Show People, a silent film directed by King Vidor, is one of those rarest and most delicious of movie confections -- a romantic comedy that's truly funny, truly zany and also emotionally affecting. It was my first encounter with the work of Marion Davies and I was curious about her for all the usual reasons.
Welles's caricature of Davies as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane is so effective and so devastating that most subsequent commentators have gone out of their way to point out that it was unfair -- that Davies was a truly talented woman. I wondered how much of this was merely apology for a patently ungallant attack and how much a considered judgement.
For the first few scenes in Show People I wasn't really sure. Davies is certainly beautiful and charming, but she has a kind of eerie calm for a movie star, an unwillingness to reach out to the audience. She's willing to mug goodnaturedly in the service of the film, and seems like a regular kid, but I wondered if her reserve was the assurance of a confident artist or the smugness of a hostess in a castle. Were the goofy faces she pulled just genial parlor tricks?
Then came the wonderful scene where she makes her debut in a slapstick movie and gets hit unexpectedly with a blast of seltzer water in the face. Her affronted reaction is effective comically and dramatically as well -- she looks truly humiliated and bewildered. And then, retreating behind the flats, she falls apart and your heart just goes out to her, as does the heart of Billy, her romantic leading man. When he carefully re-does her make-up and re-applies her lipstick, we start to care about him, and about the couple. It's the heart of the movie.
William Haines is an effective leading man in this very light role, though I found his mugging, whether slightly manic or slightly fey, unappealing. It's called for by the part, but a star in a romantic comedy has to be able to make a complete idiot of himself and still be loveable, and Haines wasn't quite, for me. What saves the situation is Davies. When she becomes an insufferable star she launches into her famous impersonation of Gloria Swanson, which is dead-on, hilarious, and occasionally downright demented. She doesn't just strike poses, she also from time to time starts pursing her lips so fast that the behavior reads as borderline psychotic. The goofiness of Peggy Pepper which keeps busting out of Patricia Pepoire echoes Billy's goofiness and reminds us that they belong together.
It's odd to find in this genial portrait of Hollywood filmmaking in 1927 a nostalgia already present for Hollywood filmmaking in the Teens, the days of knockabout improvised comedy. The collision of the two location casts, when a Sennet-like troupe passes like a dream through the already dreamlike parody set of a high-class Pepoire vehicle, out in the sunny California countryside, has a Bergmanesque, melancholy edge to it. The Hollywood past has already become surreal, even within the surreal arena of filmmaking itself.
This episode is one of the few breathtaking bits of visual poetry that remind us we're watching a film by the man who directed The Big Parade -- though there are shrewd bits of plastic calculation throughout. The first shot we see of Peggy Pepper's slapstick debut at the screening of her first film is a furious tracking shot looking back at Peggy running madly, pursued by a car-full of clowns. It's an exhilarating evocation of the spirit of early film comedy, with all its excitement and joy.
By the end of the film, I admired Davies enormously, and liked her, too -- she's good company on film, as apparently she was in life. But I still felt some element of reserve -- between her and Haines, and her and the audience. There was no smugness in it, more like a dimension of vulnerability she was willing to admit but not quite willing to share. It gave her a mysterious resonance, partly alluring and partly sad. But perhaps it's just the ghost of Susan Alexander I was sensing, the gossip and suspicion and envy out of which Welles created his malicious portrait, and which Davies had to live with long before Kane. It's a phantom which poor Marion Davies will never really be able to shake.
