Men Must Fight - 1933

Men Must Fight (1933) straddles the convictions of pacifism versus a willingness to go to war on provocation; it straddles a cinematic proclivity to predicting the future and yet carries forward anachronistic images to illustrate that future.  Mostly, it straddles the past and present: the former grim and the latter an airy illusion of modernity we weren’t living up to in 1933.

This is another in the films I’d like to examine this year made during the 1930s that represent our mindset and our pop culture of that pivotal decade.

The film begins during World War I, with a gentle and yet provocative shot of lovely English actress Diana Wynyard and Robert Young chatting in a charming, homey room in England, preparing to take leave from one another.  The director Edgar Selwyn handles this opening in a sensitive and tantalizing manner.  As the seconds and the chatty dialogue click by, we gradually realize they are lovers, and they are dressing, both preparing to return to wartime duties.  In another moment, as they dress, we see she is a nurse, and he is an American flyer.  We must pause a moment to reflect how handsome and charming Robert Young was in his early career, and what a remarkably confident and appealing nature he projects.  He is quite natural in an era where screen acting could still be quite mannered and even stilted.

Robert says he wants to marry her and we have it on good authority now that they have enjoyed a romantic tryst and are unmarried.  There is no discussion of mores of the time, only that she has anxiety that he may be killed in the war, and he brushes that off with boyish gallantry.

But he does die.  (Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I give no warning of spoilers, I just spit them out, so you newcomers to the blog had better adjust or go out and come in again.)

In an abrupt scene, we see a plane crash, and the body is transported to Miss Wynyard’s hospital, and it is Robert Young, and he doesn’t make it.

We are shunted to another scene where Miss Wynyard is talking with an old friend, played by Lewis Stone.  He is an American officer as well, but has never met Robert Young.  However, he knows Diana well enough to help her get a transfer, and make a gentlemanly offer to marry her.  “You don’t want your baby born in an atmosphere like this.”

The movie has barely begun and we get Pre-Code shock after shock.  Diana Wynyard at first rejects Lewis Stone because she does not love him and it would not be fair to him, and he gallantly accepts that, but offers security for her and the child.

The war ends, and Diana remarks, “Thank God it’s over and it will never happen again.”  That was the general idea during The World War, however unfortunate and inaccurate a prediction that turned out to be.  We know now the sequel to The World War began in 1939, but this movie, filmed in 1933, projects ahead at this point to 1940 and war clouds gather ominously again.  It is, however, a fictional war and is not really a remarkable prediction of World War II, but is rather a reflection of the dichotomy between the extremely strong anti-war fervor that began after World War I and continued into the early 1930s and the beginnings of militarism around the globe—first with Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, Hitler’s rise in Germany and becoming chancellor in January 1933, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. These world events had us on tenterhooks—at least those who paid attention to world news—and pacifism, isolationism, nationalism all converged and began to make even the most unwilling take stances.  Eventually, they would take sides.

Lewis Stone, we may note, in the early scenes during the World War is given a very dark dye job to suggest he is a much younger man than we see him in the 1940 scenes, which is appropriate, but even with the dark hair, and even looking trim in his officer’s uniform, we might note he still looks too old for Diana Wynyard, but this is not mentioned and perhaps we are meant to take him for her contemporary.

By the 1940 scenes, he looks like our old friend Judge Hardy, and Diana is now made up to look middle-aged and matronly.  They are married, and her baby is now a grown man, who has never been told that Lewis Stone is not his father.

Played by Phillips Holmes, young Bob is a recent college graduate with a chemical engineering degree, who is returning to the U.S. from abroad with a new girlfriend on board, played by Ruth Selwyn (who in real life was the second wife of the director, Edgar Selwyn).  When she eventually goes to meet his folks, she brings her mother along—played by Hedda Hopper in her pre-gossip column days.

Lewis Stone is a bigwig in the American diplomatic service, Secretary of State, and Diana Wynyard is a peace advocate.  With them living in their Art Deco apartment in New York City is May Robson, the grandmother.  Miss Robson gets to make snappy remarks and get away with it.

Their butler, Albert, is played by Robert Greig, who played so many butlers in his career that he must have belonged to the union.  Perhaps my favorite is his turn as Joel McCrea’s butler in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which we discussed here.

Diana Wynyard and Lewis Stone have a cozy, comfortable marriage, but trouble comes between them when a U.S. ambassador to a fictional nation called “Eurasia” is murdered and the United States finds itself on the brink of war.  The naval fleet is sent to confront Eurasia.  Diana wants Lewis Stone to resign his position, but he will not.  “I’m not obsessed with the fear that has haunted you all your life.   You’ve seen one war, you’ve seen the man you loved killed, and ever since you’ve been afraid of what might happen to his…”  He’s about to say “son,” but just then their boy Phillips Holmes enters and Diana shushes Lewis Stone.

She speaks at a pacifist rally, and he wants their boy, with his new degree, to enter the chemical engineering side of the war department because “Gas will win this war,” that it will kill not only soldiers but civilians as well.  While we know poison gas was one of the greatest horrors of World War I, it’s not being the weapon of choice in World War II makes the remark sound anachronistic, but not funny.

Lewis Stone is adamant, “Any talk of peace is not only cowardly, it’s treachery.”

Their cook, an immigrant, wants to go back to his homeland—Eurasia—to fight in its defense.  He sounds vaguely Italian, so we really don’t know where Eurasia is supposed to be.  Butler Greig gives him a boot.

One of the interesting attempts at imagining the future world of 1940 is the scenes where we see Diana Wynyard’s speech at the peace rally on television, and another scene where the characters talk on video phones.

Diana is heckled at the rally and fights break out.  Guards hustle her away to safety.  There is mob violence in the city, but Lewis Stone addresses it from their balcony, with their son’s girlfriend’s visiting brother, who is in uniform.  Mr. Stone uses the young soldier as a prop to show the crowd he is all for war.  The uniform calms the crowd and they cheer Lewis Stone for not being a pacifist.

Their boy, Phillips Holmes, however, is.  He has learned about the evils of warfare from his parents from an early age and he has no desire to join up or use his education to become a military chemical officer.  He is torn about what to do, and his girlfriend breaks up with him.  He wants to speak up about peace and his mother’s pacifist cause, but Lewis Stone intervenes in a surprisingly cruel way.

He will not let the son use his good name in the cause of promoting peace.  He tells him that he is not his real father and that he is not free to use in this way the surname that has been generously given to him.

“You have no moral right to use the name of Seward in the manner you propose or any other manner.”  Diana Wynyard cringes, she knows what’s coming.

Lewis Stone continues telling Phillips that he is illegitimate, “Your father was a brave man who died for his country.” He zealously pulls away the honor of his name and the security it represented to a much younger Diana Wynyard.

She tells the whole story to her son, who is now more torn than ever.

Men in uniform march in the streets, and the enemy from Eurasia bombs and burns New York City.  Diana Wynyard and her son’s girlfriend are caught in a cab that is blown up and overturned, but she’s not seriously injured.

Lewis Stone makes a prescient remark, “All those years we’ve sat around and waited. Talked about peace and disarmament.  It’s cost us lives of thousands of men. We weren’t prepared for a war like this.”

Phillips Holmes eventually decides to join up, not in the chemical corps with its ghastly poisons, but as a flyer, like his real father.

His mother is crushed, of course, and the hand of fate weighs heavy on her, to think of her son being a flyer like his father, Robert Young.

“Do you believe in this war?” she asks him.

“Of course not.  It’s a dirty rotten business,” he replies, but adds no less truthfully, “I’ve got to play the game.” 

His girlfriend takes him back, they are married, and in the final scene, the women are sitting on their New York City balcony watching warplanes, biplanes, flying overhead.  We have also gotten a glimpse of zeppelins. Nothing says future war like zeppelins.

May Robson remarks that the world should be run by women.  “Let the men crow and strut and fight and be ornamental.  Like roosters.  That’s the function of the male.”

The new young bride muses that if she ever has a child, he’ll never go through this, but May responds, “Fat lot you’ll have to say about it.  You’ll be just another mother.”

It is a wistful and sad ending, not terribly inspirational though one suspects a certain amount of inspiration was intended.

The movie is daring in so far as it can be; truthful in so far as it could presage the facts of another war, but it fails to give any guiding wisdom about what to do about extermination camps, atom bombs, and the total annihilation of total war.  It couldn’t, of course.  In 1933 we were still too innocent, despite the famed world-weary attitude of the Lost Generation, to imagine anything could be worse than what we had already experienced.

 *******************************

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

Sullivan's Travels - 1941 - The Butler's Admonition

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is a madcap romp and not-so-incidental grim social commentary—a most striking combination.  Writer/director Preston Sturges deftly constructs a screwball comedy around the framework of a sensitive and serious examination of poverty—while lambasting Joel McCrea’s naïve character for even seeking a social message.  As he begins his exploration of what it is to be poverty stricken so that he may produce a deep and profound message film instead of his usual comedies, Joel McCrea’s first and perhaps best admonition against such a quest comes from his butler.

“I have never been sympathetic of caricature of the poor and needy, sir.”

This is our entry in the Butlers and Maids Blogathon hosted by Rich at Wide Screen World and Paddy at Caftan Woman.  For more on butlers and maids, please see these posts by some terrific bloggers.

Robert Greig plays film director Joel McCrea’s butler in this movie, and Eric Blore his valet.  So intentionally anonymous are they that they are not given names, only referred to in credits as Sullivan’s Butler and Valet.  Both men spent much of their film careers playing butlers.  Mr. Greig, born in Australia in the 1870s, and Blore born in London in the 1880s, were perhaps destined for a life of genteel servitude on film in the caste system of Hollywood character actors.  Their accents, their ages, their physical types certainly recommended them for the job, and that indefatigable knack of being silly and supremely dignified at the same time, their very dignity being the springboard of their comedy. They died a year apart from each other in the late 1950s, an era when the British butler was becoming scarcer in Hollywood.

The movie begins ridiculously enough with Joel McCrea, a director fed up with producing comedies and seeking a serious subject worthy of a work of art, announces to the aghast studio heads played by Robert Warwick and Porter Hall his intention not to direct any more comedies.  Mr. McCrea is starving for satisfaction in his work, takes himself and his art very seriously, and having been raised with all the financial and social advantages of the monied class, is completely innocent about the harsh world of poverty.

Quite unexpectedly, the silliness is deflated like a balloon pricked with a pin early on in the movie when the fast-talking McCrea is brought short by the sonorous tones of his suddenly serious butler, Robert Greig.  Greig, unlike most Hollywood butlers, gets the honor of a closeup and a thoughtful soliloquy.

“If you’ll permit me to say so, sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty, and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.”

Mr. McCrea defends his intentions, “But I’m doing it for the poor….”

To which Mr. Greig adamantly responds, “I don’t think they would appreciate it, sir. They rather resent the invasion of their privacy—I believe quite properly, sir. Also, such an excursion can be extremely dangerous, sir.”

This is not the “walk this way” nose-in-air schtick of the Hollywood butler.

“You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches as disease might be called a lack of health, but it isn’t.  Poverty is not the lack of anything but is a positive plague, virulent in and of itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice, despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.”

Baffled and rebuffed, McCrea responds, “Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it.”

Mr. Greig answers, “Quite unwillingly, sir.  Will that be all, sir?”

Eric Blore, his valet, cleverly conceals identification in the soles of McCrea’s shoes like a mother protecting her boy at camp with nametags in his clothes, and in a phone call pretending to be a gentleman rather than a gentleman’s gentleman, he manages to trick a railroad clerk to tell him how and where a hobo might hop a freight.  He knows he cannot dissuade McCrea from his mission, but he does his best to pave the way for him.

We might like to know more about the butler’s past that would make him so articulate on the subject of poverty, but the story is McCrea’s, a well-meaning but essentially innocent and perhaps even pompous man who discovers the grim world of Depression-era poverty in a very personal way and learns to find his way back to the safety and blessed relief of comedy.

Veronica Lake is his companion on the trip, and as funny as the slapstick gets on their journey, it is astoundingly interspersed with almost documentary-like scenes without dialogue or narration of breadlines, crowded filthy flophouses, desperate Hoovervilles, and soul-crushing chain gangs. Some scenes are reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, and of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

Comedy and tragedy, after dancing around each other for a bit, finally intersect at the end of the film in a sweet, sad, and gentle scene in a crude wooden southern Black church, led by minister Jess Lee Brooks, a figure of dignity and nobleness of spirit.  After services, they are to have the special treat of showing a film and have invited the inmates of the local prison to join them.  The preacher reminds his flock, “Neither by word, action, nor by look to make our guests feel unwelcome, nor draw away from them, nor act high with them, for we’s all equal in the sight of God.”  The prisoners, shackled, file in – McCrea among them, who has been mistakenly arrested for murder—as preacher Brooks sings in his majestic bass voice, “Let My People Go.”

The oil lamps on the wall sconces are turned down, and the projector is started up, and a Mickey Mouse cartoon featuring Pluto, who struggles with flypaper stuck to him, entertains the congregation and their guests. McCrea observes the pleased reaction of everyone around him, how they laugh, and finds himself laughing.  He has discovered the magic of comedy in the war against poverty. Real-life director Sturges is far more successful than fictional director McCrea, for he has managed to combine tragedy and comedy in a way that validates both and trivializes neither.

The butler and valet are not present at Joel McCrea’s moment of epiphany.  We could not imagine them guffawing at Pluto with flypaper on his tail.  Perhaps they might have smirked only slightly with disciplined propriety and uttered to their master in clipped speech, “Very good, sir.”

*********

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.