The Great Profile

Great Profile, The (1940)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Incredibly bizarre and rather sad comedy has John Barrymore playing himself but the comedy brings more frowns than laughs. In the film Barrymore plays an actor who's pretty much been kicked out of Hollywood due to his drinking habits but he's given another chance by a young playwrite who feels her latest play can bring the actor back to top. The play fails but the actor comes out on stage drunk, which causes huge laughter in the crowd and turns the play into a hit. However, the young playwrite would rather have a sober actor rather than a hit play but this doesn't sit well with the producer. Yes, this is a comedy about an alcoholic that people want to get drunk so that people will laugh at him. Knowing Barrymore's history with alcohol, I can't say that this film made me laugh. The humor doesn't sit or play well today but the strange thing is that the only successful part of the movie comes during the first play performance when Barrymore goes on stage drunk. The actors maniac style really makes for some hilarious moments but everything else here falls flat on its face. The film is pretty dull, lifeless and just not that interesting. The attempts at humor might have worked in 1940 but today they just come off as sad and its made even sadder that Barrymore has to do it. Mary Beth Hughes, Gregory Ratoff, John Payne, Anne Baxter and Lionel Atwill play support.

This is an excellent comedy about an actor on his last legs hamming it up for his own amusement. I reject any of the evaluations here that rely on Mr. Barrymore's real life or condition at the time of making of this film. I don't see the logical connection. It's a funny movie, with Barrymore skillfully playing his part. I understand our English and arts departments in universities are infested with an irresistible need to analyze and judge everything not by what it is, but the conditions, times, politics, and philosophies of the people who produced them. If that makes sense to you, then you can't enjoy the Marx Brothers without bearing in mind Groucho's unhappy marriages, Chico's gambling mania, Zeppo's desire to leave performing and become a Hollywood agent, etc. Barrymore is a terrific comic actor in this film. Do you really care about his life off-screen to decide whether to enjoy it? Read about Barrymore all you want (including Ben Hecht's memoirs, A Child of the Century) and try to catch Christopher Plummer's one-man show, recently on PBS. But for heaven's sake, leave off the higher criticism or whatever the hell you call referencing stuff that's not in the work itself.

Some classic age actors, when seen today, appear hammy and using old-fashioned technique. And some are timeless. John Barrymore is timeless and, in one of his last films, "The Great Profile," he lampoons himself mercilessly - in the role of a ham with old-fashioned technique. The story is based on what really happened to the actor during a play called "My Own Children." The actor Evans Garrick (Barrymore) has been missing for three days. When he arrives home drunk, he's in costume and he's reciting Shakespeare, believing that he just left a film set an hour earlier. Infuriated, his wife Sylvia (Mary Beth Hughes) leaves him. Then pretty Mary Maxwell (17-year-old Anne Baxter) arrives with a play she is desperate for Garrick to do. He gets rid of her by saying he will meet her in his agent's office the next day. His agent (Gregory Ratoff) owes some mobsters $8200 and when he hears that Ms. Maxwell has a wealthy fiancée, Richard Lansing (John Payne) who will back the play, he's all for it. It's a complete disaster, but it gets Sylvia back from Reno as soon as she hears about it, and she wins back her role. Totally polluted by the second act, Garrick makes the play a hit by ad-libbing and finally rolling off of the stage in a wheelchair. Ms. Maxwell is finally convinced to take what she considered her serious drama into New York, where it's been booked for a six-month run, but she takes Garrick in hand to sober him up. Everyone's unhappy - her fiancée and Garrick's agent in particular, since the play is deathly if Garrick isn't drunk.

Strangely enough, most of this actually happened to Barrymore in real life, including his wife leaving him and returning to get her part back in New York. And she did hide in Barrymore's wardrobe as Garrick's wife does in the film, though in real life, Barrymore's daughter Diana tried to keep her from doing so.

Barrymore is extremely dissipated in "The Great Profile" and reads his lines off of cue cards, which toward the end, he did often. For people who say he's a ham, I say he was playing one. He does Hamlet with a quivering sing-song voice. Does anyone believe this is actually how he played his famous Hamlet? He was Olivier's inspiration for the role. Olivier first played Hamlet in 1937 and was known for speaking the dialogue instead of singing it.

There are some very funny moments in "The Great Profile" but in the end, it's a bizarre movie, enlivened by Barrymore's presence. If you want to see a non-hammy Barrymore, I suggest "The Great Man Votes" or "Bill of Divorcement." He was a great actor with a big personality - if that seems strange by today's standards, well, it's the pictures that got small.

I almost couldn't make it through the whole film, but I stuck it out for JB. He breaks my heart in a way that almost no one else can. For those of you who are using this one performance as a yardstick to judge his talent by, you're selling him and yourselves short. This was a phenomenally gifted man with a finger constantly pressing his self-destruct button for reasons only he knew. You have to see his other films, silent and sound, that show his true range. "Twentieth Century," "Don Juan," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "Svengali," - these are a few of the performances that are worth seeing. He was more than astonishingly handsome and sexy. He had guts and fire, and just couldn't overcome his fatal thirst. I would sell my soul to go back in time to see his "Hamlet" or "Richard III". All of his private and public sins aside, he was one of the greats, unjustly ignored by the Academy and forgotten by viewers. How sad. He deserved so much better.

The 20th Century Fox DVD I purchased of this film had some interesting text on the cover. It said that "The Great Profile" was an autobiographical movie about John Barrymore's life. Really? Would Barrymore have made an intentional movie that parodied his own alcoholism and his associated acting demise as a result of it?

The movie clearly has a plot that does resemble Barrymore's life. It probably also resembles any number of other actors of the day. More than a few saw their careers tank due to booze or drugs. The same has been true for actresses. Barrymore played other roles besides this one in which his character was alcoholic, or often drunk. But, as a recovering alcoholic myself, I question that he would intentionally have played a role in a movie that was meant to portray his real life. Most alcoholics live in denial about their drinking ever being a problem until one of two things happens. They (we) reach a stage of ultimate surrender to the booze with a high and mighty attitude of "so what?" or "that's my business" which then generally leads to death in time. Or, we hit bottom and find recovery through one or more of many different ways.

Well, less than two years after this movie came out, John Barrymore would be dead, due to cirrhosis of the liver and pneumonia. In the early 1930s, the first years of sound pictures, Barrymore gave some very good performances, although his drinking affected other roles. He made just one excellent comedy - "Twentieth Century" in 1934. In that film, Barrymore's hamminess was so deliberate and over the top that one couldn't help but laugh. In this film, it seems more something for a disoriented actor to fall back on, and it doesn't have the comedic touch.

In this film, Barrymore seems to be sober at times, and perhaps just playing drunk at other times. But biographies and books say that in his last several years he couldn't remember his lines and had to have cue cards. So, it's likely that was the case with this film. And, it's also likely that his drunk scenes here were more than acting - maybe just part acting.

This is supposed to be a comedy, but there's not much funny here. My guess is that the script played up the part of Boris Mefoofsky, the agent of Barrymore's Evans Garrick. Gregory Ratoff plays that role. But it's not funny beyond the first instance maybe, when the nervous and harried Boris is at wit's end over Garrick's whereabouts. After that, the constant efforts of Boris to dodge some debt collectors from the mob are flat as a pancake. His antics and lines soon become irritating,

The rest of the cast do their best, but Mary Beth Hughes, John Payne, Anne Baxter and others just have too little to contribute to lift this film as a comedy. The film wouldn't even earn five stars if not for the general efforts of the cast and an occasional spark of humor from Garrick or someone else.

Here are the few good lines I heard.

Confucius, "This time I think master dead."

Evans Garrick, "Ingratitude - thy name is woman."

Evans Garrick, "I've got it. Tomorrow I shall enter a monastery." Boris Mefoofsky, "If you find a Russian one, I'll go with you."

Evans Garrick, to Mefoofsky, "Your troubles, my friend, belong to this life. Not to the sanctuary to which I am going."

Mary Maxwell, "You, you love me?" Evans Garrick, "More than life itself." Mary, "But... are you sure you're not confusing gratitude with love?" Garrick, "I'm old enough to know whether I'm in love or not."

Richard Lansing, "Well, I only thought..." Mary Maxwell, "I know what you thought, you evil-minded....Philadelphian."