Auld Lang Syne - Waterloo Bridge (1940)

To get us ready to say farewell to 2008 and welcome 2009, here's a lovely version of "Auld Lang Syne" used in "Waterloo Bridge" (1940) with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. Should auld acqaintance be forgot? I think not. Thanks for your company this year. See you in 2009.

Merry Christmas - Pathe Newsreels

Merry Christmas.

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

In this season of Hanukkah and Christmas, though miracles are commemorated, they are seldom looked for anymore, or at least seldom recognized. “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947) presents the intriguing Christmas card type setting awash in post-war cynicism. Cary Grant is the suave and charming angel with the California tan, whose presence is by turns eerily threatening as it is comforting.

David Niven plays the Episcopalian bishop who has turned from parish vicar to corporate CEO in his drive to build a new cathedral. He matches Cary Grant perfectly in his comic timing, since the sight of a dignified man struggling to maintain his dignity under absurd circumstances is frequently hysterical. Niven’s scenes in the wealthy lady’s mansion with the wealthy lady’s expensive chair inexplicably stuck to his bottom are among his best. His embarrassment and distress grow acutely each time the butler makes an entrance.

An interesting aspect to the character is that maintaining his dignity has become more important to him than maintaining his faith, and both dignity and faith have been pushed aside for ambition as he obsesses so much over obtaining donations for his new cathedral. He is willing to sell out his principles to court the golden pocketbook of the always magnificent Gladys Cooper.

When she asks that the a depiction of St. George resemble her late husband in the new cathedral icon of St. George and the Dragon, Niven asks her quite seriously, “Who do you see as the dragon?”

Loretta Young plays his radiant wife, and though as appealing as ever, Miss Young hasn’t much to do in this film except enjoy Cary Grant’s company, which must have been easy.

The character actors, as always in any film, make this one come alive and by the end of the film seem like our extended family: Elsa Lanchester as the maid, whose precise intonation and crisp consonants alone endear her to me; James Gleason as Sylvester the cab driver, and the lovably crusty Monty Woolley as the professor of antiquities who claims to have no faith, but who keeps a Charlie Brown tree in his flat to remind him of his boyhood.

That’s the kind of faith a lot of people fall back on this season, not so much faith in a divine presence or in the miracles these holidays represent, but a comforting memory of childhood. “It gives me the illusion of peace on earth, good will to men,” Woolley tells Grant of his tree. A tree gives him this sensation, not faith, not hope, and it is not a real sensation of peace anyway, it is only to him, an illusion.

Mr. Grant’s penetrating gaze and implacable, insinuating smile are priceless, both funny and edgy. Though he enchants the ladies, his is a sly smile, not beatific. When Niven doubts Grant’s being an angel, Grant offers, “As you’re walking through the streets of the city, you may suddenly look into a strange face. It may be the face of a murderer. Or, it may be the face of an angel.”

It’s the kind of remark and delivery you might see in a Hitchcock film, so challenging and so chilling. Mr. Niven demands Mr. Grant perform miracles that he might believe in him, and Grant teasingly shames Niven, a bishop, for his lack of faith without the miracles.

As it is, his angel character does pull off a few party tricks as miracles in the film: Monty Woolley’s wine that never depletes, the instantly decorated Christmas tree, the skating party where Loretta Young and James Gleason could quit their jobs as cab driver and bishop’s wife and go join the Ice Capades. He can also make a typewriter type by itself without Dragon Naturally Speaking computer software.

The biggest miracle is one that Grant pulls off with the help of David Niven, giving Niven the push he needed to do the miracle himself, which is to give up his notion of erecting a cathedral that would only be a monument to wealth, and instead returning to his roots as a shepherd of his flock and helping the poor.

One needs two things to perform miracles it seems. One is the determination to do so. Second, is a sense of wonder. As we see with the professor, who Grant inspires to finish his lifelong work of writing a text on ancient history, a sense of wonder is fertile ground for miracles. Perhaps that’s why he, and many of us, prefer to use the holidays as an opportunity to re-live our childhoods. There is no greater sense of wonder felt than when one is a child. Miracles are possible then.

Grant’s last miracle is to un-bewitch Loretta Young, driving her back to her husband simply by forcing her to choose her husband’s love when Grant comes close to declaring his love for her. He has also, by this time, made Niven so jealous, that Niven is forced to fight for his wife, and their marriage is strengthened simply by deciding themselves that they want to be married to each other.

When Cary Grant bows out, gracefully, he bids goodbye to Niven and steps, surprisingly, into the camera instead of away from it. As if he is stepping right into us. It’s a nice effect, making the final, and inevitable, shot of Grant walking away in the snow a bit of a letdown. Ending with the previous shot would have been more powerful, if less poetic. But no one sees him but us, and none of these people whose lives he has touched will remember his presence among them. He wanders off to his next assignment, never to return lest he become too attached to these mortals. Are all angels so lonely?

Or do we project our loneliness onto them? In this season of miracles, the irony is that though we take such elaborate preparations this time of year to remind ourselves that they exist, we still have a hard time accepting that they do. How ironic that these Christmas movies often do not really remind us of a miracle of peace on earth, good will to men, as much as they do to remind us of our own cynicism.

Movie Christmas Trees

Above we have a scene from “A Summer Place” (1959) in which Constance Ford remarks with satisfaction upon decorating her little Christmas tree, “It’s solid plastic. It ought to last ten years.” I love her delivery, and it is the funniest line in an otherwise rather dour movie. Really puts you in the Christmas mood. Oh, yeah.

Here’s a few more movie Christmas trees: Another artificial specimen, the white tree in the dressing room of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in “Holiday Inn” (1942).


Another really artificial, and makeshift, specimen on board ship in “So Proudly We Hail” (1943).



Among live trees, tabletop size seems to be popular in the movies. Here we have Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, Tom Tully, Spring Byington, and Shirley Temple exchanging gifts in “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1944).



Shirley MacLaine laments her circumstances, not the size of the tree, in “The Apartment” (1960).



Marjorie Reynolds acts on a movie set that looks just the inn, with a tree that looks just like the inn’s tree -- but wait, that’s a set, too. “Holiday Inn” (1942).


Here’s a shot of Bing knocking off a bell solo in “Holiday Inn”, hitting all the right notes.


Nothing represents the abundance of the Christmas season like a full-size tree. Here Mary Astor, Leon Ames and family decide they’re not going to New York in “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944).



Little Natalie Wood searches the presents under the big tree in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947) for the two-story suburban colonial home Edmund Gwenn promised her.



Peggy Ann Garner and Ted Donaldson from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945) drag their tree home after some street vendor, who can’t sell it because it’s already late Christmas Eve, throws it at them. It turns out, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is not actually about a Christmas tree, but never mind. It could be.



Finally, the tree is up, and the family is assembled putting home-made paper ornaments on the hard-won tree. For what it represents, it’s probably the most poignant Christmas tree in the movies.


Trees do represent the homes in which we see them. They illustrate frugality and opulence, poverty and wealth. Here is wealthy, powerful, and lonely Edward Arnold pondering how to further crush Gary Cooper, as he gazes upon an enormous tree the servants decorated in “Meet John Doe” (1941).




Finally, here’s Barbara Stanwyck decorating the homey tree in the homey home that isn’t really hers in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) while Dennis Morgan serenades her on the piano. And to all a good night.

20 Actresses Meme

Having been tagged by our friend J.C. Loophole over at The Shelf, (I am still putting ice on the large red dodgeball welt on my forehead), who was tagged by the Siren, I am herewith submitting a list of 20 favorite actresses. This meme originated with Film Experience.

This was difficult, and I am appalled by the names I’ve left off. I’ve stuck with two rules, first, the Siren’s edict that these are people who, even if I thought the movie was going to be lousy, I would probably still watch it because of them. My second rule is my own. Since this is Another OLD MOVIE blog, and though there are many present day actresses I admire, for purposes of this blog if it happened after 1960, it didn’t happen. (Or thereabouts. The cutoff date might be a little fuzzy.)

In no particular order:

Barbara Stanwyck
Lillian Gish
Dorothy McGuire
Jennifer Jones
Ingrid Bergman
Teresa Wright
Claudette Colbert
Wendy Hiller
Cyd Charisse
Agnes Moorhead
Bette Davis
Peggy Ann Garner
Hattie McDaniel
Judy Garland
Audrey Hepburn
Greer Garson
Veronica Lake
Ethel Barrymore
Eve Arden
Anne Revere

I’m not going to tag anyone else, because this was worse than taking the S.A.T.s.

Teresa Wright's Contract

While Teresa Wright was playing in “Life With Father” on Broadway, she was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to play Bette Davis’ daughter in “The Little Foxes.”

Her contract with Goldwyn contained the following unusual clause that showed Teresa Wright’s independence of thought, her serious attitude towards acting, and a sense of humor.

"The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow."

She won an Academy Award nomination for that first movie role, and then two more for the next two movies she made, both in the same year. She won for one of them, a Best Supporting Oscar for “Mrs. Miniver.” No one to date has equaled that magnificent start to a film career.

But her independence of thought would later compromise her career when Goldwyn fired her for refusing to go on a publicity tour. She expressed no regrets at leaving the studio system, declaring, “We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children.” Her public declaration of independence was as famous as her contract had been.

Though her career did not end here, it never took on the remarkable ascent of its early years. That might have happened anyway, as Hollywood was always a difficult place to survive for aging female stars. Some of her best work in after years was on television, and back on the stage. She shows many qualities in her work which I admire, but foremost among them is that funny, and intelligent, contract clause.

Duck and Cover (1950)

In the last post regarding "I Want You" (1951) we referred to the little boy who practiced his "duck and cover" technique. Continuing in that theme for today, we have the 1950 short "Duck and Cover" to illustrate the little guy's education, and mindset, and legacy.

I Want You (1951)

On December 4th, in 1950, when the Korean War was roughly about six months old, Navy Ensign Jesse L. Brown was shot down near the Chosin Reservoir. His wingman, Lt. Thomas Hudner crash landed his own plane on purpose to try to rescue Brown, but even when a rescue helicopter arrived to help, they were unable to free Ensign Brown from the wreckage of his Corsair. They were forced to leave him there, and Jesse Brown died.

That Ensign Jesse Brown was the first African-American Naval aviator in a newly desegregated U.S. armed forces, and that Lt. Hudner later received the Medal of Honor for his daring attempt to rescue his pal are more than footnotes to the tragic story. This shadowy war is a grim backdrop, but a curiously subconscious one to the movie I Want You. It’s seldom discussed out in the open; it’s just there somewhere on the radio and in the back of the mind.

I Want You (1951) is roundly acknowledged to be producer Samuel Goldwyn’s Korean War answer to his wildly successful World War II era The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) discussed here. When I Want You succeeds, it is in moments of unconscious reflection that World War II might as well have ended one hundred years ago as five years ago, because the world is in a different place. The movie creaks a bit with slavishly trying to use Best Years as a template, though this must have been understandably irresistible to the Goldwyn staff. Despite this, it is a valuable film for showing us what 1950 looks like, even if inadvertently so.

At the outset we may note that the “template” aspect of using The Best Years of Our Lives is employed first by using a handful of familiar actors from that film. Walter Baldwin, who played the worried father of disabled sailor Homer Parish in Best Years here plays the worried father of young recruit George, Jr., played by a very young Martin Milner. Ray Collins, who memorably played the insincere and controlling bank executive boss of Fredric March in Best Years here plays another man of great power over others, a judge who sits on the local draft board.

Most especially we have the central figure of Dana Andrews, who stars as a World War II vet, a husband and father, who runs a contracting firm. Sitting at a work bench, fiddling with a slide rule in his work shirt, the kind he wore at the end of Best Years when Fred Derry is finally offered a job in construction and peels off his iconic bomber jacket to go to work, Dana Andrews’ character, Martin Greer, is presented to us almost as an extension of Fred Derry. This is what Fred might have been like five years down the road, working in construction, sharing a modest suburban home with wife and kids. It’s the kind of thing Fred Derry used to dream about, but was afraid he wasn’t good enough for, or not lucky enough to ever have. We finally get to see Fred’s happy ending.

But in real life, happy endings are usually temporary. Then a new story begins.

Much of the film involves the contracting firm as being the key to avoiding the military draft. The World War II draft that ended in 1947 was reinstated in 1948 to be implemented for young men who were required to serve 24 months, eventually discontinued in 1973. The draft became a sword hanging over the heads of millions of young men and their families when hostilities broke out in Korea in the summer of 1950. Dana Andrews’ younger brother, played by charming and handsome Farley Granger, is a prime candidate for the draft, and so is his young employee Martin Milner, whose father Walter Baldwin also works for the firm.

Dana Andrews is being pulled in all directions to label the young men under his charge as “indispensable” to excuse them from the draft, like Noah pulling animals out two by two to be saved on the ark. He easily could save his brother, for as his mother reminds him, their family has given enough to their country. Another brother was killed in World War II.

The film begins with a kind of flashback to The Best Years of Our Lives, in an aerial shot of his small town, emulating the ride that the three returning vets took at the beginning of that movie, swooping low over the town. In Andrews’ narration, the scene is described as what the town would look like in a bomber run. His narration, like the character himself, is somewhat world-weary. In his voice over introduction he admits, “I don’t run as fast as I once did. I don’t sleep as well.” When he loosens his belt under the table while enjoying a big meal, he contentedly lets us know that he is going to “retire with honor” from ever being young again.

Dana Andrews also calls his father, who drinks too much, “Pop,” which what Fred Derry called his alcoholic father. His father is a bit of a fool, a man who brags too much, eats and drinks too much, and continually recounts his glory days in World War I as if he’d won that war by himself. He shirks his work at the family contracting business to socialize at the bar down the street. For all that he appears harmless and lovable, and as a result, his careworn wife appears aloof and strained, probably because she has had to bear on her shoulders the responsibility that her husband avoids.


Andrews’ younger brother is played by Farley Granger. He is a likeable rogue and as much a goof-off as his father, and borrows money from an indulgent sister-in-law played by Dorothy McGuire. Granger playfully tells her, “When I get married, I must make sure to find somebody just like you.” He will all but insist that his girlfriend played by Peggy Dow take her for a model, and there lies one of many interesting differences between the World War II era generation and the Korean War generation, even though they are not really of different generations. They might as well be. Though it is only five years since the ending of World War II, the young people are different. Their world is different. And the next generation that is really a generation apart, the little son and daughter of Andrews and McGuire, read comic books about superheroes with atomic powers.

Peggy Dow is a college girl, sassy and independent, with no immediate desire to get married, so she says. She is not the small-town beauty queen that Dorothy McGuire was when she married her solider husband on a weekend pass. Miss Dow has far more advantages and far fewer cares, yet unlike Miss McGuire’s character, has no real ambition for herself, no purpose and no direction. And the young Farley Granger is clearly not his brother. He’s not a serious solider with serious post-war dreams. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy still storming about in the same jalopy he was so proud of as a high school kid. Granger resents her college education and sulks at her time away from him.

Clearly, Dow’s college career is seen by her, by Granger, and possibly by her parents as little more than finishing school experience. This was an era where some, though certainly not all, young women went to college not to obtain credentials for a particular career but to obtain upwardly mobile college men as husbands. We get the feeling Miss Dow is toying with Granger, holding out for something better. She ruminates that “maybe” she will one day get a job.

One of the best lines in the movie goes to Jim Backus, who plays Dana Andrews’ former colonel, “You still salute like a WAC in the Bulgarian Medical Corps.” Backus, who commanded Andrews in an engineering unit, might take a job with his contracting firm, but is waiting to see what transpires with this news from Korea. Backus might re-enlist.

They discuss building being an essential industry and their being fortunate to be considered “indispensable.” Andrews is too old to be drafted and has no desire to return to the military. He intends to apply for the exemption to which he is entitled. Their conversation, a casual plot exposition for our benefit, suddenly seems heartless when we see that his employee played by Walter Baldwin, the father of Martin Milner, has been listening. Only the evening before, Dana Andrews refused, though gently and politely, to write for a deferment for Milner. Baldwin is seething in his resentment.

Milner, called Junior by everybody, which he hates, is looking forward to the Army because he desperately wants to be a man. He is told, by the bombastic Robert Keith who plays Andrews’ foolish father, that the Army will make a man of him. Andrews invites Milner for his first beer to celebrate joining the army, but the bartender refuses to serve him, because he is only 19. Another WWII vet at the bar razzes him, and Milner barks back at him, “Because you guys were old enough to be drafted in the last war, you think you’re something. It wasn’t my fault I was born in 1931.”

Poor Junior is suffering from what every generation of young men experiences who have followed in the wake of heroes. They are emasculated by their very youth and lack of exposure to danger. We can imagine how acute was the humiliation of young men, both North and South, who came after the generation that fought in the Civil War. No matter what wealth or fame they achieved in their lives, they would never be a great as the private who suffered through the heat of Gettysburg and the mud and cold of Fredericksburg.

But then the radio behind the bar announces worse news from Korea, and the bartender grants Milner his beer. We may recall Homer Parish, hoisting a pilsner glass in his prosthetic hook in his homecoming visit to his uncle’s bar in Best Years. Homer is relaxed, and looking very manly with buddy Dana Andrews by his side, who is already half drunk and both happy because they think the worst is behind them. How stark is the contrast with Milner, who hoists his first beer with boyish excitement, and how Dana Andrews by his side watches him a little sadly. All the men in the bar watch Junior in complete silence, knowing better than he what he is in for.

Perhaps the scene still plays in Dana Andrews’ mind when he sits down late at night to try to write an excusal letter for his brother. But the radio interrupts again with news about action at some parallel. It is a war of “parallels” and not very parallel to World War II.

It is interesting that we do not see a single television set in this film. Though most people did not own one in 1950, some people did and perhaps we are still at the stage where movies are ignoring the enemy.

Retiring to find his wife still awake, Andrews remarks with his world-weary demeanor that the news is the same, “People shooting each other as usual. On the domestic scene, hair tonic as usual, rumbas as usual, saloons as usual.” In a world more parallel to the one we know today, the home front is disconnected from the frontlines and society seems rudderless because of it.


Miss McGuire sits up in her twin bed, her knees drawn up to her chest and asks wistfully, “Are you pleased with me? Has it turned out the way that you wanted back in that miserable little Louisiana town when you got your weekend pass and we got married?” In a very sweet scene teasing the Production Code, he sits on her bed and rests his head on her knees as they talk quietly. It’s really more a rhetorical question, and we find this husband and wife, this World War II couple, habitually re-evaluating where they are and where they are going. They take nothing for granted. They have been through too much to take anything for granted. Another difference between them and the younger set, who seem to own the world.

Farley Granger, much more self-confident than Martin Milner, and much more carefree than his older brother ever was or ever will be, gets angry when he is ordered to report to the draft board. Andrews could not bring himself to write the request for deferment, though never articulates why.

Granger’s girlfriend’s father, the judge, sits on the draft board and for a moment we get a brief lesson to Granger on freedom and how other people in the world don’t have any. But it bounces off the fuming Granger, like telling a little kid he should eat his spinach because people in some other country don’t have any. The little kid doesn’t care, and neither does Granger.

We get another lesson in geopolitics when Dana Andrews’ little son shows a neighbor lady his toy B-17 bomber, a gift from his war-mongering grandfather. The lady is a British war bride, and she relates her experience of being bombed in London. Like all young children, he is nonplussed, and helpfully tells her that in school they learned to “duck and cover” when the atomic flash comes. He giddily romps behind a tree showing her how. I don’t know if that broke anybody’s heart in 1950, or if because we’re more aware of the futility of jumping behind a tree during “the flash” that it’s so heartbreaking now.

But his young uncle Farley Granger has a similarly defiant and naïve attitude about atomic weaponry. So self-pitying is he to be drafted, he sulks aloud that he was “railroaded” by his girlfriend’s dad to get rid of him, and wishes that we would just “drop the bomb” so he wouldn’t have to go to Korea.

Dorothy McGuire has a good scene here where she calls Granger down on the carpet for being so immature and heartless. Her moral outrage over his indifference to millions of innocent people shows us she is not just the settled suburban housewife. She is still in her heart the idealistic bride of a soldier who left his wife to make a better world, honestly believing that he would.

Her chastising Granger brings down a family rift between her and her mother-in-law, who shortly gets a fantastic scene of her own. When Granger leaves for duty, Mom, played by Mildred Dunnock, rips down all the old World War I souvenirs that Pop collected and hung on the living room walls, making their home look like a boy’s clubhouse. She knocks all the empty shell casings off the mantle, tosses aside bayonets and helmets, and berates him for what she has known all along: he was an orderly to a general in World War I in a Paris hotel. He never heard a shot fired. She calls him a liar to his face.


Robert Keith slinks, humiliated, to a chair, as she shouts, “Your son Riley was killed; you were proud. When Martin was missing for four days in France, it made you feel important…As of this evening, there are no more professional heroes in this house!” The backbone of the family has had it, and there will be only reality served up in this house from now on.

Strong women seem to be a thread running through this film, as even Peggy Dow confronts the still whining Farley Granger on his accusations against her father. She counters that her father was wounded in World War I, with the shrapnel still in his body and suffers pain every day of his life. He has kept this secret because he does not want pity. Granger, so deeply mired in his own self-pity, no sooner makes up with her than he churlishly goads her into marrying him despite her protestations. He wants her to be like his sister-in-law, to follow him from assignment to assignment.

This being an ensemble movie, we jump from character to character and most of the threads of their stories are held together pretty well. Milner and Granger, both in uniform, have a night on the town, which the jubilant Milner predicts, “It’ll be V-J Day all over again” as they imagine swarms of girls surrounding them. Another feeble and out-dated reference to World War II, and they are disillusioned when it does not happen. Milner even confesses to Granger that he has never kissed a girl. He gets his chance at the Army making him a man, though, when he is shortly sent to Korea and is listed as missing in action. “That poor little boy,” Miss McGuire remarks, and Jim Backus shakes his head, “That little boy.” Even after his sacrifice, Milner will never be called a man.

We wonder if Farley Granger will grow up. He is not going to be sent to Korea; he has drawn a luckier card and is being sent to Europe. He gets his war bride after all when Miss Dow quits college, like so many young women of her generation did, to marry him. When they leave on their honeymoon, it is in his teenager’s jalopy.

Eventually we get back to Dana Andrews’ date with destiny. We know, though it is not hammered at us, that he is tormented about re-enlisting. Jim Backus goes back into the Army and requests Andrews as part of his runway-building crew. The very essential industry of building that makes Andrews eligible for deferment, also makes him indispensable to the Army.


The notion of who is indispensable is given subtle but clever examination in the movie. Maybe nobody is indispensable, and maybe everybody is. Milner’s heartbroken father spends a lot of time at the bar down the street now. In a confrontation with Andrews, he broods on some people’s luck at being indispensable, and mourns of Junior, “Maybe he was only indispensable to me.” Sorrowing Walter Baldwin scoffs at the radio behind the bar with its updates on the war, “Bad news traveling from one end of the world to another before you can blink an eye.” He should see CNN. Or the Internet.

Mr. Andrews comes to conclusion that he can no more demand an exemption from service for himself than he could Milner or Granger. His simple articulation of this complicated decision to his wife is only, “I’ve got to make peace with myself. Ever since I was 15 years old I’ve thought of myself as honest and responsible.”

No mention of fixing of the world’s troubles; that is the remarkable thing. No end in sight to the troubles, either.

One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Dana Andrews puts his children to bed the last time before reporting for duty. He weaves a bedtime story for his daughter who falls asleep in his arms, about a princess who is partly her mother and partly herself. He is the picture of a man of his era, in his shirtsleeves and his burdens. He tells his wife that someday his son will want to know what Daddy did “when the world was going to pieces” and he wants to be able to tell his son he did more than build luxury hotels. In the hindsight granted to us old movie fans decades later, we know both his son and daughter will come of age during the Vietnam War, and they may never understand him. Only his wife understands him.

It is peculiarly fitting that their farewell takes place not at a crowded train station, but in their own quiet living room, the Shangri-La of the 1950s suburban couple. Miss McGuire sighs, looking around the room, “This is nice. This is a nice house, isn’t it?” It’s not just small talk before the final goodbye. It’s another re-evaluation of where they stand as a couple and where they are going and what they have accomplished together.


Embracing her, Andrews’ voice seems to catch when he says, “Your nose. I’ll never be able to get over your nose.” He might even cry in another moment. Dana Andrews plays the heart wrenching combination of sad and valiant like nobody. In any film, he can be terribly moving when life forces his character to face facts.

His father has faced facts as well. Andrews and Pop hug when it’s time to say goodbye, something pretty unusual in Hollywood films of this era to see two men embracing.

Our hindsight will also cause us to remember that the Korean War never really ended. An armistice was signed in 1953, but no peace treaty. Technically, North and South Korea are still at war, and therefore so are we. Even the morass that was the Vietnam War ended. Today, long after Jesse Brown died, in the cold of a long ago December 4th, there are U.S. military personnel on duty in South Korea on guard near the Demilitarized Zone. They could be the grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of Dana Andrews’ character Martin Greer.  Or Fred Derry.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

More Things to Like

Addendum to ten things I like (because I keep thinking of things I like, because this post has, like Frankenstein, walked right out of the lab and is meandering wildly through the streets of classic movie blogs beyond all control, and because I’m still too full from Thanksgiving to write a coherent post):

“Darling.”

Men standing when women enter the room.

“What’s that, you say?!!” (In an excitable voice, usually while on the phone, but much funnier when one person is saying to another person’s face.)

Ballroom scenes.

Playful husbands and wives, i.e., Nick and Nora Charles, Claudia and David (Dang, that woman keeps entering these blog posts. The Siren knows who I mean.), and Mr. and Mrs. Potter from “Holiday” (1938).

Shopping trips and brown paper packages tied up with strings. (Where’ve I heard that before?)

The stark glare of a streetlamp’s light filtered through blinds and the horizontal stripes it leaves on the walls.

Plaid floor to ceiling drapes.

Any scene where a piano is moved, preferably hoisted up into an upper story window.

The deft movement of inserting or removing a hatpin to secure the chapeau to the lady’s coiffure.

Ladies wearing white gloves, and how and under what circumstance they remove them. (I recently noticed in “Invitation” - dang, there’s that woman again - where the actress Ruth Roman removes her right glove to drink coffee, and leaves her left glove on that is holding her cigarette.)

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

“Plymouth Adventure” (1952) presents the Pilgrims in an unexpected kind of soap opera about the captain of the Mayflower lusting after the wife of future Governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford.

Any film about any point in history is bound to be lacking the complete story, possibly because there never is a complete story. History is a lot more chaotic than a movie script; things don’t tie up quite as neatly as we might wish. Sometimes the attempt to bridge the gaps often leads to complete fabrication, producing a movie that may not have very much value at all historically, perhaps not even as entertainment.

“Plymouth Adventure” invents some things, like the romantic triangle between the captain, and William and Dorothy Bradford. It disregards others, like the relationship the settlers had with the Indians. The Wampanoag are given short shrift, and their importance in helping the settlers to survive the first few winters is not even mentioned. The film ends even before what we call the first Thanksgiving. Despite this, it is an earnest attempt at dramatizing what was surely one of the most remarkable voyages in history.

Spencer Tracy plays the captain, a cynical, crude man of the sea who is contemptuous not only of his Pilgrim passengers but of people in general. Gene Tierney is Dorothy Bradford, the object of Mr. Tracy’s sarcasm, lust, and eventually, love. Van Johnson plays John Alden in a rather small role, and a young Lloyd Bridges is the ratfink first mate.

We might forgive the fact that the costumes are a bit too Disney-like and clean, and that there are no authentic accents employed. The dialogue is strong and sharp, with some great lines especially by Spencer Tracy, it is really his movie, but the dialogue is not at all the correct speech of Englishmen of that era. What the film does well is special effects, with a terrific replica of the Mayflower used, and a storm at sea that is truly scary. It is the first chink in the armor of seeing the Pilgrims as all pious and brave. This film is probably the first attempt to show them as businessmen, as opportunists, as jealous and fearful, as zealots, as human beings. It is remarkable that a setting with such inherent drama and turmoil should be so little visited by Hollywood.

Directed by Clarence Brown (whose transition from the automotive industry to motion pictures is mentioned in this 2007 blog post), the film attempts to shrug off the fairy tale aspect of the Pilgrims and gives us corrupt company sponsors of the trip, and a lot of bare-chested, barefooted sailors climbing the rigging to unfurl the enormous sails. There is excellent camera work, with some terrific deck-to-topsail shots. We are given a fascinating and somewhat funny demonstration by Miles Standish on the cumbersome and dangerous operation of the 17th century percussion musket.

We are also treated to a brief sampling of songs authentic to the era, including a scene when land is spotted as the Pilgrims burst into the song whose words come from the Henry Ainsworth Psalter, Psalm 100:

Shout to Jehovah, all the earth,
Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;
before him come with singing mirth
Know that Jehovah he God is.

It's he that made us, and not we;
his folk, and sheep of his feeding.
O with confession enter ye
his gates, his courtyards with praising.

Confess to him, bless ye his name.
Because Jehovah he good is:
his mercy ever is the same
and his faith, unto all ages.

You can listen to another version of the tune here.

But as the journey concludes, the story begins to focus on the captain and Mrs. Bradford, and their hunger for each other. It makes John Alden’s flirtation with Priscilla Mullins look like puppy love, despite that he is a lonely bachelor and she is the only adult unmarried female on the trip.

An especially dark ending involves the actual historic event of the death of Dorothy Bradford and the actual dispute as to how she died. Before the English settlers (to avoid confusion, not all the passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims), established their settlement, while the Mayflower was still safely moored in the harbor at Provincetown, Dorothy Bradford drowned.

Her drowning was noted in history as far back as Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia”, but in 1869, a story in Harper’s New England Monthly suggested she had commited suicide. Though much of this story has been discounted, there are continuing discussions as to whether she could have committed suicide.

What is interesting is that the film even hints at this controversy. It could have ignored it altogether for a more prim and pious, and uplifting ending. Bradford, played by Leo Glenn replies that she would not have done such an ungodly thing and is immediately comforted, though with never a strong effort to convince, that she must have fallen overboard accidentally.

To help us accept the Pilgrims as human beings, more authentic representation from that era could be employed, rather than viewing their story through a 20th century prism. Another song of the period, a sweet and almost mournful tune by Thomas Ravenscroft, not used in this film, takes us to emotions even Pilgrims felt, and without the use of 20th century screenwriter’s dialogue:

Canst thou love and lie alone?
Love is so disgraced!
Pleasure is best wherein is rest
In a heart embraced.

That they loved and lost, and lusted, and felt deeply about it should not come as a shock. At least Hollywood acknowledges that.

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the film may have the look of one of the Hudson River School of romantic impressionist paintings. Maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Part of telling a story is re-affirming what we already know, as much as it is an effort at imparting to us something we do not.

Aside from this film’s slight attempt to crawl out from the iconic image we have of the Pilgrims, I wonder if the reaction of Americans in general to this portrayal of the Pilgrims is anything as strong as the reaction of someone from Massachusetts.


Massachusetts possesses the Pilgrims and to some extent is possessed by them. These names of the characters in this film: Winthrop, Bradford, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, Miles Standish, this is a roll call of the pantheon of icons of early Massachusetts history and are also the names which live among us today. Their descendents live here still, their names are on towns, schools, and it is possible to drive through Plymouth past the Miles Standish State Forest and stop in at the John Alden Gift Shop for a box of salt water taffy, and then head back to your room a block up at the Governor Bradford Inn. The pensive Pilgrim standing on the deck of the Mayflower II replica in Plymouth Harbor at the beginning of this post is not a Thanksgiving prop. These reinactors are with us the year round at Plimoth Plantation. (For more on Plimoth Plantation, see my post here from 2007 at my New England Travels blog.)

To watch this film and see John Alden portrayed by Van Johnson is more than a little startling and amusing to someone from Massachusetts. I imagine it could be likened to what a scholar of Greek mythology might react to him playing Zeus.

Something as basic as that can keep even a very good film from being taken too seriously. But then, no film should probably be taken too seriously anyway. For how many of us across this country is seeing our historical figures-cum-folk heroes brought to life in Technicolor by Hollywood’s latest hearthrobs an obstacle to making us believe?

The other thing missing in this film is turkey. Which reminds me…I’m about due to take the bird out of the oven. Happy Thanksgiving.

A Guy, A Girl, and a Typewriter

The romantic triangle of a guy, a girl, and a typewriter is perhaps a little less discussed than the erotic symbolism of smoking in old movies, but should not be avoided due to prudery. We’re all adults here. Unless you’re a kid. Then, young sir or young lady, you are to leave the room immediately.

The typewriter and shapely hands above belong to Barbara Stanwyck, one of film’s most prolific typists. We see her here in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) as she bangs out her magazine column.


Here Reginald Gardiner is just about to swoop down and give her a kiss, because he’s nuts about her and because her typing is driving him wild. Understandable, for there are few things more sensual than typing, few physical attributes more desirable than the strong yet supple fingers of the typist.

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Solitary Cyclist”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Holmes appraise a woman’s hands, noting that she is either a typist or a pianist, "I nearly fell into the error of supposing that you were typewriting. Of course, it is obvious that it is music. You observe the spatulate finger-ends, Watson, which is common to both professions? There is a spirituality about the face, however" -- she gently turned it towards the light -- "which the typewriter does not generate. This lady is a musician."


How wrong he is, that typing on the QWERTY keyboard does not convey a certain spirituality, even passion. If he could see this close-up of Stanwyck’s eyes from “Meet John Doe” (1941), Sherlock would know just how wrong he was.



But passion through typing is not solely the province of ladies in film. Here Gregory Peck in “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947) shows us what virility looks like: a handsome man brooding in front of a typewriter. Below we have the picture of motherly pride as Anne Revere fondly thinks to herself, “That’s my boy who can type.” Medical school? Bah! She sacrificed everything to put him through two semesters of Typing 101.



Here we have Rhonda Fleming in “The Spiral Staircase” (1945) showing that Edwardian ladies were every bit as sexy as the modern girls at a typewriter.

Here Gordon Oliver can’t resist planting a kiss on her. One of the first things he tells her when he enters the scene is to plead, “Don’t stop typing.”

Here the ménage à trois is complete as Rhonda attempts to dance with her typewriter and Gordon Oliver cuts in.


Typewriter passion is easily transferable to musicals, seen here in “Silk Stockings” (1957) where Fred Astaire’s immediate attraction to Cyd Charisse is due to her ability to type.


And even less glamorous couples find romance if left to themselves in a small secluded corner with a typewriter, as is the case here in “The Band Wagon” (1953) with Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant. There is nothing like a typewriter to bring new life to a marriage in a rut.


Amid all the froth of “Three Coins in a Fountain” (1957), the only genuine passion comes from the unlikely duo of Dorothy McGuire and Clifton Webb, again because of the typewriter. He is a writer who dictates, and she is a typist who receives his words and produces the pages. Their relationship is interdependent. How many such lovers have thrilled to the ping that warns of the approaching right margin, and the grinding crank of the carriage return? Their need for each other is occasionally accompanied by a need for carbon paper and Wite-Out.

Film noir also explored the relationship between typing and sex, in “A Lonely Place” (1950) when Humphrey Bogart, a screenwriter, begins a relationship with Gloria Grahame that becomes more steamy when she starts to do his typing for him. I’d put up a screen capture for that, but I hear those kids coming back into the room. Everybody shut up.

Now Playing - 1944

Here is an ad for “None But the Lonely Heart” (1944), published this day in 1944, about a month after the film’s release. Unlike a lot of film ads from that era, there are no raging superlatives to entice the viewer, or even much description of the story. Just a grave portrait of Cary Grant in a role unlike any other he had played up to that time.

It’s interesting that few photographic images were used of stars in ads at this time, considering how many miles of print film were used up on them in the publicity departments. Almost always an artist’s rendering was used to create the posters and print ads.

This drama of London’s East End was a turning point in Cary Grant’s development as an actor, but unfortunately not a big box office draw. As has happened to many actors in their careers, the public had gotten used to seeing him one way, and didn’t want him to change.

The Alphabet Meme

Having been tagged for the Alphabet Meme by our friend the Siren (see the gory details here), we interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast for a list of films representing each letter of the alphabet. Most of these films have already been discussed on this blog, and the rest I hope to tackle at some point. Except for “X” which I just swiped because it begins with “X”.

A - All About Eve
B - Best Years of Our Lives, The
C - Casablanca
D - Double Indemnity
E - Enchanted Cottage, The
F - Funny Face
G - Gaslight
H - Holiday Inn
I - I Want You
J - Judgment at Nuremburg
K - King Kong
L - Lost Weekend, The
M - Miracle Worker, The
N - Night Nurse
O - Old Yeller
P - Portrait of Jennie
Q - Quiet Man, The
R - Random Harvest
S - Sunset Blvd.
T - Till the End of Time
U - Unholy Three, The
V - Vertigo
X - X Marks the Spot (okay, so this is really a short subject, not a feature film)
Y - Yankee Doodle Dandy
Z - Zero Hour

According to the rules of this dodge ball game, I’m supposed to tag five others. I could only come up with three whom I thought might participate; I hope they will forgive me. They are (drumroll):

Thom at Film of the Year
Raquelle at Out of the Past
Jonas at All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!

Please visit their websites for their always interesting contributions on classic films.

This Alphabet Meme originated at Blog Cabins (see here).

Ten Things I Like About Old Movies

Ten things I rather like about old movies (without taking into consideration anything as superfluous as good acting, writing or cinematography):

1. Screaming newspapers headlines and screaming newsboys screaming the newspaper headlines.
2. Calendar pages that drop off like autumn leaves to show the passage of time. I watch my calendar on the wall, but this never happens. Except one time, when the thumbtack was loose and the entire year crashed to the floor at once. It was quite unnerving.
3. A song or music theme running all through the movie until you are sick of it.
4. Bell boys. I think it’s the uniform.
5. “Buy War Bonds At This Theater” at the end of a film. One wonders had we been relentlessly pestered to buy U.S. Savings bonds these last several years if our government deficit would have decreased a bit and our personal savings increased a bit.
6. Crashing waves, fireworks, or a quick fade to black to suggest sexual desire or consummation. During the years of the Production Code we needed some kind of subversive clue. To this day, I cannot watch fireworks without chuckling.
7. Candlestick telephones on the office desk.
8. Character actors, most of whom had a lot more experience than the biggest stars.
9. No matter how many times the private detective gets beat up, he always goes back for more. I would have chucked it in for a nice cozy job at the McDonald’s drive-through window the first time somebody beat me senseless and stepped all over my Fedora.
10. “Swell.”

For Me and My Gal - 1942

For the monumental occurrence that happened 90 years ago in 1918 on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we have an unlikely but not I hope inappropriate tribute in “For Me and My Gal” (1942). Like “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, made in the same year, (see blog post here) the movie combines the world of vaudeville with a world at war. The loss of innocence comes wrapped in spats over high button shoes, song and dance, and the sudden interruption of violent reality.

Judy Garland stars, with Gene Kelly in his first film, and George Murphy. Directed by Busby Berkeley, this film, also like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” presents its musical numbers as performances on stage, and not the unreal bursting into song in everyday settings as is common in most musicals. It helps that there appears to be a piano in just about every room.

Judy Garland, despite the turmoil of her private life, presents here her unique and irresistible confidence as a person with more talent than she can possibly contain. Mr. Murphy is her stage partner, a nice fellow who gives her up to the rakish Gene Kelly so that she gets to be a vaudeville star. Mr. Kelly is fresh as paint and full of applesauce. An arrogant opportunist, he sucks up to an operatic headliner with her own railroad car. No private Lear jets these days, just private railroad cars. Conveniently, there is a piano here, too. Judy knows Kelly is no good, but falls in love with the cad anyway.

We have the traditional vaudevillian mélange of acts, the whistle stops in small towns across the country, uncomfortable train upper berths, and the ever-constant desire to headline at New York City’s Palace Theater. It’s a rough and ready world, the chosen way of life of special people.

We see World War I has broken out from the angry headlines on the newspapers the uninterested Gene Kelly tosses aside. When Miss Garland’s kid brother is killed in battle, she leaves Kelly and the act, and their troubled romance, to go to France and perform for the troops. Kelly, who has kept himself out of the Army with a rather rash “accident”, sinks as low as he finally can in her eyes. To redeem himself, he hops over to France as well to perform, and ends up being a hero, which is fortunate for Mr. Kelly’s future acting career.

World War I is significant for the backdrop of a movie about vaudeville, as it was probably the first war that professional entertainers joined together in a voluntary troupe, sort of quasi-official units, to visit the troops. They also sold Liberty Bonds and raised money for Red Cross and other various charity drives. This would all be repeated, of course, on a grander scale for World War II.

At first, Gene Kelly balks at joining them, “You don’t think I’m going over there and sing a bunch of silly songs while all those guys are getting their heads shot off?” But he changes his mind, becomes a hero and finds redemption. Even if he had not become a hero, he still would have been doing his part. The silly songs somehow helped. And somehow got to define a war that has, perhaps more than any other, come to represent lost innocence.

World War I carried something that World War II did not in terms of a kind of folklore of lost innocence. Though the seeds of that war had been present for more than a generation in the form of social unrest, nationalism among disparate European ethnic groups and class turmoil, the war really erupted in an accidental and unintended snowball effect after the tragic 1914 assassination which set everything in motion. It was not many months into the war before generals and politicians alike realized with horror that what they had created to be a limited war was utterly beyond their control to stop. The best hope was that it would somehow burn itself out.

It did, but not before millions of deaths due to battle, disease, and famine.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in “A Farewell to Arms” that “Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years War.”

The other tragedy of World War I was, obviously, its legacy of an imperfect peace that led to World War II.


But another curious aspect to that war so tragic, was the ironic ebullience with which a generation approached it. Even these recruiting posters pictured here do not have that grim, us or them, kill or be killed message. One shows a man quietly examining his conscience as an army of his brothers marches outside the window, and the other shows a group of soldiers on a train gesturing towards the viewer to join them, as if they are happily taking a chartered excursion to a football game.

This ebullience is so marked that when one thinks of that war, one of the first things that comes to mind are the popular songs of the day. So much a part of that war, that the landmark CBS documentary series “World War I” (1964) set aside an entire episode called “Tipperary and All the Jazz” just for the songs the soldiers sang. There was no narration, just song after song played over poignant newsreel footage.

Some of these same songs are performed in “For Me and My Gal” by Judy Garland, et. al., and we are lucky enough to have a front row seat. Because of these funny, raucous, keep-your-chin-up songs, one might think the American Army marched late to the war like party crashers. That is only partly Hollywood; part of it is true. There was an especially hopeful, and for today, an almost unbelievably joyous element in going to war for that generation. “Let’s put on a show” became “Lafayette, we are here!”

It was noted by our allies. British nurse Vera Brittain’s memoir of World War I, “A Testament of Youth” (rpt. Virago Ltd., 1978) notes after three weary years of a war that would not end, “They looked larger than ordinary men; their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed…I wondered, watching them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect…Then I heard an excited exclamation from a group of Sisters behind me.
‘Look! Look! Here are the Americans!’
I pressed forward with the others to watch the United States physically entering the War, so god-like, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army…The coming of relief made me realise all at once how long and how intolerable had been the tension, and with the knowledge that we were not, after all, defeated, I found myself beginning to cry.”

One moment in the movie is particularly sober, and its sentiment particularly true, despite the theatrical setting. Judy’s brother, in uniform, finds her at a party with only enough time to say goodbye. His unit is going overseas. The song “Till We Meet Again” is struck up and everybody sings. It is a sad, sweet waltz,

“Smile a while, and kiss me sad adieu.”

We may think of songs like “George M. Cohan’s “Over There” when we think of World War I, but “Till We Meet Again” was the big song of that era. It is not very vaudevillian, at least not as much as the song one of their vaudeville troopers sings with lyrics like, “We’ll crack the Kaiser with a bottle of Budweiser!” It’s more of a front parlor song, the kind of song people sang together when they didn’t feel so brave.

Just that song was the beginning perhaps, of the loss of innocence. After all the song and dance, though the war was won, the generation that won it, particularly its chroniclers in prose and poetry, art and music, would forever be known as The Lost Generation.

The movie gives us some newsreel footage of General Pershing and the victory parades. Judy and Gene are reunited at the end, at the Palace Theater at a servicemen’s show, both of them in uniform. “For Me and My Gal” just ends with boy getting girl, and an audience made entirely of soldiers cheering them on, like those fellows in the poster marching past the window to some unforeseeable future.

Just like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” there are subtle reminders that there is another war going on outside the movie theater in real time, and some not so subtle ones. After “the end” we have “America Needs Your Money. Buy War Bonds and Stamps at this Theatre.”

Then and Now: Gentleman's Agreement - Part 2

“It’s hard to talk about abstract issues.” Commentator Mr. Schickel remarks about the prejudice issue in Gentleman’s Agreement.

“See? That’s how it was then.” I still hear my father’s voice.

This is part two of our two-part series on this movie. Part one is here.

Intolerance is not abstract when it happens to you, as Gregory Peck finds out when he is on the receiving end of prejudice. I learned this myself on a handful of occasions in my life when certain people I met over the years told jokes and made derogatory remarks about “those people” of that country from where my mother’s parents had emigrated. I had the anonymity of my father’s surname, so they did not know they were insulting my mother and myself. When I informed them that I was one of “those people” they did a little verbal tap dancing. I was less apt to live and let live with these people, admittedly because it was me they were insulting. Abstract issues? Not when it’s you, and my experiences have been nothing compared to what others have faced.

Expressions of prejudice may change, but one thing remains constant in the human experience. There are always going to be some people for whom being just as good as anybody else is never going to be enough. They must be superior. Since actually being superior is out of their reach, they go the easier method by insisting that others are inferior.

How interesting that today much of the former open vehemence of prejudice has shifted from the now socially unacceptable derision against race or religion to the more socially acceptable ridicule of political affiliation.  (See update note below.  Can it have been only 11 years since I wrote this post?)

“Conservative” and “liberal” are used today like dirty words, accusing labels, where the opposing political party, or politician, or even individual voter, is vilified with a degree of condescension, arrogance, and meanness that would appall most of us were it applied against a person’s race or religion. It is no longer enough to simply disagree. We must condemn. Those people.

I don’t know when it started, but our need to compromise as laid out by the founding fathers morphed into a need to bash each other mercilessly. The first time I can personally remember seeing this evolve was in college when a schoolmate and I discovered we were members of opposite political parties. Though I was unconcerned for my part, her surprise was overwhelming, and she blurted out, “You can’t be! Really? But you seem so intelligent!”

In today’s political climate I might be defensive, but at the time it cracked me up and I laughed.

Just before the scene where Gregory Peck goes to the restricted hotel for the showdown, he retorts to Dorothy McGuire that he must stand up to the bigots because they insult “everything this country stands for.”

The phrase seems to make Mr. Schickel squirm. “I don’t know. ‘Everything this country stands for.’ See, you know, maybe there’s a way to just slightly avoid that line. I think we’ve got it.”

Avoid that line? That line is the whole point of the movie. That’s the point of this nation. That seems to be what George Washington thought when he visited the synagogue at Truro, Rhode Island, and declared to the Jewish community, “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Idealism has the air of naiveté or even falseness to us these days where cynicism equates sophistication. Fear mongering has replaced it as a hip and edgy alternative.

Now we have a new President. Those who did not vote for Barack Obama will be disappointed, as it is only human to be disappointed when the candidate you did not want for office wins. We are on the brink of a hopeful time with a new President who embodies the diversity of our society, but we are also at a perilous time, and not strictly because of outside threats or economic collapse. There is another insidious problem, deep at our core. We get lazy. Some decent people who did not want Senator Obama to win might say nothing to the bigoted, the resentful, the fear mongers, preferring smug silence, satisfied that the one they did not want to win will not have an easy time of it. A good chunk of Gentleman’s Agreement is about guarding ourselves from our worst impulses, from taking the easy out.

After 9-11 there was a great call out to moderate Muslims to distance themselves from the radical Muslims and condemn their terrorist actions. Why were they not more vocal, protest their indignation, many wanted to know.

That’s what the movie’s about, too. As the Dorothy McGuire character had to learn, it’s not enough to be a nice person who would never act like a rude nutcase. She learns that in silence lies not only cowardice; there lies complicity.

On this point, I observed the influence of four people in my younger years. These were my father, who bristled at people who thought they were so great; and my mother, who disdained nonsense.

The other two people were John Garfield, who played a quiet but intense scene with Dorothy McGuire where he showed that a person could talk frankly about prejudice, but still maintain gentlemanly kindness; and Dorothy McGuire, who went through a scene-after-scene crisis of conscience, and got the message at the 11th hour with shamed self-revelation. My mother would have admired her epiphany of self knowledge. My father would have admired her humility.

I liked that it showed the possibility of redemption exists for us and our society. Such redemption takes courage, and it also takes practice.

There is of course, that final ironic aspect to Gentleman’s Agreement, the aftermath. Several people connected with the film had their careers and their lives damaged by the Committee for House Un-American Activities, abetted by the bigoted Congressman John E. Rankin (D-Mississippi). This man who spat racial slurs on the floor of the House of Representatives took particular interest in Jews on whom he could pin Communist affiliations, which made Garfield, a Jewish man in a watershed movie about anti-Semitism that some people in some parts of this country were trying to ban from being shown, a prime target. A film so controversial that a handful of Jewish studio heads wouldn’t touch it.

But June Havoc (real name Hovick), and producer Daryl Zanuck could not escape just because they were not actually Jewish: their names sounded Jewish to somebody. Guilt by surname consonants is an unusual reason to call someone to defend their patriotism. But these days we can still see how it could happen. President-elect Obama’s middle name of Hussein caused more than one ignorant person to assume he was Muslim, which to them must mean he was a terrorist, or at least anti-American. My mother’s first name was changed to sound less foreign and more American. She would have identified with President-elect Obama in that on his father’s side at least, he is first generation American as she was.

Anne Revere, who played Gregory Peck’s mother in the film, a descendent of Revolutionary era figure Paul Revere, obviously had a very American name and very American family heritage, but that did her no good. She was not Jewish, either, but she was married to a Jew, so evidently that was enough to not escape the Committee. That and the fact she refused to cooperate with the Committee (unlike the film’s director, Mr. Kazan who famously did, as well as Mr. Zanuck). As Miss Revere is quoted, "I'm a free-thinking Yankee rebel and nobody's going to tell me what to do!"

They nailed her good. That’s one Academy Award winning actress we won’t be bothered with again. Well, that Paul Revere relative of hers was a radical himself. They’re all alike. Those people.

To persecution, no assistance, George Washington said, rather naively.

We also have calls these days, not unlike the days of the Communist witch hunts, for an investigation into who is anti-American among our elected officials, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) most recently vocal among them. Hard to tell who is anti-American with everybody rather self consciously wearing the same flag pins on their lapels. To some people, anyone who does not agree with them is anti-American, which makes accusing people very easy and convenient.

“See? That’s how it was then,” my father shook his head at the TV where Gentleman’s Agreement showed us a world of decades ago where nice people allowed prejudice to flourish right under their noses, when people with “foreign sounding” names were suspect, when politics got so nasty that people were forced to prove their patriotism in public forums.

“You know,” Mr. Schickel allows, “antique as this movie sometimes seems in some of its aspects, the truth is that at that time it was an important statement to make.”

Antique movie? Dated and preachy, the labels from which this film has yet to escape. Casablanca is also dated and preachy, but its bad guys were the Nazis, so we don’t mind speeches against them. In Gentleman’s Agreement, we are the bad guys, or we could be if we’re not careful. That’s the difference.

“It was a good movie for the moment,” Mr. Schickel comments.

I agree, but I will add that maybe the moment is now.

Incidents, these days, of cowardly thugs leaving nooses displayed on college campuses, a factory, even a United States Coast Guard training ship. Here’s a link to a story about an incident of refusing to hire Jews or African Americans, these days. We’ve just been subjected to one of the most hostile campaign seasons in years, with much of the hostility flourishing on the blogs of anybody with an ax to grind. In such a climate, we have little right to be so blasé about this old, dated, preachy movie.

“It is a little weird why she’s taken so long to learn such a simple lesson,” Mr. Schickel complains about the film. This nation has so far taken well over 200 years, since George Washington’s day, in its continuing struggle to sort out prejudice. It takes Dorothy McGuire just under two hours.

I do not believe Gentleman’s Agreement has lost any of its edginess, its eloquence, or its relevance. The trouble is, grass grew over the ground it broke.

See? That’s how it is these days, Father.

(Update: This two-part series was originally published in 2008, the week of the election to the presidency of the first term of President Barack H. Obama.  How much more malevolent bigotry has become now in 2019 would have horrified my parents beyond belief.  I think of them often these dangerous days.)

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.