Editor’s note: As 2013 comes to an end, I’ll be reposting some of our highlights published during the year. Those who’ve already read each one can obviously skip them, or revisit if you’d like. For those who joined us later in the year, missing many of these posts from earlier in the year, they will probably be new items. Here’s the 7th of many to come, originally posted in mid-February 2013. Happy New Year to you all!
It would be fair to say that Lena Horne, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 92 and being the legend that she was, would say herself that her film career was something of a major disappointment.
She appeared in only some 18 films in almost 60 years, from her first, the 1935 short film Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party, where she appeared unbilled as dancer, to her last in 1994, where she appeared as herself to introduce some MGM film musical sequences in That’s Entertainment III.
But she was mainly relegated to appearing in brief musical sequences in movies, most of them for MGM where she was under contract, where she usually just sang a song and then left never to be seen again.
And most of the time, her appearances were separated and totally unrelated to the rest of the film, so that, in the South, her scenes could be easily cut out so as to not offend southern audiences and their delicate sensibilities, who would have been disturbed to see a beautiful black woman on the screen.
Horne, herself, talking about her limited screen time in movies, once remarked that, in most of her films, she felt that she “was like a butterfly pinned to a pillar’.
The one exception during that period was, of course, in Fox’s 1943 musical Stormy Weather, where she played the romantic female lead to dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson who was literally 39 years older than her when he co-starred with her in the film. (Grandpas needs love too)
But It wasn’t until 1969 when she was 52 years old and some 13 years after her last previous film role did Horne finally get her one and only chance to play a major dramatic role, in a film (and got above-the-title billing to boot) – the Universal western Death of a Gunfighter.
Starring Richard Widmark in the lead, the film deals with a sheriff who, over the years has spent his life taming the town to peace and respectability. The conflict arises when the town’s citizens, all now good, respectable folk, want him out, being a relic of its violent past that they want to forget. Naturally he refuses to leave his post, which eventually leads to a tragic climax, as the title of the film suggests.
It’s not a classic by any means and it has a flat, studio bound, over lit visual quality, similar to TV shows from the period. But the film does have a haunting, sad, elegiac quality to it of impending doom that makes it worth watching. (The film is currently available on Universal Home Video DVD-on-demand label Universal Vault through Amazon).
However it is definitely Horne who plays Widmark‘s longtime lover, who captures your attention. Admittedly, though the film could have fleshed out her character more, one cannot doubt that she really commands the camera’s attention. She gives a good performance and you can’t take your eyes off her every time she’s on the screen. Her relationship with Widmark, like the film itself, has a gentle, wistful quality. They both make it obvious that they understand, by what they don’t say, that their relationship is doomed.
And keep in mind, back in 1969, is was pretty radical and progressive to portray a loving, interracial relationship in any movie. More interesting since the fact that Horne’s character, being a woman of color, is never once mentioned in the film.
That the firm turned out better than expected is a miracle, since it had a chaotic production. The original director of the film was Robert Totten, a TV director, but he and Widmark did not get along at all and Totter was finally fired with two weeks left to shoot.
Widmark brought in director Don Siegel (the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dirty Harry, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Escape from Alcatraz) who just previously directed Widmark the year before, in the critically acclaimed and excellent cop movie Madigan.
However, Siegel refused to take credit as director for the film since, of course, he only directed it for a couple of weeks, and Totten refused, since the finished version was not what he envisioned for the film. So the Director’s Guild of America created the pseudonym of “Alan Smithee” for the picture, which immediately became the official DGA pseudonym for any film on which a director refused to take credit for various reasons.
And “Smithee” has, since 1969, directed some 76 feature films and TV movies, making him maybe the most prolific director in film history.
But as for Horne, not surprisingly, she never got another opportunity to show off her serious acting chops. It’s a pity too because one can only imagine what she was capable of achieving as an actress.
Here’s the trailer for Gunfighter below, and to watch a scene of Widmark and Horne together, go HERE
