Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  Partly that’s because she does not have to carry the whole picture herself. Most prominently, Margaret O’Brien was there to help out—at age seven. She was the one child actress who was allowed to be as neurotic as she wished—though we never knew if she was the least bit troubled in reality. (We do know that, while playing an English child shipped to America for the duration of the war in Journey for Margaret (1942), she carried a live hand grenade around with her for what seems like half the picture. We also have Minnelli’s claim that he told her that her dog had suddenly died in order to elicit the tears that were required for one scene in this movie.)

  What is remarkable about this performance is that this child carries the entire weight of the film’s darkness. Without her presence, the movie would simply be a genial little slice of old-timey life with a few pleasant songs. But Tootie is a case. She is obsessed with death, she attempts to derail a streetcar, she accuses Garland’s boyfriend of striking her and, in the film’s grimmest sequence, she sets out to “kill” a harmless old neighborhood gentleman, Mr. Braukoff, whom she has come to see as an ogre. At the end of the film, during what appears to be the Smiths’ last St. Louis Christmas, while Garland croons “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” she rushes into the backyard and destroys a snowman family, symbolically destroying the whole idea (ideal) of the family.

  Today, this kid would be in therapy five days a week. But the Smiths treat her as no more than an eccentric, as someone who is perhaps “just going through a phase.” Maybe so, though her attack on the snow people finally leads Mr. Smith to abandon his New York dream. (The closing shots of the film show the family happily enjoying the fair the next summer.) The only faint hope the film holds out for Tootie is a cakewalk musical number with Garland, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” a joyous, yet faintly hysterical, comic turn that hints that this kid may turn out all right in the end.

  I’ve worried about Tootie, off and on, for the rest of my life. I’d really like to know what became of this troubled child. Of Meet Me in St. Louis I have no worries at all, though it is ambiguous about the pieties of American family life; in reality, I think Papa Smith, especially in that time and place, would have told the kids to quit their whining and start packing. But you can’t have that, can you? You can only suggest the subversion of “family values,” not destroy them, even now, almost seventy years later.

  The film has grown in stature with the passing years. It is, I think, one of the few truly great musicals, hiding behind its mask of innocence, possibly because the people who made it did not know entirely what they were doing. Yet I also think they had a dim idea of what they were, in their careless, showbizzy ways, questioning. Only Minnelli, himself the product of a wandering family of players, may have guessed at that. But he was an instinctive director, not at all good at analyzing his motives. In my acquaintance with him, his mask of innocence never slipped. He kept his own counsel about this—about everything he did. He married Garland, of course, around this time. They had a child—Liza with a z. He was ever an amiable, inarticulate man. His autobiography was called I Remember It Well—when, in fact, he remembered next to nothing.

  22

  Muse of Fire

  I came late to Henry V, and I came with one of those annoying little-boy grievances. I think it was around 1946 that I caught up with the film. It was a classroom assignment, and off I trundled to see it—on a school night, no less. I was wary of the thing. I imagined a lot of high-toned palaver, of which, of course, there was plenty, but which I quite liked. It was clearly spoken and, to my relief, entirely understandable. I felt very grown up “appreciating” it and expounding on it in the days that followed.

  Better still, I noticed a mistake in the picture. There is a big old hell-for-leather cavalry charge in it, which was very gratifying to the kids in the audience, who needed some relief from all the high-flown talk. Anyway, down this valley Olivier’s horsemen splendidly thunder—right past a whole bunch of power lines.

  Yikes! How come Olivier didn’t notice them? Or maybe he did and was locked into his sequence and couldn’t move his horses and men elsewhere—it’s a big damn series of shots. Maybe he just thought that with all the action nobody would notice. Except possibly gimlet-eyed youth, and what did he care about them?

  I was naturally pleased with myself, being so observant. What adolescent does not like to see adults screwing up? But for once I didn’t run around bragging. It was my little secret—and Olivier’s, of course. I think my silence was a measure of my respect for Henry V. Or maybe my respect for a self-evidently distinguished movie. By this time, I think, I was just possibly starting to see how movies worked, how the Hitchcock and Hawks pictures sort of sneaked up on you and were acknowledged by some process of secret sharing. You didn’t want to be caught out taking something seriously that was not supposed to be taken seriously. That was for later. I cannot remember when I was able to use the words “art” and “movies” in the same sentence without stammering. It must have been a great day for me.

  So Henry V was different. It was a self-conscious act of creation—an attempt at a work of art in a medium that didn’t do that sort of thing very often—yet also, yes, a movie, which, despite its elevated language and obvious ambitions, for the most part succeeded in movie terms. It was, you had to admit, kind of fun, or so it dawned on me as it “unspooled” at the Times theater on that autumn evening, as much fun to watch as most “regular” movies were.

  It was also, almost certainly, the first movie I ever saw that wore its foreignness proudly, which said to me and my kind that movies could come from anywhere on the planet and entertain you—not like Abbott and Costello, but in some way that was rich and strange. Back in the day—not that I knew of it at the time—D. W. Griffith was given to prating on about the silent movies being a “universal language.” That was pompous, of course. But I think this movie suggested a similar possibility to me.

  I have never seen it again since that night almost seventy years ago. I think I’m afraid to. I think it might prove stiff and awkward, not what I want it to be, not what it is in my memory.

  A footnote: It is possible that Henry V is the first foreign film I ever saw—starting at the top. But it may be that I Know Where I’m Going! was the film from abroad that takes that dubious prize. Either way, it had its moments. That’s the lesson I learned from it.

  23

  Here’s Looking at You, Kid

  Murder, My Sweet (also known as Farewell, My Lovely) is one of the first film noirs of the wartime era, and it deserves mention here. At the time of its release, in 1944, it seemed most notable as the vehicle by which Dick Powell converted himself from a so-so crooner into a reliable tough guy. It has all the elements of the genre—doomy voice-overs, bad women, weariness, Powell getting the crap beaten out of him, plenty of darkness. All in all, it was a pretty good little film, and Powell—was excellent in it, as he was in most of the films that followed it in his now saved career. As footnotes go, this is a good one. Too bad that in movie history Murder, My Sweet has to share its year with Casablanca.

  I suppose Casablanca is the most beloved Academy Award winner of all time. Okay, we must remember a basic rule of this book—try to resist the superlative unless it genuinely applies. So let’s say one of the most beloved Oscar winners of them all. Julius Epstein, who wrote the screenplay with his brother, Philip, and Howard Koch (and shared the screenwriting prize with them), did not think it was his best. As I recall, he liked Light in the Piazza better, for understandable, writerly reasons—and because Casablanca was a messy business. It was written more or less from day to day, with the brotherly team going off the picture to do some wartime service in Washington (which accounts for Koch’s presence in the credits). This squares with Bergman’s recollections. She remembered not knowing until the last minute whether she would stay with Bogart or take the plane with Victor Laszlo to carry on the fight against fascism. “Play it in the middle,” she was rather unhelpfully told. But Epstein
remembered precisely when he and his brother decided she had to go with Victor: They were stopped at the light at Beverly Glen and Sunset Boulevard when they were driving to the studio one morning. It was logical, and it made all the difference. A romantic sacrifice was required. If Ilsa had stayed with Rick, we would have just had a routine “happy” ending—maybe something less than that—and none of those ravishing close-ups, the cutaways to the airplane’s revving engines, the weltschmerz that is the film’s permanent contribution to our way of seeing the world. And don’t tell me that Michael Curtiz was not a great director—every shot in the film is perfectly placed and held for just the right amount of time.

  I have no way of knowing to what degree the unproduced play on which the movie was based contributed to the screenplay’s wit—at a guess, not very much. But it seems to me that the miracle of the picture lies elsewhere. Umberto Eco has written that its success derives from the fact that it evokes every standard move or cliché of its genre. If it had skipped one—disappointed just one of our expectations—he claims it would have failed. He may have a point. But I’m not entirely certain about that—forgive me—as time goes by.

  What’s wonderful about Casablanca is that it is a war picture (or perhaps I should say a wartime picture) that has virtually no action. There is exactly one fatal shot fired in it (when the loathsome Strasser is offed by Rick). Mostly it is about Rick and Ilsa mooning about, rekindling the love they lost back in Paris some months ago. The cleverness of the movie lies in the way ideology serves as the force that keeps them apart. The damn thing has principles, which, all things considered, are worked into the narrative with a fair amount of subtlety. What it’s saying is that normally love should find its way, but not when the world is in crisis. (“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”) And it means it. Or it means it long enough for us to accept the possibility that every once in a while people can act out of their better natures. Even today the film can persuade us of this frankly dubious proposition.

  In reality, I think Rick and Ilsa would have found a way to get together again. (Go. Drop me a line when you get settled.) But that’s too cynical a note even for the ever cynical critic to strike. Besides, Bogart has by the film’s end persuaded us that he loves his misery too much to surrender it easily. He’ll always have Paris, won’t he?

  According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax, Bogart’s best biographers, Bogie was dubious that Rick would have been able to give up Ilsa in real life; she was just too winsome to resist. That’s likely true. But such leaps of faith are commonplace in the movies. They wouldn’t be movies if they didn’t make these demands on the audience’s desire to believe in a reality that is an improvement on life’s ineluctable everydayness.

  Of course, all deeply successful movies, movies that worm their way permanently into our consciousness, require some luck to get there. There are a number of movies in this book that I regard as highly as Casablanca but that are not automatic favorites of the rest of moviegoing mankind—or even necessarily known to it except as rumors, things one means to get around to someday. Part of this film’s luck was in its dialogue—that blend of wisecracks and dark portent that would, as we’ll see, shortly become the lingua franca of film noir. This movie had many more writers than have credits on it, and how they got together on this style remains a mystery, but it suited Bogart better than any of the words in the movies that had fired his recent rise. I suspect Wallis—who was very hands-on with this project—had something to do with it. He was a phlegmatic guy, but a very smart one.

  Then, too, there was the casting. Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and “Cuddles” Sakall were Warner regulars doing familiar turns, and that was comforting, I suppose. Paul Henreid was noble without being too much of a pain in the ass, and, of course, Bergman simply melted in everyone’s mouth. Casablanca was about as perfectly cast as any movie can be. There was talk at the time of other casts—Ronald Reagan gets a mention, and Ann Sheridan, too. The former would have been a disaster and, worse, turned the film into a B picture. Sheridan was a perky, winning actress—but she had nothing of the soulfulness the role required. One wonders about these rumors—were they just batted around the room for a day or two, or were they seriously considered? Again, I think Wallis was the deciding factor. He was serious about this thing, and Ronnie Reagan was not to his taste for Casablanca—Kings Row notwithstanding.

  But the best luck of the film was luck in the purest form. In January 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met in North Africa to discuss war aims. It was the first time the president had left the United States in wartime, and it was at this meeting that the two leaders advanced the (controversial) idea of insisting on unconditional surrender as a prerequisite for ending the war. The meeting took place at, yes, Casablanca—within days of a certain film’s release. The picture, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with the conference, but the venue was on the front pages for days. And Warner Bros. did nothing to discourage the notion that it might just possibly have something to do with high politics instead of sex and stuff. I begged and whined to see the film, despite the fact that my parents thought it perhaps too “sophisticated” for a ten-year-old. They weakened in the end, and I loved the movie. I understood it, if not completely, then well enough.

  Which is not quite the end of the Casablanca story. A year later, it was nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards and won some (best director, best adapted screenplay), and when it came time for the best picture award, Hal Wallis was primed and ready—it was the logical choice, and everyone knew it was, well, you know, his vision. Sure enough, its title was called out. But who should beat Wallis to the stage but Jack Warner, whose name as producer was included—a courtesy credit if there ever was one—with Wallis’s in the main titles. So far as anyone could remember, he’d had virtually nothing to do with the movie, but that didn’t faze Jack as he beamed his gratitude to the Academy. Wallis resigned from the studio within days, going on to a long and distinguished career as an independent producer, with no apologies from Jack as far as we know. Warner’s stepdaughter, acting under the name Joy Page, was in the picture—she’s the girl tearfully joining in the singing of “La Marseillaise” (and getting more than her share of close-ups from Michael Curtiz) and is, come to think of it, the fulcrum of the plot. It is she and her husband who need those letters of transit so they can get the hell out of Casablanca. Not that we much remember that plot point, what with all the romantic hoo-ha going on.

  Speaking of which, we must pause over the Epstein brothers’ next film, which they also produced: Mr. Skeffington (1944). As I said earlier, it starred Claude Rains in the title role, opposite Bette Davis as his wife. Directed by the underrated Vincent Sherman, it is an important Hollywood venture in that it is almost the only American film that takes up the subject of anti-Semitism, which as far as the studios were concerned was the great unmentionable of the war years. Mr. Skeffington is, in fact, a Jew, up out of the slums and prospering in banking. He marries Davis, who is rich and careless, a kind of playgirl, and she makes him miserable. They decide to turn their marriage of convenience into an inconvenience. He moves his operations to Europe, where in due course he is jailed and tortured by the Nazis, in the process losing his sight and his wealth. In the meantime, his wife falls ill and loses her looks. At which point the movie goes O. Henryish on us: He cannot see her decline, which, in the movie way of illnesses, doesn’t actually look too bad, and, chastened, she realizes that she loves him after all.

  Reduced to a plot summary, this sounds like cornpone, doesn’t it? But that reckons without the passion of its playing, and without the serious—at least by local standards—moral point the movie is desperate to make. Somehow, the damn thing works. It is so earnest, despite its wild manipulations. We care about these people, who have taken two whole lifetimes to attain happiness. We can even imagine a postscript in which Skeffington gets an eye operatio
n. And Davis, for godsake, calms down (well, no, not really). The picture reminds us of Noel Coward’s remarks about the power of cheap music to move us to tears and the resolve to be better people. I cannot justify my fondness for this movie, but I cannot ignore it, either. It moves me whenever I encounter it. I suppose that’s because it’s one of those films that hints at those large emotions, known only to grown-ups, which we fondly, erroneously, believe we will someday fully understand, and which we forgive when we learn that they are, in fact, cornpone—but in the grand, sweeping manner.

  The dialogue and lighting of Casablanca might seem to qualify it for consideration as a pioneer of film noir. But it’s too softhearted for that. I think we have to call it sui generis, note its influences on all sorts of filmmaking and look elsewhere for the beginnings of noir—possibly to Shadow of a Doubt (though I have my doubts). At least it brings Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps belatedly, into this conversation. As of 1943, the year of that film’s release, Hitchcock had been in the United States for four years, having established himself with creditable English thrillers touched with some nice humor. Here, he had made more ambitious suspense dramas (Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Saboteur) and was becoming a force to reckon with—though not yet the grand figure he was to become in the years ahead.

  Still, this movie (in part written by Thornton Wilder) was an extraordinarily good one, probably the best he had yet made. Hitchcock told François Truffaut, among others, that it was his favorite film. Certainly a case can be made that it is among his best. Its setting is the small California town of Santa Rosa, where at the time Hitchcock maintained a second home. There lives a restive girl called Charlie (Teresa Wright), who dotes on her uncle, also called Charlie, and played by Joseph Cotten. He represents to her the big-city glamour she craves. What she does not know is that he is a serial killer, the so-called Merry Widow murderer, who preys on rich widows, and that he is not in Santa Rosa for a family reunion. He is hiding out from the law. He tips his hand at a family dinner when he launches into a soft-spoken tirade against “idle, useless” women feeding off their men. This is misogyny raised to flash point, and as the girl comes to the conclusion that he is a murderer, we in the audience reach the near certainty that he will kill her to protect his secret, which he almost does.