50. Shackles: “Christopher Strong” and Nancy Carroll, reviewed by Cheryl S.
I’ve been working on the many details in our new dance with my Zoom choreographer Sandy (Visions, to Liszt), and watching old movies with Pippa, who is such a cinema resource. Pippa informs me that Master Raro has been checking out our building’s newly discovered dumb waiter that he located when facilitating the recent picnic on the Tower Roof, and our Master has made yet another discovery! The dumb waiter doesn’t open on certain floors, but when it accessed Tower Floor 33, Master found it gave onto a portion of the building (hitherto unknown) that had once been a reception hall and playroom, possibly for Mr. Ebersdorf, when he was co-resident here with his wife, our dear Louise.
Master explored and found that the space boasts an empty swimming pool, an immense bedroom featuring an enormous deflated waterbed and a Tibetan panda-leopard rug, and an abandoned Music Salon with antiquated Hi-Fi equipment (for example, thousands of LP recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that are now retro collectors’ items among the vacuum tube crowd). Master says that there are mounted flea-bitten deer heads on all the walls, perhaps trophies from West Texas hunting parties. Master also said that there are signs the 33rd Floor has been occupied recently – could Albertine and Paco have used it as a sometime retreat from the carceral Cat Lab on 35? Via the dumb waiter?
More from far Siberia: Mme Beach has reacted to my thumbs-down on Sylvia Scarlett by recommending Christopher Strong among films with Katherine Hepburn that might make (or inspire) new ballets. (It is available free on the Internet.) I watched it with Pippa over the Labor Day weekend. Pippa says that the author of the novel on which Strong is based (Gilbert Frankau) was a popular right-wing British purveyor of romantic fiction, and the film was directed by Dorothy Arzner, one example of whose work I have seen (Dance, Girl, Dance, which is very condescending to ballet, I have to say). I warn the reader that I have been influenced by Pippa to see Christopher as a covert political allegory rather than a successful romantic drama. For one thing, there is not much chemistry between the solitary aviatrix that Hepburn plays (Lady Cynthia) and the married Member of Parliament (Christopher Strong, played by Colin Clive) who falls in love with her. Their amorous scenes are mostly conventional clinches or Hepburn burying her head in Clive’s shoulder while mumbling about how very wrong it is to commit adultery. (Strong’s wife is played by the wonderful Billie Burke, who is so sympathetic you come to understand Lady Cynthia’s initial hesitation at stealing Christopher. There is even a late scene where Burke thanks Hepburn’s Cynthia for effecting a needed change in her errant husband!) The absence of a really involving central love affair does not prevent the film from working in another “register”, as Pippa puts it.
That tone is introduced by Arzner through the atmospheric cinematography of Bert Glennon, who was von Sternberg’s right-hand man on the visually chthonian Underworld. And Arzner does with the young Hepburn what von Sternberg would accomplish with Marlene Dietrich: cinematic deification. Cynthia is characterized as not only a modern society girl but as a kind of airborne dea ex machina, descending from on high like a goddess to set right a British family in crisis. There are shots of Hepburn’s face that have the avid, wolfish gaze that you sometimes see in Dietrich’s close-ups. At other moments, Hepburn actually resembles certain head shots of her director, Arzner. Hepburn is regularly imaged as a super-pilot heroine, and something like a glamorous answer to a right-wing M.P.’s prayers for deliverance from marital doubts and nightly homework on the British national tax laws. Indeed, the domestic and the political arenas require this Christopher to be strong.
Pippa gave me a list of the ways that Lady Cynthia is a kind of right-wing savior beyond the usual long-suffering, self-sacrificing heroine of modern romantic fiction. She has descended into the messy affairs of a straying husband and his nubile playgirl of a daughter, in both of whose difficulties she involves herself with a stop-and-start catalytic governance. Cynthia describes herself as “reckless” and Christopher as “cautious”. The contrast is reflected in the film’s pacing. I have to admit that Pippa may be onto something, because the editing rhythms, sudden fades to black, and frequent narrative jumps in this movie have a hypnotic ability to lead you on and then deny you any immediate resolution, over and over. But instead of being frustrating, this anti-rhythm somehow casts a spell. It is as though Arzner imposes a contrast between vehicular continuity (airplanes, autos, motorbikes, motorboats), and sudden ruptures in the characters’ flight-plans. It is more than a matter of condensing a complicated book-length narrative into a movie that is only an hour-and-fifteen minutes in length. (Slavko Vorkapitch has a field day here with his montage transitions.) Arzner suggests that at any moment Lady Cynthia may disappear as magically as she has materialized. Those lupine close-ups of Hepburn and the editing rhythms do the trick. You can’t take your eyes off the screen. At times I was reminded of what Joanne Winning, in writing of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, has referred to as “lesbian modernist grotesque”.
Some of the fascination of the movie comes from social rituals and banter finely observed by screenwriter Zoe Akins. I know her work in two wonderful films: George Cukor’s Girls About Town (1931), for which she contributed the story, and Lowell Sherman’s The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), which Akins adapted for the screen from her own stage success. But the tone of Christopher Strong is very different from those movies, and it is Arzner’s steady contribution that gets on our nerves. (Nevertheless, Akins interests me, and I have to do some research on her.)
Pippa points out that in Christopher Strong Arzner is trading in magico-religious ideas that have a Gnostic origin: the deity that descends into a material world that is fallen and seductively corruptive. The movie stresses the British home values of marital fidelity. Its female protagonist, Lady Cynthia, becomes both a national heroine and international in her aeronautic triumphs. (There’s even a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.) She is portrayed as reckless, stern, charming, wildly charismatic, and ambitious to be an inventor. See her bent over a drafting board! See her gold lamé moth costume for a festive ball! (Self-designed?) After Cynthia’s record-breaking around-the-world flight, she becomes a model for young British women. And our famed aviatrix eventually sacrifices herself, if not for shared political ideals then for maintenance of her conception of personal integrity. (If she has to choose between romantic love and her profession, there is ultimately no contest – it’s up, up and away.) In some circles this is called “fantasy fiction”.
Our Lady Cynthia condescends to the British social realm, flirts with the idea of being one of its independent bright young things, and ultimately finds a way to improve the locals and leave behind an imposing monument of her courageous deeds. Pippa says that the aviation motif as salvific deliverance is repeated in the Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph of the Will, with its deus ex machina, Adolph Hitler, just a bit later in the 1930s, flying to Nuremburg for a giant rally, descending from the clouds upon the populace, and leaving behind many dedicated troops. I believe this kind of thing has been called “fascinating Fascism”. The ancient Greek version of the motif involved the arrival of an iconic agalma (a sculpture) representing a coming deity and the resultant set of rituals to celebrate the newly known god. Lady Cynthia leaves behind that hefty headstone. Arzner’s film could therefore be seen as a kind of inadvertent forewarning of ambiguous gods ready to descend upon civilization. Near the climax, the director has Hepburn ruminate on her sacrificial fate while dressed in a chic black gown: Arzner’s goddess is stylish to the end.
I enjoyed that moth costume, which Hepburn wears with aplomb. And the single shot signaling the night of illicit passion that Cynthia and Christopher finally achieve – an upraised female arm encircled with a bejeweled bracelet and Hepburn’s off-screen comment, “Now I am shackled!” – is brilliantly succinct. And so Gnostic.
I’ve looked at six additional films on the Internet (all free, all available as of right now). I’ve found (to paraphrase myself) that a great thing about Cary Grant is that he can lead you eventually to the American actress Nancy Carroll (1903-1965). This artist’s wonderful 1930 film Laughter also features a female wrist encircled with diamonds, a visual trope that here signals a life that the heroine, Peggy Gibson, a former Follies girl, rejects in order to escape to commitment to an impoverished composer (played by Frederic March) in Paris. This is typical of Carroll’s films (at least those that survive, since several are lost), which regularly deal with heroines who have obstacles interposed between their dreams of personal advancement or romantic happiness and any opportunity for actual realization of their goals. The modern woman is “shackled” to conventional paths unless she rebels by resisting conventions, and Carroll has the acting range to convince you that the fight for self-realization is worth it. Carroll is my new movie heroine.
I have to admit I’ve become a little obsessed with Carroll in four of the films I’ve caught streaming on the Internet. Actually, there are six movies available, but I can’t recommend two of them. The Dance of Life (1929) is the film version of the huge Broadway success Burlesque (in which Carroll appeared) and it is a slog. Honey (1930) is broad stage humor at its most self-indulgent and heavy-handed. Both movies can be left to the specialists in theater and movie history. Carroll can’t redeem them; they are that dated.
Carroll did not have a lengthy career on film, really only part of a decade, but in the 1930s she made her mark, at one point becoming the most popular female Paramount star. She was multi-talented, able to sing and dance as well as act. Carroll’s emotional transparency and mercurial expressiveness were ideal for motion picture close-ups. Via primitive early color cinematography, her beauty is unique: red hair, green eyes, pale period complexion. She is excellent in gaging her performances opposite the male actors she partners. You may initially think of her as a permanent ingénue, but her emotional range is surprisingly wide. And she does not fall into mannerisms which you sometimes find in Bette Davis and, indeed, Katherine Hepburn. Carroll’s career was perhaps not long enough to include that dread eventuality.
Laughter is a little early sound masterpiece directed by Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, who is a new cineast to me, with a script by four writers including Herman J. Mankiewicz. Carroll’s character Peggy Gibson must juggle three men in her life: her wealthy husband who has installed her in New York society; Ralph, a suicidal sculptor of the New York demi-monde; and Paul, a young composer just returned from Paris and eager to rescue Peggy from her gilded marital cage. Paul tells her that what is missing from her life is laughter. The movie’s outcome is fairly predictable, but the staging of Paul’s renewed courtship of Peggy is a delight. The film has a wonderful improvised style – the kind of thing that later Robert Altman tried for but never quite achieved in his work. (I loved the four-handed piano number Paul essays with Peggy’s butler. Heaven.) There is a great set-piece in which Peggy and Paul break into the house of strangers on Long Island on a giddy search for the Atlantic Ocean. Carroll and March hit exactly a shared note of sustained delirium. Throughout, you have the illusion that you are meeting Carroll as she was off-stage and screen, self-assured, chance-taking, and casually adventurous. The film is a breath of fresh air, and I need to see more movies by d’Arrast!
The “golf musical” Follow Thru (1930) casts Carroll as Lora Moore, a local country club golf expert. (It was directed by Lloyd Corrigan and Laurence Schwab.) Lora is coached by her new boyfriend Jerry (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) who is a golf pro, and she is challenged by a visiting female golf champion. Rogers and Carroll get to sing “We’d Make a Peach of a Pair” and the color photography (yes, in 1930) glorifies Carroll. The movie also has a jaw-dropping production number, “I Want To Be Bad” sung and led by Zelma O’Neal – once seen, never forgotten, says Pippa. Jack Haley and O’Neal sing “Button Up Your Overcoat”. The one drawback in the film is the period humor, which has not aged well. You must bring a near-scholarly fascination with period styles in comedy in order to tolerate certain of the scenes with Haley and Eugene Pallette. But this movie captures something of the sweet, dizzy nature of 1920s musicals like no other film that I know. And Carroll simply glows.
Child of Manhattan (1933) allows the actress to demonstrate her emotional range. The script is based on a stage play by Preston Sturges, and there is a post-birthing sequence that is particularly painful. Carroll plays Madelaine McGonagle, a dime-a-dance girl working at Manhattan’s Loveland, where she meets Paul Vanderkill, a scion of wealthy New York society, played by a stolid John Boles. The film is alert to class levels of permitted behavior in the way that pre-Code Hollywood exploited. The melodramatic ending of the movie is weak, but Carroll is fascinating and touching throughout. The director was Edward Buzzell, who co-directed (no credit) Barbara Stanwyck’s Ten Cents a Dance.
I’ve saved the best for last: Hot Saturday (1932), by William Selter (who also directed the Astaire-Rogers Roberta) and starring Carroll, Cary Grant, and Randolph Scott. This was Grant’s second film, and he already catches the eye and holds it. Carroll plays Ruth Brock, a small-town girl who works at her local bank. She goes to “wild parties” at the lavish country home of Romer Sheffield (played by Grant) and develops a “reputation”. When her childhood sweetheart, Bill Fadden, played by Scott, returns to town, Ruth and Bill become engaged, but then he hears one of those rumors. I will not tell you what Ruth’s fate turns out to be, but it is a shackles-breaking surprise and definitely pre-Code. Carroll locates the perfect tone for her character, and the director catches nuances of Main Street life that are pitch-perfect. (The film’s satire of rumor-mongering is built on carefully observed details and a sense of local time passing slowly.) Carroll and Grant make a perfect team: you only wish they had been paired again and again in subsequent movies. (Grant and Scott are rumored to have been close off-screen friends at the time, but the movie separates their characters here so that there are no confrontations.)
I also want to mention that the Carroll films have a strain of domestic violence that is unique in American movies. When in Child of Manhattan the mother of Carroll’s dance-hall girl finds out she’s being “kept”, she slaps her daughter hard. The moment is shocking because it looks like habituated home behavior. And in Hot Saturday, Carroll strips her little sister of some filched underwear in a bedroom scene that you won’t find elsewhere on celluloid. Is there a kind of “Prussian” violence in our native character that could be exposed casually in the early 1930s and that then metastasized into the extreme public violence of our movies post-World War Two? Hot Saturday is like opening King Tut’s tomb. It feels like another world – and yet scarily our own.
Obviously, I have to introduce Sandy to Nancy Carroll. And I have to research Zoe Akins, Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, and William Selter. If only the “lost movies” of Carroll could turn up. We need them all (or almost all). But some of the ones we have turn out to be treasures. Thank you, Pippa. And I have to thank Mme Beach for pointing me in the right direction: Hepburn, Grant, Carroll.
C.S.
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