Tom Hooper does just about everything that a director can do to render his screen adaptation of Les Misérables unwatchable—which is only to be expected.
I had known that there was something very wrong with Hooper’s idea of mise-en-scene ever since watching his HBO miniseries John Adams, in which the cinematographer just kept doing the strangest things—peeking through the slats of a fence in surreptitious handheld mode in one scene, impersonating Dutch Golden Age painting in another—for no discernible reason. It must be admitted that Hooper’s John Adams does contain the best staging of the Second Continental Congress that has ever been set to film, although that’s largely because, due to our national cinema’s inexplicable aversion to dramatizing any but a few patches of our own history, the nearest competition is Peter H. Hunt’s 1776, the rare movie that, when the teacher popped it in the VCR in junior high history class, made you actually pray for lessons to resume. Of Hopper’s The King’s Speech, all that can be said is that it is the most deliberately hideous-looking film since I Am Sam, the sort of thing that you flip on and immediately think, “Oh, it can’t possibly all look like that.”
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All of Hooper’s Les Mis looks like that—smeared in a cloacal sludge, that is. Beyond requiring his performers to look like they’ve rolled around in an unmucked horse stall between takes, Hooper’s big inspiration is to affix a hovering handheld camera to them during the musical numbers, which were sung and recorded live, in tune to orchestrations piped in through hidden earpieces. The final result is meant to reach us, the viewers, with a bare minimum of interference from the editing and recording booth, and hopefully maximizing intimacy and in-the-moment, raw emotion. All of this is in keeping with the equation of inarticulate-yet-obtrusive camerawork with “realism,” which has steadily taken hold of movies since—I don’t know, Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives? The Blair Witch Project?
The latter is actually a good point of reference for Hooper’s Les Mis. In the one scene where Hooper’s valuation of immediacy above all else actually pays off, when Anne Hathaway’s destitute, broken Fantine belts “I Dreamed a Dream” into the camera (which at several points she seems about to swallow), doesn’t her snot-slicked, hunted face remind you a bit of the hyperventilating Heather Donahue in Blair Witch?
I should add that I loved Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream,” almost as much as I disliked the other two-and-a-half-hours of Hooper’s Les Mis, which even manages to fizzle out its tried-and-true torch song, Éponine’s “On My Own.” And talking of torch songs, if you have ever wondered who the progenitor of the genre is, I am very happy to tell you: Here is Helen Morgan, singing “Bill,” in James Whale’s 1936 film of Show Boat, one of the greatest triumphs of Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s stint as head of production at Universal Studios.
Whale’s film is as often remembered for its other great number, Paul Robeson’s capacious and profound rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” which is indeed extraordinary. But while many performers have made “Ol’ Man River” their own—I am fond of this tweaked Judy Garland rendition, as well as of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ apoplectic take—I can’t imagine anyone else putting as definitive a stamp onto “Bill” as Helen Morgan did. It reduces me to a quivering puddle every single time that I watch it, and I watch it often.
A little bit of history is in order. Whale’s film is the second adaptation of the watershed 1927 stage production, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II. Kern and Hammerstein’s “Show Boat” was adapted from a novel by Edna Ferber, which recounted a half century of life on a Mississippi river show boat. “Bill,” however, was a cutting-room floor leftover from 1917’s “Oh, Lady! Lady!!”—written by Kern and P.G. Wodehouse—trotted out again only when Kern believed he’d found the right singer for it. Which would turn out to be Ms. Morgan, who originated the part of “Show Boat”’s Julie La Verne, the Cotton Blossom headliner who is exiled to land when her mixed-race origins are discovered.
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Helen Morgan was born Helen Riggins in 1900, a farmer’s daughter in Danville, Illinois. After her father’s death, Morgan had a hardscrabble upbringing divided between Danville and Toronto. She quit school in 8th grade and went to work early, popping up behind the counter at the Marshall Field’s Loop Store in Chicago before heading on to Montreal to work as a model, where she was crowned Miss Mount Royal. So far, so Dreiser-esque! That Morgan was once a formidable beauty is not always evident from her screen appearances, for she had a ruinous drinking problem. It has been said that her signature singing pose—draped across the top of a piano a la Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys—was adopted as a precaution against the spins.
Moving on to New York, Morgan made the chorus of Flo Ziegfeld’s “Sally” in 1923, appeared in “George White’s Scandals of 1926,” and finally made her impression felt in a 1926 production of “Americana” singing a song called, I swear to God, “Nobody Wants Me.” She was cast in the Broadway production of “Show Boat” after Kern scouted her out, and her tremulous, tear-suffused soprano delivery quickly made her a star, along with another quality singled out by Claudia Cassidy: “She had in her voice the note of heartbreak—authentic heartbreak, worth its weight in theater gold.” In the Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Morgan’s masochistic persona is identified as that of “a romantic underdog, a woman slavishly devoted to her man, no matter how he mistreats her.”
In the days when Texas Guinan was the queen of New York City nightlife, Morgan lent her imprimatur to several NYC nightclubs, variously named Chez Helen Morgan, Helen Morgan’s 54th Street Club, House of Morgan, and Helen M’s Summer Home. (One, located on 134 W 52nd, was closed by Prohibition agents.) This line gave her ample opportunity to mix with underworld types, and consequently to seek out fresh opportunities for emotional abuse. Yet playing the loyal, kicked puppy was not Morgan’s sole hobby. She was also an avid collector of first editions and tropical fish—a recognized ichthyologist, in fact. In a Pittsburgh Press item dated March 17, 1933, Ms. Morgan is quoted as saying “About the only things worth getting excited about are children playing in the sun and a bottle with three stars on the label and the fish in the sea.” The article goes on to describe the 22 tanks in the fish room at the Central Park apartment of “the lady of the drowsy eyes and the startled hair.” The Schenectedy Gazette of August 14, 1934 adds to our knowledge the fact that “Her favorite pets are ‘Peter’ and ‘Emmie’, a pair of South American mouth-breathing fish.”
But enough of Morgan’s life; let us hear some more of the art…
Morgan’s collaboration with Kern and Hammerstein continued on stage with 1929’s Gay ‘90s-set “Sweet Adeline,” whose plot was partially inspired by tales of Morgan’s experiences as a singing waitress in a beer garden. Morgan created the title role, and introduced the wrenching “Why Was I Born?” that included lachrymose lyrics such as: “Why do I try/ To draw you near me?/ Why do I cry?/ You never hear me.” Also in “Sweet Adeline,” Morgan’s piteous plaint clings at your heels while you try to make it to the door in “Don’t Ever Leave Me.”
The movies came calling soon after Broadway success, and Morgan’s second significant film role—after the half-talkie Show Boat of 1929—was her best, starring as burlesque star Kitty Darling in Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929). To the film’s plot, which has Kitty sending her daughter away to a convent school, an extra layer of pathos is added with knowledge that Morgan had herself given a daughter up for adoption in 1926. Morgan again sounds the note of doormat self-sacrifice with “What Wouldn’t I Do For That Man?”—original to Applause, but taken here from 1930’s Glorifying the American Girl (ha ha). Next was Helen getting all barrelhouse to sing “It Can’t Go On Like This” in Paramount’s Roadhouse Nights (1930), with ample cutaways to a hamming Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante, in his film debut.
Morgan performs “Give Me a Heart to Sing To” in a 1934 Republic Production of Frankie and Johnny, in which she played the part of Frankie, a rare “romantic” lead. I am utilizing scare quotes because the film’s source is the American songbook standard that deals in two-timing and homicide. Harkening back to Morgan’s signature role, the setting is a St. Louis river boat.
On to Paramount’s You Belong to Me (1934) and “When He Comes Home to Me”—a number that, with lyrics like “Maybe he’s not the most marvelous man/ But I know he’s doing the best that he can,” obviously owes just about everything to “Bill.” Little David Holt, in the audience, announces “Look at the way she uses her hands!” and he’s right: Morgan often looks like she’s mangling some invisible object, or perhaps playing “He loves me, he loves me not” with an imaginary daisy.
Helen veered into south-of-the-border intrigue with “Song of a Dreamer,” from Fox’s Marie Galant (1934). “Serves Me Right For Treating You Wrong,” from the same film, is notable as a rare example of Morgan singing from the perspective of the one who’s done the screwing, not the one who’s been screwed over.
In this anguished performance of “The Little Things You Used to Do,” from Warners’ Go Into Your Dance (1935), Morgan pines for the return of the gormless slob she adores, and all the multifold delights that he brought with him: “Those ashes on the floor/ The way you used to slam the door” etc.
Julie La Verne had made Morgan a star, but by the time Universal was preparing a new Show Boat in ’36, her growing reputation as a dipso had made her practically unemployable. Whale went to bat for Morgan, and she got the part, though only after signing what Whale biographer James Curtis calls a “humiliating arrangement”: “It not only called for her to forfeit the part of Julie should she prove unreliable, but also required her to stand the cost of whomever was hired to replace her in the show.” Reports of Morgan’s on-set drinking range from “constant” to “sporadic,” but whatever the case, she got off her “Bill,” and posterity is thankful. Whale’s Show Boat was her last film.
Scarcely seven years after exhaling brandy-scented breath onto reporters while discussing her favorite fish, five after Show Boat, Helen Morgan was in Chicago preparing to perform in “George White’s Scandals of 1942″ when she was hospitalized and died of cirrhosis of the liver, aged 41, her insides eaten out by a decade of God-only-knows-what sort of paint-peeling bathtub gin. (Scott Fitzgerald, another quintessential Jazz Age character from out of the lonesome Midwest, had gone less than a year prior.) Today Helen Morgan rests in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cook County, Illinois, and would almost certainly appreciate a visit.
Morgan’s irresistibly pathetic biography was exhumed for a 1957 production of CBS’ Playhouse 90, The Helen Morgan Story, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Polly Bergen in the title role (Some of the broadcast is visible here, while a platter of Ms. Bergen’s interpretations from the Morgan songbook can be listened to here). This was adapted into a Michael Curtiz-directed feature film of the same year, in which singer Ann Blyth starred as Morgan, inexplicably dubbed by Gogi Grant. (Warners had wanted A Star is Born star Judy Garland to return—file this under Missed Opportunities.)
All of this is, however, only trivia. If you want the real Helen Morgan Story, you only need to re-watch “Bill.”
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.