Tag Archives: Casablanca

Classic Christmas Comedy: ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’

Big Lord Fauntleroy

Here are two versions of the scene in which Maggie tells Whiteside that she’s leaving him. In the movie version, Bette Davis is straight-forward and earnest, but she’s not the least bit funny. It’s not her fault: without the reaction of a live audience, there’s not a lot an actress can do above saying the lines in a reasonably credible way. Besides, except for the one zinger at the end of the scene, Maggie doesn’t have any punchlines. Still, when I watch this scene, I can’t help feeling that instead of driving the scene forward, Bette Davis keeps letting the air out of its tires. This happens throughout the course of the entire picture. Davis isn’t bad, she’s boring; Woolley is bad and boring.

But now have a look at what the wonderful Harriet Harris does with the same material. What’s most striking about the Roundabout’s production is this: for the first time, Maggie Cutler has fully as much personality as all the zanies who are Sheridan Whiteside’s friends.

Maggie’s outburst occurs about two-thirds of the way through Act One. In the Roundabout production, it was the second time a character exited to a big round of applause. After Maggie’s exit, nearly every major exit by a principal character was accompanied by loud applause. I’ve never seen anything else to match it.

Enter Beverly Carlton

Here is Reginald Gardiner as Beverly Carlton, a thinly disguised Noël Coward, in the screen version. I’m always glad to see Reginald Gardiner, but he holds back in this picture — he’s far more vibrant and funny in “Christmas in Connecticut”; he’s also more amusing (though probably for the wrong reasons) as Ginger Rogers’ hag-ridden husband in “Black Widow.”

Here is Byron Jennings as Beverly. It’s not often that I like to hear American actors attempt English accents (for some reason, American actresses fare a little bit better), but I like Jennings’ accent a lot. This is almost certainly because Noël Coward himself essentially invented his own accent, which — though it was certainly that of an Englishman — was not like anyone else’s. Jennings’ accent as Beverly Carlton is a nice riff on Coward’s invention, and as such, I think it works splendidly.

A Respite from Hilarity

In this next clip, Beverly performs a song specially written for the show by Cole Porter, who created a dead-on parody of Coward’s musical and lyrical style. Porter was great pals with Monty Woolley, who had been one of his professors at Yale. He wrote the song as a favor to his friend and the two authors, who thanked him with a gold cigarette case. I hasten to add that this is most definitely not a great song: it’s a brilliant parody of the second rate. It’s show-offy in precisely the way that Noël Coward so often was. In Stephen Sondheim’s book about lyrics, “Finishing the Hat,” he mentions that he “cordially but intensely dislike[s]” Coward’s lyrics and condemns them for coming in only two flavors, brittle and sentimental; according to Sondheim, when Coward’s sentimentality is in full flower, his lyrics veer into nonsense. Guilty as charged, I’m afraid. Cole Porter’s parody catches precisely Coward’s brittle flippancy, the sentimentality and artificiality of his lyrics, with their crowds of internal rhymes (e.g., “Softly a fluid/Druid/Meets me” — that slays me!), predicates that nonsensically precede their subjects (e.g., “Up to the stars/I climb”), and most devastatingly of all, Coward’s humdrum melodic invention, gussied up with chromaticism to give the banal melody “class.” Sondheim writes that Coward’s harmonic language is something he avoids like “dengue fever.” Well, at least he didn’t say he hates it.

“What Am I to Do?” is not in the picture, which I consider to be a serious miscalculation. To explain why, I must digress for a moment. Nine years before “The Man Who Came to Dinner” was a hit on Broadway, Moss Hart collaborated with Kaufman for the first time, on a farce about Hollywood called “Once in a Lifetime.” In the earliest out-of-town tryouts for this play, the first act was a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, but the laughs suddenly died halfway through Act Two, and Act Three played to ponderous and sepulchral silence. Many drafts later, Kaufman and Hart managed to keep the laughs going through the whole of Act Two, but Act Three still played to the crickets. Eventually, Kaufman became so discouraged he withdrew from the show (temporarily), and it died (temporarily) out of town. It was Sam Harris, the show’s associate producer (later, the sole producer of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”), who gave Hart the solution to the mystery of the disappearing laughter. Here is Moss Hart’s account (from his tremendously entertaining memoir, “Act One”) of what Harris told him:

I wish, kid, that this weren’t such a noisy play. . . . It’s a noisy play, kid. One of the noisiest plays I’ve ever been around. . . . Just think about it. Except for those two minutes at the beginning of the first act, there isn’t another spot in this whole play where two people sit down and talk quietly to each other. Is that right, or isn’t it? . . . Maybe noisy is the wrong word. But I’ve watched this play through maybe a hundred times, and I think one of the main things wrong with it is that it tires an audience out. It’s a tiring play to sit through, kid. . . I can almost feel them begin to get tired around me. That stage is so damn full of actors and scenery and costumes and props all the time they never get a chance to catch their breath and listen to the play. Sure they laugh, but I think they’re longing to see that stage just once with maybe two or three people on it quietly talking the whole thing over. Give them a chance to sit back themselves and kind of add the whole thing up. Once this show gets under way nobody ever talks to each other. They just keep pounding away like hell and running in and out of that scenery. It’s a noisy play, kid, you take my word for it.

Hart came up with the idea of jettisoning the most expensive set in the show and inserting one short, crucial scene at the beginning of Act Three — more bittersweet and nostalgic than funny . . . and quiet. This one short scene gave the audience a respite from the sidesplitting hilarity, Kaufman came back on board, and “Once in a Lifetime” became a smash hit. A much-needed respite from hilarity is exactly the effect of Beverly Carlton’s musical number: it’s charming in its own right, but in context, it becomes something approximating the Sublime. No, it’s not a great song: it’s faux-Coward, so it can’t be great. The point is that it captures the essence of Coward; it’s not first rate: it’s charming, nonsensical, flippant, bittersweet, irresistible. I’ve never been able to tell for sure whether or not Byron Jennings is actually accompanying himself on the piano, but when I saw the show, the sound definitely came from the instrument, not from a loudspeaker, and he certainly looks as if he’s playing it. Whatever the truth is, the possibility that he’s his own accompanist adds an unexpected virtuosity to his performance that makes it unforgettable.

Oh, hell, I like Byron Jennings’ performance so much, here’s the rest of it.

“The first baby will be named Beverly” is in the original script. “Then I hope it’s a girl” is new. I don’t know who came up with the line, but it’s terrific. For a topical play from 1939, the script has been left remarkably intact. Even in Kaufman’s day, when he directed his own plays, he had to call rehearsals in the middle of a run to “take out the improvements” (his expression) that the actors had incorporated. On one occasion, Kaufman stopped in to catch a matinee performance of the first act of “Of Thee I Sing,” the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, after it had been running for a few months. At the intermission, he sent a telegram to William Gaxton, the leading man: “WATCHING YOUR PERFORMANCE FROM THE LAST ROW STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE” . . .

Here’s another important element that was left out of the picture. The story of Elias P. Crockfield does not advance the plot, but it is our first (and really only) glimpse of Whiteside’s sentimental radio persona. And, like Beverly Carlton’s song in the second act, it follows a lot of break-neck comedy and gives the audience a chance to catch their breath. Lane’s performance of the speech is not as marvellous as much of the rest of his performance, but at least he approximates the idea well enough to get the job done. It’s a shame Claude Rains never played this role. I can’t imagine anyone who could handle Whiteside’s overt sentimentality and venomousness more deftly.

Enter Lorraine Sheldon

“The Man Who Came to Dinner” is notable for the number of characters in it who are based on celebrities of the day (i.e., 1939), with no attempt to conceal the identities of their real-life counterparts. Sheridan Whiteside is clearly based on the owlish radio personality, Alexander Woollcott; Beverly Carlton is unquestionably based on Noël Coward; the character Banjo is obviously based on Harpo Marx. I have been startled to discover that it is widely believed that Lorraine Sheldon is based on Gertrude Lawrence. Many sources, including the Library of America’s edition of Kaufman’s plays, blandly offer this as a matter of fact. Au contraire: she’s much closer in personality and background to Tallulah Bankhead. Lorraine Sheldon is not exactly like Tallulah Bankhead, either, but she certainly has much more in common with Bankhead than she has with Gertrude Lawrence. At any rate, an actress is bound to get more laughs playing Lorraine as if she were Tallulah than as if she were Gertie. Jean Smart (a very shrewd and capable comedienne) plays the role exactly as if she were Jean Smart, and that seems the best plan of all: she’s hilarious. She has two long moments on the telephone in Act Two that are about as broad and funny as anything I’ve ever seen. Out of context, I’m afraid they won’t mean much, so I’ll show you her entrance instead, which is plenty great.

Lorraine Sheldon has almost nothing at all in common with Gertrude Lawrence. Lawrence had two of her greatest successes with Noël Coward (“Private Lives” and “Tonight at 8:30”), and while her friendship with him was not without its bumps — both were highly temperamental — she was never his sworn enemy, as she is in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (On Lawrence’s opening night for “The King and I,” Coward sent her a telegram that read: “A WARM HAND ON YOUR OPENING.”) Nor did Lawrence ever chase “panting, from castle to castle,” an English nobleman. This latter distinction belongs to Tallulah Bankhead, who had an on-again off-again affair with Napier Stuart, Lord Alington, for many years. Most tellingly, like the fictional Lord Bottomley, Bankhead describes Alington (in her autobiography) as having “an almost repulsive mouth.” (Bring on the Roquefort cheese.) Like Lorraine Sheldon, Bankhead was American-born and was for a time considered one of the great actresses of the American theatre; Lawrence was primarily a star in Britain. And while Bankhead, like Lorraine Sheldon, was famous for her sexual rapaciousness, Lawrence was not. (Chico Marx was introduced to Bankhead at a party, but only after he was warned to behave himself in the presence of Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead’s daughter. Chico: “Miss Bankhead.” Tallulah: “Mr Marx.” Chico: “You know, I really want to fuck you.” Tallulah: “And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy.”)

In case you’re wondering, Dorothy di Frasso was an American-born café society Fascist, who married an Italian count and was close friends with Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. “Kit” (Katharine) Cornell was widely considered, in the thirties and forties, to be the finest actress on Broadway. Cornell gave Christopher Plummer a break early in his career; he was extremely fond of her, but insists that she was not, and never could be, a great actress. Beatrice Lillie was a famous (and famously scrawny) comedienne. Jock Whitney was a philanthropist, investor, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom (under Eisenhower) and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. Sybil Cartwright is a fictional character. This Roundabout production was scrupulous about keeping in place nearly all of the original dropped names. Most of the versions I’ve seen (including the motion picture) alter the names to more current or better-known ones, which only makes the chatter less glamorous, without making it more meaningful to the general public, who are unlikely to recognize half of the names, anyway. One name that the Roundabout production changed bears mentioning: “Have you kidnapped someone, Sherry?” “Yes: that was the Lindbergh baby.” The line gets a laugh, which is what it’s supposed to do, and it’s just waspish enough for Woollcott to have said. I don’t believe, however, audiences in 1939 — seven years after the kidnapping — would have liked such a joke. Unfortunately, the victim mentioned in the original script is “Charley Ross,” a name that few people are likely to recognize. In its way, a Charley Ross joke is even more objectionable than one about the Lindbergh baby, but also (therefore) funnier. Charley Ross was the first nationally famous kidnapping victim. The four year-old Charley and his five year-old brother Walter were kidnapped from their front lawn in a wealthy section of Philadelphia in 1874. Walter was released, but Charley was held for ransom and never returned. The case was never solved. In the play, Dr Bradley appears to be about seventy years old, which makes him the same age Charley Ross, had he survived, would have been. It’s impossible to know what Kaufman would have thought about the alteration. On the one hand, I’m sure he’d hate to lose the laugh; on the other hand, I have a hunch he wouldn’t have considered the Lindbergh baby an acceptable substitute. I’m willing to accept it for the laughter it excites and for its astringency.

The Stage Design

One of the great pleasures of the Roundabout revival was the gorgeous set by Tony Walton. Here he is, describing how he came up with the look.

As it happens, I have a younger brother who designs sets for the student shows at the college where he teaches scenic and costume design. Some years ago, when I learnt that his school had presented “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” I asked him how he approached the set. He told me that he operated on the assumption that the Stanleys, in whose home the action takes place, were social-climbing vulgarians. “How did you demonstrate their vulgarity?” I asked. “Oh, I made the books match the drapes.” “My God,” I said, “that’s brilliant! Did the set get a laugh?” He took a pause worthy of Kaufman and Hart, then answered, “No, but all the faculty wives wanted me to decorate their homes.” I don’t mind playing straight man to a line as clever as that one.

Starting out from Scratch: Barbara Stanwyck in ‘My Reputation’

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Original poster, and totally misleading: Barbara Stanwyck has been posed and painted to look like Jane Russell in ‘The Outlaw.’

Curtis Bernhardt’s “My Reputation” (Warner Bros., 1946) is one of the best Woman’s Pictures I know. (Bernhardt directed another great one, “Payment on Demand,” which I examined a few weeks ago.) Like “Payment on Demand,” it is unusually adult. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica “Jess” Drummond, a youngish widow with two teenage sons; she’s neither ready nor willing to be a widow for the rest of her life, but doesn’t know what she’s to do with her husband gone after a long illness and her two boys off at prep school. To complicate matters, she has a pushy, old-fashioned mother who bullies her, and she’s surrounded by a crowd of catty, gossipy friends: they’re despicable, but hardly unusual. No, they’re standard-issue Woman’s Picture upper middle class women. I’ve been looking at a lot of Woman’s Pictures lately, and with very few exceptions, they positively pullulate with idle female chatterbox parasites in hats and jewels and furs, who get tight at lunch, slander their absent friends, cheat on their husbands and ostracize any member of their set who wants to make herself useful or pursue an intellectual or artistic interest. These pampered ladies are snobs and hypocrites and busybodies — when there’s a war on, they do much of their shopping on the black market and speak scornfully of the patriotic simps who live on ration tickets and abide by the government’s austerity measures; half of them are tramps and the other half are frigid. Here’s an early scene in which we meet some of these poisonous dames at the market. There’s another type of stock villain at the scene’s end, but I’ll have something to say about him a little later on.

There have been Woman’s Pictures since the beginning, but they became a readily identifiable genre during the War Years, when Hollywood studios did what they could to cater to their idea of what women on the Home Front would want to see. The stories in this genre tend to be overwrought romances in which an attractive, sympathetic leading lady is put through tumultuous psychological wringers by antagonists who come in all shapes and sizes. Yet, with much of the adult male population fighting overseas, most of the villains in these dramas necessarily had to be other women; Woman’s Pictures, as a rule, present the vast majority of the adult female population in a harshly negative light: they’re nitwits at best and venomous reptiles at worst. Even when the screenplays were written by women (as this one was: Catherine Turney) or were based on novels written by women (as this one was: “Instruct My Heart” by Clare Jaynes — terrible title!), the pictures were produced and directed by men who worked for studios that were run by men. And of course with the Production Code in full vigor, the conclusions drawn in even the best of these pictures tend to be conservative, to say the least. The Women’s Liberation movement was still decades away.

A Message from Beyond the Grave

In this clip, which comes in the first reel of the picture, Jess reads the letter her late husband wrote for her a few days before he died.

I have great admiration for Stanwyck’s combination of intense emotion and restraint. She doesn’t hide her feelings, but she doesn’t parade them either. She sheds tears, but she doesn’t glory in them. Although “My Reputation” seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle (why isn’t it better known?), it’s one of Stanwyck’s best performances: you can start watching the picture at just about any point and within a few seconds, you’re bound to see her doing something wonderful. But I’ll give you a hint: as good as she is in the first half of the picture, she only gets better as it goes along.

The (slightly misquoted) quotation comes from a sonnet by Christina Rossetti. Jess’s husband Paul remembered the last line only slightly incorrectly, but his paraphrase throws off its rhythm. I like to think Paul got the quote wrong because he was, well, dying and didn’t have time to look it up. Besides, he closes with “your loving but unpoetic husband,” which claim his error confirms.

Remember

by Christina Rossetti
Remember me when I am gone away,
       Gone far away into the silent land;
       When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
       You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
       Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
       And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
       For if the darkness and corruption leave
       A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
       Than that you should remember and be sad.

I rather like the poem, and it’s well suited to the picture, which, like Rossetti’s work, is wet without being soppy. But I can’t help comparing it to a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the same subject — for instance, Sonnet 71, which begins “No longer mourn for me when I am dead/Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell/Give warning to the world that I am fled/From this vile world, with vildest* worms to dwell.” Not very comforting, I know, but more bracing and less sentimental. In my book, the dying husband who left that passage for his widow to chew on would be a much more interesting fellow and a greater loss. But this is a Woman’s Picture, and sentimentality is part of the deal. What makes “My Reputation” exceptional in many scenes is Stanwyck’s ability to play the emotions without becoming vague and sentimental. Jessica Drummond is a native of a wealthy suburb of Chicago, but Stanwyck puts a lot of Brooklyn in the woman’s backbone.
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* Most modern editors amend “vildest” to “vilest,” but I disapprove of this liberty: vildest has more bite.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

There are several partings in the picture, two of which are at train stations, and all of them are handled extremely well. Max Steiner’s score knocks me out: the way the main theme swells as the train pulls away strikes me as musical scoring at its best. This scene shows Jess as she puts her boys on the train to their private school back East. This is another example of how brilliantly Barbara Stanwyck expresses a complicated, deeply-felt inner life, but without telegraphing it: Stanwyck doesn’t present her emotions to you: she allows you to catch them as they fleet. It’s not only her face that registers what’s going on inside her, but look at her body language: she’s incredibly expressive. But she’s not the only one. I think the two kids in this scene are worth paying close attention to.

Bobby Cooper is the older brother, Keith; Scotty Beckett plays Kim. Bobby Cooper got out of pictures early. Of the two boys, Keith (Bobby) is the somber, soulful one; Kim’s the firecracker. And why not? Scotty Beckett was discovered at the age of three, when a casting agent overheard him singing for his ailing father, in The Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Scotty’s natural gaiety charmed the nurses: soon he was singing for all the patients on the ward. His father died the following year. Scotty appeared as Spanky McFarland’s co-conspirator in an early season of the Our Gang shorts, and went on to play opposite the biggest stars (including Garbo) at various studios all through his childhood, often portraying the leading character as a child. The kid was talented, extremely cute and a natural show-off, as Kim is. But I consider Bobby Cooper’s Keith to be the more interesting performance: Keith’s a nice looking boy, with more than a passing resemblance to his mother (they have the same eyes and the same jawline), but a melancholic, adult shadow partially eclipses his boyishness. You can see that Keith is at least dimly conscious, as his younger brother is not, of his mother’s loneliness and anxiety. And he sees that Kim is cuter and livelier than he, and knows that he lives in his younger brother’s shadow. I think little, if any, of this is in the script, but the acting is specific enough to make these details evident, without underlining them. (These details are more noticeably on display in other scenes, but they’re also in this scene if you look for them, and I wanted to show one of the nice train station sequences.) Look at the way Stanwyck interacts with her two boys: there’s nothing vague or general about her relationship to them as distinct, uniquely loveable individuals. She’s cheerful and light with Kim; she treats Keith almost as if he were her confidant . . . and the man of the family. The scene is deeply poignant, yet the dialogue is second rate at best. It’s the acting that is first rate. There’s real emotional truth in this parting that lifts the humdrum to something quite a lot better — perhaps better than it deserves. But I’m thankful for great scenes like this, however they happen and wherever I can find them.

You can also see in this clip that Scotty Beckett is already playing all the angles. His life was soon to spiral out of control; by the mid-fifties, he had become a one man “Hollywood Babylon.” Drunken driving, drug addiction, hotel robbery, passing bad checks, attempted suicide, pistol-whipping, wife-beating, a stretch in the stoney lonesome, parole violation . . . you name it, Scotty did it. An overdose killed him at 38 years old, a washed-up has-been. Poor little bastard.

The querulous old bitch of a granny with the chalk-on-a-slate voice is that bus-and-truck Gladys Cooper known as Lucile Watson. She gave the same goddamn performance in every picture she was ever in: the Sweet Old Darling rounded by an acidic brown perimeter; she’s an inferior dessert wine turned to vinegar: simultaneously cloying and tart — sickening. I can’t bear her.

The Masher

The most common stock male villain in Woman’s Pictures is The Masher. Occasionally, he’s a moderately attractive bachelor with bad manners (e.g., Jack Carson in “Mildred Pierce”), but far more often he’s an unattractive, hard-drinking, unhappily married middle-aged man who is under the misapprehension that his boorish double entendres and fulsome compliments are catnip to the ladies, especially when he’s got a half dozen Old Overholt highballs sloshing round in his belly. He usually gets a well-deserved slap in the face, which he interprets as just another step in the timeless dance of seduction. In the War Years (“My Reputation” was shot in 1943, but not released till ’46), The Masher was a more than usually objectionable and obnoxious pest: his being stateside implied he was a coward or unfit for service or unpatriotic — and probably all three. In “My Reputation,” The Masher is played by Jerome Cowan, a reliable, but wholly unsympathetic contract player at Warners.

I confess I find the scene in the car difficult to watch: what this bastard does to our heroine amounts to attempted rape — when she repulses his advances, his reassurance that nobody “would ever suspect you, anyway” is particularly loathsome. This scene takes place just days after her husband has been buried in the cold, cold ground. Who is this son of a bitch? “No hard feelings, Jess!” Hard feelings?! I’d like to see her go all Phyllis Dietrichson (“Double Indemnity”) on his ass, but that would be a different picture. Moreover, his confidence and persistence suggest that his brutishness has actually worked in the past. In the scene, Jess says, “Women on the loose can be such a mess,” but it’s hard to imagine any woman being quite that messy. I look at this scene and my wits begin to turn: during the Production Code era, a husband and wife couldn’t be shown lying fully clothed in a bed together, unless one of them had at least one foot touching the floor, but Jerry Cowan could be shown manhandling Barbara Stanwyck and smothering her with unwanted kisses, without a murmur of protest from Joe Breen’s office. Nobody gets laid or has any fun, so it’s all right for us to see it. Anyhow, having met his odious wife at the market in an earlier scene, we know that he’ll go home to her and they’ll both make each other miserable. So it all works out.

Eve Arden to the Rescue

Here’s what happens immediately afterwards. I cannot think of a more perfect example of what Woman’s Pictures are all about: serious psychological turmoils addressed with as much seriousness as Hollywood timidity and censorship would allow. Frankly, I much prefer this sort of tame psychoanalysis to what began to show up in Woman’s Pictures of the seventies, such as “An Unmarried Woman.” I love the gorgeous cinematography, the artificial (i.e., non-improvised) dialogue and the polished (i.e., not perfectly realistic) acting. And I especially savor the total absence of underscoring during the scene (the voices are melodious enough to carry it), followed by the plush ripeness of the travel music — it’s all close enough to reality to be believable, but it’s better than mere realism. Noël Coward once said, “When I go to the theatre, I want to see extraordinary people, not a series of ordinary ones.” Amen.

In this picture, Eve Arden is, for once, more wise than wise-cracking. Her analysis of Jessica’s problem isn’t what I’d call penetrating, but she’s certainly on the right track, and I like her combination of earnestness, empathy and toughness. Arden’s diction is precise almost to a fault; her way with a line is mannered and artificial, yet she unfailingly conveys canniness and above all, a warm personality. She lets you know she’s acting, but she also clearly means what she recites. She’s unreal without being phony. I’ve always found her a sympathetic actress, but never as witty as she apparently intends to be. But this is usually because her zingers aren’t good enough.

The Worm Turns

Another standard feature of the Woman’s Picture genre (and the one I like the best) is the obligatory scene in which the beset heroine finally finds the moxie to turn on her antagonist(s) and speak her mind: I call it “The Worm Turns.” “Now, Voyager” has a few spectacular examples of this, when Bette Davis faces down her formidable old tyrant of a mother (Gladys Cooper). Joan Crawford was always camp in such scenes, because she was always itching for a fight and took too much pleasure in browbeating her co-stars. Like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck plays this sort of scene excellently: she hates conflict, she doesn’t want to lose her temper, she’s ashamed of herself for losing control, but she’s got to set things straight. I love the way she lets loose in this scene: seeing it out of context, it won’t mean as much, of course, but I believe you can still get a fair idea of how emotionally satisfying the moment is in the context of the story. Steiner’s underscoring punctuates Stanwyck’s arguments beautifully. Stanny has an even better outburst later in the picture, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Lucile Watson wears that same jeweled brooch in other scenes. It reminds me of the solitary eyeball that the Grææ, the three blind hags who guarded the Medusa’s cave, passed among themselves. I’m captivated by this idea, because it reinforces the idea of Watson as a Gorgon, which she undeniably is.

The Complicated/Doomed Love Affair

Our heroine has to fall in love, of course, and the affair needs must be complicated — perhaps even impossibly so. In “My Reputation,” Jessica is a woman who married in her late teens and has no experience of romantic love outside of her marriage. She’s in her mid-thirties, but has less sexual experience than most girls in their freshman year of college; she appears to be a woman of the world, but she’s terrified of her unexplored sexuality and is afraid of being engulfed by passions that could lead her to her ruin. She’s emotionally stifled, even crippled, by the gossipy females of her social set and by her interfering termagant mother. And she has two boys who are still too young to understand her desire for romance. All the Rules say that she is supposed to immure herself in widowhood, but she falls — against her will — desperately in love with Major Scott Landis (George Brent), who introduces her to a new world of adult sexuality, which had never even occurred to her before. It’s all very complicated and confusing to her. She’s drawn to him, but he is, in his own way, just as bullying as her social set, her adolescent (and therefore selfish) boys, and her horrible old mother. The difference is, Major Landis is trying to liberate her, while they’re all trying to hold her back. The emotional conflicts become extremely intense before the picture comes to a satisfactory end.

Mind you, I don’t mean to overpraise “My Reputation”: it’s far from great. But once again, it’s a flawed picture that I admire, in large part, for its ambition. Some of the scenes with Brent are, by today’s standards, exasperating: much of what we’re to accept as his perspicacity strikes me as merely presumptuous and insulting. This first scene of him alone with Stanwyck after nightfall offers many examples of what I mean.

“I’ve seen hundreds of people like you . . .” Oh, the dirty swine: how dare he? In a later scene, she comes to his apartment, where he pours gin down her throat while he crowds her on the sofa . . . this is love? Who wants it? (And his gin is warm.) In many of Brent’s scenes, his chauvinism and smug superiority are really infuriating. And yet . . . if you can accept these things (as I do) as a product of their time and a form of getting-it-past-the-censors shorthand for a more complicated and protracted seduction and sexual awakening, at least it makes it possible for a wartime Woman’s Picture to tell a story about an inexperienced woman who learns what sex is, what all the fuss is about, and realizes that she likes it so much that she’s willing to take great risks on its behalf and to make considerable sacrifices to keep it coming. That’s no small matter, especially in a picture from the mid-1940s.

James Wong Howe photographed it beautifully. Max Steiner’s score is lush and, in the main, perfect. I dislike the flutes and the Laurel and Hardy-style mutes on the trumpets in the courtship scenes and the way the orchestrations go all puerile and kittenish in the clinches, but I expect this is intended to downplay Jessica’s sexual excitement and terror, and to emphasize instead the comical varieties of nervousness that are a natural consequence of falling in love. Taken as a whole, “My Reputation” is not nearly as good a picture as “Casablanca,” but I find its conclusion to be as emotionally exhilarating as the last moments between Ilsa and Rick. The last shot in the picture is unforgettable.

The Claude Rains Fan Club

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