I’ve griped in this column about how reluctant our arthouse venues are to explore pre-1970 American film history, seldom venturing beyond Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and other over-familiar nuggets. So it’s manna from on high this week at the Harvard Film Archive, with three unexpected Hollywood films from long ago, all in 35mm and pulled out of the HFA vault. I’m talking about Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931) on July 6 and John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) and Howard Hawks’s Tiger Shark (1932) on July 12.

Three years before his Columbia Pictures Oscar winner, It Happened One Night, Capra learned his craft there with The Miracle Woman, a curious if shaky melodrama. Most of the actors are subpar hangers-on; Columbia, then the least solvent of the studios, couldn’t be choosy. However, Capra is blessed in his lead: young Barbara Stanwyck as radio evangelist Florence Fallon, a character meant to recall the controversial female preacher Aimee Semple McPherson.

The picture begins with the off-screen death of Fallon’s minister father after he’d been fired by his church’s corrupt elders while the congregation turned their eyes to the ground. Soon after, Florence is persuaded by a satanic promoter to gain revenge by becoming the most devious of pastors and screwing all those who come to worship her.

Flash-forward: Florence is now a nationally famous media star, regurgitating the scriptures on radio station WGOD while appearing, at her mammoth tabernacle, before a huge live audience of blockhead believers. Capra’s best and most depraved scene, it anticipates Robert Altman’s Nashville: empyrean trumpets, a sanctimonious chorus, ragtag cripples à la The Threepenny Opera testifying to the Lord, and Florence preaching flashy gospel from within a lion’s cage. Keep those dollars coming!

Those who mistrust Capra’s famous populism, observing how often his wonderful crowds turn into mindless, mean-spirited, follow-the-leader robots, will find ammunition in the Christian nonentities of The Miracle Woman. The film looks ahead to the true-believer John Doe clubs of Capra’s far better Meet John Doe (1941), where cynical newspaper reporter Stanwyck is converted by Gary Cooper’s idealism. The germ of that later love story is the coy-and-kitsch romance of The Miracle Woman, where Florence is inspired to get in touch with her inner soul by the pure affection of John (stiff David Manners), a blind Tin Pan Alley songwriter.

Finally, there’s a climactic, unmotivated fire and those dumb people again, on their knees in the streets chanting the Lord’s Prayer.

YOU THINK JIMY WILLIAMS is blind and pigheaded the way he shuffles the Red Sox line-up? Check out Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. He never listens to the Pequod crew! All he ever wants is to pursue that white whale that chewed off his leg.

By 1956, John Huston had been planning for a decade to make a movie out of the Melville classic. He wanted to star his actor father, Walter Huston, magnificent in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, but Walter died. He’d thought of playing Ahab himself — remember him afterward as the perverse father in Chinatown. Eventually, he made a fatal mistake, casting Gregory Peck, decent and moderate and humane, as the obsessed and maniacal Ahab. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” this Ahab declares. Sure, Greg.

Peck assumed lunatic poses and did the best he could with screenwriter Ray Bradbury’s suede-Shakespearean dialogue. Time magazine: “He looks like a peg-leg Abraham Lincoln.” The sad part is, there was a true Ahab in the cast. That would be Orson Welles, who did a one-day shoot — and only three takes were necessary — of Father Mapple delivering a stern soliloquy of a sermon. For the stentorian Welles, Melville talk was a cakewalk.

FINALLY AT THE HFA, take heed of Howard Hawks’s very nice and practically unknown sea tale Tiger Shark, in which Edward G. Robinson is an expert at fishing but not at love. He marries the wrong gal (Zita Johann), she falls for his pal (Richard Arlen), and he seeks revenge with an Ahab-like wrath. Hawks slipped in some documentary scenes of real fisherman fishing, the kind of thing that when Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini did it 15 years later would be hailed as groundbreaking neo-realism.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: July 5-12, 2001