Gotham Diary:
Luffing
8 July 2014
Kathleen left for Maine yesterday — she spends some time every July with her old friends from summer camp, three of whom have houses nearby — and took with her, as is usual but to an unusual degree, the wind from my sails. I feel it as a physiological, not an emotional effect. I feel stilled, inert. There seems to be no reason to do anything. Except, of course, to read.
Even reading got to be too much yesterday. John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins is a decidedly political biography, which is undoubtedly proper, but writing about politics on a fine grain risks reducing politics to a game — a game with many players, none of whom, however, is seen as clearly as the hero, skewing the very sense of game. Meanwhile, I have developed an idea of Roy Jenkins’s moral character, but almost indirectly, from crumbs left by Campbell’s narrative. I wish the book opened up more on the rugged humanism of Jenkins’s thought, which is probably more in evidence in his many books. (At the same time, can I wish that Campbell’s book were any longer?) After lunch yesterday, I had to put Roy Jenkins down for a rest, even though I had no inclination to do anything else.
In my inanition, I turned, eventually, to the movies.
The second movie that I watched, in the middle of the evening, was Witness for the Prosecution, Billy Wilder’s courtroom spectacular (1957). Charles Laughton plays to the hilt a curmudgeonly but mercurial barrister who engages our affection at once with the stream of insults with which he dismisses his nurse’s solicitude. He is recovering from a serious heart attack, and mustn’t undertake anything stressful; but stress is the very air to him, and in no time he is not only deprecating but positively thwarting his nanny. (Miss Plimsoll is brought to goggle-eyed bustling life by Elsa Lanchester.) Forbidden to do so, Sir Wilfrid nevertheless takes on a capital case.
Laughton’s distinguished performance plays in two carefully distinct registers. In chambers, or anywhere else out of court, Sir Wilfried is “natural” — impulsive, domineering, exasperated, and too engaged in what he’s about to be self-conscious about it. Standing in court, wearing wig and gown, Sir Wilfrid becomes a prima ballerina balancing alongside an abyss. Every syllable, every gesture is delivered in the proper measure and with a show of confidence driven by concealed desperation. We are always aware that the stakes are very high, and that Sir Wilfrid’s case is very weak — we may wonder a little if the barrister is right to believe in the innocence of his client. The uncertainty of victory makes Sir Wilfrid’s agile maneuvers genuinely exciting. Laughton’s Rabelaisian gusto infuses the act with great good humor. Witness for the Prosecution is, as courtroom dramas go, serious fun.
I have always preferred Alfred Hitchcock’s entry in this field, The Paradine Case, however, because the barrister in the case, played by Gregory Peck, mounts a far more complex, and in the end less disciplined performance in court. He is also wrong about his client, but the nature of his misunderstanding, which, unlike Sir Wilfrid’s, leads to a just outcome, leads directly to her immolation. There is also the spectacle of a professional man stumble blindly unaware in the traps of love. Tony Keane isn’t dancing alongside an abyss but tumbling into it. The pyrotechnics of a whodunit trial are pre-empted by slow-motion disaster.
The earlier, darker picture tells, therefore, a richer, more satisfying story. But there is another difference, one that prevents Wilder’s movie from being as great a comedy as Paradine Case is a study of doomed loves. That is the supporting casts. In The Paradine Case, the supporting actors are nothing less than magnificent. (Laughton himself is the judge, august on the bench but goatishly repellent in the drawing room.) In Witness, the actors playing Sir Wilfrid’s assistants and colleagues are all first-rate, from Henry Daniell as the solicitor to Torin Thatcher as the prosecutor. But the client and his wife are underserved.
Tyrone Power would die soon after Witness was released, and it is not hard to see clouds of ill-health in his performance as Leonard Vole. In those days, there was nothing youthful about being 44, but Power looks closer to fifty, worn and confused. He is doubly implausible; not only does he fail to seem British, but he doesn’t look much like a very good actor, either. There is a heartiness about his delivery that seems about ten years out of date. The final moments of his performance redeem all of this — he was acting a part in the beginning, and if he didn’t fool us, he fooled Sir Wilfrid. But the air of hokey melodrama clings to him nonetheless.
I have even more trouble with Marlene Dietrich. For most of the picture, she plays “Marlene Dietrich,” cool as a cucumber and three steps ahead of everybody else. But at the climax, her attempt at passionate embrace simply curdles. I don’t think that Wilder gives her enough time, or the right shots, to swing into the violently different emotional state to which her character is blasted by the surprise ending. Or it may be that Dietrich was too constitutional a stoic to unbend convincingly.
I was glad that I’d chosen the movie, though. It was just right for the occasion, and I returned to Roy Jenkins with a lighter heart.
***
The movie that I watched first, in the late afternoon, was Mogambo. I had never seen it before. A thousand years ago, in the dawn of videotape, I saw Red Dust, apparently the original of Mogambo, also starring Clark Gable, but I have no recollection of it, not of Jean Harlow and certainly not of Mary Astor. In Mogambo, those ladies are replaced by Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, respectively. I did not care for it at all.
Mogambo was extensively shot in various parts of Africa, very much “on location.” This might be interesting if the movie’s central stories were not a pair of airless and trite romances. It is hard to see Clark Gable as anything but a George Clooney who has not only let himself go but also checked a major portion of his brain in a bus-station locker. Ava Gardner is a period vamp, all pointy breasts and puckered mouth, but she hasn’t got the wit to play a girl who just wants to have fun, so she slips into playing the vulgar bitch. It is Grace Kelly who makes Mogambo a must-see, not, assuredly, because she’s great, but because she shows the potential — still only potential — that attracted Alfred Hitchcock, who in three movies turned her into a great Hollywood star. It’s interesting to think of how much better Mogambo would have been with Lauren Bacall and Deborah Kerr. They might have been able to do something with Gable.
The highly detachable safari side of the story, with its tribal costumes and its gorillas, is not the sort of thing that draws me to the movies. I found it all utterly formulaic, but I suppose that that is what transmutes the alien into the exotic. Whenever lovers kissed against panoramic vistas, I had to look away, because the effect was spectacularly indecent.
Daily Blague news update: Company B.