48. Lucidity: Film Comedies and Comic Fiction, reviewed by Cheryl S.
While Sandy and I continue work on Visions, our new Joan the Maid dance, the Unholy Four (Louise, Pippa, Mme Sesostris, and Belle) have had a masked picnic beneath the enormous oil derrick sculpture on the top of Ebersdorf Tower. It seems that Pippa’s dear puss Murr demanded exercise last week and led Pippa up an internal stairwell to the roof of the Tower. Pippa said its crystalline air was so refreshing and the city daylight so clear and calming, she immediately organized a group outing, sans Murr. Our Master Raro and the building supervisor Mr. Pessoa arranged for food by Jean-Georges with several bottles of prosecco and wine and transported the feast via a dumbwaiter, unknown to us, all the way from side-street delivery to a buffet table on the Tower’s wind-blown roof. Pippa gave me and Sandy a vivid report of the festivities (and some delicious leftovers).
I am fascinated by one bit of Pippa’s information above because, if you remember, there was a mystery about how A&P (Albertine and Paco) absented themselves one evening from their locked quarters on the thirty-fifth floor, on that night when Master Raro and I were snooping about the Cat Lab. Well, maybe the pair secreted themselves in that dumbwaiter on their floor and thereby escaped in it to up above! It’s my new theory.
A masked Master Raro took a helmet-shielded Louise in her wheelchair up to the 80th floor and then carried her in his arms via the internal stairway to our building’s aerie. The celebrants agreed with Pippa that the view was extraordinary. When the girls finished dining and drinking, Mme Sesostris insisted on the group having a CE5 meditation session. That’s where you attempt to draw a UFO into your vicinity through concentrated powers of mind. (It’s presumably worked for thousands of believers. Also, Louise is currently eager to become an operative for the Pentagon’s newly created task force, which will seriously investigate UFOs after official obfuscation on this subject across decades.) Belle claims that she is part-Alien in her genes since her mother admitted to have been abducted before Belle’s advent – an otherwise inexplicable virgin birth. There is something otherworldly about Belle, especially when giving facials.
On our roof the four celebrants sat beneath the immense oil derrick, hoping for the arrival of Alien transport out of lockdown. Pippa said the ladies kept breaking the mood with giggles, and no spaceship arrived, not even a lone orange Orb. I fantasize that A&P may have been using a helicopter service for trips on and off the roof. I have to talk to Master Raro about this. Is there enough room up there for landing and departure? (Or maybe A&P themselves are Aliens! Another theory.)
Mme Beach is still landlocked in Siberia for the duration of the pandemic. She emailed me once again from cold Yakutsk, this time advising me to watch the George Cukor film Sylvia Scarlett, with Katherine Hepburn, as possible inspiration for an eventual ballet for Le Swing, her Parisian company. I caught it on the Internet, where the movie is available for free. I must say the film doesn’t really work for me. I enjoyed Hepburn’s adorable cross-dressing scenes as a boy, but her eventual maiden love for a dissolute artist just didn’t ring true. The film is based on a fiction by Compton Mackenzie, whom Henry James is said to have saluted by claiming his destiny was to drag the British novel kicking and screaming into the Twentieth Century. (Mackenzie also wrote Sinister Street, which I can affirm has magnificent prose.) In Sylvia Scarlett, Hepburn doesn’t make a believable transition into a loving young woman at the end of the movie. There is something confected about the girl’s ardor for that painter.
To recover from a George Cukor failure (Pippa says this director often over-protects his leading ladies), I watched a series of early Hepburn vehicles. I like Morning Glory and Little Women (another Cukor). I’ve always found The Philadelphia Story to be predictable (yes, yet another Cukor). My favorite director of the period, George Stevens (see Blog 21), gives Hepburn wonderful nuances in Alice Adams, and she is very funny in the same director’s Woman of the Year. But Hepburn is monotonous in tone throughout Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby. And that left me with memories of her late-career Mary in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, where she evokes the Tyrone matriarch as what Sandy calls a “nostalgia queen” rather than a semi-translucent ghost. (Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards, however, are extraordinary in that Sidney Lumet movie of the play.)
Finally, I watched Stage Door yet again, a movie I relish for its acting by just about everyone, including a soft, compelling, young Ann Miller. Director Gregory La Cava almost makes Hepburn’s character bearable in context – but the actress has to incarnate the screenplay’s allegory of overnight acquisition of acting genius through offstage suffering and sacrifice. Still, La Cava knew how to make his female ensemble very attractive and very funny throughout. The movie is a gem of group rime and rhythm. It, too, is on the Internet without charge.
The great thing about Katherine Hepburn on film is that she leads one to Cary Grant.
I have always admired Grant in his movies, but I realize now that I mostly knew the established “star” actor in his later Hitchcock roles. In his earlier films Grant is ultra-clear in his delivery, versatile in his technique, and so incredibly sexy! (The young Cary Grant had such expressive eyes.) In Sylvia Scarlett he plays a young Cockney con-man. He is so assured, so definite in his effects, so knowable, you want Sylvia to marry him, but no such luck! Instead, the young woman eventually tells his character that he has “the mind of a pig”. To which he replies, “It’s a pig’s world.” The uninflected tone of that statement as Grant delivers it is like the declaration of a new kind of actor on screen. Grant creates himself as an artist right before your eyes.
My favorite of the Hitchcock movies with Grant is, of course, Notorious, which is a masterpiece. Grant and Ingrid Bergman make romantic love seductive, painful, neurotic. The script by Ben Hecht is the source of the movie’s psychological acuity, but the musical cadences in the realization are all Hitchcock’s – and Grant’s and Bergman’s. Grant had a way of alternating comic and serious roles in his Hollywood films, and eventually Hitchcock found a way to combine both in movies like To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. Grant was lucky in his directors. And his directors were lucky in Grant.
For example, George Stevens was able to work with him three times: The Talk of the Town, Gunga Din, and Penny Serenade. Often, Grant’s female counterparts dim out in his presence, but Irene Dunne (in The Awful Truth and Penny Serenade), Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious), and Jean Arthur (in The Talk of the Town and Only Angels Have Wings) are the exceptions. When the films are lightweight charmers like Topper and Holiday, Grant has a field day, and you don’t really take his leading ladies seriously – you can’t focus on them. They come across as overly emphatic or quaintly passive. But Dunne, Bergman, and Arthur register.
I believe it was Frank Capra who said that the one great farceur in American films was Cary Grant. And that means, of course, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and His Girl Friday. In the Leo McCarey Truth, Irene Dunne manages to absorb Grant’s most subtle stingers. So grounded and acerbic is her portrait of a well-to-do New York wife, Dunne gives Grant her complacency to play against. He finds a way to suggest the slight world-weariness of a prematurely aging playboy-husband. He makes the type glamorous.
As I mentioned, in Bringing Up Baby, Grant has to endure Katherine Hepburn’s stridently vocal version of what came to be called a “wacky heiress” in the period. But he finds so many ways to physicalize a young, absent-minded professor, Grant almost redefines the fall-guy type. I love those involuntary noises he makes to suggest private amusement and imminent hysteria. And Grant has an exquisite use of his hands under Howard Hawks’ direction. The physical comedy in Baby benefits from Grant’s years of acrobatic training in music hall: he practically dances the role. Every time he’s on the screen Grant presents another facet of his physical instrument and his mental agility.
In His Girl Friday, Hawks’ remake of The Front Page, Grant is burdened with Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, opposite his Walter Burns. Russell is so challenged by her leading man that she falls back on a defensive maneuver her director should have discouraged: she acts with her chin. Every time Cary Grant sardonically tucks the famous facial dimple into his neck, Rosalind Russell leads with her jaw. You watch in disbelief as that mandible interposes itself again and again. (Especially since this actress’ performance is widely praised.) It is true that the film itself is a first-class verbal farce. But Grant operates on another level – genius.
Screenwriter Francis Lederer’s adaptation could even be said to improve on the original play and screenplay by Hecht and Charles McArthur. Throughout His Girl Friday, Grant is a lesson in comedic rhythm in his delivery of the non-stop dialogue. Here is evidence that W. C. Fields was correct about comedy: it’s all in the timing. Here is the definitive source for Tony Curtis’ imitation of Grant’s vocalisms in Some Like It Hot: that skeptical, upper-glottal purr that Grant uses to devastate his Hildy and all journalistic and political opponents. Notice the way Grant’s sense of the camera lens has become precise: he knows exactly how to register physically when standing and delivering that screwy dialogue. He is also brilliantly camera-savvy in Hawk’s Only Angels Have Wings, which is a lovely film once you realize that it is a story of impossible love (here, involving an air mail courier service standing in for dangerous World War I aviation missions). In Angels, Grant is paired with a moving Jean Arthur as a frustrated lover, and the film also has Rita Hayworth and Richard Barthelmess.
Now I have to admit a personal failing: I’m not all that keen on screwball comedy as a genre. Its ensemble style is too constricting on the expressive range of its actors, unless they are as expert as Grant. I have to confess that I’m a romantic comedy fan. Screwball is dialogue-centric. For example, I will always choose a George Stevens rom-com over a Hawks screwballer because I go to movies for visual pleasures. I suppose it’s because I’m a choreographer. As an example, let’s take a moment from Stevens’ The Talk of the Town.
Jean Arthur is discovered hanging curtains when an escaped prisoner charged with arson and murder (Cary Grant) suddenly invades her living room. Stevens has shown Arthur preparing the space for rental by climbing a stepladder and remaining erect and unfazed during a nighttime electrical storm. The director has presented Grant lurching through that storm with a sprained ankle – almost always in extreme close-up. When the two finally confront one another indoors, the camera retreats to mid-distance as Arthur uses a curtain dowel to keep Grant at bay, even when she retreats up some stairs and he follows her. Fainting from ankle pain, Grant tumbles down the stairs, hitting his head and passing out. Arthur rushes down to him and realizes he is indeed unconscious. In her startlement, she hops backwards, crouching slightly as though for attack or escape. We register Arthur’s bent knees in that quick pose through Stevens’ photographic composition: the straight, vertical lines of the room – stairway, wall corners, supports – are all thrown into cinematographic relief by her angled silhouette. Arthur has lost her command and poise. With that instinctive hop and crouch, the heroine of the film becomes both a possible aggressor and a potential victim – and the interior of her house is rendered visually dynamic as its protections are thrown into doubt. Both the cinematography and the actress bring this about. And Stevens’ choreographic direction. Stevens achieves this revealing comic moment while the great Cary Grant lies supine at Jean Arthur’s feet.
Stevens had a way of putting a directorial cushion around an actor’s performance details. He casts his supportive spell through a visual analysis involving mime, cinematography, editing, and a sensitivity to milieu. And all of these devices are coordinated to establish a comic rhythm. (Strange how few cinema critics discuss this aspect of film direction.) One of the general limitations of George Cukor’s films is the absence of such rhythms. In a Stevens comedy, the action unfurls lucidly, especially in terms of types of movement.
Speaking of lucidity, I’ve been reading the new Edmund White novel, A Saint from Texas (Bloomsbury Publishing). It creates a clear-eyed comic context from details-within-details, jokes-within-jokes. The work deals with twin sisters, Yvonne and Yvette, from an oil-rich Texas family whose chosen paths in life take them in seemingly divergent directions. Yvonne wants to marry into European nobility and acquire a title. Yvette has intellectual gifts but settles for a life of religious devotion as a Catholic nun in Colombia (South America). It is as though White has recreated Henry James’ Isabel Archer and Milly Theale via a humorous thought experiment filled with social satire. Given untold wealth, what would happen to two good young girls in a modern world that sets potential life-goals and then allows the individual aspirant to approximate them as best she can, no expense spared, no quarter given? White allows Yvonne to tell her story in a first-person narrative, but now and then we read letters to her from Yvette who describes the rigors of modern religious service.
White takes the women in different directions, while suggesting underlying shared experiences and destinies so that we sense their worlds are not so different after all. (White’s juxtapositions create a surreal novelistic register that feels utterly American and up-to-date.) Yvonne at length becomes a murderess. Yvette may drive a male infatuate to accepting his early death by political assassination. Both women turn to other women for solace in bed. And both use the sexual impulse as a litmus test of character and achieved intimacy, their own and that of their lovers. The unconscious relationship between the sisters suggests that some life experiences have parallel commonalities which are inescapable. The obvious clash of lifestyles releases the comedy of the book. At times the satire reminds one of Luis Buñuel crossed with Buster Keaton. Perhaps an ultimate lack of self-knowledge is the ongoing problem for these two women, but as the great Friedrich Schiller put it, “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” Both women fight against misapprehension of their goals – Yvonne against a socially and economically reduced French aristocracy, Yvonne against a Catholic institution that cannot recreate itself and thus imposes ancient doctrine. White is possibly no admirer of organized religion. This new novel is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers, but White has a lighter touch and a full-bodied American comic spirit.
If you know White’s moving fictional tribute to Stephen Crane, Hotel de Dream, you are aware that he has a critical view of the private man that was Henry James. James would possibly see the new Saint as a form of burlesque. Then again, perhaps he might find that Edmund White is dragging the American novel, kicking and screaming, into the Twenty-first Century.
The pandemic has inspired new venues for entertainment. In the tradition of the current drive-in movie revival, maybe Sandy and I could use the Tower’s rooftop for intimate plein air dance concerts once the crisis abates. We could have a sprung floor installed. Perhaps we could even incorporate the derrick sculpture. We must check the wind velocities up there. Would our good sport Louise be game?
C.S.
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