"Girls, young women, or really any woman who trudges off to the theater can be expected to find a universe that looks much like their husbands, brothers, and sons, and ends right there, fifty percent of the way through real life. Could this be what’s causing the grand total of around five percent of women working behind the camera? If you grow up without heroes you can emulate on screen, wouldn’t you automatically turn to books, music, or another other art form where you felt you’d be heard? The fine folks who operate websites can cultivate female critics and commentary, reward diversity, and seek out dissenting opinions. We can use our own mental devices, such as avoiding marketing; to counter the tricks a billion dollar business is trying to pull on us. Millions of people are emotionally moved by film every day, let’s turn it back into a tool that moves the culture forward, presenting new ideas and ways of thinking, encouraging discussion about art. That tool is invaluable, and we’ve let most of it slip through our hands by supporting too much lesser cinema." -“How Studios Abandoned Women to Focus on Sequels and Superheroes And Why It’s Ruining Cinema” (2013) by Laremy Legel
Claire Trevor arrived in Hollywood after signing a contract with Warner Brothers in 1925. She had few stars in her eyes when she arrived as a girl living the ‘American Dream’, seeking success and willing to work long lackluster hours. Among her admirers were William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, also known as the ‘Dollar Bills’ because none of their films ever lost money. Unusually, because Trevor came to Hollywood directly from her first love, the theatre, she already understood that movie-making was not an art form, but an industry that existed to generate wealth.
She was a star who more than most represented the rapidly changing moods of her culture and time, moving easily along with her audience, between the high optimism and grandiose scale of Western frontier idealism to the forlorn desperation, depression, corruption and deep set shadows of Film Noir. She was the consummate actress of her generation, performing unerringly as the glamorous leading lady opposite every top male star from Robinson and Bogart to Tracy, Douglas and Wayne.
Claire Trevor in "The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse" (1938) directed by Anatole Litvak
The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse was billed as a bizarre, exciting and amusing story, in which Robinson gave his greatest performance as a highly respected neurological surgeon whose interest in the mental and physical reactions of criminals at the moment they were engaged in illegal activities becomes an obsession. Eventually he decides to use himself as a guinea pig and he embarks on a career of ruthless crime.
The offers never dried up, but she continued to be treated as an asset rather than a fully-fledged and competitive star. The pattern repeated itself when, in quick succession she made The Velvet Touch, Corkscrew Alley and Key Largo. Again Hollywood shouted that Trevor would be tops, only for her once more to be forgotten.
Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor in the 1942 film "Street Of Chance."
Film Noir offered portraits of complex female characters. Here, she had the chance to exist as a champion alongside the biggest male stars of the day. In what were often shocking performances, Trevor could portray the darkest sides of the female. Her characters could be selfish, possessive, slovenly, calculating, callous and even masochistic, intelligent, shrewd and cunning, often lacking in morals, but always aware of her unique feminine tools.
From 1933 through 1938 Trevor starred in twenty nine films, often having either the lead role or the role of heroine and usually playing a sweet young woman in B movie potboilers and cheap westerns. Disillusionment swiftly crept.
Claire Trevor and John Wayne in "Stagecoach" (1939) directed by John Ford
Life was tough and uncomfortable for her at Fox. She, like many other female stars, found it excruciating to be out riding in the California sun in velvets and heavy costumes. None of the sound stages had air conditioning, “They had big fans to blow some air in but the stages would be red hot with the lights and especially if it was color because the lights they used for color were much more potent and radiated much more heat. And I didn’t like locations much more. You’d be traipsing around in forests and hills.”
William Wyler delivered a powerful adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s play, delving keenly into the social inequities of contemporary urban life and he successfully submerged Trevor’s fresh blonde beauty into the characterization of an unkempt hardened prostitute and former sweetheart of gangster Bogart. Under his tutelage she delivered a powerful electrifying performance as a downtrodden streetwalker opposite Bogart that lit up the sensitivity of both actors.
She also enjoyed working alongside Bogart and McCrea. “Joel was so nice and so handsome. I remember hearing him on the telephone outside my dressing room, calling Frances Dee, his wife. He was talking to her in just the sweetest way and I thought that girl is so lucky.”
Warner Bros had wanted her to sign up for a five year stint, telling her they wanted her to be their “Oomph Girl.” Although she turned them down, once more she later regretted it saying that Warners did make the kind of movies that suited her talents. “I was foolish and Ann Sheridan became the “Oomph Girl instead.”
"For some reason John Ford was interested in me as an actress, I couldn’t understand why, because I had nothing at Fox that would have shown any promise. You can imagine how thrilled I was when he sent me the Stagecoach script."
Later, Ford himself felt her performance in Stagecoach went largely unnoticed by the critics because she was so subtle in it. “At the end of the first rough cut, he told me that. He and I were good friends. We had a rapport. He said, ‘It’s going to be great. And you are so good in it, they’re not even going to realize how good you are’. That was a big compliment. And he didn’t give them out often."
Crack Up (RKO) 1946 was directed by Irving Reis. Here Trevor played a more sympathetic noire femme opposite Pat O’Brien, who Trevor later recalled as a “dear man, warm and wonderful off screen.” “I played villainesses in many films but it never entered my mind if people thought I was like the characters I played. If they did that was their hard luck. It never bothered me. You had to make those parts believable and some of them were not written in a way that was true to life. They were the concoctions of a dreaming author so that was the difficulty. Nothing is any good unless it’s believable.”
"Born to Kill" (1947) directed by Robert Wise, was critiqued as a “homicidal drama strictly for the adult trade” and a “sexy, suggestive yarn of crime and punishment.” A grim business about a killer, his marriage for money and his extra-marital yens and the reviewers also referred to “More Trevor neuroticism.”
Claire Trevor in "The Velvet Touch" (1948) directed by Jack Gage
Trevor had done plenty of good work in bad pictures but in 1948 she stormed into what was to be her last film noire, recapturing lost ground in Key Largo. A star of lesser caliber might not have wanted to take the risk that Trevor grabbed with this movie. Trevor turned in an extraordinary performance as washed-up, boozy nightclub singer Gaye Dawn opposite Edward G Robinson’s big time gangster. She stole the show as his long suffering moll who is now a fallen favorite with fading looks and who drinks to forget.
Hollywood Reporter: Trevor’s performance is one of those superlative jobs of acting that comes from this performer whenever she is given the opportunity. It is played thoughtfully and intelligently and reaches heights of pathos in the sequence wherein she tries to recapture the days of her singing career.
She won the Oscar for best supporting actress. Trevor said, “Bogie was over for dinner a couple of nights before the Awards and he told me that if I won I should get up and say that I wasn’t going to thank anyone, that I did it all by myself.”
Trevor and Bogart were already close friends, “I always felt like he was my buddy and I appreciated his humor. I called him ‘Bogart’ not ‘Bogie’ and no one called him Humphrey except as a joke.”
She herself could often be dismissive of her career and of Hollywood, saying that she felt films were not an art but a business and that anyone, given a chance, could do what she did. It was instinctive and she never really valued her own talent. She had steadfastly refused to knuckle down to standard Hollywood convention and didn’t seem to accept or respect the mythology surrounding the biggest stars of her era. Her artistic honesty might have been too much for the Hollywood star system.
“Looking back on Hollywood, I think the demise of the studio system is just too bad because they knew how to make stars. They weren’t business men like they are today. To be the head of a big corporation doesn’t mean you know anything about show business. They were showmen in those days and they were marvelous. I made mostly B pictures. I never had a Howard Hawks fighting for me, or a Von Sternberg like Dietrich had. Or a Mauritz Stiller, like Garbo had. And then it became just work. I am talking about making movies in eighteen days. I am talking about working Saturday nights. I am talking about doing three pictures at once. I worked hard – like a demon actually. I was paid nicely. But let’s face it, the parts I would have given my soul for - Bette Davis got.” -"Claire Trevor: Queen of the Bs and Hollywood Film Noir" (2013) by Carolyn McGivern
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