Another Part of the Forest - 1948

Another Part of the Forest (1948) is one of the finest movies made in this era, and Ann Blyth displays her ability to inhabit the role of a lusty, complex conniver so thoroughly that her film reputation as a meek good girl of only a few years later, mentioned in this post, is an almost shocking contradiction. 

The film is currently not available for sale either in VHS or DVD, and this is a shame.  I think it’s time to take a large battering ram to the Universal vault.  Where are all those rampaging village idiots with the flaming torches and pitchforks when you really need them?  Off chasing Frankenstein's monster when they should be here.

Long post.  Oh, stop crying and pull yourself together.

All three elements of acting, writing, and direction come together so perfectly, so intensely that the movie stands as a remarkable work of art—truly, and timeless.  The screenplay by Vladimir Pozner is based on the Lillian Hellman stage play.  The story is of the Hubbard family, a prequel to her The Little Foxes, which had been wildly successful both on Broadway and in the 1941 film starring Bette Davis.  Another Part of the Forest takes us to the earlier years of the three inscrutable Hubbard siblings and how they got to be that way. 

The second element is the flawlessly creative and evocative direction by Michael Gordon, which we’ll get into in a little bit.  It is, I think, the best filmed version of a stage play I’ve ever seen, because it takes the intimacy and the dynamics of a live stage setting and yet implements those tricks and nuances of film to make it a kind of hybrid film-play.  Some stage plays are filmed with a static camera and so we are left with what appears to be an authentic image of the play, but it seems stiff on film.  Conversely, some stage plays are adapted to film in such a manner that we forget they ever were on stage; the director applies superfluous action and settings that draws away from the intensity of the literary drama. 

But in Another Part of the Forest, we have a director who understands the subtleties of the finest elements of film and stage, and combines them in a beautifully artistic way. 

The third basic element to the making of any great film, of course, is the acting and here we have an ensemble cast who simply could not be better.  We see on the opening title card the unusual setting of the four main players all listed equally above the title and they deserve it.  They are a well-oiled team.  I wonder how long these scenes, particularly the dining room scene, was rehearsed, because it looks for all like they’ve been playing it on stage for months.

The story is set in 1880.  Fredric March plays Marcus Hubbard, patriarch of this dysfunctional clan.  His real-life wife, Florence Eldridge plays his wife Lavinia.  He is a storekeeper and up-and-coming businessman in a sleepy southern town, and he has been branching out into different investments that have been profitable for him.  He gives loans, he takes over mortgages, growing his tiny economic empire.  He is a shrewd and cunning man, and not at all likable.  He is rude and blunt, and openly displays his disdain for his customers, his family, his community.

He is also something of a pariah in his town because of an incident that happened fifteen years earlier during the Civil War.  He was a merchant even then, and he was accused of profiteering from the war by securing a supply of badly needed salt and then charging high prices for it to a war-torn townspeople who couldn’t pay for it.  Marcus is proud, defiant, and totally uncaring in a kind of Scrooge-like way about the needs of others.  He is focused on his own advancement.

His wife, Lavinia, a soulful, gentle, frightened woman is his whipping boy in the sense that she carries the burden of his guilt because only she feels it.  But there is another secret between them, and another secret in the town of a terrible betrayal that occurred during the war leading to the ambush and massacre of several local boys in the Confederate army, and it isn’t until the end of the movie that we discover the traitor. 

Fredric March is riveting.  The character alone is intriguing. Marcus had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, emerged from a hardscrabble boyhood through very hard work.  When he was still a boy, he took his first hard-earned dollar and bought a card at a lending library.  While he was still a child in the fields and driving a mule team, with what little free time he had he taught himself to read and then he taught himself languages: French, Latin, Greek.  He read the classics and he desired what he saw in those classics: a sense of beauty and grace that was denied him in shabby poverty.  There is much to admire in Marcus.

But like those ancient Greeks and their tales and fables, he bears a fatal flaw, and that is his avarice.  Though he has a deep love of beauty and literature and music, there is a very strong strain of the acquisitor in him, so much so that like all acquisitors, his main joy is not in the appreciation, but in the simply possessing, the controlling.  Fredric March is stunning in this role, and we at turns can despise him, can feel sorry for him, and yet also can admire him for his clear thinking.  There is a certain nobility about him.  If it weren’t for his weaknesses, he could be a great man. 

His three children are the sins he created and also the burdens on his back.  Edmund O’Brien plays Ben, the eldest, a man about thirty years old who is taking after his father, inheriting his father’s intelligence, shrewdness, and acquisitive acumen, and also his hardness of heart.  But he has something his father hasn’t, and that is a true sense of graciousness.  It is a false graciousness in many instances.  He is able to speak to people, to make people like him, to ingratiate himself when he needs to, to close a business deal, where his father is just rude.  Edmund O’Brien does not have his father’s arrogance, but he is double the monster because, like his father, he has no heart or feelings for others.  Any display of affection or kindness is merely a tool he uses to get what he wants.  The wheels are always turning in that sneaky mind.

I think it is one of Edmund O’Brien’s best roles and he commands most of the scenes he’s in.  It makes you wish he had done more leading man parts instead of character roles, but in a role like Ben Hubbard he gets to do both, and he’s quite good. 

The second son is Oscar, a weak-willed sniveling creep, who has the position in this film as a kind of comic relief.  He’s played by Dan Duryea in whimsical casting because Mr. Duryea earlier played Oscar’s son in the film The Little Foxes.  Oscar’s son Leo in that film was very much like his father is in this film. 

Duryea does not have that sinister sneer he wears in other villain roles.  Here he is helpless in his petty self-absorption, and we can even feel sorry for him, particularly in the luncheon scene when he says something stupid and his father makes a sarcastic reply.  Duryea looks down, wearing an expression of pain, because he knows he put his foot in his mouth again. 

He just can’t please his father, lacking shrewdness, and he is the most despised by his father for his ignorance.  Duryea is also an undisciplined hothead, much more so than his father.  He is easily led, and by the end of the movie, Edmund O’Brien will do the leading. 

The youngest sibling is Regina, played Ann Blyth.  Here she has one of her best roles and one of her most complex and sinister, even to rival Veda Pierce.  In the movie The Little Foxes, Regina is played in middle age by Bette Davis.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, Ann Blyth in this period of her career was being called a young Bette Davis.

Regina is attractive, sexy, and her moods rise and fall--coldness to her mother, a beguiling charm to those who can do most for her.  She is shrewd and intelligent like her elder brother and her father.  She also bears their flaw of avarice and the need for power, but she has another need which neither father nor elder brother seem to share: she juggles a strong sexual longing, where the other two men appeared to be asexual.  They lust only for money.

John Dall plays Capt. John Bagtry, a man in his thirties who left the best part of his life behind him in the Civil War.  He is the cousin of Miss Birdie Bagtry played as a delicate flower by Betsy Blair.  Betsy and her mother still run the old plantation and are struggling financially.  John lives there on charity, not able or willing to contribute to his support.  He just loafs and dreams of the old days when he was a gallant soldier.  When we first see him, he is still in uniform, having attended a Confederate Day service.  He is the pathetic object of Ann Blyth’s lust, and though John Dall is happy to let himself be captured for stolen liaisons, he does not want to marry her.  He does not want to do anything but live in the past, and it takes a while for her to see that. 

Another sticky relationship she juggles is the one with her father.  Fredric March has only one weakness—and that is his daughter.  He loves her more than his wife, more than his despised sons and his relationship with her is somewhat incestuous.  Not literally of course, but emotionally.  He splurges on her and when he arranges to go for a walk with her, it looks for all as if he is courting her.  She refuses an invitation to spend the afternoon with her mother, who suddenly looks like a wallflower losing her beau to a more glamorous rival.

 

In one scene, several boxes of dresses have arrived that she ordered from Chicago, and she takes them out and shows them off to the family, like a child trying to make her brothers jealous that her father is spending money on her.  She lifts one gown out of its box and goes to sit on the arm of her father’s chair.  She spreads the skirt of the dress over her lap and over his, and he is obviously delighted with her, and she knows this, and she’s using it.  She’s manipulating him, and in certain scenes, seems to coyly dangle herself before him.  They are always “Darlin’” to each other.

But she’s playing with fire, as her older brother Edmund O’Brien teasingly reminds her.  She and Mr. O’Brien walk up the stairs, a promenade-cum-plot exposition, while she gloats about her ability to control her father and O’Brien suggests that one day she will be a forty-year-old woman and will still be taking care of her father because he won’t let her go.  

Edmund O’Brien is in the background, a calm look of command on his face.  In the foreground, we see Ann’s expression has turned from gloating to one of cold fear.  Staying with her father until she is forty is just the thing she does not want, and knows that she must not let her father get too great a control over her.  She spends the better part of the movie walking a tightrope in her unnatural relationship with her father.

She wants the pretty things he buys her, but she wants to be in John Dall’s bed.  Controlling him.

Late in the film, a climactic scene occurs when the Bagtrys come to a train wreck of a party at the Hubbard’s house, along with a floozy girlfriend Mr. Duryea has invited, played by Dona Drake, and we see a smashing of wills, intentions, and the worst of these people come pouring out.

John Dall has a plan to take borrowed money and travel to Brazil where they are having a revolution.  He wants to be a soldier again.  As Betsy Blair explains, the “radicals” are trying to abolish slavery down there and “ruin the country” and her cousin is going to fight for his “ideals” to preserve slavery.  Fredric March is the only courageous one in this polite bunch who dares to snub the "quality" folk and tell the once-and-future Confederate to his face that he's a jerk.  But his reasons for doing so are only partly because of his admiration for the vox populi of his heroes of Ancient Greece.  Mainly, he just enjoys telling people off.

He is also jealous of the man who appears to have turned his daughter's head.  He refuses to lose her to anyone.

Ann Blyth, in a profile view, stands silent during the discussion while a leaden epiphany sneaks up on her, her eyes curiously roaming on John Dall as her father berates him.  We see the truth is settling in that John Dall will never be anything than what he is—a boy in his thirties who can’t give up playing the soldier, a job that was never really more than an ego trip for him and if he were fighting for as ideals, his ideals are pretty shabby.  And yet she wants him for the sexual hold he has over her, which she imagines is reciprocal.

However, she gets another grim surprise that evening when the floozy that Duryea invites also appears to know John Dall intimately.  Clearly, he is not as obsessed by Ann as she is with him.

The intricate plot flip-flops constantly in the tricks the siblings and father play on each other, like kids playing keep-away with somebody’s hat on a schoolyard, only it is bits of information they toss around and keep from each other, and tell lies instead. It is all a lovely, literate, shell game.

There is so much to admire in the staging of the film, in the camera blocking where characters in the background are as much as part of the intensity of the scene, and where mirror shots allow for a larger grouping.    March’s store is filled with goods and items and trinkets and you could spend the whole movie just looking at everything. 

There’s a comic scene where Dan Duryea, afraid that a lynch mob might be after him for something he did, walks through the store and bangs his head on a pair of men’s riding boots hanging from the ceiling.  He looks up and we see instantly it is like an image of a man being hanged, and we see only his boots dangling from a tree.  It’s sinister, but it’s also funny. 

Another fascinating sequence is where Duryea and his gang of KKK friends chase down a Yankee visitor and beat him up.  There’s a scene where a horse rears and we see the horse’s mouth open and his sharp teeth parted in a grimace. 

Immediately we cut to the local saloon where Duryea’s floozy girlfriend is dancing a can-can.  In a flirtatious toss of the head to her audience, her teeth are parted in the same manner as the horse. 

We cut back to the Yankee being dragged to the ground, trampled in the forest of legs around him.

Then cut back to the can-can where the floozy drops to the floor of the stage looking submissively at the audience, tauntingly, seductively in the forest of legs of dancers around her.  The shots of the brutal beating and the dance are erotic mixture of violence and pleasure. 

The camera work flows beautifully from the very beginning of the movie.  There is a Confederate memorial celebration where a speaker refers to an act of betrayal and he points to a far hill to discuss an event of the past.  But the past becomes instantly the present, as the camera swoops to the hill and we see Florence Eldridge hiding with a bouquet of flowers waiting to place it at the memorial. 

We hear a train whistle, and she looks over her shoulder at a distant passing train and the camera swoops to the interior of the train and there is her son, Edmund O’Brien.  It is so flawless and keeps the action moving wonderfully.

The costumes, the hair, the makeup, the men’s full sideburns and muttonchops are historically accurate and not caricature.  There is no cartoon campiness of the Old South, here it is all very real and unblinking. 

We see the mother has a good relationship with their three black servants, especially with Coralee, played by Libby Taylor, who finds small and clever ways of protecting Lavinia from her family’s meanness.  In the play, we are told that Mrs. Hubbard actually goes to the black church because she feels more at home there.  She feels the congregation is more spiritual; besides, she is the wife of Marcus Hubbard and so she is ostracized from the white townspeople, the "quality folk." 

At the end of the film, Edmund O’Brien has wrested his father’s business and fortune from him through blackmail.  Fredric March wants to run away with his daughter, and tells her he will continue to find a way to provide for her.  But Ann Blyth has had enough of this cloying “suitor”.  She considers her options, pouring herself a cup of coffee on the patio while Edmund O’Brien announces his plans to invest his father’s money and make still more, that they will all be rich.  Her father, beaten and begging her attention, asks her to pour him a cup of coffee too.  In a priceless image of nasty survival instinct, Ann Blyth, one eyebrow raised, walks away from her father and sits down by her brother.  She gleefully agrees to let Mr. O’Brien plan her marriage to his future business partner, Horace Gibbons.  She gives up her lust for the fleeing John Dall in exchange for a profitable, and loveless, marriage.

She, Edmund O’Brien and Dan Duryea will continue to squabble and play tricks on each other the rest of their lives and become the people we know from The Little Foxes.  Part of our enjoyment of this film is knowing where they ended up.

It’s difficult to pick out favorite scenes because they’re all so very fine, and the dialogue crackles, especially when Fredric March rises to sarcasm.  Then there is the delectable cagy sparring between Edmund O’Brien and Ann Blyth.  Dressed in her new finery, showing it off for O’Brien, she taunts him, “I just wanted to show you what you’ve been paying for.  How do I look?”

He replies, “Bright and shiny, honey, like a new two-bitpiece.”  A lovely backhanded compliment, and we see the insult is not lost on her.

And when the Yankee carpetbagger, a guest at the Confederate memorial ceremonies, responds with surprise, “In Boston, we stopped fighting the war fifteen years ago.” 

To which the old Confederate soldier, a town pillar, replies, “You won it.  You can afford to forget.”

And I love Dan Duryea's nervous Woody Woodpecker laugh, that Fredric March even imitates at one point. 

Today we have many sequels and prequels of films.  It’s become kind of a standard practice, but it is not done for the storytelling—it is for the merchandising, and we know that. Yeah, I’m looking at you “Star Wars 23”.  Another Part of the Forest was created by Lillian Hellman for the excitement of discovering more about the characters, knowing with a writer's instinct that there really was more to the story she had left on the table.  This film was one of the first times a prequel was created and some of the critics didn’t seem to know how to take a prequel.

Lillian Hellman, unfortunately, did not really have any part in the making of this film.  At this time, she became blacklisted in Hollywood for her refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Lillian Hellman, who wrote the play Watch on the Rhine, which Ann appeared in on Broadway as a child, discussed here in our intro post, proved to be good luck again for Ann.  She shows again how adept she is at playing complex women, not simply females who were dastardly. 

Louella Parsons announced in December 1946 that Ann, “…that marvelous child actress, who did so well in Mildred Pierce,” had won the role of Regina.  It was a splendid opportunity for Ann Blyth to work as part of a top-notch ensemble cast, and so demonstrate an ability to stand out among them.  Syndicated columnist Dorothy Manners wrote, “In spite of her tender years, she is one whale of an actress…When Fredric and Florence March were here, they said they would like to do a show with Ann on Broadway.  That’s real praise, because the Marches do not usually like anything in Hollywood.”

The columnist Sue Chambers wrote, “Fredric March, who doesn’t usually go overboard for the young and unsophisticated told me, ‘She’s a great actress,’ when he was doing Another Part of the Forest with Ann.”  Apparently March wanted her for his upcoming film Jupiter’s Wife, but according to this columnist, William Powell snagged her for Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid(For which she took time out from Another Part of the Forest to fabricate the mermaid’s tale, which we discussed here), and Chambers commented, “How about all this for a girl who isn’t yet twenty?” 

I’ll go one more and say that, as regards her portrayal of Regina Hubbard, if Gone with the Windhad not made it to the screen until 1949, instead of having been made ten years earlier in 1939, Ann Blyth would have been a top contender for Scarlett.

Ann remarked of Fredric March and Florence Eldridge in a 2006 interview with Eddie Muller: "To watch both of them so impressed upon me. They were so good at what they did. He was terrific. It was just electric to be on the set even if I wasn't in a scene with him. He was wonderful."
 

Another Part of the Forestwas also made as a Lux Radio Theater presentation, with Ann as the only cast member from the film.  Walter Houston played her father Marcus and Vincent Price played her brother Ben.  You can hear it here at the Internet Archive website.  Unfortunately, the quality is a bit muffled, but it will give you an idea of the story.  Later on in November 1948, Ann also re-teamed on radio with Edmund O’Brien in the Suspensestory “Muddy Track.”  The quality is quite good and you can listen to it here.  She plays a woman who is not all what she seems to be, and he is a man in trouble and on the run.  At the end, the announcer reminds us that she can now be seen in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

The copy of Another Part of the Forest I managed to obtain was in poor condition, but I was lucky to be able to find it at all.  This film badly needs to be restored and released for sale, not only because it is one of the best films of the era, but because it is an example of stellar American playwriting of the twentieth century, and about distinctly American themes.   I don’t know about the complex legal machinations involving the Universal vault and what keeps so many Universal films, thereby of course, several Ann Blyth films, from not being widely shown again, but I certainly hope that TCM is able to use its influence and free these films from that stupid vault.

I still think a battering ram is a good option.

Come back next Thursday when we jump ahead to 1957, the year Ann’s last three movies were released, all very different and showing, not surprisingly, her versatility.  However, her film career was winding down as good roles were getting harder to come by for a 29-year old in an industry that was changing.  Her second-to-last film was The Buster Keaton Story, the last time she was paired on film with her first co-star and old friend, Donald O’Connor.

 

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The Deseret (Salt Lake City, Utah) News, syndicated article by Dorothy Manners, February 4, 1949, p. F-3.

The Evening Class Blog, July 28, 2007, transcript of Eddie Muller's interview with Ann Blyth July 2006 at Castro Theater, San Francisco.

Milwaukee Journal, syndicated article by Sue Chambers, February 29, 1948.

Milwaukee Sentinel, syndicated article by Louella Parsons, December 27, 1946, p. 10.

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HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Burke's Law, Switch, The Name of the Game, The Dick Powell show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

 

 

The Adventures of Mark Twain - 1944

“The Adventures of Mark Twain” (1944) features a central figure so familiar as to be legendary, and the film leans heavy on legend.  We mark tomorrow’s anniversary of Mark Twain’s birth.

What we discover about Mark Twain through this movie is not so much facts about his life (particularly when the facts are toyed with and not in the order of their appearance), but rather how he fits into, and even represents, the grand mosaic of 19^th century American culture.  This is a rich story of a vibrant era. 

We are also treated to the rarely-presented world of history through literature. 

Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Rudyard Kipling all parade before us.  They are cameos, but they are presented as giants.  I particularly like that the film expects us to know who they are. 

A modern film might throw the answers to an ignorant audience the way a fellow student slips test answers to a pal beside him, which is ignominious, and unflattering both to ourselves and the great writers.

Mark Twain’s greatest struggle, apart from money worries, is to measure up to these literary lions.  That he finds his own place in popular literature and that the 20^thcentury lauds him with movies and stage plays and television programs, and does not do so for the aforementioned first-string players — this would astonish Twain more than anyone.

This is a film more of style than of substance, and for those dismissive of it I would suggest they consider that in classic film, a biopic is less like a Ken Burns documentary and more like an interpretive dance.

Yes, I am being facetious.

The movie is a series of events like tall tales, and even the introduction to the film cheekily warns us not to be too judgmental.  First we are on a hill watching Halley’s Comet awe and terrify the townspeople as Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born into this world.  He will joke repeatedly throughout his life that he came in with the comet and will surely leave the earth when the comet is due to return in the next century.  In a life of quips and witticisms, and wry observations, that he actually did die on the occasion when Halley’s returned in 1910 is probably the biggest joke of all.

But a lot happened in the meantime, and the movie is stuffed with scenes that roll out a long carpet of experiences and adventures.  The director plunks us down in the 19^thcentury with beautifully staged settings, many of them artful miniatures, of the majestic Mississippi, its riverbanks bathed in moonlight.  We see the long gambling salon on the riverboat (too long to be realistic, but this isn’t a documentary, it’s a pop-up book), and the lordly riverboats that young Sam so admires.

We know he took his eventual pen name, “Mark Twain” from the call of the riverboat men who are testing the depths of the water for channels deep enough for the riverboats to pass safely.  Two fathoms is a safe depth, so when they mark “twain” on the measure, it is two fathoms.  The sing-song call, “MARR-R-K…T-W-A-A-A-I-I-N-N!” is used stirringly at dramatic moments, and is replicated in notes on the musical score of the film, a clever reprise.

Unlike most movies about great men, Mark Twain is not shown as a man born to greatness.  On the contrary, he’s a stumblebum who runs off to join a riverboat crew because he can’t stand working in his brother’s print shop setting type by hand.  (His aversion will later move him to invest, disastrously, in an early mechanical typesetter.)  He runs off to the western mining camps to get rich, and doesn’t.  He delivers a stand-up routine at a dinner for the aforementioned literary giants, and, trying too hard to be funny, insults them in a kind of Friar’s roast.  His act tanks and we see his panic as he makes a fool of himself.  We begin to wonder if this guy will ever do anything right.

His one stroke of luck seems to be catching a glimpse of a fellow traveler’s photo of a beloved sister.  Twain falls in the love with the picture, and eventually the woman, who as his wife will help him achieve lasting success as a writer.

Twain has a lower estimation of his talents, and wants to write something great and important, but the audience sees, even if Twain does not, that the body of his work adds up to a chronicling of America in its most expansive, confident, chest-thumping and stumblebum charm.

Fredric March, who we last saw in "I Married a Witch" (1942), is the adult Mark Twain, in a spot-on performance.  It can’t be easy creating a character so well known, and relying in good part on mimicry and imitation.  It’s a tightrope to walk.  With the help of makeup man Perc Westmore, Mr. March is the very image of Mark Twain.  One of the fine achievements of this movie is the way the characters, Twain in particular, age so gradually and so realistically we may feel amazed by the end of the film that so much time has passed.  The aging of characters in other films of this era is usually something of a jolt, and artificial-looking. 

Alexis Smith plays his wife, and though we may note it’s another woman-behind-the-great-man role where she has little challenge, it’s still a nice piece for her.  This is a much softer role in contrast to the sophisticates she often played, and with little makeup in the early scenes, her natural beauty is quite lovely, more stunning than her glamour roles.

Miss Smith is a one-woman cheerleading squad for Mark Twain, but in real life Mrs. Clemens did more than just encourage him.  She actually edited most of his work and he came to rely on her judgment.

Alan Hale is along for the ride as Twain’s prospector pal in his patented jovial scamp gig.  John Carradine gets a marvelous brief scene as the writer Bret Harte who, in the famed contest between the jumping frogs, exhorts his frog, “Daniel Webster” with the plea, “If you love me…”  And repeated calls, “Flies!  Flies!” to encourage the magnificent amphibian to hop.  I don’t know if Mr. Carradine ever played a scene so intense with a human.

Donald Crisp is at Twain’s elbow as his manager, who also gets the impressive aging treatment.  Walter Hampden is great as Alexis Smith’s disapproving father in a scene where he tries to remove Twain from his home.

C. Aubrey Smith delivers a magnificent address at the end of the film when Mark Twain is honored at Oxford.  His scene is a standout.  That beautifully craggy face and his meticulous speech.

Joyce Reynolds, who we last saw in “The Constant Nymph”(1943), plays Twain’s daughter, Clara, horrified at spotting the return of Halley’s Comet.

A few scenes of note:  I love when the teenaged Samuel Clemens is getting his first lesson in piloting a riverboat by grumpy Robert Barrat.  Dickie Jones is the youth, who has very few lines, but the scene is marvelous.  It runs quite a long time, with close-ups on the boy’s face as he nervously reacts to the dangers of the river and Mr. Barrat’s constant barking at him. 

He’s shaking in his shoes, and when at last he manages to pull into a safe channel and the crewman sings, “M-A-A-R-R-RK…T-W-A-A-I-I-N-N-N!” we see the tears glisten in his dark velvet eyes with wonder and gratitude, and love of this river.  I don’t suppose it’s necessary to the story as a whole, but I imagine director Irving Rapper kept the attention focused on Dickie Jones for so long because he fell in love with the boy like I did.  I think it’s one of the most powerful close-ups I’ve ever seen.

The anxious expression in his soft boy’s face, on the verge of manhood.  We last saw Dickie as a much younger child in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) where he played the congressional page.

The scene where Mark Twain does one of his very first public speaking jobs.  Look at the hall filled with extras, and look at their costumes.  Such attention to the style and setting of an era is wonderful.  There don’t seem to be many shortcuts taken, as we sometimes see in other films where the sets or costumes, or hair is judged by the studio evidently as being “close enough.”

We may gag at Twain’s grotesque, “well done, good and faithful servant” joke, and note how African-Americans, particularly the unfortunate Willie Best as a butler, get the stereotypical treatment in this film.  However, there is an aspect to their presence in this movie that I admire, and that is that they are indeed present.  We see them on hill watching Halley’s Comet, and as passengers on the riverboat.  They work on the river, and live on the river, and they are the boys on the raft.  If their story is not told yet, at least we see they are not invisible.  We see they are part of the mosaic that makes up America.  For Hollywood at this time, this is something.

We get a glimpse of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford.  See my post on my New England Travels blog for more on his home, which still stands a museum today.  This weekend, another actor famed for portraying Mark Twain, Hal Holbrook, will be honored at the Mark Twain House when a hall is dedicated in his name. 

As Mark Twain’s life unfolds it gets busier.  He and his wife lose a baby son.  They have three daughters.  He travels the world to earn money to pay back debts.  He saves the fortunes of Ulysses S. Grant when the former Union general and President is dying of cancer, and struggles to write his memoirs to provide for his family.  Twain, in his own fledgling company, publishes them.

March has a moving scene when he sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the piano as his wife lay dying.  Decades later in an interview Alexis Smith noted that Fredric March’s work in this movie was underrated.  In an article at the time of filming, she commented that she had a hard time, even though she was supposed to be dead, to keep from peeking at March to watch him in his scene.

Back to the pop-up book nature of the movie — the scenes where tiny figures of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim superimposed on the written page, or revisit Twain at the moment of his death and take him by the hand to a distant sunset are imagery we would not see in a biopic today. 

But this is a tale, not a documentary.  It captures the mood and the tragedy, and optimism of this man’s era.  We may be witnessing more Currier and Ives than Vital Records, but that is the nature of interpretive dance.

Remember also that during World War II the movies were reaching back to a comfortable American image to appeal to a frightened audience.  Twain’s speech, “our tolerance will never become indifference, and our freedom never come license.  Let’s respect each other’s rights…” reflects not only his progressive views, as cantankerously as he sometimes phrased them, but also speaks to a nervous America on the precipice of doom.

For more on “The Adventures of Mark Twain” have a look at Cliff Aliperti’s two posts on his terrific Immortal Ephemera blog here and here.  The movie was filmed in 1942, but not released until 1944.  For a more detailed explanation why, have a look at Harold Sherman’s “Behind theScreenplay” here.