The Magic Cow of Happiness

 

Macushla with Sydney Greenstreet

We watched TCM for a couple days before Christmas, including Christmas Eve. I hadn't seen TCM at all since last January. Watching it, or any television for that matter, had not seemed the thing to do. Also I was not interested in the fictional narratives of cinema. I got into watching Youtube channels of traditional religious services, of people doing stealth camping in Canada, or people traveling the country in RVs.

But J had wanted to watch Christmas in Connecticut, which is one of our favorites, that I turned her onto. When we watched it a couple days ago, it was pleasing to notice details of the genius of the constructed story, even after so many watchings, and to raise deeper questions about the plot line and the characters.

One of the notable things about this movie is that, besides having a great early example of the "Town Dance" scene, it among the finest examples in all of Hollywood history---perhaps the finest---of what I call the Magic Cow of Happiness.

The Magic Cow of Happiness is a Law of Hollywood Poetics. It is the idea that in any appearance of the bovine species in film, the appearance of the animal reflects the tone of the story, and relation of the characters in the scene, in regard to earthly happiness.

The way the cow functions in the story often reflects the entire story in one scene, either foreshadowing it, or providing a mirror version of it. 

In all my years of watching movies, I have never seen this law violated. It is uncanny, because it cannot be a conscious element of the poetics of storytelling. Screenwriters don't tell each other to use cows this way in the story (although at one time maybe they did). It is far too thorough in movies, even recent ones, for that. It arises from something spontaneous in the human psyche in regard to cattle that comes out inevitably in any artistic vision involving cattle.

I could give many examples of the Magic Cow of Happiness and how it works in movies. It need not be a comedy or a movie in which the characters are happy. Sometimes they are very unhappy. In that case, the treatment of the cattle will be a sad one, that accompanies their own sadness. It can even be surreal and ugly, if the movie has that tone and style. The cows may even be destroyed. One of the bleakest movies I can think of in Hollywood history ends with a shot of a bull being killed. Cows may be used as a weapon, for example in a stampede, but if so they can only ever be used as such by the good guys as a weapon of justice.

Invariably, however, the best uses of the Magic Cow of Happiness are when the characters themselves are happy, as they are in a buoyant romantic comedy like Christmas in Connecticut. Made in 1945, it is not only a romantic comedy, but a fertility comedy.  The two main characters are more than romantically suited for each other. They obviously belong together, and should marry as quickly as possible and start putting that energy into having kids.

Because the two characters must be together, the story must put up many obstacles and barriers. Christmas in Connecticut is rich with supporting characters who interact with each other in a complex sequence of scenes, pairing or tripling them up to create comic intrigue through misapprehension and other classic story devices.

The comic barriers places between the two leading characters is so over the top that at one point in the story, when all seems lost, they have to be rescued by the intrusion of a cow right into the kitchen of the house. The cow does more than interrupt. It demands attention, which rescues the two main characters at a critical point in the story and gives an excuse for the characters to have the moment of intimacy in which they realize they are meant for each other. 

There are multiple follow-up references to the cow after its appearance, including multiple instances in which a characters is talking about the cow, and the other characters thinks they are talking about a person, or vice versa. One supporting character is converted from being a supposed cow-hater to a cow-lover.

The cow in this movie is the very essence of the force of life pulling the two characters together into matrimony. It intervenes when nothing else can, to save the day. It brings the two main romantic characters into a stable on Christmas Eve, 

It is as close to the direct blessing of God that one sees in a Hollywood story. It is what we want to believe happens, what we universally yearn to find in life when we are young, and which was so obvious in 1945 but seems oblique now in the stories of our own time.

The story is so powerful as Christmas magic that it converts Sydney Greenstreet's character, the force-of-good-despite-himself antagonist, into a giggling jolly incarnation of Santa Claus in the last shot of the movie.  It must have been a great joy for that great character actor, known so well for his villainous roles, to make this movie in which he gets to ring in Christmastime in Dickensian fashion. All it required was working alongside a cow.

The cow in Christmas in Connecticut utimately is so important to the story that it gets honored in a way that few of its species get honored in a movie. Like any important supporting role, it gets to have a name, which is said aloud by both the main characters. Macushla. It's from the Irish for "my pulse,' and it is a term of affection from a song in the era before the movie was made.

Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) as Elizabeth Lane. Stanwyck was 38 when she made the film, but she plays it was a lusty buoyancy of a woman in her twenties, something few other actresses of her day could have done.

The movie---which is an Irish romance---turns a wooden rocking chair into an  ultimately) matrimonial object of lust. This use of the rocking chair in the story, and the fact that there are an abundance of such chairs in the movie even at the beginning,  can be compared in various ways to the The Quiet Man (1951).