Mitchell Leisen’s Cradle Song (1933)
I have been singing the praises of director Mitchell Leisen at least since 2002, when I included four Leisen-directed performances in my book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t: Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table (1935), Claudette Colbert in Midnight (1939), Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night (1940), and Charles Boyer in Hold Back the Dawn (1941). I love each of those movies, and I also like his Easy Living (1937), Kitty (1945), To Each His Own (1946), and No Man of Her Own (1950). Leisen was a Golden Age filmmaker deserving of greater recognition today, no longer to be regarded as the poor man’s George Cukor. (Like Cukor, Leisen was a gay artist with a flair for sophisticated comedies and female-driven dramas, plus a special talent for combining comedy with drama, as well as a knack for getting career-best performances from his stars.) A noted set and costume designer of films in the 1920s and early ’30s (sometimes for Cecil B. DeMille), Leisen got his first official directorial credit with Cradle Song, a screen adaptation of a play. A few weeks ago, I grabbed an incredibly rare chance to see this movie at New York’s Film Forum. It was being screened in their extensive series on the films of 1933.
Cradle Song stars Swiss-born Dorothea Wieck who had recently garnered international attention for her work in the German drama Maedchen in Uniform (1931), noted for its groundbreaking handling of lesbianism. The film’s success brought Wieck to Hollywood. Like countless European actresses, Wieck was to find out that she was not, according to Hollywood and the American public, another Garbo or Dietrich. And this doesn’t seem to have happened unfairly. Though Wieck is clearly a skilled player, she seems (and sounds) more like Luise Rainer than Garbo or Dietrich, which is not a compliment. Like Rainer, Wieck is rather obvious in her effects, too self-conscious when dipping into her apparent bag of tricks. Though the film unsurprisingly did not launch Wieck, it is nonetheless worth a look (if it ever rolls around again).
In many ways Cradle Song is a typical motherlove tearjerker, but it does have a twist: the “mother” is a nun. No, she’s not the biological mother, but she is essentially the mother of the piece. Cradle Song actually plays like The Sound of Music in reverse: Wieck, an adopted orphan now grown, has been playing mother/governess to the five brothers and sisters she has ostensibly raised, but she has decided to leave them and enter a cloistered order of nuns. (Wieck plays a German girl who was orphaned in Spain, the film’s location.) So, the film begins more like The Nun’s Story than The Sound of Music, with Wieck saying goodbye and entering her new world (though clearly smuggling a lifetime supply of lip gloss for her isolated existence). Wieck is soon able to indulge her continuing maternal instincts when a foundling is left on the convent’s doorstep. It is agreed that the nuns (but mostly Wieck) will raise the little girl. She grows up to be Evelyn Venable, and it’s Wieck’s hope that Venable will join the order and remain with her. But, of course, Venable, able to go out into the world, falls in love.
The character actresses playing the nuns are not unlike those assembled for movies set in theatrical boardinghouses or women’s prisons. Warm, kindly Louise Dresser is the Mother Prioress, and crusty Georgia Caine is the sourpuss with a heart of gold. Then there’s glam Gail Patrick, comical Nydia Westman, and likable pal Gertrude Michael. Young Miss Venable is a fresh and attractive ingenue, very convincing at playing the pangs of first love (with bland Kent Taylor). It’s soon apparent that the movie’s chief asset is Leisen’s specialty, which he clearly had control of at the outset of his directing career: his ability to go beyond melodrama and locate a delicacy of feeling, a depth of character. He allows his actresses to have their moments, always stressing individual characters over the mechanics of the plot. And so we feel things, things that may have just zipped by in the hands of a less sensitive director. There may not ever be any doubt about where the story is going, with Wieck learning that she must let Venable go, but Leisen lets it unfold as a lovely, small-scale female drama defined by his tender care.
As in all of Leisen’s films, the sets and the photography are beyond first-rate. There is a rapturously beautiful image of Venable trying on her wedding veil. And you know it’s a pre-Code movie because of the scene in which the baby girl is being breast-fed by a wet nurse.
As I watched Wieck find the strength to sacrifice Venable to the world and see her go off with her husband-to-be, I realized that the movie, thanks to Leisen, was better than it had a right to be. What could have been maudlin and creaky is ultimately touching and restrained, perhaps most of all in the scene when Mr. Taylor, outside their window, asks the nuns to show him their faces so he can know who it was who raised his beloved bride and, therefore, remember them with due gratitude.
