In Memoriam: Olivia de Havilland

Where does one begin with Olivia de Havilland? Do you begin by saying she was the last star of Old Hollywood, one so consequential and monumental that even the most jaded modern film critics who spent time in her presence came away in awe? Or do you begin by saying that she, Old Hollywood’s last star, was also directly responsible for bringing about the end of Old Hollywood’s Star System and ushering in a new era of freedom for her acting brethren? Or do you begin with the famous feud between her and her sister, Joan Fontaine, for reasons they both took to the grave, and how the final scoreboard now reads: Olivia – 104, Two Oscars Joan – 96, One Oscar? No, I want to begin with “Captain Blood” (1935) and “Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938). I don’t remember watching either of these movies for the first time; I just remember that growing up in a house with a classic movie buff for a mom, these two movies always seemed to be playing in the background, on Betamax, as much the soundtrack of my youth as “Thriller.” They are essential parts of my moviegoing DNA, establishing a preference for fanciful and festive, not authentic and factual. De Havilland made these sheer entertainments with Errol Flynn, and though she was so much more than one-half of an onscreen couple, their chemistry was nevertheless unsurpassed by anyone in movie history, save for Bogey & Bacall. Of course, unlike Bogey & Bacall, who came across in sync the moment they locked eyes, Olivia & Errol were required by screenplay machinations to start at odds and then come around. Once they did, look out; it was manifestly the look of love. The conclusion of “Captain Blood” is such pure silver screen joy it will stretch your smile to burst. They do not make ’em like that anymore; they barely made ’em like this to begin with.

No one has seen it all, but de Havilland came as close as anybody. She died on Saturday, four months into the COVID Pandemic, 104 years after she was born in Tokyo the day the Battle of Somme began, July 1, 1916, two years before the Spanish Influenza. Soon after, she came to California with her mother and sister and was given the second understudy role of Hermia by Austrian director Max Reinhardt for his 1934 production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In a twist of fate that seems scripted but happened for real, the lead and the first understudy dropped out, ushering in Olivia’s liftoff. She excelled. And when Warner Bros. insisted Reinhardt use their contract players for his ensuing cinematic production of the same play, Reinhardt balked, bringing de Havilland onboard anyway. As such, she received her first notice in Variety, short but prescient: “Olivia de Havilland, as Hermia, is a fine artist here.”

Not long after, she signed a contract with Warner Bros. But because the contract locked her into an operation favoring expediency and economy born of tried and true production and story templates, she was featured in dreck and dishwater as often as the likes of “Captain Blood” and “Adventures of Robin Hood.” And though the latter were, truly, “the best of their kind” as de Havilland noted to the British Film Institute, per Farran Nehme’s essential de Havilland essay, “(t)he movies did not revolve around her character. She played these women with spirit,” Nehme notes, “but they were not complex, dynamic or conflicted.” To get those sorts of roles she had to be loaned out by Warner Bros., to David O. Selznick for “Gone With the Wind” (1939), where she pointedly wanted to play Melanie in an industry teeming with would-be Scarletts, as if more interested in humanizing the movie’s moral center, and to Paramount for “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941) where she skillfully evinces the transformation from shy schoolteacher to falling under love’s precarious spell, foreshadowing her mid-career turn to performances where she truly lived whole lives.

That turn would make some doing. When her contract with Warner Bros. was up, she realized it wasn’t up at all. Having grown chagrined with her lack of challenging roles, de Havilland frequently refused to show up for work, causing studio chief Jack Warner to suspend her without pay…and tack additional time onto her existing contract, prolonging her servitude. Rather than remain stuck, she took him to court, seeking to release herself from “bondage”, in the word of Bette Davis who had a similar if unsuccessful fight with Warners in the 30s. Olivia did win, of course, in a landmark ruling emblazoned into the culture as The de Havilland Law, a victory for labor everywhere and the first genuine, significant blow landed against the theretofore indestructible Studio System that would soon topple. Every Hollywood actor working with who they want, when they want, owes de Havilland a debt of gratitude.

Finally, after two years of not working as the lawsuit dragged on, she came roaring back, seeming to make up for lost time by playing two parts in “The Dark Mirror” (1946) as twin sisters, doing extensive research for “The Snake Pit” (1948) as an apparent schizophrenic and in her first Oscar-winning role, “To Each His Own” (1946), as if repudiating years of typecasting, demonstrating impressive range by playing a mother searching for her daughter across decades, evincing young, old and in-between. And then there was “The Heiress” (1949). My god, was anyone ever better than Olivia de Havilland in “The Heiress”? Based on the Henry James novel “Washington Square”, she won her second Oscar for playing Catherine Sloper, the eponymous beneficiary who in being manipulated by both her suitor (Montgomery Clift) and her father (Ralph Richardson) lays bare the human condition. She begins the movie innocent and awkward, underlined in her timid posture, almost apologetic, like she’s sorry for taking up space, before de Havilland virtually hardens before our eyes, absorbing life’s cruelest blows and coming out on the other side.

Who knows what else she could have done? She was offered the role of Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) but said nah. Indeed, if she fought Hollywood on her own terms, she left it on her own terms too, moving to Paris with her second husband in the mid-50s. She never really stopped acting, but in her own way, for all intents and purposes, she retired from the Hollywood lifestyle. She stayed in Paris for the remainder of her life, six decades or so, reinforcing my unproven theory that the best means to longevity is decidedly not treating time like money.

Olivia de Havilland, as so many film lovers and scholars noted over the weekend, was the last living link to Hollywood’s Golden Age, the only remaining observer of what film critic David Thomson has deemed The Whole Equation. That’s what makes her loss not simply sad but profound. Like losing the final eyewitness to some crucial historical event, we are all now twice removed from the industry’s headwaters, with nothing left but the accounts and the legends, which she surely was.

Olivia de Havilland: RIP

Olivia de Havilland, icon, was born in Tokyo in 1916 to British parents, came to California not long after, moved to Paris in the mid-50s and stayed there, but became an American citizen in 1941 and remained one. She died 25 July at the age of 104. Today the blog flies its flag at half-mast in her honor.

Commemorating the De Havilland Centennial

One hundred years ago today the Battle of the Somme commenced and future two-time Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland was born in a hospital in Tokyo. Joan Fontaine, née Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, was born in the same place a little more than a year later, though she passed away three years ago in 2013, four years shy of the century mark, which might well have given big sister Liv a reason to celebrate. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, I don’t know and I don’t care. Their famous sisterly feud seems a drop in the bucket compared to what else Olivia de Havilland has accomplished in her impressive 100 years on this planet. Like, say, the groundbreaking California labor code that informally bears her name – The De Havilland Law. That came into being in the 1940s when, frustrated by the unchallenging roles assigned to her by the movie studio, Warner Bros., holding her contract, she put her otherwise successful acting career on hold in order to stand up to this stifling of creative rights, making her destiny her own by re-arranging the status quo to ensure no studio could own an actor forevermore.

The irony is that de Havilland’s work for Warner Bros. that prompted her drastic action holds a special place in my heart. In the house where I grew up, de Havilland was a fixture, and she was a fixture because Errol Flynn was paramount, because my mom dug Errol Flynn the way I dig Keira Knightley. And so, as a child of the 80s, with home video emergent, I reveled in numerous Flynn films numerous times, and on screen the overwhelmingly dashing Australian never went better with anyone else than he did with de Havilland. If Bogey & Bacall, the only other screen couple that holds as a fond a place in my heart, seemed to go together in each of their movies from moment one, the chemistry of Errol & Olivia was born more of gradual mutual respect. She surprised him, he surprised her. It wasn’t that opposites attracted, necessarily, it was that they were more similar in spirit than they first realized. And when their respective spirits truly connected.....holy cinematic incandescence.

Their twin triumphs were “Captain Blood” and “Adventures of Robin Hood.” Those two Michael Curtiz films hold the key to my movie upbringing as much as “Star Wars” (and “Star Wars” owes a debt to “Adventures of Robin Hood”). I adored their swashbuckling, yes, but also their innocent elation. Thirty years on and I’m still not sure cinema’s pure joy has ever been as immaculately encapsulated as it was in the visage of Olivia de Havilland’s omnipresent “Captain Blood” smile. There, Flynn, as wrongfully enslaved Dr. Peter Blood, understandably takes a little time to catch up to the having-a-ball part, but de Havilland emanates a good time from the get-go. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously; it’s a movie to sword fight along to in your living room when you’re a kid and to cheerfully laugh along to when you’re an adult.

But De Havilland did not completely care for these parts, given, as she would allude to in interviews over the years, how they were essentially about nothing beyond encouraging the hero - ahem, the male hero. Still, re-watching these movies years after reading up on her life, I could not help but see how her characters fought back against the system as much as de Havilland herself did, whether it was Marian, who might have been Maid but was no Damsel, more like a co-conspirator, fiercely turning up her nose at the corrupt new ruling class of England, or Arabella Bishop smilingly scheming to thwart her own pompous, nefarious uncle. Even in “Dodge City” (also with Flynn) her character was allowed to act as a kind of old west Veronica Guerin, using the town newspaper to expose the baddies. There was an underlying fire to these roles, which de Havilland herself had and played straight to.

Her Melanie Wilkes, the supporting part she brilliantly played in the most famous cinematic soap opera of all time, “Gone With the Wind”, had a little fire too, but mostly she had a pureness that felt analogous to her own. Unlike the majority of actresses at the time, de Havilland was not interested in the central role of Scarlett O’Hara, not that she would have been considered anyway. “She wasn’t the most beautiful. She was the nicest. That’s what she played,” wrote film critic Molly Haskell.

In subsequent roles, however, particularly post-De Havilland Law, she embodied traits of both Melanie and Scarlett, such as the “Hold Back the Dawn”, where she was marvelous, so benevolent and then undone by betrayal, before the script betrayed her at the end, turning the character back into something of Melanie. In her two Oscar-winning roles for “To Each His Own” and “The Heiress” she was allowed to interpret the great agonies and joys of human experience, which was her own phrase, and which she did so extraordinarily. Her work in “The Heiress” took me to a place that no other performance ever has, so much so that I wish to excuse myself in this moment from rationality for hyperbole instead: Olivia de Havilland as Catherine Sloper in “The Heiress” is the greatest screen performance I’ve ever seen. It’s it. The defense rests on its DVD and the life-changing evidence of how de Havilland invests every little moment with precisely the right choice as she builds all those choices into an arc of an innocence being shattered and a righteous revenge consumed. This was revenge against a gold-digging male, though it just as easily might have been read de Havilland’s revenge levied against all those male studio heads and co-stars who held her back. Either way, right on.

She kept working and her work was often good, but she moved to Paris and worked less, and less, becoming more interested in her overseas lifestyle, so much that she wrote a book about it. “I have the idea that anyone who has ever heard my name has the distinct impression that I was put under the sod years ago just before they buried Lillian Russell,” she wrote. “And so, when I wonder if you know that I live in France, I’m sure you don’t, because I am certain that you think me peacefully interred, and in good old native American soil. If that’s the case, you’re in for a surprise.” That they were, and to think, since that book’s publication she’s had another 54 years, full of adventures and National Medals, as well as being knighted in France, and occasionally agreeing to sit for interviews where even the snootiest of film critics, like my main man David Thomson, read as being deferential to Hollywood’s true grande dame.

De Havilland was born at the advent of the movies and not only witnessed but help usher in its change from the studio system to a more star-driven industry. I often wonder if she watches from afar and notes how the system in recent years has opted for franchises over burnishing future stars. It’s a strategy that has yielded all manner of articles bearing titles like The Death of the Movie Star, articles to which I always think, nope, not yet. If absolutely no one else, there is damn sure one Movie Star still left. Happy centennial, O.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

There is a moment in Michael Curtiz’s telling of the infamous “Charge of the Light Brigade” that is positively “Last of the Mohicans”-esque. England's 27th Lancers have fallen under surprise attack after a negotiated retreat, and that attack eventually gives way to massacre. As the massacre unfurls, Major Geoffrey Vickers (Errol Flynn) notices his love, his wife, Elsa (Olivia de Havilland), struggling across the way. He heroically dashes to her, taking a bullet, and makes a gallant rescue. It’s akin to Hawkeye rescuing Cora in the midst of that film's own middle-of-retreat massacre. I make this comparison not merely because “Last of the Mohicans” is my favorite film and because I like to think of the Flynn/De Havilland dynamic as akin to Hawkeye/Cora but because “Charge of the Light Brigade” is, like “Last of the Mohicans”, based on fact……rather, shall we say, loosely.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem is the romanticized version of the Charge and perhaps the version with which the majority is most familiar. It is also placed in front of the film’s opening credits, citing it as foremost inspiration, crucially preceding the requisite nonsense about being based on historical fact and how some of the facts have been changed and blah blah blah. This would seem to cast this “Charge of the Light Brigade” as something more akin to action-adventure yarn than historical epic, and that’s true, yet……something deeper and more serious shines through in spite of its loose playing with the facts.

In their many films together, Errol and Olivia were routinely at odds to start, all the better when they could cut through their ornery byplay to True Love. Here, however, they open the film as husband and wife, and while he is very much in love with her, she is not so much in love with him. In fact, she’s in love with his brother, Captain Perry Vickers (Patric Knowles), and they plan to tell Geoffrey the truth. That, however, won’t prove so simple.

The actual Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place during the Battle of Balaclava of 1854 in the midst of the Crimean War, was a calamity brought about by miscommunication and bluster. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" maintains the bluster but alters the miscommunication into misappropriation. It also cribs from the Siege of Cawnpore, an Indian rebellion of 1857 in which besieged British forces were forced to surrender their garrison in turn for safe passage out. Instead the withdrawal turned into a massacre at the hands of Indian forces. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" turns that massacre into a deliberate order from its chief villain, and that in turn spurs the aforementioned bluster toward revenge.

The chief villain is a local rajah, Surat Khan (C. Henry Gordon), promised funding by England, and when he is told those funds have dried up, he turns devious. Geoffrey senses this deviousness from the get-go and continually advises his superior officers to re-consider their strategy, obligatorily all to no avail. When a considerable chunk of the garrison's forces is deployed elsewhere, leaving it woefully under-manned, Surat Khan and his army strike, the fort surrenders and agrees to depart the fort unarmed. As they evacuate, Khan orders a massacre, though Geoffrey and Elsa escape.

Initially it appears that Geoffrey is Right About Everything and his commanders are Always Wrong, but that's just the set-up. It's not unlike how we expect Elsa to fall back in love with Geoffrey because she is De Havilland and he is Flynn and that's how they do. But they don't. She spills the beans of her love for his brother and he is made to watch her go. And when, after some passage of time, Geoffrey realizes he can garner revenge against Khan by forging his commander's orders, he does.

Flynn was never better a actor than in the scene precipitating the forgery. Realizing Khan is near, he literally quakes before our eyes with bloodlust, and is why this Charge of the Light Brigade suffers from no miscommunication, merely macho pretense. Vickers leads so many of his men and himself straight into death's vicious vice, a stunning evocation of what lies in - to quote 2Pac - the heartz of men. And that's why despite being historically inaccurate, Curtiz's film is emotionally authentic.

The charge is technically unsuccessful, though thrillingly filmed, yet Geoffrey is also allowed to kill Khan at the very end because Geoffrey is the hero and the hero must kill the chief villain because this is Hollywood. Except it does not feel as valorous as Warner Bros. likely intended. Of the real-life charge, French Marshal Pierre Bosquet famously remarked, "It is magnificent but it is not war. It is madness." But what is madness if not war?