Quote of the Day (Garry Wills, on Students’ Declining Knowledge of History)

“Every professor says that what surprises them is how little the new students remember about anything more than two or three years ago. It was very revealing the first time I realized that a student had no memory of the civil-rights movement or Vietnam. They live intensely in the now, and there’s practically no ‘then’ that they have a workable knowledge of.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian-journalist Garry Wills interviewed by Cal Fussman for “The Men of Our Time,” Esquire, October 2015

(Photo of Garry Wills by Lauren Gerson, taken on March 10, 2015 at the LBJ Presidential Library, where he was joining the Friends of the LBJ Library to discuss his book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis.)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Moonlight and ‘The Sounds of Music’)

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” — Lorenzo from English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1 (1596-98)

Flashback, September 1951: ‘Streetcar’ Brings to Hollywood ‘The Method'—and Censorship Issues

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t the first Hollywood adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play when it was released in the U.S. 75 years ago this month, but it left the most lasting impact on the film industry. Unlike The Glass Menagerie the year before, it was perfectly cast and adeptly directed by Elia Kazan (as he had done on Broadway).

Moreover, with Marlon Brando repeating his sensational stage turn as brutish Stanley Kowalski only a few weeks after Montgomery Clift’s acclaimed performance in A Place in the Sun, it demonstrated the full power of the style that Kazan had been advancing at New York’s Actors Studio: “The Method,” with performers encouraged to use their memories of past emotional experiences to create a character.

Critics and audiences applauded how Kazan had translated the sweaty sensuality and tragic lyricism of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning drama from the stage to the screen.

But the source material’s frank depiction of an offscreen gay character, nymphomania, and sexual assault, among other issues, put Warner Brothers Studio on a collision course with the movie industry’s censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Much of this latter story is told in a long section of Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), a volume of revealing letters, telegrams and memos edited by film scholar Rudy Behlmer. As much of a landmark as the film is considered in terms of its overall excellence (including, by Alex North, the first notable jazz score in a major Hollywood film, and Harry Stradling’s vivid cinematography), the pitched battle over its content represented a milestone of its own.

PCA executive Geoffrey Shurlock may have summed it up best: “For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment. Before then we had considered Anna Karenina a big deal. Streetcar broke the barrier.”

Kazan and Williams presented a united front against the PCA. They grudgingly softened the treatment of the promiscuity of faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the intimate relationship between her dead husband and an older male friend. But they drew the line at the PCA’s suggestion that she could imagine her rape by Stanley because of her mental fragility.

Williams protested to PCA head Joseph Breen, vehemently and eloquently, that if the sexual assault were treated in this fashion, “the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He vowed that if he and Kazan had “our backs against the wall…none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

Kazan and Williams won that round, though making one compromise (spoiler alert): Stanley would be punished by having wife Stella leave him. They were able to prevail again when Breen seemed ready to wobble about the rape scene.

What neither the director nor playwright could imagine was that the Catholic Legion of Decency would interfere just as the film was ready for release. Its threat to issue a “Condemned” rating—guaranteed box-office poison—led Warner Brothers to cancel the movie’s Radio City booking and call editor David Weisbart in, without Kazan’s knowledge, to make further excisions.

The studio refused to accede to Kazan’s plea that the film be released in two versions clearly labeled as being edited or not. In all, he estimated, the 12 cuts amounted to roughly five minutes—footage not seen until Warner Brothers restored it for the director’s version in 1993. (The deleted scenes are in this YouTube clip.)

Vivien Leigh, the only member of the central quartet at the heart of the drama who was not carried over from Broadway (producers thought she would provide a greater box-office boost than Jessica Tandy), was, unlike Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, classically trained rather than schooled in The Method.

But she had played Blanche in a London production directed by husband Laurence Olivier, and, as author and screenwriter Logan Kelly discussed in this 2023 post on the Collider blog, she threw herself so strongly into the role onscreen that it exacerbated the bipolar disorder that was already afflicting her.

Though Brando drew favorable notices with his film debut the prior year, The Men, it was Streetcar that stunned longtime Hollywood professionals. 

His transformation into Blanche’s loutish but sensual antagonist was revelatory, in the same manner described by Truman Capote watching him in rehearsal for Broadway: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated.”

Ironically, despite the effect that Brando’s performance had on cinema acting, he did not join fellow nominated cast members Leigh, Hunter, and Malden in the winner’s circle. Best Actor that year went to industry veteran Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Brando would have to wait another three years to collect his, for the equally electrifying On the Waterfront.

Song Lyric of the Day (Stevie Wonder, on ‘Precautionary Measures’ We Still Need)

“We all must take precautionary measures
If love and peace you treasure.”—American Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder, “Love's In Need Of Love Today,” from his Songs in the Key of Life LP (1976)
 
A half century ago, Stevie Wonder was such a force to be reckoned with in pop music that, when Paul Simon won the Best Album Grammy for 1975, he thanked the Motown artist for clearing a path for him to win the award by not releasing a record that year.
 
Wonder made up for that absence from the record stores with his much-anticipated, much-delayed double album (plus a single, four-song 33-rpm disc), Songs in the Key of Life, released 50 years ago this week.
 
The LP went to #1 on the charts that first week, and continued the momentum thereafter with five singles: "I Wish," "Sir Duke," "Another Star," "As," and “Isn’t She Lovely?” The following February, Wonder collected four Grammys: Album of the Year, Best Male Pop Performer, Best Male Rhythm and Blues Performer, and Best Producer.
 
Why did this become my favorite collection of Wonder songs? Was it because there was so much in this collection? Because it was his first album that I could buy from my own work earnings? Or because, as a perfectionist, he had produced 21 songs (including several where he handled all the instruments himself!) in a dazzling variety of styles (including the Latin-infused soul and salsa track “Another Star”)?
 
So many of these tunes address love in various forms: with a current mate, a past love, or a newborn daughter (“Isn’t She Lovely?”). But the one with which he started the album, “Love's In Need Of Love Today,” addressed a different kind: what the ancients called agape or caritas—selfless, universal love that makes life possible at all for human beings.
 
Sociopolitical commentary had informed a couple of Wonder songs before: "Living for the City," about a black youth’s struggle for survival in the inner city and the justice system, and, more pointedly, “You Haven't Done Nothin,'" a scathing critique of President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal.
 
But “Love's In Need Of Love Today” took a broader view, beyond politicians, of the ills besetting America in the year of its bicentennial. His warning was stark, aimed at the heart of each of his listeners: “The force of evil plans to make you its possession/And it will if we let it destroy everybody.”
 
The passage of 50 years. The divisions in America continue to distress Wonder, as seen two years ago when, on the brink of the 2024 Presidential election, he appealed for civic understanding with “Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart."
 
That race and the resulting daily chaos at home and abroad has only underscored the moral urgency of Wonder’s message from 50 years ago. Too bad more citizens haven’t heeded the plea for “precautionary measures” urged by Wonder and others who covered this song over the years (notably Joan Osborne, on her 2002 CD How Sweet It Is).

Joke of the Day (Edwin Newman, on a Method for Dealing with Rainy Weather)

“These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”—TV newscaster and language maven Edwin Newman (1919-2010), on using newspapers to absorb moisture from wet shoes, quoted by Margalit Fox, “Edwin Newman, 91, Newsman, Defender of English and Partisan of Puns, Is Dead,” The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2010

I loved this pun anyway, but using it in this space felt mandatory today, considering that this is the third straight day of prolonged precipitation up by me in the Northeast.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Therese of Lisieux, on Deeds and Love)

“Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant, count as nothing.” —French Carmelite nun—and “Doctor of the Church”—St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), The Thoughts of St. Therese of the Child Jesus (1915)

This Thursday, the feast day of “The Little Flower”—a saint of unsurpassed humility and devotion to God—will be celebrated.

Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on How ‘Truth is Within Ourselves’)

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise    
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.     
There is an inmost centre in us all,    
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,  
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,            
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.         
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh          
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,          
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,               
Than in effecting entry for a light      
Supposed to be without.”—English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889), Paracelsus (1835)