We've All Had Our Socks Tossed Around
Come and Get It (1936)
directed by Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson, and William Wyler
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Come and Get It includes this great exchange, between Edward Arnold (as a hard-changing titan of the Wisconsin timber industry) and Walter Brennan ("Swan Bostrom," the titan's Swedish pal):
"Wonder what she's doing in a place like this."
"What's the matter with this place?"
"She" is Frances Farmer, famous for two roles in this movie - Swan's wife and daughter - and for her personal life, full of difficulties. But plenty of people with sad stories don't leave enigmas like the character of Lotta Morgan behind. There's no one I've seen quite like her in movies. She winds up with Swan because Arnold's Barney Glasgow is too ambitious a businessman to follow his heart. Swan is kind but old.
That's the narrative, at least, but the many mysteries of Come and Get It drift at the periphery of so much melodrama. The first half is best, with pulp and lumber on cabin walls and in the drinks at the saloon. Richard Rosson's second-unit logging sequences inevitably bring Twin Peaks to mind, and the pretty barmaid with a strange cadence and private past pulls the dark woods and wilderness close around her.
Shocks follow - death, a jump in time, that eerie resurrection - but, good as Arnold is, he is only adequate as the remorseful multi-millionaire that Glasgow becomes, characteristically opposed to reforestation and taxes. Men like that aren't sympathetic, not at all. I realized later that the movie I enjoyed so much for the first half hour (maybe longer?) was a setup for a less profound pronouncement on regret. But Hawks, briefly, is full of surprises: two leading men that don't fit the mold and someone like a ghost or a hearth fire between them.
directed by Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson, and William Wyler
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Come and Get It includes this great exchange, between Edward Arnold (as a hard-changing titan of the Wisconsin timber industry) and Walter Brennan ("Swan Bostrom," the titan's Swedish pal):
"Wonder what she's doing in a place like this."
"What's the matter with this place?"
"She" is Frances Farmer, famous for two roles in this movie - Swan's wife and daughter - and for her personal life, full of difficulties. But plenty of people with sad stories don't leave enigmas like the character of Lotta Morgan behind. There's no one I've seen quite like her in movies. She winds up with Swan because Arnold's Barney Glasgow is too ambitious a businessman to follow his heart. Swan is kind but old.
That's the narrative, at least, but the many mysteries of Come and Get It drift at the periphery of so much melodrama. The first half is best, with pulp and lumber on cabin walls and in the drinks at the saloon. Richard Rosson's second-unit logging sequences inevitably bring Twin Peaks to mind, and the pretty barmaid with a strange cadence and private past pulls the dark woods and wilderness close around her.
Shocks follow - death, a jump in time, that eerie resurrection - but, good as Arnold is, he is only adequate as the remorseful multi-millionaire that Glasgow becomes, characteristically opposed to reforestation and taxes. Men like that aren't sympathetic, not at all. I realized later that the movie I enjoyed so much for the first half hour (maybe longer?) was a setup for a less profound pronouncement on regret. But Hawks, briefly, is full of surprises: two leading men that don't fit the mold and someone like a ghost or a hearth fire between them.
posted by NPK at 11:43 AM
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