Fear and Consolation
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Fear and Consolation Peter Canisius and the Spirituality of Dying and Death +,/0$503$%(/ 635,1* STUDIES is a product of the Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality. This Seminar is composed of a group of Jesuits appointed from their provinces in the SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION, EFFECTIVE JANUARY 2013 United States. The Seminar studies topics pertaining to the spiritual doctrine and prac- U.S. JESUITS: tice of Jesuits, especially American Jesuits, and gathers current scholarly An annual subscription is provided by provinces of the U.S. Assistancy for studies pertaining to the history and ministries of Jesuits throughout the U.S. Jesuits living in the United States and U.S Jesuits who are still members world. It then disseminates the results through this journal. of a U.S. province but living outside the United States. The issues treated may be common also to Jesuits of other regions, oth- ALL OTHER SUBSCRIPTIONS: er priests, religious, and laity. 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PABEL STUDIES IN THE SPIRITUALITY OF JESUITS 45/1 • SPRING 2013 the first word . The name Leo McCarey might not ring a bell. Here’s a hint: The Bells of St. Mary’s. He was one of the most prolific and successful motion picture direc- tors of the 1930s and 1940s. Today the standard film histories scarcely mention him, or if they do, it may be only in connection with the Marx Brothers’ out- rageous comedy Duck Soup (1933), a film he tried to direct while each of the brothers orchestrated his own personalized brand of chaos. A little research project last summer led to several interesting discoveries about the man. He was raised in an aggressively Catholic family, and remained a Catholic until his death in 1969. He won several Academy Awards, for directing, writing, best picture, and even song writing. He teamed Laurel and Hardy and re- fined their act for the early sound era. Subsequently he directed Eddie Can- tor, a popular vaudeville and radio comic of the day, Mae West, Harold Lloyd (we still see photos of him hanging from a clock high above the street), and Charles Laughton in a rare comedy role in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). He is also credited with helping Cary Grant develop his brash but vulnerable comic style in The Awful Truth (1937). Grant, with his unique screen personality and unmistakable accent, went from reliable leading man in romantic comedies to Hitchcock thrillers in a career that lasted through the 1960s, while McCarey all but vanished from consideration as a director of any consequence. Why one director rises in reputation—like Preston Sturges, for ex ample—while another falls out of fashion is a mystery that’s tough to crack. Several factors can be isolated as partial explanations. McCarey’s two most successful films, critically and financially, were his parish melodramas, Go- ing My Way (1944) and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). As the cultural historian Anthony Burke Smith points out in his splendid study, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (2010), these twin sagas of Catholic life in urban America hit close to home as the world prepared for a postwar era of peace, stability, and a return to the traditional values we’d fought so hard to preserve. The jovial Father Chuck O’Malley, onetime songwriter and baseball player, was portrayed by Bing Crosby, unquestionably the most popular entertainer in the country at the time. With his jaunty straw hat, cheery concern for everyone in the parish, and a tendency to break into song at the least provocation, Father O’Malley iii embodied American optimism fused with traditional beliefs. A few years af- ter the success of these films, the Cold War soured the cultural climate appre- ciably, and these films seemed naïve and hopelessly sentimental. The brilliant comedies of the 1930s were dated in the eyes of more sophisticated post- war audiences and critics, of course. Finally, McCarey was believed to have “named names” of Communist sympathizers before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He didn’t, as it turned out, but the allegation made him anathema to the critical and academic establishments for many years. This combination of factors was too much for his reputation to withstand. As I worked through this mystery, one strange title kept reappearing in the literature: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). In interviews, McCarey claimed it was the best film he ever made, and when he accepted the Oscar forThe Aw- ful Truth, he politely thanked the Academy, but commented that they had giv- en him the award for the wrong film. Orson Welles, who knew a few things about movies himself, claimed that it would wring tears from a stone. One essay referred to it as the greatest American film ever made—that no one had ever heard of. True. I certainly hadn’t. With good reason. It proved disastrous at the box office and disappeared into the studio vaults to languish until a recent reincarnation on DVD. Welles and McCarey knew what the rest of us didn’t. It stands right up there with Citizen Kane and Casablanca. Why was it such a dud? Frankly, because it is about old people, and about the inevitability of aging and death, topics that film audiences, studios intent on capturing the youth market, and just about everyone else would prefer to ignore. The film opens with a family meeting. The father (Victor Moore) and mother (Beulah Bondi) have summoned their three children to announce that a combination of poor planning and the Depression have left them without resources to pay off the mortgage on the family home. The bank will foreclose within two weeks. The siblings argue that they cannot possibly help their aging parents financially, but as a compromise they will let the homestead go, and two married children will each take one parent. Sepa- rated in different cities after fifty years of marriage, both parents try to adjust in alien worlds. They try, but fail. They disrupt the families and quickly be- come, if not an unwelcome, then certainly an awkward presence. No one acts from deliberate malice; but, with brutal honesty and occasional comic touch- es to keep the film from becoming lugubrious, McCarey simply points out the inevitable friction in the passing of generations. After a penultimate dream- like sequence, as the aging couple receive their due respect and affection from strangers, who don’t have to live with them, they say goodbye on a railroad platform. He departs for California and the home of another daughter, who can “take one of them for a while.” In his farewell, he addresses his wife by her maiden name, as though affirming his realization that their marriage has iv ended and he will never see her again. For once, Hollywood failed to provide the happy ending. To cite Orson Welles again, in Citizen Kane, Bernstein, the Kane’s longtime bookkeeper, tells the reporter working on Kane’s obituary: “Old age is the one disease nobody wants to be cured of.” The topic clearly does not provoke enthusiasm, at the box office or any place else.