‘This
Land is Mine’ opens with a peaceful market place with a statue of the first World
War on it. This serenity is quickly disrupted however when we see tanks and
armies invading it, immediately establishing the link of the present to the
past and the cyclical nature of all things. After this, we are witness to a
conversation between the schoolteacher Charles Laughton and his mother Una
O’Connor. It’s almost instantly established the mother is rather dependent on
her full-grown son, conforming to the type of the domineering mother who
basically needs to give her son the idea he can’t live without her because it
would be unbearable for her if he would leave. The son is also much too
dependent on his mother however: not only does he still live at home at such an
inappropriate age, he clearly needs to be mothered, even if he doesn’t always
appreciate it: the milk which mother has secured for him (in a backhanded
manner by claiming it was for her) is given to the cat, who is of course quite
grateful for it. We’re barely five minutes into the picture and already Jean
Renoir and his scriptwriter Dudley Nichols have provided us with an intricate
web of interpersonal relations that makes up every society: mother needs son,
the son needs mother and the cat needs the son. It’s familiar territory for Nichols
of course, as he already provided John Ford with a fabulous script for
‘Stagecoach’, in which the titular stagecoach functions as something as a
microcosm for society, with its myriad relations between people. It's both the
blessing and curse of every society, because being dependent on others makes us
both strong and vulnerable and it can both stifle and enhance growth. It also
strongly suggests such a society will suffer decidedly if people are only
looking out for their own interests, thereby ignoring the needs of society as a
whole. The mother who procures the milk for her son, for instance, is
unquestionably done out of the love of her heart, but since the son doesn’t
really needs it and gives it to the cat, other people who may need it much more
are possibly deprived of it. And as the rest of the film will point out, a
society that’s divided like this, will invariably be vulnerable to outside attacks,
like the invasion of the Nazi’s.
“Everybody
has his reasons” Jean Renoir once said and although this saying has become
ubiquitous to the point of cliché, it, like all clichés, has become one because
it contains so much truth. It would be quite appropriate of course, he himself
was to experience this celebrated fact when he came to Hollywood, where he was
subjected to much outside control. As a result, his working in Hollywood wasn’t
the most happy of experiences apparently, but when you look at his American
output, you cannot help but be struck how much of it is actually very good –
even a movie like ‘The Woman on the Beach’, hacked to pieces as it may be, is
still such a powerful picture. He may not have had as much control in Hollywood
as he had in France and stylistically his Hollywood output isn’t as distinctive
as some of his French movies, but with ‘This Land of Mine’ at least, he was
able to adapt his famous style to Hollywood’s strict control and so it
resembles his French masterpieces like ‘Grand Illusion’ or ‘Rules of the Game’
the most in that it is the most Renoirian. The use of long shots and fluid
camera movement that still make his French movies so famous (because they
stylistically stress the importance of the ensemble instead of a selected few
protagonists) may be largely absent in ‘This Land of Mine’ (it very much looks
like a Hollywood movie), but in spirit they are certainly very similar, making
it a fascinating combination of French and American sensibilities. What it may
lack in stylistic boldness is compensated for by Hollywood’s knack for casting.
Anyone who’s familiar with the actors in this movie wouldn’t have a particular
hard time figuring out who plays what kind of role, making it either perfectly
or predictably cast, depending on one’s need for originality I suppose. So
Charles Laughton is his typical uncertain and weak self, Maureen O’Hara is
strong and fiery, Walter Slezak plays yet another Nazi, Una O’Connor the
hysterical mother and George Sanders is again the morally weak type.
Heroes and villains are usually so clearly characterized in Hollywood war movies they often descend to parody, but leave it to Renoir to give the whole experience a human face. Because the intricate web of relationships is always stressed in a way that's so typical for Renoir, we are constantly reminded the whole is always bigger than its parts. The subtitle of Bill Plotkin's book 'Nature and the Human Soul' is 'Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World' and could have easily served as the title for 'This Land Is Mine'. 'Together we stand, divided we fall' is an axiom that everybody recognizes when applied to a group, like a sports team. But while this may be true, it also means that the whole can never be really strong, unless its individual parts are strong also. So unless we apply the same ideas of harmony and wholeness on the individual parts also instead of just looking at the interest of the group as a whole, the whole can never be truly harmonious. You can easily compare this to the human body, as I’ve recently experienced myself: since I lost quite a lot of weight and have allowed my physical body to take care of itself, I distinctly feel I’m much more resilient to outside attacks. For instance, I haven’t been sick this winter even though there were two cases where I felt I was starting to develop a cold. Usually this would mean I would feel under the weather for a couple of days, but not this time as I really noticed my body was much better able to ward off these little attacks and nip them in the bud and the same goes for my boyfriend. Obviously, this doesn’t at all mean that we’re both somehow invulnerable now, but it does mean we are stronger now simply because our bodies our stronger. This may all sound absurdly logical, yet most people I have spoken seem to think that to have such a clean and clear body is actually more dangerous as it then would have less resistance as it wouldn’t be used to dealing with pollution and filth. But that’s more or less the same as claiming a sports team already operating at half strength because of strain, injuries or fatigue would make a better team than one that’s totally fit and healthy. When every single member is fit and complete in itself and doesn’t need to rely on others for wholeness, it makes it possible for the team to become something more, something that’s clearly impossible when the members of the team do need each other to fill in their own lacks.
What this
also means is that a society that's built on too much dependency can never
withstand outside pressure, especially when it comes in the guise of Nazi
invasion. Because what the film subtly but cleverly suggests is that while
Nazism may be grotesque and highly dangerous, it is to be praised for its
cohesion and belief in their cause. And because they form such a strong group
together, it makes the scattered and divided societies very easy prey. It's again
like sports in this way: a team can consist of nothing but brilliant
individuals, unless they work together with the same goal, it will never
accomplish anything and can in fact be easily defeated by a team which is less
talented individually but does function more cohesively. So what's needed then,
is not people just egotistically looking out for just their own interests and
merely protecting their own turf, but people who start making society whole by making
themselves whole. Charles Laughton's speech near the end of the film makes all
this abundantly clear, when he talks about how he is weak on the outside, but
strong on the inside. Similarly, he described the George Sanders character as
his own opposite: strong on the outside but weak on the inside. So what they
both need then, is to find access to their complementary core, because if
Laughton can combine his own inner strength with the outer confidence of
Sanders, he will indeed be made whole. Not that this will be an easy process,
as is made clear when Laughton can't find the paper he has written his speech
on as it fell out of his pocket, implying he still needs his domineering mother
for such things. But fortunately for humankind, difficult situations like a war
can often provide the necessary impetus for such an arduous undertaking as in ‘This
Land of Mine’, which again underscores Renoir’s fate in mankind as he is always
looking for the positive side of the situation.
Those with
an interest in psychology will probably recognize that what I've just described
is very close to Carl Jung's concept of the animus and anima, which are often
referred to as the Shadow sides of our psyches. So, someone with a male core
(whether male of female) has a female anima and a person with a female core (be
it male or female) has a male animus. Sound psychological advise would be to
develop your own Shadow self in order to become a more complete human being,
but that this is often not the case can easily be observed by the vast majority
of relationships with the male performing male tasks exclusively and the female
taking care of the female end of the relationship. In this way rigid gender
roles are unfortunately perpetuated and society doesn't come any closer to
being any more whole, for the very simple reason nobody can be completely whole
without truly embracing their Shadow self. By trying to transcend those
pre-prescribed gender roles we not only make our own relationships more
resilient and diverse, bot we would ultimately also serve the society we live in.
This
would be a good point to return to the way Renoir and Nichols used Hollywood’s
fondness for type casting to their great advantage, especially because in a way
it almost function as a critique of the usual Hollywood formula for war
pictures. Because the one person I neglected to describe in my casting list, is
the deliciously bland Kent Jones, who’s the only actor clearly casted against
type. Not only is he unmistakably American (while most other actors are either
European or could pass for it), he’s completely unbelievable as virile
resistance hero, but this of course may very well have been the point. Whether
this was a conscious decision on Renoir’s part or he was just forced onto him
because he was an RKO contract player I have no way of knowing, but his
presence does present the film with a complete lack of a typical male hero:
there’s no Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart or even a John Hodiak here. Instead all
the male actors are almost a parody of virility: George Sanders apparently was
very much a ladies' man, landing not one but two Gabor sisters, but his
onscreen manner has always depended very much on an effete manner. So with both Sanders and Jones highly unlikely candidates for the role of strong, masculine hero it
leaves us only with Charles Laughton, who, as most nowadays know, was a
closeted homosexual his entire life. His presence here works very well of
course, as he brings a certain vulnerability to his role which especially in
his final speech is quite essential. Compare it to any one of those endless
Spencer Tracy monologues he seems to have always written into his contract to
get an idea of what I mean, and to appreciate the dimension Laughton's casting
brings to it that otherwise may have been entirely lacking. What the film so
forcefully suggests in its present form then, is that if all the individual
parts of any society are strong and working together in harmony, one of those
strong male leaders that Hollywood so often depends upon would be entirely
superfluous. It would be more than enough to have a couple of weaker males and some
strong female personalities like O’Hara and O’Connor, as long as all of them
are working together instead of against each other. In this way, Renoir
intriguingly recast the battle between the French and their Nazi oppressors
into a conflict between the American individual versus the European collective.
He may have been bound by the rigid rules of Hollywood’s star system and may have
inherited its mise-en-scene, but he was, in this particular film at least, able
to infuse them with the spirit of his other work, which may very well be
Renoir’s most subversive accomplishment during his stay in America.
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