Before They Fade from View: Phillips Holmes
An F. Scott avatar whose career timing was just a little off.
Phillips Holmes always did look like a movie star, but his moniker could have used some improvement. His parents each had a blue-blooded surname that he combined, making his own name rather unwieldy. But no matter: his aristocratic nose, thick fan of eyelashes, and neat waves of golden-blond hair more than made up for it. In the 1930s, he worked with Howard Hawks, Josef Von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch and other luminaries of the early years of Hollywood, but rarely in their most remembered films, making Holmes little more than a cinephile footnote today.
The well-off Ivy Leaguer first made a mark at the tail end of the silent era, appearing in bit roles until he was signed by Paramount Studios around 1928. His star power rose in lighthearted, sophisticated comedies that the studio had made its signature—white telephones, refined characters, European manners, and so on. Aristocratic types and English gentleman became a fundamental part of Phillips Holmes’ star persona.
It didn’t hurt that Holmes was something of an F. Scott Fitzgerald avatar: a well-off, pretty-faced boy with light hair and a fashionable look. Given that Holmes was, like Fitzgerald, a Midwestern Princeton man, his resemblance to the literary star was all the more striking—and marketable. In 1931, Holmes capitalized on his personal charm in an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which told of a social-climbing young man who murders his pregnant girlfriend when a wealthy socialite takes a romantic interest in him.
Based on a scandalous true crime case, Holmes takes on the central role of Clyde Griffiths as a slippery fellow with a likable, charismatic front. The role would later be taken on by Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’ better known film A Place in the Sun (1951), but Holmes’ more unwholesome portrayal of a similar character makes for a fascinating comparison. While A Place in the Sun is dripping with tragic romance, An American Tragedy is more deeply connected to class, poverty, sex and greed in American life. The conclusions it draws are so bleak that it’s no surprise Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was originally set to direct. Instead, Paramount execs turned to Josef Von Sternberg, famous for discovering Marlene Dietrich. An American Tragedy was a box office success, scandalous enough to be banned outright in Great Britain, and did plenty for the rising star of its leading man.
In fact, Phillips Holmes’ run of directors in the early ’30s is hard to believe. In ’31, he worked with Von Sternberg and Howard Hawks as a hoodwinked naif in The Criminal Code. The following year, he was cast in Ernst Lubitsch WWI drama Broken Lullaby, as a shell-shocked French musician seeking absolution for his deeds in the trenches. The trouble, it seemed, was that Holmes was given more credit by reviewers for his wavy golden hair than for his acting ability. Even decades later, powerful critic Pauline Kael referred to him as “unspeakably handsome, but an even more unspeakable actor.”