At least for me, Miriam Hopkins’ standout role came early in her career, as Champagne Ivy in Rouben Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). But she was cast in nearly 40 other movies (her last was released in 1969) and was often on TV. It was a long run in Hollywood and busy—at least until the early 1950s when she returned to the stage and focused on theater. Biographer Allan R. Ellenberger pleads the case for her importance in Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel.
According to Ellenberger, Hopkins “was through with Hollywood” after unpleasant altercations with Bette Davis on the set of Old Acquaintance (1943); this was the turning point after 15 frenetic years at the heart of the movie industry. The Hollywood Rebel portion of the biography’s title refers to her take-me-or-leave-me defiance of the studio moguls. At the time, her “temperament” was sometimes put down to rumors of madness in her aristocratic Southern family tree. Hopkins’ apparent insecurity over her thespian talents led her to act up on sets; some actors and directors disliked her (Edward G. Robinson, Howard Hawks) while others worked well with her (Maurice Chevalier, Rouben Mamoulian).
Ellenberger chronicles Hopkins’ career, more diverse than most of us recognize, in ample detail. Who recalls that she was instrumental in promoting an unknown playwright, a fellow Southerner, called Tennessee Williams? Miriam Hopkins is the latest in the University Press of Kentucky’s Screen Classics Series.
Directors seeking a sense of wonder seldom (if ever) resort to cutting between cameras in quick edits. As Lutz Koepnick stresses in The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (University of Minnesota Press), long takes are generally the “medium to reconstruct spaces for the possibility of wonder.” He adds that not all long takes seek or achieve transcendence (some are merely dull), yet often they “rub against today’s frantic regimes of timeless time, against today’s agitated forms of viewership.” The Vanderbilt University professor could have made the same point in an essay; the book allows him to illustrate his thesis with reference to many art house films ranging from such 1960s classics as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Aventura to more recent cases such as Bela Tarr’s disturbing The Turin Horse.
