Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie Offers a Brutal Rebuke to American Conservatism
Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952) is the story of a horrible piece of shit barber who will throw anyone that gets in the way of his dream to own a tiny barbershop in a tiny town under the bus, first and foremost his titular wife. Fate cruelly thwarts all of his attempts to control those around him, and he ends up trapped in the web of his own lies. It’s a portrait of a particular type of man, a passive aggressive nice guy who stops short of physical violence, but unrepentantly deceives and manipulates to get what he wants.
Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie deconstructs this american male persona, and pulls no punches doing so. Ben, the protagonist of WTSSN, is put through the ringer. His attempts to control his surroundings through deception inevitably backfire on him. *Spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen this or read Karina Longworth’s excellent “Seduction”* Nellie is so distraught when she finds out her husband has been lying their entire relationship about an eventual move to Chicago (he had no plans to leave his small town, he was just waiting for his trapped wife to forgot her big city dreams) she heads straight there and dies immediately for her trouble.
(I choose to believe that having escaped Ben’s orbit, she achieved her lifelong dream of moving to the big city, and at that moment the timelines diverged. Ben, who we follow through the rest of this epic fail of a tale, is the one who really died. He let life move on around him, frozen in time trying to capture some imagined perfect ideal of his barbershop in a small town with a wife and children. It is however, just a fantasy. And as far as we know, Nellie’s “death” is just the story he tells the kids when they ask where their mom is.)
His children grow up to also feel the lure of progress: his son Ben Jr. makes a splash on the stage as a dancer, but Ben doesn’t approve, still bitter that his wife left him for the big city so long ago and so traditional that he’d rather be estranged from his son than accept him pursuing a career in entertainment. Ben Sr. is thus disturbingly but not surprisingly, pleased, when Ben Jr. is injured during service in WWI and as a result of can no longer dance for a living. This forces him to work in his father’s barber shop. As so many fathers do, Ben Sr. is unable to see his children as anything other than extensions or reflections of himself. His ultimate dream has come true when his son’s failures and bad luck humble him and put him back in “his place”: side by side with his old man, cutting hair.
Inviting disaster on his head, Ben Sr. reads about gangland massacres in the paper and loudly declares his approval “Let those animals kill each other off!” Alas for Ben Jr., it turns out after touring as a dancer and surviving the trenches of the great war, the barbershop life is not fulfilling. After swapping murder glory stories with an old war buddy-turned-gangster, he falls in with the same group responsible for the gangland massacres his father has been loudly encouraging.
Once Ben Sr. finds out who Ben Jr. son is working for, he looks for an opportunity to extricate his son from the gangster life, and he finds it: when his son warns him to get his mobster boss out of the barber shop because some of his enemies are coming to whack him, Ben Sr. purposefully delays the boss. As a result, both the boss and his son are shot to death in a drive-by. Ben Jr. survived the war, but he couldn’t survive his own father’s lying and scheming attempts to control.
His daughter Bessie seemingly gets off comparatively easy, (although having such death and carnage define your life because of your faildad is not “easy”) and actually seems to be heading off to Chicago on her honeymoon, something that Ben couldn’t have been very pleased about. It did however work out, and the Nellie cycle is completed with the birth of a granddaughter of the same name who grows up to look just like the original Nellie - and possibly this one will get to go to Chicago, because at least her mom seems more chill than Grandpa.
I forgot to mention this all happens in a flashback, being told by old man Ben to a newspaperman who came looking for stories about the olden days. This guy probably wanted some town history, not just this sad boy bullshit about a guy ruining his family’s lives by lying to them, trying to make himself a living fossil, and refusing to change or grow in any way not prompted by extreme tragedies that were his own fault. Old man Ben then leads a parade through a claustrophobic mass of people, the final culmination of his nightmare made real: he wanted a small town but his small town grew into a big city around him.
WTSSN is a powerful reminder to be honest with yourself and others, to take risks, to never define yourself by a profession or a place or a moment in time, and to treat people as equals and not as pawns to be controlled. If you do, you’ll soon realize that nothing is static, and what you thought was a way to shape your life was a fleeting illusion, and that illusion has become your cage. What is really important is the people around you, and if you don’t treat them as equals, you will destroy them and yourself. Conservatives everywhere will see themselves reflected in Ben’s toxic behaviour, unfortunately if they are too much like Ben, they won’t really understand what they are seeing until it’s too late.
(Also the skipper from Gilligan’s Island plays one of the guys in the barbershop quartet that hangs around the whole movie.)
