McCarey vs Leigh

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Post by Big Magilla »

OscarGuy wrote:And, for the record, I dislike Going My Way quite a bit. It's a terrible Best Picture winner, imo.
Now that you have a better understanding of McCarey's life's work, you might want to take another look at it. It's not the best movie ever made, or even the best movie of its year, but it is far from "terrible".
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Post by OscarGuy »

I'd rank two of my favorite communist-dealing films of the period were science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And, for the record, I dislike Going My Way quite a bit. It's a terrible Best Picture winner, imo.
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Post by ITALIANO »

Greg wrote:
ITALIANO wrote:From my very Italian point of view, by the way, these "witch hunt" movies are fascinating to watch. And not only the very few good ones (actually, I remember only one which could be even remotely called "good": Mark Robson's Trial. Unless, of course, one counts On the Waterfront).
I would also count The Manchurian Candidate and The Front as good witch-hunt movies.
Both good movies, and both about the witch-hunt. But I was referring more to the typical anti-communist movies of the late'40s-50s, a la Woman on Pier 13.
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Post by Greg »

ITALIANO wrote:From my very Italian point of view, by the way, these "witch hunt" movies are fascinating to watch. And not only the very few good ones (actually, I remember only one which could be even remotely called "good": Mark Robson's Trial. Unless, of course, one counts On the Waterfront).
I would also count The Manchurian Candidate and The Front as good witch-hunt movies.
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Post by ITALIANO »

From my very Italian point of view, by the way, these "witch hunt" movies are fascinating to watch. And not only the very few good ones (actually, I remember only one which could be even remotely called "good": Mark Robson's Trial. Unless, of course, one counts On the Waterfront). The point is that "anti-communist" movies were unheard of in Italy - partly because most Italian directors were communist, and most importantly because Italy had the biggest communist party in Western Europe, and honestly, if you weren't communist, very possibly your neighbor or your best friend or your favorite teacher was. So watching these movies in which conventional American happiness was suddenly compromised by the arrival of these young, sensitive, but very dangerous men - who looked like us, but weren't like us - was something new and very funny.

Leo McCarey may not be the best American director ever, but I must admit that he's one of the most interesting, if only because his work deals (openly or not) with so many important issues. Another is, as we said, religion. And if you think of it, in a country like America, with so many religions, so many tv channels about religion, and an obvious, sometimes frankly obsessive, search for meaningful spiritual values, only very few good movies about religion have been made. I'm not saying that McCarey's two movies were the best on this subject - Zinnemann's The Nun's Story was certainly better and more profound, and there MUST be others. But not many. Most were, let's face it, very superficial.




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Post by Big Magilla »

I'll agree that My Son John does offer a window into middle class Americana of the early 50s, but that period thankfully didn't last very long. It wasn't long before rock 'n' roll would start drawing a wedge between the generations.

I watched Nicholas Ray's 1956 film, Bigger Than Life last night. I had forgotten how subversive and and in its way dismissive of middle America in the 50s it was, all of it undermined by the casting of James Mason as a "typical" middle class American grade school teacher, which of course, he was far from being. The contrast between McCarey's and Ray's Americas would make for a fascinating discussion.




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Post by ITALIANO »

Very good post, Zach. And I think your approach to My Son John is the correct one - and really interesting.

I am sure that anticommunist movies of the 50s say alot about tensions and fears in American society and between generations - seen from this point of view they can certainly be very meaningful (the communist was often not just a dangerous intellectual, but, more subtly, a dangerous sexual deviant too).




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Post by Johnny Guitar »

(I should say that I haven’t seen Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys or Satan Never Sleeps. Robin Wood represented one of the biggest supporters of the former title, however—he was no friend to social or political conservatism, and this explicitly informed his criticism, but seemed to love McCarey.)

My Son John is not a good film, true, but I would say a few charitable things about it because I think it’s a film that says many interesting things, intentionally and especially unintentionally, about its time and place, and America more generally. Because America has no robust public vocabulary for speaking about class difference and friction, red scare narratives—which so often coded their “reds” as being too fancy, too educated, too youthfully naïve (and in danger of becoming cynically calcified)—were often metaphorical ways of dealing with generational rifts between different sectors of the middle class, in terms of both aspirations and achievement.

Because of McCarey’s fierce and unyielding attachment to the importance of deep personal relationships, one can see why, at least, he proceeded down this political line, even if it was wrong, even if it was rabid, deplorable. Anti-intellectual, midcentury anticommunism in America was palpably felt by people not simply because all anticommunists were rabid dupes, but because the narrative of a communist threat (even if falsely) addressed the question of class difference and the pains (so different from the feel-good mythology) of upward mobility, namely, the threat of a younger generation having to learn to hate their parents’ own values and superstitions, as the result of having more education, and more elite sensibilities. It is this fear that, in part, motivated the domestic aspect of red scare scenarios, I think, and which My Son John signifies in some compelling ways. John’s smug dissembling, his verbal ambiguities … it’s a crude caricature of ‘communism,’ surely, and one prevalent in red scare narratives. But this caricature, while it fails as a symbol for communism, still succeeds in capturing the airs of middle-class kids whose education and newly-won class position (despite espousals in favor of the downtrodden) sometimes eventually cause them to shun their own families, as well as the ideals and superstitions in which they themselves were brought up. America’s inability to speak about class directly, at least in “popular” forms (like that of the Hollywood film) operates as a kind of censorship.

Marco is absolutely correct, I think, about text and subtext. My Son John’s text is clear, in no need of “decoding” or “explaining” as something else. There’s not much one can do to defend it. But subtexts aren’t always subversive or reconstructive of texts, themselves – sometimes they just point outward to context. And in this I don’t think that the film is good (but then again, it’s definitely not the most awful or the most rabid of anticommunist films, either). But … sometimes the failures and mediocrities are good ways to keep talking about the questions that are important.
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Post by ITALIANO »

Big Magilla wrote: McCarey did not have a very deep understanding of Communsim.

Understatement of the day.

It's true that My Son John could have been about Nazism or drug addiction, and that's exactly my point; problem is, it was about Communism, and strongly, furiously against it.

I saw parts of the documentary you refer to. Because these parts were clearly chosen to show a certain kind of American approach (in those times) to religion and communism, I can't really comment on it. But what I saw, trust me, was truly embarassing. No major filmmaker, or let's say no filmmaker who wants to be considered major, would have made such a thing.

McCarey was a friendly witness at HUAC. He probably didnt betray his friends, which makes him a marginally better human being than Elia Kazan, true. Still he went there, and at least from a political point of view (and, in my opinion, not only from that point of view) this is something which says alot about the man - and the artist. His movies of the period reflect that.

I must say, though, that I have never seen Make Way for Tomorrow. I have no reason not to believe that it's a great movie. It was a different McCarey back then.




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Post by Big Magilla »

In his interview on Make Way for Tomorrow, Peter Bogdanovich suggests that Make Way for Tomorrow is a film very much of European sensibility, that it's the kind of film a Frenchman would make. Renoir was not the only major French filmmaker to champion McCarey. In a booklet that comes with the Criterion collection, Bertrand Tarvernier expounds quite eloquently on his career as well.

There's no question that McCarey wore his Catholicism on his sleeve as Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's attest to, but those two films and his last, Satan Never Sleeps are his only narrative films in which religion plays a major part. Religion isn't even mentioned in most of his films. The 1951 documentary, You Can Change the World, which I've never seen, was produced by the Christophers founded by an order of Catholic priests after World War II to combat the growing notion that Catholics were not true Americans. Their radio and TV programs whose slogan was "it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness" were about religious tolerance of all persuasions. It isn't so much a an anti-Communist documentary, as I understand it, but "look at how wonderful life is in America. All this would be gone under Communisim." McCarey did not have a very deep understanding of Communsim.

As Wesley alludes to, Gary Giddens in his interview on the Make Way for Tomorrow DVD, points out that McCarey was not even political. He did testify at a HUAC hearing at the urging of friends, but like Gary Cooper, did not name names. He merely spoke in general terms about not liking Communism. He was not like Elia Kazan and Larry Parks who named names from having been party members themselves or like Adolphe Menjou and Robert Taylor who allegedly didn't know any Communists but named people they didn't like who might be Communists without proof of anything and getting them blacklisted out of spite.

My Son John, which is not a very good movie, uses Communism as a plot device. It might have been Naziism or drug addiction or something else, but it was Communisim which caused the schism between Robert Walker and his parents. Had it been about anything else, it still wouldn't have been a very good movie.

McCarey, after his auto accident, with the pain and the alcoholism, basically lost his touch after The Bells of St. Mary's, or OK, Good Sam. His one subsequent great film was his remake of Love Affair, the even better an Affair to Remember. Of the two films he made after that, Rally Round the Flag, Boys was out and out terrible and Satan Never Sleeps was not very good but had a delicious performance by Clifton Webb in his last film as the elderly missionary priest.

McCarey should be celebrated as the man who brought Laurel & Hardy together and made Cary Grant, who mimicked McCarey throughout The Awful Truth, into Cary Grant. He was the man who gave us the Marx Brothers in Dick Soup, Charles Laughton in Ruggles of Red Gap, Harold Lloyd in The Milky Way, Bing Crosby in Going My Way, the film Paramount was afraid would torpedo Crosby's career and instead gave him and Paramount their biggest box office success to that point and won oodles of Oscars and above all, the one of a kind Make Way for Tomorrow.




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Post by ITALIANO »

I haven't seen Good Sam, Johnny Guitar, but if An Affair to Remember is the best of McCarey's post-30s movies (which it probably is), well, you kind of get the idea...
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Post by Johnny Guitar »

I don't have time to post at length now, and will return later on to address My Son John and McCarey's more unsavory political/religious leanings. But just to extend the field of his achievements a little past the 1930s: Good Sam ('48) is a masterpiece, and probably also An Affair to Remember, too.
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Post by ITALIANO »

Superficial interpretation?! It's not like anti-Communism is between the lines - the movie is intentionally, hysterically, openly anti-Communist, and its director was by then an active supporter of McCarthy and a member of several societies for the preservation of American values. And then of course one can read (and often invent) anything he wants into the so-called subtext, but this doesn't mean that the movie isn't explicitly political, and in the worst way. By the way, My Son John equals good, old, healthy American values not only with anti-Communism, but with religion(christian religion) as well, which honestly leads me to look at Going My Way and Bells of Saint Mary's with even more skepticism. (I have no idea if these two movies were made as religious propaganda, maybe not, but in Italy, at least till when I was a child, they were certainly used in that way. My idea of a movie with spiritual values is of course, as distant as possible from Bing Crosby singing and Ingrid Bergman radiantly smiling - I am closer to Rossellini, Pasolini, the Bernanos novels; I like my religion - if I must have it - to be more tortured, but also, let me say it, deeper).

And I repeat: I can't deny that McCarey's work in the 30s is often very good (Duck Soup is a masterpiece), and Laurel&Hardy are one of the great comic duos of the history of movies. But when we analyze a director, we must take all he did into consideration, not only his best period.




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Post by OscarGuy »

I don't remember exactly what was said, but the second documentary on the Make Way for Tomorrow DVD discusses My Son John and actually contradicts the idea that it was anti-communism suggesting that it's a superficial interpretation of the work but the McCarey's vision of people. I haven't seen it, so I couldn't really say if I'd share that same opinion, but it's at least worth noting in this debate.

As for Make Way for Tomorrow, I can't imagine a film that would be better suited to today's climate. I only wish we had someone like McCarey today who could create a film that managed to support Health Care the way Make Way for Tomorrow was basically a suggestion that Social Security was a valid system.
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Post by ITALIANO »

But I like some of McCarey's movies, I never denied that. The ones he made in the 30s were entertaining and very well made. Yet when most people refer to McCarey it's for his religious movies of the 40s, which are still well made but too sugary for my tastes; and anyone who wants to seriously discuss this filmmaker should be bold enough to face his little-seen movies from the 50s, full of rabid anti-Communism, sacred American values, and a desperate, honestly unheard-of hatred for SOME human beings who were unlucky enough to have political ideas the director didnt' agree with.
It's easy to seem "humanistic" when you celebrate the lightness and joy of singing priests and smiling nuns. But are those REAL people? Enjoyable, maybe, but real, believable? Seeing the world through pink-colored lenses doesn't mean loving the world, the true world, and the man showed his real face when, older and bitter, he turned to propaganda (and safe propaganda, since those were the McCarthy years), and by doing so he de-humanized the characters he despised so much (not only them actually - the "good guys" were also caricatures). I wonder if McCarey's supporters - including Jean Renoir and Johnny Guitar - have seen these movies, because they can't be conveniently forgotten or overlooked, and they throw a completely different light on this director's approach to life and art. My Son John is the most (in)famous, but there are some terrible, today rightly obscure political documentaries, and his last movie, something with Devil in the title, has to be seen to be believed.
Sometimes, one shows his love for the world and its people by being, on the surface, cynical, cold. Did Brecht hate people? Does Mike Leigh hate people? I see more love in some of his movies, in his careful, uncompromising analysis of social bonds, than in McCarey's fairy tales made with clenched teeth.

But it's true that Love Affair and The Awful Truth are good.
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