41: Hudsucker DNA Part 1: Capra
In the early 1930s, an Italian immigrant living in California who was working in the still-young motion picture industry discovered that his engineering background gave him a leg up in basic technical knowledge of how to incorporate sound and pictures together. A product of the early studio system, he directed nine films in the first three years of the decade until he produced his first piece of work that showed he was more than an assembly line filmmaker. As film incorporated sound in the early 30s, it could also for the first time contain dialogue. Certainly characters “spoke” in the silent era in that they could move their mouths and a title card could bring in what they said, but the sharp and quick back-and-forth that defined, say, the comedy of Oscar Wilde on the stage was physically impossible on the screen. Deftly using sound and understanding that it could introduce wordplay and verbal comic timing allowed this man to create a new kind of film, dubbed the “screwball” comedy, a film so critically and commercially successful that it was the first film ever to win all five of the “big five” Academy of Motion Picture Awards in a single year. In 1934, Robert Riskin won best screenplay, Claudette Colbert won best actress, Clark Gable won best actor, and Frank Capra won best director for their work on 1934’s best picture It Happened One Night.It Happened One Night inspired hosts of other filmmakers to make films in which very silly things happen to very silly people as they wore sharp clothes and talked real fast. It inspired George Cukor to make The Philadelphia Story; it inspired Howard Hawks to make Bringing Up Baby, and it created the filmmaking language that Joel and Ethan Coen used to make The Hudsucker Proxy.
Capra as a director today is probably not best known for It Happened One Night, he is known for 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life, arguably the most well known Christmas movie in the English speaking world, despite the fact that the majority of its action happens outside the Christmas season and the fact that its climactic scene is set to the song Auld Lang Syne, implying that it takes place on New Years Eve, not Christmas. Ironically, the long term success of It’s A Wonderful Life is owed to its initial failure. The film opened to mixed reviews, and failed to make back its $3.2 million budget by about half a million dollars in its initial theatrical release. Having been released in the Christmas season of 1946, it wasn’t in a position to make back the rest of its budget in 2nd run movie houses, as who wants to go see a Christmas movie in the middle of January? RKO Pictures therefore declined to put any more promotional weight behind it, writing it off as a failure. At the time, copyright for any work had a fixed term of 25 years, with the possibility of it running further if the rightsholder put in the effort and fees to renew it. In 1972, no one cared enough about It’s A Wonderful Life to renew its copyright, and so it entered the public domain, making it free to view, distribute, and copy as anyone saw fit. At the same time the American Christmas season media juggernaut was picking up steam, with the late 1960s stop motion cartoon of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and cell animation cartoon of Frosty The Snowman being hits in their first years of release and their subsequent reruns drawing big ratings in subsequent years. American television was in dire need of as much Christmas content as it could get, and despite it being a flop at its release, Frank Capra was still known as a masterful filmmaker, and so his freshly public-domained Christmas movie became an easy way to fill a couple of hours of network programming in the Christmas season. Because it was free to broadcast, it became ubiquitous across the country, to the point where in the past 50 or so years it’s been difficult to avoid It’s A Wonderful Life come December.
At its core, It’s A Wonderful Life is a story about a man who is ground down by a powerful and wealthy older man to the point where he contemplates suicide on New Years Eve, a fate that he only avoids because of divine intervention. The Hudsucker Proxy is about the same thing. While their plots and characterizations are profoundly different, one can see a little of George Bailey in Norville Barnes and vice versa. Both are men from small towns who yearn for something beyond their borders. Both are men who run businesses and struggle to run them well despite the meddling of evil and greedy adversaries, and both are men who find themselves in a deeply dark place as a result of their own perspectives of their own personal failures. Importantly, both film’s antagonists represent the worst excesses of capitalism. Both Sidney Musburger and Mr. Potter are wealthy at the start of their respective films and seem to desire nothing beyond the expansion of their wealth and power. Both men likewise have narrow scopes to their own visions of wealth and power. Neither Sidney Musburger nor Mr. Potter seem to see a world worth controlling beyond Hudsucker Industries and Bedford Falls respectively, but their entire sense of self-worth seems to revolve maintaining and expanding their control of their specific realms. Both films however are not anti-capitalist. Both see the grossest excesses of capitalism and are happy to point them out, but also place their heroes in capitalist frameworks and suggest that a virtuous kind of capitalism can exist. Bailey Building and Loan is presented as the only bulwark against Mr. Potter turning Bedford Falls into a horrorshow, with its main street full of sin and iniquity and its housing stock being slums. In Hudsucker, Norville as president while being manipulated by the board lays off hundreds of workers to pad the bottom line, but being free of Sidney Musburger’s machinations he rules “with wisdom and compassion”. Both films therefore are about the struggle between the good and evil of American Capitalism, and its survival as a beneficial system. What’s fascinating between these two examples however is that the meaning and significance of a morally good capitalism meant profoundly different things in 1946 and 1994. Capra’s characterization of Mr. Potter as being evil and avarice personified was considered enough of a criticism of capitalism to earn him an FBI dossier and his name being tossed around in the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Both J Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy saw creeping bolshevism in Bedford Falls, but of course neither pursued any real action over it, hopefully because both realized that It’s A Wonderful Life’s vision was one where capital tempered by good natured people was the ultimate boon to society, not soviet communism. George Bailey is not a revolutionary, on the contrary, he’s literally a banker. While Capra uses benevolent capitalism as something looking to the present and the future, a way to assure all Americans prosperity (unlike those deluded Soviets on the other side of the world), the Coens use the idea of benevolent capitalism as a way to remind America about its past. As Hudsucker was being made, the Soviet Union had recently collapsed, making America the “winner” of the Cold War. In the meantime however, the perception of American industry had changed drastically. The successful American CEO was not personified in men like Norville Barnes who design creative dinguses that Americans will build so that Americans will buy them and have good clean American fun with them. The successful American CEO of the early 1990s were men like Jack Welsh of GE and Roger Smith of GM, both men known not for creating new inroads in their respective businesses but men known for slashing away at their own companies in the name of padding the bottom line at the expense of the American worker. Barnes represents a kind of nostalgia for when news coming out of the business section of the paper meant that there was word of a new doohickey, not that a factory in Flint, Michigan was closing and thus a thousand people were losing their jobs.
Both films also, of course, feature angels and divine intervention into the lives of these benevolent capitalists. The affably bumbling Clarence from It’s A Wonderful Life is a very different sort of angel from the ghost of Waring Hudsucker and the time-stopping divine agent Moses from Hudsucker, but both films imply that supernatural forces are needed from time to time to keep the moral compass of the world pointed in the right direction. Hudsucker’s deus ex machina could be explained as an It’s A Wonderful Life reference. This would save the apologist from having to say that Hudsucker’s climactic turnaround is due to Joel & Ethan Coen having written themselves into a corner. I suspect however that it may be both a reference and a way to write themselves out of a jam. The divine presence in It’s A Wonderful Life is baked into the plot. Its very framing device is a trio of angels discussing the travails of George Bailey, while the divine or supernatural is at-best obliquely hinted at via Moses possessing an impossible amount of knowledge in Hudsucker. Angels explicitly tell the story in It’s A Wonderful Life, while the existence of angels isn’t confirmed in Hudsucker until one is literally in the midst of saving Norville’s life. It seems much more likely then, that having written the story to the point where Norville is slipping from the ledge of the Hudsucker Building’s 44th floor, Sam Raimi, Joel Coen, and Ethan Coen decided it was acceptable that the plot be resolved via divine intervention as, after all, Capra did it in It’s A Wonderful Life, right?
While he continued to make screwball comedies after It Happened One Night, most of Capra’s best known works today are these kinds of morality plays, films in which a deeply moral everyman is put into extraordinary circumstances, and despite the world trying to corrupt him, he continues to stand on his moral high ground —no matter how difficult— and ultimately prevails. Probably his best known work after It’s A Wonderful Life is 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Mr. Smith is at its core a film about an affable hick who is chosen by powerful men to be placed in a position of power explicitly so that he’ll be over his head, and thus easy to manipulate to do their bidding and thus get away with an immoral scheme. The Hudsucker Proxy is a movie about the same thing. Mr. Smith’s titular Jefferson Smith and Norville Barnes are likewise similar in that they are men whose positions in life allow them to simultaneously be respectable and parochial at the same time. Jefferson Smith is the head of the local Boy Rangers, a Boy Scouts of America analogue, a position that demonstrates that he has administration and leadership experience, and a position that demonstrates that he’s well admired, if only among the 11 – 15 year old boy set. Norville Barnes in the meantime has a degree in business administration for which he made Dean’s list. He has academically excelled, it is merely the fact that he has excelled in Muncie, Indiana that makes him seem like a chump. Both men also from their perch of power present ideas that seem ridiculous to the fat cats in power, but that appeal to broader society, in Smith’s national boy’s camp and Barnes’s Hula Hoop. Ultimately both men have themselves brought low by smear campaigns originating from the very same powerful men who attempted to push them around in the first place with completely fabricated evidence. Smith is accused of attempting to personally profit from his national boy’s camp plan, while Barnes is accused of stealing the idea for the Hula Hoop from Buzz the elevator operator. The fundamental difference between the two men is in how they ultimately persevere in the face of adversity. Jefferson Smith filibusters the senate floor until his fellow senator Paine from their unnamed western state — who himself is guilty of the very graft he has accused Smith of — cracks under the pressure of his own morality. He breaks down seeing Smith suffer and admits his own wrongdoing. Norville Barnes only perseveres because of an incredibly unlikely lucky break and actual divine intervention. A feature of Capra’s films are his impeccably good protagonists. Certainly they might do human things like go a little gaga over a girl or lose their temper and punch a thing, but they’re never tempted into the greater evil of abusing their own positions of power for their own gain. Capra’s heroes are largely incorruptible, a feature that usually leads directly to their salvation, unlike the all too corruptible Norville Barnes.
A national boy’s camp. You know, for kids!
One of Capra’s films is so closely followed by The Hudsucker Proxy that it would not be out of character to say that Hudsucker is directly based on it, to the point of nearly being a remake. 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes To Town is at its core a movie about a small town rube who, via the death of a man he does not know, is thrust into a position of power and wealth in New York City. He becomes the fascination of the local newspapers, and a lady reporter deceives the man into thinking she’s a helpless waif and thus gets close to him in his good graces as a means of writing humiliating stories about him in the paper. She ultimately sees though that he’s a good man though and falls in love with him, ultimately defending him as the very same powerful forces that pretended to be his staunchest allies attempt to frame him as insane as a means of taking that same power away. The Hudsucker Proxy is a movie about the same thing. While both films have their differences in opening and closing, both films’ second acts are so profoundly similar it’s impossible to not see the Coens not directly lifting scenes wholesale from Capra’s work. Once both Longfellow Deeds and Norville Barnes are established as powerful men who have seemingly come out of nowhere, both films have scenes in a newsroom with an anxious editor-in-chief berating his staff for not being able to write stories about the mysterious hick who’s had greatness thrust upon him. The scenes hew so closely to each other that they even nearly share dialogue. Take this from “Mac” the editor-in-chief of the fictional Manhattan Daily Mail from Mr. Deeds
He's news! Every time he blows his nose, it's news. A cornfed bohunk like that falling into the Semple fortune is hot copy... But it's got to be personal. It's got to have an angle. What does he think about? How does it feel to be a millionaire! Is he going to get married! What does he think of New York! Is he smart? Is he dumb? ... A million angles!
And then this from the editor-in-chief of the fictional Manhattan Argus from Hudsucker
I wanna know what makes the Idea Man tick! Where is he from? Where is he going? I wanna know everything about this guy! Has he got a girl? Has he got parents? How many? What're his hopes and dreams, his desires and aspirations? Does he think all the time or does he set aside a certain portion of the day? How tall is he and what's his shoe size? Where does he sleep and what does he eat for breakfast? Does he put jam on his toast or doesn't he put jam on his toast, and if not why not and since when? … Well?!
Shortly afterwards in both films the infinitely clever lady reporter assigned to write a story on the mysterious important and new-in-town man gets close to him by pretending to be a damsel in distress in his presence. In Mr. Deeds, Babe Bennet pretends to faint from exhaustion after spending all day on her feet looking for a job, while in Hudsucker, Amy Archer pretends to faint from exhaustion after being unable to pay for her lunch while looking for a job to pay for her mother’s lumbago treatments. Both scenes are observed as they happen by a pair of men wise to what’s going on. In Babe’s case however the two photographers she brings are in awe of her and the lengths she’ll go to get the story, while in Hudsucker the two cabbies observing Amy’s grift are wise because they see right through it. In Mr. Deeds, Babe Bennet writes stories about Longfellow, giving him the epithet “Cinderella Man”, while in Hudsucker the Daily Argus perpetually refers to Norville in the press as the “Idea Man”, and both Babe and Amy ultimately realize that their subject they’ve been milking for stories ridiculing him is actually a pretty swell guy, ultimately falling in love with him. Both films also of course end with their antagonists attempting to declare the naïve rube to be insane and thus be committed. As in Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds concludes with him using the power of stirring rhetoric to save himself convincing the courtroom with a speech that he’s as sane as the next man. Hudsucker has no such heroic moment for Norville Barnes, as his salvation comes from angelic forces beyond his control. Capra’s characters save themselves through their own moral rectitude, while Hudsucker’s protagonist is evidently saved by fate.
maybe he’s wise?
he don’t look wise
Capra’s films are undoubtedly the inspiration for much of Hudsucker’s settings and plotting, but there’s one profound difference between the two: joy. Capra’s characters exist as stand-ins for good and evil. His films have happy endings, but often there’s a great slog of showing his virtuous heroes and how they’re mistreated before we get to that happy point. His films are morality tales, and his characters are stand ins for the morally just and those who seek to exploit and undermine them. For the man who invented the screwball comedy, the films that inspire The Hudsucker Proxy have precious few moments of the zaniness that the genre brings to mind. Further, Hudsucker’s characters lack the moral black and white qualities of Capra’s films. Norville is a swell enough guy, but he’s not so profoundly upright that he can’t be corrupted by power and by the world telling him his shit doesn’t stink. Sidney Musburger is a malevolent force, but as cartoonishly evil as he is, he’s not quite so cartoonishly evil as It’s A Wonderful Life’s Mr. Potter or Mr. Deeds Goes To Town’s John Cedar. Exiting a Capra film one feels like right has triumphed over wrong and justice has prevailed, but there is no lightness, no sense of joy or mirth that one wants out of a comedy and gets in spades from The Hudsucker Proxy. For that, one would need to turn to a filmmaker like, say, Preston Sturgess, the subject of next week’s essay.