Once you strip away historical significance of The Jazz Singer as the first “talkie,” in which audiences were able to hear musical numbers in a movie for the first time, you are left with some pretty heavy melodrama. Forced to choose between a long Jewish tradition from the old country and the individualism and freedom of America, Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) chooses the latter and is disowned by his father, a cantor from a long line of cantors who wants his son to be a cantor. This goes on through the whole movie and it wears you out. But then, on the opening night of his first big break in the theater, Jakie finds out his father is dying, and there is no one to sing in the temple on the Day of Atonement. He agonizes and agonizes over the choice he must make between family and career. But what was he worried about? Didn’t he know this was a Hollywood movie where people get to have it both ways? He chooses to sing for his father, and then goes on to sing in the theater too, becoming a great success.
Author Archives: disinterested spectator
The Hunger Games (2012)
The basis for The Hunger Games is just a contrivance. It is said that the games referred to in the title, in which two teenagers from each of the Twelve Districts of Panem are forced to fight one another to the death, are punishment for a rebellion that took place seventy-four years earlier. Seventy-four years? Reconstruction only lasted about ten years after the Civil War. And whom would the Capital be punishing? Most of the people who rebelled would have long since died, and most of the people being punished would not even have been born when the rebellion took place.
The squalor of the districts people live in looks like something from the Great Depression. But when the Hunger Games begin, we find that technology has developed to the point that the people monitoring the games can cause three cats to materialize by pressing a button. Well, if they can do that, why not materialize a bunch of cows for the starving people in the districts to eat? Oh yeah, I forgot. They are still being punished for stuff they didn’t do.
We expect all movies to be politically correct to some degree, but when the political correctness is too obvious, you just have to groan. In particular, all the evil people in this movie are white; all the people who are not white are good. Oh brother!
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
Because The Greatest Story Ever Told is 225 minutes long, long enough to put in pretty much every part of the story of Jesus that is recorded in the Gospels, it is in many ways more interesting to reflect upon the things that were left out.
It is surprising that many of the well-known miracles were only mentioned, not depicted visually: no scene of Jesus (Max von Sydow) turning water into wine, walking on water, or feeding the multitude with a basket of loaves and fishes. It is not surprising, on the other hand, that we do not see Jesus’s prediction that some of the people he is talking to will still be alive when the kingdom of God comes.
A lot of sins go unmentioned in this movie. Jesus does not say it is adultery to lust after a woman in your heart, or that it is a sin to get divorced, or that marrying someone who is divorced is adultery. But we do get the scene where the adulteress is saved by Jesus, who defies the mob by saying that the one without sin should cast the first stone. That’s what the audience wants to hear, not that lust or divorce are also forms of adultery, but that real adultery itself will be forgiven.
As is typical for a movie about Jesus, he never talks about Hell. There is a movie in which Jesus spends a lot of time talking about all the people who are going to Hell, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), but that is an exception. All the other Jesus movies leave that topic pretty much alone, at least as far as the sermons of Jesus are concerned. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, other people talk about Hell instead. In one scene, there is a religious figure who says that God is going to punish the wicked, but Jesus admonishes him, saying that God is about mercy. Never mind that what the guy was saying was actually similar to what Jesus himself says in the Bible, in this movie, Jesus will have none of it. This is followed shortly by a scene in which John the Baptist (Charlton Heston) tells King Herod (Claude Rains) that he is going to Hell for committing adultery, which again is consistent with the Biblical Jesus but not the Jesus of this movie. And when Jesus is giving Peter (Gary Raymond) the keys of the kingdom, even the relatively innocuous expression “gates of Hell” is left out of Jesus’s speech.
That this movie plays it safe in its treatment of Jesus, avoiding the depiction of anything that might make the audience uncomfortable, is understandable. What is somewhat perplexing, however, is the movie’s treatment of Judas (David McCallum). Where the Bible is ambiguous regarding Judas, so too is the movie. For example, there is some debate as to whether Judas received communion at the Last Supper. Consequently, the movie is ambiguous on this point as well. We see Judas holding the cup near his lips. Then the camera cuts away to Jesus, who makes a brief remark, after which we see Judas still holding he cup, leaving it an open question as to whether he took a sip. Fine. But where the Bible is not ambiguous is on Judas’s motive for betraying Jesus. Judas negotiates with the chief of priests to get thirty pieces of silver for delivering Jesus. The motive is money, pure and simple. But in the movie, instead of asking for money, we hear Judas going on about what a wonderful person Jesus is. And then, somewhat later, when he is given the pieces of silver that he did not ask for, he says he didn’t want any money, which leaves his betrayal of Jesus completely unmotivated. One almost gets the impression that the people who made this movie did not want to show Judas in a bad light, even though this is the man that Dante did not hesitate to put right next to Satan in the frozen lake at the center of the earth. This treatment of Judas in various Jesus movies is covered more extensively in my essay “On the Rehabilitation of Judas.”
There is one thing in this movie that should have been kept out, and that is John Wayne’s only line. Right at the moment of Jesus’s death, we hear the Duke saying, “Truly, this man was the son of God,” in that unmistakable voice of his, and it is hard to keep from laughing.
The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)
The Concert for Bangladesh is a musical documentary about the first benefit rock concert. The concert starts off with a real downer. Ravi Shankar and three other Indian musicians get set to play on their weird Indian musical instruments. But first, Shankar informs the audience that they must be quiet while he is playing, because this is the kind of music you have to concentrate on. And then he tells everyone not to smoke while he is playing. The audience is quite chastened, and they clap politely after the first number. But it wasn’t a number. The musicians were only tuning up their instruments. But with that kind of music, who can tell? They could have played the wrong notes on instruments out of tune, and nobody would have known the difference.
Once that is over, and the Western musicians start playing normal music, things get a lot better, especially when half the musicians start smoking, letting the audience know that Mrs. Grundy has left the stage, and everyone can loosen up.
Calcutta (1946), Saigon (1947), and The Blue Dahlia (1946)
It was 1965, and I was in my second year of college. Having just finished watching a monster movie on the Late Show on Saturday night, I changed channels and came in toward the end of another movie, starring Alan Ladd. When I was just a child, I had seen him in Shane (1953) , which was great, and I might have seen another of his movies with my parents a couple of years later, but that one had left no impression on me.
Anyway, in this movie, Ladd walked into a room where several people were gathered, and someone said, “We were just talking about you.”
“My favorite subject,” Ladd replied. He wasn’t smiling.
The scene was apparently one involving a double-cross. Speaking to the beautiful woman in that room who had betrayed him, Ladd says, “Sorry you can’t join us in a glass of rat poison.”
Now, I’m not going to say that this was the greatest bit of hardboiled dialogue ever written for the big screen. But it was the first I’d ever heard. Besides, it had been delivered by Alan Ladd, with that voice of his and that look. Wishing that I had seen the movie from the beginning, I merely made a mental note to watch it in its entirety the next time it was featured on the Late Show. For some reason, I didn’t bother to check the newspaper to see the name of this movie, figuring I’d know it when I saw it. Little did I realize that it would never be shown on television again.
The years passed, and in the 1980s, cable television and videocassette recorders expanded my viewing options. Moreover, I became acquainted with the term film noir, and soon it was that I had seen the best of Ladd’s movies in this genre: This Gun for Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946), each costarring Veronica Lake.
But eventually, I began to think again about that movie I had seen in college. I remembered the oriental setting, and so for a while, I wondered if the movie could be Calcutta (1946). It wasn’t readily available, but it did finally show up on the internet. It’s about three commercial pilots transporting goods between Chungking and Calcutta.
Two of the pilots are played by Alan Ladd and William Bendix. The third pilot, whose name is Bill, is murdered. He was engaged to be married to Gail Russell, but she was just using him to smuggle jewels on his plane without his knowing about it, something she had done with other pilots.
At the end of the movie, Ladd beats a confession out of Russell, kills a casino operator named Lasser, who was the head of the smuggling ring, and then calls the police and has Russell arrested. And that wasn’t easy for him to do, since they had fallen in love with each other. As Ladd says to Russell, “Does a guy have to trust a girl to fall for her?” But he decides he had better not marry her. The way he figures it, since she had already killed one man in order to steal the jewels she thought he had, and had helped Lasser murder Bill, someday she might decide to kill him too, and he might not get much sleep thinking about it.
That’s how hardboiled characters have to weigh the pros and cons of marriage in a film noir. It reminds me of that incredible conversation between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, which is in both the novel and the 1941 movie based on it. Spade tells Brigid that she’s taking the fall because she killed his partner. Her feelings are hurt. She accuses him of not loving her. He admits that he probably does love her, and he accepts that she loves him. But he won’t play the sap for her. Otherwise, as he points out in the novel, when the love wears off, she might kill him one day. Still, he figures that if they don’t hang her by her pretty neck, she might get out of prison in twenty years, in which case he will wait for her. Twice he says that he will wait for her!
So, like Sam Spade, Ladd chose to turn the woman he loved in to the police rather than marry her and take a chance of her murdering him one day. Of course, Ladd had a dim view of marriage all along, quite apart from the question of whether his wife might someday kill him. Earlier in the movie, when he and Bendix find out Bill is going to get married, they are appalled. Ladd sneers, saying that what women want is “stability, to settle down.” That would be like a slow death right there.
Ladd becomes suspicious about Bill’s murder because he still had money on him when his body was found. Whoever strangled Bill must not have watched many movies, or else he would have known this fundamental rule: if you are going to commit a murder, be sure to remove all the money and jewelry from the person you kill so that the police will suspect that robbery was the motive and let it go at that. In any event, Ladd suspects Russell may have had something to do with it right from the beginning. She protests that she would never have done anything to cause Bill a moment of unhappiness.
“Wouldn’t want to harm him, huh?” Ladd asks. “Then why’d you want to marry him?”
In a later conversation, when Ladd says he doesn’t trust women, Russell asks, “What was she like?” referring to the woman she assumes must have walked off and left him bitter like that.
Ladd replies, “A woman always wants to blame a guy’s good judgment on a woman.”
And yet, while I enjoyed this movie, it was not the one I was looking for. Having already seen several other Alan Ladd films set overseas, but to no avail, I had now eliminated every possibility except Saigon (1947). Of course, if I had remembered that the beautiful woman to whom Ladd had suggested a glass of rat poison was Veronica Lake, that would have helped me narrow it down. It was not available on Netflix, but it was available as a DVD, though of poor quality. Anyway, I could hold out no longer, so I ordered it.
Saigon turned out to be the movie I was looking for. I was pleased to see that I had not been misled by the brief impression I had formed of this movie while watching ten minutes of it over fifty years ago. It holds up throughout.
In this film, Alan Ladd plays a recently discharged major in the Army Air Forces. He piloted a bomber during the war until his plane was shot down. He finds out that a friend of his, Mike, who was a captain in his crew, has two or three months to live. He suffered a severe head injury and now has a large piece of platinum as part of his skull. The doctor agrees to let Ladd tell him the grim prognosis, but Ladd tells another crew member, a sergeant named Pete, while they are sitting in a bar, that they aren’t going to tell Mike anything. His parents are dead, and he has no wife. So, they’ll just show him a good time for the next two or three months. In order to have the money needed for this purpose, Ladd agrees to take a job flying a man to Saigon. The man’s secretary is played by Veronica Lake. As in Calcutta, Ladd and his pals end up inadvertently getting involved in a smuggling operation.
Regarding Mike’s prognosis, this is a Dark Victory (1939) situation: Mike will have no symptoms (or not many, at least) until he dies; the prognosis is precise in the time left for him to live (just a few months); and someone has taken it upon himself to keep him from knowing. The key difference, however, is that Mike is killed by one of the bad guys before he ever finds out about that prognosis.
In a different way, this movie also reminded me of The Blue Dahlia, where during the war, Ladd was the leader of a flight crew, which included William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont. In this movie, it is Bendix that has the plate in his skull. His problem, however, is not that he has only a few months to live, but rather that he gets confused and forgetful. When the three men get off the bus at the beginning of the movie, after having been discharged at the end of the war, Ladd and Beaumont are wearing suits, but Bendix is wearing a leather jacket. Though there is no reference to their rank in the service, yet we gather that Ladd and Beaumont were officers, while Bendix was an enlisted man.
If so, then once again we have two officers and an enlisted man, once members of a flight crew, and now able to fraternize as civilians. Only in this case, it is the enlisted man who has the plate in his skull, whereas in Saigon, it was one of the officers. There was never any reference to the war in Calcutta, but three young American pilots were bound to have flown combat missions. And given Bendix’s screen persona, it is hard to imagine him being an officer.
Anyway, in Saigon, after Ladd and Pete agree not to tell Mike about his prognosis, Mike shows up at the bar and joins them. Ladd leaves the table for some reason, and when Mike starts talking about going home, Pete gets Mike to agree to stay so they can cheer Ladd up by showing him a good time. It seems that Ladd was planning on getting married, but then he received a Dear John letter, breaking off their engagement.
And so, whereas Ladd was a misogamist in Calcutta, in Saigon he has been jilted by the woman he wanted to marry. He got even further in The Blue Dahlia. In that movie, he is married to a woman named Helen. When he and his two friends say goodbye after getting off the bus, Beaumont advises Ladd not to just show up at his wife’s hotel room unexpectedly, but that he should phone first. Ladd says, “Maybe,” but there is no maybe about it. Only a wittol would do that, someone that might go on to become Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), for instance. But a real man just walks right in, and if he catches his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, he can settle matters right then.
Instead, when he gets to Helen’s hotel room, which is more like an apartment, there is a swinging party underway. He tells the inebriated woman who opens the door that he is looking for his wife. “We have lots of wives here,” she informs him. A few minutes later, when Howard Da Silva, Helen’s lover, realizes that her husband has returned from the war, he decides to leave the party. Helen kisses him goodbye, not realizing that Ladd can see her doing so. “You’re wearing the wrong lipstick, Pal,” Ladd tells Da Silva seconds later as he punches him in the mouth. Da Silva shows some class. Wiping the spot with a handkerchief where he was kissed and then punched, he says, “You’re right.”
After the guests leave, Ladd and Helen have an argument, during which she tells him, in order to hurt him, that their son died because she had an automobile accident one night while she’d been drinking. He pulls out his 45, saying he should use it on her, but then tosses it on the couch and leaves. Somewhat later, she is found murdered with that gun. Naturally, Ladd is suspected by the police, while we start suspecting Bendix. He met Helen in the hotel bar after Ladd left, and then accepted her invitation to go back to her room, not realizing she was Ladd’s wife.
The original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia, as written by Raymond Chandler, had Bendix be the one who murdered Helen, but the Navy objected to having a veteran be the killer, so the script was changed to make “Dad,” the house detective, be the villain. It’s a better ending anyway. We would have felt sorry for Bendix, and that would have been depressing. Much better to have Bendix be suspected on account of his war injury, and then have the unlikable house detective be the murderer.
As a side note, in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller, in discussing The Blue Dahlia, says that in general, there was an unwritten law that a veteran in a movie must never be found guilty of a crime. He overlooked Crossfire (1947), however, in which Robert Ryan plays a veteran who commits a murder. And this is a peculiar oversight, since Muller discusses this movie in the same book. I suspect that the difference had to do with the reason for the murder. In the case of The Blue Dahlia, the Navy did not want a man to commit a murder because of an injury sustained during the war, whereas the Army could accept that Robert Ryan’s character had been evil before he enlisted, and his service during the war had nothing to do with it.
So, whether as a confirmed bachelor, jilted fiancé, or cuckolded husband, Ladd seems to have good reasons for being cynical about women and having a dim view of marriage. Not that these movies could end on that note, though. In Calcutta, after sending Russell away with the police, Ladd is comforted by another woman, Marina, from whom he regularly gets a little uncomplicated nookie. We get the sense that he might just marry that girl one of these days. In The Blue Dahlia, Ladd and Veronica Lake, who was Da Silva’s wife, have fallen in love, so the good spouses from the two marriages will now presumably make one good marriage, and they will live happily ever after. We also figure that Ladd will marry Lake at the end of Saigon too, but only after first offering her that glass of rat poison.
Stage Fright (1950)
There is a recurring plot in crime dramas: an innocent man is suspected of committing a murder, and he tries to evade the police long enough to prove his own innocence. Alfred Hitchcock often used it, as in The 39 Steps. This plot requires us to suspend disbelief, because no one has ever proved his innocence in real life by avoiding the police long enough to find out who really did it and getting evidence to prove it. Stage Fright, also directed by Hitchcock, is a slight variation on this plot. In this case, the suspect’s friend tries to hide him from the police long enough to prove the murder was committed by someone else. Once again, no one in real life has ever managed to do that.
In a really good movie, like The 39 Steps, suspending disbelief is easy, and we are well rewarded for doing so. But in a mediocre film like Stage Fright, we are only partially engaged in the movie, and thus find ourselves comparing what happens with reality, and being a little put off by the difference. Instead of suspending disbelief, we find ourselves simply disbelieving.
Maybe it is just me, but if I were suspected of a crime I did not commit, I would get myself a lawyer and turn myself in to the police. The movie begins with Jonathan (Richard Todd) telling Eve (Jane Wyman) that Charlotte (Marlene Dietrich) came over to his apartment with blood on her dress, saying she killed her husband in self-defense during an argument. He says he agreed to help her establish an alibi, and he goes back to her place to get another dress, and while he is there, tries to make it look like a burglary. However, Charlotte’s maid shows up, sees him, and is able to identify him to the police. Now, we later find out that this story is a lie, but while I was watching it, taking this story seriously, I thought to myself that I would have simply advised Charlotte to get a lawyer and turn herself in to the police. And if she refused, I would have notified the police anyway.
Furthermore, when Jonathan shows up at the theater where Eve, an actress, is in rehearsal, he tells her that the police want him for something he didn’t do, and she agrees to help him escape. She should have told Jonathan to get a lawyer and turn himself in to the police. If he refused to do so, she should have notified the police herself.
She takes Jonathan to her father’s place, where the father agrees to help Eve hide Jonathan. By this time, it will come as no surprise when I say that if I had been Eve’s father, I would have told Jonathan to get a lawyer and turn himself in to the police. If Jonathan and Eve refused to go along with this idea, I would have notified the police anyway.
Later, we find out that it was Jonathan who killed Charlotte’s husband. But that only allows for one more iteration of my general advice. In that case, Charlotte should have gotten a lawyer and gone to the police. Even if she did instigate the murder, as Jonathan claims, she could have denied involvement, and Jonathan would have been the one to go to prison.
Now, it might be argued that if any one of these characters had gone to the police, as I say they should have, there would have been no movie. But any movie that is lackluster enough to allow for disbelief, rather than inspire the willing suspension thereof, is a movie we would have been better off without.
Wild Strawberries (1957)
There seems to be a consensus in Wild Strawberries that Isak (Victor Sjöström) is lonely and isolated because he is cold and aloof. Actually, he does not seem so bad. He is friendly enough with other people, and he appears to be content with his relatively solitary existence. Anyway, Sara (Bibi Andersson), the woman he loved when he was young, married his brother, and somehow that was Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. And Karin (Gertrud Fridh), the woman he ended up being married to, cuckolded him, but that was also Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. He visits his mother, who is cold and aloof. His son Evald is cold and aloof.
I suppose the point is that if Isak’s mother had been warm and friendly, then she would have raised him to be warm and friendly, and then Sara would have married him and they would have lived happily ever after. Or Karin would have been faithful to him and they would have lived happily ever after. And they would have raised their son Evald to be warm and friendly, so that he and his wife Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) could have lived happily ever after. And being warm and friendly, Evald would have been happy to hear that Marianne was pregnant, so that they would have a child of their own, whom they could raise to be warm and friendly.
Having seen the error of his ways, Isak decides that he will henceforth become warm and friendly. Better late than never. So, he asks Agda (Jullan Kindahl), his maid of forty years, if she would like to be on a first-name basis. She rebuffs him.
Sergeant Rutledge (1960)
Throughout American history, there has been prejudice of various sorts, which has been reflected in the movies. In an effort to make amends for discrimination against one group, however, a movie may end up being oblivious to the prejudice it shows toward another.
In particular, in a movie in which a black man is put on trial for raping a white woman, he always turns out to be innocent at the expense of the woman. Given all the black men that have been lynched in America for supposedly raping white women, perhaps these movies were thought necessary as a way of condemning this practice.
On the other hand, we have recently been made aware of just how much prejudice there is against women who have been raped, making it difficult for them to get justice. Our belated enlightenment on this issue makes us reevaluate the movies in which white women were to blame in some way whenever black men ended up being tried for raping them.
There are basically three ways in which women are to blame in these movies: the woman lied; the woman imagined it; the woman was provocative.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is the most well-known movie in which a white woman lies about being raped by a black man. Another is Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976). In this movie, two white women lie about being raped by nine black boys. Now, it might be pointed out that since the movie was based on a true story, we can hardly criticize those who made this movie for making the women to blame for the false accusation. On the other hand, had the two white women been telling the truth, and were indeed raped by nine black boys, we would never have seen a movie about that story because it would never have been made. This true story was selected as the basis for a movie precisely because the white women could be blamed for the black boys being tried for rape.
In A Passage to India (1984), it is not an African American who is accused of raping a white woman. But the man is a native of India and has dark skin. Moreover, the movie takes place when India is still a colony of Great Britain, and the British are prejudiced against the natives. So, it’s close enough. In this movie, the woman becomes hysterical, owing to repressed sexual urges on her part, and imagines that she was raped so vividly that she believes it actually happened.
Sergeant Rutledge (1960) falls into the third category, in which, unlike in the first two categories, where no rape actually occurs, in this movie, a woman really is raped. Because she is also murdered, she is not the one that accuses a black man. Nevertheless, she is still at fault for being raped because she was asking for it.
The movie is set in Arizona in 1881. Much of the story is told by witnesses testifying during a court martial. One of those witnesses is Mary Beecher (Constance Towers), who comes across as a strong, independent woman, who also serves as the love interest for Lieutenant Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter). As depicted in a flashback during her testimony, we see that Mary has been left alone at a train station in the middle of the night. She discovers that the man running the station is dead, an arrow sticking out of his chest. As she runs out of the station, Sergeant Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode) grabs her and puts his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Although Mary is not the woman in this movie that is raped, the idea of a white woman being raped by a black man is suggested by this scene, and that is certainly what Mary thinks is about to happen to her. He explains to her that she mustn’t scream because there are Apaches nearby. He hands her a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, implying competence with a gun, and that she will need it because the Apaches will show her no mercy. This too suggests the possibility of rape by men that are not white. Minutes later, when a couple of Apaches attack, she shoots one of them before he can kill Rutledge.
As we later find out, Lucy Dabney, a young white girl, has been beaten, raped, and strangled. Rutledge, a first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry, accidentally came upon her dead, naked body. As he covered her with a blanket, her father, Major Dabney, Rutledge’s commanding officer, entered the room, and, believing Rutledge to be attacking Lucy, pulled out his pistol and shot him, causing a minor wound. In self-defense, Rutledge shot Major Dabney in return, killing him. Realizing he would be blamed for Lucy’s rape and murder, as well as for killing her father, he decided to desert. That is why he happens to be at the station in the middle of the night.
Most of the women we see in this movie are the officers’ wives, led by Mrs. Fosgate (Billie Burke), wife of Colonel Fosgate (Willis Bouchey), who presides over the trial. The women are a bunch of simpleminded biddies, whose purpose in life is to be scandalized by the shameless behavior of others, and who are obviously overprotected by their husbands. No, I take that back. These women are so addled and confused that they need protecting. They seem to be of a totally different species than Mary. We cannot imagine Rutledge handing Mrs. Fosgate a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, and expecting her to kill an Apache, if need be.
During another flashback, representing Mrs. Fosgate’s testimony, we find that one of the things that met with the disapproval of these women was the behavior of Lucy. The women chastised her for riding a horse astride. But Lucy said, in front of Chandler Hubble, who we eventually find out is the one that actually raped and strangled her, that as long as she says her prayers and behaves herself, her father doesn’t care if she rides around like Lady Godiva. It is also worked into the conversation that her mother is dead, which explains why she does not behave with the proper sense of decorum. And those women also express misgivings about how friendly Lucy is with Rutledge, which is just one of the ways the movie lets us know that white folks regard black men as being a threat to white women.
The soldiers of the colored regiment are intelligent, brave, and of good moral character. In praising this movie for how it portrayed African Americans, critics fail to notice, or prefer to overlook, just how demeaning this movie is in its portrayal of women. And while on the subject, we never see the wives of any of the black soldiers. We have to wonder, if there had been black women in this movie, would they too have been simpleminded biddies? Alternatively, since this movie is at pains to present a positive portrayal of African Americans, would the black women have been depicted as fair-minded and intelligent, and thus superior to the white women? This movie escapes the horns of that dilemma by not having any black women in the movie at all.
Toward the end of the trial, Cantrell, whose job it is to defend Rutledge, beats a confession out of Hubble while he is on the witness stand, forcing him to admit that he was the one that raped Lucy. But while the blame has shifted from Rutledge to Hubble, the movie qualifies that blame by portraying Hubble as having acted under a sexual compulsion, triggered by Lucy’s behavior. He pleas for understanding:
Don’t you understand? She…, the way she walked! The way her body moved. She drove me crazy! I had to have her! I had to! I had to! You know I had to! God help me! God, help me!
You see, what with Lucy having her legs spread-eagled when she rode a horse and putting the image into his head of her being naked on that horse, well, it was just too much for him, especially since his wife is deceased, thereby depriving him of a normal sexual outlet. The point seems to be that it is up to women to comport themselves in such a way as to not unleash the demon in men such as Hubble. Of course, we accept this only because Hubble is white. It would be unthinkable to have it turn out that Rutledge, a black man, had such a strong desire for Lucy that he just couldn’t help himself.
And so, just as Rutledge, a black man, had to be found innocent of raping and killing Lucy, so too was it felt necessary to make excuses for Hubble, a white man, who actually did what Rutledge had been accused of. Toward that end, those that wrote and directed this movie showed no hesitation in blaming Lucy for what happened to her.
Being a relic of its time, there will never be a remake of this movie. It was praised back then, and to some extent still is, not for its entertainment value, which is minimal, but for having the correct moral posture regarding African Americans. This was not entirely new in 1960, but is now something that has been routine in movies for decades, so a remake would serve no useful function.
But let us imagine a remake anyway. There would have to be a complete reworking of the way women are portrayed. In this imaginary remake, the officers’ wives are intelligent, and in many ways wiser than their husbands, to whom they give sound advice. They are shown to have doubts as to Rutledge’s guilt, whereas most of the white men are prejudiced against him. Because the white women are portrayed in a positive manner, it is safe to have black women in the movie too, the wives of the black soldiers, and they too are shown to be just as intelligent as the white women.
Lucy’s mother is still be alive and has raised her properly. Lucy is just an innocent young girl who never dresses, talks, or acts in a provocative way.
As for Hubble, his wife is still alive, and she is an attractive woman, thus providing him with a normal sexual outlet. Nevertheless, he rapes and murders Lucy simply because he feels like it, not acting under a compulsion, but of his own free will. Such men exist in the world and always will. The fact that Hubble is a white male means it is perfectly safe to make him an unregenerate villain. It would have been safe to make Hubble such a villain in 1960 too, but those making the original movie had such disregard for women that they preferred to apologize for him at the expense of the rape victim.
By making the updated version this way, the black man accused of raping a white woman could be shown to be innocent of the charge without making it be the woman’s fault, which would be more in keeping with twenty-first century sensitivities.
Rock Around the Clock (1956)
In this movie, a lifeless and somewhat ridiculous plot acts as a frame story to showcase some rock-and-roll bands when that kind of music was becoming popular in the 1950s. Young people in their rebellious stage like to shock their elders, so naturally we have a scene in which Bill Haley and the Comets perform at a prestigious and very proper girls’ school, which scandalizes the matronly chaperones. The Comets wear suits and are clean-cut, singing songs without suggestive lyrics, but no matter, because the beat alone is indecent. So the movie has it both ways, allowing teenagers to enjoy the fantasy of shocking their elders, while the real elders watching the movie in the theaters would be reassured that rock and roll was quite harmless.
Part of the plot of this movie is that dancing is on its way out, by which is meant ballroom dancing. But the dancing done by teenagers to rock and roll is alive and well. It is basically jitterbug (also known as swing, boogie-woogie, and the bop). In a sense, however, this died too. Once the twist became popular in the early 1960s, partner dancing, in which couples make contact with each other, pretty much came to an end, to be replaced by various forms of free style, in which couples never touch each other. To see partner dancing any more, other than for slow songs, you either have to go to a country-western nightclub or to a dance studio where ballroom dancing still lingers on.
Partner dancing in the movies is one of two kinds: either the dancers are professionals, or they are just barely able to shuffle around the dance floor. The reality would be somewhere in between, with amateurs doing a fairly decent job of cutting a rug. In this movie, the brother and sister who dance together are obviously professionals. They become part of the act with the Comets, the idea being that they will show teenagers at the performances how to dance to rock and roll, to break the ice and get others on the dance floor. Of course, all those supposedly novice teenagers who venture onto the dance floor are professional dancers themselves. In fact, having that brother-and-sister team dance like that in real life would intimidate ordinary would-be dancers, making it less likely for them to get out on the floor.
Unfortunately, most of the songs performed in this movie are not that good, and in several cases, no one dances at all, usually because the beat is too fast, even for professionals. There are a couple of good numbers from the Comets and a couple from the Platters. The rest are mediocre, which, when combined with the boring plot, makes the movie a disappointment.
Repulsion (1965)
In Repulsion, a movie written and directed by Roman Polanski, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman with some kind of psychological problem concerning sex. She lives with her sister, whose sexual relations with her lover disturb Carol. Carol is very much upset that her sister is going on a two-week vacation. During that vacation, Carol descends into madness. A man who has been harassing her and stalking her breaks into her apartment because he just had to see her. She bludgeons him to death. Then the landlord stops by to get the rent and decides to rape her as long as he is there. She slices him up with a razor and he bleeds to death. Then her sister returns to find the corpses and a catatonic Carol. In the very last scene, we see a photograph, previously alluded to from a distance, of her family taken years ago. In it, we see everyone smiling and looking at the camera, except for a pre-adolescent Carol, who is looking with dread at a man to her left, presumably her father. In real life, such a picture would mean nothing, but its emphasis in the movie after what we have seen tells us that she was molested as a child, which further explains why she was so upset that her sister was going away. As a child, she would have been safe from her father as long as her sister was around.
The idea that Polanski, having made this movie illustrating the terrible consequences of child molestation, would then go on to molest a child himself is ghastly. Having made such a movie, he doubtlessly had thought the matter through. For him to molest a thirteen-year-old girl when he believed that such an act could produce consequences like those in this movie is especially disturbing.
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