“Titanic” (1953) shows that the most successful storytelling is based on what your audience provides in imagination. Other versions of this tragic tale have provided more technically thorough stories. None are as empathetic in the telling, or draw such empathy from the audience, as this version.
One hundred years ago today people were waking up to the news that the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in the wee hours of the 15th.
This movie was released some 41 years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Coincidentally, it was probably 41 years ago that I first saw this movie. I can’t be sure of the exact year but it’s a pretty good guess. I was a child, knowing nothing about the history of the story I was watching, and what I remember most vividly was the very last scene. Clifton Webb stood on the deck of the ship along the rail with many other men, all staring blankly out at the ocean. There were tears in Webb’s eyes. A little boy, his son, stood next to him on the deck. The son had all the energy and confidence of youth. He was probably only a little older than me.
The stark contrast between the sorrowful father, and that little boy, happy to be with him, confused me. I can remember asking an older sibling what was happening, what did this mean? I was told that the boy was going to drown along with his father, that he went back to the ship when he shouldn’t have, so now he was going to drown.
I think I must have assumed that at the last minute another boat would save them, so this news that their deaths were inevitable shocked me. More shocking was that this smiling boy’s fate was sealed by his eagerness. I wondered then if he knew he was going to die? His demeanor did not seem to indicate that he knew. He suggested to his father that they might swim for it.
I think this scene captures the essence of this remarkable movie. It was filmed on a set, so we are not dazzled too much by technological wizardry. But we are drawn into the consequences of the Edwardian (yes, I know George V was on the throne, but eras do not have air brakes) era-cum-dawn of the 20th century, through the splendor, costumes, values and customs, which all lead to consequences.
We have a little name-dropping. There are Guggenheims among the passenger list and of course, John Jacob Astor. He is played here by William Johnstone, whom you might remember as the radio voice of the Shadow, replacing Orson Welles. His wife is played by the lovely Frances Bergen, the wife of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and mother of actress Candice Bergen.
One name they decided to drop literally was the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown. Her character here is played by Thelma Ritter with her customary earthy gusto, but the name is given as Maude Young.
A big, beautiful ship filled with beautiful people. We are given a hint as to what it’s like to travel in steerage, but we are not hammered too much on the injustices of third class travel. We are given credit for knowing - we or our parents likely traveled to America that way.
We are given credit for knowing, too, about the era’s dignity, grace, inequity, and hypocrisy. After all, 41 years isn't even one lifespan, and not so much needs to be explained.
We are shown Richard Basehart as a recently defrocked priest returning home to America in disgrace because of his alcoholism. When the disaster happens, he redeems himself. Conversely, we are given Allyn Joslyn as the inevitable human being who disregards his humanity in the very human desire to live.
Look for Mae Marsh in a small role as the lady in the lifeboat to whom the boy, played by Harper Carter, gives up his seat.
The story and the tragedy is played out for us not so much in special effects but by two particular characters who carry with them the style and the consequences of the era. In a sense, Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb as the estranged couple have the entire story resting on their shoulders.
She is an American woman returning to her Middle West roots after years of an unhappy marriage in Europe. She brings their teenage daughter and young son to the US because she does not want them to grow up to share the same meaningless, empty, shallow life which her dandy husband Clifton Webb pursues was such self superior conceit. Both Miss Stanwyck and Mr. Webb are fantastic in this movie. Stanwyck convincingly conveys the dual quality of this woman, one who was able to feel cowed under her husband’s superior birth and social set, and yet still have the mettle to want to save her children. Her Gibson girl hairstyle is very becoming to her in this movie. She wears her costumes well. Stanwyck always did look good in period pieces.
Clifton Webb is a marvel. One might chalk up his work here as standard Clifton Webb material, a fastidious man, the intellectual giant disdainful of all the lesser creatures around him. He played it well. But there's more to him here, and he undergoes the greatest change of any character in this movie.
One of my favorite lines is when he puts down Stanwyck, “Twenty years ago I made the pardonable mistake of thinking I could civilize a girl who bought her hats out of the Sears Roebuck catalog.”
In one scene, after her confession of an adulterous tryst which resulted in the birth of her son, she drops her purse. Webb’s refusing to stoop to pick it up is his telegraphing to her, and to us, that she has dropped off the charts in respectability. If she were a lady, it would be beneath him not to pick it up. She is not a lady anymore. 1912 Etiquette 101.
But there are two sides to the coin, and Webb also shows a man deeply wounded. It is a devastating scene, his pride and his conceit shattered when he learns that the son of whom he is so proud is not his.
Stanwyck’s part in this scene is also amazing. But perhaps the real credit should go to director Jean Negulesco. The husband and wife face off over his refusal to let her take his son back to the United States.
“No court, no power under heaven will force me to give up my son.”
“He’s not your son.” She replies in the most eerily calm manner, shocking in its very everyday tone of voice almost as if she had said, “it’s time for dinner.”
The camera shows her turn around and walk out of the stateroom. We see her back and his back. We don’t need to see his expression.
In vengeance, he ignores his son for the remainder of the trip, hurting the boy who loves and admires him.
We are prepared by now to think him a monster, but we finally see a deeply courageous Clifton Webb, sensitive to the needs of others when the iceberg hits. It is such a turnabout transformation of his character, and yet, an extension of it. He is, after all, a gentleman. This is what a gentleman is supposed to do. When he learns the ship is sinking he hustles his family into life vests, not telling them of the real danger, keeping up a happy front. He gets them to the top deck.
Then he goes down to third class and hustles out the Basque family with whom he had boarded. The father of the family sold him his ticket, and Webb boarded the ship pretending to be this woman’s husband. He hustles them all into lifeboats, saving their lives. Then he helps others on the ship.
A young Robert Wagner plays a callow college student who is sweet on their daughter played by Audrey Dalton. And oh, the scores of extras. I love me a movie with lots of extras. One of them is Bert Stevens, Barbara Stanwyck’s brother.
Though we have these back stories, this is a movie of about greater things. Larger issues and devastatingly small details. Captain Brian Aherne conducts the Sunday services in the grand salon. A drunken Richard Basehart tries unsuccessfully to send a telegram home of explanation to his family. The crisp, crackling dialogue between Webb and Stanwyck in this most literate script.
I have only one minor, petty complaint. When Robert Wagner and his pals sing college fight songs, one of which is about Lord Jeffrey Amherst and Amherst College -- please, the H in Amherst is not pronounced. I don’t know how Lord Jeff of French and Indian War fame pronounced his surname, but those of us in western Massachusetts, where Amherst College is located, do not say the H. Accent on the first syllable - AM-erst.
I suspect folks from Mackinac, Michigan, might protest at that pronunciation in this film, too.
This has been a public service announcement. (Yes, I’m kidding. I realize there are far more important historical inaccuracies with which to take umbrage.)
The movie does not attempt to shock us or surprise us, rather just as it expects us to understand the mores and conventions of 1912, it also expects us to remember every moment that we are on a collision course with death. We start the film with a shot of the iceberg. We have a brief foreshadowing when Robert Wagner, cheered by the prospect of Audrey Dalton’s companionship, throws his soft cap into the ocean. It lands among chunks of ice floating by.
The band plays, first the Londonderry Air - better known to some of us as “Danny Boy”. And eventually we get around to “Nearer, My God, to Thee”. It has never been confirmed absolutely that this was played when the Titanic sank, but the legend has grown partly because of this movie.
Young Harper Carter scrambles out of the lifeboat to give his seat to Mae Marsh and joins his father on the deck because after all, he is now wearing long pants and so he is a man. This is what gentlemen do, give their seats to ladies and risk death. His explanation to his father as to why he returned to the ship is simply, “I’m wearing long trousers.”
Neither did that need to be explained to us in 1953, but I wonder if it might in 2012. I don’t mean just about boys wearing shorts and not wearing long trousers until they’re in their teens. I mean that essence of manhood that comes when one decides to be a man, i.e., to take responsibility. Steinbeck wrote, “A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.”
There are 12-year-old men, and there are 30-year-old boys.
Clifton Webb, heart breaking for his son and especially that he had ever denied his son, puts his arm around him and with tears in his eyes addresses the ocean waves “Whatever happens, I love you very much. I’ve been proud of you every day of your life. Never more than at this moment. I feel tall as a mountain.”
And yet it is not maudlin. It is a simple statement of fact, like the line “I’m wearing long trousers.”
When I watch the movie now, I see that these characters standing on the deck of the doomed ship clearly are not waiting for rescue. They are awaiting death. It is devastating in its theatricality. I can never watch it without being reminded of the first time I saw it, and could not quite comprehend then what was happening. In a way I still can’t believe it. That is the power of film, and especially of this film.
Barbara Stanwyck recalled in this oft-repeated quote:
"The night we were making the scene of the dying ship in the outdoor tank at Twentieth, it was bitter cold. I was 47 feet up in the air in a lifeboat swinging on the davits. The water below was agitated into a heavy rolling mass and it was thick with other lifeboats full of women and children. I looked down and thought: If one of these ropes snaps now, it's goodbye for you. Then I looked up at the faces lined along the rail - those left behind to die with the ship. I thought of the men and women who had been through this thing in our time. We were re-creating an actual tragedy and I burst into tears. I shook with great racking sobs and couldn't stop."
“Beloved Enemy” (1936) attempts to dramatize the events that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in the early 1920s, and at the same time, spin a “Romeo and Juliet” fairy tale of two star-crossed lovers who bring together two nations.
It’s easy to point out where this film fails. “The Troubles” as those times are called of Irish civil unrest against the British Empire, and then civil war amongst its own people, is captured in too simplistic a manner. Hollywood shunned complications, particularly in a 90-minute script.
Both the British characters and the Irish characters are represented in varying degrees of stereotype.
Most obviously, the lead character played Brian Aherne is meant to be a take-off on Michael Collins, the Irish leader who engaged in diplomacy with the British and won self-rule under dominion status for Ireland, except for the six counties in Ulster which opted for membership in the United Kingdom. Many of his countrymen felt Collins had betrayed them, and Collins was murdered by an Irish assassin.
In the movie, not only is Mr. Aherne successful at bringing peace and independence to Ireland, under so vague a set of terms we are not allowed to know them, but he survives an assassin’s bullet and he and Merle Oberon live happily ever after.
Oh, and Omar Kiam’s costumes for Merle Oberon are a bit off, too 1936 and not enough 1920.
All right, that’s off our chest. What is more telling about this film is what they somehow got right.
The movie, directed by H.C. Potter (thanks Caftan Woman), begins with one of those scrolling narratives in some script font that sets us up for what we’re about to see. In historical movies, it often seems like these narratives are really just disclaimers. That’s what this one sounds like. Part way into it, we are informed that the events we are about to see reflect “A time of horror and heroism, with men on both sides dying bravely for what they believed was right.”
It is a cleaned-up judgment that tells us nothing of the filthy side of The Troubles, with men on both sides committing soulless acts of revenge, of cruelty, of dirty political self-interest.
We are then told that what we are about to see is “not taken from the pages of history” because we are supposed to be reminded of Michael Collins, but not get close enough to the real story to either alienate the British film market or the quite large number of Irish American filmgoers -- but that the film is “legend inspired by fact.”
Nice and vague.
Fortunately, the sharp black and white cinematography of Gregg Tolland gives us some focus, a glimpse into a world without complete right and wrong. What this movie lacks in script is made up for in atmosphere. Set in Dublin, but filmed entirely on the back lot, we have the dark, wet streets, the soft flat caps of brooding men in trench coats, and the widows and orphans.
Brian Aherne is the ringleader of a political group whose paramilitary function is discussed, but we never see the violence. One scene shows his band about to stage a guerrilla attack on a British convoy, and he steps between the truck and the machine gun to save the Brits, to save his plan for diplomacy. It’s a nice scene, a bold move, but too tidy to really tell the truth. The truth, after all, is complicated, for where does freedom fighter end and terrorist begin? It’s a question that gets asked repeatedly in just about every culture.
That Hollywood even attempts to show this subject and this foreign culture is laudable. Here is one of the few films of that time I can think of about a foreign war or political strife where no American character is the center focus, nor American connection involved. All the characters, and most of the actors and actresses, are all either Irish or British. There is no intended American slant here. Except of course, for being made in Hollywood and carrying with that the usual Hollywood inability, or unwillingness, to authentically capture another culture. Whatever American slant here is organic, but not purposefully skewed to tell the story through an American viewpoint.
Brian Aherne is the rebel, Merle Oberon is the English Lady, daughter to the English Lord who is appointed to travel to Dublin, sort out the troublesome Irish and tidy up the Empire. Aherne and Oberon are beautiful people, and the camera loves them. They love each other, eventually. At first it is snarling and verbal swipes until they make the astonishing discovery that (Irish, English -- fill in the blank) people are people, too.
The film tries to keep us on an even, serious keel with the political strife at hand. We open with a British raid on the secret offices of the Irish resistance, and men are killed. We meet the widow and young son of one of them. The son, played by Ronald Sinclair, and his buddies paint “Up the Rebels” on the back of Miss Oberon’s official government car. He hurts himself running away and she takes care of him and brings him home.
It’s a scene meant to bring the enemies together through empathy, and it’s a tale that’s been told ever since Aesop wrote about Androcles and the Lion.
There’s a bit more here, though. The scene with the boys painting their graffiti to the consternation of the bumbling British soldier assigned to be Oberon’s driver is comic. They are like the Little Rascals, briefly. But we realize after a moment that these boys’ street games are really training for the young men they will one day be when vandalism turns to violence.
Aherne, friend of the boy’s widowed mother, played by Cathleen O’Brien, has been earlier chastised by her when he tries to comfort her on the death of her husband, “What do you know about love? You never let it come near you. You’re married to a cause.”
But he meets Miss Oberon when she brings the widow’s boy home (which is too nice looking, hardly the simple, and possibly impoverished-looking flat it should be), and his fidelity to the cause becomes compromised over his love for her.
We have the often repeated refrain of the old Irish folk song:
“She had a dark and a roving eye, And her hair hung down in ringlets, She was nice girl, a decent girl, but One of the rakish kind.”
(Anybody remember Guy Mitchell’s recording, “The Roving Kind”, B-side to “My Heart Cries for You”? 1950, I think. Much jazzed up, of course. With Mitch Miller’s orchestra. Ah, well, that’s neither here nor there. Just rambling. Come to think of it, anybody remember Guy Mitchell?)
Here, it’s a slow chant, wafting from jaunting carts and upstairs maids, and greengrocers, like a secret code of unity. A comforting musical buffer against “the strangers.”
When Lady Oberon and her father, played by Henry Stephenson, who are the strangers, cross the Irish sea on a dreadnought, we hear instead the majestic strains of “Rule Britannia.” (I’m pretty sure neither Guy Mitchell nor Mitch Miller ever did an up tempo recording of that one.) Her lament, “One nation and one people divided by a strip of water,” is naïve in that the label of “one people” would be balked at by both sides.
David Niven is along for the ride as her father’s military aide, and he represents the kind of nice young chap of her own class that she should marry. He’s not in the running for long, though, and it seems almost a cop-out for him to lose interest in her and find someone else, someone to whom we are never introduced. A romantic triangle would have been more interesting. However, he does have a very funny line that he delivers charmingly when he asks Merle how to handle his new girlfriend, who wants him to join her for breakfast:
“I’m not sure if she means me to drop in for breakfast or…be there for breakfast.” The censors were evidently charmed into leaving it in, or they weren’t listening.
Among Aherne’s gang is the old reliable Donald Crisp, who is distrustful of any diplomatic overtures by the British, and who is distrustful of Aherne now that he has a British girlfriend.
Jerome Cowan, who we last saw in “Cry Wolf” (1947), and who made a career of playing stuffy, uninteresting lawyers and businessmen, often in B-movies, has a good role in this, his first film. He is one of the rebel gang, Aherne’s right-hand man. His accent is credible, and his close-ups show the intensity of a hard, hungry, angry man of action.
In one scene, he and Aherne are escaping from a British raid, and they scurry along the rooftops, tumbling down the sharply pitched slate roofs in the darkness. They manage to hang onto a drain pipe to hide, and then after a very long time, pull themselves up, exhausted, to the rooftop when the British soldiers have left. Cowan, sensing Aherne’s loyalties and his good judgment are wavering, makes him promise to never see Merle Oberon again.
While the film misses the gritty authenticity of “The Informer” (1935), made the year before, it has scenes like these to illustrate the complexity of loyalty. Another attempt at honestly depicting the events of the day is to show many scenes of diplomatic negotiations. Aherne heads an Irish delegation to London under a flag of truce to discuss options for ending the violence. He and Henry Stephenson are seemingly the only ones who push for peace. All around them are their English and Irish colleagues who argue and will not compromise.
Negotiations do not make for exciting scenes, but they do honestly depict the real difficulty of the situation. People venting problems, people trying to solve problems through talk. Realism without the explosions.
We drift back into comfortable Hollywood fantasy, however, when peace is declared and truck after truck of British soldiers leaves Dublin, with Irish crowds cheering them and the end of The Troubles, jolly Tommies waving back. Wish fulfillment is one thing, but this is ridiculous.
However, we smack head-on into grisly realism again, when Merle gets wind of the plot to murder Aherne because he made a deal with the Brits for peace. Jerome Cowan, full of the unreasonable, ugly, and long-familiar rush of revenge, takes on the job of assassin. Loyalty for these rebels is really just a game of musical chairs.
When Merle barges in on the men making their murderous plans, to beg for Aherne’s life, there is a moment when they slowly rise to their feet, and one of them sneers, “I think we’ve heard enough from this alien.”
It is a tense moment when we see in their faces, and especially in Miss Oberon’s suddenly knowing expression, the possibility that they are about to assault her. So quickly do the charming Irishmen who sing silly songs and ride in jaunting carts turn to animals. Fortunately, the young Irish widow she earlier befriended, who brought her to this meeting, gets her out.
We see Aherne in his Irish military uniform, making a victory speech before a cheering crowd, and we see for the first time the Tricolor (yes, it’s a black and white movie). Ahearn ends his speech with a flourish, “Erin Go Bragh!” and Cowan pulls the trigger.
The Irish Free State was born in 1922, but this film is more a product of the pacifism of the 1930s between the two wars. Fairy tale, and historical events, and Hollywood. An uneasy mix at best, but considering the complex subject, “Beloved Enemy” is at least an introduction, not so much primer as a pop-up book, on The Troubles for outsiders like us in the American audience.
(Back already? Great. I missed you. Wipe your feet.)
Though there seems professional tension implied in the photo, this backstage shot of Audrey and Grace both with their attention diverted toward someplace off camera were not in competition. They were both presenters that year, and friendly with each other. Both were recent previous Oscar winners. There was no competition between them. There was plenty of room for more than one princess in the 1950s, an era which seemed to thrive on them.
In another month, Grace Kelly would travel to Monaco to marry Prince Rainer III in a wedding that was a media explosion. About a week after the wedding, the film The Swan premiered, likely a tactic by the studio to garner as much publicity as possible for their movie starring Grace Kelly about a princess being courted by a prince. As we mentioned in discussing Roman Holiday in the previous post, for the 1950s princess, reality and fantasy frequently crossed swords. In this movie, so do Grace Kelly and Louis Jourdan.
The 1950s princess in this case was the very real Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, but the character Grace Kelly played, Princess Alexandra, was a product of a long ago time when the media did not go to the wedding. Unlike Audrey in Roman Holiday and Ingrid in Anastasia, and unlike Princess Grace in real life, Grace Kelly’s character in this movie did not have to contend with the press. For princesses, this is a real fairy tale.
Set in a pre-World War I middle European country that, like Audrey Hepburn’s country in Roman Holiday is not named, the setting is storybook fantasy, and yet tinged with reality by references to European history and politics, and by our foreboding with knowledge that this (imagined) idyllic Europe will very soon be set afire in World War I.
Grace Kelly’s character, Princess Alexandra, lives with her mother, her great aunt, her two younger brothers, and a bushel full of family retainers in a country mansion/palace where, because their kingdom was taken from them by Napoleon in the previous century, they are considered the poor country cousins of their royal clan.
They’re not terribly poor at all, but for a royal family, their prospects are considered bleak. Bleak enough so that when their cousin Alec Guinness visits, who is the direct heir to the throne after his mother Queen Agnes Moorehead, Kelly’s mother, Jessie Royce Landis (who just got finished playing her mum inTo Catch a Thief) pins the family pride and fortunes on Grace marrying Crown Prince Alec Guinness.
There’s also the tutor to her younger brothers on staff, played by the jaw-droppingly handsome Louis Jourdan. Spark fly. Protocol gets trampled on. Drama ensues.
This is the era where many of Europe’s dynasties drew their last breath (in some cases literally as we’ll see in the film of our next post), an era where the elegant Empire style dress made a brief resurgence (speaking of Napoleon), and where real-life monarchs like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, who were cousins, addressed affectionate letters to each other as “Willi” and “Nicky”, but who in a few short years would be sending their armies out to slaughter each other.
“I don’t like the 20th Century,” sweet and slightly ditsy Great Aunt Estelle Winwood whines. She doesn’t know the half of it.
The movie is based on the Ferenc Molnár play, and like most good stage plays brought to the screen, is left mostly intact and entirely crisp and literate, and funny, with the story told through characterization and dialogue more than physical action. Where Roman Holiday, created for film, is an action-packed romp through Rome, The Swan barely leaves the drawing room. But that’s where the all the drama is.
We may note here as well as we did in this earlier post on Grace Kelly and live TV, that she first appeared in an abbreviated version of this play as the same character on live television in 1950.
In this film Grace Kelly is poised and as beautiful as she ever appeared in any Hitchcock film, but this is a different look and a different performance altogether, and a character much less sophisticated. Always an actress who appeared to move with a dancer’s consciousness, and posed like a model, here she is controlled, intense, and minimalist both in movement and expression. She seems entirely within herself, and even her younger brother jokes that nobody ever knows what she's thinking.
Her performance is spare and delicate, yet for all her stillness, she’s the one you end up watching in every scene she’s in. Perhaps she’s consciously keeping pace with the wonderfully nuanced performance of Alec Guinness.
It’s a remarkable change from her previous film, To Catch a Thief where she is bold, cool, and sexually aggressive, and her next film after this one, High Society, where she plays the feisty patrician Tracy Lord restlessly juggling former and future husbands.
Here, Grace Kelly is vulnerable and anxious, except with the tutor, who she treats with curt dismissiveness to maintain the distinction between their places, until she falls in love with him and must ultimately deal with his rejection.
Her scenes fencing with him are rather striking. It’s fun to see warrior Grace, in all seriousness, jabbing a rapier at Louis Jourdan with the panache of Errol Flynn, while M. Jourdan grasps the tip of her blade and touches it to his heart, showing her how best to wound him. She will figure out how to do that by herself, but it won’t be with a sword.
Perhaps the biggest paradox for this princess is that, though Mother is making her a nervous wreck with her constant instructions on how a princess is supposed to catch a husband and save the family, Grace really does want Alec to like her because she really does want to be a queen. Though reserved in nature, she is not passive. She is quite ambitious. But when they meet, she clumsily messes up, and it’s a downhill slide from there.
First, in a very funny and charming bit, she rises from her curtsey on being introduced to Alec Guinness, and, since he is bending over at the same time to kiss her forehead, she whacks the top of her head against his chin. The sound effects guy adds a nice, hollow-sounding, molar-loosening knock, and Miss Kelly puts her hand to her sore head and looks as if she would like the earth to open up and swallow her. Even drama could use a little slapstick now and then.
Incidentally, her mumbled greeting to Guinness just before she smashes heads with him is, “So happy,” echoing Roman Holiday and Audrey Hepburn’s greeting in formal introductions. (The next time you are introduced to someone, try saying this instead of “Hi.” Note the reactions. I don’t often give homework on this blog, so humor me.)
Afterwards, left alone on the terrace, Alec touches his hand tentatively to Grace’s, and she jerks it away in a moment of tense surprise, which she immediately regrets because he takes it for rejection. He spends the rest of the visit ignoring her, and she is humiliated.
Then Mother comes up with the idea of using the handsome tutor to make Alec jealous. At the ball, Alec Guinness is more interested in playing the orchestra’s base viol than in asking her to dance. Grace hijacks a carriage and, like Audrey in Roman Holiday runs away (running away, or at least wanting to, must be a princess thing), but Louis Jourdan goes with her and brings her back. Where, after all, is she really going to go?
The rest of the film is bittersweet when the drawing room becomes a battleground between the resentful tutor, when, after confessing his love for Grace, is told he was used as part of her mother’s plan to marry her off to the prince, and Alec Guinness, whose vague and self-involved prince begins to wake up to the equal passions of anger, jealously, and desire.
Brian Aherne plays her uncle, a friar, who first notices the attraction between Jourdan and Grace, and tactfully tries to steer them away from making a commitment neither can really keep. Jourdan, hurt by Grace’s confession that he was invited to the ball only as a ploy to make Alec jealous, refuses to be dismissed and joins the family in the drawing room for insults and accusations at ten paces.
After both he and Grace figuratively lose their innocence by chugging a couple of goblets of wine, he turns the drawing room into a verbal and very literate version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. At the end, only he, Grace, and Uncle Brian Aherne are left standing.
Grace, who shifts radically from shy princess to queen-wanna-be, to girl experiencing her first crush, shoots a brief, exquisite, pleading look of misery to Brian Aherne that says “Did I just screw up as bad as I think I did?” Other actresses might have phoned this part in and played the princess like a milksop, or else overplayed it, entirely missing the nuances important to our understanding this character, who like many women brokered in marriage, like any statesman, is walking a tightrope of complicated diplomacy. But, Grace Kelly adds dimension to this gentle, troubled princess through what appears to be genuine empathy.
Perhaps the genuine empathy sprang from her secretly being courted in real life by a prince herself at the time this was filmed, and what must have been a lot on her mind.
Mr. Aherne offers words of comfort, but when both Jourdan and Grace have confessed their puppy love for each other, he will warn them to adjust to the loss of that first rapture pretty quickly.
“You’ll never be as happy as you are now.” It’s rather like the realization Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck experience after their swim in the river in Roman Holiday when they discover the rapture of their love when it is already too late.
“By the time we feel it, it’s already gone,” Aherne says. They don’t get it yet, but they will. With what is for her a sweet, unaccustomed impulsiveness, she asks the handsome tutor his name and age, and wants to hear him say her name. She fusses over him, and succumbs to an entirely girlish crush, while he is awestruck that this vision he has adored and put on a pedestal is actually warm and human.
But Jourdan will soon realize that though they may have feelings for each other, their feelings are not on the same level, just as these two young people are not equal in society. Though she wants to run away with him against her family’s wishes, even packs her bags (again, it’s a princess thing), this time he rejects her. Poor Grace is rejected by every suitor she has in this film.
Another funny moment is when Brian Aherne, rushing to alarm the next morning, runs down the hall while scrambling into his friar’s robes, and we see, as does a surprised servant, that he wears a kind of pantaloon style underwear.
“Now you know!” he shouts at the servant, pulling his robes over his head.
The Queen has arrived, played with a funny mixture of the down to earth and splendid officiousness by Agnes Moorehead. She gets a good line too, remonstrating Grace’s little brothers, “Boys, behave yourselves. This is not a republic!”
Grace, thoroughly shaken by the events, is lost and must find her way emotionally and psychologically back to what being a princess means. When she tells Alec Guinness off for his rudeness and selfishness, he has softened both his jealousy for the tutor and his lack of attention to Grace. He is reformed, but with unaccustomed humility, attempts to woo Grace not with flattery, but with the truth. He allows that he is no great match, but delivers a speech at the end of the film that is both beautiful and sad.
He recalls her father’s nickname for her, the Swan, and muses in his measured, beautiful Alec Guinness-brand speaking voice that the swan, remote and proud, must accept its fate to “be a bird, but never fly. Know one song, but never sing it until the moment of her death” while casting “cool indifference to the crowds along the bank.” When he next touches her hand tentatively, she does not flinch nervously this time, but lets him lead her back into that rarified world of the drawing room with mature resignation for her destiny, and not the childish fairy tale about princes and princesses she had wanted to believe.
Audrey Hepburn’s princess had to give up her true love for her responsibility as princess. Grace Kelly’s princess had to give up more than her first love, but all prior notion of what true love must mean in order to be a queen. Hardly the stuff of traditional fairy tales.
The phrase about casting “cool indifference to the crowds along the bank” is an interesting one, and we might consider the media glare as part of the crowds along the bank for modern princesses. Cool indifference rarely works anymore, it only attracts the tabloids, but perhaps neither does any other attitude for maintaining one’s privacy and security.
Back to the blending of fantasy and reality. We might well think of the not-so-coincidental timing of the release of The Swan to coincide with the royal wedding in Monaco. We might also muse that many biographers and pundits credit HSH Princess Grace with catapulting Monaco onto the world stage and keeping it there as one very small nation garnering a chunk of world stature it did not previously possess, not only by virtue of her fame as an iconic film star, but by her personal involvement in the welfare of Monaco.
Like Audrey Hepburn’s princess in Roman Holiday, Princess Grace did her bit to “improve trade relations,” promoted tourism, culture, and established and was active in a number of foundations and charities that continue to this day. She left Monaco a better place.
Decades later, it has been noted that tourists, sometimes thousands per day, still visit her gravesite. How much of this adoration because she was the actress she was, or because she was the princess she was, who can say? Her lasting fame, more than other fashion icons, more than other actresses dying before their time, more than other royal figures, is because she was both.
It is only a coincidence that the star-crossed lovers of The Swan, Alexandra and Nicholas, share the names of the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II and his wife, but that leads us into our third and final post on the 1950s princess. Come back Thursday for a look at Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman as a princess who really existed…and yet, maybe not.
As an aside, have a look a this fun interview with Sir Alec Guinness, who relates the famous “tomahawk story” in which he and Grace Kelly pulled the same prank on each other for decades, that all began during the filming of The Swan.
UPDATE: Have a look at this post on the 1930 version of The Swan called One Romantic Night with Lillian Gish
