Re-viewing Two Remembered Films--Carol for Another Christmas and Watch on the Rhine
by John Aquino on 01/10/13
Over the Christmas holidays, I had the opportunity to see two films that I had watched years ago. Of one I had fond memories, of the other, not so much. On re-viewing, the feelings were reversed.
The fondly remembered one was Carol for Another Christmas, which I had seen when it was broadcast in 1964. It was just shown again over Christmas on Turner Classic Movies for the first time in 48 years.
I remember being excited that it represented the pairing of a noted film director, Joseph Mankiewicz, fresh off his frustrating experience directing the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopatra (1963), and Rod Serling, fresh from the CBS tv series, The Twilight Zone (1959-1963), which he had created, wrote for, and hosted. As the title suggests, it was a modern version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
It had an all-star cast: Sterling Hayden as the Scrooge character called Grudge, Pat Hingle as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Steve Lawrence as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Eva Marie Saint as an nurse from Grudge's past, Robert Shaw as the Ghost of Christmas Future, and Peter Fonda, son of Henry Fonda, as Grudge's nephew. Fonda's scenes were cut to just glimpses of him, and in five years he would have an iconic role as a biker in Easy Rider. The actor who received the most press was Peter Sellers, who had debuted his character of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther the year before and then had a heart attack. Carol marked his return to work. He would then co-star with Hayden in Dr. Strangelove.
The filmmakers even went to the trouble of reuniting the Andrew Sisters to re-record their 1942 hit number "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," which is only heard in the film when a record player suddenly starts playing the recording, until Grudge pulls the needle off after a few seconds. And yet the filmmakers also tampered with Serling's script, which had originally given Grudge the first name of Barnaby and shown his name as "B. Grudge," indicating that he was someone who begrudged giving charity. The script was changed so that his name was David, since the filmmakers were fearful that Grudge would be perceived as an attack on the then-Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
On its website, Turner Classic Movies invites you to tell it what little-seen films you would like them to show, and I kept writing in Carol for Another Christmas. Others must have too because they finally broadcasted it.
I guess I was in love with the idea of it in 1964. On re-seeing it, Carol doesn't play well.The idea of pairing Mankiewicz and Serling was not a good one. They both had their preachy sides. Some of the Serling's Twilight Zone scripts represent the most searching and, sometimes, the most disturbing science fiction dramas ever made. But he did use the show to comment on issues such as racism, McCarthyism, and other isms that troubled the 1950s and 1960s, and his characters do seem to like the sounds of their own voices. Serling's screenplay for Seven Days in May the same year as Carol also has long streches of dialogue, but it was propelled forward by director John Frankenheimer, who plays with images within images, especially by showing television monitors all around, and a really top-notch cast.
Mankiewicz loved to hear his characters talk too, as his screenplays for All About Eve, Letter to Three Wives, and certainly the four-hour Cleopatra show. With Serling and Mankiewicz together, Carol goes on and on without seeming to move forward. It ends when the characters stop talking: Grudge, having had some quiet form of conversion, tells his African-American staff that on Christmas morning he will have his coffee in the kitchen. It's evidently supposed to be a big step for him, but his staff simply ignores him and go on about their work.
Part of the problem is the source material. A Christmas Carol has demonstrated that it can be remade and rethought again and again. This version was sponsored by the United Nations, which had its own story to tell about its role in the world. And so Serling had to tell the story not only of a man who hated Christmas but of a man whose war experience--and the death of his nephew on Christmas--caused him to become an isolationist and to resist the idea that nations and peoples can come together by talking. The two different concepts--I hate Christmas because I remember sad Christmases of my past, and I hate Christmas because it reminds me of war and I think our country should just stay to itself--do not really mesh.
The film only comes to life at the end in the apocalyptic world Serling had some familiarity with from the Twlight Zone, with Shaw as a well-spoken spectre and Sellers as a crazy leader of the survivors of nuclear war. But overall, Carol is just a curiosity, a sidenote to the careers of Serling and Sellers.
Interestingly enough, the United Nations also sponsored the 1966 film A Poppy Is Also a Flower, an all-star thriller about the drug trade--starring Yul Brynner, Stephen Boyd, E.G. Marshall, Omar Sharif--that is remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the last film appearance by Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco--and she didn't act in the film but introduced the movie--and the film in which Rita Hayworth's lapses of memory were first evident and considered signs as alcoholism and not the signs of Alzheimer's Disease they really were. The script had a story by Ian Fleming of the James Bond novels, which indicates that the United Nations tried really, really hard to get the best people together to put on a good show. They just weren't the right people.
The other film I re-saw was the 1943 Watch on the Rhine, adapted from the play by Lillian Hellman. I barely remembered it, and what I did remember was that its star Paul Lukas won the Oscar for best actor over Humphrey Bogart in the classic Casablanca. I considered it one of the bad Oscar choices, perhaps evidence of Warner Bros., which produced both Casablanca and Rhine, throwing its Oscar weight to Rhine because it needed the award more than the box office hit Casablanca, just as MGM did in 1939 when it had its employees vote for Robert Donat as best actor in Goodbye Mr. Chips over Clark Gable for Gone with the Wind.
The screenplay was by Dashiel Hammett, who had stopped writing mystery novels because of a terrible case of writer's block that lasted his whole life (I remember reading a great quote from fellow mystery writer Raymond Chandler about Hammett's writer's block that I can no longer find). After the 1931 novel The Thin Man, Hammett wrote the stories for two Thin Man movie sequels in 1936 and 1939, the Rhine screenplay, and then not much else. Rhine is his only credited screenplay. He would not have received screenplay credit if he did not work on it, although Hellman, with whom Hammett was living, is credited with additional dialogue.
The play has one setting, the living room of the Farrellys. a noted Washington family who are visited by the daughter Sarah Muller (Bette Davis, graciously sharing the spotlight with others as she did in Juarez and The Man Who Came to Dinner) who has married Kurt Muller, a European (Lukas). They have been living in Europe for 18 years and obviously are fleeing war-bound Europe with their children. Another European guest of the family (George Coulouris) finds out that Kurt is an anti-Fascist wanted by the Nazis and tries to blackmail him. Kurt kills the blackmailer, convinces the shocked Farrelly family to help him, and returns alone to Europe to resume the fight against the Nazis.
On reseeing it, also on Turner Classic Movies, I was impressed with what a tight screenplay Hammett had written and how smartly he had opened the one-setting play up. The opening scene has the the Muller family--Kurt, Sarah, a daughter and two sons--walking aross the U.S. border from Mexico and boarding a train to cross the country to the Washington, D.C. area where the Farrellys live. We see them talk to their children about America during the train ride, interspersed with other new scenes in the German Embassy in Washington where the blackmailer plays cards with Nazis and embassy staff (including the undervalued Henry Daniel as a Nazi officer). There are more scenes outside of the house with the family's matriarch, Fanny, wonderfully placed by Lucille Watson who had created the part on Broadway, as she shops and visits her son at the firm her husband founded. Later, the blackmailer is taken outside and shot in what appears to be a garage.
The revelation is Lukas. Tired, sick throughout much of the film, he comes to life and violence as he strides over to the blackmailer and knocks him down with one blow, and you then know why the Nazis fear him. He then calmly justifies to Fanny and her son what he is doing and will do. It's a deep and rich performance, and I can actually see why the Academy gave him the Oscar over Bogart.
Watch on the Rhine is a surprise because it is not a well known film, but it's a very good one, better than some that are well known. It should be seen more for its ensemble work, as a part of Hammett's oeuvre, and for Lukas.
Copyright 2013 by John T. Aquino
