Old Yorker

  • The Young Lions

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Dmytryk (1958)

    This gripping, underrated film features a performance by Montgomery Clift that is one of his greatest and one from Marlon Brando that has great things in it.  Adapted by Edward Anhalt from a 1948 novel by Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions is the story of three soldiers’ Second World War.  They are a German, Christian Diestl (Brando), and two Americans, the WASP Michael (Mike) Whiteacre (Dean Martin) and the Jew Noah Ackerman (Clift).  Before enlisting, Christian works as a ski instructor in the Bavarian Alps, Mike has a successful show business career in Broadway musicals and Noah is a store clerk, newly arrived in New York.  He meets Mike when they attend the same US army draft board.   The Young Lions is remarkable in many respects – not least that Noah Ackerman survives the War and, in the last scene of the movie, returns to his wife and young daughter in New York.  This is nearly incredible, given that things ended badly for most of the men Clift played on screen and that his presence, by this stage in his career, seems freighted with tragedy.  This is the only movie in which he and Brando both appeared and I knew they had only one moment on screen together, with one of them dead.  I’d always assumed it was Clift who’d died and Brando who survived.

    Christian Diestl’s ski pupil in the opening scene is Mike Whiteacre’s girlfriend Margaret (Barbara Rush).  She’s on an Alpine holiday without Mike and agrees to go on a New Year’s Eve date with Christian.  Brando is amazing and very entertaining (I like him doing accents) in these early scenes – the shift from self-satisfied humour on the ski slopes to an uncertain conversation with Margaret outside the hall where New Year (1939) is being celebrated, is dazzling.  Christian tells Margaret the life of a ski instructor is no fun out of season and shocks her in expressing the hope that Hitler will change Germany for the better.  (The supposedly cute child at the New Year gathering, who wears a swastika sash, is no less startling.)  After enlisting, Christian is bored by police duty in Paris and asks his army superior, Captain Hardenberg (Maximilian Schell), for a transfer:  he wants to see action.  Christian is about to have some leave anyway and Hardenberg first sends him on an errand, to deliver a present to the captain’s wife in Germany, while Christian is back there.   Later on, he and the captain are fighting together in North Africa, where Hardenberg is grievously injured.  When Christian returns to Germany, he visits the captain’s wife again.

    It will be clear enough from this that some of the plotting of The Young Lions is less than convincing.  Christian and Mike’s connection through Margaret is a mechanical contrivance; the pair of visits to Hardenberg’s wife are designed to contrast the material comfort in which she lives in the early stages of the War and the hard times she and Germany have fallen on several years later.  Moreover, the captain’s wife, as played by May Britt, is glamorously vampish in too obvious a way.  But Brando is splendid in all these scenes – as he is also as Christian watches a boy on crutches on a bomb site, and in several sequences involving another German soldier, Brandt (Parley Baer), who has a French mistress in Paris and who introduces Christian to another French girl there, Françoise (Liliane Montevecchi).   Again, Brando’s transitions – from cocky confidence to quiet humiliation when Françoise speaks her mind on their first meeting – are extraordinary.  What stops his portrait of Christian Diestl being fully satisfying is the fault of the script rather than the actor.  Christian’s disillusionment with Germany’s war aims is protracted; he has to come to a bad end because he’s adopted a wrong cause.  Brando’s dying fall is brilliant:  as he was to prove again in The Godfather, both when Don Corleone is shot in the street and when he eventually dies in his orange grove, nobody comes down quite like he does.

    In his early scenes, Montgomery Clift looks so odd – injured and old – that he’s uncomfortable to watch.  (This and Lonelyhearts, also released in 1958, were the first two films that he made after Raintree County.)  But his artistry and the nobility of the character that he creates dispel that discomfort pretty quickly; Clift’s performance is, almost continuously, emotionally overwhelming.  (It’s one of which the actor himself was particularly proud.)  Noah Ackerman meets, and falls in love with, Hope Plowman (Hope Lange), at a party at Mike Whiteacre’s home.  Clift plays Noah’s uncertain courtship of Hope exquisitely.  After they’re married, when Noah’s been called up and leaves their apartment early one morning for boot camp, his low, unobtrusive wave goodbye to his wife is beautifully expressive.  At boot camp, Noah is on the receiving end of the other soldiers’ anti-Semitism; Mike is his only friend and defender there.  This is one of the most powerful parts of The Young Lions – partly because it’s startling to see men who are fighting against Nazism taking it out on a Jew and partly because it’s tough to watch Clift, skinny and vulnerable-looking as he is, taking punishment in the fights with his tormentors that Noah Ackerman, with his sense of honour and almost pesky stubbornness, is determined to endure.  There’s a shot of Noah’s injured face being patched up by a medic which, as Amy Lawrence says in The Passion of Montgomery Clift, is ‘terrifying’.  Although Noah’s love of books, which the other soldiers exploit as a means of bullying him, seems to come out of nowhere, Clift’s development of the character makes it just about credible:  he creates Noah’s intelligence so subtly.  (Noah seems almost simple-minded at the start of the film but Clift suggests this is partly because of his lack of social experience.)

    Amy Lawrence doesn’t like Clift’s performance and queries his approach to the role of Noah Ackerman:

    ‘Clift not only wanted to look like Kafka, he was trying “to look Jewish”.  Unfortunately the actor’s explanation of his efforts comes perilously close to parroting the anti-Semitic Nazi stereotypes the film was denouncing.  Asked why he had “lost twelve pounds to play the part”, Clift responded, “I wanted to look like a rodent, that’s why.  Lean and slim like a rodent.  Or let’s saying a rat passing for a mouse”.’

    The choice of words may be unfortunate for the reason Lawrence suggests but it’s surprising that she can’t admire the physical acting that Clift achieved as a result.  His movement, as Noah and other soldiers try to cross a river, under threat of enemy fire, is animal-like to an amazing degree:  wriggling through the reeds at the edge of the river, Noah is a true amphibian.  (This makes powerful sense in a sequence in which he saves the life of one of the men who victimised him in boot camp and who can’t swim.)   And in the climactic scenes, in which Noah and Mike help to liberate a concentration camp, Clift’s cadaverous quality – the fact that he looks on the way to concentration camp gauntness himself – gives an immediacy to the traumatic effect that seeing the camp’s victims has on Noah.  Amy Lawrence’s dismissal of Clift’s acting in the closing stages as ‘a series of poor choices’ is baffling.  His delivery of Noah’s final ‘millions like us’ speech to Mike, about hope for the future now that the war is won, is very moving.  As so often with Clift, the thoughts behind the words seem freshly minted, and to come from deep inside.

    At first, Dean Martin seems too obviously cast for the role of a man who’d rather be at parties than in the armed forces.  But Martin has a gift for tuning in to other actors and he and Clift connect very well; Barbara Rush too is more animated in her big scene with Martin than in her big scene with Brando.  There’s a fourth major performance, from Maximilian Schell as Hardenberg – especially in the scene in which Christian tells Hardenberg he wants more action than the posting in Paris allows.   Schell is very good not only at creating a character impelled by a mixture of unsentimental loyalty and brutality but at keeping you uncertain where one ends and the other begins (and, as a result, leaving you unnerved).  Hope Lange is sensitive as Hope; as her father, Vaughn Taylor (probably best known for his brief appearance as Marion Crane’s boss in Psycho) weights his lines perfectly in a conversation with her.   The father’s prejudices against Noah are laid out a shade too emphatically when he meets his daughter’s intended but the climax to the scene, in which Mr Plowman accepts Noah – and Montgomery Clift conveys both how thrilled Noah is at the news and how marginalised he still feels – is highly effective.

    The Young Lions is nearly three hours long.   Although some of the war sequences are staged powerfully, they’re disjointed; and although that disjointedness helps to get across a sense of what happens in war being crazy and random, your eventual impression is that Edward Dmytryk had to cut a good deal of material and that the remainder has sometimes been clumsily reassembled.  This disorganised quality is made worse by the overly tidy plotting of the story.   Yet what Dmytryk gets going between the actors – and sustains – is admirable and absorbing, even if (as often happens) the point a scene is designed to make is relatively crude.  Shaw’s novel, according to Wikipedia, runs to 689 pages so adapting it for the screen was no mean feat of compression by Edward Anhalt (even if not such a feat as was required – and more satisfyingly achieved – by Daniel Taradash with From Here to Eternity).  Although some of Anhalt’s dialogue is overwritten, much of it is supple and dynamic.  It’s also occasionally funny.  I enjoyed the reluctant soldier Mike Whiteacre’s moment of political foresight:

    ‘Look, I’ve read all the books. I know that in 10 years we’ll be bosom friends with the Germans and the Japanese. Then I’ll be pretty annoyed that I was killed.’

    19 February 2013

  • Come Back, Little Sheba

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Mann (1952)

    The missing Sheba is both a real and a symbolic dog.  She disappeared a few months back but her owner, the Midwest, middle-aged housewife Lola Delaney, is pining for more than her pet:  like Sheba, Lola’s youth, pretty face and figure have all vanished, along with hopes that she can be attractive to her husband Doc.  His nickname is a misnomer – an unhappy reminder that, twenty years ago, Doc had to give up his medical studies, when he got Lola pregnant and her father’s stern disapproval meant a shotgun wedding.  Lola lost Doc’s baby and couldn’t have another; the childless Delaneys now have little in common except regret.  Doc, a recovering alcoholic, makes a living – not much of a living – as a chiropractor.  Lola and he take in a boarder, a university student called Marie Buckholder.  With her boyfriends and a life ahead of her, Marie is an increasingly troubling reminder to the older couple of what might have been.  Come Back, Little Sheba, William Inge’s first stage play, was a major success on Broadway in 1950.  Daniel Mann’s film, with a screenplay by Ketti Frings, exhibits the anxieties and results in weaknesses characteristic of contemporary adaptations of stage hits for the cinema screen.

    First, the material is opened up – even though its power depends considerably on the claustrophobia of the Delaneys’ cluttered, shabby home.  A scene in which Lola (Shirley Booth) and Doc (Burt Lancaster) go together to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, to mark Doc’s staying on the wagon for a whole year, is well done but eventually counterproductive.  The audience knows the bottle of whisky that has remained untouched in the kitchen cupboard for the last twelve months will be consumed by Doc in due course.  If, through the action staying indoors, we were made to feel more of his sense of imprisonment, we might also sympathise with him strongly enough to feel that we needed a drink – and a kind of unhappy relief when Doc finally yields to temptation.  As it is, the moment arrives on cue, registers as mechanical.

    Second, the film-makers’ eye on the box office causes them to give too much attention to the younger characters, in case the story of a frowzy forty-something like Lola isn’t sufficiently appealing.  (Perhaps inspired by the success of The Lost Weekend a few years previously, Daniel Mann and Ketti Frings also exploit too much the melodramatic potential of drink problems.)  The theatrical release poster for the film illustrates the attempt to sell Come Back, Little Sheba as a tale of youthful passion but the results are – inevitably in early 1950s Hollywood – paralysed by caution in the presentation of sexual behaviour.  Marie (Terry Moore) is dated by Turk (Richard Jaeckel), a cocky, insensitive jock, but her heart belongs to a boy back home called Bruce (Walter Kelley), who eventually pays a visit to the Delaneys’.  (This results in Marie and Bruce’s weirdly instant marriage.)  One of the feeblest pieces of opening out comes when Marie and Turk go to a bar.  It’s feeble because these two are interesting only in terms of the Delaneys’ – especially Lola’s – perception of them.  An earlier scene – in which art student Marie draws Turk, posing in his athletics vest and shorts, in the Delaneys’ parlour – is visually bizarre.  It’s effective, though, because Lola’s reactions are an integral part of it.

    Third, there’s a key piece of miscasting in a lead role – also designed to improve the movie’s commercial prospects (and also reflected in the poster).  At thirty-nine, Burt Lancaster wasn’t necessarily too young to play Doc, according to age references in the script.  But he comes across as too young for a combination of reasons:  he was fifteen years Shirley Booth’s junior; he’s very emphatically greyed up; and his physical presence is too powerful for the character – he suggests not a loss of energy but a willed suppression of it.  (When Doc falls off the wagon and vents his feelings, abusing Lola verbally and threatening her with a knife, Lancaster seems relieved to let off steam.)  We gather that Doc was socially a cut above Lola but the idea that he’s a generation younger too introduces another, unintended gap between them – and makes Lola’s frequent references to Doc as ‘Daddy’ more curious than they’re surely meant to be.  (Sidney Blackmer, three years older than Booth, partnered her in Little Sheba on stage.)  Lancaster is able to express something of Doc’s pain through his big, sad eyes but he isn’t vocally dexterous enough to give his lines the shadings needed to convey the depths of the husband’s ennui and frustration with his life and his wife.  Lancaster’s unease muffles the dichotomy between Doc’s supposedly gentlemanly manner and underlying emotional turbulence, and he doesn’t connect much with Shirley Booth.  It’s pretty clear this is the result of the actor’s shortcomings rather than part of his characterisation.

    The film has fallen into relative obscurity.  I don’t recall its being on television in recent years and the DVD Sally got me through Amazon – the only Region 2 one available – was evidently made in Korea.  Shirley Booth’s performance as Lola is famous, nevertheless, and rightly so.  She doesn’t just save Come Back, Little Sheba; she makes it thoroughly compelling – and the above-mentioned attempts to draw attention away from Lola to other elements only reinforce the dominance of what Booth does.  In her strongly empathetic, admirably detailed portrait, the speech rhythms and the physicality of the unkempt, desperately ingratiating Lola are absorbed so completely that they seem perfectly natural.  There’s an arresting contrast between Lola’s shuffling around in her old chenille robe and her odd spurts of physical dynamism.  Unlike her self-approving houseproud neighbour Mrs Coffman (Lisa Golm), Lola doesn’t get many domestic chores done or meals cooked.  She breaks off from preparing Doc’s lunch to lie on the sofa, moving to the comically slinky rhythms of the music on a favourite radio programme.  Later on, she vividly expresses – in an impromptu, exuberant charleston – how good the twenty-year-old Lola might have looked doing the dance.  (It’s a pity that Daniel Mann interrupts both these highlights in exactly the same way – with Marie and Turk entering unseen and Lola breaking off in flustered embarrassment.)  Booth also has Lola do strange little runs in the small spaces of the house – for example, from the parlour to the kitchen and back to get the postman (Paul McVey) a glass of water and hold him in conversation for a while, even though he has no letters to deliver to the Delaneys.  (This is an excellent scene.)   In these moments, Lola’s body language says loud and clear that there’s lots to do and no time to waste; in fact, there’s not enough in her life to keep her busy and she can’t do even that.  As with a later, similarly memorable woman in a dressing gown, in J Lee Thompson’s 1957 film, Lola’s chattering attempts to be positive make her all the more annoying to her husband.  Booth’s radiant, exhausting eagerness to please and inability to know when to keep quiet anticipate major elements of Yvonne Mitchell’s fine performance in the Thompson movie.

    Shirley Booth first appeared on Broadway in 1925; Come Back, Little Sheba was her cinema debut, at the age of fifty-four.  She was in only four more films (the last of them The Matchmaker in 1958, in which she played Dolly Levi) but went on to much further success on stage and, subsequently, on television.  (She died in 1992, at the age of ninety-four.)  Booth won a Tony for Lola.  It’s not unusual for an actor who has performed a role to acclaim in the theatre to bring an overly finished quality to their playing of the same role on screen – to give the impression of having worked out their performance on stage, of trying to repeat the trick but having nothing more to say.  It’s therefore all the more remarkable that, as an inexperienced screen actress, Booth’s work in this movie was so successfully adapted to the medium and feels so fresh.  Daniel Mann had also directed the play on Broadway and this was his first cinema feature too.   In some respects, his inexperience does show:  the actors sometimes mistime exits and exit lines or, at least, seem to time them as if they were on stage.  But Mann deserves a good deal of credit for enabling Shirley Booth to deliver what is more than a record of a great theatre performance.  Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba was the first of three actresses to win an Oscar for their role in a picture directed by Daniel Mann.  Within the next eight years, Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo and Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 had followed suit.

    3 July 2016

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