Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

There's an inner circle that hangs over all our lives, an inner sanctum to which we will never gain admittance. Of course the oedipal chamber, where the primal scene is enacted is the inner circle which all children are excluded from. But in reality we all are like commuters who live in the suburbs of some imagined world of larger than life beings whose mythologies throw a shadow over our existence. No matter how far up the ladder, no matter how high up on the great chain of being, there's always someone there before us whose exploits out shadow anything we can accomplish. “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” is Alexander Pope’s famous line, but the fool in question is likely to be coming late to the party. Writers wistfully recall the antics of the Algonquin Round table. No matter how many steroids they take few baseball players can't compete with legends like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. No matter what their pedigree politicians never seem to have the charisma of Roosevelt or de Gaulle, nor the glamour of Kennedy whose White House was referred to as Camelot. American directors don’t make films like John Ford, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and despite being the highest paid athlete in sports today, can we really put Floyd Mayweather. Jr. in the class Joe Louis, George Foreman or Mohammed Ali? Are JZ and Beyonce, perhaps the hottest team in popular music, any competition for the Beatles or The Stones (who are still going strong)? And how do the De Niros, Pacinos, the Streeps and Jolies of today really crock up to the Clark Gables , Jimmy Stewarts, Cary Grants, Barbara Stanwycks, Katherine Hepburns and Betty Davises of the past? No matter how hard we try, we’re all bridge and tunnel. We’re all by definition standing on the shoulders of giants.

Christmas in Connecticut

Peter Godfrey ‘s Christmas in Connecticut (l945) is a winter’s version of Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the movie which played as part of the Stanwyck festival at Film Forum, Christmas Eve, Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane, a single journalist who lives a hand-to-mouth existence, but whose doppleganger is a doting wife and mother who cooks delectable meals for her patrician husband in a Connecticut farmhouse. Stanwyck had previously demonstrated an aptitude for playing double-faced characters. In Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (l941), which  was the second part of the double header, she’s a grifter who disguises herself as an aristocrat. But fantasy is the lingua franca of  Christmas in Connecticut, which begins when the survivor of a torpedoed American vessel, floating in the middle of the ocean, dreams he’s being served an elegant French meal. The conceit is carried forward in the hospital where a nurse reads Lane’s column in Smart Housekeeping and dreams up the scheme of luring one of her charges into marriage by having him transported to the fantasy Connecticut manse for the holidays. It’s interesting to note that the kind of journalistic chicanery that Stanwyck’s character practices, which usually has rather severe consequences, is here the substance of romantic comedy. One wonders if the props for the movie are stored somewhere on the Warner Brothers lot, since the setting is an iconic never never land and the ultimate house with the white picket fence. Sleighs are pulled by horses and sleigh bells announce the guests. But when all is said it functions a kind of magic retreat, like Shakespeare’s forest in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), the recovering seaman, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), the magazine publisher, John Sloane, the ill-fated suitor and Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall),a restaurateur, who is the resident Puck, all converge.The bucolic setting is belied by the potent and even revolutionary effects produced by the imaginative goings on within. This minor masterpiece is not like any Christmas you will ever spend in Connecticut. 

Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own and Ball of Fire

Cornell Woolrich, of Rear Window fame, wrote a novel called Fright in which a marriage is cursed by a crime. No Man of Her Own (1950), the Mitchell Leisen film that recently played as part of the Barbara  Stanwyck festival at Film Forum, was also based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, I Married a Dead Man. In the film adaptation a couple are haunted by a crime they never committed. At the beginning of the film Bill Harkness (John Lund) and his wife Patrice (Stanwyck) are living in a state of luxurious torpor, a life in death that’s that’s no Wagnerian Liebestod. In a series of flashbacks, we learn just what’s drained the passion (though not the love) from them. There’s a train wreck which results in a switch of identities, with the down and out Helen Ferguson mistaken for Patrice Harkness, the wife of the scion of a wealthy Midwestern family. Neuroanalytic folks would have a heyday since those who suspect her could be conceived of as suffering from a disorder called Capgras Syndrome in which a familiar person seems to be inhabited by an imposter. In this case the Patrice/Helen character is just that and the guilt, aggravated by a blackmailer named Stephen Morley (Lyle Bettger), just about undoes her. But unlike in Fright the curse is magically lifted. No Man of Her Own is a cumbersome Stanwyck vehicle replete with interior monologues and redundant railway leitmotifs which include whistles and plumes of white smoke, but it shows the enormous range of emotion that Stanwyck was able to muster as part of her dramatic palette. She was able to don so many guises, guileless victim, devoted daughter in law, would be murderer, that you wonder if the Patrice/Helen character she’s playing is suffering from another ailment, multiple personality disorder. There is one scene in the movie that's particularly haunting in the light of the recent Metro North disaster. An elderly woman is taking her fine time in the women’s room. Patrice Harkness is banging on the door impatiently. Finally she and Helen get in and seconds later the two are thrown across the bathroom by the force of the crash. Patrice is dead and Helen finds herself waking up, reinvented, in a hospital bed. In Ball of Fire (1941) which played the next night Stanwyck is a gangster's moll named Sugarpuss O’Shea. Sugarpuss finds her Henry Higgins in Gary Cooper  (Professor Potts) who is studying slang and for whom split infinitives are a pet peeve. It also Snow White, with her Seven Dwarfs as pedants writing an encyclopedia. Howard Hawks directed the Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett script and the dialogue moves as fast as the drumsticks of Gene Krupa whose band makes a cameo appearance. The role is the reverse of No Man of Her Own. Stanwyck’s playing Lola Lola to Professor Rath, though in this case she’s a seductress with a heart of gold. The repartee is brilliant. “I had a zipper during one of my acts. I couldn’t take anything off. It was so embarrassing,” Stanwyck explains breezily. Stanwyck demonstrates her musical comedy acumen in many scenes and one in particular with Krupa in which she applies her “Screw, scram, scraws” (“the complete conjugation,” as Potts says) as Krupa foregoes his drumsticks for wooden matchsticks which he beats on a matchbox. This is the kind of movie that you’re likely to leave saying, “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

The Bitter Tea of General Yen Inaugurates Stanwyck Retrospective at Film Forum

Is all romance a Shavian phenomenon? It’s interesting that Shaw never consummated his marriage since he seems to know so much about the mysterious compromise between instinct and consciousness that makes for the cocktail of romantic love. Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen inaugurated the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective at Film Forum and seeing it you sometimes think you're watching Major Barbara. Megan Davis (Stanwyck) may not be a Salvation Army cadet, but she sounds like Major Barbara in her zeal to change the world and General Yen (Nils Asther) could be the resident spokesman for realpolitik, Untershaft. Edward Paramore’s script is rife with Shavianisms. “Isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than to let them starve slowly,” Yen tells the idealistic Davis as she looks out of her boudoir at the firing squad. And later he says “I’m going to convert a missionary.” But the movie is more complex than that. Underneath his realist veneer, Yen is the true romantic willing to give up everything for love. Yen also has a bit of the pre-Socratic in him, when he declaims, “we never really die, we only change” and “life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” There’s a dream sequence in the film which competes with what Dali created for Hitchcock in Spellbound, as the man Megan despises comes to her in both as a devil and a God. Within the context of the film’s ideological conundrums the view of colonialism is actually more sophisticated than you’ll find in a more modern treatment of the theme, say in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Capra makes it clear that the Western drive to civilize the hordes of Chinese is only a superficial humanism predicated on a total inability to understand the complexities of the culture. The Bitter Tea of General Yen could be taught in one of those courses which deals with the failure to import Western style democracy to either the Far or Middle East or to put it another way Edward Said’s Orientalism is what Barbara Stanwyck’s character is suffering from. But the real subject of Film Forum’s festival is Stanwyck and in the final scene in the love crypt, replete with its Wagnerian potion, she is dazzling and enigmatic both, entering in her bejeweled gown and offering herself up to a love that can never be.