Posts tagged Erich Maria Remarque

ERICH & PAULETTE — Champagne & Caviar

Oct17
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Anita Loos, the actress-writer behind the comic novel, stage version and screen edition of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” – and a woman who knew a thing or two about luxurious living — put it best.

In her 1954 memoir “Fate Keeps On Happening,” Loos wrote this about one of her closest friends: “To Paulette, no occasion is festive without champagne and caviar.”

Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here today to appreciate the most famous of Erich Maria Remarque’s two wives, Paulette Goddard, one of the most financially savvy actresses Hollywood ever spawned.

The “All Quiet on the Western Front” author and the beautiful — and very smart — actress began their 12-year, later-in-life marriage in 1958. He was 60. She was said to be 48, although estimates of her age varied since throughout her life (which ended in 1990) Goddard never came clean about her actual  birth date.

By most accounts the Remarque-Goddard union was a success.  It lasted until the author’s death in 1970. She was gregarious and a gadabout.  He was sedentary but understanding. Both were rich.

By this stage of his life, Remarque — a man of many affairs in every sense who once romanced fellow German Marlene Dietrich — was “bored by the physical and more interested in a woman’s mind.”

DISCLOSURE — That last quote comes the 1985 biography “Paulette: The Adventurous Life of Paulette Goddard,” co-authored by Edward Z. Epstein and Classic Movie Chat’s own Joe Morella. If I may say so (Frank speaking) the book is a wonderful read, and an essential reference on Goddards’s adventurous life.

She was born Pauline Marion Levy, the only child of a Long Island couple whose marriage rapidly fell apart.

Paulette and her mother were financially pressed, and moved around a good deal when she was very young.  A child model by 13, she soon found herself cast in producer Flo Ziegfeld productions, including the 1927 musical “Rio Rita” in which she was widely noticed perched on a cutout of the moon being serenaded by a the baritone leading man. Her movie career actually began in New York in 1927, when she appeared in a four shorts for Ziegfeld.

From the beginning — and perhaps because of her beginnings — Goddard had a finely developed taste for luxury, jewelry, clothes, cars, the works. At 16, she married a Palm Beach socialite who undoubtedly catered to her expensive tastes.  The marriage was short lived, and at its conclusion in 1929, Goddard was awarded a $100,000 settlement — worth about $1.3 million in today’s dollars.

After her divorce Paulette arrived in Hollywood and in 1932, she appeared as a blond “Goldwyn girl” in “The Kid From Spain” starring radio personality Eddie Cantor.

Goddard’s stunning good looks caught the attention of 43-year-old Charlie Chaplin that same year, and their romance began.  Chaplin was intrigued not only by her seductiveness but by her keen business sense, unusual for a young starlet.  He co-starred her in 1936′s “Modern Times,” and then somewhere, somehow, they secretly married. The couple separated in 1940, and divorced two years later.

Goddard’s unsuccessful screen test for the Scarlett O’Hara role in 1939′s “Gone With The Wind” is recalled by playwright-screenwriter Garson Kanin in a chapter of his 1974 memoir, “Hollywood,” titled “Mae’s: A Very Hollywood Whorehouse.” Seems patrons of this “alluring oasis high in the Hollywood Hills” were regularly afforded private screenings of studio previews and screen tests.

“The girls, along with the rest of us, were quite impressed,” wrote Kanin.  ”When, eventually, Vivien Leigh was signed to play Scarlett, the girls were stunned…”  Well, Goddard did have her avid fans.

Her career shifted into fifth gear in 1939, and on through the Forties with Goddard appearing with Bob Hope in “The Cat and the Canary” (one of three hit films she made with the comedian), Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” Cecil B. DeMille’s “Reap The Wild Wind” and Jean Renoir’s ”Diary of a Chambermaid,” in which she costarred with her third husband, Burgess Meredith. Her performance in 1943′s “So Proudly We Hail!” won Goddard a best supporting actress nomination.

But by 1949 — the same year her five-year marriage to Meredith ended — it was largely curtains on Goddard’s career.  She was dropped by Paramount studios, and by the time she connected with Remarque in New York City, she had been living mostly in Europe as a wealthy expatriate.

The two collected art, lived quietly but lavishly and from appearances, happily. After Goddard died — outliving Remarque by two decades — her estate made a bequest to New York University (a favorite cause) of some $20 million.  Champagne and caviar, indeed.

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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT — A Remarque-able Achievment

Oct14
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

“All Quiet on the Western Front” is justly known as the most wrenching anti-war novel ever written.

Author Erich Maria Remarque conveyed the hideous destruction of humanity with almost documentary precision, and the 1930 movie version all too convincingly presents his depiction of the horror and waste of World War I.

Hi, everybody.  Your classic movie guys, Joe Morella and Frank Segers — along with our Books 2 Movies maven Larry Michie – on hand today to continue our discussion of perhaps the greatest war film ever made, and to assess how well the novel was translated to the screen.

First a small tangent. A while ago, Joe and Frank nominated director Lewis Milestone’s fine 1945 movie, “A Walk In The Sun,” a World War II drama about an American infantry mission in Italy, as perhaps the best combat film ever.  If it’s not the best, it is certainly up there.

Well, 15 years before he directed that picture, Milestone (born Lev Milstein in 1895 in Eastern Europe) won an Oscar for his handling of today’s subject movie released by Universal Pictures to great acclaim.

The New York Times video/film writer Dave Kehr wrote two years ago that while “All Quiet on the Western Front”  is an epic adaptation of a powerful novel, “‘A Walk in the Sun‘ is smaller in scale and less insistent on its universal humanism…it’s less bombastic.” OK, Joe and I can buy that.

But as he writes here, Larry has a different view.

After plowing through the stirring Remarque novel and seeing the film version, Larry flatly concludes: the movie  is equal to the novel, even though the film was made in the U.S., rather than in the war locations of Germany and France.

(Joe and Frank add that so authentic is the feel of the picture that the New York Times critic, Mordaunt Hall, who attended the film’s 1930 premier declared: “One is just as gripped by witnessing the picture as one was by reading the printed pages, and in most instances it seems as though the very impressions written in ink by Herr Remarque had become animated onscreen.”)

Larry continues his BOOKS 2 MOVIES assessment with this READER ALERT — Skip the 1979 Hallmark Hall of Fame tv series version of “All Quiet…” directed by Delbert Mann that features Ernest Borgnine and “John-Boy Walton” (aka actor Richard Thomas). Also, the internet tells us another version of the movie is planned, although Larry hasn’t found any evidence of it yet.

The classic 1930 movie boasted of writing credits by Erich Maria Remarque himself, along with playwright Maxwell Anderson (along with fellow playwright George Abbott). A magnificent performance was turned in by Lew Ayers and his supporting cast. The two Oscars the movie won were well deserved indeed.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: Be sure to tune in on Monday when we take a look at the life and career of Remarque’s famous second wife, actress Paulette Goddard. The photos alone are worth a look-see.

 


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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT — At The Source.

Oct13
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers here introduce our three-part series on German author Erich Maria Remarque, and the great 1930 screen classic inspired by his novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

To capture the full force of this movie,  it helps to know something about the source material, Remarque’s masterful 1929 novel. Thus we turn to our BOOKS 2 MOVIES maven Larry Michie – who has just plowed through the book — to provide a knowledgeable assessment.

Writes Larry: Remarque’s novel weighs in at just under 300 pages. It’s an easy read as novels go, but the narrative is enough to make you weep even before a shot is fired.

The young men are bullied by their schoolteacher into signing up for active duty, and their naive zeal is almost a mirror image of another slaughter of young patriots, namely Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

Unfortunately, WWI had machine guns, gas canisters, long-range cannons and deadly airplanes. The squad hunkers down during one bombardment — but it’s a burial site, and the bombs churn up the cemetery, complete with some of the recently departed. The men under bombardment spend much of their energy battling hordes of rats. It’s not a pretty scene.

 Paul Bäumer (portrayed by Lew Ayres in the movie) is the central character, and he and his mates are introduced all too soon to the horrors of war. Much of their time is devoted to scrounging for food, stealing such essentials as they can pilfer, and trying to be good soldiers while keeping their heads down. It is not long before their detachment of 150 men is reduced to 32.

In the movie as in the novel, the young men are introduced to military service by a classic martinet, one Himmelstoss (John Wray), a corporal who drills them and demeans them, and who eventually gets his comeuppance. It’s one rare bit of humor, although the lads in the trenches try their best to keep up their morale.

One of their finest delights is discovering three young French women not terribly far from their station. The young women are delighted by the food the young men steal to bring them — and delights are mutual.

Paul finally gets leave, and it’s small comfort to find his family impoverished and his mother very ill. He also can only barely disguise his contempt for his father’s cronies, drinking their beer and blathering about how wonderful the war is. That doesn’t sit well with a young man who has seen comrades blown to smithereens.

Part of Paul’s leave entails duty at a prison camp for Russians who have been captured.  It seems impossible, but the Russians are more starved and mistreated than Paul and his German comrades.

One passage in that section of the novel is strikingly strange, and I can’t fathom the meaning or why it was included.

Paul says of the starving Russians, “But now they are quite apathetic and listless; most of them do not masturbate any more, they are so feeble, though otherwise things come to such a pass that whole huts full of them do it.” Go figure.

Paul goes back to the battleground just as the war is winding down. Paul’s epitaph: He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

The novel is well worth the read even after all these years. (It should be noted, by the way, that despite him being German and a celebrated author, The Nazis loathed Remarque. After they took power his books were banned and burned)

Thanks, Larry. Tomorrow we’ll discuss the film.


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