It Happened to Jane - 1959

“It Happened to Jane” (1959) leaves you with a warm, fuzzy feeling about small towns, lobsters, and trains. The leads Doris Day and Jack Lemmon are delightful in their chemistry, their comedy, and their ability to convey poignancy in their seemingly hopeless financial -- and romantic -- situation. Ernie Kovacs gives a tour-de-force performance as a greedy railroad owner with the aplomb of Snidely Whiplash.


The real star, many would agree, is the location shooting. Set in the fictional coastal Maine town of Cape Ann, it was really shot in the Connecticut River Valley town of Chester, Connecticut. Have a look at my Tuesday’s New England Travels blog for photos of what shooting locations in the movie look like today. Not a lot has changed in 50 years.

By the way, in this movie they sometimes refer to a nearby town called High River. In reality, Chester’s neighbor is Deep River.

In Dan Widener’s “Lemmon - A Biography” (NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1975), Jack Lemmon is quoted as recalling “It Happened to Jane” as “…a charming picture made when you could still do charming films.” (p.162).

This comment boils down, I think, the essence of the appeal this movie has for viewers today. It seems to document a time for us when childhood summers were lush and long, and Norman Rockwell-type towns were idealized.

It also documents for us, unwittingly, the beginning of the age when railroad companies began to cut down their service in an effort to force passengers away so that they could eventually drop passenger service as being less profitable than carrying freight. We discussed this on Monday’s post in “The Out of Towners” (1970) -- which graphically demonstrates the hell of train travel when it hit rock bottom in the last days when railroad companies were privately owned and bent on scuttling themselves. What happened next was the founding of Amtrak, and a new era in passenger train service.

This Saturday the 12th marks the 5th annual National Train Day in celebration of our national railroad. Have a look here for events and information.

The beginning of the end of private railroads -- that led to Jack Lemmon’s and Sandy Dennis’ hysterically horrible train ride -- all starts, it seems, over ten years earlier with Doris Day and her lobsters.

She has a mail order lobster business, and ships her stock -- via train -- to restaurants and country clubs in big cities far away. She receives the disastrous news that her latest shipment of lobsters never reached their destination because the railroad company suddenly cut back on staff to receive and process them. They are shipped back, dead by this time, to her small village.

Among the villagers you may recognize the voice, if not the face, of Parker Fennelly, who plays Homer the depot agent. He grew up in Maine, so his Down East accent is authentic. He was Titus Moody on Fred Allen’s “Allen’s Alley.”

Mary Wickes has a too-small role as the town switchboard operator and want-to-be “newspaperman”. I think my favorite line of hers is when she gets up in the middle of the night to answer a call on the switchboard with the greeting, “I’m warning you, Stupid!”

It’s Jack, frantic, and trying to reach Doris for the 100th time.

Doris Day is a widow with a small son and daughter. Her son is played by Teddy Rooney, Mickey’s boy in real life. Jack Lemmon is her childhood friend and would-be boyfriend. Their relationship is warm, sweet, and supportive, but there is a wall between them that is quite subtle and beautifully played.

As kids, they were a trio -- the third member being the lively, spirited boy, Hank, who grew up to marry Doris. Jack, we hear, was the first to propose -- when they were 12. But Hank, who could charm the birds out of the trees, beat his time. Her husband, now deceased, still casts a long shadow over Jack. One senses the shy boy never got over Doris, and never got over being second best to a more colorful, more dynamic, more charming pal.

Jack is the local small-town lawyer and routinely defeated candidate for selectman. He becomes Doris’ ally and advocate when she attempts to sue the railroad for damages.

The railroad is personified for us by the ramshackle steam train, “the Old 97”, and by the less cozy and not at all darling image of Ernie Kovacs, who plays the miserly mogul bent on squeezing every last dollar he can find. He’s terrific in the role, and one suspects it must have been a part he really enjoyed. He huffs and puffs and threatens to blow everyone’s house down. He bullies his enormous staff, who desert him one by one when his strong-arm tactics to revenge himself on a certain Maine widow with two children becomes too much to stomach. He brandishes cigars, calls women “broads” and is so much a railroad man that he sleeps in a bedroom nook that looks like a sleeper compartment.

One of his flunkies is Casey Adams, who’ll you’ll remember as the goofy husband in “Niagara” (1953) covered here. In later years, Adams went by his real name, Max Showalter. Like the rest of the cast, he was quite taken with the Chester, Connecticut filming locations. He eventually came back and settled in the Chester area in an old farmhouse.

(Goodspeed Opera House on the Connecticut River, photo by JT Lynch)

When he died, he left his collection of film and theatre memorabilia to the famed Goodspeed Opera House (pictured here just up the river in East Haddam) and the newly established Max Showalter Center for Education in Musical Theatre.

Doris Day thought that Chester was a “regular Garden of Eden” -- in an interview with Joe De Bona in the Bridgeport, Connecticut Sunday Herald of July 29, 1962 -- “…although there were too many lobsters in the picture to suit me.

“I don’t like lobsters much, and in that picture with Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs, I was in the lobster business. When they -- the lobsters -- looked at me with those beady eyes! Ugh! But I sure am crazy about Connecticut.”

Doris and Ernie wrangle legally about the railroad’s responsibilities until he cuts off service to the town, leaving them stranded. Though Mr. Kovacs’ character is obviously a silly cartoon, we note in Monday’s post on the train sequence in “The Out of Towners” (1970) and the establishment of Amtrak, that it was the goal of privately owned railroad companies to diminish passenger service in favor of more profitable freight lines.

“You can’t continue to run roughshod over the consumer,” he is advised. Oh, yes, he can.

“Every time one of your crummy commuters gets on my train it costs me four cents!”

Mr. Lemmon has a good line which he says with all the cynicism of his later character in “The Out of Towners” - “The distance between the right and the practical is a shame to the human race.”

The news about the lobsterwoman and the railroad magnate spreads in the media. Steve Forrest, a reporter from New York, is sent to get her story. She takes him on a tour of her town, and we get a history lesson on the composite past of small-town New England, in and around actual historic buildings in Chester, Connecticut, the stand-in for her fictional Maine village. A tour inside the quiet church, inside the town Meeting House, where we later return for town meeting. Actual Chester residents play the townspeople.

“Do you know where you are?!” Jack chastises the townspeople for abandoning the good fight in support of Doris, reminding them of their forefathers, who believed in Revolution.

When they need coal to run the train, they all scavenge some from their own coal bins. You may recall that in mid-20th century most homes and businesses in this country were heated by coal.

Steve is big city boy, a smooth operator and he falls for Doris. She is charmed by him, and flattered by the attention. The dazed, sickened expression on Jack Lemmon’s face when it hits him that he’s in a recurring nightmare of losing Doris to another man is really quite sad.

Another fun aspect to the film is the several real-life celebrities who get cameos when Steve brings Doris to New York. His scheme is to get her on the then popular TV game shows and panel shows to raise money for her legal defense against Mr. Kovacs.

Dave Garroway plays himself, as does Robert Paige of the “The Big Payoff, and Garry Moore, host of “I’ve Got a Secret”. His panel of Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Henry Morgan and Betsy Palmer try to guess Doris’ secret, which flashed on the screen is “I’m Fighting the Meanest Man in the World.”  This segment of the movie cements the slower-paced 1950s world with a dose of real popular culture.

Meanwhile, Jack, left at home with the kids, is flipping out of his mind with jealousy. So frustratingly chaste is his relationship with Doris, that when he sleeps over her house to mind the kids while she’s gone, he fidgets for sleep on her couch. Apparently occupying her bed even when she’s not there is too forward for Jack. Or the censors.

We note the real-life locations in Tuesday’s New England Travels, but here we catch a clue to our Connecticut location with the presence of the television crew from WTIC- Channel 3, the CBS Hartford station.

Jack eventually comes into his own as the hero of the day in a last-minute suspenseful train run on “Old ‘97”, Doris is a genuine heroine to the nation of TV fans, and even Ernie turns out to be a hero in the end.

Despite Miss Day’s dislike of lobsters, I like their family pet, Sam the Lobster, who watches TV with the kids.  Mr. Lemmon makes a mad dash a couple of times to get him back to the water and his holding pen before he dies. He’s right up there with the seagull from “This Happy Feeling” and Samantha the Goose from “Friendly Persuasion” as my among my favorite animal actors. Lassie is all well and good, but I’ve always been more interested in character actors than stars.

Have yourself a happy National Train Day this Saturday. Make your next trip by train, and support the future of passenger rail service in this country.

(The blogger spends some quality time with an old friend.)


Or, just celebrate by cuddling up to a train.

One that isn’t moving.

The Out of Towners - 1970

“The Out of Towners” (1970) is historically important. Yeah, I said it. Historically Important. Maybe not like the Declaration of Independence, but in its own way it shows us a moment frozen in time, a movie whose plot is driven by cause-and-effect circumstances that -- unknowingly -- will lead to an unexpected future for rail travel in the US.

Those of us interested in history, I mean REALLY interested are not so much fascinated by what happened the day the Bastille was stormed, or the day Pearl Harbor was bombed -- but what happened the day before -- of what it was like in  a world about to change  We like to look for clues in the wind of what we know happened next. “The Out of Towners” shows us what happened, almost literally, the day before the United States established a national railroad, called Amtrak.

(Springfield, Mass, photo by JT Lynch)

Welcome to our annual love-fest of all things trains as related to movies. This year’s 5th annual National Train Day is this coming Saturday the 12th. Today we’ll have a look at the train sequence from “The Out of Towners”, and Thursday we’ll cover “It Happened to Jane” (1959). Both movies feature Jack Lemmon in starring roles, and both show us what happened to train service in this country in the late 1950s and 1960s to lead to its collapse -- and the final rescue by an (unusually) bipartisan Congress to save the day and save passenger rail service in this country.

(If you look really hard down those tracks heading east you can see Boston.  Look harder.  They're waving at you.  I swear, you need glasses.  You can't see 80 lousy miles?  Photo by JT Lynch.)

It’s a very important story and a modern phenomenon of politics and popular culture. Of course, these movies are not documentaries, so what they reveal to us is largely unintended, which I think makes that revelation all the more natural and valuable. If you really want the nuts and bolts history lesson of a nation that was built on trains and finding itself on the brink of losing them, have a look at the very informative video “Amtrak - The First 40 Years - 1971-2011” directed and produced by Richard W. Luckin, 2011. The first few minutes of this film is currently on YouTube here.

“Run, Gwen, Run!”

“The Out of Towners” is a hoot, start to finish. Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis are a couple from Ohio flying to New York City where Mr. Lemmon is to have a job interview, expecting to be transferred to the New York office of his company. Their travel is disrupted all along the way by the most outrageous incidents. For now, we’ll just stick to the train sequence.

Which is best appreciated when you understand what was happening to rail travel in the 1960s. Passenger service declined for many reasons, but foremost of which:

It was allowed to decay, purposely, by the railroad companies.

Passenger service increasingly became less profitable for the railroads, which were all privately owned before Amtrak. Freight and mail contracts helped pay for passenger service, to a degree, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s, railroad executives wanted to get rid of their passenger service as unprofitable. They were not allowed to just stop it, the Department of Transportation would have had a few things to say about that, so they purposely refused to invest in maintenance and upkeep, they limited service, and cut out amenities. Train travel in the late 1960s, on most railroads, was a far cry from the glory days of the 1930s through the 1950s. Service was unreliable, cars were in disrepair, food was not so great, in an effort by the railroad executives to drive passengers away. They made train travel miserable, so that they could report there was not enough ridership to continue providing passenger service.

Private industry does not always have the public’s best interest at heart. Have you noticed?

Push came to shove, and the American public pulled off a grass roots drive to force the issue in Congress, demanding that passenger service be saved. Congress, fearful of the eventual necessity of “socializing” freight travel, never mind passenger service, enthusiastically responded. Signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon, it was the birth of Amtrak.

The first decade was rough, as a lot of traditional routes had to be scrapped in an effort to focus money and attention on the handful of routes that could be saved. Gone was the City of Los Angeles, gone was the Midnight Special from Alabama to Ohio, gone was the Montreal Limited and a number of routes. Equipment was hodgepodge and funding was an annual battle.

All transportation in this country is subsidized by the government. Airports, highways, they do not pay for themselves. There is no profit. They have the benefit of a solid trust fund to support them. Amtrak, however, must fight for funding constantly.

Four decades later, more routes have been added, train cars are climate controlled, quiet, comfortable, and the food is good. Trains connect not just cities in the northeast, but downtowns. Trains reach areas in the Midwest and West that are not easily accessible by airports, or sometimes even by highways. A single high-speed route, the Acela, is top notch and growing in popularity.

Trains are the most economically efficient, and most environmentally advantageous way to move large numbers of people. Though we are still far behind Europe and Asia in the development of high speed rail service and commuter rail, this is where our future lies, because with the rising cost of fuel, and the congestion of highways and airspace, we have no choice.

We old movie buffs tend to wax nostalgic about trains as we see them in 1940s movies, but trains are no longer just a nostalgic image. They are the (rail) road to the future.

Which makes Jack Lemmon’s travails in “The Out of Towners” so ironic. This movie was released the year before Amtrak came into being. The movie, directed by Arthur Hiller, written by Neil Simon, shows a grittiness in its urban shots, both in Boston and in New York. We are entering a less colorful, more cynical modern world, yet the grittiness contrasts with how the travelers appear, not just Mr. Lemmon and Miss Dennis, but the sea of extras around them. Take a good look. All the men in suits. The ladies in dresses, and white gloves. More ladies, like Sandy Dennis, are going without hats, and many of the men are, too, but most people still dressed for travel. People in this film are slow to let go of their formality, have not become as inelegant as their train service.

Their flight to NYC is diverted, because of fog, to Boston. It is night, and Mr. Lemmon needs to be in NYC by early the next morning for his important business meeting. They grab a cab to South Station and try to get the next train to New York.

They just miss it, and one of my favorite lines is when Jack, panting, hollers, “Did you see that train?”

Sandy replies, “I didn’t see anything. I was running.”

A laconic red cap with the typical stereotyped “ayuh” New England accent informs them they can catch the train at the next stop in Longview. Back for another cab ride, and they finally get on board the train by the skin of their teeth.

Notice the logo on the side of the train. In this last year before Amtrak, the trains are still privately owned, and this one is the good old New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. We had a brief visit on this train when we covered “This Happy Feeling” (1958) here. The NY, NH & H had actually merged with Penn Central in 1968, but the Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970, the year this movie was released. It joined Amtrak in 1976.

The train is monstrously overcrowded, and they must wait two hours in line to get to the dining car, where all the food is gone. All that’s left is peanut butter sandwiches and nothing to drink except clam juice and tonic water, “But they ain’t cold.”

I once heard a joke, something about clam juice being what New Englanders drink when they’re hung over. I can’t vouch for that. I’ve never had clam juice, and I’ve never been hung over.

(Note guy sleeping in luggage rack to the right.  Now that's an overcrowded train.)

The conductor, punching tickets, replies to Jack, with a typical stereotyped New England “ayuh” accent, “This train runs empty six nights a week, ‘cept when the New York airport is fogged in. Then they fly ‘em up to Boston. Then we could use four more cars.”

“Why don’t you put on four more cars?” Lemmon asks.

“Ain’t got four more cars. Nobody takes the train anymore. Everybody’s in a hurry.”

The state of American railroads in the late 1960s boiled down in a couple of lines of dialogue.

The cheerful waiter who seems bothered by nothing, even amused by the chaos, is played by Johnny Brown, whom you might remember from “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in.”

Conductors, I am happy to report, still wear those neat hats and still punch tickets. Some of them still sing, “Worcester-Albany-Buffalo and all points we-est. All bo-a-a-rd!.” You know you’re on a northeast train when they pronounce Worcester properly. I’ve heard it butchered south of DC.

You also know you’re getting closer to New England if New England clam chowder is on the menu. I once had a discussion in a dining car with an elderly gentleman from upper New York state about Manhattan vs. New England chowder. He was for the former. We agreed to disagree.

Check out the regional menus here.   Chicken Tortilla soup on the Texas Eagle run. Southern catfish on the City of New Orleans.

We get a look at a less than resplendent South Station in Boston, likewise a run-down, dark and dirty Grand Central in NYC. The stations, like the train service, were falling apart, not maintained by the railroads. Grand Central was due to fall to the wrecking ball, a prize sought by developers, until some New Yorkers, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among them, fought to save and restore the Grand Central Terminal. Today, it is as magnificent a train station as you will ever see. (Though it does not currently serve Amtrak, which goes to Penn Station across town. Grand Central serves the commuter lines like Metro North.)

(Washington, D.C. - Union Station, JT Lynch photo)

Many train stations, like the train routes of old, have undergone a renaissance in the past few decades, among them Washington D.C.’s Union Station and the Union Station in Los Angeles.

(Cincinnati - Union Station, JT Lynch photo)

Here’s some shots of the magnificent station in Cincinnati, with its beautiful Art Deco façade and inside, an enormous mural surrounding the dome in vivid colors.

(Cincinnati - Union Station, photo by JT Lynch)

Most of these re-born stations have shops and services, and in the case of Cincinnati, a city historical museum inside. They have become more than just a place to pick up a newspaper or book a ticket.

(Cincinnati - Union Station, photo by JT Lynch)

But Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis trudge through a man-made hell of run-down infrastructure that is as horrifying as it is terribly funny. The future of train travel, or indeed, any kind of travel, looked bleak in “The Out of Towners”. It just goes to show, past is always prelude, but not always revealing of what is going to happen next.  What happened next was Amtrak.

Come back Thursday when we discuss “It Happened to Jane”, which shows us the beginning of this era of railroad decline. Jack Lemmon is a bit younger here, much more idealistic, and helps Doris Day fight off greedy railroad executive Ernie Kovacs to save the train that serves their coastal Maine village.

This movie was actually shot in Chester, Connecticut, as well as in Hartford. Visit my New England Travels blog tomorrow for photos of what the locations in the movie look like today.

(The blogger waits to board.  Photo by JT Lynch)