There’s a scene in Saturday Night Fever where Tony Manero (John Travolta) is on a date and his companion for the evening, a woman who fashions herself as far more sophisticated than Tony, but really isn’t, brings Laurence Olivier into the conversation to bolster her claim as an exemplar of good taste. She tell Tony that Olivier’s the greatest actor of all time. Tony’s never heard of him. She’s shocked and offers up not Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Hamlet, or even the previous year’s Marathon Man but, instead, says he’s the guy who does the Polaroid commercials. Tony then agrees, “Oh him, yeah, he’s good.” This kind of thing happens regularly with most actors of the classic era of Hollywood. As time marches forward, even the biggest stars remain famous to only a handful. Some, like Norma Shearer, exist so completely within their time I can’t think of any way to identify her to a younger audience unfamiliar with her. She had no Polaroid commercials, no popular tv show in the fifties, no second career selling a fragrance. She was a star of the twenties and thirties and then she left, at the age of 40, and never looked back.
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I first came to Norma Shearer with The Divorcee, the movie that changed her image and won her an Oscar in the process. But before that movie, she spent years as an MGM player in the silent period before become a full blown star in the late twenties. When sound came along, Shearer had no problem making the transition but soon feared her good girl roles would prove her undoing. The Divorcee meant to change that. I saw it for the first time years ago on a VHS tape I used to record it one night off of public television. I soon became fascinated with the movie, watching several scenes from it again and again. I should clarify, the fascination did not come because I thought it very good, but precisely because I found it very dated and clunky and odd. For instance, there’s this moment in the film where Paul (Conrad Nagel) is discussing a tragedy that he made happen. Years before, in the story, he got drunk and drove with his wife, Helen, crashed the car and permanently disfigured her. As Paul talks about it with Jerry (Shearer), he says, “Sometimes, when I think about it, I even blame myself.” Well, of course you do! It was your fault! You actually are to blame! But this was not done with irony or as a kind of in-joke but rather as a true moment of seemingly misdirected guilt. Like I said, a very odd movie. So I watched it, or at least scenes from it, over and over. That’s when Norma Shearer started to grow on me.
At first, I wasn’t very impressed with her. Or Chester Morris, for that matter. But after repeated viewings (we movie buffs do the strangest things) they both became personal favorites whose other movies I began to seek out (I’ll leave Chester for another time, another post). What I came to find with Norma was there wasn’t a lot more to seek out. After 1942, she was done. But what she did do still draws me in and I must admit that even now, I don’t think her one of the best actresses of the thirties but I do find her one of the most charming.
When I saw her in Marie Antoinette, a favorite performance of hers for me, and watched the scene where she inches the chair over to be closer to Louis, I knew she was one of a kind. Anyone who could make Marie Antoinette adorable must have something going for them, and she did. Later, in The Women, she seemed to be playing her old, sweet characters again from the silents and early talkies, only with a little more bite and self-determination. In Idiot’s Delight, she was going for dark comedy and it kind of worked, kind of, but she was still charming. She was always charming.
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Then, of course, there was her turn as Juliet in the 1936 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where she and co-star, Leslie Howard as Romeo, came off as the oldest teenagers in the history of the movies (probably having something to do with the fact that she was 34 and he was 43 at the time). She wanted it to be a hit but it wasn’t, the first movie where the Shearer magic, not to mention the Howard magic, failed to translate into big box office (probably having something to do with the fact that she was 34 and he was 43 at the time – wait, did I say that already?).
The fact is, Shearer wanted to do prestige productions like those but it was movies like The Divorcee, or her two early movies with Clark Gable (years before Idiot’s Delight), A Free Soul and Strange Interlude, that worked better for her. Norma Shearer did a fine job in the previously mentioned Marie Antoinette and Romeo and Juliet, as well as The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street, but it was her contemporary characterizations that fit her perfectly. She was a woman of the twenties and thirties and sometimes a person is so of their time that taking them out of it, for a period piece, just doesn’t quite work. Shearer felt that way to me and still does. I love her charm in everything but I believe her more in the movies that take place contemporaneously. For her, it’s a better fit.
Norma Shearer, featured earlier today on TCM in Romeo and Juliet, may not be very well remembered today outside of classic movie fans but her legacy remains intact. The Women, alone, will insure that she continues to be seen for years to come, as it remains one of the most popular films of the thirties and has a cast that is, to this day, one of the finest collections of talent in Hollywood history. No, she wasn’t Bette Davis and she wasn’t Katherine Hepburn but she was Norma Shearer, a woman of the thirties with charm to spare. Sometimes that’s enough. In this case, it was.