A play turned into a movie is mainly about emotional resonance, recapturing what made a studio buy the rights, and giving enough for a movie audience to pay attention, to want to know more about the characters, to want to know what happens next, to even make them forget that this was once a play and that it’s truly its own entity.
According to the Playbill Vault website, Claudia ran on Broadway from February 12, 1941 to January 9, 1943 for 722 performances across three theaters, starting with the Booth Theatre, and had Dorothy McGuire in the leading role for its entire run. That it was popular enough to run for a little over two years is obvious that McGuire had to be cast in the movie to recreate the role, and she does well enough as a young bride with enough energy to power the farmhouse’s electricity, if it had electricity. For about the first 10 minutes, she’s entertaining, as we see her living young married life (just a year so far) with her husband. But then, despite the script adaptation having been written by Morrie Ryskind, who wrote the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, and My Man Godfrey, Claudia gets too caught up in the trappings of its origins. It wouldn’t be so awful if the main set remained the farmhouse as well as the action outside of it on the land if the emotions didn’t feel so stagebound either. Listening to Claudia and David feels like a bad sitcom expanded into a movie. Audiences in 1943 may not have seen it like that, but today, while McGuire is energetic enough, it just feels like a revolving door of characters without any real impact. Sure Jerry Seymour, a debonair, snobbish ladies’ man comes into the picture, making Claudia wonder if she’s more desirable to men than her marriage lets on, and there’s the notion of selling the farm upon Claudia learning that her mother is very ill, but what else is there to wait for? The when-will-it-stop singing voice of Madame Daruschka (Olga Baclanova, recreating her stage role just like McGuire), the potential new owner of the farm?
That this was McGuire’s first movie is impressive. She’s not encumbered by the controlled performances of Hollywood that came before. She has a quality that nearly bursts out of the movie, like one can imagine she could easily exist in the real world. But that’s not enough to pull Claudia all the way through, to give satisfaction of time well spent. Claudia eventually learns of her mother’s illness after David tried to protect her from the news, and it’s affecting, but there’s still more waiting, hoping for something better to emerge, something to really feel. There are the married farmhands Fritz (Frank Tweddell, who also came from Broadway to reprise his role) and Bertha (Elsa Janssen), who are at times more interesting than Claudia and David, no matter that their roles are smaller. It’s trouble for a movie when wondering if the supporting characters would have made a better story, and that’s the case with Fritz and Bertha. Yet, 20th Century Fox wanted Dorothy McGuire as the star, not Frank Tweddell and Elsa Janssen, so that’s how it must be. Early on, Claudia mentions that she and David found Fritz and Bertha through an ad they put in the newspaper, and in another scene, Claudia says that Fritz has lived a hard life. There’s the story I wanted to know. Thinking about what might have made Fritz’s life difficult helps get through the numerous dry spells in Claudia.
Through Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell, Rings on Her Fingers, and now Claudia, I’ve been trying to reconcile myself to the fact that Fox Cinema Archives is probably not going to be able to restore every single title it offers to its full splendor. I know that for many of its titles, Warner Archive says that they have been “manufactured from the best-quality video master currently available,” and have “not been remastered or restored.” Therefore, with Claudia, I try to ignore the sometimes-terrible, spotty transfer, rife with contrast problems, including many scenes being darker than they should, even for a farmhouse that relies on candlelight. To me, paying $19.98 for a DVD, which is what Claudia is going for on Amazon, means that the label should do its level best to restore a movie however much it’s able, at least to be sure that in darkly-lit scenes, we’re not looking into the void and perhaps finding the restaurant at the end of the universe on the other side. With so many movies released per month from Fox Cinema Archives, probably not everything can get a full restoration treatment, but that needs to be figured out as the label sees more months and years in business. This is the one chance to do these movies right, and each one means something to someone. I hope for better transfers in the future, and that Fox might be amenable to doing better work on some of these releases, the ones that need it, like Claudia.
