John Dall

I love writing pieces about actors whose fame has largely evaporated over time and/or may never have reached the heights that were hoped for.  Such is John Dall.  Do you recognize the name?  You fellow movie fanatics, of course, know of him for his two most famous films but I dare say most folks don't know the name.

I have yet to write about someone about whom there is so little information although the internet has provided some as have a few of the Hollywood-themed books that line my shelves.  Nonetheless I am a wily sort who has always been nosy so let's see what we come up with.  I also knew someone who was a friend of Dall's and those few recollections are still fresh all these years later.

We plan on chatting up all of his films, but here's the news to take your body temperature back down... he only made eight of them over a 17-year period.  How can an actor with this track record be famous?  Well, exactly.

Mystery has always surrounded him, much of it orchestrated by the gentleman himself.  He said he knew he was gay very early in life but he grew up in a time when it was absolutely not okay to be that so he learned how to keep mum.   He was born John Dall Thompson in 1920 Manhattan to a mother who fussed over him as she was never able to do with her older son who was closer to the father.  Dall was an effeminate little kid, picked on by schoolmates, who never felt that he fit in.  

In the late 20s the family moved to Panama where the father, a civil engineer, worked on building an airport.  Johnny was still a young boy when he attended a play in which a child cast member fell ill.  Rumor has it that Dall, who had seen the play before, caught the attention of the theater manager and told him he could finish playing the role.  He did and all were stunned at how good he was.  The attention he received made him decide then and there to be an actor.

His life up to 1929 had been pretty unhappy except for the closeness he felt to his mother.  That year his father committed suicide and mother and son promptly returned to New York.  He developed a love of fashion and was an inveterate reader throughout his teen years with a knack for regaling others with tales of what he read.  In his mid teens he lost his quietude and became rather outgoing, if sometimes a bit flamboyantly.  It's doubtful that he shared with his mother when he lost his virginity in his teens.

He enrolled in Columbia University with the half-hearted intention of following in father's footsteps in engineering but that idea soon changed when he decided to pursue some training in acting.  He attended a couple of minor schools in the east and then kissed his mother goodbye and headed for the famed Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California.

He performed in children's theater and in stock companies and finally made his way back to New York and Broadway where he did several plays.  He said he knew he'd found his true calling and it must be said that Dall was always more of a theater actor than a movie actor.

While performing in The Eve of St. Mark in 1943, Dall was spotted by Mrs. Jack Warner, the wife of the head of Warner Bros.   It was agreed the studio would sign him on but he said that it would have to be contingent upon his being available to appear on the stage.

Dall's desultory screen career began with The Corn Is Green (1945), starring Bette Davis as a Welsh schoolteacher who thinks the town's coal miners need more education.  She comes across Dall, a bright young man with a drinking problem and a literary bent, and grooms him to be able to enroll in a university.

It is a sweet film, if a bit dreary, that features a lovely, understated performance from Davis.  She took a liking to young Dall but rumors were that she was miffed when he and costar Joan Lorring, another newcomer, were nominated for supporting Oscars while the grand diva was ignored.  It was a wonderful beginning for the new movie actor. 

With much fanfare Warners announced that it had six newcomers whose careers it was going to heavily promote.  Along with Dall were Dane Clark, Faye Emerson, William Prince, Robert Hutton and Lauren Bacall.  Dall was pleased but left immediately after his movie finished filming for Broadway and Dear Ruth and then the road company of The Hasty Heart.  When Paramount bought Dear Ruth, Dall was displeased when his part was given to William Holden.  In 1946 Warners released him from his contract.  Why?   
                
How did the talented, Oscar-nominated actor whose career a big studio was going to heavily promote end up leaving after one film?  What comes to mind is that he was so obviously gay and despite the fact that he was discreet, it might have been a turnoff for the studio, most especially the homophobic Warner.  Additionally, however, Dall seemed to have a grudge, the whys of which nobody was certain, but he continually rubbed people the wrong way.  Furthermore, there was always, always a game to play in Hollywood and John Dall was having none of it.  Three strikes and you're out.

Independent producer David O. Selznick took a shine to him and signed him to a contract but shortly thereafter he was released from the contract without making a single movie.  In 1946 he signed a seven-year contract with Universal-International although he would only make two films with them and then that contract was also terminated.

A very young Donald O'Connor, Deanna Durbin and Dall

I can't comment too much on Something in the Wind (1947) because I haven't seen it nor (gulp!) had I ever heard of it.  In a rather colorless role (according to a review), Dall romances Deanna Durbin after a case of mistaken identity until his brother, Donald O'Connor, takes over.  What was he doing in a musical?

The soulful-looking actor had a good part in Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel by 20 years to The Little Foxes.  Ann Blyth now had the Bette Davis part and Dall played her upper-crust suitor.  Good as he is in the film, he was over-shadowed by Fredric March and Edmond O'Brien as the Hubbard father and son.  With only a brief break, he went immediately into his next film, his most famous.

Hitchcock was a savvy old Brit, a great fan of snooping, and he obviously knew that hiring Dall and Farley Granger to play the leads in the Leopold and Loeb-inspired murder mystery Rope (1948) was an act of genius.  Hitch knew that both actors were gay as were the characters they were playing.  And just as the words gay or homosexual are never mentioned in the film, neither were they attached to either actor on the set.  Hollywood, certainly then, was a small town and everyone knew but few discussed it.  That was especially fine with Dall and it was for Granger as well.

Rope takes place entirely in the New York apartment of a pair of roommates, longtime friends and former classmates, who feel intellectually superior to others.  On an impulse they decide to murder a friend with little motivation other than to prove they can get away with it.  They stuff his body and the rope that strangled him into a chest that remains in the living room.  If that's not outrageous enough, it's done shortly before they host a small gathering that includes the dead man's father and fiancée.

Dall is obviously more amused than Granger

One other person in attendance, played by James Stewart, is their former college housemaster who is now a detective.  The odd thing about the guys' relationship with this character is that through some college chats, they discussed committing the perfect crime.  So he is almost complicit in their crime while also being the one who will be their undoing.  Of course, in the sublime Hitchcock manner comes the delicious cat and mouse game to bring about the truth.

It is without a doubt Dall's most famous film.  I can't be sure if it's his first movie that I saw (I made it a point to see every one of the director's American films) but when I did, as a kid, I remember thinking I'd never encountered an actor quite like Dall on the screen.  I don't recall being able to articulate exactly what it was.  Years later, in seeing Rope again and being a whole lot wiser, I thought it was one of the gayest performances I had ever seen in a film where gay is never mentioned. 

How any audience member could not get, even in 1948, even without it being explicitly mentioned, that Dall (especially) and Granger were not gay is beyond me.  Nonetheless, the performance is riveting, absolutely riveting.

The film was not a success when first released or for years after.  It was regarded as Hitchcock's folly in many circles.  But that hasn't been so for many years now.  It is a good film and deserves to be seen.  One last thing... and this is mainly directed to those quite familiar with the movie... as much as I love Jimmy Stewart and thought he brought his usual sensibility to the part, wouldn't James Mason have been so much better?  

Silliness with costar Peggy Cummins

Dall's next best-remembered film is the moody film noir Gun Crazy (1950) and it is a hoot.  Modeled no doubt after Bonnie and Clyde, the movie stars Dall and equally little-known Peggy Cummins as a pair of dangerous misfits whose lives are wrapped up in gunplay.  Also known in some circles as Deadly Is the Female, she tends to run the show and pressures him into pulling off a bank robbery.  The romantic scenes are pretty juicy for 1950.  

It is certainly a B film in the best sense, brought to life by the low-rent King Brothers organization and eventually released by United Artists.  It became a huge hit and remains in great favor to this day.  Cummins had a career about as successful as Dall did (Veronica Lake was first choice) but the two, who had a great time making this one, are affectionately remembered by film buffs for their gutsy turns here.

Dall again immediately went into another noir, The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950).  It is a good one, too, but sadly remembered by few.  Lee. J. Cobb plays a lieutenant embroiled in a hot romance with a married socialite, Jane Wyatt.  When she murders her husband, Cobb tries to cover for her while his brother, Dall, also a cop, is assigned to investigate the case.  The three stars were smashing in their roles but I have always thought it would have had more success with bigger names.

Once they can say in print that you're gay, you become a target.  They won't admit to hating you for being gay but that'll be all the excuse they need and they'll insinuate things from then on.  They'll never treat you the same again and you'll wonder if any bad review is due to a bad performance or just their hating you.

It is unknown, at least to me, who he said this to but it came around this time in the early 50s.  He and others who worked on both coasts often claimed that Hollywood cared far more about who was and who wasn't gay than they did in the theater.  Despite his movie career having gathered some steam in the past couple of years, Dall bolted for the east coast as the sound of gay gossip got louder and louder.  

The truth is Dall never particularly warmed to those in the film community, whether they were gay or not.  He was never part of Roddy McDowall's gay pool parties or those debauched Sunday affairs at director George Cukor's.  To his credit, he never married a woman nor was there a lesbian beard.  But in his secrecy and quiet defiance, there was also never a coterie of friends who could advise him, hang with him or cover for him.  He chose to go it alone.  To the best of my knowledge, he was also never in a relationship during his Hollywood years.  

The strangest story I ever heard about Dall (or almost any other Hollywood type) was in reading Hollywood pimp Scotty Bowers' titillating memoir, Full Service.  He claimed the actor like to hang upside down, naked, in a tree, until morning, near his home in Laurel Canyon.  He said Dall was one of his most unusual clients.  That sounds reasonable.

He would trod the boards of Broadway and around the country for 10 years appearing in many plays and receiving good notices.  But in 1960 producer Kirk Douglas asked Dall to join his glorious all-star cast in the outstanding Biblical epic, Spartacus.  Filmed largely in Spain, Dall was tenth-billed as a villainous Roman soldier.  It was a good role for him in the biggest, most financially successful movie he ever made. 

His final film was as the villain in the MGM science fiction, would-be epic, Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961), the story of the events leading up to the total destruction of the mythical continent.  It was not a glorious ending to his career although at the time, it's unlikely he expected it to be his last film.

He returned to live in California.  He took a lover, wannabe actor Clement Brace, and worked in four episodes of Perry Mason, sparked no doubt by his friendship with Raymond Burr.  In his final 10 years, Dall lapsed into alcoholism.  He died in 1971 at age 50 of a heart attack, a complication of myocarditis.

I always thought his was one of Hollywood's sad stories.

Next posting:
A glittering cast