Author Archives: disinterested spectator

An Ida Lupino Formula

I never really cared much for Ida Lupino, either as an actress or as a director.  As for most of the movies she starred in, I can’t say that it was her fault that I did not think much of them, for her acting was fine, and I doubt that any other actress in her place would have made much difference.  As for the movies she directed, for some of which she also was a writer, her responsibility for their lackluster nature cannot be denied.  Nevertheless, when Turner Classic Movies decided to show a bunch of the movies she directed early in her career in that capacity, I decided to watch them.

The first one I watched was Never Fear (1949), which was just fair.  The second one I watched was Outrage (1950), and it too was just fair.  Neither movie on its own inspired me to write a review.  However, halfway through the second movie, I began to notice a structural similarity between the movies, which fascinated me.  Whether there is an Ida Lupino formula that applies to any of her other movies and whether that formula is significant in any way, I cannot say.

In Never Fear, Guy and Carol are struggling dancing partners.  In order to give her flowers, he has to steal them.  But finally, after a performance that he choreographed, their agent gets them a two-week engagement at a major night club.  They now have enough money not only for him to pay for the flowers he brings her, but to buy her an engagement ring and ask her to marry him as well, which is something she has been hoping for.  In Outrage, Ann and Jim are also in love.  When Jim gets a raise, he tells Ann they now have enough money to get married, something she has been hoping for.

Then tragedy strikes, and the woman in each of these movies ends up regarding herself as damaged goods.  In Never Fear, Carol is stricken with polio.  Guy still wants to marry Carol, but she pushes him away, telling him she won’t marry him, because things would never be the same.  In part, she does not want Guy to marry her out of pity, but she also has lost her sex drive.  She does not say this explicitly (this was 1949, after all), but much later in the movie, she makes a remark about how she finally feels like a woman again.  (Note:  when the doctor offers Carol a cigarette as she lies in bed, she refuses the offer.  This is taken as a sign that she is depressed.  Later, when she starts smoking again, this indicates that she is getting better psychologically.)  In Outrage, Jim still wants to marry Ann, but she pushes him away.  In part, she tells him he would never be able to forget that she had been raped, but she also now regards sex as something repulsive.

In Never Fear, Carol goes to a hospital and then to an institution for therapy.  There she meets Len, played by Hugh O’Brian, who has an even more severe case of polio than Carol.  He is a kind of spiritual figure.  At one point, the doctor that heads the institution says that Len has a special “power.”  In Outrage, Ann runs away from home without telling Jim or her parents where she is going.  She collapses on the side of the road and is rescued by “Doc,” so called because he is a reverend.  He takes her to a house owned by a married couple he is friends with, and they take her in.

In Never Fear, Guy keeps coming around trying to get Carol to marry him.  He has been trying to make a go of it selling houses, but she tells him to forget about her, to find himself another dancing partner.  They have a bitter argument and do not see each other for a long time.  Eventually, Carol begins to feel better about herself, and she has reached the point where she is able to walk with crutches.  She writes him a letter, hoping to make amends.  He shows up at her birthday party with flowers.  At first, she thinks they will be able to get married after all, but then he tells her that he took her advice.  He has another dancing partner, and they will be performing in Las Vegas soon, which is why he cannot stay long.  After he leaves, she throws herself at Len on the rebound, telling him they are alike, and that they will be good for each other (it is here she makes the remark about feeling like a woman again).  But Len knows she still loves Guy.  He tells her that she is just looking for someone to be comfortable with, and that is not enough for marriage.  In Outrage, we never see Jim again, because he does not know where Ann is.  She hopes that Doc will marry her, but Doc knows that she still loves Jim, and that they must go their separate ways.

In Never Fear, when the day finally arrives for Carol to leave the institution, she has progressed to the point where she only needs a cane.  As she walks down the street, she is apprehensive about facing the world alone (except for her father, with whom she will be living for a while).  But then Guy shows up with flowers.  It is clear that they will get married and live happily ever after.  In Outrage, a man starts making advances to Ann at a picnic, and she goes all flashback, thinking he is the man who raped her.  She hits him with a wrench.  It puts him in the hospital and she goes to jail.  However, the man does not want to press charges, and the judge agrees to let Ann go provided she receives psychiatric care for a year.  In other words, Ann receives professional care same as Carol, only hers is delayed.  Doc puts Ann on a bus back to her home where Jim and her parents are waiting for her.  And in case you were wondering, the rapist was caught.

In one sense, the ending of Never Fear was not far-fetched.  People who don’t dance tend to assume that dancing partners are lovers, but dancers know that very often they are not.  So, Carol would not have had any reason to feel jealous about Guy and his new dancing partner.  However, I still did not like what comes across as an artificial, tacked-on happy ending.  I would have preferred that Carol leave the institution knowing that she will have to face the world alone, except for the support her father could give her, at least for a while.  It would have given the movie a tougher, harder edge.  In fact, I was a little bothered by the way the movie portrayed Carol’s attitude as wrong-headed.  If she wanted to make a clean break with her past, that was her business.  In Outrage, on the other hand, the happy ending seemed reasonable and natural.

 

The Virgin Spring (1960)

Being an atheist, I have always found it challenging to review a religious movie, because I worry that my criticism will be more about religion than about the movie.  This difficulty is compounded if it is not clear what the attitude of those who produced the movie is toward that religion, whether they intended the movie to be a criticism of religion or a defense of it.  In other words, it is not clear to me whether The Virgin Spring, a movie directed by Ingmar Bergman, looks upon the simple faith of some fourteenth century peasants in the same way that parents will smile at their child’s belief in Santa Claus, or whether the movie actually shares that faith in God and encourages us to do likewise.

Anyway, as I said, there is this fourteenth century family of Swedish peasants headed by Töre (Max von Sydow).  His daughter is Karin, who is a blonde virgin.  Well, her body may be pure, but her soul is not.  She is lazy, vain, and spoiled, smug in the fact that she is so cute and adorable that she can do as she pleases.  She has a foster sister, Ingeri, who is a brunette, a bastard soon to give birth to a bastard of her own.  The two of them set out for church to do something or other, and on the way it turns out that the other night Karin was flirting with the man that got Ingeri pregnant.  Though there is no hope that he will marry Ingeri, yet Karin’s dalliance with him infuriates Ingeri.  Just to rub it in, Karin taunts Ingeri for no longer being a virgin, while gloating over the way she will someday be married in all her virginal purity.

They get separated, and soon after Karin comes upon three goat herders that rape and murder her.  The men strip her body of her beautiful clothes.  Later, they ask for lodging at Töre’s house, not realizing he is Karin’s father.  That night, they present Karin’s clothing to her mother as a gift, saying it belonged to their sister.  She tells Töre about it.  He asks Ingeri what she knows, and she admits that she witnessed the rape and murder and feels guilty because she wanted Karin to get her comeuppance.  Töre then murders the three goat herders, one of whom was just a boy, who had nothing to do with what happened to Karin.  Then Töre feels guilty for having committed murder.  The whole family goes out to where Karin’s body lies dead.  When they find her, Töre raises the ancient problem of evil, asking why God let this happen and then let him commit murder, while at the same time saying that he begs God’s forgiveness.

Now, this is what I was talking about.  Are we supposed to approve of Töre’s attitude or should we be disgusted?  I mean, I’m disgusted.  In fact, it is even a little disgusting that he had to wait until his daughter was raped and murdered before questioning how an all-powerful, loving God could let this happen.  After all, God has been standing by and letting girls get raped and murdered for centuries, and it is only now, when his daughter is a victim, that he takes exception to God’s indifference.

It gets worse.  Töre promises to build a church on the spot where Karin died, in hopes of being worthy of God’s forgiveness.  Then, when they lift up her body, water begins to gush from the ground where she lay, becoming a spring.  The family treats the water as if it is a miracle, a replenishing gift from God.  That’s right.  Karin’s rape and murder have been worth it, because now we are going to get a church with a little spring nearby.  Perhaps I should point out that there is no shortage of water in that area, the family having crossed a large stream on their way to get to Karin, so it is not as though the spring will bring needed water to a parched region.  It’s just more water.

Here we go again.  I don’t know whether we are supposed to regard that spring as a real miracle or not.  If it is a miracle, then we have to wonder:  as long as God was willing to perform a miracle, why didn’t he miraculously save Karin instead?  If it is not a miracle, are we supposed to despise or admire the family for thinking it is one?

I give up.  I’ll have to let someone who actually believes in God tell me what I am supposed to make of this movie.

Greedy Geezer Logic

One of the issues that have surfaced in this presidential election cycle is that of the advantages or disadvantages of free trade versus protectionism.  And so it was that a friend of mine and I found ourselves debating the issue.  As an unabashed protectionist, who has been opposed to all these free trade deals starting with NAFTA, I said that I wanted tariffs that will encourage more goods to be manufactured here in the United States, in part because I think it is better if we are self-sufficient in this regard and in part because it will mean better paying manufacturing jobs for the American worker.  And if it be argued that much of that manufacturing would be done with robots, then let them be our robots.

My friend, on the other hand, believes in free trade.  He argues that higher tariffs will result in higher prices, so that any increase in wages will be offset by the increase in prices.  Furthermore, he points out, whereas the increased wages will be taxed, thereby reducing the dollar amount received by the worker, the increased prices will be subject to sales taxes, thereby increasing the amount paid out by that same worker.  Therefore, he concludes, the American worker will be worse off without free trade.

Each of us being unable to persuade the other, we soon moved on to other topics.  It was only later, however, that it occurred to me that as both of us are retired, we would both be better off with free trade.  That is to say, even if I were right and the American worker would make more money in wages than he would have to pay out for the stuff he buys, affording him a higher standard of living, I, my friend, and anyone else that is retired would be worse off.  No longer working, we would not benefit from the higher wages, but we would definitely suffer from the increased prices.

Now, I could tell you that notwithstanding this consideration I remain a protectionist owing to the fact that I am high-minded and care more about what is good for this country in general than my own narrow self-interest.  However, the truth of the matter is that my advocacy of protectionism was more the result of a lifetime of working for wages, creating a strong affinity between me and the American worker in general, but that from the moment this evil thought entered my head that without free trade I would have to pay higher prices without any offset from higher wages, the idea of protectionism has been losing its appeal.

What is true about goods is also true about services.  Lower labor costs mean that I will have to pay less for services provided to me.  At the same time, as someone who is retired, I do not suffer from being paid less for the services I might have had to provide were I still a part of that labor force.  And thus it is that while I, along with so many others, suffered from the decline in real income during the years that I was working, now that I am retired, such declines in real income on the part of the American worker will only be to my benefit.  In fact, if I were a cad, I would be hoping there will be even more such declines in real wages in the years to come.  But I am not a cad.  At least, not too much of one.

Inasmuch as the demographic trend is for an increasingly older population, self-interested calculations of retirees will tend to play an even greater role in the future.  That is to say, as the population ages, there will be more political pressure in favor of free trade over protectionism owing to the fact that retired people will receive all the advantages of lower prices without suffering the disadvantages of lower wages.  Add to this the fact that older people are more likely to vote than younger people, and the demographic effect will only be intensified.  Moreover, this reasoning concerning the asymmetrical considerations of prices and wages for those of us that are retired is not restricted to just the question of free trade and protectionism.  It also has implications elsewhere.

Consider the matter of illegal immigration.  One of the arguments for putting a stop to illegal immigration is that it takes jobs away from American workers and forces those Americans that keep their jobs to work for less as a result of having to compete with this cheap labor pool.  On the other hand, these illegal immigrants provide goods and services at a cost much less than would have to be paid if American workers had those jobs.  Once again, for the American worker, there is the symmetrical tradeoff of wages and prices, while for the retired American, there is the asymmetrical consideration of prices only.  As a result, as the number of retired people increases, there will tend to be increased political pressure favoring de facto open borders.  However, unlike the issue of free trade, prices and wages are not the only consideration when it comes to illegal immigration, so this is not a pure case.

We have not heard anything about replacing the income tax with a value added tax in this presidential election cycle, and if the above considerations are valid, we are not likely to hear much about it in the future.  While some retirees are well-off enough to have to pay income taxes, most do not.  As a result, retirees would look with disfavor on any plan that would eliminate a tax they no longer have to pay anyway and replace it with a tax resulting in higher prices on the things they still have to buy.

What we do hear about, however, from a candidate that might just become the Republican nominee if the Stop Trump movement is successful, to wit, Ted Cruz, is a tax plan that is equally unlikely to be regarded by retirees with much enthusiasm.  Without going into all the details of his plan which may be perused here, he wants to significantly cut income taxes.  But, as noted above, paying income taxes is not a major concern for most retirees.  On the other hand, Cruz also wants to reduce the COLA for Security by a percentage point because he believes the CPI overstates inflation by that much.  So, if the CPI says we had 3% inflation, the amount of one’s Social Security check would increase by only 2%.  Needless to say, a retiree with, say, a twenty-year life expectancy would regard such a change in the law with alarm.

Not only are Ted Cruz’s proposals likely to become ever more unpopular as the number of retirees increases (assuming he doesn’t get elected and push it through Congress in 2017), there is likely to be a shift to a very different kind of entitlement reform in the future.  While Republicans have been boldly talking about cutting Social Security in one way or another (reducing the COLA, means testing, raising the retirement age, privatizing), Democrats have been sneaking up on the idea of lifting the cap on the payroll tax as a way of putting Social Security in the black.  I predict that as the number of retirees increases, Republicans will begin to lose their nerve while Democrats will gradually become emboldened.  In short, the solution that logic has called for but politics has forbidden is that of not merely lifting the cap, but of raising the payroll tax itself.  The taboo of raising the payroll tax will diminish in the years to come inasmuch as it is a tax retirees will not have to pay.  They will get all the benefits of a secure Social Security check without any of the costs.

Given my argument that the self-interest of the increasingly large retirement population will mean more political pressure in favor of free trade, open borders, and higher taxes, some might say that I am playing right into the stereotype of the greedy geezer popularized by Alan Simpson.  Well, in the words of Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good.”

Crimson Peak (2015)

How does a movie like Crimson Peak come to be produced?  Well, I cannot say that I actually have inside knowledge of this movie in particular, but over many years of watching movies, I have noticed that a lot of plots seem to be getting more convoluted.  Perhaps it was feared by certain authors that a simple story that might have satisfied audiences in the early part of the twentieth century would have been regarded as too thin by mid-century, requiring additional elements and twists.  But even these more complicated stories may have been thought boring and repetitious as the years wore on, requiring even more stuff to be added.  Not all movies have suffered from this trend, fortunately.  It is still possible to tell a simple story well.  But for some authors, this process of accretion, by which an originally simple plot is given more and more elements until it is bloated with material, continues unabated to this day.  An especially egregious example of this  is Crimson Peak. And so, although I have no specific knowledge of how this movie came about, I suspect it might have happened something like this:

Scriptwriter:  “I have an idea for a story.  An American woman named Edith Cushing, who has a lot of money, marries Thomas Sharpe, a man from England with a title.  But when she gets to England, she finds that Crimson Peak, the house he owns, is a ruin with a gaping hole in the ceiling that lets in the snow and the rain as well as lots of moths.  There are certain parts of the house she has to avoid because of the danger of a collapse.  Furthermore, her husband is a loser, a would-be inventor who spends his time fruitlessly trying to make a machine that will allow him to extract the red clay from the earth in hopes of making enough money to restore Crimson Peak to its former glory.  In the meantime, she must struggle trying to live in a house that in America would have been condemned years ago.”

Producer:  “Is that it?  That might have been story enough for the Brontë sisters, but that’s not enough for today’s audience.”

Scriptwriter:  “All right.  The man has a sister named Lucille, who lives there too, and she is overbearing and hostile to Edith.”

Producer:  “Yawn.”

Scriptwriter:  “How about this?  Thomas and Lucille are not really brother and sister.  Actually, they are married, and they have schemed to get their hands on Edith’s money by way of a phony marriage to her.”

Producer:  “That’s better.  But there is no need to get rid of the brother-sister relationship.  That way the marriage between Thomas and Lucille will be incestuous.  Juicy!  Still, you can’t just leave it at that.  We need more.”

Scriptwriter:  “I know.  Their mother found out that Thomas and Lucille were having sex when they were children.  When she tried to stop it, they murdered her.”

Producer:  “Good.  Matricide is a nice touch.  But why stop there?  Let’s have a bunch more murders.”

Scriptwriter:  “Uh, Lucille murdered Edith’s father, who objected to the marriage.  Moreover, Thomas has been married to several other rich women before, all of whom were murdered once he and Lucille got their hands on their money.  And now they are planning to murder Edith by slowly poisoning her.  And Edith’s friend in America, Dr. Alan McMichael, has gotten wind of all this and has come to England to save her.  He and Edith are almost killed, but they get the better of Thomas and Lucille, who are dead by the end of the movie.  Edith and Alan live happily ever after.”

Producer:  “Now we are getting somewhere.  If this were still the late twentieth century, we would finally have enough for a movie.  But something is missing.  I can feel it.  Maybe if we added a plot element that required some special effects, that would get this story on its feet.”

Scriptwriter:  “I’ve got it!  We’ll put ghosts in this story.  Edith’s dead mother can warn her about Crimson Peak.  And the ghosts of some of the other people that died along the way can be added in.”

Producer:  “Ah.  That’s nice.  But there is just one thing that still worries me.  A lot of people don’t believe in ghosts.  They might regard that part of the movie as just so much silly superstition.”

Scriptwriter:  “No problem.  We’ll have Edith be an aspiring author when the movie begins, of whom it is said that she doesn’t write ghost stories, but rather she writes stories that have ghosts in them, as if to say they are not really that important.  And this will apply to the very that movie people are watching.  If they don’t believe in ghosts, they can just disregard them.

Producer:  That’s a little like saying a movie is not a Godzilla movie, but a movie that has Godzilla in it.

Scriptwriter:  Well, she can also declare that the ghosts in her stories are just a metaphor, which means the ghosts in this story are just a metaphor.”

Producer:  “A metaphor for what?”

Scriptwriter:  “Who cares?  Just as long as it flatters the intelligence of the audience.”

Philadelphia (1993)

In the movie Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a lawyer with a prestigious law firm.  In the opening scene, he successfully defends a client against what he calls a “nuisance suit,” as “an example of rapacious litigation.”  And so, if you did not know anything about this movie beforehand, you would correctly suspect that before the show is over, he will be bringing suit against someone himself.  And when he does, the lawyer whom he accused of bringing a frivolous lawsuit against his client, ambulance chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), ends up being his attorney.  In particular, the partners of the law firm he worked for say that they fired Beckett for incompetence, but Beckett claims they fired him because he had AIDS, which he concealed from the partners in addition to concealing the fact that he was gay.  Beckett explains during the trial that he decided not to tell the partners he was gay when he heard them telling crude jokes about homosexuals.  Those who produced this movie made sure that the jokes were not funny, lest we get confused and start sympathizing with the partners.  Actually, the movie never makes it clear exactly what happened regarding Beckett’s firing.  Beckett believes that someone figured out he had AIDS and sabotaged his work in order to justify dismissing him for incompetence, but we never find out for sure.

This movie is contemporaneously set in the early 1990s.  It was a transitional period.  During the 1980s, when AIDS was first identified, there was no treatment.  I remember seeing a lot of people whose bodies were ravaged by that disease.  The sight of them filled one with pity and dread (we see examples of such at the clinic where Beckett goes to have his blood monitored).  The dread was especially acute, because at the time, no one knew how contagious it was or what the vectors of transmission were.  Was it airborne?  Could it be transmitted by mosquitoes?  We knew that blood and semen could transmit the disease, but we also wondered about saliva and sweat.  By the 1990s, however, research had pretty much established that AIDS was caused by HIV and that blood transfusions, dirty needles used by drug addicts, and unprotected sex, especially between two men, were the primary methods of transmission.  Today, we seldom hear the word AIDS.  Instead, we speak mostly of HIV, because treatment has advanced to the point that we no longer see those pitiful victims that looked like the walking dead.

And so, the aversion to touching or being around AIDS victims, a perfectly rational fear in the early 1980s, came to be regarded as manifestations of ignorance and bigotry by the 1990s.  If someone was known to have AIDS, it became almost obligatory to hug him, as a way of demonstrating that one was enlightened on the subject.  And so, throughout this movie, we see Beckett being hugged on numerous occasions, more than you would normally see in a movie.  And we see other people trying to put distance between themselves and Beckett, whom we are supposed to regard as wrongheaded, if not morally bankrupt.

Before taking Beckett’s case, Miller asks a doctor about AIDS.  When the doctor assures him that HIV cannot be spread by casual contact, Miller is skeptical, pointing out that we are still learning new things about the disease every day.  Actually, this is a good point, though the movie allows it to die with this scene.  If even today someone did not want to hug someone with AIDS, just in case doctors turn out to be wrong, I would not blame him.  But the movie would.

In fact, the movie is completely one-sided in this matter.  Beckett is almost righteous in his disregard for people’s fears.  There is a scene in a library where a librarian, realizing he has AIDS, suggests that he move to a private room to continue his research, but Beckett refuses.  People in the immediate vicinity begin moving away.  In another scene, when he tells his family about his plans to sue, he is holding a baby, feeding it with a bottle.  The mother offers to take the baby back, and we suspect she is nervous but too polite to insist.  Beckett seems oblivious to the possibility that she might be worried and continues to feed the baby.

Even if the people in the library and the mother of the baby are being foolish in their fears, that does not mean that Beckett is in the right to refuse to accommodate them.  For example, my mother was a little superstitious, and she used to think it was bad luck to put money on the table.  As a result, I never put money on the table in her presence, even if she was visiting me in my apartment and it was my table.  Despite the fact that she was the one who was foolish and I was the one who was rational, it would have been rude of me to plop some money down on the table.  By the same token, no matter how irrational people’s fears of contracting AIDS through casual contact may be, Beckett should have been sensitive to those fears and allowed people the distance they needed to feel comfortable.  But this movie does not recognize any such obligation on Beckett’s part.

The issue of the case was whether the law firm illegally fired Beckett because he had AIDS or was fired because of incompetence, which would have been legal.  Therefore, the question of how he contracted the disease was irrelevant.  Nevertheless, we are not surprised that the question arises as to Beckett’s behavior, whether he contracted AIDS through reckless actions on his part.  A woman who had once worked for the partner who first noticed Beckett’s lesion is brought on the stand to testify on the part of the plaintiff (Beckett).  She had had AIDS too, but she told her employers.  The point is that the partner would have realized what the lesion meant from his experience with her, in which case knowledge that Beckett had the disease by at least one of the partners would be established, a necessary condition of proving that that was the real reason for Beckett’s firing.

Under cross examination, it turns out that she contracted the disease when she was given a transfusion after giving birth.  In other words, she got AIDS through no fault of her own.  That the occasion was when she had a baby even associates the event with motherhood.  You couldn’t want a more saintly innocent victim than that.  So, we know what is coming:  the old blame-the-victim strategy.  Sure enough, when Beckett gets on the stand, he is asked about whether he had ever been to the Stallion Showcase Cinema, a gay pornographic movie theater where men in the audience sometimes have sex with each other.  Beckett admits to having been to the theater three times in 1984 or 1985, and that he had sex with a man in the theater one time.  He also admits that he knew about AIDS at the time and that his actions could have endangered Miguel Alvarez (Antonio Banderas), the man he was living with at the time and still is.  The point of the defense is that Beckett is not an innocent victim, but someone who contracted the disease in rather seedy circumstances in full knowledge of the danger to himself and his lover.

Of course, the attitude of the movie is that it is wrong to blame the victim, but let us note that the movie also lacks the courage of its convictions.  It establishes that Beckett was and still is in a monogamous relationship, as it were, and that he just had a moral lapse one night.  In other words, the movie did not have the courage to make Beckett a man given to promiscuity, a “degenerate” who had had anonymous sex on innumerable occasions in movie theaters and restrooms for over a decade.  That would really have tested us.  Instead, the movie is saying that it is wrong to blame the victim, especially when the victim, while not being totally innocent like the woman who had a transfusion, is almost innocent.

After much testimony from various witnesses, the case is turned over to the jury for deliberations, if you can call it that.  All we hear is one man, presumably the foreman, telling the other jurors that the case for the defense does not make sense.  That’s it.  No one has a dissenting view.  In fact, no one else says anything, except to mumble agreement.  The closest thing we get to a dissent is when the jurors are being asked one by one how they stand on the issue, and juror number ten says, “I disagree.”  This is not supposed to be a jury movie, of course, like Twelve Angry Men (1957), where an Ed Begley character could express bigotry toward homosexuals or where a Lee J. Cobb character could reveal that his prejudice stemmed from the fact that his son was gay, before finally coming around to the proper verdict.  But surely they could have done better than what we got in this movie.  Alternatively, if time simply did not permit, it would have better to leave out the jury-deliberation scene altogether.  Needless to say, the jury finds in favor of the plaintiff, as if any other verdict in this movie was remotely possible.

Midway through the trial, Miller comes over to Beckett’s place to go over the testimony Beckett will be giving on Monday.  Instead, Beckett wants to talk about the opera music that he has playing.  Like most people, including me, Miller does not much care for opera.  Beckett explains what the opera is about and what emotions are being expressed through the singing.  The intensity of his performance is bizarre.  I don’t know.  Maybe if you are dying from a dreadful disease, you can get a little more worked up about things than the one normally would, but it all seems to be a bit much.  While his overwrought description of the aria was going on, I could not help but think of the movie Pretty Woman (1990).  In that movie, Julia Roberts plays a streetwalker who ends up being the girlfriend of a corporate raider played by Richard Gere.  He takes her to see an opera, presumably the first one she has ever been to, and we see her crying during a particularly moving scene.  In other words, in both movies, a major character practices a form of sex that many regard as deviant and likely to spread disease.  And in both movies, these characters are deeply moved by an opera, as if to say they have such great souls that they can appreciate art in its highest form with a passion that we philistines can scarcely imagine.  It just wouldn’t have been the same if Beckett had been listening to N.W.A., explaining to his lawyer with great emotion, “And here is the part where he gets his sawed off shotgun and they have to haul off all the bodies.”

Lifeboat (1944)

Lifeboat is a movie made during World War II, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  It begins with a freighter that was on its way from America to England, having been sunk by a German U-boat.  The captain of the U-boat gave orders to fire upon the lifeboats, after which the U-boat itself is sunk.  One lifeboat manages to survive, and one by one it is populated by British and Americans of all walks of life. Finally, Willi (Walter Slezak), a German, is pulled aboard.  Some, such as a John Kovac (John Hodiak), who worked in the engine room, want to throw the German overboard, while columnist Connie Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), radioman Stanley “Sparks” Garrett (Hume Cronyn), and industrialist Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) (i.e., a woman and two weak men, appeasers all) argue successfully that they should let the German stay.

As the movie progresses, we see that while the British and Americans share what they have with the German, he conceals from them that he has a flask of water, some food and energy tablets, and a compass, by which he tries to steer them away from Bermuda and toward an area of the ocean occupied by German ships.  He further conceals that he was the captain of the U-boat.

Of particular interest is Gus Smith (William Bendix), who has been wounded in the leg. When we find out that he loves to dance, we know right then his leg is doomed.  Sure enough, it becomes gangrenous.  As it turns out, Willi was a surgeon before the war and says that he can amputate.  We get the sense that he enjoys the idea of removing Gus’s leg, much like the sadistic doctor in King’s Row (1942), who unnecessarily amputates the legs of Ronald Reagan.  Gus does not want to have his leg removed, saying he’d rather die than live with one leg, because he is afraid that he will lose Rosie, the girl back home whom he loves.  He fears that she might not want to marry him if he comes back without one of his legs, especially since she loves to dance as much as Gus does.  To make matters worse, Gus has a rival, Al Magaroulian, whom Rosie used to date, and who is also a good dancer, even though fallen arches have kept him out of the war.  Gus is afraid Rosie will go back to Al if he has his leg removed.  But eventually he relents, and Willi performs the surgery with no better anesthetic than brandy.

Later in the movie, while everyone is sleeping lethargically from dehydration, Gus catches Willi sipping a drink of water from his flask.  To keep Gus from telling the others about the water, Willi pushes him overboard.  When the others awaken from hearing Gus’s cries for help, they realize Gus has drowned, and they ask Willi why he didn’t do something.  Willi does not, of course, tell them that he pushed Gus overboard to keep him from talking.  Instead, he tells them that Gus voluntarily jumped overboard, and that he thought it would be best not to do anything about it:

You can’t imagine how painful it was to me.  All night long, to watch him turning and suffering and nothing I could do for him….  The best way to help him was to let him go.  I had no right to stop him, even if I wanted to.  A poor cripple dying of hunger and thirst. What good could life be to a man like that?

It probably didn’t help that earlier in the movie, when the passengers in the lifeboat were voting on whether to throw Willi overboard, he heard Gus vote to toss him into the ocean.

Then the other passengers find out about the water and food that Willi has been concealing.  They attack Willi, both the men and the women, forcing him overboard and to his death.  But one person does not take part in the attack.  It is Joe “Charcoal” Spencer (Canada Lee), an African American.  The idea seems to be that killing Willi is essentially a lynching, something that Joe would be sensitive about and find repugnant. He even tries to stop the nurse, Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), from participating in the killing, though she breaks away from him.

More likely, the true motivation was external to the film, in that those who made the movie were afraid that theaters in the South would have refused to show a movie in which a black man takes part in the killing of a white man, even if that white man is a Nazi.  In fact, earlier in the movie, when they were voting on whether to throw Willi overboard, Rittenhouse asks Joe how he wants to vote. Joe asks, “Do I get to vote too?” When told that he does, he says, “Guess I’d rather stay out of this.” This too was probably to placate the South, which would have bristled at seeing Joe get to vote right alongside white people.  Instead, southern audiences were undoubtedly pleased to see that this Negro knew his place.

One of the women brought aboard the lifeboat has a baby that drowned.  Eventually, they decide to give the baby a burial at sea. The passengers know that a prayer is in order, but are not sure which one. Rittenhouse says that any prayer will do, and he begins saying Psalm 23, the one that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd….”  However, Rittenhouse begins to falter after a couple of lines. But then Joe picks up where he left off, for he knows the entire thing by heart, and finishes it reverently.  One might suppose that the movie is depicting this as something admirable, but it is actually condescending.  African Americans in the old movies were always allowed to be more religious than white people, not because they were better than white people, morally speaking, but because their lesser intelligence made it possible for them to embrace their simple beliefs with an unquestioning faith.  In movies like The Green Pastures (1936) and Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959), it is clear that their religious notions are naïve and childlike, something white people approve of in black folks with an affectionate smile, but would be incapable of taking seriously themselves.

After they kill Willi, they realize that he was the only one who knew enough and had strength enough to row them to safety. Rittenhouse says, “When we killed the German, we killed our motor.”  But Joe says, “We still got a motor,” as he looks up toward the heavens.  Rittenhouse is dismissive when he realizes Joe is talking about God.  Here again, religion enters the movie through an acceptable vehicle, through a black man, while the white people remain skeptical, thereby retaining their dignity.  All this is a prejudice of the movies I’m talking about here, not necessarily how things were in real life.

Joe is only one of two people on the boat that is married, the other being Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), the woman with the dead baby. That leaves the way open for romantic possibilities.  Sparks ends up proposing to Alice, who had been having an affair with a married man and was miserable on account of it.  She accepts his proposal.  Kovac seems to be angry at the world, especially at Rittenhouse, who is a capitalist, while Kovac is a prole.  And he resents the fact that Connie is high class.  Little by little, she loses the symbols of her wealth, her mink and her diamond bracelet, for example.  As a woman stripped of such adornments, she might be suitable for Kovac.  Finally, it turns out that she is from the same side of the tracks as Kovac.  She uses her lipstick to put her initials on his chest, right alongside all the other initials of women tattooed on his torso.  We wish Sparks and Alice happiness with their marriage.  As for Kovac and Connie, they’d better just make it a fling.

Eventually, there is another sea battle, and it becomes clear that they will soon be picked up by an Allied ship, but not before they pull another German aboard who proves to be just as bad as Willi, though he is weak and soon overpowered, leaving the survivors to wonder, “What are you going to do with people like that?”

Yes, Nazis are evil, but are we all that good?  Consider Willi’s justification for letting Gus drown.  The lie that Willi thinks will be an acceptable justification for “allowing” Gus to drown is actually repugnant to the other survivors, who listen to his words in horror. And we who watch this movie are likewise repulsed by Willi’s callous remarks.  But now let us ask ourselves why those who made this movie (John Steinbeck, Jo Swerling, and Alfred Hitchcock) put this into the story.  We already knew Willi was evil before he killed Gus. When Mrs. Higley tells Willi he killed her baby when he ordered the lifeboats to be fired upon, Willi is so bored that he yawns and lies down to get some sleep.  She becomes so distraught that she drowns herself. But if a murder on the lifeboat was needed to really drive home the point that Willi was evil, it was not Gus that had to be killed.  It could have been Connie who saw Willi sneaking a sip of water.  When she confronts him, he snaps her neck and dumps her overboard.  That would certainly make it clear that Willi was evil!  But I suspect people would have hated that movie.

The point is that those who made this movie had a special reason for killing Gus off beyond making it clear that Willi was evil, which was overdetermined in any event. They did it to make those in the audience feel better, believing that the audience would have been uneasy if the movie had ended with Gus still alive in that lifeboat.  (It is for a similar reason that the mother with the dead baby had to commit suicide, because it would have been depressing to still have her alive at the end of the movie too.)  Sure, Rosie might not have cared about Gus’s leg, marrying him anyway because she truly loved him.  In a movie like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Hollywood could make sure that things would turn out that way.  In that movie, Cathy O’Donnell marries Harold Russell, despite the fact that both of his forearms have been replaced by prostheses, and despite the fact that her parents wanted her to break off the engagement.  But in real life, we know things do not always work out that way.  Rosie and Gus were not even engaged.  Instead of being like O’Donnell, Rosie might have tried to put a good face on the situation for a couple of months and then broken up with Gus and gone back to Al Magaroulian.  Since this movie is limited to what happens in and about that lifeboat, Hollywood could not guarantee a happy ending for Gus and Rosie, leaving the audience with dark forebodings as to what will happen when Gus gets back home.

Furthermore, the movie even indicates that Rosie will not remain true to Gus.  When Kovac and Connie try to convince Gus he needs to have his leg amputated, he refuses, saying he doesn’t want to live with just one leg.  (In a way, he is in agreement with Willi.)  Connie gives Gus a long, sentimental talk about how women are, how Rosie would be heartbroken to find that Gus allowed himself to die because he didn’t have faith in her.  Gus finally seems persuaded, but Connie turns away, saying, sotto voce, “God forgive me.”  By this we are to understand that she knows Rosie will not stick with Gus, and we know we are supposed to agree with her assessment.

And so, rather than leave the audience suspecting that Rosie would desert Gus, which would have been depressing, those who made this movie killed Gus off, allowing the audience to leave the theater feeling much better about the movie than if Gus had lived.  You might even say that Gus’s death was necessary for there to be a happy ending.  But does that not imply that those who made this movie were essentially in agreement with Willi when he asked, “What good could life be to a man like that?”  If they were right in their assessment of the audience’s reaction to an ending in which Gus is still alive, then does that not imply that the audience at that time felt the way Willi did?  Of course, there is a big difference between saying a man is better off dead and saying that the death of that man made the story better.  But both stem from the same sentiment.

And so, just as the audience gets the consolation of religion through Joe, while not being guilty of indulging in his silly superstitions, so too does the audience get the benefit of evil through Willi, while not being guilty of consciously wanting it.

Straight Time (1978)

There was a joke going around back in the early 1960s, “Do you ever watch The Untouchables and catch yourself pulling for the good guys?”  It really is amazing how easily a movie can get us to pull for the criminals, making us hope they get away with their crimes.  This is done primarily by making the criminal the protagonist, and also by having that criminal played by a major star.

Is Straight Time that kind of movie?  At first, I thought so, but as I got further into the movie, I came to the conclusion that Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman), a criminal just being released from prison after spending six years behind bars for burglary, was just not sympathetic enough to make me want him to get away with anything.  In fact, I thought the movie was a good illustration of why most people are unwilling to give a convicted felon a second chance.  But after watching the movie, I read some reviews and found that some critics saw Max as a victim of the difficulties of going straight in general and of his parole officer Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh) in particular.  This in turn made me wonder if the people who made this movie, director Ulu Grosbard among others, wanted me to be sympathetic to Max after all.

The first two sentences of a plot summary on IMDb is typical:  “After being released on parole, a burglar attempts to go straight, get a regular job, and just go by the rules. He soon finds himself back in jail at the hands of a power-hungry parole officer.”  Well, I take exception to two parts of that summary, that Max attempts to “just go by the rules,” and that the parole officer is “power-hungry.”

The first thing we see Max do is order a hot dog and then “forget” to pay for it.  Then he shows up late for his meeting with his parole officer, who wants to know where he stayed the night before, because he did not show up at the halfway house, which was required as one of the conditions of his parole, something Max agreed to upon his release from prison.  Max says, “Because I just spent six years in prison.  I just wanted to look at the lights.  I wanted to feel free.  I wanted to walk around and not have somebody tell me that I gotta get in bed at ten.”

Well, isn’t that nice.  Max believes that what he wants is more important than the rules.  Of course, that’s why he has such a long rap sheet in the first place, because he thought that the fact that he wanted something that belonged to someone else was more important than the rule that prohibits stealing.  The rest of us know that we have to try to satisfy our wants while complying with the rules, but apparently six years in prison was not enough to teach Max that lesson.

If I were parole officer Frank, by this time I would be disgusted.  He tells Max he has an attitude problem, which he most certainly does.  But Max is either dense or purposely acting that way, because he asks what kind of attitude he is supposed to have.  Frank patiently explains the facts of life to Max:  “Well, you don’t decide whether or not you go to a halfway house.  I mean, you come to me, we discuss it, then I decide.”  Sounds reasonable to me, but I guess this is what the critic on IMDb meant by saying that Frank was a “power-hungry parole officer.”  I would have told Max to get his ass over to the halfway house, and that once he had checked in there, he could come back to my office and we could start talking about his finding a job.  But Frank is more generous than I would have been, saying, “I’ll make a deal with you, Max.  If you find a place to sleep today and a job by the end of the week, you don’t have to go to a halfway house. Fair?”  More than fair, as far as I’m concerned.

At the employment agency, Max is given some tests, one of which is typing.  The employment agent who is testing him is Jenny (Theresa Russell).  She tells Max three times that his time is up, for him to stop typing, but you know how Max is about the rules.  He doesn’t want to stop typing, so he figures that entitles him to keep going.  Jenny finally has to rip the paper out of the typewriter.

Max goes to visit his friend Willy (Gary Busey), who has apparently also done time.  After Willy leaves the room for a minute, his wife Selma (Kathy Bates) tells Max that it would be best for him not to come around, because Willy has been doing well going straight, and she is afraid that Max might not be a good influence on him.  And then she makes a further observation:  “You’re on parole now, Max.  Well, you really shouldn’t even be seen with Willy, right?”  So here we are again.  A condition of Max’s parole is that he not associate with convicted felons like Willy, but I guess Max wanted to see Willy, and as we know, what he wants always trumps the rules.

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary seems to be another critic who sympathizes with Max, saying that Frank is venal.  Now, “venal” means “corrupt or willing to be bribed,” but there is nothing to indicate that about Frank.  He just seems to be doing his job trying to run herd on a bunch of lowlifes like Max.  Peary also says that Frank intends to send Max back to prison, but I see nothing to indicate that.  If Max had followed the rules by going to the halfway house and avoiding Willy as he was supposed to, everything would have been fine.

Instead, just as Selma feared, when Willy goes over to Max’s motel room, he does himself up with a nice fix of heroin, and then carelessly leaves behind evidence of the deed, causing Frank to bring Max in for a drug test.  His urine tests clean, but after that he breaks parole completely and goes back into a life of crime.  But even in that realm, Max cannot go by the rules.  Another friend of his, Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), agrees to rob a bank and later a jewelry store with Max, but in both cases, Max refuses to leave the establishment when the allowed amount of time that they agreed to is up.  “You’re like a two-year-old child,” Jerry tells Max in exasperation.

I don’t even want to talk about how stupid Jenny is for dating Max and wanting to stay with him even after she finds out that he has gone back into crime.  He leaves her behind at a diner where a bus will take her back to Los Angeles, telling her she can’t go with him because he says he wants to get caught.  Oh brother!  Now, it is one thing to say that about somebody else, but it sounds artificial and hokey when someone says that about himself.  Besides, if he wants to get caught, he can just turn himself in.  Presumably, we are supposed to imagine that Jenny won’t be implicated, but she was seen leaving the office with him after he shot a policeman, and the car he drives off in belongs to her, so this is not realistic.

Peary argues that part of the problem is that it is hard for an ex-con to go straight:  “[Max] may be a habitual criminal, but it’s important for us to realize that if he really did intend to go straight come hell or high water, being an ex-con makes that a near impossibility.”  On the contrary, the movie indicates that going straight is indeed possible.  Not only did Max manage to get himself a decent job at the National Can Company, but it is also evident that both of his friends, Willy and Jerry, managed to go straight and do all right holding down jobs.  In fact, what causes Willy and Jerry to go back into crime with Max is not that society makes things hard for them, but that they are basically no good, that they prefer crime to holding down a job and living an ordinary life.

In addition to the question as to how we are to interpret this movie, either like a bleeding-heart liberal, who sees Max as someone who just needed a chance but was victimized by Frank, or like a law-and-order conservative, who thinks that Frank was just doing his job and that Max caused his own problems by not following the rules, there is the question as to which interpretation was intended by those who made this movie.  According to a review published by Variety when the movie came out, those who made this movie at first promoted the former before shifting to the latter:  “Viewers are asked initially to believe that M. Emmet Walsh, the assigned parole officer, is a sadistic person who delights in hassling his charges. But given the circumstances, he does not emerge as a heavy. Indeed, Hoffman’s too-easy lapse into his old ways absolves any blame on The System. Hoffman’s character would have defied the parole supervision of a saint.”

Finally, there is the question as to how much the actors starring in these roles influence our judgment.  Vincent Canby of The New York Times says:  “Max is shrewd, self-absorbed, tough in superficial ways, and doomed. He defines the meaning of recidivism. In real life you wouldn’t trust him to hang up your coat. In Straight Time, in the person of Dustin Hoffman, he’s a fascinating character, made romantic only to the extent that an actor of such stature invests him with importance that is otherwise denied. Max is strictly small-time.”

Peary says, “If Robert De Niro had played [Max], with Martin Scorsese as director, we’d probably be too repulsed by him to feel any of the necessary empathy.”  Another way to look at it is to imagine if the movie had been about a parole officer played by Dustin Hoffmann, one of whose parolees was played by M. Emmet Walsh.

In any event, the movie as it stands, with the actors that star in it, is one of those movies that tell you something about yourself, depending on how you react to it.  Apparently, I’m just a law-and-order kind of guy.

A Thousand Clowns (1965)

I saw A Thousand Clowns when it was released in 1965, while I was in my second year of college.  It is one of those movies that praise nonconformity, making the case that it is wonderful to be a free spirit, defying convention, and living life to the full.  Other well-known movies in this nonconformist genre are You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Auntie Mame (1958).  These movies make me say to myself, “Thank God for conformity!  Otherwise, life on this planet would be unbearable.”

Jason Robards plays Murray Burns, the nonconformist of this film.  His nephew Nick (Barry Gordon) lives with him in an apartment.  Murray glories in not making much sense, but the fact is, the world he lives in does not make much sense either, because it is a fake world, written to suit the purposes of the story.

When the movie opens, Murray and Nick are out on the street in New York City, early in the morning.  Murray starts hollering at the people in the apartment buildings that they need to clean their windows.  Later in the movie, Nick says that Murray hollers all the time:

He hollers.  Like, we were on Park Avenue last Sunday, and it’s very early in the morning.  There’s no one in the streets, see, just all these big, quiet apartment houses, and he hollers, “Rich people, I want to see you all out on the street for volleyball.  Let’s snap it up!”

And Nick is right.  Murray talks loud and hollers throughout the movie.  He is not content merely to be a nonconformist in his own quiet way, but feels compelled to put his nonconformity on full display for the benefit of the whole world.

Murray makes fun of the people who are going to work in the morning, which he refers to as a “horrible thing.”  He used to have a job working for a guy named Leo, writing jokes for a children’s show called Chuckles, the Chipmunk, but he quit and has been receiving unemployment checks for five months. Nick mentions that in school he wrote an essay on the benefits of living on unemployment insurance, which has precipitated an investigation to see if Murray is fit to have custody of Nick.

Let’s stop right there.  First of all, people who get laid off can receive unemployment checks, and so can those that quit for a good cause, such as a medical condition.  But you don’t qualify for unemployment benefits if you simply got tired of working and quit.  Second, social workers do not take children away from their homes because the person taking care of them is receiving unemployment checks.  The whole point of unemployment insurance is to allow people to have something to live on, which includes taking care of their children, until they find another job.

Nevertheless, two social workers, Albert Amundson (William Daniels) and Dr. Sandra Markowitz (Barbara Harris), come calling on Murray to see whether or not Nick should be taken away from him and put in a foster home.  Amundson is a typical character in a nonconformist movie, someone who is anal, who thinks everything must be in its place, and that everyone must act in strict accordance with his sense of propriety. And as the world never manages to live up to his rigid standards, he always seems to be on the verge of losing control of himself.  The movie needs such a character to convince us that conformity is bad, so nonconformity, by default, must be good.  In other words, if Amundson were your typical social worker, a fairly normal person, we would conclude that Murray was wrong to act the way he does.  By making Amundson so ridiculously uptight, the movie hopes to persuade us that Murray’s way must be the right way.  William Daniels, who plays Amundson, is perfect for this kind of role, if such a role is required, which is the case here, unfortunately.

After Murray talks loud and acts crazy in front of Amundson and Markowitz for fifteen minutes, with Nick doing the same, we eventually get the serious reason why Nick is with Murray.  When Nick was five, his mother abandoned Nick, leaving him at Murray’s apartment.  No one knows who the father was.  Normal social workers would be glad that a relative is taking care of Nick and would probably want him to have legal custody, because that is preferable to putting Nick in a foster home. But not so in this movie.

And then, just to add to the absurdity of it all, Nick does not have an official name.  The explanation given is that since Nick was a bastard, his mother decided not to give him a last name.  And since she didn’t give him a last name, she didn’t want to give him a first name either.  As I mentioned above, this is a fake world.  If an unwed mother refuses to name a child, the name will be assigned by the state, typically giving the child the mother’s maiden name, and picking a common first name to complete the process.  The only way her child could avoid having an official name would be if there were no birth certificate.  So, what did his mother do, have him under a bridge?

Dr. Markowitz is a fairly normal person and thus more like a typical social worker. However, she was engaged to Amundson, and they quarrel while at Murray’s apartment.  He leaves without her, and she becomes hysterical.  But soon it is that she and Murray fall in love.  And you know what that means.  She wants him to give up his nonconformist ways and get a job.  And the principal reason why Murray should do this, according to the movie, is emphasized over and over again, that only by getting a job can he retain custody of Nick.

Amundson returns the next day to explain the situation to Murray:

Late yesterday afternoon, the Child Welfare Board made a decision on your case. Now, uh, the decision they’ve reached is based on three months of a thorough study.

Since Murray has been receiving unemployment checks for five months, the investigation apparently started two months after he quit his job.  Boy, that Child Welfare Board is really on top of things!  Amundson continues:

Our interview yesterday was only a small part of that.  Quite thorough.  I want you to understand that I am not responsible personally for the decision they’ve reached….  Months of research by the board and reports by the Revere School show a severe domestic instability, a libertine self indulgence, a whole range of circumstances severely detrimental to the child’s welfare.

Amundson informs Murray that it is the board’s decision to remove Nick from his home and find a place for him where he can lead a normal, wholesome life, even though he admits that Murray loves Nick:

Now, I believe that you are a danger to this child.  … I wish this were not true, because it is obvious you have considerable affection for your nephew.  It shows in your face, this feeling.  Well, I admire you for your warmth, Mr. Burns, and for the affection the child feels for you.

Meanwhile, all over the city, children are being physically and sexually abused, but it appears the Child Welfare Board won’t have time to get to them.  They’re too busy worrying about Murray’s bohemian life style.

The most reasonable spokesman for conformity is Murray’s brother, Arnold (Martin Balsam).  He tries to explain to Murray the virtues of conformity, with special emphasis on the fact that the state will take Nick away from him if he does not get a job.  But while he goes on at length trying to persuade Murray to go back to work, the one argument that never seems to occur to him or anyone else in this movie is the one that is the most obvious:  eventually the unemployment checks will stop, and with no source of income, Murray will be evicted from his apartment, and he and Nick will have to live under that bridge where presumably Nick was born.  The steady drumbeat of how the state will take Nick away from Murray, if he does not get a job, is supposed to distract us from the main reason people have jobs, even if they do not have a child to take care of, which is that they need a paycheck.

The way this movie is oblivious to the need for a job, for the simple reason you need money to live on, reminds me of a guy I knew in my senior year of college.  When I mentioned something about having to find work after I graduated, he dismissed my concerns with disdain, saying, “You don’t have to work. That’s just what you’ve been brainwashed to believe by the establishment.”  He said this without irony, as if the fact that he had been sleeping on his friend’s couch for the last six months was a permanent option, and one available to us all.

Auntie Mame is similar to A Thousand Clowns in that both movies involve someone who has custody of a nephew, but at least Mame has enough money to live independently when the movie starts.  It’s a whole lot easier to be a nonconformist when you’re rich.  The family members in You Can’t Take It with You, on the other hand, are not rich, but they are contemptuous of ordinary work, just as Murray is. They have the philosophy that everyone should just do what he wants to do, and somehow enough money can be made doing whatever that is to get by.  But they are like that guy I knew who slept on his friend’s couch, for they are supported by Jean Arthur’s character, the one person in the family with a real job.

Just as Amundson is supposed to make conformity look repulsive in this movie so that we will side with Murray in his refusal to conform, so too are the jobs Murray is offered so repulsive that we are supposed to side with Murray in his refusal to go back to work. But he lives in New York, and there are more jobs in that city than those that have something to do with producing a television show. Nevertheless, Murray agrees to go back to work for Leo, writing material for Chuckles, the Chipmunk.  But Arnold warns him that he won’t be home free just because he has a job:

Now, my agency lawyer gave me all the facts.  The most the board will allow you is a probationary year with Nick, a trial period, and the board’s investigators are going to be checking up on you every week, regularly:  checking to see that you still have your job, checking with Leo on your stability, checking up on the improvements in your home environment.

They will be watching his every move!

So, there is little for Murray to do but take that job and marry Sandra, allowing him to retain custody of Nick.

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic, which was published in 1986, Danny Peary remarks that the movie, once a cult hit, no longer holds up:  “Today its sellout conclusion, in which the nonconformist lead character willingly sacrifices his way of life because of familial responsibility, doesn’t sit well.”  He suggests that the movie The Kid (1921), a Charlie Chaplin movie, had a better resolution.  But for this movie to have an ending like the one in The Kid, that would have required that Nick’s mother turn up, having become a wealthy woman somehow, ready to regain custody of Nick and, presumably, to let Murray sleep on her couch.

But more to the point, the movie is no longer the cult hit it once was, not because of the “sellout conclusion,” but because people no longer buy the premise.  I’m sure that guy I knew in college, who was contemptuous of the notion of having to work for a living, wore out his welcome, sleeping on his friend’s couch, and eventually had to face the cold, cruel world that expected him to get off his butt and get a job. Society no longer puts up with nonsense like that once you turn thirty.  He and a lot of other idealistic hippies may have loved A Thousand Clowns while being supported by their parents or managing to sponge off others, but found that it lost its charm when they ended up having to go to work to pay the bills just like everyone else.

Has No Always Meant No?

I was in high school in the early 1960s, a hopeless virgin, and thus I was always eager for any advice I could get from some of the guys who seemed to have a way with women.  A common refrain at the time was, “When a girl says No, she means Maybe, and when she says Maybe, she means Yes.”

Well, that advice did me no good.  For one thing, when a girl said No to me, she usually sounded pretty serious.  In fact, a girl could stop me with a glance.  If anything, I needed encouragement.  So, as a practical matter, No meant No to me, regardless of what I was being told by those supposedly in the know.

It was during those high school years that the movie Hud came out, 1963 to be exact.  I expect that most people have seen this movie, but in brief, the title character is played by Paul Newman.  He is a big stud in a small Texas town.  His nephew Lon (Brandon De Wilde) is a virginal teenage boy who admires Hud and wishes he could be like him.  They are both attracted to Alma (Patricia Neal), who is their housekeeper.  Alma admits to being sexually aroused by Hud, especially when he has his shirt off, but she is leery of him, because she thinks he is a “cold-blooded bastard.”  She regards Lon with affection, but she is practically a mother to him, and thus never thinks of him as a lover.

One night, when Hud is drunk and angry, he goes to Alma’s cabin, breaks open the door, and starts trying to rape her.  There is a fierce struggle as she tries to fight him off.  Suddenly, Lon bursts in and grabs Hud, pulling him off.  Hud almost bashes Lon’s face in, but stops, lets him go, and leaves the cabin.

I saw this movie with my parents at the drive-in when it first came out.  Both of them said that Alma wanted to be raped and that she was irritated that Lon stopped Hud from giving her what she wanted.  I voiced my reservations, but they dismissed me as being naïve.  I figured that was a losing argument, so I gave up.  A few years later, my girlfriend and I watched the movie, and she also said that Alma wanted to be raped.  I had always wanted to ask a girl if No meant No, but I figured that would lead to the absurdity of the Liar’s Paradox, so I never bothered.  But since this particular girlfriend had already taken my virginity, I guess she felt comfortable telling me that sometimes No means Yes.  Well, technically, Alma never said the word “No,” but her actions clearly implied it.

Having already been dismissed as naïve by my parents, I didn’t even bother expressing my doubts to my girlfriend.  But I never believed for a minute that Alma wanted to be raped.  It was different with an earlier movie that Patricia Neal had been in, The Fountainhead (1949), in which it is clear that her character Dominique wanted to be raped.  Or rather, as the novel on which it is based makes clear, it was because she had been raped that for the first time in her life she experienced sexual ecstasy.  Perhaps this role became part of Patricia Neal’s persona, making it easy for people to believe that she wanted to be raped in Hud as well. As for me, I have seen the movie many times over the years, and I always think about my parents and my girlfriend when the scene with the sexual assault takes place, but I have never seen any reason to change my mind.

But then I bought Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies.  I have read a lot of books on film criticism, but I have avoided Kael for years, because she seems to spend too much time praising weird foreign films.  Anyway, I finally broke down and bought this book, in which is included an essay on Hud, written in 1964.  In it, she maintains that Alma wanted to be raped, and she gives reasons in support of her position:

Alma obviously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him; she wants to be treated differently from the others.  If Lon hadn’t rushed in to protect his idealized view of her, chances are that the next morning Hud would have felt guilty and repentant, and Alma would have been grateful to him for having used the violence necessary to break down her resistance, thus proving that she was different.  They might have been celebrating ritual rapes annually on their anniversaries.

One of the objections to this theory is that Alma leaves the next day, but to this, Kael replies:

No doubt in Hud we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kaufmann [a film critic] says, “driven off by his [Hud’s] vicious physical assault.”  But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because a frustrated rape is just too sordid and embarrassing for all concerned—for the drunken Hud who forced himself upon her, for her for defending herself so titanically, for young Lon the innocent who “saved” her.

That makes three women, my mother, my girlfriend, and Pauline Kael, who subscribed to the theory that Alma wanted to be raped.  All three women, however, voiced these opinions in the 1960s, which means their attitudes could have been the same as those who made the movie, all of them sharing what might have been a 1960s Zeitgeist of consensual rape, if you’ll pardon the expression.

In other words, even if they were right, they were right about a movie made in the 1960s.  And this raises the question as to whether there could be a remake of this movie, not that I would want to see one.  That is to say, if producers in Hollywood decided that Hud was old enough to justify a remake, inasmuch as a lot of people like their movies fresh, especially since it could be made in color this time, and if this remake followed the original, especially regarding the sexual assault, how would people react to this movie today?  Surely not the way my parents, girlfriend, and Pauline Kael once did!

Or am I just being naïve again?

Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962)

Invasion of the Star Creatures is a low-budget spoof of equally low-budget science fiction films.  Just to make sure everyone is in on the joke, the credits open with, “R.I. Diculous Presents An Impossible Picture.”  It is filled with silly situations and corny jokes, but it is rather amusing, if you are in the mood for this sort of thing.

On an army missile base, Private Philbrick and Private Penn are normally in charge of such things as washing the garbage cans, but are assigned by Colonel Awol to be part of a team investigating a cave that opened up as the result of a nuclear test explosion.  The team discovers seven-foot-tall plant-like extraterrestrials, sort of like the alien in The Thing from Another World (1951).  However, these plant creatures are just slaves, their masters being two tall, beautiful women, reminiscent of movies like Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958).

The two privates are captured by the vegetable monsters and brought before the two women, Professor Tanga and Dr. Puna.  Philbrick wonders aloud what Space Commander Connors would do, an allusion to such radio and television characters as Captain Video and Captain Midnight, or the television show Space Patrol (1950-55).  The women tell Penn and Philbrick they plan to return to their planet, after which Earth will be invaded and conquered.  Then they show the privates the room where they grow the plant men.  We see flower pots, most of which have a hand sticking up out of them.  When they prepare to leave the room, Philbrick says goodbye to the plant hands, one of which waves bye-bye.

Although there are warrior men back on their planet, the women don’t seem to know anything about love, so Philbrick teaches Dr. Puna what “kiss” means. She swoons, allowing Penn and Philbrick to escape.  They return to base and tell Colonel Awol that he must stop the spaceship from blasting off.  Awol does not believe them and orders them to be thrown into the guardhouse, assuming them to be drunk.  But when Philbrick swears on his Space Commander Connors’ secret ring, Awol asks to see the ring.  When Philbrick shows it to him, Awol shows Philbrick his.  They utter the secret code words and do the hand signal.  Then they discover they both belong to the same stellar squadron, and it turns out that whereas that Awol is only a junior flight leader, Philbrick is a senior flight leader, which means Philbrick is now in command.

The three of them head back to the cave.  Penn says the three of them will not be enough to stop the space broads from taking off.  Just then, a bunch of Indians come along, whereupon it turns out that they also are members of Space Commander Connors’ flight squadron, only one of the Indians is General flight leader, and proves it with a badge pinned to his bare chest.  So now, the Indian is in command.

But they all have a pow wow, during which the Indians and the colonel get drunk.  Penn and Philbrick go back to the cave and manage to blast the rocket ship off into space, marooning the two women.  But Dr. Puna gets Penn to teach Professor Tanga what “kiss” means.  They all get married and live happily ever after.

I saw this movie a couple of times in the 1960s on the late show, and I liked it so much that I bought my own copy on DVD recently.  I was looking forward to one of my favorite jokes in the movie, when Penn and Philbrick try to get telepathic control of one of the plant men.  The way I remember it, Penn says, “Focus on his eye.”

But as the eyes of the plant men are spaced really far apart, Philbrick asks, “Which one?”

“The one next to the carrot,” Penn replies.

Imagine my disappointment when I found it was not on the DVD.  Then I noticed that IMDb says that the television version is ten minutes longer than the theatrical version.

I guess I’ll have to wait for the director’s cut.