East Side West Side (1950)
In East Side, West Side, Barbara Stanwyck finally breaks with her smooth-talking but repeatedly unfaithful husband, played by James Mason. In truth, one has some understanding for Mason since he is pursued aggressively by both Ava Gardner and Cyd Charisse. But he is a weak man, and meanwhile Stanwyck meets an upright Italian cop (Van Heflin) who has working class credibility and the moral fiber her husband lacks. This is another film in the 1950s trend, then, in which working class ethic (and ethnic) beats tuxedoed high life.
When Mason makes his umpteenth excuse and promise never to cheat again—which might stick this time since his main temptation, Ava Gardner, has been murdered—Stanwyck has finally had enough. “I don’t know how love starts or why it ends,” she says.
I thought my love for you would never end, but if it did the whole world would end, the traffic in the streets would stop, the boats on the river. But I was wrong, Brand, nothing stops. Everything goes on. It doesn’t make any difference to anyone in the world that I don’t love you anymore. Least of all to me.
A deft touch in this very watchable movie is that it ends not with Stanwyck and her new beau, but with Mason, alone in their penthouse suite.
The movie is a very loose adaptation of Marcia Davenport’s 1947 bestselling autobiographical novel of the same title. Davenport claims in her 1967 memoir Too Strong For Fantasy never to have seen the movie: “I was told [it] was a horror. . . . It wholly distorted the purpose and scope of the story.” Without seeing the movie, we might be inclined to take Davenport’s side. The daughter of renowned opera singer Alma Gluck, she was a writer of bestselling novels and a widely respected music critic. Of Jewish background herself, Davenport’s second husband Russell Davenport was a member in good standing of the liberal WASP establishment, a Yale Skull and Bones initiate and a managing editor of Fortune magazine. They divorced in 1944. Davenport traveled the world, and was an intimate of both Arturo Toscanini and Jan Masaryk.
Surprisingly, though, the novel is bloated and dull, as is her memoir. In both cases, there is highly interesting material that becomes hard to see in the glare of Davenport’s incandescent self-regard. Though highly successful in her time—she had the right connections and liberal credentials—reading her self-congratulatory and navel-gazing work now is a chore. Better the screen adaptation.
One aspect of the novel that was left out of the movie is at least of interest in terms of American political history. The Italian police detective of the movie was in the book a Czech-American, doing American intelligence work overseas. Through her connection with Masaryk, Davenport was highly concerned for Czech independence in the postwar years. In one episode toward the end of the novel, the heroine’s Czech-American lover visits his relatives in New York to tell them of the wartime horrors that have taken place back in the old country. As part of this, he delivers impassioned speeches telling them—and, by extension, the novel’s readership—to get over their naïve fear of Communism.
The Communists, he says, have fought the good fight against the fascists. Yet his Aunt Olga is not so sanguine about the intentions of the Russians: “You will see,” she tells her nephew, “they don’t leave. Never.”
“Yes they will,” said Mark patiently.
A year after the novel’s publication, the Soviet-backed coup of 1948 ensured Czechoslovak enslavement to the Communist regime for the next four decades.
Twenty years later, Davenport attempted in her memoir to justify her earlier cheerful attitude toward the intentions of the Communists. It boils down to her liberal faith that Communists would play by the same parliamentary rules as non-Communists. “I never understood why there should have been Communists, with strong ties to Moscow and the Communist International, in Czechoslovakia from the beginning of the Republic in 1919,” she writes. “As an American I suppose I oversimplify the motivations which explain Communists. I look for the reasons which made them that way.” Lord protect us from such friends of freedom.
Ironically, the screenplay that helped turn the slog of a novel into a good B melodrama was written by Isobel Lennart. Lennart had been a Communist Party member from 1939 until the mid-1940s, and later chose to testify before the HUAC, feeling she wanted to put her regret over her involvement on record. From her testimony:
To me, and to many others, it was a place to gather to talk about what was going on around us, who was writing and what, what we could do about things that seemed unjust. But the atmosphere in the party is a strictly hot-house atmosphere. You all read the same things, you talk about the same things, you hear nothing but one point of view. You don’t realize this when you are in. You don’t realize you have blinders on. But you get so if somebody outside says something that doesn’t fit in, you feel that they are beings dupes, not you, you see.
Her marriage to a leftwing anti-Communist in 1945 helped her leave the party orbit. She made the decision to name only already known party members in her HUAC testimony, but later regretted her decision to testify. Former friends vilified her, and she spent years “overcome with shame and guilt,” as she told an interviewer. Yet her career remained strong, and she won the Best Screenplay award from the Writers Guild of America for the 1968 film adaptation of her own Broadway play, Funny Girl. Lennart died in a car crash at the age of 55.
Let’s Make It Legal (1951)
The sensibility of Hollywood may have turned away from the champagne ambience of the 1930s, but that didn’t stop it from sometimes attempting to get another sip. Let’s Make It Legal is a try at a 1930s-style screwball comedy of remarriage, and even has Claudette Colbert in the lead—her last appearance in a comedy. But it is slow and clunky; the champagne is flat.
It may be that a key ingredient of a successful screwball comedy is fast talking—part of wit is quickness—and when the pace of Hollywood dialogue slows down it drags the genre down with it. What does sparkle in the film are the few minutes in which Marilyn Monroe pops in.
Let’s Do It Again (1953)
Let’s Do It Again is not an attempt at 1930s screwball but a musical adaptation of that perfect 1930s screwball, The Awful Truth. The incredible chemistry of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant is replaced by the complete lack of any chemistry discernible between an odd-looking Jane Wyman and a dull-looking Ray Milland. They don’t even have a dog to replace the wonderful Mr. Smith.
The movie is interesting for what it marks about the shifts of the 1950s. Class does not really exist in the movie. Ralph Bellamy’s role in The Awful Truth is taken over here by Aldo Ray, but whereas Bellamy indexed a wealthy but class-less interloper in New York high society, Ray’s character isn’t easily distinguishable from the other characters. He own uranium mines. There isn’t an urbanity in the film for Ray to crash against, only a sense that the world of the film has been disinfected with Lysol leaving it acutely White (except for the Latin band musicians).
And adult erotic chemistry, the stuff of 1930s wit, is also missing. Sex here is obvious and dopey. While Dunne’s take on a salacious hoochy-coochy dance in The Awful Truth is such an amazing scene because it is so out of keeping with the norms of the time—and becomes so inflected with Dunne’s personality as she does it—the equivalent dance performed by Wyman is no scandal or even terribly interesting, despite the long legs and shimmy. It’s what everyone is doing, and the job of men is to ogle.
Well, 1953 was also the year that Playboy was launched.
Reunion in Reno (1951)
Another Reno B-movie, shot on location in our favorite divorce movie city. The twist here is that the person seeking a divorce is a little girl played by ten year old child actor Gigi Perreau. She shows up in Reno and explains to a perplexed divorce attorney that she wants a divorce from her parents, though she won’t reveal who they are. The attorney and his girlfriend, a kind-hearted and anti-divorce secretary (Peggy Dow, whose somewhat Sophia Loren-like looks won her a brief, three-year film career before she gave it up), figure out the mystery. It turns out that the girl has a skunk of an aunt who told her that her soon-to-arrive baby brother will cost too much for her parents to afford, and reveals moreover that she was adopted. This is why little Gigi snuck off to Reno to seek her “divorce.” Loving parents arrive to reassure their daughter, and the attorney and the secretary not only decide to get married, but to adopt a child as well.