Wretched Refuse of Your Teeming Shore - Since You Went Away (1944)

Since You Went Away (1944) is a tribute to the American home front during World War II, its cozy, meandering plot glowing with quiet moments of breathtaking truth. Sentimental, certainly, but no less truthful for its sentiment, and never more so than the important scene toward the end of the film when we see Claudette Colbert learning a lesson on what it is to be an American.

She takes a coffee break in the canteen at the shipyard where she is doing war work. Her co-worker, an immigrant from Europe, recounts of the terror of the old country, of clutching her child, hearing, "the sound of heavy boots marching down the street."  

We do not know the country, or her religion, or how she came to arrive in America, only that her little boy did not come with her. We cannot imagine the circumstances of what we presume was his death, or what happened to his father. 

"We'd pray together that God would let us go to the fairyland across the sea."

Nazimova plays Zofia Koslowska.  Her name, Claudette Colbert writes to her husband, "is nothing like we ever heard at the country club."  Nazimova describes her visit to the Statue of Liberty upon arrival in the country, and recites from memory over the lunch counter, over their coffee, as Claudette listens, watching her face with awe, the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the bronze plaque on the pedestal of Lady Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"I know it so well here," she points to her head, "because I feel it so much here," she points to her heart.

It was Nazimova's last film; she died the following year at 66 years old.  Another veteran of the European stage, Albert Basserman, plays another immigrant in the film, and producer/screenwriter David O. Selznick prefaces his appearance with the tender, and pointed, quote on a plaque by another American poet, Carl Sandburg, 

"America, thy seeds of fate have borne a fruit of many breeds..."

Then we see a university degree awarded to Sigmund Gottlieb Golden, M.D., a kindly psychiatrist treating a young serviceman in a veteran's hospital, played by Craig Stevens, who is suffering from what we today call post-traumatic stress.  The doctor's name, like Zofia Koslowska's, would never be heard at the country club.

But middle class WASP Claudette Colbert, and her daughter played by Jennifer Jones, embrace these "wretched refuse" as role models and as friends.  We next see Nazimova as a guest at a party at Claudette's home.

Selznick uses these inferences and examples of the strength, nobility, and virtue of a culturally diverse America -- and the white Christians openly accepting the newcomers who are different -- not as a shaft of conscience, but as a source of pride during a desperate war against fascism.  Our cultural diversity and our pride in that was one of our greatest weapons against evil.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Now Playing - 1944

This magazine ad for “Since You Went Away” (1944) was published in June of that year, for the film’s release in Hollywood that month, and nationwide release in July. It appears to be a fairly modest ad for all the attention producer David O. Selznick lavished on the film, the first of his many attempts to top the spectacle of “Gone With the Wind” which haunted him as much as it gratified him.

It may not have garnered the same box office or critical acclaim that “Gone With the Wind” did, but I would guess that through TV, DVD and VHS, more people have seen “Since You Went Away” and have seen it more often. It seems to have become a sentimental favorite of many in a way even the magnificent “Gone With the Wind” has not. What are your thoughts?

"Good Morning, Miss Dove" (1955)

“Good Morning, Miss Dove” (1955) gives us a sentimental view of small-town America wherein the main character is played in a most unsentimental fashion. Jennifer Jones, whose ethereal performances in her other films, comes down to earth in a firm and no nonsense manner. Quite an about-face coming after the sweeping “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” (1955). It’s an interesting study of an actress who approached her roles, even the romantic ones, like a character actress.

Inevitably, any discussion of Jennifer Jones becomes an analysis of her controversial partnership with producer, and husband, David O. Selznick. She is ever portrayed as the Galatea under his Pygmalion’s custody. Miss Jones’ reluctance to grant interviews over the years fed the mystery and perhaps abetted the controversy. However, though Mr. Selznick determined her films, her costuming, her makeup through a flurry of his famous memos, he did not create her mind or her soul. Despite his great influence on her career and personal life, she remains an actress who worked from someplace deep within, a quiet place untouched by anyone and revealed with astonishing intimacy in her film roles.

Since she is today one of the few remaining survivors of Hollywood’s studio system, one would hope that a modern re-examination of her films might release her at last from just being Selznick’s creation, and give her the credit she deserves in her own right. Too often we wait until an actor’s demise to shower his or her memory with plaudits.

As Miss Dove, Jennifer Jones, her name above the title in this Cinemascope venture, plays a small-town elementary school geography teacher. It’s a Norman Rockwell type setting, with a tidy little town, cannon on the common, portrait of President Eisenhower on the wall of her classroom. Miss Dove rules supreme, an austere, proper spinster lady in her mid-50s who, by virtue of her old-fashioned propriety, unruffled stern demeanor and expressionless face, is viewed by the townspeople as something of a joke.

As this film launches into rather syrupy sentimentality at stages, Miss Jones’ gives us a grounded performance that is both honestly touching and at moments, very funny. A good comedienne as proven by her work in the hilarious “Cluny Brown” (1946), she plays this role in the same way by playing it absolutely dead seriously. The spinster is not overdone, not played with exaggerated mannerisms or coy stereotype. If Jones is adept at playing younger than her years, as she did in many of her films, then here she is seen to be able to play older than her years with convincing realism. Her carriage, her movements are minimalist art. Even her aging makeup is done with subtlety.

Her classroom is quiet, orderly and ruled over by her with an iron disposition if not actually an iron hand. She does not need to shout. A mere look from her withers malcontents. If some restless young students regard it as a gulag, others, like young Bill from the wrong side of the tracks, regard it as a safe haven from a home of poverty and filth. There are such kids, then and now, for whom school is the best part of their lives, where they are safe. Fortunately for Miss Dove’s students, she is serious about her work. It is still a world of inkwells in the desks, an absence of metal detectors, and Miss Dove does not attempt to seduce any of her students.

But Miss Dove, despite her professionalism, did not come into teaching as a misty-eyed idealist out of Normal School. She just needed the money.

We are given a flashback to her youth, where as a fresh graduate from finishing school, Jones is seen visiting Papa at his bank. She is elegant and mannerly, but without the austere attitude of her middle-aged self. Her voice is higher and softer. Dressed in white, with flowing dark hair, she smiles and graces the small town of Liberty Hill like a princess.

This Miss Dove fades under the shadow of misfortune. Her father dies, leaving debt and scandal, having embezzled several thousand dollars from the bank he ran with his partner. Miss Dove, hoping to avoid public knowledge of the scandal, assumes her father’s debt and takes a teaching position to pay it back. She has no credentials to teach, except for a passion for geography, about which is she very well informed. She gives up a marriage proposal to a dashing young archeological student who wants to show her the world, in order that she might spend the rest of her life in her confining small town only talking about the world to her students. This is not entirely a fancy of self sacrifice; in those days many communities required their female teachers to remain single, and they forfeited their jobs if they married.

We have a trace of George Bailey from “It’s A Wonderful Life” (1946) here, with whom she shares many traits of being denied her dream of travel by family burdens. There is even a run on the bank scene during the Depression.

Far from allowing herself to be an object of pity, Miss Dove hides her family scandal and keeps her dignity by adopting a stony reserve through which she approaches life and her relationships with others, always kept at arm’s length.

Her relationships from then on involve mostly her students. We see few other people in her life. At the beginning of the film, Miss Dove suffers a health crisis, is removed to the hospital, and the rest of the film is told through flashbacks of her relationships with them. In the flashbacks, her classroom is the same except the portrait of President Eisenhower becomes a portrait of President Roosevelt.

When stricken with pain caused by a tumor in her lower spine, her nearest rescuers are a doctor and a minister, who both happen to be former pupils. It is a source of pride and deep chagrin, and even embarrassment to Miss Dove that almost everybody she is at the mercy of from then on is a former student. Probably a lot of teachers can relate to this. I’d love to hear from some of them.

The young men make a chair of their crossed arms and carry Miss Dove to the hospital. Evidently, ambulances and gurneys are not aplenty in Liberty Hill, but it makes for a funny parade with Jennifer Jones sitting rigidly, trying to maintain relative comfort and some semblance of dignity as she is hauled through town to the hospital. She is warned by the doctor not to wobble. She replies coolly, “It is not my custom to wobble.”

Her nurse, Miss Green, is played with wonderful aplomb by Peggy Knudsen. Nurse Green is eager and cheerful, but not the sharpest blade in the drawer. She, too, is a former student, and tries valiantly to improve her vocabulary and appear genteel before Miss Dove, as if she might be graded on it. At first, her ministrations are irritating to Miss Dove, who cannot bear the indignity of being ill, let alone the intimate contact of the hospital. Nurse Green speaks in plurals, as if Miss Dove is a child, cheerfully chirping, “We’ll take off our clothes,” as she unbuttons Miss Dove’s plain dress.

Miss Dove, flushed with agitation responds, “The pronoun ‘we’ is misleading unless you propose to take off your clothes, too.”

Nurse Green archly reminds her of the rules, and Miss Dove, ever a slave to rules, glumly submits. Hoisted by her own petard.

She develops with Nurse Green, as formal as it is, perhaps the closest relationship she has had with anyone in years. They have something in common; Nurse Green has a scandal of her own. Her little daughter was born out of wedlock when she left for the bright lights of war work in Detroit. She confesses this to Miss Dove, helplessly offering, “I was in Detroit.”

Miss Dove pulls back into judgmental platitudes, “Virtue knows no frontiers.” The second thing they have in common is Bill, Nurse Green’s boyfriend, the young policeman who gallantly stops traffic for Miss Dove on her daily walks to school. Though she would never admit it, Bill is her special pride, the dirty poor kid who grew up to be Chuck Connors, and there is something terribly sweet about The Rifleman beaming with adoration at his old teacher. Officer Bill is cut from the same cloth as Miss Dove, who is something of a foster mother to him, and he rejects Nurse Green for her sin.

Though Miss Dove appears more aloof from him even than his alcoholic grandmother with whom he shares a shack, nevertheless her influence over him is nurturing for its very steadiness. When he mows her lawn, she bring him lunch on a tray, and though she cannot bring herself to touch his hair as he sits down on her porch, she tells him to drink all his milk. It’s more than his grandmother ever did. When he graduates from grammar school, Miss Dove provides his new suit. When his grandmother dies, she is the only other mourner.

Miss Dove also figures prominently in the lives of other students, such as the European refugee who is taunted by bullies for being strange, for not speaking English well, and for being Jewish. Miss Dove protects him and brings tolerance to the classroom by displaying it herself, and introduces the class to the Jewish faith and culture.

No plaster saint, she refuses the young minister’s standard prayer of confession the night before her spinal operation, which she might not survive, with her typical honesty and desire not to be a hypocrite. “I do not, in all honesty, find the burden of my sins intolerable.” She prefers they pray together silently. She keeps her own counsel.

She also pronounces before Officer Bill, that Nurse Green is an excellent nurse and quite “genteel.” Presumably lying is one of her sins, but this is for the greater good, to display tolerance for their sakes, and with the seal of approval on Nurse Green, The Rifleman is pleased to renew his affections to her.

The end of the film gives us our happy ending of course, with Miss Dove still alive and the tumor removed. But the cornball scene of the whole town outside her hospital window, including Boy Scouts, Brownies, an escaped criminal (another devoted former pupil), and her current students, is entirely compensated by her young doctor, her former student played by Robert Stack, giving a courtly bow and wishing her, “Good Morning, Miss Dove.”

The camera slides up the patient’s bed and we get the detailed, complex workings of Jennifer Jones’ emotions. Her expression seems to indicate she is stoically endeavoring to fight tears, which are self-indulgent, but she cannot help but be pleased that her life was not a waste. She has discovered devotion from a town from which she has hidden her scandal, and withheld her emotions for decades. Another kind of George Bailey ending.

Jennifer Jones owns the last shot. There is only the slightest self-satisfied smile, and then it flickers away under a gossamer moment of pure wonder. A hundred flickering thoughts shimmer in her intense expression. That isn’t something that David O. Selznick created. That’s her.

Civil War Movies and Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day holiday, a marathon of World War II movies is the typical fare on television. But we could note with irony that though Memorial Day was created from the wild bereavement and need for reconciliation over the American Civil War, Hollywood’s classic era has given us few Civil War movies. It does not seem to be a subject they wanted to touch.

Four films on the American Civil war we may use as examples both of the scarcity of film treatment of the war and this nation’s or Hollywood’s discomfort with the war itself. These are “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), “Gone With the Wind” (1939), “The Red Badge of Courage” (1951), and “Shenandoah” (1965). Just the years’ distance between each of these films is an indication that the Civil War has not been popular subject matter.

This is amazing when we consider that this war did so much to create a modern nation from a struggling democracy cobbled together from former possessions of the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires. The Civil War was not only a turning point in our history; it created “a” United States from “these” United States. No small feat; and it came at horrific cost.

Hollywood easily churned out costume dramas of European monarchs and revolutions, tales of Roman Empire vice and grandeur, and many Biblical epics. The American frontier was occasionally visited, but most film tales of American past seemed to be rooted in westerns. Westerns were easily and cheaply produced, and the idea of the cowboy as an American icon was a thrilling and comfortable topic. White hats and black hats were easily distinguishable and we knew who the villains were.

Likewise during World War II, when Hollywood did much to unify the nation and serve as a kind of arm of the government to bolster morale, the films were churned out by the dozens and the good guys and bad guys were easily distinguishable.

But the Civil War, an era made for storytelling, filled with dramatic events and bigger than life personalities, this was touched upon lightly, with seeming awkwardness.

Both “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind” deal with the Southern point of view of the war, and include the Reconstruction period, which was as wretched an experience for the defeated South as the war had been. “The Birth of a Nation” took a defensive stand on both the South’s desire for political autonomy as well as the racism that created, promoted, and defended slavery. “Gone With the Wind” was a romantic tale, less of battlefield horrors than of the always-fascinating look at the downfall of wealthy upper classes, with a twist. Here they become dogged survivors in a strange new world.

Both “Gone With the Wind” and “The Red Badge of Courage” came from popular novels, the former having won the Pulitzer Prize. “Red Badge” follows one young Union man’s emotional trial in his first taste of battle. It is not about politics or good guys or bad guys. It is personal, and could be about anybody, anywhere, in any war.

“Shenandoah” features James Stewart as the curmudgeonly widowed father of a large Virginia farming family, who refuses to support Virginia’s militia or to pay any mind to the battles raging around his farm. He has created an improbably safe island in the midst of chaos, until his teenage son is mistaken for a Confederate solider, and multiple tragedies strike his family. This is more a tale of war being bad than of personal conviction. There are also a few historical inaccuracies in this film, but that is what sometimes happens when producers are businessmen and not historians.

However, the few and far-between modern films of the past few decades that have addressed the Civil War, though they may be filled with impressive accuracy on weaponry, tactics, and costumes, still shy away from displaying accurately the vehement politics and social mores of those days.

Perhaps it is simply impossible to re-create the emotion like we can the battlefield. Our look at the American Civil War is self-conscious, at arm’s length, and perhaps with some embarrassment. An earnest desire to see all sides sometimes leads to a diluted image.

At the time, the Civil War (which is actually a technically incorrect term, but has become the most accepted title), was called The War of Southern Rebellion by the North, and by the South was called The War of Northern Aggression. This was being polite.

Is it possible for us to understand a world in which thousands of men volunteered with idealism even after battles where typically thousands would be killed in minutes? Is it possible for us to understand why slavery was not abolished sooner, or how it could be logically defended by anyone? Northern and southern soldiers came to have regard for each other’s abilities and steadfastness, but the North and the South hated each other. There was a crude, murderous feeling rampant in the land. Is it even possible for us to understand such bitterness?

Perhaps this is why so few movies were made about the American Civil War. First, the cost of depicting the era accurately has become more and more prohibitive. Secondly, the passions which fueled the war have been spent, and we are invariably revisionists when it comes to history. We may not want to be. We may sometimes disdain revisionist history, but we are often powerless to do anything other than look at the past with our modern perspective.

One might wonder if it’s not for the best. Some things are best left behind us.

Also, in an era when Hollywood preferred not to alienate their southern film distribution market, an area of the country where movie theaters were segregated, blacks were carefully used and exploited in roles of stereotypes comfortable to bigots. “Birth of a Nation” aroused perhaps the first organized outcry against this, and the film became a museum piece from practically the moment it was made. Director D. W. Griffith spent the rest of his life defending the film, and the American Civil War was seen ever afterward by Hollywood moguls as possibly too hot a topic to touch.

“Gone With the Wind” sweeps us away in a romantic fantasy during the last days of grim Depression and the opening salvos of World War II. It nearly killed producer David O. Selznick, his team of revolving directors, his tormented writers, and his bewildered cast to make it. If it occasionally pulls punches, at least it made a grand effort. The film succeeds just as the novel did largely because we are taken with Scarlet and Rhett as characters. They could be southern aristocrats or London street thieves; it makes no difference as to time and place. They may talk about “the cause” but they serve no cause but themselves, and their personalities are irresistible.

“The Red Badge of Courage” sells itself to a Post-World War II audience with Audie Murphy in the lead, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, whose citations included the Medal of Honor. Bill Mauldin, “Stars and Stripes” cartoonist who created the beloved “Willie and Joe” characters in the army newspaper, plays another Union soldier. Even this obvious attempt at transference of the shine of World War II onto a Civil War epic made from a book we read in high school was unsuccessful. The film didn’t do well at the box office. Perhaps no one believed real-life hero Murphy was really a coward who could “skedaddle.”

“Shenandoah” skirts the political edge of the war just as James Stewart’s farm skirts the edge of the battlefield. Stewart was another World War II decorated serviceman. When he expresses disgust for the war and everything about it, we believe him. His own real-life experience lends cache. But where is the wrong and the right of it his character’s world? Where is the message? That war is bad? We already know that. But if a man expresses a couple of film hours’ worth of a lack of conviction, how are we supposed to care about him?

So, Memorial Day comes around, and World War II becomes our film focus for it. It’s easier that way. We knew who the bad guys were, and we’re not ashamed to point them out. It’s easier to find our heroes, too. They were everybody who served.

But the holiday actually began as a thoughtful, careful, tenuous gesture to reconcile the war-torn nation. It was slow to be accepted. Most of the nation did not adopt the holiday until after World War I, and many southern states still hold separate Decoration Day events for Confederate soldiers. World War II, though there are many still living for whom memories of that war are deeply painful, is a more comfortable subject, both in film and in real life. We know where we stand. We all stand together. Roll camera.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

“Portrait of Jennie” (1948) has become a fantasy classic, but it did poorly at the box office in an era when more realistic films with grittier themes brought new style and energy to Hollywood filmmaking.

It is inevitably unfair to compare a movie with the novel on which it was based because films and novels are apples and oranges. They require different dynamics of storytelling. That being said, it is unfortunate that the depth and gentleness of author Robert Nathan’s prose was not captured in the screenplay for this film. It is also perhaps understandable why it could not.

The film has many attributes that recommend it, including an interesting use of color tinting at the climatic storm scene where with a sudden bolt of lightning, the night sky and the churning surf turn an eerie green and we are jolted from a black and white film to a surrealistic monochromatic color world. This loses some of its powerful effect when we see close-ups of Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, their faces also tinted green, and the dramatic eeriness merely becomes grotesque and bizarre. At the very end of the film, we see the finished painting of Jennie in full Technicolor.

The location shooting in New York City with its many scenes set on city streets and in Central Park, and the overhead shots of Manhattan and the skyline are impressive, as well as the use of Graves End Light in Boston Harbor to stand in for the lighthouse where Eben and Jennie struggle against the tidal wave.

The cast of the film are superb, with the luminescent Jennifer Jones seemingly re-creating the unselfconscious innocence which won her the Academy Award in “Song of Bernadette” (1943) as she plays Jennie, who ages from a girl at the beginning of the film (with some costuming and trick photography), to a young woman by the end of the film. Joseph Cotten plays what is probably one of his last roles as a romantic lead, the down and out artist struggling to find his muse. The wonderful Ethel Barrymore has a pivotal role as Miss Spinney, the crusty art dealer who spurs Eben’s genius and changes his fortunes, and displays unaccustomed sympathy to a young artist who is clearly lost and heartsick.

Lillian Gish plays a small role as Jennie’s teacher, Mother Mary of Mercy with that famous silent movie expressive face. It is a shame that Miss Barrymore and Miss Gish have no scenes together. That would be something. It’s interesting that these two grand dames of theatre and the early days of film had so much history and experience behind them, and yet were nowhere near done with their working years. Miss Gish, in particular, kept working practically until she died at close to 100 years of age. It’s always great to see the very old partnered on screen with the very young.

David Wayne as Gus makes a strong film debut in this film, and at the very final scene we see three teenaged girls who all went on to careers in film, television, and the White House. They are Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, and Nancy Davis, who we last saw (see entry December 27, 2007) in “The Next Voice You Hear” (1950).

The film presents another rare example in Maude Simmons, playing an African-American character which is not stereotyped or demeaned. This was the second of only three film roles ever played by Miss Simmons, who is Clara, a former theatre wardrobe mistress who knew Jennie as a child, “She used to sit on my lap. I used to give her rock candy.” She helps Eben uncover clues about Jennie’s life. She is a stately, well-spoken, gentlewoman. Eben, and we ourselves, are led to her by former theatre backstage figure Pete played by Felix Bressart who directs Eben to Clara and remarks sympathetically, “Those colored people. Very wise people …They know what trouble is.” It is an unusual comment, out of context and having nothing to do with the story, and shows us, perhaps a bit self consciously, that Hollywood is starting to slide out of the era of ridiculous and insulting caricature.

The character of Gus, the taxi driver who befriends Eben and helps in his quest for Jennie, is however changed to a very stereotyped Irishman, with a brogue (who actually plays the harp in one scene) and a comic ethic chauvinism which gets Eben a job painting a mural in a local bar, of the Irish patriot Michael Collins. In the book, the mural is a pastoral scene enlivened by nude maidens in repose. Eben is urged by the skittish bar owner, and jokingly by Gus, to “keep it clean.”

Perhaps the shift to a fully clothed subject is for the benefit of film. However in the novel Gus is not Irish. He is Gus Meyer, a good natured working stiff who mentions his Jewish background, and with his own simple religious philosophizing, provides a springboard to Eben’s spiritual awakening. This spiritual awakening is where the film really differs from the novel.

As Eben considers how Jennie, who ages each time he meets her, could possibly be from another time and who is gradually catching up to him and his time, where she hopes they will eventually be the same age, he spends a great deal of effort rejecting, and then learning to accept the impossible. Author Robert Nathan writes lyrical passages on Eben’s stream-of-consciousness brooding on the unreality presented by Jennie’s existence in his life, and how time could possibly move not in a straight line, but in elliptical patterns. There is a great deal of ruminating on God’s place in this mystery of Jennie.

Mr. Nathan writes, “We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us. Perhaps that is because when all is said and done, we do not really believe in God. In our hearts, we are convinced that it is our world, not His.”

As Eben struggles with rationalizing Jennie’s existence in some sort of time warp, “One must sometimes believe what one cannot understand. That is the method of the scientist as well as the mystic; faced with a universe which must be endless and infinite, he accepts it, although he cannot really imagine it.”

And as Eben finally lets go of his doubt and simply believes for the sake of believing, he grows more confident in the frightening modern world around him and feels safer in it. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, men thought that the earth was flat, and that where the earth and heaven met, the world ended. Yet when they finally set sail for that tremendous place, they sailed right through it, and found themselves back again where they had started from. It taught them only that the earth was round.

“It might have taught them more.”

Such passages made “Portrait of Jennie” an intriguing and beautifully written novel, and far more spiritual and philosophical than the film, but these are Eben’s thoughts and it is difficult to film first person narrative without clogging the story with a lot of voice over narration. A film cannot be passive; it must have action. This is where the film and the novel differ most. In the novel, Jennie is both Eben’s muse and a real person with whom he begins to fall in love, and she with him. In the movie, it is more of a mystery with Eben’s seeking to prove Jennie’s existence. Not how she could possibly come to him over the mists of time, but is she actually real, or just his imagination?

In the book, Gus actually meets Jennie, as does Eben’s unpleasant landlady, and Miss Spinney reads evidence of her existence from a newspaper report on her being a steamship passenger who was lost at sea. In the movie, nobody sees Jennie but Eben, and the other characters disbelieve him. In the book we also have the colorful character of Arne, Eben’s friend and fellow artist, but unfortunately he is not included in the film.

The great storm in the novel is likely inspired by the unusual Hurricane of 1938, which seemingly came out of nowhere and pummeled a New England unused to tropical storms. With no warning, it left several hundred dead. In the film, the storm is a fictional 1920s event that Eben tries to circumvent and prevent Jennie’s tragic death by putting himself at the place it happened on the date it happened. In the novel, the storm is not foreseen by anything other than a vague premonition by Jennie, because it is not yet part of history. At the end of the novel, both Jennie and Eben are finally together in the present.

This is too ethereal even for a fantasy film, so the film must have more action than the novel and becomes a last minute race to save Jennie and change the course of history.

The film gives us good performances, if a somewhat cumbersome production. Jennifer Jones’ actual portrait was painted for the film by artist Robert Brackman, and producer David O. Selznick, who was also Miss Jones' future husband, reportedly displayed the painting in his home afterwards. Jennifer Jones’ fey qualities and soft voice, and that slight speech impediment all helped to instill a childlike quality to her younger Jennie, who as she ages never loses that clean look of innocence. Mr. Matthews, Miss Spinney’s partner in the art dealership, comments that, “There ought to be something timeless about a woman.” There surely seems to be about Jennifer Jones.

“Portrait of Jennie” was her fourth and final pairing with Joseph Cotten. She was just about to enter her 30s and he was in his mid-40s, and time would not really stand still for either of them, nor their careers.

King Kong - Part 1

David O. Selznick, who produced such successful, but overladen hits like “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and “Since You Went Away” (1944) also produced a much leaner “King Kong” (1933), which has the distinction of being remarkably fast paced, imaginative, and as evocative of a place that never existed as any film of a place that did.

Reckless, driven movie director Carl Denham, played by Robert Armstrong, is the film’s catalyst. He is Ahab to Kong’s Moby Dick, but Carl Denham is less righteous and haunted than Captain Ahab. He is really more like Daffy Duck, pursuing a mound of jewels with dollar signs in his eyes. Mr. Armstrong gets to deliver the famous last lines of the film, “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” But he also gets other lines just as telling of his character and of the Depression era of this film. Warned that he must be careful with a movie actress in the wilds of his location shoot, Denham responds,

“I suppose there’s no danger in New York? Listen, there are dozens of girls in this town that are in more danger than they’ll ever see with me.”

Denham laments that his true-life adventure films are dismissed by the Hollywood critics. “Isn’t there any romance or adventure in the world without having a flapper in it?”

Interesting use of the word “flapper” carried over from the 1920s. Denham goes first to one jungle to find the girl for his film, New York City, and we see Times Square lit up at night. We meet the lovely Fay Wray whose haunting dark eyes explore the camera’s gaze from under the brim of a battered cloche hat.

“I’m on the level. No funny business,” Armstrong as Denham tells Miss Wray, and she, and we, immediately accept that he is being truthful. The amazing thing is, he is being truthful. He is a man obsessively wedded to his work. If he were not, he could never bring back the Eighth Wonder of the World.

For a love interest, Miss Wray is given instead the wooden Bruce Cabot, who is at first brusque and falls in love reluctantly. It’s nothing personal he tells her, it’s just that she’s a woman. We get the standard “Terry and the Pirates” stock images of a stereotyped Chinese galley cook, and Denham on board ship in a yachting cap and a white suit, to be replaced by a tropical kit, and a slouch hat that make him look a cross between Indiana Jones, Curious George’s Man in the Yellow Hat and Christiane Amanpour reporting from the field. But this is quite wonderful in a way, because this is Depression-era South Seas adventure, and if Denham didn’t look like The Great White Hunter, we’d be wondering exactly what he was doing there.

I get a kick where after their first wary encounter with the natives of the lost island, Denham flippantly whistles a chorus of “The St. Louis Blues.” And he remarks at their torches lighting up the black night in their ceremonial dance to pay homage to Kong, “Looks like the night before election.”

He has some terrific sets to get lost in, mostly left over from the previous year’s “The Most Dangerous Game” and Miss Wray, truly the best screamer in Hollywood as his bait for Kong. When she practices screaming in terror for Denham’s screen test of her on deck, we get an ominous sense of dread when Bruce Cabot’s character wonders, “What’s he think she’s really gonna see?”

See Part 2 of King Kong here.

Since You Went Away (1944)

What if Bill was not killed? What if Anne had started work at the war plant at the beginning of the film and not the end? What if her harmless, funny flirtation with Tony led to a serious threat to her marriage? What if Tim died, or had never been found? Since You Went Away (1944) is a much-loved film that does not answer these questions. It does not even dare ask them.

David O. Selznick’s classic American home front film is lovingly detailed in the mementos preserved by wife and mother Anne, played by Claudette Colbert. We see a year in the life of the wife and daughters left behind by Tim, a forty-something professional whom we never see except through snapshots, and come to know only through the devotion of his family.

Joseph Cotten plays the family friend Tony, whose unrelenting boyish flirtation with Colbert is either returned or squashed by her sassy and sensible replies. A nice touch to the film is the way the seasons are used to move the story and reflect the mood. It rains when Colbert returns, empty and depressed, from bringing her husband to the railroad station when he reports for Army duty. The gentle spring is a cruelly poignant backdrop to the news they receive of Tim’s being missing in action. A bright summer sky and a sudden thunderstorm are the backdrop of the first flush of romance between the elder daughter Jane, played by Jennifer Jones, and visiting soldier Bill, played by Robert Walker. A gray autumn day brings news of his death in battle. A gentle Christmas snow brings the good news of the missing Tim’s being found safe.

The story flows along in a natural progression of small moments, with the only fireworks being displayed by irascible boarder Colonel Smollett, Bill’s estranged grandfather, played by Monty Woolley. Shirley Temple is warm and natural as the younger daughter. Hattie McDaniel is their caring, and reliably funny maid, and Agnes Moorehead gets a nice role as a snippy and selfish friend. Lionel Barrymore has a cameo as the minister who delivers a sermon, not unlike Henry Wilcoxon in Mrs. Miniver (1942) which we covered here.  Where Wilcoxon’s speech was a wholly original definition of “the people’s war,” Barrymore staidly quotes from “The Star Spangled Banner.”

This is Selznick’s earnest attempt at conjuring an American Mrs. Miniver, but the problem is that though these are all likeable actors playing likeable roles, the angst for the American home front was the waiting. Unlike the civilian populations of Europe and Asia, most of the American home front experience on the mainland (beyond a few isolated attacks) consisted of the anxiety of waiting.

Not to downplay that anxiety, for surely Americans at home suffered a dreadful period during the war, but waiting for someone to return does not always make for dynamic cinema.

Back to the questions mentioned above. If Bill had not died in action, would his romance with daughter Jane pass beyond the puppy love stage? Her train-chase (“I love you Bill! I love you, Darling!”) was parodied in Airplane (1980). Walker’s sweet and sad character represents a lot of young boys, green and inexperienced, who did not come back. But because Jane is young, we expect she will get over it, and because we expect that, the impact is not as great as if her father Tim had died. Tim’s death would have brought war home for this family far more than ration points and V-mail. Or, if Anne had started her job at the war plant at the beginning of the film, rather than at the end as she finally finds a place for herself in the war effort, the war would have been brought home to them sooner.

One of the most poignant, devastating, and true scenes of the film is when Anne and her daughters watch a newsreel in a darkened movie theater. Their neighbor and grocer, Mr. Mahoney, passes them up the aisle, wearing a black armband for his flyer son who was just killed. We see the newsreel’s cheerleading message of victory behind his shoulder as he trudges, heartbroken and his future destroyed, towards the camera.

Most of the war is experienced by the secondary characters in this film, for Anne and her daughters are in the safe cocoon the absent Tim has put them in. Even though the film isn’t half over, we already know Tim is coming back, because bad things happen to other people, not to nice people like Anne and her girls.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.