Anytime Movies #6: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie. 

I’m very suspicious of patriotism (I always recall the "last resort of a scoundrel" remark), yet nothing moves me so much like a movie extolling the virtues of America. The promise "to form a more perfect Union," as it was outlined in The Constitution, as opposed to lining people's pockets, or to lionize the undeserving, or to maintain the status quo because it's comfortable.

Anybody who's fought for this country knows it's not comfortable (and if they did, they were promoted too soon!)

It wasn’t until I was voting on the Emmy’s that I sat down and watched TV's “The West Wing.” I figured it was going to be a vapid “America-Love It or Leave It” tract (starring Rob Lowe), even if it did have Martin Sheen playing the President, in which case, I could leave it. But TWW was a serious look at government work—its glories and  disappointments, the combination of ego and sacrifice. It could criticize individuals and “ideology for ideology’s sake,” but one thing it never ever criticized was the idea of Public Service, no matter what side of the aisle it was on. At the same time the country is being run by crooks specializing in an institutionalized form of bribery and graft, there is an infrastructure of people for whom government service is a sacred trust (well, there’s gotta be ONE!) “The West Wing” paid tribute to that corps of people wherever they might be, week after week, and it made for refreshingly positive TV. It also made for a refreshing look at our nation as it stands.

And so, too, does Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Made in 1939, it plays like it was written yesterday. When I saw it for the first time—right after “Watergate”—I found it amazingly prescient. But, no, it was talking about its own times. The problems just keep re-occurring again and again. And again. Whoever doesn’t know history is doomed to repeat it, and with every fresh crop of people governing, they’ll keep making the same mistakes. Maybe they think they’re unique. Maybe they just don’t know history. They say that if you keep making the same mistake over and over, it’s a sign of insanity. Well, psychology never factored in term limits.

Mr. Smith… is the story of a local youth leader who is appointed to the Senate after the incumbent suddenly dies. This runs afoul of the state’s political machine that ran that late senator as well as the state's senior Senator, Paine (Claude Rains)—who just happens to be an idol of the new senator’s. But, "The Machine" lets it happen, as Smith is a yokel, and their boy, Paine, will be able to keep him in line.

It wouldn’t work if director Frank Capra didn’t have tall awkward Jimmy Stewart—not James, Jimmy—whose every stammered syllable bespoke humility. But get him talking about America or Liberty of The Capitol Dome and the stutter disappears in a fervent stage whisper that trails off in awe. Mr. Smith isn’t sure of himself, but he’s sure sure of the Country.

And Washington, D.C. is just the place to shake him up with a few lashes of the Beltway. Stewart could be frustratingly folksy, but for Capra (and for Hitchcock and Anthony Mann) he could be unnervingly vulnerable and, at the other end of the bi-pole, dramatically unhinged. The last act of Mr. Smith…—the filibuster against false charges of graft—features Stewart in both phases. At one point, he's knee-deep in political hate-mail, clutching it in his hands and looking skyward like Jesus at Gethsemane. Then a few short paragraphs about “lost causes” later, he’s at his most defiant. “You think I’m licked! You ALL think I’m licked!!” That was his Oscar-winning performance, not the next year’s The Philadelphia Story where the “cynical reporter” bit just didn’t wash with someone who looked so homespun. The filibuster scene always brings a lump to my throat, and it’s not sympathy pains for Stewart’s frayed larynx.

Now, I’ve read the original screenplay to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” It ends with a big parade honoring the completely vindicated Smith, surrounded by his boy-rangers, supported by the woman-he-loves (Jean Arthur, again, who manages to make her extraordinarily jaded Senate Aide adorable, even when she’s at her worst—and she has a great drunk scene with Thomas Mitchell. Hmmm, Thomas Mitchell, again). Why, even the disgraced Senator Paine is being lionized in the sequence. Oh, it’s just so sweet, your eyes could roll back in their sockets and jam and stick that way. As Arthur’s Miss Saunders tipsily says in the film, “Nah, I can’t think of anything more shappy!” “Capra-corn” is what the very self-aware director called it.

So, he cut it. Orson Welles has said: "If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Capra leaves his story’s ending ambiguous. Oh, you could call the riotous goings-on at the end a Happy Ending—but all of Paine’s Senate pals are trying to calm him down, telling him it’s okay…everything’s all right, we're still on your side. The only solace Jefferson Smith is granted is in the sympathetic smile from the Vice-President (played by John Ford’s silent cowboy film-star Harry Carey) before he collapses in a heap of his enemy’s mass-generated letters. The movie "celebration" has all the weight of an Al Gore victory celebration on Election Day 2000--a case of premature exaltation. But nothing's been solved. No one's been cleared. Nothing has been decided. There is just misunderstanding and confusion. Carey leans back and has a chaw while the chaos of Democracy continues unabated. It may not be a "happy" ending, considering the sequence that was shelved. It may not even be a dramatically satisfying ending. But it is representative of the loud, messy process that turns the gears of Democracy. 

However slow-moving, however off-course, they still turn.

Jeferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) looks for guidance.

Anytime Movies:
Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

Washington turns out for the Mr. Smith premier—they weren't happy.

From Wikipedia:  "Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat and the Senate Majority Leader, called the film 'silly and stupid', and said it 'makes the Senate look like a bunch of crooks'."

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Oh. It's October (still). Guess I need to pay attention to Horror Films.

The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) There have been so many versions of "The Invisible Man"—in movies and television, including a version released this year just as the COVID-19 virus started emptying theaters directed by Leigh Wannell and starring Elisabeth Moss—but, this one, directed by the ingenious James Whale (he of the classic Frankenstein and The Old Dark House and portrayed in Gods and Monsters) hews very closely to H. G. Wells' original novel (sub-titled "A Grotesque Romance" and both serialized and published in 1897), both in circumstance and (and this is crucial) in tone. I'm reading Wells' story now (and so can you here) and, although there is always a sense of the fantastical with Wells, it is apparent that in this one Wells was having a bit of a jape at the village-life residents among whom he grew up. With the exception of the demented Griffin ("The Invisible One" he's called in the film's credits), the other characters are bumpkins and simple folk, who fall about themselves in states of slapstick buffoonery at the sight and pranks of the one who can't be seen.

It's less a novel of horror or of adventure as it is a sadistic comedy. The Invisible man, Griffin, comes to the village of Iping, having finished his experiments, completed them on himself, and emboldened with his power to be a covert agent of destruction, made his way to the village to try and find the process to reverse the change. Swathed in bandages, bulky stolen clothes, a floppy hat, dark glasses and a prosthetic nose, he's a mummified presence as he makes his way through a snow-storm (the better to see him with when he's invisible later in the film). It's a stark sight as he bursts through the door takes a sitting room with his notebooks and flasks, demanding privacy for his task. To pay his way, he resorts to thievery, shedding his clothes and invading a local vicar's home to steal the funds. He is confronted by the constabulary and town officials, he dis-robes and, in naked invisibility, tweaks and thwarts his would-be captors who are helpless to defend themselves from his attacks. 

This must have seemed like a gaudy feast for Whale, who was fond of combining the horrorific with a giddy, satiric chauvinism towards "the others" of whom, as a closeted gay man, he felt apart from, hid from, but also could feel superior to for hiding in plain sight with his secret. It's certainly a delicious visual opportunity for Whale to portray Griffin's mummified presence as he makes his way through a snow-storm (the better to see him with when he's invisible later in the film) then bursts through the door of an Inn—with the same progressively closer jump-cuts he employed in Frankenstein and The Bride of.... Whale (and his screenwriter R.C. Sherriff hewed close to the book—Wells was still quite alive and visible enough that he had script approval—but inserted a sympathetic mentor with a daughter enamored of the mad-man (had they ever talked?) and turned the novel's colleague, Kemp into a spurned rival for his affections.

Whale ramps up the comedy—there is a lot of slapstick of rabble being tossed about with mocking color comedy from the unseen Griffin. Dis-embodied bicycles run through the street and gets thrown at the chasing mob (one of whom is supposedly Walter Brennan, although you can't recognize him in the film). Whale-favorite Una O'Connor is encouraged to play her "shocked" scenes to a delightfully strident hysteria, and the villagers portrayed as yokels—swear to god, the initial arresting bobby walks into the room and "Python's" "Wot's all this, then?" The giddiness reaches a peak when a room runs down the street pursued by a skipping pair of pants while Griffin sings "Here we go gathering nuts in May..." It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, and Whale features a couple on-screen murders—Griffin bashes a policeman's head in with a chair—and a train sabotage ensures that the Invisible Man wins the body-count tally of the Universal monsters.

He's helped immeasurably by the on-screen non-presence of Claude Rains—making his American film debut and he was cast when Whale, in an adjoining room, heard his voice in a failed screen-test for another role. Rains had grown up in a theatrical family, had enjoyed stage roles and was a well-regarded teacher at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Good Lord, he taught Olivier, Gielgud and Laughton!) and it's a tour-de-force of acting without expression, as you don't see Rains' face until the final shot. Where Whale's other actors in the film sometimes act as if they're still in silent films, Rains has the best of both worlds, acting by mime and the sound of his vibrant voice (and he can over-act because he's playing crazy, but without any betraying mugging)!

Whale knew talent and high up in the cast are two actors who would burn brightly and not fade: Henry Travers—who played the angel Clarence in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and the unsuspecting father in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt—is a bit stifled (that we're used to, anyway) as Griffin's mentor and Gloria Stuart, who appeared in Whale's The Old Dark House, but is most well-known for playing "Old Rose" in James Cameron's Titanic (and, yes, she was "a bit of a dish") plays the ingenue/love interest for audiences who were looking for some kind of normalcy amidst the madness—her and Travers' characters do not appear in Wells' narrative.

In the interest of transparency (*cough*), one should say the special effects of the Universal house-technicians run from some ingenious wire-work and primitive "blue-screen" (actually black velvet) opticals to some dodgy miniature work for that train derailment. And there are some shots that you just look at and wonder "how'd they do that?"—even 87 years on. It makes a little thrill that, even in the era of CGI's Uncanny Valley, makes even un-seeing believing.

Claude Rains makes his only appearance in The Invisible Man.

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Of all the films in all the film-houses in all the world...I've never written a review of Casablanca.

At least, I've seen it (only about a million times). A recent story on NPR's "Weekend Edition" had host Scott Simon interviewing a fellow who'd just gotten around to seeing the 1942 film for the first time (evidently that's what constitutes "news" these days). It reminded me of the time, my buddy-in-Bond, Frank, proudly announced that he had finally watched Casablanca (was it at the premiere of Skyfall or Spectre?) I think I asked him what he thought of it after congratulating him and I recall he said "Great!" (or something like that). 

It did, after all, win The Best Picture Oscar of 1944.

I've never written a review of Casablanca—not here or on any previous movie blog. Oh, there was the five-part series of "Don't Make a Scene" entries centered around what other character's think of Humphrey Bogart's character (under the collective title of "Deconstructing Rick") and that said a lot. There's no formal review of the film Casablanca, however, anywhere. It doesn't even show up as one of my "Anytime Movies"—those that I can watch anytime and have the power to keep me to the end, fascinated, over and over. Again, that series is most interesting to me for what's NOT on it than for what's on it.

And Casablanca isn't there.

Casablanca is legendary, because it should NOT have "worked." Production was a mess. Bogart got the role because George Raft and Ronald Reagan didn't play it. Ingrid Bergman was an unknown. Paul Heinreid had more audience appeal. The actors frequently didn't know "why" they were playing the scenes they were playing and were not sure how it would "end" (it's a rather brilliant strategy to not have the actors betray any fore-knowledge lest the audience catch on, but...really, they were still working on the script). It is not a movie of strong "auteur" sensibilities—but its Hungarian director, Michael Curtiz, manages to fill every frame to bursting and his filming strategies have been copied in the decades since, probably as much for nostalgic recognition factor as for the fact that the strategies are so...apt. It was based on a play that flopped, but it was cobbled together by two twin-brother writers and the estimable Howard Koch into a crazy quilt of conflicts and various sides.

Director Michael Curtiz told Bogart to nod, but didn't tell him what he was nodding for or at.
It's to cue the band to play "La Marsellies," an emotional high-point in the film,
and the first instance of Bogart resisting his urge to "stick my neck out for nobody."

And great lines. Quotable lines. Lines so memorable that they're mis-remembered:  "Play it, Sam." (NOT "play it again, Sam") "Here's looking at you, kid." "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find out that GAMBLING is going on in this facility." "I don't mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one." "I was misinformed." "Be careful! There are vultures, VULTURES everywhere." "I remember every detail—the Germans wore gray. You wore blue." "I'm going to die in Casablanca, it's a good spot for it." "We mustn't underestimate 'American blundering.' I was with them when they 'blundered' into Berlin in 1918." "I stick my neck out for nobody." "It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles." "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." "Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor." "Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try and invade." "And remember this gun is pointed right at your heart"--"That's my least vulnerable spot." "You'll get along beautifully in America." "Well, that's the way it goes—one in and one out." "Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." "I'm no good at being noble." "The problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." "We'll always have Paris." And the line that the Epstein brothers realized simultaneously in the middle of L.A. traffic would solve all their script problems: "Round up the usual suspects."

It's a film that exudes the exotic even though it was filmed in Burbank, on Warner stages combined with matte shots (like the one above--see any waves in that ocean?) filling in the details. Other legerdemain done on the cheap complete the picture; the scene below has the actors performing in front of a screen back-projected with model airplanes to improve the scope. It's something they did in the finale at an airport, where to give the proper distance they had model planes attended to by "little people," and lots of fog to increase the illusion.

They could get away with it because Curtiz directed and edited fast and the audience was concentrating on a convoluted plot with equal parts conflicted romance and cloak-and-luger politics played out by a terrific cast of Warner contract players and a new fresh-faced import from Sweden named Ingrid Bergman. Everything resonated. Women liked it...even though Bogart was hardly considered a romantic lead...until then. Men liked it...even if things didn't turn out by the dictates of billing.

And, it's hardly a glamorous story: an ex-pat American, Richard Blaine, is running a saloon in Casablanca where booze flows freely, the gambling is questionable and all the authorities are paid off; Rick's Cafe Americain is a going concern because it is a black market hide-out in a desperate city and its owner, Richard—call him "Rick" (but everybody calls him something different*)—keeps a surly dispassionate view on things. But, don't approach him unless you're working for him. He doesn't drink with the guests, he doesn't fraternize, he sits in lordly isolation at a table against the wall playing chess against himself and keeping an eye out for the glance directed his way by an employee looking for direction. Then, he simply nods and that's the last word. He doesn't get involved in the deals, in the tables, nothing. He keeps things orderly, but for the under-the-table dealings going on in the saloon he has one comeback: "I stick my neck out for nobody." 

On this particular day, there are rumors and desperation flying around: two German couriers who have "letters of transit" out of Morocco to Lisbon, gateway "to the Americas," have been found murdered, their much-sought-after documents missing. They mean freedom for anyone seeking asylum, but the police are stymied, doing what they normally do when they have no other option—"round up the usual suspects." Roust some people to intimidate and see what you can scare out of them. Under pressure from the Nazi's, their interest is in both the murderer and in the papers; but, the letters are in safe-keeping in the one place they don't suspect—hidden in the piano at the Cafe American, hiding in plain sight, Rick's non-commitment being their best camouflage.

But, even a Rick Blaine has his limits. As the original play-title says "Everybody Comes to Rick's" and that includes one particularly prominent (too prominent) Czech partisan named Victor Laszlo (Heinreid). Rick would only have a dispassionate on-looker's interest in Laszlo's struggles to evade Nazi capture, if not for one key element, one a burden that he will not neglect: he has a wife Ilsa Lund (a radiant Bergman).

Both Laszlo and Lund are unfamiliar travelers to Casablanca, but it is Ilsa who arrives at Rick's with extra baggage. She recognizes Sam (Dooley Wilson)—whom she refers to as as "the boy," the only hint of racial inequity in the film—the piano player, and where Sam is, Rick can't be too far away. It's obvious that Ilsa and Rick (and Sam) have a shared past, and he is determined to keep Rick from Ilsa. But, a song request brings on Rick, charging on Sam like a bull, with an accusation of...well, betrayal. But, that protest is cut short when a larger betrayal is brought to mind when he notices Ilsa, and he realizes he was pulled by a siren song, whose first line ("You must remember this...") is both a promise and a curse.

For probably his first time in Casablanca, things get personal for him, and he is pulled into a series of complex triangulations that he is uncomfortable with—triangulations of loyalty and partisanship that he has avoided since coming to the Moroccan city at the edge of freedom and despair. He finds himself just another fish in a small pond.

Rick recovers well, but he spends that eventful evening in an indulgent, sodden reverie (which we see, conveniently, in flashback) over a bottle (or five) in which he reaches the depths of his own personal despair, and for the rest of the movie, he conducts an inner battle with himself and his character, walking the maze of morality while trying to betray...nothing.

The character of Rick is a cypher—to the audience as well as the characters surrounding him in the movie, whether strangers or intimates. He is the big mystery in Casablanca, a man with no past (and professing no future), who must deal when confronted with it, and whose best weapon is his own veneer of inscrutability, walking among the powerful and the weak, with equal contempt showing for both. He is the puzzle at the center of Casablanca, the mystery that cannot be solved...except by himself.

So, why has Casablanca lasted so long? It has been 75 years.

Perhaps it has survived because it lays out a  landscape familiar to us as we shuffle through life—a morally indifferent cesspool where "life is cheap" and everything is expensively out of reach. The only thing worth less is one's word—loyalties are betrayed, women are not only not respected but treated like disposable playthings, authority is corrupt (quite happily and never apologetically), and where even a high-roller like Richard Blaine can stare at the business end of a gun and come to say "Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor," but it's the best that one can do when one has been pushed to the water's edge by the Nazi's, and who do all of these things and worse, and have all the charm of a rubber stamp...and all of the conscience.

In such an atmosphere, an air of nihilism abides, irony substitutes for humor, sarcasm for philosophy, cynicism instead of the naive impulse of positivism or faith. All of that abounds in the film, which exudes sophistication and entertainment value with vast displays of all of it in witty, pointed  rejoinders...but no one laughs. No one dares to. It's a comedy for people with withered hearts.

So, that takes care of the sophisticates (poor, wretched souls!). But, where does that leave the rest of us? Why does Casablanca survive in our minds...and in our hearts?

I would contend that it presents us a fable, a choice that we can live with and hope with. It is because, despite desperation, despite the hopelessness, it shows us, in the most romantic of terms, that—even in that landscape—an instance of nobility—of conscience—is a candle in the darkness and that is heartening (whether it's in the middle of WWII or the Trump Administration). Cities may crumble, all may seem lost, but one act by one lone angel of mercy can dissipate the fog and make it clear again. It may take generosity, it may take courage, it may take inspiration or love, but, whatever it takes, the noble effort is still the best way to fight the ordinary tendency of sloth or indifference. March on. You must remember this.

 

So, it has been 75 years. We will always have Casablanca. The fundamental things still do apply...as time has gone by.

The last of the Casablanca principles to pass on:
Madelein Lebeau, who played Yvonne ("Because, 'Ewonne'...I luff you")
the saloon girl of divided loyalties, who also has her own reckoning.
I've always loved the sauciness of Captain Renault's rude
remark of her: "In her own way, she may constitute a third front!"
She died May of last year at the age of 92. Vive la France!

Casablanca through the years

*That's a telling little detail hidden in the screenplay's infrastructure (and part of the point I was making in "Deconstructing Rick") everybody sees him differently and so all call him something different. He owns, and is central to, "Cafe Rick" so mostly people call him "Rick." But, to Renault, he's "Ricky." To the staff, and most importantly, to Sam, he's "Boss." To the Nazi's, he's "Monsieur Rick" but to Victor Laszlo, he's "Monsieur Blaine." Ilsa calls him something nobody else in the movie does. To her, he's "Richard."