Uneasy Victors - Pt 3 - "The Big Lift" -1950

“The Big Lift” (1950) straddles the period of our role as occupiers in Berlin, and as “combatants” in a new kind of war, a Cold War. Geopolitical past and future fused together in the awkward present of 1948 Berlin.

This is our third entry in the series on Uneasy Victors. Have a look at the intro here, and at last week’s post on “A Foreign Affair” (1948) here.

The movie has a documentary feel to it, yet there are elements of humor, adventure, and intrigue. Though the backdrop is highly political, the conflicts faced by the characters are not really political in nature. They are personal.

Montgomery Clift, in his fourth film, (he’d just finished “The Heiress” which we discussed here) is the opened-hearted, open-minded youth, an enlisted man in the Air Force who works as part of the ground crew. We don’t know about his past or if he has plans for the future; he’s very much a here and now kind of guy, living for the moment. His thin, handsome face is a strange cross between rugged and fragile, and we could take that as a metaphor for much in this troubled actor’s life.

Paul Douglas, also in his fourth feature film, but who always seemed to move and sound like a veteran, plays another man in Clift’s outfit, a radar operator. He is older, and wiser in the sense he is more cynical. He has been in the service many years, and we can see he will spend his career here. Both are stationed at Hickham Field in Hawaii.

These opening moments of the film are evocative of World War II and the place where disaster struck, the bombing of this base and Pearl Harbor, that brought the US into the war. We see a newsreel at the very start that tells us the Russians are blockading Berlin, which was divided among the victorious Allies into the French, British, American, and Russian sectors, from getting supplies overland. All roads, railroads, and canals are blocked, leaving the British, French, and American sectors of the city isolated. The Russians want to force those nations out.

Then the camera pans back and we see we are in a small auditorium where American servicemen are watching the movies. Suddenly a loudspeaker announcement calls a particular unit to report for duty, and Clift and Douglas rise from their seats with a groan.

The map is a little off - Chicopee is not in central Mass.; it's on the Connecticut River in the west.

It’s a fast way to set the story. In a few moments, their unit will be on a cargo plane bound for the mainland. The map takes us across the Pacific, and then across the continent to Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts and Westover Air Force Base. We see a glimpse of the base, the huge runway, the hangars, and a sign in the foreground telling us where we are.

Where we are is the largest air force base on the east coast, which in the new Cold War, became an important point of embarkation, supply line, (and eventual line of first defense in the nuclear age), and the jump-off point to the boys’ final destination -- Berlin. They are going to help ferry food and fuel to the stranded Berliners in a remarkable mission called Operation Vittles, and would be known as the Berlin Air Lift.

Stop by my New England Travels blog tomorrow for a post on a unique side operation of this mission, “Operation Little Vittles” in which Chicopee, Massachusetts packs tons of candy, ties them to handkerchiefs to be used for parachutes, and turns them over to Westover Field so that the men flying these missions can drop candy to the kids in the ruins of Berlin.

The documentary style of the movie is evident in how patient director George Seaton is, letting us experience the mission as it unfolds. The men’s ignorance on what the mission is to be. The long flights. The arrival at Rein-Main field in Germany, and then the final, nerve-wracking hop into Templehof and Berlin. The large transport planes, because of the restriction on fly space the Russians have put on them, have to navigate a very narrow strip, and because the landing field is set in very close proximity to the five-story brick buildings of the neighborhood, the planes must literally skirt the rooftops. In one shot we see a plane land from a side view, and as it dips below the line of roofs, the tail of the plane looks like a shark’s dorsal fin slicing the ocean waves.

“Just like landing in the Rose Bowl.”

The planes land with their cargo, unload, and then take off again every few minutes. It is an exhausting, round-the-clock mission that will last for months. It was our first response to a belligerent Soviet Union testing its influence. It kept the Berliners alive. It was one of the proudest achievements of the United States Air Force.

Just as we saw the American congressmen marvel at the ruins in Berlin as their plane arrives in “A Foreign Affair”, so are Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift amazed at the devastation.

“Boy, this place sure caught it, didn’t it?” one of the men exclaims.

“Not enough. This is where they should have used the A-bomb,” Paul Douglas says.

This movie takes up where “A Foreign Affair” left off. We are a little farther along in our jobs as occupiers, and there is still the conflict between offering mercy and wanting revenge, between punishing the enemy and building friendships. Paul Douglas acts like the Ugly American, being as rude as he can to the German laborers employed at the landing field. He is dismissive and bullying to the Berliners he meets in town.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for them. They hate our guts. If the situation was reversed, they’d kick your teeth in twice a day.”

Paul Douglas is more than just the voice of vengeance and disgust with the vanquished enemy. He has a deeply personal reason for hating the Germans.

He was once abused as a POW in a German prison camp. While in Berlin, he will discover the prison guard who beat him. In a brutal scene, both men catch up with their destiny.

The movie has a nice mix of comedy that is kind of like blowing off steam at intervals between these dramatic moments. Some of the humor is macabre, like when the men have “fingers crossed” as part of their landing checklist. When Douglas, whose “schatzi”, played by Bruni Löbel (who had a long career in German film and television), wants him to define “democracy” because she is curious, he becomes an irate, frustrated, inarticulate teacher. He has no idea how to explain it, and tells her repeatedly to just shut up.

The best he can come up with is, “It’s a kind of feeling, a way of looking at things.” He explains that America is run by the people, and a light bulb goes on and she thinks it must be like the Soviet Union, which is also said to be run by “the people”. Douglas nearly has a stroke.

Another funny moment is when the men first land and find themselves dragged into a welcoming ceremony. The flight crew is paraded down a long aisle of Berlin guardsmen, under an arch of rifles, to the sound of a band. Montgomery Clift, voice shaking, nervously remarks,

“I feel just as if you and I were getting married, Lieutenant.”

At the welcoming ceremony, an old man, a young boy, and pretty woman who represent grateful citizens of Berlin, present speeches and gifts to the servicemen. They are dignified, proper, speak carefully-intoned English and display the requisite amount of humility for the newsreel cameras. The picture of the defeated enemy as possible friends.

Clift hooks up with the pretty woman, played very naturally by Cornell Borchers (who made only a handful of films in the 1950s, most of them German), and his Berlin romance begins. Her husband was killed in the war by the Russians. Her father stood up against the Nazis. Both tragedies make her a sympathetic heroine and worthy object for Monty’s affections.

He gets a pass and sees her in Berlin. When he gets paint on his uniform and must walk the streets in ragged clothes she has borrowed for him, Clift’s whirlwind escapade among the ruins in Berlin is where Jean Arthur’s ended. In parts it is just as wild and funny, and in parts more insightful and morose. This is a Berlin Americans don’t get to see on the newsreels cameras, the jostling for food, the enforced labor at shoveling rubble, the checkpoints and identity papers, the cold days and colder nights.

Because Clift is without his uniform and his identity card, he is a man without a country, and in danger from all sides, from straying into the Russian Sector, and from his own American MPs. At one point, they duck into a tavern, not too unlike the cabaret we went to in “A Foreign Affair”, where in an effort to escape the MPs, Monty hops on stage and stumbles through “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo” with a German quartet. When they start a verse in German, his panic, and his solution, are very funny.

Clift’s romance with his Berlin girlfriend is progressing. She is very pretty, and quite brave in facing the hardships of the post-war world. She accepts German defeat even though she bears no responsibility for the Nazi regime. When Clift, still without his uniform which is locked up in a tailor’s shop, spends the night, they embrace in a darkened apartment in front of a window. Behind them are the lights of the runway, and a huge transport plane flies right towards them.

The script and direction seem to take turns between using brief but stunning images like this to tell the story through metaphor, and alternatively trying to back it up with a wordy primer on German-American relations. It feels like propaganda at times, but it is probably useful for the American audiences watching the film at the time. For us today, it is a window on an era.

Both men and both girlfriends get together for a gemutlich little party with the neighbors, one of whom once traveled the US as an actor.  Today, he is a spy for the Russians, who pay him to count the American planes.  He gives them false numbers because they won't believe anything he reports anyway.

Gerde asks him, “What did you like best about America?”

He replies, “The way the Americans didn’t like it.”

Paul Douglas smiles. He directs Gerde with a glance to pay attention. He understands what the actor is trying to say.

“I mean, what they used to say about the government!”

They all laugh, and Gerde tries to understand a puzzling country where criticizing the government is okay.

Gerde works in one of the food service wagons on base. On another day, still brooding over this thing called democracy, she asks Paul Douglas about injustice in America. She points out that she has been reading a book, and by the description of the story, we know she is making a reference to “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which was also made into a movie by the same company, 20th Century Fox, a couple years earlier.

Gerde says that since the Americans were against Hitler for his actions against the Jews, how could it be that “in America Jews are kept out of certain hotels and schools?”

Douglas admits, “It shouldn’t be. It stinks.” And then he asks her where the book came from, and she says the PX. Ah, he says, finding a saving point. Would the Russians put out a book criticizing Russia in their stores? Being open about our prejudice is at least a point of honor, he wants to impress upon her. She is dubious.

Douglas is dubious about Clift’s romance with the Berlin beauty, and investigates her. Her husband was not killed by the Russians. Her father was not anti-Nazi. She seems tarnished now. She is less a heroine and more of Berlin enigma. Clift confronts her and she admits lying.

“When you have to live by the generosity of others, you have to make yourself pitiful and brave.” There is a nice shot of a wall behind her in the distance collapsing and crumbling to rubble, more rubble she will have to shovel.

This film is conscientious about showing us all sides. The United States, with rampant prejudice, is not as free a place as we claim. German gratitude may be false and self-serving. The only thing we can be sure about is the Russians are bad guys, when they are discussed at all. The foolish clowns from “A Foreign Affair” are absent here. The film’s main flaw is that we lose them and the question of who they are now. They have not even been replaced with a stereotype yet; they are shown only as rumor and headlines. In the early 1950s, we will come to choke on our paranoia and let it poison us.

Montgomery Clift struggles with his girlfriend’s duplicity, but decides after all, she was only a girl during the war. She cannot be held responsible for her family's involvement.  She is only trying to survive.  He wants to marry her.  Part of his desire, we may suspect, is the wish to save her.

He goes through the chain of command paperwork to get permission. One of the most interesting things about “The Big Lift” is that in various scenes we see a lot of military personnel. A lot of them. In this entire movie, only Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift are actors playing Air Force men. Everybody else in uniform is an actual serviceman. This gives the movie that realistic documentary style. You also have to admire the acting ability of some of them. The commanding officer, Major Hetzel, who pushes through Monty’s marriage paperwork is quite funny in his scene after shouting over the phone and losing his voice.

While marriage plans are progressing, Gerde finally gets the lowdown on democracy, but not from Paul Douglas. With his bullying ways, he is a poor teacher. She got herself a government-issued pamphlet and has memorized the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Filled with enough righteous indignation to blow the roof off a New England town meeting, she hollers at Douglas and demands he stop bullying her. She calls him a stormtrooper.

Douglas is impressed, and like all bullies, backs off when she stands up to him. “Don’t let anybody push you around, not even me. That’s democracy!”

Another World War II-era metaphor is complete when she chucks a can of SPAM at him.

I won’t reveal how the relationship develops between Clift and Fraulein Borchers. It’s an 11th hour surprise, and lessons are learned by everyone.

Though the tours of duty are ending and men are being rotated home, Paul Douglas decides to stay in Berlin. He is kinder to the German laborers on the base, and even helps them out by speaking fluent German to them, which he was forced to learn in the POW camp.

“I suppose if we’re going to sell these stoops on a new way of living, you got to be a pretty good salesman.”

Then they hear over the radio that the Russian blockade of Berlin is over. The good guys have won. It is a World War II kind of patriotic moment, but the really impressive ending of the movie is the “curtain call” style end credits where we see the real-life military men who had speaking parts in this movie lined up as if for roll call.

Incidentally, the journalist who interviews Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas when they first arrive in Berlin is Richard O’Malley, an actual journalist for the Associated Press.

Come back Thursday when we finish our series on “Uneasy Victors” with “Judgment at Nuremberg”, which takes us back full circle.  The first point of order for the occupier is to establish order and rule of law.  The second is to hold the bad guys accountable.  But it is a quickly changing world.  The political map of Europe is being altered day by day.  How do we settle accounts, so to speak, when nobody wants to live in the past anymore?  Montgomery Clift and Marlene Dietrich both return for impressive encore performances in very different roles.

Frumpy Grace Wins an Oscar

Grace’s ‘sensible’ shoes were so sensible that the only other persons I had ever seen wearing them were old maids who taught compulsory Latin in eastern prep schools…I had noticed the serene and elegant Grace who became awkward as a newborn colt when laughter overtook her. Now I could see, too, a Grace who was lusciously provocative on one night and decidedly frumpy on the next.
(From “The Bridesmaids” by Judith Balaban Quine, 1989, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, NY)

This past Saturday, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opened a new exhibit on Grace Kelly’s style and elegance as manifested by a display of her gowns and costumes. As we note from the passage above, according to observations of more than one person who knew her well, Grace Kelly did not always appear as a fashion plate. She could be downright frumpy, sometimes. Today, we have a look at her Oscar-winning frumpy role in “The Country Girl” (1954).

There is a famous quote attributed to Judy Garland, with or without expletives, to the effect that Miss Garland lost the Oscar to Grace Kelly that year because Grace took off her makeup for her role in “The Country Girl”. That is obviously an oversimplification, albeit a funny one, of the rationale that beautiful women get good notices when they take on roles which do not showcase their beauty.

Whether or not that’s true, there is much to admire in Miss Kelly’s performance in this film that has more to do with the grit in her soul than the ratty sweater or the thick glasses.

“The Country Girl”, directed and screenplay by George Seaton, is based on the stage play by Clifford Odets, and though some shifting in characters and scenes occurs, and though we get a bit of the streets of New York and Boston backstage at the theater, the film hovers pretty closely to stage-like drama of long scenes in confined places. There is great conflict between the three main characters, so much that we are not distracted by the many minor characters in this film, most we probably barely notice. I can’t think of too many films where that happens.

One of the more noticeable supporting actors, Anthony Ross plays the irascible producer Mr. Cook with very real and understandable irritation, and adds effectively to the tension. He’s not a typical cigar-chomping cartoon of a producer, but a money man with lots of worries.

Bing Crosby plays Grace Kelly’s alcoholic actor husband, who has very little work and almost no self respect. This was his greatest role, and it is interesting that in the off stage scenes he appears truly desperate and wretched, but in the scenes where he is supposed to be on stage, he comes off rather like the bland façade of his usual movie nice guy roles. It is as if he is parodying himself in a cruel Bizarro-world skit. It really was a magnificent performance from this man who otherwise seldom seemed to take chances in his movie career.

William Holden is the director who casts Crosby in his new musical play called “The Land Around Us”, which is a kind of parody itself of “Oklahoma!”, and it is very fitting this movie was filmed in black and white, because color might obliterate the real dismal feeling of this rather unremarkable-looking play with the loser Crosby in the lead. We are given the feeling we’re watching a train wreck about to happen. Color would impose a kind of make-believe to the on-stage scenes of this movie, and it’s better that the entire film be steeped in the reality of this man’s existence.

My only complaint on Mr. Crosby’s performance actually is that the tired, scared actor who broods in the wings does not seem to magically change into more than just the bland charming fellow he plays when on stage. He does not seem to have that burst of adrenalin that other performers are said to have, the aforementioned Judy Garland, for example, who were sometimes described as being reborn, who really came alive on stage during a performance no matter how physically terrible they felt just before they went on. Crosby looks miserable the whole time, and we may wonder how the poor man really can perform without a drink beforehand. A shot of courage, so called, has been a great crutch for many actors with stage fright.

Elaine Stritch, in her one-woman show told the story about a fellow actor’s response when she told him she gave up drinking before each show.

"You mean you're going out there alone?!" he replied.

The opposite of Bing Crosby’s utter wreck of a human being is William Holden’s decisive, self-confident, and somewhat arrogant director. But, Holden is not without his faults, or his endearing qualities, either. For the latter, we see him smiling fondly as he watches Crosby’s audition, like the admiring hatcheck boy he used to be when watching the big stars at the Shubert Theater. He may be a big shot director now, but deep inside he is still a star struck kid.

His faults lay mainly with his rudeness towards Grace Kelly, whom he mistakenly believes is a manipulative shrew, a millstone around Crosby’s neck. It’s Crosby that gives him that idea, and it doesn’t take much to convince Holden, because he had once been married to just such a woman, and his bitter experience has left him a bit of a misogynist.

Grace Kelly is the country girl of this piece, a woman intelligent, reserved, self-sufficient and, as we begin to see, almost heroically self-sacrificing. But she is no bravely cheerful Pollyanna. She is stoic, gut-wrenchingly pragmatic, and carries, like Holden, her own brand of bitterness and regret.

Grace Kelly’s dowdiness is often remarked upon in this role, to the point almost to neglect mentioning her actual performance, which was very good. But, as we note from the quote leading this essay, Miss Kelly could be dowdy in real life, and those glasses she wears in this film, I believe, were her own. She was quite nearsighted, but rarely wore her specs in public. This was probably the first time many of the general public saw her with her glasses on, and it was probably the first time she acted in a scene where she could see her costars clearly.

It should be noted that nearsighted people are almost always glamorous and elegant. This is the real secret to Grace Kelly’s beauty. (I have to stop here a minute and wipe my glasses. There. Okay, back to work.)

Though this film was one of the first, though certainly not the very first, to realistically portray the tragedy of alcoholism (and certainly not the only film that year, as the annoyed Miss Garland could attest), it is really more about the ones who have to cope with the alcoholics than it is about the disease. Grace Kelly in this role illustrates most eloquently the burden of always being someone’s keeper, most especially painful if that person is someone you love.

There is a toughness to her coupled with a vulnerability that is not fragile, but reveals deep reserves of emotion. Even Miss Kelly’s usual meticulously intoned speech is muted here. The lilt and precise diction of her other movie roles had been drilled into her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts to diminish what was criticized by her teachers as a high, nasal-sounding Philadelphia twang. It left her with a sometimes artificial-sounding, but unmistakably unique speech that became her trademark.

(What comes to mind is the Kathleen Freeman role as the voice coach in “Singin’ in the Rain” who implored Jean Hagen, “Round tones, round tones!”)

Here she tones it down, speaking in a lower voice, almost guttural at times, and with a slight raspy sound to it, the way someone might sound with a dry throat who had been talking a lot. It is natural and layered with feeling.

There is an intense dynamic between the triangle of Crosby, Kelly, and Holden. Crosby evokes our pity, and also at the same time, our contempt for being so manipulative of his caretaker wife, of being such a colossal liar, and for betraying her time and again.

Holden is consistently standoffish and occasionally rude to Kelly, until he learns the truth about her relationship with Mr. Crosby, and turns his passionate hatred to passionate desire.

A flashback scene shows us Crosby’s real charm in former days and Kelly’s adoring warmth for him before the tragedy that ruined their lives, and turned him to drinking. Among the fine and delicate scenes is the one at the end of this flashback, when Grace enters their dingy apartment to find that a song on the radio has dropped on Crosby like a bomb and sent him to revisit old ghosts. We see on her face her horror, and her compassion as she rushes to snap off the radio.

Later there is a fight between them, and when she finds he is hiding beer bottles, the weariness enters her voice, “Where did you get these, Frank?” as one might talk pleadingly to a child who just cannot seem to help being naughty.

Crosby’s ultimate cruelty to her is that by using his guilt over the death of their son, by basking in it, he has reduced himself to an emotional invalid, which has taken away his wife’s right to grieve. We see she has been grieving over the wreck her husband has become, but we are left in doubt as to whether she was ever allowed to grieve for her son, or if she had to hide her grief to protect her husband.

During the play rehearsals, she stands backstage in his dressing room, helping him change, flustered, making mistakes. The competent caretaker is a fish out of water in this world. We see another side of her complicated husband when he rushes in to change his costume, complain and display his brittle ego and his pettiness. She is his whipping boy and his gofer.

After a terrific bender, Crosby is confronted by Holden, and the truth comes out, and their triangle dynamic shifts as the world spins on its axis. Holden comes to the sickening realization of his own mistake in judgment, which means even more to this egotistical man than his meanness to Miss Kelly or the shock that Crosby is no longer the hero from his boyhood.

Another couple of good scenes here I like is when Grace bails Bing out of jail after his night on the town, and we see in the foreground a very old, pitiful woman, counting out what is probably her food money to bail out her disreputable old husband, who stands in a stupor, uncaring. We get the feeling she has done this many times before, and it is like a foreshadowing of what will happen to Grace and Bing if things don’t change.

Another good scene is when Grace explodes at Holden after he realizes that Mr. Crosby is a huge problem on his hands and wants her help. The dialogue here is great, and gives us more explanation and more background than any flashbacks could. Grace shouts at him,

“Can you stand him up on his feet? Because that’s where all my prayers have gone to see that one holy hour when he can stand on his own feet again. I might forgive even you, Mr. Dodd, if you can keep him up long enough for me to get out from under! All I want is my own name, and a modest job to buy sugar for my coffee! You can’t believe that, can you? You can’t believe that a woman is crazy out of her mind to live alone, in one room, by herself!”

One complaint I have about the film is the, at times, rather distracting score. It makes heavy use of the DRAMATIC CHORD OF MUSIC TO TELL YOU THIS IS A REALLY DRAMATIC THING HAPPENING NOW. Too much. A lighter touch would have been better.

Also the typical of the day grab-the-woman forced kiss of Holden to Kelly is as overblown as the music and could have been tackled I think in a less melodramatic fashion.

In the end, redemption is at hand and choices have to be made, and Grace Kelly is still the focal point. She shows the many subtle facets of this woman, and through her, the many different sides of these two men.

Perhaps this country girl is not so self-sacrificing as she is simply a knowledgeable survivor. Maybe that’s what Grace Kelly had in common with her character that made her understand this role so well. Sometimes survival takes the form of surfing the moods of others, accommodating their needs, and denying you have needs of your own.

But, despite this excellent performance in her frumpy clothes, Grace Kelly will always be remembered for the elegance and style captured in her other films, and in the many exquisite photographs taken over the years by photographer Howell Conant.

The display at the Victoria and Albert Museum will present over 50 of Grace Kelly's outfits, including dresses from her films such as “High Society” (1956), as well as the gown she wore to accept her Oscar for “The Country Girl”. On display as well will be film clips and posters, photographs and her Oscar.

For more on the exhibit, which runs through September, have a look at this website.The latest issue of Vanity Fair has an article on this exhibit, have a look here. Here is a companion piece of photos.

This exhibit was also mentioned last week in our friend Laura’s blog, “Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings” with these Vanity Fair links provided by Moira Finnie of “Skeins of Thought” and TCM’s “Movie Morelocks” site.

Drop by my “Tragedy and Comedy in New England” site on Wednesday, when we’ll have a look at Grace Kelly’s Boston stage debut.