William Gets Married

Candace Goodwin (Frances Dee) is in love with Michael Stewart (William Holden), but Mike is reluctant to propose to her - Candy's family is well-off, and Mike is a simple working man. When Candy's father Pierce Goodwin (Grant Mitchell) announces that, should Mike marry Candy, he'll cut off her funds, Mike proposes, and Candy announces her intention to live on a budget.  But, it's a lot harder than the inexperienced Candy thinks. Our film this week is Meet the Stewarts (1942), and is part of the The Wedding Bells Blogathon, hosted by Hometowns to Hollywood.

This is a pleasant film that, unfortunately, goes off the rails a few times. It starts as a sweet look at a newly married couple facing financial woes, but then degenerates into unnecessary slapstick. Jeanine Basinger in her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies points out how difficult it is to write an entire movie about a marriage - most films lead us TO the marriage, and then stop (happily ever after). It's much harder to show day-to-day life and make it interesting. Meet the Stewarts is able to do that for awhile, then seems to feel it needs something else to keep the plot moving. We didn't think It was necessary. 

Frances Dee is quite engaging as Candy. She's ill prepared for life as a struggling wife - she's never cooked, or cleaned, or kept a budget, but she is determined to learn. Ms. Dee creates a no-nonsense woman who believes she can do anything she puts her mind to. She can, but it takes time, and her husband is not really convinced that she can learn the skills of a homemaker. Their arguments become diatribes about money - with Mike looking the worse for their encounters.

Frances Dee started her career as an extra in 1929. She worked regularly, rising to more important parts. In 1933, while filming The Silver Cord, she fell in love with its star, Joel McCrea. They married that October, eventually having 3 children. They were together until Mr. McCrea's death in 1990 (on their wedding anniversary).  Ms. Dee died in 2004, at the age of 90. 

William Holden is a good partner for Ms. Dee in Meet the Stewarts. Despite his anxiety over money, you like Mike, but Mr. Holden plays the role so it is clear that Candy is making appropriate decisions and trying to learn how to be a wife with not a whole lot of money. Ms. Dee was just returning to work after a maternity leave, and was having problems adjusting to the work schedule. The film's director, Alfred E. Green decided to fire her, but Mr. Holden went to Harry Cohn and interceded. Ms. Dee remained in the film (William Holden: A Biography by Michelangelo Capua). William Holden enlisted in the Army Air Force; Columbia was able to get a dispensation so he could finish the film before entering the service, (AFI Catalog) and the film opened in May, 1942.

We looked forward to seeing Margaret Hamilton (Willametta) in the cast, but were very disappointed when she finally arrived on screen. She's supposed to be funny as an inept maid, but she is just annoying. Her incompetence is intolerable, and we kept wondering why someone didn't fire her on the spot (and dock her for breaking the glassware). Anne Revere (Geraldine Stewart) was a breath of fresh air as Mike's older sister. You think that you won't like her, but she turns out to be a good woman looking out for both her brother and her new sister-in-law.

Based on the short story Something Borrowed by Elizabeth Dunn, there are things to many like about this little film - Candy and her efforts to make the marriage work is one of the major attractions. When she goes back to work to pay a debt that she inadvertently incurred, she is admirable, and the film does not try to make it feel like she is in some way emasculating her husband by working for the money. Yes, the film gets silly at times, but in the long run, we all enjoyed it for what it was - a light, rather breezy entertainment (with some scenes we'd like to excise), as well as a look at two young people starting a new life as a married couple.

This post is part of The Wedding Bells Blogathon, hosted by Hometowns to Hollywood. Please visit the blogathon website to view the other posts in the series. 

Jeanne Finds an Apartment

Peggy Taylor (Jeanne Crain) has a big problem - she needs to find an apartment quickly. The people who lent her the place where she and husband Jason (William Holden) have been living are about to return. But there are issues - Jason is attending school on the G.I. Bill, their allotment is barely enough to keep their heads above water, and Peggy is pregnant. So, when it suggested that Professor Henry Barnes (Edmund Gwenn) has an attic that might be suitable, Peggy leaps at the chance to find an Apartment for Peggy (1948).

Note the billing on the posters displayed here. This is not William Holden's movie - it belongs to Jeanne Crain and she runs with it.  She does an excellent job carrying the film. She portrays Peggy as an independent woman, who speaks her mind and does what she thinks is best. She worked to support her student husband for as long as she could, and now, pregnant and forced out of the workplace (pregnant women were routinely fired - it wasn't considered seemly for a woman who was showing to be out in public, according to employers), she works to keep her husband from losing his drive.  Peggy is a character who thinks ahead and outside the box; she hides nothing, not even her pregnancy (which, before 1948, would have been the norm for films). The result is the audience roots for her. (TCM article)

It helps that she has the always wonderful Edmund Gwenn to bounce off. The previous year, Mr. Gwenn had appeared in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) as Kris Kringle. Like that film, Apartment for Peggy was written and directed by George Seaton, but the character Mr. Seaton created for Mr. Gwenn in this film is far different. Professor Barnes is done with life - he's lost his wife, his son (who died in the war), his job (forcibly retired due to his age), and he is about to finish his book. He feels he has nothing to live for, and that his presence on Earth merely uses valuable resources to no purpose. Yet, Mr. Gwenn plays him as facing death matter-of-factly. He is not self-pitying; he is simply finished. The arrival of Peggy shows him that his life's work is not over.

Though not a war movie per se, like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the war is a key focus of this film. Prof. Barnes lost his son to a war, Jason still has nightmares about the friends he lost when his ship was sunk and he survived on a raft. The women, too, are victims of the war; their men have changed, and now their ability to get an advanced degree through the GI Bill is widening the gap further. 

Peggy obviously worries that she - like her friend Ruth (Marion Marshall) will find her husband straying as the distance in their educational levels increase. So, she arranges for the wives to be tutored. The women eagerly drink in the lectures. They have sharp minds, and only need help in creating a path for their learning. These are not dependents - these are equal partners to their husbands.

I loved that the women arrived with their knitting - and that it is clear that their busy hands increase their ability to listen to the lecture. As a knitter myself, I appreciate it when films show that knitting increases attention; it's a concept that is hard to get across to the non-knitter.

Lee J. Cobb was scheduled to appear as Dr. Philip Conway, the part that eventually went to Griff Barnett. (AFI catalog). Mr. Barnett is fun as the doctor who is trying to prevent his friend from committing suicide, and who is supervising Peggy's obstetrical care.  Gene Lockhart is memorable as Professor Barnes' best friend, Professor Edward Bell.  

Also in the cast is the always enjoyable Charles Lane as Professor Collins, Jason's chemistry teacher.  Mr. Lane had a career that started with uncredited performances in 1930 and continued in film and television until 1995. A founding member of the Screen Actor's Guild, Mr. Lane was married for 70 years to his wife Ruth Covell; they had two children. Mr. Lane died in 2007 at the age of 102.

The New York Times review by Bosley Crowther was glowing - he called it "one of the best comedies of the year" and "a delightful and thoroughly heartening estimation of the capacities of modern youth." The review from Variety was also positive.

The story (which was originally titled  Apartment for Suzie) was used for four radio broadcasts. Lux Radio Theatre, aired it on 28 February 1949 with Jeanne Crain, William Holden, Edmund Gwenn, and again on 4 December 1950 with Ms. Crain and William Lundigan. Versions were also broadcast on the Screen Directors' Playhouse (again with Jeanne Crain) on 2 September 1949 and on 31 May 1951 as part of the Screen Guild Players.

We'll close with the scene in which Peggy tries to rent an apartment from Professor Barnes.  Do give this delighful film a viewing!

Golden Boy and the Blacklist

Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou), a fight promoter, is eager to make enough money to buy off his estranged wife and finally marry his mistress, Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck). When Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) enters their lives, they think they have found their Golden Boy (1939), but there are problems. Besides being a talented fighter, Joe is a gifted violinist, and his father (Lee J. Cobb) strongly objects to Joe relinquishing his potential career as a musician for a life in the boxing ring - the the potential destruction of his hands.

Perhaps it seems unusual to look at a 1939 film as part of the Banned and Blacklisted Blogathon, but this film featured a great deal of talent that was, in one way or another, affected by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC).  We'll take this opportunity to look at both the film, and the experiences of those involved in it during the period of the blacklist, in this year, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of this evil campaign.

My interest in the Blacklist really began in 1972, when Robert Vaughn (yes, THAT Robert Vaughn, the actor who appeared in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and had a PhD in Communications from University of Southern California) published Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting.  The book demonstrated that everyone involved in the process in Hollywood was victim - from those who supported the blacklist, to the actual victims. Dr. Vaughn's title was  taken from a quote by Dalton Trumbo: "it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims."

Barbara Stanwyck is, as always, excellent as Lorna Moon (interestingly, the play was purchased as a vehicle for Jean Arthur, with Frank Capra directing! (TCM article)). Ms. Stanwyck can take a scene, as she does when she is trying to convince Joe to continue fighting, and change her reaction on a dime.  Though filmed under the code, Lorna remains unpunished, despite the fact that she is clearly having an affair with the married Tom.  

Ms. Stanwyck was a staunch conservative - she objected to labor unions and only joined the Screen Actors' Guild when it became apparent that the new union would prevent her from working (A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940). When the investigations of HUAC began, Stanwyck, like her husband Robert Taylor, became a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Whether she herself named names is information that is not recorded - Mr. Taylor certainly made a name for himself when he testified before HUAC on October 22nd, 1947, and named names (Howard Da Silva and Karen Morley, specifically). But Ms. Stanwyck was involved with a group that was busily hunting for Communists within the Hollywood rank-and-file.

So too was Adolphe Menjou a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. His Tom Moody in our film is a rather banal man; it's hard to understand why Lorna would be interested in him, so it is easy to root for a relationship between Lorna and Joe. The day before Robert Taylor testified in front of the HUAC, Mr. Menjou testified. He fancied himself an expert on Communism, having read "over 150 books on the subject [of Russia]". He then accused John Cromwell of "acting an awful lot like a communist" (while acknowledging that he had no knowledge that Mr. Cromwell actually was a communist. He considered himself "a witch-hunter if the witches are Communists. . .a Red-baiter. I make no bones about it whatsoever. I would like to see them all back in Russia." Later, he would publicly attack many Hollywood liberals, including Katharine Heburn ("scratch a do-gooder, like Heburn, and they'll yell 'Pravda'."), infuriating Spencer Tracy and Ms. Hepburn who would only speak to Mr. Menjou onscreen when they filmed The State of the Union in 1948. (Katharine Hepburn: A Remarkable Woman by Anne Edwards)

William Holden is quite wonderful as Joe, a part for which John Garfield, Tyrone Power and Richard Carlson were all considered (AFI catalog).  This was his first real picture, and he almost got ousted from the film - only thanks to Barbara Stanwyck's intervention and coaching did he remain in the role that would effectively begin his career. When we discussed their only other film together, Executive Suite, we provided a clip of Ms. Stanwyck's tribute to Mr. Holden at the 1977 Oscars.  Though a participant in Hollywood Fights Back, a radio program hosted by the Committee on the First Amendment (the group protesting HUAC's activities), (J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War by John Sbardellati) Mr. Holden, unlike many of the other committee members (Marsha Hunt and Jane Wyatt among them) seems to have escaped unscathed from the morass of the blacklist. He even rejected vehement anti-Communist Hedda Hopper's advice when he appeared in The Bridge on the River Kwai, co-scripted by HUAC refugee Carl Foreman (Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism by Jennifer Frost). Again, it did not affect his career.

Others in the cast were not as lucky. Lee J. Cobb (named by Larry Parks, himself a victim of the blacklist), and writer Clifford Odets (named by Leila Rogers, Ginger's mother) were blacklisted until they finally, in desperation, went before HUAC to name names (see this Study Guide from Lincoln Center, from a production of the play there). For more information on those affected by HUAC, visit this list.

Golden Boy had started as a Broadway play in 1937; many of those involved in that play were also targeted, including Mr. Cobb, Mr. Da Silva, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan (who would become a symbol of the traitor when he named names to clear himself), Morris Carnovsky (named by Mr. Kazan) , Phoebe Brand (Mr. Carnovsky's wife; also named by Mr. Kazan), Luther Adler, and Roman Bohnen.  Jules Garfield, who would take Hollywood by storm under the name John Garfield was also in the Broadway play. He dearly wanted to play Joe Bonaparte, but was unable to get the needed studio loan-out to play Joe. Mr. Garfield, too, was targeted by HUAC, probably causing the heart attack that claimed his life at age 39.

These individuals, colleagues in 1939, would become adversaries for no real reason; yet the hatred that the Blacklist generated still remains.  In 2008, when Elia Kazan received a special Oscar, many in Hollywood either boycotted the award, or refused to applaud. (You can see the ceremony here). Was Mr. Kazan the only person who surrendered to HUAC? Are people like Lee J. Cobb and Clifford Odets evil because they caved into the pressure of not working in their chosen profession? And are we going to continue to punish the victims - because of their political beliefs, their race, creed, gender or sexual identity? That we can talk about the Blacklist in 2017 is a step in the right direction - let's keep the dialogue going, and remember it as a symbol of all the bias in our world.

We'll leave you of this scene featuring Ms. Stanwyck and Mr. Holden:

Barbara Pines

Barbara Stanwyck has a relatively small part in Executive Suite (1954).  She plays Julia O. Tredway, the daughter of the late head of the Tredway Corporation, a respected furniture manufacturer, now headed by Avery Bullard (voiced, but unseen, by Raoul Freeman).  However, Julia and her love for Bullard are not the focus of the film; Executive Suite is the story of a critical moment in the history of the Tredway Corporation, as the company's various executives battle for control of the firm after the death of Bullard.

The film marks a reunion for Stanwyck and William Holden (McDonald "Don" Walling).  Stanwyck was the star of Golden Boy (1939), and Holden was a newbie when he appeared in the title role.  As the film rushes came in, Harry Cohn made it clear that was not satisfied with Holden's performance, and was going to replace him.  Stanwyck defended him, and worked with him to improve his performance (Check out this TCM article for that story and others).  Golden Boy became Holden's breakthrough role.  Stanwyck and Holden remained friends, and he tried for years to convince the Academy to present her with an Honorary Oscar for her body of work.  Ultimately, he did succeed, but by the time she received the award, he had died.  In this video, you can will see Holden's praise of Stanwyck at the 1977 Oscars, and her moving acceptance speech in 1983 as she expresses her affection for her "Golden Boy".
The film actually belongs to Holden's Don Walling, the head of Tredway's research and development arm, and on his evolution into becoming a leader.  Disillusioned by his mentor, Bullard, but nevertheless grieved by his death, Don becomes convinced that only he among the corporate vice presidents can keep Tredway afloat.  His passion for a quality product and for the continued stability of the company put him at odds with other members of the board of directors.  Holden gives Don the necessary sincerity and gravitas needed to lead a major corporation.  He also demonstrates a devotion to his wife Mary Blemond Walling (June Allyson) and son Mike (Tim Considine). While some of his colleagues consider him too young to lead a company, the film focuses on his growth into the new position.

Also remarkable is Fredric March as Loren Phineas Shaw, the chief financial officer for the company.  Shaw's economies have put him at odds with Don, having advocated for and won approval of a cheap brand of furniture that, while enhancing the company's coffers, proves an embarrassment to the firm's employees and to many members of the board. March gives Shaw a number of small tics that quickly define his character for the viewer - watch how he constantly wipes his hands.  His Shaw is a character you cannot like, and March is not afraid to make him, while not quite a villain, at the very least an unattractive individual.

A greater portion of the film's $1.25 million budget went to actors' salaries, and to good effect, because each actor gives a distinct three-dimensionality to the characters.  Though only in about 3 scenes, Shelley Winters is excellent as Eva Bardeman, the secretary and mistress of Josiah Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas). Walter Pidgeon's Frederick Y. Alderson gives us a man at the end of his career, who must face the fact that he will never rise to the heights of power that he always hoped was his future. But especially worth noting is the performance of Nina Foch as Bullard's executive secretary, Erica Martin.  Foch was nominated for an Oscar for her brief, but powerful performance as a woman who is privy to her late employer's secrets, but who is the soul of discretion.  In the clip below, Foch describes her conversations with the film's producer John Houseman and director, Robert Wise, as they took a tiny, weak part and made it into the small gem that you see today. To make Erica a real person, Foch and Wise created a backstory for her:
The film opens with point-of-view camera work.  Since we are seeing the world through the eyes of Avery Bullard, his sudden death is quite shocking.  As a result, we never actually see Bullard, not even a photo of him.  This allows the audience to create their own picture of him, based on the various portraits that his colleagues paint.

Also very interesting is the credit role.  We are all used to credits which show brief names of the characters' next to that of the actors, but Executive Suite gives us the characters full names - names that were not used within the film.  We learn that Don Walling's name is actually MacDonald, and that his wife's maiden name is Blemond.   Again, the character's begin to have a life outside the frame of the story - they have a past.  They will have a future.

We were unfamiliar with Lucille Knoch, who the end credits inform us was Mrs. George Nyle Caswell (the wife of Louis Calhern's manipulative George Caswell - another masterful character creation), not his mistress, as we all had assumed.  Ms. Knoch quite good in this part.   She had a relatively short career - this was possibly the largest role she ever had.  She seems to have stopped acting after 1957; she died in 1990.

Interestingly, the film did have a future, of sorts.   It was made into a TV show from September 1976 through February 1977.  It lasted for only 18 episodes, which is not surprising, considering the new show's competition was Monday Night Football, The Rockford Files, and the NBC Movie of the Week.   Given that competition, it's shocking that it made it past the first month.   Only the Don and Helen Walling characters continued in the TV show - they were played by Mitchell Ryan and Sharon Acker.  Even the name of the company was changed in the prime-time soap opera.  It was now the Cardway Corporation.  You can see a advertisement for the show on YouTube.

We'll leave you with a trailer from the film - an introduction to all the characters, including Stanwyck's Julia Tredway: