David Manners: Isness and Whatness

When someone describes an actor or actress as “wooden,” what does that mean exactly? It usually refers to the way a performer delivers their lines of dialogue. There are ways we speak in life, which is close to the way people speak in, say, a Robert Altman film, with talk overlapping and sentences unfinished and words being stumbled over, and then there is the way dialogue can be delivered in a movie. Bette Davis never sounds like she just thought of her lines on the spot, whereas Katharine Hepburn had certain tricks that made her lines sound more natural, little stops and starts and hesitations that could start to seem mannered in her lesser work. Acting often settles into such mannerisms, and so it’s amusing that one of the most wooden screen actors of all time, David Manners, had his abiding problem embedded in his last name.

Manners was born Rauff de Ryther Daun Acklom in 1900 in Nova Scotia, to well-to-do parents. His father worked at E.P. Dutton as a literary adviser. In his youth, Manners played on the stage, with Helen Hayes in Dancing Mothers and with Eva Le Gallienne, who called him “a very bad actor.” But he was beautiful, with long eyelashes and a sculpted kind of head, like a glossy store mannequin, and he always looked great in tailored clothes. When he went out to Hollywood, his looks caught the attention of James Whale, who cast Manners in Journey’s End (1930), an adaptation of a play set during World War I. For a brief period, Manners was in demand. He made seven movies in 1930, five in 1931, and an exhausting ten in 1932. Manners had a fey quality that worked best opposite take-charge women like Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn, whom he partnered in her screen debut, A Bill of Divorcement (1932). He worked five times opposite the orange sherbet sweetness of Loretta Young and was mainly a handy prop for a leading lady. When he was given a vehicle to himself, Crooner (1932), he was unable to make an impact of his own.

Manners is certainly a very bad actor, as Le Gallienne said, but he’s bad in such a distinctive way that he sometimes creates the curious “what is that?” feeling engendered by a truly great performer. It all comes down to the ineffable David Manners way of talking, which is a matter of emphasizing every single syllable of every word he speaks in exactly the same weighted yet airy way. He makes everything sound strange, suspect, empty. Manners’s performing style is so completely divorced from recognizable human behavior that it often has an eerie quality, and this would serve him well in his well-known excursions into the horror genre, Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Black Cat (1934), where he seems almost as creepily alien, at times, as the headlined stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

You could say that Manners is “bad” in The Last Flight (1931), a beautifully made Lost Generation cult movie. He delivers most of his lines in that ringing way of his, and if you want to see a classic example of an actor forcing an emotion, look no further than the scene where Manners’s Shep goes into a hysterical laughing fit on a bed. He tries, and he tries so hard, but he has zero acting talent, and this handicap has always made him seem perversely sympathetic to me.

Manners had the aspect of a robot or a marionette, and this quality found its ideal holding place in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman, where he played a blinded aviator in love with Stanwyck’s Aimee Semple McPherson-like evangelist. This romantic plot in the middle of what is or should be a satire on phony religious revivalism really shouldn’t work at all, but, miraculously, Manners is charming and touching and very cutely helpless as this man who thinks of suicide before being brought back to life by Stanwyck’s voice on the radio. He delivers his lines in the same hollow, clueless way he always does, but this suits the vulnerable character he is playing. Capra takes advantage of Manners’s stilted quality by having him communicate with the woman he loves through a ventriloquist’s dummy, so that it’s like watching a doll talk through a doll.

Manners’s film career petered out by 1936, when he was sixth-billed in a Katharine Hepburn vehicle, A Woman Rebels. He wrote two novels in the early 1940s, both published by Dutton, and he did some theater after the war, playing in Truckline Café in 1946, which was the first break for Marlon Brando, that quicksilver, naturalistic giant of an actor who couldn’t be farther from the David Manners school of emphasize-every-syllable elocution. By 1951, Manners was retired from acting. He got himself involved in New Age circles and published a few books on metaphysical searching, including Look Through, An Evidence of Self-Discovery, where he outlined a philosophy called Isness, or “the light of pure being.” His second book on this topic was called Awaking From the Dream of Me, and I can imagine him awakening from this David Manners dream and suddenly talking like anyone else, even mumbling, maybe.

Manners was briefly married to a socialite for a year before he came to Hollywood, and of course it’s always difficult to “prove” these things, but his connections to Cukor and James Whale, the way he liked to display his body in his clothes, and something intangible in that “manner” of his suggests homosexuality, as does the Christopher Isherwood-like questing of his later years. He lived to be 98, and he has a lovingly appointed tribute website kept by his friend John Norris. The site refers to Manners living in his later years with “long-time friend” Bill Mercer. Well, that is the argot of Manners’s time. Mercer might have been a friend or he might have been more, but I assume Norris never asked Manners about it. For a man born in 1900, things like that weren’t spoken about. Looking through the photos on the site, I was taken by Manners’s beauty in his youth but also struck by how that beauty narrowed into something almost sinister and decadent-seeming as he aged. Maybe he was a doll and a seer that didn’t need to be seen moving and talking.

by Dan Callahan