Titanic - 1953

“Titanic” (1953) shows that the most successful storytelling is based on what your audience provides in imagination. Other versions of this tragic tale have provided more technically thorough stories. None are as empathetic in the telling, or draw such empathy from the audience, as this version.

One hundred years ago today people were waking up to the news that the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in the wee hours of the 15th.

This movie was released some 41 years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Coincidentally, it was probably 41 years ago that I first saw this movie. I can’t be sure of the exact year but it’s a pretty good guess. I was a child, knowing nothing about the history of the story I was watching, and what I remember most vividly was the very last scene. Clifton Webb stood on the deck of the ship along the rail with many other men, all staring blankly out at the ocean. There were tears in Webb’s eyes. A little boy, his son, stood next to him on the deck. The son had all the energy and confidence of youth. He was probably only a little older than me.

The stark contrast between the sorrowful father, and that little boy, happy to be with him, confused me. I can remember asking an older sibling what was happening, what did this mean? I was told that the boy was going to drown along with his father, that he went back to the ship when he shouldn’t have, so now he was going to drown.

I think I must have assumed that at the last minute another boat would save them, so this news that their deaths were inevitable shocked me. More shocking was that this smiling boy’s fate was sealed by his eagerness. I wondered then if he knew he was going to die? His demeanor did not seem to indicate that he knew. He suggested to his father that they might swim for it.

I think this scene captures the essence of this remarkable movie. It was filmed on a set, so we are not dazzled too much by technological wizardry. But we are drawn into the consequences of the Edwardian (yes, I know George V was on the throne, but eras do not have air brakes) era-cum-dawn of the 20th century, through the splendor, costumes, values and customs, which all lead to consequences.

We have a little name-dropping. There are Guggenheims among the passenger list and of course, John Jacob Astor. He is played here by William Johnstone, whom you might remember as the radio voice of the Shadow, replacing Orson Welles. His wife is played by the lovely Frances Bergen, the wife of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and mother of actress Candice Bergen.

One name they decided to drop literally was the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown. Her character here is played by Thelma Ritter with her customary earthy gusto, but the name is given as Maude Young.

A big, beautiful ship filled with beautiful people. We are given a hint as to what it’s like to travel in steerage, but we are not hammered too much on the injustices of third class travel. We are given credit for knowing - we or our parents likely traveled to America that way. 

We are given credit for knowing, too, about the era’s dignity, grace, inequity, and hypocrisy. After all, 41 years isn't even one lifespan, and not so much needs to be explained.

We are shown Richard Basehart as a recently defrocked priest returning home to America in disgrace because of his alcoholism. When the disaster happens, he redeems himself. Conversely, we are given Allyn Joslyn as the inevitable human being who disregards his humanity in the very human desire to live.

Look for Mae Marsh in a small role as the lady in the lifeboat to whom the boy, played by Harper Carter, gives up his seat.

The story and the tragedy is played out for us not so much in special effects but by two particular characters who carry with them the style and the consequences of the era. In a sense, Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb as the estranged couple have the entire story resting on their shoulders.

She is an American woman returning to her Middle West roots after years of an unhappy marriage in Europe. She brings their teenage daughter and young son to the US because she does not want them to grow up to share the same meaningless, empty, shallow life which her dandy husband Clifton Webb pursues was such self superior conceit. Both Miss Stanwyck and Mr. Webb are fantastic in this movie. Stanwyck convincingly conveys the dual quality of this woman, one who was able to feel cowed under her husband’s superior birth and social set, and yet still have the mettle to want to save her children. Her Gibson girl hairstyle is very becoming to her in this movie. She wears her costumes well. Stanwyck always did look good in period pieces.

Clifton Webb is a marvel. One might chalk up his work here as standard Clifton Webb material, a fastidious man, the intellectual giant disdainful of all the lesser creatures around him. He played it well.  But there's more to him here, and he undergoes the greatest change of any character in this movie.

One of my favorite lines is when he puts down Stanwyck, “Twenty years ago I made the pardonable mistake of thinking I could civilize a girl who bought her hats out of the Sears Roebuck catalog.”

In one scene, after her confession of an adulterous tryst which resulted in the birth of her son, she drops her purse. Webb’s refusing to stoop to pick it up is his telegraphing to her, and to us, that she has dropped off the charts in respectability. If she were a lady, it would be beneath him not to pick it up. She is not a lady anymore. 1912 Etiquette 101.

But there are two sides to the coin, and Webb also shows a man deeply wounded. It is a devastating scene, his pride and his conceit shattered when he learns that the son of whom he is so proud is not his.

Stanwyck’s part in this scene is also amazing. But perhaps the real credit should go to director Jean Negulesco. The husband and wife face off over his refusal to let her take his son back to the United States.

“No court, no power under heaven will force me to give up my son.”

“He’s not your son.” She replies in the most eerily calm manner, shocking in its very everyday tone of voice almost as if she had said, “it’s time for dinner.”

The camera shows her turn around and walk out of the stateroom. We see her back and his back. We don’t need to see his expression.

In vengeance, he ignores his son for the remainder of the trip, hurting the boy who loves and admires him.

We are prepared by now to think him a monster, but we finally see a deeply courageous Clifton Webb, sensitive to the needs of others when the iceberg hits. It is such a turnabout transformation of his character, and yet, an extension of it. He is, after all, a gentleman. This is what a gentleman is supposed to do. When he learns the ship is sinking he hustles his family into life vests, not telling them of the real danger, keeping up a happy front. He gets them to the top deck.

Then he goes down to third class and hustles out the Basque family with whom he had boarded. The father of the family sold him his ticket, and Webb boarded the ship pretending to be this woman’s husband. He hustles them all into lifeboats, saving their lives. Then he helps others on the ship.

A young Robert Wagner plays a callow college student who is sweet on their daughter played by Audrey Dalton. And oh, the scores of extras. I love me a movie with lots of extras. One of them is Bert Stevens, Barbara Stanwyck’s brother.

Though we have these back stories, this is a movie of about greater things. Larger issues and devastatingly small details. Captain Brian Aherne conducts the Sunday services in the grand salon. A drunken Richard Basehart tries unsuccessfully to send a telegram home of explanation to his family. The crisp, crackling dialogue between Webb and Stanwyck in this most literate script.

I have only one minor, petty complaint. When Robert Wagner and his pals sing college fight songs, one of which is about Lord Jeffrey Amherst and Amherst College -- please, the H in Amherst is not pronounced. I don’t know how Lord Jeff of French and Indian War fame pronounced his surname, but those of us in western Massachusetts, where Amherst College is located, do not say the H. Accent on the first syllable - AM-erst.

I suspect folks from Mackinac, Michigan, might protest at that pronunciation in this film, too.

This has been a public service announcement. (Yes, I’m kidding. I realize there are far more important historical inaccuracies with which to take umbrage.)

The movie does not attempt to shock us or surprise us, rather just as it expects us to understand the mores and conventions of 1912, it also expects us to remember every moment that we are on a collision course with death.  We start the film with a shot of the iceberg.  We have a brief foreshadowing when Robert Wagner, cheered by the prospect of Audrey Dalton’s companionship, throws his soft cap into the ocean. It lands among chunks of ice floating by.

The band plays, first the Londonderry Air - better known to some of us as “Danny Boy”. And eventually we get around to “Nearer, My God, to Thee”. It has never been confirmed absolutely that this was played when the Titanic sank, but the legend has grown partly because of this movie.

Young Harper Carter scrambles out of the lifeboat to give his seat to Mae Marsh and joins his father on the deck because after all, he is now wearing long pants and so he is a man. This is what gentlemen do, give their seats to ladies and risk death. His explanation to his father as to why he returned to the ship is simply, “I’m wearing long trousers.”

Neither did that need to be explained to us in 1953, but I wonder if it might in 2012. I don’t mean just about boys wearing shorts and not wearing long trousers until they’re in their teens. I mean that essence of manhood that comes when one decides to be a man, i.e., to take responsibility. Steinbeck wrote, “A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.”

There are 12-year-old men, and there are 30-year-old boys.

Clifton Webb, heart breaking for his son and especially that he had ever denied his son, puts his arm around him and with tears in his eyes addresses the ocean waves “Whatever happens, I love you very much. I’ve been proud of you every day of your life. Never more than at this moment. I feel tall as a mountain.”

And yet it is not maudlin. It is a simple statement of fact, like the line “I’m wearing long trousers.”

When I watch the movie now, I see that these characters standing on the deck of the doomed ship clearly are not waiting for rescue. They are awaiting death. It is devastating in its theatricality. I can never watch it without being reminded of the first time I saw it, and could not quite comprehend then what was happening. In a way I still can’t believe it. That is the power of film, and especially of this film.

Barbara Stanwyck recalled in this oft-repeated quote:

"The night we were making the scene of the dying ship in the outdoor tank at Twentieth, it was bitter cold. I was 47 feet up in the air in a lifeboat swinging on the davits. The water below was agitated into a heavy rolling mass and it was thick with other lifeboats full of women and children. I looked down and thought: If one of these ropes snaps now, it's goodbye for you. Then I looked up at the faces lined along the rail - those left behind to die with the ship. I thought of the men and women who had been through this thing in our time. We were re-creating an actual tragedy and I burst into tears. I shook with great racking sobs and couldn't stop."

So powerful was this film that it inspired another young person, Edward S. Kamuda, who saw it in his family run theater, The Grand, in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts when it came out in 1953. Mr. Kamuda established the Titanic Historical Society, which is the home of a unique collection of artifacts from the RMS Titanic and from the decades of storytelling about this event. Please see my New England travels blog here for my original post on the Titanic museum and for update on the tribute to two Springfield, Massachusetts, victims of the Titanic.
http://newenglandtravels.blogspot.com/2012/04/titanic-centennial-memorial-springfield.html
Also, have a look here at this previous post on the recycling of the grand salon set of  "Titanic". You’ve seen it before.

There are a couple of other recent posts on “Titanic” (1953) I recommend, this on the blog Book Talk and More, and this, a beginning of a series on Titanic movies, from Matthew Coniam over at Movetone News. Great reading.

Now Playing at Springfield's Broadway Theater, 1916

Above is the program for the lineup at the Broadway Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, probably about 1916. The theater was located on Bridge Street, and for more details on the theater, please have a look at this page on the Cinema Treasures website.For more on the evolution of Bridge Street, its theaters, businesses and residents, have a look at this essay posted on my New England Travels blog on Bridge Street in Springfield, Mass.

Photos of the old Broadway Theater, built in 1913, torn down in the 1950s are scarce, but we have this program to illustrate the evolution in the presentation of the performing arts. The bill is presented in a manner very similar to a vaudeville program. The Broadway also showed vaudeville acts until its gradual phasing out to all movies.

The first films on the bill are likely one or two-reelers, that is films that lasted ten or 20 minutes. Dorothy Bernard stars in “The Girl and Her Trust” produced at the Biograph studio, and “Breaking the Shackles” was an Edison studio film.

We note the Broadway Concert Orchestra was on hand to accompany these silent films.

“Adventure in the Woods” or “Adventure in the Autumn Woods” with Mae Marsh was from 1913, and the Francis Bushman, billed also as Francis X. Bushman (last seen here in "The Flag" - 1927)in “Blood Will Tell” was from 1914, so this movie house showed films from varying studios and the older films were more or less fillers, like lesser vaudeville acts.

The main features, both new films from 1916, were the two Paramount movies “The Spider” with Pauline Frederick, and “The Ragamuffin” with Blanche Sweet, both billed as “5-Act” films, which would have run about 50 minutes. Films were regarded as photo-plays then and it looks as if we were weaning ourselves off live entertainment by using the familiar vaudeville lineup and the suggestion that the multiple reels of film were “acts” in the drama.

We may sometimes indulge in the mistaken belief that technology changing our popular entertainment almost too fast for us to keep up is a modern phenomenon, but I wonder if anything could have seemed so fantastic and out of this world than the flickers flashed on a screen pulled down to cover the stage, leaving only the orchestra pit exposed (though only for another decade), and the astonished gaze of the downsized vaudevillian wondering how he could get in on the “act.”

My Darling Clementine (1946)

This week we’ll discuss a couple of movies that, while both of wildly different subjects and settings, are similar in the poetic way they tell their stories. The poetic quality in the first, “My Darling Clementine” (1946) is blatant and on purpose. Director John Ford, however hard-nosed he preferred to appear in real life, had a romantic view of the West. He does not trouble to conceal the rhapsody of his storytelling. He exploits it.

In the second film that we’ll save for Thursday, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945), novice director Elia Kazan tells a gritty, unsentimental story in a manner that is both beautiful and memorable. Curiously and ironically, he later expressed disappointment in what he felt was a lack of realism.

Beginning with the weathered signpost style credits in “My Darling Clementine”, and the song played as part of a medley of American folk music and hymns we will hear in the background of this film, Ford launches a tale of the Old West that uses familiar themes and settings, but is never cliché.

The true story of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Clanton gang facing off in a gunfight at the OK Corral is gussied up with a lot of incidents and subplots that are not true. Ford is a storyteller, not an historian. We might note here with tongue in cheek on behalf of Mr. Ford’s Irish roots that a word for both storyteller and historian in Irish (and Scots) Gaelic is Shanachie, an economy of language which might intimate the ability to get the facts right is not necessarily held higher than the ability to tell a story.

Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, a famous lawman who for the moment has given up being a sheriff for driving cattle with his three brothers on their way to California. We are shown a large herd of cattle crossing the favorite Ford setting of Monument Valley, a harsh and barren country Fonda remarks is “like no country I ever seen.” We have the chuck wagon, the guitar plucking in the background, the sage brush, and the raucous town of Tombstone, Arizona, where three of the Earp brothers head for a shave.

We get a first glimpse of the fastidious barber at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor who will return later in the film for a funny bit with Fonda. While they are gone, their cattle are rustled and their brother who remained guard is murdered. Now Wyatt Earp takes for himself the job of sheriff of Tombstone to get some justice.


Gunslinger Doc Holliday haunts a local gambling parlor. He is played very well by Victor Mature, whose performance as the doomed man is understated, brooding, and emotional despite the mask of fatalistic acceptance. He and Fonda have a relationship that is adversarial and also one of comradeship, a terrific balance of male bonding and suspicion of each other. When Mature and Fonda share their first drink together at the saloon, Mature erupts into a coughing fit, whipping out a white handkerchief and hacking ferociously into it. This is our signal that he is a dying man.

Whenever somebody coughs into a hanky in the movies, they’re going to die. It happened to Greta Garbo in “Camille”, it happened to Victor Mature in “My Darling Clementine.” Just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

Mr. Ford treats us to long slow shots of the wide open spaces, the clear sky, and a western town with growing pains. The town actually looks authentic, without that movie set look that a lot of towns have in western films. We are also treated to a lot of wonderful close-ups, studies of grizzled beards in the rain, of the complex emotions of Victor Mature and Henry Fonda, and of the simmering Linda Darnell, who plays a feisty saloon singer with the irresistibly funny name of Chihuahua.

Miss Darnell, who is Doc Holliday’s lover, gets some competition when his former love arrives, a respectable lady from Boston, whose name is Clementine. Mr. Mature, knowing his ultimate fate from coughing into his hanky, tries to save Clementine, played by Kathy Downs, by driving her away. Mr. Fonda, meanwhile, is smitten with her.

In between all the justice seeking and whiskey drinking and poker playing and wooing of females, there is the subliminal message that the West is changing. Towns like Tombstone are becoming civilized. As much as the inhabitants of these towns long for the same stability they had Back East, there is a mournful note as well. The irony is that the West represents individualism and freedom, but without laws and rules, it is also seen as a cesspool of anarchy.


Fonda sits at the grave of his murdered younger brother and says to the name carved on the wooden grave marker, “Maybe when we leave this country young kids like you will be able to grow up and live safe.” This could be a cheesy scene, but Ford handles it beautifully, with the help of cinematographer Joseph MacDonald. In their hands, this is not a saccharine sentiment. Intentionally poetic perhaps, but also realistic. How many of us have spoken aloud our thoughts to headstones in moments of grief? It’s a cheesy thing to do, but we do it.

There are many moments of humor interspersed as well, when Mr. Fonda dumps his poker chips into his hat, and then puts the hat on, and then proceeds to his first encounter with Doc Holliday. The scene where the barber, played by Ben Hall, sprays a startled Fonda with cologne, and when anyone thereafter remarks about the scent of honeysuckle in the springtime air, Fonda must abashedly confess that the lovely smell is him.

Later, when walking with Clementine on his arm, Fonda passes the barber who gives him a brief but very funny “I told you so” look of satisfied superiority, as if the cologne is responsible for Fonda’s success with females.

One comic moment turns in to a powerful scene of longing, and sadness, and pondering the meaning of life. A traveling actor drinks a bit too much, and then stands upon a poker table in the saloon while the wonderful Walter Brennan, father of the Clanton thugs, and his mean spirited boys, who all seem to resemble Bluto, threaten the actor into entertaining them. The drunken tragedian proudly launches into Hamlet's soliloquy.

Mature and Fonda come to rescue him, and watch. We see that Mature is fascinated by the actor’s performance. When the tired old Hamlet cannot remember the rest of his lines, Mr. Mature takes over, delivering Shakespeare’s words with simple dignity. Since we have already seen him cough into his hanky, we know that the lines about whether it is nobler to take arms against of sea of troubles, about dying and sleeping, has a deeper and more profound meaning for the doomed Doc Holliday. Fonda sees it, too.

More reminders that the West is changing occur when a flurry of activity assembles at the new church in town. Just the floor is completed, and a dance is held to raise money for the rest. After a bit of square dancing, Fonda leads Clementine in a spirited Texas two-step, while a couple of American flags flutter in the breeze. It is pure American tableau, and Mr. Ford knows that, that’s why he does it.

“Church bells in Tombstone!” is exclaimed with disbelief, another sign of the encroaching civilization.

Mac the bartender, played by J. Farrell MacDonald, who we’ve seen in a number of films, is one of those stalwart character actors without whom no film of Hollywood’s heyday could have been made. There are a number of them in the Ford gang, including Ward Bond, Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson, and former silent star Mae Marsh in a brief scene. We will see Mr. MacDonald in another bit part on Thursday in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” where he played Carney the junkman.

“You ever been in love, Mac?” lovelorn Fonda asks the bartender.

“No, I been a bartender all me life.” Not quite. Mr. MacDonald’s been a lot people, in a lot of movies but only for bits of screen time in each one. Still, he is noticeable and we remember him when we see him.


Judgment day at last arrives, and a showdown between Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and their men against mean old Walter Brennan and his boys. When Victor Mature is shot down, his hanky, which he always carries in his right hand, gets snagged on the rail fence, and hangs there, fluttering in the breeze like a flag of truce.


When peace is restored, Fonda bids goodbye to Clementine with a chaste kiss on the cheek and the hope of returning someday. She will remain here, this transplanted Bostonian who was told earlier that her kind did not belong here. She is to be the new schoolma'arm. Another sign of encroaching civilization. Clementine brings an end to the roughness of Tombstone not with a pair of six shooters, but with perfumed toilet water and soft spoken manners.

It is not an historically accurate film, but it is a tidy story, well told, and at times, quite beautiful.

We will see on Thursday that though the veteran director Ford seems to embrace poetry; the novice Kazan, whose films will launch a new style of movies in the coming decade, eschews it, yet manages to create a most beautiful film himself.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) - Part 2

The story of the Northern Stoneman family and the Southern Cameron family is played out over many years. A lot happens in the film: a war, the struggles of courtship, the power struggles of Mr. Stoneman, who, not so distressed by the loss of President Lincoln, uses the rise of freed slaves as a platform for his own political ambitions. Lincoln is treated respectfully in this film, but probably had to be for by 1915, President Lincoln had become an icon of virtue to the North if not the whole country, and presenting him in any less light than angelic would have been too much controversy for Griffith to withstand. Lincoln was no such icon of virtue to the North or South during the Civil War, but then, it sometimes serves filmmakers not to be too accurate.

The main focus of the controversy is the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan as a virtuous home army defending downtrodden whites from the anarchy of black rule. While most of the Negro extras in the film are played by African-Americans, the principal black characters are played by white actors in blackface. This turns these characters into broad caricature. Insulting, yes, but looking back with 21st Century eyes, it is also ridiculous to the point of wondering how anybody in his right mind could have swallowed this foolishness, and why a seemingly intelligent man like Griffith could have thought it artistic or accurate.

One might just as well wonder why Don Imus would make those ignorant remarks against the Rutgers women’s basketball team, now in the 21st Century, in an attempt at humor by using the same techniques of condescension and caricature. Because some people do find truth in innuendo, swallowing it with a smirk, even now. Some even believe caricature.

When both the Northern Stonemans and Southern Camerons unite to defeat the marauding blacks, and the white actor in official Hollywood mulatto makeup who has made improper advances to Lillian Gish of all people (gasp!), they are said to be joining together in “common defense of their Aryan birthright.” Chilling connotations to be sure, but Adolf Hitler, then a corporal in the Kaiser’s army when this film was released, would have swallowed it and even rejoiced. His country would lose a war, too, and they would find scapegoats, too.

Griffith gives us what he believes is a happy ending, when the blacks are defeated and denied the right to vote, the Stonemans and Camerons are united in the double marriage ceremony among sons and daughters, and younger daughter Flora Cameron, played with spirit by Mae Marsh, preserves the virtue of her Southern womanhood by leaping off a cliff to her death rather than submit to that old fate worse than death at the hands of a white actor in blackface pursuing her for marriage. Stunned was Mr. Griffith when his audiences, just like the Confederate States of America, rebelled. Stunned, too, supposedly, was Mr. Imus when the public rebelled. Condescension and caricature work only up to a point. Then, you must make legitimate the reasoning behind your prejudice. Most often, it can’t be done.

That's all for this week. See you Monday.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) - Part 1

Director D. W. Griffith was astonished to find himself called a racist upon the release of his landmark film, “The Birth of a Nation.” This in itself gives us a lot of information about the director, about the film, and the time in which it was made. Griffith was to discover something else, that the use of condescension and caricature are effective ways to make a point, and conversely, excellent ways of drawing controversy upon oneself.

Mentioning the film evokes all the controversy which surrounds it, overshadowing the Griffith’s truly groundbreaking techniques in cinema, the work of lead actress Lillian Gish who was one of the finest actresses of the silent era, and some interesting historical tableaus, including Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (that’s Donald Crisp as Ulysses S. Grant), some technically accurate battle scenes, and a very dramatic re-creation of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater.

The title, which Griffith chose over “The Clansman,” the novel on which the film is based, is an apt one. The Civil War, in many respects, did signal a re-birth of the United States, changed it forever, and fixed two errors of the Declaration of Independence that had eluded politicians for decades. These were the political sovereignty of independent states, and slavery. Both had to go for the nation to become what it always said it was, free, and united. That it took a war for that to happen is the real shame of the Civil War.

Mr. Griffith tries to make war the big evil which threatens mankind, but his story of defeated white Southerners under the heel of monstrous black masters who want to marry all the white women is a look into Griffith’s psyche more than it ever was a treatise on war or an accurate representation of Reconstruction. Like the way a handwriting expert can determine psychological characteristics, Griffith’s film tells us more about Griffith than about his characters. Mr. Griffith was a Southerner who was raised in the aftermath of the Reconstruction days, spoon fed on the stories of despair and destruction in those difficult times. Unfortunately, his attempt at legitimizing the real suffering of Southerners in those days turns their hard times into a mere cartoon.

Any historical film is just as much about the times in which it was made as about the times it is supposed to illustrate. TV westerns made in the 1950s and 1960s carry more a flavor of the 1950s and 1960s about them than the 1870s, and so it is with any look into the past made today. We are not so sophisticated that we have found a way to be accurate, and at the same time not a traitor to the sensibilities of our own times. It is almost impossible. We leave our own imprint.

So, “The Birth of a Nation” is really more about 1915, about Griffith and a modern South still rationalizing past failures, and about the United States still struggling to be “traditional,” on guard against suspicious modern influences and trends. The film sparked controversy the moment it was released, and was protested against and banned in several cities, but still grossed more money than any film for decades, largely because controversy attracts us.

More on "The Birth of a Nation" tomorrow.