At the end of Friday's insurance fiasco, I had just about enough energy when I got home to make rice pudding with cinnamon and pandan and collapse in front of my computer with a movie cat. Because they were available in the TCM buffer, I ended up rewatching Johnny Eager (1942) and Act of Violence (1948), otherwise known as a double bill of my introduction to Van Heflin. I had forgotten that the former film runs a solid twenty-five minutes before Heflin even appears because he so thoroughly steals every scene he drifts through once he does, drunk and chain-smoking and never at a loss for a literary allusion, of which I think my favorite is the time he answers Robert Taylor's warning "Now don't pin another can on, will you?" by toasting the drink already in his hand with itself: "My last Duchess." In early 2016, I associated Jeff Hartnett at once with Frederick Nebel's Kennedy; now he Venns slightly with Hannibal Sefton. Heflin doesn't remind me of anyone in the latter film because Frank Enley is so arrestingly himself, a collapsing star of moral terror and self-protective guilt at the heart of one of my favorite noirs and one of my favorite movies to be honest. I love the questions it slides under the skin of America's nascent myth of the "good war," the slow way it polarizes and flips and balances audience sympathy and horror; I love Heflin who doesn't for a second try to look good, not even tragically or pathetically.
"Van Heflin doesn't for a second try to look good," in fact, sums up much of his attraction for me as an actor. I have been thinking about this for a while, not in any especially organized fashion; I greatly enjoyed the recently published biography, but I wish someone would write about Heflin with a critical eye to his screen persona, because while I joke about the crying, it really does interest me that so many of his most memorable roles turn on vulnerability—not heroized manpain, but the murkier, more ordinary kinds of fear and tenderness and failure, and always without the slightest encumbrance of vanity. If his characters break, he doesn't need you to pity them for it; if his characters don't, he never implies it's because they never would. They are human and they hurt and either that moves you or it doesn't. (It is never, when relevant, an excuse for their behaving badly.) I'm not surprised that MGM couldn't figure out what to do with him in the '40's, because they were a glossy studio and Heflin as an actor was anything but: Warners or Columbia might have been a better match for his precise, casual way of living in a character, never looking like he's doing anything more than being exactly wherever he is. I am surprised that he made so few noirs, since noir was one of the few genres of the period in which it was permissible for men to be confused, in the wrong, or just plain fucked up, all things at which Heflin excelled. See Madame Bovary (1949), where his Charles is sweet and graceless and I wouldn't recommend the ball at Vaubyessard to anyone who suffers from embarrassment squick; see The Prowler (1951), where he performs a crushingly acute diagnosis of privilege and entitlement in the person of Webb Garwood, convinced he's always on the raw end of the deal. I had to wait until The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) to see him as a straightforward hero and then he was a pleasure, because there's nothing Sam Masterson is covering for, nothing he cares if people know about him—war record or criminal record, he meets it with the same wry, watchful confidence—but he doesn't play the hero. He's a roving gambler, a veteran from the wrong side of the tracks; a tough guy who comes by it honestly, but when he's beaten up and run out of Iverstown, it's even odds he won't go back. He skipped town with the circus as a kid and except for the years when the Army had to keep track of him, he's been no fixed address ever since. He's used to putting his mistakes behind him and moving on. It's believable that he squares up to his past this time, but it's not by goodness or bravery guaranteed. With Heflin, there's always more in the part.
It did not serve him well in his career, I suspect. The studio system worked best when it could categorize its actors and Heflin didn't have a clear type: I'm not sure Louis B. Mayer would have seen much value in "guy who unashamedly falls apart," even if I find it fascinating. The Production Code did so much to hammer out gender roles as we know and suffer from them, an actor can feel like a pre-Code throwback simply by not being able to cope. I know it wasn't Heflin's only talent. By now I've probably seen him in more movies where he doesn't cry. (After four and a half where he did, the first was a surprise.) But I also haven't seen him phone in a performance yet, whether or not the script is returning the favor; he's been the best thing about bad movies like Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Green Dolphin Street (1947), made the most of B-material like Kid Glove Killer (1942) and Seven Sweethearts (1942), and just been extraordinarily good in roles where you wouldn't necessarily expect his cat-eyed, off-true looks, like the ladykilling jerk in Possessed (1947). I keep meaning to write about Count Three and Pray (1955), because while it's something of a mess outside of the A-plot, it's a strong bewildered showcase for Heflin as a Southerner who fought for the Union; returning to his hostile hometown after the war, the former hell-raiser can't explain his political convictions any more than his newfound call to become a preacher, but he's not about to back down on either. I was totally wrong about 3:10 to Yuma (1957), by the way, and I need to say how sometime. I also need to rewatch Shane (1953). But having most recently seen Heflin in the films I started this post with, I am back to wishing for more noir—he could have been tailor-made for that skeptical, shadow-sided world, where nobody is as simple as an impervious hero. Everybody in Johnny Eager knows Jeff is a drunk, anybody who's paying attention knows he's queer, he's thrown away all his credit in the straight world to live with a heartless gangster who's hell on his self-respect and he cries without even needing to drop a hat and it is his comprehensive failure at every conventional aspect of American masculinity that paradoxically redeems the man he loves, because it's real love and in Hollywood, God knows how it sneaks past the PCA sometimes, that's the charm. This would have been a fantastic thing to write for Van Heflin's hundred-and-ninth birthday, but that was last Wednesday and I was at the doctor's. Maybe by the hundred-and-tenth he'll have some decent scholarship. This sketch brought to you by my coping backers at Patreon.
"Van Heflin doesn't for a second try to look good," in fact, sums up much of his attraction for me as an actor. I have been thinking about this for a while, not in any especially organized fashion; I greatly enjoyed the recently published biography, but I wish someone would write about Heflin with a critical eye to his screen persona, because while I joke about the crying, it really does interest me that so many of his most memorable roles turn on vulnerability—not heroized manpain, but the murkier, more ordinary kinds of fear and tenderness and failure, and always without the slightest encumbrance of vanity. If his characters break, he doesn't need you to pity them for it; if his characters don't, he never implies it's because they never would. They are human and they hurt and either that moves you or it doesn't. (It is never, when relevant, an excuse for their behaving badly.) I'm not surprised that MGM couldn't figure out what to do with him in the '40's, because they were a glossy studio and Heflin as an actor was anything but: Warners or Columbia might have been a better match for his precise, casual way of living in a character, never looking like he's doing anything more than being exactly wherever he is. I am surprised that he made so few noirs, since noir was one of the few genres of the period in which it was permissible for men to be confused, in the wrong, or just plain fucked up, all things at which Heflin excelled. See Madame Bovary (1949), where his Charles is sweet and graceless and I wouldn't recommend the ball at Vaubyessard to anyone who suffers from embarrassment squick; see The Prowler (1951), where he performs a crushingly acute diagnosis of privilege and entitlement in the person of Webb Garwood, convinced he's always on the raw end of the deal. I had to wait until The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) to see him as a straightforward hero and then he was a pleasure, because there's nothing Sam Masterson is covering for, nothing he cares if people know about him—war record or criminal record, he meets it with the same wry, watchful confidence—but he doesn't play the hero. He's a roving gambler, a veteran from the wrong side of the tracks; a tough guy who comes by it honestly, but when he's beaten up and run out of Iverstown, it's even odds he won't go back. He skipped town with the circus as a kid and except for the years when the Army had to keep track of him, he's been no fixed address ever since. He's used to putting his mistakes behind him and moving on. It's believable that he squares up to his past this time, but it's not by goodness or bravery guaranteed. With Heflin, there's always more in the part.
It did not serve him well in his career, I suspect. The studio system worked best when it could categorize its actors and Heflin didn't have a clear type: I'm not sure Louis B. Mayer would have seen much value in "guy who unashamedly falls apart," even if I find it fascinating. The Production Code did so much to hammer out gender roles as we know and suffer from them, an actor can feel like a pre-Code throwback simply by not being able to cope. I know it wasn't Heflin's only talent. By now I've probably seen him in more movies where he doesn't cry. (After four and a half where he did, the first was a surprise.) But I also haven't seen him phone in a performance yet, whether or not the script is returning the favor; he's been the best thing about bad movies like Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Green Dolphin Street (1947), made the most of B-material like Kid Glove Killer (1942) and Seven Sweethearts (1942), and just been extraordinarily good in roles where you wouldn't necessarily expect his cat-eyed, off-true looks, like the ladykilling jerk in Possessed (1947). I keep meaning to write about Count Three and Pray (1955), because while it's something of a mess outside of the A-plot, it's a strong bewildered showcase for Heflin as a Southerner who fought for the Union; returning to his hostile hometown after the war, the former hell-raiser can't explain his political convictions any more than his newfound call to become a preacher, but he's not about to back down on either. I was totally wrong about 3:10 to Yuma (1957), by the way, and I need to say how sometime. I also need to rewatch Shane (1953). But having most recently seen Heflin in the films I started this post with, I am back to wishing for more noir—he could have been tailor-made for that skeptical, shadow-sided world, where nobody is as simple as an impervious hero. Everybody in Johnny Eager knows Jeff is a drunk, anybody who's paying attention knows he's queer, he's thrown away all his credit in the straight world to live with a heartless gangster who's hell on his self-respect and he cries without even needing to drop a hat and it is his comprehensive failure at every conventional aspect of American masculinity that paradoxically redeems the man he loves, because it's real love and in Hollywood, God knows how it sneaks past the PCA sometimes, that's the charm. This would have been a fantastic thing to write for Van Heflin's hundred-and-ninth birthday, but that was last Wednesday and I was at the doctor's. Maybe by the hundred-and-tenth he'll have some decent scholarship. This sketch brought to you by my coping backers at Patreon.
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