Edward VI's Georgian Coronation

On Tuesday, Turner Classic Movies aired a series of Errol Flynn movies including Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, and The Prince and the Pauper. Based upon Mark Twain's historical comedy novel, the story in the latter movie takes place after Henry VIII's death when his son Edward trades places with a poor boy named Tom Canty. Evil Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, played by Claude Rains, takes advantage of the confusion to use the fake Prince as his pawn while Miles Hendon, Errol Flynn, protects the real king. The boys are played by brothers, Billy and Bobby Mauch, who seem several years older than the historical Edward's nine years at the time of his coronation.

Warner Brothers intended The Prince and the Pauper to be released in time for the coronation of Edward VIII, but because Edward wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, he abdicated and the coronation--now of his younger brother George--and the release of the film were delayed until May of 1937.

The Coronation Scene, which is very detailed and gorgeously filmed in black and white, is a set piece. Although the real Edward and Miles are on their way to Westminster Abbey, the director had no interest in creating any tension--there are no cuts to Edward and Miles coming closer as the anointing and the coronation of the fake Edward is proceeding. They arrive with seconds to spare! 

 A footnote in this book, which describes how Erich Korngold composed his own version of the coronation anthem, "Zadok the Priest", includes the promotional detail that this scene would be similar to the rites in King George VI's coronation so much so that "Those of us who are not fortunate enough to be able to see the actual rites, will witness an accurate picture of what will occur in Westminster Abbey in May."

So instead of trying to achieve authenticity to the historical coronation of Edward VI, the producers opted for authenticity to the contemporary coronation of George VI! 

I also found it amusing that Edward trusted Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk most of all and that he exiled his historical Protector, Somerset (Claude Rains) at the end of the movie. The anniversary of Somerset's execution is coming up--January 22, 1552.

Did She or Didn't She?: "My Cousin Rachel"

Daphne du Maurier was one of my favorite authors when I was in high school and I read almost all her novels (not sure about Rule, Britannia), and I read them all more than once. My paperback copy of My Cousin Rachel started falling apart and I found a used hardcover! Earlier this week Turner Classic Movies aired the 1952 movie based on the novel starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton. The movie is very faithful adaptation of the novel and Olivia de Havilland's performance as Rachel captures the mysterious fascination of the character very well.

The question at the heart of the story is whether or not Rachel poisoned two cousins who loved her, first Ambrose whom she married and then Philip who wanted to marry her. She may not have given them poison through her brewed tisanes, which is what Philip comes to suspect, but she certainly "poisoned" them with obsessive love which destroyed both men. Her affair with Ambrose is told at a remove through his letters and her reports of his illness and change in behavior. We witness how Philip becomes obsessed with her, wants to give her everything, expects everything in return from her--and then begins to doubt not only her but his own suspicions about her. His guardian warns him that there are some women who through no fault of their own bring trouble and disaster to those who love them. Philip should have married Louise like everyone thought he should!

De Havilland's calm, pleasant face, soothing voice, elegant figure, and quiet, sly demeanor are perfect for the role: can someone so lovely be a murderer? But she also shows resolve and steely determination. Richard Burton, in his first Hollywood film, is young, handsome, and impetuous, yet brooding enough.

Evidently, a new adaptation of the novel is in the works (the BBC produced a meandering adaptation in the 1980's), according to the Daphne du Maurier website:

19th February 2016. The likelihood of a film for cinema of Daphne du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachelseems to be increasing. Before Christmas it became clear that Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin had been cast for starring roles in the new movie. This week it has been suggested that Holliday Grainger will also join the cast.

News filtering through so far indicates that the writer-director Roger Michell will be reworking the novel and setting it in more modern times. However young Philip will still be at the heart of the story, which sees his guardian Ambrose die in circumstances which may incriminate Rachel. However the beguiling Rachel side-tracks Philip’s concerns when he becomes emotionally involved with her.

In the original novel Daphne du Maurier left the ending to the reader’s imagination, later saying that even she did not know if Rachel was innocent. It will be interesting to see how the film-makers decide to conclude the story.

If they resolve the ambiguity, they will destroy the story.

Belloc's Older Sister Marie and Her Movies!

In The Independent, Christopher Fowler summarizes her career and her most famous novel, The Lodger:

She was a prolific author, but her fame rests on a single novel. The only daughter of a French barrister and an English feminist, Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) was the sister of Hilaire Belloc, the granddaughter of the painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, and the great-granddaughter of a famous theologian who invented soda water. She was one of the first to join the Women Writers' Suffrage League, and married a Times journalist. After her husband was left a legacy of £2,000 she had the financial security to risk a writing career, and began pouring out novels, essays, plays and memoirs at a rate of one a year, (I tally her total output at around 72 volumes but there may have been more).

Lowndes proved to be brilliant at combining suspenseful, exciting plotting with psychological insight. Her novel Letty Lynton became a film vehicle for Joan Crawford, but there was another far more sensational book. In 1913, her novel The Lodger was slow to attract readers but gradually became a smash hit, eventually selling more than a million copies. It was loosely based around the Jack the Ripper murders, an outrage that had occurred just 25 years earlier and was still being discussed and analysed across the country. The book's inspiration came from a dinner party during which she overheard the hostess talking about her butler and cook, who kept lodgers and were convinced that one of them was the Ripper. In the novel, the landlady's suspicions grow when she discovers her lodger is a religious fanatic who walks the streets late at night and has an aversion to the engravings of beautiful women in his room. He reads sections of the Bible that rail against women, and returns home with a bloodstained cape. The novel's US version was championed by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.

Sources I've read about Belloc Lowndes, including the Wikipedia article, cite two movies based on her novels: The Lodger and Letty Lynton, and neglect to mention The Story of Ivy, which was made into a movie starring Joan Fontaine with the simple title, Ivy. It was on Turner Classic Movies last week. Ivy is a scheming woman who seems quite innocent: she is married (Richard Ney), has a lover (Patric Knowles), and wants another richer man (Herbert Marshall) to replace them both. So, she had to get rid of the husband and current lover and plans what she thinks is the perfect crime. It is an elegant and stylish film, produced by William Cameron Menzies. I won't give away the plot, but you know that crime does not pay--and there are few perfect crimes. According to TCM's article on the movie, this role was originally intended for Joan Fontaine's sister and rival, Olivia de Havilland. Olivia did not want the role because Ivy, as the title card noted is "So Sweet . . . So Beautiful . . .  So Lovely . . . but so utterly EVIL" and she did not want to play such an unsympathetic role.

The Mortal Storm: A Family Makes Choices

Last night, TCM showed one of my favorite movies: The Mortal Storm with Margaret Sullavan ("with an A") and Jimmy Stewart (billed as James Stewart). The New York Times reviewed the movie in 1941:

At last and at a time when the world is more gravely aware than ever of the relentless mass brutality embodied in the Nazi system, Hollywood has turned its camera eye upon the most tragic human drama of our age. In Metro's "The Mortal Storm," which opened yesterday at the Capitol, a grim and agonizing look is finally taken into Nazi Germany—into the new Nazi Germany of 1933, when Hitler took over the reins and a terrible wave of suppression and persecution followed. And, on the basis of recorded facts and the knowledge that its drama is authentic, this picture turns out to be one of the most harrowing and inflammatory fictions ever placed upon the screen.

There is no use mincing words about it: "The Mortal Storm" falls definitely into the category of blistering anti-Nazi propaganda. It strikes out powerfully with both fists at the unmitigated brutality of a system which could turn a small and gemütlich university community into a hotbed of hatred and mortal vengeance, which could separate the loving members of a family and hound two free-thinking young people into flight from their homeland and to death. It gives no quarter to the antagonists; from clear-eyed and apparently upright young men, they suddenly become heartless sadists at nothing more than the call of their leader's name, the infectious chant of a song. There is no question of why they become such. The fact that they are is assumed as a premise.

But so violent is the oppression meted out by the Nazis and so bitter and hopeless is the fate of those against whom it is aimed that even the spiritual satisfaction which might be derived from a story of heroic suffering is seriously impaired, especially in the light of current headlines. As propaganda, "The Mortal Storm" is a trumpet call to resistance, but as theatrical entertainment it is grim and depressing today.

The family involved is a mixed family: two non-Aryans (the father, played by Frank Morgan) and the daughter (played by Sullavan); the mother and her sons are protected by their Aryan blood and in fact the sons and their friends become Nazi's, while the father suffers because he will not, as a scientist and esteemed professor, accept that there is a difference between Aryan and non-Aryan blood. The reviewer is correct that the violence and bullying depicted in the movie make the viewer feel helpless and hopeless: you wish you could burst into the action and beat up Dan Duryea! You want to tell the two Roberts, Stack and Young, that they are destroying all they love! Directed by Frank Borzage.

Hollywood History: Richard the Lionheart

On Wednesday last week, Turner Classic Movies showed a series of Medieval swashbucklers (plus of a couple of outliers (set during the reigns of Charles II of England and of Philip II of Spain)--among them three featuring Richard the Lionheart: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, and King Richard and the Crusaders.

The first two pose a Hollywood historical problem: did Richard the Lionheart come home and confront his usurping brother John with the help of Robin Hood and his merry men or did he arrive during a tournament duel between Ivanhoe and De Bois-Guilbert? What both movie's Richard the Lionheart have in common is that he wants to create unity in England between Norman and Anglo-Saxon, restoring order and justice after removing his brother John and his followers.

As the BBC notes, however, Richard I had little interest in ruling over England and certainly forgave John for any attempts to usurp power while he was held for ransom:

As king, Richard's chief ambition was to join the Third Crusade, prompted by Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in 1187. To finance this, he sold sheriffdoms and other offices and in 1190 he departed for the Holy Land. In May, he reached Cyprus where he married Berengaria, daughter of the king of Navarre. Richard arrived in the Holy Land in June 1191 and Acre fell the following month. In September, his victory at Arsuf gave the crusaders possession of Joppa. Although he came close, Jerusalem, the crusade's main objective, eluded him. Moreover, fierce quarrels among the French, German and English contingents provided further troubles. After a year's stalemate, Richard made a truce with Saladin and started his journey home.

Bad weather drove him ashore near Venice and he was imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria before being handed over to the German emperor Henry VI, who ransomed him for the huge sum of 150,000 marks. The raising of the ransom was a remarkable achievement. In February 1194, Richard was released. He returned at once to England and was crowned for a second time, fearing that the ransom payment had compromised his independence. Yet a month later he went to Normandy, never to return. His last five years were spent in intermittent warfare against Philip II. While besieging the castle of Châlus in central France he was fatally wounded and died on 6 April 1199. He was succeeded by his younger brother John, who had spent the years of Richard's absence scheming against him.

The BBC also posts a discussion of whether Robin Hood and Richard I ever met.

"Intolerance" in the Morning

I caught the end(s) of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance the other morning on Turner Classic Movies. In three of the four interwoven stories Griffith traces, someone needs to get somewhere fast to warn or save someone else. In the Modern Story, the Boy is about to executed for a murder he did not commit and the race is on to convince the governor to pardon him and then to reach the jail in time to stop the execution. In the Babylon Story, the Bacchanal is in full swing (with the Ruth St. Denis dancers performing) when the Mountain Girl arrives to warn Belshazzar that Cyrus is on the way; in the French story, Prosper wants to rescue Brown Eyes from the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Spoiler alert: only the Modern Story ends with a successful intervention, just before the hangman's trap is about to be sprung.

Only one story has no rescue attempt: the Judaean story, as Jesus is led off to be crucified. The enemies of love in that story are the Pharisees, whom Griffith juxtaposes with the reformers that almost ruin the lives of The Boy and The Dear One. But the Judaean Story is one story that has the ultimate rescue, and Griffith leaves it out: The Resurrection!

Griffith tells the four stories to illustrate his theme, as the opening title cards describe it: Our play is made up of four separate stories, laid in different periods of history, each with its own set of characters. Each story shoes how hatred and intolerance, through all the ages, have battled against love and charity. Therefore, you will find our play turning from one of the four stories to another, as the common theme unfolds in each.

At the end, as this site details, the Crucifixion is the last image of the Judaean story and then comes Griffith's epilogue, influenced by the Progressive ideals of his age:

The Judean Story finishes with brilliant light streaming from the top of the hillside where the crucifixion has taken place.

In a moralistic, preachy epilogue, director D. W. Griffith ends the film with an idealistic vision of a day: "when cannon and prison bars wrought in the fires of intolerance -" will no longer prevail. Storm clouds move above a modern battlefield scene, where guns are fired, lines of battle between soldiers are enjoined, and flashes of lightning spark. Hand-to-hand fighting between two men is centered in an iris and mortar fire blasts from giant guns. A military tank moves behind the battle lines. Prisoners in striped uniforms in a long corridor shake their fists up toward a prison wall. In the cloudy sky above the modern-day battlefield, white robed, pacifistic, angelic figurines appear, as one of the hand-to-hand combatants holds his rifle in mid-air before bayoneting his fallen opponent. "And perfect love shall bring peace forevermore." All the soldiers on the battlefield look up and drop their rifles.

An open vehicle with passengers waving happily from its sides flies through (superimposed) clouds. "Instead of prison walls -- Bloom flowery fields." Brilliant light descends from above toward the exterior of a prison. The prisoners who are gesturing toward the wall suddenly move through it (again superimposed trick photography) - the prison walls disappear. The exterior of the prison dissolves into an open country scene with a flowering field in the foreground, and mountains in the background. The field is filled with black workers. The soldiers on the battlefield extend their arms to the sky as clouds (with the angelic figurines) descend toward them. In a May Day type celebration, people happily dance on a grassy field, and two children sit on a unused cannon which has sprouted weeds and flowers. Two other children, a little boy and girl, are in the foreground playing happily together - he puts flowers in her hair, she blows him a kiss, and they both hug each other. From the battlefield, the soldiers look up and cheer toward the angelic figurines. A brilliant white cross appears over the scene. There is a final medium-close shot of the woman rocking the cradle.

The woman rocking the cradle is Lillian Gish. 

William M. Drew suggests in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision, that Social Gospel Christianity and the ideals of the Progressive movement influenced Griffith's views of religion and society. 

World War I on the Big Screen (and Little)

In July, Turner Classic Movies dedicated Friday nights to World War I movies:

In observance of the centenary of World War I, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, TCM devotes its popular Friday Night Spotlight franchise to films about this conflict. . . .

The movies in our Spotlight reflect views of the First World War as seen by filmmakers through the decades. King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925), released only seven years after the war's end, takes an unflinching look at the horrors of war as experienced by an American soldier (John Gilbert). Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) makes a powerful anti-war statement in another story about the travails of a young soldier--this one a German (Lew Ayres). In Howard Hawks' Sergeant York (1941), Gary Cooper plays Alvin York, a former pacifist from Tennessee who became the most decorated soldier of WWI.

Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) tells the powerful story of a French colonel (Kirk Douglas) who goes against his better judgment in following orders to lead his men in a suicide mission against the Germans. David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) follows the colorful real-life exploits of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole), the flamboyant British officer who fought alongside Arabs in their revolt against the Turks during WWI. Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981) tells of two idealistic young friends (one of them played by Mel Gibson) who join the Australian Army during the war and fight in Turkey in the ill-fated Battle of Gallipoli. 

TCM showed many of the films highlighted in this article from The Wall Street Journal, "Unquiet on the Western Front: A look at World War I in film":

Several outstanding war pictures of the 1920s centered on aerial combat, particularly William Wellman's "Wings" (1927), winner of the first best picture Oscar; "Hell's Angels" (1930), produced by Howard Hughes and featuring Jean Harlow in her first major role; and Howard Hawks's "The Dawn Patrol" (1930), starring Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Like "The Big Parade," "Wings" and "Hell's Angels" incorporated romance into their storylines of airborne heroics. Not so the all-male "Dawn Patrol," which won an Oscar for best story and plumbs issues of personal responsibility in wartime. Though the film celebrates the derring-do of its British fliers, it also takes a nuanced look at the men who, duty-bound, send their comrades to virtually certain death and then must deal with the guilt such actions provoke. The film was remade in 1938 in response to the Anschluss, under Edmund Goulding's direction and starring Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Niven. And what this later version loses through its distance from the Great War, it more than makes up for in slicker production values and a dashing cast.

The near decade between the two versions of "The Dawn Patrol" saw the perfection of a different type of war movie, one unequivocally pacifist in nature. The most internationally celebrated and sophisticated of these is Jean Renoir's classic "La Grande Illusion" (1937), whose title says it all. With its multinational cast and a worldview more universal than any similar picture, its hold on the public imagination remains strong after nearly 80 years, and rightly so. Something similar can be said of Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930), based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel, whose mass appeal—despite its ostensibly narrow focus on German troops—has been even greater than Renoir's film, at least in the U.S. Far less famous, though no less potent, is Raymond Bernard's "Les Croix de Bois" (1932), or "Wooden Crosses." Its cast composed entirely of veterans, the film charts the gradual disillusionment of a French soldier (the excellent Pierre Blanchar) as his regiment thins and the war drags on. In addition to a tense episode in which the enemy Germans lay mines beneath a French trench, the movie features an extraordinary battle sequence that runs an unremitting 15 minutes and stands among the screen's most harrowing.

Read the rest here.

The Detective's Act of Contrition: "Forget about the doctor. Send for a priest."

Turner Classic Movies recently broadcast the 1951 movie, Detective Story, based on the Sidney Kingsley play, with Kirk Douglas in the title role. At the end of the movie, after his wife (Eleanor Parker) has left him, the protagonist, Detective McLeod, saves the rest of the policemen and suspects in the squad room from a criminal who shoots him with a gun grabbed from another cop's holster.

He knows he is dying and when his lieutenant starts to call for an ambulance, he says, never mind an ambulance, call for a priest. ("Forget about the doctor. Send for a priest.")The police have a local parish dialed up in seconds. While he suffers the agony of being shot in the gut, Detective McLeod offers a man accused of fraud a second chance, and prays that his wife Mary will forgive him--he asks one of his friends to find her and ask her to forgive him, and to help her as he had not been able to help her when she begged him.

Then he makes the Sign of the Cross with his bloody hand and begins to pray the Act of Contrition--but dies in the midst of praying it. His friend, Lou Brody, played by William Bendix, finishes the Act of Contrition for him. It's a powerful scene, and I was praying along with him.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You,

and I detest all my sins, because I fear

the loss of heaven [that's when McLeod dies]

[Brody continues the prayer:] and the pains of hell,

but most of all because I have offended You, my God,

who are all good and deserving of all my love.

I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace,

to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life.

Amen.

In the context of the movie, this scene marks a great change in the Detective's story: Detective McLeod has not been able to forgive anyone, offer mercy or leniency to his wife for her past sin (an abortion) or to a young man whom even his victim wants to forgive. Now he prays for mercy and forgiveness.

May we all receive the grace of final repentance; and as Father Zuhlsdorf would say on his blog: Go To Confession!