I love that TCM will follow Saturday night’s premiere of the beautifully restored 1954 “A Star is Born” not with a tribute to Judy Garland or James Mason — the obvious choices — but will instead pay a well-deserved homage instead to that movie’s hugely underrated third-billed star, the great Jack Carson.
I’ll be writing more about “A Star is Born” next week to coincide with its Blu-ray release, but Carson gives one of his greatest performances here as the cynical and vengeful press agent Libby — way surpassing Lionel Stander, no slouch, in the ’37 version.
Carson’s best scene comes when the long-suffering Libby decides to get some payback by demolishing James Mason’s newly-sober Norman Maine at a racetrack. A scene where the oily publicist plots to use Norman’s demise to promote his wife’s new picture comes a close second.
A big man, Carson took command of a scene no matter how big or small his role (when his cop reads a script to a tied-up and gagged drama critic in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” you almost forget the other part is being played by Cary Grant).
As he so often did, Carson gets third billing again in the film that follows Saturday night on TCM, David Butler’s “It’s a Great Feeling” a 1949 musical vehicle for Doris Day. It was the third Day film in a row for Carson; by some accounts the two were romanically involved for a time.
Like “A Star is Born,” this is another backstage look at Hollywood, albeit far more light hearted. Carson plays an egotistical actor named “Jack Carson” who is forced to direct himself in a film called “Mademoiselle Fifi” after Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh and King Vidor (also playing “themselves”) decline to work with him.
So does every actress on the lot, include Jane Wyman — and Joan Crawford, who slaps her “Mildred Pierce” co-star in the funniest scene. Plenty of actors from this era played themselves in movies, but usually with a wink. Carson doesn’t hold back on the obnoxiousness, even when he’s forced to recruit a waitress from the studio commissary (Day, of course) as his co-star.
Carson’s frequent co-star Dennis Morgan also plays “himself” in “It’s a Great Feeling” and the two play vaudevillians — not for the first time — in Butler’s “Two Guys From Texas” (1948), a Technicolored a pseudo-sequel to their “Two Guys From Milwaukee.”
This blantant imitation of a Hope-Crosby “road picture” is notable for their very clever musical duet “I Want to Be a Cowboy” and a hilarious sequence bordering on the surreal with Bugs Bunny and caricatures of Morgan and Carson.
Carson and Morgan also play vaudevillians in yet another showbiz saga, Vincent Sherman’s “The Hard Way” (1941) with Carson outstanding in a straight performance as Joan Leslie’s doomed husband.
TCM wraps up the evening with Elliot Nugent’s “The Male Animal” (1942). Henry Fonda and Olivia DeHavilland are the stars, but Carson steals the show as the married De Havilland’s neanderthal ex-boyfriend, a football player bent on denying her hubby Fonda’s academic freedom.
The hapless Don DeFore (Mr. Baxter of “Hazel” fame) who has a small role here, inherited Carson’s part in the musical remake “She’s Working Her Way Through College” (1952) where Fonda’s liberal professor was played by … Ronald Reagan.
The Canadian-born Carson died young, at 52, in 1963. Probably his best late performance is as Goober in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958). More on this neglected talent at Jack Carson: No Ordinary Guy, where some of these photos come from.