Gloria Grahame: TCM Star of the Month

Today marks the centennial of Gloria Grahame. She is currently the "Star of the Month" on Turner Classic Movies: TCM will show four of her films tonight starting at 5:00pm PST. Grahame made her biggest impact in film noir, nailing the peculiar blend of fragile femininity and hard-as-nails practicality that came to define the femme fatale in a series of roles that ranged from blowsy ditz to brassy moll to downright deadly schemer. Grahame was a startling talent, an Oscar-winning actress with an intense work ethic that kept her acting until her final days and exploring “method” techniques before there was even a word for that style of acting. Known for her peroxide blond hair and her distinctive pout, Grahame crafted a film and public persona as a woman with a unique blend of sexuality, warmth, and existential ennui.

Born in Pasadena on November 28, 1923, raised in Los Angeles by her English father and Scottish mother (who was also an actress), 19-year-old Gloria Hallward was discovered on Broadway in 1944. A talent scout saw her in “A Highland Fling,” a play starring Ralph Forbes and John Ireland, and raved about the young actress to Louis B. Mayer. Mayer promptly saw the show and signed Hallward to a contract at MGM, under the name Gloria Grahame. (“Grahame” was her grandmother’s maiden name.) Grahame made her screen debut in Blonde Fever (1944), a comedy starring Mary Astor. With the supporting role of a waitress named Sally Murfin, MGM featured her prominently in the film’s advertising. “Meet Gloria Grahame,” read the poster. “She’s gorgeous! She’s dangerous!” Variety, in its review, reported, “Gloria Grahame, as the blonde waitress, shows possibilities, but is given a conflicting, indefinite role in this opus.” 

That may as well have described Grahame’s overall tenure as an MGM contract player, which lasted over two years. She made only four other films at the studio during this time—Without Love (1945), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), Song of the Thin Man (1947) and Merton of the Movies (1947)—all of which are included in this tribute, and all of which show MGM not really knowing what to do with her. Her best films in the period were loan-outs: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for Frank Capra’s Liberty Films and Crossfire (1947) for RKO, which was lauded in its day and is now seen as one of the great examples of film noir. Crossfire was produced by Dore Schary, who had a great interest in making films with socially conscious themes. She later paid tribute to the film’s dialogue director, Bill Watts, who coached her and helped her to really understand the craft of acting. 

As Grahame said, “It’s thinking. I was doing my hair for a scene and he said, ‘forget the hair.’ And he [talked] to me about who the character was, where she was, what she was, until I was so immersed in what it was all about. After that... I did it for myself.” Grahame received her first Oscar nomination for Crossfire, which drew five nominations in all and lost Best Picture to Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947). But of the two, time has been kinder to Crossfire. Schary was so impressed with Grahame that he bought her contract from MGM in June 1947. While Grahame was indeed more suited to the grit of RKO than she was to the glossy glamour of MGM, even RKO struggled to find her the right roles. Her first picture there, Roughshod (1949), a rare western for Grahame, was shelved for two years after it was completed. Next came A Woman’s Secret (1949), which was also shelved for about a year and became a significant flop. That film, however, was significant for introducing Grahame to its director, Nicholas Ray, and the two developed a romance. After filming, Grahame got a divorce from her husband, Stanley Clements, and married Nick Ray later the same day. Five months later, she gave birth to their son, Timothy.

A year and a half later, Grahame was loaned out to Columbia to star opposite Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (1950), a heartbreaking film noir romance again directed by Nicholas Ray. By this point, however, their marriage had turned rocky, and shortly after filming began, they secretly separated, maintaining a fiction that all was fine between them for fear that the studio would otherwise fire them or stop production. All the while, Ray directed Grahame to one of her greatest performances. She is unforgettable as Laurel Gray, the beautiful and enigmatic neighbor of screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart). Dix’s dark personality and emotional instability leads everyone around him, and the police, to suspect him of being a killer. The plot of the film paralleled the disintegration of the real-life marriage between Ray and Grahame, and when production was over, their marriage continued to crumble until they divorced in 1952. 

Howard Hughes instead wanted Grahame for an RKO film noir called Macao (1952), which no one otherwise involved in its making, including stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, wanted to make. A troubled production, it was credited to director Josef von Sternberg but largely re-shot by Nicholas Ray and was shelved for two years before being released in 1952. Grahame is billed fifth in a film that has not stood the test of time. A Place in the Sun, meanwhile, was an enormous hit nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Shelley Winters, and stands as an all-time classic. After Macao, Hughes released Grahame from her RKO contract and she went freelance, now entering the richest part of her career with three important movies released in 1952 alone (aside from Macao): The Greatest Show on Earth, which would win the Oscar for Best Picture, Sudden Fear, in which she was perfectly cast as Jack Palance’s treacherous girlfriend, and The Bad and the Beautiful, produced by her former studio of MGM. 

One of the great critical films about Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) was directed by Vincente Minnelli and stars Kirk Douglas as a movie producer who ruthlessly rises from making cheap B movies to reach the top of Hollywood, betraying three friends along the way: Lana Turner playing a movie star, Barry Sullivan as a director and Dick Powell as a screenwriter. Gloria Grahame plays Dick Powell’s wife, partly because producer Dore Schary (who was now at MGM) saw himself in the Dick Powell character and thought that Grahame resembled Schary’s own wife. Whatever the reason she got the role, Grahame played it beautifully and wound up winning her first and only Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress in 1953. 

Grahame was now at the peak of her stardom, but followed up The Bad and the Beautiful with two offbeat titles. In The Glass Wall (1953), an independently made production distributed by Columbia, she plays a deglamorized factory worker helping a Hungarian stowaway who has illegally entered the United States. In Man on a Tightrope (1953), directed by Elia Kazan for 20th Century Fox, she plays the young floozy wife of a Czech circus owner (Fredric March) who is contemplating an escape from the Communist east to freedom in the west.

As biographer Robert Lentz put it: “She is the gorgeous dame who wants some of the action and isn’t above murder to get it; the mobster’s moll who just wants to be ensconced in mink; the bored woman too busy enjoying nightlife to pay any attention to her husband." Columbia then cast her in Human Desire (1954), reuniting her with her The Big Heat co-star Glenn Ford and director Fritz Lang in another noir, but this one didn’t come together as well. Ironically, her next film, the underrated Naked Alibi (1954), produced by Universal, actually did bear a strong and successful similarity to The Big Heat. It’s set in a border town with Grahame as a gangster’s moll who helps a decent cop played by Sterling Hayden. Grahame loved making this film so much that afterwards she sent a note to producer Ross Hunter saying it was one of her happiest experiences.

She would make six more feature films through the decade, before disappearing from the big screen for seven years. Three of those six are included in this tribute: The Cobweb (1955), a drama from Vincente Minnelli set at a psychiatric clinic headed by Richard Widmark, Stanley Kramer’s Not as a Stranger (1955), a star-laden drama again set in the medical world and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), one of the last gasps of film noir from a major studio. Grahame has a small role. Martin Scorsese has written of this film: “Odds Against Tomorrow was made just as the old studio era was ending and different approaches and impulses in cinema were coming alive all over the world, and it’s comprised of so many distinctive elements that it feels unlike any other picture of its time.” Source: tcm.com