Ernst Lubitsch
5 titles, 72nd in points with 11,597
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1892, Lubitsch came to Hollywood in 1922 (contracted as director by Mary Pickford), then made his mark with a too short career of classic comedies, dying there in 1947 at age 55 after his sixth heart attack. What’s called The Lubitsch Touch is a sophisticated comedy of manners, a term applied after a few successful
Showing posts with label Ernst Lubitsch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernst Lubitsch. Show all posts
A Rake's Progress: Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait
Monday, September 28, 2009
"A poignant sadness infiltrates the director's gayest moments," writes Andrew Sarris of Ernst Lubitsch in The American Cinema, "and it is this counterpoint between sadness and gaiety that represents the Lubitsch touch." Of all the Lubitsch movies I've seen, I don't believe any illustrates that statement better than Heaven Can Wait (1943). Seemingly a light-hearted bauble of a movie, the film has running beneath its whimsical surface an unmistakable undercurrent of melancholy. This is not the mordant black comedy of a disillusioned idealist turned cynic, but the detached, bemused comedy of a man who, as Sarris puts it, recognizes "that we all eventually lose the game of life but that we should still play the game according to the rules."
As the movie opens, a wizened gentlemen of 70 years presents himself to a tall, well-groomed but slightly sinister-looking man sitting at a desk in a large, sparsely furnished, stylized Technicolor representation of an office, whom he addresses as "Your excellency." The gentleman is the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), and the man at the desk is the devil (Laird Cregar). Henry is resignedly presenting himself for admittance to hell. But the devil demands that Henry first explain why he thinks he belongs there, and Henry starts to relate in flashback his life of misdeeds. "Perhaps the best way to tell you the story of my life is to tell you about the women in my life," he begins. With this line, Lubitsch, the master of Continental sexual innuendo, immediately lures us in: The movie is going to be all about Henry's sexual peccadillos, surely.
Based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Laszlo Bus-Fekete called Birthdays, Heaven Can Wait has been relocated to the upper-class New York City of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Indeed, the movie is organized around the events that take place on several of Henry's notable birthdays. In relating these birthdays to the viewer, Henry tells us about significant events in his life, about the progress of his "sentimental education" in relation to women, and especially about himself. By the end of the movie Henry has revealed more about his true nature than he recognizes, and we have come to know Henry better than he knows himself.
On his fifteenth birthday Henry is plied with champagne and seduced by the French maid, recently hired by his mother to keep up with the changing social fashions of the time. At his 26th birthday party, Henry elopes with his strait-laced cousin's plucky fiancée, Martha (Gene Tierney), a rich young woman from Kansas desperate to escape her hickish parents and live in the big city. Ten years later, on his 36th birthday and 10th wedding anniversary, he must travel to Kansas with his impish grandfather (Charles Coburn) and try to persuade Martha, who has left him because of her suspicions of his philandering, to come home with him. This long sequence is one of the most charming and humorous in the movie, with Ameche, Tierney, Coburn, and also Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main as Martha's parents all at their comic peak.
The mood of the movie begins to change perceptibly at the celebration of Henry and Martha's 25th anniversary. Henry, who has noticed that Martha has been spending afternoons away from home, suspects her of having an affair. When he hints at his suspicions to her, she responds with humor: "Why, Henry, I do believe you're jealous." She laughs off his suspicions by explaining that she hasn't been feeling well and has been seeing a doctor. Relieved, Henry waltzes with her in the hallway while the other guests are celebrating in the parlor. This is the last we see of Martha; within a few months she is dead. At 60, Henry is still squiring pretty girls around town and buying them expensive presents, but he seems a bit lost, and is reduced to asking his rather condescending son for money. By his 70th birthday, Henry is a bed-ridden invalid, but still fascinated by women, and smitten by his attractive young nurse.
The tone of the film is light throughout, but even its lightest moments are tinged with a certain sadness. Always we are aware of the unstoppable passage of time; the very choice of Henry's birthdays as a unifying and transitional device underscores this idea. In the events of his life there is a pattern of repetition that frequently reminds us of the circularity of time whirling around like the hands of a clock. When Martha decides to forgive Henry and return home with him from Kansas, sneaking away from her parents' farmhouse in the middle of the night with Henry and Grandfather Van Cleve, she calls it "a second elopement." On his 26th birthday Henry is scolded by his mother for staying out all night. Nearly 35 years later, Henry is scolded by his grown son for the same reason. We first see Henry as a baby in his crib, being cared for by his mother and grandmother. As an old man at the end of the movie, he is again in his bed, being cared for by a nurse. It almost makes you think of Jaques' seven ages of man speech in As You Like It.
As the parade of family characters passes by, it is interesting to note how they bear out the old cliché that personalities seem to skip generations. This certainly appears to be true of the male line of the Van Cleve family. Henry has more in common with his rascal grandfather than he does with his own staid and humorless father. Similarly, Henry's son more closely resembles his grandfather (Henry's father) than he does the irresponsible and pleasure-loving Henry. Henry is never shown holding down any kind of job. Yet his son, by the time he is in his early 30s, is a serious-minded executive running the family business (whatever it is—such practical details have no place in Henry's life story as he relates it) and, in a clear case of role reversal, doling out an allowance to his own father.
Death is directly referred to only at the beginning when Henry presents himself to the devil for judgment and again briefly after Martha dies. Yet the entire movie actually takes place after Henry is dead, and he is literally a dead man telling us the story of his life. Even though not directly mentioned, several other deaths occur offscreen in the intervals between Henry's birthdays—first his grandmother, then his father, then between his 36th and 51st birthdays both his mother and his grandfather. The family butler, Flogdell, appears at several points in the movie. Then suddenly after Henry's 60th birthday the butler again appears, and he is a different, younger man.
Much of the movie takes place in the enclosed world of the Van Cleves' mansion, a place so insular that events like a world war and the Great Depression pass by without a mention and seem to leave the cushioned lives of its inhabitants untouched. As the years pass, the interior decor changes too, from the cluttered Victorian style filled with William Morris-type patterns and much elaborate ornamentation to a simpler style. Several key scenes take place in the library. At Henry's 26th birthday, he sneaks into the library to be with Martha, and it is here that he persuades her to elope with him. Their 25th anniversary finds them again alone in the library while their guests wait in the parlor. It is here that the scene where Henry becomes jealous and Martha first reveals her illness occurs. Late in the movie, Henry and his grown son are alone in the library, and Henry is trying to persuade his son to hire a young woman to come to the house and read to him. Henry wanders around the library as he talks, walks up to a bookcase, and idly takes a book from the shelf. It is a book called How to Please Your Husband, the same book that Henry, pursuing Martha around town the first time he laid eyes on her, saw her buy in Brentano's Book Store nearly 35 years earlier.
The idea of relatively lightweight actors like Don Ameche and the pre-Laura Gene Tierney playing the leads in a Lubitsch film might seem anomalous. After all, here is a director who worked with some of the greatest performers of the time, people like Gary Cooper, Fredric March, James Stewart, Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert. (Lubitsch was apparently very popular with his actors. He was just about the only person in Hollywood able to get along with the notoriously brittle Miriam Hopkins. He was reportedly Colbert's favorite director, and she worked with some of the very best.) Yet both Tierney and Ameche fill their roles surprisingly well. Tierney looks simply stunning, especially in the pale blue and lavender outfits that accentuate her blue eyes. She projects both sweetness and animation in a very relaxed performance (although reportedly Lubitsch sometimes had to restrain her from overacting). Even in middle age her Martha seems both girlish and just a bit saucy.
Even more surprising is Don Ameche, who was not Lubitsch's first choice to play Henry Van Cleve but was forced on the director by 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Lubitsch eventually changed his mind about Ameche's suitability for the part, however, and Ameche gives the performance of his career in the most demanding role he ever played. Henry Van Cleve is the center of the movie. It is, after all, the story of his life. He not only narrates the film but appears in nearly every scene. He must convincingly age from 26 to 70, and Ameche does this with amazing verisimilitude. With the assistance of some very good makeup, he conveys the passing of the years with skillful modulations of his voice—its pitch, strength, and phrasing—as well as his facial expressions and posture.
But his performance consists of more than just externals. Henry is a man who really has no objective view of his own life and actions (that is left up to Lubitsch and the camera to provide), a man whose self-image is at odds with his true nature. Henry truly believes himself to be corrupt, a dissolute libertine who deserves to spend eternity in hell. The truth is that he is at heart not the dissipated roué he believes himself to be, but rather an innocent: the soul he offers for judgment is a young and benign one. In many ways he is at the age of 70 still harmless and child-like. His fascination with women has more to do with glorifying and idealizing them than with seducing them. It is sensual without really being sexual, as Martha realizes when she playfully calls him "my obstinate little boy" and "my little Casanova." And Ameche subtly conveys all this in a very nuanced performance.
In the end, Heaven Can Wait is at its heart a tender love story, one played out to the nostalgic melody of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," which we hear over the opening credits and which later becomes Henry and Martha's love theme. Henry's eye and attention may wander from time to time, but it is Martha to whom he is devoted. When the morning after meeting Martha he earnestly tells his mother that Martha is the woman of his life, he is not exaggerating. After the death of Martha, Ameche's demeanor suggests that this is a man whose life is now shaded with an unshakable sense of sadness. Even though Henry still has the capacity to enjoy life and to go through the motions of adoring the female sex, he has really lost the center of his life.
But this movie is a fantasy, right? As a filmmaker, Lubitsch was by temperament incapable of dwelling on dreariness, and the mythic Lubitsch touch is always a light one, finding humor even in a serious situation. At the end of the film when the devil rejects Henry and tells him to go to heaven, he holds out to Henry the possibility of being reunited with Martha in some kind of afterlife. In Lubitsch's bittersweet world, pleasure and sadness go together like positive and negative magnetic charges, and who can really say which is the dominant mode?
As the movie opens, a wizened gentlemen of 70 years presents himself to a tall, well-groomed but slightly sinister-looking man sitting at a desk in a large, sparsely furnished, stylized Technicolor representation of an office, whom he addresses as "Your excellency." The gentleman is the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), and the man at the desk is the devil (Laird Cregar). Henry is resignedly presenting himself for admittance to hell. But the devil demands that Henry first explain why he thinks he belongs there, and Henry starts to relate in flashback his life of misdeeds. "Perhaps the best way to tell you the story of my life is to tell you about the women in my life," he begins. With this line, Lubitsch, the master of Continental sexual innuendo, immediately lures us in: The movie is going to be all about Henry's sexual peccadillos, surely.
Based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Laszlo Bus-Fekete called Birthdays, Heaven Can Wait has been relocated to the upper-class New York City of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Indeed, the movie is organized around the events that take place on several of Henry's notable birthdays. In relating these birthdays to the viewer, Henry tells us about significant events in his life, about the progress of his "sentimental education" in relation to women, and especially about himself. By the end of the movie Henry has revealed more about his true nature than he recognizes, and we have come to know Henry better than he knows himself.
On his fifteenth birthday Henry is plied with champagne and seduced by the French maid, recently hired by his mother to keep up with the changing social fashions of the time. At his 26th birthday party, Henry elopes with his strait-laced cousin's plucky fiancée, Martha (Gene Tierney), a rich young woman from Kansas desperate to escape her hickish parents and live in the big city. Ten years later, on his 36th birthday and 10th wedding anniversary, he must travel to Kansas with his impish grandfather (Charles Coburn) and try to persuade Martha, who has left him because of her suspicions of his philandering, to come home with him. This long sequence is one of the most charming and humorous in the movie, with Ameche, Tierney, Coburn, and also Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main as Martha's parents all at their comic peak.
The mood of the movie begins to change perceptibly at the celebration of Henry and Martha's 25th anniversary. Henry, who has noticed that Martha has been spending afternoons away from home, suspects her of having an affair. When he hints at his suspicions to her, she responds with humor: "Why, Henry, I do believe you're jealous." She laughs off his suspicions by explaining that she hasn't been feeling well and has been seeing a doctor. Relieved, Henry waltzes with her in the hallway while the other guests are celebrating in the parlor. This is the last we see of Martha; within a few months she is dead. At 60, Henry is still squiring pretty girls around town and buying them expensive presents, but he seems a bit lost, and is reduced to asking his rather condescending son for money. By his 70th birthday, Henry is a bed-ridden invalid, but still fascinated by women, and smitten by his attractive young nurse.
The tone of the film is light throughout, but even its lightest moments are tinged with a certain sadness. Always we are aware of the unstoppable passage of time; the very choice of Henry's birthdays as a unifying and transitional device underscores this idea. In the events of his life there is a pattern of repetition that frequently reminds us of the circularity of time whirling around like the hands of a clock. When Martha decides to forgive Henry and return home with him from Kansas, sneaking away from her parents' farmhouse in the middle of the night with Henry and Grandfather Van Cleve, she calls it "a second elopement." On his 26th birthday Henry is scolded by his mother for staying out all night. Nearly 35 years later, Henry is scolded by his grown son for the same reason. We first see Henry as a baby in his crib, being cared for by his mother and grandmother. As an old man at the end of the movie, he is again in his bed, being cared for by a nurse. It almost makes you think of Jaques' seven ages of man speech in As You Like It.
As the parade of family characters passes by, it is interesting to note how they bear out the old cliché that personalities seem to skip generations. This certainly appears to be true of the male line of the Van Cleve family. Henry has more in common with his rascal grandfather than he does with his own staid and humorless father. Similarly, Henry's son more closely resembles his grandfather (Henry's father) than he does the irresponsible and pleasure-loving Henry. Henry is never shown holding down any kind of job. Yet his son, by the time he is in his early 30s, is a serious-minded executive running the family business (whatever it is—such practical details have no place in Henry's life story as he relates it) and, in a clear case of role reversal, doling out an allowance to his own father.
Death is directly referred to only at the beginning when Henry presents himself to the devil for judgment and again briefly after Martha dies. Yet the entire movie actually takes place after Henry is dead, and he is literally a dead man telling us the story of his life. Even though not directly mentioned, several other deaths occur offscreen in the intervals between Henry's birthdays—first his grandmother, then his father, then between his 36th and 51st birthdays both his mother and his grandfather. The family butler, Flogdell, appears at several points in the movie. Then suddenly after Henry's 60th birthday the butler again appears, and he is a different, younger man.
Much of the movie takes place in the enclosed world of the Van Cleves' mansion, a place so insular that events like a world war and the Great Depression pass by without a mention and seem to leave the cushioned lives of its inhabitants untouched. As the years pass, the interior decor changes too, from the cluttered Victorian style filled with William Morris-type patterns and much elaborate ornamentation to a simpler style. Several key scenes take place in the library. At Henry's 26th birthday, he sneaks into the library to be with Martha, and it is here that he persuades her to elope with him. Their 25th anniversary finds them again alone in the library while their guests wait in the parlor. It is here that the scene where Henry becomes jealous and Martha first reveals her illness occurs. Late in the movie, Henry and his grown son are alone in the library, and Henry is trying to persuade his son to hire a young woman to come to the house and read to him. Henry wanders around the library as he talks, walks up to a bookcase, and idly takes a book from the shelf. It is a book called How to Please Your Husband, the same book that Henry, pursuing Martha around town the first time he laid eyes on her, saw her buy in Brentano's Book Store nearly 35 years earlier.
The idea of relatively lightweight actors like Don Ameche and the pre-Laura Gene Tierney playing the leads in a Lubitsch film might seem anomalous. After all, here is a director who worked with some of the greatest performers of the time, people like Gary Cooper, Fredric March, James Stewart, Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert. (Lubitsch was apparently very popular with his actors. He was just about the only person in Hollywood able to get along with the notoriously brittle Miriam Hopkins. He was reportedly Colbert's favorite director, and she worked with some of the very best.) Yet both Tierney and Ameche fill their roles surprisingly well. Tierney looks simply stunning, especially in the pale blue and lavender outfits that accentuate her blue eyes. She projects both sweetness and animation in a very relaxed performance (although reportedly Lubitsch sometimes had to restrain her from overacting). Even in middle age her Martha seems both girlish and just a bit saucy.
Even more surprising is Don Ameche, who was not Lubitsch's first choice to play Henry Van Cleve but was forced on the director by 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Lubitsch eventually changed his mind about Ameche's suitability for the part, however, and Ameche gives the performance of his career in the most demanding role he ever played. Henry Van Cleve is the center of the movie. It is, after all, the story of his life. He not only narrates the film but appears in nearly every scene. He must convincingly age from 26 to 70, and Ameche does this with amazing verisimilitude. With the assistance of some very good makeup, he conveys the passing of the years with skillful modulations of his voice—its pitch, strength, and phrasing—as well as his facial expressions and posture.
But his performance consists of more than just externals. Henry is a man who really has no objective view of his own life and actions (that is left up to Lubitsch and the camera to provide), a man whose self-image is at odds with his true nature. Henry truly believes himself to be corrupt, a dissolute libertine who deserves to spend eternity in hell. The truth is that he is at heart not the dissipated roué he believes himself to be, but rather an innocent: the soul he offers for judgment is a young and benign one. In many ways he is at the age of 70 still harmless and child-like. His fascination with women has more to do with glorifying and idealizing them than with seducing them. It is sensual without really being sexual, as Martha realizes when she playfully calls him "my obstinate little boy" and "my little Casanova." And Ameche subtly conveys all this in a very nuanced performance.In the end, Heaven Can Wait is at its heart a tender love story, one played out to the nostalgic melody of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," which we hear over the opening credits and which later becomes Henry and Martha's love theme. Henry's eye and attention may wander from time to time, but it is Martha to whom he is devoted. When the morning after meeting Martha he earnestly tells his mother that Martha is the woman of his life, he is not exaggerating. After the death of Martha, Ameche's demeanor suggests that this is a man whose life is now shaded with an unshakable sense of sadness. Even though Henry still has the capacity to enjoy life and to go through the motions of adoring the female sex, he has really lost the center of his life.
But this movie is a fantasy, right? As a filmmaker, Lubitsch was by temperament incapable of dwelling on dreariness, and the mythic Lubitsch touch is always a light one, finding humor even in a serious situation. At the end of the film when the devil rejects Henry and tells him to go to heaven, he holds out to Henry the possibility of being reunited with Martha in some kind of afterlife. In Lubitsch's bittersweet world, pleasure and sadness go together like positive and negative magnetic charges, and who can really say which is the dominant mode?
Brief Reviews
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1941) **½
As regular visitors to The Movie Projector know, I have a special fondness for the films of Ernst Lubitsch. This one, though, is an inconsistent work that doesn't measure up to his usual standard. The film is about a chic Park Avenue couple, Jill and Larry Baker (Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas), who have been married six years and whose relationship has begun to grow stale and predictable. Each is just a little bored with the other. When Jill begins getting hiccups at moments of stress or agitation, she consults a psychiatrist. At his office, she meets a neurotic pianist, Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a self-proclaimed "individualist" who always speaks his mind and dislikes humanity. But he likes Jill, and the two soon develop a curious friendship that becomes a desultory affair that causes the Bakers to separate and plan divorce.
The movie is not without its delights. Lubitsch handles the comedy with his characteristic light and whimsical touch, and it is at a few points laugh-out-loud funny. A couple of long sequences are equal to Lubitsch's best. One is the first meeting of Jill and Sebastian followed by their visit to a modern art gallery. The other is a very funny dinner party at which the Bakers entertain a group of Hungarians who are potential clients of Larry's insurance firm and which Alexander, invited by Jill without her husband's knowledge, proceeds to disrupt in a delightfully comic way. The best thing about the movie is Burgess Meredith as the solemn and self-centered pianist. He makes an essentially humorless character quite funny.
But the movie also has some obvious flaws. Midway through, I realized that the basic plot isn't that different from The Awful Truth, a movie I have praised as the definitive screwball comedy: a couple breaks up over trivial differences, eventually they realize that they were happier together, and in the end they reunite. So why doesn't That Uncertain Feeling work better? For one thing, the pacing of the script is uneven: entertaining stretches alternate with sections of relative tedium. Then some awkwardly jumpy edits indicate an inattention to detail not typical of Lubitsch; perhaps the filming was rushed or he grew tired of the project. But the biggest problem is the two leads. Douglas is a subdued leading romantic man, but he can be very effective, as he showed in Lubitsch's Ninotchka. But to come across, he really needs a dynamic leading woman like Irene Dunne or Greta Garbo to play off of, and the lovely but bland Oberon is almost wholly lacking in dynamism. Douglas actually gets better as the movie goes along, but Oberon remains rather enervated and dull throughout.
The lesson here, I suppose, is that with even the great directors, sometimes the elements simply fail to gel. That Uncertain Feeling, a decent enough movie, is not quite a disaster. It just isn't of the quality we expect of the great Lubitsch.
THE MALE ANIMAL (1942) ***½
Having seen the banal musical remake of The Male Animal—She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo—many years ago, I was in no hurry to watch this. It's too bad I waited so long, because the original is so unlike the remake and so much better. I had always wondered what would attract Henry Fonda, who made so few comedies and preferred roles of thematic heft, to such a project, and the movie provided a clear answer.
Fonda plays Prof. Tommy Turner, a mild-mannered academic who teaches English at Midwestern University. On the eve of the big homecoming football game, he finds himself unwillingly enmeshed in a controversy over academic free speech. He is threatened with dismissal by Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette), the despotic, obsessively Red-hunting head of the board of trustees, over his plan to read to his class the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist arrested, framed, convicted as a scapegoat, and executed in Massachusetts in 1927. (Vanzetti and the man convicted with him, Nicola Sacco, were pardoned in 1977 by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.) Keller would even like to censor student writing by suppressing the student literary magazine that announced the upcoming lecture in a story, but it has already gone to press. At the same time, Turner must defend his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), from the advances of her ex-boy friend, the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who has returned for the big game. Ellen wants Tommy to give in and not read the letter, using Joe's revived romantic interest in her and Tommy's insecurity at being so unathletic to attempt to coerce him into forgoing his principles to save their comfortable way of life.
Based on a play by James Thurber and director Elliott Nugent, the movie has intelligent, witty dialogue and a deftly constructed plot. It even contains a memorable drunk sequence with Tommy and his star pupil that ends in a shambolic fistfight between Tommy and Joe. The cast is uniformly good (although deHavilland sometimes seems a bit too intelligent for her role, and comedy wasn't really her forte) and even includes Hattie McDaniel as the wisecracking housekeeper, Cleota.
Even among such great performers Fonda, predictably, is remarkable. He is especially outstanding in the climactic scene when Prof. Turner defies Ellen and the board and reads the brief but eloquent letter to a packed classroom that includes Keller, Ellen, Joe, students, reporters, and the just plain curious. Fonda reads the letter with quiet, underplayed conviction (much the same way he reads the final letter of the lynched Dana Andrews in The Ox-Bow Incident, released the following year) and wins over even his antagonists. The happy outcome seems a bit pat, but who wouldn't sympathize with Fonda's risking his marriage and career to defend academic freedom? If only such disputes always turned out so felicitously in real life.
SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955) ***
This movie would make a super second feature on a double bill with Pickup on South Street (1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It has the same basic plot setup of good guys battling Communist spies after government secrets during the Cold War of the 1950s. The movie opens with a cheesy close-up of Kotty (Terry Moore) sunning on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit. Up creeps Slob (Lee Marvin), who pounces on her and attempts to molest her before she can fend off his advances. Both Kotty and Slob work at the shack of the title, a Southern California beachfront greasy spoon run by Keenan Wynn that appears to be located near Malibu before it became developed—she as the waitress, he as the cook. The beach and the cafe are the only two locations in this clearly very low-budget movie.
Kotty is being romanced by Prof. Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a research scientist working at a top-secret government research facility just up the coast. The professor is encouraging the pretty, lively, but slightly dim Kotty to improve herself by studying for the civil service exam to be a stenographer. Moore doesn't look much like Marilyn Monroe, but she sure sounds exactly like her, and every male in the cast treats her as though she is just as desirable as MM. Unfortunately, one evening Kotty inadvertently overhears the professor passing secrets to an enemy agent, and realizing he is a Communist spy, breaks off with him. Without a protector, she is now at the mercy of the lecherous Slob.
The plot and characters are dealt with in an entirely functional way that lacks the artistic vision or cinematic personality of a Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich. The two big revelations at the end—the truth about the professor and the identity of the mastermind behind the operation, the mysterious Mr. Gregory—are wholly predictable, as is the means of Kotty being saved from rape and murder by Slob. But the dialogue—especially the repartee between Kotty and her male pursuers, which at times borders on the camp—is uniformly snappy. And the plot is presented with economy and great forward momentum.
But the movie really belongs to Lee Marvin as Slob. He is by turns sadistic, pathetic, comical, dumb, shrewd—simultaneously a feckless joker and a menacing villain. His chameleonic performance only highlights the two-dimensional characters who otherwise populate the film. The scene of him and Keenan Wynn working out with barbells and weights in the diner is the comic highlight of the movie. Of the performances nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar that year, his is equaled only by Jack Lemmon's winning turn in Mister Roberts, and Marvin wasn't even nominated. Shack Out on 101 is by any measure strictly a B-movie, but it does present an amusing time capsule of the insecurities of the era, and it is consistently entertaining. It may not be a masterpiece, but a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) ****
In the 1930s, Leo McCarey made three comic masterpieces, starting with the best movie the Marx Brothers ever made, Duck Soup (1933), and ending with what I have called the definitive screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937). In 1935 he made this film, which in style falls somewhere between the manic anarchy of Duck Soup and the restrained sophistication of The Awful Truth. The title character, Ruggles (Charles Laughton), is the British manservant to the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). Red Gap is the name of the frontier town in Washington state where Ruggles finds himself after the Earl loses him in a poker game in Paris to Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles), a nouveau riche hick making the grand tour around the turn of the 20th century.
Floud doesn't know what to make of the British class system, finding it incomprehensible that people would voluntarily submit to such institutionalized indignity. He is determined to treat Ruggles as a social equal and to loosen his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, but his wife Effie (a hilarious Mary Boland), a dedicated social climber, has other plans for Ruggles. She wants to flaunt him to the locals as proof of her newfound social status and to use his knowledge to transform her gauche husband into her image of an English-style upper-class gentleman. When the henpecked but crafty Egbert introduces Ruggles as Colonel Ruggles to his hometown cronies, he sets up a dual identity for Ruggles that results in many comic ramifications.
The movie's comic situations are of course, given McCarey's experience working with many of the comedy greats of American movies of the early 1930s, inventively devised and highly entertaining. To me the movie is most reminiscent of McCarey's work with early Laurel and Hardy, with its carefully paced set-ups building slowly to controlled comic explosions, and its opposition of rambunctious characters and repressed ones, But the comedy here is given extra resonance by the social and character details that underpin it: the absurd social pretensions of Effie and her relatives, the tension between the belief in social equality of Egbert and the adherence of Ruggles to the tradition of a prescribed social hierarchy, and the dawning realization by Ruggles that the American way of life and the misunderstandings about him deliberately fostered by Egbert present him with the opportunity to reinvent himself.
Even with all these great character actors (including fluttery, nasal-voiced Zasu Pitts as a potential love interest for Ruggles), it is Charles Laughton who elevates this movie beyond expectations. It might seem inconceivable that the notoriously hammy Laughton could so effectively play a buttoned-up comical character. But he is a marvel as he proceeds through the various phases of the psychological transformation of Ruggles from a Jeeves-like automaton to a new man, one freed from the stifling belief in a life predetermined by social class and presented instead with the ability to create his own identity. Ruggles is like a prisoner inching his way to freedom. When that freedom comes, it is a liberation that, although achieved through comic means, is deeply moving.
Ruggles of Red Gap is a sort of social fairy tale powered by American optimism, the belief in the entitlement of every person to self-definition and an open-ended future. In an age when practically anyone could use a few good laughs and a reminder that people once genuinely believed in such ideals, watching Ruggles is like getting a glimpse into an Edenic past, a less complicated and more innocent time.
As regular visitors to The Movie Projector know, I have a special fondness for the films of Ernst Lubitsch. This one, though, is an inconsistent work that doesn't measure up to his usual standard. The film is about a chic Park Avenue couple, Jill and Larry Baker (Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas), who have been married six years and whose relationship has begun to grow stale and predictable. Each is just a little bored with the other. When Jill begins getting hiccups at moments of stress or agitation, she consults a psychiatrist. At his office, she meets a neurotic pianist, Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a self-proclaimed "individualist" who always speaks his mind and dislikes humanity. But he likes Jill, and the two soon develop a curious friendship that becomes a desultory affair that causes the Bakers to separate and plan divorce.
The movie is not without its delights. Lubitsch handles the comedy with his characteristic light and whimsical touch, and it is at a few points laugh-out-loud funny. A couple of long sequences are equal to Lubitsch's best. One is the first meeting of Jill and Sebastian followed by their visit to a modern art gallery. The other is a very funny dinner party at which the Bakers entertain a group of Hungarians who are potential clients of Larry's insurance firm and which Alexander, invited by Jill without her husband's knowledge, proceeds to disrupt in a delightfully comic way. The best thing about the movie is Burgess Meredith as the solemn and self-centered pianist. He makes an essentially humorless character quite funny.
But the movie also has some obvious flaws. Midway through, I realized that the basic plot isn't that different from The Awful Truth, a movie I have praised as the definitive screwball comedy: a couple breaks up over trivial differences, eventually they realize that they were happier together, and in the end they reunite. So why doesn't That Uncertain Feeling work better? For one thing, the pacing of the script is uneven: entertaining stretches alternate with sections of relative tedium. Then some awkwardly jumpy edits indicate an inattention to detail not typical of Lubitsch; perhaps the filming was rushed or he grew tired of the project. But the biggest problem is the two leads. Douglas is a subdued leading romantic man, but he can be very effective, as he showed in Lubitsch's Ninotchka. But to come across, he really needs a dynamic leading woman like Irene Dunne or Greta Garbo to play off of, and the lovely but bland Oberon is almost wholly lacking in dynamism. Douglas actually gets better as the movie goes along, but Oberon remains rather enervated and dull throughout.
The lesson here, I suppose, is that with even the great directors, sometimes the elements simply fail to gel. That Uncertain Feeling, a decent enough movie, is not quite a disaster. It just isn't of the quality we expect of the great Lubitsch.
THE MALE ANIMAL (1942) ***½
Having seen the banal musical remake of The Male Animal—She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo—many years ago, I was in no hurry to watch this. It's too bad I waited so long, because the original is so unlike the remake and so much better. I had always wondered what would attract Henry Fonda, who made so few comedies and preferred roles of thematic heft, to such a project, and the movie provided a clear answer.
Fonda plays Prof. Tommy Turner, a mild-mannered academic who teaches English at Midwestern University. On the eve of the big homecoming football game, he finds himself unwillingly enmeshed in a controversy over academic free speech. He is threatened with dismissal by Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette), the despotic, obsessively Red-hunting head of the board of trustees, over his plan to read to his class the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist arrested, framed, convicted as a scapegoat, and executed in Massachusetts in 1927. (Vanzetti and the man convicted with him, Nicola Sacco, were pardoned in 1977 by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.) Keller would even like to censor student writing by suppressing the student literary magazine that announced the upcoming lecture in a story, but it has already gone to press. At the same time, Turner must defend his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), from the advances of her ex-boy friend, the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who has returned for the big game. Ellen wants Tommy to give in and not read the letter, using Joe's revived romantic interest in her and Tommy's insecurity at being so unathletic to attempt to coerce him into forgoing his principles to save their comfortable way of life.
Based on a play by James Thurber and director Elliott Nugent, the movie has intelligent, witty dialogue and a deftly constructed plot. It even contains a memorable drunk sequence with Tommy and his star pupil that ends in a shambolic fistfight between Tommy and Joe. The cast is uniformly good (although deHavilland sometimes seems a bit too intelligent for her role, and comedy wasn't really her forte) and even includes Hattie McDaniel as the wisecracking housekeeper, Cleota.
Even among such great performers Fonda, predictably, is remarkable. He is especially outstanding in the climactic scene when Prof. Turner defies Ellen and the board and reads the brief but eloquent letter to a packed classroom that includes Keller, Ellen, Joe, students, reporters, and the just plain curious. Fonda reads the letter with quiet, underplayed conviction (much the same way he reads the final letter of the lynched Dana Andrews in The Ox-Bow Incident, released the following year) and wins over even his antagonists. The happy outcome seems a bit pat, but who wouldn't sympathize with Fonda's risking his marriage and career to defend academic freedom? If only such disputes always turned out so felicitously in real life.
SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955) ***
This movie would make a super second feature on a double bill with Pickup on South Street (1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It has the same basic plot setup of good guys battling Communist spies after government secrets during the Cold War of the 1950s. The movie opens with a cheesy close-up of Kotty (Terry Moore) sunning on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit. Up creeps Slob (Lee Marvin), who pounces on her and attempts to molest her before she can fend off his advances. Both Kotty and Slob work at the shack of the title, a Southern California beachfront greasy spoon run by Keenan Wynn that appears to be located near Malibu before it became developed—she as the waitress, he as the cook. The beach and the cafe are the only two locations in this clearly very low-budget movie.
Kotty is being romanced by Prof. Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a research scientist working at a top-secret government research facility just up the coast. The professor is encouraging the pretty, lively, but slightly dim Kotty to improve herself by studying for the civil service exam to be a stenographer. Moore doesn't look much like Marilyn Monroe, but she sure sounds exactly like her, and every male in the cast treats her as though she is just as desirable as MM. Unfortunately, one evening Kotty inadvertently overhears the professor passing secrets to an enemy agent, and realizing he is a Communist spy, breaks off with him. Without a protector, she is now at the mercy of the lecherous Slob.
The plot and characters are dealt with in an entirely functional way that lacks the artistic vision or cinematic personality of a Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich. The two big revelations at the end—the truth about the professor and the identity of the mastermind behind the operation, the mysterious Mr. Gregory—are wholly predictable, as is the means of Kotty being saved from rape and murder by Slob. But the dialogue—especially the repartee between Kotty and her male pursuers, which at times borders on the camp—is uniformly snappy. And the plot is presented with economy and great forward momentum.
But the movie really belongs to Lee Marvin as Slob. He is by turns sadistic, pathetic, comical, dumb, shrewd—simultaneously a feckless joker and a menacing villain. His chameleonic performance only highlights the two-dimensional characters who otherwise populate the film. The scene of him and Keenan Wynn working out with barbells and weights in the diner is the comic highlight of the movie. Of the performances nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar that year, his is equaled only by Jack Lemmon's winning turn in Mister Roberts, and Marvin wasn't even nominated. Shack Out on 101 is by any measure strictly a B-movie, but it does present an amusing time capsule of the insecurities of the era, and it is consistently entertaining. It may not be a masterpiece, but a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) ****
In the 1930s, Leo McCarey made three comic masterpieces, starting with the best movie the Marx Brothers ever made, Duck Soup (1933), and ending with what I have called the definitive screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937). In 1935 he made this film, which in style falls somewhere between the manic anarchy of Duck Soup and the restrained sophistication of The Awful Truth. The title character, Ruggles (Charles Laughton), is the British manservant to the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). Red Gap is the name of the frontier town in Washington state where Ruggles finds himself after the Earl loses him in a poker game in Paris to Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles), a nouveau riche hick making the grand tour around the turn of the 20th century.
Floud doesn't know what to make of the British class system, finding it incomprehensible that people would voluntarily submit to such institutionalized indignity. He is determined to treat Ruggles as a social equal and to loosen his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, but his wife Effie (a hilarious Mary Boland), a dedicated social climber, has other plans for Ruggles. She wants to flaunt him to the locals as proof of her newfound social status and to use his knowledge to transform her gauche husband into her image of an English-style upper-class gentleman. When the henpecked but crafty Egbert introduces Ruggles as Colonel Ruggles to his hometown cronies, he sets up a dual identity for Ruggles that results in many comic ramifications.
The movie's comic situations are of course, given McCarey's experience working with many of the comedy greats of American movies of the early 1930s, inventively devised and highly entertaining. To me the movie is most reminiscent of McCarey's work with early Laurel and Hardy, with its carefully paced set-ups building slowly to controlled comic explosions, and its opposition of rambunctious characters and repressed ones, But the comedy here is given extra resonance by the social and character details that underpin it: the absurd social pretensions of Effie and her relatives, the tension between the belief in social equality of Egbert and the adherence of Ruggles to the tradition of a prescribed social hierarchy, and the dawning realization by Ruggles that the American way of life and the misunderstandings about him deliberately fostered by Egbert present him with the opportunity to reinvent himself.
Even with all these great character actors (including fluttery, nasal-voiced Zasu Pitts as a potential love interest for Ruggles), it is Charles Laughton who elevates this movie beyond expectations. It might seem inconceivable that the notoriously hammy Laughton could so effectively play a buttoned-up comical character. But he is a marvel as he proceeds through the various phases of the psychological transformation of Ruggles from a Jeeves-like automaton to a new man, one freed from the stifling belief in a life predetermined by social class and presented instead with the ability to create his own identity. Ruggles is like a prisoner inching his way to freedom. When that freedom comes, it is a liberation that, although achieved through comic means, is deeply moving.
Ruggles of Red Gap is a sort of social fairy tale powered by American optimism, the belief in the entitlement of every person to self-definition and an open-ended future. In an age when practically anyone could use a few good laughs and a reminder that people once genuinely believed in such ideals, watching Ruggles is like getting a glimpse into an Edenic past, a less complicated and more innocent time.
Lubitsch's Ninotchka: Lovers of the World, Unite!
Monday, February 16, 2009
Sometimes it certainly pays to give a movie a second chance. This happened to me with Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), a movie of high repute that I wasn't sure about the first time I saw it, but which I thought was clearly a masterpiece on second viewing. Recently it happened again with Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). I liked the movie well enough the first time I watched it a few years ago. But I absolutely loved it when I watched it a second time a few weeks ago and could only wonder how the full extent of its charm eluded me the first time around.What had happened in the meantime? Maybe my initial failure to appreciate Ninotchka fully was because it was only the second movie directed by Lubitsch that I had ever seen. In between viewings I'd seen several more movies by Lubitsch, and perhaps it simply took me awhile to become attuned to the Lubitsch touch. Or maybe it was because I was comparing it too much to the antic screwball comedies of the late 1930's and early 1940's that I love so much. A Lubitsch comedy often has definite similarities to a screwball comedy, but ultimately it has a distinctly more ethereal quality than the typical screwball comedy. In a Lubitsch comedy the situations are generally more restrained, the pacing more relaxed, the character relationships more complicated, the contrast between refined leading characters and eccentric supporting characters more subtle, the dialogue more polished.
The Lubitsch touch is an altogether lighter touch than that of, say, Howard Hawks—more cerebral and less visceral. Of Lubitsch's comedies Roger Ebert observes, "Turn up the heat . . . and you'd have screwball comedy." But the thing is that Lubitsch never does turn up the heat. In his comedies Hawks immediately turns the heat up all the way and brings things to a full, rolling boil, which he maintains for the rest of the movie. But the more mellow Lubitsch always keeps things just bubbling merrily along at a gentle simmer.
Another reason the obvious charms of Ninotchka didn't register fully the first time around no doubt had to do with its star, Greta Garbo. This was the first movie I ever saw the legendary Garbo in, and I really didn't know what to expect. In between viewings, though, I had seen her in her some of her most celebrated roles of the 1930's—in Queen Christina, Grand Hotel, Anna Karenina, and Camille—so when I saw Ninotchka again I had other performances to compare this one to.
Some find Garbo's screen personality remote and her acting style overly controlled and dependent on artifice. While I can understand this view, I find that these traits actually make her well-suited to her best roles, and that she succeeds better in those parts than would an actress with a warmer personality and more spontaneous, naturalistic acting style. Her Camille, for example, is essentially a professional performer who is always "on," working hard for her keep by acting the role that her succession of sugar daddies expect. Upon rewatching Ninotchka, I caught on to its deliberately calculated strategy. I realized that the movie was actually designed to showcase these familiar traits in the beginning in order to catch us off guard and surprise us later on by revealing a new and unexpected side of Garbo.
In Ninotchka (co-written by Billy Wilder, Leigh Brackett, and Walter Reisch) Garbo plays a Russian communist functionary who has been sent to Paris to check on the activities of three errant comrades, the comical and bumbling Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski. The mission of these three is to raise money for the government by selling jewelry confiscated during the Russian Revolution from the family of the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), herself an émigrée living in Paris and the mistress of Léon (Melvyn Douglas), a French count. The three emissaries have been neglecting their duty and living it up at a ritzy hotel, and Ninotchka has been charged with bringing them back in line.
Ninotchka is a woman whose personality lacks any trace of humor or emotion. With her immobile facial features, stiff, unfeminine martial gait, and asexual, uniform-like clothing, she is all business, almost a secular nun devoted not to religion but to her political beliefs. Upon arriving in Paris she announces to her chastened colleagues, "I want to use my free time to inspect public utilities and make a study of all outstanding technical achievements in the city." The first item on her agenda is to study the engineering details of the Eiffel Tower. It is while asking directions to it that she first encounters Léon, who is instantly smitten with her.
He follows her to the Eiffel Tower, where she proves resistant to all his efforts to romanticize it or the city as viewed from the observation deck. She does, however, permit herself to be enticed to his apartment, where he makes an all-out effort to seduce her. What follows is one of the most memorable scenes in this or any other movie.
In a long, unbroken take Garbo and Douglas are framed in a static two-shot, Douglas feeding her his lengthy patter of seduction while she listens. I have always believed that one of the most difficult things for a movie actor to do is simply to listen while another actor speaks, especially when both are in the frame together. The listener must convince the viewer not only that he or she is actually listening attentively but also that this is the first time he or she has ever heard these lines spoken. This sounds easy but actually must be quite difficult, and I have always considered how well an actor is able to do this a measure of acting ability.
By this measure, Garbo proves herself in this scene to be one of the most gifted performers ever to appear on the screen. My normal reaction to such a scene is instinctively to focus on the speaker and occasionally remind myself to look at the other person too. Here, though, the situation was for me exactly the reverse. My attention was entirely focused on Garbo; I literally could not take my eyes off her. She is costumed and made up to look frumpy. Her blank expression never once changes. Her response to Douglas consists solely of occasionally moving her eyes and slightly adjusting the attitude of her head. Yet she completely dominates the scene; I never once looked at Douglas the entire time. If you have ever wondered what is meant when it is said that the camera "loves" an actor, you need look no further than this scene for a perfect example.
At the end of his speech, the glacial Ninotchka looks at Léon expressionlessly and observes that she is aware he is trying to seduce her, adding dispassionately that his speech was unnecessary because she doesn't believe in the bourgeois concept of love. For her, attraction is a simple matter of mutual biological and chemical reactions, and those reactions are already happening, whereupon she permits him one passionate kiss. Léon has tried his hardest but still hasn't succeeded in breaking through Ninotchka's wall of ice. Ninotchka's message is clear: the physical attraction is there, but she has no intention of acting on it for so frivolous a purpose as personal pleasure. And the strangest thing of all is that Garbo's stiffness and her complete immunity to romanticism is in its rigidity and its ability to frustrate the enamored Léon very, very funny.
For his next approach to Ninotchka, Léon sets his sights considerably lower than immediate seduction. Following her to an unpretentious working man's cafe, he sets out simply to make her laugh. What ensues is another unforgettable classic sequence. Léon seats himself at her table and proceeds to tell her jokes. As he tells joke after joke, the rest of the cafe is in stitches, but Ninotchka simply sits and listens expressionlessly. She does nothing but put food into her mouth and chew. Finally overcome with his own exuberance, Léon gestures wildly, his chair topples backwards, and he falls on the floor. The entire cafe breaks into laughter . . . and so does Ninotchka—helplessly, uncontrollably. (It is a well-known anecdote that Garbo told Lubitsch she could not laugh on cue, so she silently mimicked laughter and the sound was later dubbed in.)
While the verbal strategies of seductive rhetoric and joke-telling have both failed to break through Ninotchka's wall of ideology and absolute self-control, the universal physical comic gesture of the pratfall succeeds. This is the scene that gave the movie its catchphrase and signaled the transformation of Garbo's image. Her first sound film was adverstised with the slogan "Garbo Talks!" Ninotchka was advertised with the slogan "Garbo Laughs!"
Léon's accidental success at loosening up Ninotchka leads to the third great sequence of the movie, when she agrees at last to accompany him to a night club on a date. For the first time Ninotchka abandons her drab hairstyle and clothing and actually begins to look feminine: the ugly duckling is starting to look glamorous. At the night club her reaction to her very first taste of champagne is one of delight, as is her response to the music being played. Ninotchka is susceptible to sensory pleasure after all. But this first tentative appreciation of pleasure is spoiled by the arrival of the jealous Swana (a wonderfully bitchy Ina Claire, the ex-wife of John Gilbert, Garbo's frequent costar in earlier years—a curious piece of casting), who wants her jewelry back. When Swana invites herself to sit at Ninotchka and Léon's table and begins maliciously baiting them, Ninotchka temporarily returns to her old humorless self.
After Swana leaves, Ninotchka reacts by drinking too much champagne and for the first time in her life getting drunk. Léon too gets drunk and together they stagger back to her hotel room, where their repartee playfully lampoons political ideology: "We'll form our own party. . . . Lovers of the world, unite! . . . Our salute will be a kiss." Léon stands Ninotchka against the wall, blindfolds her, and "executes" her with the pop of a champagne cork. "I have paid the penalty," she jokes. "Now let's hear some music." Throughout the movie political ideology has been the brunt of both gentle mockery and pointed barbs, but in this scene it takes its most direct hit from Wilder, Lubitsch et al. as love triumphs over dogma.
Of course, as in all romantic comedies, circumstances—in this case provoked by the conniving Swana—intervene to separate the lovers before they are happily reunited in the end. This last section of the movie is as entertaining and witty as the rest. But the heart of the movie is those three key sequences I discussed above, each one a compact masterpiece of writing, acting, and direction.
Watching Ninotchka is a pure delight, as effortless and effervescent a pleasure as sipping a glass of champagne.
Have Yourself a Merry Lubitsch Christmas
Monday, December 15, 2008
A number of years ago, while visiting relatives for the Christmas holiday, I took advantage of their cable TV, with its several Los Angeles stations, to watch movies. One night a movie that I had read about called The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was playing. I had never seen a film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, although I had heard much about the "Lubitsch touch," nor had I ever seen the actress Margaret Sullavan in anything, although I also knew of her. I fell in love with this movie as I watched it. One of my first reactions was to ask myself why, when the last part of the film takes place during the Christmas season, wasn't it as well known as those two other holiday perennials Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life. The Shop Around the Corner is every bit as good as those two Christmas favorites and, having fewer serious overtones, is in many ways even more likable.
The Shop Around the Corner, set in Budapest and based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Miklós László, is about two people working in the same shop who loathe each other but unknowingly are secret pen pals conducting a romance by mail. The premise was so successful that it has since been recycled several times. It was Americanized and musicalized by MGM for Judy Garland and Van Johnson as In the Good Old Summertime (1949). In 1963 it was returned to its original setting as the Broadway musical She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, the team responsible for Fiddler on the Roof. In 1998 the story was then updated for the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie You've Got Mail, with snail mail replaced by e-mail.
In the original version, the leads are played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and I cannot praise their performances highly enough. Alfred Kralik (Stewart) is the chief salesperson in a shop owned by Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) that seems to sell high-end gifts and trinkets. Although Matuschek owns the store, Kralik is its de facto manager. Stewart plays Kralik as an intelligent man with a naturally shrewd business sense and quick, infallible business judgment. While Matuschek sequesters himself in his office brooding about the possible unfaithfulness of his attractive, frivolous, and apparently younger wife, Kralik runs the store, making all the business decisions and managing the staff, while officially deferring to Mutscheck's final judgment in these matters.
Kralik is as good with people as he is at merchandising. Secure enough in himself to be that rarity, an egoless staff manager, he enjoys friendly relations with everyone working in the store, all of whom recognize and respond to his wisdom and modest self-confidence. Only the vain and self-important Ferencz Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut), a clerk of lesser abilities but greater ego and ambition than Kralik, a man disliked by the rest of the staff for his cold personality, fails to respond to Kralik but instead behaves like an envious rival.
Kralik is a lonely man longing for romance, which is why he first answers a notice in the newspaper placed by a young woman seeking a pen pal. Kralik soon finds a soul mate in his anonymous correspondent, someone that he bonds with intellectually and eventually falls in love with. When a jobless young woman, Klara Novak (Sullavan), comes into the store one day looking for work, Kralik not only has no job to offer but also takes an instant dislike to the forthright Klara. This is one of the few times his instinctive good judgment about people fails him, for it is soon revealed that she is his anonymous soul mate. When Klara talks herself into a job in the store by demonstrating her very capable sales ability to Matuschek, who is taken with her charm and good looks even though he doesn't need another salesperson, the stage is set for much droll dramatic irony, with Kralik and Klara bickering and feuding in person at work and romancing each other by mail in their spare time.
At the time this picture was released, Stewart was at a high point in his career. In 1939 and 1940 he gave the four best performances of his early career: in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (for which he received the New York Film Critics award as Best Actor), Destry Rides Again, The Philadelphia Story (for which he received an Oscar), and this movie. In each of these roles he shows the same outward gentleness and inner strength that would characterize his screen personality for the next fifty years.
The great character actor Frank Morgan, fresh off of playing the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, plays the owner of the store, Matuschek, and he is simply wonderful in what is my favorite of his many fine character performances. His impersonation of this overwrought, insecure man driven to distraction over the infidelity of his wife is a marvel—funny and pathetic at the same time. As a businessman, the blustering Matuschek is hopelessly inept, and it is clear from the imprudent business decisions he makes on his own or when he capriciously overrides Kralik's judgment that without Kralik the business would be lost. Morgan makes this bumbling, frazzled nervous wreck of a man not only humorous but ultimately quite touching as well.
Margaret Sullavan, who plays Klara, was one of the most unique movie actresses of the 1930's and 1940's. Between 1933 and 1943 she made sixteen films then seemed to fade from the screen. Four of her movies also starred James Stewart, with whom she had acted in a stock theater company before coming to Hollywood. Sullavan had a fey, eccentric quality that is difficult to describe and projected an odd combination of vulnerability and resolve, whimsicality and earnestness. She had a breathy voice and a manner of delivering her lines that was alternately rushed and halting. She was as idiosyncratic as Katherine Hepburn without being quite so quirky. (Interestingly, Sullavan was cast in the lead in Stage Door but was replaced by Hepburn when she became pregnant.) All of these qualities, in addition to a well-honed sense of comic timing, come through in her Klara. She works exceptionally well with Stewart, and when together onscreen they make it easy to see how the same qualities in their characters that appeal to each other in their letters—their seriousness, intelligence, outer self-confidence, and inner yearning for connection—are exactly the qualities that cause such a clash of personalities when they are at the store.
Much has been written about "the Lubitsch touch," and the terms most often used to describe it are chic and sophisticated. It is true that many—perhaps even most—of Lubitsch's films concern royalty and aristocrats, the very wealthy, suave conmen and conwomen, artists, and playboys. They generally have a Continental setting—Paris, London, the French Riviera. Yet none of this applies to The Shop Around the Corner. While not uneducated or unintelligent, these men and women are petit bourgeois who work in a shop, far from the rich and sophisticated people in movies like Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Even its Budapest setting lacks the romance and glamor of the settings of most of Lubitsch's other movies.
"In the well-mannered, good-natured world of Ernst Lubitsch," wrote Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema, "grace transcends purpose." Roger Ebert, giving his own definition of the elusive "Lubitsch touch," wrote that "the comic material is given dignity by the actors." This prizing above all else of dignity, good manners, and grace is for me the constant in Lubitsch's movies—including The Shop Around the Corner—no matter what the setting or the social station of the characters. To Lubitsch the most important thing in life is to maintain grace, self-composure, and mannerly behavior in even the most trying circumstances. When the personal relationships among the three main characters in Trouble in Paradise fail to work out, all accept the situation with dignity and manage to forge an accommodation to their changed circumstances. In Design for Living, Gary Cooper and Fredric March react to their treatment by Miriam Hopkins—her refusal to commit herself to one or the other, her playing them against each other, and her ultimate rejection of them for an older millionaire—in a similarly graceful and civilized way and in the end reach a most unusual accommodation with her.
In Lubitsch's world view, both communism (Ninotchka) and fascism (To Be or Not to Be) are enemies of dignity and grace. The glacial Ninotchka is a flawed person because she mistakes asceticism for dignity. When she thaws out and permits herself to learn about pleasure, she acquires genuine dignity, and her rigid formality is transformed into relaxed gracefulness. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis in To Be or Not to Be are also antithetical to Lubitsch's values. For him grace is linked absolutely to kindness, forgiveness, and acceptance of the imperfections and inconstancy of human nature.
One of the most difficult and frustrating experiences in life is to be helpless in the face of unjust accusation. For Lubitsch the proper reaction to this situation is the nearly impossible one of acceptance and the maintenacnce of grace under stress. In The Shop Around the Corner, Kralik's equanimity is tested when he is placed in just such a situation. When the private detective Matuschek hires reports that the person with whom his wife is having an affair is one of the employees of his shop, Matuschek mistakenly jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Kralik (it is actually the arrogant Vadas) and fires him. Kralik reacts to his unjust treatment by Matuschek—in a sense, a betrayal and rejection by a father figure—with disappointment but also with grace and good manners, not outrage or anger, as most people would. He doesn't protest his innocence or indulge in self-pity, and Stewart makes this uncomplaining acceptance of injustice seem completely believable.
Kralik is further tested when later in the film Matuschek impulsively tries (unsuccessfully) to commit suicide and is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. It is Kralik who immediately goes to his bedside and then loyally returns to run the business and conceal the truth about Matuschek's suicide attempt to protect his reputation. The importance of grace in Lubitsch's—and Kralik's—world view also explains Kralik's disapproving reaction to Klara, for it is Klara's brashness and her less than gracious attitude towards Kralik that initially cause him to dislike her. This intolerance of the lack of grace in others is perhaps the one flaw in Kralik's own devotion to that quality. It is only when he is able to perceive Klara's inner grace, a trait openly expressed only in her letters, that Kralik is able to accept her and acknowledge his love for her.
One of the most delightful things about The Shop Around the Corner is the way Lubitsch creates in the atmosphere of the shop and the interaction of its employees the feeling that these people are in a way a large family. Matuschek is the father, Kralik the wise and faithful son, Vadas the ungrateful and disloyal prodigal son, the errand boy Pepi the impudent but endearing youngest son, the other salespeople in the store kindly aunts and uncles, and Klara the orphaned young woman adopted by the family. Roger Ebert noted about the people in Lubitsch's films that "you find that you believe in these characters and care about them." The family dynamic of The Shop Around the Corner, applied to a closed group of people who are enacted by enormously appealing performers, draws the viewer in and creates tremendous emotional investment in the problems of these people and their ultimate resolution.
When all the disparate elements of a movie slot together flawlessly to provide a fully satisfying and entertaining experience, that to me is a definition of movie greatness. The Shop Around the Corner is just such a movie, an impeccable example of the unpretentious artistry that the best Hollywood studio movies and the best studio directors like the great Ernst Lubitsch were capable of achieving. Add to its other virtues a strong Christmas component, and you have a perfect holiday movie.
The Shop Around the Corner, set in Budapest and based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Miklós László, is about two people working in the same shop who loathe each other but unknowingly are secret pen pals conducting a romance by mail. The premise was so successful that it has since been recycled several times. It was Americanized and musicalized by MGM for Judy Garland and Van Johnson as In the Good Old Summertime (1949). In 1963 it was returned to its original setting as the Broadway musical She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, the team responsible for Fiddler on the Roof. In 1998 the story was then updated for the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie You've Got Mail, with snail mail replaced by e-mail.
In the original version, the leads are played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and I cannot praise their performances highly enough. Alfred Kralik (Stewart) is the chief salesperson in a shop owned by Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) that seems to sell high-end gifts and trinkets. Although Matuschek owns the store, Kralik is its de facto manager. Stewart plays Kralik as an intelligent man with a naturally shrewd business sense and quick, infallible business judgment. While Matuschek sequesters himself in his office brooding about the possible unfaithfulness of his attractive, frivolous, and apparently younger wife, Kralik runs the store, making all the business decisions and managing the staff, while officially deferring to Mutscheck's final judgment in these matters.Kralik is as good with people as he is at merchandising. Secure enough in himself to be that rarity, an egoless staff manager, he enjoys friendly relations with everyone working in the store, all of whom recognize and respond to his wisdom and modest self-confidence. Only the vain and self-important Ferencz Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut), a clerk of lesser abilities but greater ego and ambition than Kralik, a man disliked by the rest of the staff for his cold personality, fails to respond to Kralik but instead behaves like an envious rival.
Kralik is a lonely man longing for romance, which is why he first answers a notice in the newspaper placed by a young woman seeking a pen pal. Kralik soon finds a soul mate in his anonymous correspondent, someone that he bonds with intellectually and eventually falls in love with. When a jobless young woman, Klara Novak (Sullavan), comes into the store one day looking for work, Kralik not only has no job to offer but also takes an instant dislike to the forthright Klara. This is one of the few times his instinctive good judgment about people fails him, for it is soon revealed that she is his anonymous soul mate. When Klara talks herself into a job in the store by demonstrating her very capable sales ability to Matuschek, who is taken with her charm and good looks even though he doesn't need another salesperson, the stage is set for much droll dramatic irony, with Kralik and Klara bickering and feuding in person at work and romancing each other by mail in their spare time.
At the time this picture was released, Stewart was at a high point in his career. In 1939 and 1940 he gave the four best performances of his early career: in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (for which he received the New York Film Critics award as Best Actor), Destry Rides Again, The Philadelphia Story (for which he received an Oscar), and this movie. In each of these roles he shows the same outward gentleness and inner strength that would characterize his screen personality for the next fifty years.
The great character actor Frank Morgan, fresh off of playing the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, plays the owner of the store, Matuschek, and he is simply wonderful in what is my favorite of his many fine character performances. His impersonation of this overwrought, insecure man driven to distraction over the infidelity of his wife is a marvel—funny and pathetic at the same time. As a businessman, the blustering Matuschek is hopelessly inept, and it is clear from the imprudent business decisions he makes on his own or when he capriciously overrides Kralik's judgment that without Kralik the business would be lost. Morgan makes this bumbling, frazzled nervous wreck of a man not only humorous but ultimately quite touching as well.
Margaret Sullavan, who plays Klara, was one of the most unique movie actresses of the 1930's and 1940's. Between 1933 and 1943 she made sixteen films then seemed to fade from the screen. Four of her movies also starred James Stewart, with whom she had acted in a stock theater company before coming to Hollywood. Sullavan had a fey, eccentric quality that is difficult to describe and projected an odd combination of vulnerability and resolve, whimsicality and earnestness. She had a breathy voice and a manner of delivering her lines that was alternately rushed and halting. She was as idiosyncratic as Katherine Hepburn without being quite so quirky. (Interestingly, Sullavan was cast in the lead in Stage Door but was replaced by Hepburn when she became pregnant.) All of these qualities, in addition to a well-honed sense of comic timing, come through in her Klara. She works exceptionally well with Stewart, and when together onscreen they make it easy to see how the same qualities in their characters that appeal to each other in their letters—their seriousness, intelligence, outer self-confidence, and inner yearning for connection—are exactly the qualities that cause such a clash of personalities when they are at the store.
Much has been written about "the Lubitsch touch," and the terms most often used to describe it are chic and sophisticated. It is true that many—perhaps even most—of Lubitsch's films concern royalty and aristocrats, the very wealthy, suave conmen and conwomen, artists, and playboys. They generally have a Continental setting—Paris, London, the French Riviera. Yet none of this applies to The Shop Around the Corner. While not uneducated or unintelligent, these men and women are petit bourgeois who work in a shop, far from the rich and sophisticated people in movies like Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Even its Budapest setting lacks the romance and glamor of the settings of most of Lubitsch's other movies."In the well-mannered, good-natured world of Ernst Lubitsch," wrote Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema, "grace transcends purpose." Roger Ebert, giving his own definition of the elusive "Lubitsch touch," wrote that "the comic material is given dignity by the actors." This prizing above all else of dignity, good manners, and grace is for me the constant in Lubitsch's movies—including The Shop Around the Corner—no matter what the setting or the social station of the characters. To Lubitsch the most important thing in life is to maintain grace, self-composure, and mannerly behavior in even the most trying circumstances. When the personal relationships among the three main characters in Trouble in Paradise fail to work out, all accept the situation with dignity and manage to forge an accommodation to their changed circumstances. In Design for Living, Gary Cooper and Fredric March react to their treatment by Miriam Hopkins—her refusal to commit herself to one or the other, her playing them against each other, and her ultimate rejection of them for an older millionaire—in a similarly graceful and civilized way and in the end reach a most unusual accommodation with her.
In Lubitsch's world view, both communism (Ninotchka) and fascism (To Be or Not to Be) are enemies of dignity and grace. The glacial Ninotchka is a flawed person because she mistakes asceticism for dignity. When she thaws out and permits herself to learn about pleasure, she acquires genuine dignity, and her rigid formality is transformed into relaxed gracefulness. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis in To Be or Not to Be are also antithetical to Lubitsch's values. For him grace is linked absolutely to kindness, forgiveness, and acceptance of the imperfections and inconstancy of human nature.
One of the most difficult and frustrating experiences in life is to be helpless in the face of unjust accusation. For Lubitsch the proper reaction to this situation is the nearly impossible one of acceptance and the maintenacnce of grace under stress. In The Shop Around the Corner, Kralik's equanimity is tested when he is placed in just such a situation. When the private detective Matuschek hires reports that the person with whom his wife is having an affair is one of the employees of his shop, Matuschek mistakenly jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Kralik (it is actually the arrogant Vadas) and fires him. Kralik reacts to his unjust treatment by Matuschek—in a sense, a betrayal and rejection by a father figure—with disappointment but also with grace and good manners, not outrage or anger, as most people would. He doesn't protest his innocence or indulge in self-pity, and Stewart makes this uncomplaining acceptance of injustice seem completely believable.
Kralik is further tested when later in the film Matuschek impulsively tries (unsuccessfully) to commit suicide and is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. It is Kralik who immediately goes to his bedside and then loyally returns to run the business and conceal the truth about Matuschek's suicide attempt to protect his reputation. The importance of grace in Lubitsch's—and Kralik's—world view also explains Kralik's disapproving reaction to Klara, for it is Klara's brashness and her less than gracious attitude towards Kralik that initially cause him to dislike her. This intolerance of the lack of grace in others is perhaps the one flaw in Kralik's own devotion to that quality. It is only when he is able to perceive Klara's inner grace, a trait openly expressed only in her letters, that Kralik is able to accept her and acknowledge his love for her.
One of the most delightful things about The Shop Around the Corner is the way Lubitsch creates in the atmosphere of the shop and the interaction of its employees the feeling that these people are in a way a large family. Matuschek is the father, Kralik the wise and faithful son, Vadas the ungrateful and disloyal prodigal son, the errand boy Pepi the impudent but endearing youngest son, the other salespeople in the store kindly aunts and uncles, and Klara the orphaned young woman adopted by the family. Roger Ebert noted about the people in Lubitsch's films that "you find that you believe in these characters and care about them." The family dynamic of The Shop Around the Corner, applied to a closed group of people who are enacted by enormously appealing performers, draws the viewer in and creates tremendous emotional investment in the problems of these people and their ultimate resolution.
When all the disparate elements of a movie slot together flawlessly to provide a fully satisfying and entertaining experience, that to me is a definition of movie greatness. The Shop Around the Corner is just such a movie, an impeccable example of the unpretentious artistry that the best Hollywood studio movies and the best studio directors like the great Ernst Lubitsch were capable of achieving. Add to its other virtues a strong Christmas component, and you have a perfect holiday movie.
Discovering Carole Lombard
Monday, November 3, 2008
During October 2008 Turner Classic Movies paid tribute to Carole Lombard as its Star of the Month, giving me the chance to learn more about this actress. One of the major stars of the early Hollywood studio period, Lombard is an actress who has a devoted following. There is even a film/fan site (Carol & Co.) that publishes almost daily articles about her. But before the TCM tribute I had seen her in only a couple of films, both of them well-known screwball comedies from the 1930s, one of my pet genres. Having now seen several more of her films from the late thirties and early forties (she died in a plane crash in 1942 at the age of 33), I can understand why she has inspired such devotion among her fans. She will not supplant my absolute personal favorites of the early studio era—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne—but she will now be one of my also-greats, joining the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, and Margaret Sullavan—not bad company to be in.Carole Lombard appeared in her first movie in 1921 at the age of thirteen. She had appeared in around 60 films before she got the lead in the movie that made her a star: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934). This was the year screwball comedy was born in Hollywood with It Happened One Night, setting off a craze for the genre that lasted nearly ten years. (According to the website notstarring.com, Lombard turned down the lead in It Happened One Night.) Twentieth Century was the other notable example of screwball comedy from that year and exhibits the take on the genre that Hawks would continue with his masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). It's all there in Hawks's very first attempt at the new genre—the frenetic pacing, rapid-fire dialogue, contrived but hilarious situations, put-upon supporting characters, and egotistical lead characters.
Twentieth Century was just about the last remaining classic screwball comedy I had never seen, and what a treat it was to see it at last. The movie has now joined my list of the top examples of the genre. John Barrymore, lampooning his own image, stars as Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant, manipulative, often hysterical Broadway director given to melodramatic pronouncements like "The iron door slams!" and "Anathema! Child of Satan!" at moments of heightened emotionalism. Lombard plays his new discovery, a shopgirl named Mildred Plotka whom Jaffe wants to rename Lily Garland and transform into a star. Only Jaffe has any faith in the newcomer's ability, and at this point the screenplay requires that Lombard be weepy, immature, and so insecure that she is ready to give up the idea of acting and return to the sales counter. But with patience, encouragement, and gentle cajoling, Jaffe does succeed into molding her into a star.
Three years later Lily is the most esteemed actress on the New York stage, and Jaffe, like a true Svengali, is now romantically involved with her. But he has become so possessive, controlling, and jealous that Lily can no longer stand him. Now Lombard must play her character in a completely different mode—successful, confident, mature, independent, and rebellious. She walks out on Jaffe ("That's not love," she says of their relationship. "It's sheer tyranny. I'm no Trilby.") and heads for Hollywood.
The plot now shifts ahead even further. Lily is a hugely successful movie star, and Oscar is close to financial ruin, not having had one successful production since Lily left him. By chance he finds himself on the same train as Lily, the Twentieth Century Limited, traveling from Chicago to New York. Convinced that his career will be saved if he can just get her to star in his next production, he determines to get her to agree to do so before the train reaches its destination. The dirty tricks campaign he embarks on (not dissimilar to Cary Grant's efforts to stop his ex-wife from remarrying in His Girl Friday) and the complications that follow occupy the bulk of the movie.
The rub, though, is that Lily, having achieved Hollywood stardom, has become as much of a temperamental egomaniac as her former mentor, and Lombard is now required to portray Lily as a swollen-headed, self-centered shrew. Reportedly, Lombard was so intimidated by working with Barrymore, who at the time was still at the height of his profession, that Hawks had to take her aside and threaten to replace her if she didn't loosen up and stop holding back in her scenes with him. Whatever Hawks did, it must have worked, for Lombard easily holds her own with Barrymore for the rest of the movie and gives as good as she gets. It was no surprise that Barrymore was up to the demands of his role. The surprise is how well Lombard, pretty much untried in this type of exaggerated, broad comedy, does with her role, which unlike Barrymore's requires her to act convincingly in three different modes—first insecure, then independent, and finally insufferable.
If Twentieth Century clearly showed how good Lombard was at broad comedy, it only hinted at her remarkable range as an actress. It took a whole series of movies to do this. In My Man Godfrey (1936), another classic screwball comedy, Lombard plays Irene Bullock, one of those proverbial madcap heiresses. But her performance is much less theatrical than in Twentieth Century, and her sweet-natured, guileless naiveté is utterly charming. Her speech is fast and breathless, rather like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Like Hepburn in that movie, Lombard's character is impulsive and mercurial, and she shows the same child-like resolve to get her man. This performance earned Lombard her only Oscar nomination.
The next year Lombard made another classic screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. She plays Hazel Flagg, a young woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed with radium poisoning and is turned into an overnight media celebrity by a cynical reporter played by Fredric March. This is a movie loved by many, but—prepare yourselves for sacrilege—it is one that I have never totally warmed to, even after repeated viewings. For some reason the movie just doesn't click for me the way my favorite screwball comedies do. Despite mixed feelings about the film, I still find the lead performances outstanding, particularly Lombard's, in which she shows a flair for unpretentious physical comedy that pokes fun at her glamor and her astounding beauty. Many consider this her signature performance, and for anyone interested in her career it is essential viewing.
Lombard's work in two lesser-known movies is further evidence of her versatility. In 1935 she made a little comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen called Hands Across the Table, in which she plays a manicurist in a swanky New York hotel whose one goal is to marry a rich man. She sets her sights on rich paraplegic Ralph Bellamy but finds herself falling in love with Fred MacMurray, whom she believes to be penniless. (Of course, he isn't.) It sounds like a classic screwball comedy situation, but the movie lacks the antic quality typical of the genre. Lombard comes across as quite level-headed and practical and maybe just a bit disappointed with life. In the end she chooses MacMurray not just because of love, but also because she is simply too nice to exploit Bellamy in such a mercenary way. Lombard creates a quietly touching and intelligent character who is quite distinct from her boisterous Lily in Twentieth Century, her energetic Hazel in Nothing Sacred, or her whimsical Irene in My Man Godfrey.
Lombard turns in another impressive performance that showcases her ability to integrate the light with the serious in In Name Only (1939). In this film she plays a widow and mother who rents a house for the summer from Cary Grant. Grant is unhappily married to Kay Francis, who he has discovered married him solely for his money. Grant and Lombard are immediately attracted to one another and quickly fall in love. The problem is Grant's possessive wife, who refuses to give him a divorce. The movie is a showcase for the range of both Lombard and Grant, who seem to have tremendous chemistry. They are allowed to behave at times in a relaxed, loving, and light-hearted manner with each other—the considerable charm of both actors at full throttle—and at other times in a serious and troubled manner when various obstacles, including the machinations of Grant's duplicitous wife, keep them apart. The plot is pure soap, but both Lombard and Grant rise above the familiar plot to create characterizations that are completely winning. If there were ever any doubts about Lombard's ability to handle serious roles, her performance in In Name Only surely put them to rest.
In two of her last movies Lombard returned to the comedy genre she was so associated with. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a screwball-type comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only effort at a purely comic picture. The movie, while enjoyable, lacks both Hitchcock's distinctive touches and the sparkle typical of the genre. Lombard is the best thing in the movie, and the presence of her by-now distinctive personality is alone sufficient reason to watch it.
The most remarkable thing about the movie is how closely Lombard conforms to Hitchcock's idealized image of blonde beauty as personified by his other leading women like Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and Eva Marie Saint. Lombard was a very beautiful woman, but she never looked lovelier than in this picture. She is photographed by the great Harry Stradling in ways that deliberately emphasize her stunning facial beauty. Time and again, as she was photographed in close-up, with her full lips, prominent cheekbones, and straight, rather long nose, I was reminded of Greta Garbo. Like Garbo, Lombard's face seems mask-like, sculpturesque, and ethereal—an archetypal image of timeless female beauty. Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels, once remarked that Garbo "had no bad angles." The same could be said of Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and to adore that exquisite face is reason enough to see this movie.
Carole Lombard's last picture, To Be or Not to Be (1942), improbably manages to combine topical anti-Nazism with pointed comedy. Released the year after her death, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Lombard's entire screen career, she was probably never paired with a director whose light comedic touch was so attuned to her own comedic skills, and in this film she gives what to me is her most enchanting performance. As the beautiful leading lady of a Polish theater troupe that finds itself engaged in a battle of wits with Nazis to help the Polish Resistance and to effect its own escape to Britain, she is married to its egotistical leading man, played by Jack Benny.
Lombard's restrained performance forms quite a contrast to Benny's intentionally hammy one; she is at times required almost to play the "straight man" to her costar. Benny's outrageous antics propel the complicated ruse the troupe concocts to dupe the Nazis, while the beautiful Lombard handles the romantic distractions involved in the ruse. She never falters in the face of Benny's purposeful overacting but delivers an understated portrait of a woman who possesses great shrewdness, poise, and dignity beneath her glamorous exterior. The Lubitsch touch and the Lombard touch turn out to be a perfect match, and the film stands as an appropriate valedictory tribute to her beauty, grace, charm, and ability to seamlessly blend seriousness with humor.
By all accounts the real Carole Lombard was an unpretentious, generous, lively person with an outsized sense of humor. In one way or another those qualities all come through in her movie characters. Add to those qualities her great acting talent and her gorgeous looks, and you have a working definition of what is referred to as Star Quality.
One Hour with You
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
“One Hour with You” is 78 minutes of pure bliss. Director Ernst Lubitsch takes the topic of adultery and spins a gossamer web of elegance, wit and sophistication around it. Never has adultery been so appealing.
Paramount Pictures’ evocation of 1930s Paris is always a charming place to visit, and “One Hour with You” is no exception. Pair this with Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m a sure a slice of Heaven reserved for film buffs has a section resembling 1930s Paris, Paramount-style. I’m looking forward to visiting it (I hope).
The film opens with the police commissioner ordering his men to rid the parks of amorous couples. One couple is adamant in their refusal to stop necking. The couple, Dr. Andre Bertier and Colette (Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald) are happily married and devoted to each other.
All is well until Colette’s school friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) appears, takes one look at Andre, and decides she wants him for herself, friendship be damned. Mitzi’s husband, played by the great Roland Young, thinks his wife is up to something and has her followed by a private detective.
Meanwhile, another family friend, Adolph (Charlie Ruggles) is equally smitten with Colette and is determined to win her away from Andre.
All this takes place amid enjoyable songs by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. My favorite number takes place at a swank dinner party. The live orchestra plays the title song, which is first sung by the bandleader. Our main characters dance with each other, and with the targets of their affections, and sing new lyrics as they’re dancing. It’s a wonderful scene.
Chevalier frequently addresses the audience. This device can be off-putting, but Chevalier is so engaging we don’t mind. At one point, when he finally succumbs to Mitzi’s advances, he sings to the audience “What Would You Do?”
I also enjoy Charlie Ruggles, but like Hugh Herbert, he’s one of those 1930s personalities that seem to grate on contemporary audiences. I don’t know why, I think he’s funny. A master of the double take, Ruggles offers us a great one in this movie when he complains to his butler why he mistakenly told him he’d be dressing for a costume party. The butler (Charles Coleman, of course) tells him, “Oh sir, I did so want to see you in tights.” Ruggles’ reaction shot to this is priceless.
Chevalier and MacDonald made four films together, and while I don’t think they cared for each other very much, they complemented each other well on screen and that’s what counts. Their first pairing “The Love Parade” (1929), also directed by Lubitsch, continues to delight and their last film “The Merry Widow” (1934), Lubitsch again, has its champions.
My favorite film of theirs is the sublime “Love Me Tonight” (1932), with its awesome Rodgers and Hart score and deft directorial touches of Rouben Mamoulian. Plus Myrna Loy as a nymphomaniac (but a most charming and likeable one).
Lubitsch and Chevalier had a hit the year before with “The Smiling Lieutenant,” which gave us the marvelous sight of Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins singing “Jazz Up Your Lingerie” God, I love Pre-Code movies.
In fact, both “The Smiling Lieutenant” and “One Hour with You” were nominated for Best Picture Oscars in the same year. (The Academy rules have wildly fluctuated throughout the years, and the 1932 Oscars were presented to those movies that opened between August 1, 1931 and July 31, 1932.) The winner that year was “Grand Hotel”, a good enough movie but not nearly as captivating as the amorous adventures of “One Hour with You.”
I first saw this movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center many years ago, at a retrospective of films recently restored by UCLA. In those pre-video, pre-TCM days, it was a big event to see a movie like “One Hour with You” in any format. The theater was packed and a grand time was had by all. There was an amazing cross section of people there and the entire theater burst into applause at the end. We all left the theater wanting to be transported to Lubitsch’s Paris.
I remember the opening scenes in the park as being tinted a dark blue, and had hoped it would be shown that way on the recent box set of early Lubitsch musicals. It wasn’t, and I wish it had. But I’m happy to have the film so readily available in the DVD format.
Rating for “One Hour with You”: Three and a half stars.
Paramount Pictures’ evocation of 1930s Paris is always a charming place to visit, and “One Hour with You” is no exception. Pair this with Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m a sure a slice of Heaven reserved for film buffs has a section resembling 1930s Paris, Paramount-style. I’m looking forward to visiting it (I hope).
The film opens with the police commissioner ordering his men to rid the parks of amorous couples. One couple is adamant in their refusal to stop necking. The couple, Dr. Andre Bertier and Colette (Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald) are happily married and devoted to each other.
All is well until Colette’s school friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) appears, takes one look at Andre, and decides she wants him for herself, friendship be damned. Mitzi’s husband, played by the great Roland Young, thinks his wife is up to something and has her followed by a private detective.
Meanwhile, another family friend, Adolph (Charlie Ruggles) is equally smitten with Colette and is determined to win her away from Andre.
All this takes place amid enjoyable songs by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. My favorite number takes place at a swank dinner party. The live orchestra plays the title song, which is first sung by the bandleader. Our main characters dance with each other, and with the targets of their affections, and sing new lyrics as they’re dancing. It’s a wonderful scene.
Chevalier frequently addresses the audience. This device can be off-putting, but Chevalier is so engaging we don’t mind. At one point, when he finally succumbs to Mitzi’s advances, he sings to the audience “What Would You Do?”
I also enjoy Charlie Ruggles, but like Hugh Herbert, he’s one of those 1930s personalities that seem to grate on contemporary audiences. I don’t know why, I think he’s funny. A master of the double take, Ruggles offers us a great one in this movie when he complains to his butler why he mistakenly told him he’d be dressing for a costume party. The butler (Charles Coleman, of course) tells him, “Oh sir, I did so want to see you in tights.” Ruggles’ reaction shot to this is priceless.
Chevalier and MacDonald made four films together, and while I don’t think they cared for each other very much, they complemented each other well on screen and that’s what counts. Their first pairing “The Love Parade” (1929), also directed by Lubitsch, continues to delight and their last film “The Merry Widow” (1934), Lubitsch again, has its champions.
My favorite film of theirs is the sublime “Love Me Tonight” (1932), with its awesome Rodgers and Hart score and deft directorial touches of Rouben Mamoulian. Plus Myrna Loy as a nymphomaniac (but a most charming and likeable one).
Lubitsch and Chevalier had a hit the year before with “The Smiling Lieutenant,” which gave us the marvelous sight of Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins singing “Jazz Up Your Lingerie” God, I love Pre-Code movies.
In fact, both “The Smiling Lieutenant” and “One Hour with You” were nominated for Best Picture Oscars in the same year. (The Academy rules have wildly fluctuated throughout the years, and the 1932 Oscars were presented to those movies that opened between August 1, 1931 and July 31, 1932.) The winner that year was “Grand Hotel”, a good enough movie but not nearly as captivating as the amorous adventures of “One Hour with You.”
I first saw this movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center many years ago, at a retrospective of films recently restored by UCLA. In those pre-video, pre-TCM days, it was a big event to see a movie like “One Hour with You” in any format. The theater was packed and a grand time was had by all. There was an amazing cross section of people there and the entire theater burst into applause at the end. We all left the theater wanting to be transported to Lubitsch’s Paris.
I remember the opening scenes in the park as being tinted a dark blue, and had hoped it would be shown that way on the recent box set of early Lubitsch musicals. It wasn’t, and I wish it had. But I’m happy to have the film so readily available in the DVD format.
Rating for “One Hour with You”: Three and a half stars.
The Bourne Ultimatum, The Freshman, Trouble in Paradise
Friday, September 7, 2007
I apologize to one and all for not updating this blog, but work commitments have kept me busy. So rather than a long blog, here’s a quick rundown of some recent movie viewing of mine. I hope to get back on track next week and stay that way for a while.
I saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” over the Labor Day weekend and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Personally, I could do with less jerky camera movements but this is a very exciting film. I’ve enjoyed all three Bourne movies, and was especially impressed by its brevity. Director Paul Greengass takes his story through many cities and over several continents and still manages to bring the film in under two hours. Would that other directors take note of this.
I was also amused by Bourne’s invincibility throughout the film. I think when the series started the film’s producers were looking to make an anti-Bond film and show a more vulnerable spy. All well and good, but Mr. Bourne survives the many attempts on his life with a shrug of the shoulders and one especially grueling car chase where his car receives several hard hits, goes over a guard rail, falls several stories into several parked cars, and Bourne emerges from the car and continues the chase on foot. What a superman!
If they make a fourth Bourne movie, they might want to consider making him less Bond-like. Just a thought.
Rating for “The Bourne Ultimatum”: Three stars
I’m a big fan of Harold Lloyd, the silent film comedian and one of his most enjoyable films is “The Freshman” (1925), where he plays the title character, a likeable chap who’s so anxious to make himself liked by everyone in college that he becomes the campus laughingstock. There’s a football climax where he takes part in winning the game and it’s a lot of fun.
Between this, the Marx Brothers’ “Horse Feathers” (1932) and the classic Three Stooges short “Three Little Pigskins” (1936) I use to think that football and physical comedy were a match made in heaven. That is, until I saw Adam Sandler’s “The Waterboy” (1998), one of the worst “comedies” I’ve ever sat through.
Lloyd is probably best known today for the famous image of dangling from the hands of a clock in “Safety Last” (1923). It’s probably his most famous movie, but its not his best. Instead, I would opt for the aforementioned “The Freshman”; “The Kid Brother” (1927), a marvelous blending of comedy and sentiment; “Hot Water” (1924), which includes the famous segment where poor Harold wins a live turkey in a raffle and attempts to transport it home in a street car; and my personal favorite, “Girl Shy” (1924) with a chase sequence that is as exhilarating as it is exhausting.
Rating for “The Freshman”: Three and a half stars.
For a comedy masterpiece of another kind, I sat happily transfixed by the glorious “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch. Two con artists played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins take rich innocent dupes throughout Europe and are having a fine time until they decide to part wealthy Kay Francis from her jewels and Marshall begins falling for her.
83 minutes of pure joy. Any movie that has Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles as romantic rivals is just dandy with me. Robert Grieg has a memorable role as Ms. Francis’ butler who becomes more and more exasperated as the movie goes on. There are several scenes where he descends the stairs and makes all kinds of harrumphing noises. It’s hilarious the first time, even funnier the second time and screechingly funny the third time. I don’t think the noises change at all, but by the third time it happens I was on the floor.
I taped it off TCM, but its available on DVD on the Criterion label, and it’s definitely on my “To Get” list.
Rating for “Trouble in Paradise”: Nothing less than four stars.
I saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” over the Labor Day weekend and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Personally, I could do with less jerky camera movements but this is a very exciting film. I’ve enjoyed all three Bourne movies, and was especially impressed by its brevity. Director Paul Greengass takes his story through many cities and over several continents and still manages to bring the film in under two hours. Would that other directors take note of this.
I was also amused by Bourne’s invincibility throughout the film. I think when the series started the film’s producers were looking to make an anti-Bond film and show a more vulnerable spy. All well and good, but Mr. Bourne survives the many attempts on his life with a shrug of the shoulders and one especially grueling car chase where his car receives several hard hits, goes over a guard rail, falls several stories into several parked cars, and Bourne emerges from the car and continues the chase on foot. What a superman!
If they make a fourth Bourne movie, they might want to consider making him less Bond-like. Just a thought.
Rating for “The Bourne Ultimatum”: Three stars
I’m a big fan of Harold Lloyd, the silent film comedian and one of his most enjoyable films is “The Freshman” (1925), where he plays the title character, a likeable chap who’s so anxious to make himself liked by everyone in college that he becomes the campus laughingstock. There’s a football climax where he takes part in winning the game and it’s a lot of fun.
Between this, the Marx Brothers’ “Horse Feathers” (1932) and the classic Three Stooges short “Three Little Pigskins” (1936) I use to think that football and physical comedy were a match made in heaven. That is, until I saw Adam Sandler’s “The Waterboy” (1998), one of the worst “comedies” I’ve ever sat through.
Lloyd is probably best known today for the famous image of dangling from the hands of a clock in “Safety Last” (1923). It’s probably his most famous movie, but its not his best. Instead, I would opt for the aforementioned “The Freshman”; “The Kid Brother” (1927), a marvelous blending of comedy and sentiment; “Hot Water” (1924), which includes the famous segment where poor Harold wins a live turkey in a raffle and attempts to transport it home in a street car; and my personal favorite, “Girl Shy” (1924) with a chase sequence that is as exhilarating as it is exhausting.
Rating for “The Freshman”: Three and a half stars.
For a comedy masterpiece of another kind, I sat happily transfixed by the glorious “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch. Two con artists played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins take rich innocent dupes throughout Europe and are having a fine time until they decide to part wealthy Kay Francis from her jewels and Marshall begins falling for her.
83 minutes of pure joy. Any movie that has Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles as romantic rivals is just dandy with me. Robert Grieg has a memorable role as Ms. Francis’ butler who becomes more and more exasperated as the movie goes on. There are several scenes where he descends the stairs and makes all kinds of harrumphing noises. It’s hilarious the first time, even funnier the second time and screechingly funny the third time. I don’t think the noises change at all, but by the third time it happens I was on the floor.
I taped it off TCM, but its available on DVD on the Criterion label, and it’s definitely on my “To Get” list.
Rating for “Trouble in Paradise”: Nothing less than four stars.
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