Barrymore Does Barrymore: The Performing Self Triumphant in The Great Profile

This essay explores the common judgment that in The Great Profile (1940) Barrymore “lampoons” himself, providing in the process a version of the John Barrymore story that seemed to distress, even enrage reviewers. A close reading of the film suggests the complexity of the film's tone, its exploration of the star playing a star, while sending up the notion of the Barrymore legend.

Prospero Unbound: John Barrymore’s Theatrical Transformations of Cinema Reality

John Barrymore might be described as the supreme embodiment of theatre on film. No matter what roles he plays, the aura of theatre inescapably and (so often) magically defines his relation to the camera, and to his fellow performers. This essay explores Barrymore's theatrical intersections with film reality—zeroing in especially on Larry Renault's lethal entrapment on the hotel room stage in Dinner at Eight.

Dangerously Modern: Shakespeare, Voice, and the “New Psychology” in John Barrymore’s “Unstable” Characters

John Barrymore’s 1922 Hamlet introduced Freudian interpretation as a means of character development into American acting. It also provided Barrymore with a screen star persona that based his acting virtuosity on portraying unstable characters. This chapter explores the way his star persona was articulated through the production and reception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) and then in The Mad Genius (1931) a decade later.

John Barrymore’s Sparkling Topaze

In Topaze (1933) John Barrymore plays Professor Topaze, a principled man who unwittingly becomes a shill for a dishonest consumer product. This essay connects Barrymore’s complex and subtle characterization of Topaze’s existential and career crisis to the public and biographical perception of Barrymore, and also in relation to ideas about melodrama and visibility in film performance. In doing so, the chapter shows how Barrymore’s performance discloses the character Topaze’s discovery of the power of irony.

The Power of Stillness: John Barrymore’s Performance in Svengali

This essay examines the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of Barrymore’s performance as Svengali in the 1931 film of the same name. German Expressionism influences the art direction and the acting flourishes, but Barrymore’s performance controls and anchors the film. Svengali’s hypnotic manipulation of Trilby, and her singing and interaction with others, offers a fruitful area for analysis of performance’s relation to gender politics.

Barrymore and the Scene of Acting: Gesture, Speech, and the Repression of Cinematic Performance

This essay uncovers the nascent modernity of Barrymore’s work in the late silent film The Beloved Rogue. In this film, as this essay shows, Barrymore gives a self-referential screen performance that anticipates the relatively restrained and more colloquial performances in his later sound films, but without the turn to self-parody that would characterize the work near the end of his life.

“I Never Thought I Should Sink So Low as to Become an Actor”: John Barrymore in Twentieth Century

In Twentieth Century (1934), John Barrymore as Oscar Jaffe gives a performance so stupendous in its theatricality and wit that it ranks as one of the most brilliant – and most profound – in the history of cinema. This chapter argues that in its utterly ironic yet utterly honest way, Barrymore’s performance (to phrase Oscar himself) sums up everything this great actor knew about talent, about the theater, and about genius.

“Planes, Motors, Schedules”: Night Flight and the Modernity of John Barrymore

“All you care about is planes, motors, schedules,” cries Helen Hayes in the aviation melodrama Night Flight (1933), condemning John Barrymore’s airline director for the dispassion he shows towards his pilots. Through a mise-en-scène analysis of the director’s office, in conjunction with an analysis of Barrymore’s work, this essay looks at the gendering of an industrial and managerial modernity articulated by Barrymore’s performance and masculine characterization.

A Star is Dead: Barrymore’s Anti-Christian Metaperformance

This chapter explores John Barrymore’s performance in three of George Cukor’s films: A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). This chapter examines the verbal aspects of John Barrymore’s performances, and their importance to his persona, a persona that was especially prominent during Hollywood's transition from silent to sound regimes.

From Rome to Berlin: Barrymore as Romantic Lover

In four films made from 1926 to 1932, Don Juan, Eternal Love, Arsene Lupin, and Grand Hotel, John Barrymore played a series of leading men embroiled in passionate affairs. He showed himself adept at playing the accomplished flirt, the psychologically damaged lothario, the drunken target of seduction, and the sophisticated partner in crime. As this essay shows, these roles display a breadth of characterization and reveal Barrymore’s skill as an actor in both silent and sound films.