THE OBSCURITY OF FAME
Dworkin, Martin S.
The Obscurity of Fame by MARTIN S. DWORKIN THE GREAT personages of our time, especially those still alive, would seem to be obvious subjects for the screen, and comparatively easy to portray,...
...Produced and directed by Jerome Hill, the film makes use of old photographs and documents to reconstruct Schweitzer's early life—portions of which are reenacted, with his own grandson portraying him as a child, and his sister appearing as his mother...
...But his charity is one thing, and our response and responsibility quite others...
...For it has become eminently fashionable to praise Schweitzer, and to appropriate his virtue as a medallion against our own total disregard of the beliefs and way of life to which he has been devoted...
...The emphasis, perhaps correctly, is put upon the emergence of his notion of "Reverence for Life...
...What is brought to the film by the audience, in memories and understanding, must fill out its vacancies— which are also filled, although sometimes too fully, by Franz Waxman's deliberately heroic score...
...But their ignorance is an appalling indication of the historical sense of a generation that must surely take its own place in history, yet has been encouraged, by misguided permissiveness in formal education, to regard a knowl.edge of history to be irrelevant— and, by the rampant forces of popular entertainment, to look upon only the immediately novel as important...
...And while there is conveyed a sense of the danger and hardship— chiefly exhaustion—under which the flier did what he did, there is little sense of his character that was driven by such a purpose and little indication of what he signifies for his times...
...Hunter had nothing else to do with the film, but his activity on its behalf is something curiously symbolic—particularly when it is noted that not even James Stewart, who actually plays Lindbergh, wis judged to have whatever it takes to make the flight of The Spirit of St...
...Louis, it molds its subjects to its form of presentation, and there is so much more beyond that one may easily accept its limitations as necessary— especially as one recognizes that it has one prominent purpose as propaganda in a good cause: the profits from the film are destined for the Fellowship that supports the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Lambar£n£, French Equatorial Africa...
...Lindbergh is presented as a celebrity, rather than as a historically significant personage...
...The cliches of the typical "The (Somebody) Story" film are obtrusive throughout, especially the exaggerated use of flashbacks—one of which involves one of the usual mystical elements, symbolized in a running business of a St...
...In becoming famous, in our days of incessant sensationalism, the great run the risk of having their greatness reduced to appearances...
...To a considerable degree, this film conforms to the same stylized celebration...
...Several shots are quite striking, as one of the foggy morning of Lindbergh's take-off from the Old Roosevelt Field on Long Island...
...The weakness of Albert Schweitzer, by contrast, is not really what appears upon the screen, although the film is pervaded by technical flaws, evincing the difficulties in its creation...
...The visual substance of the film is created in some extraordinary photography by Robert Burks and J. Peverell Marley...
...What should be a personified indictment of complacency is instead a respectful affirmation of how nice it is to know that there is such a man as Schweitzer, philosophizing about civilization and playing Bach as relaxation from his labors for the lepers in the jungle...
...A poignant commentary upon the transience of fame is provided by the experience of Warner Brothers in its campaign advertising The Spirit of St...
...The photography in Eastman-color, by Erica Anderson, at Lambarene and Gunsbach in Alsace, is of erratic quality—quite remarkable, however, considering the difficulties to be overcome...
...Louis sufficiently glamorous to attract young customers...
...Louis...
...Schweitzer's own words are expressively read by Fredric March, as is Thomas Bruce Morgan's additional commentary by Burgess Meredith, to the accompaniment of an inventive score by Alec Wilder...
...In the movies, as in other media which inform by entertaining, and which define greatness in popular terms as fame, the great are likely to be transmuted into celebrities, and their essential qualities either obscured, or grotesquely caricatured...
...Like The Spirit of St...
...Schweitzer himself wrote portions of the narrative, and approved the whole...
...made visible, to be sure— as on the screen, yet hidden in the coruscating obscurity of notoriety...
...Once legal problems of depicting living persons are surmounted, apparently there remain only those of technique, which, although difficult, are the movies' daily conditions of production...
...Fashionable magazines have been on a Schweitzer "kick" for years, publishing reverent articles about his "Reverence for Life" between advertisements for murder mysteries, sports cars, and brassieres, and superciliously aesthetic appreciations of the niceties of Spanish bullfighting...
...A leading favorite of adolescent movie-goers, Tab Hunter, himself yet unborn at the time of Lindbergh's flight, was hurriedly called upon to lend his topical prestige to the promotion of the film, in personal appearances before youthful audiences...
...This portrayal, in which Stewart is so adept, fundamentally caresses the popular imagination by demonstrating that the outstanding and accomplished are familiarly mediocre, after all, and that whaj they have done is no more important than to have made them famous...
...The matter of the film's weakness, however, is not so directly related to what we are able to experience in the theater as to why we come at all, and what we bring with us...
...Whole areas of Schweitzer's philosophy are ignored...
...What is missing, except for moments in the commentary, is a sense of Schweitzer the great man—rather than the conventionalized institution—from whom the principles and practice of humanity which are described have come...
...The Obscurity of Fame by MARTIN S. DWORKIN THE GREAT personages of our time, especially those still alive, would seem to be obvious subjects for the screen, and comparatively easy to portray, whether they appear as themselves or are represented by actors...
...The film itself assumes a knowledge and unqualified adulation of the man and his achievement...
...To take as examples two unquestionably significant figures of our century, Charles Lindbergh and Albert Schweitzer, it appears that even the most respectful attempts to present on film their personalities, accomplishments, and meanings cannot transcend the limits of conventional forms of presentation...
...The form of the film partakes a little of the mission appeal, but is generally that of the semi-documentary "profile," in the tradition of the old March of Time and the contemporary See It Now television programs...
...The manner of the assumption, however, displays the film's essential weakness...
...It may be better to ignore authentic greatness, if we can, than to debase it by making it comfortingly famous...
...Except for the brief appearance of a girl who somewhat mystically provides a pocket mirror for compass reading on the flight, there is no High Priestess (as usually played by June Allyson) to inspire and sustain the hero (usually played by Stewart) in his quest after a secularized divinity—such as the unique bandstand "sound" in The Glenn Miller Story, that would give the musician eternal life, as the "kids" went on dancing to it forever and ever...
...For once, the color process is not allowed to produce an overbearing riot of hues, as in countless multicolored melodramas, that is invariably anachronistic...
...We must not be soft towards ourselves in understanding what the meaning of this film really is, with respect to the man it portrays, and his meaning to ourselves...
...To the shock and chagrin of those to whom the achievement of "Lucky Lindy" remains the most outstanding and characteristic of the decade between World War I and the Depression, it was discovered that vast numbers of the potential audience for the film did not know who Charles Lindbergh is, what he did, and why it was important...
...If it were not for the fact that the film will bring practical assistance to Schweitzer's work in the jungle, it would be possible to be thoroughly disgusted with what it truly signifies...
...Stewart, however, plays Lindbergh as the uncomplicated, naively dedicated all-American boy he has made familiar in so many other ritualized recreations of the lives of fliers, ball players, musicians, and other perishable folk heroes...
...These examples, moreover, illustrate that the problems of popularization arise on many levels, from that of mass audiences to that of sophisticates...
...The film, produced by Leland Hayward, and directed by Billy Wilder from an adaptation by Charles Lederer of Lindbergh's own book, achieves remarkable visual authenticity of detail: in the clothing, automobiles, and airplanes of the era, and in a faithful reconstruction of Lindy's little monoplane, shown taking shape from blueprints, and then in actual, nostalgically poignant flight...
...The latter, to be sure, cannot be expected to remember the flight that represented and precipitated the maturity of the Air Age—any more than any of us can be held to recall the firing on Fort Sumter, or the first transmission via telegraph...
...The most seriously dubious quality of the film, however, projects beyond the screen upon the spirits of the relatively sophisticated audience for which it is intended...
...But as his complexity is hardly suggested, and not comprehended within the film's compass, this aspect of his philosophy is never fully presented—and is best inferred from particular fragments showing SchweitzeT with animals, walking about, meeting and working with his charges, and giving them medical treatment...
...Paradoxically, however, the truly great are not as easily captured on film as are the merely celebrated—perhaps, most of all, because the forms of filmic presentation are primarily related to forms of popular celebration...
...Christopher's medal which the agnostic Lindbergh hangs on his instrument panel...
...The music, in fact, is often the only element of the film that unequivocally proclaims the importance of what is being shown—an unmistakable sign of weakness in what was intended to be an epic on the screen...
...The final measure, however, must be whether the man and his achievement are made believable and significant...
...He, too, has been made into a celebrity—with all the obsequious neglect this implies...
...For it is likely to be experienced as comforting entertainment to induce peace of mind, providing an assurance that all is yet well in this most possible of possible worlds, as so great a man devotes himself to doing what we all should do, so that we needn't bother...
...Although the film conscientiously and admirably eschews the more blatant conceits of the typical "The (Somebody) Story" film, it retains enough of its form and character to be impressed upon its subject...
...This allows the introduction, by recall, of the familiar priest, who has a prayer for everything, including take-offs and landings, but not, manifestly, for credibility...
Vol. 21 • April 1957 • No. 4
