Clarifying Claire Trevor

I’ve always found Claire Trevor (Claire Wemlinger, 1910-2000) enigmatic, and Hollywood’s use of her confounding, which is to say the same thing, I guess. She was normally cast as hard, bad girls, mostly in noir and westerns, but this always seemed to me to be against type. In many cases there’s a method to that madness. She generally revealed another level, a contemplative melancholy, a quality of regret or whatever. That aspect scores. It’s the outer layer that confuses me. Compared to 50 other noir dames I could name, she doesn’t raise my temperature. Which is both subjective and selfish, I guess, but there can be no insight without honesty. And she seems a hair too…finished? Refined? For many of her roles. No idea why, but she sort of reminds me a little of Helen Hayes. Look at that picture above and imagine that it’s Helen Hayes. Can’t unsee it, right? It doesn’t turn Helen Hayes sexy, it unsexes the woman posing on the fuzzy Ottoman.

Granted, Trevor’s Bensonhurst origins (and the Irish on her mom’s side) seem a roughly appropriate background for playing hard-bitten girls-of-the-streets. When she was about 13 years old, though, her father, a French tailor with a shop on Fifth Avenue, had apparently made good to the extent that he could move the family to Larchmont. And this is what one sees and hears onscreen, at least I do. Trevor took classes at Columbia and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then she worked with stock companies for a little while in the midwest. She made it Broadway with the original production of Whistling in the Dark (1932) with Ernest Truex and Edward Arnold. But prior to that, I am delighted to report that she starred in a handful of Vitaphone shorts made out at the old Brooklyn studio: Good Times (1931) with Madge Evans,The Meal Ticket (1931) with Jack Pearl, and The Imperfect Love (1932) with Jack Haley and James C. Morton.

1933, Trevor’s first year in features, saw her in a couple of Zane Grey westerns, and replacing Sally Eilers opposite James Dunn in Jimmy and Sally. The earliest of her movies that I have seen is the mind-blowing Dante’s Inferno (1935) with Spencer Tracy, a giddying combo of pre-code Horror, carnival porn, disaster movie, and medieval allegory. These were the days when actors starred in a half dozen movies a year or more — I’ll just mention some that are of partiuclar interest to me (and presumably the world at large). They include a 1936 adaptation of George M. Cohan’sThe Song and Dance Man, opposite Paul Kelly; the 1937 screen version of Dead End, which gave us the Dead End Kids; John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), the Trevor film most of us come to know first and best;Dark Command (1940), which paired her again with John Wayne; Texas (1941) with William Holden; Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable; The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942), based on the Jack London novel; The Desperadoes (1943) with Randolph Scott; The Babe Ruth Story (1943) opposite William Bendix; John Huston’sKey Largo (1948), for which she won an Oscar for her performance as a drunken torch singer; the proto disaster movie The High and the Mighty (1954), which yield another Oscar nom;Man Without a Star (1955) with Kirk Douglas; Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), The Stripper (1963), and How to Murder Your Wife (1965).

Following The Cape Town Affair (1967) with newcomers James Brolin and Jacquelin Bisset, Trevor retired, and who could blame her? She was 57. Travelling to South Africa just for work had to have been a drag. She re-emerged from retirement just a few times in the 80s, for the requisite Love Boat and Murder She Wrote episodes, and one last theatrical film, a rom-com called Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) with Sally Field, Jeff Bridges, and James Caan. Her very last credit was a 1987 TV movie called Breaking Home Ties, with Jason Robards, and Eva Marie Saint. This interesting project was inspired by a Norman Rockwell painting, written and directed by John Wilder, best known for his work on mini-series like The Bastard (1978), Centennial (1978),The Yellow Rose (1983), and Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), as well as the series Spenser: For Hire (1985-88), but that’s another post. Given his own association with westerns it’s not surprising that he’d want Trevor for his film. Too bad there wasn’t a part for her in his later TV projects.

In 1970, Trevor’s stepson underwote The Claire Trevor School for the Arts at UC Irvine. One of its most famous alum is…Jon Lovitz!