Good 80's Films: Frances

1982 Biography
From Universal
Directed by Graeme Clifford

Starring
Jessica Lange
Kim Stanley
Sam Shepard
Bart Burns
Jeffrey DeMunn
Lane Smith
Christopher Pennock
Jordan Charney

This is a twofer.  We have the Good 80's Film series and a look at a Golden Age movie actress we've only briefly mentioned before in these pages.  We have an intimate look into the life of  troubled movie queen, Frances Farmer, and watch her portrayed by the young Jessica Lange in one of her most luminous performances.

Frances is indeed a good 80's movie... full of exquisite acting, incisive writing of a compelling Hollywood story... but it's not for everyone.  It doesn't take long to get into Farmer's harrowing episodes of mental illness and once the roller coaster ride really gets going, it never lets up.  

If one lived at the time and followed the news, one could not help but hear of tragic occurrences in Farmer's life.  She was always in the news in the middle of some unsavory stories.  

At the heart of the Seattle teen's problems was her great rage which likely stemmed from watching her domineering mother (Stanley) steamroll over a meek father (Burns).  Frances always wanted him to speak up to her mother but he rarely did.  It infuriated Frances who took on her mother for herself and for her father.  Frances would recall that all she and her mother ever did was argue.

It couldn't have helped that these were the Depression years and Frances whiled away her time imagining life to be different.  That turned into a runaway idealism and a resistance to taking direction.  When there was a fork in the road, Frances never took the easy way.  For her entire life she fought against doing what was expected and had an unvarnished hatred for the average or normal.

She upset her school and community when at 16 she wrote an essay titled God Dies.  Her mother was outraged while her father supported his little girl.  She became a marked teen by local clergy and gossipy women's clubs, some claiming she was a communist agitator.  The brouhaha engendered in Frances the belief that people were generally stupid.  It was not something that ever left her and she never suffered fools gladly.

After appearing in local theater, she determined stage acting was for her.  She had a love of Russian theater and was shocked when she won a trip to Moscow as a result of subscriptions she sold of a local leftist newspaper.  The circumstance became national news which included the fact that her mother was again outraged and forbid her headstrong daughter to go.  Frances seemed to delight in dismissing her mother's protestations and was soon off to Russia.  In actuality, she cared little about Moscow.  It was New York, a stopover on the return trip, that captured her imagination and had for some time.  That's where she intended to light up The Great White Way.

The real Frances Farmer

By this point in her life the real Frances Farmer was at the height of her beauty.  While that beauty or talent or moxey didn't generate any interest from Broadway types, it did from a Paramount scout who secured Frances a six-month option.  Movies did not interest her but she elected to see them as a steeping stone for being noticed by those back east.  Before the option was up, Paramount signed her to a seven-year contract.  If Frances wasn't thrilled, her mother was beside herself.

She made four films in 1936 alone, the last of which, Come and Get It, her most famous, is the best thing she ever did.  It displays her acting chops and showcases her blonde beauty while she plays dual roles, a mother and daughter, in a logging drama.  What it did not display was what a pain in the ass she had already become.  

If she was already a woman who didn't take direction well, imagine how that was parlayed on a movie set.  She also had no respect for movie people, finding them shallow, small and, of course, stupid.  She was appalled at how much attention was paid to her looks.  This wasn't acting... it was a beauty pageant and servitude and she hated it.  She annoyed them because she wouldn't do much of anything she was told... cheesecake photos flipped her out.  She impulsively married a man she hardly knew.

He was a fellow contract player, just starting out.  The film gives him the name Dick Steele but in real life he was Leif Erickson (one day to be the star of TV's The High Chaparral).  They were married for six tempestuous years (the film leads one to think it was about six weeks).

Let's cut from Frances' true story for a second and mention something I don't like about many biographical movies.  It's not that they change Erickson's name (he would not give permission) or that her two older siblings aren't even mentioned nor is her second of three marriages (still in the film's time frame).  It is that Sam Shepherd's character is wholly made up.  He seems to be there for saving Frances from even worse fates than she would suffer and to show her in a more favorable light.  Whatever the reason, it gets my shackles up.

Anyway, she thought she'd died and gone to heaven when she got an offer to join the leftist Group Theater on Broadway to star in their production of Golden Boy.  She loved the play, the people, their thinking, their intelligence, the creative atmosphere and the fact that she was sleeping with the playwright, Clifford Odetts (DeMunn).  Never mind her husband or his wife, actress Luise Rainer.  Odetts' parting shot was, in fact, a simple note... the affair is over.  My wife has returned from Europe.

One of the seminal moments in Frances' life was when she was  informed she would not be joining the company when the play was to open in London.  She was devastated and felt betrayed.  She had also been very vocal about not ever kissing Hollywood's ass again and now had to put her tail between her legs when she returned.

It was downhill from now on.  She publicly denied it but she began consuming vast quantities of alcohol and taking amphetamines.  The studio intentionally put her in bad films (programmers) and she retaliated by acting up on the set.  They one-upped her by assigning her to even worse films.  It was a tug-of-war that she had not a chance of winning.  

A cop pulled her over for not dimming her lights in an area where it was mandatory to do so during the war years and she got into a physical altercation with him, ending with him tackling her.  Of course the incident made the papers as did what she said was her occupation when asked by the desk sergeant when she was taken to jail.  Of course, I'm too much of a gentleman to tell you what she said.  Ok, you saw through that one, but Google would probably close me down.  It certainly made audiences gasp in 1982.

After her sentencing (180 days), she threw a fit in the hallway of the courthouse... hair a mess, clothes disheveled, spewing vile language and wrestling with the guards and lashing out at reporters and photographers.  The studio tossed her out of her home that it was paying for.  

Back in Seattle with her mother things got worse between them and her mother had Frances committed to a mental institution.  It seemed it was time to address her mental illness, hostility and self-destructive ways.  Her initial meeting with her psychiatrist (Smith) is sad and wicked and funny and my favorite scene of the film. 

Checking into the hospital

After her release Frances returns to her mother who assumes legal control over her daughter's life.  Mrs. Farmer is very ambitious for her daughter and while she is determined that her daughter  resumes her movie star career, Frances says never again.  The two women have a shoving and shouting match (another great scene) and vindictively, the mother has Frances again committed.  This time she has shock treatments and is again released.  She runs away from her mother, is found and committed once again.

This time she is given a lobotomy.  It is not my favorite scene.  The movie surgeon said it is done to sever nerves that deliver emotional energy to ideas.  Further, it comes with a loss of affectation, an emotional flattening, with diminished creativity and imagination.  

She was institutionalized for a total of six years and when she got out, she was clearly not the person she was once.  I guess they got what they wanted.  

The film ends after Frances makes an appearance on the then-popular TV series This Is Your Life (1958).  The series always surprised its guests but not Frances.  They were undoubtedly concerned about what a surprise would do to her.  It would be her last public appearance for some time.

I said earlier that it was one of Lange's most luminous performances (in only her fifth film) but as I see it, it is one of the best performances by an actress in Hollywood history.  I've seen every film or TV show she's done since.  So certain was I that she was a shoo-in for the Oscar for Frances that I told everyone I knew to expect it.  And then I saw Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice and thought, oh no, how can two such towering female performances happen in the same year?  I wasn't sure who would win but of course it turned out to be Streep.  Lange, of course, won best supporting actress for Tootsie...  an adorable performance but a  consolation prize.  As such, Lange's win saw Kim Stanley's loss in the same category for Frances.  What a shame. 

As if out of a studio publicity department, Lange has said she was already fascinated with Farmer and had read her biography and was still reading everything else she could find when she got a call saying they wanted her for the role.  She couldn't believe it.  She's also said it's one of the most exhilarating experiences of her career but it left her depleted and she needed to gather her bearings before working again.

This is the film on which she met Shepherd... it happened when the director introduced the two in his office.  They would be a couple for 27 years, have two children and make four more films together (another of which is coming up soon).  Shepherd was fine in his role although I suppose I didn't pay a great deal of attention to it because it was a made-up role.

Despite their fractious relationship which is at the heart of the story, Stanley and Lange bonded until the end of the older actress' life.  Stanley, as formidable in real life as she is in the film, saw something  special in Lange and mentored her.  While Stanley only made five big-screen films, she was an accomplished Broadway actress and also did a great deal of television.  I would bet that she advised Lange to go where the good work is which may have something to do with why Lange has excelled in all three mediums.  The two actresses would work again in a television version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1984), which would be Stanley's final acting gig. 

This was Australian Graeme Clifford's first big-screen directorial effort.  He made a couple more movies and then became a television director.  I would imagine he organized the production and then just stayed out of everyone's way.  He had two actresses who knew what to do.  He had a fine script. There was superb attention paid to period detail.  John (Born Free) Barry's generally melancholic score was gorgeous... especially loved that harmonica.

The real mother and daughter

There has always been a great deal of speculation over whether Frances Farmer really had a lobotomy or, in fact, if she was ever mentally ill.  She never thought she was and apparently her friends didn't either.  Since her mother was at the forefront of most everything that happened to Frances, there has been attention paid that perhaps Frances was put away due to a vindictive mother who couldn't get along with her daughter or talk her into resuming her career.  

On the other hand, Paramount bosses and coworkers thought she was out of her mind.  Personally, I agree with them and yet, if she were living in Hollywood today, her behavior would practically be considered de rigueur by current standards.

In you're still here, you might enjoy this:

Next posting:
Movie review