Eddie Goulding was one of the top directors in Hollywood from the 20s to the 40s and made many classic films - yet from the 50s onwards languished in critical obscurity and only recently is making a comeback. I don't know exactly why Goulding was unknown in his lifetime - he wasn't a darling of the auteurists like Hitchcock and Hawks, he made women's pictures (but so did George Cukor - but then Cukor lived longer), he was mentioned often in Hollywood bios such as by David Niven (Goulding was famous for pitching stories and selling them to studios - then being unable to remember what the stories were). Part of the reason behind his recent comeback is, to be honest, his kinky sex life - Goulding was a bisexual fond of hosting orgies in his house (as he grew older he mostly watched). He was an alcoholic, but who wasn't back them. The sexual stuff gives him an edge as people re discover his films looking for kink.
This very good biography does a superb job of rehabilitating Goulding. Lucid, well researched, it makes convinving arguments of Goulding's skill, especially with actors and talky scenes (though he did direct the mostly male war film The Dawn Patrol). It doesn't deify Eddie - Kennedy gets stuck into him for being slack at times particularly towards the end of career. He also quotes an actress for whom Eddie went the grope. It seems Eddie was a bit of a genuine perv in private but also capable of great charm and kindness in public.
The thing that surprised me the most about Eddie's career was his success in other fields. I always thought Goulding was one of those directors at sea when it came to writing like Mitchell Leisen but he broke into movies as a writer, churning out scenarios (he thrived in the days of high output when studios would take anything), even writing the rural classic Tol'able David; even after he made it as a director he continued to provide stories, establishing a genre with the story for The Broadway Melody of 1928. He also wrote songs, some of which were hits, and he wrote plays and novels.
Goulding's personal life was so exotic part of me wished someone had earlier written a totally salacious bio on him first to counterbalance this, similiar to the disguised portraits of James Aubrey that used to turn up. Kennedy's sober, well researched style somehow seems to miss a little of the fun. It's still a very strong biography, however. Goulding may have received some rough treatment towards the end of his career (he may have been cold shouldered but he still kept on working - and the quality of his work did drop off), but he stayed a top director for over 20 years.
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