Famed filmmaker/actor, John Cassavetes once said, “Maybe there really wasn't an America. Maybe it was only Frank Capra.” Perhaps, but I think Cassavetes’ quote could - and should - be expanded to encompass a few more pioneers from Hollywood’s golden age who helped to shape the global impressions of America at large; chiefly, director, George Stevens. When we think of America – the beautiful – we very often conjure Frank Capra to mind. Incongruously, the same distinction has thus far eluded George Stevens; odd, since Stevens, perhaps even more than Capra, was responsible for reevaluating the American ideal and its perceptions about itself – particularly in the 1950’s, with maturing thoughts to have transgressed on the other side of atypical ‘Capra-corn’.
George Stevens was very much interested in celebrating the triumph of the American ideal as well as the human spirit. The case holds particularly true for one of Stevens’ pre-war movies: his deliciously served up cause célèbre in jurisprudence, The Talk of The Town (1942), a seemingly featherweight comedy, centered on a trio of attractive misfits: emotionally pixilated schoolmarm, Nora Shelley (a sublime and enchanting, Jean Arthur), devil-may-care escaped convict, Leopold Dilg (a fascinating departure for the usually put together, Cary Grant) and stuffy academic, Michael Lightcap (the stoic and gentlemanly, Ronald Colman). Actually, the comedic machinations unraveling in Irwin Shaw/Sidney Buchman’s screenplay (based on Dale Van Every’s adaptation of Sidney Harmon’s story) are in service to a dire and deadly serious critique of American jurisprudence. At once, The Talk of the Town is an unapologetic appraisal of the spirit of the law, as well as its fundamental applications and flaws that can allow for its wrongful misdirection by corrupt external forces.
Our hero, Leopold Dilg, as example, is an old campaigner for the spirit of the law. As he puts it to Nora, “Well, it's a form of self-expression. Some people write books. Some people write music. I make speeches on street corners.” But Dilg harbors an unmitigated scorn for the machinery itself, justified, so it seems, in lieu of a battle about to be waged against such intolerance and hypocrisies after Dilg is accused of torching the mills belonging to local fat cat/industrialist, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle). The suspected arson is also responsible for the death of one of Holmes’ foremen, Clyde Bracken (Tom Tyler). Dilg is ripe for the framing. Ah, but is he guilty? The first six-minutes immediately following the main titles are a brisk jaunt in montage through this seemingly idyllic New England community, rocked by scandal and blindly interested in seeing Leopold Dilg hang for a crime he more than likely did not commit. George Stevens takes us on this Cook’s Tour of this fictional ‘every town’ in America – Lochester – is not without its secrets and lies; also, duplicity shared between big business and local government, herein represented by a corrupt, judge, Grunstadt (George Watts), who has already decided the case against Dilg without even first considering the evidence, and, the nervously complicit, Chief of Police (Don Beddoe), more interested in a speedy resolution that fits in neatly with Grunstadt’s assumptions, than uncovering the cold hard facts for himself.
The irony here is Michael Lightcap has come to Lochester for a recuperative vacation, far removed from the stresses of his teaching post at Harvard. Regrettably, rest and relaxation are not in the cards. Lightcap’s stay at Sweet Water, the rented cottage belonging to Nora Shelley and her mother (Emma Dunn) is further complicated by Nora’s harboring of a fugitive from justice in the attic; none other than Leopold Dilg who, wounded in his prison escape and presently on the lam, has assumed the post of Sweet Water’s groundskeeper to be near Lightcap and ply him with his own interpretations of the law in order to ease Lightcap from his rudimentary and clinical impressions. The law is clear. Alas, the circumstances in Dilg’s case are severely muddled. “I don't approve of…but I like people who think in terms of ideal conditions,” Dilg explains to Lightcap, “They're the dreamers, poets, tragic figures in this world, but interesting.” The Shaw/Buchman screenplay is intent on illustrating this near tragedy from both sides, enticingly coated in a refreshing shell of pure slapstick. Like a great seismic shifting of the earth, director Stevens builds his dramatic tempo from a joyous cacophony of comedic crescendos, diametrically opposed to the legitimate tensions being created by these otherwise serious subtexts emanating like tectonic plates; the rupture, occurring when the townsfolk, stirred to furor by Grunstadt’s grandstanding and a mountain of negative press, call for Dilg’s execution, storming the county courthouse to exact their brand of vigilante justice.
The supreme eloquence in Ronald Colman’s delivery of the following lines spares us the film’s sanctimonious morality, nonetheless potent and satisfying, as he declares with adamant conviction, “This is your law and your finest possession - it makes you free men in a free country. Why have you come here to destroy it? If you know what's good for you, take those weapons home and burn them! And then think... think of this country and of the law that makes it what it is. Think of a world crying for this very law and maybe you'll understand why you ought to guard it; why the law has to be the personal concern of every citizen…to uphold it for your neighbor as well as yourself. Violence against it is one mistake. Another mistake is for any man to look upon the law as just a set of principles. And just so much language printed on fine, heavy paper. Something he recites and then leans back and takes for granted: that justice is automatically being done. Both kinds of men are equally wrong. The law must be engraved in our hearts and practiced every minute to the letter and spirit. It can't even exist unless we're willing to go down into the dust and blood and fight a battle every day of our lives to preserve it…for our neighbor as well as ourselves!”
The Talk of the Town is an exuberant and charming farce with a hard-candied center. Too little has been written about the liquidity with which director, George Stevens manages to, mostly – if not completely – migrate from drama, to comedy, to romance, to screwball, juggling all of these various disparate elements with exceptional ease. For Cary Grant, The Talk of the Town proved a pleasurable reunion. He and Stevens had previously worked together on the boisterous adventure yarn, Gunga Din (1939). And Grant, by his very conflicted nature, is capable of giving us two sides to Leopold Dilg. The opening montage, documenting Dilg’s incarceration for the crime of arson, and, his escape from prison by strangling unconscious an unsuspecting guard, reveal a sinister Grant previously unseen in the movies. Fair enough, Grant gave us a fairly unscrupulous cockney con in 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, and, a brutally authoritarian butch boss in 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. Yet, in hindsight, these characterizations were immune to further scrutiny because of Grant’s highly polished public persona. By contrast, Grant’s debut in The Talk of the Town deliberately suggests he is, in fact, the bad guy of this piece; a notion, almost immediately dispelled when he succumbs to the pain of a twisted ankle, soaked through to the bone and collapsing in Nora Shelley’s living room.
The conversion Grant’s Leopold Dilg undergoes from this moment forward cannot be overstated; Grant, playing the uncompromising fop to Ronald Colman’s stalwart professor. Colman does, in fact, take much longer to sway Lightcap’s personal investment from clinical theorist to pragmatic applier of the principles of law. Some of The Talk of the Town’s most captivating vignettes are dedicated to each man getting to know the other on his own terms; Dilg, lending Lightcap an ounce of fortitude to step beyond the safety of those ivy-covered walls and Lightcap, reciprocating in kind by opening Dilg’s mind to the concept that even the most impassioned defense of the law must be filtered through the rubric and high-minded ethics, devoted to its legal process. Such dilemmas in debate, undeniably, drew George Stevens to make The Talk of the Town and are, in fact, moments that enrich and elevate the purpose of this otherwise seemingly straightforward screwball comedy. In some ways, though particularly in hindsight, The Talk of the Town may be regarded as George Stevens’ first serious work; Stevens, no longer content merely to take his cast from points ‘A’ to ‘B’.
The Talk of the Town is remarkably non-linear in this regard - especially in its second act, as our trio of stars settle into a sort of strained domesticity with the constant threat of Leopold’s discovery dangling over their heads, though only Leopold and Nora are aware of their predicament, as yet. One recalls with a smile the innocuous recovery of the morning paper from the stoop, its front page splashed with a tabloid headline and Leopold’s mug shot, forcing Nora to cut a swath from kitchen to the dinette and deliberately drop Lightcap’s double-yolk egg breakfast in the very spot where he might otherwise have discovered his gardener’s true identity. Or the instant when Lightcap, as yet unaware of Leopold’s existence – even as his alter ego, Joseph – is narrowly missed with a bang on the head from a boot falling out a second story window; Nora, pitching the errand footwear back into the attic, before pretending to a bewildered Lightcap, with arm still extended, to be suffering from acute tendonitis. These are joyously silly moments, to be sure, attesting to some of the visual gags George Stevens showed a mastery and proclivity for in earlier hits like the Astaire/Rogers musical, Swing Time (1936) and slap-happy screwball darling, Vivacious Lady (1938). Even more remarkable, they seem perfectly at home within The Talk of the Town’s more densely packed narrative.
While some movies are an obvious credit to the people working behind the camera, as well as those set before it, The Talk of the Town manages to make us forget about the invisible minions in the background. Frederick Hollander’s score is sparse, its main title reused at interpolating tempos also as the picture’s love theme. Ted Tetzlaff’s cinematography is first rate, yet never manages to draw attention to Lionel Banks’ sets. This is not to suggest either is out of place. On the contrary, each proves the perfect complement to this star-driven morality play. And George Stevens knows he has box office gold with this triage of merry-makers, despite the fact, none was Oscar-nominated in a movie otherwise to have earned no less than 7 nods for consideration, alas – with no wins. Kudos ought to have at least gone to Sidney Buchman and Irwin Shaw for their bristling bombast and expertly placed bon mots. Grant, Arthur, and Colman are three of the most expertly skilled thespians of their generation, and, their on-screen chemistry is superior to anything else, except the script.
Interestingly, Colman’s popularity at the box office had dipped at the time The Talk of the Town went before the cameras. The picture’s colossal smash put him right back on top. In the final analysis, The Talk of the Town is both magical and memorable. In an era when so many movies cannot even juggle a single premise, much less two or three, this movie effortlessly navigates through a myriad of genres and styles with a chameleon’s penchant to entertain us, whatever our tastes. Succinctly done and with great flourish and gusto. Bravo!
Sony seems to have all but forgotten about The Talk of the Town - a shame, since its precepts about the law and its inability to find the humanity in its cleverly designed intellectualism ring painfully true today. Wondering if anyone else here shares some of these beliefs and would wish for Sony to reconsider a remastered Blu-ray - perhaps, as part of a future Columbia Classics box set release?
George Stevens was very much interested in celebrating the triumph of the American ideal as well as the human spirit. The case holds particularly true for one of Stevens’ pre-war movies: his deliciously served up cause célèbre in jurisprudence, The Talk of The Town (1942), a seemingly featherweight comedy, centered on a trio of attractive misfits: emotionally pixilated schoolmarm, Nora Shelley (a sublime and enchanting, Jean Arthur), devil-may-care escaped convict, Leopold Dilg (a fascinating departure for the usually put together, Cary Grant) and stuffy academic, Michael Lightcap (the stoic and gentlemanly, Ronald Colman). Actually, the comedic machinations unraveling in Irwin Shaw/Sidney Buchman’s screenplay (based on Dale Van Every’s adaptation of Sidney Harmon’s story) are in service to a dire and deadly serious critique of American jurisprudence. At once, The Talk of the Town is an unapologetic appraisal of the spirit of the law, as well as its fundamental applications and flaws that can allow for its wrongful misdirection by corrupt external forces.
Our hero, Leopold Dilg, as example, is an old campaigner for the spirit of the law. As he puts it to Nora, “Well, it's a form of self-expression. Some people write books. Some people write music. I make speeches on street corners.” But Dilg harbors an unmitigated scorn for the machinery itself, justified, so it seems, in lieu of a battle about to be waged against such intolerance and hypocrisies after Dilg is accused of torching the mills belonging to local fat cat/industrialist, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle). The suspected arson is also responsible for the death of one of Holmes’ foremen, Clyde Bracken (Tom Tyler). Dilg is ripe for the framing. Ah, but is he guilty? The first six-minutes immediately following the main titles are a brisk jaunt in montage through this seemingly idyllic New England community, rocked by scandal and blindly interested in seeing Leopold Dilg hang for a crime he more than likely did not commit. George Stevens takes us on this Cook’s Tour of this fictional ‘every town’ in America – Lochester – is not without its secrets and lies; also, duplicity shared between big business and local government, herein represented by a corrupt, judge, Grunstadt (George Watts), who has already decided the case against Dilg without even first considering the evidence, and, the nervously complicit, Chief of Police (Don Beddoe), more interested in a speedy resolution that fits in neatly with Grunstadt’s assumptions, than uncovering the cold hard facts for himself.
The irony here is Michael Lightcap has come to Lochester for a recuperative vacation, far removed from the stresses of his teaching post at Harvard. Regrettably, rest and relaxation are not in the cards. Lightcap’s stay at Sweet Water, the rented cottage belonging to Nora Shelley and her mother (Emma Dunn) is further complicated by Nora’s harboring of a fugitive from justice in the attic; none other than Leopold Dilg who, wounded in his prison escape and presently on the lam, has assumed the post of Sweet Water’s groundskeeper to be near Lightcap and ply him with his own interpretations of the law in order to ease Lightcap from his rudimentary and clinical impressions. The law is clear. Alas, the circumstances in Dilg’s case are severely muddled. “I don't approve of…but I like people who think in terms of ideal conditions,” Dilg explains to Lightcap, “They're the dreamers, poets, tragic figures in this world, but interesting.” The Shaw/Buchman screenplay is intent on illustrating this near tragedy from both sides, enticingly coated in a refreshing shell of pure slapstick. Like a great seismic shifting of the earth, director Stevens builds his dramatic tempo from a joyous cacophony of comedic crescendos, diametrically opposed to the legitimate tensions being created by these otherwise serious subtexts emanating like tectonic plates; the rupture, occurring when the townsfolk, stirred to furor by Grunstadt’s grandstanding and a mountain of negative press, call for Dilg’s execution, storming the county courthouse to exact their brand of vigilante justice.
The supreme eloquence in Ronald Colman’s delivery of the following lines spares us the film’s sanctimonious morality, nonetheless potent and satisfying, as he declares with adamant conviction, “This is your law and your finest possession - it makes you free men in a free country. Why have you come here to destroy it? If you know what's good for you, take those weapons home and burn them! And then think... think of this country and of the law that makes it what it is. Think of a world crying for this very law and maybe you'll understand why you ought to guard it; why the law has to be the personal concern of every citizen…to uphold it for your neighbor as well as yourself. Violence against it is one mistake. Another mistake is for any man to look upon the law as just a set of principles. And just so much language printed on fine, heavy paper. Something he recites and then leans back and takes for granted: that justice is automatically being done. Both kinds of men are equally wrong. The law must be engraved in our hearts and practiced every minute to the letter and spirit. It can't even exist unless we're willing to go down into the dust and blood and fight a battle every day of our lives to preserve it…for our neighbor as well as ourselves!”
The Talk of the Town is an exuberant and charming farce with a hard-candied center. Too little has been written about the liquidity with which director, George Stevens manages to, mostly – if not completely – migrate from drama, to comedy, to romance, to screwball, juggling all of these various disparate elements with exceptional ease. For Cary Grant, The Talk of the Town proved a pleasurable reunion. He and Stevens had previously worked together on the boisterous adventure yarn, Gunga Din (1939). And Grant, by his very conflicted nature, is capable of giving us two sides to Leopold Dilg. The opening montage, documenting Dilg’s incarceration for the crime of arson, and, his escape from prison by strangling unconscious an unsuspecting guard, reveal a sinister Grant previously unseen in the movies. Fair enough, Grant gave us a fairly unscrupulous cockney con in 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, and, a brutally authoritarian butch boss in 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. Yet, in hindsight, these characterizations were immune to further scrutiny because of Grant’s highly polished public persona. By contrast, Grant’s debut in The Talk of the Town deliberately suggests he is, in fact, the bad guy of this piece; a notion, almost immediately dispelled when he succumbs to the pain of a twisted ankle, soaked through to the bone and collapsing in Nora Shelley’s living room.
The conversion Grant’s Leopold Dilg undergoes from this moment forward cannot be overstated; Grant, playing the uncompromising fop to Ronald Colman’s stalwart professor. Colman does, in fact, take much longer to sway Lightcap’s personal investment from clinical theorist to pragmatic applier of the principles of law. Some of The Talk of the Town’s most captivating vignettes are dedicated to each man getting to know the other on his own terms; Dilg, lending Lightcap an ounce of fortitude to step beyond the safety of those ivy-covered walls and Lightcap, reciprocating in kind by opening Dilg’s mind to the concept that even the most impassioned defense of the law must be filtered through the rubric and high-minded ethics, devoted to its legal process. Such dilemmas in debate, undeniably, drew George Stevens to make The Talk of the Town and are, in fact, moments that enrich and elevate the purpose of this otherwise seemingly straightforward screwball comedy. In some ways, though particularly in hindsight, The Talk of the Town may be regarded as George Stevens’ first serious work; Stevens, no longer content merely to take his cast from points ‘A’ to ‘B’.
The Talk of the Town is remarkably non-linear in this regard - especially in its second act, as our trio of stars settle into a sort of strained domesticity with the constant threat of Leopold’s discovery dangling over their heads, though only Leopold and Nora are aware of their predicament, as yet. One recalls with a smile the innocuous recovery of the morning paper from the stoop, its front page splashed with a tabloid headline and Leopold’s mug shot, forcing Nora to cut a swath from kitchen to the dinette and deliberately drop Lightcap’s double-yolk egg breakfast in the very spot where he might otherwise have discovered his gardener’s true identity. Or the instant when Lightcap, as yet unaware of Leopold’s existence – even as his alter ego, Joseph – is narrowly missed with a bang on the head from a boot falling out a second story window; Nora, pitching the errand footwear back into the attic, before pretending to a bewildered Lightcap, with arm still extended, to be suffering from acute tendonitis. These are joyously silly moments, to be sure, attesting to some of the visual gags George Stevens showed a mastery and proclivity for in earlier hits like the Astaire/Rogers musical, Swing Time (1936) and slap-happy screwball darling, Vivacious Lady (1938). Even more remarkable, they seem perfectly at home within The Talk of the Town’s more densely packed narrative.
While some movies are an obvious credit to the people working behind the camera, as well as those set before it, The Talk of the Town manages to make us forget about the invisible minions in the background. Frederick Hollander’s score is sparse, its main title reused at interpolating tempos also as the picture’s love theme. Ted Tetzlaff’s cinematography is first rate, yet never manages to draw attention to Lionel Banks’ sets. This is not to suggest either is out of place. On the contrary, each proves the perfect complement to this star-driven morality play. And George Stevens knows he has box office gold with this triage of merry-makers, despite the fact, none was Oscar-nominated in a movie otherwise to have earned no less than 7 nods for consideration, alas – with no wins. Kudos ought to have at least gone to Sidney Buchman and Irwin Shaw for their bristling bombast and expertly placed bon mots. Grant, Arthur, and Colman are three of the most expertly skilled thespians of their generation, and, their on-screen chemistry is superior to anything else, except the script.
Interestingly, Colman’s popularity at the box office had dipped at the time The Talk of the Town went before the cameras. The picture’s colossal smash put him right back on top. In the final analysis, The Talk of the Town is both magical and memorable. In an era when so many movies cannot even juggle a single premise, much less two or three, this movie effortlessly navigates through a myriad of genres and styles with a chameleon’s penchant to entertain us, whatever our tastes. Succinctly done and with great flourish and gusto. Bravo!
Sony seems to have all but forgotten about The Talk of the Town - a shame, since its precepts about the law and its inability to find the humanity in its cleverly designed intellectualism ring painfully true today. Wondering if anyone else here shares some of these beliefs and would wish for Sony to reconsider a remastered Blu-ray - perhaps, as part of a future Columbia Classics box set release?
