A Benevolent Sense of Life
February 18, 2019
ALAN writes:
One day more than forty years ago, a friend and I were seated in a restaurant, working hard on pie, coffee, and conversation. The Muzak was on, but it was not so loud as to be annoying. At one moment a particular melody caught my ear. It was a recording by Andre Kostelanetz, if I recall correctly, and it imparted a wonderful feeling of uplift. I had heard it before but could not remember its name at that moment. So I asked my friend, who was twelve years older. He knew it immediately. It was Victor Young’s composition “Stella by Starlight” from the 1944 motion picture “The Uninvited”. He knew it partly because it is a beautiful melody and partly because ghosts were an element in that motion picture. It was one of those moments that live in memory.
It was one of many such conversations in which we talked about ideas, philosophy, science, language, and matters on the borderland of science, like telepathy, ghosts, and haunted houses. Our discussions ranged from hoaxes to J.B. Rhine’s work on ESP to C.E.M. Hansel’s critical assessment of that work to Borley Rectory, which was said to be the most haunted house in England.
The restaurant was demolished years ago and my friend died three years ago. I had occasion to remember him and that moment in that restaurant when I watched “The Uninvited” several months ago.
I have searched in stores for old motion pictures the way other collectors look for old books. It is a delight to find such gems on shelves filled with the motion picture rubbish of recent years: Islands of decency in a vast ocean of effluvia.
Lawrence Auster wrote that examples of what Americans have lost can be seen in black and white motion pictures from the 1930s-‘40s. [“What We Have Lost,” View from the Right, Dec. 12, 2006 ] That has long been my judgment also. In such motion pictures can be seen a moral framework, a benevolent sense of life, and illustrations of dignity, heroism, and gravitas, qualities that I imagine are not precisely dominant in the spectacles of mumbling, screaming, cursing, misbehavior, and demolition that Americans now accept as entertainment.
Along with “The Uninvited,” *** I had the good fortune to discover three other gems from long ago: “Laura” (1944), “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947), and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951)—all four for the astronomical total cost of three dollars. Think about that: Motion pictures representing high moral-philosophical-esthetic standards can now be found for pennies—while Americans today spend millions on the most vile junk and filth ever mass-marketed.
All four are black and white. None includes a single word or expression of profanity. All of them involve an elaborate code of manners, now long vanished in American entertainment as well as in daily life. Two of them include alien beings, an angel and a visitor from outer space. The way the characters dress, act, and speak is now itself alien to people who have never known anything better than the dumbed down standards that now surround them.
Listen to how the characters speak in these four movies. The importance of speech is greatly underrated today, whereas in those old motion pictures, actors like Walter Pidgeon, Basil Rathbone, and Ronald Colman spoke with forethought, restraint, and crystalline clarity. Listen to Clifton Webb in “Laura”; listen to his perfect diction, every word crisp and clear. Americans could take lessons in how to speak from the examples set by such actors.
And listen to the music in all four films: To the themes “Laura” and “Stella by Starlight”, each one memorable and hauntingly beautiful; to how Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” enhances the feeling of uncertainty, fear, and other-worldliness; and to “Lost April” and the other musical themes in Hugo Friedhofer’s wonderful score that adds texture to so many scenes in “The Bishop’s Wife”.
Portraits are essential in two of the films: The portrait of Gene Tierney’s “Laura” that hangs above the fireplace in her apartment and in which detective Dana Andrews finds inspiration when he believes she has been murdered, complemented by the musical portrait in David Raksin’s “Laura”; and the musical portrait of “Stella by Starlight” that composer Ray Milland plays for Gail Russell’s “Stella” as they talk in his studio by candlelight and the fading light of day, one of the best scenes in the movie.
The stories in such motion pictures may be fiction, but the way actors and actresses dress, act, and speak is not fiction. There was a nation of such people. Americans really did dress, act, and speak the way they are shown in those motion pictures: On the basis of a widely-shared and widely-understood code of manners that was part of a larger, culture-wide moral framework. Motion picture studios gave meticulous attention to cultivating and polishing those qualities in actors and actresses like those who appear in these four movies.
Ray Milland was one of them. He was a fine actor who could convey gravitas and good-natured humor equally well. Not part of the Hollywood in-crowd, he lived a long, happy, and productive life with his one and only wife. He left a series of sparkling performances in movies like “The Uninvited”, “The Doctor takes A Wife”, “The Major and The Minor”, and “It Happens Every Spring”. The closing scene in “The Major and The Minor”, with Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers, is especially satisfying and an example of superb motion picture writing, acting, and direction.
Last week, while reading a newspaper page from 1966, I discovered that Ray Milland was in town for a week late that year to appear in a stage play at the Orpheum Theater in downtown St. Louis. There were any number of times when I was downtown that year—in department stores, drug stores, book stores, and at a cafeteria just down the street from that theater. How bizarre it is to discover half a century afterward that I may have walked past Ray Milland on the street without even realizing it.
In his autobiography, he wrote that moviegoers
“….don’t want to go to the movies and see their own drab lives depicted over and over again. They go with the hope of being transported by high adventure, by humor and romantic fantasy, to see creatures of another, almost unattainable world, not stained bedsheets and moaning self-pity mouthed by inarticulate louts. They want standards to live by, old ones, preferably, because they are sick to death of the ever-growing cesspool that is confronting them.”
[Ray Milland, Wide-Eyed in Babylon, Morrow, 1974, pp. 204-05]
Those words were true for most older Americans (my father was one of them) who were indeed sick to death of seeing standards in entertainment go downward. I doubt they would apply to people today who think the deepening and widening of that cesspool is something to celebrate.
The movies I named above are good examples of that older kind of entertainment upheld and reinforced by those older standards and supported by moviegoers who hoped to be uplifted and inspired, not dragged into a sewer.
“What a great country this was”, Lawrence Auster wrote, to have produced writers and actors like those who created such motion pictures in those years. [“Phone Call from a Stranger,” View From the Right, Dec. 7, 2012 ]. Indeed. Those are my sentiments precisely.
[*** Warning: The Uninvited includes a séance. The movie is not appropriate for children or those tempted by the occult. Please don’t ever participate, even jokingly, in a séance.]
