Selznick roasting on an open fire

Well, there’s your problem right there.

I love, in an ironic way, the idea that the ultimate in David O Selznick’s perennial quest for QUALITY was to dispense with the services of Ben Hecht, Robert E. Sherwood and all the other top writing talent he could so readily afford, roll up his shirtsleeves and get down to work at the typewriter himself. His time being more valuable than anybody’s, the results would have to be impressive. Leave aside the fact that if Selznick wasn’t Selznick, there’s no way Selznick would hire him to write a screenplay.

SINCE YOU WENT AWAY, his wartime epic about the home front, build on the MRS MINIVER model, is stuffed with goodies. EVERYBODY seems to be in it, and to be fair, Selznick finds something for them all to do. Just listing the favourite actors in the cast would make this piece too long. There are TWO top-notch cinematographers, Stanley Cortez to make it beautiful, and Lee Garmes to also make it beautiful and maybe get it all shot before the war is over. (Director John Cromwell had uncredited assists from THREE colleagues, including DOS himself.) The film deserves praise for making epic scenes out of an inherently small-scale, domestic story. Compare with the lovely THIS HAPPY BREED, directed by the future Mr. Epic himself, David Lean, which keeps everything simple and understated which is also a good way to go. But it must have been kind of thrilling for Americans to see their daily struggles turned into the stuff of Hollywood super-production.

Some good scenes — some very good scenes — some scenes which work despite being unbearably schmaltzy — and some scenes which are just unbearably schmaltzy. It all ends at Christmas, and this is the best time of year for it because you’re more likely to find the icky sentimental bits bearable. Rather than the starry and excellent cast, I’m concentrating on Jack Cosgrove’s FESTIVE GLASS SHOTS. Because what is Christmas without in-camera optical effects?

A wet Sunday in Edinburgh, that’s what.

That upper one MIGHT be a miniature, not sure — the last shot of the film is a model, with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple projected on a tiny screen in the upper window, transforming them into dollhouse residents for the occasion.

The Christmas Day Intertitle

Who has time to read blogs on Christmas Day? Who has time to write them?

Who has the mental energy to read Gothic script, ffs?

Well, we’re having a quiet time at the Shadowplayhouse. The folks are dropping off some turkey and some presents.

Things Fiona got for Christmas:

Clinical depression

Acute anxiety

Flu

Chest infection

Things we both got: acute insomnia.

The good news is, I think the insomnia and flu have knocked out most of the parts of Fiona’s brain that are capable of depression, so her spirits are comparatively good, for a shambling zombie. I went four nights with no sleep and then finally got a few hours unconsciousness, so I’m basically fine and dandy apart from a tickly cough and my left eye, which has gone a bit Herbert Lom.

When it rains (at forty-five degrees and I don’t mean centigrade) it comes through the living room ceiling.

“I have a feeling this is going to be the best Christmas ever,” says Cary Grant to Carole Lombard as he battles pneumonia in a ratty hotel in IN NAME ONLY, and I feel the same way. My optimism is as hard to get rid of as my chesty cough.

Here’s a one-hundred-year-old Christmas movie. It’s quite something!

These bloody women they will not stop bothering you

Irene prepares to get things Dunne.

Don’t worry, I haven’t gone all misogynist on you. Just quoting Pete & Dud, while also gearing up to take a look at some of John Cromwell’s monster women.

Bette Davis (see yesterday) is probably the most awful, but she has some stiff competition. Hope Emerson in CAGED is practically a literal she-monster, and Cromwell’s noir outings featured the occasional femme fatale. But the trio of Laura Hope Crews (mother), Constance Cummings (lover) and Kay Francis (wife) have an unexpected amount in common.

THE SILVER CORD (1933) seems to be the first Hollywood film to aim at that great American holy cow, motherhood, with Laura Hope Crews shrill and fluttering as the controlling, near-incestuous mother of Joel McCrea and Eric Linden. McCrea’s role is almost unplayable, since he has to appear blind to what kind of a family set-up he’s from, while retaining some measure of the audience’s respect — he gives it the old college try, though, and comes out better than he does in BANJO ON MY KNEE. Eric Linden was probably pre-code cinema’s pre-eminent pisspants, and is made to measure as the (even) more spineless son, easily manipulated into giving up the adorable and beauteous Frances Dee because she doesn’t live up to mama’s standards.

A pensive, festive Linden.

It takes Irene Dunne (in one of several lead roles for Cromwell) to unmask mother, taking her down with surgical precision (Dunne is a biologist — she’s told in Scene One that she’s one of those women who CAN have a career and family, and this news is delivered by Gustav von Seyffertitz, so it is AUTHORITATIVE). McCrea STILL can’t see what’s staring him in the face until Mummy Pittypat flat-out confesses that she’s put all her romantic yearnings into motherhood, and she’s PROUD of it, goddamn it.

Upon that same rear projection screen, KONG would roar!

The thing is a giant creaking play (by Sidney Howard), but Cromwell, working as was often the case from a script by Jane Murfin, applies long, fluid traveling shots (gliding crabwise  through those weird doorways that seem to have only half a door frame, to admit the camera crew) and takes advantage of RKO’s early facility with rear-projection for a dramatic accident on the ice. It’s not actually a Christmas film, but it’s one of several Cromwell’s suited to this time of year, with its snowy backdrops (see also MADE FOR EACH OTHER, IN NAME ONLY, and especially SINCE YOU WENT AWAY).

THIS MAN IS MINE stars Dunne again (who doesn’t get enough credit as a great pre-code dame along with Stanwyck, Bette & Joan &c), battling the deliciously wicked Constance Cummings (above) who wants to steal away her husband, Ralph Bellamy (but WHY, for pity’s sake? Because he’s there, I suppose). Dunne has her delicate, piano-playing, landscape-painting hands full with all these Constance Cummings and goings.

Amusingly, this also has Sidney Blackmer, making it a kind of ROSEMARY’S BABY pre-party for Dr. Sapirstein and Roman Castavet.

ALL OF THEM WITCHES! Dunne & Bellamy/Sapirstein, Blackmer/Castavet and Cummings.

The low-key melodrama is leavened with considerable humour, most of it from the beastly Constance’s more sensible sister, Kay Johnson (Mrs. Cromwell at the time). Describing CC as “a sort of cross between a tidal wave and a smallpox epidemic,” she keeps the whole, dignified thing from getting too self-serious. Slightly surprising third-act violence when Bellamy slugs Constance unconscious with a sock in the eye, and Dunne brains him in turn with a picture frame. Well, civilisation must be preserved.

As in THE SILVER CORD, the villainess condemns herself out of her own mouth, destroying the illusion she’s built up, and the exact same thing happens a third time in the later IN NAME ONLY (1939). Kay Francis, at the tail-end of her career as leading lady, is hanging on to Cary Grant in a loveless marriage, because she wants not only his money but his dad’s (Charles Coburn, by some genetic prodigy of mutation). Grant meets and falls for widow Carole Lombard, lighting a nice fire under the whole scenario.

This is the most satisfying of the three, though they’re all worth seeing. It’s like Grant and Lombard are trying to be their own dazzling movie star selves, and every bastard around them is trying to drag them down to ordinary unhappiness with the rest of humanity. Oddly, Grant shines brightest when sparring with catty Helen Vinson (another survivor of the pre-code era, with her sharp little teeth) as a subsidiary bitch. Memorable action involves the worst hotel in the history of cinema, and Francis condemning herself out of her own mouth exactly like her predecessors. A door shuts on her with awesome finality.

Also: Peggy Ann Garner, Grady Sutton. (“Do you drink? How do you stand it?”)