Monthly Archives: March 2019

  • The Miracle Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Capra (1931)

    As Florence Fallon, a minister’s daughter, Barbara Stanwyck makes a quiet entrance in her and The Miracle Woman’s opening scene.  The church service taking place is to be the last conducted by Florence’s father before his replacement by a younger preacher.   As she makes her way to and stands at the lectern, you need to look twice to check that this is Stanwyck, so unremarkable, even dowdy, is her appearance.  When Florence starts to speak, she does so tentatively.  In the course of the next few minutes of The Miracle Woman, she’s transformed.  Her volume gradually increases as she makes clear her bitter resentment of the treatment of her father, forced into retirement by the church elders, after many years of loyal service.  Branding the whole congregation hypocrites, Florence announces that her father won’t be making his scheduled farewell appearance because, broken-hearted, he died in her arms a few minutes ago.  Stanwyck builds this impassioned speech so excitingly that you want to applaud.  The church is silent, though.  The entire congregation has fled, but for one.

    The last man standing is Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), a huckster-promoter who sees a big future for Florence as a celebrity evangelist.  (The screenplay by Jo Swerling and Dorothy Howell is an adaptation of a play, Bless You, Sister, supposedly inspired by the career of Aimee Semple McPherson.  The play’s authors were John Meehan and Robert Riskin – the latter went on to write regularly for Frank Capra.)  While Barbara Stanwyck compels belief in Florence’s angry disillusion with the religion she’s been raised in, it’s less clear why Hornsby discerns in her a talent for religious illusionism – but he has to for the story to move forward.   When we next see Florence, she’s the high priestess of a ‘Temple of Happiness’ that travels the country performing theatrical stunts/fake miracles to huge audiences.  Hornsby is her manager.

    Frank Capra’s description of evangelism as show business is sharp-eyed and level-headed, a blend that reinforces the bizarreness of the enterprise.  This is one of the strengths of The Miracle Woman; another is the interaction of pretence and authenticity in the story.  When he hears Florence’s inspirational spiel on the radio, blinded war veteran and music composer manqué John Carson (David Manners), preparing to jump from an upstairs window, decides life is worth living after all.  After their first meeting, when he attends one of her shows, John and Florence start meeting socially.  He conducts a courtship with the help of his ventriloquist’s dummy, who can say things John can’t bring himself to say.  Stanwyck gives Florence, even in her public performances, a streak of cynicism that the film audience can pick up even if the onscreen audience can’t; but it’s the look in Florence’s eyes, as she grows closer to John and contemplates his doubly blind adoration of her, that reveals the depth of her self-loathing.  When she breaks down and admits to him she’s a sham, John insists that she has genuinely helped people – he knows it from personal experience.  In order to try and restore Florence’s faith in herself, he pretends that she has performed a miracle and he has recovered his sight.  Although she quickly realises he hasn’t, John’s make-believe strengthens Florence’s love for him.

    Hornsby blackmails Florence into travelling abroad with him – officially to the Holy Land though he actually has Monte Carlo in mind.  Moved by John’s devotion, she intends, however, to use the occasion of her farewell show to tell her followers the truth about herself and the Temple of Happiness set-up.  As might be expected, this is the climax of The Miracle Woman.   There’s a showdown with Hornsby, who accidentally starts a fire that rapidly engulfs the Temple.  (The blaze is visualised most impressively by Capra and his cinematographer, Joseph Walker.)  For the second time in the film, Florence’s congregation departs at speed.  Blind he may be but John feels his way towards her unconscious body and rescues Florence from the flames.  In an epilogue to the main action, Hornsby is walking down a New York street with a prizefighter whose career he’s now promoting.  He catches sight of a Salvation Army band and Florence at the forefront of it.  ‘And she gave up a million bucks for that, the poor sap’, Hornsby scornfully remarks.  Florence reads a telegram just received from John:  doctors have told him it may be possible to restore his sight; in any event, he loves and wants to marry her.   As for Florence’s faith in God and humanity, that has certainly  been restored.  She marches down the street with her Salvation Army colleagues, singing ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’, tears of joy on her face.

    Frank Capra, a practising (Catholic) Christian, sets out his stall clearly at the start.  The opening titles include not only an apt verse from the Bible (‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves’ – Matthew 7:15) but also an explicit declaration of intent:

    ‘The Miracle Woman is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s choicest gift to humanity – FAITH.’

    What follows, as will be clear from the above, is quite a melodrama – although, as in the previous year’s Ladies of Leisure, Capra’s use of music is judiciously rationed.  That the film delivers emotionally as a demonstration of the redeeming power of love is down largely to the odd combination of performances in the three main roles:  Stanwyck is tremendous; David Manners is limited but underplays appealingly; Sam Hardy is rather dull – a weightless heavy.   This may not have been intentional but the under-powered villain of the piece makes it easier for Capra to illustrate a human potential for goodness – there’s no substantial opposition.  Beryl Mercer, in the next biggest role (obviously written though it is), is enjoyable as John Carson’s well-meaning housekeeper.

    8 March 2019

  • The Lost People

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bernard Knowles (1949)

    The BFI curator Jo Botting gave one of her most enjoyable introductions to this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ screening.  Highly informative about the source material for The Lost People, she was also unflinching in quoting examples of the film’s largely negative reception in 1949.  The screenplay by Bridget Boland is adapted from her play Cockpit, first staged the previous year.  The setting of both play and film is a theatre in Germany, shortly after the end of World War II.  The building currently serves as a displaced persons centre, supervised by British soldiers, for refugees and recently released prisoners of war.   The 1948 production of Cockpit at the Playhouse Theatre in London was innovative.   The displaced person characters – including, among others, Serbs and Croats, Russians and Poles – often spoke in their own language.  Throughout the play, actors popped up in various parts of the auditorium to deliver their lines.  Cockpit didn’t enjoy a long run but a review in the Times described it as a ‘hazardous but entirely successful experiment in applying the technique of the documentary film to the stage’.

    After a short opening sequence outdoors, The Lost People moves inside the theatre and stays there.  The plot involves characters wanting to get out of the centre and a suspected outbreak of bubonic plague within it that means no one can – so the single indoor setting retains some of the claustrophobia that must have been a major feature of Cockpit.  The lingual complexity of the stage production isn’t retained.  Since the bulk of British cinemagoers of the time weren’t used to watching subtitled fare, this might seem an inevitable concession to commercial realism.  At any rate, with everyone speaking English the film doesn’t present verbal misunderstanding as a cause of, or analogue to, the tribal tensions at the heart of the story.

    As the Wikipedia plot synopsis puts it, ‘the displaced people, after uniting against fascism for five years, begin to disintegrate into their own ancient feuds: Serb against Croat, Pole against Russian, resistance fighter against collaborator and everyone against the Jews’.   The suspected outbreak of a deadly disease temporarily restores a common enemy and corps d’esprit.  Once the fears of plague have been allayed, internecine hostilities resume and result in the killing of a young Polish woman – in a case of mistaken identity.   In the closing speech, Captain Ridley, the British officer in charge of the centre, solemnly reminds its occupants that it’s now ‘up to you’ to decide whether to co-exist peacefully.  Delivered to camera, the words are thus addressed to not only the other characters but also the film’s audience.  The Lost People is dramatically primitive but decidedly didactic.

    Jo Botting said that Dennis Price, who plays Ridley, came in for especially harsh censure from contemporary reviewers because he had some of the script’s ‘direst’ (Botting’s word) lines to speak.   The last point is right enough – Ridley represents an essentially complacent chauvinism, a Britain-knows-best mentality – but I thought Price’s acting was good, certainly good enough to prevent the film’s peroration from being laughable.  Besides, Ridley is regularly on the receiving end of criticism from certain of the refugees.  Marie (Siobhan McKenna), the resistance worker whom he first meets in the outside world when both are en route to the theatre and to whom he’s instantly attracted, is repeatedly too clever for him.  Since he speaks in the voice of what was surely, in British WWII-themed films of the time, conventional authority and good sense, it’s interesting that Ridley is cut down to size as often as he is.

    Price isn’t nearly as ridiculous as some of the Anglophone actors playing displaced persons.  They typically speak in heavy-duty Mittel-European accents.  Some wear make-up designed to give them a war-ravaged look but which suggests, rather, that the refugees have been amusing themselves applying Leichner left in the dark theatre.   I didn’t think Siobhan McKenna was any great shakes as Marie but she keeps up a passable French accent:  it’s both daft and insulting to McKenna that Marie explains that she’s actually Irish but her second husband was French.  Richard Attenborough and Mai Zetterling are Jan and Lili, a young couple (from different sides of Europe) wed in the centre by a priest (Harcourt Williams) who was tortured by the Nazis.  Attenborough is often sensitive though the poor staging of the final scene defeats him.  After Lili has been killed by the French collaborationist farmer (Marcel Poncin) who meant to murder Marie, Jan, though visible on screen, is required to delay any reaction to his new bride’s death until Captain Ridley has finished speaking.

    The most comfortable acting comes from William Hartnell as Ridley’s right-hand man, the diligent, straightforward Sergeant Barnes.  When Marie makes him coffee ‘in ze French style’ and he takes a first sip, you rather dread the reaction:  it’s a small miracle that Hartnell’s delivery of the judgment – ‘very French’ – actually makes you laugh.  (He makes it sound as if Barnes is admitting he can’t argue with the fact even if he doesn’t really approve of it.)  Although Bernard Knowles receives the sole directing credit, Muriel Box took over the directing reins for the reshooting of certain sequences, some time after the original production had wrapped.  (Box receives a credit instead for the writing of ‘additional scenes’.)  From what Jo Botting said, it seems not to be known who was behind the camera for which bits of The Lost People – not least, perhaps, because the direction is pretty flat-footed throughout.

    7 March 2019

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