Peggy Ann Garner – Movie Musings

A perfectly judged star vehicle, very slight and competent but entertaining enough

Director: Irving Pichel

Cast: Monty Woolley (Howard), Roddy McDowell (Ronnie), Anne Baxter (Nicole Rougeron), Otto Preminger (Major Diessen), J. Carrol Naish (Aristide Rougeron), Lester Matthews (Mr Cavanaugh), Jill Esmond (Mrs Cavanaugh), Peggy Ann Garner (Shelia), Merril Rodin (Willem), Maurice Tauzin (Pierre), Fleurette Zama (Rose), Marcel Dalio (Focquet), Odette Myrtil (Madame Rougeron), Marcelle Corday (Madame Bonne)

Talk about a part tailor-made for its lead. We need a curmudgeonly old duffer, with the twinkly charm of an avuncular uncle and a secret heart of gold – get Monty Woolley on the blower! In this Nevil Shute adaptation, he plays Howard, caught up in the 1940 German invasion of France while on a fishing holiday. With great reluctance, he agrees to escort Ronnie (Roddy McDowell) and Shelia (Peggy Ann Garner), children of a League of Nations diplomat, across France. Along the way, as well as dodging the Germans, he picks up a shell-shocked French orphan and a scrawny Dutch child and recruits the help of an old ‘acquaintance’ of his son, Nicole (Anne Baxter). Will Howard dodge the Germans and escape?

Woolley eases into this crusty old-timer with consummate ease – after all it’s essentially a twist on his star-making turn in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Howard might as well be the twin of Since You Went Away’s Colonel Smollett. But he can sell the heck out of characters like this, duly picking up an Oscar nomination. Introduced reluctantly helping Shelia with her homework – a running gag is Howard’s complete lack of knowledge of American geography, insisting Rochester is a state – he’s prickly around the kids, but not too prickly. Leaving us in no doubt that his gruff distance will soon melt on the road. Which of course it does, despite the occasional abrupt grumbling.

Not least since Woolley brings out a tender concern at how these kids are being exposed to the horrors of war. Little flashes of sadness as they see a dead body for the first time, and the sad understanding that crosses his face when he inspects the shell-shocked Pierre. Howard has a hard-won understanding of war, Woolley stiff of lip as he confesses the death of his RAF pilot son, mixed with pride that it took ‘three of them’ to take him down. It’s clear shepherding these children becomes, for him, the war service he was considered too old to do. We already know he’s got a determined never-say-die spirit, imperiously telling a surrender-monkey who joins him to listen to Churchill (a truly terrible voiceover impersonation) that he best never speak to him again.

Woolley is front-and-centre of nearly everything good in The Pied Piper, an otherwise fairly straight-forward mix of road movie, family adventure and war movie. It’s got a smoothly adapted script by Nunnally Johnson and competent, if uninspiring, direction by Irving Pichel. I found the film’s recurrent use of various predictable refrains – most irritatingly ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ – incredibly grating after a while. Most of The Pied Piper is all too obviously shot on studio sets, spiced up with the odd piece of stock footage. (Not surprisingly, considering it was shot while the world was tearing itself apart). Following in the spirit of its woeful Churchill radio impersonator, there are some desperately wobbly plane models super-imposed over a bombing raid on an evacuation convoy. It’s a swift and pacey film – but also a rather slight one.

Because The Pied Piper is only willing to go so far in showing the horrors of war. It will let its precocious children see a dead body but not us. The sense of peril, about what might happen to Howard if caught, isn’t quite there. Perhaps because it’s somehow implausible that anyone caught on the French-Swiss border in 1940 would think their best option was crossing occupied France rather than shooting across the border to Switzerland (those League of Nation parents must have been kicking themselves). The danger of Nazi pursuit only kicks in half-way through the film – until then, Howard doesn’t even bother to conceal his nationality. It’s not helped by The Pied Piper (like most 40s war films) totally failing to wrap its head around what a concentration camp is.

There is an episodic feeling to the film’s half, before most of the second half settles into a single location, with our heroes under the thumb of Otto Preminger dutifully trotting out one of his occasional angry Nazis. Along the way they pick up Anne Baxter, wrapping her tongue around an “ooo la la” accent that sticks out even more when several other members of the cast (including Marcel Dalio as a defiant fisherman) are actual refugee expats. But then part of the film’s family appeal is there isn’t too much peril.

The final act does introduce some – the introduction of a firing squad threat feels suddenly quite extreme – but also resolves all problems with the sort of contrivance that feels a bit like the story has been painted into a corner and without any other way to get out of it. There is a romantic innocence to it in some ways, the hope that any character could have a secret, sentimental weakness that might make them do a good thing. And the capture of our heroes does allow Woolley to showcase another weapon in his arsenal, his ability for proud, stiff-backed defiance in the face of evil.

The Pied Piper is sweet, charming, flies by quickly and offers a perfect, tailor-made star turn. The kids, thankfully, manage to not be too grating (in fact you even kind of wish Roddy McDowell and Peggy Ann Garner were given more to do). It’s a surprise to find a story so slight as this breathing in the vaulted air of the Oscar Best Picture short list, but it’s hard to argue against the relief of watching everyday heroism in the midst of war.

Easy-going father-daughter sentimentality in Kazan’s debut, which softens up an already gentle novel

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Peggy Ann Garner (Francie Nolan), Dorothy McGuire (Katie Nolan), Joan Blondell (Aunt Sissy), James Dunn (Johnny Nolan), Lloyd Nolan (Officer McShane), Ted Donaldson (Neeley Nolan), Ruth Nelson (Miss McDonough), John Alexander (Steve Edwards)

In 1912 an Irish-American family, the Nolans, struggle to make ends meet in Brooklyn. Mother Katie (Dorothy McGuire) keeps a close eye on the purse strings to ensure she can keep a roof over the head of her children: 13-year-old Francie (Peggy Ann Garner) and young Neeley (Ted Donaldson). Problem is, Katie also has a third child: her husband Johnny (James Dunn), a happy-go-lucky dreamer and “singing waiter” who is also a hopeless drunk. Johnny, with his “live-your-dreams” outlook on life, natural charm and instinctive understanding of people, is Francie’s idol. With another child on the way, and the Nolan cash reserves at breaking point, can the family hold together?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn drips with sentimental, old-fashioned, easy-watching charm. Adapted from a best-selling novel by Betty Smith, it strips out most of the plot (which covers nearly 17 years rather than the single one featured here) and considerably waters down the original’s content. (It also, hilariously, avoids any appearance at all of the eponymous tree at the centre of the Nolan tenement block, which is cursorily referenced only twice.) Smith’s book was a semi-auto-biographical chronicle of a life of struggle survived by a daughter who flourishes, but the film is more of an optimistic fable of the triumph of family love.

It feels strange that this is the first film of Elia Kazan, who would become better known for hard-hitting, location-shot, method-tinged dramas rather than the tear-jerking charm here. Kazan was later sceptical about the film – highly critical of what he considered his overly theatrical staging, particularly of the scenes set in the Nolan home – and even at the time stated he was so unsure about what he was doing that the film was effectively co-directed by cinematographer Leon Shamroy. But Kazan’s skill with actors shines through and he invests it with a great deal of pace and emotional truth.

His main benefit is the very strong performances from Garner and Dunn in the film’s most important relationship. Both actors won Oscars (Garner the juvenile Oscar, Dunn for Best Supporting Actor) and it’s the loving meeting of hearts and minds between father and daughter that lies at the film’s heart. Francie is a young girl dedicated to education – slavishly, but obsessively, reading through the local library in alphabetical order, regardless of suitability of the books – who dreams of going to a better school and bettering her life. It’s a dream that her mother struggles to grasp – largely unable to see beyond the immediate needs of putting food on the table – but which her father understands and is desperate to support.

This bond is partly what leads to Francie’s idolising her doting dad. And Johnny is doting. He’ll do things her mother won’t dream of doing – including weaving an elaborate fantasy to win her a place at that better school. He’ll joke and laugh, sing songs and entertain her while indulging her artistic leanings. Unfortunately, he’ll also make promises to reform he won’t keep, stumble home late at night or be found, drunk in the street, having boozed away every penny he’s earned.

Dunn poured a lot of himself into this self-destructive dreamer. A vaudeville comedian who had a successful run of films with Shirley Temple in the 1930s, he had blown most of his fortune in bad investments. By the 1940s was struggling to find work with his drink problem widely known. But he was also charming, decent and kind, but seen to lack the drive to build a successful career. In effect, Johnny was a version of his own life, and Dunn not only nails Johnny’s charm but also laces the performance with a rich vein of sadness, guilt and shame, but still loved by all.

While Johnny jokes and laughs with the neighbours, Katie cleans the hallway of their tenement block to earn extra bucks and moves the family to a smaller room to save what money she can. Played with a fine line in drudgery and put-upon stress by Dorothy McGuire (in a role as thankless as Katie’s life is), Katie remains unappreciated by her daughter (who sees her as a moaner who won’t cut her father a break) and by her husband as being too obsessed with the purse-strings.

The major flaw, for me, of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that the film falls almost as uncritically in love with Johnny as Francie. Getting older it’s hard not to see Johnny as essentially irresponsible and selfish, a well-meaning but destructive force on the family, the cause of the poverty which has made Katie crushed, dowdy and increasingly stressed and bitter. She essentially suffers everything – skipping meals, slaving over multiple jobs, saying no to every desire Francie has – while Johnny flies in, cracks jokes, says yes to everything and disappears when its time to work out how to deliver.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, however, wants to tell a sentimental story of a father-daughter bond and hasn’t got too much time for Katie – or for making Francie really face the flaws in her father and the virtues of her mother (for all the film gives mother and daughter a late reconciliation). There is something fake about this (tellingly the book gives a sharper realisation for Francie and subtly changes Johnny’s fate to make it less idealised). But all edges are shaved off here and the family divisions are bridged as easily as poverty is eventually solved. (There is also considerable watering down of the liberated lifestyle of Katie’s sister, engagingly played by Joan Blondell).

It makes for a film that’s warm, comforting and essentially light and even a little forgettable. It’s all too easy to drop off in front of it on a Sunday afternoon. Try as you might, you can’t say that about other Kazan films. A little more grit to this would have increased its impact considerably.