Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur

In the early 1940's Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur were co-starred in two of the finest comedies of that period. Coburn had been well received in the 1940 film "The Lady Eve" playing card shark Handsome Harry Harrington. In 1941 Colburn and Arthur were matched in the superb comedy "The Devil and Miss Jones." It was a period when labor strife was an important part of American culture and organizing workers was at the forefront. Two years later the two were reunited again another really fun comedy. By then the U.S. was involved in World War II. This picture was devoted to the home front, but was centered on life in Washington, D.C. and the problems entailed in going to that city in those days. Coburn received the best supporting actor award for "The Devil and Miss Jones." The similarities between the acting styles required for each film indicated that they could be properly reviewed in tandem.

The Devil and Miss Jones

Charles Coburn, as J.P. Merrick, is one of the world's richest men, a millionaire many times over with investments and operations in many areas. One of his properties is Neeley's, a big department store in New York city. There are problems at Neeley's. Many employees are disgruntled at not being treated fairly and are in the process of trying to get organized into a union. Merrick wants to get to the bottom of this union movement and hires a detective to snoop on the employees. When this plan falls through, he decides to get himself a job at the department store and do his own spying. He gets hired under an assumed name, Tom Higgins, but has problems right off the bat. First, he learns he was just able to pass the stores minimum standards relative to intelligence.

Problem number two occurs when he arrives at the store for his first day of work. He is assigned to Mr. Hooper, (Edmund Gwynne). Mr. Hooper is one of those supervisors who we all come up against at sometime in our careers, a low level supervisor with a strong inclination to throw his weight around. Mr. Hooper's area is shoes, but because Higgins/Merrick scored so low on the intelligence test he assigns the latter to slippers. There, Higgins meets Mary Jones played by Jean Arthur in one of her typical cheery helpful roles. She fills him on the routine and explains how to deal with Hooper, and lets him know when the lunch hour occurs. Merrick has a stomach problem which he tries to control by eating only graham crackers. When he tells her this she misunderstands the reason for his eating graham crackers and thinks he is just to poor to afford lunch. In sympathy, she forces him to accept a half dollar from her to pay for a regular lunch.

Robert Cummings is Arthur's romantic interest, Joe. At about this time, Joe creates a disturbance by chaining himself to radiator and starts yelling union propaganda at the top of his lungs. He doesn't work for Neeley's and is promptly escorted out of the store by William Demarest, who you might remember as one of Preston Sturgis' favorite actors.Miss Jones persuades Higgins to go to lunch with her. She introduces him to fellow employee, Elizabeth (Spring Byington), in a role not typical of her. Higgins is taken with Elizabeth and asks her to sit with him. Then, despite his stomach problems, he promptly eats all of her homemade tuna sandwiches. In their discussions, he makes up a history of long time employment at two different stores with layoffs between jobs.

Higgins'/Merrick's friendship with Miss Jones continues to grow. For one, he meets Joe and learns he is Jones' boyfriend. The three of them go to a Union meeting at the insistence of Joe and while there Jones gets up and makes an impassioned speech where she describes Higgins unfortunate situation, 55 years old, only two long term jobs, and includes his supposed poverty by her providing him with 50 cents for lunch and his having eaten all of Elizabeth's sandwiches because of hunger. The next days events include the failure of a setup that Merrick had worked out to sell some of the stores shoe inventory that can't be sold. This is very funny in that the buyer is a 12 or 13 year old girl that Merrick's servant at his mansion, played by S.Z. Sakall has brought to the store. The girl is a real brat and impossible to work with and forces Merrick to go through all kinds of gyrations to get her into a pair of shoes.

Impossible to imagine, but Higgins is persuaded by Jones to join her and Joe along with Elizabeth for an afternoon at Coney Island. There, jam-packed in with thousand's of beach lovers Higgin's whole life seems to unwind because of some unwitting mistakes. Eventually he ends up in court facing a charge which Joe makes even worse by launching an oppressing the workers speech. This is followed by a closure that finds the union organizers led by Joe having a meeting with Neeley's Board of Directors to discuss the Unions objectives. This is also done very cleverly with the board members thinking Mr. Merrick is sitting with them and the union organizer's thinking he is sitting with them. As you might expect, this results in the happy ending we knew was coming, but in a different fashion than we would have imagined. The film is dominated by Arthur with her characteristic way of delivering lines and with Coburn doing the same with his material.

The More, the Merrier

Two years later found Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn again in another new refreshing comedy. The setting is 1943 and deep into American participation in World War II. At that time the nation's capital was bursting at the seams with the growth in government employees and military personnel required for the successful prosecution of the War. The result was to make housing extremely difficult to come by. Jean Arthur plays Connie Milligan a secretarial type with an apartment in Washington. To help her make ends meet she has decided to sublet her two bedroom apartment and take in a border. Meanwhile Coburn in the role of Benjamin Dingle has come to Washington to contribute his expertise to the war effort. He is a retired millionaire. In those days, a millionaire was equivalent to a multi-millionaire today. Coburn is a dollar a year man. A dollar a year man, contributed his services to the government at the maximum income of $1.00 for a year's work.

Well, Mr. Dingle has discovered that though he wants to help the war effort, he is entirely unsuccessful at finding a hotel room. After struggling from place to place he spots Arthur's ad for a roommate. He goes to the apartment address while she is at work. He discovers a long line of prospective candidates for the room. Mr. Dingle's success in his work career was in motivational speaking. He featured a slogan "Damn the torpedo's, full speed ahead," which had been adopted in a previous American conflict. He puts this slogan to work this time by telling those waiting in line that the room has been rented, and proceeds to remove the rental sign. When Arthur comes home he convinces her of his trustworthiness and is accepted as her new tenant. She provides him with a list of special directions relative to using the bathroom, eating breakfast, and sharing these two facilitates. Coburn is really impressed with the list. Their resulting discussion is very entertaining.

Also arriving at Washington at this time is Joel McCrea playing Army Sergeant Joe Carter. Carter is carrying with him a new propeller concept which he is under orders to deliver to testing authorities. The propeller is quite large, about as tall as he is. If you recall Mr. McCrea, you will probably remember that he is well over 6 feet tall.

He is also having housing problems in Washington and fortuitously makes contact with Mr. Dingle who offers him the opportunity of sharing half of his sublet for a nominal rental fee. Miss Milligan is really shocked at this state of affairs and a long period of persuasion is built in the film to resolve this problem. She first becomes aware of Carter when she hears him singing in the bathroom while bathing. It is obvious what the end result will be. Three people sharing a two bedroom apartment are bound to have some difficulties in adjusting. As you may remember from "The Lady Eve," there are two long seduction scenes involving Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.

There is a similar one in this film. In this case the seducer is Joel McCrea, and the recipient of his efforts is Jean Arthur. McCrea does a very fine portrayal of a man showing a single lady what love is all about and what the future might include. Arthur is single, and not only that is engaged to a conservative gentleman of 42 who wears a toupee. This seduction starts on the sidewalk as they are walking home and they observe other couples in war time, where things are often different, enjoying the pleasures of romance. She is luxuriously dressed in a formal evening gown. They had come together accidentally, and as they near home he finds himself more and more enchanted with her loveliness. He strokes her bare shoulders and whispers sweet nothings in her ear and eventually begins to kiss her as well. She tells him of her plans to marry her Mr. Pendergast who is older and steadier. Eventually they reach the front steps of her apartment building. Finally, she realizes that despite her enjoying his attentions, caresses and kisses, he is interfering with her lifetime plans. Like Wendy Hiller in "I Know Where I'm Going," common sense eventually takes control of her. Mr. Dingle has been encouraging this match making and following his own philosophy of "Damn the Torpedo's, Full Speed Ahead," his influence causes Miss Milligan to give up her dreams with very practical Mr. Pendergast for a far more romantic dreams with Joe Carter.

****

As a whole, the two films make a nice complementary double feature. Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn were both outstanding film performers. It's difficult to think of Arthur without two of her finest roles, as an entertainer in the Howard Hawks All Star production in 1939 "Only Angels Have Wings" and of course her wonderful performance as Van Heflin's wife in "Shane," a film that also is probably Alan Ladd's finest effort. Coburn made one other memorable comedy performance as mentioned earlier in "The Lady Eve." He is also remembered for one of his untypical roles as the sadistic doctor who amputated Ronald Reagan's legs in "Kings Row."

Dick Gardner, Classic Films

Read the 25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 14, December 1982

Buy all your favorite classic films at the Classic Films aStore

Enriched by Fairview Collaborative

The Singing Detective

Dennis Potter was a very innovative director, particularly noted for the way he incorporated music into his productions. What he does is use actual recordings and have the performers lip sync the lyrics. This is not unusual except in Potter's case he doesn't do it as you normally would, i.e. girl singing for a girl, but will have men singing women's parts, etc. This is very disconcerting when you first see and hear it, but like many things it grows on you as you adjust to it.

He had three big television mini series using this concept. The first of these was "Pennies From Heaven," which was a seven hour special on Masterpiece Theatre a number of years ago, and was set to the depression era music of the thirties. The Second Masterpiece Theatre production was "The Singing Detective," which used music popular during the war years. The third one is less well known, a four hour show called "Lipstick on Your Collar," which was set in the post World War II era and used the music of that period, i.e. The Platters, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.

In the "Singing Detective," which many consider to be Potter's finest work of this type, he tells three separate stories and they bounce around between segments and not in a clear and easy sequence to follow. The mini series starts in a hospital where Michael Gambon, in the lead role is hospitalized with a very debilitating skin allergy problem. He plays a man named Philip Marlowe, note the name, who writes detective fiction. During the run of the six hour production he mentally reworks one of his earlier crime novel's, "the Singing Detective," trying out different story ideas. This becomes the films second theme. In these imaginary scenes he becomes the detective he is writing about. He's called the Singing Detective because he does sing with a small group in a nightclub and at the same time is trying to solve a crime. There is a third segment as well that deals with Marlowe the writer when he was a child. The three parts, the hospitalization of Marlowe, the rewriting of his novel "The Singing Detective," and his life as a child are intermixed. Each has a particular theme. During the segment of Marlowe as a child you gradually become aware of major effects on his life at that time, the infidelity of his mother and his great love for his father and the latter of Philip.

Only one person figures in both the dream and fantasy sequences, Gambon, playing the hospital patient and the detective story novelist the Singing Detective. One other person figures in these two sequences, that is the English actor Patrick Malahyde, who plays a villain in both the childhood and fantasy segments.

Joanne Whalley and Imelda Staunton, Academy Award winner for best actress a couple of years ago, play nurses at the hospital. Bill Patterson plays the Hospital psychiatrist who is examining Marlowe's allergy as perhaps a product of psychological problems. This is partly confirmed because Marlowe the patient seems to be continually hallucinating. In one hospital segment he is pursued by a couple of the fictional characters from the rewrite he is working on.

In the youth portions, Marlowe's mother is played by Alison Steadman. Janet Suzman plays Marlow's wife, who he strongly dislikes. You may not know some of these performers, but you will recognize them if you have been a regular follower of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

A possible way to describe this whole long six hour TV series is "The Several Veils of the Singing Detective" in a take off on the Seven Veils of Salome and of the film made in the late 1940's starring James Mason and Ann Todd that was called "The Seventh Veil." In the latter film Todd plays a concert pianist and Mason is her guardian. The film starts with her throwing herself into the Thames in an attempt to drown herself. She is rescued and her life probed by a psychiatrist played by Leo Genn trying to isolate what is causing her bizarre behavior. In this process he gradually strips the veils that she had created around herself mentally to avoid something from her background.

As an example, the lip sync from the film version of "Pennies from Heaven, as performed by "Bernadette Peters, Steve Martin and Tess Harper to a Boswell Sisters recording might not be satisfying to many film enthusiasts as should be expected, however the cleverness of the writing and the interesting stories should be a stimulus. Ultimately, "The Singing Detective" is the hardest Potter production to follow, but if the viewer is willing to put in the time to analyze what he or she has seen they will be well rewarded.

Dick Gardner, Classic Films

Read the 25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 13, November 1982

Buy all your favorite classic films at the Classic Films aStore

Enriched by Fairview Collaborative

The Gestation of Classic Films

Classic Films was created back in October 1981 as a Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Mensa organization. Des Kennelley and I both worked for a company in the Aerospace Industry that specialized in space surveillance systems. I was working in the proposal development group responsible for developing management sections of company bids for government contracts. Ms. Kennelley was an editor in the publications department responsible for editorial proofing and correcting before the bid packages were sent to the potential government agency or sometimes major defense contractors that we were subcontractors to.

During our contacts we learned that we had a mutual interest in movies and that we were both members of Mensa. It was my thought that we should pool our smarts and put out a SIG publication which we named Classic Films. Starting with the two of us initially Classic Films continued to grow and eventually we added three additional writers. Since one of these was New York based and a second in Canada it broadened the base of our coverage.

We put out Classic Films for a little over six years. Since then it has sat in limbo until earlier this year when we were approached by one of our former subscribers from back in the 80's about putting the 60 or 70 issues on to the Fairview Collaborative website:

Classic Films

The Webmaster recently suggested that we could possibly update the work we did some 25 years ago with some current comments and perhaps reviewing more recent films. This has proved attractive and we have decided to pursue that event. The first such effort in this line was a piece which was done on the exceptionally focused English actress Wendy Hiller who made several outstanding films in the 40's and one Academy Award winning film in the late 50's. Ms. Hiller was principally a stage actress and reportedly was George Bernard Shaw's favorite actress having starred in two of his plays including "Pygmalion" which she also starred in on the screen.

We have a number of other pieces in mind which I'm sure will interest many of you.

Dick Gardner, Classic Films

Read the 25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 12, October 1982

Buy all your favorite classic films at the Classic Films aStore

Enriched by Fairview Collaborative

Preston Sturges

After spending nearly ten years writing for film makers, Preston Sturges, finally in 1940, achieved his goal of film directing. This resulted in the decade of 1940 through 1949 of eleven films some of which have come down as Classic's in the areas of dialogue and humor primarily based on dialogue but engaging visual incidents that add to a films hilarity quotient. It is a terrific collection of movies and one that led to adoption of similar writing and directing techniques still in use by directors, particularly those in humor. In this piece I will review evaluate ten Sturges films as typical of his best work. Only eight of the films will be from the 40's. I have decided to include two films that Sturges wrote dialogue for and which were products of the previous decade. Both of these film when I saw them were indicative of Sturgis's work just by listening to the dialogue of the actors playing roles in the films. The films will be discussed in order of their release dates. It might be worth noting that there is a lot of boyishness in Sturges pictures. By that I mean, two elements that are found in many of his pictures, are train trips and parades. These to me represent the preferences of young men, those still not in their teen years. I suspect their is some prejudice on my part since both miniature trains, and parades were a really likable part of my own youth.

THE FILMS

1. Thirty Day Princes (1934) This film was one of the items in a ten film DVD package of Cary Grant films. I had marked them as a package to consider buying, but my daughter surprised me by making it a Christmas gift. It included some of Grant's best films and also a couple that were not too impressive. Thirty Day Princess was an unknown product to me and started off rather interestingly with Edward Arnold and Henry Stephenson occupying adjacent tubs of a mud bath. From there we learn that Arnold is Richard Gresham a big time American banker from New York, that Stephenson is the King of one of those Ruritanian type countries that were usually placed in the Balkans, and that his daughter is the lovely Zizzi played by Sylvia Sidney. The rest of the film involves guaranteeing a loan to the King by Gresham's bank which will use Zizzi as the bait to get U.S. approval. The switch in this scenario is that Zizzi catches the Mumps when she arrives via ocean liner to the U.S. and Gresham is forced to find a substitute. The latter turns out to be a currently out of work small time actress who is called on to play the princess for 30 days. You can find a parallel to Barbara Stanwyck's apparent dual roles in the Lady Eve. Grant's role is pretty incidental in that he is a New York newspaper publisher who thinks the loan is a fraud, but unfortunately he also meets and falls in love with the Princess, actually Lane in Sidney's dual role. It takes just a short time to appreciate that this film bears the handprint of Sturgis's clever writing. Sidney is excellent and plays both of her roles very convincingly.

2. If I Were A King - 1938 I saw this film initially on TV a few years back, and again I didn't realize that this was also a Sturges effort. It's a period piece which is different from most of Sturges's work. The Beautiful Blond from Bashful Bend is the only other one I can think of, and it was set in the Wild West of about 125 years ago. If I Were a King is set in France in the middle to late 15th century and stars Ronald Colman as Francois Vallon. Much of the film has historical accuracy, or at least is based on events of the time. Vallon was indeed a poet of renown in France, but also he was a criminal, a thief and was also a noted murderer. He vanished from Paris after being banned because of some of his escapades when he was just 34, and was never heard from again. The film which is based on a historical novel develops the imaginary premise of his meeting with King Louis XI, Basis Rathbone, in a really out of character portrayal from him. The dialogue between Louis and Vallon is typical work by Sturges. Colman is his usual warm voiced self. Rathbone received a supporting actor nomination for his performance as Louis.

3. The Great McGinty -1940 This was Sturges's first effort under his own direction. Supposedly he offered the script to the studio for one dollar if they would allow him to direct it. How fortunate the studio agreed with this arrangement. I loved this film when I first saw it as a 13 year old in 1940. McGinty, Dan McGinty is played by Brian Donlevy. He is a down and outer in what I assumed was Chicago. He happens into an old time saloon where you could get a free lunch cold cuts, mustard, and bread for sandwiches. While there he is approached by a man who asks him if he would like to make a couple of bucks. This results in an introduction to the operations of a low level boss who pays men to show up at the poll and vote under someone else's name. McGinty likes this so well that he proceeds back and continues to pick up vouchers so that in the end he votes 21 times and earns $42.00. With that as a starting point it is the beginning of a career that eventually leads to his being elected governor, and after corruption is discovered he is forced to flee the city. Akim Tamiroff plays the corrupt boss. In what is the funniest scene to me, McGinty hauls off and socks Tamiroff and knocks him down. The latter surrounded by his henchmen gets up, mad, and finally says with humor this bum thinks he's me. This picture also has one of Sturges's parades and includes a train.

4. The Lady Eve This, in my book, is the greatest Sturges comedy of them all. As I mentioned earlier it involves Barbara Stanwyck playing two roles, card shark Jean Harrington, and fabulously wealthy English woman, Lady Eve Sidwich. Her opposite member in this love affair, which can only be cautiously called a love affair, is Charles "Hopsie" Pike, heir to the great Pikes' Ale fortune. There are so many humorous incidents in this film that it would take several pages to note just some of them. I will mention something typical of Sturges inventiveness. The Pikes Brewery is located in Connecticut and it's slogan is "Pikes Pale, the ale that won for Yale." There is no parade in the film but a wonderful sequence on board a train where Popsie learns the truth or rather some falsehoods from his bride Lady Eve. This culminates with his leaving the train in his pajama's and landing in a muddy pool or water. There are a couple of seduction scenes which are real classics in themselves, with the card shark Jean getting Hopsie all steamed up. This has to be seen to really appreciate both the acting and the dialog. The close is also terrific with Fonda apologizing for something while talking to Stanwyck in her cabin. He tells her he shouldn't be here, She asks why, and he responds since he's married. Her response, "But so am I, so am I."

5. Sullivan's Travels - 1941 Sturges followed up The Lady Eve with this film about the movie business. It features many of the standard supporting players used by Sturges in his previous films. These include William Demarest, and such lesser knowns as Franklin Pangborn playing way out of character and the similarly used Porter Hall. The stars are Joel McCrea playing Hollywood Director John L. "Sully" Sullivan who previously directed such light material as "So Long Sarong," and "Hey Hey in the Hayloft." Sullivan is scheduled to direct "Ants in Your Pants in 1939," and frankly refuses. He wants to do a film on poverty in the U.S. titled "Oh Brother, Where Art Though." Yes, the same film that the Coen Brothers produced in 2000. Sullivan starts his investigation of poverty and after an initial pitfall starts out a second time with "The Girl," Veronica Lake in her second film. On this occasion he loses his shoes from a thief while riding on a freight train. The latter is killed in a fall from the train and Sullivan is picked up as a vagrant, put in a southern chain gang where he is eventually rescued after being assumed to have been deceased. The film is far too involved to describe all the humor. It's really one that has to be seen to be believed.

6. Palm Beach Story - 1942 Sturges takes on a train ride again, this time from New York's Grand Central station to Miami. He followed up his successful production of the previous year with Joel McCrea again playing the lead role as inventor Tom Jeffers also known as Capt. McGlew. Jeffers has invented a new airport concept where an airfield is built right over the top of a city. Besides this ridiculous concept we have Jeffers being sued for divorce by his wife Geraldine "Gerry" Jeffers. On the trip south Jeffers is accompanied by some of the familiar Sturges supporting players including Jack Norton and William Demarest who are a couple of the members of the "Ale and Quail Club" who are traveling on the same train. Eventually Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor a wealthy brother and sister get involved in the story. Ultimately, there is a wedding scene that really defies description.

7. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek - 1944 This is the story of a young lady who gets drunk at a dance for service personnel, is accidentally knocked out and discovers in a few weeks that she is pregnant. The person who did the deed is apparently named RatzkySkatzky, but that's all she knows. The young lady known in the film as Trudy Kockenlocker is played very humorously by Betty Hutton. Trudy has a boy friend, Norval Jones, Eddie Bracken in his usual befuddled style. She also has kind of a smart aleck younger sister, Diana Lynn, and a father played by Sturges's most often used supporting player, William Demarest. To add to the improbability is a bit with Akim Tamiroff and Bryan Donlevy playing McGinty and the Boss from the "Great McGinty" film Add it all together it proves confusing, but the film is delightfully funny and well worth viewing. Perhaps it should be reminded that films depicting a fallen woman were never presented with such logical sympathy for Trudy's condition in those years.

8. Hail the Conquering Hero - 1944 Sturges returned to Eddie Bracken in this hilarious story about a 4F in World War II remade into a hero by a small group of marines led by William Demarest. Bracken's role name is a mouthful in itself, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith. Several of Sturges's other supporting players are in this including Jack Norton, for a change not playing a drunk, but rather as a brass band conductor. Franklin Pangborn runs and schedules the parade for Truesmith when the latter arrives by train with his new found Marine buddies. The female lead Libby is played by the largely forgotten Ella Raines. Per usual there is a lot of Sturges's usual clever dialogue.

9. Unfaithfully Yours - 1948 Some consider this to be Sturges's last great film. Rex Harrison plays famed conductor Sir Alfred De Carter. He is a man thoroughly impressed with himself but also very jealous of any attention shown to his beautiful wife, Daphne, a very different role for Linda Darnell. He suspects her of infidelity as revealed to him by Rudy Vallee in the role of August Heshler, his brother-in-law and has hired a private detective, Edgar Kennedy in one of his right on performances, to spy on Daphne to try to catch her in an infidelity. He thinks he has and the main core of the film rests in Harrison imagining how he is going to take care of the matter while conducting three classical works for orchestra. Finally trying to put his plan into action results in a whole series of screw ups. The film was not as popular as it could have been. At the time, though married, Harrison was having an affair with Carole Landis, who committed suicide about the time the film was released. This resulted in some negative publicity for Harrison and affected the film at the box office.


10. The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend - 1949 Betty Grable is the beautiful Blond Winifred Jones a dancehall girl back in the 19th century. Her boy friend is gambler, Blackie Jobero, played by Cesar Romero. Rudy Vallee in his third Sturges picture plays a wealthy mine owner. Finally, Olga San Juan is the final member of the cast leads. She is kind of an assistant to Jones but later in the film changes herself into Conchita, an Indian girl complete with faux Indian outfit including a pigtail and a feather in her hair. She is very funny. Porter Hall, one of the Sturges regulars plays a judge in the film and unfortunately for him is shot in the fanny by Jones forcing her to get out of town. This provides an opportunity for a Sturges train scene this time in a vintage layout. The two girls arrive in Bashful Bend where they are mistaken for the new school teacher and her assistant due to arrive about the same time. The film is not great Sturges work but includes some funny lines and features one of the greatest outlaw shoot-outs of all time. Thousands of shots are fired but no one is hit from either side. There are of course several other Sturges films, but these are the ones I enjoyed the most. Sturges seemed to lose his touch after this film and his productivity decidedly declined. In sum though he provided more laughs per capita than any other writer or director in Hollywood during those years, he seemed to burn out early.

---

25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 11 from September 1982

---

Fairview Collaborative review of Nobody's Fool

---

Enriched by Fairview Collaborative

Wendy Hiller

It's easy to think of Wendy Hiller in terms of the three films she did early in the motion picture portion of her acting career. The three were so outstanding that they tend to overshadow her later film work. These later productions included an Academy Award win for best supporting actress in 1958's "Separate Tables," a role she played somewhat differently than her usually overpowering presence. She indicated that her win was due if anything to the fact that it was the best role in the film. Her numerous co-stars in that film were Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr and David Niven.

Her other roles in later years included that of Princess Dragonmiroff in "Murder on the Orient Express," Mrs. Harris in "Anne of Green Gables, the Sequel," and most memorably roles in the murder mysteries "Cat and the Canary," and the PBS Mystery Series "A Taste for Death." In 1992, at the age of 80 she gave another outstanding performance in the Masterpiece Theater production, "The Countess Alice." In each of these later films it is difficult to see that this is the same Wendy Hiller of the three early works. However, it is the latter that I am most interested in discussing here.

Reportedly Hiller was George Bernard Shaw's favorite actress and appeared on stage in the lead roles for his "St. Joan," and "Pygmalion." When Gabriel Pascal decided to produce "Pygmalion" on film, one requirement stipulated by Shaw was that Hiller play the lead role of Eliza Doolittle.

She was 26 when the film was produced. Her performance was wide ranging from the blowsy flower girl in Covent Garden to the supposedly Hungarian Princess that Leslie Howard created of her in his role as Henry Higgins. To me, the most enjoyable part of the film is when Higgins takes her to meet his mother after hours of voice correction and training. While there, she launches into a combination of exaggerated social grace while at the same time reciting a tale of truly rousing memorable incidents and actions of various of her relatives. The outstanding film scoring was by French composer Arthur Honegger.

Three years later Shaw's "Major Barbara" was brought to the screen. Hiller plays an officer in the Salvation Army, Major Barbara Undershaft, the daughter of one of England's greatest industrialists. The father was played by Robert Morley, who in real life only four years older than Hiller. The most powerful moments in the film were early on when she is preaching on the docks and exhorting those listening to her to "Come, Come," she says in powerful tones with a gentle smile on her face, as she asks the listeners to come with her to join with God. Again she projects real persuasive power. This film also has an outstanding cast of supporting players, including Rex Harrison, Robert Newton and in a film first for her, Deborah Kerr.

Then in 1945 Hiller played in the last of her wonderful early roles, that of Joan Webster in "I Know Where I am Going." In this film we see her again in obvious control of her whole destiny. She has traveled to the western isles off the coast of Scotland where she is to travel by boat to the fictional island of Killoran, near the real isle of Mull. There she will marry one of England's richest men. But she is stymied by bad weather that makes it impossible for a boat to traverse the distance between the two islands. And there her unshaken confidence in knowing where she is going is hampered by meeting a Scots Laird Torquil MacNeil an officer in the British Navy. She finds herself attracted to MacNeil played by Roger Livesay, and doesn't want him to interfere with her plans. Eventually, she makes the dangerous journey in a storm including crossing a dangerous whirlpool that lurks off the coast.

The film includes a memorable evening of dancing to Scottish rhythms and sounds with spectacular singing by local Scots. Webster is there with MacNeil and eventually and with great reluctance is persuaded to join the dance. It is the next day that in fear of losing her life commitment that she undertakes the dangerous stormy sea journey to Killoran.

Michael Powell, who directed the film originally wanted Deborah Kerr to play the Joan Webster role. Kerr had starred in his recent film "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," where she had played three separate roles opposite Livesay. He opted for Hiller when Kerr was not available because of a previous film commitment.

Two other persons of interest, who had roles in the film, should be noted. Pamela Brown played Cattriona Potts, the lady who managed the small hotel where Joan Webster stayed while waiting to go to Killoran. She is a very attractive woman with large brown eyes. She had extensive acting experience almost all of it acquired after she was diagnosed with a particularly debilitating arthritic condition at the age of 16. It interfered with some of her movements which she managed to successfully hide in most of her performances. Also in the film for the first of her only two film appearances is Margot Fitzsimmons, Maureen O'Hara's younger sister. There is one scene in particular where in profile she bears a strong resemblance to O'Hara.

Wendy Hiller can be seen to advantage in almost any of her film productions, but these three early films when she was in her middle 20's to early 30's really demonstrate her power. One of the characteristics of all of these early Hiller films is the her strength as she masters any situation she must confront. Incidentally, the two recent DVD releases of "I Know where I am Going," and "Pygmalion," are particularly fine quality-wise.

---

25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 10 from August 1982

---

Fairview Collaborative review of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South

---

Fairview Collaborative