Watching the movie Kings Row the other morning on TCM was a pleasure for me — it really coalesced a bad mood that’s been coming on for a while.  I’d probably seen the entire movie before, but not for a very long time, and suddenly there it was, starting very early on Saturday morning and I settled in to watch.  Before long, I figured that I couldn’t have stumbled on a better movie than the 1942 melodrama.  I’ve been in a funk lately, and when I realized that Kings Row was really just a microcosm of the way I’m starting to feel about the U.S. — full of lies, of hypocrisy, people in power inflicting their corrupt values on others and delighting in bringing pain, engaging in economic exploitation, those who would speak the truth and expose the darkness being muzzled, weird things coming out of small towns — well, it didn’t help my mood right away, but it did fascinate me.

Based on novelist Dr. Henry Bellamann’s 1940 novel, the titular town of Kings Row — “A Good Town, A Good Clean Town, a Good Town to Live In, and a Good Place to Raise Your Children” proclaims a sign at the edge of town — was patterned on Bellamann’s actual home town of Fulton, Missouri, and let’s hope he was exaggerating somewhat about the creepy goings-on.  Of course, by the time the book hit the screen, with a script by Casey Robinson, direction by Sam Wood, photography by James Wong Howe, and a score  by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Production Code of the time had exerted its power and some of the more horrifying and sexually sordid aspects of the story had been laundered, if not exactly scrubbed clean.  Producer Hal Wallis knew that the more sensational aspects of Bellamann’s story were important to the potential success of Kings Row as a movie, but also realized that mainstream audiences might find the unrelenting stark horribleness of a lot of the plot’s revelations to be a bit much for a night out at the cinema. 

Thus — and if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want any spoilers, skip this part — in the movie the relationship of the idealistic Parris (Robert Cummings) and his childhood sweetheart Cassie (Betty Fields), who is basically held captive by her father and home-schooled, is doomed by the suggestion that Cassie has inherited her mother’s insanity.  The town is rocked to hear that Dr. Tower (a cold incisive Claude Rains) has killed his daughter and committed suicide.  Parris eventually learns, through his mentor Dr. Tower’s diary, that he knew Cassie was starting to exhibit symptoms of insanity, and so he killed her to end her suffering and her inevitable decline.  In Henry Bellamann’s original novel, the truth is far more unsavory.  Dr. Tower does keep his wife locked up because she’s going mad, and though Parris and Cassie do consummate their attraction, Cassie has worse problems.  Dr. Tower has been committing incest with his daughter in order to study the psychological effects of it on her.  His daughter becomes a nymphomaniac, and Dr. Tower, though a brilliant physician, has let his dark side overwhelm him and so he kills himself and his daughter to end it once and for all.

Yikes!  Pretty clear why 1940s-era American moviegoers maybe weren’t quite up for that, eh?  There were also some hints of homosexuality which weren’t transferred to the screenplay, but we pretty well get the sense that Drake McHugh, Ronald Reagan’s character, is going at it like rabbits with some of Kings Row‘s more nubile and easy young ladies.  This is, of course, what precipitates Dr. Gordon (a  chilling Charles Coburn) to spurn Drake as a respectable suitor for his daughter Louise, played very effectively by Nancy Coleman.  Gordon, who has a whispered-about reputation as a sadist and a butcher of a surgeon, waits for his ultimate vengeance on the carefree Drake.  Meanwhile Drake — a turn-of-the-century trust fund baby waiting for his payout – finds that he’s been swindled out of his inheritance by a crooked local banker in charge of looking after his legacy.  Drake’s diminished circumstances knock him for a loop, and he’s genuinely down-and-out and worried about money for the first time in his life.  He no longer can take long and satisfying buggy rides with the giggly Ross sisters, but renews a childhood friendship with the down-to-earth, practical and refreshingly guileless Randy Monaghan, a gal from the wrong side of the tracks who keeps house for her widower father and her older brother.  Drake gets a job with the railroad, hard work but he likes it, and marries Randy.  They flirt with the idea of starting a real estate development, but their money situation doesn’t allow it.

So here comes the part that everybody remembers.  Drake is injured in a railroad accident, and they summon Doc Gordon, who now sees his chance.  He quickly assesses the damages and declares they must amputate both of Drake’s legs.  Before Louise (who has also heard about the accident and rushes to the scene) can interfere and stop her father from acting on his vengeful sadism, which she knows and is forced to keep quiet about, Gordon cuts off Drake’s legs.  When he wakes up, the script gives Reagan, as Drake, his most famous line from all his movies, and the future title of his autobiography.  “Where’s the rest of me?” he cries out in horror.  Nursed back to health by Randy, but completely dispirited and broken by his disablement, Drake is down in the dumps, way down.

I haven’t talked about main character Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) much, not because he isn’t interesting; he’s actually the catalyst or at least the nexus between all the other characters.  His friendship with Drake, his relationship with the stricken Cassie and her father, and earlier, the loving nurturing from his grandmother, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, which gives him a more cosmopolitan outlook than his peers — he is looking to get away from the small town environment — form his interesting personality.  Some have faulted Cummings’ performance, but he’s thoroughly decent, convincingly intellectual and gentle as Parris, who goes to Vienna to study medicine and is drawn into psychiatry, no doubt from being fascinated by the assortment of neuroses on display in his hometown.  Prior to that in the movie, Parris’ beloved grandmother dies a painful death from cancer, but in the book, Parris considers her unbearable suffering, and drawing upon the example, however muddled and flawed, shown by Dr. Tower in putting his daughter out of her misery, he performs euthanasia on the old woman. 

The movie continues as Parris returns to Kings Row as a doctor and confronts the blackness there.  His friend Drake is bedridden and depressed.  Doctor Gordon’s daughter Louise, who has confronted her father with her knowledge of his depravity and has been threatened with being sent into the asylum if she breathes a word, is slowly growing crazy with the burden of her father’s cruelty.  The vicious father-daughter argument when the doctor promises to send her to the madhouse if she talks is frightening.  The sheer horror of such an authority figure squelching the truth and in doing so, his daughter’s spirit, reminded me too much of forces in America which are trying to beat down women’s choices and, despite outward appearances and slogans, force back progress and enlightenment.  Sure, Louise ends up sort of a wild-eyed crazy lady, but no one will listen to her, and she must be heard.  But Parris does listen, finally.  We also learn that Louise, after her father died, was found next to the body as he lay in their parlor, hitting his corpse in a brutal attack that could only begin to exorcise some of the demons he inflicted on his daughter. 

In another change from the book, in the movie the finale is Drake getting a stiff dose of reality from Dr. Parris, after he completely believes Louise’s story about Doctor Gordon’s unnecessary amputation of Drake’s legs.  Knowing, or hoping at least, that only the truth will set Drake free, he bounds into Drake’s room.   “Some people grow up, and some just grow older.  I guess it’s time we find out the truth about us, you and me. ..I don’t know if you can take it, Drake.”  “Give it to me.”  ”Doctor Gordon cut off your legs.  I don’t know if it was necessary.  He was that kind of butcher, who thought he had a special ordination to punish transgressors…he wanted to see you turn into a lifelong cripple, mentally as well as physically.  That’s all there is, Drake.”   After a short pause, Drake starts to laugh, emboldened by the truth.  “That’s a hot one, isn’t it?  Where did Gordon think I lived, in my legs?   Did he think those things were Drake McHugh?”  Parris was brave enough to know that his friend could take the truth, and Drake could.  This kind of display of pluck and forthrightness is so rare these days, and when it does happen, most of the people don’t want to hear it, preferring sentimental yarns and soothing stereotypes instead of facing what needs to be faced.  Now, in the book Drake eventually dies from cancer brought on because of his mutilation at the hands of Doc Gordon, but let’s not spoil the mood, huh?

Sure, I know Kings Row isn’t about America in 2008, but I’m taking what I can from it.  I’m putting my hopes behind the smart folks, behind the ones who face the truth and try to make a better world, and reject superstition and have compassion for others.  I’m turning my back on zealots, and liars, and going for the hope.  Well, what do you know?  I’m not in quite as bad a mood as I was a while ago.  I’m working for change.

(For those of you who haven’t seen the movie lately, shhh…it’s actually online.)