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Remember the Night
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It was love that made you understand.
– Beulah Bondi in Remember the Night
At
the 1990 Melbourne Film Festival, there was a (very) belated homage to one of
Hollywood’s greatest and most significant talents, the writer-director-producer
Preston Sturges. (Ken Bowser’s 1990 doco, Preston
Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, also presented at this
event, was no kind of worthy or adequate testament.) Sturges’ career was certainly
unusual in its shape and course; he really sparkled for only four or five years,
during which everything clicked for him, between The Great McGinty in 1940 and Hail
the Conquering Hero in 1944. Other work of interest preceded and followed,
but that is truly the Royal Road of his achievement. Nonetheless, what Sturges
gave cinema – and the world – in those prime years is sublime, inimitable (many
have tried and failed) and inexhaustible.
Many
(such as Australian screenwriter-director Bob Ellis) have paid lip-service to
Sturges’ greatness, seeing only the surface delights of his films: the star
turns (by Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea …);
the witty, erudite dialogue; the galaxy of supporting character actors whom the
director enlisted as his ever-transposable troupe of travelling players. Still
today, his films are boiled down (with the notable exception of Brian Henderson’s
brilliant scholarship) to a mere platitude: a cockeyed, mostly satirical view
of the American Dream and all its dreamers, great or small.
Yet
there is so much more.
Take Remember the Night, directed by the
underrated Mitchell Leisen from Sturges’ script. (Sturges did not like Leisen’s
treatment of his work, but let’s put that behind-the-scenes squabble aside: at
least, it served the good function of prompting Sturges to become a director
himself.) The premise is standard Hollywood stuff. Lawyer Jack (MacMurray)
reluctantly looks after pretty criminal Lee (Stanwyck) over the Christmas court
recess. They travel to their respective parental out-of-town homes and
families, slowly falling in love along the way.
But,
as always in Sturges, such an adventure of the heart puts everything in question: the characters’ social roles, their moral
and ethical values, their sense of who they are and what is now possible for
them. By the time Lee and Jack must inevitably confront the harsh reality of
their lives back in the city, the emotional tension is unbearably poignant and
affecting. Watch it and weep.
The
discovery of this film in 1990 marked a powerful, personal epiphany for me, one
that I realised I had to subsequently unravel and understand. This epiphany
connects to what is virtually the primal scene of my teenage cinephilia,
although I had somewhat forgotten or erased this fact over the course of a
decade and a half: watching a string of Preston Sturges films on TV that often
moved me in ways I couldn’t articulate then, and still barely can comprehend
now. The annals of film criticism – including some of the best – doesn’t really
get me close to the heart of this mystery. So here are some further notes
toward formulating that experience and understanding …
The
profondity of Sturges: it’s in the theme of deviation,
the drift from one’s identity or role. And how far this drift can go – for Jack
in Remember the Night, it’s all the
way into criminality, the subversion of his law practice. Sturges is very
conscious of this; the plot is literally structured on a road detour, later a detour through Canada … Note,
in this light, the classic elided sex scene: “We are at Niagara Falls” – it’s
an unofficialised, unsanctioned honeymoon wedding night.
In
this version (and vision) of liminality,
there is the open, and also very unresolved, question of what these people will
do, who they will be, when they are back in their initial, social position:
whether as prosecutor and criminal, or man and woman … “This time tomorrow,
where will you be?” (The Kinks). And at the end of Remember the Night, the balance is weird and unsettling: he is
still deviating, and she is trying to
pull, trying to return him to his
destiny and vocation – and trying to get him to accept her supposed guilt
(which, by that point, he could hardly care less about).
We
can try to get the measure of Sturges’ importance through a reflection on Mikhail
Bakhtin’s concept (in The Dialogic
Imagination) of heteroglossia,
the threading and mutual displacement of many genres, film types, clichés. As the
great scholar Marie Maclean [died 1994] might have said, if this were
literature rather than film: what Sturges offers us is a true heteroglossia of
gender discourses, from all the variegated utterances of male law and order, all
the way through to trans-generational exchanges between women about
undergarments, cultural beauty-types, how one did or did not measure up …
The
problem with singular genres is the
simple fact (so obvious and “natural”, it’s a surprise to find oneself suddenly
pondering it) that they severely restrict what can be brought in, played with, thought about … entertained in the deepest sense. For instance: how many of the
great male action heroes – at least in American cinema – ever have mothers? This
is why, for example, the work of James Toback matters, because he harps on this point in a needling, idiosyncratic, obsessive
way (for, naturally, every hero, no matter how grandiose, has to come from
somewhere).
And
this is (to continue the thought-detour!) the interest of a Hong Kong
action-comedy like Tiger on the Beat 2 (Lau Kar Leung, 1990), where the “human interest” – still displaced, but not
rendered without a measure of respect and gravity, not derided out of hand (and
out of film) as merely comic – concerns the request of the mother (insistently
present through her photo and as a voice down the phone) that the “green”,
second hero find a nice home … (cf. also Roger Donaldson’s Cadillac Man [1990]).
There
is a recurring theme in Sturges (see The
Lady Eve, 1942) about pulling back from deep understanding – or at least the trembling, opening possibility of
it – and retreating to surface parlance, babble: “I’m not unnattractive”, says
Lee in Remember the Night, so that’s
why he kissed me; or: you’re a good-looking guy …
It’s
as if Sturges finds the best, picaresque way to travel though and call up
different Hollywood film-types and their possibilities. This gives rise to
endless splits of the social-cultural norm beyond any initial, binary division:
here men are variously “true”, actors, bad actors … they’re virile, virile yet
naive, out-and-out fops, hicks who turn rather proud and tough when mocked too
much. And what Sturges allows in is a great deal of the feminine element,
female exchanges and culture, as well as a wilting feminisation of the men (Sullivan’s Travels, 1941).
There
are so many crossovers in this film
(rich to poor), sudden exchanges across barriers (old to young), splits,
substitutions, deviations … An entire poetic structure, system or logic of
character trajectories that have never been properly brought to light before.
There are even unconscious adventures during sleep!
Such
is the Bakhtinian richness behind the old commonplace, endlessly said and
written about Sturges: that the films are polyglotic, that every player has
their own speech, voice, obsession, trajectory, everybody is a world unto
themselves … But what are the cultural resonances of his specific shifts, mixes
and displacements? Could it be this powerfully feminine resonance that has
escaped and silenced most critical commentary on Sturges? (Not to mention Frank Tashlin’s own further riff on Sturges, via Jerry Lewis, in Rock-a-bye Baby [1958]).
That
lame doco mentioned above gives Sturges so many supposedly masculine virtues: irony,
maverick toughness, vision, invention, incisive satire, cynicism, access to
truth – and rests this sum of greatness precisely on the flight from and
refusal of his over-cultivated, suffocating mother! And yet the films
themselves never stop returning to the figure of the mother. And William
Demarest (beloved of Sturges) is always fainting …
The
films also never stop returning to the question of culture, which is mixed into
another heteroglossia, at so many levels: it isn’t a matter (as Bowser
presumes) of high and low cultures in contradictory opposition, clash, conflict
or abrasion, but another, constant form of exchange.
Plus,
the entire sentimental, intensely romantic, yielding side of Sturges’ cinema is played down by many (most) commentators. It’s not
just a matter of “strong women”, in any attractively simple (or phantasmatically
threatening) sense. Rather, in Sturges, there is always the seduction or
absorption of the characters by a zone of the sentiments, “straight from the
heart” emotions, and intimacy. In the penultimate courtroom scene of Remember the Night, there is so much
ambivalence, so many confused feelings at play, characters’ actions that are
unknowable to each other. Love makes them deviate from their path – and
(eventually, hopefully) understand.
As
I’ve indicated, Preston Sturges’ films are at the very heart and origin of my own
cinephilia. Their ephemeral “convulsions”, their mood shifts, their fleeting,
poignant moments of half-life (Veronica Lake in the train car of Sullivan’s Travels), the open sense of
ever-present (and ever-menacing) possibility, the evasion or sly erosion of
codes of normality … these are the things for me to reckon with. In Sturges (as
in Blake Edwards), we encounter a situation (duly thematised) wherein the
enormity of the given, the obligation
to return to it, to affirm it, rubs right up, endlessly, against the temptation
to drift-away and drift-apart …
A
“sentimental feminisation” is surely a big, formative part of my own love of
cinema (romances, musicals, teen movies, cosmic art-film encounters, etc., etc.).
In the deep structure of this cinephilia, there’s a striving, a liberation of
love and/or of laughter … the whole surrealist legacy of Peter Ibbetson (1935), and of crazy gag comedy. And there is also a
register of knotted-up, adolescent longing for a female phantasm (Angel Face, 1953); as well as the
epiphanies of “pure cinema”, the power and mystery of film form, on that
palpitating surface of otherness which is the screen itself (Jean-Luc Godard, Robert
Bresson, etc: a friend refers to Remember
the Night as the most Bressonian film not made by Bresson).
But
there is also, I now recall as I “remember the night”, a yielding, a letting-go:
not a violent frgamentation or fetishisation so much as a drifting, an
absorption, a vignetting of scenes, worlds and sights that is so common to what
I once called in my teen years “the Hollywood-text” … a fraying and a decaying
at the edge of these vignetted moments, and then the “continuous streaming” (to
take a line from Love Streams) of all
these fragilities …
That
was the encounter – of a pure cinema with such streaming, poignant
ephemeralities – I was to eventually experience with the films of John Cassavetes. It all started, at least a decade earlier for me, with Preston
Sturges.
© Adrian Martin June/September 1990 |
