TV Note: "The Talk of the Town" (7/28)
David Shasha
"The Talk of the Town" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies Late Thursday/Early Friday, July 28th at 12:15 AM
All Rise: Kneeling at the Altar of the Law in “The Talk of the Town” (George Stevens, 1942)
At the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age there was a burning concern with the Law and the struggle of human beings to receive justice from a society that was often itching to convict the innocent out of convenience and expediency.
The major movie studios had some prominent films that dealt with the matter: MGM released the classic anti-Lynching film “Fury” (1936) which was directed by German-Jewish emigré Fritz Lang restating a number of themes he had raised in his classic German film “M” (1931). Fox released William Wellman’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” in 1943 which also dealt with the scourge of the Lynch Mob and how it polluted our justice system. Warner Bros. had perennial hero Paul Muni portray the crusading French writer in “The Life of Emile Zola” (1937) and a war hero who is unjustly railroaded into a brutal prison system in the South in “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” (1932).
Each of these movies spoke out loudly and clearly for the promotion of social justice.
The films starred A-list actors like Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, and Muni in gritty performances that were deeply heart-wrenching and truly affecting. Giving audiences a harsh dose of reality, the studios did not back away from telling stories that were disturbing and showing society in a less-than-salutary light. It is worthwhile to note that MGM – the so-called “Dream Factory” – produced a starkly realistic adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” (1949) with its top house director Clarence Brown taking on the subject of racism against African-Americans in a small Southern town.
The subject of justice resonated with the studio heads; Jews who had fled Eastern Europe to seek a better life in America. While they did focus mostly on fantasy and romance and comedy, the studios also made prestige movies like Darryl Zanuck’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) released by Fox studios, and the Goldwyn studios’ production of the Elmer Rice play “Street Scene” (1931) directed by King Vidor. These movies showed average people in very trying circumstances portrayed in a realistic setting.
Columbia Studios produced a crucial film in 1942 called “The Talk of the Town” which dealt with the Law in an even far more direct and explicit manner.
Based on a story by Sidney Harmon with a screenplay written by Irwin Shaw and Sidney Buchman, the movie was directed by the great George Stevens and starred three of the most eminent Hollywood actors of the era: Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, and Jean Arthur. It was a glamour production that was framed as both a Screwball Comedy and love triangle, but contained a very profound discussion of the Law and its place in our society.
The story is truly incendiary, both literally and metaphorically: a worker named Leopold Dilg, played by the matinee idol Grant, is accused of setting fire to his factory and killing its foreman. The small New England town wants his head on a platter. We quickly learn that Dilg is a labor agitator who has called out the factory’s owner for safety violations and is a ripe target to lay the blame on. In a daring moment, Dilg manages to escape from his jail cell and make it to the country home of Nora Shelley, played by Frank Capra favorite Jean Arthur, who is preparing it for a new tenant, the esteemed professor Michael Lightcap, played by the dapper Colman.
As the plot develops we discover that Professor Lightcap is one of the most eminent jurists in the country and will soon be asked to join the Supreme Court. But Lightcap is quickly exposed by Dilg as a militantly theoretical jurist who does not want to deal with the way Law works in the real world.
Lightcap hires Shelley to be his secretary. We see him dictating to her a new book he has come to the countryside to work on. Entitled “The Influence of Literature on 18th Century Law,” the treatise is to be a summa of Enlightenment thought and the triumph of what the professor calls “pure reason” in our justice system.
When confronted with Dilg’s plight, the professor swiftly retreats and maintains that he has nothing to say about it as he continues to duck the real life issues that the case raises.
Dilg resolutely maintains his innocence and claims that he is being railroaded by a corrupt justice system. But Lightcap is intent on separating Law from application. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Lightcap is concerned with rational thought as theory and not how reason should be applied to reality.
Dilg’s lawyer Sam Yates, played by Edgar Buchanan, works to persuade Lightcap to take Dilg’s case, but the professor continues to avoid facing reality. That is, until he begins to experience what is going on in the town and how the Law is being flagrantly flouted.
A critical point in the story comes when Lightcap goes with Shelley to a baseball game and finds himself seated next to the judge in charge of the Dilg trial. The judge expresses his great admiration for Lightcap’s work as a legal scholar, and then proudly blurts out that he is angry that Dilg has escaped; leaving him without the ability to pronounce his guilty verdict on him. Lightcap is astonished that the judge has brazenly pronounced sentence before the trial has even begun.
It is a crucial moment for Lightcap as he now sees that the Law is being perverted in order to persecute a man who might be innocent without even hearing the evidence. It is at this point that the professor changes his mind and begins to look into that evidence to learn whether or not Dilg is actually guilty.
The movie climaxes with a magnificent speech by Colman standing in the courtroom dock. The memorable soliloquy is a paean to the Law and its vital role in protecting human freedom and dignity. The Law, he says – with the inimitable Colman stentorian eloquence, must be defended with passion and force in order to ensure that we live as human beings and not jungle animals. The Law is not something that is to be trifled with: once we dispense with the Law we open ourselves up to the destruction of innocent human life.
“The Talk of the Town” is a brilliantly executed movie comedy from Hollywood’s illustrious Golden Age. It features some of the most popular and attractive stars of the day. It was directed by one of the best-known craftsmen in the business. It was released by one of the major studios. And yet, it is a movie whose ethical premise is one of the most vital in our collective human experience.
The Law is something that is often thrown under the bus in order to promote the interests of the powerful as they seek to oppress those who value truth and integrity. Leopold Dilg is a simple working man who runs up against a corrupt corporate system and is made the scapegoat in order to further the base greed of the bosses.
This is not some agit-prop Independent movie, but a mainstream entertainment produced by a major player in the old Hollywood studio system. This was an era where the concerns of average Americans were taken seriously. It should be remembered that Columbia studios was also the home of the great Frank Capra whose homespun populist wisdom permeated the Depression-era cinema and continues to resonate in our culture with annual showings of his holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) on network television.
“The Talk of the Town” is a movie that speaks not only of social justice, but of the very nature of the Law and its importance to a healthy society. Those who pervert justice are not just the crooked and greedy, but those – like Professor Lightcap – who ignore the reality that surrounds them and keep themselves cocooned in an Ivory Tower where “pure reason” serves to set aside the gritty reality that most people actually face in their daily lives.
It is much easier for an academic like Lightcap to ignore the suffering of someone like Dilg as he hobnobs with senators and business leaders on his way to the Supreme Court. His distance from real life serves to enable the miscarriage of justice and the deleterious impact it has on society.
It is quite difficult for Lightcap to come to the realization that he is hiding his head in the sand. The perks of being an eminent legal scholar are many: he is a rich man, highly respected in society, and travels in elite circles. He seems to have it made. He does not think about workers like Dilg who are engaged in a life-and-death battle with crooked corporations.
The only thing that can truly make a society strong is fidelity to the Law. It is interesting that during the course of the movie we see Dilg and Lightcap arguing over the place of emotion in the legal process. Lightcap rightly admonishes Dilg for asserting that Law must be changed to fit circumstances and feelings. As we see Lightcap developing his own sense of what is going on around him, a parallel process is going on in Dilg who too learns the value of the Law in its formal aspect. Dilg slowly discovers that it is not the letter of the Law that is the problem, but the way in which the letter of the Law has been perverted by the corrupt members of society.
All around us today we continue to see the problem of injustice as the Law is continually undermined and shredded to pieces in order to suit the interests of the corrupt and vain. Too many in society seek to acquiesce to the corruption because it is the path of least resistance. Once they are whipped up into a frenzy by the rotten and greedy lawbreakers, the hoi polloi become thirsty for blood. They have lost any rational sense. It is at that moment that they prepare the noose for their immoral lynching of the innocent.
Classic Hollywood movies like those I have mentioned earlier did not shy away from addressing the thorny issues of justice, morality, and the Law. While we know that Hollywood showed us life as it should be and not always as it is, it is critical for us to understand that these stories helped to inspire people and transform our society. It is the eternal hope that life could be better than it is.
We must never give in to despondency and expediency when it comes to the standards of justice. The Law – as the brilliant soliloquy spoken by Colman at the end of “The Talk of the Town” beautifully shows – is a precious value that is the central value of the Torah:
Judges and officers shall you appoint in all your gates, which the Lord your God gives you, throughout your tribes; and they shall judge the people with just judgment. You shall not pervert judgment; you shall not respect persons, nor take a bribe; for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you. (Deuteronomy 16:18-20)
When those empowered to dispense justice are corrupt, our society is undermined and our lives made meaningless. The value of a motion picture like “The Talk of the Town” is in the way in which it elevates our respect for the Law and anchors that respect in the everyday lives of individual human beings. It is the foundation stone of Religious Humanism as it affirms the power of honesty and justice in a world that would often prefer to diminish our dignity and trample on our humanity in order to line the pockets of those who think of their own material well-being over the security and dignity of their neighbors.
It is a lesson that is timeless and one that needs to be taught over and over in order to make our society the best it can be.
David Shasha
From SHU 628, April 9, 2014