The 40s: The Story of a Decade (87 page)

The script he had to work from is in itself a tremendous success. Nunnally Johnson must have found the Steinbeck novel no kindergarten job to adapt for the movies. It was long, outspoken, and, being a best-seller, something sacred. Its scandalized, delighted, and authoritative readers, many of whom refused to find even any monotony in the original discursive and iterative chronicle, were loyally ready to jump on a digression. From the moment it was heard that the book was to be screened, appreciative admirers wondered how the true force of the dialogue could be handled with the propriety requisite for screen delicacy, and, above all, how the odd dietary incident which Steinbeck devised as the shock of his conclusion could be managed. The hegira of the Joads has been abbreviated, of course, but the story of it is fully given. From the first glimpse we
have of Tom coming down the dusty Oklahoma road, we are moved straight to the world of the Okies; though without reference to either digestive or procreative processes, the language manages to be virile; Mr. Johnson keeps his characters buttoned up but human. And, perhaps with more force than the book, the film closes on Ma Joad’s words: “We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever. We’re the people.”

Ma was the great characterization in the book. Holding together her whole family in their desperate effort to survive, she was most definitely a clarified personality—not a mere type, not, so to speak, a social problem. She alone might be called Steinbeck’s creation in the novel. Jane Darwell, who plays Ma, has been long in the theatre and in pictures, and now she suffers from the very experience she has had. Here her expertness does not stand her in good stead. Competent she is, yet she never quite frees her performance from the suggestion of the theatre. Actually this does not matter in an appraisal of the film as much as might be thought. This is no scenario for stars. Individuals are lost against the grandeur of the landscape or in the huge mass movements of many people. The extras count as much as the featured players.

Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad stands out at times in the vast assemblage, and occasional specific gestures or exclamations draw our eyes and ears to the Grampa and Granma of Charley Grapewin and Zeffie Tilbury, to the Rosasharn of Dorris Bowdon, the Connie of Eddie Quinlan, the Casy of John Carradine, the Pa Joad of Russell Simpson, and the Muley of John Qualen. Mostly, though, we think of the film in terms of groups, the family on the truck, the family gathered around Grampa’s grave, the children in the store in front of the candy, the other children staring at food—something to eat—in the camp. It is a great film of the dust plains, the highways, the camps, of the sky above, and of a nameless, evicted people.

OCTOBER 26, 1940 (ON
THE GREAT DICTATOR
)

T
here’s a general feeling, I discover, prevalent around the town that
The Great Dictator
is a very curious affair indeed, something distinctly odd, and certainly unique. People aren’t sure that they like it, or anyhow they aren’t very eloquent about why they do, or, on the other hand, why they don’t. Reports and small talk aren’t apparently going to send crowds to see it, though I think the baffled and inarticulate discussions may sustain that curiosity which was so coyly nourished during all the five years of the film’s making. The truth probably is that too much has happened in these five years for the film’s own good. I don’t mean that too much has happened in Hollywood. I refer to occurrences in other portions of the globe.

There were never any very good Hitler jokes, and now, I should say, there are none anywhere near being good. Photographs suggested that Hitler looks somewhat like Charlie Chaplin, which had perhaps once some comic aspect, but it happens to be an aspect not largely relevant at this moment. The resemblance evidently did amuse Charlie Chaplin himself, and it is the cornerstone of this whole picture. That it should turn out to be even as sturdy material for laughter as it does is one of the amazing and baffling factors of this truly singular production. It is by no means so amazing, though, as that we should find ourselves titillated by hilarious burlesques of ghettos, Nazi troopers, and concentration camps. Charlie Chaplin alone could have dreamed of such an approach to the events of the day, and surely only Charlie Chaplin could somehow have swung the whole fantastic conglomeration into anything nearly successful or even endurable.

Where he is successful, which is throughout a considerable length of the picture, he is just being his old self, Hitler or no Hitler. If anything, he has grown younger with the years. As a Jewish barber, he again and again is that familiar figure of his great days, though this time it’s the Nazis he’s dodging and not the cops. The dictator role is newer stuff for him, but here, too, he is best when he can be overwhelmed or crushed down, or at least abandoned to the wildest phantasmagoria, as in the famous scene with the balloon. I would say that the scene of the balloon (a balloon with the world painted upon it), the dance of the dictator at
play with the world itself, is just about as delightful a bit as Charlie Chaplin has ever given us anywhere. It is sheerest fantasy, child’s fantasy, and I think this childlike naïveté saves the picture. Like Hitler or not, like Mussolini or not (and Jack Oakie’s mimicry is very apt also), the people of this picture, until near the very end, belong to another sphere. There’s a child’s humor in the names, names such as Bacteria, Garbitsch, Herring, and Hynkel, and much kindergarten tomfoolery in the business of the barber chairs and in a great deal of the hearty slapstick of the ghetto. Ghetto scenes and palace scenes have this young gusto about them, which is surely sustained through the first half but begins to abate from then on, until, all of a sudden, without any warning, Charlie Chaplin grows old. In the last speech, commenced in a scene of characteristic comedy, he launches into direct exhortation straight from the screen. I fear the wrench is too great. The power of the film is its detachment, its use of current matters as though surveyed from another planet, and we can’t be jolted in a jiffy back to real life like this. Nor, on the same grounds, are we prepared to see the little Jewish girl (Paulette Goddard), whom we have watched so merrily smack the Storm Troopers over their noddles with a frying pan, exalted in a final closeup as the symbol of all Jewish womankind in the lands of the dictators. Mr. Chaplin might have been wiser to have played his stunt for its full worth, making perhaps, after all, a good Hitler joke; he should have stayed on that other planet and never for a moment have touched this one.

MAY 3, 1941 (ON
CITIZEN KANE
)

T
he noise and the nonsense that have attended the release of
Citizen Kane
may for the time being befog the merit of this extraordinary film. Too many people may have too ready an inclination to seek out some fancied key in it, after the silly flurry in our press, and to read into the biography of its leading character extraneous resemblances to persons in actual life. There is a special kind of pleasure to be found in such research, and the success of the most commonplace movie often lies in the simple fact that it suggests one’s neighbors, or the scandalous
people who took the house on the corner one year, or the handsome bootlegger who used to call every week.
Citizen Kane
can hardly suggest the ways and habits of neighbors, at least to most householders, but it may remind some of revelations in Sunday supplements. To others, I suppose, it will all seem more like Mars—just Mr. Orson Welles and his Mars again.

Since movies hitherto have commenced with a cast list and a vast directory of credits, we are promptly jolted out of our seats when
Citizen Kane
ignores this convention and slides at once into its story. For introduction, there is only a stylized and atmospheric hint of background, of shut high gates and formidable fencing, and this formal difference seems revolutionary enough to establish Mr. Welles’ independence of the conventions. This independence, like fresh air, sweeps on and on throughout the movie, and in spite of bringing to mind, by elaborately fashioned decoration, a picture as old in movie history as
Caligari
, the irregularity of the opening sets a seal of original craftsmanship on what follows. Something new has come to the movie world at last.

Mr. Welles is not merely being smart, clever, or different. By the elliptical method he employs, he can trace a man’s life from childhood to death, presenting essential details in such brief flashes that we follow a complex narrative simply and clearly and find an involved and specialized character fully depicted, an important man revealed to us. With a few breakfast scenes, the progress of a marriage is shown as specifically as though we had read the wife’s diary. By a look and a gesture, electricians high above a stage describe the sad squawks an opera singer is giving below them. The use of an imaginary “March of Time” provides an outline which allows us to escape long exposition. Scenes in the great man’s Xanadu never drag, never oppress one with useless trimmings, yet we get an immediate comprehension of the unique, absurd establishment, with its echoes and its art collection, and the one gag allowed (“Don’t talk so loud. We’re not at home”) becomes just a reasonable statement.

Sometimes I thought there was too much shadow, that the film seemed to be performed in the dark. Mr. Welles likes a gloom. He blots out the faces of speakers and voices come from a limbo when it is what is being said and not how people look that is important. Only once or twice, at times like these, does the film seem mannered. For the most part we are too absorbed in the story and its characters to observe any tricks, too swiftly carried on by its intense, athletic scenes.

Dorothy Comingore, George Coulouris, and Joseph Cotten are on
the list of the fine players, but clearly it is Orson Welles himself, as Mr. Kane, the great millionaire publisher, the owner of Xanadu, the frustrated politician, the bejowled autocrat, the colossus of an earlier American era, who is the centre and focus of all the interest of the film. By a novelist’s device, we learn of this man through the comments of the few who have been close to him, the second wife’s being the most sensational—that second wife whom he drives into the grotesque mortification of an operatic career for which she has no talent. The total impression, though, is not of something entirely monstrous. Mr. Kane does not come out of all this a melodrama villain. I think it is a triumph of the film, and proof of its solid value and of the sense of its director and all concerned, that a human touch is not lost. Sympathy for the preposterous Mr. Kane survives. Indeed, there is something about him which seems admirable. I can imagine that various rich gentlemen who own newspapers may find the characterization only right and proper, and claim that their sensitivity, like Mr. Kane’s, has been misunderstood by their intimates, and others may recognize many a Mr. Kane among their competitors.