Jack Is Back and Starring

Boisterous Barrymore Does The Great Profile (1940)

John Barrymore a-huffin' and puffin' through tired reprise of 20th Century and more recent All My Children, which was stage celebration of his fall from performing heights. Jack being degraded was full-time fun of columnists and column readers who came like moths to flame of his romance with Elaine Barrie and efforts at rehab. The Great Profile was Hollywood's reward for honest hit Jack made of All My Children, a comedy he enhanced by nightly abandon of the script and no two ad-libs alike. Orson Welles saw All My Children as fullest expression of Barrymore genius and attended over/again through the play's run. Profile's "Evans Garrick" is undisguised JB as himself, the private life assumed to be as chaotic as foolery indulged in public. Those who'd lament the downfall were figured to lack humor --- after all, wasn't Jack getting as much if not more fun from ridiculing himself? He was nearing sixty, was dissipated sure, but could rouse himself to greatness right unto finish of two years after The Great Profile. Look, if you can find them, at The Great Man Votes or World Premiere, then listen to some of his radio work, which was extensive and varied.

Problem with The Great Profile was its trying too hard to rib-tickle. 20th Century was clearly the model, but this was 20th Century on steroids, with no Howard Hawks to rein it in. Director Walter Lang would recall Barrymore from 70's distance (for interviewer Jon Tuska) as a "great intellect" and "hard worker" who'd post four men about the set, all with cue cards, as he "couldn't remember lines at all." The director had seen Barrymore as Hamlet, so for the Great Man to beclown himself now "hurt me a little bit." The Great Profile begins at shouting pitch and never calms down. It is less amusing than exhausting. Barrymore makes his entrance crashing through a door, and ramps up from there. I've read that Barrymore got a pile from Zanuck for making this film ($200K, according to JB historian John Kobler), and DFZ was engaged enough to give himself a producer credit. How disappointing then, was the quarter-million loss Fox sustained on The Great Profile?

A Saucy Backstage Visitor During My Dear Children's Chicago Engagement

Latter-day 20th flips a bird at buyers with an "On-Demand" DVD transferred from 16mm that will do if you're desperate enough to see the show. Only Barrymore-curious will want to, the media circus that prompted The Great Profile having long since marched by. Was a 1940 public by now weary with his antics? I saw Burt Reynolds do a twilight-of-life chat show where he reminded me of that sad backstage "interview" Barrymore did during My Dear Children. Not that Reynolds was potted, but a light had gone out, and those who recall glory days can but ponder their own expiration date where confronted by this longest yard. Barrymore at least had the tumble-down stage to himself,  most of sidelined peers by such point staying home. Jack had to work due to a mountain of debt he was determined, and honorable, enough to see satisfied. There's little evidence of Barrymore relishing his work beyond a certain point. Maybe he never did. Acting had been a family business, after all. Had they all been slide-rule accountants, he might have been steered into that. JB did admit that he'd rather have been a commercial artist.

Jack with Elaine Barrie. Barrymore Friend Hume Cronyn Later Acknowledged She Was Powerful Hot
and Challenge For Any Man To Resist, So Was Sympathetic to JB's Plight

Co-players in The Great Profile had at least that experience to recount over endless meals for balance of lives. I read that Mary Beth Hughes eventually became a hairdresser. Suppose she ever spoke of Barrymore to customers sat under a salon dryer? Hughes did tell a JB biographer of a first encounter wherein the profile of profiles "ripped the skirt off my dress," an incident she handled with "perfect aplomb," this being Jack's idea of an initiation, which she passed (imagine outcome it would have today). "He was loaded all the time ... and when we were ready to shoot, he was flying." Anne Baxter said JB was so wasted each morning that "his man would have to carry him in and set him down in an easy chair." As to reliance on "idiot cards," as Baxter put it, Barrymore told her that Profile lines "weren't worth learning." You wonder how embellished these stories got over length of time. People after all expected anecdotes about John Barrymore to be outrageous. Baxter noted his overcoming a "flaccid" mind to play scenes flawlessly once cameras rolled, "a lesson in concentration," she called it. Worth noting is fact that both Mary Beth Hughes and Anne Baxter were teenagers when The Great Profile was made. Talk about a baptism of fire ...

Jack Later Referred To This Grind Into Grauman Cement As His "Face On The Barroom Floor" Moment

As obnoxious as Barrymore could be, re come-ons and pinching,  Gregory Ratoff, who was everybody but a public's idea of funny and a canker on The Great Profile, near-topped him at taken liberties plus frying of "ham." The expression referred to actors spreading of theatrics too thick for consumption by a knowing viewership who left lush emoting behind with silent movies. To be a ham was not to be taken seriously again, and there in a nutshell was perception of John Barrymore, drunk or not. That was gross underestimation of course, as Garson Kanin would prove when he used JB in The Great Man Votes, out a same year as The Great Profile. Publicity for Profile employed the cream of caricature artists to depict Jack-japery: Otto Soglow, Rea Irvin, Gardner Rea, Hi Phillips (him for "sparkling lines" to enhance copy) ... they'd each decorate publicity. Movie goers were assured of Barrymore's ad-libbing lines in The Great Profile just as he had nightly for My Dear Children. To complete forfeit of dignity was Fox tie-up with Sid Grauman of the fabled Chinese Theatre, where Jack's profile would be pushed into cement and thereby immortalized forever. Imagine the ride home from that ...