Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

Before watching an old movie, it is usually a good idea to know when it was made, so as to put it in the proper historical context.  Most of the time, the release date will suffice, which in the case of Gabriel Over the White House was March 31, 1933.  This was less than a month after Franklin Roosevelt had been sworn in as president on March 4.  However, production on this movie began over a year earlier, in February 1932, while Herbert Hoover was still president. As can be seen from the title, this is a political movie, so that difference is worth noting.

We also gather from the title that this movie will be about religion as well as politics.  Gabriel, of course, is an angel, but why was this one picked, I wondered.  Later in the movie, we find out through dialogue that Gabriel is known for his assistance to Daniel.  But ultimately, I believe that the name “Gabriel” is the one most easily recognized as being that of an angel.  Had the title been Michael Over the White House, people would have been wondering who Michael was.  And if the title had been Uriel Over the White House, people might have been expecting a comedy.  As in politics, so too in religion, name recognition often wins the day.

It is inauguration day when the movie begins, and Judson Hammond (Walter Huston), with his hand on an open Bible, is being sworn in as president of the United States, after which he bends forward and kisses it.

At the reception, he seems like a pretty friendly guy, with a lighthearted view of the whole business. When his nephew Jim (Dickie Moore), who is around seven years old, shows up with a toy pistol, he is asked if he wants to be a soldier.  He says he’d rather be a gangster.  Hammond admits jokingly, “I guess it’s more profitable at that.”

Later, he talks to his chief political consultant, Jasper Brooks, to whom he says he owes his presidency. Hammond says he’s a little worried about all the promises he made to get elected. Brooks, who is to be Secretary of State, assures him, “By the time they realize you’re not going to keep them, your term will be over.”

After most people have left, Hammond turns to his personal secretary, Hartley Beekman (Franchot Tone), and says of the White House, “Pretty big place for a bachelor president.”  This is unusual. We have had only one bachelor president, James Buchanan, whose term of office was just before the Civil War. The voting public is a little skittish when it comes to electing a bachelor.  They find it reassuring if a man has a wife for his sexual outlet.  That way they don’t have to worry about any disconcerting sexual activity on the part of their president.

Despite those apprehensions about bachelors, however, Hammond was elected. Sure enough, no sooner has Hammond retired to his study than an attractive, self-assured woman enters the White House and deliberately stands right on the Presidential Seal.  She presents her card, introducing herself as Miss Pendola Malloy (Karen Morley).  Beekman tries to explain that the president has had a trying day.  She replies with world-weary understanding, “Yes, I know, inaugurations are very trying.”  When Beekman asks what she wishes to see the president about, she replies, “About Miss Pendola Malloy.”

When Beekman shows Hammond her card, he tells Beekman that she can see the president at any time.  She is admitted entrance to his study.  There are some polite exchanges where they establish their nicknames:  “Major” for Hammond; “Beek” for Beekman; and “Pendy” for Miss Malloy.  That being done, she dismisses the president’s secretary, saying, “Goodnight, Beek.” Before he leaves the White House, Beekman picks one of her hairpins up off the Presidential Seal. This is even more offensive than her standing on it. Women go to a lot of trouble to look beautiful for us men, which we appreciate, but we don’t like seeing all those little female things lying about.

While being interviewed by reporters, Hammond expresses his small-government philosophy.  He says that unemployment is a local problem. When asked about John Bronson, leader of a million unemployed men that are armed, Hammond says that Bronson is a dangerous anarchist, who, if he comes near the White House, will be arrested.  As for racketeering and “notorious gangsters like Nick Diamond,” they too are a local problem.  Such things as bootlegging will disappear, Hammond says, once people have been better educated to respect the Eighteenth Amendment.  Then Hammond expresses his faith in the American people to weather the storm of the Great Depression on their own without any government assistance.  Later on, while we hear Bronson pleading for food for the unemployed in a speech on the radio, Hammond is oblivious, too busy playing a game of “treasure hunt” with his nephew, hiding a marshmallow, which Jim gets to eat when he finds it.

We also find out, through intermittent remarks, that Hammond’s ignorance of foreign affairs is matched by his indifference, which would suggest an isolationist attitude.  He orders the War Department to fly the latest issue of his favorite detective magazine to Annapolis, where he is going to give a speech, because it isn’t yet on the newsstands.

On the way to Annapolis, Hammond is having a good time driving his own car, going over a hundred miles an hour.  Then he loses control and crashes.  He has a concussion, leaving him unconscious for days. Eventually, the doctors conclude that it is only a matter of hours, that “he’s beyond any human help.” With that qualifier, “human help,” we know that it is time for divine intervention.  We see the curtains of the president’s bedroom window suddenly move, but it is no ordinary breeze.  Rather, it is the spirit of Gabriel.

Infused with that spirit, Hammond opens his eyes.  Now that he has found God, or rather, now that God has found him, we expect him to change in some way, but the change is most unusual. Whereas before, even if we disagreed with his small-government philosophy, we could see that he was a nice guy, friendly and fun-loving.  No more.

There is nothing unusual about religious fanatics in movies being unlikable.  In Rain (1932), for example, Walter Huston plays Alfred Davidson, a missionary. He is so determined to reform Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford), a prostitute, that he becomes unpleasant, even mean.  However, we never suppose that Davidson has actually been inspired by God to be like that.  We just figure that he went off the deep end all by himself.

There aren’t many movies, set in modern times, where we know for sure that a man has been inspired by God and not merely believes himself to be so, fewer still where we get to compare how a man is before with how he is after. At the very least, we would not expect such a man to become less likable than he was before.  Whatever our views are regarding religion in real life, we don’t expect that in a movie.  So, what is strange about this movie is that after Hammond has been inspired by God, through his angel Gabriel, he quits being the kind, loving man he had been before and becomes cold and hard.  From this point forward, he usually seems to be angry.

For example, although we are supposed to disapprove slightly of his having a mistress right there in the White House, at least he was nice to her.  Therefore, when he comes under the influence of God by way of the angel Gabriel, I thought he might do the right thing and marry the girl.  Instead, he stops calling her Pendy, now addressing her as Miss Malloy, treating her as if she were nothing but Beekman’s assistant.  I guess a man of God is not supposed to care about sex.

Immediately thereafter, he stops addressing Beekman as Beek, now calling him Mr. Beekman, telling him to arrange a cabinet meeting in one hour. Beekman protests that an hour is not much time, but Hammond will brook no delay.

When the cabinet forms, while awaiting the arrival of the president, they express concern among themselves about Hammond’s recent illness, apparently fearing that he may no longer be up to the job. Their concern, however, is not for the country but for the Party.  Jasper Brooks assures them, “No matter what happens, the Party comes first.”  When Hammond enters the room for the meeting, he refuses to shake Brooks’ extended hand.

And yet, while Hammond is cold with the people he knows personally, he now cares deeply for the American people.  This is paradoxical, but not unrealistic. Sometimes the people who profess so much concern for their fellow man are the very ones that seem not to care much for those they know personally.  It reminds me of The Boy with Green Hair (1948), where a married couple become so determined to help war orphans that they abandon their own child.

Speaking of children, I started wondering how Hammond would now treat his nephew Jim, of whom he was once so fond.  Apparently, it would simply be too much to see Hammond have the same attitude toward a child that he now has toward Miss Malloy and Beekman, for Jim is absent from the rest of the movie.

Hammond refuses to call in the military to keep the Army of the Unemployed from descending on Washington, as Brooks wants him to do.  When Brooks threatens to resign over the matter, Hammond accepts his resignation. Brooks tries to back down, but Hammond insists that he accepts his resignation, meaning Brooks is fired.

In the meantime, gangster Nick Diamond tries to enlist the help of Bronson, promising to feed and clothe the Army of the Unemployed, provided they remain in their camps.  His reason is that the police will be so occupied with them that they won’t have the resources to deal with Diamond’s illegal activities.  But Bronson refuses.  So, when the Army of the Unemployed begin their march on Washington, singing “John Brown’s Body,” Diamond has his men shoot Bronson with a submachine gun.

The Secretary of War refers to the Army of the Unemployed as “vagrants,” urging Hammond to use soldiers to disperse them. Hammond refuses, instead ordering him to see to it that those unemployed people receive food, shelter, and medical care.

Before his concussion, Hammond told reporters that he was not to be quoted; after his concussion, he says the president wants to be quoted.

Beekman and Miss Malloy are starting to admire him.  She says, “I’m beginning to have a faith in him I never had before.”

Beekman says, “The way he thinks is so simple and honest, it sounds a little crazy.”

Miss Malloy replies, “He’s doing the things you wanted.  And if he’s mad, it’s a divine madness.  Look at the chaos and catastrophe the sane men of this world have brought about.”

Hammond goes to Baltimore where the Army of the Unemployed has encamped.  The head of the Secret Service doesn’t want him to go alone into that mob, but so he does.  He meets Bronson’s daughter, Alice. He says to her:

My poor child, I am with you in your grief. I pay tribute to the martyr, John Bronson, who gave his life in this effort to arouse the stupid, lazy people of the United States to force their government to do something before everybody slowly starves to death.

He tells the people in the camp, many of whom are veterans of the Great War, that he is going to form them into an Army of Construction, where they will be paid the same wages as soldiers, but they will be usefully employed as civilians until they can eventually be eased back into the private sector.

That evening, Miss Malloy brings Hammond the address to Congress that she says he had written. As he is about to deny that he wrote it, we see the curtains once again being moved by the breeze, and he realizes that Gabriel wrote that speech for him.  Or rather, Gabriel now occupies Hammond’s body, so he knows it is his speech.  The metaphysics of all this is not clear.

Miss Malloy is aware that something spiritual is going on.  After she leaves Hammond’s room, she tells Beekman that she is not very religious, but she wonders, “Does it seem too fanciful to believe that God might have sent the angel Gabriel to do for Judd Hammond what he did for Daniel?”

Beekman replies, “Gabriel?  I thought he was a messenger of wrath.”

“Not always.” she says.  “For some he was the angel of revelations, sent as a messenger from God to men.”

Beekman says, “Hmm.  Grabriel over the White House.”

These two people sure know their Bible.  I had to Google “Gabriel” to find out what Miss Malloy was talking about, which I assume is Daniel 9:22, where Gabriel promises to give Daniel “skill and understanding.”

Anyway, after this conversation, the element of wrath Beekman referred to is reinforced when Hammond hears the Army of the Unemployed singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which we associate with Abraham Lincoln.  In particular, we hear them singing this well-known part:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword / His truth is marching on.

To reinforce this intended similarity between Hammond and Lincoln, the camera focuses on a bust of that president of the Civil War.  Even more connections between Hammond and Lincoln are made later in the movie.

At a secret meeting of the cabinet, called by Jasper Brooks, Beekman shows up with messages to each of those remaining members of the cabinet, demanding their resignation.  The next day, at what appears to be a joint session of Congress, Senator Langham, the Majority Leader, calls for the impeachment of Hammond.  Just then, Hammond walks in and is given the floor.  He asks Congress to declare a state of national emergency and adjourn until normal conditions are restored, saying he will take full responsibility for the government.

“Mr. President,” Langham replies, “this is dictatorship!”

Hammond replies:

I believe in democracy, as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln believed in democracy.  And if what I plan to do, in the name of the people, makes me a dictator, then it is a dictatorship based on Jefferson’s definition of democracy.  A government of the greatest good, for the greatest number.

“This Congress refuses to adjourn!” Langham says defiantly.

Referring to his role as Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy, Hammond declares martial law, after which he disdainfully walks out of the room.  Congress backs down and adjourns indefinitely.

That having been done, Hammond announces some of the emergency acts he will implement:  providing food, shelter, and medical care for the unemployed; forbidding foreclosures of mortgages by the banks; protecting the money people have in those banks; and giving direct aid to farmers.

To further show he is a man of the people, he abolishes the custom of rising when the president enters the room.

Then he talks about that “cesspool” known as the Eighteenth Amendment, which has allowed gangsters like Nick Diamond to flourish, a “cancerous growth eating at the spiritual health of the American people.” He says the repeal of this amendment will take too long, so before that happens, these racketeers will have to be eliminated.

Hammond decides the American people are spending too much money on bootleg liquor, so he decriminalizes alcohol and establishes a United States Government Liquor Store, presumably the first of more to come, which is controlled by the federal government to provide the American people with alcohol at a fair price.  However, it comes under attack by Diamond’s gangsters, who throw bombs through the window, destroying the place.

The sympathy we have felt for the neglected and callously treated Miss Malloy is relieved when it appears that she and Beekman are growing close.  Just as they are expressing affection for each other in the lobby, with her standing on the Presidential Seal again, Hammond enters the lobby too, though he seems indifferent to what they are saying to each other.  Instead, he tells Beekman about the bombing. Just then, gangsters drive by, machine-gunning the lobby, hitting Miss Malloy.

Sometime later, as Miss Malloy lies in bed, recovering from her wounds, Beekman tells her he loves her, and she asks to be kissed.  Just as their lips meet, Hammond walks in the room and says, “Beekman, you’re fired!”

But then he says, “I’ve got a better job for you.”  Hammond wants Beekman to head a mobile unit of the United States Army, to be known as the Federal Police, to eliminate gangsters, saying, “I need a man who has suffered a terrible personal hurt, a man whose energy and efficiency will be at white heat. A man ruthless and merciless.”  He implies that what has been done to Miss Malloy will make Beekman that man.  Then, in the only warmth he has shown since his concussion, he says to the two of them, “That is, if you’re willing to postpone your wedding for a while.”

In the next scene, armored vehicles line up in front of Nick Diamond’s warehouse, with Beekman demanding that Diamond and his gang surrender. Diamond isn’t alarmed.  He tells his men that it’s just another pinch, saying, “My lawyer will habeas our corpus out of that district attorney’s office in ten minutes.”

This was bound to get a rise out of the audience in those days.  It reminds me of Scarface (1932), where the title character says he got out on a “writ of hocus pocus.”  It was frustrating the way criminals could pervert the law to their advantage, and it was especially irksome the way they would show contempt for this very principle of habeas corpus that kept them from being locked up for more than a brief period without being charged with a crime.  We already want Diamond and his gang to get what is coming to them, but his snide remark about habeas corpus is intended to put us in the mood for having him get his punishment without respect for his constitutional rights.  Furthermore, this is another connection to Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.

Just to play “hard to get,” Diamond has his men start shooting at the armored vehicles out front.  The guns that are part of the armored vehicles fire back, destroying the warehouse.  After his gang is rounded up, Diamond says he’s entitled to a lawyer.  Beekman replies that he will have one, but that it won’t be a court trial.  Because the president declared martial law, it will be a court martial.

In short, having dispensed with the legislative branch of government, Hammond now bypasses the judicial branch as well.  In the next scene, we see Diamond and his men before three officers of the Federal Police, the one in the center being Beekman, who lists all the crimes Diamond and his men have been guilty of, but for which they have managed to escape punishment by virtue of “technicalities of the law.”  However, Beekman notes, Diamond and his gang are the last of the racketeers. “And why?” he asks rhetorically. “Because we have in the White House a man who’s enabled us to cut the red tape of legal procedures and get back to first principles. An eye for an eye, Nick Diamond. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life.”  The gang is lined up against a wall and blindfolded before a firing squad.  Then, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, Beekman gives the order, and they are shot to death.  So, in addition to being the arresting officer, Beekman is, as the saying goes, judge, jury, and executioner.

The Great Depression having been ameliorated, and organized crime having been eliminated, Hammond turns his attention to foreign policy.  In particular, he is bothered by the fact that the European nations have not paid their debts to the United States, incurred during the Great War.  He says the International Debt Conference will not be held in the White House as scheduled, but on a private yacht, so that the European politicians can witness a display of the full strength of the United States Navy.  When asked by reporters if he intends to use force or wage war to get these European countries to pay their debts to the United States, he keeps repeating ominously, “The debts have got to be paid!”

The “private yacht” Hammond referred to turns out be a large ship.  The diplomats are taken aback when they find out the conference will take place while people can listen in over the radio. Hammond has no use for secret diplomacy.

After much discourse about unpaid debts, Hammond puts on a demonstration of America’s “navy of the air,” in which biplanes swoop down on a couple of unmanned battleships, drop bombs on them, and completely destroy them. Looked at from our present vantage point, it is amusing to think that this demonstration with biplanes would impress upon the diplomats the utter destructiveness of future wars.

Essentially, Hammond proposes that the other nations of the Earth completely disarm, allowing them to balance their budgets and pay off their debts.  Once all other nations have complied, America will disarm too.  If the other nations refuse, then America will build an unsurpassed air-navy to enforce world peace.

The nations of the world agree to disarm.  At the signing ceremony, Hammond, who seems a little unsteady, is the last to sign, using the very quill pen that Lincoln used to free the slaves.  As soon as he does so, he collapses. He is carried to his room.  As the doctor prepares some medicine for his heart, Miss Malloy watches over him.  She sees, as do we, one image of Hammond replaced by one that is slightly different, indicating a transformation back to Hammond as he once was.  When he regains consciousness, he says, “Hello, Pendy, old girl.”  Hammond asks her to hold his hand.  The curtains move for one last time as Hammond dies.  Through the background music and the expression on Miss Malloy’s face, we know, as she does, the spiritual significance of what has happened.

It is easy to imagine this movie without any suggestion that Hammond has been guided by Gabriel, or, if you prefer, that Gabriel has temporarily taken over Hammond’s body, using it to carry out God’s will.  After all, it is not uncommon for someone to be shaken by a close encounter with death, causing him to change his ways, without necessitating any supernatural influence.  Larry Darrell undergoes just such an awakening in The Razor’s Edge (1946) when another man gives up his life to save Larry just before the end of the Great War.  Therefore, by eliminating the business with the concussion, those who made this movie could have made it clear that Hammond’s brush with death alone had transformed him from being a party hack to a man determined to change the world.  In addition, we could also imagine this movie without all the references to Abraham Lincoln.

In that case, the movie would have left it up to the audience to judge whether the ends justify the means, whether fascism is acceptable as a way of achieving a better world.  As it is, while the message of this movie would seem to answer in the affirmative, it lacks the courage of its convictions, doubting that the audience would approve of Hammond’s actions based on results alone, even if we grant those results as depicted.

As a result, the movie insists that we approve of what Hammond did, first by asserting that it had the approval of God, and then by making him out to be another Lincoln.  In so doing, the movie betrays the weakness of the case it is making in favor of fascism with its need to justify Hammond in this way.  Furthermore, there is no vice president in this movie, especially remarkable given that the president dies.  This is to keep us from thinking about how another man will now assume the office of the presidency with all those authoritarian powers still in place, and yet without the benefit of divine guidance.

On the other hand, we might glean a different message from this movie, unintended by those who made it.  A fascist can rise to power if people believe that he has been chosen by God, and that he is akin to some heroic figure from the past.

My Son John (1952)

HUAC and McCarthyism

My Son John is a movie about a communist named John, John Jefferson to be exact, played by Robert Walker.  It is impossible to discuss this movie without noting that it was made at a time when America was obsessed with communism.  The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was hard at work looking for communists, including in the movie industry, leading to the Hollywood Ten, those who refused to testify before the committee in 1947, who were then blacklisted.  And the movie was made right in the middle of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into the way communists had infiltrated the federal government.

Communism and Me

However, before delving into the movie itself, I cannot resist relating a few personal stories on this matter. I was seven years old and living in New York when the Army-McCarthy hearings were taking place.  I remember my mother standing outside, talking to her neighbor Mildred through an open window, asking her if she had been watching the McCarthy hearings on television.  She said she had. The year was 1954.

Shortly thereafter, we moved away, ending up in Houston in 1957.  One day my mother received a letter from Mildred.  She said that a couple of FBI agents had come to her house, asking questions about my father, including questions concerning communist affiliation.  She had addressed the letter to my mother rather than to both my parents, for she figured that my mother was innocent in the matter, not realizing that she was married to a communist, and she wanted to warn her.  She said that she was mailing the letter from out of town, making sure she was not being followed.  She told my mother, “It looks like the jig is up!”

My mother sent Mildred a letter back, telling her that my father had applied for a job with the Internal Revenue Service, and that the FBI was merely conducting a routine background check, as they are required to do for a lot of government positions. Unhappily, my mother never heard from Mildred again.

And now for my second anecdote.  In the spring of 1980, I was at a party where I met a beautiful woman named Kim, who was about my age.  She was there with her boyfriend, with whom she had been living for about a year. Early in our conversation, she told me that she was a communist, and had been one since she was in college in the 1960s.

I too had been in college at that time.  In my first few semesters at the University of Houston, in 1964 and 1965, I had to swear, “I am not now nor ever have been a member of the Communist Party.”  The fact that by 1966 we no longer had to swear that oath is some indication that the anti-communist hysteria was slowly coming to an end.  As the Vietnam War was getting serious by then, and as my college deferment would be over in a couple of years, I, like a lot of other male students, was looking for ways to dodge the draft. I was told that some guys, whose deferment had run out, told their local draft board, “I am a homosexual and a communist.”  The response was, “Nice try, pal, but you’re being drafted anyway.”

Anyway, Kim said that she had given serious consideration to moving to the Soviet Union.  It was clear from the way she was talking that her not emigrating was simply a matter of inertia rather than any disillusionment about the Soviet system.  She still regarded Russia fondly, as a place where the ideals of communism were being realized.  I had always known that such notions regarding the Soviet Union were common among communist sympathizers here in America, from the Bolshevik Revolution right through the 1950s, but I was surprised to hear such sentiments in 1980.

Three months later, in August, I was invited to a smaller party.  When I arrived, Kim and her boyfriend were standing near the entrance.  “Oh, the communist,” I said, by way of a greeting.  She smiled and said, “You remembered.”

About an hour later, there were six of us sitting around a table, having a little something to eat.  Kim was sitting next to me, and her boyfriend was sitting across from her, carrying on a conversation with the guy sitting next to him. Kim and I were talking about the upcoming election, in which the nominees were Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, and Ronald Reagan.  We were agreeing that we would be voting for Carter, when all of a sudden, her boyfriend looked up and said, “What! You’re voting for Carter?”  He was aghast.

She turned to him to respond, but I never heard what she said.  I was too stunned.  They had been living together for over a year, the election was less than three months away, and only now he was finding out she intended to vote for Jimmy Carter.  Moreover, I know he heard me when I referred to her as a communist, although I should have thought he already knew about that. Did he really think a communist would vote for Ronald Reagan?  Well, as I said, she was beautiful, and maybe having sex with her was all he cared about, so he never bothered to find out what she thought about anything.

All right, that’s enough about me.

John’s Parents

Although John is the title character in My Son John, the words “my son” indicate the perspective of one of his parents, Dan and Lucille Jefferson, played by Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes respectively. Which parent is being referred to by the words “my son” in the title is never stated explicitly.

The movie opens on a Sunday morning, in what appears to be a nice, peaceful neighborhood.  But then Dan comes outside his house, and he is angry. Lucille is running late for church as usual.  He goes over to his car and starts honking the horn several times.  A neighbor comes outside and tells him he is waking her baby.  He stops honking the horn and starts yelling at Lucille, as if yelling at his wife would not be as disturbing to his neighbors as honking the horn.

Of course, instead of making so much noise outside, he could have remained inside the house and said to Lucille, “Come on, honey, we’re going to be late again.”  But some people are not content to keep their marital frustrations a private matter but must put on a big display for the whole neighborhood.

Later in the movie, Dan is not watching where he is going as he drives down the street, and as a result, he runs into the car in front of him.  Although it is clearly his fault, he starts yelling at the other driver, blaming him for what happened.

So, Dan seems to be in a perpetual state of anger.  He is not very smart either.  This movie wants us to have a low regard for his intelligence because it sets up an opposition between him and John, who is an intellectual.  Dan resents the way John uses “two-dollar words.”  At one point in the movie, John, who is soon to be given an honorary degree of Doctor of Law, asks Dan, “Are you still teaching at the little red schoolhouse, Father?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Dan replies, “still teaching them the same, down to earth….”

“Fundamentals,” John helpfully adds.

The implication is that Dan is not much smarter than the children he teaches in elementary school.

At one point, Dan threatens to quit his job.  “What’s the use of the use of teaching honesty, goodness, love of home and country?” he asks Lucille.  He says all the parents seem to care about are “good grades, not character.”  One father even complained to the school.

He wanted me fired.  He heard that I mentioned God in the classroom. His little son of a … father like that snitched on me.  I must teach his little stool pigeon reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. Just suppose that he gets excellent in the three Rs and gets a goose egg for character. Reading, excellent, but if he reads nothing about his faith, whatever it might be, his head will be as empty as John thinks mine is.

Lucille, on the other hand, is sweet and pleasant, and her relationship with John is mostly on an emotional level, one of maternal affection.  And whereas John can barely stand his father, it is clear that he loves his mother.  Actually, Lucille is childlike, and though she is his mother, yet John loves her much in the way a man might love his daughter, even though she is not too bright.  She is clearly the parent referred to in the title.

However, the love of one’s mother must be secondary to the ideals of communism, and toward the end of the movie, John threatens to have her committed to a sanitarium to keep her from testifying against him.  We begin to be prepared for Lucille’s fragile mental state early on, when Dr. Carver shows up to give Lucille some pills.  She has been having dizzy spells, and the doctor was worried that the additional strain of having two of her sons sent off to war might be too much for her.  He tells her of two other women about her age that he has had to put in a rest home.  As she explains to John, the pills are supposed to keep her from going “goofy,” but she hasn’t been taking them.  “I told Dr. Carver that I’d just as soon put my faith in God and what he intended.”

Later in the movie, as she begins to suspect John of being a communist, this puts her on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she struggles between the love of her son and love of God and country.  It is at this point that John suggests she might have to be put in a rest home like those two other women Dr. Carver referred to.

John’s Brothers

At the beginning of the movie, we see John’s two younger brothers, Chuck and Ben, played by Richard Jaeckel and James Young, tossing a football back and forth in front of their house, having played the game as halfbacks in high school.  They are apparently the same age, so perhaps they were fraternal twins.

Both Chuck and Ben are blond, as opposed to John, who has dark hair.  But the main difference between these younger brothers and John is that they are mesomorphs while John is an ectomorph, said to be “the bright one.”  Later in the movie, Lucille reminisces with John about Chuck and Ben when they were playing football:

I think sometimes it hurt you when your father and I jumped up and down cheering for them.  Which you remember that I whispered to you, “Keep on studying.  There are other goals, John.”

In real life, an athlete could just as easily be a communist as anyone else, but not in a movie, so it is no surprise the John never played in any sport.

When we saw Chuck and Ben tossing a football back and forth at the beginning of the movie, they were in a different kind of uniform, about to be sent overseas to fight in the Korean War.  Lucille continues her reminiscence: “Now we’re cheering for Ben and Chuck again.  They’re fighting on God’s side now, and I’m fighting with them.”

John graduated from college in 1941, which means he would have been the right age to fight in World War II.  Even though Senator McCarthy was worried about communists in the United States Army, it would have been incongruous, as far as this movie is concerned, for John to have fought in that war.  The patriotic connotations of John’s having done so would have caused us to have mixed feelings, spoiling the simplistic oppositions being set up in this movie. No reason is given as to why John has had no military service, leaving us with only the suspicion that he managed to avoid it somehow.

Finally, there is the suggestion that John is a homosexual.  At least, I have read critics that say as much.  Writing a review for the New York Times when the movie first came out, Bosley Crowther says, “As the ‘bad’ son, the late Robert Walker does an elegantly suave and unctuous job, scratching his eyebrows with his little finger and doing other self-revealing things like that….”  I did notice that when John smokes a cigarette, he sometimes holds it with his thumb below and three fingers on top, which seems a little dainty.

There was an association between homosexuality and communism in those days.  Homosexuals were a security risk because they could be blackmailed, but more fundamental than that was the idea that since homosexuality was regarded as a sexual perversion, it was easy to suppose that it could lead to a perversion of an ideological sort.  Finally, homosexuals were thought to be weak, which fits with John’s unathletic nature.

Religion

Because John is a communist, he is an atheist.  By way of contrast, the rest of the Jefferson family is exceedingly devout.  The movie emphasizes this by beginning on a Sunday as they prepare to go to church.  After the service, Father O’Dowd (Frank McHugh) asks about John.  His parents are embarrassed, with Dan making the excuse that John was detained.  John eventually phones, saying he won’t be able to make it, owing to “official business” where he works in Washington, D.C.  (We might as well assume he works for the State Department, since that is where Senator McCarthy claimed there were lots of communists.)  In any event, it is clear that by not showing up, John has spoiled all the intense family feeling at Chuck’s and Ben’s final dinner before they report for duty at Ashville.

In fact, it is Father O’Dowd who gives them a ride to Ashville.  Normally, it is not one of the duties of a priest to provide transportation to another city. Besides, either Dan could have driven them there, or they could have taken a bus.  But as Lucille said, the boys will be fighting for God, and having Father O’Dowd drive them there is a way of making it clear that Chuck and Ben are on a religious mission.

A week later, Dr. Carver arrives to give Lucille the pills referred to above.  Then John shows up just as Dr. Carver is leaving.  John tells him how much he has come to appreciate men of science like him and the research they do.  Carver acknowledges that scientists are indeed discovering new things and making progress.  “But more and more,” Carver continues gravely, “some of us are beginning to realize that someone put them there for us to discover.”

“Somebody hides things around for us to find,” John says, feigning an effort to understand, “kind of like an old-fashioned egg hunt, huh?”

We note that instead of saying, “like an Easter egg hunt,” he drops the word “Easter” and adds the term “old-fashioned.”  Of course, the Easter Bunny is no more essential to the religious meaning of Easter than Santa Claus is to Christmas.  Nevertheless, the message here is that John regards Easter as something that is no longer to be taken seriously.

Later in the movie, when Lucille begins to worry about John, she gets him to swear on her Bible that he is not a communist.  But Dan says that if John is an atheist, that would be meaningless.

“Do you believe in the Bible?” Dan asks John.

“Well, now, Father,” John replies, “do you believe every page?  I mean, Jonah and the whale?”

“I believe every page, Son.  Jonah and the whale.”

“Even the pages you don’t understand?”

“I believe in those too.  That’s faith.”

“It certainly is, Father.”

So, Dan is a fundamentalist.  Interpreting the Bible literally is something we normally associate with certain Protestant sects, but the director of this movie was Leo McCarey, who was a Catholic, so maybe he was more comfortable making Dan and Lucille Catholics too.

The religious argument Dan and John are having makes Dan angry, which is his normal emotional state. John, as usual, remains composed, though just barely able to conceal the contempt he has for his father’s beliefs.  Finally, Dan gets to the Ten Commandments, asking about the first one, asking John if he believes in God.  John turns away, having had enough of this foolishness, but Dan pulls him back.  “What about honoring your father and your mother? That’s the Fourth Commandment.”

“Well,” John replies, “you’re making that one difficult.”  Dan grabs the Bible with both hands and bangs it down on John’s head.  “What page was that on?” John asks.  Dan pushes John, who falls backwards over a table, tearing the knee on his pants.

Lucille comes running in, and seeing the pants, turns to Dan and says, “You hit your son!”

“Well,” John explains, “he was just trying to pound some religion in me, Mother.”

The Key

Lucille runs Dan out of the house.  John changes his pants and catches a taxicab back to Washington, telling Lucille to give the pants to Father O’Dowd for charity.  When Dan comes back home, Lucille tells him that John merely has liberal views, just like St. Paul.  Dan is holding a newspaper, and he shows it to Lucille, saying of John’s liberalism, “They just caught one of his kind down in Washington.”

The headline says, “Ruth Carlin Sentenced,” followed by, “Convicted Courier Gets Twenty Years,” which in turn is followed by, “Still Refuses to Name Others.”

The next morning, Lucille receives a long-distance phone call from John, asking her to send those torn pants to him.  She says she gave them to Father O’Dowd, as he told her to.  He insists that she go right over to the church, get them back, and mail them to him.  She agrees to, but before she can leave, the man whose car Dan ran into shows up.  By coincidence, it turns out that he is FBI agent Stedman (Van Heflin), who has been investigating John.  He asks questions, and she is evasive, for now she is suspicious that Dan was right, that John is a communist.

When she retrieves the pants, she finds a key in one of the pockets.  She flies to Washington with the pants and visits John where he works.  When she shows him the key, he says it’s to his apartment, saying it’s no big deal.  They are interrupted by someone, telling him the committee is waiting for him. He says to her that they’ll talk later, and she drops the key back in her purse.

Apparently, Ruth Carlin’s address was published in the newspaper, and Lucille decides to see if the key fits the door to her apartment.  Little does she know that the FBI have cameras all over the place, watching her every move, including cameras inside Ruth Carlin’s apartment.  As Stedman and another agent watch the film later, Stedman says, “She knows,” when Lucille is able to open the door to the apartment.  She looks inside and then closes the door.

She confronts John with this knowledge.  He tells her that he and Ruth were intimate, so naturally he had a key to her apartment.  As far as Stedman is concerned, however, John’s having that key is evidence that he is a spy, provided Lucille is willing to testify that she found that key in John’s pants. It is because she is struggling with whether to testify to that effect that John starts talking about putting her in a sanitarium, where no one would believe her.

But the excuse John gave to his mother about being intimate with Ruth Carlin could be the same excuse he gives to the FBI.  He could even embellish it, saying, “You know, I used to wonder why she was always asking me questions about my job at the State Department.  I never told her anything of significance, of course.”

So, as far as I can see, that key would prove nothing.  John might lose his security clearance as a result, but that would be about it.  At first, I figured that the FBI had other evidence that John was a spy, but they don’t.  Stedman says to another agent that if Lucille does not testify, then they have no case against John at all.

And what did John want the key for anyway?  It’s not as though he would ever go back to Ruth’s apartment.  Whoever Father O’Dowd gave the pants to would probably just throw the key away when he found it.

In other words, there is no way to make sense of this business with the key within the story itself. Those who made this movie needed some way to get Lucille involved in the investigation so that she would have to choose between love of her son and love of God and country.  And so, the idea that the key would be conclusive evidence that John is a spy is imposed on the story from without.

Three Speeches

There are three speeches in this movie.  The first is the one Dan intends to give to the American Legion, where he is running for Commander of the Post. Lucille suggests that John help Dan with the speech, something that Dan really doesn’t want.  Essentially, Dan’s speech asserts that there are “God-given rights.”  If the people allow the state to regard itself as the source of those rights, he says, the state may take them away.  Therefore, the Legionnaires must fight to keep power in the hands of the people.

In editing Dan’s speech, John struck through those remarks, saying that one must exercise caution when putting power in the hands of the people because it can be misused.  Since John is an atheist, we know he does not believe that there are God-given rights.  Rather, rights exist only to the extent that they are conferred on the people by a government.  Dan reverses all of John’s blue-pencil corrections and gives the speech he intended originally.

A second speech is the one that John has been working on, a commencement speech to be given to his Alma Mater.  We get some idea of what is going to be in that speech when he explains his liberal views to Lucille: “I love humanity, Mother.  I love the downtrodden, the helpless minorities.”

Lucille is pleased, comparing what John is saying to the writings of St. Paul, happy that the early religious training she gave to John has borne fruit.  John qualifies this, saying, “I know everything that you stand for, Mother, and what I’m striving for is an intelligent and practical way to bring into existence a new and better ordered world.”

Before continuing on to the third speech, let us pause to consider a movie that might have been. Suppose Dan was not always so angry and not such a religious fanatic and patriotic zealot. Furthermore, imagine that John was not a spy, just a man who wants the American system of government to reflect the ideals of communism.  In that case, the conflict would be merely one of ideas. However, this movie takes the melodramatic step of making John a spy, which means, by way of an argumentum ad hominem, that John’s views must be wrong.

After Lucille finds out that John is a communist spy, she becomes horrified when thinking about the speech he intends to give, fearing that he will turn the entire graduating class into a bunch of communists themselves.  That speech, however, is never given.

When Lucille collapses under the strain, she is put to bed.  She says to Dan, “Let’s pray for John.”  We hear religious music in the background as they say the Lord’s Prayer, with John downstairs listening, eyes looking upward.  Through a combination of divine intervention and love for his mother, he is having a change of heart.

He had planned on flying to Lisbon, where he would be beyond the reach of the FBI, but he calls Agent Stedman, saying he’s not going to be on that flight. Instead, John says he wants to do “one decent thing.”  Stedman assures him that “Everybody’s life has some purpose, even Judas.”

I guess the idea is that if it hadn’t been for Judas, Jesus would not have been crucified.  If he had not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins.  If he had not died for our sins, no one would be saved.  If no one is ever saved, then we all have to spend eternity in the fires of Hell.  Thank God for Judas!

Then Stedman starts worrying that other spies might find out that John is not going to Lisbon.  They might try to kill him before he can do that one decent thing.  He says, “Now, listen John, use whatever free will you have left to make your own decision and get over here.”

Free will?  He could just as easily have said, “If you’ve decided to do the right thing, get over here as soon as you can.”  Free will is not exclusively a religious concept, of course, but that would seem to be its significance here, standing in opposition to the economic determinism of Karl Marx.  So, with Stedman’s reference to Judas and then free will, we know that the FBI shares the same Christian values as the Jefferson household.  Furthermore, it means that this one decent thing John wants to do will have religious significance.

John goes back to his office and tapes a third speech, quite different from the one that he originally intended to give.  He calls Stedman again, but while on the phone, Stedman realizes that someone is listening in, and that John’s life is in danger.  He says, “John, get out of there as fast as you can.  Take Pennsylvania Avenue!”  Of course, since the spies were listening in, they know to take Pennsylvania Avenue themselves, allowing them to riddle the taxicab John is in with a machine gun, causing it to turn over, right there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In his dying breath, John tells Stedman that the taped speech is in his office. The next day, Stedman plays the speech on a tape recorder, which is sitting on a lectern, for the graduating class, while a heavenly beam shines down on it from above.  John tells of how he got caught up in poisonous ideas, that he substituted faith in man for faith in God.  He admits to having become a traitor, warning the students as he wishes he had been warned.  He now prays for God’s mercy.  John and Lucille are there, and as they leave, they decide to pray for John and pray the students will remember his words.

When I first watched this movie on television in 1970, I thought that was a good idea having John get killed so that only the taped speech could be heard. I figured it would be too much to ask of us to watch John actually make that speech in person, after all that we knew about him by that time.  It simply would not have been believable.

Then I learned that Robert Walker died of a drug overdose while this movie was being made, that it was intended that John make the speech in person, after which he would go to prison.  When Walker died during production, the script was changed so that he would be killed.  Walker had already taped the speech John was supposed to give, and that was played for the graduating class instead.

Now that I think about it, if the audience for this movie in 1952 had seen John give that speech in person, renouncing communism and affirming his faith in God, they probably would have savored it.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, published in 1930 after having been serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929.  Because the movie follows it rather closely, references to the novel from time to time can give us a better understanding of the story.

The Provenance of the Maltese Falcon

A lot happens regarding the title statuette before the movie begins, bits and pieces of which are revealed at various points, all of which can be a little hard to follow.  Let us take advantage of hindsight and put it all together at once.

At the beginning of the movie, there is a prologue, telling us about the origin of the Maltese Falcon, made of gold and encrusted with jewels, sent as a tribute to Charles V in 1539 by the Knight Templars of Malta, but seized by pirates before it could arrive.  What happened to it after that, according to the prologue, is a mystery.

Later in the movie, Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) reveals additional history of the bird in the centuries since, until he became aware of where it was seventeen years ago.  However, it was stolen before he could get his hands on it.  Somewhat recently, he discovered that it was in the possession of a Russian general named Kemidov, living in a suburb of Istanbul.  Because the bird had been painted in black enamel to conceal its worth at some point during its history, Gutman surmised that Kemidov didn’t know its true value. However, he refused to sell it.  Gutman hired some agents to steal it, but they kept it instead of bringing it to him.

The novel makes it clear that those agents were Bridgid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), Floyd Thursby, and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre).  When Brigid and Thursby found out Cairo meant to double-cross them as well as Gutman, keeping the falcon for himself, they turned the tables on him and took off with the falcon after Thursby managed to steal it from Kemidov.

Brigid and Thursby went to Hong Kong, where Brigid hired Captain Jacobi, Master of the La Paloma, to bring the Maltese Falcon to her when his ship arrived in San Francisco.  Somehow, Gutman got wind of the fact that Brigid and Thursby had the bird and where they were headed.  He followed them there, along with his gunsel Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook Jr.).

At one point in the novel, Cairo claims not to know who Wilmer is, but that is unlikely, since he knew Gutman, and because he shows Wilmer affection later on, rubbing his hand, putting his arm around him. Brigid suggests that Cairo had sex with Wilmer, and Cairo says she tried to have sex with Wilmer too, for some nefarious purpose, no doubt, but with no success, probably because Wilmer was not interested in women.

Toward the end of the novel, Cairo becomes upset when Wilmer is beaten up. After Wilmer is knocked out, he is laid on the sofa:

Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.

As for Gutman, he says he loves Wilmer like a son, but I think we know what that means.

Brigid suspects that Thursby will double-cross her, so she decides to do him in first.  To that end, she shows up at the office of a private detective agency called Spade and Archer, under the name of Miss Wonderly.  It is at this point that the movie begins.

Miss Wonderly

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is in his office when Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), his secretary, steps inside from the outer office to tell him there is a Miss Wonderly to see him.  It is rather startling to see how sexualized the relationship between Sam and Effie is, even though it is otherwise merely professional. Sam addresses Effie as “sweetheart” and “darling.”  Later in the movie, he calls her “precious.”  When Sam asks her if Miss Wonderly is a customer, Effie says she thinks so, adding, “You’ll want to see her anyway. She’s a knockout.”

This “Miss Wonderly” begins telling her phony story about how her sister has run off with Floyd Thursby, and she wants help in getting her back home.  She says Thursby has agreed to meet her that night.  While she is talking, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) joins them.  He says he will be nearby when she and Thursby meet.  She puts two hundred-dollar bills on the table.

Because she knows Thursby is a violent man, her plan is that a confrontation will occur, and either Archer will kill Thursby, or Thursby will kill Archer.  If the latter, then she can tell the police about the murder, getting Thursby arrested, and then have the Maltese Falcon all to herself when Jacobi brings it to her. When she is unable to get the confrontation that she had hoped for, she takes one of Thursby’s pistols and shoots Archer herself, leaving the unusual revolver behind so that Thursby will be incriminated.

We don’t actually see who it is that shoots Archer.  All we see is a revolver pointed at Archer and fired. That Brigid shot him is not revealed until the end of the movie.  In the meantime, Brigid doesn’t have to frame Thursby for Archer’s murder as she planned because he is shot four times in the back by Wilmer. Later on, Wilmer also kills Captain Jacobi.

Wilmer

Wilmer is played by Elisha Cook Jr., who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall.  He often played the role of a small, thin-skinned man who is trying to compensate for his diminutive stature by acting tough, only to end up being humiliated.  Most memorable is when Jack Palance shoots him in Shane (1953), Cook’s body flying back into the mud.  He is usually nothing but feckless bluster, but on those rare occasions where he does manage to kill someone, he is almost always killed himself, as in The Killing (1956) or One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

In the latter movie, there was no need for him to die as far as the plot was concerned.  Rather, it was necessitated by his screen persona.  When Ben Johnson tries to rob a bank, Cook, as the bank teller, could have shot him dead with no harm coming to himself, and that would have worked just as well, logically speaking.  But to have a pipsqueak like Elisha Cook Jr. kill a big strapping man like Ben Johnson and then be triumphant, standing over Johnson’s body with a smoking gun in his hand, that would have been a grave injustice, aesthetically speaking, that is.  So, he just had to catch a bullet himself.

The Maltese Falcon is the only movie I am aware of in which Elisha Cook Jr. plays a character who kills someone, two in this movie, and yet is not killed himself.  At one point, he even kicks Spade in the face. However, Spade does humiliate him, taking his two .45s away from him on two different occasions. Wilmer is arrested at the end of the movie, but even that is diminished by the fact that we only hear about it.  I suspect that the reason he was able to kill two men in this movie without having to be killed himself was that there are no scenes depicting these murders.  Had we witnessed Wilmer gunning these men down with his two .45s, it would have been necessary to film a scene where he was shot full of bullets himself.

Spade and Archer

From the beginning, we see that Spade does not like his partner Archer. Although Spade was the one to start interviewing Miss Wonderly, when he tells her that they will have a man near the place where she is supposed to meet Thursby, Archer butts in and says, “I’ll look after it myself.” Spade gives him a look of mild annoyance.  After she leaves, Archer says, “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.”

With barely concealed sarcasm, Spade replies, “You’ve got brains.  Yes, you have.”

Just after two in the morning, Spade gets a call from Detective Tom Polhouse (Ward Bond), telling him that Archer was found dead near the corner of Bush and Stockton.  Spade says he’ll be there in fifteen minutes.  When he gets there, he and Tom discuss what happened. Finally, Tom says, “Miles had his faults like any of us, but he must’ve had some good points too.”

Spade replies, “I guess so,” as if to say he can’t think of any at the moment. We accept his indifference to Miles’ death because we are informed that Miles had no children.  If a man in a movie has young children, we are supposed to like him.

During the opening scene in which Miss Wonderly told her story about the sister she supposedly had, we are made aware of two windows in the office, both with “Spade and Archer” written on them in big, bold letters.  One window is on the wall to Spade’s right, where Archer’s desk is.  The large window is behind Spade’s desk.  The sun is shining through it and, as a result, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the wall just to Sam’s left.  After Miss Wonderly leaves, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the floor, apparently through a third window, this one on that same wall, the one to Spade’s left, which means the sun has moved around so it can shine in through that window now.  And in what kind of building could an office of ordinary size have windows on three of its walls?

This impossible repositioning on the part of the sun so it can shine through an unlikely window was probably motivated by a desire on the part of the director, John Huston, to emphasize the way “Spade and Archer” dominates the room.  The day after Archer’s death, Spade is so glad to be rid of Archer that, unwilling to allow for a decent interval of even a few days to show some respect for his dead partner, he tells Effie to have “Spade and Archer” removed from the windows and replaced with “Samuel Spade.”

Near the end of the novel, after Spade has figured out that Brigid killed Archer, he explains why he doesn’t care about that:

“Miles,” Spade said hoarsely, “was a son of a bitch. I found that out the first week we were in business together, and I meant to kick him out as soon as the year was up. You didn’t do me a damned bit of harm by killing him.”

His saying that he “meant to kick him out” tells us that us that the year in question came and went without Spade getting rid of Archer.

Iva

Spade doesn’t say why he didn’t kick him out, but I think we can guess.  Before that year was up, he started having an affair with Archer’s wife Iva (Gladys George).  It would have been awkward for Sam to break off the partnership while he was still having sex with her.  Then, after Sam tired of Iva and wanted to break off his affair with her, he found it awkward to do so while he was still partners with her husband.  As a result, he was stuck with Miles on account of Iva, and he was stuck with Iva on account of Miles.

The night Tom calls Spade to tell him that Miles is dead, Spade says he will be there in fifteen minutes. But first things first.  He calls Effie, giving her the news, and telling her she will have to be the one to tell Iva, saying, “I’d fry first.” Although he is still having sex with Iva, he can’t stand her anymore.  He tells Effie to keep Iva away from him.  Of course, Iva thinks Sam is in love with her, and now that Miles is dead, she figures they can finally get married.  Although Sam is glad to get rid of Miles as a partner, he figured he was safe from Iva as long as she was already married, but now that protection is gone.

It’s bad enough when you’re having an affair with a married woman, thinking it’s just a little on the side, when she calls you on the phone and says, “I told Clarence all about us.  I’m leaving him.  Now we can get married.”  I suppose if you’re a tough guy like Sam Spade, you could say, “Listen sweetheart, I never said anything about marriage.”  But even he cannot bring himself to say that to a woman who has just become a widow.

The morning after Miles was killed, Iva is waiting for Sam at his office.  He is irritated that Effie didn’t keep her away from him as he told her to, but as Effie points out, he didn’t tell her how.  Once inside his office, Sam and Iva do a little kissing.  She asks if he killed Miles so they could get married, which from his point of view is preposterous.  In the novel, after denying her suggestion, they do some more kissing.  Finally, he sends her away, saying it’s not good for her to be there, promising to see her again as soon as he can.

After Iva leaves, Effie asks him if he is going to marry her.  In the novel, he says, “Don’t be silly.”

“She doesn’t think it’s silly,” Effie replies.  “Why should she, the way you’ve played around with her?” When Sam says he wishes he’d never seen her, Effie continues:  “Maybe you do now…, but there was a time.”

Effie sizes him up correctly when she tells him, “You think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.  Someday you’re going to find it out.”  As far as his being stuck with Iva is concerned, I think he already has.

Later in the novel, Iva says something about Sam “pretending to love” her. Like a lot of people, Iva probably believes that if it’s true love, it will last forever, forgetting that she no longer loved Miles the way she did once.  So, when she begins to suspect that Sam doesn’t want her around anymore, she figures he never really loved her in the first place and that he was only pretending.  The reality is that people can fall in love genuinely and sincerely, only to have it die with the passage of time.  Sam probably did love Iva in the beginning, and he wasn’t pretending at all.

Effie

Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a femme fatale.  As such, we expect her to be somewhat successful in deceiving men.  What is unusual, however, is the way Brigid is able to deceive Effie.  Unlike Spade, who is skeptical of Brigid and is only partly deceived by her, Effie is completely sold.

When Brigid confesses that she lied about having a sister, Spade replies, “We didn’t exactly believe your story.  We believed your $200.”  The conversation proceeds from there with Spade seeing right through her new story and her performance.  That is consistent with what we normally expect of a private eye in a movie.  But when he asks her if she had anything to do with the death of Archer, she denies it, and he believes her, saying sincerely, “That’s good.”

In the novel, Brigid spends the night with Sam at his place.  He wakes up before she does, takes her key, goes to her apartment, and searches it thoroughly.  Then he makes it appear as though someone broke into her apartment.  When she discovers that her apartment had supposedly been broken into, Sam says she needs a new place to stay.  You would think that since Sam and Brigid spent the night together at his place, he would have the decency to let her continue sleeping with him over there, but he doesn’t.  In the movie, there is only the suggestion that they had sex, when there is a fadeout while they are kissing in his apartment, and there is no indication that Sam was the one who searched her place.

In either case, Sam turns to Effie to see if she is agreeable to letting Brigid stay with her, asking her, “What’s your woman’s intuition say about her?”

“She’s all right,” Effie replies.  “Maybe it’s her own fault for the trouble, but she’s all right.”  As a result, Effie agrees to let Brigid stay with her.

In the novel, Effie is even more emphatic in the faith she has in Brigid:

“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”

“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phonebook. That girl is all right, and you know it.”

“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway, she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”

Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”

Spade asks her on another occasion about her woman’s intuition.

“Does your woman’s intuition still tell you that she’s a Madonna or something?”

She looked sharply up at him. “I still believe that no matter what kind of trouble she’s gotten into, she’s all right, if that’s what you mean.”

With all this emphasis on a woman’s intuition, especially that of a woman like Effie, who seems to be a nice person herself, we are supposed to accept her judgment of Brigid.  Maybe that is the reason Hammett put this in the novel, as a way of letting us be seduced into trusting Brigid too.  That is why it comes as a shock at the end of the movie when we find out that Brigid killed Miles Archer in an act of coldblooded, premeditated murder.

The movie ends with the police arresting Brigid and taking her away.  But the novel continues long enough to rub Effie’s nose in it.  The next morning, Spade goes to his office, where Effie is reading all about it in the newspaper.  She asks if the story in the paper is correct.  Spade assures her that it is.

The girl’s brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him. He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: “So much for your woman’s intuition.”

Her voice was queer as the expression on her face. “You did that, Sam, to her?”

He nodded. “Your Sam’s a detective.” He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. “She did kill Miles, angel,” he said gently, “offhand, like that.” He snapped the fingers of his other hand.

She escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. “Don’t, please, don’t touch me,” she said brokenly. “I know—I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

Boy, Effie’s got it bad!  Could it be that she fell in love with Brigid?  Maybe that would explain how her woman’s intuition could be so wrong.  She was as susceptible to the lure of a femme fatale just as any man would be.

The Fall-Guy

Before Captain Jacobi died from the bullet wounds inflicted on him by Wilmer, he showed up at Spade’s office with the Maltese Falcon, since that was the address Brigid had given him.  Spade arranges to have the falcon delivered to his apartment the next morning.  And so it is that near the end of the movie, Sam Spade, Casper Gutman, Wilmer Cook, Joel Cairo, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are all in Spade’s apartment waiting for the arrival of the black bird.

Spade says they can share the loot the Maltese Falcon will provide, but he needs a fall-guy, and he suggests Wilmer.  Wilmer doesn’t like it, so Spade humiliates him again by taking his two .45s away from him.  Gutman points out that if they turn Wilmer over to the police, he will incriminate the lot of them. Spade says that he knows District Attorney Bryan (John Hamilton), saying that he’ll be satisfied to have one man to convict.  He won’t want to confuse the case by trying to convict several.  So, Wilmer can talk all he wants, and it won’t make any difference.  Even if he talks about the Maltese Falcon, Spade says, Bryan won’t care as long as he has Wilmer to prosecute.  Gutman eventually agrees, but Wilmer manages to slip away later on.

When the black bird arrives, Gutman decides to scrape some of the black enamel off it.  It is then he discovers that it is fake, made of lead, presumably by General Kemidov, to mislead anyone who might try to steal the real one. Gutman and Cairo decide to go to Istanbul and see if they can get the real Maltese Falcon from Kemidov.  After they leave, Spade calls Tom and tells him about these characters so they can be arrested, which they are.

Spade had thought for a long time that Thursby killed Archer, but by this point in the story, he has figured out that Brigid killed him.  He tells her that he now knows the truth, and he’s going to have her arrested for it.

However, Sam has no evidence that Brigid killed Miles.  In fact, the reason he was so worried about finding a fall-guy was that the police think he killed Miles so he could marry Iva.  As he says to Brigid in the novel, “You’re taking the fall. One of us has got to take it, after the talking those birds will do [referring to Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer]. They’d hang me sure. You’re likely to get a better break.”

Later in their conversation in the novel, when she asks him to let her go, he refuses, saying, “I’m sunk if I haven’t got you to hand over to the police when they come.  That’s the only thing that can keep me from going down with the others.”

Apparently, Sam thinks all he has to do is say, “She did it,” and that will be all the evidence needed for a conviction.  While we are on the subject of evidence, I’m not sure what the police would have to arrest Gutman and Cairo on.  Wilmer can be arrested for murder, sure enough, given that Spade has the two .45s Wilmer killed Thursby and Jacobi with, but what evidence is there that Gutman and Cairo are guilty of anything?

In any event, all this contradicts what Spade said earlier.  When trying to get Gutman agree to let Wilmer be the fall-guy, he said that as long as District Attorney Bryan has one man to convict, he will be satisfied with that.  After Gutman and Cairo leave, Spade called Tom so they could all be arrested. But that means that Bryan will have Wilmer to put on trial and not bother with the rest.  Wilmer will end up being the fall-guy, just as Spade wanted originally. And that means that Bryan won’t bother with anyone else, including Spade and Brigid.

In the novel, Wilmer also kills Gutman.  So, as far as Bryan will be concerned, Floyd Thursby killed Miles Archer, and then Wilmer killed Thursby, Captain Jacobi, and Casper Gutman.

In short, Spade does not need Brigid to take the fall, since Wilmer will be serving that function.

True Love

Now, it is easy enough to overlook the inconsistency regarding the need for Brigid to be a superfluous fall-guy when District Attorney Bryan will already have Wilmer, but when it comes to the idea that Sam and Brigid truly love each other, that is another thing altogether.  The first several times I saw this movie, I did not give that serious countenance.  I heard Sam saying something about love, but I figured it was all just so much hardboiled patter. Upon subsequent viewing, however, I have been forced to reach the conclusion that Sam and Brigid are sincere when they proclaim their love for each other.  Only by examining the matter in some detail was I able to convince myself that it is supposed to be true love.

First of all, let’s ask what would have happened if Brigid did not love Sam. After Gutman and Cairo head back to the Alexandria hotel, something like the following dialogue might have taken place:

Brigid:  Well, I think I just might book passage to Istanbul myself.

Sam:  Hold on, sweetheart.  I just realized that you killed Miles.

Brigid:  That’s an interesting theory you have there.  We’ll have to talk about it some time.

And with that, she walks out the door and closes it behind her.

But that is not what happens.  Instead, Brigid confesses that she murdered Miles.  Why would she do that?  The only thing that would make sense is that she is in love with Sam and is hoping for his forgiveness.

She tells Sam that it was love at first sight:  “From the very first instant I saw you, I knew.”  When I heard her say that the first few times I watched this movie, I asked myself, how can she possibly expect Sam to believe that?  But now I see that it makes sense.  People who believe in true love, the kind that will last forever, often believe that marriages are made in Heaven, that there is just one person you were made for, and when you meet that person, you know it right away.

Sam replies, “Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years, and you can come back to me then.”

Sounds as though he’s just being a smart-ass, right?  By itself, we could believe it was a wisecrack. But when he repeats it, we have to believe he is serious.  “If you’re a good girl,” he says a few minutes later, “you’ll be out in twenty years. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then Sam goes into this lengthy explanation as to why he’s turning her in to the police.  Essentially, it comes down to three reasons.  The first is a point of professional duty.  In the private-detective business, when your partner is killed, even if you didn’t like him, you’re supposed to do something about it.

The second is a matter of self-respect.  Twice in the movie he says he won’t “play the sap” for her.  In the novel, he makes seven references to playing the sap for her.  He has to turn her in to preserve his manhood.

The third is that he wouldn’t be able to trust her.  “Since I’ve got something on you,” he says to her, referring to the fact that he knows she murdered Miles, “I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t put a hole in me someday.”

The thing is, if Sam didn’t love her, he wouldn’t bother giving her all these reasons why he’s turning her in.  He’d simply say, “You killed Miles in cold blood, and you’re not going to get away with it.”

Then Sam and Brigid get to the subject of love itself.  “All we got is that maybe you love me, and maybe I love you,” Sam tells her.

“You know whether you love me or not,” Brigid replies.

“Maybe I do,” he replies.  “I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass.”

As noted above, I was never able to take any of this seriously at first.  But now, for the reasons just given, I am convinced that Sam and Brigid truly loved each other, and that he really meant it when he said (twice!) that he would be waiting for her when she gets out in twenty years.

You see, if he has her sent to prison, he will be fulfilling his obligation to do something about the murder of his partner.  Second, he will still have his dignity, knowing that he never played the sap for her.  And finally, after she gets out of prison, he won’t have anything on her anymore, since she has already done her time, so there will be no danger of her shooting him. That means when she gets out in twenty years, they can get married and live happily ever after.

Yeah, right.

As mentioned previously, the novel ends back in Spade’s office.  After Effie lets Sam know how hurt she is that he had Brigid arrested, she hears the corridor doorknob rattle.  She goes into the outer office.  When she returns, she says, “Iva is here.”

These are the last lines of the novel:  “Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes,’ he said, and shivered. ‘Well, send her in.’”

Since he doesn’t know how to break it off with Iva, at least he can have sex with her while waiting for Brigid to get out of prison.

Notorious (1946)

There have been several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock in which a man has a mother, which is usually a bad sign.  Most notable among them is the movie Psycho (1960), of course.  Preceding that movie was Strangers on a Train (1951), in which Robert Walker, who is a psychopath, is unduly attached to his mother while hating his father.  In Frenzy (1972), as soon as we find out that Barry Foster loves his mother, we are right to suspect him of being the necktie strangler.  In The Birds (1963), Rod Taylor has a strange relationship with his mother.  For four years, he has spent every weekend with her, during which time he has had no girlfriend because he didn’t want to upset her.

In all these cases, the man is a bachelor.  If a man is married or has previously been married, then there is nothing to worry about.  In The Wrong Man (1956), Henry Fonda has a mother, but he is married to Vera Miles, so that makes it all right.  In North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant has been married and divorced twice, so we know he is normal, and his mother is just amusing.

I thought that the Hitchcock movies mentioned above were all the ones in which a bachelor has a mother. But the other night, I decided to watch Notorious (1946).  I had completely forgotten about the mother angle in this movie, probably because I find the movie so disturbing in other respects that I overlooked it.

A few film critics have compared Notorious to Gilda, also made in 1946.  In that movie, the title character, played by Rita Hayworth, is married to an older man, Ballin Mundson (George Macready), a Nazi living in South America. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda used to be lovers, but that love on his part has turned into hate.  To vent his hatred on her, he sees to it that she remains trapped in her marriage to Ballin.  And then, at the end of the movie, after Ballin is killed, Johnny and Gilda are now together and will live happily ever after.  At least, that is what we are expected to believe, which is asking a lot.

A similar love/hate triangle exists in Notorious.  Cary Grant plays Devlin, an American secret agent whose job it is to enlist Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to infiltrate some Nazis in South America shortly after the end of World War II.  The fact that she is the daughter of a Nazi spy, who has just been convicted of treason, will presumably make it possible for her to gain their confidence.  The intelligence agency Devlin works for has had her bungalow wired for three months, and from the arguments they have heard her having with her father, they know that she is patriotic.

However, Alicia is also known to be a woman of loose morals, who enjoys drinking and screwing, hence the title of this movie.  Being hardboiled, she sneers at love.  When Devlin asks her why she likes a particular song, she says, “Because it’s a lot of hooey.  There’s nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.”

Because of her promiscuity, one of the men Devlin works with had misgivings for a while, saying, “She had me worried for some time, a woman of that sort….  I don’t think any of us have any illusions about her character….”  On the other hand, it turns out that a woman of that sort is just what they need.

Devlin falls in love with Alicia before finding out exactly what her assignment is.  That assignment turns to be the seduction of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who is one of the Nazis, and who used to be very much enamored of her. When Alicia does not adamantly refuse to prostitute herself in that manner, Devlin hates her for being willing to go along with it, and he starts being mean to her.  I said I found this movie disturbing, and this is the reason, the way Devlin is so mean to Alicia throughout most of the movie.  It is for the same reason that I find it difficult to watch Gilda, given the way Johnny is mean to Gilda.

Of course, we have to wonder, what did Devlin think Alicia would be asked to do if not use sex to get information about what the Nazis are up to?  After all, is he not supposed to be the honeypot that will lure her into this scheme?  In other words, the normal procedure, one would think, would be to invite Alicia into an office at the intelligence agency to see if they can get her to help them by appealing to her patriotism.  We might imagine Devlin’s superior, Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern), explaining the situation to her.  Besides, she doesn’t seem to have a job, so maybe she needs a paycheck.

Instead, Prescott gets Devlin, presumably the sexiest secret agent they have, to wangle his way into one of her parties, where he can seduce her into doing his bidding.  And then, just because he ends up falling in love with her while enticing her with his charm, he ends up hating her for not living up to his high moral standards.

It turns out that Devlin did not know that Sebastian already had a thing for Alicia a long time ago, but that merely raises the question, why didn’t Prescott let Devlin know that when he was assigned to the case?  There is no good answer to that question regarding the movie’s internal logic.  Instead, the answer is one of external logic.  The movie needs to make excuses for Devlin by keeping him in the dark, otherwise he would have no reason for being upset when Alicia goes along with a plan that he knew about all along.

Anyway, she succeeds in making Sebastian fall in love with her, and soon they are married.  At the end of that movie, when it is clear that Sebastian’s Nazi friends will kill him for being foolish enough to marry a secret agent, Devlin and Alicia will be able to live happily ever after, especially since, as in the movie Gilda, there will be no need for a messy divorce.  But as with Gilda, we feel put upon when asked to accept such an ending.  Whether we are talking about Johnny in Gilda or Devlin in Notorious, these men have shown Gilda and Alicia respectively how cruel they can be.  Such cruelty would be bound to manifest itself again in the future, for people do not change that much.  These women would be foolish to marry them.

There is, however, one big difference between these two movies. In Gilda, Ballin does not have a mother, whereas in Notorious, Sebastian does have a mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin. Suppose that Sebastian, like Ballin, had not had a mother.  In one sense, the movie could have proceeded in pretty much the same way.  Sebastian’s mother is not essential to the plot, but she is essential to the characterizations.

Claude Rains was about 57 years old when he made this movie.  His character of Sebastian is that of a man who, on account of his mother, has been bachelor all his life.  His mother says she doesn’t like Alicia because she suspects that Alicia just wants to marry him for his money, but he knows the real reason. “All these carping questions are merely the expression of your own jealousy,” he says to her, “just as you’ve always been jealous of any woman I’ve ever shown any interest in.”  In other words, Sebastian is not merely a bachelor with a mother, which in a Hitchcock movie is bad enough, but she is the reason he is a bachelor as well, which makes it worse.  In fact, the only reason he got to know Alicia long enough to fall in love with her when he met her in Washington was that his mother was not with him at the time.

Claude Rains was 5 feet, 6 inches tall.  Ingrid Bergman was 5 feet, 9 inches tall. Now, in real life, some men marry women who are taller than they are without there being any psychological implications.  But this is a movie, and Hitchcock deliberately chose these actors for their parts. Because our mothers were taller than we were when we were children, the pairing of Alicia and Sebastian, with her being 3 inches taller than he is, naturally has a mother-son connotation. Not only does Sebastian have a mother in this movie, but his wife Alicia is like a second mother to him as well.

Although a bachelor with a mother in a Hitchcock movie indicates something bad, what that bad thing is varies from one movie to another.  Freud may have conditioned us to think of an Oedipus complex, but only in Psycho is there any hint of that, and that hint occurs only in the novel on which the movie was based, and even then, the novel only refers to rumors of incest and necrophilia. In none of the other movies are there any indications of an Oedipus complex. Far from having a sexual desire for his mother in Strangers on a Train, for example, Robert Walker’s character is thought by many critics to be a homosexual.

The character flaw of Sebastian in Notorious, other than the fact that he is a Nazi, is that he is weak, which is made clear by the way he is dominated by his mother.  While we are children, we depend on our mothers for protection. This is something we naturally grow out of, but Sebastian has not. When he realizes that Alicia is a secret agent who has learned that there are wine bottles filled with uranium in his wine cellar, he goes to his mother’s bedroom and wakes her up, telling her he needs her help, berating himself, saying, “I must have been insane, mad, behaved like an idiot to believe in her with her clinging kisses.”

“Stop wallowing in your foul memories,” comes his mother’s curt response, as she lights up a cigarette and prepares to take charge of the situation.  She decides they will poison Alicia, killing her before the other Nazis find out.  Of course, Devlin rescues her from their clutches in the nick of time.

In 1956, William H. Whyte, Jr. published The Organization Man, in which there is a chapter on personality tests.  His advice for any man wanting to rise in a corporation to upper management is to cheat when taking such a test.  To that end, he provides a list of mantras to instill in one’s own mind before taking a personality test, which will hopefully allow one to answer the questions in a way that will be conducive to one’s advancement to upper management.  For example, one such mantra is, “I like things pretty much the way they are.” Another is, “I don’t care for books or music much.”

First on his list of mantras, however, is this:  “I love my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more.”  The idea behind this is that a man who loves his father more than his mother is a healthy male, one capable of taking the reins of power in a corporation.  Of course, he must still love his mother to some degree, but to love your mother more than your father would be a bad sign, indicating that one is insecure and still feels the need for maternal protection.

Ultimately, just as in Gilda, there may have been a need to diminish the masculinity of the rival male in the triangle.  A lot of critics believe Ballin is a homosexual, making it easy for us to believe that Gilda’s sex with him was not all that good, not like the kind she will have with Johnny.  In a similar way, giving Sebastian a mother and making him shorter than Alicia was necessary to facilitate a happy ending for her and Devlin, if you are willing to call it that.  In so doing, Hitchcock made it easier for Devlin to accept the sexual relationship between Alicia and Sebastian.

Now, on the one hand, it probably bothered Devlin that a mama’s boy like Sebastian was the one who got to have sex with Alicia while Devlin himself, who was tall, handsome, and manly, was deprived of that privilege.  It just wasn’t fair!  But on the other hand, if Sebastian had not had a mother, and if, in addition, he had been played by an actor that was taller than Ingrid Bergman, Devlin might have worried that Alicia really enjoyed the sex she was having with Sebastian.  The image in his mind of that Sebastian bringing Alicia to orgasmic ecstasy would have been too much for a man like Devlin to forgive.

Lady for a Day (1933)

Lady for a Day is a 1933 comedy directed by Frank Capra.  In trying to make sense of this movie, I discovered that the absurdity of its premise was completely unnecessary, for a perfectly reasonable alternative was available but deliberately rejected.  To see what I mean, we must begin with the basic story as we find it in the movie.

Apple Annie, as the name indicates, peddles apples on the streets of New York. She is an alcoholic old woman, played by May Robson, who was about 75 years old at the time this movie was made. She has a daughter named Louise, who is just coming of age.  She is played by Jean Parker, who was about 18 years old when this movie was made.  So, assuming that the age of the characters is that of the actresses, that means that Apple Annie was around 57 years old when she gave birth to Louise. A woman of that age might reasonably expect to be past the point of getting pregnant, so Annie probably thought she could have sex without fear of ending up as an unwed mother, but so she did.

All we are told is that Louise has been raised in a convent in Spain ever since she was a baby.  Annie writes her letters on stationery she steals from a fancy hotel, pretending to live there so that Louise will believe Annie is a wealthy woman in high society.  She has led Louise to believe that her father passed away and that she has remarried, her present husband being Mr. E. Worthington Manville, who is rich and aristocratic.  She explains that she is still unable to come to Spain for a visit on account of her health.

Louise is in love with a young man named Carlos, son of Count Alfonso Romero. The Count wants to meet Louise’s parents before giving his consent, so the Count, Carlos, and Louise are sailing to New York for that purpose. When Annie finds out about this, she is in a panic, for that means her daughter will find out the truth.

Dave the Dude (Warren William) has been buying apples from Annie for years because they bring him good luck.  Fearing that he might lose his luck if anything happens to Annie, he decides to help her pretend to be a rich woman of high society.  Things get more and more complicated, involving more and more people, until over a dozen of the Dude’s acquaintances are preparing to play various roles of the upper class.

Reporters start snooping around, so the Dude kidnaps three of them, intending to lock them in a room until the charade is over.  However, the police are under political pressure to find the reporters, and eventually the Dude is arrested.  He admits to the mayor, the governor, and other important people what is going on.  They all decide to help out, so instead of the Dude’s friends pretending to be high society at a reception, the real high society shows up instead.  The Count is satisfied and gives his consent.  Carlos and Louise will be able to marry and live happily ever after.

__________

All right, now let’s back this up.  A convent in Spain?  This is mentioned only once, and I guess we are supposed to accept it without question.  Well, I couldn’t accept it, so while watching this movie, I kept trying to make sense of it.  What follows is the best I can do:

Annie has a baby in a Catholic hospital.  She tells a priest that she is not married.  The priest says that she can give the baby up for adoption.  But Annie wants to remain the baby’s mother, so she asks if the baby could be raised in a convent instead.  The priest says there is a convent right there in New York that would take the baby.

Annie says that will never do because when Louise grows up, she will find out that she is the bastard daughter of a woman who sells apples on the streets of New York. Annie wants to stay in touch with Louise as her mother, but only at a distance, so that their only communication with each other will be by mail.  To that end, Annie asks if her baby can be sent out of the country instead.  The priest checks into it, and the next day tells her there is a convent in Spain that will raise her baby.  So, the baby is put on a ship and sent on her way.  

As the years pass, Annie writes letters in which she lies about how she and her husband, Louise’s father, are wealthy members of New York’s finest.  To keep Louise from wondering why her father never writes her a letter, Annie tells her that he passed away.  But eventually Annie says she has remarried, to another man of equal wealth and social prominence.

When Louise comes of age, she and Carlos fall in love and want to get married.  He tells his father, asking him for his consent.  They have the following conversation:

Count Romero:  Since Louise’s mother is a rich woman, why didn’t she raise Louise herself instead of sticking her in a convent?

Carlos:  I don’t know.  She writes Louise letters telling her how much she loves her.

Count Romero:  If she loves her so much, why didn’t she want her around?

Carlos:  I never asked Louise how she feels about that.

Count Romero:  Doesn’t she resent the fact that her mother abandoned her? Her mother didn’t even want a convent in New York to raise her, where her mother could at least go over once a month for a little visit, telling Louise to stop complaining about the food and just do whatever the nuns tell her to do. But even that would be too much trouble, I suppose, so her mother sends her over here. Then for eighteen years she uses that lame excuse about her health to avoid having to come over for a visit.

Carlos:  So, will you give your consent?

Count Romero:  I don’t think I want you marrying into a family like that, but just to be fair, I guess we could all go over to America for a visit, and maybe I can get some answers to my questions.

__________

The movie is based on a short story, “Madame La Gimp,” by Damon Runyon. So, I decided to read it to see if there is anything about a convent in that story. There isn’t.  Madame La Gimp corresponds to Apple Annie in the movie. Her home country is Spain.  After coming to America, she became a Spanish dancer of some note on Broadway.  And as we later find out, she married a man who was also from Spain.  They had a daughter, Eulalie, corresponding to Louise. Madame La Gimp felt she could not properly raise a daughter while working as a dancer, but her sister, who lives in Spain, was happy to raise Eulalie instead.

One day Madame La Gimp met with an accident, causing her to walk with a limp, hence the epithet, which put an end to her career as a dancer.  She took to drink, her marriage broke up, and she became a peddler.  Not wanting her daughter to know to what depths she had fallen, she lied about her situation in letters to her, pretending to be well off.

In other words, it all makes sense now.  Frank Capra had this perfectly reasonable explanation for Annie’s situation available to him, but he chose not to use it, preferring instead the illogical business about a convent.  Even when he remade this movie as Pocketful of Miracles (1961), after he had time to reflect on it, he still kept the business about a convent instead of letting Annie’s sister raise her, as in the short story.  Perhaps Capra wanted Louise to be raised in a convent because he was a Catholic, and he felt this change in the story gave it the proper religious tone.

There are a couple of other differences between the short story and the movie that might as well be noted, as long as we are here.  First of all, in the short story, the friends of the Dude are the ones that pass themselves off as high society, satisfying the Spanish nobleman whose son wants to marry Eulalie. But the son and Eulalie elope, so his consent becomes moot anyway.  There is nothing about kidnapping reporters, and the real members of the New York upper class are not involved.  Had the movie stayed with the short story, allowing the Dude’s friends to pass themselves off as the fashionable elite, that would have allowed for more humorous situations.  By having actual members of the upper class be at the reception, the possibilities for humor are forgone in favor of sentimentalism, or what film critics refer to as Capra-corn.

Second, the Dude’s interest in Annie’s problem seems to be completely selfish, in that he is only concerned about the good luck her apples provide him and not in Annie herself.  In the short story, the Dude is referred to as kindhearted. He helps Madame La Gimp simply because he feels sorry for her.

Why this change in motive?  Some people have a hard time accepting the fact that it is only human nature to care about others.  They cannot be satisfied unless they can sniff out some underlying motive of selfishness in every apparent act of altruism:  the need to feel superior, a desire to impress others with a show of generosity, an attempt to curry favor with God in hopes of getting into Heaven, or just silly superstition, as in this case with the apples. Maybe Capra was of this sort.  But for Damon Runyon, there was nothing problematic about the Dude’s kindness at all, no further explanation being needed than a genuine feeling of sympathy.

Finally, we are used to seeing queer flashes in Pre-Code movies, but the one in this movie is unique. In order to pass Annie off as upper class, the Dude knows that she will need a complete makeover, consisting of a hairdo, makeup, and a whole new wardrobe.  To that end, Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell) and several other women take Annie into a bedroom.  A man named Pierre starts to go in with them. Since Annie may end up having all of her clothes removed to make way for new stuff, including her underwear presumably, the Dude tells Pierre he can’t go in there.  Pierre turns around and gestures effeminately, while Missouri Martin assures the Dude that it is all right.  The Dude shrugs, now realizing that Pierre is a homosexual.  As such, Pierre is permitted to go into the bedroom with the women, the idea being that his lack of interest in women sexually means that his viewing Annie’s naked body will not infringe on her modesty.

Conservatives worried about transgender women in the ladies’ room take note.

Scarlet Street (1945)

In 1984, I bought a videocassette recorder.  No longer was my desire to watch a movie limited to (a) new releases at a movie theater, (b) movies that showed up later at the drive-in, and (c) movies that were broadcast on television.  Now I could walk into a video store where I could rent a movie when I wanted to see it, and not when fate should let it cross my path.

As a result, I began to take an interest in film theory, for now I could read about movies in books and then rent the movies the authors discussed.  One book I came across, published in 1981, was Film Noir:  The Dark Side of the Screen, by Foster Hirsch.  I had seen many films noirs prior to buying this book but did not realize I was doing so.  But then, according to Hirsch, the directors of those movies did not know they were making films noirs either, until the French critics came up with the term.

Right off the bat, Hirsch presented two movies that he regarded as the most famous of this genre, Double Indemnity (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). From my limited perspective, I had my doubts about that.  I had seen Double Indemnity a couple of times on television, but I had never even heard of Scarlet Street.  And whereas the former was available for rent at the video store, the latter was not.  As a result, it was a few years before I was finally able to see it.

In any event, Hirsch gives his reason for picking these two movies as paradigmatic of film noir:

In theme, characterization, world view, settings, direction, performance, and writing, the two dramas are focal points for noir style, as representative of the genre as Stagecoach is of westerns or Singing in the Rain of musicals.

In particular, he says these two movies are about “doomed characters who become obsessed with bewitching women.”  However, there is one theme they do not share, and that is masochism, which is present only in Scarlet Street.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) comes across as a smooth talker who is used to having a fair amount of success with women.  As for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), no man would even think about trying to push her around.

But in Scarlet Street, Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is easily manipulated by Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who enjoys humiliating him.  Chris is literally a Sunday painter, though Kitty thinks he is a professional artist who gets a lot of money for his paintings.  At one point, when Chris says he wants to paint her, she hands him some nail polish and then presents him with her bare foot, wiggling her toes, saying, “Paint me, Chris.”  As he kneels down to paint her toenails, she says, “They’ll be masterpieces.”

Kitty allows Chris to hold her foot, for which he is grateful.  This is to be contrasted with the foot of her roommate Millie, which has a different significance.  Millie has been modeling girdles, and when she comes home, she rubs her back and says she aches.  Then she sits down, removes her shoe, and rubs her foot. When two attractive women in a movie are friends, the one that indicates that her feet hurt thereby has her sex appeal diminished.  In Red-Headed Woman (1932), Jean Harlow and Una Merkel are friends. Although Merkel is an attractive woman in her own right, when she sits down, removes her shoe, and starts rubbing her foot, we know, as if we didn’t already know, that Harlow is the sexier of the two. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), when Jane Russell says to the manager of a hotel, “Show me a place to take my shoes off,” Marilyn Monroe reprimands her, saying, “A lady never admits her feet hurt.”  This reinforces the fact that, though Russell is a beautiful woman, yet Monroe is the sexier of the two. Therefore, when Millie lets us know about her aches and pains, her sore foot in particular, we know that Kitty is the sexy one.

The reason is clear.  When a man looks at a woman, he likes to imagine that it is as pleasurable for her to be beautiful for him as it is pleasurable for him to appreciate her beauty. But the minute she indicates that she is uncomfortable in any way, the effect is spoiled, ruining the man’s pleasure.  And this is especially true if she says her feet hurt.

Returning to the subject of Chris’s humiliation, we find that things are not much better for him at home. His wife Adele continually compares him unfavorably to her previous husband, Detective Sergeant Homer Higgens, whose large portrait hangs on the wall.  He (supposedly) died heroically trying to save a woman from drowning.  Although Chris has to work six days a week, we see him wearing an apron, doing the dishes, while Adele plays solitaire.  He tells Kitty that he only married Adele because he was lonely, although one suspects he would love to have his solitude back, agreeing with that fellow in The Lusty Men (1952) who says to Robert Mitchum, marriage is lonely, it just isn’t private.

Adele makes Chris do his painting in the bathroom.  She despises his paintings, which she thinks are crazy, saying, “Next thing you’ll be painting women without clothes!”

“I never saw a woman without any clothes,” he replies.

“I should hope not!”

Well, we never thought they had much of a sex life, but this confirms it.  What little sex there is probably takes place with the lights off and their pajamas on.

When Chris confesses to Kitty that he is married, that gives her an excuse not to have sex with him. She says she is not the type to run around with a married man, while at the same time indicating that she is starting to fall in love with him.  So, holding her foot is all the intimacy she allows him.

But whereas Chris’s masochistic subservience to women is psychological, Kitty’s masochism is physical. She has a boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). She likes the way he slaps her around.  In fact, Chris met Kitty the night he saw Johnny knock her down and start kicking her.  Chris came to her “rescue,” causing Johnny to lose his balance and hit his head on the curb.  When Chris ran to get a policeman, Johnny took off.  Kitty let Chris think he was her hero.

Unlike Johnny, Chris is nice to her, which is why she has no respect for him.  “If he were mean or vicious or bawled me out or something,” she says, “I’d like him better.”  At one point, in an argument she is having with her roommate Millie, Kitty tells her, “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face.”

“If that’s where it hits you,” Millie says right back, “you ought to know!”

At another time, Johnny is telling Kitty and Millie about how it is with men like him, in the movies as well as in real life:  “Why I hear of movie actors getting 5,000, …, 10,000 a week.  For what?  Acting tough, for pushing girls in the face. What do they do I can’t do?”

Johnny is obviously referring to The Public Enemy (1931), where Tom Powers (James Cagney) pushes a grapefruit in the face of another Kitty (Mae Clarke). But it is actually the movies Duryea himself played in that really exemplify Johnny’s point.  In Dark City:  The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller says that Duryea “developed an odd, almost fetishistic on-screen forte—beating women.”  It started with Woman in the Window (1944), where he slapped Joan Bennett there too.  Muller goes on to describe how Duryea slapped women in Too Late for Tears, Manhandled, Criss Cross, and Johnny Stool Pigeon, all made in 1949. Muller says that as a result, Duryea started getting lots of fan mail from “infatuated females.”

Why does a woman stay with a man that beats her?  Because Nature wants babies, and Nature doesn’t give a damn about her happiness. If a woman stays with a man that abuses her, she can still have his babies.  She may be miserable, but Nature doesn’t care.  Likewise, if a man allows a woman to belittle him and humiliate him, there is always the chance that by allowing himself to be treated that way, she will end up having his baby.  The pain, be it physical or psychological, is at first something to be endured for the sake of sex.  But eventually, the pain itself becomes erotic, imbued with the promise of sex, thus further cementing the sexual bond so that Nature can get the babies she requires.

We cannot imagine Walter Neff in Double Indemnity allowing a woman to humiliate him because Fred MacMurray is handsome.  But Chris, on the other hand, being played by Edward G. Robinson, is supposed to be ugly.  Toward the end of the movie, when Chris tries to forgive Kitty after having seen her kissing Johnny, she puts her face in her pillow, making muffled sounds that Chris interprets as crying.  “I’m not crying, you fool,” she says to him, rising up in the bed.  “I’m laughing!  Oh, you idiot!  How can a man be so dumb?  I’ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you. You’re old and ugly, and I’m sick of you.”  Those hateful words prove too much for Chris, and, happening by chance to be holding an icepick in his hand, he stabs her repeatedly.

But that happens near the end of the movie.  When the movie begins, a banquet is being held in honor of Chris’s twenty-five years of faithful service as a cashier in a company owned by J.J. Hogarth. He is played by Russell Hicks, an actor with a distinguished appearance, who was fifty years old at the time. When his chauffeur arrives and informs him that the beautiful woman with whom he is to have a night on the town has arrived in his limousine, he apologizes to his employees for having to leave the party, saying, “You can’t keep a woman waiting, can you?”  But before he leaves, he presents Chris with a 14-karat, 17-jewel pocket watch, with an inscription that not only mentions the years of service, but also refers to Chris as a friend.  And again, in shaking hands with Chris before he departs, Hogarth refers to him as an “old friend.”

This makes it all the more painful later in the movie when Hogarth discovers that Chris has been stealing money from him.  Chris has been using the money to pay for Kitty’s studio apartment and to supply her with luxuries, trying to keep her from finding out he is just a cashier instead of a famous painter.  Hogarth tells the police that he cannot bring himself to press charges and dismisses them. After they leave, he turns to Chris and asks, “Chris, it was a woman, wasn’t it?”  Chris, unable even to look at Hogarth, nods his head.  In a way, Hogarth is being kind and understanding.  But in another sense, unintended by Hogarth, it is a cruel form of pity.  The wealthy, handsome, and distinguished J.J. Hogarth, who is able to have beautiful women on his own terms, feels sorry for Chris, as he realizes what it must be like for an unattractive man to fall under the spell of the first pretty girl that has ever paid any attention to him.

The beautiful woman that is waiting in the limousine for Hogarth at the beginning of the movie gives a coin to an organ grinder’s monkey, prefiguring the relation Chris will have with Kitty.  Chris says to a fellow employee after they leave the banquet, referring to that woman, “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like that.  You know, nobody ever looked at me like that, not even when I was young.”

Although Robinson is not handsome, of course, I would never on my own have said he was ugly. However, Scarlet Street is a remake of a French film by Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931).  And in that movie, the character that corresponds to Chris is played by Michel Simon, who is even more unattractive, to put it mildly, than Robinson.  We don’t need the woman that corresponds to Kitty to tell us that she thinks he is ugly.  We know she does.

But maybe I think that way because before I saw La Chienne, I saw another film by Renoir, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), also starring Michel Simon.  I suppose you could call that movie a comedy, provided your idea of what is funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character, played by Simon, is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. Boudo then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting revolting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.  The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching that movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.  Boudu’s ugliness is as much a matter of his disgusting personality as it is the physical appearance of Michel Simon who plays that character.

In La Chienne, it is explicitly stated that the woman that corresponds to Kitty is a prostitute, and that the man that corresponds to Johnny is a procurer.  That must have been too much to get past the Production Code in the making of Scarlet Street because Kitty is merely portrayed as a woman not averse to using sex to get money from men, with Johnny encouraging her to do so.

Speaking of the Production Code, Muller points out that the movie was controversial when it was released, even though it managed to be approved.  He says that some markets for this movie reduced the number of times Chris stabbed Kitty with the icepick from seven times to four times or even only one.  The only versions I’ve seen show him stabbing her four times.

Furthermore, Johnny is accused of being the one who killed Kitty.  After he found her dead body, he grabbed her jewelry and took off.  When captured and confronted by the police with the fact that he had stolen her jewelry, he replied, “But why wouldn’t I?  She didn’t have any more use for it, did she?” As a result, he is convicted and executed in the electric chair.  But while, strictly speaking, an innocent man is executed for a crime he didn’t commit, Johnny’s character is so despicable that he seems to be getting what he deserves anyway.

As for Chris, the real killer, while not being officially punished, is punished nevertheless.  After Chris set Kitty up in her own studio apartment, he brought his paintings over there to keep Adele from throwing them out, as she threatened to do.  Johnny tries to sell them himself, still believing as does Kitty that Chris is a famous artist who is paid a lot of money for his paintings.  When a famous art critic, Damon Janeway, sees the paintings for sale on a street in Greenwich Village, he thinks they are great and wants to meet the artist. Johnny tells him that the artist is Kitty.  Soon her work is displayed in an art store owned by a Mr. Dellarowe, and Kitty is celebrated and admired for her work.

When Chris finds out that she has sold his paintings and has become famous as a result, he is not angry. As he explains to her, “If I’d brought those pictures to a man like Dellarowe, he wouldn’t have taken them. I’m a failure, Kitty.”  I guess the idea is that if being a failure is part of a man’s essence, then he cannot succeed no matter how talented he is.  Or maybe the difference is that Chris is an ugly man, whereas Kitty is a beautiful woman, with whom Janeway seems to be falling in love.  Chris says he and Kitty will go on letting others think she is the artist.  Now she lets him paint her for real, her portrait this time, and not her toenails.  He says they will call the painting “Self Portrait.”

After Chris is caught embezzling, he loses his job.  In his imagination, he can hear Kitty telling Johnny she loves him, and Johnny affectionately calling her “Lazy Legs.”  He tries to commit suicide but is prevented from doing so, and soon ends up living on the street.  He tries to confess to his crime, but no one believes him since he is now just a bum.  The police find him sleeping on a bench and tell him to go to the Bowery where he belongs.  He walks down the street.  It is Christmas Eve, and we hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” being played in the background.  Surely this portends some kind of redemption for poor Chris.

But then the music goes sour as he sees the Kitty’s “Self Portrait” being removed from Dellarowe’s, having been purchased by a woman for $10,000.  It is the masterpiece he can never claim as his own, the portrait of the woman he still loves but can never have.

Rear Window (1954)

The setting of Rear Window is an apartment complex that surrounds a courtyard, located in Greenwich Village, and taking place in the year this movie was made, which was 1954.  As the movie opens, we are given a look at the part of the apartment complex that can be seen through the window of one of those units, which turns out to be occupied by L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart). He is still asleep, with his face and neck wet with perspiration.  His thermometer says it is ninety-four degrees.  At the time this movie was made, air conditioners were not as prevalent as they are now, so it is no surprise that these apartments lack that amenity.  It is for this reason that Jeff’s window is open with the shades up.  More importantly, it also explains why the windows of the apartments across the way are also open with the shades or blinds up.

As the camera surveys the room, we can see that Jeff is a photographer, one who travels to places where there is danger in order to get thrilling pictures for the magazine that employs him, many of which are framed.  One of those is a picture of an accident involving racecars, which he supposedly took while standing in the middle of the racetrack.  Of course, a photographer standing the middle of a racetrack might be just the sort of thing that would cause an accident like that.  Anyway, it was in getting that picture that his left leg was broken.  It has been in a cast for six weeks.

One thing we do not see as we get to look around his room is a television.  By 1954, televisions were becoming quite common, but I guess he just hasn’t gotten around to buying one.  As a result, he has been forced to keep himself amused by watching the goings-on of those in the other apartments.

This movie is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, “It Had to Be Murder.”  As this was published in 1942, it would certainly be no surprise if Jeff, who is the narrator in that story, had no television.  And yet, he says that watching what is going on in other houses or apartments is like watching television, so maybe he had one in the original story.

In any event, it is an apt simile.  I have heard of men who own several televisions so that they can watch four football games at once, but in Jeff’s case, it is more like having several televisions that allow him to watch a bunch of soap operas all at once. These “soap operas” show the various stages of love and marriage, which are especially relevant to Jeff as he struggles against the threat of marriage in his own life:

Miss Torso:  Directly across the way, in what appears to be a house adjacent to the apartments, there is a beautiful woman whom Jeff calls Miss Torso.  She is a ballet dancer, who exercises and stretches in front of her open window while music plays on her radio.  She has several sexually aggressive suitors, one of whom she has to struggle to get rid of at the end of a date one night.

The Songwriter:  At right angles to Jeff’s apartment is a man who writes melodies.  He is working on his latest composition but is having trouble because of the radio Miss Torso is playing while she dances around in her apartment.  However, even when her radio is off, he has trouble of some sort, coming home drunk one night, knocking the sheets of music off his piano in disgust.  Jeff speculates that he probably lives alone because he had an unhappy marriage.

Miss Hearing Aid:  Right below Miss Torso is a woman that an online script refers to as Miss Hearing Aid, even though Jeff does not so refer to her himself.  The script says she is in her late sixties.  The word “Miss” tells us she is what would then have been referred to as an old maid.  She too is bothered by Miss Torso’s radio, but she has the advantage of being able to turn off her hearing aid.

The Newlyweds:  Off to the left is a recently married couple who are just moving in.  When we first see them, Miss Torso’s radio is playing “That’s Amore.”  The wife is oversexed, continually putting demands on her husband to come back to bed for another round of lovemaking.  It would be another couple of years before the magazine Confidential would report that Frank Sinatra’s secret for having sex with so many starlets was eating Wheaties, so this husband is having to struggle to perform without the benefit of that information.

The Married Couple on the Fire Escape:  Next there is a married couple of many years, the kind that will continue to be married for many years to come.  They live on the third floor.  Because it is so hot, they pull a mattress onto the fire escape so they can sleep out there, in hopes of getting a cool breeze.  They appear old enough to have had children that are now adults and have families of their own, but they have no young children living with them at this time.  In fact, there are no children in any of these “soap operas.”  Perhaps as a child substitute, they have a small dog for a pet, which they lower in a basket down two floors so he can do his business and then get back in the basket.

Miss Lonelyhearts:  Moving on to another stage of love and marriage is a woman Jeff calls Miss Lonelyhearts.  When first we see her, the radio is playing “To See You (Is to Love You),” which is sung by a lonely man who only dreams of having a woman to love.  She is played by Judith Evelyn, an actress who would have been about fifty-five years old at the time this movie was made. She acts out a fantasy of entertaining a man for dinner before putting her head in her arms and crying.  She is later driven to even more desperate measures to end her loneliness.  Even though Jeff uses the word “Miss” as part of his name for her, we gather that she used to be married, but is now either a widow or a divorcee.  Had she been single all these years, she would have been able to adjust to her situation gradually as those years went by.  But when a woman has been married for thirty years and is suddenly divorced, let us say, she awakens like Rip Van Winkle to an unfamiliar world, ill prepared to cope with being alone again.

The Salesman and His Sick Wife:  And now we reach the final stage of love and marriage, where a man gets so tired of his nagging wife that he murders her so he can run off with another woman.

And so, we see that marriage has its benefits and its costs.  Marriage was certainly a benefit to Jeff’s editor, Gunnison, although the marriage in question was not his own, but that of his boss.  When Jeff asks him how he got to be such a big editor, he replies, “Thrift, industry, and hard work…, and catching the publisher with his secretary.”

The reason Gunnison has called Jeff is that he thought the cast was coming off that day, and he wanted to send his best photographer off to Kashmir where a revolution is about to break out.  Jeff wants to go anyway, but Gunnison refuses, now that he knows the cast will be on for another week. Jeff says if Gunnison doesn’t pull him out of this “swamp of boredom,” with nothing to do but look at the neighbors, he’ll do something drastic like get married.  “Then I’ll never be able to go anywhere,” he says.

“It’s about time you got married,” Gunnison replies, “before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.”

“Yeah,” Jeff says, “can’t you just see me?  Rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry, and the electric dishwasher, and the garbage disposal, and the nagging wife.”  Gunnison says wives don’t nag any more, they discuss.  Jeff says that in his neighborhood, they still nag.  As he says this, he is watching the costume-jewelry salesman arriving home.  As we later find out, his name is Lars Thorwald, and he is played by Raymond Burr.  His wife is an invalid.  He goes into the bedroom, and she starts arguing with him about something, but we can’t quite hear what.

The principal spokesman for the blessings of matrimony is Jeff’s insurance nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), who comes by daily to fix him something to eat, give him a massage, and make sure he is in good health. She probably also gives him a sponge bath, but of course we don’t see that.  As she comes in through the door of Jeff’s apartment, she sees him watching his neighbors and snidely remarks that the New York State sentence for being a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. But she doesn’t know the half of it.  Before she came in, while Jeff was talking to Gunnison, we saw two young women in their pajamas walk out onto the roof.  There is a little wall surrounding the roof, about two feet high, so Jeff cannot quite see them when they lie down.  What he can see is the pajamas they drape over that wall after having removed them, allowing them to sunbathe in the nude.   However, the helicopter pilot who hovers over them gets a full, unobstructed view.

At least, we assume they are completely naked, allowing us to be Peeping Toms too, if only in our imagination.  But Stella sanitizes our imagination when she refers to the women as the Bikini Bombshells.  Women don’t wear bikinis under their pajamas, so this was probably to satisfy the requirements of the Production Code, which not only had restrictions on what could be seen on film, but also what was implied.

Stella and Jeff get to talking about his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who wants Jeff to marry her. But Jeff doesn’t want to get married.  Stella asks if they had a fight.  Then she asks if her father is loading up the shotgun, implying that she might be pregnant, which would mean that she and Jeff have been having sex.  Jeff is shocked that she would even suggest such a thing.  Of course, in those days, a gentleman would be expected to act shocked at such a suggestion in order to protect the lady’s honor. But his reaction seems sincere.

The point, then, is that back in the day when premarital sex was not the commonplace it is now, a man with a girlfriend that looked like Grace Kelly would need all his willpower to remain single.  The problem for Jeff is that Lisa is too high class, a fashion model who loves wearing beautiful clothes, eating at expensive restaurants, and gossiping about the latest scandal.  Jeff says he can’t imagine her “tramping around the world with a camera bum who never has more than a week’s salary in the bank.”

Now, wait a minute!  Jeff, who is supposedly Gunnison’s best photographer, is a bachelor, living in a small apartment in Greenwich Village without air conditioning, and yet he’s living paycheck to paycheck? What’s he spending it on?  This can’t be it!

Anyway, Jeff tries to argue that marriage can be approached intelligently and rationally, while Stella brushes that aside as nonsense, saying people ought to get married simply because they’re in love.  On another day, when Jeff refers to Miss Torso as the “eat, drink, and be merry” type, Stella says, “You keep your mind off her,” because she’ll probably end up “fat, alcoholic, and miserable.”  In other words, even if Jeff were to fall in love with Miss Torso, it would not be intelligent and rational for him to marry someone like her.  Stella’s inconsistency in this matter would seem to be driven by whatever conclusion she wants to reach.

A further inconsistency in Stella’s reasoning is that Lisa is also the “eat, drink, and be merry” type, the only difference being that Miss Torso is working class, whereas Lisa is high society, eating fancy food, drinking fine wines, and having Park Avenue fun doing it. Consequently, if Jeff were to marry Lisa, she might also become fat, alcoholic, and miserable.

When the conversation turns to Miss Lonelyhearts, Stella says that maybe one day she’ll find her happiness.  “Yeah,” Jeff replies, “and some man will lose his.”  This remark, along with others we have heard him make, tells us that Jeff’s aversion to marriage is not specific to Lisa, but rather represents his attitude toward marriage in general.  When he says marriage can be approached “intelligently and rationally,” he means that the intelligent and rational thing to do is not get married at all.

That evening, when Lisa arrives at Jeff’s apartment, she talks about her day, and we see that her lifestyle is even more extravagant than Jeff was able to describe to Stella.  She wants him to give up his job at the magazine and become a fashion photographer.  He is revolted by the idea. Saddened by his rejection, Lisa starts getting out the dinner she ordered from the 21 Club.  It is while she does so that Jeff watches Miss Lonelyhearts acting out her dinner with her imaginary lover.

Then he notices the apartment of the salesman.  The man brings his wife dinner, and all she has to say is, “I hope they’re cooked this time.”  He gives her a flower from his garden downstairs.  He fixes her pillow and kisses her on the head.  She flings the flower away from her with disgust.  He really cares about his flower garden, and we can see, when he picks up the flower she has discarded, that she has hurt his feelings.

That made me feel a little sorry for him when I watched this movie again recently.  The first time I saw this movie, it was just a murder mystery, one in which Jeff slowly figures out that Thorwald murdered his wife, chopped up her body in the bathtub, and then used his suitcase to take her various body parts to the East River and dump them there.  Then he got the woman he was having an affair with to pretend to be his wife, Anna Thorwald, so she could supposedly be seen leaving his apartment, as if going on a trip of some sort. This other woman then went to Merritsville, where she pretended to be Anna Thorwald and claimed the trunk with Anna’s clothes in it when it was delivered there.  I assumed it was a premeditated, deliberate murder.

Had I read Woolrich’s “It Had to Be Murder,” that would have only strengthened my assumption that the murder was carefully planned in advance.  In that short story, Jeff managed to figure out quite a bit from where he was, to an extent that bordered on clairvoyance.  He concluded that Thorwald had taken out as much life insurance as he could afford on his wife, and then slowly started poisoning her, which was making her ill.  But one night, she caught on, and he had to strangle her.  Repairs were being done on the floor above, in which cement had been poured to make the kitchen floor raised above the living room, so Thorwald stuffed his wife’s corpse into the cement and then smoothed it over.  This having been done, Jeff concluded that Thorwald’s plan was to leave some of Anna’s clothes beside a deep body of water and fake her suicide note, after which Thorwald and the other woman would be able to collect from the insurance company.  Apparently, Woolrich did not realize that insurance companies don’t pay off when the insured person commits suicide.

But none of these psychic conclusions about slow poisoning, an insurance policy, and a faked suicide note are in the movie.  It seems more likely that the browbeaten Thorwald became so tired of his wife’s nagging that he struck her in a moment of anger one night, killing her.  Then he gets the woman he was having an affair with to help him cover it up.

Of course, my sympathy for Thorwald was undoubtedly conditioned by my being much more aware of the theme of marriage in this movie, and in particular, how Jeff has a negative view of marriage in general and despairs at the thought of marrying Lisa.  The first time I saw this movie, I barely paid attention to these things.

Later in the movie, when Thorwald realizes that Jeff has been watching him and knows he killed Anna, he goes over to Jeff’s apartment to kill him too.  And yet, even so, he comes across as pathetic when he enters Jeff’s apartment and asks, “What do you want from me?  Your friend, the girl, could have turned me in.  Why didn’t she?  What is it you want?  A lot of money?  I don’t have any money.”

At one time, he and Anna loved each other very much, and so they married, fully believing in the vows they made, including, “in sickness and in health.” But sick she did become, souring her on life and taking it out on her husband, driving him to seek love elsewhere while he continued to take care of her, until one night he hit her in anger and killed her.  His attempt to kill Jeff is more out of frustration than any coldblooded attempt to conceal his crime, for Jeff’s murder would only confirm the evidence the police already had by that time regarding Anna.  At least, that’s how I imagine all this came to be, but I’m not psychic like the Jeff in Woolrich’s short story.

Now, let’s see.  Where was I?  Oh, yeah!  After Jeff and Lisa have the dinner that she had delivered from the 21 Club, they start arguing about marriage. Jeff says that he could never be a fashion photographer, and, presuming to speak for her, he says she would never be able to stand traveling around the world, living in cramped quarters, cold and hungry.  They almost break up.  He doesn’t want to lose her as a girlfriend, but she does not want to continue on as they are.  As she leaves, however, she tells him she’ll be back tomorrow.  It is later that night that Jeff sees Thorwald behaving strangely, leaving the apartment with his suitcase and returning shortly thereafter, several times that rainy night.

Lisa knows that Jeff is the kind of man who would feel obligated to marry a woman if he had sex with her, so she decides to spring that female trap on him.  A couple of nights later, she comes over with a Mark Cross overnight case containing a nightie and slippers, telling Jeff she intends to spend the night, maybe the whole weekend.

In the meantime, Jeff had called a friend of his, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey), a police detective, in hopes that he would investigate some of the suspicious goings-on in Thorwald’s apartment.  When Tom shows up, we hear the Songwriter start playing boogie-woogie music on his piano in a minor key, acting as ominous background music, making us think that Tom is about to confirm Jeff’s suspicions. And then, just as the boogie-woogie music stops, he announces, “Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.”  It seems that his investigation has revealed that Anna Thorwald simply went on a trip and claimed the trunk with her clothes in it.

As he explains all this, he keeps looking at the nightie and slippers in Lisa’s overnight case. Lisa thinks he is looking at the overnight case itself, wondering why he does so, and even asks Jeff later if Tom thought she stole it.  So important is it to Lisa to be fashionably attired that her chance to sport an expensive, Mark Cross accessory has made her overlook the implication of its contents.  Or maybe she is simply unconcerned about that.  From her point of view, it’s all right to have sex, just as long as you do it in style.

So, they spend the night and have that sex, although I’m not sure what sex would be like for a woman, if the man has a cast on his leg extending all the way up to his hip.  But the important thing is that this should pretty much seal the deal, as far as marriage is concerned.  It also helped that Lisa proves to be the adventuresome type herself, inasmuch as she later sneaks into Thorwald’s apartment through his window on the second floor, wearing high heels, no less, in order to try to find Anna’s wedding ring.

While all this is going on, there have been developments in the various soap operas.  The little dog that belongs to the Married Couple on the Fire Escape has had its neck broken.  It seems the dog was digging around Thorwald’s flowers.  Jeff, Lisa, and Stella are convinced that something was buried there that would incriminate Thorwald, so Stella digs around but finds nothing. What it was that had been buried there, you see, was Anna’s head in a hatbox. According to the online script, Thorwald decided to dig it up after killing the dog, and then he stuck it in his icebox for safekeeping.

This makes no sense.  If he was going to dig up the hatbox anyway, why kill the dog, unless the point is to keep people like me from feeling too sorry for Thorwald.  A man can commit murder in a movie and still have our sympathy, but if he kills a dog, that is just too heartless to be forgiven.  As for something else that does not make sense, Thorwald could easily have made one more trip with his suitcase, after putting Anna’s head in it, and then dumped her head in the East River with the rest of her body parts.  This piece of information regarding Anna’s head in a hatbox, which presumably is an allusion to Night Must Fall (1937), is put in the movie for a little comic relief.

At the end of the movie, we see that the Married Couple on the Fire Escape have gotten themselves another little dog. As for Miss Lonelyhearts, she went out one night and brought home a young man, which was a mistake, of course.  He immediately became sexually aggressive.  She slapped him and sent him on his way.  She finally decided to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills, but at the last minute, she heard the song played by the Songwriter, which soothed her savage breast.  She was able to meet him when everyone came out to see the ruckus going on in Jeff’s apartment when Thorwald tried to kill him. The Songwriter is more her own age, and at the end of the movie, she is over at his apartment.  He is pleased that she loves his music.

Earlier in the movie, Lisa also was moved by the Songwriter’s melody.  She says, “Where does a man get the inspiration for a song like that?”

Jeff replies, “From his landlord, once a month.”

That’s typical.  The man that rejects the suggestion that he get a job as a fashion photographer, where he could earn a much greater income, because he prefers the job he presently has as being meaningful and rewarding, cynically dismisses the creativity of the Songwriter, as if he could be motivated only by money.

As for Miss Torso, her boyfriend, who is a private in the army, shows up at her door.  He is dorky and shorter than she is, but she just loves him.  However, he is more interested in having something to eat out of her icebox than in making love to her.

Finally, we have the Newlyweds.  Most of the time the shade for their window has been down because they have been having sex.  Occasionally, the husband would raise the shade and look out the window, as if needing a little rest, but then lowering the shade again when he heard his wife calling him back to bed. But now the shade is up because the honeymoon is over.  The wife, who appears to be cooking, says, “I don’t care if you help me or not, but if you’d told me you quit your job, we wouldn’t have gotten married.”  The husband replies impatiently, “Oh, Honey, come on,” as he continues reading his newspaper without looking at her.

As for Jeff and Lisa, they will soon be newlyweds themselves, now that they have had sex. In the final scene, we see that Jeff has a cast on both legs, the other one having been broken when he fell off his balcony. Lisa is reading a book, Beyond the High Himalayas.  She is wearing loafers, blue jeans, and a red cotton blouse, as if she is ready to embark on a trip with Jeff as soon as he gets a new assignment. But when she sees he is asleep, she picks up a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, opens it, and begins smiling. We wonder which of them will get his or her way in the end.

The answer to that question will come the day that Lisa discovers she is pregnant.  At that point, life will become very serious.  She’ll tell Jeff that while she was happy to follow him around the world when it was just the two of them, that would be no way to raise a child, and she must return home. As for Jeff, if he has been living paycheck to paycheck in that small apartment in Greenwich Village, on what little that magazine he works for is paying him, it will be clear that he will not be able to support a wife and child on the same salary.  And so, Jeff will have to return home too and become a highly paid fashion photographer, which is what Lisa wanted all along.

You might say that Jeff should have thought of that, but as noted above, none of the soap operas featured anyone with a child, by which Jeff might have been warned of that possibility, and it would be just like a man to become oblivious to the reproductive consequences of having sex with a woman who is asking only to be enjoyed.

Marnie (1964)

In the opening scene of Marnie, we see a woman with long, black hair, carrying a suitcase, walking through a train station.  Though we cannot see her face, yet we just know, somehow, that she must be beautiful.

Then the scene jumps to the office of one Mr. Strutt, who runs a tax-consulting firm, Strutt & Co., in New York.  He is played by Martin Gabel, who is only a character actor because he is not handsome. Rather, he is just ordinary in appearance.  And so it is that we are not surprised that the beautiful woman has taken advantage of this homely man, having robbed him.

He is being interviewed by two police detectives, and as an indication of just how much Strutt is irritated by what has happened, he states the amount stolen from him to the dollar, which is $9,967. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $99,000 in 2023 dollars.)  The detectives ask him if he can describe the woman, who went by the name Marion Holland.  He does so: “Five feet five.  A hundred and ten pounds. Size eight dress.  Blue eyes. Black, wavy hair.  Even features. Good teeth.”

As he so describes her, his secretary rolls her eyes.  She knows well the influence that women like that can have over men like Mr. Strutt.  Then the detectives start chuckling as well.  One of them continues, noting that Miss Holland had been working for Strutt for four months.  He asks about her references.  Strutt begins hedging, as if trying to remember.  His secretary, through half-closed eyelids, says, “Oh, Mr. Strutt, don’t you remember?  She didn’t have any references at all.”

No surprise there.  As Aristotle said, “Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.”

Once, while in a philosophy course I was taking, the professor quoted this line from Aristotle.  “Aristotle?” another student in the classroom interjected. “Didn’t they kill him?”

“No,” the professor replied, “that was Socrates.  And he was ugly.”

Anyway, about that time, a major client of Strutt shows up from Philadelphia, Mark Rutland, played by Sean Connery.  Connery had recently starred as the suave and sophisticated spy, James Bond, in Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963), where his physical beauty made him irresistible to the women he met.

Strutt tells him that he was just robbed of almost $10,000.  “So I gathered,” Mark replies.  And then, showing no mercy, says, “By a pretty girl with no references.”

Strutt says he pointed her out to him the last time Mark was there, noting that Mark said at the time that Strutt was “improving the looks of the place.”

“Oh, that one,” Mark replies, “the brunette with the legs.”  Strutt comments, with irritation about how she acted so prim and proper, that she was always pulling her skirt down over her knees.

In the next scene, the brunette with the legs is entering a hotel room.  She puts everything that could be associated with Marion Holland into a gray suitcase, while putting a new wardrobe and the money she stole into a brown one.  It all reminded me of when another Marion, Marion Crane, switched outfits in a bedroom with a lot of stolen money lying on the bed in Psycho (1960).  And just as “Marion” in that movie was an anagram for “Normai,” similar to “Norma” and “Norman,” so here “Marion” is almost an anagram for “Marnie,” which is her real name, or rather, nickname, for her real name is Margaret Edgar.

She has several Social Security cards in her wallet with different names on them.  There would have been no difficulty about that when this movie was made.  Just previous to seeing this movie, I decided to get a Social Security card for myself.  I simply walked into the Social Security office and filled out a short form.  I had no identification, no driver’s license or birth certificate, for example, nor was the card itself supposed to be a form of identification once I had it.  Those were innocent times. Anyway, Marnie puts a Social Security card with her real name on it in the front section of the wallet.

She removes the black dye from her hair and becomes a blonde.  At the train station, she deposits the gray suitcase in a locker and then drops the key down the grate of a drain, taking only the brown suitcase with her.  She takes the train to Virginia, and then takes a hotel limousine to the Red Fox Inn, where she is known by her real name, and near Garrod’s, where she keeps her horse Forio stabled.

After riding her horse, she travels to Baltimore to visit her mother, which is apparently located on the waterfront, given the ship docked in the background.  As she gets out of the taxicab, we see little girls playing jump rope, singing a song that begins with, “Mother, Mother, I am ill.”  She knocks on a door, and a little girl opens it, a spoiled brat named Jessie, with whom Marnie does not get along, but whom her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), babysits.

Marnie comes inside with some white chrysanthemums.  She turns to look at the vase and sees it is filled with red gladiolas.  Marnie has a strong, visceral reaction to those red flowers, insisting that they be removed and replaced with her white ones.  It is at this point that we know that this will be another Hitchcock movie with a Freudian theme.

Hitchcock’s most Freudian movie of all was Spellbound (1945).  Looking back, it is hard to believe how influential Freud was at that time, and still was to a certain extent when Marnie was made in 1964.  Even into the 1970s, you could walk into a bookstore and find over a dozen books by Freud. About fifteen years ago, just out of curiosity, I checked out the psychology section of a major bookstore.  There were no books by Freud on the shelf, just one little book about Freud, sitting there all by itself, looking a little sad. There were several books by Carl Jung, of course, but he appeals to a completely different set of readers.

One of the great things about Freud, as far as movies were concerned, is that repressed memories could be the basis of a mystery, something that happened in the past that is causing problems for someone in the present.  In Spellbound, there were two acts of repression for Gregory Peck, one in childhood, and one as an adult.  In Marnie, there is just one, as was usually the case.

While Marnie is at her mother’s, we get several clues to the Freudian mystery. In addition to the way the color red bothers her, we find out that both Marnie and her mother hate men.  “A decent woman,” Bernice says, “don’t have need for any man.”  There is a reluctance on the part of Bernice to show affection to Marnie, though she has no trouble doing so with Jessie.  Marnie asks her mother why she doesn’t love her, why she always moves away from her, avoiding physical contact, as if there was something wrong with her.  Marnie wonders if her mother believes that she gets her money by being a kept woman.  Then Marnie goes upstairs to take a nap, where she has a recurring dream, precipitated by the tapping of a window shade.  In her dream, her mother wants her to move, but Marnie doesn’t want to because it’s cold. Bernice wakes her up, just as in the dream.  She tells her supper is ready. Then Bernice slowly makes her way back down the stairs, descending with a limp and using a cane, on account of an accident she had a long time ago.

The next time we see Marnie, she has light brown hair.  Once again, she has a gray suitcase, the color of the suitcases she uses for a fake identity, so we figure she is about to embark on her next act of larceny. She spots an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer for a payroll clerk.  It says references are needed, but she knows she has something better to offer than that.  By coincidence, the ad had been placed by Rutland & Co., a publishing company of which Mark is the owner.

At the office where she is to be interviewed by a Mr. Ward, he is just finishing up his interview with another woman for the same position.  That other woman appears to be in her late fifties and is referred to as Miss Blakely. When this movie was made, such women were called spinsters or old maids, and Miss Blakely matches the connotations.  Such a woman would not be given to foolishness but would be strictly business.  However, while she has the letters of recommendation, she has not the beauty.  In fact, she is quite unattractive.  So, we are not surprised that she doesn’t get the job.

Not that her appearance would have been a problem for Mr. Ward.  He is not like Strutt, for he thinks she would be perfect for the position.  However, Marnie, now going by the name of Mrs. Taylor, supposedly a widow, is sitting outside Ward’s office hoping to get that job, where she is spotted by Mark.  He seems to be trying to remember where he has seen her before, but he cannot quite place her, not even when she makes the characteristic gesture Strutt referred to of pulling her skirt down over her knees.

Mark is there to see Ward, who introduces him to Miss Blakely just as she is leaving.  Mark can barely conceal the feeling of revulsion he has at the thought of hiring a woman who looks like that.  He and Ward step into his office, where we gather that Mark says he wants “Mrs. Taylor” to be considered for the job. She is invited into Ward’s office.

While she is in the office, Mark realizes that she was the woman he saw at Strutt’s office.  He becomes amused as he listens to her explanation as to why she has almost no references.  And so, in addition to wanting her to get the position on account of her looks, his fascination with her criminal character further titillates him, leading him to overrule a bewildered Mr. Ward, who can’t believe Mark would want to hire a woman without the proper references when they could have had Miss Blakely.

After Marnie has settled into her new job, we again see indications of a repressed memory.  When a drop of red ink falls on her blouse, looking like a drop of blood, she panics and runs to the restroom to wash it off.  On another day, she agrees to work on Saturday to do some typing for Mark.  While in his office, a storm blows up.  The flashes of lightning alarm her, especially when the flashes turn red in her imagination.

We already figured that Mark didn’t really need any typing done, that he just wanted to get her alone for sexual purposes, and when she seems paralyzed by the storm, he takes advantage of the situation by kissing her.  One thing leads to another, and soon they are going to the racetrack together, after Mark finds out Marnie likes horses.  When she has a strong reaction to a jockey wearing a shirt with large red spots, Mark starts wondering, perhaps connecting it to the other ways in which she has been acting strange.

When the track closes, he brings her home to meet his father, who, unlike Mark, also likes horses and has several stabled on the grounds of his mansion.  Mark’s sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker) is there as well. (Mark’s wife, Lil’s older sister, had died almost two years ago.)  She wants Mark for herself and thus regards Marnie as a rival.

Then Marnie makes her move, stealing the money out of the safe in Ward’s office, switching back to Margaret Edgar, and going back to Garrod’s to ride her horse Forio again.  But in the middle of her ride, Mark shows up.  She tries making up all sorts of stories, but eventually she finds out that he knew she was a thief all along.  He threatens to turn her over to the police, but since he has fallen in love with her, he offers her a way out.  She can marry him.

All right, we understood that Mark would prefer to have a beautiful woman like Marnie to be hired, rather than Miss Blakely, and we even understood why he might still be interested in her after realizing she had stolen the money from Strutt & Co.  But when he not only wants to marry her anyway, but also is willing to blackmail her into going along with it, we have to wonder about Mark too.

Marnie recalls that he is an amateur zoologist.  She thinks about Sophie, the jaguarundi he told her about that he trained to trust him, which for a jaguarundi, he says, is a lot.  She says, “You don’t love me.  I’m just something you’ve caught!  You think I’m some kind of animal you’ve trapped.”

“That’s right,” he says, “you are.  And I’ve caught something really wild this time, haven’t I?  I’ve tracked you and caught you, and by God, I’m gonna keep you.”

If we are sympathetic to what Mark is proposing, even regarding it as somewhat romantic, it is only on account of the fact that he is played by Sean Connery.  Suppose, however, that Mark had been played by Percy Helton.  In Wicked Woman (1953), for example, Helton is a pathetic character who lusts after Beverly Michaels.  She gets him to give her money, promising to go out with him, but when he subsequently pressures her for a date, she tells him she would never go out with him because he’s a “repulsive little runt.”  She is planning to run off with Richard Egan after he sells the bar he owns, cheating his wife out of her share of the money, but when Helton overhears their plan, he pressures Michaels into having sex with him.  That makes Helton not only pathetic, but despicable as well.  We would feel the same way were he to play the role of Mark Rutland, trying to force Marnie into marrying him.  It would give us the creeps, just as it gives us the creeps when we hear the story about how Alfred Hitchcock tried to coerce Tippi Hedren on the set of Marnie into having sex with him, threatening to ruin her career if she did not.

Mark and Marnie get married and go on a South Seas cruise for their honeymoon.  It is then that Mark finds out that Marnie cannot stand to have a man touch her. She had let him kiss her a few times, because she thought she could fake it, but when it comes to consummating the marriage, she cannot go through with it.  Mark becomes convinced that something happened to her when she was young, and he suggests that she see a psychiatrist, but she dismisses the idea, saying that when a man is rejected, he always says it’s the woman’s fault, that there must be something wrong with her mentally.

He promises not to touch her, and for the next few days, they seem to be getting along amicably. Little by little, however, Mark becomes angry that she still refuses to have sex with him.  So, one night he goes into the bedroom and tears Marnie’s nightgown off her, leaving her completely naked. He apologizes, but when she goes into a catatonic trance, Mark takes advantage of the situation and has sex with her. Though it is a clear case of marital rape, yet we forgive Mark for what he did because, well, it’s Sean Connery. Now, it was bad enough when, in Wicked Woman, Egan walked in just as Helton was kissing Michaels on the neck. But in Marnie, if it had been Percy Helton raping Tippi Hedren, people would have been getting out of their seats and leaving the theater.

The next morning, Marnie is gone.  Mark searches for her all over the ship, finally finding her face down in the swimming pool.  He pulls her out and resuscitates her, asking, “Why the hell didn’t you jump over the side?”

She replies, “The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.”

Of course, the real reason is that if she had jumped over the side, the movie would be over.  In any event, the honeymoon is over, and they return home. Mark brings Forio to her, and she looks at Mark with genuine affection for his having done so.

Meanwhile, Lil has been snooping and eavesdropping, finding out about Strutt and how Mark has secretly paid him off, and finding out that Marnie has a mother in Baltimore, a fact that she passes on to Mark. Mark in turn hires a private detective, from whom he gets the address of Marnie’s mother, and from whom he finds out something about a man being killed when Marnie was five years old.

One night, Marnie has that dream again, talking in her sleep.  Hearing her, Mark and Lil come into her bedroom and wake her.  After Lil leaves, Mark starts asking questions about that dream.  At first, she is cooperative, saying there are three taps, after which her mother wants her to move, but she doesn’t want to because it’s cold, and “they’ll hurt her.”  Mark asks who “they” are.  She says she doesn’t know, but there are noises.

When Mark asks about the noises, Marnie recovers from this weak moment and looks at him with a level gaze.  “You Freud, me Jane?” she asks.  When this movie was made, that snide remark was as much for the benefit of the audience as for Mark.  Although, as noted above, Freud was still being taken seriously at the time, audiences were becoming a little weary of Freudian themes in the movies.  A Freudian explanation for behavior could no longer be advanced with the same expectation of acceptance on the part of the audience that was possible when Spellbound was made.  It was necessary to have Marnie express some detachment from Freud, which would match a similar attitude on the part of the audience.

She is aware that Mark has been reading books on abnormal behavior and psychoanalysis.  Mark asks if she has read them, and she replies, “I don’t need to read that muck to know that women are stupid and feeble and that men are filthy pigs.”  Then she adds, “In case you didn’t recognize it, that was a rejection.”

Mark says he wants her to read them, saying, “Start with The Undiscovered Self.”  Why he would want her to read that, I don’t know.  Repressed memories from childhood are not the subject of that book.  I would have suggested Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, but neither that nor any of the other books Mark has been reading are by Freud.  Perhaps Mark’s recommendation of this book by Carl Jung is also for the benefit of the audience, another way of establishing some distance from Freud.

Marnie asks him why he won’t just leave her alone, and he says, “Because I think you’re sick, ol’ dear.”  She sits up and replies:

I’m sick?  Well, take a look at yourself, ol’ dear.  You’re so hot to play Mental Health Week, what about you?  Talk about dream worlds!  You’ve got a pathological fix on a woman who’s not only an admitted criminal, but who screams if you come near her. So, what about your dreams, Daddy dear?

When Mark persists in encouraging her to read those books, she throws down the gauntlet:

You’re really dying to play doctor, aren’t you?  OK, I’m a big movie fan.  I know the games.  Come on. Let’s play.  Shall I start with dreams, or should we free associate?  Oh, Doctor, I’ll bet you’re just dying to free associate.  All right, you give me a word, and I’ll give you an association.

Not only does this further express a cynical regard for Freudian analysis, but it does so by making reference to the movies as well, movies in which she had once been part of the audience herself, thus assuring us that she is not some ingénue who has never seen movies like Spellbound.

All this having been established, the movie can now proceed to go full Freud without further apology. Probably not expecting much, Mark takes her up on the offer, giving her words for her to associate. At first, she is playful about the whole thing.  But then her own associations begin to bother her. When Mark says, “Black,” she says, “White,” as we expect.  But then he says, “Red!” and she repeats “White!” again and again, desperately turning away.  He grabs her, and she holds on to him, pleading with him to help her. This is a critical turning point, an essential step toward freeing her from her psychosis.

However, there is the additional problem of freeing herself from any criminal charges.  Lil maliciously invites Strutt and his wife to a big party being thrown at the Rutland estate.  Strutt recognizes Marnie, and she wants to make a run for it, but Mark figures he can coerce Strutt into keeping his mouth shut, and perhaps he can make restitution to others she has robbed as well. Because Strutt may come back the next day, he wants Marnie to ride in the hunt that has been scheduled so she will be out of the house.

Ah, the hunt!  What fun it must be ride on a horse, fashionably attired, behind a pack of hounds pursuing a fox.  When the fox is trapped, everyone other than Marnie is having a great time watching the fox being torn apart by the fangs of those hounds.  Marnie looks around, bewildered by all the happy, laughing faces she sees.  If only she were a normal, healthy human being like them, then she could enjoy the spectacle too.  Given her mental problems, however, she becomes distressed.  And then she sees the red coat being worn by one of the participants.  She has to get away, riding off at full gallop.  Forio clears fences with no problem, but when Marnie sees a brick wall that is too high, she tries to bring him to a stop, but is unable to do so.  She is thrown to the ground, and Forio’s leg is broken.  She has to shoot him.  As she does so, we see that look in her eyes and that little-girl tone in her voice that tells us when she under the influence of her past.

Once again, she decides to make a run for it.  She steals the keys to the office, intending to rob the safe again.  But she finds she cannot touch the money. Mark shows up.  He tells her they are going to see her mother.  She is afraid he will tell her mother about her crimes, but he says it is her mother who will do the talking.  It is Marnie who does the talking, however, regressing to her past, when Bernice tries to hit Mark, and they start struggling.

It turns out that Bernice was a prostitute.  Having only one bed, she would make Marnie get out of bed and sleep on the couch when a sailor came calling.  One night, having been moved to the couch, Marnie starts crying on account of the storm.  The sailor, played by Bruce Dern, comes out to quiet her.  But when he starts kissing her, Marnie doesn’t like it, and neither does Bernice.  She and the sailor start struggling. She tries to hit him with a poker from the fireplace, but the sailor falls on her, breaking her leg.  She calls to Marnie to help her.  Marnie picks up the poker and hits the sailor with it, killing him, the blood covering his white sailor suit.

Bernice thought it was a blessing from God that Marnie didn’t remember anything, and she resolved to become a better person.  She told the police she killed the sailor in self-defense.  Marnie and Bernice become reconciled.  As Mark and Marnie leave, she says she wants to stay with him.

I don’t how things are with psychoanalysis in real life, but in the movies, when the repressed memory is brought to the surface, the patient is completely cured. So, we figure Mark and Marnie will now be happily married, having a normal sex life.

But even if they don’t, they sure make a good-looking couple.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

A lot of critics do not care much for The Manchurian Candidate.  When it was first released in 1962, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times began his review of the movie as follows:

With the air full of international tension, the film “The Manchurian Candidate” pops up with a rash supposition that could serve to scare some viewers half to death—that is, if they should be dupes enough to believe it, which we solemnly trust they won’t.

But if critics like Crowther did not like this movie, neither, it would seem, did the public.  In 1988, Aljean Harmetz, also writing for the New York Times, refers to it in his review as an “old failure,” and is surprised that so many people seemed to be lining up to see it when it was rereleased.  “Although the film was based on Richard Condon’s best-selling 1959 novel,” he goes on to say, “it failed to live up to expectations at the box office and was written off as unprofitable by the studio.”  In addition, Harmetz disposes of one of the stories often heard about this movie:

There is a common misperception that “The Manchurian Candidate” was withdrawn because of the assassination of President Kennedy. But the President was killed a year after the movie failed to make a dent at the box office.

He quotes Peter Rainer, chief film critic of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, as saying the movie is “a black comedy that mixed melodrama and slapstick.”  Slapstick.  Well, I’ve never experienced it that way.  I saw it as a teenager in 1962, and I found it grim and suspenseful, as I do to this day.

That is not to say that the movie does not have its moments of comic relief.  In fact, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), of the Pavlov Institute, is quite witty at times. It was he who conceived of the idea of putting a Soviet agent into the White House as president.  The movie begins in 1952 in Korea, where a platoon of American soldiers is led into a trap.  They are taken north into Manchuria, a region that has at times belonged, at least in part, to Russia, and at times belonged, at least in part, to China, a fitting place for the initiation of a plan that is a joint operation of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Though Dr. Yen is himself a member of the Communist Party, yet his character is completely different from that of the stereotypical communist, as promoted on television and in the movies in the 1950s.  That is to say, the communist was typically portrayed as utterly mirthless, so serious about his devotion to the cause of world communism as to preclude a sense of humor.  It is an indication of just how high-ranking Dr. Yen must be in the Communist Party that he can get away with ironic observations and wry comments, whereas someone further down in the Party would probably have been executed for being insufficiently dedicated to the ideals of communism.

For example, later in the movie, when Comrade Zilkov takes pride in the fact that his rest-home, which is just a front, is one of the few Soviet operations in America that “showed a profit at the end of the last fiscal year,” Dr. Yen admonishes him:  “Profit? Fiscal year?  Beware, my dear Zilkov. The virus of capitalism is highly infectious.  Soon, you’ll be lending money out at interest!”

When Zilkov looks fearful at the thought that he will be reported to his superiors in Moscow for not being faithful to the cause of communism, Dr. Yen smiles, saying, “You must try, Comrade Zilkov, to cultivate a sense of humor.  There’s nothing like a good laugh now and then to lighten the burdens of the day.”

He subsequently remarks that he would like to spend the afternoon at Macy’s, saying, “Madam Yen has given me the most appalling list,” even though he knows full well that communists are supposed regard American consumerism with disdain.

Frank Sinatra, on the other hand, in the role of Major Bennet Marco, is always serious.  And yet, there is something amusing about his role as an intellectual. When the movie opens, then Captain Marco is riding in a truck driven by Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey).  They stop at a nightclub/whorehouse to pick up the rest of the platoon to go on a combat mission.  While Raymond goes in to get the men, Marco continues reading a book.  Later in the movie, after Marco is on the verge of a mental collapse, owing to the nightmare he has been having repeatedly about what happened in Korea, a friend of his has been sending him books of various sorts to help him keep his mind on other things, books that he has actually been reading. One of them is James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Whew!  Finally, when Raymond starts talking about what a terrible woman his mother (Angela Lansbury) is, he apologizes for going on about her. Marco replies that he is interested.  He is interested, of course, because by this time he realizes that Raymond is critical to understanding his nightmare.  To encourage him to keep talking, he says, “It’s rather like listening to Orestes gripe about Clytemnestra.”

“Who?” Raymond asks.

“Greeks.  A couple of Greeks in a play,” Marco responds dryly. Being a bookworm is totally at odds with Sinatra’s screen persona, but he manages to pull it off.

The nightmare that Marco has been having begins with his platoon sitting in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey, waiting out a storm.  In that lobby, a woman is lecturing a lot of other women about hydrangeas.  But suddenly, the women turn into Russian and Chinese men, listening to Dr. Yen tell how he has “conditioned” the American soldiers.  “Or brainwashed them,” he adds, “which I understand is the new American word.”  Presumably, he is speaking English as the second language common to both Russians and Chinese.

Practical joker that he is, Dr. Yen is letting the American soldiers smoke cigarettes made out of yak dung. “Tastes good, like a cigarette should,” he says, citing a well-known line used back when television commercials for cigarettes were still permitted.  He laughs heartily at his own joke, while the Russian and Chinese men in his audience sit there in cold silence.

The soldiers have been hypnotized, and Dr. Yen dismisses as nonsense the “old wives’ tale” that a hypnotized subject cannot be forced to do that which is repellent to his moral nature, “whatever that is,” he adds, showing contempt for such a notion.  Since communists were atheists, they were believed by most Americans to be completely amoral, since without the fear of God, there would be nothing to restrain their behavior.

As we later learn, the hypnosis is more than the kind usually seen in a movie, where someone lets a watch swing back and forth while saying, you are getting sleepy, very sleepy.  Instead, it involved the use of light and drugs to deepen the level of the hypnotic state.  That is why Dr. Yen says, “His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it has been dry-cleaned.”

To prove the point, he orders Raymond to strangle one of his fellow soldiers. As he does so, the other men appear bored.  Marco is so bored that he is even seen opening his mouth to yawn, when suddenly that open mouth emits a scream as he is jolted out of his nightmare.

At another point in the movie, a different soldier also starts having the same dream.  Of course, the dream cannot be exactly the same, and to underscore that point, the soldier in question is Corporal Allen Melvin, played by James Edwards.  Since he is black, the women in his dream are likewise black. But he later sees the same Russian and Chinese men, which helps verify Marco’s story, which no one believed at first. Melvin’s dream picks up after the strangulation and ends with Raymond using a pistol to shoot a baby-faced soldier in the head, his blood and brains splattering onto a large picture of Joseph Stalin hanging on the wall.

Basically, Raymond Shaw has been conditioned to be a cold-blooded killer, and the murder of two of his fellow soldiers is evidence of that.  He and the remaining soldiers are made to believe that Raymond saved the platoon through his heroic actions, getting him the Medal of Honor.  The soldiers have been programmed to say, when asked, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known.”

But as Raymond himself was the first to admit later on, the men hated him, and he hated them.  In that first scene in the movie, when Raymond gets out of the truck, Marco shakes his head, as if to say, that guy is really uptight, before returning to his book.  Inside the nightclub/whorehouse, the remarks of the other soldiers reveal that they have complete contempt for Sergeant Shaw, as being something of a prude.

The point of having Raymond be awarded the Medal of Honor is to help his stepfather, Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), secure the nomination for vice-president at the national convention. Then, after Raymond assassinates the presidential candidate at the convention, Iselin is supposed to hold the dead body while delivering a rousing speech.  It is a speech that has been worked on here in the United States and in Moscow off and on for eight years, intended to propel Iselin into the White House as president by an hysterical electorate, “with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”  In short, Iselin is the Manchurian candidate.

Iselin is based on the character of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy claimed that the State Department was full of communists, but in the movie, it is the Defense Department that Iselin says has communists working there.  How ironic it would be, therefore, if a Soviet agent could become president by pretending to be fiercely anti-communist.

But Mrs. Iselin, Raymond’s mother, or simply “Mother,” is the brains of the operation and will be the one who is really in charge, far exceeding Dr. Yen as the villain of the piece.  She never wanted her son Raymond to be the assassin she needed, but those communists in Russia just didn’t understand such things as a mother’s love.  But that’s all right.  She uses Raymond for the purpose anyway, giving him a wet, warm, open-mouthed kiss on the lips just before sending her hypnotized son off to his final mission.

A mother’s love is not the only emotion that communists did not understand. In the 1950s they were portrayed as affectless, driven only by an ideal of world communism.  Dr. Yen, when speaking of Raymond in his capacity as a killer while under hypnotic command, says that he will not remember killing anyone. As a result, Dr. Yen says, “Having been relieved of those uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear, he cannot possibly give himself away.”

That guilt and fear should be “uniquely American symptoms” is, of course, preposterous.  Not only are they natural human emotions, but even a dog can experience fear, and some say guilt as well, as when we see a dog’s ears lay back, and its tail go between its legs, after having pooped on the carpet.  But communists were thought to be so lacking in emotion that they could easily suppose that guilt and fear were unnatural, an idiosyncratic result of American capitalism.

While under hypnosis, Raymond is given the command to kill several people in the course of this movie.  In each case, he has no emotion while doing so, driven only by an order to kill.  This is just an extreme example of how communists were thought to behave back then, driven by the goal of having communism dominate the world, but experiencing no emotions while trying to achieve that end.

I was only nine years old when I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In that movie, the people whose bodies have been replaced by plant-like, pod substitutes have no emotions, driven only by the goal of replacing everyone on the planet in the same way.  I had already seen several television dramas, showing us what communists were supposed to be like, warning us to be on guard against such people.  In those dramas, the communists seemed to be without any human feeling.  So, when I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I immediately saw the connection.  I did not, of course, say to myself, “Why, these pod people are just like communists,” but I sensed the resemblance.

Because communists were thought to be amoral and without feeling, it was believed that they could kill one another without a qualm, should it be expedient to do so.  When Zilkov insists that Raymond needs to be tested by killing someone, since it has been over two years since he killed those two fellow soldiers in Manchuria, Dr. Yen thinks that is unnecessary.  But Zilkov is adamant.  Dr. Yen shrugs and tells Zilkov to have him kill one of his own people that work in his rest-home.  Zilkov says he would do so gladly, but he is understaffed as it is.  When it appears that Dr. Yen has agreed to have Raymond kill some nonproductive person, Zilkov asks, “Whom do you think he should kill?”

Dr. Yen slowly turns his head, looking straight as Zilkov.  Zilkov shows fear at the idea that he might be sacrificed to that end.  “With humor, my dear Zilkov!” Dr. Yen says, now smiling.  “Always with a little humor.”  Instead, he suggests that Holborn Gaines be the one who is killed, possibly allowing Raymond to be promoted at the newspaper to take his place.

When Raymond first returned from Korea, he told Mother that he intended to go to work for a newspaper as a research assistant to Holborn Gaines. “Holborn Gaines?” she said with horror. “That communist?!”

“He’s not a communist, Mother,” Raymond replied.  “As a matter of fact, he’s a Republican.”

That this was supposed to reassure Mother implies that she and Senator Iselin are themselves Republicans, which would go with their anti-communist pretense.

Mother’s greatest political foe is Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver).  She once referred to Jordan as a communist on a radio program, so he successfully sued her for defamation of character and slander.  He then donated the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, just to spite her.  Republicans regard this organization as being so far to the left as to be almost communist.  George H.W. Bush once referred to Michael Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” which brought to mind the phrase “card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” used by Josephy McCarthy, and also used by Iselin in the movie.

At a costume party held at the Iselin’s residence, Mother tells Jordan that she is hoping her husband can be nominated for vice-president at the convention, and she asks if Jordan will try to block him, which he could do only if he too were of the same party.  In other words, though Jordan and Gaines are both Republicans, yet they are insufficiently anti-communist as far as Mother is concerned.  As for Democrats, don’t even get her started on them.

Jordan says, “I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more harm to this country than he’s doing now,” little realizing the irony in his supposition.  He says he will do everything he can to keep Iselin from getting that nomination.  So, this looks like another job for Raymond.  Prior to all this, Raymond had fallen in love with Jordan’s daughter, Jocelyn.  Mother convinced Raymond that Jocelyn was just a communist tart and got him to break off their engagement.  However, at the party where Mother tries to get Jordan not to block Iselin for the nomination, Jocelyn shows up and manages to make Raymond fall in love with her all over again.

You see, Dr. Yen programmed Raymond with a key sentence:  “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”  Upon hearing this, Raymond would pick up a deck of cards and start playing.  As soon as he turned up the queen of diamonds, he would stop and wait for orders.  Dr. Yen said that the queen of diamonds had been selected as the card that would induce a hypnotic trance because it was “reminiscent in many ways of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother.”

In other words, the fact that Raymond would be looking at the card that was symbolic of Mother would further instill his obedience.  It is said that during World War II, soldiers were told that they were fighting for “Mom and apple pie,” so having Mother be the one who is behind the plot to have a Soviet agent become president of the United States is a slap in the face to that notion.

It is at the costume party that we find out that Mother is Raymond’s American operator when she gets him alone in a room and has him play a little solitaire.  They are interrupted, and she has to leave for a little while, so she picks up the queen of diamonds and takes it with her to prevent mischief.  But when Jocelyn shows up at the at the costume party and finds Raymond in that room, she just happens to be dressed as a great, big queen of diamonds, an image of that card covering her torso. Raymond does a doubletake.  The woman he has always loved has become fused with the idea of Mother, and right while he is in a hypnotic trance.  Needless to say, Jocelyn has no trouble getting Raymond to marry her.

Dr. Yen said on a previous occasion that whenever Raymond is assigned to kill someone, he must also be told to kill whoever else happens to be there at the time.  So, when Mother sends Raymond off to kill Jordan, he is under that additional command.  Using a pistol with a silencer, which always makes a killing seem more cold-blooded, he shoots his now father-in-law right through the carton of milk he was holding and into his chest, the milk pouring out much in the way we imagine his blood doing the same.  As Raymond puts a second bullet into Jordan, who is now lying on the kitchen floor, Jocelyn comes running in to stop him.  In what is the most chilling scene in the movie, he turns and shoots her without hesitation.  Then, as he leaves, he steps over her body as one would a pile of laundry that happened to be lying on the floor.

Prior to all this, however, Marco has been having a hard time of it.  His superiors think he is suffering from combat fatigue.  He shows up to visit Raymond.  Raymond is not at home, but his servant opens the door, the very guide that led them into the trap in North Korea, Chunjin (Henry Silva). Marco remembers him from his nightmare.  He punches him hard, and they begin fighting.  It is refreshing to see men in a movie employ the martial arts in a way that is realistic.

Anyway, that proves to be a turning point in the movie.  Once Marco has been supported by Corporal Melvin, the Army believes his story and assigns him to find out what Raymond has been programmed to do. Marco gets himself a deck of cards with nothing but queens of diamonds and does what he can to deprogram Raymond.  At the national convention, however, it appears that, from the vantage point of a spotlight booth, Raymond will still assassinate the nominee for president, as ordered to do so by Mother. But at the last second, he assassinates Senator Iselin and Mother.  Then he puts on his Medal of Honor. Marco comes into the booth just as Raymond does so.  Raymond says it was the only way to stop them. He then turns the rifle around and shoots himself.

In the final scene, Marco is with a woman who has helped him through his difficulties, Eugenie Rose (Janet Leigh), and whom he plans to marry.  He reads out loud from a book citing the heroism of other men that have been awarded the Medal of Honor.  Then he closes the book and says what will be written in the future:

Made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul, he freed himself at last, and in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly, gave his life to save his country.  Raymond Shaw.

Of course, the fact that the acts are too unspeakable to be mentioned in a book of citations like the one Marco is reading from does not mean they cannot be vividly depicted in a movie.  And that’s a good thing too, since this movie is one of my favorites.  And yet, the American Film Institute did not include it in their list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time.  Nor did IMDb (Internet Movie Database) include it in their list of the Top 250 Movies of all time.  And in Guide for the Film Fanatic, published in 1986, where Danny Peary reviewed “1600 must see” movies, The Manchurian Candidate was not one of them.  Were Bosley Crowther alive today, he would be pleased to see that plenty of people have not been duped into liking this movie.

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

In the opening scene of Splendor in the Grass, which begins in Kansas in 1928, we see Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) and Wilma Dean “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) making out in his car, with a raging waterfall in the background to symbolize their passion.  Bud wants to have sex, but Deanie says they mustn’t.  Disappointed, Bud takes her home.

Sexual frustration is not the only thing that makes these two teenagers miserable.  They both have parents.  Deanie’s mother is worried that Bud will get her pregnant.  And even if she doesn’t get pregnant, her mother tells her that boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with.  They want a nice girl for a wife.  In fact, nice girls don’t like sex.  They just let their husbands come near them so they can have children.  Now, tell me again why boys want to marry nice girls.

Bud’s father, Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle), wants Bud to go to Yale.  Bud doesn’t want to go to Yale, saying he’s not a good student.  He wants to go to an agricultural college for a couple of years and then take over the family ranch and raise cattle.  He figures he could marry Deanie and take her to college with him.

Ace says, “Ranching’s no life.”  He prefers being an oil man.  In fact, when the movie begins, he has just hit another gusher, which is pumping a hundred barrels an hour.  He is the opposite of Rock Hudson in Giant (1956) and Melvyn Douglas in Hud (1963), who loved raising cattle and despised the idea of drilling for oil.  In general, we are supposed to think there is something wholesome and fulfilling about raising cattle, while drilling for oil is just about making lots of money.  Splendor in the Grass likewise expects us to make those associations, approving of Bud’s desire to work his father’s ranch, while feeling there is something wrong with the way Ace is interested only in his oil wells.

Ace has ill-concealed contempt for Deanie, thinking her family is beneath his own.  He too is worried that Bud might get her pregnant.  “You get a girl in trouble, and you gotta take the consequences,” he says, meaning Bud would have to marry her.  To avoid the risk of getting Deanie pregnant, Ace suggests that Bud find another girl and have sex with her instead.  In fact, later in the movie, we assume Bud does just that, ending his relationship with Deanie and then having sex with Juanita Howard, known around school for being no better than she should be.  But if Bud had gotten Juanita pregnant, she would have been the one he had to marry.  Different girl, same result.  Perhaps Ace knew that he was in a movie, which meant that nice girls like Deanie get pregnant if they have sex just once, whereas for sluts like Juanita, their very promiscuity seems to act as a kind of birth control.

Bud gets so stressed out about it all that he collapses and has to go to the hospital where he almost dies from pneumonia.  Deanie, on the other hand, tries to be like Juanita, first with Bud, but that doesn’t work, and then with Allen “Toots” Tuttle (Gary Lockwood).  But she changes her mind at the last minute.  Toots almost date rapes her, but she gets away and tries to commit suicide by jumping into the river so she will go over the falls.  She is rescued, but then has a complete mental collapse and has to go to an insane asylum.

It would seem, then, that the combination of sexual frustration and parental pressure has caused Bud and Deanie to collapse under the strain, physically in Bud’s case, mentally in Deanie’s case.  But that raises the question, why aren’t all their friends in high school also collapsing in one way or another?

As for sexual frustration, when Toots and some other guys are talking about Juanita, they agree that she isn’t like the other girls they know, who expect a guy to be satisfied with a goodnight kiss.  Given that, we wonder why those other girls in the high school aren’t filling up the psych wards in the local hospitals themselves, since they aren’t getting anymore sex than Deanie.  And couples break up all the time in high school, so the other girls are likely experiencing that as well.  As for the boys in high school, Toots and a few other guys on the football team might be using Juanita as an outlet for their sexual needs, but we don’t get the idea that she is servicing the entire male student body.  So, why aren’t most of the boys in that school having a bout of pneumonia themselves?

Does that mean the difference lies in parental pressure?  In Bud’s case, that might make sense.  Bud’s father is about as obnoxious as they come, and Deanie meets a guy named John in the mental institution, who says he is there because his father put pressure on him to be a great surgeon. But surely these are not the only two boys in that community whose fathers are putting pressure on them for some reason, so we have to wonder why the other boys in the high school are holding up so well.

As for Deanie, the only parental pressure that she experiences is that of her mother telling her not to have sex with Bud.  Now, it’s not like the mothers of the other girls at the high school are telling their daughters that it’s all right to have premarital sex.  We don’t even have to be shown a conversation between Kay (Sandy Dennis) and her mother to know that.  But Kay isn’t destined for a mental breakdown herself, nor are any of the other girls.

If it seems as though one of the moral lessons of this movie is that sexual repression is bad, that is belied by the situation with Bud’s older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden).  She represents the Roaring Twenties in the flesh, referred to as a “flapper.”  It is rumored that while in college, some “cake eater” got her pregnant and married her for her money, but Ace had the marriage annulled and got her an abortion.  Now back home, she continues with her wanton ways, not being one to suffer from the stress of going without sex. But the movie condemns her for her behavior.  Toward the end of the movie, we find out that she died in a car accident.  One of Deanie’s friends says, “We all knew something like that would happen the way she carried on.”  In other words, movie karma killed Ginny for being sexually liberated.  Sometimes you just can’t win.

While the characters in this movie talk about how the stock of Ace’s company, Stamper Oil, keeps going up and up, they have no sense of the doom that we know awaits them in the stock market. Deanie’s parents are lucky, at least in that regard.  When Deanie needs to be institutionalized, her father sells all his stock in Stamper Oil in order to pay for it, not realizing he is doing so just as it is reaching a top.  But Ace is not so lucky.  The crash wipes him out, and he jumps out of the window of a building, the form of suicide that was de rigueur for those ruined by the stock market crash in October of 1929, probably because the fall from a great height was symbolic of the fall in the price of stocks from their great height.  Mrs. Stamper, now a widow, is said to be as “poor as a church mouse,” forced to live with her folks Tulsa.

We are so used to watching movies in which someone is wiped out by the stock market crash that we accept this without question as we watch this movie for the first time.  But upon a second viewing, we realize that would not apply to Ace and his eponymous oil company. When the stock market crashed, the oil wells did not crash along with them.  Think of all the movies you have seen set in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, where people are still driving their automobiles, which still had to be filled up with gasoline.  That means that oil was still being pumped out of the ground, refined, and distributed, none of which would have happened unless it could have been done at a profit.

Presumably, Ace is the majority stockholder, which means that he is the principal owner of those oil wells and remains such, even if the price of the stock has plummeted.  As president of the company, he could continue to pay himself a salary out of the revenue stream produced by pumping oil, even though the price for a barrel of oil decreased somewhat after the crash.  And some or all of the profit made by the company could continue to be distributed as dividends.  The decrease in the price per share of the stock of Stamper Oil would not change that.  And Wall Street never puts a lien on your physical assets.

To get some idea of how much money would be involved, we might recall a scene from Giant that takes place in the 1920s.  Elizabeth Taylor is talking to a man and his wife who live on a small ranch, but who had a bit of luck.  A gusher came in the previous year, which is making them a million dollars a month.  Even allowing for a drop in the price of oil with the onset of the Great Depression, I’d say these folks would still be doing all right.  In any event, no one in that movie gets wiped out by the stock market crash.

We might imagine that Ace committed suicide because he was disgraced, no longer as wealthy as he once fancied himself to be.  But his widow would not end up being “poor as a church mouse.” There would still be plenty of money coming in from the sale of the oil being pumped out of the ground, allowing her to live in reasonable comfort, even if the amount was less than that in Giant.

In other words, we can easily imagine a less drastic outcome for the Stamper family than the one depicted in this movie, one in which they might have had to live a little less extravagantly, but that’s all.  But movie karma would not have been satisfied with that.  Ace had to be punished with nothing less than financial ruin and death for being a greedy oil man.  And that is in keeping with the melodramatic excess that infects the whole movie, as we have seen with Bud, Deanie, and Ginny.  It would be easy to imagine less drastic outcomes for them as well, for the simple reason that such outcomes would also be more realistic.

Well, Bud ends up married to Angie, a likable Italian girl.  They have a baby, and there is another on the way.  They are living on the ranch his father owned. (The ranch didn’t get destroyed by the stock market crash either.)  Deanie, who will soon be married to John, goes to visit Bud.  Angie is a little embarrassed by the way she is dressed, but after all, she is in the middle of doing housework and wasn’t expecting company.

Deanie, on the other hand, is rightfully embarrassed, realizing that she is overdressed.  We gather that she wanted to show Bud how well off she was by being smartly attired.  Of all the lessons of love that we learn along the way, overcoming this need to show those we once loved how happy we are without them is something of which very few of us are capable.

The title of this movie is from William Wordsworth’s “Ode:  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”  The relevant section is first cited by the teacher in Deanie’s English class, most of which is recalled by Deanie as she and her friends drive away from Bud’s ranch:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

              Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

              We will grieve not, rather find

              Strength in what remains behind….

I don’t get it.  With all the misery endured by Bud and Deanie while they were in high school, how those years can bring these lines to mind escapes me.  What “splendor in the grass”?  What “glory in the flower”?  If I were Deanie, I’d be relieved to know that I could finally put all that behind me.