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.”

Sweet Charlotte

This is how it began —

I posted something on narrative structure here, and regular Shadowplayer and honorable copy-editor (thanks!) Chris Schneider asked on Facebook for my thoughts on NOW, VOYAGER, going so far as to wonder if I’d seen it. I hadn’t! Why not? Answer to follow…

For the record, the film is based, fairly faithfully, I suspect, on a novel (by Stella Dallas scribe Olive Higgins Prouty [I know — that NAME!]), and novels seem to attempt, and often get away, with far baggier and more varied structures than plays and films, probably because they’re not designed to be consumed at one sitting. So NV, while certainly divisible into a set-up, development and resolution, but these in turn are composed of a lot of overlapping movements, with different themes progressing at different rates. This is, in many ways, a better way of doing structure than the Syd Field paint-by-numbers method.

NOW, VOYAGER has one overarching issue — Charlotte Vale’s quest for happiness. But happiness is a complex thing.

In what we can take to be Act I, we meet Charlotte at her lowest ebb, dominated by her vicious old bat of a mother, and suffering under eye-glasses and out of control eyebrows that look like two friendly caterpillars roosting on her brow. I’m only going to show one image of her in this section because it’s not a good look, even as a bad look. The character is also supposed to be overweight but absolutely no effort seems to have been made to suggest this.

This introductory section also features a moderately long flashback, eminently cuttable, one would think, depicting Charlotte’s first romance, with a radio operator on an ocean voyage, savagely quashed by mom. This first movement/act is over within twenty minutes.

One very unusual thing about the movie is that, from here on, things start getting better — there are dips in Charlotte’s fortune, but she never again seems to be in danger of relapsing into her original mousey nightmare. Her eyebrows remain shapely. Rather than this resulting in an intolerable dramatic slackening, it makes us feel good. We’re relieved that bit’s over with, and we’re interested to see what will happen next.

Charlotte goes into therapy, gets a makeover, goes on another ocean voyage, and meets another man, Paul Henreid (typecast as “another man”). He’s unavailable, but this doesn’t stop them enjoying a pretty definitely sexual relationship — and neither of them has to die as a result. Warners definitely took a more progressive approach to the woman’s picture than MGM or any other studio.

Her holiday over, Charlotte returns to mother — this is around the halfway point — and kills her by telling the truth. The nasty old thing has such a conceit of herself that a single grain of truth is absolutely, instantly fatal. This takes us to the ninety minute mark in this two-hour movie. Believing herself to be headed for another breakdown (but we don’t really think it’ll be that bad) she heads back to her shrink (I forget to say, he’s Claude Rains) but instead she basically adopts Paul Henreid’s neglected daughter, who reminds her of herself at that age. This will form a connection back to him, though the movie tries to convince us that the relationship will be all very proper (the stars) rather than sexual (the moon). Actually, the famous last line is about happiness, which should be embraced even if it’s incomplete.

So, the problem of happiness is introduced, wrestled with, and semi-resolved. Along the way, two antagonists are introduced, the wire mother, and Henreid’s awful wife, never glimpsed, but described vividly by Lee Patrick, who was Sam Spade’s secretary and so can be trusted. (There must be a MALTESE FALCON-related thematic reason for her tiny cameo in that other San Francisco detective drama, VERTIGO.) Mom gets offed at the act two curtain, whereas the invisible Mrs Henreid cannot be bested as she has no corporeal form in the movie, but that means she can be more or less ignored. She’s a sort of implacable barrier to full happiness, but with the help of Claude (who knows all about invisibility) there’s a satisfactory workaround.

BUT

This is also how it all began —

 

I picked up Michael Curtiz’ THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX for £1 in a charity shop (how we know Blu-Rays are fully ascendant: you can get DVDs second-hand for 25p) and Fiona was enthusiastic about seeing Errol & Bette, or, as she put it, “a Bette Davis Misbehaves Double Bill.” But we couldn’t make it through TPLOEAE. The Technicolor was nice (but I prefer Curtiz in b&w) and the Anton Grot sets. But there were not ENOUGH sets. Being a play, the damn thing hangs about in one room for ages, and though the crazy perspective on the painted ceiling is SICK, one gets tired of it after twenty minutes. Or forty minutes. You can’t stare at a ceiling forever, as Bette could tell you.

Smoking is sex intercourse.

So we switched to NOW, VOYAGER (also shot by Sol Polito, see yesterday’s post for more) and had a rare old time. Fiona declared it to be tosh, but brilliantly enjoyable tosh. Why hadn’t we seen it before? Fiona had no explanation, and mine would be sheer auteurist snobbery. Curtiz is kind of an auteur, though one who dispenses with “recurring thematic concerns” and settles for beautiful visuals. Irving Rapper isn’t much praised as an auteur, but he directs the hell out of this thing, and proves a very clear channel for the Warners house style (the BEST house style). For whatever reason, the whole “genius of the system” thing works best when Warners is used as example.

Also — a Max Steiner score I can really get behind. I especially liked how the love theme really WAS a love theme, unheard until Henreid appears (with Franklin Pangborn playing Cupid) and  only tentatively and after a decent delay then. It’s a very tentative theme, in fact, all hesitation, moving forward in little shivering surges. Which is what makes it so damned romantic, and so right for this film and these characters.

Call security

Purchase of a second-hand edition of James Curtis’ biography of WC Fields, which I figured had to be interesting, and it is, led me to revisit THE BANK DICK.

OK, it’s not as good as IT’S A GIFT, but few things are.

I was struck by a gratuitous moment (there are many) of Fields entertaining some kids with cigarette tricks. Sticking a ciggie in his ear and exhaling smoke from his mouth is all very fine, and Fields would probably have been horrified to learn it’s the kind of thing Chaplin might do. Sticking the cigarette into the crevice between his cheek and the ala of his swollen nose is curiously repellent, implying the presence of some secret orifice possessed only by the Great Man.

Curtis tells us that the Breen Office warned that the character of J. Pinkerton Snoopington must not be depicted as camp or sissy, which must have been a note added after the casting of Franklin Pangborn was known. There’s nothing in the writing to imply homosexuality, indeed the character speaks of his wife and children, not that that proves anything. The order must have reached Pangborn, because in spite of the innate prissiness that’s an essential part of his comic armoury, he really doesn’t push it this time. Indeed, after Fields slips him a mickey, he’s so “straight,” not only sexually but dramatically, as to be quite pitiful, a sincere performance of a man experiencing calamitous ill-health, and Fields comes to seem pretty monstrous.

But this flexible approach to audience sympathy is typical of Fields, who vacillates between free-range misanthropy with himself in a protective bubble at the centre of the universe, and an all-encompassing loathing that begins at home, with the self. Maybe this is a consequence of Fields playing a character: “He’s me, so I’m on his side, but he’s also NOT me, so I detest the man.”