Luise Rainer at 100

Luise Rainer just turned 100.  Though her name is hardly a household word these days - and hasn’t been, in fact, for over 70 years - in the late 1930s Rainer became the first performer to win back-to-back Oscars.  What happened next wasn’t pretty: marital problems, poor roles and a falling out with her studio, MGM, all conspired to effectively end her career.  The Best Actress of 1936 and 1937 was all washed up by 1943.

Survival, of course, ranks as the sweetest revenge.  Rainer might not have enjoyed the satisfaction of 60 years or significant part thereof at the top like her contemporaries Garbo, Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck and Hepburn, but she is the one left standing two decades into the twenty first century.  The only comparable other figures left from that era are Gloria Stewart, who played the old lady part in “Titanic” as well as the lead role in the 1934 version of “The Invisible Man”, and Olivia de Havilland, who debuted in 1935 but who didn’t achieve real stardom until emerging from the shadow of Errol Flynn, establishing her acting credentials in “Gone with the Wind”.

The fact that Rainer is cogent enough to this month publicly introduce “The Good Earth”, the second of her award winning films, is a sign that not only does she continue to breath but that she knows her own name as well.

Auteur House is proud to stock both “The Good Earth” and “The Great Ziegfeld”.  Rainer’s Oscar in the latter has always been ascribed to a solitary scene.  Playing one of Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld’s wives, she’s required to feign joy whilst talking to him on the telephone, all the time crying on the inside.  It is a beautifully observed moment in an otherwise rather overblown, stock biopic.

“The Good Earth” is another matter entirely. Both the film and Rainer herself are truly memorable.  Few epics from the golden age of Hollywood are as visually impressive, Karl Freud’s awe inspiring cinematography capturing the humble beginnings of a Chinese peasant family, its wretched decline during a period of famine and revolution and its eventual rise to wealth and empty opulence.

If “The Good Earth” were a silent film it would be a masterpiece on the order of DW Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms”.  Unfortunately sound emphasises the phoniness of Paul Muni and several other caucasians cast as orientals.  The true measure of Rainer’s talent is that she transcends what would now be considered politically very incorrect casting.  Any German actress who can convince as a Chinese slave labourer in an American film deserves both to win an Oscar and to celebrate her centenary.