Cast of Characters

I don’t go in for lists much — I think they’re a bit lazy — but I’m feeling a bit lazy, so I thought I’d list Preston Sturges’ major stock company players and pick my fave role for each one.

William Demarest certainly got his share of major roles. I love him as Sgt. Heffelfinger in HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO and he has a kind of magnificence as the stubborn Mr. Bildocker in CHRISTMAS IN JULY, the Juror 8 of coffee slogan selection committees, and THE LADY EVE gives him the line he was born to say, “Positively the same dame!” But it’s THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK in which he breaks my heart, as well as his own coccyx (you really shouldn’t try to kick your own daughter, Constable Kockenlocker). “Daughters, phooey!” is nearly as good a signature line for him.

Robert Greig, most butling of all butlers, is staunchly reliable but of course it’s SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS which gifts him with Sturges’ most serious speech, beautifully intoned and then Eric Blore (the Lorre to his Greenstreet) takes the curse off it.

Al Bridge is a man who doesn’t get enough credit. Sturges clearly loved his saggy sourpuss face and world-weary delivery. Though his terrifying “Mister” in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS is a revelation, to see him doing what he does best, MORGAN’S CREEK (“I practice the law and as such I am not only willing but anxious to sue anybody, anytime, for anything…”) and THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (“You couldn’t make me an attractive offer, not if you got down on your bended knee and threw in a set o’ dishes…”) are tops. Do I have to choose one? I’m not going to.

With Luis Alberni I’m going to cheat and take a film Sturges wrote but didn’t direct, Mitchell Leisen’s EASY LIVING, because I love Louis Louis of the Hotel Louis and his garbled English (“Gymnasalum!”)

Jimmy Conlin’s biggest role is as Wormy in DIDDLEBOCK, but his most important is as the Trusty in SULLIVAN’S, where he supplies the only tonal connection between the deadly serious scenes he’s in and the broad comedy elsewhere. His warm reminiscences about his friend the Blowtorch Killer are hilarious.

Julius “This is a talking picture” Tannen is funny in MORGAN’S CREEK as a Russian-accented storekeeper inexplicably named Rafferty, but he’s a real human being in THE GREAT MOMENT, Professor Charles T. Jackson, and it’s startling to see the depths of bile in him. Like Conlin, he was a vaudeville actor, in fact a monologist rather than a player of scenes. But Sturges saw the potential.

Torben Meyer, another dialect wiz, as Mr. Klink in THE LADY EVE has a whole character arc in two little scenes. A Dane, he seems able to vary his accent so that odd bits of colloquial American cut through.

Porter Hall: SULLIVAN’S. Little man talking fast thru a cigar.

Robert Warwick, same film, tall man talking fast without cigar. “Why should I suffer alone?” He was a leading man in silents, you know.

I don’t remember much about Franklin Pangborn’s role in DIDDLEBOCK, but his character name is “Formfit Franklin” and that’s good enough for me.

Frank Moran, MORGAN’S CREEK, “Psycholology.”

Rudy Vallee counts, I guess, he’s in three of them, but the first, PALM BEACH, is the best. “A pathetic creature in the final stages of futility,” wrote Manny Farber of John D. Hackensacker III. “It is one of the tragedies of this life that the men most in need of a beating-up are always enormous.”

Raymond Walburn, who has buttons for eyes, is terrific as the slimy mayor in HAIL THe CONQUERING HERO but his Dr. Maxford in CHRISTMAS IN JULY is aces.

Robert Dudley, the Weenie King, is in more Sturges films than I thought — the IMDb has him down as “man” in MORGAN’S, but of course it’s as the sausage tycoon that he’ll be remembered. “Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That’s hard to say with false teeth!”

There were a few women who appeared in more than one Sturges film, but Esther Howard (right) was the only one who got showstopping comedy scenes. The randy window Miz Zeffie in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, partnered by the sour Almira Sessions, is her finest achievement.

Lots more actors did a couple of Sturges films, and of course Joel McCrea starred in three, which is a different matter. And he obviously liked Victor Potel and Harry Rosenthal and Jimmie Dundee and Georgia Caine and mild-mannered Harry Hayden, who gets another of his great speeches as Mr. Waterbury in CHRISTMAS IN JULY: “I’m not a failure. I’m a success. You see, ambition is all right if it works. But no system could be right where only half of 1% were successes and all the rest were failures – that wouldn’t be right. I’m not a failure. I’m a success. And so are you, if you earn your own living and pay your bills and look the world in the eye.”

Sturges wrote, “My bosses could never understand why I kept using practically the same small-salaried players in picture after picture. They said, ‘Why don’t you get some new faces?’ I always replied that these little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures. I guess Paramount was very glad to be rid of me eventually, as no one there understood a word I said.”

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing like the truth

Why did it take us so long to watch TRUE CONFESSION? Maybe, being a part-time auteurist, I let it sink down the viewing pile on account of director Wesley Ruggles not being a Big Name, but he’s talented, certainly in terms of creating a comic rhythm and marshalling marvelous performances. Screenwriter Claude Binyon was involved in numerous W.C. Fields films, which helps explain the shaggy dog feeling we get.

Carole Lombard is a pathological liar married to a painfully honest lawyer, Fred MacMurray. Who keeps believing her, despite her having the world’s greatest poker tell (her tongue thrusts compulsively into her cheek as her eyes open wide with sudden inspiration). And despite the fact that he pretty much always finds out she’s lied. How long have they been married? What attracted them? They’re a bit like Burgess Meredith and Mrs. Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode. The only thing they have in common is complete opposition.

Of course, we’re meant to recognise that MacMurray’s refusal to defend guilty clients (like Herbert Marshall’s in THE GOOD FAIRY) is madness, idiocy, worse than Lombard’s mythomania. It’s part of the subversive nature of screwball that the hero’s goal is usually misguided, like Joel McCrea’s terrible invention in THE PALM BEACH STORY or his terrible film in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS or, most awful of all, Dick Powell’s coffee slogan in CHRISTMAS IN JULY. So we’re kind of rooting for the hero to succeed at something that deserves to fail.

Lombard ends up a murder suspect due to circumstances beyond everyone’s control. The detective at the scene, by some cruel cinematic fate, is Edgar Kennedy, the very worst possible person to have to deal with Lombard. No man was more prone to exasperation. Within seconds of meeting her he’s resorting to trademark gestures, wiping the sweat of his bald head with his pudgy hand or slapping it into his face and holding it there as if trying to shut out the mad, bad world and the mad, bad woman. At the crime scene, he’s apoplectic, and even Carole’s friend, Una Merkel, the one sane person in the film, is driving him crazy, because she’s trying to make him recognize reality. And reality is the craziest thing of all.

At the station house, Lombard drives him crazier still, as they run through various scenarios which might explain why she killed this guy. He’s seriously proposing explanations, but really he’s just trying to find something they can agree to so that the wheels of justice can roll on. She’s just trying out scenarios — she’s an unpublished author (but Merkel says nobody can believe any of her stories because the characters are all crazy). Finally, they hit on a simultaneous confession/defence which can see her walk free if the trial goes well — she was defending her honour. Carole likes this one just as Roxie Hart does.

Now Fred re-enters and persuades Carole that a guilty plea is the only way out of this. He’s waiting to be convinced it’s the truth, so she obligingly confirms it. Now this innocent woman is on trial for a murder she didn’t commit, to which she’s confessed. And presumably the real killer is still at large.

When we see Edgar Kennedy again, at the trial, the poor man is in shreds. Having to go through his encounters with Carole again in the witness box is bringing it all back. It’s like he has post-traumatic stress just from conversing with her. Being in a screwball comedy is a never-ending nightmare to him.

We also get, for sheer gratuitous pleasure, the testimony of the coroner (Irving Bacon), who can’t seem to sort out his words. “I entered and saw the defendant… I mean the deceased, lying on the floor… I mean the rug. I examined the rug… I mean the deceased, and found two bullet wounds in the leg… I mean the head…” And Porter Hall (a Sturges favourite) as the prosecutor, who grips the bar of the jury box and bobs up and down in a frenzy when reaching one of his many climaxes.

There’s also John Barrymore. But at this point we don’t even know why. He keeps turning up, arguing with his bartender (Lynne Overman, one of a number of players with delightfully cracked voices, Merkel being another) or taunting Lombard in her cell, but his purpose in the film remains mysterious until the end. Barrymore was enjoying a new career in screwball (TWENTIETH CENTURY, MIDNIGHT) and his final decline comes in conjunction with that genre’s fade-out in the forties. We can also say that in the screwballs, Barrymore is in command of the joke, though it’s a tough struggle, and in PLAYMATES (1941) the joke is on him (picture it squatting on his chest as he expires, like the imp in Fuselli’s nightmare). He’s playing a disreputable drunk in this one, and there’s certainly an uncomfortable lack of distance between actor and role — stubble further softens the disintegrating Great Profile, a too-tight white jacket makes a gunnysack of his torso — but the eccentricities are so designed, we know there’s still a working mind organising all this. The high-pitched giggle, the rising inflection on the mantra “She’ll fry,” the echoes of Mr. Hyde in the glances to the side and the wafting claws…

This all got Fiona & I feeling like we’d missed out on some good screwballs. So welcome to Screwball Week on Shadowplay — I’ll be interrupting it on Monday to bring you the latest installment of THE PHANTOM EMPIRE, but otherwise, at least seven days in a world of drag, madness, irresponsibility, corruption and romance.

Zoning Out

Even though Joseph DR NO Wiseman’s lead character in the Twilight Zone episode One More Pallbearer is called Paul Radin, I could determine no reason why his building is called Radin Blog. (Note: I got it eventually.) I tweeted author Dean Radin, whose book The Conscious Universe is a good eye-opener, to say that it’s a shame he wasn’t writing a blog anymore as I had found the perfect banner for him.

I don’t think I ever want to run out of PG Wodehouse books to read, and in the same way I don’t want to run out of Twilight Zone episodes, although all the same i would hate to check out leaving any of them unenjoyed. This will need careful management.

One More Pallbearer is Rod Serling in atomic mode (see also: Carol for Another Christmas), which is usually good value, and he has the ideal star. As Dr. No, Wiseman played a scientist with metal hands, having lost his original flesh ones in an atomic experiment. That always struck me as improbable and a bit funny. This one suffers a bit from having no sympathy, really, for any characters, but the double twist at the end is a zinger and a half. Not quite two zingers, but still pretty good.

Kick the Can was remade by Spielberg in TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE and Fiona suggested it might be illuminating to check out the original. It was — where Spielberg’s filmlet was cloying and annoying, the original is beautifully bleak. All the rough edges were smoothed off, and the result bathed in a honey-like amber glow. The old folks’ home where it’s set seems paradisical in the movie, and starkly deadening in the series installment. The ending, in which the inmates rejuvenate and run of into the night, leaving one bereft old skeptic, is stark and strange in the series: we don’t know how these kids will live, where they will go. Serling pops out of the bushes to say they’re in the Twilight Zone, which might as well mean they’re dead. It’s eerie, not reassuring.

In the Spielberg, having enjoyed their moment of second childhood, the oldsters return to their doddering, hip-replaced selves, because the status quo must, apparently be preserved.

I like Scatman Crothers fine, though as a “magic negro” figure he Uncle Toms it a bit in the Spielberg, encouraged by his director. There’s no such character in the series episode, just an old duffer who HOPES, but does not KNOW, that playing children’s games might cancel out the aging process. I was wracking my brains to identify the actor while I was watching, then realized it was old Ernest Truex, best known as the saccharine would-be poet from HIS GIRL FRIDAY (maybe they hired him to script the Spielberg), and also memorable in Preston Sturges’ CHRISTMAS IN JULY. Turns out he had a huge career, starting in silents, and they even tried him in lead roles during the pre-code era when such things seemed worth attempting. WHISTLING IN THE DARK, which pairs him, improbably, with Una Merkel, is well worth a look.