DAVID LARDNER
NOVEMBER 28, 1941 (ON CASABLANCA)
Even though the armed forces might be said to have taken some of the play away from them, Warner Brothers have gone right ahead and released a film called Casablanca. They may feel that General Eisenhower has merely served them well as an advance agent. The Casablanca on the screen is the old Casablanca of three or four weeks ago, and much of the heavy intrigue indulged in by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Paul Henreid has presumably been cleaned up by the army of occupation by now, but there is probably enough topical truth left in the picture to suit the topical-minded. Not to speak of the eternal truths always to be found in the better screen plays.
The centre of intrigue in old Casablanca, we learn, was Rick’s, a night spot where forged passports flowed like water. Into this dive, operated by Bogart, come Henreid, as the leader of an underground movement in Europe, and Miss Bergman, as Europe’s most beautiful woman. Henreid has escaped from a concentration camp and is trying to get to America. The Germans would like to stop him by fair means or unwholesome. Claude Rains, as the local police chief, sits cheerfully on the fence and won’t do much for anybody. Bogart and Miss Bergman have met before in Paris, it turns out, and they become particularly melancholy whenever the song “As Time Goes By” is played. It’s as good a tune as any to attach sentiment to, and a good one to attach to this picture, which, although not quite up to Across the Pacific, Bogart’s last spyfest, is nevertheless pretty tolerable and deserves attractive accessories.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1944 (ON DOUBLE INDEMNITY)
A pretty good murder melodrama has come to town, named Double Indemnity. I have an idea that Paramount, which launched it, takes a certain artistic pride in the fact that the two leading characters, played by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, are heels who behave antisocially throughout and die violent deaths at the finish. This, you understand, is not the kind of thing fan clubs are accustomed to, and a producer who runs such a chance with the public’s sweet tooth is no doubt entitled to bask at his desk in a glow of prestige while assistants wring his hand in shifts and say “Chief, you are game as a pebble.”
Be that as it may, there is another point about Double Indemnity which strikes me as even more unusual. That is the nature of its treatment of the insurance industry and those predatory types among us who buy insurance. Taking up the message of the James Cain novel on which it was based, the picture, without so much as blinking, shows insurance as a deadly war between beneficiaries, felonious to a man, and the company, which fights tooth and nail in defense of its capital holdings. The true giant of the battle, and therefore of the film, is Edward G. Robinson, the company’s claims inspector, a gentleman tortured by the thought that a client may get away with something but practically infallible in forestalling such a calamity. When Mr. Robinson, told that the police are giving up their investigation of the death of a policyholder, says scornfully, “Sure, it’s not their money,” he sounds the keynote of the struggle. He is very entertaining, I should add, and not a little convincing.
It appears that sentinels as keen as this can be duped only by someone on the inside, who knows all the angles—by choice, an insurance salesman. Personally, I have done business with three or four salesmen who were, like Mr. MacMurray in the picture, genial and fair-spoken and absolute mother lodes of human knowledge and special information. It now occurs to me that if I had wanted to commit a perfect crime, and I won’t say I didn’t, I should have consulted one of them on the spot. That is what Miss Stanwyck does with Mr. MacMurray. She is anxious to dispose of her husband, at a profit, and Mr. MacMurray puts his unique resources at her service with a readiness which weakens the picture somewhat, for, though Miss Stanwyck’s beauty is great and the temptation to outwit one’s employer may be equally so, the salesman’s character, as written and acted, does not make his crime wholly credible. Apart from this fault, Double Indemnity is a smooth account of sordid minds at work, and compromises with sweetness and light only at well-spaced intervals. There are one or two especially good moments, as when Mr. Robinson, sharing Mr. Cain’s relish for this sort of detail, intones as he would a hymn the statutory variations of suicide.
JOHN McCARTEN
DECEMBER 1, 1945 (ON THE LOST WEEKEND)
The film version of The Lost Weekend is every bit as impressive a tour de force as the Charles Jackson novel from which it was adapted. The suspense that Mr. Jackson managed to instill into his study of an alcoholic is tautly evident throughout the picture, and as its protagonist, Ray Milland conveys, with a realism often overwhelming, the anguish of a man trying to find in drink a narcotic to ease the ache of failure. The problem posed by The Lost Weekend is a lot more important than any that Hollywood has tackled in a long, long time, and it is presented in thoroughly adult fashion, with dialogue pitched for sensible ears and photography designed for discerning eyes. Most of the outstanding episodes of Mr. Jackson’s book are here, from the sordid, drunken bout that the hero of the piece finances by withholding ten dollars from a cleaning woman to the nerve-racking night he spends in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue. In his role of a frustrated, dipsomaniac writer, Mr. Milland shows a nice appreciation of the terrors a sheet of blank paper can hold for an author, and in a scene in which he plods brokenly for miles along Third Avenue in an attempt to hock his typewriter, only to discover in the end that every pawnshop is closed for Yom Kippur, he gets hold of all the tragic irony of the situation.
While the burden of carrying The Lost Weekend along devolves mainly upon Mr. Milland, he receives some sturdy assistance from the rest of the cast. As a tough-tongued bartender, Howard da Silva is as convincing as anybody I’ve run across behind a beer pump, and as a spiteful, supercilious male nurse, Frank Faylen will make your hackles rise. There are excellent performances, too, by Jane Wyman, Philip Terry, Doris Dowling, and, for that matter, everybody else in the cast. While I’m scattering compliments around this way, I wouldn’t want to overlook Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who fashioned the screen play and served, respectively, as director and producer. They can congratulate themselves on having made one of the best films of the past decade.
DECEMBER 10, 1949 (ON THE BICYCLE THIEF)
Vittorio De Sica, who directed the remarkable Italian film Shoe-Shine, has come along with another offering, called The Bicycle Thief, which should establish him forthwith as the peer of any moviemaker in the world. In this one, De Sica, starting with a slender theme, winds up with a drama that is at once funny, appealing, exciting, and sad. The picture is set in Rome, and chronicles the agitated weekend of a workman who, after holding down a new job as billposter for only part of a day, sees a crook make off with his bicycle, a necessary tool of his trade. De Sica has previously established the importance of this bicycle by showing the workman’s wife pawning the family sheets to get it out of hock, and it seems a very real catastrophe when the vehicle is stolen. The pursuit of the thief makes up the rest of the picture, and the chase leads the workman into all kinds of strange situations. Following right behind him is his small son, and the pair of them, as played by Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, are totally persuasive.
De Sica never slips in his direction, whether he is taking his hero and the boy through the corridors of a wonderfully realistic mission, full of battered derelicts and starchly prim workers in the Lord’s vineyard, or plunging them into the dangerous midst of the thieves and black-marketeers of Rome. No matter how tense the movement of the film becomes, he always has time to find a touch of humor in such things as the small boy’s bewilderment when, during a rainstorm, he takes cover against a wall, along with half a dozen young seminarians, all of whom are jabbering away in German, and the child’s confusion at the mission when, on peering into a confessional, he is rapped sharply on the head by the attendant cleric. And another funny scene is a glimpse of the youngster’s irritation at being compelled to wait outside a brothel while his father is inside looking around
for the thief. Throughout the picture, the emotional interdependence of father and son is studied compassionately, and when, in an access of frustration, the workman denounces the boy as a nuisance and slaps him, it makes for as poignant a moment as I’ve ever experienced at the movies. Since the acting is altogether superior, it is worth remarking that there is only one professional in the cast. The man who plays the hero is a metalworker, his supposed wife is a journalist, and the boy is a seven-year-old whom De Sica happened upon while shooting a street scene. A good many of those in the supporting cast are just what they are made out to be. The photography is endlessly varied, and there is some fine visual irony in the views of the workman and his son making their way through crowds of fashionable and sporting cyclists in the hope of recovering the worn-out bicycle on which their livelihood depends. By now I imagine you will have gathered that I think the thing is a masterpiece.
A NOTE BY HILTON ALS
The best, most interesting criticism is produced by those writers who are willing to risk being artists themselves. Between 1940 and his death eighteen years later, Wolcott Gibbs was The New Yorker’s first-string theatre critic, a role he assumed after Robert Benchley hung up his visor following eleven years on the job. But Benchley, with his schnauzer eyes and commonsense wit, had a second career, as a sometime monologist or character actor in films ranging from the 1935 Oscar-winning short How to Sleep to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent. Unlike Benchley, however, Gibbs—bespectacled, more tall than square—was temperamentally unsuited for the job of critic as public figure; his writing was his defense against a world that both entranced and bugged him.
Gibbs felt outside life’s party from the first. He was born in 1902 into a prosperous family with ties to science, industry, and politics; his father died early, when Wolcott was six. Gibbs’s alcoholic mother was incapable of taking care of the future writer and his siblings, so Wolcott was sent off to live with an uncle. Gibbs’s education was spotty; he was expelled from one boarding school and never attended college. In 1927, after a stint as a reporter at a Long Island newspaper, he joined the staff of Harold Ross’s New Yorker, where he worked in various capacities—editor, Talk of the Town reporter, short-story and Profile writer—for the next thirty years. (His very sweet and funny 1950 play, Season in the Sun, about a sort of Gibbs-like writer’s life on Fire Island, is not least among his accomplishments, and is ripe for revival.)
But Gibbs wrote about theatre more consistently than he did any other subject for the magazine; rereading his New Yorker theatre pieces now is like looking at an ongoing journal about a cultural world where some things lasted and other things did not. (It is difficult to recall, for instance, how significant Elmer Rice’s politically motivated work was to the theatre landscape of the 1930s and ’40s, before Arthur Miller took his spot.) But what is consistent throughout is Gibbs’s voice. It was the voice of New York—always on the verge of giving up without forgoing optimism entirely. Take this moment from his first review as The New Yorker’s lead theatre critic, published February 3, 1940:
On the night when most of my fortunate and sporty friends were watching Henry Armstrong beat the ears off a fighter called Pedro Montanez, I found myself imbedded in the play known as Young Couple Wanted.… If I were asked to furnish a description of it to ornament the marquee of the Maxine Elliott, I think “winsomely inept” are the words I would choose. Jed and Catherine want to get married, but, because the capitalist system makes no provision for the basically unemployable, they can’t. Instead they live together in Greenwich Village, planning to manufacture a product made out of grapes and peanuts. In the end…but for some reason I find that I am disinclined to go on with all this. Armstrong won by technical knockout in the ninth. Or so they told me, later that night.
Nothing is more tedious than describing the plot of a play that one finds tedious. Gibbs was one of the first to make a game of it; indeed, it became a hallmark of his style. But when it came to the “new” theatre of the 1940s, ushered in by Tennessee Williams and Oscar Hammerstein II, among others, Gibbs acknowledged how his earlier critical style—with its Deco-like sheen and New York provincialism—would have to change in accordance with the America these and other artists were bringing to realistic, often lyrical light. In short, Gibbs would have to be more open and go deeper as a writer himself. Writing about Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 masterwork, The Iceman Cometh—he didn’t love it as much as the previous decade’s Mourning Becomes Electra—he acknowledged how the entire enterprise “was certainly enough to intimidate the most frivolous critic.” Never content with his facility, Gibbs, during the 1940s, threw it in the rumble seat of his past, and began producing some of the best work of his career, in any genre—without sacrificing any of his caricaturist’s love of the small or big gesture. In his review of the 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, he praises Ethel Merman for her
gift of suggesting a wide range of emotion without perceptibly altering her expression—her leer is wonderfully suggestive but practically immobile; laughter disturbs her face only for an instant and then usually in only a rather chilly parody of amusement; and love for her, at least in Annie, is expressed by a look of really terrible vacancy.
This is as beautiful and true as anything the poet Edwin Denby wrote about the dance and dancers. Like Denby, Gibbs wrote criticism that was the synthesis of everything he produced outside it, including “Eden, with Serpents,” his sad, hard short story about a clinic where people with names like Mrs. Charlie Goodenough lounge while drying out, or any number of other stories in which drinking and recovery play a part. You cannot be funny without knowing not only that great sadness is at the bottom of the precipice, but that it is actually holding up the earth you stand on. Criticism suited Gibbs because he could be alone in a crowd, immersed in the world of someone else’s vulnerability and imagination, which called on his own. That’s where he lived. And where his words continue to live, too.
WOLCOTT GIBBS
OCTOBER 19, 1946 (ON THE ICEMAN COMETH BY EUGENE O’NEILL)
The circumstances attending the appearance last week of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh were certainly enough to intimidate the most frivolous critic. There was the illustrious author—except for Shaw, perhaps the only living Olympian—returning from years of mysterious silence with a play that was vaguely reported to be just a part of a far vaster project; there was the knowledge that this work, though possibly only a fragment, was still of such dimensions that the acting of it could not be accomplished in anything less than four and a half hours; there was the impression, somehow confirmed by the cryptic title and by the fact that the reviewers were furnished with the text in advance, that the visible play offered but a very small percentage of its author’s total meaning and would therefore require a concentration on everybody’s part at least adequate for deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone. Under these conditions, it was a little disconcerting to find that The Iceman Cometh, while an interesting play, was by no means comparable to its author’s best efforts in the past, either in style or substance, and furthermore that, except for some possible ambiguity at the end, it was no harder to understand than any work that attempts to convey large general ideas in terms of specific and circumscribed action. Mr. O’Neill’s idea in this case is no more original or abstruse than the discovery, not unknown to melancholy sophomores, that life is insupportable without illusions; his treatment of it, however, is so monumental, so clearly designed to merit words like “Greek” and “symphonic,” that it is no wonder that elaborate interpretations are already being provided by the metaphysicians in the parish. For the moment, we will stick to the facts.
The curtain at the Martin Beck goes up on the bar of a Raines Law hotel in the summer of 1912. It is six o’clock in the morning and a dozen or so of the inmates are sprawled asleep over the tables. They are thus disposed, rather than being upstairs in their beds, because they are waiting for the arrival of Hickey, a sporty travelling sales
man who turns up once a year on the proprietor’s birthday to buy them drinks and to relieve the tedium of their lives with the horsy humors of the road. It is a scene of appalling squalor, though Robert Edmond Jones has made it tremendously effective theatrically, and it is not improved as, one by one, the lost men wake up and we are allowed to inspect them in more detail. Inevitably, since Mr. O’Neill is dealing with the fate of all mankind, the personnel is extensive, ranging from cheap whores and mad Nihilists to scarecrow remittance men and Harvard graduates sunk without a trace. All they have in common, except for chronic alcoholism and filth, are their sorry lies about the past and their boozy dreams of an impossible tomorrow, but these still are enough to distinguish them as living men, capable of at least some dim parody of the emotions of human beings, even including a kind of desperate gaiety.
Hickey turns up at last, but it is soon obvious that he is not the companion they have known in the past. It is bad enough for them to discover that he is on the wagon but far worse to learn that he is preaching a curious salvation. Peace can come to them, he says, as it has come to him, only when they have abandoned all their empty dreams. Before these illusions can be given up, however, it is necessary to put them to the test, and, one by one—sober, terrified, and dressed with pathetic care—the bums leave the shelter of the bar to make their doomed attempts to take up life again. When they come back, they are finally without hope, but peace has escaped them, too. Faced with the tragic truth about themselves, some wearily accept the idea of death, some are roused to a savage hatred of their companions, all begin to lose their last resemblance to men. In their extremity, however, they learn that Hickey has murdered his wife, whose illusions about his behavior had given him an intolerable sense of guilt, and that the peace he offered them was only a spiritual counterpart of the physical death he had already accepted for himself. At the last moment, stricken with remorse at the terrible effect of his compassionately meant interference with their lives, he allows them to think that he has been insane, and with enormous relief they go back to their bottles and their hollow, happy dreams.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 63
