> Very few references to GOOD SAM in the archives? Would someone care
> to give me their appreciation of it, or point me in the direction of
> an appreciation that has already been written? I know two members
> think highly of it (Dan and Zach), probably two more as well (Damien
> and Fred), undoubtedly even more.

Here's something I wrote to Zach in private email the day after I saw
GOOD SAM. Unfortunately, it doesn't treat the film directly; but my
thoughts about McCarey's overall work were largely triggered by the SAM
screening. - Dan

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More and more I think the key to McCarey is how he constantly places
audience surrogates within the film and then plays with their/our
feelings. Sometimes it's elementary and not incredibly interesting
(like the millions of scenes where a character laughs at something on
our behalf, as if to give us a laugh track), and sometimes it gets
really complicated (like the way he manages our attitudes toward
altruism and its consequences in GOOD SAM. Or that incredible moment in
MY SON JOHN where Helen Hayes becomes a super-audience by detecting the
tiniest nuance in her son's behavior and turning the whole film on it).

A long time ago I was watching an early scene in THE AWFUL TRUTH, where
Irene Dunne and Cary Grant's relationship starts to break down in the
presence of guests, and I thought to myself that if I could figure out
what was unique about the shots where those houseguests were watching
Dunne and Grant, I'd arrive at the essence of McCarey. Because those
shots are so simple and everyday, and yet no one else in the world would
do them in that way. Now I realize that McCarey took an element (the
observers to a plot crisis) which is always used in exactly one way (to
emphasize publicness, and therefore to enhance our identification with
the observees, not the observers), and characteristically twisted it so
that the guests become audience surrogates, laughing at the impending
breakup the way we the audience are expected to laugh at it (and not
cringing in discomfort the way real-life guests would). So some of our
identification flows toward these minor characters, which totally
changes the scene. It's almost like turning cinema into theater.

I'm also impressed this time around that McCarey, the alleged good-time,
love-everybody director, fills his films with the most convincing
portaits of malevolence and cruelty.