If You Could Only Cook - 1935

 

If You Could Only Cook (1935) is another Depression-era screwball comedy that uses the Great Depression as a springboard to humor. It also serves as a backdrop to contrast the silliness with the bleak realities of everyday life that presented challenges and provided plots.

Like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1935), a movie of the same year that we discussed recently here, this movie also features star Jean Arthur and brings along favorite gravely-voiced tough guy Lionel Stander in a supporting role.  He is one of the few clear-eyed and sensible people in this movie who wears his cynicism like a shield.  Everybody puts up defenses in the Great Depression, and some have more survival skills than others.

On the other end of the spectrum of cynicism is Frieda Inescort in a brief role as the bluenose fiancée of Herbert Marshall, who slyly seems to drive him to the altar in the manner of closing a business deal.  She has social standing in a respected old family that has, through generations, lost its fortune.  Marshall is new money, an automotive engineer who owns his own car manufacturing company.  She and her former debutante friends see it as the perfect match.

The movie opens on their wedding rehearsal in the family mansion, their friends and attendants, like Miss Inescort, just going through the motions of what a real, meaningful wedding celebration should be.  When Herbert Marshall leaves after the rehearsal to return back to work and a board meeting at his company, we see that he is not exactly happy.  Though he looks forward to his wedding, a sadness, a sense of dissatisfaction nags at him.  Frieda Inescort neither requires nor wants wooing.  Herbert is a romantic, and would like to have the experience of sentimental romance with a partner who could share life as an adventure. 

He faces disappointment at work, too.  His executive board does not approve of his new, futuristic, and somewhat cartoony designs for a line of autos.   He is told, “This company is in no condition to spend money on wild ideas” for his car designs, because the public has no money to spend on the cars.

Herbert’s response is a bit of fiscal cheerleading: “This country’s on its feet again, and soon it’ll be spending as it never did before.”

By 1935, the year of this film’s release, the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt did reduce unemployment since he took office in 1933 (and would continue to drift downward as the decade ended) but we were a long way from spending as we never did before.  When it comes to survival tactics, Mr. Marshall's character survives the gloom by being naively optimistic.

But fed up with his frustrations at his company, as well as in his personal life, he goes to a park as a brief respite, an afternoon’s escape to brood.  It turns into the kind of adventure he would have liked to have with his fiancée, Frieda Inescort.  Instead, he is a far luckier man; he discovers Jean Arthur.

She is on the bench he has chosen to sit upon and brood, reading the want ads in a newspaper, her suitcase by her side.  She’s down to her last nickel and has lost her digs.  But her survival skill is grit, determination, and belief in herself.  By his presence in the park in the middle of the day and perhaps by his dejected demeanor, she assumes he is also out of a job.

“Jobs are hard to find, aren’t they?” she remarks sympathetically and offers him the “help wanted-male” section.  “It’s tough these days.  About 200 people for every position.”  Not unlike today.

We are given to understand she is used to office work, but she comments, perusing the servant positions, that “the only good ones are for couples,” a cook and butler, fetching $175 per month.  “That’s real money.”

Mr. Marshall, amused, responds, echoing the title, “Now if you could only cook.”

She admits to being a good cook, having kept house for her widowed father since she was a girl.  Then a light dawns and she suggests they apply for the job together as a cook and butler.

Here we have a switch in the usual screwball scenario: she is the practical schemer, and he is the “madcap heiress,” persuaded to go along on a ridiculous romp.  It’s a fun premise, and since one never takes fairy tales or screwball comedies seriously, we do not wonder why, since he’s rich, he just doesn’t find her a job in his corporation.  He clearly takes an interest in her and wants to help her, but with very human self-interest, he sees this as a final escapade before resigning himself to the seemingly inevitable world of a dull marriage and an unfulfilling career.

Their prospective new employer is a gangster and former bootlegger played by Leo Carrillo, who fancies himself a gourmand and is especially pleased with Jean Arthur’s demonstration of merely holding a clove of garlic over a pan of sauce to infuse its flavor (I want to think she was putting him on, but again, one should never look for sense in a screwball comedy). 

Lionel Stander is Carrillo’s right-hand man, who vets all employees and anyone ever trying to get close to his boss.  He is shrewd and will soon suspect the new butler and cook are not what they seem.  Carrillo, for all his dangerous authority, is as grandiose as a character in an opera, flighty, passionate, and with the kind of zest for life we sense Herbert Marshall would like to have.

The “couple” is shown to their new digs—a room over the garage.  It has one double bed.

Mr. Marshall will take a daybed couch out on the porch, assuring her with good humor that she does not need to worry about being unable to lock the door.  When Jean retires that night to the double bed, he climbs down the trellis and heads back to his apartment to get clothes and to get a few lessons in how to be a butler from his own butler, played by Romaine Callendar.  Callendar, from an old English acting family, did a lot of stage work, and this was his first film since a couple of silents in 1918.  He frequently played butlers.

Bess Flowers, our favorite uncredited extra, can be spotted at the wedding rehearsal.

Romaine Callendar teaches Herbert Marshall to greet people at the door.  The wedding is a week away.  Herbert has one week of fun left.

Soon, the lark turns complicated, as both begin to experience possessive feelings for one another, if not love.  She is annoyed and complaining when she discovers he has been out all night, and dismisses his excuse of returning for his clothes, as if he is a wayward husband caught carousing.  When Leo Carrillo, who begins to fancy Jean, puts his amorous moves on her, Herbert gets angry, warning Carrillo off, defending his “wife.”

And bloodhound Lionel Stander, discovering their separate sleeping arrangements, does not believe they are married.  But they fight as if they are married.

The experience has woken Herbert Marshall up—he wants more from life than this playful situation, and decides to return to his company at night, take his experimental designs for cars, and start over.  He shows the designs to Jean, and she likes them, taking far more interest in his work than Frieda does.  They are lounging on the double bed with the designs, and he kisses her.  It’s okay, though, both of them still have their feet on the floor.

But Lionel has followed him, and he thinks Marshall has broken into the company to steal the designs.

It’s their day off and they plan to meet for lunch, but Jean says first she has an errand.  She takes his designs to sell to another company, hoping to give Marshall the confidence he needs in his work.  But the company notifies the board of Marshall’s company that Jean has stolen these designs that belong to them.  Poor Jean is nabbed by the cops, but Lionel Stander, who follows pretty much everybody, tells the boss that Jean is being interrogated, whereupon Leo Carrillo sends his boys to get her out.

Neither Lionel nor Jean thinks, at this point, that the designs are really Herbert’s, because he has used a fake name, and they think he has stolen the designs.

Leo Carrillo criticizes Jean for being so naïve.  “How did you happen to fall for it?”

She replies helplessly, “The Depression.”

Stander adds, incredulously, “I’ve heard of a lot of things blamed on the Depression.”  The Depression, like Bess Flowers, always gets a bit part in 1930s screwball comedies.

When they discover that Herbert is the famous car manufacturer, Jean is angry and humiliated, thinking he was just “slumming” at her expense, and Leo Carrillo helpfully says he has arranged a hit on him.

Jean is aghast and asks him to call it off, because…ready?  She loves him.

Herbert, without much enthusiasm, has shown up in a morning suit (or should that be "mourning"?) for his nuptials, and Leo, who has become protective of Jean, sends his boys into the middle of the ceremony to kidnap Herbert.  He’s not unwilling to go, but holding the wedding party and guests at gunpoint is pretty funny.

The mob brings Herbert back to Jean, who is still mad at him, but the gangsters trick Jean into revealing her true feelings by pretending to shoot Herbert. 

“Darling!” she sobs in his arms.

If it’s an odd way to find romance, well, blame it on the Depression.

 *******************************

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. 

 

 

 

 

Phantom of the Opera - 1943

Phantom of the Opera (1943) is a musical, a Technicolor feast for the eyes. There is a horror story in here, too, but it is cloaked in understanding and the eerie hindsight that dreams dashed can be a pervasive kind of horror.

Between the Phantom’s woes, portrayed with much more sensitivity than Lon Chaney’s infamous ghoul in the silent 1925 version, and the young soprano Susanna Foster’s real-life sorrows – there is enough pathos to make this movie a poignant ode to dreams that died.

The movie, more musical than monster, seems an homage to the world of operatic music than to the original nineteenth century penny-dreadful novel, though it was perhaps a smart move not to attempt to re-create the original classic silent story "note-for-note," as it were. We are given something extra, treated to the powerful baritone of Nelson Eddy and the beauty of Marta. Other “operatic” performances are not taken from operas, but are adapted works from Chopin and Tchaikovsky.

The Paris Opera of the late nineteenth century is the familiar setting for the tale, but there are differences in this movie – Nelson Eddy stars as the opera company’s baritone and Edgar Barrier plays Raoul, the local police inspector. Both men are romantic rivals for the hand of Susanna Foster, who plays Christine DuBois, a talented member of the opera chorus. The gents try to woo her, and Susanna enjoys their attention. Another man loves her and works to further her career – Claude Rains.

Mr. Rains is the Phantom of the piece – and there is no mystery about his identity. When we first meet him, he is not hiding in the shadows. He is in the orchestra pit playing the violin, a mild-mannered, middle-aged musician employee of the opera house. His encounters with Susanna are shy and awkward, and she gives him no thought other than he is a polite but odd old man. The Phantom is not a ghoul here, but a sad soul, and he breaks our hearts from the beginning. We discussed the original Phantom and the 2004 movie based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running stage musical in this previous post. We observed that the presentation of the Phantom had changed because of our evolution, not his:

      Perhaps a good deal of this transformation of the Phantom in our popular culture has simply to do with ugliness. Gerard Butler’s Phantom is a man with what looks like a few old burn scars on part of one side of his face. Nothing we can’t live with, even though he vainly keeps it covered. Lon Chaney’s face is a rotting, putrid skull. It gives us nightmares. The original book was written in the days when ugly was synonymous with evil, at least as far as storytelling was concerned. Chaney’s film was made, similarly, when the representation of evil was done mainly through an image of ugliness. We still have film monsters who are ugly to be sure, but they are evil and ugly, not evil because they are ugly. There was not a whole lot of sensitivity towards people with mental or physical handicaps in those days, when desperate parents were still leaving deformed children with carnivals. There wouldn’t be any empathy left over either for folks who were less than beautiful. In the code of old Hollywood, the heroes and heroines were beautiful, and the sidekicks and villains were not.

Today we have a bit different take on evil, on beauty, and on empathizing with those who appear different, and that perhaps is one of the reasons why the Phantom has changed. He needs to be repackaged in order to be sold. It would be difficult to film the same 1925 story and present it to a 21st century audience, with the same simplistic judgments. The Phantom’s evil as represented today is more psychological, and more a problem of society because he has been treated so shamefully. Instead of nightmares, he gives us second thoughts.

Universal was known for monster movies as being its specialty, but it also produced a large number, even more than MGM, of what could be termed teen musicals. It is from their stable of talent they drew Susanna Foster and began to groom her as one of their biggest stars. As such, Susanna had a featured role in Bowery to Broadway (1944), which we discussed here, with another youngster who was to replace Susanna as Universal’s leading songstress – Ann Blyth.

The 1943 Phantom is a kind of missing link between the two incarnations of silent ghoul and Lloyd Webber’s lavish musical.

The camera pans from Claude Rains playing violin with the orchestra in the pit, and pulls back to encompass a grand opera house interior, with every seat occupied by the well-to-do in their gowns, tuxedos, and jewels, in every box and loge. We finally pull back to the very end of the farthest rafters, the cheap seats, to reveal the enormous opulent glass chandelier. This, of course, has a prominent place in the story and the shot is breathtaking for its dual use as eye candy and premonition of things to come. It is more so a premonition because by 1943, though the original Phantom, while it may not have been as familiar to that generation, nevertheless had reached legend such that people knew the story they were about to see, or they thought they did.

There are flickering candles in every desk candelabra and overhead ceiling chandelier in every office, in every parlor and boudoir, casting shadows, and reflecting a warm glow. The film moves at a leisurely pace and we sink ourselves into its environment, from cold, gray streets, to actors adjusting costumes behind the flats backstage, to the grand but artificial sets on stage.

Claude rains plays Erique. He is a longtime employee of the opera house orchestra, but is fired because his playing has become slack, to which he attributes his hands and fingers becoming stiff. He may be one of the first people in classic films to be fired for a repetitive motion injury. But poor Erique has no workers’ compensation to fall back on. He is, worse still to any employer, getting old.

He is crushed by being dismissed, and wanders in a daze back to his one-room garret. We see he is living a poverty-stricken life, though his employer and others assume he must have a lot of money in savings from his 20-year career. However, we next see that he has spent his savings on a very expensive endeavor that is both a kindness and a fantasy. He has been anonymously paying for singing lessons for Susanna Foster, who does not know her benefactor. She has been studying with the Maestro – that’s our old friend Leo Carrillo, for three years.

Claude Rains also writes music, and he has an ace in the hole, a manuscript of a concerto he has been writing for years. He intends to have it published, thereby solving his money problem. However, the publishing house stalls him, treats him badly, and when he perceives that they are going to steal his work, in an angry rage he confronts the publisher, who is in conference with his lady friend. They are amusing themselves with his hobby of etching photos on steel plates with acid.  Nothing says love in the afternoon like etching photos on steel plates with acid. Rains attacks the publisher and strangles him to death, and the lady friend grabs the acid and tosses it in Rains’ face.

Whimpering in pain, Rains staggers out of the office and through a maze of rain-washed streets. He is hunted by the police. He takes refuge, of course, in the city sewers that lead to the bowels of the opera house – and we have our Phantom.

He steals his trademark mask and cape from the opera house costume department. It is a rather stylish sea-green mask with eerily arched brows painted on it. He steals supplies from the opera house and lives there and continues to support Susanna Foster’s career, mainly by trying to oust the pompous Diva with threats of violence. Something in his gentle, befuddled personality has slipped askew – he is more cunning, more sinister, and will do anything to get what he wants – and now he wants Susanna, no longer content to love her from afar.

Claude Rains has become strangely athletic and acrobatic in his rope climbing and rafter leaping, and that rakish forelock that drapes over his mask adds a cavalier touch.

Look for Hume Cronyn as one of the police inspector’s men who chase the Phantom through the opera house and try to lay traps for him.

Susanna Foster, at the center of the piece, is a delicate figure, but despite being the focus of the film—even more than the Phantom in this version—she seems not to have a strong screen presence here, though perhaps the role of Christine is too passive to appreciate Foster's abilities as an actress. She was known for having the ability to reach the note B above high C in her vocal range; and the film presents her beautifully, exhibiting this tremendous gift.  Perhaps this information was difficult for audiences who were not opera fans to appreciate, despite the Universal publicity department’s attempt to market it.  Phantom of the Opera was her most important film, her fifth film. She began in Hollywood in 1939 at the age of 12 years old in The Victor Herbert Story, and her path went from MGM, which never used her, to Paramount; to Universal, where they had a robust youth unit whose most famous star at the time was Deanna Durbin.

Reportedly, Susanna was brought on to keep Durbin “in her place,” giving the studio the ability to threaten to replace Durbin with another soprano if she did not conform to their demands of her. Durbin turned down the Phantom script and Susanna inherited the role. She only did a handful of films in her career. In 1945, Universal granted her wish to study opera and tour overseas, which she did, but then she decided to quit the movies.

She confessed to never being very ambitious and felt overwhelmed by the Hollywood machine, but she must really have been made of stronger stuff, for Susanna coped with more than her share of burdens. She grew up with alcoholic, abusive parents, but supported them and two younger sisters while she was still a child herself. When she returned from Europe and her movie contract was over, she reportedly gathered her resources, including selling her fur coat, to rescue and raise her two younger sisters and make a home for them. She eventually married baritone Wilbur Evans, but that union was unhappy. They did some stage work together, but when they divorced, though he was an absent father, he apparently demanded as part of the divorce decree that she not take their two sons more than 100 miles away from New York, thereby ending her attempts to have a comeback in film. She took work in New York City as a receptionist and did what she could with office jobs to support her two sons, with no help from her controlling ex-husband. Years later, she returned to the West Coast, and for a time, was homeless and living in her car.

According to author Bernard F. Dick in City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures (The University Press of Kentucky, 1997, p. 125), he notes that in 1989, Jane Withers and Margaret O’Brien learned that Susanna Foster was living in her car and “they came to her aid.”

Most poignantly, The Phantom of the Opera had begun an amazing new incarnation through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster stage musical. At that time that Jane Withers and Margaret O’Brien were financially helping Susanna, Lloyd Webber’s Phantom was playing in Los Angeles. According to Mr. Dick, the two ladies “made it possible for her to see it.”

She had been the first singing Christine in a time when the Phantom began to appear less ghoulish to us and more troubled, more sad. For the first time, we saw his side of the story.

Susanna had a story, too. In her final years, her son (one had predeceased her) moved her back to the East Coast and was able to place her in nursing home care. She died in 2009 at the age of 84 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey.

No horror story for the blog for this Halloween. At least, not the kind you were expecting.

Captain Caution - 1940

“Captain Caution” (1940) gives us a chance, if nothing else, to mark that this year is the 200^th anniversary of the War of 1812.  It was a puzzling, disjointed little war and this is a puzzling, disjointed little movie.  Victor Mature would rather not fight the war, and he seems to be the only one in this movie with any sense.

The year this movie was made, Great Britain was struggling for survival against Nazi bombing raids, and the US, still officially neutral in the early years of World War II, had not even started slipping aid through the Lend-Lease program, signed into the law the following year.  We just stood by and watched.  The War of 1812 was the last time Great Britain was our enemy, and though movies should be allowed to stand apart from current events as purely art, they often do not, intentionally.  A scene at the end of the film where a British sea captain agrees to a personal truce with Victor Mature’s crew so that they may join together to fight a common enemy might have been a convenient, palatable ending, or it might have been in the original novel.  I don’t know, but it is convenient.  Our real-life sympathies for Great Britain in their predicament were beginning to gnaw at us.

Victor Mature is First Mate on “The Olive Branch”, a symbolic enough name for a merchant ship sailing back to its home port of Arundel, Maine.  Robert Barrat is captain and owner of the ship.  His daughter, played by Louise Platt, is on board to keep the ship’s log on her beautiful lady’s finishing school handwriting, and to plague Victor Mature.  They were childhood friends, and now they are battling sweethearts.  One wonders what he sees in her, because she’s as petulant a shrew as ever sailed the seven seas.

A crew of lovable miscreants huddles below decks and swings in hammocks.  El Brendel is one of them, who plays a lute and sings very sweetly of the seaman’s sweetheart “Hilda”.

It is August, 1812, and they have been sailing from China for over 100 days.  They do not know that President James Madison declared war against Great Britain in June.  So, it comes as quite a shock when a British war frigate comes along sides, shoots cannonballs at them, and takes them all prisoner, except for the captain, who is killed.

Captain Caution is a bitter nickname Louise Platt tags on Victor Mature because he advises surrender and negotiation to get the men back home.  Especially since they are not armed to fight sea battles. 

Now that her father is dead, Miss Platt vows vengeance on the British and she’s willing to take up with anybody who will help her, including Bruce Cabot, who has an unsavory reputation as a slave ship captain.  He will do anything for money.

When they are rescued from the British by an American war frigate, Bruce Cabot joins the crew as Miss Platt’s First Mate.  She declares herself captain, and her brief scenes striding about the deck giving orders are the most interesting aspects of her role, however far-fetched they might be.  There were pirate queens back in the day who mastered their own ships, but Louise doesn’t seem to be the type who can suddenly adopt authority and a thorough knowledge of seamanship when she has spent her time before that pouting and shrieking.

Other newcomers on deck include Leo Carrillo, who we last saw in “History is Made at Night” (1937).  He plays his trademark bumbling, bombastic sidekick with the funny, over-the-top accent. 

Vivienne Osborne is his jealous coquette of a wife.

A young J. Pat O’Malley has his first movie role as a fishmonger; blink and you miss him.

Clifford Severn is the British drummer boy who is taken captive by Victor Mature’s band and has become such a mascot that by the end of the movie, he joins his new American friends.  Clifford and several of his siblings were child actors in many films, and you may recall his brother Christopher as Toby in “Mrs. Miniver” (1942).

Alan Ladd has a small role as an American sailor held captive on another British warship.  He helps Carillo and Mature to orchestrate an escape.  It wouldn’t be too long before he had starring roles and you can see why in this movie.  Ladd has a magnetic screen presence and he delivers his lines in a passionate manner.  Interestingly, he shows more emotion here than he would in his more famous roles when his characters were usually more buttoned up.

It is an occasionally odd movie, but there are two powerful elements going for it.  First, there are some good hand-to-hand combat scenes on fog-shrouded decks, with cannonball-splintered spars falling around them, tearing into square sails, and frigates on fire. 

Second, the trio of Victor Mature, Bruce Cabot, and Alan Ladd have got to be the most handsome set of fellows ever to eat hardtack.  You can’t keep your eyes off them.

Mr. Cabot is quite mesmerizing.  We know he’s the villain, his record speaks for itself, but usually villains are presented as ugly, creepy, mustache-twirling types.  Cabot is manly, rugged, intelligent, and has guts.  If he weren’t so evil he’d be a great guy to have on your side.  Mr. Ladd, despite a small role, comes off as a romantic hero with his abundant wavy hair and flashing eyes.  And Victor Mature is charming in a role unlike his usual sneering, haunted noir outings.  He’s funny and thoughtful.  He is careful and judicious, Captain Caution, as it were, but saves the day at the end when he makes a bold move. 

The only fault I can see in him is his love for Louise Platt.  He’s too good for her.  There’s a lot that's clunky in this movie, but as Leo Carillo hopefully says, “Nothing is impossible if it’s possible.”

Arundel, by the way, though an old place name for this area of Maine, was part of Kennebunkport when novelist, and Kennebunk boy Kenneth Roberts wrote “Captain Caution”.  He specialized in historical novels, (he also wrote Northwest Passage) often with New England slants.  A popular novelist of his day, after the last of his series Chronicles of Arundel was finished, the community was officially re-named Arundel in 1957.

Have a look at my New England Travels post this week for more on the War of 1812, and the USS Constitution.

History is Made at Night - 1937

“History is Made at Night” (1937)…well, then. Here we are.

We film bloggers can easily ignore movies we don’t like, but I’ve been avoiding this one because I like it so much. Sometimes you destroy something mysterious and lovely when you look behind the curtain. But, ever since this post from our friend Laura at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings and the comments, (Laura blogs on this film here.)  I’ve been brooding over blogging about this movie. Brooding. Brooding some more.

I think the deciding factor was when TCM yanked “The Public Menace” that was supposed to be on last night and changed their schedule. It put me over the edge. Now you’re going to get “History is Made at Night”, ripped to shreds. Muwaahaaahaa!

But first, the obligatory warning. There will be spoilers. I am going to discuss every frame of this movie (well, almost), for two reasons: one, I am by nature a little too analytical (stop snickering). Put a steak dinner in front of me, and I will analyze it, draw graphs, and make comparisons to Yeats’ poems and the history of Thailand, with little known facts about the modern combustible engine.

The second reason is because it occurred to me, after much brooding, as I have already mentioned, that the manner in which the plot is tossed at us is a key factor in why this movie, with such an improbable plot, seems to work.

Right, then. Do not go beyond this point if you do not want spoilers.

DANGER!!!

PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

And one more…

YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!

That ought to be enough warning for anybody. Oh, one other thing: this might take a while, so go to the bathroom now.

Ready? You by the windows, draw the blinds.

“History is Made at Night”, an unusual title for an unusual film, features Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur. Their chemistry in this film is something remarkable, and it is an oft-repeated story that a visitor to the set wondered if they were having an affair off camera because their work in this film was so intimate. Even more remarkable to this and other visitors was the professional manner of the two stars when the cameras were not rolling. This demonstrated that not only were they not having an affair; they were two of the most empathetic actors of that period. They became who they were playing and for those moments, seemed to shut out everything else.

It is one of the most romantic movies ever made, and much is credited to director Frank Borzage’s “love conquers all” canon. Something else, though, happens in the direction of this movie that keeps us interested, and believing, in the sometimes unbelievable events. Another director, another cast in this film might easily make us holler, “Oh, PUL-L-E-E-ZZE!” when we are asked to accept what is happening. Somehow, the lustrous magic of this film pulls us along. I think the intimacy of this movie reaches the audience on a personal level.

How it does that is by keeping us completely in the dark.

That’s unusual. The normal routine in films, especially of that period, is to set us up for every scene. For instance, take the old gag about somebody slipping on a banana peel. We see the character eating a banana. We know that he is going to drop the peel on the ground. After that, someone will come along and slip. Before the action ever happens, we know what is going to happen and our enjoyment of the gag is based on, not surprise (ironically), but on being clued in beforehand.

Comedies, dramas, horror movies (think of the scary music that precedes the attack), this foreshadowing happens in most films to help the audience accept what is being told to them -- though not always as obvious as the banana gag.  And an abundance of plot exposition. “History is Made at Night” takes the opposite track and makes the audience experience without any warning what the characters are facing, and makes the audience face it at the same time.

In the above-mentioned comments section in the post by Laura, we discuss the remark by Nick Pinkerton who notes: "to watch her dance with Boyer is to witness a woman falling in love in real time." I love that quote, it’s a great observation. On one level, this is a tribute to Jean Arthur’s charming power on screen, but on another level it is a tribute to Frank Borzage’s delicacy and how much he holds back, giving us a little at a time.

He gives us so little at a time that we are never sure if this is a melodrama, a romantic comedy, a suspense film…and then turns it into one of the very first “disaster movies”. Such sleight of hand is astounding. It almost seems as if they are all making this up as they go along, (and to some extent probably were) yet it is carefully orchestrated.

Mr. Borzage gives us only one set-up at the very beginning of the film. Colin Clive, who most remember as Dr. Frankenstein (“He’s alive!”), is a successful shipping magnate preparing for the maiden voyage of his splendid new passenger liner, the Princess Irene. It is named for his wife. A reporter, one of those scandal-mongering types, asks him to confirm a story that he and his wife are having marital problems. Mr. Clive dismisses him and goes to his Art Deco cabin, which he finds empty. A note is left by his wife, defending herself against his jealous rage, and requests a divorce.

Cut to a shot of Jean Arthur, his wife, on a train to somewhere, with a blank, cold, unblinking stare through the netting on her hat. She is resolute, but emotionally empty. Jean Arthur is photographed beautifully in this film. She masterfully plays an elegant, glamorous society woman, a complete turn from the down-to-earth shop girls or wisecracking reporters she made famous.

Headlines about the split between Clive and his wife.

Cut back to Mr. Clive in a meeting with his lawyer. He wants to scuttle (remember the word, we’ll need it later on) his wife’s divorce proceedings by catching her in a compromising situation with his chauffeur. Michael the Chauffeur, played by Ivan Lebedeff, needs the money, and is hired to enter Miss Arthur’s hotel room that night and “compromise” her.

That’s all the set up we get. From here on, we’re on our own.

Keep together. Hold hands.

Cut to Charles Boyer chattering glibly to an unconscious man in a darkened room. Boyer wears a dark overcoat, with a Fedora low over his eyes. He looks like Lamont Cranston as “The Shadow”. Is he a cat burglar, robbing this defenseless man? Sounds from the room next door, Jean Arthur pleading. Boyer watches from the terrace as Michael the Chauffeur takes liberties. M. Boyer socks him on the jaw and knocks him cold, then shoots a dismissive glance at Jean, surveys the room, and turns off the lights.

Is he going to attack her? Subject her to A Fate Worse Than Death? Colin Clive enters with his hired detective to catch Jean and Michael together, but Boyer threatens them with a gun in his coat pocket, yanks the pearl necklace off Jean’s neck, demands her other jewels, and locks Clive and his henchman in the closet. Oh, yeah, Boyer is a burglar all right, and worse…he’s taking Jean with him as insurance. Now she pleads with him. Both her husband and her chauffeur have been deaf to her entreaties. Will he?

Cut to a cab ride, where Jean, shell shocked and rigid with fear, eyes Boyer, who seems to sneer with arrogance. He leans over her, to place her pearls around her neck, and then ties up the rest of her jewels like a little package in his handkerchief, dropping them in her lap.

Hold the phone. He’s not a thief or kidnapper.

The sneer is a secret smile because he knows something she does not, and playfully confesses that he was putting a drunk friend to sleep in the next room when he heard the commotion. He pretended to be a thief to get her out of there and not compromise her any further in front of her jealous husband.

She is bowled over by this, and begins to chill out, not easy after what she’s been through.

He takes her to a café, which is closing, but he charms the bombastic chef, played with noisy aplomb by Leo Carrillo, by introducing Jean as Miss America, “from America”, and likewise ingratiating himself to the tired musicians to stay a little longer for a nightcap. In another moment, the egoistical Italian chef is creating Lobster Cardinal with Salade Chiffonnade (something you’re going to be hearing a lot about in this movie), and the musicians play while sipping champagne (Pink Cap 1921), and Boyer and Arthur get acquainted. She tells him she is originally from Kansas.

“You are the first Kansas I have ever met.”

Wait a minute. This isn’t a melodrama; it’s a romantic comedy.

Boyer playfully draws a face on his hand, calls his “girlfriend” Coco, and talks to Jean about the events of the evening in much the same way a child psychologist would use crayons and paper with a traumatized child. It reminds you of Señor Wences, doesn’t it? That’s because it is Señor Wences, in the close-ups and his voice. The famed Spanish ventriloquist was wowing them in the mid 1930s at New York’s Club Chico, and evidently got tagged to help with animating “Coco”.

Coco sidles close to Jean’s cheek and confides,

“I hate men. Don’t you?” Coco wants to know why Jean got married, why her husband did that terrible thing to her.

Jean loosens up, shares a little girl talk with Boyer’s hand, and tells Coco to get Boyer to ask her to dance. In a moment, with her fur coat draped modestly around her shoulders, Jean and her hero are taking soft, tiny steps to a quiet tango. She keeps tripping on her slippers. At first, he replaces her shoe like the prince in Cinderella. They talk while they are dancing.

“Would it help if you told me about it?” he asks her and here is where we begin to see her falling in love a little with him, because we are, too. He does not sweep her off her feet or romance her in the manner of the ardent French lover. With exquisite gentleness, he invites her to only to trust him in a leisurely scene that makes no demands on her, and we watch her brittle nerves disappear like a tense body being massaged.

Cut to Colin Clive. He busts out of the closet. Michael the Chauffeur wakes up. His boss interrogates him, wants to know if Boyer was here all the time, if Boyer is her lover. Michael, just wanting out of a bad situation, tells Clive what his jealous, sick mind wants to hear.

Colin Clive plays it sinister in this role. Anyone might play the jealous husband with a kind of mustache-twirling “mellerdrammer” villain, but he is like a ticking time bomb, controlled and calculating. This is what makes him really frightening. He is an intelligent lunatic. He knows that Michael was still unconscious when Jean and Boyer left. If Michael were dead, Boyer would be arrested for killing him in the fight.

Clive smashes Michael’s skull.

Whoa. We were wrong. It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s a suspense story. Colin’s going after Jean, and cops will soon be after Boyer.

Cut back to the café. Jean and Boyer are still dancing, just barely, mainly they cling to each other and whisper over each other’s shoulders, while master chef Leo Carrillo pours out his indignation in a burst of Italian invective.

Cut to Colin Clive, calmly reporting the murder of Michael the Chauffeur to the police.

Cut back to the café, Jean has kicked off both her slippers and her coat has fallen to the floor. She has exposed herself to Boyer, emotionally speaking. Nothing says trust like dancing with a man in your bare feet.

“Tonight’s what I’ve waited for,” she confesses, “Maybe because I’ve needed tonight more than anything in my life, because I’ve never been happy before.”

They look as if they are comforting each other, and we see Boyer is falling in love with her as well. It is now morning. They make plans to see each other tomorrow afternoon.

Boyer brings Jean back to her hotel room, and she skips happily, a far cry from the thoroughly demoralized woman we saw earlier. Uh-oh. In her room are the cops, and Colin Clive pretending to be so worried about her.

Jean is interrogated and tap dances her way through an explanation of how the kidnapper let her go. She does not tell them about Boyer because she thinks his punch must have killed Michael. Colin Clive notes she is still wearing her pearls, the ones Boyer ripped off her neck. He is sure now that his suspicion was right, and that Boyer was her lover all along.

When the cops leave, Clive cuts the phony worried husband act and accuses her of taking Boyer as a lover.

“I ought to kill you for this!”

“Why don’t you? Then I’d never have to see you again.” It is a flat response, not at all hysterical, but the terse reply of someone who has borne too long an abusive marriage.

But Clive holds the whip hand. She knows it. He will turn in Boyer if she doesn’t come back to him. She agrees, and they sail for New York.

Are you still with me? Good. Please, no flash photography on this tour.

The next afternoon, Boyer heads back to the café. The workers there seem to know him. A waiter hands him a menu for his approval. Boyer walks confidently back to the kitchen and checks the meal preparations. He slips into a white dinner jacket, and looks like Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.”

Oh, he OWNS this joint. That’s why he brought Jean here and why he was so easily able to make the chef and musicians stay all night.

He tells Leo Carrillo he is in love with Jean and he will marry her.

“You gonna marry with that silly girl who danced with the naked feet?” Leo cannot believe it. The glamorous Jean is not good enough for Boyer.

“You act like a love-sick schoolboy instead of the greatest head waiter in Europe.”

The greatest HEAD WAITER in Europe? Our hero is just a waiter?

We see him next greet the dinner crowd, lighting the cigarettes of patrons, making things run smoothly with an eye for detail and a deferential manner. But something else -- we see he is not cloying or insincere in his attentions to the customers. He is no sycophant who turns tricks for tips. He is elegant and dignified, and controls the dining room like a captain controls his ship. He placates a fussy lady and we see he enjoys making things all right again, and perhaps this is part of his love for Jean. He gets to be the hero by making things all right again, and the love and gratitude in her eyes is bigger than any tips he’s ever gotten.

The drunk he put to bed the night before comes in with a hangover, and starts talking about the cops and some murder that happened in the next room, but Boyer gets distracted by other customers and does not hear him. The suspense makes us grind our teeth.

He goes to meet Jean at the appointment time, but she is not there. He learns from a headline (thank heavens for headlines, they tell us everything, and so quickly), that she is the wife of this great shipping magnate, and she is sailing with him to America that day.

He calls the ship. Cut to Jean, sitting in the half dark, alone in her cabin. She has been crying, and despite the brief ecstasy of hearing his voice on the phone, tells him in her own shaky voice not to try to contact her again.

It’s not a melodrama. It’s a tragedy.

Colin Clive enters the cabin, ready for romance as he slinks his arm around her neck more like a strangler than a lover, and she withdraws from him. Instantly his jealousy spikes again and he taunts her about her Boyer. He asks what she would give to be alone on the sea with Boyer now, instead of with him.

“I’d give my soul!” Another frank, bitter, and excellently executed line. Then she laughs a little hysterically through her tears and points out that though she never had a lover, her husband’s jealously brought Boyer to her aid. She loves Boyer, and Clive made it possible.

He threatens to kill her and knocks her to the ground, but she revives with that cold determination to leave him again.

Cut to another ship. Boyer and Carrillo watch the New York skyline slide by as their ship is about to dock. He has come to find her because he knows she must be in some kind of trouble. Carrillo refers to the skyscrapers as “sky wipers”. It’s okay to laugh, I did.

They don’t know where to find Jean, since she has left her husband. It’s a big town.

Cut to Colin Clive. He knows where Jean is, and where she works now as a dressmaker’s model.

Who will get to her first?

Cut to Boyer and Leo brooding in a New York café. In one of the most improbable, but entertaining subplots of this movie, Boyer notes the crappy service in this café and the lousy food. He decides that he and Leo must use the weapons available to them to lure Jean out. They will take jobs in this café and turn it into one of the best run night spots in New York, where everyone…including Jean, will want to be.

Note to restaurateurs, store supervisors, and pretty much anyone in the service industry. The next few scenes show Boyer whipping this lackluster staff into a crackerjack team of professionals. This is how it’s done. Train your staff like this. The service is improved and you can better be sure that no waiter is ever going to call a table of patrons, “You guys”.

And the comedy has returned to the script, except for one poignant moment. He leaves one table reserved for Jean. No one else may sit there.

Cut to the dress shop where Jean models clothes for rich customers. A hired goon tells Jean that her husband wants a meeting. The murderer of Michael the Chauffeur was caught by the Paris police. Jean thinks, of course, that he’s referring to Boyer. Panicked, she meets with her husband in his New York office where there is a large painting of her. He tells her he is going to hang it in the royal suite of The Princess Irene.

“By the neck until it dies?” she responds. There is nobody that can deliver a line so full of that bewitching combination of pathos and sarcasm than Jean Arthur.

Colin Clive tells her that if she comes back to him, they will go to Paris together and testify on Boyer’s behalf to get him free. She agrees. They will fly back on the Hindenburg tonight.

Yeah, that Hindenburg.

“History is Made at Night” was released March 5, 1937, when The Hindenburg was to start her second year of commercial trans-Atlantic flights. Two months after this film was released, on May 6, 1937, The Hindenburg exploded. For more on that event, have a look at this previous post.


One wonders if the film was altered in any way after the disaster to omit reference the doomed airship, or pulled from the market. I don’t know. Colin Clive, it could be noted here, faced his own private disaster. His wan, strained appearance in this, his last film, might indicate his struggle with tuberculosis and chronic alcoholism. Mr. Clive died three months after the film was released, in June 1937.

For the moment in our film, melodrama has morphed back into comedy…no, wait, tragedy…no, wait…I don’t know…when Colin Clive takes Jean out for supper on their last night in New York. Of course, he takes her to that popular place where Charles Boyer works.

When Boyer sees her from across the packed restaurant, it a miracle moment. His expression is enough to make your heart melt, until she spots him, and starts to laugh hysterically. Jean’s lost it, because her worst nightmare is now officially over. Boyer is not captured by the police, he is here in front of her and she doesn’t have to go on The Hindenburg, or even as far as Brooklyn, with Colin Clive.

But Boyer takes her laughter for mocking. He thinks she is happy with her husband, and that her moment in his Paris café was nothing more than a rich woman slumming. He is hurt, and angry, and seethes as he shows them to the table he has reserved for her all these weeks, and he bitterly suggests Lobster Cardinal and Salade Chiffonnade. And the champagne? Pink Cap ’21.

Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.

But, wait, it’s a comedy again when Jean rides in the cab with Colin Clive after dinner and rips up her Hindenburg ticket into tiny little pieces. She jumps out and runs back to the café.

Here, she catches up with Boyer, and to reach beyond his hurt feelings and misunderstanding, draws Coco on her own hand and talks to him. I swear, the United Nations ought to get Coco to mediate between warring factions.

I mentioned “Casablanca” earlier, and in this scene where she enters the café at night, and Boyer is sitting dejectedly at a table, alone with a bottle and a glass, it reminds me of when Ingrid Bergman snuck back into Rick’s Café Americain to wheedle the documents from him.

Like Bogey, Boyer is choking on his pain and sarcastically replies, “Madame forgets herself. I am only a waiter.”

She asks him to trust her, and gets Coco to ask him to dance. Soon, we are back to romantic comedy again, and they head to the kitchen for scrambled eggs and pretend to be husband and wife.

Another morning, like that morning after in Paris, when the world wakes up and the dangers of the night are past. She wears his large overcoat to cover her evening gown. She reluctantly breaks it to him that they cannot return to Paris because he is wanted there for murder.

Boyer is shocked. He had no idea he’d hit Michael the Chauffeur that hard, and is even more appalled that another man is being held for the crime.

They walk the streets talking of fleeing to Tahiti or facing the music in Paris, while the New York rear screen projection slips by them.

Cut to the moonlight on board ship, and our two lovers standing at the rail. Where are they headed? The safety of the south Pacific? (First class ticket to Tahiti is $725, it says in the travel bureau window.)

The camera pans to the clock on the wall with the ship’s name. The Princess Irene. They’re going to Paris to see this through.

Now it’s a race against time, for if they are not able to convince the authorities of Boyer’s part in the murder, perhaps have the charges reduced to accidental death or manslaughter, he will not avoid the guillotine.

It’s a suspense movie again.

Cut to Colin Clive in his Paris office. Surrounded by employees, legal retainers and advisors, and newspapers, he learns that Boyer and his wife are returning to testify. Their romance makes the front page.

Mr. Clive’s jealously takes it up a notch and he calculatingly plays his final hand. He puts a call through to his ship captain and orders him to push the envelope and break the speed record for the maiden voyage. The captain tells him that is impossible, there is too much fog this trip, and the northern course puts them in danger of icebergs. But, Clive is the boss.

Avoiding safety procedures to make the boss happy and improve the bottom line is not something new or unbelievable, despite the captain’s willingness to put his passengers at risk and Clive’s frothing at the mouth. It happens too often. This is one improbable scene in the film that is not so improbable.

The captain passes along the orders to a group of surprised and disgusted officers.

Hold the phone. This has now become a disaster movie, and I think possibly the first of its kind (maybe somebody can correct me on this).

Wait, first a little more comedy. Leo Carrillo is a stowaway on the ship and is taking over the ship’s kitchen. He makes -- yeah, what do you think he makes?

A. Grilled cheese sandwiches.
B. Opens a can of ravioli.
C. Orders take-out pizza.
D. Lobster Cardinal, Salade Chiffonnade, and Pink Cap ’21.

Cut to Boyer and Jean in her (their?) cabin. They are getting closer to Paris and running out of time. (They don’t know the half of it.) She kicks off her shoes for old time’s sake and they hold each other. Sublimely sad and romantic.

Then eating the food Leo has cooked for them, Boyer realizes his pal must be on board ship. He goes to find him.

ICEBERG!

This ship set is great. Suddenly the camera pans back in the fog and we get shots of a huge deck listing, of a monstrous gray iceberg cutting into the bow, of a shower of ice. A hundred extras running, screaming, bulkhead doors straining to be shut as the unrelenting ocean gushes into the lower decks. Sailors running for their lives, and the piercing shriek of the siren.

Jean is lying unconscious on the floor of her cabin, knocked there by the force of the collision. Boyer gets Leo to safety in one of the lifeboats, and then goes back for Jean.

Radio distress calls go out to other ships, and many respond, but they are far away. There is nobody close to help.

Elderly couples say goodbye to each other, children are separated from parents. Boyer gets Jean to a lifeboat, but she won’t stay. She goes back to him.

He screams at her, “We would only have a moment together!”

All the women are being evacuated to lifeboats. She will stay and die with him.

Remember when Colin Clive asked what she would give to be alone with Boyer on a ship at sea, and she responds, “My soul”? She gives her life.

Does anybody have a hanky I can use? No, not if you’ve already blown your nose on it. Oh, forget it.

Cut to Colin Clive listening to the radio reports of the tragedy. The ship’s power is cut off and no rescue vessels are close. Likely, the ship has gone down.

His two greatest passions: love and jealously, now have no object of obsession since both Boyer and Jean are evidently dead. He writes a suicide note confession he killed Michael the Chauffeur, and since he knows the investigation of the ship sinking will lead to jail time for him, he goes off screen and shoots himself. There is a close-up on the portrait of Jean, the sound of a shot, and a drifting wisp of gun smoke.

Cut to Leo in the lifeboat making a tearful prayer.

Cut back to the ship, listing in the water, slipping slowly. Doomed men wander on deck.

Boyer and Jean sit perched on the iron steps, barely distinguishable in the fog, and talk of their childhoods, and some of the men start singing “Nearer My God, to Thee.”

If you ever hear that on a ship, it’s not a good sign.

Cut to the main salon of the ship, some men grouped together, singing. The one I find most moving is the fellow off by himself, standing with his face to the wall, slumped heavily to the wall as if he so heartsick and frightened he cannot even move.

Cut back to Jean and Boyer, who have a few more minutes to talk about when they fell in love. They are trying to commit everything to memory because there is so little time.

Then an announcement from a crew member. The forward bulkhead doors seem to be holding. The ship will not sink. They will have time to wait it out until help arrives.

Stunned disbelief at first, then weak, hysterical cries of joy. Some of them are fairly crazed with relief.

Cut to Jean and Boyer, and a final kiss. No need to fade out, there’s too much fog.

What is Director Borzage’s message in this? True love conquers all? True love and good strong bulkhead doors, maybe.

It’s a surprising little movie simply for the way Borzage keeps playing with our assumptions and never lets us get too comfortable. I don’t think the improbability of some of the events is necessarily a weakness of this film, though I do think our final look at Boyer and Jean could be a little stronger, with a more powerful realization that time is no longer their enemy, and that their own courage brought them safely home as much as twist of fate or the screenwriter’s whim.

And I like to think Coco gave up her seat on the lifeboat, too, and stayed with Boyer like Jean did.

A final note: we commented in this earlier post on “Shane” where Jean Arthur’s male leads were often much younger than she. In “History is Made at Night”, all her co-stars, Charles Boyer, Colin Clive, and Leo Carrillo were older than she by a few months to a few years. I don’t think that ever happened again for the remainder of her career.