CineFile Video

Did you catch the line about Mae West? Crimeny. I saw this clip from The Stand-In, directed by Tay Garnett (Postman Always Rings Twice), while checking out some of the New Arrivals over the weekend, and was pleasantly shocked by the scathing humor of this scene, among others. It reminded me of a particularly dark review of Wee Willie Winkie written by Graham Greene:

“The owners of a child star are like leaseholders - their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonial squabble? Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after “The Littlest Rebel”). In “Captain January” she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in “Wee Willie Winkie,” wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy.

Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square; hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised; watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen -respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. ‘Why are you making Mummy cry?’ - what could be purer than that? And the scene when dressed in a white nightdress she begs grandpa to take Mummy to a dance - what could be more virginal? On those lines her new picture, made by John Ford, who directed “The Informer,” is horrifyingly competent. It isn’t hard to stay to the last prattle and the last sob. The story - about an Afghan robber converted by “Wee Willie Winkie” to the British Raj - is a long way after Kipling. But we needn’t be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood’s is the better.”

This fine piece of prose garnered Greene a libel lawsuit, which he promptly lost–supposedly complaining to a friend in private, “I’m gonna have to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple.” Now, most critical observations tend to be autobiographical in nature; I have doubts that all men want to sleep with their mothers, but I’m pretty sure Freud wanted to sleep with his mother, if you know what I mean. But the repetition of certain observations tends to lend them a kind of credibility. So, is it a coincidence that the Stand-In was released in 1937, the same year that Graham Greene wrote this infamous bit of film criticism? Regardless of whether either piece of commentary informed the other, or if this is just a case of parallel observations, they go well together. This clip from the The Stand-In plays like a kind of horrifying visual proof to Greene’s point.

There’s plenty of other good humor in The Stand-In, and not just in the ‘Day of the Locust’, rotting Hollywood dream factory mold. Leslie Howard and Joan Blondell have some good ‘owl & the pussycat’ chemistry in their screwball comedy scenes, including a kiss so memorable I was tempted to excerpt that instead –but I had to leave you something to look forward to (I wasn’t too worried about the above clip, which one can gigglingly gasp in horror to, again and again).

Unfortunately, while the jokes are sharply written by screenwriting duo Gene Towne & C. Graham Baker (who also penned Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once), they’re never able to work a clean story out the novel by Clarence Budington Kelland. Kelland also wrote the source material for Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and both films use the viewpoint of an innocent to explore the seamy inner-workings ofcapitalism—in this case substitute Hollywood for New York City. However, in the Stand-In, the plot mechanics collapse about halfway through, and by the end, and you can feel the writers trying to brutely wrench the film back on course to it’s patently false, pseudo-commie happy ending.

But not every movie’s a complete classic, and if you’ve already been a good little boy or girl, and seen all of your Preston Sturges and Frank Capra, this one should sate your appetite for a night.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under From the Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.