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How did it go about the flies?
I am beginning to think I may have had the flu. Exhaustion, fever, headache, literally spent a day in bed, spent the next day out of bed and fell over before midnight, more fever, slept twelve hours at the end of which I am still hallucinatorily tired, I have to travel tomorrow (come hear me read classically-themed poems in Brooklyn!) and I'm having trouble with the concept of sitting upright. Nonetheless, I can type: I can talk about film.
I'd wanted to see The Moon Is Down (1943) since May, when I had a dream that made me wish the novel wasn't packed away with the rest of my books. All paperback fiction after G is still in storage, but the film did me the favor of turning up on TCM on Monday night. I had not planned in advance for my first movie of 2017 to be a story of resistance, but I don't mind.
When the idea of a novel on the themes of occupation and resistance first occurred to John Steinbeck in the fall of 1941, he was working for a variety of government agencies and his own country was neutral; by the time The Moon Is Down saw print in March of 1942, the U.S. had entered World War II and the prospects for the Allies looked grim. On publication, the novel met with commercial success, dramatic adaptation, and critical controversy. Steinbeck was careful to identify no nationalities in his short fable of a small mining town under military occupation by a belligerent foreign power—the characters are divided into "invaders" and "townspeople" with vaguely European names on both sides, the terrain is mostly defined by mountains and winter and the nearness of the sea, and external references to England, France, Belgium, and Russia still leave a lot of the globe unclaimed—but only so that it would have the widest possible range of identification for readers in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the U.S., it was criticized for its melodrama, its optimism, its naïveté, and especially its sympathetic portrayal of the invaders, including the war-weary veteran at the head of the occupying battalion who knows that "there are no peaceful people . . . no friendly people" in a nation taken and held by force. In Europe, where audiences understood that not every enemy comes with a cartoon mustache and an affidavit of recently eaten babies, the novel became a classic of the resistance. It was translated—clandestinely—into Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, even German; there were two serialized versions published in the USSR and another in China. After the war, Steinbeck was awarded the Haakon VII Freedom Cross by the king of Norway himself, for outstanding service to the country during the war. The lack of proper names had not prevented readers all across Europe from identifying the novel's invaded country as Norway. I was introduced to the novel by a friend whose father had grown up in Fredrikstad during the German occupation. It didn't matter that it was written by an American author who had known refugees and members of different resistance groups but never lived in an occupied country himself; to Norwegians, it rang true.
In any case, despite the critical flamewars, The Moon Is Down—its title taken from Macbeth, which never stops me from thinking δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα and inappropriately associating it with Sappho—was not so unpopular at home that it didn't get optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox, adapted and produced by Nunnally Johnson, and directed by Irving Pichel. On the whole it's a faithful version. The novel is quiet, omniscient, compassionate, and impossible to read without feeling a little cold; the deep, waiting winter closes around the reader as much as it does around the town and its inhabitants, and whether you find it a comfort or a horror depends on whose perspective you're in. The film is more exciting, which means that it feels more episodic and the stakes are raised on some of its significant events, although not so much that I think the point is lost. I would love to know its reception in Norway, because the national identity of the nameless little town is unambiguous from the opening image of Hitler's fist pounding on a map of Scandinavia while a harshly rising voice rants about Norwegen, Norwegen to the choral singing of "Ja, vi elsker dette landet" (Anglicized to "Yes, We Love This Land, Our Country") underneath the final scene. In between it is nowhere near as programmatic as these two examples make it sound, since the script is, despite Steinbeck's reassuring but specious distinction between the "free men" of democratic countries and the "herd men" of authoritarian regimes, as conscientiously complicated as the novel in its depiction of both sides of an occupation.
I don't just mean that the German characters are human, although it's important that they are, since it is one of the ways they can be defeated. But they are more interestingly human than the conventional sympathy for the villain; the townspeople resist them in ways that do not always look like recruiting posters. Having taken the small, coastal town and its vital iron mine with blitzkrieg efficiency and the eager assistance of the local quisling, Colonel Lanser (Cedric Hardwicke) encouragingly describes his military presence as "more of an engineering job than a conquest" and expresses the diplomatic hope that the iron can be mined and shipped to Germany "without friction," but his brisk courtesy and his repeatedly stated desire to avoid violence mask a deep pessimism about the chances. The collaborator Corell (E. J. Ballantine, a proud little bantam rooster rather than a rat) speaks of "peaceful people," assuring the colonel that "there's no feeling for fight" in his countrymen. "I've occupied countries before," Lanser grimly informs the Norwegian, before relating the story of a little old lady in Brussels, very fragile, white-haired, and sweet, who used to sing in German and comfort the young soldiers with cigarettes and drinks and "when they finally shot her, she had killed twelve men with a long black hatpin." He knows from experience that hostages and reprisals breed only hatred and further resistance: "Even patriotism isn't as sharp as a personal hurt." And he's quite right. The first anti-German act in the community is not a considered gesture of defiance from a partisan, but a spontaneous loss of temper from an insulted man: mineworker Alex Morden (William Post, Jr.) is holding a pick when the sneering Captain Bentick (Hans Schumm) spits in his face and without thinking twice he lams the German over the head with it. His summary execution for murder crystallizes the uncertain atmosphere of the town. A shot is taken at a junior officer in the aftermath of the sham trial. Slowdowns at the mine escalate into outright sabotage as the weather worsens. Forbidden lights signal the whereabouts of vulnerable infrastructure to the RAF during blackouts. An assignation between an officer and a townswoman ends in grisly murder. By the time the British have started dropping care packages of chocolate and dynamite with instructions for easy use, the German band in the town square may be playing "We're Sailing Against England" as jauntily as the first afternoon of the invasion, but the bandleader has penciled in a mordant "Still" between the first two words. And yet at no point is Lanser willing, even tacitly, to change tactics. He's not a fanatic. He's not a fool. He's not a bully like the late Captain Bentick or a romantic like the late Lieutenant Tonder (Peter van Eyck) or even a sturdy unimaginative follower like Lieutenant Prackle (John Banner), the kind of man who would honestly say "I was only obeying orders" and never understand why that wasn't justification enough. Lanser is a professional soldier with a job to do for his country and a personal code of ethics which requires that he pursue it to the best of his ability, even when he's fairly confident it's a doomed venture in service of a cause he almost certainly doesn't believe in. When orders from Berlin tell him to take hostages from among the town officials, he knows it's a spark to the powderkeg, but he does it anyway. He's dangerous not because he can't be reasoned with, an intelligent man with hard experience of two world wars and no appetite for further bloodshed, but because he has set internal limits past which reason does not apply to his decisions. It would take him into unknown and conflicted territory. He knows what he knows and tells himself this war will be different and does all the same things that didn't work the last time. That's very human; it frightens me; it should have frightened Steinbeck's audience. You don't need to look to the past to find it, either.
For the townspeople, the most effective and important form of resistance is not actually the dramatic stuff like the bombing of the mineworks or the dynamiting of the railway or the few times shots are fired onscreen. Before the trial and execution of her husband, Molly Morden (Dorris Bowdon, excellent in the last role of her short career) accurately takes the temper of her community: "I think the people feel they mustn't be docile. If they're docile, they're beaten." They know that not being docile doesn't have to mean constant armed revolt. They don't have the resources to fight against trained soldiers with machine guns, but they have what their conquerors with the production-line schedule of a constantly expanding military-industrial complex don't—the advantage of patience. The strategic value of the iron mine and the geographical isolation of the town offer a paradoxical protection: individuals can be beaten or shot, food can be rationed and withheld, but there are limits to the degree of punishment that can be inflicted upon a fixed population which is needed for regular work, especially if those in charge of the punishment are trying, like Colonel Lanser, to maintain at least the mechanics of civility. So the townspeople obey their occupiers with a cold sullen courtesy, the letter of the law of welcome and a chill absence of spirit. They never give an inch of friendly interaction, consistently refuse to treat the Germans as they might any other strangers in town. When Lieutenant Tonder tries to order a beer and blend in with the crowd of miners and farmers at the local pub, his mere presence kills the chatter, the warmth, the game of darts; when he protests that the Norwegians should be "more sensible" than the citizens of other countries who are obliged by law to remain fifteen minutes in any public place after the entrance of a German officer and that they all might as well "make the best of conditions" by amicably sharing the space, they give him a pointedly timed fifteen minutes of the next best thing to the silent treatment and then all walk out together. He's left alone with his Pilsner and the silence of the barman and the barman's wife (an uncredited cameo from director Pichel and real-life spouse Violette Wilson), loneliness slowly darkening into paranoia. Elsewhere, a four-year-old child (Natalie Wood!) turns her face away and clings to her mother's skirts when a stranger keeps asking for her name; he is a homesick German soldier and doesn't mean to frighten the child who reminds him so much of his own "little girl at home . . . just about your age, but her hair is light," but his officious superior seizes the opportunity for an object lesson and harangues the crying Kari and her furious mother for their "persistent attitude of antagonism and surliness toward [their] protectors" until he looks up and sees every woman in the queue grinning at him with creepy compliance, their expressions fixed and false as dolls. What goes around the fascist ethos comes around. It is easy for the invaders to enforce their military superiority. It is almost impossible for them to be regarded as human.
This wintry policy culminates in a scene that would pack a punch in any war movie today, Lieutenant Tonder's attempted seduction of Molly Morden. Romantically handsome, sensitive as a scholar-soldier with his nineteenth-century idealism and his love of the banned poet Heine, the lieutenant is the clearest-sighted of Lanser's staff and the closest to cracking up because of it. "I had a funny dream," he confides to his fellow officers, none of whom want to hear it. "I dreamt Hitler was crazy!" He laughs like he's choking on it while they stand uncomfortably around, paralyzed with embarrassment and the hair-raising fear that he's right: "Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses. Flies conquer the flypaper! Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!" He has fallen in love with Molly from afar, or he's a lonely young man and she's a beautiful young widow; he approaches her in courtship, with compliments and poetry, and she forces him to recognize any relationship they might have as transactional, because there is no equality between occupier and occupied, no free choice when one of them commands a firing squad and the other is starving. "What about your own girls, after the last war? A man could choose among them for an egg or a slice of bread. Do you expect me for nothing?" She does not deny that she is "lonely, too," in her "half-warmed bed." He's not an unappealing suitor, with his shy ardent pleading and his pride hurt at the thought of buying a woman rather than winning her; all he wants is connection without qualifiers, to be seen as "a man, not a conquering man," and he cannot understand that so long as he wears his uniform like he means it—no matter what he dreams—he has forfeited that right. What the viewer can't tell is whether Molly will give him the illusion of it anyway, food-hungry and skin-hungry in the endless winter night. He's such a nice Nazi and it's such a popular convention, love across the boundaries of war. She goes up to her bedroom and Lieutenant Tonder follows her. She opens the door to him, the knife-bladed scissors in her hand.
Nonetheless, for me, probably the most interesting character in The Moon Is Down is the one who does almost literally nothing in the movie; that's the point. Henry Travers was mainly a comic actor, almost certainly best known as Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class—hasn't got his wings yet—in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and most of his characters had this well-intentioned, slightly bewildered quality; they'd be on the side of light, but they might trip over a rake or two coming to your aid. Mayor Orden is a serious role, but he doesn't automatically look like one. The casting alone gives him the air of a holy fool, an innocent in over his head; he has fluffy eyebrows which he lifts like a shrug and grieving makes him look like a sad clown. He insists continually on his own unimportance, repeats apologetically that his role as mayor is really ceremonial, that he does what his people want him to do and not the other way around, that they'll do as they please no matter what he tells them. He always looks a little bemused, a little inappropriate. When his house is being commandeered as Nazi HQ, he goes skidding out of the parlor mid-word after Annie the cook (Helene Thimig) throws boiling water onto Lanser's soldiers and Madame Orden (Margaret Wycherly) runs to her defense; he is more concerned with their safety than with an orderly transfer of power, which is admirable but undignified. And he never collaborates. His self-deprecation may be genuine humility—it probably is—but it is also an act of resistance, like the miners working no faster than they can be driven, the townspeople being only as polite as showing teeth. As the local authority, any action he takes to ease the interactions of the townspeople and the invaders will legitimize the occupation, normalize it. So the most useful thing he can do is take no action at all. He can't stop the Germans from holding the charade of a trial in his house, but he can refuse to pronounce sentence; he can't have much to do with the formal resistance, under house arrest, but he can refuse again and again to condemn it. "I'm not a very brave man, sir," he explains to the colonel, still apologetically. "If I tell them not to fight, they'll be sorry, but they'll go on fighting." He goes to his death as faintly absurd as he entered the life of the picture—slips on the snow-covered steps of the gallows and has to be pulled to his feet, his hands bound behind him and his mayor's chain of office around his neck because his wife placed it there before the soldiers took him away; he always leaves for important occasions without it—and he does it consenting, because it is in reprisal for his people's successful use of the British dynamite. He'll hang to the sound of the mine itself being brought down. The banality of evil is famous, but I think the banality of good is underrated: heroism is easier to depict when people look good doing it. Near the end of the film, Mayor Orden gets a moment of "exaltation" talking his way through a passage of Plato's Apology, Sokrates prophesying for the men who have condemned him; it is the same speech he gave at his graduation forty-six years ago, remembered fondly by his friend Dr. Winter (Lee J. Cobb, playing twice his age) because he wasn't very good at it then—his shirt-tail hanging out, persistently misquoting "death" for "departure"—and it is relevant now and he is right to remember it and he still gets the word wrong. He does not get wrong what his people need him to do. I was glad to have seen the film just for Travers' performance.
So that was a very interesting movie to see in the same week that Trump tweeted about his enemies and I am thinking about resistance in general, Nazis optional. It has its flaws—primarily I think its score is a little too dramatically on-the-nose and could have relied more on folk motifs like the Norwegian national anthem, as composer Alfred Newman had done successfully with his scores for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941)—but it preserves all the things I remember liking about the book and adds some I didn't know I was missing, like Henry Travers and occasional striking cinematography. Other films that may deserve a rewatch in the near future are Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine (1943) and Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943). This course of study brought to you by my organized backers at Patreon.
I'd wanted to see The Moon Is Down (1943) since May, when I had a dream that made me wish the novel wasn't packed away with the rest of my books. All paperback fiction after G is still in storage, but the film did me the favor of turning up on TCM on Monday night. I had not planned in advance for my first movie of 2017 to be a story of resistance, but I don't mind.
When the idea of a novel on the themes of occupation and resistance first occurred to John Steinbeck in the fall of 1941, he was working for a variety of government agencies and his own country was neutral; by the time The Moon Is Down saw print in March of 1942, the U.S. had entered World War II and the prospects for the Allies looked grim. On publication, the novel met with commercial success, dramatic adaptation, and critical controversy. Steinbeck was careful to identify no nationalities in his short fable of a small mining town under military occupation by a belligerent foreign power—the characters are divided into "invaders" and "townspeople" with vaguely European names on both sides, the terrain is mostly defined by mountains and winter and the nearness of the sea, and external references to England, France, Belgium, and Russia still leave a lot of the globe unclaimed—but only so that it would have the widest possible range of identification for readers in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the U.S., it was criticized for its melodrama, its optimism, its naïveté, and especially its sympathetic portrayal of the invaders, including the war-weary veteran at the head of the occupying battalion who knows that "there are no peaceful people . . . no friendly people" in a nation taken and held by force. In Europe, where audiences understood that not every enemy comes with a cartoon mustache and an affidavit of recently eaten babies, the novel became a classic of the resistance. It was translated—clandestinely—into Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, even German; there were two serialized versions published in the USSR and another in China. After the war, Steinbeck was awarded the Haakon VII Freedom Cross by the king of Norway himself, for outstanding service to the country during the war. The lack of proper names had not prevented readers all across Europe from identifying the novel's invaded country as Norway. I was introduced to the novel by a friend whose father had grown up in Fredrikstad during the German occupation. It didn't matter that it was written by an American author who had known refugees and members of different resistance groups but never lived in an occupied country himself; to Norwegians, it rang true.
In any case, despite the critical flamewars, The Moon Is Down—its title taken from Macbeth, which never stops me from thinking δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα and inappropriately associating it with Sappho—was not so unpopular at home that it didn't get optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox, adapted and produced by Nunnally Johnson, and directed by Irving Pichel. On the whole it's a faithful version. The novel is quiet, omniscient, compassionate, and impossible to read without feeling a little cold; the deep, waiting winter closes around the reader as much as it does around the town and its inhabitants, and whether you find it a comfort or a horror depends on whose perspective you're in. The film is more exciting, which means that it feels more episodic and the stakes are raised on some of its significant events, although not so much that I think the point is lost. I would love to know its reception in Norway, because the national identity of the nameless little town is unambiguous from the opening image of Hitler's fist pounding on a map of Scandinavia while a harshly rising voice rants about Norwegen, Norwegen to the choral singing of "Ja, vi elsker dette landet" (Anglicized to "Yes, We Love This Land, Our Country") underneath the final scene. In between it is nowhere near as programmatic as these two examples make it sound, since the script is, despite Steinbeck's reassuring but specious distinction between the "free men" of democratic countries and the "herd men" of authoritarian regimes, as conscientiously complicated as the novel in its depiction of both sides of an occupation.
I don't just mean that the German characters are human, although it's important that they are, since it is one of the ways they can be defeated. But they are more interestingly human than the conventional sympathy for the villain; the townspeople resist them in ways that do not always look like recruiting posters. Having taken the small, coastal town and its vital iron mine with blitzkrieg efficiency and the eager assistance of the local quisling, Colonel Lanser (Cedric Hardwicke) encouragingly describes his military presence as "more of an engineering job than a conquest" and expresses the diplomatic hope that the iron can be mined and shipped to Germany "without friction," but his brisk courtesy and his repeatedly stated desire to avoid violence mask a deep pessimism about the chances. The collaborator Corell (E. J. Ballantine, a proud little bantam rooster rather than a rat) speaks of "peaceful people," assuring the colonel that "there's no feeling for fight" in his countrymen. "I've occupied countries before," Lanser grimly informs the Norwegian, before relating the story of a little old lady in Brussels, very fragile, white-haired, and sweet, who used to sing in German and comfort the young soldiers with cigarettes and drinks and "when they finally shot her, she had killed twelve men with a long black hatpin." He knows from experience that hostages and reprisals breed only hatred and further resistance: "Even patriotism isn't as sharp as a personal hurt." And he's quite right. The first anti-German act in the community is not a considered gesture of defiance from a partisan, but a spontaneous loss of temper from an insulted man: mineworker Alex Morden (William Post, Jr.) is holding a pick when the sneering Captain Bentick (Hans Schumm) spits in his face and without thinking twice he lams the German over the head with it. His summary execution for murder crystallizes the uncertain atmosphere of the town. A shot is taken at a junior officer in the aftermath of the sham trial. Slowdowns at the mine escalate into outright sabotage as the weather worsens. Forbidden lights signal the whereabouts of vulnerable infrastructure to the RAF during blackouts. An assignation between an officer and a townswoman ends in grisly murder. By the time the British have started dropping care packages of chocolate and dynamite with instructions for easy use, the German band in the town square may be playing "We're Sailing Against England" as jauntily as the first afternoon of the invasion, but the bandleader has penciled in a mordant "Still" between the first two words. And yet at no point is Lanser willing, even tacitly, to change tactics. He's not a fanatic. He's not a fool. He's not a bully like the late Captain Bentick or a romantic like the late Lieutenant Tonder (Peter van Eyck) or even a sturdy unimaginative follower like Lieutenant Prackle (John Banner), the kind of man who would honestly say "I was only obeying orders" and never understand why that wasn't justification enough. Lanser is a professional soldier with a job to do for his country and a personal code of ethics which requires that he pursue it to the best of his ability, even when he's fairly confident it's a doomed venture in service of a cause he almost certainly doesn't believe in. When orders from Berlin tell him to take hostages from among the town officials, he knows it's a spark to the powderkeg, but he does it anyway. He's dangerous not because he can't be reasoned with, an intelligent man with hard experience of two world wars and no appetite for further bloodshed, but because he has set internal limits past which reason does not apply to his decisions. It would take him into unknown and conflicted territory. He knows what he knows and tells himself this war will be different and does all the same things that didn't work the last time. That's very human; it frightens me; it should have frightened Steinbeck's audience. You don't need to look to the past to find it, either.
For the townspeople, the most effective and important form of resistance is not actually the dramatic stuff like the bombing of the mineworks or the dynamiting of the railway or the few times shots are fired onscreen. Before the trial and execution of her husband, Molly Morden (Dorris Bowdon, excellent in the last role of her short career) accurately takes the temper of her community: "I think the people feel they mustn't be docile. If they're docile, they're beaten." They know that not being docile doesn't have to mean constant armed revolt. They don't have the resources to fight against trained soldiers with machine guns, but they have what their conquerors with the production-line schedule of a constantly expanding military-industrial complex don't—the advantage of patience. The strategic value of the iron mine and the geographical isolation of the town offer a paradoxical protection: individuals can be beaten or shot, food can be rationed and withheld, but there are limits to the degree of punishment that can be inflicted upon a fixed population which is needed for regular work, especially if those in charge of the punishment are trying, like Colonel Lanser, to maintain at least the mechanics of civility. So the townspeople obey their occupiers with a cold sullen courtesy, the letter of the law of welcome and a chill absence of spirit. They never give an inch of friendly interaction, consistently refuse to treat the Germans as they might any other strangers in town. When Lieutenant Tonder tries to order a beer and blend in with the crowd of miners and farmers at the local pub, his mere presence kills the chatter, the warmth, the game of darts; when he protests that the Norwegians should be "more sensible" than the citizens of other countries who are obliged by law to remain fifteen minutes in any public place after the entrance of a German officer and that they all might as well "make the best of conditions" by amicably sharing the space, they give him a pointedly timed fifteen minutes of the next best thing to the silent treatment and then all walk out together. He's left alone with his Pilsner and the silence of the barman and the barman's wife (an uncredited cameo from director Pichel and real-life spouse Violette Wilson), loneliness slowly darkening into paranoia. Elsewhere, a four-year-old child (Natalie Wood!) turns her face away and clings to her mother's skirts when a stranger keeps asking for her name; he is a homesick German soldier and doesn't mean to frighten the child who reminds him so much of his own "little girl at home . . . just about your age, but her hair is light," but his officious superior seizes the opportunity for an object lesson and harangues the crying Kari and her furious mother for their "persistent attitude of antagonism and surliness toward [their] protectors" until he looks up and sees every woman in the queue grinning at him with creepy compliance, their expressions fixed and false as dolls. What goes around the fascist ethos comes around. It is easy for the invaders to enforce their military superiority. It is almost impossible for them to be regarded as human.
This wintry policy culminates in a scene that would pack a punch in any war movie today, Lieutenant Tonder's attempted seduction of Molly Morden. Romantically handsome, sensitive as a scholar-soldier with his nineteenth-century idealism and his love of the banned poet Heine, the lieutenant is the clearest-sighted of Lanser's staff and the closest to cracking up because of it. "I had a funny dream," he confides to his fellow officers, none of whom want to hear it. "I dreamt Hitler was crazy!" He laughs like he's choking on it while they stand uncomfortably around, paralyzed with embarrassment and the hair-raising fear that he's right: "Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses. Flies conquer the flypaper! Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!" He has fallen in love with Molly from afar, or he's a lonely young man and she's a beautiful young widow; he approaches her in courtship, with compliments and poetry, and she forces him to recognize any relationship they might have as transactional, because there is no equality between occupier and occupied, no free choice when one of them commands a firing squad and the other is starving. "What about your own girls, after the last war? A man could choose among them for an egg or a slice of bread. Do you expect me for nothing?" She does not deny that she is "lonely, too," in her "half-warmed bed." He's not an unappealing suitor, with his shy ardent pleading and his pride hurt at the thought of buying a woman rather than winning her; all he wants is connection without qualifiers, to be seen as "a man, not a conquering man," and he cannot understand that so long as he wears his uniform like he means it—no matter what he dreams—he has forfeited that right. What the viewer can't tell is whether Molly will give him the illusion of it anyway, food-hungry and skin-hungry in the endless winter night. He's such a nice Nazi and it's such a popular convention, love across the boundaries of war. She goes up to her bedroom and Lieutenant Tonder follows her. She opens the door to him, the knife-bladed scissors in her hand.
Nonetheless, for me, probably the most interesting character in The Moon Is Down is the one who does almost literally nothing in the movie; that's the point. Henry Travers was mainly a comic actor, almost certainly best known as Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class—hasn't got his wings yet—in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and most of his characters had this well-intentioned, slightly bewildered quality; they'd be on the side of light, but they might trip over a rake or two coming to your aid. Mayor Orden is a serious role, but he doesn't automatically look like one. The casting alone gives him the air of a holy fool, an innocent in over his head; he has fluffy eyebrows which he lifts like a shrug and grieving makes him look like a sad clown. He insists continually on his own unimportance, repeats apologetically that his role as mayor is really ceremonial, that he does what his people want him to do and not the other way around, that they'll do as they please no matter what he tells them. He always looks a little bemused, a little inappropriate. When his house is being commandeered as Nazi HQ, he goes skidding out of the parlor mid-word after Annie the cook (Helene Thimig) throws boiling water onto Lanser's soldiers and Madame Orden (Margaret Wycherly) runs to her defense; he is more concerned with their safety than with an orderly transfer of power, which is admirable but undignified. And he never collaborates. His self-deprecation may be genuine humility—it probably is—but it is also an act of resistance, like the miners working no faster than they can be driven, the townspeople being only as polite as showing teeth. As the local authority, any action he takes to ease the interactions of the townspeople and the invaders will legitimize the occupation, normalize it. So the most useful thing he can do is take no action at all. He can't stop the Germans from holding the charade of a trial in his house, but he can refuse to pronounce sentence; he can't have much to do with the formal resistance, under house arrest, but he can refuse again and again to condemn it. "I'm not a very brave man, sir," he explains to the colonel, still apologetically. "If I tell them not to fight, they'll be sorry, but they'll go on fighting." He goes to his death as faintly absurd as he entered the life of the picture—slips on the snow-covered steps of the gallows and has to be pulled to his feet, his hands bound behind him and his mayor's chain of office around his neck because his wife placed it there before the soldiers took him away; he always leaves for important occasions without it—and he does it consenting, because it is in reprisal for his people's successful use of the British dynamite. He'll hang to the sound of the mine itself being brought down. The banality of evil is famous, but I think the banality of good is underrated: heroism is easier to depict when people look good doing it. Near the end of the film, Mayor Orden gets a moment of "exaltation" talking his way through a passage of Plato's Apology, Sokrates prophesying for the men who have condemned him; it is the same speech he gave at his graduation forty-six years ago, remembered fondly by his friend Dr. Winter (Lee J. Cobb, playing twice his age) because he wasn't very good at it then—his shirt-tail hanging out, persistently misquoting "death" for "departure"—and it is relevant now and he is right to remember it and he still gets the word wrong. He does not get wrong what his people need him to do. I was glad to have seen the film just for Travers' performance.
So that was a very interesting movie to see in the same week that Trump tweeted about his enemies and I am thinking about resistance in general, Nazis optional. It has its flaws—primarily I think its score is a little too dramatically on-the-nose and could have relied more on folk motifs like the Norwegian national anthem, as composer Alfred Newman had done successfully with his scores for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941)—but it preserves all the things I remember liking about the book and adds some I didn't know I was missing, like Henry Travers and occasional striking cinematography. Other films that may deserve a rewatch in the near future are Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine (1943) and Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943). This course of study brought to you by my organized backers at Patreon.