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The best friend was an underrated element of Classic Hollywood’s dream machine. Sure, everyone wanted to vicariously live out their romantic fantasies, to be swept off their feet by a dashing, beautiful movie star. But to have a best friend to go on all your adventures with? Someone to confide in, to look out for you in times of danger, to offer sage advice when you need it most? That was pretty neat too, especially if that friend was an endless source of excellent quips and outrageous fun. During the 1930s, there were few actors who fit the bill as consistently or as fabulously as Una Merkel.
Una Merkel did have a scattering of lead roles early in her career, but she truly found her groove as the second female lead, backing up almost every major leading lady—Carole Lombard, Loretta Young, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, Jean Harlow—of the era.
If you were a heroine in a 1930s Hollywood movie, you had two main options for your best friend. She could be a sweet flibbertigibbet—well-meaning and loyal, but so daft it’d be difficult to tell how she’d make it through each day in one piece. Or she could be a wise-cracking pragmatist, there to keep the reins on the heroine’s wild schemes, and to pull her—lovingly, yet bluntly—back down to earth when she’d lost all sense of reality. Una Merkel played both many times, but her specialty was the latter.
They Call It Sin saw her as the spectacularly-named chorus girl Dixie Dare, who takes Loretta Young’s naïve Marion under her wing, after the latter finds herself alone in NYC in pursuit of a beau she didn’t realize was married. Dixie offers her a place to stay and plenty of much-needed moral support, looking out for her without any ulterior motive (which is more than can be said for the movie’s men…). When budding composer Marion has one of her pieces stolen by Louis Calhern’s scheming Svengali, Dixie goes right along with her to confront him, cheerfully losing her job in the process. That’s just the kind of pal she was!
In True Confession, Merkel is Daisy, best friend of irrepressible fabulist Helen (Carole Lombard), whose inability to tell the truth leads to her wrongful conviction for murder. We meet Daisy at her desk, where she takes a call from Helen, who insists she comes over. She protests that she’s at work and cannot—but when Helen says she’s taken an accidental overdose, her friend rushes around. It’s a lie of course, and the fact that Daisy’s reaction is only mild disgruntlement tells us all we need to know about the history and landscape of their relationship. Merkel plays Daisy as part confidante, part matriarch; both intrigued and frustrated by Helen’s wild adventures, but always there for help when needed.
Una Merkel took more of a back seat in the Anita Loos-scribed Red-Headed Woman, where her Sally is the best friend of Jean Harlow’s gold-digging Lillian. Although skeptical about Lillian’s scheme to wed her married boss (Chester Morris), Sally doesn’t spend long advising against it, instead choosing to sit and watch the fireworks along with the rest of us. While her character is passive, the zesty dialogue exchanges between Merkel and Harlow are consistently the movie’s finest—the two starred in four features together between 1932 and 1937, the warmth of their real-life connection helping to make them among the best films of either’s career.
Though it was certainly her bread and butter, Merkel could slip out of the bestie mold. She made a lot of underrated gems, but she could also be depended upon to lift sub-par fare—or to quote Patricia Keats in a 1934 edition of Silver Screen magazine, “All the critics will tell you that the Merkel gal has certainly done her part towards saving dull and dreary pictures from utter boredom.” From playing Lincoln’s first love Ann Rutledge in the stodgy D.W. Griffith biopic Abraham Lincoln, to being a proto-scream queen in B horror The Bat Whispers, or a saintly maid in the prison drama Day of Reckoning, or Sam Spade’s secretary Effie in the original version of The Maltese Falcon, when it came to giving films that needed it revitalization, few had more natural range or were as reliable.
As befitting a performer with, as Leonard Maltin put it, “her vivacity and infallible comic sense,” Una Merkel also appeared opposite some of the era’s biggest comedy legends, like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Zanzibar, W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick and Harold Lloyd in The Cat’s-Paw. While they hold up today with… varying degrees of success, Merkel’s fleet-footed turns were a highlight of each—Lloyd was such a fan he asked his writers to specifically beef up her part, making her one of the most prominent female leads in any of his films.
The 1930s were Merkel’s heyday (she made 13 movies in 1933 alone!), with her brand of sassy, self-sufficient charm holding particular appeal for Depression-era audiences. Hollywood didn’t want to be her best friend so much during the 1940s and ‘50s, though, when the gushing stream of work dried up considerably—in the ‘50s, she turned her attention more towards the exciting new medium of television.
In 1961 however, two movies reconciled Merkel with the big screen.
The original The Parent Trap saw Merkel play Verbena—maid to Mitch (Brian Keith), the father of the identical twins (both Hayley Mills) separated at birth and determined to get their divorced parents back together. When the twins switch places to aid their scheme, they fool their parents with worrying ease, but they can’t fool the canny Verbena. Though the supporting cast is full of familiar faces from the ‘30s and ‘40s, it’s Merkel’s warmth and knowing wit that provide the most sparkle.
Just a few months later came the release of Tennessee Williams adaptation Summer and Smoke, which would be the only movie of Merkel’s to earn her any awards attention, in the form of a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Which is a shame, because the film is so overripe that it plays like Tennessee Williams in self-parody mode, and Merkel’s character—the mentally ill mother of Geraldine Page’s repressed Southern belle—is pure caricature. (Or, in her more measured interpretation, “The part was very ill-defined, both in the play and in the picture.”) Despite her valiant effort, the role allowed little room for the wry subtleties of her greatest performances, and yet her unusually exaggerated turn was right up the Academy’s street.
Not quite enough however—Merkel didn’t win the Oscar (it was Rita Moreno’s year for West Side Story). She spent the last few years of her career splitting her time between cinema, the stage and TV; her final film role was in the Elvis Presley vehicle Spinout. Una Merkel died 20 years later, at the age of 82, leaving behind a legacy of sparky second leads that, almost a century after her heyday, remain the best pals a gal could wish for.
Next week: we cover the long, difficult and fascinating career of the great Clarence Muse.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.