Marjorie Main – Movie Musings

Lubitsch brings his touch to death and infidelity all flown under the wire of the Hays Code

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Gene Tierney (Martha), Don Ameche (Henry Van Cleve), Charles Coburn (Hugo Van Cleve), Marjorie Main (Mrs Strable), Laird Cregar (His Excellency), Spring Byrington (Bertha Van Cleve), Allyn Joslyn (Albert Van Cleve), Eugene Pallette (EF Strable), Signe Hasso (Mademoiselle), Louis Calhern (Randolph Van Cleve), Helen Reynolds (Peggy Nash), Clarence Muse (Jasper), Tod Andrews (Jack Van Cleve)

If you are going to start a film in Hell, it helps if you have the Lubitsch touch. Heaven Can Wait tells the life story of the late Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), a charming old roué being interviewed by ‘His Excellency’ (Laird Cregar) at the entrance of a place ‘where innumerable people had so often told him to go’. Van Cleve’s life is one of general well-meaning romance, from his boyhood discovery that kissing a girl doesn’t mean you have to marry her, through to his elopement with Martha (Gene Tierney), the intended of his stuffy cousin, his winning her back after his (implied) good-natured faithlessness, and their happy decades of marriage and his roguishly flirtatious final years.

Perhaps only Lubitsch had the wit – and cheek – to sneak the story of a shameless Casanova under the Hays Code wire as a sort of heart-warmingly decent fable. Because, in many ways, Henry Van Cleve is exactly the sort of person the Code had doubts about – and of course Lubitsch loved: a debonair, classy man of means, who appreciates fine art and beautiful woman, would die of shock at the idea of a hard day’s work and never repents his choices for a second. Played with a bashful smile and wide-eyed honesty (even innocence) by Ameche, this is the sort of seducer the Hays Code could get behind (especially as Lubitsch subtly blurs the reality of his many conquests).

But than you also can’t imagine any other director presenting Satan like this. He’s embodied by Laird Cregar as a sort of genial bank manager – in a Hell that looks like a hotel lobby – whose hilarious dropping (Bond-villain like) of a loud-mouthed society Grande Dame down a trap door mid-conversation only makes us like him more. Our framing device runs us through a series of Henry’s crucial birthdays (the original play was even titled ‘Birthday’ – Heaven Can Wait is a much better title), many of them making a hilarious mini-film themselves, with sharp-edged dialogue perfectly captured by Lubitsch’s smooth and witty camera, that knows just how long to hold a shot.

Heaven Can Wait is full of just-under-the-wire sexual energy, disguised but very apparent today. What else are we to make of new Van Cleve maid ‘Mademoiselle’ (a very funny Signo Hasso) announcing her two years working for a duke were what he called “the happiest of his life”? Not to mention the life advice – kissing don’t mean marriage – she gives the Van Cleve (who learned, as a boy, when wooing an impressed girl with his insect pets that it pays to have ‘lots of beetles’). Or the clear implication Henry and Mademoiselle spend a wild night sharing far more than just a bottle of champagne.

Lubitsch hints at this with mutual hiccups. Throughout Heaven Can Wait coughs, sneezes and hiccups serve as a code for very different bodily outbursts (that of course couldn’t be shown). Wooing Martha in his tedious cousin’s (a very funny role of pedantic tedium for Allyn Joslyn) library during a terrible private concert, Martha’s sneezing fit is a clear substitute for her real feelings. Perhaps only Lubitsch could have disguised this mutual wild sexual elopement as something reassuringly pure. There is something very sweet about Ameche passing himself off as a book-store clerk to spark conversation with Tierney as she searches for How to please your husband (a title ripe for inevitable innuendo).

As with Ameche, Lubitsch gets a light, underplayed performance by Tierney that makes these two feel like a perfect pair. Heaven Can Wait’s fourth movement sees Martha flying the marriage home after suspecting Henry of an affair. Henry reassures her it is a misunderstanding – but with such ease, and such heavy breathing fluster on Martha’s part – it feels pretty clear Lubitsch is inviting us to understand perhaps Martha thinks fidelity is an optional extra with someone she has such hots for. It’s all conveyed with such lightness – and Ameche plays Henry with such innocent earnestness, never once tipping the wink – it’s extremely funny.

As you’d expect with Lubitsch, the film is full of marvellous comic touches. Charles Coburn is excellent as Henry’s worldly-wise grandfather, who might love his family but only really likes Henry. Coburn’s wry amusement at Henry’s antics is consistently hilarious, Lubitsch gifting him two perfectly timed wonderful sight gags (one with a glass of water, the other seeing him emerge suddenly from a crowd). Even better though is the wonderful set-piece of Martha’s feuding parents (played with perfect passive aggressive bluster by Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main), sitting at opposite ends of a long table, communicating only through long-suffering servant Jasper (a very refreshing role for Clarence Muse, where the Black man is smartest in the room). Lubitsch films this in a single take, gliding from table end to end which only magnifies the humour.

The first 70 minutes of Heaven Can Wait are so good – sharp, cheeky, funny – that when the Van Cleves effectively elope again, it perhaps would be better the film ends. Sadly, the final half hour dials up the sentiment (as Henry tries to steer his son away from a life of debauchery, an older Martha nobly resigns herself to cancer and Henry meets his end) and the energy drains out. Even Satan gets a moralistic, happy-ever-after closing speech! This closing act is duller, considerably less snappy and very easy to drift off in. You feel Lubitsch exhausted his interest and filmed the final act by contractual obligation.

But until then, this is a sharp, witty, delightful comedy, crammed with great performances. It balances naughty charm with surprisingly dark undertones (with each movement forward, more and more characters die off, a dark reminder this film opened in the afterlife) and has more than enough laughs in its first 70 minutes for you to sit through the closing 25. Perhaps second-tier Lubitsch, but his second tier his others first.

Technicolour musical delight in this unashamedly nostalgic and feel-good Minnelli musicial

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Smith), Margaret O’Brien (“Tootie” Smith), Mary Astor (Mrs Anna Smith), Lucille Bremer (Rose Smith), Leon Ames (Mr Alonzo Smith), Tom Drake (John Truett), Marjorie Main (Katie), Harry Davenport (Grandpa), June Lockhart (Lucille Ballard), Henry H Daniels Jnr (Lon Smith Jnr), Joan Carroll (Agnes Smith), Hugh Marlowe (Colonel Darly), Robert Sully (Warren Sheffield), Chil Wills (Mr Neely)

“There’s no place like home” is the message lying behind two of Judy Garland’s most iconic films. While it might be at the heart of Wizard of Oz, that longing may be even stronger in Meet Me in St Louis. From the Arthur Freed production stable, this technicolour delight is relentlessly gentle and optimistic. It went down a delight in a year when so many Americans dreamed of the end of a war that had separated families and kept soldiers from their home and remains a delightful paean to a lost America (that perhaps never even was).

Set, of course, in St Louis in 1904 during the build-up to the World’s Fair (the gleam of the electric lights turning at the exhibition are the film’s final shot), Meet Me in St Louis follows the lives and loves of the Smith family. Patriarch Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) is a lawyer (or something, the film doesn’t trouble itself too much), his wife Anna (Mary Astor) a devoted home maker. They have four daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer) hopes for a proposal from Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully), youngest children Agnes (Joan Carroll) and especially “Tootie” (Margaret O’Brien) are perpetually in trouble and Esther (Judy Garland) is just starting to make eyes at next door neighbour John Truett (Tom Drake). But their contented life could all turn upside down when father announces they will be moving to New York. Surely, they can’t leave St Louis behind?

In many ways Meet Me in St Louis is an inverse The Magnificent Ambersons. While Welles’ film brilliantly charted the decline of a family of wealthy snobs (the Ambersons would certainly recognise the Smiths as equals) with technology an intruder, upending everything they understand about the world, Meet Me in St Louis is a gloriously entertaining celebration of nostalgia with new technology either a source of jokes (scrambled long-distance calls, jolly cable-car songs) or wonder (that closing light-show). Both have stylistic comparisons: from their use of title cards to their fluid camera showcasing sumptuous sets and costumes. But only one of them is about cheering you up.

Meet Me in St Louis only barely has a plot, so concentrated is it on charm and whimsy (father’s announcement, which introduces the real drama, arrives over half-way through). Adapted from a series of short stories by Sally Benson, it’s an episodic film built around events – parties, cable-car rides, a Halloween adventure and a Christmas Eve ball – with a few threaded plotlines of flirtation, principally between Esther and John. Freed sprinkles in a series of songs from his collected rights holdings (including the title song) with a few additional tunes from writers Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, the most notable being The Trolley Song (a ludicrously catchy-number you can’t get out of your head) and the iconic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (although their original far more depressing lyrics were hurriedly re-written).

These last two are performed with astonishing bravura by Judy Garland in possibly her finest hour (until A Star is Born). Garland’s singing is almost effortlessly graceful and beautiful, and she matches it with a very warm, feisty and engaging performance. Esther lands perfectly between two stools: she can be rebellious, impatient and judgemental but also caring, sensible and forgiving. Garland is reassuringly collected, funny and luminous through-out – so much so it’s striking to read what a nightmare the shoot was, with the star frequently absent as she succumbed to the mental and physical ailments that would plague the rest of her life.

Part of the success of her performance was the closeness that developed between her and Minnelli – the first director to really treat her as an adult and collaborator (they started an affair during the film). Minnelli, in only his third film and first in colour, directs with the assurance and visual beauty of an accomplished pro. Meet Me in St Louis was his first Freed musical and it might just be his best. The sumptuousness of the visuals and design were to a large part due to him – you can see the influence this had on the later work of Visconti among others, particularly the ballroom scene – and Minnelli worked labouriously with the actors to build a sense of family between them.

This pays off in spades throughout the film, where the close chemistry between the actors only helps create a nostalgic glow for happy days gone by. Ames and Astor have a relaxed ease of a long-married couples, while the four sisters interact with each other with an easy, unstudied naturalness – sharing chairs, food from their plates and time together with an unfussy ease. In particular Minnelli helped guide Margaret O’Brien to the one of the most delightful child performances on screen: the Halloween sequence, where “Tootie” confronts a scary neighbour is a masterclass of childish excitement and fear, matched later by O’Brien’s affecting distraught tears at the prospect of leaving St Louis.

Minnelli shoots the film with a technical confidence and imagination that quickly makes you forget it’s simple plot. That Halloween sequence is an eerie wonder, shot with a low-angled, tracking shot unease that leaves a haunting impression. He and cinematographer George J Folsey deigned a gorgeous gaslight dimming sequence as Esther and John go through her house dimming the lights, the camera moving in a single, complex, take up-and-around them while Folsey adjusts the set light in sync. Later there is a brilliant shot that seems to pass through a window to lead us straight into the ball, which seems years ahead of its time in its technical accomplishment. The ‘Trolley Song’s sequence uses framing and costumes perfectly to turn a cable car into something that feels as large as a small theatre. It’s an exceptionally well-made film.

You could argue certainly that it is a conservative and unchallenging film. It’s a celebration of small-time life, an argument for staying where you are and embracing the status quo. It never crosses its mind to consider that it’s a lot easier to do that if you have a huge house and servants. Not a moment of anger or serious disagreement is allowed to enter the picture. Everyone is unendingly nice all the time. But does that matter? Sometimes you need a film like a warm hug. And, when you do, don’t you want it also to be a masterclass in filmmaking with a star like Garland at the top of her game? Of course you do.