Cinema: Tugboat Annie

(See front cover)

Cinemas in which Marie Dressier plays the lead have one quality in common—the heroine is a raffish, vigorous old woman whose generous heart thumps under sleazy clothes that do not fit her. Tugboat Annie (MGM) is not merely a typical Marie Dressier picture; it crowns all her previous works because its heroine is even more raffish, kindly, troubled, brave and energetic than the heroines of Min and Bill, Emma, Politics or Prosperity. She is Annie Brennan, whose three excitements are her mischievously drunken husband Terry (Wallace Beery), her handsome, respectable son Alec (Robert Young) and her dilapidated tugboat, the Narcissus.

Life on the Narcissus is complicated principally by Terry’s appetite for whiskey. He cuts off pieces of the hawser and pawns them for liquor so that when Annie sets out to tow a schooner into port she is humiliated by finding that she has no rope. Young Alec, disgusted by his father’s dipsomania, goes to work for a steamship company, manages to satisfy his mother’s ambition by becoming captain of the company’s sleekest passenger ship, the Glacier Queen. The day Alec completes his first voyage, Terry gets drunk on hair-tonic. Annie locks him up in the cabin while she goes to a reception for her son, meets his fiancee Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan), daughter of his boss.

The next three reels of Tugboat Annie show a few more of the things Annie has to put up with. At a reception on board the Glacier Queen, Annie snatches so many glasses of punch away from her husband that she gets tipsy herself. Alec persuades his employer to give Terry a job. Terry gets drunk, makes embarrassing remarks about Alec’s fondness for the employer’s daughter. Finally one day when Annie is ashore trying to borrow money for new boilers, Terry takes the Narcissus for a spin in the harbor, rams a ferry boat while turning around to pick up a floating case of whiskey. The Narcissus has to be sold to pay the damages. Annie—by this time estranged from her son because she will not desert her inconvenient husband —is hired to stay on as captain.

Having presented the principal figures as slapstick personages, the picture finally tries to deal with them more solemnly. One stormy night when Annie is towing a load of garbage out to sea, she comes on the Glacier Queen, her shaft broken, foundering near a reef. This time Terry behaves like a hero. He crawls into the fire box of the Narcissus to repair the boiler so that the tug can pull the Glacier Queen out of danger. The film ends with Terry recovering from his burns and wearing a medal. The steamship company has bought back the Narcissus for Annie and she is reconciled with her son.

Tugboat Annie is likely to become financially one of the most successful pictures of the year not because of its plot. which was rewritten by Zelda Sears and Eve Greene from Norman Reilly Raine’s

Satevepost stories, nor because of Mervyn LeRoy’s competent direction. It is entirely because of the presence in its cast of an old lady whose preposterous career makes the happy ending in Tugboat Annie seem comparatively realistic and whose flamboyant character makes the people she impersonates seem pallid reflections of herself. Seven years ago Marie Dressier was an impoverished “bit part” actress, nervously consulting astrologers as to the advisability of opening a Paris hotel in the hope that friends who remembered when she was a famed stage comedienne might patronize it enough to keep her comfortable. Now, at 63, she is indisputably the most valuable performer in Hollywood. Last year 12,000 exhibitors in Motion Picture Herald’s nation-wide poll agreed that her name was worth more at the box office than that of Greta Garbo, Janet Gaynor, Jean Harlow or Mickey Mouse. Her last four pictures have earned an average of $800,000 each—far more than any other star’s. She gets a salary of $4,000 a week because she is too good-natured to demand more. In 1931 she won the Cinema Academy’s prize for the best acting of the year in Min & Bill. Last year she nearly won it again, for Emma.

Born in Canada (like Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer), Lelia Koerber (Marie Dressier) grew up in Cobourg, Ontario where her father was a music teacher. At five she performed as Cupid in a church pageant, made her audience laugh by falling off a pedestal. At 14, under her stage name (borrowed from an aunt) she joined an itinerant stock opera troupe, finally got a chance to understudy Katisha in The Mikado for $8 a week. Eight years later, playing in the same theatre, she was getting $800 a week.

After six more years, she played there again, for $1,600. By this time, Marie Dressier had had time to get married—to a handsome ticket seller named Hopper, from whom she was later separated —and to become a celebrated comedienne. She had played with Lillian Russell in Giroflé Girofla, with Joe Weber in Higgledy-Piggeldy, with Sam Bernard in a burlesque of Romeo & Juliet, distinguished herself as Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey. After an unsuccessful engagement in London, she discovered a one-cylinder farce called Tillie’s Nightmare, played it in Manhattan for two years and on the road for three. It was in this that she sang “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.”

Marie Dressler’s career as a theatrical celebrity falls into two divisions. By 1925 she had acquired the financial problems which customarily overtake actors who are too fond of their friends to save their money. When she made up her mind to start a hotel in Paris, her closest friend, a Manhattan astrologer named Nella Webb, persuaded her to wait, predicted that she would enjoy “seven fat years” beginning Jan. 17, 1927. On Jan. 17, Director Allan Dwan telephoned Marie Dressier, offered her a role in a picture he was about to make in Florida. Reluctantly—because she suspected that the producers who remembered her would think she was superannuated —Marie Dressier took the job. When her friend

Frances Marion—then No. 1 scenarist for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who as a cub reporter had met Marie Dressier 15 years before—heard of the picture she persuaded Producer Irving Thalberg to bring Marie Dressier to Hollywood. There the role of old Marthy in Anna Christie— which she got because Director Clarence Brown remembered that Lon Chancy had called her the most brilliant character actress in the U. S.—made Marie Dressier a celebrity for the second time.

Captious cinema critics have suggested that Marie Dressler’s most dependable talent is flexibility of her facial muscles and that if the Academy awards her anything for her performance in Tugboat Annie, it should be no medal but a mug.

In this respect, her critics are only partially correct. What makes Marie Dressler’s performances invariably exciting is the fact that even when they are careless impersonations they are brilliant recordsof her own robust and friendly personality. In farce, like most of Tugboat Annie, she is more likely to depend on antiquated tricks than when she is expanding a small part so expertly as to “steal” a picture—as she did in Anna Christie and as she may well do again in Dinner at Eight or The Late Christopher Bean, her next two pictures.

Enjoying the second installment of her own success story (she wrote the first installment in a sentimental autobiography called The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling), Marie Dressier lives at Hollywood in a handsome house which she bought from the late Razorman King Camp Gillette. Because her mother once advised her to read newspapers regularly, she does so every morning in bed while having tea. She has three massages, two facial treatments every week. Her two colored servants, Mamie and Jerry Cox, have been with her for 19 years. Mamie handles her expenses, banks her checks, selects many of the innumerable hats on which Marie Dressier likes to rearrange the decorations. Since having an operation for tumor last winter, Marie Dressier works less than she used to do—from ten to three every day. She likes to dine in bed, seldom shows herself at Hollywood festivities, gives few interviews, spends her weekends with socialite friends at Santa Barbara.

Twenty five years ago, she was invited to more socialite parties than any other actress in Manhattan. This was because of a friendship between herself and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish which sprang up one day when, throwing vegetables from the stage in her vaudeville impersonation of the Cherry Sisters, Marie Dressier hit Mrs. Fish with an onion. Marie Dressier maintains a correspondence with General Pershing, often receives a call from the Prince of Wales when she is in London. The legend that she has known every U. S. President since Harrison is an exaggeration.

When Marie Dressier writes for publication, her words are often more sentimental than spontaneous. The flavor of a character which is attractive because it has remained warm, vulgar, direct, somewhat unsophisticated but far from unwise is conveyed better in the extemporaneous Dressier aphorisms that Hollywood especially admires. “I ought to have had a dozen kids and made their clothes and done their washing. . . . I always felt sorry for beautiful women. . . . Keep working always. ‘It brings luck. … A lady may stand on her head in a perfectly decent self-respecting way. . . .” Said Marie Dressier when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered to make her a star after her performance in Anna Christie: “They make you a star and then you starve. All I want is a small part to come in and upset the plot. . . .”