|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That John
Ford, in the middle of the greatest armada in history,
would have been thinking about Going my way (US
1944) may surprise us today. Going my way may be
one of the most popular movies ever made, but it is also
one of the most embarrassing, because it makes people who
like it cry, and somewhere nearby there is always going
to be some philistine eager to guffaw about "contrived
sentimentality." Yet Going my way meant a lot to a
great many people in the spring of 1944, caught up in
worldwide terror and daily death. Even James Agee
conceded that Going my way "points the way to the
great films which will be possible when Hollywood becomes
aware of the richness and delight of human character for
its own sake"[2]
And it is true, as it is true of much of
our century's finest art (which Agee pompously ignores),
that the morale and magic in Going my way is
rooted in character, although not just for its own sake.
Curiously, however, a more recent McCarey champion is
unwilling to grant Going my way even Agee's
accolade of "pointing the way"; for James Harvey Going
my way's characters are "stereotypes...s rigid and
hollow, as consolingly counterfeit, as any the movies
could offer."[3]
Indeed, I have read a good portion of everything written
during the last forty or fifty years about Leo McCarey
and about this movie which Leo McCarey made - and
audiences cried over - in the darkest days of World War
II, and I have not found anyone except John Ford who
notices the war. John Ford knew
very well that there are times when a movie can do
something for a society not so much different from what
Virgil's Aeneid was intended to do at the dawn of
the pax romana: account for the past and
consecrate the community to high principles. Ford himself
had made such a movie at the dawn of the pax
americana, The battle of Midway (US 1942).
Since such a movie cannot be a monologue, Ford has voices
speaking to the movie. McCarey's movies also try, quite
consciously, to have conversations with their audiences.
McCarey's movies were a modern commedia dell'arte
which would play an audience, conduct
people through kaleidoscopes of melodramatic emotions,
and unify viewers and listeners with each other.
McCarey declared: Movies could
be a kind of social "sacrament" that would create a
community at that moment, there in the theater--and
consecrate it to "going my way." The tears which Going
my way has evoked for more than half a century are
not so simplistic. McCarey's
architectural notion of a church is one that is almost
all door, inviting. Space, for McCarey in these years, is
constantly a kind of metaphor for community, or better,
an "actualisation" of it. When the boys begin to sing
"The mule," McCarey's camera tracks back majestically
(almost like at Versailles in Rossellini's Louis
XIV [France 1966]), opening up space, in
response to the community being forged by the miraculous
grace of the music, the boys, and Father Charles Francis
Patrick O'Malley (Bing Crosby)--"kindness as permanent
catharsis, as providential remedy to all the physical and
moral ills of humanity," Jacques Lourcelles calls
it.[5]
More
frequently, it is by fragmenting space and by
crosscutting that McCarey creates a sense of community
engagement. At the end of the movie, by crosscutting 180
degrees between old Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald)
and the small congregation of individuals who are now his
friends, McCarey paints the space between them as
something they share, as containing their emotions and
relationships, their "kindness," their community. And by
showing us beforehand the surprise appearance of Father
Fitzgibbon's ancient mother, McCarey involves us in the
conspiracy leading, as in Ruggles of Red Gap (US
1935), to a community apotheosis in which life's most
private moments are consecrated publicly,
communally. In a single
shot in an earlier church scene, panning across the pews,
McCarey brought together all his story's diverse
characters and plots, just as John Ford would do (in
imitation?) in church scenes in The sun shines
bright (US 1953), The long gray line (US 1955)
and Donovan's reef (US 1963). In an aisle on the
side, we find O'Malley standing awkwardly, a bit like
Danglars in the Moulin Rouge in Jean Renoir's French
cancan (France 1955), for it is Father O'Malley who
has devised this assemblage of delinquent boys, runaway
girls, predatory landlords, opera stars, and tin pan
alley hucksters. But now, at
the end of the movie, even though the church has mostly
burnt down, a real space exists, an actual "kindness", a
community which no longer requires O'Malley's "way" to
manipulate it into existence. It can do without him, just
as the Moulin Rouge can dispense with Danglars now. For
the moment, all problems have been solved, everyone is
being looked after by a kindly hand, especially Father
Fitzgibbon. Abandoning the point-of-view crosscuts (in
which Fr. Fitzgibbon and his congregation stared
alternately at us), McCarey cuts
slightly to the side of Fr. Fitzgibbon: In Going my
way's final shot, we find Father O'Malley outside,
peering through a window and enjoying the commedia
he has created, a bit like Camilla in front of the
curtain at the end of The golden coach (Italy
1952), and in a benedictory camera movement we follow him
a bit as, having reunited a family (and more) he goes on
his way, alone in the snow and the night, and we watch
him leave the frame (a bit like Judge Priest at the end
of The sun shines bright). The rejuvenated Father
Fitzgibbon has already predicted the outcome of Father
O'Malley's next assignment: "you'll bring him around to
your way of thinking!" But at the end of the movie's last
shot, space only shows absence. Moreover, there is no one
looking at this absent space, no other character
around--except me; suddenly I am alone, going my
way. Father
O'Malley is a hero because he asserts himself. "At one
time," he says, "I had quite a decision to make, whether
to write the nation's songs--or go my way." He is not so
different, then, from the Irene Dunne characters of
The awful truth (US 1937) and My favorite
wife (US 1940) who in asserting their interests
against rejection in love never pause for self pity or
self doubt. Such courage! "Ma" and "Pa" Cooper in Make
way for tomorrow (US 1937) are kicked around brutally
when they fail to assert themselves--but they are the
last McCarey characters to fail. Charles Laughton's
moment of self-redemption comes in Ruggles of Red
Gap when he comprehends his independence while
reciting Lincoln's Gettysburg Address--an American
Aeneid in two hundred and seventy one words; no
text but the Bible was more sacred. Yet what gives force
to this verbal paean to human freedom (this rejection of
class status by the lower class rather than through
liberation by the upper class), and to Ruggles' inner
revolution, is the way McCarey socializes Ruggles'
individual rite of passage, in a series of cameo-like
shots of individual bar patrons drawing together into a
Druid-like circle around Ruggles. In putting the action
onto this level of separate individual reactions, McCarey
draws us into a sudden communal catharsis; Lincoln's
words and Ruggles' revolution become a ritual in which we
all share. In the second stage of Ruggles' liberation,
after Ruggles risks scandal by ejecting a tormenter from
his restaurant, his townsfolk cheer him for going his
way. "For he's a jolly good fellow!" they sing, and again
McCarey draws us in, now to a more Dionysian celebration,
with fourteen rhythmic cameos reprising the
commedia's animated characters--a sequence which
was probably Jean Renoir's inspiration for the finale of
French Cancan. Renoir, like Ford, admired McCarey
deeply. In both men's movies, the result of a series of
medium shots of individuals looking out at us is not the
fragmentation of the community, but the sum of its parts,
and a repeated effort by all of them to involve the movie
audience into their communal love-fest. Silent film
comedy was an extension of vaudeville humor. The essence
of vaudeville humor was interaction with an audience.
This is why vaudeville, like commedia dell'arte,
depended on improvisation within an outline. The
performer needed to know where he was going but, more
importantly, had to be able to adjust his driving to the
conditions of the road. A problem in silent film comedy
was how to make such adjustments. In cinema's own
vaudeville period, one-shot movies like those by the
Lumières could be run slower or faster, backward
or forward, depending on the day's reactions from the
audience. By the teens, comics were trying to accomplish
the same thing by test-screening their pictures and
tinkering with them in between tests. By the twenties,
Chaplin was notorious for refilming every gag a million
times until he found his solution. In the thirties and
forties, McCarey's solution was to arrive on his set with
no one having any idea what they would be done that day,
which would be decided during chats or while McCarey
played piano, whereupon dialogue would be dictated and
the scene discovered for the first time, the fruit of
reactions among the director, his players, and their
characters. "I think probably 75 per cent of each day's
shooting was made up on the set by Leo," said Bing Crosby
of Going my way.[6]
Nobody knew what they were doing on The
awful Truth, said Ralph Bellamy, "nobody but
McCarey."[7]
Perhaps
McCarey's solution was not so much a solution as the only
way McCarey could function fully (like Rossellini). He
told Frank Nugent: "It wasn't until we got on the set
that the story began to show itself. One character took
over. After ten days we had to suspend production and
begin rewriting. We still didn't have a script when we
resumed. We worked nights on scenes to be shot the next
day. You can't tell about a story until you begin
shooting, and even then you get
surprises."[8]
Commedia could not be created
except in a state of near-spontaneous interaction. "We
never knew or cared when quitting time came," said Victor
Moore, of Make way for tomorrow.[9]
Yet (as with Renoir) the result was primarily the
director's art, and the material for improvisation had
been rewritten dozens of times and pondered over for
months.
McCarey has
been credited for introducing slow and deliberate
reaction shots in his many Laurel and Hardy shorts, thus
slowing down the rushing pace of Sennett-style silent
comedy. Of course both the slow double-take and the
"non-reaction" of controlled dismay are as hallowed as
theater itself, precisely because it requires a
give-and-take between the player and the audience, and
much of the magic of any McCarey movie occurs as his
characters react (which maybe explains why Barry
Fitzgerald in Going my way was nominated for
Oscars in both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor
categories but only won for supporting himself). As James
Harvey writes, McCarey shows us: Such
performance tricks--tried and true in vaudeville and
commedia--succeed in drawing us in to the
characters because they compel us to figure out what, for
example, a blank face means, and in making this
effort we are converted from being merely passive
watchers; we become off-stage prompters. In Love
affair (US 1939), it is when grandmother hears the
boat whistle, or when Terry puts on her shawl, or when
Michel sees his painting hanging in Terry's bedroom that
we feel closest to these people and share the multiple
layers of their emotions. Present time takes on a haunted
aura; lines of dialogue are made to resonate, characters
are posed iconically, gestures are unfolded mythically,
even though everyone appears to be behaving perfectly
normally, because both they and we know these are images
to be remembered always. We have already become the
lovers' co-conspirators, as their half-expressed emotions
oblige us to complete their thoughts. Even when a
character is in action, like Ruggles reciting the
Gettysburg Address, it is the character's own reactions
to his own actions that most affect us. These are the
moments of change, of redemption, of grace, of
revolution, of going one's way. At least in
the years 1935-57 McCarey's movies are always about
change, about people changing or being changed, by
others, by themselves, but not by physical environment,
which is one reason why people say McCarey lacked a
visual style--a lack sometimes noted also apropos of
Hawks, whose sets (interiors or exteriors) are even less
interesting than McCarey's, because the only environment
that counts for him is people. But in McCarey, what
changes is also the space between people. Space in
Going my way even becomes grace. As do camera
angles, when McCarey is at his best. We noted that,
rather than looking at one person from another person's
exact perspective, McCarey often insists doggedly on his
own point of view. Especially in Love
affair. Each detail is
thus autonomous. What unites the shots is their common
viewpoint inside the triangle formed by the three
people. This is a space which the three share, which
becomes their love for each other, which exists
independently of them, transcendent. As McCarey repeats
these four close shots, these pockets of space, these
fragments variously ordered, their reiteration around a
common point celebrates togetherness more rhythmically
and forcefully than the single shot of their ensemble can
achieve. Thus there is
a powerful jolt of absence when McCarey cuts to an angle
outside the triangle as Grandmother hears the boat
whistle signaling Michel's and Terry's departure. What
McCarey's camera angle really tells us, along with his
unrelenting stare (like Vidor's at the end of The
champ [US 1931] or Rossellini's in Una
voce umana[segment in L'amore, Italy
1948]), is about the solitude in which Grandmother
will be going her way, as she is well aware. In contrast in
the re-make twenties year later, An affair to
remember (US 1957), rather than shooting the triangle
from a single interior point of view, McCarey's camera
jumps around all four corners of the room. These
characters' love has no space of its own; their love is
no longer transcendent, with a force of its own. It
exists only within each of them. Exactly opposite the
poetry of Love affair, the lovers now link eyes in
180-degree cuts, and exist only for each
other. McCarey often
seems unsure how to edit in Cinemascope, and awkward at
times when he tries for the sorts of articulations that
were workaday in the 1930s, as in this series: Autonomy and
space are again the issue in Love affair when
Terry tries to launch herself as a nightclub singer, in
order to find her own way as an independent woman and
become worthy of Michel. Her debut is shot entirely in
close shots of her Love
affair's heroes spend a lot of time deliberating with
objects. McCarey's lack of interesting interiors is in
fact usually a stripping away of "extra" reality in order
to focus emotions on one specific object. In contrast, in
An affair to remember the riot of widescreen
clutter and jangly colors creates so much background
"noise" that deliberation in impossible. Thus Terry's
wheelchair appears briefly and matter-of-factly after she
encounters Nicky at the theater in An affair, but
in Love affair her wheelchair is revealed and
brought down the aisle slowly and ceremoniously. More
importantly, when Michel returns to Grandmother's room
after her death, his emotional resonances with certain
privileged objects goes deeper than their obvious
associations, because they are all parts of a shared
reality, their love external to themselves; the piano,
the shawl, the sounds of Grandmother's playing and
Terry's singing are merged with Michel's inner
self. Charles Boyer
(for whom McCarey made Love affair) cited it as
his favorite of his American movies and it is not
difficult to discern why. In place of Boyer's usual
laid-back, fin de siècle charm, Michel has
a hard, angular edge to him, bitter aggressivity, and
deep currents that come only gradually to the surface.
Curiously, Boyer, after pronouncing McCarey "an
unappreciated major artist"
and
anticipating a methodical, reflective collaboration, was
surprised to find the director dreaming up the story
piecemeal as they went along, and even halting production
completely halfway through in order to figure out what
the lovers would do after getting off the
boat.[11]
McCarey even seemed indifferent about
character analysis and expected Boyer to help create his
own dialogue just before shooting each day. But if
Love Affair resembles Rossellini's Viaggio in
Italia (Italy 1953) in the apparent chaos of its
production, it resembles it also in the near perfection
of the result, in both cases charting the combustion of
something deep within the characters with a spiritual
space outside of them. This is what is so disturbing, for
instance, when Michel finds himself holding the shawl.
Once again McCarey combines two points of view: Michel's
war within himself to distance himself from Terry, and
the fact of this directive from beyond the grave. Terry's
bantering line earlier, "Going my way?" takes on a new
meaning. Michel's
painting is distanced for the same effect that the Empire
State Building is distanced as a reflection in a glass
door when Terry gazes at "the nearest thing to heaven
that we have in New York"--where she will be reunited
with Michel in a few months. Probably she
is recalling the story she told him about her father and
the song she is writing and will repeat like a mantra
after her accident: Wishing
will make it so. Terry is in
the foreground, the building in the background, so we
concentrate on her and the building becomes a reflection,
not-yet tangible, a dream, a "wish." Like Michel's
painting. Here is the heart of melodrama. Again and
again, McCarey articulates the heart of this melodrama as
much with his angles and cuts as with his objects, his
music, or the nuances of gesture and voice. As much as in
a Bresson film, the characters come to life, emotionally,
through the artifices of cinema. When Michel
draws closer, pressing Terry, Finally he
finds the solution, as the camera pans The shawl, we
realise, is Michel in some stange way. There does
exist a moral universe outside humans. An elaborate
camera movement (similar in spirit to the benedictory one
which ends Going My Way) accompanies Michel back
to Terry. In a coda, a variant of the French
Cancan-like finish to Ruggles, shared space at
last is celebrated in an accelerating montage of three
pairs of crosscuts. The alternating two-shots creates
something of the effect that other directors try to
achieve by spinning the actors or the camera itself.
McCarey cuts across the axis each time, so that each of
the lovers occupies the other's space half a dozen
times. It appears it
was McCarey who showed Ozu what a camera angle
is. McCarey told
Cahiers du Cinéma that the difference
between Love Affair and An Affair to
Remember "n'est autre que la différence entre
Charles Boyer et Cary Grant. Cary Grant ne peut jamaias
réussir à masquer tout à fait cet
extraordinaire sense de l'humour qu'il a; en dépit
de tous ses efforts, il n'arive pas à se
débarrasser de cet humour. C'est pourquoi la
seconde version, même dans les plus
émouvants scènes d'amour, reste assez
drôle....Je préfère la
première version pour sa beauté, et la
seconde parce que, financièrement, elle a
été un beaucoup plus grand
succès."[12] In fact, Cary
Grant seems as out of place as he would have been in De
Sica's Ladri di biciclette. He is not, as McCarey
says in other words, an actor capable of world-shattering
emotional change. Grant is Teflon; Boyer displays every
blemish. If McCarey made Love Affair for Charles
Boyer, he made An Affair for Deborah
Kerr. As Terry McKay
she is delicate and petite, charming pouring tea or doing
anything, each movement exquisitely graceful, yet
down-to-earth; with no other director does this actress
seem so vulnerable and at the same time so rooted. One
always senses her Terry's origins: one of 10 kids; a
drunk father; poverty; everyone worked. It's a unique
occurrence, like Grace Kelly or Ava Gardner with Ford in
Mogambo; Audrey Hepburn with Vidor in War and
Peace; or Françoise Arnoul with Renoir in
French Cancan. Irene Dunne, in contrast, in
Love Affair (and The Awful Truth), is more
like a professional tennis player, sturdy, and
self-advancing; we admire her for her courage and
strength: she never has time for feeling self-doubt or
rejection. And she is not in the least embarrassed at
being a kept woman. McCarey was forced to remove not only
any mention of sex, but also a scene in which Terry's
lover visits her in the luxury apartment he provides for
her (although there is such a scene in current prints).
Yet everything is clear immediately, when Terry-Dunne
fingers her pearl necklace and brassily explains, "He
sends me on a buying trip every once in a awhile. You
see, he's my boss, too." In An
Affair to Remember, not surprisingly, McCarey gives
most of Irene Dunne's qualities to Cary Grant, and gives
Charles Boyer's figurine charm and fragility to Deborah
Kerr. Thus in An Affair it's the man (Grant who
reminds the women (Kerr) to take the elevator in the
Empire State Building; but in Love Affair it was
the women (Dunne) who reminded the man (Boyer). Love
Affair is fundamentally Michel's story, of his
change; An Affair to Rememberis Terry's story, her
change. In Love Affair, after the ship's
photographer snaps them together, Terry-Dunne really does
flee from Michel out of practical fears of publicity. But
in the same scene in An Affair, it is clear that
this excuse comes as a convenience for Terry-Kerr, who
has just confessed her prostitution with cathartic guilt.
McCarey frames her in the picture's most Romantic
composition, against the sea and sky. The purpose of
McCarey's commedia is to draw us into the
character, so generally we are to share the character's
emotions, as in Hitchcock, Capra, Ford, or Ophuls. But at
other times we are also to find them alienating, more
like Jerry Lewis, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Woody
Allen, or Albert Brooks. Through most of the first half
of Make Way for Tomorrow, "Ma" Cooper (Beulah
Bondi) is insufferable, and offensive in her
obliviousness to others. Eventually even her
daughter-in-law (Fay Bainter), the most empathetic soul
in the movie, cannot help but look at her with hate
indistinguisable from sympathy-as do we. This is what
McCarey wants: that we share with the characters
conflicting emotions that neither we nor they can
reconcile. Still we are startled in the film's second
half, when the old couple have their last hours together
in New York, at how perfectly Ma fits in when she is with
Pa (Victor Moore). Yet now, since the movie has already
shown us what life will be like after Lucy and Barkley
Cooper part, there is no room for our (or their)
uncertainty about what it means when they do part. Then
the movie itself cuts us off from ma's life just as the
train taking pa away has cut everything off from her
life, so that no matter where she will be, her space will
only be absence. These are scenes that on repeated
viewings become almost unwatchable. This catharsis does
not anneal. Which of
course is why nearly everybody avoided seeing Make Way
for Tomorrow in 1937. They sensed the danger. This is
not the McCarey who wants us to laugh and cry and feel
better, the McCarey whose cinema is "fondé...sur
une alchimie de bons sentiments,"
as
Lourcelles called it, justly.[13]
Or maybe it is. Maybe Make Way for Tomorrow is the
validation of the necessity for "bons sentiments," whose
absence in the Cooper family (and in later McCarey films)
is so disastrous. "Wishing will make it so" may be
simplistic, but, far from being a pollyanna sentiment, it
goes to the heartbeat of western civilization. McCarey
meant, as Borzage did, and Griffith, Chaplin, Capra and
De Mille (and Sirk and Ray and Rossellini) that sometimes
through suffering and obdurate persistence we can get
what we want, we can make a dream come true, we can even
change the world. But we have to try; we can't
just sit around, do nothing, and wish, like "Ma" and "Pa"
Cooper. This is what "going my way" meant to Father
O'Malley-and to John Ford on D-Day. In Lourcelles' words:
"chaque être vivant conduit seul sa destinée
mais [et] par sa présence attentive
à autrui, se transforme lui-même en
transforment les autres."[14]
Going My Way's title card-the
empty road, the horizon, the clouds and light and birds,
the solitary group of trees- nicely expresses this merger
of the existential, the luminous, and the mission to the
world. In 1946
McCarey told The Saturday Evening Post, "Let other
people take care of sordidness and ugliness. I string
along with Disney. I think the biggest message of all is
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. They way I look at it,
it's larceny to remind people how lousy things are and
call it entertainment."[15] Indeed,
Jean-Louis Noames, taking McCarey at his (blank-faced?)
word, suggests that "sa manière est un peu l'art
de tous ceux qui prennent la vie comme un obstacle et le
cinéma comme un prétexte pour le
franchir."[16]
But if this is true, then "wishing will make it so" is
false and the success of Father O'Malley is fraudulent.
But in fact people did go to the moon, invent penicillin,
and make movies, and occasionally even virtue gets
rewarded. Cinema does not need to overcome life. Goodness
knows McCarey's gloom is so much darker than his sun that
he almost resembles the neo-realist De Sica (or is it De
Sica who resembles McCarey?). Good
Sam (1948) and My Son John (1952) will
resemble Make Way for Tomorrow: black comedies
with skit after skit of situations so painful,
embarassing, lugubrious and intensely true, as to be
unwatchable at times, and to make us giddy. But already
in Love Affar, toward the climax of Michel's
despair, Michel is made by McCarey to walk into an
absurd, Sisyphus-like skit of a man who has to carry a
Christmas tree-constantly stumbling, and in the
snow-another 150 blocks. The skit is pretentious and
preachy, the way Godard can be, and jars with the rest of
Love Affair. But the dark
side is never absent in McCarey. By age 42 McCarey had
spent more than six years of his productive life either
in the hospital or convalescing from one ailment or
another, and in addition he suffered from alcoholism. He
was arrested twice during The Bells of St. Mary,
once for creating a public disturbance while drunk, then
on suspicion of drunk driving after he lost control while
going the wrong way down a hill toward a
highway.[17]
McCarey caused a whiff of a scandal in Going My
Way by showing priests enjoying their drink in tiny
doses. Good Sam and My Son John and
Rally `round the Flag, Boys! (1958) all contain
longish scenes of drunkenness treated as comedy, with, in
two cases, tender wives looking with amused endearment
upon their insufferably drunk and self-pitying husbands.
McCarey was listed as the highest paid man in all of
America in 1944. He made so few films, Edgar G. Ulmer
tells us, because il avait "peur de ne pas réussir
son prochain film."[18] All these
disasters take their toll. Courage leads to obduracy
which leads to confusion and disorientation. Already in
Going My Way (where disasters seem to be befalling
everybody), when Father Fitzgibbon tells us from his
pulpit in 1944 to "Give what you can!" we understand that
much more is being asked of us than money; similarly in
Love Affair in 1939 we are solemnly reminded that
"France needs men." By the time The Bells of St.
Mary was released (November 25, 1945), the elation of
D-Day had long since given way to the winter of the
Ardennes, to extermination camps and extermination bombs,
to the sense than no victory had been won, that struggle
was only beginning. The strain of war permeates this
movie, reminding us every moment "how lousy things
are"-and often giving us pain rather than entertainment.
A schoolyard Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag is given a
ritualized quality that to eyes today makes it
resemble Sacrifice is
unrelentingly demanded of a McCarey hero. Where else in
cinema does one find so onerous a sense of life?
Dreyer? Bresson? "Going my way" is now redefined as "the
sixth sense [after "to see," "to hear" etc.]: to
be." "To be, that's what really matters. It's like a
world inside us and it's up to us what we make of
it....To thy own self be true!...To be or not to be, that
is the question!" Is this Sartre or Shakespeare? Or is it
steadfast loyalty to an institution? My Son
John is a logical development of these trends. We may
think that My Son John is about John, but really
it's about the person saying "my"-the mother, Lucille
Jefferson (Helen Hayes). Lucelle has a lot of Sister
Benedict in her, including her luminous capacity for
suffering. Her mind is extraordinary, clever and alive,
at times sardonic, but with a compassion that puts her on
McCarey's highest moral plane. In contrast,
her son John (Robert Walker) has the mind of a cypher,
with only a single manner (sardonicness), so that
his love of "humanity and the downtrodden" prevents his
loving actual persons. But John always assumes a position
of authority. He makes the priest come to him outside the
church, he stands waiting without budging an inch. He
doesn't give his parents an inch, either; his sardonic
manner keeps them off balance. And we tend to
see things at first from John's point of view,
particularly the blustering slogan hurling of his father.
How can a woman such as John's mother, with so supple and
nuanced a sensibility, endure someone as obdurate as
John's father? Dan Jefferson (Dean Jagger) is easy to
dislike-for the same reason that Ma Cooper was easy to
dislike in her son's apartment in Make Way for
Tomorrow, and Sam was easy to dislike at times in
Good Sam-because Dan is out of place. One of My
Son John's scenarists remarked after seeing the film
that "what was coming off the sceen...was our
dumbness-registered by McCarey with embarrassing
fidelity....It's [the] sound-of familiar
conversational fatuity-that is the film's real
craziness."[19]
But Lucille probably sees Dan the way he was ten years
ago, in the first year of the world war, when he was
indistinguishable from Jimmy Stewart or Van Heflin.
Nowadays Dan gets disgusting drunk, and Lucille watches
him with love and amusement. She represents McCarey's
third way; she's Father O'Malley. Nonetheless,
it is not clear what McCarey's intentions were for My
Son John, because Robert Walker's death intruded
before filming could be completed. Thus the picture's
last fifteen minutes, after the climactic scene with
John, Lucille, and Stedman, seem like a different movie,
and not just because of a vastly different visual style
necessitated by Walker's death (short takes rather than
long ones, because of the shortness of the clips of
Walker that McCarey had to use from Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train; voice-offs, because Walker
couldn't be lip-synched; absence of two-shots, of
expressively expanded scenes). More importantly, there is
no development or climax of McCarey's melodrama, with its
inextricably muddled conflicts. What is
missing is John Jefferson's change,
a change
that would transcend the muddle, an inner revolution
similar to Michel's in Going My Way or to Terry's
in An Affair to Remember. Perhaps in McCarey's
original treatment (if one existed) there was something
like that shawl or Father O'Malley's hopeful smile, which
would have rekindled a fire inside John Jefferson,
leading him (and us) to rediscover fidelities we had
thought to have left behind us, long ago. Perhaps, as in
past pictures, McCarey would have synchronized John's
rebirth with our awakening awareness of Lucille as the
movie's focal point. On the other hand, all such hopes
seem dashed at the point McCarey had reached in the movie
when Walker died; even Lucille seems
compromised. Curiously,
what McCarey finds terrible about Communism isn't its
despotism or economics but the elusiveness of John's
person (which McCarey identifies, in his fabricated
finale, as secular humanism. "With no spiritual
compass, I lost all sense of direction," John confesses.
What would McCarey think of us today?). Otherwise McCarey
in My Son John pays absolutely no attention to
Communism. He ignores it the way Dreyer ignores
witchcraft in Day of Wrath. And instead like
Dreyer he fashions a black comedy on how the effect of
hunting the witches is to demonize religion,
patriotism, and all human relationships, even motherhood.
Skies are gray, shadows menace; the war is being fought
on the home front; people start shaking and can't
stop. Communism was
a real fear in 1952, a fear "they" would do to use what
they'd just done to Czechoslavakia, Hungary, and Poland.
Worse, there was Korea, with its endless winters and
endless deaths in a war that was even less popular than
the war in Vietnam would be. "Communism" has Lucille
surrounded on all sides-her jingoistic husband, her
traitor son, her other two sons on their way to fight in
Korea. "[Christ] died to make men holy, they may
die to make men free," she gasps to John, then adds,
"They're fighting on God's side," but her desperation
makes it clear she does not quite accept this
rationalization, does not truly believe that dying and
"God's side" are compatible. At a time when
the vilest crime attributed to Nazis and Communists was
that they encouraged children to inform on their parents,
McCarey shows us an America where parents are encouraged
to inform on their chlldren. The FBI man idolizes this
mother whom he calls "our witness" and regards her son
with the same revulsion that Abraham Lincoln in Young
Mr. Lincoln showed for a government prosecutor trying
to force a mother to testify against her son. In Ford's
1939 Lincoln is aghast that the state could suggest such
a profanation; in McCarey's 1952 America the state
expects it. "We have to fight on the home front," the FBI
man explains, pointing to the Jefferson Memorial, but he
mean's Lucille's home. Devastated,
she sits alone on a bench in a park. We know this-in one
of the most immoral scenes in cinema-because the FBI were
photographing her hour by hour as she sits on that bench,
and we watch as the agents stand around watching the film
and talking about Lucille, like in a porno parlor, or in
1984. Big Brother is watching. But so is McCarey,
who is photographing "Lucille," and so are we. What,
then, are we fighting for? Yet these
problems are universal. Of "Communism" or "Democracy," of
any of their specific issues, there is no serious
presentation in My Son John. But perhaps instead
there is the serious presentation of what ought to be an
issue: the confusion. Our "real" world is made up of
fantasy and emotion, as in Dreyer's Day of Wrath,
and McCarey does not stare less steadily at the terrible
things in life: the war, there and here, the grayness
that, outside, looks like frames from Bresson's
Journal d'un curé de campagne-with the same
Jansenist paradox of the absence of God (the gray winter,
the cold, the death) and the omnipresence of grace (the
glowing light; the sense of winter as hibernation).
How far this
is from the Manhattan street in front of St. Dominic's in
Going My Way, from the faith that wishing will
make it so and virtue can change the diabolic world. Even
O'Malley's irrepressible sidekick, Father O'Dowd, who is
now the Jeffersons' parish priest, has turned a bit
solemn. True
spirituality was once McCarey's third force: character as
myth. In face of the demonic, there was a smile, genuine
warmth, and inclusiveness. In face of secular reason and
all good sense, there are Good Sam's Franciscan
interventions in aid of the unworthy. Sprituality was
once the enchantment that overtakes protagonists when
they sing and seem to inhabit a different reality, as
they did in almost every McCarey movie-in long sequences
invariably inserted into the plot just at the moment when
we expect events to be rushing to their climax, because
song is the climax. McCarey's usedo the camera to record
what it cannot see. But My Son
John has no songs. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Peter Martin, "We shot D-Day on Omaha Beach," The
American legion magazine (June 1964): 16. [2]
In Time; quoted in James Harvey, Romantic
comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges (New
York: Knopf, 1987), 272; no citation. [3]
Harvey, 272. [4]
Quoted in Dictionnaire du cinéma: les films
(Paris: Lafont, 1992), 306; no citation. Trans:
AM. [5]
Dictionnaire du cinéma: les films (Paris:
Lafont, 1992), 305. Trans: AM. [6]
Bing Crosby and David Butler, "Remembering Leo McCarey,"
Action (September 1967): 12. [7]
Quoted in Harvey, 269, presumably from Film fan
monthly (September 1970). [8]
Quoted in John A. Gallagher, "Leo McCarey," in John
Wakeman, World film directors: vol. 1: 1890-1945
(New York: Wilson 1987), 743; no citation. [9]
Quoted in Harvey, 268; no citation. [10]
Harvey, 263 and 265. [11]
Larry Swindel, Charles Boyer: the reluctant lover
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 269. [12]
Serge
Daney & Jean-Louis Noames, "Leo et les aléas,"
Cahiers du Cinéma 163, February 1965; p.
18. [13]
Dictionnaire
du Cinéma: Les Films (Paris: Lafont, 1992), p.
1199.
[14]
Dictionnaire
du Cinéma: Les Films (Paris--font, 1992), p.
1199. [15]
Peter
Martin, "Going His Way," Saturday Evening Post,
Nov. 30, 1946; p.48. [16]
Jean-Louis
Noames, "L'art et la manière de Leo McCarey,"
Cahiers du Cinéma 163, February 1965, p.
25. [17]
Laurence
Leamer, As Time Goes By: The Life of Ingrid Bergman
(New York: Harper & Row,1986), p. 116. [18]
Quoted in
Bertrand Tavernier, Amis américains (Lyon:
Institut Lumière/Actes Sud, 1993), p.
173. [19]
Quoted in
Harvey, p. 275; no citation.
8098 words
Abstract
D-Day, 6
June 1944. John Ford was there. Twenty years later, he
said it was the most vivid experience of his life:
Not
that I or any other man who was there can give a
panoramic wide-angle view of the first wave of
Americans who hit the beach that morning. There was a
tremendous sort of spiral of events all over the
world, and it seemed to narrow down to each man in its
vortex on Omaha Beach that day. My group was there to
photograph everything we could for the record. In the
States, as [the D-Day operation]
Overlord got under way, the film Going my
way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald was a
smash hit. I had nothing to do with it, but the title
was somehow appropriate when I remembered what we were
starting in Normandy.[1]
I
love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a
story to say something, and I hope the audience feels
happier leaving the theatre than when it came
in."[4]
through most of the 1930s McCarey, like John Ford, will
emphasize a character's autonomy by refusing the intense
subjectivity of the sort of paired 180-degree crosscuts
we have just experienced, which prompt us to identify
with the characters, whereas most of the time, as now,
McCarey wants our empathy to be more objective. And now
something magic happens. Father Fitzgibbon looks off
camera and we cut to his mother across the space staring
directly into the camera (at Father Fitzgibbon; at us),
and then back to our "objective" view of Father
Fitzgibbon. As always with McCarey, it is the
intersection of two points of view, inside and outside,
that forms his climax. And this time there is more.
the
involuntary motions of temperament, of people's
deepest natures, those instinctive signals of sympathy
or recoil that can't be taken back once they've been
given away, and that nearly always tell more about
ourselves than anything we choose to tell....cCarey
captures romantic intoxication so extraordinarily well
exactly because he includes it all: all the elements
of satire and prickliness and even irritation that
other filmmakers might leave out or not even know
about."[10]
Michel
and Terry gather around the piano
and Grandmother plays "Plaisir d'Amour." But when Terry
(Irene Dunne) joins in, nothing has prepared us for close
shot of her from a perspective deliberately high, so that
we can not attributable it to Grandmother or
Michel (Charles Boyer).
Terry is in her own world here, an autonomous person. And
autonomous also, because again in each case shot from "no
one's" perspective are the scenes close shots of Michel
,
Grandmother (Maria Ouspenska) 
, and even Grandmother's hands. 
In
An affair to remember, in contrast to the
elaborate découpages of his black-and-white
pictures, McCarey much of the time relies on long takes
and mise en scène to make his points, and
gags tend to be geometric movements of characters. There
is nothing like the play of angles that is at the soul of
Love affair as a movie. In An affair to
remember McCarey does not manipulate the audience, or
invite them in as he once did.
,
with only a single cutaway to the audience
,
which, not coincidentally, seems as alien in the
nightclub as in the single cutaway of the "audience" in
the ship's dining room
that
was staring at Terry and Michel at their separate tables.
But
Terry triumphs in the nightclub, and returns for an
encore, and suddenly not only is she part of the crowd
through frequent cutaways but even within her solo shots
we see musicians who were hidden earlier.
Eventually he paints what he feels: grandmother
bequeathing the shawl to Terry. McCarey never gives us a
good look at the painting. In the gallery it's obscured
by foreground objects and distanced. But the gallery
contains only three other pictures, all of women in
various phases of rapture and triumph.
Just keep on wishing,
and care will go.
Dreamers tell us dreams come true.
It's no mistake.
And wishes are the dreams we dream
when we're awake.
The curtain of life will part,
if you are certain within your heart.
So if you wish long enough,
wish strong enough,
you will come to know,
wishing will make it so.
At the beginning of Love affair's final scene,
there is almost no shared point of view.
The camera is roughly perpendicular to the couch in both
the two-shot and the detail of Michel; but off to the
left side for the detail of Terry. There is no innerspace
like in the "Plaisir d'amour" scene; Michel's space and
Terry's space only scarcely intersect. The dividing
barrier of the couch makes the same point, more obviously
but less forcefully.
the shared space seems to diminish. Voilà: The
function of each element of cinema has emotional value
only in context, like notes on a piano. The same sort of
180-degree crosscuts that in Going my way
articulated community, and in the nightclub in Love
affair alienation, here torment the lovers as
invincible opposition, a glass wall separating them.
Subjective point-of-view shots, in pairs, tend not only
to diminish some of a character's autonomy, but also to
cancel some of the camera's mediation (the camera seems
almost to disappear, to be replaced by the other
character's stare) -- and, indeed, it is precisely the
lack of self-confidence (autonomy) and the lack of
mediation (the angle of view; the shawl) that are keeping
our lovers apart.
In vain Michel keeps changing position, trying to resolve
their opposition but only finding variations of the same
invisible wall.
to
show his discovery of his painting in Terry's room.
Superficially, Michel realises Terry did not show up for
their rendezvous because she has had a terrible accident.
More importantly, the painting is reflected beside Michel
like Terry with the Empire State Building, and now again
the dreamer is part of the dream, as though in another
world, where the love of "Plaisir d'Amour" was located.
The
solution to Michel's unresolvable opposing angles with
Terry is an image within an image within an image. Michel
sees his dream, sees it come true, sees himself seeing
it, feels himself changing, an immense change, like for
Ruggles. We feel it in each tiny twitch. Often in McCarey
paintings and photographs evoke this world beyond the
stars-which is above all a world of "values," and distant
from here and now. A retreating camera swiftly distances
a photo in Make Way for Tomorrow, adding spatial
distance to the temporal distance of the photo's
evocation of the hotel as it used to look, when the
movie's old couple were young. The past takes on
something of the aura of the Holy Grail.
Her hair blows in the wind-a sudden irruption of reality
amid artifice, all the more telling in that such reality
is otherwise absent from this movie; Terry-Kerr feels
naked, scared. She is ashamed of things it never occurred
to Terry-Dunne to be ashamed of. Thus Terry-Dunne did not
have a moment of change; she had honesty instead. But
Terry-Kerr has a world-shattering change, a return to her
Catholic ideals, just like Michel's change at the end of
Love Affair. McCarey celebrates the event by
giving her a star-filled sky as her stage in her next
scene. Unfortunately, this climax comes at the middle,
rather than the end, of An Affair to
Remember.
Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will; at any rate it
has a grimness that evokes this time not Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address but his Second Innaugural: "With
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right."
In The Bells of St. Mary's, dedication has a
martial tone: learn to fight. Father O'Malley cheers the
victor in a schoolyard fight, and lectures Sister
Benedict: "On the outside it's a man's world...Sometimes
a man has to fight his way through....Don't you think
sometimes in raising boys that a woman's influence can be
carried too far...that they may become sissies?" Deep
faith was the way, and a nurturing smile, we were told in
Love Affair and Going My Way. Things are
different now. In contrast to O'Malley's earlier openness
to the world and St. Dominic's giant door, Sister
Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) 
lives
in semi-monastic retreat and there is a desperation to
her sense of luminous mission that makes her into a kind
of Joan of Arc. She must have a miracle, and will accept
martyrdom. And the miracle she demands is no longer the
sort that Terry McKay and Father O'Malley and Ruggles
wished for, the "miracles" that saved people; Sister
Benedict wants to save an institution. In order to
persuade a businessman to donate his new building as the
new St. Mary's School, Sister tells him it will survive
when his body is dust. But it is Sister who leaves first.
She pauses on the staircase, one last time, and McCarey's
camera lingers on the staircase after she is gone,
because, thanks to Sister's miracle, this staircase will
endure after her body is dust.
No wonder, McCarey depicts the FBI's entrance into her
home in demonic terms-the shadow falling on a mirror, a
variation on Love Affair's Terry McKay and the
Empire State Building, where a reflection also evoked a
dream.
In Ford's movie Lincoln uses the heavens and the law to
reunite a family; in America 1952 it is The Bible and
John's father who get John killed. Dan throws a Bible at
John, who falls over a table and rips his pants, which
are then thrown away, but which are found to contain an
incriminating key. Worse, this mother not want merely to
save her son, the way Grandmother wants to reform Michel.
Lucille's vision of earthly redemption is that even a
reborn John should go to jail for the rest of his
life.
"If we let the state give us freedom," exclaims Dan, "it
also has the power to take it away." Dan thinks he is
reviling Communism. But what is happening in America?
"Our methods are very often criticized," the FBI man
readily agrees, and then explains everything in language
Noam Chomsky would understand, defining America as "a
firm that protects its business."
Endnotes
