And Yet There's Still Sexual Chemistry
Every once in a while, various movie-loving groups compile lists of movies where no one understands why they aren't out on DVD. I mean, The African Queen just got its first DVD release last year. (Which, you know, Christmas is coming up, as is my birthday . . . .) Before
that, it generally topped those lists. "What the?" we all said. So okay. Those movies get released every now and again, usually with great fanfare that they're finally available, as if it weren't the studios' own fault that they weren't out in the first place even though you can get a box set of the complete series of Full House. This movie tends to appear on those lists, too. I ended up having to watch it streaming on Netflix. (With a moderated thank you to Roku; the power supply died and had to be replaced within a month of purchase.) And naturally, this also means the transfer is bad, because no one cleans up for online streaming.
Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien) is leaving newspaper work to get married. He is very firm on this point. He is going to go to New York with his "girl," Peggy Grant (Mary Brian), and be an advertising executive. He excuses himself from Peggy and her mother (Effie Ellsler) to go say goodbye to the boys in the press room at the prison. Earl Williams (George E. Stone) is to hang for murder the next morning. This is at least in part political; the sheriff (Clarence Wilson) is running for reelection, and he wants the hanging to be proof that he's tough on crime, these things being proof that there's nothing new under the sun. Hildy must also disentangle himself from his editor, Walter Burns (Adolph Menjou). In a convoluted series of events, Earl Williams escapes and Hildy ends up hiding him from the law. Even though Peggy and her mother both keep trying to pull Hildy away from the whole thing. It's a big story, after all.
You may recognize the story. We've covered it before when we did the Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell remake, His Girl Friday. In which Hildy was transformed into a woman. And the thing is, very few changes were needed, including the nature of the characters' relationships. Yes, Cary Grant played the ex-husband, but there was still a codependent nature to the relationship even when he was just Hildy's editor. Indeed, having it an all-male atmosphere--there are four females in the entire movie, and they're all treated as intruders--really only strengthens the feeling that there's something deeper to the relationship. Walter really does go to extraordinary lengths to keep Hildy with him. Perhaps that's why they felt the need to turn it into a romantic comedy; in some ways, it already is one. Everyone treats the hanging as farce, to the extent that I'm not a hundred percent certain as to the details of the crime leading up to it. It's why the only witness for the defense, Molly Malloy (Mae Clark), is so angry.
And that may be part of the point, in fact. These people are so hardened by everything which happens to them that they no longer grasp real emotion. Roy G. Besinger (Edward Everett Horton) is more fixated with his health problems and the acclaim he thinks he deserves for his dreadful poetry than the fact that it's about a real person. One of the reporters sits around playing a banjo. Molly jumps out a window at one point, and no one except Mrs. Grant really seems to care. The sheriff is willing to do pretty horrible stuff in order to make political hay, and Walter is delighted at the thought that his paper would bring down someone he just doesn't seem to like personally. Not that Walter ever seems to like anyone personally. When Hildy genuinely wants to go off with his girl and get married, they mock it because none of them can imagine being outside the newsroom. The idea that getting away from a room where you are waiting cheerfully for someone to die is a foreign one.
Of course, newspaper work is important. The power of the press is one of the strongest forces in keeping democracy alive. The story which comes out at the end is the sort of thing that shows why. Yes, they broke it in part for the sheer joy of bringing an unlikeable figure down, but on the other hand, the public does need to know that one of their elected officials would do something that reprehensible in order to stay in office. The problem, I think, may come from the old "if it bleeds, it leads." We want to know about catastrophes and murders, and we want to see pictures of kitties. We as a nation, possibly as a species, don't want to know much in between. A lot of the really important stuff is detail-oriented. You have to think to get into it, to understand what's going on. The movie, and presumably the original play, reminds us that you have to put all the important information in the first paragraph of a newspaper story. No one reads beyond that.
October 30, 2010
