Fredric March

The Dark Side

For an actor who won two lead Academy Awards during the golden age of Hollywood and originated the role of James Tyrone on stage in Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, Fredric March has been somewhat forgotten or neglected. There was a strange moment recently when it was thought he had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan as a young man, but this turned out to be false. Yet those who look into his life and career are going to quickly be confronted by stories from many of the women he co-starred with, particularly Claudette Colbert, Olivia de Havilland, Carole Lombard, Evelyn Venable, Evelyn Keyes, and Veronica Lake, that he sexually harassed and groped them and would not stop even when they pleaded with him.

Today he would be disgraced for such behavior and probably criminally charged. The story goes that Lombard, finally pushed beyond endurance, plotted revenge; she suddenly returned his attentions and basically said, “Tonight’s the night!” March got very excited, he turned up in her dressing room, and Lombard smiled, tossed off her robe, and was nude save for a rubber dildo, which sent March supposedly screaming away in horror. Hopefully some version of this story is true.

March came from a prosperous Wisconsin family and pursued a banking career at first but soon decided on theater instead, and he got signed up by Paramount and worked hard in early talkies opposite its top female star Clara Bow and fellow theater transplants like Ann Harding and Ruth Chatterton. He came across rather unpleasantly on screen at first; there was an air of blocked feeling about him, or menace, or the pain of self-loathing that might flare up into bad behavior. There was a kind of warning note in his eyes and even sometimes in the enclosed sound of his voice.

March made his first positive impression on screen as the bohemian who coaches former showgirl Nancy Carroll to embrace Laughter (1930), a proto-screwball comedy where he took the space like an experienced theater actor grabbing the audience with the authority with which he entered a room and sat down at a piano. This was a favorite film for March, and one of the few he kept a print of.

If his smile felt a bit forced in Laughter, it only meant that he was seeking the cover of outright impersonation, which is why his expert impression of John Barrymore in The Royal Family of Broadway (1930) felt like his breakthrough and won him his first Oscar nomination for lead actor; even though he has limited screen time, March so dominates his scenes that it feels like he is the center of the film. The floridness of the Barrymore voice and bounding physicality and even some of the Barrymore hand gestures releases something magnetic in March, who seems like the sort of performer who went into acting in order to be something more or better than his actual self and carefully acquired the technique to do so.

For Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in regular work in this period in America, March played a sexual harasser of a boss who propositions secretary Claudette Colbert in Honor Among Lovers (1931) and then fires her when she rebuffs him. This is an unpleasant movie, not just because it reflects what was happening between March and Colbert off screen but because it eventually makes his character turn around and try to act noble, which is hardly credible after the rotten way we have seen him behave.

March won his first Oscar for Rouben Mamoulian’s dazzlingly inventive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), where he is very carefully filmed in order to look nearly angelic as Jekyll (quite a feat of lighting and make-up artifice) and made disgustingly and effectively physically ugly as the sexual sadist Hyde. March somewhat overplays Jekyll’s despair in a camp way towards the end, but his Hyde is nothing if not uninhibited, so much so that you might not even know this was March under the make-up unless you saw him in the other scenes or his name in the credits. He gets a lot of help in this picture, and the performance is somewhat uneven, but March’s best moments here have a let-‘er-rip intensity that set a standard for the horror genre.

March was at his very best as the alcoholic would-be playwright in Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) opposite Sylvia Sidney, a rare leading lady who said in later interviews that she didn’t mind his stated attraction to her, which was only verbal in her case; the result is chemistry on screen that allows them to deeply explore the pain of the characters they were playing. If March has any special talent, it is the deep and sometimes very heavy way he expresses pain and humiliation, especially if this pain and humiliation is somehow tied to drinking too much.

He adapted to the very stylized demands of Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday (1934), for he was always encouraged by heightened or non-naturalistic opportunities where he could get far outside of himself, but March was very subordinate to his female co-stars in costume pictures until he played another alcoholic, the fading movie star Norman Maine in A Star Is Born (1937), which emphasized all his strengths: worry, self-doubt and loathing, dependance, and a flair for being rejected. In the scene where he interrupts the Academy Award speech of his movie star wife (Janet Gaynor), March is as frighteningly uninhibited and monstrous as his Mr. Hyde, and in scenes of humiliation he is agonized, though hardly sympathetic.

He was far too solemn and even morose in the classic comedy Nothing Sacred (1937) opposite Lombard, but March excelled again as another self-loathing drunk in Susan and God (1940) for George Cukor and was willingly upstaged by Joan Crawford’s far more flashy efforts in the leading role. He worked a bit less in the 1940s and started playing on stage again, often with his long-time wife Florence Eldridge, before coming to the part for which he is best remembered, the returning war veteran in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won him his second lead actor Oscar.

March’s Al Stephenson is a decent man, ordinary, aging, and inclined to drink a bit, which meant that March could display his talent for virtuoso drunk scenes: one scene of extreme drunkenness on the night Al comes back from the war, and another scene of slightly less extreme drunkenness when he is giving a speech to his co-workers at a bank. March somehow makes more sense as a man getting on in years than he did in his youth; he seemed more vulnerable and less threatening.

The unease that sometimes characterized his work as leading man in some of his 1930s films had vanished, and March was a first-rate technician by the 1940s who could play all facets of a character with extreme subtlety. He dominates Another Part of the Forest (1948) as the complex head of the mercenary Hubbard family, which co-starred his wife Florence Eldridge, but he was a rather stuffy figurehead in biopics of Mark Twain and Christopher Columbus.

March turned down the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on stage and recognized soon afterward his mistake, and so he eagerly accepted it for the 1951 film version, but his Willy Loman is too gloomy and effortful, without the air of desperate vitality that Lee J. Cobb brought to the role. Willy Loman is a falsely self-confident man at times, and this went against the grain of all of March’s instincts as an actor; his range was fairly wide, but delusions were beyond him.

March’s female scene partners were still on alert for him even as he was pushing 60. “He was able to do a very emotional scene with tears in his eyes and pinch my fanny at the same time,” related Shelley Winters. How aware Eldridge was of her husband’s predations is an open question. At the start of his film career March briefly appeared in The Studio Murder Mystery (1929) as a jerk of a murder victim who became an actor for access to women, and Eldridge played his long-suffering wife who has put up with his philandering. By all accounts theirs was a solid, long-running marriage, and productive on many levels. They were a popular and social couple within certain limits and dedicated to liberal causes; it looked from the outside like an ideal. Elia Kazan, who directed them on stage, thought they behaved more like mother and son than husband and wife.

Close to her husband’s equal in terms of skill and range, Eldridge largely abandoned her career in the 1930s to make a home for March and raise their two adopted children, but by the 1940s they were an established team again on stage, and their steady work won them the greatest plum roles in twentieth century American theater, James and Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway in 1956, which won March the second of his two Tony awards. But March and Eldridge did not get to do these roles on film.

By the mid-1950s, March had often slipped into character roles. He badly overplayed the antagonist in Inherit the Wind (1961), mistakenly offering crude acting to represent a crude man, and in that film he played opposite Spencer Tracy, a performer to whom he was sometimes compared; set side by side with Tracy, March seems diligent rather than inspired, dogged rather than soulful. In Lawrence J. Quirk’s 1971 book The Films of Fredric March there is this now-surprising line in the introduction: “Many regard March as our greatest American actor.” If that was ever the case, such a high reputation has slipped considerably in over half a century.

March went out on a high note: as Harry Hope in a film of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1973), where he hit a pure vein of old-timer vigor that is very moving. This is a lengthy and often distinguished career that points up how craft and seriousness as an actor are sometimes not quite enough to ensure that a reputation stands the test of time, even if his two Oscar wins and A Star Is Born are still classics that very much rely on his skill and instinct for self-doubt and self-hatred.