Some Die in Battle, Some in Bed: 'Forever Amber'
Some Die in Battle, Some in Bed: 'Forever Amber'
Commemorating Linda Darnell's centennial by re-examining a misunderstood high-point from her Fox years
This piece is a part of the Linda Darnell Centennial Blogathon, organized by Samantha Richardson. You can read the rest of the entries celebrating the queen of Fox in the ‘40s at Musings of a Classic Film Addict.
If you’ve heard of the film Forever Amber before, you might have heard about it in comparison to Gone With The Wind, and not in flattering comparison. Since its release in 1947, eight years after Gone With The Wind, Forever Amber hasn’t quite managed to get out from under the shadow of that gargantuan classic, the juggernaut of 1939 so unstoppable that even the strongest other offerings from that year, films as good and as distinct as Stagecoach, Love Affair, Ninotchka, The Women, The Old Maid, and Midnight were threatened with the same kind of eclipse. But each one of these films has found its footing in time with its respective audience. That’s because Forever Amber’s problem wasn’t one of time, but of nature. Something particular to the character of the film that falters when subjected to the iron force of a film like Gone With The Wind, something that isn’t even shared by a film like Jezebel, a Civil War scorcher released by Warner Bros. a year before Wind, purported by some to have been concocted for the sole reason of pacifying Warner’s leading lady, Bette Davis, when she failed to win the role of Scarlett O’Hara, which was certainly a blatant ploy to head off some of the success that was in bound for MGM.
In fairness, Amber and Wind do share a lot in common: a period setting during a civil war, an epic, historical sweep encompassing real-world events and figures, a fiery, irrepressible heroine named after a color at their center, that heroine hung up on a “man that got away” plot, and more. There was also the fact that Darryl F. Zanuck, the studio chief at Fox, mounted a stunty national casting search for the perfect Amber St. Clare, one that was highly reminiscent of David O. Selznick’s infamous search for Scarlett O’Hara (one Forever Amber lobby card entitled “Forever Linda” included under a glossy production still of Darnell in costume a caption that read, “When 20th Century Fox went hunting for the right girl to play the title role in Forever Amber, bystanders recalled the frenzied quest for a cinematic Scarlett and Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece”). Forever Amber was positively received by critics and audiences in its time, though, and not always because it promised to open back up that magic door to Gone With The Wind land.
The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther gave the film a surprisingly positive review, writing that “a more becoming Amber could hardly be conceived than the firm, luxurious creature that Linda Darnell makes.” Though he does dedicate a disproportionate chunk of the short review to coming up with different ways to call Amber St. Clare a whore — “remarkable harlot,” “intemperate lady,” etc. Variety’s review was equally warm, noting all that viewers could expect to see: “a wealth of derring-do, 17th-century knavery and debauchery, the love of a good woman (Jane Ball), and the rest of a depraved court’s atmosphere.” In sum, “It’s solid escapology,” and “Darnell manages her chameleon Amber character very well.” The rest of the contemporary national notices that are available follow in this regard, and audiences certainly turned out in droves to see it. The scandal that resulted from the publication of the source novel by Kathleen Winsor three years earlier, combined with the Catholic Legion’s immediate decision to denounce the film on its opening night, gave it a must-see charge. The film broke into the year’s box office top 10, became Fox’s highest earning film of 1947 (though not its highest grossing), and according to AFI, broke box office records when it opened in New York City at the Roxy Theatre on the 22nd of October.
I suspect that Forever Amber’s being positively received — though not ecstatically so — may have actually hastened its eventual obsolescence and decline in the cultural memory, rather than prevented it. Had it been a disastrous bastardization of Gone With The Wind, somehow superseded Wind’s breathtaking technicolor spectacle, or departed in some major way from its most recognizable beats and elements, it may have stood a chance of standing apart. But it didn’t. Forever Amber was merely good, and like a dog-eared paperback, it has been left to molder atop the towering stacks of misfit movies that classic Hollywood enthusiasts routinely rifle through, hoping to uncover hidden gems. Forever Amber is too well known to feel “hidden,” and too good to feel “misunderstood,” though. Indeed it may be that the film is suffering from a Goldilocks problem: too historical for the woman’s film fans, too romantic and overwrought for the historical film fans, not hot enough for the romance lovers, Forever Amber claims no great supporter. Among the careers of its director and star, Otto Preminger and Linda Darnell, it hardly ever ranks among the best of their work.
And yet — you can probably imagine I’m going to write this if you’ve made it five paragraphs deep into a blog post dedicated to Forever Amber — I’m thrilled to dedicate time and space to what I consider to be one of the most remarkable films of its kind, in its period. Assessing Forever Amber through the Goldilocks frame works even better in reverse: as an out-and-out woman’s film, a cinematic type indebted to coding and symbolism, it’s remarkable how clearly the film defines Amber’s romantic progress through the Restoration court as a kind of political progress; as a historical film, Forever Amber never loses sight of its specific, to-the-year context, from the title card relaying information about Cromwell’s revolt against King Charles I (“England is aflame with civil war…”) through the flourishing of the empire after the Interregnum was put down (“this is an age of expansion,” Amber’s crooked investor tells her before she winds up in a debtor’s jail), and so forth; as for the not hot enough allegations … Darnell and her leading man, Cornel Wilde, are certainly sexy enough in their own rights to fog up the lens whenever they’re in close-up, and their chemistry is decent, but the Hays Code unfortunately hacked away most of the real meat on that bone.
But even without it, Forever Amber is a soaring, sumptuous affair wreathed in taffeta and brocade, one that marries the personal and political at such a melodramatic pitch it’s easy to miss, or misconstrue its sharp intelligence, and the ornate period trappings can work the same way insulation does in a recording booth for the story’s thornier implications. Amber St. Clare is every bit the heroine as Scarlett O’Hara — twice as voracious and just as doomed, and Linda Darnell, the actress who brought her to life, astonishes. The dignified level of her gaze, the proud arch of her brow, her exquisitely coiffed and braided hair, her aesthetic abandon in “going ugly” during the plague scenes, the heartbreaking procession she makes from the “pigsty” of her ancestral village, to the inner circle of King Charles II’s court, into a private hell that makes the pigsty look like heaven. Darnell played her part, and while she might not reach the heights attained by the exemplary performances in the woman’s film canon — Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce — her Amber St. Clare accomplishes, with extreme elegance and force, what each of these enduring heroines accomplished in their times: to endear, estrange, break your heart and make you furious, all at once.
Forever Amber begins in 1644 during the English Civil War. A narrator (the only use of this device in the film) recites a passage from the Winsor novel, setting the viewer up quite well for the bodice-ripping ribaldry to come:
"This is the tragic story of Amber St. Clare, slave to ambition, stranger to virtue, fated to find the wealth and power she ruthlessly gained wither to ashes in the fire lit by passion and fed by defiance of the eternal command — the wages of sin is death.”
We’re introduced to Amber as an infant, wrapped in a luxurious blanket embroidered with her first name in swooping and swirling cursive, as if the first Mrs. de Winter stitched it herself. She’s left on the doorstep of a Puritan farmhouse by some nobles in a Cavalier carriage fleeing Oliver Cromwell’s anti-Royalist warpath. She quickly grows into a young woman played by Linda Darnell, which only strains credulity the slightest bit because, though Darnell was only 23 at the time of shooting, she was always made up to look at least 32, even when she was a 16 year old first being signed to Fox by Zanuck himself. Like many of the most memorable heroines of the woman’s film canon, Amber’s first and most fierce character motivation is to escape her shitty little hometown. Amber resents the squalid simplicity of her Puritan village, with its humdrum routine of daily chores and unquestioned values of devotion and humility. Like Bette Davis’ Rosa Moline (Beyond the Forest), Ida Lupino’s Helen Chernen (The Hard Way), or Ginger Rogers’ Kitty Foyle (Kitty Foyle), Amber feels bigger than her surroundings. Unlike those characters, Amber is actually right. She isn’t like her adoptive family — she has royal blood.
Forever Amber constructs an ambivalent relationship to the concept of class destiny from the start. On the one hand, Amber’s eventual rise through the ranks of English society to become, at her peak, the King’s mistress, is depicted as inevitable, a natural consequence of her royal breeding guiding her to back into her rightful place atop the class hierarchy. On the other hand, the thrill of the film comes from witnessing Amber’s Machiavellian tenacity to escape the destiny of her upbringing, despite her actual origins. If we really believed that it was inevitable Amber would make it to the top, would the film be any fun to watch? The fun of Forever Amber is watching Darnell flirt, marry, bed, backstab, connive, plead, sacrifice, and self-immolate to move forward through the film. To “get what she wants,” yes, but mainly just to get by. In the woman’s film, absolute deference to the woman in question and to the patriarchal circumstances which enclose her trumps everything.
Rather than reading Amber’s secret royal heritage as the detail which explains her ability to “climb from one class to another like they were rungs on a ladder,” as Richard Greene’s Lord Harry Almsbury puts it, it’s more accurate to view that element as being used to heighten the dramatic irony, thereby deepening the impact of the ultimate tragedy. Amber rises to her station through sheer force of will, and when she finally realizes that she’s alone at the top, the fact that she had a right to that station by birth all along serves to amplify the magnitude of her loss. This is the operating logic of the woman’s film at play: manipulate every component of the cinematic apparatus to intensify the woman’s suffering so that inside of it, like the liquid blue core of a wick of flame, we may glimpse her virtue, her honesty, her pure goodness, holding out like holy fire against the wretched world we force her to walk through.
Back at the farm and still in her teens Amber meets Lord Bruce Carlton (Wilde), a strapping cavalier in a Parliamentarian army brigade who rides into Amber’s village one night. Carlton is the other major element that both Winsor and Preminger use to make Forever Amber deeper, richer, and more complex than your average bodice ripper.
It is a bodice ripper, though, which should be said. Upon its release Winsor’s 1,000~ page novel was banned in 14 states. In his 1944 suit against the novel, the Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts cited as evidence of the book’s malignant nature “70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions, 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men, and 49 miscellaneous objectionable passages.” The production code and the dictates of economical screenwriting whittled those numbers down to five romantic partners, one illegitimate child, a couple instances of undressing, and no depictions of sexual intercourse. The scenes between Bruce and Amber sufficiently sexy, though. No doubt Cornel Wilde recalled for audiences of the time Darnell’s frequent screen partner, Tyrone Power, Fox’s other, more popular swashbuckling type. Darnell certainly had more palpable chemistry with Power, but Wilde invests the character of Bruce with a cold refusal, and eventually disdain, that I’m not sure Power would have been capable of. This quality that lends an icy prickle to the estrangement between the characters, and it likely plays a major part in enduring comparisons of the filmed version of Forever Amber to Madame Bovary.
Wilde’s wide build in contrast with his haughty, princely face with its heavy brow and downturned lip enhances the force of his eventual rejection of Amber. But Amber hardly ever wavers in her devotion to Bruce, not when she’s a miserable mistress in the King’s court and not when she’s a 16-year-old farm girl looking for a way to London. In the barn one night when her family and his soldiers have all gone to bed, Amber and Bruce negotiate the terms of her freedom for the first of many times to come. She’s been betrothed to a slovenly local farmer named Bob Starling (Richard Bailey) and yearns for escape. “Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life in this pigsty?” she asks him. He refuses her as a political refugee but can’t quite refuse her as a sexual partner. The moonlit rendez-vous in the woods of the novel is transformed in the film into a chaste kiss, but the implication is clear based on the easily-read semiotics of the genre at play: the way they look at each other, the way she needs him, the way that he merely wants her — they will inextricably be bound, to her detriment.
Amber follows Bruce and Almsbury to London, where it becomes clear that for Amber, Bruce was much more than a ticket to ride. The following exchange of dialogue establishes the asymmetrical dynamic between Amber and Bruce, which ties Amber’s economic prospects, political progress, and romantic conquests together in a painful knot around one inconvenient, ineradicable fact: she is and will always be in love with Bruce:
Bruce: I never heard that a steady husband was a bad thing for a girl. And for you I think it’s rather a necessity.
Amber: I’d rather die. Believe me I’d rather die than live with Bob Starling and his pigs. Keeping his house, bearing his children, rotting away in that stinking little village. You could turn me away but I won’t go back. I’ll stay in London no matter what happens to me. Please, Bruce, let me live her with you. I’ll be your servant, I’ll never ask for anything.
Bruce: You’re asking for a great deal at this very moment.
Amber: More than I’m worth?
Bruce: That’s a very direct question my dear, and it deserves a candid answer. I don’t know by what standard of value you measure yourself, but it can’t match the currency in which I weigh my freedom.
So follows a series of episodes which fuse together two of the most common narrative types of the woman’s film — the “man that got away” story and the “climbing” story. Climbing films like Kitty, Rain, The Strange Woman, and the ultimate example, Baby Face, depict a world in which men use women without consequence or second thought. The films’ heroines often start out victimized — violated, abandoned, left destitute — and soon learn there’s only one realm in which they can best men, whether to regain a place in the world or just take revenge — the sexual world. The great historian of the woman’s film, Jeanine Basinger, points out in A Woman’s View that even in the most righteous of these films, even when the woman in question has been so egregiously wronged that the audience is practically begging for payback, the dictates of the genre take over in the form of “one man whom the leading lady really cares about.” Her love for him foils her progress and melts down her weapons, for in fact, “the woman has learned this lesson” in dominating men “by having herself been dominated by the first man in her life, the one she truly loves.”
Rather than viewing these films as nihilistic about women’s independent prospects and condescending about their supposed susceptibility to love, climbing films can instead be viewed as providing a covert form of liberation to contemporary female audiences, allowing them to have their cake (steal, cheat, fuck, party, rage, rise vicariously via the heroine) and eat it too (not feel guilty that they’d never be permitted to be so free in their own lives, as ultimately, the heroine in these films is always put back in her place). In Reading the Romance, Janice Radway describes stories of Forever Amber’s kind as “clearly unrealistic but nonetheless soothing,” which act as a “kind of cultural safety valve.” The woman’s punishment for superseding the limits of her sex is at once rote — most movies simply wouldn’t be released if the woman went unpunished, save Baby Face — and a source of deep commiseration and illumination — her suffering reveals deep truths about the consequences women face should they attempt to access their true power and potential.
In the particular case of Forever Amber, Basinger is pessimistic:
“This climb is a kind of ugly metaphor for woman’s liberation, but it is again presented as a journey to nowhere, because, in the end, the woman finds herself abandoned. She has plenty of clothes, and jewels of course, and she’s even been the mistress of the king and the famous stage actress, but without love, she might as well be back at the tavern with the pigs.”
Indeed, Amber St. Clare’s rise through England’s Restoration court reaches its zenith at the exact moment the floor begins to give way beneath her. Everything she has striven for on the surface begins to take on a charge that will repel what she really wants, hidden deep beneath the placid, porcelain veneer. From the unclaimed mistress of a brigade officer to the wife a lowly noble, to a wealthy widow, a prisoner in a debtor’s gaol, the thieving wife of a highwayman named Black Jack (John Russell) to an unwed single mother who turns to the most obvious form of protection from the law — becoming a famous stage actress, to becoming the Countess of Radcliffe, a professional widow, plague survivor, Great Fire of London survivor, and finally, mistress to King Charles II (George Sanders). The further Amber gets from the “pigsty” of her ignoble upbringing, the more appealing those once scorned virtues of devotion and humility look, especially with their attendant benefits of community and mutual trust.
Amber remains devoted to Bruce as she hops from husband to lover to patron, and in return he pays her dust. Earlier in the film, in one of the film’s most famous lines, Amber vows to attain whatever it is she lacks that disqualifies her in Bruce’s eyes from marriageability — at any cost. “I’ll get the things he wants — a title, a fortune, all of them. I’ll climb so high hell have to reach up to touch the hem of my skirt.” She certainly supersedes him by film’s end, so completely he doesn’t even bother to reach up. Depicted with a painful irony common to the woman’s film, Amber’s twin goals of personal improvement and finding love are at direct odds with one another. What she lacks in the beginning are a name, title, and fortune, all of which, you’ll remember, she does not know she actually has. She does the only thing she can do to get them — woo, bed, marry, and wait to become a widow. Her focus on Bruce’s love never blurs, but her absolute concentration on that goal ironically blurs her sight around the periphery, blinding her to the fact that her means are spoiling her ends. By the time she’s socially marriageable, she’s personally disgusting to Bruce. One tough scene toward the film’s end acutely renders Amber’s transformation: she denies her son (with Bruce) when he asks her to go on a walk so she can go on a date, but doesn’t forget to remind his maid, “He’s not to play with any of the other children unless you know their name and rank.”
Without bonking you over the head about it, Forever Amber illustrates the insidious double standard between Amber and Bruce, both of whom lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top of society. But in the end, Bruce gains custody of their child, marries a young American, and sails off to the New World to start a new life. Amber is left husbandless, childless, and kicked out of court by a spurned Charles II. Further, Bruce’s character isn’t impacted by the sins he has to commit to stay alive. He’s free to be a brogue. Amber, however, descends into cheapness and vanity. She only begins to understand that while the conditional love of Bruce will only bring her pain, the love of Bruce Jr. is abiding and unlimited, when it’s too late. Remaining a viable member of elite society required constant work, work that forced her to neglect Bruce Jr. When he’s given the option to live with either the mother who sacrificed her life for his well-being or the father he barely knows, he chooses his father, who at least has never directly hurt him. Preminger delivers a final stinging blow when Amber is propositioned by one of the King’s guards. She’s been dropped by Charles II, left by Bruce, and forsworn by her only son. But she can go out on another date. The reputation she earned by way of fighting for herself, her son, and her ill-fated love guarantee that if she has nothing else, she can always find a suitor.
Forever Amber is finally a tragedy. A heart-rending incarnation of Lauren Berlant’s notion of the female complaint, that “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” I do think it rivals Hangover Square, My Darling Clementine, and A Letter to Three Wives among Darnell’s very best performances. And that isn’t to suggest the film isn’t superb. Forever Amber was nominated for a lone Academy Award, Best Music. It was the year of Miracle on 34th Street, Gentleman’s Agreement, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, and Black Narcissus. So, a fantastic year for the movies, but not a year in which any one film swept all the major competitions. Still Forever Amber barely registered in the eyes of the serious critical establishment. And for shame!
All these years later, I think we can resuscitate Linda Darnell’s Amber St. Clare as one of the most vivacious, electric, and tragic heroines of the woman’s film, the historical romance, the Preminger film — however you want to slice it. Watching it some 70 years after the release of both the novel and the film reveals a brilliant analysis of power flowing beneath its twisted tale of ill-fated romance. The transitory nature of power, how it gathers and comes loose from class, and how for women, it doesn’t corrupt the holder so much as everyone around her, against her. These are the harsh realities with which Forever Amber deals plainly, easy to miss beneath the glimmering dresses and all the jewels.
References
American Film Institute, “Forever Amber (1947)”
Attorney General v. Book Named “Forever Amber,” 323 Mass. 302, 81 N.E.2d 663 (Mass. 1948)
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View, Wesleyan University Press (1995)
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint, Duke University Press (2008)
Bosley Crowther, “Amber, Minus a Few Husbands but Flashing Her Old Charm, Relives on the Roxy Screen in Person of Linda Darnell,” The New York Times (October 23, (1947)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Revue de Paris (1856)
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance, The University of North Carolina Press (1984)
Variety Staff, “Forever Amber,” Variety (Dec 31, 1946)
Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber, Macmillan (1944)
Films Mentioned
Rain, United Artists (1932)
Baby Face, Warner Bros. (1933)
Stella Dallas, United Artists (1937)
Jezebel, Warner Bros. (1938)
Gone With The Wind, MGM (1939)
Love Affair, RKO Radio Pictures (1939)
Ninotchka, MGM (1939)
The Women, MGM (1939)
The Old Maid, Warner Bros. (1939)
Stagecoach, United Artists (1939)
Midnight, Paramount Pictures (1939)
Kitty Foyle, RKO Radio Pictures (1940)
Now, Voyager, Warner Bros. (1942)
The Hard Way, Warner Bros. (1943)
Kitty, Paramount Pictures (1945)
Mildred Pierce, Warner Bros. (1945)
Hangover Square, 20th Century Fox (1945)
The Strange Woman, United Artists (1946)
My Darling Clementine, 20th Century Fox (1946)
Forever Amber, 20th Century Fox (1947)
Miracle on 34th Street, 20th Century Fox (1947)
Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, Universal (1947)
Gentleman’s Agreement, 20th Century Fox (1947)
Black Narcissus, The Archers (1947)
Beyond the Forest, Warner Bros. (1949)
A Letter to Three Wives, 20th Century Fox (1949)
Great review of a sumptuous film!
What a wonderful article, Ryan! Forever Amber is one of Linda Darnell's films that I've wanted to see the most, and I'm looking forward to it even more now after reading your brilliant write-up and seeing George and Linda looking so glorious in Technicolor. Thank you so much for paying such great tribute to Linda for the blogathon!