But I was not finished with the Capras. Frank died, at the age of ninety-four, in 1991. His passing was by no means ignored, though the obituaries were more guarded than they would have been some years earlier. I wrote a couple of pieces that attempted to redress the balance in his favor. I was also asked to appear on another television show about him, produced, once again, by his sons. It was a happy experience, lengthy and leisurely, and it offered some pretty good insights into the man and his films.
I think Meet John Doe was his finest work. There are so many things wrong with the picture, which begins as a kind of comedy and veers, at the end, very close to tragedy, from which it is rescued at the last minute by a not entirely persuasive happy ending. It was at the time (1941) neither a critical nor a commercial success, this story of a sore-armed baseball pitcher (Gary Cooper) who is promoted by the marvelous Barbara Stanwyck to become the head of the John Doe club, which sees him, eventually, as the figurehead of a national populist movement, at first supported, then betrayed, by Edward Arnold’s fascist rich guy. Cooper is very far from being his usual self. He is, as David Thomson says, a neurotic figure and, in his innocence, an easily exploited one. In time, he is betrayed by his followers and dissuaded from suicide by an outburst of desperate populist sentiment. It is an ending that was much argued over by Capra and his colleagues.
There are desperate improvisations that don’t really add up in the film. Yet, at another level, there is that rally in the rain, a masterful construction in its shooting and editing. And in its meaning. It starts out to be a celebration of Cooper as a heroic everyman. But it ends up as a terrible indictment of the volatility of the crowd. Gone is the sunny optimism of Capra’s early years. His people are now “a great beast,” and Capra fully embraces their volatility. They have an infinite capacity to be misled for reasons they cannot understand (which is an important reason why the desperate attempt at an upbeat ending does not work—it is too little, too late).
This was (at the time at least) an unacknowledged crisis for Capra. The war, of course, intervened. He was a long time away from the movies, and when he returned to them he could not return to his former ways, except with It’s a Wonderful Life, which was, as I said, a failure when it was released in 1946. It is a far darker and more dangerous film than we care, even now, to admit. Having tasted the forbidden fruit of seriousness, he could not return to the comic, though he tried in ways that were generally rather wan and listless. But sobriety was not, it seemed, an option, either.
For roughly a decade, Capra was a great filmmaker, an almost perfect exemplar of the American spirit in his time. I think Frank was puzzled by his fall from favor. There is something that endures in his work, something that transcends his moment.
13
Greatness
A case can be made—probably I’m in the midst of doing it—that the period between 1935 and the onset of World War II was the greatest era in the history of American movies. But I’m naturally resistant to such ultimate superlatives. Good movies are made all the time—though obviously not as often as bad ones. What we can say is that by the mid-1930s, Hollywood had settled down. Most of its best first- and second-generation directors were working steadily, as were the most important stars of early talking pictures.
But what are we to make of Cimarron and Cavalcade—now basically unwatchable—as best-picture winners? Or, for that matter, of Grand Hotel and The Great Ziegfeld? Surely, the Academy could have done better than these safe, sane and comfortable pictures? Officially speaking, it was a mediocre period, especially among directors—the names we now revere were scarcely mentioned then. But, of course, history grinds along. Balances are redressed.
The problem was, to a large degree, one of critical standards. Most of the people reviewing movies at that time—a notable exception was the sharp and graceful Otis Ferguson—were not cineastes. They had the impulse to pass judgments, but they were borrowing their standards from other media. They did not fully (or even halfheartedly) grasp that movies were a unique means of expression. For example, they could see that film had about it aspects of the theater, that it was by and large a dramatic medium. So the standards of the play were imposed on it—especially in American film. (Europeans were permitted somewhat more leeway in this regard.) We must not forget that D. W. Griffith was basically a man of the theater, and rather hangdog at first about making movies. It wasn’t until he enjoyed inordinate success with The Birth of a Nation that his problem became the opposite—one of grandiosity. I hold that his most enjoyable movies of this era were rather unpretentious little movies, on the order of A Romance of Happy Valley. He didn’t despise these movies, but he didn’t think much of them, either. He was convinced that his future lay with the epic exertions of Intolerance and Way Down East.
His films were “cinematic” all right. They could not have been accomplished in any other medium. The same was true of the novel as a source for movies. And I think (we’re speaking in broad generalities here) it was perhaps a more useful model. It had a range, a looseness of structure, that granted film a waywardness that suited it. In fact, you could argue that the movies had before them a model—in the work of Chaplin, Keaton and the other silent comedians—wherein their future could be read. But they were set apart. They were so odd. People could not see in them models of behavior and dramatic structure that were generally applicable to the medium. Also, of course, they needed to talk. Until they could, the silent film, for all its felicities, was a crippled medium.
Some of the movies discussed earlier in this book obviously triumphed over these defects—like The Crowd. But the victory of the talking picture in the marketplace, when it arrived, was simply overwhelming. In 1927, The Jazz Singer opened, and by 1929 silent film was dead. In the entire history of culture, no technology-based revolution was accomplished with such speed and completeness. And lack of apparent regret. Only Chaplin held out for a while—he did not speak on-screen until 1940.
There was about the sound movies of the early years an undeniable rough magic. It was enough for a brief while that dialogue and songs issued from the screen. It seemed like some kind of minor miracle—and never mind the quality of what was said or sung. Of course, there were wonderful pictures in this era, ranging from Duck Soup to Camille. But I think we probably ought to risk a generality: The roughness was, almost unconsciously, being smoothed out of them. They became, by 1935 or 1936, much slicker, particularly the comedies and the romances. Not many of them were “great” movies, but a certain standard was attained. The average inched higher.
As with, for example, Dodsworth, in 1936, directed by William Wyler, from a script by the playwright Sidney Howard, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel. Wyler was shortly to become everyone’s idea of a great director, a man largely devoted to “important” adaptations of plays and novels, culminating in The Best Years of Our Lives, about which I am more dubious than most. (Never mind—we all have our blind spots.) Wyler was a sober and earnest craftsman, whose preferred pace was rather stately, but he also had a very fine eye for performance. His best films contain yards and yards of very good naturalistic and unfussy performances. None more so than Dodsworth.
The story is, in its way, quite linear. In his early fifties, Sam Dodsworth (the sublime Walter Huston) sells his automobile manufacturing company for no particular reason, largely at the behest of his wife (Ruth Chatterton), for an idle life in Europe. She occupies herself with “playboys”; he occupies himself with nothing very much. He’s bored and restless, totally at loose ends. Huston, who originated the part onstage, is befriended by the young and vibrant Mary Astor (as Edith Cortright), who offers him what amounts to a new life. He is, however, a good and faithful man. The idea of setting aside even the charade that his marriage has become does not sit easily with him, especially as he is a man who must also find meaningful work to achieve fulfillment—not easily accomplished at his age. We fear for him, for the real possibility of misery, fecklessness, a wasted, petering-out sort of
life.
That, however, does not happen. Sam rallies. The restless, entrepreneurial side of him cannot be entirely stilled. And Astor’s character keeps turning up—patient and willing to wait for him to sort through his many issues. By the end of the movie he is considering a new business (aircraft manufacturing) and is devotedly committed to her. Dodsworth is that comparatively rare thing, a serious movie that ends happily for the people in it we care most about. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” goes its tagline, and we believe it.
It is a very elegant movie. Wyler’s direction seems to me perfect in its understatement, and the playing is the same. It is a calm movie, but it is also intense without ever raising its voice. When people talk about it—which they do not do as much as they should—the word “adult” is often used. I have no objection to that. It is definitely a film for grown-ups. But it is more than that, I think. In a period when romantic drama tended to be somewhat overwrought, the tone of the picture seems to me exemplary. It is just so steady, so lacking in fuss and feathers. It draws you in without ever seeming to beg for your attention. At a time when the movies tended to be somewhat frenzied in their bid for our attention—though, on the whole, there is nothing wrong with that—Dodsworth spoke, quite uniquely, in my judgment, to our yearning for something more “refined” (I guess that’s the word I want) and delivered it without misstep. And, it seems to me, without any true competition.
14
Ornaments of the Age
Romantic comedy. Screwball comedy. You know: The Thin Man. My Man Godfrey. It Happened One Night. The Awful Truth. Bringing Up Baby. And so on. In the latter half of the 1930s, it set the tone for the period. Which is slightly perverse, I suppose; these were, after all, grim times. But that may be the reason the screen was so giddy: We needed these pictures, perhaps more than we cared to admit.
A case in point: the sublime Twentieth Century, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and based on a play. It has Hawks directing John Barrymore and Carole Lombard on a train—very confined but not giving a damn about that. He’s a producer, she’s a star (and ex-wife). He needs her for what sounds like a truly terrible show he’s trying to produce. She’s probably still in love with him but doesn’t want to admit it. In the course of their antics, he is called upon to recite the story of his play, which includes, among other things, a solemn imitation of a camel. This is one of the great comic monologues in the history of the movies.
Hawks claimed he had to settle Lombard down. After shooting for a day or so, he took her out for a walk and told her she had already done enough acting for the entire movie. She was perhaps overawed by Barrymore, who actually was always an amiable and unpretentious presence on his sets. It seems to me that screwball comedy, in its full glory, begins here, in 1934. It has it all—attractive people, smart dialogue and, as Andrew Sarris acutely noted, leading players who did not offload their wisecracks onto the supporting players. They damn well did it all themselves.
There were obviously all kinds of other films in this era, including those featuring Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn. But I do think comedy set the tone for the period; it is the first thing I think of when my mind turns to it. This does not mean—as we’ve already had ample reason to see—that wonderful movies were not made prior to that more or less arbitrary 1934 date. Or that pretty bad ones weren’t routinely released in the latter half of that decade.
Let’s consider Cary Grant. There’s no particular reason to do so, except that in my fanboy way I adored him from the first time I clapped eyes on him, probably in Arsenic and Old Lace. He was just so damned funny in that. More sophisticated appreciation arose later.
Of his past I at first knew nothing. I later learned that he had known hard times in the familiar patterns of show business: a lost mother, a stern father, work in a boy acrobat troupe, that sort of thing. In his apprentice days he had been a stilt walker, and then an appealing and apparently quite expert, if more or less minor, musical comedy player, who was making quite a nice living in the theater—on Broadway, on the road—in the 1920s and early ’30s. He was not yet a great star, but he was likable and nearly always had work. In those years, I do not believe anyone predicted the greatness that was soon to be his. He would have been a star of some sort—he was too good-looking, and too easeful, to have avoided that fate. But until perhaps 1937, there were far grander star careers.
Yet here we have David Thomson writing in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that Grant is “the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.” He is almost casual in his assertion. Really? one thinks. Can that be so?
You pause to think it over. On reflection, you come to believe it is likely true. He was not an actor of huge range—high heroism was mostly beyond him. But, as Thomson writes, he could be “attractive and unattractive simultaneously; there is a light side and a dark side to him, but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view.”
Not that that came easily to him, though he had the gift of making it seem so. He came to the movies in 1932 playing minor roles in minor films—a rather recessive fellow standing around with his hand thrust in his pocket, as he himself said. He admitted imitating the likes of Rex Harrison. He debuted in April (This Is the Night), but by the fall he was with Dietrich in Blonde Venus (a second lead), by no means making any grand assertions. He followed that, however, with the best of his early films, Hot Saturday. (Seven Grant pictures were released in his first year at Paramount.) It is his first lead, and you can see in the film a little bit of the actor who would emerge in the next few years. He plays a young man who keeps himself rather apart from his peers, the better to live in a free-spirited way, avoiding the hypocrisies of small-town life. It’s minor, but in its way it is rather smart, too. There is something hard and glittery about him; he was, oddly enough, showing his dark side on the screen before his charm was allowed to surface. And it led directly to his first “prestige” production, the role of Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly, opposite Sylvia Sidney, produced by her lover (and the studio’s head of production), B. P. Schulberg. The film was a creaky flop, but it brought Grant to the avid attention of no less a personage than Mae West, who provided him with the notoriety around the studio, around town, that he had thus far largely lacked.
She put it about that he was an extra she had spotted around the lot (not true, of course), but he was her kind of hunk. He played agreeably, but still recessively, with her in She Done Him Wrong, which was a studio-saving hit, full of Westian zingers and zappers. Within a year he was thrown into a sort of sequel (I’m No Angel), also a hit.
Whereupon he suddenly became Cary Grant—that is to say, the Cary Grant we came to know and love. The unlikely instrument of his deliverance was a flop called Sylvia Scarlett (1935), wherein he plays a feckless fellow known as Jimmy Monkley, a con artist and swindler. The audience at the premiere hated the thing—so much so that some of the cast, which included Katharine Hepburn (who plays something like half the movie in drag, which I guess gives you some idea of its slightly desperate quality), Brian Aherne and Edmund Gwenn, offered to make another picture for producer Pandro Berman without fees to make up for the disaster (or so the story goes). He rejected them. (“I don’t want you…ever to work for me again.”)
But for Grant—although he does not appear to have recognized it at the time—it was something of a miracle. And an unexplained one. According to George Cukor, who directed, the actor who until then had no particular identity—was, indeed, rather awkward—had suddenly “flowered.” “He felt the ground under his feet.” He was both mean-spirited and cheeky, both a sparrow and a hawk, in the words of the script. It is a performance, at last, thought out and colored both in darkness and in light.
There is no explanation anywhere on record of how this transformation occurred. Perhaps Grant had just finally grown up. Maybe something in his morally ambiguous character spoke to something in his past experience, something he could identify with. All we can say
for certain is that he abandoned his passivity and attacked the role in the highest spirits.
He now entered upon a period virtually unprecedented in American movie history. Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Suspicion, The Talk of the Town—from 1937 to 1942 there is no actor’s filmography to compare with Grant’s. It lies at the heart of Thomson’s admiration and my own. And we have yet to consider To Catch a Thief, Indiscreet, North by Northwest or Charade.
He was obviously fortunate in his directors. In addition to Cukor, he worked in this period with Howard Hawks, George Stevens and Alfred Hitchcock—the best of the best at that time. Since he was a persnickety sort of man, we have to believe that he had a lot to do with making those choices—especially Hitchcock, who did him the favor of making Grant’s first real venture into darkness with Suspicion. It is a film that ends happily—preposterously—and should not. But it is important as a venture into territory that is significant for the rest of his career. It showed that he could go to the dark side—especially with this director—without totally abandoning his charm. It added greatly to his available range, putting, for example, Notorious (which may be my favorite among his films) within his grasp. There were films he was offered and for whatever reasons rejected (A Star Is Born—the Garland version—and The Third Man), but career management is a field rife with error.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 9