NFR Project: 'Sergeant York' (1941)

 

NFR Project: “Sergeant York”

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Harry Chandlee, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Howard E. Koch

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: William Holmes

Premiere: July 2, 1941

134 min.

He was a modern Cincinnatus – a man who left his plow to go to war and then returned quietly to it. Alvin York was a real person, one awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery above and beyond the call of duty during the First World War. In a single engagement, he killed 20 German soldiers and captured 132 more. By himself.

Oddly, though, he was initially a pacifist, and this film adaptation (and embroiderment on) the diaries of York takes great pains to mark the journey of a man from conscientious objector to war hero.

The film is both an epic and a spiritual journey. Howard Hawks directed, and his ingenious approach to the material is textbook Hollywood: the expansion of an ordinary person’s life into that of a mythic character. None other than Gary Cooper played York. Cooper’s aw-shucks demeanor and good looks, combined with his superb underplaying (in every scene he’s in he draws the eye because he’s listening fully) made him into an American icon. He personified the way America liked to think of itself. Who better to play the ultimate American warrior?

The film starts in backwoods Tennessee, where York rides around as a young ruffian, drinking hard liquor and shooting his initials into tree trunks. Walter Brennan is his minister, Margaret Wycherly, his impossibly stoic mother. He is cheated on a land deal, and goes to deal death to his opponent when he is literally struck by lightning, as was the Apostle Paul, and gets religion.

York feels that the Bible teaches that killing is wrong. When war comes, he tries to register as a conscientious objector, but is refused. He then goes into the service, willingly. He is launched into a mixed bag of fellow soldiers, who are bemused by his back woods ignorance. He then, practiced from shooting turkey in the hills, proves a dead shot and gets advanced to teach his skills, provoking the spiritual crisis within him that that is resolved by his settling on serving his country.

We are swept into the defining battle that made York’s reputation. Hawks stages war brilliantly, and this rendition of the Meuse-Argonne offensive of October of 1918 plays like the real thing. William Holmes’ Oscar-winning editing makes the battle scenes riveting. Cooper as York seems to be in touched with a special type of Providence as he advances through the bullet-pocked terrain alone, picking off men without a thought.

York is of course lauded for his actions, receives a parade, and get commercial offers. He turns thejm all down and goes home to Tennessee to marry his sweetheart (Joan Leslie). And everybody chips in and buys him that farm he always wanted. The End.

It’s a propaganda film. While this film opened in July, 1941, the Germans invaded Russia. England had fought the Battle of Britain the year previous. It seemed more and more apparent that the U.S. was going to go to war. The film espouses a deep devotion to the concept of the defense of American democratic principles. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” intones Cooper on a rocky crag overlooking his beloved valley as he reads the history of America. And like flicking a switch, he’s in for participating, and he does so in the most skillful way. He’s inspired. He doesn’t suffer a scratch.

And he comes home, and he’s the same nice guy he was when he left.  Unimpressed by the bright lights and big city, he returns to his country roots. He, a farmer, achieves acts of valor and gets everything he wants just for being so brave. And he doesn’t get hurt. It’s a loaded statement, a mythic statement.

This all is largely true, but it’s been sculpted to fit the exigencies of the Hollywood biography. It’s bound to have some fibs in it. But in real life, York was a hero and a good man; he used the proceeds from his movie deal to fund a Bible school in his home town.

Cooper is straight-up doing the will of God in this movie. He is a secular saint, all the more for being a spiritually redeemed character. He proves that you can be a Christian and a warrior at the same time – a message American audiences of the time were ready to hear.  It was a hit. Cooper won the Oscar for Best Actor. It inspired men to enlist.

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

NFR Project: 'The Maltese Falcon' (1941)

 

NFR Project: “The Maltese Falcon”

Dir: John Huston

Scr: John Huston

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Thomas Richards

Premiere: Oct. 18, 1941

101 min.

The list of directors that have made perfect feature films on their first try is short. It is even rarer for these wunderkinds to continue to create engaging work. Well, writer/director John Huston did it with his first film, The Maltese Falcon, and kept making fascinating films, 36 more, over the next 46 years.

The story was adapted from Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel of the same name – two films prior to this tried to adapt it, with indifferent success. Huston was by this time a go-to screenwriter in Hollywood. He relished the opportunity to make the film he wrote as he saw it in his mind. He studiously planned out the entire film, creating storyboards for every scene. He worked carefully with his cast, shooting almost entirely in sequence. This kept the players on the same page, and added immensely to the suspense inherent in the screenplay.

This definitive film noir gives us a world in which everyone is suspect. “Everyone has something to conceal,” says the protagonist, private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). Huston’s selection of Bogart was inspired – after years of knocking around as a supporting player, Bogie finally fell into the persona that would carry him through the rest of his career. The smart, cynical, world-weary professional, Sam Spade is the archetypical gumshoe – a man who has seen everything and has a low estimation of the integrity of his fellow human beings. He is rarely disappointed. He seems to subsist on cigarettes and whiskey. He is a dark knight who slickly navigates the slimy contours of the urban jungle. He discovers hidden truths and makes wrongs right. Thanks to this film, Bogie became a hard-bitten movie hero.

The story is as convoluted as you might expect a mystery film to be. Spade takes on the case of a woman, Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) searching for her sister. Spade’s partner Archer (Jerome Cowan) goes out to help the lady, and gets murdered for his pains. Now Spade is determined to find out the truth from the lady, who turns out to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy. She is after a “black bird” – the fabled Maltese Falcon, a statuette encrusted with jewels, crafted in centuries past.

Her opponents include the Fat Man, Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet, marvelously malevolent in his first film) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), an effeminate schemer. They are assisted by the psychotic young gunman Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Together, this quartet bedevils Spade as they all seek to deceive each other and get ot the Falcon first.

The Falcon’s atmosphere is gloomy – everything is shot indoors or at night. Huston plays fair with the story – we rarely know more than Spade does at any given moment, and we are kept guessing as to the outcome until literally the final five minutes. Spade is tempted, time and again, to make a crooked choice, but each time he manages to walk a straight line without getting himself killed. Spade has a perverse integrity that means he lives by his own code, come what may. He is in society but not of it – his bleak take on humanity isolates him from his fellow man, making him an outlier. In this world, Spades are necessary and expendable at the same time. By film’s end, however, only Spade is standing. His caution and intelligence preclude him from being caught up in the greed and need for manipulation that infects the others onscreen.

Falcon boasts ingenious plotting, exquisite dialogue, and inspired performances. It has something more than this, however. There is something melancholy and affecting about the proceedings. Huston has captured a vibe that will resonate through countless succeeding examples of the film noir genre. This is simultaneously the starting point and most perfect example of the noir sensibility.

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

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.