Bickel Victory

Captures the mood chez mois round about now.

As these things do at Shadowplay, John Cromwell Week is running on into a fortnight or so…

I’m indebted to Nicky Smith for the information that it was John Cromwell who advised a young actor named Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel that he might do better under the name Fredric March. The name, and the actor, were subsequently so successful that they appeared together in two Cromwell films, VICTORY and SO ENDS OUR NIGHT. I admired both.

VICTORY adapts Joseph Conrad’s novel, previously filmed by Maurice Tourneur and later a dream project for Richard Lester (scripted by Pinter).

In The Hollywood Professionals Volume 5, Cromwell is quoted by author Kingsley Canham as expressing dissatisfaction with VICTORY, since he couldn’t get the performance he wanted out of chief villain Sir Cedric Hardwicke and he couldn’t find a cockney actor to play his “secretary,” thus was forced to resort to Jerome Cowan, a good all-rounder but no Londoner. In fact, to my eyes, Hardwicke appears excellent — a modern, minimalist take on malignancy. His sinister sunglasses, a touch borrowed from Ben Deeley in the silent version (Conrad makes no mention of them) make his face (even) more skull-like than usual.

If Cromwell was dissatisfied with his baddies, he surely must have been pleased with March and particularly Betty Field, who produces a remarkably credible English accent which really wasn’t called for, but which sounds very sweet. You may know her from OF MICE AND MEN, but this is an unrecognizably different characterisation. It’s essential that we care about this couple despite their age difference and the brevity of their acquaintance. March is so gentle and Field so vulnerable… Cromwell assists with the same direct-address camera angles he used in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, letting the audience inhabit each character in turn.

Also: Sig Rumann as the oily Schomberg, perfect if unimaginative type-casting as a sneaky blowhard. He doesn’t have a beard to point in this one, but his chin threatens to go off all on its own.

SO ENDS OUR NIGHT is a tale of stateless refugees in pre-war Europe, from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque. It suffers from a structural feature easier to make work in a book: a divided protagonist. A very young Glenn Ford gets most of the screen time, pursuing Margaret Sullavan (practically compulsory casting in Remarque adaptations, it seems), but March keeps popping up and taking the narrative away with him. He’s a more compelling actor and he gets Erich Von Stroheim and Frances Dee to interact with, but it has the effect of deforming the narrative.

Although my copies of both movies are pretty rotten, it’s just possible to appreciate the contribution of William Cameron Menzies to the latter film — as production designer, he did far more than plan sets, he sketched every composition, somewhat usurping Cromwell’s role with the director’s grateful cooperation. The film was a low-budget one — too depressing a story to excite Hollywood enthusiasm, even at the start of the war — and Menzies’ careful planning allowed miracles to be achieved.

Another Menzies-designed Cromwell flick, MADE FOR EACH OTHER (1939), is available in pristine form. Despite starring James Stewart and Carole Lombard, it’s pretty bad — two-thirds painfully predictable sitcom schtick (admittedly, they hadn’t had decades of domestic television comedy to wear out this kind of thing yet) followed by a mind-bogglingly inappropriate action climax. As a slight recompense, it does offer Louise Beavers (Mae West’s grape-peeler-in-chief, Beulah) playing an intelligent and capable woman, which she rarely got to do. Beavers would turn up very briefly in Cromwell’s late production, THE GODDESS, demonstrating his long memory.

After an hour devoted to Stewart’s struggle to raise a family and get on in his law firm (as boss, Charles Coburn plays an intransigent patriarch just as he did in the superior IN NAME ONLY), the movie abruptly swerves into lunatic melodrama, as the Stewart-Lombard baby gets sick and an experimental vaccine must be flown at once, overnight in a torrential storm, from Salt Lake City. Selznick, the presiding lunatic in this whole affair, throws resources at this totally left-field ending, and Menzies provides dazzling visual accompaniment. It’s like I Love Lucy suddenly decided to climax with the third act of DIE HARD. Madness.

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Male Practice

THE DOCTOR AND THE GIRL is an MGM film before it’s a Curtis Bernhardt film — no glimmers of expressionism here. And what Fiona called “the worst title ever” — certainly the most generic. But it does stretch a bit at the limits of what can be said about the world in an L.B. Mayer production. Arrogant junior doctor Glenn Ford, product of a tyrannical surgeon father (Charles Coburn NEARLY in KING’S ROW mode) falls for and is humanized by Janet Leigh, who is of humble origins, mans a taffy-rotating mechanism for a living, and has a lung abscess, though you would never know those things to look at her. Surprisingly, he sacrifices his dream of neurosurgery to become a slum doctor, and finds happiness. It’s the sacrificed dream bit that’s surprising — most Hollywood confections would find a way to give him his heart’s desire twice over.

Meanwhile. his sister (Gloria DeHaven) gets pregnant out of wedlock, which means she’s sentenced to death by the Hays Code.

What’s unsettling is the glimpses the film offers us of Bellevue — Leigh only survives the place because Ford pulls strings and gets her the top surgeon — it’s made pretty clear that with a regular doctor she didn’t stand much chance. If she hadn’t been young perky and white, what chance would she have had? What chance do these characters have?

Shoot the Money

When students first start editing dialogue scenes in their films, often their first instinct is to simply show the person talking. While Jack Webb makes this work in DRAGNET, film and TV show, it isn’t usually an expressive or involving approach, since it deprives us of a lot of emotional connection which comes from watching the listener rather than the speaker. An editor needs to be like a mind-reader, predicting what the audience wants to see in order to follow the emotional flow of the conversation.

To prove that the person speaking need not be the person visible, I often show students Rita Hayworth’s first appearance in GILDA, which is an exemplary scene in all kinds of ways, not least of which is the way a scene involving a newly-wed husband and wife and a friend is arranged so as to practically exclude the husband altogether. While appearing to assemble his material in a conventional, commonsense manner, director Charles Vidor (and editor Charles Nelson) actually lead the audience to realise very strongly the undercurrent of attraction that hubby is unaware of.

One effect of using this clip as a teaching aid is that poor George MacReady’s exclusion from his own bedroom scene becomes increasingly hilarious once your attention is drawn to it. Before we even get to the boudoir, Vidor uses a camera move to push in on Glenn Ford, who matters here, and exclude MacReady, who apparently doesn’t. Of course, the real purpose for the track-in, or maybe the alibi, is to emphasise Glenn’s emotional reaction to the unexpected presence of a woman. Glenn and George have been very close, you see.

Rita’s first appearance, with the spectacular hair-flip, is striking for other reasons. She gets a big close-up, deliberately boosting her over the two menfolk, who have just been seen in a knee-length medium shot that makes them virtual pygmies in her presence. Her appearance has IMPACT, and it’s a purely cinematic creation: if you were in that room, you’d have seen her long before she enters frame from below like a surfacing shark, and you’d have seen her in the same kind of distant mid-shot as the boys get. The effect is WOW. No wonder Glenn has to grab the door frame for support. And note Rita’s eschewing of femme fatale smolder in favour of a googly-eyed ditziness that’s much more effective for being indirect.

Vidor then intercuts between some intense looks between his two leads which apparently George doesn’t notice at all, because when we get back to the wide shot he’s perfectly happy and unsuspicious. That’s the mood he leaves us with, because he’s not going to be glimpsed again until the end of the scene. Now he leads Glenn forward to be introduced (Glenn walking like a small boy in his way to some frightful corporal punishment), and we cut to —

A splendiferous wide of the boudoir in which we get a full-length Rita x2, an O/S of Glenn, and no sign of George. So irrelevant to this love scene that he doesn’t even cast a reflection in the vast dressing table mirror.

Rita now advances into an O/S midshot, and when we cut to the logical reverse of that, her great head of hair is completely obscuring our view of George. And we find that we don’t mind that at all. Now a long dialogue can play out, most of it between George and Rita, but what the visual scheme is telling us is something very different — this is a scene about Glenn and Rita. The scene is cut exactly as if Glenn were doing the talking — you can amuse yourselves by imagining George’s voice as being telepathic communications from inside Glenn Ford’s head.

Then a big close-up of Rita, simmering away, all sultry and smoking, while Glenn and George converse meaninglessly. You can imagine this bit as being about the voices in Rita’s head. It won’t get you anywhere, but you can totally do it.

Finally Glenn gets a close-up, very slightly smaller than Rita’s (I blame the hair) but basically a match. George is still AWOL, literally phoning his performance in for all we know. He should’ve got a special award for giving a radio performance in a feature film. Vidor continues in a shot-reverse-shot pattern that would seem entirely conventional except that one half of the conversation has been usurped by the silent, moody Mr. Ford. This is a classic example of the conventions of film-making being used in a defiantly unconventional way for expressive reasons.

Vidor cuts back to the MS of Ford and some strange guy we’ve never seen before — oh wait, it’s George MacReady — crashes the shot and swoops in to kiss Rita. But Vidor isn’t through humiliating the oblivious dope: perversely, he uses shot-reverse-shot cutting on Ford and Hayworth to make them interact during the kiss. MacReady may be owner of the lips descending on Hayworth’s expensive face, but it’s Ford she’s thinking about. Further sadomasochistic intrigue oozes in as she calls him “hired help” — Glenn’s reaction shot here — *GULP* — is priceless, as he swallows his pride like a bad oyster. In the words of Bart Simpson, if you use slomo, you can actually see the moment his heart breaks.

Glenn’s shoulder frames the next three-shot, where George again has his back to us. A fresh angle allows him at least a profile, salvaging some of the poor guy’s dignity, but he’s still way off to the side, with Ford obviously the subject of the shot and Rita’s cascade of hair taking up more screen space than either man.

Then Glenn slopes off, George bounding after him (unusual to see this actor so puppylike). Entertain yourselves one more time by abolishing perspective and picturing the back of Rita’s head as being actually bigger than all of George MacReady. Now you have an unforgettable and accurate image of their wedding night.

George leaves, and Rita caps the scene with a brooding, smoky close-up and another swish of her hair, a sort of bookend to the action.

Now, “Shoot the money” was a well-known Hollywood saying, meaning that the stars get the limelight and the character players have to fend for themselves, grabbing moments when they can (which may have helped produce the manic, intense and over-eager style so beloved in successful bit actors like Pangborn or Demarest). But obviously, I hope, there’s more than that going on here — the cutting is telling a story that’s very different from that carried in the words. Of course, many of those words are laden with subtext too, but in a classically Hollywood manner, Vidor reinforces the meaning of the scene through framing and cutting. And it makes great use of the slower cutting pace of the period. Nowadays, when editing is so fast, even in conversations, I can imagine someone saying, “Why not have a quick glimpse of George, just to remind us he’s there?” And of course, the answer is, “As far as these two are concerned, he’s not there.”

Dedicated to the memory of Bert Eeles, my editor on CRY FOR BOBO, who died last week.