Fifty Years of Film in 50 Weeks, #27: Body and Soul, 1947

Promoter Roberts: "What makes you think you can get away with this?"
Charley Davis: "What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies."

Body and Soul, 1947

Director: Robert Rossen
Writers: Abraham Polonsky
Cinematographer: James Wong Howe
Producer: Bob Roberts for Enterprise Productions
Starring: John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, Anne Revere, Canada Lee, Hazel Brooks, William Conrad

Fascinating shot of nightclub singer Alice (Hazel Brooks) and her
lover Quinn (William Conrad).

'No-spoiler' plot overview 
As the only son of a lower East Side candy store owner during the early days of the depression, Charley Davis dreams of being a prizefighter but his mother is intent on seeing him go to college. When his father is accidentally killed in a gang-related hit, Charley is more determined than ever to pursue his dreams and earn enough money boxing to support his mother and his fiancee, Peg. Unfortunately, he falls victim to unscrupulous agents and promoters, and while his fortunes rise, his integrity sinks. When he is duped into endangering the life of one of his rivals in the ring but a friend outside of it, and Peg leaves him, he must decide if he'll sell out to corruption or get out before it's too late.

Production Background
John Garfield was a star for Warner Bros. in the 1930s and early 1940s, but when his contract expired he formed his own production company, Enterprise Productions, and employed many of his colleagues from the Group Theater to develop films that had sociopolitical messages - Body and Soul was one of the first of those. Screenwriter Polonksy adapted a story of the life of boxer Barney Ross, with significant details altered, for the script. To capture the intensity of the boxing matches, cinematographer James Wong Howe apparently rollerskated with his camera around the ring in the boxing scene at the end of the movie. 

The film was well-reviewed at the time, when Garfield reached perhaps the peak of his success, shortly before the Communist witch hunts put a target on him. He received his second and last Oscar nomination for his performance in this film. Polonsky also received a nomination for his script.

Some other notable film-related events in 1947 (from Filmsite.org):

• The Actors Studio, a rehearsal group for professional actors, was established in New York City by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford. It soon became the epicenter for advancing "the Method" - a technique of acting that was inspired by Konstantin Stanislavski's teachings. It later gained fame through the leadership of Lee Strasberg in the 1950s, whose clients included Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.
• In Washington, D.C., the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) opened its hearings for an investigation of alleged communist influence in the Hollywood movie industry. It subpoenaed 41 witnesses, its first wave of witnesses which included the 'unfriendly' "Hollywood 19" (13 of 19 were writers). 
• The Golden Age of Hollywood peaked at 4.7 billion theater admissions in 1947.
• MGM's Cynthia (1947) was the coming-of-age film for budding 15-year-old screen star Elizabeth Taylor, in which she played the title role of small-town, physically-frail, musically-talented teenager Cynthia Bishop. She received her first (grown-up) on-screen kiss from beau Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon) in a scene on a front porch following their attendance at the Spring Prom.
• 1947 was the first year in which an outstanding foreign film would be honored each year by a special non-competitive statuette; the first film to win was Vittorio de Sica's, Shoe Shine. [The Academy had no separate category to recognize foreign language films until 1956 when it established the Best Foreign Language Film category.] The film also received only one competitive Oscar nomination, Best Original Screenplay.

My Random Observations

• Why must all female love interests be artists or nightclub singers? Why not pharmacists, research chemists, or accountants?! I may be exaggerating, but every once in a while this chemist would like to see a working woman in a more ordinary profession get noticed by leading men. 

  

  The "other woman" is nightclub singer Alice, who Charley 
  visits (with his back to the camera) when he's feeling blue.

Peg and Charley are attracted to each other even while
he pushes a bit too hard.

Alice visits Charley at the ring; let the flirting commence.

• Another comment about the times: despite smoking being ever so prevalent during the mid-20th century, I would have thought in a studio full of freshly painted art it would be verboten. Not so. Watching Lilli Palmer's character strike a cigarette in her own artist's studio took me out of the picture momentarily imagining a yellow film over all those paintings. 

  

  Peg (Lilli Palmer) lights up while Charley (John Garfield)
  chats with her roommate.

• While Charley and his parents clearly live on the lower East Side of NYC, there doesn't appear to be anything in the film that depends on their being Jewish except for a matter-of-fact declaration by a social worker in a scene where Mrs. Davis (Anne Revere) is applying for monetary assistance--a rather refreshing and unusual perspective in the 1940s. Of course, Garfield was Jewish, along with screenwriter Polonsky, and he had just come off the successful Oscar-winner A Gentleman's Agreement, all about being Jewish in America and anti-Semitism. 
• I normally approach boxing movies with trepidation as I don't relish seeing two humans bash each other for sport, but this one had relatively few scenes of with actual fighting. The climatic match at the end of the film was fabulous to watch, kinetic and apparently realistic, yet not so brutal that I had to turn my head.



Charley (Garfield) does get beat around in the boxing scene.
Apparently Garfield at one point suffered a minor heart attack 
while filming.



• Beware of spoilers in this comment about the irony of art and life. Canada Lee's character, boxer Ben Chaplin, suffers a blood clot in his brain that could dislodge and kill him at any moment. It basically ends his boxing career, but when he is fired in his coach role his emotional reaction triggers the fatal attack (this was a heartrenching scene). In real life, though, it was Garfield's precarious health (due to a scarlet fever-damaged heart) that threatened to end his life. And similar to Canada Lee's character, a rejection (his blacklisting during the HUAC witchhunt era and corresponding loss of film roles) is believed to have precipitated his fatal heart attack at only age 39. 

Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) and Charley have a heart-to-heart.

• I was struck by the choice of lighting in key scenes in the film. Most of the early scenes, and almost all in the Lower East Side are at night or in limited lighting and shadows, perhaps signalling the tough life our hero was living in, or his state of mind then. When he begins to attract money and fame, indoor scenes are much brighter, and there are a few outdoor daytime scenes as well. Here we have a life much more desirable and seductive. No wonder it's hard to turn away from corruption and easy living.

Charley and Peg conduct their courtship in the shadowy
Lower East Side.

Charley returns to his mother's apartment (Anne Revere) and finds
she doesn't approve of how he makes his living.

When the dough is rolling in, Charley is in the bright lights:
here in his luxury apartment way uptown.

Where to Watch
The film is currently on YouTube, here.

Further Reading
The Film Noir Board blog digs into the meanings in the film's story and makes the case that it's a noir film. 
As usual, TCM's site provides production details.

A confrontation over a high price to pay to maintain the
lifestyle to which our hero and his lady have become accustomed.

Fifty Years of Film in 50 Weeks, #26: To Each His Own, 1946

"Although (screenwriters) Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry are not telling anything new in "To Each His Own," which follows the broad pattern of countless tales about the grief of unwed mothers, they have worked in a few refreshing twists."  
--NY Times reviewer Bosley Crowther, May 24th, 1946.

To Each His Own, 1946

Director: Mitchell Leisen
Writers: Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry
Cinematographer: Daniel L. Fapp
Producer: Charles Brackett for Paramount Pictures
Starring: Olivia de Havilland, John Lund, Mary Anderson, Roland Culver, Philip Terry, Bill Goodwin, Griff Barnett

'No-spoiler' plot overview 
In a tale told in flashback, middle-aged business executive Miss Jody Norris talks to her London colleague Lord Desham about why she gives her life over to work. As a young woman, helping her father in his drug store in Piersen Falls, USA, during the time of the Great War, she meets a young combat pilot (Capt. Cosgrove) with whom she has a secret and brief affair before he is killed in action. She retreats to NYC to have her baby, a son, and despite her wanting to keep him, he is adopted by her friends Corinne and Alex Piersen who don't know the truth about his birth parents. Jody plays nanny to the little boy until she can find a way to convince them to give her her son back. Meanwhile, she throws herself into work, and nearly single-handedly converts her friend and former beau Mac's bootlegging operation into a cosmetics factory that brings her wealth and status. Her efforts to get her son back don't go as planned, of course, and she must make a choice once her grown son crosses her path.

Production Background
To Each His Own was a significant film for Olivia de Havilland for at least two reasons. First, it won her first Oscar for Best Actress, and second, it was her "comeback" role after her legal battle with Warners' seeking early termination of her contract. She won the lawsuit, and what became known as the De Havilland Law, that prevented movie studios from indefinitely extended actors contracts that limited their options and creative freedom. She had been off the screen for two years prior; her previous film was 1943's Government Girl.

De Havilland campaigned to have Mitchell Leisen direct the film, as she thought the material would be elevated from its soap opera foundation, as she was thrilled with his work directing her in Hold Back The Dawn (1941), also a wartime romantic melodrama. A name largely unrecognized today, Leisen helmed many successful A pictures at Paramount (including Death Takes A Holiday (1934) that I wrote about here), and de Havilland and other actors felt supported by him. Leisen worked closely with Charles Brackett to polish the script and make de Havilland's character more nuanced. The film also marked the debut of actor John Lund, who played both Jody's lover and her grown son. 

Some other notable film-related events in 1946 (from Filmsite.org):

• Disney's first live-action feature film The Song of the South was released, with three major segments of animation; it was based upon Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus folk tales regarding Br'er Rabbit; due to extensive protests (mostly by the NAACP) over the stereotypical representations of blacks in the film and the film's romanticizing of slavery, the controversial film was never released on home video for US audiences
• The most famous role and peak performance of WWII's GI "love goddess" - the beautiful, alluring, and provocative, red-haired pin-up Rita Hayworth - with her sleek and sophisticated eroticism, lush hair and peaches and cream complexion, was in director Charles Vidor's Gilda. 
• Director William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor in 1947. It was a classic post-war film that poignantly portrayed the readjustment of veterans and their families after their return home. Double amputee and amateur actor Harold Russell became the only actor to win two Oscars for playing the same role, a returning GI named Homer Parrish. He was awarded a special Academy Award for "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans," and then also won the year's Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.
• French critic Nino Frank was credited as being the first to coin the phrase "film noir" in reference to Hollywood movies in the 40s (dark crime dramas and gangster films, psychological thrillers, etc.) that combined gritty expressionistic cinematography and bleak, hard-boiled writing - from novelists such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. His article was published in the French film magazine L'Ecran Francais (August 28, 1946 issue).

My Random Observations

• Olivia de Havilland owned this movie. In addition to being in nearly every scene, she in effect played two distinct characters: the ingenue and the hard-nosed businesswoman with a secret. The former was shades of Melanie Wilkes, and the latter was a warm-up for her older character in The Heiress. Come to think of it, that was another film requiring her to portray great range. 

  

  Middle-aged Jody immediately before the flashback begins...

  
  

  

  And with the power of lighting and makeup, she
  is transformed to a younger woman.

• It was refreshing that the main character was allowed to be unsympathetic at times. When she blackmailed Corinne to get her son back (then at schoolboy age) you rather rooted against her. But when she was sympathetic it wasn't just when she was a young innocent following her heart; it was when she showed a better business head than her male colleagues and worked circles around them.  And she clearly enjoyed the success her career gave her.

Jody gets to work to convert Mac's (Bill Goodwin,
right) bootlegging operation to a cosmetics plant.

• Any film about unwed motherhood made in the 1940s will be dated, and while you do feel for Jody here, and rue the societal forces that conspired against her, to me adoption by a loving (if vain) mother is a special calling that should be honored. So I winced during those moments when Jody was trying to wrestle "Griggsy" away from Corinne and Alex. And the ending was sour for me (Warning: Spoiler ahead). While it seemed a fait accompli that the adult Griggsy would be made aware and be reunited with his birth mother, the fact that that revelation was made during his wedding I felt was wrong. Even though it was lovely that Lord Desham arranged for the quick wedding before Griggsy was to ship out, the evening should have been about the wedding and not a reunion that really wasn't needed. (And I 100% with Bosley Crowther's statement at the beginning of this post).

Jody preparing to blackmail the unsuspecting
Corinne (Mary Anderson) by offering to bail her husband
 out of financial ruin if they give her back their/her son.

Lord Desham (Roland Culver) encouraging Jody
to tell about her younger years.

• Who were all these wonderful character actors?! I've been used to recognizing well-loved character actors over and over again, so my experience with this film was just...odd. Perhaps because I've seen fewer Golden-age films from Paramount? Regardless, one I recognized slightly was Griff Barnett as de Havilland's father, as he had some small roles in some Alan Ladd films of the era. He was wonderful.
  

  

  Griff Barnett as the wise father.

• Speaking of Alan Ladd, John Lund bore an uncanny resemblance to Ladd, although Lund was, of course, taller. Ladd and de Havilland had worked together in 1958 in the underrated and heartwarming The Proud Rebel.

  

  John Lund as Capt. Cosgrove

• This picture was lush and evocative. I've learned Mitchell Leisen was apparently very attuned to period detail in set design and costuming and insisted on 100% accuracy. That gave his films a sense of time and place that elevated his films.

First indication she's pregnant -- she very deliberately
drinks milk in her father's small-town drug store.

Stylish and successful, Jody takes no prisoners.

Where to Watch

Unfortunately, this one is difficult to find commercially. It isn't available on DVD in the U.S., although it was released on VHS. A rough print is available on archive.org here. 

Further Reading
A detailed analysis of the film is provided in this article in Film Comment magazine.

The Making of Citizen Kane and the Music of Bernard Herrmann - An Interview with critic Roger L. Hall

On Tuesday, September 14, our local classic film club Reel Classics of Greater Boston is hosting a special virtual presentation on the making of Citizen Kane, with a special emphasis on the score by Bernard Herrmann. Our speaker is Roger L. Hall, composer, film music critic, preservationist, and writer. We're thrilled to celebrate this landmark film's 80th Anniversary with "Raising Kane - The Making of a Classic Film and Score." 

I had the opportunity to chat with Roger and ask him a bit about his experiences with the music of Bernard Herrmann and of course his love of Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece. Excerpts from the interview are below.

Roger L. Hall

JD: If you could sum up Bernard Herrmann’s music or musical impact with a word or short phrase, how would you do it?

RH: It’s a tough one, but I would say ‘master of orchestration.’ He used the orchestra in novel ways in his scores. Think of the violins in the shower scene in Psycho, for example. He applied his unique use of instruments across a broad range of musical styles (classical to jazz) and from his earliest films to his last film that he scored, Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. Amazingly, Herrmann insisted on doing his own orchestrations!

JD: Is there anything you’d like to be able to ask Herrmann today about a musical choice he made in one of his films?

RH: It probably wouldn’t be easy! Herrmann was a very difficult man to talk to. I was listening to an interview with him the other day, and he came across as very obstinate and argumentative. But given the chance I would love to ask him about many things especially about the orchestration in certain films. I find particularly interesting that his favorite films that he scored were ones in which the stories were compelling to him: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, for example, was his favorite film, and of course his score was beautiful in that film. He had lived in England and was very taken with British culture, especially in the 19^th century. He wrote an opera based on Wuthering Heights (the Emily Bronte novel). But beyond that, the stories themselves were very important to him. Even Taxi Driver and Obsession, his later films. If he liked the story, he put everything he had into the music.

Orson Welles speaks with Bernard Herrmann
(from bernardherrmann.org)

JD: What would be missing in the experience of Citizen Kane without the great score by Herrmann?

RH: Many of the great scenes are enhanced by the score, but particularly Herrmann aided Welles in the transitions between scenes. There are a lot of quick scenes in Citizen Kane, and a lot of them are done through the music, not dialogue. Without the music the scene cuts would be awkward and wouldn’t work well. This technique comes from radio in which scene transitions were cued with a musical flourish. Of course, Welles and Herrmann worked extensively in radio. I recently re-read NY Times critic Bosley Crowther’s review of the film, and even he, who rarely pointed out the music in a film, praised Herrmann’s score as being a critical element.

This is why I titled my tribute on the 75^th anniversary of the film Herrmann Raises Kane! (with apologies to Pauline Kael), because his music really adds that extra element that takes an already great film to the next higher plane. There aren’t too many films that you can say that about; Gone With The Wind is another (score by Max Steiner).

JD: I understand you have some personal connections to the film.

RH: Yes, I’ll tell my story about the sled during the presentation, but one other connection was a place where I went to school was filmed in the opening newsreel montage! I didn’t realize it when I first watched the film, but learned about it later – it’s Oheka Castle on Long Island where I attended Eastern Military Academy. I have speculated that the builder of Oheka Castle, Otto Kahn, could very well have been one of the inspirations for Charles Foster Kane, as he was Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera, wielded considerable power in New York, was a creditor of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, and kept a mistress.

Oheka Castle, Long Island, NY (modern view)

Oheka Castle and grounds as seen in Citizen Kane

JD: What did you think about Mank (the 2020 film portrait by David Fincher of Herman Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles)?

RH: Frankly, I had trouble with it. It was interesting in places but there really wasn’t much to it. I also didn’t like the music at all (music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). But I’m glad that it brought timely focus again to this great film.

JD: Thanks so much, Roger! I’m looking forward to your presentation on Tuesday!

Check out Roger's special compilation of Herrmann excerpts from his 1941 films and related text files and radio programs that Roger participated in.