Morning Comes for Frances

By RICHARD CORLISS

A new movie rediscovers Hollywood's most troubled beauty

It was a life full of headlines and hard times. 1931: SEATTLE GIRL WRITES

"GOD DIES" ESSAY, WINS PRIZE. 1935: COED ON REVIEWING STAND FOR MOSCOW MAY DAY PARADE. 1936: FRANCES FARMER, A MOVIE STAR AT 21. 1937: HOLLYWOOD BLOND WINS ACCLAIM IN BROADWAY'S GOLDEN BOY. 1938: STAR CAMPAIGNS FOR SPANISH LEFTISTS. 1939: FARMER WALKS OUT ON ROLE IN HEMINGWAY PLAY. 1942: FRANCES FARMER "DEPORTED" FROM MEXICO. 1943: ACTRESS ARRESTED, PLACED IN INSANE ASYLUM. 1945: FRANCES FARMER DISAPPEARS AGAIN, IS FOUND. 1950: EX-STAR RELEASED AFTER YEARS IN VIOLENT WARD. 1958: FRANCES FARMER, THIS IS YOUR LIFE! 1970: FRANCES FARMER, ACTRESS, DEAD OF CANCER AT 56.

Great beauties of the 1930s must have dreamed of looking like Frances Farmer. Right arms all over Hollywood would be deposited in the gene bank if it returned eyes as crystal blue as hers, features and figures as smart and sensuous. Add a dusky voice and no little acting potential, and you have God's recipe for a movie star. But if Farmer was a blessed presence in Samuel Goldwyn's Come and Get It and a dozen B pictures, her life was one roiling curse. She was part of a movie age that glorified the strong-willed woman and punished the ac tresses who incarnated them. Hepburn, Davis, De Havilland were all mistreated by moguls who wanted their stars to behave like little women. Farmer was as willful as any of them--and far more troubled. The pressure drove her from the screen. It may have driven her mad.

Her fluttering tailspin--reaching bottom at a Dickensian snake pit where she was gang-raped by drunken G.I.s and subjected to every form of torture the psychiatric Establishment could devise, from shock treatment to massive doses of mind-bending drugs and, quite possibly, a transorbital lobotomy--is the stuff nightmares and film biographies are made of. Now a company of film makers is attempting just that: Frances, a $10 million movie starring Jessica Lange as the doomed actress and Kim Stanley as her wildly eccentric mother Lillian.

They are filming a scene that took place Oct. 19,1942, the night Frances was arrested for drunken driving. High on hauteur, Frances stands in the courtroom and taunts the judge with sarcasm. Then she realizes the consequences, asks to make a phone call and is dragged away screaming. Lange goes through the scene ten times--teasing, glaring, hating, crying, shrieking, allowing the camera to read the subtlest nuances on a face that remarkably resembles Farmer's. Graeme Clifford, Lange's editor on The Postman Always Rings Twice and her director on Frances, shouts "Cut! Print!" Lange goes limp; she has reason to feel exhausted, and pleased.

It was in 1974, before Lange's debut in the Dino de Laurentiis King Kong, that she read Farmer's autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? In vain she tried to persuade Bob Rafelson or Bob Fosse to direct it. (Rafelson would hire Lange for The Postman; Fosse is now preparing a film based on the tragic life of a modern starlet, Dorothy Straiten, with Mariel Hemingway in the lead.) In the interim came Shadowland, William Arnold's incorrigibly readable Farmer biography. The Frances screenwriters claim their script is based on original research, so Arnold has sued and awaits a showdown at the film's completion. But Lange's and Farmer's time is now. Says Lange, who beat out Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld and Goldie Hawn for the role: "The movie is a statement about women's independence and how frightening it can be. Politically, Frances was a radical. But she didn't have a generation backing her up. The Hearsts hated her, and Hollywood raped her. L.A. is a tricky place--there are a lot of killers here."

Farmer didn't have to go to Hollywood for that. She had a character assassin right at home: her own mommie dear est, Lillian. Six feet tall and fearsome as a Pauline Bunyan, Lillian made headlines in World War I when she crossbred a Rhode Island Red, a White Leghorn and an Andalusian Blue to produce a red-white-and-blue chicken--the Bird Americana--as she called it, which she proposed as the new national emblem. By the time of the next World War, Lillian was convinced that the Communists had driven her poor daughter crazy. And so, in 1944, she declared Frances insane and had her locked up at the Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, Wash.

It is eerily appropriate that Lillian in the film is Kim Stanley, the imposing stage actress who 25 years ago played yet another troubled movie star in Paddy Chayefsky's The Goddess. Stanley still has star quality: when Mel Brooks, Hollywood's reigning zany and the executive producer of Frances, was told that she might be available to play Lillian, Brooks jumped on his desk for joy. Stanley, the holder of a master's degree in psychology from the University of Texas, looks at her role and says, "Lillian mixed her identity with Frances'. She was in love with this child, obsessed with her. When a mother wants a child to be glorious, the child is in trouble. It can be crushed."

Stanley is as fascinated with Lange: "Jess was the kind of dame I wanted to work with -- with-quick, open, smart." But the out-of-sequence shooting on a movie set disturbs her: "You have to be a clerk. You have to file, recall -- 'When was this part of the scene last shot?' The theater is to drool. You rehearse. You're not playing poke-in-the-dark." This is only her third theatrical film in a 35-year acting career.

The part of Frances' fictionalized friend Harry York is taken by another part-time movie star, Playwright Sam Shepard, who "picked this movie because it's like a Greek tragedy." But one with a happy ending. Now the stardom that Frances Farmer never quite achieved in her prime is likely to be hers a dozen years after her death.

-- By Richard Corliss. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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