by Marc Eliot
The haste with which the film was made, on a relatively modest budget, was a strong indication of MGM’s lack of confidence in the project, underscored by its release on January 12, 1940, traditionally one of the slowest box-office periods, immediately following the big holiday rush. This also made it ineligible for 1939’s crop of Oscar nominees, which, as it turned out, didn’t matter, as the film was not a crowd-pleaser and did not break any box-office records after it opened.9 It was more or less dumped by the studio, with Mayer dismissing it as something of an anomaly, made at the wrong end of the decade, with artificial “old Europe” sets and overly mannered caricatures of clerks, customers, and courtliness; and its director somewhat over the hill, whose career had peaked with Ninotchka and was now trailing off and near its end. He wasn’t entirely wrong, at least not about Lubitsch, who would make only six more films before dying in 1947 of a heart attack.10
Shop received good, if not particularly enthusiastic reviews. The New York Times singled out the cast, noting how “James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Frank Morgan and Joseph Schildkraut make The Shop Around the Corner a pleasant place to browse in.” Time magazine focused on Stewart, acknowledging his ascent to “screen personality” by saying that he “walks through the amiable business of being James Stewart.” Only The New Yorker seemed to feel the film was an unqualified success: “The Shop Around the Corner is close to perfection—one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country.”
Although Jimmy’s performance did not hurt his soaring career, it didn’t particularly help it, either, and in industrial Hollywood, then as now, stepping sideways meant stepping backward. The Shop Around the Corner was, ultimately, too small of a picture for him to follow the successes of Mr. Smith and Destry, and because of it, he and the film were more or less buried by the bigger pictures of the year, which included John Ford’s outstanding adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda; Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (a film whose political controversy put it on the front pages of every newspaper in the country); Ford’s The Long Voyage Home; Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca; Sam Wood’s Kitty Foyle; and William Wyler’s The Letter—all of which, in their own way, looked forward, acknowledging the darkening clouds of impending warfare. In the end, Jimmy’s performance in Shop was too Americana to suggest anything like the wistfulness of old European sentimentality that the role demanded (and that the supporting cast, mostly European immigrants, superbly exuded). Whereas Capra had been able to use his spirituality as the basis for conflict in order to elevate Jimmy’s character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to active heroic proportion, Lubitsch’s use of the actor was hampered by an emphasis on lovelorn passivity that did nothing so much as shift Shop’s focus to Sullavan, who ultimately dominated both Jimmy and the picture.
He appeared in two more movies in 1940 as he tried to regain his career’s upward momentum. But before starting work on Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm, a somewhat worn-out Jimmy decided to go home for the holidays, something he had not done in two years. He took his time making the journey to Pennsylvania by rail, taking the Los Angeles–Chicago–New York route, spending a few days in Manhattan before actually heading back west to Indiana.
While in the city, he met up with his two sisters, Doddie and Ginny, who looked forward to passing time in the city with their now famous movie star brother. They accompanied him everywhere, and when he walked them down Fifth Avenue, they were delighted by how many strangers came up to shake his hand or ask for his autograph. “When people stared at him as we strode down the street,” Ginny later recalled, “Doddie and I tried to appear blasé: but it was undeniably exciting…the little girl who jumped on the running-board of the taxi and begged for an autograph ‘for Geraldine’; the aristocratic little lady who wished him a Merry Christmas on the Avenue…for three days we sailed around New York, doing exactly what we wanted to do and having a wonderful time. One evening as we were leaving a night club, photographers appeared in the lobby. ‘Get him with a girl,’ one of them whispered. I fled, but someone pushed poor Doddie and the two of them were snapped looking like frightened sheep.
“On Christmas Eve, we had dinner at Ralph’s [a New York restaurant they had discovered years earlier on occasional trips to the city to visit their unemployed brother]. We ate there for sentimental reasons, for Ralph’s had known us in other less cheerful days. As the evening passed and sounds of carols and holiday merriment floated in from the street, we grew reminiscent and nostalgic and very wistful. At midnight, we boarded the train, exhausted and grouchy, and before we knew it morning had come. It was Christmas and we were home.”
The visit home proved a brief one for Jimmy. There was little said between Alexander and his successful, famous actor son besides the usual litany of lectures, this time with a strong choral backup supplied by Elizabeth. When was he going to get married? both his father and mother wanted to know. All decent young men past the age of thirty had wives and, if no children, certainly were in the planning stages, weren’t they? And when was he going to come back home and take over the family business? When was he going to act like a Stewart?
One might have felt a touch of envy in the air, as Alexander tried to maintain his position of undisputed head of the Stewart-Maitland empire. In truth, his son had managed to overshadow him in every way except in the ever-shakier convictions of his own superiority. By the time Jimmy boarded the train bound for Chicago and then on to Los Angeles, the emotionally taut wire between the two had become even more tightly stretched than ever and he could not wait to return to the comforting reality of Hollywood unreality.
Frank Borzage, the director of Stewart’s next movie, The Mortal Storm, had already built a career in silent films before making the successful transition to sound. By 1931, he had two Oscars on his mantel and a solid, if unspectacular reputation among movie-goers.11 Actresses especially liked to work with him because, as most of the silent directors had discovered in their (and the industry’s) pioneering days, the simple but extraordinary power of the female close-up on the screen was unmatched by anything a script or a special effect could do to the viewer. That was why he was always one of Margaret Sullavan’s favorite directors, and how he came to be chosen for her next project, following The Shop Around the Corner. For her co-star, despite Shop’s lackluster reception, she once again insisted on Jimmy, in what would turn out to be their last on-screen pairing.
Based on the popular prewar (1938) novel of the same name by Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm is one of those films made in the years before Pearl Harbor when England and the rest of Europe were engaged in war with Germany and Asia was being shredded by the Japanese, while the United States maintained an official neutrality.
During the American prewar years, Hollywood was warned by Washington not to violate any of the three Neutrality Acts (1935, 1936, 1937) by making explicitly anti-Nazi or anti-Japanese movies. At the time, a raging domestic battle behind the scenes in the film industry was taking place over whether or not the United States should stay isolationist or expand its presence, and its power, in Europe and Asia. The government insisted that Hollywood name no specific enemy in its late-thirties, early-forties “prewar” films, to purposefully keep the enemy vague, a generic rather than geometric evil. For the most part, despite personal feelings, the heads of the studios did what they were told.
The story of The Mortal Storm concerns the plight of the Roth family during the rise of a nearly generic European tide of Fascism (about as close as MGM could come to attacking Hitler without specifically naming him or Nazism). The father, Professor Roth (Frank Morgan), the head of a respected Jewish Bavarian family, is a favored teacher in his hometown university. His daughter, Freya (Sullavan), falls in love with both Martin Breitner (Stewart) and Fritz Marberg (Robert Young). She likes Fritz more, until she discovers his pro-Fascist sentiments. Things become darker and more threatening, and Professor Roth is expelled from his position because he is Jewis
h and sent to a concentration camp, where he dies. Breitner, meanwhile, continues to oppose the Fascists, and escapes to Austria, only to return to rescue Freya, even as Fritz plots to hunt her down and kill her. Just as Breitner is about to carry her over the threshold to Austria, Freya is shot and killed. With tears in his eyes and the body of his beloved in his arms, Breitner delivers her body, and with it her soul, to freedom.12
Although he had never been overtly political in any of the more than eighty films he previously made, Borzage dove into The Mortal Storm and its story of the increasingly savage pursuit of Jews trying to escape the widening, murderous grip of what was obviously Hitler’s Nazism. The intensity of the film proved so powerful that a decade later it would still be remembered by some as too “pro-Communist,” and bring its director before the unforgiving investigation of HUAC. As a result, Borzage was blacklisted for much of the fifties and he gained the incorrect reputation of being essentially a political filmmaker, and a left-leaning one at that. This not only fatally shortened Borzage’s career, it left a taint on all his films, regardless of their content. That is why, despite what would become the best pairing of Jimmy and Sullavan, The Mortal Storm and Borzage are less fondly remembered (if at all) than The Shop Around the Corner and Lubitsch.
The Mortal Storm had its world premiere at New York’s City’s Capitol Theatre on June 20, 1940, and while the reviews were consistently good—the New York Times called it “magnificently directed and acted,” the New Republic declared that “Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Frank Morgan are fine,” Variety said “the performances are excellent,” and the New York Herald Tribune declared James Stewart “one of the finest actors alive today”—the film did not do particularly well at the box office. Perhaps it was a bit overly sentimental, if such a thing were possible in a film that dealt with the grim realities of Nazism, ending on a whimsical note that looked back on the past. Or, perhaps, despite Stewart’s bravura performance, his character’s heroic rescue, and Sullavan’s character’s impassioned flight for freedom, the film was no match for the real-life drama of the headlines in the daily papers.
Two days after the film opened, France fell to Hitler.
Jimmy Stewart knew now that it was only a matter of time before America entered the war, and when the time came, he would do what every Stewart and Maitland had done before him, take up arms and fight to the end against any and all tyrants who sought to take away freedom and destroy the democratic way of life!
But first he had to make another comedy.
11
“Stewart’s most distinctive quality is his voice. If you listen to him, it’s hard not to start imitating him, stammering out a ‘Whal, gosh,’ or two. The stars with staying power all had distinctive voices that were essential to the continuing thread in their characterizations. Stewart’s voice isn’t hesitant because he’s unsure of himself, though there’s some of that; it’s more that he doesn’t want to rush things, come on too fast or too strong. Voice is at the heart of the appeal of The Philadelphia Story. With Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant, the picture is a veritable summit meeting of memorable voices.”
—DAVID FREEMAN
In the spring of 1940, for his work in The Shop Around the Corner James Stewart was named one of the Best Actors of 1939 by the National Board of Review. This sent a signal to the powers at MGM that perhaps they should consider taking “Stringbean” out of action-adventures and back into romantic comedies. The only problem was, they didn’t have a property for which they thought he was suited. Instead, Mayer decided to lend out Jimmy once more, for the last picture due on the option the studio had given David O. Selznick (Selznick International Pictures—SIP) for Jimmy’s services that had begun with Made for Each Other, the completion of which set into motion a series of events that would, improbably, lead to Jimmy’s winning his first and only Academy Award.
Less than two weeks after The Mortal Storm opened to rave reviews but indifferent box office, Stewart found himself at Warner Bros. preparing to star in William Keighley’s No Time for Comedy (1940). Selznick, a degenerate gambler and uncontrollable womanizer forever in need of immediate cash and fresh-faced beauties, had developed a way of saving on payroll by trading with the studios for their most popular stars. While waiting for Jimmy to finish The Shop Around the Corner, Selznick had traded his option on him to Warner in return for the services of Olivia de Havilland, whom Selznick had desperately wanted to play Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind.
Warner gladly gave de Havilland to Selznick because the studio thought Jimmy was perfect for its long-overdue screen adaptation of Goodbye Again, the play in which he had made his Broadway debut as Kenneth Bixby. However, when Jack Warner couldn’t get MGM to postpone Shop Around the Corner, he renamed the project Honeymoon for Three and assigned Lloyd Bacon to direct. Warner put George Brent in the role of Bixby.
While waiting for his opportunity to use him, Jack Warner reluctantly gave to other actors several projects he had sequentially intended for Jimmy. The star, however, at least according to MGM, was never available. This led the increasingly impatient and at times paranoid Warner to believe that Selznick must have known of Jimmy’s unavailability all along and had somehow pulled a fast one on him to get de Havilland.
Warner then green-lighted the purchase of the movie rights to S. N. Behrman’s Broadway hit No Time for Comedy as a mollifying vehicle for Bette Davis for the then-enormous sum of $55,000. Davis, however, was at war with the studio head over the types of roles she wanted to play (as opposed to the ones they wanted her to play) and stubbornly refused to make the film. Warner gave that part instead to Rosalind Russell, hot after coming off her successful turn starring opposite Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday. Just before the film was slated to go into production, Jimmy finished work on The Mortal Storm and was now available. At Jack Warner’s personal directive, the studio’s producer of the film, Hal Wallis, cast him as the male lead.
However, it quickly became clear that Jimmy was not the ideal choice to play a role the suave, sophisticated Brit Laurence Oliver had created on Broadway (opposite Katharine Cornell). Wallis ordered Julius and Philip Epstein, two brothers on the studio’s writing payroll, to do a complete rewrite, to make No Time for Comedy more suitable for its star. In the original play, the quite urbane hero, Gaylord Esterbrook (Oliver on stage, Jimmy on film), having struggled for several years, suddenly finds success as a playwright on the New York stage. He is, at the time, married to actress Linda Paige (Cornell, Russell), but, after becoming famous, is “tempted” by another actress, Amanda Swift (Genevieve Tobin), toys with the idea of leaving his wife, but eventually reconciles with her.
In the film, Gaylord is a single newspaper reporter from the Midwest who, in his spare time, writes a comedy about New York City and sells his play to Broadway. When the production falters in rehearsal, he is suddenly called to New York City to do major rewrites. Once there, he falls for actress Linda Paige, now a “sophisticated New York woman” who shows the naïve youngster the ways of the world (a custom-tailoring of the role for Stewart that perhaps even the Epsteins, Wallis, and Jack Warner may not have realized at the time). Paige eventually convinces Esterbrook he must write only “serious drama,” he realizes he is in love with her, proposes, and they get married. His new sense of his artistic self leads him to fall for the leading lady of his new, “serious” play, the married Amanda Swift. To “get even,” Paige seduces Amanda’s husband, Philo Swift (the always funny Charlie Ruggles). It is only when the play flops that everyone “comes to their senses,” Amanda returns to Philo, Gaylord to Linda.
Echoing the infinitely superior Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in its depiction of an attempted corruption of purity (in Smith a purity of soul, in No Time a purity of craft), and anticipating the far greater Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1942) in sorting out the dramatic differences between tragedy and comedy, grimness and greatness, pretense and passion, the film, released September 6, 1940,
proved to be nothing more than a typically pragmatic Hollywood trampling of a once legitimately entertaining New York stage comedy. Audiences thought so, too, and stayed away.
By now it was impossible for Jimmy, who hadn’t had a solid hit since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to avoid the reality that the upward momentum of his career had stalled, and his once red-hot name was in danger of lingering forever in the loan-out mediocrity of Hollywood’s functionary middle roster, movieland’s equivalent of what’s-his-name.
To prevent that from happening, the always shrewd Leland Hayward hit upon the idea of putting Jimmy together with George Cukor, who had gained a reputation for being a “woman’s director” primarily for his successful New York stage work with such Broadway divas as Dorothy Gish, Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, and Helen Hayes.
After Cukor moved to Hollywood, at the insistence of Katharine Hepburn (who was represented by none other than Leland Hayward and had just signed with RKO Radio Pictures, then under the leadership of David O. Selznick), his direction of 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement made Hepburn the newest star of the silver screen. What followed for her was ten years of a career whose arc resembled a roller coaster. In 1936, co-starring opposite Cary Grant, she suffered a major blow, however, with the Cukor-helmed production of the commercially disastrous Sylvia Scarlett. Although the film flopped and Hepburn was blamed for her poor performance by the critics, it did wonders for Grant, who received great reviews and continued to work, as did Cukor, without interruption.
