The Awful Truth (1937)

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth: they even look good in pajamas

Films, for me, need to inspire. When you have watched a couple of turkeys, you start to lose faith in the cinema, so you turn to what you hope will be a sure success. Hence, we watched Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963), because it starred Cary Grant. Unfortunately, at 59, it was a rather too old Cary Grant. Supposed to be playing a suave jewel thief, he struck me as someone who would rather be tucked up in bed of an evening. He was too suntanned, too complacent, to be playing the role of a thief. And he didn’t display any real chemistry with his co-star.

So, in an attempt to remember Grant at his peak, I watched The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), with Grant 25 years younger. The story is simplicity itself. A married couple, in the process of divorcing, decide they prefer being together and are reunited. There’s not much doubt about the likely ending: it’s pretty clear throughout the film that whatever magic you see on the screen is when Grant and his partner Irene Dunne are together, and it’s only a matter of time before they abandon all pretence of separating and get back together. From their screen presence alone, you feel this is a just ending. Entertaining though the other actors are, Dunne and Grant seem to inspire each other to a wholly different plane of acting, one in which murmurs and hesitations are as important as the scripted lines.

They don’t simply recite their lines, they rework those lines around gestures, of mumbling, of half-finished statements. Usually it is only Grant who can put meaning into a simple “mmm”. Here, they both do it! It is remarkable to watch, and truly cinematic. Often it is just the slightest gesture, or sound, both of which would probably be lost in the theatre, where everything has to be communicated on a large scale.

As for Dunne, she displays a majestic scornful wit that sends shivers down your spine. Accused of infidelity with her music teacher after a night at a hotel, the music teacher tries to explain what happened, and Dunne then has one of the great put-down lines:

-        Armand Duvalle: I am a great teacher, not a great lover.

-        Dunne: That’s right, Armand. No one could ever accuse you of being a great lover.

Apparently Leo McCarey, the director, was responsible for many of the early Laurel and Hardy films – he even introduced the comedy pair to each other. The Laurel and Hardy trick of preparing a gag slowly, so you the viewer can see the disaster looming, is the same technique used in The Awful Truth. Grant comes to see his former wife and unwittingly finds himself in a concert recital where she is singing in front of a rapt audience. We feel that Grant will not be able to control himself simply to become a member of the audience. Sure enough, within a few seconds he has fallen off his chair and disrupted the entire recital.

So astonishing and attention-grabbing are the moments when Grant and Dunne are together that it is only after the film is over that you being to notice its defects. 

One of the defects of The Awful Truth: there is a dog (Mr Smith)

Grant and Dunne play a fabulously wealthy and tasteless couple. The have servants to serve the drinks. They have investments but don’t seem to do any work. Their house is monumental and vulgar.  They have someone to choose the decor (I hope they didn't play any part in it). They are snobbish and elitist. In social situations, there is a definite code that should be followed, with condemnation reserved for those who don’t understand this wealth-based code. When Grant meets a showgirl in a fancy restaurant, the woman’s reputation is shattered when she sings a song about the wind and her dress is blown up from below. Funny it may be, but tasteless according to the arbiters (Grant and Dunne) and so to be laughed at, not with.

When introduced to a man from Oklahoma (this is before the musical), Grant has a series of snide remarks about this rural hell compared with New York. Dunne soon joins in the condemnation.

Finally, and most insultingly, Dunne, whose ferocious wit is enough to put any man in his place, gets her former husband back by dressing seductively and artfully persuading her partner to join her in bed (a consummation that, of course, happens off screen after the film is over). Would any man with the social awareness of Grant allow himself to be caught in such a way? Would any woman with such withering contempt for other men throw herself so openly at her former partner? I don’t think so. Of course, most film directors have enjoyed making Cary Grant squirm. But the awful truth is, we don’t really care. We just want the two of them on screen for as long as possible, he in a dinner suit, without a hair out of place, and she in yet another dramatic yet vulgar backless dress (a new outfit every ten minutes or so), despite the fact that they are surrounded by tasteless bourgeois opulence. All we see is the most stylish couple in the world, with their effortless dialogue propelling the film into paradise of sorts: our movie paradise, where that wit goes back and forth all day, without end.  

 

Isleham, a village in the Fens

Opinions differ with visitors to the Fens. There are those who find the landscape compelling, while others make remarks about going mad in this landscape, and compare it to those Swiss valleys where the sun never shines. I can see both points of view, but I find some of the landscape quite compelling

 

If you like your nature uncurated, unbeautified, the stark, raw verges, the opposite of pretty, have their own charm:

 

This visit to the Fens was based around Isleham (pronounced “eyes-lam”), noted for a former priory building.

 

The priory wasn’t open (unsurprisingly), and seems to play the role of car park to the village, but the church was open, as well as the village pub. Here there was a couple of musicians doing cover versions of pop classics to a crowded garden full of drinkers. So there was some life in the village.

 After visiting the church, we did a circular walk alongside fields, with the church tower in view all the time (which didn’t prevent getting lost by misreading the map).

What can you say about Isleham? For the most part, it resembled so many other Fen villages. A small, busy Co-op, no other shops, no real central focus to the village. More than most Fen villages, it looks quite cut-off from the rest of the world. The roads to it, like so many roads in the Fens, are full of potholes, as if you are being reminded as you approach that nobody expects to be going anywhere else once they have arrived. I couldn’t imagine any kind of employment in the village apart from farms, which today require almost no casual labour. Yet there were many new houses in the village, for the most part ignoring any local building traditions, yet here and there a few of them with garden walls attached to remnants of much earlier walls of clunch, as if the new build had almost (but not quite) obliterated the medieval origins.

But the present-day isolation is nothing compared with earlier years, it seems. Mary Coe, aged 86, recalled that in the 1970s “No one left the village [of Isleham], and there were no outsiders in the village either .. if there was a stranger about, you wanted to know who they were, and where they come from.” This quote is from the excellent Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens, by James Boyce, 2020. Isleham cannot always have been like this. In the church was a major surprise:  some fascinating, vivid brasses, and a magnificent, brightly-coloured pair of Renaissance tombs:  

 

They are monuments to members of the Peyton family; the one above is Robert Peyton, died 1590. The Peytons also paid to put in a dramatic clerestory to the nave of the church, and an angel roof. At the time the Peytons lived, the Fens were not drained, so the village must have been an island, with communication to the outside world largely by boat. There in the priory was a handful of monks (no more than four); street names such as “the Causeway” suggest the aquatic nature of the place. The combination of grand tombs, a priory turned reused as a barn, and the rows of stark trees, create a strange, rather eerie effect.

A less elitist vision for education

 

Cambridge Corpus Christi College: wonderful education for the few

We all believe we are experts on education, because we have all experienced it. Unlike, say, going to sea, or exploring Antarctica, we have not only suffered from it (or enjoyed it) but we have also had a chance to reflect on it (because most of the people who talk about education have ended their own formal education). Those in full-time education usually have experience of little else.

So, what can we say about education? Firstly, education in the United States and the UK is like a private London club. Entry to the elite institutions is very exclusive, reserved for the rich, and becomes self-perpetuating. Attempts to democratize education have usually foundered as a result of externalities. In the UK, the abolition of grammar schools was accompanied by the rise of comprehensive education. But comprehensive schools don’t mix all classes. They are largely restricted by catchment area. I lived in an area of Oxford that comprised the catchment area for The Cherwell School. Its results were considerably better than other schools in Oxford, almost entirely because of its wealthy parents in the catchment area.  

Higher education has similar external restrictions. The elite Ivy League institutions in the US are all private. Admission to these institutions is becoming steadily more expensive in real terms. A review of recent books on education in the TLS reveals that “Yale spends $166,000 annually on instruction per student, while its neighbour, Southern Connecticut State, spends $15,000”. Does that represent the respective value of the education provided? Hardly.

Here are some suggestions. Education as a set of credit vouchers, the same value for all. Full-time courses replaced by part-time and online classes, on smaller, more focused subjects. Lifetime education provided by universities who split their role between research and teaching – and don’t pretend that those who research can teach. An end to undergraduate education at Oxford and Cambridge, or perhaps each college has to choose between one or the other, but not both. A genuine attempt to end the elitism of UK higher education.  

The gangster who brushes his teeth before going to bed

 

Sharing pate with your partner: the most powerful moment in Touchez pas au grisbi

He not only brushes his teeth, but wears very traditional striped pyjamas – and has a spare pair for visitors. He has clean sheets in the cupboard of his flat. His performance, believe it or not, is one of the greatest gangster depictions ever: Jean Gabin as Max in Touchez pas au grisbi (Don’t touch the loot!) directed by Jacques Becker, 1954. 

The enduring image from this film is all about Gabin. There is action, but you remember Gabin's character: a pensive, considered, even moral gangster. He does not act in a hurry. He only carries a gun in emergencies, when he is threatened. The theme of the film is loyalty: he and his partner Riton have just carried out a major theft of eight gold bars from Orly Airport. This, Max explains, is to be his last job; now he can retire. He has been with his partner Riton (Rene Dary) for over 20 years, but learns during the course of the film (just over 24 hours, an evening, a night, and the following day and night) that Riton has revealed details of the robbery to his girlfriend Josy (a very young Jeanne Moreau). She in turn has talked to a rival gangster, Angelo (Lino Ventura).

Jeanne Moreau and Jean Gabin: does this man look like a gangster?

Max appears in almost every scene, and there is just one moment where Max, in a voice-over, reveals his disappointment in his partner. During the film Max reveals his honour and absolute faith in his friend: to rescue Riton, he gives exchanges all the loot with Angelo.

The film is worthy of Tarantino. There is some shooting, but most of the film is dialogue between villains. The police are almost completely absent, apart from a couple of sweet types on bicycles.

This is no glorification of violence; it is a homage to someone who shows himself to be, for the duration of the film, an ethical gangster. Max trusts his friends, until he learns they have deceived him, and even then, he behaves honourably towards them. Most noticeably, in almost the first scene of the film, when he is invited to a night club to see their two female companions, Lola and Josy, perform, he leaves early and goes home to bed. Not for him the bright lights and expensive seduction. He appears indifferent to a chorus of almost bare-breasted women dancing in front of him. In other words, women are OK - in their place. Some women (the manager of the restaurant where the gangsters eat) can be trusted; but not all.  

Of course, Max is not perfect. We discover later that he is susceptible to female attractions – he has sexual encounters with girlfriends in the middle of the day (so he still gets his early night). He treats them honourably, but does not divulge any secrets to them; he doesn’t lose his head over them.

What will stay with me for a long time is the wonderful, simple scene when he takes Riton, his partner, back to an apartment to stay the night. He opens a jar of pate and some toast from a packet, together with a bottle of wine, and the two companions eat together. Following that, they brush their teeth and put their pyjamas on. It’s a very powerful image of shared food, shared trust, lack of pretension: quite the opposite of what you would expect from a gangster film, and all the more impressive as a result.

 A truly remarkable film.

A walk in Hertfordshire

The village pond, with the church in the distance

There are several ways of looking at a place. I am surrounded by books concentrating on buildings (Pevsner), or focusing on walks (various guides), or even landscape (the marvellous Hertfordshire: a Landscape History), yet they none of them describe the totality of the experience of one short walk.

The place was Barkway, and the walk just three or four miles, a circular tour starting in the village, walking East between the grounds of a large house and a wood (Earls Wood), then following the edge of the wood around three sides and returning down a very gentle slope back to the village.

 The village (claimed a noticeboard by the village pond) had been a coaching stop on the route from London to Cambridge and Kings Lynn. There was an unusual number of interesting houses along the main N-S street through the village, but to be honest, the village itself was nothing special. No sign of any poverty; the noticeboard stated there was a local foodbank, but I didn’t see any sign of anyone who might benefit from such an initiative.

 All that you read from the noticeboard was that there is one pub left, and you could see just one shop. That shop, curiously, sold flowers and served coffee and cake. Clearly, if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread or a pint of milk in Barkway you would be out of luck. It didn’t seem to bother the inhabitants too much, judging from the size of the cars passing us as we walked up the main street; there were not one but two Teslas parked outside one barn conversion.

So here was a village, clearly prosperous enough to sustain a flower shop, but not sufficiently pressed for everyday needs to have a corner store. No sign that there had ever been a station.

The walk started at a recreation ground, interesting for a few features. A sign at the entrance stated the ground had been the recipient of Premier League and Football Association funding for changing rooms – a very welcome reminder that football need not all be about making more money for the top clubs, as the European Super League had tried to do. The recreation ground had adults in it – it was not a no-go area abandoned to outsiders. Finally, there was a very nice semi-circular seat in memory of someone, a lovely place to sit and to enjoy your coffee.

 

Earls Wood, Barkway

The highlight of the walk was not the village or the recreation ground but the wood, about a mile to the East. I couldn’t find any mention of the wood for anything exceptional. It was a deciduous wood, not ancient, and with the trees planted quite far apart, which meant on the ground there was quite a bit of vegetation: plenty of bluebells and cowslips to be seen Every few hundred yards the wood had been partially cleared, as if for a fire break, but then there would be  a few big trees in the clearing. No, the purpose of the wood was evident from the iron steps provided at several locations, and the prominent signs saying “private – no entry”. This was a wood for shooting game. For the walker, the enjoyment of the wood from the edge or from the middle was pretty much equal, so I couldn’t complain. In fact probably the best view of the wood was along the edge, where you could observe the trails made by animals (badgers? deer?) in and out of the trees. The whole wood, indeed the whole walk, had some very light gradients, which gave a pleasant aspect to the walk. It was a circular walk, but the path changed direction every few hundred yards, which meant for the most part you couldn’t see what was coming next.

Barkway, main street: the historic centre

After the wood, back to a new development at the southern end of Barkway, where the footpath was hemmed in by tall fences on either side making sure the new houses could not be viewed by any of the walkers. Then back to the main street, the school, some almshouses, a village pond, and to the start. 

How could you sum up such a village? A great walk, a lovely wood, a recreation ground. No shops. Expensive cars. Land organised around shooting. Which of these represented Barkway? A bit of all of these?  

Sullivan's Impossible Travels

 

Sullivan and his butler

What an astonishing film! It reaches heights (and, to be true, depths) that other movies don’t approach. Always watchable, the story lurches between starkly opposing genres and tones, and never successfully resolves them. There are at least three different genres contained within the film:

o   A smart Hollywood comedy of manners, much like Sturges’ earlier The Lady Eve; a cast full of gifted character actors (an English butler, two film studio bosses, a would-be film actress)

o   social issues, just a few glimpses of what must have been common sights: a night camp for the homeless; hundreds of tramps  running to join a freight train; a church with a singing pastor, accompanying the congregation

o   Slapstick humour, from silent film comedies, as when the car Sullivan hitches a lift in goes at top speed with the motorhome behind it trying to keep up and causing chaos in the motorhome galley

How the three ever manage to come together is difficult to imagine. Any other film would have collapsed with just two of these themes. Let’s look at what works, and what doesn’t: 

The conversation scenes between Sullivan and his entourage: his two butlers, who severely remind him that trying to see the poor is a foolish activity;

The wonderful dialogue between Veronica Lake as a would-be actress buying a cup of coffee for what she thinks is a hobo (“Can you get me an introduction to Lubitsch”?

Most unexpectedly, a few magical minutes where a pastor in a black church asks his congregation not to look down on the prisoners coming to watch a movie. To the best of my knowledge this is one of the very few moments of pre-1960s Hollywood in which a black actor appears in a part that is not clearly subservient and demeaning. He sings a song with his congregation, and they all watch a Disney film together.

Joel McCrea is that strange phenomenon, a leading male who is just a shade too mundane and ordinary-looking to be a perfect romantic lead like Cary Grant. But in this film he is perfect as the idealistic, well-meaning but rather ineffectual film director who believes he should get more experience of real life. He is tall and handsome, so we feel confident he will not suffer too much in the real world, but in any case he is surrounded by an entourage of people who give him constant advice and shield him from the everyday.

These were the successes. What about the failures?

Veronica Lake (playing a part without a name, just “the girl”) has a moment of magic in her first scene. She doesn’t know who Sullivan is; he is just someone down on his luck. She buys him coffee (it’s the last thing she buys him) and for a moment they converse as equals. But within a few minutes the truth emerges; he is a fabulously wealthy film director, and her attitude changes. She herself recognizes the change: 

The girl: “You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!'”

 That’s typical of this film, which is both bravely commenting on but enslaved by the social system of its day. Later in the film, she is desperately trying to tag along with him; she has become subservient and dutiful. 

The whole premiss of the film is compromised in the same way. Sturges’ aim in this film is stated in the first scene – and immediately knocked down, just as Sturges probably was by his own studio bosses:

Sullivan: “I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man.”

            Lebrand: “But with a little sex in it.”

As fast as we reach a serious message, it is undercut by knockabout comedy (a car chase, or people being pushed into a swimming pool) and the movie loses all its taut energy. Not entirely vapid, because it is almost always redeemed by the sparkling script that holds you spellbound by its wit and readiness to talk about things never before mentioned in Hollywood: 

Policeman at Beverly Hills station: How does the girl fit into the picture?

John L. Sullivan: There's always a girl in the picture. What's the matter, don't you go to the movies?

Finally, the film collapses (as you suspected it might) because Sturges can’t resist hammering home his message. For a few magic seconds, we see a church full of people laughing their heads off at a Disney cartoon; but nobody in the congregation laughs at the prisoners being given a treat at the same time in the same place. Even Sullivan laughs. For a few seconds, the movie has respect for others, and is profoundly moving. But then the skilled film-making disappears as Sullivan spells out the message, as if we weren’t capable of seeing for ourselves:

Sullivan:  There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.

 Forget any condemnation of the crazy excessive wealth of the studios and stars, or the system that creates such stark contrast of wealth and poverty. It’s all about laughter.

The Searchers

You would imagine a famous film, regularly voted one of the best films of all time, would not cause gratuitous offence. But The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) certainly does that.

The character of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is guaranteed to offend. From his first appearance on screen, he says a racist remark to young Martin Pawley, who has some Indian blood in him – something that in Ethan Edwards’ eyes makes him less than human. When an innocent family is massacred by Indians and one of the daughters, Debbie, is kidnapped, Edwards vows to find her. More than five years later he finally finds her, but instead of capturing her, he tries at first to kill her. Now she is an Indian’s wife, she is no longer human either.  

For almost the entirety of the film, Edwards casts his obsessive, anti-social pall over the other characters, up to the very last moment when he turns away from a house that represents community and companionship. For many commentators, his turning away, when he has nothing left to search for, is a moving moment. For me, it exposes the limitations of the Western’s moral universe. 

Characters like Ethan Edwards are common in modern literature. He has much in common with Esteban Trueba in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Like Alan Ladd in Shane, Ethan Edwards arrives from nowhere, and disappears into nowhere. But unlike Shane, Ethan Edwards could never belong in a community, not even for a moment. There is a wonderful moment in Shane where Ladd joins in an activity: a tree stump has to be removed, and it has proved impossible for Van Heflin, the small-scale farmer, to get it out of the ground. For a joyous moment, Ladd joins the homesteader and the tree stump is conquered. Sadly, you could not imagine Edwards abandoning his obsession even for a moment. Such a character is deeply disturbing. It is certainly the best acting role I have seen for John Wayne, although that’s not saying much, seeing the trivial parts he was so often expected to perform.  

The Searchers is a film full of questions. It simply doesn’t add up in so many respects. The film is set in the most inhospitable desert where no farming would be possible, yet we are expected to believe a farmer and his family live there. We see an Indian massacre and believe it appalling, but later in the film an entire Indian village is wiped out, without, it seems, any comparisons being made. Nobody asks what Wayne has been doing in the three years since the end of the Civil War. Nobody asks what Wayne is going to do as he heads away at the end of the film. There is nothing civilised he can do. This is a film that celebrates a sociopath; it makes you question what kind of person John Ford, the director, was. Is this the kind of film you would watch for entertainment? Hardly. It ranks with Taxi Driver, for moral unease, in that you initially enjoy the excitement of the shooting, but then you realise it has left a bad taste in your mouth.