From Balzac to Bickelsrock

“This sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator.” Federico Fellini’s gross, bizarre, yet not unaffectionate description of Donald Sutherland, his star in Casanova, always seems to me perversely applicable to another screen legend, Ann Dvorak.

A particular favorite at Warner Brothers, where her charms were not always understood, Dvorak played a lot of girl-next-door types, aided by her winning, vulnerable smile, peaches-and-cream complexion and long smooth legs (which Michael Curtiz liked to run his camera up and down like a tongue), but her persona always hinted at darker things, and given the chance, they erupted.

A scene of incestuous desire in Scarface was so intense, Howard Hawks felt it had to be shot in silhouette. Warners’ ultimate hymn to mother-love is Three on a Match, where Dvorak expresses maternal self-sacrifice by flinging herself through a third-floor window. Heat Lightning takes its name from a weather condition, but could equally apply to the condition of Dvorak’s emotional temperature. Desperation, hysteria, melancholy and forbidden desire were the emotions Dvorak purveyed best. If the script had no call for them, they simmered somewhere behind her big, soulful, sad, dreamy, wicked eyes.

“My name is properly pronounced “vor'shack.” The D remains silent. I have had quite a time with the name, having been called practically everything from Balzac to Bickelsrock.”

by David Cairns