Dizem que é Pecado

How many movies had a score by Brahms? 'People Will Talk' features his Academic Festival Overture, which is the only example of cheerful grandeur I can think of in serious music. Mankewicz knew what he was doing, because this is a cheerfully grand movie. While his 'Letter to three wives' and 'All About Eve' are more famous, this one is my favorite.

For one thing, Cary Grant has never been more attractive, for Dr. Praetorious is a good and humane doctor. "I don't cure illness, I make sick people well." If the notion that a woman bearing a child out of wedlock is a disgrace has gone, the theme of the mediocre witch-hunting the brilliant is timeless.

The phrase 'beloved character actor' could have been invented for Finlay Currie, but you've got to be able to use it for Walter Slezak - at least in this movie. (See "Lifeboat")

If you spend two hours with these people, you'll hear some very splendid talk, and you'll feel both warmed and civilized. How many of today's movies do that?

This is indeed a very well hidden film which should be up there with North By Northwest, Citizen Kane, and the like. For its time, People Will Talk took on the most controversial topics of the day (even of TODAY) including: abortion, unintended pregnancy, HUAC and McCarthy-style witch hunting, taxpayer-subsidized farming not to grow food ... and the list goes on. Perhaps most up front is the defending of American individualism that was then (and is perhaps more than ever now) under attack. All of this was presented very cleverly, often with wholesome comedy. A great film with top actors, writing and direction. Only the very ending is a bit soppy ... not the least of which is the dopey expression on Carey Grant's face of imbecilic ecstasy while conducting his university's orchestra. Otherwise, it was a nearly perfect film.

This is very unique film. Superlatively written, it offers amusing dialog, social insight and enlightened views of science, women's issues, social mores, the nature of success, materialism and the urge to destroy what we cannot understand.

It is not boring, yet its main characters are doctors/composers, and professors. Though its setting is an elite clinic and a university, it is concerned with real people and their needs.

Cary Grant is at his warm, compassionate and wryly witty best.

His sidekick, so to speak, is the rumpled and likeable Walter Slezak. Hume Cronyn is superb as the little weasel who sets out to "investigate" i.e. slander and destroy the Cary Grant character. Sound familiar?

"People Will Talk" may be considered a comedy of manners of the 1950's and a companion piece to another, similarly-titled Cary Grant film, the lesser-known Frank Capra masterpiece "Talk of the Town." Both are intelligent, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining Hollywood gems.

Don't forgot to check out the "typical farm family..." You'll recognize the narrow-minded, cliche-ridden, hypocritical patriarch of the clan...

After winning two successive Oscars for A Letter To Three Wives and All About Eve, director Joseph Mankiewicz was on one big creative roll. His next film was this charming comedy/drama about a medical doctor with some interesting ideas and one of his patients, a girl with a bundle of joy on the way and a dead father, courtesy of the Korean War.

Those roles are played by Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain. Grant's a strange kind of doctor who believes that surgery and pills are only a last resort. Today he might be operating a very successful wellness center.

Grant would still be getting the a lot of criticism from jealous colleagues like Hume Cronyn. In fact that's how the film opens up with Cronyn getting a report from Margaret Hamilton who was from a place where Grant practiced his trade called Goose Creek. It was a report about Grant affected a lot of 'miracle' cures down in Goose Creek. Our boy Cronyn is looking for dirt with which he can discredit Cary.

Playing a most mysterious role in the proceedings is Finlay Currie who lives with Grant and is hardly ever not around him. At the faculty hearing that Cronyn has called to discuss the charges Cronyn has made because of his investigation, Currie's story is finally told and it is quite the tale indeed.

Cronyn has one of two roles that could be described as villainous. He's a nasty little Grinch like creature who thinks he can rise to the top by discrediting others. You find those in every profession, in every walk of life.

You also find people like Will Wright who is Jeanne Crain's uncle. She and her father, Sidney Blackmer, live on Wright's farm totally as his dependents. Blackmer is a cultured, cultivated man who unfortunately was never able to make a go of the various professions he tried, teacher, reporter, etc. Now with bad health he's come back to the family farm to live with Crain at the sufferance of Wright who proudly claims them as his dependents.

In defense of Wright he's no doubt a hard working individual, but he's as prosperous as he is because of government agricultural subsidies. In a scene very similar to one Elizabeth Taylor had in Giant, Grant rather firmly puts Wright down saying how unfortunate it is that brains and talent can't similarly be subsidized. Wright is such a philistine, the remark goes totally over him. It's my favorite scene in the film.

Besides those I've mentioned, look for a nice performance from Walter Slezak as Grant's friend and chief defender and Basil Ruysdael as the dean of the college conducting a hearing.

People Will Talk is a wonderful film about mostly some very nice people and the small contributions they make to make our planet a happy one. The only fault I have with it is I can't imagine Cary Grant coming from a place called Goose Creek.

PEOPLE WILL TALK may be my favorite film, if you can have such a thing. Loosely based on a German play, Doctor Praetorious, it tells of a Doctor with a unique philosophy. It was quite a step into some sort of cinematic adulthood when a young student who has found herself pregnant from an illicit romance becomes the sympathetic heroine of the movie, finding love with a charismatic doctor.

Some have said this movie was a comment on the McCarthy era, of personal investigations used by jealous men to destroy charismatic figures, and I thought of this movie quite a lot during the Clinton Impeachment proceedings. I kept saying to myself that the defense team could just run scenes from the movie with good effect, especially Shundersun's closing comment Hume Cronyn's character. And Slezak's comments to the same character that he could string together more unpleasant words than any little pipsqueak he had ever known.

And finally this movie offers some wonderful characters, Walter Slezak's loyal professor, Finley Curry's as the mysterious companion, and the dignified if defeated Sidney Blackmer.

I hope someday to read the German play upon which it was based, but as far as I know it was never translated.