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A rule broken ceases to be a rule
I cannot especially recommend We Who Are Young (1940), but it contains a wonderful ninety-nine seconds of Charles Lane.
He is not wonderful for the majority of them, which is the importance of the scene. We Who Are Young was produced in the pre-war tail end of the Depression and its naked-city melodrama of socioeconomics leaves no heartstring to chance as its office lovebirds played by Lana Turner and John Shelton marry sweetly, naively in night court and find themselves immediately exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism—she's fired on the spot thanks to the Depression-justified discrimination of the marriage bar, he's canned after defaulting on a loan taken to cover their suddenly single-income household expenses, her pregnancy coincides inevitably with his enrollment in the unemployed eight million from whom a working wife is supposedly stealing a job. As the man in charge of repossessing the living room set which the newlyweds so optimistically purchased on the all-American installment plan, Mr. Perkins looks like one more indignity on the heels of a fruitless degree and a wedding ring still in hock; he looks like the latest in Lane's hard-nosed string of clerks and managers, an anonymously efficient mantis of a man with his face behind his glasses as sharp and preoccupied as his voice running perfunctorily over any confusion or excuse, "Two weeks overdue. Three extensions. It's too late . . . Repossession order went out on that stuff this morning." He reads off his card files like ticker tape; he barely looks at the distraught young man to whom he explains the depreciation of the furniture which precludes a refund, the impossibility of storing it until such time as finances improve, the exception that can't be made even for the chaise lounge which makes such a difference to a pregnant wife's aching back. When Shelton's Bill Brooks throws his hat down on the repossession agent's desk with a sudden frustrated shout of "The rule, is it? Well, I'm sick of your rules! They only work one way! I want a rule that'll work for me for a change!" Perkins raps wearily back at him, "Won't do you any good to get sore." As if the last of his pride blew out with his useless anger, Bill fumbles for his hat, brokenly apologizes, begins hopelessly to plead again for the chaise lounge and in the face of his helpless persistence Perkins blows a small and surprising fuse of his own. The camera which has held off over his shoulder so that we could concentrate on the demoralized protagonist snaps around to his face and it is anything but bureaucratically blank. "Now, wait a minute!" he interrupts explosively, so high-speed that his words strike off one another like flints. "You think I keep this job because I like it? Day in and day out, men and women begging for a miserable stick of cheap furniture they paid too much for and lost because they—" He cuts himself off mid-sentence; turns however it was going to finish into the slam of his own hands onto his blotter and ledger, a sharp wave of Bill out of his office as he rubs his forehead as if with a headache or some equally nagging emotion: "Go on, go on, get out of here and leave me alone." Resigned and bewildered, Bill turns to go and behind him Perkins mutters distinctly, as if addressing himself to the files on his desk, "I'll try and put a hold order on that chaise lounge for you when it comes in, give you a chance to get it back. Goodbye."
At the nadir of his fortunes, driven to near-criminal distraction by the humiliation of monthly relief checks and his wife's unfailing support in which he feels less and less justified as her pregnancy nears term without a salary in sight, Bill will be bailed out by the owner of the construction business whose site he crashed in a dogged bid for the self-respect of any kind of work, who explains his kindness not in terms of charity or philanthropy but paying it forward, citing his own rescue during the Panic of 1907: "Tony's your friend, I'm your friend, and a lot of people you've never heard of yet will be your friends. We'll help you and you can help somebody else sometime. Pass it along. That's the only important rule." His job offer to Bill is the couple's salvation, permitting the whiz-bang finale in which Bill cathartically tells off the money-minded martinet of an office manager who originally fired them and the blessed event of which Margy is delivered in the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital turns out to be a punch line of twins, but as visibly as Jonathan Hale's Mr. Braddock descends from comparably progressive, benevolent authority figures in the New Deal tradition of the pre-Codes, Perkins impresses me more. He isn't the boss of his own business with the discretion to bend his own rules and the security to risk it. He's a harried cog in the hard sell of the Golden Hope Furniture Company who could be thrown out on his own ear if he's caught making exceptions for the next sob story to wilt across his desk. We never even find out what happens with the chaise lounge—realistically, six months may be too long for Perkins to keep it on ice—but just the fact of that covert, contingent offer feels like a big deal, especially from a paper-pusher who didn't have to extend it. In hindsight, he's a vote of confidence in Braddock's philosophy of unexpected friends, a rebuke to the self-sufficient bootstraps pushed by Gene Lockhart's C. B. Beamis who ruffles with conservative affront to be told that "everybody from the minute they're born, they're being helped. The whole country—our homes, our churches, our schools, and what they stand for—nobody could build those alone. We did it together, all of us. The people, helping each other. And believe me, Mr. Beamis, if any man says that he made his money or built his life without the help of anybody else, he's a fool. He's worse than a fool. He's a liar!" Louder for the tech bros in the back, Bill. I hope you went back to see Perkins even if your chaise lounge resold the next week.
Written by Dalton Trumbo, We Who Are Young was directed by Harold S. Bucquet for MGM and may represent a sincere collision of left-wing ideals with studio suds. Despite such occasional ideological anvils as Henry Armetta's Tony bellowing "Capitalist!" as his last word on the officious foreman who unnecessarily called the cops on Bill, the film only intermittently attends to the potential of its politics and spends much more time on swelling strings, Shelton tightening his jaw in shame, Turner looking tearfully brave in their denuded apartment beyond whose night-curtained windows all New York glitters like the as yet unfulfilled promises of their wedding night. "You know the lights on Brooklyn Bridge? You can have them for a necklace. You see the Empire State Building? That's a feather for your hat." She at least is trusted to act without a single tight sweater, but he leaves the uncomfortable impression he was supposed to be Jimmy Stewart. The narrator who picks their story out of the seven and a half million on offer may be an occupational hazard of the era, but additionally eavesdropping on the couple's thoughts is pushing the script's luck. It does seem to be trying for maturity with the frankness of their shy reactions to a hotel bed and the tenderness, even mid-pregnancy, of sinking for comfort into one another's arms, but if I want a proletarian novel of marriage in the Depression, I could just be reading Thomas Bell's All Brides Are Beautiful (1936). I actually watched this film for Gene Lockhart, since I had just recently been studying his daughter; Charles Lane came as a complete and welcome surprise. I remain delighted to have discovered almost ten years ago now that Boyd McDonald thought he was hot. This hold brought to you by my helping backers at Patreon.
He is not wonderful for the majority of them, which is the importance of the scene. We Who Are Young was produced in the pre-war tail end of the Depression and its naked-city melodrama of socioeconomics leaves no heartstring to chance as its office lovebirds played by Lana Turner and John Shelton marry sweetly, naively in night court and find themselves immediately exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism—she's fired on the spot thanks to the Depression-justified discrimination of the marriage bar, he's canned after defaulting on a loan taken to cover their suddenly single-income household expenses, her pregnancy coincides inevitably with his enrollment in the unemployed eight million from whom a working wife is supposedly stealing a job. As the man in charge of repossessing the living room set which the newlyweds so optimistically purchased on the all-American installment plan, Mr. Perkins looks like one more indignity on the heels of a fruitless degree and a wedding ring still in hock; he looks like the latest in Lane's hard-nosed string of clerks and managers, an anonymously efficient mantis of a man with his face behind his glasses as sharp and preoccupied as his voice running perfunctorily over any confusion or excuse, "Two weeks overdue. Three extensions. It's too late . . . Repossession order went out on that stuff this morning." He reads off his card files like ticker tape; he barely looks at the distraught young man to whom he explains the depreciation of the furniture which precludes a refund, the impossibility of storing it until such time as finances improve, the exception that can't be made even for the chaise lounge which makes such a difference to a pregnant wife's aching back. When Shelton's Bill Brooks throws his hat down on the repossession agent's desk with a sudden frustrated shout of "The rule, is it? Well, I'm sick of your rules! They only work one way! I want a rule that'll work for me for a change!" Perkins raps wearily back at him, "Won't do you any good to get sore." As if the last of his pride blew out with his useless anger, Bill fumbles for his hat, brokenly apologizes, begins hopelessly to plead again for the chaise lounge and in the face of his helpless persistence Perkins blows a small and surprising fuse of his own. The camera which has held off over his shoulder so that we could concentrate on the demoralized protagonist snaps around to his face and it is anything but bureaucratically blank. "Now, wait a minute!" he interrupts explosively, so high-speed that his words strike off one another like flints. "You think I keep this job because I like it? Day in and day out, men and women begging for a miserable stick of cheap furniture they paid too much for and lost because they—" He cuts himself off mid-sentence; turns however it was going to finish into the slam of his own hands onto his blotter and ledger, a sharp wave of Bill out of his office as he rubs his forehead as if with a headache or some equally nagging emotion: "Go on, go on, get out of here and leave me alone." Resigned and bewildered, Bill turns to go and behind him Perkins mutters distinctly, as if addressing himself to the files on his desk, "I'll try and put a hold order on that chaise lounge for you when it comes in, give you a chance to get it back. Goodbye."
At the nadir of his fortunes, driven to near-criminal distraction by the humiliation of monthly relief checks and his wife's unfailing support in which he feels less and less justified as her pregnancy nears term without a salary in sight, Bill will be bailed out by the owner of the construction business whose site he crashed in a dogged bid for the self-respect of any kind of work, who explains his kindness not in terms of charity or philanthropy but paying it forward, citing his own rescue during the Panic of 1907: "Tony's your friend, I'm your friend, and a lot of people you've never heard of yet will be your friends. We'll help you and you can help somebody else sometime. Pass it along. That's the only important rule." His job offer to Bill is the couple's salvation, permitting the whiz-bang finale in which Bill cathartically tells off the money-minded martinet of an office manager who originally fired them and the blessed event of which Margy is delivered in the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital turns out to be a punch line of twins, but as visibly as Jonathan Hale's Mr. Braddock descends from comparably progressive, benevolent authority figures in the New Deal tradition of the pre-Codes, Perkins impresses me more. He isn't the boss of his own business with the discretion to bend his own rules and the security to risk it. He's a harried cog in the hard sell of the Golden Hope Furniture Company who could be thrown out on his own ear if he's caught making exceptions for the next sob story to wilt across his desk. We never even find out what happens with the chaise lounge—realistically, six months may be too long for Perkins to keep it on ice—but just the fact of that covert, contingent offer feels like a big deal, especially from a paper-pusher who didn't have to extend it. In hindsight, he's a vote of confidence in Braddock's philosophy of unexpected friends, a rebuke to the self-sufficient bootstraps pushed by Gene Lockhart's C. B. Beamis who ruffles with conservative affront to be told that "everybody from the minute they're born, they're being helped. The whole country—our homes, our churches, our schools, and what they stand for—nobody could build those alone. We did it together, all of us. The people, helping each other. And believe me, Mr. Beamis, if any man says that he made his money or built his life without the help of anybody else, he's a fool. He's worse than a fool. He's a liar!" Louder for the tech bros in the back, Bill. I hope you went back to see Perkins even if your chaise lounge resold the next week.
Written by Dalton Trumbo, We Who Are Young was directed by Harold S. Bucquet for MGM and may represent a sincere collision of left-wing ideals with studio suds. Despite such occasional ideological anvils as Henry Armetta's Tony bellowing "Capitalist!" as his last word on the officious foreman who unnecessarily called the cops on Bill, the film only intermittently attends to the potential of its politics and spends much more time on swelling strings, Shelton tightening his jaw in shame, Turner looking tearfully brave in their denuded apartment beyond whose night-curtained windows all New York glitters like the as yet unfulfilled promises of their wedding night. "You know the lights on Brooklyn Bridge? You can have them for a necklace. You see the Empire State Building? That's a feather for your hat." She at least is trusted to act without a single tight sweater, but he leaves the uncomfortable impression he was supposed to be Jimmy Stewart. The narrator who picks their story out of the seven and a half million on offer may be an occupational hazard of the era, but additionally eavesdropping on the couple's thoughts is pushing the script's luck. It does seem to be trying for maturity with the frankness of their shy reactions to a hotel bed and the tenderness, even mid-pregnancy, of sinking for comfort into one another's arms, but if I want a proletarian novel of marriage in the Depression, I could just be reading Thomas Bell's All Brides Are Beautiful (1936). I actually watched this film for Gene Lockhart, since I had just recently been studying his daughter; Charles Lane came as a complete and welcome surprise. I remain delighted to have discovered almost ten years ago now that Boyd McDonald thought he was hot. This hold brought to you by my helping backers at Patreon.
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The things we do for a fave! ♥
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Your understanding is appreciated!
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He did write a favorite film noir of mine!
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He may be the original "Oh, THAT guy!" I think he has more credits than Whit Bissell! I have no idea where I first saw him, or even when I first began to notice him; he just sort of accumulated. And is now a definite asset wherever he turns up.
I like that he lived to be a hundred and two.
Yes! And like Norman Lloyd, acted up to the end.
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(I giggled at your remark about the narration pushing its luck, eavesdropping on thoughts. Oh God!)
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I loved him.
(I giggled at your remark about the narration pushing its luck, eavesdropping on thoughts. Oh God!)
I did not love the voiceovers!