MonsterHunter

It usually starts the day after Thanksgiving. Well, to be completely honest, it actually starts pretty much as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is over: the debate over which family member will be ruining Christmas this year. The only reason is doesn’t start sooner is because the month of November is consumed by speculation over who is going to be the one that ruins Thanksgiving. You see, in our family, ruining a holiday is just as much a tradition as opening up Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or going to church on Easter is for regular families.

The incidents are legend, stretching back as long as I can remember or at least until I started drinking heavily on holidays. There was the time the power went out in the house on my sister’s birthday. Somehow or other this ended up with my dad stepping on her birthday cake, though for some reason the electrician who came over to fix things is often given the credit for ruining that day. And who could forget that one Easter when us kids decided that our pet gerbils would enjoy Easter morning more if they were let out of their cages to stretch their little legs a little. Our parents should have been glad I never got that pet tarantula I whined continuously about for several years.

More recently was the epic confrontation at a Thanksgiving that saw two members of my family fight over who was going to walk out on the other first! And respect for the dead prevents me from bringing up another Thanksgiving that saw one of my sister’s friends wreck things with a lack of social graces that was matched only by a commensurate lack of personal hygiene. But she got killed a little while after that, so I won’t talk about what an uncouth stinker she was.

The Man Who Came To Dinner is a story about a guy who ruins Christmas, but since this is Hollywood, he also manages to save it in the end. And unlike the majority of my family, Whiteside’s consistently caustic manner and maddening self-absorption is fairly amusing, though the guys that wrote this understand the rudimentary elements of comedy and thus we are also treated to penguins periodically running around loose in the house. There is also an octopus and a mummy case. And an actor who impersonates a stuttering English nobleman. And an axe murderer. And Jimmy Durante. There’s even a love affair that Whiteside first attempts to sabotage and then has to try and repair!

I know that you’re thinking that there’s no possible way for all of this to end up making any sense, but that’s because you’re using your 21st century brain on a 1940s movie. Nowadays, we are very advanced in the field of comedy and understand that all great comedy involves TV shows where fat lazy guys are married to skinny nagging broads and that these TV shows have to be named after the fat lazy guy. Back then, they didn’t even have TV so they had to make do with stuff like wild animals, razor sharp banter, and Bette Davis.

Monty Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside who is a thinly-veiled version of Alexander Woollcott, a critic famous in his day for all the things that Whiteside engages in during the course of this film. (Except for the stuff about hurting his hip, getting stuck in some crappy town in Ohio, and meddling in everyone’s life there. I’m pretty sure that Woollcott ruined Christmas at some point in his life though.)

Bette Davis plays his secretary, Maggie Cutler, a smart cookie who somehow manages to tolerate Whiteside’s irascibility and doesn’t mind his mistreatment of everyone until she becomes the target for his egomania. Together, they spend the Christmas season in a small town in middle America after Sherry hurts his hip falling down some stairs.

The gimmick of this play-turned-movie is that Sherry immediately takes over the household of the people that he is staying with. This results in lots of wacky antics involving the aforementioned penguins, octopus, and Sherry’s various actor friends who drop in as needed by the plot. The gimmick doesn’t really make any sense since I’m unaware of any hip injury that would be severe enough that you couldn’t leave the house, but don’t have to go the hospital. I mean, they carried this guy’s carcass inside from the front steps didn’t they? Why can’t they carry his impolite ass back out the front door to a hotel?

The implausibility of the gimmick aside, this is a pretty funny movie. Whiteside spends close to two hours unleashing a torrent of insults, snide remarks, and name dropping that leaves most of his small town victims unaware that they’ve even been put down. Most of them are either in awe of the celebrity in their midst or are cowed by his puffed up self-importance. Some of you goobers out there from the middle of the country may be a bit put off by the portrayal of you hayseeds in this film, but that’s just because you aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the high art that folks on either coast can. Don’t worry about it. Just try to laugh when your smart relatives from out of town do.

Since Sherry is going to be laid up through Christmas, he is going to have to give his Christmas broadcast from his new home in Ohio. This is one of the big ironies of the film - that a guy as obnoxious as Sherry is known nationally for his treacly broadcasts, especially the sappy Christmas one he does every year. That may help explain the ending of the movie when he turns all good and does everything he can to save his secretary’s relationship with the editor of the local newspaper. Maybe, he just uses all the nasty comments as a form of armor because deep down he’s just insecure. Or maybe Sherry calculated all the outcomes and thought he might have the best chance of retaining Maggie’s services if he lets her go her own way for awhile, instead alienating her with a more obvious gambit like bringing in Ann Sheridan as a famous sexy actress to try and steal away Maggie’s budding-playwright boyfriend. Or maybe, the movie just needed a happy ending.

The love story here is pretty weak. When newspaperman Bert Jefferson talks about how he and Maggie kind of started their relationship when she changed a typewriter ribbon for him, I was wondering if he was referring to a scene that had been cut from my copy of the movie. I mean, one minute they were meeting each for the first time when she and Sherry arrived at the train station and the next thing I know, they’re yucking it up while ice skating and he’s giving her a yucky charm bracelet for Christmas.

It doesn’t help that Bert is a bland drip, who is completely oblivious to the machinations of Sherry’s actress pal Lorraine, whom Sherry has imported for the express purpose of breaking up Bert and Maggie. It’s like I keep trying to tell my married buddy. As a man, your job is to hate every other woman even more than your wife does. How tough is that to figure out? But for some reason Bert just can’t understand why Maggie is all crabby and emotional while he’s out drunk all night with Lorraine working on his play and then gleefully announcing that he can hardly wait to spend three weeks with her in Lake Placid doing “rewrites.” I was never too sure exactly why Maggie was interested in him, beyond the generically handsome looks that would later carry actor Richard Travis to parts in such movies as Mesa Of Lost Women and Missile To The Moon.

The movie doesn’t rise and fall on Maggie mooning over Bert, since it’s merely the excuse to move Sherry through a variety of increasingly convoluted situations culminating with him and Jimmy Durante trying to figure out how to get rid of Lorraine before Sherry is tossed out of the house by sheriff’s deputies in fifteen minutes. (Not to spoil anything, but in a movie like this, the late arrival of a giant mummy case can only mean one thing.)

The movie does runs a bit longer than you’d like and some of Sherry’s comments come off more mean than amusing, but overall this is a nice cynical antidote (ending notwithstanding) to the usual sappy holiday movies foisted on us, so it’s worth a look.

© 2008 MonsterHunter