Claudia - 1943

Claudia (1943) is a film of rare accomplishment even while cloaked in the ordinary. Its comic premise of a scatterbrained child-bride and her lovingly tolerant husband barely scratches the surface in describing this remarkably deep film, and its deft exploration of love, death, birth, and especially marriage.

This week we’ll be covering both Claudia and its sequel, Claudia and David (1946). The sequel, unlike most sequels, was every bit as good as the original, so strong in its own storyline that it stands well on its own. Both films sprang from the hit Broadway play, Claudia, which sprang from a series of magazine stories, later developed into several novels, by Rose Franken.

Stop here if you don’t want any spoilers. The whole thing is going to be spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. Look! There’s another one! Duck!

Claudia, the Broadway play, shot lead Dorothy McGuire to stardom in a show than ran two years and over 700 performances. When Hollywood scooped up the rights, it scooped up Dorothy McGuire as well. Her role was then taken over on stage by Phyllis Thaxter, who recently passed away. Have a look here at my New England Travels blog for Thaxter’s Claudia on tour in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Playwright Rose Franken directed the stage show and picked Dorothy McGuire, with only some summer stock under her belt, to play the demanding role of a lead character who is in almost every scene. When she went to Hollywood, McGuire was touted as being part of that new look of young actresses, called natural, to distinguish them from the glamorous screen sirens of the 1920s and 1930s. Jennifer Jones and Ingrid Berman, Martha Scott and Teresa Wright, as well as Phyllis Thaxter, were part of this cadre.  Both McGuire and Teresa Wright understudied Martha Scott in Our Town.

A beauty column written by Sylvia Blythe, syndicated in the Milwaukee Journal, January 18, 1942 picks up on the change:

Naturalness, which at long last brings good looks out from behind a cloak of artifice and affectation, is a style trend of the times…

If you shiver with fear that this new look is going to strip you of all pretentions to loveliness, look at Dorothy McGuire. Naturalness won this young actress the coveted theatrical role of the naïve girl-wife in ‘Claudia’, one of this season’s outstanding theatrical hits.

Moreover, as a vitamin-fed, pink-scrubbed, lean-limbed, sweater-and-skirt girl, Miss McGuire has captivated Broadway, which usually pays its homage to sophisticated glitter.

Claudia is a young bride married to a slightly older, much more level-headed fellow, played here by Robert Young. He works as an architect in New York, but their home is a rambling hobby farm in Connecticut. They have an elderly German couple working for them, played by Frank Tweddell -- who played the same role on Broadway with Miss McGuire, and by Elsa Janssen, who we last saw as Lou Gehrig’s mama in The Pride of the Yankees (1943). You’ll remember her as one of the refugees at Rick’s in Casablanca (1943) as well.

Ina Claire plays Dorothy McGuire’s mother. She had a splendid stage career herself, began in vaudeville, performed in the Ziegfeld Follies as a fresh-faced comedienne, perhaps not unlike McGuire’s persona in this film, and starred on Broadway throughout the 1920s. She did only a handful of films, and Claudia was her last before spending the rest of her career back on stage which she preferred.

The movie was directed by Edmund Goulding, who worked magic with The Constant Nymph (1941) which we discussed here. This movie required the same sensitivity, despite the setting and the characters being much less artistic and fey. Still, Goulding pulled a magical twist on what could have been a really commonplace tale. He takes the characters seriously, and the script, though busy, always moves forward. The acting is superior.

Claudia, more waif than wife at first, hits us like a stiff breeze of constant activity, fast-talking speech that flits from one subject to another, even as Dorothy McGuire flits about her rather large colonial farmhouse. As was typical of Hollywood, the set designers depict what should be a fairly small home with uneven floor boards, low ceilings and small rooms -- has a living room large as a ballroom. The folks from Holiday Inn (1942) and White Christmas (1954) might put on shows here.

There is only one small touch of genuine New England architecture, when Miss McGuire proudly refers to a door being “the crookedest door in Connecticut.”

McGuire is all energy and little sense, and there are the usual clichés about her not being able to balance the checkbook, and having the bad wifely habit of listening in on other people’s phone conversations. However, there is a huge difference in Claudia compared to other movie scatterbrained wives.

She is forced to grow up.

Claudia is not really stupid or scatterbrained, rather she is undisciplined, coddled by a mother who thinks she’s a hoot, and tolerated by a husband who is charmed by her freshness and gaiety. The character is rather like a child or young teen who says something or does something unexpectedly funny, and wins the attention of all around her. So she tries to repeat the action until she gets the same response. Pretty soon, it gets to be a habit -- not the need for attention, but the desire not to be held accountable for anything she does or says.

Until that moment she very much wants to be taken seriously, and no one does.

McGuire is fascinating in the role. She moves like a fidgety kid, flopping on furniture, running her hands through errant hair that is always falling in her eyes. Her moods are mercurial. She and Robert Young have great chemistry. Their marriage, in so far as it has not been seriously challenged yet, is good. They are sexy, playful, with a lot of touching, tickling, and spontaneous gestures of desire and affection.

Robert Young moves gracefully between the comedy and the drama, always as steady as his character, and much of the depth of the film is due to him and his skill as a wonderfully empathetic actor.

Young is never really exasperated with his young wife, which would be the typical husband’s reaction in other films with comic scenarios of this sort. When she bungles the checkbook he is amused and play-acts frustration to bait her. He holds it over her head that she is a silly child, and to mock her innocence there is some coy conversation when their milk cow needs to be “serviced” to continue to produce milk. He tweaks her for being a mama’s girl, because she has a close relationship to her mother.

But Young, too, has a close relationship with his mother-in-law, also unusual in the movies. The two of them banter like pals.

“YOU talk to her, Mother, you gave birth to her.”

“YOU married her. She’s yours now.”

There are two moments of crisis for the couple, and both are really illustrated through Mr. Young’s reactions. First, the charming British scamp Reginald Gardner, a new neighbor, makes eyes at Miss McGuire. She encourages him because her husband’s teasing, which sounds condescending to her, makes her feel undesirable. She wants to see if she can attract another man.

In a showdown, Gardiner has one of his funniest moments when he quickly slips on a pair of glasses so Young won’t hit him.

When Young confronts his wife, we see the tenor of Young’s attitude change. He is not as angry as he is hurt, as well as disappointed in her because he knows Claudia well, has long seen a pattern that is dangerous. He wants her to grow up, for the sake of their marriage. He asks if she knows she could have destroyed their marriage with this foolishness, and she wants to know why he never tells her she is beautiful or desirable. It is a moment of quiet conversation, one of many scenes in the movie that suddenly take an introspective turn. Both admit they messed up, but remain on tenterhooks.

Robert Young has a lot on his shoulders, and his worry over his wife’s emotional immaturity is compounded by some very bad news he’s been hiding from her.

Her mother is dying.

We find out at the beginning of the film that Ina Claire is going in for x-rays and to see a specialist. She confides in her son-in-law, who is supportive and wants to go with her to the hospital, but she does not yet want to tell her daughter. She’s probably got cancer, but it’s never said aloud, and doesn’t need to be. We’re all reading each other’s minds at this point.

She's worried about how her daughter will handle it.  “Claudia has to learn to let go of people she loves. To hold close, but with open hands.”

How the film deals with this death sentence is quite frank and its very lack of melodrama gives the subject a much stronger impact. The news hits Robert Young, and us, like a ton of bricks.

“It means an operation,” Robert Young surmises.

“If I’m lucky,” she answers.

Young’s best moment is when he receives Ina Claire’s phone call about the results of her tests. Look at his expression crumble, his voice begin to shake. He is trying to be emotionless for her sake, and that makes the scene all that more emotional.

Director Goulding, who has framed this happy household in sunny window seats with billowing curtains and farmyard sets, now follows the stricken Robert Young out onto the porch in the half-dark, where Young pulls himself together after the phone call and tries to figure out a way to break the news to his wife. The camera pulls back, and we see she has been in the kitchen, listening on the extension.

Here is where Claudia has to grow up in most brutal way. She must let her mother go in way that will not put any more emotional demands on her mother. She has to let her mother feel free to die.

Not usually the stuff of domestic comedies.

There are subplots to round out the larger issues of life. A visiting Russian soprano wants to buy the farm. Olga Baclanova also came from the Broadway cast, and reminds me of Fanny Brice, with startling lung power as she erupts into high C shrieks. This was her last film role.

The servant couple have a son, who was in prison and came around to steal the egg money. We never see him, and that story is dropped pretty quickly in the film. Robert Young shoots a handgun in the air to frighten the unknown intruder away. He keeps the pistol in his car. We’ve mentioned loaded guns in desk drawers before, but not in the glove box.

There does not seem to be electricity in their house: all the rooms are lit with oil lamps. But they turn on the radio. Hmm.

One small touch I like: Ina Claire is reading the newspaper. It’s The Hartford Courant, still the oldest continuously published newspaper (since 1764) in the United States.  She said proudly.

Toward the end of the movie, Elsa Janssen diagnoses Dorothy McGuire as being pregnant, because of McGuire’s latest craving for pickles. A late menstrual period does not occur to either of them, but then only hygiene films dared mention menstruation back in the day. Robert Young insists upon a more scientific diagnosis by the doctor, and he confirms Janssen’s diagnosis.

She should know, after all, she’s the housekeeper.

The joy of having a baby is destroyed for McGuire, now she has learned she’s going to lose her mother.

“What’s the sense of pouring your heart and soul out in what you don’t possess and can never posses?”

Young answers, “Because a loan carries a greater obligation than a gift.”

Another fine moment: When Young insists to his mother-in-law that she will spend her remaining days with them, she bristles at being a charity case and mumbles, “I’d rather die.” Then she realizes the irony, and begins to chuckle.

Claudia tackles the full circle of life with surprising poignancy between waves of silliness. It established Dorothy McGuire as a star in her first film, and would lead to two other parings with Robert Young. They played the troubled couple in The Enchanted Cottage (1945) discussed here, and would return to the Connecticut farm in the following year.

Come back here for Claudia and David (1946).

*********

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.

Pride of the Yankees (1942)

We have a triple-play of baseball-related themes on my blogs this week, from amateur play in the 18th and 19th centuries on my New England Travels blog, to one of theatre’s biggest baseball fans, Ethel Barrymore, on Tragedy and Comedy in New England. Today, we begin with the king of baseball movies.

“Pride of the Yankees” (1942) is lauded for its inspiring tone about one of baseball’s greatest legends, Lou Gehrig. Ironically, there is actually very little baseball action in the movie; most of it is comprised of vignettes aimed at illustrating the self-effacing personality of the quiet man.

Since humility, according to this film, was as great a virtue as his athleticism, one wonders if that seemed as difficult a thing to capture to the makers of this movie as it would be today. Today it might be even more difficult, as quite often when a reporter interviews an athlete right after the event, the first words out of the athlete’s mouth are usually something like, “Well, I’m really proud of myself.”

This was especially apparent, to a nauseating degree, during the last Olympic Winter Games, when I lost count over how many athletes were proud of themselves. To be sure, competition is as much mental as it is physical, and modern athletes are trained to be goal-oriented and focused on objectives. Still, if expressions of humility do not make a better athlete, they do make a better human being. Perhaps we have taught the importance of self esteem sometimes at the risk of encouraging overbearing conceit.

But, here we have a movie whose sole purpose is to laud humility and to show it as a courageous act.

By now, probably most people who’ve ever read anything about “Pride of the Yankees” know that its star, Gary Cooper, was not an athlete and knew very little about baseball. Moreover, he was not able to even fake batting left-handed to imitate Lou Gehrig. A distinction can be made between what is sometimes pointed out as the phoniness of old movies, and what is movie technical trickery. The former we may roll our eyes at; the latter earns our admiration.

Movie trickery in this instance is how they managed to get Gary Cooper to bat like Gehrig. They sewed the number 4, Gehrig’s Yankee’s number, backwards on the back of Cooper’s baseball uniform. When he swung right-handed and “hit” the ball, Cooper ran down the third base line, rather than the first base line. Then the mad geniuses in the production department just reversed the image for the final print of the film so it looks like he’s batting left and running down to first base.

The phoniness comes in the typical movie bio vignettes, including events which did not happen, and ignoring some stuff that did. We start with the pushcarts and ice wagons that take us back to Gehrig’s turn-of-the-century childhood in the poor New York neighborhood. He plays sandlot ball and breaks a window. His parents are hard-working immigrants. Papa, a mild man who assiduously avoids irritating his strong-willed wife, is played by Ludwig Stössel, who we saw in “Casablanca” (in this previous blog post) as the émigré who asked his wife “What watch?”

Mama, loving but bossy, is played by Elsa Janssen. Lou will adopt his father’s gentle demeanor and spend a lot of the time placating Mama. We see Lou in the old neighborhood as a boy, we see him off to college working as a waiter in the college cafeteria where Mama is a cook. We see him want to play baseball more than anything else. Mostly, we see what a humble man he is, even though he stands head and shoulders above any other of his fast-talking pals like a Greek god in his looks, his demeanor, and his athletic abilities.

Walter Brennan plays a sports writer who discovers Gehrig and becomes his one-man publicity team, a man so impressed that he predicts great things for Gehrig. As time passes, Brennan becomes deeply devoted to Gehrig because of his integrity and his humility, even more than his athletic skill. The character Brennan plays is fictional, but could stand as a composite for many whose lives crossed Gehrig’s and felt the same protective devotion of a parent, a sibling, a fan and hero-worshipper all rolled into one.

It must have been difficult to cobble together a script about Gehrig’s life since he was simply a quiet man who played baseball well and never missed a game. Samuel Goldwyn, producer of the film, was reportedly not interested in doing a baseball movie because there seemed nothing exciting about it.

What sold Goldwyn was newsreel footage of the famous “luckiest man” speech Gehrig made at the end of his life when the New York Yankees paid a public tribute to him at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, when everyone knew that he was dying.

The speech moved Goldwyn, and was enough for him to give the green light to a movie featuring two of Goldwyn’s brightest stars about a man who did nothing more than do his job well and was humble about it.

Teresa Wright, who plays his wife, was probably the best match for Gary Cooper in this film, as her own open-hearted warmth and natural quality to her acting complimented Cooper’s understated style perfectly. They were both able to convey great sensitivity with their faces and movements, and Cooper perhaps saw this himself enough to request her specifically to team up with him later in “Casanova Brown” (see prior post on that movie here).

We see a courtship interrupted by montages of baseball games accompanied by many refrains of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and a lot of team hijinks on trains. There is an interlude at a nightclub where we get a performance by Veloz and Yolanda, a novelty dance team who are really very good and fascinatingly acrobatic, but otherwise have nothing to do with the plot, with Ray Noble and His Orchestra in the background

Brennan touts Cooper’s virtues against his rival in the press box played by habitual movie wise guy, Dan Duryea, who backs Babe Ruth.

There is the scene, much parodied in the decades since, about “Billy” in the hospital to whom Ruth promises a homer in the World Series Game that afternoon. When the crowd of reporters leaves, Gehrig hangs around and exchanges a few words with Billy that are more heartfelt and less bombastic, and promises him two homers if he will try to walk again. Ruth seems compared unfavorably to Gehrig in this film as someone less sincere and more full of himself, and one wonders if that was okay with the Babe, who plays himself in this film. He’s not portrayed as a villain, just not as nice. The two had a rift and did not speak for some years, which is not brought up in this film.

Bill Dickey, Mark Koenig, and Bob Meusel, other teammates, also play themselves, as does radio sportscaster Bill Stern.

Trophies accumulate, and Teresa Wright pastes a few more clippings in the scrapbook to show the passing parade of years. We see the first sign of Gehrig’s mysterious illness when they playfully wrestle on the floor, and he has muscle pain. Soon it is harder for him to grip things as he loses strength in his hands. The doctor holds up x-rays and intimates to Gary Cooper that it’s the end of the road for him, but we never hear a diagnosis or an explanation of the disease. This is probably only partly due to that vague manner that old movies addressed illnesses, and mainly because the disease was as mysterious to the medical profession as the public.

The disease, we know now, was Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which affects nerve cells in the brain and in the spinal cord that control the muscles. The nerve cells, or motor neurons, die, and the victim loses the ability to control muscle movement. The disease is progressively degenerative, and is fatal.

At some point after his death, the disease came to be commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

There are momentary scenes that speak volumes of the equal anxiety and fear of both Teresa Wright and Gary Cooper, but the illness is not played for melodrama or even addressed much in this film. It is simply what brings closure to the film even as it brings Gehrig’s life to a close.

The final sequence showing the tribute at Yankee Stadium in 1939 builds the emotion to a climax, yet is handled in sensitive and imaginative ways, when I suppose it could have been merely exploitive. First, upon entering the ballpark, Miss Wright and Mr. Cooper run into young David Holt, who plays the now 17-year-old “Billy”, who took Gehrig’s two-homer promise to get well, and did. He says hello briefly and explains who he is, and we see tears glistening in his eyes because his gratitude and hero worship for this man are tempered by anguish that his hero is dying.

Nobody says he is dying, we just all know it. The teammates know it, and tactfully turn their heads when he stumbles. Nobody offers him help, partly so as not to embarrass him by noticing his failing body, but also as a signal to us to show that a man is really on his own when he is dying. Despite whatever comfort is extended to any of us in our last days, we are made alone by the uniqueness of our pending experience.

When Gehrig cannot physically play his last game, he takes himself out, and we see him exchange a brief moment with the rookie who will be taking his place. The announcer lets us know that a change is being made in the lineup, and Gehrig will not play in the game for the first time in 14 years. Even wise guy Dan Duryea feels the weight of the moment.

When Teresa Wright cannot cry or express her anguish to Cooper because she does not want to let him know she knows he’s dying, she falls apart on Walter Brennan’s shoulder. That wonderful character actor tears at our hearts with his blank frightened stare and his very inability to say anything of comfort to her.

When Cooper steps out for the ceremony on the infield, the historic newsreel moment is re-created here. Cooper delivers the most famous speech in sports (changed a bit for poetic license), and then walks off the field, down into the darkened tunnel. That’s the last we see of him; the tunnel is metaphoric.

Possibly the only more stunning speech ever made was by the announcer of the last game Gehrig ever played in May 1939: "Ladies and gentlemen, Lou Gehrig's consecutive streak of 2,130 games played has ended."

His record was not broken until 1995.

Lou Gehrig died in June 1941, about a year and a half before this movie was released, about two years after he was diagnosed. For more on Lou Gehrig’s life and career, have a look at this website.

There have been great strides made in the treatment of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but there is still no cure. About half of its victims will live less than three years. For more on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, have a look at this website.

Teresa Wright, who, like Gary Cooper was not much of a baseball fan at the time of the film, later became a devoted Yankees when she was 79 years old. On July 4, 1998, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Yankee Stadium’s Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day and the “Luckiest Man” speech, Miss Wright was invited to throw out the first pitch. She watched the game, and the Yankees gave her a dozen roses and a World Series jacket. She followed baseball avidly after that.

Below, we have Gary Cooper delivering the “Luckiest Man” speech from “Pride of the Yankees.” (Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and mute the music.)



Here is actual footage of the event as shown in the Ken Burns baseball documentary:



And here is a recitation of the “Luckiest Man” speech in its entirety.