Senses of Cinema – Merle Oberon: She walked in beauty … Page 1 of 5 CURRENT ISSUE ABOUT US LINKS TOP TENS GREAT DIRECTORS SPECIAL DOSSIERS WORLD POLLS ARCHIVE CONTACT US DONATIONS ← Previous Post Next Post → Search Merle Oberon: She walked in beauty … SUBSCRIBE by Brian McFarlane September 2009 Feature Articles, Issue 52 Name: Email: Perhaps it was a matter of being caught young. I first saw Merle Register Oberon when I was about 12 or 13 and A Song to Remember (Charles Vidor, 1945) came to rural Victoria some years after a Features Editor: Rolando Caputo Festival Reports Editor: Michelle Carey very long run at Melbourne’s Savoy Theatre. I have never Book Reviews Editor: Wendy Haslem forgotten how she looked in that, and every time I’ve seen it Cteq Annotations & Australian Cinema Editor: Adrian since it brings back that indelible, life-changing image she Danks imprinted on my young mind. Hers was a face of great delicacy, Webmaster and Administrator: Rachel Brown exquisitely oval, framed with lustrous dark hair, with eloquent Social Media Editor: Hayley Inch eyes and bright red lips – and she was unforgettably dressed in pale grey trousers, scarlet waistcoat, generous bow-tie, black cutaway coat and grey top hat on first appearance. As novelist IN THIS ISSUE… George Sand, she swung down a Parisian street (that’s Paris, Hollywood) with ‘friend’ Liszt (Stephen Bekassy), and came into Welcome to Issue 66 of our journal a café where Chopin (Cornel Wilde) and his mentor-teacher, Professor Elsner (Paul Muni), sat at a table. She said little in this scene, but as she and Liszt move on to their own table she inclined her head to look Features provocatively at Wilde to say, “I hope you will like Paris, Monsieur Chopin. I’m sure Paris will like you.” From Ubu Roi to My Generation: A Tribute to Albie Thoms Simple words of courtesy maybe, but on Merle’s lips charged with subtle sexual promise. Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Curiously, A Song to Remember has never become a cult classic. Perhaps it goes in for too much ‘dignity’ and high-mindedness rather than camp excess. It is quite often very silly and its depiction of Chopin as a political Book Reviews refugee from Poland under the heel of “tsarist swine” who composes for the sake of the motherland, even to the point of endangering his health, doesn’t bear close inspection. The one thing that people recall when it is Festival Reports mentioned is “the blood on the keys” when Chopin is about to collapse at the end of a patriotically inspired concert tour. But for me the great moments in this film all involve the fabulous Merle at the very peak of her beauty, the film having been made when she was about 33. I think of the recital she has arranged at the DONATE TO SENSES mansion of the Duchess of Orléans (Norma Drury). Everyone has been expecting Liszt to play and the lights have been turned down to satisfy who knows what artistic whim associated with him. At the open windows, listening menials are whispering “Ssh! Liszt!” As the pianist’s performance draws to a close, Merle, her hair Click here to make a donation. If you are an Australian resident, any donations over $2 are tax deductible. now swept up the better to reveal her incomparable forehead and her body encased not in trousers but in a swirling long white gown, walks down the aisle between the rows of the audience, holding a candelabra aloft to reveal that the performer was none other than her protégé, Frédéric (aka Frederick) Chopin. This is a TAGS turning point in his fame and she carries off this epiphanic moment with stunning assurance and poise, until she stands beside him at the piano. Every budding composer surely needs such a patroness; my guess is that few have had one who looked like Merle. Albie ThomsAlfred HitchcockAndrei Tarkovsky There’s an even bigger climax when she turns on him in wild apologia, her eyes blazing with anger, with “No Australian one knows this human jungle better than I.” We know she (i.e., George Sand) is a writer but the film is not cinemaAustralia on filmBarbara very interested in, say, La Mare au Diable (neither was I when it was prescribed for French I at Melbourne University a few years later), and it was nothing like as memorable as Merle’s outburst: “No one knows this StanwyckCarl DreyerChris MarkerClaire human jungle better than I. Who ever fought more bitterly to survive in it? To have had some talent and DenisDavid Lynchdocumentary Elio PetriEmeric ambition and to be a woman – in the eyes of men something slightly better than a head of cattle. I wore Pressburger Eric RohmerfeaturedFrank BorzageFrançois men’s trousers, to remind them I was their equal …”, etc. I’m quoting that from memory, but am pretty sure I TruffautFritz LangG.W. PabstHoward haven’t made any mistakes. Merle was ablaze with gender-based fury (why haven’t the feminists lit upon this HawksIngmar Bergmaninterview Jacques flare-up?) and alight with sexual challenge. Anyway, she lures Chopin away from the distractions of Paris to her island fastness, predicting alliteratively, “You could write miracles of music in Majorca.” All does not go RivetteJean-Luc GodardJean-Pierre smoothly on the island: the rain is incessant and Frédéric is very chesty by this time. Merle is getting a bit MelvilleJerzy SkolimowskiJohn FordJoris IvensKenji testy with him, perhaps incredibly he is not paying her enough attention, and she orders him to “Stop this so- MizoguchiLee MarvinLouis MalleMarlene called polonaise jumble you’ve been working on for days” and pay more attention to her. After all, she has DietrichMichael HanekeMichael MannMichael given him – in her own words – “what artists have been crying out for down the ages”: that is, solitude in a PowellMIFFOrson WellesPaul CoxRobert picturesque setting with someone who looks like her. BressonRoberto Rossellini Roman PolanskiSamuel FullerStan BrakhageViviane Well, as I say, the damp climate has played havoc with his chest and, bravely defying advice, he undertakes VaghYasujiro Ozu the fund-raising tour for beleaguered Poland that leads to the-blood-on-the-keys, after an extensive montage of concert halls and iconic monuments of cultured Europe. Merle is having her portrait painted when old Professor Elsner, who has always been wary of her, dodders in and says that Frédéric is dying and that he has asked to see her. Without a tremor of her matchless profile, she simply says: “Frederick was http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/52/merle-oberon-she-walked-in-beauty/ 1/07/2013 Senses of Cinema – Merle Oberon: She walked in beauty … Page 2 of 5 mistaken to ask for me … Please continue Monsieur Delacroix.” Not many actresses could carry off a line like that as if they meant it – and without laughing aloud. There were a lot of other beautiful women in films when I was first getting interested in films – and in beautiful women. There were gorgeous redheads like Rita Hayworth, Maureen O’Hara and Geraldine Fitzgerald, and brunettes like Ava Gardner and Jane Greer, all predating the more obvious sexiness of Marilyn Monroe a few years later, and all staying clearly with me over five decades. But Merle was something else: the challenging eyes, the forehead, the handsome bosom, the sheer elegance, the romantic intensity with which she imbued all she said and did. It used to be thought that Merle was born in Tasmania and this myth was not exploded until after her death. In fact, she was born in India of mixed British-Indian parentage and, when she went to racially conscious England in the 1930s, she suppressed her Eurasian heritage in the interests of pursuing a career. All this suppression is by now well -documented, and it’s a bit surprising that she was able to maintain this secrecy about her background. As late as 1980, my son was working as dogsbody in a big Australian firm when an elderly Indian colleague told him about having been involved in an Indian dramatic society with Merle in the late 1920s and very early ’30s. But such people, and there must have been plenty who remembered her, remarkably kept their counsel and never in her lifetime contradicted the Tasmanian myth. The racial mix, of course, accounts in no small measure for the astonishing uniqueness of the beauty. After several tiny, uncredited roles in British films of the early ’30s, she got herself noticed in Zoltan Korda and Leotine Sagan’s Men of Tomorrow (1932), and even more thoroughly noticed the following year in brother Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Not having for some years now seen this epoch-maker (for British films, not just for Merle), I’ve never forgotten how she, as doomed Anne Boleyn, asks as she comes up for execution (“Chop and change”, as a lady-in-waiting rather crudely says), “Will my hair sit straight when my head falls?” She manages to invest her few moments with a touch of real poignancy, which is as much due to the contrast between her youthful perfection and the hideous cruelty of the axe as to Anne’s historical situation. By now, following the international success of Henry VIII and The Scarlet Pimpernel (Harold Young, 1934), in which she was a ravishing Marguerite to Leslie Howard’s Percy Blakeney,Hollywood had Merle in its sights. In Goldwyn’s 1935 romantic melodrama, The Dark Angel (Sidney Franklin, 1935), she won an Oscar nomination as the woman whose lover is blinded in World War I, but it was really William Wyler who made her a star with a worldwide following.