(photo courtesy NNBB.COM)
I usually try to change my template at least once a week. If I've found any new websites particularly interesting, I add them to my sidebar. I also update "BOOKS" and "MOVIES" to reflect what I'm reading, and what I'm watching. I don't have TV (except one which is hooked up to both a VCR and a DVD, to watch movies) so there isn't any reason to indicate which television shows I watch. If there was, it would always be blank.
But last weekend I watched "Stagecoach" for about the tenth time, and once again I was captivated by the character of Dallas, the blond B-girl with the proverbial heart of gold.
She has always seemed familiar to me, and this time I actually looked her up in the Internet Movie Data Base to see who she was.
The part was, of course, played by Claire Trevor (1910 - 2000). IMDB tells us:
"A remarkable actress, Claire Trevor was famous for playing molls, floozies, broads, and was cast as the owner of a rowdy saloon in many a Western feature ..."
Claire Trevor and John Wayne in "Stagecoach" (1939)
Strangely enough, Stagecoach had a harder job than you would expect at the 1939 Academy Awards. Sure, it was nominated for Best Picture, but it was competing against "The Wizard of Oz", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "Goodbye Mister Chips", "Of Mice and Men" and the winner "Gone With The Wind".
It's no shame to lose against that kind of competition. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" didn't even receive a nomination.
Thomas Mitchel (Doctor Josiah Boone) did win Best Supporting Actor; Director John Ford was nominated (but lost to Victor Fleming for "GWTH"); the movie also won the award for Best Editing. And the music score won an Academy Award. (Side note: in the last scene, in the bar at Lourdsburg, Ford used the repetitive chords by the piano player to increase the tension. The same song was used by the Hoagy Carmichael look-alike piano player in a later John Wayne movie, Howard Hawks' "El Dorado".)
What did Claire Trevor get out of it? Nothing.
Well, not THIS year.
She was active in many more movies, and in 1948 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress In A Supporting Role as "Gaye Dawn" in the Humphrey Bogart "Key Largo", starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore and Edward G. Robinson.
In that year, the Best Picture award was won by the British production of "Hamlet" (Directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier, who was nominated for Best Director and won Best Actor.)
Key Largo's director, John Huston, also won Best Director and Best Screenplay ... for another little film he made that year: "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", also starring Bogart as the immortal Fred C. Dobbs. In that film, Walter Huston won Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Other than Claire Trevor's award, Key Largo wasn't even nominated for ANY other awards; nor did Bogart win any nominations that year.
("Bogey" received the Best Actor Academy Award for The African Queen (1951) and nomination for Casablanca (1942) and as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (1954), a film made when he was already seriously ill.")
I'm frankly surprised to find that Claire Trevor played in two of my favorite movies (among, say, the top 20), and even more surprised that I didn't make the connection before.
Bogart may have made bad movies; Wayne certainly did (not that I don't own more John Wayne movies than those featuring any other single acter.) I don't think John Huston or John Ford made many bad movies, but that's a matter of opinion and taste; you pretty much have to love Westerns to make that kind of statement.
But Claire Trevor won her academy award in 1948; John Wayne had to wait until 1969, when he won Best Actor as Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" only ten years before he died ... and 21 years before Trevor's death.
Trevor's most memorable quote came not from a role, but from an interview:
"Don't fall in love with your leading man. Of course, that's just what I did."And a few of them fell in love with her, too.
Claire Trevor was paid $15,000 for her role in Stagecoach.
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