Ward Cleaver's World War II heroism

Ward Cleaver sat sipping coffee with his wife, June, in their suburban kitchen and mentioned, “When I was in the Seabees, I got into a fight over a picture of Lana Turner.”  

It’s not something we expect of Ward, but little droplets of his life through the series, before he came The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and his children’s go-to guy for getting them out of trouble, were fascinating.  More than his children realized, he was the epitome of the Greatest Generation and what happened to them after the war.

This is my entry into the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon, hosted by Terence over at his wonderful A Shroud of Thoughts blog.  I look forward to this blogathon every year because it gives me a chance to showcase performances by actors from classic films who took guest spots, or sometimes took their entire careers, over to the small screen.

Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, the father on Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), was one such actor who began his film career in 1940 (we covered his role in The Blue Dahlia – 1946 here), and played a variety of supporting roles in big films, starring roles in B-movies, and lots of uncredited parts.  He was in his late forties when Leave it to Beaver gave him steady work, made him a household name, and for generations afterward, made him the number one dad on TV.

One of the most well-remembered shows of the era—largely because succeeding generations have grown up with reruns, featured Beaumont, Barbara Billingsley as his wife, June; Tony Dow played their older boy, Wally… “and Jerry Mathers as The Beaver.”  The show was well-written, often quite funny, and Jerry Mathers was probably one of the most natural child actors of the day.  The boys were average kids revealing the world of postwar childhood to their occasionally baffled elders, and each episode ended with some kind of lesson—but often not for the boys, rather, for their parents.  This represented a sea change in TV sitcoms and reflected the growing importance, and perhaps coddling, of The Baby Boomers.  (Though to be accurate, Wally, who was supposed to be 13 years old when the show started in 1957, would have been born during World War II, and therefore, technically not a Boomer.)

When television dawned in the living rooms of (some) American homes at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, popular shows were geared more to the Greatest Generation, the ones who were buying the TV sets.  After a day of work, they would unwind with comic Milton Berle on The Texaco Star Theater, Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners, or the brilliant, Your Shows of Shows with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and a cast that couldn’t be beat.

These were mostly sketch comedies, but even The Honeymooners, which could be considered a sit-com, did not feature children in the cast.  These were shows for grownups, the stars were their contemporaries, and though kids could enjoy them, the shows did not spotlight their experience, their world.

As the fifties progressed, more family sit-coms appeared, but even Make Room for Daddy, centered more on star Danny Thomas than on his children.  One could say Robert Young of Father Knows Best, at least got equal time with his kids, mostly.  By the time Leave it to Beaver appeared in the fall of 1957, television began more and more to showcase, and to market to, the young Boomers.

Hence, we have Ward Cleaver, a likable, intelligent man with a likable intelligent wife, taking a backseat to the adventures of their kids. We don’t know much about Ward and June.  Hints drip out once in a while about her boarding school, his growing up on a farm, their meeting in college.  They have social engagements only once in a great while with friends they otherwise never discuss.  

The wonderful boor Fred Rutherford, who works in Ward’s office, is seen more as a pain in the neck than a friend. 

Even Beaver and Wally never seem to know much about their parents and are always surprised they had a life before the kids came along.  The Boomers usurped the Greatest Generation in part due to their parents’ doting on the kids, and also living in the moment after what were likely difficult childhoods in the Great Depression and the world blowing up when they came of age.  They were forward-looking people, who wanted orderly quiet now, and as a result, unless their children were persistent in asking about “the old days,” they might never know.

As a child, I liked the boys and their exploits—though it annoyed me that they were such terrific liars.  Nice boys, to be sure, but in each episode, they lied about something and thereby needing to be rescued by dad.  Unlike their parents, we got to meet all the kids’ friends (and most of them really funny).  Oddly, all the kids’ friends were backstabbers.  Truly, a strange dynamic at work here.  (Although all Larry Mondello would have to do would be to enter a room and I’d crack up.)

I was drawn more to the adults.  I even liked Fred Rutherford.  I liked Mrs. Rayburn, the principal.  I still do.  She’s one of my favorites on the show.

I especially liked Ward and June.  I think I felt sorry for him with his several reminisces of having a strict, somewhat mean-sounding father, and so he went over backwards to try to be lenient with his sons.  Ward actually resembled my father a little, though in personality was nothing like him.  They were both tall, lean, and had the same haircut.  My father served in the South Pacific during World War II, and so did Ward. 

Ward served in the U.S. Naval Construction Battalions, called “CB” or Seabees.  Formed in 1942, it supported Navy and Marines, and is now the U.S. Naval Construction Forces.

Ward’s mention of getting into a fight over a photo of Lana Turner was in season 6, episode 29, “Eddie's Sweater.” 

In “The Visiting Aunts” (December 18, 1958, season 2, episode 13),  Ward recollects wryly of Aunt Martha and her friend, whose husband is always referred to as “The General,” came to their wedding and was surprised that June was marrying a Seabee, as if that wasn’t good enough for an Army man.

In “The Perfect Father” (March 14, 1958, season 1, episode 22), Ward puts up basketball hoop over the garage for the boys.  He muses “I must have put up hundreds of those all over the South Pacific when I was in the Seabees.”  June teasingly responds, “I guess we all contributed to victory in our own way.”

June, we learn in “Mother’s Day Composition” (April 30, 1960, season 3, episode 31), volunteered at a USO during the war and served coffee and donuts. This was not quite as impressive as Beaver’s friend Richard’s mother, who was a WAC private, then a corporal, and eventually became a captain. In “Kite Day” (June 10, 1961, season 3, episode 37) we learn his father flew a P-38 in the war.  Beaver scoffs, “Ah, those are so old, they don’t even make models of them anymore.”

So much for past glory.  Even Eddie Haskel (Ken Osmond was great in this memorable role) suffered shame when in “Summer in Alaska” (May 9, 1963, Season 6, episode 33), Wally recalls that when they were kids, Eddie bragged that his father was a three-star general in the war, but they found out otherwise when they discovered Mr. Haskel’s air raid helmet in a closet, proving he was a civilian air raid warden during the war. 

During the war, anyone doing his bit was considered patriotic, but to the kids growing up later in peacetime, only the most heroic actions would be worth bragging about.  We come to “Beaver’s Hero” (April 9, 1959, season 2, episode 28), when the boys discover the secrets of their father’s wartime footlocker.

Mr. Willet (played by Wendell Holmes) is Beaver’s substitute teacher (Miss Landers is sick) and he tells the class about the world war. Wally asks The Beav, “Which world war?”

Beaver replies, “You mean there was a lot of them?”

“There’s two of them that I heard about.”

Beaver responds, “I think it was the one that President Eisenhower was in.”

“Yeah, that’s the one Dad was in, too.”

Beaver asks his mother, “Was Dad and Mr. Eisenhower in the same war?”

June says yes and Beaver replies, “It’s something having your father in the same war with the president.”

This, his ignorance, I found stretching credulity as a child, as those of us who had parents in World War II certainly knew about the war, because being only 20 or 25 years ago was still part of the social memory.  Also, we watched Combat when we were kids and took turns playing Vic Morrow and Rick Jason.  I can recall wearing plastic World War II-style helmets and throwing plastic grenades over a fence into a neighbor’s yard, and the bunch of us running to “hit the dirt” on someone else’s front lawn, covering our heads and making “ka-pow” noises.  When it was safe to stand, we had to climb over the fence into the neighbor’s yard to retrieve the plastic grenades.  Something which I never saw Vic Morrow or Rick Jason do, by the way.

So there were times I found Wally and Beav’s self-involved ignorance rather frustrating.  But, to continue…

Back in class, Judy Hensler (played by Jeri Weil), brags that her father was a hero who flew his own plane in World War II.  Gilbert’s uncle was a Marine sergeant who was “almost a general.”

(I like how the teacher calls the kids by their surnames and “ladies and gentlemen.”  I didn’t run into that until college.)

Beaver tells the kids his father was a hero, that he has a trunk in the garage full of guns and grenades, “and all kinds of stuff he took off of enemy guys.”  Judy accuses him of being a liar, which makes her very smart, because he is.

Wally and Beaver look at the trunk in the garage with the Seabees insignia. Their mascot emblem was a fighting bumblebee with a machinegun, a wrench, and a hammer.  Wally assumes the reason the bumblebee is carrying a hammer is so that if they “miss the guys with the gun, then they can hit him with a hammer.” There are photos of young June pasted on the lid of the footlocker, starlet photos of Barbara Billingsley.  Beaver has to be told that this is his mother and that she was ever that young.

He finds a T-square and thinks it’s a sword.  There is a tripod for surveying, that he thinks is the “bottom of some kind of machine gun,” and a transit, which Beaver thinks is a gun barrel.  With each item, Beaver spins a fantasy narrative, but Wally has his doubts, and Ward interrupts. He laughs at an old photo of himself the boys have dug out of the trunk.  He and a buddy, both bearded, are wearing grass skirts on some South Pacific island base and mugging for the camera.  My dad had a couple silly photos of his pals, too. He sent a grass skirt home to my mother.  I still have it. Generations have used it for costumes. My sister labeled the bag it’s in, “Mother’s Grass Skirt,” which, provocative-sounding, makes me laugh every time I see it.

“How many guys did you kill in the war, Dad?”  Beaver asks, finally getting to what is the meat of the matter for him.

Ward tells him he didn’t kill anyone. Explains the Seabees, and that his primary job was building airfields and bases.

Beaver wonders, disappointed, “Gee, Dad, was all you did in the war was see if the ground was level?”

Ward answers, with a somewhat weary tone in his voice, remembering, “I sure did a lot it, Beaver.  Acres and acres.”

Now Beaver has a dilemma; his friends will know he is a liar, and also find out that his dad was not a war hero, which is probably the bigger shame for him.  He tells Wally, “How was I supposed to know that all Dad did in the war was measure dirt.”

Mr. Willet calls and asks Beaver to bring his father’s war souvenirs to class, but not to bring anything dangerous.  “You’d better check with your father.”  Good idea.

To help cover for the Beav, Wally writes a false letter from Ward to June, dating it from the war period, to document his bravery, which is typically funny. It’s not the first phony note Wally has written for him.  “Dear Mom…”

“Wally, he calls her June.”

Wally writes Ward’s position from Wake Island, because he cannot spell Guadalcanal.  He writes how Ward captured 65 prisoners, and the general said, “Good goin’, Ward.”

Ultimately, Beaver decides not to use it and throws it away.  Ward finds the letter and calls Mr. Willet to explain, and the teacher, with great delicacy, decides to change the focus of the class to the Louisiana Purchase and move off World War II.  Nice guy.

Ward tells Beaver, “There were thousands of us in the service who weren’t heroes.”

Beaver answers, “Yeah, but a guy likes to think his father was.”

“Well, you see Beaver, they put a man where they thought he could do the best job.  Now, I was an engineer, so I could do a better job with tools than I could with guns.  There were lots of fellows in the Seabees who were heroes, but I just didn't happen to be one of them.”

Beaver responds, considerately, “You know, Dad, I’ll bet you were the best dirt leveler in the whole Seabees.”

I’ll bet he was, when he wasn’t hanging up basketball hoops for his bearded buddies.

Hugh Beaumont was actually a Methodist minister, who was a conscientious objector during World War II, and served as an Army medic.  As mentioned previously on this blog, Lew Ayres, who was also a conscientious objector, volunteered for the U.S. Army Medical Corps and served as a medic and chaplain’s aide in the South Pacific under fire, earning three battle stars. I don’t know if Beaumont served stateside or overseas. Even during the run of Leave it to Beaver, he served part-time in various churches as a lay minister.

Richard Deacon, our beloved Fred Rutherford, also served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and had studied medicine in college before turning to acting.

Too bad the school principal, Mrs. Rayburn wasn’t in this episode.  Doris Packer, who played her, served in the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, a WAC like Richard’s mother.  She entered as a private and reached the rank of Technical Sergeant.

The war touched everyone in that generation, in one way or another. Most of them put it aside pretty quickly and moved on, just as they'd put the Great Depression behind them, like Ward and June, in their comfortable suburban home, trying to make the kids' childhoods easier than theirs, and two boys who didn’t know how lucky they were.

Have a look at some other terrific posts in the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon over at A Shroud of Thoughts.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Inherit the Wind - 1960

Inherit the Wind (1960) pits Fredric March versus Spencer Tracy, and fundamentalist religion versus science, but at its core is the premise that knowledge should not be repressed because the religious right is uncomfortable with it.

This is obviously a timely message for our present era, but the script was based on the 1955 play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, whose message was more about the repression of McCarthyism than creationism, who used the famous standoff of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to reflect on not only the right of free speech, but of the very right to think for oneself.

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral,” goes one line in this strong, literate script.

As regards the battle between Mr. March and Mr. Tracy as actors, it is a pleasure to see two old lions with juicy character parts to play.  Since much of the story takes place in a courtroom, which is inherently dramatic, this gives them a notable setting to joust. 

Spencer Tracy, of course, was famous for stealing a scene just by standing still, but Fredric March stretches even his usual strong screen presence by unrepentant scenery chewing in this movie.  At times, it appears to render his character somewhat cartoonish, but then, we know that bombastic men who enjoy public notoriety can sometimes appear cartoonish.

Directed by Stanley Kramer, the film is rich in atmosphere with the setting of a small Southern town almost lyric in its storytelling.  I love the slow-moving camera that glides around characters in a scene without sharp, abrupt cuts. 

We begin with the tick-tock of the clock on the courthouse, and the march of a sheriff, joined by others including a minister, to the jailhouse to retrieve the prisoner for his trial.  There is no one else on the streets, and its almost like a “high noon” showdown in a western.

There is no desperado in the jail, however, just young Dick York, a high school science teacher who has taught his class about evolution from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man. We will soon see that it is something of a show trial rather than a criminal indictment; the creationists have enticed a nationally known public speaker to prosecute the case, and an equally nationally known lawyer arrives to defend Dick York. 

York plays his role with sensitivity and nuance, he was really a fine actor before his more well-known gig as Darrin Stevens in the TV show, Bewitched. His character is overwhelmed by the attention, pained over the separation from his fiancée, who is not sure his crusade is either wise or necessary, and ultimately he takes a principled stand because of the trauma inflicted on the parents of a student by fundamentalist insensitivity over their son’s tragic death.

Gene Kelly plays a smart-aleck reporter, whose newspaper has provided the services of Spencer Tracy as a means to showcase the event and sell papers. 

Florence Eldridge, the real-life wife of Fredric March, plays his wife here.  This was the final of several films she made with her husband. We last saw her play his longsuffering wife here in Another Part of the Forest (1948).  She is not so longsuffering in Inherit the Wind, but she does have a lot to contend with keeping her larger-than-life husband supported with her understanding, fried chicken, and occasional admonishments to keep him in line.

The characters played by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Gene Kelly, and Dick York are, of course, all based on real-life people.  They are given fictional names here, perhaps to keep the story more of a parable than a documentary.  The real figures are William Jennings Bryan, who like his fictional counterpart played by March is a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president, was a Secretary of State under President Wilson, and a noted orator whose “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 pushing for keeping the U.S. off the gold standard monetary system made him a giant of nineteenth-century American politics. He, like his fictional counterpart, also supported women’s right to vote, which makes him a fascinating contradiction.

Spencer Tracy’s character is based on Clarence Darrow, eminent attorney and one-time supporter of William Jennings Bryan in his presidential campaigns.  It also seems like an abrupt contradiction when Tracy and March meet at the local hotel and we think the fireworks will start, but they greet each other as old friends. 

First, Tracy greets Florence Eldridge warmly; they are old friends, too.  We are set up to understand that though the citizens of this small town who clamor at the courthouse and burn Dick York in effigy are hot under the collar at feeling their religious beliefs are threatened, the fight between the two old gladiators is an intellectual sparring of mutual respect. 

Gene Kelly’s character is based on the acerbic journalist H.L. Menken, himself a bundle of contradictions who enjoyed tearing down pomposity, but was himself an elitist, who was not a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The so-called Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a blistering hot week of July 1925.  Here in the movie, a local funeral parlor passes out fans with their advertising to the people in the courtroom.  Later in the film, the two combatant counsels get permission to peel off their suit coats. (In the real trial, the proceedings were finally allowed to take place outdoors due to the awful heat in the courtroom.)

Because the teaching of evolution is taken as a blasphemy by creationists who take the Bible as literal, and is illegal in Tennessee, the story quickly becomes, as it did in 1925, a fight to preserve religious teaching from being pushed aside in relevance by scientific thought.  We begin the story, as the men march to from the courthouse, one of them wearing a clerical collar, we hear an acapella rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.”  It sung as a slow, stately dirge by Leslie Uggams.  This is just a voiceover, however.  We do not see her, nor do we see any people of color in this movie.  Another interesting contradiction.

This is a somber moment, and though the quiet streets of this small town will soon be filled with street vendors selling souvenirs and hot dogs, and an actual carnival with a Ferris Wheel, the intent at the outset in this community is to keep their dignity and pride.

In the courtroom, Mr. Tracy and Mr. March, both of nimble minds despite their tired bodies, hash out not so much the Constitutional ideas of separation of church and state, or the First Amendment, but rather confine themselves almost entirely to biblical logic and illogic. 

Mr. March states with authority that the world began in 4,004 B.C. on October 4^th at 9:00 a.m., and Mr. Tracy after some thrust and parry, gets Mr. March to admit that the day at the time of creation might not have been a precise 24 hours.  One day might have lasted years, or eons.

This is the crux of the courtroom battle, for Tracy’s expert witnesses, all representing scientific disciplines, are disallowed by the judge, played by Harry Morgan.  To build his case, Tracy must rely on putting Mr. March on the stand instead and using Mr. March’s formidable knowledge of the Bible to turn the tables on him. 

Because they are old colleagues and know each other well, the twists and turns of their minds is like playing chess with a familiar opponent.

Fredric March, rather than protest, actually enjoys being put on the stand because he is something of a grandstander, who clearly directs his remarks not to the jury, and not to Mr. Tracy, but rather to the crowd in packed seats in the courthouse, and the new-fangled radio microphone in court.  He loves an audience.

This is where March does most of his mugging and scenery chewing, but how close this came to the real William Jennings Bryan, I really don’t know.  He is, at least in the film, an example of a highly intelligent man who enjoys an argument, but with God on his side, anyone who opposes him must be morally deficient.  The townspeople, already disposed to find fault with Dick York’s teaching evolution in his science class to their teenagers, is gleeful to see his lawyer marked as a heretic. 

At one point, we see Fredric March, along with his wife, show great compassion and concern for Dick York’s fiancée, played by Donna Anderson.  She is troubled by the trial, especially since her father is actually the minister, played by Claude Akins.  He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and in one scene, when he prays to a photo of his deceased wife in his daughter’s presence, begging his wife not to condemn their daughter for loving and defending a heretic schoolteacher, from falling from the way of grace, and we see he is unfeeling, cold, manipulative, and arrogant.  When she seeks guidance in the matter from March, he is kind and we see another side of the famous grandstander.

However, in confidence, she has told him that Dick York left the church.  A student of his drowned two years previously, a 13-year-old boy, and Preacher Claude Akins said the boy was damned because he had not been baptized.  This infuriates Dick York, and pains the boy's parents, who are in the courtroom.  His father is played by Noah Beery.

March gets her on the stand and twists her words to break her, until his wife, Florence Eldridge, from the gallery, shouts his name to stop.  Is he trying to get the fiancée to repent of loving Dick York and shame her as her father tried to earlier, or does he just really want to win this case?  Is it his religious zeal or his competitiveness that turns him to cruelty?

Beyond the scenery chewing, the other aspects of March’s portrayal I find distracting is his heavy makeup and obvious skull cap to replicate William Jennings Bryan’s baldness.

Spencer Tracy manages to mock Fredric March enough to the point where even the devout gallery snickers at March and applauds Tracy, and that evening when March and Florence Eldridge retire to their hotel room, he is an exhausted and frustrated man, hurt at being laughed at in court.  We wonder if he is emotionally stable.

At the end of the trial, his character collapses in court from the heat and dies, as did the real William Jennings Bryan (though some weeks after the trial was over).  In the next scene, when Tracy is quietly packing his briefcase in court, and Gene Kelly snidely congratulates him and triumphs over the theatrical ending of Fredric March, Tracy pays tribute to March.  He calls him a great man. 

Mr. Kelly teases Tracy, and they have a brief war of words, and Kelly learns and delights in the contradictions he has discovered in Tracy.

All the three principal men in this story have their contradictions, and we leave it to Florence Eldridge’s summation when Donna Anderson confronts her about her husband’s cruel fanaticism:  “My husband is neither a saint nor a devil, and he makes mistakes…if he’s been wrong, at least he stands for something.”

Gene Kelly stands for nothing, he’s only here for the deliciously cynical mocking.  As Tracy says to him, “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”

One of Kelly’s lines I love: “It’s a newspaperman’s duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

As Tracy leaves the courtroom, we hear Leslie Uggams’ lovely voice again, acapella, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  It is slightly more triumphant-sounding, but still a sober reflection as a national song against the Civil War rebellion and the lauding of the Republic, but a republic that rejoices in victory as “the coming of the Lord.”  Again, another thought-provoking contradiction.  We are a nation full of them.

Inherit the Wind, (which Tracy quotes from the Bible, “he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” Proverbs 11:29) is one of the films from that pivotal era I mentioned in this post on A Face in the Crowd (1957):  There was…

“…something noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly liberal in their message.  Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, 'Enough.  Our turn in the sun now.'”  

Inherit the Wind, which comes out of the McCarthy era, is really about free speech, including, but not only, the right to quote from other than the Bible.  As Tracy says, “It is a good book, but it is not the only book.”

I recall an incident from when I was in college, I think it was in 1980.   I had a geology class, and the professor cheerfully announced that anyone in class who may have had deep religious beliefs need not be unsettled by the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, because it could have been God who created the Big Bang.

I was shocked by his announcement.  I had been raised to go to church and considered myself religious, yet I found nothing upsetting by learning about science.  It never occurred to me that a college professor in a very progressive state (Massachusetts) would feel the need to placate anyone about science possibly refuting their literal interpretation of the Bible.  

No one in class, as I remember, made any comment or reacted, so perhaps I was the only one surprised.  Along with church, I was also raised on the notion of separation of church and state.  

I thought he was a good teacher, and I enjoyed the class, and soon we were engrossed in talking about another Big Bang, as that was the year Mount Saint Helens erupted.  He never mentioned anything about that being in the Bible.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

 

 

The Miracle Woman - 1931

The Miracle Woman (1931) stars Barbara Stanwyck as a con artist Evangelist preacher who is unexpectedly ministered to by someone in need.  The title character of the movie reflects its era with an obvious nod to the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular media evangelist of her day, who reached celebrity status in the 1920s and 1930s, but the similarity ends there.  Stanwyck’s “Sister Fallon” has a backstory more mundane and a future more ordinary than McPherson’s lionized life path, but Stanwyck’s incredible adventure brings her, more than her followers, an epiphany and a kind of humble salvation.

Directed by Frank Capra, this was Miss Stanwyck’s second of five films with him.  The story is told briskly, with some beautiful camera work, and several of Capra’s tender touches.  It is not a story of a woman losing faith or mocking faith; it is the story of a woman deeply disgusted by the hypocrisy of churchgoers.  Ultimately, the faith lost and restored is her faith in mankind.

The title card warns us, “The Miracle Woman is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s choicest gift to Humanity—FAITH.”  This is to keep the censors at bay and to reassure audiences that the studio does not support religious fakes. 

We are also reminded of the verse from Matthew, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing.”  That could apply, as it has for millennia, to the world of politics as well as religion.

But the story about Stanwyck’s character is far more interesting than the possible rise and fall of a corrupt preacher—we have seen real-life examples of that to fill a mountain of tabloids—because she is not an arrogant, greedy, sociopath, someone with whom we could not really identify and therefore might cheer her downfall.  She is simply a strong but troubled young woman who needs to right a wrong and find her place in the scheme of things.

The movie starts with the lovely hymn, one of my favorites, “Holy Holy Holy! Lord God Almighty,” and a large church, packed with congregants, as Miss Stanwyck takes the pulpit.  She is not the minister; her ailing elderly father is, but he is unwell, and she is standing in for him today to read his dictated sermon. After which, she delivers one of her own.

The church deacons have recently hired a younger man to fill the post as minister, and after twenty years, Stanwyck’s pop is getting the sack.  At the point in the sermon where her father quotes the 23^rd Psalm (King James version), “The Lord is My Shepherd,” she breaks off because that is where her father left off just before he dropped dead.

The congregation is stunned.  She plows ahead with a much more fiery sermon of her own, blasting them for throwing her father away and for their hypocrisy, accusing them of killing him.  “The laborer is worthy of his hire—but you wouldn’t pay him what you pay your chauffeurs.”  He hadn’t accumulated enough savings in his tenure at the church even for a decent burial.  She goes on to threaten to make public the temperance union members who subscribe to bootleggers, and the (apparently many) adulterers among them.

“This isn’t a house of God; this is a meeting place for hypocrisy!”

The congregation runs away from her; they can’t get out of that church fast enough.

Sam Hardy makes his entrance, a visitor to the church, who consoles her on the loss of her father and her home (they’re probably going to want her to vacate the manse pretty quickly now), and offers her a new career.

“Religion’s like anything else—great if you can sell it, not good if you can give it away.”

Aha.  Turning the tables on the “faithful” by feeding into their hypocrisy and profiting from it.  She wants revenge, but is uncertain.  He assures her, “You’re not a hypocrite if you admit it.”

He builds up her new career as a faith healer, an evangelist who gains a following through radio and through her own theatrical services at a barnlike church.

We are now introduced to David Manners, a handsome and charming actor who played affable, mostly lightweight leading man roles in the early 1930s, later returning to the stage and eventually leaving acting in the 1950s to write.  He is probably most famous for his role in Dracula, released this same year of 1931 and which we covered here.  Manners plays a blind World War I vet who will have a profound impact on Stanwyck.

His introduction to us is one of Capra’s skilled emotional moments.  We see a woman sitting quietly in her apartment before an open window, slowly rocking her child in a cradle next to her.  She looks off, with an expression that is enigmatic; seems to convey weariness and yet serenity, as she listens to Stanwyck preach over the radio.  The woman’s vacant expression is fascinating; we don’t know her story, but she is not conveying feelings of being inspired or comforted by the evangelist.  Capra could have had her easily rapt, but she is in a world of her own, maybe just enjoying a quiet moment after a morning of housework and never-ending chores and obligations.

Manners leans out from a window above across the alley and asks her to turn down the radio, which she does.  Before he pulls his head in, there is a downward shot over his shoulders showing us what the alley looks like and how high up he is.  Another deft Capra shot that, though we don’t know it yet, is a kind of foreshadowing, because Manners will contemplate killing himself by jumping out that window in a moment.

As he pulls his head in and we see his apartment, the Army helmet draped over a lamp and various photos and souvenirs of the war, we understand his past, and discover he is blind. 

His kindly landlady, Beryl Mercer, brings the mail with bad news—his songwriting efforts fail to get him published.  When he eventually returns to the window to consider throwing himself out, he hears Stanwyck’s voice from his neighbor’s radio again.  Her sermon has taken a turn into a pure Depression-era keep-your-hopes-up theme, reminding her followers that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was a blind man.

Manners’ expression softens, and he gently laughs, feeling, if not inspired, then at least a little foolish for feeling so sorry for himself.

He wants to know more about the voice on the radio, and his landlady takes him to one of her services, which he attends as one amused by the circus-like setting rather than being immediately drawn in.  He is not looking for religion; he is just curious.

The large choir in their sweaters and singing World War I songs like “Over There,” seem more like a college football cheerleading squad than a church choir, but Stanwyck, or more to the point, Sam Hardy, knows the way to catch profits is to catch the most gullible segment of the population, and to catch them, one needs to appeal not to their intellect, but to what makes them feel good, and to put on a good show.

To this end, the curtains part, revealing lions in a large cage.  Stanwyck makes her entrance from an upper balcony, walking down a long ramp to the stage below, wearing a white gown, dressed as if she is an angel.  She enters the cage (Hardy makes sure the lions have been fed and staff are standing by to shoot the animals if they attack Miss Stanwyck), and begins her call to the faithful, to encourage them to enter the cage with her and be healed.

The hired shill for tonight is drunk and misses his cue, but Manners stands to volunteer.  He is not really seeking a cure; he just wants to find out more about Miss Stanwyck and talk to her.  He also senses she has been left hanging by no one going up to accept her challenge.  His landlady is concerned, “The lions will eat you!”

He responds with easy self-effacing humor, “No, they won’t; I’ve got a Murad.”  I think this might be a reference to the advertising slogan for the aromatic Turkish Murad cigarettes.

We have another topical reference of the day to vaudeville’s worst act, The Cherry Sisters, when Sam Hardy berates one of the other hired shills about her lousy performance, “You ain’t even one of the Cherry Sisters.”

After the show, Stanwyck, in her dressing room, tells Hardy she feels frustrated, like a prisoner, and is growing tired of the act.  He insists she continue, partly because they are so successful, and partly because he is growing obsessed with her and is increasingly possessive.

Giving Manners a ride home in the rain—Capra often sets romantic or sensual moments in the pouring rain in his pictures—he invites her up to his apartment and they get acquainted. He amuses her with his toys, a mechanical music toy and a “dancing doll,” and, rather creepily, his ventriloquist’s dummy dressed like a WW1 soldier.

She learns to laugh again and is perhaps touched that his gentle man, with all his problems, has no malice in his heart, no thirst for revenge as she has had.  

Before she leaves Manners after her first visit to his room, there is sweet moment where she turns to glance back at him, and the camera shifts to David Manners, standing there with something like expectancy, more on our part perhaps than his. He cannot see her looking at him, but he senses she has not left yet.

Stanwyck hesitates, then she goes back to him for a brief, soft kiss. 

Her need for revenge is fading away, and this is noticed by Sam Hardy.  He trails her with a jealous heart.  She rebuffs his advances.

Her faithful chauffeur, played by Frank Holliday, can cover for her only so far, and Hardy becomes menacing.  Their manager, who gets a third of a cut of the offerings and merchandising they take in (Manners had bought a plaster bust of Stanwyck to “see” what she looks like, and she is embarrassed at the tacky merch), is found dead.  Later, Hardy will threaten Stanwyck with the same fate if she does not run away with him to the Riviera.  He plants news stories that she is going to take a break for her health and travel the Holy Land.

She agrees to go, to protect David Manners from Hardy.  She confesses to him that she is a fake, but he comforts her.  She "writes" notes to him in fabric on paper so that he can feel the outline of the letters. It must have been an arduous process and looks like a ransom note.

He and the landlady break into the “tabernacle” and to Stanwyck’s dressing room so he can become familiar with the placement of the items in the room, to pretend to Stanwyck that his sight has been restored, freeing her to leave, but it doesn’t work.

On her farewell performance, the crowd is overflowing and exuberant, and she is about to confess her fakery to them, when Hardy cuts the lights.  It is reminiscent of the scene in Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941, previously covered here) when Gary Cooper is about to “out” the Edward Arnold gang and his microphone is cut in the stadium, and no one can hear him.  This was Barbara Stanwyck’s fifth and final film directed by Frank Capra.

A horrific fire breaks out, and people panic, and Stanwyck, strangely, encourages them to stay and sing, that fire cannot hurt them if they have faith and believe in God.  Perhaps she has begun to believe her own powers.  Sensibly, they leave the building. 

Manners, who wakes up in her dressing room after having been punched in the face by Hardy, heroically makes his way down to the stage and rescues her.  They are both removed from the scene outside on stretchers as the crowd recites The Lord’s Prayer.

We jump to many months later, when in New York City, Sam Hardy is working on another scam with a boxer, and he spots Stanwyck on the street wearing a Salvation Army uniform, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with her new fellow Salvation Army colleagues.  She is happy, having just read a telegram from David Manners stating a possible operation might restore his sight, but concedes it might not, “Who cares?”  He also mentions that the ventriloquist's dummy will be his best man at their wedding.  I think he's kidding.

Hardy remarks, “She gave up a million bucks for that?  The poor sap.”

The truly religious are servants to mankind, not managers of mankind.  Stanwyck has found her redemption.  She had never really demonstrated a lack of faith in God; such a question was too difficult for the studio system of the day, even Pre-Code, to examine unless the character could be brushed off as evil and dispatched by the final reel.  What she needed to overcome was her cynicism over mankind, which I think is a more interesting subject to explore; it leads far more easily to corruption. 

The Miracle Woman can currently be seen on YouTube.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

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