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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 26 |
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BRENDA JOYCE-- DEATH OF A 'SCREAM QUEEN'
she made at Universal. BELOW RIGHT: The 1942 horror comedy she did with Milton Berle while still under contract to 20th Century-Fox.
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Brenda Joyce's genre films
will keep her memory alive
of TheColumnists.com
Brenda Joyce's movie career lasted only 10 years and she hadn't appeared in a film during the last 60 years of her life, but I'm guessing she'll be remembered long after many bigger stars have faded away because she was in so many "B" movies adored by diehard film fans.
Joyce died on July 4 at age 92 in a Santa Monica, Calif., nursing home where she'd been treated for dementia for years. Don't expect any grand retrospectives of her career. Though Joyce was a leading lady in most of the 26 feature films she made between 1939-49, she wasn't a big award-winner and nobody has published any books about her life. She might have passed away in total obscurity if she hadn't been caught up in the cult following for the Tarzan movies that continues to flourish six decades after she starred in her final one, "Tarzan's Magic Fountain," in 1949.
Altogether Joyce made five "Tarzan" pictures and earned her place in film history when she replaced Maureen O'Sullivan as "Jane," Tarzan's "mate," in 1945's "Tarzan and the Amazons," starring opposite Johnny Weissmuller, the famous Olympic swimming star who had been the screen's No. 1 "ape man" since 1932. She further cemented her historical status in 1949 when she became only the second movie "Jane" to appear opposite two different screen Tarzans. That was in her final film: "Tarzan's Magic Fountain," in which Lex Barker assumed the Tarzan role.
All her Tarzan films are enjoying a big comeback on home video right now. Her four films with Weissmuller came out in a DVD boxed set in 2007 and her final film is included in a new boxed set of all the Lex Barker Tarzan films, now available online via the Warner Brothers Archive website.
But Joyce also will be remembered by thousands of horror movie fans who know her from the three chillers she made as a "scream queen" at Universal Pictures in the mid 1940s. Two of them were in the "Inner Sanctum" series, inspired by the radio horror program, which all starred Lon Chaney, Jr. She's in "Strange Confession" (1945), in which she plays Chaney's wife, and in the final film of the series, "Pillow of Death" (1946), this time as the comely secretary Chaney wants to marry, if he can just get his wife out of the picture.
In 1946, Universal was shutting down its once-profitable horror movie operation. The public had lost interest in such films while everybody in America celebrated the end of World War II. Meanwhile, the too-familiar Universal monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, etc.) were beginning to bore filmgoers, so the need for "scream queens" was not great.
That was too bad for Joyce, who had just filmed her best role in such a film--"The Spider Woman Strikes Back," in which she's the pretty young "companion" hired by a mysterious blind woman to live with her in a spooky old house in the woods. The "blind woman" turns out to be the notorious Spider Woman, who likes to drain some of Brenda's blood each night in order to feed it to the giant man-eating (or woman-eating) plant she's growing as her latest experiment in wickedness. Helping the Spider Woman with her evil doings was Rondo Hatton, the real-life grotesquery Universal was trying to build up as a new "monster" called The Creeper.
Though the nasty lady was played by Oscar-winning actress Gale Sondergaard ("Anthony Adverse," 1936), who was reprising the role she had played in one of the most popular of Universal's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, "The Spider Woman" (1944), the movie was a cheapie and played mostly the bottom half of 1946 double bills. It did nothing for Joyce's then flagging career.
Joyce had one more "horror" item on her resume--the 1942 comedy "Whispering Ghosts" in which she did the screaming as radio detective Milton Berle investigated a haunted house.
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ABOVE LEFT: The first of two "Inner Sanctum" films she did at Universal. ABOVE RIGHT:
Brenda Joyce's final film and her first as "Jane" to new Tarzan, Lex Barker.
In some ways, Brenda Joyce's whole career was kind of an accident. Always strikingly beautiful, she had done some modelling while still in school. A talent scout from 20th Century-Fox saw her pictures, arranged a screen test and she was signed by the studio in hopes she might have some acting skills. She began her movie career playing the second female lead in an "A" picture, "The Rains Came" (1939) with Tyrone Power, Myrna Loy and George Brent.
But the studio quickly routed her into "B" pictures after showing her off in a couple of secondary leads in such films as "Little Old New York" and "Maryland," then let her go. She worked here and there in the early 1940s until she landed the "Jane" role. She seldom had a chance to play a "normal" role, but when she did, she often showed quite a bit of talent. A good example: "The Enchanted Forest" (1945), which she made at the poverty row company PRC, playing the mother of a little boy who learns about life from an old man who lives among the animals in the forest.
Brenda Joyce was married only once--to Owen Ward, who was not in show business, and had three children with him before retiring from acting in 1949, the same year she was divorced from her husband. For years Joyce lived in Carmel, Calif., and avoided the limelight. Little is known about her post-Hollywood career.
I think aspiring stars can learn something important from the career of Brenda Joyce: Don't look down your nose at genre films if you're interested in being remembered forever. Those films keep returning again and again, often with more fanfare than the "A" pictures most actors seek.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photos and ad reproductions are courtesy of Universal Pictures, 20th Century-Fox and RKO pictures. This column first posted July 27, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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