What I'm really watching: golden age Hollywood comedies
How to fill the evenings in these desolate times? A colleague told me she will be delving into her BFI playlist of Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog. I hope to emulate her ambition, but I was even more thrilled when a kindly cineaste neighbour turned up at my door with DVDs of a trio of Hollywood comedies: Design for Living (1933) directed by Ernst Lubitsch and two Preston Sturges classics, The Lady Eve (1941) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).For a few happy hours, I was able to suspend the feelings of dread and boredom we are all currently experiencing. Watching them on successive evenings, I was struck by several things. They are all dialogue-heavy movies but have a speed and fleetness of foot that make a lot of today’s films seem cumbersome. They also remind me of George Meredith’s dictum in his Essay on Comedy that laughter depends on quickness of perception: you realise how much film-makers once relied on the alertness of a mass audience. And, while these films have a comic brio, they incidentally reveal a lot about sexual, social and even political attitudes.I was marginally disappointed only by Design for Living. Lubitsch was a supreme comic stylist and he gets a fine performance from Miriam Hopkins as a woman simultaneously attracted to a painter and a dramatist. But Ben Hecht, who based his script on a Noël Coward play, once joked “There’s only one line of Coward left in the picture – see if you can find it.”
More seriously, the movie skirts round the point, highlighted in recent stage revivals at the Donmar in 1994 and the Old Vic in 2010, that the two men are as closely attached to each other as they are to the heroine, Gilda. It is hard to believe in such fine upstanding examples of American virility as Gary Cooper and Fredric March sharing a bohemian Paris apartment, let alone a bed, and much of the original’s loucheness gets lost. Lubitsch directs with admirable briskness, but this is Coward sanitised for the cinema.If Lubitsch is evasive about sex, Sturges in The Lady Eve created one of the most subtly erotic films in cinema history. The plot hinges on the mutual attraction between Barbara Stanwyck as a shipboard cardsharp and Henry Fonda as a rich but naive ophiologist. There’s a great scene where Stanwyck flees in terror from Fonda’s pet snake – make of that what you will – and draws him to her cabin where she holds him fiercely in her grip while urging him “don’t let go of me”: the combination of Stanwyck’s allure and Fonda’s perplexity make this scene heated and hilarious at the same time.Sturges also had a gift for social satire while exploring the strangeness of sex. Having been dumped by Fonda, Stanwyck gets her revenge by turning up at his palatial family home disguised as an English aristocrat. Sturges has great fun at the expense of the greed and snobbery of the American rich who slaver over a title. But at the heart of the story lies Fonda’s bewildered fascination at the sight of a renewed Stanwyck. “It’s positively the same dame,” protests his sidekick. Fonda’s puzzled uncertainty, however, eerily prefigures Hitchcock’s Vertigo and James Stewart’s similar attraction to a transformed Kim Novak.
In The Lady Eve, Sturges proved that comedy could work simultaneously on several levels. And he confirmed that in Hail the Conquering Hero which, while made in the midst of war, audaciously questions the whole notion of heroism. Eddie Bracken plays a marine who, discharged from the services because of hay fever, returns to his native town and unwittingly finds himself treated as a conqueror. James Agee in a perceptive review pointed out a central implausibility: you wonder why a group of genuine marines, just back from Guadalcanal, should create a fictive past for Bracken and eagerly endorse his elevation to local hero and prospective mayor.But the sheer energy of the film sweeps aside any logical objections: the scene of Bracken’s
return, where rival town bands play a cacophony of competing tunes, is one of the most riotous in cinema. For all its comedy – which has echoes of Gogol’s The Government Inspector – the movie also raises disturbing questions. As David Thomson said, “It’s the first serious warning about the loss of judgment in American public life.”What Sturges suggests – and this in 1944 – is that a gullible populace is so hungry for heroes that it will happily endorse any pretender to the title and will even, as a throwaway line in the movie suggests, see in him a potential president.
One hardly needs to press the point that Sturges’s movie has a prophetic edge. What really hit me, however, seeing these three films was that Hollywood golden age comedy had the capacity to make us laugh uproariously while also forcing us to think. Where, I wondered, are its equivalents today?
hymn to the Troubles. It was a difficult time for us because Enya [Brennan] had just left along with our manager/producer, Nicky Ryan, to pursue a solo career. We’d just started using electronics and wrote the song on a Prophet 5 synth. We had the lyrics, harmonies and melody in a couple of hours, then came back the following evening and recorded a demo on a little cassette recorder. Yorkshire TV loved it.
Before Harry’s Game aired over three nights, we went to a private press showing in London to around 100 people. At the end of the first hourlong episode, the house lights came up, the song played and nobody reacted. I thought, “That’s that.” After the second hour, there were less people talking over the music. The third episode was devastating. Both main characters died. Then the music came on. Not one person stood up, and the music just played out. That’s when we knew the song had touched a nerve.
Moya Brennan, singer
I didn’t think I had much of a voice. I would have loved to have been a rock’n’roller, but gradually I realised that I had a different timbre and an ethereal feel, which is very much part of the Clannad sound. Whenever people ask where that sound comes from I say, “Go to Donegal. You’ll feel the earthiness and the atmosphere.”
The Irish Gaelic lyrics for Theme from Harry’s Game derived from a saying in a book of old Irish proverbs that our grandfather had given Ciarán:
“Everything that is and will be, will cease to be. The moon and the stars, youth and beauty.” There’s no solution to war, just people killing each other. We were never a political band, but the sentiment that all things must pass inspired the lyrics.
The chorus, “Fol lol the doh, fol the day, fol the doh fol the day,” comes from ancient Irish “mouth-music”. It was common in the reels and jigs world, but Ciarán thought it would be good to slow it down. Some people thought I was singing, “On the dole, all day.” Yorkshire TV sent over an engineer, Richard Dodd, who’d worked on 10cc’s I’m Not in Love and introduced us to the idea of layering the vocals. Ciarán and I sang looking right at each other. We could feel the emotion of the song. I think we used the second take, and layered it on top of that.
There were only three TV channels back then, so we knew people would watch Harry’s Game. Noel Edmonds played the song on Radio 1 for the first time and then after the next song he said: “We’ve been inundated with people asking, ‘What was that?’” So he played it again. Bono said that when he first heard it in a car, he had to pull over. Then because of the Troubles it was taken off the radio for a day in case it was offensive, so we sent them the translation and they played it again.
One day, we were in a Transit van in Germany; the next we were being picked up in a limo to do Top of the Pops and taking pictures of ourselves jumping in and out. It was unreal for a small Irish folk band from Donegal. I was the first female Irish folk singer to break abroad. People started calling me the First Lady of Celtic Music, a title I’m really proud of.
Interviews by Dave Simpson. The anthology In a Lifetime is out now; the band is scheduled to tour the UK from August.