Tag Archives: Ethel Merman

Arms and the Hams: ‘Stage Door Canteen’

Original poster.

Original poster.

There were a lot of morale-boosting musical revue pictures made during World War II. They featured as many big stars as could be crammed into a two-hour running time and usually had a gossamer-thin plot to give a bit of organization to the various numbers. “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” “This Is the Army,” “Hollywood Canteen” and “Stage Door Canteen” all followed this plan. “This Is the Army” was originally produced on Broadway and is the only one that was filmed in color. But “Stage Door Canteen” is the one that I feel holds up the best. Unhappily, the picture has not been restored or remastered, so the quality of the image and the soundtrack have suffered more than the others.

“Stage Door Canteen” begins on an army transport train as it speeds toward the New York City area. This clip introduces us to the soldiers known as Dakota, California, Jersey and Texas aboard that train as it rumbles across Ohio. Several years ago, when Alfred Uhry was the guest programmer on TCM, he selected this picture and singled out this scene as having special meaning for him. I wish I could remember his exact words, but he mentioned that when he saw the picture as a boy, the girls on the train platform in their clear vinyl raincoats looked to him like angels. I confess I hadn’t thought of that before, but now whenever I see this scene, I wonder how I could have missed that image. They do look like angels as they take the GIs’ letters and hand out free packs of cigarettes. The tune that’s being played on the harmonica is “Don’t Worry Island,” which shows up later in the picture, played by the Freddy Martin Orchestra.

Soldiers Come to Town

There’s a weird linguistic usage that is often employed in these wartime pictures: young men and women constantly refer to themselves in a slangy form of the third person, especially when they talk about their hopes and future plans. Technically speaking, this is a rhetorical device known as antonomasia, in which an epithet substitutes for a proper name (for example, the substitution of “that paperhanging son of a bitch” for “Hitler”). Antonomasia is generally used to refer to others. The usage that I’m describing is unusual because the characters who employ the device use it to talk about themselves. In this particular scene, there are two examples of this curious use of antonomasia: “Sometimes a fella feels like he’d like to write to somebody,” (read: “Sometimes I’d like to write to a girl”) “Kinda makes a guy wish he had a nice girl he could kiss goodbye,” (read: “I wish I had a girl to kiss goodbye”). Odd as the usage is (or at least as odd as I think it is), it is common to many plays, screenplays and songs written in the thirties and forties; it shows up repeatedly throughout “Stage Door Canteen.” I’ve never been able to tell if this is simply a stylistic convention of the period, or if people actually spoke that way in those days. It sure sounds corny, but I can’t help liking the sincerity with which such lines are delivered. It’s a distancing device, intended to let “just folks” heroes and heroines express ideas about themselves that the authors worry are more exalted than their characters’ stations in life warrant. It allows them to be highfalutin and common at the same time. Sort of.

Delmer Daves wrote the script. (He also wrote and directed “Hollywood Canteen.”) “Stage Door Canteen” is no less corny than the other morale-boosting revues, but perhaps because it’s from a small studio and set in New York City, it’s less slick and seems more heartfelt. Of course I don’t take “Stage Door Canteen” as an accurate picture of how it actually was, but I like to think it’s how it must have felt. It’s also quite well acted by the non-celebrity actors and actresses, few of whom managed to have much of a career after the War.

Heartbreak

One unusual element that “Stage Door Canteen” has is heartbreak; it has heartbreak in spades. Other pictures in this genre avoided anything approximating grim reality. Here are two examples:

The Royle Treatment (a/k/a The Heave-Ho)

This scene comes early in the picture. I’ve always been crazy about Selena Royle, but I must say the girl, Marion Shockley, is also wonderful. It’s a shame she didn’t have a bigger career, and much of it prior to this picture was frittered away on a wretched series of shorts about an intrepid heroine by the name of Torchy. I’ve seen several of them on TCM; they are dreadful. Shockley was married to Bud Collyer, who was for many years the host of “To Tell the Truth,” and the voice of Superman(!) on the old cartoon series.

The Valiant Brother versus the Blankety-Blank Japs

In this clip, Jean, one of the young hostesses from the Canteen, reads her brother’s letter aloud to her roommates (they’re also hostesses). The actress is a Warners contract player named Marjorie Riordan. Pay particular attention to the gorgeous underscoring, which is used beautifully, perfectly: it supports the emotionalism without forcing it; when the development settles down, the tune that emerges is “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye,” a ravishing melody, which we will hear Lanny Ross sing about a half hour after this scene. Notice, too, the nice composition and lighting.

Marjorie Riordan’s biggest role came a year later, when she played the adult daughter of Claude Rains and Bette Davis in “Mr Skeffington.” In the fifties, she became disenchanted with the acting profession, which she found intellectually unsatisfying. She went back to school to study the psycho-dynamics of stammering before she moved on to the field of clinical psychology. I mention this because her reading of the letter suggests that, quite apart from her talent as an actress, she’s extremely intelligent. The text of the letter is full of sentimental clichés and is specifically intended to jerk tears. But Riordan fights the tears; occasionally she is nearly overcome by emotion as she reads, but then she pauses for a moment and continues in an even voice. It’s a remarkably skillful and restrained performance, and it often moves me to tears but never makes me feel as if I’ve been had. She was 22 years old when this scene was shot, but her technical skill is that of a much more experienced actress.

I’m also impressed by Cheryl Walker, who plays Eileen, a seemingly heartless Broadway hopeful. She’s the one character in the picture who goes through an emotional and psychological transformation, and she does it beautifully and believably. Unfortunately for Cheryl Walker, like most of the other young unknowns in this picture, her career never took off.

Brushes with Greatness

The biggest selling attraction in the Cheer Up the Home Front genre was always the crowds of famous movie stars, singers and musicians. Another thing that sets “Stage Door Canteen” apart from the others (aside from the higher quality of young actors) is its large number of theatrical stars and New York personalities, many of whom rarely made motion pictures.

A Few Moments with the Lunts

This clip is not terribly interesting, except that it’s one of the rare screen appearances by the Lunts (a/k/a Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne), who were unquestionably the most celebrated and well-liked married acting couple for most of the mid-twentieth century. They were famous for their ability to keep performances fresh after a thousand performances and two years of touring the sticks. (A famous acting lesson tells of how Lunt once complained after a performance: “Why have they stopped laughing when I ask for a cup of tea? The line used to get a big laugh . . .” Fontanne replied, “Because you’re asking for it. You used to ask for a cup of tea.”) They even come close to making this inferior-grade stuff seem witty and fresh.

Katharine Cornell

“Stage Door Canteen” is the only motion picture Katharine Cornell ever appeared in. She did a couple of live television shows, but no other pictures. In her time — running from the twenties to the mid-fifties — she was one of the two or three most celebrated stage actresses in America. She was talented and extremely well-liked. She gave Christopher Plummer his first big break on Broadway. Here is a shrewdly observed passage about “Kit” Cornell from Plummer’s excellent memoir, “In Spite of Myself”:

Guthrie [McClintock, Cornell’s husband/business partner/director/manager] could never turn Miss Kit into a great actress. No matter how skillful his presentation of her — she remained always the same — fine, noble, sympathetic, in everything she portrayed. But by bringing those qualities of hers to the surface he had, intentionally or not, turned her into a great star and a great “boss.” She ruled her little kingdom like a queen and as she worshipped goodness to obsession, so she believed everyone in it to be good. When one of her lambs decided to stray from the path of righteousness, she simply refused to believe it; and if some outsider dared criticize her “brood” she turned a deaf ear and a cold shoulder.

Listen to her speak Shakespeare, and she is almost equally reluctant to let one of her iambs stray. (That’s a joke, not a dig.)

Plummer must surely be right: Cornell was probably not a great actress, but she is, as he says, “fine, noble, sympathetic.” I love the whole idea of her, and I think she speaks the lines beautifully. Like Jane Cowl, Lynn Fontanne and several other actresses of that era, Cornell offers a glimpse of what “great acting” looked like before the Method changed American acting almost overnight. Cornell is obviously way too old to be swanning about on a moonlit Veronese balcony, but she’s incredibly poignant and romantic. On the other hand, whenever I see this one scene she did for the movies, I can’t help thinking of her private life and of what Ethel Merman once said about Mary Martin to an admirer of Mary Martin, “Ya know, she’s a big dyke!” Speaking of which:

The Merm Marches through Berlin

Here’s Ethel Merman at the peak of her Broadway popularity, singing a jingo tune. I particularly like the lines “The Devil put on a diff’rent face/Came to plague the human race . . .” When did it become unfashionable to demonize the enemy? I suspect it was probably around the time of the Mỹ Lai massacre, but I’m only guessing. At any rate, because the technique hasn’t been used in decades, when I come across an example of it, it always gives me a little thrill of conscience-stricken pleasure. This clip begins with a youngish Georgie Jessel, some years before he became America’s Toastmaster General. His celebrity mystified me when I was growing up, but now I find his brand of low-brow Jewish humor absolutely hilarious.

Merman was not much of a looker . . . ever. This picture was made in 1943; twenty-three years later, when she starred in a revival of one of her biggest hits, wags along the Main Stem dubbed the show “Granny Get Your Gun.” The stories about her saltiness are almost numberless. Here’s my favorite. During the month or so that she was married to Ernest Borgnine, a Hollywood big shot producer invited her to lunch. When she came home afterwards, Borgnine was watching TV. “How’d it go?” he asked, uninterested.

“SWELL!” she said, “He said I have the eyes of a teenager, the complexion of a twenty-year-old and the legs of a twenty-five-year-old!”

Borgnine’s face grew dark. “Howbout yuh sixty-year-old cunt?”

“You were never mentioned.”

Gracie Fields Sings of Japs and Jehovah

This is surely the weirdest pairing of numbers in the whole picture. British star of stage and screen, Gracie Fields, emerges from a wooden crate, sings a jingo tune, “Three Jap Planes,” then, almost without pausing for breath, goes into “The Lord’s Prayer.” I like both performances enormously; Frank Borsage staged “The Lord’s Prayer” nicely: the soldiers all rise to their feet as soon as they hear prayer in the smoky air, then bow their heads when she sings “Amen” — except for one young soldier in the center, which I take as evidence of inclusiveness not usually found in pictures of the period. Wearing her cardigan like a cape, Gracie Fields looks like a beefy, road company Deborah Kerr in “Tea and Sympathy.” I haven’t an ounce of religion in me, but I find the scene very touching. The astonishing bad taste and the depiction of the sneaky, unsportsmanlike Jap give the semi-religious sentimentality enough astringent wrongness to keep it from cloying. (“The Lord’s Prayer” was cut out of the British release. Hmm.)

The effort to demonize the dirty, skulking Jap was even more intense than it was for the lousy Kraut/Hun bastard. It was everywhere. In Hollywood pictures, high ranking Nazis were portrayed as rakish, debonair devils (Conrad Veidt, for example: venomous, but extremely attractive and witty); the Japanese were invariably portrayed as a terrifying, brutal sub-species with beaver teeth and thick, steel-rimmed spectacles. “Fibber McGee and Molly,” one of the most popular wartime radio shows, sold bonds with the slogan, “Every time you buy a bond,/You slap a Jap across the pond.”

Ah, so! They don't make posters like this anymore . . .

Ah, so! They don’t make posters like this anymore . . .

Though Gracie Fields never caught on in America, she was a huge star in England, and one of the most beloved women of her time; in Britain, she was invariably referred to as “Our Gracie.” When she became gravely ill in 1939, the story was front page news all over England. She was born in 1898, over a fish-and-chips shop in Rochdale, Lancashire. When she left England to be with her husband in America (Italian-born, he was declared an enemy alien in Britain when Italy joined the War), she was vilified in the British press as a traitor. They never mentioned the amount of work she did entertaining Commonwealth troops. When she toured British munitions factories during the War, most of her audiences were initially hostile, but (according to eyewitness accounts) in every case, she completely won them over by the end of her second number. Witnesses say that the effect she had on British audiences was terribly moving.

Ray Bolger

Bolger is a rather freakish talent: he’s a spazz attack in tap shoes and he raises exuberant brainlessness to a high-ish art. I don’t think I’ve ever liked him better than I do in this number. (I’ve excised the whole of his comic interlude between his two dance routines: it’s worth seeing, but it makes for a longer clip than serves my purpose here. The complete version can be found on YouTube.) His tapping is fiendish, fast and funny; his hold on the audience is extraordinary — you can see that these guys love him. And like “Seinfeld” decades later, his entire act is really about nothing. I find this routine irresistibly charming — it’s so incredibly cheerful and committed, extravagant and idiotic. The song is by Rodgers and Hart.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

Perhaps it’s due to my early exposure to Michael Redgrave’s harrowing portrayal of a ventriloquist in “Dead of Night,” or perhaps it’s the lifeless limbs and haunches that make me find puppets so unsettling, but whatever the reason is, I’ve always recoiled from them and all their pomps. Nevertheless, Charlie McCarthy really makes me laugh even while he gives me the creeps; when I was a child, he scared me batshit. I continue to hate Mortimer Snerd: I find nothing at all funny about the agonies of self-consciousness suffered by this horny-but-timorous mental defective with Jheri Curl locks and Jerry’s Kids limbs.

I first began to like W.C. Fields when I heard him, on a recording of an old Chase & Sanborn Hour, invite Charlie McCarthy to come to his place to take a piggyback ride on his buzz-saw. I’d have liked him even better if he’d extended the offer to McCarthy’s longtime companion, Mortimer Snerd. I’m amused by the way Bergen flings them away when he’s through with each in his turn: he slips the suddenly cataleptic Charlie off his arm and pats his shoulder lovingly, but Snerd he roughly tosses over backwards. I wonder if Edgar Bergen didn’t have a shame-faced crush on the cruel Charlie and find Snerd’s slavish adoration oppressive, while Charlie despised them both — a tab show “No Exit.”

Lanny Ross

Completely forgotten now, Lanny Ross was an amazing fellow. As you will hear, he has a beautiful tenor voice, full of ardor; his intonation and phrasing are perfect. He sang for the Yale glee club and took a law degree at Columbia University, and paid for everything with the money he made from his singing engagements. I find him very appealing. He has unmistakable class.


Wow, this song always knocks me out! I couldn’t believe that it didn’t win that year’s Oscar for Best Song — that is, until I saw what the competition was that year. A partial list of the nominations: “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” “My Shining Hour,” “That Old Black Magic,” “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and the winner, Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know.” “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye” is a terrific number, but it wasn’t robbed.

Katharine Hepburn Does Her Bit

The young unknowns in “Stage Door Canteen” are generally as good or better than the celebrities they support. Take a hinge at this scene at the very end of the picture. Eileen, as if competing for the goody-goody prize, outdoes her Canteen girlfriends by marrying Dakota, whom she’d been snubbing through most of the picture. But before they can get them colored lights goin’, he’s shipped off to Europe, where, presumably, he’ll personally murder that paperhanging son of a bitch. Here’s what happens when Katharine Hepburn overhears the virgin bride’s lament. Hepburn gets through the material with authority and speed, but the real heart of the scene is in Cheryl Walker’s performance. Hepburn does most of the talking, but Walker gives the star her full attention and responds beautifully.

“Days without end, amen,” says Miss H. To which I reply, “Days without end . . . ahem.”

Classic Christmas Kitsch: ‘The Bishop’s Wife’

Original Poster. When nobody went to see the wretched picture, Goldwyn re-released it as 'Cary and the Bishop's Wife.' It worked.

Original Poster. When nobody went to see the wretched picture, Goldwyn re-released it under the nonsensical title,’Cary and the Bishop’s Wife.’ It worked.

[Author’s note: I have more received hate mail about this article than for anything else I’ve ever written. So if you’re a great fan of “The Bishop’s Wife” and a differing opinion is likely to make you fly into a rage, I respectfully ask you to read no further. Don’t send me hate mail: I’ll almost certainly never see it. I have no wish to upset anyone, but neither do I see why I should walk on eggshells when I choose to write about a Christmas picture from seventy years ago. I think “The Bishop’s Wife” is a terrible picture, and normally I don’t see the point in writing harshly about bad pictures. I find it much more interesting to write about movies that I think are great or, failing that, mediocre pictures that I get great pleasure from watching. “The Bishop’s Wife” falls into the latter category, and with a vengeance. Usually, when I like a bad picture, I can find plenty of reasons that it appeals to me, and that line of inquiry is a pleasure to write about. In the case of “The Bishop’s Wife,” I cannot deny that I enjoy it immensely, but I think it is very probably the worst picture that I genuinely like. I hoped that writing about it would help me understand what it is, exactly, that makes me like the picture as much as I do. But it turned out to be an even more vexing question than I supposed it would be, and by the time I finished writing about it, I was no closer to an answer than when I started: in fact, I was more bewildered than ever. What had been a riddle had become an insoluble mystery. Anyhow, this particular article represents a lot of work and frustration on my part, and the unhappy knowledge that I failed to solve the mystery that I hoped to solve. I am tired of receiving email from irate strangers who presume to psychoanalyze me and feel that their love for this sentimental picture entitles them to threaten me, to call me all sorts of ugly names, and to order me not to put my opinions in writing that nobody ever forced them to read.]

Let me say at once that “The Bishop’s Wife” (Samuel Goldwyn, 1947) is saccharine rubbish. If you look at it when you’re in a bad mood, you’ll probably find it intolerable. I like it enormously, but am at a loss to explain why. It’s a scornful pleasure that comes very close to being a guilty one, because a lot of it is very nearly beneath contempt. It’s muttonheaded Christmas kitsch; its several forays into religious instruction are so banal that they make Lloyd C. Douglas‘ poppycock seem like Thomas Aquinas by comparison. I also find it irresistibly entertaining and likable.

Episcopalian Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) plans to erect a new cathedral, but is hampered by a cantankerous society doyenne, Mrs Hamilton (Gladys Cooper), who holds the purse-strings and rules the congregation with a rod of iron. She tells the Bishop plainly that “The church will be built according to my specifications or not at all.” Pushed to the verge of despair and fearing that his nerves are about to crack, the Bishop prays to God for guidance. His prayer is answered in the form of a dapper, smirking, incognito angel named Dudley (Cary Grant), who comes to work for him in the guise of an assistant. The action takes place during the Christmas season, in an unspecified city. The opening scene takes place on Madison Avenue, but it seems unlikely that we are to assume we’re in Manhattan.

The Simpering Angel

When Dudley reports to work on his first day, the Bishop’s flinty secretary (Sara Haden, in a quietly broad performance) and long-suffering housemaid (Elsa Lanchester, in a noisily broad performance) fall all over themselves in the slippery slickness of his charm.

Julia, the Bishop’s wife (Loretta Young), also falls for Dudley; so does Cindy, the Bishop’s daughter (Karolyn Grimes); so, indeed, does everybody else who crosses Dudley’s path. In this clip, the leader of the gang is Bobby Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Robert E. Sherwood co-wrote the script . . . “We’ve bwoken their mowale!” Jesus God Almighty. That line bears the unmistakable imprint of Sherwood’s heavy hand. Was he this corny when he shared a tiny office with Dorothy Parker back in the twenties?

Even crusty old Professor Wutheridge (Monty Woolley, who is much, much better than usual and never once bares his ghastly teeth) cannot resist the heavenly visitor. He is reticent at first, but then Dudley does the old bastard two big favors: he gives the Professor an angle that allows him at last to start work on his long-planned history of Rome, and he puts an enchantment on the Professor’s bottle of sherry so that no matter how much the old boy drinks, the bottle never runs dry: “It warms, it stimulates, it inspires, but it never inebriates!” says the grateful academic tippler. (But I wonder: when Dudley’s mission is through, does Professor Wutheridge lose his all-you-can-drink privileges?)

Monty Woolley: The broken-down scholar finds new purpose, a magic bottle of sherry and a warm place to sleep it off.

Monty Woolley as Professor Wutheridge: Thanks to Dudley, a broken-down old scholar finds new purpose, a magic bottle of sherry and a warm place to sleep it off. All he needs now is a catamite.

The only person who remains impervious to Dudley’s suave flippancy is the Bishop himself, whom the beautifully tailored angel has come to help. David Niven was originally cast as the angel, and Grant as Bishop Brougham. But when Grant read the script, he said he’d play Dudley or withdraw from the project. Niven was a good sport about it, but it must have irked him. As it is, Niven doesn’t do much with the part, other than look put out. Eleven years later, when he appeared in “Separate Tables” with Gladys Cooper (who once again was cast as his tormentor), he won an Oscar for his troubles. (He’s awfully good in that one; so is she.)

Twinkle, Twinkle, Cary Grant:
Can you con me? No you can’t.

It’s just possible that I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t find Cary Grant (nee Archibald Leach) irresistibly charming. I sure do like the idea of him; he’s very handsome and looks swell in a suit, but he twinkles too much; he never stops making faces and doing comic double- and even triple-takes. It seems he was too big a star for any director to tell him, “Aw, fer chrissake, Archie, will ya just say the fuckin’ lines?” He did his best work for Hitchcock, but he starred in a lot of second and third rate comedies and was never, ever better than the bum material he apparently preferred to act in. He was at his worst in the only picture he did for Frank Capra (“Arsenic and Old Lace”), but he’s scarcely better in this one. Still, it’s an amusing conceit to cast the flippant, debonair Cary Grant as a celestial being — and he’s far less excruciating as Dudley the Angel than is, say, Henry Travers as Clarence Oddbody, AS2. Here he is twinkling away like mad in the scene that follows the rigged snowball fight. The birdlike biddy who says “He’s holding her hand” is the estimable (always funny, nearly always underused) Almira Sessions. (There’s an abrupt cut in this clip, where I edited out about half a minute of syrup. You’re welcome.)

There’s the faux-folksy voice of Robert E. Sherwood again, loud and clear . . . “The world changes, but two things remain constant: Truth and Beauty: y’know, they’re really one and the same thing” . . . “The only people who grow old were born old to begin with.” Aw, go shit in yer hat!

Robert Nathan, cousin to Emma Lazarus and Benjamin Cardozo, and writer of sentimental kitsch novels with metaphysical/spiritual overtones (e.g., “Portrait of Jennie”), was the author of the novel on which this picture was based, but I don’t know whether it was he or Sherwood who conceived of the personification of Divine Intervention as a combination of busybody, cop on the beat, benevolent bureaucrat and drummer for the liquor lobby. In this story, Dudley’s allusions to Heaven give the distinct impression that the place is a vast, mid-twentieth century bureaucratic corporate beehive. (O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!) And was it Nathan or Sherwood who befuddled the biddies with stingers? At any rate, it’s awful.

The Maxwell House Connection

The only thing in the picture that’s busier and more bustling than Cary Grant’s performance is Hugo Friedhofer’s score. The whimsical angel theme never fails to remind me of the old Maxwell House “boo-boo-boo BOOP-boop” jingle. (If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can find it on YouTube.) “The Bishop’s Wife” preceded Maxwell House’s percolator theme by fourteen years; the two themes are not identical, but they both have that signature leap of a major ninth, which is a highly unusual interval in pop music. (I can think of only one pop tune that features it: “I’m Telling You Now” sung by Freddie and the Dreamers in 1965; Harold Rome also used the interval to good effect in a ballad from “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” but how many people — with the possible exceptions of Elliott Gould and Barbra Streisand — remember that score? Marilyn Cooper, who sang the tune, is dead.) Friedhofer uses the motive so often throughout the picture that I think of the score (quite unfairly) as Rhapsody on a Jingle for Maxwell House. Paradoxically, this strikes me as a good thing: without the lousy music, the entire picture would be no better than grotesque kitsch; with the lousy music, it’s appealingly nutty . . . especially when the Maxwell House Variations are at odds with the spiritual uplift of the scenes they underscore. At least, I think so. But you and your ears may have to squint to see and hear it my way. I have to be in the right mood for it (i.e., dead tired, with my defenses down), because it’s awfully sticky and so sugary that it often hurts my teeth. Unlike Maxwell House, which is alleged to be Good to the Last Drop, “The Bishop’s Wife” is goop to the last drip.

As the Bishop’s wife, Loretta Young, with her heavy-lidded saucer eyes and eerily elongated Silly Putty face, looks more Disneyesque equine than ever. She was famously one of the best-dressed women in Hollywood, though most of her ensembles in this production are hideous. She gives literal meaning to the old cliché “clothes horse.” For the life of me, I can’t understand how she had a career. Marlene Dietrich once said of her, “Every time Loretta sins [i.e., has sex out of wedlock], she builds a church. That’s why there are so many Catholic churches in Hollywood.” She was a notorious Catholic scold, who used to institute a swear jar on the sets she worked on. Whenever she heard anyone use foul language, she’d demand that the offender pony up the fifty cent fine, which she’d send each week to the Bishop of Rome. Ethel Merman was told of this practice when she was visiting Celeste Holm on the set of “Come to the Stable.” Merman fished into her purse and pulled out a bill. “Here’s ten bucks, Loretta. Go fuck yourself!”

Dudley Conducts The Mitchell Boychoir

Somewhere in the middle of the picture, Dudley and Julia go to St. Timothy’s Church to hear a rehearsal of the boys’ choir. This is what happens.

The singers are all members of a group called The Robert Mitchell Boy Choir (in the credits, they’re listed as The Mitchell Boychoir). Most of these kids came from poor families; all of them attended a special school in Los Angeles that was established and run by choirmaster Robert Mitchell. They sang in several movies in the thirties and forties, including “Love Affair” and “Going My Way.” I like the way at least half of them look as if they have said “Please don’t send my brudduh tudduh chair” at some point in their lives. And I love the sound they make. I know the scene is corny, and I dislike Cary Grant’s hamming, but I find the underlying idea completely irresistible, especially when the descant kicks in.

The Hack Philosopher

James Gleason, ugh. He plays a cutesy-pie taxicab driver named Sylvester.

Cary Grant and Loretta Young listen to James Gleason gas on as Sylvester, the loquacious cabbie.

Cary Grant and Loretta Young listen to James Gleason gas on as Sylvester, the loquacious cabbie.

Gleason was a popular character actor in the thirties and forties; I can see why, but I don’t have to like it: you either enjoy his brand of corn or you don’t. He’s the urban male version of the Quaint Old Darling type that I find repellent. In “The Bishop’s Wife,” we meet him when Dudley and Julia climb into his taxi. After eavesdropping on their conversation, he unburdens himself of some half-baked Sherwood/Nathan palaver about “Ya know what duh trouble is widda woirld t’day?” — and nearly kills all three of them in a head-on collision with a truck while he’s gassing on and forgets to watch the road. (Dudley secretly intervenes and disaster is averted.) Then Sylvester goes ice-skating with them — a protracted comic/romantic interlude that brings the three of them closer together. It’s pretty dreadful stuff, but I enjoy the phoniness of it, especially the way that Dudley’s skating stunt double is so obviously not Cary Grant: he’s shorter and stockier, and his head (much larger than Grant’s) is kept in ludicrous shadow that follows him around like a negative spotlight. I wonder if audiences bought the effect back when the picture was released . . . Maybe it worked better when the picture was shown in movie theatres where the air was thick with cigarette smoke. The stunt doubles for Loretta Young and James Gleason are less obvious. She’s in an ostentatiously hideous hat, which partially disguises the deception. When the skating party is over and Sylvester delivers them at the Bishop’s residence, he refuses to accept money: “You two have restored my faith in yuman nature,” he says. Dudley watches him drive off and murmurs (with a twinkle in his voice), “Sylvester is a noble man. His children and his children’s children shall rise up and call him blessèd.” Something in me rises up, too, but it’s not a blessing.

Gladys Cooper Hears an Angel

Without the Bishop’s permission, Dudley decides to pay a call on the fierce Mrs Hamilton. Once there, he looks for clues about how to confront the aged tigress in her lair and stroke her till she purrs.

Presumably Allan Cartwright, the composer of “Lost April,” also did the ornate calligraphy on the sheet music.

'Lost April' score.

‘Lost April’ score.

We’re expected to believe Allan Cartwright was in love with Agnes Hamilton, but if he wasn’t gay, I’ll eat my head. And take a hinge at the insipid lyrics: “Lost April, where did you [go?]” . . . Well, if nothing else, they’re of a piece with the rest of the picture. As soon as Dudley begins to play the tune on the harp, Mrs Hamilton appears at the top of the stairs and, transfixed by the music, she descends. I pick up the scene in the middle of the gushing tune.

“I never loved George Hamilton,” she says. Well, who does? Gladys Cooper rose to stardom as Sir Gerald du Maurier’s leading lady. Du Maurier was famous for underplaying and Miss Cooper followed her leading man’s example. (When George S. Kaufman was in London directing a show in the early thirties, he remarked to a friend, “I have a slight cold, caught while watching Sir Gerald du Maurier make love.”) In this scene, she represents her inner life with an artfully raised eyebrow while keeping absolutely still. Her performance is artificial as hell and I adore it. I also love the way she pronounces the name “Cartwright” as “KHAR-tritt.” Cooper couldn’t bear to act with unattractive men; perhaps that’s why she’s so wonderful in this scene. I’ve never seen her play such vulnerability in any other picture. Anyhow, I’m always glad to see Gladys Cooper act — mostly because her presentational style of performance provides a superb example of what early twentieth century stage acting looked like. And, frankly, her old-fashioned technique is not nearly as artificial as the stuff Method Actors came up with in the second half of the century, nor nearly so self-regarding and self-indulgent. Her style is more glamorous and charming. And it’s faster.

Henry Koster directed. The stupendously ugly production design is by Perry Ferguson and George Jenkins, who were responsible for the ugliness of several other Goldwyn pictures of the mid- to late-forties. I find their work immediately recognizable: vulgar, gloomy Victoriana. I believe it’s supposed to look expensive and cozy, but merely looks claustrophobic and kitsch.