The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

This is a great time of year for people like me. I love movies, especially older movies from the 1930s and 40s. Each year Turner Classic Movies runs its “31 Days of Oscar” programming, a whole month’s worth of award-winning films, so there’s never a shortage of films from the 30s and 40s during the month of February. I prefer older movies because there’s less reliance on special effects than what one generally finds today. Hollywood these days is bound and determined to crank out one big money spectacle after another. Got a screenplay with a huge plot hole? Easy! Just fill it with a $20 million CG special effects shot of something spectacular, such as aliens blowing up a city. It’s a quick and easy way to box office boffo! I was recently reminded of this short-on-story-long-on-effects phenomenon when I watched the movie “Twister” with my wife. Afterwards, I turned to mi esposa and commented, “Jesus, that was awful! The plot’s thinner than a McDonald’s hamburger!” While I appreciate what it takes to create a computer generated effect and how it can add to a movie, it seems that Hollywood has lost the ability to tell a story.

So what are my favorites? Here’s my short list--the complete list is too long to post here.

Citizen Kane: Orson Welles’ story of Charles Foster Kane and the investigation into his dying word, “rosebud,” was almost never seen by audiences. Welles’ based the character of Kane a little too closely on newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst caught wind of the script, he tried everything he could to make sure the final print of the film was destroyed. When he was unsuccessful in that attempt, he used his newspapers to discredit Welles and his movie. In the end Hearst was never the same person again and Welles never had nearly as much control of his films as he did with Citizen Kane.

The movie is a series of flashbacks depicting Kane’s life as a newspaper reporter tries to decipher the cryptic “rosebud” comment. As the story progresses and Kane becomes more of a public figure, he seems unable or unwilling to reconcile his private and public lives. He ruins his marriage and political aspirations when he engages in an extramarital affair to a woman he would eventually marry only to have that relationship fail as well. Despite being the American success story, despite all his wealth and successes, Kane ultimately dies alone. Unable to love others he himself is not loved and this may explain why his dying thought is of the sled he had when he was a child. Perhaps he longs for the innocence of childhood, or maybe to be a child again and live life over once more, correcting those mistakes he made during his life.

Best Years of Our Lives: No matter how often I see this one I never tire of watching it. The 1946 tale of three servicemen returning from the war to find that their homecoming is not the wonderful experience they thought it would be. Dana Andrews plays an Army Air Corps officer who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; Frederic Marsh is a former army sergeant who comes home with a drinking problem; Harold Russell plays a sailor who has lost his hands when his ship sank, leaving him with two prosthetic hooks in their place. While he has come to terms with losing his hands, he has a difficult time with his family’s reaction to his hooks. To ensure a reasonable degree of accuracy to the issues these characters experience, director William Wyler hired a crew composed entirely of veterans. Meanwhile, cinematographer Gregg Toland was able to manipulate his cameras to create a depth of focus that put objects in both the foreground and background in equal focus, something unheard of until that point.

In real life, Harold Russell lost his hands in a training explosion at Camp Mackall, NC in 1943. Samuel Goldwyn saw Russell in the documentary, “Diary of a Sergeant” and decided to change the role of Homer Parrish from suffering from shell-shock to one that reflected Russell’s situation. Later on, Russell would become the first, and to date only, person to win two Oscars for the same role (supporting actor and a special award for being a role model of hope for returning veterans). Other cast members in this film include Myrna Loy as Frederic Marsh’s wife, Teresa Wright as Marsh’s daughter and later Dana Andrews’ love interest, and the incomparable Virginia Mayo, who is superb in the role of Andrews’ philandering wife. An excellent movie that faithfully depicts many of the issues returning veterans faced in post-war America.

The Grapes of Wrath: The cinematic version of John Steinbeck’s story of the Joad family’s trek from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the fertile fields of California. It’s one of those rare occasions when a good book is turned into a good movie, even if there are some deviations between the two. John Ford directed this movie, and this film effectively launched Henry Fonda’s career (much like Ford had done for John Wayne in 1939 with “Stagecoach”). The movie was released in 1940, the same year Steinbeck won a Pulitzer for the book. I often think this movie should be in color, especially those shots of scenic vistas during the Joad’s trip west. However, black and white really captures the grittiness of the Depression—not to mention some of the lighting effects just wouldn’t be the same in color. The ending of the movie is one of hope, quite different than how the book ends. There was much speculation at the time how Ford planned on ending the movie; this was to be expected considering the book ends with Rose of Sharon miscarrying her baby and then breast-feeding a starving man they find on a railroad car. Such a finale would have made the collective head of the Catholic League of Decency explode like a Fourth of July rocket. To hide the true ending to the movie, Ford distributed the script to the entire cast--minus the last six pages of course.

Sons of the Desert: I never really liked Laurel & Hardy films when in my younger days, but this one was a great re-introduction to their work. In this film, Stan & Oliver want to attend the national convention of The Sons of the Desert fraternal order, but Oliver’s wife objects as she has made plans for a vacation trip to the mountains. The boys decide to trick their wives by hatching a plot where Oliver fakes an illness and is ordered by a doctor (really a veterinarian) to take a trip to Hawaii to recover his health. Instead, the boys head to Chicago and the convention. While in the Windy City, where they’re having fun and ill-advisedly hamming it up for newsreel cameras, the ship to Hawaii they are supposed to be on sinks during a typhoon. The film then becomes a comedy of errors as the wives, played by Mae Busch and Dorothy Christy, discover the plot and exact a measure of payback. The movie runs just over an hour, but for being made in 1933 I think its comedic value holds up quite well.

The Andy Hardy Series: Okay, these aren’t great movies in comparison, but they’re a guilty pleasure of mine. All told there were 17 movies featuring the ongoing saga of Judge Hardy’s Family between 1937 and 1958, and the series was a big moneymaker for MGM. Though people familiar with the series know that Judge Hardy was played by Lewis Stone, originally Lionel Barrymore was cast in that role for the 1937 debut of the series, “A Family Affair.” It was clear at that time that Barrymore was suffering from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, which would confine him to a wheelchair in 1946s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movies are preachy and somewhat cornball by today’s standards, but they reflect a certain innocence and sentimentality of a time gone by. And as a student of history I enjoy seeing and hearing the technology, fashions, and swell linguistic idioms as a snapshot of Americana several decades ago. Mickey Rooney’s character of Andy Hardy is a bit naïve and more than just a little misogynistic. He perpetually finds himself in situations of his own doing for which there is no easy way out (asks two women to marry him, sells a car with bad brakes to his friends for $20). But perhaps Andy Hardy was meant to be a good example of a bad example, showing others what not to do.