Tag: Mervyn LeRoy

Random Harvest (1942)

Two superb leading performances hold together a romantic confection of a film

Director: Mervyn Le Roy

Cast: Ronald Colman (Charles Rainier/”Smithy”), Greer Garson (Paula Ridgeway/ “Margaret Hanson”), Philip Dorn (Dr. Jonathan Benet), Susan Peters (Kitty Chilcet), Henry Travers (Dr. Sims), Reginald Owen (Biffer), Bramwell Fletcher (Harrison), Rhys Williams (Sam), Una O’Connor (Tobacco Shopkeeper), Aubrey Mather (Sheldon), Margaret Wycherly (Mrs. Deventer), Arthur Margetson (Chetwynd Rainier), Melville Cooper (George Rainier), Alan Napier (Julian Rainier), Jill Esmond (Lydia Rainier)

Random Harvest is one of the most fondly remembered romances of Golden Age Hollywood – if you want yearning dedication bought to life, this is the film for you. It might also be one of the barmiest films ever made, stuffed with so many outlandish plot developments, hilarious logic gaps and hand-waved contrivances it would put a Netflix soap to shame. You can see why Syndey Pollack and Anthony Minghella eventually abandoned remakes: you can’t imagine a modern audience going with Random Harvest’s essential loopiness and not laughing somewhere along the line. Which is not to say it isn’t beautifully made and winningly bought to life at times.

It’s the final days of World War One, and amnesic soldier “John Smith” (Ronald Colman) can’t remember anything about his life. On the final day of the war, he sneaks out of the asylum and runs into music hall performer Paula (Greer Garson). She takes a shine to “Smithy” and decides to save him. They run away to the country, fall in love, get married, have a baby, he starts to write, goes to Liverpool to start a journalism career… and gets hit by a cab. The collision restores his original memory – but also causes him to forget everything about Paula and his life as Smithy. Instead, he restarts his original life as industrial heir Charles Rainier, presumed dead by his family. While he lives this life for years, Paula takes a job as his secretary “Margaret”. Will he remember who she is?

It says a lot that that summary only scratches the surface of a plot that throws in the kitchen sink in attempting to ring as many tear-soaked tissues out of you as possible. Smithy and Paula carry out their little memory dance over the course of over twenty years. It’s the sort of a film where millionaire Charles only thinks about investigating what might have happened to him in Liverpool when nudged to do so after over a decade. Where the couple enter a ‘marriage of convenience’ as the memory-free Charles and fake Margaret. Where Charles’ owns a major factory in the town where our lovers first met, but neither (a) stepped foot there in 15 years (since the moment he does his memory starts to return) and (b) the heir to the town’s major employer wasn’t recognised by anyone while living in an asylum five minutes walk down the road.

Take it on the merits of logic and conventional narrative and Random Harvest crashes and burns. But this isn’t a film about those things. This is a classic weepie that stole the hearts of a war-torn nation in 1942 (it was the biggest hit of the year). Powered by two committed and emotional performances, if it hits you in the right mood its probably irresistible. The sort of long-term adversity that makes Romeo and Juliet’s look like a casual dalliance (so full of tragedy, the death of their son is literally a throwaway moment). It’s framed with a great, sensual beauty by Mervyn LeRoy and powered by an emotionally throbbing score by Herbert Stothart that’s just the right side of sickly.

Ronald Colman’s performance is quiet, measured and vulnerable (especially in his “Smithy” performance). From the start, he has eyes of hesitant, unknown sorrow and stumbles into a relationship with Paula like a new-born discovering life. Threads of his gentleness and excitability work their way into his Charles persona, tinged this time with the natural confidence of wealth. Nevertheless, Colman makes Charles a man who has dealt with unnerving amnesia by actively not thinking about it, carrying on a watch-chain the key to his “Smithy” home as a subconscious reminder. It’s a fine performance – so much so you can overlook he’s twenty-five years too old (the restored Charles forgoes returning to university, something that looks long gone for Colman).

Just as fine is Greer Garson, fully embracing an emotional roller-coaster as Paula. Introduced as a good-natured music hall singer (and Garson sings a high-kicking She’s Ma Daisy number in possibly the shortest skirt the Hays Code ever allowed), Garson’s warm and playful Paula is drawn towards “Smithy” in ways she almost can’t understand. But it’s a wonderfully different side for an actress so often associated with self-sacrificing wives and mothers: Paula is vivacious, forward and seizes the things she wants from life. It’s the second half – the patient, yearning desperation of “Margaret” hoping her husband will remember her – that leans more into her Mrs Miniver wheelhouse, but Garson mixes this with a real lingering, desperate sadness tinged with just enough hope that her husband might just recognise her.

Both performers overwhelmingly lift this otherwise (frankly) slightly contrived film into something rather sweet and endearing. It is, however, a film that would be even more so if it was shorter: the general morass of missed opportunities, misunderstandings and wrong ends of sticks being grasped would be easier to sustain over 90 than 120 minutes. It’s a rare film that covers so much ground over so much time that it’s lead character is declared dead twice.

The second declaration is Paula gaining that status for “Smithy”, dissolving their marriage and removing (you suspect for Hay’s Code reasons) the risk that Charles might accidentally commit bigamy by marrying his young niece. This is a lovely performance of youthful idealism and earnest devotion from Susan Peters (a tragic accident shortly after curtailed her promising career), and if the whole years-long subplot of the possibility of Charles marrying his besotted niece is a narrative cul-de-sac the overall film would be better without, it does at least mean we get the pleasure of Peters, performance captured forever.

But Random Harvest remains a pure romance: where no less than two women spend decades of their life in selfless, one-sided devotion for the lead and he still comes across as the sort of saintly man cheered by his own factory workers for sorting out a strike. The whole confection is a very fragile thing, but LeRoy carries this fully-loaded glass ornament with pure skill and the performances of Colman and Garson set the bar for classic Hollywood tragic romance. Minghella and Pollack were right – our cynical age can’t believe the nonsense – but on its own terms it still works.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932)

Pioneering social issues film remains an impressively mounted film, made with real passion

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Paul Muni (James Allen), Glenda Farrell (Marie), Helen Vinson (Helen), Noel Francis (Linda), Preston Foster (Pete), Allen Jenkins (Barney Sykes), Berton Churchill (Judge), Edward Ellis (Bomber Wells), David Landau (Warden), Hale Hamilton (Reverend Allen), Sally Blane (Alice), Louise Carter (Mrs Allen)

What are prisons for? Just punishment or should they encourage reform and change? To many in the South, its clear prisons were solely about the former and had nothing to do about the latter. That, in fact, you couldn’t reform a criminal – after a prison sentence he would always inevitably come back for more. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on a true story, is all about exploring a dehumanising system designed to turn men into working animals, beaten for looking the wrong way. No chance of a pardon, just chain men to each other, shove a pickaxe in their hand and give them a thrashing if they stop swinging it against a rock for more than second.

Based on a memoir by Robert Burns, James Allen (Paul Muni) returns from fighting in World War One with dreams of becoming an architect. Instead, he finds the American workplace is not a welcoming place for a flood of returning soldiers, drifting from state to state for work. Until, in an unnamed Southern State, he accidentally ends up in the middle of a $5 theft and is sentenced to ten years on a chain gang. The prison is a hotbed of inhumanity, with prisoners frequently beaten, dehumanised and all but worked to death. After a year he escapes and finds his way to Chicago where he reinvents himself as a successful surveyor – only, years later, for a bitter wife to expose his secret. Can he trust the Southern State that his sentence will be commuted if he agrees to return and give himself up?

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was one of the first – and probably one of the best – 1930s social issues films. It’s a surprisingly hard-hitting look at a cruel system, which (although keen to make our hero an unwitting participant in a minor crime, rather than clearly guilty like Burns) passes a sympathetic eye on criminals, asking us to question whether, whatever their crimes, they deserve this system. A system where prisoners can be randomly thrashed near to death by a thick leather belt, where pausing at work will lead to an instant beating. Where a prisoner tied to a post by his neck is such an everyday occurrence, the film is happy to throw it away in a passing shot. It makes a strong case that how we treat prisoners says as much about us as I does them – and that, sadistic wardens quickly become little better than the men they guard.

LeRoy’s film also makes a strong argument that we talk-the-talk but rarely walk-the-walk when it comes to supporting servicemen. James Allen returns a decorated hero – but his family, former employer and patronising reverend brother assume he will happily return to grunt work on the production line. War has expanded his horizons and ambitions, given him the skills to better himself. No one wants to hear it. He’s not alone: many drifters are ex-servicemen and when he tries to pawn his medals a pawnbroker sadly shows him a bucket full of worthless service decorations. It’s an indication that everyone has an assigned role and place and they shouldn’t for one minute expect to step outside this.

It’s no wonder that the prison sentence treats men like animals – a point LeRoy makes by cutting between donkeys and men both being chained up ready for a day’s work. IAAFFACG makes clear in this system all men are equal in their inequality, cutting back and forth from Black to white prisoners as they are prepare for the days work. (The film does make clear there is a higher number of Black prisoners than white). Allen protests at first, but learns to shrug his shoulders and turn away like the rest do. A freed prisoner showcases this indifferent acceptance of suffering, leaving at the same time as a deceased one, hitching a ride on the cart sitting merrily on a fellow worker’s coffin, striking a match for his cigarette on it. LeRoy shoots the prison beds where the men sleep chained together with a forbidding moodiness and the wide-open spaces where they slave in the beating sun with a scale and sense of heat bearing down on us.

Allen won’t be beaten though. His escape is a beautifully filmed and edited sequence, show-casing the film’s triumphant use of sound. LeRoy’s camera tracks both Allen and pursuers as they flee through the undergrowth, adding pace and intensity to the sequence, soundtracked to the bark of the hounds following him. It’s a sound you really notice disappear when Allen hurls himself into a river, using a reed as an air pipe, hiding feet away from his pursuers, in a series of underwater shots that have a haunting power. It’s superbly done, full of tension and fear.

Escaped, first thing James does is buy a suit and have a shave. Instantly he is above suspicion – even while he is perfectly described be a flatfoot cop sitting next to him in the barbers, not a trace of suspicion is placed on to him (thanks for the ‘close shave’ Allen drily says). Now looking like a respectable middle-class sort, James Allen – under his new name of Allen James – suddenly finds opportunities heading his way, moving quickly up the chain at his new job in Chicago. In this world, outward appearances make the man: and a guy in a new suit is always going to get the sort of attention a down-and-out can only dream of.

So much is Allen now an ideal prospect, he is blackmailed into marriage by Glenda Farrell’s hard-faced Marie, a decision that will bite him hard when he makes eyes years later at the sweet Helen (Helen Visnor). He’s pulled back into the world he thought he had left behind, only to find its not changed at all: to the ‘justice’ system his new professional achievements count for not a jot. To them he’s still the same subhuman scum he was before, an even harsher regime swiftly initiated to drive any vestige of humanity from him, even in the face of a national campaign.

At the centre of this film is a superb performance by Paul Muni. Sure, you can see touches of Muni’s love for melodrama, the odd overdone reaction. But this is an emotionally raw, deeply touching performance. Muni gives Allen a superabundance of energy, enthusiasm and hope at the film’s start all of which slowly drains away. The horror builds behind his eyes: it’s no surprise that, re-sentenced to the chain gang, Muni’s face crumbles into genuinely affecting tears of fear and hopelessness. Slowly, despite himself, Allen becomes the toughened, cynical, damaged man the system assumes he was at the start, strangling the hope and optimism that characterised him at the start. It’s a sensitive, deeply humane performance, of humanity being chiselled away.

It results, of course, in the film’s striking (and famous) closing shot, the now fugitive Allen whispering from the shadows, all chance of making an honest life gone. IAAFFACG has already symbolically shown how this system has twisted Allen: having dreamed his whole life of being a bridge builder, one of his final acts in the film is to destroy a bridge as part of a desperate escape. IAAFFACG doesn’t overegg its social commentary, but leaves a strong and lasting impression of how treating men like animals becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leave them no choice and a man must turn to crime: it’s as true for abandoned veterans as it is for chain-gang criminals. In making an appeal for a fairer, kinder world, IAAFFACG doesn’t miss that we are a long way from it right now.

Quo Vadis (1951)

Peter Ustinov revels in the Status Quo (Vadis) of Imperial Rome

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Robert Taylor (Marcus Vinicius), Deborah Kerr (Lygia), Leo Genn (Petronius), Peter Ustinov (Nero), Patricia Laffan (Poppaea), Finlay Currie (St. Peter), Abraham Sofaer (St. Paul), Marina Berti (Eunice), Buddy Baer (Ursus), Felix Aylmer (Plautius), Ralph Truman (Tigellinus), Rosalie Crutchley (Acte), Nicholas Hannen (Seneca)

In the 1950s, epic films were the way for the movie studios to defeat the onslaught of television. What better way to best the creeping presence of the small screen in every home than offering more action, sets, crowds and colour than could ever be squeezed into that small box in the corner of the room? Quo Vadis was the first film that started a wave.

Returning to Rome after years on campaign, Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) falls in love with a Christian hostage, Lygia (Deborah Kerr). Gifted Lygia as a reward by the decadent Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov), Marcus slowly becomes fascinated by her religion – and more aware of the insanity of Nero. Petronius (Leo Genn), Marcus’ uncle and Nero’s cynical retainer who hides his barbs under double-edged flattery, unwittingly plants in the Emperor’s mind the plan for a Great Fire in Rome. After the mob reacts with fury, Nero kicks off a persecution of Christians that will end in slaughter in the arena…

There is a charming stiffness to some of this film which actually makes it rather endearing. Like many films that followed it, this balances a po-faced reverence for Christian history with a lascivious delight in sex, destruction and violence. This means the audience can be thrilled by Rome burning, entertained by Nero’s decadence, watch Christians mauled by Lions and burned alive – while also being comforted by the triumph of good-old fashioned Christian values and persuaded the film has some sort of higher purpose because it ties everything up with a nice faith-shaped bow.

Of course this all looks rather dated today, but back in 1951 this was the studio’s most successful film since Gone with the Wind and the biggest hit of the year: it started a nearly 15-year cycle of similarly themed religious epics. The money has clearly been chucked at the screen – the sets are huge, the casts sweeping, the staging of the Roman fires and Christian sacrifices very ambitiously put together. Perhaps the only surprise is that the lush, attractive cinematography isn’t in wide-screen – this was the last film of this kind to not be filmed in the widest lens available.

Despite its nearly three-hour run time, this is quite an entertaining story, laced with enough real history to make it all convincing (even if it telescopes the last few years of Nero’s reign into what seems like a week or so). Despite this, the storytelling does feel dated at times as we get bogged down in back and forth about Christianity (told with an intense seriousness by the actors, mixed with long-distance-stares type performances), and the homespun simplicity of its message lacks the shades of grey we’d expect today (as well as being a little dull) but it just about holds together.

The main problem is the lead performers. Robert Taylor is an actor almost totally forgotten today – and it’s not difficult to see why here. Not only does he speak with the flattened mid-Atlantic vowels recognisible from American leads in historical films from this era (the jarring mixture of accents in the film is odd to hear) but he is an uncharismatic, wooden performer sorely lacking the power a Charlton Heston would have brought to this. Marry that up with his character being a dull chauvinist and you’ve got a bad lead to root for. The relationship between him and Deborah Kerr’s (equally dull) Christian hostage is based on a terminally dated, borderline abusive, set-up: he kidnaps her from her home and wants her to change her faith, she won’t but never mind she loves him anyway without condition and surely her love will make him a good man, right!

Despite the efforts of the leads and some decent supporting actors (Finlay Currie in particular makes a very worthy Peter) the Christian story never really picks up. There are some nice visual flourishes – the recreation of some Renaissance paintings is well-done, and the stark image of Peter crucified is striking – but the Christian story isn’t what anyone will remember from this film. It’s all about the corrupt Romans.

Not only do they have the best lines and all the best scenes, but in Leo Genn and Peter Ustinov they also have the only actors who perhaps seem to realise they are not in a work of art, but a campy popcorn epic. Both actors give wonderfully complementary performances. Genn’s dry wit as the cynical Petronius (whose every line has a cutting double meaning) underpins his wry social commentator to fantastic effect, delivering many of the films laugh-out loud moments. He elevates many of the best lines in a dry but educated script.

Genn’s low-key performance also brilliantly contrasts with Ustinov’s extravagance as Nero, making the emperor a sort-of sadistic Frankie Howerd. Ustinov has enormous fun in the role, cheerfully going up and over the top with Nero’s man-child depravity, bordering on vulnerability and a needy desire to be liked and respected by the people and his underlings. Depictions of his singing are hilarious, his petulant sulking extremely funny. Yes, it’s an absurd performance – more a comic sketch almost – but it somehow works because (a) everything else in the film is so serious and (b) Genn’s world-weary cynicism anchors the character for the first two-thirds of the film, giving Ustinov much freer reign to go over the top.

So it’s all about the baddies – as was often the way with films of this era. You’ll remember the scenes of Nero holding court, and the archly written dialogue between Petronius and Nero. Ustinov and Genn are, in very different ways, terrifically entertaining (both received Oscar nominations). The Christian message of the film is on-the-nose (to say the least), and the lead actors are more like kindling for the Great Fire than actual characters. It’s a strange film, at times a bloated far-too-serious religious epic, at others a campy tragi-comedy with a dry wit. Yes it’s dated and far from perfect, but it’s also strangely entertaining and even a little compelling.