Something amazing happened to me the other day. I read an article in the New York Times with which I actually agreed.
Heather Havrilesky, who apparently writes an advice column on Substack, contributed a piece to the Times in defense of tearjerkers – movies that, in the old days when we actually went to the movies, would send you up the aisle, after the lights went up, wiping your eyes and hoping nobody else would notice that you’d actually been moved to tears.
“Tears are sacred,” Havrilesky wrote. “They express sadness, communicate joy, signal need, and expunge stress.” Her bottom-line message: “Bring back the tear-jerker.”
Three cheers. But then I read Havrilesky’s list of movies she considers tear-jerkers. In her view, the films in this genre “hit their peak in the 1970s and 1980s,” with the climax being Terms of Endearment (1983). She went on to mention Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, Field of Dreams, Beaches, E.T., and Top Gun. Also the end of Titanic.
I see on Wikipedia that Havrilesky is 53, born in 1970. I guess these are the movies she grew up on. I have nothing against any of them. Well, not much, anyway. Terms of Endearment, which was written, produced, and directed by James L. Brooks, who had made his name as creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Taxi, and other sitcoms, is entertaining enough. But did it deserve to win Best Picture? No. And was it a tearjerker? Only for those most susceptible to cheap manipulation. Like Brooks’s TV productions, Terms, the story of an overprotective mother (Shirley MacLaine), her next-door-neighbor boyfriend (Jack Nicholson), and her daughter (Debra Winger), was a sitcom, even though it did turn sad at the end. The level of contrivance, one has to admit, was through the roof. Nicholson’s character was supposed to be an ex-astronaut. Why? Why not an ex-salesman, or dentist, or whatever? It didn’t feel authentic. Nothing did. Of course the daughter’s life ended up tragically – where else could the story go?
As for Havrilesky’s other selections, I’ve seen all of them. I’ll admit that I’ve actually cried at Beaches. Ditto E.T. But Kramer vs. Kramer? Ordinary People? Really? And for heaven’s sake, Top Gun? As for Titanic, I was impressed by the scale of the production, but the love story left me cold.
Which is not to deny that Havrilesky has a point. It’s just that the films she cites as examples of tearjerkers are lame examples of what she’s arguing for. Looking her up online, I see that she grew up in North Carolina. I presume that she didn’t enjoy the extraordinary privilege I had as a kid in New York, growing up in the 1960s and 70s and viewing wonderful movies from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s on TV every day (and, sometimes, late into the night). Havrilesky dismisses recent movies such as Manchester by the Sea and Call Me by Your Name as “restrained tales of quiet heartbreak, not outsized operatic tragedies.” I’d agree. But I’d put her list of 70s and 80s pictures in the same category. In my view, if you’re looking for real tearjerkers, you need, with very few exceptions, to go a good deal further back in time than Havrilesky does.
Take Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), the story of a teacher of classics who works at an English public school from 1870 to 1918. There’s a reason why one of the very few Oscars that Gone with the Wind didn’t win that year was the one for Best Actor – instead of going to Clark Gable for Rhett Butler, it was presented to the British actor Robert Donat for his thoroughly endearing performance in the title role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. I’ve seen this picture at least a dozen times, and at this point I start weeping during the opening credits, for heaven’s sake.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips was based on a novel by James Hilton. So was Random Harvest (1942), which, like a lot of remarkably effective movies, really shouldn’t work, if you look at the basic working parts that have been put together to create the thing. First, Ronald Colman was far too old (he was fifty at the time) to play the young World War I soldier who, at the beginning of the story, is being treated in a psychiatric hospital for what we would now call PTSD, not to mention amnesia. Second, his amnesia would, in any other film, almost certainly feel like a cheap, soap-opera-like gimmick. But damn it, the picture does work. In fact it’s the most beautiful love story that I know. And the ending – those last few seconds – utterly destroys me every time. If you’re talking about tearjerkers, it could never be improved upon.
Greer Garson was in both Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Random Harvest. She also starred in Blossoms in the Dust (1941) and The Valley of Decision (1945), the former a magnificent weepie about a real-life Texas woman (Edna Gladney) who devoted her life to orphans and the latter a love story (with Gregory Peck as the male lead) set amid the steel mills of Pittsburgh. To a large extent, I guess this piece is a tribute to Garson, who over a period of a very few years appeared in one terrific MGM production after another that sent the audience out into the streets in tears. All of these pictures, as it happens, were released during World War II – which reminds me to mention Mrs. Miniver (1942), also a sure-fire tearjerker, about the life of an ordinary but valiant middle-class English housewife (also Greer Garson) during the first part of the war. As has been mentioned a million times, Winston Churchill pronounced that the film, as a piece of unabashed pro-British propaganda that was the year’s most popular picture in the U.S., was “more powerful to the war effort than the combined work of six military divisions.”
But Garson wasn’t alone. The year 1957 brought An Affair to Remember. This is another picture that shouldn’t really work. A 53-year-old Cary Grant as an Italian playboy? With a grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt) who’s still alive and kicking and who just so happens to live at Villefrance-sur-Mer, where the ship Grant is taking from Europe to New York just so happens to dock long enough for his beloved granny to meet and form a tender bond with the woman (Deborah Kerr) that he’s falling in love with?
Sheer nonsense! And yet if you fail to cry at the end, you’re just not human. And that’s what tearjerkers are all about.