Clifford Odets (1944)
Cary Grant is Ernie Mott, a Cockney lad, a charmer but a ne’er-do-well, who returns to his home in the East End and, when he learns that his mother is terminally ill, decides to be the son to her that he’s never been but that she’s always deserved. Cary Grant is a charmer but he is otherwise dead wrong for the part. The fact that he started life in Bristol, in poor circumstances, as Archie Leach, probably made matters worse – Grant may have thought he could bring to the role something within himself but his efforts are counterproductive. His accent is an extraordinary concoction: it’s as if he’s trying to reach back, from the voice that he constructed in America, to his English roots – with Hollywood Cockney then overlaid. The problem isn’t so much that Grant – and most of the others in the cast – can’t do the accent. It’s rather that they try hard to do it and the effort makes them often lose the sense of the lines (and sometimes intelligibility). Barry Fitzgerald – as Ernie’s friend and counsellor, Henry Twite, who’s full of streetwise philosophy – sensibly sticks to Irish, even though I missed any other indication in the script that Henry actually was Irish. As a result, Fitzgerald’s voice and characterisation at least are clear and coherent. The children in the cast, who either can’t or don’t attempt to conceal American accents, also come off relatively well.
The movie’s conscientiousness makes it worse than it might have been if approached less seriously. Clifford Odets wrote the script and this is one of only two Hollywood features that he also directed (the other is a 1959 movie called The Story on Page One) but the source is not one of his own plays but Richard Llewellyn’s second novel, the successor to How Green Was My Valley. None But the Lonely Heart is a mishmash of social conscience and antique melodrama – the former is mixed up with implications of fighting for a better world through World War II although without any explanation of how defeating the Axis powers will remove the poverty and gangsterism, and their toxic interaction, which are main features of the lives being shown on the screen. The characters – Ernie especially – are prone to portentous rhetorical questions such as ‘When’s the world coming out of its midnight? When does the human soul get off its knees?’ The timeframe and Ernie’s age in particular are baffling. His middle name is Verdun, which suggests that he was born after the Great War in which his father fought yet at one point Ernie seems to say he’s thirty-five. (Cary Grant was forty when the film was made.) I also didn’t get what eventually happened to Ernie’s bull terrier Nipper: the dog looks as if he may have some symbolic importance but Odets seems then to forget about him.
The crime sequences are among the most convincing – a physical assault of two Jewish characters, a car chase and crash. The look of the movie is certainly distinctive although self-consciously so. There are some good bits in the more casual moments such as the echoes of Ernie and Henry’s drunken voices in a tunnel. Several of the actors are remarkable – June Duprez, as a gangster’s ex, has an exhausted prettiness: her face and voice suggest someone who’s terminally ill, as Ernie’s mother is. In the latter role Ethel Barrymore’s presence dominates the picture. The noble mother is a cliché and Barrymore may be a little too grand for a working-class version of it but she’s absorbed the character, she does convey the temper of an East End matriarch, and her watchfulness, taking in everything and letting the audience do so as well, is impressive. So too are her emotional intimacy with Ernie, once he’s trying to be a good lad, and her cry of shame just before Ma dies in a prison hospital. Barrymore’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was not undeserved but Cary Grant’s Best Actor nomination was an example of the Academy’s persistent belief that when someone is doing something different from what made them a star it must be better than usual. Apart from being much worse than usual, Grant is not different enough. In working clothes and a cap he looks like Cary Grant in disguise; when Ma buys him a suit he looks like Cary Grant. The title is that of a piece of Tchaikowksy music, played on the cello by the respectable girl (Jane Wyatt) who holds a torch for Ernie and on whose door he knocks the ‘hopeful’ end of the film.
6 May 2013
