What The Hell America!

It’s graduation season in America, one that has been made unusually dramatic and occasionally inspiring by university students such as Cecilia Culver of George Washington University and Logon Rozos of New York University, who defied tremendous governmental and social pressure and risked serious consequences to make statements during their commencement ceremonies condemning the openly genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza by the government of Israel, backed by the United States.

I was never expecting to find a mainstream movie that would reflect this shocking state of things, but I ran across an old favorite currently running on Turner Classic Movies that nearly fits the bill. It represents ordinary university students and faculty members pressured to remain silent — though a few speak out anyway — in the context of the “Red witch hunt” that was already getting traction during World War II when this film was made, though it wouldn’t become an appalling juggernaut until after the war. Just the fact that this film got made and released shows how much relative freedom of expression was possible in films of the early 1940s. But not for much longer.

This unusual and timely film takes place at the end of a school year at the fictional Midwestern University. It’s called The Male Animal, and it’s a comedy based on the 1940 hit stage play by celebrated writer James Thurber and his collaborating playwright-director Elliott Nugent, who also directs this 1942 film version.

The most confounding thing about the film is that it’s a screwball comedy. Yet its central subject matter deals with the crushing of academic freedom and freedom of speech in general. It’s treated humorously at first, then becomes more and more intensely serious. The film culminates with the protagonist, a mild-mannered, untenured professor in the English department named Tommy Turner (Henry Fonda), risking his career by reading before a large and contentious audience an eloquent portion of one of the last statements written by Bartolomeo Vanzetti before his execution.

Yes, that Vanzetti, of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two Italian immigrant laborers living in Massachusetts who were anarchists, making them doubly suspect in the eyes of many during the 1920s Red Scare. They were framed for a robbery and murder and prosecuted on highly suspect evidence before a plainly biased judge and jury in a notoriously ideologically driven 1921 trial. It resulted in a judgment of guilty and a sentence of execution for both men.

Leftists made the case a social justice cause célèbre. But in spite of many appeals and widespread protests on their behalf, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair on August 23, 1927. Fifty years later, in 1977, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation acknowledging that the two men had not received a fair trial.

Here is the Vanzetti text read by the professor (with ungrammatical sentences preserved):

If it had not been for these thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. . . . Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for men’s understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words — our lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph.

The reading, delivered with beautiful gravity by left-wing actor Henry Fonda, is extremely moving. And you’ll have to see the movie to find out how on earth a larky comedy can contain such a heart-tearing text as that one and still come out in comic mode in the end. But here are a few indications of how it’s done.

The title of the film, The Male Animal, refers to Thurber’s preoccupation with what he felt was the absurd position of the modern male in contemporary society. Thurber, after all, is most famous for his 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” all about the elaborate fantasy life of the middle-aged male protagonist who dreams of himself as a traditional hero in old-fashioned action-adventure scenarios while living a thwarted life subservient to his boss at work and his wife at home.

Thurber came to prominence in the late 1920s and early ’30s through his foundational New Yorker magazine stories and drawings. His comical “hapless male” characters, hanging onto their bow ties and the remaining shreds of their traditional values in a world surging past them, led by large, hard-charging women, were plainly a big influence on the screwball comedy genre, which flourished in the 1930s and ’40s. The Thurberesque “hapless male” characters dragged helplessly resisting into the unnerving but exciting world of modernity by a “madcap heiress,” tough “working girl,” or other assertive young woman living on the edge, can be found in such screwball classics as Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and The Palm Beach Story.

In The Male Animal, Tommy Turner finds his settled small-town collegiate life upended by two chaotic forces. First is the comical one, the football mania that overtakes his community, his workplace, and his domestic life during homecoming week when the Big Game fuels a sports hero–worshipping hysteria that sidelines bespectacled, unathletic scholarly types such as himself. Tommy is particularly alarmed at the effect on his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), whose old crush on the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson) is revived when Ferguson comes to town for the Big Game.

The second leads in the film are younger versions of Tommy and Ellen, which seems to be part of Thurber’s comically bleak sense of the same patterns emerging in one generation after another. Red Scares and blacklists in the 1920s come around again in the 1940s, and the same character types play out their roles repeatedly. Ellen’s kid sister Patricia (Joan Leslie) is a Midwestern University student torn between the new football hero on campus, Wally Myers (Don DeFore), and her diffident intellectual student boyfriend, Michael Barnes (Herbert Anderson), in a repeat of Ellen’s dilemma. Michael, who is tall and thin and wears owlish glasses just like Tommy, is the editor of the campus literary magazine that’s about to run a fiery editorial of his.

The editorial condemns the college trustees as “fascists” for unlawfully firing three progressive professors on political grounds, and it equally condemns the faculty for not standing up to the trustees in defense of academic freedom. In conclusion, Michael’s praise is reserved for his mentor, Tommy Turner — the only brave professor left, in Michael’s view, because he goes on teaching what he wants without bowing to political censorship or fear of trustee threats. Tommy is even going to read in his introductory English class a piece by Bartolomeo Vanzetti, of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Michael’s editorial embroils the normally passive Tommy in controversy and makes it a community flashpoint. Will he or will he not dare to actually read the Vanzetti piece, once he’s been told that he’ll be fired if he does?

Which brings us to the second force of upheaval, the serious one, which is the anti-leftist purge going on at the college. It’s aggressively led by the bigoted dunderhead who’s the current head of the trustees, Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette). He’s one of the football fanatics on campus, and his major accomplishments so far are getting the new football stadium built and firing the three professors suspected of being communists and teaching seditious texts. Ed is after a clean sweep of “subversive” elements at the university in order to guarantee that nothing will be taught that’s not “100 percent Americanism!”

“Get me Reds!” Ed barks into the phone at gentle old Professor Frederick Damon (Ivan Simpson), who’s now the dean of the humanities, his long career admittedly due to his “following a policy of appeasement” for decades. “And if you can’t find any Reds, get started on the Pinks!”

Trying to remain “civilized” by tamping down his own anger and the building controversy, Tommy remains ambiguous about whether or not he’ll actually read the Vanzetti piece, insisting it’s just one of several texts he was planning to read that represent eloquent writing by people who weren’t professional writers. Initially at least, he has far more trouble squelching his bored and satirical reactions to football as the topic under constant discussion — an attitude which is regarded as un-American and just as potentially subversive as his teaching. Plus his resentment of Ellen and Joe’s resurgent attraction is growing by the hour.

What’s a skinny, bookish fellow to do about such an overwhelming rival? Tommy is being characterized as Thurber’s typical thwarted middle-aged man, though the timeline in the film is an odd one. It insists it’s only been six years since the student Ellen broke it off with Joe and married Tommy, clearly right after they graduated, meaning they would only be in their late twenties, depending on how long they studied. But they all act as if they’re in their forties experiencing a mid-life crisis.

For example, Michael, shattered by his difficulties with Patricia when she goes off with Wally, says he envies Tommy in his advanced age: “When all is over, and love turns to kindness.” The humor works if Tommy is forty, still embroiled in a welter of emotions and incredulous that a young guy of twenty believes he’ll be “peaceful” and past it all at forty. But if Tommy is somehow only twenty-eight, or maybe thirty, it doesn’t even make sense.

At first, regarding his domestic trouble, Tommy chooses the quiescent course typical of him: he decides to step aside and allow Ellen and Joe to resume their romance, even if it means she leaves him for Joe. But as various pressures begin to grind him more painfully, Tommy goes on an afternoon bender with Michael and reverses course. He overwhelms Michael with a long, drunken, incoherent rant about “the male animal” of every species doing what he himself now intends to do: fight for his mate. After all, just consider what violent acts the male tiger would commit “in defense of his home.” Or the wolf. Or the hawk. Or the sea lion.

“Consider the penguin!” Tommy shouts. Then, struck by the oddity of the word, he enunciated it again carefully: “Pen-goo-in.” Shaping the Arctic bird’s small imaginary body with his hands and gazing at it with mawkish tenderness, he adds lugubriously, “That little. . . THING.” But even the pen-goo-in, small and oblong as he is, will fight like a tiger or a wolf or a sea lion against a predatory rival.

Henry Fonda does wonders with this soused monologue. Always a great comic actor, as The Lady Eve proves beyond any doubt that he should’ve made dozens of comedies, but his career diverged toward dramatic roles like Abe Lincoln and Tom Joad and the least angry of the Twelve Angry Men.

At issue in the comical and the serious narrative strands of The Male Animal, as they converge, is what really constitutes an act of courage. In short, in the old-fashioned gender terms of the day that the film represents, who’s the real man? And layered over that, who exemplifies the best of “Americanism” — its football heroes or its defenders of basic freedoms? Of course, it’s Tommy, facing down the whole community in the Midwestern University auditorium, where his English class has been moved because so many people have requested to attend, in order to read the letter by Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

And even more than Tommy, it’s Bartolomeo Vanzetti, condemned to die for being “un-American” in his ethnicity and his politics, and finding victory in his own unsought martyrdom.

Issues of bravery don’t concern women, in Thurber’s view, so Ellen and Patricia are pushed into “cheerleader” roles, converting from football-hero worship to adoration of the courageous intellectuals fighting to preserve freedom of speech and assembly, Tommy and Michael. It should be noted that, not only was Thurber invested in comedy centered on the displaced traditional male in the crazy modern world, he was also an entrenched misogynist.

Thurber was no leftist. He tended toward an ever more splenetic and alcoholic conservatism as he aged. But he was also an odd duck who voted for liberal presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Thurber’s indignance over issues of right-wing censorship made him loathe Joseph McCarthy and his fellow postwar Red witch-hunting blacklisters.

Thurber was offered but turned down an honorary degree from Ohio State University, for example — that was his own “Midwestern University” in the 1910s, but he’d failed to graduate because his partial blindness, the result of a tragic accident in childhood, had left him unable to complete a required ROTC course. Thurber was outraged by the gag order OSU had imposed on guest speakers during the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s in order to tamp down left-wing political speech. (There’s an unfortunate coda in 1955, when Thurber’s daughter opted to accept the honorary OSU degree posthumously on his behalf.)

In The Male Animal, before Tommy reads the Vanzetti statement, he cautions those who might try to censor the written record of it that it’d be no use burning every copy in existence, because so many literary figures had already memorized it and “know it by heart.”

That gave me a real pang. Thurber lived in a world where people memorized their favorite literary passages and could recite them any time, any place, in any state of sobriety or inebriation. They were considered “words to live by,” and so it wasn’t enough to have them in books. They had to be in the memory, in the bone marrow, of a person.

I caught the last fumes of that world. As an avid young reader, I used to memorize passages, though I had no real expectation of ever reciting them. Nobody recited any more, even then.

But the whole impact of The Male Animal stands or falls on the power of Tommy’s reading of the Vanzetti statement at the end. In the movie, it reduces everyone in the auditorium, including the pugnacious Ed Keller, to chastened silence. It converts them all at once. That’s clear to the viewer, but not to Tommy, who leaves the stage somberly, not sure whether he’s going to be attacked or exonerated.

After all, his audience, especially the football team in the middle rows, showed up looking for a pinko professor to get humiliated in public and probably roughed up afterward, with maybe a bit of rioting to follow. But once the statement is read, the good old American tradition of mob terror has already turned toward mob lionization, and once outside, Tommy is paraded through the streets as a hero instead of a potential lynching victim. Nervous jokes and laughter can now resume.

Try to make that same film in 1950 — it couldn’t have been done as the Red witch hunt overtook Hollywood in 1947. But if by some fluke it had been, Tommy would’ve been reconceived as a scheming menace to the community, his fancy intellectual sophistry corrupting poor Michael Barnes, who’d probably die by suicide or be allowed to redeem himself by exposing Tommy’s evil commie plot. And Ellen would’ve escaped Tommy’s sinister influence to run off with clean-cut, all-American Joe Ferguson. Bombastic Ed Keller in his attacks on the Reds and the Pinks would’ve been the hero of the day, and the movie would’ve ended with him facing the camera and calling on all true Americans to report any subversive behaviors to the local authorities.

And if you tried to remake this film today? I refuse to imagine it. Things are horrifying enough as it is.