I WAS A FIREMAN (Humphrey Jennings, 1942)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Released in 1943 in a shortened version titled Fires Were Started, I Was a Fireman is a documentary reconstruction; actual firemen play firemen like themselves battling and quelling an enormous fire, the result of German aerial bombing of London during the Blitz. At Y substation, Precinct 14, men arrive from home and civilian jobs; the film will span 24 hours, dawn to dawn, siren alert to all-clear. These homefront warriors prepare for battle and do nighttime battle modestly, uncomplainingly, untouched by the bombast of a Hitler—or a Churchill. The film stays with the men, except for contextualizing snippets showing staff who are also in the system. No Luftwaffe plane is ever shown.
     Detailed as to individual characters and firefighting preparations and procedure, this film by Humphrey Jennings shows British citizens united in labor and by a common cause: the war effort. Blending dramatic enactment and stock footage, the firefighting scenes are the most brilliant and thrilling of their kind.
     But the film is also poignantly ironical. It opens on a frieze of ancient soldiers. Script introduces a backward glance—winter/spring 1940-1941. A new member of the squad, Barrett, who works in advertising, must be brought into the fold. Banter amongst the men, for the most part genial, occasionally lights (and as quickly exits) an edgier note pertaining to class division. War brings these men together in both senses, but war reconciles their differences only in its own moment. Robert Browning: “. . . the good minute goes.” Success: the warship moves out at dawn. Its immediate destination is combat; its ultimate destination, the past, leaving Britain to her future. How much at home will remain resolved after the war?
     I Was a Fireman is a compounded epic, expressing at once the aspirations and the anxieties of a people.

SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (Preston Sturges, 1941)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Hey, am I laughing?
     John L. Sullivan, heavyweight champion from Boston, met his match, decades after his demise, in another John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea, wonderful), the successful Hollywood musical-comedy director in Sullivan’s Travels whose masquerade as a hobo, intended to bring authenticity to his planned foray into socially committed cinema (O Brother, Where Are Thou?), reverses the boxer’s ascension from poverty to celebrity. Our John L. ends up in a brutal prison while the nation thinks him dead. (His butler warned him this would happen!) That’s life in socioeconomically topsy-turvy America.
     Following his glorious romantic comedy The Lady Eve (1941), this time writer-director Preston Sturges gave romance a back seat, allowing it in at all only because “there is always sex in a picture,” and dedicated Sullivan’s Travels to clowns and buffoons—those who make us laugh. In turn, his Swiftian road comedy makes us laugh aplenty—until, that is, Sullivan’s suffering becomes all too real. Sullivan’s middle initial, we discover, stands for Lloyd, not Lawrence—a witty reference to Lloyds of London: as rich as this man is, his firsthand study of American injustice makes him uninsurable!
     After his ordeal and resurrection, Sullivan decides against making a film about the beseiged underclass in favor of another hilarious trifle; the poor need to laugh more than anyone, he reasons. This lame conclusion—in truth, what the poor really need is more systemic justice so that they have less need for antidotal laughter—matters little, because the weight of the film documents Sullivan’s descent into America’s underbelly, where a tramp is mowed down on the tracks after robbing his play-acting surrogate. Critic Andrew Sarris nails the Social Darwinian metaphor: the derelict “is trapped in a metal jungle of switch rails, and is unable to avoid an oncoming train.”

POWER AND THE LAND (Joris Ivens, 1940)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The bread we eat and the milk we drink depend on Bill and Hazel Parkinson . . . and their farm and how they’re making out.
     Produced by the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Power and the Land opens with a long shot of rural America: a great expanse of sky beneath which trees and a house appear tiny. Birds fly through. Brilliant Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens holds the shot long enough so we take in the pertinent fact: No power lines interrupt this vast, open space. Why? Voiceover commentary—this is, otherwise, almost entirely a silent film—explains, “Power companies want a profit,” and this they can make in cities but not in the country, where returns cannot overcome the cost to them for equipment and service. “The farms are left in the dark—[in 1940,] three out of four farms are left in the dark in this big, inventive country. Seems wrong somehow.”
     In 1935, the REA was set up to remedy this situation by offering low-interest loans to cooperatives of farmers, who then collectively own the means for generating power they themselves have bought and installed. An Ohioan family whom the film chronicles, the Parkinsons, become members of the Belmont Electric Cooperative. First, the film shows the daily hardships that the want of electricity imposes. A passage shows farmers in the area harvesting corn together; this spirit of cooperation at work leads to the formation of their electric cooperative, to make work easier. The film then catalogs numerous ways in which electricity makes life easier for Bill and Hazel Parkinson and their children.
     Hearteningly, Power and the Land thus finds a space in American life (already inhabited by the U.S. postal service) amenable to socialist ideas.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Having just made the heavenly Ninotchka (1939), highlighted by one of the greatest comedy performances in cinema, Greta Garbo’s, Ernst Lubitsch now made a charming, funny, warm, delicate and, surprisingly, deeply moving romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner.
     The setting is Matuschek’s, a bourgeois gift shop in Budapest in the early 1930s. Two of the employees, Klara Novak and Alfred Kralik, constantly bicker. What Kralik doesn’t know is that he is in love with Klara. They are anonymous pen-pals. Will the two come together in one another’s arms or forever conduct their romance through the post office?
     The title sets the universal tone of the piece. It also distances the time of its activities from the time when the film was made and released. The world that Lubitsch so lovingly details is just out of reach—“around the corner.” The agent of change in Europe has been Adolf Hitler. In the guise of light romantic comedy, Lubitsch’s Shop is his lament for the Europe that he remembers, the Europe that has vanished. A Berliner, Lubitsch also was Jewish, and this deepens his lament. The tenderness with which he gazes at the interconnected lives at Matuschek’s is an index of the keen sense of loss he feels. They are a kind of family. This film is unique in Lubitsch’s canon; it is emotionally full.
     Actors are indispensable to Lubitsch. His star, sherry-voiced Margaret Sullavan, is wonderful as Klara, hilarious, poignant; James Stewart is good as Kralik; and the European-born Jewish actors in the supporting cast, Joseph Schildkraut, Frank Morgan and Felix Bressart, are excellent.
     Along with Lubitsch, we all end up missing Matuschek’s. And we miss his glowing film, until we pop it back in the machine and it breaks our hearts all over again.

THE GREAT DICTATOR (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Achingly funny, The Great Dictator finds Charles Chaplin belatedly letting into a film of his more than just a trickle of sound—and now, not to skewer a pompous politician (as in City Lights, 1930) or to ridicule the intrusiveness of sound in cinema (as with the nonsense song in Modern Times, 1936), but to excoriate Adenoid Hynkel’s—Adolf Hitler’s—messianic rants. At least on film Hitler doesn’t stand a chance.
     Chaplin directs from his own script, and his double role here—as Tomania’s anti-Semitic dictator who rules under the sign of the Double Cross, and, in the Ghetto, a polite, humane Jewish barber, a tad shell-shocked from his First World War experience (more or less, the Charlie who is familiar to us)—results in a split performance of sheer brilliance. There are any number of high points: the hilarious discrepancy between Hynkel’s angry, vicious speeches in gibberish-“German” and their official translations into mild, conciliatory English; exposing megalomania, Hynkel’s private ballet with a balloon globe of the world that he hopes to conquer, the ball bouncing off his head, arms, hip and buttocks; mistaken for Hynkel, the barber giving a speech that discloses his own loving heart rather than Hynkel’s foul hatred. The last yields to an image of the barber’s beloved Hannah (Paulette Goddard, irresistible), now in a concentration camp, perhaps telepathically hearing his words and looking up at the sky: a deeply moving finale.
     Chaplin, the conscience of American cinema, could not fully imagine Nazi Germany’s brutality or evil; the concentration camp here is a detention camp, not a death camp. But who knows what it cost the world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wedded to a policy of neutrality, kept Chaplin’s film from being made for two years?