NFR Project: 'The Lady Eve' (1941)

 

NFR Project: “The Lady Eve”

Dir: Preston Sturges

Scr: Preston Sturges

Pho: Victor Milner

Ed: Stuart Gilmore

Premiere: Feb. 25, 1941

94 min.

It’s tremendously filthy and tremendously heartfelt at the same time. Preston Sturges was at the height of his powers when he made this movie, an outrageous, improbable farce that plays with the ideas of real and ideal. It’s a perfect little movie.

Sturges’ screenplays are essays on morals and manners, universals that everyone could appreciate. He made highbrow comedies for middle-class audiences. And he still believed in love.

In this film, the putative Adam, destined to fall, in this case from ignorance and prejudice, for his Eve is Charles “Hopsie” Pike, scion of an ale fortune (“Pike’s Ale – The Ale That Won for Yale.”). He’s a quiet young chap who’s just spent a year up the Amazon studying snakes. Henry Fonda is oddly quiet as the seemingly impassive Hopsie, who’s hornswoggled at every turn.

His Eve is Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a professional gambler, a card shark who’s working the cruise ship he finds himself on with her father, the “Colonel” (an affecting Charles Coburn) and their manservant/accomplice Gerald (Melville Cooper). Hopsie and Jean fall in love, but then his zealous and cynical aide de camp/bodyguard Muggsy (a hilarious William Demarest) tells him the truth about her. He turns on Jean, and spurns her.

She vows revenge. With her pal, scammer Sir Alfred (Eric Blore, perfect) she infiltrates high society as the Lady Eve Sidwich, and artfully seduces the awkward Hopsie. Despite Muggsy’s protests that “it’s the same dame,” the two get married. Then, as their train hurtles through the night of their honeymoon, “Eve” confesses a multitude of previous couplings, until Hopsie is forced out into the rain and the mud.

Sturges gives us a universe peopled with distinct characters. The Lady Eve sports dozens of characters, each of whom possesses a personality, many of whom worked for Sturges as a kind of stock company through many of his films.

Early in the film, someone holding a blurry, absurd object crosses Fonda on the boat deck. Fonda shoots him a look. Minutes later, Fonda is in the same position, and the same guy crosses again, holding something different. “Good morning,” he says. We never see him again. Sturges plants jokes everywhere, if you look sharp.

His sharp writing, combined with his expertly chosen casts and venturesome story-telling – we follow a running conversation that moves along the deck of the ship in an elegant tracing shot; the climax of Jean’s seduction of Hopsie comes in a ridiculously prolonged close-up of the two, entwined on her cabin floor.

The gap between the ideal and the real is apparent from the beginning. Hopise is leaving the Amazon, bearing a rare reptile; his servant Muggsy turns to a native girl and says, “So long, Lulu. I’ll send you a postcard.” Sturges deflates Freudian conceits throughout, emphasizing snakes and giving us a sexual confession in a train roaring through a tunnel. Young Pike is smug, entitled, isolated; as in all screwball comedies; he needs an active heroine who will step in and change his life, usually through the strategy of chaos. Jean, the knowing and intelligently manipulative leading lady, is impersonated perfectly by Stanwyck. Her frequently passionate musings are delectably delivered.

Jean/Eve refuses to consent to a divorce. Hopsie boards another cruise ship. Jean and company follow him. Overjoyed to see Jean again, he races with her to her cabin.

“And I have no right to be in your cabin. I’m married,” Hopsie says.

She replies, “But so am I, darling. So am I.”

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Maltese Falcon.

NFR Project: 'Kannapolis, N.C.' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Kannapolis, N.C.”

Dir: H. Lee Waters

Premiere: 1941

137 min.

Between 1936 and 1942, the enterprising director H. Lee Waters made a series of films he called Movies of Local People. He went to at least 117 towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and filmed anyone he could get in front of a camera. Then he developed the results and displayed them at the local theater before the feature film, for a cut of the ticket sales.

It was a gimmick. Presumably, if you were captured for all time on film, you and your family would pay to see yourselves on the local silver screen. Curiosity was the motivator. It was a novelty that pretty much all the small-town, middle-class “representative” citizens could enjoy.

Waters was not a documentary filmmaker. The only examination of the underclass in the films was his documentation of some parts of African-American life in these little places, which are now known as “town portrait” or “town documentary” films. The genre existed from the mid-1910s through the early 1950s, when it is arguable that affordable home-movie equipment took over the market. It’s a weird subset of cinema that simply seeks to get as many people posed or captured on the run, shot with a home-movie level of technical competence.

In color and in black and white, silently, Waters films Kannapolis crowds on the streets, marching bands, schoolchildren, babies, soda jerks, cops, mill workers. “When the Daltons Rode” is on at the local movie theater. A man demonstrates a refrigerator. People smile, people wave, people duck out of the way. Some studiously ignore the goings-on. Hundreds are frozen in time for the brief moments in which they pass by the camera. The editor, impatient, keeps cutting, cutting, cutting, moving without let or hinder on from one face to another, desperately thirsty.

It’s inadvertently valuable for capturing the state of vernacular society at that time and in that place. It’s difficult to estimate how many of these director/entrepreneurs there were. Not much of their output survives. Here’s home movies for the masses, a snapshot of days gone by.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Lady Eve.

 

NFR Project: 'How Green Was My Valley' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘How Green Was My Valley”

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Philip Dunne

Pho: Arthur C. Miller

Ed: James B. Clark

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1941

118 min.

Winner of Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography Oscars in 1941, How Green Was My Valley is a moving epic – one of John Ford’s most emotional films.

The film is adapted from the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn. It’s the story of the Morgan family, Welsh coal miners in the late 19^th century. In their small village, they live and go down to work in the galleries underground. (The entire village and mine were created on 80 acres in a California valley.)

They are a poor, exploited lot, and the story is unremittingly tragic. The narrator (voiced here by the great Irving Pichel) is leaving the valley, and reflects on his childhood there. He is Huw, played by Roddy McDowell in his first He  film, at just the age of 12. He has five older brothers, who all work at the mine, and a sister, Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) who keeps house with their mother (Sara Allgood). The father of the family (Donald Crisp in an Oscar-winning performance) is stern but loving, and rules benevolently over his family.

Tragedies abound. The men go on strike; the father opposes it and the brothers move out. The miners mutter against the father; the mother defiantly addresses a meeting in the winter and falls into a river with Huw; both are severely injured, Huw more seriously. It takes the intervention of the kind minister Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) to inspire Huw to walk again.

Two of the brothers lose their jobs, and move to America. Angharad and Mr. Gruffydd fall in love, but he won’t ask for her hand as he’s too poor. She is soon courted by the mine owner’s son, and reluctantly marries him.

Another brother dies in a mining accident, after which his wife gives birth. Huw is picked on in school, and is taught boxing. He beats his tormentor, which leads his malicious schoolteacher to beat him. It takes the interest of a couple of ne’er-do-wells to stop the schoolmaster from running Huw’s life. Huw declines university and goes to work in the mine, supporting his dead brother’s sister-in-law and infant.

Meanwhile, Angharad returns to the valley alone. Gossips speak of the love between her and Mr. Gurffydd, and finally he is expelled from the post. That same evening, another mine disaster strikes, and Huw’s father is dead. The film ends with Huw clutching his father’s body, covered with soot and despair. (A brief glimpse of all the men in the family meeting in heaven tries to lift the film out of its gloom.)

Ford is unparalleled here in his reliance on close-ups, his camera lingers on the subtle reactions of all the performers. Ford loves to gaze into the souls of the actors, and we watch as the tragedies challenge them, or grind them down. The script masterfully tames the material, and Arthur C. Miller’s cinematographic is luminescent.

A convincing portrayal of a vanished world and life.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Kannapolis, N.C.