Myth Happens

Philosophically Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark (1942) is one of those debates between the preservation of liberty and the preservation of the individual in which the individual is left at the post on account of wartime, which means that the only suspense of its concluding arguments between a heavily attrited group of fractious, malaria-racked American GIs no longer officially stationed on a small island of the Philippines in the spring of 1942 is the language in which they argue for or against holding the line for their retreating comrades instead of falling back to more assured safety, but I like its handling of its supernatural element. The title follows the tradition—the play takes its epigraph from Keats—of foretelling the dead of the coming year with the twist that a maiden may see and converse specifically with her doomed lover. "Has to be a virgin or she won't see anything?" – "That's right." – "The legend has naturally fallen into disrepute." Thus the half-dreamed, half-hallucinated conversation between the hero and his sweetheart in the middle of her Midwestern night and his feverish Pacific noon indicates to the audience the outcome of the soldiers' decision to stay, which dramatically is left suspended by engagement with the enemy and then an inconclusive radio broadcast and some fragments of a letter handed on to the heroine from her lover who has been listed as missing in action following the Japanese capture of his island. Despite seriously trying, they did not manage to consummate their relationship before he was shipped out. "I didn't know—but the empty days and nights / have taught me now how if you've missed your love / there's nothing to put in its place." The play never spells the link out; the hero is the only person in possession of all the relevant knowledge and he never puts it together, which means that it floats for the audience to realize where the patriotism is poetically spoon-fed. "Some nights I try to think myself clear out of this place, and round the world to you, and once or twice I seemed to be there in your room, but I'm never quite sure I found you." His parents retain the faith in his survival which his sweetheart cannot share and cannot explain why, only the sense of her painfully brief, blank-verse visitation: "They made a decision that meant they wouldn't come home." Perusal of James Agee plus the AFI Catalog confirms that not only did the sexual explanation get stripped out by the PCA, the 1944 film obviates the certain sacrifice of the soldiers, at which point I don't know what's left of the story that couldn't have been any other recruiting film of brave boys in some branch of the armed forces. I appreciate abstractly that it preserves some percentage of Michael O'Shea's stage performance that got him signed by 20th Century Fox and as it added Vincent Price and Harry Morgan the odds are better than not that I'll watch it if it ever comes around on TCM, but frankly it could just not and we'll all survive. The original London production included Sergeant John Sweet in the supporting part of Private Francis Marion, the other literary double of Marion "See Here, Private" Hargrove: it brought him to the attention of Powell and Pressburger for A Canterbury Tale (1944). For that, we could talk time machine.