Jean Renoir | La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion) / 1937, USA 1938

a world of the dead

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak (screenplay), Jean Renoir (director) La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion) / 1937, USA 1938

Seeing Grand Illusion the other day upon the large screen of Los Angeles' Laemmle's Royal Theatre, I perceived this film in a new way than I had watched it as a young student years before.  In the interim, I had attempted to view an old VCR tape, but the quality was so washed out that the subtitles were impossible to read and it was painful even to the eyes. This 1999 restoration was, in every way, a revelation.

     If I had originally perceived this film as an almost comical anti-war statement from the great film director, this time around, provoked by comments from my companion, Howard, I realized that despite the film's international admiration, it is a work that is not entirely self-contained, that particularly for the young without a strong sense of history, its meaning might be blurred. Despite what we generally know about the savagery of the first modern war of the 20th century, Renoir's work depicts the wartime situations from the strange vantage point of various German prisons for officers in which, although we are shown some deprivations and the utter boredom of prison life, for the most part the officers from various countries—although Renoir focuses primarily on the French—are treated relatively humanely, particularly when they are transferred to Wintersborn prison under the command of Rittmeister von Rauffenstein (the imperious Erich Von Stroheim). Indeed, in some respects, given the hefty food packets received from home by Lieutenant Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), their gastronomical condition is far better than the Germans, who survive primarily on cabbage. Yes, they are all prisoners, forced at times to endure painful punishments, but they are given liberties not even conceived of in Billy Wilder's World War II encampment of Stalag 17, which, along with numerous other films, owes much to Renoir's 1937 work. Although there are certainly outbreaks of anger and even violence between the various prisoners and their captors, Renoir's work has none of the front-line futility of a film like All Quiet on the Western Front of seven years before.

     Even the film's final escape into German territory, where the two survivors, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal are forced to cohabit a small cottage with a widowed German farm woman (Dita Parlo) and her daughter, is presented as almost idyllic, and the two men's final escape into Switzerland is greeted with respect and appreciation by the German soldiers attempting to track them down.

     In short, one might ask, what is this film, so obviously cinemagraphically well-conceived, really about? War, at least from Renoir's perspective, is certainly not hell and, at times is even lauded, particularly by the aristocratic career officers, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and von Rauffenstein. Even if we take Renoir's own statement that his film is "a story about human relationships" that demonstrates that the commonality of mankind is far more important than political divisions, Grand Illusion seems, at first sight, a timid statement of pacificism.

     The film's seeming relativism, moreover, seems even more strange given the movie's date, 1937. Although World War II, if one ignores the Japanese-Chinese War already raging in 1937, is generally dated as beginning in 1939, there was no question at the time of the work's filming that Europe was moving in the direction of another violent encounter between countries. Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany four years earlier, the Italian Fascist party under Benito Mussolini had seized power nearly a decade before. France had allowed Italy to conquer Ethiopia and in 1935 the Territory of the Saar Basin was reunited with Germany, repudiating the Treaty of Versailles. In return for Germany's support of their Ethiopian invasion, Italy dropped their objection to Germany's desire to absorb Austria. By 1937, almost anyone except perhaps for British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, would have recognized that the whole continent was again about to explode into war.

     Renoir's gentlemanly depiction of the previous war's prison camps, accordingly, seems almost cowardly in retrospect. Yet, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels named Grand Illusion "Cinematic Public Enemy No. I," ordering all prints to be confiscated. The French authorities banned the film in 1940 for "as long as the war should last." When the German Army marched into France that same year, the Nazis seized every print and negative of the film for its ideological criticisms of Germany. What are we today missing in that picture?

      In part, it is simply Renoir's great sense of irony that has been lost. For years now I have maintained that irony has disappeared in the young, to be replaced instead with satire or camp exaggeration. A long tale told through vignettes that subtly play out a conflicted statement is perhaps hard to comprehend in a time of pastiche.

     Let me attempt to explain Renoir's masterwork by suggesting that the world it portrays was recognized by most intelligent viewers of the time as a world that had long before been destroyed, that the characters of Grand Illusion existed, at the time of the film's making, in a world of the dead. Accordingly, all their values, whether fascistic or humane, were "grand illusions," visions of a world that would be destroyed by the war in which they were engaged. By moving us away from the front lines, removing us from the playing fields, so to speak—and Renoir's work is very much one about the relationship of soldiers and children at play (consider Captain de Boeldieu's statement: "Out there, children play soldier...In here, soldiers play like children.")—we can more vividly see the delusions of all concerned.

     The most obvious of those delusions is the absurdity of class, the belief, encapsulated in both Captain de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein, that in their aristocratic commitment to their military world, that they stood somehow apart and superior to the political divisions which they were ordered to impose. Having just finished reading Joseph Roth's wonderful fiction, Radetsky March, a few weeks before seeing Grand Illusion, I am struck by the parallel conclusions of Roth's and Renoir's visions. If nothing else, World War I completely shattered the smug contentions of moral superiority embedded in militaristic nations such as Germany, Austria, and even France. As grand as these gentleman officers might have perceived their world, it was they who brought war into existence and it was they, as a class, who were most obliterated by their involvement. The only difference between de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein, is that the former comprehends that he represents a world of the past to be replaced by the working class officers like Maréchal and outsiders such as the Jewish Rosenthal, while the survivor, Rauffenstein, lives on as a kind of mad Frankenstein, his body made up of metal and wood, much of his blood and bones having been destroyed in battle after battle. But even von Rauffenstein knows what lies ahead: "Believe me, I don't know who is going to win this war, but whoever it is it will be the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus."

      Sacrificing his life to what he perceives is a new future, de Boeldieu finds a more graceful "way out," playing the clown as he runs up and down the castle staircases, flute in hand, cigarette in his mouth, to serve as decoy for his escaping soldiers. Although he is described as a "regular guy" by Rosenthal (whose family is nouveau riche), Maréchal comprehends throughout that the Captain is a man apart, a remnant of a world that has been an illusion all along, a world shared by von Rauffenstein of the belle epoque, represented in the film by the Paris restaurant Maxims, Frou-Frou, and woman they both loved.

      Yet, Renoir does not stop here in revealing his characters' personal illusions or delusions. War has already made them comprehend numerous realities that they had previously not conceived. For most of them, their wives back in France have taken up with other men, and their own sexualities, once so completely defined, have come into some question. One of the most touching moments in the film is the arrival of theater costumes, women's dresses, by which the men, who will soon don them for the joy of entertainment, are amazed given their short length and their silky textures, changes in styles since they have left home. As one young man puts on a dress and wig, the others stare, jaws locked in wonderment: for them he is clearly the reincarnation of womanhood, the stunning object of their desires. Renoir goes no further in this revelation of gender transformation, but we, as perceptive theater-goers, comprehend its significance. And for the prisoners Renoir makes clear the importance of the drag show, which motivates nearly all of his characters, and ultimately becomes a central activity given it is the route the film takes for the major characters’ escapes. If life has become an illusion, so too has sex and sexual identity itself.

     If class differences seem to have truly been obliterated, racial, religious and social differences are still very much alive, as, fed up with each other, the escapees, Maréchal and Rosenthal, suddenly turn on one another, hurling epithets that no longer have meaning. They reunite, but the pain of those abuses never quite heals.

    Renoir's gentle German farm woman, Elsa, is only too pleased to invite the two invaders into her home; after all, her own husband and brothers have been already killed in the war, in the horrible battlegrounds—Verdun, Liège, Charleroi, and Tannenberg from which Renoir has kept his audience—and she is lonely.

    Although Maréchal may be the better lover, bedding Elsa soon after their arrival, Rosenthal is the better father, a man who talks with and even educates her young daughter, going so far as to create a Christmas crèche for the child, an act that goes against his faith. Both delude themselves in their short stay in paradise, that they might return for Elsa and the child, bringing her and Lotte of "blaue augen"—the dominant symbol of Hitler's pure German—back to France after the war. As Maréchal expresses his hope that this war will be end of all wars, Rosenthal argues that such thinking is another "illusion."

    Although they both escape into Switzerland, the last few images are of them attempting to move forward as their feet become entrenched in the deep snow. And we recognize, as Renoir certainly did in 1937, that in the world to which they return, if they make it, they once more will be conceived of as a "rough" mechanic and a "rotten" Jew; certainly Rosenthal might not have survived what came after. In an early version of the script, Rosenthal and Maréchal, near film's end, agree to meet in a restaurant at the end of the war, with the final scene, celebrating the armistice, showing two empty chairs at a table.

    In short, what may have appeared as a gentlemanly world based on codes of honor, valor, and trust, are just as destructive, so Renoir suggests, as the bombs and gas in the trenches at battle's front, offering no more hope for the future than a bullet to the heart.

 

Los Angeles, May 24, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2012).

Mitchell Leisen | Easy Living / 1937

innocents lost in a cynical society

by Douglas Messerli

 

Preston Sturges (screenplay, based on a story by Vera Caspary), Mitchell Leisen (director) Easy Living / 1937

 

Gay film director Mitchell Leisen began his career as a costume designer, dressing the likes of Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Natacha Rambova, Douglas Fairbanks, and many others. He then moved on, through working with Cecil B. DeMille, to become a notable set designer, including devising the look, as critic Cláudio Alves describes it, “of such opulent productions as the deliriously vulgar Madam Satan and the orgiastic hedonism of The Sign of the Cross. Had he been working primarily in the pre-Hays Code days before 1934, Alves wonders “what lewd camp spectacles he would have created otherwise.”

     His transformation into a director was rather by accident, but also emanated from the belief that perhaps the facile and multi-talented Leisen could do anything. New to film, Broadway director Stuart Walker was hired to direct a couple of films, the studio heads hiring on Leisen as co-director. Leisen, in fact, almost took over those productions for the inexperienced Walker. And soon after, he was given a chance to helm his own production with Cradle Song (1933) staring actor Leontine Sagan of the earlier lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform.

      In 1934, he directed Death Takes a Holiday and by 1937 had moved on to the screwball comedy under discussion in this essay, a work with a script by later director Preston Sturges. Alves suggests some of the reasons why Sturges ended up most unhappy with Leisen’s direction and points to a series of comments from Sturges, Billy Wilder, and others that for years helped to disparage and led critics and audiences to ignore Leisen’s rather remarkable directorial abilities.

 

“While scripted by Preston Sturges, Easy Living's less hurried and more sincere than any of that man's brilliant directorial efforts. Unfortunately, the future maker of The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels didn't enjoy the edits Leisen did to his work, the streamlining of plot points, the pruning of excisable minor characters.

     Preston Sturges, who wrote other films by Leisen including Remember the Night, would call him ‘an interior decorator who couldn't direct,’ more interested in frocks than good screenwriting. He went so far as to name the director as one of the people whose incompetence made him want to direct his own scripts. Unfortunately for Leisen, Sturges wasn't the only one who felt this way. As the war years approached, Paramount assigned some scripts by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett to Leisen, starting a tumultuous partnership that left no one happy. When David Chierichetti wrote Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director, he interviewed several people who had worked with the man, including Wilder. He had this to say: ‘All he did was he fucked up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you. Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don't knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen's problem was that he was a stupid fairy.’"

     As Alves puts it, “One need not be a genius to read homophobia in Wilder's words or Sturges' pithy comments.”

     In many respects, Leisen was of an earlier generation, a romantic closer to someone like Ernst Lubitsch—who Mary Pickford had earlier described as a “director of doors”—than to the cynical cleverness and frenetic paced films of Sturges and Wilder. Yet while Leisen believed in the basic goodness of even his so-called villains (death included), his films nonetheless seldom demonstrate the open sentimentalism of some of Sturges’ works which, at moments, particularly in Sullivan’s Travels, but also in Hail the Conquering Hero veer dangerously close to Frank Capra territory. And although he certainly did encourage his art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté to come up with grand interiors for the film’s grand mansion and the Louis hotel room, he also wasn’t afraid to fall back on the pie-throwing, prat-falling antics of the silent film days, which also helps further ground this screwball comedy in the Depression even more so that Gregory La Cava’s more sophisticated work, My Man Godfrey (1936), with which Easy Living is often compared.

     And despite Sturges’ slightly homophobic comments, one might argue that, at heart, his script is a kind of “fairy tale,” beginning when an ordinary working girl, Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), riding on the top level of a double-decked bus is suddenly buried under the riches ($58,000 to be exact) of a sable coat which financier and banker J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold) is furious to find his wife has just purchased, despite a closet full of other fur coats.

      Playing something like hide and seek with his wife Jenny (Mary Nash), Ball finally catches her and the coat, tossing off the balcony of the penthouse, an action which ends in his wife immediately leaving Florida.

       Mary, on her way to work at the Boys’ Constant Companion, is so honest that she is willing to be late to find the owner of the coat, who, as she begins to go door-to-door in the row of wealthy townhouses by which the bus was passing, she quickly meets up with as he leaves the building on his way to work. He not only insists his chauffeur take her to work, but that they stop by a milliner to get her a new hat to replace the one destroyed by the coat. The coat is also hers to keep, he insists, she totally confused by the gesture, but not knowing its real worth or his identity, finds his generosity impossible to refuse.

       Evidently the dour folk overseeing the boys’ magazine are not able to see the humor of the situation, and fire Mary Smith for ostentatious behavior and lying, even as she speaks the truth. No one wears such a coat, in their prurient minds, without something naughty going on. One might wonder whether one should have wanted one’s boys to have such constant companions.

       The milliner, Van Buren (Franklin Pangborn), however, is not only perfectly aware the price of such an expensive coat, but is delighted when Ball choses one of the most fashionable of their hats, and recognizes Ball’s name when he presents his card for the billing, rushing out into the street to tell his friend Louis. 

        How Leisen ever got Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA)—who in 1933 had banned all pansies from films, and was a stickler about all sorts of issues that arise in Easy Living—to approve the prissy gossip which Van Buren represents is something I still need explaining—let alone how the board could ignore hotelier Louis Louis’ (Luis Alberni) spooner-like contortions of the English language such as, “I'm a man like this, I don't beat around de bush to come in the back door. I tell you, this is where you belong and this is where you have to be.”

      True, in this role Pangborn is perhaps prissier than he is sissier, but it comes down to the same thing, even if his doesn’t use as many hand gestures or sashay through any doors, it’s quite clear that he’s a swish, as so many dress and hat designers were represented to be in the pre-Code days. Perhaps he was one of the “excisable minor characters” who got some pruning, but his role here is still far more substantial than sissies were generally permitted in the early 1930s. Here he is not only the source of the gossip about Mary being Ball’s mistress, but in passing his interpretation of events on to Louis and others, he later becomes involved with further visits to Mary’s hotel suite, permitting for the first time in years a sissy to actually become a central player in the story. At one point he enters Mary’s suite with a handful of so many dresses and hats it appears that he is himself attired in the female costumes.

      In short, he serves the purpose in this film of the Mercury who reports to others what Hitchcock calls the McGuffin, the event that sets the entire plot in motion and keeps it rolling almost until the end of film. His “queer” reading of the situation and his sharing that piece of news with Louis, whose empty grand Louis hotel (based on the Waldorf apparently, which when it first opened could find no customers to fill it) is in debt to J. B. Ball who is prepared to foreclose, upends the lives of all the film’s central characters. If Louis can get Mary into his finest hotel suite, how can Ball close him down?

      And when Louis, in turn, passes the news on to the gossip columnist Wallace Whistling (William Demarest) that Ball’s mistress is now living in his hotel and that Ball (again quite by accident) has chosen to stay for night in the hotel, his actions further result in Mary suddenly being offered an automobile, jewels, and an entire wardrobe—proving the Depression-era adage that financial gains are awarded only to those thought to be privileged, never to those who were most need them.

      In fact, Mary demurs regarding almost all these lavish offerings, but the givers are so insistent and Arthur’s character is presented as so wonderfully clueless and overwhelmed by the magnificent presents that she cannot resist, and she ends up somewhat flustered with a world of possessions she has no need of. What she most needs early on in this film is simply something to eat. She now has a glorious place in which to sleep, but with only a few nickels she’s stolen from her piggy bank, she has nothing to put into her belly. Even at the local automat she can afford only a piece of pie.

     It is there, by the Dickensian coincidence of all such comic plots, that she meets John Ball, Jr. (Ray Milland), who in one of the first scenes of the film has become so frustrated with his father’s over-protecting financial control of his life, that he has determined to leave the house and find a job. He now works as a busboy in the automat, and is so taken by the poor girl in a sable coat that he attempts to obtain free food for her by pushing open the automated doors, a comic device that will appear over the years in numerous other films such as That Touch of Mink with Doris Day and Cary Grant (1962). Here, John junior is immediately found out and caught, but in an attempt to outrace his arresting pursuer—much like his mother’s race throughout the house that morning with his father on the chase—total chaos consumes their universe, eventually through the struggle opening up all the automated food slots and, after a diner shouts “free food” to the people in the street, ends up in a food fight where everyone is eventually engulphed in consumables on the automat’s floor.

 

     Only John and Mary escape, Mary asking whether he has somewhere to sleep the night, and inviting him up to her palatial hotel room. Once again, the Hays board seems more than bountiful in allowing them to spend the night together, permitted perhaps through Leisen’s clever architectural arrangement of a bedroom couch where they lay together in opposite directions toe to head. But that doesn’t mean they first don’t share a bath, in this case a huge conch-shell construction for which they cannot even figure out how to turn on the water, achieving the fountain’s effects only by accident while being fully clothed.

       Given everyone’s mistaken perception that J. B. Ball, staying, again by coincidence, in the hotel, has shared the night in Mary’s room, and the fact that his son really has spent the night there, one might argue that Easy Living is one of the raciest movies that has even gotten through the Hays Code restrictions without notable cuts. 

       To add to the general confusion of the central figures, who know nothing of the numerous scandals in which they’re involved—and applauded for—an investment broker sneaks up to the suite to see if she might be able to find out from the Bull of Wall Street via his mistress if steel is going up or down. When Mary asks her own “Ball,” he offhandedly jokes that since it’s going to rain, it’s going down. So the couple unknowingly send the market for steel into a plunge at the very moment that J. B. is buying, certain the price is on its way up.

       The disaster finally ends in his temporary financial ruination, in Mary being tossed out of the hotel, and in John discovering that the sable upon his now beloved Mary was given to her by her father. By the time they reach J. B. to resolve the crisis, he has reached such a fever pitch that all he can do is shout, which does indeed so dominate the other busy comings and goings and smaller gags that it truly results in some displeasure as noted by several commentators.

      The return of his wife finally quiets J. B. down somewhat, and Mary’s arrival finally convinces them that the only way out of the predicament is to have her call back the stock broker and report that J. B. now says steel is going up. It works, providing enough joy to permit all these loving innocents to explain whatever needs explaining, which is practically everything since everyone has imagined the worst. All of them being innocent and clueless at heart—even the bull-headed J. B.—is what makes Leisen’s film so pleasurably different from Sturges’ later films where, in fact, the beloved innocents are really found to be truly guilty. Which explains, perhaps, why there is something giddy, if not gay, about all of Leissen’s motion pictures.

       In his review on Zekefilm, Justin Mory very nicely summarizes Leisen’s ability to marry the high and the low, humor and drama, art and slapstick in this film:

 

“In all, balancing the sharp edges of the script with a seasoning dash of romanticism, Easy Living remains 1930’s entertainment at its zenith, with keen intelligence and lowbrow humor often co-existing in the same scene. And while one might assume this comic synthesis derived exclusively from the involvement of Preston Sturges at the scripting level, who later joined slapstick and satire to masterful effect in the high society nonsense depicted in, say, 1941’s Lady Eve, one of the most surprising revelations in….Kat Ellinger’s audio commentary [to the film] is that director Leisen himself developed the malfunctioning Automat food riot that ends up being one of the simultaneously broadest and breadlines-era incisive scenes in the film. Precisely the sort of thing Sturges might have dreamed up himself had it occurred to him first. ….A viewer today finds a perfect fusion of artistic sensibilities in Easy Living despite the later comic director’s dismissal of his earlier artistic collaborator….”

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Archie Mayo | It’s Love I’m After / 1937

standing by his man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on Gentlemen After Midnight by Maurice Hanline), Archie Mayo (director) It’s Love I’m After / 1937

In the tradition of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, and William A. Wellman’s Nothing Sacred, the 1937 film It’s Love I’m After is a splendid example of the US screwball comedy. The reason you may not have heard of the last one is that its director, Archie Mayo, directed dozens of interesting films but seldom managed a truly significant work, unless you want to include his somewhat stultified version of the stage play The Petrified Forest (1936) or the soap-operaish Four Sons (1940). Despite often wonderful casts—in this instance Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—Mayo simply didn’t have the golden touch, relying more on stock situations and involuted plots than focusing on the talents at hand.

       In It’s Love he’s forced to rely mainly on dialogue from old melodramas and melodramatic renditions of Shakespeare’s plays, which actually works well for Howard playing a comic ham actor and veteran womanizer Basil Underwood in a deeply committed love/hate relationship with fellow thespian Joyce Arden (Davis) who is given the opportunity to let loose with every angry invective she might ever have wanted to as Margo Channing in her later film All About Eve. A young, 21-year-old de Havilland, in only her third year of making movies, gets to play the impetuous lover that Carole Lombard perfected (Lombard was in two of the films I name above), and, working quite against character, does a credible job when the mad duet of Howard and Davis aren’t tossing barbs at one another. But more than the splendid acting of these three professionals, Mayo this around had a special treat for his audiences: Eric Blore playing the role he plays best, the intimate and impertinent gentlemen’s dresser and personal confident, in this case named Digges.

        In fact, nearly all the real humor of this work derives from his dialogue with his employer Howard. So I’ll quickly kill off the rest of the plot to get to the heart of his LGBTQ gem by summarizing. Basil loves Joyce, but they are actors who spend their entire time together battling out their love through the melodramatic gestures and sentiments of the dramas in which they perform, allowing little time in between to kiss, make up, and promise to get married, the latter of which they nonetheless have, as Digges puts it, come to the “precipice” of twelve times. Presumably they’ll never actually marry, nor really make up, but will wake up one day realizing that they have all along been a couple truly in love, despite Basil’s dozens of tawdry affairs, of which he forces Digges to keep count, weighing them against any good deeds he accidently accomplishes; he remains always in the negative according to Digges faithful tallying up of the scores.

        Yet this quarreling couple, a cleverer Punch and Judy might have lived on in perfect stasis had not the young romantic dreamer Marcia West (de Havilland) happened to see Basil in his tights playing Hamlet. Although she’s engaged to be married to a perfectly nice young man, Henry Grant, Jr. (Patric Knowles), the problem, as her aunt Ella Paisley (Spring Byington) puts it, is that there is no problem with Henry who is, after all, perfectly nice; and the perfectly nice girl suddenly wants a little nastiness in her life.

        A quick visit by Marcia to Basil’s after-show dressing room does nothing but rouse her girlish instability, forcing the foolhardy Henry to seek a solution to a problem that might have resolved in a few days—after all, as Marcia later puts it to Basil, “I was in love with Clark Gable last year, and if I could get over him, it's a cinch I could get over you.”—if he’d not insisted that Basil visit Marcia and her family, playing such a cad that she will be cured of her romance, the plot of one of his most successful plays.

        Inevitably, just the opposite occurs: the more he demeans her, the more she adjusts to the situation and falls even more fervently in love, until Basil ponders:  “I say, Digges, you don't suppose I've aroused her slap-me-again-I-love-it complex?”—something like the behavior I bemoaned recently in my discussion of the 1925 film My Lady of Whims. Whatever her condition, she so insistently maintains her innocent adulation of the actor that even he becomes confused, wondering, when looking into the dreamy eyes of this fresh young person, if he might shift his role to that of ardent lover instead of the blaggard, at which point Digges has no choice but to call his regular savior, Joyce Arden herself. Yet this time out of anger she only further confuses the mess into which her lover’s got by pretending to Marcia to be his wife realizing that she must give him up to his greater happiness. Meanwhile, reminding Basil that with Marcia he will have “love in morning, love for lunch, and love for dinner,” she awakens him to a terrifying fate of freedom from Joyce’s venomous bites.

       But, of course, everything eventually works out, with the very nice girl going off her very nice beau, and the loving couple spitting out the hate for one another happily ever after.

       In between and before, and surely later, we have the real heart of the story, the love—with either the audience or the character actually realizing it—Basil is truly “always after”: that of his constant companion Digges. Even if by this time Joseph Breen and the Hays Code had blackballed pansies, they somehow left Eric Blore behind to look after men like Howard’s Basil Underwood and Edward Everett Horton’s Horace Hardwick. who always seem to prefer his company to the women they are supposedly busy chasing. Whether he be named Digges, Bates, or Cecil he whistles out his sibilants to include the nominative of the possessive pronoun “we,” a communal utterance which marries the men he dresses to himself more thoroughly than any marriage vow might. 

        Mayo visually established the hierarchy of Basil’s relationships with Digges and Joyce quite early in the film, with both simultaneously observing Marcia leaving Basil’s dressing room. Bigges stands next to Basil in the foreground, while his fellow actress and lover Joyce stands behind, having just left her own dressing room on the way to visit Basil.

        Throughout this film and so many others, Blore as Digges, in this case, reassures his permanent companion time again not only that he stands by him—

 

Basil Underwood: Down in the street below, a great carnival of people... happy together. And up here, one man, miserably alone.

Digges: I'm here, sir.

Basil Underwood: Oh, you're always here, Digges.

Digges: Yes, I thank you, sir.

 

—and that he truly loves him.

 

Basil Underwood: Digges, why is it no one loves me?

Digges: But I love you, sir.

Basil Underwood: Don't confuse the issue. Am I really such a bad fellow as she thinks?

Digges: Oh, please, sir. Don't let's go into that now.

Basil Underwood: There's loyalty for you. Alone in the city.

 

    At another point when Basil questions his loyalty to Joyce, wondering aloud if he hasn’t made his love clear, Digges interceding with the phrase: “Not unless you’ve been cheating on me sir,” the me being the indeterminate pronoun whose identity the dresser always assumes.

    In their constant acting out of scenes, Digges time and again plays the female to Basil’s male leads, “The girl from Venice enters. “Kiss me!”

    Once ensconced in the West estate, Digges reads Basil his daily letters from his female fans, which when Marcia’s naughty little sister Gracie (Bonita Granville)—clearly a cousin to Tracy’s Lord’s sister Dinah in The Philadelphia Story—overhears by listening through the keyhole, she naturally assumes they are speaking of their love for one another, describing them very much as they truly are to her pedestrian family members:

 

Gracie Kane: ...there's a couple of crazy men in the room next to me.

Mrs. Kane: How do you know?

Gracie Kane: Oh, I peeked through the keyhole. I always do. It's very educational.

 

     I’m sure it is. If nothing else, it’s significant that such men also always share their rooms with their dresser, sometimes even living in different suites apart from the women to whom they are supposed to be in love or to whom they are married. Even on the precipice of heterosexual marriage, Digges toasts “Well here’s to our wedding!” And the puns of their conjugal relationship go rolling through the films with no one to deny or dispel their suggested meanings. Even when the story gets a bit repetitive or boring, we will always have Blore to straighten our ties, pack our suitcases, and take care that we behave as such gentlemen are wont to behave.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).