> The thing that's shocking about Honeymoon is not the character parts,
> but the way the main characters perform for each other, not for us.

McCarey blurs that distinction, I think. More and more I feel that the
essence of McCarey is the way that the interaction between performers and
audience is recreated on-screen in various ways. This first occurred to
me when I started thinking about that amazing scene in THE AWFUL TRUTH
where Grant and Dunne's pals sit in the living room, gleefully turning
their heads back and forth as if they were at a tennis match, watching
their friends' marriage come apart.

The performer-audience bond that is recreated can be sometimes subtle,
sometimes broad, because that's McCarey. The thing is that he simply will
not let anything slip by the audience. If he can be subtle and still bop
us on the head, he'll do it; if he can't, he'll just bop us on the head.

> Like when she cracks up over the not-all-that-funny sexual innuendo
> that she alone detects in Rogers' remark about not having anything to
> wear on her honeymoon. Why is this woman laughing?

And then, if I recall correctly, just when you think she can't laugh
any more, McCarey does one of his patented awkward cuts in from long shot
to medium shot, and she starts up again. It's like a nightmare.

> I recently watched Satan, too. Maybe you could elaborate by
> commenting on the one that's fresh in your mind? The basic strategy
> is for the priests to be acerbic, something he already did to a
> lesser extent in the My Ways, but pushed much farther here.

Yeah, not only acerbic but also Clifton Webb. I dunno, it's hard for me
to criticize McCarey outright, but there's something odd about lines like
"You are rapidly replacing the Communists as my number one concern."
McCarey has a shtick for this kind of comedy, letting the actors play the
lines hard, and then giving them a little pocket of silence to play in.
The mechanism works about the same with the Communists/Nazis and, say,
Edgar Kennedy, which is peculiar.

On the positive side, there's something sweet about the fact that McCarey
will give capital-E Evil characters like Slezak these little endearing
moments. And the way he resolves the melodrama with France Nuyen and her
Communist rapist in SATAN, as bizarre and unsatisfactory as it might be on
any number of levels, has the advantage that it doesn't paper over the
issues. Maybe there's something to be said for conceiving politics in
terms of comic foibles.

Then I think of that totally successful moment in MY SON JOHN where Helen
Hayes detects that Robert Walker is mocking her. In a way, it's a perfect
fusion of political comment and personal style. Walker's snarkiness is
practically undetectable by the audience: if Hayes didn't point it out,
we'd almost certainly miss it. But, because McCarey is all about the
performer-audience relationship, Hayes must stop the movie in its tracks
to point out how we missed this truly earthshaking event. (It would be
totally un-McCarey to point up this moment with a close-up, a la
Hitchcock, while letting it go by the other characters. He doesn't just
care about feeding the audience information - he wants the audience to be
represented on screen and reacting.) So he gets to be fantastically
subtle and yet totally obvious.

It's one of the greatest of all McCarey moments, and yet of course one
wonders how much it has to do with Communism. I'm not sure that HONEYMOON
has any more direct connection to Nazism. Though in all cases McCarey
makes some meaningful observations about human nature, as you point out
apropos the scene where the victims cannot understand what the Nazis are
saying about them in German.

Maybe my real problem is not so much that there's a disconnect between the
political observation and the actual politics, as it is that HONEYMOON and
SATAN can be a little cutesy at times.

> A propos of nothing: There's an amzing short McCarey did for tv, Tom
> and Jerry, where a priest fakes coming on sexually to a married woman
> at lunch to shock her into getting back with her husband. It ends up
> being a very embarrassing scene.

Whoa. See, there you go. You can call McCarey reactionary, but he winds
up exposing things that no one else wants to touch. And he's often quite
open about sex. - Dan