Archives for June 2014

“Admitted that the music critic is expected to listen once a month to the fifth symphony of Beethoven and the ‘Pathétique’ of Tchaikovsky and the third Brandenburg Concerto of Bach; still these works are at any rate the products of genius. The average ‘new’ play is not even talented or adult. The music critic is kept in touch with large and creative minds; the dramatic critic may well yawn through twenty successive nights of banal thought and emotion. When we come to think of it, there are few masterpieces of the theatre that will bear perpetual acquaintance, measured with the masterpieces of music, painting and literature. I could easily compile a list of a hundred large-scale compositions with which we are able to live delightedly for a lifetime. How many plays could likewise be chosen?—excepting poetic drama (that is, all drama which aspires to the conditions of music and deals first with the emotions in terms of character and only second with a didactic criticism of manners or society). I question whether, beginning from Ibsen, a dozen such masterpiees have been written.”

Neville Cardus, Second Innings

Film Forum is showing a newly restored print of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, about which I recently wrote as part of a Commentary essay occasioned by Mark Harris’ Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.

Here’s what I said about it then:

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) focuses not on the war but on its aftermath, telling the story of how three combat veterans (played by Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell, a real-life soldier who lost his hands in the war) adjust to civilian life. Robert Sherwood’s movingly understated screenplay incorporates some of Wyler’s personal experiences during and immediately after the war. Billy Wilder spoke for most of Hollywood in calling it “the best-directed film I’ve ever seen in my life,” though it was not, as Harris claims, the object of “unanimous” praise. In a 1947 Partisan Review essay called “The Anatomy of Falsehood” that goes unnoted in Five Came Back, Robert Warshow condemned The Best Years of Our Lives for its “optimistic picture of American life….For every difficulty, there is conceived to be some simple moral imperative that will solve it, at least to the extent that it can be solved at all.”

As usual with Warshow, there was something to his critique of The Best Years of Our Lives. The film’s fundamental weakness is that for all of its closely observed realism, it remains at bottom a Hollywood romance in which all three principal characters appear at the end to be on the way to surmounting the obstacles placed in their paths by the war. But just as none of the film’s other critics objected to these variously plausible “happy” endings, so are most present-day viewers of The Best Years of Our Lives inclined to see it not as false but impressively frank, even mature, in its presentation of the psychic and emotional effects of war.

It happens that I’d never seen The Best Years of Our Lives on a screen. Indeed, I blush to admit that it’s been at least a decade since I last saw any studio-era Hollywood film in a theater. So Mrs. T and I went down to Film Forum yesterday afternoon and caught a matinée, and were knocked sideways by the experience.

To watch The Best Years of Our Lives in a theater is, among many other things, to be riveted by Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography, which is so sharply detailed that you can actually identify some of the books on the shelves of the characters’ homes. (I was amused to see, for instance, that Al and Milly Stephenson owned the once-ubiquitous two-volume Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Remembrance of Things Past.) No less riveting is Hugo Friedhofer’s Copland-influenced musical score, which comes through so clearly at Film Forum that you can easily hear the occasional portamenti played by the Louis Kaufman-led string section of the studio orchestra.

I won’t pretend, though, that I paid attention to such minutiae for more than a reel or two. I soon got caught up in the film itself, in large part for the very good reason that I was viewing it not in my living room but on the biggish screen of a darkened theater, sitting among similarly absorbed strangers. Studio-era movies were made to be seen under just those circumstances, and it is only when you see them that way that they cast their proper spell, creating an all-enveloping collective experience that can be overwhelming.

Sure enough, I was overwhelmed all over again by of The Best Years of Our Lives. What’s more, I know I wasn’t the only person in the theater who felt that way, because I heard a fair number of my neighbors weeping. Truth to tell, it’s all but impossible to watch The Best Years of Our Lives under any circumstances without weeping, but seeing it in a theater heightened the film’s emotional intensity to a pitch that at times was close to unbearable.

“Why don’t we come see old movies here more often?” I said to Mrs. T as we left the theater.

“I don’t know,” she sensibly replied. “Why don’t we?”

Of course we both knew the obvious answer to my half-rhetorical question: because it’s infinitely more convenient to watch them at home, at a time of our own choosing. But I’m glad we finally got to see The Best Years of Our Lives the way it’s supposed to be seen—the way our parents saw it—and I hope we’ll remember how much the experience meant to us the next time Film Forum announces a screening of one of our old favorites.

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For more information about Film Forum’s screenings of The Best Years of Our Lives, which end on Thursday, go here.

The climactic “aircraft graveyard” scene from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, starring Dana Andrews. The score is by Hugo Friedhofer:

From 2004, Our Girl in Chicago on Henry James:

Whatever you think of James’s style–and I know that plenty of smart people go into sneezing fits when they even get into the same room with his books–I find it hard to believe that someone could read his work and think of his as a sheltered existence. The inner lives of so many different kinds of people are animated there: men, women, children, rich, poor, middle-class, bright, dim, kind, wicked, and so on. This curiosity, let alone his insight, didn’t come from simply sitting back and coldly observing life….

Read the whole thing here.

“A boy does not regard his books as part of culture; at least, boys of forty years ago didn’t. We went into them neck-high for fun and illusion. We did not distinguish between our authors and the way they transmuted their material. In later life, no doubt, the critical attitude to literature brings pleasures of a refined aesthetic order. But I doubt if they console for that lost first willing surrender to the author’s most simple and direct invocation—that is to say, if we are so unfortunate as to lose it at all.”

Neville Cardus, Second Innings

I recently got around to reading The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig’s 1942 autobiography, about which I wrote in my “Sightings” column for last Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

This passage is from the foreword:

Both my father and my grandfather lived their lives in a single, direct way—it was one and the same life from beginning to end, without many vicissitudes, without upheaval and danger, a life of small tensions, imperceptible transitions, always lived in the same easy, comfortable rhythm as the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave. They spent all their days in the same country, the same city, usually even in the same house. As for what went on in the outside world, fundamentally that was only something they read in the newspaper, it did not come knocking at their doors. There was probably a war of some kind in progress somewhere in their time, but only a little one compared to the dimensions of modern warfare, and waged far away from their borders….But we have lived through everything without ever returning to our former lives, nothing was left of them, nothing was restored.

I thought at once of my mother when I read those words. She grew up in Diehlstadt, a tiny village in southeast Missouri whose current population is 161, and moved as a young woman to Smalltown, U.S.A., which is a dozen miles away. Except for brief stays in two other nearby towns, she spent the rest of her life in Smalltown, and from 1961 until her death two years ago, she lived in the same house. She endured the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, but except for the first of these events, none of them touched her directly. Like Zweig’s father and grandfather, she knew about the outside world only from reading about it (and, later, seeing it on TV). Outside of two brief visits to New York and a handful of summer vacations spent elsewhere, she scarcely ever traveled more than a hundred miles or so from the place where she was born.

Hers was a small life, in other words, but a satisfying one, and until old age started to wreak its final havoc on her body, I think she was basically happy. On occasion I took her to museums, concerts, and performances of various kinds, but while she enjoyed them, her family, friends, and home mattered far more. Instead of pining for wider horizons, she was content to see the world through my brother and me, and in due course through Lauren, her beloved granddaughter.

My life was wider and more tumultuous. It has taken me far from home, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But my own happiness—and I, too, count myself a mostly happy person, an ebullient pessimist—was surely rooted in part in the fortunate fact that unlike Stefan Zweig, I was always able to return to my former existence. Until my mother died, I went back to Smalltown two or three times each year to see her, and whenever I did so, I slept in my childhood bedroom. I had—in other words—deep roots in the world of yesterday.

What kind of person would I have become had those roots been pulled up when I was young? One of the many things that struck me about the movie Grosse Pointe Blank was the scene in which Martin Q. Blank (played by John Cusack) returns in early adulthood to the house where he grew up, only to discover that it has been torn down and replaced by a convenience store. “You can never go home again,” he later tells his psychotherapist, “but I guess you can shop there.”

Is it any wonder that Martin grew up to be a contract killer? Or am I over-dramatizing the psychic consequences of living without roots? Certainly Stefan Zweig was unable in the end to cope with the loss of his own past. He moved to Brazil after writing The World of Yesterday, and there he killed himself, leaving behind this note:

Before parting from life of my free will and in my right mind I am impelled to fulfil a last obligation: to give heartfelt thanks to this wonderful land of Brazil which afforded me and my work such kind and hospitable repose. My love for the country increased from day to day, and nowhere else would I have preferred to build up a new existence, the world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.

But after one’s sixtieth year unusual powers are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning. Those that I possess have been exhausted by long years of homeless wandering.

Needless to say, I won’t do anything remotely like that should 713 Hickory Drive burn to the ground one day and be replaced by a 7-11. But I would grieve deeply if such a thing happened, for I know better than anyone how much it meant to me to have a childhood home—and a loving mother—that I could visit whenever I pleased. I have wandered far from Smalltown, but I’ve never been homeless. Neither was she.

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A scene from Grosse Pointe Blank:

Clifford Curzon and the Amadeus Quartet play Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1977:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.”

Rex Stout, The Rubber Band

In honor of the great day when Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Hello, Dolly!” knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts, John Marchese of the New York Times has written a nifty little piece for that paper called “Back Where He Belonged: An All-Satchmo Day”:

Maybe it was the 50th anniversary of “Hello, Dolly” having knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts (May 9, 1964), but it occurred to me recently that with a little advance work, I could spend an entire day in New York with Louis Armstrong.

Yes, I know, that idea seems absurd at first. Even a devoted fan like me has to acknowledge that as much as his music lives on, Armstrong, the renowned jazz musician and beloved entertainer known worldwide as Satchmo, died on July 6, 1971.

But he died in his sleep in the king-size bed on the second floor of his modest brick-clad house on 107th Street in Corona, Queens. His widow, Lucille, eventually left the house to the city, and it has been preserved largely as it was in his last days—right down to a bathrobe and a pair of slippers—and is open to the public six days a week. That would be my first stop….

And his last stop? A performance of Satchmo at the Waldorf, of course.

Read the whole thing here.