So Ends Our Night

TCM's daytime lineup for tomorrow is a bunch of movies starring Margaret Sullavan. One of them is a movie that was new to me when I first saw it on the TCM schedule a few weeks back: So Ends Our Night. I recorded it then because it sounded interesting, and since it's on the schedule for tomorrow at 5:45 PM, I decided to sit down and watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

Sullavan isn't the star here; that honor goes to Fredric March although the movie is somewhat more of an ensemble cast. March plays Josef Steiner, a dissident in Nazi Germany who's been forced to flee the country, leaving behind a wife Marie (Frances Dee in a tiny role), and leaving behind his passport. This means that Steiner is a refugee, and like many of the other refugees from Nazi Germany, unable to obtain work or legal permission to stay in whatever country he's fled to.

Steiner isn't the only one in this predicament; there are lots of Jews like Ludwig Kern (Glenn Ford in an early role) who at the start of the movie are in detention for having been picked up as illegal aliens. Sometimes they can get temporary work permits; sometimes they work under the table; but eventually they're found out and picked up by the police, being placed in detention until they can be deported into another country for the process to be repeated all over again. Nobody wanted them as refugees, in part because they were all recovering from the depression and had trouble creating enough work for the people who were born citizens of their countries.

It's around the end of 1937, a few months before the Anschluss in which Nazi Germany absorbed Austria, and Kern and Steiner have both been thrown out of Czechoslovakia into Austria. Steiner, only being a dissident, has a slightly easier time getting a false passport. Kern meets chemistry student Ruth Holland (that's Margaret Sullavan), who like Kern is Jewish and has fled Germany, studying chemistry where and when she can under a professor who himself is a fellow refugee.

Ludwig and Ruth are eventually found out and forced to leave Austria, this time heading for Switzerland, where they're able to hide for some time, although they're trying to make it to France since rumor has it that it's easier to get work permits there than in other European countries. (Obviously they wouldn't have known that the Nazis were going to overrun France in two years' time.) They do get to France, only to find out that it's not that much easier in France than anywhere else they've been. Steiner also makes it to France, which is where he gets a letter informing him that his wife is terminally ill back in Germany.

So Ends Our Night is another of those movies with an interesting premise. I mentioned quite a few years ago how Hollywood was for a long time unwilling to take on the issue of Nazi Germany's human rights problems, since Germany was still a big market for them. There was also the issue that a lot of Americans were still weary of the Great War and didn't want to get involved in another European war. Indeed, in the second half of 1941, Congress started hearings on the subject of those Hollywood movies that did dare to call out the Nazis, although of course those hearings would go by the wayside once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Most of the other movies that did deal with Nazi Germany either had westerners getting caught up in the country, or Nazi spies in America. Even The Mortal Storm didn't mention Jews.

So Ends Our Night is more unflinching, although it's in some ways unrelentingly grim, in that we get it after the second or third time the characters are forced back into hiding. The ending also seems unrealistically upbeat. But the main characters all give good performances, and as a look at how Hollywood tried to be daring before actually going to war with Germany, it's a movie that's absolutely worth a watch.

One note, however, and that's that the print TCM showed a few weeks back wasn't in the best of shape, being slightly wavy, almost as though whatever source material had been used for the transfer wasn't quite flat. It's not jumpy, but the scenes do have a sort of uncomfortable sway to them.

The Silver Cord

I mentioned in this morning's post on Ingrid Bergman that there are a couple of movies coming up in the Thursday evening into Friday morning lineup on TCM that I wanted to blog about, so one of them would get a post today and the other one tomorrow. The first of the movies is The Silver Cord, which will be on overnight between Thursday and Friday (Dec. 3) at 3:30 PM (which is early Friday everywhere in the contiguous 48 states).

Christina (Irene Dunne) is a biology student studying under a prestigious researcher in Heidelberg. Just as she thinks she might have made an interesting discovery, who should walk into the room but David Phelps (Joel McCrea)? David is an architect who was in Europe for reasons not quite mentioned but aren't really important because the movie is about to go back to America anyway. David is also Christina's husband. He has a job offer with a prestigious architect in New York and wants to head back to America as a result. Christina, thankfully, had an offer from a research institute in New York that she may still be able to take up, so they'll both be able to work in New York and live happily ever after.

Not so fast, of course. David says to Christina that he'd like to introduce her to the rest of his family, now headed by his mother (Laura Hope Crews) since Dad died many years ago. It's a natural thing to do, but since they leave for America just a few minutes into the movie, you know that the visit is not going to go without a hitch. Sure enough, Ma Phelps seems stunned that Christina is actually a scientist -- why, women just didn't do such things back in her day! They were good mothers to their children and produced a generation of responsible adults.

Not that all of Mrs. Phelps' chlidren are responsible adults. David is, but there might be a question about his kid brother Robert (Eric Linden). Robert has fallen in love with a young woman, Hester (Frances Dee), and Mom thinks Hester isn't quite right for Robert. Worse, she fears that Robert and Hester might move away, leaving her all alone, and that's something she can't countenance. So she works on getting Robert to see the "error" of his ways and dumping poor Hester.

She also goes to work on David, since she doesn't want him to live in New York, especially if he's only goin gto be working his way up from the relative bottom. The family has a nice plot of land that could be developed as new housing, something which would both enable David to live nearby, and allow him to start a lot closer to the top of the architecture business. Of course, David and Christina would have to give up their dreams, but Mrs. Phelps doesn't care about those, only how she can keep her sons close to her.

If David and Robert have been raised by their mother so long and inculcated into this warped view of what a mother's love is to the point they can't see through it, Christina certainly isn't. She gets fairly quickly what's going on, and definitely takes Hester's side over the way Robert and especially Ma Phelps treat her. But it also means that there's going to be a lot of conflict between Christina and David before we get to the inevitable climax: who's it going to be, her or me?

The Silver Cord was based on a 1926 stage play, which explains why so much of the action is kept to a few rooms of the house, and also why a big housing development could be a thing in a movie that was made at the height of the Depression. In any case, all of the cast give very good performances, and while the script sometimes goes over the top by today's standards, that's not the actors' fault. One mild plot hole for me was thinking that the boat David and Christina took back to America would dock at New York, letting them set up house there before going to see Mom (the exact location of the Phelps manor is not mentioned); this would give David and Christina no good reason to stay with Mom. Also unanswered is why Mom let David go over to Europe alone in the first place.

But these are minor quibbles for what is a pretty darn interesting movie, and one that you should definitely watch.

Torch Song in reverse

I noticed that Torch Song is on the TCM schedule, tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM. Not too long ago, I watched a different movie that reminded me of Torch Song. That one is called Night Song and, not having blogged about it before, now would be a good time to do so.

Merle Oberon plays Cathy Mallory, an unmarried socialite living in San Francisco with her aunt, Miss Willey (Ethel Barrymore) and who is a patron of the arts. She and some of her friends go to the symphony, and after that they go to a little hole-in-the-wall bar off a side street that has a jazz combo playing. The combo has a pianist, Dan Evans (Dana Andrews), and Cathy thinks he's pretty good.

Cathy goes over to the piano to chat up Dan, but he reveals that he's blind, and rather snottily bitter about it too, spurning any advances because after all, who's really going to love a blind guy? They're just going to pity him. Dan's best friend Chick (Hoagy Carmichael) would like to see Dan get better, and go back to working on that concerto that he was composing before he went blind, but who knows if that's going to happen?

So Cathy comes up with a daft idea. Perhaps Chick could arrange for Dan to be somewhere that Cathy could bump into him, like at the beach. Only this time, Cathy is going to pretend to be blind and not well-to-do, so that Dan won't think this new woman he's just met is taking pity on him. Now, of course, the obvious question is what's going to happen when Dan finds out that Cathy is in fact fully sighted. I'd think he'd hate her for lying to him and treating him as the butt of some sort of sick joke.

At any rate, Dan doesn't figure out that this is rich and sighted Cathy Mallory, and becomes friends with the woman he thinks is blind, her aunt in tow because she supposedly needs a sighted companion, too. Cathy hears the concerto and thinks it's good and that Dan should keep working on it. She also learns that this is one of those forms of blindness that might be curable, but it's going to need $5,000 (a fairly substantial sum back in the late 1940s) and a trip east for the operation to do so.

Ah, but Cathy has a solution for that. She has the money to set up a contest to commission a new concerto, with a grand prize of... $5,000! Oh, and Cathy most definitely isn't in any way going to influence the judging to make certain that Dan's concerto wins, no sirree.

So of course we know that Dan is going to win the contest, and the prize also includes the great pianist Artur Rubinstein (a real concert pianist back in the day, playing himself) is going to perform the concerto... in New York in a few months' time, those few months being more than enough time for Dan to go to New York too and get that operation. Of course, once Dan regains his sight, he's not so sure he wants to see the "blind" Cathy any more since he doesn't want her to think he's pitying her. "Sighted" Cathy comes to New York....

Oh boy is the plot to Night Song ridiculous. The acting is good enough, but dammit if all those plot holes about the characters' motivation don't stay in the front of my mind throughout the movie. Fans of classical music will probably enjoy the music, although of course it really pops up at the end so you have to sit through a good 80 minutes or so before you get to it.

Night Song was originally released by RKO, so unsurprisingly it has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.