The Talk of the Town (1942)

Directed by George Stevens

Just before Valentine’s Day, our Film of the Week is a love story, but a most unusual one. The Talk of the Town is part romance, part whodunit, part screwball comedy, and all throughout a lightly handled though serious meditation on what the law is really all about. And we have three of our favorites at Word and Song. There’s Jean Arthur, with a touch of the hare-brained about her, but smart as a whip, and appealingly crazy and resourceful when the comedy goes into full gear. There’s Cary Grant, for my money the greatest comic actor America has produced, so good at these roles, people just roared with laughter at his absurdity without considering that it took tremendous talent and perfect timing. And then there’s the man with the silky voice and the face that could speak a thousand words in a silent glance, a set of the mouth or a turn of the eye, wistful and intelligent, Ronald Colman. Just to watch those three together is a treat, and add in the jus’ folks character actor Edgar Buchanan, who always gave a heck of a lot more than the bare script demanded. So then, what’s the movie about?

Well then, the film begins with screaming headlines and sirens and a man hunt. Here’s the deal. A fire has destroyed the biggest factory in a small American town, and one Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) — he’s got to have an eastern European name, because eastern Europe is where anarchists come from, as everybody knows — is accused of arson. He’s on the hook for murder too, because the factory inspector is presumed dead in the flames, though his body hasn’t been found. But he’s escaped from prison before the trial gets underway. The whole town is against him. That’s the irony of the film’s title: Leopold Dilg is “the talk of the town,” because they all want to hang him high from the next tree.

Now then, he sprains his ankle badly while jumping from a second story window, yet in a furious rainstorm he manages to hobble off to a big empty house outside of town. The young lady who owns the house, Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur), was a schoolmate of his, so she’s got some pity for him when she finds him in his bedraggled state, and she manages to hide him in the attic. The only reason why she’s there that night, though, is that she needs to get the house ready for a boarder who is to arrive the next day. The boarder is a law professor, Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman). But he too arrives that night, and all at once Miss Shelley has a fugitive from justice (who of course is innocent) and a law professor under one roof, and the professor thinks he’s got the place to himself. Lightcap believes in the law as a beautiful abstraction, the result of pure unaffected reason. Dilg, with no trust in the machinery of justice, believes in law as it is lived in the sweat and the mire and the passions of ordinary people. Nora thinks that Leopold is innocent, but she has no proof. She passes Leopold off as a gardener named Joseph, and for several days she also manages to keep from Lightcap’s eyes all newspapers, so that he won’t know who Joseph is. That can’t last forever, of course, but it ends up buying a couple of days, and in those days the professor and the supposed gardener become friends, despite their disagreements, or because of them.

And there is another complication. A senator comes to visit Lightcap, to tell him quietly that the President is going to nominate him to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. That would be the pinnacle of the professor’s career. But, says the senator, he ought to keep his name out of the newspapers in the meantime, and that means he should not meddle in the goings-on in town. Ordinarily, that would be fine with Lightcap. At first he doesn’t want a thing to do with the matter, even when his old law school classmate, Sam Yates (Edgar Buchanan), visits him to beg him to look into it. Yates is a lawyer in town and he believes Dilg is innocent, and that the fire was set deliberately by the shop owner, with the mayor in cahoots. Lightcap turns his old friend down, but that won’t stop Yates, and it doesn’t stop Nora, either.

No more of the plot! You can expect that two bachelors in one house will fall in love with Jean Arthur, but aside from that, I won’t reveal any of the turns. We have here three people who are deeply good, in three different ways, and they exert a powerful influence on one another, and not always on purpose. Both the professor and the fugitive have things to learn, and I can’t think of any better moment of pure friendship than what you will see in the film’s final scenes. George Stevens, the director, is hard to pigeonhole: when I think of John Ford, whom I rate as the greatest American director, I see in my mind’s eye the dust of the old west; when I think of Alfred Hitchcock, I think of moral suspense in a strange physical setting, a Dutch windmill or the crown of the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore; but Stevens — all he was, was a teller of human stories, many of them comic or romantic or both, but always affirming the power of goodness, to be found in surprising places. The Talk of the Town is a bit on the long side, but attend to it, and you will be rewarded handsomely.

Click on the image above to watch this film free on Youtube. Caution: the showing includes very loud commercials.

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