feaito wrote:Check The Passionate Plumber, an amusing flick with Buster Keaton, lovely Irene Purcell and fiery Mona Maris.
Thanks, Fernando. I will try to view it this time. I get sad for Buster, but the cast is intriguing (other than the miscast OTT Jimmy Durante, whom I normally like).
MissGoddess wrote:I am fond of Juarez. Not only for Gilbertito, who looks like a painting of a Spanish grandee come to life, but I've always thought Bette Davis looked exceptionally beautiful as the dark, tormented Carlota. Also, Brian Aherne makes Maximilian human.
Sue Sue Applegate wrote:She was lovely in Juarez!
JackFavell wrote:I agree, Juarez has some exceptional moments for Bette and Brian. Gilbert is so noble and graceful here, I just love him, though it's in a futile cause. I also am fond of John Garfield in the film. Joseph Calleia gives a nice shifty performance as a political animal who urges Juarez to betray some of the people he represents, rather transparently in order to satisfy his own ambitions.
I agree about Bette, who kept her eye-popping gesticulations under control in this movie, using those trademarks judiciously in her mad scenes. Maybe that was William Dieterle's doing, though the actress did say that when she worked on this movie she was in awe of two others--Brian Aherne for his drop dead looks & Claude Rains for his authoritative hauteur as Napoleon III. Davis' performance made a viewer feel the tragedy of her life and that of her husband. Don't get me started on Brian Aherne...please. He was just wonderful and knew that this was his best role.
GR was near the height of his good looks in that late '30s, imho. His character's brave, blind loyalty to Maximilian gives the film a bit more needed humanity and poignancy too.
JF--I kept wishing that they could have told Paul Muni to stay home and concentrated on Calleia and Garfield on the Juarezistas' side. Muni could be good, or he could be awful. There appears to have been little in-between with actor, who apparently thought he was playing a plaster saint instead of a real person and gave his stiffest performance ever on-screen.
Above: Brian Aherne holding Mickey Kuhn as Gilbert Roland looks on in Juarez (1939).
BTW, on the set, Gilbert Roland reportedly was smitten with Mickey Kuhn, who played the little boy adopted by Carlota & Maximilian to help legitimize their place on the Mexican throne in
Juarez (1939). In "Growing Up on the Set: Interviews with 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television by Tom Goldrup, Jim Goldrup:
"Mickey's first recollection of working in a picture was when he was six years old. 'In 1938 I did a movie at Warner Bros. called Juarez with Paul Muni and I got a hundred dollars a week. Gilbert Roland also appeared n Juarez, and I'll tell you an interesting little sidelight in regards to that. He and his wife were childless and wanted to adopt a child. He approached my mother in all seriousness to work out an arrangement to adopt me. Of course my mother said, 'No, I'm sorry.'"
I guess that Mickey was referring to Constance Bennett as GR's "wife" though they were not legally married until 1941 (after her divorce from the the long-absent Henri de la Falaise, the Marquis of de la Coudraye, who was fighting for France at the time of the split).
Lorinda Roland, Constance and Gilbert's eldest daughter was born--according to her mother, who never seems to have produced a birth certificate--in her NYC apartment in April, 1938, to avoid publicity. Since the relationship between Bennett & Roland was reportedly quite "torrid" and subject to separations and renewals, is it possible he did not know of his daughter's birth or that he hoped a son would help things between himself and Bennett?
A younger daughter, Gyl, was born on Dec. 9, 1941, also reportedly at home on Carolwood Drive in Los Angeles and this is reportedly detailed in GR's unpublished memoirs, though strangely, no mention of Lorinda's birth is made in that book, cited by the author Brian Kellow in "The Bennetts: An Acting Family."
GR & Bennett had married in April of 1941. Gilbert Roland reportedly enlisted in the Army Air Corps the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, so that event may have cast a pall over her birth, but at least there was less speculation about the girl's paternity since her parents were married then.
In any case, Mickey Kuhn, who went on to play the son of Melanie & Ashley in GWTW (and loved working with Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard & esp. Clark Gable), apparently thought very highly of
Gilbert Roland. Kuhn explained to the authors that "like with Jimmy Stewart, Gilbert Roland, John Wayne and all of those people you learn something [from each of them]."
He recalled fondly working with him again in the movie
High Conquest (1947), though he received a bad burn on his hand during the film.
"'I carried a flare and fell off a mountain and tumbled to my death. In that particular scene something happened with the flare and it spewed out and landed on my hand and burned it. Not a whole lot, but just enough to put a good scar on it. Working with Gilbert Roland again was a thrill beyond all thrills because I really thought that world of that man. When he died I hadn't realized he had been at the Motion Picture Home. If I had known I would have certainly gone and seen him because he was always one of my favorites. He was a nice, nice man, and that's hard to come by.'"