softening the leather
by
Douglas Messerli
Harold
Brighouse, Wynyard Browne, David Lean, and Norman Spencer (writers), David Lean
(director) Hobson’s Choice / 1954
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.
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.
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.
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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