MGM – RHAPSODY IN STU

goinghollywood

That Hollywood always fashioned itself as a palatial fantasy mill – a conveyor belt of shimmery product whose pulleys and rollers were lined with gold – is evident from its earliest years, from the barrage of publicity it both manufactured and deliberately attracted from the word ‘go.’ Even the black-box of production, the whole technical backend of movie-making, is magical and exciting, so the publicity cooed, pushing the idea that hoisting cameras, clipping microphones, and signing contracts is as extravagant as the finished product whose escapism was supposed to rid the audience of any awareness of the means of its creation. And so whenever classical Hollywood churned out “a movie about the movies,” it was as if a window into the industry’s self-image had been left open for all to peer in at. The most satirical of such movies offered something like a self-diagnosis – Victor Fleming’s BOMBSHELL (’33) is a touchstone, with its spitball excoriation of the star-maker machinery – but the best, satirical or no, played on the audience’s soaring perceptions of the industry, and induced a profound anxiety. Will the audience surrogate, the dreamer of Hollywood’s marketed dreams, fly too close to that tinsel sun, only to nosedive into an abyss of disillusionment?

These are lofty terms to employ when speaking of GOING HOLLYWOOD (’33) a schizoid 78-minute programmer with Marion Davies and Bing Crosby sparring all the way from some American nowheresville (or is it supposed to be New York? And is there a soul alive who knows for sure?) to the eponymous land of life and love as translated by an army of technicians into the glamorous language of the movies. But simply examine the credits. Here is Walter Wanger, one of the most creative and personally fascinating of Hollywood’s producer class, just a few years away from bucking the studios in a bid for independence. Here is Donald Ogden Stiers as screenwriter, before HOLIDAY (’38) and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (’40) enshrined his mastery of light existentialism as wrought within society’s upper echelons. And Raoul Walsh, the most vibrant of the first wave of Old Hollywood auteurs, spending the Pre-Code years bouncing from one studio to the next (a few years before he would achieve a total symbiosis with Warner Brothers). A young Arthur Freed contributed the lyrics and petitioned for Bing Crosby’s casting, and William Randolph Hearst hovered in the background, pulling whatever strings he could to make Davies’ waning star reignite. This smorgasbord of screen talent is so far from the standard unit production model of the era (particularly at MGM, with Irving Thalberg as the omnipresent head of production) that it all but implodes the usual notions of house style. This lively work of vigorous unpredictability is not an MGM picture in the same way that BOMBEHSLL, for all its countervailing pleasures, is an MGM picture. Walsh and Crosby are even said to have been banned from the lot.

The film begins with Davies’ Sylvia Bruce teaching at an all-girls school, where mirthless pedagogy reigns, enforced by all manner of repressive rules. Davies knows she is not fit for the job – by night she listens to the crooning of Bill Williamson (Bing Crosby, more himself than in his wholesome GOING MY WAY phase), and it all but whisks her away on the downy cloudscapes of her lovelorn imagination. Davies is a marvel, so dazed and dreamy that her wittiest repartee softens even as it stings (her fellow schoolteachers act offended but are unable to sustain their ire). Her voice comes out in a caramel whisper, a mellifluous transmission from a far-off realm where different rules apply. Part of the joy of Going Hollywood, and of early Hollywood in general, is in experiencing well-worn clichés before they have calcified. Such is the case for Davies’ quiet midnight reverie, a sequence of such languorous beauty that it utterly bypasses the cynicism with which the showbiz itch is usually catalyzed in movies. So what if there is a fundamental naiveté baked into such aspirations? Naiveté makes the world go round.

This is not to say that Walsh and co. have not a knack for cynicism, nor an eye for Hollywood’s tackier enticements. After the opening scene, the movie becomes a vertiginous musical tract on artifice and artificiality. Crosby’s bored playboy, underneath that heavenly voice, is phoniness incarnate, a peddler of counterfeit dreams for the world’s love-struck loners to feed on. When Sylvia sets her sights on Bill with an aim toward real-world romance (he’s got a picture to make in Hollywood, she’s going to follow him there), the frisson between the one’s earnest infatuation and other’s beer-soaked diffidence becomes the film’s central conflict, to be resolved one of two ways: the dreamer to grow as disenchanted as her wary conquest, or the popular artist to fall in love with that rare member of the masses who can put the magic of the whole enterprise back into gleaming perspective. You may guess which will win out in the end, but the tug-of-war along the way, especially as Sylvia becomes a star in her own right, is irresistible.

Because the film’s vision of Hollywood is a manic flurry of backstage drama revved with sketch-comedy panache, all the stardust romance of the film’s opening minutes truly seems to have dissipated once things get really moving, replaced by a cawing Ned Sparks, a fever for “putting on a show” redolent of contemporary Warner Brothers fare, and a regrettable bout of blackface. This is Raoul Walsh in the whirlwind mode of THE ROARING TWENTIES (’39) or THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (’41), plunging through the story in a cavalier leapfrog, with such amplitude of incident, such profusion of action, such vitality of character, and such overall looseness of narrative logic as to suggest a Hollywood that is all but brimming over with itself. And in the final analysis, we find that the love and languor of a radio ballad or a movie melodrama – and the ecstasy with which we experience them – cannot be extricated from the crazed means of their production, from all that backstage frenzy and professional disaffection. Any number of relevant clichés apply – that the dream factory contains multitudes, or that we can have our cake and eat it too. My humble takeaway: nothing is fake that is felt. Here’s to the Sylvia Bruces of the world.

shoparound

Originally written for FilmStruck

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (’40) has not aged much in the 80 or so years since it was originally released. Whether swapping hand-written letters or Tinder messages, we still find ourselves beguiled by anonymous paramours. And while the frost-limned Budapest department store of the film’s setting is long out of date – a quaint relic of early 20th century Europe – the underlying workplace mechanics that director Ernst Lubitsch depicts with such fastidious care are universal. How many of us lead the double lives led by Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) and Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), who reserve their best and most elevated selves for their off-time, while toiling away by day in a den of unfettered materialism?

Materialism is indeed the operative word. After Kralik realizes that it is Klara who has been writing him such swooning messages, he approaches her at the appointed meeting place they had worked out in their letters, but feigns coincidence – two coworkers happening to meet outside of work (she, of course, has no idea that it is he who has been aiming Cupid’s missives into her post office box, and awaits a more dashing, albeit nonexistent, suitor). When he suggests that she has yet to scratch his salesman’s surface, she responds, “Well I really wouldn’t care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I’d find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter which doesn’t work.” There is a hint of justice in the remark: what other impression is she to have gotten from a man she knows only as Matuschek and Company’s top peddler of leather goods? Hence her most damning rejoinder, in which she calls him a “little insignificant clerk” to his face.

Mr. Matuschek, meanwhile, is played by Frank Morgan, in a performance that captures all the bristling contradictions of the employer-employee relationship. He knows that to expect subordination is to be met with dishonesty, such as that of the sycophantic Mr. Vadas, who yesses him to death while carrying on an illicit love affair with his wife. Kralik, who has spent nine years under Matuschek’s mentorship, seems something of a son to him, until the old man’s misplaced suspicions freeze this warmth into a cold professionalism. Lubitsch seems to be asking throughout the film, “What kind of relationships can we expect to form with our workplace superiors, and them with us?” When Kralik is unceremoniously let go, and a pall falls over the shop, we realize that this workaday family is something of an illusion: at the end of the day, what the boss says goes, and no one wishes to jeopardize his or her own livelihood in order to rally to poor Kralik’s defense. That Mr. Matuschek’s woes begin and end with an anonymous letter informing him of his wife’s infidelity brings the story full circle – is his imagination not as susceptible to mysterious epistles as Kralik’s and Ms. Novak’s? Undergirding the meat-and-potatoes business of turning a profit by hawking music boxes is a whole network of correspondences that cut to the very heart of our innermost fears and fancies.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER has the veneer of Christmastime cutesiness, and has been marketed accordingly since its release. This sweet MGM romantic comedy, starring James Stewart at his most winsome and Margaret Sullavan at her most bright and beautiful, will surely live on forever as an evergreen crowd-pleaser, and there is nothing quite like watching Stewart keep Sullavan on the hook as Klara slowly unravels the delectable mystery that Kralik has made of himself and his letter-writing alter-ego. And yet the film would not please us so profoundly were not Ernst Lubitsch at the helm, conducting a cinematic symphony in dramatic irony and detailing with such precision the practical impediments to romance that afflict all working men and women. In short, here is a movie of real perfection, as worthy a TCM Select inductee as any classic film that I know.

Tag: MGM

GOING HOLLYWOOD (Raoul Walsh, 1933)

On Love, Labor, and the Lubitsch Touch: THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (’40)