Hans Christian Andersen (1952)
directed by Charles Vidor, starring Danny Kaye
(Note: This is my entry in the Words, Words, Words! Blogathon, Hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.)
Hans Christian Andersen (Danny Kaye) is the most contented man in all of his tiny village. Even though he's only a humble cobbler, his knack for spinning fairy tales out of the air dazzles the children and keeps Hans himself happily living in fantasy land. However, his tales don't sit well with the local schoolteacher, who sees his charges abandoning their books to listen to Hans. He demands that Hans be kicked out. Peter (Joey Walsh), Hans' young ward, protects his friend's innocence by convincing him to leave town for Copenhagen. Hans, overcome with the city's glamor, agrees and sets off for a grand adventure. Along the way, he wins the hearts of many people with his charming stories and songs. But one day, the naive storyteller meets a beautiful ballerina (Zizi Jeanmaire) and her angry, shouting director-husband (Farley Granger). Hans is immediately smitten with the dancer's charms. Even more so when he realizes she's the victim of an abusive marriage. His much more practical friend Peter thinks Hans is setting himself up for tragedy. But Hans is too busy pouring out his heart into a new tragic fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid," to listen. Little does he realize that he's living out his own story in a way he never imagined...
Hans Christian Andersen is one of those movies that is far more fascinating to me for what it suggests about the people that make it and watch it than for anything in the movie itself. It's a movie about one of the most famous storytellers that ever lived, the man whose best fairy tales ("The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Snow Queen") feel as timeless as the oldest stories on earth. And yet, this movie, the most famous filmed version of Andersen's life tries to honor him while simultaneously working its hardest to obliterate Andersen himself.
It's a biopic movie, told as a fairy tale. The film even opens with a title card that says flat out they're going for pure fantasy here, no facts: "Once upon a time there lived in Denmark a great storyteller named Hans Christian Andersen. This is not the story of his life, but a fairy tale about the great spinner of fairy tales." I have to admit, it's kind of refreshing to have one of those "great artist" movies that just tells you upfront that it's not even going to pretend to a smidgen of accuracy. I've sat through so many biographical movies (the Bronte sisters melodrama Devotion being the latest and silliest) that diligently smuggle in a few facts here and there like they're crushing up some vitamin pills in the dessert. Instead
of trying for halfhearted realism, the makers of Hans Christian Andersen choose enthusiasm and magic, all the way.
Instead of making Hans Christian Andersen into the difficult, depressed, ambitious man he was, here he's a happy, singing cobbler who spins dreams for children. Instead of being a busy, proudly perfectionist writer, in this movie he stumbles into authorship in the way a man in a fairy tale might stumble into a magic castle. Instead of being a man who longed for adulation and worked hard for patronage, the Andersen that Danny Kaye plays is a simple soul whose happiest moments are when he can bring a smile to a child's face.
It's an approach to biopics that is, despite the awkwardness, kind of charming in its sincerity. This movie, helped along by a string of hummable Frank Loesser songs and a Danny Kaye performance that miraculously holds things together, is a sweet tribute to the way fairy tales can make us feel. How they can cheer us in times of trouble, help us find humor in strange places, and, as the character of Hans finds out, how they can sometimes mislead us into thinking people much less than they are.
However, the thing that makes Hans Christian Andersen a truly strange film for me, for all it's many enjoyable parts is that the very people who want to honor Andersen's life by telling it as a fairy tale end up with a film that seems as if it were made by people who never actually sat down and really read his fairy tales at all.
And seeing as how this film was a Samuel Goldwyn pet project, that's very likely the case.
My grandmother gave me a book of the complete fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child. And one thing I learned very quickly was that Andersen fairy tales were dark. Not the dark of unabridged Grimm fairy tales; Andersen wasn't crude enough to scare
you with blood and gore alone. Oh no, you read Andersen, you get treated to gems like "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf," in which a girl who makes the fatal mistake of using a bread loaf to keep her feet dry is rewarded with a stint in a peat bog as a witch's statue. She is forced to stay in this immobile state while hearing people on earth tell her story and weep over her sin for generations. Later on, our bread-treading girl gets to show her penitence by flying around as a bird, giving bread crumbs to other starving birds until the crumbs add up to the bread she misused. Other Andersen tales include "The Red Shoes" (a girl nearly dances herself to death until her feet are cut off), "The Story of a Mother" (a woman who fights Death tooth and nail for the life of her child, to the point of pressing thorn bushes against her bare chest and giving up her own eyes, only to be told her child is better off safe in Heaven) and "The Snowman" (a snowman falls hopelessly in love with a stove, melts, and is forgotten).
However, what struck me, even as a kid, way more than the brutal punishments and death that exist in Andersen stories, is the tone of isolation and suffering that permeates even his more whimsical tales. He could find anguish in two toys sitting on a mantel or in a Christmas tree. His characters are almost crushed under the weight of unrequited love, a personal pain that hardly ever seems to happen in our Perrault and Grimm fairy tales. Even when people win and find happy endings, they're bittersweet after the taste of so much sorrow.
And yet, Andersen's tales often succeed in speaking so well to people (children and adults) because they never take for granted those hurt feelings that sometimes really do last our whole lives. There's a reason the phrase "ugly duckling" has become a permanent part of the lexicon. And the physical tortures he inflicted on his characters could sometimes be the perfect metaphors for a character's feeling. In the original "The Little Mermaid," the mermaid not only trades the voice that would allow her to speak her feelings to her beloved human. She also endures the pain of invisible knives cutting her feet every time she walks; the price she pays for becoming a new person is a life without true rest or relief.
This is the problem with Hans Christian Andersen the Movie. At no point is it possible to connect Danny Kaye's happy cobbler with a man who could understand deep feelings of loss or a lack of belonging. The movie does hint in this direction by giving us a plot about Hans falling in love with a ballerina and, thanks to his lack of real world understanding, imagining her as a damsel in distress who loves him, too. It gives a touch of poignancy that the movie badly needs. However, the movie works so hard to emphasize the whole angle of Hans Christian Andersen, Friend to All Children, that it can't connect the man to his own actual work.
So, after all that, what makes Hans Christian Andersen a movie worth watching? Danny Kaye. After seeing so many great comedians crash and burn on the Shoals of Sentimentality (it's pretty tricky to switch to sincerity if all you're used to is snark), I was pleasantly surprised with how well Danny Kaye managed to convince me that he really is a goodhearted, humble soul who makes children smile. His idea of Hans is a man who's simple but never simpleminded. He's not dumb, he just finds too much wonder in the world to pay attention to those boring everyday matters. He gets along with kids because they're on the same wavelength. Kaye has the charisma and the acting talent to make these scenes work. Whether he's inventing "Thumbelina" for a little girl outside his jail cell or "The Ugly Duckling" for a boy with a shaved head, he's always good company. Oh and when he sings the song, "I'm Hans Christian Andersen," it will never leave your head.
Kaye's counterpart is Joey Walsh, a child actor who plays Hans' young ward Peter (at least I guess he's a ward, the movie never really explains). Just as Hans is the child in the grown man's body, Peter is the adult in a child's boy. It's his job to explain to Hans why he has to focus on the business of cobbling shoes as well as making fairy tales. He is the one who stays by Hans' side and tries to protect him from the humiliations that others might heap on him. And Peter is the one who understands where Hans' ill-fated attraction to a married ballerina will lead him. Joey Walsh is fine in the role and the moment where Hans tries to send his friend away in a fit of temper is surprisingly sad.
Hans Christian Andersen is so much a Danny Kaye showcase that, other than Peter, the supporting characters don't fully register. Which is a shame because the whole unrequited love subplot, with Farley Granger and Zizi Jeanmaire as a dancing couple locked in a complex love-hate relationship, really begs for more explanation.
Farley Granger famously summed up Hans Christian Andersen as "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets boy." He was pissed off at Goldwyn for foisting him into the underwritten part of the dance director who simultaneously bullies and worships his wife. Granger was nearing the end of his glory days as a Goldwyn contract player and playing second banana in a Danny Kaye vehicle could hardly have sweetened the deal. Kaye also, reportedly, saved most of his charm for his onscreen moments, carping at his director, his fellow actors, and complaining whenever he felt cheated of something. He objected to Granger getting to sing in a duet with Jeanmaire, taking the part for himself.
Granger answered second-class treatment and a second-class part with a second-class performance. He looks great in costume but can't muster up much than bored petulance. But then, what can you do in in a part that asks you to play one half of a sadomasochistic love affair in a brightly saturated, singing kid's movie? Maybe George Sanders could have pulled that one off but not the clearly bored-out-of-his mind Farley Granger.
Moira Shearer was Goldwyn's original choice for Doro, the object of Hans' infatuation. Unfortunately, Shearer became pregnant and the role went to Zizi Jeanmaire, the famous ballerina who danced into international stardom with her 1949 interpretation of Carmen. I say, unfortunately, not because I have any real problem with Jeanmaire, but because I have a real soft spot for Shearer whose redheaded, wide-eyed beauty seems much more in tune with the damsel in distress that Hans dreams up. She was also a better actress than Michael Powell liked to admit; her tragic fates in The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom wouldn't carry nearly the bite if Shearer's characters didn't seem so joyously alive.
Jeanmaire on the other hand, plays Doro as a preening, self-absorbed cliche of a French ballerina. She's saucy and smirking, the kind of woman who seems more likely to inspire, well, Carmen, than The Little Mermaid. She's got charm but I never once believed her chemistry with either Kaye or Granger. Still, Jeanmaire does get a great moment at the end, when Doro finally, for the first time, realizes that Hans is a human being with feelings that she has completely taken for granted. The slow-dawning understanding in her eyes allows us to see, for the first time, Doro as a woman who could dance The Little Mermaid and mean it.
Also, Zizi Jeanmaire does get a fine showcase for her talents with The Little Mermaid ballet, choreographed by her husband Roland Petit. Some reviewers don't care much for the ballet interlude in the film, but I think it's a treat, adding a welcome touch of darkness and starkly beautiful pantomime to a very bright, tuneful movie. Also, if it wasn't for me looking up facts about Petit and Jeanmaire, I might never have found out about this gorgeous real-life couple of almost sixty years, who, in addition to their balletic brilliance, had the gift of looking perpetually adorable and in love in nearly every photo taken of them.
At the time of its release, Hans Christian Andersen was a smash success for Samuel Goldwyn, then in the twilight of his movie-making career. And yet, this movie exists uneasily in the land of semi-classics. It's too fondly remembered by too many people who saw and loved it as a kid to be totally forgotten. And yet it doesn't fully click for a lot of people, myself included. Really, if anyone nowadays wants to tackle a Hans Christian Andersen movie musical that actually puts some of the real Andersen in it, I would be behind them all the way. I would pay money to see someone write a song about that time when Hans Christian Andersen stayed with Charles Dickens and made himself The Most Annoying Houseguest of All Time (so annoying in fact, that he reportedly inspired Uriah Heep). Can you imagine the Dickens-Andersen duet?
In the end, even if the 1952 Hans Christian Andersen is not fully to my taste, I can still concede that there's room enough in this world for all kinds of fairy tales. The kind that end in Hollywood box office and the kind that end in peat bogs. The kind that tell what a man's work means to someone and the kind that tell us that storytelling, no matter how silly or serious, really matters.
Favorite Quote:
"The other day I asked my Gerta what time it was and she said that the minute hand and the hour hand weren't speaking to each other. They were both in love with the second hand. And they wouldn't make up until they met at twelve o'clock. And no one could tell the time until then."
Favorite Scene:
Danny Kaye singing "I'm Hans Christian Andersen." It's just so irresistibly catchy.
Final Six Words:
Sugar-spun fantasy of writer's life
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre
(Note: This is my submission in the Fabulous Films of the 30s Blogathon, Hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.)
Happily married Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) are on a winter holiday at a European ski resort with their young daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam). While there, they laugh and dance and intermingle with all kinds of interesting new people, from the suave Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) to the strange, funny Mr. Abbott (Peter Lorre). But their vacation suddenly turns into a living nightmare one night when Louis falls to the ground, shot by an unseen enemy. It turns out that Louis Bernard was in fact a government agent and before he dies, he passes on a vital secret to the Lawrences. The secret is an imminent assassination in London, one that threatens to start a second world war. But before the couple can act on the information, the assassins, led by the ever-smiling Abbott, kidnap young Betty. This forces the couple to keep their mouths shut, even as the danger draws closer. However, they refuse to give up and instead, choose to search for Betty on their own. Bob and his trusty brother-in-law Clive (Hugh Wakefield) take to the back alleys of England, hunting down leads that range from the weird to the truly bizarre. Still, Abbott is onto them and so are the rest of the assassins. The family will have to find the strength and courage to save Betty and somehow do it without betraying their own country. It's a battle of wits and wills and there's no telling what could happen...
For someone who likes to introduce herself as an Alfred Hitchcock super-fan, to the point that I wrote my college admissions essay on him, it's taken me an amazingly long time to catch up with this film. It's strange, but while the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was ridiculously easy for me to catch on TV during the periodic Hitchcock marathons, its older (and thoroughly British) sibling from 1934 has been elusive. The experience of finally seeing the original film however, gave me a renewed understanding for why both movies are so inextricably paired together in critical discussion. Comparing them is irresistible but deciding between them is very difficult. The two films are such a perfect encapsulation of their respective decades and countries, with all the attending strengths and weaknesses, that preferring one to the other seems to be less of an aesthetic judgment and more like an epicurean deciding which tickles his palate. They're equally delicious.
Both films tell the tale of a more-or-less ordinary married couple who stumble into a dangerous world of espionage and assassins. Despite their naivete and seeming helplessness, the couple find new reserves of strength and determination when their own child is kidnapped to keep their mouths shut about an impending assassination.
In the 1934 film, the Lawrences are a sophisticated English couple vacationing at a Swiss ski resort with a young daughter. The husband is well-off and contented; the wife is flirtatious and happens to be a crack shot. In the 1956 film, the McKennas are a cheerful but sometimes hapless American couple traveling through Morocco with a freckle-faced son. The husband is a blunt, guy-next-door doctor who doesn't quite fit into his foreign surroundings any more than his long legs fit under Moroccan tables. His wife is a famous singer who gave up her career for the sake of her marriage. In both films, it's the husband that takes the active role in searching and fighting while it's up to the wife to use her great talent (sharpshooting and singing, respectively) to save the day. And in both films, it's the couple's very unassuming ordinariness that causes the ruthless villains to fatally underestimate them.
The great dividing line between the 1934 film and the 1956 remake is the tone. In the brightly colored and much more expansive remake, Hitchcock gives us a fresh-faced American couple, so complacent that they can crack morbid jokes over the various patients whose ailments funded their vacation ("You know what's paying for this three days in Marrakesh--Mrs. Campbell's gall stone"). He then proceeds to torment them 'til they crack. The fact that all of this is happening to James Stewart and Doris Day, two beloved Hollywood superstars, puts the frantic emotions of the couple front and center. All of this even while Hitchcock dazzles the eye with exotic settings and amazing set pieces. Everything is so immense that even Stewart and Day can unravel without anyone noticing. The 1956 movie sort of takes the rotten-apple-core mentality of Shadow of a Doubt, in which another innocent American goes up against ruthless villainy and pairs it to the giddy visuals of something like To Catch a Thief.
The 1934 film on the other hand, is like the speedy little roadster next to the 1956 cruise ship. It's a much compacter version of the same tale, clocking in at a mere 75 minutes. It also is much sharper in the twists and turns of its moods, careening from lightweight comedy to tense thriller and back again. It doesn't linger nearly as much on the parents. To a large extent, Leslie Banks and Edna Best are just there to keep the story moving along. They keep the stereotypical stiff upper lip to the point that even when Banks reunites with his daughter, in the middle of a group of assassins, he tries to make light of the entire situation. The one government representative we meet is coolly annoyed with the couple's secretiveness, barking at them to put their country first. And in the end, the film's most memorable character is not the couple nor any of their friends. It's the villain.
For all those who like to harp on Hitchcock's onscreen infatuation with his blonde leading ladies, I say that Hitchcock was just as enamored (in a cinematic way) with his villains. Peter Lorre, playing the kidnapping assassin Abbott, sets a template for the charming villain that Hitchcock would repeat again and again with actors like James Mason, Ray Milland and Robert Walker.
The story goes that Peter Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically in order to play the mysterious Abbott. Not that anybody cared because, after his indelible performance in M, they were eager to get him. Lorre's acting here is really a marvel of assurance; it's a complete 180 degree turn from his cringing, desperate performance in M. Abbott is smooth and confident, with one of the most beautifully beaming smiles you could ever hope to see. When you put him up against the bluff, so-very British Leslie Banks, Lorre almost looks like the mischievous schoolboy tweaking the nose of the headmaster. He's the guy who tosses in a Shakespeare quote as a threat ("A long, long journey 'from which no traveler returns'") and then caps it off with the deadpan aside, "Great poet."
And yet, I think the key to Lorre's brilliance in the role is his unpredictability. Just when you think you've gotten used to Lorre as the impeccably polite villain, he turns the tables and gives you moments of sadistic menace or even, in a startling scene, genuine grief. When his creepy female accomplice dies in a shootout, Lorre holds her and looks, for a moment, like a brother holding the body of his sister. And then the moment's gone. We never learn what they were to each other. We never really understand Abbott, who smiles innocently in moments where he should threaten and looks angry in moments when everything's going his way. But Lorre is so good in the role that he eclipses everyone else. Because of him, the film ends up less as a tale of two ordinary people up against evil and instead, becomes a briskly unsentimental film which sets up scenes and knocks them over like dominoes. This is pure suspense, with no more character development than absolutely necessary.
In comparing the 1934 film and the 1956 remake, it's quite striking to see how the role of the wife evolved over the course of two decades. In the first film, Edna Best carries on in the tradition of the sprightly, sophisticated wives of '30s films. There's something a little Nora Charles-ish about her in the way she sails through rooms, cheerfully flirts with other men (in the full confidence that her husband is watching and smirking) and shoots down clay pigeons with cool panache.
However, once her child is kidnapped, Best is pushed to the side of the story. Her own grief at the loss of her child is relegated to one scene, in which Best staggering with the news of the kidnapping, turns glassy-eyed and spins into a faint, while Hitchcock briefly cuts to a whirling POV shot. From there, her husband's off to do the work of tracking down their child, with the brother-in-law along as the trusty sidekick. Best is benched for a good chunk of the movie from then on; she reappears for the famous Albert Hall sequence and then for a final shootout with the assassins. It's in those final moments that Best seizes her own action-hero moment, grabbing a rifle and delivering the shot that will save her daughter. Even if you could see it coming (Why else establish the wife as a crack shot?), it still comes off as an exhilarating bit of physical heroism, all the more so because none of the characters treat it as anything odd.
The 1956 film, by contrast, knows it's got Doris Day and a star gets a star part. Day's emotions are given much more depth and attention than Best's. The British film treats Best's motherly anguish as so much inconvenient baggage, with the government man basically snapping at her and husband for being so unpatriotic as to, you know, care more about the life of their child than the life of a statesman. The 1956 film by contrast has a prolonged, deeply uncomfortable scene of James Stewart drugging Day to calm her; the chin-up-old-girl spirit of the original has turned into cruelty. Day's torment during the Albert Hall concert scene is also drawn out much more than Best's. In addition to being a more openly emotional character, Day's housewife is a famous singer whose ambitions have been subtly snuffed out in favor of marriage. The irony is that, despite the fact that she seems, on the surface, like a much more retrograde archetype than the earlier Best character, Day does in fact use that same powerful voice to save both her child and the statesman. She's so much more repressed than Best's action hero and yet, because her film pays more attention to her, she comes off as much more heroic.
Now that I've finally crossed the 1934 film off my list, I can say with confidence that it's a sparkling, smart movie in its own right. It's the work of a young filmmaker just discovering the full range of what he can do and the mesmerizing shifts of tone, the charismatic villain, and the quirky bursts of humor all come together perfectly. Really, when I think about it, the experience of watching both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is like visiting their respective locations. The 1956 film is a trip through a dazzlingly colorful, overcrowded marketplace. The 1934 original is like a trip down a snow-covered mountain. Cool, exhilarating and all over in a rush.
Favorite Quote:
"You know, to a man with a heart as soft as mine, there's nothing sweeter than a touching scene. Such as a father saying goodbye to his child. Yeah, goodbye for the last time. What could be more touching than that?"
Favorite Scene:
The scene in which Edna Best is dancing with the spy. Her husband, playfully pretending to be jealous, takes her knitting and turns it into a unraveling bit of thread that quickly entangles her and her dancing partner. It's all light and romantic. And then in one of those perfect bits of Hitchcock turning on a dime, her partner falls down, mortally wounded, and the light thread that entwined them together has suddenly become a trap. It's really the ultimate metaphor for the Hitchcock movie.
Final Six Words:
A champagne bubble balanced on knives
Test Pilot (1938)
directed by Victor Fleming, starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy
(Note: This is my entry in the Build-Your-Own Blogathon, hosted by the Classic Film and TV Cafe.)
Jim Lane (Clark Gable) was born to ride the skies. He's a test pilot, which is just another way of saying he's rough, reckless, and foolish enough to try anything. His best friend, mechanic Gunner Morse (Spencer Tracy) has had his back for as long as he cares to remember. Gunner knows that Jim is destined to die young, but he still sticks by him, always watching out for danger. But as it turns out, one day, Jim crash-lands and there, sitting in a Kansas wheat field, is the one danger Gunner never expected. Said danger goes by the name Ann Barton (Myrna Loy) and it doesn't take long for sparks to fly between her and Jim. The attraction is so intense, the pair impulsively marry. Gunner disapproves, but before long, he finds that Ann is a warm, wonderful, self-sacrificing woman who worries about Jim just as much as he does. The two form a strange but fierce friendship as they watch over Jim, hoping and praying that this crazy guy they both love will come out okay. But it'll take more than love and luck. It'll take everything they have to give.
Test Pilot is
such a textbook example of old-school MGM filmmaking, from the polished
heads of its mega-watt stars to the foot-tapping thrills of its action
sequences, that I have to think of it as Louis B. Mayer's extended
apology for the reviled Parnell. I can just imagine Mayer's directives to the creative team. "Okay, so Parnell was
boring. Quick, what's the opposite of Irish politics? High-speed plane
racing? Got it, it's gold. And none of that hero of the people jazz,
from now on, Gable's back to the boozing and the women. If there's any
heavy stuff, let Spencer take care of it. But don't give him too much,
it's got to be all about Gable and Loy. Maybe just make it Gable and Loy
for the first hour, until we've hooked 'em. Make sure it all ends with
marriage and a baby though, we want good, clean fun here."
I kid, but it all adds up to something deliciously enjoyable; Test Pilot is a perfect example of the studio formula firing on all four cylinders. It's essentially two different movies held together by one central conflict. The first half is a pure Clark Gable and Myrna Loy romantic comedy, complete with banter and wrenches and awkward trips to the lingerie department. The second half is a drama about a loyal wife (Loy) and a best buddy (Spencer Tracy) trying their best to stick by a guy who'll probably break both their hearts. While often tagged as a melodrama, the only real plot of Test Pilot is the inevitable tension of being, well, a test pilot, and the toll it takes on those around you.
In so many ways, despite its glossy MGM pedigree, Test Pilot feels like a long-lost Howard Hawks film. It's really more of a hang-out film than a melodrama, closer kin to something like To Have and Have Not or Rio Bravo than it looks on the surface. It's mainly about the chance to hang out with Loy, Gable, and Tracy for two hours and to watch them banter, bicker, and take care of each other. Scenes that a more plot-driven movie would use as a simple gag get drawn out for the sheer pleasure of it.
For example, there's a sly joke after Loy and Gable are married that Loy, who eloped in a hurry, needs a nightgown. Tracy reminds his buddy of the problem and Gable brings it up distractedly to Loy, who responds with a perfectly timed eyebrow raise, as if to say, "Do I really?" The movie could have stopped there, but instead we get to dawdle over a charming scene of Loy daring Gable into the lingerie department and snickering into her sleeve as he makes a total botch of it. The gag just keeps going and building and you're just so grateful that Test Pilot took the time for it.
Of course, the Howard Hawks film that Test Pilot most closely resembles is the aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings and after seeing both films, I'm firmly convinced that Hawks took Victor Fleming's film as a personal challenge. There's a definite resemblance in both films' central theme of how tough you have to be for aviation and how women who love aviators are forced to be even tougher if they want to hold onto their men. However, the Hawks film takes the position that these men are doing what they love and only the people who can keep up with them are allowed to stay. The Fleming film, on the other hand, is pretty explicit that Clark Gable's choices are wreaking havoc on the nerves of his wife and friend. His recklessness is played up more as immaturity than bravery. While it's not too surprising that an MGM film would ultimately come down in favor of domesticity over macho bravado, it's fascinating to see how both films spin such different morals from the same kind of material.
Incredibly, Myrna Loy ranked the loving, loyal Ann Barton in Test Pilot as her favorite role, ahead of her indelible character Nora Charles and her brilliant performance in The Best Years of Our Lives. However, her choice doesn't seem quite so odd after you've seen the film. The role of Ann gives Loy the chance to play an entire emotional spectrum, taking her from light and flirtatious in her early courtship scenes with Gable to wry and witty during the early part of their marriage and finally to a sadder, more desperate woman in the end, one who's fully realized what kind of bargain she's made.
It's really a perfect role for Loy because she gets to play so many different moods but is never forced to take center stage by herself. She's always playing off the boys and nobody could do that better than Loy. She was never happier as an actress than when she could be the perfect foil for her leading man, matching her moves to his like an expert dance partner. She made six movies with Clark Gable and her style with him is always a little slower and more openly sensual than her rapport with William Powell or Cary Grant. No doubt, Loy knew that the rat-a-tat patter of her screwball roles would tear holes through Gable's more macho delivery and she adjusts accordingly.
For me, Loy proves just how great an actress she is here in the way she can make her character's every action seem like the most logical next step. Myrna Loy standing around in a Kansas wheat field looking like she's waiting for cocktails to be served? Makes sense. Falling for Gable in the span of 24 hours? Perfectly natural. Getting engaged to a local and flirting with Gable all the while? Only sane thing to do. Marrying Gable, the crazy test pilot, after knowing him one day? Of course. Constantly going back and forth between leaving him forever and staying with him? She'll do it and come off like the wisest, warmest, wittiest woman you could ever hope to meet. Clark Gable finding someone like her in a wheat field is like the equivalent of someone shoving the winning lottery ticket into your hand and begging you to take it. Just watch her in the scene where she imitates Clark Gable as a bear; it's impossible not to fall for her.
For fans of Spencer Tracy, Test Pilot is
essential: for my money, it makes a far better case for his acting
talents than the film that actually won him the Oscar that year, Boys Town. Not only is it a more interesting performance, it's also an amazingly underwritten one; Spencer Tracy just takes the part of the loyal sidekick and runs all the way to Alaska with it. Tracy's character Gunner is not given any particular backstory or subplot to call his own. He seems to be utterly wrapped up in looking after Jim, with no thought for himself. He's also a grumpy killjoy who spends most of his scenes frowning over at his buddy. It's hard to blame Tracy for being annoyed that he'd gotten stuck with playing second fiddle to Gable again.
And yet, damn it all if Tracy doesn't draw your eye in every single scene he's in. Tracy was a canny enough actor to realize that he didn't have to resort to any silly stage business like waving a hat or flipping coins to steal attention from Gable. All he has to do is watch him. He's always watching Gable, always aware of him. The audience can't help but care about Gunner because he cares so much. He cares better than his friend can understand. And when Gunner forms a platonic bond with Ann, it's surprisingly sweet and touching. They become almost like parents to Jim themselves, both of them fretting and worrying and fervently trying to buck each other up. Tracy's performance here should be studied by character actors, to remind them that sometimes you're better off on the sidelines.
Of course, Tracy himself wasn't above hamming it up on occasion. There's an anecdote about the filming of one particular scene that demonstrates the Gable-Tracy rivalry perfectly. At the time, Gable had the box office clout but Tracy had the critical praise. Tracy had no interest in playing sidekick to Gable in another MGM film and the insecure Gable was always nervous that Tracy would blow him off the screen. So during the filming of Tracy's death scene, Tracy deliberately tweaked Gable's nose by drawing out every single gasp and dying groan and twitch and mumbled word. Gable had to cradle Tracy in his arms all while his costar died a more drawn-out death than Camille's. Finally, Gable got so frustrated, he let Tracy's head go with a loud thunk and shouted, "Die, goddamit, Spence! I wish to Christ you would!"
As the rowdy, immature Jim, Clark Gable is admittedly playing a pretty standard Gable role. He's gruff but flirtatious with Loy, devil-may-care when it comes to his job, and mortally afraid that something will reveal his hidden heart of gold. There's nothing wrong with Gable's acting here, far from it. It's just that to anyone who's seen plenty of Gable movies, it leaves very few surprises. Loy and Tracy both act rings around him in this one.
However, Gable does get one indelible moment, one that Howard Hawks would outright steal for Only Angels Have Wings. After losing a fellow aviator to a brutal crash, Gable and the other pilots retreat to a bar. One well-meaning patron starts up a toast to the winner and they drunkenly join him. But when he raises his glass and says the name of the dead man, Gable snaps to his feet, dead sober in a flash. "Who's he? Never heard of him." The other pilots also forswear the name of their fallen friend, honoring him by refusing to speak of him. It's the only code they can live by. The scene is every bit as powerful as the "Who's Joe" moment in Only Angels Have Wings and while I would normally take Howard Hawks over Victor Fleming in a heartbeat, I think it's a damn shame that Hawks' film is the only one that's remembered.
Test Pilot actually took a Best Picture nomination in 1938, one of those odd cases of a film with no big social relevance, no big acting moments, and no particular importance that manages to sneak onto the awards list solely because it's a very well-made film. For me, however, I think Test Pilot is worth watching, not because it's deep or weighty or important. It's because it's such a sterling example of old-fashioned MGM filmmaking back in the days when they really did know what the public wanted. They knew they could spin a good yarn just by taking three great actors and giving the audience the chance to spend plenty of time with them. Watching Loy, Tracy and Gable together is exhilaration enough. Whether they're up in the sky or down on the ground, they're stars.
Favorite Quote:
"She's crazy, I broke all the records, too. I entered high school a sophomore and came out a freshman!"
Favorite Scene:
Isn't it obvious? Myrna Loy's impression of Clark Gable as a bear. I defy anyone to watch it and not find their hearts set a-fluttering by Loy.
Final Six Words:
It bounces more than it soars
Note: The Myrna Loy gif is credited to norascharles tumblr.
The Queen of Spades (1949)
directed by Thorold Dickinson, starring Anton Walbrook, Yvonne Mitchell, Edith Evans
(Note: This is my entry in The British Invaders Blogathon, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts.)
Night after night, Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) goes with his fellow officers to a club, where the laughing sons of nobility stare at the gypsy dancers and play the card game faro until the sun rises. Suvorin, a strange, solitary man, never spends any time with the dancers and never spends any money, but there's a furtive hunger in his eyes as he watched the cards. Andrei (Ronald Howard), the only one in the company nice enough to try to be Suvorin's friend, is puzzled by his behavior, but Suvorin, a poor man who despises his wealthier comrades, is determined not to play faro until he's certain he'll win.
One night, Suvorin discovers a book that promises him the key to unbelievable wealth. The book tells the story of the Countess Ranevskaya, a beautiful, desperate woman who sold her soul to the Devil in order to win the secret of the three winning cards. With the secret of the cards, she won enough money at faro to keep herself from ruin. Suvorin is excited beyong measure at the story, especially when he discovers that Ranevskaya is still alive now an old and irascible crone (Edith Evans) who's never once breathed a word of the secret cards to anyone. Suvorin becomes obsessed with learning the three cards at any price. Even if it means seducing the countess's innocent young ward Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell). Even if it means loss of life or sanity. Even if he throws his own soul onto the fire...
For a film that Martin Scorsese himself referred to as a "masterpiece," The Queen of Spades has been strangely overlooked for decades. Even now, while it's attained a certain small cult status with those who've seen it, in the U.S., it still only pops up on a dual DVD with Dead of Night (not that Dead of Night isn't a good film in its own right) and it doesn't usually pop up when people are chatting about all the great films of Britain's postwar period. Maybe it just has too much competition; The Queen of Spades was nominated for a BAFTA in 1949, the same year as another little film you might recollect, oh, The Third Man that was it. Maybe it's because Thorold Dickinson, the film's director was born under an unlucky star since despite his own good reputation, his movies (the 1940 British Gaslight, Secret People, Hill 24 Doesn't Answer) haven't always been the easiest to get a hold of. Or maybe it's because The Queen of Spades is easy to mistake for just another cozy British ghost story.
In fact, the film is tremendously arresting in its visuals, its set design is amazingly elegant for its shoestring budget, and its performances are all topnotch. It's creepy, it's thrilling, and it horrifies in all the right place. Finding The Queen of Spades kicking around on Youtube or in out-of-date DVD releases is like realizing that the eccentric little old lady neighbor you've been ignoring for years was really Miss Havisham all along.
Adapted from a Pushkin short story, The Queen of Spades tells the story of Herman Suvorin, a man who becomes convinces that the riches and esteem he craves will be his if he can learn the secret of how to win at cards. It's a simple enough tale that teases you as to whether our hero is literally selling his soul or just going completely off his head. But for me, The Queen of Spades takes that simple story and makes it beautiful. Despite the fact that director Thorold Dickinson was given the assignment only five days before it started, despite the fact that they had the budget of a mayfly supper, and despite the fact that it showcases little actual horror, The Queen of Spades is a visual feast, creating a cold, haunted vision of Imperial Russia that could rival The Scarlet Empress.
Much of the credit has to go to Dickinson, who's endlessly inventive in his distorted camera angles, twisted mirror shots, and imagery. In one moment that made me literally catch my breath, he goes from a shot of Herman Suvorin scratching out a love letter while a spider spins a web in his dusty room to a shot of Lizaveta swooning away on her bed, her fingers suggestively reaching under the pillow to caress his letter as the transposed image of the spider keeps spinning over her face.
In another sequence where a younger and more beautiful version of the Countess makes her bargain with the Devil, Dickinson blurs the edges of the scene, as if we're watching something not quite of this world. To hint at the doom that will befall her, all he has to do is show a shot of some mysterious figure's gnarled hands slowly working out the details on a tiny doll, a little miniature of the Countess. And when the Countess does make her fateful visit to the place that, in the film's cryptic words, "left a mark on her soul," Dickinson leads up to it by showing us the Countess walking through a shadowy tunnel, coming to a door that enters into pitch blackness. We hear her scream and we hear the scream of her horses but nothing more. And when the light comes back, the tiny doll is being trapped under a glass bowl by those same unknown hands. When the movie cuts to the real Countess, she's pleading to a painting of the Virgin Mary for mercy but in a merciless answer to her prayers, the faces of Virgin and Infant slowly turn to black. It's as great as anything you'll find in a Val Lewton film.
The legendary stage actress Edith Evans, here playing the old, crabbed Countess Ranevskaya, is the film's most impressive visual effect. Just watching her hunch across the screen, with her huge powdered wig teetering on her head and her eyes darting around suspiciously is like watching some grotesque oddity from Alice in Wonderland come to life. The Queen of Spades was actually Evans' screen debut, but she's so assured onscreen that you'd think she'd been doing films for years. In her line delivery, Evans is a perfectly banal, constantly complaining old woman, but you can't help but notice something haunted and despairing in her eyes. She strikes the perfect balance, keeping you guessing as to whether Evans is an ordinary woman who's become the unfortunate target of Suvorin's delusions or a soulless crone who knows far more than she's telling.
Dark-eyed, regal Yvonne Mitchell, also making her screen debut after years on the stage, is surprisingly very good as the naive, romantic Lizaveta, the Countess's companion. She's lovely and good-hearted, but her life with the Countess has kept her sheltered from the outside world. Despite Suvorin's brusque manners, poor situation, and unattractive appearance, his ardent love letters (diligently copied out of books) are enough to set her head spinning. It would be easy to write off Lizaveta as just another ingenue, a helpless pawn in Suvorin's schemes. But Mitchell has too much dignity in her manner to let you dismiss her entirely. Instead, you get the sense of a woman who could very well grow into strength and intelligence, given the chance to experience the world. By forcing her ward into seclusion and servitude, the Countess has ironically turned her into the same reckless, unhappy woman she herself once was, seeking relief in a faithless lover.
Ronald Howard, son of Leslie Howard, gets the film's most thankless role as the pure-hearted Andrei, Suvorin's aristocratic foil. As the only character not to originate from the original Pushkin story, his main purpose is to provide Lizaveta with a happy ending. Still, Howard shows more than a few sparks of his father's talent, giving Andrei a genuine warmth and sensitive watchfulness that makes you root for him to bring Suvorin down. Judging by his work here, Howard should have had more of a career.
Like his other great obsessive role, Lermontov in The Red Shoes, Anton Walbrook is again the cold, vaguely inhuman creature whose eyes light up and whose hands tremble, not for a fellow human being, but for something intangible. In this case, it's privilege, not art. He looks at the beautiful, adoring Yvonne Mitchell as if he can stare right through her to the life of wealth that awaits him. Considering that the only other character he spends any time with is an attractive young man, who seems rather fond of him for no apparent reason, it's tempting to try to work in a gay subtext here. However, Walbrook doesn't play it that way; he's just as bored making small talk with Andrei as he is writing love sonnets to a woman.
That chilly detachment certainly fits for the character, but it did leave me feeling a little removed from Suvorin for a good part of the film's runtime. Unlike Lermontov, who can at least boast that he's bringing beauty into the world, Suvorin's concerns are all wrapped up in himself and so his downfall doesn't feel particularly tragic or shocking. I'm not one to complain about characters being likable or not, but I couldn't help wishing for a little more insight into Suvorin.
Still, that minor complaint aside, Walbrook's performance is knock-out spectacular once Suvorin goes from pinched misanthropy to complete insanity. Intensity was Walbrook's great gift as an actor and he brings it full-force to this role, commanding your attention simply because his needs are so raw. He wants the secret of the cards and he wants it so much that everything else in the world has turned to ashes for him. His one scene with Edith Evans is a stand-out, but I'm also enthralled by the moment when he finally feels he's won. Walbrook mutters to himself, hardly daring to believe it. He closes his eyes in relief. And then he stands up as if to stretch but instead, Walbrook put his hands to his chest, clawing at his own skin in some kind of bestial triumph and then makes this undefinable noise. It's like a bird of prey cawing, I quite literally can't think of another actor ever doing anything like it. And then to cap it all off, Walbrook lifts his hands up, lets out a few hysterical sobs, and ends with a glass-rattling scream that would unnerve even the most jaded horror fan. You don't know whether to be more terrified of him or for him. There's plenty of actors who can make a meal of a mad scene, but Walbrook truly makes this unique and memorable.
In a lesser film, the director would have just let Walbrook's performance carry the whole thing, but Thorold Dickinson creates a movie that's just mad enough to keep pace with its feverish hero, using mirrors, shadows, sounds, and eyes to tell the old story of what happens when we want too much. More people should know it and more people should talk of it. And more people should be talking about Thorold Dickinson, a man who played his best even when fate dealt him an unlucky hand. The ghosts of the other great movies he could have made haunts The Queen of Spades just as much as the story's ghosts do.
Favorite Quote:
"Take life as you find it."
"I'd rather take it by the throat and force it to give me what I want."
Favorite Scene:
For me, the most thrilling scene in The Queen of Spades comes when Suvorin hides in the Countess's room in order to beg the secret of the cards from her. Dickinson carefully draws out the suspense. He shows us every slow step of the Countess being made ready for bed, her body suddenly shrunken without the weight of her wig and jewels. She mumbles to herself the same prayer we heard the younger Countess make, "Holy virgin, have mercy on me." In the darkness, Evans' eyes look like two black holes. Suddenly she sees a black apparition next to a painting of the Virgin. She rears up and the shadow steps forward to reveal himself as Suvorin. He comes forward, pleading, presenting himself as a supplicant. The Countess looks away from him, mute. Suvorin falls to his knees, asking her to help him in the name of God and any human feeling, but she moves away. Suvorin's pleas turn to demands and then finally to threats. And still the Countess refuses to answer. By this point, the audience is almost as maddened as Suvorin, wanting desperately for this woman to share what she knows. But what if he's a madman tormenting an innocent old woman? The film doesn't tip its hand either way and it ups the tension immensely, as you keep trying to figure out who's most in danger here.
It's hard to overstate just how brilliantly matched Walbrook and Evans are in this scene. Walbrook brings all his vocal gifts to Suvorin's shifting, increasingly savage speech and Evans uses the power of her face alone to show both great dread and a strange, mute contempt. I won't give away how the scene ends or the little shock coda afterwards, but it left me very grateful for directors who know how to let actors bring the horror all on their own. Sometimes you don't need CGI demons coming up through the floorboards or overacting Satans (actually scratch that--you practically never need that). Sometimes all you need is the terror in two people's eyes as they slowly realize they're staring into the face of their own damnation.
Final Six Words:
Sends shivers of delight and horror
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady
(Note: This is my entry in the John Ford Blogathon, hosted by Krell Laboratories.)
Young Mr. Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) is a man of weighty thoughts but light experience, at least when it comes to the rule of law. All he really knows, he's only learned from books. But after he loses his first love Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore), Lincoln makes up his mind to study the law in earnest. However, his first case will prove to be as great a challenge as he could ever have imagined.
The Clay family have come to town for a Fourth of July celebration. At the fair, the two brothers (Richard Cromwell and Eddie Quillan) get into a fight and a man ends up dead with a knife in him. Both Clays are accused of murder. Both are determined to take the blame, trying to spare their brother from a hanging. Their mother (Alice Brady) is a witness to the crime but absolutely refuses to say a word; she'll never sacrifice one to save the other. The other key witness to the crime is J. Palmer Cass (Ward Bond), a friend of the victim; he insists that he saw the stabbing by the light of the moon and refuses to budge on that point.
Lincoln agrees to take on the case, but all the fates seem against him. He's got a town braying for the blood of the two Clay boys, a town that's ready to lynch them at any second. He's got a jury that's already biased against the case. He's got no testimony to counter the accusations. His defendants won't tell the truth of what happened. And he himself is as green a lawyer as ever walked into a courtroom. But that won't stop him from putting up one hell of a fight. Little does he know that it's only the beginning for him.
Of all our presidents, Abraham Lincoln is arguably the most cinematic. Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson had more bombastic personalities and George Washington was the more standardized hero, but Lincoln stands out as uniquely well suited to the big screen. He's both the approachable, folksy "rail-splitter," the common man striving to better himself, and the mythical, untouchable paladin for human rights. He's a figure we can look up to in awe, but, to snag an old election phrase, someone we could also imagine wanting to share a drink with. Consider that in the very same year, we got both a big-budget, prestigious, Oscar-nominated film inspired by Lincoln's efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment and a splashy fantasy action flick about Abraham Lincoln, the vampire slayer. Lincoln presents, in many ways, the archetypal image of what Americans want to think about themselves. Sharp and tricksy but also reasoned and wise. Compassionate yet stern as steel. A humble background but the will for power.
John Ford's 1939 biographic film, Young Mr. Lincoln, is a testament to those ideas of Abraham Lincoln and in that regard, it's a beautiful, modest, rather slippery piece of work. "Biographic" is a term I use very loosely here, because the movie has little interest in retelling the facts of Lincoln's life. It marks off a lot of the famous little anecdotes about his early career, like the time when he told the story of the dog and the pitchfork in court or the time he asked Mary Todd to dance ("I want to dance with you in the worst way"). But it carries precious little in the way of facts. The movie invents wholesale a story about him defending a pair of accused murderers and devotes most of the runtime to that. With the overwhelming abundance of storytelling material in Lincoln's actual life, the choice to depict him as a crusading Atticus Finch seems oddly limiting at first glance.
However, once you get past that mental hurdle, Young Mr. Lincoln offers a portrait of Lincoln that is deeply affecting and more complicated than you might expect from the synopsis. In fact, the Lincoln here has a lot in common with the 2012 Spielberg version of Lincoln. They're both presented as canny, thoughtful men, not above using a little trickery or insults to get their way. The Lincoln in this film cracks lowbrow jokes, hems and haws over his true intention and calmly manipulates people. He even cheats to win a game of tug-of-war at one point and John Ford cuts away without tipping his hand as to whether we're supposed to applaud his smarts or be disconcerted by his casual disregard for rules. Without showing Lincoln's political career, the 1939 film manages to throw in a great many hints about his political aptitude. This film also highlights Lincoln's essential isolation from other people, ending in a famous scene of him walking alone up a hill that surely must have been in Spielberg's mind when he filmed the final scene for his version. The key difference between the 1939 and 2012 biopics is that the Spielberg story is about the collaboration and compromises Lincoln and other people must make to form that more perfect Union. Ford's film, by contrast, presents Lincoln as a singular figure, one whose struggles are not truly shared or understood by anyone else.
Sometimes, an actor's star persona is virtually indistinguishable from his offscreen one, as in the case of Clifton Webb. Other times, it's almost a night and day contrast; the down-to-earth homemaker turns into a sultry temptress on silver nitrate or vice versa. Personally, I hold to the theory that you can usually unearth bits and flashes of the actor's true self underneath the performance, no matter how wide the gulf seems at first. Vincent Price's joy in living, Joan Crawford's drive for self-improvement, Rita Hayworth's need to please. It's there if you know where to look for it. But Henry Fonda is one actor that strains that theory of mine to the breaking point.
On film, Henry Fonda is the purest personification of honesty. He isn't just a good guy. He's the hero struggling in the dark, his eyes fixed on some distant mountain peak of perfection that the rest of us can only imagine. He could take characters as decent and honorable as Tom Joad, Juror No. 8, Wyatt Earp, and Abraham Lincoln and convince you that they were possible. And yet in real life, Henry Fonda was a cold, unreachable man who alienated his loved ones and quite frankly, acted like a shit to them much of the time. After you've read a few of the Fonda family bios, it seems frankly unbelievable that this man could dig deep enough to find the fathomless generosity and compassion of his most famous roles.
However, when you look at Henry Fonda and compare him to the other famous "good guy" actor, James Stewart, the connection snaps into place. The hallmark of a Fonda hero, as opposed to a Stewart hero, isn't heartfelt emotion, it's thought. Fonda heroes are always staring off somewhere into the middle distance, thinking their way towards a solution. Unlike Stewart, who so often ends up loving too well and not too wisely, Fonda is more isolated, more cerebral and less open. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart's climactic speech has him distraught and anguished, voice cracking, fiery and exhausted. In Grapes of Wrath, Fonda's famous speech has him looking offscreen, patient and undaunted, slowly struggling his way towards the understanding that he himself belongs to a larger whole. And there is a certain coldness to that kind of hero. He can't belong to us in the way Stewart can.
All this is leading up to a notion of mine that when Henry Fonda plays the John Ford hero, it results in films that tend to be quieter and less easy to pin down than Ford's films with John Wayne. My Darling Clementine, The Grapes of Wrath, and Young Mr. Lincoln all have their fair share of Fordian humor and American nostalgia, but they keep us at more of a distance (I have a feeling that Mr. Roberts might be the exception that proves the rule but don't tell me, I still haven't seen it).
I realize that I have spent almost this entire review talking about Henry Fonda and not the supporting cast, which includes some famous names, including Ward Bond, Donald Meek, Alice Brady, and Richard Cromwell. And that's for the very good reason that this film is really Fonda's showcase the whole way through. When he's not onscreen, you're waiting for him to come back. The other characters don't really register, although I appreciate the sly touch of having the aptly-named Donald Meek play Lincoln's slick, confident opponent. Alice Brady's performance as the anguished mother of the defendants is also good, but the script rarely gives her more than one note to play. Truthfully, Young Mr. Lincoln, while a great character study for its protagonist, does suffer a little by making the supporting characters so simple. John Ford films in general rely heavily on archetypal characters, but I can't help feeling that they came across as richer and deeper in movies like How Green Was My Valley or Stagecoach than they do here.
The greatest joy this film has to offer for John Ford fans, aside from Fonda, is the aching beauty of its camerawork. His shots of Lincoln rambling through the woods look like something you want to hang in a gallery, they're so well framed. Ford's ability to find both emotion and mythic resonance in his stories is also just as evident here as it is in his more famous films. There's an early scene with Lincoln talking to his first love Ann Rutledge out near the river. She encourages his dreams, he compliments her hair. The sun is shining. The mood is tentative and hopeful; their romance is just barely beginning. When she walks away, Lincoln tosses a stone in the river. The ripples slowly transition to shifting blocks of ice in the dead of winter. The camera finds Lincoln making a slow, deliberate walk to Ann's grave to replace the flowers there. The cruel, lovely simplicity of the image cuts straight to the bone.
For me, the best John Ford films are built on moments like that. Moments that make us feel like we're seeing an elemental truth of human experience. While I wouldn't rank Young Mr. Lincoln as one of his greatest films, if only because his best is so very great, it carries enough of those moments to make me very glad that John Ford and Henry Fonda chose to make their idea of Abraham Lincoln. In 1939, they were without a doubt the best men for the job.
Favorite Quote:
"What I'm afraid of is that some of the jurors might not know you...and that'd put me at a great disadvantage."
Favorite Scene:
The scene in which Lincoln takes on an angry lynch mob. It's a simple scene on the surface, but it's so elegantly constructed that if I taught film classes, I'd make it required viewing for all my students. Abraham Lincoln has just taken on the case of the two Clay brothers and a raging mob descends on the cell, ready to storm it and kill the boys then and there. Lincoln appears just in time and throws himself between the crowd and the door, armed with nothing but his lanky body and the sound of his voice. Rather than just appealing to their better natures or diffusing the situation with humor or angrily calling them out, Lincoln applies all these strategies in one speech, revealing his incredible political aptitude for the first time.
I love the way that Ford matches the shifting camera angles to Lincoln's shifting tactics. In the first part of the scene, when Lincoln appears in front of the door, Ford's camera goes for a jarring, extreme close-up of his back turning around. When he turns, the camera has traveled sharply away from him and he's a distant, almost frightening figure in black, loudly proclaiming that he'll beat up anyone who tries to pass him. As the crowd argue with him, Lincoln gradually turns the conversation into subtle mockery, poking fun at himself in order to draw a laugh from them ("I'm just a fresh lawyer trying to get ahead...and you boys act like you want to do me out of my first clients"). Ford brings the camera closer and now Lincoln is in the middle of the frame. He's more approachable now, but rather cool and dispassionate. The crowds starts to calm. Ford cuts to a beautiful closeup of Lincoln, now leaning against the doorframe, his head bowed. He begins speaking regretfully of the nature of lynch mobs, subtly drawing the conversation away from the comical waste of money to the real moral cost. The humor's gone. Then he actually calls out one of the mob by name, reminding him of his honorable name and piety. He paints a picture for the crowd of this same man going home to read his bible and turning to the passage, "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy." By now, the crowd has been thoroughly subdued. Their battering ram is almost slipping from their hands. Lincoln looks up and says softly, "Why don't you put it down for a spell, boys, ain't it getting heavy." He has won a total victory. Moreover, Ford's camerawork matches Fonda's performance so perfectly in this scene, Lincoln can't help but win over the movie audience as well.
Final Six Words:
Wise, wistful portrait of elusive legend
