State Fair (1933)

MoMA showed the 1933 State Fair last night as part of its retrospective of the films of Janet Gaynor, whose 100th birthday would have been this year. The film is not available on DVD or VHS, so this was a rare opportunity to see a remarkable film.

This is the pre-Rogers and Hammerstein version, with no music whatever except in the background of the fairground scenes and no Technicolor. What a blessing! There's far more real music and lyricism in any five minutes of this film than in all of the 1945 remake. Instead of relying on the songs to tell their story, the actors communicate by first of all believing in their characters, whom they never patronize.

One good example is the matter of the brandy in the mincemeat. In both versions, an early scene involves an disagreement between Abel and Melissa over whether the latter should put brandy in the mincemeat she is planning to submit for judging at the fair. Abel says yes, but Melissa is against strong drink. When she leaves the kitchen, Abel takes the brandy bottle from the cupboard and adds some to the mincemeat. Then he leaves, she returns, and she does the same. In 1945 Charles Winninger's perpetually bug-eyed Abel performs this business with exaggerated gestures, as if he were on a stage before an audience of thousands. He also seems to desperate to let us know that he himself understands what an empty head poor Abel is.

But Will Rogers, in the 1933 version, plays the same scene with understated simplicity. He's not afraid we'll mistake him for a simpleton, because he doesn't think his character is a simpleton, just a plain man who knows what judges at a country fair are going to like. And he doesn't have to wave his arms and bug his eyes, first because this happens to be a movie and secondly because he is a brilliant physical actor who can do his job with little movements that hardly seem like gestures at all.

In the same way, 1933's Louise Dresser far outshines 1945's Fay Bainter. In the scene where the mincemeat is judged Bainter plays manic-depressive as her chances of winning rise and fall, all gestures and expostulations. Dresser does it all with her eyes. She understands that her character's ingrained modesty is the anchor of her dignity, and that Melissa would never betray herself to the other contestants, so she stands in the front row and lets us alone see the clouds and sunshine pass over her face.

The whole film is like this, intimate with the viewer and trusting him or her to see the dignity in these characters. Even Blue Boy, Abel's beloved entry in the hog judging, benefits from Rogers's warm, empathetic approach to acting. In the Technicolor version, Abel's enthusiasm for Blue Boy makes him look like a complete fool, as most city audiences would indeed take a person to be if he got excited about a pig. But for Rogers, the empathetic actor, Abel is himself an empathetic man whose own self-respect is the source of his respect for Blue Boy, and he makes this clear both with dialogue and in his physical acting when with the animal.

This kind of intimacy earns the film our trust when it enters into its central questions about human love and its dangers. Margy, the daughter, falls in love at the fair with a local reporter who has to admit, though he loves her, that his past has been filled with empty affairs. Can she trust him? Instead of making the answer obvious, the film shares with us this aching secret: we don't know. We rarely know if love is going to work out, and if the wisest of us were asked to sit Margy down and explain things to her we wouldn't know what to say.

A lot of this intimacy has to do with camera work. The Internet Movie Database credits this to Hal Mohr, but someone else is credited on the screen. When I saw the name I grabbed my notepad to write it down, but unfortunately I see now that I wrote down "John Seitz," the name of a nineteenth-century merchant I once wrote about. I think the screen credited John something-else, but definitely not Hal Mohr. This is a pity, because someone deserves praise for the wonderful camera work and also for the lighting (which is uncredited both onscreen and at the IMDb).

At Fox in the early 30s there seems to have been a house style of photography that involved leaving plenty of space around the characters. This is a feature of all the early Gaynor pictures at Fox. This may have been due to economy, as many scenes in the other pictures use just one camera, panning left and right as characters enter and leave. Such a tactic would require keeping a certain distance from the actors. But in State Fair the distance speaks of the film's respect for the characters.

In one scene on the fourth morning of the fair, for example, Abel jokes to his son that he should pay his buddy room rent, since he's been sleeping at his place the last few nights. Abel does not know that this "buddy" is a woman, an entertainer from the side show. The camera holds back far enough for us to see Wayne standing behind his father, much discomfited, even while we see Abel's pleasure with his own joke, Melissa's blank unconcern, and the cozy home they have made of the tent they brought to the fairgrounds. No knowing cuts from one face to another, no elbow in our shoulder, just enough to make us laugh nervously and not know how to feel.

The film was released in January of 1933, which means it just barely made it before the intensification of censorship that was instituted later that year. Few pre-1933 movies have used their freedom of expression as eloquently, and as responsibly, as State Fair. Wayne falls in love with a woman who tells him from the start that she is "not wild, and not tame. I just do what I want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody." She gets him into bed on the first night of the fair, and on the last day tells him it is over for good, hurting him plenty because he thought he was in love. The beauty is that we not only understand and sympathize with him, we understand her as well. This is a film with malice toward none.

A reviewer on IMDb says the movie is seen on "Fox" every once in a while. I guess he means the regular Fox broadcast network. Other than that, we may have to wait a long time for another opportunity to see this remarkable work.