Two Movies About Fate and Choices: Turn Back the Clock and Holy Matrimony

Edgar Selwyn's Turn Back the Clock (1933) is an early entry in films about time travel.  Joe Gimlet (played by  an unusually vulnerable Lee Tracy) runs a tobacco store in New York and tries to convince his wife Mary (Mae Clark) to invest their savings of $4000 with an old banking friend (Otto Kruger), now married to Joe's former love Elvina (Peggy Shannon).  When Mary refuses to invest their life savings Joe stalks out and is hit by a car.  Under anesthesia he travels back in time and makes different choices: marrying Elvina,  becoming wealthy and losing all the money in the crash (he knew it was coming but Elvina  had invested the money without telling him), after which he is indicted and chased by the police.  He wakes up and realizes he had made the right choices after all, that wealth is not measured in dollars. The screenplay by Selwyn and Ben Hecht (screenwriter of many great films, including Lubitsch's Design for Living, also 1933) is not as schematic as it may sound.  With the help of MGM's cinematographer Harold Rosson, Selwyn does a wonderful job of re-creating the different time periods, not just with production design (by Stan Rogers) but with changing attitudes and mores, especially with the transition from horse-and-buggy to motorcar.   Selwyn also manages to elude the sentimentality that Capra, for instance, brought to this kind of material, eschewing sentimentality for rigorous realism, emotion and feeling.

Selwyn was originally a stage director, whose film directing began and ended with the 30's.  John M. Stahl directed films until the late forties but seems to be as forgotten as Selwyn, largely because his melodramas -- Imitation of Life (1934), Magnificent Obsession (1935) -- were eclipsed by the more ironic Douglas Sirk remakes. Andrew Sarris writes "Stahl's strong point was sincerity and a vivid visual style" and "Holy Matrimony (1943) was a success by any standards."  Holy Matrimony stars Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields (a dance-hall singer who was a charming actress), making it the kind of movie the late William K. Everson liked to show at the New School:  excellent, obscure, strongly English in tone.  Fields and Woolley are nicely restrained as two older people who end up living together because she confused him with his deceased valet, played by Eric Blore, one of many closeted homosexuals in the cast, including Woolley himself and Franklin Pangborn.  Brought together by mistake, misanthrope Woolley and Fields gradually begin to feel a mutual affection and Stahl begins to bring them together visually as they grow more protective of each other. They end up on the same isolated island where Woolley had lived with his valet. Along with Stahl credit goes to Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay, and Arnold Bennett, who wrote the original novel, Buried Alive (1910).

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for recently showing these two movies in their tributes to Mae Clark and Monty Woolley, proving once again that there is much about film and its history that has yet to be discovered and explored.