Heaven Can Wait

I have always been a bit more immune to the famous "Lubitsch touch" than I ought to be.  After all, what is there not to love about witty dialogue batted briskly between stylish characters, splashing in tidal pools of double entendre?  But the three films by the director that I have seen (Trouble in Paradise, To be or not to be, and Ninotchka) left me sadly cold.  All struck me as potentially scintillating films that descend into sentimentality, predictability or falsehood.

When I began Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait last night, I thought Ernst and I had finally understood each other.  It begins likea  hellish counterpart to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946).  Where the British film follows its hero from a technicolor earth to an infinite, shining black-and-white heaven, Lubitsch opens Heaven Can Wait (1943) down below, in the glossy, vast waiting room of Hell, where an oddly compassionate Devil (all waxed mustaches and toothy smiles) waits to judge whether you've been bad enough to earn a fast trip through a flaming trap door.  If not, it's back into the elevator for you, and we'll see whether they'll take you above.

So Henry van Cleve, child of privilege, charmer of parents and grandparents and legions of women, sets his considerable persuasive skills to work on Satan.  By way of earning a place in Hell, he recounts his life story, starting with a mischievous, spoiled childhood spent getting drunk with the French maid and making astonishingly filthy jokes (for Code-muzzled Hollywood, at least):

That woman with the elaborately expensive dress and the ludicrous accent is the maid, by the by.

The early part of the film is the most ingenious, because it is in the carefully drawn stereotypes of his various family members (a father who can't give utterance to any sentiment but the need to maintain a stiff upper lip, for instance) that the film strikes its richest comic balance between affection and the harshness of satire. On learning that our hero has been sneaking out to drink champagne at a restaurant with the French maid, this is how his family reacts:

Goody Two-Shoes Cousin Albert:
"But that's not all, grandfather.  It seems, from what I could gather, that Mrs. Asterbrook, of the Asterbrooks, who was sitting at an adjoining table, resented bitterly the idea of Henry dropping a nickel into her decolletage and complaining to the management because no chocolate bar dropped out of Mrs. Asterbrook."
Mother:
"Mrs. Asterbrook?  How can I ever face her?"
Grandmother:
"What a disgrace!"
Father:
"I'm going to teach that boy a lesson."
Grandfather:
"Yes, that what he deserves - throwing nickels around like that.  Knowing the Asterbrooks, I can tell you right now we'll never see that nickel again."

The grandfather is by far the most appealing character in this familial menagerie. He is all bluster: stern disapproval masking a boyish love of hijinks.  (The scene above ends with his congratulation of his grandson Albert, whose willingness to rat on his cousin apparently does the family proud.  No sooner does Albert make his smug way downstairs then he finds himself on the receiving end of a glass of water his proud grandpapa has poured from the landing above.  There is much giggling and grandparental creeping-away that follows this dousing.) This aged ancestor wields the words "I love you" like they are a club to bludgeon his family with at the end of a string of insults. [Anything after this point, by the way, might be accounted a spoiler by the more... plot-squeamish among you.] Even when his beloved grandson falls in love, marries, and drives his beloved away with his perpetual infidelities, who is on hand to help the scamp win her back but grandpa!  Naturally.

Don't worry: the heroine will get her own Dickensian nightmare of a family, all of whom are simultaneously affectionate and unbearable.  They are meatpacking magnates, their company represented by a cartoony cow who gleefully proclaims her joy in being eaten in singsong verse.  "We're very proud of Kansas," her mother declares in funereal tones, upon first being introduced to New York society. Her parents are so ensnared in conflicting midwestern puritanisms that every breakfast descends into an apocalyptic battle for the funny papers of Dr. Strangelove proportions.  It's a remarkable scene when we are given a glimpse of these morning maneuvers.

Despite an abundance of scenes like these, scenes which would make sublime short comedies in their own right, the movie falls flatter and flatter as it goes on.  In part this is the same problem I've had with Lubitsch before: the pacing isn't as crisp as this style normally warrants. It isn't as sharp and rollicking and mercilessly paced as Wilde or Coward or Sorkin or Shaw working with similar material.  But this isn't even the real problem.  This I could forgive when weigh in the balance against the abundance of great scenes like the breakfast table battle.  No, the problem is the heroine: Gene Tierney really sinks this film.

I don't ever remember hating Gene Tierney before, although I have to admit that it has been some years since I have seen anything of hers. (I LOVE Laura, so I'm not going to hold this or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir against her.)  But here she is stiff and undernourished and paralyzed by artificiality. The words that fall from her careful pout are somehow both diffident and tortured.  And, thanks to bad styling and some truly terrible wigs, she is not even particularly lovely for most of the film.  Of course, she has a hard row to hoe: while Don Ameche gets to be the dashing, energetic playboy, beloved of all who see him (with the notable exception of a showgirl he encounters in middle age, who really gets the best of him), she has to play the befuddled, put-upon wife, doomed to perpetual cycles of betrayal, disillusionment and forgiveness-against-her-better-judgment until finally she perishes (some years after her self-respect must have died).  She does get some phenomenally complex scenes, however, the best of which is the one where, having left her philandering husband and returned to Kansas, she tells her parents and smug Albert that she won't be judged for the years of her marriage under any circumstances.  It wasn't ten years of suffering, she says, and she refuses to be cast as that kind of woman.  It was a decade of highs and lows, like any other marriage.

Oh, it begins so very high. Henry sees her at a public telephone, lying to her mother about why she isn't home yet. Smitten, he pursues he  into a bookstore, where he finds his beloved perusing a book titled "Making your Husband Happy."

What is a man to do in a situation like that but pose as a sales clerk and persuade the young lady that she needs neither the book nor the man she myopically believes she is marrying.  After an astonishing sales pitch, the disguise begins to crumble:

She:
"If you don't change your attitude, I shall have to complain to your employer."

He:
"I'm not employed here.  I'm not a book salesman. I took one look at you and followed you into the store.  If you'd walked into a restaurant, I would have become a waiter. If you'd walked into a burning building, I would have become a fireman.  If you'd walked into an elevator, I would have stopped it between two floors, and we'd have spent the rest of our lives there."

Swoon.

D, a word to the wise (by which I mean anyone smart enough to fall in love with a bibliophile): anytime you want to say those words to me in a bookstore, I'm yours.

And let's not forget the film's best (only?) elevator: the one that takes hell's rejects up to the other place.  It's hard not to remember this part of the bookstore scene at the film's end....

Howl (Atlantic Film Festival)

Last night I ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery.

That is to say, I spent an hour and a half in company with the new movie (part biopic, part legal drama, part animated hallucinterpretation of the poem) based on Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I am starting at the end of my first experience with the Atlantic Film Festival, which has been unfolding languorously around Halifax for a little over a week now.  And a giddy week it has been for me: I missed the festival entirely last year, and - determined not to let it slip by again - I found myself on a frenzy of ticket buying.  Seven films in as many days, and all of them more or less gratifying.  Two of them Cannes award-winners.  Several by directors whose work I already admired.  None of them Canadian (through no fault of the programmers, since they included a panoply of intriguing Canadian and Maritime films at times I couldn't make them, including the rather bleak national entry for this year's Academy Award).  And I still have regrets: I didn't manage to make it to the new Woody Allen film, although I wanted to.  I comfort myself with the knowledge that it is almost certainly fairly awful.

More backstory on Howl, which stars a surprisingly good James Franco.  Last week I was talking to a friend from my department about the film, and she said "You know he is getting his doctorate in English, right?".  "Ha!" I scoffed, "Where?".  "At your program," she said, surprised to be delivering this news, "At Yale."  I thought she was lying.   I knew I had arrived at Yale a decade and a half too late to overlap with David Duchovny; it just seemed like the taunting of fate that I then left a year too early to coincide with another movie star.  (Once I saw Duchovny on "Inside the Actors Studio" while I was in the throes of my dissertation.  James Lipton asked him about his Yale years, which seemed fine at first, but then he said something like, "You left... before completing your dissertation.  What was the title of that work?".  And David Duchovny, possessor of fame and wealth beyond most people's wildest imaginings, just sort of, well, crumbled away, collapsing in on himself as he travelled mentally back to the masochistic, excruciated mindset of someone in the advanced stages of pursuing their doctorate.  He curled forward and shook his head slowly, and I thought, "Yes.  Yes: you never lose that terrible anxiety of underachievement, no matter what else you accomplish in life.  David Duchovny, I know exactly how you feel.")

As it turns out, my friend was only telling me true. James Franco has just begun his Ph.D. in literature and film.  So all I could think throughout this film was how very different my seminar years of graduate school would have been if this Ginsberg-tinted Franco had been a part of them.

But, the film:

It is a sort of a quilt of a project, a stitching together of "interviews" with a youngish Ginsberg (played by Franco) at the moment when his book Howl and Other Poems has landed its publisher in court under obscenity charges.  His reflections on poetry, inspiration, and his biographical influences (most notably a series of men he loved and situated as muses and often priapic heroes in the poem) are interlarded with animated illustrations of the poem, which unfurl like whisps of highly sexualized smoke, and with scenes from the trial itself.  The casting of the film is phenomenal: in the trial scenes, for instance, the uncomprehending prosecutor is played with convincing bluster by the suddenly gray David Strathairn, while the coolly eloquent defense is portrayed by who else but Jon Hamm, who delivers a defense of literary freedom like he is pitching ad copy to a skeptical corporation.  It is all brilliantly rousing, even before you see a line of famous character actors playing professors and critics of literature, called in as "expert witnesses" on the necessity of words like "snatch" to the artistic integrity of Howl.  And, more impressively, it is rarely clear.  The court scenes don't succumb to the Hollywood conventions of juridical process any more than they have to: most of the time the witnesses and lawyers are merely muddling through some very murky ethical and aesthetic territory as they attempt to establish a concrete legal conception of literary value.

The least compelling aspect of the film is the animation, sad to say.  This isn't because it is an objectionable choice: it is in fact a compelling formal experiment, and if ever a poem were made for this sort of experiment, it is Howl.  But the aesthetics of the CGI don't match the polish or complexity of the rest of the film: they seem clumsy where everything else is elaborately casual, and the human forms seem wooden exactly at the moments when they should be as organic and sinuous as a vine.

As the credits began to roll, I turned to the colleague sitting next to me in the theatre.  "So," I said, "will you be showing your freshmen this film in 'Introduction to Literature?'".  "Well, I had high hopes for it," she replied with a laugh, "but ... no, I don't think so."  I thought back to the students sitting next to us, texting persistently through the first twenty minutes of the film, who got up and left in the middle of the umpteenth cartoon copulation to grace the screen.  As they stepped in front of me, two of several departures that didn't seem related to the film's quality, I had to wonder whether they weren't (oddly) unready to be "dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts."

Sowing Wheat and Getting Ashes: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

Life flies past us so swiftly that few of us 

pause to consider those who have lost the tempo of today.

 - Opening epigraph, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)     

You may remember a bit of bemoaning from a couple of weeks ago:

I was in the midst of two weeks' visit and general caretaking with my grandparents (aged 89 and 90), and the visit was filled with delights.*  But the mysteries of Netflix (notice how I distance myself from the fact that I am the organizing principle behind all this - the invisible hand of the free queue) meant that my first disc upon arriving back in the USA after a long time away was a famously weepy tragedy involving the callous abandonment of an elderly couple by their progeny.

So it was that I approached watching Leo McCarey's unsung masterpiece of mature romance, Make Way for Tomorrow, with some reluctance.  But when it was over, I was so struck by the nuance and sincerity of it all, and above all by its respectful, round treatment of a profoundly unmediagenic theme, that I talked about it ceaselessly to my grandparents and all their friends.  I couldn't seem to get off the subject, despite a certain lack of enthusiasm I detected in my audience for the topic of growing old to discover your children are miserable, selfish ingrates.

The premise is this: Ma and Pa (played by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore, both decades younger than the parts they are playing) call their children together for an announcement.  Pa (yes, they call each other Ma and Pa almost to the exclusion of any other names, which made me wince and dread a Leave-it-to-Beaveresque tale) has lost his job, and with it the ability to pay their mortgage.  The banker (one of Ma's old beaux) has given them six months to find a solution.  Great!, the kids say, that gives us plenty of time to come up with something for you.  Well, Pa adds, the six months are up this week.  We were hoping to solve the problem on our own, without bothering you all.

Already we can see the careful way McCarey has crafted this family dynamic.  The kids are understandable nonplussed: now they are facing a desperate situation, and the potential upheaval of their households if they take in the elder generation, with no time to adapt, prepare, or gather resources.  But it is hard to take Ma and Pa to task - they are the matriarch and patriarch of this family, loathe to impose their problems on their independent children, or to accept that they are no longer completely in control of their own lives.

Ultimately, they hit on a horrible solution: no one has room for two more in their home except the wealthiest sister, and she is saddled with a rich husband who wants nothing to do with his in-laws. At one point he refuses to have her mother over for the evening, because they have plans to go out.  You should just tell them, he insists, that we are never going to take her on.

"Coincidentally," his wife says, as she gets ready to do her nails, "who are we going out with tonight?"

"My mother."  Piercing glare from his wife.  "But that's different."

Furious nail-filing.  And then, casually, poisonously, she replies: "I was so afraid it would be someone I didn't like."

So the eldest son takes in his mother, putting her in a room with her callow-as-can-be teenage grand-daughter (Rhoda), and his sister takes in her father, making room for him on the couch of their one-bedroom house.  It's just temporary, they all assure themselves.  Just until rich daughter works something more permanent out with her husband. (She won't.)  Or until Pa gets a job.

So the couple of fifty years, who had promised themselves they would always be together, go their separate ways.

The minute portrait of family life that follows is excruciating - and this is a mark of how well crafted it is.  The teenage grand-daughter's friends won't come to the apartment any more because they are embarrassed by Ma, who eagerly chats with them.  Rhoda starts going out more, making dates with much older men, even staying away whole nights at a time, to her family's distress.  Don't you want to spend time with boys your own age, her grandmother gently asks - boys whom you might want to marry?  The look of scorn this question elicits is familiar to anyone who has ever had or been a teenage child.  Ma intervenes in her daughter-in-law's parenting and housekeeping, claiming that she just wants to lift the burden from her as she works.  But, dear!, she says, You seem so busy playing bridge.  I don't play bridge, the daughter-in-law replies through clenched teeth, I teach bridge.  Each intervention is like a criticism: you are too involved in making money to pay attention to what really matters - taking care of your family.  I found myself turning pretty strongly against Ma.

Meanwhile, Pa is staying with a considerably more crotchety daughter, who becomes irritated with him when he falls ill, and rushes him from the tiny couch to their bedroom for appearance's sake when the doctor arrives to take a look at him. Still, Pa can't seem to stop harping on about how untrustworthy the perfectly competent doctor is, complaining that a bit of Ma's cooking and caretaking always put him right in the past.  When the doctor asks him to make certain sounds while he listens to his lungs, Pa refuses.  When the poor man tries to examine his throat, Pa bites him.  My patience with these parents begins to run very, very thin.

In a classic piece of ambivalent film-making, McCarey sets up a scene in which Pa calls Ma on the telephone.  We only hear her side: she receives the call in the middle of a bridge lesson at the apartment.  (Let's recall that the family's livelihood depends in part on these bridge lessons.) Before the call, she had the maid bring her chair into the center of the room, where she rocks creakily and loudly, drawing alarmed looks from the clients, all of whom are wearing black tie.  From time to time she goes around the table, looking at the cards and complimenting the players in great detail on the features of their hands.  Her daughter-in-law begins to sweat.

Then the phone rings, and it is Pa.  She starts to talk, at the top of her lungs, the way those who don't often use cell phones still do, unable to believe the voice could travel so far without a really powerful set of pipes behind it.  She is giddily happy to hear his voice.  Soon all the heads in the bridge room are turned towards her, although she has her back to them.  She believes she is entirely alone with Pa; we know she has an audience, imposing on their privacy.  But it is an increasingly tender audience - they (we) can see the affection at work here, and they (we) sympathize.  The bridge players exchange a series of small smiles.  Soon Ma's anxieties come to the fore.  Is it cold there?  Pa isn't used to the cold.  How much did he pay for this phone call?  Well, she concludes sadly, he could have bought himself a nice warm scarf for that price.

She hangs up, and we know he won't call again.

This isn't the only time that McCarey writes a surrogate audience into the film for us, modeling the affection he wants us to feel for this exasperating couple.  At one point, Pa receives a letter from Ma, but he has broken his glasses, so he goes to a shopkeeper he has befriended and asks him to read it aloud.  The shopkeeper is a remarkably three-dimensional character - somehow he is the essence of Jewish film stereotypes, and yet warmer and more genuine than any of the couple's awful children.  The device of the letter lets us step squarely into his shoes, allowing us cannily into the intimacy of their longing for each other (finally the shopkeeper decides it is too private a letter and can't go on). But it also creates a complex scenario for the revelation of a key piece of news: Ma is being shown around retirement homes, in the unspoken hope that she will get used to the idea of them.  Pa is clearly aware not just of the implication of this news, although Ma doesn't lay it out clearly, but also of his friend's judgment.

As outrageous as these filial tactics seem, the truth is that Ma is putting enormous pressure on the income and emotional stability of her son's household. When she sees that they have written away for information about a facility for aged ladies, she preempts the inevitable.  I have been thinking, she tells her son, that I would really rather be at a facility.  Don't tell me no.  She takes his face in her hands: "You always were my favorite."  There is no mind game here; this is an era in which less public stigma (although no less private trauma, I suspect) was attached to parents' having favorites among their children.  And indeed he is the least wormlike of her offspring; he at least has the decency to feel guilty about foisting her off on a somewhat bleak retirement home. He walks back into his bedroom, looks at his wife in the mirror, and tells her sardonically that she can be proud of the work he did today.

Ma's conditions for going to the facility aren't many, but they are strongly felt.  First, Pa must never, ever know that she has gone.  He is going to stay with their daughter in faraway California, and his conviction that he will get another job in his seventies - a job that will allow him to bring Ma out to join him - is unshakable.  Even Ma tows the line of this delusion, always claiming that she "believes" in Pa's capacity to solve problems like this.

"Why don't you just face facts?" her grand-daughter asks, insensitive but genuinely frightened for her.

"Oh, Rhoda," Ma replies, without a trace of anger in her voice, "Where you're seventeen and life is beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as dancing or going to parties.  But when you're 70, well, you don't care about dancing, you don't go to parties any more, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there aren't any facts to face." Gently, as if resigned: "So would you mind if I just kind of ... went on pretending?"

Ma's second condition is that she get to say goodbye to Pa.  They meet in Manhattan, where he is going to catch a train that evening.  They spend the day retracing the events of their honeymoon five decades earlier, and they realize that this is the only vacation they have had together since.  Because this is NYC, everyone is incredibly nice to them, charmed by their obvious affection.  They revisit the hotel they stayed at on their honeymoon, and the management is eager to treat them to anything they might like.  Pa urges Ma to have a drink with him at the bar.  Oh no, I coudn't, she cries.  But look, Ma, he says, women are drinking here now.  Tentatively, she looks up and down the bar, and then she orders... an old-fashioned.  They go to dance, and the bandleader sees them struggle with the jaunty music of the thirties.  He abruptly stops the song, to the consternation of all the other dancers, and strikes up a waltz, just for them.

This scene contained the very moment when I realized how brilliant a piece of work this film is.  Ma and Pa sit at a table in the ballroom of their honeymoon hotel of yore.  This is a scene well known from thirties cinema, but the figures are unfamiliar - we expect Marlene or Greta, not this homespun, dowdy pair.  As one of the commentators on the Criterion disc notes, this is the very rare film that is a romance of old age.  But a romance it is: they are swept away in the moment, and they lean towards each other, backs to us, in that classic Hollywood shot.  Moments before their lips touch, she looks, startled, back over her shoulder.  Straight at the camera.  Then, smiling, she leans away from him.  It is a perfect moment - more expressive of romance within the values of a certain era than a kiss ever could be.  And the way it involves - ensnares - the audience is chilling.

They skirt the issue of their upcoming parting and dance around the topic of their truly awful children.  Who is really to blame for this situation?  McCarey has laid a careful foundation for the tragedy that is the end of this film: their separation is inevitable and heartless, but wholly plausible.  Their lives with their children really are untenable, for clear and specific reasons.  Ma even understands her own complicity in the outcome, without absolving her children: "If I'd been all I thought it was, things'd be different now.  You don't sow wheat and get ashes, Pa."

The day is supposed to end with a big family dinner before they all deliver Pa to his train.  But Ma and Pa decide, in the final analysis, to blow their children off.  Pa does this, skillfully, in a phone call to his kids - a call the McCarey chooses not to show us in its entirety, but which the kids feel is a sign that Pa understands the extent of their betrayal.   They fret and grind their teeth over how inconsiderate these old people are.  But the eldest son - the favorite, you recall - keeps everyone busy until the time has passed when they could see their father off at the train station:

"I kinda thought they'd like to be alone," he admits.

"If we don't go to the station, they'll think we're terrible," one sibling complains.

"Aren't we?"

The final scene of the film is so profoundly tragic, without any trace of histrionics or any need for events outside everyday experience, that I wept uncontrollably.  So did Orson Welles, apparently, since he told Peter Bogdonovich, "Oh my god. That's the saddest movie ever made.  It would make a stone cry.** And nobody went!"

It was indeed a box office failure, coming as it did amid the ravages of the Depression, when people didn't feel like spending a Friday night contemplating the certainty that they would grow old, lose their job and their home, and be rejected by the kids they had spent their entire life caring for.  Studio executives begged McCarey for a happier ending, and cut him loose when he refused and the film didn't sell.  When he won an Oscar for another film he directed that year, The Awful Truth, McCarey told the Academy that he was grateful, but they had praised the wrong film.

It is a film of ideals - simultaneously scathing and understanding like many of the great naturalist novels of the late 19th century, novels which showed their characters being ground into despair by the economic realities of their lives.  Social security had just been passed in 1935, as Gary Giddons points out in the Criterion commentary, and the controversy surrounding it bore a striking similarity to our current debate around health care.  Look, this film says, this is what happens when we allow the market to take its course with the elderly.  Real people are crushed.

Not a profitable film, then, but a fervently admired one.  George Bernard Shaw (always one for a good piece of socially conscious art) wrote a fan letter to McCarey after seeing his film.  Directors all around Hollywood quietly adored it. And years later, in Japan, a film-maker named Ozu made a movie under its influence.  He called it Tokyo Story.




Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Dir. Leo McCarey
****



* I did spend a lot of time ferrying my grandmother to dentist appointments, which was more grueling for her than it was for me.  Amid these appointments, however, I had a dream that I bit down too hard on something, and all my teeth fell out.  I went to our dentist - who also happens to be a family friend - and he said "Tsk.  You should have come to me more often."  Well, Dr. Freud?

** Phew.  I'm not a stone. I can always count on Orson to save me from these moments of ontological doubt.