During a rough youth as a strolling player, Marjorie Rambeau saw it all and learned how to grab the attention of an audience and not let go. On stage in her youth, she was very adept at pulling on the heartstrings, so much so that Dorothy Parker, of all people, wrote a poem about Rambeau’s way of touching the hearts of her public. The Reuben sandwich, a grilled concoction of corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing, was also supposedly created for Rambeau, and it’s real schmaltzy like she was.
This early Rambeau is lost to us; her silent films have gone missing. By the time she came out to Hollywood in 1930, Rambeau was 40 years old and got typecast for a while as floozies of the waterfront, as in her first talkie, Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1930), where she plays Annie, a tart from “the wrong side of the island” who keeps getting deported. Annie is a boozer, like so many of Rambeau’s characters, and Garnett’s camera follows her in a very impressive tracking shot as Annie greets all of her lower depths pals outside various bars.
Rambeau’s Annie has not one but two spit curls on her forehead, maybe to indicate long-time experience as a woman who relies on men to survive. She is slangy and good-hearted and refers to herself in the third person a lot, as in, “Annie knows when to keep her trap shut!” Some of Rambeau’s tarts were malevolent: in Min and Bill (1930) she plays a selfish, self-pitying, and mean-minded wreck of a gal who wants her daughter to take care of her. Rambeau’s low-down diction in this movie is a hoot; she says “per-don me” instead of “pardon me” and “hoise” instead of “hearse,” and she feels the need to flirt with Wallace Beery and call him “big boy,” which maybe explains why she’s in such a bad mood most of the time.
Rambeau was signed to MGM in this early period and turns up in small parts in vehicles for their Big Three stars: Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford. In the Garbo movie Inspiration (1931), Rambeau shows that she can vary her type and her vocal delivery as a high-class call girl named Lulu, and in the Shearer picture Strangers May Kiss (1931) she is a wise friend to the heroine and a businesswoman who is only toying around with a rich man, and her diction has ascended up to the level of mid-Atlantic “a’s” for this part.
Rambeau was hilariously butch and managing in the difficult-to-see gender-reversal comedy The Warrior’s Husband (1932), which gave her more breathing room than usual to take control of a film, and as Flossie in Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933) she proved ready to defend the central lovers and sacrifice herself for them because she knows that her own life has been sordid and pointless.
By 1940 she received an Oscar nomination for her Mamie in Gregory La Cava’s Primrose Path, another woman of the lower depths, a good-natured but limited harlot who is married to a drunken failed writer named Homer (Miles Mander). Rambeau is pretty broad here at first, but she gets quiet and sincere and touching when Mamie speaks to her daughter (Ginger Rogers) about how she was impressed by Homer’s intellect in her youth and got stuck with him. It is in the neglected Primrose Path that we can see the Rambeau that so touched Dorothy Parker and others in her youth, particularly in a deathbed scene that she plays very dryly and admirably for maximum tough pathos.
In her fifties and sixties, Rambeau sometimes played ritzy nouveau riche matrons who still retained their earthy common sense, perhaps because Gladys George had begun to play the Marjorie Rambeau parts on screen. She got another Oscar nomination for supporting actress for Torch Song (1953), in which she played Joan Crawford’s mother and did a homey “turn” in the last part of the film as a sentimental woman who likes her beer and longs for thicker and saltier pretzels. Rambeau is immensely likable here, even when hamming it up slightly in reaction to Crawford’s revelation that she is in love with a blind man. Rambeau somehow makes something out of this small part with her “you can cry on my shoulder, kid” quality and her wistful eyes; it’s the sort of thing that her character might have dubbed “real corny,” but that has its appeal.
Rambeau married three times, and the third time was the charm; her third husband had known her on the stage in her youth. She retired in 1957 and lived until 1970, when she died at age 80. Her characters covered the waterfront, and they could be mean, but life had made them that way, and so what explains the good nature of so many of them, the empathy, the fellow feeling?