Enchantment (Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, RKO, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Earlier in the evening I’d watched a couple of movies on Turner Classic Movies, including a 1948 film called Enchantment that, though it wasn’t Gay-themed, did touch on some of the same career-vs.-love and responsibilities-vs.-love issues as The Christmas Setup. It was based on a 1945 novel called A Fugue in Time in Britain and Take Three Tenses in the U.S. The author was Rumer Godden, a woman born in Sussex (though from the name I’d previously assumed she was Welsh) who like a lot of other female authors of the 19th and 20th centuries published under a name that didn’t give away her true gender (her full name was Margaret Rumer Godden and her older sister and occasional collaborator wrote under the name Jon Godden; also I’d assumed the last name was pronounced “GOD-den” until the late TCM host Robert Osborne said “GOAD-den,” and since Osborne actually knew her I’m assuming he was right.). I’d first heard of her when TCM showed Black Narcissus, a 1947 film based on her 1939 novel of life in a Roman Catholic convent in the Himalayas and the young prince (Sabu) the British convent girls are there to educate (the star is Deborah Kerr, anticipating her role in the film The King and I as a governess to a royal family in Asia by nine years). It was produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and it’s a gorgeous film visually (all of it was shot inside a studio, with painted backdrops and process screens, even though much of it takes place outdoors in a mountainous country) but dramatically rather silly and oddly sited in the Powell-Pressburger oeuvre between two masterpieces, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).

In the wake of back-to-back hits with The Best Years of Our Lives and The Bishop’s Wife, producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to A Fugue in Time despite its daring (for the late 1940’s) non-linear structure. There’s an opening and closing narration by a house in London that when we first see it is in a still habitable but partially wrecked state, courtesy of a German bombing raid during World War II. Among the people still inhabiting it during the war but before the raid are General Sir Roland Dane (David Niven in so much white hair and age makeup I didn’t recognize him at first), who gets a houseguest during the war: an American servicewoman stationed in London named Grizel (Evelyn Keyes) who turns out to be his grand-niece, though given that two generations, not just one, have passed between this film’s two (not three!) tenses one would have thought great-grand-niece would have been more likely. (By coincidence David Niven had a sister named Grizel.) She was told by her late mother to look up the house in London and reach out to its resident, and the film snaps back and forth between the 1940’s and the 1890’s, when Sir Roland was a young man living in the same house and about to be shipped off to fight in the British war in Afghanistan. (Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of empires” because it defeated Alexander the Great in the ancient era, the British in the 1890’s, the Russians in the 1980’s and the U.S. in our longest-running war that began after the 9/11 attacks and is still going on -- President Trump wanted to end it but the next President, Joe Biden, is likely to keep it going.)

While Roland and his sister Selina were still children (as which they’re played by Peter Miles and Sherlee Collier) their father took in an orphan named Lark Ingoldsby (Gigi Perreau as a child, Goldwyn star Teresa Wright as an adult) after her parents were killed in a bridge accident. Rollo develops a crush on Lark while Selina -- played as an adult by Jayne Meadows in an acidulous performance that’s by far the best acting in the film; who knew that nice Mrs. Steve Allen had such a brilliant bitch role on her resume? -- can’t stand her from the get-go. Rollo ultimately proposes to Lark -- as does his brother Pelham (Philip Friend) and an Italian count Pelham introduces her to, the Marchese Del Laudi (“Marquis of Praise” -- really?) -- but Selina sabotages Rollo’s chances by pulling strings to get him an army promotion that will include five years’ service in Afghanistan in a posting at which he won’t be allowed to bring his wife. So Lark ultimately marries the Marchese and moves with him to Italy despite Rollo’s warning -- “They eat larks for breakfast in Italy,” a line of such demented stupidity it’s a testament to David Niven’s professionalism as an actor that he was able to get it out of his mouth without laughing his head off. (Then again, maybe he did laugh his head off and it might have taken director Irvng Reis a large number of takes to get one where Niven didn’t.) Rollo serves out his time in Afghanistan, rises through the ranks of the officer corps and ultimately becomes a general -- though he retired and therefore isn’t taking an active role in World War II -- but he’s never forgotten Lark, nor apparently did he ever marry or have kids himself.

This 1890’s story is intercut with a modern plot line in which Grizel Dane falls in love with Pax Masterson (Farley Granger), a Canadian officer who’s stationed in London during World War II -- we know he’s Canadian because his uniform has a little patch reading “CANADA” on the arm near the shoulder -- and it’s yet another of these amorphous roles Granger got stuck with during his years under contract with Goldwyn in which he’s supposed to be a romantic hero but he’s just too diffident to be believable. (His three best films -- Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train -- were for directors who managed to harness that diffidence in the service of portraying morally ambiguous characters.) It also doesn’t help that Granger is saddled with one of those thin “roo” moustaches that usually marked an actor as a no-good seducer or rotter (though Ronald Colman wore one throughout his career and it didn’t have that effect on him). Not surprisingly, the idea of the two interlocking plots is that the Granger and Keyes characters are about to make the same mistake the Niven and Wright characters did 50 years earlier -- to let the war come between them (Pax actually proposes marriage to Grizel, but she puts him off with the usual it’s-too-soon-we-barely-know-each-other line -- a far cry from the way Judy Garland and Granger’s future Strangers on a Train co-star Robert Walker handled a similar situation in Vincente Minnelli’s marvelous The Clock) and ultimately break them up -- and their plot line culminates during a German bombing raid on London in which Grizel chases Pax through the streets as the bombs are falling, after a few harrowing escapes they run into each other, and it’s Roland who’s killed when a bomb lands on the house (ya remember the house?) and partially destroys it -- though the house, which introduced the film in its ruined state, assures us in a spoken epilogue by narrator William Johnstone that it will be rebuilt and presumably continue to serve future generations.

Enchantment was the last film on which the great cinematographer Gregg Toland served as director of photography before his death at only 44 -- though it didn’t offer him much of a showcase because most of it takes place inside That House and it’s only during that climax that Toland gets to achieve the brilliant, spectacular images for which he was known. Director Henry Koster., who’d worked with Toland on Goldwyn’s immediately previous production The Bishop’s Wife, told Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton that Toland’s nickname was “Little Grief” -- “he called himself that,” Koster said -- and said he was always asking directors for permission to do extra takes, particularly on close-ups. Toland’s best directors, William Wyler and Orson Welles, had the imagination and power to make the most of Toland’s gifts; here, saddled with director Irving Reis (who had done excellent work in RKO’s Saint and Falcon “B” detective series but seemed overwhelmed by a major production), Toland had little chance to do much -- and the scenes around the house’s fireplace, with its big mantel, just recall how much more Welles and Toland got out of a similar set in Citizen Kane. Enchantment is the sort of O.K. movie that could have been really good with a stronger director, a stronger cast (as it is Jayne Meadows as the villainess out-acts the rest of the actors) and a more sensitive screenwriter than John Patrick, who here (as in some of his later credits, notably Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing) writes lines of such stultifying banality you wonder if his previous employer was a greeting card company. It was a box-office failure on initial release, apparently largely because the double time structure and the constant switching back and forth between generations confused audience (just as the multiple-narrator structure of Citizen Kane had); it would be interesting to imagine a modern-day remake now that non-linear films with multiple time structures are almost a commonplace!