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the-rewatch-rewind · 1 year

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Another Cary Grant movie!

Script below the break

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind, the podcast where I count down the 40 movies I rewatched the most in 20 years. My name is Jane, and today I will be talking about number 29 on my list: Universal Pictures and Granox Company’s 1964 comedy Father Goose; directed by Ralph Nelson; written by Peter Stone and Frank Tarloff, from a story by S.H. Barnett; and starring Cary Grant, Leslie Caron, and Trevor Howard.

It’s 1942 in the South Pacific, and most people are focused on a little thing called World War II, but beachcomber Walter Eckland (Cary Grant) just wants to mind his own business. While he’s stealing fuel for his boat from the Royal Australian Navy, his old friend Commander Frank Houghton recognizes him, and coerces him into becoming a coast watcher – which involves living on a deserted island and reporting Japanese plane and ship movements. Frank “accidentally” instructs his ship to crash into Walter’s boat so he’s forced to stay, and hides whiskey throughout the island to motivate Walter to report in. When another coast watcher is in trouble, Frank sends Walter to rescue him in his still functional but tiny dinghy, with the promise that the other man will replace him. When Walter gets to the other island, the coast watcher has been killed in an air raid, and a Frenchwoman named Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron) has been stranded there with seven young schoolgirls. Walter has no choice but to take them back to his island, and then to learn to live with them, since there’s no safe way to evacuate them. Proper, particular Miss Freneau initially clashes with uncouth, sloppy Eckland, but they eventually start to care for and learn from each other.

I have no memory of my first impressions of this movie. I know my family borrowed it from the library a few times, and then bought it on VHS when our local Hollywood Video was getting rid of all of its VHS tapes, and then eventually got it on DVD. I watched it once in 2003, three times in 2006, twice in 2007, three times in 2009, then once each in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2019, twice in 2020, and once in 2021 and 2022. So I seem to have phases when I watch this movie a lot and then stretches when I take a break, but I’m not exactly sure why, unless it just has to do with the availability of copies. It’s a very fun movie that I pretty much always feel like watching, although these days I tend to only get around to it during my annual Cary Grant birthday week marathon.

It always feels particularly appropriate to watch this for his birthday because he said that Father Goose was one of his favorite movies to make, and that Walter Eckland was the character he played whose personality was closest to his own. While the scruffy and vulgar Eckland is very different from the dignified, suave gentleman that tends to be associated with the name Cary Grant, he plays this part so perfectly and comfortably that it’s easy to believe he was really like this, and almost impossible to picture anyone else in the role. I’m not sure how Leslie Caron feels about the film or her role, but she also does an absolutely perfect job. She is so delightfully funny. We meet her character at an incredibly stressful moment, and she makes us laugh without ruining the gravity of the situation. Walter finds her and asks who she is, and she replies, “I asked you first!” and then he asks where the man he’s supposed to be picking up is, and she replies, “I buried him.” And then there’s a pause, and then she adds, defensively, “He was dead!” and I don’t know why the way she says that is so funny to me, but I can’t help but laugh every time.

And from there the film continues to provide excellent comedic moments between Grant and Caron. One of my favorites is when Catherine is trying to stall Walter so the children can steal some of his clothes and supplies – they were going to get more supplies provided via a parachute drop, but Commander Houghton determined that even that was too dangerous, and Walter has already made it clear that he has no intention of sharing. Because Catherine and the children are living in the hut with the radio and Walter is living on his boat, Catherine got the message about the cancelled drop before he did, and the way she passes it on to him as slowly as possible is so funny. First, she lets him call in on the radio only to be told that the message has been given to her. Then she hands him the paper she wrote it on upside down, and once he turns it around he finds out that it’s in French, so he asks her to read it, which she does, and when he protests, “You’re reading it in French!” she responds, “Well it’s written in French!” So he asks her to translate it, and that’s when we get the amazing moment I quoted at the end of last episode when she asks him how to say “parachute” in English, and he pauses and thinks for a moment before exclaiming, “Parachute!” and she just goes, “Oh really? Huh” and moves on, and the way they do that is just so perfectly silly and I love it so much.

Another very funny scene that is maybe my favorite part of the movie is after Catherine has been attacked by what she thinks is a water snake, but is actually just a thorny branch. After being told that all water snakes in the area are extremely venomous and there’s nothing they can do, Walter convinces her to reveal where she hid his whiskey – she objected to his excessive drinking in front of the children – so he can make her as comfortable as possible before the end. So she gets very drunk, and he’s being nicer to her than he ever has before because he thinks she’s dying. The audience knows the whole time that she’s not in any danger, so we’re free to enjoy the humor of the situation, and I have to say, of all the playing-drunk-for-comedy performances I’ve seen, Leslie Caron’s is quite possibly the funniest. I especially love – and frequently quote – the part when she’s telling Walter about dating an official at the Italian consulate in Fiume, and she asks Walter, “Do you know where Fiume is?” and he says, “Yugoslavia, isn’t it?” and she says, “No, it’s in Yugoslavia” and I realize that has no right to be very funny but it still cracks me up. And then there are several more very silly moments until she convinces Walter to talk about himself and open up about his past, and then it actually becomes relatively serious for a little bit, as he reveals that he had been a professor until he realized that school was all about teaching conformity rather than encouraging curiosity and critical thinking. Then Catherine passes out and he assumes she’s dead, so he puts a blanket over her face and tells Frank, but while he’s on the radio we can see her feet moving. Meanwhile, the children have found the stick and realized what happened, so they show it to Walter, and he takes the blanket off her face, she says, “Is it morning already?” and then we get another of my favorite moments, when Walter tells Frank, “She’s alive! The snake’s dead!” and then holds the branch up to the radio microphone as if that will in any way explain what happened. And then he just walks away while Frank is yelling his name over the radio in confusion, in the perfect ending to a perfect scene. Although I did just learn that my favorite joke is slightly ruined by the fact that Fiume was actually part of Italy from 1922 to 1945, so technically it wasn’t in Yugoslavia when the movie takes place, and it certainly wouldn’t have had an Italian consulate. And it’s at this point that I would like to apologize to The Sound of Music for calling it a very 1960s version of World War II because that movie isn’t anywhere near as anachronistic as Father Goose. The most egregious offense is Leslie Caron’s hair and makeup, but there are also factual inaccuracies like the Yugoslavia thing, plus some of the military equipment was apparently from the Korean War. But none of that really matters because it’s just trying to be a fun comedy, and as you’ve probably gathered by now, in my opinion it very much succeeds at that. And there are still some aspects of the story that remind us how devastating and disruptive war is: case in point, there are seven children who have been separated from their parents.

While these seven children are not nearly as iconic as the Von Trapps, I still think this movie does a decent job of making most of them at least somewhat distinct people. Angelique and Dominique are stuck as “the French ones” and they’re pretty interchangeable, but at least they get some funny moments. The oldest, Elizabeth, has a huge crush on Walter; Ann likes to complain and wants to go home; Christine has an imaginary friend named Gretchen and decides to give herself the code name Rumpelstiltskin – everybody involved in the war has a nursery rhyme code name, and Walter’s is Mother Goose, which is where the title of the film comes from. Then there’s Harry, who loves cricket and corrects Miss Freneau when she uses the name “Harriet.” I don’t like assigning labels to people, and I don’t know if Harry was trans or just experimenting with gender expression, but I do know that when Walter and Catherine are getting married and the chaplain asks over the radio who the best man is, Walter looks around for a moment and then says Harry’s name, and the kid’s eyes light up, and it’s kind of beautiful. Perhaps this was intended to be seen as merely humoring a childish whim – like playing along with Christine’s imaginary friend – rather than validating trans identities, but compared to the current manufactured panic trying to force trans kids to conform to cisnormativity, it’s strangely refreshing to see adults in a movie made nearly 60 years ago at least kind of listening when a child says they want to be seen as a different gender than they were designated at birth.

The seventh child, Jenny, is probably the most important to the story. At first, she doesn’t speak at all, and repeatedly bites Walter’s hand. But at one point when she’s gathering coconuts on the beach, some Japanese soldiers decide to land on the island looking for turtles, and Walter manages to hide her before the soldiers notice her – despite her biting his hand again. Later, to thank him, she brings him one of the hidden bottles of whiskey, and he manages to get her to start speaking again, and then she and the other kids start helping him fix his boat. While they’re doing that, he decides to paint her name on the dinghy, but he accidentally does it backwards. Their whole dynamic just strikes the perfect balance of sweet and silly. And while I’m pretty sure that it was a complete coincidence that a couple years after making this movie, Cary Grant named his daughter Jennifer, that kind of makes his fatherly relationship with this Jenny even better.

Grant retired from acting when his daughter was born, so this was his second to last film, and the final time he played a romantic lead. I mentioned in the Monkey Business episode that in the later part of his career he frequently played opposite women who were much younger than him, which is very much the case in Father Goose – there’s a twenty-seven-year age gap between Cary Grant and Leslie Caron. In this particular movie, I don’t actually mind it that much; it works for their characters, and Caron was in her 30s, which feels significantly less creepy than when middle-aged men play opposite women in their early 20s. Still, it’s rather obnoxious that at the time most actresses who were around Grant’s age were faced with the choice of retiring or being stuck in stereotypical grandmother roles, while he was still getting fun and interesting parts opposite women young enough to be his daughters. Although Katharine Hepburn was definitely still slaying in her 60s. But anyway, I’m not objecting to the Grant/Caron pairing in this movie because I think both of them were absolutely perfect for their roles and I wouldn’t replace either of them, but their age difference does still reflect Hollywood’s troubling trend of being particularly agist toward women. And there’s still that part of my aroace brain that wonders why almost every movie with a male and female lead needs them to be romantically involved.

Yes, Walter and Catherine have a great enemies-to-lovers arc, but why can’t we get more enemies-to-friends stories? Not everything has to be about romance! Although their wedding scene is a key turning point in more than just their relationship. It starts off very sweet but then gets interrupted when an enemy plane starts shooting at the hut. Thankfully, everyone is fine, and they’re able to finish the wedding and also maintain a relatively lighthearted tone, but at that point it’s clear that they have to get off the island. The wedding wasn’t strictly necessary to move the story to this phase, but it greatly adds to the scene so I can’t be too annoyed about it. Also I guess it would have been kind of scandalous at the time for them to have lived together on an island for a while and then not gotten married, although the movie goes out of its way to make it very clear that they do not sleep together on the island. Before their wedding, they’re living in different places, and then after their wedding they need to escape because the enemy has found out where they are. A submarine is going to rescue them the following morning, so they all spend the night on the beach – very close to the water, for some reason. Early in the morning, while the children are still asleep, Catherine and Walter have an entire weird conversation that seems to have the sole purpose of letting the audience know that they haven’t consummated their relationship yet, and it’s just like, yes, we get it, why are you telling us this? It’s almost a relief when a Japanese patrol boat shows up and interrupts them. But overall I’m not against their relationship. I like the way they help each other grow into better versions of themselves, and I hope they have a happy life together after the events of the movie. I just crave more platonic male-female friendship representation in film.

While I would prefer it without the romance, overall Walter’s character arc teaches a good, albeit difficult, lesson. Often I find myself tempted to adopt the attitude he has at the beginning, when he says, “Several years ago, I made peace with the world. Now if the world isn’t bright enough to make peace with itself, it’s just going to have to settle things without me!” But Walter soon learns that running away from the world and its problems doesn’t solve anything and isn’t even making him happy, and that he and everyone else has a responsibility to help the world make peace with itself, however they can. His participation may not have made a huge difference in the grand scheme of the war, but he still did something, mostly using skills and talents he already had. There is such an overwhelming number of horrible things happening all the time that getting a boat and just sailing around by oneself sounds kind of wonderful, but it’s important to remember that we each have abilities that can help make things at least a little bit better, if we decide to use them – or, as in Walter’s case, are tricked into using them. Of course, the main purpose of this comedy is to entertain, and it certainly doesn’t feel like it was meant to be any sort of call to action, but the message is still unexpectedly inspiring, and that is yet another of the many things I love about Father Goose.

Thank you for listening to me discuss another of my most frequently rewatched movies. Please subscribe or follow, and leave a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you’re enjoying this journey. This wraps up the three-way tie of movies I watched 17 times from 2003 through 2022, so next week I will talk about the shortest in the three-way tie of movies I watched 18 times. As always, I will leave you with a quote from that next movie: “You’ve been taken to the cleaners, and you don’t even know your pants are off!”

#father goose #cary grant #leslie caron #the rewatch rewind

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