Lonelyhearts
Vincent J Donehue (1958)
Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts reached the screen almost immediately after its publication in 1933, in a movie called Advice to the Lovelorn, directed by Alfred L Werker and starring Lee Tracy. Howard Teichman adapted the book for the stage in 1957. Although Miss Lonelyhearts closed on Broadway after only twelve performances, it’s acknowledged, along with West’s novel, as the basis for the producer Dore Schary’s screenplay for Lonelyhearts. (This was the first of only two feature films directed by Vincent J Donehue: the second was Sunrise at Campobello (1960), on which he again collaborated with Schary, the author of the Tony-winning stage play on which the film was based, as well as the screenwriter and producer.) The plot of Lonelyhearts assumes that the agony aunt column is an essentially exploitative newspaper feature – one that relies on the feebleness and need for attention of those who write for help, and that palms these correspondents off with facile, generic solutions to their problems. Lonelyhearts focuses on William Shrike, the cynical editor of a small-town local paper who initiates an agony column, and Adam White, a younger man desperate for work as a journalist. Adam reluctantly accepts Shrike’s offer of writing the daily ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ feature and comes to take seriously the unhappy situation of those who write to him. When Shrike encourages him actually to meet one of them, Adam becomes more involved with her than he meant to be. (This is the pretext for the tonally misleading strapline on United Artists’ theatrical poster for Lonelyhearts: ‘His name was Adam … but he wasn’t the first man to yield to temptation!’) The film explores, as well as the journalistic ethics of the two principals, the morality and miseries of their own personal lives.
Looking the picture of Dorian Gray (at the end of the story), Montgomery Clift seems too old, both physically and spiritually, for the role of Adam, whose compassion and idealism are meant to contrast with the jaded malevolence of his editor, played by Robert Ryan. Clift moves as if in pain; this and his features combine to make Adam appear nearly as old as Shrike – and older than the father (Frank Overton) of Adam’s girlfriend, Justy. At one point, Adam says to Shrike that he’d ‘like to know what’s eating’ the editor. The viewer, though, already knows what that is: it’s the explanation of Adam’s palpable inner anguish that you’re waiting to see revealed. Montgomery Clift is an expressionist study of a man being gnawed away from inside: Adam White has a false surname and a related dark secret but Clift is so intense that, even when the lurid explanation arrives (his father is in prison for the murder of Adam’s mother and the man with whom she was having an affair), it seems inadequate to what the actor is expressing. Clift radiates sensitivity throughout. It’s no surprise that Adam takes so seriously the problems in Miss Lonelyhearts’s in-tray. It’s much harder to believe when, initially, he jokes with colleagues on the newspaper about these letters. Although his evident fragility helps to give Adam White a suggestion of innocence, Clift’s other qualities limit his effectiveness in the role. Still, he does some fine acting, for example in Adam’s gentler conversations with Justy (Dolores Hart) and with Shrike’s barfly wife, Florence (Myrna Loy). In these exchanges, Clift also takes the opportunity to show some of his comedic skill.
Lonelyhearts is wordy – each of the half-dozen or so main characters is able to articulate an understanding of their unhappy situation – but the literariness of the script is in some ways convincing. Although Shrike is given too many lines with which to demonstrate his outlook on life, Robert Ryan’s reading of them conveys how this practised cynicism has become second nature to the man. Like many a rhetorician, Shrike tends to triplicate his insights but Ryan ensures that he never becomes a windbag. There’s a continuing force to what he says: Shrike’s words may needle or bludgeon Florence, Adam and the other journalists – either way, the words get under their skin. So strongly does Robert Ryan register that you’re able to ignore one of the apparent improbabilities of the story: when Adam wants a job, Shrike asks nothing about his previous writing experience – he simply asks Adam to compose a newspaper article on the spot. Ryan immediately makes you believe that Shrike couldn’t care less about Adam’s background, that the editor is interested purely in testing and using people. (Witty exchanges of impromptu journalese between Ryan and Clift bookend the main story and work particularly well.) Shrike is never more lethal than when he’s smiling. There’s a light in Ryan’s eyes too when he dispenses venom but what happens in those eyes when he’s bested in conversation by Adam is something to behold.
Myrna Loy, in the sequence in which Florence Shrike voices her anguish at what her marriage has become, is conventionally, breathily desperate but her soigné stiffness in other scenes gets over effectively Florence’s predicament. As the startlingly unstable Fay Doyle, the letter-writer with whom Adam chooses to meet, Maureen Stapleton, who made her film debut here, energises Lonelyhearts from her very first appearance. Fay is both downtrodden and dangerous. In retrospect, her opening scene doesn’t make sense: as she sees him leave the bar where he’s been with the Shrikes, Fay asks William Shrike about Adam, who ‘seems familiar’ to her. Whether or not that’s an invention on Fay’s part, it’s puzzling that she appears not to recognise Adam when she subsequently accepts an invitation to meet at his office. After things have gone too far there, Adam takes Fay back home in a taxi and explains that he doesn’t intend to see her again. Maureen Stapleton’s sudden switch into molten anger is spectacularly good.
The plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that Advice to the Lovelorn is substantially less pessimistic than Nathanael West’s novel. Lonelyhearts, however, is a thoroughly unhappy story until its last two minutes. (It’s possible that Dore Schary and Victor J Donehue didn’t intend Justy’s family life to seem grim but an early shot of her father’s car among many others at a drive-in movie is desolating and I found her two brothers depressing rather than the careless, wholesome light relief they may be meant to be.) A husband’s intolerance of his wife’s unfaithfulness is a persistent theme (and the word ‘tramp’ occurs more than once): Shrike, although accused by Florence of serial adultery himself, won’t forgive her a single drunken indiscretion ten years ago; Adam’s father (Onslow Stevens) still dreams recurrently about his revenge on his wife and her lover. Fay Doyle threatens her husband Pat (Frank Maxwell) with a kitchen knife but he later turns up with a gun at the newspaper offices and points it at Adam. The withholding of any scenes of murder (or suicide – you think for a moment, in the final scene, that Shrike will use the gun that Pat Doyle has handed over to shoot himself) is dramatically effective but the core material is too bleak for the relatively happy ending to avoid feeling tacked on. Adam’s humanity is still intact, he and Justy are reconciled, life will go on for the Shrikes and the Doyles. That’s a melancholy prospect for both those couples yet the tone of the closing moments is tentatively hopeful.
27 December 2014