The dialogue in Lonelyhearts can perhaps best be described as a hard-boiled version of the polite Victorian banter that we associate with the plays of Oscar Wilde. Not all the characters are smart, but they do manage to use words with something more than efficacy. They convey their thoughts and feelings with a precision that we rarely see in cinema, and never in life. But somehow their extremely careful word choices come across as effortless, which is probably because most of the characters are either honest or deluded into believing that they are honest.
Although based on the short and engaging novel Miss Lonelyhearts (by Nathanael West), the screenplay for Lonelyhearts is far more successful than the novel in its treatment of such themes as sacrifice, redemption, and empathy. Much of the credit has to go to Howard Teichmann (who adapted the novel to the stage) and Dore Schary (who adapted the stageplay to the screen), but the primary reason that the film works is because of Montgomery Clift’s extraordinarily sensitive performance. Clift plays Adam White, a man who dreams of becoming a journalist and has no choice but to accept the Miss Lonelyhearts column when editor William Shrike (Robert Ryan) gives White a chance to prove himself as a newspaperman.
Adam White’s name is, perhaps too obviously, an allusion to his role as a Christ figure. According to Christian mythology, the original sin of Adam is cleansed (i.e. man is made pure or ‘white’) by the sacrifice of God’s son. Adam White has a martyr’s impulse, a desire to set things right in the world. Like Christ (or Bill Clinton, take your pick), White feels the suffering of the people around him down to the depths of his soul. His job requires him to respond to the letters of people who are despondent, depressed, even suicidal. But whereas other newspapermen would simply laugh at the sufferings of the people who write to Miss Lonelyhearts with their troubles, Adam White tries to help them—only he doesn’t know how.
Although White is supposed to be the advice columnist, we rarely hear him giving advice. Rather, we see one person after another advising him about how to write an advice column. Shrike tells him to quote scripture—not psychiatry texts—to his readers. White’s fellow journalists urge him to tell his readers to ‘snap out of it,’ whatever ‘it’ is. Even his girlfriend, Justy Sergeant (Dolores Hart), tells him that “anybody who writes his troubles to a newspaper is feeling too sorry for himself.”
“Yes,” White answers, “but he still might be in trouble.” He can’t help being concerned for those who write in with their problems. And when Shrike tries to teach him to be callous, White cries, “Is it a sin to feel?” He is terrified of giving his readers the wrong kind of advice and says, “I would rather ignore them than lie to them; and I would rather be dead than laugh at them.”
He wants to be a decent, caring individual. But Shrike, who only hired White in order to prove a point to his wife Florence (Myrna Loy) about young and ambitious men, says that White is only good because he hasn’t had the opportunity to be bad. Shrike sees White less as a Christ figure than as Adam before the fall (another quite reasonable interpretation of his name). In his relationship to White, Shrike is both God and Satan. He is the provider of Eden (the newspaper job), but also the tempter. He defies White to meet one of the people who has written him a letter. “Choose anyone from this stack!” he shouts, brandishing a pile of cries for help and pleas for sympathy. He’s convinced that if White will only meet one of the ne’er-do-wells who write in for advice, the young man will see that people are all self-serving hypocrites who seek pity only when they discover that it’s an effective way of manipulating others.
White accepts the challenge and ends up acting on a carnal impulse. Of all the people he could choose to meet, he selects a woman who has written to him concerning the problem of her husband’s impotence and her own sexual frustration. The woman meets him alone in his apartment, and things play out just as Shrike would have predicted. Is the sin merely White’s or everyone’s? The film seems to suggest that guilt is universal, as White’s own mother was killed in the arms of her lover by White’s father. The sins of the parent are the sins of the child. White follows in his mother’s footsteps by betraying his fiancée for a stranger who claims to have an impotent husband. Then he gets drunk and punches another writer on the paper, succumbing to what he believes is the violence inherent in his father’s blood.
Lonelyhearts is not an apology for or a dissection of Christianity, but it does try to examine our lack of faith—not in God, but in each other and ourselves. When did we become so callous? Is our insensitivity the necessary byproduct of the cold war? Was it because nuclear annihilation began to hang over our heads in the ‘50s that it suddenly became fashionable to be contemptuous of the suffering of others? When Shrike tries to justify his accidie (a word that I urge readers to look up and reflect upon) by saying that “the world could end tomorrow,” White responds, “You’re guilty of a giant sin: cynicism.”
Lonelyhearts is an attempt (obviously a failed one) to reject cynicism as a cultural norm. We see forgiveness of White by the people that he has wronged and presumably of Florence Shrike as the film closes with the image of her husband wrapping up flowers as a peace offering. Maybe forgiveness is only meaningful in a world in which we’re no longer trading jaded laughter with one another. Maybe with the cold war behind us, we can get back to being sympathetic to strangers once more. But even if that sounds like a pile of malarkey to you, Lonelyhearts is still worth watching, if only for the scene in which White convinces Shrike to hire him by dictating an article about their meeting as they sit facing one another in a restaurant. Even though he is speaking the article instead of writing it, he closes it in true newspaper fashion, by saying, “Thirty.” That scene alone makes this film a must-see.
—30—
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Sordid-1 has done such an admirable job of calling attention to Montgomery Clift's great contributions to humanity that it seems we're soon likely to forget that he was an actor as well.
I am grateful to eplovejoy for explaining the use of --30-- by newspaper writers in his excellent discussion of the greatest reporter movies ever made, available here:
http://www.epinions.com/content_1128571012
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