Cheaper by the Dozen never pretends to be delivering a message. Most people, even as late as 1950, assumed that big and boisterous families were good things, were blessings from God. The filmmakers felt no need to persuade anyone of that. My father was one of eleven children, my mother one of six; my wife’s father one of six, and her mother one of twelve. Raising a very large family might have been thought a challenge back then, but it was also a considered a cause for celebration. In our time, when a great many people find the idea of raising any child at all too difficult a challenge, Cheaper by the Dozen gives us a glimpse into a world that knew the sweetness of normality. Perhaps someday we will know that normality again. If you are friends with any large homeschooling families, you may perhaps have met up with such as the Gilbreth’s and their lively and cheerful brood. If you get a chance to watch this film, sit back and enjoy a hearty dose of mirth, particularly in Clifton Webb’s portrayal of a man, who despite his all-encompassing focus on efficiency at work and in the home, has never lost his ability to laugh at human foibles, even when the joke is on himself.

Clifton Webb is always fun to watch, and the chemistry between his understated humor and the similarly droll Myrna Loy is perfect. So is the warmth of father-daughter love, between him and Jeanne Crain. And don’t miss that motherly Sara Allgood as the blustery Irish maid, Mrs. Monahan. Of course this film is for the whole family, the little kids too.

Click on the image above to view our film on Youtube.

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This week’s delight in language here at Word and Song continues with what for Debra and me is a discovered gem, and not just a hunk of amethyst in the rough. It’s an emerald of dramatic art, perfectly conceived and brilliantly executed. We might expect as much, because the author of the play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw, also wrote the screenplay to adapt it to the screen. He wasn’t alone at that — he did it together with one of the stars of the film, the intelligent and genteel Leslie Howard (you’ll know him as the dream-ridden southern gentleman in Gone With the Wind, but see him as the art-collector and writer in the Canadian Rockies in the tremendous English-Canadian-American wartime film, The 49th Parallel). Not only that, but Howard also co-directed the film, with one of England’s most successful directors, Anthony Asquith — see his work in that relentless examination of human failure, yet not beyond redemption, in The Browning Version (1951, with Michael Redgrave; not the remake in the 1990’s). So we have three men of a broad array of talents, uniting to transform what I think is Shaw’s best play into one of the best screen versions of any play that I’ve ever seen. And yet that still isn’t the most gripping feature of this film. What is? Well, the opening credits read, “And Introducing WENDY HILLER.”

She plays Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney girl who sells flowers in Covent Garden, “discovered” by Professor Henry Higgins (Howard). He’s an expert in articulatory phonetics: what shapes we make with our tongue, lips, teeth, and palate, and what we do with our breath, vocal cords, and oral cavity, to make the several hundred sounds that carry meaning among the human languages. You’ll know by now that that’s a hobby of mine, too. I just learned the other day that one of the “S” sounds in Hebrew was probably an unvoiced L, spelled in Welsh as LL, and hard for English speakers to distinguish from TH or SH — and it made my day. Higgins meets a Colonel Pickering right at the same time as his first altercation with Eliza, and Pickering himself has just arrived from India to meet Higgins, because he too is a linguist. One thing leads to another, what with Eliza shouting and being as Cockney as it is possible to be, and Higgins says he’s going to take her home and turn her, in three months, into someone who can pass herself off as a duchess. Say after me, everybody, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains!”

Shaw, of course, was no kind of Christian, but even he could not help absorbing some of the Christian sense that man is made in the image of God — the “divine spark,” as Higgins puts it, manifest most clearly in language. He also knew, somehow, that the most profound dramas involve redemption, and that, in an odd and utterly delightful way, is what we get in Pygmalion. The classical allusion is instructive. Pygmalion, in Greek myth, was a sculptor who carved Galataea, a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her, and prayed to the gods to make her come alive, which she did. Essentially, Higgins is setting himself up as a Pygmalion, but we see that there’s also a real hubris and a moral obtuseness about him. He’s going to make it so that Eliza can fool people into thinking that she’s a princess, all the while forgetting that just because she is a human being she is already more than any mere social status can confer. We see that he himself has a good deal of learning to do, including in the area of speech and manners — and plain old right and wrong! The human “creator” is himself an object of change, of conversion of heart. He is being re-fashioned, or rather he must finally submit to the grace of being remade, if he is really to live.

But don’t let me give you the impression that it’s all seriousness here! Pygmalion is a very funny movie, with many a scene of high comic fancy. Why, I almost — almost! — can understand why my hero, G. K. Chesterton, was such good friends with him. Surely that ought to go into the case for Saint Gilbert Keith’s canonization. The social situations are comic, the language flubs are comic, even Eliza’s halfway state, trying very hard to keep her pronunciation steady while not having anything sensible to say, is high comedy — often laugh-out-loud. But behold the great Wendy Hiller near the beginning of her career. It wasn’t actually her first film, regardless of what the credits say. But supposing it were, I’d say that it is the single greatest breakout performance of any actress I’ve ever seen.

Your smaller children might not “get” the humor, but otherwise, this is a film for the whole rest of the family.

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Our Film of the Week is available free right now on PLEX. Click on the image above to view it. You may also be able to watch “Pygmalion” on Youtube, but the version we found there was a bit grainy and muffles. Happy watching!

Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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But Americans had long had a divided conscience when it came to the Indians. James Fenimore Cooper soared to the pinnacle of popularity in the 1820’s and 1830’s with his Leatherstocking novels, casting some of the natives, such as the great Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the “last of the Mohicans,” as men of the highest courage and honor. That there was yet savagery among the various tribes, Cooper would be the last to deny. Francis Parkman’s comprehensive volumes of native American history and ethnography, a few feet away from me as I write these words, are unsurpassed, and they too manifest both sympathy and criticism.

Yet Jim Thorpe, that great athlete, did bear the weight of prejudice against his people, as you will see frankly admitted in Jim Thorpe, All-American, our Film of the Week. And he also often handled his setbacks poorly, making matters worse; taking to drink, for example. This too the film does not evade. His performance in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics is legendary. Indeed, King Gustav V, crowning him with glory, said, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.” That was no less than the plain truth. But then came the cruel disappointment, when it was revealed to the Olympic committee that one summer Thorpe played some local semi-pro baseball to pay for his room and board at Carlisle, because during the summer, the government did not provide those free of charge. He didn’t know he had thus become a “professional.” He pleaded ignorance, and Warner, his dear friend and coach, pleaded for him too. But the committee held to the letter of the law. They stripped him of his awards; these were restored 30 years after his death. That sort of thing might poison anybody’s heart, and Jim Thorpe, mighty as he was in the flesh, could easily be wounded that way.

His life then bounced around, often crowned with glory, as our film well shows, yet often darkened with disappointment — the death of his first child in the influenza epidemic of 1918, for example, and the divorce that followed seven years later, though he and his wife had had three more children by then. The film does not shy away from those things. Perhaps that is owing to the director, Michael Curtiz, himself a ferocious fellow not likely to shy away from anything. The cast also is very strong. Burt Lancaster, young and powerfully athletic, has a massive build and yet a litheness that made him a natural to play Thorpe (Lancaster was a circus performer at the age of 9), and a brooding intensity also fitting for the role. Charles Bickford, the dour father in Days of Wine and Roses, is Pop Warner, Thorpe’s true friend even when, as happens, he has to speak to him most sharply. But check out the now largely forgotten actress Phyllis Thaxter, who plays the first Mrs. Thorpe, with an earnestness and feminine warmth and vulnerability that are all the more powerfully moving when seen against Lancaster’s frame and his character’s impulsiveness.

This film isn’t bubble gum — it isn’t the sometimes embarrassing Babe Ruth Story. Curtiz didn’t do that. Lancaster didn’t, either.

Our film this week is available free on Tubi, with ads. Click here to view it.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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Now, this same Douw Fonda, when the Revolutionary War began in 1775, was still very much alive, still plying his trade as a grocer, and still determined to fight on the side of the colonists against the British, his Loyalist neighbors, and the two Indian tribes who sided with them (the Oneida tribe sided with the colonists, so it was not as if it was the American colonists against everybody). The Hudson and Mohawk valleys were crucial for the British, because if they controlled them, they could cut off New England from the other colonies, they could choke off the great port of New York from all trade but their own, and they would shut the colonists’ main access to the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. So there were plenty of crucial battles fought there, at Bennington, Stony Point (under my state’s favorite son, Mad Anthony Wayne), Fort Ticonderoga (under Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, and, alas, the brilliant tactician and turncoat-to-be, Benedict Arnold), and so on. But in 1780, in a raid led by the British general Sir John Johnson, whose father was an old friend and neighbor of Douw’s, the old man was captured by a Mohawk named One-Armed Peter, tomahawked, and scalped — to the chagrin of the general, a merciful and peace-loving man.

The place where this happened was later named Fonda, after Douw Fonda. It is an old village, the seat of Montgomery County, along the Mohawk River, 30 miles west of its confluence with the Hudson.

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Then in 1936, Walter D. Edmonds wrote a novel called Drums Along the Mohawk, about life in that valley during the Revolutionary War, as it is lived by a fictional couple, the newly married Gil and Lana Martin. Gil leaves the high society of New York City for that rich farmland in the Mohawk Valley, with Lana at first wary and doubtful — and for good reason too, since they hardly have arrived there when war breaks out, and that doesn’t just mean redcoats in orderly marching array, with law and a code of civil decency to guide them, but the Indians allied with them, the Mohawks and the Senecas, had no such. The novel portrays the tangle of alliances, broken friendships, divided loyalties, devastating losses, and ultimate triumph — from the American view, of course — that the valley saw. And it was from this novel that John Ford made his film of the same name. It’s got a first-rate cast. Along with Henry Fonda, you have Claudette Colbert as Lana Martin, Edna Mae Oliver as an old battleax who will fight to the death for her farm (she got an Oscar nomination for her role, but see her also as the redoubtable Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities, Arthur Shields (brother of that Irish imp Barry Fitzgerald) as the gun-toting Reverend Rosenkrantz, and such Ford regulars as Ward Bond, John Carradine, and his own big brother, Francis Ford. Then there’s the imposing and stolidly comic Indian ally, Blue Back, played by the Seneca Indian actor Chief John Big Tree.

Ford had a mythic imagination. He could be as subtly analytical as anyone when, for example, a moral and social problem of the greatest urgency cannot be resolved without profound suffering and loss — sometimes the loss of an entire way of life, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, his greatest western and his last. But if you want the myth that tells a great truth, rising above the confusion of history and the pettiness that in political movements you will always have with you, Ford is the man to go to. Drums Along the Mohawk is a deeply passionate film. And if you want a movie that shows how a nervous socialite can become, not only despite suffering but in it and through it a pioneer and a heroine, this film and Claudette Colbert are for you.

Of necessity, we have only a trailer for our Film of the Week. We hope you will enjoy the film, whenever you are able to see it.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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The hero Kim is an orphan, a beggar of the streets. He doesn’t know why he has the name he does, or why his looks differ from those of the native people of India. He will find out that he’s the son of an Irish soldier named Kimball, and somehow that’s important, because though he knows only India, and can speak no English until he has it drummed into him at a school for a while, he is and is not native to that tropical land, a vast hothouse of beauty, mysticism, wealth, beggary, intellect, superstition, ignorance, and cultures to be dated by the millennia. It’s because he does and does not fit, because he has no caste, and because he is after all a boy and not a conspicuous man, that Kim can go anywhere and get into things when no one else can. This Kim, as proud as a young peacock, one day meets an old man, Teshoo Lama, whose like he has never known. He’s a lama from the high snowy mountains, a holy man, but utterly innocent of the ways of the teeming cities of India. He is searching for the source of a holy river, which he longs to enter, to wash himself in its waters before he dies. How is that for ringing a change on Cervantes’ titanic work? It’s not Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but a wise old man who is as innocent as a child, and who would not survive a week on the Grand Trunk Road in India, with a mere boy to lead him, a boy who knows nothing but the ways of the world, though of nations and armies and colonies he too is innocent. And on that Grand Trunk, raised high above the adjacent land, where all India is on the road for adventure, trade, pilgrimage, weddings, and theft, the boy and the old man grow to love each other.

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Yet India is under the British raj, which extends into what is now Pakistan, and besides, the native Hindus were not the rulers before the British stepped in, but rather the Muslim Moghuls, a Turkish-Mongol people. So it is no surprise that Kim has to deal with a rich Muslim trader, Mahbub Ali, who befriends him and who uses him as a courier on his own behalf and that of the British. Why would a Muslim want to do that? Well, Mahbub is ethnically Persian, and so he considers himself superior to the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Hindus. From Mahbub, Kim comes into contact with the smart and kindly Colonel Creighton, and thus does he enter what is called “the Great Game,” a game of espionage and governance, crisscrossing all the ethnicities, as it’s from Creighton that Kim meets the man who will instruct him in the basics of the Great Game, the Hindu scholar with the wonderful name of Hurree Chunder Mookherjee. The plots are woven together with great art and skill — as Kim derives instruction in enlightenment from the utterly un-political Teshoo, and in national powers and defense, from his fellows in the Game. And indeed the Game is afoot, because the Russians have sent spies across the Khyber Pass, preparatory to a possible invasion.

Hollywood does tinker with Kipling’s plot, so I’ll leave you with the stage I’ve set. The cast is excellent. Kim is played by Dean Stockwell, who, before you saw him as the dour Al in Quantum Leap, was the most famous boy actor in Hollywood of his time. We’ve featured him in The Secret Garden and Stars in My Crown. Teshoo Lama is played by Paul Lukas, an arch-conservative opponent of Nazism and communism, who won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of an ordinary man fighting the Nazis, in Watch on the Rhine (1943). Hurree Chunder is played by the kindly-featured character actor Cecil Kellaway, the chief doctor at the asylum for the insane, in Harvey. And who else to play the man’s man Mahbub Ali, if not Errol Flynn himself?

Here too is a film to enjoy with the whole family.

Above is a trailer for the 1950 film, “Kim,” starring Erol Flynn and Dean Stockwell.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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So when I watch The Greatest Show on Earth, I think of a kind of life that isn’t to be had anymore, and I wonder also what kinds of people made it so that when this film was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture, beating out High Noon, The Quiet Man, and Singin' in the Rain, the last of which didn’t even get a nomination, there was wild applause in the audience, and everybody in the country, except for a few critics, was delighted to hear about it. If you expect from The Greatest Show on Earth a morality play, or the result of investigation of the circus’s underbelly, you should go elsewhere. The director, Cecil B. DeMille, obviously admires the circus and the clever, daring, energetic, and self-sacrificing performers, carpenters, groundskeepers, machinists, costumers, and sheer grunts that make it possible. That we do see, as the film sometimes shifts, comfortably, into the mode of documentary. And it’s not a put-on. The film is stocked full of famous circus performers, including the man often named as the greatest clown of all time, the sad-face Emmitt Kelly, and the little-boy sized Cucciolo, a spectacular equestrian and elephant rider. And the actor and actress who do trapeze acts, Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde, performed a lot of the stunts themselves — Hutton more than Wilde, as she was a real trooper. The story of her life is quite moving, and I’ll tell it some day, for sure.

That’s not to say that the film is all spectacle. There are three interwoven stories. One involves a man who has become a clown, Buttons, as he is a former doctor running from the law (Jimmy Stewart). Buttons wears his makeup at all times. Then we have the chief of the circus, Brad Braden (Charlton Heston), who has “sawdust in his veins” when the show is in question. He’s twisted the arms of the financiers to let the show run a full tour rather than hit only the large cities, but that’s because he’s enlisted the most renowned high-wire act of the day, a smooth-talking woman-loving peacock-proud fellow named Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). But that means he’s got to have the center ring, displacing the beautiful Holly (Betty Hutton), who is in love with Brad and who then enters into a generally friendly but very dangerous competition with Sebastian — in acts performed without a net. Complicating things further, the two appear to fall in love. But the scene-stealer in this film is Angel (Gloria Grahame), who was once one of Sebastian’s conquests, who could love Brad, and yet — Sebastian has returned. Add in Dorothy Lamour in an important comic role, and the narrative voice of Edmond O’Brien — an actor who had as much talent and intelligence as the best that America ever produced.

Stephen Spielberg said that this was the first film he ever saw in a theater, and that it influenced him deeply, or rather a stunning scene involving a train wreck did the trick. The film was meant to be seen on a wide screen, and by people who had experience of the circus, which was, in the America of that time, almost everybody. Watch it for what it is, and for certain features of an America that was.

Above is an official trailer for our Film of the Week.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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We are back in the United Kingdom — and Europe — for our Film of the Week, one of the most unusual war and espionage films ever made, The Man Who Never Was. It’s not unusual for spectacular scenery, massive destruction, and hair’s-breadth success in sabotage, like The Guns of Navarone. It’s not unusual for tense analysis of leadership under tremendous pressure, like Twelve O'Clock High. It doesn’t concentrate on one decisive battle, like The Longest Day, or on one towering warrior, like Patton. Yet it is absolutely fit for our week of the memorial, and it is largely based on a true operation, one of the cleverest pieces of misdirection in military history.

The Allies were set to invade Sicily, and thence make their way up the Italian peninsula, gutting the Axis powers in southern Europe and cutting their easiest east-west routes in two. Sicily is a very large and mountainous island, well-populated, not easy to conquer and control. Patton’s bloody sweep from Licata to Palermo in 1943 was a great triumph, precipitating the fall of Mussolini. Contributing to that triumph was something called “Operation Mincemeat,” devised by Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, of the Royal Navy. The Allies wanted to keep as many German divisions as possible away from Sicily. That meant they had to trick the Germans into believing that the impending invasion of southern Europe would concentrate on Greece — again think of The Guns of Navarone — and not on Sicily. So Montagu came up with an ingenious plan, but one that required an extraordinary emotional sacrifice on the part of an ordinary Englishman who had lost his son.

The idea was this. The British knew that Nazi spies were operating on the southern coast of (neutral) Spain. So they planned for those spies to pick up, apparently by chance, a body floating at sea, a body of a British soldier carrying top-secret documents. The soldier was to have been lost in an apparent air crash, and drowned — which meant that Montagu had to choose, for his decoy, the body of a young man who had recently died of pneumonia. An entire identity had to be created for him out of whole cloth. The plan was to let the natural direction of the tides wash the body towards the Nazi outposts, and let the very industriousness and intelligence of the Nazis work against them. Of course the documents were false, and of course the Germans would be assiduous in taking measures to assure themselves of their truth. In the film — not in real life — that involved sending an Irish spy and assassin, a hater of all things British, to England to hunt down the fiancee of the supposed soldier, and to twist out of her who was who and what was what.

In real life, as in the film, the trick worked like a charm. The invasion of Sicily was in its third week (!), and the Nazis still believed that the real action was going to come in Greece. Let us say that the British depended on the Nazi high command’s being too clever by half. Hitler fell for it too. The wiser Nazi officers who were skeptical of it all were overruled.

It is a fascinating film, pitting intelligence against intelligence, keen vision against keen vision; also hope against a feeling of defeat or futility, and perseverance above all. The cast is top-of-the-line. Lt. Com. Montagu is played by one of our favorites, the intelligent and perceptive Clifton Webb, perfect for the role, that of a man somewhat advanced in years, whose work in the war must involve the mind and not the body — much like Burgess Meredith’s superb role as the strategist of In Harm’s Way. The Irish assassin is — who else? — Stephen Boyd, debonair, cunning, malign, and dangerous in the extreme. Gloria Grahame plays a young woman who has just received the devastating news that her fiancee has died in action — and plays that part, sincerely, in front of the Irish assassin. We have also Michael Hordern (see him as the much-hated Uncle Featherstone in the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Middlemarch), Cyril Cusack (see him as the leader of the holdouts for the old ways in Catholics, but also as the chief “fireman,” that is, burner of books, in Fahrenheit 451), Geoffrey Keen (the second-in-command in a great British show about Scotland Yard, Gideon’s Way), Joan Hickson (one of the Miss Marples in British television’s adaptations of Agatha Christie’s stories featuring that old woman sleuth), and many others.

The final scene, a quiet one and filled with pathos, occurs at a cemetery, at the memorial for the man who never was.

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Today we have the trailer for “The Man Who Never Was,” a very fine film, which we highly recommend.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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But there’s a difference, isn’t there, between what has always been wild, and what has been under the careful and loving hand of man, and then let go to seed? There’s no betrayal in a wilderness. If there’s sadness in an lonely stretch of prairie, never built upon by human hands, it’s a natural lonesomeness, without regret, without pain. But a ghost town? Or a ghost garden? That’s what the grieving husband wants to let that whole part of his life become. Yet the film, following the novel, shows that that is not possible.

It’s shown most powerfully in Craven’s son Colin (Dean Stockwell), who is apparently a cripple, and who torments the servants in the sprawling and spidery old mansion by his fits of screaming in pain. The father’s grief bids fair to destroy the son, not because he doesn’t love the boy, not because of any cruelty, but because he has shut himself up in his own sorrow. He has locked up his own heart, indulging his grief, while the boy indulges his frailty and the real or imagined pains in his legs.

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But, as in so many tales inspired by a Christian vision of the world, salvation comes to the man from a child, and in ways that he least expects. The child is his orphaned niece Mary (Margaret O’Brien, still with us at the age of 89), whose mother and father died of cholera in India. She has as much reason to grieve as does Mr. Craven, then, but instead she brings life and hope where she goes. Nor is she alone in the enterprise. Just as at Christmas, it was the shepherds and not the learned men of the world who first heard the news of the Savior’s birth, so we cross the social classes here too. Mary meets the kid brother of one of the servants, a country lad named Dickon (Brian Roper). Dickon knows all about birds and animals and growing things, and he is eager to show them to Mary, including his pet raven, Jimmy. It’s the raven that finds a key to the garden in the underbrush. Mary and Dickon enter, and all is color; and they tend the garden, at the same time as they befriend Colin — against the commands of his quack doctor — and take him outdoors, where he begins to live, for the first time in many years. Mr. Craven’s own conversion from death to life, from a death-like despair to love, is yet to come. The widower will be recalled to life by a thoroughly natural friendship between a boy and a girl.

The film keeps close to the children’s novel The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I think that in this case, as also in The Wizard of Oz, the film is at least as good as the book. We see and hear the youthfulness, and its contrast with age, age not in the frolic winsomeness of old people whose very wrinkles seem to smile, but rather in a settled glumness, a conviction that nothing can ever be good or beautiful again. The child actors are terrific. Fans of the oddball television show Quantum Leap will remember Dean Stockwell as the balding and crusty admiral Al Calavicci, but he had a very long and celebrated career as a child actor, with a shock of curly brown hair and a face out of Botticelli. Margaret O’Brien, for my money twice the actress Shirley Temple was, might as well have directed on her own every scene she is in, so clearly does she know what she’s about. The country boy, Brian Roper, is at that age at which boys and girls become friends without a shade of suspicion that there is ever anything but friendship in the world, and he plays it without a flaw.

Here’s a film you can watch with all the children, from the smallest to those who have to use a cane when they walk.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Our current Film of the Week has to do with the week’s theme, the names of flowers, because Johnny (Edward G. Robinson) has to take on another name, one that fits the order and the monastery. The others there know him as “Brother Orchid.” It is a common in human cultures to denote a change in being by a change in name; it is also common for people to get a new name in order to hide who they are. Which one shall it be? Let’s think about the matter in general. When I was confirmed, I took the middle name Michael rather than Thomas, which was my father’s middle name, and thus I did not become a “Junior.” That was fine with my father, who didn’t want me to be saddled with the awkwardness of it. I don’t remember that I had any special reason for the name Michael, other than that it is the name of the prince of angels. Only much later did I even learn that the name is a Hebrew question, “Who is like God?” — with the implied answer, “No one.” Think also of that climactic moment when Jesus said to Simon son of Jonah, “You are Peter,” because Peter had suddenly confessed the revelation given him by the Father, that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God. It didn’t all at once make Peter less impetuous than he always was, or clearer in the head; just as, if you suddenly turn to face the right direction, that doesn’t mean you are nearer the goal. It may mean that you become aware for the first time just how far away you are.

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Brother Orchid is a film of a sort that I don’t know we still make — part comedy of errors, part romance of redemption. We’ve featured one or two here at Word and Song: for example, When in Rome, featuring a criminal on the lam (Paul Douglas), who hides out in Rome in disguise as a priest. Such plots teeter between the pit of hell and the lowest steps on the stairs to heaven. The audience has to be persuaded that the ultimate fall can happen, and then they must be persuaded by the redemption, which cannot be presented as something easy, or as something brought about by the sinner’s own strenuous effort. Shakespeare had the pattern exactly right in his late romances, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, and it’s typical of our time that critics can only maunder on about the “patriarchy” in all three, missing the wonder of the redemption. I used to tell my students that it’s as if somebody were right there at the raising of Lazarus from the tomb, and his only question was whether the man was a Pharisee or a Sadducee.

The cast for Brother Orchid is quite strong. Besides the great Eddie Robinson, we have a young Humphrey Bogart as Johnny’s former underling and now chief rival, our always admired Donald Crisp as the superior of the monastery, Cecil Kellaway (the old doctor in Harvey) as the kindly Brother Goodwin, and Ann Sothern, one of the big three (with Lucille Ball and Eve Arden) among funny women in early television, though Lucy was clearly the best of them. Then there’s a young raw-boned thoroughly innocent Ralph Bellamy, in one of his usual roles as a Texan come to the big city, and we know that somehow he’s got to come into, shall we say, contact with Bogey and his mugs.

This one too is for the whole family.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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The owner of the local general store accidentally finds out when he sees an ad in a magazine. She’s from an ancient breed, he says to Uncle Jesse, one that was bred many years before the coming “of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” The owner (Phil Harris) is a proud man and an aficionado of hunting dogs, and he hasn’t always gotten along with shiftless Uncle Jesse. But he is a human being, too. This movie is of a sort we don’t see much of anymore: a classic boy-to-man story, but without fights, without blood, without cussing and hollering, without diving from an airplane or something. It didn’t take much money to make the film. It just took a lot of intelligence and heart.

When I first saw this film, I was enthralled — by its straightforward simplicity, and by the strangely moving yet simple guitar music that accompanies it. Well, that music was played by Laurindo Almeida, the Brazilian guitarist who could do everything — a guitarist for the ages; that is what I’ve read, as I admit I’m no expert on the classical guitar!

At that time, I didn’t know anything about Phil Harris, but at that time everybody knew him, just as they knew his good friend Bing Crosby, and his other good friend Jack Benny, on whose television show he often appeared, playing a down-home loudmouth character who called Benny “Jackson” all the time. But Harris was a blues singer and a bandleader, more than he was an actor, and after his first (failed) marriage, he married the singer and actress Alice Faye, and their marriage lasted for more than 50 years, ending with his death in 1995. If you like the old Disney’s last musical cartoon film, The Jungle Book, you may remember old Baloo the Bear singing that jaunty and carefree song, “The Bare Necessities” — that was Phil Harris, who did a lot of cartoon voices too. Here Harris plays a man with an edge to him, yet he’s the one who eventually has to reveal a bit of bad news to Jesse and, through Jesse, to Skeeter, that the dog had a (prospective) owner already.

Check out the film also for three very nice cameo roles, one by Sidney Poitier in the midst of his meteoric rise to become the most-respected and honored African American actor (Jamaican American, to be really precise) in Hollywood. The other two are by Louise Beavers and William Hopper — he’s the longtime friend and detective who assisted Raymond Burr in the Perry Mason series. And Louise Beavers? She was in so many films, if she ever got paid what she was worth, she’d have been the richest lady in California. Our favorite role for her: with Claudette Colbert in Imitation of Life. You’ve got to be at your best to stay in the same scenes with Claudette, and Louise Beavers does more than that.

Sometimes the most memorable films are the ones you don’t hear anybody make a fuss over. This is one such. Not to miss!

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and access to our full archive and to comments and discussions. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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Our Film of the Week, A Stolen Life, is a story of identical twins, Kate and Pat Bosworth (Bette Davis in both roles), who have been formed by choices for good, in the case of Kate, and evil, in the case of Pat, though at the beginning of the film these orientations have not come to full fruition. Kate is pleasant, generous to a fault, indulgent toward her sister, soft-spoken, and beautiful. Pat is flashy, selfish, secretly contemptuous toward her sister, brash, and — well, she looks exactly like Kate, and the same actress is playing both of them, and the film demands that we accept the possibility that Pat may be mistaken for Kate. Yet Bette Davis — in this regard, perfect for the role — must still subtly convey a trace of Pat’s ugliness, while remaining, for the most part, indistinguishable from her sister. For our moral habits do show up in the countenance, don’t they? And the posture, too. But for the sake of the film, which was based on a novel that used the same device, we have to accept that the evil Pat can impersonate Kate, and, what may be a little easier, that the good Kate can impersonate Pat.

The story begins with Kate trying to get to her old homestead, on an island off the New England coast where her sister lives. She hasn’t seen Pat in a while. When she misses the ferry, she persuades a lighthouse inspector, Bill Emerson (Glenn Ford), to take her to the island. Kate’s a painter by vocation and avocation, and her sensitive nature appeals to Emerson, and to the lighthouse keeper himself (Walter Brennan), whose portrait she paints. Kate falls in love with Emerson, but Pat comes on the scene, first by tricking him into thinking that she’s her sister, and then by angling for his attention. When Emerson has to go to Boston, Pat follows after, ambitious, aggressive, and devoured with envy. Somehow, we are not told how, while they are in Boston, Pat maneuvers him into proposing marriage. So they announce it to poor Kate when they return to the island. For Pat, we must understand that it really is a twin victory: she’s got the man, and sweeter than that, her sister doesn’t.

Kate tries to gather up the ruins of her life by turning more seriously toward painting, to which end she takes instruction from a harsh and temperamental artist (Dane Clark), who insults her, but who falls in love with her too, and it appears that Kate can at last have something that her sister will not steal. But she is obviously still in love with Bill Emerson. As for him, he goes to Chile, for business, but we can guess that it’s a boon just to be in a different hemisphere from the wife he’s married. Kate is left to spend the intervening time with her sister. We’ve got the coast of Maine here, notorious for cold seas and rough storms, and sure enough, one day they go out and a storm rises — and one sister returns. I’ll tell no more of the story.

I often point out to my students, when we’re reading something like Paradise Lost, or Julius Caesar, wherein the vice figures most prominently, that envy, from Latin invidia, sees everything askance or inside-out. You look at something someone else enjoys, and the enjoyment saddens you, so you will glare at it and turn it into something wicked or contemptible. The vice is most deadly when what makes you sad is a spiritual good. If you think about it, then, there’s no way that the good can satisfy the envious, because, let’s say, if Kate treats Pat with kindness and consideration, Pat hates her all the more for it, because what she hates in her sister is not a fault but a virtue. And I show my students that there is no good that the envious cannot twist into an evil. Friendly to everybody, and fun at a party? “A showoff, a gladhander!” Careful to be just? “Scrupulous prig!” Saintly? “A holy-roller!” So it goes.

Grant the possibility of mixing up the identical twins, and watch this film for the excellent performances of the five main characters. Dane Clark was in the same category with John Garfield and John Hodiak, but both of them died young, while he kept on and was, for many years, one of America’s most sensitive character actors. Walter Brennan, as you may know, won three Oscars, and Glenn Ford, though he never won an Oscar, was flawless in some of our favorite movies here at Word and Song, such as the gritty Blackboard Jungle, and the wonderfully amiable comedy Teahouse of the August Moon. Bette Davis needs no tribute here from me. But the fifth of the main characters, the one I haven’t mentioned yet, is the wise Cousin Freddie, who knows better than Kate herself does, just how wicked Pat really is. He’s played by Charles Ruggles, whom you may remember as the tycoon in disguise as a tramp, in It Happened on Fifth Avenue, and cartoon lovers will know his voice as that of the wise Aesop, in the Aesop & Son cartoons. Aesop too knew what people are like!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Yesterday's post on the king in Hamlet, and his terrible doubts as he tries and fails to pray, has determined for me what our Film of the Week would be — Hamlet itself. I’d mentioned the vocal introduction that Laurence Olivier appended to the film, which he both starred in and directed: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Olivier said he wanted to zero in on the tortured emotions of the Prince of Denmark, especially what he saw as Hamlet’s ambiguous love for his mother, and that’s why he cut about an hour and a half from what would otherwise have been a four-hour production. He cut everything political: there’s no Fortinbras, prince of Norway, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to act as the king’s suborned agents against their college friend Hamlet, no view of Claudius in action as the ruler, no vexed question of the succession to the Danish crown. That last one is a real issue in the play, as it certainly was for Englishmen in Shakespeare’s time, since Queen Elizabeth was old and in poor health, and she had no children. The Danish crown was elective, which makes us ask, “Why did the people throw their weight toward Claudius, the king’s brother, rather than to Hamlet, the king’s grown son?” For the play does set it up as a legitimate question, as Hamlet accuses the King of having “come between the election and my hopes.” So it’s not just a lot of lines that Olivier cut, but a large and important side of the play.

Still, Olivier produced a terrific film. I wouldn’t have chosen it for the Oscar it won for best film of 1948; my vote would have gone to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or to the harrowing Johnny Belinda. And there have been several big productions of Hamlet since then, one with Nicol Williamson, one with Kenneth Branagh, even one with Mel Gibson. But here I’m going once more to take a cue from the Prince of Denmark himself, and “by indirections find directions out.” How about, for psychological power and for situating the Prince in the entire complex of political and personal demands that Shakespeare gives us? I’m thinking of a production with a severely restricted set, but with few lines removed, and with the rest of the dramatis personae restored to their importance, as they all serve as points of contact or contrast with Hamlet, to deepen the ambiguity of the man’s choices, and render them harder to accept, and thus more terribly tragic if we conclude that they are wrong?

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The BBC, from 1978 to 1985, produced all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, with a pretty wide range in quality. You’d think that the comedies would be the easiest to do, but there the success was pretty spotty: the two I found to be excellent were Twelfth Night (with a wonderful performance by Robert Hardy as Sir Toby Belch; you may remember Hardy as the mischievous old veterinarian Siegfried in All Things Bright and Beautiful) and Measure for Measure (see Kate Nelligan as Isabella). They were best with the histories: see for example Ron Cook as the restless hunchback in Richard III, and Anthony Quayle as Falstaff in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2; the dream sequence in Richard III is performed with breathtaking subtlety and quietly mounting terror.

The tragedies were hit or miss — the best were Othello, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. When you consider the cast, you ask, “How could it be otherwise?” Derek Jacobi is the Prince, intelligent, introverted, self-doubting, a shrewd judge of character, and, once roused, a formidable opponent. Claire Bloom is the Queen, and Patrick Stewart, yes, that Patrick Stewart, with hair still on the top of his head, is Claudius. So I recommend both productions, but if I had to choose one or the other, I’d go for this one. “Make it so,” he said.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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There’s the internet, and there’s the truth. Log today’s post in the category, These Two Are Not the Same.

In 1938, the novelist Graham Greene, a convert (from nothing) to the Catholic faith, traveled through Mexico to witness first-hand the brutal attempts by the Mexican government to crush the Church — outlawing the Mass, convicting priests and sentencing them to death if they said Mass, even putting men and boys before the firing squad. His research, much of it undercover, resulted in the harrowing book, The Lawless Roads. If you go to the Wikipedia article on Graham Greene, you will find next to nothing about this. The article on The Lawless Roads is hardly more than a “stub.” But Greene did not stop there. He then wrote The Power and the Glory, which I consider to be his most powerful novel — just edging out, in my ranking, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and Brighton Rock. Its unnamed hero, called “the whiskey priest,” is on the run from the Mexican government that wants him dead, but his most determined foe is the unnamed Communist lieutenant, a man who boasts that he has shot or forced into secular life every single priest in his state. What Greene has done is to set in antagonism two visions of human life, the Church’s, and the secular state’s, and made as a representative of each one a man who would give his life for it. For the lieutenant is a lonely, unhappy, ascetical man, frustrated and angered by what he sees (and what sometimes is) the stupidity of the people he wants to lift out of the dust. And the priest? When the persecution came, in one moment of human longing, he sinned with his housekeeper, and from that union a daughter was born. He knows that it has happened, he hasn’t been able to confess his sins to another priest in years, he has taken to drink, he believes he is a bad and worthless priest, and yet — what he does not know, but what we know, is that he is indeed a holy man; a nobody, but a saint.

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But if you go to the International Movie Data Base (IMDB) page for our Film of the Week, you will read the following as a summation of the plot: “A cynical Catholic priest is sent to Mexico to preach. It’s the 1930’s and Mexican government sees the church as competition. They send a secret agent to assassinate the priest.” Almost nothing about those three sentences is correct. The priest is not cynical about anything in the world other than himself. No one has “sent” him. The government does not see the Church as “competition,” but as a plague to be wiped out. The lieutenant is not a secret agent. The act is not assassination. It is far worse than that. It is a juridical, official, state-conducted and state-enforced execution, all above-board, all out in the open, all quite legal. So was a certain other execution, 1,900 years before.

Graham Greene was quite active in the film business, as a writer and sometimes an adapter of his own works: see Carol Reed’s brilliant film, The Third Man, an adaptation of one of Greene’s stories, which we featured here at Word and Song back in February. So it’s natural to expect that The Power and the Glory would make it to the silver screen. Our favorite American director, John Ford, turned it into the film The Fugitive (1947), with Henry Fonda as the priest and Pedro Armendariz, Sr. as the lieutenant (see Armendariz with Harry Carey, Jr. and John Wayne in Ford’s Three Godfathers). It’s a worthy film, but Ford took some considerable liberties with the novel, especially, at the end, with the character of the lieutenant, making him into a secret believer, sort of.

But David Susskind, the producer and actor and social commentator, wanted to take up the project again, and it resulted in The Power and the Glory, which aired on CBS television in 1961. This version doesn’t take liberties. It does make cuts, and I don’t see how it could have done otherwise. The Whiskey Priest is assisted by various people along the way, sometimes with eagerness, sometimes grudgingly, but always with danger to the helper — even death. They include a British dentist who is divorced and who hasn’t been able to get free of Mexico; he’s a cynic. There’s also a young American girl, living in Mexico with her wealthy family, who says she doesn’t believe in God. There’s a horrible mestizo who plays Judas to the priest, while pretending to help him (and sometimes doing so). There are more; and in the novel, a boy who begins as a hater of his mother’s faith and the Church and an admirer of the ruthless lieutenant, but in the end is devoted to this mysterious priest’s memory. What Greene shows us, unbeknownst to the priest, is that the man has a strange and redemptive influence on these others. He thinks that because he is a bad priest he can bring Christ to people only in the sacraments. But — and Greene leaves all of this implicit; he doesn’t hammer us with holiness — he brings Christ also in his own person, in his sacrifice. He isn’t a great man. But God will deign to use any materials that are to hand, if we will submit to be so used.

The film, again, was made for TV, with some of the limitations that that imposed on it, not to mention a low budget. But the cast is star-studded: Laurence Olivier is the priest; George C. Scott is splendid as the Communist lieutenant; Roddy McDowall is the treacherous mestizo; the rest of the cast includes Julie Harris, Tim O’Connor, Martin Gabel, Fritz Weaver, Thomas Gomez, Keenan Wynn, Patty Duke, Cyril Cusack, and Mark Lenard (“Sarek” in the old Star Trek franchise, Mr. Spock’s father). The director, Marc Daniels, was a stalwart of early television, basically putting the comedy I Love Lucy on its own path to glory, directing plenty of television playhouse shows for Ford Theater where he was the boss, going on to direct 15 Star Trek episodes, and many other shows for the rest of his career.

So I’m plugging the TV show, but more than that, the novel. It’s a quick read, like most of what Greene writes, and his style is swift and clean, prime for powerful understatement. Think of the title alone. You have an entire government and its armies on one side, and a lone priest on the other, despised and hunted. Where are power and glory to be found?

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Back in the early days of the Nobel prizes for literature, it was to your advantage if you wrote about the faith, not because the judges were bigots, but simply because they were well-educated people who knew that the revelation of God to the Jews, which Christians believe was fulfilled in Christ, presented mankind with the noblest moral ideals, and the best opportunity, by the grace of God, to have something like peace on earth. And that was why they gave the award in 1905 to the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, for his novel on life in Rome in the time of the mad and wicked emperor Nero, Quo Vadis? And it is that novel that gives us our Film of the Week of the same name, made in 1951, right at the beginning of Hollywood’s age of the Biblical epics, some of them masterpieces, but I think none of them so shrewdly and intelligently about what happens to a capable, wealthy, powerful, and corrupt people doomed to self-destruction, such as Rome had been, when suddenly the seed of the faith is planted in their midst.

Before I tell you a little about the story, I’d like to note that the work of Sienkiewicz was never meant just for people with high tastes in art. I said he was a Polish author, and that’s true, but in his lifetime there was no such country as Poland. The powers around her — Prussia and Russia — had carved her up between them. Poland survived only in the hearts and memories of her people, and in their unshakeable faith. Sienkiewicz had long written epic novels about the ages of her glory, which were also ages of deep religious devotion, when Poland — not England, not Germany, not France — twice saved Europe from being overrun by the ever-aggressive and ambitious Turks. I have read these works and I admire them immensely: The Teutonic Knights, and the trilogy With Fire and Sword. And then he turned his mind toward the first empire that the faith brought down, or made new, depending on how you look at it.

The title, Quo Vadis?, is Latin for the question, “Where are you going?” Tradition had it that Saint Peter, by then an old man, had been urged to leave the city of Rome to save his life, during the first persecutions ordered by Nero, who wanted to blame the great fire of Rome on the Christians, when, as many believed, he himself was responsible for it. Peter didn’t want to leave, but he gave in to their pleas. And so he and his companion, a lad baptized as Nazarius, were walking south on the great Appian Way, just outside the walls of the city, when suddenly Peter saw the Lord approaching him, going in the opposite direction. Peter was stunned, and fell to his knees.

“Where are you going, Lord?” asked Peter. And Jesus replied, “Because you are leaving the flock I gave to your care, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.” Peter got up and quietly turned around, and began to walk back. “Where are you going, my lord?” asked Nazarius, who had heard and seen nothing. “To Rome,” said Peter.

If you visit Rome and you are walking south on the Appian Way, you may come upon the little church of Domine Quo Vadis?, built on the spot where Peter is said to have seen the Lord.

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From that legend, Sienkiewicz constructs a story that brings the might and arrogance of Rome, but also her moral exhaustion, against a small number of people, many of them women and slaves, who have no weapons but the truth, and no prince but an old fisherman. Peter, of course, is a crucial figure in the story (played by Finlay Currie with a kind of massive humility; see him as the convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations), but it really centers on four people: a Roman tribune named Marcus (Robert Taylor), who simply assumes that a handsome young Roman should get everything he wants; the young woman he falls in love with, Ligia (Deborah Kerr), in her own barbarian land a princess, but now a Christian convert in a pious and conservative Roman household; the emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov), bored, vain, cowardly, intelligent but by no means brilliant, and cruel; and the one sophisticated man who lives for good taste and who can barely keep Nero in check, Marcus’ uncle the famed man of letters, Petronius (Leo Genn).

It takes Marcus some time, and much pain, even humiliation, to begin to grasp what this new way of life is about, a way that seems to make no sense to him; but the love of the Christians and the purity of Ligia awaken him to a life that is not all about ambition, power, hedonism, and the cruelties that they make necessary. He learns what all of Rome will eventually have to learn, and what we, I believe, are going to have to learn all over again. But Nero is suspicious of him, and Nero’s wife, the jealous and evil Poppaea, hates Ligia, and day by day Petronius is losing whatever influence he has to restrain the emperor’s wickedness, and he, to save his nephew, and for a religion he thinks is idealistic madness, must play a game of life and death against his own enemies, who are in the ascendant in Nero’s favor.

It’s said that this film saved MGM from bankruptcy. If you’re looking for piety as sugar and spice, you won’t get that here. But you will get one of Hollywood’s greatest actresses, Deborah Kerr, in one of her finest roles, and Robert Taylor in one of his; not to mention Peter Ustinov, and a giant of a fellow named Buddy Baer, kid brother to Max Baer the heavyweight boxing champion, in the arena with a wild ox, and his princess Ligia as the prey to protect. And of course you get the real story: that of a world, even against its will, brought into the light.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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The Golden Age did not disappear overnight, and the skills that went into the playhouse shows found expression also in weekly dramas, before such were co-opted to promote political “messages.” So it happens that, in our experience, the greatest of the medical shows on television was right at the beginning of such: Ben Casey. It provides for us our Film of the Week, an episode in the first season, “Pavanne for a Gentle Lady.”

Ben Casey for us has been a real find. Let me introduce the characters, so you can get your bearings. Ben Casey (Vince Edwards) is the chief resident in neurosurgery at County General, a hospital in Los Angeles. By “resident” we mean just that. He lives there, he gets his meals there, and therefore he is paid little. That was the way. Dr. Casey is young and handsome, but hard to get to know; he does not suffer fools, he rides his interns hard, he will often defy hospital regulations to get something done for his patients, and he pulls no punches in his criticisms. When it comes to that, he draws no distinction between men and women. But he is not always in the right. His mentor is Dr. David Zorba (Sam Jaffe), old and wise and experienced, but as stubborn as Ben, whom sometimes he must set straight, and seldom in a gentle way. Ben’s best friend and fellow resident is Dr. Ted Hoffman (Harry Landers), not as dour as Ben is, not as aggressive, but just as honest; and their friendship seems often to walk on the brink of a cliff. His only other good friend is Dr. Maggie Graham (Bettye Ackerman, in real life happily married to the much older Jaffe), an anesthesiologist, and she also often sees in his heart what he does not see. Yet the reverse is true too: Casey is a shrewd judge of human character and human motives, and you had better not think you can get away with falsehood and other forms of mischief in his presence.

Let me not give the impression that Dr. Casey is without compassion. Quite the reverse. He is almost without sentimentality, but he feels deeply for his patients who suffer, especially when they are old and frail and in pain, as is the main character in today’s featured episode, Mrs. O’Banion (Nellie Burt, a stalwart of the Broadway stage), or when they are just children. “Suffer the Little Children” is indeed a title of one of the episodes, echoing the words of Jesus who welcomed the children to come to him. For the series’ producer, James Moser, appears to have been a man of warm religious faith. Allusions to Scripture or to well-known prayers are common in the series but never obtrusive or preachy; other titles include “There Was a Man in the Land of Uz,” “Behold a Pale Horse,” “Even Death Shall Die,” and so forth.

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Debra and I have watched several dozen of the episodes, and have not found a dud among them. I call Ben Casey the great Anti-Anti-Climactic Show, since many episodes leave the audience with suggestions of what will happen, or what may happen, to be filled out by their imagination. The silent power of such endings is quite impressive.

In “Pavanne for a Gentle Lady,” we deal with life near the beginning and near the end. A two-year-old girl has been brought to the hospital with meningitis, and the doctors do not know whether there is an abscess in the brain that must be drained and cleaned; here Dr. Casey is staunchly conservative and will order no operation unless he is sure it is necessary. The child’s life hangs in the balance. Meanwhile, the elderly widow Mrs. O’Banion has a tumor in the spine, which we are told at the beginning of the show, is inoperable. She has at most five or six months to live. Her choice is whether or not to have an operation which cannot cure her, but which will relieve her pain. The alternative treatment has been pain control through morphine, which she does not want to continue using. But what concerns Mrs. O’Banion most of all is that her own pain is causing her sister (Anne Seymour) to suffer. The two sisters love each other dearly, though they will hardly say so. Pay close attention to the old woman’s eyes, and to the subtle softening of Dr. Casey’s voice. Bethel Leslie also stars in this episode as the sick little girl’s pediatrician, who must work with Dr. Casey, even when she thinks that his determination to delay operating on the child is wrong. Both are concerned with the welfare of the child, and in this case, both are correct in their diagnoses. But if it weren’t for the misunderstandings between male and female, almost half of the world’s literature would never have been written.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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And in a further irony, the same Donald Crisp — whom we love at Word and Song, not least for his Oscar performance as the wise Welsh patriarch in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley — had played the president of Notre Dame, Father John Cavanaugh, in the Knute Rockne film. Pat O’Brien of all people ought to have played the coach of the fighting Irish; he grew up with Irish immigrants, he went to a boys’ Catholic school in Milwaukee, mostly populated by the Irish and the Polish, then to Marquette. His best friends were his fellow Irish actors, Jimmy Cagney and Spencer Tracy; see him also as the priest opposite Cagney’s hoodlum in Angels with Dirty Faces, probably his next most famous role. All three actors were Catholic, though Hollywood got to Tracy; Pat O’Brien, like Jimmy Cagney, married once, and it was for keeps, and both of them kept their family life away from the studios and the glitz.

Our film portrays Knute Rockne as a man of considerable brains — he did, after all, teach chemistry at Notre Dame, and he worked alongside Father Julius Nieuwland in the study of acetylene and synthetic rubber. If you’ve ever worn a Halloween mask when you were a kid, or put on a wet-suit, or used a garden hose, actually, if you’ve used any of hundreds of common items in and around the house, you’ve profited from their work, which was taken up by the DuPont company and continued with Father Nieuwland’s assistance.

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But really, the film is about making boys into men. That is one of the foundational tasks of all human cultures. For boys do not become men by the accretion of musculo-skeletal matter. They must be formed by other men: taught the hard virtues of self-denial, courage, endurance under pain, diligence, and submission to the good of the team or the platoon or the school or the city. That’s what Rockne excelled at, and that’s what the film portrays. Perhaps its most famous moment comes in a hospital. George Gipp, quarterback and halfback for the Irish, and their first ever All-American, is dying of strep throat complicated by pneumonia. The year was 1920, understand, and there were no antibiotics, or even sulfa drugs. Rockne comes to visit him, and he and Gipp — played in the film by Ronald Reagan, called “the Gipper” for his role here — have their last conversation. Gipp calls his coach “Rock,” and asks him to promise something. “When the boys are down, and all the breaks are against them,” he says, “tell them to go in there with all they’ve got, and win one for the Gipper. And from where I am, maybe I’ll see it, and I’ll be happy.”

The film has an excellent cast, with O’Brien, Crisp, Reagan, Alfred Basserman as Father Nieuwland, Gale Page as Bonnie Rockne, the ever-present when you need a Scandinavian John Qualen as Lars Rockne, Knute’s father, and cameo appearances by Jim Thorpe, Walter Camp, Pop Warner, and Amos Alonzo Stagg. Rockne himself had died in an airplane crash in 1931. He was on his way to Hollywood, of all places, to give his advice on the production of the film The Spirit of Notre Dame, starring the great and then very young Lew Ayres and Andy Devine. But the glue attaching one of the wings to the body of the plane had gotten wet, and the wing detached, causing the plane to crash an hour after takeoff from Kansas City. Yet in 1925, something far more important happened to the great Coach: he was baptized, on the grounds of Notre Dame.

For the whole family, this one!

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

The title for Dowson’s short poem is a line from one of Horace’s odes (I.iv.): Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam, which means, if I may take a little liberty, “Life, so brief in all, forbids us from setting forth on any long hope.” Dowson wrote them in 1896, and they were published with the rest of his poetry after his death in 1900 at the age of 31.

You may ask whether Dowson hastened his death by too much “wine and roses,” and my answer would be yes and no. He led a wild life first as a student at Oxford and then as a city boy with a little too much money in his pocket and too much taste for excitement. It seems certain that he became an alcoholic, but that doesn’t give us the whole of his youth, not by far. In his early 20’s he became a Roman Catholic, probably after having practiced not much religion at all, and he fell in love with a Polish girl, whose immigrant father ran a restaurant; Dowson’s own father owned and operated a dry-dock along the Thames in Limehouse, hardly the site for the posh — that’s where the low-life river-scrounger Riderhood lives in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. The girl turned Dowson down, though later the family took him in when he was penniless and derelict. You see, both his parents contracted tuberculosis. His father died in 1894 from an overdose of a patent medicine called Chlorodyne, which was a potent and numbing mixture of alcohol, opium, cannabis, and chloroform, “the greatest medical discovery of the present century,” says an advertisement for the potion, which had by then been selling for 30 years. His mother took her own life a year later. Dowson, whose own health was poor, never recovered from the double shock.

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I mention these things because they’re all germane for our film. The Days of Wine and Roses is the story of a young and much-carousing ad-man named Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon, who himself fought against alcoholism) who meets a beautiful and innocent girl, Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), whose father, a stern old Swede (played with dour earnestness by Charles Bickford), runs a large nursery and greenhouse, is suspicious of Joe, but he submits to what seems inevitable. At first, Joe and Kirsten appear to have a happy marriage. The problem is that it began with Joe’s introducing Kirsten to hard liquor — and now she is as hooked on the stuff as she is.

They have a child, a little girl named Debbie, and anyone who thinks that parenthood is a cure for addiction to alcohol is engaging in a pious wish. Yes, it is reasonable that the new responsibility might cause some people to sober up. It is also, alas, predictable that in others the new responsibility makes them more skittish, more fearful, more dependent on what they vainly hope will settle their nerves. So it proves with Joe and Kirsten. He loses his job, and she accidentally sets fire to their house, and after one awful binge, Joe sees that there is no way for them to go on unless they smash the bottle. They go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous — I believe it is the first time in American film that that organization is featured. There, Joe meets the man who will be his sponsor, and who from this time on will never be far from him in time of need; his name is Jim Hungerford (Jack Klugman, perfect for the role), and he not only supports Joe in his resolutions and in his colossal failures and his attempt to gather up the debris of his life; he teaches him, and of course us in the audience, about the underlying psychology of the alcoholic. For Kirsten, he says, had certain traits in her personality, long before she drank that first brandy alexander with Joe, that made the addiction more likely, and thus the drink more dangerous.

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I’ll say no more about the plot. I have a very high opinion of each of the four actors I’ve named: see for instance Lee Remick in a film we’ve featured here, Wild River. Debra and I saw Jack Lemmon in person, performing at Chapel Hill, alongside Bethel Leslie in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and I’ve long thought that if he had been born ten or fifteen years earlier, we’d be placing him up there with the greatest of the great, with James Stewart and Spencer Tracy. Lemmon, as I said, had his own problems with the bottle, as did director Blake Edwards, who quit drinking after his own film got to him.

Days of Wine and Roses is a riveting film, almost beyond tears in its exploring the pathetic failures of the human heart — almost beyond tears, I say. Blake Edwards often made films that sacrificed coherence to some snappy comic scene, but not here; perhaps he was restrained by the television play that preceded the film. For the drama first appeared on Playhouse 90, with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie — perfect choices — as Joe and Kirsten. Debra and I have long felt the influence of the televison playhouse shows, which were numerous and immensely productive, on American films in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, and some of them succeeded in both venues. See Paddy Chayevsky’s Marty, and Rod Serling’s Patterns, the first an Oscar-winning film for Best Picture, and the second — brilliant and relentless. Days of Wine and Roses is another. And then, for some reason I can’t fathom, those playhouse television shows simply fell away, and Hollywood has been much the poorer for it.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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With shrewd irony, Greene takes his motif of the “third” man — and here I’ve taken my lead from our Word of the Week, three — from the story in Luke’s gospel, of the two men walking on the road to Emmaus after the Resurrection, when suddenly a third man is walking beside them. It is the risen Lord, whom they do not at first recognize, while he carefully explains the Scriptures to them, how the Messiah had to suffer and to die, and rise again. Dante plays on that same scene in his Purgatorio, when Virgil and the pilgrim poet are climbing the mountain, and suddenly a third man is beside them — he turns out to be the classical poet Statius — and wishes for them the peace of God. It was an important scene for T. S. Eliot too, as he alludes to it in “The Waste Land” and “The Four Quartets.” Greene, the Catholic convert, of course knew all this. Yet in this story, the “third man” is a shady, empty-souled, death-dealing man of avarice and cynicism. The scene at the Ferris wheel, Vienna’s “Riesenrad” or “Giant Wheel,” is one of the most famous and unsettling in all of film history, as Lime expresses to Martins his contempt for all the little people below, mere ants, nothings, to be crushed at will.

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I’ve mentioned Hitchcock and Greene and Welles, but it’s not as if the director of this film, Carol Reed, was a nobody. In my opinion, he was second only to David Lean as the greatest of all British directors, and it’s a close second at that. We’ve featured his work here a couple of times, work that shows us the sorry side of human life, but that engages our feelings all the more for it: see his sure hand in The Fallen Idol, with Sir Ralph Richardson cast against type as a cowardly butler engaged in an illicit affair, but adored by his employer’s small boy. And of course he’s the man orchestrating the acting and the cinematography and everything else in Oliver! In The Third Man, we have him directing Orson Welles, himself a great director, along with a very strong supporting cast, including one of our favorites, Trevor Howard, as Major Calloway, of the Royal Military Police, on the lookout for Lime.

There’s also the scene-stealing performance of Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg (!), otherwise known as Alida Valli, or simply by her stage-name, Valli; Italy’s answer to Ingrid Bergman, a star with a very long and wide-ranging career. The final scene of the film is hers, and only the greatest of actresses could have pulled it off.

The British Film Institute named The Third Man as the greatest British film of all time. I’d name The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for that honor in the United States. Post-war Vienna, and the wild west — the one in danger of collapsing from civilization, the other verging upon civilization; and no easy political answers in either one.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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You see, Billie Dawn seems — but perhaps only seems — as dumb as a bag of rocks. She doesn’t believe in anything, not because she’s rejected every high principle she’s ever encountered, but because she’s never encountered any at all. Judy Holliday gives her a heavy working-class New York accent that is immensely entertaining, yet we suspect she’s got some brains somewhere in there. And of course she is beautiful, and Paul falls in love with his pupil, and so what we’ve got here is a form of the Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady) story. Harry half suspects it, but only half, as Paul slowly teaches Billie Dawn that she’s not worthless, she doesn’t have to lead the rather hopeless and benighted life she has been leading, there are more things in the world than the strong taking advantage of the weak, and in fact there’s a great world of knowledge out there, and beauty, that she can begin to enjoy and be a part of. Once she sees that, we understand that the break with Harry is inevitable. The questions are when, and how, with how much ruin, and who’s going down with him.

The film’s a romp, of course, and it is not a religious film — the “salvation” that Paul brings to Billie is to awake her to a higher and purer way of life. But it is a film of conversion even so. Conversion means what the Latin suggests: you turn around. We don’t have any saints here, but we do have that fundamental movement from a life that is just vanity in perpetual motion, to a truly human life — and of course, as in almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies, we have to end in marriage. But you suspected that, no doubt. The fun of the film is in how you get there — with a good lot of dramatic irony at the final turning point!

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So this one’s more than Rex Harrison teaching Audrey Hepburn to say after him, “The RAIN in SPAIN falls MAINLY on the PLAIN.” We’ve always found it a lot of fun at our house. Judy Holliday steals every scene she’s in, yet we never feel that she’s overdoing it — she just simply IS Billie Dawn. She had played the role on Broadway, opposite Paul Douglas as the junkyard millionaire, where the play was a smash, and she won her Oscar over Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and, more of a coup in my view, over Bette Davis in All About Eve. The political angle was a tad controversial at the time, but the real heart of the film is purely human.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Dave the Dude (Warren William) is surely no saint, but he’s got some feeling for Annie, partly because he swears that her apples bring him good luck, and whenever he’s about to go someplace to lay some big wagers, he makes sure that Annie knows about it, and she always shows up with an apple for him. And a singer at the dance hall, “Misouri” (Glenda Farrell), in love with the Dude, falls in with his plan — in a big way, too — somehow to make it so that Count Romero and the boy will be impressed with Annie and her high-class connections. They must make her what the title of the film says, a Lady for a Day.

That’s all I will reveal here of the plot. It’s a “fairy tale” indeed, so long as we remember that fairy tales that deserve that honorable name reveal deep and everlasting truths about human life. This particular fairy tale is one that Frank Capra plays upon again and again in his films. I’ll mention two ways I think the tale works in our film. The lesser of the two is that it celebrates something fundamental to the American imagination. You’ll have noticed it in It's a Wonderful Life, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and in most of the rest of his works too. It’s that American sense that truth and goodness are seldom to be found among the powerful in this world, but among the unconsidered, the common people, the “John Doe” and “Jane Doe,” the people who, as George Bailey says to the wealthy, cynical, ambitious, and utterly utilitarian Mr. Potter, “do most of the working and living and dying.” The best of America is not to be found under blaring lights, not in the steel-and-glass skyscrapers, but in the local diner owned by the same family for fifty years, or at a high school football game in the old Rust Belt, or in the summer fair and farm show with the carnival rides, the funnel cakes, the hot dogs, and the dunking machine.

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But there is something more important than that. I don’t know how powerful an influence it was in his life in 1933, but Frank Capra never lost it altogether, and he was soon to return to it in a forthright and committed way. I’m speaking here of his faith. Capra was a Catholic, and even during those years when he strayed from the practice of it, it formed his imagination, and it revealed to him the resounding truths you will find in Lady for a Day. They have to do with that reversal of the world’s values that we find in the gospels, particularly in the virtue of humility. He who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. To shepherds watching over their flocks by night comes the first news of the birth of the Redeemer. The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Annie’s not a saint, and her fibbing does embroil her in a lot of trouble. But her heart is right, as far as is possible for the heart of a confused sinner such as every one of us is. We may be surprised to find that the hearts of a lot of people we fight with all the time are right, too.

This film also, though pre-code (1933), is for the whole family. Keep a close eye on the performance of May Robson in the title role — her face, her hands, her eyes. There was a time when artists could remember once in a while that the right word, or the right look, can speak ten thousand words.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true