In 1971, when the American critic, Pauline Kael, published her book Raising Kane, a controversial argument as to the sources of Orson Welles celebrated film, she cited the 1933 picture The Power and the Glory, as an important influence on the Herman Mankiewicz script for Citizen Kane. At the time of Kael's book, The Power and the Glory was more of a rumor than a film -- due to Hollywood's lack of "self-respect", Kael said that the much-ballyhooed 1933 picture existed only as "tattered fragments." The studio had failed to transfer the nitrate print onto safety stock and the movie had decayed, seemingly beyond restoration. Digital technology, however, can work wonders and The Power and the Glory has been conserved to the point that it can be watched and, even, enjoyed to some extent although there are oddities about its current state of preservation. The picture, written by Preston Sturges, can be watched on You-tube, although it is shown with some curious artifacts of its preservation -- a couple of times, the image is embossed with an ad for Fox News and there are other strange marks that appear from time to time on the picture.
Preston Sturges wrote the script as a free-lance project and sold it to Fox Studios for the vast sum (then) of $17.500 (the equivalent of $375,000 today) together with a share of the profits. The movie employs a non-linear narrative style that is very poignantly constructed. As used in the movie, Sturges' "narratage", as it was then called, fragments the story into different scenes that don't proceed chronologically but rather according to an emotional logic -- the picture's fundamental structure is to show us how things turned out and, then, cut back to the precursors of later developments. The effect is melancholy -- we see people grieving and suffering and, then, the film flashes back to happier days when the characters had no idea as to the malign fate awaiting them. For instance, we see a libertine son ruining his father. Then, the film shows us the young man's birth and his father's happiness and dreams for the baby boy. A divorce is bracketed by shots of the couple when they were in love with one another. This narrative device creates an impression of profundity and the audience is invested with a sense of Olympian detachment, almost serenity (and superiority) over the strivings of the characters in the picture. In Russian formalist theory, narratives have two components, the fabula (that is, the story or plot) and the syuzhet (the order of events as told -- that is, the way the tale is presented). Sturges script for this short, but event-packed, picture enforces the maximum possible distance between the plot and the order of events presented by the "narratage." In 1933, when the picture was a popular hit, the concept of "narratage" seems to have been regarded as the cinematic equivalent to fictional devices using stream-of-consciousness in Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's novels. The innovation was thought so important and radical that a bronze plaque was installed at the first movie theater in New York City where The Power and the Glory was shown commemorating the "invention of narratage" -- but, then, as Pauline Kael observes, the film stock on which the famous movie was printed was allowed to decompose to "tatters."
The Power and the Glory chronicles the life of Tom Granger, a self-made man, who rises in the railroad industry to become a ruthless and powerful tycoon. The movie begins with his funeral in a sepulchral cathedral-like space, the gloom cut through by slanting rays of light (compare to the scenes in the screening room in Kane, where the projection beam creates chiaroscuro effects -- as well as other scenes in Welles movie featuring expressionistic beams of light). One of the mourners rises and walks out of the church. This mourner is the deceased Tom Garner's best friend and personal secretary, Henry. As he walks home, Henry encounters a doorman who says that he's glad Tom "croaked." At home, Henry's wife bitterly denounces the dead man. Henry, who admired Garner, defends him and this triggers a series of flashbacks, organized thematically as opposed to presentation in chronological order. We seem Tom as an abused farm kid (kept home to work on farm by his tyrannical father). Boys are frolicking in an idyllic swimming hole. Tom fights Henry but admires his spunk and defends him against older bullies. Tom, who is a dare-devil dives from a perch on a tall tree, gets his hand stuck in rocks underwater and almost drowns -- for the rest of his life, Tom has a prominent scar on his right hand. Next, we see Tom as a powerful and self-confident tycoon -- he bullies his company's Board of Directors into buying another railroad, the so-called Santa Clara line, an acquisition that will lead to his doom. The movie, then, shows us Tom as a simple "track-walker", a worker for a railroad whose job, it seems, is to walk the line and observe defects. Tom is first shown emerging from a tunnel on a mountain pass. He meets a comely schoolmarm and she discovers that he can't read or write or do arithmetic. The young woman teaches him these elementary skills and they fall in love. He marches her up to a mountain top ostensibly for a hike but there proposes to her. (This scene is baffling -- it's shot like a silent movie, perhaps, a necessity since the sequence features real-life locations where it may have been impossible to record sound; the sequence plays like a slide-show narrated by Henry. It's not very effective and, indeed, the narration, although clever -- Sturges is always very good with words -- distracts from the images. I account for this peculiar method of production by the deficiencies in early sound-recording technology). Next, we see Tom's son, Tom Jr., who has been booted out of some Ivy League school for drunken debauchery. The tycoon orders his son to go to work for him as a junior accountant. Tom's wife remonstrates with the him about mistreating the boy whom she has obviously coddled. In the midst of these scenes, we see Tom's wife, the schoolmarm, working as a track walker herself in a blizzard -- she has taken this job in order to support Tom's education as an engineer attending college in Chicago. There is a flashback to the birth of Tom's son, Tom Jr. and the couple discuss their dreams and aspirations for the little boy. The acquisition of the Santa Clara railroad requires a meeting with the line's previous owner who seems to use his accomplished young daughter as an incentive for the deal -- she flirts overtly with Tom Sr. Tom approaches his wife of thirty years and says that "a terrible thing has happened" -- that is, he has fallen in love with RR owner's daughter, Eve. Tom's wife is devastated but takes the blame for this disaster -- she says that Tom would have been happy as a "track-walker" on the line and that she drove him to be successful and made him work when he "just wanted to go fishing." Therefore, she agrees to a divorce and says bitterly: "Why wouldn't you be in love and do what you want to do once before you die." Wandering about on the city sidewalk, as if in a dream, Tom's wife throws herself under the wheels of a street car -- she visualizes the street car as a huge, thundering locomotive. This part of the film is very powerful and Sturges' "narratage" device here is shown to its best advantage. After the suicide, the movie cuts to Tom and his wife 20 years earlier, living in a humble cottage, with the woman announcing that she is going to have a baby and the two of them vowing to be happy the rest of their lives. Henry, Tom's amanuensis is telling this story to his own wife, who is skeptical -- Henry keeps asserting that Tom was not to blame and that "things just happened to him." We see Tom reconciling with his son, apparently in Key West or Palm Springs -- the sea glitters in the moonlight under the terrace where the two men are sitting. Tom marries Eve with Tom Jr. acting as his Best Man. There follows a strike sequence shot in impressive montage with burning buildings and cops falling dead to sniper fire. Tom invades a Union meeting and harangues the workers, apparently, unsuccessfully because scabs are brought in and there are pitched battles in which (we are told) 450 men are killed. One day Tom comes home and hears his young wife talking to her lover on the telephone. She says that "the baby looks just like you." The baby, also looks just like Tom Sr., because the child is the son of Eve and Tom Jr. When Tom Sr. figures this out, he goes into a trance, hearing his wife's words during a Board Meeting and blurting out all sorts of crazy stuff. Tom goes home, obsessively repeating his dead wife's words: "Why wouldn't you fall in love and do what you want to do once before you die." He locks himself in a room and shoots himself in the heart. As in Kane, there are some spectacular chiaroscuro effects in this scene -- a beam of light slashes down through a window like a razor blade. Henry finishes the story; his wife pats him on the shoulder and leaves him alone in the kitchen as she wearily trudges upstairs to bed, a disconcerting image itself of marital alienation and loneliness. (This is a pre-Code picture and it pulls no punches.)
Similarities to Citizen Kane are obvious: both movies involve the reconstruction of the life of a great man for whom things have ended badly. A loyal sidekick narrates both stories and the sequencing of events is intuitive and associative as opposed to strictly chronological. Both films feature a young leading man who has to be aged by make-up artists -- Welles was 25 when he played Charles Foster Kane, in many scenes made-up as an old man; Spencer Tracy, who plays Tom Garner, was 32 when he appeared in The Power and the Glory. (Tracy is very effective throughout the film and, as he is shown to age, changes his gait and his posture -- he's more persuasive as an old man than Welles; Tracy is one of those actors who seems to have been born middle-aged.) In both films, the hero is undone, more or less, by a woman. Of course, both films argue the proposition that wealth and power are not equivalent to happiness. Citizen Kane has more vivid supporting actors; Welles had a repertoire company in the theater, the Mercury Players, and he directs them very effectively. (Sturges later did this in his own films beginning with the 1940 movie, The Great McGinty; however, the supporting cast in The Power and the Glory is a bit blurry and vague -- for instance, Eve's motivations are very unclear: why does she marry the much older Tom Garner? The film makes it clear that she cuckolds him because he is conspicuously absent managing the bloody railroad strike, but I couldn't divine why she was ever interested in him in the first place.) The movie is filled with clever and eye-catching details. In the swimming scenes there's a dog riding on a raft that has to paddle to the edge of the idyllic-looking pond when Tom is trapped underwater. The scenes involving track-walking have a curious fairy-tale look -- they appear to be staged on miniature sets that are not at all convincing and this gives these scenes, particularly, the winter shots, an odd legendary aspect -- the fact that many of the exteriors seem fake or shot in a studio is curious because production notes show that some of the railroad scenes were shot on high mountain passes in the Sierra Nevada. At the climax of the film, Tom comes home to his young wife with a bracelet (he has just bought it since he forgot their anniversary) and a marionette puppet for the little boy -- the marionette casts a sinister shadow on the wall.
The movie's restoration is problematic. The film proceeds with a strange, dream-like stop and start rhythm. Panning and crane shots glide along, halt momentarily, and, then, continue to move -- it's as if the film is secreting some kind of interstitial stillness, advancing as a series of still photographs. (This effect must have something to do with the terribly damaged prints that were used to reconstruct the movie -- the soundtrack has been restored and is reasonably audible but the film's imagery itself seems somehow mostly comprised of still shots animated together into motion.)
Sturges' script, said by studio bosses to be the "most perfect script" anyone had ever seen, is based on the life of C.W. Post, a cereal tycoon from Battle Creek, Michigan. Post founded the Postum Food company, later known as General Foods -- wholly owned subsidiaries came to include a number of other companies including Jello. Post divorced his wife to marry his 27 year old secretary. He almost died due to stomach trouble and appendicitis -- Charley and William Mayo operated on him in Rochester, Minnesota at their clinic. Post never recovered from his gastric problems and killed himself out of despair at the pain that he was suffering. The movie is only 82 minutes long.
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