Me at 5:45 AM: TCM, how thoughtful of you to show a classic women's picture starring Bette Davis and Claude Rains at an hour of the morning when I am unavoidably awake thanks to an upcoming medical procedure. A three-hanky soaper is just about my mental level right now.
Me, 146 minutes later: WHO ORDERED THE HOLOCAUST.
I would like to return to Mr. Skeffington (1944) when I have slept more than four hours in the last two days, because there are some very interesting strains of race and class in this melodrama, even if they sometimes appear to be taking place in a second, much more socially conscious picture through which the slightly Gothic romantic drama of the main plot periodically passes. Equally buried somewhere under the impressive aging makeup is the portrait of a complicated marriage. In 1914, Fanny Trellis (Bette Davis) is the celebrated beauty of a genteel but impoverished family, the latter primarily because her wastrel younger brother ran through their inheritance and has now begun embezzling from his employers; her exquisite looks and her flirtatious unattainability have all of New York society at her feet, but to everyone's surprise she pursues and presently succeeds in marrying middle-aged stockbroker Job Skeffington (Claude Rains), who enters her life the night he accidentally crashes one of her parties while trying to confront her brother about his phony bond sales. It is not an entirely calculated move on her part, though it restores the family fortunes and safeguards her brother from legal disgrace. To a girl who rates her self-worth by her ability to captivate men, Job is a gratifyingly lovestruck suitor, a forceful financier who doesn't lose his cool even when his office erupts into bedlam at the outbreak of World War I, but turns as awkwardly vulnerable as a schoolboy around the woman he has long admired from afar: "Dining at Sherry's. Dancing at the Waldorf. You never noticed me." Of course she wouldn't have. Even before we meet the eponymous Mr. Skeffington, we know he's not her kind of people. He's Jewish.
Even if he exists to make a point about anti-Semitism in America, even if he's not played by a Jewish actor,1 a Jewish romantic lead in a Hollywood movie from 1944 was unusual enough to get my attention, especially since TCM hadn't mentioned it. Aside from the physical fact that he's played by Claude Rains, Job is an attractive character, with a lively, ironic sense of humor and a capacity for gentleness that does not turn him into a doormat. He describes his life story as "routine rags to riches"; he was born into tenement poverty on the Lower East Side and responds to Fanny's artless fishing—"Skeffington, that's a strange name for Market and Cherry"—with the wryly spoken, but honest, "The immigration official on Ellis Island wasn't a good speller. 'Skeffington' was the closest he could get to 'Skavinskaya.'" His velvet-edged urbanity of speech is just as deliberately cultivated as Rains' own. He really loves Fanny, not the coquettish fiction of her; he's too shrewd a businessman not to recognize the self-serving aspect of her attentions, but he hopes that in time the distracted tolerance with which she permits their first kiss might change to real affection. But his motives are mixed, too: as much of his new wife as he sees clearly, she's also a symbol of the world he's never been allowed inside. "But I married the woman everybody else wanted to. That makes up for it." Especially given the whack of tragedy that is going to land on him later in the plot, I appreciate that Job, despite his name, is no saintly sufferer—he's a loving father and a brave soldier, but his weakness for his secretaries enables Fanny to divorce him for a generous settlement once the marriage has really gone on the rocks.2
Anti-Semitism is a real factor in the script, not just a topical afterthought. The first we hear of "Skeffington & Co.," the automatic response is, "That's the Jewish firm?" The front door of the Trellis brownstone opens to admit an apparently endless parade of Fanny's admirers in evening dress; Job in his well-cut three-piece suit almost gets it shut in his face as though he were a tradesman who tried the wrong entrance. When Fanny confronts her irresponsible brother (Richard Waring) over his theft of $24,000, he bridles, "I'm glad Dad isn't alive to see you insult and humiliate me in defense of a cheap, common little—" and only Fanny's protesting interruption prevents us from hearing Trippy's epithet of choice. "I don't like him or his type." He will later enlist in the Lafayette Escadrille to get away from the shame of his blue-blooded sister marrying a nouveau-riche Jew, after first drunkenly attempting to pick a fight with Job: "I'm going to be challenged—he's going to heave his checkbook in my face!" He may be choosing his words for maximum treyf when he jeers, "If Skeffington's a gentleman, then a swine is what I want to be." The consternation in their social circle is less baldly stated, but no less bigoted, and the scope only widens as the film goes on. For my money, the most heartbreaking scene in the picture belongs to Job and his ten-year-old daughter (Sylvia Arslan) as he painfully tries to explain his reluctance to take his bright, devoted, desperately adored child to Europe with him after the divorce. The year is 1926. If she stays with Fanny, he argues, however carelessly her mother regards her, at least she can pass as not Jewish. "You will never know what it is . . . I mean, if you come to Europe with me, it's different there. People may look upon you as . . . Oh, this is very difficult to explain to a child."3 He does take her, though, and it is 1935 before she returns to America as a self-possessed, dark-haired young woman (Marjorie Riordan) explaining to her startled mother that she wrote "from Berlin . . . The Nazis don't frighten him, but they frighten me, so Dad thought maybe I'd better come back here to you." I uttered the all-caps line reproduced above. I hadn't realized the film's timeline was going to run so close to recent events. After that I felt no surprise whatsoever to learn that the plot had taken Job to a concentration camp; the only suspense was whether he was going to survive to reunite with his redeemed ex-wife or die before she realized she loved him after all.
And despite being the most compelling and remarkable thread in the entire plot, the events sketched here constitute perhaps a third of the film at most, the rest being concerned with Fanny's increasingly reality-detached attempts to preserve her image of herself as eternally youthful and desirable, which thanks to a stern cosmetic regime and genetic luck of the draw lasts right up until a ravaging bout of diphtheria allows Davis to go for the hagsploitation four decades ahead of schedule. There's poignant material in this plot, with fifty-year-old Fanny unable to imagine a life for herself beyond endless rounds of suitors and sexual adventures. She paints her face into a stiff doll-like parody of its girlish complexion; she begins to imagine that she is being haunted by Job, a silent apparition of spurned unconditional love; in order to assert her imperishable appeal, she convenes all her old admirers and their wives for a dinner party which rapidly turns into cringe tragedy, the audience queasily uncertain of Fanny's ability to accept the facts of passing time until the last lines of the scene.4 I am not even saying that Davis doesn't do a good job with a character who has to age thirty years in the space of two hours and resist any signs of emotional maturity until the very last beat. She has always been afraid to grow up, because she has never been able to differentiate it from growing old. That's fine; that's believable. But when you dovetail this plot with a cross-section of twentieth-century anti-Semitism culminating in a Jewish character losing their sight to the Nazis to make room for some kind of inner beauty disability metaphor, I want to play necromancer with Julius and Philip G. Epstein and explain that whatever tug of the heartstrings they were aiming for with their melodrama, the historical context just crushed it like a bug.5
I haven't really slept since Monday, so I had better wind this up. As far as Oscar-nominated box-office smashes of Hollywood's Golden Age go, Mr. Skeffington is one of the weirder I've run into lately. The original novel by Elizabeth von Arnim was published in 1940 and I would love to know how closely it adheres. Claude Rains is a national treasure. This bewilderment brought to you by my historically aware backers at Patreon.
1. I didn't think Claude Rains was Jewish, but David Skal's Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice (2008) reports that "Rains had strong personal feelings on the topic [of anti-Semitism]; his wife was Jewish, and he believed there might be Jewish blood far back in his own lineage," which if true slightly mitigates my feelings of whitewashing and possibly explains the otherwise nonplussing casting of Rains as Haym Solomon in the Oscar-winning two-reeler Sons of Liberty (1939). Trying to think of Jewish actors of the time who actually played Jewish protagonists, I'm mostly coming up with John Garfield. Everyone else, it's bit parts or any ethnicity but.
2. Job has handled Fanny's own string of affairs discreetly, by which I mean with hilarious passive-aggressiveness: he has a habit of loitering downstairs in the drawing room and quite literally handing each latest lover his hat as he leaves, a gesture which confuses and embarrasses all of them and appears to entertain the hell out of Job. I can side-eye a lot about Mr. Skeffington, especially as we approach the third act and the script's present day, but I cannot accuse the Epsteins of making him a model minority.
3. Being as perceptive a kid as her mother earlier lamented ("It's impossible to keep anything from her. She's inherited all of Job's brains and none of my looks. As a matter of fact, Job says she looks just like his grandmother"), Fanny, Jr. promptly slings back, "I suppose it's easier to explain to a grown-up, isn't it?" and Job has no good answer for that.
4. There is almost certainly a dissertation to be mined from the film's awareness of femininity as a performance even as the narrative punishes Fanny for doing such an exemplary job; it can at least see both sides. "A woman is beautiful when she's loved," Job tells his newly pregnant wife, trying to allay her self-loathing fears of physical change. Fanny dismisses him tartly: "Nonsense. A woman is beautiful if she gets eight hours' sleep and goes to the beauty parlor every day. And bone structure has a lot to do with it, too."
5. They might have had a better chance if nobody had gone blind. The weight of history might still have been insupportable. I watched this movie with my mother who was also unavoidably awake and she was skeptical, too.
Me, 146 minutes later: WHO ORDERED THE HOLOCAUST.
I would like to return to Mr. Skeffington (1944) when I have slept more than four hours in the last two days, because there are some very interesting strains of race and class in this melodrama, even if they sometimes appear to be taking place in a second, much more socially conscious picture through which the slightly Gothic romantic drama of the main plot periodically passes. Equally buried somewhere under the impressive aging makeup is the portrait of a complicated marriage. In 1914, Fanny Trellis (Bette Davis) is the celebrated beauty of a genteel but impoverished family, the latter primarily because her wastrel younger brother ran through their inheritance and has now begun embezzling from his employers; her exquisite looks and her flirtatious unattainability have all of New York society at her feet, but to everyone's surprise she pursues and presently succeeds in marrying middle-aged stockbroker Job Skeffington (Claude Rains), who enters her life the night he accidentally crashes one of her parties while trying to confront her brother about his phony bond sales. It is not an entirely calculated move on her part, though it restores the family fortunes and safeguards her brother from legal disgrace. To a girl who rates her self-worth by her ability to captivate men, Job is a gratifyingly lovestruck suitor, a forceful financier who doesn't lose his cool even when his office erupts into bedlam at the outbreak of World War I, but turns as awkwardly vulnerable as a schoolboy around the woman he has long admired from afar: "Dining at Sherry's. Dancing at the Waldorf. You never noticed me." Of course she wouldn't have. Even before we meet the eponymous Mr. Skeffington, we know he's not her kind of people. He's Jewish.
Even if he exists to make a point about anti-Semitism in America, even if he's not played by a Jewish actor,1 a Jewish romantic lead in a Hollywood movie from 1944 was unusual enough to get my attention, especially since TCM hadn't mentioned it. Aside from the physical fact that he's played by Claude Rains, Job is an attractive character, with a lively, ironic sense of humor and a capacity for gentleness that does not turn him into a doormat. He describes his life story as "routine rags to riches"; he was born into tenement poverty on the Lower East Side and responds to Fanny's artless fishing—"Skeffington, that's a strange name for Market and Cherry"—with the wryly spoken, but honest, "The immigration official on Ellis Island wasn't a good speller. 'Skeffington' was the closest he could get to 'Skavinskaya.'" His velvet-edged urbanity of speech is just as deliberately cultivated as Rains' own. He really loves Fanny, not the coquettish fiction of her; he's too shrewd a businessman not to recognize the self-serving aspect of her attentions, but he hopes that in time the distracted tolerance with which she permits their first kiss might change to real affection. But his motives are mixed, too: as much of his new wife as he sees clearly, she's also a symbol of the world he's never been allowed inside. "But I married the woman everybody else wanted to. That makes up for it." Especially given the whack of tragedy that is going to land on him later in the plot, I appreciate that Job, despite his name, is no saintly sufferer—he's a loving father and a brave soldier, but his weakness for his secretaries enables Fanny to divorce him for a generous settlement once the marriage has really gone on the rocks.2
Anti-Semitism is a real factor in the script, not just a topical afterthought. The first we hear of "Skeffington & Co.," the automatic response is, "That's the Jewish firm?" The front door of the Trellis brownstone opens to admit an apparently endless parade of Fanny's admirers in evening dress; Job in his well-cut three-piece suit almost gets it shut in his face as though he were a tradesman who tried the wrong entrance. When Fanny confronts her irresponsible brother (Richard Waring) over his theft of $24,000, he bridles, "I'm glad Dad isn't alive to see you insult and humiliate me in defense of a cheap, common little—" and only Fanny's protesting interruption prevents us from hearing Trippy's epithet of choice. "I don't like him or his type." He will later enlist in the Lafayette Escadrille to get away from the shame of his blue-blooded sister marrying a nouveau-riche Jew, after first drunkenly attempting to pick a fight with Job: "I'm going to be challenged—he's going to heave his checkbook in my face!" He may be choosing his words for maximum treyf when he jeers, "If Skeffington's a gentleman, then a swine is what I want to be." The consternation in their social circle is less baldly stated, but no less bigoted, and the scope only widens as the film goes on. For my money, the most heartbreaking scene in the picture belongs to Job and his ten-year-old daughter (Sylvia Arslan) as he painfully tries to explain his reluctance to take his bright, devoted, desperately adored child to Europe with him after the divorce. The year is 1926. If she stays with Fanny, he argues, however carelessly her mother regards her, at least she can pass as not Jewish. "You will never know what it is . . . I mean, if you come to Europe with me, it's different there. People may look upon you as . . . Oh, this is very difficult to explain to a child."3 He does take her, though, and it is 1935 before she returns to America as a self-possessed, dark-haired young woman (Marjorie Riordan) explaining to her startled mother that she wrote "from Berlin . . . The Nazis don't frighten him, but they frighten me, so Dad thought maybe I'd better come back here to you." I uttered the all-caps line reproduced above. I hadn't realized the film's timeline was going to run so close to recent events. After that I felt no surprise whatsoever to learn that the plot had taken Job to a concentration camp; the only suspense was whether he was going to survive to reunite with his redeemed ex-wife or die before she realized she loved him after all.
And despite being the most compelling and remarkable thread in the entire plot, the events sketched here constitute perhaps a third of the film at most, the rest being concerned with Fanny's increasingly reality-detached attempts to preserve her image of herself as eternally youthful and desirable, which thanks to a stern cosmetic regime and genetic luck of the draw lasts right up until a ravaging bout of diphtheria allows Davis to go for the hagsploitation four decades ahead of schedule. There's poignant material in this plot, with fifty-year-old Fanny unable to imagine a life for herself beyond endless rounds of suitors and sexual adventures. She paints her face into a stiff doll-like parody of its girlish complexion; she begins to imagine that she is being haunted by Job, a silent apparition of spurned unconditional love; in order to assert her imperishable appeal, she convenes all her old admirers and their wives for a dinner party which rapidly turns into cringe tragedy, the audience queasily uncertain of Fanny's ability to accept the facts of passing time until the last lines of the scene.4 I am not even saying that Davis doesn't do a good job with a character who has to age thirty years in the space of two hours and resist any signs of emotional maturity until the very last beat. She has always been afraid to grow up, because she has never been able to differentiate it from growing old. That's fine; that's believable. But when you dovetail this plot with a cross-section of twentieth-century anti-Semitism culminating in a Jewish character losing their sight to the Nazis to make room for some kind of inner beauty disability metaphor, I want to play necromancer with Julius and Philip G. Epstein and explain that whatever tug of the heartstrings they were aiming for with their melodrama, the historical context just crushed it like a bug.5
I haven't really slept since Monday, so I had better wind this up. As far as Oscar-nominated box-office smashes of Hollywood's Golden Age go, Mr. Skeffington is one of the weirder I've run into lately. The original novel by Elizabeth von Arnim was published in 1940 and I would love to know how closely it adheres. Claude Rains is a national treasure. This bewilderment brought to you by my historically aware backers at Patreon.
1. I didn't think Claude Rains was Jewish, but David Skal's Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice (2008) reports that "Rains had strong personal feelings on the topic [of anti-Semitism]; his wife was Jewish, and he believed there might be Jewish blood far back in his own lineage," which if true slightly mitigates my feelings of whitewashing and possibly explains the otherwise nonplussing casting of Rains as Haym Solomon in the Oscar-winning two-reeler Sons of Liberty (1939). Trying to think of Jewish actors of the time who actually played Jewish protagonists, I'm mostly coming up with John Garfield. Everyone else, it's bit parts or any ethnicity but.
2. Job has handled Fanny's own string of affairs discreetly, by which I mean with hilarious passive-aggressiveness: he has a habit of loitering downstairs in the drawing room and quite literally handing each latest lover his hat as he leaves, a gesture which confuses and embarrasses all of them and appears to entertain the hell out of Job. I can side-eye a lot about Mr. Skeffington, especially as we approach the third act and the script's present day, but I cannot accuse the Epsteins of making him a model minority.
3. Being as perceptive a kid as her mother earlier lamented ("It's impossible to keep anything from her. She's inherited all of Job's brains and none of my looks. As a matter of fact, Job says she looks just like his grandmother"), Fanny, Jr. promptly slings back, "I suppose it's easier to explain to a grown-up, isn't it?" and Job has no good answer for that.
4. There is almost certainly a dissertation to be mined from the film's awareness of femininity as a performance even as the narrative punishes Fanny for doing such an exemplary job; it can at least see both sides. "A woman is beautiful when she's loved," Job tells his newly pregnant wife, trying to allay her self-loathing fears of physical change. Fanny dismisses him tartly: "Nonsense. A woman is beautiful if she gets eight hours' sleep and goes to the beauty parlor every day. And bone structure has a lot to do with it, too."
5. They might have had a better chance if nobody had gone blind. The weight of history might still have been insupportable. I watched this movie with my mother who was also unavoidably awake and she was skeptical, too.
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