“Union Pacific” (1939) is a Cecil B. DeMille spectacle on the joining of the transcontinental railroad, making this great big country a little smaller, or as it is said, uniting the country “with a wedding ring of iron”.
No longer did passengers need to suffer the dangers of a prairie crossing in a Conestoga wagon, or round Cape Horn in a six-month sea journey around South America to get to the west coast of the U.S. It seems we have Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea to thank.
Miss Stanwyck plays the daughter of a train engineer on the Union Pacific. She holds court in the caboose as the postmistress for the workers laying track. She reads their letters to Irish immigrants, like Regis Toomey, who are illiterate.
As it is said of her, “She belongs to the railroad, although you’d think the railroad belonged to her.” She uses an Irish accent in this film, which is pretty credible when she holds onto it, but she seems a bit self-conscious in this movie, as if trying to hold onto that accent is taking all her concentration. She seems much less natural and relaxed than in other performances.
One of the film’s stunning images comes at the very beginning when we see her standing precariously atop the car of firewood on the moving train, bringing her engineer father, played by J. M. Kerrigan, his dinner pail. They lovingly verbally abuse each other in the manner of Irish families.
Our first glimpse of McCrea is a dramatic ride on horseback to catch up to the moving train, leaping onto the platform. His character doesn't go through a lot of change or development in this movie, but his low-key heroism is always a pleasure to watch.
Joel McCrea is the other “Captain Butler” of 1939, an ex-soldier from the Civil War now on security duty for the railroad, keeping crooks like Brian Donlevy in order. Robert Preston is McCrea’s old army buddy, who is now in league with the evil Mr. Donlevy.
Preston is years, maybe light-years we could say, away from his future movie stardom as a happy go lucky flim-flam man, but he has his roots here as the charming ne’er do well in a pencil-thin mustache. He competes with Mr. McCrea for Miss Stanwyck’s affections.
One of the fun things about this movie is spotting (or at least reading credits on the IMDb site) all the minor characters and extras who found a job, for only minutes, on this movie. They include Ward Bond, Lon Chaney, Jr., Monte Blue, Will Geer -- who most of us remember more as the grandfather in “The Waltons” television series, Anthony Quinn -- the director was his father-in-law, Evelyn Keyes, and Bert Stevens, who was Barbara Stanwyck’s real-life brother.
Better known character actors like Lynne Overman and Akim Tamiroff play Joel McCrea’s sidekicks. They supply a bit of comedy relief, but with an unusual courage and capability not often granted to sidekicks in the movies. They are shrewd, sensible, and protect McCrea’s back on repeated occasions. He would be dead several times over if it weren’t for them.
Henry Kolker plays the crooked banker whose plans to scuttle the Union Pacific provide much of the plot. He played a lot of bankers, and you might remember him as Katharine Hepburn’s stuffy banker father in “Holiday” (1938).
Nameless are the scores of real-life Navajos playing the Indians who contemplatively watch the smoke-belching iron horse tear across the wide open landscape, who in other scenes, attack the beast with ineffectual courage against the passengers who fire at them with rifles. In a one scene they wreck a train and pillage its contents, causing anxiety for McCrea, Stanwyck, and Preston, who are trapped inside trying to hide. The idea that these three could send a Morse code message by tapping an electrified wire on the barrel of a shotgun pre-dates any of “MacGyver’s” antics by decades.
I’ll not do a play-by-play on the plot. Cecil B. DeMille was a showman, and what is most powerful about this film are the showman’s images, not necessarily the story (which has so much action and so many arcs it seems like a several-part serial shown all at once). We pretty much know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and in the mire of stereotypes, there really aren’t too many surprises.
Oh, the train wrecks are startling, but not really surprising. I think we expected them.
The images tell stories all on their own, quite apart from the plot. Those Native Americans watching the train thunder by, the one warrior on his pinto pony that rears up at the precise moment. It reminds one of those 1940s or 1950s magazine advertisements for the Santa Fe “Chief”.
Though the movie was filmed in many western locations, much of the interior work in the cars was obviously shot in the studio, though the rear-screen projection of the desert with distant rocky spires and buttes that slides on by us out the train windows is done pretty well. The train cars rock and sway as Barbara Stanwyck walks through and tenderly replaces the bonnet on a sleeping woman, and the top hat on a snoozing gent, careful to tuck his train ticket in his hatband.
The scene with the heard of bison roaming around Stanwyck’s and McCrea’s solitary handcart looks a bit more artificial, technically. Unlike the Sioux that look so picturesque watching the train from their ponies, there is no sense of foreshadowing of doom for the bison, though we know most of them were decimated by white hunters shooting them for sport, often right from trains.
There is instead the distasteful scene when one of Donlevy’s henchmen, played by Harry Woods (not Robert Barrat, thank you Caftan Woman), takes up a bet with Anthony Quinn that he can shoot an Indian for sport out the window of the train.
The warrior who rides along the train waves, and we see him smile, as if he is playfully challenging the train to a race. The bad guy takes his rifle, and, shockingly, murders the happy rider instantaneously. There is much less destruction in this instant than the later train wreck(s), and yet it is more heartbreaking. We hear the sounds of shock and anger from other passengers, the disdain over their complaints from the bad guys, “What’s one more dead Indian, more or less.”
Joel McCrea slugs it out with the murderer, while his sidekicks keep boss Donlevy and the other henchman at bay. Mr. Tamiroff is pretty handy with a bullwhip.
The murderer falls off the train platform. We see him roll in the dirt, and the train pulls off into the sunset, becoming smaller and smaller while the land gets bigger and wider, with the lone figure standing in the foreground. He is made small and insignificant in the shot, now that the train has pulled away, and tension builds as he is also probably in danger from the warrior’s tribe when they catch up with him, alone and unprotected.
The train is a world unto itself, and when it leaves in the distance, it takes civilization, protection, and companionship with it. But, the is not a very comfortable world, the hard train seats, the soot and smoke, the days on end of riding a swaying, narrow wooden box across an enormous wilderness.
The train heads for “end of track” where still another world is set up. Donlevy’s gambling house and saloon is there to lead the track workers astray. The supplies for track building, and everything needed for a temporary town, are hauled in, and Stanwyck sets up her post office in the caboose. End of Track is like Oz, but a whole lot less pretty and dream-like.
Back to the train wreck that imprisoned McCrea, Stanwyck, and Preston -- another dramatic image is when Stanwyck turns her back to the gentleman to pray for their salvation, and McCrea points his pistol at the back of her head, ready to do a mercy killing to keep her from getting captured or tortured by the Indians. A very eerie shot.
At the final moment, they are saved -- by another train. Trains are the real heroes in this movie, Joel McCrea notwithstanding. Even the U.S. Cavalry that comes to their rescue arrives by train.
In this world where the train is everything, the most iconic image, of course, is the final Golden Spike scene, where a bit of humor is injected when conniver Henry Kolker, having been forced by Tamiroff and Overman to pay for his evil deeds by driving spikes with a sledgehammer until he’s surprisingly gotten very good at it, does the honors.
The two trains meeting nose to nose is as familiar as any image we have of 19th century America, of the West, and of the post-Civil War era when uniting North and South seemed more troublesome than uniting east and west. The throng of people climbing on the engines, the dignitaries in their top hats, the photographer and his bulky camera on a tripod to catch what everyone at the time knows is going to be the most historic event of their lives.
I first remember seeing this movie when I was quite young, perhaps as young as 8 or 9 years old, and as the movie played, tracing with my finger the route of the Union Pacific on a map of the U.S. Some place in Nebraska called Omaha to another place in Utah called Ogden, about four inches away. I sat on the floor with the coffee table as my desk. I think it was a Saturday afternoon, and I can still recall the play of afternoon sunlight, with one strong beam splashing on the map from the window behind me, so strong a light I could see the dust in the air.
I understood nothing of the history or the politics in the plot of the movie (even Ulysses S. Grant shows up at one point), but the images were easy enough for even a child to grasp. Maybe that’s what Mr. DeMille really excelled at, a simplified but still dramatic image. Most of his epics have more splash than depth, but they are eyecatching.
This post is part of our celebration of National Train Day, this Saturday May 7th. The train has an unusually iconic place not just in our history, but in classic films. This movie, throughout the jumble of carnival showmanship, imagines how important the train was to a 19th Century America with growing pains. It also shows Hollywood’s love of the train as a set, as a metaphor, and as a plot device.
It ends with a swell of patriotic music and a shot of a modern streamliner roaring past the camera.
Trains would continue to be important to America in the first half of the 20th Century, and to the movies for the first several decades of the film industry. Come back Thursday when we’ll have a look at “The Narrow Margin” (1952), which shows the other end of the romantic timeline of the train in American history and American film. It’s a sleek, modern train, faster and more elegant. There are no pioneers on this trip, even though it’s heading west to California, but there is plenty of danger, and almost all of it is on board.
We’re going to spend this week talking about two films that both mythologize and yet seem to deconstruct how classic film depicted the American West. This was accomplished, however, by way of telling a more intimate story about men and women.
The two movies show a world that is certainly rugged, but is supremely romantic in a way we don’t usually see the Old West. These two movies feature relationships between men and women that are introspective beyond stereotype, and brave in attempting understanding beyond the usual bravery needed to face the bad guy.
Today’s film, “Trooper Hook” (1957) was based on a short story, and Thursday’s film, “Shane” (1953) was based on a novella. Both were written by the same man, Jack Schaefer, who was among the first writers to create Western literature above the usual pulp novel standards. He claimed at the time of his enormous success with “Shane” to never have read those pulp Westerns, and approached his story like a literary novel, feeling that the American West was a topic worthy of great themes and not such shoot-em-up action stories.
At the time he wrote “Shane” he had never even visited the West. It was a world both of his research and his imagination. By the time his story “Sergeant Houck” had been made into the film “Trooper Hook”, he had moved to Arizona, settling in the great West he admired. His books, though touching on the familiar themes of cattlemen versus homesteader, the gunfighter, the vanishing American Indian culture, he did not eulogize the West, nor did he intend to mythologize it. It was simply his canvas to write about men and women.
In the case of both of these two movies, “Trooper Hook” and “Shane”, it is the story of one woman and two men in a painful, and poetic, romantic triangle.
Interestingly, and perhaps the most glaring departure from lusty romance and bold adventure in a savage land, these romances are depicted without the usual trusty script convention (and real life reaction) of healthy lust or demonstrative desire. The Production Code may have required discretion back in the day, but there was still plenty of room for suggesting lust. The romance here, however, is envisioned more through tenderness and respect, as a union of soulmates.
“Trooper Hook” takes place in the Southwest, where Apache warriors, under their chief, Nanches, execute a group of cavalry soldiers on a cliff. They are subdued by another troop of soldiers, lead by Joel McCrea. The soldiers burn the Apaches’ village in revenge, and send them to a reservation. We see the cruelty of both adversaries.
Among the Apaches, the soldiers discover a white woman, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who was captured from a wagon train some years before. She has a small son by Nanches. Joel McCrea takes her back to the fort, with her son, to be hopefully be reunited with her white husband.
We start off with what will be a litany of bigotry, racial and sexist, against Barbara Stanwyck for having borne a child by the Apache chief. Though we understand from the beginning that she was taken against her will and she had no romantic feelings for Nanches; we are made to understand she was raped; nevertheless she is treated by the white community as one who should have committed suicide before she allowed herself to submit to an Apache, or at least had the decency to kill herself after she discovered she was pregnant.
“You mean you let yourself whelp that buck’s kid? You ain’t no white woman, no more you ain’t,” one of McCrea’s soldiers says to her. With terms like “whelp”, “mongrel” and “Indian leavings” to refer to the child, we see that Stanwyck’s humiliation as a captive is going to only continue even though she is now free.
It’s a powerful way to examine a slice of America’s history of prejudice. Had there been a romance between Stanwyck and the Apache chief, the writers might be inclined to show him as noble and heroic, and make him, rather than her, the greater victim of prejudice in a star-crossed romantic tale of intolerance between races.
But, making Stanwyck the abused possession of a man who was cruel and dangerous, and having the settlers’ and soldiers’ bigotry directed at her for being victimized, we see prejudice that is salacious as it is mean, as commonly and cheaply sexist as it is intolerance twisted beyond the logic of normally decent people.
A few will show her kindness. The first and foremost of these is Joel McCrea, as the stoic career soldier who is assigned to escort and her child back to her husband. Quito, her poker-faced little boy, is played by Terry Lawrence. Rodolfo Acosta, who moved from Mexican cinema to American movie and TV westerns, is Nanches. He breaks free from his shackles, and wants his son back.
Every once in a while Tex Ritter sings another verse of the ballad that reminds us what’s going on, a-la’ “High Noon.” It’s just not a Western without Tex Ritter, nor without dependable Royal Dano as the stagecoach driver. With his goatee, mustache, and flowing gray hair, he looks like Colonel Sanders without the bucket of chicken.
The West as a place of redemption is also hinted at in this movie, not just redemption for Miss Stanwyck or Mr. McCrea, who bears a past humiliation of his own, but of the nation. We see McCrea’s blue (yes, it’s a black and white movie) soldier’s kepi, but Royal Dano, who is the other man to treat Miss Stanwyck with open-minded gallantry, wears a gray kepi. Union and Confederate team up to get this lady and her boy home.
Barbara Stanwyck is withdrawn, emotionless, having learned from her years as a captive to repress her feelings in order to survive. The first words we hear from her are threats when she attacks a bully with a shovel for harassing her son. It draws admiration from Joel McCrea, who is her protector from one threat after another for the remainder of the story.
We get hints of his own past, and we are led to believe that he has a family somewhere, but we see another kind of family coming together in the long, arduous stagecoach ride across the open desert. Time and space is telescoped in the narrow, jostling confines of the stagecoach. Another passenger joins them, a nosy salesman who, among other things, notes that Stanwyck’s hair is “cut a might short to me.”
Later on McCrea will comfort her that it will grow out as she self-consciously brushes her hand through her fetching bob (which looks like she had a perm somewhere along the trail), and perhaps we are meant to infer that her hair was shorn to subjugate and humiliate her in the custom of degrading female prisoners and social outcasts for centuries. She spits the venomous explanation, “Lice!” at the rude man.
She also gives him a look that seems to say, “Yeah, and my hair’s gray, too. You want to make something of it?”
The hairdo was more likely an affectation of 1950s feminine coiffure, and we could also comment on Jean Arthur’s similar short hairstyle in “Shane”. In her case, her hair might have still been growing out from her successful Broadway gig as “Peter Pan” months before “Shane” began shooting (see our reference on that here in our discussion of her co-star, Boris Karloff, also here); her character in the novel is described as having her hair piled on her head.
Short hair for married women in the 19th century was not unheard of, but most certainly was not common. I think we’re looking at the 1950s taking the forefront over history here. It’s interesting that a producer and director will take such pains to make a film historically authentic but leave a glaring anachronism, either for modern women moviegoers to identify with the heroine, or to accommodate the comfort of the actress.
McCrea soon banishes the talkative salesman to the driver’s box, because really, can you imagine traveling through the hot desert in a bone-shaking conveyance with a guy who just won’t shut up?
When they make their first stop, the half-Apache child and his practically-a-prostitute mother are not allowed in the hotel dining room, so Joel McCrea takes them on a picnic, where Stanwyck and her boy bathe in a lake. She becomes more confidential with McCrea, having observed his unexpected traditionally feminine ability to nurture as well as his traditionally masculine trait to protect, and she tries to explain her captivity in terms of her strong desire to just live through it. Bearing humiliation was a tool to do this.
He understands. In a scene moving for its frank honesty as well as its simplicity, McCrea recalls his experience as a young soldier during the Civil War, when he was imprisoned at Andersonville. For those unfamiliar, this Confederate prison had the infamous reputation of being one of the worse hell-holes imaginable, where overcrowding led to men lying on the ground out in the open in the mud and their own filth, being barely kept alive on small rations of putrid food.
A fellow prisoner, sick out of his mind with fever, hallucinates about having a dog with him. Joel explains, “He had a love of dogs, and I found if I barked once or twice, he’d give me some of his rations.”
He got down on his hands and knees, pretending to be this feverish man’s submissive, loyal pet, letting the man feed him. “For a whole month I was a dog.”
Then his master died of the fever.
McCrea goes beyond sympathizing with her humiliation by sharing his own, and the practical lengths he had gone to survive.
The stagecoach trip resumes and the new passenger is a young Earl Holliman, a hung over but still pretty happy-go-lucky cowboy with nothing but his saddle to his name. They ride through the night, and we are given a sublime picture that seems to sum up the movie in a cozy image. Holliman hunkers on his bench in the stagecoach, with McCrea’s outstretched leg extending across and bolstering up the sleeping Holliman with his boot to keep him falling.
McCrea and Stanwyck are on the other seat, with the sleeping boy sprawled across both their laps. Stanwyck is asleep, slumped against McCrea’s chest, and Joel McCrea is the only one awake, with his two arms outstretched to grasp either side of the stagecoach, the linchpin that keeps everyone from rocking too much, from having their sleep disturbed. He is keeping watch, and also, we may imagine, savoring the sensation of warm bodies who need him. He is heroic in his simple thoughtfulness. He is the picture of the family man we thought he probably was, but there is something different about him now, something more wistful than stoic. Perhaps he has lost his family and is remembering times past. Perhaps he never had one.
Nanches is free and stalks the stagecoach.
New passengers include an aristocratic Spanish matron played by Celia Lovsky, and her convent-schooled granddaughter, played by Susan Kohner, who is on her way to an arranged marriage. Holliman falls in love and we have the makings of a subplot. Also along for the ride is a big blow-hard rancher who brags about risking everything in a poker game to attain his immense wealth. When trouble comes, we see he has lost his bravado for risk, but doesn’t mind risking the lives of others.
Tex Ritter sings another verse.
Nanches and his warriors catch up with the stagecoach, and there is a standoff, temporarily won by Mr. McCrea when he plays a curious and fairly sickening game of “chicken” with Nanches by having Holliman hold a gun to the boy’s head.
It buys them time, and they arrive in the settlement where Miss Stanwyck’s husband awaits. He has been notified of her arrival, but not told about the boy. He is horrified.
“What about other people? What do I tell them? How do I even face them?” He tells Stanwyck she should have left Quito with “his own kind”.
Sergeant McCrea stays for supper. One could make a comparison with the scene in “Shane” where Shane is the stranger for supper at the homesteader’s cabin of Van Heflin and Jean Arthur, with their boy. But McCrea and Alan Ladd as guests with a lonely and troubled past is the only similarity. Heflin’s and Arthur’s relationship is close, and their boy is openhearted and happy.
Actually, there is another similarity and that is the niggling romantic triangle that grows so quietly that we may not notice it among greater passions until there is nothing left to do but have a showdown.
McCrea, now that his duty is done, tries to be on his way, but first has a man-to-man talk with the angry husband. “The boy gave her a reason to live, and she’s lived through an awful lot.”
But her husband, played by John Dehner, is adamant that she will stay with him and the boy will be sent back with McCrea.
“I was ready to forgive you about the Indian,” he says.
“Forgive me?!” Stanwyck finally opens her eyes, and gives free rein to her anger.
“What kind of man do you think I am?” he fires back.
Yes, we were wondering that ourselves, for in both these films we cover this week there is a subtitle, something along the lines of “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
McCrea, no marriage counselor, decides mother and child are unsafe here, and helps them to escape. Dehner follows with his gun, but then, right about this time Nanches shows up. One angry man wants the woman, but not the boy. The other angry man wants the boy but could care less about the woman. Both have guns, so there’s little room for compromise and the result is a too-convenient ending.
Still, there is time for one more confession, and one more act of love. As McCrea and Stanwyck, and Quito, ride off into the sunset on a buckboard, McCrea remarks, “I’m 47. Nearly 30 of that in the Army makes a man rough. Got four months ‘til the end of my last hitch.”
It is a marriage proposal, in case you missed it, and she questions about the family she thought he already had. He confesses he was never married and only lets people think that.
“I think I always knew,” she says, smiling, and all through this shy exchange neither has shared even a look, let alone a kiss. Yet we don’t doubt the outcome because somewhere down the dusty trail they have already become a family.
Come back Thursday for another Western romance with what has been called one of the best Westerns ever made: “Shane”.
(Sorry the screen captures are so poor. I was working off a VHS tape that had seen better days.)
Fair warning, I'm going to discuss pretty much the entire movie, so if you don't want to know the details, stick your fingers in your ears and sing, "La, la, la, la!" for the next half hour.
“The More the Merrier” (1943) brings the war story back to this side of pond now that the U.S. had entered the fighting and Americans had learned what it was to be, sort of, deprived. Americans had a different experience from Mrs. Miniver and family, and we handled The War with not so much with a stiff upper lip, as with a wisecrack. Tomorrow, December 7th, marks the anniversary of our reason for joining the fighting.
The main gag driving the film is the wartime housing shortage. For the first time in U.S. history, masses of people were moving all over the country at the same time. Servicemen and women were leaving home for military camps and then to points of embarkation. Young brides, those that could, followed inductee husbands to new posts stateside. Big cities called to a still mostly rural America to fill slots in war factories and civil government.
“The More the Merrier” is set in Washington, D.C., and teases us not only on the housing shortage, but on the befuddled bureaucracy of a democratic republic. The faux travelogue at the beginning reminds us we are in a city disparagingly once described as a place of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
That used to be a joke. Son.
The second running theme is introduced when Charles Coburn, a consultant to the government on the housing shortage, admires the statue of Admiral David Farragut, whose famous directive during the American Civil War at the Battle of Mobile Bay you’ll recall was, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” It is Mr. Coburn’s motto, too. He gets his own affairs and the affairs of others which are none of his business briskly managed with this war cry.
It also reflects wartime cheerleading to a frightened audience.
He shouts this motto so often, that one wonders if his exuberance is really because he gets to say the word “damn” with impunity. Evidently this caused less fuss than when Clark Gable uttered the cuss word in “Gone with the Wind” (1939) a mere four years earlier. You could say the dam broke.
Several other themes weave their way through this film, like the shortage of men leading to more women leaving the home and entering the workforce. The shortage of men also makes them a valued commodity, and turns women from the pursued into the pursuers. There is a scene in the movie where a line of women wait to punch in a time clock, and they tease a lone young man with whistles and catcalls that unnerves him into running away.
Charles Coburn has arrived in the city too early for the hotel reservation made for him, so he tricks his way past a line of applicants to take the room for rent offered by Jean Arthur. She is also a government worker, and she has a small flat with an extra bedroom that she has chosen to rent to serve her country.
Jean Arthur was nominated for an Oscar for this role, and Charles Coburn won Best Supporting for his role as Mr. Dingle. They had first teamed up for “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941), and their wonderfully silly rapport is repeated here. He becomes a nosy, pushy sort of fairy godfather, not merely because he just likes to run everything, but also because he senses immediately, as do we, that Miss Arthur is drowning in her own lack of spontaneity. As she wails later on in the film, “I’m not the kind of person anything happens to!”
It is not until Coburn barges his way into her life that she begins to realize how empty her life has been.
She is reticent to take him on as a roomer because she prefers to have a woman living with her. She finally agrees to let him stay, but adds a caveat that they must be careful not to be seen coming and going together. Coburn’s rakish, proud, smile is so cute as he begins to understand she is afraid the neighbors will think they are shacking up, just one of the many instances they play off each other so well. He thanks her for the compliment.
More than most other very fine, but more “stagy” actresses in this glamorous era, Jean Arthur played her roles with a natural and almost otherworldly believability. She is identified mainly as a comedienne, but I think she was really a dramatic actress in comic roles, and that gave her a multidimensional quality far beyond just broadly playing clowns. Someone else in this role might appear shallow, and buffoonish. Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse. Along with her famous sure-fire comedic timing she adds a touch of pathos.
Perhaps her ability to remain so deeply in character, so locked in the moment, was a defense mechanism that enabled Jean Arthur, extremely shy and insecure in real life, to do her job. Many of her roles, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, were women who found themselves undergoing a metamorphosis, responding to deeply buried passions when stimulated by challenges, crisis, and in this film at least, a strong case of sexual arousal brought on by Joel McCrea. That happens later.
First, a little slapstick. A long scene (which I would have loved to have seen in rehearsal), of Coburn’s and Arthur’s first morning together, each with a timed set of tasks to accomplish before they head off to their respective jobs. Coburn calls it the steeplechase. A running gag involving his pants that keep disappearing and reappearing is mapped out well, and looks like a silent movie scenario.
Another funny bit is when he locks himself out of the apartment while Jean is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Here’s where we get another glimpse at Miss Arthur’s unadorned believability. Yes, the toothpaste froth around her mouth dripping like a rabid dog is funny; she is not afraid of looking foolish. However, look at her eyes.
Though she looks into the mirror, it is an empty gaze. She inspects her ear as she scrubs her teeth. She looks like her mind is wandering. This is exactly what we do when we brush our teeth. Our minds wander. We are thinking about work, about picking up the kids at school, about what to wear, but the last thing we think about while brushing our teeth is brushing our teeth. She was meticulous about being natural.
“War brings people closer together,” Mr. Coburn states, and in large measure it did. We will see in the film numerous examples of crowding and inconvenience that would probably send people today, who seem to have a greater sense of entitlement, into rants and possible acts of revenge. Back then the greatest ranting, revenge, and sense of entitlement was to be found in Hitler or Mussolini. Nobody wanted to be like those guys.
Another aspect of life then that does not translate to today is the running gag on awkward grammar. Coburn shows his comic finesse with little more than dropping prepositions after a moment of wondering what to do with the leftovers, such as “because she borrowed it to go to it. In.”
He does this a few times and it’s quite funny, but today in a world of, “Uh, I’m, like, you know, whatever…” people speaking stupidly is the norm. When stupid is normal, it’s not funny. Also, breaking social rules is not an effective gag anymore when we live in a society where pretty much any behavior is accepted or tolerated. Breaking the rules is not daring or funny when there are no rules. (This is not meant to be a societal judgment, only a comment about script conventions.)
Obviously, Jean Arthur’s puritan worries about being caught living with men is also no longer standard today, so that joke may stretch very thin here. But perhaps the biggest theme moving the plot is also one that takes some translation. The War. It’s the reason why they’re all together here, it’s reason why Jean is renting her spare room, it’s the reason why Coburn and Joel McCrea need it, it’s the reason why the plot thickens, complications arise, new worlds open up, dreams are dashed, and why they must go on in spite of everything.
But, where was The War, exactly? Mrs. Miniver had it in her back garden, in her destroyed dining room, in the body of her dead daughter-in-law sprawled on the floor. When the enemy arrived in our country, it was as prisoners, and they were tucked safely into POW camps. Most people never saw them.
Here the war is less an effort to survive (though it would be if things got any worse), but more a sense of guilt and unrelenting responsibility. It may be difficult for younger audiences to comprehend how a war fought somewhere else could be so pervasive, could dominate every facet of daily life here, and demand personal sacrifice unheard of today.
We know of the tremendous sacrifices of service personnel in that war. What few people recall today is that a good part of the civilian population worked themselves nearly to death during those years. They had little support, only constant reminding not to complain. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
But, this is a comedy, so we hint at these subjects with typical American wisecracks. This is what makes this film so quintessentially American. We may exhibit a bit of awkwardness trying to interpret Mrs. Miniver’s wartime Britain, but here were are on home turf.
Flippancy makes things seem normal even when the world is upside down. Flippancy covers immense national anxiety, perhaps as much as Jean Arthur's smooth comic timing masks hers.
Back to Jean and her roomie. We discover a hint of loneliness in this rigid woman’s austere personality when she writes in her diary about Coburn, “At least someone around the house to break the silence.” He senses her social backwardness, and decides to play matchmaker when Joel McCrea stands out on the sidewalk with his suitcase and a large propeller over his shoulder. Coburn rents his half of his room, which has two beds in it, to McCrea.
Joel McCrea, as we will learn in small bits, is a mechanic from an airplane factory out in California, sent here to deliver what is probably classified aeronautic equipment to a Washington government department. In a few days, he is to be sent to North Africa as a sergeant on special assignment. Coburn decides Mr. McCrea is an eligible bachelor, but being eligible during World War II also meant eligible for military service. McCrea knows his dance card is full for the next few years, and he has no intention of getting involved with anybody in the meantime.
It is another intrusion of The War into this movie. McCrea knows where he is going, but he is still lost, between engagements. His life is not his own.
Joel moves in, and Coburn tries to find a way to explain it to Jean. Mr. Coburn’s and Mr. McCrea’s constantly calling each other by the wrong name is also a well-maintained running gag and smoothly done.
There is another slapstick scene of Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea not realizing the other is there, lots of just missing each other as they move from room to room. There is a cute moment where she is in her bedroom dancing to a rumba version of “What is This Thing Called Love”, glancing backward at her bum to see if she is sexy. It is our first clue there might be more to this schedule-obsessed wallflower.
Meanwhile, Joel, standing in the hall in his bathrobe, clutches his toiletries kit and starts to rumba as well. They are apart, but it is as if they dance together, a mating dance. We are, incidentally, treated to a tantalizing shot of Joel’s bare legs. More to come later.
A note here about rumba music (Yes, yes, I know. Just shut up already and talk about the “damn” movie.) A craze for Latin music began in the late 1930s and exploded during the war years, partly in response to our Pan-American re-awakening that we needed some allies in our own hemisphere. Maybe sometime we can go into the conga craze in movies. (You with the pencil, put that on our list of things to do.)
("The Devil and Miss Jones")
Just about everything you see in old movies is there for a reason. Well, maybe not everything…does it seem to you that the cropped top Jean is wearing in the rumba scene exposing her bare midriff is the same one she wore in the beach scene in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941)?
("The More the Merrier")
Back to Jean and Joel. Eventually each discovers the other and Mr. Coburn has some ‘splaing to do. Another cute bit with proper speech versus colloquial slang where the phrase, “six bucks” is passed back and forth between them.
“Well, give him back his six bucks.”
“I don’t have the six bucks. He gave you the six bucks.”
And Coburn dangles more prepositions, “And I’ll have the money to pay him. With.”
It’s only funny if you understand it’s bad English.
Jean relents and lets Joel stay. The next morning, our trio crams together in a little kitchen nook. Jean tries to keep to her precise schedule of eating her egg and getting ready for work, but here two big, hearty men sit down, invade her personal space, share her toast and make breakfast small talk. She is awkward at social banter, and we see her discomfort. She gradually displays a tentative willingness to be brought out of her shell that is as courageous as it is sweetly pathetic.
By the way, I love the dresser scarves in her apartment, that she has them. It’s such a miniscule touch that she wants things just so. She has precise standards. And the photograph of Abraham Lincoln on her desk.
She reveals she is engaged to a Mr. Pendergast, whom she always calls Mr. Pendergast. They chide her about his age, 42, and that he has kept her waiting at the altar nearly two years. We sense, and they know without meeting him yet, that Mr. Pendergast is a drip, whose career comes before Jean. When Joel gets on Jean’s nerves and the only bad thing she can think to call him is “messy”, he teases her that Mr. Pendergast must comb his hair constantly. She thinks she is putting Joel in his place when she retorts, “Mr. Pendergast has no hair!” and walks out.
Her “so, there!” moment falls dismally short of its mark, but she is saved from appearing ridiculous to the audience by stopping halfway down the stairs, glancing back, and thoughtfully half smiling to herself. They are now her boys, and they have become a kind of family.
Another wartime era moment is left to us when Jean Arthur boasts that Mr. Pendergast has had dinner at the White House, and Mr. Coburn replies, “Worst food in Washington.” By all accounts, during the Roosevelt years, it was.
One more topical war reference: Mr. Coburn uses the phrase “Eastern War Time”. Daylight saving time was established temporarily during World War I to save energy, and was re-introduced in 1942 for the same reason. We remained on daylight saving time the entire war, no changing the clocks, and this was referred to as War Time. (Somebody shut her up! Sit on her!)
On Sunday, the rooftops of D.C. become the playground of the apartment dwellers who all come up to catch some sun in an era where most people did not own cars, and even if you did, three gallons of gas per week was all you might be allotted by rationing.
Here’s Jean Arthur and co-workers driving in a car with an “A” gasoline rationing sticker on it, which would have allowed them about three gallons a week. Have a look here at this previous post on wartime gas rationing in the movies.
That wasn’t going to get you to the beach or out in the country for the day, even if pleasure motor trips were not banned by law (which they were). Off in the distance, we see the Capitol Dome, which we get several glimpses of in this movie. I suppose it’s like Paris: in the movies, every bedroom window has a view of the Eiffel Tower. Here it’s the Capitol Dome.
On the rooftops the neighbors pose for snapshots, read, paint, picnic, kids play war games with toy guns. War was probably the most popular child’s game during The War. While Toby Miniver clutches his cat’s tail in the backyard air raid shelter on another sound stage, these kids machine gun Charles Coburn for fun, who plays along and shoots back at them.
The “family” gathers on the roof with the Sunday paper and the portable record player, cushions and blankets. The director reminds us again how sexy Joel McCrea is by leaving him in the foreground in shorts and a beach robe opened to reveal his chest. In this world of government women, like Amazon warriors heading for the time clock, lazy, laconic Joel McCrea, must be, for this sweet pinup moment, the male Betty Grable. Like the small point about the dresser scarves, I love that he walks around in stocking feet, wearing white gym socks.
Jean sprawls on blanket nearby, knitting, and the boys read the Sunday funnies aloud to each other. She glances over them with a look that is half amused and half disapproving, like an elder sister forced to mind her younger brothers for the day.
Then Coburn really does the bratty kid brother act by reading her diary, and when she discovers, her “That was a miserable thing to do,” bleeds venom from her voice, and heartbreak because she has been humiliated. She learns what she has always suspected: it is risky to let people into her life.
She boots them out but later allows McCrea to remain because he has only a day left before he will join the Army and be shipped to Africa with his propeller.
Now we move into the romantic stage, for if it was Coburn that brought them together, his presence also keeps them apart. The family dynamic changes when a family member leaves, and both Joel and Jean grow up and discover each other now that they are on the island alone.
There’s a comically suspenseful scene when she waits for a call from Mr. Pendergast on whether or not he will decide to take her out on a date that evening. At a crucial moment, a teenage boy from downstairs named Morton, played by Stanley Clements, whom you may remember as the gang leader from “Going My Way” (1944), bursts in for advice from Jean. Note his “Jughead” hat (Archie Comics, you remember), which was popular among teens of that era. They took a man’s felt fedora hat, turned in up and cut the brim like a zigzag.
Don’t knock it. Someday tattoos are going to be funny.
He wants to know if he should join the Boy Scouts, and is as serious as if he were pondering joining the Army. She calls him her “fella”. Truly, they’re either too young or too old.
That was a song, by the way.
Eh, skip it. (I could sing it, but I won’t. I can see your attention is wavering.)
It’s a cute scene, and both Joel and Jean want to kill Morton for procrastinating. But Mr. Pendergast, who at last arrives to take Jean out for the evening, is the real party pooper.
But, the night is young, and Jean and Joel, and Mr. Coburn, and Mr. Pendergast all run into each other at a nightclub. Another cute moment when they are all sitting at a table, and a rumba plays in the distance. Both Jean and Joel, still seated, start to move their shoulders and succumb to the seductive rhythm. Mr. Coburn tells them to go dance so he can discuss business with Mr. Pendergast.
He keeps Mr. Pendergast, terrifically played with delightful self importance by Richard Gaines (who does a 180-degree turn in character when he plays Patrick Henry in “The Howards of Virginia” - see previous post), busy for the rest of the evening.
Jean sees Joel being ogled by a flock of other women, and she gets jealous and territorial in a way she never was over Mr. Pendergast. I love Mr. Gaines’ officious-sounding, radio announcer-quality voice. Mr. Pendergast, by the way, has a spectacularly ugly toupee that nobody mentions. It’s just there for all to see. Like the Capitol Dome.
When Joel escorts her home, we are treated to one of the most erotic and silly seduction scenes Hollywood ever produced. They walk down the street, passing lovers clutching each other in dark corners. They glance at these couples with interest and envy, as Jean tries to pry information out of Joel about his past, particularly his former girlfriends. She is apparently jealous of them, too. He takes her hand, her arm, puts his hand on her bare shoulder repeatedly as they walk all the while she smoothly, but without apparent alarm, plucks his hands from her person. It is like a dance.
They sit on the front steps of their apartment building, and talk more about her marriage plans with Mr. Pendergast. She continues to sing Mr. Pendergast’s praises while Joel slowly runs his hands over every part of her body the Production Code will let him. I don’t know how carefully this was rehearsed but some of it had to be improvised.
He clearly desires her, is doing everything but undressing her, but maintains a polite stream of conversation. If he just said “uh-huh” to her dialogue, as if ignoring what she is saying to him, it wouldn’t be as funny. Their equal determination to carry on the discipline of conversation despite their growing obsession with each other is a sparkling moment as comic as it is romantic. It’s like when they were doing the rumba separately, both preoccupied with their passions, but that time indulging them in secret.
Jean shows herself the master of both comedy and endearing emotion in this scene as she tries to soldier on through the proper social niceties and talking about her cousin’s stamp collection, battling to suppress her arousal as Joel explores her, kisses her neck, her hand, her bare shoulder. Her voice breaks. In perhaps the first spontaneous thing she ever did in her life, Jean takes Joel’s face in her hands and plants a kiss on him that makes him dizzy. Not bad for a first try. We have a feeling she’s been saving that one for a long time. They part breathlessly, but with polite formality, gathering bits of dignity they have left all over the steps.
The silliness never once lessens the steaminess of the scene. The sensuality never overwhelms the silliness. It’s a perfect marriage. THIS SCENE is why they call it “romantic comedy”.
Joel McCrea had, like Jean Arthur, a natural style so well suited to comedy, a quiet, light manner open to sudden dramatic shifts and surprising intensity. They were a great match, and this was their third and last film together. Another good scene, intimate and silly, is when they examine together all the compartments of the new travel bag he gives her. It’s really charming, with their low, quiet voices overlapping each other’s sentences, and you have to admire what two pros can do with a simple prop.
George Stevens directed this film, and responsible for much of its magic, worked particularly well with Jean Arthur. He also made her memorable final film “Shane” a decade later.
Early in the film, we are shown that the wall between her room and the spare bedroom is quite thin and Mr. Coburn and Jean can talk through the wall. Now, with Jean and Joel gone to their separate beds, we have a split screen effect of them in bed “together” that predates the similar device used in “Pillow Talk” (1959) with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It is more erotic here, because they are not miles away in different apartments. Also, because they have more at stake. The scene decompresses from sexual tension into sorrowful tenderness when, after they have confessed their love for each other, realize that there’s not just a wall between them, it’s The War.
Yes, The War was that pervasive. It entered the bedroom as easily as it slipped into the workplace, the school, the wallet, the conscience, the subconscious. There was no escape.
It's sweet that she wears what looks like a gardenia in her hair for the evening out, and does not remove it when she goes to bed. If I wore a gardenia in my hair to bed, I'd wake up with petals up my nose.
Not that I've tried it. But I might sometime if curiosity got the better of me.
It might even be worth the embarrassement of going to the ear, nose, and throat doctor the next day to get the gardenia petals out of my nose.
There’s a bit more slapstick to go when suspicious young Morton has turned Joel into the FBI as a spy, another crowded cab ride shows us that gas rationing affected cabbies, too, who were not allowed to drive unless chair cabs were completely full of passengers, and when Joel and Jean succumb to a marriage of convenience arranged by Mr. Coburn to keep her reputation spotless. Lots of great dialogue, but this post is already stretching beyond the state line.
The last scene (yes, I know I’m telling you everything here. Don’t shush me. You’ve shushed your last shush, as Jean would say), brings the culmination of all the wartime crowding, the separation of lovers, and Admiral Farragut’s “damn the torpedoes” attitude.
Jean, miserable and crying over her cheap fake marriage, changes into a sexy negligee to sleep alone again. Joel goes dejectedly to the spare room to pack because he’s due to report for duty in a few hours. He demands she not take in any more roomers because of the riffraff she might attract, and she complains that he is already crabbing like a husband. A poignant moment when he pulls off his sprig of lily of the valley from his suit lapel (to match her wedding bouquet) and mutters, “Well, I am a husband…at least until it’s annulled.”
She cries and they lamely try to pick a fight with each other, when both suddenly realize the wall between their rooms is gone. Mr. Coburn has had workmen tear it out. Astonished, their reserve crumbles like the drywall.
Anguish turns to comedy, and then to sex when Joel and Jean, adopt slow, sly smiles. Jean’s crying has ceased, but she manufactures a few fake wails as a kind of mating call to demand comforting. Joel, who we’ve known from the beginning is her perfect mate, happily responds to the call of duty like any good bridegroom.
Full speed ahead.
But only until The War intrudes again.
Come back Thursday for our final post on “war stories” when we jump back across the pond to England and see that wartime deception has led to tragedy for Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones in “Love Letters.”
Have a look below at the silly seduction scene. Let me know what you think. (Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page to mute the music so you can hear the video.)
