Background
John Cromwell was born on 23 December 1888 in Toledo, Ohio, United States.
John Cromwell was born on 23 December 1888 in Toledo, Ohio, United States.
When sound hit the movies, Cromwell was nearly forty, and he had a fine career as actor and director onstage. But then, for over twenty years (until he came under suspicion for leftist sympathies), he had a successful Hollywood career as a deft, self-effacing director who was espeeiallv sensitive to women and respectful of novels and plays.
There are several failures—The Enchanted Cottage does not wear well; The Racket is listless, no matter that Nicholas Ray came in to direct some of it after an ailing Cromwell quit; In Name Only manages to waste Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in lengthy tearjerker passages.
The idiosyncratic casting eye of Robert Altman recalled Cromwell to the screen in a small part in 3 Women (77), playing with his last wife, Ruth Nelson, and a classic scene-stealer as a fuddled bishop in A Wedding (78).
It's hard to detect theme or personality, and nothing Cromwell ever ottered in interviews encouraged such hopes. It was his intent to “realize” scripts and do the best job possible. It may be telling that he was one of the favorite directors of David O. Selznick, who appreciated men prepared to be the humble and tireless enablers of his dreams and second thoughts. Thus, Cromwell did Selznick Interna-tional’s first film, the Freddie Bartholomew Little Lord Fauntleroy, without a tremor of shame over the old-fashioned material and attitudes. He did a good job with the plot and the action of The Prisoner of Zenda, though Selznick was driven to bringing Cukor and Woody Van Dyke in for scenes that needed more than routine work. Above all, Cromwell directed Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Shirley Temple in Since You Went Away, a picture that bled from Selznick’s soft heart.
But there is much more that is interesting: Kim Stanley, otherwise a nonentity in the American cinema, is very striking in The Goddess and even occasionally persuades us that she is beautiful enough to be a great movie star; Bette Davis gloated over Mildreds acidity in Of Human Bondage; Laura Hope Crews is one of film’s most disastrous, smothering mothers in The Silver Cord; Charles Bover and Hedv Lamarr made a broody couple in Algiers; Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison did Anna and the King of Siam with all talk and no songs; Sweepings is a kind of weepie with Lionel Barrymore as the businessman head of the family; The Fountain is an exceptional ren-dering of a Charles Morgan novel, with a fine performance from Ann Harding; Raymond Massey is a very subtle Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois; Caged is a remorseless account of prison turning Eleanor Parker into a hardened criminal, and a shrewd estimate of fascism as personified by Hope Emerson’s monstrous matron; while Dead Reckoning is an overlv complex flashback thriller with Bogart being double-crossed by Lizabeth Scott. Years later, Bogart’s “Geronimo” in Dead Reckoning is memorable for its self-pastiche, quivering but droll.