Comedy is hard. Ask any professional comedian or comedic actor. In the movies, romantic comedies are hard to do, so that good ones are rare, and really good ones even more so. Great romantic comedies are like rare gems; the avid movie fan sees a lot of junk looking for these sparkling creations.
I give you Delbert Mann's exquisite 1964 jewel DEAR HEART, perhaps the sweetest little film of the decade, and a showcase for the late, great Geraldine Page.
Page plays Evie Jackson, a postmaster from Avalon, Ohio who arrives in New York at the beginning of the film for a convention. Evie is a sweet, slightly daffy, and almost too-friendly woman on the brink of middle-age who redecorates her hotel room to make it feel more like home and who knows every member of the hotel staff by their first names before her first day in New York is over.
Also checking in is Harry Mork, played by the always-dependable Glenn Ford. Ford was never a great actor but he is wonderful here. Harry is the epitome of the stereotypical traveling salesman (greeting cards), with a woman waiting for him in nearly every city he visits. Soon after his arrival, he goes to visit one of his many mistresses, a commercial artist he calls by her last name, Mitchell, played to a fare-thee-well by the great and underrated Patricia Barry. It is to Mitchell that he breaks the news that he has met a woman named Phyllis, and has somehow gotten himself engaged to marry her, almost on a bet. Mitchell, the consummate New York sophisticate, takes the news in stride, and as Harry leaves, you can almost hear her thinking, "You'll be back, buster!"
Back at the hotel, Harry finds himself being shadowed by a young man who takes it upon himself to carry his luggage upstairs. The young man is the son of Harry's as-yet unseen fiancée. Harry is a bit befuddled; he has a picture in his wallet of Phyllis and her son, taken when Patrick was thirteen. He is now twenty, and has come to seek out "Dad's" advice and support because Mom appears to him to be unaware of the fact that he is nearly grown. With him is his silent girlfriend, whose main function is to be caught taking baths in other people's bathrooms.
Finally, Harry enters the hotel coffee shop in search of lunch, and the only available seat is at a table across from none other than Evie Jackson. Page and Ford are simply sublime together; the script is very knowing, and quite sophisticated for its time. Harry's exploits are already well-established, and in a later, rather poignant scene, we realize that at a previous convention Evie was intimate with a married man, an intimacy she now regrets because it was only a shadow of what she really wants. For himself, Harry is so taken with Evie that almost immediately after lunch, he propositions the girl at the magazine counter almost on a reflex. The resulting "date" is one of the film's comic high points.
I don't want to give away too much of the romance; it is too good to be spoiled that way, so I'll simply urge anyone who reads this to see it for him/herself.
But what about Phyllis?
Oh yes, Phyllis. So far, she's only been a name and a face in a picture; we haven't actually seen her. But as Harry and Evie return from a lovely stolen day in New York, the lady herself (Angela Lansbury) is at the magazine counter, swathed in furs and completely unconcerned that Harry has been out and about with another woman.
Lansbury's role is a small one, but as usual, she is a revelation. Coming a mere two years after her absolutely chilling Mrs Iselin in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, her Phyllis is quite the wrong woman for a man looking to "settle down" by the standards of the day. She's also screamingly funny, because she never seems to actually hear a word her fiancé says to her. As for her son, even with a beard she still sees him as a little boy.
Somebody once said that the best comedy comes from pain and sadness. I think there is some truth in this, because amid all the laughs, and there are a lot of them, the central theme of this film is loneliness. Evie and Harry, underneath their cheery façades, are both desperately lonely people.
Geraldine Page, a self-described "stage actress who does movies occasionally," delivers another luminous performance here; she is so utterly appealing that by the end of the film we feel as if we know her, and wish we did in real life. As for Ford, working with talents like Page and Lansbury is good for him here; he delivers a much deeper performance than he is accustomed to, one that may be all the more difficult since he starts off as a bit of a heel and it is not until the end that his character finds redemption.
In his excellent review of 1981's ON GOLDEN POND, the eminent critic Roger Ebert had this to say:
"Fragile emotions are hard to portray in a movie, and the movies that reach for them are more daring, really, than movies that bludgeon us with things like anger and revenge, which are easy to portray."
I give you DEAR HEART, a film which, like ON GOLDEN POND nearly twenty years later, deals in the frailty of the human heart, the pain of loneliness, and the ways in which lonely people deal with their pain, all while making the audience laugh. For a "little" film, this is a huge accomplishment.
A definite must-see.
