humoresque: the place is haunted

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1946. dir: Jean Negulesco) Neither Joan Crawford nor Clifford Odets has ever been better. Crawford had just won her Oscar for Mildred Pierce and her role in this one subsequently unfolded from a compact point into a broad canvas. The story is a John Garfield vehicle, heavy melodrama about a young musician and his older patroness, but the script is so vivacious that the thing rarely drags. Odets' humor is as dark here as it ever gets, dark and fast and fizzy, a cynical champagne of a screenplay, and the only times it starts to lag are in the "happy part of the love story" times, because the happy part of a love affair is the hard part to communicate. Plus, Odets doesn't believe in love, which further hampers his course.

The movie's true passion for classical music is fully apparent, and sometimes hypnotic. When Crawford pulls her Anna Karenina at the end, it's set to such a gorgeous piece and so beautifully photographed that you let the Wagnerian Soap Opera angle of it slide.

The other interesting thing (in these Hays Code times) is the despair which Crawford's character feels towards marriage. She's a dame who's been around the block a time or two and knows for a solid fact that Happily Ever After doesn't come after you say "I do", but also knows she's mad for this boy and wants to believe in it, the possibility of building happiness with him. It's that knowledge, that street wisdom, the inability to sustain the necessary illusion, which spells her doom. "Here's to love," she toasts, at the end, quietly, drunkenly, to herself, "and here's to the time we were little girls and no one asked us to marry." She's a nearsighted drunk who goes into physical ecstasy at the sound of Garfield playing his violin, and yet resents the music as the mistress who will always rule first in his heart. It doesn't scan, it's hard to buy, but everything looks and sounds so great, and Garfield and Crawford throw themselves so wholly into it, that you buy it anyway, without carping over the price-tag.

What a fantastic screenplay. Garfield, after the tragedy, is walking on the beach with his piano player. He's weary and wounded, and what momentous thought does Odets give him? "I have to shave. Why do I have to shave every day?" It's so real it hurts.

The Crawford character tells us she spends most of her time doing penance for things she does wrong every day. In one particularly good drunken scene in the bar she frequents, she keeps repeating, "No offence," to everyone, then, when the barman puts his hands on Garfield who's trying to drag her out and she tells him to back off, the guy says, "No offence," and Crawford, with that confused recognition drunkards get, says, "No offence? That's my line, no offence." Almost as good is her line when Garfield walks in to claim her: "Well, what do you know? The place is haunted."

And in his opening speech, Garfield gives us what might as well be the summation of every part he ever played: "All my life I wanted to do the right thing, but it never worked out. I'm outside, always looking in, and feeling all the time that I'm far away from home and where home is I don't know."

He is strangely at his ease as the violin virtuoso ascended to fame and fortune from poor roots. People will tell you that the movie doesn't really start until Crawford shows up, but that's hogwash. It's every bit as easy to lose yourself in Garfield as in Crawford; they're both superstars. This whole movie, in a nutshell, is better than you think it's going to be.