One of the great Hollywood stories airs today, A Star is Born from 1937. Starring Frederic March and Janet Gaynor, it tells the story of a hugely successful actor, Norman Maine (March), on his way down while his own discovery, and now wife, Vicki Lester (Gaynor), is on her way up. By the end, in full despair and knowing of no other escape, Maine drowns himself by walking into the waves against a setting sun. An early example of three-strip technicolor, it’s a beautifully shot scene and takes the long view of Maine’s demise, not actually following him to his death. But an earlier film, one that may or may not have inspired A Star is Born (there was some talk of lawsuits that eventually fizzled out), contained a far more extraordinary death scene, one that has stayed with me all these years. The film is What Price Hollywood and it reminds me that classic Hollywood, long before the ratings system came into play and grizzly death scenes became a dime a dozen, had the ability to remove a character from this mortal coil in some of the most memorable and powerful ways the cinema has ever known.
If you’ve never seen What Price Hollywood, DVR it today and watch it because it’s just terrific. And, as I said up above, its death scene is quite amazing. I suppose I should warn everyone, at this point, that spoiler alerts will follow for the whole post. In What Price Hollywood, the characters aren’t an actor and actress but a director and actress. The director is Maximilian “Max” Carey (Lowell Sherman) and the actress is Mary Evans (Constance Bennett). When Carey reaches his ultimate moment of despair, he finishes himself off with a gun he finds in his dresser drawer. That may not seem too extraordinary but what follows is. As Carey aims the gun at his chest and pulls the trigger, the movie switches to a hyper fast edit of multiple images of his life, from scenes in the movie we’ve just watched, before switching back to his body collapsing, in slow motion. Honestly, the idea of illustrating a man’s life passing before his eyes as he leaves this world and then, in 1932, decades before slow motion was used widely, to have his lifeless body collapse in such a lingering way, is pretty amazing. The life seems but a glimpse, the final collapse an eternity.
Now, at the top of the piece, I mention Norman Maine, both Fredric March and later James Mason, walking into the ocean. Well, there are two other death scenes (or should I say “dead scenes”) in which two characters, both already dead, lay and sit motionless in the water, dead stare and all. The first is William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. The images of him floating in Norma Desmond’s pool is still one of the most haunting shots of a dead person from the classic era. At the start of the film, we get a glimpse of what will become of Holden and this only makes the inevitable more painful. However, there is another image that’s a close cousin to this one and it’s not only more haunting, it’s maybe the most haunting corpse shot ever for my money: Shelley Winters at the bottom of a lake, sitting in her car, as the water gently strokes her hair, in Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterpiece, Night of the Hunter. Her death happens off screen but her lifeless body is the centerpiece of one of the cinema’so most haunting shots.
Those examples above reflect how haunting classic Hollywood could be showing a character die, as in What Price Hollywood, or the already dead and now peaceful corpse, as in Sunset Boulevard or Night of the Hunter. But another thing the great classics excelled at was the silent death scene, the camera pulling away or fading out or even holding it as the character’s life bleeds away. One of the most memorable comes with someone simply going to bed, and her housekeeper pulling a blanket over her to keep her warm. You probably can guess what I’m talking about already: Bette Davis in the final moments of Dark Victory. It’s not only peaceful and beautiful but almost as haunting as anything described above. That image of Davis, laying across the bed, on her side, staring ahead, as you know she is going completely blind and sinking into her final moments. For me, it’s a death scene more powerful than any out there involving lots of crying and moaning and other sundry histrionics.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with crying and sadness and emotion in a death scene. Certainly not if it’s Walter Huston doing the dying in Yankee Doodle Dandy and James Cagney doing the crying. Or how about Stephen Boyd’s death scene in Ben-Hur? Now there’s a death scene that’s filled with acting! Maybe a little too much but it still works. And for truly over the top dying, as in top of the world, nothing can beat James Cagney going out in ball of fire in White Heat. And then there’s Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train which beats even Ben-Hur‘s Mesala for dying out of spite. I mean, here he is, heading out the door for all eternity and he still won’t clear Farley Granger. That’s a death!
It’s true that grisly deaths started early in the movies, from Cagney’s bandaged corpse falling through his mom’s doorway in Public Enemy all the way up to Janet Leigh getting hacked to death in the shower in Psycho in what may still be the most famous murder scene in movie history. But when classic Hollywood wanted to send someone out poetically, it came up aces a lot more often than it didn’t. I’ve mentioned so few here that they don’t even qualify as a handful but that’s because this isn’t meant as a “greatest of” list of the death scenes. It’s meant to reveal in some small part the moments when the movies sent someone out in such a haunting (I keep using that word) way, that’s it’s never left me. I’m sure everyone has a list of their own. A list of those memorable moments in the dark when the flicker goes out.