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CORRIDOR OF NOIR |
DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 2, No. 5 |
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REMEMBERS MARIE WINDSOR QUEEN OF B MOVIES EMPRESS OF NOIR |
 Marie Windsor 1922-2000 |
They'll be lining up to buy drinks for Marie in B-movie Heaven
of TheColumnists.com
I've often wondered what Emily Marie Bertelson might have said if some soothsayer in her hometown of Marysvale, Utah, had accosted her at the age of five and told her she was going to grow up to be the best darn cheap thrill ever given to the hoodlums, thugs, informers and two-timing dirty rats of Hollywood's B-movie world.
It would be nice to think she took the cigaret out of her mouth and told the soothsayer, "Beat it, buster. You're standing in my light!"
But most assumptions about our favorite stars are baloney and that one certainly is. The truth is Emily was probably a pretty nice little girl--and stayed that way long after Hollywood turned her into Marie Windsor and made her Queen of the B's, if not the Empress of Noir. I say that because the adult Marie was one of the nicest people I ever met in Hollywood, far removed from her "bad girl" image, which is why I was especially saddened to learn of her recent death.
Windsor died of natural causes at her Beverly Hills home on Dec. 10, the day before her 78th birthday. She had gradually withdrawn from show business to concentrate on her business activities, which made her very successful off the screen, and hadn't really done anything significant as an actress in quite some time. That didn't matter. She already had her place in history.
You
can't watch Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" without
coming away impressed with Marie Windsor as the abusive wife
of hoodlum Elisha Cook, Jr.. She's the one who blows the central
caper of the film--a bold racetrack heist.
Nor can you watch Richard Fleischer's classic noir thriller,
"The Narrow Margin," without noting how superb Windsor
is as the gangland moll, pursued by hit men on a cross country
train ride. In a classic moment, she blows smoke in detective
hero Charles McGraw's face and tells him, "I wouldn't want
any of that nobility to rub off on me."
And you have to take your hat off to Marie, too, after watching
her straight-face it through her villainous role in "Abbott
& Costello Meet the Mummy." She retained her considerable
dignity even in the face of total silliness.
When I think of Marie Windsor dying in that large, comfortable home off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills, I remember being there with her in 1988, the two of us laughing it up over coffee in her kitchen, my eyes ever straying to all the photos around the place: Marie with John Wayne, Marie with Bob Mitchum, Marie with Jim Garner, and so on. She had done it all on screen, from her 1941 debut in "All-American Coed" through some of the best--and worst--pictures of the last 50 years. And, to hear her tell it, she'd loved every moment.
Like many young actors, Windsor had a totally different notion of what she might be good at on screen. She figured: Leading ladies and heroines all the way.
"I expected to be a superstar," Windsor told me. "I never made it, but it's been a very nice career."
She had studied drama at Brigham Young University with the great Maria Ouspenskaya, the renowned Russian stage actress who emigrated to America and wound up being best remembered here as the gypsy Maleva in "The Wolf Man" instead of doing Chekhov on Broadway.
Certainly, Ouspenskaya might have given Windsor a clue about what Hollywood could do to you once it decided to re-mold your image to fit its own needs. Instead, Windsor came to Hollywood before World War II, got a job as a cigaret girl at the Mocambo night club and set out to become a bright and bubbly ingenue in movies. She saw herself as June Allyson before June Allyson showed up.
And, for a time, it seemed to be working. She sparkled on the radio show "Romance on Honeymoon Hill" for three years and did "Follow the Girls" on Broadway. Then, in 1943, MGM signed her to a movie contract, but gave her very little to do. When she asked why she was going nowhere at Metro, they told her: She wasn't born to bubble.
They told her she was too tall for most leading men at 5-9; that she wasn't pretty enough, even though she has once won a beauty contest as Miss Utah; that she had a "bad" mouth and an unappealing "bump" on her nose. (She got a nose job she later considered a major waste of money.) They kept on pointing out her shortcomings: Her eyes were "wrong," her voice "too deep" and her manner of speech too deliberate. But, she told them, she really felt like Greer Garson inside. They reminded her they already had the real Greer Garson under contract and didn't need any more of them.
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So, what do you do if your whole body seems "wrong" and nobody wants to put your face on magazine covers? Marie knew she seemed attractive enough to most of the men she met in real life? In fact, they thought she was pretty sexy.
So, Windsor decided to do what seemed to come easily to her: Go slinky. There seemed to be plenty of work for "bad girls" in the movies. It was a decision she never regretted.
"The June Allysons can't be slinky and sexy," she told me. "Pretty soon, some of the leading ladies--the wispy-looking ones--told me they really wanted to play the parts I was doing."
Almost immediately, things started looking up. By 1948, Windsor was becoming a vital component for dark, shadowy noir films like Abe Polonsky's classic "Force of Evil" and she was on her way to becoming what film historian/critic Leonard Maltin calls "one of the best bad girls in Hollywood history."
Of course, there weren't enough noir films being made to sustain the kind of busy career Windsor wanted, so she took all kinds of roles, usually playing bad girls, in all kinds of films from westerns ("Hellfire," "The Tall Texan," "The Fighting Kentuckian") to horror/sci-fi pictures ("Little Shop of Horrors," "The Day Mars Invade Earth," "Chamber of Horrors") to cheap action pictures ("Swamp Women," "Outpost in Morocco") to the occasional "A" picture, usually in smaller roles ("Trouble Along the Way," "Bedtime Story").
Still, the noir films gave Windsor her signature roles and her best work is still on display in pictures like "The Sniper," "City That Never Sleeps," but especially "Narrow Margin" and "The Killing." Windsor considered her role in Kubrick's "The Killing" (1956) to be the absolute nastiest of her career.
"God, what a horrible woman I was in that picture," she told me. "jerking poor little Elisha Cook around, sleeping with Vince Edwards and trying to make it with Sterling Hayden!"
In retrospect, maybe Windsor should have held out for more films like that and skipped the pedestrian pictures she so often worked in during the 1950s and 1960s as she slipped from leading lady billing to supporting parts. She admitted she took pretty much whatever came her way.
"I love to work," she told me. "I never turned down a job unless I was asked to undress."
If her standards had been higher, though, she probably never would have appeared in the film many consider a top contender for the worst movie of all time: "Cat Women on the Moon," a grade-Z production filmed in 3-D and released to an unprotected world in 1953.
"Did you see that?" she howled when I asked her about it. "God, that has to be the worst picture ever made! I was supposed to be on a spaceship, but it was such a cheap production that they had me rolling around on a deck chair."
Her co-stars were various has-been Hollywood stars, including Sonny Tufts and Victor Jory, and the plot was so ludicrous--moon explorers find a secret civilization of women wearing "cat suits" in caves on the moon--that it has become a "midnight movies " cult classic. (Our John Stanley says, "You'll howl at the Sears spacesuits and Woolworth zap guns.") In the 1980s, a Los Angeles improv comedy group used to show the film without a soundtrack and make up their own comic dialogue for the characters. In 1988, somebody got the bright idea to use clips in commercials.
"I can't stand the thought of it, but I signed the contract anyway," Windsor told me.
Actually, Windsor had a soft spot in her heart for schlock producers like Robert L. Lippert because she had so much fun making his tacky pictures, like "The Jungle," a 1952 film in which Rod Cameron and Windsor tracked down reports of prehistoric mammoths living in India. She said the "mammoths" were Indian elephants that Lippert had fitted with fur coats.
"He sent me to India for that one, which certainly was one of the most memorable experiences of my life," Windsor said of producer Lippert.
Luckily, Stanley Kubrick really wanted Windsor for "The Killing" or she might have lost the part because she was away filming a schlock picture, Roger Corman's "Swamp Women." Kubrick let her come in two days late and shot around her until she was ready to take on the part that may be her all-time best.
Though she was regarded as an upbeat woman, Windsor confided that she'd had many difficult stretches in her career once the "poverty row" studios faded away in the 1970s and she was no longer young enough for leading lady parts. She credited her marriage to real estate man Jack Hupp, who made a fortune in Beverly Hills property, with keeping her from really sinking low when parts started coming very infrequently.
"I feel so sorry for some of these actresses my age," Windsor told me after landing a TV role in ABC's short-lived "Supercarrier" series in 1988. "There are very few parts for us older broads nowadays. Some of them come into an interview and you know they just have to get the job to pay the rent or buy a new dress."
But, because she was so good at playing wicked saloon girls and hard-bitten shrews, Windsor kept working in smaller parts in films like "Cahill, U.S. Marshall" with John Wayne, "The Good Guys and the Bad Guys" with Robert Mitchum and "Support Your Local Gunfighter" with James Garner.
And when she wasn't working in features, Windsor did an enormous number of weekly TV series guest parts. In the 1950s, she worked in lots of drama showcases like "Climax," "Ford Theatre," "Screen Directors Playhouse," but over the years she appeared in scores of the most popular weekly series, among them: "Perry Mason," "77 Sunset Strip," "Lassie," "Hawaiian Eye," "Batman," "Mannix," "Bracken's World" and "Adam 12." Yet westerns were her TV reliables. Between 1952-64, she appeared on "Cheyenne," "Maverick," "Yancy Derringer," "Bat Masterson," "Rawhide," "The Deputy," "The Rebel," "Wyatt Earp," "Lawman," "Branded," "Jesse James," "Alias Smith & Jones" and "Bonanza," often in multiple episodes.
In all those movies and TV shows, Marie Windsor built, without any conscious design, a remarkable body of outstanding work as a Hollywood "bad girl" that will guarantee she'll be remembered far longer than so many of the leading ladies whose husbands she stole and the leading men she so often betrayed on the silver screen.
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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