The picture is slow to get started, but it gathers complexity and power as it develops. Arletty, as she negotiates the complexity of her several relationships, gives an enormously subtle performance, one of the great female parts in all of cinema, never sacrificing wit to the sobriety of its intentions. It is at once a gay and utterly serious movie, impeccable in its development—wise and reserved, sometimes slyly so. It is a signpost on a promising road not often taken in postwar film.
There is something else I want to say about Children of Paradise. It was finished and released in 1945, when I was twelve years old. I imagine that it made its way to the United States within the year. That was of small consequence to me. Other movies loomed much larger in my life, and within the critical community. It did not have any international stars like Jean Gabin to help it along its way. At that stage, none but the truly devoted cinephiles had heard of Arletty. I guess Barrault was a little bit better known, but mostly as a kind of distant rumor. Consulting my various collections of reviews, I find no mention of the film at the time, except for a brief, enthusiastic burble by James Agee.
Yet I kept hearing about it, especially after I attended college and fell in with a group of cineastes who had seen it somewhere or other. Their enthusiasm fed my desire to see it, though I have no memory of where I finally caught up with it. It was probably in New York, when I was working my first jobs, had no television set and was haunting the Greenwich Village revival houses, for want of anything else to feed my eyeballs.
I was by this time not a total zero about movies. I was reading the reviews and noting pictures that I wanted to see. Some intentionality crept into my moviegoing—I was seeking out movies—though the supporting literature was surely scant and not very inspiring, a cult sort of thing at best.
But Children of Paradise and a few other movies became grails of a sort. My quest to see them symbolized—without my being entirely aware of it—my commitment to film as an art form that was going to become central to my life and, ultimately, of course, to my profession. I was stumbling toward something or other, but not daring to admit to this quite improbable desire.
Well, you have to do something to pass the time between the cradle and the grave. And note this: It cost me nothing to become “expert” in the field. It just sort of happened (there wasn’t much competition). I wrote my first book about film in 1962, became a reviewer shortly thereafter and essentially never looked back. And only occasionally and briefly regretted what I had become.
20
Crime Waves
From the sublime to the absurd. Why not? I think it may be the best one-sentence history of the movies. Crime Wave (1954) featured Sterling Hayden as a police detective gnawing on a toothpick as he tries to quit smoking while helping a young couple (Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk) evade the clutches of some small-time crooks with big-time ambitions for a bank robbery. (Charles Bronson is in it, playing under his real name, Charles Buchinsky.) It is essentially a mean little movie, which was a specialty of André de Toth. He was a nice guy in his way, as I said, but he had a truly bleak spirit underneath his bluster that he did not necessarily hide, which is why he never got the recognition he deserved.
I was left wondering, after he died, about the mysteries of Hollywood careers. He made some very good movies; so why is he, at best, a footnote? I think there’s the matter of genres to consider. He made a few pictures, and they were all right, but the standard references talk of him largely as a maker of westerns and crime stories. In his heyday, those did not get you mentioned among the big boys. The fact that they were always well made got noticed by the likes of me, but we did not make this connection—that other movies, of similar budget and ambition, did not often compare in competence to his. In the waning days of the studio system, when he was most active, there was a place for him; people in the business knew his work and liked it, but only occasionally did they give him shots above his station. And then, after a while, the studios weren’t making many B pictures; if they got made at all, they were “indies,” forced to scramble along the margins of the industry, often enough shakily financed and distributed. You can see why André just sort of said the hell with it and picked up his sculptor’s tools. In an earlier Hollywood (or a later one), he would have fought his way in from the margins—lots of guys made their debuts in series films, Nero Wolfe among them, and moved quickly on to solid careers in the thirties and forties. Later, from the sixties on, they didn’t have to apprentice at all; they wrote a screenplay or two, heard their genius proclaimed and skipped Nero Wolfe entirely—not that those often agreeable little films were being made much, either.
There are, of course, other careers like André’s, and by paying modest tribute to him I hope to pay tribute to all of them. Talents of this kind were once something like the backbone of Hollywood, a significant source of its stability and profitability. And fun. That André achieved such solid results so consistently is a tribute to his professionalism and to a sort of ease with his craft that nowadays is missed perhaps more than we know. I’d like to see a festival of his work—complete with an unreadable monograph. Or maybe not. Maybe he should lurk forever on the fringe, waiting to be discovered, one picture at a time, by folks with nothing better to do than find good forgotten films. They would discover that low-budget moviemaking is not always a problem; that it can be, indeed, part of the solution.
21
Why We Fight
Britain had a history dating back to before the Magna Carta—a sustaining tradition. Other Allied nations had something similar to see them through the war years, to buck them up when the going got tough. But American history was comparatively short. We had suffered the Civil War, but that experience somehow did not seem entirely relevant to the present crisis. We had recently endured the Great Depression, but the harsh lessons learned from it did not seem particularly applicable to the war years, either. It was all well and good to bleat on about democracy and the glories of the American way of life, but there wasn’t much fun to be found in speechifying. We needed something more cheerful, more innocent and sentimental, to keep us up and hopeful as the war wore on. We found that chiefly in nostalgia. During the war years, and for a while after them, movie after movie took us, among other places, back in time to the “Gay” Nineties and its songs—some authentic to the period, others pastiches of their manner.
Twentieth Century Fox had the best routine lot in this line of business. Betty Grable, famous for her legs and a pert presence on the screen, was from 1942 to 1951 absent only once from the annual list of the top box office stars. She could sing a little and dance a little and be sexy a little in a distinctly nonthreatening way. She seemed to be a nice girl; she was rather good in Mother Wore Tights—a showbiz life recalled—and persuasively scared in I Wake Up Screaming. Best of all, she was parentally approved, which could not necessarily be said of more dangerous-seeming rivals like Rita Hayworth. Fox had some nonthreatening guys like Don Ameche on their payroll, too. (It was quite late in his career before he proved that he could actually act.) The truth of the matter is that the studio’s standard was routinely good-natured and genial—their musicals and comedies were okay, but rarely challenging. I think that was all right with the wartime audience. They were not looking for trouble. A bland biopic about a pair of songwriters, say, was just fine.
It was not until Darryl Zanuck came back from the war and started making more hard-hitting movies that the studio came into its own for a few years. He made tough movies—twists on his old Warner Bros. style. Kiss of Death (1947) is a good example, and Richard Widmark madly giggling his way to glory was, for a time, something new and definitely strange to the movies. He would not have been more than a character man before the outbreak of hostilities. When many of the major male stars were in the armed services, many of the older guys and the 4-Fs took up the slack, with, it seems, no notable diminishment in the movies’ quality.
One Saturday night in 1942, there was an uncommon stir at 1721 North Sixty-ei
ghth Street. We were going to the movies as a family. That didn’t happen very often. This night, we were all going to see the early show of Yankee Doodle Dandy.
I had heard of its star, James Cagney, of course, but I don’t think I had seen him in anything as yet, with the possible exception of its immediate predecessor, Captain of the Clouds, which was not so hot. I had also heard of the movie, which was wildly popular with ladies of my mother’s generation. It struck me as kind of a dim proposition—a biopic about George M. Cohan, an apparently legendary song-and-dance man much beloved by older folks, though unknown to me, except by way of the publicity for this movie. But a movie was a movie, and besides, there was talk of ice cream sodas afterwards—“if it isn’t too late.” So off we went, toward transformation, in my case.
The story is quite simple: Cohan is running in a play called I’d Rather Be Right, which mildly satirizes Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he is summoned to the White House for what he imagines will be chastisement for his cheekiness. Not so, as it turns out—the president wants to give him an award, some sort of civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. The two men get to talking, Roosevelt asks Cohan to tell him his life story and he proceeds to do so, in a series of flashbacks that are highly fictionalized. In essence, they recount the history of the entire Cohan family’s trip to vaudeville and legit stardom, which does not contain many setbacks but does contain many Cohan favorites, like the title tune, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and “Over There,” then being recycled as an anthem for the U.S. involvement in World War II. The recital over, Cagney taps his way down a preposterously long White House staircase and emerges into a parade of soldiers who happen to be marching past the White House and happen to be singing “Over There.” He joins in that rousing chorus as the movie ends.
There are a couple of versions of how Cagney became involved in the project. He told me, decades later, that Fred Astaire had been mildly interested in doing Cohan’s story—that would have been a disaster; Astaire was a genius of elegance, whereas the film needed someone more raucous and sentimental—but he dropped out and Cagney dropped in. There was also talk that Cagney needed a flag waver just then; he was, at the time, close to being a fellow traveler (he ended his life as a Reagan conservative) and needed to prove his all-American credentials. That’s plausible, I suppose, but he was an enormously beloved star at the time; very few people would have held his personal politics against him in the early forties.
Anyway, it was done—in black and white, of all things—with the mysterious Michael Curtiz directing. He was a great, fecund filmmaker (Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, etc.) about whom we know next to nothing biographically, except that he was a Hungarian given to fracturing English, staging elaborate tracking shots (which drove Hal Wallis crazy) and expressing no known opinions about the pictures he made.
What my family saw that night was, in essence, a pretty straightforward musical, which occasionally broke with the convention of staging its musical numbers within the confines of some theatrical setting and soaring off to do routines that could not be pulled off within any theater known to man. Normally, I would have hated that; the first aesthetic little boys embrace is stern realism. In this instance, though, I didn’t give a hoot about that. The whole damn thing was a fantasy, and in a way I understood that instinctively, though I could not articulate the thought clearly at the time.
Cagney never had a dance lesson in his life. He and other kids taught one another their steps—and also the panoply of gestures that constituted a good share of his screen character—on the streets of New York. What emerged with him as a dancer was a style all his own—all strut and manic energy, nothing held back. There was in Yankee Doodle Dandy something heedless and demonic about his presence. There comes a moment, for instance, when he simply hurls himself at the proscenium’s side wall, seemingly halfway up it, bounces merrily off it and proceeds with his number. There are dancers of more elegance, like Mikhail Baryshnikov, who are in awe of him because of the naturalism of his movements, though you can be sure everything he did was carefully choreographed.
It is, finally, a wonder. Cagney, who won one of history’s most deserved Academy Awards for the film, was careful to downplay it. He liked to pretend a sort of improvised ease in what he did. But that kind of madness in him when he dances is unique to him. I had never seen anything quite like it. And I have never seen anything like it in the decades since—all the sweat hidden, yet clearly expended. And all the while, Cagney remained a nice guy in the public’s estimation—a lovable scamp, if you will, with a sentimental and even genial side to him. Norman Mailer, who had a role in Cagney’s last feature, Ragtime, said the man was as tough as they come, but, at heart, he was a very decent guy—because, as he put it, “there’s nothing more depressing than finding a guy as tough as nails and as mean as dirt.”
Cagney more or less agreed with this estimation. “I understood that type perfectly well. No strain.” Interviewing him for a book and TV show I was doing on him, I objected. After all, Ragtime was not exactly a gangster film. But there was a hunk of hoodlum in almost everything he did, he said—“There really was. Oh, sure.” He chuckled to himself as he remembered deviltries past.
Objections to the pictures Warner Bros. had forced him into in his early days were more or less forgotten, though they contained some of his best work. He was at last ready to be easy on himself. We stayed in touch a bit as my film came together, and one night in 1981, when he was in New York for the premiere of Ragtime, I received a call from his people. Could I possibly bring my film up to the Carlyle Hotel, where he was staying, and show it to him?
I could and I did. It was a very odd screening. He laughed at the sad bits in the film and teared up at the funny stuff, but on the whole he seemed to enjoy the picture. I got the impression that he had not seen the early films since he had made them—and found them to be better than he remembered them. The next night we went to the Ragtime premiere and to a dinner at Lüchow’s, then in its final days. He was sternly ordered not to eat the cheesecake (he was a diabetic), but he did, taking sly little bites of it when he thought no one was looking—a hint of deviltry in his demeanor, which no one had the heart to deny him.
I never saw him again. Still, he was an ornament of my life, a man who couldn’t remember where he had lunch yesterday but had total, amused recall of the long-past past and was more than happy to share his memories, though pretending surprise that anyone was still interested.
Aside from the explosive talent of Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy was a pretty conventional backstage musical, and I would guess no more than a marginally “true” story—not that anyone cared very much about that. Its energy just blasted away whatever doubts the spoilsports grumbled into the ether. But a year later there was another musical that, in its unpretentious way, was unlike any previous venture in its genre.
First, perhaps a little cultural history is in order. In the spring of 1943, the musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. It was a game changer. There had, of course, been other shows that at least occasionally focused on ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but Rodgers and Hammerstein did so with an ease and thoroughness that was extraordinary. It had a shimmering score. It had ballet. It had a cheerfully comic subplot (“I’m just a girl who can’t say no”) and, balancing that, a dark side (“poor Jud is daid”). It had Jewish jokes—not so hot in retrospect. Most of all, it changed forever our expectations of what we wanted to see in a “musical play,” as this one came to be called.
There were precedents for it—Show Boat and Pal Joey spring to mind. And the timing was perfect, feeding into the wartime nostalgia market that we have previously noted. It ran for five years, a record, and during its run imitations of its spirit had been mounted. More important, perhaps, MGM was an investor in the production. A novelty was on the way to becoming the new standard for this kind of film enterprise. I am talking specifically about Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
It was based on a col
lection of autobiographical New Yorker short stories by Sally Benson, recounting the mild adventures of a typical American family, the Smiths, as they await the opening of the World’s Fair in the title city in 1903. There is a running joke about the tiresome song that gives the movie its title. But it’s a genial joke, in a film that, in its way, is a masterpiece. The tension in the film comes from a crisis: The family’s father (Leon Ames) has been offered a promotion that would require them to abandon their idyllic life in St. Louis and move to New York, which no one, save him, wants to do.
Judy Garland, as everyone knows, is the picture’s star—falling in love with Tom Drake and singing most of the songs, some of which became standards, by the relatively minor songwriting team of Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin (“The Trolley Song,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”). These are situated in the Irving Brecher–Fred F. Finklehoffe screenplay, and the film is impeccably directed by Vincente Minnelli.
I think a case can be made that this is Garland’s best work ever. It’s a relaxed and free performance, absent the tensions that marred so much of her work. She seems to be finding fun in it—she’s not pressing, but she is not resisting the sentimental side of the role, either. There is real happiness in this work, when so much of the rest of her career was a thing of firings and suspensions and general misery. Is it possible that for the brief time of this film’s making she was authentically happy? I really don’t know. I do know that she had a grace and charm here that was mostly absent elsewhere in her troubled life.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 14