Now Playing - "I'll Be Seeing You"

Here's an ad for "I'll Be Seeing You" (1944), which we covered in this previous post.  We've got the soldier, the beautiful girl, and a hint of scandal (prison) and romantic intrigue one wartime Christmas.  But, we smack a great big photo of teenaged Shirley Temple in case the names of Selznick, Cotten, and Rogers aren't enough.  Always hedge your bets.

War Stories - Part 3 - "Love Letters" - 1945

“Love Letters” (1945) is our third and last in the series of “war stories”. It’s a love story, and a mystery that doesn’t really need The War as a backdrop, but this was a time when so many letters were written, and relationships begun on the strength of a chance meeting.

In many families, the wife said goodbye to the husband (or sweetheart) at the train station. She said welcome home to him (if she was lucky), three or four years later.  The only way to communicate in the years between were by letters. They might meet again -- to resume their lives and their relationship -- as near strangers, unless the letters were particularly heartfelt, and the communication between them was open and honest.

I doubt in our age of instant, but often weak and meaningless, communication does the power of language ever come close to matching the importance it had during World War II.

Note: Ayn Rand co-wrote the script with the writer of the novel on this story is based, Christopher Massie.

Joseph Cotten, again here in his trademark role of the troubled, romantic loner, is an officer with the British Army in Italy. He pens the letters that his fellow officer, Roger Moreland, sends to his girlfriend. Roger, played by Robert Sully, is a boorish, self-centered cad, who, though unfaithful to this woman, is amused by the idea of winning her through Mr. Cotten’s tender prose.

Cotten is sick of the idea, and disgusted with himself for doing the chore, partly because he knows Roger is an ass, and partly because he fears he is falling in love with the woman who writes sensitive replies to his letters. He has a fiancée of his own, and he is growing apart from her. He seldom writes her, saving his deepest thoughts for Roger’s friend, Victoria.

“I was able to write to her all the things I was never able to say to any woman I know.” He says, and felt the ruse was innocent as long as the girl didn’t care. “But Victoria cared, understood.” He realizes Victoria has fallen in love, not with Roger as she believes, but with his letters.

“She’s in love with a man who doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Cotten demands the charade stop. He won’t write anymore, wants to know nothing more about her. When Cotten is seriously wounded and placed in a military hospital in Italy, he gets a letter from Roger, who has returned to England for training. Roger has married Victoria.

When Cotten is sent back to England to convalesce he learns from another pal that Roger is dead, not in the war but from an accident at home. This news nags at Mr. Cotten, because it means this Victoria is now a widow, and free, and a temptation in spite of himself. He also feels guilt for making possible what he suspects must have been a bad marriage.  In a way, though it is never couched in these terms, it's as if he prostituted this earnest, romantic woman to a callous stranger.

He still wants no part of the charade he committed, and wants to distance himself from what he has done.  But when his brother takes him to a party at a friend’s flat, Cotten meets Victoria even though he is not aware of it, mainly because she is not aware she is Victoria.

Victoria is played by Jennifer Jones in their second pairing after last year’s “Since You Went Away.” She goes by another name, because she has lost her memory. There is more intrigue to come, and we get bits and pieces a little at a time. I won’t give a play-by-play on the plot, that would ruin it, but we do learn that Roger was murdered, and Mr. Cotten discovers his letters played a part in a tragedy and the great mystery of Miss Jones’ amnesia.

Jennifer Jones is by turns ethereal, and also teasing and free spirited. This is also something of a trademark role for her, the fey innocent, but she appears more at ease in this film and less fragile than in some of her other work.

Ann Richards plays her friend, a woman who took Jones into her flat and cared for her when she was unable to take care of herself. Ann Richards also had minor roles in “Random Harvest” (see this post) and in “Sorry Wrong Number” (see this post here and here), but her film career ended in the early 1950s.

It’s difficult to believe she could not have been given better promotion by a studio in Hollywood and enjoyed a longer film career, as she has an engaging presence in this film. Her role is minor, but she shows a range of emotion and great chemistry with Joseph Cotten. Until Cotten falls in love with Jennifer Jones, one might suspect, and even wish, that she would get together with Cotten.

Notice the scene where, when Ann Richards wants to discuss the tragedy/mystery privately with Cotten, she sends Jennifer Jones to the store to get some porridge. She hands her their ration book. Since the UK imported most of their cereals (and a lot of other products), rationing was more severe there and lasted well beyond the war. Though the US had its own rationing program, I don’t think we rationed oatmeal (porridge). Maybe somebody can set me straight on that. Being the so-called “bread basket of the world” had its compensations.

We don’t see too many ration books of the day in the movies, and I’m not sure why. Possibly the government requested the cooperation of the film industry not to make too big a joke of them so that people would follow the rules and take their use seriously. Possibly they did not want to harp on (though an English setting in this movie, this was still an American-made movie for an American audience), shortages to an audience weary of them and doing its utmost to sacrifice.

Mr. Cotten takes up residence in a country cottage left to him by his deceased aunt, where he is looked after by rustic family retainer Cecil Kellaway (whom we saw in “Portrait of Jennie”, see here). Ian Wolfe plays a vicar, and Harry Allen a local farmer, both character actors who you might remember from “Mrs. Miniver”, which we reviewed in the second post on this series.

Gladys Cooper, who also teamed up with Jennifer Jones in “Song of Bernadette” (1943), see this previous post, plays Miss Jones’ guardian. She plays prominently in the tragedy/mystery, and she’s a shadowy figure for most of the film. It’s not until the very end we get her story and the truth about Victoria. It’s a good scene between Jones and Cooper, where they both reach back into their memories and describe a particular pivotal event, each finishing the other’s sentences.

The war in this movie, unlike in “Mrs. Miniver” and “The More the Merrier” is less on the surface of everyday life for these country dwellers and more in the fog-shrouded background, though there is one scene where Cotten, driving with Jones on winding lanes, does mention the gas rationing, “Since you love motoring so much, we’ll travel to the end of our coupons.”

Also, there is a scene with a wedding in what appear to be the bombed-out ruins of a church, evocative of the end of “Mrs. Miniver.” The war is still present in this movie, but it seems to be sliding into the background.

And I think that portrait of the little boy which figures in a couple of scenes that Joseph Cotten says is him as a child really was him. There is a similar photo in his autobiography, “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere” (Mercury House, Inc., San Francisco, 1987). In that book, he states that the photo was also used in “Shadow of a Doubt”.

The war is mostly represented in the letters he has written to her, and in his depression on coming home. He tells her, “Ever since I came back from the war, I’ve wanted to be alone. I’ve been miserable with other people. You’re the first one with whom I feel at peace.”

She replies, “That’s because you’re broken up inside almost the same as I am. You’ve been through the war and you can’t bear to look back.”

In this movie, and as World War II drifted into the past (the film was released in August 1945, after the Japanese surrender but before the formal surrender ceremonies in September), the generation that fought the war seemed to decide in large measure not to talk about it anymore. Many servicemen, like Joseph Cotten in the film, preferred not to look back.

Much of that war is documented in letters, and the intriguing notion that two people can fall in love without ever meeting each other…I would not hazard a guess as to how many times that actually happened. I don’t doubt that it did.

This is the end of our series on “war stories”. The all-clear has been sounded. Now get out of my cellar.  I'd better not be missing any cans of SPAM.

Niagara - 1953

(Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page to pause the music first so you hear the video.)

As you can see by the trailer above, “Niagara” (1953) was a showcase built more around Marilyn Monroe than even Niagara Falls, though the Falls gets prominent play in this movie, as so too does Jean Peters. She’s the non-bombshell in this movie as we are repeatedly reminded.

The IMDb website notes a bit of trivia that a scene with Marilyn Monroe walking is the longest walk filmed in movie history at 116 feet of film. Apparently, the camera couldn’t let go of her.

Hollywood either saw her as box office or future box office, because although she had made quite a few movies before this one, “Niagara” was her most important role to date, and after this movie, it was stardom all the way.

There is an offbeat quality to this movie, a certain unevenness, a disarming goofiness that makes it intriguing. An average couple played by Jean Peters and Max Showalter, billed as Casey Adams, take a delayed honeymoon at Niagara Falls. They encounter their complete opposites in another couple played by Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe. Directed by Henry Hathaway, the film almost feels like Alfred Hitchcock material in the way pleasant, even comic, normality is suddenly accosted by the weird and threatening.

The film has the Kodachrome look of old family vacation slides. We get a travelogue of Niagara Falls throughout the course of the movie.

Peters and Showalter have been married a couple of years, and take this trip ostensibly as a honeymoon, but also because he works for the Midwestern branch of Shredded Wheat, which has its corporate office in Buffalo, New York. He won a contest for most imaginative sales campaign, and his prize is to be hosted by a company mucky-muck. When they arrive at their lodgings after a leisurely drive in their convertible (and need no documentation to get over to the Canadian side, nor probably back again), Mr. Showalter exclaims with excitement, “You can see it from here!”

We think he means the Falls, but he means the Shredded Wheat plant. We have in Showalter’s character one of the most delicious cornball yokels in movie history, someone Hitchcock would have probably featured as the guy who is comically oblivious to the murder and gore around him. Mr. Showalter may not be totally oblivious, but his ever-present grin and enthusiasm might be tiring it if weren’t so funny.

His wife, Jean Peters, is the steady, sensible one of the pair. She is more in tune to what is going on around them, and by nature, is more eager to be involved. She turns into Nancy Drew and gets her life threatened before the movie is over.

The tension is provided by Joseph Cotten, a recently released psychiatric patient from a veterans’ hospital (shades of his character from “I’ll Be Seeing You” - 1945 - see this previous post), and his nubile, duplicitous wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miss Monroe, is actually quite good in this movie, despite the caricature the studio is already making of her as a sex object, playing a woman hatching a plot to murder her husband all the while playacting she loves him and is so worried about his mental condition.

But, being Marilyn Monroe with her star on the ascendant, we get a lot of eye candy which has nothing to do with the plot. Shots of her showering, of provocative poses, and costumes, and constant stares by all the males around her.

We start the cheesecake from the very beginning of the film, when Joseph Cotten, after a solitary ramble around the Falls in the early morning while his voiceover tells us how miserable he is, returns to their room to find her nekkid in bed. He calls her name, picking up one of her stockings that she had dropped on the floor, but she pretends to sleep. When he gives up and goes to his own twin bed, we see her contemptuous sneer.

Their digs are a motel of efficiency cabins right by the Falls. Peters and Showalter have booked the same cabin, but Miss Monroe and Mr. Cotten have not vacated yet, and so the new couple agreeably takes another cabin.

It’s a whole world unto itself, this land of efficiency cabins, where the resident owner plods around watering flowers and knowing everything about everybody, where the companionable vacationers dance in the pavilion to swing records on a phonograph and sip from Coke bottles on the steps under the stars. They are in no rush to see and do.

If you don’t count the murder plot, it seems like a very relaxing holiday. These days I think we’re programmed to be constantly on the go, even on vacation.

But, it’s not all ho-hum reading magazines in the rooms that have no cable TV, phones, or Internet service. The travelogue continues as Miss Peters and her goofy husband do all the requisite tourist stuff at Niagara Falls: the Rainbow Bridge, the Maid of the Mist boat ride, the Cave of the Winds. They spend a fair amount of time in raincoats and boots.

On one such excursion, Peters notices faithful worried wife Marilyn Monroe kissing a strange man. This is also a movie of darkened stairwells, trysting places, and secret haunts.

Miss Peters observes, as do we, that there’s something not quite right about that couple in the other cabin. Miss Monroe is not the faithful wife she pretends to be. But what about Mr. Cotten? Is he really a sick man the way his wife contends?

Jean Peters, smart, open-faced and unassumingly friendly gets to decide that for herself. When the cabin neighbors are all dancing under the stars, Monroe comes out to enjoy the music alone, puts on a record she has brought with her, and joins the normal couple on the steps.

In a moment, Cotten barges out of their room and smashes the record in his hands like The Incredible Hulk. We begin to see that the tune has a deeper meaning, and her actions are calculated for effect. She is not embarrassed or worried about her husband; she is pleased that so many people have witnessed his over-the-top behavior.

She is planning for her boyfriend to murder him, and wants to make it look like suicide. It won’t be hard. It apparently doesn’t take much for Mr. Cotten to become unglued.

It is Jean Peters, not his wife, who rushes to his room with a first aid kit and mercurochrome to patch up the cuts on his hand. If you’re going to smash a 78 rpm record, wear gloves.

It is an interesting scene, her caring for him, but even when he turns off the lights so she can better see Niagara Falls lit up at night, there is no intended eroticism. She is businesslike in her kindness, and he is too overwrought over his oversexed wife to contemplate sex or romance with anyone else.

When Peters’ goofy husband enters, he is so comfortable in his marriage and in her that he is not even jealous or suspicious. Maybe he’s too stupid. I can see where an audience might find his obtuse cheerfulness irritating, but I think he’s a hoot.

Cotten smashes the wooden model car he has been making in his room (more fun things to do when there is no cable TV) as he tells his back story about always messing up his life and how his wife is a tramp. He imagines she is unfaithful with every man she meets.

We don’t know that for a fact, but we do know that Miss Monroe is playing him like a violin, and uses his jealousy to lure him into a hidden spot where Boyfriend can knock him off.

Cotten’s paranoia serves him well, because he kills the boyfriend in self defense. He sneaks back to his cabin, knowing his wife thinks him dead, and finding Jean Peters there instead taking a nap. Again, more confidentiality in the half-light, but she screams and he runs away. Later, her tails her (more raincoats and boots) on another walk to the Falls, and he pleads with her to not tell anyone he is alive so that he can leave his wife and just get on with his miserable life by himself.

She’s willing to do this at first, even keeping his secret when the boyfriend’s body is found and the cops get involved. But, then she realizes that he might now be after his wife, who has fainted at identifying the body of her boyfriend in the morgue. This time she isn’t faking; she’s really shocked. Miss Peters, by default, becomes her caretaker.

Miss Peters’ goofy husband finally loses his remarkable serenity and is fed up with her continued involvement with the neighbors.

“We wait three years for a honeymoon and spend it with a couple of spooks!”

Then we get another burst of comedy when Mr. Showalter’s Shreaded Wheat boss welcomes him. Played by the booming barrel of chuckles, Don Wilson, who was the announcer for many years on the Jack Benny radio show, the boss and his wife, played by Lurene Tuttle, escort them on a social whirl of Niagara Falls. More raincoats, more hiking up wet wooden stairways along wet cliffs, and finally, a fishing excursion on the Niagara River that has tragic consequences.

By the way, Don Wilson is not the only connection to Jack Benny we have in this movie, if you think about it. The model car Joseph Cotten builds is a Maxwell. Remember the Maxwell chauffeured by Rochester, and the sputtering sounds made by Mel Blanc?

There’s a lot more danger and intrigue from this point, but if I go on, I’ll ruin it for anybody who hasn’t seen it. Just a couple of items about this movie that are fun to note:

Will Wright, perennial movie night watchman and grumpy crooked suspicious fellow (remember his small but pivotal role in “The Blue Dahlia”? We’ll have to cover that movie one sometime or other.) Here he has a small role as a grumpy boat rental owner.

The Carillon featured in this movie was part of the Rainbow Tower on the Canadian border side, and was completed in 1947. “O, Promise Me” is played on it early in the movie, I suppose to refer to the honeymoon connotations of the Falls, but popular tunes are also heard on it, and in one scene, a secret message is sent to Marilyn Monroe in a song. At the time this movie was made, the Carillon was played manually by a carilloneur. Today, it’s all automated.

Come back Thursday for more fun at Niagara Falls through the perspective of other Hollywood films.

The Man with the Cloak - 1951

“The Man with a Cloak” (1951) is a deft melding of equal parts historical drama and film noir. Set in New York City in 1848, we follow the cloak (literally) and dagger schemes of a wealthy, aged, and dying rapscallion played with superb aplomb by Louis Calhern, and the sycophantic but secretly devious household staff.

Joe De Santis plays his thuggish-looking butler with the threat of violence beneath a thin veneer of servitude. Margaret Wycherly is the comically frumpy, ineffectual but surprisingly knowing cook and housekeeper. Barbara Stanwyck, yes, Barbara Stanwyck, is Louis Calhern’s hostess and most prized possession. She is a former actress whom Mr. Calhern has collected, now reduced to playing the role of devoted dogsbody to a man she despises. All three are tired of playing the waiting game for their exasperating master to die, and are plotting to hurry him along to his final reward.

Enter Leslie Caron, in her second film after “American in Paris”, with her wide waif’s eyes and determination to appeal to Louis Calhern for his financial support. She has just arrived from Paris, where her lover, who is Calhern’s grandson, leads a revolt against the current Orleans monarchy to establish the Second Republic. Grandpa Calhern, however is on the opposite political side, having fought for the Emperor, escaping to the United States when Napoleon was ousted. He has been estranged from his grandson, but his heart is softening as he realizes he has little time to live.

And Calhern, still the rogue, is captivated with Mademoiselle Caron, which drives Miss Stanwyck up a tree.

On the outskirts of this mélange, but soon to be an integral part, is Joseph Cotten, the man with the cloak. Though he gives his name to the affable bartender played by Jim Backus, we nevertheless come to understand early in the film that he is a man of mystery, and that this is likely not his real name.

In this film, Mr. Cotten plays a real historical figure. We get a few clues throughout the movie about his identity, but his name, finally revealed at the very end of the movie when his signature is scrawled on an I.O.U., may still come as a poignant surprise.

The movie’s film noir aspects include a score by David Raksin that at some points sounds almost like it would belong with a 1950 police drama. However, Raksin also wrote the 19th century-flavored tune “Another Yesterday” which Barbara Stanwyck sings. It’s her own voice, low and with limited range, but very smoothly and pleasantly done. Mr. Raksin also wrote the tune “Laura” for the other famous detective drama, so he’s no stranger to mood pieces.  We discussed his work in this previous post on "The Next Voice You Hear" (1950).

The bulk of the 19th century is carried on the shoulders of costumer Walter Plunkett. The costumes and sets seem both spot-on for the period.

The mood of Dickensian grimness and 20th century noir is woven together as well in the damp nights on cobblestone streets lit by gaslight, the layers of deception, the bungled plot that results in not one dead body but two, and a very crisp and literate script that concludes with a surprisingly wordless and violent fight scene.

Perhaps the signature of film noir is represented in this costume drama in the character played by Joseph Cotten, who is the original anti-hero, the man down on his luck, a slave to drink, who roams with bitter failure on his back, his own worst enemy, and yet who with cunning and cynical savvy, becomes Leslie Caron’s knight in shining armor.

Leslie Caron, however is not the typical damsel in distress. Here she plays a courageous young woman who is Cotten’s intellectual equal and together they solve a few riddles before the game is done. Mademoiselle Caron, in this and in many of her films, seems to exude a unique serenity, a confidence and sureness despite her youth that results in her characters looking completely natural. There is no staginess, despite the precision of her speech and her movement.

Mr. Cotten’s relationship with her is not romantic, nor is it particularly fatherly, but there is a comfortable confidentiality to their scenes together.

Another fine aspect of this film is that it manages to be an ensemble piece. Jim Backus, as the philosopher bartender, who remarks, “Some men leave good will. Other just a will,” is as important to the plot as the brutish butler, and as important as Miss Stanwyck, who with her customary professionalism, seems content to be a team player. She also has the guts to play a woman of a certain age with fading charms, who desperately uses everything left in her arsenal.

To be sure, however, she takes center stage easily when sparks fly in her scenes with Joseph Cotten, when the tension builds and the stakes are higher. They size each other up like they are about to have a knife fight instead of kiss. Stanwyck is as still and cold as a statue, playing the grand lady and every inch a woman of another era. One can see early shades of her Victoria Barkley character from “The Big Valley” television series here, only evil. And no horse. But, boy howdy (as Heath would say), she can descend a staircase with the best of them.

Cotten remarks of Louis Calhern, “He was a roué in the grand manner. A connoisseur of wine, women, and wit. Now he’s an ancient ruin with one arm paralyzed and one foot in the grave.” Cotten, who sees through just about everybody, makes cutting, sarcastic remarks, but is a foremost gentleman who after each dig mumbles a perfunctory, “Forgive me” in between sips of wine.

One of my favorites is when he brushes by the hateful butler and murmurs, “Try to get the murder out of your face.”

While Joseph Cotten and Leslie Caron are attempting to protect the old man’s life against his murderous household servants, the old man pulls a fast one on everybody, writes a new will, and then attempts to end his life with poison.

In the grand manner of a horror tale, the poison is consumed accidentally by another, while Calhern, silenced by another stroke, must watch helplessly.

In the end, the reluctant hero solves the riddles, and the Parisian waif may return home triumphant, and the household staff…they receive a most ironic and fitting legacy from their master.

Ruth Roman, Betsy Drake, and the SS Andrea Doria

Newspaper article from “The Boston Daily Globe” July 26, 1956, page 1.

In July 1956, the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria sank on the last night of its transatlantic voyage from Italy to New York City when another ocean liner, the MS Stockholm, collided with her.

It seems a watershed moment, almost as if morosely heralding the end of the leisurely elegance of ship travel (the first jet was to cross the Atlantic two years later), and the beginning of instant news as still photographers from  Life  magazine and others, newsreel cameramen, and reporters scrambled to the site to watch the vessel sink. Topping any newspaper “extras”, the film was developed and shown on television, a first.

Along with scores of immigrants making that journey, were the well-to-do and well-traveled, and two who made that fateful trip represented Hollywood. They were actresses Ruth Roman, (last seen here in our discussion of “Invitation” - 1951) and Betsy Drake. Their experiences on the last voyage of the Andrea Doria, along with the harrowing tales of many others, are told in Richard Goldstein’s fine book “Desperate Hours - The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria” (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY, 2003), from which much of the following information is taken.

Betsy Drake, and husband Cary Grant, had traveled on the Andrea Doria before, and other stars, as captured in the documentary “Secrets of the Dead - The Sinking of the Andrea Doria” (PBS 2006), include Kim Novak, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, and Tyrone Power.

Hollywood has given us a glimpse of the ship, inadvertently, in the final moments of “On the Waterfront” (1954) when Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are standing atop his apartment building. The ocean liner moving down the Hudson is the Andrea Doria, two years before the tragedy.

Her last voyage was to be a nine-day journey from Genoa, Italy to New York City in this era where travel was leisurely. Ocean liners had individual designs and décor (unlike planes which were stamped out pretty much one like another). Meals were extraordinary, and passengers dressed for dinner.

There were three classes on the Andrea Doria, 1st class, cabin class, and tourist class, each with its own gym, library, bar, dancing, movies, and swimming pools. The sumptuous ship was itself like an art museum with paintings and sculptures in airy solons with modern furniture, making it a most glamorous ship.

Ruth Roman, whose film “The Bottom of the Bottle” was released a few months previously, traveled with her three-year old son, Richard, called Dickie, as well as a traveling companion, Janet Stewart, and her son’s nanny.

Betsy Drake joined the voyage at Gibraltar, where she left her husband Cary Grant making a movie in Spain and pursuing Sophia Loren, much to his wife’s distress.

The trip enjoyed clear weather, and a peaceful crossing until its final night, when it entered the notoriously fog-bound waters south of Nantucket off New England. There were the usual last night farewell festivities, with champagne and streamers, and a roast beef dinner, and “Arrivederci Roma” played by Dino Massa and Orchestra.

Many cut the evening short to head back to their cabins and get some sleep before the early morning docking in New York. Betsy Drake did, never being much for socializing, and preferring to climb into her bunk in her cabin to read.

Ruth Roman and companion Janet Stewart enjoyed a last drink in the Belvedere Observation Lounge, while her son slept in the cabin a lower deck with his nanny minding him.

Some people watched the movie “Foxfire” (1955) with Jeff Chandler and Jane Russell.

A little after 11 o’clock that night, the MS Stockholm, leaving New York for Sweden, accidentally rammed the Andrea Doria. To some passengers it seemed like a dull thud, to others a great jolt, depending on where they were on ship, and then the screeching sound of ripping metal. Ultimately, 46 people on this ship, and 5 on the Stockholm, died.

Betsy Drake’s cabin on the Boat Deck shook, and she immediately put her stylish suit back on, grabbed a life vest, and headed for the upper deck. Her jewels, and a semi-autobiographic novel on which she’d been working, went down with the ship.

Ruth Roman ran from the lounge to get to her son, and ripped her form-fitting dress up the back so she could move better on the stairs that were already at a treacherous angle due to the listing of the ship on its side. She took son, and nanny, and life vests, and ditched her high heels to manage the climb to the upper deck.

Distress signals went out. First on the scene were a commercial freighter, Naval ships, and another grand ocean liner, the Ile de France.

The Ile de France had left New York City that morning and was heading to England, but turned around at the Morse Code distress call. 

The Doria was taking on water and ominously threatening to roll over. There were plenty of lifeboats on the Andrea Doria, a lesson well-learned from the Titanic disaster, but an unexpected problem arose. Because of the lurch of the ship onto its side, half the lifeboats could not be launched, and were useless.

Fortunately the Stockholm, though it had sustained severe damage to its bow, was in no danger of sinking. Several of its lifeboats were sent to fetch passengers from the Andrea Doria.

Ruth Roman found a deflated balloon left over from the party. She blew it up and amused her little boy with it, plunking him in a barricade of life vests and blankets on the deck, telling him they were having a picnic. Around them, scenes of chaos, courtesy, panic, selfishness, and selflessness.

The ship creaked, and slipped some more. About 2 a.m., Miss Roman and her gang slid down from the higher end of the deck to the lower side where they hoped to catch a rope to a lifeboat below. A young cadet sailor from the Andrea Doria took her son and strapped himself to Dickie, and climbed down a rope ladder to a waiting lifeboat.

The boat pulled away before Ruth Roman could climb in. The boy disappeared in the fog with a group of strangers. She, and nanny, and companion, waited for another opportunity to escape.

By 2 a.m., three hours after the collision, there were still around 1,000 people left on board the Andrea Doria awaiting rescue, the two Hollywood stars among them. No more division into classes; it was egalitarianism at its most miserable. Betsy Drake clung to the high side of the ship, took off her shoes for traction, and waited.

About that time the Ile de France approached. With sensitivity mixed with perhaps a certain Gallic élan, the captain ordered all the festive lights on the ship turned on so that the Doria survivors would see that help was coming. Among its strings of lights, there was the name lit up between its two funnels in great block letters: ILE DE FRANCE suddenly piercing the black gloom. More than reassuring, it seemed like something miraculous, a finale scene out of a movie.

Ruth Roman was taken in a lifeboat to the Ile de France. Her little boy was not here, and she could not find out to which ship among the seven rescue ships he had been taken.

Betsy Drake was also taken to the Ile de France. She had previously sailed on this ship under happier circumstances. (She had met Cary Grant when they sailed together on the RMS Queen Mary.) So many survivors were trying to send cables from the ship to loved ones, that she was unable to send one to Cary Grant.

Newspaper article from “The Boston Daily Globe” July 26, 1956, page 1.

Many of the passengers on the Ile de France donated clothing to the Doria survivors. A tennis professional named Eddie Hand gave Ruth Roman a pair of trousers, a white polo shirt, and woolen socks. A Life photographer who happened to be traveling with his family, brought her to rest in his cabin.

The Ile de France managed to scoop up 753 of the Andrea Doria’s passengers. When she entered New York Harbor, other boats blew whistles in tribute, and cheers rose up from the crowds gathering at the piers. Just after 5 p.m. on the 26th, she docked at Pier 88 off West 48th Street.

Betsy Drake, met at the pier by a friend, was still wearing her suit but also a pair of white sweat socks a sailor had given her. Many of the survivors had no shoes. Many of the immigrants had nothing left but the donated clothes on their backs.

Ruth Roman finally learned that her son had been taken to the MS Stockholm, which initially had trouble leaving the scene of the collision because its anchor chains had become tangled. It was still at sea when she arrived at the pier with the other Ile de France passengers.

Late the next morning, on the 27th, Miss Roman finally reunited with her son, as the Stockholm entered the Harbor. Now that the media had come of age, or at least catching on to its exploitive possibilities in the reporting of instant news, the moment she picked her child up and hustled through a mob of reporters and cameramen was captured with all its excitement and cruel lack of privacy.

Article from "The New York Times", July 26, 1956, p. 1

For both Hollywood stars, their connection to the sinking of the SS Andrea Doria would become a footnote of trivia, though Betsy Drake was reportedly traumatized by the incident for months. She ultimately left acting, and her husband, for a career in psychotherapy, particularly in the treatment of children and adolescents.

The most remarkable aspect of the sinking of the Andrea Doria is that so many were saved due to an impromptu, but terrifically successful rescue operation. For more on the event, stop by at my New England Travels blog tomorrow.

For Mr. Goldstein’s excellent book, including an excerpt describing the arrival on scene of the Ile de France, have a look here at his website.

A Stolen Life (1946)

“A Stolen Life” (1946) is one of those movies that does not seem to equal the sum total of its parts, but its parts are interesting. Break up the separate themes of this film and I suppose you could have at least three separate movies, so adventurous is the life of the unadventurous character Katie Bosworth, played by Bette Davis. She also plays Katie’s identical twin sister, Pat. Herein lies the main plot device that links the episodes in this film.

While I believe I can be objective and unprejudiced about most issues, I have to state right off that I detest “evil twin” stories. They are mind numbingly trite. I also find them insulting, preferring, like most twins, not to regard myself as a freak of nature.

It’s common to compare twins, to search out something that makes them different from the other. At best, it becomes a benign parlor game of visiting relatives marveling at different interests of the twins.

At worst, it becomes an onslaught of labeling each twin as the one who has better grades in school, which twin is more gifted athletically, which twin is actually better looking or at least has fewer flaws than the other twin. God help the twins if one, or even both of them, is handicapped. What God has put together, the world insidiously tries to pick apart.

In movies, there is a cruel assumption that one twin must have all the positive attributes and the other all the negative. I doubt writers and producers have any idea of the angst this causes in many twins who, if they are lucky, can laugh at the ridiculousness of such a theme, or if unlucky enough to be hit with insensitive comparisons, and self doubt, in real life, must be reminded yet again of the burden of being the “different” one in a society where movies tell them they are freaks automatically.

“A Stolen Life”, however, gives us a slightly more acceptable situation in that Pat is not really evil. She’s self-centered and shallow, but she’s not maniacal. Katie, too, is not exactly perfect. She is quite capable of wheedling her way into what she wants; it’s just that her wants are more simple and wholesome than Pat’s. Their relationship is not completely adversarial, and they seem to mostly live their lives apart. It could have been a film with more depth if it explored this more, as well as issues of co-dependency, instead of just hinging everything that happens to Katie based on her being the “good” twin.

What this film does have going for it is a whole lot of atmosphere, which I suspect is a draw for a lot of its fans. Taking place on an unnamed island off the Massachusetts coast, we get lots of majestic seascape, crashing waves on the rocky New England coastline, a lighthouse that figures prominently in the story, sailboats, a ship in a bottle, and a cozy cottage. Lobstah traps on the wh-a-a-a-h-f, ayuh.

The changeable sea can be dark and threatening at one moment, or gloriously beautiful and serene the next. It’s a great place to set a movie with moods and undercurrents. The isolation of the island can be a haven, or it can be a trap.

The other draw for this film is the remarkable technical achievement of filming Bette Davis as two people in the same scene. It’s done pretty well, and not overdone to the point of milking it. Most scenes have the two women separately, so we get used to thinking of them as different people. In the scenes where they are together, it is like electricity, a tantalizing achievement by the technical crew as well as Miss Davis.

The film starts with a map of New England, zeroing in on New Bedford, on Buzzard’s Bay. The Bay State has a lot of bays. I like movies with maps as much as I like movies with trains. Does it seem like Warner Bros. films have map graphics in them more than the other studios?

Bette Davis as Katie enters rushing from a taxi to meet the last steamer of the day leaving for “the island,” swinging her suitcases with the stickers on them. Not only are there lots of bays, there are lots of islands, but I guess since even a fictional name is not applied, we might infer she’s heading for Martha’s Vineyard. She’s supposed to reach there in two hours, so I don’t think it’s supposed to be Nantucket, which would be a bit longer journey.

Martha’s Vineyard is usually referred to by New Englanders as “The Vineyard.” It’s not a vineyard, it’s an island, but with so many islands, nobody would know what you mean if you said you were going to “the island”. I suspect Hollywood neither knew nor cared about this. And although there is a shot of her sailboat against some bluffs that look like a reasonable facsimile of the western part of Martha’s Vineyard called Gay Head or Aquinnah, the lighthouse in the movie (which is off a point called Dragon’s Head), does not resemble the real Gay Head/Aquinnah lighthouse). See my post on this lighthouse in my New England Travels blog for the real one.

So, right off we’re heading into a mix of fantasy and reality the way Bette heads right into the mysterious fogbank. I would love to know where some scenes in this film were shot. Some of the quaint New England seaport village stuff is obviously back lot, but there’s enough real coastline that teases us.

By the way, the airport scene was filmed at the actual Long Beach, California airport. Other movies were, too, and we’ll have more on that next week.

The lighthouse is particularly intriguing. Close-ups of its front door may be a partial replica built anywhere. Distant shots against a backdrop of glistening ocean could be a miniature model on a scaled down set. However, there are mid-range shots of Bette actually hopping off a boat, trotting up the dock up to the lighthouse, which makes me think at least some of this is an actual location. I’ve read somewhere that Laguna Beach, California was one filming location, but I’d love to know more detail on that. One of the other interesting aspects of this movie is how well they splice visuals together.

Katie, missing the ferry steamer, hitches a ride to “the island” from Glenn Ford, who is the lighthouse keeper’s assistant just about to leave the wharf with a motor launch full of supplies. On the way she sketches him, and we learn she is an artist, a woman who is sensitive and playful, yet down to earth.

Mr. Ford is handsome as can be here, a rugged but gentle and introspective chap who has forsaken a promising career as an engineer to work as Walter Brennan’s assistant at the lighthouse because of the simple life and freedom it offers. Mr. Brennan in his usual role of the comically crusty old codger doesn’t really have too much to do in this film, but he adds as much atmosphere as the lighthouse and the fog. His natural born eastern Mass. accent fits nicely with his role, no phony Yankee here.

For that matter, our Miss Davis hails from Lowell, Mass., so she seems to fit naturally among the all the pseudo New Englanders populating this faux community. We see her striding about in her casual trousers and flats, the wind tussling her hair carelessly, or in jeans and sneakers, and sweater, doing away with Hollywood glamour in this role. She seems pleasantly authentic, a woman/actress on her own turf.

With the lighthouse scenes, we might also muse on the film’s efforts to recapture a romantic past, or at least to ignore the realities of the present. We see painted above the door of Walter Brennan’s lighthouse “U.S. Lighthouse Service”. When this film was made in 1946, there was no U.S. Lighthouse Service. This government bureau was ended in 1939, capping an era throughout the 1920s and 1930s when more and more lighthouses were being automated, discontinuing the need for lighthouse keepers. In 1939, the U.S. Coast Guard took over the management of lighthouses. This post-war movie continues the romantic fantasy of the lonely intrepid lighthouse keeper, ignoring the possibility that Walter Brennan would have been downsized.

We are not given much back story on Katie and Pat, except that Charlie Ruggles is their cousin and their guardian. They are visiting him in a cottage on “the island” which he has rented for the summer. Mr. Ruggles is ever the delight in his films, with that finely drawn mixture of kindly bumbler and sharp-as-a-tack gentleman of the old school.

Katie relates that this is her first time to “the island”. However, she’s learned to sail somewhere, and she wastes no time taking out her sailboat to visit Walter Brennan at the lighthouse. She wants to paint his portrait and bribes him with a ship’s model he covets to do so, but it is a ploy so she can spend more time with Glenn Ford, with whom she has fallen in love.

(Small point here, but I like the way she handles the paintbrush, deftly rolling it in her fingers, changing her grip on it as she concentrates on the detail of her portrait of Mr. Brennan. It looks like she knows what she’s doing.)

We see that, far from being the perfect “good” twin, Katie can be cunning, duplicitous, and secretive, but we can also see that she has a very understanding heart. She earns our sympathy from the beginning with her confessions of loneliness and her quiet charm.

The movie pulls a nice trick on us by not revealing Katie has a twin until she enters her bedroom at the cottage after a date with Glenn Ford, to find her sister Pat lazily lounging in a chair. Pat peeks her head around to notice Katie in the foreground of the shot, still in the half shadow. Her voice is familiar. They chat companionably, and in another moment, Bette Davis walks over to the chair where her sister sits, turns on the lamp. GASP! There are two of her! Then she hands her twin a match so the sister can smoke a cigarette. One senses this shot was most gleefully done by everybody involved.

Notice however, that Katie does not light Pat’s cigarette, but reaches down to put the match in Pat’s hand, which rests on the arm of the chair. They are cleverly covering the joined exposures here. In another moment, Katie is in bed, and Pat flops on the other side to chat a bit more, seeming to pick at Katie’s sleeve as she speaks. Another good matching of exposures here. There’s not too much of this in the film, it would detract from the story, but it’s a lot of fun to watch.

Pat, we discover, is more worldly than Katie, more sophisticated, bored with “the island” and her wealthy friends in Hyannis on Cape Cod. Perhaps it is her boredom which leads her to make a play for Glenn Ford, tricking him into thinking she is Katie.

Mr. Ford is a good sport at first when he realizes he’s been fooled. Then decides it is Pat he really loves. Considering we are set up to believe he and Katie are meant for each other, and we are also set up to accept Pat as a self-centered man trap, it seems a bit of a stretch that his swell guy would fall for what seems so obviously artificial to us. But, fall he does, preferring as he says “the frosting” rather than the cake, as he also says most men will.

“Must you always let that sister of yours get ahead of you?” Charlie Ruggles demands of Katie, wanting her to fight for what she wants. She avoids being competitive with her twin (more could be made of this), but she determinedly side steps the bridal bouquet Pat later merrily tosses to her. We see Katie has a recalcitrant side.

Pat’s conquest of Mr. Ford happens rather swiftly at the local barn dance. New Englanders, you see, love square dancing. You can tell by how many Hollywood movies have New England square (sq-way-uh) dances in barns or at the town hall. We see it in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) (where we also see our penchant for riding in sleighs, see this previous blog post) and “Summer Stock” (1950), and so we have to have one here. A good old b-a-a-h-n dance. The other thing we do with b-a-a-h-ns is turn them into playhouses for the local summer stock company. Like in “Summer Stock”. Summer stock in New England is sometimes referred to as The Barn Circuit (or The Straw Hat Circuit).

In fact, our Bette Davis in real life got her start in such a barn at the Cape Playhouse on Cape Cod, where she was an usher before graduating to bit parts. Have a look here in my Tragedy and Comedy in New England blog. (Come to think of her, her hometown of Lowell now has a first-rate professional regional theatre, the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. She’d be pleased. Except it’s not in a barn. Uh, that’s b-a-a-h-n.)

By the way, Mr. Lippincott, who owns the b-a-a-h-n, is played by silent screen actor Monte Blue, according to the IMDb website. Other silent screen stars have uncredited roles as well, including Snub Pollard, who also shows up at the b-a-a-h-n dance. He appeared in eight movies in 1946, all in bit parts that must have kept him eating. Creighton Hale is also listed as an extra.

Pat sweeps Glenn Ford off his feet at the b-a-a-h-n dance, and they get married. Katie heads back to the family mansion in New York to brood and paint. She is not alone. Dane Clark shows up to brood and paint, and bully her with insults, which Kate takes with astonishing serenity.

Here is where we have a branching off of plot that could make a separate movie. Dane Clark is a starving artist of, we are told by him, great talent. His role is similar to John Garfield, the dismissive pianist in “Four Daughters” (1938), see this previous post, who was also poor and talented, with a really lousy attitude.

Mr. Clark, however, does not seem to have the same knack John Garfield had for drawing our sympathy. Clark’s character is without any humor about others or himself. His arrogant proletariat rudeness toward Katie makes her seem far more a doormat than she ever was when Pat stole her boyfriend. A person living in the shadow of a more glamorous or accomplished sibling is a common story, in the movies and in real life, but here we wobble uncertainly as to what is the cause of Katie’s malaise.

Dane Clark’s explanation is simple and cruel, “You two disliked each other from the time you were born. It’s a perfectly natural antagonism.” This presumptuous and ignorant conclusion is what drives most “evil twin” stories and is perhaps one of the other reasons I dislike them so much.

Mr. Clark, who seems to thrive on antagonism himself, criticizes her painting, making a further accusation, “I bet you’re not even a woman.”

When she asks him for clarification, he sneers like a little boy who has thrown a rock at a bird and delights in having hit it. “That always gets ‘em,” he says.

From the time Pat is said to have “frosting” to the time Mr. Clark indicates Katie is not a “ball of fire”, we are seemingly meant to infer that Katie’s reticence is more than just a meek acceptance of stolen boyfriends and angry artists. She may not be sexually experienced, which may explain Clark’s ridicule. She is hardly shy; it is she who pursues Glenn Ford, but she is not sexually aggressive in the way Pat is, and perhaps we are being told this is one of her flaws.

According to the Hollywood on Twins Playbook, if being oversexed is Pat’s character trait, then Katie must be afraid of sex, for as we seem to be told, tiresomely and yet again, that twins, individually, are not whole people, that only together they have all the attributes of a human being. Individually, they are only fragments of a person. When the egg in the womb splits their chances at ever being a complete person evaporates.

There’s probably a lot more dime store Freud in here that I’m missing, but you get the idea.

But, Katie, passive or not, seems to impart a kind of courage, a stoic survivor’s attitude, bearing up under Pat’s callousness, under Walter Brennan’s blustering, under Dane Clark’s insults, and even under Glenn Ford’s hideously thoughtless request that she help him pick out intimate apparel for Pat’s present on their birthday.

The older men in this film are more interesting than the younger men. Ford and Clark act like pinheads hijacked by their own insensitivity, who are either manipulating or being manipulated.

Katie seems to get some of her moxie back when she efficiently rebuffs Dane Clark’s rough advances. He actually looks crushed and his scowl departs for about two seconds. Unfortunately, she also declares herself a third-rate artist in comparison to his talent, and we must wonder if she is giving up her art because she cannot be the best.

Katie heads back to “the island”, unexpectedly finds Pat there also seeking refuge, and the twins companionably head to the wharf to go sailing, striding through town in their jeans like a Doublemint commercial. This is a long shot with Bette and a double. The split-screen close-up was done in the studio with rear-screen projection.

Pat has become outdoorsy like her sister, perhaps feels more than she actually expresses of her regret in marrying Glenn Ford, and they get caught in a storm. I realize this entire post has been a spoiler, as all my posts are, but if you don’t want to know what happens next, you’d better go down to the corner for a newspaper. Bring me back a candy bar, any kind.

Did they leave? I thought I heard the screen door slam. Okay. For those of you who have remained, I’m going to assume you know I’m going to tell you that one of them drowns. It’s Pat. Here’s where the plot splits again and could be the story for another entirely separate movie.

The scenes of the twins sailing in the storm are skillfully done, with Bette and a double alternately blocked by the swinging boom. She, and the double, had to film this scene separately as Pat, and as Katie, being battered by wind and soaked by waves. It’s all stitched together quite well, even more impressive when you realize it was filmed on a set.

Katie, who though distressed at the loss of her sister does not express anywhere near enough the realistic anguish of the situation, impulsively decides to say nothing when she is mistaken for Pat. Her rescuers think it was Katie who drowned. Katie plays along, thinking this is her chance for happiness being the wife of Glenn Ford.

(The scene with the beleaguered sailboat smashing against the rocks of the lighthouse ledge reminds me of “Portrait of Jennie” (1949). You wonder for a moment if Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones are going to scramble over the rocks.)

Assuming the identify of a deceased person is also not a new plot idea to film, but using identical twins makes an interesting twist because Katie now moves about incognito, disguised in plain sight. As such, she is comforted by Walter Brennan and others who tell her that her sister Katie was such a wonderful person. It’s like being at her own wake. Very eerie and emotional, and more could have been done with this.

Even Dane Clark displays his own belligerent sense of grief when he shows her that he has painted a portrait of Katie from memory.

Now, Katie must run an obstacle course of fitting into Pat’s life. The easiest part is making Pat’s dog, Mike, accept her even though Katie doesn’t smell like Pat. Mike is not fooled. Mike is the smartest character in this movie.

But, she gets around him with treats. Even Mike, it seems, can be bought.

However, Katie’s game of pretend comes crashing down on her head when irony akin to an O. Henry story slams her in the chops. Glenn Ford wants to divorce her because Pat has had affairs with other men. Katie runs back to safety of “the island”, where Charlie Ruggles figures out her secret, because he’s almost as smart as Mike. We are given one of those slapped-on happy endings because somebody must have noticed they were running out of film and it was time to end the movie.

It’s still a fun movie, for all the tangled plot threads, but especially for the technical achievements, and the atmosphere. It makes an attempt to carve out an old stock melodrama using film technology and good old film theatrics. But there’s a story missing in all this contrivance. It’s the twinship that never gets told, that Hollywood never seems to get a handle on.

And I’m not even going to mention the Carol Burnett parody.

For a look at the striking scene where Bette Davis meets up with herself, have a look below. (Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page and pause the music.)