It has been said that Brahms was the first composer to possess the same sense of music history (periods, influences, shifts in harmonic inventiveness) that we do. I’m not sure there were many directors or critics who had a comparable sense of movie history in the forties (the way that Scorsese and Tarantino do now). U.S.C. began its film program early, in 1929, and by 1932 was offering a degree in film studies, and U.C.L.A. followed in 1947, but film study was rare or nonexistent at most universities. During the silent period, there had been an enormous flow of euphoric writing about movies as an art form in little magazines devoted to experimental work (Hound & Horn) or left-wing politics (New Masses). But the coming of sound, and the greater psychological plausibility and realism that came with it, tended, at the serious level, to chase away the aestheticians and to encourage the sociological critics who harped on important themes and the social responsibility of the medium. In the forties, magazine and newspaper criticism was mostly what it had always been, plot summary garlanded with a grade, though there was one great critic, James Agee, at The Nation, who wrote enduring American prose about movies.
When The New Yorker began, in 1925, the magazine was much more New York–centric than it is now, and the prime local industry in the arts was theatre, not movies. Some of the magazine’s staff wrote for the theatre, or mixed happily with theatre people and wits who lived and breathed plays, productions, actors, and actresses. Hollywood, the place of disillusion, was “out there,” as Dorothy Parker later put it, though, of course, many New Yorker writers, including Parker, went to Hollywood (Pauline Kael has immortalized this coastal transfer in The Citizen Kane Book). The general attitude was that Hollywood was a place to make money and have a hell of a good time (when you weren’t having a hell of a bad time).
Movies were omnipresent, familiar, loved, but rather taken for granted. The magazine demanded brevity and wit in its movie reviews and no more than a glancing touch of seriousness, and the writing, from our viewpoint, lacks sensuous evocation and physicality—the commanding impress of image, landscape, atmosphere, eros. Throughout the forties, however, the critics wrestled with the apprehension that something complicated and subtle might be going on in at least some of the films. I admire John Mosher’s way of capturing the bewildering tonal shifts in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. And Mosher’s impressive piece on The Grapes of Wrath does indeed work as evocation. I’m surprised that Mosher writes off, with a witticism, the resemblance of Charles Foster Kane to William Randolph Hearst, since that resemblance was, of course, part of what made Citizen Kane exciting, but Mosher understood that Welles was creating an entirely new form in his great film. John Lardner, in his appreciation of the noirish Double Indemnity, edges toward a recognition of perversity; the movie, he says, is “a smooth account of sordid minds at work, and compromises with sweetness and light only at well-spaced intervals.” And John McCarten, in his lovely review of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, attempts to describe an entirely new mode of feeling: “By now I imagine you will have gathered,” he says at the end, “that I think the thing is a masterpiece.”
JOHN MOSHER
JANUARY 13, 1940 (ON HIS GIRL FRIDAY)
Since 1931, every movie of newspaper people and their lives has been in one way or another just a repeat of The Front Page. No young actor dressed up as a cub reporter and waiting his turn on the set has failed to make his little prayer to the shades of Hildy Johnson, and perhaps each pavilion for the care of the mentally unbalanced has its crop of youngsters who happened to see the movie, or the Hecht-MacArthur play it came from, just before they landed a job in some city room. Looking back through my line-a-day book, with marginalia, for ’31, I discover I thought then The Front Page was the funniest movie in town, and I evidently had a very good time with its ribald and hilarious comedy. Now, after all these years and after God knows how many feeble, wispy, sad imitations of the original, I find the new and authentic adaptation—which is what His Girl Friday, titled from Walter Winchell’s weekly valentine, turns out to be—as fresh and undated and bright a film as you could want.
Mysterious things, to be sure, have happened to the original, as you can imagine when you hear that the role which brought Pat O’Brien to the screen has been revamped for Rosalind Russell. And that role, you may remember, is the Hildy Johnson part itself. Miss Russell is Hildy and is unabashed at her own audacity, and even Lee Tracy, the first of all the Hildys, should appreciate her verve. With Cary Grant as her editor—that was Menjou once, you know—there’s a shift in the plot, with some new scenes and a ludicrously innocent part for Ralph Bellamy, but the big central scene of the police reporters’ room in the city jail, the jail break of the condemned man—no longer an anarchist, for that would date the piece, as one now doesn’t seem to hear much about anarchists for some reason or other—and all the give and take of the old pretty dialogue remain. It’s not ladyfied a moment just because the beautiful Miss Russell is planted right in the midst of the rumpus. The idea seems ominous, yet perhaps we had best face the prospect: she may do for the ladies what Lee Tracy and Pat O’Brien did for the young men. The women’s wards in those hospitals had better lay in some new cots.
FEBRUARY 3, 1940 (ON THE GRAPES OF WRATH)
Out from California now comes The Grapes of Wrath, the epic of starvation. With a majesty never before so constantly sustained on any screen, the film never for an instant falters. Its beauty is of the sort found in the art of Burchfield, Benton, and Curry, as the landscape and people involved belong to the world of these painters. Its visual qualities, too, can be traced back through the history of the movies; the best of the past has been used, every lesson learned. Thus there are moments when we see a lone figure silhouetted against the horizon as in the old films which aspired to impress. It was a stunt that was impressive then, and it is still impressive. Again, there are moments in The Grapes of Wrath so direct and simple that they are like excerpts from a fine newsreel. That, too, is right. Or again, the camera seems to pause in the style of the Russian films, and we are given what is almost a series of stills. Faces are brought forward, out from the huge panorama, and held a moment, close and enlarged—the faces of hungry children, work-racked old men and women—silent and unmoving before us. Such a method, as here employed, does not slow down the film as it has often done in Soviet pictures. John Ford has kept his pace swift, and when familiar approaches to his subject have been essential, he has made them as fresh as though he had been the first to note the dramatic value of that man placed against the sky. He showed what he could do in The Informer, and he has gone beyond that in The Grapes of Wrath.
The script he had to work from is in itself a tremendous success. Nunnally Johnson must have found the Steinbeck novel no kindergarten job to adapt for the movies. It was long, outspoken, and, being a best-seller, something sacred. Its scandalized, delighted, and authoritative readers, many of whom refused to find even any monotony in the original discursive and iterative chronicle, were loyally ready to jump on a digression. From the moment it was heard that the book was to be screened, appreciative admirers wondered how the true force of the dialogue could be handled with the propriety requisite for screen delicacy, and, above all, how the odd dietary incident which Steinbeck devised as the shock of his conclusion could be managed. The hegira of the Joads has been abbreviated, of course, but the story of it is fully given. From the first glimpse we have of Tom coming down the dusty Oklahoma road, we are moved straight to the world of the Okies; though without reference to either digestive or procreative processes, the language manages to be virile; Mr. Johnson keeps his characters buttoned up but human. And, perhaps with more force than the book, the film closes on Ma Joad’s words: “We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever. We’re the people.”
Ma was the great characterization in the book. Holding together her whole family in their desperate effort to survive, she was most definitely a clarified personality—not a mere ty
pe, not, so to speak, a social problem. She alone might be called Steinbeck’s creation in the novel. Jane Darwell, who plays Ma, has been long in the theatre and in pictures, and now she suffers from the very experience she has had. Here her expertness does not stand her in good stead. Competent she is, yet she never quite frees her performance from the suggestion of the theatre. Actually this does not matter in an appraisal of the film as much as might be thought. This is no scenario for stars. Individuals are lost against the grandeur of the landscape or in the huge mass movements of many people. The extras count as much as the featured players.
Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad stands out at times in the vast assemblage, and occasional specific gestures or exclamations draw our eyes and ears to the Grampa and Granma of Charley Grapewin and Zeffie Tilbury, to the Rosasharn of Dorris Bowdon, the Connie of Eddie Quinlan, the Casy of John Carradine, the Pa Joad of Russell Simpson, and the Muley of John Qualen. Mostly, though, we think of the film in terms of groups, the family on the truck, the family gathered around Grampa’s grave, the children in the store in front of the candy, the other children staring at food—something to eat—in the camp. It is a great film of the dust plains, the highways, the camps, of the sky above, and of a nameless, evicted people.
OCTOBER 26, 1940 (ON THE GREAT DICTATOR)
There’s a general feeling, I discover, prevalent around the town that The Great Dictator is a very curious affair indeed, something distinctly odd, and certainly unique. People aren’t sure that they like it, or anyhow they aren’t very eloquent about why they do, or, on the other hand, why they don’t. Reports and small talk aren’t apparently going to send crowds to see it, though I think the baffled and inarticulate discussions may sustain that curiosity which was so coyly nourished during all the five years of the film’s making. The truth probably is that too much has happened in these five years for the film’s own good. I don’t mean that too much has happened in Hollywood. I refer to occurrences in other portions of the globe.
There were never any very good Hitler jokes, and now, I should say, there are none anywhere near being good. Photographs suggested that Hitler looks somewhat like Charlie Chaplin, which had perhaps once some comic aspect, but it happens to be an aspect not largely relevant at this moment. The resemblance evidently did amuse Charlie Chaplin himself, and it is the cornerstone of this whole picture. That it should turn out to be even as sturdy material for laughter as it does is one of the amazing and baffling factors of this truly singular production. It is by no means so amazing, though, as that we should find ourselves titillated by hilarious burlesques of ghettos, Nazi troopers, and concentration camps. Charlie Chaplin alone could have dreamed of such an approach to the events of the day, and surely only Charlie Chaplin could somehow have swung the whole fantastic conglomeration into anything nearly successful or even endurable.
Where he is successful, which is throughout a considerable length of the picture, he is just being his old self, Hitler or no Hitler. If anything, he has grown younger with the years. As a Jewish barber, he again and again is that familiar figure of his great days, though this time it’s the Nazis he’s dodging and not the cops. The dictator role is newer stuff for him, but here, too, he is best when he can be overwhelmed or crushed down, or at least abandoned to the wildest phantasmagoria, as in the famous scene with the balloon. I would say that the scene of the balloon (a balloon with the world painted upon it), the dance of the dictator at play with the world itself, is just about as delightful a bit as Charlie Chaplin has ever given us anywhere. It is sheerest fantasy, child’s fantasy, and I think this childlike naïveté saves the picture. Like Hitler or not, like Mussolini or not (and Jack Oakie’s mimicry is very apt also), the people of this picture, until near the very end, belong to another sphere. There’s a child’s humor in the names, names such as Bacteria, Garbitsch, Herring, and Hynkel, and much kindergarten tomfoolery in the business of the barber chairs and in a great deal of the hearty slapstick of the ghetto. Ghetto scenes and palace scenes have this young gusto about them, which is surely sustained through the first half but begins to abate from then on, until, all of a sudden, without any warning, Charlie Chaplin grows old. In the last speech, commenced in a scene of characteristic comedy, he launches into direct exhortation straight from the screen. I fear the wrench is too great. The power of the film is its detachment, its use of current matters as though surveyed from another planet, and we can’t be jolted in a jiffy back to real life like this. Nor, on the same grounds, are we prepared to see the little Jewish girl (Paulette Goddard), whom we have watched so merrily smack the Storm Troopers over their noddles with a frying pan, exalted in a final closeup as the symbol of all Jewish womankind in the lands of the dictators. Mr. Chaplin might have been wiser to have played his stunt for its full worth, making perhaps, after all, a good Hitler joke; he should have stayed on that other planet and never for a moment have touched this one.
MAY 3, 1941 (ON CITIZEN KANE)
The noise and the nonsense that have attended the release of Citizen Kane may for the time being befog the merit of this extraordinary film. Too many people may have too ready an inclination to seek out some fancied key in it, after the silly flurry in our press, and to read into the biography of its leading character extraneous resemblances to persons in actual life. There is a special kind of pleasure to be found in such research, and the success of the most commonplace movie often lies in the simple fact that it suggests one’s neighbors, or the scandalous people who took the house on the corner one year, or the handsome bootlegger who used to call every week. Citizen Kane can hardly suggest the ways and habits of neighbors, at least to most householders, but it may remind some of revelations in Sunday supplements. To others, I suppose, it will all seem more like Mars—just Mr. Orson Welles and his Mars again.
Since movies hitherto have commenced with a cast list and a vast directory of credits, we are promptly jolted out of our seats when Citizen Kane ignores this convention and slides at once into its story. For introduction, there is only a stylized and atmospheric hint of background, of shut high gates and formidable fencing, and this formal difference seems revolutionary enough to establish Mr. Welles’ independence of the conventions. This independence, like fresh air, sweeps on and on throughout the movie, and in spite of bringing to mind, by elaborately fashioned decoration, a picture as old in movie history as Caligari, the irregularity of the opening sets a seal of original craftsmanship on what follows. Something new has come to the movie world at last.
Mr. Welles is not merely being smart, clever, or different. By the elliptical method he employs, he can trace a man’s life from childhood to death, presenting essential details in such brief flashes that we follow a complex narrative simply and clearly and find an involved and specialized character fully depicted, an important man revealed to us. With a few breakfast scenes, the progress of a marriage is shown as specifically as though we had read the wife’s diary. By a look and a gesture, electricians high above a stage describe the sad squawks an opera singer is giving below them. The use of an imaginary “March of Time” provides an outline which allows us to escape long exposition. Scenes in the great man’s Xanadu never drag, never oppress one with useless trimmings, yet we get an immediate comprehension of the unique, absurd establishment, with its echoes and its art collection, and the one gag allowed (“Don’t talk so loud. We’re not at home”) becomes just a reasonable statement.
Sometimes I thought there was too much shadow, that the film seemed to be performed in the dark. Mr. Welles likes a gloom. He blots out the faces of speakers and voices come from a limbo when it is what is being said and not how people look that is important. Only once or twice, at times like these, does the film seem mannered. For the most part we are too absorbed in the story and its characters to observe any tricks, too swiftly carried on by its intense, athletic scenes.
Dorothy Comingore, George Coulouris, and Joseph Cotten are on the list of the fine players, but clearly it is Orson Welles himself, as Mr.
Kane, the great millionaire publisher, the owner of Xanadu, the frustrated politician, the bejowled autocrat, the colossus of an earlier American era, who is the centre and focus of all the interest of the film. By a novelist’s device, we learn of this man through the comments of the few who have been close to him, the second wife’s being the most sensational—that second wife whom he drives into the grotesque mortification of an operatic career for which she has no talent. The total impression, though, is not of something entirely monstrous. Mr. Kane does not come out of all this a melodrama villain. I think it is a triumph of the film, and proof of its solid value and of the sense of its director and all concerned, that a human touch is not lost. Sympathy for the preposterous Mr. Kane survives. Indeed, there is something about him which seems admirable. I can imagine that various rich gentlemen who own newspapers may find the characterization only right and proper, and claim that their sensitivity, like Mr. Kane’s, has been misunderstood by their intimates, and others may recognize many a Mr. Kane among their competitors.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 62
