I was perusing the March 2010 issue of my AARP Bulletin (I'm a self-described young 53; I can remember when I'd scan this periodical at my parents' home), when I was intrigued by the caption 50 Movie Zingers, a grouping author Betsy Towner describes as "...great quotes from the silver screen...". Her source is the American Film Institute.
My first impulse was to check for the familiar. Number 4 was "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." The visual impact of the shift from gray Kansas farm scape to technicolor Oz village was unknown to me circa 1963-64 because in my early elementary school years we owned a black and white set. Dorothy's guileless wonderment as conveyed by the inestimable Judy Garland were the only spurs my imagination needed. Those fifteen syllables take me back to the smells of buttery popcorn tossed in a paper bag and the chocolate/peanut butter/oatmeal confections called no-bake cookies that my mother offered up on many a Sunday night as we lay on our tummies, chin in hands, on the floor of our sparse but tidily kept living room.
As I studied the list closely most of the quotes were from movies I've seen, or, as in the case of Network, a 1976 offering listed at number 19, feel I should see. This compact, necessarily subjective, hardly comprehensive list of lines from cinema images evoked kaleidoscopic memories and musings. "Love means never having to say you're sorry." transports me back to my early teens and the company of my best friend Bonnie. It was 1971 or later because we viewed Love Story on her Aunt's television during one of our regular sleepovers. The film, number 13 on the survey came out in 1970.
We wore our hair long, straight, and parted down the middle much like Ali MacGraw the iconic, chic actress who played stoic Jenny. I remember that even as we cried for Jenny and Oliver, a part of my brain, or perhaps more accurately, the heart of me, rejected her sentiment as somehow contrary to the best of what was taught me by pure example. This August my husband and I will mark thirty years of marriage;love means we've both offered scads of sorrys.
Although the titles listed are facile memory prompters, one of my favorite movies, and the line whispered by winsome,willowy Peggy Ann Garner is not included. Miss Garner was about thirteen years old, an actress since the age of six. As Francie, a poor child growing up with her brother Neely in a Brooklyn tenement dwelling and its neighborhood's streets, she shared the screen in 1945 with some of Hollywood's finest character actors. The movie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, based on Betty Smith's sweeping novel of the early 1900s, was the directorial debut of the gifted, prolific, and controversial Elia Kazan.
"My cup runneth over." Francie utters this near prayer to her father, Johnny Nolan, a courtly, loquacious Irishman whose support of his family as a singing waiter is rendered inefficacious by a tendency to tipple. Francie forgives him this trait. He is a fond, keenly intuitive father, an intent recipient of his children's queries, comments, and often pithy observations. Mr. Nolan, as played by the convincingly misty-eyed James Dunn, is a man both achingly alive and yet fading away. His hopes for his wife's encompassing love fade over several scenes as her care-worn face fights for patience to trump cynicism as he weaves his" someday our ship will come in" fantasies.
Austere Katie, as rendered by Dorothy McGuire is protective of him; respectful toward him; and even intimate with him; but her trust in him is as faded as his one suit that she so carefully cleans, brushes and steams before the rare paid engagement. Gregarious Johnny is deeply kind. Children trust him. Women bloom at the tip of his hat. Men want to share a pint and a laugh. Johnny is never so tall as when he cheers a sickly neighbor girl as he climbs the stairs to their spartan but somehow homey walk-up.
In several scenes his industrious wife is kneeling on these stairs, young back bent, hands in soapy, gritty, cold water, scrubbing her way to the top landing. The implication: she helps secure the rent of their abode, or the reduction thereof, with the likely pittance she earns with her extra labor. Katie doesn't resent hard work, but she wants in Johnny a partner, not a daydreamer. She struggles to enjoy her earnest children,but she is tired and even a little afraid, as evidenced by her careful hoarding of the money for their funeral insurances. When Katie instructs the children on how to stretch the family's coins as they pursue the Saturday errands to the butcher and baker her tone is strict but sweetly plaintive. McGuire conveys Katie's deep maternal love with a wan smile, a proud glance, a hesitant gesture; yet the children, especially Francie... miss her silent evidences of the same parental love Johnny bestows effortlessly with his effusive brogue.
Johnny feeds Francie's growing soul; Katie feeds her growing body. Therein lies the tension just behind Francie's wary expressions, quiet movements, and stiff posture. Francie is preternaturally officious as a stalwart mother's helper. She is a tender nurse, faithful steward, and eager cohort when her father returns tired or worse, drunk, from a singing engagement.
Francie tries to smooth the surfaces, sweep the corners, and fill the silences of her parents' strained relationship. From where is this strength powered? From whence does it flow? Her elixir is in the form of a library card. Her potion is poured from pen to paper. The dutiful daughter of a man whose dreams are will'- o- the- wisps, and a woman whose dreams are as stale as the family's discounted bread, is a curious student and nascent writer. Her dream, newly born on a Sunday walk to a pleasant neighborhood where trees line the street, flowers adorn the yards, and birdsong twitters peaceably, is to attend the grand school upon which her longing eyes rest.
Francie's rich imagination is sharply condemned by her classroom teacher. She is to answer the question at hand without detail or wonderment. When Francie admits sadly, upon her mother's admonition to study, that she is tired of school, Katie doesn't react; she is absorbed in a chore. Johnny perceives the peril to Francie's spirit, her core; his reaction is the invitation to the stroll that leads them to a cross road in Francie's young life.
As Johnny notes the hope that refreshes Francie's face in the admission of her dream, he schemes a worthy act of civil disobedience that shows his true quality as a man and his worthiness of Francie's lavish trust. The pair turn their excited attentions to the charming,closely set homes that border the sidewalk just across from the school. Francie revels in the time honored game of choosing a favorite. As they indulge in the merry language of fantasy, Johnny forms the plan that will insure a quality education for his serious little girl.
He will appropriate the address from the house Francie admires most, invent a fictional aunt and uncle, concoct a plausible scenario for Francie's transfer, and submit the proper paperwork to both schools. He assures Francie the contrivance will succeed. She asks him to bend down. He does. "My cup runneth over," she solemnly avers in the softest, most genuine, murmur of gratitude I've ever witnessed on film. Yes, his act is a small deceit; yes, he broke municipal rules, not to mention one of the ten commandments, but his decision to help his daughter is one of the great acts of parental love displayed on the silver screen.
Children want what we all want: to be heard. Francie's future holds an irreplaceable loss. She can not ken in the shared moment of supreme grace with the father in whom she has placed unflinching faith, the schism that wrenching void will rend in her tenuous communications with her grave, distracted mother. Her pure, spontaneous, tenderly breathed words of gratitude are rare in film or perhaps in life. She is a girl. Then in a celluloid second she is a young woman.
Johnny Nolan dotes on his son and daughter, but he adores Katie, the wife of his youth, as if she were still an enchanted newlywed and not a worried tenement trapped wife. Johnny talks effervescently, but he listens effectively. In securing Francie's future with the gift of a fine school and a devoted teacher, he unwittingly secured a new and empathic bond between mother and daughter. Where there is thankfulness, judgement diminishes.
It is Francie who attends to her widowed mother's child bed. In the barely lit apartment, as rain pours in streams down the unadorned windows, shadows flicker and fade, as Francie meets her mother's every request ...patiently, kindly...and with forgiveness as Katie gives vocal birth to her repressed affections even as she gives physical birth to little Annie Laurie.
The new baby, named for a plaintive Irish tune, one which Johnny sang to his children, is a blanket wrapped harbinger of a new start for the family. A staid beat cop, an observant gentleman who has admired the tenacious Nolans, offers the two older children his friendship, the baby his name, and widowed Katie the security that eluded her with Johnny. She accepts widower Officer McShane's proposal not only because he is as she states "...a good man...", but because Francie's demeanor of gratitude has helped her to recall what she once knew and championed; her Johnny, her bonny Irish lad, was a good man too.
Francie and Neeley grasp that they will soon enjoy a better home, better food, and better clothes, but they are decidedly unimpressed. The pensive siblings recall the good times they've enjoyed, especially in their dutifully earned Saturday freedoms. Neeley doubts poor, privileged Annie Laurie will experience such freedom. Francie is serene, content to look behind, content to look ahead. The power generated when a father gave unreservedly what he could offer, when he was unreservedly asked to give, has produced a cache of strength and promise from which Francie can go forth, unfettered by grief or misunderstanding, to pursue with her mother's grit her father's love of story.
