Daily Archives: Wednesday, April 20, 2016

  • Miracle on 34th Street

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Seaton (1947)

    I’d always thought it was a children’s film but it turns out to be anything but.  It’s about proving the existence (or otherwise) of Santa Claus so I guess it would be alarming to infant believers and ridiculous to kids who’ve just grown out of the idea.  The Santa on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York is drunk if not disorderly.  A distinguished elderly man with a white beard complains to the event director Doris Walker that the sot is bringing the name of Santa (‘my name’) into disrepute and the anxious Doris persuades the old gentleman to take over.   He does the job so well he’s hired to continue as Santa at Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street – but he’s a Santa with a difference.  If a child wants something that Macy’s don’t stock, he advises the parents to try another store instead – even if it’s Gimbels, Macy’s arch-rival at the time[1], on 33rd Street.  The unconventional approach of the old gentleman, who insists that his name is Kris Kringle, proves so commercially innovative and headline-getting, however, that before long Gimbels are imitating it.  (It’s remarkable testimony to the self-confidence of both Macy’s and Gimbels at the time that they allowed their names to be used in this way.)

    In the meantime, however, Doris – who doesn’t hold with her daughter believing in Father Christmas, let alone with Kris believing he is Santa – arranges for him to be ‘psychologically evaluated’.  He passes with flying colours but antagonises the psychologist, Granville Sawyer, by calling into question the latter’s own mental health.   When Kris learns that Sawyer has told Alfred, a teenager who sweeps the floors at Macy’s, that he’s got mental problems, he lets fly at Sawyer verbally and bops him on the head with his walking cane.  In revenge, Sawyer gets Kris confined to a mental hospital. Kris has been lodging with Fred Gailey, a young lawyer who lives in the same block as, and is very keen on, Doris.   Fred successfully applies for a court hearing to prove Kris’s sanity and unique identity.  There are happy endings all round.  Miracle on 34th Street is a very successful mixture of conservative sentimentality and light-hearted, sharp-eyed satire.  On the one hand, the rational, divorced, working woman Doris has to learn the error of her ways, and psychology is beyond the pale.  On the other, Kris Kringle is vindicated in court through a comical convergence of the self-interested strategies of commercial competitors, ambitious local politicos and workers at the New York post office, who want to get rid of thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus.

    Edmund Gwenn, with a George Bernard Shaw beard, is splendid as Kris Kringle.  He plays the role with great wit and charm but dead straight, steering well clear of the roguishness that could have made it insufferable:  Gwenn is so good that he’s thoroughly believable both as someone deeply delusional and as Father Christmas.   (He deservedly won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  The film also won writing Oscars for George Seaton and Valentine Davis.)  Doris’s young daughter Susan, whom Kris helps to rediscover her belief in Santa, is played by an eight-year-old Natalie Wood with startling competence and precision.  She does great things with her eyes and with bubble gum:  it’s just a pity that you can’t watch her without being reminded of the adult performer she became.  Maureen O’Hara, as Doris, could use some of Wood’s liveliness.  O’Hara is lethally dull and John Payne as Frank is likeable mainly because he’s so ordinary – but their romance never feels central to the story anyway.  There are some highly enjoyable turns in the minor roles – notably Gene Lockhart as the anxiously droll New York Supreme Court judge, William Frawley as his cigar-smoking political adviser, Jerome Cowan as the harassed district attorney prosecuting Kris Kringle, and Porter Hall as the egregious Sawyer (with a very funny shadow movement signalling his own psychological hang-ups).  Thelma Ritter, as a weary shopper at Macy’s, is on screen for only a couple of minutes but they’re a couple of cherishable minutes.  Jack Albertson’s appearance is even briefer but he’s great as a quick-thinking post office employee.

    23 December 2010

    [1] The rivalry was so notorious that, according to Wikipedia, the phrase “Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” was once general parlance in the US ‘as a put-off to inquiring people, the implication being that a company does not give information out to its competitors’.  Gimbels folded in the 1980s.

     

  • Tell Me Lies

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Brook (1968)

    This London Film Festival screening of Tell Me Lies, its first public showing in this country since a brief appearance on its original release, was made all the more special by the presence of eighty-eight-year-old Peter Brook, who introduced the film and answered Clyde Jeavons’s and audience questions from the NFT1 stage afterwards.   Tell Me Lies has its origins in a theatre piece, US, conceived by Dennis Cannan and performed by the RSC at the Aldwych in 1966.  The punning title refers both to the United States and to the piece’s view that the US involvement in the Vietnam War also requires Britain (‘us’), whose way of life and fortunes are so bound up with America’s, to examine its conscience on the subject of Vietnam.   In Tell Me Lies, several RSC actors, more or less playing themselves, are moved by the photograph of a wounded, bandaged Vietnamese child to take a public position against the war.  Part drama and part documentary, the film shows these ‘characters’ engaging with actual conversations or protests about Vietnam that were taking place in London at the time.  (At one point, Mark Jones, in the central role, attends an event in which Paul Scofield, among others, is taking part.  The effect is somewhat surreal.  The actor Mark Jones, as a politically engaged actor called Mark, interviews the real Paul Scofield – who would go on to play the title role in Peter Brook’s next piece of cinema, the 1971 film of King Lear.)  It’s cause for celebration that Tell Me Lies has been restored (by the Technicolor Foundation and the Groupama Gan Foundation) and seen again but the Q&A that followed the BFI screening was more interesting than much of the film itself.

    For once, the questions in a session of this kind were good ones.   What effect did working on the piece have on the RSC actors concerned after the cameras stopped rolling?   How did Brook stage the remarkable episode in which Mark Jones and Pauline Munro debate Vietnam with guests at a drinks party who include Kingsley Amis, Peregrine Worsthorne and Ivor Richard?   The answer was pretty straightforward:  Brook talked about a ‘directorial device’ which he then revealed to be Scotch – the great and the good had been invited to a party and given plenty to drink.  Presumably the well-oiled talkers were too absorbed in their debates, or even themselves, to wonder why they were being filmed – Brook didn’t otherwise explain what the guests thought of the cameras in the room.  The same questioner also asked about ‘the black actors’ in the party sequence.  ‘That was no black actor’, replied Brook sharply, ‘that was Stokely Carmichael’.   Fascinating as this section is as a piece of cinema, I could only agree with what Ivor Richard, then a junior minister in the Wilson government, had to say:  regardless of whether Britain was morally compelled to oppose what the Americans were doing in Vietnam, our potential influence on US policy was very limited indeed.

    What was the process of adapting the stage material for the screen?   And could Brook – who, in his introductory remarks, described the world situation of today as worse than that of 1967 – elaborate on how he compared then and now, and explain what action he thought was needed in 2013?   In response to these questions, Brook was charming but cryptic-going-on-slippery.  He talked interestingly about the translation of Marat-Sade from stage to screen (and how crucial he felt it was for the camera to be mobile enough to replicate a theatre audience’s ability to choose what to focus on) but he was comparatively vague about Tell Me Lies.  He said that none of the actors in the film had been in the theatre piece but I’d be very surprised if it was true that, as he also said, each scene in the film was purely improvised.   The more choric or choreographed sequences – one featuring Glenda Jackson and Michael Williams particularly comes to mind – must have been worked up  (and, I’d guess, drawn from US)  to the same extent that the songs – words by Adrian Mitchell, music (by Richard Peaslee) – presumably were.  (Several of these numbers have an oddly conventional, big-band-ish orchestration.)  Brook refused to be drawn into giving advice on political action (‘it’s up to ourselves – each one of us’).  At the same time, he qualified his earlier remark about things getting worse by suggesting that more widespread cynicism about politicians was a step in the right direction.

    Peter Brook took Clyde Jeavons to task for describing Tell Me Lies as ‘agitprop’ – it is, Brook insisted, ‘ “agit” but not “prop“ ‘.   He felt strongly that the piece did not promote a particular point of view about the Vietnam War although it seems inconceivable that anyone watching the film could infer that a decent case could be made for American involvement:  it’s the one-sidedness that makes Tell Me Lies, although it’s a valuable historical record, sometimes tedious.  Brook explained that the film’s title was a sarcastic dig not only at politicians’ duplicity but also at the weakness of the people who elect them.  The imperative is, in other words, a plea to governments, from those of us who’d rather not sustain a morally engaged position, to shelter us with falsehoods – give us an excuse for not facing the truth.  Clyde Jeavons praised Tell Me Lies for a radical dynamism that kept it fresh after nearly half a century and meant that ‘it could have been made today’.   What gives the film distinction is that it wouldn’t be made now – not, at any rate, by someone of the stature of Peter Brook.

    20 October 2013

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