The Best Picture Countdown #11: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Director: Frank Capra
Starring: Lionel Barrymore, Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Edward Arnold

The moral of the 1938 comedy You Can’t Take It With You can be summed up in 3 words: Life is short. It’s a story about seizing the day, doing what you love to do, and making the most of the time you have. Directed by Frank Capra – his fifth movie in six years to be nominated for Best Picture and the second to win – it is a kind hearted comedy about nice people (some of whom don’t quite realize how nice they are) with a sweet romance mixed in. Capra made a lot of movies like that, but it’s to his infinite credit that he managed to make each of them unique and classic in their own way.

Review: Shane (1953)

* * * *
Director: George Stevens
Starring: Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Brandon DeWilde

Shane is undoubtedly one of the best and most beloved westerns ever made. The story is relatively simply - good guys, bad guys, and a morally ambiguous hero - but what director George Stevens and his cast do with it makes the film truly special. Not all classic films hold up over time, but Shane does.

Alan Ladd stars as Shane, a mysterious drifter whose path crosses with that of the Starretts' - Joe (Van Heflin), Marian (Jean Arthur), and young Joey (Brandon DeWilde) - at exactly the right time. The Starretts' livelihood is under constant threat from Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), a cattle baron who wants to push them, and all the other homesteaders in the valley, off their land so that he can take it over for his own use. Shane decides to stay on with the Staretts as their hired man, though really he's just waiting for the inevitable showdown with Ryker and his crew, who don't think twice about using violence and intimidation to get what they want.

When Joe convinces the other homesteaders to band together to find a way to fight back, Ryker sends for Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a gun for hire, to add some extra muscle to his force. Shane is familiar with Wilson's reputation and when Ryker sends an invitation to Joe for a peace meeting that's actually an ambush, Shane knocks his friend out in order to take his place and settle things once and for all. When all is said and done, Shane will either be dead or forced to ride alone into the sunset because, as he warns Joey, "There's no living with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand."

On the surface Shane is a fairly conventional film, assembled with the stock parts of the classic hollywood western. You've got the mysterious gunslinger, the woman he ultimately cannot have, the all powerful villain, the gunfight, the bad guy in the black hat, the good guy in the white. Shane takes these elements and goes deeper, becoming a study of character and society. The most striking thing about it is its exploration of ideas about masculinity, how it defines "real men" and pretenders. Shane, certainly, is a real man, as is Joe and even Wilson. They are men willing to get their hands dirty and fight their battles. On the flip side there's Ryker, a villain who talks a good game but is ultimately impotent when it comes to enforcing his threats. Late in the film he remarks that he'll kill Joe if he has to, to which Wilson sharply replies, "You mean I'll kill him if you have to." Wilson is undoubtedly a villain in this piece, but he's still seen as more honourable than Ryker, who delegates the tough part. In the final showdown Shane is Joe's agent, just as Wilson is Ryker's, but Joe hasn't willingly stepped aside to let Shane enter the standoff and so he's allowed to retain his honour.

The story is seen through Joey's eyes, which is important thematically because he's at an age where he's beginning the define for himself what it means to be a man. The film gives him plenty of examples of types of manhood - Joe's, in which violence is the last resort and reason the first weapon; Shane's, in which violence yields the best results when used with a cool head; that of the neighbor Torrey (Elisha Cook Jr.), who is quick to fight but doesn't use his head - and the ending is somewhat ambiguous as to which path he'll follow. By the end of the film he sees that his father is a good, honourable man, but he also sees the glamour that surrounds Shane, even if his actions do force him into exile.

The performances in the film are uniformly good, playing to the tropes of the western genre without feeling stale. The biggest surprise for me is DeWilde, if only because so often in films kids end up being precocious to a fault, but Stevens guides him to a strong performance that balances innocence with a budding knowledge of the ways of the world. So much of the film's success depends on this character and performance and it's pitch perfect. The film itself is pretty close to perfection, too, and it's staying power definitely can't be denied.

Review: A Foreign Affair (1948)

* * * 1/2
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Jean Arthur, John Lund

A Foreign Affair is one of my favourite Billy Wilder films, but it's surprisingly hard to get hold of. Thank God it shows up on TCM every once in a while. A romantic comedy, a post-war drama, occassionally a musical - this one's got it all. If you're a Wilder fan or a Dietrich fan, this is definitely a film you'll want to seek out if you haven't seen it already.

The story takes place in post-war Berlin and concerns a love triangle between a visiting Congresswoman, a U.S. Army Captain, and a former Nazi mistress. The Congresswoman is Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur), who is prim and proper and determined to take people to task for the activities that tend to be the offshoots of reconstruction after war, such as black market bartering and relationships between foreign servicemen and local women that are founded on a kind of tacit prostitution. She's scandalized at every turn by what she sees around her and by the efforts of the people in charge to gloss over it rather than deal with it. Since her time in Berlin is limited she can't clean up the entire American zone, but she becomes determined to set at least one thing right by bringing Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich) to justice.

Erika is a singer in one of the underground clubs and is rumored to have been the mistress of at least one high ranking Nazi official. Thus far she has managed to elude the process of de-Nazification and a mandatory stretch in a work camp thanks largely to John Pringle (John Lund), a US Army Captain who offers her protection and provides her with some small luxuries in exchange for her favours. He does what he can to hinder Phoebe's progress in bringing Erika down and, in the process, falls in love with her. She falls in love with him, too, and starts to loosen up a little but even after Erika does Phoebe a favour by keeping US authorities from finding out that she was arrested as part of a raid in one of those clubs, Phoebe is determined to do what she sees as the right thing.

The screenplay by Charles Brackett and Richard Breen is sharp, mixing in a lot of humor while also staying on point. The story is not presented as black and white and acknowledges that in times of war, certain codes of morality tend to be suspended. Phoebe is presented as "good," but she's also presented as being a bit naive and a little too rigidly moralistic. Erika, while not "good," exactly, isn't presented as a villain either. In one of my favourite movie speeches ever, she explains her position to Phoebe:

We've all become animals with exactly one instinct left. Self-preservation. Now take me, Miss Frost. Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs... yet somehow I kept going. Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going.

She's a survivor. The things that she has done to survive - both while the Nazis were in power and after the Allied victory - haven't always been pretty, but she's still there, still going forward. As for John, he's done things that are questionable but, as he points out to Phoebe, it's not so easy to pull the breaks after spending years going full speed ahead to attain victory. You can't just flip a switch and go back to playing by ordinary rules. Wilder and the writers give these characters complexities that aren't always afforded to characters in romantic comedies, allowing them to seem less like "types" and more like "people."

As far as the actors go, they deliver exactly what you would expect of them. Arthur is good as the stick in the mud who slowly learns the let loose, and her facial expressions and body language whenever Phoebe is supposed to be shocked and appalled by something are excellent. She has fair chemistry with Lund, who has that roguish charm down pat. The show is stolen, of course, by Dietrich who manages to look glamorous even while brushing her teeth in a crumbling apartment. This is one of my favourite Dietrich performances and Wilder plays to all of her strengths here, allowing her to shine like a diamond in the rough. The film itself, though fairly light in spirit, nevertheless hits on certain truths about the hardships of postwar reconstruction that give it depth. People like Erika, Phoebe and John exist in places torn apart by war (though in reality they likely don't end up as happy) and some of the arial footage that opens the film is actual documentary footage of bombed out Berlin at the close of the war, giving the film a dose of realism to balance out the elements of pure movie escapism. I honestly can't recommend it more.