Sylvia Sidney: Jailhouse Blues
“She always looked like she was gonna cry!” my grandmother would exclaim whenever Sylvia Sidney came up. In her 1930s heyday, Sidney was constantly cast as the victim of circumstance, hovering at the very bottom of the economic ladder, mixed up in crime and usually winding up in or near jail. “I was paid by the tear,” Sidney joked later, and that knowing comment is a measure of just how different she was from her on-screen persona. “My mother and I adored her and her films,” said Tennessee Williams. “She was always so fragile and plaintive. She appeared to need protection. Let me tell you: Sylvia needs no protection. She may look frail, but look in that exquisite purse she carries with her: it contains the balls of thousands of men who annoyed her; the hearts of those who crossed her; and the locations of those who betrayed her.”
Sidney was born Sophia Kosow in 1910 in the Bronx to a Russian-Romanian Jewish family. She studied at the Theatre Guild School as a teenager and was acting on Broadway at age 17. Sidney was unhappy with her screen debut, Thru Different Eyes (1929), a film made at Fox where she played a murderess, and she returned to the stage. While acting in the play Bad Girl, she was spotted by Paramount head of production B.P. Schulberg, who promised that if she signed with his studio that she would play in an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Tempted by that, and by Schulberg himself, she signed with Paramount and was soon rushed into the lead role in Rouben Mamoulian’s City Streets (1931), replacing Clara Bow, who had had a breakdown.
Sidney gets quite an entrance in the arty City Streets, winking at a criminal accomplice before being seen in a screen-filling close-up where she is closing one eye to fire a gun in a shooting gallery. Her heart-shaped face looks vulnerable, but when she talks in this movie, the toughness of the Bronx comes through: “You oughten to be wastin’ yer dough in these joints,” she tells Gary Cooper, as they wander through a carnival and start to fall for each other. On a beach with Cooper, Sidney treats us to one of her secret weapons, a sunburst of a smile that transforms her face, puffing out her cheeks and nearly shutting her eyes with pure joy. Such joy never lasts long for Sidney on screen, however. She gets sent to jail here and then suffers some more and tears up most fetchingly when she realizes Cooper has joined her father’s criminal underworld. Sidney rarely played smart women in her youth. The girls she pretended to be were always a little dim so that fate could sock it to them as hard as possible. “I didn’t mind playing unhappy characters,” she said later. “Every young actress thinks she’s a tragedian—the more tragic the roles, the more you cry, the more you suffer, the better an actress you are.”
In Josef Von Sternberg’s version of An American Tragedy (1931), Sidney makes a far more appealing victim than Shelley Winters did in the remake, A Place in the Sun (1951). Her Roberta is an innocent girl, looking wide-eyed with shock when social climber Clyde (Phillips Holmes) first kisses her, but she falls deeply in love with him, pleading soulfully, “Please don’t go,” when he wants to sleep with her. Lovely as she is, Sidney’s Roberta is also a bit of a clinging vine and seems fated to turn slovenly and bitter through lack of money and opportunity. Sidney is alarmingly good at being pitiful here, and she’s particularly pathetic when Von Sternberg actually shows her drowning after a boat tips over, calling out for help several times before finally going under. In King Vidor’s adaptation of Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene (1931), Sidney is a bit of a flirt at first, but she soon suffers to the utmost. These three movies were all carefully made and designed to show off Sidney’s best assets, and together they made her a star.
She was framed for murder and sent to the hoosegow again in Ladies of the Big House (1931). Off screen, Sidney became Schulberg’s mistress, and you’d think that might have won her special privileges, but she started to get a reputation for being difficult when she complained about being stuck in bad movies like The Miracle Man (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932). “They considered me a bitch,” she said, and the studio loved putting her in punishing positions in films. She wound up in jail once more in Pick-Up (1933), and in the sleazy Good Dame (1934) she is accosted by the infamous Pre-Code sex fiend Jack La Rue, who offers her a part in a girlie show. “I’m not a cooch dancer!” she protests to Fredric March. “I gotta take a job cuz I’m broke!” Thirty Day Princess (1934) was one of her few changes of pace, a bit of froth that might have made a meal for Claudette Colbert or Carole Lombard, but Sidney can’t function in screwball comedy. Her eyes look habitually anxious in Thirty Day Princess, as if she fears she might be thrown in the slammer at any moment.
Her relationship with Schulberg ended in 1934 when he returned to his wife. Sidney signed with independent producer Walter Wanger, who had produced her last credit on her old Paramount contract, an archetypal Sidney film, Mary Burns, Fugitive (1935), where her bad lot boyfriend helps to railroad her into prison for a crime she didn’t commit. At this point on screen, Sidney was starting to seem like a regular paranoid, constantly looking worried and speaking tentatively in her high, strained voice (all traces of the Bronx had been wiped out of it by this point).
While in New York, Sidney entered into a very brief marriage with publisher Bennett Cerf, who advised, “One should never legalize a hot romance.” She looked beautiful in three-strip Technicolor as a mountain girl in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) and then followed that film with two masterpieces in a row, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). As Spencer Tracy’s sweet fiancée in Fury, Sidney ably carried her usual load of suffering, believably fleshing out her love for Tracy in the first scenes and then looking memorably stunned in close up as she watches a lynch mob try to burn her man up in a jail.
As Mrs. Verloc in Sabotage, Sidney runs a cinema, and she makes it very clear that this woman, who is only known by her married name, has made a loveless marriage to Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka) solely so her charmingly mischievous little brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) can be taken care of. She’s nice but not very bright, and so she doesn’t discern that Mr. Verloc is a terrorist until after her brother has been blown up by one of his bombs. When she realizes what has happened, Sidney faints. After she’s revived, she says, “I want Mr. Verloc, I want to see Mr. Verloc,” in a trance-like voice. This is a truly tragic film that does not let either her or the audience off the hook, and Sidney goes the full distance with it. She has the sort of face that looks like it knows the worst before it happens, and so when the worst does happen, it just confirms the anxiety in her eyes.
Sidney’s Mrs. Verloc sinks down into sheer misery when Mr. Verloc talks to her about her brother’s death in a callous, sociopathic way. She stumbles out into her cinema and hears people laughing at a Disney cartoon. Grateful for any distraction, Mrs. Verloc sits down in the theater herself and laughs a little at the cartoon until a bird is shot and a bass voice sings out, “Who killed Cock Robin? Who killed Cock Robin?” The smile on Sidney’s face dies away instantly—she looks like she’s been stabbed in the back. It’s an unforgettable moment, as is the piercing little cry she lets out when she stabs Mr. Verloc with a carving knife, not vengefully but fearfully, as if she has no control over what she’s doing, and what she’s doing simply needs to be done. “Stevie, Stevie,” she cries, in her high, helpless voice, after executing Mr. Verloc. This is Sidney’s finest hour on the screen, her flair for suffering put at the center of one of Hitchcock’s most unsparing looks at evil and its consequences.
Sidney then entered wholeheartedly into the l’amour fou of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) as a faithful lover of a convict (Henry Fonda) on the run who becomes a criminal herself. In William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), she wears little make-up and is not afraid to appear totally downtrodden, alternating between toughness and tears. Her third outing with the tyrannical Lang was You and Me (1938), a strange movie where yet again she is an ex-convict involved in crime. In …One Third of a Nation (1939), where she plays opposite a very young Sidney Lumet, Sidney looks dead tired of this type of socially conscious leftist ‘30s film. Watching a bunch of Sidney’s 1930s movies in a row, I couldn’t count the number of times I said, “Poor thing, poor thing.”
Nearly ten years of cinematic suffering had taken their toll on Sidney, and she had made many enemies. “I used to fight,” Sidney said later. “Yes, it’s true. I even used to throw telephone books and anything else I could get to at the time. Everything that didn’t go smoothly annoyed me terribly. And I flew off the handle and got myself terribly disliked.” She married the actor Luther Adler and returned to the theater for a number of years, making a brief comeback with James Cagney in Blood on the Sun (1945), where she played a glamorous half-Chinese woman. She was still typecast for suffering as Fantine in Les Miserables (1952), and this was the beginning of an awkward period where her looks had changed and slightly coarsened so that she couldn’t play leading lady roles anymore but was still too young for character parts.
Sidney survived on stage and on television before making a second and very successful film comeback with a brief but flashy role as Joanne Woodward’s acidic mother in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), which won her her only Academy Award nomination. This was followed by a steady stream of parts, some thankless, some juicy, in a variety of films and TV projects. A long-time smoker, Sidney’s high voice had lowered to a gravelly baritone, which was particularly amusing in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), where she played a caseworker for the dead who smokes through a long slash in her throat.
Burton used her again for her final film, Mars Attacks! (1996), in which she played a spacey, ill-tempered Grandmother in a wheelchair who foils the alien monsters with her favorite Slim Whitman records. “They blew up Congress!” she cackles at one point, seemingly glad that “the system” which landed her in jail so many times on screen was being destroyed. Off screen, Sidney enjoyed being thoroughly not nice, not the victim anymore but the gleeful victimizer. “She was a bitch on wheels!” says film distributor Gene Stavis, who knew her a bit. “A naturally nasty lady. She could never let an opportunity pass without laying a zinger on someone. I guess she didn’t want to be thought of as a sentimental old lady, so she went wildly in the other direction.”
by Dan Callahan