Tag: Myrna Loy

Arrowsmith (1931)

An uninspired prestige drama suddenly turns at the end into an intriguingly subversive drama

Director: John Ford

Cast: Ronald Colman (Dr Martin Arrowsmith), Helen Hayes (Leora Arrowsmith), Richard Bennett (Gustav Sondelius), A.E. Anson (Professor Max Gottlieb), Clarence Brooks (Dr Oliver Marchand), Alec B Francis (Twyford), Claude King (Dr Tubbs), Bert Roach (Bert Tozer), Myrna Loy (Mrs Joyce Lanyon), Russell Hopton (Terry Wickett), Lumsden Hare (Sir Robert Fairland)

A neat trivia question: what was the first John Ford film nominated for Best Picture? Not many people remember Arrowsmith today – although, since Ford was ordered by producer Samuel Goldwyn to not touch a drop of the sauce while making it, we can be pretty sure he did. Adapted from a hulking Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Sinclair Lewis, it was the epitome of prestige Hollywood filmmaking. It’s a far from a perfect film, but it contains flashes of real beauty and genius – and presents one of the most surprising, subversive visions of infidelity you’ll see in 30’s Hollywood.

Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) is desperate to be a high-flyer. A scientist and doctor, he’s wants to make his mark – and his mentors such as noted bacteriologist Professor Gottlieb (A.E. Anson) and Swedish scientist Gustav Sondelius (Richard Bennett) think he can. But Arrowsmith postpones his dreams for a spontaneous marriage to Leora (Helen Hayes), before re-embracing science. When plague breaks out in the West Indies, the Arrowsmiths travel there, ordered to test a possible cure on the natives: half will receive the cure, the other a placebo. But temptation and tragedy will be Arrowsmith’s constant companion there.

Arrowsmith is very much a film of two halves (or, in terms of its run-time, two-thirds, one-third). To be honest, much of its first hour is frequently rushed, ponderous and dull, flatly filmed with the air of uninspiring prestige production. Watching it play, it’s hard to connect a film as flat, perfunctory and serviceable as this with Ford’s energy and flair. It’s not helped by the accelerated storytelling. Stuffing in as much of Lewis’s door-stop best-seller as it can (the first fifteen minutes cover as many events as whole movies often content themselves with), the plot barrels along so fast it can leave your head spinning. Scenes either feel like sketches from a larger whole or like narrative cul-de-sacs included to tick a box from the novel.

Arrowsmith feels like a compromised film. I suspect Goldwyn’s aim was to cover the book. But I feel Ford’s interest – if he had one in the film’s opening hour – was the Arrowsmith marriage. On the surface this is your standard loving-husband-supportive-wife pairing. But, underneath, there is a lot more going on here. Everything about their courtship and registry office marriage feels perfunctory. Arrowsmith treats his wife with a fondness that never tips into passion. When she suffers a miscarriage (which prevents her having children), he is sad but moves on remarkably quickly. At one point, Leona discusses the idea of leaving her preoccupied, distant husband who disappears for days on end (you feel she’s only half joking). Arrowsmith calls her ‘old girl’, which feels rather complacent and smug.

You suspect Ford might be hinting that, frankly, Arrowsmith is a self-important shit with grandiose ideas. It’s an idea the film can’t quite push – Ronald Colman’s undoubted charm smooths off Arrowsmith’s rough edges, even while he makes him self-righteous and pompous. But as Leona (Hayes is excellent in subtly suggesting this woman is much more lonely than she admits) watches her house jerry-rigged into a Frankenstein-laboratory (his atrociously poor safety measures will come back to haunt him later) or is left for days alone at home, it’s hard not to feel this is a more complex, strained relationship than the film can openly say.

These half-stated implications lead us into the film’s final act in the West Indies, which almost redeems the slightly confused mish-mash it proceeds. From the opening shot of this sequence – focused on Clarence Brooks’ doctor (notable for treating a Black character as an assured professional) with his patients sitting on a balcony, excluded from the conversation about their health going on down below – it’s impossible not to see Ford’s sympathy more openly lying with the West Indian villagers, whose health is of little interest to the white population and who even our nominal hero (reluctantly) uses as guinea pigs for his cure. This powers us through a half-hour sequence that is by far-and-away the most focused and interesting of the entire film.

This tragedy-laden sequence not only buzzes with an indignation of the unfairness of this system – in which our hero is a semi-reluctant participant – but unleashes the most beautiful, shadow-filled, expressionistic lighting in the film. Ford signposts moments of high emotion by casting people’s bodies in shadow. This mesmerising effect is used brilliantly, combined with shots deliberately echoing each other (most strikingly two contrasting shots of the Arrowsmith home, both framed at low angles with foreground chairs – the second laced with tragedy). Visual imagery reflects, not least the cutting between two cigarettes smoked by the Arrowsmith’s. There is a host of heart-rendering, inventive ideas in visual storytelling: at one point, Arrowsmith’s phone call with a sweating colleague goes dead – we cut to see a shot of the empty phone on the other end bathed in shadow, enough to tell us his interlocutor has literally died mid-call.

This shadow-filled sequence also powers the film’s most subtle moment: possibly the most under-the-wire depiction of infidelity seen in the movies. The original novel made clear Arrowsmith was serially unfaithful. Here, he meets Myrna Loy’s wealthy heiress, to whom he admits an immediate kinship. At night, wordlessly, Ford cuts back and forth between Loy preparing for bed and Colman sitting (bathed in shadow) smoking and possibly waiting. Wordlessly the cuts go back and forth – and then fades to black as we see a shadow approach the door of Colman’s bedroom. You can miss it entirely: but its clear they sleep together. (A late scene with Colman and Loy, with a lingering handhold, feels like proof positive). A late scene of Colman filled with manic energy, in this context feels powered more by guilt and shame.

It’s subtle because we know that in scenes of open emotion and dramatic import we’ve seen faces thrown into shadow. When its repeated here, in an otherwise inconsequential scene, we’re having visually communicated to us something the film can’t openly tell us: Arrowsmith is cheating on his wife. It’s the highlight of a compelling final act, full of drama, tragedy and beautiful filmmaking. When the film leaves the West Indies for its lab-set coda, it returns to flat film-making and sudden, jarring plot developments. But for this half-hour section, it’s a fascinating, oblique, challenging and rewarding film: one of the best short films buried in a large one you’ll see. Arrowsmith may not be a classic, but’s it’s a fascinating film.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Harold Rusell, Dana Andrews and Fredric March find coming home can be as tough as war in The Best Years of Our Lives

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson), Fredric March (Sgt Al Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Captain Fred Derry), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Cathy O’Donnell (Wilma Cameron), Harold Russell (PO Homer Parish), Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Eagle), Gladys George (Hortense Derry), Roman Bohnen (Pat Derry), Ray Collins (Mr Milton)

Three men return from the Second World War. They’ve changed, but everything around them seems the same. How do they even begin to adjust when no one really understands what they’ve been through? The Best Years of Our Lives was a sensation when it was released, speaking to a whole country reeling from the shock of war. Many films focus on the gruelling experience of war, but few take on the struggle to find a place for veterans and help them reintegrate into normal life.

Our three veterans all meet at the airport, trying to home to the same small (fictional) city in the Midwest. Normally they would probably have never met: but war has given them a shared bond they will find hard to replicate back home. Al Stephenson (Fredric March) is a banker, who has developed something of a drinking problem to the surprise of his wife Milly (Myrna). Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a café worker who became an Air Force Captain – but finds that doesn’t interest employers back home. He also now has nothing in common with the flighty, flirty wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) he married before shipping out – and far more in common with Al’s thoughtful daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright). Homer Parish (Harold Russell) lost both his hands, replaced with mechanical hooks. Can he overcome the adjustments – and allow himself to be loved by Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell)?

What The Best Years of Our Lives explores brilliantly is how quick we are to praise heroes, but how slow we can be to offer them practical help and support. These problems aren’t just restricted to an unlucky one or two – the film goes out of its way to demonstrate the problem is universal. Our three leads are from different services, and radically different walks of life: an important businessman who served as a sergeant, a wash-out who found a purpose in the air force and an athletic sailor who returns without his hands. Rich or poor, it’s tough to find your place whoever you are.

Wyler shoots all this with a documentary realism, with extensive use of deep focus photography. It helps make this a frequently moving film. It sometimes feels like Wyler just captured real events. Flying home our heroes see “people playing golf like nothing happened”. They are all so nervous going home that both Al and Homer both suggest going for a drink rather than leave the cab they are sharing. Everyday problems about going to the office or looking for a job seem more affecting because we know they’ve come back from the war and don’t deserve knock-backs like this.

The heart of this film is Fred’s struggles to find some sort of purpose on civvie street. War offered more opportunities to him more than anyone else. He is a nobody who became a respected somebody. Now he can’t get a job in a department store. As a potential employer tells him, his CV is stuffed with irrelevant experience and his years out of the job market mean he’s fallen behind the rest. This is how a man with a chest full of medals, winds up serving ice cream and busting a gut trying to flog perfume to housewives who let their children run wild around his stand.

Dana Andrews is the heart of this film, giving a marvellous performance of great depth and sadness. Haunted by nightmares, Fred’s optimism drips away the longer he fails to find proper work. Perhaps most heart-breakingly of all, he increasingly makes himself the target of his dry wit. By the time he has surrounded to the indignity of taking back his old soda jerk job (and reporting to the spotty kid who used to be his assistant), Fred is disparagingly belittling his own wartime accomplishments.

If someone as matinee idol handsome, with a wonderful war record, as Fred can’t get ahead, what chance does anyone have? Fred’s wife (Virginia Mayo, marvellously smackable as this shallow girl) isn’t even interested in him, only the idea of him – begging him to wear his uniform (medals and all) for as long as possible so she can show him off like a new handbag. Fred is knocked back so many times, he comes to believe he deserves it. In a beautiful scene, late in the film, he walks through a field covered in old air force bombers. It’s a striking visual metaphor – one Fred is all too aware of – that he’s as much on the scrap heap as them.

The Best Years of Our Lives shows time and again how quick we are to forget. Al is hauled over the coals for offering a loan to a collateral-free GI who wants to start a farm. But Al feels a loyalty to men like this – and he recognises, unlike his superiors, there are qualities you just won’t find in a bank account. Homer is confronted at Fred’s workplace by an arrogant anti-Commie, who suggests the entire war was a waste of time, spent fighting the wrong foes. Calling Homer “a sucker” for losing his hands in the wrong war leads to a fight – and Fred losing his job for punching the guy out. Where is the sense of debt to these people?

Homer not only has to deal with disability – but also the metallic claws which get him all the wrong attention. The army trained him how to use the claws – but as Al observes, watching Homer’s awkward homecoming “couldn’t train him to put his arms round his girl”. They can solve the practical problem, but there is no support for actually coming to terms with the emotional impact.

Homer is played by real-life veteran paraplegic (and non-actor) Harold Russell, in a poignantly sincere, unstudied performance. It becomes even more heart-breaking, as his torment clearly rooted in Russell’s own experiences. When Homer demonstrates to Wilma how vulnerable he is without his hands – if a door shuts, he’s trapped in a room, he can’t dress himself– it’s almost unbearably sad (O’Donnell is equally good in this scene). Russell’s simple, matter-of-factness is more moving than any histrionics.

The only plot that doesn’t get fully explored is Al’s implied drinking problem. He gets pissed the first night home (and his wife comments several times on his growing reliance). Everything to Al feels a little different – his kids are older, his bankwork seems stuffier. Today the film would dive more into Al’s probable survivor guilt. But Al makes a stand when others won’t to help his veterans – and March has a superb, low-key speech at a banquet in his honour where he vows to invest small loans into returning GIs. The film also gently probes – and in some ways leaves open – the ongoing problems he and Milly (warmly played by Myrna Loy) have had in their marriage, problems which Al’s absence and drinking have not helped solve.

Wyler pulls these threads together in a restrained style that largely avoids melodrama (though Hugo Freidhofer’s score is frequently overblown – Wyler apparently hated it). Instead, dilemmas are grounded in reality. Al might like Fred, but the last thing he wants is for Fred to get his daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright in a gentle, touching performance) caught up in a divorce. In a perfect example of Wyler’s restrained, documentary style, Al and Fred have a quiet man-to-man discussion, before Fred calls Peggy to see he can’t see her anymore. He does this in the back corner of the frame while the foreground shows Al listening to Homer and his uncle play the piano. It’s a perfect example of the way Wyler uses deep focus to give the film a fly-on-the-wall quality.

There is something extraordinarily modern about The Best Years of Our Lives. It feels calm and un-histrionic – and of course many veterans still struggle today. The camera feels observational and unobtrusive and the characters respond to situations in a very natural way. It’s also helped by the wonderfully natural acting. It all comes together in a film that is important without feeling like it’s trying to be important. An observant, sensitive exploration of the experience of veterans (made by a veteran), that never feels false and looks at our world with affection but realism.

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

Luise Rainer and William Powell bring the life of The Great Ziegfeld to life in this decent-but-not-great Best Picture winner

Director: Robert Z Leonard

Cast: William Powell (Florenz Ziegfeld Jnr), Myrna Loy (Billie Burke), Luise Rainer (Anna Held), Frank Morgan (Jack Billings), Fannie Brice (Herself), Virginia Bruce (Audrey Dane), Reginald Owen (Sampson), Ray Bolger (Himself), Ernest Coassart (Sidney), Joseph Cawthorn (Dr Ziegfeld), Nat Pendleton (The Great Sandow)

I’d always been led to believe The Great Ziegfeld was one of the low points in Best Picture history – that the Oscar had gone to a plotless, over-long, empty mess. So, watching this film for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised. The Great Ziegfeld may be flawed, but it’s not as bad as all that. In some places it’s even pretty good.

Florenz Ziegfeld Jnr (William Powell) is a showman with big dreams. From the Chicago World Fair of 1893, where his show features strong-man The Great Sandow (Nat Pendleton) – lifting a massive pair of dumb bells inside of each is a “Dumb Belle” (geddit?!) – Ziegfeld heads towards New York. There he puts on a series of variety shows, The Ziegfeld Follies, crammed with popular entertainers and gorgeous babes. Along the way he spends money like water, marries star Anna Held (Luise Rainer), cheats on her a lot (although the film handles this coyly) and finds love with star Billie Burke (Myrna Loy – the real Burke grudgingly agreed she was too old to play herself).

Watching The Great Ziegfeld you can see how it influenced so many later films. A witty, show-piece crammed crowd-pleaser about a impresario, its essentially the grandfather of The Greatest Showman. It’s unpretentious and easy-going – but also impossibly long, far too long for its slight story. It’s sprawling, puffed-up and the musical numbers are often mundane and tedious – but it, just about, manages to stay entertaining.

In real life Ziegfeld was a chancer with a roving eye. He left a mountain of debt and his genius was at least as much about promotion as it was art. You can see why Hollywood has a soft-spot for him: he was all about spectacle (a running gag has him always wanting “higher steps”, a neat short-hand for making things bigger). His rough edges (the affairs and the financial chicanery) are filed down as the film’s Ziegfeld is a charmer with a Wodehousian wit, cheeky and naughty but always a gentleman.

William Powell is perfect casting, and a big part of the film’s charm is tied up in his winningly (and deceptively) casual performance. Powell turns the role into a personality part, smoothly underplaying with a wink to the camera. He delivers the various bon mots with a real skill and provides nearly all the film’s pace and energy and a big barrel of its sense of fun.

He sits at the centre of a film that has genuine moments of directorial flair from Robert Z Leonard. There are some great tracking shots and he handles the ‘acting’ scenes very well – a scene with Ziegfeld chatting with Will Rogers and Fanny Brice (playing herself) is worth the price of admission alone. The performers mostly bounce effectively off each other.

Leonard also gets emotional impact from Ziegfeld’s late romance with Burke (a sequence of the two of them chatting, coyly holding hands is very well done) and creates a superb series of visuals to close the film (a shot of the ageing Ziegfeld sitting in his chair, staring at his name in lights over his theatre, is a wonderful summary of the man’s life – and maybe, when his hand drops down releasing a flower, it even gave Welles a bit of inspiration for Kane’s death five years later).

When The Great Ziegfeld focuses on Powell’s lightness of touch, and character-led moments (Frank Morgan is also great fun as Ziegfeld’s bombastic, long-suffering rival) it works really well. What has suffered over time – and today feel like its weakest parts – are those heavily praised in 1936.

MGM marketed this as the most expensive film ever made, the money splurged on those massive musical numbers, with scores of extras and enormous sets. The centre-piece is the “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” number, featuring countless extras on a massive rotating “wedding-cake” set, 175 spiral steps high. Like Ziegfeld’s shows it’s all about the cost, spectacle and size. And they are not even 1% as interesting as watching Astaire and Rogers tap dance in a marquee in Top Hat.

The film’s numerous musical numbers often feel like dull products of yesteryear. Over-long, over-extended, shot to squeeze the set into frame rather than focusing on skill or grace. These numbers – some of which I admit I fast-forwarded through – pad out the running time but contribute nothing to either story or entertainment factor. If anything, you are desperate to get back to Powell’s skilled playing of the biographical scenes, rather than sitting through another over-ripe number.

Similarly much of the acting has aged less well. Myrna Loy is strangely uncomfortable as Burke (perhaps all to aware the real Burke was just off camera). Luise Rainer won the first of her two consecutive Oscars – but her performance is extremely over-played, utterly lacking in nuance. Her famous “telephone” scene (heartbroken, she calls Ziegfeld to congratulate him on his new marriage) was hailed as great acting, but today looks mannered and overblown.

But despite all these flaws – mundane and boring musical numbers, a lack of spark and pace – there is actually a fair bit of wit and charm. Its early sequences – which focus on Powell and Nat Pendleton’s witty turn as Sandow – are surprisingly light and engaging. The moments where the film relaxes and isn’t straining to impress are engaging and fun. There is a decent 90-minute Astaire-Rogers film straining to get out here, crushed under the weight of the Ziegfeld/MGM grandeur. It’s entertaining – better than you might have heard – but can’t hold a candle to the great Hollywood musicals of yesteryear, its charm spread very thin.