Hard Times

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

Directed and Written by PHILIPPE MORA

Yes, yes, it is good to know all about the wayward economics of big business that caused the Depression, and about the NRA, unemployment curves, the deprivations of the Dust Bowl and Social Security. But what about the time Huey Long met Ina Ray Hutton? Moments like this--of which there are many in Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?--may not change history, but they can bring it close as no transcript or statistic can. It is the unproclaimed thesis of this breezy, weightless chronicle of the Depression that time is the sum of events great and small, and that the footnotes to history usually make better reading than the main text.

For the record, Ina Ray Hutton, with her all-girl orchestra in the background, presents the Governor of Louisiana with a rendition of his own composition, Every Man a King. The Governor is seated during the performance, blank-faced and staring straight ahead as one hand flaps in an approximation of syncopation. He thanks Ina Ray and allows that her chances are good, although for what he does not say. The singer and the politician look and sound, accordingly, like contestant and M.C. on some cosmic amateur hour.

Balmy Fictions. Much of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? is given over to similarly novel footage: home movies of F.D.R. horsing around with his family during a swimming party; the Hindenburg, with a swastika painted on its tail, floating peacefully between the skyscrapers of Manhattan; Los Angeles, dawdling about growing, still a transposed prairie town set down in the middle of an antic oasis. There are also, intercut with fact, many of the best and balmiest fictions of the time: James Cagney, ever brash and streetwise, pushing mugs around; King Kong poking his head up through the el tracks.

What makes Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? entertaining beyond its spirit and charm is the manner in which Writer-Director Philippe Mora has organized the footage and orchestrated it to a period score that runs from Duke Ellington and Woody Guthrie through Rudy Vallee and Ginger Rogers. There is no narration, hardly ever a title to identify a person or event. Fact and fiction are interwoven without distinction. For Mora, the hard reality of the Depression is inseparable from all the fancies it produced.

J.C.

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