IN the usual superficial, gaga Hollywood-biography way, “Roughly Speaking” looks at the life of Louise Randall Pierson, who wrote the movie script as well as the best-seller on which it is based. Mrs. Pierson, who describes herself as “granite” and “New England,” is as ambitious as Alexander and “not afraid of anything,” and has spent her life, as far as this movie is concerned, mainly in trying to get rich and failing. The daughter of a wealthy New Englander, she was married and divorced by a banker and since then has been successfully married to Mr. Pierson, who has tried a number of ventures, from rose-growing to welding. She feels, so the picture says, that she is one who “breaks rules” and “swims upstream,” though her ideas about success, marriage, divorce, America and money fit the conventional concepts even of Hollywood. Mrs. Pierson has had more children than movie wives generally do, but in the film they are typical movie offspring, with, if anything, less to show for themselves than usual. The effect of Mrs. Pierson’s “granite” on them isn’t noticeable.
The film goes through the last forty years of American history with Mrs. Pierson on “the inside” of its main attractions, which is where she believes in being. But her inside view is as stock and vague as her children. Yale, in the early years of the century, is a singing session of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” in a student’s room; World War I is a shot of Mrs. Pierson selling a war bond; the money-mad days of the twenties is a shot of a lot of checks being made out; the depression is a comedy scene with Mr. Pierson practising the sale of a vacuum cleaner on his wife; prewar days is someone’s remark that they see the lights of the Polish Pavilion going out on the World’s Fair grounds; the present war is a shot of Pearl Harbor and a protracted railroad-station scene with the Piersons saying goodbye to three enlisted sons.
“Roughly Speaking” seems to me about as terrifying as it seems useless. It is dealing directly with conventional attitudes about success, money and fame, and all of its people are devoted to these attitudes. Success to the Piersons means getting rich no matter what, ambition is “two of us against the world,” “being of a different cut” is coming up from the bottom to win a fortune, money-making is a complete, satisfying existence. The Piersons’ blind striving for a fortune, which takes up three-quarters of the film, is seen through a bemused eye as wholesome, virtuous and fun. There is no suggestion of sterility, snobbism or hostility in this money-grubbing. Because they have such a zealous and happy time selling things to people, there is a strong suggestion of the aggressiveness involved and their indifference to everything but the dime they make out of the hamburger. This all seems useless to me because we have been shown it for years, and because once again it sees only these elements in money-making; and it seems to me that such lack of knowledge of what it means to pile up a fortune in terms of personal greed and social evil and the kind of life resulting from it is an anachronism of a particularly frightening kind.
The relationship of Mrs. Pierson to her husband and children is generalized and insipidly vague, though her first marriage is seen a little more sharply and objectively. The banker, who is made convincingly dry and drab by Donald Woods, is a quiet but purposeful conservative with a couple of nice speeches that indicate his character well, and he is the only person in the picture who is allowed to suffer nearly enough from Mrs. Pierson’s personality. The best parts of the movie, though, have to do with Jack Carson’s ability to make the talent for sophisticated humor and easy sociability of the second husband rich and effective. If some of the less vaudevillian aspects of his marriage had been written into the script, Mr. Carson would probably have created a masterpiece of this particular amiable, insecure rich man’s son. I am not a fan of Rosalind Russell, who plays Mrs. Pierson.
The good things that turn up in the picture are inevitably cut to ribbons and compromised by Director Michael Curtiz and his jack-rabbit style. This style, which aims at killing dullness, involves jumping as fast as possible from one aspect of an event to another, gaining the maximum amount of musical comedy and action. A typical example of the way it works is the meeting between Miss Russell and Mr. Carson at a Yale dance, which seems to me quite exciting until it is hurried into a slapstick dive into a fountain. That in turn is hurried into a kitchen conversation, which is then marred by a too quick proposal and the corny, predictable entrance of Miss Russell’s four children by her first marriage. The purpose of Mr. Curtiz’s style—to get in and around events and keep you awake—is good enough, and he does a lot of convincing things in directing his actors. But as far as I can see, he is totally incapable of shooting a scene without making it seem staged, falsely corny and less interesting than it should be.
February 19, 1945