The Male Animal

The Male Animal (Elliott Nugent, 1942) The draw for this one wasn't the director or the stars (although I'm a big fan of Henry Fonda and Jack Carson). 

 

It's the author, James Thurber. Probably a name past it's sell-date in many people's minds, but his legacy in the zeitgeist has burrs that stick. The phrase "My World and Welcome To it"—which was the title of a book he authored and a TV series inspired by him—is attached to Thurber. He was also the author of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and it was adapted for the movies, first (in 1947) starring Danny Kaye and (just a few years ago) one directed and starring Ben Stiller. 

The man was, obviously, a writer, and quite well-known in his time. He was also a cartoonist—appearing in The New Yorker—a playwright, and (as the phrase goes) "a celebrated wit." He was a good enough writer that he probably never used the phrase "a celebrated wit" in regards to himself or anyone else. Thurber wrote the original play with this film's director, Elliott Nugent, and it was adapted for the screen by Stephen Morehouse Avery and the celebrated Casablanca team of twin-brothers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein.

It takes place in modern times at Midwestern University, where football is the driving force for the college-town rather than higher education. And the weekend of Homecoming with its anticipated game against Minnesota and the return of All-American Joe Ferguson (Carson) for the first time in six years, the streets are filled with flivvers and bobby-soxers and impromptu rallies through the streets. Everyone is in a fervor and rah-rah-ing on a testosterone high (and little thinking to anything else).

So, it's a bad time for there to be any little contretemps on campus, with the boosters and city officials schmoozing around and their blood pressure already on the boil. Even if something is a little subtle in its nuance, it will turn into a cut-and-dried cage-match in arguable hues of black-and-white. It wouldn't seem to be a bad time for English professor Tommy Turner (Fonda) to announce his planned readings for the Monday after the game with the theme of "English prose by non-English speakers). Dull stuff...not unlike Turner, himself. Except Turner has a sister-in-law (Joan Leslie). Sister-in-law has a boyfriend (Herbert Anderson), who's the editor of the campus newspaper and in Turner's class. Said boyfriend writes an editorial in said newspaper praising the professor for including anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti in that list of non-English speakers.

What's the American word for "contretemps?" Taken in context, it must be when you object to something without having read it, or seen it, but you'd "heard something about it." Sure glad something like that wouldn't happen today (he said sarcastically).

By the way, the passage that is being objected to is this:

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belongs to us - that agony is our triumph.