Cass Timberlane

Lana Turner was one of the stars TCM honored back in August in their annual Summer Under the Stars programming feature. One of the movies that this gave me the chance to record, not having blogged about it before, was Cass Timberlane. Recently I finally got around to watching it so I could do a post on it here.

Although Cass could easily be a woman's name, in this case Cass Timblerand is played by Spencer Tracy. He's a judge in the medium-sized town of Grand Republic, MN, one of those cities that populate the midwestern America of Hollywood movies during the studio era. In the movie's opening scene, he's seen denying a motion for divorce, telling the two parties that marriage is sacred and all that jazz. It's pretty clear, especially since we know that this is based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis, that the good judge is going to turn out to fall afoul of that in some way.

But not just yet. At the beginning of the movie, Cass is a widow, having lost his wife young, and living alone in a big house with a maid and not much else. He's friends with the town's upper class, with his lawyer friends trying to hook him up with Chris Grau (Margaret Lindsay), who they think would be right for him. Among his friends is Boone Havock (Albert Dekker), the lawyer for the town's one big industrial firm, owned by Webb Wargate (John Litel). Another good friend is another lawyer, the bachelor Bradd Criley (Zachary Scott).

Another of the cases over which Cass presides is of a boarding house owner on the wrong side of town, who is suing the city because they didn't properly clear ice from the sidewalk, causing her to slip and injure herself. Among the witnesses is one of her tenants, Ginny Marshland (Lana Turner). She's a designer and sometimes artist who among other things draws a political cartoon-like picture of Judge Timberlane, which Bradd finds and brings to the judge's attention when Ginny misplaces her notepad.

Cass decides he's going to make things right with Ginny by walking over to her side of town, apologizing to her when he meets her. But he also gets roped into umpiring a pick-up baseball game, and then going to a restaurant with Ginny where she eats dinner. This even though Cass is supposed to be at a country club party for one of the upper class couples' anniversary.

If they find out about Cass and Ginny, it's going to cause a scandal. And sure enough, Cass and Ginny start seeing each other more often, to the point that they eventually say the hell with convention and get married. As with All that Heaven Allows a decade later, the town really starts gossiping, and making life a bit challenging for the Timberlanes.

It doesn't help that Ginny feels she's put herself into a gilded cage, and she'd like to see more of the world. Bradd could show her more of that world, and he's just enough of a wolf that everybody would expect him to put the moves on Ginny.

Meanwhile, the Wargate company is being sued by some of the shareholders for profiteering during "the war" (whether it's World War I or World War II isn't made clear; all of the cars and clothes scream 1947 when the movie was released, but the action takes place over a long enough time that it would have had to start while the war was still on, which doesn't seem to be the case). The Wargates, Havocks, and the rest of the upper class expect Judge Timberlane to keep granting the defendants a stay in the case, which he grants until he has an epiphany in New York.

In theory there's some promising material in Cass Timberlane, but it falls apart thanks to somebody deciding that what this material needs is a didactic, moralizing treatment. I'm not certain whether that somebody was Sinclair Lewis (I haven't read the book), or the suits at MGM. In any case, the slow deterioration of the Timberlane marriage veers into the ridiculous. Tracy does his best, and he's perfectly competent in a role that makes me think of Edward, My Son, but even he can't save the material. Lana Turner is nice to look at, and Zachary Scott has a role he could have played in his sleep, as if he walked off the set of Mildred Pierce one day and decided he'd start being Monty Beragon over at MGM the next.

Cass Timberlane is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.