The 1920s - Then and Now series #1 - Intro

The 1920s were silent – but only as far as the movies. It was actually a loud and raucous decade, but one that, despite our image of quaint innocence, was actually strangely close to our own era socially, politically, and as regards the economy. The movies captured some of that, either intentionally or incidentally. But not all of it.

Over the next three posts were going to discuss a few films from the 1920s, including The Racket (1928), The Cocoanuts (1929), Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and Our Modern Maidens (1929). The latter two movies, both starring Joan Crawford, leave us with the impression of the decade being dominated by flappers. Perhaps the most well-known chronicler of that era, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Joan:

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

The hedonistic young woman of the 1920s with the rouged knees may have shocked her parents, but she has come down to us as a more or less comic cliché. She was called a “modern.” She has been interpreted, and innocuously, many decades later, in the film Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), and The Boy Friend (1971).

Both movies are musicals, and interestingly, while The Boy Friend had its origins as a Broadway hit starring Julie Andrews in 1954, Thoroughly Modern Millie, which starred Julie Andrews, ended up being a Broadway hit in 2002, taking the opposite direction. The movie The Boy Friend starred Twiggy, whose pencil-thin figure and wide eyes epitomized the flapper. Glenda Jackson plays an uncredited role as the stage star who breaks her foot, for whom Twiggy must go on as an understudy. That movie is a rather heavy-handed spoof of early Hollywood films, overladen with Busby Berkeley fantasy sequences.  Some dialogue, such as when Twiggy is admonished that she must go out a youngster and come back a star, are taken pretty much verbatim from 42^nd Street (1933).

The movie lacks the subtler, silly charm that Thoroughly Modern Millie had which, along with Miss Andrews starred James Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Channing, and John Gavin – who I really think was the funniest of the bunch just by being straight-faced through it all. The wonderful Beatrice Lillie appeared here in her last film. Being spoofs, they are more interested in exaggeration, as is the nature of parody, and though they are fun to watch, they are about is genuine a view of the 1920s as mock apple pie is to real apple pie. Perhaps, though, they were the vanguard of the 1970s nostalgia craze.

The 1920s is remembered for being The Era of Wonderful Nonsense, The Jazz Age.  Often films made much later that are set in that decade, such as The Helen Morgan Story (1957), which we discussed here, are jammed with slangy dialogue and visual triggers like hip flasks as a shortcut to jog something in our collective memory about the decade.

One of the few movies made after the dust of that decade had settled that actually remembered the era not with nostalgia but with chagrin and something like regret was The Roaring Twenties (1939), which we discussed here.  The movies actually made in the 1920s, however, especially the freewheeling chaos of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton films, seem to celebrate the technology that shaped the era – the phones, the cars, the flickers. The antics may be as remote to our present day as a black-and-white silent Felix the Cat cartoon to a modern-day CGI animated feature, but this fascination with technology and consumer products should key us into a mindset that was closer to our own than we realize.  It wasn't the only similarity to our era.

Though we recall 1920 as the year women won the right to vote – and all the bold flappers were called “moderns,” the decade was not really as progressive as it may seem. A generation of expatriates, writers, artists, musicians, composers, were living out their dreams overseas because of what they regarded as stifling and overbearing conservatism at home, including its most virulent and perhaps, to them, objectionable edict: Prohibition.

It was the era of the Palmer raids, the red scare and the wholesale roundup and deportation of immigrant aliens.  The National Origins Act restricted immigration. Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death in the electric chair after a trial that left much room for doubt about their actual guilt, but the climate of the red scare and sudden animosity toward the foreign-born usurped any interest in finding out the truth.  As poet Edna St. Vincent Millay noted:

[The] men were castaways upon our shore, and we, an ignorant savage tribe, have put them to death because their speech and their manners were different from our own, and because to the untutored mind that which is strange is in its infancy ludicrous, but in its prime evil, dangerous, and to be done away with.

It was the era of the Scopes trial when a high school biology teacher was tried in court for teaching anything but creationism.

It saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to its most powerful point, most especially in Indiana, with resultant beatings, lynchings, and shootings. Benito Mussolini founded a fascist regime in Italy, and Hitler began his fascist crusade, but we flirted with it, too, long before we met up with those devils in another generation.

The 1920s saw the rise of religious fundamentalism joined with materialism.  President Harding spoke of returning to “normalcy” after World War I and yearned for an orderly, Calvinistic world that never existed. The word “normalcy” never existed before that, either; it was made up for the occasion.

Under a trio of Republican presidents there were restrictive tariffs, scandal most notably in the Harding administration, and a stock market run ruthlessly like a Ponzi scheme. The shareholders’ titanic profits took precedence over the workers’ meager share (though wages did increase during the 1920s, unlike our own era), and an expansion of credit and few restrictions led to a booming economy and a dizzying stock market bubble in the year 1928.  Republicans controlled the Congress and the presidency through the decade that began with a depression and ended with one. 

It was an era of pop heroes, perhaps the most famous of which was Charles A. Lindbergh, who flew the first solo trans-Atlantic flight.  In another decade, he became involved in the America First committee and was a Nazi sympathizer.  If we think of the 1920s only in terms of “Oh, you kid,” and “23-skidoo,” it may be that the silent movies, though only a fraction of which that were made have survived, have bequeathed to us the image of an “Era of Wonderful Nonsense.”  There was a lot more going on off the set, and some of it quite serious.  Movies had been around since the turn of the twentieth century, but the 1920s was the turning point that made film a huge part of our national psyche, yet the flickers didn’t catch everything that was going on.

One could say that our era is more like the 1920s than it is of any other decade in the past century.  One film that resonates this is The Crowd (1928), which we discussed here in this previous post. This unflinching examination of a fellow whose failure to cope is summed up in one of its title cards, “We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is…until we get out of step with it.”

The excellent narrative history The Perils of Prosperity by historian William E. Leuchtenburg gives us many points on which to make the comparisons between that world and ours.  Perhaps another reason why we are left mainly with lightweight images of flappers, speakeasies, and bathtub gin is that the door slammed shut very quickly on the Jazz Age in October 1929 when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.  As Mr. Leuchtenburg remarks in a sympathetic if ominous epilogue: “Never was a decade snuffed out so quickly as the 1920s.”

Come back next Thursday, February 8th, when we’ll discuss The Racket (1928) about mobsters and political corruption—the first film to be produced by a young Howard Hughes.

The Post (2017), All the President's Men (1976), and All the King's Men (1949)

One cannot watch the movie The Post (2017), out in theaters now, without immediately recalling All the President’s Men (1976), at least for those of us of a certain age for whom the Watergate scandal carved out a huge chunk of our formative years. Making comparisons is inevitable not only between the two movies of the two overlapping scandals of the Nixon years—the publishing of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate—but obviously between the Nixon administration and the current scandals in the Trump White House. Film, either consciously or unconsciously, reflects who we are as a society. But there is one great difference in our present day experience with the Trump White House from the Nixon White House:  We are no longer able to be shocked, and we are much more willing to accept scandal as a normal fact of life. Nixon’s offenses and even crimes were far less than Trump’s.  Nixon, for all his odious activities, never committed treason.  For many people, the outrage is gone, and that may mean we have been worn down, dumbed down, or been duped by the cynicism which a former generation considered a badge of honor, eschewing formerly held idealism as a weakness.

That is not to say there are not outraged people today or idealistic people. We have only to point to the hundreds of thousands of marchers in the past year, most notably of this past weekend, which by many accounts broke records of the greatest display of public protest in the history of this country. But our cynicism, which I think we once thought of as being realistic, mature, smart and savvy, maybe even cool, has weakened us. The tough outlook turned out to be a Trojan horse. The enemies of democracy—fascists and demagogues—got past the gate.

Today we will have a look at The Post, and All the President’s Men, as well as the classic film, All the King’s Men (1949).  When All the King’s Men was produced in an era that left us, not unlike the Vietnam era, cynical in the backwash of a long and terrible war, it was a different examination of political corruption that has more to do with our current environment than the early 1970s does.  There was great courage in examining the messianic character who is corrupted by his political office and leads his state towards fascism. World War II just being over, we knew very well the evils of fascism and the ultimate slavery, death and destruction that fascism brings, so it was a little like preaching to the choir, but there was still a courageous aspect to making this movie, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren because we were in the first flush of the communist witch hunts. Any pushback on a far right candidate suggesting that fascism represented corruption, could bring an instant accusation of being a communist.

We haven’t come very far.  Any protest or comment against the current administration is likely to bring, from many quarters both official and civilian, taunts, intimidation, and even death threats. We may deride the obvious stupidity of the person issuing a death threat for calling Trump an evil piece of garbage, but we must still take it seriously because stupidity is dangerous. In our Goebbels-like era where any charge against the current administration is called “fake news” with blathering idiocy, we must always be on guard for the freedom and autonomy of the Fourth Estate.  Recently a nineteen-year-old jerk threatened to carry out a mass shooting in the offices of CNN.  Presumably, he felt he was gaining celebrity in a heroic act for the sake of his Fuhrer.

The Post, much more than those other two movies, actually is idealistic in its portrayal of journalism as the watchdog of our freedom, and that was a delight and a surprise to me perhaps because of the admittedly nostalgic view we receive of the early 1970s through director Steven Spielberg’s viewfinder. Though the story of how The Washington Post brought out the scandalous Pentagon Papers, which laid out a roadmap for the corruption in the operation of the Vietnam War (the New York Times actually published the Pentagon Papers first) is certainly intrigue enough, the director clearly understood that nostalgia was going to be part of this story for a modern-day audience. It could not help but be so. When we see the fashions, and the hairstyles, the cavernous newsroom of The Washington Post with no computers (for anyone who ever aspired to a journalistic career, the sight of a newsroom is one of the most exciting things in the world, I kid you not) the cars, the phones, any number of items that jump out at us from the background that the art director has put on the set – this is obviously going to suck us in to the time and the mood of the era.  Rather than push them at us with a teasing parody or coyness, the director seems to frankly acknowledge we are going to be interested in the nostalgic aspect of the look of the film and he invites us to look. Some of us were undoubtedly misty-eyed just seeing a mockup of a newspaper scratched over with blue pencil. Yes, there was a time when paste-up and layout actually physically meant paste-up and layout.

I can’t say that Tom Hanks reminded me very much of Ben Bradlee either in voice or demeanor, but he and Meryl Streep worked very well together. It is a film worth seeing not only because of their performances but because of the message of the movie (including a strong streak of women’s empowerment) and because it reflects the scandal of that former era that still resonates to our own.

For all that, it does not have the shock value that All the President’s Men has – still has. They are bridged, of course, by the incident of the Watergate scandal. At the very end of The Post we see a young security guard walking through a darkened building which we come to understand is the Watergate hotel. He stumbles upon a burglary in progress and he calls for the police. At the showing I attended, the theater was full of Baby Boomers, which was, in one way comfortable because everyone got the same jokes and at the very end of the movie everyone chuckled knowingly at the young security guard because we knew what was going to happen next. At the end of the film, as the credits rolled, everyone applauded. I don’t know if this movie is attracting any younger generations, but I hope so.

All the President’s Men begins at the point that The Post ends: when the young security guard discovers the break-in in progress. The genius of All the President’s Men is that it does not make any political judgment, and interestingly, no background story on the private lives of the reporters—it is a lean and muscular story only about their work and the mystery they have uncovered. Because it is a movie from the era about which it was made, there is no sense of nostalgia. There is no smiling at the lack of computers or the dial telephones; the director shows us current events. We are not looking to see if they got it right, because obviously, they did.

The movie is filmed like a spy novel or a detective story. The reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, had no idea what a hornets’ nest they’ve stumbled onto. The story comes together in bits and pieces, clues and interviews. One of the delights of the movie is seeing a roster of actors who we’ve come to know very well, including Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, John McMartin, Ned Beatty, Jane Alexander, Meredith Baxter, Allyn Ann McLerie, and others. Hal Holbrook plays the mole nicknamed “Deep Throat,” and Jason Robards plays Ben Bradlee in this version, and won Best Supporting Actor. His Ben Bradlee is more sneering, gruff and barking. Tom Hanks’ Bradlee has more of a twinkle in his eye. It was only in 2005 that the general public finally became made aware that Deep Throat was actually Deputy Director of the FBI W. Mark Felt.

The reporters go deeper and deeper and they are told by Hal Holbrook that in order to uncover the corruption they are going to have to “follow the money.” That saying was coined and made famous by this film.  We have heard it in many investigations since.

The film covers only the first seven months of the investigation by the reporters into the Watergate scandal; it does not cover everything in the book by Bernstein and Woodward, on which the movie is based. Despite the creepy realization that the reporters have uncovered something truly sinister, it is the final moments of the film that pack the most punch—because of the idealistic image that pounds home the message.  At the very end, we see the newsroom and a television on which is broadcasting Richard Nixon’s second inauguration ceremony. We see the reporters in the background typing on their manual typewriters. It is a remarkable image, and a proud one for anyone interested in journalism – indeed, the book of the movie spawned a new generation of journalists which brought, despite the scandal that inspired it, a new wave of political idealism, that what one said and what one wrote and what one believed mattered and would change the world.

The shock comes when the very last shot that shows us the staccato tapping of the unrelenting Teletype. It stamps out pounding letters (the pounding echoes the cannon salutes to the President during the ceremony on TV) in a string of simple declarative sentences listing what happened to the men involved in the Watergate scandal, bulletins of the indictments. The very last line typed out by the ferocious Teletype tells us that Richard Nixon has resigned and that Gerald R. Ford will be assuming the presidency at noon. The Teletype abruptly stops, freezing a moment in time. We look at the typed page and the sudden silence is deafening, and we are in awe that two reporters typing on manual typewriters could have brought down an administration with something so strong – and so vulnerable – as the truth. You can watch that scene here on YouTube.

All the King’s Men is actually even more stark and cynical than those two modern movies. It begins with the character Willie Stark as a small town self-taught lawyer who runs for office with honorable intentions, and by the time he reaches the governor’s mansion, he has become corrupt, bullying, his administration held up by patronage, bribes, and lies. He is a kind of self-styled messianic figure who leads his base of “hicks.” It is said that he is based on real-life 1930s Louisiana governor Huey Long (though author Mr. Warren denies this).

Broderick Crawford won the Best Actor award for his role as Willie Stark. Best Supporting Actress that year went to Mercedes McCambridge, who plays his political aide and one of his mistresses. She is riveting the moment she appears on screen, a forceful, bitter, snide, and shrewd woman who, like most of his aides and Crawford himself, seems to have no moral objective. The only goal is to win. John Ireland plays the young reporter who follows Stark and presents the story to us through his view.  Ireland is corrupted, too, when he joins the staff. His fiancée becomes Broderick Crawford’s next mistress. We might think that at some point, even though their eyes are open to what a monster Crawford is, including his longsuffering wife and adopted son, played by John Derek, they continue to allow themselves to coast in the trail of this mouthy, forceful man’s blind ambition.  He is so oily, he even subverts an impeachment investigation against him.

The state in the movie is unnamed, but it could be any state. It does not take much for certain personalities to become tyrants. But their power always comes from below, their loyal base that slavishly allows the demagogue to rule with an iron hand. Eventually, of course, all fascist regimes fail due to their own suicidal compulsion and paranoia to punish and control, especially their own supporters, to divide and subvert. We saw this in a string of movies in our series on American fascism last summer which began here with The Mortal Storm (1940).

There are certain lines in this compelling movie that echo the political environment today.  One of them, when John Ireland’s mentor, a judge, who is the uncle of his fiancée, berates him for his joining Broderick Crawford’s staff and supporting his corrupt administration despite knowing Crawford is evil.  The judge, played by Raymond Greenleaf accuses Ireland, and Crawford’s base: “You’re afraid to admit you made a mistake.”

Broderick Crawford has assembled his own private security squad.  He has taken over newspapers and radio stations.  He cannot stand criticism.  His quest for power is vindictive and full of conceit.  Interesting how this 1949 old movie parable can have such relevance today, perhaps even more than All the President’s Men or The Post. We note that in this movie, the journalist is complicit.

It is always tempting to look back on a former era and draw parallels. But obviously, no one era is an exact template for another. If we are to adopt the adage that if we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it, we must also acknowledge that we can’t recreate the mood of the original era that keeps repeating. The cynicism in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam was preceded by a truly idealistic era in the early 1960s, and that idealism lingered and helped strengthen the marchers, the reporters, the investigators, all those who stood to bring down corruption. As such, though we may compare the Trump scandals and what will eventually be the inevitable downfall of his presidency to Nixon’s, society as a whole has more in common not with the early 1970s, but not even with the late 1940s which gave us All the King’s Men. I’d like to suggest that we really have more in common socially, politically, economically, even technologically, with the decade of the 1920s.

We’ll talk about that, and the movies that illustrate this, in the coming weeks.

Have a look at trailers for The Post and for All the King’s Men here on YouTube.
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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.

Extras - A Life in the Background

Extras line up for a job in Meet John Doe (1941)

Spotting familiar “extras” is fascinating to classic film buffs, and is something we can’t help doing even while enjoying the screen time of our favorite stars.  They may have a minute or two on camera, a single line or none at all, but they contribute immeasurably to the look and tone of a movie.

Last week we discussed Beverly Washburn’s accepting work as a television extra as an older adult despite her early career of starring and supporting roles on film and TV in the 1950s.  Once in a great while, an unknown extra became a star—John Wayne was perhaps the most famous former-extra.  Sometimes they became stand-ins and then graduated to starring roles:  Joel McCrea was a stand-in for Valentino and for Wallace Reid in the 1920s.  Gilbert Roland once served as a stand-in for Ramon Novarro, and Ann Dvorak for Joan Crawford.

The plight of most extras, though, was far from hopeful and could be heartbreaking.  Gone Hollywood, an interesting book of classic film trivia by Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz notes that Central Casting, an employment registry for studio extras, came about in the 1920s as a response to the hordes of young people heading for Hollywood in search of fame and fortune.  There were more hopefuls than there were jobs, and the lucky ones sometimes snagged a role through nefarious means, including bribes and sexual favors.  Will Hayes, of Production Code fame, set up Central Casting to circumvent feared scandal when it appeared that a fair number of prospective starlets were actually prostituting themselves for work.

Central Casting established a pool of extras and a more appropriate and professional way for them to acquire work from the studios.  Hundreds were assigned jobs on films every day, but with as many as 15,000 on the rolls, there still weren’t enough roles.  It was also a factor of their employment that they supply their own costumes—street clothes, sport clothes or evening dress for scenes that required them.  The authors of Gone Hollywood reference a 1934 Photoplay magazine article about extras pooling their meager resources and living five and six to a room to share costumes and expenses, and that others were living in Hoovervilles around Los Angeles

They would usually earn an average of $5 per day and overtime, if called for.  The authors report that in 1936, only 58 out of 5,500 men and only 20 out of 6,500 women averaged three or more days of work per week.  One could earn a little more if they were willing to take roles which required them to get wet or fall off a horse.  Certain physical impairments might also be on demand for a particular film, and often there was a demand for extras based on ethnicity or race. 

It is harrowing to recall that, according to the authors, the average yearly income for an extra in the mid 1930s was only $131.36.  Think of this the next crowd scene you see.  Their plight, especially for older extras, was sometimes met with sympathy by some directors and producers, who would throw work their way whenever possible.  MGM casting director Billy Grady organized the Casting Directors Ball to raise money for extras who were ill or in need.

Perhaps the most famous of these not famous actors was Bess Flowers, who we’ve mentioned on this blog from time to time, known as The Queen of the Hollywood Extras. She worked in the background from the early 1920s through the early 1960s, in more than 350 films, as well as television.  She was one of the founders of the Screen Extras Guild.

 Gone Hollywood.  Finch, Christopher and Linda Rosenkrantz (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.) 1979.

Beverly Washburn's Reel Tears

Beverly Washburn’s memoir, Reel Tears - The Beverly Washburn Story chronicles the career and private life of an actress remembered primarily for her children’s roles and her amazing ability to cry on cue real or “reel” tears in scenes that were moving and natural.

We discussed Beverly’s appearances here in Old Yeller (1957), Shane (1953), Here Comes the Groom (1951), and the television show The New Loretta Young Show (1962-63) – which particularly showed her deft ability in both comedy and drama as a teenager. Beverly relates many anecdotes about her childhood career (which fortunately was a pleasant experience for her and which she remembers fondly) as well as the many stars with whom she worked. Jack Benny was particularly kind and was like an uncle to her.

There are two aspects to her story that I find especially interesting – first, that the roles seemed to dry up for her in her twenties. Though this is often the case for child actors – that there is a difficult transition to adult roles – it’s hard to accept how someone as talented, well-connected, and photogenic as Beverly Washburn should fall into this too-common problem. I think if I had to bet my money on anybody making a seamless transition to adult roles, it would be this exceptionally talented young woman.

The second aspect to her story that intrigues me is how in later life, after many years of being out of business, with both her and her husband supporting themselves with a string of retail and fast food jobs when employment opportunities in their own fields went scarce, Beverly returned to acting as an extra on television.

To be an extra is to occupy the lowest tier in the acting profession. It is one not always appreciated by fans (except, of course, for classic film fans – we notice everything) or even, it seems, by the industry. Her agent, who was not happy about her deciding to go for work as an extra, told her to use her married name so that she wouldn’t be recognized. As she notes, “It’s an honest job and necessary to filmmaking, but few extras ever rise above that. It’s almost the stigma: once an extra, always an extra. And extras aren’t always treated with a lot of respect.”

Ms. Washburn, now in her 70s, still occasionally works, but has come to enjoy appearing at autograph shows, where she interacts with fans and meets old friends and colleagues – including Tony Dow, with whom she appeared as a guest on Leave It to Beaver, Paul Petersen of The Donna Reed Show, and many former child stars of 1950s and 1960s television.

The memoir, published by BearManor Media, is gentle, upbeat despite a career and life that did not always run smooth, and the “Take Two” re-issue includes quite a lot of photos, including lobby card images and even scans of her contracts and filming call sheets – the kind of ephemera particularly appealing to classic film buffs. (Which, interestingly, came from her old missing scrapbook that was recovered by a friend off eBay!)

I would have liked to have seen more detailed anecdotes about particular films and television shows in her early career, but she was only a child, and for most of us, our childhood memories are a blur of us standing center stage in a world we barely comprehend. Ms. Washburn takes a warm, friendly, unassuming command of center stage as a child; it is her adult career which left her drifting with much less control. Still, a journey that led her from being the darling fodder of teen movie magazines to doggedly continuing her craft as an extra shows a love for the profession, a rare sense of humility, and perseverance that is admirable.

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.

Joy Cometh in the Morning

I think that classic film fans are idealistic.  We may differ in our lives in many ways, but we share that basic element of idealism that is likely the result of watching films from a more unabashedly idealistic -- and yet, no less troubled -- era of history.  "Watching" perhaps isn't a strong enough word; we absorb these films through a wonderful intellectual and emotional osmosis.  They give us ideas, stir up our feelings, add value to our lives in ways which I think we are actually acutely aware.  They also give us inspiration and courage.

James Stewart in the above photo comes with hat in hand to Lionel Barrymore, the Scrooge-like villain of Bedford Falls.  The great difference between Mr. Potter and Mr. Scrooge is that Scrooge will undergo redemption and become a decent human being again at the end of the story.  Mr. Potter will not.  

James Stewart as George Bailey is demoralized, defeated, crawling to him for money, for mercy.  He is at the end of his rope.  It is George, not Potter, who undergoes an epiphany with the help of supernatural aid. When his brother Harry announces at the end of the film, "A toast to my  big brother George, the richest man in town!" -- we cry, the church bells in our heads ring, and it is a moment to rejoice.  His family, his friends, his community have come to his rescue.

We are lucky to be classic film fans; those who are not may have more difficulty swallowing the idea that good can triumph over evil through something so simple as all of us helping each other.  We will need that lesson, and that kind of inspiration and courage to get through the years to come.  Fascism is evil, and it is with us in the White House, in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, and is bleeding downward to state and local offices.  There may be a time when a black and white movie about a wealthy man who strips the poor of what they have, destroying any possibility of their climbing into the middle class will be banned.  Consider how during the infamous House Un-Amercian Activities committee, which we covered in this previous post, a film like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) could be criticized because it showed a character who was a wealthy banker merely for showing him in a less than flattering light; and for showing a character who embraced far right-wing politics being punched in the face.

We've had the draconian tax bill destroying our future.  We've had the encouragement of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis.  We've had the protections stripped away, the rules broken, the nation sold out to the highest bidders, foreign and domestic.  Now look for censorship, and erasing the Bill of Rights.

Let's remember our idealism in the face of this, and have courage, and help each other.

To all who visit this blog, may I wish a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a very Happy New Year to all.  May we discover, as George Bailey did so hopefully expressed in Psalm 30:5:  "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

We'll see you next on Thursday, January 4, 2018, for another year of Another Old Movie Blog.

Mankind Was My Business - A Christmas Carol (1951) and Scrooge (1935)

John Krakowski, Chicopee, Mass., 1911, photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is a novella written in six weeks in 1843 whose power to entertain has lasted over a century and a half.  It has received several film treatments; today we have a look at Scrooge (1935), and A Christmas Carol (1951), but Dickens always invites us to look beyond the tale on the page—or the screen. There is a rich background to our experience with this story, a tale that instructs as much as it entertains.

One year I attended a local community theatre production of A Christmas Carol, which I will always remember for a charming blooper at the very end of the show.  The little boy who played Tiny Tim was lifted onto the shoulders of the man playing his father, Bob Cratchit, and he was to jubilantly shout the last line of the show: “God bless us, everyone!”  He literally stopped the show—by forgetting his line.  The other members of the cast, all dressed in some semblance of Victorian London, as much they could with a limited budget, huddled around with frozen, expectant grins, waiting for him to end the show.  Nothing.  The boy just calmly observed the audience, daydreaming with a pleasant smile from the advantage of his perch.  “Bob Cratchit” grew nervous, and perhaps a little tired, as the boy got heavier with each moment.

Crickets.  Finally, a handful of people in the audience started to shout out, “God bless us…”

And then the rest of the audience, laughing as we did so, finished the sentence, “EVERYONE!”   Then, of course, the little boy remembered he had forgotten to say something, so he quickly blurted it out, “Godblessuseveryone!”  In any other play, the audience probably would have thought that the play ended with silence, and begun to file out after some applause.  This was one of the few plays in existence where every member of the audience KNEW the last line, and we weren’t going anywhere until we heard it.  That we supplied it ourselves made for a lovely, interactive sort of theatre.

I’ve always felt that A Christmas Carol was a very interactive piece of literature.  It does not render us as passive readers or a passive theatre or film audience.  We are intimately involved because we must ponder every nuance of Scrooge’s experiences and wonder at the enormity of the lessons he is learning, and sometimes even wonder if he is actually learning them.  It has been said that author Charles Dickens is the father of the modern Christmas because of this book and its impact, and that may be so in a world where tales of Bethlehem and the Messiah seem diminished in nearly two centuries of an industrialized world where commercialism is the new religion.  I would imagine that there are many homes where the Crèche has been replaced by a ceramic village meant to evoke a largely fictional Victorian Good Old Days where the only thing held sacred is sentimentality.

Despite Tiny Tim’s blessing on us, there is really very little sentimentality in AChristmas Carol, however; it is one of the few modern Christmas tales whose message is redemption—that same powerful point of the First Christmas.  Instead of a biblical setting, we have a claustrophobic brick and mortar jungle during the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

The story has always been a favorite of mine; my twin brother and I read it aloud to each other for years, often making some of the characters sound like Yosemite Sam or Sylvester.  We were cartoon junkies at an early age.  One of my earliest memories is watching Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), with Jim Backus, of course, as Mr. Magoo; the wonderful Paul Frees supplying several voices; Royal Dano as Marley’s Ghost; and in an interesting bit of casting, Jack Cassidy as Bob Cratchit.  As delightful as this musical cartoon version is, the segment where young Ebenezer is singing about his loneliness in the boys’ school, “I’m All Alone in the World,” destroys me.  Perched on a stool in an empty classroom, trying to draw a hand on the chalkboard to pretend to grasp it—all I can think of are the playground outcasts, those with difficulty being accepted, the shy, the physically or mentally challenged, the different, those who are not approached and find it hard to approach others.  How many autistic children mourn their childhoods as being people to avoid, “A hand for a hand was planned in the world, why can’t my fingers reach?  Millions of grains of sand in the world, why such a lonely beach?”  I’ve been watching it for fifty years; it still brings tears.

This is the power of Dickens’ masterful tale, and his exquisite telling of it.  Even in a Mr. Magoo cartoon, it is not sentimental.  But neither is it so cynical that we are given a villain to despise and destroy.  It would be so easy to have Scrooge vanquished and let everyone live happily ever after, but Dickens doesn’t do that.  He shows us a sad boy who became a greedy man, and then allows him to be redeemed.

But the path to redemption is not easy.

Speaking of cartoons, I also recall watching the 1971 animated version (which you can watch on YouTube here) that is the scariest and most bleak telling of the story I have ever seen.  It haunted us as kids.  Ebenezer Scrooge is voiced by Alastair Sim.

Which brings us to the 1951 film, A Christmas Carol. Sim played Scrooge here as well, in a British-produced film that was the standard for a generation.  Movies would not revisit the story again until 1970 and the musical Scrooge.  Sim pastes a continual sneer across his face as an expression of Scrooge’s distaste for others and his sarcasm for his kindly nephew; to the many poverty-stricken renters who owe him money and whom he evicts; to his longsuffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, whom he berates for using more coal to bank the fire in their chilly office.  He even humiliates Bob by suggesting he is a fool for celebrating Christmas on the meager salary he pays him.

At the end of the movie, however, when Scrooge embraces the meaning of Christmas and the idea of charity to others, he erupts into hearty giggles, laughing at himself for trying to suppress them, which, more than other actors who have played the role, lets us see that Scrooge all along has had a sense of irony, a latent sense of humor.  Who but a man with a sense of humor could knock out, “There’s more of gravy than of grave in you,” to Marley’s Ghost.

The movie also presents us a textbook telling of the ills of capitalism, the end game of which we’re witnessing today, which seems to indicate that AChristmas Carol is in some ways as prescient as Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work.  When the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to Fezziwig’s, the company where he was apprenticed as a young man, he witnesses a venture capitalist of the day trying to get Mr. Fezziwig to invest in a new scheme where machine manufacturing takes the place of humans.  Fezziwig is a bit of a Luddite, perhaps, because he will not change his business to the new model.  “There’s more to life than money,” he replies.

The venture capitalist makes an impression on young Scrooge, and he and his partner Marley will buy out Fezziwig’s.  When one of the young clerks anxiously asks Scrooge if he will be retaining him under the new management, Scrooge replies that yes, he can keep his job—for four shillings instead of the five Fezziwig had been paying him.  And so it goes.  Even today, we know the pattern.  Scrooge learns, “control the cashbox and you control the world.”  How many in the current Republican-held Congress and White House would agree?

Dwight mill gate, Chicopee, Mass., photo by J.T. Lynch

Looking back, I suspect another reason I was always so taken with this story as a child is because it seemed real and true to me, its setting and circumstances was something that was familiar to me and with which I could identify. I grew up in a New England factory town.  Enormous manufacturing bastions of soot-stained red brick were the backdrop of my childhood, and since some of them, as well as some commercial buildings in town, date from the early 1840s when A Christmas Carol was written, you can easily, on a cold, grey, foggy December evening, imagine yourself back in the days of Charles Dickens—the scene was, as they say, Dickensian.  Generations of my family worked in these factories.  We had a few farmers, craftsmen, small business owners as well, but it was the factory workers for whom I felt the most affinity.  They seemed to have endured much, and yet enjoyed a zest for life that belied their limited opportunities.  I’ve done factory work as well, and appreciated having the opportunity to know something firsthand of their experience. 

Sophie, Chicopee, Mass., 1911, photo by Lewis Wickes Hine,
Library of Congress

The sociologist and photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, who documented child labor in the early twentieth century, came to my town and shot this photo, now in the Library of Congress, of a girl named Sophie, who tended the bobbins in a cotton textile mill here, in 1911.  The venture capitalists in Boston made a mint off her.  The dreaded poorhouse was just down the street for those—perhaps like Tiny Tim—who would never have the strength to work 13-hour days at the mill.

Much of those nineteenth century and early twentieth century industries in my town closed during the Great Depression, though some factories closed because the corporations moved their operations to the South, where there were no unions and they could pay their employees much less.  The union to which my father belonged in his 40-year factory job fought—over many, many strikes—to grant him the peace of mind in my parents’ old age they would not have otherwise had:  A modest monthly pension and decent health insurance.  They had little else at the end of their lives, but they had that.  These came from the union’s bulldog efforts; the corporation would never have been so generous otherwise.  That was a lesson from my childhood, and one that I take into my reading of A Christmas Carol.

But even Scrooge knew the importance of an employer’s benevolence, when he comes to the defense of his employer Fezziwig when the Ghost of Christmas Past chides him for his praise of a simple Christmas party at work:

“He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.”

Mr. Dickens came to New England on his first American book tour and was taken to Lowell, Massachusetts—a planned industrial city that was the model for my own town—and marveled at how the English-born Industrial Revolution exploded with a new American vigor.  He also came to my area to give readings from A Christmas Carol.  See my New England Travels blog next Tuesday the 19^th for more on Dickens’ trip through New England.

Because Dickens had been sent to a workhouse as a young man to pay off his father’s debt, some of the most poignant and politically charged passages of A Christmas Carol are borne of his firsthand knowledge of getting squashed in the cogs of the Industrial Revolution.

In A Christmas Carol, those pesky “snowflake” social do-gooders come to Scrooge asking for a donation to their fund for the poor:

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?"
"Plenty of prisons..."
"And the union workhouses." demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Soon, Marley’s Ghost will chastise him for his soul-destroying greed, and warns him not to fall into the same otherworld of everlasting torment that Marley has earned:

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

In Scrooge (1935), another British-produced film, we have Seymour Hicks in the title role, who had a long history of playing the character.  He’d been Scrooge on stage since the late 1800s, so we have an authentic bit of theatre history in this actor who’d practically originated the role on stage.  This movie also, quite interestingly, is filmed in a simplistic theatrical manner, with some scenes almost like the tableau of nineteenth century theatre, or reminiscent of silent film techniques.  The ghosts who visit him are mere shadows, we have no actors playing them, and Mr. Hicks remains center stage for most of the film—though look for a brief scene with Shakespearean actor and future father of Samantha Stevens on television’s Bewitched, Maurice Evans, in the role of a poor fellow whom Scrooge evicts.

Scrooge is more nervous in this interpretation, more eccentric and less evil than in Alastair Sim’s crusty characterization.

When Cratchit’s poor, struggling family toast Scrooge as “the founder of the feast” we are reminded that the under classes acknowledge that there are masters and there are servants—especially in the then rather rigid caste system of British society.  Particularly touching is the scene where a large banquet is held by some wealthy folk and they toast the Queen, singing “God Save the Queen.”

The camera pans back to the dark, cold, alley where a mob of poor—children and adults—wait for scraps.  They immediately stand to attention and sing the anthem as well, just as reverently and as proudly.  They are not seeking revolution.  Perhaps they cannot even imagine equity.

What these two films omit is the searing message Dickens puts in the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Present confronts Scrooge with his own arrogant assumption that the wealthy are more important than the poor. It is a lesson that the greedy need to learn over and over again.  For some, like a stupid man who would install gold toilets in his gaudy home, the lesson is too difficult to learn.

This scene was played out, however, in the excellent 1984 television version starring George C. Scott.  The Ghost refers not only to the rapacious Scrooge, but those who prop up their own power by dismissing the humanity of others:

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us… Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child."

There is a suggestion of revolution, perhaps, as well, when the ghost shows him two child specters:

"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."

That is probably the most important, most profound passage in the book.

Scrooge’s conversion is the crux of the story that really links the Modern Christmas with the Biblical One.  Dickens approached the Christian idea of salvation and loss of salvation through his world of the Industrial Revolution, and deftly merges Scrooge’s redemption—a greedy guy who has a change of heart for the sake of his fellow man, and a guy who recognizes his sins and tries to atone for them for his own sake.  The story becomes appealing for both those who are religious and those who are not.  It reaches us on all levels.  His salvation is based largely on his newfound empathy, for that is what leads to his atonement, perhaps equally if not more than his fear of eternal retribution for his behavior.  The arrogant don’t fear hell—they feel they are omnipotent, and those lacking in empathy cannot imagine the distress of others. 

But Dickens gives us a Scrooge who can change—for most of us, a herculean task. A villain who becomes a hero.  Alastair Sim and Seymour Hicks marvel that they made it to Christmas Day and a new, clean slate is before them.  Because of Scrooge's change of heart, maybe Bob Cratchit and his kids can soldier on through the Industrial Revolution a little easier.

God bless us.  Everyone.

photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress