Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), "Would You Kindly Direct Me to Hell?": The Infamous Dorthy Parker (1994)

(New York City, Hollywood; 1919-1958)
The Movie-IMDb

Dorothy Parker (beguilingly essayed by Jennifer Jason Lee) has become a personification of both wit and the independent women, an American Virginia Wolfe if you will. This comparison has the added virtue, if you want to call it that, of reflecting a shared internal despair and predilection to suicide attempts. However unlike Wolfe, the are no charges of lesbianism floating around Mrs. Parker. She married young to a well intentioned, but relatively simple minded stock broker from Connecticut (Andrew McCarthy) whose primary attraction for her was his physicality. However that marriage was to be ill fated, they were a mismatched pair who never had that much in common, and after his return from the first World War his addiction to morphine followed by one to alcohol, pretty well de-sealed the deal. She however always kept the last name.

Even during the period of her first marriage, Mrs. Parker fooled around. It is suggested by some that she found her true love in the person of Charles Macarthur (Matthew Broderick) a married writer and solder from Chicago, who may have broken her heart and served as inspiration for some of the poetry on suicide she produced. Pain seemed to be a wonderful inspiration for her, it brought out her defensive wit in even more substantial force then was otherwise typically, and it was never something found to be wanting in supply.

Parker was the most well known female member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, a collection of wits and other talents who often meet for lunch at the restaurant in the famed New York City hotel. I’d long been fascinated by this whose who, perfect characters for a movie, which included such luminaries as Berlin, Kaufman, Levant, Willcot, Ferbner, Marx (Harpo), and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott). Benchley may have been Parkers great unconsummated love, a perfect mate for her intellect and wit, though having seen him in film not the sort of man I’d expect women to find especially attractive physically (at least not as he appeared in middle age), though the shorts he stared in during his Hollywood days were routinely hysterical.

Parker went to Hollywood to, eventually, a success at all sorts or reviews (books, theater) but not so much in plays, or other more involved projects she attempted in New York. So she flew out to California and worked, largely unaccredited on a good number of films (including Hitchcock’s Saboteur), and a smaller number of credited titles with her second husband Alan Campbell (Peter Gallagher). She was never satisfied there, or pretty much anywhere, with pretty much anybody, but she remained a person who held a strong attraction to certain elements of the public, particularly those who held themselves to be more educated or erudite. Dorothy park died of an heart attack in her 70’s after more then half a decade of serious illness, and the very fact that this icon of the 20’s intelligencea had still been alive startled many of her obituary readers. She was a fascinating but sad women whose life provides much to feed our voyeuristic impulses in film, yet still human enough to prompt and deserve genuine reflection, much more then can be said for nearly any of today’s empty witless celebrities.