Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

In the late 30s and early 40s, Fox was the vanguard studio in confronting socially relevant topics like labor reform (in The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley), and now in 1947, its founder, Daryl Zanuck, turned his lens toward another pressing matter: prejudice. He produced Gentleman’s Agreement, the first major Hollywood product to deal with anti-Semitism, and the risk was worth the reward: three Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, and heaps of praise. And, in my estimation, it earns all of it – I’ve only a few minor quibbles that I’ll arrive at later on.

Skylar “Phillip” Green (Gregory Peck) has just accepted an offer as a NY magazine writer; he’s made at home most readily by his new boss’s generous accommodations, including the affections of his niece, Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who takes to Green immediately. But the newly relocated writer now has a tough beat –to pen an article on anti-Semitism – and he’s ripping his hair out to find the right angle. He finds inspiration in a tactic; he’ll pretend to be Jewish for a few weeks, using an assumed name (Greenberg) and telling no one of his secret so as to avoid disclosure. But the ruse takes its toll on his ailing mother; his young son, Tommy, who gets assaulted in school for his minority identity; and even for now-fiancé Kathy, who does not outwardly protest but doesn’t rally to his defense either, preferring a policy of under-rug-sweeping, especially at her family’s engagement party. His Jewish G.I. buddy, Dave, seems to be his one true ally, and he makes Kathy realize that her acceptance of bigotry has the same effect as condoning it. Phillip goes back to her, just after Dave announces his move to NY.

When I look back on Agreement, I’ll always remember one thing: dialogue. This was Hollywood’s Golden Age of sharp, finely crafted wordsmithing, and it’s perfectly apropos as the primary device in conveying the film’s message of racism and stereotyping. On a more focused level, it looks takes aim at passivity – the act of condoning racism simply by accepting it (which turns out to be Kathy’s great sin) – and in so doing offers up a more targeted, and thusly more effective, rebuke. But all of it comes out in dialogue scenes, with director Elia Kazan keeping up a good pace to keep all that talk flowing along.

The dialogue is so thick with polemic, in fact, that at times it gets a little to abstract, particularly in the film’s final act. Too often we get grandstanding speeches about race and bravery and feelings and who knows what, when action would far better drive the intended point across. The film’s best scene – in which Green wants to get a hotel room under his Jewish alias and is refused – succeeds because it combines hot, crisp lines with the drama of conflict, and perhaps a few more scenes along these lies could offer the film a stronger narrative drive. But it feels wrong to carp too much – particularly when you remember how daring it was to use confront such a topic on any level back in 1947.

Of course, the film would be a crushing bore if there weren’t also a strong personal story. And Agreement’s got one, in the form of a truly engaging relationship between Green and Kathy, two ordinary, insecure adults who enter their union without a true understanding of each other’s nuts and bolts. And Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire’s chemistry is as dynamic as it is homey – we know these people, and yet their big-screen presences provide just enough awe to remind us we’re watching a major-studio picture. It sure does pass the rudimentary test for all screen couples: do we want them to get back together in the end; I mean, really want them? Yes, yes we do.

There’s just one small complaint I have about the clarity of the picture. Early on, we get the strong impression that Skylar Green is Jewish (after all, it is a common Jewish surname). and that his decision to take on the undercover gig is based largely on that. Then he tells the he’s not, but I thought it’s because he’s hiding his Judiasm. Then he confides in his secretary that he is, but is he being honest or just playing the ruse? Do you see what I men – the frontloaded ambiguity of Green’s ethnicity causes great confusion later on. Looking it up confirmed that Green is, in fact, a gentile, but let’s make that crystal clear from the get go, and, quite frankly, the revelation that he could be a Jew would be better utilized if saved until at the end, when the audience discovers that he wasn’t really pretending about his identity after all.

But overall, fine work. A significant entry, not simply for its artistry but also its social relevance. Still important. Still, still.

                     Rating:  ***1/2

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

And now we come to an entry in the collection that I’d expect most people have already seen, due to its perennial yuletide airings on TV. Miracle on 34th Street, of course, is the beloved tale about an elderly man who claims he’s Santa Claus, and even upon its 1947 release, it enjoyed immense popularity and praise (unlike other holiday classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, which took years of cult-gestation to attain their veneration). I’ll just say right off the bat that it not only earns those stripes, but still holds up remarkable well for a pre-postmodern entertainment, owing primarily to a sharp-witted script (they were good at those back then) and a beguiling central conceit that will never age so long as children of all ages believe in jolly ol’ St. Nick.
 
Edmund Gwen is the elder gent here, enlisted to play Santa for the Macy’s parade when he notices that their Santa is drunk. The parade manager, Doris Walker, takes credit for the replacement, and also gets high praise for the new Santa’s goodwill policy of directing customers to other stores to get what they really want for Christmas. But when the man claims to be the real Kris Kringle, she begins to doubt his sanity, suspicions exacerbated even more by the store’s nefarious “quack” psychiatrist who has it out for the red-bearded one.

Meanwhile, Doris’s home life is turned upside-down too; Kringle seems to be warming up to her 10-year-old daughter, Susan (Natalie Wood), whose inherited cynicism of all things fantastic and imagined may be melting under the consideration that perhaps the old man may just be the real Santa Claus. A single lawyer who already believes, Fred Gailey, sees this perfectly healthy for the child, ad perhaps good for Mom too, whom he secretly has romantic feelings for.

But when Kringle “assaults” the psychiatrist (he just taps him on his head with a cane), he’s committed to an institution, now requiring Gailey’s legal council to get out and prove his sanity. A widely-publicized trial ensues – and the presiding judge is at loggerheads when faced with the trial’s two key questions: does Santa exist, and is this guy really him? It’s also a tough poser for Gailey, who ultimately avails himself of the testimony of a child to prove the former, and thousands of U.S. postal-service-carried letters, delivered directly to the defendant, to prove the latter. And, on a more personal level, Doris finally concedes that the man is Santa, with Susan the final convert after her ultimate wish-list item fulfilled: a house in the ‘burbs, with a new daddy attached.

Not a lot of in-depth analysis here; it’s just a shining example of fine, vintage-era Hollywood product, with a tight Oscar-winning screenplay by George Seaton, who had already penned Fox’s The Song of Bernadette (also in this collection). In both films he explores the reason and faith, and how, ultimately, they’re not opposites at all but symbiotic elements, both of which are essential to the human psyche. It’s amazing how in both cases, he manages to convince even the most jaded cynics in the audience (like myself), that the unprovable or unseeable must exist, on some level, when it is perceived as true by so many.

Edmund Gwen won an Oscar, too, with his avuncular depiction as Santa, and in a way his performance was the first in what I like to call the “Is he or isn’t he?” genre. You know: take a character who claims to be a fantasy figure or that something fantastical is true and spend the movie trying to determine if  he is or just delusional. Other films of this ilk include K-Pax, Don Juan DeMarco, and Take Shelter, and they all end the same way: they’re not crazy. I’ve actually seen variations of Miracle, on TV for example, in which “Santa” is crazy, but that what matters is the joy he spreads, and the faith he inspires in others.

And then there’s Natalie. As young Susan. she nearly steals the film with her furrowed-browed cynicism – but yet, she makes the transition to believer truly believable. I think that’s due to her marked intelligence – we see her cerebral wheels turning beyond those innocent eyes – an intelligence that would make her such huge movie star in the postwar 50s, counterculture 60s and feminist 70s. It’s hard to imagine a more auspicious movie debut for a juvenile actress.

And now, having heaped praise upon the film itself, I’d like to take Twentieth Century Fox to task now for the most misguided decision I’ve yet seen on this collection. They used the colorized version. I’m not going to get into why I’m against it; hopefully if you’re reading this you agree with me. But for Fox to assume that the likely purchaser of such a mammoth set – a serious student or at least fan of quality film – wouldn’t want the B&W version is a most egregious miscalculation of their target demographic. And beyond that, it’s just wrong. For shame, Fox. What would Zanuck say?

But the film itself is a chestnut.

                          Rating:  ****

Laura (1944)

I’m about to make a confession that will no doubt result in the demotion of my rank as film-lover: I’m not the biggest film noir fan in the world. I know many who adore the genre, and that’s fine for them, but I’ve seen enough noir to know that I don’t like it, Sam I am. Probably something to do with the self-conscious stylization, the mannered delivery of the dialogue, and the dialogue itself, which never seems to operate in the real world – just a conveyance of information that usually requires the viewer to take studious notes in order to get what the whole thing is about. 

I know – it’s the “other-worldliness” that is exactly the appeal. And Laura operates squarely in that world, although, to be fair, it can also be described as an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, replete with cast of possible culprits, and the final revelation of who really dunnit, after a few false leads and red herrings. By the time we do get to the dénouement, I was pretty well worn out from all the twists and turns. But to be fair, I guessed wrong – so it gets props for at least that.

As the film opens, the voice-over narration of Waldo Lydecker, columnist and radio personality, informs us of the recent murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a beautiful young woman whom he clearly had a great affection for. The detective on the case, Mark McPherson, coolly questions his relation to her, and does the same for a cavalcade of other acquaintances of the ill-fated brunette, among them her fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), and a woman who clearly has eyes for him, Anne Treadwell. Through flashback, we learn of Waldo’s tutelage of the girl, taking her under his wing and helping her advance in the ad industry. We also discover of Laura’s vocational assistance to Shelby, and how, perhaps, their engagement may not be quite as solid as it seems.

At a little past the halfway mark, we get a major twist: Laura is, in fact, alive. She shocks McPherson by showing up as if nothing ever happened; when he apprises her of recent events via newspaper headline, she is just as shocked. The murder victim? Evidentially, Shelby’s “other woman,” murdered by… Laura, who just hours earlier was the murder victim herself. At least that’s all Shelby can deduce from the catfight he overheard behind a closed door. When McPherson takes the culprit away, he confides to Laura that it’s all just a show – she can’t possibly be the one – and his suspicions are justified when a rifle’s fingerprint check confirms Waldo as the real killer. They shoot him just after he attempts to kill Laura, and confesses that he also mistakenly killed the other woman, dressed in Laura’s negligee. 

Laura is a confirmed classic, with awards and critical accolade aplenty, so it would ill-serve me to be too critical of it. I suppose this could be on that list of films that I can respect without necessarily loving. I sort of feel like, after all the deep, heady Fox films I’ve recently seen as I go through this collection, Laura comes up soft and lightweight. Quitted-witted dialogue, to be sure, and gorgeous B&W cinematography, but it’s all surface-level theatrics. But it was probably above-par for the film fare of its day – just what the doctor ordered for war-weary audiences looking for some soothing salve to help them deal with the harsh realities of 1944.

I’d like to add, though, how much I admired Vincent Price as Shelby. His characterization of the jilted fiancé is a perfect straddling of tall, dashing class and odd, off-kilter nebbishness. It makes one wonder – if he did not become such a horror icon some 10 yeas later, would he have continued to be such an effectively piquant character actor?

And Gene Tierney as Laura herself? Ravishing, of course, and a reminder of how those old classic film icons weren’t just pretty faces (even though they were that). They all possessed a brimming intelligence – a furtive authority that enabled them to control everyone in the room, and that included the audience. That ineffable quality of possessing everyone’s attention, immediately. In a modern cinematic world where the sound and fury of CGI, hyperactive audio/video editing and the mantra “louder is better” prevail, we al could take note of the soft, subtle power of the movie star.

So go back in time, and relish the old days of film through Laura. Not an deep or hugely emotional picture, but a fine work nonetheless. And it’s a classic.

                          Rating:  ***

The Song of Bernadette (1943)

There once was a time when Hollywood wasn’t afraid of religion, and it wasn’t that long ago. Starting at the beginning of the medium’s inception, and continuing on up to the 80s or so, the movies featured religion, and Christianity in particular, quite prominently as primary subject matter, and until the New Hollywood movement of the 70s, it was mostly in a haloed, highly complementary manner. From the great Biblical epics of D.W. Griffith, to biopics about clergymen as modern-day heroes like The Bells of St. Mary’s and Going My Way, tinseltown celebrated the faith, owing mostly to its reflection of American society during those conservative years, and its strict adherence to the Hays Code, the act of self-censorship which kept the film industry’s morals in check for most of the twentieth century.

By the 80s, religion was largely ignored by most filmmakers, and in the 1988 came the straw that broke the camel’s back. Director Martin Scorsese, who had always cast a questioning eye toward his Catholic upbringing, unleashed The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie that challenged the prescribed dogma of the life of Jesus by speculating about his humanity – specifically, his ability to e tempted by carnal lust in the form of Mary Magellan. It didn’t take long for protesters to picket movie lines, and the film’s underwhelming box office is most often seen as the causation of this controversy (despite the likelihood that the smash success of 2004’s The Passion of the Christ was due to the same controversy, although it did cast Christ in a far more stoically heroic light). From then on, religion was seen as box office poison, and when it was addressed, it was used merely as superficial spice (1995’s Priest) or quite disparagingly (2015’s Spotlight). The connection Hollywood/Church bond was severed, for good.

So it’s a bit of a time-machine trip to view 1943’s The Song of Bernadette, a film prefaced with the quote, “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t, none is possible.” I count myself among the latter group, so right away I was skeptical, but as the film started I was amazed at how matter-of-fact, how understated (despite appropriately timed musical swells) it was, telling the simple story of a French girl who sees the Virgin Mary in a remote thicket, and how that vision stirs up the unwashed masses in hope, while stirring up controversy among the law and the church in anger. Bernadette doesn’t proselytize; it chronicles an spiritual event, and while it all the while comes down on the girl’s side, it doesn’t demonize the heavies either. It made me think about religion’s place in society, particularly that of a century ago, in another country, and that it is enough for me.
 
Bernadette (Jennifer Jones) is a young teenage girl in Lourdes, France in 1858, born into a peasant family, afflicted with asthma and often ridiculed for her frailty and naïveté. But then one day, wandering in the woods, she sees the glowing image of a beautiful lady, and she is so enraptured she visits the site every day. Energized, her, and he family’s, fortune changes and word spreads of this “miracle.” The local prosecutor, Vital (Vincent Price), and mayor, isn’t so fond – especially when it stymies plans to run a profit-inducing railroad through town. They procure the council of a doctor to find out if she is ill, a psychiatrist to determine her mental health, and search the lawbooks to look for a way she is breaking the law. Every effort proves fruitless, but they are befuddled by her apparent sincerity – and ability to deflect all their interrogations with sound reasoning and logic.

When they finally seem able to lock her u in an institution, the Church steps in – Father Peyramale, initially a skeptic, sets up an appointment by the high clergy to determine the authenticity of this girl’s sighting of the “Immaculate Conception,” and her ostensible materialization of a spring, of which the water evidentially has curative powers beyond scientific explanation. They deem her miracles real, Peyramale encourages Bernadette to devote her life to God. She enters the convent, where fellow some novitiates are impose their rigidity on her – for at least one, the result of guilt over accusing the girl of not having suffered, when it is learned she is suffering from a leg tumor causing unspeakable pain. As the Church, and indeed the entire country, prepares for Bernadette’s death, many previous doubters appear now to be believers, including Vital, now terminally ill with cancer of the larynx. Through an interior monologue, we discover how solitary and self-loathing he is – and we hear his plea to Bernadette for prayer… and redemption.

At roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes, The Song of Bernadette is a long film, particularly for such a narrow plotline. But its swift, spare direction by Henry King, and smart writing by prolific screenwriter George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, Airport) keeps it rolling along, with only minor dragging at around the ¾ mark. And there’s a propelling interest to keep one engaged, namely, what exactly is going to happen to poor Bernadette, who gets dragged through the mud over and over again simply for being honest in what she sees in the grotto. Not knowing the story of the “Miracle at Lourdes,” I had no clue, though the film clearly keeps you firmly on her side, since we actually see the blessed virgin just as clearly as she. (Interestingly, if this movie were remade, I’d suspect we’d be kept oblivious, forced to speculate whether she is a miracle viewer or just simply delusional.)

And we’re also engaged for another reason, and that lies in Bernadette’s character, the epitome of sincerity, of nobility… of purity. So much so, in fact, that the one-noteness of her character is often maddening. Why does she get led around so? Why won’t she protest more when fatherly forces coax her into joining the seminary, for example, or threaten her with imprisonment for her resolute belief in the miraculous? I ultimately determined that in many ways, Bernadette is more of a static character than we’d like – more of a reflection of the way others see her, and treat her (and they do, mostly, treat her badly). In actuality, the true dynamic character is Prosecutor Vital, whose eleventh-hour appeal to Bernadette for clemency is heartbreaking – the final appeal of a man hitherto strict and pedantic, but now realizing, perhaps too late, the folly of his myopic introversion. Perhaps I identified most with Vital, and though I don’t and likely won’t believe in miracles, I can understand the movie’s theme of being open-minded to the unexplainable.

And Bernadette reminds us that often, particularly in times of despair, the unexplainable is all we’ve got.

Another notch in Fox’s belt – a supremely well-conceived, artfully executed work of theological entertainment. Enjoy them while they still made them.                     

                           Rating: ***

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

By 1943, Henry Fonda had developed a name for himself as the voice of social conscience in the movies. With roles in films like Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath, the lanky, blue-eyed actor usually assumed the moral center of the stories he inhabited, and his next Fox film, The Ox-Bow Incident, would prove to be no exception.

Fonda had signed a seven year contract for Fox, at the behest of Daryl Zanuck, who wasn’t entirely convinced the actor would be a better choice to play Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath than the more popular Tyrone Power. We all know how that turned out, but it turned out to be a win-win situation for both parties, which by and large spun the same political orbit. So it was a no-brain to cast Fonda as the protagonist in the studio’s adaptation of the novel The Ox-Bow Incident, a western that pretty much made the phrase “lynch-mob” a common metaphor in the American vernacular.

Fonda is Gil, a “just passin’ through” cowpoke, who stops in to a small Midwestern town alongside his amigo, Art (Harry Morgan, decades before his most famous role as Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H). At the bar, he overhears a couple of ranchers complaining about a few rustlers who had robbed and most likely killed their good friend Kincaid. Gil assists the men in their quest to form a posse and go after the culprits, but soon the gang, headed by a former Confederate soldier, starts talking about hanging. The town sheriff is kept in the dark about their plans, while the deputy “deputizes” the entire posse, giving them what they consider to be the legal validation they need to go forth with their vigilantism.

The gang finds the three men encamped on the prairie, in the middle of the night, and wakes them, demanding an explanation. Yes, they do have Kinkaid’s cattle, the trio’s leader, Donald, confesses, but they were purchased legally. No, they didn’t get a bill of sale, no, they know nothing of Kincaid’s death, and no, that knife they have, allegedly belonging to Kincaid, was found on the ground. But the bloodthirsty rogues aren’t convinced; they came for a lynching, and by-God they’re gonna get one. Even Donald’s heartfelt last letter to his wife, which the town doctor believes to be so good it can’t possible be penned by a murder, won’t change any minds. Gil proposes one last chance for absolution – a poll, between those who vote for the rope, and those who believe in due process of the law. The ropers win, and, at sunrise on the dot, Donald and his two associates are hanged.

On the way back, the posse crosses the sheriff, who had been belatedly sent for to straighten out the matter. The sheriff informs them that Kincaid’s not dead at all, thereby validating everything Donald said as true. The weary, guilt-stricken men saunter back to the bar, and Gil, demoralized and disillusioned by the behavior of his fellow man, saddles out of town with a mission: to deliver Donald’s note to his with and help out with his now-fatherless children.

The Ox-Bow Incident is a fable – a morality tale in which its characters don’t grow as much as they are simply emblematic of human behavior. In that it reminded me a great deal of a good Twilight Zone episode, maybe, say, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” or “The Shelter,” and with Ox-Bow’s tight, 75-minute running time, that’s not such an outrageous comparison (particularly if we’re talking about Zone’s fourth-season, hour-long episodes). You could even regard Ox-Bow’s ending as a “twist,” offering up the combined one-two punch of both surprise and moral edification, in the great-grand Serling tradition.

The other work this film reminded me of is the classic 1957 film 12 Angry Men, also starring Henry Fonda, none-too coincidentally. In that film he convinces his co-jurors, one by one, that there is insufficient evident to convict the man on trial, and in Ox-Bow, he pretty much does the same thing with his fellow cowpokes, only this time, he’s entreating them to have a trial in the first place. Men, of course, has a cheerier ending, and the comforting notion that men do possess the power to change. Ox-Bow, as all the great fables generally do, prefers to proffer the notion of man’s implacability – we’re the ones who are supposed to change.

And change I did, in just a small way. Sure, it was preaching to the choir. but one thing that affected my was how resonant the film still is. These thugs, though overacted and broadly written (as they all were back then) could still exist in this day and age. Human nature hasn’t changed; people are still just as malleable when in a group environment, willing to alter their moral fiber just to fit in It’s no surprise the film has been remade – we see the evils that the need for conformity can produce every time we read the papers. I could see showing this to a classroom in 2016, and after the students giggle and laugh at the dated elements, they’ll be mesmerized by the timely theme.

Just like I was.

                          Rating:  ****