The Crack of Dawn

Volume #379

6/27/23

Newsletter #379

The Crack of Dawn

I’ll finally finish the topic of my man, George Seaton.  As I’ve mentioned several times, Seaton wrote and directed two smash hit films: Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) and Airport (1970).  In the intervening 23 years, Mr. Seaton wrote and directed many other pictures.  I’ve already discussed An Apartment for Peggy (1948), and Anything Can Happen (1952), but the George Seaton film that I saw the earliest — I don’t even know, nine, ten, eleven — that left the deepest impression on me was, Mister 880 (1950).  The film starred the young, wonderful, ridiculously charismatic, Burt Lancaster in one of his earliest roles; the underappreciated, Dorothy McGuire; and of course, George Seaton’s ringer, Edmund Gwenn (who had won an Oscar three years earlier playing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street).  The story of Mister 880 (oddly, not written by Seaton, but instead by the biggest big-shot, Oscar-winning, screenwriter, Robert Riskin, who was Frank Capra’s favorite screenwriter, and had won his Oscar for Capra’s It Happened One Night [1934]) is about an extremely kind, though desperately poor, old man who lives in a NYC apartment building next door to the lovely Dorothy McGuire (please keep in mind that I haven’t seen this film in at least 30 years).  The old man is always quick to help out anyone with a dollar if they need it, even though he himself has so little.  Dorothy McGuire meets the tall, young, strapping Burt Lancaster, who turns out to be a Treasury Agent investigating the longest-running open case of counterfeiting in the history of the Treasury Department.  These three characters are really the whole little black & white movie.  If indeed anyone actually watches any of these obscure films that I recommend, and you go to the trouble of watching Mister 880, I won’t spoil it for you, but it all ties up very nicely.

Once again, as with many of George Seaton’s films, it’s about sincere human emotion.  However, in the Meta-modern world in which we live, sincerity is no longer cool.  Sincerity is now only for suckers and schmucks.  I’d surmise that the reason is that honest sincerity – not the pretense of it – is such a fine, fragile, delicate emotion that 99 times out of 100 it’s mishandled and becomes what we Jews call schmaltz, which is Yiddish for chicken fat.  Schmaltz is both difficult to watch and uncomfortable to sit through.

The first example that jumped into my mind is needlessly provocative, but I’ll use it anyway: Brokeback Mountain (2005), which won an Oscar for its script.  Two country boys, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, stricken with loneliness from herding sheep all alone, fall in love.  But since they’re both boys, it’s a forbidden love.  And now these two young actors are afflicted with dialogue like, “I can’t quit you.”  Well, it may very well have won an Oscar, but it was pure schmaltz.  The “breakthrough” was that they were applying artery-clogging chicken fat to a homosexual relationship. Impressive.

A better example, and probably even more provocative in its own silly way, is damn near every line spoken between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic (1997).  Girls may be able to suspend their sense of disbelief and love it, but boys know it’s horseshit.  The love story is pure, unadulterated, skimmed-off-the-top-of-the-soup, schmaltz, used as an excuse to get to the ship sinking.

Whereas in Titanic (1953), with Barbra Stanwyck and Clifton Webb (which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay), it is schmaltz-free.  Therefore, when it gets to its big emotional climax at the end, it breaks your heart.  As an aside, the film begins with American, Barbra Stanwyck, leaving her rich, snotty, British husband – the perfectly cast, Clifton Webb – and taking their young son home with her.  In a stroke of luck (aided by money), she is able to book tickets for the Atlantic crossing back to America aboard the RMS Titanic.  Clifton Webb is too rich and high-class to act like he gives a damn, and says dismissively, “Fine, take the boy and go back to your cow-town, Ann Arbor, Michigan.”  I was offended and gasped.

As with Mister 880, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling either story.  And I assure you that both films tie up beautifully.  To me, when a story can do that – tie up all its threads – I experience total satisfaction.  In fact, in the case of the 1953 Titanic, I cried, which hasn’t happened very often.  From the first scene of the movie, they know exactly where they’re going emotionally, and why.  Just so that we understand one another – and of all people, Teddy Roosevelt said it, “Comparison is the death of joy” – but I think (but don’t know) that when James Cameron sat down to write his cleverly entitled script, Titanic, I’m reasonably sure he was thinking about what he could do with these intriguing new things called “digital effects.”  And, oh yeah, there would be a love story, too.  As well as a villain running around shooting at them with a pistol – as though the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic on its maiden voyage needed dramatic help from James Cameron.  That’s laughable. I didn’t cry at the end of that movie, although I readily admit it was cool when the guy fell off the end of the ship and hit the enormous propeller on his way down with a metallic tong sound. 

The difference between these two films, both entitled Titanic, is the world.  The older film is excellent on numerous levels: literary, performance, direction, and production. The second version is a bloated, overlong, sluggish, dramatically amateurish, piece of junk that was the world’s biggest moneymaker for 12 years until James Cameron’s even stupider film, Avatar (2009), made even more money.  Weeeee!  Money, money, money! We blew it, man.

In between those two films is actually my favorite Titanic film, A Night to Remember (1958).  Based on a book by Walter Lord that we read in school in sixth grade, and adapted by the great screenwriter, Eric Ambler, it’s the straight-forward, clear, this-is-how-it-really-happened, version.  It avoids schmaltz at all turns and is almost exactly two hours long (123 minutes) and doesn’t have a wasted minute.  By the time Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio get to their final scene it’s already been over three hours, and the half-assed schmaltz they must now spew at each other is what you get in the post-Irony, Meta-modern world.  Were I Buster Keaton and allowed to enter the movie, I would stomp on Leo’s fingers causing him to drown and die sooner.  Whoops.  Spoiler alert.  Oh, fuck, I ruined it.  Now, if you haven’t seen it, there’s no reason to see James Cameron’s Titanic.  I gave the plot away.

I’ve run out of facetiousness.  Have a wonderful day.