It Can't Happen Here - The movie that was never made.

It Can’t Happen Here is possibly the most important movie that was never made. It did have a cast: Lionel Barrymore was to be the star, playing the lead role of the crotchety small-town newspaper editor Doremus Jessup. The plot told of an America in the 1930s where democracy was eroded into fascism in the wake of a populist and powerful figure elected to the presidency.  It was a kind of alternate universe dystopian story -- of the kind we are living out today. 

The script, based on the best-selling novel by Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, was by Sidney Howard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who had already adapted Lewis’ book Dodsworth for Hollywood, released in 1936. Everything pointed to a most important smash hit for Hollywood with It Can’t Happen Here, and for M-G-M, which slated the movie to begin shooting in 1936.

Others in the cast were to include Basil Rathbone, Walter Connolly, and Virginia Bruce.  J. Walter Rubin was to direct.

The sets were built. But then something curious happened. The movie was canceled in February 1936. While it is uncertain on whom to pin the fault for pulling this film out of production, according to the introduction of the 2014 edition of the novel by Michael Meyer, it seems that the Hays Office had a hand in it because they did not wish to offend foreign film distributors in Germany and Italy, or their governments. Their governments, at the time, were fascist. It Can’t Happen Here was an antifascist message of warning.

But it was not a tale of warning against Germany or Italy, or indeed, any European country. The victim and chief offender in the story was the United States of America. Hence the title It Can’t Happen Here.

But, of course, it can, it has, and it may continue to appalling degrees, with the right kind of complacence.

Some of the blame for not continuing with the film was also laid at the door of studio head Louis B. Mayer, not necessarily for wishing to avoid offending foreign governments by painting fascism as a bad thing, but for the amount of money that would be lost if those foreign markets decided to boycott the movie.

The novel continued Sinclair Lewis’ body of work of examining what he felt was the corruptive hypocrisy and choking materialism of middle-class America, in works such as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth. It Can’t Happen Here, however, took a sharp turn, a more imaginative and dystopic view of what was down the road, rather than what we recognized with familiar comfort as everyday life in the U.S.

The story takes place in a small town in Vermont. Doremus Jessup is the editor of the local paper, in his early 60s, married with one young son and two other grown children, and friends and colleagues and neighbors who are all affected by a strange new political upheaval in the land. The genius of the book is it portrays fascism as something that happens to a country slowly, very slowly, and with surgical precision, until the victims – its own citizens – are too helpless to do anything about it once they have recognized the crisis.

This is the template for fascism in every country. The most startling aspect of this book is that there is so much to reflect upon that is relevant today.

Doremus Jessup is acidic. He is not one to raise the call to alarm, and though we see the coming turmoil through his eyes, because, being a newspaper editor, he is observant, we see that much of the fault of not preparing for and warning people about the encroachment of fascism falls upon people like him. They are educated, but they have adopted the bemused attitude that morons may shout a little but will never carry the day, that intellectuals are protected in their own cocoons by their education, and that double-edged sword that damns us as a country – the belief that our own system of government is so perfect that it will protect us against anything, that we are so superior a people that we would never fall for a pack of lies. That the founding fathers set this nation on autopilot and that we don’t have to do anything to help steer the course.

But Doremus Jessup does observe the follies happening around him. Rather than protest, he smirks, and that is the extent of his indignation. He fluffs off much of what he sees as insignificant because the ultra-right-wing people coming into power in local, state, and national government are fools who admire bullying strongmen. Eventually, he is moved to call them out, not in angry tones, but in a merely dismissive attitude.  He scoffs, “Remember our Red Scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the OGPU were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won, the Pope would illegitimize their children?...Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how truckloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings?... Why, wherein all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

A populist figure runs for the presidency. His name is Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, and he is low on intelligence but he has a great big mouth and a certain degree of charm for those who hate progressives.

Windrip’s campaign promises include several points. One of his planks is that “all Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they should be taxed 100 percent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year... Negroes shall, by definition, be persons with at least one-sixteenth colored blood.”

Another campaign promise, “All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties as homemakers and mothers.”

We see where this is going. As fairytale fantastic as this sounds, it still echoes the idiocy and meanness of the farthest right-wing Trumpanzees of today’s political climate. They have insidiously taken their inch; they hope eventually to forcibly to take their mile.

Windrip touts himself as the hero of “forgotten men”, he glories in big rallies where he is the center of attention, and he accuses the press of lying. His fans and supporters, encouraged by his message, heap hatred upon the intellectual “elite” and they take out their hatred on blacks and on Jews.

Doremus Jessup’s family is torn, with a grown son attracted by the new fascist government and rising in its ranks, and his courageous daughter rebelling against the new order in whatever method possible with the new underground resistance.

When President Windrip is disappointed that Congress fails to pass his whacko campaign promises into law, he declares martial law and takes over sole control of the government, with the help of his colleagues in office who have been waiting for such powerful coattails to ride.  And still, there are people who think it can’t happen here.

“The most liberal for members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”

A group of right-wing vigilantes who call themselves Minute Men make up his private army and are used to put down public protests. With little hope to overcome the fascism in their government, many people attempt to escape to Canada, as does Doremus and his family, but fail. Eventually, Doremus is sent to one of the new concentration camps for resistors. The descriptions of his experiences in the camp are chilling and vivid; he is subjected to beatings and sick torture.

Across the nation, opposition groups are kidnapped and arrested, journalists foremost among them, for they are the vanguard of freedom in any republic. Doremus’ greatest sin, which he comes to acknowledge himself, is that, as a member of the free press, he did not take this threat seriously, or have the courage to speak out about it when he finally did see the trouble.

“The charity of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of big business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work,” he realizes. “It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

The media who surfed Trump’s campaign as a ratings-grabber failed their responsibility of due diligence in a time of impending crisis, which they should have foreseen and faced. 

One of the thugs who raids Doremus’ home upon his arrest finds many volumes of the works of Charles Dickens. One of the dumbbell vigilantes, looking for proof of Doremus’ lack of loyalty remarks, “That guy Dickens—didn’t he do a lot of complaining about conditions – about schools and the police and everything?” I had to smile at this; it reminded me of a comment left on my post about A Christmas Carol back in December by a reader who felt that my political views were “quite extreme” for writing about the “Dickensian” lives of the characters in A Christmas Carol, and for the IMPEACH TRUMP banner across the top of this blog that will remain as long as he remains in office. Apparently, there is, indeed, something in Dickens to rile the right and put them on the defensive.

How the characters in the novel, It Can’t Happen Here adapt to the new order, how they escape it, and how they resist, are compelling subplots to the main story, which is always in the background – that it can’t happen here. That is the greatest irony of the book, the irony on which the story is pegged. It does happen here in the story. It can happen here in real life. Even under a progressive president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we saw concentration camps for Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

Eventually, the dictator Windrip is a deposed by another dictator – as we’ve examined before in our series on fascism in America, fascism is always and inevitably cannibalistic. Fascists will always sell out each other.

The movie which was not made did have a second chance with the possibility of Lewis Stone playing Doremus Jessup, but M-G-M again decided not to go through with the project. It was adapted for the stage in 1937 by the Federal Theatre Project, which was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration – a federally funded program to keep alive vital theatre in America and to employ thousands of theatre professionals.  It was disbanded in 1939 when Congress cut its funding. However, the play opened in over twenty different productions simultaneously in eighteen different cities on
October 27, 1937, and was a smash hit.

The Berkeley Repertory Theater, of Berkeley California, produced the play in a timely offering in the fall of 2016, just before the November election.

It should be produced again. It should be produced for television for a mass audience to see. It should be made into a major motion picture.  I wish we could have seen Lionel Barrymore in it.

For Hollywood, It Can’t Happen Here is unfinished business.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

Sometimes what’s happening in the movie is not just what’s happening in the movie, but is reflective of wider influences, either intentionally or unintentionally. To certain respects that is what Another Old Movie Blog is about; movies are not made in a vacuum. Consider “Strangers When We Meet” (1960), which stars Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, and Suburbia.

The plot, which involves adultery between the two stars who are married to other people, as well as the considerable screen presence of both these two actors, are strangely almost difficult to concentrate on when there are so many suburban artifacts to amuse and entertain. The big cars, just beginning their streamlined 1960s look in which they cruise from shopping plaza to home. The houses in the suburban subdivision, the stuff inside. It’s like looking at old family photos, like recalling from Kodachrome memory what you thought was forgotten.

Peg-legged Scandinavian-inspired furniture and decorative boxes on the coffee table that housewife Kim Novak fills with cigarettes. She bumps into Kirk Douglas at the grocery store, a circus of bright colors and food preservatives, a bazaar of angle parking and time saving meals for people on the go. No Diet Caffeine-Free Coke. No organic veggies or free-range chicken. No such thing as gluten allergies. Just modern pre-packaged foods with good nourishing things like salt and sugar, and plenty of cigarettes to have on hand for the guests. Grapefruit may be 19 cents a pound, but these two skip fresh veggies and fruit for the stuff in cans. It’s the modern way.

Douglas is a freelance architect who works at home. Driving his little son to the bus stop, he sees Kim Novak, the mother of another little boy, and takes an immediate interest. He is the pursuer and she the reluctant object of his interest. With a seemingly stable home life, a wife played by Barbara Rush, with whom he appears to have a good relationship, we are uncertain as to why he pursues Kim Novak so keenly. He does not seem a skirt chaser, and is absorbed more by his work than by anything else in his life. When he meets prospective client Ernie Kovacs at a restaurant to discuss plans for Ernie’s new house, Douglas is full of talk of design and is oblivious to the waitress, whom Kovacs ogles.

Kovacs, who is a novelist, and Douglas provide an interesting contrast between two men who are both self employed in creative endeavors. They have that in common, and there is an understanding between them because of it, the struggle to produce work that is meaningful and not merely commercial; the ever-present challenge to come up with something new. Do they still have what it takes? They soon have Kovacs’ new house in common as well, the big project Douglas hopes will prove a challenge for his abilities and an achievement for his reputation. It is as much Douglas’ house as it is Kovacs’, and there is even a subtle emotional battle between them as to whose house it really belongs to, the owner or the creator?

Kovacs, egotistical, emotionally brittle, and skirt chasing, is at a crossroads in his career. He fears failing, but also fears churning out the same material to play it safe. Douglas challenges him to take chances with his new book, to go out on a limb and write about what is most important to him, not to play it safe.

Douglas wishes to do the same with his work as an architect. This is perhaps the only bone of contention we see between Douglas and his wife. She runs the home with confidence and a sense of command. She appears to quash her husband’s artistic side for the more commercial aspects of his work, regretting his decision to go freelance, and badgering him to accept a safe and dull job with a firm he does not want.

When his relationship, at first only friendship, with Novak begins, Novak takes a keen interest in his work. She likes to discuss it. She has read articles about him. They discuss Kovacs’ last book, which they have both read. She does not insult Douglas’ artistic talent by demanding he forsake it. When he shows her the lot where he plans to build Kovacs’ new house, she takes one end of the measuring tape he hands her. We watch how far they can go.

Though Novak is the more reluctant of the two to begin an affair, we see that she is the more unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, dull and preoccupied, seems unresponsive and utterly lacking in passion for her. In one melancholy scene, an anxious Novak greets him half dressed, lights dim, their son sleeping over at a neighbor’s, trying to seduce her husband, pleading him to make love to her. His awkward brush-off is as baffling as it is heartbreaking. We are not given explanations as to his indifference, because we never really get to see his side of their marriage, but it would have been a different movie if this has been explored. We are shown their twin beds, and that’s all we get.

So desperate is Novak for a physical relationship that she confesses to Douglas a disturbing incident where she once allowed a man who made a pass at her to have sex with her, after she had taken enough sleeping pills to get her passively through the experience. If her emotionally damaged vulnerability is what also appeals to Douglas, then she displays plenty of that. But her lack of courage, her passivity, will also be the biggest hurdle in their relationship.

They fall in love, and for Novak it seems to begin when he calls her “Maggie,” which is what her father called her. To her husband she is Margaret, and to her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship, she is Margaret. Played by Virginia Bruce, mother once had an affair that hurt her marriage and destroyed her daughter’s affection for her. When her mother catches on to Novak’s affair with Douglas, there is a knowing look exchanged between them. We imagine that Novak has begun to understand that mother is a human being, just as we all must come to terms with our parents being human and messing up. This, too, unfortunately, is not explored in great depth.


Baby boomers will watch this film with the irresistible attachment of nostalgia. Many had dads who looked like Kirk Douglas in the movie, with the slacks and golf sweaters, the short haircut that never seemed to change. We never knew when 1960 dad went to the barber, because his hair was always the same. He wore a jacket and tie to a house party. 1960 dad did not dress like junior. He never put himself on the same level as junior. In many ways, he was a mystery to us.

Most dads did not work at home. If they were home, they were out of a job, or on vacation. When on vacation, they painted the house. Particularly in blue collar neighborhoods, vacation trips were rare. A day at the beach or the ballpark was a treat.

But even in the working class neighborhoods, the houses were not too different from one in the neighborhood of Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. Even if working class 1960 dad and mom could not afford the same furniture and artwork that the professional classes did, they bought cheaper copies, so it looked the same. They might have furnished the whole house from the S&H Green Stamp catalogue, but it looked like the same imitation wood grain Formica coffee table. When something big was purchased, like the first color TV or the hi-fi with the automatic record changer that played Nat King Cole and Andy Williams, the neighbors were brought in to see it.

Walter Mathau, who plays another neighbor in this intriguing suburban world, makes a comment that wives view their husbands as part of the furniture. One could say that the Baby Boomer kids viewed both their parents in that way. You went home from school, there was mom, and the TV. Dad was in the basement sharpening the lawnmower blades. They were part of the house, like the appliances.

The house was the whole world. The kids might rove in great wolf packs on the street on their Schwinn bikes, but the house was the center of the universe. Dad and Mom evidently felt the same way. A $10,000 mortgage was not taken lightly; it required all their commitment, to paying the thing down, and to each other. In a sense, their lifestyle was geared not just to living in the house, but living up to it.

Even if they managed on one paycheck, they might have still had two cars. Without the car there would be no suburbia, it was like the chicken and the egg. Everywhere you wanted to go was someplace else. You stopped walking downtown. You drove there. Then you drove past there and didn’t stop anymore. There was a whole new world of shopping plazas out on the highway that in many communities was called The Magic Mile. You needed a car. It was your passport to life. They created the world we live in today, where we need a car.

Kirk Douglas drives his two-tone big ol’ convertible with the fins to the site of Ernie Kovacs’ new house. We see the house going up, bit by bit. He drives to a seaside motel for trysts with Kim Novak. They drive and drive and drive, because gas is cheap and plentiful as water.

At one point they lie on the beach, and as she tenderly strokes his naked back, she asks him about his experience during the war, confirming that her husband had also spent time in the service. It was something 1960 dads had in common; they were almost all, except very young dads, veterans of World War II or the Korean Conflict or both, though they didn’t like to talk about it. Some moms, too. This was another reason why they were so adaptable, so eager for modern things. We may look back upon them as old fashioned, but they were the most forward-looking generation of all. When they looked back, all they saw were the childhoods spent in want during the Great Depression, and the friends they knew that had been killed in the war. They wanted to move on, right now, away from all that. They got there fast. They took the car.

If 1960 Dad was a mystery, then 1960 Mom was taken for granted. Her opportunities for a career were limited. She may have pondered this; we didn’t. She must have done more than shine up her flour and sugar canisters on the kitchen counter, but we never knew. She was always busy. When the new department store opened up out on the Magic Mile, she and dad went there in the car, dressed as if they were going out to a nice restaurant. She wore stockings. He shaved, again. It was a big deal. Mom never left the house without her white gloves.

She lived in a confining world, even if that world of her suburban house was partly of her own making. For her, the confinement started from the skin out. It was a prison of girdles and garters and chastity belts.

We don’t really know what Douglas’ wife does with her time, if he’s the one bringing their boy to the bus stop and doing the marketing. She puts the groceries away, (we have several scenes of her and of Novak in their separate kitchens) and he hoists his rear end up on the kitchen counter, which is a nice touch. It’s a suburban thing to do, sit on the kitchen counter. She looks busy, impatient, as if she has somewhere else she must be, but we are never told what else is happening in her life. She seems only an appendage of her husband.

She plans a house party, and the neighbors all show up, ladies in dresses, men in coats and ties. Douglas floods the charcoal briquettes on the patio barbecue with about half a can of lighter fluid. No state of the art gas grills, here. Not a propane canister in sight. Just dump enough flammable liquid on warm coals and admire the chest-high flames.

Kim Novak and her husband arrive at the party, too. If it is a tense moment for Kirk, who flies about the place trying to be busy, trying to outrun his guilt with another martini, it is a deeply sad revelation for her. She sees the home he has made with his wife. She chats with his little boy. When she retrieves her coat from their bedroom, she sees that their twin beds are pushed together.

The guests discuss crabgrass and parenting. Her boring self-satisfied husband discusses with the other guests how hard it is to be a good father. Asked if he thinks he is a good husband, he remarks, “I think I’m a good husband. I haven’t heard any kicks yet.”

Kim Novak is not one to complain. She is too passive. Her one attempt to confront his coldness to her failed. Later, when Douglas tells her they can’t continue as they are, she resists either breaking off or asking her husband for a divorce. She cannot make herself do anything but keep things as they are.

Douglas shows her his home office and tells her, “This is where I miss you most,” still equating his passion for her with his passion for his work, which only she understands.

The real catalyst at the party is Walter Matthau, in what must have been a fun role. Early in the film he appears to be a rather solid, pontificating, dull as dishwater suburban husband and father. He complains about another man’s off-color jokes. He is, by his own admission, old-fashioned.

Not entirely. He follows Kirk Douglas around as the party winds down, insinuating he knows Douglas is having an affair. We learn that Matthau lives a double life, and has affairs with other women. Pleased that Douglas has joined the club of unfaithful husbands, he gleefully needles him. Matthau tells him his wife already suspects, and Douglas is paralyzed by that thought.

Matthau has his own motives. When he discovers Douglas’ wife alone, Matthau boldly enters their home, interrupts her when she is about to take a shower, and attempts to seduce her. Her reaction to Matthau forcing himself on her is one of panic and hysteria, leaving Matthau more soundly rebuffed than if she had hit him with a waffle iron bought with S&H Green Stamps. His expression of humiliation is very subtle acting, and terrific. But his embarrassment does not last long. When confronted by Douglas, Matthau sneers accusingly, “How am I any different from you?”

It hits home to Douglas, and he is sickened. And though at first his angry wife confronts him about his affair, tells him to get out of her life, with Miss Rush getting some great dialogue here, she later recants and begs him to stay.

Kirk Douglas’ inner conflict isn’t solved, but he ends his wife’s pain by accepting a new job in Hawaii where he is to draft plans for an entire new city. Thousands of acres of pristine native bush will be paved over for progress, and Douglas’ eyes light up at the thought of it. His wife and kids will go with him on this five-year mission. They will escape suburbia to create a new one.

But 1960 Dad and Mom likely just grew older in their three-bedroom ranch. How much alarm they felt as years passed when they noticed their daughter’s skirts getting shorter and their son’s hair getting longer we need not imagine, because we remember. We were getting older, too, and about that time they stopped being fixtures in the house and became people instead, people with whom we sometimes argued. The political and social turmoil of later decades hit them pretty hard sometimes, but mostly they weathered it. Their house was their haven from the increasingly baffling outside world. With faith and hope, they exchanged the avocado kitchen appliances for “Harvest Gold.”

Today the neighborhood has changed a bit. The houses don’t look exactly identical anymore. It’s now a land of vinyl siding covering the old cedar shakes, and replacement windows. Additions were put on over the years, sunrooms, two-car garages. The people living in these more individual-looking houses are probably more diverse, too. A lot more of them, like Kirk Douglas, are working at home now.

Then one day there’s a “for sale” sign on 1960 Dad and Mom’s house. A 50-year tenancy is over. We see their stuff at the yard sale, all over the front lawn. Remember those electric carving knives? And the vinyl LPs of cocktail music. An archeological dig couldn’t come up with more telling artifacts.

Kirk Douglas meets Kim Novak at the building site of Ernie Kovacs’ house, really their pretend house, one last time to say goodbye. The house is finished. They walk through it. It is empty, Kovacs hasn’t moved in yet, so there is no furniture, no stuff. Just the house itself with all its promise.

The builder walks in to check a few things, and he thinks Miss Novak is Mr. Douglas’ wife. They do not bother to correct him. How odd, when they have expended such effort to escape their suburban prisons, they spend their last few moments together “playing house.”