Brief Reviews

THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1941) **½
As regular visitors to The Movie Projector know, I have a special fondness for the films of Ernst Lubitsch. This one, though, is an inconsistent work that doesn't measure up to his usual standard. The film is about a chic Park Avenue couple, Jill and Larry Baker (Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas), who have been married six years and whose relationship has begun to grow stale and predictable. Each is just a little bored with the other. When Jill begins getting hiccups at moments of stress or agitation, she consults a psychiatrist. At his office, she meets a neurotic pianist, Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a self-proclaimed "individualist" who always speaks his mind and dislikes humanity. But he likes Jill, and the two soon develop a curious friendship that becomes a desultory affair that causes the Bakers to separate and plan divorce.

The movie is not without its delights. Lubitsch handles the comedy with his characteristic light and whimsical touch, and it is at a few points laugh-out-loud funny. A couple of long sequences are equal to Lubitsch's best. One is the first meeting of Jill and Sebastian followed by their visit to a modern art gallery. The other is a very funny dinner party at which the Bakers entertain a group of Hungarians who are potential clients of Larry's insurance firm and which Alexander, invited by Jill without her husband's knowledge, proceeds to disrupt in a delightfully comic way. The best thing about the movie is Burgess Meredith as the solemn and self-centered pianist. He makes an essentially humorless character quite funny.

But the movie also has some obvious flaws. Midway through, I realized that the basic plot isn't that different from The Awful Truth, a movie I have praised as the definitive screwball comedy: a couple breaks up over trivial differences, eventually they realize that they were happier together, and in the end they reunite. So why doesn't That Uncertain Feeling work better? For one thing, the pacing of the script is uneven: entertaining stretches alternate with sections of relative tedium. Then some awkwardly jumpy edits indicate an inattention to detail not typical of Lubitsch; perhaps the filming was rushed or he grew tired of the project. But the biggest problem is the two leads. Douglas is a subdued leading romantic man, but he can be very effective, as he showed in Lubitsch's Ninotchka. But to come across, he really needs a dynamic leading woman like Irene Dunne or Greta Garbo to play off of, and the lovely but bland Oberon is almost wholly lacking in dynamism. Douglas actually gets better as the movie goes along, but Oberon remains rather enervated and dull throughout.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that with even the great directors, sometimes the elements simply fail to gel. That Uncertain Feeling, a decent enough movie, is not quite a disaster. It just isn't of the quality we expect of the great Lubitsch.

THE MALE ANIMAL (1942) ***½
Having seen the banal musical remake of The Male Animal—She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo—many years ago, I was in no hurry to watch this. It's too bad I waited so long, because the original is so unlike the remake and so much better. I had always wondered what would attract Henry Fonda, who made so few comedies and preferred roles of thematic heft, to such a project, and the movie provided a clear answer.

Fonda plays Prof. Tommy Turner, a mild-mannered academic who teaches English at Midwestern University. On the eve of the big homecoming football game, he finds himself unwillingly enmeshed in a controversy over academic free speech. He is threatened with dismissal by Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette), the despotic, obsessively Red-hunting head of the board of trustees, over his plan to read to his class the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist arrested, framed, convicted as a scapegoat, and executed in Massachusetts in 1927. (Vanzetti and the man convicted with him, Nicola Sacco, were pardoned in 1977 by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.) Keller would even like to censor student writing by suppressing the student literary magazine that announced the upcoming lecture in a story, but it has already gone to press. At the same time, Turner must defend his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), from the advances of her ex-boy friend, the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who has returned for the big game. Ellen wants Tommy to give in and not read the letter, using Joe's revived romantic interest in her and Tommy's insecurity at being so unathletic to attempt to coerce him into forgoing his principles to save their comfortable way of life.

Based on a play by James Thurber and director Elliott Nugent, the movie has intelligent, witty dialogue and a deftly constructed plot. It even contains a memorable drunk sequence with Tommy and his star pupil that ends in a shambolic fistfight between Tommy and Joe. The cast is uniformly good (although deHavilland sometimes seems a bit too intelligent for her role, and comedy wasn't really her forte) and even includes Hattie McDaniel as the wisecracking housekeeper, Cleota.

Even among such great performers Fonda, predictably, is remarkable. He is especially outstanding in the climactic scene when Prof. Turner defies Ellen and the board and reads the brief but eloquent letter to a packed classroom that includes Keller, Ellen, Joe, students, reporters, and the just plain curious. Fonda reads the letter with quiet, underplayed conviction (much the same way he reads the final letter of the lynched Dana Andrews in The Ox-Bow Incident, released the following year) and wins over even his antagonists. The happy outcome seems a bit pat, but who wouldn't sympathize with Fonda's risking his marriage and career to defend academic freedom? If only such disputes always turned out so felicitously in real life.

SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955) ***
This movie would make a super second feature on a double bill with Pickup on South Street (1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It has the same basic plot setup of good guys battling Communist spies after government secrets during the Cold War of the 1950s. The movie opens with a cheesy close-up of Kotty (Terry Moore) sunning on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit. Up creeps Slob (Lee Marvin), who pounces on her and attempts to molest her before she can fend off his advances. Both Kotty and Slob work at the shack of the title, a Southern California beachfront greasy spoon run by Keenan Wynn that appears to be located near Malibu before it became developed—she as the waitress, he as the cook. The beach and the cafe are the only two locations in this clearly very low-budget movie.

Kotty is being romanced by Prof. Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a research scientist working at a top-secret government research facility just up the coast. The professor is encouraging the pretty, lively, but slightly dim Kotty to improve herself by studying for the civil service exam to be a stenographer. Moore doesn't look much like Marilyn Monroe, but she sure sounds exactly like her, and every male in the cast treats her as though she is just as desirable as MM. Unfortunately, one evening Kotty inadvertently overhears the professor passing secrets to an enemy agent, and realizing he is a Communist spy, breaks off with him. Without a protector, she is now at the mercy of the lecherous Slob.

The plot and characters are dealt with in an entirely functional way that lacks the artistic vision or cinematic personality of a Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich. The two big revelations at the end—the truth about the professor and the identity of the mastermind behind the operation, the mysterious Mr. Gregory—are wholly predictable, as is the means of Kotty being saved from rape and murder by Slob. But the dialogue—especially the repartee between Kotty and her male pursuers, which at times borders on the camp—is uniformly snappy. And the plot is presented with economy and great forward momentum.

But the movie really belongs to Lee Marvin as Slob. He is by turns sadistic, pathetic, comical, dumb, shrewd—simultaneously a feckless joker and a menacing villain. His chameleonic performance only highlights the two-dimensional characters who otherwise populate the film. The scene of him and Keenan Wynn working out with barbells and weights in the diner is the comic highlight of the movie. Of the performances nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar that year, his is equaled only by Jack Lemmon's winning turn in Mister Roberts, and Marvin wasn't even nominated. Shack Out on 101 is by any measure strictly a B-movie, but it does present an amusing time capsule of the insecurities of the era, and it is consistently entertaining. It may not be a masterpiece, but a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) ****
In the 1930s, Leo McCarey made three comic masterpieces, starting with the best movie the Marx Brothers ever made, Duck Soup (1933), and ending with what I have called the definitive screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937). In 1935 he made this film, which in style falls somewhere between the manic anarchy of Duck Soup and the restrained sophistication of The Awful Truth. The title character, Ruggles (Charles Laughton), is the British manservant to the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). Red Gap is the name of the frontier town in Washington state where Ruggles finds himself after the Earl loses him in a poker game in Paris to Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles), a nouveau riche hick making the grand tour around the turn of the 20th century.

Floud doesn't know what to make of the British class system, finding it incomprehensible that people would voluntarily submit to such institutionalized indignity. He is determined to treat Ruggles as a social equal and to loosen his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, but his wife Effie (a hilarious Mary Boland), a dedicated social climber, has other plans for Ruggles. She wants to flaunt him to the locals as proof of her newfound social status and to use his knowledge to transform her gauche husband into her image of an English-style upper-class gentleman. When the henpecked but crafty Egbert introduces Ruggles as Colonel Ruggles to his hometown cronies, he sets up a dual identity for Ruggles that results in many comic ramifications.

The movie's comic situations are of course, given McCarey's experience working with many of the comedy greats of American movies of the early 1930s, inventively devised and highly entertaining. To me the movie is most reminiscent of McCarey's work with early Laurel and Hardy, with its carefully paced set-ups building slowly to controlled comic explosions, and its opposition of rambunctious characters and repressed ones, But the comedy here is given extra resonance by the social and character details that underpin it: the absurd social pretensions of Effie and her relatives, the tension between the belief in social equality of Egbert and the adherence of Ruggles to the tradition of a prescribed social hierarchy, and the dawning realization by Ruggles that the American way of life and the misunderstandings about him deliberately fostered by Egbert present him with the opportunity to reinvent himself.

Even with all these great character actors (including fluttery, nasal-voiced Zasu Pitts as a potential love interest for Ruggles), it is Charles Laughton who elevates this movie beyond expectations. It might seem inconceivable that the notoriously hammy Laughton could so effectively play a buttoned-up comical character. But he is a marvel as he proceeds through the various phases of the psychological transformation of Ruggles from a Jeeves-like automaton to a new man, one freed from the stifling belief in a life predetermined by social class and presented instead with the ability to create his own identity. Ruggles is like a prisoner inching his way to freedom. When that freedom comes, it is a liberation that, although achieved through comic means, is deeply moving.

Ruggles of Red Gap is a sort of social fairy tale powered by American optimism, the belief in the entitlement of every person to self-definition and an open-ended future. In an age when practically anyone could use a few good laughs and a reminder that people once genuinely believed in such ideals, watching Ruggles is like getting a glimpse into an Edenic past, a less complicated and more innocent time.

The Awful Truth: The Definitive Screwball Comedy

A few weeks ago I wrote about the classic American screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"). In that post I described the typical dilemma of the genre: a character must choose between two possible romantic interests who represent on the one hand safety and conformity and on the other hand risk and idiosyncrasy. In 1937, only three years after the original screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, was released, a movie came along that for me represents the apogee of the genre, The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey.

At the beginning of the movie the two main characters, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne), the type of urban sophisticates who routinely populated the screwball comedies of the 1930's, are already married. Jerry, just returned from a trip to Florida, finds that in his absence Lucy has been enjoying herself with their friends and immediately notices that she seems to be receiving a great deal of attention—and returning it—from a suave Continental bachelor who has "gigolo" written all over him. His jealousy aroused, Jerry refuses to believe Lucy's protests that that her actions have been entirely innocuous. As the squabble between the two escalates, Lucy, dismayed and frustrated with her husband's lack of trust in her, files for divorce and the two separate.

In typical screwball fashion, each soon becomes attached to someone else. Lucy becomes engaged to a new neighbor, a rich oilman (and mother-dominated hick) from Oklahoma. This character, played by Ralph Bellamy, is in every way the opposite of Jerry—slow-witted, unsophisticated, and unimaginative. Jerry is at first desperate to win Lucy back before the divorce decree becomes final and does everything he can think of to sabotage her engagement, including becoming attached to an embarrassingly tawdry nightclub performer named Dixie Belle Lee in an effort to make Lucy jealous. When all his efforts fail, he gives up and becomes engaged to a dull and conventional heiress. It is just at this point that Lucy finally realizes that she still loves Jerry and that her oilman is all wrong for her. She breaks off her engagement and lays plans to get Jerry back. Her scheme succeeds with hilarious results and the two are reunited just before their divorce decree becomes final.

What makes The Awful Truth the definitive screwball comedy is not just its archetypal plot, which the brief synopsis above hardly does justice to. What really makes it special is its perfect confluence of star power, inspired direction, and tremendously entertaining situations. It is in this movie that the Cary Grant persona as moviegoers came to experience it over the next three decades emerged fully formed. Cary Grant had been working in movies for five years before making The Awful Truth, which was his thirtieth film credit. Yet seeing him in movies like Sylvia Scarlett (1936) or the two Mae West classics She Done Him Wrong or I'm No Angel (both 1933), one might find it hard to believe that this is the same actor. In The Awful Truth he is relaxed, urbane, slyly witty, subtly funny, slightly disreputable, everything that one associates with the screen personality "Cary Grant." The screen persona of the comic Cary Grant was born in this movie and continued with little alteration until he retired in the mid-1960's.

Like Grant, Irene Dunne was an experienced movie performer when she made The Awful Truth, but unlike Grant she was already a major star and two-time Academy Award nominee. She had appeared in just about every kind of Hollywood movie, from Westerns to musicals and especially ultrasentimental tearjerkers. She had a lovely soprano singing voice and an affinity for the songs of Jerome Kern, playing Magnolia in the 1936 version of Show Boat. Yet she had her first major comedy role, in Theodora Goes Wild, just the year before. In The Awful Truth she shows a real affinity for both sophisticated and physical comedy, and it's hard to imagine an actress who would have been so perfect as Lucy. At key moments she gives what I think of as the Irene Dunne reaction, a slightly vacant expression of wry surprise and disbelief that in its way is as distinctive as Grant's familiar recoiling, wide-eyed double-take. Her ability to balance, and sometimes to project simultaneously, conflicting emotions made her one of the most versatile and talented actresses of the studio era. Her seriousness in this movie is tempered with lightheartedness, and her whimsicality with restraint. Like Grant, her frustration is comic, and her comic behavior is a response to emotional turmoil. The interaction of these two actors makes it clear to the viewer that the characters they play are ideally suited to each other and that their notions of incompatibility are complete nonsense.

Those familiar with the later work of director Leo McCarey, swamped in heavy-handed sentimentality and a curiously outdated sensibility, might find it difficult to believe that he was responsible for The Awful Truth. In fact, McCarey had previously worked with many notable Hollywood comics, including Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Harold Lloyd. He was responsible for two of the funniest movies ever made, the Marx Brothers' zany Duck Soup (1933) and the delightful Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The Awful Truth is masterfully directed, with a sure command of controlled comic invention and a light touch throughout. It is packed with clever sight gags and moments of restrained physical comedy that stop just short of farce. And as in the best movie comedies, these humorous bits always seem to grow from the plot and never to be arbitrarily imposed on it. For The Awful Truth McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director, an award that was well deserved.

Three sequences in the movie are especially memorable. Early on, Jerry and Lucy go to court to see who will get custody of their dog, Mr. Smith, played by the same fox terrier that played Asta in the Thin Man series. The judge decides that he will let the dog make the choice, and both Jerry and Lucy begin frantically calling him to come to them. But Lucy has a trick up her sleeve (or in this case up the muff she has carried into court): Mr. Smith's new toy, a ball shaped like a bulldog's head, which, without letting either Jerry or the judge see, she uses to get the dog to run to her. Mr. Smith is really Jerry's dog, so why is she so determined to get custody of him? Is she just being competitive, or is she unconsciously seeking a way to keep Jerry connected to her (he is awarded visiting rights)? Either way it's a very funny sequence, directed and performed with precision timing.

Later in the movie, Lucy hits upon a clever ruse to break up Jerry's engagement. She turns up at the swanky party Jerry's snobbish fiancée and future in-laws are giving on the very night that the divorce decree is to become final. Pretending to be Jerry's fictitious sister, Lola, she appears as a garishly dressed, bubble-headed lush, a professional singer clearly based on Dixie Belle. She pretends to get drunk and insists on performing the tasteless and risqué musical number she saw Dixie Belle do in the nightclub, correctly predicting that the humiliated Jerry will rush her out of the party and drive her home. To see the refined Lucy as performed by the refined Dunne cut loose like this, a departure into controlled slapstick so out of character for Lucy, is the high point of the movie. And to know that Lucy's gauche behavior is all a pretense just makes the whole episode all the more funny.

But Lucy's plot is not yet over. She contrives to have Jerry drive her to her aunt's country cabin instead of to her own apartment and further contrives for the car to break down so that they will be forced to spend their last night together as husband and wife in the remote cabin. What ensues is another bout of hilariously restrained slapstick that involves adjoining bedrooms, a connecting door that refuses to stay shut, and a mechanical clock with male and female figures (actually Grant and Dunne in Alpine costumes on a huge mock-up of the clock) emerging from and returning to separate doors as the clock ticks away to midnight, when the divorce decree becomes final.

Will Jerry give in to temptation and sleep in Lucy's room, which will invalidate the divorce decree? Will she let him? Of course, but not until they have negotiated a truce. The suspicion and jealousy that wrecked their relationship will be banished; their renewed marriage will be based on the principle of mutual trust. Theirs will be a modern marriage in the style of Nick and Nora Charles, one of partnership combined with independence. Just as the mechanical clock strikes midnight the two figures emerge from their separate compartments, but this time they both return to hers, an ingenious sight gag concocted by McCarey not only to skirt Production Code issues but to indicate visually the reconciliation of Jerry and Lucy.