Oscar Profile #260: Phillips Holmes

Born July 22, 1907 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Phillips Holmes was the eldest of three children of actors Taylor Holmes (1878-1959) and Edna Phillips (1878-1951). He, his sister Madeline and their younger brother Ralph all joined the family profession, with young Phillips making his film debut as his father’s son in 1918’s Uneasy Money. A member of Princeton’s Triangle Club, he had his first credited role in 1928’s Varsity in support of Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Mary Brian.

The strikingly handsome actor climbed quickly up the Hollywood ladder, appearing with Clara Bow and Fredric March in 1929’s The Wild Party and opposite Nancy Carroll in 1930’s The Devil’s Holiday for which Carroll received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

The young heartthrob starred in three major film in 1931, Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code opposite Walter Huston and Constance Cummings, George Abbott’s Stolen Heaven again opposite Nancy Carroll and Josef von Sternberg’s film of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy opposite Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee, generally considered the highlight of his career.

Holmes gave an even more impressive performance opposite Lionel Barrymore and Nancy Carroll in 1932’s Broken Lullaby, but audiences expecting a sophisticated Ernst Lubitsch comedy found the director’s anti-war melodrama heavy going. He received good notices for 1932’s Night Court again opposite Walter Huston and 1933’s The Secret of Madame Blanche . Great things were expected of Dorothy Arzner’s 1934 film of Emile Zola’s Nana showcasing Anna Sten, but the film flopped. He did, however, receive strong notices for the same year’s Caravan opposite Loretta Young and Charles Boyer, but it wasn’t enough to save his failing career. He was relegated to B features and stage appearances in such plays as The Petrified Forest, Golden Boy and The Philadelphia Story.

The actor had a long-term volatile relationship with singer Libby Holman. Holman had been indicted for the 1932 murder of her first husband, the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, but charges were dropped at the insistence of his family. When Homes and Holman broke up in 1939, she married his brother Ralph, eight years his junior.

Both Phillips and Ralph Holmes enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force to fight the Axis in 1941. Ralph became a pilot. Phillips attended the Air Ground School to become a pilot as well, but shortly after graduating he and six of his classmates were killed in a mid-air collision en route to another base in Ottawa on August 12, 1942. He was 35.

Ralph Holmes, suffering from post-war syndrome and despondency over his brother’s death, committed suicide with barbiturates on November 15, 1945. He was 30.
Libby Holman committed suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning on June 18, 1971. She was 67.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE DEVIL’S HOLIDAY (1930), directed by Edmund Goulding

Nancy Carroll had been a top star in light comedies and musicals, but she had never been tasked with a strong dramatic role prior to this smash hit film that she took on after the death of intended star Jeanne Eagels. Both she and Phillips Holmes in his first starring role give flawless performances as the gold-digging manicurist and the rich but dumb farmer’s son who falls in love with her. The film was so successful that it was only a matter of time before Carroll and Holmes were given an equally successful follow-up, 1931’s Stolen Heaven directed by George Abbott.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931), directed by Howard Hawks

Walter Huston gives one of his best performances as the D.A. turned prison warden in one of the finest prison films ever made. Phillips Holmes matches him every step of the way as a model prisoner who must choose between honoring the prisoners’ code of not snitching on his fellow in-mates and pointing the finger at the murder of his cell-mate. Constance Cummings co-stars as the warden’s daughter with whom Holmes falls in love. Hawks made this one between The Dawn Patrol and Scarface. It was remade in 1950 as Convicted with Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford and Dorothy Malone.

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931), directed by Josef von Sternberg

Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee star in the roles later played by Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1951 remake, A Place in the Sun, and are every bit as good. This version is closer to Theodore Dreiser’s novel with the emphasis on Holmes’ social-climbing character. Holmes and Clift had something else in common – Libby Holman, the singer who was the three years younger Holmes lover in the 1930s, the eleven years younger Ralph Holmes’ wife from 1939-1945 and the sixteen years younger Clift’s lover for a number of years after that.

BROKEN LULLABY (1932), directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Five years before director Leo McCarey’s dramatic Make Way for Tomorrow was ignored by the same public that flocked to his comedies, sophisticated comedy director Ernst Lubitsch’s dramatic Broken Lullaby suffered the same fate. The film, finally released on home video in the U.S., is an anti-war classic about a musically gifted French soldier who is grief-stricken over his killing of a similarly gifted German soldier educated at the same French music conservatory. A powerful study of love, loss and redemption, Phillips Holmes is the French soldier, Lionel Barrymore the dead man’s father and Nancy Carroll his fiancé.

DINNER AT EIGHT (1933), directed by George Cukor

This superb film version of the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber stage success, adapted for the screen by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz, is one of the great films in George Cukor’s canon and the careers of a number of its stars including Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke, Lee Tracy, Edmund Lowe, Karen Morley, Madge Evans and in lesser roles, Phillips Holmes (as Evans’ fiancée), Gant Mitchell, Louise Closser Hale, May Robson (as Burke’s cook) and Elizabeth Patterson (as Lionel Barrymore’s secretary) It was Holmes’ last great film..