They Were Never Lovelier

Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in "It Happened One Night"

George Clooney said something I liked to Matt Damon when they were discussing the new, but deliberately atavistic, war movie Clooney has written and directed, "The Monuments Men." It went something like, “People aren’t as cynical as their movies.” I don’t see many war movies, but the best of them portray war as a bloody horror; and yet the number of wars around the world seems to multiply with gay abandon. Could it be, possibly, that the folks back home (safely back home) who vociferously support conflict after conflict think war is really a bit more like “Kelly’s Heroes” than “Apocalypse Now”? Of course it could. If they believed the latter had any truth to it they would never vote for another hawk president or prime minister again.

As we get older and we have less time to fool ourselves about our vanishing life, and less desire to posture for others, we find we no longer like the films we were once so enthusiastic about, or even the films we know we’re supposed to like. My favourite movie so far this year isn’t “12 Years a Slave,” as much as that has been lauded by everybody around the world; it’s “Philomena,” in which Steve Coogan’s jaded journalist helps Judi Dench’s cheated mum trace a child sold for adoption by the Catholic church in Ireland 50 years before. It would be hard to argue against the huge importance of “12 Years a Slave,” and the potential good it could do in terms of correcting false notions about black history, but for some reason I thought it was arch and emotionally disconnected. “Philomena,” though, made me cry buckets.

I also find, more and more, that I like the old Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s (but especially the 30s). The romantic comedies of the time, which I love the most, are nearly always made according to the same formula; but it is such a rich one each time you see it the experience is new: handsome male leads like Cary Grant and beautiful, but always intelligent, females like Katherine Hepburn and Claudette Colbert; clothes by the top designers; humour that sometimes borders on anarchy—people chasing in and out of rooms talking at 90 miles an hour, frequently over one another, and using the richest of language, with puns and Hollywood in-jokes that stray onto postmodern turf before the idea had even been identified (like when Cary Grant orders a character played by Ralph Bellamy in "His Girl Friday" to be dealt with to stop him interfering with the course of true love and says, “You know who I mean, he looks like that actor Ralph Bellamy.”)

The culmination of almost every story made according to this formula is marriage between the male and female but that doesn’t matter; back then marriage was the signifier of romantic union, so all that marriage really needs to say to us as modern viewers, if we object to the institution itself, is love found, love achieved, love consummated—and however sophisticated we think we are, we all need love. Women in movies from the 30s—the better movies anyway—invariably marry on their own terms too. You don’t imagine Katherine Hepburn heading out through the door in the last scene of a film and then taking up a life of meek domestic servitude.

The best, most ambitious, romantic comedy from the 30s is probably “It Happened One Night,” in which Claudette Colbert’s heiress (there is always money) goes on the run to escape marriage to a man she doesn’t love and meets, on a journey across America, Clark Gable’s journalist, who’s looking for a scoop; obviously, Clark falls in love with her. That movie is shot with an exceptionally poetic eye by master director Frank Capra. It also does something that the feeble, diluted modern imitations of the rom-com style never do, which is offer a stark sudden glimpse of real life in the midst of the wonderful dream it weaves. On a bus ride through the night which has always looked to me like a visual rendering of the concept of Beatness, the travellers are singing together when someone collapses from hunger. This is, after all, the Depression. When we go back to the love story, the importance of love as a rescuer and ennobler of the spirit is somehow enhanced.

And that’s why I like the movies of that period, I think. Not because, as people often assume, they offer an innocent refuge from the world as it really is. Hollywood doesn’t show you the world as it really is these days; with a few notable exceptions mainstream American cinema (and I distinguish that emphatically from the indies) hasn’t said anything worth a shit for decades. I love old Hollywood movies because they have more of a habit of talking honestly to us, albeit in formulaic ways, about things that matter; and those formulae, fundamental to which are a style and panache we don't have anymore, embody something else that is vitally important to the survival of civilisation—the existence of dreams. When I dream, not being twenty years old anymore, I don’t dream about being a muscle-bound soldier mowing down Taliban in a Call of Duty game. My favourite is the one where I am a handsome singer in a night club and everybody thinks I’m terribly funny and charming. Now that is something Cary Grant could have made a good movie about.

Subversion In The Dream Factory

Strong Women And Other Crazy Ideas in Katherine Hepburn's "Sylvia Scarlett"

 

Hollywood is too money-driven an industry to be radical. Large investment means there’s an expectation of larger financial returns; and those are guaranteed, so the wisdom goes, by giving the audience “what they want.” Or what they are presumed to want, since a business with enough cash to bankroll a film has no more insight into the minds, the real minds, of the cinema-going, dvd-watching public than a booster for political change. That’s why we get “surprise hits.” A producer takes a chance on something slightly different, or a low budget movie gets good distribution, and the public everybody has been talking on behalf of picks the movie up and runs with it.

Representations of gender and sexuality have always been a problem in the mainstream, give-me-your-money cinema. Hollywood in its pursuit of the buck and its fear of causing offence to the “ordinary movie goer” tends to reflect the cultural consensus of the times; and at no time, really, have strong women or homosexuality been socially acceptable, much less a subject to bring to the dinner table. Some argue that this is beginning to change. My view is that the representations of homosexuality, which began to have occasional screen currency in metropolitan movies in the 80s, are still as clichéd as they are well-intentioned. Strong women in mainstream cinema continue to be so rare we tell all our friends when we’ve seen one. They’re like the first cuckoo of Spring, and I use the cuckoo advisedly, since it isn’t their own nest these strong women are sitting in.

Given the rarity of these positive images of women and homosexuality in 2013, then, I was quite staggered last night to watch a movie made 77 years ago which features heavy doses of one and daring, almost Shakespearean investigations of the other. The movie Sylvia Scarlett was no underground curiosity or foreign import either; it was a star vehicle for two of Hollywood’s hottest actors, Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and director George Cukor was a stalwart of the studio system, already known by that time for film adaptations of David Copperfield and Romeo and Juliet. He was hardly a radical tubthumper.

Based on a novel by Compton Mackenzie, Sylvia Scarlett was a fantastic flop in its time, grossing nearly $250,000 less than it cost to make. And it’s not hard to see why. When audiences were used to Fred and Ginger, or Gable and Lombard, in tales where good and bad were usually well defined if the polarities were evident at all (not much wickedness in You Were Never Lovelier), a movie in which all three heroes are con artists would have been puzzling enough; watching the central female dress up as a boy for most of the film must have made the miniscule number of people who saw it feel they had been the victim of some sort of elaborate, distasteful trick.

The subversions of the film don’t stop there either. After Hepburn, her father and Cary Grant (letting down the whole project with the worst lor’-luv-a-duck London accent in cinema history), decide to give up their life of petty crime and go on the road in a travelling show, their new partner Maudie (Dennie Moore), in a distinctly homoerotic scene, draws a Ronald Coleman moustache on the disguised Hepburn and then kisses her. And later artist Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), before he learns that Hepburn is a woman, tells her that she provokes a mysterious interest in him. It’s Twelfth Night replayed for Hollywood in an era that Shakespeare would have found morally suffocating. Unwitting and unacknowledged homosexuality as heavy in the air as impending rain.

Oh, and then, then, the coup-de-grace. Aherne fails to return the love of his Russian suitor and she tries to drown herself. Who dives into the storm-racked sea to rescue her? Hepburn, before Cary Grant has even got his boots on. And although she has fallen for Aherne herself, she realises the suitor’s love is greater; so she appeals to Aherne to come to the Russian’s bedside and show her compassion. Sacrifice or sisterhood? or both? I confess I don’t know; but her refusal to make an enemy of the competition seemed an enlightened act to me – she looked into the other woman’s heart and saw something there that she recognised.

And so they rush to the camp where the travelling show has parked its caravans; but Cary Grant, still the grifter, has taken the woman away to exploit her devastation at the loss of Aherne and make her his own. She is wealthy. In his unreformed, unsentimental mind there is nothing else to do. There follows a chase, a high speed chase (or as high a speed as a 1936 jalopy could muster), and when Aherne gets his hand caught in the car door Hepburn takes the wheel; once again woman becomes rescuer, careening down country roads – alas, she’s not a terrifically good driver, but she drives. And then, in a twist of the plot which reinforces all of the complex ideas about gender and sexuality that the film explores, Hepburn is forced to remove the dress she has stolen to reveal herself to Aherne as a woman and return to the rough suit and flat cap she has worn as her disguise. As two men, they get into a fight with a policeman. As two men, they share a cell for the night, never letting on to those who’ve locked them up because Aherne doesn’t want them to be separated.

Propriety is restored for the final, inevitable romantic clinch. For that Hepburn is in an elegant long black coat, although obviously her close-cropped hair remains. They have had an inordinate amount of time to buy the coat given that when the chase resumes, they find themselves on the same train as Cary Grant; apparenty a lead of at least 12 hours on his pursuers wasn’t enough of an advantage for Grant. But that’s fine; Shakespeare usually restored propriety too – it’s the messing with it in the first place that’s interesting. Morality, however, is left decidedly skewed here. The wealthy Russian isn’t warned of Grant’s ill intentions by Aherne and Hepburn; that was their intention, but once Kate has Aherne’s confession of love she drops any feelings of sisterhood she has . . . the new couple just pull the train’s emergency chord and run off into the night, while Grant in his compartment watches them from the window and laughs boyishly. It’s a weird, weird ending, but it’s great. Neat moral resolutions may make us feel good in movies, but they bear little resemblance to the world we find when we come out of the darkness of the cinema and walk like blind hamsters into the light.

Katherine Hepburn was never an archetypal Hollywood star. She didn’t look like one, and she definitely didn’t think like one. Others may have been intelligent, but Hepburn didn’t care who knew it; and the simple irrefutability of her assertion that she could, indeed, match any of your asses in anything caused even stupid reactionary men (John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn) to stand back and let her do her thing. Sylvia Scarlett is one of many examples. Films where she carries you along with her like a wave and as Holden Caulfield says about good writers in The Catcher in the Rye, you wish you’d been able to call her up and invite her round for dinner after you watch it. But it’s more than just a tour-de-force performance by one of Hollywood’s great actors, in her physical prime. It’s a movie of ideas and investigations, a movie about women and men, hetero- and homosexuality, even servant and server (which ties in with the gender theme) – all three con artists are poor, and when Maudie comes into their circle she is, literally, in service, to a rich family we never see.

In the sense that it’s a movie of ideas, I could be glib and say, not surprising it tanked so spectacularly then. But that would be arrogant, and probably bullshit too. I know how things work. A movie’s success depends on reviews, distribution and advertising even before footfall becomes a consideration;  all of those are part of the large patriarchal machine of the entertainment industry. To what extent did the men who ran the system support a movie so filled with ideas that challenged the world as they constructed it, the world they profited from so nicely? Not a hell of a lot, I would imagine (with informed confidence).

Still, quality, common sense and Katherine Hepburn have had their final revenge, as anyone who can find the movie now will tell you.