Fitzwilly - 1967

Fitzwilly (1967) is both a heist movie and a Christmas movie, another example of whimsical blending of genres, but it also provides a last look at the grand era of the grand downtown department stores.  Gimbels in New York City is a supporting player in this movie.

As we mentioned in the previous two posts of this series on Christmas movies, Cover Up (1949) and The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), that one also about "Christmastime in the city" -- building up to the release of my next book Christmas in Classic Films -- Christmas evokes nostalgia, it is dripping with it, in a way unlike other holidays or festivals in our lives. Nostalgia, rather than just being a by-product, is the driving engine of our modern secular yuletide. Classic films delivered what later generations would think of as nostalgia in an effortless and unselfconscious way, which is part of their charm.  Today’s faux-cozy attempts at Christmas movies seem strained and forced by comparison – with one notable exception, which we’ll get to in weeks to come.  That would be A Christmas Story (1981).

In between the classic films and the modern movies lies Fitzwilly, billed as a romantic comedy but is really a farce, which delivers no intentional sentiment. It is viewing this movie from the distance of the early 21^st century that the sentimentality appears like magical snow. Gimbels is the “mark” for the robbers in this movie, but to us, the store is a lovely and now unreachable fairyland.

The robbers are a band of servants led by butler Dick Van Dyke, one of the most popular comedic actors of the 1960s, riding the crest after his landmark TV series, big musicals Mary Poppins (1964) and his next feature Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).  Here,  Mr. Van Dyke is not the usual likeable and quirky buffoon, but rather a more reserved, urbane, and aloof character.  He is Claude Fitzwilliam, butler and head of staff to the wealthy Miss Vickie played by Dame Edith Evans.  She gets to play the quirky eccentric here, and his job is to protect her from her best instincts.  Dame Edith likes to donate to many, many charities, but the problem is she’s really flat broke due to the squandering of the family fortune by her father.

So the butler Fitzwilliam, known affectionately by his employer as Fitzwilly, is her resourceful protector.  He followed his father into service, a family trade, but when his mother died when he was a child, Edith Evans raised him and the two are devoted to each other.

He runs the house with spit and polish precision, but his staff hero-worships him.  They are involved in the many complicated capers he orchestrates to get money to continue to keep the old lady in the style to which she, and they, are accustomed.  This involves an elaborate system of playacting, forgery, fraud, fencing of stolen goods (through his uncle in Philadelphia played by Cecil Kellaway), and most of the thievery done to upscale boutiques and department stores results in damage to the insurance companies.

Since we all hate insurance companies, nobody feels too badly about this.

There are some gems among the junior staff, including Anne Seymour as the lady’s maid whose funny remarks are delivered with deadpan seriousness.  Noam Pitlik is a footman eager for the next exciting adventure.  Helen Kleeb is on the kitchen staff, whom most readers may likely remember for her role in The Waltons television series as Miss Mamie Baldwin.  A young Sam Waterston plays the chauffeur.

Van Dyke’s right-hand man is the wonderfully poker-faced John McGiver, and he is the only one who seems to feel a sense of guilt over their happy misdeeds.  His conscience will nearly send them all to prison.

Into this mix comes Barbara Feldon in her first movie. She’s a spunky and brainy grad student hired to be Edith Evans’ temporary secretary.  Dame Edith has been working on writing a dictionary for people who can’t find the word in a dictionary they want to spell.  Quite a bit of her entries are accompanied by entertaining stories of her ne'er do well father, which Miss Feldon thinks is a hoot and she brings the manuscript to her professor father for his opinion.

At first sight, butler and new secretary detest each other.  She is forward and frank; he is reserved and dignified.  When Feldon begins to know him better and begins to like him, she thinks he is wasting his life as a butler.  He is college educated, he clearly has managerial qualities.  She looks down on his life in service, and he bristles at her snobbery.

He remains in his job not merely to look after the welfare of his beloved employer; he, and his staff, have come to really enjoy robbing stores.  It’s fun.

Their biggest caper is coming up on Christmas Eve.  Until the big night, Christmas is sprinkled throughout the movie in low-key but decorous images: a wreath on a door, a bit of evergreen garland on a mantle, some silver and gold touches on the wall decorations on the rich wood-paneled mansion of the Dame Edith, to the apartment of Barbara Feldon’s father, to the unobtrusive table-top tree in the servants’ hall.  Christmas is graceful and elegant, not screaming at us.  It is the guest at the door who waits patiently for us to make our way there and invite it in. Ironically, the servants prepping for the final Christmas Eve caper in the servants’ hall makes them appear almost like elves in Santa’s workshop.  They must make haste.  They’re robbing Gimbels at 5 o’clock. Good servants are always punctual.

Gimbels, in 20^th-century pop culture, was famed for being the rival of Macy’s (they even beat Macy’s by having the first Thanksgiving parade in 1920 in Philadelphia), but most of that so-called rivalry was just publicity for both stores. It was established first in 1887 in Philadelphia and opened its flagship store in New York City in 1910 in Herald Square.  In the waning years after this movie was made, the store was bought up, as companies are, by conglomerates and sold off in chunks, finally meeting its demise in 1987.  Gimbels lasted 100 years.

My favorite part of this movie is the climactic heist scene.  I like heist movies, but really the main attraction here is just the store.  The wonderful, big, colorful, dignified store.  Though really geared toward middle-class customers, today it looks posh to us.

This is where the Christmas nostalgia inadvertently comes in.  Allow me to detour for just a brief moment to recount a recent mall trip.

This particular mall in my neck of the woods is quite large, with long concourses stretching across former farmland to create a glass and concrete indoor city of commerce.  It was established in the late 1970s, grew a bit through the decades, and is now quite fallen from its heyday.  It is probably no different from any other mall across the U.S., with the same chain stores.  It still has a Macy’s anchor store, which is the only spot where one can imagine what shopping was like back when, although a young clerk, when I found one, did not know what a cardigan sweater was, and when I described a sweater that buttoned down the front, she pointed me to a rack of flannel shirts, because they had buttons.  I thanked her anyway.

A young male clerk told me to “just look.” Or was that in Penney's? 

Still, I enjoy Macy’s for the ambiance and the escalator ride this time of year, and the knowledge that, unlike the unhappy Gimbels, it still exists in some form, both the flagship store in New York (which I have also visited and like a giddy child ridden many escalators) to its suburban spawn.

The rest of the mall has deteriorated into a mass of arcades, cell phone stores, nail salons, and shops which cater to the ripped-jeans wearing set.  The nadir of the afternoon was passing a new store: a tattoo parlor and body piercing clinic.

I joked to my sister afterward that I next expected a new shop to open up called “The Red Light District.”

But it was only half-joking. The shopping experience has become dismal.  Down in the similarly dismal food court, a teenaged girl at the next table gleefully yelled out obscenities in a merry chat with her friends seated with her and in a more intimate relationship with her phone.  She was not cussing to express anger; the f-words were only adjectives.

This brings us to the nostalgia of final scene at Gimbels in Fitzwilly, which was not intended to be nostalgic when it was filmed.  Director Delbert Mann would not have envisioned a world where future movie fans would watch his finale in fascination, not only for the heist, but for the, compared to today at least, opulence of the store’s décor, the floors and floors of merchandise, the proper protocol of service, and the customers who dressed for shopping the same way they might dress to visit a house of worship. Coats and ties, white gloves, not a pair of ripped jeans in sight.

The entire staff is enlisted like special ops, each to a task to create an elaborate diversion so that Dick Van Dyke can head up to the business office on the tenth floor and snatch the day’s profits.  Norman Fell is the guardian of the vault, a nervous man who admits he is not at all well. He’s the only one with whom we sympathize.

The diversion tactics are at first subtle, then build, until finally the entire store erupts in chaos.  The final ruse is to convince shoppers to flood the business office upstairs because there the store is giving away free color televisions with any purchase. This is news to the store staff.

Color television.  Nirvana.  You remember: the wonderful world of, “color, color, COLOR!”

The caper is successful until Mr. McGiver’s sense of shame takes over, but a happy ending is pulled out of the hat at the last minute.

The movie is cute and pleasant, but it is the finale at Gimbels that I could watch over and over again.  When I watch with family, there are invariably delighted remarks of “remember that?” and again and again, “remember that?” when we point to the store interior, the shoppers, the world that we remember that is no more.  If we are not reminiscing about Gimbels exactly, we are really recalling the big family-owned department stores we did know locally, run by local prominent families, and the store was never some gimmicky made-up name; it was the family name proudly emblazoned on the marquee, on the gift boxes, the hat boxes, the charge-a-plates.

Christmas was commercial back then, admittedly, just as much as it is today, but in a less tawdry way that it was hard to frown upon. Just shopping there made you feel classy.

Happy Thanksgiving to American readers. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow is Black Friday.

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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.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Middle of the Night - 1959

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1975, that dropped to 80 percent.

In 1985 - 70 percent.

In 1995 - 50 percent.

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

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

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

“The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1960) gives us a curious mix of cozy nostalgia skewed with a foreboding modern world of alienation.

Thanks to Kate Gabrielle over at Silents and Talkies, I was able to finally see this movie. It doesn’t seem to play on TV much, and I don’t think it’s out on video or DVD. Maybe some of our readers can fill in the blanks on that info.

The film, set in the early 1920s, resonates today with problems of technology eliminating jobs, and the strain on marriage caused by the struggle for money, a lack of communication, and a lack of satisfying sex. But mostly money.

Robert Preston plays the middle-aged traveling salesman whose world is crashing down upon him. His products are horse harnesses and accoutrements, but even he, like most of his customers these days, are driving flivvers. The horse-drawn conveyance business is drying up, and here in small-town Oklahoma, a new world is on the horizon, literally. Oil rigs are going up on lonely farms, and a new era in transportation, and in the American economy, is beginning. Mr. Preston is laid off.

There are a few elements that make this quiet film, based on William Inge’s stage play, quite compelling. One is the serendipitous fact that Robert Preston had just come off Broadway in another hit, “The Music Man”, and was slated to star in the film version. Preston’s indifferent career really took off after the “The Music Man” a role which he was offered apparently only because just about everybody else turned it down. It proved to be his making.

Because of his enormous success in that musical, which today we know continued with the film version, this other traveling salesman character he plays in “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs”, sandwiched between “Music Man” gigs, makes his role as Rubin Flood, downsized harness salesman, seem like a Bizarro World version of the larger than life scamp, Harold Hill. It is impossible not to compare them when watching this movie.

Here, Preston is married to Dorothy McGuire, a sensitive, genteel woman, a warm supportive mother, but whose serenity is shaken by her frustration at being trapped in a helpless situation. It’s the kind of role Dorothy McGuire could play with one hand tied behind her back. The other compelling aspect to this movie is the several strong female roles that give us the range of the “woman’s world” experience in 1920s small-town America. They are played with a vengeance by Miss McGuire, by Eve Arden as her pushy sister, and by Angela Lansbury as the local beauty parlor operator and “other woman”. I don’t suppose the business, as well as the art, of casting a movie is given enough attention by old movie buffs, but whoever made the decisions on putting together the lineup for this team hit a homer.

We might also consider that this movie made in 1960, a time when the “greatest generation” of film stars were losing job opportunities due to their regrettable habit of aging, gives us a chance to see experienced actors and actresses in meaty roles. Had the movie been set in 1960 and not 1920s, would they have still seemed appropriate (marketable) for their roles by the producers? One might wonder if since these stars were leftovers from the Golden Age of Hollywood, did that make them seem old-timey automatically?

For the younger set, we have Shirley Knight, terrific as the shy, awkward daughter of Dorothy McGuire and Robert Preston, who is due to fall in love, and endure tragedy, the extreme highs and lows the movies tend to reserve for those who are young. But we see that highs and lows, falling in love and enduring tragedy belong to their elders as well.

One more note on the casting of Hollywood greats: Dorothy McGuire’s role was played by Teresa Wright on Broadway. The only member of the original Broadway cast to reprise his role in the film was Frank Overton, who plays the henpecked, morose husband of Eve Arden.

The plot seems episodic, and drifts in focus from one set of characters to another. Directed by Delbert Mann, there is a feeling about the cinematography and the pacing of the film that evokes a made-for-TV movie from the 1970s. We have a few outdoor shots, including our establishing shot of the turn-of-the century house with its big porch and gingerbread on the gables, though the paint is peeling here and there enough to keep us from assuming right off that we’re entering an idyllic world. Most of the scenes are interiors, maintaining the atmosphere of stage drama.

Robert Preston begins the film eager to head out on the road again, and Dorothy McGuire laments his frequent absences, clings to her shy daughter and her younger son, bullied by the other boys, in a stifling and over-protective manner, and complains about Preston controlling the purse strings in the family with a purse that doesn’t have much money in it. Shortly, Mr. Preston will learn he is fired, and all the petty annoyances of his life come crashing down on him like great big monsters.

He broods in the back room of the local drug store (the only place in small town Prohibition America where a fellow can get a drink -- because it’s a “prescription”), and angrily wonders “How does everyone else get rich?” Something plenty of us brood about today. Sitting next to him is the town rich guy, deeply troubled and guilty because his wealth came from an insurance scam.

Meanwhile, Miss McGuire fusses over daughter Shirley Knight and pushes the frightened girl into going to her first dance. “My only chance of staying young is through you,” she tells her.

By chance one afternoon, Shirley meets a wiseacre lonely boy from the local military academy, an outcast like her, and forms a bond with him. Later, when she reluctantly comes down the stairs in her home to meet her blind date, she discovers with delighted surprise it is him. It’s like a Cinderella moment.

But there are few magical happenings in this gentle, but realistic setting. Miss McGuire suspects her husband of philandering with the town beautician, Angela Lansbury. Beauticians, like librarians in old movies, seem to be geared to a certain stereotype -- in this case the world-weary, somewhat hardened female. Miss Lansbury doesn’t snap her gum, but she does smoke, so we know she’s been around the block. But, she has a heart of gold, can turn a deaf ear to the petty gossip she hears in the beauty parlor, which is literally her front parlor, and charges a dollar for a perm.

She and Preston are buddies, unusual in the old movies, particularly between traveling salesmen and hard bitten women who’ve been around the block, and Mr. Preston refreshingly acknowledges that she’s really one of his best friends. Partly, as we come to understand, he respects her because as a working woman she knows the value of a dollar, and he thinks his wife does not. Angela Lansbury is not a millstone around his neck.

In a touching scene that also manages to be rife with sexual tension, she talks about the happy marriage she once had, and how being a widow is tough on a woman with normal desires, including a very strong desire for him. The almost-seduction fails because Preston’s heart isn’t in it; he’s faithful to Dorothy McGuire. Miss Lansbury, like the pal she is, lets him off the hook. But when she confesses, without self pity, her loneliness and longing for a romantic relationship, Preston shoots her an expression of wonder, and sadness, and we see he clearly aches for his friend and wishes he could help, but he is no better at lending comfort than he is at finding a job.

The sad and depressing episode spurs him to trying again for a job, any job, and he humiliates himself by asking an old farmer friend to let him be a farmhand. The man tries to let Preston down easy, but must be frank that he’s too long in the tooth for that kind of heavy labor.

Meanwhile, Dorothy McGuire commiserates with sister Eve Arden, and we have yet another look at a broken marital relationship. Miss Arden is gloriously opinionated, funny in her very obnoxiousness, and her strong personality completely overshadows her quietly bitter husband’s moodiness. McGuire envies her a nice respectable dentist husband who works at home, while Eve Arden confesses her husband no longer makes love to her, that she never actually enjoyed sex, and her husband has long since pulled away from even any meaningful discussion with her. “God, I’d like a good fight. Anything would be better than this nothing,” she explodes.

While the grownups are bumbling through their errors, the younger set seem to have more promise. Shirley Knight’s young man, played by Lee Kinsolving, sweetly entertains her with a pretend scenario as he describes what it will be like for him to date her regularly, show up at her house and mow the lawn, being nice to her kid brother and her parents until he is “just like one of the family.” His own mother, a struggling actress in Hollywood, has nothing to do with him and he wants to belong to somebody.

Unfortunately, at the country club dance, we see, and Shirley Knight learns, what he has known all along: that he will never fit in for one reason or another. For tonight, it is because a society matron has decided that a boy named Samuel David Golden is Jewish and therefore does not belong in a restricted country club. He is more than humiliated; his romance and his daydream about fitting in are destroyed.

The film ends with an astonished, and sobered, Robert Preston getting a job as a traveling salesman for the oil corporation, selling drilling equipment about which he knows nothing. But, as he tells the smug young interviewer, he knows how to sell, how to talk to the common people hereabouts. The manager, an older man with enough experience about life to know about such things, decides that Mr. Preston talks horse sense. The job is his.

Becoming employed again does wonders for his marriage, but this is not a film of entirely happy endings. Other troubled lives we’ve seen are still unresolved, and Shirley Knight will carry the memory of a sad boy with her to whatever relationships she has in the future.

Robert Preston remarks with humble satisfaction about his new employment and starting over in his 40s in a new economy driven by new technology, “Now I’m a stranger in the land I was born in…but, I’m doing the best I can.”

A lot of us know the feeling.

Back to Harold Hill. It is irresistible to muse that this might have been the future of Harold Hill and Marian the Librarian 20 years down the line, after the final happy ending scene of “The Music Man”. Maybe they still heard the bells on the hill, but it might have taken more work to concentrate on them when things turned sour. The movie ends with Preston taking Dorothy McGuire’s hair down in the upper floor bedroom, the curtains billowing in the breeze, in the house with the gingerbread gables that need painting.