Dolores Costello Movies

Orson Welles' followup to Citizen Kane (1941) was utterly different from Kane in style and texture, but just as brilliant in its own way. Writer/director Welles does not appear on camera, but his voiceover narration superbly sets the stage for the movie's action, which fades in valentine fashion on Amberson Mansion, the most ostentatious dwelling in all of turn-of-century Indianapolis. Its mistress is the haughtily beautiful Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello). When Isabel's beau, erstwhile inventor Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), inadvertently humiliates her in public, she breaks off the relationship and marries colorless Wilbur Minafer (Donald Dillaway). The neighbors are certain that, since Isabel can't possibly love Wilbur, she will spoil her children rotten. As it turns out, she has one child, George Minafer (Tim Holt), and that one is enough as far as the rest of Indianapolis is concerned. There are those who live for the day that the arrogant, insufferable George will get his comeuppance. When George returns home from college, his mother and grandfather (Richard Bennett) hold a gala reception in his honor. Among the guests is the older-and-wiser Eugene, now a prosperous automobile manufacturer, and his pretty daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter). George takes to Lucy immediately, but can't warm up to Eugene, especially after learning from his uncle Jack Amberson (Ray Collins) and his maiden aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) that Eugene and Isabel had once been sweethearts. After the death of Wilbur Minafer, the widowed Eugene feels emboldened enough to propose to Isabel again. This time she is willing, but the obstreperous George refuses to allow his mother to see Eugene. His imperious bullheadedness will lead to tragedy for all concerned--and, at long last, a chastened George Minafer will indeed receive his comeuppance. The film's real villain is not George but that old intangible bugaboo called "Progress." As the automobile age comes to fruition, the elegant, cloistered lifestyle of the Ambersons fades from view, finally disappearing altogether. This is superbly foreshadowed in the "winter outing" sequence (filmed in an L.A. icehouse) in which George's two-horse sleigh is abandoned in favor of Eugene's clunky horseless carriage. Welles evokes performances that his actors seldom (if ever) matched in later years; even the very limited Tim Holt is wholly believable-and even a bit pitiable-as the blinkered George Amberson Minafer. The current version, however, is but a pale shadow of Welles' original concept. Out of time and overbudget, the movie previewed badly and was eventually sliced down to an abrupt 88 minutes (by, among others, editor Robert Wise, who would go on to direct such films as West Side Story and The Sound of Music). Even though the film therefore must be regarded as a marred masterpiece, the remaining two-thirds of Welles' original concept is still a thrilling cinematic experience, especially whenever Agnes Moorehead is on the screen. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A remake of Racetrack, King of the Turf stars Adolphe Menjou as a seedy, alcoholic bookie with a long-dormant streak of decency. Roger Daniel is a young stable boy whom Menjou befriends and offers advice. The bookie and the stable boy purchase a racehorse, with Daniel training to be a top jockey in order to ride the horse to victory. When Menjou's ex-wife (Dolores Costello) arrives on the scene, she reveals that Daniel is in fact Menjou's son, who'd run away from home to pursue a racetrack career. She begs Menjou not to allow the boy to throw away his life--and not to reveal the truth behind their relationship. The next day, Menjou gets good and drunk and orders Daniel to throw a crucial race. The disillusioned boy does so, is disqualified for life, and turns his back on Menjou. Never realizing the true identity of his fallen idol, Daniel returns to his mother, while Menjou, having done the "right thing," disappears into the crowd. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Boy soprano Bobby Breen dons a pair of skates in the oddball musical Breaking the Ice. Escaping his super-strict Mennonite relatives, our hero gets a job singing at a Philadelphia ice-skating rink. Here he tries to earn enough money to help his beloved widowed mother (Dolores Costello) wrest herself free of those selfsame relatives. The plot requires canary-voiced Breen to share the spotlight with six-year-old skating sensation Irene Dare. Within a year, Breaking the Ice producer Sol Lesser attempted to launch another series of family musicals built around the talents of little Ms. Dare, but the first entry in this project--Everything's on Ice--was also the last. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

David O. Selznick's first independent production upheld the producer's tradition, established at Paramount, RKO and MGM, of bringing the "classics" to the screen. Adapted by Hugh Walpole from the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy is set in the late 19th century. After establishing Freddie Bartholomew as a likeable Brooklyn boy who can handle himself in a scrap--with the assistance of his roughneck pal Mickey Rooney, of course--the film introduces us to Bartholomew's mother, played by Dolores Costello-Barrymore (though divorced from John Barrymore, Mrs. Costello-Barrymore was still billng herself by her married name). Costello-Barrymore is the widow of a titled Englishman, whose father, the aristocratic Sir C. Aubrey Smith, detests all Americans with equal fervor. Upon discovering that Bartholomew is the rightful heir to his fortune, Smith demands that Costello-Barrymore deliver the boy to his sprawling English country estate. Now addressed by one and all as Lord Fauntleroy, Bartholomew chafes at the restrictions imposed upon him by his station in life. The boy's good nature and forthrightedness wins his grandfather's respect-and, eventually, the old man's love. When pasty-faced Jackie Searl, a false claimant to Bartholomew's title, shows up, Bartholomew's American pals, led by Rooney, set things right. His hard heart softened at last, Smith stage-manages a happy reunion between Bartholomew and Costello-Barrymore. Expertly sidestepping the "sissy" onus that has been unfairly placed upon the original Burnett novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy scored well at the box office. Other versions of this venerable tale have starred Mary Pickford (as both Fauntleroy and his mother) and Ricky Schroder. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Dolores Costello spent the twilight months of her Warner Bros. contract in such trifles as Expensive Women. The star is cast as wealthy society girl Constance Newton, a "girl of whims" who flits from one man to the next like a butterfly. After a couple of desultory affairs with Bobby Brandon (Joe Donahue) and Neil Hartley (Warren William), she finds true love in the form of Arthur Raymond (Anthony Bushell). Even so, she's hesitant about making a lifetime commitment -- and besides, Arthur is already married. A few days later, Constance is back with the reckless Bobby, a reunion that ends in disaster when Arthur kills Bobby in a fight. Not wishing to ruin two lives, Constance takes the blame for the killing, which is ruled by the jury as a suicide. Having learned her lesson, Constance is consoled by Neil Hartley, who returns from nowhere to make her his wife. It was supposed to be a heavy drama, but audiences tended to laugh in the wrong places. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this drama, a dancer's brother is wounded during a church robbery; the town doctor appears, rats on the boy and then lets him die. Later the doctor and the dancer become lovers which makes the boy's partner insane with jealousy. He attacks the physician, and believing he is dead, blackmails the woman into becoming his bride. Fortunately for her, the doctor lives, goes to the police, and saves her. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this romance set in Russia, a fisherman's daughter is jilted by her true love and instead marries a baron. Time passes and the two men meet each other in Siberia where they have both been exiled. When the poorer man has the opportunity to come home, he changes places with the baron so that he can return to his wife. Unbeknownst to him, she has gone to the frozen wasteland to search for him. Instead she meets her old love, and they soon find themselves once again involved. The distraught baron tries to get revenge by killing himself. The lovers then are united at last. The film was created with two different happy endings. In one, the couple returns to their home and live in freedom. In the other, they remain together in captivity. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Although there was little love lost between star Dolores Costello and director Michael Curtiz, the two Warner Bros. contractees collaborated on several films, including the early-talkie Madonna of Avenue A. Costello plays Maria Marton, an expensively educated young miss who has been led to believe that her mother Georgia (Louise Dresser) is a high-society doyenne. Our heroine is in for quite a shock when she learns that her sainted mom is actually the blowzy proprietress of a seedy dime-a-dance joint. Among the scriptwriters of Madonna of Avenue A was one Mark Canfield, a pseudonym for Warner's scriptwriter/producer Darryl F. Zanuck. The film's plot would be reworked several times, most memorably as the 1953 Doris Day vehicle Lullaby of Broadway. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Directed by a young Michael Curtiz, this Warner Bros. epic had aspirations of becoming another Intolerance (1916). In the end, Curtiz' treatise of man's inhumanity to man was ironically sabotaged by the enormous success of yet another studio release, the groundbreaking The Jazz Singer (1927). Basically a quaint romantic melodrama set during World War I, Noah's Ark opens with American George O'Brien falling in love with German Dolores Costelllo while travelling on the Orient Express on the eve of war. The train wrecks and the two seek shelter at a nearby hostelry. Russian military officer Noah Beery tries to molest Miss Costello but is repulsed by O'Brien. The three meet again near the end of the war in a little French village, where Beery accuses Costello, now Mrs. O'Brien, of being a German spy. Placed before a firing squad, Dolores is saved in the nick of time by her husband, a member of the squad.The Germans use this very moment to bomb and all are soon entombed in the basement of a demolished building. Comparing the war with the Biblical account of the Flood, screenwriters Anthony Coldeway and Darryl F. Zanuck flash back to Miriam (Costello) and Japheth (O'Brien) at the festival of Jaghut. The climactic Flood (the filming of which brought Miss Costello a severe case of pneumonia) pulls out all the stops and is magnificent in UCLA's lovingly restored print. After the deluge, the story shifts back to war-torn France, where Costello and O'Brien are rescued by the Red Cross on the eve of the Armistice. Ready to be released, Warner Bros. withdrew the film in order to add several scenes of dialogue, considered a necessity after the unprecedented reception of The Jazz Singer. The results were doleful: Ever so often, Noah's Ark comes to a screetching halt as the characters leave the realm of silent movies to speak stolid lines of dialogue. The cumbersome Vitaphone sound-on-disc made for pedestrian drama as everyone were forced to speak slowly and enunciate carefully. Dolores Costello, Warners' blonde leading lady and the off-screen Mrs. John Barrymore, suffered the most and would see her flourishing career all but evaporate. But UCLA's restoration of Noah's Ark proves once and for all that the rumors of Miss Costello having trouble with sibilants were highly exaggerated. It was Costello's line-reading of "Merthy, merthy, have you no thisther of your own?" in Tenderloin (1928) that supposedly sealed her fate in talkies. But even though the restored Noah's Ark shows little sign of the dreaded lisp, the hapless Miss Costello is visibly ill at ease before the microphone and her stilted dialogue, by Coldeway, is of no help whatsoever. "Part-talkies" like Noah's Ark were mercifully only a stop-gap measure; by the time of M-G-M's Broadway Melody (released June 6, 1929), "all-talking, all-dancing" features had already freed themselves from the constraints of early sound technology. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

It's hard to believe that Darryl F. Zanuck, producer of such anti-prejudice films of the 1940s as Gentleman's Agreement and Pinky, wrote the incredibly racist screenplay of Old San Francisco. After a lengthy prologue detailing the establishment and settlement of San Francisco by the Spanish aristocracy, the story proper begins in 1906 at the hacienda of Don Hernandez Vasquez (Josef Swickard) and his lovely daughter Dolores (Dolores Costello). Having fallen upon hard times, Don Hernandez nonetheless refuses the entreaties of wealthy businessman Michael Brandon (Anders Randolf) to purchase his property. Originally hired by Brandon to persuade the Vasquez family to move out, young lawyer Terrence O'Shaughnessy (Charles E. Mack) changes his mind when he falls in love with Dolores. Meanwhile, Chris Buckwell (Warner Oland), in charge of all illegal activities in Chinatown, offers himself as the "champion" of the Vasquez clan, all the while plotting to grab their land for himself and claim Dolores as his bride. Able to indulge in his skullduggery without fear of retribution from his Chinese victims because of his Caucasian status, Buckwell makes the mistake of revealing to Dolores that he actually has Oriental blood. When Dolores threatens to expose Buckwell as a "half-breed," he kidnaps the girl and attempts to sell her into white slavery. Surrounded by lustful Chinese merchants, Dolores prays for salvation -- whereupon the San Francisco Earthquake destroys everything around her, including Buckwell's criminal empire! Miraculously, both Dolores and Terrence escape from the earthquake unscathed, and in the final scene they are shown arm in arm, overlooking the rebuilt and "redeemed" San Francisco. Though beautifully photographed and consummately produced, Old San Francisco is no classic, nor will it ever be mistaken as a monument for racial tolerance. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The David Belasco play had been filmed twice previously, in 1915 and in 1921, before Warner Bros. made this version with the fetching Dolores Costello in the role made famous by Mrs. Leslie Carter. Maryland Calvert (Costello) is a true belle of the South, so when the Civil War breaks out, there is no doubt that her allegiance remains with the Confederacy. Not so Alan Kendrick (Jason Robards Sr.), her sweetheart, who joins the Union army. Thorpe, who also loves Maryland (Warner Richmond), is kicked out of the army and becomes a Confederate spy. It is Thorpe who orchestrates Kendrick's arrest. He is imprisoned and sentenced to be shot, but Maryland comes to the rescue. As her lover makes his getaway, she rushes to the alarm bell and desperately clings to its clapper to keep it from ringing and announcing his escape. Union and Confederate alliances are washed away as the couple are happily united. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi