The first thought was to borrow Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy (two of a kind), and it’s fascinating that the chemistry that worked was a mismatch: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert—he was loaned by M-G-M for peanuts in an effort to discipline him. Colbert was the proof that Columbia could get real stars. They were different cuisines; they were hard work versus snobbery, real life against being spoiled—and this was 1934, a moment when such clashes meant a lot. It was Capra and his writer, Robert Riskin, who really saw that potential.
It came from a magazine story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, and it was budgeted as a film for $325,000! Colbert was apparently “snooty” on the shoot, while Gable enjoyed Capra. But Capra knew the chemistry, and there were sexual jokes on set just as there was her hitchhiking technique (the raised skirt) and the absence of his undershirt. Joseph Walker shot the picture, and the supporting cast included Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, and Jameson Thomas.
When it opened, in a country where many theaters had gone dark because of the hard times, It Happened One Night was the model of show business success and the tough, teasing deflation of the rich by guys like Gable. It had rentals of around $1 million, and it undoubtedly changed the business’s expectations of comedy. In hindsight, it’s a mystery that Gable and Colbert were not reunited until the lackluster Boom Town.
Capra was gloomy about the Oscars, because he had been rejected before. Moreover, the Academy was in some chaos over rival acting unions early in 1935. But the sweep achieved by It Happened One Night was authentic—Best Director, Best Writer, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Picture. This success would not be repeated until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
It’s a wonderful life—except for what you can’t get out of your head in the early hours of the morning, when you can’t sleep. How many of us have gone to bed imagining we were Jimmy Stewart in You Can’t Take It with You or The Philadelphia Story and woken up as George Bailey watching our sweet little town, Bedford Falls, pass by as some poisoned Pottersville? You may be checking the title, and asking yourself, Is this really one of America’s most heartwarming pictures he’s talking about, our Christmas picture, or has the printing system gone awry?
There is a great tradition in the American movie of our heroes packing their bags with our imaginary energy and going out into space, adventure, and the new. It is Charlie going to Gold Rush country. It is the great land race in Cimarron. It is Kit and his girl loping into the Badlands like wild deer. It is Rick and Louis strolling off into the fog together at the close of Casablanca. And then there are the films about people with too little courage or risk for the dream: It is the Smiths who stay home in St. Louis; it is Dorothy getting “home” again; and it is George Bailey.
He stayed in a backwater. He denied himself so much challenge, and in its place he took security, a sweetheart for a wife, a respected job at the savings and loan, the state of being trusted by a few people. But then there is the risk of that going sour, because Uncle Billy lost the crucial deposit. And Potter will move in… and George, in that despair known most intensely in Frank Capra films, where the young men have the DNA of being haunted by guilt in their souls already—George may kill himself.
Yes, it turns out all right, thanks to an apprentice angel, Clarence, thanks to Christmas and it’s being a movie. But you can feel the ordeal and the agony, and you know what I mean when I say it’s also a film noir itching to get out and infect the small-town assurance. You know more. You know that since 1946, the United States has come to resemble Pottersville far more than Bedford Falls. The rural idyll of security and self-sufficiency didn’t work. America was too desperate to get ahead. So as the years pass, this would-be charmer becomes a little more disturbing.
But what else from 1946 still bears watching in the same suspense—as if your life depended on it? So It’s a Wonderful Life deserves “Isn’t it?” as a coda. But the film is coming into its meaning and the vision of Pottersville is grim and obstinate. Who can forget it? Stewart is on the cusp of prewar and postwar. The cast is listed in our hearts: Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H. B. Warner. Script by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Jo Swerling from a story by Philip Van Doren Stern, “The Greatest Gift”—surely modeled on A Christmas Carol.
Ivan the Terrible (1945/1958)
Despite its immense research and the effort to re-create the world of Tsar Ivan IV (1530–84), it’s very difficult now to extricate this film from the history of another great Russian leader, Josef Stalin (1879–1953). Moreover, the fantastic graphic style or artistry of Sergei Eisenstein has so dated that it may be easier to view the film (to read it) as a disguised account of Stalin more than a reliable portrait of Ivan the so-called Terrible. At the very least, a great deal of backstory is required.
Eisenstein had come home from the United States and from Mexico in 1934–35, under a shadow, if not in disgrace. The Mexican venture was depicted as an abortion by the authorities, and the director had none of his footage. He was attacked by party officials, and his attempt to film Bezhin Meadow (from Turgenev) ended in disaster and severe criticism from Boris Shumyatsky, the production chief under the Soviets. But he had another chance with Alexander Nevsky (1938), and it was reckoned that he had redeemed himself by making a conventional, heroic epic, free from excesses of montage and unequivocally patriotic—it’s stately and exotic, but it’s in Michael Curtiz territory. Nevsky is old-fashioned and simplistic by Eisenstein’s standards, but it worked, thanks in part to a score by Sergei Prokofiev.
Thus, in the early 1940s, a remade man (it seemed), Eisenstein planned a three-part Ivan the Terrible. The research lasted two years. Starting in 1943, part one was filmed at the Alma Ata studios in central Asia. It premiered early in 1945 and was regarded as a magnificent fusion of history with the current war effort. The photography was shared by Eduard Tisse (exteriors) and Alexander Moskvin (interiors). Prokofiev did another score and Nikolai Cherkasov played Ivan in a story that showed the child coming to power, being defeated, but rising again to unite Russia.
Part two (The Boyars’ Plot) was filmed in 1945 with the same team, and with the addition of garish color sequences. But in part two something in the ideal Soviet story went astray. Ivan’s court is now a hotbed of conspiracy, of plots and secret police. It is also rife with homosexual feelings. It’s not hard to see why Stalin and those close to him felt uneasy with the film. It was not released. It was said Eisenstein had suffered a heart attack—and he died in 1948 (he was only fifty). It was 1958 before the film was released.
Since then, Ivan the Terrible (like Eisenstein as a whole) has gone out of fashion—which is another kind of secret police. Pauline Kael said Ivan was no more than a collection of staggering stills, and it’s not that she’s wrong. Eisenstein was out of his element doing propaganda, and yet the totality of his imagination is beyond dispute. If he had done graphic novels, he would be a cult. But Eisenstein has reached a nadir now that needs rediscovery, and we ought to start looking at Ivan the Terrible again, if only in the spirit of history. After all, we love stories of the artist up against the system if they are our artists (and our system). Eisenstein may have been an imagist prodigy battling many things in movie’s nature. But he was a designer of genius, a brave homosexual and a hero who had been turned away by America when he sought authentic American fun and the chance to have an affair with Mickey Mouse. A life of Eisenstein would have been a lot more energizing and complicated than a tribute to John Reed.
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
No one says there is a war going on (when nurses are as valuable as artillery shells), but everyone knows in I Walked with a Zombie; everyone knows what fate is. So a pretty nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) comes to the island of Haiti. She has been hired by a planter, Paul Holland (Tom Conway), because his wife, Jessica (Christine Gordon), is unwell. How sick is she? Well, Paul somehow fe
els that he’s responsible—and people know about responsibility. But the Haitians think that Jessica has been made into a zombie (the walking dead). As screenwriter Curt Siodmak put it in talks with his producer, Val Lewton, the woman “lacks vaginal warmth.” Meanwhile, Jessica has a half brother, Wesley (James Ellison), who loves Jessica, blames Paul for the problem, and longs to walk with Jessica into a sweet, welcoming death.
This is an RKO production, a 68-minute picture, the film Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur made after Cat People, and it’s like that pioneer work in its tidy folding in of schlock manners and quite advanced literary ideas. Lewton dreamed of making Jane Eyre in the Caribbean, and in the end of this film Betsy does get her man after Wesley has found a way to be with Jessica in death. In other words, the deep and illicit romantic yearning is accomplished through the apparatus of a “silly,” atmospheric horror film. Not that the zombie-ism is played to the Haitian hilt. The film sees voodoo going on and accepts what the natives believe. It is more interested in the stealthy heat of the night where white dreams can turn into shadows. And the result is uncanny: The ridiculous suddenly becomes beautiful and arresting. A Freudian interpretation is entirely possible: that Jessica is unmoved by Paul, that the marriage has never been consummated, so that both people exist in a kind of virginal prison.
This emotional intelligence seldom penetrated the A pictures of the era, just as the patent fantasy of the story (the nurse wants her boss) was rarely worked out in so open a way. I Walked with a Zombie was marketed as a horror picture, but really it’s not that. It’s a dream in which the studio Haiti (art direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller) is a set of scrims and screams and the acting styles reflect this: so Tom Conway is effete and languid, while Frances Dee is strong and direct. The whole thing is done in J. Roy Hunt’s photograph—those day-for-nights where every frond and finger throws a shadow. To add to all of this, Lewton hired a real calypso singer, Sir Lancelot, who strolls through the action offering a Feste-like commentary on it.
Just as the basis of I Walked with a Zombie might easily be redone now as a story of romantic aggression overcoming dead marriage, so it would be fascinating to know whether this suggestive Jane Eyre was seen by Jean Rhys as she came to write Wide Sargasso Sea.
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
With a title that smacks of Ed Wood and several scenes where characters talk earnestly of “female troubles,” it’s a marvel that this picture earned over $4 million at the domestic box office, especially since (as Howard Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, admits) it is a film that alienates young male viewers not accustomed to seeing their heroes so relentlessly exposed to frustration and humiliation. On the other hand, Cary Grant reckoned that it may have been the best comedy he ever made.
As they discussed Hawks making a contract with Fox, Darryl Zanuck suggested that the director might film Twelve O’Clock High. But Hawks was against doing another war picture, or one that took the war too seriously. There was another idea knocking around Fox, a true story, about a Belgian, Henri Rochard, who had married an American nurse and was only allowed into the United States as a “war bride.” It seemed promising.
Leonard Spigelgass had done a draft, and Hawks asked Hagar Wilde and Charles Lederer to rewrite it—stress the humiliation, he told them, and think Cary Grant in the role. It says so much about Hawks that four years after the peace, the war was for him an opportunity for farce in which man’s real enemy was military bureaucracy.
On paper, it’s a small picture, but Hawks and Fox had the notion to shoot on location. The reason for this was tempting and had nothing to do with veracity: The studios had cash in Europe that they couldn’t withdraw, because of currency restrictions. So going to Europe to spend it seemed politic. But as Hawks would discover, the cuisine and the hotel facilities were not what a movie director was used to. The European method ended up expensive and unsatisfactory, and a lot of the unit got sick along the way.
But the script was brilliant, and enough to send the Breen Office into a panic. Some cuts had to be made, alas, but Hawks actually ignored the Breen advice and just trimmed in the editing. They filmed in Heidelberg and Bremerhaven and then at Shepperton. Norbert Brodine did most of the photography, but Russell Harlan filled in on sick days.
Hawks had thought of Ava Gardner opposite Grant, but he decided she couldn’t deliver a joke, so he picked Ann Sheridan as the female lead, and this is the film that leads us to regret that she was often neglected by her own films, for she is very funny and still saucy in uniform. (You have to remember that the Army dressed its women with the hope of burying sex appeal.) Just to look after himself, Hawks cast his own girlfriend, Marion Marshall, as Sheridan’s girlfriend. The cast is rounded out by Randy Stuart, William Neff, Eugene Gericke, Ruben Wendorf, Lester Sharpe, and Ken Tobey.
This is the film where Grant has a couple of scenes in drag, but otherwise it is a delicate, dirty-minded comedy about that seldom treated but ugly scar on the face of just and honorable wars—that they get in the way of our sex lives. Meanwhile, Twelve O’Clock High survived without—as far as I recall—a single joke.
I Was Born But… (1932)
The “but” is a crucial conjunction in twentieth-century art, and it’s so remarkable to see it raised in Japan, in 1932, in a silent film. For here is the essential declaration that yes, of course, life is great or fun, “but”—with the question being, Is there something in life inherently deceptive or treacherous to the high purpose—or are we letting it down, by compromising? Of course, with the movies, we are talking not about a Rilke elegy so much as the mass medium of the age, the attempt to embrace all the people, most of the time. And Yasujiro Ozu’s title here is like adding to Capra’s, in 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life, Isn’t It? By the end of the twentieth century, you may decide, there was more robustness in that skepticism than there was in cinema itself. But it is so striking to see the mood arising in Japan—where, like simpletons, we believe a different system prevailed.
As invariably, with Ozu, it is a family story. A father and mother and their two little boys, Ryoichi and Keiji, move from the country to a suburb of Tokyo so the father can be closer to work. It is a measure of his stepping up in the business. The boys have a hard time at first at their new school. They long to have a radio. They play truant and forge reports, But they are found out and their father tells them to improve. They settle down and then one day they see home movies—a crucial sign of technology breaking down the old order of secrecy—taken by the father’s boss in which Father has to clown around to amuse people. He makes faces. He is humiliated. His sons are outraged and they go on a hunger strike. It doesn’t last. Life goes on. The boys have had a first lesson about the way their society is a hierarchy where freedom exists only in carefully defined levels.
You can make I Was Born But… sound like a sociological treatise. In fact, as scripted by Akira Fushimi and Geibei Ibushiya, and with the plucky vigor of the two boys, this is a comedy of manners with a darker lining to it. Indeed, you can easily pick out Ozu’s future mystery (or is he resigned to it?), that life’s plan is so often subverted by petty distinctions and by the ordinary unkindness of others. Ozu seldom sees this as malice. Rather, it is just that others do not have one’s own point of view. It is in every human justification being valid that the great confusion begins—this is surely Renoir. And just as Renoir has a free camera style where any character can take over the mise-en-scène, so Ozu’s style is complete and withdrawn, covering all points of view. In other words, the unity of style and meaning is shared—look at I Was Born But… and, say, Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, and Renoir is more unsinkable just as Ozu may be more pledged to a society founded in order. But the two pictures of life are so close. And if Ozu is so resigned, then why is there such a growing pain in his films? Meanwhile, it’s hard to think of children in an American film of 1932 being treated as such grown-up minds.
J’Accuse (1919/1937)
The story behind J’Accus
e is matchless. Abel Gance (born in 1889) served in the French army at the end of the First World War. An accident at a gas factory nearly killed him, but Gance insisted on returning to the front because he had conceived the idea of an epic, antiwar film. And the story goes that he shot real battle scenes in the last months of the war that easily outstripped any other contemporary war picture. Shot by Léonce Burel, J’Accuse became a sensation. It had a strange, but very Gancean subplot in which two soldiers, in love with the same woman, become deadly rivals. One of them, Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé), becomes the “Christ of the Trenches”—himself just saved from being buried, he calls on the dead to rise up and walk at the end of the film. They are skeletons in uniform, and they revisit the land where they died to see if their deaths were worthwhile. At the same time—and this is Gance again—those scenes are amazingly vivid and unbearably melodramatic. The French military hated the film, but the public was overwhelmed by it.
So then history takes a turn, and in 1937, Gance decides to remake his own film. The second film repeats and abbreviates the action of the first, with Victor Francen in the role of Diaz. Francen is a blessing: Not only does he have a strong, somber face, he is a natural underplayer, and thus works against Gance’s excesses in a very intriguing way. Once more the trench scenes are outstanding and hideous (they surpass the horror of All Quiet on the Western Front).
Then the action moves forward: Diaz has survived, though in unlikely ways—he is the woman of that triangle from the first J’Accuse, but since he promised a dying husband that he would not tell the man’s wife that he loved her, the new relationship suffers. What’s more, his deep pacifist feelings have driven him into… technical work on inventions that will assist war.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 67
