The Sleeper Awakes

Guest-post from Jaime Christley —

Recently I got sidetracked from my viewing queue by one Leo McCarey / Charley Chase short, then another, then another. Presently following a McCarey compulsion as far as it will go; clearing out several rarities per week. (I’ve seen all the major sound features except SATAN NEVER SLEEPS, if that one is considered “major”.)

Oh and PART TIME WIFE; can’t seem to find that one.

I no longer get much out of arguing auteurism pro or con, but the concept is quite a bit more interesting as one catalogs McCarey from 1929 and walking backwards from there: job titles like “Director” get a bit cloudy with the addition of “Supervising Director” (McCarey has been both), and it’s common knowledge that Laurel and Chase conceived and wrote the largest part of their own stories and gags. 

Still, when I think McCarey is really feeling his oats, the difference is palpable, especially in the Chases. It helps that I don’t find Chase all that funny (but I don’t dislike him, far from it), so I find myself grouping the more successful 1- and 2-reelers by how much a film is managing to achieve equilibrium with/against what I’ve come to think of as “Hal Roach hijinks”… i.e. the notion that actors behaving funny is funny enough. (I’m recalling a very early Mack Sennett short that ends with a guy wearing a funny disguise biting down on a curtain rod.

An auteurist like me has to make peace with the fog, as well as the dominance of bigger voices and “truer” authors. And I believe in Stan Laurel’s genius, he probably did as much for the cinema as anybody. Nevertheless the hunt for McCarey-ness continues apace, and I even feel, here and there, vindicated. The unassuming and seemingly minor-register BROMO AND JULIET, during this survey, has been the closest to a triumph, even as the reasons why I think it’s a near-masterpiece elude me. It’s just one of those cases where the souffle rises rather than doesn’t.

I think of it like this: take this frame from MUM’S THE WORD. Credit Chase for devising a meet-cute prompted by Martha Sleeper shooting him in the butt (she was fighting off a purse thief). (Chase liked to have Jimmy Jump get shot in the butt. I guess he thought you don’t get hurt back there?) But those onlooking passengers in the background, sort of audience surrogates watching the seeds of a future romance … that’s something McCarey would make sure was part of the bit.

Jaime Christley

The Christopher Movement

This is the only film Leo McCarey shot between GOOD SAM in 1948 and MY SON JOHN in 1952.

It’s a sort of documentary made for the Christopher Movement, a Catholic organisation dedicated to, I guess, getting more Catholics into government, education and labour organisation. It’s not, I would argue, a very distinguished piece of film. Although it’s meant to be factual rather than entertaining, it’s entirely staged. A bunch of Hollywood types discuss the movement with Father James G. Keller. Notes follow ~

1. The best thing about the film is the wonky telecine job performed on it by the uploader or his associates. We keep zooming and panning in sudden drunken lurches at every edit, giving the conversation a woozy, drugged-out quality.
2. William Holden may have become McCarey’s opponent on SATAN NEVER SLEEPS but he was happy to donate his time to this thing.
3. Normally, a film with these people would be bound to be interesting, though it’s hard to think up a plot that could realistically incorporate roles for Holden, Paul Douglas, Jack Benny & Rochester, Ann Blyth, Loretta Young and Irene Dunne.
4. Who invited the mermaid?
5. It’s not really fair to judge Keller on how he comes across here since he wasn’t a trained actor. But I find him damned sinister. Also, he looks a good bit like McCarey. Great cheekbones.
6. Paul Douglas’ rendition of the Declaration of Independence is not as effective as Charles Laughton’s* in RUGGLES OF RED GAP. Context is key.
7. Despite everything, Irene Dunne gets a laugh around 13.30. She was one of McCarey’s regular visitors when he was dying, as he is here.
8. Jack Benny gets some laughs at around 23.
9. Bob Hope might have gotten a laugh but the sound effect is timed badly.
10. Oh Leo, Leo, Leo.

*See comments for correction.

 

Oh God! You Devil!

SATAN NEVER SLEEPS on the one hand would have made a great entry for The Late Movies Blogathon but on the other hand it’s simply too depressing. One thing that makes a director’s disappointing final opus more than just dispiriting is when said director references previous, better movies. Auteur status is simultaneously confirmed and travestied. And so it is in this 1962 turkey from Leo McCarey, filmed on location in matte-painting China and on the hillsides of Wales.

There are insistent callbacks to earlier, better McCarey films, and I may have to raise my estimation of GOING MY WAY and THE BELLS OF ST MARY’S since compared to this they look like the masterpieces some benighted souls claim they are. William Holden plays a priest sent to relieve an older, more staid priest, Clifton Webb (GOING MY WAY is basically reprised in this idea). A new element is added: Holden has saved the life of France Nuyen and she’s fallen in love with him and is basically stalking him. Then again, the story posits old-fashioned religious values against the dread communism, staged as a kind of father-son conflict (repeating MY SON JOHN). The wicked commie, Weaver Levy, dismisses the kids from the mission school upon his arrival, upsetting the nuns, as Bing Crosby does in THE BELLS OF ST MARY’S, then falls in lust with Nuyen and rapes her. When she bears his child and he tries to apologise, he falls into double-talk straight out of THE AWFUL TRUTH — “If things were the same, it would be different…” etc. Holden reunites the couple to create a nuclear family, again like Crosby in TBOSM does with William Gargan and Eva Novak. That’s right: Holden marries Nuyen to her rapist for a smiling, laughing happy ending.

This scene is made weirder by all the characters being superimposed into the church setting, and Holden’s poorly-matted vestments turn transparent like the parrot in CITIZEN KANE. Is he a ghost? Are we in space? Those painkillers poor McCarey was hooked on must’ve been some really good shit.

The characters walk down this road, there’s a cutaway to where they’re headed, and then they walk through the same shot AGAIN. Surreal.

The idea of harking back isn’t an obnoxious one in itself, and McCarey had always done it, repurposing gags from his early Charley Chase and Laurel & Hardy films in features like THE AWFUL TRUTH and MY FAVORITE WIFE. Even the idea of stealing bits out of the reassuring, sentimental priest movies and deploying them in a dysfunctional, creepy movie full of neck-snapping tonal shifts might work for me because I kind of dislike the priest movies, in case you hadn’t noticed. But the film doesn’t display any of Leo’s early sure-footedness: there are a few small laughs (Burt Kwouk!) and some dramatic moments that aren’t totally abortive, but the playing is often wildly mistimed: Nuyen and Webb might be acting via satellite link with time-lag. McCarey knew there was a problem: he told Daney & Scorecki (and Bogdanovich, in identical language) that he didn’t like Holden, Webb or Nuyen. Probably, as director and producer, he shouldn’t have cast them, then.

At least with Holden his dislike seems motivated: he claimed Holden nixed his preferred ending, which would have seen the character looking to the heavens for a sign from God, and being inspired by a helicopter (rather anachronistically for 1948 China, I suspect), and then giving his life to save the others. The revised climax leaves Holden standing as an impotent witness to a lesser character’s sacrifice, so it’s hard to imagine an action star preferring this, and Holden had cheerfully died for Wilder and Lean and would do so again for Peckinpah. I’m probably missing a few. I think it might have been the helicopter-as-sign-from-God bit that Holden objected to, since this isn’t used in the film as it stands, where it could presumably have been retained. But then Holden could still have died.

Anyhow, Leo lost all enthusiasm and let his assistant finish the last week of shooting.

Weirdly, the movie, at two hours and five minutes, is EXACTLY the same running time as both GOING MY WAY and THE BELLS OF ST MARY’S. Theories welcomed.