Old Yorker

  • The Talk of the Town

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Stevens (1942)

    This London Film Festival screening of George Stevens’ comedy was made even better by BFI curator Robin Baker’s introduction – entertaining, informative and thought-provoking all at once.  Baker picked up on the received wisdom that Stevens’ work underwent a sea change as a result of his experiences in World War II.  A member of the US Army Signal Corps, he headed a film unit from 1943 through to 1946, shooting footage of the D-Day landings and the Allies’ grim discoveries at Dachau.  Stevens had been best known in Hollywood as a director of comedies, including Alice Adams (1935) and Woman of the Year (1942), and even directed the Astaire-Rogers musical Swing Time (1937).  He subsequently graduated to weightier, sometimes tragic, drama.  You can see that switch happening almost in the course of his first post-war feature, I Remember Mama (1948); over the next decade or so, he went on to make A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).  Without dissenting from the conventional view of Stevens’ development, Robin Baker was keen to point out there were signs in his earlier films – this one included – of a less light-hearted sensibility at work.  The Talk of the Town (written by Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman and Sidney Harmon) proved Baker right but that didn’t stop it from being great fun also.

    Three people find themselves unexpectedly sharing a house in the suburbs of a New England town.  Schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur) has rented the place out for the summer.  As she readies it for the arrival next day of the new tenant, another man makes an uninvited entrance.  This is Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), whom Nora has known since they were at school together – and whom we already know from the film’s prologue, in which George Stevens expertly sets the scene.  A fire in a local woollen mill left the mill foreman dead.  Dilg, a mill worker and political activist, was standing trial for arson and murder but has escaped from jail and is on the run.  Nora is deep in agitated conversation with Leopold when distinguished legal scholar, Professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), who has rented the house as a quiet place to complete his latest book, turns up on the doorstep – a day early.  Nora hides Leopold in the attic but it’s not long before Lightcap catches sight of him; Nora then passes him off as her gardener, Joseph.  Visitors to the house in the days to follow also include Dilg’s lawyer, Sam Yates (Edgar Buchanan); Lightcap’s valet and chauffeur, Tilney (Rex Ingram); and Senator Boyd (Clyde Fillmore), sent by the White House to inform Lightcap that the president wishes to nominate him to a vacancy on the Supreme Court.  Boyd is sure the confirmation process will be a formality (times change) but the matter must remain hush-hush for a while yet.

    Nora’s two main guests are chalk and cheese.  Leopold, a local boy made bad, is a grown-man holy terror.  Lightcap is a bearded yet rather childish pedant and a confirmed bachelor, old before his time.  Dilg has been a thorn in the flesh of his boss, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle), for some time, telling anyone who cares to listen that the mill owner is a crook.  The professor assures Senator Boyd, when the latter mentions it will be better for Lightcap to keep his name out of the newspapers in the immediate future, that ‘I’ve been keeping my name out of the papers for years’.  He and Leopold do, though, share an interest in legal matters and, in the days ahead, enjoy spirited discussions that reflect their common sense vs academic approaches to the law.  It soon emerges they also share a liking for Nora (who’s been keen on Leopold since their schooldays).  Lightcap’s new-found ardour, which takes him by surprise, transforms his behaviour in other ways, and eventually makes him headline news.  In due course he discovers Leopold’s true identity but, suspicious of the prosecution case against him, turns on-the-hoof investigator.  This involves pretending to court the mill foreman’s girlfriend, Regina Bush (Glenda Farrell), owner of a local beauty parlour.  Plying Regina with drinks to loosen her tongue, Lightcap learns that the foreman, Clyde Bracken, is alive and well and hiding out in Boston.

    There are plenty of funny bits – among the best are those where Lightcap is suspected of being the man on the run from the law.  He happens to be wearing Dilg’s footwear just as police arrive at the house:  the professor runs round the place trying to escape the attentions of sniffer dogs.  He visits Pulaski’s Polish deli to buy borscht.  Jan Pulaski (Leonard Kinskey) knows Leopold Dilg is the only customer of his who insists on borscht with an egg beaten up in it.  When Lightcap specifies the beaten egg Jan smells a rat though his mother (Ferike Boros) is more sceptical:  ‘You think he’s Leopold Dilg with a beard, huh?’  (Undaunted, Jan reports his suspicions to the police.)  Glenda Farrell delivers a great turn as Regina Bush, telling Lightcap about the tragic discovery of her lover’s remains (or lack of) after the mill fire:  ‘All they found of Bracken was a medal he had won in school.  It gives a girl a queer feeling.  One night, you got a man weighing 211 pounds – then, wham, all that’s left is a medal for shot-putting’.

    The Talk of the Town‘s harsher aspect comes through in skulduggery so central to the plot that it’s increasingly hard to ignore, despite the screwball antics on display.  Holmes has burned his own premises down to get an insurance payout and frames Dilg to pay him back.  The trial judge, Sam Yates is sure, is in Holmes’s pocket.  Lightcap, Leopold and Nora join forces to abduct Bracken (Tom Tyler) from Boston and bring him back to Nora’s house.  Her two companions argue about whether to telephone the police; Bracken knocks them both unconscious and escapes, though not before Lightcap has won the argument and made the call.  The police arrive at the house and re-arrest Dilg.  The mood darkens further when a mob of angry locals descends on the courthouse where his trial resumes; they’re threatening to lynch the accused when Lightcap arrives on the scene, accompanied by the supposedly deceased foreman.  The professor’s approach to the law has moved a long way from the theoretical in the direction of the practical:  he has made a citizen’s arrest of Bracken, holding him at gunpoint.  Lightcap then delivers an impassioned speech to the court on the paramount importance of the rule of law – in theory and practice.  Dilg is acquitted.  The mill owner and his foreman are indicted.

    In other words, the film turns serious enough to make explicit, through Lightcap’s speech, the moral of the story.  George Stevens asks a lot of himself in negotiating this marked change of tone:  the courtroom climax is slightly awkward.  Even so, Ronald Colman lays down the law with the gracefully light touch that’s the hallmark of his admirable performance throughout.  For much of the time, Cary Grant, enjoyable as he is, doesn’t seem quite right as a common-man political animal (let alone a lethal lawbreaker).  Yet he’s so right in the end he makes you question your earlier doubts.  You understand what Nora feels:  that Leopold’s elusive quality is both what makes him maddening and the source of his charm.  That same quality allows for a degree of suspense, right through to the closing minutes, as to which of the two men Nora will opt for romantically.

    The professor, whom she’s grown fond of, is duly appointed to the Supreme Court; Nora, with Leopold in tow, goes to Washington for Lightcap’s inaugural sitting as an Associate Justice.  Nora’s former tenant now conveniently reverts to his old order of priorities:  his Supreme Court appointment is, he says, the fulfilment of his life’s ambition.  But he’s still a kinder man than he used to be.  Lightcap also tells Nora that his happiness will be complete if his two friends spend the rest of their lives together.  The film’s last few seconds make clear that they will.  Jean Arthur, the ideal emotional fulcrum between Leopold and Lightcap, is intensely likeable:  you always root for Nora, especially when she’s thwarted or exasperated (as she often is).  Arthur, a fine comedienne, is more athletic than I expected from what I’d seen of her before – she gives off a lovely suppressed energy that serves to express Nora’s strength of feeling.  Robin Baker’s introduction described Jean Arthur as the film’s ‘beating heart’; it makes good sense that the woman she plays ends up with a man whose heart’s in the right place.  The Talk of the Town, as part of the ‘Treasures’ strand at this year’s London Film Festival, was in the right place, too.

    13 October 2024

  • The Piano Lesson

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Malcolm Washington (2024)

    It seems that screen versions of August Wilson’s ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’ plays will be appearing once every four years:  after Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) comes The Piano Lesson, now showing at the London Film Festival.  Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences; The Piano Lesson involves two generations of the Washington family.  Denzel produced, as he did on the two earlier films; his elder son, John David, has a starring role; his younger son, Malcolm, is behind the camera – directing his first cinema feature and sharing the screenplay credit, with Virgil Williams.  Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle comprises ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century.  The Piano Lesson is the 1930s play but Malcolm Washington’s adaptation blurs this identity through repeated flashbacks to events seminal to the story that occurred in 1911.  This use of flashback betrays a larger anxiety on the film-makers’ part – as to how ‘cinematic’ Wilson’s theatre pieces need to be when they’re turned into screen drama.

    Fences, though indecisive in this respect, mostly felt stagy.  Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which opened up Wilson’s play only occasionally, made a dramatic virtue of restricting the action to one place:  the confines of the recording studio served to increase claustrophobic tension.  The Piano Lesson, though more visually and sonically dynamic than either of these predecessors, is hamstrung by the same kind of uncertainty that plagued Fences.  Although the Washington brothers and others involved in the film, speaking on the Royal Festival Hall stage ahead of this screening, made clear their reverent admiration for August Wilson, that uncertainty, in effect, does him a disservice.  When, for example, Samuel L Jackson’s Doaker Charles recounts what happened twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Washington cuts away to show on the screen what Doaker is describing; on the soundtrack, Jackson’s voice is accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s (undistinguished) music.  It seems clear that, on stage, Wilson’s words and their delivery, in combination with the reactions of the characters listening to those words, are all that’s needed to make Doaker’s account dramatically powerful.  Washington’s visual and other aids, as well as relegating the importance of Doaker’s voice, dilute that power.

    Like Fences, The Piano Lesson relies centrally on a symbolic object but this one is freighted with richer cultural and moral meaning.  In 1936 Doaker Charles is the head of a Pittsburgh household whose living room contains a piano, decorated with the carved faces of the family’s ancestors, who were slaves on a Mississippi plantation.  The piano originally belonged to the slave owner, Sutter, who bought it as a present for his wife.  In order to do so, he broke up a family by selling two of his slaves, a mother and her child, to raise funds.  Mrs Sutter enjoyed the piano but missed these two slaves; Sutter had his Black carpenter carve their likenesses on the piano.  The carpenter, who was also husband and father to the two sold slaves, was Doaker’s great uncle.  While the Sutter family was enjoying Fourth of July celebrations in 1911, Doaker’s brother and an accomplice stole the piano from the plantation house.

    Doaker now shares his home with his widowed niece, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith).  It was Berniece’s father who stole the piano from the Sutters.  Her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), and his pal, Lymon (Ray Fisher), arrive from Mississippi, where both have recently served time in prison.  A sharecropper, Boy Willie means to better himself by buying the land on which his forebears were slaves.  He wants to sell the piano to help him do that.  Berniece, although she no longer plays the piano, is implacably opposed to the idea.  The conflicts arising from their opposing points of view – move on from your family history versus never forget it – are the heart of The Piano Lesson, in which the ‘ghosts’ of the past feature prominently.  Sutter’s dead body was found at the bottom of a well and Berniece accuses her brother of putting him there.  She and Maretha, who has been taught to play the piano though not told about its provenance, both see the ghost of Sutter (Jay Peterson) in the Pittsburgh house.  Regular visitors there also include Wining Boy (Michael Potts), another of Doaker’s brothers and the closest relation to a comedy character in the story; and Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), an upstanding preacher and Berniece’s hopeful suitor – although he finds her as reluctant to abandon the memory of her late, much-loved husband as she is to dispose of the piano.

    The film’s star turn is unquestionably Danielle Deadwyler.  I wasn’t among the many who thought her outrageously overlooked for an Oscar nomination for her work in Till (2022) but Deadwyler deserves one for The Piano Lesson.  This is acting-your-socks-off acting, to be sure, but as Berniece she shows impressive range and control, and real depth.  John David Washington’s Boy Willie, although vigorous, isn’t quite as volatile as the set-up and storyline suggest he needs to be.  Washington had played the role in the latest (2022) Broadway production of The Piano Lesson, whose cast also included Samuel L Jackson, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts.  Jackson is, of course, by far the most experienced screen actor in the film’s cast, and it shows.  He knows how little you often need to be doing (or seem to be doing) on camera, in order to be doing more than enough.  This doesn’t always, though, give him the prominence he deserves.  As already noted, Malcolm Washington denies Jackson what should surely be his highlight moment, when he tells the story of the piano’s theft and its aftermath.  More generally, his relatively subtle playing makes less histrionic impact than some of the louder performances going on around him.

    The high volume is sometimes a bit much.  One quarrel about the piano is so noisily prolonged that when tearful, fearful Maretha suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, you can’t understand why she hasn’t been disturbed sooner – and, especially, why it hasn’t occurred to Berniece what effect the argy-bargy must be having on the child that she’s so anxious to protect.  Malcolm Washington has a sure touch, though, both in directing Skylar Aleece Smith, who’s excellent, and in handling Berniece’s romantic scenes.  Ray Fisher’s portrait of awkward, simple Lymon, which sometimes seems designed for the upper circle in a theatre, comes into its own when Lymon dabs perfume on Berniece’s neck:  he and Danielle Deadwyler make this exchange really affecting.  Deadwyler is good, too, in conveying Berniece’s almost guilty inability to respond to the righteous but unappealing Avery.  She does ask him, though, to bless the house with a view to exorcising Sutter’s ghost.  Washington gives this climactic sequence the all-stops-out treatment:  the  supernatural fireworks earned a round of audience applause in the Festival Hall but they’re a forced spectacle.

    Other than in the flashbacks and when Boy Willie and Lymon first test its weight, the eponymous instrument stays put.  Berniece eventually wins the argument, while also coming to understand that she must resume playing the piano – and that her daughter must keep on playing it – in recognition of their ancestors.  Boy Willie, though he accepts defeat, heads back to Mississippi warning that if they don’t play the piano, he’ll return to the household, along with the unquiet ghost of Sutter.  The shades of Laurel and Hardy can rest easy, however.  Their efforts in The Music Box (1932) remain American cinema’s most memorable piano-moving episode.

    12 October 2024

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