The Impatient Years (1944)

The Impatient Years (1944) is an example of the kind of movie that is hardly ever made anymore, but was a staple of Hollywood’s heyday: current events.  In this case, the consequences of a hasty wartime romance, a quickie marriage and a baby – but when the couple are reunited when the soldier returns Stateside, they discover they are strangers.

(By the way, have a look at the "A" sticker on the car windshield in the picture above - and have a look at this previous post on gas rationing as depicted in the movies of World War II here.)

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a poignant and even rather sad take on what was a common problem as the divorce rate soared in the post-war years.  Even for those couples choosing to stay together, it was often a tough adjustment.  In a real sense, there was no getting back to “normal.”  There was only a mature and resigned acceptance that adapting to a new life was the only course.  Both husband and wife would have become different people in the meantime, due to their wartime experiences.

Jean Arthur is the lady, and she brings her trademark comic chops and intelligent silliness to the role of a young woman, repeatedly described by her father as a “nice girl,” so that we wouldn’t mistake her marrying a soldier almost the moment she met him as indicative of a “V-girl.”  “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t brought up right…it was wartime and they fell in love.” 

Now, however, waiting with her father at the bus station to welcome home her soldier husband on medical leave, she’s as nervous as a cat and clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being married to somebody she knew only for four days.

Lee Bowman plays her husband, home on temporary medical leave.  He’s just as uncomfortable with Jean as she is with him, more so because he is coming home not only to a wife he barely remembers, but to a father-in-law he’s never met, and must try to make himself at home in a house he’s never been to and is already crowded.

Charles Coburn is Jean’s father, reprising a similar role of curmudgeonly matchmaking as he did in The More the Merrier (1943) of the previous year.  In fact, you’ll notice his “The Torpedo Song” of that movie being reprised as a theme for his character in The Impatient Years every time Coburn enters a scene.  He is the voice of common sense, trying to get his daughter and son-in-law to give each other a chance before they divorce – the movie starts in divorce court and the plot is then revealed in flashback.

There are two more people in the house who are strangers to Lee Bowman, one is his infant son, in whom he is delighted, but nervous as to how to hold him.   He has seen only pictures, and is disappointed to have missed his first words – which include “Mama,” and “Henry.”

Henry, played by Phil Brown, is the other stranger, a boarder in the house.  He is a young man who has been immensely helpful with the baby and who regards Jean and the baby as his surrogate family.  A proper fellow who enjoys the routine around the baby that Jean Arthur has established for the home, Henry, as Charles Coburn remarks to Lee Bowman, “He’s a very fine young man.  You’re going to get very sick of him.”

And we see why, but I feel rather sorry for poor Henry, usurped by the baby’s real father.  Despite his late-hour, petulant confession to Jean Arthur that he is in love with her, he stands no chance.  Yet there he is, in Jean’s room, soothing the baby while she goes to warm up the bottle of milk, with Lee Bowman staggering around, trying to find a place to hang up his uniform.  

When Jean returns and the baby is settled, Bowman asks casually, “You finally got him in bed?” and we know that her uneasy reply of “yes,” just short of a double-take is because at that moment, they are both thinking of Henry.  It is one of a few clever double meanings in this script.

As I remarked in the post on her work in The More the Merrier: “Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.”  One could say the same for her character here in The Impatient Years, except that here she is slightly more irritable as a means of defense.  Her skittishness, and his own being baffled by the strange surroundings and stranger family, Lee Bowman nonchalantly decides to sleep on the floor, giving the excuse that he is not used to a bed after rugged Army life.  It is a gallant move to put his wife at ease, though we can see that she might also take it as an insult.  He ruefully remarks of the baby in the crib next to her bed, “I think he’d be ashamed of his old man.”  It is both self-deprecating and a shaft of conscience to Jean Arthur.

But they quickly get on each other’s nerves the next day and decide to call their marriage quits.  We are brought back to the courtroom scene where Charles Coburn, in an attempt to force them to get to know each other as a way to avoid divorce, suggests to the judge, played by Edgar Buchanan, that they be required to re-live the four days of their courtship that led to their marriage.  Judge Buchanan remarks, “You boys and girls think it’s very romantic to get married just because it is wartime.  You don’t stop to think for a minute that there’s going to be an after the war time, with a whole long life to be lived together.”  Yes, if they're lucky.

It is an admonishment to the young lovers in the audience, and it is a daffy screwball comedy turn in the great tradition of that era, and so we have our second half of the movie as the now bickering couple find themselves in the scenes of their hasty courtship in San Francisco, revisiting the same restaurants, tourist sights, hotel, and marriage license office, leaving confused desk clerks in their wake.  As Miss Arthur grumbles about a marriage license clerk who does not understand that they need to fill out a marriage license to get a divorce, “For heaven’s sake, if he’s going to be so stupid, let’s go.”

Ironically, it is their very spatting like an old married couple that brings them closer together, along with reliving the scenes of their romance and being away from Pop, the baby, the crowded house, her regimentation with household chores, and Henry. 

Because they need to follow through on the judge’s orders, they kiss, but only to avoid committing perjury.  But aha, there’s a glimmer of falling in love again.

Grant Mitchell plays a befuddled hotel desk clerk very concerned about Jean Arthur’s welfare when he thinks Lee Bowman is not only a wolf, but mentally unstable; and Charley Grapewin is the world’s oldest bellboy.  

He loyally sits outside Jean’s door all night to protect her, and humors Lee Bowman when Lee says “I love you,” meaning this is the message he was trying to tap in their old code on the wall of Jean’s adjoining room.  Charley thinks Lee loves him.

When sailor Frank “The Old Magoo” Jenks cuts in at a hotel dance, we see Lee Bowman getting jealous, to Jean’s delight.  But she saves Bowman from the MPs by vouching he is her husband and takes him firmly by the arm, “C’mon, darling.”

Finally, they trek to the house of the minister who married them.  He is Harry Davenport, and his sweet wife is Jane Darwell.  She remembers the couple, and the old folks are thrilled that a couple married in their livingroom, for once, came back to visit them.  It is not a screwball moment, but a very sober example of what a long and dedicated marriage is, and Mr. Bowman and Miss Arthur feel somewhat shamefaced at their fecklessness.

Afterward, they end up at the place where they had their wedding dinner—a Chinese restaurant where the vocalist is Bob Haymes, actor and singer Dick Haymes’ younger brother.  I’m not sure the point of this interlude of him singing at their table, except to give the up-and-coming fellow a bit of screen time. He has a nice voice.  But the dinner is where they really relive their wedding night—Jean becomes ill on fried shrimp, just as she did the first time.

The hotel clerk and his erstwhile bellboy are on the alert when Bowman must carry her up the stairs and she blithely announces her husband has poisoned her.  Charles Coburn and poor Henry arrive at the 11^th hour with a telegram ordering Bowman to the military hospital for his end-of-furlough checkup. 

It now appears that since their trial courtship is over and Bowman is ordered back to active duty, there’s nothing to keep them together anymore. 

In a sweet ending, however, Jean returns to her father’s house to reunite with her baby and discovers Bowman there, playing with him on the floor.  Miracle of miracles—the little boy takes his first steps to Daddy, and Jean is overcome with emotion.  She wants the toddler to walk to her next, and Bowman asks, “Can I come too?”

We have our happy ending, except for Henry, of course.  He's out of luck.

The movie, while not packing a punch like The More the Merrier, has some good moments, and it is particularly noteworthy that the screenwriter and associate producer for the film was Virginia Van Upp (1902-1970) – a child actress in silent films, later a script writer, producer, film editor, casting director, agent – pretty much a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, unusual for a woman at that time.  (And is this a swell photo or what?) She had been brought over from Paramount to Columbia for Cover Girl rewrites that same year by studio boss Harry Cohn.  Lee Bowman also appeared in that film.

Speaking of the studio boss, The Impatient Years was Jean Arthur’s last film for Columbia under her much-hated contract with much-hated Harry Cohn.  She was free at last, and the wonderful A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and Shane (1953), discussed here, were ahead of her.

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

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Bachelor Mother (1939)

Bachelor Mother (1939) just only happens to be a Christmas movie on the side, and with screwball Depression-era panache, it swaps humor, farcical truths, and stretched credulity for sentiment.  It parodies sentiment, and with wry Little Orphan Annie-style toughness, dares ya to disbelieve.

This post is part of the countdown to Christmas coinciding with the launch of my newest book, Christmas in Classic Films.

Ginger Rogers is in one of our apparently most-hallowed Christmas scenes: the department store.  She works the counter in the toy department (more competently than Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame), but she is a member of that misfit army, the temp worker.  She has been hired only for three weeks during the Christmas season.  The movie opens in the last few minutes before the workday starts, as the employees line up to listen to their employer give them a perfunctory if well-meaning Christmas sale pep talk and wish them happy holidays.  A few minutes later, as their sales books are distributed (no cash register-printed receipts here), many of them, Ginger included, find a pink slip thanking them and tell them to get lost at the end of the business day.

On her lunch hour, Ginger visits an employment agency, and passing by a foundling home, watches an elderly woman leave a baby on the steps.  The woman dashes off, (claiming, we may assume truthfully, that it is not her baby) and when the door opens, Ginger is presumed to be the mother.  On this thread the story is told.  The foundling home contacts her employer and between the two of them, bully and shame her into keeping “her” baby.  No matter how the bewildered and irritated Ginger protests, they insist and when she gets her job back permanently with a raise to help her support her child, she decides to just go with the flow.

It’s hard to convince anyone it’s not her baby.  He has taken her to immediately and cries when he is not in her arms, stopping once she holds him.  She grins, dumbfounded as if watching a magician’s trick, “For heaven’s sake!”

The landlady, played by Ferike Boros, likewise assumes she has been hiding the baby from her, and volunteers to help babysit. Later her lawyer son will try to help Ginger try to keep the baby when she’s afraid the boss wants control of his “grandson.”

Frank Albertson, a familiar face from many films, if the parts were usually quite small, gets a larger role here as the annoying stock clerk.  He takes Ginger to a dance contest with disastrous results, and when he also assumes she’s the baby’s mother, assumes that the son of the store owner is the father.  He will use this assumption to get a promotion, and then get revenge when he is demoted again.

The store is one of those old family-owned juggernauts, sadly lost today, run by patriarch Charles Coburn, whose indignation over his playboy son is priceless.  The only sentiment in the movie comes from him, and it is played for laughs, when he thinks his son, David Niven, is the father of the baby and therefore the baby is his grandson.  He holds it lovingly, believes they have named the baby for himself, and he tears up.  It is sweet and laughable.

David Niven, at first an irritant to Ginger, finds himself involved more than he would like, but by New Year’s Eve, without a date for a fancy shindig, he calls her up.  Like a fairy godfather, he provides the suitable gown and accessories from the store.

Love blooms in the end and fixes up the mess, but never in a sentimental way.  In their final embrace before the fade out, Ginger’s “hah!” when Niven affirms he really believes the baby is hers beautifully jabs him as if to say, “you sucker.”

Interestingly, as if to tie up the background of Christmas commercialism in the movie (the toy department is labeled as Santa Claus’s headquarters), there is no musical theme in the movie that reprises the lovers’ bond from scene to scene.  Instead, a toy wind-up duck is seen throughout the movie as the symbol of Ginger’s work (and a funny line about losing sleep and waking because it’s time to wind ducks); a gift to the baby; a foil to Niven, who discovers it breaks and he must try to run the gauntlet in his own store to get a refund; to noisily outing Ginger when she is hiding; to finally quacking away at the end in triumph.  It looks like Donald Duck in a blue sailor suit, but there is no product identification, and perhaps we are looking at a cheap knockoff, a trademark and patent violation.  That, too, is the experience of Christmas.

May I wish you all the very happiest of holidays!

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

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Rhapsody in Blue - 1945

Rhapsody in Blue (1945) presents George Gershwin’s piece “Rhapsody in Blue” almost in its entirety.  This, and cameo appearances by some who knew and collaborated with Gershwin: Paul Whiteman, Oscar Levant, and Al Jolson – playing themselves, make this film a worthwhile entry in our series on musicals about composers.  However, it’s so lacking in factual material, or even an interesting fictional tale – that there’s not much else to recommend the movie.

Adding to these detriments is a dour subplot of the main character plodding through life to his well-telegraphed doom.  The film was made some eight years after George Gershwin’s death at the age of 38 from a malignant brain tumor.  The story is told through that lens.  It is less a celebration of his life, ambition, and his prodigious contribution to American music, than it is a quietly haunting march of the walking dead.  Perhaps it was difficult not to film this movie within a prism of grief.

There are bright spots in the film, most notable of which is jazz and classical pianist Hazel Scott, who appeared in a handful of 1940s musicals as a specialty act.  A class act she was: elegant and stunningly beautiful, as well as being sublimely blessed with talent.  She is the most sparkling image in this movie.

Alexis Smith and Joan Leslie are also on hand as George Gershwin’s two (fictional) romantic relationships, with Miss Smith in her customary cool, intelligent beauty role, and Joan Leslie as the loser in the triangle when Gershwin cannot commit to her but seems to forget her in the dust of his ambition. Miss Leslie loses her all-American girlishness in this film that brought her to stardom at Warner’s, and instead appears quite moving and lovely as a sadder-but-wiser woman. 

Robert Alda plays George Gershwin (his screen debut), and though Alda is likable, it’s a performance so low key that it is hard to appreciate what drove this clearly driven man.  Perhaps it is just too difficult to visually depict the inner turmoil and ecstasy of the creative process.

Herbert Rudley is his brother and lyricist Ira, who was his closest relationship.  Sweet and reliable Morris Carnovsky and Rosemary DeCamp are Mama and Papa.

Eddie Marr plays lyricist Buddy De Silva, who we saw portrayed by Gordon MacRae earlier in this series here in The Best Things in Life are Free (1956).

Will Wright plays Rachmaninoff, the thought of which still cracks me up.

Mark Stevens, who we saw earlier in this series in I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now has a brief uncredited role as a singer. I’m pretty sure his tenor voice is dubbed here.

When first viewing Rhapsody in Blue years ago, I remember thinking how unrealistically stupid it was that when George Gershwin’s headaches seemed so severe, nobody thought of taking him to a doctor. I have since learned that when he finally did seek medical help in June 1937, he was ironically given a clean bill of health and told that his problem was hysteria.  A month later he fell into a coma and then it was decided that he had a brain tumor.  Gershwin died having emergency surgery.  So what is least believable in old movies is sometimes what we must believe.

The movie takes us from his childhood days in New York, to Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Paris, and the Hollywood Bowl.  We are treated to “Swanee,” by a hyperkinetic Jolson, and snippets of “The Man I love” and “Yankee Doodle Blues” from Hazel Scott, a bit of “Embraceable You,” from Joan Leslie, who was unable to finish overcome by her hurt that Gershwin has brought Alexis Smith to a party.  We have Anne Brown and Todd Duncan recreating their Broadway roles as Porgy and Bess, but not enough of them.  Just bits.  We don’t get enough of Gershwin in this movie about Gershwin.

Oscar Levant and Charles Coburn are welcome additions to the cast, as they anchor the dreaminess of the proceedings with invariably caustic but sensible remarks, but as mentioned in our last entry in this series, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, the film would have been better served – especially with the shocking passing of the man still clearly mourned by the entertainment world – with a greater tribute by just presenting performances of his music, and not reminding us with foreshadowing at every turn that he was doomed to live a short life.

I would have rather had a film that left the audience lost in the rapture of his music, and observing the busy course of his full life, have had the sudden end of his life come as a shock, as indeed it did for people in 1937.  That way we can better appreciate his work, and also share in the sense of loss, coming to understand its magnitude on the American Songbook.

“Work is a compulsion.  It’s an obsession,” George says, but the obsession of this movie is not his work; it’s his death.

Come back next Thursday when we cap off this series on musicals about composers with a double-header: a look Cole Porter’s career through Night and Day (1946) and De-Lovely (2004).

*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

The Constant Nymph - 1943

“The Constant Nymph” (1943) recently premiered on TCM. It would be interesting to get TV ratings data for that night. A film so long tangled up in legal limbo, it’s a rare gem for classic film buffs, probably all of whom with access to TCM were watching or recording it or both.

“Legal limbo” has an otherworldly sound to it. It’s not really a place. It’s an imaginary existence -- or lack of one -- that suggests a challenge yet to be resolved. Those of us on the outside of this struggle, with little understanding of it, merely accept that there is such a plane of existence.

Accepting without understanding can be a kind of safety valve. At other times, it can be a gift we give to those whose feelings or actions are beyond our comprehension. “The Constant Nymph” shows us a musically creative family who need a great deal of understanding, but whose peculiar “insanity” is “of the most enchanting kind.”

This, according to Charles Boyer, friend of the family and not a little insane himself.

The art of illusion plays a big role in this film, gently directed by Edmund Goulding. The dilapidated chalet in the Swiss alps, whose foothills hover just on the back cyclorama, are straight out of “Heidi”. A storybook illusion. The mosses and ferns, and disparate branches and grasses on the furry mounds just beyond the house wave in the light breeze created by the unseen wind machine, and lift the errant strands of hair escaping from Joan Fontaine’s tight, untidy braids.

Joan Fontaine is the biggest illusion in this film. She plays a teenager here, natural and unaffected, completely innocent yet possessed of wisdom beyond her years. She runs with a round-shouldered burst of exuberance, and throws her opinions around like any know-it-all kid. She is funny, and elfin, and tragic. I think it’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from any film of that era. She was something like 25 years old at the time. Her skinny, awkward body is the least of the illusion; most of it comes from that hyperactive energy, the clear face with its constantly changing expressions. She is quite remarkably moving.

The way Boyer rustles his hand through her hair roughly and puts a gentle hammerlock on her, tucking her head under his arm. He doesn’t quite get that she’s in love with him, but the film avoids the sexual escapades of the book by putting her love and his misunderstanding of it on a higher plane.

Like legal limbo, I suppose.

Boyer’s main trauma comes from not living up to his potential as a composer. “If he’d only cry,” Joan Fontaine’s dissolute composer papa, played by Montagu Love, declares. M. Boyer recoils from sentiment and tenderness, or maybe just hard work, preferring a lazy joke, or a romantic diversion, which here is played by Alexis Smith.

Alexis Smith, for once in her life, has a role she can sink her teeth into. She is the wealthy, upper class society debutante who is summoned to the storybook chalet to take charge of the girls after the death of Montagu Love (who actually did die a month before this film was released). She is the maternal cousin of Joan Fontaine. Her father, played with typical comic crankiness by Charles Coburn, is the brother of Fontaine’s long-deceased mother.

Rounding out the family we have a few more sisters and half-sisters, one of which is played by Brenda Marshall, who is pursued with middle-European angst by Peter Lorre.

Joyce Reynolds is charming as Fontaine’s closest sister, who shares in her troubles and hijinks. Fontaine dumps Miss Reynolds from her bed onto the floor in our introduction to her character. In a sweet, melancholy scene, Reynolds comforts Joan Fontaine, who has fainted. Noticing a bruise and smudge of dirt on Joan’s upper arm from when she fell like a sack of wet cement in the dirt, she licks the corner of the bedspread and daubs it lovingly on Joan’s skin.

Joan took a dive when she heard that Boyer has suddenly proposed marriage to Alexis Smith. Afterward, whenever Smith and Boyer are around, Joyce Reynolds keeps a close watch on her sensitive sister. On another occasion we see her dark eyes dart from the happy couple to Joan, helpless to prevent the cold slap of reality that she’s just a kid and Boyer is a grown man with a grown man’s appetites.

But soon, it’s Alexis Smith who needs comforting. She has perceived no warning from Joyce Reynold’s alert glances. Miss Smith begins to sense, on her own, a bond between Boyer and Fontaine. She’s almost sick with jealousy. It’s a very good performance, and even at her most harsh and shrill we have to sympathize with an insecure woman who knows she’s losing her handsome husband to a skinny little poor orphan with fainting spells.

“You’re so real, so definite,” Boyer says to Alexis, by way of a compliment, but he has no real interest in reality. It’s much more fun to play in an ethereal existence. Not that he hasn’t the ability to fit in wherever he goes. In a ballroom scene, he meets Dame May Whitty, more cranky than her pal Charles Coburn, and charms her to pieces. How they click immediately is irresistible.

I was a bit thrown by “Danny Boy” being played in the background. Not something I would expect in an upper class British ballroom.

But, Boyer chafes under his bride’s social set, does not want to perform for them, and Alexis deals smoothly with his tantrums and fretfulness. It’s Joan Fontaine that gets under her skin. Still, Alexis has agreed to become the girls’ guardian, save them from poverty, and this may be her chief value to Boyer, though he has the tact not to say it. She even has looked into and learns the name of Joan’s mysterious heart condition that gives her palpitations and fainting spells; Boyer shrugs it off as a bothersome detail, like school enrollment, which is also left to her.

It is the reality of his new everyday existence that perhaps irks Boyer most, with the girls sent to boarding school and Alexis so in love with him she shows him off to all and sundry, when she is not sending him to his studio to work. He needs a little illusion, or at least some self delusion, to buffer against the responsibilities of the everyday.

I think my favorite illusion in the film is the fact that in real life, Alexis Smith was nearly four years younger than Joan Fontaine.

Her height and elegance conveys that she’s the grown up and Fontaine is the kid. Fontaine’s school uniform helps, and the delightfully floppy way she carries herself completes the picture.

The film has a leisurely feel to it, and lightness, and gentleness that compliments the ethereal nature of the story. It takes a different tone from the book -- and has to, to pass muster of the Code, but this is part of the movie’s charm. It could be such a heavy soap opera, and it’s not. Think of other films like “All This and Heaven, Too” (1940) or “Now, Voyager” (1942), which hammer us with the illicitness of the love story. This fable, like Joan Fontaine’s character, is beautifully natural and tenderly developed.

The tension builds with Alexis Smith’s devotion to honesty, which is even stronger than her devotion to Boyer. The truth may set us free, but honesty is often the most callous and brutal road to freedom. Both Smith and Fontaine suffer this, and courageously face honest self appraisals of their shared reality. The two characters change the most, almost in tandem, through the film.

At the end, we have a conversion of sorts, when Alexis Smith, enraptured this time and no longer haunted by this embarrassing romantic triangle, experiences the same thrill of Boyer’s music as Fontaine does, and at the same time. The music here is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, which launches Fontaine into a dream sequence. It is one of the most imaginative scenes in the film where snippets of previous dialogue are strung together to create a kind of fractured memory effect -- the illusion that the words are familiar and yet completely new. An eerie déjà vu.

Smith is not part of Fontaine’s dream sequence; we do not get to see her epiphany. We only see the ironic twist that Fontaine is roused from her reverie by the fear of death in the reprise of lines she earlier recited with an innocent lack of understanding of what they meant.

I like movies that give me something to think about after they end. What if we had been allowed inside Alexis Smith’s head when she changed her mind about the love between Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer? Her astonishing turnabout, her offer to release him is done without self-pity or bitterness, but with a heart full of love, a sense of excitement in accepting a situation that exists without understanding it. What went on in that theater box for her to do a 180 on wanting to boot Fontaine out of her house?

What if the ending was different? (I’m going to avoid a spoiler here, but you several million who watched the TCM premiere know what I’m talking about.) Would there still be a romantic triangle tinged with the rumor of pedophilia? Would Boyer ever find his muse without losing it first?

What happens if he is without both his muse and his wife? Is he still going to compose, the new darling of the moneyed set, or just find some other storybook soundstage to lose himself -- that other elusive plane of existence that enchants and entangles, and inevitably leads to sorrow?

Like legal limbo.

War Stories Part 2 - "The More the Merrier"

Fair warning, I'm going to discuss pretty much the entire movie, so if you don't want to know the details, stick your fingers in your ears and sing, "La, la, la, la!" for the next half hour.

“The More the Merrier” (1943) brings the war story back to this side of pond now that the U.S. had entered the fighting and Americans had learned what it was to be, sort of, deprived. Americans had a different experience from Mrs. Miniver and family, and we handled The War with not so much with a stiff upper lip, as with a wisecrack. Tomorrow, December 7th, marks the anniversary of our reason for joining the fighting.

The main gag driving the film is the wartime housing shortage. For the first time in U.S. history, masses of people were moving all over the country at the same time. Servicemen and women were leaving home for military camps and then to points of embarkation. Young brides, those that could, followed inductee husbands to new posts stateside. Big cities called to a still mostly rural America to fill slots in war factories and civil government.

“The More the Merrier” is set in Washington, D.C., and teases us not only on the housing shortage, but on the befuddled bureaucracy of a democratic republic. The faux travelogue at the beginning reminds us we are in a city disparagingly once described as a place of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

That used to be a joke. Son.

The second running theme is introduced when Charles Coburn, a consultant to the government on the housing shortage, admires the statue of Admiral David Farragut, whose famous directive during the American Civil War at the Battle of Mobile Bay you’ll recall was, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” It is Mr. Coburn’s motto, too. He gets his own affairs and the affairs of others which are none of his business briskly managed with this war cry.

It also reflects wartime cheerleading to a frightened audience.

He shouts this motto so often, that one wonders if his exuberance is really because he gets to say the word “damn” with impunity. Evidently this caused less fuss than when Clark Gable uttered the cuss word in “Gone with the Wind” (1939) a mere four years earlier. You could say the dam broke.

Several other themes weave their way through this film, like the shortage of men leading to more women leaving the home and entering the workforce. The shortage of men also makes them a valued commodity, and turns women from the pursued into the pursuers. There is a scene in the movie where a line of women wait to punch in a time clock, and they tease a lone young man with whistles and catcalls that unnerves him into running away.

Charles Coburn has arrived in the city too early for the hotel reservation made for him, so he tricks his way past a line of applicants to take the room for rent offered by Jean Arthur. She is also a government worker, and she has a small flat with an extra bedroom that she has chosen to rent to serve her country.

Jean Arthur was nominated for an Oscar for this role, and Charles Coburn won Best Supporting for his role as Mr. Dingle. They had first teamed up for “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941), and their wonderfully silly rapport is repeated here. He becomes a nosy, pushy sort of fairy godfather, not merely because he just likes to run everything, but also because he senses immediately, as do we, that Miss Arthur is drowning in her own lack of spontaneity. As she wails later on in the film, “I’m not the kind of person anything happens to!”

It is not until Coburn barges his way into her life that she begins to realize how empty her life has been.

She is reticent to take him on as a roomer because she prefers to have a woman living with her. She finally agrees to let him stay, but adds a caveat that they must be careful not to be seen coming and going together. Coburn’s rakish, proud, smile is so cute as he begins to understand she is afraid the neighbors will think they are shacking up, just one of the many instances they play off each other so well. He thanks her for the compliment.

More than most other very fine, but more “stagy” actresses in this glamorous era, Jean Arthur played her roles with a natural and almost otherworldly believability. She is identified mainly as a comedienne, but I think she was really a dramatic actress in comic roles, and that gave her a multidimensional quality far beyond just broadly playing clowns.  Someone else in this role might appear shallow, and buffoonish.  Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.  Along with her famous sure-fire comedic timing she adds a touch of pathos.

Perhaps her ability to remain so deeply in character, so locked in the moment, was a defense mechanism that enabled Jean Arthur, extremely shy and insecure in real life, to do her job. Many of her roles, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, were women who found themselves undergoing a metamorphosis, responding to deeply buried passions when stimulated by challenges, crisis, and in this film at least, a strong case of sexual arousal brought on by Joel McCrea. That happens later.

First, a little slapstick. A long scene (which I would have loved to have seen in rehearsal), of Coburn’s and Arthur’s first morning together, each with a timed set of tasks to accomplish before they head off to their respective jobs. Coburn calls it the steeplechase. A running gag involving his pants that keep disappearing and reappearing is mapped out well, and looks like a silent movie scenario.

Another funny bit is when he locks himself out of the apartment while Jean is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Here’s where we get another glimpse at Miss Arthur’s unadorned believability. Yes, the toothpaste froth around her mouth dripping like a rabid dog is funny; she is not afraid of looking foolish. However, look at her eyes.

Though she looks into the mirror, it is an empty gaze. She inspects her ear as she scrubs her teeth. She looks like her mind is wandering. This is exactly what we do when we brush our teeth. Our minds wander. We are thinking about work, about picking up the kids at school, about what to wear, but the last thing we think about while brushing our teeth is brushing our teeth. She was meticulous about being natural.

“War brings people closer together,” Mr. Coburn states, and in large measure it did. We will see in the film numerous examples of crowding and inconvenience that would probably send people today, who seem to have a greater sense of entitlement, into rants and possible acts of revenge. Back then the greatest ranting, revenge, and sense of entitlement was to be found in Hitler or Mussolini. Nobody wanted to be like those guys.

Another aspect of life then that does not translate to today is the running gag on awkward grammar. Coburn shows his comic finesse with little more than dropping prepositions after a moment of wondering what to do with the leftovers, such as “because she borrowed it to go to it. In.”

He does this a few times and it’s quite funny, but today in a world of, “Uh, I’m, like, you know, whatever…” people speaking stupidly is the norm. When stupid is normal, it’s not funny. Also, breaking social rules is not an effective gag anymore when we live in a society where pretty much any behavior is accepted or tolerated. Breaking the rules is not daring or funny when there are no rules. (This is not meant to be a societal judgment, only a comment about script conventions.)

Obviously, Jean Arthur’s puritan worries about being caught living with men is also no longer standard today, so that joke may stretch very thin here. But perhaps the biggest theme moving the plot is also one that takes some translation. The War. It’s the reason why they’re all together here, it’s reason why Jean is renting her spare room, it’s the reason why Coburn and Joel McCrea need it, it’s the reason why the plot thickens, complications arise, new worlds open up, dreams are dashed, and why they must go on in spite of everything.

But, where was The War, exactly? Mrs. Miniver had it in her back garden, in her destroyed dining room, in the body of her dead daughter-in-law sprawled on the floor. When the enemy arrived in our country, it was as prisoners, and they were tucked safely into POW camps. Most people never saw them.

Here the war is less an effort to survive (though it would be if things got any worse), but more a sense of guilt and unrelenting responsibility. It may be difficult for younger audiences to comprehend how a war fought somewhere else could be so pervasive, could dominate every facet of daily life here, and demand personal sacrifice unheard of today.

We know of the tremendous sacrifices of service personnel in that war. What few people recall today is that a good part of the civilian population worked themselves nearly to death during those years. They had little support, only constant reminding not to complain. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

But, this is a comedy, so we hint at these subjects with typical American wisecracks. This is what makes this film so quintessentially American. We may exhibit a bit of awkwardness trying to interpret Mrs. Miniver’s wartime Britain, but here were are on home turf.

Flippancy makes things seem normal even when the world is upside down.  Flippancy covers immense national anxiety, perhaps as much as Jean Arthur's smooth comic timing masks hers.

Back to Jean and her roomie. We discover a hint of loneliness in this rigid woman’s austere personality when she writes in her diary about Coburn, “At least someone around the house to break the silence.” He senses her social backwardness, and decides to play matchmaker when Joel McCrea stands out on the sidewalk with his suitcase and a large propeller over his shoulder. Coburn rents his half of his room, which has two beds in it, to McCrea.

Joel McCrea, as we will learn in small bits, is a mechanic from an airplane factory out in California, sent here to deliver what is probably classified aeronautic equipment to a Washington government department. In a few days, he is to be sent to North Africa as a sergeant on special assignment. Coburn decides Mr. McCrea is an eligible bachelor, but being eligible during World War II also meant eligible for military service. McCrea knows his dance card is full for the next few years, and he has no intention of getting involved with anybody in the meantime.

It is another intrusion of The War into this movie. McCrea knows where he is going, but he is still lost, between engagements. His life is not his own.

Joel moves in, and Coburn tries to find a way to explain it to Jean. Mr. Coburn’s and Mr. McCrea’s constantly calling each other by the wrong name is also a well-maintained running gag and smoothly done.

There is another slapstick scene of Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea not realizing the other is there, lots of just missing each other as they move from room to room. There is a cute moment where she is in her bedroom dancing to a rumba version of “What is This Thing Called Love”, glancing backward at her bum to see if she is sexy. It is our first clue there might be more to this schedule-obsessed wallflower.

Meanwhile, Joel, standing in the hall in his bathrobe, clutches his toiletries kit and starts to rumba as well. They are apart, but it is as if they dance together, a mating dance. We are, incidentally, treated to a tantalizing shot of Joel’s bare legs. More to come later.

A note here about rumba music (Yes, yes, I know. Just shut up already and talk about the “damn” movie.) A craze for Latin music began in the late 1930s and exploded during the war years, partly in response to our Pan-American re-awakening that we needed some allies in our own hemisphere. Maybe sometime we can go into the conga craze in movies. (You with the pencil, put that on our list of things to do.)

("The Devil and Miss Jones")

Just about everything you see in old movies is there for a reason. Well, maybe not everything…does it seem to you that the cropped top Jean is wearing in the rumba scene exposing her bare midriff is the same one she wore in the beach scene in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941)?

("The More the Merrier")

Back to Jean and Joel. Eventually each discovers the other and Mr. Coburn has some ‘splaing to do. Another cute bit with proper speech versus colloquial slang where the phrase, “six bucks” is passed back and forth between them.

“Well, give him back his six bucks.”

“I don’t have the six bucks. He gave you the six bucks.”

And Coburn dangles more prepositions, “And I’ll have the money to pay him. With.”

It’s only funny if you understand it’s bad English.

Jean relents and lets Joel stay. The next morning, our trio crams together in a little kitchen nook. Jean tries to keep to her precise schedule of eating her egg and getting ready for work, but here two big, hearty men sit down, invade her personal space, share her toast and make breakfast small talk. She is awkward at social banter, and we see her discomfort. She gradually displays a tentative willingness to be brought out of her shell that is as courageous as it is sweetly pathetic.

By the way, I love the dresser scarves in her apartment, that she has them. It’s such a miniscule touch that she wants things just so. She has precise standards. And the photograph of Abraham Lincoln on her desk.

She reveals she is engaged to a Mr. Pendergast, whom she always calls Mr. Pendergast. They chide her about his age, 42, and that he has kept her waiting at the altar nearly two years. We sense, and they know without meeting him yet, that Mr. Pendergast is a drip, whose career comes before Jean. When Joel gets on Jean’s nerves and the only bad thing she can think to call him is “messy”, he teases her that Mr. Pendergast must comb his hair constantly. She thinks she is putting Joel in his place when she retorts, “Mr. Pendergast has no hair!” and walks out.

Her “so, there!” moment falls dismally short of its mark, but she is saved from appearing ridiculous to the audience by stopping halfway down the stairs, glancing back, and thoughtfully half smiling to herself. They are now her boys, and they have become a kind of family.

Another wartime era moment is left to us when Jean Arthur boasts that Mr. Pendergast has had dinner at the White House, and Mr. Coburn replies, “Worst food in Washington.” By all accounts, during the Roosevelt years, it was.

One more topical war reference: Mr. Coburn uses the phrase “Eastern War Time”. Daylight saving time was established temporarily during World War I to save energy, and was re-introduced in 1942 for the same reason. We remained on daylight saving time the entire war, no changing the clocks, and this was referred to as War Time. (Somebody shut her up!  Sit on her!)

On Sunday, the rooftops of D.C. become the playground of the apartment dwellers who all come up to catch some sun in an era where most people did not own cars, and even if you did, three gallons of gas per week was all you might be allotted by rationing.

Here’s Jean Arthur and co-workers driving in a car with an “A” gasoline rationing sticker on it, which would have allowed them about three gallons a week. Have a look here at this previous post on wartime gas rationing in the movies.

That wasn’t going to get you to the beach or out in the country for the day, even if pleasure motor trips were not banned by law (which they were). Off in the distance, we see the Capitol Dome, which we get several glimpses of in this movie. I suppose it’s like Paris: in the movies, every bedroom window has a view of the Eiffel Tower. Here it’s the Capitol Dome.

On the rooftops the neighbors pose for snapshots, read, paint, picnic, kids play war games with toy guns. War was probably the most popular child’s game during The War. While Toby Miniver clutches his cat’s tail in the backyard air raid shelter on another sound stage, these kids machine gun Charles Coburn for fun, who plays along and shoots back at them.

The “family” gathers on the roof with the Sunday paper and the portable record player, cushions and blankets. The director reminds us again how sexy Joel McCrea is by leaving him in the foreground in shorts and a beach robe opened to reveal his chest. In this world of government women, like Amazon warriors heading for the time clock, lazy, laconic Joel McCrea, must be, for this sweet pinup moment, the male Betty Grable. Like the small point about the dresser scarves, I love that he walks around in stocking feet, wearing white gym socks.

Jean sprawls on blanket nearby, knitting, and the boys read the Sunday funnies aloud to each other. She glances over them with a look that is half amused and half disapproving, like an elder sister forced to mind her younger brothers for the day.

Then Coburn really does the bratty kid brother act by reading her diary, and when she discovers, her “That was a miserable thing to do,” bleeds venom from her voice, and heartbreak because she has been humiliated. She learns what she has always suspected: it is risky to let people into her life.

She boots them out but later allows McCrea to remain because he has only a day left before he will join the Army and be shipped to Africa with his propeller.

Now we move into the romantic stage, for if it was Coburn that brought them together, his presence also keeps them apart. The family dynamic changes when a family member leaves, and both Joel and Jean grow up and discover each other now that they are on the island alone.

There’s a comically suspenseful scene when she waits for a call from Mr. Pendergast on whether or not he will decide to take her out on a date that evening. At a crucial moment, a teenage boy from downstairs named Morton, played by Stanley Clements, whom you may remember as the gang leader from “Going My Way” (1944), bursts in for advice from Jean. Note his “Jughead” hat (Archie Comics, you remember), which was popular among teens of that era. They took a man’s felt fedora hat, turned in up and cut the brim like a zigzag.

Don’t knock it. Someday tattoos are going to be funny.

He wants to know if he should join the Boy Scouts, and is as serious as if he were pondering joining the Army. She calls him her “fella”. Truly, they’re either too young or too old.

That was a song, by the way.

Eh, skip it. (I could sing it, but I won’t. I can see your attention is wavering.)

It’s a cute scene, and both Joel and Jean want to kill Morton for procrastinating. But Mr. Pendergast, who at last arrives to take Jean out for the evening, is the real party pooper.

But, the night is young, and Jean and Joel, and Mr. Coburn, and Mr. Pendergast all run into each other at a nightclub. Another cute moment when they are all sitting at a table, and a rumba plays in the distance. Both Jean and Joel, still seated, start to move their shoulders and succumb to the seductive rhythm. Mr. Coburn tells them to go dance so he can discuss business with Mr. Pendergast.

He keeps Mr. Pendergast, terrifically played with delightful self importance by Richard Gaines (who does a 180-degree turn in character when he plays Patrick Henry in “The Howards of Virginia” - see previous post), busy for the rest of the evening.

Jean sees Joel being ogled by a flock of other women, and she gets jealous and territorial in a way she never was over Mr. Pendergast. I love Mr. Gaines’ officious-sounding, radio announcer-quality voice. Mr. Pendergast, by the way, has a spectacularly ugly toupee that nobody mentions. It’s just there for all to see. Like the Capitol Dome.

When Joel escorts her home, we are treated to one of the most erotic and silly seduction scenes Hollywood ever produced. They walk down the street, passing lovers clutching each other in dark corners.  They glance at these couples with interest and envy, as Jean tries to pry information out of Joel about his past, particularly his former girlfriends. She is apparently jealous of them, too. He takes her hand, her arm, puts his hand on her bare shoulder repeatedly as they walk all the while she smoothly, but without apparent alarm, plucks his hands from her person. It is like a dance.

They sit on the front steps of their apartment building, and talk more about her marriage plans with Mr. Pendergast. She continues to sing Mr. Pendergast’s praises while Joel slowly runs his hands over every part of her body the Production Code will let him. I don’t know how carefully this was rehearsed but some of it had to be improvised.

He clearly desires her, is doing everything but undressing her, but maintains a polite stream of conversation. If he just said “uh-huh” to her dialogue, as if ignoring what she is saying to him, it wouldn’t be as funny. Their equal determination to carry on the discipline of conversation despite their growing obsession with each other is a sparkling moment as comic as it is romantic. It’s like when they were doing the rumba separately, both preoccupied with their passions, but that time indulging them in secret.

Jean shows herself the master of both comedy and endearing emotion in this scene as she tries to soldier on through the proper social niceties and talking about her cousin’s stamp collection, battling to suppress her arousal as Joel explores her, kisses her neck, her hand, her bare shoulder. Her voice breaks. In perhaps the first spontaneous thing she ever did in her life, Jean takes Joel’s face in her hands and plants a kiss on him that makes him dizzy. Not bad for a first try. We have a feeling she’s been saving that one for a long time. They part breathlessly, but with polite formality, gathering bits of dignity they have left all over the steps.

The silliness never once lessens the steaminess of the scene. The sensuality never overwhelms the silliness. It’s a perfect marriage. THIS SCENE is why they call it “romantic comedy”.

Joel McCrea had, like Jean Arthur, a natural style so well suited to comedy, a quiet, light manner open to sudden dramatic shifts and surprising intensity. They were a great match, and this was their third and last film together. Another good scene, intimate and silly, is when they examine together all the compartments of the new travel bag he gives her. It’s really charming, with their low, quiet voices overlapping each other’s sentences, and you have to admire what two pros can do with a simple prop.

George Stevens directed this film, and responsible for much of its magic, worked particularly well with Jean Arthur. He also made her memorable final film “Shane” a decade later.

Early in the film, we are shown that the wall between her room and the spare bedroom is quite thin and Mr. Coburn and Jean can talk through the wall. Now, with Jean and Joel gone to their separate beds, we have a split screen effect of them in bed “together” that predates the similar device used in “Pillow Talk” (1959) with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It is more erotic here, because they are not miles away in different apartments. Also, because they have more at stake. The scene decompresses from sexual tension into sorrowful tenderness when, after they have confessed their love for each other, realize that there’s not just a wall between them, it’s The War.

Yes, The War was that pervasive. It entered the bedroom as easily as it slipped into the workplace, the school, the wallet, the conscience, the subconscious. There was no escape.

It's sweet that she wears what looks like a gardenia in her hair for the evening out, and does not remove it when she goes to bed.  If I wore a gardenia in my hair to bed, I'd wake up with petals up my nose. 

Not that I've tried it.  But I might sometime if curiosity got the better of me.

It might even be worth the embarrassement of going to the ear, nose, and throat doctor the next day to get the gardenia petals out of my nose.

There’s a bit more slapstick to go when suspicious young Morton has turned Joel into the FBI as a spy, another crowded cab ride shows us that gas rationing affected cabbies, too, who were not allowed to drive unless chair cabs were completely full of passengers, and when Joel and Jean succumb to a marriage of convenience arranged by Mr. Coburn to keep her reputation spotless. Lots of great dialogue, but this post is already stretching beyond the state line.

The last scene (yes, I know I’m telling you everything here. Don’t shush me. You’ve shushed your last shush, as Jean would say), brings the culmination of all the wartime crowding, the separation of lovers, and Admiral Farragut’s “damn the torpedoes” attitude.

Jean, miserable and crying over her cheap fake marriage, changes into a sexy negligee to sleep alone again. Joel goes dejectedly to the spare room to pack because he’s due to report for duty in a few hours. He demands she not take in any more roomers because of the riffraff she might attract, and she complains that he is already crabbing like a husband. A poignant moment when he pulls off his sprig of lily of the valley from his suit lapel (to match her wedding bouquet) and mutters, “Well, I am a husband…at least until it’s annulled.”

She cries and they lamely try to pick a fight with each other, when both suddenly realize the wall between their rooms is gone. Mr. Coburn has had workmen tear it out. Astonished, their reserve crumbles like the drywall.

Anguish turns to comedy, and then to sex when Joel and Jean, adopt slow, sly smiles. Jean’s crying has ceased, but she manufactures a few fake wails as a kind of mating call to demand comforting. Joel, who we’ve known from the beginning is her perfect mate, happily responds to the call of duty like any good bridegroom.

Full speed ahead.

But only until The War intrudes again.

Come back Thursday for our final post on “war stories” when we jump back across the pond to England and see that wartime deception has led to tragedy for Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones in “Love Letters.”

Have a look below at the silly seduction scene. Let me know what you think. (Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page to mute the music so you can hear the video.)