Cinema: For Whom?

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This protracted wheedling of Beauty by what Beauty regarded as the Beast might have gone on until Miss Bergman inherited the shawl of Ouspenskaya but for a second Selznick brainstorm. Selznick decided that vociferous blandishments, promises and temptations by cable were still a shade too Hollywood, and quit wearying the wires with them. This was a task, he now realized, for flesh and blood. Considering Miss Bergman's mental picture of an American female executive, the casting of the role was brilliantly lucky. He sent over a particularly tactful lady named Kay Brown. And that did it. Miss Bergman was braced to resist something in unshaven tweeds with a Cremo breath and a voice like a moose decoy. What she met was "so sweet and human that I decided that anyone she worked for" (Mr. Selznick walked up the walls in devilish glee) "couldn't be nearly so crazy as I expected." When, in early April 1939, the Queen Mary docked at Pier 90, the remarkable Miss Brown had in tow the richest screen potentiality of a decade.

"The Palmolive Garbo" was David Selznick's epithet for his new property. The hard-veined, soft-souled gentlemen of the press felt differently. There was something about Miss Bergman—they clawed the air for adequate words—which made them coo and baa like fatuous old uncles. "Lunching with her," sighed Thornton Delehanty, "is like sitting down to an hour or so of conversation with a charming and highly intelligent orchid." An A.P. feature writer uttered the glad cry, "As unspoiled as a fresh Swedish snowfall." Bosley Crowther in the Times, after some startling lyricism involving a Viking's sweetheart, Ivory Soap, peaches, cream and Dresden china, concluded: "This reporter would like to go on record that he has never met a star who compares. . . ."

The ladies have been less abandoned in their eulogies, but even among them Miss Bergman has managed very nicely. She even got past the Scylla and Charybdis of the screen press without shipping any water: Hedda Hopper has had nothing but good to say of her, and Miss Bergman is probably the only woman in Hollywood who can say of Lolly Parsons, with transparent sincerity, that she is "really sort of sweet."

Hollywood itself, normally a paradise of private snidery, feels just as the press does. Not only is Ingrid Bergman without an enemy in the whole community: people like the way she works, too. If she muffs a line, her apology is so obviously sincere that there is not a man or woman on the set who would not overwork to please her.

Victor Fleming, who directed her in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, calls her Angel. Sam Wood calls her "a fine wholesome girl," and gracefully credits her and Cooper with the excellent morale of the whole outfit during difficulties on The Bell's location. Deafening Gregory Ratoff shouts: "Haffing diracted Meese Boergmann in her foerst two Amerrican peetures, I vould say puzzitiffly I hope I do de same tvanty-two timeps more. She is sansahtional!"

What Are Her Assets? As with the press and Hollywood, so also with the nation. But not even David Selznick's Palmolive epithet, though it is first-rate poetry, affords an analysis of Miss Bergman's peculiar assets. There has been no such analysis. Yet in some degree her assets can be listed:

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