Charles Coburn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his Benjamin Dingle in The More the Merrier (1943), and that feels right even though he is very much one of the three leads because Coburn’s Dingle is supporting the two younger lead actors, Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, and pulling the strings that lead them to romance. His motto is that of Admiral Farragut, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!” And this is a good wartime motto, because during a war like World War II, things need to happen quickly. What transpires in The More the Merrier in the small apartment these three people share takes place in just the span of a week, yet it will have lasting consequences.
The script of The More the Merrier doesn’t give us too many clues about the past life or lives of Coburn’s Dingle, who is in his sixties. When he sizes up the attractiveness of Arthur’s Constance Milligan, Dingle says, “Once upon a time…” in order to let her know that in his day he was something of a ladies’ man, and this approaches charm, but Coburn really starts to dominate this picture when he begins to do the physical comedy routines built around the strictness of Connie’s morning schedule and the smallness of the space they are in. Director George Stevens had photographed Laurel and Hardy movies once upon a time, and there is something of Oliver Hardy’s grace and “chin up!” dignity in the way that Coburn takes his pratfalls and gets a coffee pot stuck inside the sleeve of his robe.
But Coburn reaches a level beyond even charm during the great sequence where Connie and McCrea’s Joe Carter, who haven’t met yet, start to dance to a rhumba on the radio in opposite rooms and Dingle comes in at the very end and does a stripper “bump” with his large stomach, a moment of unexpected fun so beautifully timed by Coburn that it comes across as not “cute” or worse but as the vicarious hopefulness of an old man who is wooing a young woman using a young man as his proxy, and of course moviegoers are often in such vicarious positions; we are all Benjamin Dingle watching movies starring Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, and we’d like to think we have a stake in their coupling.
Coburn was born in 1877 in Macon, Georgia, and he had a theater troupe that he toured in with his wife Ivah Wills until her death in 1937, at which time he focused on character roles in Hollywood. He was James Stewart’s father in Vivacious Lady (1938), his monocle ready to be popped as he observed Stewart’s fiancée Ginger Rogers, and then he was store owner J.P. Merlin in Bachelor Mother (1939), one of Rogers’s best vehicles. Here Coburn was a man who wants to have a grandson so that he can go on living forever, an American dynamo who wants to cheat even death.
Coburn’s characters on screen were generally men with power, ruthless capitalists, and this could shade into convincing mean-mindedness, as in a movie that revolves around him, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), where he plays a tycoon named Merrick who infiltrates a department store he owns in order to find employees who might want to join a union. The expected or Capra-ish development of this scenario would have Merrick seeing the side of the workers and joining them in some way, but director Sam Wood was a right-winger and so was Coburn, and so Merrick looks on them all fairly skeptically and with pragmatic coldness. “Fire anyone who’s suspicious,” Merrick says in an early scene. “You don’t need to be accurate.” Lines like this prefigure the McCarthy era to come after the war.
But that same year Coburn made the most of his Preston Sturges lines as “Colonel” Harrington, the card sharp father traveling with his daughter Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) in The Lady Eve who tells her, “Let us be crooked, but never common.” Coburn’s Harrington seems to stand outside his relationship with his daughter as if they aren’t related, and he views her with tender detachment. He tells rich sucker Pike (Henry Fonda) that “ribaldry” comes out in the female side of his family, with the exception of him, and Jean says, “and what an exception” with that offhand way that Stanwyck has of making us understand a complex character or situation in an instant, full steam ahead.
The Colonel shows his daughter a trick with the cards, and she is impressed, and Jean doesn’t impress easy. “You don’t really need it,” he says airily, “it’s just virtuosity,” and this is a moment where we can see why Jean is with her father on this boat; she can still learn a lot from him, but she is wary, too. “You’re such an old scoundrel you’d skin me if you had the chance,” she tells him, and that’s a distinct possibility with this man, even if he does comfort her when she cries over Pike.
The characters Coburn played took a much darker turn in 1942, the year of Kings Row, where his cruel doctor amputates Ronald Reagan’s legs out of spite, and In This Our Life, where he plays a roaringly unscrupulous man named William Fitzroy who has cheated his own brother out of business and wants to keep his niece Stanley (Bette Davis) as a kind of incestuous mistress of sorts. “What Stanley needs is a firm hand,” he says, and goes further by saying, “Stanley needs the whip!”
When Uncle William gives Stanley a check, he demands a kiss, and he tells her not to turn her head for this kiss, not after that big check he gave her! He hates “soft” people with no “guts” and doesn’t want “liberties” for what he terms “the wrong people,” and there is a moment here where Hattie McDaniel’s Minerva shoots Coburn’s William Fitzroy a disapproving look, as if he is the embodiment of everything that is keeping her people down, and alas, Coburn himself fit that bill; he was a member of the White Citizens’ Councils, a white supremacist group that opposed racial integration.
At the end of In This Our Life, Coburn’s Fitzroy is a wretched old man staring into a fireplace who knows he is going to die in six months, and his self-pity has a Shakespearean or Wellesian grandeur, especially when Davis’s Stanley shouts at him, “You can die for all I care! Die!” Coburn worked quite a bit after his Oscar win, but nothing was too memorable until his two encounters with Marilyn Monroe in the early 1950s.
“Get someone to type this,” he tells her secretary Miss Laurel in Monkey Business (1952), and when Cary Grant looks at him askance after this Coburn is the soul of reason when he says, “Anybody can type.” His character Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman owns a diamond mine in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and he looks at Monroe with flushed hopes in Technicolor.
Coburn made it to age 84, having made a second marriage to a much younger woman in 1959, and he even had a daughter with her, so there was more than a little of him in his characters. He was in the wrong on integration and much else, but a lot might be forgiven for that stripper “bump” in The More the Merrier.