From my collection: Wanda Hendrix (1928-1981) Saddle Tramp & Sierra (both 1950)

I recently had the pleasure of viewing two Universal westerns from 1950 that just happen to feature the pert Wanda Hendrix, Saddle Tramp, in which she joins Joel McCrea's adopted brood only to become ... well, take a guess; and Sierra, as a girl lawyer, with the stress on the "girl" part. She probably remembered the latter with mixed feelings considering her private life at the time.

A petite, dark-haired and often highly emotional actress, Wanda Hendrix is better remembered for her 14 month union with World War II hero turned action star Audie Murphy (see below) than for any of her film roles. Which is rather unfair. She was very good, for example, as the little Mexican waif aiding world-weary blackmailer Robert Montgomery in Ride the Pink Horse (1947), a fine film noir that deserves to be better known; and she starred in Captain Carey, U.S.A. (1950), which gave the world the haunting Evans & Livingston song “Mona Lisa.” But her marriage to Murphy grabbed the headlines. She claimed that the shell-shocked veteran took to brandishing a gun in her face, and by the time of Sierra (50), their one joint venture, in which Universal billed her above him, they were already headed for divorce court. She retired in 1954 to marry the playboy brother of actor Robert Stack but that union, too, proved short-lived and when she returned to the screen after their divorce, all she got was such tepid fare as The Boy Who Caught a Crook (1961), a children's film that earned few play dates, and the plodding retro western Stage to Thunder Rock (1964). There were two comeback films as late as 1972 but only one, the cheesy thriller One Minute Before Death (1972), was ever released. Although a pleasing personality who added a rare vulnerability and sensitivity when cast in the appropriate vehicle, Wanda Hendrix more or less fell through the cracks and she has not been treated with kindness by Audie Murphy’s various biographers.

From my collection: Gail Russell (1925-1961) Angel and the Badman

Viewing Angel and the Badman (1947) again, and in the restored version, one cannot help thinking that Gail Russell, had she been able to conquer her demons, would have been one of the great stars of the 1950s. A more introverted Susan Hayward, perhaps. It was not to be, alas.

Poor Gail Russell. The adjective has almost become part of her name, as in poorgailrussell, and she is usually only mentioned whenever the more destructive aspects of fame are discussed, her movies a mere afterthought to her well-reported neuroses. Discovered by a Paramount scout while still in high school, she was considered a mix between a young Hedy Lamarr and an even younger Kay Francis and garnered quite a bit of attention in The Uninvited (1944), a lyrical ghost story and the finest film she ever made. Her other Paramount pictures are all but forgotten today but her Quaker girl opposite John Wayne’s outlaw in Republic's Angel and the Badman is not. The Western, which has fallen into public domain and is everywhere today, caused a bit of a scandal back in 1947 when a jealous Esperanza Wayne apparently unfairly accused her husband of having an adulterous affair with his costar. Already fortifying her scant confidence with the occasional nip of gin – she is visibly unsteady in both Wake of the Red Witch, another Wayne vehicle, and the western El Paso (1949) – Russell soon took to the bottle in a major way and attempted to escape the negative headlines by entering into a marriage with the possibly homosexual bobbysoxer sensation Guy Madison, a union that lasted a scant five years. For all intent and purposes, Russell's career came to a screeching halt when she was hit with the first of several drunk-driving charges in 1951. She bravely returned for a couple of programmers in the mid-1950s, looking shockingly aged, but had generally become too much of a risk to bother with. There was apparently a somewhat stabilizing romance with a well-known lesbian, the singer Dorothy Shay, but the drinking only continued and in the Summer of 1957 Russell was awarded a 30 day suspended sentence and a fine of $400 for crashing her car into a shop window on Wilshire Blvd., briefly pinning a man under the front wheels, in retrospect a rather lenient sentence for a near-fatal drunk-driving incident. The discovery of her body, literally surrounded by empty liquor bottles, has become part of Hollywood lore; the autopsy read heart attack but smitten film historians advocate the more sentimental verdict of an intelligent girl broken by a heartless industry.

Greta Nissen in The Circus Queen Murder (Columbia, 1933)

Trivia from the Internet Movie Database:
"Greta Nissen, who plays Josie La Tour, was the female lead in the never-released silent version of Howard Hughes Hell's Angels. Since her German accent would have been unbelievable as the voice of an Englishwoman, she was replaced by Jean Harlow in the sound version."

As faithful readers if this blog will know, I warn everyone to use the Imdb with extreme caution and the above quote demonstrates why.

Of course, first of all, Greta Nissen was Norwegian and not German. (Josie LaTour, the character she plays in The Circus Queen Murder, however, is German and actually speaks that language with her lover, Donald Cook.) Greta did have a slight accent, but it was indeed slight and she would have made as good an Englishwoman as the very American Jean Harlow in Hell's Angels. The reason for the recast was probably more a scheduling conflict than any problems with accents, a much overblown rationale for early talkie mayhem that has more to do with Singing in the Rain, I fear, than historical fact.

Nissen, from Oslo, had trained as a dancer and appeared with Danish screen comedy duo Pat & Patachon prior to making her Broadway debut in a Ned Wayland extravaganza in 1924. That in turn led to a contract with Paramount and a series of highly successful programmers. She did three with suave Adolphe Menjou, the future star of Circus Queen Murder, and was languidly seductive in several highly suspect bible adaptations directed by Raoul Walsh. Then came Howard Hughes and Hell's Angels, but the loss of the female lead in that WWI spectacular did not ruin her career but instead opened up new doors at Fox. The reason for Greta Nissen's fading career in the thirties was more due to her never caring all that much, it appears. She wasn't aggressive enough, according to her second husband, and widower, Stuart Eckert, reached by this author in 1994 in preparation for my first book, "Strangers in Hollywood." "It may seem strange to you," Mr. Eckert explained to me, "but I never did see any if her films." When she retired after a British quota quickie released in 1937, Greta Nissen truly retired.

Meanwhile, The Circus Queen Murder is a nifty enough little thriller with the expected maniacal performance by Dwight Frye as Greta's cuckolded husband. The real mystery here is why Frye, not Greta Nissen, faded into obscurity so quickly.

Martha Vickers in Ruthless (1948) and The Burglar (1957)

Remember Martha Vickers? She was drug-addled Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep (1946), Lauren Bacall's slutty younger sister who attempted to sit on Bogart's lap while he was still standing. That was a career-making performance, brief as it was, and a complete change of pace for the former Martha MacVicar, who had been a Powers Girl and a Universal starlet until then. She still looks like Carmen Sternwood in Edgar Ulmer's 1948 Eagle-Lion release Ruthless, a sort of bargain basement version of Citizen Kane with Zachary Scott trambling on all of sundry on his way to the financial top. But, surpríse!, Martha is a victim here, the femme fatale role instead going to former MGM discovery Lucille Bremer, now thoroughly down on her luck. But despite these lovely ladies, and former child prodigy Diana Lynn as the girl everyone is lusting after (!),Ruthless is a tough road to hoe with a screenplay by blacklisted Alvah Bessie who did not have kind words for capitalists such as Mr. Scott. Happily, Martha is back to form again opposite Dan Dureya and, in the final denouement, Jayne Mansfield, in The Burglar, a heist noir that reeks of a Playhouse 90 episode stretched almost beyond endurance into feature film length. It is a much hardened Martha we meet here, though. In real life she had become one of Mickey Rooney's many wives, giving him a son before their 1951 divorce. Rooney was down on his luck, too, by then, even further down, in fact, than fellow MGMer Lucille Bremer, and Vickers went through hell. Allegedly. She left films in 1960 (or films left her) and died of cancer 11 years later. Martha was 46.

Photo: Martha MacVicar at Universal in 1943 right before becoming Carmen Sternwood at WB.