It was in 1926, when she played Poppy on Broadway in The Shanghai Gesture with Florence Reed as her Mother Goddam, that Mary Duncan first came to real prominence. A Virginia belle, one of eight children, Duncan had worked as a child actress, and she was already in her early thirties when she played Poppy, a girl who is gradually corrupted by drugs and men until she is totally depraved.
There was something of that depraved look about the long-limbed, long-faced Duncan in her first silent pictures, a perverted quality that might have alarmed even Luis Buñuel. Legend has it that she was the last one to possess a copy of a film she starred in for F.W. Murnau, 4 Devils (1928), maybe the most coveted of all missing silent movies, but that the nitrate print caught on fire and needed to be tossed into the sea, by either Duncan or her fellow audience members on a boat.
Most of Frank Borzage’s The River (1929) is also missing, but the 45 minutes or so that remain are among the most erotic in film history, and they seal the deal for Duncan’s immortality. Once seen, who can forget Duncan’s Rosalee sitting in her tight dress near water with a pet crow by her side, a curiously lascivious expression on her face as she communes with herself and first spots Charles Farrell’s innocent Allen John swimming in the nude. Though Rosalee says she never wants to see another man, there is an extraordinarily sexy charge between her and Allen John in a cabin as she stands in back of him to test how tall he is and stretches out her fabulous legs to take off her high heels.
That depraved smile that had made Duncan’s name as Poppy turns up again in The River as Rosalee has Allen John feel her bosom, which is the cover, of course, for her heart, and this Borzage movie goes beyond sex to something spiritual when Rosalee brings a frozen Allen John back to life with the warmth of her body and Borzage seems to catch something supernatural on the faces of Duncan and Farrell.
Duncan was teamed with Farrell again for F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930), a film that was taken out of Murnau’s hands by Fox. In at least the first third of that picture, though, Duncan is a memorable heroine, a woman who wants to get away from waitressing in a stylized and hot Chicago who finds that life on a farm is just as bad in its own way. Duncan’s Kate keeps a mechanical bird in a cage that she brings out to the farm, and this bird of hers bewilders a farm cat, symbolism that still carries a peculiar intensity, just as Kate’s gamboling in the wheat at the farm prefigures Terrence Malick heroines to come.
Talking pictures revealed that Duncan had a very highfalutin and fruity way of speaking, like Ruth Chatterton or some of the other grander stage divas of that day, and she had trouble getting parts eventually. So it was lucky for her that she befriended Marion Davies when they filmed Five and Ten (1931) together and Davies introduced Duncan to a rich polo star named Stephen “Laddie” Sanford. They were married in 1933, the year Duncan made her last film, Morning Glory, a key Katharine Hepburn vehicle where she played the top blonde stage star Rita Vernon.
Rita Vernon is so different from Rosalee in The River that it would be difficult to tell she was played by the same actress if Duncan’s name was not credited. Rita roars when she speaks even offstage, and C. Aubrey Smith’s character actor says that Rita has a gift but has been “spoiled” by success since leaving his company, where she once made a hit in a small part.
Rita uses all weapons at her disposal in dealing with the producer who has her under contract, Louis Easton (Adolphe Menjou), and they have clearly slept together at some point; later in the film, Duncan’s Rita says she knows enough about Easton to hang him, and she probably does. She is willing to do a comedy called Blue Skies for Easton if her part is “built up,” but what she really wants is a new translation of a Molnar play called The Golden Bough.
The reactions of other characters let us know that Rita Vernon is an excellent actress with talent even though we never see her on stage, but it is ominous when she says of her public, “They always like me no matter what I give them.” One stagehand calls her “an old hag” as she plays hardball with Easton and loses The Golden Bough, which means that Rita’s days are numbered, most likely, as a top attraction.
Duncan herself retired and ruled as a grande dame of Palm Beach for decades, particularly as a friend of the Kennedys. There are photos of her with Rose and Teddy Kennedy from the 1960s where Duncan is again unrecognizable as either Rosalee or Rita Vernon and has turned into one of those society ladies from that time with helmet hair.
Duncan went right on with philanthropic work and so on even after the death of her husband in 1977, staying active right up to the end of her life at age 98 in 1993. Rita Vernon is amusing and worth thinking about, but Duncan will always be the woman sitting with her pet crow in Borzage’s The River with warmth enough in her lanky body to bring any man back to roaring life.
I love City Girl so much