Raymond Stanley's Show Buzz John Carradine - The Hollywood villain who loved Shakespeare. In February 1981 I was in Auckland, New Zealand, and scheduled to visit the set of a horror film called The Scarecrow. However, as filming had taken place all through the previous night there was no shooting that day since cast and crew were getting much needed sleep. Meantime, an interview had been set up for me with the picture’s imported star - John Carradine. The Scarecrow apparently was to be a ‘funny, scary and moving picture’, adapted from a 1963 novel by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, set in a small town in the early ‘50s. Carradine was playing Hubert Salter, a magician and murderer, hypnotist and necrophiliac, who insinuated himself into the heart of the town somewhere between the pub and funeral parlour. “Salter’s a very difficult role”, the producer later told me. “We knew all the obvious people in New Zealand and auditioned them. I made a list of about six American and English actors who could play the role. I approached them all, but each was either far too expensive or else unavailable. One of them was John Carradine”. A local actor was cast in the role,then a call came from Carradine’s agent, saying he was available after all. Carradine was staying in a flat in an Auckland suburb. A small tape recorder clutched tightly in one hand, I knocked at the door of the flat. After what seemed a lengthy period I heard some shuffling, the door slowly opened and a tall, frail-looking, very aged man stood in the doorway. It was Carradine. Although he was 75 at the time he looked even older. He was expecting me, and I was ushered into the main room of a very dark, dingy, and untidy flat. He introduced me to his wife, who could have been anywhere between 50 and 70. Plump and not looking at all well, with a blanket covering the lower part of her body, she was seated in front of a television set viewing a western. Throughout the interview (except for a brief break when she made some coffee), Mrs. Carradine watched that western, so that the noise of the dialogue, horses and gunfire sometimes made it difficult to hear what her husband said. Carradine too sat with a blanket around his legs. Both seemed to be suffering from the cold (although it was warm outside) and presented rather a depressing sight. He spoke with long pauses and a distinct drawl but seemed to have total recall. He told me he had been able to come to New Zealand because of the abrupt folding of Frankenstein, the play he had opened in on Broadway. “I had a year’s contract and thought it would run for a year, but the critics didn’t like it. I thought it was good. It was a very expensive production. Elaborate and magnificent, wasn’t it honey?” His wife merely nodded her head and continued staring at the television. “It was a magnificent production. We had about six weeks of previews, and it just lasted one night! The preview audiences loved it”. What had attracted him to the role in The Scarecrow ? “A job! It’s a good role. A nasty guy. I’m a degenerate scoundrel”. Wasn’t coming to New Zealand, working with people he knew nothing about, rather a risk? “I don’t care who I work for so long as they pay me. That’s the important thing. I work for a living. If I know a man’s dishonest, I don’t work for him”. What were his favourite film roles? Which had given him the greatest satisfaction? “Oh, The Grapes of Wrath..... The unfrocked preacher in The Grapes of Wrath , Captains Courageous and - among the dozen greatest pictures ever made - Stagecoach ... The gambler in Stagecoach . When he was making those movies, had he any idea of the impact they would make? “I knew they were bigger pictures. In the first place they were John Ford pictures, and he never missed. Ford only made one flop., It was called a flop when it was first released, but now it’s not considered so. That was Mary of Scotland , which I was in. You knew any picture of Ford’s would be of quality, and I did eight pictures for him”. “Was he your favourite director?” “Oh, yes”. “What other directors?” “I liked to work with so many of them. Richard Boleslawski I liked very much; he was a very fine director, but, unfortunately, he died early. He directed me in The Garden of Allah and Les Miserables. He also directed Clive of India - the first time I worked for him - with Ronald Colman. He was a great gentleman and a fine director. “Then I did a number of pictures with Cecil B. DeMille: The Sign of the Cross and his last film, The Ten Commandments, and several others in between. I did a sculpture - a bust of him.... He gave me permission to do a bust of him, which I did in 1931. We were good friends”. Were there any films he had made which he thought had been under-appreciated? “Oh, yes, I think The Grapes of Wrath should have got an Oscar - at least a nomination. Captains Courageous .... Winterset, which introduced Burgess Meredith to the screen, was a great picture but didn’t seize the popular imagination”. What about the actors he worked with? Who did he enjoy working with most? “I enjoy working with actors. I of course did several pictures with Spencer Tracy, who was a hell of an actor. He was a fine actor. I don’t think he was the best actor in the world. No. But he was a damn good actor; he was very convincing. He had a quality - which the critics noticed - called sincerity. He had a tremendous sincerity. That was something professional in Hollywood. He was a hell of a nice guy”. What about actresses? Which did he admire? “Oh, I got along with all of them. I got along very well with Hepburn, and we’ve been good friends over the years”. I asked about his sons, three of whom had been in films - David, Keith and Robert. “I’m very proud of them. They’re doing very well, and they’re good actors. They all worked on the stage with me, under my direction. That’s how they learned their business”. Had he tried to discourage them? “No, I said: ‘Look, the theatre’s a literary profession, so go to college and take an arts course and major in English literature because that’s what you’re going to deal with all your life’. And they did very much as I suggested, except they didn’t stay at college. David did, went all the way through. “Keith got started in college, in a production there of The Lion in Winter, playing the king, and that did it for him. He got bit. So he quit. Came back to the West Coast and ran into David, and David was about to try out for a part in the musical Hair, and invited Keith to go along with him for his audition. When they got there the people took one look and said: ‘We don’t want you, we want your kid brother’. They hired Keith on the spot and took him to New York. He was in Hair for a year; that got him started in a big way. David never was in Hair, he went on to other things”. Was he critical of their performances? Did they come to him for advice? “No, they don’t. In fact, I’ve given them advice just once. I saw David in a production of Romeo and Juliet, and I went backstage afterwards because I knew he was aware I was out front. I had to go back to him. He was 19 at the time, playing Tybalt. I thought he was pretty good. He said: ‘Well?’ ‘You smile a good deal’, I said. ‘What’s wrong in that?’, he asked. I said: ‘Nothing, except that Tybalt is not a pleasant man. If you smile, it can’t be a pleasant smile, and if you want to know how to achieve that, well smile only with your eyes. Let your eyes smile, and it becomes menacing’. So he tried it and wrote to me later and said it worked like a charm. That’s the only time I ever advised them. “Of course, they worked under my direction. I’d direct them as I’d direct any actor. I directed David in Hamlet. I was playing Hamlet and was directing the production, and he played Laertes. I’d seen him play it with somebody else, and he wasn’t very good. I said: ‘Come and play it with me, and I’ll show you how to play Laertes’. I did and he did, and it worked out. He was the best Laertes I ever had. Then David had his series, Kung Fu, and we all worked in that. We haven’t worked together as much as we’d like to. “Three of the boys were together in The Long Riders. They had two scripts for that, one of which included the boys’ stepfather, but they didn’t do that script, and they had wanted me for it. Too bad because the boys were expecting me to be along with them in that. But it didn’t work out that way.” Carradine said he had a great love of Shakespeare, and that was why he became an actor. I asked if there were any roles he wished he had played. “I’ve not played Lear, and I wanted to play Lear. I’d still like to .... if I can get away with it. Some people have said it’s an impossible role, that it’s impossible to play Lear. I don’t agree because I’ve seen it well played. I’ve seen Morris Carnovsky do it very well.” I asked if he had seen any English actors play it - John Gielgud for instance. “The only time I saw Gielgud was when he did his Shakespeare recital. I didn’t think much of it. I’ve done the same things myself and thought I did a better job with it. ‘The Seven Ages of Man’, which he did, he did nothing with it at all. He gave it no expression, it requires a certain amount of anemometry, which he didn’t do. He made nothing of it at all. It’s a tour de force for an actor, that one speech, and he did nothing with it”. How did his recital differ? “Well, I made something of it. He just read the words., That’s the only thing I’ve seen him do. I haven’t seen him play Hamlet. I saw Olivier’s film Hamlet. I saw Burton do it on Broadway without any scenery and half a costume and that sort of thing, and I didn’t think much of that. They put out the news in their publicity that this was done as a sort of semi-dress rehearsal. That was no excuse for it having not much scenery and not much in the way of costumes. If you’re going to do Hamlet then do Hamlet . What did he think of Olivier’s film Hamlet? “What about Maurice Evans? How do you rate his performances in Shakespeare?” “I didn’t like him at all. He sang it .... he sang it all. Chanted it, and that sort of Shakespeare went out 50 years ago”. Orson Welles? “Orson Welles was extraordinary. He didn’t stay with it very long. I didn’t see his Lear, which he played briefly on Broadway. But I saw his Macbeth. I saw it on the stage and then saw the picture. He was unbelievably bad. He had some idea it rained all the time in Scotland. Whenever you saw Macbeth he was standing in a puddle of water, being drenched with water pouring down. Then they tried to use something resembling a Scottish burr. It wasn’t very good, and they finally re-dubbed the whole soundtrack and got rid of the burr, but it didn’t help the picture. It was a terrible flop”. I asked Carradine what Shakespearean performance had impressed him; he thought deeply before replying. “Well, I was impressed with Paul Robeson’s Othello in a way. I was impressed by the fact he didn’t do anything. He was a lumbering man; he didn’t move well, so they put him in a chair centre stage and said: ‘Sit there’, which left all the action to Iago. Jose Ferrer, who played Iago, just danced around Othello all evening, and I didn’t think very much of him. Robeson had a magnificent voice, but it was a very limited voice. He had about eight notes. As a singer he had eight rich bass notes, but that’s not enough.” What about the Julius Caesar film with Gielgud, Brando and Mason? “Well, I thought Brando was full of splendid surprises. He didn’t mumble. His English was impeccable, and I thought Gielgud was very bad in the instigation scene but wonderful in the quarrel scenes. I don’t know why there was such a difference in his performance in those scenes. I’ve played Cassius several times, and I was anxious to see what he would do with it. In fact, I wanted to play it; I tried to get the part myself in the picture, but they chose Gielgud. But I was pleasantly surprised with Brando, because he was known as a mumbler, and his English was perfectly clear and crisp, British and natural. I thought he did a very good job.” What did he think of English actors as a whole? “By and large they’re the best actors there are. They have the best training, you see. They don’t get a chance in the West End of London till they’ve had three years of repertory. By that time they’ve played everything - Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekhov - everything. They may not be great artistes, but they know their business. English actors are the best actors we have in the English language”. Had he ever seen Paul Scofield? “Yes, I have. I saw him do A Man For All Seasons. He disappointed me. He did nothing with it at all, but he may have had an off night. It’s the only time I’ve seen him. But, having seen it, I decided I wanted to play it, and when he quit it bearded the producer (Robert Whitehead) in his den and tried to get the part, but he wanted an Englishman and brought over Emlyn Williams to do it for three months. Then when I heard Williams was quitting I bearded Whitehead again, and this time he chose the understudy. I got a chance to play it later, and I’ve done it several times since. It’s my favourite part in the theatre now”. “All these great roles you’ve played on stage - how do you feel when you’re playing murderers and suchlike in films?” “They’re jobs. I love to act. I remember one time I was doing a TV show written by Raymond Massey, The Hanging Judge. He’d had it done on the stage in London....” “With Godfrey Tearle?” “Yes, Godfrey Tearle, and he was the wrong man. He was a too-warm-hearted personality to play this cold-minded judge. So, when he decided to do it in the States Massey decided to play it himself on TV, and he hired Cedric Hardwicke and me to play the opposing counsels. I was counsel for the defence and Cedric was Queen’s counsel. “We had a scene together playing a game of pool in our club and we consulted each other about it and I said: ‘Why don’t we actually play a game of pool and sandwich the lines in between shots - really play the game of pool. So we did. John Frankenheimer, who directed, thought that was a wonderful idea, and he loved it. “When we got through with it we were sitting on the sidelines of this big rehearsal hall in this big Hollywood studio. It was in the summer season, and we had this huge rehearsal hall, and this was the dress rehearsal, and Cedric and I were sitting on the sidelines watching the rest of the rehearsal, and Cedric turned to me and said: ‘You know, John, we have something in common’. Well, I’d known Cedric for 25 years at least by that time and we’d been very good friends for years. ‘What is that, Cedric?’ I asked. ‘We both love to act, and we’re damn good at it!’, he said. “Cedric was a fine actor. He had a wonderful quality that I noticed even before I ever met him. A wonderful quality of stillness in his face. Not a muscle ever moved, yet he conveyed wonderful things. First time I’d seen him was in Les Miserables - as a matter of fact, that’s where I met him. I was playing the young student who starts the French Revolution and he was playing the Bishop from whom the candlesticks are stolen, and his acting had a quality of extraordinary serenity. He had that in his face, and it always impressed me. Tremendous serenity in his face. “He was a fairly serene man considering he had a great deal of trouble in his life. His wife was a dipsomaniac - they didn’t live together - he had her in an asylum in Canada. She would escape every once in a while, get a bowl of liquor and make a mess of things. And he had this to contend with for years and all his friends knew it. He was very fond of her because she was a lovely lady when she was in her right mind. But he had to suffer this for years. He never divorced her. So his life was not a serene life. He had an extraordinary modest serenity in his personality considering the trials and tribulations he had to suffer”. “Well, he was a great Shavian actor. What’s your opinion of Shaw?” “I’ve only played one Shaw play, and that was one of his very early plays they revive in London every couple of years or so. That’s a play called You Never Can Tell. I played the waiter - lovely role. Some top English actor plays it every five years or so. They get the top actor of the time, and they love to do it. I did it in stock somewhere. I was travelling doing stock all over the country, you know, doing different plays”. Surprisingly Carradine apparently never played in Chekhov, Ibsen or O’Neill. During the War, he told me, he had his own Shakespeare company, touring the west coast of America. “I did three plays: Hamlet, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. It was a big heavy production, a beautiful production, which I designed,. When I played San Francisco they not only complimented me on my acting but for my production, designing the set and my direction... It was a going proposition, very successful. “After eight weeks of touring the West Coast, I was about to embark on a cross-country tour and couldn’t get out of Los Angeles. I couldn’t get a truck, couldn’t get a baggage car, couldn’t get anything. The Armed Services had taken everything. This was ‘43. So I had to give it up. I played Shylock, Othello and Hamlet. Sometimes I played Iago”. I brought the conversation round to more contemporary playwrights, like Tennessee Williams. “The only Tennessee Williams play I did was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which I liked. I played Big Daddy. Do you know, the funny thing was it was offered to me some years before when they were first doing it. They were rehearsing out of town - New Orleans - and they called me up and wanted me to do it in New York, but I couldn’t get away. I was engaged in another production. I found out they got Burl Ives. “Tennessee’s original idea for the part was a tall gaunt man, instead of a beefy man like Burl. Tennessee revived it under his own aegis in Paris a couple of years later, and he got a tall gaunt man to play Big Daddy. He was talked out of it apparently by the production people in New York. He had wanted me for it, but I was not available. It was too bad because it’s a great part”. The interview had come to an end. I was getting up to leave when Carradine suddenly said: “Put your recorder on again. Here’s an anecdote you might like to record. I had an idea about Romeo and Juliet. I was playing Mercutio and the tradition was that Mercutio was killed offstage and Benvolio comes on and informs Romeo: ‘Mercutio is dead, that gallant spirit, etc....’ “I had a better idea for it. Instead of having Benvilio come on and announce the death of Mercutio, I had him come in carrying the dead Mercutio in his arms, with his sword still in his dead hand, and I had Romeo run for him and help him, and they laid Mercutio on a bench upstage and at that point Tybalt comes in and challenges Romeo, and Romeo turns, pries open Mercutio’s dead hand and with Mercutio’s sword he turns on Tybalt and kills him. It’s a hell of a piece of business. I found out - oh, years later - in going over the Variorum edition of Romeo and Juliet that Henry Irving did it in 1880. The same piece of business. Nothing new under the sun! I thought I’d invented a wonderful piece of business, and Irving did it in 1880! Same piece of business! “When it was done on Broadway, the producer hired Jack Hawkins to play Mercutio. I was trying to get the part, but he decided he wanted Hawkins, which was all right with me because Hawkins was a fine actor - a hell of an actor, one of my favourite actors in the world was Jack Hawkins. I thought: ‘Well, I didn’t get the part, but I’ll tell them the business I invented’. At that time I didn’t know that Irving had done it, and I told the producer, but they didn’t use it”. While still in New Zealand, I was told a nice little story of John Carradine on The Scarecrow set. Carradine, playing the murderer, comes into town disguised as a visiting magician. He was driving onto the set in a Mercedes to give him the right treatment., It was an all-night shoot about 1 a.m. He got out of his Mercedes, walked slowly over to the front of a movie theatre, and there was this big poster saying: “Dracula - starring John Carradine”. He looked at it, didn’t flicker a muscle, just looked at it, obviously thought something, and then walked on. He was getting into position. Did not say a word. But it obviously made quite an impression. I often wonder what Carradine was like in his heyday playing Shakespeare. Ephrauim Katz in his The International Film Encyclopaedia says in Hollywood Carradine had a reputation as an eccentric and a ham, and was known as the ”Bard of the Boulevard” for his habit of reciting Shakespeare in his booming voice while walking the streets. Lloyd Fuller Dresser in The Illustrated Who’s Who of the Cinema is kinder and says: “The man’s credits are a roll of honour of the American cinema”. Leslie Halliwell’s assessment of Carradine is of an actor “who scored a fine run of character roles in the thirties and forties but later sank to mad doctors in cheap horror movies, touring meanwhile with one-man Shakespeare readings”. |