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 A woman endures lots of difficulties throughout two marriages and four children, but always maintains her positive outlook on things. 1945, 117 minutes
Any doubt you may have had that you were in for one of those multi-generational epics about some woman who was either tough as nails and persevered through years of hardship or how she became tough as nails as a result of said hardship is laid to rest as soon as you get a gander at the Bride of Frankenstein wig that adorns star Rosalind Russell for the second half of this too lengthy endeavor about not very much. I never would have imagined that a horror film from the 1930s would have been so influential on all the melodramas that followed, but after Bride Of Frankenstein came out, it seemed as if every woman's movie of the next fifteen years that required its star to age adopted the Bride's trademark streak of white hair to accomplish that feat.
These types of movies usually starred pillars of female strength and longevity such as Bette Davis and Greer Garson. We've seen Bette in movies like Old Acquaintance with hair like this and I know that Greer had to age in both Mrs. Parkington and Blossoms In The Dust . Irene Dunne also had at least a pair of movies where we were subjected to someone's naval gazing reminisces transferred to the screen in I Remember Mama and Life With Father . I can't say for sure whether she also visited the Bride's salon, but I'm pretty dang sure she didn't end up bald. I've also noticed that the only other visible effect the passing years leaves on our heroines is perhaps a few artfully added crow's feet (more to indicate accumulated wisdom than being an old bag) and that misty-eyed look whenever they beam admiringly over how well their brood has turned out (I can't believe little Tommy is now a doctor and that young Susie overcame her club foot and Tourette's Syndrome to become the ambassador to Spain and an Olympic fencing champion!).
Just once, I'd like a little realism in these soapy epics. Let's face facts. The vast majority of old folks end up as bloated up senile vampires that suck this great country's vital resources up while us young, vigorous, taxpayers are forced to shoulder more than our fair share. Just like these professional boxers that can't retire and leave the spotlight, these old coots don't know when to exit gracefully. Don't misunderstand me as some kind bigot who's practicing ageism. I've got no problem if someone over the age of fifty is doing something in life beyond drawing their government check (my buddies in the corporate world refer to this as "elder welfare") and turning out in droves on Election Day to keep the dried up prunes in charge of this country. So really, I'm not opposed to old people per se, it just usually turns out that way.
Just like I'm not against family epics per se, it's just that these families are usually either a bunch of slugs like in Mrs. Parkington or are such goody-goodies like in most of the other movies (I Remember Mama , Life With Father ) that you just can't wait until some little kid falls underneath a street car or young Johnnie gets sent off to fight the Kaiser with just his boyish good looks and artist's soul. Give me the pleasing familiarity of a dysfunctional crew of jackals like The Royal Tenenbaums and I'll be entertained. I just don't need to see some whitewashed version of the American Dream over and over again. How many times do I need to have that whole "no matter what happens, we'll be okay because we've got each other and we're hard working Americans" line of bunk shoved in my face? Apparently back in the war years they couldn't hear it enough.
This time they've enlisted Rosalind Russell, who is perhaps best well known for the screwball comedy His Girl Friday with Cary Grant. I like to think that this movie was a dry run for Life With Father since director Michael Curtiz made that one two years after finishing this one and it featured fellow Cary Grant screwball comedy co-star Dunne. Michael learned at least one lesson from this one, when doing Life With Father - have a strong male character to balance the picture out. Rosalind suffers through two different husbands, neither of them particularly memorable and neither of them William Powell.
Half way into the movie Rosalind's Louise Randall Pierson learns that hubby number one has been coming home late from work not because he's really busting his hump at his job as bank V.P. but because he's humping some busty job at his bank thereby exposing her to V.D. During their big break up speech, this guy complains that Louise never properly worshipped him enough and that she tried to do everything for him and wasn't suitably devastated whenever something bad happened. You see, she is supposed to be so dependent on this guy that when he comes home and announces he lost his job (the job before the one where he had to work overtime screwing some hot young thing) that she should go to pieces as soon as she gets the news. Instead, she breathes a sigh of relief when she finds out that his bad news is merely his newly unemployed status and counsels him that he's so great he'll get another job in a hurry. There wasn't much drama when he left since we all knew she was better off without that insecure turd.
Husband number two is only marginally better in that he at least is predisposed to be in perpetual good humor, no matter how badly his cockamamie schemes gummed up their lives. Harold C. Pierson is a bit of a dreamer and is always seeing the "next big thing" that they should get in on the ground floor of and invest everything including their gold fillings in. After Roz meets this guy at a costume party and deciding to marry his crazy butt a couple hours later, he decides that what this country needs in the mid 1920s is lots of roses. Harry and Roz build these greenhouses, hire a big staff, and kick it into high gear so that the Christmas of 1928 will see them shipping 30,000 roses all over the east coast. This is where some business school might have helped Harry (or at least where paying attention to his father wouldn't have been a bad idea since he ran greenhouses as well). You see, when you ship 30,000 roses and your competitors have shipped another million or so, you're going to run into a little something the pocket protector types call "market saturation." Next stop for the Piersons? A public auction followed by a road trip with all their remaining belongings strapped to the back of their jalopy, Joad-style.
If Christmas 1928 is over, veterans of these kinds of movies are positively licking their lips about what's going to happen next. Even as Harry gets his family embroiled in a scheme that sees them investing their last thousand dollars in a fledging airplane business, the audience is already fantasizing about the newspaper headlines that are sure to whirl by shortly with catchy phrases like "Biggest Stock Market Crash Ever!" and "Entire Nation Turns Into Shiftless Hobo!" We get to see Harry test out the plane successfully for a group of wealthy and very interested investors and I'm just muttering to myself, "wait for it, wait for it" and then just as we're about to buy a house with our anticipated airplane winnings, the newsboy is running around the street yelling "Extry! Extry!" and Roz excitedly buys it thinking they published a special edition about her husband's kick ass new airplane. Biggest laugh of the movie! Even bigger than the time when Harry pretended to become a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, but was really just hanging out at the local pub all day long hustling marks in game after game of nine ball. Coolest husband ever!
Following this foray into salesman/pool shark, Harry gets that big break that he's been waiting for. One day he gets a letter and it turns out that that job he wanted as supervisor of the 1939 New York's World's Fair has come through! Huh? Wasn't this guy just playing a drunk named Hooch for quarters in some smoky pool hall in between tall frothy glasses of pilsner? And he's in charge of the world of tomorrow? Lucky for all us, World War II finally gets around to starting and since the movie itself was made in 1945, there wasn't much left to show us. With WWII going hot and heavy, the movie concludes with rather pointless scenes of Roz's kids going off to war. Since we never really met these kids except to periodically hear that they were going to Yale (you will get real tired of hearing the Pierson family sing the Yale fight song) or Harvard and the movie ended before we found out which of them ended up sucking saltwater on the bottom of the Pacific, the goodbyes don't pack much of an emotional impact. That and Harry didn't seem too broken up over them leaving (he was just sorry he was too old to go, too!). It was a fittingly flat ending to a rather uninvolving series of reversals of fortunes this woman suffered.
This movie was purportedly based on a book by the real-life Louise Randall Pierson, who also got a screenplay credit, but it's difficult to swallow the fact that anyone's life would simply be a series of setbacks, handled alternately with steely determination or good natured humor (though she does start getting weepy at the end of things - that was probably just the onset of menopause or something though). Not only is this the woman that laughs in the face of a jobless husband (and shares a beer with the other one once she discovers his little fib about the vacuum cleaner business), but who refuses to get too upset over the fact that one of her kids turns up lame. Childhood paralysis? Just another thing on my "to do list" in between "deal with husband's affair" and "raise four kids on my own." In fact, all the drama that Roz regularly faces becomes something of a running joke, even to Roz and her second husband! At one point during the movie, they were whooping it up about how funny it was that whenever something was going good for her.
After awhile, it became a tiresome routine, watching her work on some project while waiting for it to implode on her, to be inevitably followed up by her "dang it, now I just got to dig in and try a little harder next time" attitude. At about two hours, there's ample time to get to know her and her family, but the movie's more interested in slathering on the obstacles for her to overcome that you're just left running through in your head what big world disaster she's going to have to cope with next. And the kindest thing modern audiences might have to say about the movie's attitude toward working women is that it's quaint since Roz is portrayed as some kind of hyper-ambitious crappy wife for daring to dream of working as a - gasp - secretary! Roz handles what she's given competently, but you'd have to put this pretty far down the list behind all those Bette Davis, Greer Garson, and Irene Dunne Bride of Frankenstein movies. It wasn't bad enough to turn my hair white, but I did feel it thin a bit.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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