Tag: James Gleason

The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

Charming Christmas enjoyment in this rather odd angel comedy that wins you over

Director: Henry Koster

Cast: Cary Grant (Dudley), Loretta Young (Julia Brougham), David Niven (Bishop Henry Brougham), Monty Woolley (Professor Wutheridge), James Gleason (Sylvester), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Agnes Hamilton), Elsa Lanchester (Matilda), Sara Haden (Mildred Cassaway), Karolyn Grimes (Debby Brougham)

Newly appointed Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) is forgetting who he is. Now spending all his time with the hoi-polloi (led by Gladys Cooper’s grande dame Mrs Hamilton) trying to secure funding for a new cathedral he’s rather lost sight of things at home with his devoted wife Julia (Loretta Young). Enter, seemingly in answer to his prayers, angel Dudley (Cary Grant). Taking up a role as Henry’s new assistant – with only Henry knowing the Heavenly background of his guest – Dudley sets about helping those around Henry rediscover their spiritual joy in life.

The Bishop’s Wife is a gentle, unassuming film, all taking place in the week before Christmas. It’s heart-warming, seasonal stuff, competently directed by Henry Koster, who efficiently juggles gentle character conflicts with a reassuring moral message. There are some rather charmingly done magical special effects sprinkled across the film: Dudley uses his angelic powers to instantly sort reference cards, fly decorations onto a chair, dictate to a self-operating typewriter and guide a snowball through the air with all the dexterity of Oliver Stone’s magic bullet. As a gentle piece of seasonal viewing, it gives you everything you could want.

Such is its easy charm and seasonal sweetness, it almost doesn’t matter that it’s quite an odd film. It’s no real surprise Dudley isn’t on Earth to help Henry secure mega-bucks he to build a grand cathedral (especially since principle doner Mrs Hamilton is more interested in making it a tribute to her late-husband rather God) but to help Henry work out his real focus should be the ordinary joes of his community and his marriage. That he should make sure he prioritises a humble choir at small local church St Sylvester’s and keep in touch with the parishioners he used to dedicate his time to. And, above all, that he should find time in his bustling calendar to keep the love in his marriage.

But the methods used by Dudley – away from angelic magic over inanimate objects and his ability to know everyone’s names before they even open their mouths and cross roads in bustling traffic without fear – are a little odd. Aside from shoring up a few people’s spiritual strength, he essentially begins a campaign of seduction, giving Julia the sort of loving attention Henry hasn’t given her in ages. It’s a slightly bizarre holy campaign – the angel who uses the temptations of the flesh to save a marriage – but it’s done with such innocence a viewer almost forgets the odd idea.

It also just about makes a virtue of casting of Cary Grant as Dudley. In a part that feels tailor-made for Bing Crosby, surely Cary Grant is no-one’s idea of an angel (a slightly abashed, heart-of-gold, demon perhaps). Grant, to be honest, slightly struggles with the role – at times the complete decency of Dudley leaves him rather stiff and the Grant twinkle gets one of its most subdued outings in cinematic history. However, Grant’s naughty charm does make us accept a little bit more that Dudley might just feel a little more than he’s saying with his attraction to Julia (even if, the rules of films, tell us there is zero chance of an angel being a seducer).

It still manages to get the goat of Niven’s Bishop, who increasingly resents this overly efficient new presence in his life more focused on charming his wife than getting on with what he presumes he’s there for – securing funds for the Cathedral. Niven (originally cast as the Angel – but his raffish charm would have been as unnatural a fit as Grant’s), does rather well as a decent man crushed under expectations and duty who has forgotten the things that really matter. Niven has a very neat line in quietly exasperated fury, so buttoned-up and English (despite being American!) he can’t give vent to his real feelings but hides it under genteel passive aggression. He also sells a neat joke that he is constantly rendered literally incapable of saying out loud that Dudley is an angel.

Loretta Young, between these two, has the least interesting part, trickly written. It goes without saying that a feel-good product of 1940s Hollywood is not going to have the wife of a Bishop actually, genuinely considering straying from her husband (just as, I suppose, it can only go so far in suggesting Grant’s Dudley is sorely tempted to leave his wings behind). Young’s role leans a little too much into the patient housewife, just eager for her husband to embrace day-to-day joys at home and not lose himself so much in work, but she manages to make it work.

These three lead a cast made up of experienced pros who know exactly how to pitch a fairly gentle comedy like this. Monty Woolley is great fun as a slightly over-the-hill professor, who needs to be befuddled by a never-emptying glass to stop him wondering why he doesn’t remember Dudley from the lectures he claims to have attended all those years ago. James Gleason offers cheeky, down-to-earth humour and sensibility as a friendly taxi-driver, while Gladys Cooper once again proves she can give austere grande dames more depth than anyone else in the business.

It all makes for a gentle, rather sweet and charming film despite that fact that almost nothing in it really make sense. In fact, it frequently falters as soon as you consider any of the plot at all or any of the actions and motivations of its characters. But then, this is basically a sort of Christmas Carol where the Angel arrives to re-focus the (not particularly imperilled) soul of one man, with wit, charm and warmth – and if it feels odd that also involves inspiring envy and jealousy (deadly sins right?!) in a Bishop, I suppose we should go with it. After all, it’s Christmas.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Laughton’s only masterpiece is a fairy-tale, stuffed with beautiful images and dreamlike logic

Director: Charles Laughton

Cast: Robert Mitchum (Harry Powell), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Miss Rachel Cooper), James Gleason (Uncle Birdie), Evelyn Varden (Icey Spoon), Don Beddoe (Walt Spoon), Billy Chapin (John Harper), Sally Jane Bruce (Pearl Harper), Gloria Castilo (Ruby), Peter Graves (Ben Harper)

Few films have had their critical reputation change quite as much as The Night of the Hunter. When released, its reception from film critics and audiences was so negative that the crushing disappointment saw director Charles Laughton decide his debut would also be his last film. Flash forward seventy years and it’s now hailed as one of the great American films, a pictorial masterpiece. The Night of the Hunter sits alongside Citizen Kane as the classic film unappreciated in its day.

Adapted from Davis Grubb’s best-selling novel, it follows the nightmareish experiences of young John Harper (Billy Chapin) and his sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). These kids witness their father Ben (Peter Graves) dragged away by the cops to imprisonment and execution – but not before he’s hidden $10,000 in Pearl’s doll and sworn them both to secrecy. Word about the money gets out: it’s why sinister ‘Preacher’ Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) arrives and starts a-courting their mother Willa (Shelley Winters). After swiftly disposing of Willa, Powell turns his attentions to the kids – who flee down river, eventually coming under the protective wing of kindly widower Rachel Cooper (Lilian Gish) and her brood of young waifs and strays. Is it far enough though to escape Powell’s clutches?

The Night of the Hunter plays out like a fairy tale. Its images are full of the magic of the countryside and mysticism of nature. It frequently, deliberately, uses artificial sets and locations to create a dream-like state. It’s got a classic monster its heart, with Powell a demonic force-of-nature. It follows a pair of children on a journey reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel. There is a kindly old woman and a moral message of the importance of love, family, faith and loyalty. Everything in it feels, to various degrees, heightened. This is Southern drama via Hans Christian Anderson.

I wonder if that’s what threw people off on release. I’d agree that the film’s opening – Lilian Gish’s face superimposed over a starry night sky (followed by a cut of five kids heads superimposed over the same sky raptly listening) – might tee us up for the film’s mood, but looks and feels kitsch. The moments where Laughton deliberately aims at heightened, almost cartoonish, reality push the envelope of what you can accept – why does Powell, at one point, chase the kids up a flight of stairs, hands stretched out before him like he’s in a live action Tom & Jerry cartoon? Stumble onto The Night of the Hunter unwarned about its fantastical grounding and melodrama and it must look and feel odd, bizarre and even a bit laughable.

But it’s these same qualities that have made the film last. Laughton created a film of magical force and power, crammed with striking, imaginative images and beautiful sequences that tip between dream and reality. Its real heart lies in the children’s escape down the river, a remarkable sequence as the camera follows the boat drifting down an obviously artificial river, the children asleep as it glides past spider’s webs, frogs and other wildlife. From a film that opens with the aggressive arrest of the Harper’s dad, this burst of Where the Wild Things Are mysticism intentionally feels like we are crossing into a completely different world, let alone movie. But it’s also part of the film’s striking originality and quirky memorability. Few things look conventionally ‘real’ – in fact, like the farmhouse the kids stop at overnight in their long drift down river it feels even intentionally artificial – but it also gives the film a timeless, poetic feeling.

It’s a beautiful sequence in a film stuffed with them. Laughton worked closely with cinematographer Stanley Cortez and several sequences are awash with poetic visual flourishes inspired by some of the great German silent cinema of the 1920s. Who can forget the visually stunning shot of Willa’s body in a car at the bottom of the river, her hair flowing in matching waves with the weeds around her (possibly the most beautiful image of death in the movies)? From the countryside shots that bring back memories of Murnau’s Sunrise to striking sets that seem to have emerged from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Most striking is the high-ceiling, Church-like set that is Powell and Willa’s bedroom, a shadow-laden expressionist nightmare. The scene is played with the same carefully choreographed expressionist force, from Mitchum’s vivid gestures to Winter’s corpse-like resting.

Death comes from Mitchum’s Preacher, one of the great monsters in cinema. With those famous ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ tattoos, Mitchum makes the role truly terrifying. Mitchum kept up a studied public contempt for acting, but he immerses himself in Preacher in a way he did with few other roles. He makes him horrifyingly charming (he wins adult confidences easily) and his smooth gravel-voice and masculine bearing are both imposing and intimidating. But Mitchum also embraced the weirdness, the psychopathy of a man who murders without a second thought while keeping up a private conversation with the Lord. Preacher is an animalistic demon wrapped up in human skin – he lets out the most bizarre, piercing screams when foiled or injured – twisting his body into unsettling shapes before his misdeeds or letting his eyes boil with anger and disgust (most particularly at sex, something he seems to find repulsive and fascinating).

It’s an extraordinary, terrifying, monstrous performance unlike almost everything else in Mitchum’s career in its willingness to go to such twisted, eccentric, unnatural extremes. Mitchum credited Laughton as his finest director – and Laughton’s skill with actors is clear from all the performances. Shelley Winters’ has rarely been better in a role she skilfully downplays, as an unhappy woman, desperate for redemption, forced to feel ashamed of her desires. The two children are very good, in particular Chapin’s frequently raw panic and trauma and determination. The rest of the cast is stuffed with striking, Dickensian pen portraits, performances of striking eccentricity.

These performances fit within the magical realism of the film in a film that is as stylised as this. Again, I can’t imagine that audiences at the time – used to blockbusters, shot on gloriously realistic locations – were ready for something that aped so strongly the artistic flourishes of silent cinema. But it works spectacularly for a film about a children’s semi-magical quest into the wilderness. It’s hard to think of another film that leans so completely into such an aesthetic unreality as this one – even the town the kids eventually escape to feels like it’s a movie set rather than a real place.

The film’s final act in the home of Miss Rose Cooper is not as strong as those before. There is something rather po-faced and self-satisfied about the slightly clumsy moral message of finding faith and goodness which feels rather twee and disappointing considering the gothic film we’ve just watched. The film’s final sequence, on a peaceful Christmas day, belongs in a more conventional film (even though you could argue it’s also a conventional fairy tale ending). Much as I enjoy several moments of Lillian Gish’s performance as a tough old woman – like a shot-gun wielding Whistler’s Mother – the shift of focus away from Preacher’s demonic schemes feels like a loss.

The Night of the Hunter, for me, isn’t the complete masterpiece it’s sometimes hailed as – there are clumsy moments (I would agree the Tom & Jerry Preacher chase feels tonally out of place, and neither the opening or closing is strong), but it’s also filled with moments of pure cinematic magic – and has a performance from Mitchum that is one for the ages. Its imagery is beautiful, it’s tone mostly perfect and its imagination limitless. The greatest sadness about watching it is that Laughton never directed again – based on this, imagine how good his next film might have been?

Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941)

Edward Everett Horton, Robert Montgomery and Claude Rains deal with death, admin and body swops in Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Director: Alexander Hall

Cast: Robert Montgomery (Joe Pendleton), Evelyn Keyes (Bette Logan), Claude Rains (Mr Jordan), Rita Johnson (Julia Farnsworth), Edward Everett Horton (Messenger 7013), James Gleason (Max “Pop” Corkle), John Emery (Tony Abbott), Donald MacBride (Inspector Williams), Don Costello (Lefty), Halliwell Hobbes (Sisk)

One of the best things about the Hollywood Studio system is that created an environment where middle-brow talents could suddenly lift themselves up to create something very special. That’s certainly the case with Here Comes Mr Jordan, the career high spot for its director and its main stars. It’s the sort of product of Classic Hollywood where everything comes together perfectly and delightfully.

Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is a boxer with a shot at the title. An amateur pilot, Joe flies his own one-man flight to New York for the match. On the way, his plane crashes. An officious Angel, Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton), collects his soul – only to find on arrival in heaven that Joe was meant to survive the crash and live for another 50 years. Unfortunately, by the time the mistake is found out, Joe’s body has been cremated. Head Angel Mr Jordan (Claude Rains) has no choice other than to find Joe another body on Earth. So Joe winds up in the body of millionaire Bruce Farnsworth, recently murdered by his wife Julia (Rita Johnson) and secretary Tony Abbott (John Emery). In his new body, Joe decides to correct Farnsworth’s wrongs, returning his embezzled money to investors and helping to free the father of Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), who took the blame. Joe also wants to retrain for a boxer – recruiting, much to his confusion, his old coach Max Corkle (James Gleason) – and he and Bette begin to fall in love. But Joe’s destiny, it turns out, is to be the champ – and he can’t do that in Farnsworth’s body. How will Mr Jordan clean this mess up?

Here Comes Mr Jordan is a delight, a hilarious musing on reincarnation and afterlife, in which the next world is as weighted down by bureaucracy and red tape as much as this one. With neat, unobtrusive direction from Alexander Hall (who never hit the jackpot like this again), the film keeps its comic balls up in the air beautifully, while throwing in some neat observations around life, death and fate. The script bubbles with lovely bits of invention, from the Afterlife to a bureaucratic organisation to Joe’s inhabiting of Farnsworth’s body (after trying a few other bodies on first), while still appearing to himself (and we the viewers – a neat idea that the film invites us not to think about too much as Joe’s mannerisms and physicality must be completely different from Farnsworth) unchanged from his original body.

Around this the film gets some neat pot shots at big business corruption. In some ways this is a little like A Matter of Life and Death mixed with Capra. As in Capra, the humble, kind-but-not-super-smart regular Joe is the one who takes a long-hard look at the corruption and greed of Big Business and Corporate America and decides “there has to be a better way”. The kind of guy who solves major business problems simply by doing the right thing and listening to his heart. Counterbalancing that is Joe’s ongoing obsession with continuing his boxing career, from his determination to get a body that’s “in the pink” (a phrase that drives Mr Jordan up the wall) to roping in his ageing butler into a series of vigorous workouts.

A large part of the charm of Joe Pendleton lies in the brilliantly dry, witty, sweet but still a little selfish qualities that Robert Montgomery (Oscar nominated) brings to the part. Playing the part with a homespun Brooklyn honesty and simplicity, Montgomery also has a childish delight in finding he can pass unobserved as this new man (particularly funny after his initial terror that he will be “found out” any second), while his boxing obsession has an endearing genuineness to it. Montgomery, as well as getting the light comedic tone spot on (no surprise that Cary Grant was the first choice for the role – although he could never have played the working class Joe as well as Montgomery does he) he also builds a very sweet and charming romance with Evelyn Keyes (also in a career best role), who is ill-treated but defiantly assured of the importance of doing the right thing as Bette.

The whole cast is quite superbly assembled, seasoned pros, doing their thing with aplomb. James Gleason was Oscar-nominated as Joe’s befuddled manager, trying to wrap his head around incarnation. Gleason also gets some of the finest gags, as Corkle tries to interact with Mr Jordan, who remains invisible to the living – but also brings a genuine warmth and tenderness to his feelings for Joe, who he clearly sees as a son. As Mr Jordan, Claude Rains is smoothness personified, playing the entire film with a relaxed grin on his face, gleefully mixing in an obsession with ensuring the “rules” are followed, while offering a dry reaction to events such as murder. As his underling Edward Everett Horton brings his patented A-game of flustered middle-man.

Mr Jordan grins so much through the film it’s easy to forget that he’s basically the Angel of Death. Reasonable and supportive, Jordan is also blithely unaffected by death and murder. The film, among the jokes and the general air of a fairy tale, has a little vein of darkness. In his introduction Jordan is overseeing the collection of souls from some of the battlefields of World War II. Later he calmly informs Joe of Farnsworth’s murder taking place even as they speak. The film doesn’t hesitate to shy away from the details of Farnsworth’s killing – or from two further murders. It’s a little nugget of darkness in amongst the charm, and a reminder that this comedy on death and the afterlife took place while the world was tearing itself apart. No wonder death can sometimes not be as big as a deal to everyone as it is today (especially to the Angel of Death).

Because the film has a more Capraesque belief that what matters is not who we are but what’s inside. Joe will appear as Farnsworth to everyone, but eventually what people will respond to (he is told by Jordan) is the person inside not the outward appearance. The potential that Joe may have to move to a new body to fulfil his destiny of becoming the champ, doesn’t meant that he and Bette need to necessarily be apart if his heart remains the same. While the film does suggest (I feel darkly!) at one point that Joe may forget who he was originally the longer he is in a new body, the more it stresses the point that the basic qualities of his decency won’t be lost.

Its ideas like this – combined with expert telling and superb Classic Hollywood grace and skill in its shooting, directing and acting – that give Here Comes Mr Jordan a little bite, along with its comic impact. Nominated for seven Oscars it won two – and it stands to be remembered in what was a glory year for Hollywood. You might expect something rather slight – but this delightful comedy is as thought provoking as it is playful.

The Last Hurrah (1958)

Spencer Tracy runs for office in John Ford’s toothless satire The Last Hurrah

Director: John Ford

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Major Frank Skeffington), Jeffrey Hunter (Adam Caulfield), Dianne Foster (Maeve Caulfield), Pat O’Brien (John Gorman), Basil Rathbone (Norman Cass), Donald Crisp (Cardinal Martin Burke), James Gleason (“Cuke” Gillen), Edward Brophy (“Ditto” Boland), John Carradine (Amos Force), Willis Bouchey (Roger Sugrue), Ricardo Cortez (Sam Weinberg), Wallace Ford (Charles J Hennessey), Basil Ruysdael (Bishop Gardner)

Mayor Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) is running for a fifth term of a “New England city”. Skeffington’s roots lie in the town sprawling Irish population, and has successfully played the game of machine politics all his life. He’s alienated the members of the towns traditional elite – who can trace their ancestors all the way back to the Mayflower – but he’s loved by the regular people of the city. But is Skeffington going to find himself out of touch with a political world starting to embrace populism and the power of television?

John Ford’s adaptation of a hit novel by Edwin O’Connor, is one of his rare “present day” pictures. But it’s a bit of a busted flush. What should have been an exploration of a tipping point in American politics, totally fails to successfully land any of the points it could make. It’s a film that doesn’t understand the Kennedy-esque world America was moments away from embracing, and looks with such ridiculously excessive sentimentality at old-school politics it manages to tell us nothing about the corruption and dirty deals of this sort of machine politics. Effectively it’s a film that takes two long hours to tell us almost nothing at all.

The film adores two things – and it’s not a surprise in a Ford film – the past and the Irish. Anything from yesteryear is covered in a halo, with the parade of old-school Hollywood character actors from the Ford rep company taking it in turns to denounce and condemn anything and anyone less than 40 years old. Every young person in the film is either a feckless idiot – Skeffington and Cass’ sons are a playboy and an embarrassing moron – or, like Jeffrey Hunter’s Adam Caulfield (Skeffington’s nephew covering the election for the local paper) is there merely to provide doe-eyed adoration.

As for the Irish, the film loves the grace and charm of this old immigrant community. Skeffington’s Irish political machine is sanitised beyond belief. In the real world these sort of organisations operated on a system of back room deals, intimidation and careful arrangements to deliver set quotas of votes on polling day. Sure many of these politicians also delivered a number of social reforms – as Skeffington does – but any suggestion that any of Skeffington’s dealings could ever be described as dirty are roundly dismissed. Here it’s all about what Skeffington could do for other people, and no mention of the endemic corruption in many politicians like this. Instead Skeffington is presented with nothing but rose-tinted sentimentalism, a respectful widower, a kind man, whose actions are often more about other people than politics.

Former Boston mayor James Michael Curley – who Skeffington was clearly based on – was imprisoned for corruption. No chance of that happening to Skeffington who only uses intimidation and back-street savvy to fight the causes of orphans and widows (literally) and takes nothing at all from the public purse (although he still lives in a lovely big home). By contrast his elite opponents are the sort of scowling, greedy, penny-counters you might find in a Frank Capra film, shameless bankers and newspaper types who care nothing for truth and justice and only their own selfish needs.

Perhaps that’s why Skeffington’s opponent McCluskey (an early Kennedy substitute with his perfect family life, war record and lack of actual accomplishments) is portrayed as such an empty suit, a mindless, grinning yes-man who has nothing to say and no goals to meet. Ford’s contempt for him – and for the new word of television – drips off the screen. The TV shot we see McCluskey shooting is a farcical mess, poorly shot, edited and delivered with stilted artificiality by McCluskey and his tongue-tied wife. Not only is it not particularly funny, the presentation of this just shows how out of touch Ford was with modern America. Two years after this, Kennedy would win an election largely off the back of his ability to present a dynamic image on TV. Skeffington even crumbles in the election due to his traditional, press-the-flesh campaign not competing effectively with TV slots. How can that look even remotely convincing when Ford shows his rival has no mastery of the new media at all? That in fact he’s worse at making TV than Skeffington proves to be?

What exactly was Ford going for? By failing to criticise anything at all about the old-school politics and pouring loathing on the new politics, he ends up saying very little at all. Skeffington is a twinkly angel, but we never understand why so many in the church and the city oppose him – other than the fact I guess that he is Irish. Donald Crisp’s cardinal promises at one point near the end to reveal why he always opposed Skeffington – only to be hushed. If anything bad ever happened, Ford ain’t telling us making this one of the most dishonest of his tributes to Old America.

None of this is to criticise much of the acting, which is great. Spencer Tracy dominates the film with his accustomed skill and charisma, his Skeffington both a twinkly charmer and a practised flesh-presser who manages to subtly pitch and adjust his character depending on his audience and whose physicality helps to assert his dominance in every scene. Pat O’Brien does fine work as his fixer and Basil Rathbone is suitably sinister as a his principle financial opponent. Ford also puts together some memorable shots – especially a long walk Skeffington takes past a victory parade – and scenes, but the film is an empty mess. And, with its extended final twenty minute coda, goes on way too long.