Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • To Each His Own

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mitchell Leisen (1946)

    Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas may be the paradigm but self-sacrificing mothers weren’t exactly a rare breed in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s (The Old Maid, Mildred Pierce and so on).  The children of these women might be (a) illegitimate or (b) spoilt, brattish ingrates or (c) beneficiaries of their mother’s unstinting hard work and knack for making money – or all three.  These various elements of what amounts to a sub-genre all feature in To Each His Own, starring Olivia de Havilland.  Mitchell Leisen’s film, with a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry, begins and ends in London during World War II.   Josephine ‘Jody’ Norris (de Havilland), a forty-something spinster, is fire-watching with a middle-aged English gent (Roland Culver).   Their exchanges are tetchy until he nearly falls from a church roof and Jody saves his life.  She then warily accepts his invitation to dinner.  Lord Desham (as he turns out to be) begins to talk about his sad past and presently solitary life.  He’s sure that he’s spotted in Miss Norris a lonely kindred spirit.

    Jody has a mid-Atlantic accent which, for once, makes sense:  she was born and raised in America before coming to London in her late twenties to live and work.  At the restaurant with Lord Desham, she’s approached by a young man in uniform who recognises her as a former resident of his home town of Piersen Falls.  He mentions by name a US air force colleague, also from Piersen Falls, who’s travelling down from Yorkshire, where he’s been posted, and due to arrive in London imminently.  This news is enough for Jody to terminate her outing with Lord Desham and hotfoot it to Victoria Station.  The train carrying Gregory ‘Griggsy’ Piersen (sic:  his surname and the place name are the same) is running very late.  Waiting in the station, Jody remembers her youth – when she helped out in her father’s drug store in Piersen Falls, declined the suit of a couple of beaus, and enjoyed a whirlwind romance with Bart Cosgrove (John Lund), a dashing US Army Air Service pilot.  Bart visits the town on a World War I bond drive.  He and Jody become sweethearts but Bart is killed in action in Europe.  Shortly afterwards, she discovers that she’s carrying his baby.  Although she confides in her kindly father (Griff Barnett), Jody knows that the stigma of having a child out of wedlock will make small-town life intolerable.  A sympathetic nurse on the maternity ward (Victoria Horne) offers to help execute a plan whereby Jody’s baby son will be left on a doorstep in Piersen Falls with a note explaining he’s a war orphan.  Jody, being the kind, conscientious citizen that she is, will take the baby in and raise him as her own.

    Corinne Piersen (Mary Anderson), who married Jody’s suitor Alex (Phillip Terry) on the rebound, has just lost her newborn (first) baby.  The well-meaning Belle Ingram (Alma Macrorie, also the film’s editor) is the local Mother Hubbard on whose doorstep the ‘orphan’ is left.  She gives him to Alex and Corinne.  Jody tries, throughout the childhood of Griggsy (Billy Ward), to spend as much time with her son as she can:  this becomes very difficult once Corinne, already jealous of Jody because Alex stills holds a torch for her, knows that she’s also the boy’s birth mother.  When her father dies, Jody goes to New York, to take up the offer of a job with her other ex-suitor, Mac Tilton (Bill Goodwin).  His line of work turns out to be bootlegging; Jody, undaunted, uses Mac’s hooch-making equipment to create cosmetic products instead and she’s soon a successful businesswoman.   When Alex and Corinne fall on hard times, Jody bails out them out in exchange for Griggsy but the child, in spite of being pampered by his doting ‘aunt’, misses the woman who raised him and who, as far as he’s concerned, is his mother.  It’s when Griggsy returns to Corinne that Jody crosses the Atlantic to put her past behind her.

    The first part of the film is the best.  Mitchell Leisen takes time to introduce and start to develop the relationship between Jody and Lord Desham – enough time, and conversation, to ensure, thanks to the actors and the script, that we’re interested in both these middle-aged people in their own right, not just as a means of taking us into the main story.   The abundance of dialogue is less welcome as the film continues.  Bart Cosgrove, on his flying visit to Piersen Falls, is a verbose man of action; there’s a lot of talk throughout To Each His Own.  In the middle part – the main part – of the narrative, it becomes ever harder to shake off a sense that the movie is going through the masochistic motions of a mother-love-cum-illegitimacy melodrama.   The war orphan plan is not only bound to go wrong according to the heartbreaking conventions of this kind of movie:  it immediately strikes you less as not quote foolproof than as utterly foolhardy.   It’s not clear, since Griggsy has been legally adopted by Corinne and Alex, what point there is in Jody’s repeated insistence that the boy is rightfully hers.  (She doesn’t insist in a way that suggests she’s irrationally unable to face facts:  she seems to be stating a reasonable claim.)  Corinne, as played by Mary Anderson, is exceedingly unappealing – we don’t feel this woman’s understandable anxiety and insecurity about Jody’s unintended hold on Alex and her profound connection to Griggsy.  It doesn’t help either that Griggsy himself is far from endearing, though Billy Ward is better when the kid is upset than when he’s acting cute.

    The post-flashback climax to the film, although it’s no less anchored in formula, is effective enough.  Having the same actor play Bart Cosgrove and the grown-up Griggsy is an obvious idea but it pays off – even if John Lund is no great shakes in either role.  (Lund, already well known as a stage actor, was making his movie debut here.  Although he went on to do other films, he never became a screen star.)   During Griggsy’s few days in London, Jody continues to deny herself , in order to indulge the son who knows he was adopted but still doesn’t know the identity of his biological mother.  Griggsy’s insouciant-verging-on-ungrateful acceptance of Jody’s relentless help is rather startling – probably more startling than it’s meant to be (‘And youth is cruel, and has no remorse’). Griggsy is desperate to marry his English sweetheart Liz (Virginia Welles); Lord Desham, who proves himself able to ‘pull strings’ whenever the script requires, makes this happen.  At the wedding reception, where the bride and groom and guests dance, Liz mentions to Griggsy that Aunt Jody is looking at him ‘as if you were her own son’ and the penny drops.   ‘I think this is our dance, mother,’ is the last line of the film, as Griggsy and Jody go into a waltz.   Olivia de Havilland was only thirty when she made To Each His Own: what’s remarkable about her (Oscar-winning) performance is that she’s more interesting and persuasive as the middle-aged Jody than she is playing the woman closer to her own age.  As the older Jody, de Havilland’s line readings are more strongly felt and distinctive.  Her movements and mannerisms are natural – her make-up and costumes look right too.  Roland Culver – deftly humorous, emotionally subtle yet incisive – is excellent as Lord Desham.

    11 July 2016

  • Walpurgis Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Valborgsmässoafton

    Gustaf Edgren (1935)

    The film is being shown at the BFI as part of the Ingrid Bergman season, which includes pictures she made in Sweden before emigrating to Hollywood.   The basic structure and imperatives of the story are formulaic – true love is tested and the lovers separated, eventually the good are rewarded and the bad are punished.   There are some absurdities, particularly in propelling the story to its happy ending, as the romantic lead simply extricates himself from the foreign legion that he’s joined, returns home to hand himself in – then emerges from the police station in the next shot with everything sorted out.  In most respects though, the film seems intelligently fresh.    It begins in the office of a local newspaper, the Morning Post – with a debate among the editor and his colleagues about the reasons behind and the implications of the falling Swedish birth rate.   This introduces the story of Lena (Bergman), the daughter of Fredrik Bergström, the senior journalist on the paper.  A spinster (and expected to devote herself as necessary to keeping house for her father), she gives up her job as the secretary of Johan Borg, a successful businessman, because her unspoken and, as far as she can tell, unrequited love for him is proving too painful.   It turns out the love is requited:  Borg’s own marriage to the cold but promiscuous Clary has become increasingly unhappy because of her refusal to start a family.   The plot involves Clary’s need for an abortion, an attempt at blackmail as a result of this, and the consequences of an incident in which the blackmailer is shot dead.  (The gun is fired by Clary, in a virtual act of self-defence on behalf of her husband, but in a way that appears to incriminate Borg himself.)

    Gustaf Edgren moves from one scene to another unemphatically.  In the first part of the film, this tends to make the story seem dramatically underpowered.  The fact that it was (I assume) not yet technically possible to make instant editing transitions between scenes gives the film a slightly disjointed quality.  But Edgren’s unassertive style begins to pay dividends:  it leaves you wanting more, sometimes makes you realise – after the scene is over – that something dramatically or emotionally significant has occurred without its being crudely stressed.  The acting is very well orchestrated.  I enjoyed the essentially (but not reductively) comical flavour and playing of Bergström’s colleagues at the newspaper, especially the editor Gustav Palm (Erik Berglund), who has a look of G K Chesterton – and an especially good moment when he confesses to being a covert milk-drinker in the office.  Palm has kept this secret by putting the milk into a professionally acceptable beer bottle.  The rotten wife (Karin Kavli) and the blackmailer (George Rydeberg) are played in a more conventional melodramatic style but Lars Hanson as Borg is interestingly impersonal and opaque in the early stages – it’s not easy either to understand Lena’s passion for Borg or to read his motives.     And the pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjöström is fascinating.  There’s a scene in which daughter and father face off that seems a much larger moment – at this distance in time a watershed in Swedish cinema:  the incipient international screen star confronts the illustrious director of silent films.   You can see in Bergman’s acting here the qualities that made her so distinctive in 1940s Hollywood – the combination of propriety and sensuality, the ability to radiate a character’s feelings as if from within rather than through histrionic detail.   Sjöström brings a fine blend of theatricality and naturalism to the role of Bergström.  He creates a fully convincing portrait of a socially responsible and intelligent man whose professional success increases his impregnability as a respected patriarch but who is a benign tyrant in his relationship with his daughter.

    The BFI note comprises brief extracts from Swedish and New York reviews of Walpurgis Night at the time of its release (the former are highly enthusiastic, the latter patronising – and shocked at the abortion theme), along with an ‘NFT programme note’ by David Shipman.    Shipman says that ‘This film attempts a seriousness it doesn’t afterwards maintain by starting with a discussion as to whether crowded housing conditions is [sic] the reason for the low birth-rate’.   I think the screenplay, by Edgren and Oscar Rydqvist, is thematically more consistent and dramatically more sophisticated than this suggests.   The film seemed to me pro-children – and to express that view in a range of ways:  in the opening discussion (where Bergström, who deplores the falling birth rate, commands a respect that his callow colleagues don’t); in the family gathering for Bergström’s sixtieth birthday (and the song sung there by his grandchildren); in the morbid consequences attaching to the abortion; in the lesson learned by Bergström that he needs to let his daughter live her life and by his fellow workers at the Morning Post that they should get on with procreating; in Palm’s conversion from alcohol to milk; in the fact that  Walpurgis night in Sweden marks the advent of spring, the start of new life.  Some of Edgren’s and Rydqvist’s illustrations of their theme may be questionable now but the variety of these is admirable and they steer as clear as possible of sentimentality.  Apart from its considerable historical interest, Walpurgis Night is greatly entertaining and emotionally satisfying.

    8 January 2009

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