The British Invaders Blogathon: Went the Day Well? (1942)

This essay is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution to The British Invaders Blogathon, currently underway from August 1-3 at A Shroud of Thoughts and spotlighting the best in classic films that originated on the other side of the pond.  For a list of participating blogs and the movies/topics discussed, click here.

There’s very little doubt as to the outcome of the events in Went the Day Well? (1942)—Charlie Sims (Mervyn Johns), the verger at the local church, explains in the first three minutes of the movie that the famed “Battle of Bramley End” came out all right in the wash.  We then flashback to a Whitsun weekend in the sleepy little English hamlet—Whitsun being the English designation for Pentecost—where there wasn’t much going on save for a platoon of British soldiers who have arrived in Bramley under the supervision of Major Hammond (Basil Sydney).  Hammond makes arrangements to billet his men, with the inhabitants most welcoming of their temporary guests.

Still...there’s something a bit unsettling about the presence of Hammond and his men.  Nora Ashton (Valerie Taylor), the vicar’s daughter, finds it curious that when the back of a telegram was used to mark down scores in a card game that took place among several soldiers—the figures were jotted down in the “Continental” manner, with elongated fives and strokes through the sevens.  Nora’s suspicions are further aroused when young George Truscott (Harry Fowler) finds a chocolate bar among Hammond’s personal effects.  An Austrian chocolate bar.

Nora takes her concerns to the village squire, Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks)…but today is just not her lucky day.  Wilsford is a fifth columnist, working with Hammond—whose real identity is Kommandant Orlter, and who’s on hand as the leader of a vanguard of an invasion of Britain.  Oriter and his men quickly establish their authority in the blink of an eye (by killing the Reverend Ashton, Nora’s father, when he attempts to signal outside help by ringing the church bell) and inform the stunned populace that no one is leaving Bramley…and any attempts to contact anyone outside the village will be dealt with most severely.  (Nazis.  I hate these guys.)

Went the Day Well? is a mixture of WW2 propaganda, comic nightmare and subversive surrealism that was produced at the renowned Ealing Studios, a name we usually associate with such classic comedies like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).   The source for the script (written by John Dighton, Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan) was a short story written by Graham (The Third Man) Greene; in “The Lieutenant Died Last,” published in the U.S. in 1940, a poacher single-handedly stymies a Nazi attempt to invade a rural English village.  Dighton, MacPhail and Morgan considerably expanded the scope of Graham’s tale, though they did feature the poacher (played by Edward Rigby) as a minor character.

Despite the spoiler warning at the beginning of the movie, Went the Day Well? is a model of cinematic suspense; sure, we know the villagers eventually get the word out concerning their plight, but director Alberto Cavalcanti makes us squirm in true Hitchcockian fashion.  (Cavalcanti would later go on to helm the most famous segment of the 1945 British horror anthology Dead of Night—the one with Sir Michael Redgrave and that freaking ventriloquist dummy—and the underrated 1947 noir They Made Me a Fugitive.)  Two Land Army girls, Peggy Fry (Elizabeth Allan) and Ivy Dawking (Thora Hird), manage to scrawl a message of help onto an egg that is placed in a box with other hen fruit and handed off to a boy delivering newspapers by bicycle.  The paperboy is sideswiped by a car on its way to Bramley, and the eggs wind up smashed.  This sets up the next attempt: the driver of the car is a woman named Maud Chapman (Hilda Bayley), who’s there to pay her dowager cousin Mrs. Fraser (Marie Lohr) a visit.  Fraser manages to smuggle a note to her cuz in the pocket of her jacket, but Maud uses the paper to steady a rattling window on the passenger side of her automobile.  (The paper later becomes dislodged and is devoured in the backseat by Maud’s dog.)

The film often juxtaposes moments of black comedy and jarring, disturbing violence—the most memorable sequence involves the town’s postmistress (Muriel George), who also moonlights as Bramley’s phone operator.  Held hostage in her home by one of the German soldiers, she springs into action by throwing pepper into the Nazi’s eyes and dispatches him to the Great Beyond with the help of an axe.  She then tries to ring for help but her call is ignored by a gossipy phone operator from a neighboring town…and by the time chatty Gertrude returns to the desperate woman she’s met the business end of a German bayonet.

Released in December of 1942, Went the Day Well? premiered a few months after the similar The Next of Kin (also produced by Ealing, and featuring Well? players Johns, Sydney, Hird and Johnnie Scofield)—both movies were made not necessarily to scare the British public, but to highlight the possible dangers of a Nazi invasion.  Most scholars are in agreement that by the time of the movie’s release, that scenario was highly unlikely.  Still, the movie continues to exert its influence; the 1971 feature film version of the hit Britcom Dad’s Army (as well as a couple of episodes of the series) covers similar ground as well as the 1972 novel The Eagle Has Landed, which was brought to the big screen in 1977.  The mention of “the Home Guard” in the film kind of made me smile because I couldn’t help but think of what Dad’s Army fans call “The Magnificent Seven”…though I would be remiss in pointing out that what happens to the Guard in Went the Day Well? is far more savage than any of the shenanigans that befell Captain Mainwaring and Company.

Went the Day Well? eventually reached U.S. shores in June of 1944, retitled 48 Hours…because most American audiences were not familiar with the famous quotation by John Maxwell Edmonds that was borrowed for the title of the movie.  (“Went the day well?/We died and never knew/But, well or ill/Freedom, we died for you”)  It’s been off the radar screens of most classic film buffs—but according to TCM oracle Robert Osborne, it was one of the surprise hits of the TCM Film Festival in 2011…and recently premiered on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ in April of this year.  Bobby Osbo and guest programmer Glenn Taranto noted that with the exception of Leslie Banks (subversively cast as the treacherous Wilsford in light of his heroics in 1935’s Sanders of the River) and Mervyn Johns (Glynis’ pop; he’s also in Dead of Night) most of the British thesps will be unfamiliar to us Yanks; but I recognized Dame Thora, or course, as well as Patricia Hayes (as the postmistress’ assistant) and David Farrar (Black Narcissus).  (James Donald and Dad’s Army’s Private Godfrey, Arnold Ridley, also appear in bit parts.)

No, I first became acquainted with Went the Day Well? when I read about it as one of the entries in Halliwell’s Hundred; released to Region 2 DVD in November of 2006, I procured myself a copy (though the movie was re-released in 2011 to take advantage of its 2010 restoration—this is the version Tee Cee Em showed in April) and have been a champion of the movie ever since.  It’s unquestionably one of the finest war films I’ve ever watched, a masterful blend of comedy and suspense…and the next time it makes the rounds again on Turner Classic Movies, I suggest you make an appointment to see it.

Children should be seen and not heard

For those of you who passed on taking the German elective, the “Die Kleinen Strolche” in the above screen capture is what the Hal Roach Studios’ Our Gang comedies were called in Deutschland.  On this side of the pond, the famed series is referred to as either “The Little Rascals” or “Our Gang”—though this last appellation usually applies to the fifty-two MGM one-reelers produced from 1938 to 1944; Roach sold the series to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and although he eventually bought it back from the mega-studio they kept the rights to the name.  During the original run of Our Gang, beginning in 1922, title cards of the comedies were usually adorned as “Hal Roach presents His Rascals.”

This dissertation on Our Gang is being presented today because I recently purchased a 2-DVD set (yes, at the same time I bought the Max Davidson and Female Comedy Teams collections, thanks for noticing) of fourteen silent Our Gang comedies from 1927-29 (a smattering of the surviving shorts that Hal Roach produced under his new contract with MGM) released by Kinowelt.  While the Roach Our Gang sound comedies have been made available on DVD through RHI/Genius Entertainment, and the MGM one-reelers from Warner Archive, a good set of the silent shorts is often hard to locate.  For instance, the silent Gang comedies that Roach produced for Pathé (1922-28) wound up being sold to National Telepix and other distributors for television, and these people went at the shorts with a chainsaw, removing their main titles and substituting their own (they were televised under various names like The Mischief Makers and Those Loveable Scalawags and Their Gangs).  I’ve bought a set or two of these shorts from various mom-and-pop places and some of them are just a downright mess.

So it’s nice to be able to own a DVD of some of these comedies…the only problem is, they’re from the period when the Our Gang franchise was at a particularly low ebb, in a creative sense.  The series really wouldn’t pick up again until the sound era with additions like Jackie Cooper, Matthew “Stymie” Beard and of course, George “Spanky” McFarland and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer.  The comedies in this DVD collection feature veteran members like Joe Cobb and Allen “Farina” Hoskins, but you also have kids like Harry Spear and Jay R. Smith (hired apparently because he had more freckles than the departing Mickey Daniels) who really didn’t add too much to the proceedings.  Still, the series continued to be popular with moviegoers…and there are one or two entries that generate some mirth (and a couple that are just flat-out-bizarre), plus the viewer also becomes acquainted with some members who transitioned to the sound era like Jean Darling, Mary Ann Jackson and Bobby “Wheezer” Hutchins.

It’s a toss-up between two shorts in this collection for the coveted “What the…front yard?” award.  In Dog Heaven (1927), the Gang’s beloved dog Pete is planning to commit suicide by hanging himself.  (I swear I am not making this up.)  The dog feels betrayed by his owner, Joe, whose attention to his best friend has been diverted to a girl named Clarabelle (it’s always a dame)—he’s even spent the money he was saving to buy Pete a new collar on that fickle female.  The event that buries the camel in a big straw stack is when Pete, having saved Clarabelle from a possible drowning, is accused by several individuals of having pushed the gal into the drink in the first place…fortunately, an eyewitness who viewed the incident from the get-go is able to clear the canine, and Joe and his pals rush back to save his mutt from the rope in the nick of time.  Now…you can’t argue that this isn’t an offbeat short (and its humor is definitely of the jet-black variety, which appealed to me)—and unusual in that it was directed by Robert A. McGowan (a.k.a. “Anthony Mack”), the nephew of frequent Our Gang helmer Robert F. McGowan, who’s considered the least-inspired of the franchise’s directors—but you sort of have to wonder what effect it had on the kids in the audience when it was released in 1927.  (I imagine more than a few wound up in therapy.)

Wiggle Your Ears (1929) is the other two-reeler that will have you scratching your head in wonderment.  Mary Ann Jackson is in love with young Harry Spear, who is able to perform the titular task for her delight…alas, poor Joe is unable to so his love for Mary Ann is continually rebuffed.  But Mary Ann finds herself having to compete with a rival in the form of Jean Darling, who is also captivated by Mr. Spear’s charms.  Harry has Jean in the palm of his hand…until he experiences a cramping of the ears and is unable to per…look, you don’t need the Enigma Machine to decipher the Freudian overtones of this short.  It was also filmed in extreme close-up for some odd reason; my memory may be a little rusty but I seem to recall that Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann speculated in their invaluable reference book Our Gang: The Life and Times of the Little Rascals it was either a technical error (the wrong camera lens was used) or was done on purpose for parody’s sake (I’m convinced it was the latter).  Interestingly on this DVD, you can watch the short in its original presentation or see it as it was shown on German television (the screen cap at the beginning of this essay is from the animated introduction of the show)…

…which is accompanied by a bit of narration and voices representing the kids (all in German, of course).

I found myself amused by the last short on the collection, Saturday’s Lesson (1929)—which was the final Our Gang silent comedy (though it was released in between two of their newer sound shorts, Bouncing Babies and Moan & Groan, Inc.).  The kids are grumbling because it’s Saturday and their mothers have loaded them up with chores (Farina has rugs to beat, Joe wood to chop, etc.), with the moms warning them that lazy kids will soon answer to “the old devil man.”  Fortuitously, a man (John B. O’Brian) dressed as Beelzebub himself (he’s carrying a sandwich board touting Mephisto heaters) overhears the kids and decides to pose as Satan with the help of a few smoke pellets.  Scared sh*tless at being confronted by Mephistopheles, the kids race home and begin Project Chores in earnest, thanks to some speeded-up action via the cameraman.  This is the highlight of the two-reeler; Joe, in particular, is so rattled that he chops wood with the fury of a kid possessed, and when his mom (Orpha Alba) is convinced there’s something wrong with him she orders him to bed…prompting him to leap out when she’s not looking and haul ass and elbows back to the woodpile.  (She insists on giving him a dose of castor oil and when he complains, Devil Guy appears at his window…prompting Joe to grab the bottle and chug down its contents.)  Okay, it’s way too heavy on the moralizing (at the end, the Gang addresses the audience to tell the youngsters to mind their mothers…oh, and stay in school, kids!) which wouldn’t become prevalent until MGM got hold of the series…but the gags involving the kids’ new work ethic are pretty hooty.

There are also good moments in another silent comedy released at the time when Our Gang was transitioning to sound—Cat, Dog & Co (1929), in which yet another lesson is handed down to the kids that they should be kind to animals.  This is the woman who imparts that lesson, by the way:

You might recognize her as Hedda Hopper, and it is a shame that she did not practice this same kindness when she embarked on her later career as one of the truly monstrous people of Hollywood.  There’s a running gag in Cat that finds Joe bothered by a pesky flea; he keeps picking him off his person and depositing him on the ground (because kindness to animals) and the flea (animated) keeps hopping back on Joe for a ride.  The highlight of the short is an entertaining sequence where Wheezer dreams that he’s been put on trial, charged with cruelty to animals (the special effects in this one are a lot of fun) who have become his judge and jury.

As for the rest of the material…the entries range from amusing (Noisy Noises) to just plain time-passers (Crazy House).  The Spanking Age (1928) utilizes an interesting storytelling technique in that none of the adults are seen from the waist up—it’s not unlike a Tom and Jerry cartoon.  Oliver Hardy has a cameo in Barnum & Ringling, Inc. (1928) as does Eugene Pallette (Babe is a tipsy guest, Pallette a hotel dick).  The nadir of this set is Spook Spoofing (1928), in which the audience learns not only are scared kids uproariously funny but African-American kids being frightened generates twice as many laughs.  The Our Gang shorts have their defenders and detractors; the latter group pointing out that there’s a lot of uncomfortable racial insensitivity in some of the comedies.  Spook Spoofing is enough to give the franchise a bad name (the gang takes sadistic delight in playing practical jokes on Farina, portrayed as a kid who carries a lucky “mumbo-jumbo” charm to ward off evil); it’s presented on the set in its two-reel form although it apparently was released originally as a three-reeler…but believe me, two reels of this nonsense is plenty.

The Our Gang set also features some promos for DVDs also offered by Kinowelt…one of which is several collections of Get Smart released under its German title, Mini-Max.  I kind of giggled at this because there’s footage from the episode “The Groovy Guru” and it’s funny watching Larry Storch being dubbed by a German actor.

Classic Movie Blog Association’s Gene Kelly Centennial Blogathon: Christmas Holiday (1944)

This essay is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution to The Gene Kelly Centennial Blogathon, sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association in honor of the 100th birthday of one of the silver screen’s most talented and innovative practitioners of dance.  For a list of the blogs participating and the movies and subjects covered, click here.

After triumphs in such Broadway plays as The Time of Your Life and Pal Joey, Eugene Curran “Gene” Kelly signed a Hollywood contract with independent überproducer David O. Selznick in October of 1941—who then proceeded to sell half of that contract to M-G-M, which allowed Kelly to make his impressive debut (alongside Judy Garland) in the musical Me and My Gal.  Buoyed by the success of that film, M-G-M unit producer Arthur Freed bought the other half of Gene’s contract—despite reservations from the studio—and began to cast the young talent in musicals such as Du Barry Was a Lady and Thousands Cheer.  With Kelly on the cusp of movie stardom, the studio also tried him out in dramatic roles in non-musical pictures like Pilot #5 and The Cross of Lorraine.  His success in both of those films demonstrated that Gene Kelly was more than just a song-and-dance man.

In 1944, Kelly was loaned out to two other studios—first to Columbia to make Cover Girl (which co-starred Rita Hayworth and Phil Silvers), the musical that inarguably put him on the musicals map (Kelly devised the innovative sequence that allowed him to dance to his own reflection), and then to Universal to play a dramatic role opposite one of that studio’s big moneymakers, Deanna Durbin.  Durbin had rescued Universal in the late 1930s from bankruptcy with a string of successful musical comedies that featured her as the winsome girl-next-door who usually had to settle a crisis within the span of each film’s running time.  Durbin was anxious, however, to break out and do something different—so she convinced Universal to let her exercise her dramatic chops with a film loosely based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.  The result: Christmas Holiday (1944).

The film opens with a young Army lieutenant, Charles Mason (Dean Harens), preparing to embark on the titular sabbatical courtesy of a week’s leave from the service…but before he’s out the barracks door he gets a “Dear John” (a telegram, of all indignities) from his fair-weather fiancée letting him know there won’t be trouble with the seating arrangements at their nuptials…she’s married someone else.  Distraught, he decides (for reasons unexplained) to head out to San Francisco but when his plane is grounded in N’awlins due to inclement weather, the airline puts him up in a hotel room for the night.  At the hotel, he meets up with in-his-cups reporter Simon Fenimore (Richard Whorf), who’s apparently working on behalf of the city’s tourism bureau since he graciously offers to take him to a whorehouse run by madam Valerie de Merode (Gladys George).

Okay—they don’t come right out and say “This is a cathouse”…but it’s fairly obvious that’s what it is (there are a lot of young women in there showing men a good time, and despite what you may have seen in movie and TV westerns, dance hall girls did more than just dance), with Fenimore acting as pimp to lure male customers to the joint, collecting a monthly stipend for his trouble.  Lt. Roberts takes a shine to chanteuse Jackie Lamont (Durbin), who, after belting out the Frank Loesser classic Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year, agrees to join Charlie at his table.  She also accepts an invitation to accompany him to midnight Mass for Christmas Eve (the management asks that you refrain from any It Started with Eve jokes) and afterward he treats her to a nosh at an all-night coffee shop.  When she reveals that she’s going to have to hang around the diner until the next bus comes by in the a.m., he chivalrously invites her to spend the night in his room (all perfectly innocent—she in the bed, he on the couch).  Touched by his kindness, she begins to open up by telling him that her real name is Abigail Lamont…and then relates her sordid story.

Abigail meets a charming young broker named Robert Manette (Kelly) at an evening concert, and afterward the two of them engage in a whirlwind courtship.  She’s very much in love with Robert (their “song” is the Irving Berlin standard Always, heard and sung by Durbin throughout the film), and he’s serious enough about marriage to introduce her to his mother, played by Gale Sondergaard.  (TDOY’s admiration of Ms. Sondergaard is well-known throughout the Internets—but if we were a demure young thing wanting to marry into a family at which she sat as head, we would run fast and run far.)  Mother Manette welcomes Jackie into the family fold because she believes the two of them can restore her son’s strength—but as it turns out, he’s a bit of a wastrel and a cad…and murders a man one night for his bankroll.  The cops pick Bob up for the deed and a subsequent trial finds him guilty as sin…so while Manette is made a guest of the state, Abigail enters her own purgatory by becoming a torch singer in that sleazy New Orleans dive.

A movie whose reputation is loftier than the finished product, Christmas Holiday is not a readily accessible film for viewing in this country—I purchased a DVD copy from a Mom-and-Pop outfit many years back but when I got the chance to score a Region 2 disc I handed off Mom-and-Pop to my longtime online pal Pam.  Holiday is a favorite among Deanna Durbin fans, chiefly because she was cast against type and allowed to stretch her cinematic muscles some.  I think Deanna is wonderful in the moments of the film that detail the early days of courtship between the characters played by her and Kelly.  But when things get dark and “Abigail Manette” descends into the hell that is the New Orleans brothel where she gets by with tips and a song…Durbin comes up woefully short.  She mistakes speaking in a monotone for world-weariness, and all through the movie I kept thinking that a stronger actress would have made Holiday a more rewarding watch.

Though there are some flaws with Kelly’s Manette—it’s never really explained to my satisfaction his descent into crime other than a fundamental weakness in his Southern aristocrat character—Gene is able to pull off his change-of-pace portrayal far more successfully than his co-star.  It’s a shame Kelly never attempted another role like this once he matured more as a thespian—the closest I think he came was in the 1950 noir Black Hand.  Again, the innate charm of Kelly comes to the fore in the scenes where he and Durbin’s Abigail are just getting acquainted…and it’s not that difficult to believe that Abigail never stops loving her husband even after she learns that he’s a killer and is on a one-way trip to the Big House.

In Holiday, the Deanna Durbin character describes how happy the first six months of her marriage were with "Robert, Mother and me."  What's wrong with that picture?

The most interesting scenes for me in Holiday belong to Sondergaard, who is…well, there’s no getting around it—that woman is pure dagnasty evil.  You know just from the first glance of her character that Mother Manette has a twisted Freudian hold on little Robbie, and yet Gale is able to modulate her performance by reigning in the urge to go over the top with it.  There’s also a very effective scene just after Kelly’s Manette is convicted of murder and both Sondergaard and Durbin are walking in lockstep out of the courtroom and through the court house, ignoring reporters’ questions…then all of a sudden Sondergaard stops and confronts Durbin, blaming her for her son’s predicament and slapping her across the face.  Durbin’s character has been relating this to Harens’ Roberts and she’s seen forlornly holding her hand to her face as the flashback ends, letting the audience know she can still feel the physical and mental sting of Sondergaard’s rejection.

Christmas Holiday was scripted by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who’s perhaps best known as the Oscar-winning scribe of Citizen Kane…and like Kane; Holiday uses the flashback technique as a framing device to further the plot.  I don’t think this was a particularly good idea because it sort of waters down a bit the fascinatingly bleak tone of the film (I’m not going to reveal the ending here, only to tell you it’s not a happy one); it also introduces characters that I think the movie could have done without, chiefly Lt. Roberts.  (Actor Dean Harens had a rather extensive career in movies and TV, most notably a semi-regular role on The F.B.I.—but I really wasn’t all that impressed with him here.)  Gladys George is great in the kind of role she could have played in her sleep, and of course I always have difficulty refraining from grinning when I spot serial and B-movie favorites like Eddie Acuff, Oliver “Geoduck” Drake, Joe Crehan, Louise Currie, John Hamilton and Cy Kendall in bit parts. 

But I don’t want to wave anybody off in watching this film; the expert direction by TDOY fave Robert Siodmak is first-rate as always (I love the extended crane shot as Durbin and Kelly descend several flights of outside stairs at a restaurant) and the musical score by Hans Salter grabbed an Oscar nomination, adding a feather to the film’s cap.  Christmas Holiday did very well at the box office for Universal…though Durbin took a little heat at the time from her fans, who have since forgiven her for taking a walk on the wild side in the “hostess” role.  If you can track down a copy of Christmas Holiday it’s definitely worth your while to watch young Gene Kelly at the beginning of what would be a long and fruitful career.