Like many people—and Chaplin had toured the world—Charlie was distraught at the economic depression and the rise of fascism. He had seen automobile works in Detroit and he recognized the inhumanity in elaborate production lines—note, he had also appreciated the opportunities for comedy such as Buster Keaton had explored years earlier in The Navigator. He spoke out about such things in his naïve way, without acknowledging that mass production was part of an economy that might save the world. He never noted that movie was the industrialization of the image.
But he would make a film in which the Tramp fell foul of the mechanized production system—and made the audience laugh. There are union crowds in Modern Times, demonstrating and rioting, and Chaplin wags his finger at them disapprovingly. Still, the Tramp is driven to a breakdown by the system and he is largely rescued by the “gamin” (a role for his new girl, Paulette Goddard), and by far the most beautiful, tomboyish, and aggressive woman he ever put in a movie. And so the film ends with Tramp and girl disappearing down the endless road to the theme “Smile” (credited to Chaplin himself).
There was no talk, but Chaplin did want music, and he ended up hiring the very young David Raksin to help him. They fought a lot. Raksin was fired a couple of times, and he did not refrain from pointing out that the most autocratic boss he had ever heard of was named Chaplin. At the same time, Chaplin doubted that he would ever use the tramp character again: it was just that he did not know how to make that character appealing with talk.
The movie opened and had rentals of just over $1 million—in other words, it did far less well than The Gold Rush or City Lights. Why was that? Was the audience impatient with silence? Was the humor here too literally mechanical? Or was there the beginning of a movement against Chaplin in the public? Was it just that Charlie had been too big too long? You can take your pick, but I think it’s true that the comedy is oddly detached from any theme. Machinery isn’t the end of the world. Even Detroit was a scene of fresh opportunity for millions of ex-tramps.
Mommie Dearest (1981)
Joan Crawford died in 1977. Four years later, this film was a lurid hit that dragged campness into the mainstream and which has largely determined the ways in which succeeding generations regard Crawford. I don’t mean to be pious about this. By and large, the children of Hollywood stars—whether natural or adopted—have had a very hard time of it, and surely they have some right to revenge and a chance to clean up. It may be that Christina Crawford (author of the original book) was abominably treated by a capricious monster. Yet she was rescued, she was spoiled, she was raised to lofty levels of spending—such as her book could maintain. I can believe that Joan Crawford was often an unhappy woman, mocked and patronized by her employers, and not easily given to the warm maternal touch that might have kept Christina sweet.
On the other hand, Joan Crawford once was ravishing; she was a sexpot, and a very good actress; and she survived through thick and thin. She deserves better of us than this very one-sided and horribly complacent demolition. I have to add that the enduring audience for Mommie Dearest has been gay, sardonic, and rather cruel. I can see how the history and iconography of Hollywood have gained that whiplash audience. But again, it is so much less than the full story. You have only to look at a few Crawford films to know that she was so much more interesting a person.
Mommie Dearest was scripted by director Frank Perry and producer Frank Yablans, with the help of Tracy Hotchner and Robert Getchell. It fixes on the period from 1939 until 1977, and of course that is sufficient to rule out the very tough years in which Joan Crawford made it from San Antonio to be an international star. Faye Dunaway plays the lead, and she offers an excruciating impersonation. She was not nominated for an Oscar, and I think the theory is plausible that she damaged her own career a lot by taking the part. There were plenty of people in Hollywood who knew bad stuff about Joan who still flinch from this merciless treatment.
By contrast, Diana Scarwid gives a very good performance as Christina. Howard Da Silva plays Louis B. Mayer without subtlety. But the film lacks a great deal in terms of atmosphere: it is far more Grand Guignol than a social commentary about the ways in which an ardent young woman could be altered by the movies that made her famous. This is a great subject, and we need as much sober work on it as possible. But Mommie Dearest seems like a forerunner of the new gossip press that builds flimsy figures into stars so that it can then rip them to pieces. It’s far too late to expect an honest or thorough portrait of Joan Crawford. But everything we learn about the making of our stars suggests an uncommon ordeal and a rare mix of courage, stamina, and humor. What Christina Crawford never seems to get is how Mildred Pierce had told the story so much better.
Monkey Business (1952)
It was a treatment called, “Darling, I Am Growing Younger” by a newcomer named I. A. L. Diamond, and Howard Hawks liked it a lot. On the one hand, that interest was an admission of the clever setup: laboratory bent on searching for the secret of rejuvenation; a magical serum accidentally arrived at, and randomly distributed thanks to the chimpanzees who served as test cases. Of course, this was in the good old days when America’s interest in rejuvenation depended on wonder drugs instead of on sheer stupidity. In those days people more or less acted their age, except that Howard Hawks had an extra-personal interest in the story to the extent that, close to fifty-five, he was dating a woman in her early twenties (this was Dee Hartford, a knockout who became Dee Hawks in 1953). Of course, picture people are different—or are they pioneers, full of the need to break unbroken ground?
The treatment was passed on to Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer and they turned it into a spiffy script that filled Fox with glee. Fifty-six years later and counting, it is a very funny film, a version of screwball as if done from lawn chairs at the end of a fine summer evening. What I mean by that is the gentlemanly air of expertise which starts right off with a bemused Cary Grant ready to begin the movie and the dry, caustic voice of Howard Hawks telling him, “Not quite yet, Cary.” It’s like Babe Ruth pointing to the spot. Bringing Up Baby—its clearest antecedent—is frantic and headlong, whereas in this picture Hawks and Grant seem to be enjoying themselves, rerunning a classic game from their own youth. And nostalgia may be the most active antidote to rejuvenation.
Ginger Rogers is the wife and she works hard and does fine, yet somehow you know that Hawks was bored by her. This is a married couple, a subject that Hawks seldom touched onscreen or allowed to interfere with his deep interest in seduction. So Marilyn Monroe gets a fuller run as Lois Laurel, the voluptuous office secretary who is eyed with the same interest by the chimpanzees and by Oliver Oxley (Charles Coburn), the old man who is putting up the money for this research and who plainly longs for the Viagra assist that will get him into Laurel’s bush.
I would like to apologize for that, and I would, but apologies mean so little in the world of Hawks and, truly, the joke gets the level of innuendo as well as anything else I can think of. In other words, a Breen Office worth its salt would have burned this lewd and cunning picture and flogged Hawks on Pico Boulevard (outside the Fox premises). As it is, we are left with one of the most casual masterpieces ever made. That said, a film about these guys doing this picture while Howard was trying to act twenty-two (and Grant was chasing some youth) might have been heaven. Thank God, Howard Hawks had some vestiges of dignity, with Cary Grant along to keep everything professional.
Of course, it would be very hard to remake just because so many people now have learned to think young without any help from drugs, surgery, or religious conversion. Our immaturity has become entirely natural.
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
The story goes that in 1941, Orson Welles gave Chaplin the idea for a picture called The Ladykiller based on the French mass murderer Landru. Chaplin snapped it up and paid Welles $5,000. He said it was an idea, Orson said it was a script. Go pick. Five years later, Chaplin had his script. He called it Comedy of Murders. He showed it to the Breen Office and they scol
ded him as thoroughly as they could. Charlie responded with venom. What the Breen people were doing was tantamount to limiting his freedom of speech. He easily read that response into the hostile attitude of many in the government. Yet an idiot would have known that the script raised problems for the Code on every page. And an innocent clerk in that office—if he or she existed—might have sighed and wondered how so benevolent an artist had come to this gloating portrait of cruelty.
Chaplin’s answer was that the world was now into so much mass killing, who could measure the individual losses? He had been harried and harassed, and it is not too hard to portray Charlie as a victim by 1947. On the other hand, his tyrannical side had grown, his cruelty had built, and he had surely lost touch with what was or was not funny. When he hired Robert Florey as his assistant on the project, he was soon fighting with his own man, leaving Florey aghast that so much of Chaplin’s art had atrophied. Far more than Chaplin realized, his spirit had turned to antisocial thoughts, to violence and to a sense of his own need for vengeance. I think there is no doubt but that he was so dismayed by the world’s heartlessness that he felt compelled to make a satire on it. But his artistry and his own sentiments were now out of control. So it’s hard not to feel the misanthropy in the film. As Roger Manvell said of late Chaplin: “These films are laments for the human soul lost in the devil’s politics of our time.”
Seldom does it feel like a comedy, and thus the genuine comic interludes seem forced or unreal. What holds us most in the film is Verdoux’s quiet pessimism as he watches the “lost girl” become the mistress of an arms dealer. She tells him that life must go on, but Verdoux has a list in his head of those who deserve to die. And he is self-appointed to the task, the melodrama of which plainly thrills him. It is a film Adenoid Hynkel might have dreamed.
Rollie Totheroh shot it, and the cast includes Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom, Martha Raye, Irving Bacon, and William Frawley. It did terrible business in most of the world—only the French really approved of it—and it undoubtedly dictated the course of the next few years for Chaplin, notably his exile from America. It has to be seen, just as Chaplin has to be esteemed as the crucial figure in film history. You can easily conclude that Chaplin forgot the lesson of Sullivan’s Travels—or that he needed someone as brilliant and modern as Sturges to direct this film. But Monsieur Verdoux is heartfelt. That is what makes it so troubling.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74)
My title refers to the original forty-five shows, undertaken by the BBC and all shown in Britain as part of the regular television programming before they had their debut in America. It’s important to stress that subversive, institutional nature. Set up big in movie theaters, where they had many notable coups, the Python gang movies could never match the hallucination and the unraveling of that very silly thing—regular, steady TV—or the sense that “the right time” and British decorum had been taken over by program snatchers. To be sure, Python was funny, but never forget the underlying threat that a band of ruffians have taken over the institution of broadcasting. There is nothing as suggestive in television as that rumor, or innuendo—and Monty Pythonism was a version of anarchy always focused on the bland if benign totalitarianism of BBC television. “And now for something completely different”—indeed. I can think of no other program, show, or movie that so fruitfully drew upon the dynamic of interruption, the great risk but the great hope for a society where steady programming is the last imprint of the state and its drab plans for us.
The comparison with Invasion of the Body Snatchers is relevant, I think. For example, with the screening of the strenuous but misguided The Invasion in 2007, a profound truth emerged. Whereas in the mid-fifties it was all very well to play that story line with people good and pods bad, today the opposite view begs attention. Suppose that poddery is already in: as advertising, the “Net,” regular TV coverage of everything; weather reports; stock market numbers; sports scores. Isn’t it time by now for a pod that breathes poetry, error, and l’amour fou into this airconditioned nightmare?
Make no mistake, the very elaborate technological enterprise of film and television cries out for insurrection—the Marx Brothers knew that (even if they were politically empty-headed) and so did the Pythons. Thus you have to start your assessment of their show by saying: If you had to devise an ideal TV network, the BBC would be very close to it—tolerant of diversity and minority tastes; risk taking; silly and serious; and with responsibility. All pluses for effort. But nothing takes away from the fact that a network cannot help but turn us into fish. In which case the primary thrust of a radical show must be to try to destroy the net and its tidiness. Nothing was as miraculous in Monty Python as the cockeyed view that regarded the rest of the evening’s shows.
The boys were John Cleese, one of the great desperate clowns (as witness Fawlty Towers), Terry Jones (maybe the most directorial), Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam. Yes, they made “proper” films and some have moments of sublime filth and unreason. But the TV show was the thing and the shining example that the insane can not just take over the asylum but cleanse it.
The More the Merrier (1943)
Once war was under way, it was tough for people passing through Washington, D.C., to get a room, or even a bed. That is the basis for this delightful, and unexpectedly sexy, comedy, written by Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, and Lewis R. Foster (they shared an Oscar nomination and lost to Casablanca) and directed by George Stevens. But the story is not quite as simple as that. Garson Kanin met one of the four writers, Frank Ross, and Ross’s wife, the actress Jean Arthur. She complained of the poor material she was being offered at her studio, Columbia. For $25,000, Kanin offered to write a script that Ross could then sell to Harry Cohn at Columbia. Indeed, when the key meeting came, it was Kanin who read the script aloud to Cohn, and won him over. Of course, the credits reflect none of this.
Arthur would play Connie Milligan, a young woman working for the government and of a rather clerical turn of mind. Connie is engaged to Charles Pendergast (Richard Gaines), a self-important bureaucrat. Better than that, Connie has a D.C. apartment. Half of which she has let to Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), a millionaire who seems to be retired, but who wants to be close to the action. (He has a motto, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”) Along comes Sergeant Joe Carter (Joel McCrea) from the Air Force, in desperate need of a place to stay. Thinking of Connie’s sparse romantic life, Dingle lets Joe have half of his half.
It is a comedy of space and manners, in which as square footage goes through impossible stretchings for the war effort, so the cut-and-dried Connie becomes a looser woman whenever Joe is around. This was really Coburn’s first opportunity to play a naughty if matchmaking old man—though he is not entirely immune to Connie’s charms (Coburn was only sixty-five at the time). But he intrigues to bring Joe and Connie together, a task helped by the uncanny chemistry between them. Jean Arthur at this time was a leading comedienne, but a shy woman resigned to her reputation for being difficult. Meanwhile, McCrea told everyone who hired him that he knew he was their second choice. But it’s about time to admit that McCrea had a wondrous charm, and fire-warning sex appeal.
Their great moment occurs in the doorstep scene, where Connie and Joe have just had dinner together for the first time. What follows was supposedly improvised: McCrea is gruff and taciturn, but he is feeling for her, and bit by bit the officious Connie is reduced to helpless womanhood. It ends in her seizing his face as if it were a jug of water and slaking her thirst. It is one of the great wooing scenes in American film, and a beautiful portrait of how in 1943 things could happen.
Ted Tetzlaff did the photography, Lionel Banks did the art direction, and there’s a song by Leigh Harline. The rest of the cast includes Bruce Bennett, Frank Sully, Don Douglas, Clyde Fillmore, Stanley Clements, Grady Sutton, and Ann Savage. Jean Arthur was Oscar-nominated but not McCrea, and Coburn won the Supporting Actor Oscar.
Mor
occo (1930)
“Why don’t you just marry her?” hissed Riza Royce von Sternberg to her husband Jo. This was 1930, in Los Angeles. Josef von Sternberg was designated in Marlene Dietrich’s new contract with Paramount as her only director. Then Lubitsch, the fox, sought to shoot a cameo on Dietrich in a studio promotional package, but Sternberg had stepped in, argued the law, and done the segment himself with Marlene in a white tuxedo. It was a sensation. Next, Jo put his actress in an apartment across the corridor from the one he shared with his wife. That’s when Riza threw her hissy fit, and Sternberg came back with, “I’d sooner share a telephone booth with a frightened cobra.”
I know, you want to see that film now, with Riza launching a divorce and Jo spending hours and days with his discovery. He got her to diet (she had been pastry-plump in Berlin); he redirected her eyebrows; he had her work on her English; and then he got top stills artists in, and had her pose for new publicity pictures. According to Steven Bach’s biography, Marlene thought they depicted the most beautiful creature on earth, but not quite her.
And so Morocco began, from a book called Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny, that Marlene had given to Sternberg. It’s racier than the film, describing a high-class Parisian prostitute who follows the Foreign Legion to North Africa, does cocaine and lesbianism, and falls for a taciturn legionnaire. It’s the story of a romantic sophisticate and a sexual expert (Amy) who gives up career, liberty, and her Parisian shoes to be a desert camp follower to Tom Brown, who likes her, and likes her yielding of all dignity to him, but who would never settle with her. Near enough, that’s how Jo and Dietrich were getting on: he gave up marriage, dignity, and freedom; she respected and learned from his artistry, she surely let him in and out of her bed a few times when the schedule permitted, but she never settled with him.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 91
