Like every great comic team, Laurel and Hardy are themselves a married couple subject to constant misunderstanding and the threat of violent termination. They are not really safe together, yet they are inseparable, and somehow this bond endures because of an ancient superstition that they are friends and eternal allies in the face of an unkind world. Yet every day, and every minute, they are made aware of not thinking or existing in the same way. Marriage, therefore, is the defiance of natural antagonism, and because—like all comic married people—they never address this problem, they are going mad. What I am describing can be presented in a different light—by Strindberg, say—and so I stress that the comic point-of-view is itself the last defense against terrible violence. But violence has to go somewhere, and in their case it must devastate the external world and its pianos.
One of the funniest jokes in The Music Box is the boys’ eventual discovery from the helpful mailman that they did not have to get the piano up the steep staircase that leads to 1127 Walnut Avenue. There is a road that goes around the hillside to the top level in a manageable way. This is L.A. Suitably enlightened, Oliver and Stanley take the piano down the stairs, put it back in their cart, and make the journey by road. The wisdom contained in this joke, and its sadness, are of such an excruciating nature that it is kind of the short film not to draw attention to them.
Most of the other humor is up front, physical, and beautifully timed, and most of the appeal of the film lies in the gradual way in which a simple mission becomes apocalyptic. From small acorns, great oak trees grow (that is the business motto of these moving men), and in The Music Box we learn to yield to the gravitational force and appeal of destruction. We are enormous neurotics in life: We can’t stand a scratch on our car, a leak in our house, or a typo in our wills. And we strenuously attempt to preserve order, tidiness, and newness. And then film came along with this insatiable urge to destroy and damage and leave ruin in its wake—even when it’s your birthday. There’s no need to be too solemn about the consequences of such silly fun as this, except to say that destruction is the natural end of man’s plans. Comedy is hard; it is evidently painful sometimes; but most of all it is the finish for improvability and religion alike. And a good thing, too, for those dire frauds are fit to be removed. It is the great tidal force in film.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
In 1935, there was only one way to play Mutiny on the Bounty. Captain Bligh was a vicious sadist, gross and awkward; Fletcher Christian—though he had to lose Clark Gable’s mustache (naval regulations)—was tanned, urbane, a knockout and a natural leader of any insurrection against tyranny and overacting. This was an Irving Thalberg project, a very big film for Metro, with a carefully reconstructed Bounty even if it was put to no more test than the waters off Catalina. In the end, the picture cost close to $2 million and helped secure the wisdom that sea pictures were trouble.
It was based on a novel written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, published in 1932, narrated in old age by a midshipman from the Bounty. It seems that director Frank Lloyd bought the rights for himself—he meant to direct it and to play Bligh. But somehow or other Thalberg talked him into this deal: Charles Laughton would be Bligh; Lloyd would direct and coproduce.
As was typical of costume and adventure pictures at Metro in those days, rather more effort went into the clothes and the rigging than into the story. So there’s not much hint of Fletcher Christian and the crew as other than good-natured fellows bound to mutiny against the cruelty and mania of Bligh. The actors worked accordingly. Laughton turned himself into a monster of self-disgust—this Bligh hates the world, but we never doubt that the disease began in warped self-regard.
Gable declined to use an English accent or to be more than Gable. At first, he seems to have found Laughton a chilly fusspot, and there were times during the shoot when Laughton declared himself physically afraid of the robust Gable. This was Laughton’s way of taking on a part and Gable’s of remaining himself. In the end, they became friendly and Gable trusted that the script was on his side, so Laughton could act his head off.
It was scripted by Carey Wilson, Talbot Jennings, and Jules Furthman, and John Farrow helped. The confrontation of good and evil is not subtle or ambiguous. The only real dramatic interest lies in the depths and curlicues of Laughton’s depression, and the way he rallies when cast adrift. It was as if he knew that he had found his most hateful role and the one that every impersonator would hammer at.
Studio boss Nick Schenck hated the film, but he was alone. It won Best Picture but not Best Director for Lloyd (that went to John Ford for The Informer). Laughton, Gable, and Franchot Tone all lost Best Actor to Victor McLaglen, and Laughton also lost Thalberg (his favorite producer). Nowadays, the generosity to The Informer looks very odd. Mutiny on the Bounty was a great hit, a film that passed into folklore: For decades, boys crouched, and lisped, “Mr. Christian!” as if they had had a whiff of evil.
Later films ruined the simple setup—notably Brando as a Fletcher Christian from Harrods. But Brando got into Tahiti and its women with a zest that is treated very tactfully in the 1935 film, despite the presence of “Movita” as an authentic babe of the islands.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Blame it on the 1959 Ben-Hur. What was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to do when that remake of an archaic monument turned into a hit and a Best Picture? They announced that epic remakes were now a policy, and they nearly destroyed themselves. The second Mutiny on the Bounty is still the best demonstration of the last days of Hollywood and the awful end of everybody. It is also a better film than legend would have it, so you can survey the death wish and signs of life at the same time.
From Canadian shipyards, M-G-M commissioned the building of a new Bounty, a third again as big as the original. They wanted it to look good, and in the end they sailed it along the west coast of the U.S.A. in a forlorn attempt to promote their picture. Not that everything looked ruinous at first. Marlon Brando had agreed to play Fletcher Christian and declared himself full of enthusiasm that the film’s story would go on after the mutiny, for the chance at an English accent and for his deal—he got $500,000 plus 10 percent of the gross, $10,000 a week in expenses, plus $5,000 a day for every day over schedule. Plus script approval.
Carol Reed would direct. Trevor Howard would play Bligh. And Eric Ambler’s screenplay would bypass the 1935 picture and go back to historical research, including Christian being more of a gentleman than Bligh, and what happened on Pitcairn Island when the mutineers found their Shangri-la.
The trouble began as Brando would call Ambler and Reed up to his house on Mulholland and lecture them about the script and its defects. Ambler quoted history and fact, Reed gently urged the needs of drama. Brando indicated that it was his picture, and even producer Aaron Rosenberg had to allow that this was so. At $3,000 a week, Ambler decided he was too old—and a troop of other writers started. This was an exact prediction of what would happen with Reed once shooting began.
Reed had an English cast lined up: Richard Harris, Percy Herbert, Hugh Griffith, Richard Haydn, Tim Seely, Gordon Jackson. They took sides (with Reed and Howard) and so the fictional hero of the ship, Brando, was loathed by everyone. And Brando started to take over the direction. Reed departed, Lewis Milestone (age sixty-seven) came in, and did his best. But as Brando took over a scene, Milestone wandered away. Where are you going? the producer asked. I’ll see it when it opens, said Milestone.
The three-hour movie cost $27 million and earned $10 million (so Brando took another $1 million off that wretched gross). But somehow, Ambler, Reed, and Milestone left a portrait of the spoiled, sulky Christian as the mutineer who casts himself adrift by his actions. It’s palpable that Howard despised Brando and in their last scene the dialogue is one actor telling another that he’s an unprofessional lout. Inadvertently, Brando becomes a kind of Hamlet on the Bounty. Put that next to the vivid Tahitian color and a good score by Bronislau Kaper, and you can see a real movie struggling to
survive. But by 1962, the system had smothered its product.
My Darling Clementine (1946)
It’s a classic American story—ripe for comedy or farce as much as hero worship—how Wyatt Earp, gambler, businessman, all-purpose operator on the frontier, should come to have the Lincolnian resonance and easygoing gravity of Henry Fonda. Just after the war, turning to the Earp story, John Ford’s head was filled with the legend of the O.K. Corral and Stuart N. Lake’s alleged biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, published in 1929. The real history was ignored, including the way that in Earp’s crowded, turbulent life he was a frontier marshal for just a few years, but always someone trying to survive and make a buck.
Winston Miller’s script is a classic of hagiography, in which the Earps are gentlemen cowboys and not just rough opportunists. Tombstone appears to have shifted its geographical base to Monument Valley. And the Clanton family are low-down varmints, headed by that snake in the grass Walter Brennan and a vicious kid, John Ireland. The only departure from cliché is that Doc Holliday should be not an actor on a merciless diet but the burnished Victor Mature, as robust as any star (he would be snapping lions’ jawbones in a couple of years) and aglow with the health of self-love. Ford gives him a large white handkerchief into which he may cough—or is he smothering laughter?
We know who wins it all, because every aspect of the film is fixed on who ought to win. The reality of a place like Tombstone, of its need to be controlled for business and law, is sadly neglected. It is somehow assumed that the Earps (Tim Holt and Ward Bond play Wyatt’s brothers) were just a family born into the line of duty and service. They dress like cowboys, and they do entertain modest relations with ladies (as opposed to Doc’s thing with Chihuahua—Linda Darnell), but they are clerics of law and order. We note how easily Ward Bond could slip over from Texas ranger to preacher.
The one extra is that passage in the film where Wyatt goes to a barber, lolls elegantly in a chair, and then walks himself up to Sunday meeting where we find real building going on in Tombstone. It’s a moment of near authenticity amid all the Western conventions, and it cries out for something blunter than the decorous dance of Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs (who plays a girl called Clementine!). Much as one admires the sequence, and Fonda’s awkwardness at the dance, the historian sighs for the real Wyatt Earp who was adding to upset in Tombstone by going with a Jewish actress supposedly the mistress of Sheriff Behan.
The photography by Joseph MacDonald is stark. Cyril Mockridge does the conventional music. Lyle Wheeler and James Basevi did the art direction, including the new church. Still, this Tombstone is a myth and a shrine, and never a place where now means now, with its share of fun and danger.
Years later, with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford raised the question of truth or legend. But from films like My Darling Clementine there can be no doubt about which he preferred.
My Fair Lady (1964)
The musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion opened in New York in March 1956 and played 2,717 performances; it then moved to London and ran for another 2,281. Of course, there would be a movie, and the rights were sold by CBS and William Paley to Warner Brothers for $5 million. (But CBS was to get 50 percent of the gross over $20 million.) Seemingly, the transfer would be simple and tidy—the book by Alan Jay Lerner, the music by Frederick Loewe.
But on a project of such potential and investment, Jack Warner determined that he would produce the picture personally. His first move was to say that Julie Andrews (the toast of New York and London) was not a movie star. True, she hadn’t made a picture yet. Lerner was horrified at the thought of dropping her. But it was serious: Warner would pay Audrey Hepburn $1 million to do the part, and be dubbed in the singing (by Marni Nixon). Warner then wondered about Cary Grant as Higgins with James Cagney as Doolittle. It was Grant who crushed that idea, and so the movie settled for Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway repeating their stage roles.
George Cukor was hired to direct, and he was a sensible choice. So was Cecil Beaton to do the sets and costumes. No one could really anticipate that a war would develop between the two men and make the production more extended and troubled than was necessary. Beaton regarded Cukor as a Nazi! Cukor would say later that Beaton’s sets were so difficult to build that Gene Allen did a lot of the work. Harry Stradling photographed the film. Hermes Pan did the dances. André Previn orchestrated the score. The supporting cast included Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jeremy Brett, Gladys Cooper, Theodore Bikel, and Mona Washbourne.
And really, it’s all right, even if Rex Harrison takes over the show. It works. But it had cost $17 million in the end, and its rentals stopped at $30 million. Remember the CBS cut on the gross. It was profitable, but not by much. At the same time, Disney made Mary Poppins just to prove that Julie Andrews could carry a film. What happened? Well, the My Fair Lady score was overly familiar. The Shaw estate was against any changes in the play. Audrey was unhappy—and I think it shows. And Cukor’s fight with Beaton did damage. But it won Best Picture. At last Cukor got his Oscar. Harrison won, and there were other Oscars for Stradling, Beaton, and Previn. But at 170 minutes, it seemed old-fashioned. When a show plays as widely as this one had, and when the long-playing record has sold in commensurate numbers, too many people in the audience were checking the film against a text in their heads. There was too little surprise or discovery.
My Man Godfrey (1936)
One may argue with the conclusion of My Man Godfrey (more anon), but is there a more beautiful beginning? I mean the credit sequence of the film, the lights of the titles with a Doré-like view of the Brooklyn Bridge and spilling down beside it the city dump (no. 32, actually), which looks like nothing so much as a landslide of diamonds. In 1936, the boldness of a dump worth millions was for the public to explain. But it is, simply, a stunning movie opening, and the prelude to that very noir sequence—though far too serious for noiristas to take seriously—in which the Bullock sisters come looking for a forgotten man. They are Carole Lombard (Irene) and Gail Patrick (Cornelia), and we need to catch all the subtexts between them, for these are sisters at war—the one wants the other to go mad. And he is Godfrey, gentleman resident of the dump, a habitué who says “bonsoir” to his fellows.
The film came from a novel by Eric Hatch, and it was scripted by Hatch and Morrie Ryskind. The director was Gregory La Cava. And we are dealing with one of the most amazing screwball comedies ever made, in which the poor behave decently and quietly and the rich are demented monkeys. As Eugene Pallette says, early on, there’s nothing so special about an asylum—all you need is an empty room and the right kind of people. And the effervescence of the first half of the film is exactly that of a mob coming into a great salon, or champagne going into a fresh glass. The frenzy of characters as so many report from the scavenger hunt is beautifully handled—it is a dance, yet it is so close to real madness. And Godfrey will be engaged as butler to the Bullocks even if one sister (Patrick) means to torture and humiliate him, while the other needs him for her rescue.
Ted Tetzlaff photographed it with just the diamonds-on-black-velvet look he brought to Swing High, Swing Low. The women’s dresses are exquisite, sheer and very sexy, and William Powell’s butler is one of the handful of most elegant men ever to appear in American films. But for half the picture this is scorching social satire—you feel if it could go all the way, the house of cards might collapse. Did La Cava intend that? Or was there always the intention to play safe? Whatever, another narrative takes over. Godfrey and Irene (Lombard) are in love, and Godfrey, of course, is not quite what he seems. So, finally it is possible to forget the cannibalistic jokes and to see this crazed society reordering itself. If only La Cava could have found the necessary cruelty while keeping the wit—if only this Manhattan could be swept aside by a tempest.
Never mind, we are at a point here where within the legitimate confines of screwball comedy we have seen the end of the known world and the threadbare condition of its aristocracy. A film to tre
asure as it gambles away our capital—with Alice Brady, Mischa Auer, Alan Mowbray, Franklin Pangborn, and Jean Dixon.
Mystic River (2003)
Clint Eastwood easily seems like one of film’s few aristocrats now (the Count of Malpaso Creek), so it’s useful to remember his blue-collar Californian upbringing. And something vital of that pragmatic, survivor’s toughness adheres, so Mystic River is, first of all, a study in Boston Irish toughies as good as has ever been done, leaving you in little doubt that the city that pioneered Independence can also be nasty, mean-spirited, and racist. But if you think back to the directorial career of Eastwood, if you go back to Play Misty for Me, you can see that that was a trick too dolled up with modish advertising airs and a misogynist panic to be a hip picture, whereas Mystic River is nothing less than a candid look at unhappy lives. There’s no need—in my book—to read Eastwood as an artist, but very few filmmakers have shown such steady improvement.
So Mystic River is a tribal picture, really, about blunt, fearless savages who stick together even if three boyhood friends have turned out so differently. One day in 1975, one of them, Dave, was kidnapped and sexually abused—he turned out to be Tim Robbins in an ashamed performance of unhealed trauma. Another, Sean (Kevin Bacon), is a cop. And the third, Jimmy Markum, is a small-time kingpin, a local power and hoodlum, as well as maybe the best and most revealing part ever given to that uneasy mixture of sparrowhawk and fighting cock in Sean Penn.
It’s a convoluted plot, a knitting together of past and present, that kicks off with the murder of one of Markum’s children. It comes from a Dennis Lehane novel, with a good script by Brian Helgeland that requires labor and patience from the audience. Yes, it turns out very badly in a case and a context where the police have only so much power. But we are too ragged and brutalized by now to surrender the great white lie that the cops are going to clear everything up. In this world, nothing is designed to be tidy or comfortable. This is a part of the world and a reach of life where the nominal authorities know when to leave things alone.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 94
