The Late, Not-So-Great, Leo McCarey

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Fox recently added coveted titles to its DVD catalog, initiating a film noir series with Otto Preminger’s incomparable 1944 “Laura” (choose the “extended” version from the menu, which includes a two-minute femme makeover montage that wartime censors considered too decadent) and Henry Hathaway’s 1948 Chicago-neorealism crime drama “Call Northside 777” (a commentary track discusses its historical basis). Fox also restored for its Studio Classics series John Stahl’s 1946 film soleil “Leave Her to Heaven” (Gene Tierney’s psycho, though the true star is Leon Shamroy’s luminous photography). Less widely noted has been Fox’s handsome new release of Leo McCarey’s 1962 swan song, “Satan Never Sleeps,” a universally loathed romantic comedy about priests, Communism, rape, and familial dysfunction at a Chinese mission in 1949. The very clash of generic conventions indicates that the film is misbegotten in a way unique to its oddly divisive director.


I am not about to defend the indefensible: “Satan Never Sleeps” is a bad film. One of its most obdurate detractors was McCarey. Here is an excerpt from his last interview, with Peter Bogdanovich, recorded shortly before his death in 1969:



“You didn’t get along well with [William] Holden.”


“No.”


“Did you like Clifton Webb?”


“No.”


“How about France Nuyen?”


“No.”


“You really didn’t like that picture.”


“No – it was a nightmare. I finally let the picture go and my assistant shot the last five days.”


McCarey’s primary gripe was that his original story, in which a young priest is tempted by a Chinese beauty, whose brutal rape he is forced to witness, and resolves his dilemma by sacrificing his life, was vetoed by William Holden, who did not want to die. The astonishing and quite risible ending edited in McCarey’s absence has the older priest (Clifton Webb) making the sacrifice, while Holden marries the woman to her rapist and exchanges a golly-gee sitcom grin when she announces that she will name their baby after him.


So why dredge it up? Because if ever a stubbornly individual filmmaker rewarded the not infrequently tested patience of admirers, it was McCarey, and “Satan Never Sleeps” is not without its McCarey moments. Jean Renoir famously observed, “McCarey understands people better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood.” Yet it is virtually impossible to find a critic who will take him whole.


Even the impassioned defenders Leland Poague and Robin Wood (who champions “Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys,” of all things) are mum on “Satan Never Sleeps.” More conventional critics celebrate McCarey for having introduced Laurel to Hardy and supervising much of their best work or directing the best Marx Brothers film (“Duck Soup”), the best screwball comedy (“The Awful Truth”), and the best movie about growing old in the United States (“Make Room for Tomorrow,” which AARP might consider reviving as propaganda for social security); or the popular Father O’Malley films (“Going My Way” and “Bells of St Mary’s”); or such anomalies as “Ruggles of Red Cap” and the much remade “Love Story” and “My Favorite Wife” (for which illness required him to delegate direction), not to mention vehicles for Eddie Cantor, Mae West, W.C. Fields, and Harold Lloyd. But hardly anyone champions them all, least of all that misapprehended line in the sand, “My Son, John,” a film that in 1951 reeked of anti-Communist hysteria yet now ranks as a devastating critique of generational faultlines and the war between unthinking conservatism and cultist rebellion.


Renoir’s observation defines the problem. McCarey is invariably too humane to paint his characters as good and evil, and his approach necessitates a nimble tread over a tightrope tautly pulled by comedy and drama, the one gaining on the other with scarcely a warning. Robert Warshow’s attack on “My Son John” (“Father and Son – and the FBI”) enumerated instances to show that the American Legionnaire father is, in fact, loonier than his communist son – as though McCarey hadn’t intentionally devised that situation. Watching that film and “Satan Never Sleeps” today, you can scarcely avoid the conclusion that communism didn’t much interest him except as a device to illuminate relationships in crisis – no more than Nazism did in his even more bizarre romantic comedy set against the Holocaust, “Once Upon a Honeymoon,” which introduces some of the very plot contrivances extended in “Satan Never Sleeps.”


The provenance of “Satan Never Sleeps” is confusing; it is credited as a script by McCarey and Claude Binyon based on a Pearl Buck novel, yet Buck’s only relevant fiction was a novelization of the script that was published as a paperback original. There is reason to be lieve that she was hired to write the script based on McCarey’s story (every element of the plot is McCareyesque, beginning with the “Going My Way” clash between a young and an old priest) and that the credits resolve some kind of contractual conflict. In 1961, when “Satan Never Sleeps” was in production, priests were everywhere: Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy took their collars out of mothballs as Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn took their vows, Otto Preminger planned “The Cardinal,” and Norah Lofts’s soap opera of Chinese warlords violating a women’s mission, “7 Women,” was first televised and then filmed by John Ford.


“Satan Never Sleeps” instantly mutes political urgency with a loopy theme song, sung by Timi Yuro in the manner of Nancy Wilson and co-authored by McCarey: “And in the ember of the flame / you’ll have your foolish heart to blame.” This is followed by a shot of Holden leading France Nuyen in front of a traveling matte shot and arriving at a mission where he explains his tardiness in a scene conceived entirely for laughs, until it breaks into hysteria as he abandons her. From that point on, the picture often runs like a plane with a wobbly gyroscope, veering between cute, funny, sentimental, dramatic, and melodramatic. There are misunderstandings, changed loyalties, late-night comings and goings, and the rape, which the production attempts to soften – though the final scene of victim and tormentor reciting nuptials is as unsettling as any in the movies of that era.


McCarey might have called the film, “My Son, Ho San,” as the story is ultimately animated by a former protege of Webb’s priest who becomes a rabid demagogue until his own future is threatened by an evil Russian, who murders Ho San’s Christian parents before his eyes. That event, paired with the birth of his son, moves him abruptly into the older generational slot, where he resolves to live in a country that allows parents to speak freely to their children, a gift he did not forbear his own parents.


Ho San (Weaver Lee) triggers several McCarey moments, including his response, after Webb tells him to go to hell: “I cannot roast in your hell. I’m no longer a member. “The more Ho San asserts himself, the more the nuns persist in treating him like a juvenile delinquent – his violence seems as aimed at them and Webb as his victim. After he seizes Webb’s cognac as a symbol of western exploitation, Holden says, “Be sure to divide that equally among the poor. [Pause] If you can’t think of a clever answer, just go.” Whereupon Webb pours half his glass into Holden’s and observes, “As the saying goes, share and share alike.”


After Ho San opts to save them, he shoots a soldier in the back and explains, “That was my last act as a non-Christian.” Realizing an enemy jeep is in pursuit, he kills all the passengers and exults, “So now I have performed my first act as a reconverted Christian.” Passages like that, a slap-fest reminiscent of the boxing scene in “Bells of St. Mary’s,” and Nuyen’s logical argument that Holden become Protestant testify to the peculiar charm of an irreplaceable filmmaker. The DVD, incidentally, has no extras except for a sexy photo of Nuyen in a sheath dress on the back of the box – from another movie, of course.


***


If “Satan Never Sleeps” is an unholy disaster with privileged moments, Pietro Germi’s contemporaneous “Divorce Italian Style” is the perfect antidote. One of the funniest films ever made, it unwinds with clockwork precision, demanding subsequent viewings to marvel at the intricacy of the script, scalpel like meticulousness of the camera work and editing, and the excellence of the performances – excepting Marcello Mastroianni, who exceeds mere excellence, launching himself into a realm of comic originality where Keaton and Chaplin dwell. Intended initially as a drama by a filmmaker associated with Italian neorealism, “Divorce Italian Style” – a huge international hit in 1962 – burlesques a loophole in Italian law that shows mercy for killings intended to avenge marital dishonor.


Mastroianni, married to a plump, cloying woman with one eyebrow and the whisper of a mustache, wants to kill her so he can marry his teenage first cousin. He plans to find her a lover, catch them in the act, and dispatch her to clean the dreaded imputation of cuckoldry from his family’s escutcheon. He plays the role with his nose in the air, drooping eyes, and the walk of an oiled dandy; his deadpan expression is broken only by a twitchy clicking of the teeth, and his hair has a role of its own – alternately slicked back or matted with a net or unruly as a mop or half and half. The ingenious structure involves a flashback so slick you hardly see it coming, as Mastroianni, emerging from a toilet on a train, ruminates on Sicily, introduces characters, and guns the plot, which stays gunned, returning to the train only for the penultimate scene.


The shrewd musical score includes a piano waltz, Donizetti, and the rock ‘n’ roll sequence from “La Dolce Vita,” the recent opening of which is extensively satirized. The comic techniques include fast-forwards, zooms, fantasy murders, interior monologues, and the hero’s recurring stumbling upon his sister and her lover, forever jumping out of the dark, straightening their clothes, and protesting their innocence. If early Preston Sturges had collaborated with middle-period Tolstoy, they might have conceived something as fiendishly immoral, but apparently not even Germi (whose next film was the similarly subversive hit, “Seduced and Abandoned”) could repeat the inspired lunacy of “Divorce Italian Style.” The Criterion print is stunning, blacks and whites that shimmer, and the extras – a documentary, interviews, screen tests – whet the appetite for more Germi, one of the least exported directors of his era.


The New York Sun

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