Walking the Line

We were a family. How'd it break up and come apart, so that now we're turned against each other? Each standing in the other's light. How'd we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What's keepin' us from reaching out, touching the glory? 

—Pvt. Witt (in voice-over), The Thin Red Line

It’s difficult to do justice to the works of filmmaker Terrence Malick. How can one begin to describe in words, let alone analyze, what can only be grasped in a cinematic experience, and sometimes only fleetingly or partially at that? It would take a book to adequately explore all five of Malick’s films, each of which is as enigmatic as the J.D. Salinger-like director himself. If we limit ourselves to a more manageable number, like, say, one—then which one do we choose? Beginning with Days of Heaven, his second feature, up through The Tree of Life, all are of a piece, steps in the forward progression of Malick’s apparent search for the presence of God in nature, in the universe.

The sublime The Thin Red Line, unjustly overshadowed at the time of its release in 1998 (though nominated for the Best Picture Oscar) by Steven Spielberg’s war-film-by-the-numbers, Saving Private Ryan, finally received the home video treatment it richly deserved last year, courtesy of The Criterion Collection. So let’s go with that one.  

In the years since its release, The Thin Red Line has come to be considered one of the best War movies ever made, but it’s an injustice to pigeonhole it into any one genre. Malick deals in the profound, and in Red Line, as in Days of Heaven, The New World, and The Tree of Life, he reflects on the entry of sin—of the Cain slew Abel variety—into Eden, and the ensuing desecration and devastation. While showing many of the gritty, gruesomely disturbing realities of war, both mental and physical, he nevertheless detaches the viewer to a certain degree by employing a point of view that’s simultaneously omniscient and intensely personal. Screenwriter-director Malick, who studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and taught it at MIT, allows us to hear the innermost thoughts of several individual characters while giving us a more serene overview of the whole, the Steinbeckian “one big soul,” and the indifferent but breathtakingly beautiful natural world in which it exists, as we hover over these men who are dealing the best they can with being in harm’s way. It recalls not so much John Ford’s They Were Expendable—another brilliant, fundamentally serene and reflective film about the sacrifices of war—as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. It is perhaps even more closely related to The Human Comedy, a World War II picture set on the American home front, which examines with a patient, empathetic, all-seeing eye the lives, deaths and longings of the people of a small town affected by the war. In it, as in Red Line, death is everywhere, and is ultimately embraced.

Malick has a distinct advantage over his precursors in spirit who worked within Hollywood’s old studio system. Nowadays, independent-thinking directors are highly regarded in many circles, practically worshipped in others; “indies” have been given their own film festivals, even their own cable TV channel, which makes walking the thin green line between commercial success and art for art’s sake a relatively common occurrence. Not so back in the days of maverick auteurs like Ford, Orson Welles, and a few others, when original thinkers had to bring their visions to fruition within the confining structure of the system, packaging their art in the guise of entertainment, pleasing to not only bottom-line-eying executives, but to the lowest common denominator of the paying public. Directors, like actors, were under contract to the movie moguls, if they wanted to work at all, and they had to meet quotas stipulated therein.  

The notoriously reclusive Malick, by contrast, had made only two films in twenty-five years at the time of Red Line. Yet his reputation, based not only on the strength of those two transcendent works (Badlands and Days of Heaven), but nearly as much on his elusiveness, had Hollywood A-Listers lining up to work with him, even if it meant only a bit part. Nick Nolte, John Travolta, George Clooney, John Cusack, Sean Penn, and Woody Harrelson all appear in Red Line, willingly occupying widely varying amounts of screen time.  Penn reportedly told Malick, regarding his salary, “Give me a dollar and tell me where to show up.” Scenes with Martin Sheen (Badlands’ co-star, with Sissy Spacek), Bill Pullman, Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patrick, Mickey Rourke, and Gary Oldman were cut from the finished film, while Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Kevin Costner, and Johnny Depp all either took part in readings, were auditioned, or met with the director to discuss prospective roles in Red Line.

James Caviezel in The Thin Red Line.

When all was said and done, relative unknowns Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin were given the lion’s share of substantive screen time, and their voice-overs—which provide the primary stream of consciousness the film navigates—are the most deeply compelling. Both actors were more than up to the task, and proved to be wise choices for the linchpin roles, as known entities’ celebrity likely would have distracted viewers. Nick Nolte, on the other hand, who was certainly a well-known star, utterly transcends his celebrity and gives the bravura performance of his life as an aging Colonel, passed over when more than a few promotions were handed out, who sees a victory at the Battle of Guadalcanal (the historic event that is the ostensible focal point of the film, and the James Jones novel on which it is based) as the opportunity of a lifetime, no matter how many lives it may cost. 

Malick’s cache also earned him seeming carte blanche with producer Bobby Geisler, Pioneer Films, Phoenix Pictures, and 20^th Century Fox, all eager to cash in on his magic touch as they backed his painstaking, laborious, and expensive process of researching and adapting a screenplay, and scouting locations in Central America and the South Pacific.

The importance of cinematography and music in Malick’s films is immeasurable, as they preside over most of the frequent interludes and passages that have no dialogue as completely as would a strong, fully realized main character. He utilized to full capacity the considerable talents of legendary directors of photography Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler in the stunning “magic hour” sequences of Days of Heaven. Lingering in the memory are such well-chosen music pieces as Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica, which features prominently in Badlands, and Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium,” from Carnival of the Animals, over Days of Heaven’s opening credits. The eminent composer Ennio Morricone provided the ethereal soundtrack music for Days of Heaven, with notable contributions from guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke. Red Line features a mesmerizing score by Hans Zimmer and John Powell, as well as such borrowed pieces as Gabriel Fauré’s celestial “Requiem in Paradisum,” Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” and a beautiful Melanesian choral chant, “God U Tekem Laef Blong Mi” which perfectly complement the lush and atmospheric cinematography of John Toll, and eloquently serve Malick's statement to Zimmer that the soundtrack music must be part of “a river leading to a destination.” 

Malick remains an enigmatic but vital force in the film world. With his current release, The Tree of Life, he continues his quest through nature, via introspection, to touch the face of God. This time around he seems to have polarized critics and audiences alike—just as Orson Welles did in 1941 with the now universally lauded Citizen Kane.  

© Jon Oye, 2011

Perfect Sounds

I’ve been an unabashed Beatles fan since I was twelve. To me, it’s simply a given that they were the single most prolific, creative, and deservedly popular musical entity of the past fifty-five years—the rock era. Their music and chemistry straddle generations—my ‘tween and teen-aged kids love the Beatles’ songs and movies as much as I did when I was their ages, maybe more. The very first song my nine-year-old loaded onto his iPod was “Octopus’s Garden.”

Their eclectic range—particularly when one bears in mind the fact that their entire recorded output was produced in about a seven-year span—is staggering. From the buoyant, irresistible sound of their early period, through their more reflective and challenging middle years, to their final, experimental, more expansive phase, it’s almost impossible to make the blanket statement, “I don’t like the Beatles’ music.” There’s too wide a breadth of styles to not find at least one album—one song—that appeals to you. In fact, I tend to get a trifle defensive when people make claims of musical superiority regarding perceived challengers to the throne, like, say, the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys. And I like the Rolling Stones—but, more or less (as Mick Jagger once described them) as a complement to the Fabs.

Not so much the Beach Boys. A few of their singles have resonated with me to varying degrees over the years, like the infectious “Help Me Rhonda,” the inarguably great “Good Vibrations,” the ebulliently wistful “Darlin',” the anthemic car song “I Get Around,” and its flipside, the transcendent “Don’t Worry Baby,” but for the most part I find their catalog singularly irritating.  The early “surfin’” tunes, which feature Mike Love at his fingernails-scraping-the-chalkboard shrillest, “Fun Fun Fun,” Beach Boys’ Party, the admittedly very good but obscenely over-played “California Girls,” that annoying, repetitive song from that annoying, obnoxious movie, Cocktail, all send tremors of nausea rumbling through my innards.

And yet, the Beach Boys made one of my favorite albums, Pet Sounds.

Oddly enough, I didn’t discover Pet Sounds until I was in my thirties. But immediately upon hearing it, some mystic chord of collective unconscious memory was struck, eliciting a wave of inexplicable, bittersweet . . . call it nostalgia, for lack of a better word, a conduit back in time to my teenage years. Somehow, the burgeoning musical genius of Brian Wilson, shut up in his room somewhere in California (and the poetic genius of ad man/lyricist Tony Asher, wherever he was), creating the preeminent musical expression of ‘60s teenage angst, longing, love, and dreams, reached out across two and a half decades and moved me. 

It arguably doesn’t possess the scope of, or cut as wide a swath of sophistication as Rubber Soul (Wilson’s creative impetus for making Pet Sounds) or Revolver, the best back-to-back rock LP releases ever—I'm speaking of the UK versions, not the US bastardizations; though it was the much-loved US RS that inspired Wilson—but it is more focused and may very well be the finest pop album ever, encompassing all the youthful hopes and fears of the pre-psychedelic, more innocent early-to-mid 1960s—before they became The Sixties. It’s an inward-looking, male version of the Ronettes, taken to the next level.

Rock “groups”—which is what bands were called in the 1960s—all began life in search of a new “sound” that would attract the attention of DJs and the hearts and minds of a newly affluent generation of teenagers and adolescents who were growing up in the economically sound post-World War II era. Pet Sounds, like the best of everything the Beatles had to offer, sounded like nothing ever had before. It wasn’t a big hit by Beach Boys standards upon its initial release, reaching number 10 on Billboard’s album charts, but its very existence was enough to drive the creatively competitive Paul McCartney to drive the Beatles to produce Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band*, by consensus the ultimate ‘60s concept album. For me, it’s Pet Sounds.

*Paul would eventually pay tribute to his second-favorite album in 1971, in the "Long Haired Lady"/"The Back Seat of My Car" song sequence that closes Ram.

The mutual admiration society meets in 2002.

Strictly speaking of course, PS isn't really a Beach Boys album. It's Brian Wilson's vision, his sweat and toil and tears, his baby—with an emphatic nod to his backing band on PS, the Wrecking Crew, Phil Spector's house band on all those classic Wall of Sound singles he produced in the early '60s, immediate ancestors of PS. Sadly, with the storied and agonizing demise of PS's follow-up, Smile, and Brian's ensuing drug-induced recession into near oblivion, the Boys soon became not much more than a glorified oldies band, a shadow of which they remain to this day. 

Like most pop culture entities—movies, TV shows, songs, and LPs—Pet Sounds is of its time. I’m sure older baby boomers who were in their teens when it was first released certainly have a stronger bond with it than I do (I was seven, and, as mentioned, was oblivious to it—though not to the Beatles, who were ubiquitous). Yet, like all entities that ultimately come to be considered classics, I imagine it continues to resonate with others who weren’t of that era, just as, say, "Rhapsody in Blue" or Casablanca or "Sing, Sing, Sing" do with many who weren't yet born when those American paradigms were introduced to the world.

I’ll leave it to the experts and musicologists to dissect each song and examine its intricacies, subtleties, and influences (which has been done ad infinitum). The best I can do to champion Pet Sounds is merely attempt to relate the effect it has had, as a whole (and Pet Sounds must be swallowed whole), on me. Besides, I don’t want to destroy the magic, or the state of near-bliss that is summoned up when I listen to this masterpiece, by putting it under a microscope. 

For what it’s worth, Pet Sounds made the number two spot in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. Number one? What else? —Sgt. Pepper. 

© Jon Oye, 2011

Critical Massiveness: Gary Giddins’ Warning Shadows

     Gary Giddins is as close to a perfect critic as we’re likely to see in our time. His style, at once easy and authoritative, is a seductive delight to read. He has an uncanny eye for detail—for the way films are shot and edited, for the subtle play of emotions on an actor’s face, for the way movies illuminate their moment and take their place in history. His patiently arrived at judgments are witty, impeccable, and, to my mind, indisputable. I’d rather read Giddins on the movies than go to most of them.

—Richard Schickel, writer, filmmaker, and film critic

I’ve always been a bit in awe of critics. Not the garden variety simpletons who slap together off-the-cuff, minimally informed, self-serving blather about an artist’s latest album or a glorified plot synopsis of a new film, but those who provide something deeper, who have studied and thoroughly understand what their subject is all about and how it applies to our world in a larger sense (if applicable), and present it in the form of memorable, inspiring prose. I’m sucked into the dizzying depths Tag Gallagher plumbs in his studies of John Ford and Leo McCarey. I’m entranced by Peter Bogdanovich’s blog. When I was younger, and (overly) enthusiastic about rock music, I would hang on every written word by the likes of Dave Marsh, Paul Nelson, and Greil Marcus, whether in Rolling Stone or Art Forum. Stranded: Rock And Roll For A Desert Island is still one of my favorite books.

At the top of the critical mass is Gary Giddins, who doesn’t only “get” jazz music, his area of well-proven expertise—he “gets” movies, too. After digesting only a few pages of his new collection of movie reviews (most of them from the recently defunct New York Sun), Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema, it becomes clear that he intimately comprehends, and has the uncanny ability to bring into focus for the reader, not only the bigger picture (which he does, breathtakingly, in the very first chapter—a stunningly astute overview of the full-circle journey of motion picture viewing since the turn of the last century), but also the diverse intricacies of genres and sub-genres, of film directors' entire oeuvres, of the basic, indefinable stuff that makes us love to watch movies, even when we're home alone.

Though best known as the long time jazz critic for the Village Voice and multiple award-winning author of several books on music (and one of the more memorable talking heads in Ken Burns' marathon documentary Jazz), Giddins revealed in an earlier anthology, Natural Selection, that prior to his gig at the Voice he was a movie reviewer, and it was a toss-up as to which direction he would opt to go in when the Greenwich paper beckoned. After a long career as the most respected jazz critic alive, it’s nice to see him spread the wealth of his erudition and come back to critiquing films. 

Actually, in Warning Shadows he focuses on DVD releases—more often than not, box sets and compilations, which provide him with the opportunity to delve into the works of time tested auteurs and much-appreciated actors and stars as well as overlooked geniuses and forgotten, would-be masterpieces. It’s both an enlightening experience and an enjoyable ride to partake of his knowledge, which is vast.

He adroitly notes, for instance, that Alfred Hitchcock has had the last laugh on his many biographers and critics by remaining the most durably popular studio-era film director in the English-speaking world, and he illuminates in two essays about the often misinterpreted and misunderstood John Ford more than some have managed in entire volumes. He makes the following observation, lost on so many, about Ford in his overview of Young Mr. Lincoln:

     (Ford’s) famously stubborn refusal to elucidate himself of his work or to admit that 

     what he did had anything to do with art honors the audience. Art implies intellect, 

     which is unequally distributed, and Ford demands emotion, which ruthlessly seeks 

     out the common denominator in us all. The implication is that if he has your heart, 

     your mind will follow, if only afterward as the justification for losing your emotional 

     grip.

Giddins writes in his piece on Noir-cum-Western-cum-Sixties Epic auteur Anthony Mann, “The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the Western, the period in which generic formulas were at once sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are reframed against classical paradigms.” In the same manner Giddins reinterprets much of what has come to be accepted (or dismissed) as cliché in classic cinema, and reframes individual films and entire bodies of work within fresh new evaluations that make you want to watch them.

Beneath the analytical surface, it's disarmingly obvious in every chapter that Giddins is an unabashed fan of cinema, and this fact, palpable in each line, makes the book an absolute joy to read, for the rest of us unabashed fans as well as the casual reader who may wish to learn more about the defining art form of the twentieth century and some of its most adept practitioners.

© Jon Oye, 2011

John Ford Prints the Legend: My Darling Clementine

Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine.

In 1966, John Ford told film critic and fledgling director Peter Bogdanovich that he had known Wyatt Earp back in the early days of Hollywood, when the aging former marshal of Dodge City and Tombstone would visit the sets of the silent Westerns Ford then worked on as a prop boy. “I used to give him a chair and a cup of coffee,” Ford said, “and he told me about the fight at the O.K. Corral. So in My Darling Clementine we did it exactly the way it had been.”

Ford did know Wyatt Earp, who no doubt told him some version of what took place during the infamous gunfight, but history tells us that the shootout, as portrayed in Clementine, was not the way it actually happened. Of course, it doesn’t matter. As the newspaperman told Senator Ransom Stoddard in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

My Darling Clementine is arguably the best Western by the best director of Westerns in the history of motion pictures, and it may very well represent the apex of John Ford’s long and distinguished career. It was made a few years past the mid point of his filmic pilgrimage, 1946: the first full year of peace following World War II, which was undoubtedly the defining event of both the 20th century and of Ford’s life. (He served as head of the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime forerunner of the CIA, and he actually shot 16mm footage of—and was wounded at—the Battle of Midway. He also participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.) As filmmaker and critic Lindsay Anderson observed, Ford's masterful and groundbreaking 1939 Western Stagecoach was prose, very good prose; by comparison, My Darling Clementine was poetry.

 John Ford, 1960. 

His recurring theme of manifest destiny and the inevitable settling of the American frontier, which he treated as progress in his early years (The Iron Horse, Drums Along the Mohawk), and with bittersweet melancholy later (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cheyenne Autumn) is in full flower in Clementine. The latter day melancholy begins to reveal itself here, possibly due, in part at least, to his experiences in the most devastating war in human history. Film critic and historian Tag Gallagher, in his excellent book John Ford: The Man and His Films goes so far as to view My Darling Clementine as allegory: "Wyatt Earp (the U.S.) gives up marshaling in Dodge City (World War I), but takes up arms again to combat the Clantons (World War II) to make the world safe."

Henry Fonda (also just back from the war), who had been Ford’s perennial leading man prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, plays a sanguine, almost lethargic Wyatt Earp, a classic Fordian hero, removed from society, quietly confident and basically nonviolent, but nevertheless commanding the utter respect of others, partly because of his reputation, which has preceded him, and its inherent threat of violence. And, typically for a Fordian hero, he is ultimately unable to share in the peace and security that he makes possible for others.

It is perhaps Fonda’s finest performance. He never appeared more cool and comfortable in a role as he does portraying the legendary marshal of Tombstone, laconically and assuredly inhabiting and policing the lawless frontier town. Even when displaying exasperation he possesses something like a controlled grace. Early in the film he is getting a long overdue shave, when it is abruptly interrupted by gunfire. Bullets shatter the windows and mirrors of the tonsorial parlor, yet the main reason Wyatt goes to the trouble of incapacitating the offending party is not for the sake of securing his or anyone else’s safety, but apparently so that he can finish his shave in peace.

In contrast to Wyatt’s commanding calm, Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), another outcast from civilization, is a haunted, tragic figure. The first augury of Ford’s encroaching postwar cynicism is visible in him, which would culminate ten years later in The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards. We learn that Doc was once a surgeon (the real Doc Holliday was a dentist, another negligible historical discrepancy), a valued, functioning member of society, his career presumably cut short by alcoholism, consumption and perhaps other undisclosed ghosts which apparently still haunt him. As a traveling player, “Mr. Shakespeare” Thorndyke (Alan Mowbray), falters during a coerced rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy, we see in Doc’s eyes a mournful identification with the tragic Shakespearean character as he recites the remaining lines:

But that the dread of something after death

…makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than to fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.

The consumption from which Doc suffers—his internal bleeding—takes on new meaning during his recitation.

Victor Mature and J. Farrell MacDonald 

Family, whether extended, military, community or immediate, is all to Ford, and the mother, or mother figure, the provider and nurturer of life, reigns supreme within the Ford movie family. Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Beth Morgan in How Green Was My Valley, Mrs. Jorgensen in The Searchers, all hold a special office in the hierarchy of Ford’s universe. The Clanton family, a conspicuously motherless, miscreant tribe—as the Cleggs would be in Wagonmaster—are the antithesis of Ford’s family idyll. They are the embodiment of demented evil, a malignancy that must be expurgated from the landscape of Tombstone in order for the community to survive and move forward. Headed by Pa Clanton (played by the multifaceted Walter Brennan with ominous, understated vitriol), the father of the clan, they steal the Earps’ cattle herd, which has been left under the guard of 18-year-old James Earp. Pa murders James, thus providing the impetus for Wyatt and his two remaining brothers, Morgan (Ward Bond) and Virgil (Tim Holt), to stay in Tombstone and assume the roles of marshal and deputies.

Paradise, Once Lost, Returns

Unlike Frank Sinatra, who elevated the long-playing record album to a near art form after reinventing himself in the early 1950s (with a big assist from Nelson Riddle), the crux of Bing Crosby’s career came in the pre-LP era of the 10-inch, 78 rpm shellac single. In those days a record album consisted of four, five or six of these singles packaged together in a physical album, with record sleeves bound between cardboard covers like pages in a book, and they were usually compilations of previously released material. Partly because of this, Bing’s name rarely comes up when the phrase “classic album” (read: 33 & 1/3 rpm long-playing vinyl record) is bandied about, and he has therefore been largely forgotten by at least the last couple of generations of music buyers—unlike the crop of singers who came after and were influenced by him: Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., et al., who made the LP format (and nightclubs) their principality.

Bing did in fact record quite a few memorable albums in his later years, but by that time, after his 20-year contract with Decca had run out, he had gone freelance, farming out his talents to a variety of labels starting in the late ‘50s. In the years since his death the contents of those albums were more or less scattered to the winds, showing up on various compilations here and there, if at all.

As they disappeared, so did the legacy of the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20^th century. Did you know that Bing Crosby began his career as a jazz singer and that he popularized the use of the then-new electronic microphone? That he had more #1 singles than any other recording artist, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Michael Jackson? That he was among the top ten movie box office attractions for a span of nearly 20 years? That his radio shows (radio being the TV of the 1930s, ‘40s and early ‘50s) ranked in the top 20 for nearly 25 years?

The recently formed Bing Crosby Archives, in conjunction with Collector’s Choice and under the auspices of the Crosby family, is in the process of reversing the unfortunate series of events that has obscured Bing’s achievements. In the past year they’ve released a slew of his albums to CD, along with several dozen pristine radio recordings that hadn’t been heard since the 1950s, plus several TV specials not seen since their original decades-ago air dates. Included in this embarrassment of riches for Crosby aficionados are a couple of early ‘60s treasures, El Señor Bing and Return to Paradise Islands.

Truth be told, though I've been a Crosby fan for just about two decades now, I'd never found El Señor Bing quite enticing enough to pull off of the old record shelf with any level of regularity, and not just because putting a bulky vinyl record on a turntable became an increasingly inconvenient task in a world of first CD, then MP3, technology. But after listening to this newly re-mastered Collector's Choice release a couple of times, it has jumped several notches on the Bing-O-meter.

Capra's Masterpiece

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe.

1941 was a watershed year in American cinema. It was the year of the bold and groundbreaking Citizen Kane, the breathtaking and heart wrenching How Green Was My Valley, the grippingly patriotic Sergeant York, the sobering, frightening fable, The Devil and Daniel Webster, the pioneering noir classic by which all others are measured, The Maltese Falcon, the brilliant and hilarious send-up of gangster films, Ball of Fire, and the ultimate thinking man’s comedy, Sullivan’s Travels. All are landmarks in the cinematic landscape, which hold up amazingly well today. But director Frank Capra’s fanfare for the common man, Meet John Doe, also released that year, was arguably the greatest achievement in the careers of Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, character actor James Gleason, and Capra himself.

Gary Cooper was in three of the classics mentioned above, and few actors have ever made a better showing in a twelve-month stretch. Coop availed himself admirably enough as a real life hero forced to make a life changing decision in the Howard Hawks-directed World War I drama Sergeant York to take home 1941’s Academy Award for Best Actor. He displayed impressive comedic chops as a vulnerable and awkward academic with integrity in Hawks’ Ball of Fire (which also co-starred Stanwyck). Either of these performances, let alone both, would be enough to elevate any actor to legendary status. Yet in Doe, Cooper, as Long John Willoughby, a down-on-his-luck, dead armed baseball pitcher who is persuaded to portray the fictitious John Doe, managed to transcend even himself in an acting tour de force that elicits laughter, tears, and the gamut of emotions in between.

One could cite any number of scenes as examples, but a moment that particularly stands out for me is when the people of a small town come forward to tell John what the burgeoning John Doe movement means to them and how it has changed their lives. Cooper displays, in his face, wordlessly, an eloquent range of nakedly moving emotions as he listens, at first reluctantly, to their stories—culminating in an utterly indescribable look of shame, modesty, guilt and love as an elderly woman kisses his hand.

Stanwyck is at her most effervescent as the street savvy but idealistic columnist Ann Mitchell, who creates, then falls hard for, Cooper’s Doe. She’s in there fighting not only for her man, but also for the ideals her late father taught her, which she infuses into the stirring, heartfelt speeches she writes for John. And we pull for her as she overcomes manipulation and machination by repugnant powers-that-be while fighting for what is right.

Left to right: Walter Brennan, Cooper, Irving Bacon, Stanwyck, James Gleason.

This was undoubtedly James Gleason’s finest hour, as Stanwyck’s boss, the seen-it-all, hard-bitten newspaper editor Henry Connell. His drunk scene in a diner with Cooper, in which he eloquently sums up the value of freedom and why it’s worth defending, to the death if necessary, is enough to stir men’s souls—which of course was the intention. He’s speaking from a late 1940 perspective—with war raging in Europe and Asia and an unemployment rate of 14.5% at home, the twin threats of fascism and communism are very real—hearkening back to “lighthouses in a foggy world”: Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. But looking back today through the spectrum of what has transpired in the seventy years since, it’s difficult not to get a little choked up by the stirring lines penned by screenwriters Robert Riskin and Myles Connolly, and Gleason’s masterful, off-the-cuff delivery of them.

More than a passing nod is due Edward Arnold, as the personification of opportunistic corporate-political evil, D. B. Norton, and to the incredibly versatile Walter Brennan (who also supported Cooper in Sergeant York) as Doe’s Jiminy Cricket-like conscience and sidekick, who is referred to only as “the Colonel.”

The main character’s correlation to Christ is undeniable, and Connell even makes a reference to Pontius Pilate following what can only be described as a crucifixion scene. Capra, who was Roman Catholic, imbues his hero with the Christ-like characteristics of a sacrificial lamb, offering him up for the greater good of Mankind. Ultimately, though, Doe’s motives aren’t quite on the level of  “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” as his intentions are somewhat vindictively (though perhaps justifiably) geared toward sticking it to the D. B. Nortons of the world. Ultimately, Ann convinces him that his sacrifice is unnecessary, that “the first John Doe” took care of it nearly 2,000 years ago, again drawing a Christ comparison, and on Christmas Eve no less.

John contemplates the ultimate sacrifice.

Though most would choose It’s a Wonderful Life as Frank Capra’s crowning work in a heartbeat, I can’t help but lean toward the somewhat forgotten John Doe. Capra was at the top of both his game and the movie world when he began shooting Doe in the summer of 1940, teamed with his best screenwriter, Riskin. Though his achievements would eventually be eclipsed by those of the great John Ford, he was at the time the most decorated director in Hollywood, having won three Oscars in the previous five years. His hallmark optimism and populism are palpable in nearly every frame of Doe, and while this film and Wonderful Life both celebrate the exceptional everyman, Doe resonates as a more personal work.

With rampant unemployment serving as the impetus for nearly everything that transpires in the film and a nationwide grassroots movement of the people as its centerpiece, plus ominous allusions to a new world order, Meet John Doe is open to a variety of sociopolitical interpretations from a 21^st century perspective, which I’ll leave to you. But more than a few of the warnings and lessons therein are certainly pertinent today. What we are left with in the final analysis is a wonderful, thought provoking, inspirational film, with all the best of what the Hollywood studio system had to offer at its peak, by one of its finest directors.

© Jon Oye, 2011