Middle of the Night - 1959

Middle of the Night (1959) begins with a camera shot out the back of a moving truck in New York City traffic. It is early morning. The soft strains of a single oboe lend a contemplative touch. We float through the traffic and the pedestrians (actual New Yorkers going to work and unaware they are being filmed from the back of a truck). We head into the Garment District, and we see workers pushing rolling racks of clothing on the street. Here is where Fredric March spends his days and a good many of his nights as a clothing manufacturer.

We celebrate Labor Day today with a look at this terrific film about a middle-aged widower, a self-made man and workaholic, who begins a romantic relationship with his 24-year-old receptionist, played by Kim Novak. Their performances are powerful, and the script by Paddy Chayefsky adapted from his Broadway play, is the kind of introspective, sensitive, and adult (in the real meaning) story we rarely see anymore. There are no “Storyline for Dummies” cliché images; we are meant to take our time, and expend a little effort, to understand.

Directed by Delbert Mann, the film, being film, takes us places that the stage play can’t - outside in the wintry streets, allowing us to examine the cold stone exteriors of the claustrophobic interiors were we spend so much time.

What interests me most about the writer’s and director’s treatment of this story is how much importance they place on the workplace. We know that Fredric March is a well-off factory owner, but are not asked to accept this on faith with a shot of him at a desk mumbling into a Dictaphone. He is a hands-on manufacturer and his work is his life. He is sort of the opposite of the smarmy corporate shark he played here in Executive Suite, which we examined Labor Day last year. Fredric March is riveting, commanding every scene.

The scenes showing the love story between Kim Novak and March, and the emotional confrontations with their families, are always interspersed with scenes of the workplace. Unlike like many films showing career people in turmoil, here it is the job that represents the sane, safe place, and the home life is the source of tension and chaos.

When we arrive at the factory, it is as if we are taken out of the back of the truck by the delivery driver, and brought up to the dark, narrow hall where Kim Novak types and shuffles manifests and bills of lading behind her receptionist’s window. The delivery guy leers at her, and she is flustered, wants to get rid of him quick. She is distraught and in the throes of some emotional crisis.

Just beyond the office is the factory floor, where men are cutting out clothing patterns on long tables, and Fredric March takes a moment to have a coffee in a paper cup with some of his salesmen, who tell tales of the road. They are all middle aged men, feeling the angst of knowing their own mortality, and morbidly gossip about whom among their peers is sick and who is dead.

His business partner brags of his romantic conquests of younger women. Played by Albert Dekker, he has a pivotal role through the film as the example of a man not going gently into that good night, but making a fool of himself among his colleagues. Towards the end of the movie, we see how really unhappy he is, and how a desperate action of his makes March take some decisive action of his own.

Dekker playfully leers at Kim Novak, and she is unnerved, ready to fall apart.

Mr. March leaves work early to go home and change for a meeting with the union that evening, the drudge and curse of management. He lives with his older unmarried sister, who manages their apartment and tries to manage him. He has a grown son and daughter, and a grandchild. When his daughter tells him he should start to see other women, he tells her that he had been seeing a woman who was a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue -- it’s all about work in this movie -- but she declined his marriage proposal. He has not seen her in a couple months.

When March is heading out the door to his union meeting, he stops, in his hat and coat, to try one more phone call to this woman. Though we hear only his side of the conversation, we watch him become deflated as she brushes him off, and tells him she has married someone else. As pitiful as the scene is, Mr. March is not the kind of man to ask for pity. He is gracious and gentlemanly on the phone, though his voice shakes and his lips tremble.

It is an interesting sketch of a man who, as we are gradually told through the film, came to this country as a child, had no formal education, and though he lived through some hard and miserable times on the street, worked diligently to establish his own business and thrived. Not only did he work hard, but he learned -- from others, from the people around him whether they were his workers or others, perhaps bankers and business associates, and teachers from the design school he attended -- people who were his superiors in education and society -- how to speak and how to behave like the man he wanted to become. We sense that though he came from the streets, by the time he worked his way up to his own factory floor, he left streets outside.

Before he can attend his meeting, he has to stop by Kim Novak’s apartment to pick up some work she had brought home. He is cordial and businesslike with her, but suddenly struck with sympathy for her when he sees she is struggling with some unspoken overwhelming burden. Though he may occasionally bark at his employees, he is an old-style paternalistic master, who takes responsibility for his own. Through the course of the evening, he gets her to talk, and he listens patiently, to her unhappy marriage that ended in divorce, to her unhappy childhood with a father who abandoned them and a mother who ignored her.

Cut to later in the evening when she is telling a funny story about her teenage years, and we see he is laughing and enjoying her company. He breaks up the evening only long enough to make a quick call to the union meeting and tells them affably, with only mock gruffness, “All right, tell them we’ll make it six cents a seam.” He used to belong to a union himself. He knows that workers have value, not just because of what they can do for him, but because they are human beings and so is he.

And those of us who had been union factory workers or children of union factory workers know that each sick day, health benefit, or few cents an hour raise came not through the corporation’s benevolence, but by fighting tooth and nail for it.

In one scene, March is urged by his salesmen to take on a big new client and dump the little ones. He refuses, because they have been faithful customers, these smaller stores who buy his merchandize. He treats his customers with fairness and respect, because they have been with him through thick and thin, and he knows the bigger conglomerates will not extend him the same courtesy. “We don’t chisel our customers for anybody!”

Mr. March finds himself smitten with Miss Novak, astonished that it should be so, but with honesty and frankness, has already diagnosed himself as going through a midlife crisis. Because of his unflinching analysis about himself, he is able to apply the same direct focus on her problems. She feels confidence in him, and he helps her to untangle her emotional pain.

We see a shot of him later on in the movie pinning a cloth pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy, smoothing the fabric over the shoulders with a capable, almost loving touch. We sense his knowledge of human beings developed through years of making clothing for them, as if in creating this shell for the outside of the people, he has gained knowledge of what’s going on inside them.

Their relationship is tenuous, frightening for both of them. They pull away, and get back together with frustrating repetition. We are reminded by them, and by their unsympathetic families how impossible or inappropriate a romance between a 56-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman is supposed to be. We are shown no fairy tales of love conquers all or automatic happy endings, but we see the struggle of loving and being loved.

We see other married couples in the film who are more suitable for each other, yet are more unhappy. Martin Balsam plays Fredric March’s son-in-law, one of a few actors who also appeared in the original stage version. (Edward G. Robinson played March’s role on stage, with Gena Rowlands in the Kim Novak role.) Balsam has some great scenes as one of the Bright Young Men of the late corporate 1950s whose wife shows, at times, cruel disregard for his feelings until he finally blows up at her.

I love these films of the late 1950s and early 1960s when we get to see the greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age matched up with the rising young TV-trained stars. We saw some of this before here in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) -- another Delbert Mann-directed movie.

In some scenes, Mr. March tentatively talks about his youth, which is tied inextricably like everything else in his life, to his business. It is as if he tries to explain himself to her, for the sake of transparency let her see the goods before she buys. During one such scene, they are in the work room late at night alone, he in his shirt sleeves finishing up an order, tracing markers for a pattern.

He talks about being a kid of 14 when he started work. “I joined the union, they made me a goon…you don’t know what went on here 30, 40 years ago. Bosses hired gangsters, we hired gangsters. People were murdered right in the streets here.”

But though she listens, those other moments she explores his craggy face with her young hands are what seem to tell her more about him, and it is exquisitely touching how hungrily she seeks to know him by touching his face, on which his age is plastered more plainly than anything else about him. His birth certificate or his resume of past experience could not tell her more than the lined and sagging skin on his cheek.

More juxtaposition of home with work. After a scene where Novak comes to March’s apartment to meet his family, where all are well-behaved but on tenterhooks, we cut to a more relaxed and happy scene in the workroom where the office girls and the salesmen from the road, and cutters in the shop gather for a farewell party for Miss Novak. She is leaving her job to marry Mr. March (which though common back in the day, it was also common for married women in mom-and-pop establishments to continue working. March’s factory seems less corporate than it does mom-and-pop. You’d think that both would prefer to continue to spend their days together as well as their nights.) The workers celebrate with cold cuts from the deli and champagne in paper cups. It is her first party, and she is delighted at the attention.

Then cut to another nasty confrontation from her family, who bring her down quickly, especially her best friend, a very bitter Lee Grant, who tells her that life is just “pay the rent, and go to sleep.”

Novak defends her relationship with Mr. March, “I don’t have to beg him for kindness; he gives it with both hands.”

We know what they want and they know what they want, the question is, are labor and management able to get together? And would world end if they did?

As long as we’re talking about juxtaposition here, a good film to watch with this movie is the HBO documentary Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (2009).

This is a fantastic documentary illustrating the history of the garment industry in New York City, with lots of archival footage from the early 1900s right up through the 1990s. Immigrants, mom and pop to big corporations -- the nuts and bolts of the garment industry and how its story works as a microcosm for what has gone wrong with the American economy -- namely the deregulation that allowed jobs to be sent overseas, the weakening of unions, and the new corporate mentality of focusing on the stockholder instead of the product as Wall Street takes over the operation.

What do they know about making clothes? This is what one laid-off garment worker in the film wants to know. Maybe nothing, but they do know that slave labor, including that of children, in overseas sweatshops makes for a sweet profit.

There are many interviews with garment industry workers from all levels, from sewing to the designers. One recalls her immigrant mother quitting her sewing job one day -- I believe this was in the early 1960s. The woman, herself a laid off garment industry worker today, recounts with disbelief that her mother simply walked into another factory and got a new job that same afternoon. There was a sea of jobs in what had been the largest single employer in New York City. And over 90 percent of those jobs union.

Archival footage showing us fashion through the decades. We see the guys hauling rolling racks of clothes along Seventh Avenue, and the enormous work rooms full of sewing machines, the designers who in the 1970s and 1980s became rock star famous, the bridal shops, the sportswear and separates, the ranchero scarves, and the glitz of the sequined 1980s. It’s a fascinating ride through fashion and culture, and money, and politics.

A stunning montage shows that in 1965 about 95 percent of the clothes bought and worn in America were made in America.

In 1975, that dropped to 80 percent.

In 1985 - 70 percent.

In 1995 - 50 percent.

And in 2009, the year this television documentary was made -- only 5 percent of the clothing sold and worn in the USA was made here.

That’s a lot to think about, and I leave you to think about it. Happy Labor Day.

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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.

Then and Now: Gentleman's Agreement - Part 1

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is often labeled today as dated or preachy. This is what I’d like to address in this post. Observations could be offered on director Elia Kazan’s work on this film and on the performances, but that could be for another time.

Because of this essay’s length, this will be divided into two posts, beginning today and concluding Thursday.

The 2003 DVD release of Gentleman’s Agreement features a commentary by two actresses in the film, Celeste Holm and June Havoc, and by film historian and critic Richard Schickel. I think the comparison of their comments on this film best illustrates the road this movie has taken from being seen as edgy and eloquent at its release, and seen today as being quite dated or preachy. Though Mr. Schickel acknowledges at the outset that the film was a “pioneering study of anti-Semitism in America” he quickly demonstrates what I think has become common among critics today, both those experienced and knowledgeable and those not: a certain condescension over this movie. There is perhaps a wish to like it better, a grudging sense of obligation to note its place in film history, but a nagging discomfort about how it holds up today.

(Being aware of Mr. Schickel’s opinions on the validity of critic bloggers, I write this post, which challenges some of his remarks, with some amusement, but with sincerity. Despite my challenges to his commentary, he provides insightful remarks, including on the career of director Elia Kazan, the subject of one of Mr. Schickel’s books.)

Mr. Schickel’s remarks contrast sharply with the comments by Miss Havoc and Miss Holm, who both speak unapologetically of the idealism of the film. Miss Holm seems to almost respond directly to Mr. Schickel’s more cynical, rather “yeah, whatever” attitude with, “The writers had a real sense of responsibility to the audience. They had a point. They were written for a reason. That seems to have gone out of style.”

At times Mr. Schickel seems to vacillate in his opinions, wavering. While he notes the “great American silence” on prejudice which prompted the book by Laura Z. Hobson and the film, he complains that the characters’ passion as expressed by Moss Hart’s script “kind of over-explains what’s really sort of not that difficult a moral issue.”

Not that difficult a moral issue? It was then. I think it still is now, for many people.

His opinion may reflect his own experiences, which in his case is the longtime analysis of film, which may make him more sophisticated. We mostly speak from our experiences, just as June Havoc and Celeste Holm speak from theirs. However, Miss Havoc’s and Miss Holm’s voices come over as authentic, as people whose experiences give them a certain cache on this issue and this movie, because of having lost none of their idealism of the era and a film which was so dangerous for them to make. Mr. Schickel’s comments are truly from another era, in contrast emotionally remote, and occasionally irritatingly irrelevant, as when he remarks, “Notice how guys always wore hats in the movies in those days? It’s funny, we don’t do that anymore, wear hats,” followed by chuckles at his own remarks.

My first experience seeing this film was many years ago, watching it on television with my parents. I don’t normally like to interject personal stories in this blog, because then it becomes a blog about me and not about old movies. But I hope you’ll indulge me.

My mother grew up in a poor urban neighborhood of many ethic groups, religions, and races. She referred to it as a League of Nations. Because she pre-dated the United Nations, to her, it was always the League of Nations. Most were from Eastern Europe, but there was a fair representation of immigrants from the Balkan countries, the countries around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, some from Asia, Quebec, but the majority at this time were from Eastern Europe. To these immigrants, the most “American” people in the neighborhood were the people whom they called Negroes or colored people, because they had been in the U.S. for several generations and could speak English well. Next in being more “American” came the Irish family that lived around the corner; they had been here probably two or three generations. But everyone else were newcomers, most of them escaping something unpleasant in the old country.

Though this polyglot neighborhood could be said to represent the whole world, to my mother the real world was outside of it. The world was what she thought she saw in the movies. Hollywood’s view of the U.S. and the world was pretty narrow in those days, but not to a young girl who was enchanted by what she saw on the silver screen.

When she was a teenager, she got a job in a big downtown department store. It had marble, and elevators, and well-mannered, well-speaking sales clerks. It was just like in the movies. She worked in some sort of seasonal part-time stock or inventory capacity. She did not wait on customers. She and a handful of other teenaged girls hung clothing or unpacked merchandise, and when nobody was looking, playfully slipped the expensive fur coats over their shoulders and pretended what it was like to be those people that shopped here, those people that had lives that were just like in the movies.

At some point, I don’t know if it was while she was still employed there or sometime afterwards, but she found out that the store was “restricted” in its hiring policy. They did not hire Jews.

This brought her up short, because she was an analytical person. This restriction on Jews did not add up.

Her closest neighbors were Jews in the tenement where she lived. She identified with the people who were restricted from working in that store more than she identified with the people who owned the store or shopped in the store. She had long admired the store and the movie upper crust it represented. She accepted that they were her social superiors. She could see that they were: they had education, better clothes (them fur coats), and a lot of money. But the idea that they assumed she was good enough to hire and the Jewish families in the building and the neighborhood who probably went through Ellis Island the same time as her parents were not, made her question how logical these social superiors really were.

She did not speak English at home. Her first name had been changed by a self-conscious older sister at the time she enrolled my mother in kindergarten to sound less foreign and more “American,” just as she had change her own name. What would the store think of her if they knew this?

My mother watched Gentleman’s Agreement with me and thought of this when Gregory Peck, posing as a Jew, tries to register in a hotel that is, like the store she worked at, restricted. The years melted away, and it all came back.

It was a scene my father liked. He was less analytical about prejudice than my mother. With something of a chip on his shoulder, he bristled under the arrogance of bigotry. Though he had seen Gentleman’s Agreement before, I think when the hotel scene came up, he was hoping that this time Gregory Peck would sock somebody. He liked movies where somebody got socked.

He shared an experience he had as a recruit in World War II, traveling on a troop train, heading for basic training in the South. An African-American recruit among them was told when they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, to move to the back. My father and a few others questioned this and complained. They were told, “Boys, you don’t know where you are.”

The remark grew less cryptic the more they saw as they traveled further south.

My father remarked that the first time he saw “colored only” signs, it made him sick. Once on a pass from camp, he and another buddy or two tried to make use of a “colored only” restroom to show what they thought of this segregation business, and were informed, I think by an MP, that they were not to try this again. I’m paraphrasing. This is a family blog.

These two incidents of prejudice witnessed by my parents were not the stuff of mob violence. They knew nothing of lynchings or pogroms. These incidents were mild in comparison to the experiences of others, but though there was no mob violence, there was mob rule. There was an insidious consensus that this is the way it should be. It was, if you will, a “gentleman’s agreement.”

Raised again, the specter of their memories, by an old movie considered by some critics today to be no longer relevant. To be a quaint museum piece of its day.

In a way, my parents felt so, too. I recall my father gesturing to the film on TV excitedly, “See? That’s how it was in those days.” They marveled that the world had changed so much in their lifetime.

A few months ago, someone was telling me the story of how someone they knew, a friend of a friend, got a great bargain shopping somewhere because they “jewed down” the seller.

I was as astonished by the use of the archaic phrase as much as by its malicious inference. I can’t remember what my comment was, but evidently my remarks and my expression were enough to make the speaker quickly respond, “I know. I shouldn’t say that, huh?” With a slight embarrassed chuckle, the person changed the subject.

Within the past couple of decades, a handful of incidents like this stand out when I watch Gentleman’s Agreement today, just as when my parents were reminded of incidents from their past. I recall the time a non-Jewish friend telling me of a new boyfriend and right after telling me his German-sounding surname saying, as if to assure me, “But he’s not Jewish.” Again, her instant embarrassment at what she said when I pointed out this was not a matter of great importance to me. The time another acquaintance, upset at being laid off from her job, ranted that her employer’s being Jewish was the cause of his unfairness to her, because those people were all alike and didn’t I think so?

I disagreed, politely but firmly refusing to placate her. Another time someone else complained of being the victim of backstabbing by a co-worker, who in this case was African American. She pulled the “N-word” out of her holster and fired it off. I told her I did not like that word and the conversation was over if she used it again. This time an apology.

In each case I do not believe I changed the attitudes of any of these people; I only showed them they would not change mine. Less enamored of confrontation than my father, I prefer mannerly stubbornness. To my knowledge, my relationships did not suffer with these people for challenging their remarks. They backed off, and I for my part was willing to live and let live. None of us have halos; we all mess up sometimes. My parents, I’m sure, experienced occasions where prejudice rose up and they said nothing. For each of us, life is a learning process that never ends.

Despite my parents’ view that times had changed, all of these people to whom I had to say “please stop” were born in that supposedly enlighten era after 1947. They grew up in the great modern society my parents thought had eradicated restricted hotels and society’s acceptance of prejudice, all the “gentleman’s agreements”. These acquaintances were not dangerous nutcases, but basically decent people with bad habits.

Albert Dekker, who plays the editor, Mr. Minify, in the film remarks, “There just isn’t anything bigger than beating down the complacence of essentially decent people about prejudice.” Preachy and dated?

I’ll see you for part 2.

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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.