From such simple material Pagnol fashioned a comic gem and a humanist masterpiece. With his regular troupe of actorsRaimu, Fernand Charpin, Robert Vattier, and othersPagnol animates a galaxy of characters that is both funny and touching. His light touch and the actors talents transcend the crude stereotypes (womanizing aristocrat, pedantic teacher, cantankerous old maid, cuckolded husband), creating a world in which each has his or her own clearly defined role. Giono and Pagnols Provence is conservative and patriarchal (the wife does not have much of a say), but it is a world in which shared fundamental valueshere represented by bread, both a Christian and pagan symbolcement social cohesiveness.
Raimus towering performance effortlessly alternates comic theatricality with minimalist realism, turning his comic cuckold into a tragic hero. Raimu, from the South of France himself, was a superlative stage actor, at ease with the florid language and emphatic delivery of the Marseilles vernacular. His filmic modernity, however, came from his ability to switch within seconds to understated moments, giving them extraordinary emotional impact, as illustrated by the films most famous scene. As the repentant wife returns, Raimu welcomes her back as if nothing had happened and instead takes it out on a surrogate, the straying female cat Pomponnette, in the most vivid and affecting terms. In this moment of contrived high comedy I defy anyone to remain dry-eyed. It may be called The Bakers Wife, but it is definitely Raimus film. GV
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1930s
BRINGING UP BABY (1938)
U.S. (RKO) 102m BW
Director: Howard Hawks
Producer: Howard Hawks, Cliff Reid
Screenplay: Hagar Wilde, Dudley Nichols
Photography: Russell Metty
Music: Roy Webb
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Leona Roberts, George Irving, Tala Birell, Virginia Walker, John Kelly
Bringing Up Baby, the definitive screwball comedy, was the first film Howard Hawks made in a six-picture contract with RKO in 1937. Unpromisingly based on a short story about a young couple and their tamed leopard, the shoot went forty days over schedule and over budget. It earned so little upon its release in 1938 that Hawks was fired from RKO and Katherine Hepburn had to buy herself out of her own contract. Ahead of its time, its amazing breakneck pace and disarmingly witty dialogue set new standards for all such comedies thereafter.
At his whimsical best, Cary Grant is Dr. David Huxley, a handsome and easily distracted paleontologist who spends his days piecing together a brontosaurus skeleton while he is taken apart by his henpecking fiancée. With one more bone to go before the four-year museum project will be complete, Huxley manages to bumble an important meeting on the
golf course with a wealthy potential patron. There, Huxley meets Susan Vance (Hepburn). As beautiful and scatterbrained as he is, she steals his golf ball; after that, Huxleys world never snaps back into place. Trying anything to keep him from marrying another girl, Vance uses Baby, the house-trained pet leopard sent to her by her brother in South America, as a worthy Huxley diversion. By the time the family dog buries Huxleys precious dinosaur bone, the couple are headed to jail.
The laughs in Bringing Up Baby are real, almost completely disguising its deft analyses of 1930s-style gender expectations, sex, and marriage. So suspicious was the censor of the scripts deeper and possibly sexual meanings that Huxleys quest to find his lost bone was queried as a reference to lost masculinity. The scene where Huxley dons Vances feathery feminine bathrobe didnt help dissuade that notion, containing as it does one of the first popular appearances of the word gay being used to mean something other than extremely happy. The critics may have hated it, the audiences may have stayed away, and Oscar didnt smile upon it at the time, but Bringing Up Baby has had the last laugh on all its detractors. It remains one of the true masterpieces of celluloid wit. KK
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1930s
STAGECOACH (1939)
U.S. (Walter Wanger) 96m BW
Director: John Ford
Producer: Walter Wanger, John Ford
Screenplay: Ernest Haycox, Dudley Nichols
Photography: Bert Glennon
Music: Louis Gruenberg, Richard Hageman, Franke Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken
Cast: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Louise Platt, George Bancroft, Donald Meek, Berton Churchill, Tim Holt, Tom Tyler
Oscars: Thomas Mitchell (actor in support role), Richard Hageman, W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken (music)
Oscar nominations: Walter Wanger (best picture), John Ford (director), Bert Glennon (photography), Alexander Toluboff (art direction), Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer (editing)
The 1930s wasnt a great decade for the Western. After a few expensive flops such as The Big Trail (1930) and Cimarron (1931), the major studios largely abandoned the genre to Poverty Row producers making cheap B-movies. John Ford hadnt made a Western for a dozen years when he cast John Wayne and Claire Trevor in a story about a stagecoach ride through dangerous Indian territory. In trying to sell it to producer David O. Selznick, Ford described Stagecoach as a classic Western, a cut above the B-Westerns that Wayne himself had been making. One thing this meant was giving it more appeal to women in the audience. So Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols added to the original story by Ernest Haycox a more developed love story and the birth of a baby. But this wasnt enough for Selznick, who looked down his nose and passed on the project.
Not that Stagecoach stints on the genres more traditional satisfactions. The last part of the film packs in plenty of action, including a gunfight between Wayne and the Plummer gang and a stirring Indian attack as the stagecoach careers across the flat desert. The sequence was enriched by some superlative stuntwork by Yakima Canutt, who, playing one of the Apache attackers, leaps onto one of the stages horses, is then shot, and has to fall between the horses hooves and under the wheels.