Olivia de Havilland films: William Wyler’s The Heiress with Montgomery Clift.
Twelve Olivia de Havilland movies will be presented on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, Aug. 27, as part of TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars” series. (See Olivia de Havilland schedule further below.)
Nothing rare among the entries (e.g., The Charge of the Light Brigade, Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Male Animal, etc.) For most of her career as a Hollywood star, de Havilland was a Warner Bros. contract player. (The de Havilland-Warners split was both highly acrimonious and highly influential.)
Needless to say, Time Warner, which owns TCM, also owns the Warner Bros. library. Olivia de Havilland movies have been a TCM fixture since the cable channel was born over a decade ago.
My chief Olivia de Havilland Day recommendation is The Heiress (1949), one of the relatively few pre-1950 Paramount productions widely available on cable/home video.
“Not many film producers are able to do the sort of thing that William Wyler has done with The Heiress, the mordant stage play of two seasons back,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. “For Mr. Wyler has taken this drama, which is essentially of the drawing-room and particularly of an era of stilted manners and rigid attitudes, and has made it into a motion picture that crackles with allusive life and fire in its tender and agonized telling of an extraordinarily characterful tale.”
De Havilland won a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar for her role as the ugly duckling seduced and abandoned by handsome crook Montgomery Clift. The supporting cast includes former Paramount/Goldwyn/RKO/Warner star Miriam Hopkins, Ralph Richardson at his unmannered best, Vanessa Brown, and Mona Freeman.
Ruth and Augustus Goetz penned the classy, intelligent screen adaptation of their own play, in turn based on Henry James’ novel Washington Square.
Some have complained that de Havilland was too pretty for the part, which onstage went to Wendy Hiller. I disagree. Not that de Havilland wasn’t pretty; it’s just that I found her believably homely in this one.
A couple more recommendations:
The Snake Pit (1948), a very well-intentioned and very melodramatic Film with a Message – mental patients are people, too – that earned de Havilland her fourth Oscar nomination and a New York Film Critics Best Actress Award. Anatole Litvak, one of Miriam Hopkins’ former husbands, directed.
To Each His Own (1946), de Havilland’s first movie away from Warner Bros. Directed by Mitchell Leisen, To Each His Own (right, with John Lund) is an old-fashioned melodrama of the kind they were already cranking out back in 1916 – out-of-wedlock baby, self-sacrificing single mother, etc.
De Havilland isn’t at her best, but she did win a Best Actress Oscar for this one. Whether that win was because of her performance or because of the protracted Warners War, who can tell?
Now, it would be great if TCM showed The Well-Groomed Bride (1947), the one old de Havilland vehicle (co-starring Ray Milland, no less) that is really hard to find. (I believe they’ve shown the somewhat less elusive The Dark Mirror already.) Maybe next year, or when TCM finally leases the Universal library – which includes pre-1948 Paramount fare.
Olivia de Havilland films: TCM schedule (PDT)
3:00 AM The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, David Niven.
Director: Michael Curtiz.
B&W. 116 min.5:00 AM Dodge City (1939)
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Sheridan.
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Color. 104 min.7:00 AM The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
Cast: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland.
Director: Michael Curtiz.
B&W. 106 min.9:00 AM The Male Animal (1942)
Cast: Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, Joan Leslie.
Director: Elliott Nugent.
B&W. 101 min.11:00 AM Princess O’Rourke (1943)
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings, Jane Wyman, Jack Carson.
Director: Norman Krasna.
B&W. 94 min.1:00 PM Libel (1959)
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Olivia de Havilland, Wilfrid Hyde-White.
Director: Anthony Asquith.
B&W. 100 min.3:00 PM Light in the Piazza (1962)
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton, Rossano Brazzi, Barry Sullivan.
Director: Guy Green.
Color. 102 min.5:00 PM The Heiress (1949)
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins, Mona Freeman.
Director: William Wyler.
B&W. 115 min.7:00 PM To Each His Own (1946)
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, John Lund, Roland Culver.
Director: Mitchell Leisen.
B&W. 122 min.9:15 PM The Snake Pit (1948)
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Mark Stevens, Leo Genn, Celeste Holm.
Director: Anatole Litvak.
B&W. 108 min.11:15 PM Not As a Stranger (1955)
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame.
Director: Stanley Kramer.
B&W. 137 min.1:45 AM Alibi Ike (1935)
Cast: Joe E. Brown, Olivia de Havilland, Ruth Donnelly.
Director: Ray Enright.
B&W. 72 min.