|
"Oh for the life of a farmer..." The overture suggests a homegrown Pather Panchali, a series of fresh perceptions at dawn, sizzling bacon for breakfast rouses the family pooch but the children require a smack to the rump to get out of bed. "This hurts me as much as it does him." "Yes, but not in the same place." Idle paterfamilias (James Kirkwood Sr.) and squabbling brood, Ma (Mae Marsh) holds it all together. Years pass and tragedy strikes, Pa has a bootlegging sideline and the wastrel son (James Dunn) takes the blame, Ma receives the news in a POV spiral of looming faces and prison bars. Widowed and displaced, she wanders from offspring to offspring and illustrates Griffith's question, What Shall We Do with Our Old? The passage from plenitude to bareness informs this exceptional Henry King pastorale—the home introduced teeming with life becomes a husk of phantom memories, the sign reading "Sold for taxes" is as stinging a sight as anything in The Grapes of Wrath. (King dollies in for a close-up of Marsh crying alone, then dollies back for the miracle of Dunn released and by her side.) Sustained camera movement works in tandem with a strikingly active soundscape: Morning routines scored to a crowing-barking-meowing menagerie, thoughts voiced as murmurs (cf. Hitchcock's Murder!), the industrial roar of a guilty conscience, the bustle of a New York cocktail party interrupted by the matriarch's arrival. Off to the poorhouse courtesy of her other son (Olin Howland), a self-serving religionist who's literally dragged across the street by his furious brother. "Didn't I always say you was an artist at heart?" The fairytale rescue at the close is answered by McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow. With Sally Eilers, Edward Crandall, Joan Peers, Eula Guy, Claire Maynard, and William Pawley. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |