Rassegna stampa di Tyrone Power

Figlio d'arte - il padre Tyrone Sr., morto nel 1931, fu attore del cinema muto, ma addirittura anche il bisnonno era un attore che dalla natìa Irlanda emigrò nella prima metà dell'Ottocento in America - frequenta inevitabilmente una scuola di recitazione esordendo in teatro con Il mercante di Venezia di Shakespeare. Scritturato dal boss della Fox Zanuck nel 1936, in poco tempo Power divenne un divo di prima grandezza soprattutto in ruoli romantici e avventurosi (a 23 anni è già protagonista de I Lioyds di Londra). Gentile ed educato, era dotato di una tecnica recitativa molto più ricca di quanto gli venisse permesso di esprimere anche nei suoi ruoli più celebri: Zorro, il torero Gallardo in Sangue e arena, il romantico Larry Darrell che cerca se stesso fra Parigi e il Tibet ne Il filo del rasoio tratto dal romanzo di Somerset Maugham. Sebbene di religione cattolica, Power si sposò tre volte, e furono proprio le sue relazioni extraconiugali a compromettere i matrimoni con con Annabella (sposata nel '39 e da cui divorziò nel '48) e con Linda Christian (sposata nel '49 e da cui divorziò nel '56). Dal matrimonio con la Christian nacquero nel 1951 Romina e nel 1953 Taryn. Dall'unione con la terza moglie, Deborah Ann Montgomery Minardos, sposata nel 1958, pochi mesi prima di morire, nacque l'anno successivo Tyrone William IV, diventato anch'egli attore. Power - che durante la seconda guerra mondiale servì come aviatore nel corpo dei marines - morì per infarto nel 1958 mentre si trovava a Madrid per girare il film Salomone e la regina di Saba (fu poi Yul Brinner a sostituirlo nelle riprese). Fu sepolto all'Hollywood Forever Memorial Park Cemetery, il cimitero dei divi sulla collina di Hollywood.

When the 22-year-old Tyrone Power makes his entrance in the last minutes of a fusty melodrama called “Girls’ Dormitory,” it’s as if all the lights on the soundstage had gone on at once. Listen closely, and you can almost hear the collective sigh of the original audience of 1936: this sincere young man, with the perfectly arched eyebrows, penetrating gaze and blinding smile, seems to have stepped off a cloud.
Although Power already had a few uncredited bit parts to his name, it was his brief appearance in “Girls’ Dormitory” that won the attention of the powerful gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and set him on his way to becoming one of the major stars of the studio era. Though the source of his appeal is evident — his only rival for physical beauty on the Fox lot was his frequent costar, Loretta Young — the secret of his endurance is harder to pin down. Hollywood in the 1930s did not lack for strikingly handsome leading men, but while most of his chiseled brethren sooner or later fell by the wayside, Power continued to be a box office force until his premature death in 1958. (Only 44, he succumbed to a heart attack on the set of “Solomon and Sheba.”)

Power was, as the title of a new boxed set from Fox puts it, a “matinee idol,” an object of worship to the vast number of female fans who flocked to the movies during daylight hours. Fox has already released several of his major, across-the-board hits to DVD, including “The Mark of Zorro” (1940) and “The Razor’s Edge” (1946); the “Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection,” with 10 impeccably transferred features, concentrates on his bread-and-butter pictures.
With their slim premises, small casts and restricted settings, movies like “Love Is News,” “Café Metropole” and “Second Honeymoon” (all with Young, and all from 1937) are typical of the moderately budgeted star vehicles that kept theaters open between blockbusters. Power seems more at home in these modest endeavors than he does in prestige pictures like “The Rains Came” (1939), in which he plays an Indian doctor laboring among the starving masses of Ranchipur; gravity was not his strong suit. As one of Hollywood’s few leading men who actually seemed comfortable wearing an ascot, Power was most convincing when he was playing in the upper registers of superficiality. His specialty was the disinherited heir, the inattentive husband, the aristocratic wastrel who discovers commitment in the last reel. The emotion he projected most strongly, in his prewar films at least, was a boundless sense of self-enjoyment, of an impish, uncomplicated ability to have fun, a skill that served him well in the swashbucklers that remain his best-remembered movies, from “The Mark of Zorro” to “Prince of Foxes” (1949).
Directed by the professionally boisterous Tay Garnett (“China Seas,”“Seven Sinners”), “Love Is News” is an overlooked screwball comedy that contains some of the classic elements of the genre: a wise-cracking, hard-boiled reporter (Power); a spoiled heiress (Young); and much crisscrossing of class lines. There are sequences in it that point to three well-known films that followed, all starring Cary Grant: Leo McCarey’s “Awful Truth” (released later in 1937), George Cukor’s “Holiday” (1938) and Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday” (1940).
Yet Power never quite captures Grant’s emotional investment in his characters. He remains a pleasant young man, for whom nothing seems truly at stake, in exactly the situations in which Grant always seemed to be gambling with his future happiness (and even, at times, his sanity).
Power joined the Marines in 1942 and served as a pilot during the war. When he returned to Fox in 1946, he did so as a more mature and ambitious artist, starring as the troubled drifter in Edmund Goulding’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s best seller “The Razor’s Edge.”
He worked again for Goulding in the genuinely disturbing “Nightmare Alley” (1947), trading on his slightly thickened good looks to play a carnival hustler who becomes a nightclub mind reader. (Both films have been previously issued by Fox, in very nice editions.)
But this was not the way his public wanted to see Power, and Fox quickly stuck him back in swashbucklers and comedies. “That Wonderful Urge,” included here, is a rote 1948 remake of “Love Is News,” with Power essentially repeating his earlier performance, this time opposite Gene Tierney. In “The Luck of the Irish,” released the same year, he’s a newspaperman befriended by a leprechaun (Cecil Kellaway); the DVD restores the green tinting originally used in the scenes set in Ireland, which doesn’t help.
Although the “Matinee Idol” box contains one of Power’s lesser-known prestige pictures — Anatole Litvak’s 1942 “This Above All,” a propaganda piece in which Power plays a disillusioned British soldier who regains his patriotism with the help of Joan Fontaine — the discovery of the set is the curious “I’ll Never Forget You,” a 1951 film by the British genre specialist Roy Ward Baker.
Based on “Berkeley Square,” a John Balderston play that Fox had first filmed in 1933 with Leslie Howard in the lead, the picture is a strangely disaffected time travel fantasy, with Power as a very up-to-date nuclear scientist working in London. A bolt of lightning propels him back to 1784, where he has changed places with one of his ancestors, a prosperous American who has come to London to claim a bride. But his prospective in-laws find his conversation too strange and too pointed, his look too distant and too haunted; he knows things he should not.
“I’ll Never Forget You” seems to give shape to the inchoate anguish of Power’s performances in “The Razor’s Edge” and “Nightmare Alley,” with their undertones of alienation and unhappiness. Ultimately, Power’s character finds that he is just as miserable in the 18th century (filmed in Technicolor) as he is in the 20th (filmed in black and white). Displaced in time, he also seems displaced in his own body; his beauty has become a kind of prison. (Fox Home Entertainment, $49.98, not rated)
Da The New York Times, 29 Luglio 2008