Oscar Profile #24: Gary Cooper

Frank James “Gary” Cooper was born May 7, 1901 in Helena, Montana. The son of a Montana Supreme Court judge, he was schooled in England and Iowa as well as Montana. He moved with his parents to California when his father retired from the bench. His numerous early jobs included that of an extra in films, usually as a cowboy. He was an expert horseman, having learned to ride as therapy for a hip injury suffered in an auto accident.

His first major role was as a cowboy in Henry King’s The Winning of Barbara Worth with Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky in 1926 and he stole his brief scenes as a pilot in William A. Wellman’s Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture.

Cooper became a superstar with his first talkie, 1929’s The Virginian, directed by Victor Fleming and had big hits with such films as Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco and Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms in the early thirties before receiving his first Oscar nomination for Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936. Even though he turned down the leads in both John Ford’s Stagecoach and Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind in 1939 and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent in 1940, his career suffered no damage. He had one of his best western roles in William Wyler’s The Westerner in 1940 and starred in three of the biggest hits of 1941, Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York and Ball of Fire.

In fact without Cooper, Alvin York, World War I’s most decorated hero, would not have allowed his story to be told. The film won Coop his second Oscar nomination and his first Oscar.

His Lou Gehrig in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees, directed by Sam Wood, brought him his third Oscar nomination and was his mother’s favorite film.

Hemingway handpicked Coop to star in the 1943 film version of his For Whom the Bell Tolls based on his admiration for Coop’s performance in A Farewell to Arms, which had also been based on one of his novels. It brought him his fourth Oscar nomination.

After a series of flops, some of them quite embarrassing, Cooper made a major comeback in 1952’s High Noon for which he won his second Oscar accepted n his behalf by John Wayne while Coop was filming Vera Cruz in Mexico. He also turned in memorable late career performances in 1956’s Friendly Persuasion, directed by William Wyler; 1958’s Man of the West, directed by Anthony Mann and 1959’sThe Hanging Tree, directed by Delmer Daves.

At the 1960 Oscar ceremony on April 17, 1961, Coop was given a third statuette, this time a career achievement award accepted by a tearful James Stewart, signaling to the world that Cooper might be quite ill. He died of cancer less than a month later on May 13, 1961, just six days after his 60th birthday. His last film, The Naked Edge, directed by Michael Anderson, was released posthumously.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1932), directed by Frank Borzage

Hemingway’s World War I romance between an ambulance driver and a nurse was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two for Sound and Charles Lang’s exquisite cinematography. The performances of Cooper, Helen Hayes and Adolphe Menjou as Coop’s jealous major, are all at the top of their game. Very much in the style of Borzage’s Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell romances at Fox, the Paramount film was remade as Force of Arms in 1950 and under its original title in 1957. Its basic plot has also been used in several other films, but none of them reach the heights of the Cooper-Hayes original.

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936), directed by Frank Capra

The quintessential feel good Depression Era comedy, Coop was the perfect choice to play the small town Vermont boy who unexpectedly inherits a fortune that various city slickers set out to relieve him of. Enter Jean Arthur as a damsel in distress. The hilarious competency trial during which Coop turns the tables on the crooks still elicits loud belly laughs. The film was so popular it played more than a year in theatres around the country that usually only showed a film for one or two weeks.

BALL OF FIRE (1941), directed by Howard Hawks

Coop won his first Oscar for playing World War I hero Sergeant York in the year’s big box office hit, but for my money he was even better in two of the year’s best comedies, Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe and York director Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire. Coop’s co-star in both Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire was the superb Barbara Stanwyck, who received an Oscar nomination for the latter. She’s a stripper and he’s a timid professor in this screwball classic about a group of bachelor professors, who along with Coop, are in the process of putting together a dictionary on slang.

HIGH NOON (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann

The classic western about a lone lawman who must face three dastardly killers when his fellow townspeople refuse to help, was seen as a metaphor for the plight of the writers on Hollywood’s blacklist. Fred Zinnemann’s taut direction, Dimitri Timkin’s score and Coop’s tight-lipped performance are the film’s greatest assets. John Wayne and Howard Hawks were so incensed by the film’s message that they made Rio Bravo in retaliation. Volumes have been written about Rio Bravo being a film for Republicans, while High Noon, which is Bill Clinton’s favorite film, is for Democrats. I say they’re just movies. Watch and enjoy.

THE HANGING TREE (1959), directed by Delmer Daves

For some reason Warner Bros. has never released this on home video, which is a shame because it’s one of the most unusual and unusually pleasing westerns to come out of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cooper, in his last great performance, is a doctor who saves a petty young criminal (Ben Piazza) from the titled hanging tree and makes him his indentured servant, controlling his every move. He later cures beautiful Maria Schell of temporary blindness, caused by looking at the sun too long. Karl Malden and George C. Scott, in his film debut, are the principal villains. Mary Robbins’ recording of the Oscar nominated title song was a huge hit at the time.