CANADA Saves the Screen

...On another hand, there is the problem, especially in British-made films about World War I or II, of what to do about an American actor or actress within the story, in order to get his or her name safely on the theater marquees...

...A Canadian is the ideal, universal citizen of the British Commonwealth, as far as the movies are concerned...

...In general, that these "Messieurs" and "Mesdames" are supposed to be speaking French to one another, that they are supposed to be Canadians, and that their being French-Canadians has some relevance to the story, is less convincing than the fictive science being made visual—if not actual—by the wonders of real applied science on the screen...

...Americans may be grateful for the implication that Canada is no different from California when it comes to mad scientists and their monsters...

...But nobody, and particularly no Canadian, should get the idea that making Americans into movie Canadians is a simple matter of business routine...

...If so, it is the more welcome during this International Geophysical Year, when so much point is being made about the universal unity of scientific knowledge...

...For, to make Home into an Australian, or New Zealander, or South African, would have added new complications concerning accents, special slang—and even more detailed explanations as to why this fellow happened to be involved...

...And these depend upon the notion that there is such a thing as a standard Canadian "accent," and that it can pass for an American accent and the other way around...

...But it also may become a kind of medallion to be worn against the cold specificity of being merely American or British...

...The resultant new species was clearly not in the movie's image of God and had to be obliterated...

...But little else is conveyed by director-producer Kurt Neumann of a distinctly different locale and atmosphere...

...Canadians who may be dubious about the strange ways whereby they are being made to pop up, along the longest undefended screen in the world, may reflect upon the lengths to which the movies go in the process...

...With it, Holden, the American-volunteer Canadian-posted British naval officer, assigned to a Dutch ship, succeeds to the housekeeping of Sophia Loren, who is appropriately Swiss, after the death of his friend and tugboat colleague, Trevor Howard—himself only one in a line of predeceased predecessors, of several nationalities...

...It isn't that Canadians have a nice, thick, easily recognizable accent— like that of traditional stage Irishmen or dialect villains and comedians—to help audiences tell the characters apart...

...It does not violate synopsis security to say that the wife did kill her husband...

...But Canadians, currently concerned about encouraging an authentic Canadian culture amid the floods of American automobiles, breakfast foods, and picture magazines, may be less appreciative of what may seem just another freshet of cultural imperialism pouring across the longest undefended border in the world...

...In a way, having a Canadian around in a movie can be like taking out a kind of international insurance policy, good for all sorts of noncommittal utilities...

...From the vantage of a very sensitive industry, the notion has the definite virtue that there are far fewer Canadians than Americans to feel offended by the identification—if anyone is likely to be offended...

...The screenplay, by James Clavell from a story by George Langelaan, insists we are in French Canada by having the characters address each other some of the time as "Monsieur" or "Madame...

...Explicit moralizing is expected—nay, demanded by the simple faith in the fundamental sin of science that imbues so much of our sophisticated ardor for the implicit irresponsibilities of science fiction...

...On the one hand, there is the frequent story problem, in American movies about Englishmen, of how to provide a leading character with a proper Empire or Commonwealth flavor—but one not too exotically remote for American audiences to lose vicarious contact...

...And so, we are able to explain how a sizable parcel of blocked British funds could be used by an American company to make an action epic, Paratrooper (Columbia, 1954), with a British supporting cast—but with carefully calculated American appeal provided by the star, Alan Ladd, playing a Canadian...

...But there is more to the presence of the Canadian than his rounding out the "international character" of the expedition, as the American remarks...

...Producer Carl Foreman's screenplay, based upon a novel by Jan De Hartog, deliberately concatenates nationalities in a chain from which the key dangles symbolically...

...The little group of commandos bent on destroying the bridge—the one the British under Alex Guinness are busily building for the Japanese in the Burmese jungle—is made up of an Englishman, Jack Hawkins...

...Or, perhaps, if the course of scientific experimentation or of law enforcement had been obstructed by some difficulty of jurisdiction among the autonomous municipalities or, more dramatically, by some manifestation of lost love among the French and Anglo-Canadians...

...There is so little to place either the science or the fiction firmly in Canada, and specifically in Montreal...

...In one light, the film thereby achieves a broader irony than did the original novel by Pierre Boulle, which stressed only the particular stupidities of Englishmen and Japanese, in mordantly depicting the general, assiduously complicated stupidities of modern warfare...

...And so, for example, C. S. Forester's Cockney river boat skipper in The African Queen (United Artists, 1952) was transformed by the screenplay of James Agee and Director John Huston into Humphrey Bogart's seedily independent Canadian, goaded into gallantry against the Germans by Katharine Hepburn's indomitable British missionary...

...The representation of Canadians in The Fly, as gratuitous as it may be, is only one more example of a continuing tradition in the cinema in which Canadians are cast in a very special role...

...Canadians themselves may suspect, of course, that they are being invented...

...There are certain delicate implicatons for international relations in its specification of people and place...

...Significantly, in the same year Ladd again appeared as a Canadian, "Sergeant O'Rourke" of the Mount-ies, in Saskatchewan (Universal), directed by Raoul Walsh...

...Thus, the United States, Britain, and the Commonwealth are nicely represented, for maximum values of audience association and promotion...

...With no offense intended, therefore, the movie-makers can proceed to deal with a couple of related problems that have proved quite vexing since the advent of sound on the screen, and especially since World War II...

...Such seeming serious*-ness is not incongruous in promoting an example of a genre in which play-seriousness is essential...

...Indeed, why Canada...

...The comfortable home of the young genius is across the yard from the electronics plant...

...Not only in American films, but perhaps even more in British, fictional Canadians are so frequently essential that the real Canadians might have had to be invented, if they did not already exist...

...Here we are not speaking of the few films produced every year that are really about Canadians, accurately or not, for these films do not exemplify what may be the most significant role of Canadians in the movies today...

...The police inspector speaks of Queen's warrants, and is more gentlemanly, more cultured, more foreign than the usual "Lieutenant So-and-So, Homicide," would be, if things were happening around Los Angeles...

...More often than not, it is a tricky business, on which the movie people spend much intricate imagination...

...All this is supposed to happen in Montreal, but we see absolutely nothing of that many-citied city or its environs...

...The ingenuity involved in working Canada and Canadians into movie plots is even more intricate in The Key (Columbia, 1958...

...The answer: Make him a Canadian...

...This sleight of services and nationalities does make possible one moment of added drama, when it is announced that the United States has entered the war...

...In all his deeds of daring sleepwalking with sword and buckler, he made it quite convincing that meanwhile, back at the ranch, all those English knights and ladies thought they were on the set of another movie...

...The film's story about a scientist who toys with a means for disjecting and reintegrating matter in space does perpetuate the hallowed science-fiction parable of the penalties of pride...

...And it is only repeating billboard secrets to add that there was nothing mean about her behavior...

...an American, William Holden...

...Now, Ladd as a Canadian at King Arthur's court would have made much more sense...

...There is, for example, the matter of the Canadian in The Bridge on the River Kwai (Columbia, 1957...

...There are usually story reasons and business reasons for making a point of a character's Canadian nationality...

...The genius appears to have been murdered by his wife, Patricia Owens— by being crushed in the great press installed in the electronic manufactory that he runs jointly with his brother, Vincent Price...

...We are told that we are in Montreal, at the private laboratory of a young genius, Al Hedison...

...It seems her husband insisted upon being hydraulically flattened, as his latest extension of the frontiers of human knowledge had gotten his body mixed up with that of a passing housefly...

...That dash of Canada in Holden's background—added voluntarily, you see— begins to take on mystical flavors even outside the story line of the movie, which unfolds under Carol Reed's direction as vivid wartime drama, with fear and the fear of fear informing every little bravery, every act of sheer survival, with an essential doom...

...Some trouble is taken to make the point that William Holden, arriving in England in 1941 with a new commission as captain of a seagoing tug in the dangerous rescue service, has been transferred from the Canadian army, in which he is a sergeant...

...and the Canadian, Geoffrey Home...

...It is added, however, that he is himself not Canadian, but American...

...And the locale is not some California research center (in direct touch, of course, with the Pentagon in Washington), or a remote roost (also recognizably within budget distance of Hollywood), whence some electronic doom is destined to envelop the earth, until within a nick of time...

...The laboratory is in the basement...

...Now, if there had been one scene of the hurrying police inspector being held up in a typical traffic jam, as some bridge or other is opened to let a ship pass by...

...And, almost simultaneously, he proved the point about movie Canadians being necessary by clanking around the court of King Arthur in The Black Knight (Columbia), as if Olde Englande was not pasted together in a British studio, as anyone could see, but was safely back in hoss-opera country somewhere...

...But the moralizing in The Fly has one novel aspect...

...O' Canada, sung in nicely indeterminate accents on the screen, if not elsewhere, may sound an anthem of newer unities...

...It is all as cozily convenient for shooting—and for later television projection—as can be made on a studio sound stage...

...It is, we may hope, a move to take the cliche pressure off the United States, which, in the popular mind, still has the monopoly of atomic scientists whose misguided enlightenment threatens to darken the earth...

...Why Montreal...

...The scientist, this time, is not an American, but a Canadian...

...There are a few scenes in a room or two of the brother's house somewhere else, and one or two of the police inspector, Herbert Marshall, at headquarters or at his club...

...But we may be sure that there are more meanings than this intended, in a film so literally mystical as to make a door key into an ikon for life...