Lew Ayres – Movie Musings

Small-town drama is a beautifully done exploration of prejudice with excellent performances

Director: Jean Negulesco

Cast: Jane Wyman (Belinda MacDonald), Lew Ayres (Dr Robert Richardson), Charles Bickford (Blackie MacDonald), Agnes Moorehead (Aggie MacDonald), Stephen McNally (Locky McCormick), Jan Sterling (Stella), Rosalind Ivey (Mrs Poggerty), Dan Seymour (Pacquet), Mabel Paige (Mrs Lutz), Alan Napier (Defence Attorney)

Small towns. Sometimes they’re safe, cosy little havens of the familiar. And sometimes they’re bitchy places of resentment and suspicion where everyone judges everyone else’s business. In an environment like that, it doesn’t pay to be different. Belinda MacDonald (Jane Wyman) is as different as they come: a deaf and dumb young woman, who (despite her intelligence and warmth) everyone assumes is a mentally deficient. Just as different, in a way, is Dr Richardson (Lew Ayres), a compassionate, well-educated man who forms his own opinions and is oblivious to other’s prejudices. Life’s going to be tough for this pair.

Dr Richardson is the only person in this small Canadian fishing town who can see the bright, vivacious young woman Belinda is. With his support, her father Blackie (Charles Bickford) rediscovers his love for a daughter, who he always blamed for her mother’s death in childbirth, while her austere aunt Aggie (Agnes Moorehead) thaws and proves her loyalty. Belinda will need them when she is raped by the popular Lucky (Stephen McNally) and trauma leaves her unable to remember who is responsible for the resulting child. The town, of course, blames Dr Richardson.

Johnny Belinda has all the ingredients of a melodrama: but it surprises as a mature, sensitive and moving story about real people. It’s amazing to see a 40s film this frank about rape and an illegitimate child, that lays not a finger of reproach on the victim, instead turning its fire on the small-minded judgements of those around her. It’s also striking it doesn’t define Belinda solely as a victim, either of deafness or rape. She gives birth to a child she dearly loves, refuses to let what’s happened haunt her and sees her life as one with blessings rather than curses. But neither is she an angelic character, being at times as capable of mistakes and quick judgements as the rest of us.

It helps that Jane Wyman (in an Oscar-winning turn) gives a perfectly judged performance. She’s never winsome or cloying, but fills Belinda with an uncomplaining grit to make the best of things, matched with a growing joy as her opportunities expand, from her discovery of sign language to the birth of her child. In complete silence (Wyman intensively learned sign), Wyman employs her expressive eyes to communicate a range of emotions from wonder to joy to fear to pain and grief (including a wordless rendition of the Lord’s Prayer). Belinda is a character we deeply empathise with, but never we nor the film treat her as an object of charity.

That also springs from Ayres’ Dr Richardson, a genial, kindly man whose inability to see the worst in people makes him a target-in-waiting for gossip. His less than regular attendance at Church has already raised question. Add his academic earnestness – and Ayres wonderfully embodies a man quietly passionate about making a difference – and you’ve got someone who doesn’t fit in a town that respects manly ruggedness. Richardson doesn’t pick up on this at all – just as he doesn’t even notice the clearly besotted devotion of his housekeeper Stella (an excellent portrait of quiet desperation by Jan Sterling).

Gossip is soon flying that Richardson is too close to Belinda. A trio of judgemental old woman, like Irish banshees, frequently stand on street corners to share little tit-bits of meanness. The town punches down on outsiders, fitting people into insultingly simple brackets. It’s partly why immigrant shop-owner Pacquet (Dan Seymour) becomes the ringleader of a morality lynch mob: he’s all too aware it otherwise won’t be long before he’s the target again. No one, of course, can imagine for a moment that the carefree, rugged Lucky (Stephen McNally, a wonderful portrait of utterly smackable shallow vileness) could be the sort of cruel, cowardly cad he is.

A cad who takes notice of a newly confident Belinda – and not in a good way. Part of Johnny Belinda’s power is you can sense the latent danger in those eyes on a newly radiant and confident Belinda at a town shindig, the shy wallflower turned smiling young woman enjoying the music through feeling the vibrations of a violin string (a lovely moment, played with a real burgeoning wonder by Wyman). It’s a mark of the cruelty of the world that this confidence just makes Belinda a target for the vile Lucky.

Again, it’s a mark of Johnny Belinda’s success that the cruelty of what happens hits so hard. Rarely have I despised a film villain as much as Lucky, perhaps because he’s so weak, snivelling and arrogant – the sort of guy so arrogant and stupid he crows over the good-looks of his illegitimate son. He’s a picture of the real villains out there: the weak, stupid and shallow who always get passes from those around them.

Johnny Belinda creates deep, engaging characters. Charles Bickford’s Blackie is presented as first as a gruff, careless father. But the film – and Bickford’s performance – slowly unpeels him as a tender, caring and decent man. The sort of man whose first instinct is to protect, who delights in his unexpected grandson and is thrilled with the excitement of sign language. Similarly, Agnes Moorehead gives a terrific performance as a woman who seems at first a bullying harridan, but becomes a pillar of familial strength. (Both of them and Ayres were Oscar nominated, Johnny Belinda one of the few films to get nominations in every acting category).

This affecting story of people who feel real and three-dimensional, is well directed with restraint and care by Jean Negulesco (easily his finest film) and shot with a real beauty in its rugged Canadian sea-town visuals by Ted McCord. Max Steiner’s excellent score mixes emotional melody with sea shanty influences. It’s a world where intense but very real emotions help ground a story of rape, murder, scarlet letters and court cases into something that feels real and relatable.

Johnny Belinda feels like an overlooked gem, a sort of perfect example of Hollywood issue film where the ‘issue’ isn’t pounded over our head but built organically into the plot. One where characters surprise us with developments that feel real, embodied by a series of excellent actors at the top of their game. It’s a small gem that deserves to be better known.

War is hell in one of the greatest and most influential war films ever made

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Lew Ayres (Paul Baumer), Louis Wolheim (Stanislaud Katczinsky), John Wray (Himmelstoss), Slim Summerville (Tjaden), Arnold Lucy (Professor Kantorek), Ben Alexander (Franz Kemmerich), Scott Kolk (Leer), Owen Davis Jnr (Peter), William Bakewell (Albert Kropp), Russell Gleason (Muller)

Franklin Roosevelt once said “War is young men dying and old men talking”. Perhaps no film shows that more truly than All Quiet on the Western Front. The first truly great film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, it’s a profoundly influential and unflinching look at the horrific cost of war. Specifically, it looks at how a younger generation buys into dreams of glory and destiny, only to arrive at the front lines and discover they’ve been sold a pup. A sense of glorious purpose collapses into death, mud and misery. War, it turns out, is hell.

All Quiet on the Western Front follows a company of German soldiers during the First World War, plucked from their college to lay down life and limb for the Kaiser. Their unofficial leader is Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres), an intelligent and thoughtful young man. They soon find the frontline is a world away from what they expected, and death moves through the boys like a flu. Over time Paul, with the mentorship of experienced soldier Stanislaud Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim), finds his naïve view of the world torn away with each bullet and failed attack.

In many ways it was brave to make such a large-scale Hollywood epic that placed the side America had actually fought against in the sympathetic role (on the other hand, much easier to look at the losing side and say “you’re fighting for a hopeless cause”). But that makes the film’s message even stronger: it doesn’t matter about sides, war claims young men regardless. The deaths come thick and fast on the Western front – and the gains are negligent. While the boys’ Professor (a pompous Arnold Lacy) sings a familiar hymn of glory and success by Christmas, life on the front line is actually continual terror. Mud, rats, debris and the constant chance the next step you take could be your last. Shelling is non-stop and every inch of the rickety, ramshackle trenches shakes with each explosion. Never mind going over the top, just being there shreds the nerves.

When the attacks come, the film is striking in its modernism and visual invention. Milestone frequently uses intriguing angles and long tracking shots to present an uninterrupted vision of hellish conflict. The film is full of crane shots, urgent camera movements and judicious cutting. The horrors are shown clearly – at one point a soldier literally explodes while cutting through barbed wire, his hands left clinging to the wire, the rest of his body gone. Milestone intercut shots of machine guns firing an arc with the camera moving in a smooth tracking shot as men run towards it and collapse in death. The film is literally shredding its soldiers.

The debris filled, fox-hole spotted no-man’s land the film presents is hellish. It’s a literal minefield of death, with bodies charging backwards and forwards depending on the tide of battle, the camera moving alongside them. For hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches, Milestone shoots the action with a tracking crane shot above the trenches, which stretch like a jagged flesh wound in nature, overflowing with people trying desperately to kill each other. During one charge, Paul lands in a fox hole with a French soldier, who he mercilessly wounds with his bayonet – then spends a dreadful night watching him slowly die. There isn’t any glory here and attack and retreat are both equally pointless. All that really happens is the body count ticking slowly up.

Most of the company are dead well before the film hits the half-way point. After the first big attack, the company goes behind the lines for a meal. Their meal is almost denied them as it was made for a company twice the size of the one that actually reports. It’s a sign of the suffering and hardening to death, that the reaction of the survivors is joy at the unexpected double rations. Later Milestone follows the fate of a single pair of boots, in a beautifully edited sequence that constantly visually focuses on a pair of good boots, while their successive owners meet their deaths.

It’s all so different from how we started, with an Eisenstein-inspired series of cuts to cheering faces as the students sign up. The horseplay at the training camp – where they deal with an officious postman turned corporal Himmelstoss (a puffed up and preening John Wray), overly aware of his own rank and determined to rub the boys faces in it – in no way prepares them for what is to come. This is all too clear from their confused faces at the staging post, a chaos of mud, soldiers and shelling. No wonder no one at home understands what’s happening here – as Paul discovers on leave, when he is repeatedly shocked and disgusted by the casual triumphalism of old-armchair-Generals utterly ignorant of the realities at the front.

All Quiet on the Western Front is so beautifully shot and edited – you can see its influence on so many war films to come – that it’s a shame some of its dialogue and ‘acting’ scenes are now either a little too on-the-nose or overstay their welcome. There are some big themes handled in the dialogue: why are we fighting, what is the point of war, how do we live our lives when they could end at any time – but the dialogue is sometimes a little stilted. It’s also where the film reverts to something more stagey and theatrical and less cinematic and visual. It’s also a slightly overlong film – already a sign that Hollywood had a tendency to equate “important” with “long”. Most of the films’ points are well made by the first hour, and the second hour or so often repeats them.

However, those concerns are outweighed by how much there is admire. Lew Ayres is very good as the noble Paul – the film had such a profound effect on him he became a life-long pacifist, a conscientious objector in WW2 who served as a front-line medic. Louis Wolheim is superb as the rough-edged but decent and kind Kat, a senior soldier taking the new company members under his wing and teaching them nothing is more important than the next meal and no unnecessary risks.

All Quiet on the Western Front takes place in a naturalistic quiet, with no hint of music to interrupt the mood. It is an overwhelmingly powerful movie about the pointlessness and cruelty of war – and the lies that young men are told to fight it. When Paul returns to the homefront – and sees another class of boys being inspired to die for their country by his Professor – he denounces the whole thing (and is promptly branded a coward). War is a cycle that eats everyone it comes into contact with and has no logic behind it. Directed with verve and imaginative modernism by Milestone, this is a brilliant picture, one of the first sound masterpieces – and still one of the greatest war films ever made.