I will always wonder if La Cava heard Annie Ross’s “Twisted” before he passed away. Not to let my own interests cloud my judgment of La Cava. Anyway, reporting back from my screening of Private Worlds (1935) at The Cinema Museum (it is still a wonderful surprise to say that)! I’d like to thank again the people who came to the screening on the 6th of May for supporting my belief that La Cava fever is alive and well, and for his lesser known works.
The journey to this screening began when I was searching for any prints of Feel My Pulse in the UK, glad to report back that Christopher Bird recently acquired a 16mm print, and thought the extensive collection of film prints from Martin Humphries and Ronald Grant would be my first stop. Phil Clark informed me that they did not have that title, but did have 16mm prints of The New School Teacher (1925), the silent feature La Cava made in his New York days, Gallant Lady (1933), Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), and Private Worlds (1935). I may have touched on this in the early days of this blog, but Gallant Lady was the picture that really was the starting point for my interest in La Cava. The striking honesty and delicate approach to the story, all the while not dismissing the genre of the melodrama that the film firmly sits in is quite beautiful. It’s a smart film, however, this type of picture is quite divisive, and seemed more appropriate to approach in a season of like-minded pictures or a La Cava retrospective event, and the carefully balanced humour and humanity of Private Worlds (1935) appeared like a more suitable choice for a screening.
La Cava’s reputation today is primarily as a filmmaker of comedy, albeit his preferred genre, but titles such as Private Worlds, Primrose Path and The Age of Consent all contain his particular sensibilities and his adaptability as a filmmaker. The injection of comedy into these pictures always feels natural, as evident in the smatterings of laughter at appropriate moments. Private Worlds (1935) gave La Cava the opportunity to explore his fascination with psychology, adapting Phyllis Bottome’s Private Worlds with Brentworth Hospital, the psychiatric institute of Private Worlds, being his playground to explore more explicitly the torment of the human condition. Private Worlds follows Claudette Colbert’s Dr. Jane Everest, a progressive psychiatrist in belief of the “talking cure”, and her resilience against the discrimination due to her position as a female doctor by the institute’s new supervisor, Charles Boyer. Colbert’s co-worker, Dr. Alex MacGregor, played by La Cava favourite Joel McCrea’s, world is also fractured by the arrival of Boyer and his sister, Helen Vinsion, which spirals into an adulterous affair, tormenting McCrea’s wife, Joan Bennett.
Psychology had always been a fascination of his as La Cava’s script supervisor Winifrid Kay Thackrey recalled: he even retained a psychiatrist Dr. Levine to consult with as “he wanted to know why we said one thing while believing something quite different, why we covered our hopes and fears with wisecracks and laughter.” This tightly wound story is a departure from La Cava’s improvisational methods, as Claudette Colbert recalls that La Cava did not come down the stairs with little pieces of paper for today’s new scene, due to his intent for portraying psychology and the psychiatric institute as honestly as he knew how; as he was also familiar with sanatoriums due to alcoholic rehabilitation programmes for both himself and W.C. Fields. But he was still interested in his actor’s response to his script, as with most of his work, and the “human element” in his films is evident in La Cava tailoring scenes and characters to reality and the personalities of his actors. Joel McCrea reflected on how crucial La Cava was to receiving more of a variety of roles with La Cava fighting for McCrea above the studio choices of either William Powell or Robert Montgomery for Private Worlds (1935). Here’s McCrea talking about this in an interview conducted in 1971 by Charles Higham:
Not just through the script, as I believe partially what makes Private Worlds such fascinating piece of work and, I hope, enjoyable for you is how La Cava navigates these private worlds, these internal struggles, through these intimate photographic choices, such as the dimming of light on a patient who has just died. The fight sequence between the patients and the doctors, that Colbert gets into the middle of, also features an array of zoom lens techniques that was relatively new at this point. I have shared an article cinematographer Leon Shamroy contributed to on this blog before, but it’s interesting to return to once seeing the rather vivid photographic choices of Private Worlds, his detailing that “You will notice in a La Cava film that there are more master shots than closeups. Instead of simply doing a scene with a series of closeups and getting the individual reaction of each character, La Cava aims to reveal the reaction of each character in the scene to all the others” is partially abandoned for creating the suffocating atmosphere of the psychiatric institute with close-ups, zooms, and camera tilting capturing the feeling of psychological distress. In Private Worlds, the intimacy of La Cava’s interest in photography manifests in the alignment with Joan Bennett’s distress, and it’s great to see these fascinating photographic choices on a 16mm print.1
Delighted to say that there will be more La Cava at The Cinema Museum next year! A small tribute to some other La Cava rarities with focus on his silents and Pre-codes is in the works, which I will announce on here near the time. I will create a screenings page not just for my own screenings but for La Cava screenings that I can find both nationally and internationally. If you’re screening some La Cava films, let me know! I’d love to share and help with your screenings any way that I can. Thanks again for reading my blog and your interest in my screenings.
- Phil Clark estimates this print to be from around 1958. ↩︎
