The Guest Writer #1: Barry Putterman on Claude Binyon

I have decided to add a new feature to the blog, the occasional guest writer, somebody who is given complete freedom to write about whatever he or she wants, and in whatever way they choose, with my job only to proofread it (and perhaps add an image, or a fact or a figure for clarity). Today sees the inauguration of this new feature.

Barry Putterman, who lives in New York, is well-known among cinephiles, not least for his regular comments at Dave Kehr's now suspended site Reports from the lost continent of cinephilia. Barry has also written books, such as On Television and Comedy: Essays on Style, Theme, Performer, and Writer (McFarland & Company 1995), and he has written essays about Peter Bogdanovich and George Roy Hill (to be found in American Directors (McGraw-Hill 1983), edited by Jean-Pierre Coursodon). There are few who know as much about American cinema, as well as American society/history, as Barry, and it is a treat to have him as my first guest writer.

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Claude Binyon, by Barry Putterman

Public acclaim is an illusion based on popular misconception which distorts ambition and ruins romantic relationships. The first part of that statement is most certainly illustrated by the critical reputation of screenwriter/director Claude Binyon. As reported in Patrick McGilligan’s book “Backstory,” when Leo Rosten polled the Hollywood community regarding the most admired screenwriters in 1938, Binyon ranked in the top ten along with such still highly visible names as Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht and Nunnally Johnson. Today, hardly a cinephile lives that has even the slightest familiarity with the man and his work. And yet his extremely vital and highly entertaining films which explore the entirety of that first statement remain ready for rediscovery and exploration.

Claude Binyon was born in Chicago in 1905 and joined the long tradition of that city’s aspiring writers by going to work for one of its newspapers; The Examiner. However, his career as a reporter proved to be short and disastrous due to his most prominently observed personal characteristics; an all but debilitating social shyness and vocal hesitancy.

His writing talent was recognized by the Examiner however, and he was recommended to the Chicago office of the show business trade paper “Variety.” Again, it was found necessary to keep him assigned to work within the office, where he rose through the ranks of the publication and gained credit for, among other things, writing the paper’s famous headline regarding the stock market crash; “Wall Street Lays An Egg.”

By 1932, his time spent moonlighting on his own fictional writing led to a request to leave the paper and ultimately to the writing staff at Paramount Pictures, where he became the eighteenth writer assigned to work on the omnibus IF I HAD A MILLION. In 1933 Binyon was assigned to work with Frank Butler on the script for COLLEGE HUMOR, starring Bing Crosby and Jack Oakie and directed by the recently arrived from RKO Wesley Ruggles. He struck up what proved to be a lifelong friendship through this professional connection with Oakie, who publicly commented on how much he admired the way that Binyon’s dialogue fit his speech pattern.

Ruggles must have been impressed as well, since Binyon was back the following year working with Howard Greene on his film version of the Ben Hecht/Gene Fowler play “The Great Magoo” starring Oakie, retitled SHOOT THE WORKS. And then, it was Ruggles again directing Binyon’s first solo screenplay THE GILDED LILY released in early 1935.

This film proved to be a major hit for Paramount, solidifying star Claudette Colbert’s dominance in romantic comedy and catapulting co-star Fred MacMurray from obscure contract player to leading man, as well as to becoming another lifelong friend of Binyon’s. But more to the point, it began an all but unprecedented series of eleven consecutive films teaming Binyon, as solo screenwriter, and director Ruggles. ACCENT ON YOUTH, THE BRIDE COMES HOME, VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE, I MET HIM IN PARIS, TRUE CONFESSION, SING YOU SINNERS and INVITATION TO HAPPINESS follow at Paramount. Then, the team moved together to Columbia for TOO MANY HUSBANDS, ARIZONA and YOU BELONG TO ME.

If you discount the studio and/or director dominated projects; adaptions of a Samson Raphaelson play (ACCENT ON YOUTH) and a popular Fanny Hurst styled novel (VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE) plus a large scale western (ARIZONA), and add on the two films, gracefully directed by Mitchell Leisen, he wrote after the Ruggles partnership ended back at Paramount (TAKE A LETTER DARLING and NO TIME FOR LOVE), what you have is the core of Binyon’s work. But it all starts with THE GILDED LILY.

As sometimes happens artistically, all of the themes and characters which Binyon would explore in his career are all laid out in this first film. In fact, it could almost be said that they are all laid out in the first sequence. Newspaperman Pete Dawes (Fred MacMurray) and office secretary Marilyn David (Claudette Colbert) are having their weekly Thursday meeting on a park bench across the street from the midtown Manhattan Public Library to watch the world go by, which Pete proclaims to be “big stuff.” “Oh yes, Marilyn adds, “big stuff.”

And Pete has this down to a science, to the point of knowing that the popcorn they are munching is the proper food for the occasion. He demonstrates that he can put his hand in the bag, grab some popcorn and stick it in his craw without taking his eyes off the street. Whereas with peanuts, you have to look down to crack open the shells, remove the nuts and place them in your mouth, thus missing half of the action. “Sure,” Marilyn concurs, “peanut eaters don’t know how to live.” And thus Pete is established as something of a know-it-all philosopher and Marilyn as his affectionately bemused companion.

From out of nowhere Pete then asks her; “Do you love me?” and Marilyn thoughtfully concludes “No.” Pete is satisfied; “That’s the way to talk. No jealousies, no commitments….why don’t you love me?” Marilyn responds that her idea of romance is finding a man for whom you feel such commitment that you can ignore all of his flaws and happily sacrifice whatever it takes to live happily with him.

Pete tells her that she wants to be Lizzie Glutz; “the girl who runs her own little world to suit herself because she is too unimportant for the world to run her.” But the catch is that the smarter you are, the more you realize that that is the way to live, but Lizzie Glutz becomes Lizzie Glutz only because she’s too dumb to be anything else; which Marilyn isn’t.

While Marilyn retorts “you newspapermen know everything,” they both get up to leave; Marilyn to the subway and Pete to his job of interviewing celebrities on the incoming and outgoing ships at the docks, which becomes their first steps on their long journey back to the bench.

At the subway, Marilyn is bullied by an aggressive subway guard and a gallant young man with a British accent comes to her defense. Push comes to shove and the two of them flee the ensuing melee to embark on a romantic adventure. The man is charming, but seemingly aimless; as he has no job and no stated ambition beyond courting Marilyn. Aptly, his name is Gray (Ray Milland).

They spend a day at Coney Island. And, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the sound sequence in LONESOME, agree on a mutual desire for few social contacts beyond a comfortable and deeply affectionate marriage. But they once again literally stumble across the family of that self-same subway guide and must once again flee.

Marilyn believes that she has found her romantic ideal. But Gray is in reality a British nobleman vacationing incognito in New York who has now trapped himself between his public and private personas. He sincerely wants to marry Marilyn, but his celebrated position obliges him to return to England and both inform his family and break off his engagement lest scandal break out. And so he privately tells Marilyn a lie (that he must depart for a while to investigate a job possibility) which is actually the truth (that he intends to return and marry her). But when Pete arrives to cover his departure at the docks, he must tell the truth (that he is returning to England and his fiancée) which is a lie (omitting his intention to return for Marilyn). Reading this in the newspapers, Marilyn is heartbroken. But Pete plots revenge. He simply turns Gray’s ambiguity around and begins writing stories about The “No” Girl, the plucky American office girl who spurned royal romance and the Cinderella opportunity.

So Marilyn is now also two people, the private Lizzie Glutz, and the publicly acclaimed ‘No’ Girl, who in Pete’s words, has become: “one of those peculiar people made strangely famous through ordinary newsprint.” In other words: a celebrity. And, if that was not enough, while Marilyn is drowning her sorrows, Pete promotes her as a café entertainer to cash in on her notoriety.

Marilyn is aghast. “One schooner of highballs and I wake up with my name on a billboard. Can’t we pretend we’re sane and call the whole thing off?” But when she is shoved on stage and truthfully confesses that she cannot sing or dance and is even too nervous to remember the lyrics to her opening song, the sophisticated overflow audience accepts this as artful artifice designed to cheerfully welcome them to the inside of celebrity. And when Marilyn’s dancing literally stumbles her into a confrontation with another front page figure, her success is assured.

However, being a celebrity turns out to be a full time job. Pete has fathered The ‘No’Girl, but it leaves her no time to be a park bench companion. “Can’t you stick around every once in a while, just to see if I’m getting older or something” he pleads. And the unintended consequences now also affords Marilyn the opportunity to perform in England, where she can at last find out the truth about her romantic ideal.

In the final reversal, in reuniting with Gray, she finds that he no longer believes in the lie that was the truth of two nobodies falling in love in New York, but rather now accepts the truth which is a lie of two celebrities who can mutually benefit each other in England. So when Pete sends a wedding present of a box of popcorn with a note asking whether she has found her English park bench, Marilyn uses what celebrity has taught her to stage a very public walkout of her own.

And so, with Pete realizing that “no jealousies, no obligations” may not be the way to talk, and Marilyn realizing that romance may go beyond ignoring the other’s flaws; they both fight their ways through separate hysterical mobs to wind up battered and tattered back at their park bench---with popcorn.

All of locations of public gathering in THE GILDED LILY, (the subway, Coney Island, the café where Marilyn performs, etc.) turn out to be places of false identity, popular misconception and ultimate humiliation. There is also such a scene near the beginning of THE BRIDE COMES HOME, (a title which relates to absolutely nothing which takes place in the film) at a party celebrating Jack Bristow’s birthday on which he comes into his three million dollar inheritance. However, the film is primarily concerned with examining the three basic Binyon characters established in THE GILDED LILY in further depth. In fact, the film barely contains a story at all; just the three characters continuing whirling around each other towards an inevitable resolution.

Jack is the American version of Gray; charming, privileged and completely rootless. He is sweet-natured and genuinely caring, but since he has no concept of work, he has no fixed identity or understanding of how his actions affects other people. Jack is played by Robert Young, who would play the character again in I MET HIM IN PARIS opposite Melvyn Douglas playing a more sophisticated variation on the Fred MacMurray character. And Douglas and MacMurray would play off each other in TOO MANY HUSBANDS. Meanwhile, YOU BELONG TO ME imagines what might happen if the Young character actually married the woman, with Henry Fonda playing the part.

In THE BRIDE COMES HOME, Fred MacMurray continues what would become a career long role as the Binyon male protagonist. Here he is Jack’s hired bodyguard and former newspaperman Cy Anderson. As his split occupation indicates, this character is also two personas, but his duality is internal. He is part mug and part artist, and never completely at peace with either aspect of himself. In INVITATION TO HAPPINESS he is a prizefighter who has a poetic vision of a muse calling to him from across the river. In TAKE A LETTER, DARLING he is a painter who works as a private secretary at an advertising firm. In NO TIME FOR LOVE he is a sandhog who is also an engineer and inventor.

Cy’s duality takes the form of publicly resenting Jack’s aimless irresponsibility while privately enjoying his company. While proud of his plebian work ethic, he is constantly conscious of how his lack of refinement inhibits his social acceptance and personal ambitions. And when the now rich Jack asks him what he would want to do if he was not dependent on him for employment, Cy answers that he would like to start a magazine “for men who make their money the hard way.” So it is that “The Man: His Magazine” is born, with Jack as publisher and Cy as editor.

Enter the woman. Jeannette Desmereau is Jack’s buddy since childhood and the woman to whom he has proposed marriage about two hundred times. But as Jack has come into his money, Jeannette’s father has gone broke and so she has decided to look for work. And when Jack hands Jeannette over to Cy as assistant editor sans experience, Cy has a new target for the push and pull of his resentments and yearnings multiplied by an enormous sexual attraction.

As Fred MacMurray is the male Binyon protagonist, so Claudette Colbert is his female foil and counterpoint. With a naturally aristocratic grace and an ironic appreciation of human foibles, she is balanced between the two males with equal doses of sophistication and character strength. Colbert plays this part in person in these two films as well as in I MET HIM IN PARIS and NO TIME FOR LOVE. And it is her in spirit in INVITATION TO HAPPINESS, TOO MANY HUSBANDS, YOU BELONG TO ME and TAKE A LETTER, DARLING.

And, unlike Jack, Jeannette gives as good as she gets. When Cy assigns her the humiliating busywork of counting names in the phone book and tells her to take the desk in the corner with all of the dust on it, her immediate response is: “I could get some more dust if it would make you happy.” But she soon escalates to pummeling him with a barrage of procedural questions about the counting and ultimately forces his retreat.

In fact, it is Cy who is the one who admits to the romantic ideal when Jeannette comes calling with a rock that she only half kiddingly intends to throw at him. He describes his daydream of being the White Knight villain slayer whom Jeannette applauds only to end in disgust with the source of his internal frustrations: “But I’m not that good. Nobody’s that good.” To which she mutters in reply: “You’re more of a kid than I am.” And when, in turn, she admits to loving him, it really isn’t such a surprise that his reaction is: “Well, doesn’t it make you mad?” And hers is: “A little. I came here to throw a rock at you.”

Inevitably, this tug of war as they try to reconcile their conflicts both internal and external proves too exhausting for them, and they split apart in all conceivable ways. Jeannette is now much more susceptible to yet another proposal from Jack as she reflects: “I wouldn’t even be surprised if you told a woman she was right every once in a while.”

It is left to the woman’s father (William Collier Sr.), a recurring presence in these films (in description in THE GILDED LILY, in person here as well as in INVITATION TO HAPPINESS and TOO MANY HUSBANDS) to convince Cy that this war is his and Jeannette’s form of love as they band together to follow Jeannette’s bread crumb trail in order to invade her elopement to Jack.

While THE BRIDE COMES HOME is almost entirely about the characters, TRUE CONFESSION becomes an almost abstract meditation on the chasm between private intentions and public interpretation and the relationship between creative invention and downright lying. Based on a French play “Mon Crime” by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr, the film is most certainly conscious of another play, by Binyon’s fellow former Chicago newspaper colleague Maurine Watkins, “Roxie Hart.” And, as the Binyon work which comes closest to all out farce rather than behavioral comedy, it could be considered his funniest. Indeed, in many ways TRUE CONFESSION is to Gregory La Cava’s LADY IN A JAM what THE GILDED LILY is to that director’s UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

Ken and Helen Bartlett (Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard) are seemingly complete opposites who have attracted into marriage, but are actually quite similar in their inability to connect public means to private ends. Ken is a lawyer who is so entirely devoted to “the truth” that he refused to defend any client whom he is not already convinced is innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not surprisingly, he is all but unemployable. Helen is a would be writer of fiction who sees no difference between inventing characters in a story for publication and inventing a story about her husband as a character who believes that her typewriter is his recently deceased baby to dissuade the finance man from repossessing it.

When Helen takes a job which seems too god to be true as a very private secretary to a stock broker who works at home, it turns out to be just that as she is forced to punch him in the stomach and run out of the house in order to escape his advances. Returning to retrieve her hat, coat and purse, she is swept up by the arriving police who demand to know why she shot the stock broker, who is now lying dead beneath his work room rug.

Taken into custody, she is grilled by the investigating detective (Edgar Kennedy) in what she assumes is a story conference. Which, in fact, it is since the police have simply taken the available evidence, drawn the logical conclusion that she is the murderer, and now must only come up with a believable motive to include in a confession. The detective throws open a number of scenarios which Helen finds unsatisfactory until he hits on the “tough dame” character. “You didn’t love him. You don’t love anybody. You’re that kind of a dame” he growls in accusation. Her eyes light up as she exclaims “Gee!”, thrilled at the role she has been given until told that in this version of the story she will either get a life sentence or the death penalty.

Unhappy with the plots she is being offered, Helen makes up her own story of why she shot the stock broker, and when told that in this version she would get practically no penalty at all, is delighted at her work. “See, I know how to do it! You offer me life or the electric chair and I give myself five years to nothing!” The detective is equally delighted until he asks her to sign this story as her confession and she responds with bafflement: “No. I was making it up just like you were.”

But Ken’s devotion to the truth is just as logical as the rest of society. All of the evidence points to Helen and Helen has, in the past, been known to make up stories. He is prepared to give her the honest defense of justifiable homicide not only in her own defense, but also in the defense of all woman kind if she will only stop insisting that she didn’t commit the crime. And Helen can see how successfully making this case will also be the making of Ken’s legal career. So rather than “pass that up trying to prove something that can’t be proven,” she relents and confesses.

So it is that Helen pretty much becomes The ‘Yes’ Girl, taking claim to a crime she didn’t commit in order to fulfill society’s need for a comforting narrative of sacrifice and martyrdom. Indeed, the trial proves to be Helen’s version of Marilyn David’s café performance (in THE GILDED LILY) as she and Ken reenact the crime as both a true account of what happened up to the time that Helen fled and a complete travesty of how it happened. Ken proves to be a woefully nervous and wooden actor in the part of the stock broker, Helen keeps throwing in additional lines of dialogue to reinforce Ken’s moral viewpoint and the prop door won’t operate, causing them both to run around in circles while playing the scene. The exasperated prosecutor (Porter Hall) may in fact be expressing the author’s most heartfelt comment regarding the public display of private experience in his outburst: “Must we submit to this three ring circus in the guise of drama? What can they hope to prove with these cornball theatrics? With every ounce of decency in me, I object! Give them the gong.”

Lombard and MacMurray in True Confession.

And just like Marilyn at the café, Ken and Helen win public acclaim. In the wake of the not guilty verdict, Helen is now the author of the newspaper column “My Life, My Struggles” and concocts novels with the same literal tongue-in-cheek concentration gesture that she used to convince the butcher than her husband was dead in order to avoid the meat bill. Ken’s law office is doing turn away business, but his unease about the success being built on his wife’s crime spills over when their new maid (Hattie McDaniel) asks if she shot her philandering husband whether Ken could get her off. “Kind of touchy,” she muses as Ken storms off.

When the whole charade finally collapses, Ken manages to repress his joy that his wife isn’t actually a murderess enough to denounce the mockery she has made of truth, justice and the American way. Helen is distraught, pleading “I tried to tell the truth but it seemed everything worked out better if I lied.” In a final desperate attempt to prevent Ken from walking out, she claims to be pregnant. And when that is also exposed as a lie, she responds with what might in fact be Binyon’s ultimate judgment on the subject: “Well, it could be true.” And this inspires Ken to carry Helen back into the house and cure her of lying once and for all.

As with many of his contemporaries who collectively defined American romantic comedy in the 1935-1945 decade (McCarey, Capra, Sturges, La Cava, etc.), Binyon did not adjust as well to the rhythms of post-World War II America. In 1948 he became a writer/director, in many cases adapting books which related to the themes and characters he had previously developed. Frederick Wakefield’s fictionalized version of his dealings with the legendary Broadway producer Jed Harris, THE SAXON CHARM, concerns a playwright who allows the lure of artistic success relentlessly erode his marriage. The conflicting demands of a public career and a private marriage is examined from another angle in MOTHER DIDN’T TELL ME, an adaptation of Mary Bard’s account of life as a doctor’s wife which plays something like INVITATION TO HAPPINESS told from the female perspective. STELLA is a rather eccentric adaptation of a Doris Miles Disney crime mystery novel which reexamines all of the black comedy themes regarding death and the legal system from TRUE CONFESSION and anticipates the movable corpse ploy in Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY by five years. And DREAMBOAT, more characteristically taken from an obscure story, is another meditation on public exposure when an upright college literature professor (Clifton Webb of course) is found to be a former Hollywood heartthrob when his old silent movies begin appearing on television.

These films, STELLA in particular, are generally satisfying. And, as a director, Binyon is effective without being distinctive. However, given his extreme diffidence, one wonders how he managed to function in this job at all. In Hal Kanter’s autobiography “So Far, So Funny,” he reports Bob Hope saying that during the filming of HERE COME THE GIRLS, by the time that director Binyon managed to stammer out “Cut,” co-star Rosemary Clooney was already back in her dressing room.

Most of Binyon’s last decade of screenwriting was taken up with collaborations, the highlights of which were his co-writing with the director on Leo McCarey’s last two films, RALLY ‘ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! and SATAN NEVER SLEEPS. He retired to his California ranch in 1964.

Claude Binyon will never again be listed among Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters. However, a reappraisal and appreciation of his work is long overdue. Unfortunately, many factors continue to stand in that path, not the least of which being the almost complete invisibility of Paramount films beyond the top tier of what are now considered established “classics.” And that situation borders on the criminal given that the rights to these films are controlled by cable giant Comcast which, between the Paramount and Universal libraries, has a ready-made TCM style network at their fingertips, if they could only be bothered to assemble it.

The low esteem in which director Wesley Ruggles is held is also an inhibiting situation. Ironically, Ruggles’ modesty, which borders on a complete lack of directorial personality, allows the elements in Binyon’s viewpoint to shine more clearly. He should also be given credit for have a sensitive casting sense, not only for finding and staying with the right actors to inhabit Binyon’s prototype characters, but also assembling a collection of comedy character actors who make multiple appearances throughout the series (including the aforementioned Kennedy, Collier and Hall, but also Tom Dugan, Richard Carle, Donald Meek and others) which develops an almost Sturges like feel to this world. Indeed, if for no other reason, one must thank him for gracing TRUE CONFESSION with the always delightful Una Merkel, who forms a kind of Lucy and Ethel team with Carole Lombard.

Still, Ruggles’ pokey, somewhat airless direction, akin to George Stevens without any compensating composition sense, does in fact create a number of aesthetic limitations which must be ignored in order to appreciate Binyon’s work.

But then again, if Claude Binyon is philosophically accurate and rediscovery ripped him from Lizzie Glutz’s embrace, the result would only be a hysterical misunderstanding of his intentions and an artificially manufactured version of his artistic persona. A process that I may well have begun right here.

The fog of authorship

In a previous post there was an image from Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer 1955), and as it is a great image I will post it here again. But not because it is great but because it appears in another film, made three years later by Leo McCarey, whom I wrote about last week. It is not just a similar image (or rather shot) but the very same identical shot. It is a useful reminder on the need to remain cautious before asserting credit (or blame) for scenes, shots and ideas in individual films.

McCarey's style of filmmaking is different from Fleischer's in many ways, and one is the visuals. McCarey was most at home in the Academy ratio and he was not interested in landscapes or cityscapes. His camera is usually indoors and focused on the actors. Fleischer on the other hand was one of the great CinemaScope stylists and had an interest in striking compositions, outdoors and indoors, that McCarey had not. Or rather, his compositions are of a different kind. So it is not surprising that, when Rally 'Round the Flag Boys (1958) became McCarey's first film in CinemaScope, he, or more likely the studio, felt obliged to add some visual flavour by borrowing a shot from another film and another director. This does not undermine ideas about authorship, it is just that since this habit of borrowing is common enough we should not be too sure about who is responsible for individual shots and images in a given film.

Another cause for caution is censorship, a problem that is, or at least was, common enough in most countries. For an example that recently came to my attention, look at The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall 1946). It was the only film to which Raymond Chandler wrote an original script, and it is a good script, but it gets all weak and abrupt in the last few minutes, obviously so. This is because the US Navy had objections about the script so the ending was rewritten. There is a murder in the film and it turns out that the killer is a sailor, an ex-serviceman who suffers from a mental illness after the war. Or at least it does in the original script, the one the Navy did not like. After it was rewritten another person is blamed for the murder, more or less at random, in the last scene. There are a few interesting things about this. Not necessarily that the US Navy objected but that they were even asked, and that their opinion mattered so much that the film was altered. Another is that to some extent it does not matter. I have seen the film three times, with a time lapse of many years between the first and second viewing, and when I saw it the second time I thought I knew who the killer was, i.e. the sailor, because that is the way the film is structured and that is what makes sense, up to the last minute. I had completely forgotten about the weak ending. When I saw it the third time I had not forgotten the ending, but I did not care about it. For all points and purposes it is the sailor who is the killer. I was curious about that ending though so I did some digging and found out what happened to the script and why the ending was like it was. Ultimately the way the finished film ends does not matter, you can easily disregard it and stay with the original ending, as I did, even if you do not know the circumstances.

The Blue Dahlia is perhaps the work of Chandler (and should be included when his writing is discussed) but he was annoyed by some changes that George Marshall, the director, did, and how the visuals worked. But that is a director's prerogative. So The Blue Dahlia has several authors, and who had the most definitive influence on the finished film is a work for a thesis. (It can also be enjoyed as probably the best of the films that Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake made together, but more about them in a later post.)

This post is related to three earlier posts (this, and this and this). It is one of the great things about blogging, the ongoing, endless sprawl of connections and links.

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Incidentally, Chandler also contributed to the script for Strangers on a Train, but that is unmistakably a Hitchcock film. I should also add that there is nothing unusual about re-using footage from previous films as was done in Rally 'Round the Flag Boys. It happens with some frequency, now as well as then.
2014-03-31 I added a sentence to emphasise my point that this does not undermine the idea of authorship, only that we cannot know for sure who is responsible for each individual shot or image in a given film.

Leo McCarey

There are two sides to Leo McCarey. The first one is him being one of the most important comic filmmaker of all time. He made shorts with Charley Chase. He put Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together and was the, to use a contemporary term, show runner for most of their silent films as Laurel & Hardy (he wrote and directed many of them as well). He directed Duck Soup (1933), the best of the Marx brothers' films, and it was he who devised some of their most memorable scenes such as the fake mirror sequence (a routine with a long history). In addition he directed Mae West in Belle of the Nineties (1934) and Harold Lloyd in the fine The Milky Way (1936). Some claim that with The Awful Truth (1937), which McCarey wrote, directed and produced, he "created" the persona of Cary Grant that is known today but although The Awful Truth was important Grant had been building himself up over time, and in Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937) the Cary Grant who combines wackiness and elegance was more or less in place. So The Awful Truth was important, and Grant is much better in it, but not groundbreaking. Besides his filmmaking McCarey also had an encyclopedic knowledge of humour (if you mentioned a joke he could say when it first was made and by whom) and a theoretical view on how humour works, ideas which he put forward in articles and essays.

The second side is as a profound humanist, a maker of some of the most moving films ever made, such as Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) and Love Affair (1939). The McCarey of whom Jean Renoir said that he "understands people - better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood." He was loved by most people, and Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, George Bernard Shaw, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin were among those who praised him and his work. He was Irene Dunne's favourite director and even Maria Ouspenskaya spoke kindly of him.

McCarey lost his way somewhat after the Second World War. The causes were several, including suspected alcoholism, addiction to painkillers (after a car accident that nearly killed him), and a sense of writer's block after winning a remarkable number of awards and being the most highly paid man in the whole of the United States in 1944. After having made at least a film a year until 1945 he made only five more films after the war. Of those five films one succeeds, and very much so: An Affair to Remember (1957). But it is significant that it is a remake of his earlier Love Affair. The other four films are the decent but dull Good Sam (1948), an amiable comedy called Rally 'Round the Flag Boys (1958) and two films on which McCarey had severe problems. On the first one, My Son John (1952), the leading man Robert Walker died during the shooting and McCarey had to borrow scenes from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), in which Walker also starred, to fill out the gaps. Walker's character is killed in the film but only because the actor had died, not because that was McCarey's intention. On the second problematic film, Satan Never Sleeps (1962), he got into a fight with William Holden, who played the lead, and when the studio took Holden's side McCarey walked away. Somebody else finished the film and McCarey never directed another film. An ignoble end to a once brilliant career.

But those final years cannot undo what had gone before. When he was at his most inspired he had few equals. His style of filmmaking was rather unique. He would come up with a general idea for the film, often based on his personal life, and then during the making of the film he would improvise constantly and making it up as he went along, together with his cast and crew. He would always have a piano on set and he would play on it whilst thinking up ideas, and then when he had a good one he would get back to filming. Often he would just say to the actors how a scene would begin, and then let them do whatever came natural to them. He would film it all, often in one take, and being as curious as anybody else as to what would happen. He would also tell one actor or two to do something, but not tell the others, and so let them improvise a response. This means that when a character looks surprised in a film by McCarey in all likelihood the actor playing that character is just as surprised. This is one of the true wonders of his films, these unguarded moments of genuine emotions.

McCarey was not shy of having the actors look into the camera, at the audience. The example above might be the most devastating of them. The old couple in Make Way For Tomorrow, one of the saddest of films, are having a special evening on the town, a few precious moments alone. Or almost alone. Just as he is about to kiss her she turns and looks at us, as if to say "Kindly go away and let us have this moment for ourselves." I do not know if it was her idea, or McCarey's, but it does not matter. The weird feeling of shame, for intruding upon them, is there.

McCarey's way of filmmaking also affected the structure and pacing of his films, in that they are often a progression of what I call emotional set-pieces rather than a more conventional narrative. The films do have a forward motion but it is not the story that is the main concern but the emotions of the characters. The sequences in which these emotions are expressed are often so rich and nuanced they become like short movies in themselves of either hilarious comedy or heartbreaking sadness and/or tenderness. Examples of this are plenty but perhaps the best is the visit to the old grandmother in Love Affair or the scene in Going My Way (1944) when Father Fitzgibbon, the old priest, tells the new priest Father O'Malley that he has understood that O'Malley has been sent to replace him. Or rather, he does not tell him, he let it be understood in a roundabout way, because he cannot bring himself to say out loud the truth; that he is too old to remain in his post and is not wanted anymore. Then he starts to cry and walks away, out of the room and out of his beloved church.

This way of making the films led James Agee to make the observation, when writing about The Bells of St Mary's (1945), that a film by McCarey is "distinguished for leisure and spaciousness, for delight in character and atmosphere, for it use of scenes which are inserted not to advance the story but for their own intrinsic charm." This scene for example, from Bells of St Mary's, where McCarey just told them to try and box.



The old priest in Going My Way, Father Fitzgibbon, was based on a priest that McCarey had known well. In the next film, The Bells of St Mary's, the nun played by Ingrid Bergman is based on McCarey's own aunt, also a nun. The Awful Truth is based on McCarey's own marriage. Make Way For Tomorrow, a film about loneliness and generational conflict that was an inspiration for Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), McCarey made after the death of his father. These are some examples of how personal the films were, and how McCarey used his art to deal with his own life. Allegedly his wife used to asked him, when she saw the films, what the different scenes were meant to represent. ("When was that, darling?" she would ask.) If you want to know what McCarey was like you can look closely at Jerry Warriner, the character Cary Grant plays in The Awful Truth, because he based him on McCarey. What should also be mentioned is the sense of religiosity and spirituality that imbues several of his films.

McCarey was once one of the most honoured and celebrated of any filmmaker, and an internal auteur. The trio of films he made between 1937 and 1939, Make Way For Tomorrow, The Awful Truth and Love Affair, constitute the pinnacle of his achievements. Although he is not a household name anymore among cinephiles he is not forgotten and in the history of film his position is secure. Here, finally, is a scene from Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), where an English butler finds himself in the Wild West. There is no gunplay or fistfights here, but something much more spellbinding.



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I have never been able to watch My Son John, which is usually considered a disaster. But it has its defenders, for example Jonathan Rosenbaum who has called it "great but deranged". Some have suggested that it is the result of a conflict between McCarey's natural artistic sensibilities and the forced anti-communist theme. I have not mentioned Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), McCarey's anti-Nazi film, because it has been so long since I saw it but I think it might very well be classified as "great but deranged" as well. It certainly takes black humour to some surreal extremes. As for Satan Never Sleeps, while McCarey hated the finished film it has its moments. The three people it is about, played by Holden, Clifton Webb and France Nuyen, are treated with warmth and humour, and there are several fine scenes. But as a whole it is rather weak, muddled and obvious, especially the last 15 minutes or so.

For a deeper analysis of The Awful Truth see Stanley Cavell's book The Pursuit of Happiness. For a book about the life and career of McCarey see Wes D.Gehring's Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy (which is not as good as one would have wanted). The quote from Rosenbaum about My Son John is from his book Essential Cinema. The quote from Agee is to be found in Agee on Film Volume 1.

Delmer Daves writes a letter

One of the finest scenes in American cinema is in 3.10 to Yuma (1957), when the outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) comes to a saloon and, instead of playing the tough macho role, becomes very tender and sweet when he meets the bar maid (Felicia Farr). The long, quiet scene ends with them disappearing into the back room.

She says "Funny, some men you see every day for ten years and you never notice; some men you see once and they're with you for the rest of your life." in a sequence that is a reminder that Delmer Daves, before he began making his own films, was one of the writers on the script for Love Affair (1939), the last of Leo McCarey's trio of emotional masterpieces.* 3.10 to Yuma is Daves's most famous film, and possibly his best. It is very well acted, both tense and moving and it looks beautiful, not to say spectacular, with a unique view of the West. But he did several fine films. They are often emotionally complex, show a willingness to discuss social issues and have impressive visuals, not least his crane shots that have the capacity to add meaning and emotions when they appear, sometimes even introducing a sense of some larger force watching over the characters. Besides 3.10 to Yuma, Jubal (1956) and The Hanging Tree (1959) are two of his very best. More famous is Broken Arrow (1950), which I am not that keen on. It is a bit stiff and the dialogue is too explicit, but it has some moments of greatness. (The claim that it was the first western that showed Native Americans in a positive light is of course wrong, that had been done before, many times and sometimes with more subtlety.) Before Daves turned to the West he did different kinds of films, such as the two he made in 1947, Dark Passage and The Red House. Dark Passage is a thriller, a slightly off-beat experiment that is sometimes genuinely unsettling, and Daves uses the San Francisco setting to wonderful effect, even though Bogart and Bacall in the leads lack the sparkle that they had under Howard Hawks's direction in To Have and Have Not (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946). The Red House is less accomplished but also unsettling, a tale of family secrets and Freudian complexes in a lyrical summer setting. At the end of his career Daves made a series of romances, starting with A Summer Place (1959), that I have not seen unfortunately. But I have heard good things about them. I would be curious to see if he brought the same sense of alienation to the teen romance that he did to many of his other films. "You know, what we have in common is that we're both lonely." says a man to a woman he just met at a bus station in the end of Dark Passage, and they are not the only characters in Daves's oeuvre that feel this way.

I am not an expert on Daves so I will not write any more. Instead I will let Daves speak for himself. The archives at the library at the Swedish Film Institute (where I work) hold a lot of fascinating documents and here is a letter from Daves where he writes about himself and his films, invoking Jean-Paul Sartre, Greek tragedy and his childhood. He wrote in response to a retrospective of western films that the Film Institute's Cinematheque was organising in 1968. It is a great read.

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*Leo McCarey's two other films in that trio are The Awful Truth and Make Way For Tomorrow, both made in 1937. 

Here is Glenn Kenny's celebration of one of Daves's last films, Youngblood Hawke (1964).

A few words about: Tokyo Story (1953)

Since it is the 60th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story I have re-watched it yet again. It is on many levels a very good film. The formal elegance and precision is wonderful, and it is filled with warmth and humanity, and it is very moving. But there is one thing that I have a problem with, and that is its superfluous, or overtly explicit, dialogue. In the beginning there is a sequence where the old couple the film is about is seen packing for their trip to Tokyo. A neighbour stops by and they talk about them going to Tokyo to see the children and the neighbour says that it must be lovely and wonderful and the children must be looking forward to it so much, and so on. This is the first instance of this recurring feature in the film, that at regular intervals a character will say something that is meaningful for the plot, which is then repeated by another character. Towards the end of the film the couple's youngest daughter says "Isn't life disappointing." while looking earnest and thoughtful, and the couple's daughter-in-law answers "Yes, nothing but disappointments." The worst example though is at the very end, when the old man is sitting alone in his living room. Suddenly the neighbour from the opening scene appears again and says "You must be feeling lonely with them gone." He answers "Yes." and he adds that he will be lonely now and the neighbour concurs "Absolutely, you'll feel lonely." The scene had the potential to be beautiful but it is ruined for me by this repetitive dialogue.

This need to explain to us what is happening and treat the audience as if it had been taking naps during the film irritates me, and makes me hesitant to agree with the general consensus that Tokyo Story is a really great film, one of the very best. Another thing about Tokyo Story is how transparent it is that the mother will soon succumb to some unspecified illness. It is there from the beginning and clearly sign-posted repeatedly. Its alleged inspiration, Leo McCarey's remarkable Make Way For Tomorrow (1937), is actually more subtle, and for me the better film.

Yet when critics write about Tokyo Story they see it differently. Here is for example Roger Ebert, who says that one of Ozu's strength is his way of "removing the machinery of effects and editing and choosing to touch us with human feeling, not workshop storytelling technique." But is not the opposite the case, and is not Tokyo Story actually very much an example of "workshop storytelling technique" by Ozu and his longtime co-writer Kogo Noda? This is not to deny that there are also many examples of subtlety. For example, in the opening scene when the couple is packing they have an argument about an air cushion. That says a lot about their relationship, without in anyway being explicit. As with my earlier comments about The Searchers (1956), I would not mind these issues I have with Tokyo Story if the film was not so good. But now they get in the way.

By the way, in his review Ebert quotes Donald Richie, who says that "The reason for the low camera position /.../ is that it eliminates depth and makes a two-dimensional space." This is puzzling and I do not understand why a low camera position would eliminate depth. But more to the point, Tokyo Story has great depth, using both deep space and deep focus to telling effect. Perhaps especially in order to create a sense of the larger world, since the lives of their neighbours are often seen through windows in the background, but most of the shots, even those showing street scenes and nature, are carefully staged and framed to create depth.

Finally, I have seen some 15 of Ozu's films and although it is hard to choose between them, if I had to pick one as my favourite, it would be I Was Born, But (1932). It is close to sublime.

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In an earlier post I wrote about the common but bad habit of comparing everything to Hollywood, and this tendency is something that is a consistent problem when it comes to Yasujiro Ozu as well. When critics and historians discuss him it is almost always focussed on how he had a unique style that was "the complete opposite of Hollywood" (as if all Hollywood films were in the same style), but it is much rarer to see comparisons between Ozu and for example Mikio Naruse or Sadao Yamanaka, even though that would be more apt.