WITHOUT RESERVATIONS (1946)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Mervyn LeRoy

SCREENWRITER: Andrew Solt

FILM STARS: Claudette Colbert, John Wayne, Don DeFore, Anne Triola, Phil Brown, Frank Puglia, Thurston Hall, Dona Drake, Fernando Alvarado, Charles Arnt, Louella Parsons, Frank Wilcox, Sam McDaniel, Lisa Golm

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Jane Allen & Mae Livingston

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Century

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1946

COUNTRY: USA

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1946

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: Thanks God! I’ll Take It From Here

NOTES

GENRE: Romantic Comedy

WORDS:

An obscure (ish) John Wayne film based on an obscure novel.

The novel is a humourous romance and some philosophising. The film is a romantic comedy with screwballish overtones.

The story is engaging, and relevant, coming as it does at the end of World War 2. Kit, a 24ish author from New England, writes a novel “Reunion in Jeopardy” an inspirational novel which becomes a best seller. The book espouses amongst other things a future ordered society made up of citizens who “not only had the privileges of living in a democracy, but the responsibilities as well” (page 4). Children are educated and would be groomed for public service because “we’ve got a world full of sickness – take it – it’s yours to cure … Let’s see that everyone to begin with has a good healthy start. Let’s not forget too, that the human soul needs more than bread. Let’s have beauty and truth and freedom, but above all individual dignity” (page 5). The hero of “Reunion in Jeopardy” rejects the woman he loves because he has important civic things to do, which makes him that much more appealing to female readers. The book comes in the closing days of the war and taps into what a new society could look like, a socially engineered one, that breeds prosperity and peace. The book is a best seller which has bipartisan support of its vision from all sides of politics (Christians, Communists, Democrats, Republicans) making the book a cultural phenomenon. The book is optioned by a movie studio, and Kit hops on a train to head west to Hollywood to talk about leads, Lana Turner and Cary Grant are being chased, and script for the film version.

On the train she meets a couple of pilots in the marine corps on their way to San Diego for deployment, Rusty and Dink, and doesn’t let them know she is the bestselling celebrity author. She comes to realise that the film needs an unknown for the lead and that Rusty would be perfect for the role. The trouble is all he thinks about is chasing “beetles” (girls) and, worse still, he has read the book and thinks the book is wrong headed, and thinks all men should be self-reliant, and the call of nature will come before any civic responsibility. Screwball style adventures ensue. Kit and Rusty fall in love as you would expect without realising it and ‘without reservations” with Dink the third man (to keep all activities (and perceptions) above board).

Social engineering versus rugged individualism is at its core but this this is no Ayn Rand tract. Kit may fall in love causing her to reassess the position she took in her book, but Rusty has also been put through the hoops. Love can’t be socially engineered and it takes two to tango I assume id the point.

The book is a gentle send up of the inspiration novels of Louis Bromfield and the like wrapped up in a romance.

The book is told from Kit’s perspective, and the end is particularly satisfactory. Inevitably, Rusty finds out that Kit is the author and leaves upset never to see her again. Her rise to Hollywood celebrity, his yearning for her, her making him jealous leading to their eventual reconciliation is largely done through letters between her and Diink, epistolary style before the final where Kit on her way to meet Rusty looks upwards and say ends as does the film with the line “Thanks God” I’ll Take it from here” (the original title of the novel).

It is an easy read. It’s light, there is no dramas, just one humorous situation after another. Nothing written will make you laugh out loud, though nothing written will make you cringe either. It’s not boring, but it is a little obvious, perhaps.

Reading the book, I felt I had seen if before rather than read it before. It covers the same ground as any number of screwball comedies films from the 30s and 40s. I’m not complaining though.

Two authors:

Mae Livingston was born Folesia Mae Livingston on August 13, 1903, in South Carolina, she worked as a novelist and television contributor apparently. There is little biography, bibliography or filmography on her. I can’t find any novels (apart from this one) attributed to her but she has a poetry collection ”Psalms of These Days” which is held in the Library of Congress collection (I can’t find a publication date on it). She earned a story credit for an episode of the anthology series ‘General Electric Theater‘ in 1959. Livingston died on June 19, 1989, in the United States.

The main driver of the novel would seem to be Jane Allen and it seems that Jane Allen is a penname for Silvia Schulman.

It’s all very murky, not a real-life murk but an internet murk (things get repeated and repeated and become the truth but aren’t … heard that before? You will, I suspect there is a lot more coming).

The Internet Movie database has Jane Allen with no mention of Silvia Shulman:

“Jane Allen was born on October 24, 1916 in Indiana, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for She Knew All the Answers (1941) and Without Reservations (1946). She died on February 16, 1970 in Santa Monica, California, USA”.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0020622/bio/

She also has a string of bit parts in films of the 1940s (apparently).

Wikipedia has Silvia Schulman as the person who used the pen name Jane Allen:

Silvia Schulman (March 3, 1913 – February 19, 1993) was an American writer, interior designer, and building contractor. During the 1930s, she worked for the Hollywood film studios RKO Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and later Selznick International Pictures as a secretary. She was producer David O. Selznick’s personal assistant until February 1937, when she quit to marry screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. During their honeymoon, she began to write a comic novel based upon her Hollywood experiences and later enlisted the help of freelance writer Jane Shore. In 1938, I Lost My Girlish Laughter was published under the pseudonym Jane Allen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Schulman

No mention of any appearances in films as “Jane Allen”. I have no idea who Jane Shore is (if she exists). She is referred to on-line as a screenwriter, or a ghost writer.

Apparently, the I Lost My Girlish Laughter novel was written by Schulman with the Allen pseudonym to avoid her losing her job, though it seems on some accounts she had already left her job after marrying Ring Lardner Jr before starting the novel.

In any event on some accounts online the novel caused a scandal at the time. And on some accounts on-line (in the murky world of feminist agenda driven blogs) she never worked in Hollywood again (even though she wrote “Without Reservations” later). I’m not sure why the novel would cause a scandal even if written by an insider. The year before Hollywood had taken a poke at itself in the drama A Star Is Born (1937) and in the comedy Stand-In (1937). If true, perhaps her proximity to Selznick made it more sensitive.

How influential she was on Selznick and his movie making is open for debate though apparently, she had tried to make her own mark as a writer, co-writing the play Adam Had Three Eves with Selznick production assistant Barbara Keon in 1935. Selznick bought the rights but never produced it. In any event she raised two children and worked for many years as an interior designer and building contractor in California. She died of cancer in 1993.

I’ve gone off topic.

The movie is a hoot and sticks closely to the book in narrative, events and tone though Kit resists Rusty a little less in the film. Little things, as always, have been omitted, probably for length: there is picnic scene dropped from the novel, and a few other “misunderstandings” are omitted. I note, for no other reason than I noticed it when reading, that the car that replaces the train on this road trip goes from a (German) Mercedes to a (Italian) Isotta.

The actors are all too old for their roles with Colbert (still a big star – and billed above John Wayne) aged 43 as the youthful Kit, and John Wayne at 39 as the young flier.

John Wayne was a star but not a big one. He didn’t enter the Top 10 box office till 1949. At this point in his career, he was still under contract to B picture outfit Republic Pictures (a firm he had managed to drag almost to A status). The prestige roles of the time were his loan outs to other major studios (here RKO) and they were happy to cast him in non-westerns. This is his second screwball (ish) comedy. The first was A Lady takes a Chance (1943) (also RKO) with another screwball actress, Jean Arthur, which showed John Wayne could do light comedy. That was reinforced many times in the future – The Quiet Man (1952), North to Alaska (1960), McLintock (1963), Donovan’s Reef (1963) and individual scenes in many other action-oriented films. He had a likeable persona. He is ruggedly individualistic here but not boorishly so. It is strange, though, how his character matches his beliefs and the post war persona he created – some good dialogue delivered by Wayne against progressive social engineering and in favour of freedom could have been lifted directly from a script (or scripts) by his mate James Edward Grant. But the politics are minimal, he spends most of the time channelling his inner Cary Grant. Claudette Colbert was an old hat at this type of romantic comedy: she was in the similar (and bona fide classic) It Happened One Night (1934), Midnight (1939) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). Don DeFore is a little bland as the third wheel but that is the third wheels job. Anne Triola who is one of the people the trio meets on the train and later Wayne and DeFore find being a waitress in San Diego is a 100% total hoot and scene stealer, Frank Puglia as the Mexican does what he does best, earthy ethnics, and Dona Drake as his daughter is suitably distracting (why she never became a bigger actress I don’t know. She was often cast as Hispanics even though her ancestry was Afro-American, albeit light skinned). Look hard and you will find a young Raymond Burr and there are cameos from Cary Grant, Jack Benny, Dolores Moran, Louella Parsons, and director Mervyn LeRoy.

Andrew Solt wrote the screenplay – though he doesn’t add much. He just follows the “road” theme … travel by train, car, foot and add events and misunderstandings. Solt hadn’t hit his stride, yet which came shortly after though for thrillers and dramas, Joan of Arc (1948), Little Women (1949), Whirlpool (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Thunder on the Hill (1951) … all based on novels or plays. Mervyn LeRoy was accomplished Hollywood director. He could direct anything, comedies included (though not often) but his forte was drama and action films, Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Anthony Adverse (1936), They Won’t Forget (1937), Waterloo bridge (1940), Random harvest (1942), Little Women (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), Rose Marie (1952) Gypsy (1963). He produced The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The film made money. Budget $1,683,000 (estimated), Box office $3,000,000 (US rentals). The film returned a profit of $342,000. (apparently)

This film is, perhaps, not for everyone. If you don’t like romantic comedies it won’t work. I do, so it works on me. The film owes a lot to It Happened One Night (1934) and there are shades of Hail the Conquering Hero? (1944) but if you are going to lift then lift from the best.

The film is hard to find but worth watching for a few reasons though Wayne in a comedy is the major one.

The book is a pleasant read and refreshing (reading it now) in its lack of cynicism, and it may even be relevant to today. A remake would be interesting, though unlikely.

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