Movie Quote of the Day (‘Heaven Can Wait,’ on What the Sight of Gene Tierney Could Do to a Guy)

Martha [played by Gene Tierney]: “If you don't change your attitude, I shall have to complain to your employer.”

Henry Van Cleve [played by Don Ameche]: “I'm not employed here. I'm not a book salesman. I took one look at you and followed you into the store. If you'd walked into a restaurant, I would have become a waiter. If you'd walked into a burning building, I would have become a fireman. If you'd walked into an elevator, I would have stopped it between two floors and we'd have spent the rest of our lives there. Please forgive me but you can't walk out of my life like that.”— Heaven Can Wait (1943), screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, based on the play Birthday by Leslie Bush-Fekete, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Design for Living,’ in Which a Playwright Defines His Job)

Gilda Farrell [played by Miriam Hopkins]: “Are you a painter too?”

Tom Chambers [played by Fredric March]: “Oh, no, not me. I'm a playwright. I rewrite unproduced plays. I’m very good at that kind, actually.”— Design for Living (1933), screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noël Coward, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Heaven Can Wait,’ on Meeting the Love of One’s Life)

Martha [played by Gene Tierney]: “If you don't change your attitude, I shall have to complain to your employer.” 

Henry Van Cleve [played by Don Ameche]: “I'm not employed here. I'm not a book salesman. I took one look at you and followed you into the store. If you'd walked into a restaurant, I would have become a waiter. If you'd walked into a burning building, I would have become a fireman. If you'd walked into an elevator, I would have stopped it between two floors and we'd have spent the rest of our lives there. Please forgive me but you can't walk out of my life like that.”— Heaven Can Wait (1943), screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, based on a play by Leslie Bush-Fekete, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

No, the 1943 Heaven Can Wait had nothing to do with the 1978 Warren Beatty comedy. (That derived from another vintage 1940s comedy, Here Comes Mr. Jordan.) But it has a charm all its own, courtesy of the same screenwriter-director team that worked on Trouble in Paradise (1932) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Samson Raphaelson and Ernst Lubitsch.

For years after he went on to forge his own independent career, writer-director Billy Wilder paid tribute to his mentor by keeping a sign on his office wall reading, ““How would Lubitsch do it?” The so-called “Lubitsch touch” is as evident in the above bit of dialogue as in the classic he made with Wilder, Ninotchka. Sure, it involved a Continental, worldly attitude toward sexuality (he was a German émigré), but it was all delivered with charm, sophistication, often ruefulness, and never crudely or obviously.

Don Ameche’s Henry Van Cleve (originally written, I was surprised to learn, with Fredric March in mind) is the kind of man with a love for the feminine form who, while he might have shocked some in his own time (his youth was during the Gay Nineties), was too fundamentally good-hearted not to be forgiven over time—including by his beautiful, long-suffering wife Martha. (Even the debonair "His Excellency"--i.e., Satan-- doesn't think Henry's application to the nether region is quite up to snuff.)

Heaven Can Wait was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. It wasn’t its fault that it ran into a juggernaut known as Casablanca. It’s well worth catching on DVD or Turner Classic Movies, the next time it shows up. Co-stars Ameche and Tierney might have been contract players taken on with regret by Lubitsch at the behest of Twentieth-Century Fox, but the director extracted some of the best work they ever produced on film.

See why my favorite film blogger, “Self-Styled Siren,” calls this “the wisest commentary on marital happiness that she has ever seen.”

 

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Shop Around the Corner,’ With Feuding Clerks at Xmas)

Alfred Kralik [played by James Stewart]: “There might be a lot we don't know about each other. You know, people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.”

Klara Novak (Miss Novak) [played by Margaret Sullavan]: “Well, I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work.”— The Shop Around the Corner (1940), screenplay by Samson Raphaelson and an uncredited Ben Hecht, based on a play by Miklos Laszlo, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

You might know The Shop Around the Corner for its adaptations—musicals onscreen (In the Good Old Summertime, with Judy Garland and Van Johnson) and onstage (She Loves Me), as well as a snarky, not-as-fun Nora Ephron film (You’ve Got Mail). But the original is worth seeing for its own wonderful sake.

The plot is simple enough: Two clerks at a Budapest gift shop can barely stand one another, not realizing that they're falling in love through the mail as each other's anonymous pen pal.

If you are getting tired of watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time, this film—also starring James Stewart—is a wonderful holiday replacement. It’s contains a terrific screenplay, subtle direction by the incomparable Lubitsch, great humor and poignancy in equal doses, plenty of opportunities for a terrific ensemble cast (including “The Wizard of Oz” himself, Frank Morgan) to shine, and one of the great MGM pairs, Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

Stewart appeared in this classic the same year as the movie that won him his only competitive Oscar, The Philadelphia Story. In many ways, his chief clerk here is a trickier role than his flashier award-winning one as cynical reporter Macaulay Connor. Kralik, a loyal, longstanding employee, is honest to a fault—and, at least on the surface, to Miss Novak, all too prosaic. Stewart’s pained restraint is remarkable as he responds to her insult above as a blend “of poetry and meanness.”

As for Sullavan—I considered her all-too-short career (and all-too-tragic life) in this prior post. Stewart had many other female co-stars throughout his long career—some more beautiful, some with more fire—but none as unique as Sullavan. She may never have been better onscreen as Miss Novak—vivacious, intelligent, romantic, and, in her need for a job on the eve of the holidays, more than a bit desperate. Without her, Kralik might be fated to live his life as an all-too-stolid bachelor, but Miss Novak may be in even more need of the stability he provides.

Central to Sullavan’s marvelous performance is what silent film actress-turned-film commentator Louise Brooks pointed to: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."