The Howards of Virginia (1940)

“The Howards of Virginia” (1940) is one of not-very-many movies Hollywood made about the American Revolution. It’s a good effort in some respects, and fails dismally in others, but that may be not just to acting or direction. Sometimes our failure in being able to interpret a particular era in the past may be our own tenuous grasp on what it really was like. We’re not really as good at turning back the clock as we think we are. It’s just not that easy.

The story is one of those span-of-years tales, in this case from the boyhood of lead character Matt Howard, played by Cary Grant, when his father was killed fighting Indians when Virginia was under British rule during the French and Indian War, to Matt’s adulthood as a solider of the young Continental Army fighting to end British rule during the Revolutionary War.

The costumes mostly are pretty good (except for the wedding dress, too modern), and so are the hairstyles, the sets, and furniture. Some care went into the making of this film, and it is impressive that part of the filming was actually done in Williamsburg, Virginia. So far, so good.

But I wonder if sometimes planting a story against an historical backdrop, and using that backdrop only as kind of puppet show stage scenery and not as an organic element to drive the story is kind of like having a canvas with a beautiful landscape on it and then painting stick figures in the foreground. They stand out badly and it’s hard to appreciate the pretty background anymore because all your eye can focus on is those stupid stick figures.

Our chief stick figure here is Cary Grant. Some have called him miscast in this movie, and maybe he was, but I have to wonder if half the problem is just the way the character was written. Grant seems to be pretty one-dimensional, buffoonish and Always! Seems! To! Talk! In! Exclamation! Points!

Cary Grant spends the entire movie shouting, not in anger or with passion, but just normal every day speech. Hello becomes HELLO!!!! His hyperkinetic overacting is a distraction, and rather fatiguing to watch after a while.

Martha Scott plays the well-born lady this frontier fool pines for, and though it would seem her sedateness and dignity might soften Mr. Grant’s explosive personality, it doesn’t really. Sometimes she seems a bit remote with little warmth.

The best performer here for my money is Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who plays her elder brother, the snobbish family patriarch who looks down on Grant. When the Revolution begins, he is a Tory, or would be if there were any profit in it, and he provides a fascinating contrast to Cary Grant. Mr. Hardwicke’s scenes are absorbing, and we discover many layers to this character in a way we never do with Mr. Grant’s character. Hardwicke is noble, self centered, disdainful, and ultimately tragic. So is Grant’s character, but we may find ourselves understanding Grant less and disliking him more.

Cary Grant takes Martha Scott out to the western lands of Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley to carve out a home in the wilderness, but a home similar to the mansion she left behind in elegant Williamsburg. Their new mansion goes up with remarkable speed. It’s nice to see Anne Revere in a brief role as a frontier neighbor lady. Nobody could pull the job off better than she.

These scenes are reminiscent to “Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939) which we discussed last year, but the leap Martha Scott has to take to make a life here with the rustic folk is much greater than the adjustment Claudette Colbert had to make. For one, we may understand that Miss Colbert’s character is likewise from a background more genteel than frontier husband Henry Fonda’s. But her genteel heritage is likely based on commerce. Colbert’s family from the northern colony of New York and New England derived their social superiority from trade.

Martha Scott isn’t just rich. She’s aristocratic. The caste system of Olde England transplanted itself in Virginia and the southern states in a way it never much did in New England, which was the repository of outcast Pilgrims and Puritans bent not on copying life in England but forging a new society where they would be top dog…a level of superiority they would have never achieved back in the old country.

However, aristocratic Scott stands by her man in buckskins and may look horrified at smelly backwoodsmen, but her very acquiescence to this life seems more democratic than someone in her position would actually be. It is the first indication that we are leading to a message of how wonderfully democratic this country is, and was. It’s a nice sentiment, but largely a fairy tale.

Also, the affable Thomas Jefferson, played by Richard Carlson, who is Matt Howard’s lifelong friend was not so affable and hail-fellow-well-met in real life. This shy, reclusive man, though he wrote one of the most noble documents ever penned - The Declaration of Independence - was also an aristocrat who disdained the company of lower-born folk he saw mainly in terms of rabble. This is certainly no crime and is not unusual in anyone well born and well educated. But, we may conclude he is re-drawn here to suit our World War II -era sensibilities.

Then we come to the first disgruntled rumblings of American discontent during all the repressive taxes the Crown placed on the colonies, and we see that Cary Grant has won a seat in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s lower legislative house, where we are treated to snippets of speeches by Thomas Paine, played by Richard Gaines. Again, just as we discussed a few weeks ago about historical symbols in “Gone with the Wind” (1939), we have a schoolroom quick survey of American taglines as history through Paine’s words. Give me liberty or give me death. You remember that one.

This kind of use of slogans to represent eras does nothing to increase our understanding of an era, but only serves to confirm what we already think we know.

We might note here, however, a difference, though a subtle difference, in the treatment of the colonial African-American experience to what we observed in “Gone with the Wind”. The servants in the grand homes of course are all slaves, and one female slave goes with Martha Scott when the newlyweds strike out for the frontier. She is even more appalled at the rough backwoods people than Miss Scott is, and looks down on them as not being “quality”.

We don’t see too much of Dicey through the movie, she’s not Scott’s constant companion in life the way Hattie McDaniel’s “Mammy” was with Scarlett O’Hara, but we observe she deports herself with every bit as much high-born dignity as does Miss Scott. None of the slaves depicted in this film come off as caricature.

Still, it might be argued by some that the few dismissive glimpses we are given of the slaves indicate this is another example of Hollywood’s racism. I don’t think so, not entirely in this case, and for two reasons. First, the movie isn’t about the slave experience, it’s about the blustering Matt Howard. (Though for my money, a little less shouting Cary Grant and little more soft spoken Dicey might have made it a more interesting movie.)

Second, there is an interesting dramatic dynamic we can see here if we look for it. We learn about the slaves’ place in the world even by their diminished film presence. Just by viewing them in the background, we see how marginalized their lives are, how controlled their lives are, how little credence they were given by both Colonial America and by 1940s Hollywood.

I believe this effect here was unintended, the by-product of an era in Hollywood filmmaking. However, it was used on purpose with great success, if you remember, in the British television series “Upstairs/Downstairs.” We get to know the servants best when they have their scenes “below stairs” in the kitchen or servants’ dining hall. Here they are animated and effusive.

Then, when the bell rings and the butler Hudson, played by Gordon Jackson, goes upstairs to the morning room to answer the summons, the camera, the story, and mood shifts to the upper class family by whom the servants are employed. We are now treated to a scene of what is going on in the masters’ lives, and Gordon Jackson, grog tray in hand, stands in the background and blends in with the wall. Suddenly, the man we thought we knew so much about, with such a strong personality downstairs, becomes a stranger, an enigma to us. It tells us all we need to know about his place in society.

So it is with Dicey and her fellow servants. We get a brief look into her feelings and sensibilities, and then the door slams shut when the focus is back on her owners. It may not be satisfying to the audience who want to know more about her, but it is dramatically effective and historically accurate.

(I wish American television could turn out a product as good as “Upstairs/Downstairs” with similar subject matter. We have a lot of history to dabble in, if only we weren’t so lazy about depicting it in more than just convenient slogans and taglines, and not being willing to spend more money than it would take to put on a “reality” or talent contest shows, or fear being too historically accurate, thereby “losing” an uninformed general audience, or otherwise fear of offending modern sensibilities by being too accurate.)

Besides, a better evidence of Hollywood’s racism is that Libby Taylor, who played Dicey, spent a couple of decades playing maids and ladies’ room attendants.

Another subplot to the film is Cary Grant’s relationships with his sons. The younger, James, played as a young man by Tom Drake, is the apple of his eye. He ignores the older one, Peyton, because Peyton was born with a foot deformity, much like his brother-in-law, Cedric Hardwicke, whom Grant despises. When the child is born and Mr. Grant first sees his baby’s deformity, he suddenly refuses to name him after his father, but adamantly insists he be given her maiden name instead, branding him as an issue from her side of the family. Grant finally bonds with his son Peyton, played by Phil Taylor, when the lad performs a heroic act as a soldier during the Revolution.

The films ends, or we should say, tries to wrap itself up, with the astonished Grant recognizing a quality in his son even more important than his heroism. He observes that young Peyton, though ignored and dismissed his whole life as less worthy, is a kind and gentle person with no hatred in his heart. Grant declares to Martha Scott that their boy represents a new kind of person for the new nation they are founding, the best of both their worlds.

It’s a nice sentiment, and a wonderful goal to reach for, the idea that this republic may ever keep itself righted by the presence of kind, heroic people with no hatred in their hearts and the ability to forgive. It was an important message to send during the early years of World War II when the United States was not yet involved, but surely feared it probably would be before too long. We never quite seem to reach that placid plateau of good fellowship.

Williamsburg, where parts of this movie was filmed, was the capitol of Virginia until about 1780, when the capitol was moved to Richmond, in part at the recommendation of Thomas Jefferson. The town which had contributed so much to the political and cultural heritage of Colonial Virginia sort of became a quaint, gentle, and ignored (like young Peyton Howard), hamlet until about the 1920s, when Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin of the Bruton Parish Church got together with philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to restore some of the historic buildings. We owe those two gentlemen a lot.

This project grew through the years, and now takes up nearly 85 percent of the original town, a beautifully restored living history museum, called Colonial Williamsburg. It is well worth a visit, and should be on the list of anybody with an interest in American history.

For more on Colonial Williamsburg, have a look at this website.

Happy Independence Day. Pace yourself eating those burgers and dogs.

Drums Along the Mohawk - 1939

“Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939) leads us into our weekend celebrations of Independence Day, and is one of the few movies of Hollywood’s heyday to deal with the American Revolution. Surprisingly so, since one would expect that the intrigue and drama of the era, not to say the very patriotism of the theme, would lend itself to films of the day. Perhaps the studios perceived the subject was too remote, too far past to be appealing to modern audiences, the people and manners too colorless. Director John Ford’s vibrant movie does much to dispel the ideal that the forefathers were saintly heroes and the Revolution a foregone conclusion.

This early Technicolor film is beautifully shot, and the muted pastel tones are much more realistic and pleasing to look at than the garish “red shirt photography” of the 1940s musicals that would follow. The score is peppered with 18th century fife and drum music, and country fiddle tunes (and a liberal smattering of “In an English Country Garden” to designate the gentility of Claudette Colbert’s refined family heritage).

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert are frontier newlyweds when the frontier was still in New York. Fonda looks good in knee breeches and always looks authentic in period settings, no matter what the period. Claudette Colbert, even more like a porcelain doll in this rough setting of log cabin, appears as she always does; a loveliness of no certain age, but perhaps a bit too glamorous.

The movie is stolen outright by Edna May Oliver, who received an Oscar nomination for her role as the feisty widow who the young newlyweds come to work for as servants when the Indians burn their own homestead and crops to the ground.

The story is comprised of events, rather than a linear beginning, middle and conclusion. The frontier settlement, always battling the Indians, gets word of the colonists’ revolt against the English king. They think it’s a swell idea, and drill in ragtag formation, ready to fire upon any redcoats, but the British domination of North America in this movie is just John Carradine as a menacing Tory leading bands of Indians in waves against the township’s lonely fort.

Miss Colbert, the daughter of a fine family, must adjust to the roughhewn ways of her new neighbors and her new life. She and Fonda suffer privations and tragedies. Their bond, as actually occurred with many frontier couples, is strengthened from necessity of self reliance as much as from being in love.


There are humorous moments in the film, such as when the minister, Arthur Shields, half prays for and half reprimands a local girl for keeping company with a New Englander, “he’s a Massachusetts man, Lord, and Thou knowest no good can come of that.” He also prays for a man with the flux “real bad” and gives a commercial for a local merchant. And when he announces that the militia be formed, “Every man failing to report for duty will be promptly hanged. Amen.”

Ward Bond, another Ford regular, is the lusty, barrel-chested, booming-voiced bachelor who teases Edna May Oliver, and she gives it right back to him. John Ford always seemed to have given as much attention to the character actors as to the stars, which may be why they are so memorable in his films. At one point Bond, some 20 years her junior, playfully plants a kiss on a surprised Miss Oliver that, in its ferocity and very length is probably one of the most passionate kisses on the silver screen. I half expect that if the couple were Fonda and Colbert, the Code would not have allowed the kiss to last that long, but because the characters are supposed to be comic, Ford, and Bond and Oliver, get away with it.

But Edna May Oliver is more than just comic foil in this movie. She gets a chance to display her considerable dramatic talents, and the inherent drama in her each slight movement provides depth and texture to her role. Sometimes the ability to make a moment seem both comic and dramatic at the same time is like laying a perfect bunt down the third base line. It’s a thing of tantalizing beauty when it works.

Miss Oliver does this in such scenes as when Fonda is about to join a column of troops passing by her stone cottage, and she bids him goodbye first so that he can spend another few moments with his wife.

“I’m going to kiss you, so I better do it now so’s you won’t go off with the taste of a widow on your mouth.” Afterward, she comes indoors to keep from watching the men march away, reminded of her late husband, “Sometimes he’d wave…ten to one he didn’t even see me.” Her voice drops wearily, and the comic moment becomes tension-filled, and then simply philosophical.

Another moment finds both Colbert and Oliver on a porch at night, waiting for news of the battle. Colbert paces, finally is persuaded to sit on the step of the porch as Oliver, planted in a chair behind her, flaps a palmetto fan at mosquitoes. The contrast between the two actresses is interesting. Colbert is still, like a pristine statue, looking dreamily off. Miss Oliver hunches forward, her legs spread apart under her long skirts, resting her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hand in a brooding manner much less lady-like. She uses her whole body. Miss Oliver is living her role, while Miss Colbert is seems merely posed for the camera.

But the comedy is never too deeply buried, and bubbles up in Miss Oliver like a stream, as when the tobacco-chewing frontiersman comes to her door and tells her all families must flee to the fort. It’s a tense moment, but seeing he needs to spit his tobacco juice, Edna gets irritably practical,

“Go on and spit, man! Spit and get it over with!” She shoves him out the door so he can do so outside, and then mutters, trying to conceal her alarm about the approaching enemy, “Fool. He can’t even spit by himself.” In her crusty way, she is sensitive to life where Colbert is only hypersensitive to sounds and smells, and possible danger.

When Fonda and the troops march off in the distance, Colbert watches in the foreground, her back to us, from the rise of a sunny meadow. It’s a scene repeated in other Ford films like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Fort Apache”, and “My Darling Clementine.”

The film turns from a study of frontier life to an action flick. Fonda, dragged from the rain and the mud, babbles to himself as he describes the gore of battle while Colbert tries to stop his bleeding and tries not to listen to him. It is her best scene where, distracted from posing, she appears most natural.

A man, sent to get help, is captured and tortured, and the horrified minister shoots him to keep him from suffering when the Indians burn him to death. Fonda is sent next to get help, and the women huddled in the fort don men’s uniforms to make the enemy think the fort is well defended by soldiers. This has precedence in many instances during the Revolution and in the French and Indian War when women took on a soldier’s role, sometimes donning soldier’s uniforms.

Even Daisy, Miss Oliver’s black house servant, dons a uniform and loads muskets. Edna May fires her gun, and takes an arrow in the chest, takes it like a man.

One wonders if the Indians were surprised that the “soldiers” were still wearing their frilly day caps underneath their tricorn hats.

The Indians depicted here are all “savages” except one; that is the character called Blue Back, played by Chief John Big Tree. He is a Christian convert, what were once called “praying Indians”, and so is friendly to the settlers. One could excuse Ford’s making the enemy Indians “savages” and the “good Indian” as the one who befriends the settlers, because that is how English-speaking settlers in the 18th century would have viewed the matter themselves. The year 1939, when this film was made, was too early for the revisionist history that attempts to make modern films on historical subjects less bigoted, if perhaps also sometimes less accurate in depicting the true (if sometimes repugnant) feelings of our ancestors.


However, Blue Back could have been a stronger, more well-rounded character, and Ford might have shown the immense conflict of what it must have been to have his feet planted in two different worlds. Unfortunately, Blue Back is little more than a clown who hollers “Hallelujah” at unexpected moments. Ironically, as a member of the Seneca nation, Chief John Big Tree is probably the most authentic link to the locale of the film.

The film ends with the fort being saved and the news that the British surrendered. That means the British lost the war. What they do not know, and the colonists all might have wondered for at least another generation, was who won the war? Who were the Americans?

John Ford brings the film to a rousing close with the strains of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (which since those lyrics had not been written yet, was still “God Save the King”, an odd choice), and the camera pans on the Americans of this frontier outpost admiring the raising of their new American flag atop the church steeple. Separation of church and state hadn’t been invented yet.

The camera lingers on, among others, the smiling face of Daisy, the African-American servant of Edna May Oliver, played by Beulah Hall Jones (in the last of only a few films she made). Daisy could have been a freewoman, but at this time it is more likely she was a slave. Her expression of breathless hope and satisfaction looking at the new flag is quite surprisingly moving. The camera lingers on Chief John Big Tree, also admiring the flag. Is it Ford’s way of showing we’re all happy Americans now, or Ford’s subtle irony that “freedom” and “equality” would have to wait for some people? Flawed, and diverse, if not equal, they all take in the moment to celebrate the new nation.

I hope you can take a moment this weekend to celebrate it, too. By the way, among the flags that finale color guard is holding appears to be the flag of New England (see this post from my New England Travels blog). Apparently, the reverend’s warning against consorting with New Englanders (or perhaps only Massachusetts men) was suspended for the moment.

Orphans of the Storm (1921) - Part 2

Like the villainous Jacque-Forget-Not, we see that the commoners, like the rapacious aristocracy, are not all that great either, and have their own nests to feather. One of the nice ones is Pierre Frochard, who peddles a knife sharpening and scissor repairing trade in the streets, but not very successfully. His hag of a mother, played by veteran stage actress Lucille La Verne, and his bullying brother Jacques, played by Sheldon Lewis, would rather steal and beg. You can’t pick your relatives, unless you happen to be Lillian and Dorothy Gish, who remain devoted to each other throughout the several ongoing tribulations of this film. They are separated and spend many months trying to find each other, while the blind Dorothy is held prisoner by Mother Frochard and made to beg in the streets. Their underground hideout is a foul sewer of rotten wood, dripping stone and dirty straw. And some strategically placed rats.

Lillian, meanwhile, escapes a fate worse than death at the Marquis’ fete, where the debauched aristocrats bathe in wine fountains and a dandy drinks wine from a glass clenched between the ankles of a woman of apparently questionable virtue. The Chevalier saves Lillian, they fall in love, but cannot be together until they find Dorothy, and his uncle and aunt, the Count and Countess, relent and give their permission. We learn that the Countess is actually Dorothy’s long-lost mother, and so things turn out right at the end and we have our happy ending. Dorothy becomes not only sighted, but rich and aristocratic. Not a bad deal. However, now she is too good for the decent fellow Pierre Frochard, who finally becomes a man by defying his rotten mother and knifing his bullying, lecherous, brother, saving Dorothy from a fate worse than death. Frochard also knifes the executioner about to guillotine Lillian. Apparently a man who sharpens knives for a living knows how to stab pretty well.

Danton, echoing the ferment of the rebellious people mutters, “Damned Aristocrats!” long before Clark Gable ever got to say the naughty word in “Gone With the Wind.” Danton has troubles of his own. Royalist spies are after him, and he hides after being wounded in Lillian’s room, compromising her respectability. But, she’s a feisty thing and insists he stay, cares for him, and he pays her back by rushing to the scaffold with her official pardon just as Madame Guillotine is about to have her for lunch.

Griffith keeps shifting the action from one plot element to another, never letting us get bored, keeping us on edge, making us wonder what will happen next. One wonders what efforts it took to get hundreds of extras in the appropriate costumes, appropriate weapons, cannon, and a horse cavalry filmed at a racing gallop. In the scene where Dorothy and Lillian, reunited as Lillian is in the cart being taken to the guillotine, embrace for the last time and kiss, they are stone still, a vision of complete stillness while the wild crowd behind them of peasants and revolutionaries wave sticks and guns and various sharp things in a constant frenzy. It looks almost like a contrived special effect.

But Lillian need not fear, as Danton makes a speech before the revolutionary tribunal to save her life. We can tell he is eloquent by the way he flails his arms around as he speaks.

The French Revolution, its backwash noted for the horror it created, is not the only revolution to exhibit a dark side. Most revolutions begin with a mixture of high ideals and terrible violence, and end not always with justice and peace, but with a confusing new set of rules to adjust to, and justice is sometimes delayed for months or years. The Russian Revolution had its aftermath of injustice, and even the American Revolution, lauded for creating the first Republic the world had ever known, suffered Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in its wake. These two limited, but enormously politically important events were limited perhaps because they were regional, and we had no aristocracy upon which to take vengeance once the British army was defeated and could no longer be blamed for our troubles, and no guillotine to make execution a public entertainment of our wrath.

Still if “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” as Thomas Jefferson expressed, it can easily slip through our fingers to unspeakable and bestial anarchy. This is not just the stuff of history. Present day perspectives we might have aside, Mr. Griffith was seemingly echoing Hollywood's uneasiness over the Red Scare in America at the time, with his references in the film to bolshevism. How much of the film is really about the Red Scare in the guise of examining the Reign of Terror would be an interesting discussion.