The last of Louise

That's Louise Brooks up there, flanked by John Wayne and Ray "Crash" Corrigan, with goofball Max Terhune in front of her, in a publicity still for Overland Stage Raiders, her last film, made in 1938. What a way to go. Overland Stage Raiders was an entry in the "Three Mesquiteers" short features made by the not-quite-Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures (you want to see REAL Poverty Row Westerns, go PRC) between 1936 and 1943. You think today's movie franchises overdo it, chew on this: there were fifty-one of them. The Mesquiteers were a trio of amiable cowboys whose adventures were kind of unstuck in time (in 1938's The Night Riders the boys appeal to President Garfield to help them out in a land-grabbing case, and he is assassinated before he can set things straight; by 1942's The Phantom Plainsmen they're fighting Nazis). The pictures were one of the many places where Duke Wayne found a cinematic home whilst kicking around Hollywood between 1931's The Big Trail and 1939's Stagecoach. 

Overland Stage Raiders is one of the more close-to-contemporary Mesquiteers tales, in which the boys discover that the mining business they have some kind of interest in (the fellas are really quite the entrepreneurs, with specialties in pretty much every kind of business venture that turns up in a Western) can somehow be improved via airplane travel, and determine to go into business with a young pilot, Ned Hoyt (Anthony Marsh) has a purty sister that Mesquiteer Stony Brooke is kinda sweet on. Yes, Beth Hoyt is none other than Brooks, her iconic pageboy hairdo replaced by a less-severe tonsorial non-style, long, loose and straight with ladylike pin-curls. The dresses she wears are kind of plain too. 

It's important to remember that the aforementioned iconic pageboy is only iconic today. Brooks' work with G.W. Pabst was/is sensational, but it didn't make her a star the way Dietrich's work with Sternberg on The Blue Angel did. This was the fault of the times, and, as Brooks recalls in her own indespensible book Lulu In Hollywood, her own fault as well. "[It] was during the making of Diary of a Lost Girl—on the last day of shooting, to be exact—that Pabst moved into my future. We were sitting gloomily at a table in the garden of a little café, watching the workmen while they dug the grave for a burial scene, when he decide to let me have it. Several weeks before, in Paris, he had met some friends of mine—rich Americans with whom I spent every hour away from work. And he was angry: first, because he thought they prevented me from staying in Germany, learning the language, and becoming a serious actress, as he wanted; and second, because he looked upon them as spoiled children who would amuse themselves with me for a time and then discard me like an old tow. 'Your life is exactly like Lulu's,' he said, 'and you will end the same way.' [...] At the time, knowing so little of what he meant by 'Lulu,' I just sat sullenly glaring at him, trying not to listen. Fifteen years later, in Hollywood, with all his predictions closing in on me, I heard his words again—hissing back to me. And, listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas."

On the very next page of my edition, the opening line of her epilogue, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs," reads "'The trouble with us,' Grant Clarke told me in 1930, 'is that we are too degenerate for one part of Hollywood and not degenerate enough for the other.'"

Brooks made Overland Stage Raiders about six years before she packed her bags and went back to Kansas. In the movie, she looks as if she never left there. Although she looks entirely innocuous when Stony offers to carry some packages for her, Corrigan's Tucson Smith observes, "It never fails, when Stony meets a gal we meet trouble." Her now-seemingly cornfed looks and plain bearing aside, her line readings speak of elocution lessons above all. There is some not-unintriguing subtext available for her character. Brother Ned, it happens, is an ex-con; although he was cleared of trumped-up charges, he's still got a prison rap that turns out to be excellent kind-of blackmail fodder from back-East gangsters who wanna horn in on that mining bonanza. "Can't you forget the past?" Brooks' Beth asks her brother, and those familiar with the glories of Brooks' seedy, tragic, and definitively fatale Lulu in Pabst's Pandora's Box can easily imagine a past for this now-banal presence to have escaped from, if not forgotten. The feeling gets a little stronger, and a little funnier, when she looks up at Wayne and says, "Stony, there's something I've got to tell you. Something I should have told you a long time ago."

With Fritz Kortner in Pandora's Box, 1929. 

In a blog post in The New Yorker last spring, Hilton Als praises Girls' Jemima Kirke and her performance in that show thusly: "[S]he's less interested in our approval than she is in being watched." Als continues: "In this, Kirke is the descendant of Louise Brooks in almost anything." The tenability of comparing Jemima Kirke to Louise Brooks is, happily, no concern of this department. But as to the quality to which Als alludes, the interest in being watched, what fascinates about Brooks' presence in Overland Stage Raiders is the almost total absence of the desire to be even seen, let alone watched. Five years after turning down a lead role in The Public Enemy, six years before quitting Hollywood for good, she was done. 

Overland Stage Raiders, a pretty entertaining picture overall, as long as you're not too creeped out by Max Terhune's ventriloquism stuff, is available in a pretty nice-looking Blu-ray from, who else, Olive Films. 

Comments

[Jim Gabriel]

My God, look at her in the bottom still. That look is two degrees away from being able to strip paint. She was glorious.

[Not David Bordwell]

Second Jim Gabriel's sentiment, but that's one of the things that makes Pandora's Box relentlessly depressing (complicity in the male gaze, etc. etc.). Great film, but hard to watch and want to watch again.

Sounds like Glenn finds the John Wayne programmer producing some of the same feelings of sadness and loss?

[LondonLee]

It was Kenneth Tynan's profile of Brooks in 'Show People' that introduced me to her. That was a very happy discovery.

[La Faustin]

Does anyone know whether the chorine with Brooks' bob and, to my eye, smile, who pops up in early 1930s screen musicals -- WHOOPEE, FOOTLIGHT PARADE's "Honeymoon Hotel" number -- is in fact Brooks?

[David Ehrenstein]

I read all her pieces whn they first appeared in "Film Culture" -- years before they were assembled as "Lulu in Hollywood." She was a goddess and a scholar.

When Henri Langlois opened his grand museum at the Cinematheque Francaise an enormously blow-up photograph dominated the entrance. An unwary cineaste asked him "Why her? What about Garbo? What about Dietrich" to which Langlois replied

"There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! THERE IS ONLY LOUISE BROOKS!!!!"

[David Ehrenstein]

Here's Part 1 of 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02xMWmc64ps

[Glenn Kenny]

Yes, there's sadness and loss here, but as David E. points out, she was a goddess and a scholar, and the fact that she lived to write such a great collection of essays is both a not-unhappy postscript to the sadness and loss but an interesting riposte to the oft-gratuitously-cited Fitzgerald observation concerning the absence of second acts in American lives.

[Gigi Allen]

Yeah, that second still...wow, I had no idea Louise Brooks was that freaking hot. You take that woman out of that still and drop her into any random Brooklyn house party today and she would be the defacto hottest woman in the room.

[Cadavra]

A few years ago, Paramount kindly struck a new 35 of OSR--the first since 1953!--so we could shoe it at Cinecon. Not just because it's a darn good picture, but I felt that Brooks' presence might attract some folks who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead at a B-western. It played like gangbusters, with several people expressing surprise afterwards at how slick and well-made it was. The moral, of course, is that any road that gets you there is the right one.

[Ed Hulse]

Glenn Kenny reviews a Three Meskeeters pitcher for his foo-foo blog! Hot damn!

I notice Cadavra takes credit for introducing Cinecon attendees to this "darn good" Republic B Western. It wasn't all that many years ago he wouldn't be caught dead watching a B Western, much less pimping one to Cinecon's audience.

[Glenn Kenny]

I liked "The Night Riders" too, Ed. Enough to get the other couple Sherman/Mesquiteers titles from Olive, if I can.

You and Cadavra play nice. Remember the good times!

[Ed Hulse]

Actually, the four remaining Wayne Mesquiteer pictures -- due for release next year -- are actually the better of the eight 1938-39 series entries, in my estimation. They include the last of the group, NEW FRONTIER (aka FRONTIER HORIZON), which had young Phyllis Isley in the ingenue role. The daughter of a prominent exhibitor, she was given a six-month contract by Republic execs looking to curry favor with her father. Ms. Isley's only other Republic film was the 1939 serial DICK TRACY'S G-MEN, which gave her limited screen time and placed no demands on her talent ("Here's that file you asked for, Dick..."). Her acting career went nowhere until David O. Selznick placed her under personal contract and changed her name to Jennifer Jones. For the record, she fared somewhat better in her appearance with the Mesquiteers.

[Cadavra]

Mr. Hulse misremembers slightly. I wouldn't "wouldn't be caught dead" at a B-western; in fact, I had not been exposed to many of them, and indeed I owe him a great debt for furthering my understanding of and appreciation of the genre. He is no doubt referring to my less than great affection for singing cowboys, and the cracks I would make during screenings of some of the worst offenders. He has a tendency to take one specific remark and make it a blanket statement. He also can't understand my great affection for JOHNNY GUITAR. But that's okay. The man knows his shit, and deserves props for that.

[george]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOIyIK_RuSU

Brooks in a 1931 Educational comedy (the best thing she could manage after turning down the Harlow role in "Public Enemy").

I'm afraid she needed silence to be magical. Same haircut, but her face looks different in the more natural lighting used in talkies. She's not unattractive, but there's nothing special about her. She could be anyone.

She's magical in the early Paramount talkie, "The Canary Murder Case" (1929), but her scenes were shot silent.