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A Tribute to Joan Bennett
Classic film actress and "Dark Shadows" star

A Tribute to Joan Bennett

As a child of the 60's, I was part of the generation of school kids who RAN home every day to watch "Dark Shadows" (1966-1971), ABC's afternoon supernatural serial. It's hard to imagine today what a phenomenon "Dark Shadows" was at the time, but during most of it's run it was the highest rated afternoon program on television, so successful that it was the first "soap" to spin off onto the big screen with 2 theatrical films. The series turned around the wealthy Collins family and the vampires, witches, ghosts and werewolves that plagued the great estate of Collinwood for 200 years. And starring as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the mistress of Collinwood, was classic Hollywood actress Joan Bennett.

Joan Bennett (born February 27, 1910) had been a bonafide movie star during Hollywood's Golden Era and had made over 65 films between 1929 and 1960, starring opposite such classic Hollywood actors as Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Fredric March, Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, Robert Ryan, James Mason and Walter Pidgeon, just to name a few. She is perhaps best remembered today for "Little Women" (1933), as the youngest March sister, Amy, opposite Katharine Hepburn as Jo; the classic comedy "Father of the Bride" (1950) as the wife of Spencer Tracy and mother of the bride, Elizabeth Taylor; and for the 4 thrillers and film noir classics she made for the great German director, Fritz Lang; "Man Hunt" (1941), "The Woman in the Window" (1944), "Scarlet Street" (1945) and "Secret Beyond the Door" (1947).

From Little Sister to Smoldering Beauty

When Joan Bennett made her starring debut opposite Ronald Colman in "Bulldog Drummond" (1929), her older sister, Constance, was already a major star. They were the daughter's of Richard Bennett, a Broadway matinee idol of the early twentieth century who later played character roles in Hollywood films of the 1930's. Contance Bennett began her career in silent films and by the early 1930's was the highest paid actress in Hollywood. She was a big hit as the Brown Derby waitress who becomes a movie star in "What Price Hollywood?" (1932), which served as the basis for the later "A Star is Born" films, and made a string of popular "women's pictures", including 4 with handsome Joel McCrea, with whom she made a popular team. When the vogue for such films ran out in the mid 30's, Constance reinvented herself as a comedienne and had the biggest hit of her career in the Hal Roach comedy "Topper" (1937) opposite Cary Grant. Through out most of the 1930's, Joan Bennett remained very much in her sister's shadow. A blonde, like Constance, with a fragile china doll-like beauty, Joan was cast mostly in ingenue roles. While Connie had a vibrant screen persona, Joan came across as cool and aloof, qualities which would serve her well later but were not ideal for ingenues. Of the 35 films she made between 1929 and 1938, there were only a handful in which Joan was able to make an impression as an actress. She played a smart talking waitress in "Me and My Gal" (1932), with Spencer Tracy, showing a talent for wise cracking dialogue, a talent which would never again be properly utilized. She was pert and funny as Amy in George Cukor's "Little Women" (1933), quite moving as the wife of psychiatrist Joel McCrea who teeters on the brink of insanity herself in Gregory LaCava's "Private Worlds" (1935), and she was sweet and very likable opposite Henry Fonda as the restless small town girl who longs for adventure in "I Met My Love Again" (1937). Professionally, Joan felt she had been merely treading water during this phase of her career, always feeling like "the pig-tailed little sister" of Constance. But things were about to change.

Joan and Constance Bennett

Joan had been under personal contract to independent producer Walter Wanger since 1934. He had made small gains for Joan by casting her in "Private Worlds" and "I Met My Love Again", but had yet to find the proper vehicle which would launch her to major stardom and set her apart from Constance. In 1938, Wanger's production of "Algiers" made Hedy Lamarr a star, and director Tay Garnett thought Lamarr looked like a brunette Joan. Together they came up with a film to cash in on Lamarr's popularity. In "Trade Winds" (1938), Bennett plays murder suspect Kay Kerrigan, who flees the police and is pursued around the world by detective Fredric March. To disguise herself, Kay dies her blonde hair brunette. Joan's new hair color was meant to be a one-time gimmick and she wore a dark wig, fully intending to continue afterwards as a blonde. But "Trade Winds" was a box office hit and Joan's dark, sultry new look a sensation. "After that film," Joan said, "everybody liked me in dark hair so I turned my hair dark and got much better parts." Joan Bennett remained brunette, both personally and professionally, for the rest of her life.

One person intrigued with Joan's new look was producer David O. Selznick, then in the midst of his world wide search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With The Wind". Joan was asked to make a screen test and promptly agreed. She worked with dialogue coach Will Price on the southern accent and on December 20, 1938, filmed three scenes with George Cukor (who would later be replaced as the films director by Victor Fleming). Selznick judged the results "magnificent" and Joan was one of the final contenders, eventually losing the Oscar winning role to British actress Vivien Leigh.

Fritz Lang and the World of Film Noir

Following "Trade Winds", Joan made a couple of routine costume pictures for producer Edward Small ("The Man in the Iron Mask", 1939, "The Son of Monte Cristo", 1940), and the preposterous jungle adventure "Green Hell", 1940, which the Harvard Lampoon chose as one of the 10 worst pictures of the year. Things improved with "The House Across the Bay", 1940, with Joan as an Alcatraz widow pursued by both Walter Pidgeon and Lloyd Nolan while husband George Raft serves time on the island, and "The Man I Married", 1940, with Joan the American wife of German-born Francis Lederer who watches in horror as her husband falls under the spell of Hitler and the Nazi party. The newly dark-haired Joan, beautifully costumed in all, looked stunning and was generally considered one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood.

With Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Publicity shot for "Green Hell" 1940

Joan Bennett's next big step forward was provided by the great German director Fritz Lang, who cast her in his 1941 espionage thriller, "Man Hunt". Set in pre-WWII London, Joan plays a Cockney streetwalker who helps man-on-the-run Walter Pidgeon elude the Nazi's. Joan worked with British character actress Queenie Leonard on the Cockney accent and the results were outstanding. "Joan Bennett's Cockney accent is so good," wrote The New York Post, "that you have to look again to remind yourself that it's really Joan Bennett." The role was smaller then most of the parts she had been getting, but a flashy role, both gutsy and tender, and Joan received some of the best reviews of her career for her sympathetic performance. Lang became one of Joan's favorite directors, and he would help further her career even more during the next 5 years. (It is interesting to note that while Joan's career was on the rise in the 1940's, Connie's was on the decline. By the end of the decade, Constance was working at low-budget studios Republic and Monogram, and would never regain the fame and popularity she enjoyed in the 1930's.)

Publicity pose for "Man Hunt" 1941

Merle Oberon, Joan Bennett and Claudette Colbert on a WWII war bond tour.

During the early 1940's, Joan made a series of inconsequential films, none of which matched the quality of "Man Hunt". But in 1944 Fritz Lang entered the picture again and would usher Joan into the realm of film noir and her greatest phase as a screen actress. Joan's dark hair had added an element of danger and mystery to her aloof screen persona and Lang would take full advantage of it. He cast Joan, along with Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea, in "The Woman in the Window". In the title role, Joan plays Alice Reed, a mysterious artists' model who ensnares married professor Robinson in a tangle of lies, murder and blackmail. The film proved to be a triumph for all involved, with Joan giving her best performance to date. "Fritz was terribly exacting and demanding," Joan later wrote, "and working with him was sometimes abrassive. But he commanded great respect, and I performed better under his direction than at any other time in my career. Almost always I did what I was told, and we developed a great working rapport." "The Woman in the Window" is now recognized as one of the great film noirs of the 1940's.

Joan Bennett and Edward G. Robinson hiding the evidence in "The Woman in the Window"

With the success of "The Woman in the Window", Joan Bennett, Walter Wanger (who had become Joan's third husband in 1940) and Fritz Lang entered into partnership together, forming their own production company, Diana Productions (named after Joan's eldest daughter). Their first effort, "Scarlet Street", 1945, was another film noir, this one even more dark and disturbing then the first. Though not a sequel, Lang again cast Joan with Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea, with Joan and Duryea as a couple of cheap hustlers who extort money from meek, henpecked bank teller Robinson. "Scarlet Street" marked a great personal success for Joan, who gives one of her very best performances as Kitty "Lazy Legs" March, the deceitful, low-life dame who brings tragedy to everyone, including herself. In his 1993 book _Alternate Oscars_, author Danny Peary picked Joan Bennett in "Scarlet Street" as his choice for best actress of 1945, though Joan never received an Oscar nomination during her film career.

Fritz Lang, Joan Bennett & Walter Wanger, 1945

Joan Bennett as "Lazy Legs"

During the second half of the 1940's, Joan would appear in continental-type roles in a series of arty, offbeat motion pictures for several major European directors, who seemed to understand her brooding, sensual persona better then their American counterparts. They were not always critical or popular successes, but Joan's work with Fritz Lang had instilled in her a new confidence as an actress and she's in top form in all of them. Joan followed "Scarlet Street" with another of her best performances in "The Macomber Affair", 1947, directed by Zoltan Korda, brother of the great British film executive Alexander Korda. As the wife of cowardly Robert Preston on an African safari with big game hunter Gregory Peck, Joan again received rave reviews as the duplicitous, self-centered wife. She then moved onto Diana Productions second film, "Secret Beyond the Door", 1947. With many plot elements similar to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca", 1940, Joan stars as Celia Barrett, an heiress who marries the enigmatic Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) after a short romance and returns with him to his family estate, where she finds mystery, danger, and skeletons in every closet. Unfortunately, the Fritz Lang/Joan Bennett partnership would not prove successful a fourth time. The film was slow and lacking any real suspense, and became one of the years biggest critical and box office failures. Bennett, Wanger and Lang disolved Diana Productions, and Joan Bennett would never work with Fritz Lang again.

Despite it's failure in 1947 and it's poor regard by today's critics, there are many Joan Bennett fans who adore "Secret Beyond the Door". She is the focal point of the story, the "star" rather then the "leading lady." She's at her high-glamour peak in the film, as beautiful as she's ever been on screen, superbly lit and photographed by cinematographer Stanley Cortez. And she plays a strong woman (unlike the spineless second Mrs. de Winter in "Rebecca") who doesn't shrink from danger, but bravely exposes the family skeletons and secrets behind locked doors, confident that she can save her husband from the demons that have twisted his mind and threaten her very life. The film has many merits for Joan's fans.

As Celia Lamphere in "Secret Beyond the Door"

Another Transition, then Scandal

Joan's next film, "The Woman on the Beach", 1948, directed by the great french director Jean Renoir, again cast Joan as a lying, unfaithful wife. She gives another excellent performance, but the film was muddled and confusing and failed to find an audience. At 39, Joan wisely realized that her days as a sultry screen siren were numbered and she was ready to move onto the next phase of her career. Wanger cast her in "The Reckless Moment", 1949, as a suburban California housewife and mother of two teenage children. Continuing her penchant for working with European directors, the German filmmaker Max Ophuls was hired to direct. Joan plays Lucia Harper, who discourages her teenage daughter Bea from getting involved with the seedy Los Angeles buisnessman she has fallen for. While her husband is away on business, the man turns up dead on their property and Lucia, believing Bea has killed him, disposes of the body. Then blackmailer James Mason shows up, and Lucia, with limited resources in the absence of her husband, must find a way to save her family from scandal.

Given a small release during the holiday season of 1949, the film went virtually unnoticed before disappearing. Luckily, it was discovered again during the film studies movement of the 70's and in revival houses across the country. Though criminally hard-to-find, "The Reckless Moment" is now regarded as a superb suspense thriller as well as a probing examination of suburban American life and a woman's place in it. And most critics and Joan Bennett fans agree that, as Lucia Harper, Joan Bennett gives the finest, most searching performance of her screen career. She charges through the film like a lioness, brandishing one cigarette after another as if a sword, hiding bodies, dealing with blackmailers, and trying at all costs to protect her family and their comfortable lifestyle. James Mason offers excellent support as the blackmailer who first has contempt for Joan's middle class housewife but slowly grows to admire then love her. Both stars are in peak form in a film which richly deserves a DVD release. "The Reckless Moment" was reworked (the daughter became a gay son) and remade in 2001 as "The Deep End", starring Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic.

Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, her greatest film performance

Joan then appeared in one of her most popular films, Vincente Minnelli's classic comedy "Father of the Bride", 1950. Joan was perfectly cast as the wife of Spencer Tracy (in the title role) and mother of the bride, Elizabeth Taylor, their brunette beauty making them totally believable as mother and daughter. The film was a huge success and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The cast repeated their roles in the 1951 sequel, "Father's Little Dividend", which again was a box office hit. At a time when many of the glamour stars of the 30's and 40's were having a difficult time adjusting to middle age on-screen, Joan had made a smooth and successful transition into mother roles. Joan always insisted that the "Father of the Bride" series would have continued had scandal not intervened. But it was not to be.

Joan Bennett's marriage to Walter Wanger had been slowly disintegrating for several years. Joan had long known that Wanger, like many powerful Hollywood producers, was a renowned womanizer, a fact she grew less and less able to tolerate. In addition, by 1951 the Wangers' were facing serious financial difficulties. Walter had lost most of his money, and a good deal of Joan's, on his 1948 production of "Joan of Arc," starring Ingrid Bergman. The film had been an expensive box office failure, leaving Wanger facing bankruptcy and, worse, unable to get a new film production started. It didn't help Wanger's ego that his wife had great successes with "Father of the Bride" and it's sequel, two films that Wanger had no hand in. As the marriage grew more and more strained, Joan turned to her agent, Jennings Lang, for comfort and support. It soon became well known in Hollywood circles that Joan and Lang were having an affair, with weekly rendezvous at the L.A. apartment of one of Lang's business associates. (The situation later inspired Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar winning film, "The Apartment.") Then, on December 13, 1951, Walter Wanger errupted into violence. Following one of their meetings, Lang drove Bennett back to her car in the parking lot of the MCA building in Beverly Hills. As he helped her into her car, Wanger approached with a .38-caliber pistol and fired off two shots. The first shot went wild. The second ricocheted off the pavement and struck Jennings Lang in the groin. He was rushed to Midway Hospital and into surgery. Walter Wanger was taken into police custody, where he explained, "I've just shot the sonofabtich who tried to break up my home." The incident made front page news around the country.

Walter Wanger in the 1940's

Jennings Lang recovered from surgery and was home from the hospital a few days after the shooting. Walter Wanger pleaded guilty to a charge of "assult with a deady weapon" and was sentenced to four months in the Wayside Honor Farm outside of Los Angeles. After his release, Wanger was able to jump start his career again, later producing the sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", 1956, and the Oscar winning "I Want To Live!", 1958. It was Joan Bennett who suffered the greatest repercussions from the incident. The resulting publicity, which painted Joan as the unfaithful wife who drove her husband to an act of violence, destroyed her career in films. Joan Bennett found herself virtually unemployable in Hollywood. Several friends rallied to her support, including Humphrey Bogart, who later insisted upon her being cast in "We're No Angels", 1955. But her film career was all but over. "I might just as well have pulled the trigger myself", she wrote years later. Having made 65 films in her 23 years as a professional actress prior to the shooting, Joan Bennett would appear on the big screen only 7 more times over the next 25 years.

Stage, Television and DARK SHADOWS

For the sake of their two young daughters, Stephanie (born 1943) and Shelley (born 1948), Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger kept their marriage going. With a family to support and little-to-no film offers coming her way, Joan Bennett spent the next 15 years working on the stage and in television guest spots. She appeared on tv in such shows as "The Best of Broadway", "Ford Theater", "Climax!" and "Playhouse 90," worked on the Broadway and London stage, and crossed the country in road shows of many popular stage plays. In 1965, Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger finally divorced (Wanger died 3 years later in 1968), and in 1966, Joan was offered a role in a new television soap opera, "Dark Shadows." Joan was reluctant to accept. An actress of her stature had never appeared on a daytime soap opera before, and the workload was grueling, with 5 episodes per week to produce. But Bennett had never been afraid of hard work, and the prospect of a steady income and an end to touring proved too difficult to dismiss. Joan accepted and was cast as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, matron of the wealthy New England Collins family and the Collinwood estate. From the start, "Dark Shadows" was different from other soap operas, a Gothic-style mystery far closer to "Jane Eyre" then "General Hospital." Debuting on ABC-TV on June 27, 1966, the show did poorly in the ratings and was in danger of cancelation it's first year. The producer, Dan Curtis, decided to pull out all the stops and move from Gothic mystery to supernatural horror. In April of 1967, Jonathan Frid joined the cast as 200 year old vampire Barnabas Collins, and before long the ratings took off. "Dark Shadows" was soon the highest rated show on daytime television, popular with both housewives and school kids. Over the next 5 years, "Dark Shadows" would be populated with a series of ghosts, witches, warlocks, werewolves, zombies and even a Frankenstein monster, remaining at the top of the ratings for most of it's run. The story lines moved back and forth through time with the regular cast members playing various roles. In addition to Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the present time, one of Joan Bennett's roles was Naomi Collins, mother of the vampire Barnabas, in the 1795 story line Though Frid's popularity as the vampire soon elevated him to the shows star, Joan didn't mind. She was in a hit series and had found a whole new generation of fans. "I feel positively like a Beatle," she said of her renewed stardom and popularity. In 1970, Joan Bennett reprised her role as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the theatrical film "House of Dark Shadows," a box office hit. But soon after, the shows popularity began to wane. A second film, "Night of Dark Shadows" in 1971 (which Joan did not appear in) didn't match the success of the first, and the series was canceled, it's last episode airing April 2, 1971. Joan Bennett had remained with the show during it's entire 5 year run, scoring one of the most popular successes of her lenghty career. "Dark Shadows" was resurrected in 1991 as a prime time series on ABC starring Ben Cross as Barnabas Collins and Jean Simmons as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard but lasted only one season.

Joan Bennett as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard

Joan Bennett, Louis Edmonds, Alexandra Moltke

Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid on "Dark Shadows" bubble gum cards.

Towards the end of "Dark Shadows" in 1970, Joan published 'The Bennett Playbill', a history of her illustrious acting family going back five generations on her mothers side. After "Dark Shadows", Joan Bennett continued to work on stage and in the occasional made-for-tv movie, including "Gidget Gets Married", 1972, "The Eyes of Charles Sand", 1972, "This House Possessed", 1981, and "Divorce Wars", 1982. She traveled to Italy in 1977 to make her final big screen appearance in director Dario Argento's horror film, "Susperia." In 1978, she married her fourth husband, publisher David Wilde, and settled into semi-retirement in their Scarsdale, NY home. In 1982 she made a guest appearance on the ABC soap opera. "The Guiding Light." It was her final performance. Joan Bennett passed away on December 7, 1990 at the age of 80.

With Myrna Loy and Claudette Colbert, 1972

"Suspiria" 1977

Miss Joan Bennett, 1984

The Bennett family plot, Pleasant View Cemetery, Lyme, Connecticut. Joan Bennett Wilde's gravestone is front center between her mother and father. The inscription reads "Beloved Mother, Adored Wife."