The Great Dictator (1940)

USA, 125 minutes

Director / writer: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Music: Charles Chaplin, Meredith Wilson

Editors: Willard Nico, Harold Rice

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovitch

Getting back to this movie after decades, I was reminded of the old chestnut that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes” when a character named Epstein showed up. He’s Jewish and a powerful financier who must be turned to for assistance by the fascist and openly antisemitic regime of Tomainia, which is basically Germany in director and writer Charles Chaplin’s clonking sendup. Chaplin is Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey (Fuhrer) of Tomainia, which happens to be in an uneasy alliance with Bacteria (Italy). The Tomainian swastika is two X’s, called the double cross. You can tell Chaplin was not holding back here (though an editor or collaborator might have come in handy). For a 1940 Hollywood picture it’s unusually blunt about its points, which is not to say always inspired. Chaplin also plays a Jewish barber and veteran of World War I who lives in the ghetto of an unspecified Tomainian city (he probably couldn’t think of a Warsaw gag ... where are Mad magazine writers when you need them?). The Jewish barber must endure the problems you would expect.

The picture is bloated at over two hours, ham-handed to an infinite degree (did I mention Rome here is called Aroma?), and so self-righteous it verges on chest-pounding narcissism, which are reasons I haven’t been back to it in a long time. In retrospect, this is the beginning of the end for Chaplin. I hated to see it and all that followed—some, admittedly, with bright moments, but it was also the period when he ruined The Gold Rush by trying to add sound. Still, nevertheless, I could not deny that The Great Dictator hits different in 2026. That’s what made the details of a relatively background character named Epstein so eerily remarkable.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: George Cukor

Writers: Donald Ogden Stewart, Philip Barry, Waldo Salt

Photography: Joseph Ruttenberg

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Frank Sullivan

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, John Howard, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Mary Nash, Roland Young, John Halliday, Henry Daniell

I first saw The Philadelphia Story quite a long time ago, on early missions to collect all the various Hollywood classics of the late ‘30s and ‘40s. The first thing that struck me coming back to it again was what a phenomenal amount of star power it has, with not one not two but three major players: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart. Plus the great Hollywood director George Cukor (Little Women, Holiday, part of Gone With the Wind, Gaslight, Born Yesterday), a specialist in romantic comedy arguably at the peak of his powers. That’s the view from now anyway—interestingly, Hepburn at the time was considered box office poison for some reason, so when Grant demanded top billing in this one he got it. Hepburn had also flopped on Broadway a few years earlier, making it something of a low ebb for her career, though of course she is remembered now as a steady-glowing superstar.

In fact, The Philadelphia Story started life as a vehicle written for Hepburn by playwright Philip Barry. Talk about star-studded: in the Broadway production, Joseph Cotten had Cary Grant’s role and Van Heflin had Stewart’s. And it was a big hit, so I’m not sure what the Hollywood moguls were worried about. But I’m sure there’s a story. At any rate, the film version is bracingly modern for its times, acknowledging the reality of embittered marriages and divorce. On the other hand, it reverts more to the form of its times by making a joking matter out of routine domestic violence. It’s given as funny that C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) “socked” his then wife Tracy Lord (Hepburn) (no apparent relation to the porn star). This movie loves the word “sock.”

Pinocchio (1940)

USA, 88 minutes

Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen

Writers: Carlo Collodi, Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Bill Peet, Frank Tashlin

Music: Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Frank Churchill, Edward H. Plumb

Animators / editors: numerous

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Cliff Edwards, Evelyn Venable, Walter Catlett, Frankie Darro, Charles Judels, Mel Blanc, Walt Disney

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of Pinocchios have been showing up around here lately. There’s a Disney remake starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto and a long-in-the-making version by Guillermo del Toro, both of which came out just last year. Haven’t seen them yet. This 1940 fully animated Disney version is the first of a long line of movie and TV adaptations. It has felt like the original to me most of my life, but the wooden puppet—pine, if you please, source of his name—and wannabe boy actually goes back to a series of stories by the Italian author Carlo Collodi published in the 1880s. Among other things, Collodi’s Pinocchio is something of a reprobate and in fact ends up hanged from a tree by the Fox and the Cat. The scene as reported by Wikipedia is desolate: “[A wind] beat the poor puppet from side to side, making him swing violently, like the clatter of a bell ringing for a wedding.... His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.”

There’s nothing quite so bleak or explicit in this 1940 picture, where the Fox is known as J. Worthington Foulfellow, or Honest John, and the Cat is called Gideon and set up to be a version of Harpo Marx. The best cat in Pinocchio belongs to the craftsman Geppetto, who builds Pinocchio. Its name is Figaro and it is a feisty, charming tuxedo cat who almost steals the show for as long as we are in the Geppetto household. But I digress. Of course, no one is going to be hanged to finish a Disney cartoon (I think?) but, in 1940, when there was much less inclination to acknowledge sensitivities, you could still have Pleasure Island and the fate of the lost boys who are kidnapped there. It’s enough to give one pause for thinking about it too much, not least because it invokes the specter of missing children.

His Girl Friday (1940)

USA, 92 minutes

Director: Howard Hawks

Writers: Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Morrie Ryskind

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Sidney Cutner, Felix Mills

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Alma Kruger, Billy Gilbert, Abner Biberman

His Girl Friday is an older picture, like Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz, that remains worth seeing for everyone at least once. It pulls off a killer stunt in the impossible pace alone, and you also can't miss director Howard Hawks's evident ability to translate a party atmosphere on his shooting sets into his movies. Everyone appears to be having a ball. Hawks's version of the stage play The Front Page (which has been made into movies three or four times) is still unique as it sprints on a tempo that defies all speed limits, along with some interesting and innovative technique like overlapping dialogue. Admittedly His Girl Friday may look primitive to a lot of contemporary viewers, but it's still impressive and likely to surprise. Not even Billy Wilder could come close when he took it on in a 1974 version with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

The play's original story and dialogue carry it some way, doubtless the reason it has been made into a movie so many times. Cary Grant by himself puts on a clinic in screwball timing and fast talking and Rosalind Russell keeps up admirably. Grant is Walter Burns, a newspaper editor and political kingmaker in the cynical mode of the time (slower and possibly more corrupt versions would appear in Citizen Kane and Meet John Doe). Russell is Hildy Johnson, Burns's best reporter and ex-wife. Now she is about to remarry and move to Albany but Burns has one more last-minute assignment for her, which she can't resist. The blood of a newspaperman plainly courses her veins.

The Big Con (1940)

Although now it is as notable for being outdated as much as anything, David W. Maurer's study of the confidence racket remains as charming and engrossing as when it was published. As a linguistics professor by day, Maurer's fascination started with the lingo of con men. But the intricacies of the con job as such, as it existed during the Great Depression, are at least as fascinating, and down that road Maurer went, letting the rackets take priority over any study of the language. And why not? My copy, with introduction by Luc Sante, is classified as "crime / sociology." It's definitely an odd duck of a book. When I say it's outdated, that's merely in the mechanics of the operations as reported. Certainly the work of these "gentlemen" criminals goes on—consider the well-known African prince email scam. Back then (and perhaps now still), these tricksters were considered the upper crust in the underworld. What's outdated is the technology. One reliable ruse at that time, for example, the so-called "payoff," is built around race results that can be delayed long enough to get bets down in betting parlors on actual known winners. Or, more accurately, it's based on the believability of such a scenario. Maurer makes grifting seem more dignified and civilized than our last president did. He buys into the rationale that is common wisdom among con men, which is that you can't cheat an honest man. A lot of these cons specifically play on the existing avarice of the victim, or "mark" as he was known then (and still might be). I'm not so sure about that, but maybe that's because I'm not so sure my own avarice couldn't be excited into disaster, given the right circumstances. But Maurer is obviously comfortable with and even enjoys the company of these criminals, which enabled him to pump them for lots of interesting and entertaining information. The result is this tremendously readable book, a real page-turner in its way. The Big Con also served as a primary source for the movie The Sting, although Maurer had to take the producers to court to get the recognition. Note that Chapter 9, "The Con Man and His Lingo," is a glossary, because you're going to want to refer to it frequently.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Lucky's Grove" (1940)

This delightfully heavy-handed story by H. Russell Wakefield, a student of M.R. James and English folklore, is about a damned patch of land that sits in the center of a fallow growing field, left untouched. Best avoided, in fact. Our main character, Mr. Braxton, is a self-made man. He grew up on the estate as a servant and now owns it. As a boy he wandered into the grove from time to time, compelled somehow to worship a particular tree. And so he did, and does now that he has returned. The locals, meanwhile, are full of horrible tales about this so-called Lucky's Grove, tales that apparently do not come to the attention of Braxton's estate foreman, who takes the Christmas tree for that year's celebration from there. The oblivious foreman did notice that the roots of the tree were stained red as they came out of the ground. When Mr. Braxton doesn't like it, the foreman assures him he will replant it in the grove again after the holiday. Of course, bad things start to happen right away. The tree branches slap people around, for example, raising welts and wounds that become infected. The foreman grows deathly ill, no one knows why, and takes to his bed. The thermostat goes bonkers and it's always way too hot in the mansion. One of the boys makes a snowman that looks like a hideous reptilian monster. He can't say where he got the idea. All this is going on on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The extended Braxton family carries on the best they can, but things keep getting worse. I was hoping for a little more of the Algernon Blackwood lost-in-the-woods effects—Blackwood an influence with James on Wakefield—but alas no. This is one of the reasons why Wakefield comes after Blackwood and James in the scheme of things. In fact, a very good companion piece for this story is Blackwood's "Ancient Lights," also about a small blighted patch. Wakefield works skillfully within a classic style of English ghost story, from the stained roots of the violated tree to the various cruel payoffs to the existence itself of such a patch of land, respected by all who come near (except that foreman). It's reminiscent in a way of Puritan superstitions about the deep North American forests and the witches and so forth who lived there, but this is an isolated copse in a field everyone just knows to leave alone. I like the implication, never stressed, that Mr. Braxton's unlikely rise in the world has something to do with Lucky's Grove and worshiping that tree. I like the Christmas setting too, though the story veers hard away from the kind of more cozy Dickens-derived spooky stories associated with the time of year. The destruction of Braxton and his family and estate is quite complete. There'll be no plum pudding this year.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Fantasia (1940)

USA, 125 minutes
Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen
Writers: Joe Grant, Dick Huerner, Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid, Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg, William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John McLeish, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peet, Vernon Stallings, Campbell Grant, Arthur Heineman
Photography: James Wong Howe
Music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Amilcare Ponchielli, Modest Mussorgsky, Franz Schubert
Animators / editors: numerous
Cast: Deems Taylor, Leopold Stokowski

Is anyone still alive who saw this when it was new? It seems unlikely, as the release of "this new form of entertainment, Fantasia," is 80 years past now, a full lifetime. The pompous words are from the dweeby Deems Taylor, standing uncomfortably in formalwear he doesn't belong in, who is our host, master of ceremonies, and all-around Robert Osborne guy for the movie. He's really not wrong about "new form of entertainment," as the vast collaboration of Fantasia arguably produced the template, if not indeed the ultimate refinement and pinnacle, of what we'd later call music videos. Taylor, continuing, "Now, there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake."

As it happens, the third kind tends to be my favorite here and it seems to be what gets Taylor most amped up himself, as when, after the intermission (Fantasia is also old-fashioned in many small comforting ways), he carries on a conversation with "the soundtrack," represented by psychedelic symmetrical shapes and colors corresponding to musical instruments playing. In many ways it's the forerunner to computer screensavers and those hypnotic visualizers digital music players used to have.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Nunnally Johnson, John Steinbeck
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Alfred Newman
Editor: Robert L. Simpson
Cast: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Zeffie Tilbury, Dorris Bowdon, Eddie Quillan, Russell Simpson, O.Z. Whitehead, John Qualen, Ward Bond

The Grapes of Wrath was remarkably successful as both a novel and then a movie, one of those instant outsize media successes we like to produce in this country when we can. John Steinbeck's novel was published in 1939 and quickly became emblematic of the Dust Bowl environmental disaster of the Great Depression, accompanied by the arrival of big agribusiness capitalism and a massive migration West. It's a kind of small-bore version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, intersecting history right in the moment. It was banned and burned and yapped about on rightwing talk radio, but it also won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer, and it was the work most often mentioned when Steinbeck won his Nobel in 1962. Almost immediately upon publication Darryl F. Zanuck paid a princely sum for the movie rights and then this John Ford version came out the following year, ultimately winning Oscars for director Ford and for Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, with five more nominations to spark the evening, including Best Picture. It all happened in just a couple of years, during the high hysterical times as the Depression moderated and a world war loomed, 1939 to 1942, Hollywood's most characteristic years.

The book and movie now appear regularly on long-faced lists of important great things, and the truth is they both are great, or capable of it, though arguably dogged by some slight odor of sanctimony. I was surprised to find a contemporary Time review, by Whittaker Chambers of all people (via Wikipedia), which declared the movie "possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book"—surprised because if anything I see it the other way. The movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, as impressive as it is, is finally merely another case of a movie not being as good as the book. If it's only going to be one, read the book. This is for specific reasons, notably the treatment of the ending. Yet even falling short of this extraordinary novel can still mean the movie is pretty good and deserves its accolades too.

Darkness at Noon (1940)

Although it was taught in my high school and I've heard about it all my life, I'd never read Arthur Koestler's classic of dystopia literature until recently. "Dystopia" might be the wrong word. It's not set in the future and now it seems a little like a relic of the Cold War. In fact, I had it pegged in my mind as a '50s novel, but it was published when Hitler and Stalin were both in power and at war. In many ways it reads like a categorical rejection of communism but I don't think it's exactly that simple. It has more in common with Jim Jones than any of Joseph McCarthy's bogeys, a melancholy study of how ideals metastasize with power and grow mindless and deadly. The narrative arc follows the obtainment of a false confession from a once high-ranking Communist Party official, Rubashov. We hear about little physical torture, but the threat is pervasive. We see more the psychological side, with interview sessions conducted under painfully bright lights all through the day and night. Sleep deprivation is a key point though rarely discussed as such. There are various clumsy points that might be worth acknowledging—hard to believe, for example, that prisoners can communicate so easily and even eloquently with a tapping system through the walls. But what is profoundly believable is the ability of humans to turn true and sincere belief into unanticipated chambers of horror. As a species, are we ever going to figure it out? I despair sometimes. Rubashov may have more perspective on communist ideals as self-delusion, seeing it in his younger comrades as an older man, the generation which followed the Revolution. One of the ways Rubashov justifies his false confession to himself is that it is good for the Party. He knows he has committed his own sins of excess and zeal, and feels he is being punished for them indirectly. He still believes in all the Marxist concepts of history, logic, and inevitability. We know now that the USSR was doomed, even in 1940, to eventually implode into its own oblivion. But I don't think the news would cheer Rubashov. It might make him even more suicidal. It may be hard from the historical context to separate the anticommunist cant from the human tragedy but it's generally worth the effort.

In case it's not at the library.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

I only came to Carson McCullers's first novel about 10 years ago, but have read it several times now. Something about these mundane events in a small Georgia town in the 1930s is mesmerizing and keeps drawing me back. It's extraordinarily beautiful. McCullers started it when she was 20. She was 23 when it was published. Her prodigy is more one of instinct. Her aim is true. Her eye is gentle but telling, circling and unerringly tracking the interior lives of many different people: Mick Kelly, a teenaged girl who dreams of composing music. Jake Blount, an alcoholic Communist true believer. Dr. Copeland, an African American physician who seethes with racial resentment. Biff Brannon, the stoic proprietor of the New York Café, an all-night diner. And John Singer, the deaf-mute silver engraver at the town jewelry store who ties them all together. Each one is plunged into loneliness, hurting for something like soul connections. That's my term, not McCullers's. She is somehow operating on levels beyond language. That's what's most impressive about this novel, even more than how young she was when she wrote it. The most common praise I've seen is for how believable her African American characters are. Richard Wright, who published Native Son the same year, praised them as astonishing. But there are further hints of social tensions here even beyond race and class, flirting with the broader spectrum of sexuality. I sensed them in this novel before finding out more about McCullers's life, which included alcoholism and bisexuality in both she and her husband. The sexuality is mostly on the furthest sidelines of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, just a humming vibration in the background. As much as anything this novel is focused on poverty, the spiritual kind (see title) but definitely the material kind too. It's the Depression era in the South. It may go to the Jesus story and New Testament somewhat obviously, with a martyr and disciples and so on, though not to drive any point or message, let alone a religious one, but more because it is a comfortable frame, a way to understand—a common language. This is her gospel as a young woman, the gospel according to Carson McCullers. The real common language here is pain. Some terrible things happen in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and arguably the whole thing is downbeat or even depressing. Yet its view of human souls is so penetrating and astute, shot clear through, that it is almost breathtaking in places. Not everything rings fresh and true, but the things that do are often best of their kind. For example, the story of Bubber and Baby, their shared moment of fate and its aftermath. All five of the main characters are memorable and true, and so are their stories. It's amazing stuff—after Gatsby, my favorite American novel.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"A Spinster's Tale" (1940)

Read story by Peter Taylor online.

Peter Taylor's story commits the sin of a man writing first-person as a woman, in this case an adult woman who is remembering incidents from her early adolescence. The fact that she is a spinster—that is, enduring the tragedy of being unmarried—we know only from the title. It's not mentioned in the story. It seems to me, a man, that this is a story about a woman who is adversely affected by the boys and men she grew up around. Her brother (called "Brother"), her father, and her two uncles are all varying shades of drunkard. The formal focus of the story, in fact, is a town drunk named Speed, or "Mr. Speed," as our spinster narrator, Elizabeth, calls him. Her father and his friends call him "Old Speed." Elizabeth develops something of an obsession from her first sight of him: "I beheld Mr. Speed walking like a cripple with one foot on the curb and one in the street. And faintly I could hear him cursing the trees as he passed them, giving each a lick with his heavy walking cane." You get the sense that Mr. Speed represents something larger and more general for her. Perhaps he is the reason she never married—the reason she has decided all men are drunken beasts. She has to take the bad behavior from her family but in the conflict with Speed she is cold, harsh, and condemning. As an interpretation, that might be too easy. Taylor has said he was under some influence of Henry James at the time he wrote this story, so perhaps that accounts for the strange open-ended ambiguities. The title keeps suggesting to me that the story is some kind of explanation—not necessarily for her never marrying, but for some fundamental trait of her personality or her life. Men are brutes and to be treated that way. It seems simplistic, but there's an undeniable rage tucked away in the formally clean language. She ends it on a strange and compelling image: "... my hatred and fear of what [Mr. Speed] had stood for in my eyes has never left me. And ... not a week has passed but that he has been brought to my mind by one thing or another. It was only the other night that I dreamed I was a little girl on Church Street again ... and that there was a drunk horse in our yard."

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Native Son (1940)

Native Son is a remarkable American novel, with Richard Wright mixing up two oppositional elements. The first is a novel of social realism, by one more 20th-century writer influenced by John Dos Passos, reminiscent of, say, The Grapes of Wrath for fitting its narrative into the stream of great American stories. The context is Chicago, decades after the Civil War and the great postwar migration to the cities of the North. Wright expertly details the realities of life in Chicago, the de facto racism which Northerners have always specialized in, using the blunt force weapon of the police (and the National Guard as deemed necessary ... watch Donald Trump on this one) to intimidate, ghettoize, and segregate Negroes and whites. Within this nicely worked out context, however (including lucid observations on how "Communist" efforts toward change fit into the social and political milieu), Wright has inserted phantasms of horror: huge rats infesting tenement apartments, unimaginable poverty and violence, and finally a crime that goes ludicrously over the top. This is a great novel, a really great novel, with narrative currents like a flooding river. The first of its three long sections (named "Fear," "Flight," and "Fate") is best for the shock and awe impact Wright pulls off here, over a hundred pages uninterrupted even by line breaks, unfolding unbelievable and horrific events of a single day. Bigger Thomas, our hero—bearing one of the great names in American literature—commits the worst crime possible for a black man, the murder of a white woman. (The murder of his girlfriend Bessie is actually much more heinous, but Wright obviously knows black on black crime holds little interest for white majorities.) Not to go white on you with the comparison, but this is some clear forerunner to Eminem's "Kim," a fantasy adventure that travels deep into the interior of a brooding vengeful mind, where what we experience is shocking in a casual, almost light-hearted way even as it throws a spotlight on our worst taboos and sometimes seems to be laughing about them. Bigger Thomas is no thug, he is one of the most complicated characters in American literature, probing at the perceived limits of assimilation, racism, American justice, and the soul of a human being. Indeed, Thomas's crime is so terrible, so extreme, it is hard to have sympathy for him. But it's not hard to understand him. One of my great struggles with Native Son is how exactly to take Thomas. This novel cries to be read more than ever. Fresh and powerful and still amazing.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)