Film review

  • Carrie (1952)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1952)

    Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy was the source material for George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), one of Hollywood’s most celebrated dramas of the early post-war era.  Just a year later, another Dreiser novel – his first, Sister Carrie – was adapted for the screen.  William Wyler’s Carrie isn’t nearly as well known as A Place in the Sun (or as Carrie‘s 1976 namesake) but this is a powerful romantic tragedy, one that sees Laurence Olivier at his best.  Watching bits of his famous Richard III (1955) on television the other week, I found Olivier, not for the first time, ridiculous.  As Richard, his delivery and diction, though technically formidable, are excessively stylised, and his movements (the limp and so on) erratic; because his line readings make clear the thoughts behind the words, Olivier’s confidential looks to camera are a tautology.  The experience of Carrie couldn’t be more different.  This is great screen acting, in the same class as Olivier’s Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (1960).

    Sister Carrie was first published in 1900 and the film’s action is contemporary.  Jennifer Jones is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her family home in rural Missouri to make her way in Chicago.  She’s following in the footsteps of her elder sister Minnie (Jacqueline deWit), already living in the city, but Carrie knows she can do better than Minnie – ‘I went through school,’ she informs Charlie Drouet (Eddie Albert), the affable travelling salesman who chats her up on the train journey to Chicago and gives her his card.  She moves in, as their rent-paying lodger, with Minnie and her husband (Robert Foulk), who live, barely above the breadline, in rooms on the South Side.  Carrie is soon frustrated.  She slaves long hours and with growing resentment as a machinist in a shoe factory until she injures a finger at work and is promptly fired by the sweatshop foreman (Charles Halton).  Although immediately suspicious of Charlie Drouet’s smooth talking, Carrie is now desperate enough to look him up.  Hearing her tale of woe, he hands her a ten-dollar bill and invites her to dinner at Fitzgerald’s, a high-end restaurant and bar.  Arriving early, before Charlie, Carrie is directed from the bar, where women aren’t allowed, to the adjoining restaurant.  The man who directs her there is George Hurstwood (Olivier).

    When he’s not wearing eccentric disguise on screen, Laurence Olivier is a naturally classy presence – a quality reinforced, perhaps especially in America, by his own public persona:  by the end of the 1940s Olivier was not only a beautifully spoken English gentleman but a knight of the realm.  I’m not sure if Carrie immediately realises George Hurstwood is the manager of Fitzgerald’s rather than one of its upper-crust patrons; I have to admit this viewer didn’t realise it at first.  Whatever, socially ambitious Carrie does instantly see in George a man who’s a cut above.  She tried to refuse Charlie’s ten dollars and, after Minnie chides her for not succeeding, turns up at Fitzgerald’s only in order to return the money.  Charlie soon arrives and the dinner goes ahead though it’s a moot point whether he or George Hurstfield is the reason Carrie changes her mind.  Even so, she ends the evening in Charlie’s apartment and, jobless, stays there.  When the neighbours gossip and Carrie uneasily asks about getting married, Charlie fobs her off by inviting George, who he knows impressed her, to the apartment.  What neither Charlie nor his kept woman realises is that George, an unhappily married man and father of two grown-up children, has already and irrevocably fallen for Carrie.

    She soon reciprocates his feelings but doesn’t know George is married until Charlie tells her.  When she consequently breaks off from seeing George, he tricks her into believing that Charlie’s in hospital and that he’ll take there; she agrees and George virtually abducts her.  It’s accidental that he finds himself in possession of $10,000 of the restaurant owner’s money (George accidentally locks a timed safe as he’s cashing up for the night); but when he learns that Mr Fitzgerald (Basil Ruysdael), under pressure from George’s shrewish wife Julie (Miriam Hopkins), is planning to pay his salary direct to her in future, George absconds to New York, with the takings and Carrie.  She doesn’t know about the theft until long after a bond company agent (Ray Teal) dispatched by Fitzgerald turns up at their apartment to demand the money back.  In a culminating falsehood, George assures Carrie that Julie has divorced him, and they marry.   Carrie is pregnant when she learns the bigamous truth.  She miscarries.

    This sounds a melodramatic sequence of events but it doesn’t play out as such.  That’s no surprise, of course, with William Wyler at the controls and a screenplay by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who had worked to great effect with Wyler on The Heiress (1949).  Laurence Olivier is in every sense the star of the show, though.  George lies or fails to mention things to Carrie in order not to lose her; Olivier depicts brilliantly the combination of desire and desperation that dictate his deceptions.   As a young stage actor, Olivier was celebrated for, as well as his extraordinary vocal qualities, his athletic invention and daring, and his physicality as an actor endured.  You see it in late work like his deathbed scene as Lord Marchmain in the Granada television version of Brideshead Revisited (1981).  You see it in mid-career bloom in Carrie, too.  When George first kisses Carrie, he’s hungry, animalistic.  The wonder of the performance is that, in the climax to the story, when George is destitute and ill, Olivier’s movements are powerful in effect but controlled in execution – not at all theatrical in the pejorative sense.

    The plotting becomes more mechanical and less convincing in order to set the stage for the tragic finale.  George can’t get a job, however menial, supposedly because it’s (very!) common knowledge that he stole money.  Julie eventually agrees to a divorce, in exchange for George’s agreement not to ask for a cent of the proceeds of the couple’s house sale.  Living in virtual poverty with him, Carrie decides to try for work in a chorus line and, to her amazement, gets it.  (To the amazement of the audience, too:  the auditions are one of the film’s weakest sequences.)  George reads in the society page of a newspaper that his son (William Reynolds), who has made a rich marriage, is returning with his bride from honeymoon.  Carrie encourages her husband to go and meet George Jr; he turns up at the docks only to feel consumed by shame and hide  his face as his family walks by.  (Olivier does even this well.)  When George returns to New York, he finds a goodbye note from Carrie, in which she says that she isn’t good for him.  Years pass … She becomes a successful actress while George is homeless.  He hangs around outside the theatre one night and speaks her name.  They talk in her dressing room; she orders food and gives George money, eager to put things right:  Carrie blames herself that he sacrificed his comfortable life for love of her.  While she’s out of the dressing room, George briefly contemplates the gas burner on a stove.  He returns the paper money to Carrie’s handbag and removes from it just a quarter coin before disappearing into the night.

    Although Olivier dominates, the acting is strong nearly all the way down the cast list:  Walter Baldwin, as the heroine’s father, regretfully buying his daughter’s one-way ticket to Chicago at the local station in the brief first scene, sets the tone; Ray Teal, emphatically one-note as the bond company man, is an exception.  Eddie Albert, a year before his best-known collaboration with Wyler on Roman Holiday (and three years before he played another ingratiating salesman in Oklahoma!), is terrific as Charlie Drouet.  Albert is such a naturally likeable and empathetic actor that you can’t help rooting for questionable Charlie (who does show Carrie kindness in the process of exploiting her).  Miriam Hopkins is less satisfying; her if-looks-could-kill interpretation of bitterly vindictive Julie would work better if Hopkins managed more than the one look and was able to suggest that the Hurstfields’ marriage may not always have been as bad as it has become.  Jennifer Jones appears (as the opening credits point out) by agreement with her movie-mogul husband David O Selznick but, in Wyler’s capable hands, delivers one of her best performances, particularly in the early stages.  In the first Chicago scenes, Jones’s Carrie, anxious to do better for herself, is far from likeable though her vulnerability takes the edge off her prickliness.  This means that, although Carrie’s eventual burgeoning theatre career is a plot requirement, it makes emotional sense:  you believe the young woman who so resented working in a shoe factory would be determined enough, once she gets her chance on the stage, to stick with and make a lasting success of it.

    In the home straight, Wyler and the Goetzes manage to muffle the creaking plot machinery with a few echoes that ring true.  In the early part of their relationship, Carrie and George love theatre-going together and he encourages her to try her hand at amateur acting; you remember these things when she becomes a pro.  George’s refusal to take dollar bills from Carrie in the closing scene recalls Carrie’s reluctance to accept Charlie’s ten bucks gift/loan/bribe.  David Raksin’s score is only occasionally a bit much:  for the most part, it serves the narrative well.  Carrie wasn’t a success at the box office or with many critics at the time of its release.  According to Wikipedia, Wyler felt in retrospect ‘that the film was too depressing during a time when American audiences wanted escapist entertainment to take their minds off the Cold War’.  Telling an ‘immoral’ love story couldn’t have helped either.  But Carrie has aged very well indeed.

    25 April 2024

  • The Razor’s Edge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edmund Goulding (1946)

    According to the BFI website, ‘This adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s novel is a searing exploration of upper-class American society in the aftermath of the First World War’.  In fact, The Razor’s Edge is tosh – long-winded tosh – but it is quite entertaining.  One unusual feature is that Somerset Maugham is a character in, and voiceover narrator of, the supposedly fictional story; it seems this device is also used in the novel[1].  In the film, it works for reasons both negative and positive:  without it, there’d be no kind of centre to the convoluted narrative; and Herbert Marshall as Maugham gives the film’s best performance.  With an air of restrained melancholy, he underplays naturally and acutely.  Whenever Maugham’s on the screen, Marshall conveys the apt impression that he’s observing as much as participating in the action.

    The Razor’s Edge begins in 1919, at a Chicago country club party where Maugham’s a guest and which introduces all the main characters.  The host is wealthy expatriate Elliott Templeton (Clifton Webb), resident in France for some years but back in America for a visit to his widowed sister (Lucile Watson) and her daughter, Isabel (Gene Tierney), who’s engaged to be married to Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power).  Elliott disapproves of Larry’s reluctance to work for a living but Larry has his reasons.  He served as a pilot in the Great War.  Moments before the Armistice was declared, another pilot saved Larry by sacrificing himself (the details aren’t explained).  Larry’s survivor’s guilt takes the form of a restless desire to discover the meaning of life, which he’s sure isn’t to be found making money.  Also at the gathering are Sophie Nelson (Anne Baxter), friends with Larry since childhood and now with his fiancée, too; and Gray Maturin (John Payne), also Larry’s friend but his polar opposite. A businessman from a wealthy family, Gray is in unrequited love with Isabel:  as Elliott explains to Maugham, his niece has eyes only for Larry.  That’s not quite right, though, because Isabel also adores affluence.  The tension between her twin passions is sharpened when she learns from Larry that he has turned down the offer of a job from Gray’s millionaire father.  They decide to postpone their marriage for a year, while Larry tries to get his thoughts straight.

    He elects to do this in Paris, where he reads, goes ‘to lectures at the Sorbonne and so forth’ but fails to find peace of mind.  Twelve months on, Isabel and her mother visit.  Larry proposes marriage but Isabel can’t bear the prospect of a life without money and breaks off their engagement.  Larry decides to work in a coal mine and is not the only metaphysically inclined member of the workforce there:  his miner colleagues include a defrocked priest (Fritz Kortner) who encourages Larry to travel to India to gain spiritual enlightenment.  Larry fetches up at a Himalayan lamasery, presided over by a Holy Man (Cecil Humphreys) who informs him that ‘As long as man sets his ideals on the wrong objects there can be no real happiness’, and so on.   Maugham’s novel takes its title from the English translation of a verse in one of the Upanishads:  ‘The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard’.  Larry’s path to Salvation is pretty straightforward.  He listens some more to the Holy Man’s solemn spiel, has a mountaintop epiphany (as dawn is breaking!) then obeys his mentor’s instruction to return to ‘your own people’, never forgetting that ‘There is in every one of us a spark of the infinite goodness’.  Back in Chicago meanwhile, worldly Isabel weds dull Gray.  Sophie has already married hospital doctor Bob MacDonald (Frank Latimore) and become a mother.  Her materially modest but happy family life is destroyed when Bob and their child are killed in a traffic accident.

    Whenever the action moves out of America the film goes bonkers.  It’s par for the course for a big Hollywood melodrama of the period to depict abroad as emphatically exotic but The Razor’s Edge‘s funny-foreigner concoctions exceed expectations.  On what will be their last evening as an engaged couple, Larry and Isabel dine in a Paris restaurant where they’re serenaded by Russian singers in ethnic outfits; they then move straight on to a club where a whirling dance number is performed by a couple without many clothes, to the accompaniment of frenetic drumming by a top-hatted man of colour without many teeth.  It’s differently but no less bizarre in the Asian lamasery albeit the Holy Man, because we’re meant to take seriously what he says, has a complexion only lightly tanned and is played by a beautifully spoken English actor.  From the point at which it leaps forward several years to the early 1930s the story is in France uninterruptedly and so almost continuously ridiculous.

    It’s momentarily confusing when Maugham bumps into Elliott Templeton in Paris and learns that Isabel and her new family were ‘wiped out in the crash’.  You think: that was Sophie’s family, surely – before realising he means the Wall Street Crash.  Because Gray lost everything and had a nervous breakdown, whereas Elliott ‘sold short’ at just the right time, the latter has taken his niece, her husband and their two young daughters under his wing and into his home.  Larry is in Paris too and Maugham arranges a reunion.  On entering Elliott’s apartment, Larry meets Isabel’s children (this what-might-have-been moment out of the way, the little girls are virtually forgotten about, rather as films tend to ignore domestic pets once they’ve done their plot job).  The grown-ups go out to dine then proceed to a sleazy bar in the Bastille Quarter, where Edmund Goulding’s exotic exaggeration is back in full swing, and the party encounters the most remarkable Chicago émigrée of all.  Sophie, unable to cope with the loss of her loved ones, now lives in Paris – a drink-and-drugs-addled woman of easy virtue.  Did she make the move because it suited her new appetite for self-abasement, French moral standards being known to fall far short of American Midwest ones; or has the old, decent, grieving Sophie been corrupted simply by breathing the noxious air of Paris?  Either way, her plight in the city gives off a strong whiff of xenophobia.

    When Larry first arrives chez Elliott, Gray is suffering from one of the terrible headaches that have plagued him since the onset of the/his Great Depression; with the help of hypnosis and an ancient coin which he puts in Gray’s hand, Larry gets rid of the headache.  When he sees the state Sophie’s in, he cures her various dependencies (we’re not shown how exactly) and decides to make her his wife.  His enlightenment then goes on ice for a while so as not to get in the way of the plot.  Furious that Larry is to marry Sophie when he might have been hers, Isabel cunningly lures the bride-to-be back to the bottle; Sophie returns to the Parisian lower depths and Larry – now wearing a mac and a beret, presumably to pass as a local – goes in search of her.  He finds her in an opium den that’s full of men with fezzes; the drunken Sophie is sprawled across one of them.  When Larry tries physically to remove her, this swarthy customer performs what may be the only truly startling incident in the whole film, by jabbing a lighted reefer into Larry’s neck.  The hero now resorts to using his fists, reasonably unable to see his assailant’s spark of the infinite goodness.

    A year later, the show moves on to the South of France – Toulon and Nice.  In Toulon, Sophie, having gone from bad to worse, is found murdered; Larry and Maugham try to help with the police investigation.  In Nice, in another of his homes, Elliott lies on his deathbed, smarting from exclusion from the guest list for a grand society party being thrown by his sister, now remarried to a European aristocrat.  Larry butters up the hostess’s secretary (Elsa Lanchester) in order to secure Elliott a party invitation; he receives it, RSVPs in the negative, and dies happy.  Isabel tells Larry she’s always loved him.  His spiritual insight finally makes a comeback to thwart her, as he tells Isabel he knows who’s really to blame for what happened to Sophie.  Larry plans to work his way back to America on a tramp steamer.  The film’s closing shot shows him on deck, hoisting cargo in the eye of a storm.

    Just before this, when Isabel complains that she doesn’t understand what Larry wants, Maugham tells her Larry has already found what few people ever find – ‘You see, my dear, goodness is after all the greatest force in the world, and he’s got it’.  Presumably the moral of the story, this is certainly the last in the succession of epigrams spouted wherever The Razor’s Edge happens to travel.  I don’t know how many are lifted from Maugham’s novel, how many were the brainchild of Lamar Trotti, who has the dubious honour of sole credit for the screenplay (although Wikipedia reckons that producer Darryl F Zanuck also had a hand in it).  Alfred Newman’s music does something analogous:  it sounds just the same whether swooning to Isabel’s and Larry’s romantic interlude at the Chicago country club or gazing in wonder at the Himalayan-vista backcloth beyond the lamasery set.

    Herbert Marshall’s work is all the more creditable given that his role is a bit of a thankless task compared with the juicy opportunities given to some of his co-stars.  Not all those opportunities are seized.  Gene Tierney is beautiful and accomplished but there’s shallowness in her acting as well as in the selfish bitch character that she’s playing.  Clifton Webb, obvious casting as a camp socialite, has more than his fair share of the epigrams and some effective moments but his deliberate line readings aren’t greatly varied.  Elsa Lanchester is entertaining in her relatively tiny part but the only player who really makes the most of a bigger one is Anne Baxter.  Sophie’s ludicrous, roller-coaster transitions require Baxter to act her socks off over and over again.  It’s no surprise she was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar – striking, though, that her finest acting comes not in the melodramatic highlights but during Sophie’s brief period of temperance in Paris.  She seems anxiously adrift in the real world to which Larry has restored her, in which she’s aware once more of the happiness she has lost.  Rather than falling off the wagon, Sophie is pushed but Baxter gets across her sense of weary relief as she raises the fateful glass to her lips.  Larry isn’t among the humdinger roles and Tyrone Power, though he does a respectable job, hasn’t enough invention to liven it up.  Goodness in a character is rarely the greatest force in the world of acting.

    19 April 2024

    [1] ‘Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players …‘ (Wikipedia)

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