Tag Archives: Gladys Cooper

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’: The Wages of Sin Is Yeccch!

Original poster.

Original poster.

Q: What do you get when you cross Oscar Wilde with Louis B. Mayer and Albert Lewin?
A: Oscar Mayer Baloney.

Writer-Director Albert Lewin’s labor of love, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” was, surprisingly, Metro’s big prestige picture for 1945. It’s doubtful that Old Man Mayer would have chosen to give it the deluxe treatment if he had ever bothered to read Oscar Wilde’s extremely irritating, silly, pretentious book. The basic plot provides an excellent premise for a clammy little Val Lewtonesque shocker: the portrait in oil of a handsome young man grows old and diseased while its subject retains eternal youth — and his soul decays until it “be as damn’d and black/As hell, whereto it goes.”

The Artist at Work

Here’s the opening scene. Wonderful Cedric Hardwicke narrates wonderfully. Except for Gladys Cooper, he is the only person I’ve heard pronounce “secretive” as seh-KREET-ive. You will hear later in the scene that the equally wonderful George Sanders (who is the best reason to see this picture in its entirety) pronounces it in its conventional way. The painter, Basil Hallward, is played by an American actor, Lowell Gilmore, who is able to slice the Oscar Mayer Baloney pretty thin, but not quite as thin as the supremely droll and capable Mr Sanders.

Sanders dashes through the thickets of Wilde’s language with the nimble lightness of a wood sprite. Listen to how quickly he rattles off the line “I like persons better than principles and persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. Now I remember . . . !” He often gives the impression that there’s a martini waiting for him in his trailer — and it’s getting warmer by the second.


“Who’s that at your piano, Basil?” After Lord Henry asks this question, a fatal alliance is formed. When the novel was first published, there was a sharp critical outcry against the homosexual overtones of Lord Henry’s friendship with Dorian Gray. Those overtones do not exist in the screen adaptation, mainly because one can imagine wicked old George Sanders capable of indulging just about any sybaritic pleasure except homosexuality. Hurd Hatfield and Lowell Gilmore are rather more sexually ambiguous. Anyhow, it’s a Hollywood picture: you’ll find fell actions on the bill, but never fellatio.

Be Careful What You Wish For — Especially When There’s an Egyptian Cat in the Room

And here’s the scene in which Dorian Gray unwittingly strikes the impious bargain that he will live to regret. How strange that Lewin should have selected Hurd Hatfield to play the perfect embodiment of male beauty in the morn and liquid dew of youth . . . ! He’s not at all a bad looking fellow, though as I mentioned several months ago, he always looks as if he’s just come from a chemical peel. But did Lewin honestly think Hatfield was the loveliest lad in Tinseltown? The way Lewin directs him, he’s like one of the historical automatons at Disneyland. His eyes, in particular, have no more life in them than a pair of polished marbles.

The Egyptian cat fetish is Lewin’s contribution, not Wilde’s. No mention of Egypt or feline divinities is made in the book. Lewin had his own brand of mad nonsense that he wanted to explore under Wilde’s epicene ægis; their sensibilities are similar, but their touchstones are different. In the book, Wilde makes up for the absence of cats and the Seventy-three Great Gods of Egypt with a lot of other ponderous nonsense, about which he goes on interminably, especially with regard to a certain evil “yellow book,” which leads Dorian into the most febrile deviltries. (This “yellow book” appears to be Joris-Karl Huysmans’ oddball decadent novel, “À rebours” (“Against the Grain”). You can get it for free on Kindle, but I don’t recommend it.) Unhappily for the reader, Wilde’s novel is little more than an excuse for him to ride his three favorite hobbyhorses: Art, Morality and Æsthetics. About debauchery, Wilde is surprisingly (and Lewin unsurprisingly) prim. Wilde barely describes the low haunts that his hero frequents, but Lewin takes us into a noisy pub, The Two Turtles, where the piano is out of tune and a creepy puppet duo known as Mr and Mrs Ezekiel beat frantic tattoos upon the xylophone. Lewin’s demi-monde is no more depraved than a demitasse. No sinner’s soul ever became wreathed in garlands of boils and buboes from listening to xylophonic envois!

Mr and Mrs Ezekiel and Their Xylophone: Get thee behind me, Satan!

Mr and Mrs Ezekiel and Their Xylophone: Get thee behind me, Satan!

Wilde’s moralizing is exasperating; the conclusions he draws are the sheerest balderdash. But it’s when he yammers on about æsthetics that he’s at his punishing worst: sententious, narrow-minded, wrong-headed, dictatorial and stupendously long-winded. He’s Ayn Rand for faggots. Here is a much truncated version of the preface to his book. Since Wilde makes declarations without supporting or developing them, I can assure you that my abridgment loses no thread of logic; it merely cuts the nonsense in half.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. No artist desires to prove anything. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless. [Wilde’s emphasis, not mine]

To be sure, with “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde created a thing that is quite useless, but that doesn’t make it a work of art. When Wilde dons his High Art vestments and clambers into his pulpit of ebonized wood with gilt highlights, the gospel he preaches is all wet. As a philosopher and critic, he’s a stultifying prig. As a wit, he relies heavily on ironic paradox (“The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer”) and antimetabole (“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul”), but both of these examples, like many of his aphorisms, are what I consider imitation wit, because they simply don’t fit the facts. What good is a cynical paradox that is patently false?

A few years after Wilde’s novel was published, in a terrible miscarriage of justice, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labor for “gross indecency.” Had he been on trial for being a bore, they’d have broken him on the wheel.

'The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.' Aw, nerts!

‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.’ Aw, nerts!

On the other hand, Wilde deeply impressed William Butler Yeats, who wrote the following passage in his memoir, “Four Years”:

My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that night at [critic, poet (“Invictus”), editor William Ernest] Henley’s, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde’s listeners have recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: ‘Give me “The Winter’s Tale,” “Daffodils that come before the swallow dare” but not “King Lear.” What is “King Lear” but poor life staggering in the fog?’ and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision, sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater’s ‘Essays on the Renaissance:’ ‘It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence. The last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’ ‘But,’ said the dull man, ‘would you not have given us time to read it?’ ‘Oh no,’ was the retort, ‘there would have been plenty of time afterwards — in either world.’ I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure . . . And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at once, ‘I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all’; and I was too loyal to speak my thought: ‘You & not he’ said all the brilliant things. He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said, on that first meeting, ‘The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl’; and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after Wilde’s downfall he said to me: ‘Why did he do it? I told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.’

Of course, Yeats is writing about Wilde’s masterful use of rhetoric in everyday conversation, his unflappability and his creamy Irish charm; he’s not appraising his merits as a novelist and playwright. The passage offers an interesting example of how personal magnetism can be so overpowering that even a man of Yeats’ intelligence can fall entirely and rapturously under its spell. Wholeheartedly do I accept the accuracy of Yeats’ observations, yet I find the substance of most of Wilde’s eloquently expressed observations to be idiotic — especially his remarks about “King Lear” and his blithely nonsensical repartee about reading Walter Pater in the afterlife. Brilliant, perhaps; false, certainly. But is it possible that Yeats, in the cold light of day, could have believed “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to be a good novel?

Well, whatever Yeats thought of “Dorian Gray,” Albert Lewin considered it a work of genius — he was obsessed with the book; over the course of more than a decade, he worked out the picture to the minutest detail. According to Angela Lansbury, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Sybil Vane (the first victim of Dorian’s cruelty), “It was his baby.” When at last the picture went into production, Lewin was given an enormous budget and a long shooting schedule, yet went way over budget and over-ran the schedule by more than a month.

The Metro-Gnome

Lewin directs Gilmore and Sanders. I wish it were a bigger picture, but Lewin was tiny.

Lewin directs Gilmore and Sanders. I wish it were a bigger picture, but Lewin was tiny.

Albert Lewin was hired as a screenwriter at Metro in 1924, and not long afterwards, became Irving Thalberg’s personal assistant and closest associate for many years. On account of Lewin’s diminutive stature, wags in Hollywood referred to him as “the Metro-Gnome.” When Thalberg died in 1937, Lewin went over to Paramount, where he produced pictures until 1941. He turned to directing in 1942 — he took Maugham’s enjoyably middle-brow fictional account of Gaugin, “The Moon and Sixpence,” and turned it into earnestly unenjoyable middle-brow crap. Next came “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which is considerably more enjoyable than the novel; then in 1947, “The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami,” which is considerably less enjoyable than Maupassant’s “Bel-Ami.” Lewin’s “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951) is the most lunatic of the bunch. I haven’t seen the two that followed it. Judging from what I’ve seen, especially “Pandora,” I have the distinct impression that the Metro-Gnome was one wacky, pretentious little dude.

The Sorrows of His Changing Face

Here is what we’re to accept as Basil Hallward’s masterpiece “The greatest thing you’ve ever done, Basil,” murmurs George Sanders. The early paintings of Dorian are by Henrique Medina; the later, ghastly ones are by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. The final painting now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Originally, Albright’s twin brother Malvin painted the early portraits, but Medina’s work was used in the picture. Adam Emory Albright, father of the twins, was himself a popular painter at the turn of the last century, famous for his sentimental pictures of children in bucolic settings — you know the genre: barefoot lads in picturesque tatters, with floppy straw hats and fishing poles. One of his paintings showed up on the Antiques Roadshow the other week — Ivan and Malvin were two of the three models in it. Ivan’s work appears to have been a fairly violent rejection of his father’s style.

Basil Hallward's portrait of Dorian Gray.

‘O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow/Nor draw no lines there with thy antique pen’: Basil Hallward’s portrait of Dorian Gray (painted by Henrique Medina).

Here is a close-up of Dorian’s face:The painting before Dorian has done anything to be ashamed of.

Now here is a close-up of his face after his callousness has driven poor little Sybil Vane to suicide:After his first act of cruelty.

On the DVD’s commentary track, film historian Steve Haberman says he’s never been able to detect the difference in Dorian’s expression. I shrug and am silent . . . except to say that the painting is rather a better actor than Hurd Hatfield. According to Angela Lansbury, Lewin was so adamant about line-readings, facial expressions, body language and everything else about his conception of the role, that poor Hurd Hatfield never had a chance. (She and Hatfield were lifelong friends.) The Metro-Gnome simply would not print a take until he was satisfied that Hatfield’s performance was the real McCoy.

Sanders Cracks Wise

This is why the picture is watchable, why it’s fun: George Sanders.

Only Bad Witches Are . . . Beautiful?

Well, so things go from bad to worse. Dorian gives into his shameful proclivities (never described in the book or the movie; the book does mention something about opium) until finally he commits murder. Here is his portrait as it looks minutes before he commits murder. This is Ivan Albright’s work.

Supperation anxiety: Ivan Albright's 'Picture of Dorian Gray'

Suppuration anxiety: Ivan Albright’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray.’

Neither Lewin nor Wilde explains why eternal youth leads irrevocably to infernal deeds. I really do not understand the connection: why should Dorian Gray go round eating opium and killing people just because Time has no power to dig deep trenches in his beauty’s field? What’s Wilde’s moral? Is he suggesting that absolute beauty corrupts absolutely? Had Dorian aged like everyone else, would he have pursued the same vices? Or did he pursue them only because his changeless beauty gave him carte blanche? If that’s Wilde’s point, then he is arguing that a man’s honesty and goodness are tuned to the degree of his homeliness. But that’s preposterous. So what the hell does he mean? “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I./It is too strong a knot for me t’untie.”

Don’t Go In the Attic!

Obviously, Dorian Gray must pay for his crimes with his own life. Upon his demise, the picture and he trade places. Donna Reed and Peter Lawford (both play characters who don’t exist in the book) break into Dorian’s attic hideaway, where they find The Picture of Dorian Gray in its original condition (but with a knife through its heart) and a grotesquely disfigured corpse stretched out at its feet. When I first saw this climactic scene on TCM several years ago, I blurted out, “Why, if it isn’t Jack Nicholson!”

Little Boy Ewww

Little Boy Ewww

Harry Stradling’s cinematography is excellent. He won that year’s Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black and White. Herbert Stothart’s score is predictably plush and humdrum. Angela Lansbury is poignant; Donna Reed is pretty; Peter Lawford looks like Jiminy Cricket with the eyebrows of John L. Lewis.

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.