Nobody remembers much about the movie version of How Green Was My Valley (1941), but if anything from that dull film has lodged in your brain it is likely to be the tear-tempting moment when Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) leaves the church where she has just been married and the wind catches her veil and sets it billowing in the air. The gusts and gasps of romantic love have rarely been better captured on film. As the man who wrote the script, Philip Dunne, later said “My God, what a shot! . . . I tried to reproduce it when I directed 10 North Frederick, and then I realized it was a mistake . . . . You can’t reproduce those accidents”.

For accident the moment was. Nothing in Dunne’s screenplay had suggested it might be a good idea to have a wind machine on hand for that scene outside the church. And although the director John Ford’s eye for a seductively composed image has long been esteemed, there is no evidence that he planned a shot of a woman with a wispy whirlwind around her head. Like Napoleon’s favourite generals, these movie-makers got lucky.

One of the virtues of Robert B. Ray’s marvellous The ABCs of Classic Hollywood is its grasp of the parts that hazard and happenstance play in even the most controlled filmmaking arena. At first glance the book might be another introduction to the works of four directors who came of age during the golden age of the popular cinema. But Ray knows that movies are far too slippery and protean to be governed by even the most inflated of egos. Though he never quotes Orson Welles’s definition of film directors as men whose job it is “to preside over accidents”, something of that spirit infuses his book.

The movies he considers – Grand Hotel (1932), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Meet Me in St Louis (1944) – are a disparate bunch. An adept might be able to isolate nodes that link these pictures; otherwise what is most remarkable is that none of them is anything like a masterpiece. So what? says Ray: these are films I like. Moreover, they represent most of the genres of the classical Hollywood period: melodrama, screwball comedy, noirish thriller and musical. All that is missing is a Western. Best of all, Ray’s four pictures afford him the chance to discuss many of that starriest era’s biggest draws. For stardom is central to a serious understanding of the movies. No one would call Grand Hotel an Edmund Goulding film; it is a Greta Garbo picture or it is nothing. Nor did anyone rush to see The Philadelphia Story because George Cukor had directed it. What fascinated audiences in 1940 (and fascinates anyone who sees the movie on television today) are Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart – the way they bump and bounce off one another in what is otherwise a bloodless comedy. As Ray (quoting David Thomson) argues, in the “B is for Bogart” section of the chapter on The Maltese Falcon, “it is often preferable to have a movie actor who moves well than one who ‘understands’ the part. A director ought to be able to explain a part, but very few men or women can move well in front of a camera”.

This is close to saying that the movies are less story than spectacle, so it is no surprise that the masters behind Ray’s thinking are Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. A good deal of the book reads like a celluloid take on S/Z. Fortunately Ray writes almost as well as Barthes (and a lot better than Benjamin does). Not for him the impenetrable prose of the average film theorist. Merely reading Ray’s brief entries on the motif of still cameras in The Philadelphia Story or the art deco iconography in Grand Hotel, would introduce a novice to the basics of film aesthetics.

It is true that Ray’s ABC conceit – each of his films has at least one entry for every letter of the alphabet – leads to some abstruse and even absurd readings: “as the 24th letter of the alphabet, [x] equals the number of hours before the wedding [in The Philadelphia Story], during which time a series of reversals (X-like crossings) will occur”. Z stands for Zero – “the recurring nothingness . . . at The Maltese Falcon’s centre”. At such moments the more frolicsome side of Barthesian analysis can become wearying. Still, there is almost as much jouissance to be had from this book as there is from the movies it discusses. Do not let Ray’s erroneous belief that Cary Grant was a cockney put you off reading it.

Robert B. Ray
THE ABCs OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
392pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $99); paperback, £17.99 (US $29.95).
978 0 19 532291 0

Christopher Bray’s book on Sean Connery and hero-worship is due to be published next year. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday.

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