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Excuse me, I really must gibber at the oriel window
This Land Is Mine (1943) is out on DVD. This is one of the movies I had to watch on YouTube because I couldn't find it on home video for annoyance or money, excellent as I thought it was. It stars Charles Laughton, but mostly I talked about George Sanders. In Laughton's honor, therefore, and in honor of movies where I talk about someone else, I am finally going to write about a movie I promised ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asakiyume so long ago it's actually embarrassing. I've had notes on my desktop for years.
Tiny Wittgenstein aside, there are reasons it's taken me forever to write about The Canterville Ghost (1944). It's not a classic film. Jules Dassin was handed the direction five weeks into production; the story takes its name from Oscar Wilde and shares about as much material as an Anglo-American culture clash and a ghost named Sir Simon de Canterville who wants nothing more than to sleep, as he has not for three hundred years, in the garden beyond the pine woods. It's tonally confused even for a wartime fantasy-comedy with dramatic underpinnings, its production values range unevenly from A-list effects to some guys with motorcycles and German helmets, and while the finale is thematically a good idea, in practice it came out kind of silly. I am nonetheless strangely fond of it, possibly because it's the movie that introduced me to Robert Young. I caught it on TCM in 2007 and taped a re-run a couple of years later, which does me so much good now that I have neither a television nor a VCR.
The plot, or at least the set-up: Since 1643, Sir Simon de Canterville (Charles Laughton) has been the most fearsome ghost in the history of English hauntings, notwithstanding that in life he was a rather sweet, marshmallowy type who funked a duel and for his shame was walled up by his father behind an arras with the curse that he should walk the halls of his ancestral castle until a kinsman of his, wearing the self-same signet ring he dishonored, should perform a brave deed in his name. Unfortunately, whether through the effects of the curse or the power of suggestion, all the likeliest Cantervilles since Sir Simon's time have displayed the tough moral fiber of Sir Robin the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot: the ancestor who dropped down a well to get out of Waterloo, the ancestor who laid low in drag throughout the Thirty Years' War, the ancestor who charged the opposite way from the Light Brigade . . . In the present day, all that remains of the family are a couple of legal guardians and the six-year-old Lady Jessica (Margaret O'Brien), an imaginative, very serious child who has grown up so frightened of the ghost—she's never seen it herself, but it's been credited over the years with an impressive string of derangements and suicides—that a tinsmith hailing her from the roof sends her running inside with a scream. Nonetheless, when there are visitors to the castle she steels herself and makes a perfect, if pint-sized hostess to the company of U.S. Army Rangers being billeted on the grounds, among them one Cuffy Williams (Robert Young), a cheerfully smart-mouthed private who doesn't believe in ghosts. He changes his tune sharpish, as his new allies might say, when a Laughton-shaped spectre comes out of the wall that night, rattling chains, throttling itself, bleeding on things, and generally carrying on like Anne Boleyn by Weston and Lee—but like the class clown that he is, Cuffy deals with this genuinely spooky intrusion by catcalling it, and in short order it's the Rangers who are terrifying the ghost as they don sheets and gas masks (looking creepily like some panels of Sandman) and chase it back up the chimney. And as a punchy, triumphant Cuffy doubles over with laughter at the notion that the ghost might have come looking for a kinsman in a pack of American GIs, we see on the back of his neck the birthmark that attends all males of the Canterville line . . .
You really can figure out where it goes from here, although I will warn you that if you skip the movie entirely, you'll miss out on one of the great jitterbugging scenes of cinema. (Seriously. It's right up there with Nils Poppe.) A lot of the rhythms are awkward, as if they started shooting the movie without knowing quite how much of it there was supposed to be; I don't mean it has continuity problems, but the prologue is completely superfluous and the denouement doesn't need to take all the time it does and the other major action sequence suffers from too little budget and too many motorcycles. But Margaret O'Brien is an amazingly non-cloying child actor for the period, and I'll go on about Robert Young after the cut, and it is really their relationship that allows me to believe the final piece of the plot, which would otherwise be simply sentimental and unlikely. What the film handles very well is the possibility that the curse may be nothing more than self-fulfilling fear—it's not the grip of the supernatural that paralyzes Cuffy on the failed raid on the French coast, it's the suddenness with which a friend is suddenly dead weight in his arms when a moment ago the two of them were gunning down a motorcade of Nazis like the first coming of Quentin Tarantino; he stares at the blood on his palm in a daze and barely even notices when his frustrated sergeant knocks him aside and commands the machine gun himself. That's a situation in which a person without any supernatural cowardice in their background can be excused freezing. What we've seen of Cuffy is kindhearted, snarky, quick-thinking, not necessarily much of a fighter. (When he makes a little too much of his newfound aristocracy for his fellow soldiers to tolerate, they jump him and de-pants him in front of Lady Jessica.) His sergeant isn't even unsympathetic, delivering the bad news: "Rules are rules, Williams. We can't afford to risk your life and the lives of others taking another chance." But he's had Sir Simon fretting around him like an anxious bluebottle, walking him sonorously through the failures of previous Cantervilles and pestering him into wearing their signet ring into combat—a brave deed done in his name—and now he can't stop looking at it and wondering, as if something of his ancestry seeped out of it with the knowledge and stained him. He had the fun of claiming he was a Canterville: is this just the price?
(I did not expect him to be a protagonist; so few of the characters I really like are. He doesn't look like much of anything when he's introduced, the kind of joker who puts his feet up on two-hundred-year-old furniture with theatrical ease and leaps to attention only so long as it takes his lieutenant to clear the room before he slouches breezily back down again. He has a flip remark for everything from social niceties to spot remover to superstition, a long puckish mouth that corners easily into a smile and the lightly raised brows of someone who finds nothing worth taking seriously, so he might as well play along with everything—his grave courtesy toward Lady Jessica is a game when they first meet and she is right to call him on it. But the rest of his platoon remain straightforwardly comedic characters and Cuffy gradually becomes real, someone who catches the audience's sympathy as well as their smiles. When he sees how scared Jessica really is of the Canterville Ghost, he makes a point of introducing her to Sir Simon on the grounds that no one should be afraid of a ghost who can be chased up a chimney, or even sometimes a ghost who can't. He steps in defensively—of her, not himself—when the townsfolk chuckle that it's no honor to be called a Canterville. He's still playful with her, as if she were a much younger sister or a cousin, but after his first experience with the ghost he doesn't condescend to her once. He is, basically, underneath his reflexive irreverence, a nice guy, and by the midpoint of the movie Jessica has come to trust him as much as she does Sir Simon: a marked change from her early, formal isolation. Eventually he's a serious enough character to be scared, and ashamed, and struggling with something he doesn't want to believe about himself. I'd just figured him for one of my traditionally favorite supporting cast. Here is as good a place as any to mention that I was delighted to catch Robert Young later that year as the romantic lead in The Enchanted Cottage (1945), because he truly hadn't struck me as a leading man outside of B-movies and I am always glad when someone in the studio system was more open-minded than I think.)
And so it works beautifully that the breaking of the curse is a collaborative effort. In keeping with the film's intermittent but well-intended realism, it's not until Cuffy stops to think about the complete insanity of what he's doing—hitching a blockbuster to a jeep so that he can drive it into a ravine before the oblivious Rangers get themselves blown sky-high—that he freezes again, reality check vs. ancestral doom, and it is an appropriate turnabout that Lady Jessica is the one to jolt him out of it. He was so encouraging of her in their early scenes when she wouldn't walk a straight line through her own home for fear of meeting the ghost; now she's like the boy who doesn't know how to shudder, facing down a ticking bomb as if she had no idea of the damage it could do. And whether it's his own words thrown back at him or the danger to her or some sheer level of stubbornness they both share, it's enough to get Cuffy moving. He's the one with the signet ring still on his hand and the initial impulse to get the bomb off the Canterville grounds regardless of the risk to himself, but she's the one who reminds him that he's no more a coward than anyone else in wartime—he was brave before he knew he was a Canterville and he's brave all the same now and heroism and foolhardiness are cousins anyway. Even the ghost of Simon de Canterville, as much as he gets in the way, is allowed to be part of the slightly ridiculous brave deed that undoes the centuries of equally ridiculous fear. (The actual disposal of the bomb is still too long and too slapstick and the stuntman doesn't look very much like Charles Laughton. Having just discovered there's a Lux Radio Theater adaptation, I am perversely curious to know whether the action scenes work better when you can't see them. If it doesn't have Robert Young, though, I'll be sad.) No one is singlehandedly, thoughtlessly fearless; three scattered generations all get to do their part. Families can stick together, not just suffer by association. There are worse morals. No, I don't think it's a romantic ending. From Cuffy's laugh, I don't think he does, either. But I'd be very surprised if he wasn't there at Jessica's wedding in fifteen or twenty years.
If you want the definitive film about World War II, British-American relations, and the haunting ways the present is affected by the past, watch A Canterbury Tale (1944). But if this one ever crosses your television screen, it's fun. It has an actor I turned out to like very much in it. It will not help you at all with Jules Dassin's later work. Charles Laughton gets to deliver lines like the title of this post with flawless Shakespearean diction. What more reason do you need?
asakiyume so long ago it's actually embarrassing. I've had notes on my desktop for years.Tiny Wittgenstein aside, there are reasons it's taken me forever to write about The Canterville Ghost (1944). It's not a classic film. Jules Dassin was handed the direction five weeks into production; the story takes its name from Oscar Wilde and shares about as much material as an Anglo-American culture clash and a ghost named Sir Simon de Canterville who wants nothing more than to sleep, as he has not for three hundred years, in the garden beyond the pine woods. It's tonally confused even for a wartime fantasy-comedy with dramatic underpinnings, its production values range unevenly from A-list effects to some guys with motorcycles and German helmets, and while the finale is thematically a good idea, in practice it came out kind of silly. I am nonetheless strangely fond of it, possibly because it's the movie that introduced me to Robert Young. I caught it on TCM in 2007 and taped a re-run a couple of years later, which does me so much good now that I have neither a television nor a VCR.
The plot, or at least the set-up: Since 1643, Sir Simon de Canterville (Charles Laughton) has been the most fearsome ghost in the history of English hauntings, notwithstanding that in life he was a rather sweet, marshmallowy type who funked a duel and for his shame was walled up by his father behind an arras with the curse that he should walk the halls of his ancestral castle until a kinsman of his, wearing the self-same signet ring he dishonored, should perform a brave deed in his name. Unfortunately, whether through the effects of the curse or the power of suggestion, all the likeliest Cantervilles since Sir Simon's time have displayed the tough moral fiber of Sir Robin the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot: the ancestor who dropped down a well to get out of Waterloo, the ancestor who laid low in drag throughout the Thirty Years' War, the ancestor who charged the opposite way from the Light Brigade . . . In the present day, all that remains of the family are a couple of legal guardians and the six-year-old Lady Jessica (Margaret O'Brien), an imaginative, very serious child who has grown up so frightened of the ghost—she's never seen it herself, but it's been credited over the years with an impressive string of derangements and suicides—that a tinsmith hailing her from the roof sends her running inside with a scream. Nonetheless, when there are visitors to the castle she steels herself and makes a perfect, if pint-sized hostess to the company of U.S. Army Rangers being billeted on the grounds, among them one Cuffy Williams (Robert Young), a cheerfully smart-mouthed private who doesn't believe in ghosts. He changes his tune sharpish, as his new allies might say, when a Laughton-shaped spectre comes out of the wall that night, rattling chains, throttling itself, bleeding on things, and generally carrying on like Anne Boleyn by Weston and Lee—but like the class clown that he is, Cuffy deals with this genuinely spooky intrusion by catcalling it, and in short order it's the Rangers who are terrifying the ghost as they don sheets and gas masks (looking creepily like some panels of Sandman) and chase it back up the chimney. And as a punchy, triumphant Cuffy doubles over with laughter at the notion that the ghost might have come looking for a kinsman in a pack of American GIs, we see on the back of his neck the birthmark that attends all males of the Canterville line . . .
You really can figure out where it goes from here, although I will warn you that if you skip the movie entirely, you'll miss out on one of the great jitterbugging scenes of cinema. (Seriously. It's right up there with Nils Poppe.) A lot of the rhythms are awkward, as if they started shooting the movie without knowing quite how much of it there was supposed to be; I don't mean it has continuity problems, but the prologue is completely superfluous and the denouement doesn't need to take all the time it does and the other major action sequence suffers from too little budget and too many motorcycles. But Margaret O'Brien is an amazingly non-cloying child actor for the period, and I'll go on about Robert Young after the cut, and it is really their relationship that allows me to believe the final piece of the plot, which would otherwise be simply sentimental and unlikely. What the film handles very well is the possibility that the curse may be nothing more than self-fulfilling fear—it's not the grip of the supernatural that paralyzes Cuffy on the failed raid on the French coast, it's the suddenness with which a friend is suddenly dead weight in his arms when a moment ago the two of them were gunning down a motorcade of Nazis like the first coming of Quentin Tarantino; he stares at the blood on his palm in a daze and barely even notices when his frustrated sergeant knocks him aside and commands the machine gun himself. That's a situation in which a person without any supernatural cowardice in their background can be excused freezing. What we've seen of Cuffy is kindhearted, snarky, quick-thinking, not necessarily much of a fighter. (When he makes a little too much of his newfound aristocracy for his fellow soldiers to tolerate, they jump him and de-pants him in front of Lady Jessica.) His sergeant isn't even unsympathetic, delivering the bad news: "Rules are rules, Williams. We can't afford to risk your life and the lives of others taking another chance." But he's had Sir Simon fretting around him like an anxious bluebottle, walking him sonorously through the failures of previous Cantervilles and pestering him into wearing their signet ring into combat—a brave deed done in his name—and now he can't stop looking at it and wondering, as if something of his ancestry seeped out of it with the knowledge and stained him. He had the fun of claiming he was a Canterville: is this just the price?
(I did not expect him to be a protagonist; so few of the characters I really like are. He doesn't look like much of anything when he's introduced, the kind of joker who puts his feet up on two-hundred-year-old furniture with theatrical ease and leaps to attention only so long as it takes his lieutenant to clear the room before he slouches breezily back down again. He has a flip remark for everything from social niceties to spot remover to superstition, a long puckish mouth that corners easily into a smile and the lightly raised brows of someone who finds nothing worth taking seriously, so he might as well play along with everything—his grave courtesy toward Lady Jessica is a game when they first meet and she is right to call him on it. But the rest of his platoon remain straightforwardly comedic characters and Cuffy gradually becomes real, someone who catches the audience's sympathy as well as their smiles. When he sees how scared Jessica really is of the Canterville Ghost, he makes a point of introducing her to Sir Simon on the grounds that no one should be afraid of a ghost who can be chased up a chimney, or even sometimes a ghost who can't. He steps in defensively—of her, not himself—when the townsfolk chuckle that it's no honor to be called a Canterville. He's still playful with her, as if she were a much younger sister or a cousin, but after his first experience with the ghost he doesn't condescend to her once. He is, basically, underneath his reflexive irreverence, a nice guy, and by the midpoint of the movie Jessica has come to trust him as much as she does Sir Simon: a marked change from her early, formal isolation. Eventually he's a serious enough character to be scared, and ashamed, and struggling with something he doesn't want to believe about himself. I'd just figured him for one of my traditionally favorite supporting cast. Here is as good a place as any to mention that I was delighted to catch Robert Young later that year as the romantic lead in The Enchanted Cottage (1945), because he truly hadn't struck me as a leading man outside of B-movies and I am always glad when someone in the studio system was more open-minded than I think.)
And so it works beautifully that the breaking of the curse is a collaborative effort. In keeping with the film's intermittent but well-intended realism, it's not until Cuffy stops to think about the complete insanity of what he's doing—hitching a blockbuster to a jeep so that he can drive it into a ravine before the oblivious Rangers get themselves blown sky-high—that he freezes again, reality check vs. ancestral doom, and it is an appropriate turnabout that Lady Jessica is the one to jolt him out of it. He was so encouraging of her in their early scenes when she wouldn't walk a straight line through her own home for fear of meeting the ghost; now she's like the boy who doesn't know how to shudder, facing down a ticking bomb as if she had no idea of the damage it could do. And whether it's his own words thrown back at him or the danger to her or some sheer level of stubbornness they both share, it's enough to get Cuffy moving. He's the one with the signet ring still on his hand and the initial impulse to get the bomb off the Canterville grounds regardless of the risk to himself, but she's the one who reminds him that he's no more a coward than anyone else in wartime—he was brave before he knew he was a Canterville and he's brave all the same now and heroism and foolhardiness are cousins anyway. Even the ghost of Simon de Canterville, as much as he gets in the way, is allowed to be part of the slightly ridiculous brave deed that undoes the centuries of equally ridiculous fear. (The actual disposal of the bomb is still too long and too slapstick and the stuntman doesn't look very much like Charles Laughton. Having just discovered there's a Lux Radio Theater adaptation, I am perversely curious to know whether the action scenes work better when you can't see them. If it doesn't have Robert Young, though, I'll be sad.) No one is singlehandedly, thoughtlessly fearless; three scattered generations all get to do their part. Families can stick together, not just suffer by association. There are worse morals. No, I don't think it's a romantic ending. From Cuffy's laugh, I don't think he does, either. But I'd be very surprised if he wasn't there at Jessica's wedding in fifteen or twenty years.
If you want the definitive film about World War II, British-American relations, and the haunting ways the present is affected by the past, watch A Canterbury Tale (1944). But if this one ever crosses your television screen, it's fun. It has an actor I turned out to like very much in it. It will not help you at all with Jules Dassin's later work. Charles Laughton gets to deliver lines like the title of this post with flawless Shakespearean diction. What more reason do you need?
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I have a vague feeling that I might have heard, sometime after reading the original Wilde story as a child, that somebody had made an in-very-slightly-more-than-name-alone adaptation set in the Forties. I'm glad I didn't see it at that time, because I suspect I would have found that unforgiveable and this sounds like a movie which deserves to be forgiven for it.
As always, your write-up is lovely.
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I feel that I should stress even more than usual that this is a movie with a lot of problems—I don't know if I can chalk it up to the change in directors or just the script and the production schedule, but I really would have cut the prologue and shortened the ending substantially, especially the bit where it goes straight into undercranked cartoon territory; also the running gag about the lieutenant not believing in the ghost has a cute payoff, but I'm not sure about Cuffy's friend who calls himself a "Hoboken Indian." (I applaud the attempt to represent a Native character just hanging out in the army like anyone else, but it would have been nicer if he weren't a genial lunkhead.) There's just something in it worth coming back to, and I'd watch it again if I could find it anywhere online.
As always, your write-up is lovely.
Thank you. Maybe I should tackle The Enchanted Cottage (1945) next.
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She was very good as Beth in the 1940s version of Little Women.
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I think that's the one I haven't seen! The 1933 adaptation with Katherine Hepburn, yes, and I saw the recent (1994) version when it was in theaters, after which its cast has been surprising me for years. (Hello, Gabriel Byrne. Hello, John Neville. Susan Sarandon? Christian Bale? I suspect the only reason Trini Alvarado's name means nothing to me is I've just never seen her in her defining roles. At the time, I mostly knew from Claire Danes.) Do you recommend this one?
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To be fair, Gabriel Byrne wasn't exactly German . . .
(Although I thought he sounded like the father of my best friend at the time, who was from Germany, so his accent can't have been terrible.)
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Of course, I haven't seen it since then, so I can't say whether it holds up.
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I remember the 1994 version very fondly and would like to see it again now that I'd recognze the cast.
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I enjoyed it too and would be happy to see it again. I saw it in company with my sisters and my mother, over Christmas, which was about perfect. In fact, my father may have been out of town, which would be even more perfect. Albeit, I don't think there was a romance plot in my winter vacation that year.
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I caught it on TCM in 2007 and taped a re-run a couple of years later, which does me so much good now that I have neither a television nor a VCR.
had me laughing sympathetically. We have a situation with viewing anything (in terms of devices capable of receiving and then showing films) that rivals the fox-goose-grain boat scenario.
Okay, but the review. "Too little budget and too many motorcycles" should become a phrase like "turn it up to eleven." Although some will surely ask if there can ever be too many motorcycles. What you say about Cuffy gradually becoming real is touching; indeed, everything you write about him and Jessica and the nature of the family curse and their relation to it and each other is touching. Then you had me laughing, too, with "intermittent but well-intended realism"--I feel like that could be a catchphrase for my life.
With the healing angel now an enthusiastic bronie, I have a hard time reading "Canterville" and not thinking of My Little Pony.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. It's wonderful; I have the pleasure of watching a film just by reading your reviews.
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I admit that's not the way it usually goes! I grew up on The Blues Brothers (1980); I am a great fan of too many motor vehicles. But this movie could definitely use fewer.
What you say about Cuffy gradually becoming real is touching; indeed, everything you write about him and Jessica and the nature of the family curse and their relation to it and each other is touching.
It's the core of the story for me, and the reason I keep thinking about the movie. Charles Laughton isn't irrelevant, but he's at an angle to them, I think. Their relationship would still interest me even without a ghost. (For starters, it's a randomly convincing portrayal of an adult who's good with children and a child whose best friends are grown-ups.)
"intermittent but well-intended realism"--I feel like that could be a catchphrase for my life.
Please feel free to take it!
With the healing angel now an enthusiastic bronie, I have a hard time reading "Canterville" and not thinking of My Little Pony.
. . . I hadn't even thought of that. Fair point.
It's wonderful; I have the pleasure of watching a film just by reading your reviews.
Thank you. Let me know what you think if you ever see it!
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If you have any suggestions as to how to make this happen, I'll take them. I like writing about movies very much, but I've always assumed I wasn't saying anything—late-night, years-late, LJ, informal—with the requisite depth for publishable criticism.
(Okay, I do think I have something to say about Powell and Pressburger. There's almost nothing on them and what there is I tend to disagree with, except for
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The storytelling of your reviews makes this old movies come to life even--as in my own case--when a person has almost no familiarity with old movies.
Maybe you could do it as a Criterion watch-along. Or, you could pick certain actors to follow, or certain directors. Those could be organizing principles. But the appeal for readers would be the drama of your retellings.
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I think of those as having a broader, snappier appeal than my semi-essays about movies most people have never watched because I have to track them down from libraries or Criterion only puts them out after I've taped them off TCM. Nonetheless, when I am not running out the door on errands, I will consider this.
Thank you.
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But really, what I think I want is for somebody to remake the movie, in a way that matches my mental image. I'd watch the hell out of that.
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There will be a lot of flaws, but I hope you enjoy the other stuff!
But really, what I think I want is for somebody to remake the movie, in a way that matches my mental image. I'd watch the hell out of that.
Hee. I'd love to know what your mental remake from my words about a film looks like.