Last month, I wrote about Jimmy Stewart playing a monster in Vertigo. It seems only fair that I cover one of his gentlest roles next, that of lovelorn salesman Alfred Kralik in holiday favorite The Shop Around the Corner (1940). For those unfamiliar with the film, it was later remade as the horrible You’ve Got Mail (1998), which I despised only slightly less than the man behind me in the theater, who complained, “You’ve got to be kidding me” to his girlfriend after it ended.
The Shop Around the Corner is superior to its remake for many reasons. Since this is a Ernst Lubitsch film, there’s a sophisticated touch to the little dramedy throughout; the plot is nuanced, funny, heartwarming, and occasionally heartbreaking.
The hardworking salespeople of the little Hungarian gift store are likable and driven and funny and loyal to one another.
They’re also struggling to get by, as in the moment when Alfred asks his colleague Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) if he’s ever gotten a bonus and gets a wistful “…once…” in response. The film often reminds me of workplace comedies, especially Brooklyn 99 and The Office, because the little family of coworkers commit to their work and vie for status with their boss. Shop experiences take up far more time than the romance.
The irascible, sensitive owner, Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan), is entertaining.
One of my favorite moments is watching Pirovitch dart out of sight when Hugo, trying to explain a specialty cigarette box, says to Felix’s colleagues, “All I want is your honest opinion.” We soon find out just how unwise it is to express your feelings to this particular boss.
Meanwhile, Alfred, the hero (Stewart), is writing love letters to an unknown respondent, who happens to be Klara (Margaret Sullavan), the prickly salesgirl the shop just hired.
She, unaware he’s her pen pal, treats Alfred with disdain. Her attitude is partially the result of misunderstandings, but also because she’s a snob who sneers at him for his job. Even though she can be conniving and even cruel, there’s something so sad about the little airs she puts on, and about how fragile her thin veneer of confidence is.
And what a savvy salesgirl! She actually convinces a customer the cigarette box the owner loves, with its terrible music, is actually a candy box that is intentionally annoying so that it prevents overindulgence. Brilliant. I can’t help but root for her even if I think Alfred is too good for her. And their dialogue is so funny, clever, and entertaining.
What a doll Alfred is. He’s so tender toward Klara once he knows who she is and is sympathetic toward the owner, who wrongs him. He bears with both of their treatment with a warmth and understanding that reveal he’s made of much finer stuff than either of them. He’s also so modest despite being the most admired worker in the shop. I love the moment he fears his pen pal will be beautiful. “Well not too beautiful, no . . . what chance does a fellow like me..?….just a lovely average girl, that’s all I want.”
Comic relief Pepi Katona (William Tracy), the confident delivery boy, doesn’t appear much until the second half, but what a joy he is every time he shows up. I particularly enjoy him teasing a doctor and the new delivery boy. He and Pirovitch are both by turns funny and warm–an unusual combination for a comedy:
You’ve Got Mail, in contrast, dials up the time spent on the romance, eliminates any humor, makes the modest hero (Tom Hanks) a big box store magnate and forces the heroine (Meg Ryan) to be bop-her-head cutesy and snarky at the same time. I’d tell you more, but I’ve blocked the rest from my memory.
Do yourself a favor, and watch The Shop Around the Corner instead.
I love a good casting against type. That’s why Scottie in Vertigo is so disarming: It’s creepy to find America’s aw-shucks sweetheart, Jimmy Stewart, playing a villain.
Of course, not all of Stewart’s parts are sugary; he was a murderer in The Thin Man series. He was a professor with disturbing philosophical beliefs in Rope. But Stewart plays innocence beautifully and so memorably—as in his iconic performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or in his role opposite an imagined rabbit in Harvey. It’s in these parts—and as the lovely George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—that Stewart makes the most enduring impression on viewers.
That’s why when Scottie begins to act unhinged in Vertigo, the audience gives him the benefit of the doubt, and can understand why his loves do too.
He’s just in grief, we think. It must be awful to blame yourself for your coworker’s death.
He’s just experiencing PTSD.
I know he must be a good guy…He’s George Bailey!
Scottie seems to be a good guy at first. He’s a charming, funny friend to Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), who secretly loves him. He’s willing to help desperate college friend, Gavin (Tom Helmore). Gavin claims his wife, Madeleine, is possessed by a sad ghost and employs Scottie to trail and protect her from self-harm.
But right away, Scottie’s actions are suspect. He falls for Gavin’s wife. I mean, it’s hard to blame him. Look at her entrance:
She somehow looks even better in a rather drab grey suit:
Still, Scottie didn’t have to act on his attraction. He breaches friendship and professional ethics by hitting on Madeleine. Knowing—as we viewers do by the end—that Gavin planned it that way doesn’t change anything.
For a brief moment, Scottie and Madeleine seem to enjoy each other’s company, but the happiness is short lived.
Soon, things go terribly wrong for Scottie. Madeleine leads Scottie to a tower. His vertigo prevents him from following her, and he thinks he sees her leap to her death. What he really sees is the real Madeleine (whom he never met) thrown from a tower, while fake Madeleine, whom he’s been trailing (Novak), hides until he leaves.
Once Scottie loses fake-Madeleine to supposed suicide, we’ve forgiven him for any bad behavior. After all, look at his despair!
It’s what he does with that despair that makes Scottie a villain.
First, he follows a strange woman, Judy, to her apartment door.
Let’s start there. Stalking a woman because she looks like your lost love is deranged. Her hostile response to his knock is valid—even if she weren’t the fake Madeleine we know her to be.
Of course, Judy is hardly innocent. She was involved in a murder plot that ruined Scottie’s life. Despite her complicity, we feel for her. She’s so remorseful and almost as self-destructive as pretend Madeleine: who after such a perfect crime falls for her own mark? (Gavin would have killed her had he thought her capable of it.)
And Scottie? Had Scottie believed Judy guilty, his cruel behavior toward her would be somewhat justified. But Scottie believes her innocent. He’s an emotionally abusive boyfriend who feels ZERO guilt for expecting irrational sacrifices from his lover.
His next disturbing act post-stalking is to force Judy to wear the same grey suit as his dead love. When Judy realizes what he’s doing, she protests.
His justification for distressing her is jaw-droppingly awful: “Judy, Judy, it can’t make that much difference to you…. Judy, do this for me.”
I admit. I laughed aloud when I heard these words this time around. Can’t make any difference to YOU, what you wear? Yeah, nothing personal there.
“I don’t like it,” she says of the suit he offers her.
“We’ll take it,” he responds to the saleswoman.
Judy responds by laying her head on a desk in misery. Scottie’s answer? Ply her with liquor.
She asks why he’s terrorizing her and threatens to leave but fears he wouldn’t let her. Sadly, she wouldn’t leave anyway: she wants to remain with her abuser.
This is when we wish Judy’s friends from an earlier scene would return.
RUN, HONEY. RUN!!!!!!
Scottie then says his last few days with her (and yes, he starts on this nonsense just DAYS after they get together) are the first happy ones in a year.
She says that’s only because she reminds him of his dead love. What, besides that, does he like about her?
He replies, “It’s you too. There’s something in you that…” He starts to touch her, then WALKS AWAY without finishing the thought. Because she’s right: he only likes her for her resemblance to Madeleine.
“You don’t even want to touch me,” she says.
“Yes, yes I do.”
Let it be said that there’s no evidence to back his words.
“Couldn’t you like me, just me, the way I am?” Judy cries.
Now this is some heartbreaking stuff. But it gets worse:
“When we first started out,” Judy says, “it was so good, w-we had fun. And then you started in on the clothes, well, I’ll wear the darn clothes, if you want me too, if, if you’ll just, just like me.”
What is his response to this pathetic concession?
“The color of your hair.”
Because of course, he wants to change her brown hair into Madeleine’s blonde locks too.
“Oh no!” she says and walks away.
“Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.”
Again, as a woman, I must say, the color of one’s hair is QUITE PERSONAL.
But Judy is now ignoring red flags as tall as the sequoias she visited with him (while acting as Madeleine): “If…If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”
“Yes, yes,” he says.
“Then I’ll do it. I don’t care anymore about me.”
Her sad words don’t worry him, or even make him feel remorse. Because she caved to his senseless demands, he is finally affectionate, nuzzling her, “Here, go on, let’s sit by the fire,” and he takes out a cushion for her.
And so Judy makes the full transformation into his lost love for him.
We hear the elevator after the full makeover, watch her move toward him. She enters the room without a word, hesitant. She’s afraid. She puts her purse down.
“Well?” she says, turning toward him.
It’s clear that Judy is expressing one tiny rebellion, one last trace of self-respect. She comes back with her hair down, not up, like Madeleine’s. In every other way, she’s the dead woman’s twin.
“It should be back from your face and pinned at the neck,” says Scottie, “I told her [the beautician] that, I told you that.”
Wow.
“We tried it. It just didn’t seem to suit me,” she says, combing her hair nervously.
He grabs her hair.
She turns to face him.
“Please, Judy,” he begs.
She walks in other room, fixes it for him.
He sees her in fog as she somnolently walks toward him. She half-smiles, then smiles fully as she sees his tears.
Being the toxic man he is, he gives her a REAL kiss. After all, she’s now actually BECOME his dead love for him. Because that’s healthy.
In the next scene, we see them playful and flirty with each other—an echo of the earlier conversation with Midge, but with heat.
“Hello, my love. Like me?” She smiles and then spins for him in a pretty dress, her air and voice confident, easygoing—the tone of a well-loved woman. This is the first genuine smile we’ve seen from Kim Novak in the film. (Scary, right?)
“Mmmm,” he responds.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Come here.”
“Oh no, you’ll muss me.”
“Well, that’s what I had in mind. Now come here.”
He then spots Madeleine’s necklace on her neck and knows Judy’s guilt. He says cryptically, “One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past.”
Scottie drives Judy to Madeleine’s supposed suicide tower. He forces her up the stairs and through the trap door.
Then he attacks and half-strangles her, saying, “He [Gavin] made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over, only better. Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words and those beautiful, phony trances….Did he train you, did he rehearse you, did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say? You were a very apt pupil too, weren’t you?”
It’s easy to read these words on multiple levels. Yes, he’s angry she deceived him and furious she’s taken advantage of his affliction. But he’s also angry that she’s had a former lover, Gavin. And he’s angry that Gavin was a better Geppetto than he was.
Scottie’s physical actions are brutal now that he knows what Judy’s done, but those actions are just an escalation of earlier ones.
Note how many times he pins Judy’s arms throughout this story, how many times he forces her from behind—whether it is to wear the clothes he wants, or to go up to a tower where her death awaits. Observe how many times she looks fearful, hesitant, unsure of herself. She is a victim of his cruelty, just as he has been a victim of the murderous plot.
Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie is the definition of a boyfriend who should make a woman run. If he doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies in Vertigo, you’re just not paying attention.
The first half of The Spirit of St. Louis, Billy Wilder’s ode to Charles Lindbergh, is engrossing. It’s even that rarest of traits in a biopic: fairly accurate. The scenes of his airmail days capture the impossible bravery of America’s early pilots and the primitive conditions under which they flew. Wilder conveys each stage of Lindbergh’s struggle beautifully: The search for funding and a plane for the epic NY-Paris flight, the near-universal doubts about his fitness for the attempt, the rush of finally finding a team to build that plane, as eager to prove themselves as he was.
Until just after that terrifying take-off, I couldn’t believe the film hadn’t earned more praise than it had.
That’s why the clunky transition into the flight–Lindbergh (Jimmy Stewart) gabbing with a fly–shocked me enough to stop the film, ponder what had gone wrong.
It wasn’t the cheesiness of the fly talk; after all, Raymond Chandler had managed to make a similar conversation in The Little Sister downright poetic. It was that everything about the first twenty minutes of the famous flight confirmed my fears: Wilder would definitely fail to make 30+ hours of sleep deprivation interesting, and his attempts to do so would not only grossly misrepresent his subject’s character, but Lindbergh’s whole purpose for making the journey.
Given, Wilder had quite an obstacle: How do you convey hours of reflection without awkward voiceovers? How do you enlighten viewers about the brilliant, reserved, limelight-averse, notoriously elusive Lindy with so little narrative space? That’s why Stewart was chosen, I thought. Wilder must have hoped the actor’s folksy geniality would while away the minutes, make us forget that the star was twice Lindy’s age, and about 100 times as charming. (If you doubt this comparison, check out Bill Bryson’s hilarious depiction of Lindbergh’s social awkwardness in One Summer: America, 1927.) The autobiography on which the film was based illuminates just how much Wilder miscalculated, and just how his still very worth viewing first half could have been redeemed in the second.
The Flashbacks
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book moves from flight to memory throughout, as the film does, but the latter’s flashbacks have a homespun, aw-shucks feel to them, with Lindbergh as a kind of lovable oaf who survives only due to luck. In one flashback, he buys a plane he can’t fly, utterly unconcerned about his lack of skill. The scene plays for comic relief, but painfully reinforces everything that Lindbergh stood against: recklessness.
Lindbergh was daring, yes, but cautious and calculating. When the flashbacks begin to appear in the book, he uses them not to illustrate character or give the reader a lovable feeling toward him. No, they explain his success. Here’s a moment of danger, and here’s the experience that prepared him for it: earlier escapes, his training as an instructor, his previous discoveries of flaws with his planes. His whole mission was to disprove that air travel was suicidal daredevilry because otherwise why pave runways? Why install lights for landings? Why allot money for research and development?
When Stewart actually pored half the canteen of water on his face—twice! —I nearly shouted at the screen. The real man was apportioning his own water in dribbles. Had anyone involved with the writing of the film read the book? “Lucky” Lindy put more thought into one move above or below the clouds than the writers did into his entire characterization. (Wendell Mayes co-wrote the screenplay with Wilder, and Charles Lederer was given adapting credit.)
Was Lindbergh lucky? Of course. But that isn’t the primary reason he succeeded. His competitors for the NY-Paris flight–those few who survived–were hundreds of miles off course, with safety features and luxuries he lacked. Lindbergh landed on his intended airfield early based on dead reckoning—no radio, no sextant, no help. How disappointing that the filmmakers would buy the “Lucky Lindy” headlines, and miss the far more interesting man.
The Moments of Danger
Lindbergh almost died innumerable times on that flight across the ocean, but Jimmy Stewart’s wide-eyed panic in no way captures Lindbergh’s icy calm. Interestingly, the pilot forced himself to calculate how to handle various frightening scenarios not out of panic, but to stay awake. He discovered that pleasant thoughts soothed, and thus led him to sleep. Plans to land on Arctic waters kept him alert—and alive. If Lindbergh really were as shot through with anxiety as the film implies, how could he have been a professional parachuter, as he was at the start of his career? A wing walker? (Tellingly, Lindbergh even dismisses the dangers of this part of his history, analyzing how safe both jobs could be with the right team.)
Oh, Jimmy… I love Jimmy Stewart. Maybe if it were just the age, or the accent, or the personality. But it was everything: The talking aloud. The boisterous shouts. There’s a deafening, tone-deaf, overacting feel to nearly every word in the second half of the film.
Lindbergh was not Jefferson Smith or George Bailey. Effusiveness, goofiness—how widely these traits miss the quiet, introspective, highly scientific man that Lindbergh apparently was. I suspect this hamming was under protest: Stewart’s own distinguished flying record in WWII suggests he was far too acquainted with pilots to misstep this badly without directorial intervention.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so disappointed in the depiction of the flight, had the film not been so brilliant in the first half. But I kept thinking about what could have been: What if the film had ended at takeoff? Why try to put onscreen so much of a reflective book? Like The Great Gatsby, another notoriously hard to film text, the ideas are paramount here: Lindbergh’s meditations about God, about power, about nature and loss and risk.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger could have attempted an arty take on Lindbergh’s thinking. But Wilder, the storytelling genius, should have stuck to action, and let us end with that lovely image that he conveyed so perfectly: of Lindbergh weighing the current against forecasted weather, his chance to beat the competitors versus his sleeplessness, the muddiness of the airfield versus its length, and then deciding to go, and with a few laconic words to the panicked faces around him, pushing off into the sky.
This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association’s fall blogathon. Go here for fantastic entries on films highlighting planes, trains, and automobiles. You can also find an eBook version of the blogathon with many of the group’s entries, including mine, at Smashwords (for free) or Amazon for. 99. All funds for the latter go to the National Film Preservation Foundation.
I had been looking forward to the return of House of Cards for months. Frank Underwood’s (Kevin Spacey’s) skewering of his opponents is almost as fascinating to watch as his wife Claire’s (Robin Wright’s) icy machinations.
The Underwoods, DC’s creepiest power couple
But something about the nonstop snow, ice, and wind this winter has made me too blue to compound my already too cynical view of Congress. In months like these, I need to let some spring-tasting idealism in the room. In other words, I’m craving some Capra.
Many have seen It’s a Wonderful Life, and if so, they already have a feel for director Frank Capra’s conviction that the little guy/gal can make a difference. Capra clearly relished films that breathed hope, like those optimists who would follow him, Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg.
When I stared at a pile of snow two feet high today and knew my shovel was buried somewhere within it, a dose of hope was required, and few films can refresh mine as thoroughly as Capra’s brilliant Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Smith inspired by the Lincoln Memorial
The beauty of the movie is that it lets us see the world—and its hero—through the eyes of world-weary Saunders (Jean Arthur). Tasked to assist Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart), she can’t decide if he’s full of it or dim-witted. This guy insists on going to see the Lincoln Memorial when he arrives for his senatorial post, for crying out loud. He claims his primary goal is creating a boys’ camp for his state. Could anything be more suspicious to a DC insider?
Saunders’ reaction to Smith’s tourist plans.
Saunders begins by undermining him, inviting a bunch of photographers to capture him at his most foolish.
Smith inadvisedly demonstrating a bird call for the press
But as she slowly begins to reassess him, we find ourselves losing our cynicism about his dogged honesty and downhome goodness along with her. Of course, poor Smith encounters his share of Frank Underwoods, especially crafty Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), who calls him a “drooling infant.” Interactions with Taylor and his cronies will lead Smith to lose a lot of his innocence but help him develop some much-needed spunk.
Underwood (Spacey) and Taylor (Arnold)
The powerful filibuster scene at the center of the movie is so moving that reporters still reference it today as justification for allowing that congressional maneuver. The film came up as recently as the Affordable Care Act battle last September, when writers claimed Ted Cruz’s was a “faux filibuster,” and last summer, when Wendy Davis pulled the famous Jimmy Stewart move at the Texas state house for eleven hours straight.
Smith (Stewart) in the midst of his filibuster
Most days, the news convinces me that idealists like Smith will always be crushed by the powerful jaws of the Frank Underwoods among us. But somehow, I don’t feel that way today: I’ve been watching Capra.
