Author Archives: disinterested spectator

The Scarlet Letter (The Book and the Adaptations)

Most movie versions of The Scarlet Letter jump right into the story of Hester Prynne in Boston during the middle of the seventeenth century, leaving out “The Custom-House,” the introductory chapter of the novel.  I suppose the main purpose of this chapter is to give the impression that the story Nathaniel Hawthorne is about to tell is based on true events, in which a woman is forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her bosom for being guilty of adultery.

The 1979 television mini-series does go so far as to include that part of “The Custom-House” where the author discovers some documents, a manuscript, and a scarlet letter, which become the basis for the story.

That, however, comes only toward the end of that chapter.  The purpose of the first part would seem to be that of explaining the author’s sentimental attachment to Salem, Massachusetts, where the custom-house is located, while at the same time distancing himself from the Puritans that founded it and of whom he is a descendant.  He says that these Puritans would likely regard him as an idler, while he in turn casually remarks that these ancestors of his may well be spending eternity in Hell for their cruelty.

So, what was it that made these Puritans so evil?  Hawthorne seems to be of the opinion that it was the fact that their women were ugly.  Perhaps he thought that it was being unattractive that made these women mean and intolerant, but I get the impression that he believes that an ugly body will just naturally have an ugly soul.  Either way, these women provided the cruelty that lies at the heart of Puritanism.

It is our good fortune, Hawthorne avers, that in each successive generation, the women became more attractive, and with that were blessed with a more pleasant disposition, until the time of his writing, where the women were as pretty and good-natured as any man might want.  And so it was that as the women became better looking, the Puritan religion dissipated.

In “Chapter II, The Market-Place,” Hawthorne describes the women that are waiting in the crowd to see the humiliation of Hester Prynne and her baby:

Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.

As noted above, Hawthorne would have us believe that the story he tells is true, based as it is on the documents and manuscript found in the custom-house.  So, we have to wonder how he knows all this about the women.  Was there a letter among the documents in the custom-house where someone comments, “Boy! These women in Boston sure are ugly.” And was there an additional document, dated many decades later, where someone comments, “It sure is strange the way Sally is so much better looking than her mother was, and who in turn has had a daughter even prettier than she.”

Now, we readily grant that in creating a story based on the documents and manuscript he discovered, Hawthorne must be allowed the freedom to imagine what thoughts are running through someone’s head or what that person might be doing when alone in a room.  But his assertions regarding the increasing beauty of women in the two subsequent centuries go beyond what license we willingly permit the author for the sake of the story and take us into the realm of some kind of fantastic metaphysics in which spiritual progress has been a function of the way women were becoming prettier.

As for the men, one of the women in the crowd comments, “The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is a truth.”  She goes on to say that instead of having to wear a scarlet “A” on the bodice of her gown, Hester should have had an “A” branded on her forehead with a hot iron. However, another woman, whom Hawthorne characterizes as “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges,” says she should be put to death.

Though Hawthorne believes that the essence of Puritanism lay in its ugly women, yet he does not mean to imply that such women were revered.  Rather, they often seem to be despised.  One of the men in the crowd, upon hearing what these women have to say, reprimands them, calling them “gossips” and telling them to be quiet.

In fact, ugly women were in danger of being accused of witchcraft.  The very scaffold upon which Hester is to be displayed with her baby and scarlet letter is the one where Hawthorne says a Mistress Hibbins, who had a “sour” face and an “ill-omened physiognomy,” would be hanged three years hence for being a witch.

Hester’s beauty, on the other hand, was sufficient to remind one of the Virgin Mary:

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent….

Lest he be accused of blasphemy, however, Hawthorne is quick to add that this thought would occur to that imagined Papist “only by contrast [with] that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world.”

Still, Hawthorne’s prejudice regarding a woman’s physical features is merely being carried to the next level:  if ugly women are vindictive, and attractive women forgiving, then a beautiful woman must partake of the divine, as indeed Hester does as the years go by, becoming a “Sister of Mercy,” being of aid and comfort to the very people that had condemned her, who came to say of her that she was “so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!”

In fact, it is Hester’s beauty that is a major reason why she is not being put to death, as a man in the crowd explains to a stranger, the very man who turns out to be her husband, Roger Prynne:

“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall,—and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,—they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death.  But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

From this we may gather that had Hester been plain and frumpy, the magistrates would have been less merciful, reasoning that because no man would have gone out of his way to tempt her, she would have had less excuse for giving in to her sexual desires, probably luring to her bed some hapless fellow who succumbed in a moment of weakness.  Justice is not blind.

The movies of 1926 and 1934 are faithful to the novel in this regard, where we see unattractive women expressing their hostility toward Hester, with only the occasional young woman with delicate features expressing some degree of sympathy for her.  In the 1934 version, while the homely women watch with stern faces as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale preaches about sin and iniquity, it is a young, pretty woman that falls asleep, whom the usher has to wake up.  We know that she is of the future, where pretty women will discard the dark days of Puritanism.

In the 1979 version, however, this correlation between soul and body is not maintained.  There is an attractive woman that is snide and catty to Hester, and Mistress Hibbins appears to be pleasant in appearance.

In any event, while Hawthorne may have delighted in portraying the Puritan religion in the worst possible light, the 1934 version of this story is more circumspect, for it begins with an exculpatory prologue:  “Though to us, the customs seem grim and the punishments hard, they were a necessity of the times and helped shape the destiny of a nation.”

How they were a “necessity of the times” is not explained, as if it is a given that these people could not have survived had they been tolerant and forgiving. And while there is no doubt that these Puritans helped to shape the future of this nation, we may take exception to the word “destiny,” which has a positive connotation, for this nation might well have been better off had the Puritans stayed in England.

Of course, this movie was made when the Production Code forbade putting religion in a bad light, and the prologue undoubtedly served to assuage the misgivings of the censors who were not sure there should be a movie version of this novel at all.

In this 1934 version, a man points out that by the laws of Moses, a woman guilty of adultery should be put to death by stoning.  He is, of course, referring to Leviticus 20:10-12 and Deuteronomy 22:21-24.  This was what the woman in the novel was referring to when she said Hester deserved death. That Hester’s punishment is limited to wearing a scarlet letter is what the other woman meant by saying the men were too merciful.

Speaking of which, in the 1926 version, a man is punished by having to wear a sign saying, “Wanton Gospeller.”  There is no reference to this man or his sign in the novel, but we may imagine that he was being punished for preaching from the Bible in a manner inconsistent with what was deemed proper by the Puritan community, presumably by citing those passages that are about love and forgiveness.  He might even have had the temerity to relate the story of the adulteress from John 8:1-11.  In that community, however, should he have said that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone, he would likely have been pelted many times over.

In the 1934 version, however, the Reverand Arthur Dimmesdale does mention that story from the New Testament to the governor, but since Dimmesdale is the one who got Hester pregnant, his argument is self-serving.  It is easy to forgive the sins of which one has been guilty.  In any event, the governor dismisses that story about Jesus as being too lenient.

After “The Custom-House,” the story in the novel begins in medias res. However, the 1926 version tells the story chronologically.  This spoils the surprise of later discovering that it was Dimmesdale that had sex with Hester, although we so love it when a man of God is brought low after lecturing others about sin that we would likely have hoped for that outcome in any event.

In that 1926 movie, when Dimmesdale finds out that Hester is pregnant, he suggests that they get married.  She tells him, however, that she is already married to a man who was supposed to follow her to Boston but never arrived. She suspects he is dead but has no certainty in this regard.

This is a mistake.  If Dimmesdale does not know she is married, then presumably no one else in the community knows that either, in which case, she might be guilty only of fornication rather than adultery. However, the novel makes it clear that everyone knows the story of how she married a man in England before coming to Boston.

Still, her being married would not have stopped them from leaving Boston. They should have made plans to leave as soon as she found out she was pregnant.  In fact, that is what they eventually plan to do seven years later, only Dimmesdale dies right after his public confession. Considering the fact Hester’s punishment might have been death, he should have gotten her out of town before she was even showing.  It would have been the Christian thing to do.

Perhaps this is the biggest objection to the 1995 version, where Dimmesdale does not die after confessing.  When he, Hester, and their daughter Pearl all proceed to leave Boston and live happily ever after in the Carolinas, it underscores the fact that they could have done that to begin with.  The whole seven years of humiliation and suffering was as pointless as it was unnecessary.

If it is a mystery why Hester and Dimmesdale didn’t leave Boston immediately, it is an even greater mystery why she ever married Roger Prynne.  He shows up the day Hester is brought from prison to stand upon the scaffold, holding her baby, and displaying her scarlet letter “A.” Outraged at what he sees, he plans to avenge himself on the man who had sex with her, but as he is ashamed of being a cuckold, he does not reveal himself to be Hester’s husband, but says his last name is Chillingworth.

When he gets a chance to talk to Hester alone, Roger admits that he wronged Hester by persuading her to marry him, for she had youth and beauty, while he was ugly, decaying from old age, misshapen from birth (specifically, a hunchback). She in turn admits that she wronged him, saying only that she told him from the beginning that she felt no love for him nor feigned any. Because they wronged each other, Roger says they are even.  He seeks revenge only against the man that wronged them both.

In saying in her defense that she told Roger from the beginning that she neither loved him nor would pretend such love, Hester probably thought herself virtuous, in that she had been honest with Roger.  But when a woman is no longer willing to lie to her husband, that marriage is over, and in this case, even before it began.

Given her declaration, we can only wonder why she should have married him. While standing on the scaffold, her memory takes her back to England, from the time she was born until she married Roger and moved with him to Amsterdam. From there, he sent her to America, promising to follow her shortly after tidying up his affairs.  But in none of these recollections do we understand why she agreed to marry him. Given how beautiful she is, there should have been plenty of young men to court her, from whom she might have had her pick.

To what end, therefore, does the author make Roger physically repulsive? We can easily imagine an alternative story, one in which Roger was young and handsome when they married, and that they truly loved each other. But when a year went by and he did not show up, it would still be understandable that she would give in to her sexual desires for another man.

The explanation must lie in Hawthorne’s belief in a correlation between spiritual and physical features. The man in this novel that has even more hatred in his heart than the ugly women of Boston is also the one man in the novel who is himself ugly.  Remarks are made by various people, including the author, to the effect that Roger is like the “Black Man” or Satan, and that his determination to torment Hester’s lover is akin to Satan’s gaining possession of a man’s soul.

Later in the novel, after Roger has discovered that it was Dimmesdale that impregnated Hester, she tries to talk Roger out of seeking revenge against him. In reply, he says, “It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer….”  In other words, he was not religious when he married Hester.  But now that he is full of so much hatred, he needs religion to give it meaning.  To match such wickedness, Hawthornian logic requires that he be deformed.

I noted above that the 1979 version did not maintain the correlation between the physical and spiritual ugliness of the women that was in the novel.  It deviated from this even more so in the character of Roger.  He was played by Kevin Conway, who was only thirty-seven years old at the time. Conway admitted that Hester’s marriage to Roger was inexplicable, so it was decided that when Roger first arrives in Boston, he would look not like Igor, but rather be depicted as a man of vitality, one whom we might believe Hester could have married and been happy with had things worked out differently. Only later in the movie did the makeup artist make him appear older and fiercer. Needless to say, this requires that we forget what was said earlier about how things were back in England, where Roger had a decaying, misshapen body, and how Hester declared that she did not love him and would not fake it.

The 1995 version tries its hand at explaining why Hester married Roger. Referring to her father, a man asks, “ls it true he was in debt to your husband, and you were the payment?”  I suppose such a thought might reasonably occur to a Puritan, for the Bible tells you how to sell your daughter (Exodus 21:7-11). Hester does not answer him, but the audience is expected to accept this, nevertheless.  I don’t suppose I need to mention that there is no hint of that in the novel.  But then, a lot of stuff goes on in this version that is not in the novel.

After seven years, it finally occurs to Hester to leave Boston.  Dimmesdale likes the idea.  Somehow, Roger finds out about their plan and books passage on the same ship leaving for Europe, planning on following them wherever they go.  However, before they leave, Dimmesdale stands upon the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing an “A” on his own chest.  The strain is so much that he dies.

A year later, Roger dies too, leaving Pearl an inheritance.  Yeah, sure, why not?

Hester and Pearl sail to England.  After a time, Hester returns, and when she dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale, sharing a single tombstone, bearing the letter “A.”

As for Pearl herself, she seems to be the happiest person in the novel.  As a child, while living with her mother on the outskirts of Boston, she became something of a free spirit, allowed to play and have fun. When she became of age in England, she married an aristocrat.  And as she was described, even as a child, as having a “rich and luxuriant beauty,” we can be sure that she sluffed off what little of the Puritan religion she was exposed to.

Call Her Savage (1932)

Clara Bow’s Tabloid Past

Knowing that Call Her Savage was a Pre-Code movie, I sat down to watch it expecting the usual hints at immoral sexuality that would be forbidden once the Production Code started being rigorously enforced in 1934.  For example, at one point the movie features a nightclub for gays and lesbians, for we see a man with his arm around another man, and a woman with her arm around another woman.  The entertainment consists of a performance by a couple of effeminate waiters, singing something about a sailor in his pajamas, and how they would like to be chambermaids on a big battleship.

Earlier in the movie, however, there is a scene where Clara Bow starts playing with her Great Dane, at one point even getting underneath him.  I was ashamed of myself for the thought that popped into my head. I told myself that if I revealed what I was imagining here, people would think I was some kind of twisted pervert.  And so it was that I intended skip over this part.  But then I thought, it wouldn’t hurt just to Google it.  It was then that I found that others had had a similar reaction, that there was a hint of bestiality in that scene.

The internet is one thing, and respectable film criticism is something else again.  With that in mind, I turned to the last word on the subject, Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood:  Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934.  On page 104, he lists, among the many violations of the Hayes Code in Call Her Savage, Clara Bow’s “erotic frolicking with a Great Dane.”

In the same paragraph, moreover, Doherty says that Bow’s life was full of scandal. Rather than retire from public view, Call Her Savage was a comeback vehicle for her, one in which she flaunted the features of her lurid life. “Making the best of the tabloid headlines,” Doherty says, “Call Her Savage invited audiences to link the affairs of the actress with the antics of the lusty hellion she played on the screen.” It would be like Fatty Arbuckle making a movie in which he tells a woman at a party, “Things go better with Coke.”

We always knew in general that life reflects art, and art reflects life, but that is especially so in this movie. I normally have little interest in the personal lives of actors, caring only about what I see on the big screen, but I made an exception in this case, looking into her biography.  And yes, there were tabloid stories of Bow having sex with her dog.

This reminded me of the movie The Scarlet Empress (1934), in which Marlene Dietrich plays Princess Sophia in her eventual rise to power as Catherine the Great.  There is the story, possibly apocryphal, that she died while having sex with her horse.  The harness holding up the horse broke, and she was crushed to death when it fell on top of her.  It’s easier for a man.  All he has to do is get his horse stump broke. But then, when it comes to sex, things are often easier for men.  In any event, at the end of the movie, Catherine the Great is seen standing next to a mighty steed, thereby hinting at the scurrilous rumor concerning the death of this historical figure.

The First Generation

When Call Her Savage begins, we see a wagon train crossing the state of Texas, being led by a man named Silas.  Everyone knows that Silas is committing adultery with a woman in the last covered wagon.

Two old men are talking about it.  We never learn the name of one of the men, but he is played by Russell Simpson and will be referred to as such.  The other man is Mort, and he says, “No good will come of it. You’ll see.  He’ll bring down the wrath of God on all of us.”

Let’s stop for a moment to consider this.  The question is not, what are we to make of this?  For that answer will vary, depending on one’s religious nature, ranging from Christian fundamentalist to atheist. Rather, the question is, what does the movie want us to make of this?  As a general rule, movies do not expect the audience to agree with an old coot like Mort, with his talk of the wrath of God, an Old Testament God that will punish an entire community for the sins of just one man. Therefore, even though Indians appear on the horizon right after he says that, we would normally be expected to regard it as mere coincidence.

The Indians fail in their attack on the wagon train, and they ride off.  The few settlers that were killed are buried, and Silas leads a prayer for them, while we hear “Abide with Me” in the background: “And we ask God, in His infinite mercy, to take them to His bosom, that they might dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven, forever and ever.  Amen.”

This is the kind of God that movies usually approve of, although it also makes sense that a sinner like Silas would prefer a loving and forgiving God to the wrathful Deity that Mort was invoking.

Anyway, Silas walks over to Mort, who is lying on the ground, slowly dying. Mort rises up a bit, accusing Silas and that woman he was with, whom he refers to as a Jezebel and a harlot, of being responsible for the communal punishment God has inflicted on those they just buried.  Silas puts his foot on Mort’s neck, forcing him to the ground, crushing his windpipe.

Simpson comes up to Silas, saying it’s against God what he’s been doing.  Silas says it doesn’t matter because Mort would have been dead by sundown anyway. Simpson says he’s not worried about Mort. Rather, he is talking about Silas’s daughter Ruth.  “A man passes his nature on to his children, Silas, and your nature is bad.  The good book says the sins of the father will be passed on to his children, even unto the third and the fourth generation.”

The reference is to Exodus 20:5, where God is giving Moses the Ten Commandments.  It is not clear to me whether that passage means it is the sins of the father or the guilt of the father that is passed on. Simpson seems to be saying the former, in which case, Silas’s children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren will also be sinful.  However, it might mean that even if the father’s progeny are themselves innocent, they have inherited his guilt and will therefore be punished.

I take it to mean the latter.  For example, as told in 2 Samuel 11-12, David and Bathsheba commit adultery, and then David has her husband Uriah murdered to get him out of the way.  For that reason, God kills their baby.  The doctrine of original sin aside, the baby was clearly innocent, certainly as innocent as any other baby that gets born every day, except for the fact that it had inherited David’s guilt and therefore deserved punishment.

Nevertheless, I think that when Simpson says what he does to Silas, he means that Silas’s sinful nature will be passed on to his daughter Ruth.  In either event, the idea in the Bible seems to be that the method of transmission is supernatural, that God has ordained this inheritance.

When Mort spoke of the wrath of God being visited upon them, he struck us as one of those fanatical religious types that the movies always portray in a bad light. But Simpson impresses us as being more level-headed, so we begin to wonder if the movie wants us to take this stuff seriously.

The Second Generation

Just before the Indians attacked the wagon train, we saw two children playing, Silas’s daughter Ruth and a boy named Pete, who was pretending to be an Indian, threatening to scalp Ruth.  Eighteen years later, Pete and Ruth have grown up and gotten married. But he neglects her.  Sitting in a wagon, about to go on a trip, he yells to Ruth to say goodbye to him.  She is bathing, but she wraps a towel around her and comes to the window.  After he leaves, she lies on the bed naked, except for the towel. No question about it, she is unfulfilled. Rising to the occasion is Ronasa, Ruth’s Indian servant. He has the love she needs. However, he tells her he must leave her because his father wants him to marry some squaw that he cares nothing about.  Before he departs, he and Ruth have desperate sex out in the woods, which we know is hot and passionate because Ronasa is an Indian. As a result of their union, Ruth gives birth to Nasa.

At this point, we again get the quotation about visiting the iniquity of the father on his progeny, adding the introductory phrase, “For I am a jealous God,” which is also part of Exodus 20:5.  This time, however, it is not uttered by any character in the movie, but rather is written as an intertitle, with two tablets behind it of the sort on which the Ten Commandments were written. This makes it clear that we are supposed to regard this as literally true.  In addition, the movie probably wants us to believe that Mort was right after all, that God had the Indians attack the wagon train because Silas was committing adultery.

The Third Generation

Clara Bow plays Nasa when she grows up.  We know, as she does not, that her biological father was Ronasa.  After lashing her half-breed friend Moonglow (Gilbert Roland) forty times with her whip, while he just stands there and takes it because he loves her, she says she doesn’t understand herself, why she is so wild and angry all the time.  Her savage nature cannot be blamed solely on her being a half-breed because Moonglow is also a half-breed, and he is not wild and angry at all. It must be that, in addition, she has inherited the sins of Silas.

In an effort to tame her, Pete, her (legal) father, sends her to a girls’ school in Chicago, but that only gives her more opportunity to express her sinful nature. Then Pete tries to make her marry a man she doesn’t love.  When she refuses, he says he never wants to see her again.

The man she does end up marrying is Lawrence Crosby.  He marries her only because he wants to make his mistress jealous.  That mistress is Sunny De Lane (Thelma Todd), whom he broke up with because she had been “weekending” him.  But she is the one he really wants because she is willing to cater to his “peculiarities.”  We subsequently get an idea about one of those peculiarities.  While talking to Nasa at a party, he sees Sunny arrive.  After telling Nasa who she is, he makes a Freudian slip.  While looking directly at Sunny, he says, “Mother.”

Crosby leaves Nasa after one night of marriage, telling her she will have credit at either of his banks. Months later, a lawyer tells her Crosby is dying, and that it would be wise to visit him so that she can continue to get her allowance. During her visit, he tries to rape her.  His doctor says his mind is infected. That sounds like syphilis to me.  However, the doctor says he can be cured with the proper care, presumably with Salvarsan and bismuth.

The Fourth Generation

The next month, Nasa has a baby.  Oddly enough for a Pre-Code movie, her baby is legitimate. She expresses concern as to whether the baby is all right, which suggests apprehension about syphilis again. That would be one way of passing down the sins of the father, but I believe only supernatural transmission is what the Bible had in mind.

Because Crosby cuts off her allowance, we slowly see the effect of her impoverishment, as she loses her fancy clothes and starts living in a cheap hotel. She looks at a prescription for the baby: ephedrine sulphate and chlorotone, drugs that might be used to treat the side effects of Salvarsan and bismuth.

Of course, if the baby had syphilis, then so too would Nasa.  Later in the movie, Crosby appears, completely cured and paired up with Sunny again, so I guess we can imagine Nasa taking the cure too.  I know it’s not terribly realistic.  The treatment we are talking about took years, but I still think that was supposed to be the idea.  An even more unrealistic example occurs in The Road to Ruin (1934).  In that movie, a woman is given the Wassermann test, and the result is positive.  In what appears to be a week or two later, she is cured.

Alone with a sick baby to take care of, and no money to pay for its medicine, she turns to prostitution. The first two men who approach her on the street for sex completely disgust her, but she is able to tolerate the third one.  She has sex with him and then uses the money he gave her to buy the medicine. By the time she returns to her apartment, however, there has been a fire, and her baby has suffocated.   After all, the baby was the fourth generation of Silas and had inherited his sins.  Therefore, it was deserving of God’s wrath.

Soon after, she finds out that Silas has died and left her $100,000.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $2,000,000 today.)  She says, “I’ll get even with life.”  At first, I wondered why she didn’t say she was going to get even with men, given the way she had been treated by Pete and Crosby, in addition to the disgust she felt when men approached her on the street for sex.

I think the reason for her turn of phrase, “get even with life” instead of “get even with men,” goes back to Bow’s reason for making this movie.  Scandals about her had caused her to have a nervous breakdown, and now, with this movie, she was getting even, after a fashion, by defiantly putting her sordid sexuality on the screen.  Nevertheless, she does seem to have it in for men, hiring a gigolo so she can treat him like dirt.

In the end, Nasa receives a letter from her mother Ruth that she is dying.  She returns home to Texas.  In her dying moments, Ruth gives Nasa just enough information for her to figure out that Ronasa was her real father.  Nasa tells Moonglow that she is a half-breed like him, so they can get married and live happily ever after.  I don’t know if God is all through punishing the generations of Silas, however, so maybe they shouldn’t have children, just in case.

Start the Revolution Without Me (1973) and Its Antecedents

Among other things, the Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are created equal.  This document formally began the American Revolution, the success of which allowed us to become a democracy, completely divesting ourselves of any trace of royalty.  This revolution, however, only allowed our thirteen colonies to free themselves from the British.  We did not invade England and chop off the head of King George III.

The French Revolution, which also took place toward the end of the eighteenth century, was a revolt from within France itself, leading to the Reign of Terror that subjected their aristocrats to the guillotine.  As such, it is the revolution that stands out as the starkest example of one that overthrew an aristocracy in favor of equality.

By the nineteenth century, it occurred to certain authors that one way to illustrate the injustice of an aristocracy lording it over its subjects was to tell a story of “twins,” literally in some cases, but loosely understood in many others, amounting only to a double of some sort.

Although set a century before the French Revolution, the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask captured the attention of several authors, notably Alexandre Dumas. Written between 1847 and 1850, he tells a story of identical twins, sons of Louis XIV, one of whom is imprisoned with an iron mask kept over his head to avoid having him become the cause of a civil war.

Prior to that, Dumas wrote The Corsican Brothers in 1844.  It is about conjoined twins, separated at birth, both surgically and geographically, one becoming a bandit in Corsica with the other enjoying the good life as an aristocrat in Paris.

In A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, Charles Dickens tells a story about two men that look enough alike to be twins, though they really are not.  One of them, Sydney Carton, nobly substitutes himself for the aristocrat who looks like him, allowing himself to be guillotined.

Although France is the perfect setting for these stories about twins, there are some that take place in countries other than France that deserve mention. One is The Prince and the Pauper, set in England, which Mark Twain published in 1881.  It is about two unrelated boys that happen to look like twins, one of whom is the Prince of Wales.  They switch places.

Another is The Prisoner of Zenda, written by Anthony Hope in 1894, in which a commoner from England turns out to look exactly like Rudolf V of Ruritania. The commoner is compelled to pretend to be the king when Rudolf is drugged on the eve of his coronation and subsequently kidnapped.

In 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs published his own Ruritanian romance, The Mad King, featuring another story of royalty and “twins,” in which a man looks exactly like King Leopold of Lutha.

Let us return to France.  Rafael Sabatini published Scaramouche in 1921, set in the days leading up to the French Revolution.  In this story, Andre Moreau seeks revenge against the Marquis de Maynes, who turns out to be his father. This story was improved in the 1952 movie version, in which the two men are half-brothers. Through most of the movie, the two men do not know they are related because Andre is illegitimate.  In this case, they do not look alike, but the unequal treatment of the two brothers still serves the purpose of illustrating the injustice of an aristocracy based on birth, especially since fraternité is right next to égalité in the French motto.

In Orphans of the Storm (1921), set just before and during the French Revolution, we have two stepsisters, Henriette and Louise.  Henriette is the daughter of a married couple who live in poverty. They adopt Louise, who is the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat.  In the end, Henriette marries an aristocrat, and Louise marries a beggar.

Recently, I watched Metropolis (1927).  I don’t know what background music Fritz Lang intended for this movie at the time, but I kept hearing the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise, while the workers, who live below ground, are rebelling against those that live on the surface, who constitute a capitalist aristocracy.  So, we are encouraged to see a similarity between what happens in this movie and the French Revolution. Are there twins in this movie?  Yes, but with double or even triple meanings.

Essentially, Joh, the leader of the upper world, and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a mad scientist, were once both in love with a woman named Hel.  She married Joh and then died giving birth to their son Freder.

Rotwang has a metallic right hand.  One suspects there might be Freudian significance in this, the hand being phallic, thus indicating a castration complex, symbolic of his being unable to have sex with Hel. But I’m no Freudian, so let’s move on.

Rotwang misses Hel so much that he built a robot version of her.  She is made out of metal, but he intends to complete the job by adding a flesh exterior.

Meanwhile, Freder has been cavorting about with women in the Garden of the Sons, when a beautiful woman named Maria shows up with some children so they can see how their “brothers” live above ground.  With these children gathered around her, she looks maternal, even though, being unmarried, she is at the same time virginal.

It’s love at first sight for Freder, so he follows her back down below the surface where he is horrified by the working conditions of those who live down there.  Eventually, Freder switches places with his “twin,” a worker named Georgy, or “Georgi” in the novel on which this movie was based, where Freder says they are essentially brothers.  Unfortunately, Georgy quickly succumbs to the pleasures of the surface world.

Maria is a spiritual leader.  Joh realizes that she may be trouble, so he gets Rotwang to make a flesh version of Maria out of the robot, to be used for his own nefarious purpose.  Rotwang does so by kidnapping Maria and then strapping her to a machine for the flesh duplication.  Because this fake Maria is also a robot version of Hel, she is an aristocrat, while the real Maria belongs to the working class.

The fake Maria thus created is likened to the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelations.  She is given to all seven of the deadly sins, especially Lust.  We cannot help but wonder if Hel’s name is supposed to suggest Hell.  In any event, by establishing a strong association between the fake Maria and the most evil woman in Christianity, this encourages us to make an association between the real Maria and the holiest woman in Christianity, her namesake, Mary, Mother of God.  In the novel, she is said to have Madonna-eyes and a Madonna-voice.

Freder finds this fake Maria in the arms of his father, which hurts him because he believes she is the real Maria.  But since she is also the robot version of Hel, then she is also the double of Freder’s mother, which gives this situation Oedipal connotations, so we are back to Freud again.

This fake Maria starts a revolution, but the mob turns on her and burns her at the stake, revealing her metallic body.  Rotwang chases the real Maria, thinking her to be the fake one, the duplicate of Hel, wanting to have sex with her at long last, but he falls off the roof to his death.

Freder is the Mediator that the real Maria prophesied, the one destined to bring the rulers and workers together with sympathy and love.  As noted above, Hel was Freder’s mother.  The robot was not only a double of Hel, but also a double of Maria.  So, it’s almost as if the virginal and maternal Maria is the twin of Freder’s mother.  Given the association noted above between the real Maria and the Virgin Mary, Freder corresponds to Jesus.

All these movies about twins of some sort were meant to be taken seriously, but it was just a matter of time before they gave rise to parody.  Start the Revolution Without Me (1970) takes the idea of twins in the context of the French Revolution and gives it the ultimate satirical treatment.  When the movie begins, we see Orson Welles standing in front of the summer palace of Louis XVI, giving the movie a serious tone as he tells of how historians have recently discovered certain previously unknown facts that might have changed the entire course of European history had certain events unfolded differently, in which case the French Revolution might have been avoided.  These facts have been made into the movie we are about to see.

The story begins in the middle of the eighteenth century.  The Corsican Duke de Sisi and his pregnant wife are trying to get to the hospital in time for her to have her baby, but they are forced to stop and avail themselves of the doctor in a small village. However, there is a peasant, Monsieur Coupé, who is already there and whose wife is also about to have a baby, saying his wife comes first, even though he knows the man to whom he is speaking is the Duke de Sisi, the “scrounge of Corsica.”

The duke is appalled.  “That’s the scourge of Corsica, you ignorant peasant!”

The two men begin fighting, when suddenly, both wives go into labor.  It is all very frantic, but each woman has her baby, and all seems well.  But then both women go into labor again, and it turns out that each woman is having twins. Unfortunately, in all the excitement, with the four babies having been laid on the bed, the doctor and his assistants are not sure which twins belong to the duke, and which belong to the peasant.  The doctor decides to pick one baby from each twin and switch them. That way, he says, they will at least be half right.

And so it is that one pair of mismatched twins grows up to be Phillipe and Pierre de Sisi (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland), while the other pair of mismatched twins grows up to be Claude and Charles Coupé (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland).

Phillipe and Pierre become the greatest swordsmen in all Corsica; Claude and Charles become the greatest cowards in all France, reluctantly caught up in the revolution with the rebels. Neither pair is aware of the existence of the other.

Owing to palace intrigue on the one hand and rebel activity on the other, Phillipe and Pierre disguise themselves as peasants, which results in their being mistaken for Claude and Charles, who in turn pretend to be the aristocrats Phillipe and Pierre.

At the very end of the movie, both pairs of mismatched twins finally encounter each other, which leads to the point at which Orson Welles is about to tell us how the history of Europe might have taken a different path.  But he is murdered, so we never get to find out what happened.

What is actually killed is the use of twins to undermine aristocratic rule in favor of equality.  Fortunately, Start the Revolution Without Me will not prevent us from enjoying the old stories that utilized this idea, but completely new ones are out of the question.

At least, that’s what I thought until I watched Trading Places (1983) again the other day.  And while I can’t be sure, I thought I detected a hint of La Marseillaise in the background music toward the end.

Shoot (1976)

To say a lot of people, including critics, dislike the movie Shoot is an understatement. Many of them detest it.  Leonard Maltin rated it BOMB.  There are some people, like me, who really liked this movie as a satire on gun enthusiasts. However, there are not enough of us for this movie even to achieve cult status. As a result, it is pretty much unavailable, except for a version of poor quality on YouTube.

At the beginning of Shoot, Rex (Cliff Robertson) wakes up, not gradually with sleepy eyes, but suddenly, as if he willed himself to wake up early that morning. He looks at his watch, the face of which is black.  He presses the button on the side, causing red numerals to light up.  We are used to seeing outdated technology while watching old movies, but when we do so, it generally strikes us as incidental.  In the 1970s, however, featuring an LED watch in a movie was supposed to impress us as being the latest thing, but it looks so out of date now that it provokes derision.

Anyway, the time is 4:02.  He gets out of bed, his wife still sleeping, and starts getting ready.  After performing his daily ablutions, he straps on a .45 automatic. But that is not the only gun he has, for we see a full display of rifles against the wall, including a submachinegun.

He selects a hunting rifle with a scope from his collection and then proceeds to clean and oil it in a manner that is unmistakably sensual.  Holding a rod with a patch secured at the end, he penetrates the barrel, inserting it all the way. After that, he squirts oil on a cloth, which he firmly squeezes. Still holding the cloth, he encircles the barrel with his hand and slowly slides it all the way down. Then he oils the other parts of the rifle, gently caressing them.

He is obviously a veteran of World War II, for as he does all this, we see pictures on the wall that were taken while he was deployed overseas, and we see a photograph of a saluting General Eisenhower.  Ah, those were the days!  At the present time, he is the leader of the local National Guard Unit. Somewhere in the midst of all the pictures is one of his wife.

Speaking of his wife, she is a miserable alcoholic, whom he neglects.  He cheats on her, but his affairs with other women are only a minor form of infidelity.  His true love is for his guns.

Rex leaves in a camouflage outfit, suitable for winter weather.  He arrives at a parking lot where he picks up his four friends, among them Lou (Ernest Borgnine) and Zeke (Henry Silva).  He drives them to his hunting lodge out in the woods. They are all having a good time as they walk through the woods, getting back to nature.

As a hopeful sign that there may be deer close by, one of them says that he saw some “deer shit.”  Zeke says it was “hippie shit.”  When asked how he knows that it was hippie shit, Zeke replies, “It had hair in it.”

Now, that’s not much of a joke, but it reminds us of the title character in Joe (1970), who is also a veteran of World War II, a gun nut, and someone that hates hippies and blacks.

Anyway, after hours of walking, they become frustrated because they haven’t come across any animals. It’s hard to appreciate the beauties of nature if you can’t find anything to kill.  As they reach the bank of a river, they decide to give up, but then they hear something from the other side of that river.  It is another group of hunters, who apparently have not had any luck finding something to kill either. The two groups stare at each other for a long time. Then a hunter from the other side aims his rifle and fires, grazing one of the men with Rex.  In return, Zeke shoots back, hitting the hunter that shot at them right between the eyes.  Both sides take cover and begin shooting at each other, until the hunters on the other side disappear back into the woods.

Of course, this reminds us of The Most Dangerous Game (1932).  In that movie, Count Zaroff has discovered that hunting men is the only challenge left that still excites him.  However, Zaroff never gave his human prey a rifle and ammunition to shoot back with.  I guess he knew that would be too exciting.  This movie, however, takes things to that next step.

Rex and his friends argue about whether to call the police.  Zeke especially does not want to do that since he is the one who killed the hunter on the other side.  But Lou thinks calling the police would be the right thing to do. Finally, they decide to hold off and see what happens. At first, they are relieved when the other hunting party does not report it to the police. Instead, there is only an obituary notice of a man from a nearby town, Ed Graham, that might be the hunter that was killed.

Rex decides to check it out, calling Graham’s widow, pretending to be an old friend and wanting to pay his respects.  Like Rex’s wife, Mrs. Graham is an alcoholic, and she is just as miserable, expressing contempt for the way hunters are so close to one another, closer than they are to their wives.

But then she sympathizes with the way her husband had to put up with all that “bleeding heart gump from his own son.”  She says her son became an assemblyman, adding that he was elected by “the hippies and the junkies and the jigs, not to mention the ecology nuts and the anti-gun nuts.” When her son expressed his dislike for the way his father willfully hurt the wildlife, she told him he should move to India where they worship cows, letting them shit right in the street.

However, she goes on to say that it’s not really about protecting the wildlife:

It’s all part of great plot to disarm the American household so the hippies and the junkies and the jigs can come in whenever they like and beat you half to death and rape you, while their buddies downstairs are taking out the TV sets so they can sell them and buy more heroin.

She tells Rex she has her own .357 Smith & Wesson in her bedroom to shoot any of those hippies, junkies, or jigs that try that stuff with her.  She also tells Rex that she isn’t wearing any bra or panties under her robe, having earlier told him she was “stark naked” when he called her on the phone.  Well, everyone grieves in his own way.

She mention’s her husband’s best friend from college, Marshall Flynn, who was said to be a one-man army against the Japs.  When Rex leaves, we see a man sitting in a car watching him, presumably the friend she was telling him about. Soon after, we see Flynn in Rex’s town in various places, checking things out.

Rex comes to the conclusion that because the other hunters did not report it to the police, that means they prefer to get revenge their own way.  He calls a meeting of those who were involved. Speaking of the hunters on the other side, Rex says, “They know where we hunt. They know when we hunt….  I think those bastards are going to be waiting for us Saturday, and this time, we’re going to be prepared.”

But since they figure the other hunters will bring more men with them on Saturday, Rex says they will have to get more men they can trust too.  One of the extra men suggested is John, a security guard who works in Rex’s store and who is African American.  Zeke doesn’t like the idea of including “that black guy,” but Rex says he is someone they can trust, and that is what matters.  We see Rex talking to John, who apparently agrees to go along, but we really don’t see much of him after that.

However, he does serve an important moral function.  Zeke already expressed his disdain for hippies, and now we see that he is prejudiced against blacks as well.  To that extent, he is like Mrs. Graham, who gave us insight into the attitude held by her late husband, his friend Marshall Flynn, and all the other hunters that were on the other side of the river.  This is the movie’s way of disparaging gun nuts in general.  On the other hand, it is important that we recognize that Rex and his friends are the good guys, relatively speaking, and that is the point of having Rex include John as a man they can trust.  As opposed to this, the men they are going up against would never dream of including anyone in their group who wasn’t white.

In addition to the extra men Rex says they will need, they intend to arm themselves with automatic weapons, along with 100,000 rounds of ammunition, a B.A.R, camouflage helmets with netting, and hand grenades.  These guys miss the war, and they feel good about being real soldiers again.

When Saturday arrives, snow has fallen on the ground, something they seem unprepared for as they keep slipping and sliding while they move down a slope. When they get to the same spot as the previous week, there is no one on the other side.  One of the soldiers, who was not part of the original group, starts talking in a loud voice, saying it’s all ridiculous because there is no one there. In fact, we have been wondering all along if this would happen, that no one would be there, and they would end up looking silly.

Suddenly, the other side of the river comes alive.   Men in white camouflage rise up out of their foxholes after tossing aside the corrugated metal sheets that had covered them, on which the snow had accumulated.  They all start firing their submachine guns and tossing grenades, slaughtering everyone in Rex’s company. Only Rex survives, sort of.  We see him holding his hands over his face as a bloody gob of brain goo oozes out between his fingers.

There is a transition to a nursing home, where Rex has been for a long time, unable to move, barely aware of the light, which reminds him of snow.  He is filled with regret as he thinks of the friends he lost:

God, I wish I had them back.  If only we could go back together and do it right.  If only we’d gotten there first.  Then we could have cut them to pieces, the bastards.

Political Movies of the Past

It will never be the same.

I’m thinking about some of the political movies that I enjoyed watching once, back when I was living in a fool’s paradise.

In All the President’s Men (1976), two reporters for the Washington Post uncover evidence that eventually leads to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Nothing like that will ever happen again, now that the Supreme Court has given the president immunity for such things as using the Department of Justice to obstruct justice.  Today, the president that was once and will be again would probably order the FBI to bring charges against such treasonous reporters, assuming that the owner of the newspaper didn’t fire them first.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was one of my favorites.  But now, instead of an elaborate plot involving brainwashing and assassination in order to put a Soviet agent in the White House, Russia was able to get its candidate elected president by ordinary, democratic means.

In Advise & Consent (1962), we see the Senate struggle to confirm the president’s nominee for secretary of state, one Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda).  Information has come to light that the nominee was once a member of a “communist cell,” where he supposedly said that communism would come to the United States gradually.  From some of the nominee’s speeches, it is feared that he will be all too willing to yield to the demands of the Soviet Union.  But with a name like Leffingwell, what would you expect?

In a few months, we can expect a different kind of struggle within the Senate.  Since the president-elect himself can be counted on to cozy up to the Russians, there is not much point in worrying about his nominees in this regard.  The Republicans need only ask themselves whether they should confirm those nominees in the usual way, thereby displaying their fealty, or simply allow for recess appointments, dodging the matter altogether.

One of the senators in that movie commits suicide when his past catches up with him, in particular, his homosexual relationship with another soldier when he was stationed in Hawaii.  At first, I thought this was one more feature of the movie that was outdated.  But then it occurred to me that the Supreme Court may not only invalidate same-sex marriage but even recriminalize sodomy as well.  So, perhaps this plot point will live to see another day.

Seven Days in May (1964) was thrilling, watching generals plot a military coup, in which President Lyman (Frederic March) would be removed from office and replaced by General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster).  There were several indications that these senior military officers were basically fascists, while the president and his allies believed in the Constitution, the rule of law, and democracy.

General Scott and other senior men in the military were worried about the fact that President Lyman was too trusting of the Russians, and that action had to be taken immediately before he allowed the Soviet Union to gain a military advantage over the United States.  This concern on the part of the generals in the movie is similar to that which exists between actual generals of today and our once and future president.  As in the movie, these actual generals are concerned that the re-elected president will play into the hands of the Russians.

Unlike the movie, however, it is a fascist president that that attempted a coup, not the generals, who are the ones that believe in the Constitution.  As a result, they may be subjected to courts-martial for being disloyal.

As with Advise & Consent, there is a sexual component in this movie as well.  General Scott wrote some love letters to a woman with whom he was having an affair, and this evidence of adultery is considered as a way of thwarting the coup, forcing Scott to resign under threat of scandal.  However, President Lyman decides to eschew such scurrilous methods. Unlike the threat of a homosexual scandal in Advise & Consent, the possibility of a heterosexual scandal of the kind found in Seven Days in May now seems quaint.  In a world where a politician can be found liable for sexual abuse and then go on to be elected president, love letters revealing an adulterous affair in the past aren’t worth the price of the postage stamps by which they were mailed.

And so it is that these movies must now be viewed as artifacts of twentieth-century America, revealing a time when people believed in the strength and integrity of their constitutional republic.

I suppose if we want to see a political movie that still has relevance, there’s always Triumph of the Will (1935).

Hud (1963)

The title character of Hud, played by Paul Newman, is a psychopath, and just enough so that we envy him. To be unburdened by our conscience is something we often long for.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), for example, when the former title character drinks his potion and becomes the latter, his first words are “Free! Free!” Of course, Hyde is too evil for us to want to be like him.  After all, we don’t want to kill anyone. We just want to be able to have sex with a married woman and then point the finger at our nephew when we get caught, the way Hud does at the beginning of the movie.

It also helps that Hud is good looking, whereas Hyde is ugly.

Anyway, the movie is set on a cattle ranch owned by Hud’s father, Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas). Hud’s nephew is Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde). They have a maid, Alma (Patricia Neal).  At one point in the movie, while Hud is drunk, wearing a wife beater, and feeling ornery, he tries to rape Alma in the small shack she occupies right near the main house, but Lonnie grabs him and pulls him off her. Hud becomes so angry that he starts to hit Lonnie in the face, but he has just enough of a conscience to stay his hand. He gives up and leaves.

The movie was based on a novel, Horseman, Pass By, which I have not read, only summaries.  In that novel, the maid’s name is Halmea, and she is African American. Lonnie is unable to stop Hud from raping her and can only watch as Hud does so.

That the movie changed black Halmea into white Alma is not surprising. Even if the Production Code had allowed it, I’m not sure how audiences in 1963 would have reacted to seeing a white man rape a black woman.  However, there is another consideration other than that of race.  Had Hud in the movie actually raped Alma, we would have despised him for that, and the Production Code, if not just ordinary movie morality, would have required that he die in the end.  But since he failed in his attempt, as a result of what little conscience he had, what he did was forgivable.

Am I wrong to say that?  I might have hesitated in this regard were it not for the fact that a lot of people say that Alma wanted to be raped.  On my own, that thought would never have occurred to me.  After my mother saw the movie, however, she said that Alma wanted Hud to take her by force. My girlfriend said that Alma was irritated that Lonnie prevented Hud from raping her.  A third woman, Pauline Kael, said the same thing in her book I Lost It at the Movies:

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.

I still don’t see it.  But I’m just a man, so what do I know?

Before we get to that attempted rape in the movie, all the cattle on the Bannon ranch have to be destroyed because they have hoof-and-mouth disease. They contracted it when Homer bought some Mexican cows to add to his herd.  As a result, the Bannon family is impoverished.  It is suggested to Homer that he might drill for oil, but he doesn’t like the idea.  As a result, Hud gets a lawyer, intending to take possession of the ranch owing to his father’s incompetence. When Homer finds out about that, they start arguing. Hud says that he’s going to get control of the property, one way or the other. Homer replies:

Why, you’re badly mistaken about all this.  I’ll be the only one to run this ranch while I’m alive.  After that, you may get part of it.  I don’t know. But you can’t get control of this place. No way in the world.

Homer could have said that when he died, Hud and Lonnie would inherit the ranch, but he most decidedly did not say that.  He said that Hud may get part of the ranch.

Earlier in the movie, when they first find out the cattle are diseased, Hud says to Homer:

You’ve had twenty-four of my thirty-four years working for you on this ranch, and, Daddy, you’ve had top-grade cheap labor.  I’ve shoveled manure for you.  You’ve got my calluses. For what?  Your blessings the day you die? No, damn it. I want out of this spread what I put into it.

I will only add that Hud doesn’t even have his own place.  I can’t imagine being thirty-four years old and still living at home with my father.

A man with a lot of money will sometimes turn his children into slaves, getting them to spend their lives doing his bidding for the sake of an expected inheritance, only for him to decide late in life that his children are unworthy and leave it all to the church or to some teenage tart, figuring it’s his money to do with as he pleases. That is why there are laws to prevent that sort of thing, and that is why we see some justification in what Hud is doing.

Before Hud is able to get guardianship of the property, Homer falls off his horse and is mortally injured. Lonnie tries to reassure him that he’ll be all right, but Homer says he wants to give up:  “Hud there’s waiting on me. And he ain’t a patient man.”  Right after saying that, he dies.

Therefore, like the attempted rape, the guardianship is only attempted as well. Our attitude toward Hud might have been different had he actually succeeded in getting possession of the ranch and putting his father out to pasture.

In the novel, Lonnie goes to get help, and while he is gone, Hud shoots Homer, saying he did it to put him out of his misery.  That would also have been too much for us had that scene been in the movie. As noted above, we no longer want to identify with a psychopath in a movie once he kills somebody.

And so it is that the movie softens the character that is in the book, and in so doing, allows us to interpret his behavior sympathetically, even if we have misgivings as we do so.

As noted earlier, I have not read the book.  I didn’t see anything in the summaries about Hud’s having been drafted.  In the movie, however, as Lonnie prepares to leave the ranch for good after Homer’s funeral, Hud says to him that he is a “little bit green” to be going off on his own:  “I was about your age when I went in the Army. Your granddaddy bought me a Mars candy bar at the station, and said, ‘Character’s the only thing I got to give you. Be a man.’”

Lonnie replies, “Well, I guess he was kind of worried, your trying so hard to get out of the draft.”

I did not see this movie when it first came out in 1963.  When I did finally see it at the drive-in with some friends of mine in 1968, we all laughed in a grim sort of way.  Our college deferments were just about up, and we were all trying to figure out some way to dodge the draft.  So, while Lonnie’s remark was supposed to indicate one more way in which Hud was a shameless character, by 1968, dodging the draft had acquired an entirely different connotation.

More to the point, given that this movie wants to portray Hud as an unscrupulous character, wouldn’t it have been better to have him succeed in dodging the draft? Or would that be like the attempted rape of Alma and Hud’s attempt at guardianship?  That is, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to rape her, whereas we would not have done so had he succeeded; and we find it easier to accept what Hud was doing about trying to get possession of the ranch when Homer’s death makes that unnecessary.  By the same token, then, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to dodge the draft, whereas we might not have done so had he succeeded in that case either.

That old movies should frown on draft dodgers is not surprising.  In For Me and My Gal (1942), Gene Kelly deliberately breaks his hand to avoid being drafted but ends up redeeming himself heroically. In Mr. Lucky (1943), the title character played by Cary Grant dodges the draft, but ends up having a change of heart and decides to do what he can for the war effort.

With the advent of the Vietnam War, attitudes about the draft changed for a lot of people.  In fact, one thing good about that war was that you could dodge the draft without shame.  After I pulled it off, everyone was happy for me:  my college professors, my friends, my parents.  In fact, even the sergeant at the draft board, after reading the doctor’s recommendation, said to me with a big smile on his face, “Congratulations, you just got yourself a I-Y deferment.”

Going beyond that, I knew a girl who said she would never have sex with a man who had been in the Army, indicating that a man should have the moral courage to refuse to serve.  In Hamburger Hill (1987), a soldier gets a Dear John letter from his sweetheart, breaking up with him, because her college friends have persuaded her that it is immoral to have a boyfriend who is a soldier.  There are also remarks in that movie about girls back home “fucking for peace.”  We’d come a long way since D.H. Lawrence, when asked why men go to war, replied, “Because the women are watching.”

And yet, these changes in attitude notwithstanding, I have never seen a movie in which someone dodged the draft and then went on to live happily ever after, unless he first redeemed himself in some way.

The draft was ended in 1973, so we can only speculate as to what our attitude toward a draft dodger would be today.

Johnny Belinda (1948)

For a long time, I had heard about the movie Johnny Belinda, and I knew it was about a woman who was deaf, so when I finally got around to watching it, I naturally assumed that she was the title character. But no, her name is Belinda MacDonald, played by Jane Wyman.  As a result of being raped, she is impregnated.  She gives birth to a son, whom she names Johnny.  I should have thought that his name would then be Johnny MacDonald, but nothing is ever said to that effect.  I have never heard of an illegitimate child being given the mother’s first name as his surname, but I suppose she could do that if she wanted to.  No one in the movie says that his name is Johnny Belinda, but given the title, I assume that is the idea.

Most of the time when we watch an old movie, we simply make allowances for the censorship in place at the time of its production, in particular, the Motion Picture Production Code.  Perhaps because this movie is about rape, I found myself paying closer attention to the way this story is told than I might otherwise.

The word “rape” was not forbidden as such, but on those rare occasions when it was uttered, it was more likely to be used in the sense of despoiling, as in, “the rape of Europe had begun” in Mission to Moscow (1943), rather than in the sexual sense.  So, it came as no surprise that no one used the word in this movie.

The movie is set on the island of Cape Breton in the province of Nova Scotia.  The chief industry there is fishing.  As for the rest, there are farmers and merchants. The people that live there are portrayed as backward and ignorant.  It is no surprise, then, that Belinda is not only referred to a deaf and dumb, but is also called “the dummy.”  I can’t say what the people on Cape Breton were really like in 1948, or whether someone in Belinda’s situation would have been treated better in New York or Los Angeles, but that seems to be the way the movie wants us to see things.

Into this community has arrived Dr. Richardson (Lew Ayres), replacing the doctor recently deceased. One night he is summoned to the MacDonald farm where lives Belinda, her father Black (Charles Bickford), and her aunt Aggie (Agnes Moorehead).  They are dirt-poor farmers, and a cow is having trouble giving birth. It is there that Richardson meets Belinda and learns of her condition.

It is our introduction to her as well.  She is portrayed as childlike, although her age is never specified. Jane Wyman was over thirty years old when she made this movie, but that doesn’t mean that Belinda is supposed to be thirty.  Maybe she is supposed to be a fifteen-year-old girl.  Adults often played the roles of teenagers in those days.  Alternatively, it may be that Jane Wyman’s persona in 1948 was naturally childlike.  However, in the movie Stage Fright (1950), made only two years later, she comes across as the mature adult that she was.  In any event, the result is that when she is raped, it is as if a child has been raped.

The next Sunday, instead of going to church like everyone else, Richardson prepares to go fishing on the MacDonald farm, having been given permission to do so by Black as his fee for delivering that heifer.  The women of the community, represented by three old biddies in particular, are scandalized by the fact that Richardson has been living there three months and has never attended church. This is not uncommon in the movies.  As a general rule, if the protagonist is a bachelor, he probably believes in God, but he does not go to church.  If he is married, then he does go to church, from which we infer that going to church is something for women, who bring their domesticated husbands there with them. The Production Code says, “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith.” And yet, the way the movies depict bachelor protagonists as avoiding church, there is the implication that these characters have disdain for churchgoing, as if it is beneath them. Presumably, this was permitted by the Production Code as long as these bachelor protagonists did not actually say how much they disliked religion.

Richardson’s real reason for going to the MacDonald farm is to try to teach Belinda sign language, with which he was already familiar from having worked with deaf children at a hospital, and which he has been reviewing from a book he has.  He also gets her to start lipreading.  Eventually, he teaches her how to read and write.

Richardson has a cook and housekeeper named Stella (Jan Sterling).  She is in love with him, but it is unrequited.  Her boyfriend is Locky (Stephen McNally), a surly captain of one of the fishing boats. One day, when she sees him looking at Belinda, she becomes jealous, saying, “One thing, she’d never tell on you,” but then admonishes him to stay away from her.

That night at the dance, the three old biddies are watching what is going on.  One of them remarks of a woman on the dance floor, “She looks right spry for a woman who’s just had her arteries cut out.” Another corrects her, saying it was not her arteries.  She leans toward her and whispers something so low that we cannot hear what she says.  We often hear what people whisper in a movie, but not here.

That something is apparently the word “ovaries.”  I guess the censors regarded that word as too suggestive of sex to be permitted utterance in a movie.  The earliest use of that word in a movie that I could find was in 1970 in the movies Getting Straight and Tropic of Cancer.

But why is this scene in the movie?  Presumably it was to show how silly these old biddies are, thinking they have to whisper the word “ovaries” to each other even though no one else was around to hear them. But if these women are silly, thinking the word “ovaries” has to be whispered, how silly were the censors back then to believe that audiences should not be allowed to hear that word at all? If it be argued that there might have been children in the audience, then we are saying that children could watch a movie in which a woman was raped, but not one where the word “ovaries” was said out loud.  It’s almost as if the censors wished everyone were as deaf as Belinda, then no dirty words would ever be heard.

Stella quits dancing with Locky, telling him he is drunk.  He notices that Black and Aggie are riding out of town to visit their sister who has taken sick.  Seeing his chance, he goes to the MacDonald farm and rapes Belinda.  She becomes sullen after that, flinching if someone touches her. Richardson has been away treating sick people, and when he comes to see her, he is able to cheer her up a little.  He offers to take her to a town to see a diagnostician, thinking something might be done about her inability to hear.

When they arrive in the town, they pass by a store that sells women’s clothing.  In the display window, there is a brassiere and, I believe, a full slip.  She points to them, asking in sign language what they are.

This brings us back to the fact that she is portrayed as childlike, one too young to be wearing such undergarments.  Of course, as we soon find out, she is old enough to be pregnant.  Since Jane Wyman is a small-breasted woman, perhaps Belinda’s family figured she could do without such things.

We watch this scene through the display window from inside the store.  In other words, we are not allowed to hear what Richardson says to her.  The word “brassiere” was used in the movie Three on a Match (1932), but that is a Pre-Code movie.  It also is used in The 39 Steps (1935).  So, the word is more acceptable than “ovaries.”  Nevertheless, we are not allowed to hear what Richardson says to her, once again putting us in the position of being deaf like Belinda, right where the censors want us.

We watch Richardson struggle, trying to figure out what to tell her.  Finally, he distracts her by pointing to a scarf, which he buys for her.  Apparently, he decides that she is not old enough to know about such things, that she is like a child.

Richardson finds out from the diagnostician that Belinda is pregnant.  But the word “pregnant” is not used.  Instead, there are variations on phrases that include the word “child,” as when the diagnostician refers to Belinda’s “expected child,” or when Richardson tells Aggie that Belinda is going to “have a child.” The word “pregnant” was pretty much avoided in those days.  Where it occurs, it is usually in a foreign film like Fanny (1932), which is also Pre-Code, or used in a figurative sense, as in Hamlet (1948), where Polonius says, “How pregnant sometimes his replies are!”

Because “being pregnant” and “going to have a child” denote exactly the same state of affairs, the difference must be a matter of connotation.  There is something ominous about being pregnant, whereas there is something warm and cuddly about having a child.  I’ll go one step further.  It is not said that Belinda is “going to have a baby.”  That is too much like “being pregnant,” a dreadful anticipation for an unmarried woman.  Richardson does not tell Black about this, afraid that he will want to kill the father, no matter what words are used to indicate Belinda’s condition.

Black decides that Belinda is doing so well he will take her to church, something he did only once, years ago.  Richardson goes with them.  As noted above, a male protagonist will go to church once he is married, and this indicates, as if we could not already guess, that he and Belinda will eventually marry.

When Locky arrives at church, Belinda reacts with fear in her eyes, something noticed by Richardson, from which he gathers that Locky must have raped her. Anyway, it is announced at church that Stella and Locky will be getting married soon.  Stella has a lot of money that she inherited from her uncle, and this is the chief reason Locky wants to marry her.

Eventually, Aggie has to tell Black that Belinda is going to have a child.  He becomes furious, demanding that Belinda tell him who the father is.  Richardson shows up at that point and tells Black that she has repressed it, that “it’s blotted out of her mind.”  He manages to calm Black down, saying that even if he found out who the father was, bringing it before the community to exact revenge would only be more traumatic for Belinda.  Then Richardson goes to Belinda’s room and tells her she is going to be a mother, which has even more of a positive connotation than “going to have a child.”  As it sinks in, she becomes happy at the thought. When she has the baby, she loves it dearly.

I suppose there are some women who are raped, have the rapist’s baby, and then come to love that baby. But I suspect there are others that would be horrified at the prospect of having the rapist’s baby.  Telling such a woman that she is “going to be a mother” would be the height of presumption, effectively telling her that she is obligated to love that baby.  Instead, she might detest it, being filled with loathing when she sees it, determined to give it up for adoption.

But that’s real life.  I have never seen a movie in which a woman detested her baby.  Even in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where Satan himself rapes Rosemary (Mia Farrow), when she looks at the baby that she has given birth to, you see the love in her eyes and the joy in her heart.  In It’s Alive (1974), a woman has a baby-monster on account of some birth-control pills she was taking.  It kills every doctor and nurse in the delivery room and then goes out of the hospital to continue its killing spree.  It eventually makes its way back to its mother, who in turn loves her baby-monster.  And in The Brood (1979), we even get to see Samantha Eggar licking the blood off the psychoplasmic baby that she just removed from its external fetal sac.

A possible exception is the baby-monster in Demon Seed (1977), where Julie Christie is raped and impregnated by a supercomputer.  When she sees what she has given birth to, she seems dubious.  However, her child has developed so quickly that it already looks like a seven-year-old girl.  Mothers are no longer obligated to love monstrous children once they are past the baby stage, as in Village of the Damned (1960).

Let us return to movies about normal babies.  If a woman does give up her baby, it is never with great relief to be rid of the damn thing, but usually out of desperation and with much heartache, as in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Even in the movie Juno (2007), which ends happily, the title character cries after giving birth, knowing she will be giving up the baby for adoption.

Anyway, Locky spreads a rumor that Richardson is the father.  If this movie were made today, suspicion would probably fall on Belinda’s father.  But Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, would have turned purple had there been the slightest hint of that in the script.  That aside, given what Locky has been suggesting, no one wants Richardson’s services as a doctor anymore. Because of Belinda’s shame, people in town stop extending the MacDonalds credit. Richardson offers to marry Belinda, but Black says he would be doing it only out of pity, so that idea is put to rest.

A storm comes up, so everyone scrambles to prepare for it.  As a result, no one is in the house when Locky show us to buy some ground barley.  He sees the baby and starts talking to it when Black walks in, none too pleased to see him.  Locky forgets himself, saying the baby is the “spitting image of his father.” Realizing his mistake, he quickly leaves, with Black following.  They start fighting near a cliff, and when Black slips and struggles to cling to the ledge, Locky refuses to save him, letting him fall to his death.  He leaves, and no one in the movie ever finds out that he murdered Black.  They think it was just an accident.

Richardson decides to leave Cape Breton and take a job in a hospital in Toronto. When he explains this to Belinda, she starts crying and hugs him.  He realizes that she is in love with him, as he is with her.  We can tell they are going to get married. He kisses her, but only on the cheek.

However, he first has to get things ready at his new job and find a place for them to live.  In the meantime, the Town Council has a meeting.  It is decided that something must be done to uphold the honor of the community in light of the shame Belinda has brought upon them.  The baby should be taken away from her and given to the newly married Locky and Stella.  Otherwise, the godless child will run loose like an animal.

Locky and Stella ride over to the MacDonald farm to get Belinda to sign a release and give them the baby. Stella goes in by herself.  Belinda refuses to sign the release, outraged at the idea of giving up her baby. Stella goes back outside and tells Locky they are being mean trying to take away her baby, saying, “She’s his mother.”

Locky replies, “I’m his father,” horrifying Stella.  He goes in the house to get the baby, and Belinda kills him with a shotgun.

She is tried for murder.  At first, Stella plays dumb, but as the trial wears on, especially after Richardson is implicated as the father, she bursts out in court, telling what she knows.  Belinda is acquitted. She and Richardson leave Cape Breton for good, taking Aggie with them, the farm having been sold.

Let us return to the moment right after Belinda has been found innocent.  She comes to Richardson and starts using sign language.  He takes her hand and says, “I know Belinda.  You don’t have to say anything.” He holds her face in his hands affectionately.  Then she turns to get her baby.

It is the end of the movie.  Richardson and Belinda are going to get married and live happily ever after.  In any other movie made back then, the man and woman would kiss.  But not here, not even the little peck on the cheek we saw earlier. Although the Production Code forbade “excessive and lustful kissing,” it still allowed kissing that was unquestionably erotic, as when we saw Locky and Stella kissing at the dance.  So, why don’t we see Richardson take Belinda in his arms and give her a passionate kiss, to which she responds sensually?

As has been noted, Belinda is childlike.  For him to kiss her that way would be like kissing a child in a sexual way.  But that only pushes the question back one step. Why did the movie render Belinda’s character as childlike so as to preclude passionate kissing?  And the answer to that is that she had been raped.

A decent woman that has been raped in a movie might end up finding love and getting married, but if a raped woman is seen, either previously or subsequently, to have strong sexual desires, her moral character is called into question.  To see Richardson kissing Belinda on the lips would remind us of when Locky kissed her on the lips, thereby undermining her innocence.

In the old days, women who were raped were often said to have brought it on themselves by dressing provocatively, and a defense against a charge of rape was the testimony of other men who had had sex with her.  In other words, a woman that enjoyed sex could not truly be raped.  Any indication that Belinda was looking forward with lustful anticipation to frolicking in bed with Richardson on their honeymoon would be unthinkable.  It would suggest that what Locky did to her was not really so bad, that she might even have liked it.

Therefore, Belinda had to be desexualized.  We are supposed to believe that she will be happily married to Richardson, and that would imply a reasonably satisfying sex life, at least for him.  On her part, she will be passive, enjoying it to some degree, but mostly because she sees that it pleases her husband.

The Graduate (1967)

Reviewing The Graduate in 1967, Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars, which seemed appropriate, given all the nominations and awards received by this movie. In 1997, however, Ebert gave the movie only three stars, while reflecting on how his appreciation of it had changed thirty years later.  It is commonly remarked by other critics reviewing that movie, both before and since Ebert’s revision, that the movie is dated.

Though it is regrettable that a movie that seemed so good when first released is now dated, yet such a characterization does invite us to ask why this is so.  I suppose we might begin by noting that what it means to be a college graduate today is not the same as it was back then.

There is a scene in the movie where Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is in bed in a hotel room with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the older, married woman with whom he has been having an affair.  They have been having sex for some time, but without conversation, other than the minimum necessary to make arrangements.  Finally, Benjamin expresses a desire to get to know her better, insisting that they have a conversation and that she pick the topic.  Impatient with the whole business, she suggests art, but then denies having any interest in the subject.  Benjamin keeps at it, finally asking her what her major was in college. She says, “Art.”  This is funny, in a sad sort of way, for as Benjamin concludes, “I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years then.”

There was more freedom for students to major in what interested them in those days, without undue concern for whether they were being practical.  Back then, the mere existence of a college degree, even if the major was one of the liberal or fine arts, proved that one had ability.  While many students were practical right from the start of their freshman year, others felt no need to be so.  I drifted from one major to another, trying to find something that suited my fancy, until I finally settled on philosophy.  My best friend majored in psychology, and I had a girlfriend who majored in French. There was the sense that once you had a college degree, you had it made.

Although Mrs. Robinson never had to work for a living, her pregnancy having forced her to get married and occupy the housewife role, her sex would have been more of an obstacle to finding employment than her major, given that she would presumably have been in college in the late 1940s.

As for Benjamin, we don’t know what he majored in.  We learn that he was on the track team, that he edited the college newspaper, and that he received the Helpingham Award, whatever that is, but nothing is said about his major.  This omission is a little strange, but not much.  As noted above, what really counted back then was the fact that one was a college graduate.  When Mr. McGuire dramatically tells Benjamin that he has just one word to say to him, which turns out to be “Plastics,” suggesting that he seek employment in this field, someone watching this movie for the first time today might be excused for wondering if Benjamin had a degree in chemistry. Otherwise, what would qualify him for getting a job with a corporation for which plastics is an important product? But that would not have been necessary back then.  Even if Benjamin had a Bachelor of Arts, that would not have prevented him from going to work for Plastics, Inc.

In short, the title of this movie had a significance in 1967 that it would not have today.  If The Graduate had never been made, and someone produced a movie with that title today, I would anticipate a story about a recent graduate struggling to find a job where he could make enough money to pay off his student debt.

It has often been said that the Baby Boom generation, beginning with those born in 1946, had a tremendous influence as they moved through life.  The oldest members of that generation, of which I am one, were just one year away from graduating when this movie came out.  As such, this movie had a meaning for us that was especially relevant.  Needless to say, we all identified with Benjamin.

With Mrs. Robinson, we can understand how she has lost interest in art over the years.  Having to get married on account of being pregnant, being a housewife, married to a man she no longer loves, if she ever did, would naturally sap the enthusiasms of her youth.  With Benjamin, he’s already there. We don’t find out what he majored in because we can’t imagine his being enthusiastic about anything.  But at least he was comfortable being a student.  Now that he has graduated, the world is starting to become real for him.  He just wants to be alone in his room while he worries about his future.  In other words, it’s time for him to go out and get a job, but he doesn’t want to do that.

Actually, the real future that someone like Benjamin would have had to worry about back then was being drafted.  Having used up his college deferment, he would have had to face the prospect of being inducted into the Army.  From watching this movie, however, you would never know that there had been such a thing as the Vietnam War.  Paradoxically, this is one way in which the passage of time works in this movie’s favor.  Someone watching this movie today might not notice the way it overlooked the threat that war posed for anyone graduating in 1967.  For those of us watching it when it first came out, dreading the possibility of being killed or maimed in a pointless war, this was a glaring omission.

Mr. Braddock, Benjamin’s father, is played by William Daniels, who often plays a character that must have things exactly his way, according to his rigid schedule, as in A Thousand Clowns (1965) and Two for the Road (1967), so he is perfect for his part here. Without consulting Benjamin, he arranges a party for his homecoming and later insists that he demonstrate a scuba-diving outfit that Benjamin never wanted. However, there is a simple solution for all that.  All Benjamin needs to do is get a job and move into his own apartment.  But he would rather stay in his room and worry about his future.

Roger Ebert was not a member of the Baby Boom generation, having been born in 1942, but he would still have been a young man when this movie came out, as were a lot of the critics that now say this movie is dated.  Being young, there would be a tendency for them to sympathize with Benjamin, as opposed to the older people in this movie.  That Benjamin’s parents are pushy to the point of being caricatures was not recognized as such back then.  But as Ebert and other critics have aged, they have begun to lose patience with Benjamin.

While at the homecoming party, Mrs. Robinson coerces a reluctant Benjamin into giving her a ride home.  Once there, after some heavy flirtation on her part, she gets completely naked and tells him she is available for sex.  It scares Benjamin away, but after thinking about her naked body for a while, he calls her up, and they meet at a hotel, where they get a room.  He is so nervous and awkward that she asks if it is his first time.  He bristles at her suggestion that he might feel inadequate and be afraid, which spurs him to action.  Well, different things work for different people. I hate to think how inadequate I might have been in his situation.  In any event, we can’t help but agree with Mrs. Robinson that this really is his first time.

On the night they had that discussion about art and how she had to get married because she was pregnant with her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross), Mrs. Robinson becomes furious at the mere suggestion that Benjamin might ask Elaine out when she comes home from Berkeley.  Seeing her reaction, he promises he won’t.  Unfortunately, his parents, and even Mr. Robinson, put pressure on him to ask her out. So, he does.  He promises an angry Mrs. Robinson that he will take Elaine out to dinner, have a drink, and bring her back home.

But he doesn’t.  Instead, he drives recklessly, making Elaine nervous, until they get to a strip club. When they get there, he walks in front of her as she struggles to keep up. When they are shown to a table, he sits down without getting her seated first.  Then, as she stands there, he says, “Sit down.” He smokes a cigarette while wearing sunglasses in the darkly lit club. He reminds me of the obnoxious Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor (1963), and his taking her to this strip joint reminds me of Robert De Niro taking Cybill Shepherd to a porno movie theater in Taxi Driver (1976).  When the woman doing the striptease twirls some tassels around that are attached to her nipple pasties, Benjamin asks Elaine if she can do that.  What kind of creep would do this to a girl?

And it is as unnecessary as it is crude.  He could have taken her to dinner and spent a pleasant evening with her, chatting about one thing or another.  He wouldn’t have had to ask her out again.  Nor would she have felt slighted, for she soon returns to Berkeley where she already has a boyfriend.

Anyway, he finally realizes that he has overdone it when the tassels are being twirled around right over Elaine’s head.  They leave the place, and he starts apologizing for his behavior.  After they spend some more time together, on what would now seem to be a normal date, he tells her, “You’re … the first person I could stand to be with.”

Seriously?  Except for her, there has never been anyone in his entire life that he could stand to be with?  The movie would have us take that as an indication that she is the right woman for him, soon to be the love of his life.  Instead, it made me think of “The Parable of the Two Villages.”  If this were real life, Elaine should never go out with him again, for if she did, she would eventually become the next person he cannot stand to be with.

Nevertheless, she agrees to see him again the next day.  When Mrs. Robinson finds out, she threatens to tell Elaine all about her affair with Benjamin.  He manages to tell Elaine first, but it is no good.  Elaine never wants to see him again.

After sitting alone in his room for a while, Benjamin decides to go to Berkeley, where Elaine is still taking classes, determined to marry her.  When I saw this movie in 1967, I accepted this, possibly because men did stuff like that in the movies.  It was an indication of how much he loved her.  Back then, if a man in a movie truly loved a woman, that settled it.  She was supposed to accept his love, and if she did not, she was wrongheaded.

Now, it’s one thing to watch an old movie and note with amusement that what was acceptable back then no longer is so, perhaps even smiling when we see people smoking in public places.  But when I watched this movie again recently, the way Benjamin stalks Elaine made my flesh crawl. Moreover, when he persists in sexually harassing her, he does so in a loud voice while other people are around, thereby humiliating her.

To up the melodrama, Mr. Robinson now knows about the affair and is getting a divorce.  He is also determined not to let Benjamin get anywhere near Elaine, having pulled her out of school.  Benjamin breaks into the Robinson house looking for Elaine, finding only Mrs. Robinson, who calls the police, reporting what she calls a “burglary,” but is really a home invasion.  He runs off when he hears the police car driving up.

Elaine has agreed to marry a guy named Carl, who smokes a pipe.  (When a young man in a movie smokes a pipe, that should give us pause.)  Benjamin asks Carl’s fraternity brothers where the wedding is to take place.  They all kid around about it being a shotgun wedding, about Carl’s being the Make Out King, with one guy saying to tell Carl to “save of piece for me,” then adding, “of the wedding cake.”

As a general rule, if someone in a movie belongs to a fraternity, we are not supposed to like him. (We have no doubt that Benjamin never joined a fraternity.) In addition, this locker-room talk is supposed to make us dislike Carl, but as the lesser of two evils, she would be better off with him than with Benjamin. Much better would be for her not to marry either one of them, but that possibility never occurs to her because when this movie was made, women were supposed to get married to somebody.  If this movie were made today, she would be free to remain single, and we would be happy if she did so.

Benjamin gets enough information to get him on his way to Santa Barbara, but he has to stop at a filling station to make a phone call to Carl’s father to find out which church it is that will be having the ceremony.  In searching through the phonebook to get the number, he tears out several pages that are in his way. Perhaps this is not as bad as the other stuff he has already done, but it does reinforce just how inconsiderate he is.

After this there comes the classic scene at the church.  Benjamin arrives right after Carl and Elaine have been pronounced man and wife.  He beats on the glass until she realizes that Benjamin is the man she really loves and runs off with him, Benjamin using a cross to lock people in the church.

Mrs. Robinson is furious, so I doubt she’ll be dropping the charge of burglary she has already filed against Benjamin.  And I’m sure that locking people in a building against their will must be a crime of some sort, so that charge will be added as well, probably by Elaine’s husband.

Benjamin and Elaine get on a bus, and we see the two of them with alternating looks of happiness and doubt, already having second thoughts.  It is obvious what misgivings Elaine might be having.  As for Benjamin, it is probably dawning on him that he will now have to go out and get a job, once he gets out of jail, that is.  It will probably be something in plastics.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I was at a party one night, which was more of a casual get-together of a few friends, and there was a natural flow of conversation of the ordinary sort: speculation as to which teams would be in the Super Bowl, recommendations of a couple of movies showing at the theaters, and disagreements about who would win the next election.  Then, for some reason that escapes me now, someone made an offhand remark about haunted houses.  At that point, the conversation took a turn from which there was no coming back.  Topics seemingly unrelated were enthusiastically discussed by several members of the party in rapid succession:  among others, they brought up exorcism, levitation, Oak Island, the Loch Ness Monster, the Flying Dutchman, and, of course, UFOs.

Not everyone participated. A few of us sat there in silence, feeling overwhelmed. Basically, we just listened, somewhat perplexed.  Logically, there was no reason to think any of these things were related, why, for instance, one person’s mentioning Nostradamus would lead another to start talking about the Lost City of Atlantis.  Somehow, these topics formed a Constellation of the Weird.  I concluded that most of the time, those who embrace such ideas keep them to themselves, but once one person touches on one weird item, it gives someone else permission to bring up another.

Steven Spielberg, who directed and helped write the script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is of that sort, except that he would have many of these things be related under the unifying concept of UFOs.  But not all.  There is a point in the movie when ordinary citizens claiming to have seen a UFO are in a discussion with government officials who, of course, make light of their observations. Suddenly, some guy looking like a hippie leftover stands up and says that he saw Bigfoot once, thereby making him and the others look like a bunch of fruitcakes.  Nevertheless, this illustrates how one element in the Constellation of the Weird can suggest another, even though the one is logically unrelated to the other.

One weird category that Spielberg does want to fall within the scope of UFO phenomena is mysterious disappearances.  When the movie begins, we see several different groups of men gathering in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico on account of the sudden appearance of bombers from Flight 19, a squadron that disappeared in 1945.  The planes appear to be in perfect condition.

David Laughlin (Bob Balaban) asks, “Where’s the pilot? I don’t understand! Where’s the crew?! How the hell did it get here?!”

We will eventually get an answer as to “where” and “how.”  A flying saucer has the crew, and it put the planes there in the desert.  What we never get an answer to is “why.”  And that leads to the question, “Why don’t we get to know the why?”

Also present at the site is Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), a French scientist who specializes in UFOs. It is brought to his attention that there is a witness, a local who saw what happened the previous night. When asked, he says that the sun came out and sang to him.  He is an old man and clearly simpleminded.

Later in the movie, the SS Cotopaxi, a ship that disappeared along with its crew in 1925, is found sitting in the middle of a desert in Mongolia.

Later still in the movie, we are taken to India, where hundreds of Indians are getting themselves all worked up religion-wise because they heard five notes coming from the sky.  Claude Lacombe is there, and he subsequently gives a lecture about the notes to his colleagues.  The aliens have had plenty of time to learn how to speak English, but these notes and some corresponding hand signals are the only forms of communication they deign to use.  And that’s too bad, because if they spoke English, we could ask them, “What’s the point of all this?”

In the meantime, at an air-traffic control center, pilots from different planes tell of unusual activity on the part of some strange aircraft, but no one wants to report it as a UFO. They don’t want to get involved.  So, not only does the government cover up information it has about UFOs, but a lot of such sightings don’t even get reported.

The scene shifts to a house in Indiana.  It’s the middle of the night, and Barry, a five-year-old boy, is awakened when his toys become activated.  As he walks through the house, other such things start happening, such as doors opening on their own and a coke can opening by itself.  Implicit in this is the suggestion that in those stories about houses where stuff flies around the room, the cause is UFOs.

The old man who witnessed the planes being placed on the ground in Mexico had a childlike mentality. Barry, a second person to witness one of the UFOs, is an actual child.  Perhaps it is not too soon to recall Luke 18:17, in which Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”

This movie is not alone in suggesting a religious aspect to UFOs.  I first became aware of the way some people make that connection about fifty years ago.  A friend of mine, who was studying to become a minister, offered up the following argument.  UFO sightings are evidence of a higher intelligence on other planets, he said. So, if I was willing to accept that, then I should be open to the possibility that there is an even higher intelligence, namely God.

I feel bad repeating this argument, for it may appear that I’m making fun of him. But I do repeat it because I have since come across the idea behind it in many forms.  What was unusual about his argument is that he actually presented it explicitly.  Usually, the connection between extraterrestrials and God is only hinted at so that it never amounts to more than a feeling.  The entire movie Contact (1997) is an example of this.

The scene shifts to another house in Indiana consisting of the Neary family.  That would be Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), his wife Ronnie (Terri Garr), and their young children, two boys and a girl.  They are all in the living room, and it is pandemonium.  About a week earlier, Roy promised the family a movie.  He sees that Pinocchio (1940) is playing at a theater, and his kids have never seen it.  He tells them they will love it, but one of his sons, who is eight years old, says, “Who wants to see some dumb cartoon rated G for kids?”

Ostensibly, the joke is that this boy is a kid.  However, I believe this is also an inside joke.  One thing that producers in Hollywood quickly learned after the ratings system was established was that it was difficult to make a lot of money on a movie rated G.  The ideal rating is PG, which is conducive to maximum attendance.  Therefore, to keep the movie we are watching from being rated G, the word “shit” is worked into the dialogue four times.  I first became aware of this a few years later when I saw Popeye (1980), which you would expect to be a movie for children.  I was surprised when at one point in the movie, the title character, played by Robin Williams, says, “Oh, shit!”  The reason for this, as I later discovered, was to give the movie its PG rating.

The character Pinocchio is a little boy, wooden at first.  And it is clear that Roy wants to see the movie for its own sake, while enjoying it vicariously through his children.  Roy also likes to play Goofy Golf, and we see him playing with toy trains with his son.  In other words, he too is childlike.

Finally, Ronnie announces that it is time for bed.  One of the boys says, “No way! Dad said we could finish watching The Ten Commandments.”  It is the 1956 version.

Needless to say, there are many other movies that might have been on television, but this one was chosen as another way of making an association between UFOs and religion.  In 1968, Erich Von Däniken published Chariot of the Gods?  Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, in which he argued that aliens from other planets enabled ancient civilizations to build things like the pyramids of Egypt or the statues on Easter Island.  These ancient astronauts were regarded by those on Earth as gods.

Building on this thesis, there are those who wonder if many of the miracles reported in the Bible were brought about by these ancient astronauts.  In ETs Among Us:  UFO Witnesses and Whistleblowers (2016), someone in the movie argues that religious art from the past proves that miracles associated with Moses, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and Jesus were brought about by UFOs.

One might suppose that this is an atheistic thesis:  since we have ancient astronauts to account for miracles, then I guess we don’t need God.  But somehow, these ancient astronauts are supposed to be evidence that there is a God.

In particular, the parting of the Red Sea, allowing Moses and the Hebrews to get across before the Egyptians could catch up with them, is explained by some as the work of ancient astronauts.  Once again, the proponents of this idea know that it does not pay to get too far into details, lest the idea collapse under the absurdity of it all.  No one says, “God told the ancient astronauts to swoop down and part the Red Sea.”  Certainly, Close Encounters of the Third Kind does not.  It merely operates on the association of ideas.  Having The Ten Commandments being shown on television while Earth is being visited by UFOs is all that is needed for the purpose at hand.

In a similar way, in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a man from another planet calls himself “Mr. Carpenter” and is resurrected after he dies, prompting an association of him with Jesus.  But an association of ideas is as far as that movie is willing to go.  No one says, “Gosh, Mr. Carpenter must actually be Jesus Christ, and his landing here on Earth in a flying saucer is the Second Coming.” At that point, reason would kick in, and the idea would be rejected as preposterous.

Roy is a utility lineman, and he gets a call telling him he is needed to take care of a huge power outage. While out in his truck, a UFO hovers over him, doing its poltergeist thing, and then moves on.  He starts driving again when he almost hits Barry, whose mother Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) grabs him out of the middle of the road at the last second.  It’s a good thing she sleeps in her clothes, because if she had had to get dressed first before chasing after Barry, she might not have made it in time.

Roy goes back home and drags his entire family out of bed so that he can take them back to where he was, so that they can see what he saw, but it’s not there anymore.  Ronnie is not amused.  The next day they start arguing about it, with Roy wanting to investigate what he saw, and Ronnie wanting him to stop with the nonsense.  Then she answers the phone and finds out that Roy has been fired. We don’t know why because while she was talking to his boss, their two boys were arguing about aliens that live on the moon, and it was hard to hear what she was saying.

Earlier that day, while Roy was getting ready to shave, the shaving cream in his hand triggered something in his head, an idea put there by the space aliens.  In other words, we can now add ESP to all the other weird stuff that UFOs are responsible for. That night, Roy comes across Jillian again.  Her son Barry is building a shape out of the mud, with her help, that matches the shape that Roy has been seeing.

When Roy gets back home, he starts going crazy, determined to build a large version of his vision out of mud and other stuff right in his living room.  Ronnie gets so fed up that she takes the kids and goes to stay with her sister, eventually calling him up, saying she wants a divorce.  The reason for this becomes clear later on.  After the alien mothership lands, Roy wants to go with them and gets on board.  Had Ronnie not left him, he would be abandoning his wife and children, and that would never do.

Being part of a family is not conducive to having a religious experience, especially a family like that of the Neary household, which is never quiet, but always full of noise and confusion.  That is why in Luke 14:26, Jesus says, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”  Roy’s vision is part of his religious experience, which he feels compelled to follow, but his obligations to his family conflict with that.  (Luke 14:20:  “And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.”)  This is solved by having his wife leave him.

In the meantime, a UFO visited the Guiler house again, this time trying to get inside, so to speak.  As Jillian tries to keep it out, Barry wants to let it in, saying, “Toys!” and “You can come and play now.” Eventually, he gets away from Jillian and is abducted by the aliens.  But not to worry.  Barry was right. When we get to the end of the movie, we see that the aliens look like space children, so they only wanted Barry to come out and play.  Jillian did not realize that Barry’s abduction was just a play date.

The government and the scientists figure out that the UFOs want to meet us earthlings at Devils Tower, the vision of which has been haunting Roy, Jillian, and some others.  The government tries to keep anyone else from knowing about this because that’s what the government always does in a UFO movie.  But Roy and Jillian manage to make it there and see what is happening.

When the mothership first opens up, out come the missing pilots from Flight 19. Commenting on the fact that the pilots don’t seem to have aged, a scientist says, “Einstein was right.”  Another scientist replies, “Einstein was probably one of them.”

Those not enamored of the Constellation of the Weird simply smirked when they heard this line while watching this movie, not taking it seriously.  But Spielberg did intend for it to be taken seriously.  Of course, Einstein did not look like those aliens, so what Spielberg meant to suggest was that one of those aliens mystically infused his spirit into Einstein’s body, thereby giving him the insight that no human being on this planet would be capable of.  But the scientist making that comment does not flatly state that thesis because it would violate the principle that such things are only to be hinted at, never to be clearly enunciated.

As far as the first scientist is concerned, he is, of course, referring to the twin paradox, in which an astronaut gets on a rocket and flies away at speeds close to that of light, while his twin stays here on Earth.  When the rocket finally returns, the astronaut seems to have aged only slightly, while the twin that stayed on Earth is an old man.

So, I guess what happened is this.  The aliens abducted the pilots and took off at speeds approaching that of light for just over thirty years of Earth time, but only a year or so of UFO time, and then brought them back.  Oh, but wait a minute!  They also abducted the crew of the SS Cotopaxi in 1925. So, they flew off with them at speeds close to that of light, and after thirty years of Earth time, returned, picked up the crew of Flight 19, and then took off again for another thirty years of Earth time.  But we also see a woman exiting the mothership, so somewhere along the way they returned, picked her up, and took off again.  Why they did this over and over again, we never find out.

At the beginning of the movie, we saw that one of the planes had a photograph of a young woman, probably the pilot’s sweetheart.  I would love for that pilot to have said, “Now that I’m back, Margie and I are going to get married,” only to be told that Margie is a grandmother now.  Better still would be for another pilot to say that he can’t wait to go home and see his mother again, only to be told that she died a long time ago. And in addition to the heartbreak experienced by the abducted, having lost their loved ones, think of all the grief visited upon the friends and family of those abducted people, when they thought their loved ones had died.  Those aliens are an inconsiderate bunch.

We see several men and women in red uniforms, apparently potential passengers on the mothership for its next trip out.  A prayer is said over them to establish, once more, a connection between religion and UFOs.  Then we see them parading toward the spaceship.  Roy is with them.  He is singled out as someone special by the leader of the aliens, and he will be the one they take on board.  I suppose the aliens’ plan is to take off at speeds close to that of light for about thirty Earth years, and then return him looking as young as when he left, since that seems to be their thing.  Roy’s wife will have to raise three children by herself without child support, but he doesn’t care about them.

Coma 1978

At the beginning of the movie Coma, Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) arrives at Boston Memorial Hospital where she and other doctors talk medicalese all day, which impresses us because we don’t understand it.  She and another doctor at the hospital, Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), finally finish their day and arrive at his apartment where they live together.

It doesn’t take long for them to start squabbling about who gets to take a shower first, who fixes dinner, and who brings whom a beer.  Susan becomes fed up and leaves. She leaves him on a regular basis, but then she always goes back to him. She is able to do this because she never gave up her apartment. Later in the movie, we hear Susan telling a psychiatrist, “Mark’s whining about how I can’t make a commitment, and I’m cold, and I’m afraid of intimacy.”

Mark tells her she doesn’t want a lover; she wants a wife.  Of course, it’s also true that he wants a wife. And since, as long as they remain a couple, they can’t both have a wife, it would be best if they split up. We wish they would. We know they won’t.

Susan’s best friend Nancy needs an abortion.  It is referred to as a therapeutic abortion, presumably because if Nancy’s husband found out she was pregnant, it would be bad for her health.  We are not told how her husband would know that the baby is not his, but several possibilities are available:  military deployment has kept him away from home for the past six months; he had a vasectomy five years ago; Nancy has been having an affair with a man of a distinctly different ethnicity.

Whatever the reason, the doctor performing the abortion seems to know all about it, commenting on her situation to others in the operating room, saying that she is in “a hell of a mess,” but that what she has done is none of his business.  “I’m just her surgeon.  I don’t run her life.”  Because he feels the need to justify doing this abortion, he seems to regard the procedure as morally dubious.  Moreover, in the very act of congratulating himself for not being judgmental, he is implying that she has done something shameful.  His attitude appears to be that of the movie itself, that she is guilty of committing one sin in order to cover up another.

In that case, movie karma says that she should be punished.  And so, she is. During the procedure, she goes into a coma and never recovers. When another young patient has a minor operation and goes into a coma too, Susan becomes suspicious.  When she decides to investigate to see how many young, otherwise healthy patients have inexplicably gone into a coma during surgery, she is thwarted by Dr. George, Chief of Anesthesiology.  He won’t let her look as the files. Worse yet, Dr. George is played by Rip Torn, who often plays unsavory characters.

Susan finally gets a sneak peek at the files, and she discovers that all the patients have something in common:  Operating Room 8.  Further investigation on her part reveals that a device allows certain patients being operated on in that room to be fed carbon monoxide instead of oxygen.  Then their bodies are sent to the Jefferson Institute where their organs can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is while she is snooping around there that she overhears a conversation indicating that “George” is behind it all.

Because Susan’s investigation may jeopardize all the money that the Jefferson Institute is raking in, an assassin is assigned to her case. He chases her into the amphitheater and then into a room where she sprays him with a fire extinguisher. At that point, he pulls out his pistol and chases her into a room full of cadavers, which is kept really cold so that they don’t rot.  While he is trying to find her in that room, she pushes a bunch of cadavers onto him and runs out of the room, locking it behind her.

The lock is a barrel slide bolt.  Such a lock does not prevent anyone from entering the cadaver room, but it does keep the cadavers from getting out.  Well, you never know.  What if Herbert West is a doctor at this hospital?  In any event, the assassin is locked in with the cadavers.

At this point, the most natural thing in the world is for her to call the police and tell them a man just tried to kill her, and that she has him locked in the cadaver room. Instead, we next see her in Mark’s apartment, crying hysterically about Operating Room 8, while he strokes her hair in a patronizing way, telling her she needs a Valium.

I suppose we should have known it would turn out like this when the movie condemned Nancy for trying to conceal an adulterous affair by having an abortion.  The movie is faux feminist.  It starts out by letting us think of Susan as being intelligent and resourceful, and indeed she is.  But then the movie does this!

Can you imagine the roles being reversed?  That is to say, imagine it was Mark who began to suspect something strange going on with these comas.  And then, after almost being killed by the assassin, whom he locked up in the cadaver room, he fails to call the police and instead runs to Susan, sobbing and blubbering, while Susan strokes his hair and humors him as if he were a child.

But that’s just it.  This movie plays into sexual stereotypes so vividly that their roles cannot be reversed.  Susan may be a doctor and able to hold her own in that profession, but she is still a woman, and Mark is still a man.  So, according to this movie, that means she is weak, and he is strong.

Anyway, while she is resting, she hears Mark talking suspiciously to someone on the phone.  Perhaps Mark is in cahoots with Dr. George? She sneaks out of the apartment.

You might think that having had a chance to regain her composure, she would now go to the police and tell them that a man tried to kill her, and that he is locked in the cadaver room. Instead, she goes to see Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark), Chief of Surgery, and tells him all she knows.  Like Rip Torn, however, Richard Widmark is also known for playing unsavory characters.  And it turns out that Dr. Harris’s first name is “George.”  He slips her a drug that not only makes her drowsy, but also causes her to have symptoms of appendicitis.  He gets her prepped for immediate surgery.  Of course, there haven’t been any lab tests, and she hasn’t signed all the necessary forms agreeing to have an appendectomy, but no one is willing to question Dr. Harris.

However, Mark hears Dr. Harris insisting on using Operating Room 8, reminding him of Susan’s theory.  He manages to stop the carbon monoxide from being fed into her breathing apparatus in the nick of time, thereby becoming the hero of the story. Then, because Mark is a man, he knows to call the police.  Dr. Harris sees the two policemen waiting for him outside Operating Room 8, and he realizes he is going to be arrested.  As for that guy who is locked up in the cadaver room, he probably froze to death by now.

Given the way the way this movie subverts its superficial feminism, we may guess how things will be for Mark and Susan going forward.  She will make a commitment, quit being cold, and quit being afraid of intimacy.  She will give up her apartment and become Mark’s wife.  And that means she will be the one to fix dinner and bring him a beer.