Capra worked closely with Swerling on the script. “I have to absorb [the script],” the director said, “and like it in order to interpret it on the screen. Even though somebody else wrote it, it becomes yours before you’re through with it.”
• • •
To be at the studio each morning at 7:00, Barbara left her house in Malibu at 5:00 a.m. to drive the forty miles to Gower Street. It took a full hour to put on makeup and another hour for hair; by 9:00 a.m., the company was ready to start shooting.
For the picture’s opening scene, Florence Fallon comes before the parishioners to give her father’s farewell sermon. Barbara walks quietly, hesitating a beat before those in the pews. She is wearing a black dress with wide white cuffs and collar. The church her father preached in is a simple white-clapboard building, and Florence has the stark look of a Puritan, perhaps a Hester Prynne.
Barbara looks out at the men and a few women, simple folks, sitting and waiting to hear what she has to say. Her face has a set expression. She begins to read from the notes before her on the pulpit.
Her voice is quiet: “This morning my father was to deliver his farewell sermon to you. But he has been ill as you all know. And today he cannot be with you.” Barbara’s voice is soft; she is holding herself together; not looking directly at the churchgoers.
“I have it here and I am going to read it to you.”
She speaks as the dutiful daughter whose voice is young, reading the sermon her father had dictated to her, as he had for so many years. The camera pulls back to the rear of the church and shows Sister Fallon in front of the room, still, alone, sorrowful, but proud.
“I have baptized many of you in the Lord’s grace.” She continues to read, her voice a monotone, making it clear she is reading by rote; the words are of little value to her.
She raises her eyes now to look out at those around her. “And though I leave you, I do not leave the Lord.” The camera looks up at her as one of those listening to her father’s words. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. When the heart is thirsty, there is drink.” Her voice softens; there is love in her words, the love she feels for her father and for the familiar words that will comfort her and carry her through this difficult time. “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth—” She lifts her eyes, and stops speaking, and looks out at the parishioners, wary.
“That’s as far as he got. This is his farewell message to you.” She stiffens. “You see that he stopped in the middle of a sentence.
“My father is dead.” Whatever restraint she was able to find gives way to a quiet power. “He died in my arms five minutes ago before he could finish his message to you. But I am going to finish it for him.” Her words are an indictment.
She comes out from behind the lectern. The flatness of her words is gone as her voice rises up against the parishioners. “My father preached to empty hearts. I don’t mind talking to empty pews.” She is crying, her words piercing the sanctity of the room. “My father is dead and you killed him. You crucified him just as surely as He was crucified.” The camera is behind her as we see her fragile girl’s arm pointing to a stained-glass window that shows Christ on the cross.
Her words reverberate throughout the room as members of the congregation stand up to get away from her berating and the truth. Her tirade is shocking, hard to listen to. Her eyes are ablaze. “This isn’t a house of God. This is a meeting place for hypocrites. Go on, get out.” She is fighting with everything she’s got, screaming at the church deacon, “You’ve been running this church, but I’m going to run it for the next hour. I’m going to preach the sermon my father should have preached. The Bible says the laborer is worthy of his hire.” She is following the parishioners in the aisle, walking after them, her words like fire as they try to get away from her. “But you wouldn’t pay your pastor what you pay your children . . . I was brought up on the Bible and I know it by heart. I’m going to take my text this morning from chapter 23 of the Gospel of Matthew.” She is beating them down with the force of her words: “And I say unto you, as Christ said to the scribes and the Pharisees, ‘Woe unto you hypocrites for you devour widows’ houses and as a pretense you . . . make long prayers.’ ”
Frank Capra (center, in light suit) filming Broadway Bill, 1934. (PHOTOFEST)
Those who are trying to get out of the church look back and call out that she is crazy. She is crazy; she has become crazy before the parishioners, but she won’t stop talking as she advances toward them. “Go on, get out, all of you. Get out so I can open these windows and let some fresh air into this church.”
The parishioners have fled her rage. She shuts the church doors, sobbing, exhausted, alone in the house of the Lord. A man (Sam Hardy) applauds her performance. She looks up at him. He tries to sell her a line of how magnificent she was. She is all business; the softness is gone. She tells him she isn’t interested in what he has to offer.
• • •
Capra decided to get to the heart of the scene, the vital close-ups of Barbara, first. Multiple cameras were set up on her. If different shots, different setups were used, he’d “never get the same scene again,” and with multiple cameras Barbara only had to do the scene once.
David Manners as John Carson, the lonely, blind songwriter who’s given up on life and is reawakened by Sister Fallon, charming her with “Sambo, the Hoofer,” a dancing whirligig, as Pagliacci the clown (not shown) plays a mechanical xylophone and pounds out “Farmer in the Dell.”
Because of the two or three cameras, Capra shot a close-up of Barbara in profile. When he wanted to have her full face, to see both eyes and have a stronger impact of her performance with the close over-the-shoulder two-shot, the camera was moved deep into the set, and Barbara did the scene again, performing it with the same emotional power that she had before. Using two or three cameras made it more difficult for the crew. “Multiple cameras aggravate the difficulties of lighting and recording,” Capra said. “Four times as complex with two cameras, eight times with three cameras.” But Capra made it clear to the crew that “they were working for the actors. They’re not working for you.”
Capra blocked out the scene with the actors and crew and shot Barbara’s close-ups first instead of the establishing shot. “It’s all right if you have one or two people,” said Barbara. “But if you have four or five people in a scene, working backwards is very difficult for a director, because he’s got to remember all the places. But Mr. Capra made it easy for me.”
In the next shot Barbara is with her deceased father, sitting on the floor at his feet as he, undisturbed, sits in a wingback chair with its back turned toward the camera. Her body is caressing the sleeve of his jacket, her body almost like a pietà. The swindler has come to the door to search her out. As she rises, startled, and asks, “Who’s there?” the softness in her face disappears. She is guarded and shuts the door to the sacred room of love.
From scene to scene Capra alternately showed Barbara’s steeliness, her playfulness and softness, her tenderness and openness, her sense of what is love and what isn’t.
David Manners, a twenty-nine-year-old contract player, was lent from Warner–First National to Columbia for the part of John Carson, the young blind songwriter. Manners had appeared in Mothers Cry and in the just-released Dracula as John Harker. As John Carson of The Miracle Woman, Manners, a romantic who’d dreamed of becoming a sea captain from his boyhood in Nova Scotia, came through as a man of deep feeling, of artistic temperament and sensitivity. Even his real name conjured up wilder shores: Rauff de Ryther Duan Acklom. While Manners had longed to be an actor, he’d graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in forestry and somehow made it to New York, found work in the Theatre Guild, and went out to Hollywood.
Capra used Barbara’s scenes with John Carson at his apartment to reveal the unfettered Floren
ce Fallon: childlike, loving, touched by the innocence of Carson’s soul, and transformed by his kindness into the real miracle woman, able to bring happiness and love to a man who has given up on life. It is in his apartment that John Carson’s sincerity and maladroitness open her up and show her to be soft and true.
As she preaches to her thousands of followers in the lions’ cage at the Temple of Happiness with her arms open and outstretched, looking diaphanous in the stream of her white chiffon robes that seem like the wings of an angel, Sister Fallon is seemingly lit from within. She stands with the lions pacing behind her in “a cage of fear, [with] bars of doubt . . . among beasts that tear and destroy,” and assures her flock that “behold they cannot hurt me . . . if you come into this cage with love and understanding in your heart” because finally “there is no fear in God’s kingdom.” Florence knows it is a fake but draws her boundaries (“When I’m out there talking to those people, I’ve got to make it seem real, or I can’t put it over”).
It isn’t until she leaves the tabernacle one night on her way to a party—a week after John Carson has gone to see Sister Fallon for himself and has come forward from the bleachers to enter the lions’ den with her, sincere, willing, giving—“Blessed are the blind who cannot see fear,” Sister Florence intones to him as he stands with her in the cage with lions behind them both . . . “Faith, you have shown it brother, by coming up here with me tonight, and I solemnly promise when the day will come and your faith will be rewarded”—that Florence is shown the way out from her deceit and from being truly tainted.
Sister Fallon with Carson at her Temple of Happiness, preaching to her followers that she and her fellow believer, “among the beasts that tear and destroy,” are unharmed, from The Miracle Woman, 1931. (PHOTOFEST)
It is raining heavily late at night. John Carson is standing at the stage door waiting for a chance to talk with Sister. She leaves the building, dressed to go out for the evening, sees that it’s raining, and asks a man standing near her to run to tell her chauffeur to escort her with an umbrella. She doesn’t recognize the man who a week before had come forward out of the audience to stand with her in the lions’ den. She realizes that he is blind and, embarrassed, asks if she can give him a lift in her car. She bundles him under her umbrella and takes him in out of the rain.
When they arrive at his apartment and step out of her limousine, she is wearing his fedora and overcoat to protect herself from getting wet; he stands shyly at the door of his building. She insists on going up to his apartment, and when they reach the top floor, she asks if she may take off his hat and stay awhile. Shyly, he begins to entertain her with his two “friends,” which he takes out of a cedar chest: “Pagliacci the clown” that plays a mechanical xylophone, and “Sambo the hoofer,” a dancing whirligig.
“What would you like to hear?” John asks Florence. “Ballads, songs, symphonies?” When she responds, “A bit of opera,” the little clown begins to pound out “Farmer in the Dell”; Sambo dances along in accompaniment to the music of the xylophone. With the second chorus, Florence joins in and sings along. The camera is close in on her. Her eyes are full of the pleasure of the moment, and Barbara looks radiant.
Florence and John banter back and forth interrupted only by his landlady, Mrs. Higgins (played by Beryl Mercer, an actress born to British parents in Spain, a leading lady of Sir Herbert Tree’s, and a celebrated actress of the London stage before she was twenty). Mrs. Higgins, plump, birdlike, dowdy, kindly, has brought John a large box. She is surprised to see he has a guest and even more surprised when she is introduced to Sister Fallon. “Oh, sure,” Mrs. Higgins says, “and I’m Martha Washington . . . But I know Sister’s voice as well as her face, so speak up and I’ll tell you if you’re Sister or not.” Sister is dressed in an evening gown, in fur trim. She looks glamorous, worldly, and in response to Mrs. Higgins’s dare that Sister “say a few words,” Florence says, looking like a great sophisticate and almost in a monotone: “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” It’s what people say when they speak to hear back their voices and say the minimal amount, but instead of it sounding silly or thin, or like a throwaway, the richness and dimensionality of Barbara’s voice make it sound like a benediction, a piece of wisdom spoken from the worldly elegant lady.
Mrs. Higgins opens the box she’s brought John, and inside is a life-size plaster bust of Sister Fallon. John is embarrassed and admits to Sister, “I wanted to know what you looked like.”
John begins to work dummy, Al, who speaks the words to Florence John doesn’t have the nerve to say to her directly. (“I’ll say I’m getting personal,” John says through Al. “It’s about time somebody was getting personal around here.”) The magic of the evening is enfolded by the steady sound of the rain (the same sound Capra used for the love scenes of Ladies of Leisure and for effect in his silent pictures, including The Matinee Idol). The clock’s cuckoo bird calling the hour is all that is heard above Florence and John’s talk.
It is the end of the evening, and Florence has said her good night. She is about to go back to the real world. John is standing there, part of the enchanted but circumscribed room. He looks sweet, yearning, almost unable to move from the sadness of her leaving. She walks over to him, stands on her toes, and kisses his lips. She who has lost touch with her heart begins to feel it again.
With Florence Fallon and John Carson, Capra reversed convention. She is the one who knows the ways of a man’s world with its deceits and dirty dealings, who’s fast-talking and has the trappings of success and luxury and the pretense of power that supposedly heals the sick and the deformed and can change lives. He is the innocent spirit, brought in from the rain, who allows Sister to enter his simple world, where things are domestic and orderly and safe, whimsical and childlike and shielded from the ugliness beyond its walls. When Capra has Barbara kiss the David Manners character, she is the more worldly of the two, the one who knows the truth of life. In the safety and innocence of Carson’s room both spirits are reborn.
Richard Cromwell, former actor who starred in Columbia’s 1930 Tol’able David and became an artist, making a bust of Barbara as Sister Fallon for the blind John Carson to feel what she looks like.
Florence returns to the gritty truth of her life at the party of freaks where she was originally headed. Circus performers and contortionists drinking and mostly drunk are singing around a piano; a crazed hilarity rings throughout. Florence is clearly disgusted with the ugliness that surrounds her. Barbara’s bearing as she strides across the room (“Where did you collect all this garbage?” she asks) is angry and hard and shut off, the opposite of the openness and innocence she shows when she is with Carson.
• • •
“She could suffer from her toughness,” Capra said. “And really suffer from the penance she would have to pay.”
Capra was so deft with Barbara there were times she felt she wasn’t being directed. “But of course you were,” she said.
As Capra left her dressing room, he would say, “Remember, Barbara. No matter what the other actors do, whether they stop or blow their lines—you continue your scene right to the end. Understand?”
Capra wanted to make it easy for Barbara. What Willard Mack did for her on the stage, Frank Capra was doing for her in pictures. “He wanted me to be great and made me know it.” She felt “babied and pampered” by him. And in his understanding of her, she knew, “he wanted me to be free,” and made it possible for her to reach deep into herself.
The notion of innocence in a far from innocent universe intrigued Capra, as did the process of redemption. He’d used the idea of the innocent afoot in a careless, indifferent world early in his pictures: as the basis of the Harry Langdon character and again at the heart of Ladies of Leisure. Capra saw in Barbara a childlike innocence that he could help her to find. He felt the depth of the pain still inside her and gave her room for her to reach it. Hers was a passion and purity of feeling that deepened his own heart.
“He sensed things that
you were trying to keep hidden,” Barbara said. “He’d been kicked around [and] he understood it. And without probing and asking a lot of intimate questions, he knew. He just knew.”
To Capra, Barbara was “naïve” and “unsophisticated.” She lacked pretension, vanity. She wasn’t interested in the things that most actors and actresses were: “makeup, clothes, or hairdos.” When she went to work, “this chorus girl,” he said, “could grab your heart and tear it to pieces.”
• • •
In one emotionally pitched scene, David Manners was supposed to remain calm while Barbara became upset. During the shooting of the scene, Barbara’s work so carried Manners away he had to turn his back to the camera so his tears wouldn’t spoil the take.
As the days passed, Capra saw that Barbara “knew nothing about camera tricks: how to ‘cheat’ her looks so her face could be seen, how to restrict her body movements in close shots. She just turned it on and everything else on the stage stopped.”
Capra was falling in love with her.
When production started on The Miracle Woman, stories began to appear in the newspapers that Barbara and Fay’s marriage was over. Both denied the rumors. Fay told the Los Angeles Examiner, “You’d better speak to my wife about it; she’s in the kitchen.” Barbara said to the reporter, “I’m making a pot of tea and a bit of shortcake for him this moment. Does that sound like we’re separated? Would any wife do that much for a husband she was mad at?”
It was Fay who was upset and drinking heavily. Barbara felt a profound loyalty to him. They were in this together, and she was determined to tough out whatever problems they were having.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 26
