Till the End of Time - 1946

Till the End of Time (1946) examines the difficulties of post-war adjustment for three returning Marines, their families, and a war widow for whom the post-war world – as it was for anyone who lost someone in the war -- is not so much an experience to be adjusted to, but to just endure.  Despite being a good film in its own right with good performances, it lacks the beauty, the inspiration, and the dramatic punch of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), discussed here, which was released some five months later.  Though Till the End of Time apparently did well at the box office for being a timely film and was popular in its day (taking its title from an already popular song of the era), today it has been pretty well eclipsed by The Best Years of Our Lives as the most beloved movie about returning World War II vets.

This is our entry in the Classic Film Blog Association’s Hidden Classics Blogathon.  Please have a look at the other great blogs participating in this event.

Guy Madison stars as one of the returning Marines, a handsome fellow who has to remind himself occasionally how lucky he is to have returned without any physical or psychiatric wounds from the war, plagued only by a feeling of restlessness that takes him weeks to understand and accept as part of the process of adjustment to peacetime life.

Dorothy McGuire plays the war widow in a role quite different from most of her other work.  This was her sixth film, and the five preceding this were quality films in which she produced quality work (we covered Claudia, Claudia and David, The Spiral Staircase, and The Enchanted Cottage), so apparently, with the reputation of being a discerning and mature young stage actress, she was allowed to play the part of a woman who copes with the loss of her flier husband by attaching herself temporarily to several men, breezing through relationships with no intention of settling on any one of them.  This would have been a floozy role in the hands of anyone else, but McGuire brings depth and sympathy to a character that can be flippant, bristling, showing her pain, her intelligence, and her capacity to still empathize with others despite wanting to shut herself off from such feelings. 

She seems much more mature emotionally than Guy Madison, and just as Miss McGuire was actually some five or six years older than he in real life, we might assume her character is older, which makes their relationship even more unusual for the era and more interesting.  Though she has played ingenues, Dorothy McGuire is the world-weary woman of experience who, after steamy moments, smiles amusedly at Mr. Madison.

Robert Mitchum plays Madison’s Marine buddy, who is being released from a military hospital for a head wound suffered on Iwo Jima, for which he has a metal plate in his head. He is an easy-going cowboy who wants to buy a ranch back home in New Mexico.  He’ll go broke in Vegas before he ever gets his ranch, and a couple of fights will bring warning headaches that may threaten his life.

The third Marine is a pal of Mitchum’s whom he met in the hospital, played by Bill Williams, who has had both legs amputated.  He has returned home to a widowed mother and a younger brother, ashamed to be a burden to them.  He had been a boxer before the war, and his career is obviously over, with no interest in another one.

The movie opens with the discharge process, the awarding of service record documents, of mustering out pay, and with stern advice given by William Gargan, who will pop up through the movie as a Marine rehabilitation officer, trying to get the boys on a firm path to civilian life and to avail themselves of any advantages the military has for counseling, pensions for the wounded, etc.  Mitchum balks at applying for a pension for the brain injury that will likely debilitate him in years to come.

Guy Madison takes a cab home to his parents’ stucco house in Los Angeles.  His folks are out, so he has a quiet homecoming, entering through the back door with the customary hidden key.  He lifts the service flag from the window and drapes it over a family photo in the living room, signifying the missing family member has returned.  However, he walks through the house rather briskly, with seemingly little reflection.  He enters his boyhood room with all its juvenile trappings of pennants, street signs, a deflated football, and we might be reminded of Homer’s room in The Best Years of Our Lives.  He is amused an old jacket does not fit him.  With nothing to do here, goes to a local hangout.  Unfortunately, moments like this which could have been dramatized to greater effect were sort of breezed through.  The movie has strong dialogue, especially in scenes between Dorothy McGuire and Madison, but much of director Edward Dmytryk’s work pales by comparison.  In many scenes, we might consciously miss the strong, sensitive intuition of William Wyler, who would have made more of such simple things.

Jean Porter is the bouncy girl next door, a comic hepcat who makes eyes at Madison.  Guy’s mother, played by Ruth Nelson, would like him to date her, but she’s just a kid.  On a skating double-date, she refers respectfully to Dorothy McGuire as “Mrs. Ruscomb,” stressing her age, but which Dorothy regards only with wry amusement.  Jean Porter would later marry director Edward Dmytryk.

If Till the End of Time does not have the same power as The Best Years of Our Lives, it does, however, have a gritty quality that makes it especially interesting in comparison.  Till the End of Time goes to areas where Best Years does not go.  Where Best Years may show the floozy wife played by Virginia Mayo telling her husband, Dana Andrews, who is plagued with nightmares to “Snap out it” and get over the war, we have Guy Madison’s parents, particularly his mother, actually refusing to allow him to talk about his war experiences because what her son has gone through to save the world is upsetting and disgusting.  Other civilians, like Harry von Zell, who used to run the malt shop and now runs the local bar, welcomes Guy Madison home with, “You’re back from the thing!  You all in one piece?”

The vets in Till the End of Time, including Guy’s old boyhood pal played by Loren Tindall, acknowledge that the only people they confide their experiences to are other vets.  They make the decision to shut out the civilians.  “Sometime you’ll tell me what you did, and I’ll tell you what I did.”

A case of PTSD is shown when McGuire and Madison grab a coffee at the skating rink snack bar and they notice a soldier, played by Richard Benedict, hunkered down over the counter, shaking wildly.  They both move in to cover him and talk him through it.  He is on leave from the local VA hospital, fearful to go home to his folks when he’s eventually released.  He doesn’t want them to see him like this.  This is not just a nightmare to be comforted from as it is only a dream, as Fred's nightmare was in Best Years, but rather this is a waking, conscious moment of utter panic and physical disability.  It is ugly, and we don’t know what his family will think if he ever gets the nerve to go home to them.

Miss McGuire, the war widow, confronts Madison with her own particular gripes and burdens when he calls her a tramp for seeing other men.  Though early in the movie he says that war widows should be given a Purple Heart, he demands that she get on with life just as other have demanded that of him.  She laments that she bought into the dream of a post-war world with her husband and she was cheated out of it.  “The war is over and John isn’t coming home and I’m stuck with my dream.”

His parents nag Madison to get a job as he is floundering at home doing nothing, even Dorothy McGuire encourages him to go work.  She asks what has he done for work?

“Go to school.  Go to war.”  As for so many of his generation.

She gets him a job where she works in a factory manufacturing radios.  She works in the office.  He works in the plant where a young Blake Edwards is his foreman.  After starting a fight with the foreman, Madison explains to McGuire, who has followed him to a hamburger stand, “Okay.  I’m back from the war.  I’m lucky.  I’ve got two arms, two legs, and two eyes.  Nine out of ten fellows are going to be in the same shape.  Normal.  Then what’s bothering me?  I’m edgy. I feel out of things.  You know why?  Because I’ve been scrounged.  I’m robbed of three and a half years.  Somebody stole my time.”

It’s a movie where the hero gets to be a petulant whiner, and that is honest, because only a superhero could undergo such sacrifice for so many years and not complain.  And the Greatest Generation were human.

Even Bill Williams, wallowing in angry self-pity over his double amputation, is brought to action by his mother, who reminds him of a man who lost the use of his legs.  “He didn’t quit.  He got to be President.”

It even takes one step farther a political warning raised in Best Years.  In that movie, we see Ray Teal confront Homer and Fred about “Americanism” and how we should have been fighting on the side of the Nazis.  Fred satisfyingly socks him.  Till the End of Time hints throughout the film that veterans’ groups are contacting vets through the mail and soliciting their membership, some of the groups have far-right leanings.  Madison’s dad, played by the wonderful Tom Tully, warns him against them.  In a climactic scene at the end of the film, Robert Mitchum, Madison, and Bill Williams are in a bar and they are confronted by one such belligerent far-right vets’ group, the American War Patriots.  They don’t allow Catholics, Jews, or Blacks.  The Black soldier who has been playing pinball with Mitchum watches them and leaves in disgust.  The Nazi sympathizers aren’t just civilian malcontents; they’re actual veterans of whom we now need to be afraid.

We may remember Caleb Peterson as being the Black soldier helping to move the airplane engine in the opening scene of The Best Years of Our Lives.  

Mitchum responds, telling them about a war buddy of theirs, Maxie Klein.  “If Maxie were here, he’d probably spit right in your eye.  But Maxie’s dead on Guadalcanal.  So just for him, I’m going to spit in your eye.”  And he does.  The fight that breaks out seriously reinjures Mitchum’s skull injury, and they rush him to the hospital. 

The film does not conclude so much as it decompresses, with the operation a success, and Dorothy McGuire suddenly chummy with Guy’s mother, but we don’t know when or how that happened. 

Till the End of Time is not as polished as The Best Years of Our Lives, but it stretches further into uncomfortable areas that are worth taking a good hard look at.  And then, too, there’s a nice beach scene between Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison which we discussed in this previous post.

Have a look at the other blogs posting in this CMBA Hidden Classics Blogathon.

 ********************

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.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Gasoline Alley - 1951

Gasoline Alley (1951) brings the popular comic strip to life, and like the strip seems to reflect that life goes on and time doesn’t stand still, for the story is mainly about main character Skeezix’s younger brother Corky.

The comic strip is the longest currently running strip in U.S. history, begun in 1918.  Unlike most strips, the characters in Gasoline Alley aged, and much of the storyline chronicles the life span of Skeezix Wallet.  Skeezix was an abandoned baby found by Walt Wallet on Valentine’s Day 1921.  Walt was a bachelor, but he took the baby in and raised him.  Walt and his pals liked to tinker with their autos – a new-fangled invention still in the early ‘20s, and so the alley behind their street was nicknamed Gasoline Alley.

Skeezix did not remain a baby, but readers followed along his boyhood as he aged in the 1920s and 1930s – While Walt married, had another son, and then another baby, a girl, was abandoned in his car in the mid-thirties.  Walt just seemed to attract foundlings, apparently.  Skeezix joined the Army during World War II, married in 1944 and had a couple of kids of his own.  He’s a great-grandfather today, having celebrated his 100^th birthday this year.

This was another strip, like last week’s Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, that my mother loved, because she grew up with it and she reminded me many times that Skeezix shared childhood milestones with her, as they were close in age.  She talked about him as if he was a cousin.

The comic strip was very popular in its day, spawning radio versions, a children’s middle-grade chapter book, and a couple movies: this one and its sequel Corky of Gasoline Alley, also released in 1951. Frank O. King, the cartoonist, is also a co-writer of this script.

Corky, played by Scotty Beckett, stars in both movies, as the focus had shifted from Skeezix, now perhaps viewed as more settled with a wife and kids, onto a younger fellow with more trouble in his life. 

Corky’s main problem is his discontent about growing up in Skeezix’s shadow.  He has never measured up to his older brother’s steady qualities, and now that Skeezix has his own business – a garage called Gasoline Alley, a wife and kids and his own home, Corky wants to catch up to him.  The movie begins when Corky unexpectedly arrives home from college announcing he has quit school, and brings in his new bride. 

His parents are understandably shocked, a little annoyed, and worried as heck about their boy’s habit of acting in haste.  Corky and Hope, his new wife, live with Ma and Pa until Corky can get a job and afford a place to live. 

Walt is played by Don Beddoe, and he is the only person in the cast to actually resemble the cartoon character he plays, with that shock of hair pasted high over his forehead.  A great job by the hair and makeup folks.  None of the other actors look like the characters they portray, but probably could not be expected to, after all, these were cartoon drawings. That Don Beddoe looks so much like Walt Wallet is delightful and, I suppose, a little distracting.  He draws your attention in every scene he’s in.

Skeezix is played by Jimmy Lyndon, who we last saw here in Life with Father (1947).  He doesn’t get much screen time, unfortunately.  Patti Brody plays little sister Judy, who has a few funny lines and delivers them well.  Susan Morrow makes her screen debut as Hope.

Corky’s first attempt at working for living is to become an underwear model for a catalogue, which has its funny moments, though a sexy woman model he meets pops back in the story from time to time as a prospective danger to his marriage.  This is no soap opera, however, and the movie’s director, Edward Bernds, transfers some of his experience on Three Stooges and Bowery Boys flicks in broad comedy sprinkled throughout the movie, especially in a wild car chase at the end. (Where, told to stop the car by throwing out the clutch, the terrified driver exclaims, “I haven’t got one, it’s Dyna Flush!”  I’m assuming this is a comic reference to the Dynaflow early automatic transmission in Buick cars.)

Corky next gets a job as a dishwasher for a restaurant, and with incredible luck, or hutzpah, decides to take a lease on a run-down diner.  Fry cook Pudge, played by Dick Wessel is along for the move – turns out he was in the Army with Skeezix, and Gus Schilling’s hired as a dishwasher with a prison record.  Corky gives him a job to help him go straight, though Schilling’s light-fingered skills will help later on when they need to stall signing a contract.  We last saw Gus Schilling here as the beleaguered TV deliveryman in Our Very Own (1950).

With his wife, Hope, as waitress, and a big loan from Skeezix, Corky’s in business and much of the movie follows the ups and downs of getting established. A wolf after Hope happens to be a shill for a competitor.  Corky and his crew run and out of the diner so often on emergencies, that at one point the cook, heading out the door, yells to a customer, “Turn off the lima beans in ten minutes!”

It’s possible that since two movies were made in the same year featuring the Gasoline Alley characters that it might have been intended to make a series, such as the long and successful Blondie series of movies produced from the late 1930s through 1950, also, of course, based on a famous comic strip. However, no more followed and it’s possible Scotty Becket’s own personal troubles might have played into that decision.  He’d been around Hollywood since a small child, first coming to attention in the Our Gang series.  As an adult, his self-destructive behavior destroyed his career and eventually, his life at only 38 years old.  He played his role in Gasoline Alley with great energy and likeability. 

The strip continues today, having passed through its fascination with the Tin Lizzie, with the Depression, World War II, post-war family life, Skeezix's children having served in Vietnam and in the Peace Corps, and each fad and whim in succession through the last ten decades of our history. It survived by examining the small stuff of life, and then letting it go, because life goes on and time doesn’t stand still.

Next week we join the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Hidden Classics Blogathon, with a look at Till the End of Time (1946).

********************

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.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Working Winnie - 1926

Working Winnie (1926) brings the 1920s sensation from the funny papers -- Winnie Winkle -- to the big screen.  It's a short movie, about 24 minutes, and was the first in a series of ten live-action adventures of our heroine.  She was that other modern sensation of the 1920s; not the flapper, but the "working girl."  It was one of the very first pop culture hits to feature a single working woman.

The strip by Martin Branner, who also co-wrote the script for this movie, was called Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, because she was the sole support of her parents and younger brother, Perry.  The strip began in 1920 and was an immediate hit, chugging along through the decades and finally discontinued by the newspaper publishing syndicate in 1996, when it was deemed that Winnie was no longer relatable to modern women.  Hogwash.  Winnie was a favorite of mine from childhood, when she was still working, though by the 1970s the strip was more of a continuing story like a soap opera and not comic gags.

In her 76 years, one of the longest-running comic strips in U.S. publishing history, Winnie had been through a lot.  Lots of jobs, lots of leering bosses, a marriage to Bill Wright, who later got lost in the Amazon jungle while Winnie was pregnant with twins (boy and girl twins, my favorite kind), raising her children as a single mother, and finally founding her own fashion design company before they pulled the plug on our heroine.  At least they had the decency to bring Bill back out of the jungle and reunite them.  Actually, Winnie, in true independent woman fashion, went to the jungle and brought him back herself.  Through it all, she kept her single surname.

From July 1976

Winnie was a favorite of my mother's as well.  We discussed the strip's progress daily.  My mother was one of the most intellectual people I'd ever met, and a great reader of much heavier material, but she had a sentimental fondness for the comic strips of her childhood, especially the ones that accompanied her into adulthood.  She was a dedicated newspaper reader, and I suppose that the funnies were her gateway drug to the world of print news, and were for a lot of children back then.

Today, I find reading comics in newspapers a struggle because in many papers they tend to be printed much smaller than they used to be.  It's not much of a pleasure anymore.  When the strips are larger, one is able to appreciate the artwork more, as well as being able to just read the words.  You can lose yourself in a nice big 2 1/2 x 9 1/2 inch strip, or even a 2 x 6 1/2, as they were by the 1970s.  Strips had a lot more detailed background back then as well, which would probably not transfer well today on a much smaller space. Terry and the Pirates, now that was a joy to behold, its fine detail beautifully showcased in a larger format.

Working Winnie is a simple plot full of action, as the silent flickers were.  It stars Ethelyn Gibson as Winnie.  Miss Gibson was married to Billy West, who was the producer of this film, and starred in lots of comedies himself, including not a few with Oliver Hardy.  He appeared in a huge number of movies from the teens right through the 1920s, but by the 1930s was relegated to uncredited bit parts, and he retired in 1935.

Here's Billy West as the silent World War I Medal of Honor winner in Joan Blondell's musical number "My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933, which we covered here.

Winnie suffers the indignity of running to catch a trolley, ripping a man's pants off when she can't get a grip on something as she tries to board.  She gets another trolley, packed like sardines.  At work, a sandwich she has left in her desk drawer has ants all over it, which get onto her hand and onto her body, and when she jumps, wiggles and shimmies, her co-workers think she is dancing and they clap along.  Her grumpy boss and her hoped-for suitor suffer the same fate.

The trolley is so packed on the way home, she has to crawl on the floor and down the steps, landing head-first in the street.

Invited to a swank dinner party that evening, her frumpy parents, mischievous little brother and his roughneck gang, all do their best to embarrass her. 

The movie is available here on the Internet Archive site.  It's quite muddy, but there are a few laugh-out-loud moments, but don't expect much of a story line.  For that, you had to read the funnies.  And then discuss them with your mother.

Yesterday, May 5th, was Cartoonist's Day.  In the spirit of the festivities, here's a nod to my favorite cartoonist, my twin brother John.  His collection of delightfully sweet and silly cartoons is available on Amazon, in print or eBook:  Arte Acher's Falling Circus.

Next week, we'll have another look at a movie based on a comic strip - Gasoline Alley (1951).

********************

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.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.