In Those Good Old Vanished Days

 

One Sunday Afternoon Spawns Numerous More

Dirt path telling of a tale weaved twice again in the 40’s, neither time with such honesty and conviction, One Sunday Afternoon leaves much gay out of the 90’s to make us realize good moments of life, then as now, were rare and to be savored. The 1890’s were bronzed like baby shoes the further we got into a rapid-changing new century, more and more to represent a lost paradise. I get that. 2019 already seems to me like last of good old days. One Sunday Afternoon sings quaint songs, grapples with wire-rim collars and clip ties, all of what brought tear to 1933 eyes, but also there is meanness, cruel coquetry, and flash of a gun or fist to put a good man on rockpiles before he can finish a refrain of Sweet Adeline. The Strawberry Blonde (1941), then further 1948 re-do (again One Sunday Afternoon) had these necessary elements, but caramel-dipped, the 90’s forevermore stuff of stereographs in Grandma’s parlor. By the 1940’s, it seemed compulsory to present that past in glowing terms, as in yes to a Coney Island, no to The Magnificent Ambersons. One Sunday Afternoon was made closer to actuality, so focuses on drama rather than simpler-to-apply rose hues. For that, it is an austere treasure.

One Sunday Afternoon missed the Paramount pre-49 boat to MCA in 1958, the property having been sold to Warners for the remakes, with 1933's original buried in pitch few knew about or cared enough to exploit. There have been articles, a book even, about movies we cannot see because of rights snaggle or internment due to updates. One Sunday Afternoon surfaced when Turner channels began using it, the print ragged because maybe that’s all there was/is left. Where seeming primitive before, now comes One Sunday Afternoon to favored status, though again that may be my gleaning values not evident before. Fresh wrinkles in a film can be vivid as those in a mirror, age a straightest route toward deeper appreciation. One Sunday Afternoon tries less to be funny than forthright about choices a man makes, then lives with. “Biff Grimes” (Gary Cooper) thinks he wants “Virginia Brush” (Fay Wray) more than anything in his world, but loses her to “Hugo Barnstead” (Neil Hamilton), whose snappier line wins the day. Biff marries plain “Amy Lind” on the rebound, but can’t get over Virginia. Past love lost is more a theme in real life, I suspect, than of movies, possibly because there’s never a fix for it, too many marriages spent with one partner while regretting loss of another. Not a high note to begin or end any story on, but there it often is, embedded in reality all too many know.

Films generally handled the theme, as does One Sunday Afternoon, with characters realizing they had it made all along, that whoever they imagined to be an ideal was, in truth, anything but that. For Biff it means seeing Virginia finally for what she is, and always was. But might Virginia have turned out entirely different married to Biff? A man truly hung up would tell himself that to maintain the illusion. I’ve known several who have. Movies avoid lost or unattainable love themes because therein lies stilled pace, dearth of action, too many seeing selves or spouse circumstance they’d rather not think about. We feel for wife Amy knowing Biff longs for another even as he lies down with her. A second anniversary feast she prepares goes awry because Biff has forgot the occasion, even as he relishes “scrapple” she has set before him. As if to drive nails further in, Hugo and Virginia invite the couple to a hotel suite feed, Biff raring to go because it’s Virginia asking. Cooper plays all this splendidly. He was an actor who could be awkward, inarticulate, yet knowing his attraction for women. There was a dangerous quality to Cooper, an unstoppable force if or when roused. To be catnip and register cool in Morocco was one thing, but where Cooper was obsessed by heart interest, as here and especially year previous A Farewell To Arms, he could be almost scarily determined. I wonder how easily that sat with his female following.

Toward definition of scrapple, here’s what I found: “Scraps of pork or other meat stewed with cornmeal and shaped into loaves for slicing and frying, especially characteristic of eastern Pennsylvania.” So how does that sound for eating? Anyone tried it? The Grimes’ table, laid with this and biscuits and blueberry pie, contents me as to life being gayer in the 90’s, so long as there was grub like this to tie onto. Downside, however: You didn’t get to keep teeth long. Biff as correspondence schooled dentist (his diploma dated 1900) sits Hugo down for molar extraction, latter bragging that seven teeth previously came out of the right side of his mouth, and five from the left. This, please note, was accepted way of life back then, and you don’t wanna know how many movie stars went more-less toothless, dentistry a catch as catch-can process. We read of bridgework damaged, emergency replaced, during Classic Era filming, teeth yanked out of actor-actress heads in favor of pearly, if obvious, substitutes. A dream factory, but also stuff of nightmare where you ponder what these people actually went through.

One Sunday Afternoon was put down as a failure by boxoffice sum-up The New York Times did in early 1934. It was also noted as virtually the only Gary Cooper film so far to lose money. I don’t doubt some shunned Sunday for Cooper mooning throughout for a woman he cannot have. Who wanted that, especially from him? Story basis had been a play, well received on Broadway from February to November 1933, with Lloyd Nolan as Biff. Maybe stage viewers could better imagine Nolan letting a gal get so under his skin, but Coop? Not likely. Stars were early on victims of fast grown personas, a good thing where cast properly, less so when not. One Sunday Afternoon thereafter bore stain of a flop, that coloring Jack Warner judgment when he screened the 1933 version prior to go-ahead for The Strawberry Blonde in 1941. Memo from JL to Hal Wallis: “Dear Hal … I ran One Sunday Afternoon last night at my house. Of course the picture is very bad, but anyone who has seen the show or read the script claims there is a great picture in it. It will be hard to stay through the entire running time of the picture, but do this so you will know what not to do.”

Parsing Warner words: “Of course” the picture is "very bad"? Why, because it was made in 1933, or the fact a rival made it? I’d say this was backwash of JL having been told that One Sunday Afternoon flopped, everyone in the industry knowing low grossers for “bad,” and how can you blame them, as this was business they were doing, not art appreciation. “Hard to stay through the entire running time” I’ll attribute to Jack’s apparent low threshold for even 85 minutes, even as we wonder how he handled WB’s All This and Heaven Too and Anthony Adverse. He did see One Sunday Afternoon as a property from which a good picture could be made, and The Strawberry Blonde, aggressively Gay-90 and comedic to loss of focal issue Sunday dealt in, still gave greater value for spout-open 1941 fun seekers. Director Raoul Walsh saw Strawberry as evocation of an idealized boyhood, with barbershop quartets on every corner and guys getting slung regular through swinging barroom doors. There was enough by-now distance to reimagine the 1890’s on whatever terms were wished, the writing Epstein brothers born in 1909 and thus not eyeball observers of past days depicted. To them and most others that attended in 1941, this was an era of silly notions, dated ritual, and catch-phrasing no one would use again (“tell it to Sweeny,” reference to “The Wreck of the Hesperus”). Was the 1890’s a society of way-over-the-top Alan Hales? You’d think so watching him bellow in The Strawberry Blonde and Walsh’s close cousin follow-up, Gentleman Jim.

Something about the story clung, for Warners did it again. Titled One Sunday Afternoon as in ’33 yore, depart otherwise to extent of Technicolor and Dennis Morgan bursting forth in song as Biff Grimes, his less than star-bright support (Dorothy Malone, Don DeFore, Janis Page) reflective of WB marquee strength less strong by 1948. Raoul Walsh déjà vu directs, one he surely made for paycheck alone. How’s for glamour and reward of doing a rote job you know won’t turn out distinctive? Such plow-horsing was not necessarily to be envied. Still, Walsh had more good ones than bad, and you’d not call his Sunday an off day if unfamiliar with early and better versions. Did Warners expect us to have utterly forgot this yarn after only seven years? Maybe so, because that is after all how often Disney brought old stuff back, and their scheme worked. ’48 Sunday was more about music anyway, and evoking not prior treatments, but turn-of-century yearnings of Meet Me In St. Louis and Life With Father, both massive hits. By that reckoning, re-doing One Sunday Afternoon was a smart idea, though further out from the 90’s made it seem the more a candy-box of impossible dreaming, by now too remote for even Mom and Dad to recollect. Under heading of some properties never die, One Sunday Afternoon got done yet again, and again, and again, for television. These might exist on dinosaur kinescope they’ll let you watch on a tabletop at one of those broadcast museums, but who’s going to dig so deep into One Sunday Afternoon over a hundred years after an era it portrays?