Lost and Found: Miss Tatlock's Millions

I interrupt my consideration of The Magnificent
Ambersons for this entry in the Classic Movie
Blog Association's Comedy Classics Blogathon.
For other posts in the blogathon, click on the
link; you'll find my colleagues at CMBA holding
forth on comedies from City Lights to Pillow
Talk, from Ball of Fire to The Producers,
and on stars from Jean Harlow to Gene
Tierney. There are a lot of famous names
and revered titles on the agenda; trust
me to pick one you never heard of.

Miss Tatlock's Millions (1948) is another one of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal that I used to see regularly in late-night TV syndication, like Night Has a Thousand Eyes and Alias Nick Beal. That's where I discovered it in the late 1960s -- our local CBS affiliate dipped freely into the Paramount package, and after local news signed off at 11:30 p.m. it was movies every weeknight until the wee hours. Tatlock was one of the titles I used to search for every week in the Late Late Show listings as soon as we got the TV Guide home from the supermarket.

If (as it's sometimes said) Charade and Witness for the Prosecution are the best Hitchcock movies Hitchcock never made, then Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the best Preston Sturges movies Preston Sturges never made. Of course Sturges (like Hitchcock) remains peerless, and I wouldn't necessarily rank Miss Tatlock's Millions up there with The Lady Eve or Sullivan's Travels. But The Great McGinty? Christmas in July? Definitely. (And for that matter, miles ahead of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock or The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend.)

For starters, just take a gander at -- feast your eyes upon -- the roster of names on this poster. That's what I call a pretty deep bench. I'll get to all of them in time, but let's begin with the fine print way down there at the bottom.

Charles Brackett's name probably rings a bell, and well it should. He was Billy Wilder's writing partner for 13 years; they turned out scripts for other directors (Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Midnight, Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn) and, once Billy turned director, for Wilder himself (The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and their mutual masterpiece Sunset Blvd.) Brackett teamed almost as often with young Richard Breen (Breen was 30 in 1948, Brackett 56), and five years later they would share an Oscar (with Walter Reisch) for writing the first Titanic with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. Brackett and Breen came to Miss Tatlock's Millions fresh from collaborating with Wilder on A Foreign Affair. (And by the way, for info on another Brackett-Breen collaboration, hop over to Tales of the Easily Distracted and read DorianTB on Henry Hathaway's Niagara, another terrific Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn't make. But I digress.)

Miss Tatlock's Millions begins, like Sullivan's Travels, with a midnight brawl between two men, this time in a seedy room rather than on a speeding train. Also like Sullivan's Travels, the opener turns out to be a movie-within-the-movie tease. Not on the screen, but on the set: One of the two men crashes through a window, rolls across an overhang, falls on his back in the street below, and a voice shouts, "Okay, cut!" The director is Paramount ace Mitchell Leisen ("I had hoped he'd hit his head on the chimney coming down, but I guess that's the best we can get."), and the man who took the tumble is stuntman Tim Burke (John Lund), doubling for star Ray Milland. Leisen and Milland here make in-joke cameos, a favor to Brackett in return for ones he's done them: scripts for Leisen (Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own), roles -- and an Oscar -- for Milland (The Major and the Minor; Arise, My Love; The Uninvited; The Lost Weekend). (And say, check out that nameless script girl standing between them; eager to make an impression, or what?)

As he leaves the set, Burke is approached by Denno Noonan (Barry Fitzgerald), who found him through a picture file at Central Casting. Noonan is the social secretary (i.e., "keeper") for one Schuyler Tatlock, the eccentric (i.e., "barking mad") scion of the wealthy Santa Barbara Tatlocks, shipped off by his concerned (i.e., "embarrassed") family to the safe distance of the Hawaiian Islands. That is, he was Schuyler's keeper -- until two years ago, when Schuyler, indulging his weakness for matches, burned himself to death while Noonan was in the village indulging his own weakness for Irish whisky. Noonan never told the family, just stayed there enjoying the sunshine, tropical breezes, and $500-a-month allowance checks. But now Schuyler's grandparents have both died, and Noonan must produce him for the reading of the will; he wants to hire Burke to impersonate Schuyler, "a thousand dollars in 48 hours and no physical discomfort whatsoever." Noonan insists the family won't know the difference -- "They haven't seen him in ten years and they didn't look at him then." Looking at a snapshot, Burke admits there is a strong resemblance. Of course, he'll have to darken his blonde hair, adopt the glasses Schuyler always wore...

...and put the proper expression on his face.

Burke is still dubious, but as Noonan wisely points out, it beats falling off buildings for 150 bucks a pop, so before long they're motoring up the Coast Highway toward Santa Barbara. That's where Burke gets his first glimpse of the Tatlock estate. "Just a sweet little family cottage," Noonan explains, "with 22 bathrooms." "How come they didn't buy the Pacific Ocean too?" asks Burke. "They would've," Noonan says, "only they couldn't landscape the other side."

In that sweet little cottage up there, the heirs of Grandfather and Grandmother Tatlock have started to gather. Already there is Schuyler's younger sister Nancy (Wanda Hendrix), who lived with her grandparents, joined by her uncles Gifford (Dan Tobin) and Miles (Monty Woolley) and Miles's wife Emily (Dorothy Stickney). Emily is sweetly engrossed in her embroidery, but the two brothers are already licking their chops. Miles calculates that after all the assorted taxes and fees, their parents' estate will come to "only" about $6 million. "As a practicing communist, you should be pleased." "Gifford's not a communist, Miles dear," Emily says; "he just likes to see his name on letterheads." "Oh, I admit you're not one by conviction," says Miles. "You just haven't the guts to face being a rich man." Nancy is appalled at their naked greed and goes for a walk in the vast garden (with its $900-a-month watering bill).

Noonan comes in with the ersatz

Schuyler, announcing that Schuyler

is "a turtle" today, and he refuses

to talk to anybody but

other turtles...

 ...so Miles, Gifford and Emily have

no choice but to follow suit -- only

to have "Schuyler" change the game

and guffaw at their silly poses.

Next to arrive is Nicky Van Alen

(Robert Stack), Schuyler and Nancy's

cousin. He's a shallow, conceited Polo

Lounge Lothario who's never given a

second's thought to anything but himself

-- but he's the first one to notice that

there's something different about

Schuyler.

Finally, Burke/Schuyler meets 19-year-old Nancy, who greets him affectionately and remembers how he was "so sweet to me when I was little." Burke is speechless, not sure how to respond, and Nancy turns dolefully to Noonan. "He's worse, isn't he?" Nancy is beautiful, fetching and open-hearted, and it's a real effort for Burke to maintain Schuyler's idiot grin. This job is getting more complicated by the minute.

The last relative to arrive is imperious Cassie Van Alen

(Ilka Chase), Nicky's mother and Miles and Gifford's

sister. But when the will is finally opened and read,

there are a couple of surprises in store for the

acquisitive branches of the Tatlock-Van Alen clan.

Grandfather Tatlock, after a few small bequests to

the servants, left his entire estate to "my beloved

wife Annette Tatlock, for distribution to our heirs"

-- never suspecting that she would outlive him by

only an hour. And what nobody suspected until

now is that Grandmother Annette left a hand-written

holographic will leaving "everything I possess" to her

unfortunate grandson Schuyler -- and as things turned

out, everything she possessed at her death consisted

of the entire Tatlock estate, lock, stock and barrel.

Schuyler gets absolutely everything.

The next morning at breakfast, Miles, Cassie and Gifford fawn over their new favorite nephew, then ignore him as he climbs under the patio table, complacently sure that their conversation will go over his head -- literally and figuratively. From his perch at their feet, Burke hears the three siblings cut a deal: Miles and Gifford will have themselves made Schuyler's trustees, and will then settle a generous allowance -- "Say, $100,000 a year for life" -- on Nancy, which Cassie will gain control of by marrying Nancy off to Nicky.

Once Cassie has explained the facts of life to Nicky, he turns on the oily charm to Nancy, nurturing the crush she has had on him since childhood. "It just hit me all of a sudden," he preens, "I haven't been giving you a break. Did a miracle happen overnight? You've stepped right up into my class. I could show you around with a lot of pleasure."

That night after dinner, Nicky turns up the heat over candlelight and cocktails in the greenhouse. Meanwhile, Burke prowls protectively (and jealously) in the trees overhead, keeping an eye on the snake Nicky's progress. Suddenly he slips and falls through the glass roof, landing flat on his back at Nicky and Nancy's feet, in a real-life reprise of the stunt that opens the picture. This time, however, he's injured and momentarily stunned. Before his head can clear, he speaks to Nancy, forgetting to keep up the babbling Schuyler act. Nancy is thrilled, convinced that the shock has knocked Schuyler into his right mind, and that she has "a real brother" at last.

In the days that follow, Nancy appoints herself Schuyler's personal therapist, moving him into the room next to hers, nursing him back to health, planning to take over his education and ease him into adult society. The aunt and uncles scramble to ingratiate themselves with their newly-competent nephew. And Nicky pouts and fumes that suddenly Nancy has no time for him.

Things quickly get complicated, especially for Burke, who has fallen in love with Nancy. For Nancy too, who can't imagine why all at once her lifelong crush on Nicky pales beside her affection for her "brother". (Here the script plays with sexual taboo in much the way Brackett and Wilder did in The Major and the Minor: In the earlier picture, Ray Milland was disturbed by his feelings for the "child" Ginger Rogers, and the movie got away with it because we knew she was really an adult. In the same way, we know here that "Schuyler" isn't really her brother -- but Nancy doesn't.)

Things begin to tumble out of control, just as Burke did when he fell through the greenhouse roof. Aunt Cassie finds a mysterious bottle of hair dye under the mattress in Noonan's room, which sets her thinking, and doing a little homework. She still has a few tricks up her sleeve.

Well, I think that's about as far as I want to go; mustn't spoil everything. Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the forgotten pleasures of 1940s Hollywood. I'm told that it was a moderate success at the box office with a loyal cult following (rather similar, I imagine, to the response to the original Peter Cook-Dudley Moore Bedazzled in 1967). A quick glance at the picture's user reviews (including my own) on the IMDb testifies to the fondness for it among those who saw it, either in theaters in 1948 or (like me) later in its TV syndication.

Miss Tatlock's Millions was directed by veteran character actor Richard Haydn, who also appears (under the name "Richard Rancyd") as the family attorney who breaks the good news to "Schuyler" and the bad news to Miles, Cassie and Gifford. As Lawyer Fergel (accent on the second syllable, please), Haydn uses the patented hyper-nasal, super-enunciated voice for which he was famous, the same voice he used as the Caterpillar in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland ("Ah-whooo...aaaarrrrrre...Ah-yooo?"). Haydn could be just as memorable without the voice, most noticeably as "Uncle" Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music in 1965. (I've heard many people bemoan the fact that Christopher Plummer was passed over for an Oscar nomination in that picture, and I agree with them. But even more unjust, I think, was the failure to nominate Haydn as best supporting actor. It should have been the capstone of his career.) For Tatlock -- the first of only three pictures he directed -- Haydn adopted a style and pace less headlong and frenetic than Preston Sturges at his best, but still sprightly, giving his sterling cast plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy themselves. (Brackett and Breen's sparkling dialogue gave Monty Woolley one of his signature lines, often quoted by people with no idea of where it came from: "California, the only state in the Union where you can go to sleep under a rosebush in full bloom -- and freeze to death.")

Haydn could take considerable pride in the performance he got from John Lund. Lund's career never quite fulfilled its early promise; he seems to have spent much of it -- certainly at Paramount -- being palmed off as a taller version of Alan Ladd. Certainly, he shows here a flair for semi-slapstick comedy that was seldom given rein, and never exploited as fully as Brackett, Breen and Haydn do here. Miss Tatlock's Millions is, not to mince words, a riot, and it's largely thanks to John Lund.

Miss Tatlock's Millions is harder to find than it was in 1948, or during the 1960s and '70s on TV, but it hasn't entirely dropped off the face of the earth. It briefly appeared on VHS during the Video Stone Age. Still, it was rare enough that I considered myself lucky to score a 16mm print on eBay about six years ago. No sooner did I do that than it came out on DVD-R from Hollywood's Attic (as a general rule of thumb, if you want to ensure that a movie comes out on DVD, talk me into buying a 16mm print of it). That disc appears to have been transferred from a 16mm syndication print, but it's decent enough; the pictures in this post are frame-caps from it. But even that is out of print now, though you can still (as of this writing) find a few copies on Amazon. Miss Tatlock's Millions is long overdue for a proper DVD transfer from original elements, or at least a 35mm print -- a transfer that does justice not only to the performances, but to Victor Young's music and Charles Lang's cinematography. 

How about it, Universal?

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 1

It happens to be my personal opinion that Citizen Kane is Orson Welles's second greatest movie; I prefer The Magnificent Ambersons, and by a considerable margin. Maybe it's because I first discovered Ambersons on late-night TV in the early 1960s, a good four years before I first saw Kane. I hadn't yet heard all the tales and legends behind the making (and editing) of the picture, so I didn't know I was supposed to regard it with sorrowful disdain as The Great Saint Orson's might-have-been masterpiece yanked from his loving hands and mutilated by the mindless paws of lesser, crasser men. All I knew was what I saw on the screen, and I thought it was a terrific movie. I still do.

It's not my purpose here to try to dethrone Kane in favor of Ambersons; that's a fool's errand and I know it. Everybody who considers Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made -- i.e., just about everybody with an opinion on the subject -- has good and sufficient reasons for saying so, and I wouldn't dream of trying to talk them out of it. Personally, I've always found Kane ... well, dazzling, impressive, virtuosic and all that, certainly, and a singular achievement any way you cut it. But for me it's a rather cold movie that I rather coldly admire, like a display of fireworks seen from afar.

In Ambersons the fireworks are much closer and consequently quieter -- and they're very personal. The Magnificent Ambersons was a very personal picture for Orson Welles, too; quite a bit more personal, I think, than Citizen Kane had been. And I suspect that's why he took what happened to Ambersons so personally; his bitterness was palpable any time the title was mentioned during the last 43 years of his life. "They destroyed Ambersons," he often said, "and the picture destroyed me."

Pardon me, but nobody destroyed The Magnificent Ambersons. If the picture is not as great as it might have been -- and I do not concede that point -- I say Orson Welles deserves as much blame for it as anyone. I suspect that on some level he knew that, and I think his bitterness over it must have come from chagrin as much as righteous indignation -- maybe more.

But before I get too deep into barstool psychology, let's review the facts.

The Magnificent Ambersons, first of all, was a novel that
won Booth Tarkington the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in
1919 (the second came three years later for Alice Adams).
Born in 1869 in Indianapolis, Tarkington was successful right
out of the chute with his first novel, The Gentleman from
Indiana, published when he was 30. He was popular and
prolific, turning out some 53 novels, plays and nonfiction
books, including one published posthumously in 1947.
Like many of his contemporaries, he has drifted out of
fashion, but in his day he was nationally famous and
well respected; his Penrod books, idealized yarns of
mischievous childhood, gave Mark Twain's Tom and
Huck a good run for their money, and in 1922 the
Literary Digest proclaimed him "America's greatest
living writer".

Tarkington's current obscurity is undeserved. Certainly his
two Pulitzer Prize winners are as good as they ever
were. The Magnificent Ambersons was the middle
volume of a trilogy Tarkington called Growth (the
others: The Turmoil ['15] and The Midlander ['24]),
and is the only one of the three that remains in print.

Tarkington's inspiration for The Magnificent Ambersons was the town where he lived much of his adult life (and where he died in 1946): Woodruff Place, named for James O. Woodruff, who owned the 80 acres where the town sat, about a mile-and-a-half northeast of downtown Indianapolis. Woodruff Place was characterized by wide avenues designed for horse-and-buggy traffic,
multi-tiered fountains at the intersections, pseudo-European statuary posed under the magnolia and oak trees that lined the expansive streets, and stately, even pretentious upscale homes. Most stately and pretentious of all was Woodruff House itself. Here's a postcard image of the house in its heyday (it was demolished in the 1930s); anyone who has read Tarkington's novel (or seen Welles's movie) will readily recognize the prototype of the Amberson Mansion, Tarkington's

"house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches".

Woodruff Place began in 1872 as a tony suburb for the prosperous merchants of Indianapolis, a parkland refuge from the soot and smoke of the growing city. It was incorporated as a town in 1876, even as Indianapolis crept out to engulf it. (James Woodruff, meanwhile, didn't live to see the full flowering of his municipal namesake, dying at 38 of "congestion of the brain" in New York while planning an educational around-the-world cruise in 1879.)

New homes continued to rise for the rest of the 19th century, but the coming of the automobile accelerated both Indianapolis's growth -- by 1907, it was the fourth-largest manufacturer of cars in the world -- and Woodruff Place's decay. As cars made commuting more practical, residential suburbs sprouted ever farther from the city center, and by 1910 the town of Woodruff Place was surrounded on all sides by Indianapolis. Affluent citizens followed the city's spreading outskirts, the industrial inner city grew, and the grand homes of Woodruff Place were subdivided into apartments, sometimes as many as eight or ten, for the burgeoning blue-collar population. Finally, in 1962, Woodruff Place's long struggle for independence ended when it was annexed by Indianapolis. Today it is on the National Register of Historic Places and a designated preservation district by the City of Indianapolis.

Much of Woodruff Place's decline came after even Booth Tarkington was dead, but the handwriting was on the wall decades earlier as he mapped out his Growth trilogy. For this second volume, Woodruff Place became Amberson Addition (Tarkington's description is unmistakeable), while James Orton Woodruff was transformed into the leonine Major Amberson (and permitted to live to a ripe old age). Tarkington saw what was happening to Woodruff Place, and he chose to portray it as reflected in the decline of a single family through their failure to cope with the changing times. And Tarkington's symbol of that change was the automobile.

Magnificence, Tarkington writes, is always comparative; the magnificence of the Ambersons dated from 1873, when Major Amberson made his fortune, and it lasted "throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city". The Ambersons and their doings dominate the town's activities and its conversations; everybody knows what they are up to and cares what they say, think and do. Major Amberson has six offspring, but only three of them figure in Tarkington's plot: sons George and Sydney and daughter Isabel. Isabel in turn has two suitors: careful, quiet Wilbur Minafer ("a steady young businessman and a good church-goer") and George's best friend Eugene Morgan -- dashing, charming, and a little wild.

One night, Eugene gets a bit too wild. In a state of inebriation while trying to serenade Isabel, he stumbles through a bass viol, reducing it to splinters and himself to a mumbling heap. Humiliated by his "making a clown of himself in her front yard", Isabel refuses to accept his apologies or even to see him, and two weeks later announces her engagement to Wilbur. The wedding is a grand Amberson affair, the honeymoon as staid and careful as the groom, and Wilbur and Isabel move into their new house, a wedding present from the Major next door to (and almost as impressive as) his own, and they live there with Wilbur's unmarried sister Fanny.

Isabel is a good and faithful wife to Wilbur, but she doesn't really love him. A town dowager predicts that all her love will go to their children, "and she'll ruin 'em." The dowager is only partly wrong: Wilbur and Isabel don't have children, they have one child.

By the time he is ten years old, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's only grandchild and the apple of his adoring mother's eye, is a spoiled rotten brat, lording it over local citizens and strutting around town as if he owns the whole place -- which he assumes, by right of birth, he will someday. As a teenager he high-hats and bullies his supposed friends in a "secret club" they have formed when they dare to elect someone else president. The idea that he may be making enemies never enters Georgie's mind; it's other people's job to curry favor with him. He dismisses anyone not an Amberson as "riffraff". Among the solid citizens of the town, more than a few long for the day this haughty young prince will get his "come-uppance" ("Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there!").

So much for prologue. The Magnificent Ambersons really begins when 19-year-old George Minafer, now grown into a strikingly handsome young man, comes home from school for the Christmas holiday. His parents and grandfather host an elaborate formal soiree in his honor at the Major's mansion. It is "the last of the great long-remembered dances that 'everybody talked about'" -- because, although the Ambersons may not realize it, their town is already growing too large for "everybody" to talk about anything.

At this party George comports himself according to his idea of noblesse oblige, pretending to remember people when he doesn't (and, with some of his former boyhood friends, pretending he doesn't know them when he does). One of the people he pretends to remember is none other than Eugene Morgan, now a widower with an 18-year-old daughter, returning to town for the first time since before George was born. George doesn't know the history between his mother and Eugene, of course, but there's something about the man that he doesn't quite like.

Eugene's daughter Lucy, however, is another matter. George likes her very much; he is instantly smitten. Lucy, for her part, takes a liking to him as well, despite his rather smug and grandiose airs, which, to his consternation, she finds slightly amusing.

Eugene spends the evening dancing with Isabel and George's Aunt Fanny and talking over old times with Uncle George, the Major, and his old rival Wilbur. Fanny -- who, like many young women back in the day, was quite taken with Eugene -- revels in his return, and in a quieter way, so does Isabel.

Young George's suspicions are aroused when he learns that Eugene, who left town years ago as a struggling lawyer, has turned inventor and intends to establish a factory in town manufacturing horseless carriages. George insists that those noisy, unreliable machines will never amount to anything and suspects that Eugene is trying to weasel his way into the family's graces to get the Major to invest in his fly-by-night operation. When Fanny defends Eugene, George teases her about setting her cap for him. Fanny angrily berates him for his "mean little mind", and George is amazed to realize he must have struck a nerve.

George stifles his mild dislike for Eugene as he continues to court Lucy, never quite sure where he stands with her, but finding her so much more interesting than the "silly" girls he grew up with. Eugene, meanwhile, becomes a regular visitor in the Minafer home, taking Fanny and Isabel, and sometimes Uncle George, on frequent outings in his automobile. For all of them it seems like old times, which both amuses and unsettles young George.

Some time later, the first crack in Major Amberson's vast fortune appears when Uncle Sydney and his wife Amelia -- insufferable snobs -- decide that the town isn't fit for a "gentleman" to live in, and pressure the Major to give them their share of his estate now rather than make them wait to inherit it in his will. Uncle George holds that the estate can't handle being broken up so soon, and in the ensuing squabble Amelia makes catty allusions to rumors going around about Eugene and Isabel. Young George, his latent antipathy aroused, is alarmed, but Aunt Fanny, herself infatuated with Morgan, pooh-poohs the idea, while Uncle George dismisses it as the idle gabble of the malicious and greedy Amelia.

During young George's senior year at college, Wilbur Minafer dies, the victim of a listless constitution and his worries about a business that died just before he did, taking all the Minafer money with it. Wilbur's death therefore leaves Fanny penniless and at the mercy of her Amberson in-laws. Isabel and George agree that Fanny should continue to live with them, and they assign Wilbur's life insurance money to her to give her something of a nest-egg. Still, she remains bereft, insecure and emotionally fragile; when Georgie returns home after graduation and teases her anew about Eugene Morgan, she is quickly driven to tears.

Also on his return from college, George is appalled to discover that the broad lawn between the Amberson Mansion and his and Isabel's house has been subdivided by the Major to build five smaller houses as rental properties. George's aesthetic sensibilities are offended; even more offensive is the idea of strangers -- riffraff -- interloping on Amberson property. Uncle George fails to impress on his nephew the idea that perhaps the Major needs the money. Later, when George asks his grandfather to buy a larger two-horse carriage, or even a four-in-hand, the Major temporizes, then mumbles something about helping George get through law school. George fails to make the obvious connection; he worries that the Major is getting senile.

Eugene Morgan continues a frequent visitor at the Amberson and Minafer homes, taking Isabel and Fanny -- sometimes the Major, or Uncle George, or young George too, but always Isabel -- for drives in his motorcar. Georgie, for his part, prefers buggy rides with Lucy, but his courtship is not going well. Whenever he presses her to become engaged, she sadly parries his advances. Finally George gets her to admit that she is concerned for her father's approval and uneasy about George's reluctance to "make something of himself". George is affronted; why should he make something of himself when he's already an Amberson? The very suggestion that he enter some profession insults him. He becomes quarrelsome, and he and Lucy are estranged.

That same evening, on their front porch, as Fanny and Isabel chat, George daydreams of Lucy begging his forgiveness, promising she will never listen to her father again, that she now dislikes him just as much as George does. This is followed by another, less pleasant fantasy: He imagines Lucy surrounded by young men -- the same ones he bullied and dominated when they were boys -- and laughing gaily, giving no thought to him. Riffraff! George continues to stew over his foundering romance with Lucy, and what he sees as Eugene's meddling in his personal life. (Everything is always about George Amberson Minafer.)

One night, when Eugene comes to dinner --
without Lucy -- George's resentment boils
over. As Eugene and the Major chat about
Eugene's flourishing automobile factory,
George blurts out that automobiles are a
useless nuisance; they'll never amount to
anything and had no business being invented.
In the awkward silence that follows, the Major
chides George for his tactlessness. Eugene's
answer is worth quoting because it has become
-- partly due to the abbreviated version of it
that appears in Orson Welles's movie -- the
most famous passage from the novel:

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

 

Eugene excuses himself and leaves, while Isabel, Fanny and the Major wonder at George's rudeness. Isabel asks George why he dislikes Eugene so, but he denies disliking him -- or liking him, for that matter. He affects a pose of lofty indifference, although he is slightly perplexed when Aunt Fanny hastily whispers to him that he has "struck just the right treatment to adopt".

Some time later, when George, still brooding over his break with Lucy, again snubs Eugene, Fanny sees it and comes to George's room to congratulate him. She knows exactly what he's doing, she says, but she doesn't. In fact, she has let her own frustrated dreams of marrying Eugene Morgan poison her, and the poison festers as she sees long-buried feelings blossoming again between Eugene and Isabel. Now, misunderstanding George's motives, she says she understands that he's only trying to protect his mother's reputation, that he'd give up Lucy in a minute if it was a matter of Isabel's good name.

George is thunderstruck. In his self-absorption he hasn't given a thought to Eugene and Isabel, but now, badgering the sputtering Fanny, he learns that Aunt Amelia was right, there has been talk about them, and it has only increased since Wilbur's death. Fanny thought he already knew, but in fact she's the one who has told him. Now she tries to restrain him, but he flies into a fury.

George storms across the street to confront Fanny's friend Mrs. Johnson, a notorious gossip. Imperious as always, he demands to know who has been slandering his mother's name, but she indignantly orders him out of her house. When George turns to his uncle, Uncle George is appalled at what George has done. Doesn't he realize that he's only thrown fuel on the fire? Gossip is never fatal until it's denied, he says. Worse yet, in his nephew's eyes, he appears unperturbed at the thought of Eugene and Isabel marrying; why shouldn't they, he says, if they're both free and care about each other? Young George calls the idea "monstrous".

It is clear to Georgie that it's up to him to defend his mother's good name -- the Amberson name -- not to mention the memory of his father (whom he barely noticed when he was alive). When Eugene comes to the door to take Isabel driving, George intercepts him, refuses to let him in, tells him he is no longer welcome, and slams the door in his face.

Isabel waits in vain all afternoon for Eugene to come for her. Instead, late that evening, her brother George arrives, takes her into the parlor and closes the door. Fanny stops Georgie from barging in on them; She knows Uncle George is telling Isabel what her son has done.  Too late, Fanny realizes the damage she has done, and is aghast. She realizes that she's been a fool; she never had a chance with Morgan, and wouldn't have had, even if Wilbur had lived. She was only letting off steam, and now look what she's done.

Uncle George has brought a letter from Eugene pleading with Isabel to stand up to her son for the sake of their happiness. But George remains adamant, and the heartbroken Isabel can't bring herself to go against his wishes. She breaks it off with Eugene once again. "This time," he laments, "I've not deserved it."

The next day George encounters Lucy downtown. It is clear she doesn't yet know about the scene with Eugene. She is friendly and cordial, but she keeps the conversation light and trivial, which frustrates George. He had thought losing Lucy would be "no great sacrifice", but now that he sees her, and she offers no hint of their former intimacy, he knows otherwise. Reminding him of their quarrel, she says since they can't "play nicely", they'd best not play at all. He tells her that he and Isabel are going away soon -- indefinitely, perhaps permanently -- and he may never see her again. She expresses casual regret but wishes him "ever so jolly a time". Stung, he stalks off. Only when he is gone does Lucy show her true feelings, nearly swooning inside a nearby shop. When she gets home, she finds Fanny Minafer waiting for her, and at last she hears about what George has done to her father. Immediately after Fanny leaves, Lucy burns George's pictures and all his letters.

The next day George and his mother leave on a round-the-world tour. Fanny has warned George that Isabel's health is not good, but he refuses to believe it, says she's the healthiest person he knows. In their absence, real estate values in Amberson Addition decline sharply, so much that the Major is unable to rent all of the new houses he had built.

One evening, relaxing on the veranda, Fanny and Uncle George fall to talking about money-making opportunities in the face of the dwindling Amberson fortune. Old Frank Bronson, the Major's lawyer, has told George about a new company planning to manufacture automobile headlights; with the proliferation of motorcars like Eugene Morgan's, this could prove to be a lucrative investment. Fanny and George agree to consider putting some money into the company, agreeing also not to invest more than they can afford to lose.

They ask Eugene's opinion, and he advises caution, but by then Fanny and George have "the fever" and see the headlight company as a sure-fire way to get rich quick. They both "plunge" on the company, forgetting their resolve not to invest too much. It's a decision that will have serious consequences.

Eugene Morgan's factory continues to prosper. Soon he and Lucy are able to move from the modest house they have been renting into a luxurious new mansion which Eugene has built in a new suburb of the city, farther from the center of town and less vulnerable to the urban smoke and soot that have blighted Amberson Addition. George Amberson comes to see them after a visit to Paris where Isabel and young George are staying. The elder George tells them he was alarmed at the evident decline in Isabel's health; he tells them also that his nephew refuses to see it. He says he sensed that Isabel wants to come home, but that Georgie, without actually using force, refuses to let her. One night, Amberson says, Isabel expressed a wish to see her father once more, and it struck him that his sister was more worried about the state of her own health than about the Major's.

Finally, after nearly a year and a half abroad, even young George can see that they must return home now if his mother is ever to withstand the journey. As it is, the trip home is so arduous that by the time they arrive Isabel is too weak to walk a step, and George has to carry up to her room. A doctor and nurse have been summoned and are waiting. Fanny, Uncle George and the Major are desolate, understanding -- as young George does not, quite -- that Isabel is on her deathbed.

Eugene Morgan hears, and comes to see Isabel, but George again refuses to let him in; if it weren't for Morgan, he says, none of this would have happened. When Isabel learns that Eugene has been there, she whispers that she would have liked to see him -- just once. The next morning she is dead.

Young George is dazed and devastated; he had been clinging to the forlorn hope that she might get better. Even a month later, he is still answering the unspoken reproaches he imagines coming from Uncle George and Aunt Fanny. "What else could I have done?" Before long, his question becomes, "If I was wrong, couldn't someone have stopped me?" Fanny tells him, bleakly, that no, nobody could stop him; he was too strong, and Isabel loved him too much.

On some level, George seems to understand that his mother died of a broken heart, and that it was he and not Eugene Morgan who broke it. And even in his wretched grief and denial, he certainly knows this: He refused his mother's dying wish to see Eugene one last time.

With Isabel's death, the fall of the House of Amberson gathers a terrible momentum. Major Amberson withdraws into his own private contemplation of mortality, where his son and grandson can no longer reach him. The headlight company where Uncle George and Fanny put so much money fails, never having resolved the technical flaws in the product. No one can find a clear title to Isabel's house, the wedding present from the Major so many years ago; it seems the Major neglected to transfer the deed to Isabel or to register it with the county land office. Nor is the Major any help; his mind seems elsewhere. The two Georges hesitate to question him on the matter, but they hesitate too long; one morning a servant finds the Major dead in the easy chair by his bedroom window.

Between the money Uncle George invested in the headlight company and the share that Sydney and Amelia took (which turns out to have been the only share that was really worth anything), the Major has died virtually penniless. Sydney and Amelia, now living like royalty in their Italian villa, decline to help.

Young George loses his mother's house and land, and is able to clear only about $600 from the sale of Isabel's furniture and clothes. Uncle George, thanks to his political connections, lands a minor consulship in South America, but even then he must borrow $200 from his nephew to make the trip to his new home. At their last meeting, before boarding his train, uncle tells nephew that he's always been fond of him -- hasn't always liked him, but always been fond. You've had some hard blows lately, he says, and you've taken them like a man. There may be others in this town who are fond of you too; don't be too proud to turn to them. And with that he is gone; both men know that they'll probably never see each other again.

George's only prospect now is an $8-a-week job as law clerk to Frank Bronson, with the prospect of on-the-job training, eventually to become a lawyer himself. He and Fanny must vacate the Minafer home, and Fanny has found a place for them in a boarding house across town where some of her old acquaintances are living. But when Fanny and George look closely at their finances, they find that, for all intents and purposes, they have none. Fanny had in fact, despite her assurances to the contrary, invested every penny she had in the headlight company, and now it's gone; she has only $28 left to her name. George, after dismissing the servants and staking his uncle, has only about $200 left. The boarding house is going to cost, at a minimum, $100 a month. And George will be making $32.

George tells Frank Bronson that he can't take the job, and he hasn't time to wait to become a lawyer. He needs something that pays well right away. Bronson protests, but George explains that, well, he has much to atone for in his life, and he can't really make it up to the people he owes it to. The next best thing is to behave decently to poor Fanny, whom he has never really treated very well. Now George has heard that there are well-paying jobs for men in dangerous professions -- handling chemicals or explosives, things like that. Bronson reluctantly agrees to help George find such a job: "You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met!"

All this time, Lucy still has feelings for George, and she indirectly admits as much to her father. He doesn't tell her that he has learned that George has found a job handling nitroglycerine at a chemical plant -- a job with a high mortality rate. An old friend tells Eugene that George seems to be trying to do the decent thing for "old Fanny", and he hints that he (Eugene) might find a safer job for George. Eugene is in fact a silent partner in that chemical plant, and could arrange something without George ever knowing. But Eugene, still bitter, is unwilling to do George any favors.

On one of his Sunday walks, while Fanny is at church, George takes a melancholy stroll through Amberson Addition. The once-stately houses are now rundown, soot-stained and seedy, converted into apartment buildings, boarding houses, shops, lodge halls and the like -- or, like the Amberson Mansion and Isabel and Wilbur's old house, demolished, waiting for the rubble to be carted away. Even the newer houses the Major built as rental properties have been pulled down. The fountains at the intersections are dry and crumbling, the statues lining the streets corroded and pitted. All that's left of the family name, he muses, is the name of Amberson Boulevard itself. But a corner streetsign disabuses him: Amberson Boulevard has been changed to Tenth Street.

Returning to the boarding house, George remembers a book he saw in the parlor, a municipal tome chronicling the 500 most prominent families in the history of the city. He takes the book down, opens to the index, and looks over the names listed there: Abbett, Abbott, Abrams, Adam, Adams, Adler, Akers, Albertsmeyer, Alexander, Allen, Ambrose, Ambuhl, Anderson...

George stares a long time at the page. Five hundred families, and there's nothing between "Allen" and "Ambrose". He puts the book back on the shelf. Something has happened that has been a long time coming: Georgie Minafer has had his come-uppance -- "three times filled and running over." But all those people who so longed for it are not there to see it. "Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

In the end, it's not the nitroglycerine that gets George. Of all things, it's an automobile. One Sunday, walking downtown, he remembers seeing a young lady stepping into an expensive motorcar. He thought at the time that it might be Lucy, but he couldn't be sure. Now, standing in the street, he remembers back to that day, and while he's standing there thinking about the auto in his memory, another auto in the here-and-now runs him down, breaking both his legs. As George lies there in a haze of agony, the driver jumps out of his car and begins jabbering to police that it wasn't his fault; he's sorry for George but it wasn't his fault, and he has a witness. As George lies there dusty and bloodied, waiting for the ambulance, he mutters, "Riffraff!"

Eugene Morgan reads about George's accident in the paper while on his way to New York on business. His bitterness toward George is unchanged by the young man's misfortune, but somehow in his reverie he senses the presence of Isabel, and can see her wistful eyes, more than at any time since her death. In New York, on an impulse, he goes to see a spiritual medium, a woman he had visited once before and dismissed as a fake. Now, however, the woman gives him an ambiguous reading that faintly suggests a message from Isabel: A beautiful lady, she says, wants him to "be kind".

Has Eugene subconsciously fed cues to the woman that enabled her to lead him on this way, or was she really in touch with Isabel? Eugene can't be sure, but when he returns home he goes straight from the station to the hospital where George is convalescing. He isn't surprised to find Lucy already there.

Nor is George surprised to see Eugene. "You must have known my mother wanted you to come, so that I could ask you to -- to forgive me."

Eugene takes George's hand, and Tarkington's novel ends thus:

But for Eugene another radiance filled the room. He knew that he had been true at last to his true love, and that through him she had brought her boy under shelter again. Her eyes would look wistful no more.

 *                     *                     *

That, in a large nutshell, is the novel Orson Welles undertook to film in the autumn of 1941. It was not the first screen adaptation of Tarkington's book; there was Pampered Youth from Vitagraph in 1925, with a title change that suggests they were trying to lure the Clara Bow and Colleen Moore fan clubs. The picture evidently survives only in fragments, two of which you can see here and here on YouTube. The letter and spirit of the novel were evidently low priorities for writer Jay Pilcher and director David Smith; the picture climaxes with Eugene Morgan saving Isabel from a burning building, resulting in reconciliation with George and happily-ever-after all around. 

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre took a different tack. I have illustrated this post with pictures from Welles's movie, but the synopsis is of the original novel. I have gone into considerable detail for reasons that I think will become clear as we discuss what happened when Welles brought his version to the screen. We'll move on to that in Part 2.

To be continued...

Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships

(NOTE: I feel terribly guilty about letting the Cinedrome lie fallow for so long. Between Christmas shopping and nine performances a week of A Christmas Carol at the Sacramento Theatre Co. I haven't had the time I would like to devote to researching and writing my next post (on The Magnificent Ambersons). Soon, I promise! Until then, here's an earlier post on one of my favorite movies, for those who may not have seen it when I put it up a year ago. -- jl)

In 1949 Henry Hathaway made one of the best movies of his long career. In it, his three stars, Richard Widmark, Lionel Barrymore and Dean Stockwell (and for that matter, most of the supporting cast) each gave one of his own best performances. Down to the Sea in Ships is in fact one of the finest movies ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system, and almost nobody has ever heard of it.

I know I run the risk of overselling the product here, but I simply don't understand why Down to the Sea in Ships isn't one of the best-loved movies of all time. When the talk turns to the great seafaring stories of the screen -- Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, Captains Courageous, Moby Dick et al. -- it's a mystery to me why Down to the Sea in Ships never comes up. If there are such things as flawless movies, and there surely are, Henry Hathaway's Down to the Sea in Ships is one of them.

I say "Henry Hathaway's" to distinguish this picture from the other Down to the Sea in Ships, from 1922. That one made a star out of Clara Bow, and curiously enough, it's available on home video -- no doubt because it's in the public domain, while Hathaway's picture is still under copyright and quarantined in the 20th Century Fox vault. In the 1960s and '70s it was the other way around: Down to the Sea in Ships (1922) was gone and long forgotten, but if your local TV station had a decent film library and you were willing to stay up till two or three in the morning, you could count on seeing Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) two or three times a year. 

Before we leave the subject of Clara Bow's breakout vehicle for good, let's get one point clear: Wikipedia says that the 1922 picture "was remade by Twentieth Century Fox in 1949," but -- well, that's Wikipedia for you. (Whoever wrote the article didn't even know that it's "20th Century Fox," not "Twentieth.") In fact, there is no connection whatsoever between the two pictures -- other than the fact that they both deal with whaling ships out of New Bedford, Mass., and they both take their title from Psalm 107:23 ("They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters..."). These aren't two versions of the same story, they're two different movies with the same title; henceforth, when I use the title, I'll be talking about only one of them.

Fox chief Darryl Zanuck first set out to produce Down to the Sea in Ships in 1939 -- if not this picture precisely, at least one with this title and setting. Things got as far as sending a second unit crew into the waters of the Gulf of California to shoot background footage. But when World War II made it impossible to shoot on the open sea, or even in California's harbors, the picture went on a back burner. 

After the war, Zanuck reactivated the project and handed it over to producer Louis D. ("Buddy") Lighton and director Hathaway. Both men were working for Fox now, but they had been paired before in the 1930s at Paramount: Lighton had produced the
Shirley Temple vehicle Now and Forever, The Lives of a  Bengal
Lancer, and Peter Ibbetson, all of which Hathaway directed.

The first draft of the script was by Sy Bartlett -- that's him at right -- born
Sacha Baraniev in Russia (now Ukraine) in 1900 but raised in America from
the age of four. Originally a newspaper reporter, he became a screenwriter
for various studios in the '30s, but he was noted more for hobnobbing
in Hollywood society, hosting Sunday barbecues, and the occasional
gossip-column appearance. He served with the U.S. Army Air Corps
during World War II, then returned to Hollywood and a job at Fox.
At the time that he took his first cut at Down to the Sea in Ships,
Bartlett's most memorable work was still ahead of him: he later
turned his wartime experience into the novel and screenplay
Twelve O'Clock High (1949) for director Henry King
and star Gergory Peck.

Music historian Jon Burlingame (in his notes for the movie's soundtrack CD) says Bartlett's script underwent a rewrite by John Lee Mahin -- shown here (on the left) in a rare acting stint in Hell Below (1933) with Robert Montgomery. Like Bartlett a reporter-turned-screenwriter, Mahin already had a number of major credits on his resume, many of them -- including Red Dust, Treasure Island (1934), Test Pilot, Captains Courageous and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) -- for Hathaway's mentor Victor Fleming.

Without access to what records might be in the 20th Century Fox archives, it's impossible for me to say exactly how credit for Down to the Sea's script should shake out -- which is a pity, because the script is a truly masterful piece of work; if the picture ever gets the kind of attention it has deserved for over 60 years, maybe someone will shed some light on the subject. The writing credit on screen reads "Screen Play by John Lee Mahin and Sy Bartlett; From a Story by Sy Bartlett," which matches the general drift of the two writers' careers: story was Bartlett's long suit, dialogue Mahin's. Making an educated guess, I'd say Bartlett was responsible for Down to the Sea's distinctive blend of rousing adventure and psychological acuity, Mahin for the unerring cadence and vocabulary of the speech of 19th century New England whalermen. Or it may have been more complicated than that; Mahin gets top billing on screen, which suggests that his rewrite probably amounted to more than just touching up the dialogue.

Down to the Sea in Ships opens in New Bedford in the summer of 1887. The whaling ship Pride of New Bedford returns from a four-year voyage under the command of Capt. Bering Joy (Lionel Barrymore), the best whaler on the New England coast. He's just about the oldest, too, though he shows no signs of being ready to retire from the sea. The reason for that is his 11-year-old grandson Jed (Dean Stockwell), the youngest in a line of the whaling Joy family that extends back "mighty nigh two hundred years." Capt. Joy, though still on crutches from an injury that kept him bunk-ridden for much of the voyage, is unwilling to retire, at least until Jed is thoroughly brought up in the ways of the sea and can continue the family tradition. Jed himself is (if you'll pardon the expression) entirely on board with this; he loves the seafaring life, the only life he's ever known. He's spent the last four years -- nearly half his life -- as his grandfather's cabin boy, and is now eager to ship out again as an apprentice member of the fo'c'sle crew.

Unfortunately, the decision may be taken out of both their hands. The whaling firm's insurance company refuses to cover Capt. Joy; moreover, Massachusetts law will not allow Jed to return to sea unless he can pass an exam covering the four years of schooling he missed while he was away. Fortunately, a sympathetic school superintendent (Gene Lockhart, in a warmhearted cameo) fudges Jed's test results rather than disappoint the captain.

And a tentative compromise is reached on the insurance issue when Capt. Joy is persuaded to sign Dan Lunceford (Richard Widmark) as first mate. The firm's president (Paul Harvey) says Lunceford is a promising young seaman who only needs some experience under a master mariner like Capt. Joy, but the captain isn't fooled: he realizes that Lunceford, who has a master's license, is being foisted on him at the insurance company's behest, to be in a position to take command of the Pride of New Bedford if age or infirmity should overcome the old man.

For his part, Dan Lunceford doesn't care much for the look of Capt. Joy, nor for his sneering at Lunceford's "book-learnin'" and his college degree in marine biology; only a sweetening of his percentage of the voyage's profits persuades the younger man to ship out with Capt. Joy after all.

Once the Pride of New Bedford is out to sea, Capt. Joy plays his trump card. He tells Lunceford that he sees "the hand of Providence" in Lunceford's presence on board. Jed was allowed to ship out, he says, only on the condition that his studies be continued, and Capt. Joy is hereby assigning Lunceford, in addition to his regular duties as first mate, to be Jed's tutor during his off-duty hours. In this way, the crafty old mariner intends to kill two birds with one stone: he'll see to Jed's education, and he'll keep Lunceford too busy to undermine his authority.

Lunceford has no choice but to accept the assignment, but he does so with ill grace. Resentful at what he regards as essentially a babysitting chore, he is impatient, sarcastic and dismissive. Resentful in turn, Jed is obstreperous and uncooperative. Lunceford decides Jed is just as ornery and pigheaded as his grandfather, and he give up the lessons as a waste of his time.

Stung, Jed applies himself and in time surprises Lunceford with answers to all the questions that had stumped him before. Lunceford suddenly approaches his duties as tutor in earnest, tailoring lessons more carefully to Jed's quick and lively but unsophisticated intelligence. As the friendship grows between Jed and Lunceford, Capt. Joy begins -- rightly or wrongly -- to fear that his grandson's respect and affection are drifting away from himself and attaching themselves to Lunceford; he responds to the unexpected competition by looking more carefully at Lunceford's ideas, which he had formerly dismissed as not worth his attention. All this happens even as the Pride of New Bedford roams the waters of the South Atlantic, stalking and taking whales.

That's about as much of the plot as I care to go into here; better that you should discover the rest for yourself. Down to the Sea in Ships isn't available on home video, but it does surface (pun intended) from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel, and it's worth seeking out to discover how the three-generation, three-way relationship of Capt. Joy, Jed and Dan Lunceford plays itself out against the background of a perilous voyage contending with the forces of nature and the leviathans of the deep. Each of the three discovers qualities of strength and character in the others that he either never suspected or did not properly value at first. Each brings out the best in the other two, and allows the other two to bring out the best in him.

All this, mind you, while the movie does not skimp on action and high adventure. There are scenes of whale chases and boats lost at sea, suspenseful and beautifully shot (Joe MacDonald) and edited (Dorothy Spencer), with excellent special effects (Fred Sersen and Ray Kellogg). Capping it all is a climactic sequence in which the Pride of New Bedford runs aground on an iceberg in the fog near the horn of South America...

...with the crew desperately struggling to free themselves and repair the damage before the sea pounds their ship to splinters against the unforgiving ice. Not to mince words, it's an absolutely brilliant action/suspense set piece. Amazingly enough, it was shot entirely in a soundstage tank on the Fox lot, but it's spectacularly convincing and harrowing for all that.

Down to the Sea in Ships was Lionel Barrymore's last
starring role, on loan from MGM. Once, when introducing
Barrymore on a 1939 radio broadcast, Orson Welles
referred to him as "the most beloved actor of our time."
It was probably an exaggeration, but not by much;
Barrymore's stock in trade was playing cantankerous
old codgers with hearts of gold. Ironic, then, that the
only role for which he's widely remembered today is
Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, one of the most
thoroughly heartless characters in the history of movies.
In his own day Barrymore was more closely identified
with wise old Dr. Gillespie in MGM's Dr. Kildare series,
and with his annual holiday performances as Ebenezer
Scrooge on radio. In fact, Barrymore had been slated to
play Scrooge in MGM's A Christmas Carol (1938) until
he broke his hip in an auto accident. That injury landed him
in a wheelchair, then advancing arthritis kept him there for
the rest of his career -- until Down to the Sea in Ships.

Henry Hathaway remembered, at first, a testy working relationship with Barrymore. As he told interviewer Polly Platt:

He had everything wrong with him, most of it in his head...I said, "You're not sick, you're just destroying yourself...I have no sympathy for you. You're a glutton, you drink too much...You want to destroy yourself, you're really doing it."

Is this callousness or tough love? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Hathaway had a reputation for being tough on actors. His side of it was simply that he refused to mollycoddle them; he expected actors to report to the set ready to work. He also remembered the day they finished shooting Barrymore's scenes:

We finish the picture, he walked off the set. No wheelchair. No crutches. And he came to me and said, "Mr. Hathaway, I want to tell you, you did more for me and for my life on this picture than ever happened to me before. From my father or my mother, or from anybody. I was just simply sitting there and waiting to die."

Hathaway went on to say that they remained friends for the rest of Barrymore's life. In any case, whatever the validity of Hathaway's recollection, the evidence is there on screen: Barrymore responded -- whether out of spite or chagrin -- by giving one of his strongest performances in years. For once he's not merely being wheeled around the set acting crusty (although in his more physically active shots he was often doubled by assistant director Richard Talmadge).

I don't mean to minimize the genuine pain Barrymore surely suffered, but that wheelchair must have been a real convenience for a man who had never been all that crazy about being an actor to begin with. In youth, his real interests were in painting, writing, and composing music, but the pressure to enter the family trade (and the money to be made from it) kept him on stage, screen and radio for nearly sixty years. The role of Capt. Bering Joy was a recognizable "Lionel Barrymore type," but it was also a complex and vigorous character betrayed by age and ill health, and Barrymore the self-described ham connected with it on a more profound level than almost any part he ever played. He deserves to be remembered for this performance as much as -- indeed, more than -- for the unalloyed wickedness of Henry Potter. 

Down to the Sea in Ships was Richard Widmark's fifth movie, after his sensational debut as the giggling psycho killer Tommy Udo in Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947). In the intervening three pictures, Widmark played a woman-beating gang lord (The Street with No Name), a murderously jealous bar owner (Road House) and an underhanded western outlaw (Yellow Sky). The studio realized he was in danger of being typecast as a succession of nutjobs, sleazeballs and unsavories (because he played them so well), when what the studio really needed was another leading man. Casting him as Dan Lunceford was a conscious effort to help him segue into more sympathetic roles. It worked. Widmark went on to be one of Fox's most stalwart leading men, playing good guys (Slattery's Hurricane, Panic in the Streets), bad guys (No Way Out, O. Henry's Full House) and guys in between (Pickup on South Street, Don't Bother to Knock) -- until, like many other stars, he went free-agent in the mid-1950s.

In Down to the Sea, Widmark is top-billed, although he doesn't appear until half an hour in. His Dan Lunceford is the character who goes through the most self-surprising changes in the course of the picture. After all, Jed is an adolescent coming of age, and changes are to be expected, while Capt. Joy, though seemingly set in his ways and defiantly so, proves to be flexible, open to change, and willing to learn -- when he thinks nobody is watching and he can do it without losing face.

Capt. Joy blusters, but it's Dan Lunceford who is most nearly arrogant at the outset; part of the reason the captain scoffs at Lunceford's education is that he senses Lunceford is more than a little puffed-up about it. For his part, Lunceford treats Capt. Joy with an exaggerated politeness that stops just short of insolent sarcasm. (Capt. Joy: "You may have noticed that most of my crew generally sign on again." Lunceford [drily]: "Out of affection no doubt, sir.") His sarcasm towards Jed's lessons, on the other hand, is undisguised -- at first. In time, he comes to realize he has misjudged them both, especially the captain. By the end he's telling Jed that his grandfather is "more of a man than you or I could ever hope to be." It's an admission Lunceford could hardly have imagined making when the voyage began.

And then there's Dean Stockwell. Stockwell's first screen role came in 1945, when he was eight years old, and he's still working today -- which means that his career has now lasted longer than Lionel Barrymore's or Richard Widmark's. When I screened my print of Down to the Sea in Ships for some friends, one of them said, "Dean Stockwell was a revelation!" She was familiar with Stockwell as an adult actor, and knew he had started as a child star, but had no inkling he was ever as good as he is here. ("He was marvelous," remembered Hathaway, "just a great actor. Intense little guy.") My friend was right: Dean Stockwell's performance here is a revelation, easily (at the age of twelve) the best of his career -- and for an actor whose resume includes Gentleman's Agreement, The Boy with Green Hair, Compulsion, Long Day's Journey into Night, Blue Velvet, and the TV series Quantum Leap, that's saying something. Jed Joy is the fulcrum upon which the plot of Down to the Sea in Ships pivots, and in Stockwell's performance we see him grow from an uncertain, sometimes petulant child into the makings of a fine, strong young man -- he seems even to grow taller as the story progresses (and it's all in his acting; the shooting schedule wasn't that protracted).

Jon Burlingame says that Down to the Sea cost $2.5 million, one of Fox's most expensive pictures of 1949, and that despite good reviews and high expectations ("...so engrossingly done that the box-office appeal should be sturdy," said Variety, "...dotted with tremendously moving scenes that will stick in the memory."), it failed to break even. Not an unfamiliar story in the history of Hollywood.

I've been dancing all around something here, and I might as well come right out and say it: Down to the Sea in Ships is a masterpiece. It's not one of those "miracle pictures" I've talked about before, like Peter Ibbetson or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Making it was no departure for the Hollywood studio system; on the contrary, pictures like this were right up Hollywood's alley. If there's a miracle here, it isn't that it was made in the first place, but that it turned out so well in the end.

Henry Hathaway never worked with a better script; for that matter, neither has anyone else. Whether the credit goes mainly to John Lee Mahin or to Sy Bartlett -- or some magical, once-in-a- lifetime chemistry between the two -- Down to the Sea's script is nothing less than a work of genius. It's a rousing sea adventure, a sharp-eyed psychological study, a near- documentary reconstruction of the 19th century whaling trade, and a subtle examination of the customs and dynamics of a shipboard community in the age of sails. Nearly every line is memorable, every scene layered with nuances that reward repeated viewings. Even the name of the ship -- Pride of New Bedford -- is pregnant with symbolism: the many facets of pride, as both virtue and vice, is a major theme that runs through the story and all three of the central characters. This superb text inspired everyone who touched it -- Hathaway, his actors, photographer Joe McDonald, editor Dorothy Spencer, composer Alfred Newman, everyone -- to give it the best of their considerable abilities. The result of their efforts is (I say it again) a flawless movie. Not a work of art, perhaps -- perhaps -- but of such a high order of craftsmanship that it's all but indistinguishable from the real thing. 

If you ever get the chance to see Down to the Sea in Ships, don't pass it up. I've never shown it to anyone who didn't love it. I guarantee it: this is one of the greatest movies you never heard of.

For my other posts on director Henry Hathaway, see:
          "A Genial Hack," Part 1 
          "A Genial Hack," Part 2: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
          "A Genial Hack, Part 3: Peter Ibbetson
          Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills

Remembering the Night

This post is adapted and expanded from an article I wrote for the November 22, 2007 issue of the Sacramento News & Review.

I always dread this time of year, when the holiday movies are trotted out. You can't turn around without hearing some jackass bitch about how much he hates It's a Wonderful Life. He can't get enough of "I am your father, Luke" or "I'm King o' the World!", but Zuzu's petals once a year is just more than he can bear.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when I had It's a Wonderful Life all to myself (and yes, there was such a time). Well, almost to myself, anyhow. Certainly everybody else who knew and loved Frank Capra's picture had my own last name. Back about 1974 or so, in college, I had two friends who made a nightly ritual of staying up to watch car dealer Jay Brown's all-night movies on Channel 36 out of San Jose. One day -- and it was nowhere near Christmas -- they rushed up to me bubbling with enthusiasm for this great Jimmy Stewart movie they'd seen the night before. They figured if anyone would know about it, I would, and they were right. That was -- for me, anyhow -- the beginning of the revival of It's a Wonderful Life. And the beginning of the end for my family and me having the memory of It's a Wonderful Life all to ourselves. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad the picture finally came into its own, and I thank a merciful Providence that Capra, Stewart and Donna Reed all lived to see it. But then again, when people like that hypothetical (but all too credible) killjoy I mentioned above feel free to rag on it, sometimes I'm not so sure.

So I almost hesitate to mention Remember the Night. Maybe I wouldn't, but the cat seems to be getting out of the bag. When I wrote about Remember the Night in 2007, it was available only on out-of-print used VHS or bootleg copies of an AMC broadcast from the 1990s. Things are different now; the movie's available in an above-board (and beautiful) DVD from the TCM Web site (and as usual, there's an even better deal at Amazon), and I figure it's only a matter of time before someone runs up to me bubbling with enthusiasm about this great Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck movie they saw the other night. I want to be able to say I'm way ahead of them.

Most of the reason for Remember the Night's resurgency -- I mean in artistic terms, independent of the arcane ins and outs of who owns a film and who decides there's a market for it -- is its writer, Preston Sturges. This was the last script he ever wrote for somebody else to direct, the somebody in this case being Mitchell Leisen, then second only to his mentor Cecil B. DeMille as the alpha dog among Paramount directors (a position he would soon cede to -- or at least share with -- Sturges himself). Leisen's star has slipped a bit since his heyday in the '30s and '40s, alleviated somewhat by an excellent biography, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director by David Chierichetti, originally published in 1973 (the year after Leisen died), then revised and expanded in 1995. I'll have more to say about some of Leisen's pictures later.

Right now I'm talking about Remember the Night. The version of Sturges' script published in Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges is a facsimile of Sturges' actual typescript, dated June 15, 1939 and bearing the title The Amazing Marriage. Written in by hand on the title page is "Remember the Night[,] Or". Obviously, neither Sturges nor producer-director Leisen ever came up with a really good title. The Amazing Marriage at least has some slight connection to a line from the script, albeit one Leisen cut during shooting. The picture's final title, though, is so generic as to be meaningless.

If the title is generic, however, it's the only thing about Remember the Night that is. Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a hardboiled, tough cookie who gets busted in New York for lifting a diamond bracelet from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. MacMurray is assistant D.A. Jack Sargent, about to leave town to drive to his mother's farm in Indiana for Christmas when his boss yanks him in to prosecute Lee. Disgruntled and eager to get on the road, he takes advantage of a legal technicality and gets the case continued until after New Year's. Then he begins feeling guilty about leaving Lee in jail over the holidays and arranges to get her bailed out. To his surprise and discomfort, the bail bondsman remands Lee to his custody, and the surprise is compounded when, despite the fact that he was prosecuting her only that afternoon, the two find themselves taking a liking to one another. They even learn that they grew

up about fifty miles from each other in the same part of Indiana. So, still feeling responsible for Lee, Jack decides to take her home to spend Christmas with his mother (Beulah Bondi) and aunt (Elizabeth Patterson) and their hired hand (Sterling Holloway).

At the humble Sargent farm outside Wabash, Ind., Lee's hard shell begins to soften and melt in the glow of a household suffused by warmth, affection and mutual support -- the kind of nurturing family atmosphere that was completely missing from her own upbringing just a few towns away. This idyll of a Hoosier holiday brims with lovely moments, from Sterling Holloway leading the family in singing "The End of a Perfect Day" around the Christmas tree to the always-delightful Elizabeth Patterson (here at her sweetest) ruefully musing about her own youthful brush with romance ("I twiddled around with the idea one summer; was all right again by fall.").

Patterson's Aunt Emma sees clearly what we do: Love -- the other kind of love -- is beginning to bloom between Lee and Jack, and they allow themselves to forget -- almost -- that she's a repeat offender, and come January 3 he's going to have to try to send her to jail for a long time. 

Remember the Night wasn't marketed as a holiday movie -- it was released January 19, 1940, and besides, such a thing was almost unheard of then -- but it's one of the best and least-known. It was a hit in 1940, with Stanwyck and MacMurray already showing the sexy chemistry that would play to more sinister effect four years later in Double Indemnity. The picture was visible on TV through the 1960s and into the '70s, but was out of circulation for decades. Now that Turner Classic Movies and Universal (which owns the pre-1948 Paramount library) have partnered up to issue it on DVD, it surely won't be long before it becomes as popular and beloved as It's a Wonderful Life. Well, okay, maybe not entirely as much -- Wonderful Life has a mighty powerful mystique -- but I'm betting it won't be far behind. 

Now that the Thanksgiving leftovers have all been nestled snug in their Tupperware beds in the fridge, and as it begins to look a lot like Christmas, if you're casting about for a new movie to add to your list of holiday favorites, consider giving Remember the Night a try. There's still plenty of time to order your copy

Oh, and one more thing. Don't come around in 2037 moaning about how you're sick and tired of Remember the Night. I won't want to hear it.