Episode Notes More on Saroyan Our Patreon Auto-Generated Transcript Registry-The Human Comedy Fri, 8/12 11:53AM • 6:32 SUMMARY KEYWORDS film, presents, story, family, script, ithaca, andy hardy, focused, work, star, great, comedy, james cagney, telegraph office, incredibly, deserved, dialoguing, fascinating, mayor, role This is Registry, a Podcast, from Office Supply Publishing and Klaus at Gunpoint The Human Comedy is exactly the type of film the National Film Registry should be honoring. It is a uniquely American film about a fascinating time in American history. It has a backstory that's wonderful. But ultimately, it is a hopeful story, a hopeful story being told in a time when hope was somewhat limited. The concept of the Human Comedy is based on the work of William Saroyan and William wrote in the style that been referred to as Troyan esque, it is optimistic, perhaps sentimental, at the same time as being somewhat cynical of the role of society and rules. Basically, it's this idea that everyone in a society is a value in as much as they present, a goodness of sorts, and that becomes more hazy. sering wrote the original screenplay and gave it to Louis B. Mayer of MGM, and Mayer picked up this 240 Page screenplay and said that Saroyan wasn't going to direct it as he had kind of hoped. And he had actually made a short film called The Good Job as sort of an audition for that. Mayer gave the script to another screenwriter and to a different director. And Serena adapted that screenplay into the novel The Human Comedy, which became his biggest seller. The film was excellent. And it featured, among others, Frank Morgan, as the telegraph operator who was fantastic. He, I think, deserved incredibly high billing. And I think he even got it. We also had, of course, Mickey Rooney, who was the biggest star in the world at that point. Well, okay, one of the biggest stars in the world, he was huge. Donna Reed, Van Johnson, this wonderful set of character actors, which is actually the perfect set of actors to have for this story. Because it's not a straight narrative. There's narrative elements, of course, there's a through line. The idea being that the McCauley family is in Ithaca, California in the Central Valley during World War Two, and the oldest son is off at war, the other son has taken a job at the telegraph office, delivering messages, which are often messages of members of their families being killed in action. And we see the interactions between people. What's fascinating is that serine often focused on sort of the focus on immigrant populations, he focused on the downtrodden, the gamblers, the sex workers, to a lesser degree. Here, he focuses on the McCauley family that is decidedly WASPey, for lack of a better word. And what he's done is he has presented them as poor or at least lower on the economic ladder, but an incredibly tight family, an incredibly loving family, and most importantly, I think, an incredibly earnest family, and that earnestness makes the dynamics of the story work. The shooting is wonderful, the script is great. There's probably not a lot of saurians original script, it's he won the Oscar for Best Story. And the story is all there really, but I think the way the dialogue is handled is less certain than it is traditional Hollywood dialoguing. What makes a story so powerful, though, is the fact that there is a positivity towards every scene, even when it's scenes of conflict. There are scenes of conflict towards an end, which is positive and beautiful. In other words, it's a Williams Orion story. Mickey Rooney is great in it. I love Mickey Rooney in general. I think here is his best non Andy Hardy work until we would see him in Sugar Babies and other things in the 70s and 80s. I think that Johnson is great. We there's not a lot of him, but there's just enough that I was very pleased. None of reads. Okay, she's got her moments. But the real star is Frank Morgan. And
