The last of Louise

That’s Louise Brooks up there, flanked by John Wayne and Ray “Crash” Corrigan, with goof­ball Max Terhune in front of her, in a pub­li­city still for Overland Stage Raiders, her last film, made in 1938. What a way to go. Overland Stage Raiders was an entry in the “Three Mesquiteers” short fea­tures made by the not-quite-Poverty Row stu­dio Republic Pictures (you want to see REAL Poverty Row Westerns, go PRC) between 1936 and 1943. You think today’s movie fran­chises overdo it, chew on this: there were fifty-one of them. The Mesquiteers were a trio of ami­able cow­boys whose adven­tures were kind of unstuck in time (in 1938’s The Night Riders the boys appeal to President Garfield to help them out in a land-grabbing case, and he is assas­sin­ated before he can set things straight; by 1942’s The Phantom Plainsmen they’re fight­ing Nazis). The pic­tures were one of the many places where Duke Wayne found a cine­mat­ic home whilst kick­ing around Hollywood between 1931’s The Big Trail and 1939’s Stagecoach. 

Overland Stage Raiders is one of the more close-to-contemporary Mesquiteers tales, in which the boys dis­cov­er that the min­ing busi­ness they have some kind of interest in (the fel­las are really quite the entre­pren­eurs, with spe­cial­ties in pretty much every kind of busi­ness ven­ture that turns up in a Western) can some­how be improved via air­plane travel, and determ­ine to go into busi­ness with a young pilot, Ned Hoyt (Anthony Marsh) has a purty sis­ter that Mesquiteer Stony Brooke is kinda sweet on. Yes, Beth Hoyt is none oth­er than Brooks, her icon­ic page­boy hairdo replaced by a less-severe ton­sori­al non-style, long, loose and straight with lady­like pin-curls. The dresses she wears are kind of plain too. 

It’s import­ant to remem­ber that the afore­men­tioned icon­ic page­boy is only icon­ic today. Brooks’ work with G.W. Pabst was/is sen­sa­tion­al, but it did­n’t make her a star the way Dietrich’s work with Sternberg on The Blue Angel did. This was the fault of the times, and, as Brooks recalls in her own indes­pens­ible book Lulu In Hollywood, her own fault as well. “[It] was dur­ing the mak­ing of Diary of a Lost Girl—on the last day of shoot­ing, to be exact—that Pabst moved into my future. We were sit­ting gloomily at a table in the garden of a little café, watch­ing the work­men while they dug the grave for a buri­al scene, when he decide to let me have it. Several weeks before, in Paris, he had met some friends of mine—rich Americans with whom I spent every hour away from work. And he was angry: first, because he thought they pre­ven­ted me from stay­ing in Germany, learn­ing the lan­guage, and becom­ing a ser­i­ous act­ress, as he wanted; and second, because he looked upon them as spoiled chil­dren who would amuse them­selves with me for a time and then dis­card me like an old tow. ‘Your life is exactly like Lulu’s,’ he said, ‘and you will end the same way.’ […] At the time, know­ing so little of what he meant by ‘Lulu,’ I just sat sul­lenly glar­ing at him, try­ing not to listen. Fifteen years later, in Hollywood, with all his pre­dic­tions clos­ing in on me, I heard his words again—hissing back to me. And, listen­ing this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas.”

On the very next page of my edi­tion, the open­ing line of her epi­logue, “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs,” reads “ ‘The trouble with us,’ Grant Clarke told me in 1930, ‘is that we are too degen­er­ate for one part of Hollywood and not degen­er­ate enough for the other.’ ”

Brooks made Overland Stage Raiders about six years before she packed her bags and went back to Kansas. In the movie, she looks as if she nev­er left there. Although she looks entirely innoc­u­ous when Stony offers to carry some pack­ages for her, Corrigan’s Tucson Smith observes, “It nev­er fails, when Stony meets a gal we meet trouble.” Her now-seemingly corn­fed looks and plain bear­ing aside, her line read­ings speak of eloc­u­tion les­sons above all. There is some not-unintriguing sub­text avail­able for her char­ac­ter. Brother Ned, it hap­pens, is an ex-con; although he was cleared of trumped-up charges, he’s still got a pris­on rap that turns out to be excel­lent kind-of black­mail fod­der from back-East gang­sters who wanna horn in on that min­ing bon­anza. “Can’t you for­get the past?” Brooks’ Beth asks her broth­er, and those famil­i­ar with the glor­ies of Brooks’ seedy, tra­gic, and defin­it­ively fatale Lulu in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box can eas­ily ima­gine a past for this now-banal pres­ence to have escaped from, if not for­got­ten. The feel­ing gets a little stronger, and a little fun­ni­er, when she looks up at Wayne and says, “Stony, there’s some­thing I’ve got to tell you. Something I should have told you a long time ago.”

With Fritz Kortner in Pandora’s Box, 1929. 

In a blog post in The New Yorker last spring, Hilton Als praises Girls’ Jemima Kirke and her per­form­ance in that show thusly: “[S]he’s less inter­ested in our approv­al than she is in being watched.” Als con­tin­ues: “In this, Kirke is the des­cend­ant of Louise Brooks in almost any­thing.” The ten­ab­il­ity of com­par­ing Jemima Kirke to Louise Brooks is, hap­pily, no con­cern of this depart­ment. But as to the qual­ity to which Als alludes, the interest in being watched, what fas­cin­ates about Brooks’ pres­ence in Overland Stage Raiders is the almost total absence of the desire to be even seen, let alone watched. Five years after turn­ing down a lead role in The Public Enemy, six years before quit­ting Hollywood for good, she was done. 

Overland Stage Raiders, a pretty enter­tain­ing pic­ture over­all, as long as you’re not too creeped out by Max Terhune’s vent­ri­lo­quism stuff, is avail­able in a pretty nice-looking Blu-ray from, who else, Olive Films.