Oscar Profile #31: Clarence Brown

Born May 10, 1890 in Clinton, Massachusetts, Clarence Brown was a used car salesman before starting out in films as an assistant director to Maurice Tourneur in 1915.

After a stint as a fighter pilot during World War I, he returned to Hollywood. By 1920 he was receiving co-directing credit with Tournear for The Great Redeemer and the 1920 version of The Last of the Mohicans featuring Wallace Beery as Magua, most of which he directed after Tourneur was injured. After that he received sole directing credit for his films.

In 1926 he directed Greta Garbo in the hugely successful Flesh and the Devil and immediately became her favorite director, directing her in six more films including 1930’s Anna Christie and Romance, both of which earned him Oscar nominations. He received one the following year for ,A Free Soul, with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable.

Now not just Garbo’s favorite director, but MGM’s go-to director for their biggest stars of the 1930s including Marie Dressler in Emma; Helen Hayes in The Son-Daughter; Joan Crawford in six films, with and without Gable, beginning with 1931’s Possessed; Garbo again in Anna Karenina and Conquest; Beery again in Ah, Wilderness!; Walter Huston and James Stewart in Of Human Hearts; Shearer and Gable again in Idiot’s Delighi and Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power in The Rains Came.

His 1934 film, Night Flight, starring John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy, long thought to be a lost film, has recently resurfaced and will be given a major DVD release from Warner Bros. soon.

He began the 1940s directing Spencer Tracy in Edison the Man and Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell in They Met in Bombay.

His most prolific period began with his direction of 1943’s The Human Comedy with Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan, for which he received his first Oscar nomination in thirteen years. He followed that with The White Cliffs of Dover with Irene Dunne, National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney and The Yearling with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, earning additional Oscar nominations for the latter two.

By now he had directed ten actors to Oscar nominations, two of them (Lionel Barrymore and Anne Revere) to wins and had become the first director to be nominated for five Oscars without winning. He was later joined by Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, the only one of the four to finally win when he was nominated for a seventh time.

Although it failed to garner him another Oscar nod, he did win a BAFTA for his 1949 film about then contemporary race relations, Intruder in the Dust, which may well have been his finest film. After that he failed to direct anything of distinction and ended his career with 1952’s Plymouth Adventure.

A very wealthy man thanks to savvy real estate investments, he refused to watch new movies for fear an interest in them might cause him to restart his career. However, in 1970 at the age of 80 he became extremely popular on the lecture circuit thanks primarily to his association with Garbo.

Clarence Brown died in 1987 at 97.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

ANNA CHRISTIE (1930)

Famed as the film in which Garbo first spoke, Brown’s film is faithful to Eugene O’Neill’s famed play, while providing his star with the perfect role to prove that she was indeed ready for talking pictures.

Marie Dressler dominates the film’s first act as a lovable waterfront hag whose friend George Marion, a tugboat captain, is expecting his farm bred daughter to be a perfect lady. In walks Garbo at the start of the second act imploring of the bartender “gif me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.”

THE HUMAN COMEDY (1943)

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright William Saroyan won an Oscar for his original story about the McCauley family of mythical Ithaca, California. Director Brown, star Mickey Rooney and the film itself had to be content with mere nominations.

Rooney never had a better role than that of the young telegraph man who has to deliver mostly bad news during World War II. Frank Morgan as the old telegrapher, Butch Jenkins as Rooney’s brother, Fay Bainter as his mother and a myriad of fine character players provide welcome support in this one of a kind movie.

NATIONAL VELVET (1944)

Enid Bagnold’s beloved novel about a young girl and her horse gave Elizabeth Taylor the role that made her a star at the age of 12. Mickey Rooney as the horse’s trainer, Angela Lansbury as her sister and Donald Crisp and Anne Revere as her parents are also memorable, with Revere winning an Oscar as her mother, a former Olympian swimmer.

Brown received his third Oscar nomination for his erstwhile direction.

THE YEARLING (1946)

Victor Fleming began filming Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ best-seller in late 1841, but the harsh Florida locations and the outbreak of World War II put a halt to it until after the war.

Using some of the footage Fleming and others had shot, Brown seamlessly interweaves the performances of his stars, Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman, Jr. into the ix in this compelling story of a boy and his pet deer.

Brown, Peck and Wyman and their film were all nominated for Oscars. The film won for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction.

INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1949)

William Faulknor’s novel was the source material for this exceptional film about an old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) and a boy (Claude Jarman, Jr.) who stand up to a mob intent on lynching local black Juano Hernandez for the murder of a white man, which he didn’t commit.

One of several films dealing with the black experience at the time, this is generally considered the best of those films, which also include Lost Boundaries; Home of the Brave and Pinky.