Pauline Frederick

A Woman of a Certain Age

In her youth, when she was a star on the stage, Pauline Frederick was known as “The Girl with the Topaz Eyes,” and those piercing blue eyes of hers are her trademark in her surviving and readily available films. Tied to a stage mother who lived with her and scorned by a disapproving father, Frederick married five times and had a generally messy personal life that included an affair with a young Clark Gable when he was trying to break into movies in the 1920s.

When she started working in films in 1915, Frederick was in her early thirties, and the roles she took on screen emphasized her ability to seem to age and change over time, especially in her 1920 version of Madame X. Frederick’s eyes would flash in these early pictures, there would be gunplay, and she often wound up in court somehow; she also played Zaza (1915), and she played in an adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho (1917).

It is only in recent years that her collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch, Three Women (1924), has been made available in a very clear print from Kino Lorber with ideal musical backing from Andrew Earle Simpson. The first shot of this picture is of a scale, and we can see on Frederick’s face that her character does not like what the scale tells her. As the rich and vain Mabel Wilton, Frederick seems deeply involved in the story of this beautiful woman of 40 who is trying to keep up with the “whoopee!” flaming youth decade of the 1920s. She wears very heavy eye shadow over those noted topaz eyes and is so fabulously gowned in a scene at a large party that Lubitsch is able to do an extensive montage just of her jewels as an avaricious suitor (Lew Cody) looks her over.

Frederick in Three Women has something of the imperious severity of Gloria Swanson, but with a more vulnerable edge underneath her rather harsh visual presentation. When Mabel hears that her young daughter is coming to visit her, Frederick stares into a mirror and touches her face, and she is utterly serious about this woman’s dilemma. Lubitsch is just as serious, in his dry way, but with a more satirical impulse at times.

Frederick is as subtle a player as Lubitsch requires, and she was just as subtle for Clarence Brown in Smouldering Fires (1925), perhaps her finest extant performance, in which she plays Jane Vale, a middle-aged woman who runs her late father’s company with an iron fist. Frederick’s Jane dresses in suits and ties with slicked-back hair, and she is given to referring to herself in the third person, as in, “Are Jane Vale’s methods not effective?” Efficiency is her obsession, and so it makes sense that when she falls in love with a comely younger man (Malcolm McGregor), it is because he has innovative ideas about how to streamline her business and he isn’t afraid to call out the yes men around her.

Frederick’s armored face in Smouldering Fires gives way very touchingly to guarded longing and wistful discontent. Brown’s style is sober, steady, and nearly plodding, but with an attention to the minutest emotions of his characters, and that attention pays off: the problems of Frederick’s Jane Vale, McGregor’s Robert, and Jane’s sister Dorothy (Laura La Plante) come to matter to us. There is a very psychologically incisive scene here where Jane finally lets her guard down and shows herself in all her raw yearning to Robert, and Brown catches a helpless ambivalence on his face, as if he is somewhat in love with the grandiose Jane who runs the company but is less certain of how he feels about this newly needy woman underneath. Frederick leaves herself very exposed in a moment like this, so that the bravery of the character merges with the bravery of the actress playing her.

At age 48 in This Modern Age (1931), Frederick is even more effective than she was on the silent screen, with her low, resonant voice and rather low-key, naturalistic manner, and she makes a very convincing bohemian mother to a young and blonde Joan Crawford, whose own eyes are even bigger and more demanding than Frederick’s famed topazes. There is a sense in This Modern Age that this is the mother Crawford wanted and needed in life, worldly and understanding, but she only got to take advice from her on the screen; there is a sweet moment where Crawford softly slaps Frederick on the behind and those topaz eyes flash to say fondly, “You naughty girl!” You want to know more about Frederick’s Diane “Di” Winters, both character and actress.

Frederick proved her range as a malevolent, white-haired dowager out to eliminate chorus girl daughter-in-law Nancy Carroll in Wayward (1932), but she was beset by ill health shortly after that and died from an asthma attack at just age 55 in 1938. So much of her film work has been lost, but her Jane Vale in Smouldering Fires, very persuasively championed by William K. Everson in his sensitive 1979 book Love in the Film, remains as moving a study of the dilemma of an older woman falling in love for the first time as will be found in cinema.