by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was
one I had recorded recently off TCM as part of a run of “B” movies but one that
proved unexpectedly interesting: Ever in My Heart, a 1933 Warner Bros. vehicle for Barbara
Stanwyck with surprisingly sensitive and atmospheric direction by the usually
hacky Archie Mayo and a marvelous script by Bertram Millhauser and Beulah Marie
Dix. (Millhauser is the writer Sherlock Holmes buffs love to hate — he wrote
most of the Universal Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce and was
largely responsible for the campy treatment of Bruce’s Dr. Watson and the
anti-canonical overplotting of the later films in the series — but he’s in
excellent form here.) The story opens in 1909 (note that date!) in Archerville,
a smallish town dominated by the Archer family — we get an opening shot of a
war memorial listing the Archervillians who gave their lives in the service of
the U.S. and most of the people listed are named Archer — and we meet Mary
Archer (Barbara Stanwyck) along with her grandmother (Laura Hope Crews), her
brother Sam (Frank Albertson) and quite a few Archer relatives who all live in
the big Archer mansion. They’re anxiously awaiting the return of Mary’s second
cousin, Jeff Archer (Ralph Bellamy), whom Mary dated and was planning to marry
before he went off for several years to live and study in Germany. Jeff indeed
arrives, but he brings with him a German friend, Hugo Wilbrandt (Otto Kruger,
surprisingly good-looking and restrained in his acting style, and fully
credible as a romantic lead instead of the villain he usually played later).
Mary and Hugo instantly fall in love with each other — he courts her by playing
a German song on the Archers’ family piano and singing it (in a quite credible
though strictly amateur voice), and teaches her the words (which give the film
its title) — and she marries Hugo instead of Jeff, much to her family’s
consternation. For the next five years things seem to go swimmingly for the
Wilbrandts — they have a son, Tommy (Ronnie Crosby), and get a dachshund dog;
they also settle in the college town of Rossmore and Hugo gets a job as a
college professor and becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen — until World War I
breaks out. Even before the U.S. formally enters the war, a wave of anti-German
propaganda sweeps the American newspapers and the Wilbrandts find themselves
ostracized. Hugo is fired from their professorship, their son Tommy dies, and
in an especially cruel plot twist a gang of the local kids beats up the family
dog because it’s a German breed, and Hugo has to take out a gun and shoot the
poor animal to put it out of its misery. When Mary asks why her husband didn’t
report this to the police, Hugo says that not only wouldn’t they believe him,
but as a German carrying a gun he’d probably have been arrested himself. After
the U.S.S. Lusitania is sunk Mary finds herself rejected even by her own family — her
brother angrily tells her his best friend was killed on the Lusitania — and though Mary arranges for them to move
to Archerville where her family will arrange a job for him, Hugo angrily
rejects the condition attached that he change his name to something
Anglo-sounding.
Instead, Hugo leaves Mary and leaves behind a letter which ends
with the statement that he’s going to go to Europe and “fight for my
country.” Jeff, Mary’s second cousin and the person she was expected to marry
all along, volunteers for the Army, and Mary herself signs up for the WAC’s or
whatever it was called in World War I, arranging to be stationed in the same
camp as he, where she runs the canteen. Two older women come to be volunteers
and, convinced by the hysterical propaganda that if the Germans capture them
they’ll suffer the “fate worse than death,” they bring along a gun and two
poison pills just in case. Mary relieves them of these items because the
regulations are that women volunteers are not supposed to carry anything
lethal. Then Mary learns from Jeff that there’s a spy in the American ranks
who’s already found out details of upcoming troop movements and, if he’s not
caught, will relay this information to the Germans. Mary spots Hugo in a U.S.
uniform in the ranks and is torn between still loving him and deducing that
he’s the German spy. She arranges for them to spend one last night together —
and, this being a so-called “pre-Code” movie, there’s no doubt that they
actually have sex — and that night, as he waits for dawn when he’s supposed to
go to the German lines and give his report, instead of getting out the
confiscated gun and shooting him with it (which is what both Charles and I were
expecting), she gets out the poison pills, puts one in each wine glass as she
pours for both of them, and commits joint murder-suicide in an amazingly
powerful ending that no doubt consciously evokes Romeo and Juliet — only instead of two feuding families, Hugo
and Mary have been separated and ultimately forced to die by two feuding countries.
Ever in My Heart is a quite remarkable movie — and not just
because Barbara Stanwyck, who I have become convinced over the years is the
greatest film actor of either (or any) gender and any era, is the star; and not
just because she is superb in this film, understating scenes just about anyone
else at the time would have used as excuses to chew the scenery and at the same
time coming through when she needs to for the genuinely big moments. Its
conflicts between love and family, love and social position, and love and
country, ring true even today — indeed, one could readily imagine a modern-day remake in which the
heroine’s husband is an Iraqi-American, they marry in the mid-1990’s and 9/11
serves the plot function of the Lusitania sinking, as the ostracism, vicious social
prejudice and insane government discrimination against Arab-American and
Muslim-American men (remember the so-called “special registration” program, instituted
just three months after 9/11, when all documented male U.S. immigrants from a list of 31
countries, all but one of which — North Korea — were either Arab or majority
Muslim, were forced to turn themselves in for special government scrutiny, indicating
that though it didn’t turn into a prelude to internment the mentality that had led to the internment of
German-Americans in World War I and Japanese-Americans in World War II was
alive and well) slowly radicalizes him and leads him to go to Iraq to fight for
the Resistance.
Within the framework of a standard-issue tearjerker Ever in
My Heart makes some
quite stinging social comments about prejudice and the way war heightens the
fear of the “Other,” whoever the “enemy” de jour happens to be; also about scapegoating and
how easily otherwise decent people succumb to it and break up family
connections and long-standing friendships because the person they’ve lived
alongside of, broken bread with and even shared a bed with is now part of an
“enemy” they’ve been told to fear and hate. It’s a story premise so powerful
that even people like Bertram Millhauser and Archie Mayo, who usually savored
every opportunity the material they were working with gave them for
over-the-top melodrama, restrained their usual (bad) instincts and created a
film that moves precisely because it’s subtle — indeed, one suspects Millhauser
picked the murder-suicide by poison ending instead of having Mary shoot Hugo
precisely because it was more subtle and genuinely tragic than the more
melodramatic and more superficially “exciting” ending of having the good girl
shoot the bad guy. As it stands, we leave this film feeling for two people literally destroyed by circumstances beyond their
control, facing their fates with a kind of awestruck resignation rare in the
movies then and even rarer now (indeed, it reminded me of the similarly intense
joint suicide of the characters at the end of William Dieterle’s 1928 German
silent Sex in Chains). Ever in My Heart is a film that really deserves to be better known, and Stanwyck’s
performance is so luminous I suspect (as I have with other movies in which
Archie Mayo directed her) Mayo copied Frank Capra’s trick of working with
Stanwyck: dispensing with master shots and shooting the all-important star close-ups
of her first, thereby
capturing her performance of each scene when it was at its freshest and most
intense.
