The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Sydney Greenstreet, Adolphe Menjou, Ava Gardner, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold, Aubrey Mather, Richard Gaines. Screenplay: Luther Davis, Edward Chodorov, George Wells, based on a novel by Frederic Wakeman. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: Lennie Hayton.

The Hucksters was made in the era depicted in Mad Men, when men who had served in World War II were returning to their civilian jobs. In the advertising business, that included men like Don Draper in the TV series and Victor Norman in the movie, men whose wartime experience had toughened them and given them a fresh angle on the business of selling to the postwar clientele. If Mad Men seems to us to have a more reliable point of view than The Hucksters on that business, it's partly because hindsight is keener than the contemporary view, but also because popular entertainment is less tight-assed now. Frederic Wakeman's novel was a bestseller in part because it was frank about the sex lives of its characters, which movies in the Production Code era couldn't be. So Gable's Victor Norman is turned into a more buttoned-up character than Jon Hamm's Don Draper, but censorship especially worked to a disadvantage for Deborah Kerr, in her first American film. Kerr is forced to be chaste and prim -- characteristics that would type her in the movies until 1953, when Fred Zinnemann finally allowed her to have a sex life in From Here to Eternity.  Kerr's character may agree to go away for a weekend with Vic, but only after she's assured that they will have separate rooms at opposite ends of the hotel. And when she discovers that they instead have adjoining rooms with a connecting door, she bolts. The effect on the movie is to sap any chemistry that MGM might have hoped Gable and Kerr would have. In contrast, Gable and Ava Gardner, as one of Vic's old girlfriends, strike fire immediately, which makes the ending of the movie, in which Gable's and Kerr's characters wind up together, feel phony. The Hucksters, coming a year after her breakthrough performance in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, helped make Gardner a star. Kerr had to muddle through in costume parts in movies like Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) before finally getting a chance to be sexy. There is some zippy dialogue in the movie, and the hits on the advertising business are often funny, but the only real reason to see The Hucksters today is to watch some skillful old character actors like Adolphe Menjou and especially Sydney Greenstreet do their thing. Greenstreet plays an imperious soap manufacturer sponsor with non-negotiable ideas about what his commercials should be, and likes to intimidate his advertising clients by doing things like hocking a loogie on the conference table to get their attention. If the film had stuck with the ad biz and not strayed off into tiresomely predictable romance, it might have been a classic, or at least a lot better.

Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952)

Egotism is accounted a sin, or at best a character flaw, but what would art, at least since the Renaissance, be without it? Imagine the history of motion pictures without the egotism of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Orson Welles, not to mention countless movie stars. So it comes as a bit of a shock to find David Thomson, in his essay on Singin' in the Rain in Have You Seen ...?, making reference to "[Gene] Kelly's rather frantic ego." I do know what he means: I've always found the "Broadway Melody/Broadway Rhythm" number overlong and overdone, suggesting Kelly's attempt at being regarded as "serious" dancer, especially in the pas de quatre with Cyd Charisse, her train, and a wind machine. And its ending, with the zoom-in-close of Kelly's face, does seem a bit de trop. Thomson also hints that producer Arthur Freed may have been indulging his ego by loading the film with his and Nacio Herb Brown's catalog of songs, instead of those of better songwriters. Freed, as the head of the legendary "Freed Unit" at MGM, had won a best picture Oscar for another Gene Kelly musical based on a songwriter's catalog, An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), which was wall-to-wall George Gershwin. And even though Singin' in the Rain is a better movie, it might have been nicer if it had songs by Harold Arlen or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. Porter at least gets plagiarized in Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number, the tune for which is virtually identical to that of "Be a Clown," which Porter wrote for the Freed-produced The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948). That said, the Freed-Brown songs are entirely appropriate to the era depicted: They date from such 1929 MGM musicals as The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont) and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner), exactly the ones parodied in Singin' in the Rain's montage of early movie musicals. My point is that egos are not enough to spoil the wonder that is Singin' in the Rain, widely regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals, and in my opinion just plain one of the great movies. Much credit goes to the expert comedy writing of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and to Harold Rosson's cinematography. Kelly and Stanley Donen wisely did what directors of movie musicals so often fail to do: rely on long takes and full-body shots during dance numbers. As for the performers, no one in the film, and that includes Kelly and O'Connor, ever reached this peak again. Debbie Reynolds was too often betrayed into perkiness, but she is human and appealing here. Jean Hagen stole scenes from everyone and received one of the movie's two Oscar nominations -- the other was to Lennie Hayton for scoring -- but her movie career stalled and she wound up doing TV guest appearances. As for egotism, it pains me to remember that Singin' in the Rain was not nominated for the best picture Oscar winner for 1952. The winner was The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by one of the great egotists, Cecil B. DeMille. Some egotists are geniuses; others are hacks.