Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat is often compared to Double Indemnity.  In both movies, a man has an affair with a married woman, and they conspire to kill her husband for money.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) are the lovers.  They murder her husband, played by Tom Powers, in order to collect on his accident insurance.  By the end of the movie, however, Walter has murdered Phyllis because he suspected she would betray him, and he is on his way to the gas chamber.

In Body Heat, Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) are the lovers who murder her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna).  Because she had signed a prenuptial, the only way for her to get any of his money was by inheriting it.  After the murder, Matty betrays Ned, who ends up in prison, while she gets what she has dreamed of since high school, “to be rich and live in an exotic land.”  She has committed the perfect murder.

Of course, Body Heat was made in 1981, whereas Double Indemnity was made in 1944.  Before 1968, when the Production Code was still in force, there was no way someone could get away with murder in a movie.  After the Production Code was abandoned, it became possible to make such a movie, but it almost never happens because we usually don’t like it.  In fact, we so don’t like it that a lot of people deny that there is any such thing as a perfect murder.

In Jigsaw (1962), two detectives are trying to solve a murder.  After being foiled at every turn, one of them says, “It’s beginning to look like the perfect murder to me.”

His superior dismisses the possibility:

There’s no such thing as a perfect murder, my lad.  Somewhere there’s always a flaw.  There’s always a track leading from the kill to the killer, and no matter how well he covers the track, he’s going to leave more tracks doing it.

And yet, murders go unsolved all the time.

Perhaps, in all fairness, we have to distinguish between an unsolved murder and a perfect murder.  Unsolved murders often involve street crime, murders committed by lowlifes, as when a dope fiend kills a drug dealer, and all the police do is send the body to the morgue.  The idea of a perfect murder presupposes that the killer and his victim are at least middle class.

Even when so restricted, there still remain unsolved murders, so perhaps we should make another distinction, in that a murder would not have to be perfect in order for someone to get away with it.  It could have been sloppily done, but the police were busy with other cases and didn’t have the time to thoroughly investigate it.  The perfect murder is supposed to be a matter of wits:  the ingenuity of the killer in setting it up, maybe even faking evidence, as opposed to the cleverness of the detectives in trying to figure out who done it.

Perhaps the mistake lies in trying to apply the concept of the perfect murder to real life, where it does not belong.  Instead, the idea of a perfect murder belongs only in fiction, and even then, only as an ideal toward which the killer strives but never quite realizes, as in movies like Jigsaw, where it turns out not to be perfect, and the killer is caught. Body Heat, however, is a rare exception to this principle.

If we are to enjoy a movie in which someone commits a perfect murder, it is essential that the victim is only getting what he deserves.  In Body Heat, Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) is Ned’s friend.  He is also a prosecuting attorney, and he suspects that Ned is involved in Edmund Walker’s murder.  “Walker was a bad guy,” he says, “and the more I find out about him, the happier I am he’s dead. I figure it’s a positive thing for the world….  As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care who killed him, and I don’t care who gets rich because of it.”

That means we don’t have to care either.

Furthermore, there is a scene where Ned is at a restaurant with Edmund and Matty.  When Matty excuses herself to go to the powder room, Edmund says that if he ever found out that she was having an affair with another man, he would kill the guy.  Because he would be willing to kill over a woman, it doesn’t seem so bad that Ned is willing to do the same thing to him.

The second person to be murdered is Mary Ann Simpson.  Actually, she is the real Matty, and Matty is the real Mary Ann.  To avoid confusion, they will be referred to by their assumed names, not their real ones.  Matty assumed Mary Ann’s identity to cover up her unsavory past, and when Mary Ann found out about it, she started blackmailing Matty.  As we have learned from watching movies, blackmailers never accept a single sum of money to keep quiet.  They always come back for more, so the person being blackmailed can put an end to it in only one way.  In other words, the blackmailer brings it on himself.  Furthermore, we always detest blackmailers and want them to come to a bad end, more so even than those that commit murder.  We might accept that Matty gets away with murder and enjoys the rest of her life, but we could not stomach the idea of Mary Ann getting away with blackmail, the movie ending with her living life to the full after having soaked Matty for all she was worth.

Another thing that makes it possible for us to accept the idea of Matty getting away with murder is that we never actually see her kill anyone.  Just as Walter is the one who killed Phyllis’s husband in Double Indemnity, Matty gets Ned to kill Edmund, and we never see her kill Mary Ann, who is already dead when the explosion occurs in the boathouse where her corpse had been placed.

Finally, Matty is a woman.  If a man in a movie murders his wife for money, he absolutely must come to a bad end.  But when a woman does that to her husband, is there not some deep, underlying sympathy for her?  As the song says in Chicago (2002), “He had it coming!”

And this is paradoxical, because when a woman kills her husband, that seems to be the greater evil.  At least, it seems that way to men. In any event, they don’t expect that from a woman.  Men are known for being violent, whereas women seem unsuited for it:  physically, because women are the weaker sex; psychologically, because we think of women as compassionate and nurturing.  That is why Lady Macbeth says, “Unsex me here,” so that she can help her husband commit murder.

Clytemnestra murdered her husband with the help of her lover Aegisthus.  And yet, was she not justified in doing so?  Did not her husband, Agamemnon, murder their daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis? But whereas Clytemnestra is known as the notorious husband-murderer, Agamemnon is not principally known as a daughter-murderer, but for leading the Greeks in a conquest of Troy, gaining glory for himself in doing so.

Perhaps it worth noting that the need for a sacrifice resulted from the fact that Agamemnon had killed a deer in a grove that was supposedly sacred to Artemis.  Calchas, the seer, told Agamemnon that in order to appease Artemis, he must sacrifice Iphigenia.  Now, I think we can all agree that the Greek gods do not exist.  So, this idea on the part of Calchas that Iphigenia must be sacrificed arose out of his own imagination.  In other words, a man decided that a young girl must die.

Calchas could have said to Agamemnon, “Artemis wants you to be sacrificed since you were the one that killed that deer.  She says your brother Menelaus can take over from here and lead the ships to Troy.”

Alternatively, he could have said, “Your son Orestes must be sacrificed.”  But he did not because the idea of sacrificing a female rather than a male was more congenial to all concerned, aside from the girl and her mother, that is.

Finally, the whole story could have been pure fiction, in which case I would be willing to give long odds that it was a man who made it up.

There remains the question, is Body Heat the first work of fiction in which a woman commits the perfect murder?  No, that honor goes to the novel Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp is twice referred to as being in the role of Clytemnestra.  She poisons her lover, Jos Sedley, for his life insurance. Most adaptations, be they movies or television series, shy away from that ending, even allowing Becky and Jos to live happily ever after.  The only exception that I am aware of is the 1987 version, in which the murder does take place and Becky gets away with it.

Interestingly, there are repeated allusions in the novel to the murder of Iphigenia, reminding us of how women have readily been sacrificed by men in pursuit of their own selfish ends.

There is a fundamental injustice between the sexes that has been there from the beginning, which men have exploited to their advantage.  And so it is that when a woman finally strikes back against a man, there is a sense of justice being served.  He had it coming!

Religulous (2008)

I saw Religulous when it first came out, and while I enjoyed Bill Maher’s humorous take on religion, there was one section of the movie that told me something I did not know.

It begins with Maher saying that when he went to church as a child, there were “moments of sheer terror” at the thought of burning in the eternal fire of Hell.  Following this, the scene changes, and we find Maher announcing that he is in the Vatican.  But not for long.  Suddenly, the camera is apparently pushed down, filming the floor, while the microphone picks up sounds of scuffling.  The next we see of him, he is standing in front of the Vatican.  He says he wanted to interview the Pope, but he would have settled for a cardinal, a monsignor, or even the flying nun. No such luck.  Instead, they just threw him out.

But then a priest does turn up, Father Reginald Foster.  In the course of their conversation, Foster makes reference to all the books he has read by atheists who say religion is stupid.

“You know what’s going to happen to them,” Maher replies.  “They’re going to be roasting in Hell.”

“Come on, roasting,” Foster replies.  “That’s the old Catholic thing.”

“That’s what they taught me,” Maher says, somewhat perplexed by this.

“Yeah, I know,” Foster says, “that Hell business.”

“Well, come on,” Maher persists, “the standard doctrine that I was taught as a kid.”

“Yeah, that’s all gone,” Foster says dismissively.  “That’s all finished.”

“But that’s not fair,” Maher replies. 

“Yeah,” Foster concludes, giving the whole business a raspberry.

After priests frightened Maher with Hell when he was a child, they now say, “Never mind,” and have a laugh at his expense for having ever believed such foolishness.

I was as perplexed as Maher.  No Hell?   Somebody should have told me!

I have a friend who is a Catholic.  She said she once asked a priest about a hypothetical situation: A man and woman are truly in love with each other and plan on getting married, but one Saturday night they get carried away and have sex.  Filled with guilt, they decide to go to confession on Sunday, after which they will get married so as to preclude the possibility of lapsing into sin once more.  However, on the way home they are involved in an automobile accident and both are killed.

“What would happen to them?” she asked.

The priest replied, “They would go to Hell.”

After I saw Religulous, I called her up to tell her that her priest had apparently not received the word.

Recently, I happened to be reading an excerpt from Against All Gods, by A.C. Grayling, who discusses the phrase “fundamentalist atheist.”

Christians among other things mean by “fundamentalist atheists” those who would deny people the comforts of faith….  Yet in its concessive, modest, palliative modern form Christianity is a recent and highly modified version of what, for most of its history, has been an often violent and always oppressive ideology….  Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specializes in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles.

In other words, by taking what Jesus had to say about Hell seriously, the fundamentalist atheist is spoiling everyone’s good mood.

Grayling goes on to mention that the Church of England abolished Hell by an Act of Synod in the 1920s.  Instead, those who do not accept Christ as their savior are merely separated from God.  Apparently, the Catholic Church came to a similar conclusion in 1992.  And so it is that the Anglican and Catholic Churches no longer have a Hell.  All they have now is a Heck.

Needless to say, a lot of Christians still believe in a real Hell, a place where those without faith will literally burn in the eternal fire.  Early in the movie Religulous, Maher, who is, of course, a fundamentalist atheist, passes by a billboard which reads, in all caps, “HELL IS REAL.”

Maher’s mother was Jewish, but his father was Catholic, and he was raised as such.  When talking about religion, he also includes Islam.  So, all three Abrahamic religions are examined, along with Mormonism and Scientology.  He says that he used to make jokes about religion as a standup comic, but his quest now is more fundamental, so to speak.  He wants to understand how otherwise rational people, from a fear of death, can cling to a belief that “they know can’t be true.”

When Maher is talking to the kind of people that believe in Hell, they are usually also the ones that are fundamentalists in the ordinary sense of the word.  As a result, Maher can question them about such things as the story of Adam and Eve.  But given the fact that the Anglican and Catholic Churches no longer believe in Hell, it is not surprising that they don’t believe in a lot of other stuff in the Bible too, so that a fundamentalist atheist like Maher has less material to work with.

However, as Grayling points out, the mean-spirited, fundamentalist atheist can still cause discomfort by going on about “the demand for poverty and chastity,” by noting that in Matthew 19, Jesus says that we should sell all our worldly possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.

While talking to Father Foster, Maher points to the Vatican, saying:  “When you look at a building like that, a giant palace, does it seem at odds with the message of the founder?”

Foster, in his usual joking manner, admits that it does bother him, and that he wouldn’t live there if he were boss.

With only a little prompting from Maher, Foster goes on to say that a lot of stuff Christians believe are just “nice stories,” and people believe them or not as they want.  “Talk about Cafeteria Catholics!” he says, followed by another raspberry.

Maher asks, “So how do you convince people of what’s the true faith?”

“You don’t,” Foster says, as he sums it all up.  “Forget it.  You just have to live and die with their stupid ideas.”

And one of their “stupid ideas,” of course, is their belief in Hell.

So, for that “hypothetical” couple my friend was worried about, Religulous brings them good tidings of great joy.  They might end up being separated from God, but at least they will have each other.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Andromeda Strain begins with a prologue telling us that the movie we are about to see is based on actual events:

This film concerns the four-day history of a major American scientific crisis.  We received the generous help of many people attached to Project Scoop at Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Wildfire Laboratory in Flatrock, Nevada.  They encouraged us to tell the story accurately and in detail.  The documents presented here are soon to be made public.  They do not in any way jeopardize national security.

Sometimes movies do this, saying that what we are about to see is true even though it is not.  The film poster for Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) said, “Just the Way It Happened!”  A film poster for Macon County Line (1974) made a similar claim:  “It Shouldn’t Have Happened.  It Couldn’t Have Happened.  But It Did.”  Most of us eventually learn not to take such claims seriously, although I have known people who believed the events depicted in Serial Mom (1994) really happened because the title card said, “Based on a true story.”

No doubt some people are hoping the documents referred to in the prologue of The Andromeda Strain are part of the UFO Files and will finally be released.  The truth that is out there, however, is more down to earth.  There was merely a desire on the part of those that made this movie to give it some verisimilitude.  More effective in that regard, however, is the movie’s female scientist, Dr. Ruth Leavitt, played by Kate Reid.  I may have barely noticed the prologue, but she really impressed me, making the movie seem realistic, science fiction though it may be.

Previously, a female scientist in a movie would be played by a beautiful woman, who would become the love interest of the leading man.  She might even wear high heels to enhance her sex appeal as Faith Domergue does in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and This Island Earth (1955).

To say that Kate Reid is no beauty would be an understatement, but I have seen her in movies where she was made to look somewhat attractive, as in This Property Is Condemned (1966).  But in The Andromeda Strain, she wears frumpy clothes. And, of course, she wears flats.

Normally, when a woman in a movie is supposed to be unattractive, she is played by an actress who would be regarded as pretty in real life, like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942) or Betsy Blair in Marty (1955).  That way we can believe it when she eventually finds love.

In Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), John Bromfield has to get a checkup before going to South America.  He has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth as the doctor takes his blood pressure.  The doctor explains that his assistant will be giving Bromfield some inoculations for tropical diseases, saying that she is a capable, young woman.

“Yeah, I know how it is,” Bromfield remarks, “Can’t get a man, so she chooses a career.”

“Yes,” the doctor agrees, “very sad.”

The woman is played by Beverly Garland, who is as pretty as she is capable.  She ends up getting Bromfield before the movie is over.

But we have no such expectations with Kate Reid.  She may already be married in a movie, but she is not suited to be the love interest of a leading man.  In Shoot (1976), Reid plays the widow of a man recently killed in a shootout between two groups of hunters.  Cliff Robertson calls her on the phone, pretending to be an old friend of her late husband, wanting to come over and offer his condolences, but really wanting to find out what she knows.  When he gets to her house, she tells him that while she was on the phone with him, she was sitting on her bed stark naked.  During their conversation, she says she keeps a .357 Smith & Wesson right near her bed to prevent the “hippies and the junkies and the jigs” from robbing and raping her.  Before Robertson leaves, she asks him, “Would you believe that I haven’t got on any underwear underneath this outfit?”

Coming from her, we are supposed to regard this as a preposterous proposition, and we are not surprised that Robertson excuses himself and leaves.  In real life, speaking for myself, I would have succumbed.  The flesh is weak.

Back to The Andromeda Strain.  The movie is about a satellite that has returned to Earth with a deadly organism, and four scientists are brought to together to prevent it from spreading.  In addition to Dr. Ruth Leavitt, there is Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson), and Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne).  It is an emergency, so soldiers arrive to pick up each scientist.  Two of them, Stone and Dutton, are married, and soldiers arrive at their homes.  Seeing their domestic lives interrupted is dramatic.  Inasmuch as Hall and Leavitt are single, however, it would not have been interesting to see soldiers arrive at their respective apartments, one of them watching television and the other taking a nap.  So, soldiers arrive where they work:  Hall, just as he is about to operate on a patient; Leavitt, while she is at a critical point in an experiment she has been overseeing.

There are a few time-capsule jokes in these scenes.  When Mrs. Stone interrupts her husband while he is speaking to someone, saying it’s important, he says, “The S.D.S. has arrived, no doubt.”  When Dutton tells his wife there is no need for her to pack clothes for him, she says, “A hippie.  He’s going to a love-in.”  And when the soldiers come for Leavitt, saying the orders are from Dr. Robertson, the president’s science advisor, she says, “Call Robbie.  Tell him I burnt my draft card.”

Hall really does not want to be part of the team, and he wonders why he was picked.  Stone says that among other reasons, the fact that Hall is a bachelor means that he satisfies the recommendation of the Odd Man Hypothesis.  We eventually learn that this is the theory that a bachelor is psychologically best suited to allowing a nuclear device to go off, killing everyone in the Wildfire Laboratory, himself with it, should it be necessary to destroy the organism and keep it from spreading.

Before Hall finds this out, however, he asks, “Who picked Leavitt? Talk about the Odd Man Hypothesis, which we haven’t yet. She’s really an oddball.”

Yes, it’s very sad. Couldn’t get a man, so she chose a career.

To my knowledge, there has never been another movie produced since this one in which an unmarried, female scientist is deliberately depicted as unattractive, and enough so as to preclude any romantic involvement with the male lead.

In the end, the deadly organism is finally neutered, and all is well, after which we imagine the four scientists going their separate ways.

Of course, things would have been different had Faith Domergue played the part of Dr. Leavitt, in which case a romantic relationship between her and Hall, which is to say, between Ruth and Mark, would have been inevitable. I can just imagine it. In the final scene, he takes her in his arms and kisses her, telling her he loves her.  She looks up at him and says, “Would you believe that I haven’t got on any underwear underneath this outfit?”

The Four Feathers (1939)

The Four Feathers is a novel that was published in 1902.  One can only conclude that it must be a popular story, for there have been seven movies based on it, the best of which is said to be the one produced in 1939.

That movie begins when a Dr. Sutton arrives at the home of General Faversham for a reunion of retired military officers of the British Army.  Sutton brings word that General Gordon has just been murdered at Khartoum, which happened in 1885.  General Faversham’s arrogance upon hearing of this is unabashed:  “That’s no news to me.  I said that was going to happen years ago when they first sent Gordon to Egypt. He wasn’t hard enough.”

Whether sincerely or disingenuously, Dr. Sutton feeds his vanity.  “They wanted someone like you out there,” he says.

“Just what I was going to say myself,” the general agrees without the slightest trace of modesty. “First time for a hundred years there hasn’t been a Faversham in the Army, and look at the mess they make.”

General Faversham berates himself for not having married sooner.  As a result, he is too old to have gone to Egypt and do things proper, and his son Harry is too young, only fifteen.  Furthermore, he is worried about the boy.  After sending him to the best army school in England and inspiring him with tales of his ancestors, the many portraits of which are hanging on the wall, famous for their military exploits, he caught Harry reading poetry.  “Shelley, of all people!”

Presumably, it wouldn’t have been so bad if Rudyard Kipling had been the poet Harry was reading, but Percy Bysshe Shelley was an atheist who wrote the subversive poem “Ozymandias,” mocking the conceit of the British Empire.

The general has decided to let Harry dine with them that night, hoping to infuse some martial spirit into the boy.  That night, General Burroughs (C. Aubrey Smith) starts things off by reminiscing about the Crimean War, some thirty years earlier, telling of how he led the charge at Balaklava:  “Ah, war was war in those days, and men were men. No room for weaklings.”

As for those weaklings, several stories are told of men who were cowards and ended up getting the death they deserved, either while running away or by committing suicide later out of shame.  “There’s no place in England for a coward,” General Faversham avers, while giving his son a stern look.

Ten years later, Harry (John Clements) is now an officer.  He learns that his regiment will join Sir Herbert Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian Army for the reconquest of the Sudan, finally avenging the death of General Gordon.  His fellow officers are ecstatic.  Later, we see people cheering as the soldiers march down the street and a military band plays “The British Grenadiers.”  We see a woman weeping sentimental tears as she sees her husband off.  Then she and the crowd sing “Auld Lang Syne.”  However, no one is more teary-eyed than General Burroughs, who wishes he could go with them.

Harry is among the crowd, dressed in civilian attire, viewing the spectacle with dispassion.  The day before the regiment was to leave for Egypt, Harry informed his commanding officer that he was resigning his commission, saying that now that his father is dead, his duty to him in upholding the family tradition of service in the Army is over.  After the colonel reminds Harry of his duty to his country, but to no avail, he accuses him of being a coward.  Harry remains adamant in his determination to leave the Army.

Prior to this, Harry’s engagement to Ethne (June Duprez), daughter of General Burroughs, was announced at a party celebrating the occasion.  Now at the Burrough’s home, Harry explains to a bewildered Ethne why he did not leave with the others:  “We’ve discussed it so often, the futility of this idiotic Egyptian adventure, the madness of it all, the ghastly waste of time that we can never have again.”

While Ethne may have agreed with Harry in principle when they discussed it, he mistakenly assumed that she would approve of his resigning his commission.  Upon hearing about it, however, she eases back out of his arms.  Harry continues:

I should have done it sooner. Long ago. It’s released me from the life of an impostor. That’s all a man is when he fails to be true to the things he believes in. I believe in our happiness. I believe in the work to be done here to save an estate that’s near to ruin, to save all those people who’ve been neglected by my family because they preferred glory in India, glory in China, glory in Africa.

As Ethne listens, not fully comprehending, a package arrives.  It contains a calling card from each of Harry’s three friends:  Mr. Thomas Willoughby, Mr. Peter Burroughs, who is Ethne’s brother, and Captain John Durrance (Ralph Richardson), Ethne’s disappointed suitor.  Attached to each man’s card is a white feather, signifying cowardice.

Moreover, Harry realizes that Ethne also thinks he was wrong to resign his commission. She says:

Some people are born free. They can do what they like without concern for consequences. But you were not born free, Harry, and nor was I. We were born into a tradition, a code which we must obey even if we do not believe. And we must obey it, Harry because the pride and happiness of everyone surrounding us depends upon our obedience.

In response to this, he plucks a white feather from her fan to go with the other three.

As I watched this first part of the movie, I thought about what might have been.  If only Harry had remained true to his resolve, forgoing his love for Ethne, accepting the accusation of cowardice from his three friends, remaining true to himself while helping those neglected by his family’s estate.

But that would have been impossible in a movie, where cowards must either redeem themselves or come to a bad end.  The only exception is comedies, such as in a Bob Hope movie, where cowardice can be played for laughs.  But this movie is no comedy.  So, what I was dreaming of was not realistic.

And yet, it would have been far more realistic than what follows.  Overwhelmed by the judgments of others, Harry concludes that he is indeed a coward.  So, he goes to Egypt and disguises himself as a Sangali native whose tongue had been cut out as punishment, the reason being that since he cannot speak the language, he needs an excuse for not talking.  This allows him to sneak around the general area of Egypt and the Sudan in hopes of redeeming himself in some way.

Meanwhile, Captain John Durrance has had a sun stroke and been blinded by the sun. Determined to do his duty, he lets no one know of his condition, leading his men without being able to see where he is going, brandishing his sword and swinging it about in ludicrous fashion.  When his company comes under attack, many are killed in the battle, and Durrance is almost one of them.  But Harry, who had managed to infiltrate the Dervishes, saves him while he is being attacked by a Fuzzy Wuzzy.  Durrance passes out, and Harry is knocked unconscious.  As a result, both are left for dead.  When Harry recovers, he leads Durrance to safety.  While Harry is slipping one of the white feathers into Durrance’s papers, some British soldiers think he is robbing him and take him into custody, putting him in a convict gang.

Durrance is sent back to England, where Ethne decides to marry him out of pity.  Women often make sacrifices like this in the movies.  Speaking of the fair sex, Ethne is the only major female character in the movie.  All the other women have only bit parts.  Her mother is no longer living, just as Harry’s mother was no longer living.  This makes the movie intensely masculine.  Ethne’s sole function in this movie is to be the prize for a man of courage.

Meanwhile, back in Africa, Peter Burroughs and Thomas Willoughby, who were part of Durrance’s company, have been captured.  Harry manages to get himself into the prison where they are being held, at which point he orchestrates a jail break, getting the three of them to safety, returning to them their white feathers as well.

In the end, when Durrance finds out who saved him in the desert, he breaks off his engagement to Ethne, allowing her the freedom to marry Harry.  But while Harry has managed to return the white feathers to his three friends, Ethne says he must still do something to prove his courage to her, although she says this in a good-natured way.  While her father, General Burroughs, is once again telling of how he gave the order to charge in the battle of Balaklava, Harry has the temerity to contradict him.  Presumably, his father had told him what really happened, that Burroughs never gave that order, that he ended up leading the charge inadvertently because his horse got spooked and took off with everyone else following him.  Burroughs admits that he will never be able to tell that story again.

With that, Harry returns the feather to Ethne, and they live happily ever after.

It is only natural when watching a movie to try to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, wondering what you would have done.  However, my personal experience is limited to the Vietnam War.  There are some superficial similarities.  For one thing, just as the British had no business being in Egypt and the Sudan, America had no business being in Vietnam.  For another, when Harry resigned his commission, that corresponded to my dodging the draft.

But for the most part, the Vietnam War was the complete opposite of the British adventures in Africa.  During the late 1960s, there was no shame in dodging the draft, quite the opposite.  It was practically a badge of honor, with other guys that I knew in college hoping that they would be so lucky.  Even the sergeant at the draft board, upon reading the recommendation written by the doctor, based on the lie I had told him, looked up at me with a big grin and said, “Congratulations!  You just got yourself a 1-Y deferment.”

My parents were pleased.  My father had fought in World War II, which many people would regard as one of America’s good wars, but he told me that he would never fire another shot in anger for the whole lot of them.

My two friends also managed to get out of the draft, although, unlike me, they did so legally, each having a minor health problem.

As for my girlfriend, when she learned that I had dodged the draft, she said she would give me something special that night as a reward.  I’m still thinking about that one.

Several years later, I knew another girl who said that she would never have sex with any man who had been in the Army.  I had sympathy for the men who were not as fortunate as I had been and were sent to Vietnam instead, so I asked, “What if the man had been drafted?”

She said it didn’t matter, that he should have had the moral courage to refuse to be inducted, even though it meant going to prison.  I thought that was a little harsh, but she was beautiful, so I was pleased to hear that I was not disqualified from consideration.  At least, not for that reason.  Unfortunately, she apparently had a different reason for disqualifying me.

All my college professors were against the war, so they were happy for me too, and I was now free to enter graduate school.

In other words, given the social milieu in which I existed, no one accused me of being a coward.  And yet, that is exactly what I was.  You see, the way I figured it, if they sent me to Vietnam, there were people over there who would try to kill me.

But let us assume that things had been different:  that my father disapproved of my dodging the draft; that my friends had enlisted, proud to be doing their patriotic duty, while regarding me as a coward for shirking mine; and that my girlfriend broke up with me, ashamed of what I had done.  So, in order to redeem myself, I go to Vietnam as a civilian and disguise myself as a mute Vietnamese.  Then, when one of my friends is blinded from exposure to napalm, I manage to find him and lead him to safety.  My other friend is captured and put in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam, but later on, I am also taken prisoner and end up in the same camp, after which I organize a jail break, and we escape to safety.

The absurdity of this fantasy can go no further.  How could anyone set out to do something like that with any expectation of pulling it off?

In one last effort to identify with the protagonist of this movie, I ask myself what I would have done had I been Harry.  In that case, I suspect my cowardice would have taken a different form.  I would never have had the courage to resign my commission and face the opprobrium.  I would have gone off with the rest of the regiment, wondering all the while, “What am I doing here?”  Then, during a battle, assuming I was lucky enough not to be killed myself, I would have killed men who didn’t deserve it, men who were only defending their land against an invading army.

In fact, that was what I figured would happen if I had been unable to dodge the draft.  Not having the moral courage to face going to prison, I would have put on a uniform and allowed myself to be sent to Vietnam where I would have committed murder out of cowardice.

The Persona of Pierce Brosnan

The Long Good Friday (1980) was a good movie, although it had a lot of characters in it that I had trouble keeping track of, their faces being somewhat ordinary, other than the main stars, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.  However, there was one actor who, though he had only a small part, stood out:  Pierce Brosnan.

This was at a time when we were still suffering from James Bond movies starring Roger Moore.  He was handsome enough, so we had no trouble accepting the fact that he had a way with women.  But when he got into a fight with the bad guys, it always looked as though they were trying not to hurt him.  Of course, we all knew that there would never be another Sean Connery to fill that role, although George Lazenby was good in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which I liked even better than some of the later movies with Connery.  When I saw Pierce Brosnan, I thought to myself that he had the right look to be the next James Bond.  Needless to say, a lot of other people thought so as well, and so it was that he eventually got that role.  Looking back, however, I have to wonder if Brosnan looked too right for the part, actually making James Bond less believable on that account.

Before that happened, however, he starred in Remington Steele (1982-1987), a television show about a female detective, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalest), who finds that no one will take her seriously as a private detective because she is a woman.  So, she makes up the name “Remington Steele,” with its manly connotations, and pretends that this fictional man is her boss.  The ruse works, and business picks up.  Through some fortuitous circumstances, however, a man played by Brosnan ends up fleshing out that fictional character.  He doesn’t know much about actually being a private detective, but he has seen a lot of movies about private detectives, to which he often refers.  This is reminiscent of Don Quixote, a man that tried to become a knight by modeling himself on what he had read in books on knight errantry, to comical effect.  Of course, Laura is the one that solves all the mysteries, while pretending only to be helping her “boss.”

The show is partly a romantic comedy, so we are not supposed to take it too seriously.  In real life, the name “Remington Steele” would be laughable, an obvious fake, just as Brosnan’s character, in filling that role, is fake.  One wonders, if by looking the part too much, just as the name is too much, Brosnan is more suited to playing a phony detective than a real one.  Furthermore, it is fitting that his character used to be a thief and a con man, because someone that good-looking would make you suspicious if he were trying to sell you something.

This role captured the essence of Brosnan’s persona, that of someone that looks so right for the role he is playing that we cannot take him seriously.  This showed up in the Bond movies he eventually made.  As Roger Ebert noted when reviewing GoldenEye (1995), the first Bond movie Brosnan starred in, the formula for a Bond movie was there, but something was different:

“So, all of the parts are in place. And yet, in an important way, this James Bond adventure … marks the passing of an era. This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.”

Even though he admits elsewhere that Brosnan makes the best James Bond since Connery, he also acknowledges that, psychologically speaking, there is something different:

“Brosnan’s Bond looks at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo, but he’s more knowing, more aware of relationships. I am not sure this is a good thing. Agent 007 should to some degree not be in on the joke.”

Once again, we have that Don Quixote effect, as if a man is trying to be James Bond based on all the James Bond movies he’s seen.

Still, in these Bond movies, Brosnan must be the good guy and play it fairly straight.  In other movies about espionage, however, he is a shady character, a bit unscrupulous, as in Remington Steele.

A good example is the movie No Escape (2015).  This is principally a fantasy film for husbands who are failures.  A lot of men feel they have let their wives down, and in this movie, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has done so in a big way.  From the dialogue we learn that he used to be in business for himself, but he eventually had to give that up.  So, he takes a job with Cardiff, a water company, requiring that he relocate his family to some unnamed country in Southeast Asia, which means he and his family are strangers in a strange land, where they don’t speak the language and where the food being sold in the marketplace would cause you to lose your appetite.  They check into a hotel where the phone doesn’t work, some of the lights don’t come on, and there is nothing but snow on television.  And this looks like the best hotel in the whole city.  It all proves to be too much for Jack’s wife Annie (Lake Bell), and in the middle of the night he finds her sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying.  In other words, if things had proceeded normally from this point, this would have been a movie of misery, probably resulting in Annie’s taking their two children back to the United States before long and filing for divorce.

But then there is a coup, the prime minister is assassinated, everyone in the American embassy is killed, and the police are overrun by mobs of revolutionaries, whose ultimate goal is to slaughter every Caucasian foreigner in the country, especially employees of Cardiff.  As horrible as that sounds, it gives Jack a chance to redeem himself, as he leads his family this way and that through one melodramatic situation after another, even to the point of killing a man who was threatening them, which he does in full view of his wife.  And she thought her husband was a failure.  Hah!

On his own, however, he would never have been able to get his family out of the country.  Fortunately, on the plane coming over, they met Hammond, who is played by Pierce Brosnan.  Given all the James Bond movies Brosnan has starred in, we are not surprised when he turns out to be a British spy.  However, he is dissolute:  he drinks too much and frequents strip clubs.  Nevertheless, Hammond still has all the requisite lethal skills for a British spy.  When Jack and his family are about to be murdered by several rebels, Hammond and another agent, a local named Kenny, are able to intervene and kill all the bad guys.

Hammond tells Jack he knows of a place where they will be safe.  It appears to be a combination brothel and opium den.  Presumably, Hammond is a regular customer.  When they get on the roof, Hammond explains what is going on.  It turns out that he is a corrupt version of James Bond.  Now that the Cold War is over, his services are put to ends more pecuniary than patriotic.  He confesses to being the ultimate cause of the revolution.  His job is to get countries to borrow money for projects, such as waterworks, knowing that they will never be able to pay back the loans. Being hopelessly in debt, the countries have no choice but to let corporations like Cardiff come in and make big profits at the expense of the impoverished citizens.  Normally, things work out well, and the citizens don’t realize how it all happened.  But this time, things did not work out well, and so the people have risen up to take their country back.  In other words, Hammond continues, they are trying to protect their families just as Jack is trying to protect his.

Unfortunately, Hammond and Kenny are killed in subsequent fighting, but Jack and his family are eventually able to make it by boat to Vietnam.  From there, presumably, they will go back to the United States and stay there.  And so, thanks to the revolution caused by Hammond, Jack and Annie will live happily ever after.  Without that, he would have been a failure, and she would have divorced him.

However, it is in The Tailor of Panama (2001) that Brosnan’s persona was really put to good use.  In that movie, Brosnan plays Andrew Osnard, James Bond’s evil twin, as it were.  The movie begins with an establishment shot of MI6 Headquarters.  An M-like character informs Osnard that he is being transferred to Panama, or rather, being banished there for his sins:  blown cover, gambling debts, and the wives.

The “blown cover” is almost a joke in the James Bond genre.  Only in Dr. No (1962) did Bond try to conceal the fact that he was a spy.  By the next installment, From Russia with Love (1963), Bond is so well-known as a spy that SPECTRE has an island where men run around wearing James Bond masks so that assassins can practice killing James Bond.

Also starting with Dr. No, but continuing throughout the franchise, Bond always wins when playing chemin de fer, or whatever they play in those European casinos, especially when sitting opposite a beautiful woman.  But in The Tailor of Panama, gambling is one of Osnard’s vices, resulting in serious gambling debts, something that cannot be allowed for someone that has access to state secrets, as those debts would make him susceptible to exploitation by foreign governments.

Finally, Bond’s womanizing is typically restricted to single women.  Here we gather that Osnard has been fooling around with the wives of men with influence, including his superiors at MI6.

Osnard figures that he is expected to keep his head down, serve out his time in Panama, and retire with a pension.  But “M” says Britain has vital interests there and warns him of much danger in what goes on in that country:  money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption.  We see Osnard smile at this, figuring he will fit right in.  On the plane to Panama, he scrolls through a list of two hundred Brits that are residents there.  He takes an interest in a tailor, Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), about whom MI6 apparently has a lot of information.

The scene shifts to the shop of Pendel and Braithwaite, where Harry is promising to help a customer realize the dream of “becoming more than we are” with the proper attire.  Harry approves of the suit the customer picks, referring to it as “Connery’s choice,” presumably an inside joke with the audience, suggesting that the suit could make the customer look like the first and best actor to play James Bond.  Making appearances triumph over reality is the theme of this movie.

Osnard introduces himself to Harry as a future customer, but soon reveals that he knows the truth, that the business about Braithwaite is phony, that Harry has served time in prison, that his firm was never based in the prestigious Savile Row, and that he is seriously in debt on account of a farm he should never have bought.  Osnard promises Harry that he will help him with that debt if he provides Osnard with secret information that might prove useful to him, information that Harry can glean from the powerful men for whom he makes suits.

Harry doesn’t really have anything to tell, but he needs the money, so he makes up stuff about the “Silent Opposition.”  Later, when he makes up stuff about the president of Panama selling the canal to the Chinese, Osnard becomes excited, but not because he believes him, saying it’s “a better yarn than Arthur Braithwaite.”  When Harry is surprised that Osnard sees through his spiel, Osnard says that the important thing is that “it plays,” something he can report back to MI6.

It all reminds me of Our Man in Havana (1959), where Alec Guiness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, before the revolution.  He needs money on account of his daughter, who just bought a horse, which she wants to keep in a stable at the expensive country club, while he wants to send her to finishing school in Switzerland.  He is approached by Noël Coward, who is a British Secret Service official, to get him secret information, for which he will pay a lot of money.  Guiness is unable to come up with any secret information, but his friend Burl Ives has some encouraging advice:  “That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination….  There’s something about a secret that makes people believe.”  When Guiness says that they want him to recruit agents, Ives tells him to invent them too.  And so he does.

Returning to The Tailor of Panama, we find that the story Harry made up, while good enough for London, was not accepted by Washington.  So, Osnard puts more pressure on Harry to come up with something that Washington will believe.  Harry says that will cost ten million dollars, thinking that will end it, but Osnard is fine with that.  Things get crazier and crazier, leading the Americans to launch a military invasion, after paying fifteen million dollars for Osnard’s bogus information.

In the end, Osnard is able to make it out of Panama, on his way to Switzerland, with two suitcases filled with the millions of dollars he was able to extract from Washington, after bribing the British ambassador with just over a million, since he had caught on to what Osnard had been doing.  As the two of them walk toward the plane Osnard will be boarding, he says, “Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” alluding, of course, to the movie Casablanca (1942), much in the way Brosnan, as Remington Steele, would allude to old movies.  On the plane, he flirts with a pretty stewardess, his next conquest.  And so it is that James Bond’s evil twin will live happily ever after.

As a final note, early in the movie, Osnard meets Francesca, a beautiful woman that works at the British embassy.  He makes a date with her at a place where a band is playing music.  At one point in their conversation, he asks her to dance.

“Oh, God, you don’t dance as well, do you?” she asks.  Even she realizes that Brosnan’s character is too perfect for the part he is playing.

Marjoe (1972)

I tried watching Marjoe, lo these many years ago, but when it began with this icky kid, with his mother by his side, talking about the Lord, I turned it off.  I should have given it more of a chance.

Recently, I was reading Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell:  Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, in which the author posed the question as to how much religious leaders completely believe what they are saying, to what extent they are mere charlatans, and to what extent they are a little bit of both, which Dennett thinks is most likely, that genuine belief needs to be accompanied by tricks and gimmicks:

Every religious leader, including priests, ministers, imams, and rabbis, experiences a spectrum from knowledge to innocence, similar to the revival preachers depicted in the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary Marjoe, which chronicles Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young preacher who, after losing his faith, returned to preaching to expose the industry’s manipulations.

At that point, I put down the book and watched the movie.  It didn’t take long to see that what Dennett said was true, that Marjoe Gortner, or simply, Marjoe, so named as a combination of Mary and Joseph, made this movie as an exposé of revivalism.

He talks about what his mother did to him, starting when he was four years old.  He wanted to go outside and play, but his mother would make him spend hours and hours memorizing sermons or the words in wedding ceremonies, which he would then perform. When his memory would slip, she would hold a pillow over his face or hold his head under a water faucet so that he could not breathe.  The only thing that prevented this torture from being any worse was that she knew she could not beat him, leaving marks on his body, since he would have to appear in front of the press, where he would claim that none of his sermons were memorized, but all would come directly from God.

This in turn reminded me of another book I had recently been reading, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who devotes an entire section of his book to the idea that in many cases, a religious upbringing can be a form a child abuse.  He even goes so far as to say that what priests of have done to children by molesting them sexually is not as bad as what they do to them mentally, although he does make a distinction between fondling (not so bad) and sodomy (very bad).

While I was mulling that over, I recalled something Patty Hearst said, several years after she had been released from prison, that while she did not like being repeatedly raped after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, what they did to her mind was much worse.

Anyway, Marjoe explains that while everyone thought it was a miracle that such a young child could be a preacher, he says he never believed that stuff.  In fact, he says, “I can’t think of a time that I ever believed in God….”

In a scene where Marjoe is talking to the film crew that he has enlisted to make this documentary, he tells one of them that his long hair, his “lovely locks,” will have to go, otherwise those in the Pentecostal movement, of which Marjoe is a part, will want to save and convert him.  In order to be left alone, the crew member will need to cut his hair and play it straight.  Marjoe also tells the film crew that they can’t smoke, not even if they step outside the tent or auditorium, or someone will try to save them.  And they must leave the girls alone, the revival groupies.  They would pose a distinctly different danger.

In fact, Marjoe continues, if anyone asks them if they have been saved, it is not enough merely to say, “Yes, I’m saved.”  Instead, they need to say, “Yes, brother, I’m washed in the same blood as you.”  Marjoe goes on to say that it is important to use the word “blood,” for it’s a “bloody, gory religion.”

While we are watching one of the revival meetings, Marjoe says he likes the part about the singing and dancing.  In fact, at one point in the movie, where there is a black choir doing the singing, with a black female preacher singing and dancing up front, it all reminded me of that scene in The Blues Brothers (1980), when the title characters go to a Baptist church where James Brown is giving a sermon.  As opposed to that, the fun part, Marjoe goes on to say that all that stuff about sin and burning in Hell is a drag.  However, he admits that he needs to put sin and damnation in his sermons to make money.  Presumably, people are willing to pay more for the promise of salvation than they would just to sing and dance.

At one point during a sermon, Marjoe asks people to pick the largest bill they have in their wallet and drop it in the bucket.  That doesn’t seem too bad.  But later, a woman that is preaching tells people that if they want an extra-special blessing, they must really make a sacrifice, such as giving money that they were going to use to pay some bills.  She says she doesn’t want just an ordinary contribution, but a real sacrifice, one that hurts, for which God will give that special blessing.

It is a lucrative business, and Marjoe goes into great detail about all the ways of fleecing people.  He figures his parents made about three million dollars off him, which they spent, leaving him with nothing.  He thought about suing them, presumably under the Jackie Coogan Law, since they didn’t set up a trust fund for him.  But then he decided just to let it go, that in holding on to his hatred for his parents, he would only end up hurting himself.  That is probably for the best, even from a purely secular point of view.  However, Marjoe adds that he believes in karma, saying, “All those things that you do bad will eventually, someday, come back on your head.”

Of course, there is no such thing.  The world is full of wicked men and women who live quite comfortably and will never be punished for the evil that they do.  Along with belief in God, belief in an immortal soul, and the belief that all suffering has a meaning or a purpose, belief in karma, that we live in a just world, is a feature of religion.  And so it is that Marjoe has not completely freed himself from all religious belief.

Apparently, Marjoe decided that sometimes karma needs a little help, so he included his father in this movie, where it would be revealed that his father used Marjoe as a child to swindle the gullible and then absconded with all the money.  Aside from the film crew, none of the people in this movie knew that Marjoe was going to portray the evangelical movement in such a bad light.

To cap it all off, at the end of the movie, Marjoe is blatantly blasphemous.  In the backyard with his girlfriend, he makes fun of salvation by playing with his dog, saying that this dog was in a wheelchair, but now he is walking around, a miracle from God.  He pretends to be asking people to give money to help kill a Commie for Jesus, to fight communism so that little dogs like this can be free.

Early in the movie, when Marjoe is talking to the film crew, one of them asks the question we have been wondering about, given that this documentary is going to show how revivalism is a fraud.  “Are we going to film Marjoe’s crucifixion when they find out about all this?”

As noted by Christopher Hitchens in his god is not Great, however, there was no such “crucifixion” since the movie had no effect on the people it was about:

The film Marjoe won an Academy Award in 1972 and has made absolutely no difference at all.  The mills of the TV preachers continue to grind, and the poor continue to finance the rich, just as if the glittering temples and palaces of Las Vegas had been built by the money of those who won rather than those who lost.

When Harry Met Sally … (1989)

When Harry Met Sally… addresses the question, can a man and woman be friends?  The man and woman in this movie, who must navigate between sex and friendship, are Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan).  They meet right after college, sharing a drive from Chicago to New York City, during which time Harry declares that a man and a woman cannot be friends because sex gets in the way.  At the same time, despite their disagreements, we can see that they like each other.  In the years that follow, their paths keep crossing, until they finally end up getting married.

It is interesting that Billy Crystal is just over five feet, six inches tall, while Meg Ryan is five feet, eight inches tall.  When she wears pumps, the heel is at most one inch.  Because they are about the same height, with her being just a little taller, it is easy for us to believe that they are just friends.

In Casablanca (1942), Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) are passionate lovers, despite the fact that Bogart is five feet, eight inches tall, while Bergman is five feet, nine inches.  However, the way they are filmed together makes it appear that he is a little taller than she is, which was a pretty good trick since we see them dancing together.  Maybe she was barefoot and he was the one wearing heels.  Anyway, the countenance of Bogart as opposed to that of Crystal also makes a difference.  We cannot picture someone who looks like Bogart even bringing up the subject of friendship with a woman.

I mention the movie Casablanca because Harry and Sally discuss it several times over a period of eleven years.  The first time is when they are driving together to New York.  On another occasion, they watch it together on their respective television sets while in bed and on the phone with each other.

In their first conversation about this movie, Harry says that Rick wants Ilsa to leave, which is why he puts her on the plane.  Harry doesn’t say why Rick wants Ilsa to leave, but the reason given in the movie is that Rick has decided that fighting the Nazis is more important than the love Rick and Ilsa have for each other.  The idea is that Ilsa’s husband, Victor Laszlo, needs Ilsa to support him in his fight to free his country from tyranny, and so Rick and Isla must sacrifice their love for the greater good of mankind.  Sally argues that Ilsa wants to leave with Victor for socio-economic reasons—she would become the First Lady of Czechoslovakia—even though the marriage would be passionless.  (At a later point in the movie, Sally denies she ever said such a thing.)

Harry couches the choice for Ilsa as either having “the greatest sex of your life” with Rick or having a passionless marriage to Victor for the sake of prestige.  Sally accepts this characterization of Ilsa’s relationship with Rick.  In other words, neither one of them says that Rick and Ilsa are in love with each other.  But when Casablanca was made, we were supposed to think of their relationship as one of true love.

Do we even believe in that kind of love anymore?  When Harry Met Sally… continually gives us reasons to be cynical.  For example, at the beginning of the movie, before he gets in the car with Sally, Harry is kissing a woman and telling her that he loves her.  Years later, he can’t even remember her name.  And if “great sex” is now the replacement for “true love,” even that must be viewed with a jaundiced eye.  Sally says that she has learned from several of her girlfriends that marriage ruins sex, which means that if Ilsa had stayed with Rick, their marriage would likely have ended up being passionless too.  After all, the sex Victor and Ilsa had in the early days of their marriage was probably pretty good too.

At the end of Casablanca, Rick says to Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  Harry says, “Best last line of a movie ever.”  It is, of course, a friendship between two men, but we are encouraged to think of the friendship between a man and a woman as something that can be beautiful as well.

But let us examine this supposedly beautiful friendship a little more closely.  It was Louis’s practice to allow a married couple to leave Casablanca provided he got to have sex with the wife.  On two occasions, we see him smirk as he anticipates his next victim.  I would not want to have anything to do with someone like that.  His sexual extortion doesn’t seem to bother Rick, although he did interfere with Louis’s plans for the wife of one young couple.  Taking pity on her, Rick let the husband win enough money at roulette to allow him and his wife to leave Casablanca without her having to degrade herself.  That irked Louis since he was looking forward to having sex with her.

We are, of course, supposed to see an analogous situation between Rick and Ilsa when she has sex with him to get the letters of transit that will allow her and Victor to leave Casablanca.  But in the case of Rick and Ilsa, we know it is true love.  With Louis, on the other hand, he enjoys having sex with desperate women even though he knows how much they despise him for it.  And yet, the fact that Rick is willing to regard a friendship with a man like that as being something beautiful is still warmly applauded by most people that watch this movie, including Harry, apparently.

Periodically during this movie, elderly married couples are interviewed, assuring us that there is such a thing as a happy marriage, one in which there is a sexual attraction between the couple, as well as a fondness for each other that would otherwise be thought of as friendship were it not for the fact that they are married.  In this way, we are prepared for Harry and Sally to achieve a synthesis of sex and friendship when they finally get married and become one of the interviewed couples themselves.

Without these interviews, we would not have taken the happy ending seriously.  I’m not sure we take it seriously even then.  Perhaps that is why the greatest love stories are those in which the man and woman are not together at the end, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Brief Encounter (1945), The Way We Were (1973), and, of course, Casablanca.

Les Diabolique (1955)

Les Diabolique (1955)In the movie Les Diabolique, Christina (Véra Clouzot) is married to Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse), who mistreats her and abuses her almost as much as he (supposedly) does his mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret).  Christina could divorce Michel, and she would get full ownership of the boarding school they operate owing to the fact that her dowry paid for it. Michel would simply have to go out and get himself another job.  There is just one problem with that.  Christina is very religious, having been raised in a convent, and she believes that divorce is a mortal sin.  So, she agrees with Nicole that they will have to murder Michel instead.

This absurdity brought me to halt.  I wondered if the novel, Celle qui n’était plus, was responsible for this perverse thinking on the part of Christina.  It wasn’t.  In that novel, a man and his mistress plan on murdering his wife in order to collect on her life insurance policy.  In the end, the two women are actually lesbian lovers who cause the husband to have a heart attack, cashing in on his life insurance policy instead.  And they get away with it.  The main thing, however, is that murdering someone for money makes a lot more sense than murdering him because divorce is a sin.

Curiosity got the better of me, however, so I watched the rest of the movie.  As it turns out, Nicole and Michel have conspired to make Christina think that she and Nicole have drowned Michel in a bathtub.  Then the two women dump his body in the swimming pool at the boarding school, supposedly to make it appear that he fell in and drowned.  It’s all pretty farfetched because Christina has to conveniently leave the room or turn away long enough for Michel to get a breath of air before pretending to still be drowned.

When the pool is drained, however, Michel’s body is nowhere to be found.  Christina is so horrified that she faints.  After she recovers, Nicole finds her kneeling at her prayer bench.  On it are statuettes of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.  Christina is holding a rosary, her hands clasped in prayer.  We don’t get to hear that prayer, however.  My guess is that it would have been something like this:  “Dear God, don’t let anyone find out that Nicole and I murdered Michel.”

Later, Christina discovers Michel’s body in another bathtub full of water.  When he rises up, as if from the dead, Christina, who has a weak heart, dies of a heart attack.  This was supposed to allow Michel to inherit the boarding school, which he and Nicole could sell for a lot of money.  A detective discovers the truth, however, and Nicole and Michel will end up going to prison.

There was a remake of this movie, Diabolique (1996).  It changed the ending so that the two women kill the husband, and neither of them will be charged with a crime.  More importantly, a better reason is given as to why the wife does not get a divorce, which is that a divorce would not give her clear ownership of the boarding school.  So, instead of the wife choosing to murder her husband because divorce is a mortal sin, she chooses to murder her husband as a way of getting ownership of the school without any legal difficulties.  Although the critics did not care for this remake, and it bombed at the box office, we must at least give this movie some credit for giving the wife a reason for not divorcing her husband that makes sense.

Nevertheless, Christina’s thinking in the original, irrational though it may appear, might nevertheless be realistic, psychologically speaking, and that for two reasons.  First, talking about God is an indirect way of talking about man.  If Christina were to get a divorce, everyone would know about it.  She would feel ashamed every time she went to church.  This feeling would be experienced as God’s disapproval of her shameful conduct.  On the other hand, only she and Nicole would know that the two of them had murdered Michel.  Therefore, Christina could still go to mass without anyone knowing the truth, which would be like God not caring what she had done.

Second, a person’s religious nature ranges from the moral to the magical.  For some people, their religious beliefs focus on being good and doing what is right.  Their belief in the supernatural is minimal.  Even the belief that there is a God may fade away.  For others, religious belief is all about the supernatural, about spiritual forces that one can manipulate, even for immoral purposes.  Christina is of the magical sort.  At one point in the movie, when Nicole says something about their plan to kill Michel, Christina shudders and crosses herself.  Presumably, when people make the sign of the cross, they are expressing their faith in God and making an unspoken prayer for his protection. For Christina, it is as if she wants God to give her the strength to murder her husband and shed his grace on her for doing so.  One might think that her belief in Hell would stop her from doing anything that sinful, but she apparently believes she can compel God’s favor by blessing herself, forcing God to support and forgive her.

When Christina was at her prayer bench, an alternative prayer to the one I suggested above might have been one of repentance, asking God for forgiveness.  In that case, one might think that genuine contrition on her part would have resulted in her turning herself in to the authorities, but only if one doesn’t fully appreciate the spiritual dynamics of Catholicism.  In “I Confess” (1953), for example, a man confesses to a priest that he committed murder, but he has no intention of turning himself in to the authorities.  It’s all about availing oneself of the magical forces of religion, manipulating them to one’s advantage.

As a matter of fact, when Christina decides that somehow or other Michel must still be alive, she tells Nicole she is going to confession.  I guess Nicole never saw “I Confess,” because she says to Christina, “Do you think you’ll get absolution if you don’t turn yourself in?”

Christina apparently hadn’t seen that movie either, since she replies, “Then I’ll turn myself in.”  But then Nicole tells her Michel’s body has been found, showing her the morning newspaper, where it is reported that a man’s body has been found in the Seine.

Well, that changes everything.  No need for a confession now.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

I didn’t get to see The Wild Bunch when it first came out, the reason being that I was in love with a woman who had heard about how violent the movie was, and she didn’t want to see it, and that meant I didn’t get to see it either.  The things we do for love.

However, she had a brother who had seen it, and he told me all about it one night while I was over at her house, getting so excited at certain points that he had to stand up and act out the parts.  And so it was that when my girlfriend broke up with me, I was free to see this movie.

My best friend had already seen it with his wife, perhaps because, unlike my girlfriend, she didn’t know what she would be in for.  She subsequently divorced him, though not for that reason, of course.  Since this was about the same time that I lost my girlfriend, the way was clear for my friend and me to go to the drive-in and enjoy the masculine spectacle of wholesale slaughter, bodies flying in all directions in slow motion, with blood and viscera goop spurting everywhere.

I started telling others what a great movie this was, including this one man who had fought in World War II.  He said he didn’t want to see a movie like that because he saw enough men die during that war.  I could see his point.  Fortunately, I had been able to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War, so my enjoyment of this movie was not spoiled by reality.

Although a lot of women saw this movie when it first came out, either out of curiosity or simply because their boyfriends or husbands dragged them to it, when my friend and I went to see the movie again about three years later, the theater consisted mostly of men.  During the intermission, when my friend and I went to the lobby get some refreshments, we overheard a couple of guys talking about a bar they had been to the night before where there had been some kind of altercation.  They looked big enough to be football players, and one of them said to the other, “We ought to go back there tonight and tear that place apart,” the other one nodding in agreement.  My friend and I glanced at each other while we listened to this, as he munched on some popcorn, and I sucked on some soda pop through a straw.  This movie could really get you pumped, although my friend and I knew the importance of distinguishing between video violence and the real thing.

The movie is about a gang of bandits headed by Pike Bishop, played by William Holden, who was about fifty years old at the time.  As movie stars from the classic era started aging, they often played in movies where the West was aging as well, and this movie is set just before the outbreak of World War I.  Toward the end of the movie, Pike and his gang end up in Mexico where General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) is seen to be in cahoots with a high-ranking officer of the German army, so when Pike and his gang go out in a blaze of glory, killing Mapache and the German and then machinegunning a fort full of Mexican soldiers, the mayhem has a patriotic glow.

The movie was made back in the day when scenes were often cut to allow for more showings at a theater.  As this was before the dawn of video cassette recorders, followed by laserdiscs and then DVDs, there were no director’s cuts to restore such scenes.  In fact, just the opposite would often happen, where movies would be further edited for television, the sides cut off to fit the television screen, material cut to get rid of sex, violence, and profanity, and in some cases, to make room for more commercials, with the original version being lost forever.  A good example of this sort of thing was what happened to Darker Than Amber (1970).

Fortunately, a director’s cut of The Wild Bunch did eventually become available about twenty years later, and I got to see several scenes for the first time.  This had the unintended effect of giving those scenes more emphasis than they would have had originally.  The message seemed to be that following a leader like Pike Bishop can cause you a lot of misery, even get you killed.

For example, there is a scene in which Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) becomes so angry with Freddy Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) that he starts to shoot him, saying that the old man is going to get them all killed.  Pike stops him, saying, “When you side with a man you stay with him.  If you can’t do that, you’re worse than some animal, you’re finished.”

Later, Freddy tells Pike, “That was a mighty fine talk you gave the boys about sticking together.”  Freddy then asks about how his grandson Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins) did when they robbed the railroad office at San Rafael.  Pike says he did not know that Crazy Lee was Freddy’s grandson.  He tells Freddy that the boy did just fine.  This was one of the scenes cut from the movie when I first saw it.

It recalls the beginning of the movie, which begins with the robbery Freddy is referring to.  After the gang takes over the railroad office, they realize there are bounty hunters in place ready to shoot them when they leave.  Crazy Lee asks Pike, regarding some customers he is watching, “I kill ’em now?”  Pike says to hold them until after the shooting starts.  Crazy Lee says he’ll hold them until Hell freezes over unless Pike says otherwise.  We see a funny look in Pike’s eyes at those words.  He doesn’t like Crazy Lee because his character fits his name, and Pike figures that this will be a good way to get rid of him.

What follows is a massacre, where the bandits shoot their way out of the railroad office just as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is marching by, singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” many of them being killed in the crossfire as the bandits and bounty hunters shoot it out.  After several minutes of carnage, what is left of the gang rides away.  All except Crazy Lee, that is.  He is still holding the customers in the lobby, forcing them to sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” while marching them around the lobby.  It’s a funny scene because we had completely forgotten about him.  But Pike didn’t forget about him.  He left him there on purpose knowing he would be killed.  So much for siding with a man and staying with him.

Leading the bounty hunters is Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan).  In another scene that had been cut out when I first saw this movie, we see that Deke and Pike used to be partners.  One night at a whorehouse, Deke says they should leave because it’s too dangerous to stick around much longer.  Pike dismisses his concerns, telling him to stop worrying.  Pike is sure that there is nothing to worry about, saying that it is his job to be sure about such things.  But then a deputy sheriff and some other men come in through the door.  Pike escapes while Deke is captured and sent to Yuma where a prison guard regularly whips him as part of his punishment.

Deke is eventually released in exchange for a promise to lead the bounty hunters to capture Pike, hired by Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker), a railroad executive.  Pike tells Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) that Harrigan has a grudge against him because of all the times he robbed the railroad and because he made Harrigan realize that his way of doing things wasn’t any good.  Pike says that a lot of people just can’t stand to be wrong, and their pride won’t let them learn from their mistakes.  While he is saying all this, we see the flashback of the whorehouse where Pike was so sure there was nothing to worry about.

A third scene that had been cut is when Pike recalls the woman that he loved and wanted to marry.  Unfortunately, she was already married.  He says that he should have killed her husband, but he wasn’t around, so Pike became careless.  One night her husband showed up unexpectedly, entering the bedroom while she and Pike were in flagrante delicto.  The husband starts shooting and his wife is killed.

In retrospect, these scenes made me think of other scenes in the movie that had not been cut but nevertheless showed that it was dangerous to trust a man like Pike, that following him could bring you to a bad end.  In a similar way, I have to wonder what happened to those two guys in the lobby that were planning on going back to that bar to really kick some ass, perhaps allowing Pike to lead them, figuratively speaking, into a situation they would come to regret.

My girlfriend’s reluctance to watch this movie was based on all the violence she had heard about.  Had she actually watched it, she might have also been put off by some of the scroungy characters and the way they like their women.  For example, Freddy has rotten teeth and a beard stained with tobacco juice, but he says, “I’m a delight with a pretty girl.”  And then there is Tector and his brother Lyle, played by Warren Oates.  They seem to enjoy having sex with whores while in the same bed together.  Whether there are two whores they are having sex with, “in tandem,” as Dutch says, or with just one whore, taking turns, the main thing is that the two brothers like it better when they are both in the same bed.  All right, that’s kinky enough.  But they also seem to enjoy it better when they don’t have to bathe first.

One of the interesting things about Westerns is the frequency with which bathing comes up.  In other genres, bathing is typically intended to have an erotic function, which is why it is usually a woman that is bathing, such as when Jean Harlow bathes outside in a rain barrel in Red Dust (1932).  Even when a man is bathing, it is likely to have sexual significance, but in that case, it is homosexual, as in Spartacus (1960), in the scene with Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis.

But Westerns are different.  In this case, it is mostly the men that bathe, and there is nothing sexual about it.  Instead, the bathing serves the purpose of allowing the man to be clean, the normal purpose of bathing, as in The Searchers (1956).  In that movie, Jeffrey Hunter is embarrassed when Vera Miles walks in while he is in the bathtub, but she is not aroused by his naked body.

Although bathing has always been necessary for the sake of cleanliness, it is primarily Westerns where bathing is depicted for that purpose.  Perhaps it is the fact that Westerns are often set in the desert, where men ride around outdoors in the hot sun, so it is felt necessary to reassure the audience that a romantic couple, like Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles, will be nice and clean when they eventually make love.

Strictly speaking, Sam Peckinpah, the director of The Wild Bunch, is not the first to make a Western in which a dirty, smelly character wants to have sex without bathing first.  I believe that honor goes to Marlon Brando in his One-Eyed Jacks (1961).  In that movie, Ben Johnson makes the following remark to his companion, as they arrive in Monterrey, California, where they plan to rob a bank: “You know, I think of the money waiting in that bank, just makes me wanna cry.  Harv, you gonna have diamonds in your teeth.  And you ain’t never gonna have to take that bath.”

The idea seems to be that with all the money Harvey will soon have, women will be willing to have sex with him without his having to take a bath first.

On the other hand, I have read that Sam Peckinpah wrote an early script for this movie, which ultimately was not used.  Could it be that this element of not bathing before having sex was Peckinpah’s contribution and was retained by the screenwriters that took his place?

In any event, Ride the High Country (1962) is another movie by Peckinpah about aging gunfighters in a West that is coming to an end.  In that movie, James Drury is planning on marrying Mariette Hartley.  His brothers are all looking forward to gangbanging Hartley on the night of the wedding, since that seems to be a family tradition.  One of the brothers is played by Warren Oates.  Drury asks him if he is planning on taking a bath first, saying, “Hate to get married with one of my brothers smelling bad enough to gag a dog off a Gut Wagon.”

Oates is not planning on bathing, saying, “Didn’t wash when cousin was wed back home.”  And then with a big grin says, “Didn’t seem to bother his bride none.”

In The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah employs Oates to the same end.  After Pike and his gang have agreed to do a job for Mapache, Pike says, “With your permission, I need a bath.”

An assistant to Mapache says, “With my permission, you all need a bath.”

At this point, Lyle (Oates) says to that assistant, “I don’t need no bath.  What Tector and me need is a couple of them women you’re hogging.”

And so it is that while Pike, Dutch, and Freddy have the normal kind of bath in a Western, for the sake of cleanliness, Lyle and Tector get themselves three whores to have sex with, in tandem, and without taking a bath.

Depending on your sense of humor, the scroungy characters in these two Peckinpah movies, especially the ones played by Warren Oates, could be good for a few laughs, and some would argue that they made the movies more realistic.  Of course, these movies would have been even more realistic if they had been filmed in Smell-O-Vision, but once again, we don’t want reality to spoil our enjoyment of a movie.

Compliance (2012)

There is an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.  The movie Compliance exemplifies that principle. Were we not assured at the beginning of the movie that it was based on true events, we would have lost all patience halfway through, thinking the whole thing to be preposterous.  The names have been changed, of course, including that of the fast-food restaurant where the story mostly takes place.

It is a hectic Friday, and Sandra (Ann Dowd), the manager of ChickWich, is under a lot of stress because someone forgot to close the freezer door and the bacon got spoiled, although she did manage to get a replacement shipment.  Moreover, they are shorthanded because one of her employees is sick.  And she tells everyone that a franchise quality-control person, a secret shopper, may be coming by that day, so everyone will need to be on his best behavior.  This mention of a secret shopper introduces the idea of someone pretending to be something he is not.

Shortly after they open for business, Sandra gets a phone call from a man claiming to be Officer Daniels.  He says that one of her employees stole money from the purse of one of the customers, and they have her doing so on a surveillance tape.  He describes her, and Sandra realizes that he is talking about Becky (Dreama Walker), a pretty, petite blonde.

Daniels gives an excuse as to why he cannot come to the restaurant just then to arrest Becky, so he says Sandra will need to check Becky’s pockets for the money.  It seems like a small request, so Sandra takes Becky into the back to do just that.  No money.

Little by little, Daniels says more investigating will be needed.  As this goes on, Sandra is having to run back out front from time to time to deal with situations, and she asks various employees to go back with Becky, all of whom are disturbed by the situation.  Becky is told to remove all her clothes, including her underwear.

When an employee named Kevin is asked to be with Becky, he is appalled. Because he is her friend, he refuses to be a part of it, even though he believes, as does everyone else, that Daniels is really a policeman.  He leaves the room.

By this point in the movie, we see where the phone call is coming from.  It appears to be in a room where this Daniels is able to fix himself a sandwich. And yet, it doesn’t seem to be his house because later in the movie, he arrives home and talks to his daughter, a little girl.  My guess is that he is calling from his garage, which he has fixed up to be his man cave, while his wife is at work, and his daughter is in daycare.

However, very early in the movie, we see Daniels putting two quarters into a payphone.  Speaking into the phone, he says, “Listen.  Listen to me.”  Then he yells, “Sir!” followed by the word “sir” again, only much quieter.  This is before he calls Sandra at ChickWich, and when he does call her, he is calling on a prepaid cellphone.  So, I don’t understand this scene at the payphone.  If anyone can make sense of it, let me know.

Anyway, Sandra is a homely, middle-aged woman, apparently in her fifties. She has a boyfriend named Van, whom she says will soon be asking her to marry him, although we have doubts about that.  She asks Van to come over and help watch Becky until the police are able to come to the restaurant.

Now comes the part where we really needed to know that this was based on a true story in order to accept what happens.  When Van gets on the phone, Daniels tells him to have Becky do jumping jacks while naked to make whatever she has hidden inside her drop out.  Nothing does.  Then Daniels tells Becky that she has been bad and needs punishment, and he tells Van to give her a good spanking.  So, Becky puts her naked body across Van’s lap, and per Daniels’ instructions, Van gives her a long, hard spanking. And then, because Van has been so cooperative, Daniels tells him that it is time for Becky to do something nice for him.

Oh, no!  Not that!

Oh, yes.  In the next scene, we see Becky, still completely naked, on her knees, performing fellatio on Van.  Van feels guilty, but only after he has reached the good part.  Then he leaves.

Throughout the movie, we have been waiting for an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, which, now that I think about it, is another story in which someone is tricked into being naked in front of others. It happens when Harold, the custodian, shows up.  Sandra asks him to go to the back where Becky is, handing him the phone. Daniels starts telling Harold he will need to do an invasive cavity search.

Harold goes back out front and tells Sandra that the guy on the phone is not a policeman, and the whole scam falls apart. The real police figure out who Daniels is, and he is arrested.  Sandra breaks up with Van.  She loses her job. Becky is advised not to bother suing Sandra, now an unemployed, former fast-food worker, but rather to sue the ChickWich corporation for being remiss in not warning employees about such fraudulent phone calls.  (At the end of the movie, we are told that there have been seventy such phone calls across thirty states.)

So, why did all this happen to Becky?  The answer is something I have commented on in previous reviews of other movies, and it intrigues me so much that I must mention it again, begging the reader’s indulgence if he has heard me go on about this before.  It is a dramatic principle that a small sin must be punished severely.

At the beginning of the movie, when Becky first arrives at ChickWich and parks her car, Kevin comes up to her and starts kidding her about parking close to the front door, an area that is supposed to be reserved for customers, playfully saying he’s going to tell Sandra on her.  Where Becky has parked is indeed close to the door, and this is the sin for which Becky is punished.

Later in the movie, after Becky has removed all her clothes, Daniels tells Sandra to take the clothes to her car, put them in the front seat, and leave the door unlocked so that the police can pick them up later for closer inspection. We see Sandra walking all the way to her car, the area where employees are supposed to park.  The scene could have been shortened or even left out completely, but the movie deliberately rubs it in as to how far Sandra has to walk.

Here are some other movies exemplifying this principle.  First, there is Storm Warning (1950), in which a woman ends up being whipped by the Ku Klux Klan because she took little advantages of her good-natured colleague.  Then there is Colossus:  The Forbin Project (1970), in which a man ends up being enslaved by his supercomputer because he stole an ashtray from the White House as a souvenir.  And then there is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which a woman gets her husband to lie to their landlady in order to break their lease, and as a result, she ends up being raped by Satan and having to give birth to the Antichrist.  This principle has been around for a long time.  For example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character is punished with death because he hesitated.

In the true story on which this movie was based, on the other hand, the man corresponding to Daniels was acquitted for lack of evidence.

And so it is that there are two kinds of karma, one for nice people like Becky, who are punished severely for their peccadillos, and one for evil people like Daniels, who commit terrible crimes and get off easy.