TY - JOUR
AU - Newsom,, Chad
AB - David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944) is a meandering, three-hour film about one year in the everyday life of an average American household while the father is away at war. The film prompted a flood of letters to Selznick from soldiers who saw in the film not only glimpses of their own homes and families but also a concrete reason to fight or even die in battle. In one of these letters a soldier tells a clumsy, long-winded anecdote that nonetheless ends with a punch. He recalls conversing with a young child and realizing that the child’s sense of reality was largely formed by Hollywood cinema’s image bank. Only a child, he initially assumes, would find such fiction credible. But the soldier then connects this anecdote to his experience of watching Selznick’s film – a movie he finds powerfully realistic: ‘Concluding, might I say that we all have some child[ish] tendencies, for instance in Since You Went Away I was home for over 2 hours […] There’s a lot of G.I.s got to go home with me if only in a picture.’1 While the soldier recognizes this emotion as evidence of ‘childish tendencies’, he still describes the film as creating a believable cinematic vision of home. This dichotomy will recur in critical responses to this film. Yes, it presents an overidealized dream version of the American home, but it does this so convincingly that one cannot help but be moved. Yet how can a film create the feeling of home, an emotion that seems simultaneously individual and collective? Since You Went Away offers an ideal case study to answer such a question, for this film is ‘as specific as the point of a pin and as broad as all outdoors’.2 I argue that Since You Went Away creates a feeling of home by constructing a melodramatic world: a fictional world in which everyday life takes on moral significance. I suggest that while such a feeling of home is not unique to this film, I focus on it here because its epic scope brings into relief the concerns of a larger, overlooked filmmaking trend: the 1940s family melodrama. I begin by discussing the link between melodrama and morality, and go on to clarify how the 1940s family melodrama plays a unique role in melodrama’s ongoing task of moral legibility. I explore how Since You Went Away constructs a convincing melodramatic world by three means: an episodic structure, the accumulation of everyday detail, and the filmmakers’ stylistic choices, such as lighting, framing and blocking. To do so I rely not only on close analysis but also on archival documents that reveal how wartime audiences responded to the film. These articles, reviews, preview cards and letters provide valuable insight into what successfully creates a melodramatic world, and they help bolster the claims that I make not just for this film but also for the 1940s family melodrama more broadly. Finally I consider how the film’s vision of the American home might appear to viewers today, and whether or not its datedness inhibits its emotional resonance. In this essay I use the term ‘melodrama’ to denote not a genre but a mode or sensibility underlying Hollywood cinema – an ‘American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action’.3 Likewise I use the term ‘family melodrama’ simply as a label for American movies that make family and domestic life their central concern, treating family life as more than just the background to romantic pursuit. This idea of melodrama-as-mode stems from the work of Peter Brooks, who is best known for establishing a firm link between melodrama and morality. Brooks argues that in a post-sacred world that lacks a central, unifying moral authority (such as church or monarchy),4 melodrama aspires to moral legibility, working to uncover and recognize virtue.5 It is no coincidence, Brooks writes, that melodrama comes about during the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution, when ‘the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question’ and the ‘explanatory and cohesive force of sacred myth lost its power’.6 Nor should we be surprised, as Linda Williams argues, that melodrama retains its force to this day as the ‘ongoing loss of moral certainty’ continues;7 melodrama works to identify ‘moral good in a world where virtue has become hard to read’.8 Brooks addresses this problem of legibility through his concept of the moral occult, ‘the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality’.9 In other words, melodrama provides us with indexical signs (in the case of movies, filmic details) that point to and reveal a ‘truer, hidden reality’ of Manichean moral conflict.10 Thus the ‘things and gestures of the real world’ are never ‘merely themselves’, but instead metaphorically ‘refer us to the realm of spiritual reality and latent moral meanings’.11 In Since You Went Away, for example, an empty chair is not simply a realistic detail to create the setting of a den: it points to what is missing (the father at war who used to occupy that chair); it makes the spectator feel that loss (the camera lingers on the bodily impression that the chair still carries); and it helps to give a concrete sense of what the father is fighting for (to get back to his home, his family, this very chair). Thus a small detail grows rich with connotation and works to clarify the film’s moral stakes. One finds this longing for significance within the everyday at the heart of the melodramatic imagination, which ‘insists that the ordinary may be the place for the instauration of significance […] that in the right mirror, with the right degree of convexity, our lives matter’.12 Here Brooks’s phrasing helps clarify that, for melodrama, ‘morality’ is a necessarily vague term, referring to no ‘transcendental system of belief’13 but rather to a personal sense of what really matters: ‘the questions how to live, who is justified, who are the innocent, where is villainy at work now, and what drives it’.14 Melodramatic art, then, aids the individual in creating a personal ethics. Yet one particular concept from Brooks’s work has been overlooked: the ‘melodrama of manners’, which is his term for the adaptation of theatrical melodrama to the nineteenth-century novel (for Brooks, Balzac and Henry James).15 Film scholars have probably not picked up on this term because it does not apply to classic examples of family melodramas from the 1950s and 1960s, which have received critical attention in a way the 1940s variant has not. For Brooks the melodrama of manners involves a ‘dual engagement with the representation of man’s social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence’.16 The melodrama of manners involves a dialectic of document and vision: it documents life’s everyday, material details, but insists those details point to a realm of moral value and ‘make the world we inhabit one charged with meaning’.17 All melodramas seek moral legibility, but the melodrama of manners does so via the everyday. To this end, I argue that 1940s family melodramas create the feeling of home by deriving moral significance from everyday details. In doing so they construct what I call a ‘melodramatic world’. To explain this concept, I apply Brooks’s insights to Since You Went Away, the paradigmatic example of the 1940s family melodrama. Selznick’s film operates on a grander, more epic scale, and with higher, more apparent moral stakes, than other 1940s family melodramas – it is a film that clearly reveals how it works. But while I treat Since You Went Away as an exemplar, my claims apply to any number of 1940s family melodramas, from Mrs Miniver (William Wyler, 1942) and Meet Me in St Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), to Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) and Life with Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947). All melodramas seek moral legibility, but the melodrama of manners accesses the moral occult via the quotidian; an emphasis on the moral stakes of everyday family life unites such films. Consider, for example, Meet Me in St Louis. The film’s story concerns a turn-of-the-century Midwestern family, the Smiths, who may have to move to New York. News of this ‘crisis’ – the fear that they will have to leave home and friendships behind to move to the dreaded city – does not occur, however, until around the seventy-minute mark, almost two-thirds of the way through the film’s running time. The first seventy minutes work to create a vivid sense of home; that home comes under threat, and then the final third of the film grows increasingly nostalgic until, at the last minute, the father decides to keep the family in St Louis after all. The film’s episodic plot focuses on minor, everyday situations (waiting for a phone call, turning the lights out at night, flirting with the boy next door, having ice cream with your family) and gives them an exaggerated importance. For example, the film’s first twenty-seven minutes revolve around one of the Smith daughters waiting for a phone call from her beau. If one reads such a description and has not seen the film, its attempt to generate drama out of decidedly undramatic situations seems to border on the absurd. But if one experiences the film’s duration – spending time with this family, experiencing the rhythms and events of their life – these scenes in which nothing happens take on a deeply felt significance when this idyll is threatened by the potential move to New York. 1940s family melodramas often turn on such slight plot points, even if they do not often extend to the entire film as they do here: a father’s baptism in Life with Father, Christmas in Little Women or Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940), a schoolgirl crush in Margie (Henry King, 1946). And when major events such as war intervene in Mrs Miniver and Since You Went Away, the time spent with these families in their homes causes the sense of loss to be experienced even more profoundly. What, however, makes the 1940s family melodrama distinct from its later, more popular iteration? Family and domestic life have always been privileged topics in the study of film melodrama. In fact, after film studies ‘discovered’ the family melodramas of Douglas Sirk in 1971,18 ‘a whole genre came into view’.19 And by the time of Thomas Elsaesser’s foundational essay, ‘Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama’, was published in 1972, ‘the family melodrama’ became a category with its own golden age (1940–63) and expert practitioners (Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, George Stevens, Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan).20 Yet despite the fact that Elsaesser mentions the Hollywood family melodrama between 1940 and 1963, only the later years (1955 to 1963) and a small number of films and filmmakers receive extended discussion. Looking today at these films – Written on the Wind, Home from the Hill, Bigger than Life – it is not hard to see why they attracted, and still attract, much attention. They emphasize intense family conflicts much more than everyday detail. While we recognize daily life typically as a mundane affair, in the 1950s domestic melodrama it might well involve adultery, crime, murder, incest, peripeteia, or similar excitements. These films present a version of family life saturated with high drama, so that a daughter’s uninhibited desire kills her father (Written on the Wind), sexual repression causes insanity (Splendor in the Grass), and the mere choice of which curtains to hang can prompt mental anguish and send lives into uproar (The Cobweb). For Elsaesser the 1950s domestic melodrama ‘is perhaps the most highly elaborated, complex mode of cinematic signification that the American cinema has ever produced’.21 He devotes his attention to the family melodramas of the 1950s because of their expressive use of colour, widescreen, deep focus, sound and conscious manipulation of style to tell stories of the emotionally impaired lives of families in various states of crisis.22 Barry Langford writes that Elsaesser’s essay ‘set the terms for the next 20 years’ engagement with the genre’, and led to the equation of family melodrama with melodrama itself, its most significant iteration.23 1950s family melodramas, with their potent combination of stylistic excess, gender dynamics and pop-Freudianism, proved fertile ground in the 1970s for a newly politicized film studies, which emphasized ideology and antirealist style, and borrowed methodologically from psychoanalysis and feminism. Because much melodrama scholarship did not depart from Elsaesser’s focus, the 1940s domestic melodramas have received scant attention. In their visions of everyday, albeit idealized family life, the images of domesticity in these films differ considerably from those of later years. In the 1940s, melodrama’s typical concern with the recognition of virtue goes far beyond any one character. These films put the virtue of the American home itself at stake, and then work to make that virtue visible. It is this characteristic that lends the era its uniqueness, distinguishing its films from the more celebrated family melodramas of the 1950s and early 1960s, which frequently treat the home and domestic life as the source of psychic trauma. When James Dean exclaims to his parents ‘You’re tearing me apart!’, in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), his accusation could function as a slogan for the 1950s melodrama, a far cry from the family’s role as a source of meaning, comfort and stable identity in the 1940s. The 1940s melodrama creates the feeling of home to which those later films seek to return. If, as Williams suggests, a central question of melodrama is whether or not we will ‘get back to a time before it is too late’, the 1940s family melodrama works to render that time vividly.24 If melodramas seek ‘a return to a “golden past”’, these films give us a cinematic vision of that Eden.25 Yet moving beyond film studies’ interest in melodrama, the connection between melodrama and family has existed since the form’s beginning. Melodrama emerges historically at a time when the family takes on newfound significance, as we move from an era in which religion and social class provide one’s sense of cohesion to one in which the family takes over that function.26 This transition occurs alongside the rise of capitalism in the seventeenth century, producing a ‘split between the personal and productive’.27 Chuck Kleinhans elaborates, ‘Given that one’s sense of identity and social worth could not be achieved in productive labor under capitalism, the division of social from economic life meant that the family and the area of interpersonal relations took on a huge burden’.28 This new burden – the pressure on the family to provide ultimate satisfaction – falls to melodrama for resolution: Under capitalism people’s personal needs are restricted to the sphere of the family, of personal life, and yet the family cannot meet the demands of being all that the rest of society is not. This basic contradiction forms the raw material of melodrama.29 We see this contradiction – of domestic life failing to live up to its promises – on display in full force in the 1950s, but the family melodramas of the 1940s successfully create a vision of home in which domestic life possesses a transformative, restorative power. But what led to this trend of family melodramas in the 1940s? Firstly, Hollywood responds to financial success, and the box-office and critical triumphs of The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) and especially Mrs Miniver no doubt led producers to realize A-class features about families could do major business. Before the 1940s the most extended treatment of family life occurred in MGM’s Andy Hardy films, a series of B-movie comedies; now, however, that same topic became the subject for big-budget, star-studded features. Secondly, the trend demonstrates studios’ characteristic responsiveness to audience demographics: the baby boom did not start after the war but in the early 1940s, as the marriage age, marriage-rate and birth-rate increased.30 In other words, more people were married and having children at a younger age than before, and it is understandable why marriage and family life became a popular film subject as America became a ‘family-centered culture’.31 Witness, for example, the transformation of the glamorous gods and goddesses of 1930s cinema into 1940s fathers and mothers: Cary Grant becomes Mr Blandings, Joan Crawford becomes Mildred Pierce, and so on. Finally, and most importantly, the 1940s saw the emergence of what Elaine Tyler May calls the ‘domestic ideology’.32 Considering the fundamental threats and fears that people living in the 1940s had faced, or soon would face – the Depression, war, the Bomb – it makes sense that family life and the mythic security it provides would suddenly take on a new ideological value. With the onset of World War II, and later the Cold War, Americans were well poised to embrace domesticity in the midst of the terrors of the atomic age […] The family seemed to be the one place where people could control their destinies and perhaps even shape the future […] The home represented a source of meaning and security in a world run amok.33 In an era she describes as ‘profoundly domestic’,34 May writes that ‘Americans were receptive to emotional appeals to home and hearth’.35 It is no surprise, then, that movies such as Mrs Miniver, Meet Me in St Louis and Since You Went Away proved immensely popular entertainment for 1940s audiences. For contemporary viewers, Since You Went Away’s success may seem curious: it runs for nearly three hours, focuses on everyday life, and lacks the sensation found in other family melodramas of the era (such as the action scenes of Mrs Miniver or the musical numbers of Meet Me in St Louis). The film covers a year in the domestic life of Tim and Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert) and their two teenage daughters, Jane (Jennifer Jones) and Brig (Shirley Temple). Tim never appears, except in photographs, but three other men figure prominently into this story: the Colonel (Monty Wooley), a prickly boarder who rents a room in the Hilton home; Tony (Joseph Cotten), a Navy lieutenant and Tim’s best friend, who spends his leave with the Hiltons, always flirting with Anne (the proverbial ‘one who got away’) and providing a dreamy object of affection for Jane and Brig; and finally Bill Smollett (Robert Walker), the Colonel’s meek grandson who falls in love with Jane in the last days before he heads off to combat. In addition to these major characters, Hattie McDaniel plays the Hilton’s maid Fidelia, and Agnes Moorehead appears as the vain socialite Emily Hawkins, a woman for whom the war figures only as a social inconvenience. We live with these characters for the film’s entire running time, and their interactions comprise the film’s only content. While this description may not sound compelling, reviewers and audiences in 1944 responded with an overwhelming consensus that Since You Went Away had successfully created the impression of everyday American life in a way few other movies had managed. One critic refers to the film as a ‘human document’, while another admires how it ‘[captures] an intimacy beyond the documentary and a truth that belies the fiction’.36 Audiences responded likewise, calling it ‘a living document of our times’,37 and praising its naturalness and focus on the everyday: ‘One felt they were watching the every day happenings of a real family’, or as another puts it, the ‘living habits of Mr Average American’.38 Such praise, of course, was not unanimous. Terry Ramsaye comments that the Hilton Home ‘is hardly typical or average American’,39 a view seconded by James Agee: ‘If it is not an average US reality, it is an average US dream’.40 In their analysis of the film, Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black suggest that the film succeeded because it offered viewers a dream rather than grim, wartime realism.41 While I concur with this – for surely all Hollywood movies offer a dream version of reality – I also argue that audiences responded to Since You Went Away because it gives that dream the imprimatur of realism. Even though a relatively small number of Americans could identify fully with the film’s setting (the white, upper-middle-class, suburban, Midwestern home), many nevertheless responded to what they perceived as the film’s realism; the film not only creates the impression of reality, but forces it to ‘yield [moral] meaning’.42 In this way it successfully constructs a melodramatic world, and it does so through three means: an episodic structure, the accumulation of everyday detail, and the filmmakers’ stylistic choices (including lighting, framing and blocking). Firstly the film creates a melodramatic world through its episodic plot structure, which emphasizes ‘a mosaic-like pattern of familiar intimacies’.43 While there is a story arc – one year in the life of the Hilton family – the film mostly contains a series of loosely connected scenes, incidents and ellipses, often without a clear connection to the previous or following scenes: a family evening in the living room, a dance, a date night, a train ride, a birthday party, a game of charades, a conversation, and so on. Take, for example, Bill and Jane’s date night, which occurs at a point when Bill has been offscreen for almost half an hour, during which time Jane has directed her affections primarily towards Tony. In other words the date just happens; it is not the outgrowth of some previous scene. We see them first at a bowling alley, where a confrontation soon erupts when a confident, handsome sailor (Guy Madison) laughs while Bill is bowling and then competes with him for Jane’s attention. A standoff ensues, complete with low-key lighting. The sailor, Hal, tells Bill he is just playing around and trying to be friendly, now coming across as less self-assured and more as a lonely man awkwardly seeking attention. At this point Bill trips, passes out, and then wakes up thinking he has won a fight. Immediately there is a dissolve to a street scene, with the three now walking together, pausing to look in a shop window and having a friendly conversation – all tension is resolved. Shortly Hal announces he needs to catch a bus to get back to his base; when one pulls up he boards it and is thereafter out of the picture, never seen or mentioned again. After he departs, Jane and Bill walk to a soda fountain and Jane questions Bill about his timidity, for she has noticed, as have we, that he contrasts sharply with other servicemen in the picture – Hal, Tony and especially the Colonel, his grandfather. Through their conversation, Jane learns that Bill has failed to live up to his family’s tradition of militant masculinity and is very uncomfortable talking about his ‘weakness’. She senses his nervousness and suggests they continue their conversation back at the Hilton home. Once there, they sit on the back porch, and Bill opens up to reveal more details: he was kicked out of West Point; his family is ashamed of him; and, most importantly, he is living out his grandfather’s dream for his life instead of his own. While he fears how Jane will take this information, she finds his sensitivity endearing and in this moment her romantic interest in him begins. As her affection grows, so does his confidence. As a coda to this sequence, we then witness a scene the next morning as Jane helps her mother prepare the Colonel’s breakfast and decides to confront him about the way he treats his grandson. A heated argument follows, but then the scene ends as the film transitions to Jane’s high-school graduation. This sequence, which involves four scenes and takes up seventeen minutes of screen time, is indicative of the film as a whole, with casual pacing, minor crises and a loose narrative thread tying the sequence together. That thread enhances characterization but leads to little onscreen action. The whole film works on a principle of addition rather than causality: this happens, then this happens, and so on. To understand how critics and audiences responded to the film’s meandering plot, it helps to look at some of the pre-release press that would have primed audiences’ expectations of what the film would deliver. From reading the press, a viewer would have known certain key facts: the film is Selznick’s follow-up to Gone With the Wind; it features more extras than that film did (5035 compared to 2500); there are more speaking parts than in Gone With the Wind (205 compared to 55); the film contains seven major stars compared to four; the film is three hours long, shorter than Gone With the Wind, but the script was longer (300 pages compared to 244).44 In other words, if you knew anything about the film, your sense would have been that if Gone With the Wind was big, Since You Went Away was going to be bigger. If Gone With the Wind was an epic-length, star-driven, romantic drama about the Civil War, viewers expected the same from Since You Went Away – just with a different war. The actual film, then, surprised viewers by being a drifting, three-hour ‘flood of incident’.45 For some the film’s length and episodic structure were cause for complaint. As Howard Barnes of The New York Herald Tribune comments, ‘The story is so slight that one wonders how ever a writer-producer could have expanded it to its inordinate length’.46 In other words, the movie’s intimate subject matter did not merit its epic running time. In preview cards, audiences tended to be fairly generous but were sometimes divided over the picture’s length. But at the multiple previews given just before the film’s official release, ‘not too long’ won out over ‘too long’, often by a significant margin.47 Most comments about length and episodic structure tended to be more in the nature of a curious observation rather than a complaint; the movie that was supposed to be Gone With the Wind II proved different from people’s expectations: ‘Take note also that whereas this is whopped up as a sort of successor to Gone with the Wind, it is nothing of the kind. It has no spectacular effects, no battle scenes. It stays very much within intimate range.’48 Ivan Spear of Boxoffice provides the most extensive comparison of the two films: The picture is woven of vastly different material. Where GWTW stimulated the emotions like a hot, flashing sheet of colorful lightning, this warms them like the embers of one’s own hearth. Where GWTW dealt seethingly, spectacularly, and oftimes harshly with an era of national psychology which Americans know only through their history books, this treats softly, humanly, understandingly with the life, the thoughts, the joys and the sorrows of today’s Americans.49 And while ‘there is no spectacle in the picture in the accepted meaning of that term’,50 some praised the film for avoiding the ‘usual fireworks which one finds all too often in Hollywood “epics”’.51 The film ‘might not seem profoundly stirring’52 or have ‘no real dramatic surprise’,53 but these observations were seen as a reflection of the film’s quality, what made it unique. The film told the story of quotidian family life, a subject matter that, as one viewer notes, ‘we always look for, hope for, in a movie, but seldom get’.54 Furthermore, most agreed that even if they felt the picture needed to be cut, they realized that a shorter film would undermine the film’s meaning. As one reviewer writes, ‘Even the digressions give, for the most part, strength to the general picture’.55 Sherwin Kane of Motion Picture Daily describes the movie as ‘incident chained to and piled upon incident, much of it relevant and essential, some of it irrelevant but diverting or touching’, but he offers an accurate rationale behind the movie’s method: the film needs its ‘broad canvas’ so that it includes enough wartime experiences, settings and character types to attract a wide audience.56 And for a movie with both blockbuster budget and aspirations, this strategy was a smart one, and paid off – the movie grossed $4.92 million, making it one of the top-earning films of 1944–45.57 By far the most interesting response to the film’s structure comes from a soldier who attended a preview in San Bernardino. In response to the question, ‘Was the action of the picture entirely clear?’ he replies: Action was generally clear throughout the picture. However, it too often deviated from the path of the plot with sequences that frequently seemed to be entirely irrelevant to the outcome of the story. The effect was disturbing, in that it clogged up action and made the picture ‘drag’. If you were riding down Sunset Blvd. with a friend – with a view toward stopping off at the Troc for a long, cool drink – and this friend insisted on driving down every side street along the way to show you a Victory Garden; to point out a window with three blue stars in it; to meet a soldier just home on furlough; to stop in and watch a bowling game – you would feel pretty disturbed about it and a little confused. Well, that was the trouble with Since You Went Away – too many side streets.58 One could find no better analogy for the film’s plot structure. And yet these ‘side streets’ are essential: ‘It’s episodic, true, but the episodes are cleverly interwoven, leaving one feeling he is watching life as it is really lived’.59 A film any shorter or less episodic would not create the same impression of reality that exists in the complete, three-hour film. For the episodic plot, extended to such a length, gives viewers the sense of having lived with these characters. While many reviewers and moviegoers suggest the film could be cut, few agree on what, if anything, should be cut. On preview cards, viewers were given the option to list scenes that should be further edited. While the opening and hangar dance scenes often received more votes than others, each preview resulted in a laundry list, with most scenes getting just a few votes. In other words there was no consensus, which confirms Selznick’s success in producing a film that had something for everyone. Louella Parsons recommends cutting ‘incidental scenes and yet, it is the very details that make this what it is’.60 Another reviewer recommends cutting, but resists his own suggestion with an ellipsis – ‘But the detail …’.61 Because scenes are often tied together so loosely, there is more of an emphasis on detail within scenes than on some extended action taking place. It is the film’s ‘cumulative effect of small detail’ that offers a second means by which the film creates a melodramatic world.62 As one reviewer comments, ‘The story advances no thought that is new […] but what it draws from the commonplace is little short of tremendous’.63 We see the film’s method announced in its much-celebrated opening: a long-take tracking shot that not only showcases objects in the Hilton home but also visually narrates: an empty leather chair, an impression in the seat from frequent and recent use; a morose, loyal bulldog (named Soda) at the foot of the chair; a package containing a rush delivery of military garments. The same shot continues, but now moves across a desk, revealing the following objects: a calendar (Tuesday, January 12); a set of car keys atop a telegram, which calls for Captain Timothy Hilton, of Suburban Drive, to report for duty in Louisiana; a placard commemorating a honeymoon fishing trip (August 23, 1925); a pair of bronze baby shoes sitting on a stack of magazines, doubling as a pencil holder; a houseplant; and, finally, a recent portrait of Brig, Anne and Jane. As the camera reaches the end of the desk, we can now see through a front window (complete with blue star banner) as a car arrives outside in the rain. The first cut then occurs as the car’s sound rouses Soda; he lumbers to the window, lifts himself up by his two front paws to look outside, but then goes back to lie down once he sees that it is Anne who has arrived home, not Tim. Before Anne even enters, the Hilton home has already become alive, its objects communicating to the viewer the value of what Tim has left behind and the loneliness of the home without him. In one effortless shot, the home is filled with meaning. This technique corresponds to how melodrama works: ‘Significant things and gestures are necessarily metaphoric in nature because they must refer to and speak of something else. Everything appears to bear the stamp of meaning, which can be expressed, pressed out, from it.’64 Next we get an expanded view of the home’s interior as Anne arrives, and the film offers her perspective through voiceover narration. As she enters the front door and pauses to look around, we hear her commentary: ‘This is the moment I’ve dreaded. Coming back to our home … alone.’ We learn that Tim has only been gone an hour, and as she remarks that the house feels empty without him, she removes her hat and coat and looks down to see a recent photograph of him. After she looks at the photograph, she holds onto it as she heads upstairs, pausing halfway up as she catches a glimpse of an older portrait hanging on the wall. She takes the photograph down, placing it in her other hand, and heads into her bedroom, pausing as she enters and sees their two twin beds. She walks over to her dresser, placing the photos on either side of a mirror, and then opens a book of poetry, which contains Tim’s pipe as a bookmark. The ending of the poem reads, ‘And if tomorrow shall be sad, or never come at all, we’ve had at least – today!’ As she finishes reading the poem she manages a slight smile, saying ‘We’ve had at least – today’. She then walks towards Tim’s bed, picking up his bathrobe, which lies across it. As she clings to the robe, she promises, ‘I’ll try to keep all the good things as they were. I’ll keep the past alive. Like a warm room for you to come back to.’ At this point she not only weeps onscreen but on the voiceover as well, though as she does so we hear shouts offscreen from Brig and Jane, announcing they are home. She wipes her tears and composes herself, putting on a happy, motherly front. In these opening moments Selznick has built a scrapbook of homely detail, one that gives us specific information about the Hilton family yet also remains general enough for anyone to identify with the images of togetherness, affection and loyalty. As one reviewer responds, ‘Here is a house to be lived in indeed!’65 And these details are not simply there in the background to create atmosphere: the camera emphasizes them and characters engage with them. Thus the film treats the objects and rituals of everyday domestic life not simply as a backdrop but as key ingredients of its home-front vision. Throughout the film’s first fifteen minutes, Selznick continues to amass details of home: another shot of a lonely Soda, this time climbing into his master’s empty bed; additional closeups of family photographs; a view of nightly bedtime routines; a love letter hidden under Anne’s pillow, written that very day; a shot of Tim’s empty bed; preparation of the girls’ lunch for school; the grocer’s home delivery; a nighttime game of gin rummy in the living room; a delicate snowfall outside with a roaring fire inside. A turning point occurs as Brig, eager to contribute to the war effort, hatches a plan for the Hiltons to rent out rooms to soldiers who need a place to stay. Anne and Jane initially scoff at the idea, laughing off the suggestion that they turn their home into a boarding house. But Brig pushes them: ‘But mother, listen to me. Why shouldn’t we rent a room? There’s such a terrible shortage.’ ‘It’s perfectly ridiculous’, says Anne; ‘It’s communism!’, declares Jane. Brig then makes her plea personal: ‘It might be sort of like having Pop back … Suppose Pop were looking for a room in some crowded city like this. And suppose there was a nice family like ours that had three bedrooms for three people. Don’t you think it would be just malicious of them not to want to rent a room to Pop?’ Anne grows exasperated at Brig’s suggestion, but says she’ll think about it; we see her the very next morning on the phone placing the ad. We hear her ask that ‘fireplace and bay window’ be the important details included as part of the ad and, at the advertiser’s suggestion, adds ‘homey atmosphere’. The film has worked already to create the feeling of the all-American home, and behind Brig’s idea lies the notion that it would be not only a waste, but immoral, to hoard instead of board. Brig espouses the wartime rationing mentality, in which you give up something small to support a bigger cause. All of the house’s homey details now have a function: to provide the home experience to soldiers separated from their own abodes. And soon three soldiers will be welcomed into the Hilton home: the Colonel, the official boarder; Tony, who stays only for a few days; and Bill, who does not stay there but whose last experience of home is provided by the Hiltons. Yet Anne’s ad is directed not just diegetically but extradiegetically, with the film working on a figurative level to provide the feeling of home to soldiers viewing the movie. The film itself suggests such a reading through its title, which contains a useful ambiguity; the ‘you’ technically refers to the film’s missing husband, and the film itself is designed as a letter to the absent husband. But that same ‘you’ also adds a discursiveness to the film; its snapshots of home-front life are offered as a ‘letter’ to any serviceman, creating a vivid portrait of what they left behind and what they are fighting for. We see this same double meaning of the personal pronoun in an advertisement for the film, the ‘you’ here addressing the magazine’s female readers: You might have written the book, Since You Went Away, which is the correspondence of a wife to her soldier husband. For your letters may be keeping alive the picture of such a home for someone far away. And this picture will sustain him.66 Notice, as well, the double meaning of ‘picture’ here, referring not only to the image of home found in the letters the film is based upon, but also to the film itself and the way it ‘portrays the things American boys are fighting for and wish to come home to’.67 In this way the film fulfils a major mission of wartime entertainment: Widespread war-propaganda efforts called on the nation to support the men who were fighting to protect their families back home. To Americans who were steeped in an isolationist tradition, suspicious and not sure about the stakes in Europe, these appeals were more than clichés. They provided tangible reasons to live, and even to die.68 We see this viewpoint in a line Tony delivers to Anne late in the film, when he explains his reason for joining the Navy. He laughed at those who joined because of ‘noble motives, The Four Freedoms, and all the rest of it. But I found out that it all added up to a simple, corny phrase that I couldn’t laugh off: home sweet home.’ Tony’s sentiment was repeated in letters Selznick received from soldiers: one remarks that the film provides a portrait of ‘America’s most tangible asset, the American home’,69 while a sergeant who trained soldiers thanks Selznick for making a movie that ‘goes a long way toward making men realize what they are training here to fight for and protect’.70 Melodrama personalizes, and fighting for one’s home (or to get back home) provides a more compelling reason for ‘why we fight’ than any abstract or more political rationale. Yet to give ‘home’ the moral legibility that melodrama demands, a film must construct that home via concrete details; Since You Went Away and other 1940s family melodramas work to make that concept tangible. By examining letters written to Selznick, we see that the film successfully created the feeling of home for many viewers. As one letter puts it, ‘It really is home’.71 A husband remarks that he and his wife ‘were charmed by the home-and-family feeling it epitomized’ and ‘thrilled in seeing so finely presented a way of life that we ourselves are living’.72 One soldier even thanked Selznick for making a movie that provides the best answer to ‘“What are we fighting for?” – our American home’.73 Very quickly we have moved from discussing a chair, some photographs and a gin rummy game to discussing the moral value of the American home – such is the work of melodrama. We should not be surprised, however, because the film announces in its opening epigraph that it will derive ethical significance from domestic life: ‘This is the story of the Unconquerable Fortress: The American Home … 1943’. Here we see the metaphoric nature of the melodrama of manners beginning to work: you think you simply see an average American home (document), but it is really a battlefront where something grander is at stake (vision). One private’s letter describes precisely this move from document to vision that the film encourages: [The film] has made me realize more fully what we fight to preserve in our country, but more than that, it has given me a picture of the home front which makes me want to try more than ever to be the kind of soldier who is deserving of the support [we’re given].74 The sentiments expressed by this soldier and others do not stem simply from the film’s episodic plot or its mass of detail; a melodramatic world would be lifeless if not realized via a compelling, convincing and appropriate stylistic technique. Since You Went Away offers an interesting opportunity to examine melodramatic film style because one of its two credited cinematographers, Stanley Cortez, wrote an essay on cinematographic method inspired by his work on the film. The essay, ‘Psychological photography’, has a context: Cortez wrote it for publication in Popular Science as a guide for amateur cinematographers on how to adapt the film’s techniques to home movies. For Cortez ‘psychological photography’ has a simple meaning: ‘the treatment of situations that unconsciously takes the audience through the emotional experience of the actors as though the onlookers were living the parts’.75 An everyday domestic event ‘represents a dramatic situation’, but you need proper technique to elevate the scene from the everyday to the dramatic.76 He explains in detail: During my years behind the camera, I have come slowly to the conclusion that sound and light are only different aspects of the same emotion-moving quality. We have long known that allegro passages generally produce sensations of lightness and gayety; largo passages, sensations of depression and sadness. Translated from music to light, bright lights make for comedy and fantasy; long, heavy shadows for mystery, melodrama, murder. By adapting light and shadows properly to the scene before your camera, you can attain dramatic sequences representing living, day-by-day experience. Thus they lose nothing in being transferred from real life to the screen. Indeed, they gain something, and strike with greater impact than do the original things and actions themselves.77 Cortez argues that film style has two functions: to set the mood and to establish realism; or, in other words, to affect the spectator’s emotions and to place the viewer into the scene.78 It is clear from his article that he is using ‘realism’ in two senses, referring both to the capture of realistic details from domestic life, and also to an emotional realism, which involves making the audience feel as a character does. In the rest of the essay he discusses two basic approaches that correspond to these functions. First he explains how to modulate emotions using light and shadow. As an example he uses the scene in which Anne, Jane and Brig attempt to reunite briefly with Tim. They have received a telegram from him that says he has a short window of time between trains to see them before he ships out. They take a train to the city and go to the designated hotel lobby to meet him (figure 1). Cortez describes the scene: They are gay, in anticipation of a long-awaited reunion with their husband and father. You not only see the happiness on their faces under the bright lighting, which dispels shadows and illuminates their faces above the level of the background; you actually live their gayety with them.79 They page for Tim but there is no response, and before long they receive a telegram to say they have just missed him. Sadness immediately strikes, and the lighting changes accordingly as they turn away from the front desk and head out through the lobby: ‘Now, the lights fade. A single light above the door casts three long shadows as the three slowly retrace their steps. Long, sad shadows which fasten like heavy weights to their ankles’ (figure 2).80 Through the dialectic of light and shadow, Cortez remarks, you can make the audience ‘feel the emotional drag of such a scene’.81 He adds that nothing complex happens here, and that at home you could accomplish the same technique with ease. Lighting allows one to draw ‘dramatic interest’ from an otherwise common scene and even prompt an ‘emotional transition’ for the audience.82 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide All images from Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944), Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide All images from Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944), Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Cortez gives only this one simple example, but the film uses lighting to establish mood from the film’s opening. A five-minute overture plays before the credits begin, accompanied by a series of seven still images: a high-angle shot of Jane standing alone at the train station, a beam of light casting a long shadow; a nighttime view of the Hilton home, shrouded in darkness except for lights by the patio where Jane and Bill conclude their first date; a high-angle shot of a hangar dance; the iconic tableau shot of the Hilton women in their living room, the daughters (and Soda) listening as Anne reads a letter from Tim; another high-angle view of the hangar dance; an image of Bill and Jane’s final embrace in the shadowy train station; and to close, the first shot is repeated. Of course at this point a viewer may recognize the stars themselves, but does not yet know the characters or the context for these images. We must assume, then, that these shots were selected for their visual qualities and mood. Their sequencing demonstrates care, and the most intimate shot, of the family, comes fourth, at the heart of the montage (figure 3). The other shots’ contents create a visual rhyme: the first and seventh feature an isolated woman, images of loneliness bookending the series; the second and sixth show a couple; the third and fifth show a crowd. Selznick has selected for this overture some of the most expressionistic and strikingly composed images from the film, linked by a common theme (people surrounded by darkness) and mood (melancholy). Even the two shots here of a couple are tempered by lighting and camera setup, creating images that appear both romantic and sombre. Once the overture ends, the credits temporarily alter this mood, scrolling over a roaring fireplace in the Hilton home, adding a warmth that was lacking in the colder overture. Thus before the movie even properly begins, lighting has already told us the story: in these dark times, the home remains a source of light. This noir effect continues throughout the film, with expressionistic lighting often applied to scenes of everyday home life, not just its pressured emotional peaks. A pervasive darkness has descended upon the home, and by the end of the film there is a complete contrast between the lightness of the scenes (a birthday party, a game of charades, Christmas festivities) and the darkness of the lighting, creating a melancholic mood in which the viewer never feels completely at ease. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide After he discusses mood/emotion, Cortez turns his attention to realism, and for this second approach to psychological photography he discusses how to ‘bring those who view your picture inside your home, and not merely [show] them its interior’.83 Cortez recommends three steps. First one must pay attention to ‘the set and its dressing. You plan to make a home movie, therefore the dramatic qualities of home should be emphasized’.84 For Cortez sets and props should reveal character, and I discussed earlier in this essay how the film’s homey details function to narrate. Next one must choose wisely where to place the camera so that ‘the architecture and forms of the room are brought out’.85 Cortez emphasizes that one does not simply film a room, but should work ‘to create the maximum emotional effect’.86 To that end the goal is specific: ‘You are not looking into the house; you actually are in it’.87 For his third step he borrows from his previous points about lighting: ‘Arrange lighting to fit both the mood and audience reaction desired’.88 Cortez gives no compelling example of how these three steps combine, so I offer a close reading of one of the film’s key scenes, in which the film musters its technical powers to bring Anne to an emotional and moral epiphany. The scene begins with a birthday party for the Colonel, but ends with Anne’s realization that she is not sacrificing enough for the war effort. The scene opens as Anne, Brig, Jane and the Colonel sit around the dining room table. The women sing ‘Happy Birthday’ as Fidelia walks in with the cake, illuminated by candles. In this initial long shot, the house’s interior architecture frames the table in a centre box; candles on the table and cake provide the only light, and the rest of the image is completely dark (figure 4). Yet despite the chiaroscuro lighting, this festive subject matter means that the scene offers a moment of levity. But just as the Colonel lifts a knife to cut the first slice, the doorbell rings. Jane goes to answer the door, and for a second the viewer fears the worst. Before she opens it we see a view of the door from outside, framed over the shoulder of a uniformed man, possibly the bearer of tragic news. Instead it is Tony, on leave again. Everyone warmly welcomes Tony and invites him to participate in the evening’s festivities. After the cake, the action progresses to the living room. While some shadows persist, this moment is considerably brighter than the previous scene in the dining room. The gaiety continues as Tony performs a magic trick, but soon the doorbell rings again, and this time it is the dreaded Emily Hawkins. She and Anne were once close friends in less trying times, even having cocktails together early in the film, but as the movie progresses and wartime stresses increase, Emily’s snobbery, disingenuousness and superficial patriotism push Anne’s patience to its limit. Before Emily arrives, we are frequently shown all the characters grouped together in a single, casually organized, deep-focus shot. Yet once she enters, battle lines are drawn: Emily on the left, and a wall formed by characters both sitting and standing on the right (figure 5). It only takes a few seconds before Emily becomes offensive. Asking Jane about her work at the hospital, Emily huffs, ‘What a revolting idea for an unmarried girl of your age! Of course, our whole code of living seems to be completely ignored these days.’ Initially Anne tries to smooth things over, but matters quickly go downhill. Emily apologizes to Jane, but only by placing the blame on her upbringing, which visibly angers Anne. Eventually Jane reprimands Emily and boldly defends herself, even earning a ‘Well done, Jane!’ from the Colonel. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hawkins’, Jane shouts, ‘Please don’t worry if our precious, well-bred hands come in contact with those mangled bodies!’ Jane and Brig exit the scene, running up the stairs. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Jane’s emotional outburst registers so powerfully because of the subtle technique at work. The scene takes place in a single, uncut shot, which lasts around a minute. The shot begins as Jane sits centre-frame on a chair’s arm, with Brig standing to her left and Anne sitting in the chair itself. Emily remains seated on the far left. As soon as Jane becomes impassioned she stands up, towering over Emily and dominating the frame. Anne tries to defuse the situation by standing up, taking Jane by the arm, and suggesting she is tired and that she go upstairs. Obediently Jane starts walking toward the stairs, but pauses, turns around to face Emily again, and resumes her defence. As she does so the camera tracks in quickly to frame Jane in a medium closeup, accentuating the moment’s high emotions. As she continues to speak, her shouts becoming hysterical, the camera never moves closer but pans slightly right to keep Jane and Brig in the frame as they move towards the stairs. As they run upstairs, Anne, who has been offscreen right, steps back into the frame’s centre. As she fills the empty space, we first see her from behind, but as Emily begins berating her (‘What on earth has happened that you would permit a child of yours to talk that way!’), she turns around sharply. A rack focus accompanies this movement, as the camera lens readjusts to keep Anne’s face in clear focus. With this added sharpness comes resolve. Emily now enters the frame to confront her, but Anne has finally had enough and starts to tell her off, expressing disgust that she has ever known Emily. In a two shot, Emily stands on the left, her face in shadow, and Anne stands on the right, her face illuminated, underscoring how she finally sees clearly for the first time. The long take ends here, but the argument does not. Anne has come to a new understanding, but the film now brings her to a conviction. Emily snidely inquires as to what ‘noble sacrifices you’ve made to give you the privilege of being so self-righteous?’ At the utterance of this line there is a cut to Anne, no longer angry but in a state that resembles shock or sadness. She stands in profile, in a long shot, at the right edge of the frame, facing right, her head and shoulders lowered. She then moves into the foreground of the frame, towards Emily, and behind her Tony and the Colonel come into view, taking up the middleground and background, respectively. The three figures are blocked to form a front that faces off against Emily (figure 6). Anne speaks humbly: I’m afraid that’s just it, Emily. I haven’t really made any sacrifices. I haven’t hoarded and cheated and done all the other selfish, unpatriotic things that you’ve done. But as far as making sacrifices, I’m afraid we’re two of a kind. And the realization of it doesn’t make me very proud or happy. During this final tense moment, Emily’s face is lit with harsh shadows, accentuated by a hat that casts a shadow of its own. Anne, however, is brightly lit, and this lighting corresponds to her epiphany. She has been brought to a point of emotional and moral clarity, and throughout the course of this extended scene, the film’s style – through performance, camera placement, blocking, focus and lighting – has orchestrated this narrative climax in which Anne now speaks the language of melodrama. She believes that she has not suffered or sacrificed enough, and so she decides to act. After Emily storms out, Anne converses with Tony about how she has been living in a dream world but has now awoken – prompted not just by the confrontation with Emily but also by her daughters’ courage and her husband’s sacrifice. She believes in the idea of ‘home sweet home’, she says, but she wants to do something about it. This conversation is soon followed by a dissolve to the next scene: Anne has become a shipyard welder. After a few shots in which we observe her working, we then see her sharing a coffee with a fellow worker she has befriended, named Zofia, who tells Anne of her story as an immigrant – her longing for America (‘the fairy land across the sea’), her son who died before she emigrated, her arrival at Ellis Island, her first view of the Statue of Liberty. She then remarks to Anne, ‘You are what I thought America was’. For Anne that sentence was ‘the most thrilling thing that has ever been said’ to her, and for the film’s melodramatic project it marks the ‘moment of astonishment’: the combination of pathos and action, of sacrifice and doing, that pays off with melodrama’s ‘recognition of virtue’ the moment of moral legibility for which the melodramatic narrative strives.89 Shortly after this scene we reach the film’s conclusion. It is Christmas Eve, 1943, in the Hilton home. Tim has not only been away for nearly a year but is now missing in action. He had, however, left Christmas presents for Anne, Jane and Brig before he went. It is late at night and Anne, alone, kneels beside the Christmas tree and opens her gift. She removes the ribbon and tissue paper and lifts a powder box out of its wrappings; the musical underscoring suddenly ends as she opens the box and it plays an instrumental version of their song, ‘Together’, whose lyrics we heard much earlier in the film. Anne, moved by her husband’s thoughtfulness, reacts appreciatively to the gift before she hears the song, but once the music begins she becomes temporarily motionless, staring at the object in her hands (figure 7). Almost immediately she breaks down sobbing as the song continues. The music stops as Anne rises to move from the living room to the den. Now Max Steiner’s score begins again, carrying a strain of ‘Together’. As she reaches the den she pauses to look at Tim’s empty leather chair, repeating the film’s opening shot. As if by telepathy, a telephone ring interrupts her stare – Tim is on his way home. For a second time she cannot hold back tears, and clutching the powder box, now a talisman, she runs upstairs, shouting the good news and hugging her daughters. In the film’s final shot, the embracing family are seen framed through an upstairs window as the camera rapidly tracks backwards, assuming a god’s-eye point-of-view. ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ plays on the soundtrack as a final message appears onscreen: ‘Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord’. In three, sentiment-packed minutes, an ordinary activity (opening a present) has gained emotional, even spiritual, power, and a song’s wishful lyrics have been made a reality: this family will be together again. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide For viewers in 1944, this powder box proved one of the film’s most significant details. Selznick received a striking number of letters containing a very specific request: they wanted to know where they could buy the musical powder box. The letters were sometimes straightforward but often they were touching, even heartbreaking: a soldier who listened to that song the night before he left for combat;90 a young woman who had lost her boyfriend;91 a husband who wanted one to console his wife because their only son was recently killed in action.92 The song’s lyrics, while written by the celebrated writing team of Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown, are especially generic and repetitive, with lines such as ‘We strolled the lane together / Laughed at the rain together / Sang love’s refrain together’ and ‘You’re gone from me / But in my memory / We always will be together’.93 And yet that sentiment, embedded in a common object, takes on a weighted significance. In the film a simple powder box becomes charged not only with meaning but with psychic power. Whether hoping for a future reunion or mourning for what they have lost, wartime spectators wanted the powder box not just for a memorial but also, perhaps, to see if the film’s fantasy could carry over into their own lives. In many ways that is Hollywood cinema in a nutshell – mawkishness made emotionally and morally compelling. As Tony commented to Anne, ‘home sweet home’ may be simple and corny, but he ‘couldn’t laugh [it] off’. But does the film maintain any of its emotional potency for viewers today, or do we, unlike Tony, find it all too easy to laugh off? Historical distance alone exaggerates the film’s overidealized portrait of the average American family. The film may usefully document how Americans (or at least Hollywood) envisioned family life during World War II, but no one today would praise the film’s realism, as many viewers of the time did. To better understand how the it holds up today, it helps to look at the film’s most thoughtful and harshest critic, James Agee. In a review for The Nation, he writes that Since You Went Away is not a good film, by any standards I care for, and I would not dare to recommend it to anyone who cares exclusively for good films. But I enjoyed it a good deal, even when I was most dissatisfied with it, and I was very much interested by it.94 Already we see a split between what Agee thinks and what he feels: he knows it is a bad film but he cannot completely dismiss (and even seems upset by) his enjoyment. He is most impressed by the ‘fidelity to detail’, yet the result is not a realistic film but one that contains the ‘superior realism of a dream’.95 In this sense Agee the distinguished critic is no different from the soldier whose letter opened this essay. Both realize there is something false or childish about being moved by the film, but they still cannot help but respond to it emotionally. Furthermore, Agee is troubled by aspects of the film in a way that would strike viewers as legitimate today. The film is a white, upper-middle-class fantasy of family life. Agee wonders, for instance, how many bourgeois women really would become welders. In particular, in what Agee describes as a ‘pelvis-cracking split you can only get away with in a dream’, Hattie McDaniel plays a domestic servant who must find another job because the Hiltons can no longer afford her, but who then comes back to live and work at the Hilton home in her spare time.96 Finally he deplores the film’s nationalism: surely, the ‘wives and children in England, and in Russia, and in China, and even, conceivably, in Germany and in Japan, are missing their men and cherishing their homes very much as we are’.97 He continues, ‘I don’t like to see these phenomena presented as the peculiar glory of one particular country and its one true cause and justification and aim of war’.98 In other words, he detests (or at least fails to understand) melodrama: Hollywood movies address real-world issues exclusively through a personal lens. Yet despite all his criticisms, Agee says that one must acknowledge that the film runs on the ‘law of dream life [… which …] is so broad and deep that one’s sense of reality can, at best, only hope to stay afloat in it’.99 To say that the film distorts and idealizes, however, misses the point. The film works to create the impression of everyday family life, but succeeds at the level of feeling rather than fidelity. And for Since You Went Away and the 1940s family melodrama, that feeling is qualified – the feeling of home. Williams writes that ‘Melodrama begins, and wants to end, in a “space of innocence”’, and it ‘seizes upon the icon of a home with which to figure this innocence’.100 For Williams ‘the most enduring forms of the mode are often suffused with nostalgia for a virtuous place that we like to think we once possessed’.101 By the 1950s, and continuing to this day, that lost home appears beyond recuperation. In Sirk’s films, for example, families are seen in states of crisis or decay, but there is also a persistent longing for a lost past – Marylee Hadley wanting to get ‘back to the river’ in Written on the Wind (1956) or Ron Kirby’s Thoreauvian back-to-nature lifestyle in All That Heaven Allows (1955). But 1940s family melodramas work to render vividly a prelapsarian home. And even when we recognize the limitations of Since You Went Away’s dream home and its futile desire to get back to ‘a time before it is too late’, I find it difficult not to admire the film’s attempt to accomplish these impossible goals.102 I agree with many of Agee’s criticisms, but also with his view that the film espouses an innocence that ‘achieves remarkable things’.103 That innocence, however, was a dream even in 1944, as not only Agee’s review but other reviews, letters and preview cards attest. And yet as one reviewer wrote, so what if the film is over-idealized, it still engages viewers’ desires.104 Then as now, melodrama works to retrieve an absolute innocence and good in which most thinking people do not put much faith. However, what we think and what we feel at the ‘movies’ are often two very different things. We go to the movies not to think but to be moved.105 And while the film no longer seems to us a realistic document of American home life, it maintains its emotional, ‘beneath-the-surface’ realism.106 The film enacts a total mobilization, with every character, setting and detail contributing to the war effort and thus taking on added moral significance.107 As an example, I always come back to a line Jane delivers to her mother one evening, shortly after she has become a Nurse’s Aide. Anne has just read a letter from Tim to her daughters, and she tries to cheer them up afterwards by suggesting they try out some ‘new hair-dos’. Jane replies with complete sincerity: ‘Would you mind if we didn’t? There’s a pamphlet I want to study on third-degree burns.’ That’s the kind of line that produces guffaws in contemporary viewers, yet I cannot help but find its earnestness endearing. In Since You Went Away, even throwaway lines or minor details work towards constructing a world of complete moral legibility. The film offers viewers a powerful fantasy: a melodramatic world in which every person, action and aspect of daily life has clear moral purpose. I do not believe this fantasy for one second, but its sincere ambitions never fail to resonate. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the reading-room staff of the David O. Selznick Collection in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Footnotes " 1 ‘Letter from Private Humphrey F. Famularo, Jr to David O. Selznick’, The David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter DOS HRC), Box 195, Folder 10. " 2 ‘Gloucester Daily Times film review, 31 August 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. Selznick created a large portfolio of film reviews and letters, sometimes of original clippings, but mostly containing typed transcriptions of those original documents. Throughout I have cited the archive in which I found these documents and, when possible, cited the originals if I was able to locate them. " 3 Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, in Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 43. " 4 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 15, 16. " 5 Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, p. 52. " 6 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 15–16. " 7 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 23. " 8 Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, p. 54. " 9 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 5. " 10 Ibid., pp. 2, 4. " 11 Ibid., p. 9. " 12 Ibid., p. ix. " 13 Ibid., p. viii. " 14 Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking genre’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Hodder Arnold, 2000), p. 234. " 15 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 5. " 16 Ibid., p. 22. " 17 Ibid. " 18 See the essays in Screen’s Sirk issue, Screen, vol. 12, no. 2 (1971). " 19 Christine Gledhill, ‘The melodramatic field: an investigation’, in Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), p. 7. " 20 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama’, in Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is, p. 43. " 21 Ibid., p. 52. " 22 Ibid., pp. 51–52. " 23 Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 37. " 24 Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, p. 74. " 25 Gledhill, ‘The melodramatic field’, p. 21. " 26 Ibid., pp. 20–21 " 27 Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Notes on melodrama and the family under capitalism’, in Marcia Landy (ed.), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 200. " 28 Ibid., p. 198. " 29 Ibid., p. 200. " 30 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 59, 130. " 31 Ibid., p. 13. " 32 Ibid., p. 88. " 33 Ibid., p. 26. " 34 Ibid., p. 58. " 35 Ibid., p. 60. " 36 ‘Weekly Variety film review, 19 July 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10; Carl Guldager, ‘Film review in The Chicago Daily News, 19 October 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 37 ‘Letter from Marion Denitz to DOS’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 38 ‘Preview Card, Chicago, 26 June 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 282, Folder 3. " 39 Terry Ramsaye, ‘Film review in Motion Picture Herald, 22 July 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 203, Folders 11–13. " 40 James Agee, ‘Film review of Since You Went Away ’, Time, 17 July 1944, pp. 94, 96. " 41 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1987), p. 161. " 42 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 1. " 43 Henry T. Murdock, ‘Film review in The Chicago Sun, 19 October 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 44 ‘Since You Went Away is biggest production’, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 August 1944, p. 38. " 45 ‘Daily Variety film review, 19 July 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 203, Folders 11–13. " 46 Howard Barnes, ‘Film review in The New York Herald Tribune’, reprinted in Motion Picture Herald, 29 July 1944, p. 50; see Media History Digital Library, <http://archive.org/stream/motionpictureher156unse#page/n349/mode/2up> accessed 10 June 2016 " 47 ‘Preview cards’, DOS HRC, Box 282, Folders 2–3. " 48 Leslie Moore, ‘Film review in Worcester Daily Telegram, 9-21-44’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 49 Ivan Spear, ‘Boxoffice goes all out – says SYWA better than Wind ’, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 August 1944, p. 37. " 50 ‘Film review in The Hollywood Reporter’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 51 ‘Film review in Gloucester Daily Times, 31 August, 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 52 ‘Film review in Redbook, June 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 53 Henry T. Murdock, ‘Film review in The Chicago Sun, 19 October 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 54 ‘Letter from CF Hartman to DOS, 11 April 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 55 George Foxhall, ‘Film review in The Worcester Evening Gazette, 21 September 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 56 Sherwin Kane, ‘Film review in Motion Picture Daily ’, DOS HRC, Box 203, Folders 11–13. " 57 Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (New York, NY: Charles Scribner, 1997), p. 467. " 58 ‘Preview card, San Bernardino’, DOS HRC, Box 282, Folder 4 " 59 Harold Hunt, ‘Film review from Portland, Oregon, 24 September 24 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. The specific newspaper is unidentified. " 60 Louella Parsons, ‘Film review in The Chicago Herald-America, 19 October 1944, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 61 Leslie Moore, ‘Film review in Worcester Daily Telegram, 9-21-44’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 62 Henry T. Murdock, ‘Film review in The Chicago Sun, 19 October 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 63 Ibid. " 64 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 10. " 65 ‘Film review in Gloucester Daily Times, 31 August, 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 66 ‘Hollywood’s version of the typical American home,’ DOS HRC, Box 202, Folder 11. " 67 ‘Letter from Donald R. Koch to David O. Selznick, 18 November 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 68 May, Homeward Bound, p. 60. " 69 ‘Letter from Sgt. George A. Rogers to David O. Selznick, 19 September 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 70 ‘Letter from Sgt. Thomas F. Brown, Jr to David O. Selznick’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 71 ‘Letter from Harold Grummer to David O. Selznick’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 72 ‘Letter from CF Hartman to David O. Selznick, 11 April 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 73 ‘Letter from Private Richard H. Reed to David O. Selznick, 19 September 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 74 ‘Letter from Private R. C. Williams to David O. Selznick’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 75 Stanley Cortez, ‘Psychological photography’, DOS HRC Box 208, Folder 7, p. 1 " 76 Ibid. " 77 Ibid., p. 2 " 78 Ibid. " 79 Ibid. " 80 Ibid., p. 3. " 81 Ibid. " 82 Ibid., p. 7. " 83 Ibid., p. 3. " 84 Ibid. " 85 Ibid., p. 4. " 86 Ibid. " 87 Ibid. " 88 Ibid. " 89 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 26–27. " 90 ‘Letter from Paul L. Krueger to David O. Selznick, 11 October 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 91 ‘Letter from Kathleen Fannan to David O. Selznick, 19 September 1944’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 92 ‘Letter from John G. Brackett to David O. Selznick’, DOS HRC, Box 195, Folder 10. " 93 B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson, ‘Together’ (New York, NY: Crawford Music Corporation, 1928). " 94 James Agee, ‘Review of Since You Went Away ’, in Agee on Film (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 106. " 95 Ibid., p. 107. " 96 Ibid., p. 108. " 97 Ibid. " 98 Ibid. " 99 Ibid. " 100 Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 28. " 101 Ibid. " 102 Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, p. 74 " 103 Agee, ‘Review of Since You Went Away’, p. 108. " 104 Spear, ‘Boxoffice goes all out’, p. 37. " 105 Williams, ‘Melodrama revised’, p. 61. " 106 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 51. " 107 Susan Ohmer, ‘Female spectatorship and women’s magazines: Hollywood, Good Housekeeping and World War II’, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 25 (1990), p. 56. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
TI - Feels like home: Since You Went Away and the 1940s family melodrama
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjx030
DA - 2017-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/feels-like-home-since-you-went-away-and-the-1940s-family-melodrama-6ml7kCku4w
SP - 285
VL - 58
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -