Halloween in "Meet Me in St. Louis"

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) celebrates Halloween in a manner that probably had not been done before in movies, or even since.  Here, it is a time for children’s mischief and pranks, but the treats are a holiday spread for the entire family, a cozy home-party with no costumes or gory decorations. 

The movie takes us through an entire year of a family living in St. Louis, Missouri, from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904, and the four seasons each make up an “act” in the story.  The summer begins with anticipation for the building of the fairgrounds for next year’s St. Louis World’s Fair – or as little Margaret O’Brien grandly announces, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”

The Technicolor musical is a lovely feast for both the eyes and ears, and parties and special events are opportunities to move the plot along in song.  Christmas, famously, is the winter portion of the movie and the climax of the story, where Judy Garland, the second-oldest daughter and middle child of five kids, croons the touching and sweetly sad, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to console Margaret O’Brien over the dismal prospect of the family moving away from St. Louis.

Spring is the shortest act, where the loose ends of the tale are tied up and we have our happy ending strolling through the magnificent grounds of the World’s Fair.  Before all that, however, we have an autumn interlude, which is a big chunk of the movie.

Judy has barely made an inroad to her romance with Tom Drake, “The Boy Next Door,” and the older brother, played by Henry H. Daniels, Jr., isn’t even in this segment because he’s away at college. Most of the segment focuses on the two little girls, Margaret O’Brien and Joan Carroll, who dress in costumes that came out of a rag bag and join neighbor kids on the street, who are piling scraps of wood and furniture on a bonfire in the road.  They break up into commando units to play pranks on neighbors. 

Mother Mary Astor, as her girls are getting ready to join the fun, reminds them that a neighbor lady has folded up a hammock and set it aside for the kids to “steal,” but would they please return it when they’re done.  This tells us that Halloween is intended to be more mock hooliganism than the actual thing—at least until young Margaret and Joan make a thrilling escape from a policeman after an attempt to derail a trolley.

Even before that surprising finale to the evening, we might raise our eyebrows at the idea that Margaret must prove her courage to the other kids by marching up to a feared, forbidding neighbor about whom they tell gross rumors of being a wifebeater and killer of cats, and throw a handful of flour into his face, screaming that she hates him (Grandpa Henry Davenport has advised her to wet the flour first, that way it will stick better). This is to break a banshee spell.  She does the job, albeit trembling all the way, and he, nonplussed, wipes the flour off his face as if he knows it’s just a Halloween thing not to take seriously, like the lady who allows her hammock to be stolen as long as she gets it back.  Margaret becomes a hero to the other kids, and her assault on a neighbor is apparently a rite of passage.

More concerning to today’s parents might be the sight of small children burning half the crates and small tables in the neighborhood in a huge bonfire in the road, unsupervised, if not unsanctioned. 

I can remember in the dim recesses of my childhood watching my father burn autumn leaves in the road by the curb, and also in a large rusty metal barrel, taller than me, meant for that purpose.  But it’s nothing I or my friends would have been allowed to do ourselves.

Halloween, despite the modern decorations meant to induce horror, has become a much tamer thing for children.

And apparently, far less civilized and mature for the adults (compared to today).  We see the family in the movie sitting down to a table with cake and apples, and the bounty of the season, for it seems more a celebration of harvest and autumn as a completion of another phase in the year.  As family maid and cook, Marjorie Main, blithely announces as she sits down with the family to enjoy her own piece of cake, “Well, here it is Halloween, and we’re all another year older.”

Just as we settle into a cozy Victorian parlor scene, chaos erupts.  Margaret O’Brien returns with a bloody lip and a tale of being attacked by Tom Drake.  Judy runs next door to belt Tom.  We assume this will not help their romance. A doctor is summoned (for Margaret, not Tom), and Margaret receives a few stitches, is tucked into bed with treats and made a fuss over—enjoying her invalidism immensely. Joan Carroll returns and excitedly tells Margaret what she missed when she left the fun—that the dummy “body” the kids placed on the trolley nearly derailed it, and they had to run from the constable.  Tom Drake had saved the girls from the police by hiding them down an alley, but they scoff at his interference.  As Margaret notes with a superior air, “As if anybody ever pays attention to girls!”

But a worse calamity suddenly befalls when Papa Leon Ames returns home, triumphant with the news that he is being promoted at his law firm and the family will be moving to New York.

Goes over like a lead balloon, and the family gives him the cold shoulder, from Grandpa down to little Margaret, and one by one, upset, they leave the parlor. 

Mom Mary Astor repairs the damage by soothing Pop, sitting down at the piano and playing the Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed tune “You and I.”  I don’t know if she’s really playing on the track, but you can see for yourself her “playing” is confident and realistic—as Mary Astor was a trained pianist herself.  Pop drifts towards the piano, putting down his cake, and wistfully begins to sing, but the sweet duet is dubbed, however.

One by one, the family all return to the parlor, resume the cake-eating, drawn by the sound and the comforting scene of their parents’ fine example of “life goes on.”  The family unit is all that matters.

The Halloween scene had moments of treats and tricks, and serves to put proper perspective on life’s challenges.  It’s easy to fight off pretend goblins and make-believe doom; it’s a lot scarier to face moving away from your comfortable house, your friends, and everything familiar to be forced into the great unknown.

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

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

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

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

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

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

 

90th Anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash

James Stewart's dazed expression at the panicked customers demanding all their deposits in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash speaks volumes to the audience who remembered the crash and lived through its aftermath.  His quick decision and energetic parceling out of meager funds saves the bank with two dollars to spare at closing time.  Today we mark the 90th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash.

Many movies of the 1930s reflected and illustrated the Great Depression with unblinking frankness despite, as Mary Astor noted in her memoir Mary Astor--A Life on Film:

“The national situation was tragic, but it wasn’t our tragedy.  It was something that was happening ‘out there’ and wasn’t it awful, but did you read Variety today?  People stood in line at the employment agencies but they also stood in line at the theaters.”  (p.81)

“These were the years called by the extravagant name of the Golden Years, maybe because nobody ever had it so good as the movie-makers.  In our fortress of films we were safe from dust bowls and grinding poverty, breadlines and alphabet agencies.”  (p. 109)

The buildup to the Crash was also extensively covered by Hollywood in its 1920s pre-Code party mode -- the vamps, the lascivious key-hole views of wild parties, and occasionally, a look at the even more wild spree on Wall Street.  The Marx Brothers capped the madness by adding more of their own in The Cocoanuts from 1929 a few months before the crash, which we covered in this post.

The Roaring Twenties (1939) attempts to cover it all -- the boom, the bust, the gangsters that appeared to usher the era in and out again, but takes the Crash with a clearly clichéd and nostalgic view.  It's easier to put a label on an event or an era when we are looking at it in the rearview mirror.  Here 90 years on from that event, from which we have only a few images of people swarming to the Stock Exchange when the panic began, we still dismiss it with a bemused and somewhat condescending eye.  We cannot imagine ourselves running to our local banks and screaming for our money, and not getting it (not all banks were so fortunate as to have George Bailey and his two dollars left).

We covered The Roaring Twenties here in this post -- ten years ago on the 80th anniversary of the Crash.  Have I really been writing this blog for twelve years?  We were coming down off a financial crisis then, ten years ago.  I have, I confess, feelings of more ominous foreboding for the one we're entering right now, but I can still take comfort in George Bailey's desperate and gusty response to a crisis. 

The timeline of the crisis that ultimately launched us into all those great Great Depression movies was this:

On Wednesday, October 23, 1929, the stock market fell about 4.6 percent, but rallied on Thursday the 24th in heavy trading.  Bankers stepped in and bought up shares, similarly to what the Fed is doing today, to prop up the market.  By Friday the 25th, the crisis seemed to have been averted.

But Monday, October 28th, when the market reopened, stocks dropped again.  Tuesday, October 29th, "Black Friday," the bottom fell out and the stock market collapsed.

That event is what we like to peg the beginning of a new era, but the market did not actually stop falling.  It slid down a bit more through several months and did not actually hit its bottom until July 1932, when 90 percent of its 1929 value had been lost.

Of course, as devoted investors like to point out, if one had bought stocks in August 1932 and held them, they would be rich because the stock market went up after that.  Well, yes, but it did not reach its 1929 level until 1954 -- 25 years later.  Fine if you're young and bought in (not a whole lot of people had the money, let alone confidence in Wall Street, to buy stocks in the depths of the Depression), but if one was middle-aged or a senior, the ball game was over.  What was lost was never to be recouped.

History, as is said, does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes, in a quote often attributed to Mark Twain.  I like to take a lesson from charts and graphs, from the testimony of people who experienced an event -- and from George Bailey, who always seemed to be behind the 8-ball but who thought fast and stayed on his feet.

May we all be here in ten years, marking the 100th anniversary of the start of the Sound Era with curious, bemused, and somewhat condescending commemorations of the Crash of 1929.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Mary Astor - 1930 portrait

This is Mary Astor in a portrait from Stars of the Photoplay, a book of photos of Hollywood stars published by Photoplay Magazine in 1930.  The brief biographical note mentions is she 5-foot, 5 inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, and became a WAMPUS star in 1926.  At the time of this photo, she had been recently widowed when her husband, director Kenneth Hawks "was killed in an airplane accident over the Pacific" while filming Such Men are Dangerous in January 1930.  His brother was director Howard Hawks.

By this time, Mary had been a silent film star for nearly a decade, would have a long career ahead in "the talkies."  Three more marriages awaited her, a scandal that nearly ended her career, and a couple of fascinating books she would write about the whole shebang.  We discussed Mary Astor in this post on her remarks about her career and Hollywood.  We covered her work here in Claudia and David (1946) and in This Happy Feeling (1958)

But this sepia-toned, come-hither shot featuring those lowered, large eyes under pencil-thin brows comes in the middle between her silent screen work and The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Great Lie (1941), Dodsworth (1936) and all the greater films of her career, the films for which we remember her.  Here she is 24 years old.  She has already experienced so much.  So much is still ahead of her.

Mary Astor's Life on Film

Mary Astor wrote one of the best “movie star” autobiographies when she spoke intimately of the film industry and the studio system, but with a surprisingly analytical and objective voice.  Mary Astor – A Life on Film (NY: Delacorte Press, 1971) presents a world that no longer exists, revealed through the sharp eyes of an intelligent woman with a gift for writing that is rare among biographies and autobiographies of Hollywood’s great players. 

Today we turn the blog over to Miss Astor.

On transitioning from silent to sound film:

“There was much talk about ‘talking pictures,’ and most people thought that it would be a loss to an art form.  It was felt that instead of being more realistic, it would be a sort of two-dimensions…Theatre had sound, and color and three dimensions, and true reality.  Actors from the theater had difficulty in the movies—it was a real translation—and a movie-trained actor rarely made it in the theater.  There was a little something called sustaining a scene which a film actor was never called upon to do.  His acting was done in bits and pieces…But soon we were to be supplied with that most expressive organ of emotion: the larynx.”  (pp. 62-63)

“For while we did not have to adhere as strictly to the words of a script, the words were there, and had to be learned and spoken.  Sometimes when a scene was going well and a pair of actors were in step we would add something or take a different tack.  Today it’s called improvisation.” (p.74)

The movies had sound now, but because they had sound, the “sound stages” had to be kept quiet during filming.

“I can remember I had difficulty adjusting to the deathly silence after I started making sound pictures; it was disconcerting, a hollow void.  That pleasant murmur, the director’s voice saying little helpful things, ‘fine, now you hear footsteps—and freeze!” (p. 74)

On being isolated in Hollywood while the Depression destroyed lives just outside the studio walls:

“The national situation was tragic, but it wasn’t our tragedy.  It was something that was happening ‘out there’ and wasn’t it awful, but did you read Variety today?  People stood in line at the employment agencies but they also stood in line at the theaters.”  (p.81)

“These were the years called by the extravagant name of the Golden Years, maybe because nobody ever had it so good as the movie-makers.  In our fortress of films we were safe from dust bowls and grinding poverty, breadlines and alphabet agencies.”  (p. 109)

On the peculiar subliminal tossing away of one’s personal past when a star was born:

“It was as though actors’ lives began the day they got their first check for acting, and to speak of parents and peers, of schools, of activities in other lines of business would decrease the actors, lessen them as individuals.  Even their beginnings were spoken of as discoveries rather than as strivings on their part.  They might have had hard times, small parts, done a little starving; but it was never spoken of as growth, of learning, of becoming.  They had always been there, fully developed, just waiting for the spotlight to pick them up and reveal their talent.”  (p.81)

On her MGM mother roles:

“I was in my late thirties, and so it played hell with my image of myself.  And my femme fatale image of the Diary days [she refers to the famous scandal of her diary made public and nearly destroyed her career] went right down the Culver City drain.” (p. 171)

On the creativity of acting:

“I could form my boundaries in the air, the proscenium, the limits wherein I could move—and they were felt as though I could reach out and touch them.”  (p.115)

In “Thousands Cheer (1943)”:

“I played the mother of Kathryn Grayson, a very lovely girl with a fine coloratura soprano.  She was quite fascinating in her total concentration on music.  Often we stood together in front of the camera waiting for the lighting to be set, saying nothing.  Kitty would have a vague, lost look on her face and I’d whisper, ‘Sing Kitty Cat!’ and out it would pour—the song she’d been singing in her mind—no beginning, no hesitation, just another breath, the middle of an aria, perhaps.  It was like squeezing a Mama doll.”  (p.173)

On modern film (of the late 1960s and early 1970s):

“…no one longed for innovation, for change, more than I did, for I was often up to my knees in dreck.  What troubles me is the direction that the changes and innovations have taken.  For they are just as drecklich and boring in their own way.”  (p. 187)

“I admire the young film-makers for they try new things, new concepts, but I think they are just as much in danger of getting trapped in clichés as at any time in film-making history.  Audiences will get just as tired of people wrestling in bed as they did of Tom Mix kissing his horse.” (pp 186-187)

“We need identification that can purge but not lower one’s spirit…This is not accomplished by shotgun stimulation.  Multiple action, strobe lighting, flashing, psychedelic color, split second subliminal outs.  It’s exciting, yes, but very tiring…Linear action can accomplish much more.  It can build interest and tension, and then resolve that tension by something satisfying or thought-provoking.”  (p. 92).

“To ‘tell it like it is’ is an impertinence, because it just isn’t, not everywhere.  Therefore, it become propagandizing.”  (p. 93)

“I watch the new ones, the new breed, and when they do something great and fine, I’m proud.  And when they do things that are blatantly bad, I am ashamed.  But I can’t disinherit them, for no matter how much they may feel that it is a whole new thing, it isn’t really.  It is a continuation.  For what they have today was built upon the great and fine and blatantly bad jobs we did—we old movie-makers.”  (p. 219)

We've mentioned other quotes from this book in this previous post on Golden Age Perspectives of Film Sex and Violence.  This marvelous book is currently out of print, but check your library.  Her previous book, My Story-An Autobiography was published in 1959 and covers more about her personal life.  She also wrote several novels.

It is in A Life on Film where she leaves us with the remark most quoted: “There are five stages in the life of an actor: Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor?”

This post is my contribution to the Mary Astor Blogathon, sponsored by Tales of the Easily Distracted, and Silver Screenings.  Please have a look at the other blogs participating in this fun event to pay tribute to a wonderful actress and a remarkable lady.

 

One Romantic Night (The Swan) - 1930

“One Romantic Night” (1930), AKA “The Swan” shows a world, and a medium, in transition. The world is one in which fairly tales about princesses are out of step with the Jazz Age just passed. The decade ahead will bring plenty of fairly tales, but they will be about shop girls instead. The medium was the dawn of talking pictures, which had not yet delivered a freedom of expression they’d promised; instead the actors and crew were shackled to the demanding and unforgiving microphones.

“The Swan” was remade in 1956 with Grace Kelly in the lead, with Alec Guinness as the Prince she pursues, and Louis Jourdan as the lovelorn tutor who pursues her. We discussed “The Swan” here. Comparisons are inevitable and must make up the bulk of this post. I won’t go too deeply into the plot, as we’ve covered that in the previous post.

Most glaringly different is the absence of the sad and lovely speech the Prince makes comparing the Princess to a swan and reminding her, and us, of her responsibility to remain true to her birthright. Here, the Prince tricks the Princess into becoming his bride. She slaps on a cloche hat and they run off together in an automobile. An attempt to modernize the piece?

Lillian Gish, in her talkie debut, was in her middle 30s at the time of this film, but with her grace and beauty, this is not necessarily a detriment to playing a much younger character with regal poise. She looks every inch the princess. Her princess, however, is a warmer, more confident young woman than Grace Kelly’s princess, who was tortured by her own diffident angst. Interestingly, there are moments when Miss Gish actually sounds a great deal like Grace Kelly in her careful intonations of Ferenc Molnár’s lines (Maxwell Anderson adapted the script). Their voices sound quite similar.

Rod La Rocque plays Prince Albert, who here is a much more caddish fellow than the Prince appeared in the 1956 remake. We meet him at a debauched soiree saying farewell to a line of girlfriends. Alec Guinness’s prince was reserved, a muddled fellow bumbling about in his own vague self-involvement. Both are struck with bouts of jealously and resentment, but La Rocque has less humor, less depth. At times he has more spark. He is a playboy. He also has one of the most grotesquely toothy grins one will ever find on film.

Conrad Nagel is very appealing as the love struck tutor who is wounded by the Prince’s sarcasm and the Princess’s pity. His deeper, modulated voice carries better than the other actors, and he seems to easily leave behind the silent film mannerisms that many carried into the sound age.

This would include Marie Dressler, who is the most animated of the group and raises the level of the ambitious mother to broad comedy.

O.P. Heggie rounds out the principle cast as the friar uncle, confidant of many, and voice of reason.

Reportedly there was creative conflict on the set between director Paul Stein and Miss Gish.  Some of the film's unevenness may be due to that.  Still, there are a few lovely framed shots of the rose garden, and a dramatic tracking shot while La Rocque and Lillian Gish are dancing. The camera watches Conrad Nagel, his beautiful dark eyes with their pained expression, watching them.

Overall, the film misses the wry, gentle humor of the 1956 version. Most of us might prefer the 1956 remake, which, far removed from both the Jazz Age and the transition into talkies, is free to indulge in a long-ago fairy tale world about a princess, ironically starring an actress who became a real princess as that film was released.

But the 1930 version was, itself, a remake. “The Swan” was first made as a silent movie in 1925 featuring Frances Howard as the Princess, Adolphe Menjou as the Prince, and Ricardo Cortez as the tutor.

The obligatory stiffness of scenes in the first sound remake is likely less due to this being adapted from a stage play than it is due to the modern sound equipment. Mary Astor makes her typically astute observation on those transitional years of early sound when actors were made awkward. From Mary Astor - A Life on Film (NY: Delacorte Press, 1971):

“At that point in technical development, talkies were nothing but a poor imitation of theater itself. Silents were an entirely different medium. It was a way of telling a story -- images created the emotion -- a direct appeal…"

Talkies required more rigid camera setups: "Everything would have to be straight cuts, no fade-ins or fade-outs, no dissolves. All the fluid movement of the camera would be lost. It would be static, dull, tied to a microphone. You couldn’t go outdoors…

“Even in more intimate scenes, you could never speak while moving around. Of course, you could hide a microphone in things. It was only slightly smaller than a breadbox, but it could be done.” (pp 73-74).

I think this passage can help us appreciate the stylistic choices of this film and give us a bit more understanding when it comes to appreciating what at times seems a very static movie.  The fairy tale was hobbled by the reality of the new technology.

Golden Age Perspectives on Film Sex and Violence

In a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter (August 3, 2012), director Peter Bogdanovich is interviewed (as told to Gregg Kilday) on movie violence and the horrific movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado this past July. Mr. Bogdanovich’s directorial debut in 1968 was, coincidentally, “Targets”, which concludes with a sniper shooting the audience at a drive-in movie.  He also wrote the screenplay.

Bogdanovich responds, “Violence on the screen has increased tenfold. It's almost pornographic. In fact, it is pornographic. Video games are violent, too. It's all out of control. I can see where it would drive somebody crazy.”

Mr. Bogdanovich’s remark may be refreshing to many of us classic film fans, whose preference for older films may indicate a preference for less film violence and the opinion that film violence can inspire a more violent society (obviously not necessarily the opinion of all of us). I wonder if his opinion is based only on his being a veteran filmmaker questioning the course younger filmmakers are taking? His “Targets” was shocking for its day and meant to be. But then, he was a much younger man.

Does his moral outrage simply stem from getting older?

Emotional and mental maturity are worthy of respect. Often it seems our present day mores are rife with ignorance and immaturity.

How much movies play into making our society more violent or sexually promiscuous one could discuss forever and never reach agreement. What I find interesting, and quite poignant, are the first calls against film violence and graphic sexual situations from those classic film actors who found themselves, like Peter Bogdanovich, getting older in an industry so drastically changed that they no longer recognized it.  How bewildering that must have seemed.

How much more shocking would the films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps films like “Target” been to a Golden Age studio contract player now middle aged or older and still looking for work?

Mary Astor: “I admire nudity and I like sex, and so did a lot of people in the Thirties. But, to me, overexposure blunts the fun…Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear. Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible until it was touched and then it cut deep. Now it is so blunt that it merely bruises and leaves ugly marks. Nudity is fine in the privacy of my own bedroom with the appropriate partner. Or for a model in life class at art school. Or as portrayed in stone and paint. But I don’t like it used as a joke or to titillate. Or be so bloody frank about.” (Mary Astor- A Life on Film, NY: Delacorte Press, 1971, pp 90-91).

Audrey Hepburn: “It’s all sex and violence. I don’t like guns, and I can’t strip because I don’t have the body for it. I’m too scrawny. So I don’t know what the future holds…But, whatever happens, the most important thing is growing old gracefully.” (Rex Reed, Valentines & Vitriol, NY: Delacorte Press, 1977, p.59)

Victor Jory: “I don’t know if it’s a moral thing or not…but over the years—and I started acting when I was 16—you develop certain standards. I don’t want to be photographed with naked ladies and I don’t want to say certain words in films. In private conversation, I use four-letter words, but I don’t want to use them in front of an audience” (Syndicated, NEA, Williamson (West Virginia) Daily News, May 23, 1977, p. 8)

Ginger Rogers: “I enjoyed a happy image in films. Why should I become a destructive force in the minds of the young people in this country who grew to love Fred and Ginger on the Late Show? No, thank you. I can do creative things elsewhere. I don’t want to stoop to horror films.” (Reed, p. 158)

Mary Astor: “I don’t think Garbo with her clothes off, panting in a brass bed, would have been more sexy than she was.” (Astor,p. 92)

Dana Andrews, during his tenure as President of the Screen Actors Guild denounced nude scenes as demeaning for actresses (New York Times, December 23, 1963).

William Holden accepted both his age and the state of the movies, even welcomed it, on his return in “Network” (1976): “What am I? A craggy-faced, middle-aged man. I can’t grow younger. People seeing “Network” say, ‘God! He’s getting old.’ Fortunately, they don’t have reruns of their past on TV…at least I no longer have to sit on the edge of Gloria Swanson’s bed with one foot on the floor and my overcoat on. The movies have grown up and so have I.” (Reed, p. 189).

Holden was one of the few Golden Age stars who, if they wished, could find work in starring roles in the 1970s, not just cameo roles.   We might compare him to Meryl Streep or Clint Eastwood, who both are commanding fabulous salaries and are as much in demand as they were, say, 30 years ago in the early 1980s. They are older--elderly--but their stature as stars has only grown and not diminished with age.

But, despite the fantastic technological developments--computers, cell phones, etc.--in our everyday lives, the movies have not changed as drastically in the 30-year period between 1982 and 2012, as they did between, say 1940 and 1970. Our social standards, for want of a better term, are not that different today from the early ‘80s. Television has changed; the language and subject matter of network “family” shows today are equal to (or surpass) what was shown on late-night TV in the early ‘80s, and cable television surpasses everything.

The movies have plateaued to a level of public taste being irrelevant, or, judging from the box office take of many films, non-existent. It has become, using the terminology of the stock market for a moment--“what the market will bear.”

In the early 1970s the Golden Age stars observed the first experimentations with pushing the boundaries, and they must have felt like dinosaurs.

Mary Astor: “I admire the young film-makers for trying new things, new concepts, but I think they are just as much in danger of getting trapped in clichés as at any time in film-making history. Audiences will get just as tire of people wrestling in bed as they did of Tom Mix kissing his horse.” (Astor, pp. 186-187)

Pearl Bailey: “Why do all the movies have to be pornographic? Ten minutes after the picture starts, before I get the popcorn open, they’re in bed. For every ten minutes in the bed, I’d like to see fifteen minutes in the shower gettin’ clean again. Equal time for hygiene, that’s all. The courts let the criminals go free, nobody controls the guns the maniacs are carrying around—there are a thousand things we gotta change instead of worryin’ about who’s got the oil and who’s got the wheat.” (Reed, p. 83)

Mary Astor again, perhaps most eloquent on the impact of film: “We need identification that can purge but not lower one’s spirit…This is not accomplished by shotgun stimulation. Multiple action, strobe lighting, flashing, psychedelic color, split second subliminal cuts. It’s exciting, yes, but very tiring.” (Astor, p. 92)

“…To ‘tell it like it is’ is an impertinence, because it just isn’t, not everywhere. Therefore, it becomes propagandizing.” (Astor, p. 93)

Peter Bogdanovich, from the article noted above: “Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible. Back in the '70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, 'We're brutalizing the audience. We're going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum.' The respect for human life seems to be eroding.”

Perhaps modern filmmakers, and their younger audiences, would benefit from a greater familiarity with the heritage of classic film. It tends to lend perspective. Perspective lends maturity.  Personally, I am more offended by childishness and stupidity than I am by scenes of sex or violence (though I find heavily resorting to using sex and violence to tell a story both immature and stupid).

Don Ameche, though not risen to the level of superstar like Meryl Streep or Clint Eastwood, nevertheless was one Golden Age star who enjoyed a brief movie “comeback” in 1983 with a supporting role in “Trading Places.” He was required to use profanity, and though it made him uncomfortable, he compromised. He would perform only one take.

And he apologized to everyone on set before he cussed.

Mary Astor: “…I watch the new ones, the new breed, and when they do something great and fine, I’m proud. And when they do things that are blatantly bad, I am ashamed. But I don’t disinherit them, for no matter how much they may feel that it is a whole new thing, it isn’t really. It is a continuation. For what they have today was built upon the great and find and the blatantly bad jobs we did—we old movie-makers.” (Astor, p.219)

Claudia and David - 1946

Claudia and David (1946) takes us four years later into the marriage of Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young, first paired in Claudia (1943) discussed here on Monday. It’s an unusually successful sequel, partly because of the consistent excellence of McGuire and Young in the roles, and partly because the story, with a host of new characters, stands on its own.

Just as with my post on Claudia, I’m going to throw out spoilers here and there like the Easter bunny scattering eggs. Proceed with caution.

Elsa Janssen and Frank Twedell are back as their live-in servants, but Walter Lang is the new director at the helm. His style is less pensive and intimate than Edmund Goulding’s was on Claudia, but the film does not suffer for it. It has a broader scope, takes us outside into the community, long drives on rural Connecticut highways, and the homes of their friends. No longer is the ramshackle farmhouse an island unto itself.

And it has electricity now.

The baby McGuire was expecting at the end of Claudia is now a three-year-old boy, played by the adorable Anthony Sydes. Just as she clung too much to her mother in Claudia, here McGuire clings too much and too possessively to her son.

That, and their friendships with the opposite sex are the new challenges to their marriage.

We learn more about Young’s work as an architect. He plans to travel to a professional convention. McGuire doesn’t want him to go alone, and doesn’t want to go with him, either, and leave their son. She frets over every act of her husband’s independence. She mourns her lack of sophistication as they dress for a dinner party.

Young’s high society sister, played by the glamorous Gail Patrick, has invited a group of neighbors to her home, none of whom know each other very well.  Miss Patrick, always a pleasure to find in the cast of any movie, was nearing the end of her film career with only a few more after Claudia and David.  Unfortunately , she doesn't have much to do except lend the cachet of her own splendid elegance.

John Sutton is Miss McGuire’s dinner companion, who sneaks his oysters to her as they make fast friends. Rose Hobart, who we last saw here in Conflict (1946) as the severe wife of Humphrey Bogart is here the severe wife of John Sutton. Their marriage is a bit rocky as they are growing apart after the loss of their son. Miss Hobart obsesses over her child’s death, and tries to find consolation attempting to contact him through psychics.

Jerome Cowan, who I love to pick out in so many supporting roles, plays a phony psychic at the dinner party.

The wonderfully pompous Florence Bates, another favorite in the stable of character actors, is his champion who swears by him. He warns McGuire of a dire accident to come.

Mary Astor plays a newcomer to the neighborhood, a widow with a young daughter, who wants Robert Young to design a new house and barn on her property. They hit it on very well from the start, which will cause Miss McGuire a great deal of jealousy.

The movie, in a gentle and smooth way, debunks the traditional Hollywood idea of a “happily-ever-after” in marriage. Here, all the married couples must work at their marriages if they want to keep them.

The dinner party scene is especially intriguing, because we have all the principle characters together, and the camera can pause on different groupings and individuals as we drift in and out of conversations. The characters we don’t know well are all neatly established for us in a few minutes.

Mary Astor had already started playing mothers of grown, more glamorous, children, and the dowager parts were coming soon.  Just as with Gail Patrick, Claudia and David lets us see Miss Astor one more time as elegant and provactive. In her excellent memoir on her film career, Mary Astor - A Life on Film (NY: Delacorte Press, 1971, pp. 190-191), Mary Astor recounts her work in this film, with special emphasis on the consequences of the dinner party scene.

I enjoyed (Claudia and David)—I loved it—I wasn’t anybody’s mother and I looked lovely in beautiful clothes…

There was a big formal dinner…quite a long episode with a lot of dialogue. I think it was two or three days’ work. Table scenes are difficult, technically. People can’t be moved around, there are cross cuts, you are attached to the table. It’s a lighting and camera problem mainly, and takes time.

The first course—and only course…was oysters. Lovely fresh bluepoints on the half shell served on an iced plate with the usual accompaniments…The first day we were all delighted with the excellence of the oysters that the studio had provided us…The first two shot you spear an oyster, dip it into the sauce and swallow it quickly in time for whatever it is you have to say. While the other person is speaking, you have time to eat another, or to wipe your lips with a napkin. But, careful! It has to match: You ate an oyster at that point in the establishing shot!

No lunch that day. Just, “I think I’ll like down during lunch hour.”

After three days of eating nothing but oysters and crackers, the body rebels…Dorothy and I had the longest scenes, the most close-ups—and in spite of frequent visits to the ladies’ room, we both looked rather pale and wan in the sequence that followed…

Just as in the first movie, Claudia’s challenge is become more emotionally mature. She deals, awkwardly if earnestly, with her jealousy over Mr. Young’s attentions to Mary Astor, and in turn, she must comfort Rose Hobart, who is jealous over McGuire’s relationship with John Sutton. Sutton, in a friendly though perhaps unwise gesture, sends Dorothy McGuire a dozen white roses.

Miss Hobart, in a moving scene, recalls that her husband gave her white roses only three times in her life: when they were married, when their son was born…and as consolation just after he died.

Seeing Hobart’s faults in herself, McGuire is determined not to be jealous and  tells Young, “Don’t let’s ever fight again.”

He replies, with his usual sense, “Well, that’s a tall order, but I’d rather have you fight back than be one of those noble women.” Regarding his friendship with Miss Astor, “Do you think marriage means the beginning and end of all human contact?”

McGuire’s mother, who died in Claudia is mentioned here on a few different occasions in a nice bit of continuity, and serves as a reminder to McGuire to not cling too tightly to those she loves.

Just as in the first movie, this one has two very grave episodes that add surprising depth. The first is when their little boy comes down with measles. John Sutton brings Dorothy McGuire home from the house party and they find the child unconscious with a fever-induced seizure. Sutton, with the help of the servants, takes over and helps undress the boy and put him in a tub of water.

The doctor is another favorite character actor, Harry Davenport.

When Robert Young returns home late to the commotion, he graciously thanks Sutton for taking his place, then angrily confronts his wife for not calling him and becomes jealous himself.

The second potential tragedy happens during preparations for their own dinner party. As McGuire gets ready to dress, they get word that Young has been involved in an auto accident.

Elsa Janssen holds the fort while her husband, Frank Twedell, drives McGuire to Doc Davenport’s office, where the unconscious Young has been moved. In a striking scene, really brutal despite its simplicity, we see the viewpoint out the car window as they come upon the highway accident scene.

A cop directs traffic. Rubberneckers begin to swarm. Two cars are wrecked. One is Robert Young’s. It’s completely upside down.

We pass it slowly. The camera is mesmerized by it, and so are we. McGuire and Twedell exchange no conversation; we can almost sense her heart in her mouth.

Later, after Robert Young has been transported to the hospital and they await a call, McGuire must endure the horror of a house full of guests. They are the same Hobart and Sutton, Gail Patrick and her husband, and Mary Astor, but now they are no longer strangers and wait out the long night together. They have all been through a trial by fire, in their own marriages and in their friendships with each other. Astor, aware she has inspired jealousy in McGuire, delicately helps her to dress.  When Dorothy McGuire leaves the party to visit Young in the hospital, Rose Hobart, no longer jealous, magnanimously suggests to her husband that he drive her.

Claudia and David could have led to further adventures, but by this time Dorothy McGuire was eager to move beyond the scatterbrained wife roles. Finding challenging material to equal her prodigious talent would be a problem for the remainder of her career, more than just the common complaint of actors of being typecast. Hedda Hopper, syndicated in the Toledo Blade, August 7, 1946 wryly noted, “Dorothy McGuire got caught in her own web of excellence.”

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.