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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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Watch “Pavonne for a Gentle Lady” above.

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.

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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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The setup of the film’s plot is simple enough. The young Tony Kirby (Jimmy Stewart), son of a ruthless and ulcer-ridden tycoon (Edward Arnold; see him as the great and wise patriot in The Devil and Daniel Webster), has fallen in love with a young woman (Jean Arthur) who happens to be the granddaughter of that same old and quirky Grandpa. And Grandpa’s house is the sole remaining property on a block that the elder Kirby wants to buy up and turn into a huge factory complex. But old Grandpa Vanderhof won’t sell. And for some time, nobody but we who watch the film knows who is related to whom, and that there’s going to be a problem. On one side you have money and genuine industrial energy and all the added force of upper class snobbery. On the other side you have love, with a way of life mostly free from the preoccupations of the rich and of those who desperately want to become rich.

Scene after scene will challenge you to ask questions like, “Well, why don’t we live like that?” It’s easy to say that it’s impossible, when what we really mean is that it’s possible but we’re afraid to try. Why don’t we live in a place where little kids with an accordion and a flair for dancing can roam the streets at night and teach strangers how to dance ‘The Big Apple,’ for ten cents a pop? And yell ‘Cheese it, the cops!’ and run off – without any harm done? That’s one of my favorite glances at America in the whole history of Hollywood films.

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What do we take with us when we die? Why are we not aiming for love and marriage, more than anything else? Why are our Sundays more and more like Monday, instead of our Mondays being more like the feast of Sunday?

I think of my father here. He sold insurance, and his company promoted him to be a manager of an office in Allentown, 90 miles from where we lived. So we moved into a very nice house on the outskirts of the city, in a family-oriented neighborhood, with a huge public park a few hundred yards away. He made good money, and we had a chance to buy that house — with its cement swimming pool bordered around with apple, peach, plum, apricot, and walnut trees. But he didn’t enjoy the work as much as he did just being a salesman. He didn’t meet as many people. His heart was still with the farmers he used to meet all the time, whom he liked, and they liked him and trusted him too. So we went back to what was really our home, after all. He did very well, as an agent will do when rural people tell each other who’s to be trusted, but he didn’t let it get in the way of our family life. And every Sunday we went to Mass, and then we visited his parents three miles away (my mother’s parents lived across the street from us), and we children had the run of the town, outdoors whenever it was sunny and often when it wasn’t.

But back to the film! Check out the fine performances in the supporting cast, including Spring Byington and Samuel Hinds as Grandpa’s daughter and son-in-law, Mischa Auer as a Russian ballet instructor, and especially H. P. Warner (you may recall him as Mr. Gower the druggist in It's a Wonderful Life), playing Kirby’s old partner and showing up in an intense confrontation to warn him that he is destroying himself. Edward Arnold, who usually played the heavy, was a good and kindly man in real life, and he could let that side of him come out, sometimes almost — almost! — imperceptibly. And I can’t let slip Harry Davenport as the judge in the night court — but scene after scene is splendid. This too is a movie for the whole family.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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I had thought I might revisit Scott of the Antarctic (1948)this week, with John Mills as the brave explorer who reaches the South Pole after his rival, the shrewder yet strangely less admirable Roald Amundsen gets there, and who never makes it back alive. But now that I mention it, we have here two films that circumnavigate the world, not by latitude but by longitude. Yet we also have two films, separate by only twenty years, that seem to come from different worlds. For Scott of the Antarctic is a patriotic celebration of courage, manly camaraderie, and heroic self-sacrifice. You can tell it in the understated but heartfelt acting, and the cast is superb — including Kenneth More, whom you may recognize as Father Brown in the BBC series that put G. K. Chesterton’s murder mysteries on the screen, and John Gregson, Commander Gideon in the excellent British crime series based in Scotland Yard, Gideon’s Way. And with a score by Ralph Vaughan Williams, you can’t miss.

By the time we get to Ice Station Zebra, the stress is not on the human characters, with the exception of those played by McGoohan and Borgnine, but on spectacle and international political tension. The visuals are indeed impressive. There’s the Tigerfish ramming the ice cap from below with its tower, and failing again and again to pierce it, but finally cracking through. There’s sabotage on the submarine just as that operation is being attempted, so that the vessel sinks fast, its hull on one side breached — we watch the depth gauge gaining feet by the second. There are the American seamen, on the floe in the midst of a horrific windstorm, roped together, when suddenly an air-crevasse opens beneath three of them, and others must descend into the breach to pull them out, fighting against time and the sides of the breach that is quickly closing up. There’s the station itself, and the dead and the half-dead. There’s the approach of Russian air power, and men parachuting onto the floe, and the confrontation, which is quite well done, between Ferraday and his Russian counterpart, Ostrovsky, all over the capsule and the precious and world-endangering film.

If you were a kid in 1968, as I was, you might be forgiven if it occurred to you now and again that the world was coming to an end. What struck me most was the first time I saw drug-induced graffiti, spray-painted on the pavement. Or the first time I saw, in the newspaper, the letter “X” to label a film, and felt the threat that it posed, the challenge to all things decent. We took for granted that the United States stood for goodness and sanity, but already that sense was curdling, and if you think about it for a minute, the greatest movies from 1968 on celebrated, if you can call it that, the anti-hero, somebody who had as much in common with Captain Scott as Scott had with a card-sharper on the docks of Liverpool. Think of The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and so forth. Sometimes, when an art reaches and then falls from its peak, you get greatness of a decadent sort for a while, on the far side. Eventually, that peters out too; and then the art, if it’s to live again, has almost to be reinvented.

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But Ice Station Zebra has stretches of real tension, of the white-knuckle kind that has you gripping your chair and staring wide-eyed. Watch it for that, for the cinematography and the score, and for the performances of Patrick McGoohan and Ernest Borgnine. We’ve featured the big Italian in the heartfelt near-tragedy Marty, where he plays a lonely but deeply good man, and in From Here to Eternity, as the sadistic and murderous sergeant. Borgnine was as ugly as boiled sin, but he could do everything, in comedy and romance and adventure and tragedy — see him also, with his intelligent expressiveness, as the centurion in Jesus of Nazareth. Of Patrick McGoohan, whom you may recall as the formidable King Edward “Longshanks” in Braveheart, Debra and I say what we say of a lot of actors and actresses of his time, that they should have been born 20 years sooner. He is always brilliant. A good friend of Peter Falk he was, too, as he holds the distinction of being the Most Frequent Villain in the Columbo series. I’ll watch anything with one of those two guys in it, and here they are together. Rock Hudson has all he can do to stay on the same ice floe with them!

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Due to changes at Youtube and Internet Archive, we are having to search out different avenues for free versions of our weekly film recommendations . If you don’t mind commercias, our film is available on Tubi at no charge. Click on the image above to watch.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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I’ve said here before that Alfred Hitchcock was in one way a victim of his own success. People expected suspense from him, and they usually went home from the theater more than satisfied, but what even the critics overlooked is that Hitchcock is the director par excellence of the common man or woman placed in a morally ambiguous situation, yet somehow, by pluck, intelligence, and moral virtues they themselves are hardly aware of — the ordinary person’s virtues, which include innocence — they accomplish what the experts on the side of the law cannot, and they foil the over-complications and indirections and entanglements of the evil. It’s Joel McCrea as the clear-eyed and never-defeated American reporter in Foreign Correspondent, my favorite of Hitch’s films. It’s Teresa Wright as the girl who discovers that her uncle, played to debonair and sinister perfection by Joseph Cotten, is a murderer, in Shadow of a Doubt. And here we have Jimmy Stewart, America personified, and Doris Day, who well cultivated her persona as the Girl Next Door, and a boy you can’t help but like, ranged against evil in high places. With Hitchcock, unsentimental as he is, the good will be taxed to its limit, but evil, which the Catholic director knew was a kind of self-contradiction in the mind and soul, a hole in being, would somehow contribute to its own destruction.

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As always, I don’t want to give away anything crucial to the plot. But watch, very closely, the performance of Brenda De Banzie as Lucy Drayton. She is of course responsible for Hank’s being kidnapped. But that is not the whole of it. We’ve praised her work before at Word and Song, in the magnificent comedy of reversed expectations, Hobson's Choice, in which Charles Laughton and John Mills have to be at the top of their game just to keep up with her, lest she steal every scene she’s in. For The Man Who Knew Too Much is not just a morality tale of good against evil. It is an analysis of what makes for good, and of the incoherence of evil; for Mrs. Drayton likes the boy Hank. As I say, watch her closely. And enjoy the unctuous wickedness of her husband (Bernard Miles; the pure and innocent and brave Joe Gargery in Great Expectations), and the reptilian speech and facial twistings of the assassin, played by Reggie Nalder. Those of you who are fans of the old Star Trek television show may remember the terrific line he delivers as the Andorian ambassador, speaking to the analytical Mr. Spock, who is trying to make some sense out of a murder and an attack on Captain Kirk: “Perhaps you should forget logic and devote yourself to motivations of passion or gain. Those are reasons for murder.”

In short, don’t underestimate Hitchcock! Suspense was the first violin in his orchestra. But there are the piano and the horns and the kettledrums too.

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During Advent it’s our aim to share some of our family’s “must-watch” films with a Christmas setting or theme. We hope you will enjoy a revisit to one of our very favorites!, And in case you missed it, our Christmas Special is available again at Word & Song. We hope that some of our subscribers enjoy our little magazine enough to share it as a gift with…

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During Advent it’s our aim to share some of our family’s “must-watch” films with a Christmas setting or theme. We hope you will enjoy a revisit to one of our very favorites!, And in case you missed it, our Christmas Special is available again at Word & Song. We hope that some of our subscribers enjoy our little magazine enough to share it as a gift with…

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