It
was an unusually long life, 104 years until it ended today, but Luise Rainer
was best known for having won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Actress in
the late 1930s, for “The Great Ziegfeld”
in 1936 and “The Good Earth” in 1937.
She herself seemed stunned by that unexplained generosity. No one at her home
studio of MGM was pushing for her either time. Quite the contrary. And she had
bested world-class competition.
In
1936, she was up against Irene Dunne in “Theodora
Goes Wild” and Carole Lombard in “My
Man Godfrey,” both classic screwball comedies. Dunne and Lombard never won
Oscars, but their highly worthy comedy performances were overlooked, it seems
clear, for a single telephone scene that Rainer has in “The Great Ziegfeld” where her character Anna Held tearfully
congratulates her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell) on his marriage
to Billie Burke (Myrna Loy).
This
phone scene lasts close to four minutes, and it should be remembered that “The Great Ziegfeld” won Best Picture and
was one of MGM’s most expensive productions ever. Rainer might have gotten away
with just that one win as a vote of confidence, especially if she had won in
the newly created Best Supporting Actress category instead, for her Anna Held
has limited footage beyond the opportunity of that phone aria, where Rainer
coos, “Flo…Flo…” throughout.
Rainer’s
dazed, exaggerated work might seem unclassifiably weird today if you don’t know
anything about her background. She was born in Germany to an upper class Jewish
family and raised in Vienna, and as a young girl Rainer joined Max Reinhardt’s
theater school and company. At that time, all the young German actresses were
inspired by the example of Elisabeth Bergner, an obscure name now but a hugely
influential actress in her time who patented an adorable gamine style that was
only made palatable by her technique and her steely control over her effects.
If you see Bergner in a film like “Dreaming
Lips” (1937), you will see the style that Rainer is trying for in “The Great Ziegfeld” and the other films
she made at MGM in the 1930s, but the stylized Bergner shapes every moment and
holds it to a strict standard of realism whereas Rainer indulges herself
emotionally in the most reckless way.
Which
is maybe why voters were impressed by her more passive work as O-Lan, a
long-suffering Chinese peasant in “The
Good Earth,” for which she won another Oscar. This time, fatally, Rainer triumphed
over Greta Garbo in “Camille,” Barbara
Stanwyck in “Stella Dallas” and Irene
Dunne again in “The Awful Truth.” However modestly touching Rainer is in “The
Good Earth,” and she is touching if you can get past her yellow face
make-up, it seems insane that she won over Garbo and Stanwyck, neither of whom
ever won Oscars and both of whom were doing career-best work. In the photo from
that night when she won again, Rainer looks perplexed. She is wearing pajamas
because she was rousted out of bed; she had been fighting with her husband, the
playwright Clifford Odets. It’s as if she knows that she will never live this
down, and she was right about that.
Hollywood
soon reacted against her double win, and she made only a few more movies. She
gave maybe her best screen performance opposite Spencer Tracy in “Big City” (1937), where director Frank
Borzage patiently and kindly scaled down her mannerisms until she seemed like
an exquisitely beautiful but recognizable human being. But in “The Toy Wife” (1938), where she played a
character nicknamed “Frou Frou,” Rainer was so over-the-top that she seemed to
tip all the way over physically like a ship on a stormy sea in reaction to
every turn of the plot. There were two more films at MGM, and then she told studio
head Louis B. Mayer that she had nothing more to give. “We made you, and we
will break you,” she remembered him telling her. Rainer did only one film in
the 1940s, “Hostages” (1943), and then
she disappeared, working occasionally on stage but otherwise in seeming
retirement.
For
decades, Rainer became a kind of Oscar trivia question, but then she re-emerged
as a beautiful old lady in the 1990s as one of the bluntest interviewees in the
1992 MGM documentary “When the Lion Roars,” and then as an elderly aristocrat in “The
Gambler” (1997), a movie version of a Dostoyevsky story, where her popping
eyes and frou-frou mannerisms were as outrageous as ever. Seduced by the
roulette wheel, she keeps betting on “Zero!…Zero!” repeating that word as she
once repeated “Flo…Flo” on the telephone. Rainer was an excessive actress,
larger than life, probably more suited to the Viennese and German stage of her
youth than anywhere else. But her centenarian sparkle and her Oscar wins assure
her an unusual place in film history.
