Goodbye, My Fancy

Goodbye, My Fancy

D: Vincent Sherman (1951); with Joan Crawford, Robert Young, Eve Arden, Ellen Corby, Janice Rule.

This is ridiculous fluff that compounds its error by trying to have meaning. Joan plays Congresswoman Agatha Reed, chairwoman of a committee dedicated to "investigating the high cost of food." Says Congresswoman Reed, "The housewife has been getting it in the neck too long. I'm going to keep fighting long enough so that the American family can take a vacation once a year, see a movie every week, and feed an occasional peanut to an elephant." She's all business, but she becomes all gushy after receiving an honorary degree from Good Hope College, which expelled her for the crime of staying out all night. (The parallel to Joan's real life is unmistakable here, as it is in all Joan movies.) The degree causes much consternation on campus ("That would make it the most broad-minded institution in the history of education!"), but Joan is unaware of this as she arrives. The college president, Jim Merrill, played by Young at his handsomest, happens to be Joan's former teacher -- and lover. It was with him that she spent the night out all those years ago, but Joan felt it was better to just disappear rather than try to explain to the skeptical college that they were about to be married. Naturally, this high-profile event will be covered by Life magazine -- and who does the photographer turn out to be? Yet another of Joan's old lovers -- a man she hung out with in China "during the war," and he thinks Joan might be headed for trouble with her old flame. Eve Arden, playing Joan's assistant Woody, is at her most butch and most smart-aleck in this movie. Her flippant and unnecessary remarks would get her fired if they didn't make her so likable. But in this role, as in all her roles, you not only like Eve -- you adore her. She is so droll and no-nonsense, you'd pay her just to hang around and be one of the boys. When Joan cries upon arriving at her alma mater, Eve tells her it "looks fierce." But Joan says that while maybe others only see a collection of buildings, she, Joan, sees youth -- herself at 18, "eager, expectant, a little frightened, asking, 'What is life? What am I?'" But, of course, if we actually go into depth about Joan at 18, the truth is a little different. For me, this is the major problem with any Joan movie. You can call her characters whatever you want, but it's all Joan, all the time. So, since what we're always seeing is Joan playing herself, it's easy to dispense with characters' names. But this gets confusing when Joan tries to tell us something patently untrue, like the description of herself at 18. We know that at 18, Joan had already been around the block several times. Sure, many men might have described her as eager, and as far as being expectant, she had already had several abortions by then. But I digress. (I just wanted to explain why I write "Joan did this …" when we're obviously not watching a home movie.) There is an unintentionally hilarious moment in which Joan is given the Clara Bow doll that she left behind in college -- quick arithmetic tells us that Joan and Clara were contemporaries, and this is a transparent ploy to make us believe Joan is much younger than she actually looks. It fails. What also fails is an attempt at early-Fifties political correctness. In the story, Joan has written a book about free speech and made a film (no, not the one about the plumber), and she attracts the attention of a campus radical, Dr. Pitt, who is about to be fired for his views, which are shockingly similar to Joan's. This is where the movie mysteriously becomes a morality tale -- a weak one, to be sure, but perhaps the only thing that keeps it from sliding into oblivion.