Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Spotlight (2015)

At the beginning of Spotlight, we are told that the movie is based on true events. We might have suspected as much anyway since everyone in the movie seems to be white.  Fictional movies so lacking in ethnic diversity are now discouraged.  There are homosexuals in this movie, which would normally be a plus in favor of diversity, but they mostly turn out to be priests that molested young boys.  The whole point of diversity is to portray in a positive light those who belong to a group that has historically been discriminated against, so featuring homosexuality in this negative way in a work of fiction would defeat the whole purpose.  Given the requirements of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now in place, one wonders if this movie could have received the award for Best Picture were it made today.  The Academy also encourages representation of people with disabilities, but the closest this movie comes to that is when one of the child-molesting priests seems to be mentally impaired.  For example, he thinks it’s all right that he fooled around with boys because he never got any “gratification” out of it.  On the other hand, maybe the Academy would have made an exception for all this on account of its being a true story. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is sometimes politically incorrect as well.

Speaking of which, there are some movies that would be unbelievable if presented as fiction, but are accepted by the audience if informed at the beginning that the story is true.  In the case of Spotlight, however, the statement at the beginning that it is based on actual events has the additional function of making the movie morally permissible.  If it were not true that the Catholic Church was guilty of covering up hundreds of thousands of incidents of child molestation on the part of priests for decades, making a fictional movie depicting such events would have been unthinkable.

The movie sums things up nicely in the first few minutes.  The year is 1976. The place is a police station in Boston.  At the front desk, a young cop is learning how things work from an older cop.  It seems that Father Geoghan has been caught molesting a couple of boys.  The older cop says, “The mother’s bawling and the uncle’s pissed off.”  The mother is divorced with four kids, so Father Geoghan was “helping out,” the older cop says sarcastically. Later in the movie, we learn that priests often prey on boys from families where there is an absentee father.

In another room, the bishop emphasizes the good work the Church does for the community, assuring the mother, who is there with her brother and her two children, that Father Geoghan will be taken out of the parish.  The screenplay says she is fingering some rosary beads, but it is not obvious when watching the movie. Toward the end of the movie, however, we see a similar scene with a mother and her two sexually abused children, only this time we can see the rosary she is holding.

The Assistant District Attorney arrives, encouraging the older cop to keep the press from finding out what is going on, but this cop already knows the drill. When the young cop says that it will be hard to keep the press away from the arraignment, the older cop says with derision, “What arraignment?”

This scene captures the essence of the situation.  The State is in cooperation with the Church to keep the press from finding out, and to that end, the priest will be able to remain a priest, and there will be no charges filed against him.

The mother is devoutly religious, so in addition to the horror of finding out that her two boys have been molested, she must cope with the fact that it was a priest who was guilty of doing it.  In general, the need people have for religion is so strong that it is thought better to let priests keep molesting children rather than have the truth come out and shake people’s faith in God.

Later in the movie, the year now being 2001, one of the reporters for the Boston Globe, Eileen McNamara, has written an opinion piece on how Father Geoghan has by this time molested eighty kids in six different parishes over the last thirty years, something Cardinal Law knows all about. When it is noted that the Church dismissed the claims, Eileen remarks, “He said, she said.” Actually, it is more a matter of “Adult says, child says.”  And the sense we get repeatedly in this movie is that if women often have a hard time being believed when men abuse them, with children it is even more so.  In fact, it is not so much a case of their not being believed as it is that children don’t seem to matter that much.

The discussion about Eileen’s opinion piece is brought up on the day that the Boston Globe is welcoming a new editor, Marty Baron, played by Liev Schreiber.  He is especially interested in this story, but no one else at the meeting seems to care much.  In fact, prior to Marty’s arrival, the attitude at this newspaper seems to be that it is just a dog-bites-man story.  Priest molests child? Not news.  Child molests priest?  Now, that would be news.

There is an investigative team at the Boston Globe called “Spotlight,” consisting of Robby (Michael Keaton), Mike (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha (Rachel McAdams), and Matt (Brian d’Arcy James).  They report to Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery).  They were all raised Catholic, but they have lapsed or have drifted away from the Church for one reason or another.

Marty wants Spotlight to follow up on this story about Geoghan.  Here is another instance of something that would not likely have been in the movie were it not based on actual events.  Marty is a Jew.  Having a Jew attack the Catholic Church for protecting pedophile priests would have been inflammatory had the story not been true. If this movie were fiction, my guess is that Marty would have been a Protestant played by an African American.

There are two other aspects about Marty that make him a suspicious character. In a discussion Robby has with Jim Sullivan, an attorney for the Church, Jim asks if Marty has a family, and Robby answers that he does not. Jim then asks if Marty is divorced.  Again, the answer is No. Notwithstanding the fact that the Catholic Church regards divorce as a sin, Jim would have felt better if Marty were at least divorced because a lot of people don’t trust bachelors.  Unless they are priests, of course.  Also, Marty doesn’t care about baseball.  Of all things!  Jim can’t believe this guy is the new editor of the Boston Globe.

An attorney that has been representing the victims of Father Geoghan, Mitchell Garabedian, says that it takes an outsider like a Jew to take on the Church.  That makes sense.  Still, were this movie fiction, someone like Morgan Freeman would have been outsider enough, as well as satisfying the need for diversity without risking a charge of antisemitism.

By the way, I said that everyone in this movie seemed to be white, but Garabedian says he is also an outsider since he is Armenian, which would make him Asian.  I guess in real life, he was.  But he is played by Stanley Tucci, who is of Italian descent.  That would never be allowed today.  Those that made this movie would have had to go out and find an actual Armenian to play this part.

Garabedian is exceptional among lawyers, most of whom deal directly with the Church for some easy money, taking a third of the maximum settlement allowed by law for a suit against a charitable organization, $20,000 to be exact. Instead, Garabedian insists on taking these cases to court.  As a result, he has been threatened with disbarment three times.  Noting how widespread the corruption is regarding these cases, he says to Mike, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

In the end, the Boston Globe finally publishes a series of stories revealing the many priests in Boston that have molested children and the coverup going all the way up to Cardinal Law.  But this turns out to be just the beginning, for the epilogue lists places all over the United States and the rest of the world where the Church has also sinned by protecting priests rather than children.

Hopefully, this will be the last time we have to deal with a major conspiracy to protect pedophiles.

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Men have been marrying older women since Oedipus married Jocasta.  Of course, when Oedipus discovered that Jocasta was actually his mother, he blinded himself, and she committed suicide.  So, that didn’t work out too well.

But suppose she had not turned out to be his mother.  Could their marriage have been a happy one? There are two problems confronting a couple in which the woman is older than the man.  The first concerns how the man and woman will feel about each other as the years go by.  The second concerns the approval or disapproval of society.  At first, the man and woman may think that only the first consideration is relevant, taking the attitude that that they aren’t hurting anyone, and that it’s nobody’s business but their own.  They may soon learn just how wrong they are, however, that happiness often depends on having the approval of society, as unfair as that might seem.

A lot of people do in fact disapprove of a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman. At the same time, those who do disapprove realize that, indeed, it’s none of their business. After all, there is nothing immoral about such a relationship.  Rather, it is unaesthetic, as it is when the woman is taller than the man.  People just don’t like the look of it.

Because people feel like busybodies in objecting to the woman’s being older than the man, they may look around for other reasons to supplement their disapproval.  For example, French President Emmanuel Macron seems to be happily married to his wife Brigitte, who is 24 years older than he is. There is a conspiracy theory embraced by Candace Owens to the effect that Brigitte is actually a transgender woman.  Of all the wives of politicians that she might have imputed this to, why was Brigitte singled out for such calumny?  No doubt Candace Owens and others feel themselves to be on firmer ground in objecting to the marriage of the Macrons if Brigitte is also transgender.

Movies are good indication of what people approve or disapprove of, and in most movies about a young man having sex with an older woman, things do not work out well for them.  Classics such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Graduate (1967) readily come to mind.  In other words, such movies act as a morality tale, saying, “See what misery comes to a man if he has sex with an older woman!”

Of course, in some movies, it is the woman who comes to grief.  In Dodsworth (1936), the movie based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is married to Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston).  While they are in Europe, she has an affair with Kurt von Obersdorf, who is younger than she is.  She intends to divorce Sam and marry Kurt, but Kurt’s mother, Baroness von Obersdorf (Maria Ouspenskaya), disapproves:  first, because Fran would be a divorced woman, while Kurt and the Baroness are Catholics; second, because Fran is 42, too old to bear Kurt’s heirs.  As an added consideration, the Baroness says to Fran, “Have you thought how little happiness there can be for the old wife of a young husband?”

This remark is especially painful for Fran, desperately afraid of becoming old. She has been lying about her age, saying she has just turned 35, and concealing the fact that she has recently become a grandmother.  Although Fran is the villain of the piece, and we are glad when Sam leaves her at the end of the movie, we nevertheless feel sorry for her.

Neither the movie nor the novel tells us how old Kurt is, but if we may infer the ages of Fran and Kurt from the actors who played them, then Fran is 8 years older than Kurt.  By itself, that might not seem worth worrying about. Perhaps that is why, in writing this story, Sinclair Lewis made religious and fertility considerations be the main objections to the marriage.  As noted above, a lot of people object to the idea of a man marrying an older woman, but they sense that it is none of their business.  So, they need other reasons to justify their disapproval, and Sinclair Lewis has helpfully provided them.

The movie with the greatest disparity between ages, and one in which the relationship is a happy one, is Harold and Maude (1971).  In this quirky comedy, Harold (Bud Cort) is 20, and Maude (Ruth Gordon) is 79. They become lovers.  In the end, Maude commits suicide, not because she is unhappy, but because she has had a good life and decides to avoid a miserable end by finishing it on her own terms.

In none of these movies do the couples get married.  Whether a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman ends happily or not, in most movies of this sort, they do not get married. Society is more tolerant of the age difference if the relationship is a brief affair rather than one resulting in marriage.  For that reason, there are more movies of the former sort than the latter.

One movie in which we know the couple will end up getting married is All That Heaven Allows (1955). Jane Wyman stars as Cary Scott, a widow with two grown children.  When Wyman made this movie, she was 38 years old.  At the beginning of the movie, Cary’s friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead) stops by her house to return some dishes she borrowed.  She mentions in passing that she has to find a date for some last-minute weekend guest for her party that night. Cary says, “A Date?” showing an interest.

Sara dismisses the idea that it might be Cary, saying, “Look, he’s 40, which means he’ll consider any female over 18 too old.”  Instead, Sara suggests that she come to the party with Harvey, the only bachelor around that she thinks is suitable for Cary.  Harvey is played by Conrad Nagel, an actor who was 58 at the time this movie was made.  Sara says she’ll call Harvey and have him pick her up.

That night, Cary’s two children, Ned and Kay, arrive home from college.  They don’t think Cary should have sex at all.  Kay sums up why Harvey is just right for her:

I like Harvey. He’s pleasant, amusing, and he acts his age. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s an old goat. As Freud says, when we reach a certain age, sex becomes incongruous. I think Harvey understands that.

However, Kay has no objection to the fact that Cary looks attractive in the red dress she is wearing for the party:

It’s about time you wore something besides that old black velvet…. Personally, I never subscribed to that old Egyptian custom…of walling up the widow alive in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with his other possessions, the theory being that she was a possession too. The community saw to it. Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore.

“Doesn’t it?” Cary responds dryly.  “Well, perhaps not in Egypt.”

That goes right over Kay’s head.

When Ned sees Cary’s red dress, he is disconcerted, saying it is lowcut and that he hopes it doesn’t scare Harvey off.  When he goes to answer the door, Kay continues with her psychoanalytic observations, saying of Ned:  “A typical Oedipus reaction….  A son subconsciously resents his mother being attractive to other men. We call it an Oedipus complex.”

The party is not much fun for Cary.  First, she gets a backhanded compliment from a “friend,” who says, “It’s indecent to have two grown children and look as young as you do, attracting attention, isn’t it?”

Later, a married man makes a crude move on Cary, saying they could meet in New York and have sex on the sly.  Finally, when Harvey brings her home, he proposes marriage, indicating that it is only companionship and affection that he has in mind.  Cary rejects both the proposal and the proposition.

Cary’s gardener is Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson).  When Hudson made this movie, he was 30 years old. So, she is 8 years older than he is.  This was thought to be enough of an age difference to be problematic in Dodsworth, and it is enough to cause a problem here too.

They are attracted to each other and gradually start getting to know each other on a more personal basis. He invites her to meet some friends of his, Mick and Alida, who live out in the woods.  These friends are very different from those she is used to, the ones at Sara’s party.  They are warm and genuine.  In other words, there is not one society whose approval or disapproval will be important, but two:  Cary’s society, which will disapprove of her romance with Ron, and Ron’s society, which does approve.  That will make things easier for her in the end.

Cary sees a copy of Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.  Guess which line she just happens to come across.  That’s right, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  She continues without turning a page:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises…? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The line about “quiet desperation” is in the first few pages of the book, while the quotation above is at the end, in the conclusion, but this is a movie, so we have to make allowances.

Anyway, these lines are suggesting that one should live the life one thinks is right, regardless of the opinions of others.  At the same time, the opinions of those in Ron’s society are not judgmental. They will not disapprove of the age difference between him and Cary.  It’s nice when you can step to the music you hear while those around you like the same music.

Alida says that Walden is Mick’s bible.  When asked about Ron, she says that she doesn’t think Ron has ever read it.  He doesn’t have to.  “He just lives it.”  And, indeed, he always has a look on his face that bespeaks of spiritual wisdom.

At the party being thrown by Mick and Alida, all their friends seem to have something to do with nature:  beekeeping, birdwatching, etc.  In contrast to this, Sara insists that what Cary needs is a television, so that she will have something to do.  Presumably, we are supposed to think of television as being artificial.  But then, so is the movie we are watching.

When those in Cary’s society learn that Ron and Cary intend to marry, they are scandalized, her children most of all.  The essential objection is the fact that Cary is older than Ron.  At the same time, because age difference alone might not seem to be enough, a class difference was added to the story to give some additional justification for the disapproval of their marriage.  And as noted above, people will sometimes make up stuff to justify their disapproval, for which reason people start spreading a rumor that Cary and Ron were having an affair while her husband was still alive.

To keep from alienating her children, Cary breaks off her engagement to Ron.  But then she finds out she won’t be seeing all that much of her children anymore, for Kay is getting married, and Ned will be spending the next year in Paris.  Ned says that since he and Kay will no longer be living at home, she might as well sell the house.  However, Ned bought her a television for Christmas. After it is placed in the middle of the room, we see Cary reflected in the screen, which means her life will now be as artificial as the shows that she can watch on that television set.

Cary realizes she made a mistake.  She drives over to his Ron’s house to talk to him.  Ron, who has been hunting pheasants, sees her from up on a cliff.  He tries to get her attention, but he slips and falls a great distance, rendering him unconscious from a concussion.  There is some concern about his condition. Cary sits by his side all night.  In the morning, he opens his eyes and sees her, saying, “You’ve come home.”

Cary replies, “Yes, darling.  I’ve come home.”

I have read that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder, is not exactly a remake of All That Heaven Allows, but rather is an “update” or an “homage” to that movie, which was directed by Douglas Sirk, whom Fassbinder admired.  On my own, that the one was inspired by the other would never have occurred to me.  Although Sirk was a German immigrant, his melodramas are Hollywood all the way.  Fassbinder, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Germany, and in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, his version of this story is quite the other thing.

The movie is set in Germany.  Emmi, a German woman who appears to be in her sixties, stops in an Arab bar to get out of the rain. She meets Ali, who is from Morocco. If we may infer from the ages of the actors, Emmi is 26 years older than Ali.  One thing leads to another, and he ends up spending the night with her.

In addition to an age difference much greater than the 8 years in All That Heaven Allows, the added factors that also lead to society’s disapproval are equally excessive.  First, Emmi and Ali are a mixed-race couple.  It is no longer considered politically correct to say there is such a thing as race, but when this movie was made, people would have said that Emmi was a Caucasian and Ali was a Semite.  And just as people are more likely to disapprove of an age difference when it is the woman that is older than the man, so too are they more likely to disapprove of a mixed-race couple if it is the woman that is white. And though religion never comes up, we suspect that she is Christian and he is Muslim.

As the bartender says of their relationship, thinking it will be just a passing thing, “Of course it won’t last. So what?” But this movie manages to get them married anyway through a contrivance that strains our credulity.

The rudeness and bigotry they experience from almost everyone is over the top, with people calling Emmi a whore and ostracizing her.  Whereas Cary’s son bought her a television in All That Heaven Allows, Emmi’s son kicks in her television set.

In All That Heaven Allows, Ron and Cary knew they were right for each other, and it was only the disapproval of Cary’s society and her children that was a problem; in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, both Emmi’s society and Ali’s society disapprove of the marriage, and Emmi and Ali themselves begin to have misgivings about what they have done.  Ali becomes sullen, cheats on her, and seems to be ashamed of her. And Emmi begins to exhibit prejudice against foreigners: she tells him to carry stuff down to the cellar, as if he were the hired help; she refuses to cook him couscous, saying he should get used to eating German food; and she and her friends talk about him while he is standing in the same room, discussing how clean he is.

As we wonder how all this is going to work out between them, Ali collapses on the dance floor from a perforated ulcer, brought on by stress.  But was he not stepping to the music he heard?  Try to imagine Ron Kirby having a stress-induced ulcer in All That Heaven Allows.  

In the final scene of the movie, Ali is unconscious in a hospital bed.  Now, it would have been no trouble to add a scene in which Ali regains consciousness after a successful surgery, with Emmi sitting by his side.  Instead, it’s an unpleasant ending to an unpleasant movie.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that Fassbinder didn’t approve of their relationship either.

Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

Cast a Dark Shadow begins with a man and a woman in a car ride at an amusement park. They go through a dark interior where scary demons appear to jump up at them, the sort of ride a romantic couple might enjoy.  The woman, whose name is Moni, short for “Monica,” is played by Mona Washbourne, who was 52 years old when this movie was made.  She seems to be having a good time. The man sitting next to her, whose name is Edward, is played by Dirk Bogarde, who was 34 years old when this movie was made.  He is looking at Moni, and his face is the scariest face in the entire ride.  Not content to be subtle, however, the director had Edward’s eyes show demonic points of light when the car moves into darkness, which takes this movie into the realm of camp.

After the ride, they go to have tea at their favorite seaside resort.  While they are seated at a table, we learn that they have been married for a year now, and this is sort of their second honeymoon, which they have been spending in Moni’s bungalow, a little home away from home.  In fact, the real reason for their vacation is so that Moni could get over the flu. Here in America, when we have the flu, we just stay where we are, but this movie is set in England, and they do things differently over there.

After the waitress puts the tea on the table, indicating that they will have to pour it themselves, Edward asks Moni, “Who’s it going to be, Mother?”  Given that Moni is old enough to be his mother, I thought this implied something oedipal regarding their marriage.  However, I have since found out that the one who pours the tea in England is to be referred to as Mother.  So, for any American woman reading this, if you go on a date with a man who is from England, and he asks if you would like to be Mother, as long as tea is being served you have nothing to worry about.

Now that Moni is over the flu, she feels well enough to return to her home, which is a mansion.  When they arrive, Moni’s lawyer, Phillip, is already there, waiting to speak to her.  When Moni and Phillip are alone in the living room, we find out about the will she made right after her marriage.  As Phillip sums it up, with a severe look on his face, “Your husband gets this house, and your money goes back where it belongs, back to the family.”  We don’t entertain notions like that here in America, where we would think it only natural that a wife would leave everything to her husband and vice versa, but as noted above, they do things differently in England.

In any event, the only “family” Moni has, in the British sense of the word, which apparently excludes husbands, is her sister Dora, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years, and who is quite wealthy.  As Moni puts it, “Her husband left her an enormous fortune.”  I guess he didn’t have his money “go back to the family where it belongs,” but maybe it’s different for husbands in England.

Anyway, after the flu she had, Moni decided that if something happened to her, Edward should get all her money, and she wants a new will to reflect that. When Edward hears about this new will, he gets the wrong impression, thinking that Moni intends to leave everything to her sister Dora while leaving nothing to him.

So, there’s only one thing for him to do:  kill her before she signs the new will. Some people think that Edward intended to murder her all along, only now he must do so immediately.  I think he was merely waiting for her to die of natural causes, and it is only now, in apprehension about this will, that his thoughts turn to murder.

If we may allow an inference from the ages of the actors to the ages of the characters they are playing, we note that Mona Washbourne lived another 33 years after she made this movie, dying at the age of 85, when Dirk Bogarde was 67.  So, let this be a word of warning to any would-be fortune hunter that might be reading this.  If you marry a rich, older woman, then unless you are planning on murder, you may be collecting Social Security before you can get your hands on her money.

Edward makes it appear that Moni passed out drunk while trying to light the gas fireplace and died from inhaling the gas.  Then he finds out about the will she would have signed, that would have left him everything, but now he is stuck with only the house, the bungalow, and Emmie, the maid. Looks like his fortune-hunting days are not over just yet. Meanwhile, Edward keeps going over to what was Moni’s favorite chair, rocking it gently, while addressing her by way of apostrophe, affectionately telling her his thoughts and feelings.

He returns to the bungalow near the seaside resort where the movie began.  It is at the resort that he meets Freda (Margaret Lockwood).  Her Cockney accent indicates that she is working class. In fact, she used to be a barmaid at the very restaurant they are in.  She married the owner and then sold it after he died, leaving her with enough money so she never has to work again. I guess his money did not “go back to the family where it belongs” either.

At one point, after Edward and Freda have been dancing a while, she asks to sit down because her feet hurt.  And just to make sure we get the point, we later see a closeup of her foot going back into her shoe before they get up from the table to dance again.  As Marilyn Monroe said in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), a lady never admits that her feet hurt, the reason being that a man likes to look at a woman and enjoy the vision of her physical beauty unsullied by any thought of pain or discomfort on her part.   So, her lack of consideration for Edward’s feelings in this regard is one more indication of the kind of woman she is.  However, it is a good thing that she is a tough broad if she is going to get involved with Edward.  She has already had trouble with fortune hunters since becoming a widow, so when Edward broaches the subject of marriage, she says it will have to be “pound for pound.”

After they arrive at what is now Edward’s house for Freda’s inspection, Emmie brings in tea.  Edward asks Freda if she would like to be Mother.  Now wait just a minute.  I was willing to overlook this the first time as some queer British expression, but the screenwriter has worked it into the script twice, so he must have done so for its oedipal connotations.  And while I’m on the subject, that nickname “Moni” sounds a lot like “Mommy.”  Margaret Lockwood was only five years older than Dirk Bogarde when she made this movie, but maybe that’s supposed to be older enough for this purpose.

Anyway, they do get married.  Freda discovers that the door to one room is locked.  She tells Emmie to open it.  Emmie is afraid to, saying that Edward “will go raving mad.”  Freda orders her to open it nevertheless, saying, “Well, anyone would think it’s Bluebeard’s chamber,” not realizing how close to the truth that is.

Edward shows up and is furious, saying, “This is Moni’s room!”  Freda regards the whole business as peculiar but not worth fighting about.  The next day Edward apologizes, but then adds that he hasn’t been sleeping well, feeling shut in, which makes him irritable.  He says he wants to sleep in Moni’s room for a while.  His desire to do so is not because he wants to have an entire bed to himself with undisturbed slumber.  Rather, it is another indication of just how much he still loves the woman he murdered.  Freda is not amused, saying, “Listen Ed.  I don’t know what your arrangement was with Moni, but I didn’t marry you for companionship.”

I once read that upper-class married couples have separate bedrooms and go on separate vacations. After all, there is such a thing as too much togetherness.  However, Freda is working class, and she naturally thinks a married couple should sleep in the same bed.  Furthermore, it struck me that she did not say, “I didn’t marry you only for companionship.”  Rather, she seems to indicate that his companionship is of no interest to her at all.  She married him for sex.  Today, any woman with that attitude would simply have sex with men and not bother to marry them.  But this movie was made before the sexual revolution, so it may be that in those days, marriage for some people was just a license to have sex.

In fact, as the movie progresses, we gather that she really doesn’t like Edward. For example, when Edward tries to get Freda to spend some of her money on one of his investment ideas, she puts him straight, saying, “What sort of fool do you take me for, Ed?”  She tells him he can spend his own money if he likes, but he is not getting any of hers.  He becomes so angry that he starts to hit her, at which point she threatens to hit him right back.  Later on, Edward rocks Moni’s chair, saying, “You wouldn’t have liked this one, Moni.  She’s crude.”

Freda eventually finds out that Edward doesn’t have any money of his own, that he married her for her money.  Nevertheless, she admits that she still loves him.  Boy, the sex must really be good!

About this time, Charlotte, another rich woman, enters the movie, and Edward figures he might do better with her.  But first he will have to murder Freda.  While he is working on that plan, however, he comes to the realization that Charlotte is really Dora, Moni’s sister, who has returned from Jamaica to find out what really happen to Moni.  Edward decides to murder her instead, thereby inheriting her money as well as that which she inherited from Moni.  Now, given the way things are done in England, according to Phillip anyway, Dora’s money should “go back to the family, where it belongs.”  But since there would be no more family, I guess Edward, as her brother-in-law, would get it by default.

But the entire scheme falls apart when Freda, Dora, and Phillip find out that Edward murdered Moni.  When Edward realizes that he will go to prison, he starts blubbering.  Freda takes him in her arms and comforts him.  Presumably, she likes him even less now that she knows the truth, but she still loves him, or whatever you want to call it.  Nevertheless, he must get away, so he runs outside and jumps in Phillip’s car and drives off.

Have you ever noticed how many times in the movies someone will get in a car that is not his and be able to drive it away because the owner apparently left the key in the ignition?

Anyway, he finds his exit from the driveway is blocked by another car.  No problem.  The owner of that car also left the key in the ignition too, so he gets in it and drives away. Unfortunately, the car belongs to Dora, the one he snipped the brake line on as part of his plan to kill her.  Unaware of this, he drives away, saying, “I’ve done it, Moni.  I’ve done it.”  And then, just as he realizes that he is in Dora’s car, the brakes give way, and he plunges off the cliff.

And now I have to wonder.  Will Freda inherit Edward’s house, or will it go to Dora, which is to say, back to the family where it belongs?

Gone with the Wind (the Novel and the Movie)

One of the paradoxes about the movie Gone with the Wind, as well as the book on which it is based, is that, politically speaking, though reviled by many on the left, yet there is much in it that they might otherwise find congenial to their way of thinking.

First, it is feminist. Its protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), who starts out as just another Southern Belle, but who rises to meet the horrors of war, lives up to her vow, “I’ll never be hungry again,” and who then manages to “beat the Yankees at their own game” during Reconstruction.

At one point in the novel, she realizes that the male-dominated world she had grown up in was based on a lie:

A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.  Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true, but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind.  Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words.  She sat quite still, with the heavy book across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise, thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came.  Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.

Second, it is secular.  In the novel, it is said of Scarlett that “religion went no more than lip deep with her.” Reflecting on the hardships forced upon her and her family after her return to Tara, she gives up on religion altogether, irritated whenever she sees her sister Carreen praying:

If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers. Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.  She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.  God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.

Third, it is anti-war.  When the movie begins, the Tarleton twins are heartbroken when Scarlett tells them there isn’t going to be any war.  The next day, at the barbeque, the men are talking about how they will defeat the North in the war that is now inevitable, that the Yankees will turn and run after only one battle, because gentlemen always fight better than rabble.  In the movie, only Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) are opposed to the war:  the former saying, “Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars, and when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about”; the latter noting sarcastically that it is hard to win a war with words, that with its industrial might, the North will be able to overwhelm the South.  In the novel, an old man, Mr. McRae, who is hard of hearing, becomes furious when he is told what the others in the room are arguing about:

“War, is it?” he cried, fumbling about him for his cane and heaving himself out of his chair with more energy than he had shown in years.  “I’ll tell ‘um about war.  I’ve been there.”  It was not often that Mr. McRae had the opportunity to talk about war, the way his women folks shushed him.

He stumped rapidly to the group, waving his cane and shouting and, because he could not hear the voices about him, he soon had undisputed possession of the field.

“You fire-eating young bucks, listen to me.  You don’t want to fight.  I fought and I know.  Went out in the Seminole War and was a big enough fool to go to the Mexican War, too.  You all don’t know what war is.  You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having the girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero.  Well, it ain’t.  No, sir! It’s going hungry, and getting the measles and pneumonia from sleeping in the wet. And if it ain’t measles and pneumonia, it’s your bowels.  Yes sir, what war does to a man’s bowels—dysentery and things like that—‘

Shortly thereafter, word comes that war has been declared, and the young, Southern boys are ecstatic, giving the Rebel Yell while firing their revolvers.

Little by little, we begin to see the miseries of war of which Ashley and Mr. McRae spoke. Scarlett’s first husband, Charles Hamilton, dies ignobly of dysentery.  Both of the Tarleton twins are killed.  Later, we see a nurse writing down the last words of a dying soldier in a letter to his mother, saying, “I’ll never see you or Pa again.”  Dr. Meade tells a soldier that his leg is gangrenous and will have to come off, even though they are out of chloroform. Finally, when Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) is about to have her baby, Scarlett goes to get Dr. Meade down by the railroad, where countless men are lying side by side, beyond all consideration of triage, dying from their wounds.  As the camera pulls back, we see the tattered Confederate flag in the foreground.

But for all that, the movie’s attitude toward slavery makes it irredeemably offensive to many of those on the left, owing to its “Southern point of view.” By that expression, I do not mean it is the attitude of everyone who lives in the South, nor restricted to those that do. Rather, it is meant to refer to those who believe that slavery was a benign institution, and who are still sympathetic with the Antebellum South. There is no better expression of this attitude than that of the prologue:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave.  Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

The inclusion of the phrase “Master and Slave” in all this implies that this way of life did not just happen to involve slavery, but rather that slavery was essential to it, a necessary complement to a way of life that was noble and fine, as opposed the egalitarian North, which was vulgar and crass.

In Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks:  An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, he discusses the five principal categories of black characters in old movies.  Gone with the Wind, the movie, has four of those five.  The Mammy is, of course, Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel. The very word suggests that she was like a second mother to the girls growing up on the O’Hara plantation.

The Buck, a big, muscular black man, is Big Sam (Everett Brown).  When he rescues Scarlett from two assailants as she crosses the bridge near Shantytown, his heroic action exemplifies the bond of affection that had existed between master and slave.  Just before that happens, we see him in in Shantytown, where it is obvious that his freedom has not made him happy. After the rescue, Scarlett’s husband, Frank Kennedy, gives Big Sam money to get back to Tara, knowing that he will otherwise be arrested.  Tara is where Big Sam had been a slave, and he is happy to return there, just as he would be happy to be a slave once more.

As an aside, Roger Ebert once said that In the Heat of the Night (1967) was the first movie in which we see a black man strike a white man.  He clearly had forgotten about Gone with the Wind.  Not only do we see Big Sam hit a white man with his fist, but he is never punished for doing so either.

The Tom, as in Uncle Tom, a black man that is loyal to his white masters, is Pork (Oscar Polk).  He is content being a slave.

Finally, the Coon, a black person who is funny on account of being simpleminded, is Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), who needs to be under the protection of her white masters.  At one point in the movie, we see Prissy walking down the street, in no hurry to get anywhere, singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” in particular, the part of the song that commiserates with the hard life of a darky:  “A few more days for to tote the weary load….”  The joke is that Prissy has never had to work a hard day in her life.

The Coon, by the way, was the preferred type during the Jim Crow South.  In a book on sociology that I read once, it commented on the fact that a lot of people believe that when a black man was lynched, it was because he had raped a white woman.  Far less serious reasons were often given by those who participated in these lynchings, however, one of which was that the black man “wasn’t funny enough.”

At one point in the movie, Melanie is expecting a baby.  Prissy assures Scarlett that she knows what needs to be done to deliver a baby.  But when the moment arrives, and Dr. Meade is too busy taking care of wounded soldiers to attend to Melanie, Prissy admits that she lied, that she doesn’t know anything about “birthin’ babies.”  Scarlett becomes so angry that she slaps her.  This is what passes for slave-beating in Gone with the Wind.

Scarlett takes over from Frank the running of the lumbermill, which employs prisoners, who are mistreated by Johnny Gallagher, whom Scarlett employs as a foreman.  When Ashley complains about using enforced labor, Scarlett points out his hypocrisy, noting that he didn’t seem to mind owning black slaves.  He replies, “That was different.  We didn’t treat them that way. Besides, I’d have freed them all when father died, if the war hadn’t already freed them.”  In other words, for those who might still object to slavery in any form, even if only as a benign institution, the movie lets us know that slavery would have eventually been phased out by the more enlightened Southerners themselves, that the War of Northern Aggression was unnecessary.

Scarlett eventually marries Rhett.  Thanks to his wealth, they are able to move into a mansion, and she brings Mammy, Pork, and Prissy to live with them as servants. The fact that they gladly do so indicates that they will be just as happy being servants as they were being slaves.

If the movie whitewashes slavery in the Old South, it also softens much of the material in the novel. To put it differently, if the movie had been more faithful to the novel, the audiences would have seen a darker version, one that might have been acceptable to some white folks in the South, but which would have been disturbing to many others.  In these differences between the movie and the novel, however, it is the novel that is more realistic.

For example, of the five types of black characters mentioned in Bogle’s book, only the Mulatto is absent in the movie.  In the novel, Dilcey does not really count as a mulatta because, while one of her parents was black, the other was an Indian.  She is married to Pork, and Prissy is their daughter. Mulattoes are problematic because by their very existence they imply that a white man had sex with a black woman, or that a black man had sex with a white woman, neither possibility being compatible with what is acceptable in the idealized version of the Old South.  At least, it would not be acceptable if the white parent were a Southerner.  On the other hand, mulattoes are perfect for besmirching the Yankees.  In The Birth of a Nation (1915), there are two villains in that movie, both mulattoes:  one is a woman, who is living up north as the mistress of a senator; the other is a man, who has moved down south as a carpetbagger and has become a powerful leader of the recently freed black population.  In Gone with the Wind, the novel, there is much talk about all the “yellow babies” that have been showing up ever since the Yankees arrived, both during and after the war. The existence of mulattoes is completely avoided in the movie so as to avoid the uncomfortable idea of miscegenation.

In the movie, after Scarlett is attacked on the bridge, Frank and Ashley get together with some other men and burn down Shantytown.  There is no explicit reference to the Ku Klux Klan, and we certainly don’t see them wearing sheets.  In the novel, however, Frank and Ashley are members of the Klan, which finds the men that attacked Scarlett and kills them.

Of all the ways in which the movie softened much of what went on in the novel, there is one that stands out from the rest.  In the movie, Rhett is placed under arrest because the Yankees believe that he has made off with the Confederate Treasury, which is plausible, since he did a lot of blockade-running, for which he received payment in gold.  Eventually, the Yankees let him go, presumably because he purposely lost when playing cards with the officers, and they wanted him to be able to pay his debts to them.

In the novel, he is still suspected of possessing Confederate gold, but the charge brought against Rhett was that of killing a black man.  He gets himself released by a government official with whom he had corrupt business dealings during the war. Scarlett says she would take an oath that he wasn’t innocent. Rhett replies:  “No, now that I am free of the toils, I’ll frankly admit that I’m as guilty as Cain.  I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”

Not even in The Birth of a Nation could I have imagined a line like that.

And Then There Were None (The Novel and the Adaptations)

The Novel

The original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was Ten Little Niggers.  Apparently, there was nothing thought to be problematic about that title when the book was first published in England in 1939, but by 1940, the title was changed for American editions to And Then There Were None, the last line of the nursery rhyme to which the original title referred.

Now, it was easy enough to change the title of the book, but there remained the problem of that nursery rhyme, which plays an essential role in the story, wherein each of the “ten little niggers” is killed off one by one.  For that purpose, the word “Indian” was substituted.  That worked out so well that some reprints in America use the title Ten Little Indians.  Both substitutes for the original title can also be found for the titles of the movies that have adapted this story.

However, the British were comfortable with the original title, and so it was used in the United Kingdom until 1985.  Because Agatha Christie was herself British, and because the British often used the word “niggers” to refer to the dark-skinned people of India, that led me to wonder if the word “Indians” was recommended as a substitute with the people of India in mind.  Over here in America, we didn’t readily make that association, so we imagined it was American Indians being referred to. But I’m just guessing.

However, the word “Indian” is no longer politically correct when referring to the indigenous people of America, so the title might have become Ten Little Native Americans, except for two problems:  first, the word “little” is somewhat demeaning when used to refer to any ethnic group; second, it wouldn’t work for the poem, the meter being all wrong, as in “Ten little Native Americans went out to dine.” For that matter, “Ten little African Americans went out to dine” wouldn’t work either.  And so it is that the term “soldier boys” made its way into later editions.  However, Ten Little Soldier Boys sounds silly, so the title And Then There Were None was resurrected.  The words “little” and “boys” seems to be acceptable when connected with soldiers, but Ten Little Black Boys would not have been a good way to update the original title.  The story takes place on an island, and the name of that island underwent corresponding changes for similar reasons. Sanitizing a novel is not easy.  In discussing the novel and its adaptations generally, I shall use the word “Indian.”

But there is still more work to be done, and that concerns the antisemitism in the novel.  Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune, refers to Morris, the man who talked him into going to Indian Island, as a “little Jew” or a “Jew boy.”  Christie herself refers to the “thick Semitic lips of Mr. Morris.”  It is my understanding, however, that many of her novels are presently being sanitized to eliminate the antisemitism as well.

The basic story in the novel is as follows.  Ten people have (supposedly) been invited to Indian Island under false pretenses by a Mr. U.N. Owen.  In each person’s room, hanging on the wall, there is a copy of “Ten Little Indians.”  On a table in the dining room, there are ten figurines representing the ten Indians. On a record that is played for them, which has the title “Swan Song,” they are all accused of murder. One by one, each person is (supposedly) killed as punishment for his or her crime and in a manner corresponding to the poem.  Along the way, they realize that “Mr. U.N. Owen” stands for “Mr. Unknown.” As each person is executed, one of the figurines disappears.

Of special interest are Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne.  Lombard was a mercenary who abandoned twenty-one natives in East Africa, leaving them without food, resulting in their deaths. As for Vera, she drowned Cyril, a child that was in her care as governess, so that Hugo, the man she loved, would inherit his aunt’s fortune rather than Cyril.  Hugo had told Vera that he could not afford to marry her because he hadn’t a penny to his name.  (Presumably, it was out of the question that he should go out and get himself a job.)  But, he continued, if only Cyril had been born a girl, he would inherit his aunt’s fortune instead.  (It’s that strange British law about inheritance again, like the one we encountered in Pride and Prejudice.)  Had that happened, Hugo says, he and Vera would have been able to marry.  But after Vera allows Cyril to drown, Hugo suspects her of murder and wants nothing to do with her.  Some readers believe that Hugo was hinting to Vera that he wanted Cyril to die, but once she allowed the boy to drown, Hugo didn’t need her anymore.

Eventually, Lombard and Vera conclude that the so-called Mr. Owen must be Dr. Armstrong, the only one left alive besides the two of them, or so they think. When they discover Armstrong’s body lying dead on the beach, Vera decides that Lombard must be Mr. Owen, and she shoots him with his own revolver. When she returns to the house, she sees a noose waiting for her, suspended from the ceiling. She is so depressed and guilt-ridden that she sticks her head in it and hangs herself.

A man eventually shows up at the island on account of some S.O.S signals that had been sent, and he discovers that all ten people are dead.  Some of those people kept a diary or made notes of the events that took place, but Scotland Yard cannot figure out what happened.  One day, a bottle floating in the sea is picked up by a fishing trawler.  It has the solution to the mystery enclosed within, written by Judge Wargrave, one of the guests on the island. He admits to killing the other nine guests, while faking his own death along the way with the assistance of Dr. Armstrong, whom he fooled into trusting him.  In fact, he also faked his own guilt, for the man he sentenced to death was guilty and deserving of such punishment.  Wargrave’s motive was to see to it that the other nine people got the punishment they deserved, whose secrets he had been slowly learning about over the years. Then, after the other nine had all been killed, he committed suicide in a way that made it appear that he had been murdered too.  He had already been advised by a doctor that he did not have long to live, and rather than suffer a slow and protracted death, he decided to go out in a “blaze of excitement,” and in so doing, to express himself as an artist of crime.

Of course, the person really who really was the artist of crime was Agatha Christie herself.  There have been more adaptations of this novel than any other she had written, and possibly more than any than that of any mystery written by any author.  The paradox regarding its popularity lies in the fact that the whole thing is preposterous.  That all these people could be brought together in the same place and at the same time is enough of a stretch.  That being done, Judge Wargrave had to kill each one of them without anyone else seeing him do it, in the manner dictated by the poem, and in the proper order.  Finally, he had to fake his suicide to make it look like he had been murdered by whoever Mr. Owen was.

So, why is this story so popular?  Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “icebox scene” to refer to any scene in a movie that does not make sense but will not be noticed by someone watching the movie until much later, after he has left the theater, returned home, and is getting something to eat out of the icebox before going to bed.  However, by then it doesn’t matter because he has already enjoyed the movie.  This novel by Agatha Christie doesn’t merely have an icebox scene. Rather, the entire story is one big icebox scene.  By the time we realize that no one could possibly arrange things in the novel the way Judge Wargrave did, it is too late.  We have already enjoyed it.

The Adaptations

With all the adaptations that have been made of this novel, we naturally expect them to differ from one another in a variety of ways, most of them minor.  There is one major difference, however. First, there are the adaptations that follow the story in the novel.  Second, there are the adaptations in which Lombard and Vera are innocent of the crimes charged against them and are still alive at the end. Judge Wargrave realizes this right after drinking some poison, and he dies knowing that he has been foiled. Lombard and Vera are a heterosexual couple that have formed a romantic relationship and thus satisfy the common formula for a happy ending.  Both alternative endings have appeared in plays, but I’ll stick with the movies.

The Happy-Ending Adaptations

While there are many happy-ending adaptations, I shall limit myself to just two, the best of the lot, the others being inferior and derivative.

1945.  The first adaptation is And There Were None, produced in 1945.  The tone is lighthearted, as one can immediately tell from the background music. There is a lot of silliness, including some regrettable drunk humor.  In keeping with all this, it is not surprising that Barry Fitzgerald plays the role of Judge Wargrave, for he tends to play cute.  Actually, someone decided to give this character a different name in this movie just because he could, but I’ll refer to him by his book name.

In this movie, Judge Wargrave is actually guilty of what was charged against him on the record:  he knowingly sentenced an innocent man to death. Instead, it is Lombard and Vera who are innocent. Actually, the so-called Lombard is Charles Morley (Louis Hayward).  The real Lombard was so guilt-ridden over what he had done that it drove him to suicide.  Morley decided to accept the invitation to Indian Island, pretending to be Lombard, in order to find out why his friend had killed himself.  As for Vera, she is accused of killing her sister’s fiancé.  However, it is her sister that killed him, and Vera merely covered up for her, taking care of her until she died.

1965.  The 1965 adaptation uses the title Ten Little Indians.  A lot of the names were changed in this one, and there are some generic changes as well:  the elderly, pious spinster, Emily Brent, has been replaced by an actress; the real Lombard was an engineer.  Lombard is no longer said to be guilty of the deaths of twenty-one men, but only of a woman he got pregnant.  We gather he talked her into getting an abortion, which was botched.  Since the man presenting himself as Lombard will turn out to be the innocent Charles Morley (Hugh O’Brian), the diminishment of the crime would seem unnecessary.  The secretary, who was Vera in the novel, but now is Ann, played by Shirley Eaton, was falsely accused of having killed her sister’s fiancé, as in the 1945 version, except that her sister is now in a mental home.  As with Lombard, there would seem to be no need to change her crime from that of allowing a child to drown since she will turn out to be innocent anyway.  Because the movie will have a happy ending, where Morley and Ann (a.k.a. Vera) will be the innocent, heterosexual couple that survives, perhaps it was thought better not to let the crimes of which these two guests had been accused be too dark and disturbing, lest the taint of the accusations linger on.

The Everyone-Dies Adaptations

I have been able to see only two adaptations in which everyone dies in the end, just as in the book, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more out there somewhere.

1987.  The original title of the 1987 Russian version, translated into English as Ten Little Indians, was Desyat negrityat.  In the subtitles, the characters refer to Indian Island and to the poem “Ten Little Indians,” but I wonder.  My knowledge of the Russian language is minimal, but I believe that “negrityat” means “little blacks.”  Furthermore, the statuettes on the table have the clothing, color, and physiognomy of African natives.  Moreover, Lombard’s antisemitism is also in this version.

This inclusion of racism and antisemitism makes sense if the intention was for this to be the most faithful adaptation of them all, even if that was undone when modified for an English-speaking audience.  And it is a faithful adaptation, except for one little thing.  In the novel, there is no sexual or romantic relationship between Lombard and Vera.  In this movie, he rapes her.  But I guess it must have been pretty good sex because she spends the rest of the night with him.

2015.  A television miniseries was made in 2015, using the title And Then There Were None.  This adaptation is moody and atmospheric:  the skies are perpetually overcast; the interior of the house is always dark.  So dark, in fact, that I kept wishing someone would turn on the lights.

I read somewhere that Agatha Christie tried to make the characters in her book guilty of crimes that those in the audience might imagine themselves to have committed, given the right circumstances; or, failing that, crimes that one can imagine being tempted to commit, while still having sufficient moral character to resist.  Unfortunately, I cannot find that quotation by Christie.

In the happy-ending adaptations, the crimes were sometimes lessened, making it even easier for us to identify with those who were accused.  The modifications of the crimes Lombard and Vera were accused of in the 1965 movie have already been noted.  As another example from that movie, Emily Brent was replaced by Ilona Bergen, and her crime was telling her husband that he meant nothing to her and that she was leaving him, after which he committed suicide.

In this 2015 television miniseries, however, either the crimes are made much worse, or the characters are made unlikeable, in either case to the point that we are not likely to identify with them.  Anthony Marston, the irresponsible playboy, snorts cocaine, and when someone in a movie does that, we are supposed to despise him.  Dr. Armstrong, the alcoholic surgeon who butchered a patient, and William Blore, the private detective, help themselves to what was left of Marston’s cocaine later in the movie, so they are also worthy of our contempt.

In addition, Blore is a homophobe, using words like “degenerate” and “pansy” to refer to the homosexual he murdered by stomping him to death.  His doing so was an expression of self-hatred, since he had been caught and sent to prison for homosexuality himself.  (In the novel, Blore got an innocent man convicted by giving perjured evidence.)  Rogers, the butler, smothered Jennifer Brady, a woman he and his wife were taking care of, with a pillow.  (In the novel, Rogers and his wife simply withheld the medication that she needed.) General MacArthur shoots his wife’s lover in the back.  (In the novel, he ordered the man on a dangerous mission, where he was likely to be killed.) Emily Brent, the elderly, pious spinster, is a lesbian pedophile.  She made advances to an adolescent girl, a foundling she had adopted. When spurned by the girl, Brent abandoned her, and the girl committed suicide.  (In the novel, Brent dismissed her maid because she was pregnant out of wedlock.) This Emily Brent is also an antisemite, who says the Jews are probably responsible for their situation on the island.

In other words, these characters in the novel were all guilty of someone’s death, but their crimes were presented in a such a way that we were still able to identify with them, at least to some degree, making us care about what happened to them. This 2015 adaptation, on the other hand, makes the characters so detestable as to preclude even the slightest amount of sympathy.  As a result, we don’t care about the danger they are in.

Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

If Tarzan the Ape Man had lots of sex in it, Tarzan and His Mate, the sequel, takes it to the next level. When this latter movie begins, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) is planning to return to the elephants’ graveyard for the ivory, as he promised to do in the former.  He is teaming up with Martin Arlington (Paul Cavanagh), who has just arrived by boat.  Harry greets him just as Martin is leaving a cabin where he has knocked off a quick piece with a married woman, and not a moment too soon, since her cuckolded husband walks up right after, completely oblivious to his wife’s infidelity.  Martin is such a rake that we immediately don’t like him, not because he has committed adultery, but because it is so easy for him, while the rest of us really have to work at it.

Ivory is only part of the reason Harry plans to go on another safari.  He also hopes to win Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) away from Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) with presents that he had Martin bring with him for her:  silk dresses, nylon stockings, expensive perfume.

After much action and adventure, the safari finally reaches the top of the Mutia Escarpment where Tarzan saves them from some gorillas.  Then we see Jane.  She is in the skimpiest outfit ever, with a loincloth that allows us to view most of her body from the side.  When she greets Harry, she stands close to him with her hips thrust slightly forward, which makes her even more enticing.

At this point, I must vent my displeasure.  When Turner Classic Movies showed this movie recently, it had been modified from a movie in standard format to that of widescreen.  To accomplish this, the top and the bottom of the movie had to be cut off, just the opposite of when a widescreen movie has had the sides cut off to be in standard format.  As a result, part of Jane’s beautiful, almost naked body is cut off, depriving us of a full view.  Whoever did this probably thought he was doing us a favor.  Fortunately, the movie is available in its original, standard format through Xfinity in their On Demand service.

Anyway, Harry shows Jane all the stuff he brought for her, and she gets all dressed up in an evening gown, nylon stockings, and heels.  She puts all this on while alone in a tent, but Martin gets to see her naked body in silhouette from outside as she dresses up.  When she comes out, he gets her to dance with him and then kisses her against her will.  She promises to forget about it, but then Tarzan shows up and pulls out his knife.  Fortunately, it is only the record player that has caught his attention.  Then he sees Jane all dressed up. The clothes are so alluring that he just naturally wants to remove them and have sex.  For that purpose, he insists on taking her up to the tree house he has just put together, carrying her away, leaving Harry and Martin standing there in envious awe.

The next morning, when Tarzan and Jane wake up, she encourages Tarzan not only to say to her, “I love you,” but also to say, “I love my wife.”  So, that means they are married, in case anyone was worried.  No one performed a ceremony, of course, and there is no marriage certificate, but the same could be said of Adam and Eve, and Eve is referred to as Adam’s wife in the Book of Genesis. So, if it’s good enough for the Bible, I guess it’s good enough for this movie.

Jane slept naked with Tarzan, but she tells him she must put the dress back on or else others will think her immodest.  Then they decide to go for a swim. Tarzan rips Jane’s dress off her, and she plunges into the water without a stitch on.  For next couple of minutes, we see a nude Jane swimming with Tarzan.  (For this purpose, a body double was used, that of an Olympic swimmer.)  This footage was removed from the picture before being released but was eventually restored toward the end of the twentieth century.  In his Pre-Code Hollywood:  Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934, Thomas Doherty refers to this scene in his preface.  He saw it in a theater where the audience was shocked into silence, except for a few that gasped.  It wasn’t the nudity per se that shocked them, but the fact that they were seeing it in an old movie.  At that time, “classical Hollywood cinema” called to mind movies that were released after the Production Code was strictly enforced.  Doherty says that seeing such pre-Code movies for the first time was like glimpsing an “alternative film universe,” both fascinating and disorienting, and this movie was a perfect illustration of that.

Tarzan objects to raiding the elephants’ graveyard for ivory, so Martin shoots him while no one else is around, believing that he has killed him.  As a side benefit, that will give Martin a chance to make a move on Jane.  In the end, after much action and adventure as only the jungle can provide, Harry and Martin are dead.  We see Tarzan and Jane riding on an elephant as she leans into him with her almost naked body, looking all soft and warm.  We know that he will soon be giving her all of his hot, jungle love.

After that, the Production Code was strictly enforced, so we see Jane in a dress in Tarzan Escapes (1936). The dress is short, allowing us to see the upper part of her thighs, and she does still run around barefoot, but the days of the skimpy loin cloth are gone.  In Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939), Jane still wears that dress, but now she also starts wearing shoes.  As the title tells us, Tarzan and Jane adopt a son, whom they call “Boy” (Johnny Sheffield).

I guess the thinking was that even though Tarzan and Jane were bound to be having sex, the movies could get past the stern hand of Joseph I. Breen as long as their sexual relationship wasn’t emphasized. But if Jane actually got pregnant and had a baby, that would have been shocking.

Of course, that shock would have been nothing compared to when Loweezy told Snuffy Smith that she was going to have a baby.  Even though they were married, that was the day we were forced us to think of the two of them having sex, something we never wanted to do.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

Tarzan movies can be a lot of fun.  There are the wild animals, cannibal savages, and the physical dangers of the jungle itself.  I have been told that the word “jungle” is not politically correct, that we are supposed to say, “tropical rain forest,” but if you are worried about that sort of thing, it’s best to stay away from Tarzan movies anyway, at least the old ones.

Then there is sex.  That was clear from the first Tarzan movie I ever saw.  It was Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle (1955), starring Gordon Scott.  At one point in the movie, Vera Miles steps into some quicksand.  As if that were not bad enough, a python is slithering toward her.  I suppose the snake might have had phallic significance, but I was only eight years old at the time, so I didn’t think of that.

Anyway, Tarzan comes to her rescue.  After he pulls her out, she faints in his arms. He picks her up and lays her gently on the grass.  She has mud all over her, so naturally Tarzan must clean her up. Scooping water from the river, he starts washing her body, beginning with her arms, and then rubbing water on her legs. He even lifts her skirt above her thighs so he can do a thorough job. While he is doing all this, she is still in a faint, but responding to her being bathed by him nevertheless, her head slowly moving back and forth, mouth slightly open, as if she were sexually aroused.

The theater where I saw this movie was in a small college town, and so the audience was full of college students.  They went wild, one guy yelling, “Watch it, boy!” while another sang out “Diddy-wah-diddy,” his version of the Tarzan yell, presumably.

As time went by, I was able to see earlier Tarzan movies, the ones starring Johnny Weissmuller, the first of which was Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).  When the movie begins, Jane Parker (Maureen O’Sullivan) shows up unexpectedly in Africa to visit her father, played by C. Aubrey Smith, who is trying to find out where the elephants’ graveyard is, the place where elephants go when they are dying.  He wants Jane to return home, but she refuses, saying, “Listen, Dad, from now on, I’m through with civilization. I’m going to be a savage just like you.”

Now, Jane does not mean that in a sexual way, but those of us in the audience are aware of that connotation, where civilization represents sexual repression, while savagery suggests running about half-naked, free of all inhibitions.  Of course, we don’t know just how much civilization she intends to give up, since she has brought six trunks with her, containing what she refers to as the “necessities of life.”

Anyway, while alone with her father, with a mischievous look in her eyes, she starts getting undressed, only down to her slip, but enough to make her father uncomfortable, owing to the effect her sexual charms are having on him.  She says, “Darling, don’t be silly. You’re not embarrassed by me. Why, you’ve bathed me sometimes, and very nearly spanked me, too.”

The bathing to which she refers makes us think of her being naked in front of her father, and the spanking she almost got makes us think of him paddling her bare behind.  This hints at incest, but it is not intended to go further than sexual teasing.  Nevertheless, the fact that it is taboo is titillating.  Finally, when she leans over the sink to wash her face, we get to see the upper portion of her breasts, which are ample.  Meanwhile, another man who will be on the safari to hunt for ivory, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton), has already fallen in love with her.

After they climb the Mutia Escarpment, they are spotted by Tarzan, who grabs Jane and makes off with her.  He is too sexually naïve to actually do anything with her, but he knew there was something about her he liked.  I have read that there is no movie where Tarzan says, “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” but they begin having a primitive form of communication, where Tarzan doesn’t quite understand the function of pronouns.  While he is away looking for food, she is rescued by her father and Harry, who kill an ape that Tarzan was friends with.

It is clear that Jane has already fallen in love with Tarzan, and she remarks how unhappy he was when the ape was killed.  Her father says that people like him, living in the jungle, have no emotions. When Jane points out that Tarzan is white, her father says it makes no difference, for he is still a savage.  Harry is no better, ridiculing her for considering the feelings of a man-ape.

Tarzan kills some of the porters to get revenge for the death of his ape-friend. Harry and Jane’s father trick her into calling Tarzan, supposedly to get him to stop, but as soon as Tarzan shows up, Harry’s shoots at him, just grazing his head. Eventually, Jane comes to Tarzan’s rescue, nursing him back to health.

As he recovers, she decides to bathe in the river.  She removes her boots and is now barefoot, symbolic of her first step away from civilization, toward savagery.  She starts to get completely naked but stops when she sees that Tarzan is watching her.  They both end up in the river, with Tarzan holding her. When they get out of the river, Tarzan starts playing with her foot. Then he compares her hand with his, noting how much smaller she is.  “Do you like that difference?” she asks, looking at him in a way that asks him to take her.  He picks her up, and she buries her head between his neck and shoulder.  As he carries her away, the scene fades, and we know they have sex.  Cheeta, the chimpanzee, is embarrassed, so he covers his eyes.

Afterwards, she sees her father, and she knows she must return to him, so Tarzan brings her back. Shortly thereafter, the safari is surrounded by a tribe of small black men.  Jane asks, “Are they pygmies?”  Harry replies, “No, they’re dwarfs.” What Harry should have said was, “No, they’re Caucasian dwarfs in blackface.”

Jane tells Cheeta to go get Tarzan, which he does.  Then Cheeta goes and gets the elephants. Meanwhile, the dwarfs are having fun throwing men into a pit where a gorilla crushes them to death. Then Jane gets thrown into the pit.  The gorilla does not kill her but merely picks her up and holds her.  There is no mystery about that. As we have learned from watching pre-Code Movies like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Sign of the Cross, (1932), and King Kong (1933), gorillas always want to have sex with white women.

Tarzan rescues her just as the elephants arrive, scattering the dwarfs.  A wounded elephant leads her father, Harry, Jane, and Tarzan to the elephants’ graveyard, where her father dies.  Harry says goodbye to Tarzan and Jane, and we gather that there will be a sequel, where Harry returns in hopes of getting all that ivory.

Tarzan and Jane are now free to start living in sin.

Madame Bovary (1949)

In 1857, prosecutors in France brought charges of obscenity against Gustave Flaubert after he published his novel Madame Bovary. After he was acquitted, his novel became a best seller, of course. The best thing an author can do to promote his book is to get it banned somewhere.

It is strange that the title is Madame Bovary.  If you didn’t know better, you might think the story was going to be about Charles Bovary’s mother.  Then you might think it was going to be about his first wife Héloïse.  By the time you get to his second wife Emma, you might think, “I hope this one is it!” This confusion could have been avoided had the title been Emma Bovary, but I guess “Madame” was used to emphasize the fact that Emma is a married woman.

There have been many movies or television series based on this novel, only three of which I have been able to see.  In comparing the 1949 version with the 1975 television series and with the 2014 movie, the most striking difference is the faces. Hollywood sure knew how to pick actors with star power in those days: Jennifer Jones as Emma, Van Heflin as Charles, and Louis Jordan as Rodolphe. The 1975 and 2014 versions are full of ordinary faces, so unremarkable that one might easily forget who’s who.  For this reason alone, the 1949 version is the most enjoyable to watch and easiest to remember. Strictly speaking, the 1949 version is actually about the trial of Flaubert, played by James Mason, where he tells us how we are supposed to understand his novel, so that we won’t think it obscene.

An important difference between the 1949 version and the novel is the way the former improves the character of Charles Bovary.  In the novel, his first wife is much older than he is, and she is described as being “ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds.” He marries her because she has money.  The novel says something about her being the woman his mother picked out for him, which is a little creepy right there.  But it also says, “Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money.”  All right, so it doesn’t work out the way he planned, this wife being something of a termagant, but his intention remains the same, that of marrying for money rather than for love.

The 1949 version leaves out this first marriage, as does the 2014 version. Perhaps the constraint of time was a factor, since the longer 1975 version includes it.  What every version of this novel must include, however, is the part about Hippolyte, played by Henry Morgan in the 1949 version (another interesting face).  In the novel, Emma pressures Charles to perform an operation on Hippolyte, who has a clubfoot. She figures that if the operation is a success, she will rise in society as the wife of the brilliant surgeon who performed it.  However, the operation is a failure, and the leg ends up having to be amputated.  As a result, Emma feels disgraced and becomes even more contemptuous of Charles than ever before. Such is the case in the 1975 and 2014 versions.

In the 1949 version, however, Charles realizes his limitations at the last minute and refuses to perform the operation.  The difference is that while Emma still feels contempt for her husband, in this case for what she regards as his failure of nerve, we admire him for doing the right thing.  So, just as this movie avoids having Charles be a mama’s boy and a second-rate fortune hunter, so too does it avoid having him be an incompetent surgeon who should have known better.

This change in the story cannot be attributed to any need to conform to the Production Code, which does say that surgical operations should be treated within the careful limits of good taste.  But if that had been enough to change the story of this novel, the movie King’s Row (1942) could never have been made, since that is the movie where a malicious doctor amputates both of Ronald Reagan’s legs. No, this movie simply wants us to like Charles Bovary. But even with the omissions and modifications, he still comes across as someone whose wife will cheat on him.

And cheat she does, for the story is about an adulteress who ends up committing suicide.  You would think that her suicide would have satisfied the prosecutors, the novel having punished Emma for her misdeeds.  We can only wonder what would have happened had she run off with Rodolphe as she had wanted, the two of them living happily ever after.  Flaubert would probably have been drawn and quartered.

Actually, it is not the adultery per se that brings about Emma’s downfall, but her willingness to go into debt to buy herself beautiful clothes and to furnish her house with fashionable finery.  It doesn’t cost much for a woman to have an affair, and Charles was enough of a cuckold that she could have gone from one lover to the next with impunity.  On the other hand, had she been completely faithful to Charles but still spent extravagantly to satisfy her vanity, her ruination and his would have been the same.

In any event, it might be that the prosecutors were upset that while Emma was punished in this world, Flaubert allowed her to escape punishment in the next. After Emma consumes arsenic at the chemist’s shop, she goes home to die. Charles tries to save her but eventually calls for a priest, who administers the sacrament of extreme unction.  The novel tells us that “her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.”  Moreover:

The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought.

Maybe this is what offended the prosecutors.  Emma had been absolved of her sins through divine intervention, and who would dare to question the will of God? Flaubert is assuring us that instead of burning forever in the fires of Hell, Emma is now in Heaven, smiling sweetly as she looks down on those she left behind.

About twenty years later, Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina, in which another adulteress ends up committing suicide.  Like Emma, she also has a child that she is willing to abandon to be with her lover, which makes her adultery especially reprehensible.  And like Emma, she escapes eternal damnation by way of last-minute repentance.  Just as Anna throws herself beneath the wheels of a train, she regrets having done so, saying, “Lord, forgive me all,” after which she is sliced in two.

Of course, there are those who would say that God did not intervene to prolong the lives of Emma and Anna, giving them enough time to repent, that it was just good luck on their part that they managed to slip through that Christian loophole at the last minute, causing God to shake his head in exasperation, saying, “Once again, a sinner gets off on a technicality!”

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The first time I watched The Asphalt Jungle, my attention was naturally focused on the planning for the heist of a jewelry store and how it all goes wrong, both during its execution and in the days following. The mastermind is Herr Doctor Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) or “Doc” for short. Because he is a German immigrant, speaking with an accent, it is funny to hear him use the slang words “caper” and “hooligan,” but for him they are technical terms, the latter referring to a necessary ingredient of what is denoted by the former.

What caught my attention on a recent viewing was how pathetic most of the characters in this movie are. The man who supposedly is bankrolling the caper is Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern).  He has a wife who says she doesn’t feel well, lying in bed, begging him to stay home with her because she gets so nervous in the big house they live in, with no one but servants around. He says he can’t stay home with her because he has “business” to attend to, that business being the double cross he is planning to pull on Doc after the robbery. You see, he doesn’t actually have the money to fence the stolen jewels, as he promised Doc he would, because he is on the verge of bankruptcy, what with “two houses, four cars, half a dozen servants,” and, as Doc learns from a prostitute he spent the night with, “one blonde.”

That blonde is kept in the other of those two houses Emmerich owns. She is Angela (Marilyn Monroe).  It has been noted by film critics that Marilyn is often paired up with weak men, as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Niagara (1953), and this seems to be the case here. Whether the men are weak to begin with or whether a man just naturally becomes weak when he falls for such a sexually desirable woman, it is hard to say.

Anyway, she calls Emmerich “Uncle Lon.”  He tells her he doesn’t like it, but she persists in doing so anyway.  The word “uncle,” if taken literally, would suggest incest, pouring cold water on his love for her.  It also suggests that he is too old for her.  In any event, when he kisses her, it seems all she can do to tolerate it for a second or two before easing away from him, her patience for this show of affection having reached its limit. From this we may infer that she lets him have sex with her when he visits, but she gets it over with as quickly as possible. Emmerich’s wife back home loves him, and she is nice looking, but he would rather take scraps from Angela.  Later on in the movie, when Angela fails to provide him with an alibi, he blows his brains out.

The hooligan that the Doc needs for his plan is Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). At one point early in the movie, we see Dix in a lineup, if you can call it that. In any other movie I have seen featuring a lineup, about five men fitting the description of a witness stand in a row.  Some of the men are just policemen in plain clothes, but least one of the men is the suspect, who cannot see the witness who might pick him out.

But not in this movie.  There are only three men in the lineup, the rap sheet of each one being clearly announced, only one of whom would be likely to commit an armed robbery, which is Dix, of course. The witness previously said the man who pulled the stickup was tall.  So, Dix, who is six feet, five inches tall is standing next to a man played by Strother Martin, who is five feet, five inches tall, a whole foot shorter than Dix. Moreover, Dix can see the witness and glares at him.  The witness gets scared and says he isn’t sure.  Lieutenant Ditrich is exasperated that this phony lineup, purposely designed to single Dix out for identification, has failed to bring about its intended result.

As a result, Ditrich is now in trouble with his boss, Police Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire), who is upset about all the crime statistics.  When Ditrich tells him the witness got cold feet, Hardy tells him to lock the witness up and scare him worse, not exactly what you would call a witness protection program.

Dix is released.  Sometime later, a woman he knows, Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen), comes over to his flat. She’s a dancehall girl, and the place where she worked got shut down because Police Commissioner Hardy is on a tear, having ordered Ditrich to shut down the clip joints.  Doll is locked out of her apartment because the raid took place before she got paid. Out of the goodness of his heart, Dix lets her stay for a couple of days. The next morning, we see that he has slept on the couch.  This is not something required by the Production Code.  Doll is in love with Dix, but he just isn’t interested in her.

In fact, he doesn’t seem to be interested in any woman.  In this way, he is the opposite of Doc, who is obsessed with women.  Doc’s plan after the robbery is to go to Mexico and chase pretty Mexican girls in the sunshine. However, he never gets there.  Because he spends too much time ogling a teenage girl on his way out of town, he is arrested by a couple of cops who just happened by.

But all Dix wants to do is save up his money and buy back the Kentucky horse farm his family lived on before they lost everything as a result of bad luck, including when a black colt of much promise broke its leg and had to be shot. Ironically, Dix could have saved up the money he needed to buy back the horse farm a long time ago, but he keeps playing the horses at the racetrack, and they keep losing.

He places those bets with a bookmaker named Cobby, who also helps Doc find the men needed for the robbery.  In addition to Dix, there is Louis the safecracker and Gus (James Whitmore), a hunchback, who drives the getaway car.  Louis is fatally wounded when a gun goes off accidentally. His wife becomes angry at Gus for getting him involved in all this, calling him a cripple and a crooked back.  Cobby is also the one that arranges for Emmerich to finance the heist, who in turn is supposed to see about finding a fence for the jewels.  Cobby is a weak, nervous man, whom Ditrich beats a confession out of, forcing him to rat out everyone else. But Ditrich has been on the take, so he also ends up in jail by the end of the movie.

The double cross Emmerich had planned doesn’t work, and by the end of the movie, all the men involved one way or another are either dead or in jail.  Dix had been shot during the double cross, but he doesn’t believe in doctors.  He is determined to make it back to that farm his family had when he was a kid. Doc had tried to disabuse Dix of his dream of home, saying, “Listen, Dix. You can always go home.  And when you do, it’s nothing. Believe me. I’ve done it. Nothing.” But it often happens that when a man approaches the end of his life, he wants to go back home, wherever that is.  So, with the help of Doll, he manages to make it back to what used to be the family horse farm before dying from loss of blood, saying that if Pa can just hold on to that black colt, everything will be all right.

Toward the end of the movie, Commissioner Hardy gives a speech about how much crime there is in the city and how terrible it all is.  It comes across as an exculpatory epilogue, justifying the movie we have just seen as a kind of public service announcement, intended to make us ordinary citizens more vigilant and supportive of the police.  But since it is Hardy’s policy to terrify witnesses and throw them in jail if they don’t do what they’re told, I don’t think those crime statistics are likely to get any better.

Ulysses (1954) and The Odyssey (1997)

Another movie based on The Odyssey is due to come out next year. Perhaps this would be a good time to reflect on just what it is we want from such a movie, guided by the movie versions that already exist. I saw Ulysses when it first came out in 1954.  At the time, some people complained about the way the English was dubbed in, but that is what I prefer.  Recently, I saw it again on TCM, and it was subtitled, which I suppose is what others prefer.  Either way, the movie is fun to watch. The Odyssey, a television miniseries made in 1997, was only fair, although it does have the advantage of being originally in English.  References to this version will be followed by the letters “TV” in parentheses in order to distinguish it from the epic poem by Homer.

Less Is More

Do we want a faithful rendering of Homer’s epic poem?  Merciful Minerva! May the gods forbid! Back in the eighth century B.C., there was very little to entertain people.  Sitting around a campfire in the dark, while it was too early to go to sleep, they were bored.  And so it was that a poet that could recite The Iliad or The Odyssey was much appreciated in those days.  Let him go on at great length about minor matters. That was better than having him finish it up and having to go back to staring into that campfire.

In Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, he has a chapter entitled “Mozart on the Run,” the point being that musicians today play the music of Mozart at a faster tempo than when it was first played in the eighteenth century.  And that makes sense, for once the composition was over, people had little else to do but go home and be bored. So, they were happy if the music was dragged out a bit longer. But now that we have other ways of amusing ourselves, a shorter performance of Mozart’s music is to be preferred.

And a shorter version of The Odyssey is just what we need as well.  In fact, one of the problems with the television miniseries The Odyssey (TV) is that its pace is too slow.  Its total length is just over three hours, which would allow more of the story related in the poem to be told, if we thought that was important, but that is no longer a given.  Ulysses, on the other hand, is just over and ninety minutes, during which time things move along at a brisk pace.

In the poem, we find out that Odysseus has been kept on an island with Calypso, a nymph that has promised him immortality if he stays with her, but he longs to return to Ithaca.  Even though the poem says he was there for seven years, that does not mean a lot of the movie must be devoted to it.  This was just Homer’s way of keeping his hero from getting back home for a long time.  Ulysses wisely ignores the whole business with Calypso, who is merged with Circe, leaving it to her to promise him immortality.  The Odyssey (TV), unfortunately, has us sit through a long, boring period on Calypso’s Island.

The First Draft Dodger

At the end of Ulysses, the title character, now reunited with his wife Penelope, refers to their wasted youth on account of a savage war.  This reminds us of how he never wanted to have anything to do with the Trojan War in the first place. From a source other than The Iliad or The Odyssey, the Fabulae of Hyginus to be exact, there is a story of how Odysseus was obligated to take part in the war against Troy when Helen, the wife of Menelaus, fled there with Paris.  Not wanting any part of that, Odysseus feigned madness when Agamemnon and Menelaus came for him, but Palamedes saw through this fakery, and Odysseus was forced to leave his wife and home.

We do see Agamemnon and Menelaus arrive in Ithaca to fetch Odysseus in The Odyssey (TV), and it would have been easy enough to include this story at that point, but it was left out.  Those of us that managed to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War take exception to this omission, and we hope it will be included in the upcoming version next year.

Penelope’s Motivation

One of the things that puzzles us today is why Penelope allows the suitors to park their butts in her house, feasting and drinking, while demanding that she marry one of them on the assumption that her husband is dead.  An attempt is made in The Odyssey (TV) to apologize for Penelope.  First, before he leaves, Odysseus tells her that if he has not returned from the war by the time their newly born son Telemachus has started growing a beard, she must remarry.  Moreover, the mother of Odysseus puts pressure on Penelope to marry again.  It was apparently thought necessary to explain Penelope’s behavior in this way, but it feels contrived. In Ulysses, we see how the suitors have forced themselves on a woman who is alone, except for her son and a few servants, and that is sufficient explanation.

Although we get to see for ourselves how Penelope is determined to remain faithful to Odysseus, he does not know what awaits him when he gets back to Ithaca.  In Ulysses, Circe allows him to speak to some of the souls in Hades. Agamemnon tells of how his wife, Clytemnestra, with the aid of her lover, murdered him when he returned home, suggesting the same fate might befall Odysseus. But then, Agamemnon might have expected his wife to be a little put out with him after he murdered their daughter Iphigenia. This encounter between Odysseus and the shade of Agamemnon is not featured in The Odyssey (TV).

In Ulysses, even when Odysseus, upon his return to Ithaca, has greeted his son Telemachus, he still is not sure if Penelope can be trusted.  We don’t see such doubt on his part in The Odyssey (TV).  Actually, his only question should be why she has not remarried.  He told her before he left that she should get herself a new husband by the time their son had grown a beard, and Telemachus is now twenty years old.

Classical Allusions

Many of the adventures of Odysseus are regularly alluded to in subsequent literature as well as in ordinary conversation.  As a result, we should expect to see these events in a movie based on this epic poem. Both movies disappoint, though in different ways. Ulysses fails to depict a scene in which Odysseus must steer his ship through the Strait of Messina, bordered on one side by Scylla, a flesh-eating monster, and on the other side by Charybdis, a giant whirlpool.

We do see this in The Odyssey (TV), but it fails to depict the scene in which the ship must pass by the sirens, whose singing lures sailors to crash their ships onto the rocks. In the poem, Odysseus has his men fill their ears with wax, while at the same time tying him to the mast so he can hear their songs, which is depicted in Ulysses.

Hopefully, the upcoming movie based on The Odyssey will include both.

My Name Is Nobody

When Odysseus and his men are trapped by Polyphemus, a Cyclops, he tells the one-eyed giant that his name is Nobody.  After a stake is jammed into the eye of Polyphemus, he screams that Nobody has blinded him. The other Cyclopes on the island figured there was nothing to do about it since nobody blinded him. Unfortunately, this trick is not depicted in Ulysses, although it is in The Odyssey (TV).

This is all the more perplexing when we get to the scene where Odysseus washes up on a shore and is discovered by Nausicaa, who is a Phaeacian.  In the poem, he is naked, but both movies have understandably covered his privates.  In the poem, Odysseus merely conceals his identity for a while, not being sure of the how well he might be received by the people on this island. Finally, when moved to tears by a poet’s recounting of the fall of Troy, he admits, “I am Odysseus,” just as he taunted Polyphemus after having escaped and boarded his ship, declaring there too that he was Odysseus.  In other words, in both cases, he begins as a nobody until finally asserting himself as one of the great heroes of the Trojan War.

Ulysses actually improves on this.  Not only is he (almost) naked, but he has lost his memory as well. He is as much of a nobody as one can be.  In The Odyssey (TV), the king of the Phaeacians figures out who Odysseus is so quickly that the point of his being a nobody again is minimized.

Of course, Odysseus becomes a nobody once more when he arrives in Ithaca, pretending to be a beggar, until, having strung the bow and shot the arrow through the axes, he declares himself to be Odysseus.

This theme of his being a nobody until he once again becomes Odysseus recapitulates his long absence after the war until he returns to Ithaca and claims his rightful place as king.

Needless to say, the upcoming version should, at the very least, have Odysseus tell the Cyclops that his name is Nobody.

The Greek Gods

We naturally expect Odysseus and others to believe in the gods of ancient Greece, but do we actually want the gods themselves in a movie? There are no gods depicted in Ulysses.  In The Odyssey (TV), however, Athena, Poseidon, and Hermes are shown to exist. As a result, the story in Ulysses, despite the presence of some supernatural elements, can be experienced more or less realistically.  The story in The Odyssey (TV), on the other hand, is just a fantasy.

Furthermore, when Odysseus is talking to Athena in The Odyssey (TV), he asks her why she hasn’t done more to help him, and she explains that, as a goddess, she has much to do and can’t always be at his beck and call. This is not exactly equivalent to the ancient problem of evil that has bedeviled monotheistic religions since The Book of Job and the dilemma of Epicurus, but it does force us to try to make sense out of the behavior of the Olympians, which is a distraction.

The Death of Argos

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he disguises himself as a beggar, but he is recognized by his old, neglected dog Argos:

As soon as he saw Ulysses standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Ulysses saw the dog on the other side of the yard, he dashed a tear from his eyes….

Argos dies soon after.

So brutal are the stories from ancient times that we think of those people as of another race.  But this affection between a man and his dog makes us realize that they too were capable of tender feelings.

This scene is depicted in Ulysses to good effect.  It was left out of The Odyssey (TV).

The Wooden Horse

There is one point on which both versions agree, and that is on the story about the wooden horse. In fact, they are also in agreement with every other movie I have seen about the Trojan War, such as Helen of Troy (1956) and Troy (2004). In particular, Greeks hide themselves in the wooden horse, the Trojans bring the horse through the gates of the walled city, and that night the Greeks slip out, open the gates, letting the rest of their army in, and Troy is sacked.

In The Aeneid, a Latin poem written by Virgil, a slightly different story is told. When the Greeks pretended to give up and sail away, they left behind Simon. When the Trojans find him, he explains that the horse was built to honor Minerva.  They purposely made the horse too big to bring within the gates, for if the Trojans were to take the horse into their city, they would get the benefit and be able to destroy the Greeks. Undeterred, the Trojans tear down part of the wall and bring the horse in.

This is absurd enough when we read it, but to see that in a movie would be all the more so.  Why do men need to be hiding in the horse if part of the wall has been torn down?  All the Greeks needed to do was sail back that night, sneak up to the city, and pour right in through the breach. According to Robert Graves, in his The Greek Myths, there is another source in which it is related that the Trojans repaired the breach once the horse was brought inside.  Nice try, but we don’t want to see that in a movie either.

Clearly, there was an earlier story, in which there were no men hiding inside the horse.  It was made large enough to force the Trojans to tear down part of the wall, and that night the Greeks got into the city that way. That’s the kind of plan I would prefer.  The only person at risk is Simon.  If the Trojans burn the horse instead, nothing has been lost.

Later, someone came up with the idea of Greeks hiding inside the horse. That version was much more exciting and insidious.  All the poets needed to do was drop the original story.  But it just wouldn’t go away, and that is why it shows up in The Aeneid and elsewhere.