Little Women (1933)

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) Pre-code version of Louisa May Allcott's much-beloved novel of the March family struggling with life in mid-Civil War America. "Pre-code," but we're talking Louisa May Allcott here, so don't expect anything surprising eyebrow raising, other than director Cukor's penchant for laying the iron on stuffed shirts and exposing society's pretensions and hypocrisies.

 

No, this is Little Women, so there is warm homespunnery, with an encouragement towards spunkiness of the actresses—much too old for the parts (but, jeez, Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett, who's going to complain?)—playing the March sisters, consigned to different fates for womanhood in the 19th century: home and hearth, marrying rich, seeking a risky independence (for awhile, anyway) or early death. The story is multi-faceted with the emphasis on self-improvement, charity towards others, positive attitudes in times of strife, and the spark of imagination.

 

Oh, and family values. Ambition is good, but when kept in small orbits...like, within horse-cart distance. Family is all.

Cukor directing Kate Hepburn directing

 

Cukor wanted to work less on the star-crossing and budding relationships and concentrate on the charity, selflessness and bonding in what would become the blueprint for all subsequent versions of Allcott's Women (there had been two previous silent versions), and although times and tastes have changed, one can't quibble too much with the acting, everything is done with such brio and conviction that, even if something questionable does come up, there will be something that punches you in the gut within a minute. Hepburn, of course, shines, but everyone else is good, too, particularly Henry Stephenson as the somewhat reticent Mr. Laurence.

And now, something a little personal: while watching the film, a flash of memory happened as one of the March sisters admonishes the others for quarreling. "Birds in their little nests agree" in a lilting sing-song. I remember as a child (3? 4?) my grandmother saying the exact same words with just the same inflection. The source of the phrase is from "Divine and Moral Songs for Children"* published in 1715 by Isaac Watts. Now, Watts was a prolific hymn-writer, but he was a Protestant (where my family was traditionally Catholic), so I'm not sure where my grandmother picked it up, but it probably was this version of Little Women. 

At the time of its release, RKO's version of Little Women was seen as wholesome entertainment (back in Hollywood's salacious "pre-code era") with an emphasis on "making do" and charity for the less fortunate. 1933 was, after all, deep into The Great Depression and that lilt and those circumstances make me certain my grandmother saw it. My mother certainly did at the age of 22. She was always an admirer of Katherine Hepburn and when the star toured Seattle in 1981 with "The West Side Waltz" (at the 5th Avenue Theater), I made sure to get tickets for her. And me, too.

It's funny how movies can reach back in time and space and link generations together over a shared memory. Small orbits...

 

* Song 17 goes like this:

1. Whatever brawls disturb the street,
There should be peace at home;
Where sisters dwell, and brothers meet,
Quarrels should never come.

2. Birds in their little nests agree;
And ’tis a shameful sight,
When children of one family
Fall out, and chide, and fight.

3. Hard names at first, and threatening
They are but noisy breath,
May grow to clubs and naked swords,
To murder and to death.

4. The devil tempts one mother’s son,
To rage against another;
So wicked Cain was hurried on
‘Till he had kill’d his brother.

5. The wise will let their anger cool,
At least before ’tis night;
But in the bosom of a fool,
It burns till morning light.

6. Pardon, O Lord, our childish rage,
Our little brawls remove;
That, as we grow of riper age,
Our hearts may all be love.

 

Ah, Wilderness!

Ah, Wilderness! (Clarence Brown, 1935) The 1933 Eugene O'Neill play adapted by the wife-husband team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who also wrote The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Diary of Anne Frank (play and adaptations). Just the collective writer credits is reason enough to watch the film, which (I've read in some film circles, incorrectly as it turns out) inspired the "Andy Hardy" series at M-G-M. 

 

"Inspired" as in as loose an interpretation of the term as possible. They're both about families and have Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney in the credits. But, the "Hardy" series never dealt with alcoholism, sloth, and the revolutionary pangs of rebellion and first love that can raise the roof of any American domicile, until it is planed down to respectability (or some form of it). It may be the lightest of O'Neill's plays and so not threatening to the "American values" of M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer. But, the O'Neill name would have appealed to M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg (who had cut back activities after a 1932 heart attack) and his replacement David O. Selznick.

It's not all Currier and Ives at the Miller household in 1906 New England, where father Nat (Barrymore) is a newspaper publisher, sagely juggling the traumas, large and small, happening under his roof, with wife Essie (Spring Byington), children (in order of birth) Arthur (Frank Albertson), Richard (Eric Linden), Mildred (Bonita Granville), and youngest Tommy (Mickey Rooney) and Nat's brother Sid (Wallace Beery) and Essie's sister Lily (Aline MacMahon). Sid is living in his brother's house because he can't hold a job, largely due to his constant drinking. Lily is there out of charity for a spinster, which Sid would love to change, if not for her constant rejection due to his drinking and questionable past.

Then, there's Richard, about to graduate from High School and suffering the pangs of first love, two things that can puff out a guy's chest and mess with his head—as the saying goes "you can tell a Senior, but you can't tell him MUCH."*

With his mind swimming with Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Marx and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and mooning over the girl next door (Cecilia Parker), he thinks himself a man of the world, bound for Yale, and is itching to prove himself, when, frankly, he's still living under his father's roof and hasn't even kissed a girl (or "the" girl, as she's afraid of kissing). The influences and urges set him up to become a failure like his Uncle Sid—although Sid, for all his talk and self-conceit (and self-deception) does have his uses—so, the faltering steps the kid takes to manhood have to be monitored and negotiated.

That includes not citing Marxist tracts in his graduation speech, learning how to drive the family's Stanley Steamer, his passionate love letters to his girl, Muriel, which are intercepted by her father and found to contain passages from Swinburne, leading to the parent storming the Miller residence and threatening to cancel advertising in father's newspaper. Muriel is forced to write a farewell letter to which man-of-world Richard can only blurt "Geewhillickers!" and bust out in tears.

 

To say nothing of his getting roaring drunk and getting rolled by a floozy.

Growing up is tough. And one is reminded of that other dramaturge John Wayne who when assured that that the immaturity of an opponent is a temporary thing and "will learn" usually replied "...if he lives." Nobody learns anything getting killed in the process.

But, O'Neill—and Goodrich and Hackett—makes sure the kid survives long enough to go to Yale. It's a sweet movie, sometimes painful, but everything promises, if not happiness, continuity, and maybe an upward trajectory from the fates of so many in O'Neill's plays, whose foibles and self-delusions are given a light dusting of sugar in Ah, Wilderness!

 

* “You can tell a freshman by his silly, eager look / You can tell a sophomore ’cause he carries one less book / You can tell a junior by his fancy airs and such / You can tell a senior, but you can’t tell him much.”

My Brother Talks to Horses

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day....

My Brother Talks to Horses (Fred Zinnemann, 1947) Oh now, THIS is a curiosity...Ten years after he'd immigrated to the U.S. from Austria and started making short films at M-G-M, five years after graduating to B-features and three years after his first hit for the studio, The Seventh Cross (starring Spencer Tracy), director Fred Zinnemann—who would go on to make High Noon, From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons, The Nun's Story, The Day of the Jackal and other great films—made this odd one, his second film in a row to feature child-actor Jackie "Butch" Jenkins.

Jenkins had been a hit with audiences in roles in The Human Comedy and National Velvet, where he was a spunky little performer, far afield from the "perfect-looking" child stars that M-G-M usually trotted out in kid roles. Young Jenkins had lazy wide-set-apart eyes and splayed teeth and perpetually looked like that "phase" your parents hope you grow out of. But, he was just popular enough to graduate from playing Mickey Rooney's little brother to...Peter Lawford's little brother...? Well, at least he gets top billing.

Young Master Jenkins plays Lewie Penrose, an odd little boy from an odd little family just this side of Thornton Wilder, living in the Baltimore of 1909. Ma Penrose (Spring Byington) insists that her dinner guests practice yoga before saying pre-meal grace. Ma's boarder, Mr. Puddy (an inventor) is proud to offer the diners his latest invention for refreshment—beer...in an edible bottle. Ma's other son John (Lawford) is an inventor, as well, and he's courting Martha Sterling (Beverly Tyler) but his prospects are meager if his affections are ardent.

Lewie talks to horses, all kinds of them. His best equine friend is The Bart, a racehorse owned by Mr. Bledsoe (Edward Arnold), with whom he regularly converses on his way to school. The Bart's trainer, Mr. Mordechai (Ernest Whitman) confirms this. Complications ensue, especially when Mr. Bledsoe takes Lewie and John to the races, and after having a confab with the horses, confidently tells the party who's going to race...and that horse then does. Word gets around and pretty soon everybody, including some pretty shifty gamblers, see Lewie as a way to get rich quick. That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid.

It's lightweight stuff, and what the filmmakers do with it takes on some dark tones, especially when the gamblers start to rough little Lewie up. I'm not sure that a little darkness in a kid's movie is a bad thing, but if I were a gifted child and saw the complications that this movie described, I might want to act a little less gifted. Adults are creeps!

On the other hand, it is not too surprising to see Zimmermann's touch on this—especially once one has seen it. For a low-budget kid's movie, it looks very good and revels in its period details—so many straw hats and fascinators! It's not that much a leap to see how Zinnemann would leap into one of the great movie craftsmen, able to pick and choose his assignments—I mean, if he can make My Brother Talks to Horses look good...—and his next movie—also a kind of kid's movie—would provide the good transition from making entertainment for kids to entertainment for adults, without insulting the intelligence on anybody. Not even the horses.