The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

I was first drawn to The Barretts of Wimpole Street because the stage version starring Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne (pictured at left) is on my ever-growing list of time machine plays, that if I ever get access to a TARDIS, I'll be sure to go back and watch. Written in 1930 by Rudolpf Besier, the original Broadway production ran for more than 300 performances at the Empire theater. That run was followed by a highly successful cross-country tour and then a world tour that took Aherne to far-flung places like the Australian outback about which he writes charmingly in his autobiography A Proper Job. I was intrigued by the story although, the film version stars Norma Shearer and Fredric March, (as if they were a pair to sneeze at!)

It's not often that a movie is made about one writer let alone two. Writing usually just isn't exciting enough as an activity to be the subject of a movie. And writer's lives, while they have their moments of drama, tend to be about observation more than experience. Fictional writers of the ilk of Carrie Bradshaw abound, but it's really pretty rare that a real life author is the subject of a film. The most we usually get on film is an actor portraying Sommerset Maughm appearing as a rye character in an adaptation of one his books. Occasionally a biopic about a writer, like say Becoming Jane about Jane Austen, will make it into the mainstream, but it is unusual if it is faithful to reality in any way. But Barretts is truly rare in that it focuses on the lives of two writers and it is not wildly off the mark. The story revolves around Barrett's father who was steadfastly opposed to any marriage by any of his children and the hiding in plain site courtship that she carried on with admirer and fellow-poet Robert Browning. It is based loosely on the mass of correspondence between the two famous poets from 1945 until their elopement in 1946. Much of the dialog in the film is quoted from or paraphrased from the letters. This makes for a slightly artificial and odd way of communicating, since in real life, people don't speak as they would write. The work succeeded despite this stagey quality and despite the fact that the problems of two rich neurotic thirty year old virgins couldn't have had much appeal to people facing life in America in the early 1930s.

Or could it?

I've been trying to work out what it was in the play that resonated with audiences in the grip of the Depression. At first I thought that it was just escapist fantasy, yearning for a time and place where money problems seems simply to not exist. In reality of course, money was an issue. Robert Browning was a poor poet who managed on a very small income from his father. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning had not had her own small income, free from the machinations of her father, there would be no possible elopement and no drama. The couple had a mutual friend the painter, Robert Haydon, who committed suicide as a result of a huge financial loss. But the movie simplifies even further what the play barely mentions.

Escapism alone can not explain the popularity of the play and film. The play focuses instead on the father's opposition to marriage, implying rather strongly that he was a rapist, molester and that incestous feelings were behind his strange and vehement opposition to his daughters marrying. In real life Edward Mouton Barrett was opposed to all of his 12 children marrying and disinherited the boys and girls who disobeyed him. In some of Elizabeth's letters there are hints of physical abuse, but no explicit examples are ever named. The application of modern psychology to Mr. Barrett's strange attitudes (Elizabeth describes them as "eccentricity and something more") was probably appealing to 1930s audiences as well as the lurid subject matter. Most appealing of all, was probably the theme of breaking away from one's extended family and focusing on creating a new, separate "nuclear" family. Demographically many Americans were in this boat. The Depression caused many families to stay together perhaps longer than the young people could wish as marriages were happening later, etc. My own grandparents were forced to move back in with my great-grand parents, with not always harmonious results.

As for the production of the film, it was first promised to Marion Davies. After a battle royale with Norma Shearer, the role was reassigned and the kerflufle that followed led to Davies, and the substantial bank roll behind William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan pictures, leaving MGM. As a result Hearst papers refused to review the film, which probably hurt its box office a bit. Not wanting anything to do with this hornet's nest of studio politics, Brian Aherne ran a mile from the part. The role fell to a somewhat unhappy Fredric March who complained that director, Sydney Franklin was so focused on Shearer that he allowed him to get away with the worst excesses of hamish acting. Not only does this seem like unfair criticism (it's the director's fault that you can't control your hamish instincts?) it is just plain wrong. March is actually quite wonderful and perfectly suited to the part. In real life, Robert Browning was an intense dude. This was a man who had major life crisis in his twenties because he read a poem by Percy B. Shelley. He wildly declared his love for Elizabeth Barrett Browning in his first letter to her and then spent the next 16 months trying to prove his feelings were not mere fanboy gushing. He could be overly enthusiastic (friends described him as loud-mouthed), impetuous and even unreasonably optimistic. Had he not been all these things as well as a cracking great poet he never would have gotten Elizabeth Barrett Browning to marry him.

Norma Shearer is equally well-suited, though it is not what we typically think of as a Shearer material. I think this film is often neglected by Shearer fans, because it was technically post-code. While some of the references to incest were toned down from the play, these changes were actually very minor and the film stands as one of her edgiest and most powerful performances. While Norma is emotionally restrained and subtle, she really sells the idea that is a woman battling for her life and independence, standing up to a tyrannical, even dangerous father. In one of her letters to Robert Browning, Elizabeth declares that her father would rather see her dead on his doorstep than married. I don't know how anyone could watch the last ten minutes of the film and not hum "I am woman here me roar" to themselves while Norma, with the help of her maid, Wilson (Una O'Connor) gains the strength to pick up and leave her oppressive environment for the man she loves. Franklin gives her a gorgeous close-up as she surveys for a final time the room where she's spent most of her adult life. It's powerful stuff and it hasn't been diluted a bit by the intervening seven decades since it was shot.

The unacknowledged star of the show is Charles Laughton who is at his scary best as the bullying, manipulative father. "They can't censor the twinkle in my eye" he famously groused when producers had to tone down some of his more overtly sexual moments. In a scene where his niece sits in his lap and fondles his whiskers, the stage directions for the play insist that he slaps her roughly on the thigh while she squeals in delight. This is really the only purge I can find in his scenes, which survive almost verbatim from the stage version of the script. Laughton is aided by the wonderful Maureen O'Sullivan who plays Elizabeth's lively sister Henrietta. O'Sullivan gets a great scene at the end where she relishes delivering Elizabeth's good-bye letter to their father and one very funny scene early on between she and a tongue-tied suitor whom she continually admonishes not to speak before he can get a word out to her. I'm pretty sure Woody Allen ripped off the whole concept for a similar scene in Bullets over Broadway. This sparkling bit of nonsense was invented by screenwriter Ernest Vajda for the film as comic relief.

I've spent most of the intervening ten days since I first watched the film reading everything I could get my hands on about the two poets who are subject of the film, including a volume of their letters, the script of the play, Barrett-Browning's volume of poetry written during their courtship, Sonnetts from the Portugese, and a feminist biography of her life, which dismisses the film as reducing her to a cheerful invalid who has to be rescued by a man. The problem with this assessment is the same one that haunts Barrets of Wimpole Street. When you add a layer of contemporary expectations to something that happened in the past you are really just twisting it to your own ends. We may never really understand the tortured relationship between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her father. It is probably certain that it was not as dysfunctional as what appeared on stage or screen in the 1930s. I am equally certain that this film was not intended to be a weak-kneed reinforcement of Barrett-Browning as a cheerful invalid. Of all the films in which I've seen Shearer since starting this blog, I liked The Barretts of Wimpole Street the best. I think it deserves a second look from fans as it may be the height of her achievement as a barrier- breaker for the way in which women were depicted in film.

Can your Spam: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

I was leery of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1957): Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, technicolor, big budget "message" picture. I couldn't help but be reminded of the Duel in the Sun (1946) debacle which ended weeks of agonizing with the white flag of "I don't know what to make of this." Well, I know what to make of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The man is hot. As for the movie, it is at least closer to achieving its goals as a message picture than Duel in the Sun.

It's the story of Tom Rath, a war veteran who is hoping to get ahead in business and make his suburban home life a bit happier in the process. As Tom rides the train from Connecticut into Manhattan he flashes back to scenes of the Second World War. He remembers killing a young German soldier to get his winter coat, accidentally killing his best friend with a grenade and the shell-shock episode it triggered. He spends a fair amount of time reliving his own version of Roman Holiday, in which he has an affair with starving Italian woman named Maria (Marisa Pavan) who is so completely charming, self-sacrificing, vulnerable and out and out stupid that one feels very conflicted about his behavior toward her. On one hand he's a complete rat for not trying harder to look her up after the war, on the other hand she's a woman who first slept with him for a can of SPAM, knew that he was married and still wanted to have his baby on her own.

Jennifer Jones plays Betsey Rath, who at first appears to be a '50s suburban Lady MacBeth, but grows more likable as the film goes on, especially as it becomes inevitable that she's going to get it with both barrells full of the truth about her hubby's history with canned meat prositutes. There is a somewhat tedious subplot about Tom's new boss, Mr. Hopkins, at the TV network (Frederick March) and his troubled home life. As good it as it is to see March onscreen with Ann Harding who plays his wife, the whole thing is handled with enormous ham (SPAM?) fists. Hopkins warns Tom that he has to take care of his family while he has a chance, lamenting the son lost in the war and the daughter "lost" to an unwise elopement. Conveniently for Tom, his moral dilemma about whether he should be spending so much time at the office when he knows he should be taking care of his own troubled brood is solved when his boss gives him permission to simply be a "9 to 5 man." Dilemma solved. Now it's home to mop up a small raft of "Father Knows Best" scale crises and of course the problem like Maria.

One of the more astringent aspects of the movie is a fairly harsh criticism of the way that television effects the average family. The Rath's children are creepily strung out on violent westerns and more than a little morbid for it. This seems a bit rich coming from the movie industry, which can't exactly claim to have never put a bad idea in a child's head. Consider also that TV was killing the studio system that was making big technicolor message pictures like this and it seems more than a little hypocritical. Mr. Hopkins, a man who has supposedly spent his whole life building a television network to the detriment of his personal life, tells Tom "Turn the TV off. Kick it in if you have to. Spend time with your kids."

For all this raging hypocrisy, what makes The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit interesting is not just the actual man in the gray flannel suit, because if you've learned anything from this blog, it won't surprise you that I really enjoyed Peck's performance. ( The movie is a good showcase of a wide range of emotions and when he's not skillfully emoting just enough he's projecting integrity all over the parts of the movie that are a little bit thin.) It works as a message about the dangers of materialism because it is so steeped in the 1950s that its trying to decry. Every piece of set decoration, from the gleaming Herman Miller furniture in Tom's new office to his pretty secretary, clad in a skin tight gray flannel wiggle dress is a seductive reminder of just how wonderful it was to have decade of pure self-indulgence and confidence after the Depression and the War and how completely wrong it was for the country to undergo those two calamities for mere prosperity. With a total absence of prosperity you have Italian women selling their bodies for commodity grade meat and meat byproducts and with too much prosperity you have Jennifer Jones wanting her husband to sell his soul for a new washing machine. Rath is walking a tight rope of "safe choices" that will both keep his family in reasonable comfort and his conscience from keeping him awake nights. While working on a PR campaign for the network on behalf of mental health, Tom has to choose between being a yes man or telling the truth. I couldn't help but wish that he'd told the truth about his own break with "mental health" during the war, but it really is cataclysmic enough for him to say, "I thought your approach on this speech was wrong."

Feeling so good about speaking truth to power, Tom decides to speak truth to Betsey and then things get a bit crazy. He ends up tackling her on the lawn. The movie pulls out of a total lust in the dust tailspin as Betsey decides to forgive Tom and help set up a trust fund for his son in Italy and I'm assuming a life time supply of SPAM for the mother. So here I am again defending yet another movie where a guy cheats on his wife and she forgives him. Well, yes and no. I'm left with lingering doubts about his truthfulness about Maria. For someone who is supposedly long forgotten he sure thinks about her a lot, spending as much time daydreaming about the good times as feeling bad about leaving her preggers in a war zone. His final "I worship you" to Betsey rings as hollow as an empty tin of SPAM blowing across the Piazza Navona. So yeah, maybe I am back to "I don't know what to make of this" but at least I won that bet with myself that I could reference SPAM in a blog post ten times. What's that you say, not quite there yet? Well, to paraphrase another PR man from this era, Jim Blandings, "If you're not eating WHAM, you're not eating ham."

A Star is Born (1937) & What Price Hollywood (1932)

The 1930s should be in black and white. It's just plain odd to see a 1930s film in color. The exceptions to this are Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz, both 1939. It just feels weird to see the young Frederich March in technicolor. The power of the art deco sets and costumes is lost when its rendered not in silver bur a lot of green and brown. If there's one thing I learned from watching A Star is Born, it's that brown was a far more popular color in 1937 than I imagined. This gripe aside, this movie is undeniably a classic, only lessened slightly by the fact that I had just watched George Cukor's smart version of this story, What Price Hollywood, a few days before.

Fredric March is always great and he especially shines in the early part of the film, playing an actor who drinks too much and is unhappy with his girlfriend. One night he meets an ambitious waitress (Janet Gaynor) who treats him humanely. March is drunk and he ends up getting her fired, so he gets her a screen test to make up for the trouble he's caused her. She becomes an overnight sensation, while his career sinks into oblivion. His low point comes when he humiliates her at the Academy Awards ceremony with a drunken tirade. Afterward he disappears on a long bender while his wife and few remaining friends fear for his life. He returns and she pledges to give up acting to help him get sober. Unable to face being the cause of ending her career he commits suicide by walking into the sea.

In What Price Hollywood, Lowell Sherman plays the drunk, this time a director and Constance Bennett plays the waitress turned star. This story is complicated by a love triangle between Bennet, Lowell and Bennett's polo playing husband (Neil Hamilton). Cukor is a romantic comedy master and he creates a very romantic and funny foundation for the polo player and the Hollywood glamor gal. As their marriage falls apart Bennett is consumed with caring for her alcoholic friend who has fallen from grace at the studio. The question is never overtly raised but it seemed clear to me that this toxic friendship is as much a cause for her divorce as demands of her career. His suicide is handled in a way that lets the viewer believe that he was trying to keep from being a burden on his friends.

Hollywood's view of itself is always slightly strange, because it is always critical of the system that makes stars and spits them out when its had its merry way with them and yet the movies never do much to deflate the dream of overnight stardom. In fact they do just the opposite as in both films, the women are working dead-end jobs and their dreams come true with seemingly little effort. Although the dreams come with a price they still reinforced that fairytale. In the 30s contract players had a yearly option at which time the studio could decide not to continue employment. An off take at the box office or the wrong move in front of the press could end a career. Actors were never really secure and even the biggest stars were vulnerable to changeable tastes and the whims of executives. Many of the stars who rose to the top in the pre-code era, lost their audience when the code came in and dumbed down their movies, just as the stars who had been big in the silent era seemed to fade when sound came through, proving that talent and star quality, what ever it may be, is a tradeable commodity.

Mary of Scotland: a partial, imperfect and ignorant history

No, it's not another leg tribute (but it could be.) Frederich March as the James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, traditionally historic villain and hero of Mary of Scotland. Hepburn was an ancestor of actress Katharine Hepburn who starred in the film and as such the treatment of Bothwell in the film was softened so as to not offend her. Bothwell is always referred to as "Bothwell" in the movie, perhaps to avoid confusion with the actress and the Earl.

I watch a lot of costume dramas. You might say that everything I know about history has been at least supplemented or more likely warped by their influence. It's been more than a decade since my last proper class in history and I've never been much for reading it for fun. To paraphrase Jane Austen, I am a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian. Such poor qualifications didn't stop Jane and they won't stop me from expounding on the topic. In her hilarious youthful satire, The History of England, Austen paid comically little attention to wars and most of her comments in the Tudor era are directed at praising Mary Queen of Scots and castigating Queen Elizabeth the Ist for her treatment of the Stuart queen. Jane came down firmly on the side of Mary of Scotland and so did the makers of the film by the same name, director John Ford, and writers John Dudley and Maxwell Anderson.

The film begins with Queen Elizabeth (Florence Eldridge) opining the return of Mary Stuart (Katharine Hepburn) from Scotland. Stuart was a rival to her throne and Elizabeth is warned by her advisers that she must not let Mary land safely in Scotland. Elizabeth's plan to intercept Mary fails and she is allowed to take her throne, in doing so she supplants her half brother the Earl of Moray who has been Regent in her absence. Mary quickly discovers that she can not trust Moray or the other Lords who've set themselves up as her counsel. They want her to renounce her religion and send her personal secretary, David Riccio, an ardent Catholic, back to France. Mary refuses and is backed up by the feisty Earl of Huntley (Donald Crisp, in a brave but wavering attempt at a Scottish accent). Huntley is out-numbered until the Earl of Bothwell shows up to keep the Lords in line.

In typical classic movie fashion their first meeting is flirtatious and full of innuendo. I said in a post earlier this week that Rossano Brazzi was the only man to look at Katharine Hepburn with naked lust on screen, but that was before I saw Frederick March as Bothwell. March is wonderful in love scenes as he has a very direct manner that is also tender and self-effacing without being studiously so.

Bothwell not only frightens the rebel Lords into submission he controls the border more effectively than it has been in years, an act which impresses both Mary and Queen Elizabeth who has been jealously hearing stories about Mary's court full of admirers. With suitors aplenty, Mary contends she will never marry again, though it is clear that she is in love with Bothwell. Riccio advises her to marry Lord Darnley who has the claim to the English throne as well as being Catholic. This leads to some unintentional comedy as Hepburn continually address Riccio as "David" in a voice and manner so similar to her pursuit of David Huxley (Cary Grant) in Bringing Up Baby that I couldn't help but make the occasional leopard joke.

Mary hesitates as long as possible but eventually consents to marry Darnley whom she loathes. In a great scene that could only happen in the movies, Bothwell kicks down Mary's door and demands to know whether she loves him and why she will marry Darnley. The film's portrayal of Darnley is a master stroke because Douglas Walton not only looks like pictures of the real-life lord, but he plays him with a combination of cowardly ambition and dissipation that is pretty close to the mark. The film substitutes alcoholism for Darnley's syphillis in a probable concession to the production code.

After their marriage Darnley's weaknesses grow more pronounced: he stays away from home, seeming not to care about the health of his newborn son and he is continually jealous of the influence of David Riccio, a jealousy which Moray and his lords encourage. Darnley agrees to have Riccio killed and in an intense scene which is close to the real-life incident, Darnley has his soldiers drag Riccio from the queen's apartment, where they stab him, within view of the queen and her ladies. Though in real life Darnley wasn't present at the murder, the film version makes him so, perhaps to remind the audience of his guilt in the crime. Darnley quickly realizes his mistake when the Lords talk next of removing Mary from power. Without Mary, he will have nothing, so the pair are reunited by a need for survival. Bothwell arrives and is disgusted by Darnley's cowardice and both he and Mary wish they could be rid of her husband. Bothwell pledges, somewhat ominously to serve Mary forever. Now this is the point in the movie, where I wondered if they were going to imply that Bothwell was responsible for Darnley's death which is the most common historical view of Bothwell. But the scenes that lead up to the explosion at Kirk o Fields (by the way Darnley didn't die in the explosion , he was found strangled outside the castle in his nightshirt after the dust cleared from the blast) imply that it was Queen Elizabeth working with Moray and his cronies who were responsible for Darnley's death. Whether or not this is true, it is unlikely that Bothwell was responsible as was the finding of several several modern reassessments published in the 1930s, which probably influenced playwright Maxwell Anderson.

Bothwell saves Mary who is under attack from the rebel Lords who want to imprison her for Darnley's death and put her son on the throne, while making Moray regent again. Bothwell and Mary flee, getting married along the way. The film makes it clear that the supposed abduction of Mary by Bothwell, was a transparent ploy to distance Mary from Darnley's murder, since Bothwell was the chief suspect in the crime. Huntley refuses to go along with abduction scheme and thinks their marriage is foolish and he breaks with the couple. After three weeks of marriage, Bothwell decides to leave to raise an army to defend Mary and take back the throne. In real-life the Lords confronted Bothwell and Mary in battle at Carbury Hill. Hopelessly outnumbered, Mary agreed to surrender on the condition they let Bothwell go. Mary is imprisoned, escapes and is tricked again into being imprisoned in England. Meanwhile Bothwell is imprisoned in Denmark where he dies of a fever. This collapses a series of jailings, escapes, battles and betrayals that ended with Mary's imprisonment in Tutbury Castle in 1589 and Bothwell's internment in a notorious dungeon in Denmark.

Jane Austen contended that Elizabeth I was entirely responsible for the imprisonment and execution of Mary and that all her ministers and advisers who are often pointed to as being to blame for giving her bad advice on the matter are not as guilty as the sovereign. This is undeniably sound reasoning, couched in elegantly ironic terms which would seem at first glance to praise Elizabeth, but in reality amounts to an extended spleen venting. And that is exactly what Mary of Scotland contends as well, that the plot against Elizabeth's life supposedly emminating from Mary was a frame-up designed to give Elizabeth an excuse to kill her rival to the throne. The movie combines the inquiry into Darnley's death that was conducted years earlier and her trial for treason in that principal evidence against her are forged letters. Mary is tried, found guilty and executed with her last moments on the scaffold, imagining that she hears Bothwell's pipers riding to her rescue.

Mary of Scotland had as one of its taglines, the phrase "One of histories great love stories" which may or may not be true. Accounts of the relationship between Bothwell and Mary vary from the seriously anti-Bothwell version which contends that Bothwell abducted and raped Mary to the "realist" view that Mary allowed the abduction in order to distance herself from Bothwell, who was the chief suspect in her husband's murder and that she married him because he was her closest ally and supporter. In real life Bothwell was married during the period that he and Mary fall in love in the film. His first wife divorced him after he impregnanted one of their servants. Bothwell also had two common law wives in Scandanavia before he was married to his Scottish wife. Since common law marriages weren't recognized in Scotland, he could never be charged with bigamy, but it still wasn't a very nice way to operate. And his double dealing caught up with him when he was arrested in Norway after he fled Scotland, since one of his common law wives had risen to prominence and was an eager witness against him at his hearing. No mention of Bothwell's wives or paramours is made in the movie. Nor is there any mention of Mary's pregnancy with twins and miscarraige of Bothwell's children while in captivity. I actually like the romantic view that the film takes of the couple and think that it fits in with many of the facts of their lives. Afterall Mary surrendered her throne on the condition that Bothwell be allowed to go free--not exactly the actions of a woman who'd been raped or coerced into marriage. Other minor incidents support the view of a real affection between the pair. Before Darnley's death, just days after the birth of her son, James, she made a difficult journey to visit Bothwell who'd been quite seriously injured in a riding accident. Though she was there under the guise of state business, it seems plausible to me that there was a romantic pull for her. Bothwell and Mary first crossed paths in France when she was girl and he was responsible in part for her safe conduct from France to Scotland. He had served her mother dutifully and given his reputation as a handsome and charming ladies man, it's not hard to imagine that the young Queen would fall for a man who offered her political security as well as the romance clearly lacking in her first two political marriages. While Mary of Scotland fails to capture all the details of their relationship, it captures the spirit of it.

The film also captures the spirit of the rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary, which was definitely one of history's great cat fights. In a wonderful scene before Mary's execution, Elizabeth comes to visit, offering Mary a chance to recant her claim to her throne in return for her life. Eldridge plays Elizabeth like an old school vamp, full of scorn, vanity and a falsely sweet varnish that fools no one. She is driven by fear, ambition, unnamed herat break, righteous anger and a tough intelligence. Interestingly she looks quite a bit like Bette Davis, and I think her performance here creates the "Elizabeth Template" that would be used up to the present day in Cate Blanchett's excellent performances. And indeed Betty Davis was cast to star in another adaptation of a Maxwell Anderson play The Private Lives of Elizabeth of Essex (1939). Mary is at first taken in by Elizabeth's softness and says that the sad thing is that they have so much in common and that they should have been friends. This may be a bit far-fetched or an an attempt to make Mary Queen of Scots into a saint, but in essence it is correct. Elizabeth and Mary were alike in that they were both Queens whose grasp on power was always slippery and who were forever under pressure to marry and produce an heir. They were compelled to be enemies and the film implies that at least part of Elizabeth's enmity is fueled by personal jealousy of her younger, more popular cousin. Elizabeth chose to remain single and consolidate her power through constant maneuvering. Mary chose to marry for her throne, and perhaps, for love. In the end Mary says she doesn't regret the decision she made a bit and she predicts that history will condemn Elizabeth for her treatment of her and that her son, James will one day become King. Both of these predictions came true and yet certainly, Elizabeth could not have regretted the decisions she made either, for they allowed her to rule half a century, save England from Spanish invasion and raise the country to a position of power in the world. Her reign gave us Shakespeare and an English presence in the New World. England and America would not be the countries they are today without her vision. Mary Queen of Scots is a rather sad, romantic sideshow in all other histories but those penned by Jane Austen and Maxwell Anderson.

Loving Design for Living

I just saw Design for Living (1933) for the first time and I'm going to gush a bit. Ernest Lubitsch and Ben Hecht, the best director and writer of this type of material adapt a Noel Coward play with Frederick March, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins. The result is one of the wittiest, sexiest comedies in a decade jam packed with such gems. George Curtis (Gary Cooper) a starving painter and Tom Chambers (Frederick March) an unpublished playwright, meet a commercial artist, Miss Glinda Ferrell(Miriam Hopkins) on a train to Paris. Unable to choose between the two, Glinda enters into a "gentleman's agreement" to live together with them with "no sex." In return, she offers them hard nosed criticism and their art greatly improves. As one can imagine this "no sex" thing doesn't last very long. As soon as Tom goes out of town, Glinda makes a move on George, attacking a lower button on his coat with an offer to sew it back on. George attempts to resist her seductive seemstressing by insisting she go take in the new Tarzan movie. "Glinda, please, Tarzan" he says helplessly. Moments later Glinda is sprawled across the sofa saying "we had a gentleman's agreement. Fortunately, I am no gentleman."

George and Glinda make a go of it for a while as his career takes off. Meanwhile in London, Tom is heartbroken, but his play "Goodnight Mr. Basington" is a massive hit. I love the play within a play which somehow involves a mandolin, a love triangle and the immortal line, "it may be fun, but not more fun than 100% morality and three squares a day." After meeting a mutual friend, Max Plunkett (the always brilliant Edward Everett Horton) in London, Tom decides to go back to Paris to find Glinda. While Tom is away painting a commission, Tom seduces Glinda by going over the finer points of typewriter mechanics. If ever a movie needed the slightest pretenses for a love scene, it was Design for Living. George arrives home early and punching ensues. Again, unable to choose, Glinda leaves them both for Max Plunkett who wastes no time in marrying her. Much of the plot of the movie is delivered through dictated letters and telegrams and one of the most delightful is the one Max writes to his mother telling him of his upcoming nuptials. We learn among other things that Max has no romance in his soul and that Glinda is originally from Fargo, North Dakota. As a fellow North Dakotan, I have to thank Noel Coward (or perhaps Ben Hecht?) for that one!

The comedy really gets cooking when George and Tom join forces to retrieve Glinda. I think Gary Cooper struggles a bit in other parts of the movie, trying to find his feet as George. The minute he and March get genuinely wacky he really starts to come alive. The last 15 minutes of the movie are out and out screwball comedy and certainly do add greatly to the argument that the Production Code was not a necessary element in that genre. Of all the pre-code movies I've watched in the last few weeks, Design for Living is far and away the most entertaining. I don't mind telling you, I'm loving Design for Living.