softening the leather
by
Douglas Messerli
Harold
Brighouse, Wynyard Browne, David Lean, and Norman Spencer (writers), David Lean
(director) Hobson’s Choice / 1954
A longtime
favorite among movie-going audiences, David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice has not particularly aged well. This 1954 film
seems a bit like it was made in the 1930s and even, had film been available, in
the 19th century, with its picaresque views of Lancashire.
As usual Charles Laughton chews the
furniture in his booming harangues against his three daughters and his drunken
muggings—with apologies to both the moon and door revealing his sentimentality
beneath his gruff exterior. And, although Brenda De Banzie plays his
spinster-deemed daughter, Maggie, quite authoritatively, and John Mills
handsomely mopes around in his role as her self-determined groom, each of the
actors can’t quite escape the types which she and he have been assigned; De
Banzie is bit shriller, equally head-strung Deborah Kerr, and Mills (as Will
Mossop) only at the very end is allowed to escape his hound-dog, “aw-shucks”
characterization.
After many years of thinking of Maggie’s
actions as a restorative, almost feminist-like act, which, furthermore, permits
her other two sister to marry as well, I felt this time around that her and
Will’s creation of a competitive boot shop just around the corner from her
father’s as issuing as much from revenge as an attempt to temporarily convince
him of his own misogynist ways. In fact, despite his assertion of male
domination, it is clear that his daughters have always ruled his shop; the only
superiority that he has ever had exists only in the Moonracker bar where he
brags to his friends. Just like the moon which he chases through the puddles,
his dreams of patriarchal rule are permitted only when, in his drunken stupors,
he climbs to the top of the imaginary mast, the moonracker of ships.
Yet the real problem of this film, I
perceived this time through, is that none of the film’s characters is really
likeable. Hobson is, after all, simply a drunk with imaginary claims; we seem
him in a constant motion between the bar and bed. Without his daughters, it is
hard to even imagine how the shop might still survive. And it is difficult to
even figure out how he got into the business in the first place.
Alice and Vicky (Daphne Anderson and
Prunella Scales), his younger daughters, seem selfish and as indolent—if it
were to be allowed—as their father. And the young men to whom they have
attached themselves, Freddy Beenstock and Albert Prosser, are as foolish as
their names suggest, men will quickly grow into boring businessmen who someday
will also sneak off to the Moonracker, or in Freddy’s case, watch those who do
sneak off with prurient dis-ease.
The strong-willed and fairly likeable
elder daughter, Maggie is, as her
father proclaims, a bit like the leather her would-be lover crafts into
beautiful boots and shoes. Even after she determines to marry, she remains so
stiff-necked that we can hardly believe that upon her wedding night she has
successfully given up her virginity to the evidently-pleased Will. If we’re all
happy that she “gets her way,” it appears her way is as harsh as a missionary
lecturing the local natives. Even when she defers to her new “master,” we know
that it is simply a ruse to keep her husband on his leash.
The most likeable figure in the film,
Will, is truly a dolt. He seems perfectly willing to give away his life to a
woman who lives with her mother more like an uneducated whore than the beauty
he imagines her to be. Moreover, although he appears to be meek and modest, it
is clear that he is also as vain as any of us, a quality that Maggie plays to
in praising his boot-making skills so that she might charm him into marriage. And
what, one wonders, other than their collective leather and management talents
they bring to the world, might the two ever do in their off hours? Certainly
Maggie will never let Will sneak off to the local pub, nor allow herself much
but the hard work she already committed to for 30 years; perhaps a Sunday walk
in the park—of course, after church. Will, after she has taught him better how
to read, will pick up the newspaper and learn about the life he has never had.
The best we can say of their relationship is that perhaps Will may work to
soften and shape her leather as well.
I will always think of British director
David Lean as a kind of smarter, but just as corny and sentimental director as
the American Frank Capra. Is it any wonder that this film’s hero, Hobson, winds
up deep crib of corn?
If Capra knew a good story when he saw it,
Lean had an equally keen eye for images and a marvelous skill to edit them. The
joy of this film is not so much in its characters as it is in Lean’s ability to
whip up atmosphere: the wailing storm of the first scene (as in his Dickens
films) as the camera sweeps in upon a creaking boot advertising what lies
within the shop and then roves across the rows of boots, slippers, and clogs
for sale which lay at the center of his tale. As Laughton waddles down the
street on his way to his favorite bar, you could swear you were in Salford one
early morning in the 1880s.
Yet Lean’s tales, at heart, are as
quintessentially stock British as Capra’s are stereotypically American. And
there is always in Lean’s films a sense that the story (new or old) is being
told by a tired Oxford lecturer reciting British history. Heterosexual love in
Lean’s films (particularly in his supposed love story, Brief Encounter) is always a kind of transaction, and in his later,
epic works he almost abandoned the subject, except through the pop-like
refrains of Doctor Zhivago’s “Somewhere
My Love.”
Los Angeles, June
28, 2017
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