On Blu-ray: Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge (1940)

 

Vivien Leigh made so few films that every opportunity to see her is a great pleasure. She achieved one of her best screen performances in Waterloo Bridge (1940). I recently watched the World War I-set romantic tragedy on a new Blu-ray release from Warner Archive. 

Adapted from a Robert E. Sherwood play based on his own experiences, this version of the story followed a more gritty take from the pre-code era directed by James Whale and starring Mae Clarke, and preceded the less faithful color adaptation Gaby from 1956 starring Leslie Caron. Director Mervyn LeRoy’s slick, but emotionally wrenching 1940 adaptation benefits from its sympathetic leads and solid supporting performances by reliable character actors including Maria Ouspenskaya and C. Aubrey Smith. It is perfectly engineered studio filmmaking, but Leigh’s performance gives it guts. 

Leigh plays Myra Lester, a young ballet dancer in wartime London who struggles to adhere to her dance mistress’ (Ouspenskaya) strict rules. She meets army colonel Roy Cronin on Waterloo Bridge and quickly bonds with him as the pair shelter together during an air raid. Their courtship advances speedily to engagement, but then Roy is abruptly called to battle, so they cannot be married. Myra loses her job and can’t find more work in war ravaged London. 

When Myra receives a mistaken notice that Roy has died in battle, she wearily turns to prostitution to make ends meet. She eventually finds Roy has actually been a POW, and is both elated and devastated to be reunited with him. For a time she continues their relationship, but she fears for his reputation if her secret is discovered. 

One of the best things about Waterloo Bridge is the way the leads subvert the norms of this kind of story. Vivien Leigh’s Myra could have easily slipped into weepy melodramatic mannerisms, but she remains grounded, mostly due to her steady intensity, but also because instead of becoming sentimental, she always stays firmly in the reality of her predicament. Taylor’s character is written to be more compassionate than men typically are towards a woman in Myra’s situation, and he enhances that kindness with a sort of wonder in the magnificence of this woman he loves. For this reason, their connection feels real in a film where the plot tosses them around with brutal efficiency. 

It is ultimately a story of how easily those who are marginalized can be destroyed. Myra and Roy can’t be married because of a law about when marriages can be performed, and it seals her fate. Myra nearly starves because she has no family or husband to protect her and there are few opportunities for young women to find steady employment in wartime London. When Myra meets Roy’s mother, the wealthy older woman has no understanding of her vulnerability, she takes her existential distress as a personal insult. Likewise, Roy fails to see the struggles a woman like Myra must endure simply to survive; he has only known luxury and the privilege of being a man. As a result, an innocent woman is devoured by a society that fails to support her. 

While it all sounds unbearably bleak, the couple's relationship is charming, Leigh is mesmerizing, and it is a beautifully filmed production. It breaks your heart, but with great elegance. 

Special features on the disc include a trailer for the film and a radio production of the drama starring Norma Shearer in the role of Myra.

Many thanks to Warner Archive for providing a copy of the film for review. To order, visit The Warner Archive Collection.

Book Review--Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait

Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait
Kendra Bean
Running Press, 2013

Scarlett O'Hara is the kind of role that could both make and destroy a career. The risk is multiplied when an actress is as perfectly cast as Vivien Leigh was. If becoming an Oscar winner being an English Southern rose was her only claim to fame, she would still have been legendary. What's remarkable is that she went on to do so much more, achieving numerous triumphs on the stage and screen, acquiring another Academy Award for A Streetcar Called Desire (1951) and even winning a Tony in 1963 at age fifty for performing in the musical Tovarich.

Living an ordinary existence was never an option for Ms. Leigh. She knew that early on, as a young wife and mother who left behind placid domesticity to fully embrace her passion for the stage. Without her jaw dropping beauty, she might not have gotten far. Her thin voice was not made for reaching theater audiences and clearly she needed to work hard to develop her craft. And yet, she had an intensity and charisma that was meant to be admired.

Leigh used these raw materials, and a determination that always bordered on obsession, to become one of the most celebrated and adored actresses of both stage and screen. She overcame her limitations to make a significant mark in theater, but she was built for film. No worries about a voice carrying there, and audiences could catch every delicious emotion rippling across that delicately beautiful, but somehow not really delicate face.

At her side for over two decades was Laurence Olivier, a man for whom she had either great reverence or a pathological obsession, depending on who you asked. She put him on a pedestal, allowing him to mold her in the hopes she could absorb some of his greatness, though she knew she was not born with his genius. Before and over the course of their marriage they were lovers and partners, focused on their work both together and apart, but always in great need of each other.

Kendra Bean draws on documents from the newly-available Laurence Olivier Archives to fill out the contours of these elements in Leigh's life. There aren't any shocking revelations, but more than in any previous biographies of the star you get a sense of the intense drive that propelled her towards both greatness and despair.

With Intimate Portrait, I got a better feel for how Leigh's manic depression affected her life and loved ones. Though I knew her disease had been a factor in breaking up her marriage to Olivier, I'd never fully understood how devastating it had been for him to watch his beloved wife suffer. His love for her never died; he simply had to save himself from being destroyed by her madness.

Through sheer determination, Leigh held back her illness so that she could continue her work, following each episode of mania with apologies to her friends. She could be in the midst of an episode, shaking from the intensity of it off camera, pull herself together for a scene, and then return to the sidelines, once again in agony.

Leigh's good manners, style and professionalism endeared her to friends, co-workers and an adoring public. The enduring halo of Scarlett cemented that goodwill, and had she not succumbed to tuberculosis at age 53, it is likely that she would have kept her prestige. She was not one to fade away into obscurity.

Bean is a compassionate biographer, and she has constructed a loving, balanced portrait of the actress. She acknowledges that Leigh was not always an angel, sharing Streetcar co-star Karl Malden's story of how the actress snubbed his wife at a social event and tales of her infidelities with other actors. Explored here in detail are the complexities of a woman who essentially abandoned her baby daughter, while she eventually became a maternal figure to Olivier's son Tarquin, from whose mother she stole his father. There are two dark Viviens at play here: one who sins because of a manic episode and another who rebels against convention to pursue her passions.

Though Intimate Portrait could stand on its text alone, the photos that Bean has found, many of them previously unpublished, are striking and sometimes astonishingly revealing. From public appearances, to cozy private picnics, these images reveal a glamorous and yet down-to-earth woman with an intoxicating verve for life. The overall book design is beautiful as well, sensual almost, with rare attention to details including color, endplate design and organization. It is an elegant presentation worthy of its subject.

Many thanks to Running Press for providing a copy of the book for review.

Images from Wikimedia Commons/Wikipedia