IF you tried to imagine the most gruesome result of a collaboration between William Saroyan and MGM, to both of whom life tends to be a chocolate soda made out of words, you couldn’t have approached the disaster of “The Human Comedy.” Its humanity and its comedy never get past its sermons, its hymns and the overwhelming proportion of Dale Carnegie in Saroyan, but even more in MGM.
The movie’s most serious error is in stripping the Saroyan world of its main charm—the humor, the zaniness and the mishap—and in playing it straight for its homely morality: sing your troubles away; every cloud has a silver lining; love thy neighbor and the devil take the hindmost; it’s not what you do, it’s how you say it. All this is right back in the smooth old MGM groove, with the best Saroyan nowhere in sight. In other words, the movie hasn’t produced Saroyan in anything like the proper spirit: in a medium like the movies, with an impact of visual realism that the printed page does not possess, there must have been a touch of fantasy to achieve any of the wonder Saroyan insists is everywhere, occasionally well enough to achieve conviction, as in the stories of his own people. In “The Human Comedy,” Saroyan has written about some people whom the movie presents as inexorably average. Both he and the producers, using the heaviest realistic approach, have tried to settle on their ordinary shoulders the burden of godhood. These average Americans, lacking utterly the exoticism and the life-is-but-a-song spirit which, in the “Aram” stories, gave real being to goodness and innocence, are people whose wonder and happiness, this film would have you believe, can be had just by saying it’s there; and Saroyan has made no attempt to go deeper than that. To believe this movie, American life is wondrous when you sing constantly, pray out loud and explain your prayer, see no evil and hear none (naturally you don’t do any yourself), and at intervals make sure you tell someone at length the secret of a beautiful life. There are a few exceptions to this kind of behavior: the one villain, the high-school track coach, who turns up a drunken spectacle in the town saloon, demonstrating the humiliating prospect in store for all liars and fascists; and that good fellow, the rich man, whose worth is indicated in the simple way he greets his fellow man with “Hiyah!”
The idea is to tell you how wonderful the Macauleys of Ithaca, California, are. The trouble is that their goodness is so flashy and exaggerated and their real goodness, as it would come out in behavior instead of sermons, so ignored, that even the promising situations die hideously from marmalade poisoning. An example of this sham occurs in the scene in which a returned soldier stands on a corner and rhapsodizes about the town, while nowhere in the picture were you shown the wonder that really is there, and in every town. The straight realism makes it so much hogwash—you can’t get an emotion on the screen by simply using the words that describe it.
The production is strictly MGM in its weird pseudo-realism. The girls have that ravishing Hollywood beauty that makes you cringe when you first see it. Ulysses, who acts like three years old and very cute for that age, turns out to be five, and you wonder, is he an idiot? His pal, twice his size and eleven, first appears to be unpopular because he is a bookworm, and then it develops that he can’t read, and you must ask the same question, getting no answer. The students in Homer’s high-school class have nothing to do with the awkward, chaotic personalities you would find in your own high school. The photography outlines each head with a halo and deadens the outdoor shots with painted backdrops, usually forgetting to put occasional people into the street scenes or the telegraph office (except when a stooge is needed on whom to demonstrate the Boss’s beautiful character), making these scenes look like those of a play without the money to hire walk-ons. When the three soldiers and their two girls go into a theatre there isn’t an empty seat in the house except five on the aisle.
The actors, Mickey Rooney, Jack Jenkins, Fay Bainter, James Craig, Van Johnson, Frank Morgan, play the characters with every capability, trying in some cases, especially Rooney’s, to understand and project people that are beyond understanding. And so they are inevitably unable to capture a warmth that was never in the character. If something had loosened up somewhere, if it were all less trite, if the picture had shown a real understanding of beauty and wonder instead of trying to impose it, these actors could have made it sing.
March 15, 1943