I mentioned a few weeks ago how excited I was that someone had finally written a biography of Margaret Dumont. I ordered it immediately at the beginning of January and it came quite soon afterwards. I started reading it, stopped about half way through, and came back to it yesterday.
I admit, at the time of writing I'm coming up to possibly the most rewarding bit: the half-century of Dumont's career after she worked with the Marx Brothers. But people are always writing reviews of things when they've read the whole thing, completely avoiding the reality that to get to the end you also have to get half way through. Here are my thoughts so far:
If there are insights to be had into the mind and actions of Margaret Dumont that are not, magic-eye-like to be divined from unfocussing your eyes and imaginatively looking through decades of almost-hundred-year-old studio promo guff, to try and imagine whether Dumont actually said this stuff about herself and if so, whether she meant it, then the authors have not found it. Possibly they have not tried to find it.
The authors are accomplished people, they didn't need to do this. Chris Enss writes about women in the old west (i.e. not character actors in mid-20th-century Hollywood) and has apparently written umpteen books on this topic, arcane but you can imagine why it would be popular. Howard Kazanjian is a very successful film producer, working on Star Wars and similar pablum. There's no special reason for him to be interested in writing about this person, much less in this cack-handed manner. I suppose it's possible that one employed the other to whip stuff into shape.
If the non-Dumont Marx material (including for instance 1930s photographs of the Four Marx Brothers without Dumont, stuffed way into the section where Zeppo was long gone) was taken out, I don't think there'd be very much left. The authors may not have had the opportunity to see the films Dumont made outside the Marx orbit, and apparently she made many, reputedly usually playing the same kind of reserved, upper-class 'society lady' person but often in dramatic roles, etc, but you would have thought Howard Kazanjian for instance could have brought a bit of pressure, money, influence etc to bear to at least find copies of some of them to sit through and report on. Instead, I am going to say that they have not seen many Margaret Dumont films outside the ones she made with the Marx Brothers and indeed the ones they made without her get significant reportage too. When it comes to her non-Marx films, they just give a summary from, I assume, press reviews or reports from the period.*
Most of the text, as suggested above, is based on press reports of the films, their content, and things that were reported about Dumont and/or she reputedly said to the press. The authors do not for one second question any of this stuff, although Kazanjian surely, if not Enss, must understand that most of the material reported in the press as coming from the mouths of film stars was if not made up, then very processed (and sanitised). I have no problem with being given detail of what Dumont (or Groucho, or whoever) was reported as saying in the media in 1940, but I find the assumption in these pages that this is just what they said a bit weird.
The Wall Street Journal's Jeanine Basinger calls this book 'prodigiously researched', which suggests to me that Jeanine Basinger has never done a newspapers.com search. I don't know for certain but there must surely be a huge amount of studio archives and so on which at very least would give some insight into how she was contracted to films and so on. Did she have a manager/agent? Did she have correspondence with publicists, etc? There must be some non-published sources that could have been consulted. There are even some things you could probably get to the bottom of online in half an hour - when MD's sister died in the early 1940s, what killed her?
More soon...
*It's quite possible that many of these films are lost. But then, they need to tell us that. But they won't, because they don't care if they're lost or not - they weren't going to watch them anyway (if they did, it's not at all obvious they did).
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