Helen Walker
Helen Walker was a sad case, her offscreen life a discordant contrast to the amount of fun she produced in her Hollywood roles. Her career was short, and so was her life.
In brief: New Year’s Eve, 1946. Walker was driving a car borrowed from director Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone (I Wake Up Screaming) and stopped to pick up three hitch-hiking soldiers. The two who survived the ensuing accident, in which the car hit a divider and overturned, testified that Walker was drunk. Everyone was badly injured and Walker was kicked off the film she’d been shooting. Amazingly, her career wasn’t totally over, but the work that followed was intermittent and Walker’s health declined and she died aged forty-eight, having not made a film for thirteen years.
It should have been different. In 1942, Walker is bright and breezy in Lucky Jordan, opposite Alan Ladd in one of his roguish early roles before he succumbed to respectability. Her role mainly requires her to look good and be outraged at her co-star’s crooked ways. She’s damn good, and it’s impossible to square the sharp and sassy dame onscreen with the tragic and disorderly life.
Most of Walker’s early roles were lightweight, showcasing her gift for comedy. Murder, He Says stars Fred MacMurray and is directed by former Laurel & Hardy man George Marshall, whose handling of farce is strikingly pacey and cinematic here. MacMurray was liked by his leading ladies for not hogging the limelight – he saw himself more as a horn player who got lucky than an actual actor, though he was in fact very talented in that department (Jean-Pierre Melville credited him with inventing underplaying in Double Indemnity: “Even Humphrey Bogart was not underplaying before then.”) Walker is similarly low-key, and they compliment one another nicely.
Cluny Brown is one of the jewels in Walker’s crown: the last film completed by genius of comedy Ernst Lubitsch, it hasn’t acquired the reputation of his other later works, such as Heaven Can Wait or To Be Or Not To Be. Maybe that’s because it’s not for everybody. It’s quite a strange film, oddly structured: the opening scenes concern a man called Hilary Aimes and a party he’s to throw, then we get sidetracked into the subject of plumbing and Aimes never appears again. Jennifer Jones plays an unlikely young Englishwoman who doesn’t fit in (with that accent it’s hardly surprising), then the plot decamps to a Wodehousian country house, the leading man is Charles Boyer, cast as some kind of great political thinker who never discusses, or apparently thinks about, politics.
Walker plays the Honorable Betty Cream, subsidiary romantic interest to subsidiary lead Peter Lawford. We’re told that she “doesn’t go everywhere,” and she “sits a horse well,” (“Damn it,” adds Lawford) and this phrase then spreads like a disease through the cast, being applied to one character or another at random intervals, becoming obscurely hilarious through sheer nonsense overkill.
I’m not sure how well Betty sits a horse – Walker was too tiny to convince in the saddle – but the line is spoken after her only horseback appearance so it retroactively brainwashes us into believing it. And the rest of her performance is divine, catty, bitchy, superior, and so correct in her superiority that you don’t hate her for it. She’s the only one who can disarm the charming and unpredictable Charles Boyer. And then she gets a talking to from Lawford’s mum and turns into a little girl. Walker, with her moon face and big doll eyes always had that aspect about her, so the transformation seems logical.
The apotheosis of Walker’s cool is Nightmare Alley, a classic noir steeped in corruption. Carny Tyrone Power tries to rise through society from his sideshow mind-reader act and finds crookedness all the way up. Walker is a shrink, her line of business distinguished from Power’s only by a superficial veneer of respectability. She plays her scenes with him amused, perpetually astonished by the temerity of this jumped-up con artist, knowing the would-be slickster is nothing but a rube compared to her.
Power gets three romantic, or quasi-romantic interests in the film, with Walker the only femme fatale. It’s clear that she’s a predator like him, but a much more ruthless and effective one: rather than being a misogynist trope, her character illuminates his most unappealing qualities by taking them to the logical extreme, and the tough, smart guy’s more attractive aspect turns out to be his vulnerability – or gullibility. With only a subtle adjustment of the vixen quality she’d displayed in Cluny Brown, Walker slides the movie into her hip pocket and walks away with it.
A couple more vamp roles followed, as a murderous wife in Impact and a hard-bitten reform school governor in Problem Girls. Walker’s last role is painfully apt.
The Big Combo is remembered as a fine noir, with a daring and provocative relationship between gangster Richard Conte and his mistress Jean Wallace. But the plot turns on a quest to find Conte’s weakness via a figure from his past, who turns out to be Walker. Dazed, glassy-eyed and confused, Walker plays a broken woman with a fractured mind – surely, she must have been less damaged than this in order to play the part, but given that it’s her last role and her decline was in progress, it’s hard to know where the actor ends and the performance begins, which makes this an unusually disturbing characterization. Especially since one of Walker’s signature qualities had been that sense of her being too smart and too good for her surroundings, even when cast in a superb film. Stripped of her air of sexy superiority, playing essentially an injured child, she’s heartbreaking in a way that feels like the intrusion of something from outside the movie even if in fact it may be only the artistic construct of her laser-sharp talent.
by David Cairns