The Male Animal is only intermittently funny, often plodding as a comedy — but it’s interesting from beginning to end. It was directed by Elliott Nugent, who had written the original Broadway play of it in collaboration with his friend and fellow Ohio State alum, James Thurber. Nugent had played the lead role on stage; Henry Fonda plays it in the movie. (There aren’t too many examples of an artist who writes the play, plays the stage lead, and then directs the Hollywood movie.) Nugent was a competent director of comedies, but his touch can be dull, especially visually. His instincts were for the stage. What saves this rather excessively play-like comedy from dullness is Fonda’s performance and a suppressed political fury.
The story, viewed in 2020, is unnervingly topical. Fonda plays Tommy Turner, a mild English professor at “Midwestern State,” a barely veiled Ohio State. The trustees — led by their Chairman, Ed Keller (played by Eugene Pallette with all the brutish sinister energy that you always feel smoldering in him) — have been firing all the faculty suspected of being Communists. One of Fonda’s students, a similarly mild-mannered tweedy campus dissenter, has written an opinion piece in the student literary magazine defending the fired profs, accusing the trustees of being fascists, and praising the courage of Professor Turner, who has planned to read Vanzetti’s famous letter from prison as an example of rhetorical effectiveness. Keller threatens to fire Fonda if he does so. But Fonda gains the courage to do it in spite of the threats, and a happy end ensues.
So what does this have to do with the male animal? While the political storm is gathering, Fonda’s oppressively petit bourgeois wife Ellen (Olivia de Havilland) wants her husband to cease rocking the boat and to concentrate on getting a promotion and a raise — and as the plot unfolds, to keep from getting fired. She is also carrying a dim torch for a former football jock, Joe Ferguson, who was Fonda’s rival for her affections back in the day. Played really well by Jack Carson, Joe has reappeared on the occasion of the university’s big game against Michigan. Marital problems ensue. Fonda has to decide whether to let his narrow-minded and materialistic wife leave him for Carson’s adult jock, or to fight for his marriage.
Fonda’s masculinity is in question — as it usually is for bespectacled English professors in such movies. But this isn’t screwball territory. Nugent’s conceit is to link Turner’s role as a husband with his role as a liberal educator. His goal is to associate masculine virtue with political/intellectual courage, as opposed to meathead rah-rah aggressiveness. For much of the action Turner dithers about whether to fight for his wife (like all “male animals” do, as he spouts in a funny drunken binge) or to let her go as someone unworthy of his dignity, and whether to risk his job by standing up to the Trustees or to go along to get along. It’s a ponderous link — most of the comedy is in the marriage plot, while the political plot is unswervingly serious. The linchpin of the two is football. Ellen was a head cheerleader when she was a student and great football fan (hence her attraction to Joe). Tommy couldn’t care less about the sport and is put off by the school’s fanatical spirit. But for Keller and the Trustees, the whole purpose of the university is football.
Political comedy is always hard to manage. The satirical part has to be resolved into the comic resolution somehow, and it has to be done without preaching, which is inimical to the basic comic principle that all participants are fools, even the heroes. It probably hasn’t been managed well since Aristophanes handled it 2,500 years ago. Comedy likes being fearless. Even when the Spartans were threatening Athens, Aristophanes could make everyone look like idiots — Spartans, Athenians, men, women, the gods, you name it. But The Male Animal has a lot of fear in its heart. The early stages of the Red Scare had begun. The House Un-American Activities Committee was formed in 1938. University teachers accused of being Communists or fellow travelers were fired — and the standards of academic freedom at the time did not protect them. Things started to frighten liberals when the hunt for Reds extended to free thinkers. And so begins the political plot of the movie.
Things get worse of course. Turner is outraged at Keller’s stadium-first yahooism, and can’t help defending his duty as a liberal educator. Fonda was an almost cliché choice to play Turner. He had proved his comic chops in The Lady Eve the year before, but more importantly he had become a Hollywood icon of high idealist speechifying in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln in 1939 and The Grapes of Wrath in 1940. You might say the audience expected him to represent high-minded idealistic innocence. (The film had had interesting timing. The anti-Communist fervor reached its peak after the Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1939, and The Male Animal was made in that atmosphere. But by the time it was released in 1942 the Soviets and the US were allies against the Nazis, and national sentiment had swung against the Red baiters.)
For me the most interesting part of the film is the way Nugent depicts the great football enthusiasm of schools like Ohio State at the time. The festive rally and bonfire on the eve of the game are made to feel like a Klan rally. Keller’s speech is filmed as thug oratory — with the nice touch that he seems oblivious to the fact that almost all of the first-string players he introduces have non-Anglo-Saxon names (except for Jones, “the substitute”). The whole spectacle is just short of an All-American nativist, fascist call to arms. For my generation the scene is uncannily alive — Ohio State’s legendary coach of my time, Woody Hayes, was routinely associated with rabid support for the Vietnam War and hostility to the counter-culture. The Ohio State rallies on the eve of the Michigan game, which are still central events in the campus culture, were functionally mammoth pro-war demonstrations.
None of this is very comic. The humor and self-irony all has to do with Turner’s struggle to gird his loins — which he mainly conceives as a struggle to man up as a husband. The funniest scene in the film is Turner’s drunken self-encouraging explanation of instinctual masculine protection of the home, which he sees as universal among all animals, including humans. In a speech that has Thurber’s wit all over it, he can’t keep all those animals straight.
In the end, Turner decides it’s not physical aggression, but the courage to stand up for freedom of thought that determines what makes a man. He insists on reading the Vanzetti letter, braving the wrath of Keller, who is outraged that Turner considers ideas more important than the new stadium.
Turner emphasizes that ideas shouldn’t be condemned because of the lives of their authors. His speech persuades the entire campus and all are reconciled (with the exception of Keller) in a big parade in honor of intellectual freedom. (Such parades do happen occasionally. They are usually the first steps of revolutions.) I’m not sure what folks outside of New York and Hollywood thought of the film. I’ll need to check. Some of it is just stiff. De Havilland’s role as Ellen is awful, and she plays it badly. (It was totally against type for her.) She’s a caricature of women as complacent defenders of the status quo. But to be fair, I was familiar with some faculty marriages that were like that when I was in school, so it’s uncomfortably plausible. But other things — the depiction of the Trustees and the priority of the football stadium over the classroom, and the thuggish anti-intellectualism — are as fresh as tomorrow’s news.