CLASSIC MOVIE: Julien Duvivier’s Lydia (1941), Joseph Cotten, Merle Oberon, Alan Marshall

I will have to watch this OP. loved Duvivier’s version of ANNA KARENINA.

While appearing in Mae West's play Sextette, Alan Marshal had a heart attack onstage and died. He was only 52.

R2 whaaat?

I really like this movie.

R4 I first heard about it in a book called “The Great Romantic Films” by Lawrence Quirk. It’s out of print now, but lists many good films, love stories primarily. Even “Stella Dallas”. Though not a love story, the writer considered maternal love and sacrifice romantic. This man loved Merle because he lists several of her films.

Merle Oberon isn’t really convincing as an elderly woman in her later scenes. The makeup is good, but her mannerisms are too youthful to be believable as an old woman.

[quote] Merle Oberon isn’t really convincing as an elderly woman

She is NEVER convincing. She was a good clothes-horse but NOT a thespian.

R2 That Alan Marshal played the handsome Captain Phoebus and was presented as the counterpoint to the grotesque Quasimodo.

Wiki says he was an Aussie and had a nervous breakdown and stayed a recluse for a number of years.

Estelle Thompson's movies will come back into fashion in another twenty years.

A new generation will re-discover her brand of fake artistry.

I thought she was a good actress. Have to watch this because I loved her as George Sand in that Chopin biopic she made with Cornel Wilde.

[quote] This was to be an important film for Duvivier

It was his first film here. He was on the run from The Nazi Invasion of Paris.

He had a beautiful surname but he wasn't so himself.

MAKEUP BY HOUSE OF WESTMORE

SEXTETTE is on Tubi

R12 The House of Westmore Salon was the most well-known beauty salon in the world!

Very interesting, r14!

This poster almost looks like something by Toulouse -Lautrec

I just realised that this was made by the great Hungarian-English film magnate Sir Alexander Korda.

He produced six years of great English film classics but was obliged to close production in England when the Nazis hovered over England with bombs and plans to invade.

It's amazing that in her heyday, nobody ever said, "Damn, that woman looks South Asian, not Tasmanian."

LYDIA was even better as Duvivier's 1937 original, UN CARNET DE BAL (on Criterion).

UN CARNET DE BAL is French for 'A dance program'

Always found Oberon and Jennifer Jones to have an uncommon beauty, almost otherworldly.

R18 I think that she experimented with her makeup and eyebrows. Early in her career her Eurasian roots were quite evident. By the thirties she discovered that thicker eyebrows could make her eyes look rounder and less ethnic. But the makeup that they used on her and other stars was problematic. She would breakout from the toxic mess. Barbara Stanwyck got a serious eye infection from using studio makeup. She was laid up for most of 1940 as a result, making only one film, the underrated holiday weeper REMEMBER THE NIGHT. Plus, Merle used foundation a shade or two lighter than her actual complexion. It was oil based with lots of other stuff. It was so bad that Lana Turner used Borax scouring powder to clean her face after a day on set. She told Kathryn Grayson her secret for clean skin, and Kathryn thought that Lana was trying to sabotage her career.

[quote] Early in her career her Eurasian roots were quite evident.

Do you mean this? Her first appearance in '33?

They are pretty evident in that photo r22.

I love this movie. The scene where she recalls a ballroom with an orchestra and scores of couples dancing amid hundreds of candles and someone points out that the room and event was much more modest, that in her mind she exaggerated it all because she was in love, is fucking beautiful.

Duvivier's "La Fin du Jour" is a funny/sad movie set in a home for retired actors. It was filmed in France a couple of years before he returned to Hollywood and made "Lydia," and it has a wonderful cast.

Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, and Orson Welles all, understandably, greatly admired Duvivier.

The long sequence in "Lydia" where Oberon is holed up with hot Alan Marshall and clearly having non-stop sex with him comes as a real surprise.

I wondered why the censors allowed this r26. Every now and then they let someone bend the rules. But they did have some old man stay there with them, so there’s that.

I wonder if Sir Alexander Korda was hoping that Aussie Alan Marshal might be another Aussie Errol Flynn.

I heard Alan Marshall had a remarkabky small penis. Nonetheless, I want him shallowly inside me.

Do you have a tiny anus, R29?

Merle Oberon did. She was fastidious to a T.

In fact, she was tedious in her fastidiousness (according to those who visited her white-carpeted mansion in Acapulco).

Wow, Marshall was a fox. Why did he allegedly have a nervous breakdown after arriving at Hollywood?

Yes, he was rather handsome.

But he chose a fake surname but couln't decide if it was a French 'Marshal' or an English 'Marshall'.

I tried to watch this movie last night but I fell asleep half way through.

But the female star is just so INADEQUATE!

I would love to see this hooter again…Merle’s contribution to camp:

^ I can't read that.

That Roger Greenspun review made me laugh. A year after he wrote it he was fired by the Times because the managing editor A.M. Rosenthal believed "you are writing for a rather small coterie of people. In a way, you are writing trade reviews. The level of the segment of the trade to which you address yourself may be quite knowledgeable and interested in your work. But it is still trade writing, not criticism addressed as it should be to an audience outside the trade."

R34 Is that a 1973 review of a 1941 movie?

It's a review of Merle Oberon's last film, "Interval."

"Married?""No""Never?""Not yet!" . . . sigh . . . And so Serena Moore (Merle Oberon), as tremulous as any girl, parries the charming but too insistent German restaurateur who rescued her from her stalled car and has already fallen in love with her on the short drive from nowhere to the Mayan ruins at Chichen-Itza. She has come to the Yucatan, Serena Moore, in search of peace. And she has brought with her a gold-framed Romantic landscape painting, a 5 million-year-old fossil fish ("to put me in perspective"), a change of wardrobe for every occasion, and an unquenchable thirst for life."It's so beautiful here," she exclaims, forging her way through a tropical rain forest, "only one thought on its mind—to grow!"Who could resist a lady like that? Nobody. Not the helpful German, nor the old rake at the bar, nor the handsome stranger on the beach, nor the teen-age boy on room service—but, always graciously, Serena refuses them. Until Chris. Tempestuous, passionate, young, it is the vagrant artist Chris (Robert Wolders), also in search of peace, who awakens Serena's dormant fire and provides the occasion for "Interval," the story of a woman who finally stops running from love.

The film opened yesterday at the 34th Street East Theater.It is one of those ecstatic affairs, full of wonder and discovery, and yet it doesn't work. Perhaps Serena is just too fine, too sensitive. Perhaps it is something else. There is a problem, a silent traveler with Serena on her journeys, which I wouldn't bring up if the movie didn't keep bringing it up—in whispers: "The age thing." Though it is the last thought on his mind, and though you could never tell from looking at her, at some point Chris has to admit that Serena is—well—"over 40."But truth to tell, Merle Oberon is well over 60, and from time to time it shows. "Are you a statue or are you real?" asks Chris, marveling at her beauty. You can't always say. Such uncanny freedom from wrinkles has not been achieved without a certain cost, and at this stage in her career Miss Oberon seems to have only two or three facial expressions left. Consequently, she acts mainly with her eyes, and with a small shake of her shoulders, which may be spunk, but which is never quite appropriate for the emotion of the moment. There was never such a movie for observing its leading lady from the back of the head.There probably was never such a movie for anything. As performed by Miss Oberon, directed by Daniel Mann, written by Gavin Lambert, with a musical score by Armando Manzanero and Ruben Fuentes that flows over everything like detergent back-up, the tragic tale of Serena Moore in "Interval" provides the first genuinely funny comedy of the year.On the scale of awfulness, it is almost sublime, better than "Pope Joan," nearly as good as "The Great Waltz." A few movies like this can last you for a lifetime.

^ I heard that was filmed in her mansion at Acapulco.

Do we get to see the while shag pile carpet?

She always had wide hips and they were on full display in Interval. The plastic surgery was quite obvious too. No wonder the film critic said that she only had two or three facial expressions.

I think she was quite vain. Since she was not a great actress who got into films based on her looks, she never really worked at her craft. She was always worried about lighting and makeup-obsessed with hiding her racial identity and her scars from the car accident as well as the bout with cosmetic poisoning. She could effective in the right role.

[quote] She could effective in the right role.

Which one was that, R40?

She had the luck of being picked up Sir Alexander Korda and appearing with some quality performers but (as far as I'm concerned) she was no more than a clothes horse.

I say that that the late Estelle Thompson (who sold herself under the pseudonym 'Merle Oberon') was as useful as Timothée Chalamet.

You can watch INTERVAL (73) at www.rarefilmm.com

Her eyes are two inches further apart (due to plastic surgery) than they were in her heyday.

^ Estelle's slopey forehead is ENORMOUS.

R43 There's one scene in it where she describes herself as 'Chinese'.

I think she was good In LYDIA, A SONG TO REMEMBER and THESE THREE.

[quote] I think she was …

I think she was embarrassingly bad in almost everything.

She may have happened to look brilliant when she was dolled up in frilly frocks and coiffure ('Scarlet Pimpernel' and 'Desiree'). But she looked bereft and bare wearing contemporary street clothes (The Divorce of Lady X). You couldn't help but notice her spastic upper lip and ineptitude trying to do comedic dialogue.

It’s fine. I’m not a fan of Natalie Wood, but on the thread about her, she has a lot of defenders. I will always like Merle. Even if her body of work isn’t all that impressive, her life story is.

There's only a short excerpt from 'Carnet de Bal' on line but I wonder if it all those tedious geriatric scenes that Lydia has.

Audiences don't like movies about geriatrics— especially fake geriatrics with fake make-up.

She was a great, somewhat campy George Sand.

R10 that biopic was abominable. I love old movies but it’s among the worst I’ve seen.

I like it because it was so campy.

I remember watching "Temptation" with my grandmother a long time ago...Charles Korvin had the most beautiful cleft in his chin.

A new autobiography by a. Gay Indian author called LOVE, QUEENIE. Gives a different perspective on her life - her mother (actually her grandmother; her real mother was raped by her grandmother’s boyfriend when she was 12) had Merle’s tubes cut so she wouldn’t get pregnant. Without telling Merle. He also focuses on Merle’s self-centered nature and how she used men to get what she wanted from life. She was also rather greedy and demanding. One of her husbands and one of her boyfriends beat her terribly; one broke her nose, the other broke her jaw. Good times for Merle…

I'd never seen "Temptation" and enjoyed it. I wonder if Somerset Maugham had read the novel it's based on, "Bella Donna" by the (gay) novelist Robert Hichens, or seen the successful play adapted from it; there are many similarities to Maugham's story/play/movies "The Letter."

Korvin reminded of Dick Gautier, if Gautier had had a beautiful cleft chin.

Dick Gautier was hot.

“Lydia” has a lovely score by the great Miklos Rozsa, excellent cinematography, and decent performances, including the final film appearance of Edna May Oliver as Oberon’s eccentric, domineering aunt. However, its episodic structure slows it down, and the basic premise is empty, ultimately about a woman’s vanity.

Oberon’s greatest performance is playing Cathy in William Wyler’s brilliant “Wuthering Heights.” Even though co-star Olivier treated her badly during filming, she really does bravura work. And remember, for what it’s worth, in 1939 the New York Film Critics awarded Best Picture to “Wuthering Heights,” not GWTW.