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You ever been lonely?
Should you ever need proof of the fallibility of the Hollywood studio system, just remember that Night into Morning (1951) starred Nancy Davis and relegated Jean Hagen to a bit part.
I have been generally fortunate in how little I have seen of the screen careers of the fortieth President of the United States and his First Lady. Finally catching the future Nancy Reagan in a role of more substance than a supporting wife, however, made me realize that ironically she shared her husband's problem, namely that even beyond the interference of their politics, I can't understand what either of them was doing in movies except that they had their faces on the right way up. They feel less to me like actors than actor substitutes. I do not mean understudies, doubles, or stand-ins; I mean a kind of homogenized quality, almost a vacancy. Nothing conspicuously distinguishes their screen presences from any other trained warm bodies that could be hitting the same marks and delivering the lines. Nothing animates their characters beyond the requirements of the script. Dramatically speaking, Davis has a great part in this seriously intended, handsomely produced MGM A-picture: she is cast as the more emotionally active, perhaps sympathetically misguided of the friends available to Ray Milland's Phillip Ainley in the wake of the gas explosion which gruesomely bereaved him of his wife and child while he was lecturing his English class on Richard II. War-widowed, her efficient department secretary Katherine Mead knows something about the devastation of love and the difficulty of returning to life without it, but the film hangs complicating fire on whether her efforts to reach out through Ainley's self-imposed numbing isolation are humane and necessary or whether she is overidentifying with the frozen man, trying to be for him what no one was for her when her husband died, which may not be what he needs in his own grief at all. Her fiancé suggests repeatedly that she's intruding, but he has trouble believing that she would take an interest in another man's welfare without a romantic motive and we have trouble believing that he's not a sexist dolt. From the bar of the residential hotel he's moved into, Ainley insists that he is coping just fine. Altogether it's chewy, ambivalent stuff, raising all kinds of adult questions about trauma and boundaries and the distance between the cultural expectations and the individual realities of healing, and yet somehow the dynamics onscreen are never as compelling as they should be, never as urgent or untidy as they look on the page. Milland is fine-grained in a part that could have fallen back on broad heartstrings, but Davis delivers her performance in a solid block; slice it and you would find the same thing clear through, a consistent blend of gentle and frustrated understanding with a few inclusions of indignation in an overall mold of concern. It isn't one-note, exactly, but it isn't responsive. In a role which calls for something more than soul-saving, she seems unable to summon the honesty to be anything other than reassuringly bland.
It hampers the movie, not just because of its damping effect on the emotions, but because it exists in the same stretch of cinema as Hagen, who in five minutes tops has no difficulty establishing a life in three dimensions, blasting classical music across the hall at such a volume that the exasperated Ainley gives up on the papers he's trying to grade and for the first time approaches another resident of the Cavendish Hotel, to ask her to turn her music down. It should be a meet-cute. The crooked, appealing smile of the woman who opens the door invites one, as does her unembarrassed willingness to debate interpretations of Beethoven's Fifth while standing in the hall with a stranger. "Anybody who says Beethoven's arrogant has got to be smart," she concedes, though she herself finds his music "sort of sad." Forging ahead as the conversation runs down, she's a little skittish, a little scattershot, even a little desperate, but so likeable that she's almost easier to describe by what she's not: a tramp, even though she alludes to former boyfriends and makes so direct a play for Ainley that it might be honorably termed a proposition; a dipso, even though she pours him a shot from the bottle of rum she claims to have picked up a taste for in Havana; a sad case, even though by her own admission she's out of work, coming off a bad relationship, and sharing her digs with a stuffed panda named Clark Mullen, after the violinist who gave it to her. Called out on her hopeful embroidery of her life story, she grins at her guest, unabashed and undeterred: "I told you you were smart. So I never had any voice to lose and I knew he was married and my mother wasn't any opera star. But she did sing, occasionally." She kisses him, very gently. She's still standing in the lighted frame of her own room when he closes his door, as curiously hard and final a gesture as if he's shut it in her face. It's a neat, unexpected, dramatically compact scene. Her offer isn't the moral index of Ainley's self-neglect, fallen so far from the ivory tower that he can be picked up by girls who don't even like Beethoven; it's the human connection he's cutting himself off from. Unlike Katherine, the girl with the whimsically curved face and a voice the same dark honey as her hair can't be accused of acting out of loyalty or pity, since she doesn't know his story or even his name—she isn't moved by anything other than the loneliness she frankly admits to and a liking for this intellectual man she's watched coming and going around the hotel, always with his papers under his arm. What she wants, he can't give her. He can't even keep her company for longer than it takes to drink her rum. Better for her that he doesn't go further, then, but it doesn't augur well for him. Thus we understand her narrative raison d'être, but the character herself isn't contained by it; it is impossible to listen to her scrupulous revisions regarding a tenor sax or watch the belated dab she gives a glass with a cocktail napkin and not wonder about her life beyond the walls of room 802, which is suggested almost less by what she says than how she says it. Hagen started her career in radio and her versatile voice can spin a line off from its scripted trajectory so that it caroms back at gratifying, implicit angles. "You better watch it, all work and no play," she teases Ainley. "You better be careful. You'll crack up someday." The clichés curl off as huskily as flirtations, an unknowing burlesque of his colleagues who couldn't prevent him from resuming his classes the day after the funeral, but then the line which should clinch the come-on comes out instead on a note of quizzical world-weariness, as if a pang of memory has snagged in the chat-up protocols: "All I know is what happens to people who don't know how to relax." You can't tell if she's thinking of a bandleader, a boyfriend, a relative, herself, a newspaper story she heard about or a movie she saw one time. Slice a performance like that and it's just pure agate, no rough or polished face the same pattern twice. Even the film seems reluctant to let go of her, since she reappears late in the day for a kind of coda where she mistakes—because he allowed her to believe he was hiding out from love trouble instead of a ravaging tragedy—the intentions of an attractive female student come looking for Ainley and advises accordingly: "Right over there . . . And give him a better break this time, huh?" It's a punch line with the student's mystified reaction as rimshot, but it's not a mean one, tossed off casually and sincerely where a less generous version of the character might have made her exit more bitchily or forlorn. This one shrugs a little; goes on with her life beyond the screenplay. She is credited only as "Girl Next Door."
I always thought Hollywood classed girls next door in the same protective category as Mom and apple pie, but what can I tell you? She isn't even my favorite performance by Jean Hagen; that honor almost certainly belongs to the peerless blonde cacophony of Lina Lamont, her stratospherically tin-horned triple threat as indispensable to the alchemy of Singin' in the Rain (1952) as Donald O'Connor running up a wall and more impressive every time I revisit the movie, although I am intensely fond of the gender-bending moment in Adam's Rib (1949) in which she is made to appear to the eyes of a susceptible jury as a dapper wolf with a pinstripe mustache and I loved her in the B-noir No Questions Asked (1951), playing a level-headed second-stringer who sees herself out from the no-goodnik she picked up on the rebound with baroque pulp perception: "Smart girls don't hang around haunted houses. Your ghost came back, didn't she?" She's poignantly disposable in Side Street (1949), spitefully shameless in The Big Knife (1955). She may be my favorite thing about Night into Morning. Independent of Nancy Davis, the production suffers needlessly from the escalation so often endemic to social problem films. For two out of three acts, it is unusually and realistically low-key about the ways in which, when people are doing very badly, it doesn't have to look like very much. Ainley in the months following the deaths of his family is drinking too much, teaching on autopilot, obviously in a slow decaying orbit of estrangement from his emotions and his responsibilities that is getting him nowhere with his grief and may well kill him before it wrecks his career, but it isn't an actionable crack-up. He isn't plastered on school time. His students aren't suddenly failing. However sad and worrying his behavior, it gives the university no grounds to suspend or dismiss him and his refusal to take a leave of absence—it's clear without anyone having to say it that his classes are providing the sole structure left in his life—means that nothing is stopping him from coasting on in this state indefinitely. If he survives the summer recess, he might persist for years. Or as expressed crudely but cogently by John Hodiak's Tom Lawry in one of his less sexist-doltish moments, "I know he's on his way to being a drunk, I know he's next door to being psychopathic, but what can I do about it?" It's an uncomfortable, recognizable situation and then as the end of the semester approaches, the film completely loses its nerve; all the conventional action it had hitherto eschewed in favor of smaller, more sharply chosen interactions crashes in as Ainley fails one student undeservedly, involves another in a drunk-driving accident, is forced to a personal and professional crisis by the shame of a court appearance where his friends and colleagues surprise him by sticking up for him and all hurtles inevitably toward a confrontation with suicide. Milland doesn't phone it in. When he starts to unravel, he's as precise with the bigger, sloshier gestures as he was with smaller-scale danger signs like a blunted affect cut with a hair-trigger temper. If the ending works at all, it is probably because he's acting for three. I wish the film had kept on remembering that acting for one can communicate all the crisis in the world, without a crowd-drawing drunk scene or a window ledge, even.
The bottom line is, I had just about written off the entire part of the female lead and then Hagen appeared and I was pierced with the unanswerable desire to know what Night into Morning would have looked like featuring her Katherine Mead. I suspect it would have been far stronger. She could have put the weight of a shared life behind her remembrance of loss, a real edge of neediness on her desire to help, the wounded authority of someone who once scraped bottom herself and risks no condescension in speaking of suicide, when she had to use the memory of her husband to bring herself back from her own brink—all of the ambiguities that are present in the script but can't be drawn further by Davis who never delivers a line in a surprising way and does not possess, like Hagen, one of the qualities I prize most in actors, the ability not to care whether she looks good. Dammit, MGM. I am confident I have seen movies before where a star was conspicuously inadequate to a supporting player, but I am not sure I have seen a case that I take so personally. I am left feeling like Boyd McDonald, lamenting in 1984 that if America had felt compelled to elect a couple of actors, why couldn't it have chosen Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell instead of the Reagans? As long as we're talking about small parts, I appreciate the uncredited presence of Whit Bissell, unmacabrely selling gravestones. UC Berkeley more or less plays itself. Davis, though, couldn't have carried the girl next door. This crack-up brought to you by my careful backers at Patreon.
I have been generally fortunate in how little I have seen of the screen careers of the fortieth President of the United States and his First Lady. Finally catching the future Nancy Reagan in a role of more substance than a supporting wife, however, made me realize that ironically she shared her husband's problem, namely that even beyond the interference of their politics, I can't understand what either of them was doing in movies except that they had their faces on the right way up. They feel less to me like actors than actor substitutes. I do not mean understudies, doubles, or stand-ins; I mean a kind of homogenized quality, almost a vacancy. Nothing conspicuously distinguishes their screen presences from any other trained warm bodies that could be hitting the same marks and delivering the lines. Nothing animates their characters beyond the requirements of the script. Dramatically speaking, Davis has a great part in this seriously intended, handsomely produced MGM A-picture: she is cast as the more emotionally active, perhaps sympathetically misguided of the friends available to Ray Milland's Phillip Ainley in the wake of the gas explosion which gruesomely bereaved him of his wife and child while he was lecturing his English class on Richard II. War-widowed, her efficient department secretary Katherine Mead knows something about the devastation of love and the difficulty of returning to life without it, but the film hangs complicating fire on whether her efforts to reach out through Ainley's self-imposed numbing isolation are humane and necessary or whether she is overidentifying with the frozen man, trying to be for him what no one was for her when her husband died, which may not be what he needs in his own grief at all. Her fiancé suggests repeatedly that she's intruding, but he has trouble believing that she would take an interest in another man's welfare without a romantic motive and we have trouble believing that he's not a sexist dolt. From the bar of the residential hotel he's moved into, Ainley insists that he is coping just fine. Altogether it's chewy, ambivalent stuff, raising all kinds of adult questions about trauma and boundaries and the distance between the cultural expectations and the individual realities of healing, and yet somehow the dynamics onscreen are never as compelling as they should be, never as urgent or untidy as they look on the page. Milland is fine-grained in a part that could have fallen back on broad heartstrings, but Davis delivers her performance in a solid block; slice it and you would find the same thing clear through, a consistent blend of gentle and frustrated understanding with a few inclusions of indignation in an overall mold of concern. It isn't one-note, exactly, but it isn't responsive. In a role which calls for something more than soul-saving, she seems unable to summon the honesty to be anything other than reassuringly bland.
It hampers the movie, not just because of its damping effect on the emotions, but because it exists in the same stretch of cinema as Hagen, who in five minutes tops has no difficulty establishing a life in three dimensions, blasting classical music across the hall at such a volume that the exasperated Ainley gives up on the papers he's trying to grade and for the first time approaches another resident of the Cavendish Hotel, to ask her to turn her music down. It should be a meet-cute. The crooked, appealing smile of the woman who opens the door invites one, as does her unembarrassed willingness to debate interpretations of Beethoven's Fifth while standing in the hall with a stranger. "Anybody who says Beethoven's arrogant has got to be smart," she concedes, though she herself finds his music "sort of sad." Forging ahead as the conversation runs down, she's a little skittish, a little scattershot, even a little desperate, but so likeable that she's almost easier to describe by what she's not: a tramp, even though she alludes to former boyfriends and makes so direct a play for Ainley that it might be honorably termed a proposition; a dipso, even though she pours him a shot from the bottle of rum she claims to have picked up a taste for in Havana; a sad case, even though by her own admission she's out of work, coming off a bad relationship, and sharing her digs with a stuffed panda named Clark Mullen, after the violinist who gave it to her. Called out on her hopeful embroidery of her life story, she grins at her guest, unabashed and undeterred: "I told you you were smart. So I never had any voice to lose and I knew he was married and my mother wasn't any opera star. But she did sing, occasionally." She kisses him, very gently. She's still standing in the lighted frame of her own room when he closes his door, as curiously hard and final a gesture as if he's shut it in her face. It's a neat, unexpected, dramatically compact scene. Her offer isn't the moral index of Ainley's self-neglect, fallen so far from the ivory tower that he can be picked up by girls who don't even like Beethoven; it's the human connection he's cutting himself off from. Unlike Katherine, the girl with the whimsically curved face and a voice the same dark honey as her hair can't be accused of acting out of loyalty or pity, since she doesn't know his story or even his name—she isn't moved by anything other than the loneliness she frankly admits to and a liking for this intellectual man she's watched coming and going around the hotel, always with his papers under his arm. What she wants, he can't give her. He can't even keep her company for longer than it takes to drink her rum. Better for her that he doesn't go further, then, but it doesn't augur well for him. Thus we understand her narrative raison d'être, but the character herself isn't contained by it; it is impossible to listen to her scrupulous revisions regarding a tenor sax or watch the belated dab she gives a glass with a cocktail napkin and not wonder about her life beyond the walls of room 802, which is suggested almost less by what she says than how she says it. Hagen started her career in radio and her versatile voice can spin a line off from its scripted trajectory so that it caroms back at gratifying, implicit angles. "You better watch it, all work and no play," she teases Ainley. "You better be careful. You'll crack up someday." The clichés curl off as huskily as flirtations, an unknowing burlesque of his colleagues who couldn't prevent him from resuming his classes the day after the funeral, but then the line which should clinch the come-on comes out instead on a note of quizzical world-weariness, as if a pang of memory has snagged in the chat-up protocols: "All I know is what happens to people who don't know how to relax." You can't tell if she's thinking of a bandleader, a boyfriend, a relative, herself, a newspaper story she heard about or a movie she saw one time. Slice a performance like that and it's just pure agate, no rough or polished face the same pattern twice. Even the film seems reluctant to let go of her, since she reappears late in the day for a kind of coda where she mistakes—because he allowed her to believe he was hiding out from love trouble instead of a ravaging tragedy—the intentions of an attractive female student come looking for Ainley and advises accordingly: "Right over there . . . And give him a better break this time, huh?" It's a punch line with the student's mystified reaction as rimshot, but it's not a mean one, tossed off casually and sincerely where a less generous version of the character might have made her exit more bitchily or forlorn. This one shrugs a little; goes on with her life beyond the screenplay. She is credited only as "Girl Next Door."
I always thought Hollywood classed girls next door in the same protective category as Mom and apple pie, but what can I tell you? She isn't even my favorite performance by Jean Hagen; that honor almost certainly belongs to the peerless blonde cacophony of Lina Lamont, her stratospherically tin-horned triple threat as indispensable to the alchemy of Singin' in the Rain (1952) as Donald O'Connor running up a wall and more impressive every time I revisit the movie, although I am intensely fond of the gender-bending moment in Adam's Rib (1949) in which she is made to appear to the eyes of a susceptible jury as a dapper wolf with a pinstripe mustache and I loved her in the B-noir No Questions Asked (1951), playing a level-headed second-stringer who sees herself out from the no-goodnik she picked up on the rebound with baroque pulp perception: "Smart girls don't hang around haunted houses. Your ghost came back, didn't she?" She's poignantly disposable in Side Street (1949), spitefully shameless in The Big Knife (1955). She may be my favorite thing about Night into Morning. Independent of Nancy Davis, the production suffers needlessly from the escalation so often endemic to social problem films. For two out of three acts, it is unusually and realistically low-key about the ways in which, when people are doing very badly, it doesn't have to look like very much. Ainley in the months following the deaths of his family is drinking too much, teaching on autopilot, obviously in a slow decaying orbit of estrangement from his emotions and his responsibilities that is getting him nowhere with his grief and may well kill him before it wrecks his career, but it isn't an actionable crack-up. He isn't plastered on school time. His students aren't suddenly failing. However sad and worrying his behavior, it gives the university no grounds to suspend or dismiss him and his refusal to take a leave of absence—it's clear without anyone having to say it that his classes are providing the sole structure left in his life—means that nothing is stopping him from coasting on in this state indefinitely. If he survives the summer recess, he might persist for years. Or as expressed crudely but cogently by John Hodiak's Tom Lawry in one of his less sexist-doltish moments, "I know he's on his way to being a drunk, I know he's next door to being psychopathic, but what can I do about it?" It's an uncomfortable, recognizable situation and then as the end of the semester approaches, the film completely loses its nerve; all the conventional action it had hitherto eschewed in favor of smaller, more sharply chosen interactions crashes in as Ainley fails one student undeservedly, involves another in a drunk-driving accident, is forced to a personal and professional crisis by the shame of a court appearance where his friends and colleagues surprise him by sticking up for him and all hurtles inevitably toward a confrontation with suicide. Milland doesn't phone it in. When he starts to unravel, he's as precise with the bigger, sloshier gestures as he was with smaller-scale danger signs like a blunted affect cut with a hair-trigger temper. If the ending works at all, it is probably because he's acting for three. I wish the film had kept on remembering that acting for one can communicate all the crisis in the world, without a crowd-drawing drunk scene or a window ledge, even.
The bottom line is, I had just about written off the entire part of the female lead and then Hagen appeared and I was pierced with the unanswerable desire to know what Night into Morning would have looked like featuring her Katherine Mead. I suspect it would have been far stronger. She could have put the weight of a shared life behind her remembrance of loss, a real edge of neediness on her desire to help, the wounded authority of someone who once scraped bottom herself and risks no condescension in speaking of suicide, when she had to use the memory of her husband to bring herself back from her own brink—all of the ambiguities that are present in the script but can't be drawn further by Davis who never delivers a line in a surprising way and does not possess, like Hagen, one of the qualities I prize most in actors, the ability not to care whether she looks good. Dammit, MGM. I am confident I have seen movies before where a star was conspicuously inadequate to a supporting player, but I am not sure I have seen a case that I take so personally. I am left feeling like Boyd McDonald, lamenting in 1984 that if America had felt compelled to elect a couple of actors, why couldn't it have chosen Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell instead of the Reagans? As long as we're talking about small parts, I appreciate the uncredited presence of Whit Bissell, unmacabrely selling gravestones. UC Berkeley more or less plays itself. Davis, though, couldn't have carried the girl next door. This crack-up brought to you by my careful backers at Patreon.
no subject
Me neither. There have been a number of occasions when I've seen a synopsis for an old film and said, "That looks interesting! Why haven't I ever seen it? Oh." (Because it starred Reagan.)
I don't think I've ever seen Jean Hagen not being wonderful.
(To this day, whenever I see Whit Bissell appear on screen, I yell, "Whit Bissell!")
no subject
He is an active deterrent. I wasn't sure about her until this movie, because it's not fair to judge even Nancy Reagan by Donovan's Brain, but I guess now I know.
I don't think I've ever seen Jean Hagen not being wonderful.
She may not have been capable of not being wonderful. Almost forty years after seeing her for the first time, I am realizing she falls into the company of actors whose studios didn't know what to do with them—or she would have been headlining more films than five-minute stealing them—and I am so retrospectively annoyed. (Also, discovering she started in radio made so much sense of her work before and behind the scenes in Singin' in the Rain.)
(To this day, whenever I see Whit Bissell appear on screen, I yell, "Whit Bissell!")
He deserves fanfare!
no subject
Heeee. This legit made me laugh out loud (and then read it to my husband and my sister).
no subject
Thank you!
(I would care less if they had not gone on into politics, but they did and it just feels insulting.)
no subject
I am glad to have read this review! Thank you for writing it!
no subject
You're welcome!
I feel no qualms whatever saying that you are a better many, many things than Reagan.
no subject
Then I got to your paragraph on Jean Hagan and thought, Well I have to see that! And if you're not 100 percent right there, too. What a charmer! I was grinning through that whole scene.
... Not enough to watch the whole movie, though.
no subject
What a horribly appropriate way of summarizing her attitude. I have been made to understand that politically the Reagans succeeded by playing on nostalgia and fear, but artistically, I got absolutely nothing. Their acting is an insult to margarine.
Then I got to your paragraph on Jean Hagan and thought, Well I have to see that! And if you're not 100 percent right there, too.
Thank you! It is important to me to represent the movies I watch accurately, as well as the ways I feel about them.
What a charmer! I was grinning through that whole scene.
I would perhaps even more happily have accepted the alternate-universe version of this film where Ainley works through his grief-shock by making friends with the girl across the hall. So he missed the meet-cute; he's got the rest of the semester to make it up.
... Not enough to watch the whole movie, though.
If you saw Jean Hagen, you saw the best parts.
no subject
And let's imagine that alternative-universe film with dedication and determination--it sounds like a way more satisfying story.
no subject
No worries! I think I read right through that typo, so the spirit was clearly stronger than the letter.
And let's imagine that alternative-universe film with dedication and determination--it sounds like a way more satisfying story.
I would trust you to write it.