Nancy Carroll

Pre-Code Paramount Star

I first read about Nancy Carroll in John Springer’s book They Had Faces Then (1974), a celebration of female stars of the 1930s in which he picked her performance in The Shopworn Angel (1928) as one of his favorites of that period. The gallant Springer also paid tribute to Carroll in the book Close-Ups (1978), a collection of film star profiles where he wrote about his friendship with Carroll in the 1940s and ‘50s when she was a middle-aged woman, after her movie career had ended.

Carroll had been a major star at Paramount in the early 1930s and had received an Oscar nomination as best actress for The Devil’s Holiday (1930), but her pictures didn’t play on television or get released on video in the 1980s and ‘90s. Aside from Springer’s heartfelt endorsement of her and the stills of her provided in those two books in the 1970s, it felt as if Carroll had been erased from film history.

The first Nancy Carroll movie I finally got to see was Laughter (1930) when it played at the Museum of Modern Art in the 2000s. Both Pauline Kael and James Harvey had written highly about Laughter as a key proto-screwball comedy, and it does have that magical free-spirited feel of the best comedies of the 1930s, but in nucleus form. Carroll is at the heart of Laughter as a former Ziegfeld girl who has married a broker (Frank Morgan) for money but is urged to break out of her respectable shell by a bohemian man (Fredric March). The red-haired, blue-eyed, Irish Carroll has a perfect film face—round and soft-looking and symmetrical like a kewpie doll—and a rather hard speaking voice, and she expertly handles the very difficult switches in tone in Laughter from fizzy and celebratory to serious and intimate.

Next I managed to see James Whale’s The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) when it played at Film Forum on a double bill at around that same time. This is another high-style picture in which Carroll is again married to Frank Morgan but plays an adulterous and vain trophy wife with a very distinctive look: beautiful half-bangs, penciled eyebrows, and glamorous gowns. Carroll’s effect here is more visual than anything else, but there is a moment when she gets enraged at Morgan after he has mussed up her hair with a kiss that shows some of the temperament that Carroll became notorious for in Hollywood, which helped to curtail her career.

Carroll was the seventh of 14 children, and her Irish immigrant parents disapproved of her going on the stage to sing and dance with her sister Terry. She worked as a chorus girl, and she married newspaperman Jack Kirkland in 1925; when Kirkland got a gig in Hollywood they went out west, where Carroll got her big break in the movie version of the despised but commercially popular stage hit Abie’s Irish Rose (1928) opposite Buddy Rogers. There are several different stories about how she landed that role, but Springer’s version had Carroll capturing the attention of Abie’s Irish Rose playwright Anne Nichols when she lost her temper and yelled at a guard at Paramount who wouldn’t let her in the studio gate. If this story is true, it means that the anger that finally destroyed Carroll’s career is what also made her stand out enough to give her a start.

Abie’s Irish Rose and The Shopworn Angel only survive in incomplete form, alas, and several of her other silent pictures are lost. She became a star because of her appearances in early musicals like Sweetie (1929), which does survive, and which features an introductory star close-up of Carroll that shimmers with pep and charisma. The ambitious and strong-minded Carroll disliked working in musicals, and her displeasure sometimes shows, but this gives her a kind of edge as she gazes semi-mockingly at Buddy Rogers in the two-strip Technicolor Follow Thru (1930), an enjoyably bawdy entertainment where she really does look like a painted doll in close-up with her red rouged cheeks and her red hair. When Follow Thru was shown at Capitolfest in 2015, Carroll’s first close-up where her face opens up like a flower got a spontaneous round of applause from an audience overwhelmed by the beauty and life of her color image on the large screen.

Carroll saw herself as a dramatic actress, and she went about proving it when she got herself the role of Bonny in The Dance of Life (1929), which had made Barbara Stanwyck a star on stage. At her best in this movie, Carroll is not unworthy of comparison to Stanwyck, and the expressions on her face fluctuate between tough and tender in a beguiling way. This key Carroll picture is a love story set against the rough world of burlesque in which Carroll’s Bonny stays loyal to the talented Skid (Hal Skelly) even as he descends into alcoholism and comes in dead drunk on their wedding night.

The Dance of Life is in the public domain and turned up on YouTube a few years back, and what it revealed was a performer who was defined by her access to both anger and sensuality. Carroll has a very memorable heightened private moment in The Dance of Life when she is waiting for Skid and looks in the mirror at herself; she is very pleased and even ecstatic with what she sees, fully alive and aware of being such a lovely girl in a way that gives her great pleasure. Some of the early scenes where Bonny fights for herself and for Skid are vivid and naturalistic, but in the last third of this movie Carroll starts to “act,” and this is likely because she worked with two directors here, John Cromwell and A. Edward Sutherland, and one of them handled her well and one of them didn’t.

In The Devil’s Holiday, which in spite of her Oscar nomination is still very hard to see but sometimes turns up on YouTube, Carroll is playing a cynical, false person, and so her style is far more calculated, and the film itself is very stiff and creaky, unfortunately. “She wasn’t in a good frame of mind,” said director Edmund Goulding of Carroll. “She was so determined to score a success as a dramatic actress that tears of rage would come from her eyes when a scene did not go as it should.”

Carroll’s personal life was unhappy by 1931; she had divorced Kirkland, and she wasn’t winning any popularity contests with either the press or her co-workers. Goulding’s The Night Angel (1931), where she played a temptress named Yula Martini, was a notable flop and got very negative notices, and a brief affair with Joseph Kennedy could not have helped her bad mood. Carroll went around with a chip on her shoulder and was suspicious of everyone, and her co-star George Murphy said she seemed to enjoy making other people uncomfortable. Even when she worked with Ernst Lubitsch on The Man I Killed (1932), Carroll was stubborn and hard to deal with. “She doesn’t understand what I want her to do,” Lubitsch said. “She doesn’t want direction.”

Carroll dominates William A. Seiter’s Hot Saturday (1932) as an affected small-town girl who has to choose between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott while attempting to guard her reputation from mean gossip. In many of her Paramount movies of this time, Carroll could be erratic, touching and real in one scene and over-the-top and false in another, but in Hot Saturday she accomplishes something very tricky, playing in a deliberately arch style in the first scenes and then opening herself up emotionally in an extraordinary sequence where she wakes up nude with the honorable Scott after he has taken her in from a rain storm.

“Say, I might be Irish, but I’m not that green,” Carroll says as a dance hall girl in Child of Manhattan (1933), which is based on a Preston Sturges play and features another of her erratic performances. It seems clear that Carroll needed direction but was too bullheaded to take it, and so her career started to drift into B pictures once her contract with Paramount was up. When a second marriage ended in 1935, Carroll quit the movies for a year and spent some time in Ireland, and this was a key mistake. In 1938 she came back for two movies, a cameo at the end of a Deanna Durbin picture called That Certain Age and then a small part as the snooty roommate to Patsy Kelly in There Goes My Heart, in which Fredric March, her co-star from Laughter, is still the male lead while she has been demoted to fifth billing.

There were no more movies for Carroll after that, even though she was just 35 years old. She had made 39 pictures in less than ten years, yet almost all of them languish un-shown and barely known. When Carroll spoke to Springer about her lost career, there were no illusions. “She talked much about her movie heyday and was unsparingly honest about the mistakes she’d made, never blaming anyone but herself,” Springer said.

Carroll’s daughter Patricia became an actress, and sometimes Carroll acted with her on television in the 1950s. She had been a big star in the early 1930s at Paramount, getting more fan mail than just about anyone else, but in her fifties Carroll was just a vaguely familiar and jobbing actress on TV, where she specialized in daffy Alice Brady-like matrons and was at her best opposite Tallulah Bankhead in a teleplay called A Man for Oona (1962). She died in 1965, still hoping for a comeback.

It is somewhat easier to see Carroll’s movies than it was when I first read Springer’s loving remembrances of her. Hot Saturday and The Kiss Before the Mirror have been released on DVD, and Child of Manhattan has played on TCM, but other of-interest Carroll vehicles like Personal Maid (1931) and Wayward (1932) are as inaccessible as ever except in poor grey-market copies, and Laughter and Follow Thru particularly merit more exposure. Carroll might have felt forgotten as an older woman, but that audience who cheered her first color close-up in Follow Thru in 2015 knew a real star when they saw one.