The Return

The Best Years of Our Lives: adapted by Robert E. Sherwood from the novel by MacKinlay Kantor; directed by William Wyler; starring Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Fred Derry), Fredric March (Al Stephenson), Harold Russell (Homer Parrish), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Engle) and Cathy O'Donnell (Wilma Cameron) (1946): Winner of multiple Oscars -- including a Best Supporting Actor nod and a Special Oscar for Harold Russell, the real wounded WWII veteran who does lovely work here.

The Best Years of Our Lives feels at once fresh and Golden Age Hollywood, with sharp performances and a pointed script centered around the difficulties faced by both veterans and their families upon the homecoming of American troops from World War Two. The three male leads, played by Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Russell, face different problems: Andrews doesn't have a job available for him despite the fact that he's the highest ranking of the three; March is a banker who's suddenly and painfully aware of social and class issues; and Russell must cope with both the loss of his hands and people's reactions to that loss (including his own reactions to those reactions).

The stories of those three are woven together, along with those of their loved ones, into a bundle that may seem a bit too neat at the end, though it holds together better than a lot of contemporary studio films. It's a view into a foreign country of the past with the familiar of our time just beginning to surface (the chain drugstore that offers everything and has bought out the privately owned town drug store being one example of both the familiar and the long-lost, as the drug store still has a soda jerk). Post-traumatic stress disorder, a term that hadn't even been created yet, touches the lives of all three soldiers, as does their occasional resentment of those who didn't have to go to war.

But there's also the essential displacement felt by men who've been so long away -- March hasn't seen his wife or children in five years; Andrews has been away at war for far, far longer than he was at home with his married wife (Virginia Mayo) , the two of them having gotten married on the spur of the moment just before he shipped out, only a week after they'd met (!).

Russell's struggle is made especially poignant because it's obviously a real struggle; his work with his prosthetic hooks is so deft at times that one understands the surprise of many of the characters when they first see that deftness -- and Russell's character's desire to be treated like everybody else. There's an essential sweetness to him and to his story, as there is to all of the stories here.

William Wyler's direction concentrates on the performances -- there's nothing showy here, and Wyler prefers to keep the camera on his characters with little or no movement to highlight those performances. Myrna Loy does a lovely, warmly comic turn as March's wife. Teresa Wright is bright and earnest as March's now-grown-up daughter, and Mayo is shallow but understandably dissatisfied as Andrews' wife. Really a splendid, moving film. Highly recommended.

Hothouse

Inherit the Wind: screenplay by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee; directed by Stanley Kramer; starring Spencer Tracy (Henry Drummond), Fredric March (Matthew Harrison Brady), Gene Kelly (E.K. Hornbeck), Dick York (Bertram T. Cates), Claude Akins (Reverend Jeremiah Brown), and Donna Anderson (Rachel Brown) (1960): As much about McCarthyism and the Red Scare as it is about the teaching of evolution in American schools, Inherit the Wind is loosely based on the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' of the 1920's. In that trial, the State of Tennessee prosecuted a substitute teacher for teaching evolution in a high-school biology class.

That set-up only partially remains here. The prosecuted high-school teacher in Inherit the Wind is full time and, to complicate things dramatically, engaged to the daughter of the preacher who has him brought up on charges in the first place. Yikes!

And as Dick York's schoolteacher lives in a small town, there's really nowhere for him to escape the growing mobs of angry, placard-waving, effigy-burning Christian fundamentalists except for the town jail, where he plays cards with the sympathetic, apologetic jailer.

In the real trial, famous American defense lawyer Clarence Darrow led a team of lawyers defending Scopes. The prosecution was led by former Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Acerbically reporting on the whole affair was the famous H.L. Mencken.

Here, Matthew Harrison Brady stands in for Bryan, Henry Drummond stands in for Darrow, and Hornbeck stands in for Mencken. While the supporting roles are capably acted, and while Gene Kelly holds his own as the sarcastic, cynical Hornbeck, it's Fredric March and Spencer Tracy who command the stage here.

March is bombastic as the fiery, Bible-thumping Brady, while Tracy is slightly cooler and much funnier as the 'famous agnostic' Drummond. That the men share a history going back 40 years and were once friends adds another level to the intellectual conflict: both are disappointed in the path the other has taken, though only Drummond strives to cool things down, unsuccessfully, throughout the trial.

With more than an hour devoted to the courtroom proceedings -- many of them closely following the real arguments -- Inherit the Wind succeeds or fails on the basis of the drama of two men talking. I think it succeeds grandly, as these two old, titanic actors are given lines and scenes that allow for high drama centered around people talking, arguing, shouting, and occasionally mopping their brows in the steamy courtroom, in the steamy hotel, or on the steamy hotel porch. It's hot, dammit!

I imagine a lot of people would be turned off by a drama of ideas, especially one in which fundamentalist Christianity takes the intellectual and moral beating of a lifetime. I think it's swell, and in a way an obvious forerunner to the work of Aaron Sorkin, though here much of the talking is done while the characters remain mostly stationary. Highly recommended.

My Evil Self is At the Door!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart (1931): Fredric March deservedly won an Oscar as Best Actor for his portrayal of Jekyll and Hyde, though it's his Hyde that still has the capacity to astonish. Jekyll's dark side, released by a potion Jekyll has developed, is played by March as a malignly energetic simian, a movie monster who generates neither sympathy nor pathos but only revulsion and horror. There really is something scary about March's Hyde, something I can say about very few movie monsters. Also, he has something of a conehead. That's scary in and of itself.

Stevenson's original novella lacks many of the things Hollywood has always wanted -- a clear-cut conventionally moral lesson, a love story -- so the film adds these things, for the most part to good effect. Jekyll is a crusading saint in the movie, offering a free clinic to London's poor and working long hours there in between bouts of wooing his fiancee. But he's also obsessed with the idea that people have dual natures, and that the animal side of the consciousness can be released and perhaps even discarded with the administration of the right drugs. Well, you know how badly that goes.

Don't do drugs, kids. Especially drugs that release your dark side and cause you to physically transform into a monstrous, murderous pervert.

Yes, Dr. Jekyll has invented Red Bull.

The screenplay makes manifest the idea that Jekyll is driven in great measure by sexual frustration, and by frustration at the hypocritical propriety of late Victorian England: he wants to get laid, but he also wants to help people without being repeatedly pooh-poohed for his concern for the poor and working class. Hyde, once released, is a rapist and sexual sadist, a murderer -- but also "free" in the basest meaning of that word.

During Hyde's first appearance, March does a lovely bit of physical acting -- Hyde stretches again and again, apparently to work out the kinks from being confined for so long. And then he relentlessly pursues a music-hall girl whom Jekyll had earlier helped, ultimately to bring disaster down upon her (and, finally, himself). Hopkins, as the musical-hall girl, is first erotic and light-hearted and then progressively more terrified and broken-down. It's a gem of a performance, the most sympathetic and saddest in the film.

The movie was made and released before the Hays Office was created to censor movies, and so it's surprisingly frank for a 1930's picture. Mamoulian's direction is refreshingly ahead of its time for a sound film of this era -- the camera actually moves around quite a bit, and there's an odd but ultimately effective use of first-person camera at the beginning of the film. Given the size of a camera in 1931, the staging of the six-minute sequence must have been something of a nightmare. Highly recommended.