Feature Filmint.

27 Below Margaret Dumont and Groucho Marx in Duck Soup

From Ruggles
Foreword: A paradox: can
an artist be simultaneously
a passionate conformist and

to Rally; or, a dangerous subversive?

Answer: only, perhaps, if he’s
Leo McCarey... (no wonder

America, America! he became an alcoholic...).

The strange career F O R S O M E Y E A R S N OW the

film world has confronted us with
an ‘official’ triumvirate of the great

of Leo McCarey Hollywood directors, the three who

represent classical Hollywood at its
artistic height: Ford, Hawks, Hitch-
By Robin Wood cock. I want to challenge that assess-
ment because I don’t think Hitchcock
belongs in it. Not (of course!) on the
grounds of inferiority. Rather, on the
grounds that such a trio, genuinely to
represent classical Hollywood, should
be American and make authentically
‘American’ movies. Some of Hitch-
cock’s films use, certainly, American
capitalist culture (North by Northwest
(1959) seems to me the most ‘Ameri-
can’ of all his movies). But if ‘Hol-
lywood’ cinema means a cinema of
America, the trio should undoubtedly
be Ford/Hawks/McCarey. Why has
McCarey been so persistently over-
looked? His films seem to me to raise
the question, ‘What does it mean to
be an American?’ in all its complex-
ity and all its impossible contradic-
tions. Critics are, perhaps, still wary
of having their names linked to the
man who voluntarily, with nothing to
lose, named names before HUAC (the
House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee) and helped ruin the careers of
a number of his fellow film-makers,
believing himself to be a staunch and
committed Yankee Roman Catholic.
But he was also the person who made
a film embodying the wish fulfilment
Keywords: Ruggles of Red Gap, Leo McCarey, that America had never existed.
classical Hollywood, American identity, the Put it this way: of the three direc-
tors named above (and I would also
Hollywood clowns, ‘American values’, religion, include Hitchcock in this), McCarey
anti-Communism, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! is the one I would most have liked
to meet (so long as our conversation
kept off politics and religion). I feel

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Feature From Ruggles to Rally

very little in common with Ford, while admiring many tion) but bonded with Harpo, a preference that makes
of the films in his extremely uneven career; with Hitch- perfect sense: McCarey’s comedy, throughout his career,
cock I would have been tongue-tied. I met Hawks once is always predominantly physical, like Harpo’s, rather
(in a half-hour interview in London – he was there for than verbal, like Groucho’s. I have long suspected that
the release of El Dorado (1966), among his worst films). the scenes with the unfortunate lemonade seller were
He was pleasant and patient and I only made him angry essentially McCarey’s: Edgar Kennedy doesn’t appear in
once, yet I felt quite intimidated, not only by his pres- any other Marx Brothers’ film, but he was something of
ence but because of his ‘man of action’ persona, all that a regular in the Laurel and Hardy shorts; the scenes are
huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ stuff. But I think McCarey and I Harpo’s, with Groucho entirely absent. The escalating war
could have relaxed together, swapped anecdotes, perhaps (provocation, retaliation) between Harpo and Kennedy
got drunk (he was an alcoholic in his later years, like has numerous antecedents in the L&H films (most fully
myself – who wouldn’t be, today, with global warming developed in Big Business (1929)). McCarey’s work with the
all around us and a planet which may be uninhabitable clowns clearly encouraged the streak of anarchy and spon-
for our grandchildren?) … I have a feeling that Leo and taneity that surfaces repeatedly in the later films (Roland
I might have hit it off, if I was able to withhold the facts Young’s drum lesson in Ruggles of Red Gap; Irene Dunne’s
that I am a gay socialist revolutionary who believes that masquerade in The Awful Truth (1937); Ginger Rogers’s
religion is among our worst enemies. Watching his best abrupt disposal of her Nazi husband Walter Slezak at the
films, I love him, as I have never ‘loved’ Hitchcock, Ford end of Once Upon a Honeymoon; Paul Newman’s wild night
or Hawks, much as I love their films. I love the spirit of with Joan Collins in Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys). It consorts
generosity that animates everything McCarey did, the somewhat uncomfortably with the naming of names and
‘shpontanuity’ that Walter Slezak’s Nazi in Once Upon the Catholicism, without necessarily contradicting them.
a Honeymoon (1942) would so much like to emulate.
A McCarey (post ‘clowns’) essentials list:
Top line (masterpieces): Ruggles of Red Gap; Make
McCarey and the clowns Way for Tomorrow; The Awful Truth; Love Af-
McCarey’s early career in film (silent, then sound) was fair (1939); Once Upon a Honeymoon.
dominated by his work with the Hollywood clowns: Eddie
Imperfect but essential: The Bells of St Mary’s (1945); An Af-
Cantor, W.C. Fields, Burns and Allen, Mae West, Harold
fair to Remember (1957); Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys.
Lloyd, but especially Laurel and Hardy (L&H) and the
Marx Brothers. He ‘supervised’ most of the L&H shorts, Note: I would have liked to include Rally ‘Round the Flag,
working with them on the stories and gags and personally Boys in my top category. It is among my favourite films. But
directing three of their finest (We Faw Down (1928), Liberty I have to agree that it has its longeurs, its dull spots, and it
(1929), Wrong Again (1929)), and he directed Duck Soup really should have ended with the pageant, not the rocket
(1933), surely the Marx Brothers’ most coherent, inventive ship, which is clearly an anti-climax. It contains a number
and closely worked film, just as Wrong Again is a strong of McCarey’s greatest (and most subversive) moments.
candidate for L&H’s finest short. The latter, with its back-
Of interest: My Son John (1952); Satan Never Sleeps (1962).
to-front female nude torso and its horse on a grand piano
held up by Hardy’s head, must be one of the silent com- (Yes, I know, I’ve omitted the most popular of all
edies in which the French Surrealists found inspiration. McCarey’s films; and no, I haven’t forgotten Barry
McCarey himself seems never quite to have got over Hardy: Fitzgerald’s reunion with his incredibly ancient moth-
Walter Slezak (in Once Upon a Honeymoon: the moment er. But can one moment redeem an entire movie?)
when, in front of his fellow Nazis, he hears Cary Grant’s
broadcast about his marrying a girl who ‘turned out to be
Jewish’), Jack Carson (in Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys (1958):
Favouring Women
the bar scene), and Mary Boland (Ruggles of Red Gap (1935): The great majority of McCarey’s feature films (Ruggles
when she learns that Lord Bernstead has married Nell Ken- of Red Gap and Going My Way (1944), at opposite ends of
ner) have moments of pure Oliver, his mannerisms, his the spectrum, are the exceptions) are centred on ‘the
little self-disparaging nervous laugh and shoulder-hitch. couple’, yet one always senses that McCarey’s sympa-
Many would insist that the Marx Brothers didn’t need a thies lie predominantly with its female half. This is clear
director, but I don’t think McCarey’s presence on Duck Soup in Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth and The Bells of
was merely incidental. He revealed in an interview that St. Mary’s, slightly less so in Once Upon a Honeymoon, and
he got on badly with Groucho (who apparently behaved problematic in Rally, where the two most sympathetic
very unprofessionally, turning up late, refusing coopera- characters are not part of the couple but either the threat Y

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Feature Leo McCarey
Below An Affair to Remember: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr

‘Why has McCarey

been so persistently
overlooked? His films
seem to me to raise
the question, ‘What
does it mean to be an
American?’ in all its
complexity and all its
impossible contradictions.’

to it (Joan Collins) or outside it altogether (Tuesday Weld, mental, but look carefully! No one in the room looks genu-
in a performance that always drives me into mild hysteria: inely happy, the dominating impression is of awkwardness
can anyone resist the ‘You’re my Boojum’ scene, where all and uncertainty. The best one could say is that it is ‘mak-
she has to do is go into ecstasy?). If the Academy Awards ing the best of a bad job’, and there seems no guarantee of
ever made any sense, Beulah Bondi would surely have its lasting. As for McCarey’s Catholicism, I certainly don’t
got one for Make Way for Tomorrow; the subtlety, nuance want to suggest that it was in any way hypocritical, but
and sheer humanity of the performance silencing all (as far as the films are concerned) it seems to amount to
competition. But of course the film was thrown away by little more than ‘doing good’ and teaching children to be
its own studio, McCarey being allowed to make it only good (see the ridiculous scene in Going My Way where Bing
under protest and with a low budget, a short shooting Crosby converts rough adolescent street kids to good little
schedule, and non-star cast, if he agreed to be ‘shipped boys in a matter of seconds by getting them to sing Three
out’ to make The Awful Truth immediately afterwards. We Blind Mice), without any clear supernatural aspirations.
can thank chance rather than providence that it wasn’t
a ‘lost’ film (it was immediately and unceremoniously McCarey and
‘dumped’, and the likelihood of its ever coming out on
DVD is miniscule). You are fortunate if you’ve caught ‘American values’
an old bleached-out copy on TV, buried away in some The obvious starting point is My Son John, McCarey’s
late-night programming error. Ozu acknowledged ill-judged headlong dive into politics and his ‘good citi-
that it was one of the sources of Tokyo Story (1953). zen’ contribution to the McCarthy witch hunts. Under-
Surely The Bells of St. Mary’s superiority to Going My Way standably, the film is seldom shown nowadays, but it
is due predominantly to the presence of Ingrid Bergman doesn’t deserve its general dismissal. It’s one of the most
and McCarey’s unmistakable gravitation towards her. She broken-backed films of all time, falling into two halves.
is given most of the film’s cherishable moments: the cel- Part 1 presents us with one of McCarey’s variants on the
ebrated boxing lesson, of course, but above all the Christ- American family. A friend once put the point succinctly:
mas play. McCarey (or, within the diegesis, Bergman) ‘McCarey loves couples but hates families’: there isn’t a
encouraged the children to make up the play themselves, single authentically happy family anywhere in his oeuvre
preserving only the outline of the Bethlehem story. The but there are a number of variously successful relation-
result is remarkable: the birth of Jesus shorn of all its su- ships. The ‘happy ending’ of Love Affair and its remake An
pernatural paraphernalia except for one winged angel who Affair to Remember has the woman crippled, perhaps for life,
takes no part in the action and appears to be there purely and presumably unable to bear children; Father O’Malley
for decoration. Father O’Malley’s well-intentioned offer and Sister Benedict can’t (for obvious reasons) get mar-
of ‘Silent Night’ is politely but firmly rejected. This scene, ried; the couple of The Awful Truth (heading for divorce, but
presided over by the woman, is balanced later by the fam- we know they’ll sort it out) have a dog instead of a child;
ily reunion engineered and presided over by O’Malley, the the old couple of Make Way for Tomorrow are only happy and
film’s most uncomfortable scene. Many consider it senti- relaxed when they get away from their offspring and spend

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Feature From Ruggles to Rally

Ruggles of
time on their own. On the other hand, the story of My
Son John, Part 1, depicts a family torn apart by the Oedipal

What determines the

struggles of an uneducated, unimaginative father and an

Red Gap
educated, supercilious son, driving the mother (a magnifi-
cent performance by Helen Hayes) to the verge of break-

parts that an actor gets

down; and the family of Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys fight and
argue almost continuously, the two kids appearing alienat-
ed before they’re even in their teens. Hence the McCareyan The girl from the east
‘unmarrying motif ’: the husbands of both Make Way for ‘The girl from the east’ is a figure we associate imme-

to play on screen?...
Tomorrow and Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys pointedly address
their wives as, respectively, ‘Miss Breckenridge’ and ‘Grace
Oglethorpe’, restoring the time before their children were
born. The opening printed ‘statement of intent’ in Make
diately with John Ford, though in fact she doesn’t turn
up in his westerns nearly as frequently as one seems to
remember. Her function is to bring American civiliza-
tion to the wilderness. Her definitive embodiment is
Way for Tomorrow tells us firmly to ‘Honor thy father and always thought of as Clementine (Cathy Downs), in the
thy mother’; the film that follows demonstrates defini- film that bears her name, and her definitive scene is the
tively the impossibility of doing so, within the constraints ‘church bells in Tombstone’, Sunday morning sequence
of American middle-class existence (a two-bedroom at the film’s core. No other embodiment in Ford (as far
apartment with a daughter in her late teens, for example). as I know – there are so many missing films) fits the bill
The first part of My Son John is splendid, a powerful so perfectly, though there are also (before it) Claudette
and disturbing family melodrama, but with the revela- Colbert in Drums along the Mohawk (1939) and (after it)
tion that John is a (ssshh! whisper, whisper) Communist Shirley Temple in Fort Apache (1948), and Joanne Dru in She
everything falls apart. The loutish, insensitive father is Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). I would add to these Donna
suddenly the all-American hero, his mildly obnoxious son Reed in the Christmas party scene in They Were Expendable
the epitome of evil. As appears to be usual in America, (1945), though we are far from the Wild West here and the
no distinction is offered among Communism, Marxism, context is quite different. It is a figure that, significantly,
Stalinism and Socialism; John (Robert Walker) is killed never appears in the films of Howard Hawks, whose
off (in real life!) without being allowed to explain why women are very different and whose twin attitudes to
he’s a Communist (the word itself is apparently suffi- American civilization seem to be ‘Get as far away from it
cient), but he leaves behind a taped message to his fellow as possible’ or ‘Disrupt it totally from within’, sentiments
students telling them how wrong he was and urging them which many of us today must find highly appealing. But
never, never to involve themselves in anything so terrible. the girl from the east made her first and truly definitive
(Originally, Walker was to make the speech in person; appearance, transsexual and cross-dressed, in a rather
amazingly, he had already recorded it before his death, different western made years before any of these, in the
apparently for practice. A fragment from his death scene unlikely figure of Charles Laughton in Ruggles of Red Gap.
in Strangers on a Train was inserted to replace his appear- Ruggles of Red Gap is, without the slightest possibility of
ance. The effect is clumsy but it is arguable whether the doubt, one of the great films about America and ‘Ameri-
planned ending would have been an improvement). can values’. In the present context of Bush’s America,
it seems particularly touching (in its generosity, its in-
nocence and its confusions), an essential film. Given its
To sum up so far: schizophrenic director (who also happens to be among
McCarey’s apparent conformity with ‘American values’ the greatest, if largely unacknowledged, in the history of
and right-wing politics partly conceals an irrepress- Hollywood) it is not surprising that its enduring fascina-
ible, instinctual anarchy rooted in the early ‘clown’ tion lies as much in its confusions and contradictions as
movies but ready to burst out anywhere. Looking back, in what it appears ‘officially’ to be saying. It could scarcely,
one might suggest that Oliver Hardy was a profound in 1935, be expected to anticipate global warming, the
and constant influence: Hardy was always trying to devastation of the environment, the possibility/prob-
‘do the right thing’, keep everything safely in its place, ability that life on our planet is in danger of becoming
like a good little conformist, but inevitably the anar- extinct, and that our grandchildren will spend their lives
chic impulse surfaced and catastrophe resulted. confronting daily disasters. It remains, in fact (and I
watched it again just this afternoon, before writing the
final section of this article), one of the most captivating,
intelligent and seductive films ever made about America.
Its first part (in Paris) introduces two couples and Y

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Feature Leo McCarey

four different social/political positions. The Ameri- utes) strikes me as extremely touching. It’s a film you can
can couple (Charlie Ruggles, Mary Boland) are divided pull to pieces, then find it’s still there when you finish.
between, respectively, a primitive, cowboyesque value
system and pretensions to social climbing, aspiration
and snobbery; the British couple (Roland Young, Charles
A note on Rally ‘Round
Laughton) are respectively aristocrat and manservant the Flag, Boys!
(whose name is, to everyone’s confusion, Ruggles). Did McCarey know what he was doing? Perhaps he never
By the end of the film Egbert (Charlie Ruggles) will be really knew: he was an intuitive artist, not an intellectual.
largely unchanged, Effie (Boland) will have begun (just!) If he’d been the latter his films would be unwatchable. Of
to accept the breakdown of class distinctions, the Brit- all the captivating scenes in Ruggles of Red Gap, perhaps the
ish aristocrat will have married Nell Kenner, who runs most captivating is the celebrated and unforgettable drum
the local beer joint (sex joint? – the film, made in 1935, lesson. It apparently happened because Roland Young
is understandably inexplicit on this) and the manser- and Leila Hyams were playing around with the drums
vant will be running a restaurant (under, significantly, (on the party set) between takes; McCarey saw them and
the name he chose: the ‘Anglo-American Grill’). spontaneously put it in the film, turning it into a charm-
Jump back to the middle, and one of the most cel- ing and hilarious bit of sex-play culminating in orgasm.
ebrated scenes in Hollywood cinema, the scene that Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys is, as I’ve already suggested,
everyone remembers (commonly placing it at the end, as not one of the perfect films, but it contains another of
the film’s climax!): Ruggles’ delivery of ‘What Lincoln McCarey’s most hilarious and subversive sequences:
said at Gettysburg’. The scene is marked in several ways: Joanne Woodward’s pageant about the founding of
as a major, star-moment, set piece for Charles Laughton; America. Compared with McCarey’s earlier comedies the
for its text; for the presence of Del Henderson. Hen- film is frequently jarring, its humour (for him) unusually
derson had a lengthy career as the director of dozens of mordant. One thinks of it primarily as a film of quarrels,
forgotten short features back in the 1920s; as an actor, the one major break being, significantly, Paul Newman’s
he became something of a ‘regular’ for McCarey, play- night of drunken play with Joan Collins, his escape from
ing small but significant roles. Their relationship goes wife and family. The pageant is a replay of the founding of
back to McCarey’s Laurel and Hardy silent period: most America: the Mayflower, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Indians,
memorably, he is the millionaire owner of ‘Blue Boy’ in Pocahontas, conceived by Woodward as celebratory and
Wrong Again. He is also the butler in the scene of Irene inspiring but in practice totally subverted: the Mayflower
Dunne’s masquerade in The Awful Truth and, most im- sinks, the Pilgrim Fathers get scalped: America never
portantly, the surprisingly kind and understanding car existed. We’ve come a long way from Red Gap: to the
salesman in Make Way for Tomorrow, when he realizes that end of the road, in fact. How conscious was McCarey of
the old couple ‘just thought he wanted to show off his what he was saying here? Little wonder that the film is so
automobile’. In Ruggles of Red Gap he is the bartender (and, uneven, some of his most brilliant scenes juxtaposed with
apparently, owner) of the ‘Silver Dollar’. The main point awkward ones, unfunny domestic squabbles that strike
of the scene is, of course, that the only person present in one at times (remarkably for McCarey) as mean-minded.
a fairly crowded American bar who actually knows ‘what Little wonder that he retreated, for his last film, to the
Lincoln said at Gettysburg’ is a British manservant. ‘What relative safety (for him) of Catholics versus Communists.
Lincoln said’ was of course the supposed basis of the Satan Never Sleeps is of no more than intermittent interest. }
American constitution: ‘Government of the people, by the
people and for the people’, which in practice has trans-
Contributor details
lated into ‘Government of the people, by the rich and for
the rich’. Lincoln’s formulation, taken at its word, could Robin Wood is the author of a number of books, in-
only translate into a form of Socialism – the irony being cluding Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Sexual Politics and Nar-
that the United States refuses its voters a left-wing party, rative Film and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and
offering only a choice between a moderate Right and Beyond. He is one the five editors of CineAction and a
an immoderate one. What makes the scene so moving frequent contributor to Film International. His favourite
and so powerful is precisely the fact that its promise has composers are Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Mahler and
never been fulfilled, together with its honesty in showing Stravinsky, and he is currently rereading the novels of
a whole bar-full of assorted people for whom politics George Eliot. He acknowledges a permanent debt to
apparently doesn’t exist, despite the fact that it largely the great literary critic F.R. Leavis, whose lectures he
determines their lives. McCarey’s total commitment to his attended at Cambridge University about 55 years ago.
film (there isn’t a slack moment anywhere in its 92 min-

34 | film international issue 27