Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) is a thoughtful commentary on the Great Depression masquerading as a screwball comedy.  There are screwballs aplenty, to be sure, but director Frank Capra, as is his wont, manages to show humanity’s noble fight against cynicism in a world full of bad guys lining up to crush us.

Gary Cooper is Mr. Deeds, a flaky, tuba-playing writer of greeting card poems who could be called a misfit except that he fits in very well in the small Vermont community where everybody else is also marching to the beat of their own drum.  It is only when he goes to town – New York City, that he stands out as an oddball.  Mr. Deeds is idealistic, but suspicious of the motives of people who turn out to actually have ulterior motives—making him strangely canny for someone so naïve on the surface.  He is gentle, except for when he belts people in the mouth for pushing his buttons.  He is liberally generous to some, and yet expects to get value from his charity from others and admires those who have enough pride to not ask for his help.

Gary Cooper plays the role that fits him like a glove with such ease and believability that his co-star, Jean Arthur, no less capable in her trademark role as the sassy foil, makes it difficult for us to decide who is the more fascinating.  It is a case, perhaps, of two actors who employ the same method of effortlessly charming us by apparently just amusing themselves. 

Just as he can be a bit vague and preoccupied when spoken to, she also seems distracted by other thoughts, or maybe just has the ability to keep more than one idea in her mind at the same time.  When he is approached by the lawyers for the estate of his deceased uncle, he listens with only one ear, busy with his tuba, or dashing off to the window to watch a passing fire truck.  When her editor speaks to her, Jean Arthur is playing with a piece of rope or a puzzle toy, seemingly not listening but taking in every word he says.  Cooper’s and Miss Arthur’s characters are more alike than even they realize.

Gary Cooper is brought to New York to accept the inheritance left to him, which includes a large mansion and a great fortune.  We see he’s a babe in the woods in the big city, but the estate attorney, played by Douglass Dumbrille, steers him to social obligations and financial investments.  Mr. Dumbrille’s motives are not fiduciary, however.  He attempts to get Cooper to make him power of attorney so that he can control the money and live high off the hog on it, just as he did when the uncle was alive.

Lionel Stander is great in the role of the savvy, snarky man on board to control the press.  He is a gravely-voiced tough guy, with more of East Side in him than the gloss of Mr. Dumbrille, and is as disdainful as he is incredulous that Cooper is unfazed by the fortune and actually seems to not particularly want it.

We are treated to a glimpse of Franklin Pangborn as one of the harried tailors trying to measure and outfit Mr. Cooper as he animatedly discusses business with Mr. Dumbrille.

Jean Arthur is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist given the assignment of getting a story on the new millionaire in town, Mr. Cooper, and she pretends to be a poor soul trudging about town looking for a job.  When Cooper escapes his bodyguards for a bit of freedom, he encounters her one rainy night on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, fainting from hunger.  

He brings her to a cozy restaurant where she is revived with a meal, and after she tells him her story, assuring him she has just gotten a job and starts tomorrow and does not need further help from him, he is charmed, and calls over a violinist playing sad and sweet music.  

Her face, coyly partially hidden under the cloche hat, beams. She is enchanted and he very quickly falls in love.  

His face, reacting to the pleasure of treating her thus, is a marvel of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm.  One of his goals in life is to meet a woman who is a damsel in distress that he may save, and he thinks he has found her.

The romp begins when he recognizes famous literati at the next table and wants to meet them.  They are invited to join the party, mainly because the literary men know he is the famous newly rich composer of greeting card schlock and they want to make fun of his work.  Jean is wary, she’s not sure if he realizes he is being mocked, but he’s not as naïve as he sounds.  He knows very well they are mocking him and he calls them out for their bad manners.  It ends with him throwing punches, but one drunken poet, played by Walter Catlett, who gets a charge out of seeing his colleagues thrashed, befriends Cooper and wants to do the town with him.  Off they go. 

Cooper, introduced to alcohol, spends the evening on a spree, including such antics as feeding a horse a bag of donuts.  He will end up being brought home by two cops without his clothes.  Jean leaves the two drunken fellows with the staff photographers who are sneaking behind them, and heads home to write her article on Cooper, dubbing him “Cinderella Man.”  (However, we know that he’s not the real Cinderella Man; that’s boxer James J. Braddock, who was dubbed thus by writer Damon Runyon the year before Mr. Deeds was released.  See the movie Cinderella Man – 2005.)

Her editor, played by George Bancroft is pleased and wants to know how she managed getting through the bodyguards, the PR tough guy Lionel Stander, and a crop of flunkies.  She remarks offhandedly, “I was the world’s sweetest ingenue.”  She is to be awarded a month’s pay with salary. 

Cooper, reading the headlines the next day, is obviously furious and wants to know whom he can punch (Jean has used a false name with him), but he consoles himself with another date with his dream girl.

They ride the double-decker buses through the city and he gets to see Grant’s Tomb in a lovely moment of wonder and patriotism.  She is moved by his respect for history and great men, and he unknowingly throws a shaft of conscience at her with the remark, “What puzzles me is why people get so much pleasure out of hurting each other.”

On a park bench, they perform a duet of “Swanee River” and “Humoresque” with humming and pretend tuba playing and drumming with sticks on a trash can.  It’s pretty good. I would have liked to see them rehearse that one.

Later, we see Jean’s digs, which she shares with pal Ruth Donnelly, who unfortunately does not have a large role, but we see she is an artist while Jean types her column on a big old typewriter on the coffee table in the living room.  As she composes another hit piece on Cinderella Man, we see she is feeling guilty and having a change of heart.  “I’m crucifying him,” she says, and the theme of the hero being crucified is another favorite Capra trope.  We see it as well in Cooper’s role in Meet John Doe (1941), which we discussed here, and by James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Jean Arthur, which we discussed here.

But he does make good copy.  He abruptly ends a soiree in his mansion for the opera set, scattering them with disdain and critiquing their pomp.  He writes a poem to Jean that sounds like the opening salvo to a marriage proposal.

Then the inevitable.  Lionel Stander discovers his dream girl and the writer of the articles is the one and the same, and he shows the proof to Gary Cooper, who is stunned, his very stillness and the way the director just lets the film roll is something wonderful.  There were not a lot of male actors who could use their faces as effectively as Cooper.  He truly had an ability to show the character’s innermost soul with his eyes and a very slight twitch of his expression.  We see he is shocked, but also deeply heartbroken as if he might cry.  After what seems like a long while, he turns his back to Stander and faces a window, lightly touching a curtain in an absent way.  

Stander moves us as well with a quiet, “If I knew you were going to take it so hard, I would have kept my mouth shut.  Sorry.”

Cooper, however, is dragged from the depths of despair by a man who breaks into the mansion with a gun.  He is a desperate farmer out of work and he accuses Cooper of being just another heartless millionaire.  He angrily reminds him of the outrageous antic of feeding donuts to a horse.   “You never give a thought to all the people starving,” and that there were people in the world who could not feed their children or themselves.  He is played in this wonderful scene by stage and movie veteran John Wray.  He did nine movies in this year of 1936, all bit parts and most uncredited.  Stander, by the way, did eight this year.

He collapses in tears and apologizes for brandishing a gun, saying he lost his head.  “Standing in the breadlines.  Killed me to take a handout.”  Cooper gets him food and watches him eat.  The wheels begin to turn and he gets an idea of what to do with the fortune he never wanted anyway.

He will offer 100 acres, a horse, a cow, and a plow to as many destitute farmers as his money will provide for, some 2,000, and he sets up headquarters in the grand foyer of his mansion, with staff to help, including the converted Lionel Stander, and soon his home is filled with applicants. 

Douglass Dumbrille is not happy, nor a pretender to the family fortune who shows up with his gold-digger wife late in the game.  Lawyer Dumbrille now brings a suit against Cooper, charging him with insanity and needing to be put under his guardianship.  H.B. Warner is the head judge, and the public hearing is swamped with deponents, expert witnesses, and a whole lot of “forgotten men.”  Jean is there, too, trying to make up to Gary Cooper and to help his case and keep him from being institutionalized.

He wants nothing more to do with her.  He will not even defend himself.  As part of his charge against Cooper’s philanthropy, Douglass Dumbrille builds his case on the aspect even more egregious than insanity: philanthropy itself. (Capra, a conservative Republican, had been once poor himself and did not mind pointing out the flaws in oligarchs.)  “In these times, with the country incapacitated by economic ailments and in danger with an undercurrent of social unrest, the promulgation of such a weird, fantastic, and impractical plan as contemplated by the defendant is capable of fomenting a disturbance from which the country may not soon recover.  It is our duty to stop it. Our government is fully aware of its difficulties.  It is capable of pulling itself up out of its economic rut without the assistance of Mr. Deeds or any other crackpot.”  One wonders if he includes President Roosevelt in that number.  One wonders if Capra did.

Two of the witnesses are a pair of sisters, played by Margaret Seddon and Margaret McWade, from Cooper’s Vermont hometown who insist he is nuts, or “pixilated.”  Afterward, when Cooper addresses them in his cross-examination, we learn they think everyone is pixilated except themselves.

But at first, he will not defend himself and remains stubbornly silent.  It is only when Jean, harassed by Mr. Dumbrille into admitting she loves Cooper, that he relents and gets the gumption to fight for himself.

We have our happy ending when Cooper retains his freedom, his fortune, and is allowed to give it away to help end the Great Depression.  He scoops Jean Arthur up into his arms and inexpertly kisses her. 

We learn that when money is absent, pluck will go a long way to aid in survival.  It might even have been true.

    

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

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

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

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

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

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

 

Naive Idealism -- Part 11 of the State of the Classic Film Fan

It’s the idealism.  It’s the idealism (sometimes dismissed as propaganda, sometimes spurned as naiveté) that is most powerful about classic films and cannot be duplicated today.

We are in a more cynical age, where we mistrust idealism.  We also resent even the merest suggestion that a film might be preaching to us.  We don’t mind being preached to by hypocritical politicians, by hypocritical television advertisers who think they are telling us what we want to know or confirming our worse fears to induce us to buy their products, and by actual preachers whose personal wealth puts them in the camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle category.

But if a movie tries to make us rally around a simple concept of decency, honor, and patriotism – by suggesting that we are all decent, honorable, and patriotic – the modern audience that does not like classic films hoots in derision (or worse).

“One might suspect their morality,” says the haughty Nazi officer of the compromised crowd of partygoers at the German embassy in Watch on the Rhine (1943).

I love that movie, loved it since I was a teenager, and marveled at its message of idealism in action.  “So the time has come,” Paul Lukas, the professional antifascist says, “This time it is of the utmost importance.”

So it is.  We finally vote this coming Tuesday.  This nation has not been in such crisis in decades, or in such danger since 9/11.  Some weeks ago, we discussed several movies in a series about fascism as represented in classic films: The Mortal Storm (1940),  Address Unknown (1944),  Storm Warning (1951),  Keeper of the Flame (1942), and Seven Days in May (1964).

Eight years ago, I wrote another pre-election day post, a two-part series on Gentleman’s Agreement (1949), part 1 here and part 2 here.  In this passage from that series, I remarked on the surprising nastiness of the 2008 campaign year:

How interesting that today much of the former open vehemence of prejudice has shifted from the now socially unacceptable derision against race or religion to the more socially acceptable ridicule of political affiliation.

“Conservative” and “liberal” are used today like dirty words, accusing labels, where the opposing political party, or politician, or even individual voter, is vilified with a degree of condescension, arrogance, and meanness that would appall most of us were it applied against a person’s race or religion.  It is no longer enough to simply disagree.  We must condemn. 

How naïve those words sound today, like those old movies that espoused idealism.  Our level of political and social discourse has sunk far lower; open bigotry is accepted by society and unquestioned in the media.  I could not imagine then that the fascists who reviled, taunted, and condemned Barack Obama for his paternal African American heritage would continue to do so for his entire two-term presidency, unchallenged by a media that reveled in any controversy fired by lies.  I certainly did not imagine that an evil, idiotic piece of filth like Donald Trump would ever become his party’s nominee for the highest political office in this country and the leader of the (formerly known as) free world. 

This is the 11^th part of our year-long monthly series on the state of the classic film fan.  In my first post in January, I specifically referred to Donald Trump, in affirming our American idealism as such that he could not possibly be elected president.  From that post in January:

Today, we address the juxtaposition of classic films on the turbulent world in which we live today.  Are they merely an escape from a louder, cruder world?  Or, do they provide us with mental and emotional sustenance to cope with our modern, angry society?  Probably both, but that depends on the classic film fan.

So we find ourselves, we classic film fans, at a crossroads.  Are our old movies a model, or an escape?  In my youth, they were a model; for I had nothing to escape from that I was aware.  Now, in middle age, I don’t know.  My earlier confidence that Trump was not a threat to the vigor of our democracy was clearly foolish.  I did not imagine that so large a number of people in this country could be so devoid of intelligence or integrity to support him; nor a media so lazy, greedy and corrupt that it failed its duties as the Fourth Estate; nor a Republican party so eager to roll over and play dead. 

Frank Capra’s Prelude to War, the first in his World War II Why We Fight series would, understandably, be labeled as propaganda today, but it was a powerful teaching tool that easily instructed a populace about to face the greatest evil of modern times on why it would have to risk death doing so.  The film quoted politicians, scripture, the words of Confucius, and from the Koran, and talked about Americans as a diverse society free and strong because of its diversity.  It just assumed its audience agreed.  Such “propaganda” dragged conservative isolationists to the table, and to the fascists among us – certain Jew-haters and industrialists – it made them shut up.

Their brand of wickedness was no longer fashionable. 

How did it get to be fashionable again, and make idealism passé?

I love the old movies that lead off with a paragraph scrolling before the first scene.  We don’t have that anymore; nobody likes wordiness, or the feeling that they are being preached to.  Watch on the Rhine begins with these words:

In the first week of April 1940 there were few men in the world who could have believed that in less than three months, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France would fall to the German invaders.

But there were some men, ordinary men, not prophets, who knew this mighty tragedy was on the way.  They had fought it from the beginning and they understood it.

We are most deeply in their debt…

Such unabashed idealism, so unashamedly taking sides against fascism, without reserve.  Of course, the movie, unlike the play on which it was based, was produced during wartime, so it took little courage to point out our enemies for what they were, though Warner Bros. had a better track record on that that the other studios.

Another movie, Meet John Doe (1941), which we covered here, was even more courageous for picking out a fascist villain that was purely American: a businessman who wanted to take political control for personal gain.  Sound familiar?  James Gleason, in a wonderful scene of slightly drunken disgust, implores the very naïve Gary Cooper to open those beautiful eyes of his and see what is painfully apparent:

“You’re mixed up with a skunk.  A no-good dangerous skunk…

I get mad for a lot of other guys besides myself.  I get mad for a guy named Washington, and a guy named Jefferson, and Lincoln.  Lighthouses, John, lighthouses in a foggy world…”

The fascist businessman is…

“…trying to worm his way into the White House, so he could put the screws in, so he could turn out the lights in those lighthouses…”

Leave it to Frank Capra to have the guts to risk calling the common folk a bunch of saps, and then raising them to herculean majesty when they see their error, and put the brakes on evil.  The little guys convince Gary Cooper to carry Barbara Stanwyck off the snowy rooftop and back to safety and a new fight, as James Gleason, cynical and yet idealistic, and thoroughly righteous member of the Fourth Estate taunts the businessman fascist,

“There ya are Norton, the people.  Try and lick that!”  And the movie ends with ringing of church bells and the triumphant swell of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

No, that sort of thing wouldn’t happen today in a movie.  We’re too smug. 

I wonder what the demographic is among political affiliations among classic film fans?  From what I have observed on blogs and social media, old movie buffs are a wonderfully diverse group, where both liberal and conservative voters are equally drawn to classic films and can unite in our appreciation of their artistry and value to our culture. 

“But I do not believe for a moment that he will be elected president.”

That was my comment in January.  I did not think that by November I would be so ashamed of my country for laughing at a vulgar joke, for allowing a faction of stupid bigots to forsake common sense and common decency in order to vent their vileness.

In my complaint that modern critics found Gentleman’s Agreement too preachy:

Casablanca is also dated and preachy, but its bad guys were the Nazis, so we don’t mind speeches against them.  In Gentleman’s Agreement, we are the bad guys, or we could be if we’re not careful.  That’s the difference.

Now I wonder if there isn’t a very large segment of our population—Trump supporters—that would, if they were shown Casablanca for the first time, cheer for the Nazis?

We’ll see on Tuesday.  As Paul Lukas, the professional antifascist, says in Watch on the Rhine when he fears the greedy George Coulouris will sell him to the Nazis for a price,

“We will wait, and we will see.”

If the outcome is bleak, will classic films continue to inspire courage and decency, or just serve as an escape from a society decomposing?

I suppose I am waiting naively, idealistically, for the happy ending, the ringing of bells, and the soaring strain of Beethoven's Ninth in the background.  But it will never come again.

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

Past posts in this series here:

Part 1 of the year-long series on the current state of the classic film buff is here: A Classic Film Manifesto. 

Part 2 is here: Cliff Aliperti’s new book on Helen Twelvetrees.

Part 3 is here: An interview with Kay Noske of Movie Star Makeover.

Part 4 is here: Evolution of the Classic Film Fan.

Part 5 is here: Gathering of the Clan at Classic Film Festivals.

Part 6 is here: John Greco’s new book of film criticism: Lessons in the Dark.

Part 7 is here: Tiffany Vazquez, new TCM host.

Part 8 is here:  Planet of the Apes at the Cineplex.

Part 9 is here:  Aurora & Classic Movies and More Interview.

Part 10 is here: A Canadian's Perspective: A Visit from Paddy Nolan-Hall.

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

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

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Calamity Jane Pt 2 - "The Plainsman" - 1937

“The Plainsman” (1937) never lets an absence of fact stand in the way of telling us a good story. Director Cecil B. DeMille is in his element here, treading on history and myth with great flourish. Here Calamity Jane is part of the tapestry of the American West and not just a freak show refugee. We can thank Mr. DeMille for this, for if he bends the truth a bit, he at least makes the attempt, and most certainly Jean Arthur makes the attempt, at showing Calamity Jane to have angst and tenderness, humor and compassion, which were most certainly part of her character as much as the men’s clothes and bullwhip.

Other parts of her character were eliminated, such as the drinking and raucous behavior that occasionally landed her in jail in real life, and this is a shame, because we might have learned more about Calamity Jane if she had been allowed to be more than just Wild Bill Hickok’s girlfriend.

Not that DeMille’s Calamity Jane was fooling audiences at the time. The review in the New York Times by Frank S. Nugent charges DeMille with “taking history by the tail and throwing it out the window." I particularly like the line “ you frontier authorities will probably be confounded, and will confound Paramount for telling you the sweetest story ever told about Wild Bill and Calamity Jane...the changes that time and Jean Arthur have wrought! She doesn't chaw tobacco anymore. She doesn't cuss. She doesn't run around with the boys. She just talks low and husky, is cute when she's being tomboyish, and she loves Wild Bill so much, she almost faints when the Indians start torturing him..."

In “The Plainsman” Calamity Jane is one of the trio of American West icons. Wild Bill Hickok, played by Gary Cooper, helps his pal Buffalo Bill Cody, played by James Ellison (who we’ll meet up farther down the trail in “The Texan and Calamity Jane” as her new prospective boyfriend), deal with a Cheyenne uprising and the scoundrels who sold them repeating rifles.

The movie starts in Washington, D.C. towards the end of the Civil War, where President Abraham Lincoln discusses the proposed transcontinental railroad. He wants the frontier to be made safe for the plow. Then he excuses himself from the meeting because he’s going to Ford's Theater. We covered what happened at the theater that night in this previous post on “Prince of Players” (1955).

Before we get too far, we might as well just forget picking out historical inaccuracies. There are too many of them. Suffice it to say in any movie about Calamity Jane, approach it as entertainment and not as a documentary on her life. Very little of what you see is probably true.

After Abe’s left the room some unscrupulous arms manufacturers conspire to sell rifles to the Indians because with the Civil War winding down, they are not going to make such huge profit anymore. The man they have dealing directly with the Indians is Charles Bickford. Though he's the head bad guy, we don't see that much of him in this movie. We get a bigger impression of his smarmy toady Jack McCall, played by reliable smarmy guy Porter Hall. He seems to bump into Gary Cooper a lot.

When we meet Wild Bill he is at the river landing in St. Louis, about to board a riverboat. He has just been discharged from the Army, and he runs into his old pal and fellow scout Buffalo Bill Cody and Cody’s new bride played by 19-year-old Helen Burgess (whose career was sadly cut short when she died of pneumonia the following year).

DeMille gives us one of his patented scenes of history that is a feast for the eyes. The camera leisurely moves over an enormous steamboat, and more extras than you can possibly count all moving busily in this bold young city on the Prairie. There are calls of “Mark Twain!" from the river navigators plumbing the depths, and most of you I'm sure know this is where the writer, Mark Twain, chose his pseudonym. We take it all in, and that's what Mr. DeMille meant us to do.

In a minute, we meet Herself, Calamity Jane. Not standing out in the crowd, only one of the Western menagerie. She is hitching a team of horses to her stagecoach. She wears loose buckskin trousers and shirt, and an army kepi. And, what appears to be quite red lipstick. Her short hair is brushed back off her face in a manner similar to the longish hair of Gary Cooper and Buffalo Bill Cody, making all three of them sort of resemble each other.

We might interject here that according to Calamity Jane, the Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005) which we referred to in our first post on this Calamity Jane series on Monday here -- the real Calamity Jane had dark hair and was tall, at about 5'9" and about 170 pounds, which one of her contemporaries recalled many decades later, was “all frontier muscle." (Page 112.) Whether this is a picture of her in her 40s or her 20s, we don’t know, but it’s of course drastically different from the blonde, delicate-looking Jean Arthur who stood about 5'3".

But there is something in Arthur's characterization that seems so natural. Particularly when you compare it to other actresses who've played Calamity Jane that appeared more affected and stagey.

We see Jean Arthur hitching up her team, climbing on the stagecoach, and throwing her whip. She does it with a natural athletic gracefulness quite different to many actresses in the role whose stomping around in hands-on-hips postures is done deliberately to look to mannish. She seemed perfectly at ease with what she's doing and this is the chief accomplishment in Jean Arthur's work.

Author James D. McLaird quotes from a play written by Thomas Newson in 1878, only a couple of years after the incident in 1876 when Wild Bill Hickok was shot by Jack McCall (I know this is a movie spoiler, but it's also history). Playwright Newson describes the character Calamity Jane in his stage directions: “Her movements are all free and unstudied, yet in no sense unbecoming. Her conversation is animated. She imitates no one; is an original in herself; despises hypocrisy; and is easily melted to tears. She is generous, forgiving, kind-hearted, sociable, and yet when aroused, has all the daring and courage of the lion or the devil himself..." (p. 103). This seems to be Jean Arthur’s take on her as well.

Calamity Jane was in her mid-20s, and she was already a celebrity, having dime novels and plays written about her. The darker side of Calamity Jane, her alcoholism, which caused her more than once to be thrown into jail for rowdy behavior is not mentioned in the novels or the play. That behavior, the other side of the coin, is left to the newspaper journalists of the day to illustrate in dry, ironic observations of the heroine of the plains, the so-called Queen of the Prairie. We are missing that description in this movie and in the rest of the movies in this series.

Jean Arthur carries no such baggage, and yet there is that angst about her which make us sense there is more to her than just buckskin leggings. There are certain aspects of the real Calamity Jane that are suggested in this movie. That they are only suggested and not portrayed is, of course, in part to do with the Production Code of the day. But, the Code was not entirely the obstacle of keeping the truth about Calamity Jane from the public. The truth is nobody really knew the truth, and the truth was made up of a lot of little slivers of fact, that never quite came together -- not in the media, and they never quite came together for Martha Jane Canary, and maybe that's what tortured her.

We get a few hints. While Jean is hitching up her stagecoach, a man walks by and flirts with her briefly and she returns his greeting in a friendly way. We see she has many men friends without needing to chase them. Gary Cooper is the one she wants. When she and Cooper first greet other, we see that she is crazy for him, plants a kiss on him which the disdainful Mr. Cooper wipes off and he insinuates that she is “a woman that has a fellow in every stage station and a beau in every cavalry troop west of the Missouri.” Through the Production Code gauze we are being told that she is promiscuous, which she was. She was also for periods of time, a prostitute, and in this movie a few times she uses the word “mopsy” to refer to a mistress or prostitute. Only a low woman would know such a western saloon word.

But this is the West and as Cooper tells Buffalo Bill Cody's frightened bride, “There's no Sunday west of Junction City. No law west of Hay City, and no God west of Carson City.”

Though Cooper shrugs off Miss Arthur's affection, he carries a pocket watch with a picture of the two of them. She wears around her neck a set of beads that he once gave her.

General George Armstrong Custer gets a cameo. He's going after a band of Cheyenne warriors, and Ellison and Cooper are recruited as scouts. Ellison must leave his wife and their very dusty cabin.  Jean shows up to take her in hand, and look out for her.

Holding up curtains against her waist, Jean replies that it's pretty enough to be worn as a dress. Mrs. Cody asks, “Why Calamity, do you ever wear dresses?"

“I might if I had one," Jean answers affably. As we mentioned in part one, Calamity Jane did wear dresses just as much she wore buckskin, and Arthur's delighted reaction to wearing one of Mrs. Cody dresses, getting a kick out of seeing the skirt twirl, shows us she is not presented as someone who needs to be taught to be a woman (as in later movies about her), but as a woman who was product of her environment and that is at least refreshing. Credit should be given to Cecil B. DeMille, despite the otherwise artificial aspects of her character in this movie, for presenting her as a person in a time and a place where Calamity Jane was after all, accepted.

It was rather the eastern newspapers, the eastern writers, who made much of her, who turned her into one-part heroine and three-parts curiosity or sideshow freak. The Western journalists took her for what she was, good and bad and made no great fuss over her in a world where there were plenty of other wild characters. She is no more outlandish in her buckskin than Cody or Custer or the Cheyenne.

Except for that part where the Cheyenne warriors try on the ladies hats that Jean gives them to distract them from capturing Mrs. Cody. They capture her instead.

Gary Cooper comes to her rescue, and when they are held captive together awaiting torture, we see how lovesick she is, and he finally admits begrudgingly that he loves her, now that he’s going to die anyway. Jean can't stand to watch Gary Cooper being hoisted over flames, so she tells the chief where the small band of soldiers is headed, which saves Gary Cooper's life, but dooms the men of an infantry squad.

Mr. Cooper sends her for help, and he heads out for the ambush, joining the troop under siege. His pal Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the members. It's another one of DeMille's dramatic scenes with the besieged men are fired upon from all angles by the Cheyenne who have the new repeating rifles, thanks to the unscrupulous arms manufacturers. And Charles Bickford. And Porter Hall.

She goes off, brings back Custer, the cavalry comes in saves the day. Gary Cooper still has a score to settle with Charles Bickford and when he finally catches him and his gang, he holds them up in the saloon for the military authorities to come and take them into custody. While they're waiting, they play poker.

Here is where we get the famous scene (or a CB’s version of it) where Wild Bill Hickok was murdered by Jack McCall. It seems something of a travesty to have Porter Hall gunning down Gary Cooper, doesn't it?

History buffs know that Gary Cooper is going to die when Mr. DeMille shows us a close-up of his last poker hand. A combination of aces and eights in five card draw. It is popularly called “the dead man's hand,” supposedly because this was the hand held by Wild Bill when he was murdered on August 2, 1876 at Saloon Number 10 in Deadwood, South Dakota.

However, there are different versions of what this hand of poker actually comprised. In this version and the many versions of the story, he's holding black suits -- ace of spades, ace of clubs, a pair of black eights and the king of spades. Nobody really knows if that's what he was holding and other versions of the story had him holding different cards.

While in Deadwood, Calamity Jane has left stagecoach driving to become a bartender, which she really did on occasion. She’s still using her bullwhip against bullies and people who don’t pay their bar tab. Check out the scene with a mechanical cocktail shaker. One imagines Mr. DeMille found that a tag sale somewhere, pining for the right movie to use it.

When Wild Bill is gunned down, Calamity Jane rushes to hold him in her arms and gives him one last kiss that he can't wipe off. In the play written about her so soon after this incident, Calamity does more than mourn for Wild Bill; she goes after his killers.

Calamity Jane was still in her early 20s at the time this event happened. How remarkable that she could become an icon of the Wild West when she was still a very young woman -- and over an event which she really had no great part.

Martha Jane Canary herself, though she made an unsuccessful attempt at selling stories of her life in pamphlet form in wild west shows in her later years, was one of the few people to fail to profit off Calamity Jane.

In 1902, the year before her death, according to author McLaird, she reportedly gave an interview to a newspaper where she said that she and Wild Bill Hickok were to be married in a few days, when Wild Bill was murdered. Maybe she started believing the stories.

Facts very quickly became irrelevant in the forming of Calamity Jane's fame. Rather, it seemed the case of detractors wanting to paint her as a ridiculous person, admirers wanting to make her far more angelic than she was, and the fascination of the public for the great adventure at the American West represented.

Women were part of that great adventure. They were wives and schoolteachers. They were captives and orphans, and sometimes they were what the eastern towns would consider to be the scourge of society. And Calamity Jane represented all of this, all rolled into one person. There is a temptation, particularly in the 20th century, to define Calamity Jane in feminist terms. But she confounds even that reasoning. She was just who she was, and the fact that she never fit in and defied explanation was perhaps the irresistible draw to this hapless misfit.

What would she have thought if she saw herself getting the star treatment in the movies? When Jean Arthur played this role she was at the top of her game or soon would be. Calamity Jane in this movie was an equal to the characters of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. They were the dynamic trio, they were the Mod Squad of the 19th century. Although she may be quaint and odd in her buckskin and her bullwhip, she is not a sidekick or comedy relief. Indeed, as previously mentioned Jean Arthur plays her with a kind of sensitivity we don't get to see from later portrayals of Calamity Jane in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The Plainsman” was not the first occasion we see Calamity Jane in the movies. According to James D. McLaird, the first known film was in 1915, “In the Days of ’75 and ‘76”, locally produced in Nebraska. She and Wild Bill were married in that one.

He notes the first nationally distributed film that featured Calamity Jane starred William S. Hart and Ethel Gey Terry in 1923, but that no print of this movie exists. So “The Plainsman” is the earliest major motion picture to feature the character of Calamity Jane in existence, and this a starring role by one of Hollywood's major actresses of the day.

In his excellent biography, Jean Arthur, The Actress Nobody Knew (Limelight Editions, New York 1997), author John Oller notes that Mr. DeMille's first choice for Calamity Jane was Mae West (p.94).

Let’s all consider that a moment and choke on our coffee.

But, C.B. was pleased with Jean Arthur's dedication to the role. Apparently, she wanted to play the role without makeup, and with close cropped hair, but the studio apparently wouldn't let her get too scruffy.

In The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, edited by Donald Payne (Prentice-Hall Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey 1959), the director notes that he was pleased with Jean Arthur, particularly by how she learned to use the 10 foot bullwhip “as competently as Calamity Jane did when she was driving a stagecoach. I offered my wrist is a convenient target for the curling end of the whip during Jean’s practice sessions. The wrist for a lash marks for days; but Calamity herself would have applauded the skill of her portrayer.”

Mr. Oller in his book on Jean Arthur also notes the coincidence that Jean Arthur's mother was a child in Deadwood, South Dakota at the time Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were living there.

In what was certainly part of promotion for the film, and perhaps part defense of playing the notorious social outcast, Jean Arthur wrote an essay called “Who Wants to Be a Lady?” for Screen and Radio Weekly, (quoted by Oller, p.p. 96-97) which was published September 20, 1936. Noting that Calamity Jane lived her own life the way she chose in the environment and circumstances that presented themselves to her, “really emancipated women are always natural, because they do what they want to do. They are not dulled with ‘culture,’ either, because there's nothing false or ‘put on’ with them. They may be smart and well-informed, but they are not stuffy. Because of this there are thousands of emancipated women who don't wear slacks, smoke or drink cocktails, a type, clerk, keep house, raise children.

"Doing what they want to do, they are emancipated without knowing it.”

Emancipated, or deeply troubled, a victim of her time and circumstance or survivor of it, or just her own worst enemy, Calamity Jane means many things to her many interpreters. Come back next Monday when Calamity Jane slides from stardom and becomes queen of the B-movies in “The Texan Meets Calamity Jane” and “Calamity Jane and Sam Bass.”