Green Light

 I’m always impressed by 1930s black and white medical dramas, and how the black and white photography really highlights the cold, white sterility of the operating room theaters. The whites in these sequences are often really, really white and make the hospitals seem like miracles palaces.

Such an operating room theater is on hand in one of the most unusual medical dramas of the period, “Green Light” (1937), an oddball but affecting drama that throws in everything but the kitchen sink - spirituality, love, self sacrifice and medicine. The fact that it works at all can be attributed to director Frank Borzage, who makes the most melodramatic events seem like everyday occurrences.

Errol Flynn plays Dr. Newell Paige, a successful surgeon who takes the blame for the death of a patient, Mrs. Dexter (Spring Byington), at the hands of his surgeon mentor, Dr. Endicott (Henry O’Neill).

Like the other characters in the movie, he turns to the sermons of Dean Harcourt (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), an Anglican (I think, or at least non-denominational) minister for spiritual comfort, whose sermons are broadcast on the radio to a wide and admiring audience.

Another of Harcourt’s admirers is Phyllis Dexter (Anita Louise), who seeks any kind of understanding from him after her mother’s death. Of course, she falls in love with the handsome Dr. Paige, without knowing who he really is. Paige’s nurse Frances Ogilvie (Margaret Lindsay) is in love with him, but promises to keep his secret about Dr. Endicott. She befriends Phyllis, not knowing how Phyllis feels about Dr. Paige.

 

After Phyllis finds out who Paige is, and thinking he was responsible for the death of her mother, she rejects him. Paige joins his friend Dr. Stafford (Walter Abel) in the rural west, looking for a cure for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is decimating the local population and economy.

Frustrated at their inability to find a cure for the disease, Paige injects himself with an experimental vaccine, and his life hangs in the balance.

All this, and a dog named Sylvia, in only 84 minutes!

 “Green Light” was based on a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, a minister-turned novelist who had a pretty good track record when it came to film adaptations. His biggest novelistic success was “The Robe”, but he died in 1951, two years before the movie version came out. There were also good film versions of his novels “Magnificent Obsession” (twice),. “White Banners” (nicely underrated movie), and two movie adaptations unseen by me, “Disputed Passage” and “The Big Fisherman.”

“Green Light” was made in 1937, an interesting year in Flynn’s career as Warner Bros. still wasn’t quite sure what to do with their latest star. ”Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) were blockbusters for Warner Bros., but Flynn didn’t want to be stuck in costume pictures and the economical Warner Bros. couldn’t afford the expensive adventure films every year. So that year, they cast him in a supporting role in a costume film, “The Price and the Pauper”, a funny screwball comedy “The Perfect Specimen” and two movies of noble self-sacrifice, “Green Light” and “Another Dawn.”

Now, anyone who knows anything about Errol Flynn off screen knows he was anything but altruistic. I often wondered how much eye rolling he did when reading the scripts of these two movies, and found my suspicions were correct when reading one of the best books ever on the actor, “Errol Flynn The Life and Career” by Thomas McNulty ( McFarland & Company, 2004), a book I highly recommend to any Flynn fan.

McNulty carries a quote from Flynn’s thoughts on “Green Light”:

“Green Light extracted from me a noblesse I myself cannot pretend. I am not constituted for noble sacrifice or suffering and so I don’t think the character was really the best I could have been given. Personally, I left that character, as I have done with every other one with which I have struck up a brief studio acquaintance, the moment the director told me the film was through.”

 

Errol Flynn and Anita Louise make a strikingly handsome couple, and the movie gives a look at what might have been if Warner Bros. had kept to their original casting of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) with Anita Louise as Maid Marian. The studio was grooming Anita Louise for big things, and saw the role as an opportunity to really make her shine with the public. But saner heads prevailed, Olivia deHavilland was cast in one of her most iconic roles, and movie history was made.

Anita Louise would have made a good, but not great Maid Marian, but Flynn and Louise don’t have quite the same chemistry he had with other leading ladies, like Olivia, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino or even Bette Davis. Yes, I know they hated each other, but Flynn and Davis are very good in the two films they made together.

Still, there’s a scene with Flynn and Louise sitting in a cathedral, listening to one of Dean Harcourt’s sermons, and they look like the two most beautiful people who ever lived. If I was a member of that congregation, I would find another place to worship, as I would not be worthy to be in the same building as those two.

 

 

“Green Light” won’t make the list of great Frank Borzage movies, and it often does seem like two different movies, if only in terms of setting. But that deep well of self-sacrifice and doing good works for others permeates all the story lines, so it’s not as jarring as one might think. It may not be very good, but it’s never less than watchable.

Finally, one more Flynn quote from the McNulty book, after his perplexing (for him) roles in “Green Light” and “Another Dawn”:

“I want some acting to do, if I am to be called an actor, which seems to be the general idea around Hollywood. If you ask me whether I have any preferences – and I really have – I would pick on light comedy roles. Generally speaking, they seem to be my stuff. I feel light comedy is easier for me to do and, being by nature more than a trifle lazy, I like to take the easiest or at least the most appealing route through the daily grind.”

Warner Bros. bowed to the wishes of their latest star and assigned him another screwball comedy, the agreeable “Four’s A Crowd” (1938).  But it did only middling business at the box office as did the aforementioned dramas. With the success of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” that year, the lazy nature of Flynn would be tested with lots of sword fighting and horseback riding and shooting. It must have galled him something terrible.

Three Comrades (1938)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Frank Borzage

Andrew Sarris has called the director Frank Borzage "an uncompromising romanticist . . . [with] a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity," a description of Borzage's work well illustrated by Three Comrades. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), the movie opens on Armistice Day in 1918. Three war buddies from the German military—Erich (Robert Taylor), Otto (Franchot Tone), and Gottfried (Robert Young)—are celebrating the end of World War I in a tavern and making plans for the future. When a German officer proposes a toast in honor of all those who have died in the war—German, British, French, American, and Italian alike—the three young men are clearly in accord with his feelings. Meanwhile, at a nearby table three stiff-necked officers bristle at these sentiments of reconciliation with former enemies, foreshadowing future confrontations between nationalistic fascists and those who believe in tolerance and peace like the three young comrades.

Two years later the German economy has collapsed and the three young men, their lives permanently marked by their war experiences, are barely eking out a living from the garage and taxi service they run. When they drive to a rural tavern to celebrate Erich's birthday, they encounter a young woman named Patricia (Margaret Sullavan), a "fallen aristocrat" who has lost her money in the postwar financial crash. All three are enchanted by her, but it is Erich with whom she falls in love. Against this background of economic hardship and political unrest, the lovers struggle to maintain their relationship and the three comrades their close friendship. Complicating the situation even further, Patricia is seriously ill with tuberculosis and Gottfried has become involved with a pacifist political group that is the target of the nascent fascist movement. Still, the four are able to maintain a camaraderie that cannot be touched by the problems of the time. "Where you walk," Otto says to Patricia at one point, "we three walk beside you."

Franchot Tone, Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young

Throughout the film Borzage deftly maintains a fine balance between the romantic and the realistic. Always in the background, and at times irrupting into the foreground, is the threat to love and friendship caused by economic difficulties and political discord. But the main emphasis of the film is the romance, and ultimately the marriage, between Patricia and Erich. Although events of the time are never neglected, it is plainly the personal element of the story that most interests Borzage—the emotional effects of outside events on these four people and the way they are unable to avoid the complications to their lives caused by those events. The realistic underpinnings of this deeply romantic film give it a profoundly moving, richly emotional quality that a strictly sentimental love story could never attain.

Borzage's sensitive direction, the elegant cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Gigi), and the unobtrusively fluid editing all contribute to the strength of the movie. But this is above all else a movie about the emotional lives of its characters, the kind of film dependent on actors to put the story across. Borzage uses Taylor's pretty-boy blandness to good effect, making obvious the appeal of his hopeful, boyish personality to the world-weary Patricia. Young, who has the smallest role, is perhaps a bit mild as the most political of the three comrades, an idealist whose war experiences have transformed him into a committed activist. I kept wondering if a more passionate actor like the young James Stewart might have made a stronger impression in the role. Tone, as the most intelligent of the three, has never been better—by turns relaxed and intense, and although clearly in love with Patricia himself, deferential to her stronger feelings for Erich. Together the three men form a sort of trine of the masculine personality: emotions, action, and intellect.

Regular readers of The Movie Projector will be aware of how much I admire Margaret Sullavan and how strongly I feel that she deserves to be better known. (For more about her life and career, see my post on The Good Fairy.) In Three Comrades she gave probably the best performance of her relatively brief screen career, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress. (She lost the Oscar to Bette Davis for Jezebel.) Her marvelous Patricia, a woman of outward frailty and inner strength, is the glue that holds the movie together. Having lost her money and her health, she has resigned herself with stoical acceptance to a forlorn future. Yet she hasn't altogether lost her sense of humor—even if it has a touch of the gallows in it—or her capacity to accept and return love when she finds it. She is too much of a realist to nurture the false hope that her happiness with Erich will last; she is enough of a fatalist to know that forces outside their control make that unlikely. But she is completely willing to live for the present in the glow of their feelings for each other while she has the chance. When she recognizes that the time to let go of Erich has come, she does so with selflessness and grace. It is a performance of rare delicacy, nuance, and serenity.

One last thing I should mention is that Three Comrades is the only screenplay officially credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was not pleased with what MGM did with his script, though, and understandably so. In 1938 MGM still wanted to protect the distribution of its movies in Germany and actually submitted the script to the German ambassador to the US, who wanted certain changes made. All overt references to anything that might be construed as reflecting badly on contemporary Germany or the Nazi party were modified or removed. Even though in retrospect it's easy to see implicit criticism of Nazi Germany and the post-World War I attitudes which brought the Nazis to power, this criticism is so generic that there is no denying that the movie sidesteps crucial political issues. It wouldn't be until the powerful anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm (again starring Sullavan) in 1940—with World War II begun in Europe, although the US was not yet involved—that Borzage was able to criticize the Nazis openly.