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Do you know what loneliness is—real loneliness?
Tonight ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I saw Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941), a film I cannot honestly recommend despite its gorgeous Technicolor location shots and a strong lead performance from Randolph Scott. I had never actually seen him in a movie, only in photographs with Cary Grant. As Vance Blake, he's lanky, conflicted, not at all wooden; he has a lean, cautious face and his hair is startlingly gold when he takes off his hat, although he's not young. Very rarely, we see him smile. (A woman gives him the cameo she wears as a necklace, cloud-white on blue; he loves her, but never says it. He says he met her too late.) Nothing about his story is intrinsically Western; replace his outlaw's past with a gangster's life of crime and he'd fit right into a film noir, right down to the stubborn, silent loyalties that keep him from walking away from the gang shadowing him in his new, honest life. I suspect it would have been a better film as a noir. Maybe then Lang could have done something about the artificial injections of slapstick and the unwatchably racist elements—as in, I closed my eyes rather than watch some of the scenes with the Lakota characters. We were unsurprised to read afterward that Lang rewrote the entire script when he got the project and the studio made him write it right back. You can see the film he wanted in the traces of what's there, but that's not the film you get. The score also sounds like it was grafted on after the fact, but at least that's an aesthetic problem, not an actively offensive and demeaning series of script choices. Which were in no way necessary to the plot! It would have been a stronger film without them! And that was sad.
So I don't really want to talk about Western Union. Instead I am going to use Robert Young (who co-starred; less interesting than elsewhere) as a springboard to The Enchanted Cottage (1945), which I saw once in 2008 and never wrote about. I think I promised it toasakiyume years ago. Blame Tiny Wittgenstein for the delay!
Almost unconditionally, I love this movie. I watched it with my mother on TCM and it amazed me, partly for what it did and so much for what it didn't do. It's a romance with a mysterious twist; its theme is the transformative power of love; it's framed by a blind pianist playing for the first time a tone poem called "The Enchanted Cottage." It should have been as treacly as thar cakes, with sticky wish-fulfillment fingerprints left all over the scenery. What it reads most like is a version of Beauty and the Beast in which each of the lovers takes both parts in turn and the story plays fair with them. All sorts of spoilers and that jazz. It is impossible for me to talk about my reasons for loving this movie without discussing the plot.
Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire) is not a beautiful girl. Newly arrived in a small town in New England in 1940 to answer an ad for a maid-of-all-work, she is unkindly but not inaccurately described by a local boy as "terrible homely"—which in Hollywood usually means a bombshell with glasses, but in truth she's round-faced, heavy-browed, with flatly cut hair and gawky shoulders; her clothes hang on her as slackly as a clothesline and she carries herself with a flinching consciousness of the space she occupies, someone who learned early on that the best she can hope for is to be ignored. The titular cottage is all that remains of a grand colonial-era estate, now a popular getaway for honeymooning couples. Legend says it's haunted, just as the town kids all know that Mrs. Minnett (Mildred Natwick, a tart sibyl) who owns it is a witch; burnt and rebuilt fragment of a manor house that it is, its windows scratched all over with newlywed names, Laura loves the place and Mrs. Minnett takes her on. Soon there's a war on. With fewer honeymoons and more work for the home front, Laura washes dishes at the canteen, bitterly endures the nights when soldiers glance at her once and then guiltily ask some other girl to dance. She's not happy, exactly, but perhaps she has stopped expecting to be. In her spare time, she noodles around on the piano and works on her woodcuts.
And in 1943, she is still at the cottage to run into Oliver Bradford (Robert Young), whom she met once with his fiancée before the war. Then he was a jaunty flier with a gorgeous girl on his arm, a young blood with old money, despairing of his socially proper mother and stepfather and cheerfully confident that the woman he loves understands him better than anyone else in the world. He tries to scratch their names into the cottage window with her engagement diamond—jumping the gun of the cottage's tradition—so sure of himself, he's not even discouraged when the rock pops loose. A ring's a formality. They're modern lovers; no need to hurry into the church just because his draft card's come up. They'll marry when he returns, a hero, probably. Come 1942 and he's shot down in flames over Java. He used to be right-handed and win prizes for polo and tennis; now he walks stiffly and uses his left hand for everything. His face is not unrecognizably disfigured, which perhaps makes the scarring across the left side worse: he looks like himself pulled out of true, asymmetrically into a sneer. Why not? He has nothing but contempt for himself, the former daredevil who now chokes and covers his ears in thunderstorms. His mother wants nothing more than to cosset him, his stepfather to talk him briskly out of his weakness man-to-man, and that soulmate of his? She made him a promise; she'll go through with it . . . Out of his last vestiges of cope, Oliver flees to the cottage, where Laura walks in on him as he contemplates his serviceman's pistol perhaps a touch too thoughtfully, and because she knew him before and doesn't recoil from him now, he talks to her. In snappish fits and starts at first, but he remembers how to apologize. When he tells her she couldn't possibly understand what it's like to have people always looking away from her or looking only with pity, at least he has the grace to shut up before she tells him to. In turn, to her surprise, when she speaks of the cottage's history, how much she loves its strange sense of stopped time and the ghosts of lovers she feels haunting the air—the magic she believes could still be summoned up—he listens to her.
It's perfectly obvious where this relationship is heading. It certainly doesn't go unnoticed by the supporting characters, who are themselves not untouched by war: the composer Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg at Arras) whose blindness is not Teiresias-shorthand for his insight, but a shrapnel relic of the trenches, Mrs. Minnett whose calendar forever reads 1917, marking the date she learned of her husband's death. They observe as Oliver starts to go out walking, and Laura is heard to laugh out loud, and he collects driftwood for her engravings and she prints a portrait of him and their friendship is starting to look like something true and intimate, not just a confluence of loneliness and opportunity, and then Oliver ruins it. He proposes to Laura. He proposes only because a suffocating letter from his parents makes him feel childish and useless and backed into a corner; Laura very sensibly refuses—no matter how much she likes him, she won't marry a man to get his parents off his back—but he protests, and no one ever asked her before, and the next shot is wedding bells. It is painfully a mistake. A silent, wretched dinner follows. The wedding night is set to be unbearable. And when Laura takes to the piano to express in music everything she cannot say to her husband's face, something dreadful and wonderful happens: the more furiously she plays, the more he changes before her eyes and ours, until there he stands as on the day he first walked into her life, hale and straight and handsome, and in agony that the magic has finally worked only to demonstrate how little someone like a healthy Oliver would want someone as plain and odd and awkward as herself, Laura breaks off and runs upstairs. And Oliver, appalled at his selfishness in pressing someone as compassionate and courageous as Laura into a sham marriage with a pathetic bitter mess of nerves like himself, goes after her and takes hold of her shoulders to tell her that he's sorry, she deserves better, he'll get her the divorce as soon as she wants it, and in his arms she turns and is beautiful. And they stare at one another, beautiful. And beautiful they make love. And still beautiful they consult shyly and humbly with the composer, who advises them to enjoy their miracle, not question its entrance into their lives. Cue end credits, choirs of angels, all the usual sap?
Well, no. Because it's not a miracle at all. It's not a spell of ghostly lovers. It's a shift in perspective. The composer has always known; so has Mrs. Minnett. Like the folktale says, We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them. The audience has been just as drawn in; that's the virtue of tight third-person. But when his parents look at them, married just three weeks and glowing, Oliver is still halt and scarred, Laura still gauche and raw-faced, and as they forge on with their misplaced sympathy—how lucky he is to have a wife so patient with his infirmities, how sensible she is to know that a good heart has more to offer than a pretty face—we watch the lovers change, inexorably and cruelly, in each other's eyes. The magic drains away. Their faces in shadow after his parents have gone, they sit apart by the window, until Oliver gets up to scratch their names onto the glass after all, like all the other happy couples. Cue end credits, somber music, all the usual downbeat? Well, no. Because as time circles around again to the last few phrases of Hillgrove's new composition, a couple who must be Laura and Oliver are coming up the front walk: we see them only from the back, until they turn at the door to kiss in the half-light, so that we cannot see if he is scarred, if she is plain-faced; it doesn't matter. They are beautiful and that's the end. And I don't remember anything about the end credits after all, because I was too busy thinking about the film.
I was expecting the magic to be real. I love so much that it's not—or that if it is, it is only the familiar magic of looking at a person one day and realizing how dear they have somehow become. I love that we don't really see Laura and Oliver at the end, because outside perspectives are not the point; it's what they see in each other. And because the magic isn't real, the whole thing avoids being ableist instead of affirming. I mean, Oliver's going to have trouble with loud noises and a limp for the rest of his life. Laura may grow more socially confident, but no one is ever going to look at her and think she's a conventional knockout. But all we were ever seeing was their affection for each other, visually expressed. And it works, too, because the movie doesn't overplay. Oliver's parents aren't monsters; they are that recognizable species of overprotective parent who mean well with the worst results. His fiancée is neither shallow nor heartless; she was really not prepared to cope with PTSD and massive self-loathing. The soldiers who don't ask Laura out aren't shying from some stupefying ugliness so much as glossing past a wallflower in favor of prettier, more social girls; it is not kind of them, but it's not uncommon, either. (Because patriarchy.) And the film never, not once, claims that love fixes broken people. All it underscores is the importance of loving people for who they are, not who they used to be or who you hope they'll turn into. That's a moral I can approve of.
I find it fascinating that the original play was written in the wake of World War I as a kind of reassurance to wounded soldiers. There's an earlier silent version I haven't seen; it stars Richard Barthelmess. Perhaps, when he was Oliver, he was the main character. The protagonist of the 1945 version is very clearly Laura. That is one of the other things I like.
Naturally, Netflix hasn't even heard of it. Try libraries? I must sleep.
derspatchel and I saw Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941), a film I cannot honestly recommend despite its gorgeous Technicolor location shots and a strong lead performance from Randolph Scott. I had never actually seen him in a movie, only in photographs with Cary Grant. As Vance Blake, he's lanky, conflicted, not at all wooden; he has a lean, cautious face and his hair is startlingly gold when he takes off his hat, although he's not young. Very rarely, we see him smile. (A woman gives him the cameo she wears as a necklace, cloud-white on blue; he loves her, but never says it. He says he met her too late.) Nothing about his story is intrinsically Western; replace his outlaw's past with a gangster's life of crime and he'd fit right into a film noir, right down to the stubborn, silent loyalties that keep him from walking away from the gang shadowing him in his new, honest life. I suspect it would have been a better film as a noir. Maybe then Lang could have done something about the artificial injections of slapstick and the unwatchably racist elements—as in, I closed my eyes rather than watch some of the scenes with the Lakota characters. We were unsurprised to read afterward that Lang rewrote the entire script when he got the project and the studio made him write it right back. You can see the film he wanted in the traces of what's there, but that's not the film you get. The score also sounds like it was grafted on after the fact, but at least that's an aesthetic problem, not an actively offensive and demeaning series of script choices. Which were in no way necessary to the plot! It would have been a stronger film without them! And that was sad.So I don't really want to talk about Western Union. Instead I am going to use Robert Young (who co-starred; less interesting than elsewhere) as a springboard to The Enchanted Cottage (1945), which I saw once in 2008 and never wrote about. I think I promised it to
asakiyume years ago. Blame Tiny Wittgenstein for the delay!Almost unconditionally, I love this movie. I watched it with my mother on TCM and it amazed me, partly for what it did and so much for what it didn't do. It's a romance with a mysterious twist; its theme is the transformative power of love; it's framed by a blind pianist playing for the first time a tone poem called "The Enchanted Cottage." It should have been as treacly as thar cakes, with sticky wish-fulfillment fingerprints left all over the scenery. What it reads most like is a version of Beauty and the Beast in which each of the lovers takes both parts in turn and the story plays fair with them. All sorts of spoilers and that jazz. It is impossible for me to talk about my reasons for loving this movie without discussing the plot.
Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire) is not a beautiful girl. Newly arrived in a small town in New England in 1940 to answer an ad for a maid-of-all-work, she is unkindly but not inaccurately described by a local boy as "terrible homely"—which in Hollywood usually means a bombshell with glasses, but in truth she's round-faced, heavy-browed, with flatly cut hair and gawky shoulders; her clothes hang on her as slackly as a clothesline and she carries herself with a flinching consciousness of the space she occupies, someone who learned early on that the best she can hope for is to be ignored. The titular cottage is all that remains of a grand colonial-era estate, now a popular getaway for honeymooning couples. Legend says it's haunted, just as the town kids all know that Mrs. Minnett (Mildred Natwick, a tart sibyl) who owns it is a witch; burnt and rebuilt fragment of a manor house that it is, its windows scratched all over with newlywed names, Laura loves the place and Mrs. Minnett takes her on. Soon there's a war on. With fewer honeymoons and more work for the home front, Laura washes dishes at the canteen, bitterly endures the nights when soldiers glance at her once and then guiltily ask some other girl to dance. She's not happy, exactly, but perhaps she has stopped expecting to be. In her spare time, she noodles around on the piano and works on her woodcuts.
And in 1943, she is still at the cottage to run into Oliver Bradford (Robert Young), whom she met once with his fiancée before the war. Then he was a jaunty flier with a gorgeous girl on his arm, a young blood with old money, despairing of his socially proper mother and stepfather and cheerfully confident that the woman he loves understands him better than anyone else in the world. He tries to scratch their names into the cottage window with her engagement diamond—jumping the gun of the cottage's tradition—so sure of himself, he's not even discouraged when the rock pops loose. A ring's a formality. They're modern lovers; no need to hurry into the church just because his draft card's come up. They'll marry when he returns, a hero, probably. Come 1942 and he's shot down in flames over Java. He used to be right-handed and win prizes for polo and tennis; now he walks stiffly and uses his left hand for everything. His face is not unrecognizably disfigured, which perhaps makes the scarring across the left side worse: he looks like himself pulled out of true, asymmetrically into a sneer. Why not? He has nothing but contempt for himself, the former daredevil who now chokes and covers his ears in thunderstorms. His mother wants nothing more than to cosset him, his stepfather to talk him briskly out of his weakness man-to-man, and that soulmate of his? She made him a promise; she'll go through with it . . . Out of his last vestiges of cope, Oliver flees to the cottage, where Laura walks in on him as he contemplates his serviceman's pistol perhaps a touch too thoughtfully, and because she knew him before and doesn't recoil from him now, he talks to her. In snappish fits and starts at first, but he remembers how to apologize. When he tells her she couldn't possibly understand what it's like to have people always looking away from her or looking only with pity, at least he has the grace to shut up before she tells him to. In turn, to her surprise, when she speaks of the cottage's history, how much she loves its strange sense of stopped time and the ghosts of lovers she feels haunting the air—the magic she believes could still be summoned up—he listens to her.
It's perfectly obvious where this relationship is heading. It certainly doesn't go unnoticed by the supporting characters, who are themselves not untouched by war: the composer Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg at Arras) whose blindness is not Teiresias-shorthand for his insight, but a shrapnel relic of the trenches, Mrs. Minnett whose calendar forever reads 1917, marking the date she learned of her husband's death. They observe as Oliver starts to go out walking, and Laura is heard to laugh out loud, and he collects driftwood for her engravings and she prints a portrait of him and their friendship is starting to look like something true and intimate, not just a confluence of loneliness and opportunity, and then Oliver ruins it. He proposes to Laura. He proposes only because a suffocating letter from his parents makes him feel childish and useless and backed into a corner; Laura very sensibly refuses—no matter how much she likes him, she won't marry a man to get his parents off his back—but he protests, and no one ever asked her before, and the next shot is wedding bells. It is painfully a mistake. A silent, wretched dinner follows. The wedding night is set to be unbearable. And when Laura takes to the piano to express in music everything she cannot say to her husband's face, something dreadful and wonderful happens: the more furiously she plays, the more he changes before her eyes and ours, until there he stands as on the day he first walked into her life, hale and straight and handsome, and in agony that the magic has finally worked only to demonstrate how little someone like a healthy Oliver would want someone as plain and odd and awkward as herself, Laura breaks off and runs upstairs. And Oliver, appalled at his selfishness in pressing someone as compassionate and courageous as Laura into a sham marriage with a pathetic bitter mess of nerves like himself, goes after her and takes hold of her shoulders to tell her that he's sorry, she deserves better, he'll get her the divorce as soon as she wants it, and in his arms she turns and is beautiful. And they stare at one another, beautiful. And beautiful they make love. And still beautiful they consult shyly and humbly with the composer, who advises them to enjoy their miracle, not question its entrance into their lives. Cue end credits, choirs of angels, all the usual sap?
Well, no. Because it's not a miracle at all. It's not a spell of ghostly lovers. It's a shift in perspective. The composer has always known; so has Mrs. Minnett. Like the folktale says, We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them. The audience has been just as drawn in; that's the virtue of tight third-person. But when his parents look at them, married just three weeks and glowing, Oliver is still halt and scarred, Laura still gauche and raw-faced, and as they forge on with their misplaced sympathy—how lucky he is to have a wife so patient with his infirmities, how sensible she is to know that a good heart has more to offer than a pretty face—we watch the lovers change, inexorably and cruelly, in each other's eyes. The magic drains away. Their faces in shadow after his parents have gone, they sit apart by the window, until Oliver gets up to scratch their names onto the glass after all, like all the other happy couples. Cue end credits, somber music, all the usual downbeat? Well, no. Because as time circles around again to the last few phrases of Hillgrove's new composition, a couple who must be Laura and Oliver are coming up the front walk: we see them only from the back, until they turn at the door to kiss in the half-light, so that we cannot see if he is scarred, if she is plain-faced; it doesn't matter. They are beautiful and that's the end. And I don't remember anything about the end credits after all, because I was too busy thinking about the film.
I was expecting the magic to be real. I love so much that it's not—or that if it is, it is only the familiar magic of looking at a person one day and realizing how dear they have somehow become. I love that we don't really see Laura and Oliver at the end, because outside perspectives are not the point; it's what they see in each other. And because the magic isn't real, the whole thing avoids being ableist instead of affirming. I mean, Oliver's going to have trouble with loud noises and a limp for the rest of his life. Laura may grow more socially confident, but no one is ever going to look at her and think she's a conventional knockout. But all we were ever seeing was their affection for each other, visually expressed. And it works, too, because the movie doesn't overplay. Oliver's parents aren't monsters; they are that recognizable species of overprotective parent who mean well with the worst results. His fiancée is neither shallow nor heartless; she was really not prepared to cope with PTSD and massive self-loathing. The soldiers who don't ask Laura out aren't shying from some stupefying ugliness so much as glossing past a wallflower in favor of prettier, more social girls; it is not kind of them, but it's not uncommon, either. (Because patriarchy.) And the film never, not once, claims that love fixes broken people. All it underscores is the importance of loving people for who they are, not who they used to be or who you hope they'll turn into. That's a moral I can approve of.
I find it fascinating that the original play was written in the wake of World War I as a kind of reassurance to wounded soldiers. There's an earlier silent version I haven't seen; it stars Richard Barthelmess. Perhaps, when he was Oliver, he was the main character. The protagonist of the 1945 version is very clearly Laura. That is one of the other things I like.
Naturally, Netflix hasn't even heard of it. Try libraries? I must sleep.
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http://viooz.co/movies/13879-the-enchanted-cottage-1945.html
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Huh. It looks like it works. Thank you!
[edit] The site does not seem entirely compatible with my browser, but it also didn't try to install anything on my hard drive, so I suspect it will work for other people and I'll try it again. Still thanks!
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Thank you. I've been thinking about it on and off for six years.
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I really liked it. I hope it works as well for other people.
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What it reads most like is a version of Beauty and the Beast in which each of the lovers takes both parts in turn and the story plays fair with them. --Yes: yes I can very much see this in your telling.
I love your storytelling, and also your thoughts on the ending, on the magic/not magic, on how that avoids ableism. Oh, pretty much everything.
One note:
she carries herself with a flinching consciousness of the space she occupies --so well said. I heard a line in a video of a poetry slam that this reminds me of:
"This is for the ones told, 'Speak only when you are spoken to,'
And then are never spoken to" (Source--it was
the film never, not once, claims that love fixes broken people. All it underscores is the importance of loving people for who they are, not who they used to be or who you hope they'll turn into. --Amen
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I like to think that I didn't make up all the things I love! I hope you can find it.
It was just a rather astonishing movie to run into one night on TV. Halfway through, I was expecting to grit my teeth against the end. I loved so much that I didn't have to.
"This is for the ones told, 'Speak only when you are spoken to,'
And then are never spoken to"
That is very good.
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Nine
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You're welcome.
So I saw Robert Young in The Canterville Ghost (1944) and then I saw him in this and it's pretty much immaterial to me that he starred for decades on Father Knows Best; I like him.
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Oh, cool. I do not watch things on Amazon, but that makes it much more accessible to people who do. Enjoy if you watch it!