“Happy Land” is one of the sweetest numbers of the Goody Two Shoes series, the one that is so comfortably certain that it is the portrait of American life. Since not one thing occurs here that is short of being the contented cow’s idea of what she would like her milk to grow up to be, it becomes ever more amazing to me that the people in Hollywood can go on presenting this fantasy that makes sugar seem sour as typical American life. It is the fantasy that every American is schooled in from his first school day, and there should be a New Republic supplement on why we feel it necessary to uphold it, as though it were the flag itself. It makes the soap operas of the radio and “Mary Worth” of the comics look like “Tobacco Road”; and Saroyan’s “Human Comedy,” which it has ghost-written, or vice versa, seems like a rich, full life.
The central problem in “Happy Land” has to do with a son’s death in the war, and his father’s being so broken up about it that Old Gramps descends to earth out of Heaven to show him that suffering and pain are also a part of life, and that “as long as American kids can be Boy Scouts and aim to do a good turn every day—as long as they can eat ice cream—go to high school (go to movies like this)—play football—have a picnic in Briggs’s Wood—then it’ll be worth while. The whole thing . . .” Then the boy’s pal returns from sea to take the dead son’s place in the family. It manages to include other American points of interest along with the ones Gramps noted. There are the first day of school, block “H” sweaters, the hurdle race (in family movies the hurdles seem to be the great American pastime), graduation exercises, train whistles, a drug-store, not the pool hall or masturbation. I think you will find little in these points of interest that will recall anything to you, since they seem to have been made to satisfy the most suspicious, narrow-minded upholder of American goodness in the world, which I don’t suppose you are.
“Happy Land” is a movie in which each face is the empty, good-looking one that is associated only with other movie faces, because only they can be so bare of emotional states, can call up so little of the environment (and I don’t mean Max Factor) that developed them, can be so inhumanly uninspired and unmoving. Everyone is so careful to be gentlemanly and in good taste that you feel they walk around in dancing pumps. But mainly there is not one moment of it that will strike you as the actuality. When it experiences death it is with a face that is not nearly ugly or terrible enough (though Mr. Ameche’s is certainly a pain). And what it does to the Boy Scouts is inhuman.
Now, to turn a sharp corner; because this is, I think, an important movie for how it does what it is saying, as well as for what is said. It is a good movie technically, and even an important one, as far as Hollywood’s development goes. It has a great deal of undecorated, solid honesty in its visualizing, and it looks at and paces its material with a homely, unromantic, plodding spirit that the material itself lacks completely. Its refusal to jazz things up by cutting makes it even dull, a monotone. There is continually a promise in this picture—that the same eye and attitude directed at an adult experience of reality will some day turn out American movies that haven’t been seen since the silent days.
This picture is like nothing so much as a particularly terrible women’s baseball team managed with the Puritan perfection and lack of compromise that could only be Joe McCarthy’s. There is an early episode of the father in the garden just after he has received news of his son’s death; as he miserably moves back and forth, the camera resolutely moves back and forth with him, keeping stolidly dead center on his face, and achieving a fascinating quality by its exact realization of the movement. Later, as the picture flashes back to the son’s growing up, he and his father walk home at night from the city, and again the people are looked at with almost blind devotion, till you get tired of their faces and start watching the night-dark city buildings passing very slowly behind them, a scene that in spite of what they are talking about, is exciting for being so purely as it would actually be. The last episode, which brings the dead son’s sailor pal home, and the only face with any character that has yet appeared, indicates what this technique could produce if it had more faces as natural as his. There are others: several tours taken with the wife (Frances Dee, who has a particularly marvelous quality) through her house; a brief one on the train with a college boy returning home, where the sound image and the visual image combine for one brief moment to catch the exact reality of train-ride rumination.
Like so many recent movies, “Happy Land” has noticed that the people in the English pictures, notably Coward’s and “Desert Victory,” talked softly, and it therefore has all its members talk softly. It can drive you crazy. Other Hollywood Americana are the fact that, unlike Saroyan’s Uticans, “Happy Land’s” HEARTfieldians of the male sex may tipple—their intoxicant is loganberry wine, the loganberry being undoubtedly the thing that gets it across as in the soft-drink class; it is okay for Heartfield’s upright sons and daughters to kiss one another’s foreheads. The only thing I can say is that you can take your choice of not seeing a custard pie, or of seeing an interesting technical performance.
December 13, 1943