Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Skyfall (2012)

You know there are too many gadgets in our lives when even James Bond is sick of them, for Skyfall expresses an unconscious revulsion against the very gadgetry in which this franchise once gloried.

The first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), had no gadget. In that film, a man from Q-branch gives Bond (Sean Connery) a Walther PPK, to replace the Beretta, which the man dismisses as being fine for a lady’s handbag. It would not be until From Russia with Love (1963) that Bond would get his first gadget from Q, a black briefcase, with all sorts of nifty stuff in it. But the die was really cast in Goldfinger (1964), when Bond was given an Aston Martin, with machine guns, an ejection-seat, and I forget what all else. After that, no Bond movie was complete until Q (Desmond Llewelyn) performed the ritual of giving Bond his gadget. Like technology itself, it had acquired a life of its own. But in Skyfall, Q (Ben Whishaw) gives Bond (Daniel Craig) another Walther PPK, to replace the one he lost, thereby bringing us full circle, back to that first movie, when all a spy really needed was a gun.

The movie starts with Bond chasing a bad guy. The bad guy has stolen an important hard drive, and Bond is getting lots of assistance from a technological control center. This is just to get us in the mood, to remind us of the technology that now saturates our lives. Then Bond is shot and falls to his death, which may be inferred from the fact that the movie just leaves Bond suspended below the water, unconscious. We never see him coming to and swimming to the surface, or being rescued by some bikini-clad Bond girl, as would usually be the case. The rest of the movie should be interpreted as Bond’s hallucinatory fantasy in the final moments of his life, where he dreams of a return to a simpler world. This is suggested by the theme song, which has the lyrics, “For this is the end / I’ve drowned and dreamt this moment.”

When we next see Bond, he seems to be in some tropical paradise, safe from the world of gadgets. But he realizes it is not enough to hide from those gadgets. He must return to London and stamp them out. It is after he gets back that he has the encounter with Q. When Q gives Bond the Walther PPK, plus a routine tracking device that is really no big deal, Bond seems surprised. Q asks him if he was expecting an exploding pen, and then notes derisively that they don’t do that anymore. Well, thank goodness for that. It’s not just that we are tired of that cliché. In a world full of gadgets, what could Q have possibly given Bond that would have stood out from all the technological clutter that now constitutes just so much background scenery?

Later in the movie, there is a parliamentary inquiry, at which M (Judi Dench) is the key witness. The argument being made by one of the ministers is that we don’t need secret agents anymore, because now we have technology. Just then, the bad guys burst in the door and begin shooting up the place, almost killing the contemptuous MP, until that obsolete secret agent James Bond shows up to save the day. Looks like that parliamentary inquiry is over.

MI6 had by this time already retreated underground in an effort to be technologically inaccessible, but now Bond decides to go all the way, and retreat to his childhood home in Scotland. Ultimately, this expresses a desire to return to the safety of his mother’s womb, where not even an ultrasound can get to him. But first, he goes to a secret garage, where he and M get in the old Aston Martin of Goldfinger days, because that way they cannot be tracked. But then he arranges things with Q so that he can be tracked. Well, how much logic do you expect in a man’s hallucinatory dream? Besides, it’s just another expression of his ambivalence to technology. In order for Bond’s plan to work, he needs the very technology he is fleeing from. Later, we find out the real reason for his bringing the Aston Martin. It’s so the dang thing can finally be destroyed. In this way, Bond avenges himself on the gadget that really started it all.

When Bond and M get to the house, they encounter the gamekeeper Kincade (Albert Finney), from whom we learn that Bond has been an orphan since childhood, and he is thus incapable of having the maternal protection that he unconsciously seeks. In fact, the situation is reversed. M becomes his mother-substitute, and he must protect her, instead of the other way around. In any event, the house has not changed in all these years, which means that it has remained unsullied by all the technological innovations of the intervening years. Bond, M, and Kincade lay their weapons on the table. Aside from Bond’s pistol, there is an old rifle, a shotgun, and a knife, the most primitive weapon of the bunch. Right then, we know that it will be the knife that kills the villain, a slap in the face to all the gadgetry Bond has had to endure for fifty years now.

When M, his mother-substitute, dies, Bond realizes that he will never be able to escape from this gadget-saturated world, that there is no going back to those days of innocence, when you could go a whole week without someone inventing something. The movie should have ended with M dying in his arms, as Bond’s dream comes to an end, and death, not his mother, embraces him, giving him the sanctuary of the grave.

Instead, the final scenes, which are not part of his dream, are merely a device to suggest that there will be more Bond movies to come. I suspect that in the next one, Q will be back with a real gadget again. There is just no getting away from them.

Four Daughters (1938) and Young at Heart (1954)

In the movie Four Daughters, there is a musical family consisting of a widowed father, Adam Lemp (Claude Rains), who plays the flute, his sister, Aunt Etta, and his four daughters:   Ann (Priscilla Lane) plays the violin; Kay is a singer; Emma plays the harp; and Thea plays the piano.

Neither Ann nor Kay has a boyfriend.

Emma has a suitor named Ernest, whom she jokes about marrying. However, she does not love him, and for her, that is very important. She talks about wanting a “storybook” romance, a “knight in shining armor on a white horse,” while Ernest is always hesitant and awkward in her presence. As a result, she figures she will end up an old maid.

Thea plans to marry Ben (Frank McHugh), whom she does not love, but that doesn’t matter to her. She says that love is overrated. What is important is that Ben has lots of money and can provide her with status. This would not be so bad if she were good at faking it, as some gold diggers are, but throughout the movie it is obvious that Thea finds Ben irritating and doesn’t like it when he tries to be affectionate.

Ann and Emma both make disparaging remarks about Ben’s looks.  Moreover, his personality is made out to be just as unattractive.  Thea invites him to dinner.  When he arrives that evening, he compliments her on the lovely house her family has, and then he compliments her on how beautiful she looks.  So far, so good.  But then we get the following:

Ben:  I hope my watch is right.  I’ve been driving around the block, afraid I’d be here too early.

Thea:  You’re right on time, as usual.

Ben:  Well, that’s my long suit: punctuality.  I believe in hitting appointments right on the nose!

The reason for this dialogue is to make punctuality out to be a cringeworthy character flaw.  For that reason, Ben is made to go on about it, showing him to be obsessed with being on time.  Later in the movie, at Adam’s birthday party, Ben’s present to Adam is a watch.

At this point, I must confess to being punctual myself, and I have done something similar to what Ben did on many occasions.  But one night stands out from the rest.  I had a date with a girl when I was in college.  I was to pick her up at seven o’clock. Never having been to her house before, I left early, just in case I had trouble finding it. However, I located her house at ten minutes before seven. I pulled around the corner, drove down the street, and parked my car.  At seven, I drove back around the block, and pulled up in front of her house.  Her father answered the door when I knocked, saying that Sarah wasn’t ready yet, but for me to come inside.  I had a pleasant conversation with her father for about ten minutes, and then Sarah came down the stairs.  The fact that she was running a little late didn’t bother me one bit.  But as soon as we got in the car, she began lecturing me that a gentleman never shows up exactly on time for a date, because if the lady is running late, it makes her look bad.

I have read five books on etiquette:  one by Emily Post, one by Amy Vanderbilt, and three by Miss Manners. I have never read what Sarah was talking about in any of those books.  But one rule of etiquette stands out above the rest:  you should never make someone feel bad by telling him he broke a rule of etiquette. After all, she never had to go out with me again, if I was so crude and boorish as to show up on time for a date. She should have acted as though nothing was wrong, and then said she already had a previous engagement the next time I asked her out.  Needless to say, there never was a next time.

The moral of that tale is that people that run late resent people that are always on time, and they are at pains to put them in the wrong, making such people out to be uptight, while those who run late are held out to be free spirits.  In the movie Nora Prentiss (1947), those in the movie who are punctual are shown to be stuffy and dull, while those who are often late are happy and carefree.  A doctor who is always on time shows up late for work one morning.  He says it was because it was such a nice day that he drove through the park on the way in.  We rightly suspect he will soon be having an affair, cheating on his mirthless wife, who is always obsessed with her schedule.

In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), the title character, played by Maggie Smith, receives a note from her superior while she is teaching class.  It reads:  “Dear Miss Brodie, I hope it will be convenient for you to see me in my office this afternoon at 4:15.”

Miss Brodie is not amused.  She reads the note aloud to her class, saying, “4:15!  Not 4:00, not 4:30, but 4:15.  She thinks to intimidate me by the use of quarter hours.” When Miss Brodie shows up at exactly 4:15, the clock in the office just striking the quarter hour, she says, somewhat snidely, “I was afraid I might be late … or early.”

The idea is that punctual people not only have the bad taste to always show up on time, but they expect the same of others.  Of course, it is folly to try to change anyone. If a friend, a lover, or an employee continually shows up late, either accept it with a smile, or find someone else.

And then there was this one guy I knew who said that he always showed up late for appointments because he didn’t like to wait.

Following the punctuality scene with Ben, his interaction with the family that night is uncomfortable. While offering Ben some wine, Adam presumes to pat Ben on his chest.  When Ben makes a weak attempt at humor and nervously laughs, Thea’s sisters make fun of his laugh, mocking him.  At the dinner table, Ben sips some water, only to have the family embarrass him when they start saying grace without any warning.  A couple of times, later in the movie, Ben starts to tell a story, but others in the room pay no attention to him, talking right over him as if he weren’t there.

In general, Ben is always good natured and friendly, with never a mean word to say about anyone. And yet, everyone in the movie treats him badly.  Either they make fun of him, despise him, or ignore him.  Nor does the movie want us to take his side, but rather expects us to be in agreement with those who have contempt for him. Admittedly, he is not tall and handsome.  He is not witty or clever. If it weren’t for his money, no one would have anything to do with him.  He’s just a nice guy, but that doesn’t count for much, not in this movie and not in this world.

As is typical in a melodrama, once we are acquainted with a stable family or community, a bachelor comes along and stirs things up. In this case, the bachelor is Felix, a handsome composer.  As an example of just how charming he is supposed to be, he tells everyone where to sit at the table in their own home.  Furthermore, he thinks he is being oh-so cute when he flirts with the elderly Aunt Etta, acting as if she is young and pretty. She appears to be flattered by it, as old women always are in the movies when young men pull this routine.  I suppose in real life, there are old women who like this attention, but lot of them hate that kind of patronizing attitude, because it only underscores just how old and unattractive they have become, and makes them appear silly and foolish for being taken in by it. This might have been especially painful in Aunt Etta’s case, since she later refers to herself as a spinster.  Of course, the men who do that sort of thing always seem pleased with themselves, imagining that they are bringing a little happiness into the life of an old woman.

But just like Aunt Etta, everyone in the family is charmed by him, and we are supposed to find him charming as well.  As a result, all four sisters start falling in love with him. And they certainly don’t treat him the way they did Ben.  None of them make fun of the way Felix laughs.  When Adam offers him some wine, he does not pat him on the chest.  At dinner, the scene cuts off before the family says grace, so Felix is spared any embarrassment on that score.  Later in the movie, after Felix has won a contract with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, he excuses himself, saying he has to catch the train to Seattle.  Just to remind us one more time that punctuality is something to be despised, Aunt Etta says, “Can’t you miss your train? You know, they’ll never believe you’re a great musician in Seattle, if you get there on time.”

As if one bachelor were not disrupting enough, another one enters the community, a man named Mickey (John Garfield), who excels at playing the piano.  Felix needs Mickey to help him with his composing.  Felix explains to Adam that there is no telling when Mickey might show up:  “He’s an hour late now, but he may not be here for a week.  In fact, he may not get here at all….  He’s just a little, well, unpredictable.”

Since Mickey is not at all punctual, that means we are supposed to like him before we have even met him.  When he finally arrives, his hair is mussed, his tie is loose, and his shirt is not fully tucked in. Later on, when talking to Ann, he says that the Fates are against him, determined that he will always be a loser.  It has never occurred to him, apparently, that being undependable and looking like a slob might have more to do with being a loser than the Fates.

Normally, people speak of fate when they wish to express a kind of personal determinism, but Mickey puts it in the plural:  “The Fates, the Destinies, whoever they are that decide what we do or don’t get.”  This makes us of think of the Moirai of Greek mythology, but we don’t believe for a minute that Mickey embraces that pagan religion. This is the movie’s way of letting us know he is an atheist.  At another point in the movie, Mickey says to Ann, “Allah be with you.” Because he is obviously not a Muslim, we take this as another expression of his atheism.  We can’t imagine him saying, “God be with you.”  Of course, since he is an atheist, movie logic required that he come to a bad end.

Felix asks Ann to marry him, and she accepts. They announce their engagement at her father’s birthday party. Because Mickey has fallen in love with Ann, he is crestfallen.  And as Ann’s three sisters are also in love with Felix, they are all upset too. Kay, who had been procrastinating about going to Philadelphia to study on a singing scholarship, immediately announces that she intends to do just that. Thea, who had been stalling Ben about setting a marriage date, announces that she will marry him in June. Ernest, thinking that Emma will be similarly disposed, suggests getting married, but she rebuffs him, and goes into the kitchen to cry.

On the day of Ann’s wedding, Mickey not only tells Ann that he loves her, but also reveals that Emma was heartbroken when she found out that Felix was going to marry Ann instead of her. At first Ann does not believe it, but later she sees that it is true when, standing outside, she looks through the kitchen window and sees Emma and Felix together.  Emma helps Felix with his cravat, and then starts crying when Felix leaves the room.  In what can only happen in a movie, Ann leaves Felix standing at the altar and elopes with Mickey.

When an event in a movie is of great significance, and yet is not dramatized, that is sometimes because had it been so dramatized, we wouldn’t have believed it.  Let us, therefore, imagine said dramatization.  Because people are in the house getting ready for the wedding, Ann cannot go inside and pack.  As soon as she walked in through the door, they would expect her to put on her wedding dress.  Therefore, she must elope with Mickey with only the clothes on her back.  She doesn’t even have her purse with her.  We’ll have to assume that the impecunious Mickey actually has some money on him, so he can buy tickets for the train, pay the first month’s rent for an apartment, and then buy some clothes and a purse for Ann.

But let’s not forget the dialogue we must imagine for ourselves when Ann proposes to Mickey:

Ann:  Mickey!  I just realized you are right.  Emma loves Felix.  So, I’ve decided to jilt him so he can marry her instead.

Mickey:  That’s noble of you.

Ann:  And now I want to marry you.

Mickey:  But you’re in love with Felix, not me.

Ann:  I know, but I have to fool Emma into thinking I love you so she’ll feel free to marry Felix.

Anyway, let’s return to the movie as it was actually filmed.  Contrary to Ann’s expectations, but not ours, Felix does not marry Emma on the rebound.  In fact, Emma ends up marrying Ernest after all.  Later in the movie, she tells Ann how much she admired the way Ernest took charge at the wedding, explaining to the guests what had happened.  And in doing so she contrasts Ernest with Ben, whom she regards as an incompetent blowhard.  Poor Ben.

Four months later, Ann and Mickey are struggling financially. When they go back home for a family reunion at Christmas, Mickey notices how Ann reacts when she sees Felix again, realizing she still loves him. As often happens in a melodrama, things get so messed up and complicated that someone has to die in order for things to get straightened out, and that is what happens here. Between not being able to provide for Ann, and her still loving Felix, Mickey decides to commit suicide by driving really fast in a snowstorm. Apparently, he had never read Ethan Frome. Well, things don’t turn out that bad, but he does wind up in the hospital, living just long enough to say a few words to Ann before he dies. In the next scene, we see it is spring. Felix returns, and it is clear that eventually he and Ann will get married.  This is a happy ending, but it is compensatory, softening the tragedy of Mickey’s death.

There are numerous changes in the remake, Young at Heart (1954), one of which is that all the names are different.  (Don’t ask me why.)  Kay’s character has been eliminated as superfluous.  Here are the rest:

Ann = Laurie (Doris Day)

Emma = Amy

Thea = Fran (Dorothy Malone)

Adam = Gregory

Aunt Etta = Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore)

Ben = Bob (Alan Hale Jr.)

Ernest = Ernie

Felix = Alex (Gig Young)

Mickey = Barney (Frank Sinatra)

There is only a hint of Bob’s punctuality, and he does not make a big deal out of it the way Ben did.  In the original, Aunt Etta says to Felix, “You know, they’ll never believe you’re a great musician in Seattle, if you get there on time.”  In the remake, Gregory says to Alex, “No one will believe you’re a real composer if you show up at every rehearsal.”  These changes in the script were probably made by someone who regarded punctuality as a virtue and took exception to the way it was demeaned in the original.

Bob gets much better treatment in this remake than Ben did in the original.  When we first see Bob and Fran, they are kissing.  We never saw Ben and Thea kissing, for she had a physical aversion to him.  Gregory does not pat Bob on the chest, and Laurie and Amy do not make fun of his laugh or disparage his looks.  In the original, when Emma tells Ann how Ernest took charge of things at the wedding, she said, by way of contrast, “Ben, who blows the loudest trumpet, he couldn’t do a thing.”  In the corresponding scene in the remake, Amy tells Laurie how Ernie took charge of things at the wedding, but without making any negative remark about Bob.

Barney does not die in the end.  However, this happy ending is suspicious, because we never see him get out of the hospital, which is usually the case when someone’s recovery is to be understood realistically. See, for example, The Glass Key (1942), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Godfather (1972).  Another movie that fails to provide such a scene is Vertigo (1958).  Because there is no scene showing James Stewart getting out of the psychiatric hospital, I believe the second half of that movie is really James Stewart’s dream, while he remains in a catatonic state.  The closest we come to a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene in Young at Heart is when we see Barney being wheeled into a room for surgery.  But even so, there is no scene following surgery, where the doctor says the operation was a success.  We immediately go from Barney apparently dying in the hospital at Christmas to Barney singing at the piano in the Spring, surrounded by the entire family, including his wife Laurie.  The whole thing just seems fake.  For that reason, it is easier to accept this ending as the dream of a dying man.

Furthermore, for the first time in the movie, Barney seems to be happy, instead of being the disgruntled loser that he has been through the whole movie.  It is one thing for someone to make a miraculous recovery after almost dying.  That can happen.  But as far as personality goes, people don’t change that much.  For him to go from being terminally grumpy to inexplicably cheerful, without any attempt to show us dramatically how such a transformation was possible, that just isn’t believable.

I suppose the explanation for this change in personality is the fact that Laurie has had a baby.  She had just found out that she was pregnant at Christmas, when Barney tried to kill himself.  And now Laurie wishes the baby Happy Easter.  So, this must be over a year later.  I should have thought the novelty of a baby would have worn off on Barney by that time, especially now that he knows he has another mouth to feed.

Although Four Daughters is about a musical family, and there is music played or sung at times, it just doesn’t strike me as being a musical, although I would not argue the point if someone said otherwise. Young at Heart, however, is definitely a musical, and perhaps that accounts for the difference.  It’s not just that we expect musicals to end happily, though not all of them do, but it is easier for us to accept an artificial, tacked-on happy ending when the movie is a musical than when it is a melodrama.  Still, the ending is so abrupt and unrealistic that it is easier to imagine that it is Barney’s hallucinatory dream just before he dies.

This is similar to another musical, Young Man with a Horn (1950).  In that movie, Kirk Douglas is a grumpy trumpet player.  When he finds out that his wife, Lauren Bacall, is a bisexual who has decided to go full lesbian and run off to Europe with another woman, his life starts going downhill. He ends up living on the street, where he collapses.  A cab driver, who happened to be driving by, brings him to a place for alcoholics, but Douglas has pneumonia and must be transferred to a hospital.  His two friends, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael, are with him at what appears to be his deathbed scene.  When he hears the siren of the ambulance coming to get him, he says that’s the note he’s been looking for all his life, which is a bit delusional by itself.

And then, with only a brief explanation by Hoagy Carmichael, who has been narrating this movie, as to how Douglas turned his life around, becoming a good person and a great musician, we see Douglas and Doris Day performing together.  His trumpet playing is given a reverb effect to make it seem ethereal.  Once again, given the absence of a scene showing him getting out of the hospital, along with a complete character change that is only described, not dramatized, that final scene lends itself to a dream interpretation.

The Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990, and 2016)

It is traditional in the movies to portray gangsters as having problems of a sexual nature.  In Little Caesar (1931), Rico (Edward G. Robinson) despises women and love, calling it “soft stuff.”  Some critics even argue that he is a repressed homosexual.  In The Public Enemy (1931), Tom Powers (James Cagney) is a misogynist who smashes a grapefruit in a woman’s face.  In Scarface (1932) and its remake (1983), Tony (Paul Muni and Al Pacino respectively) is incestuously possessive of his sister.  In White Heat (1949), Cody Jarret (James Cagney) has an Oedipus complex.  In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) is impotent.  In The Long Goodbye (1973), Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) smashes a coke bottle across the face of his girlfriend to prove to Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) how serious he is about wanting to know where his money is.  In Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Noodles (Robert De Niro) brutally rapes his childhood sweetheart.  Needless to say, these movie gangsters were incapable of having a normal family life.

The Godfather (1972) broke with that tradition.  Both Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) are portrayed as good family men, who are never even tempted to cheat on their wives.  It is a cliché in gangster movies that gangsters come to a bad end, such as by being riddled full of bullets and left dying in a gutter.  Vito does get riddled full of bullets and lie in the gutter, but he pulls through.  Years later, while playing with his grandson in the garden, he has a heart attack and dies, just the way a good family man should.

Michael’s marriages do not run terribly smooth, but that is not because of any sexual or emotional problems on his part.  Instead, the trouble comes from external sources, like when his first wife gets blown to bits by a car bomb.  But mostly he is able to run the family business without letting it interfere with his marriage, as when he and his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) go to church and become godparents to his sister’s baby while he has the heads of the other five crime families wiped out.

There is, however, one little problem with Michael’s marriage to Kay, a problem that women seem to be especially sensitive to.  When I first saw this movie in a theater, my friend and I happened to be seated next to a couple of young women.  Throughout the movie, whether it was the horse’s-head-in-the-bed scene, the scene where Sonny (James Caan) is machine-gunned to death, the scene where Moe Green (Alex Rocco) gets a bullet in the eyeball, or any of the other vividly violent scenes in the movie, I heard not one peep from the two women on my right.  But one scene did bother them.  When Connie (Talia Shire) accuses Michael of having her husband killed, which he did, Kay begins to wonder if it is true.  She asks Michael about this later, and he becomes angry, telling her never to ask him about his family business.  She begins to tear up, and he relents, saying that this one time he will let her ask him about his family business.  When she indicates a repeat of the question as to whether he killed Connie’s husband, Michael looks at her tenderly, and with sincerity in his voice says, “No.”

At that point the women on my right were audibly outraged, one of them saying, “Oh, you bastard!”  I have since talked to other women about this scene, and many of them agree that they were not bothered so much by all the killing going on in the movie as by Michael’s lying to his wife.  Of course, given the patriarchal attitude of the movie, his lying was to protect her from knowing the harsh truths of the world, which only men are able to deal with.  As Vito says to Michael, “Women and children can be careless, but not men.”

In The Godfather:  Part II (1974), Michael is still a good family man, but just as families in general seem to be breaking apart, so too is Michael’s family being strained by divorce, abortion, and sibling rivalry.  In particular, the sibling rivalry between Michael and Fredo (John Cazale) leads to an act of betrayal, which almost gets Michael assassinated.

Fortunately for Michael, other fraternal bonds seem to be intact.  When Michael is called up before a Senate investigating committee on organized crime, he denies all wrongdoing.  When he realizes that Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), who mistakenly thinks Michael tried to have him assassinated, plans to testify against him, Michael flies Frankie’s brother in from Sicily to sit in the committee room.  When Frankie sees his brother, the thought of violating the law of omertà with his brother watching is too much, and he refuses to testify.

Admittedly, a lot of people interpret this scene differently.  They believe that Frankie refused to testify against Michael because he was afraid Michael would kill his brother.  But think what it would take to kidnap a Mafia don in Sicily, who is normally surrounded by bodyguards, get him on a passenger plane, bring him to the United States Capitol with all kinds of security about, and where the brother could scream for help at any time.  Beyond that, this interpretation is too crude.  It is far more in keeping with Michael’s understanding of the bond between brothers that the presence of one could instill a sense of shame in the other.

On the other hand, those who have no family are in trouble.  We learn early on that Michael is going to have problems with Senator Pat Geary (G.D. Spradlin) in his move to take over the Tropigala casino.  To ensure his cooperation, when the senator visits a house of prostitution run by Fredo, he is drugged.  When he wakes up, the prostitute that he had tied to the bedposts as part of a game lies there disemboweled.  We know that Al Neri (Richard Bright), Michael’s favorite hitman, is the one who killed her, but the senator is made to think he did it.  Michael’s foster brother and consiglieri, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), tells the senator, “This girl has no family.  Nobody knows that she worked here.  It’ll be as though she never existed.  All that’s left is our friendship.”

The murder of the innocent prostitute is just one of the dark notes in Part II that were absent in The Godfather, where everyone who is killed by the Corleone family deserved it.  In this sequel, when people are killed, we don’t always feel that they deserve it, or the manner in which they are killed is dissatisfying.  Frankie Pentangeli is pressured to commit suicide.  When Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) is assassinated by Rocco Lampone (Tom Rosqui), an important man in Michael’s organization, he is shot by the police.  Kay essentially puts a hit on Michael’s future son by having him aborted, because she wants all this Sicilian stuff to end.  And Fredo is shot in the back of the head while saying a Hail Mary.

Throughout this movie, there are flashbacks to when the young Vito Corleone, née Andolini, (Oreste Baldini and Robert De Niro) first came to America and slowly became head of a crime family.  Unlike the problems besetting Michael and his family, Vito’s family life is good.  In fact, his family feeling is so strong that he goes back to Sicily to satisfy a vendetta against the man who killed his father and brother, even though the man is so old he belongs in a nursing home.

Although Part II is a great movie, it is logically flawed, and in such a way that once noticed, it is impossible to ignore. Early in the movie, Michael walks into his bedroom, where Kay is sleeping. She wakes up and asks him why the drapes are open. He looks around at the open drapes, apparently sees something outside, and drops to the floor as submachine-gun bullets riddle the bedroom. The compound is sealed off, and Michael gives orders that the gunmen be taken alive, but they are found shot dead shortly thereafter.

Now, presumably these hitmen had an escape plan.  The fact that Michael is not dead should not have made any difference in that plan.  So, there was no reason to think that these men would need to be killed before they were captured.  Furthermore, the one who killed the hitmen had to find them before anyone else did, notwithstanding the fact that these men would have been running for their lives.  Was he standing right behind them ready to kill them regardless of the outcome?

Michael tells Tom that there is a traitor in the family, and so he is turning power over to him while he, Michael, disappears for a while. Though Tom is only a foster brother (and not Sicilian), and though Fredo is Michael’s older brother, yet Michael does not turn temporary control over to Fredo because “he is weak and stupid.”

From the beginning, the word “family” has been used ambiguously:  first, in the ordinary sense of people that are related to one another by blood; second, in a slightly extended sense to include someone that was adopted, not a minor consideration in the Mafia, where being Sicilian and connected by blood is of utmost significance; and third, in a figurative sense that includes all the people that work for a family in the first or second sense.  In the first movie, the ambiguity was interesting, but here it takes on a more ominous significance.  In what sense does Michael mean when he says there is a traitor in the family?  He probably meant it in the third sense.  But Fredo turns out to be the traitor in the family in the first sense.

And it is here that the story becomes illogical.  Are we supposed to believe that Fredo is the one who sneaked into the bedroom and opened the drapes while Kay was sleeping? And does that also mean that Fredo was the one who executed the two hitmen before they could talk? If he did all that, I am ready to believe that he was the one who set up his father Vito for the hit in the first Godfather movie. But given his character, we cannot believe Fredo did any of these things.  He says he didn’t know it was going to be a hit, and we believe him, because he’s weak and stupid, just as Michael said.

In that case, however, we have to ask what it was that Fredo did that was so bad. Fredo says that Johnny Ola (Dominic Chianese) enlisted his aid because Michael was being tough in the negotiations about Cuba. So what does that mean? That occasionally Fredo was supposed to say to Michael, “Don’t you think you’re being a little tough in the negotiations?”

Furthermore, the person who did open the curtains and executed the hitmen is the real traitor in the family, in the third sense of the word. There are plenty on the compound who might have done that, and that person, whoever he is, is still a threat to Michael. It might even have been Al Neri. But Michael seems to be unaware of this obvious implication.  Though he has Fredo killed for being disloyal in some way that is not clear, yet he has no concern about the man still on the compound that facilitated the attempted assassination.

These first two movies have been combined from time to time, telling the story in chronological order, eliminating the flashback structure of The Godfather: Part II, and adding additional footage that was never seen in the theaters.  More recently, HBO presented Mario Puzo’s The Godfather: The Complete Epic 1901-1959 (2016), which is the best one thus far.  The additional footage typically spends more time introducing characters, explaining how certain situations came to be, or killing a few more people off as part of a vendetta. None of it is necessary, for we never had any trouble following the story by using our imagination.  But if you just like the first two Godfather movies so much that you think you would enjoy a leisurely stroll through the history of the Corleone family, The Complete Epic may be the version for you.

Of course, if the additional footage had shown Fredo opening the curtains in the bedroom and then putting a silencer on his gun before killing the assassins so they wouldn’t be able to talk, then that would have been something else entirely.

Regarding The Godfather:  Part III (1990), this is a movie that should never have been made: in part because it is in itself a bad movie, and in part because it tends to infect the two great movies that came before it.  The story itself might have been all right, but there are way too many lines stolen from the previous two movies and repeated in this one.  In fact, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), who is Sonny’s bastard son, made me think of Don Quixote.  In his eponymous book, Quixote goes mad reading books about knight errantry and starts seeing the world in those terms, even though the days of chivalry and knighthood have long since passed, and he ends up looking ridiculous.  In Part III, it is almost as if Vincent went mad watching the first two Godfather movies of this trilogy over and over again, and then went onto the streets trying to play Godfather, even though the modern world no longer seems appropriate for that sort of thing.  And the speed with which he goes from street punk to head of the Corleone family is not plausible.

On the other hand, with all the allusions and quotations from the first two movies crammed into this one, you would think the characters in this third movie would also be familiar with what has come before, but not so.  In the first movie, Vito tells Michael that the traitor in the family will be the one who comes to him with a deal to meet with the heads of the five families.  And sure enough, when Tessio (Abe Vigoda) tries to set up a meeting, Michael knows he is a traitor and has him killed.  But in this third film, when Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) tries to set up a meeting between Michael and other mobsters, Michael suspects nothing.  Even when Altobello refers to Michael’s father, that does not jog Michael’s memory.  And sure enough, although we in the audience know it will be a hit, Michael is oblivious.

In my opinion, a big opportunity was missed.  First, they should have had fresh dialogue.  Second, they should have eliminated the Vincent Mancini character.  Third, they should have allowed Michael to be assassinated, followed by a struggle over the Corleone empire between Connie, who wants to continue the criminal activities of the family, and Kay, who wants to realize Michael’s dream of making the Corleone family legitimate, but who in the meantime needs Al Neri, who is loyal to her, to protect her from her sister-in-law.  That would have been an ironic end of the Corleone patriarchy.

Instead, all we got was a bad movie.

Roman Holiday (1953)

Roman Holiday is generally classified as a Ruritanian romance, a term derived from The Prisoner of Zenda, an 1894 novel by Anthony Hope, set in Ruritania, a fictional country of Central Europe.  In part, this is because Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) is a princess of some unspecified, minor country in Central Europe; in part, because there is a romance between her, a woman of royal blood, and a commoner, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), as was the case in The Prisoner of Zenda.

Princess Ann is on a goodwill tour of various European countries, arriving in Rome as the story begins.  She gets bored with all the ceremonial duties she has to perform and runs away.  Joe is a reporter assigned to cover a boring press conference with Princess Ann for his newspaper, but he fails at his duties as well.  They meet without knowing who each other are.  It begins when Joe finds her sleeping off a sedative on a public bench.  He eventually lets her sleep it off in his apartment.  The next morning he finds out who she is and plans to cash in on his good fortune by writing an exclusive story on her.  They spend the day together and end up falling in love instead.  In the end, he forgoes writing that story as she returns to her duties as princess.

At one point, Princess Ann alludes to the Cinderella story by saying, “And at midnight I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper,” which, of course, mixes up the elements of the fairytale. In similar way, the movie itself is a Cinderella story with the elements mixed up.

In some versions of the story, Cinderella was a lady by birth, but forced into servitude by her wicked stepmother. For one night, she is able to dress up like the lady she really is. Princess Ann is a commoner by nature, and for one day she is able to dress down like the ordinary person she really is. Cinderella marries the prince she has fallen in love with; Ann does not marry the commoner she has fallen in love with.  At the end of the fairytale, Cinderella comfortably slides her foot into a glass slipper; at the beginning of the movie, Ann slides her foot out of the shoe that is bothering her.

At one point when she slides her foot out of her shoe, it gets away from her.  She struggles to get the shoe back on her foot while continuing to be introduced to notable personages.  When it comes time for her to sit down, her dress moves back with her, revealing the shoe that no longer has her foot in it.  Those around her see what has happened, and they are aghast.  Finally, the ambassador asks her to dance, allowing her to stand up and wiggle her foot back in the shoe before moving onto the dance floor.  After that, she dances with several men, but not having any fun at all.

The business with Ann’s feet is more than just a link with the story of Cinderella.  In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Dorothy (Jane Russell), when asked by the manager if he can help her, says, “Certainly.  Show me a place to take my shoes off.”  To this, Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) says, “Dorothy, a lady never admits her feet hurt.”  The same might be said of a princess:  to admit her feet hurt makes her seem common.  But in addition to that, all this concern by those around Ann about her shoe is an indication of the great matters of state with which she must deal.  Her challenge from day to day is to perform ceremonies without making a misstep.

Later, a countess helps Ann get ready for bed.  Even when she sleeps, Ann must dress in accordance with her station.  She complains that she does not like wearing a nightgown, and she does not like her underwear either.  She says that lots of people sleep with nothing on at all, and that she would at least like to sleep in pajamas, the tops only.  The countess does not approve of pajamas, and she doesn’t even wish to consider people sleeping naked.  And just in case we have not already gotten the point about Ann’s feet and her shoes, she jumps out of bed and runs barefoot to the window to hear some music coming from outside.  The much put-upon countess retrieves her slippers and tells her to put them on.

After that, the countess reads to Ann her schedule for the next day, which is one of insipid monotony, all for the sake of trade relations, we are told, as if Ann’s country would not be able to engage in commerce with other countries unless she performs accordingly.  As the countess informs Ann of all the places she must go to the next day and things she must do, Ann screams maniacally, saying she wishes she were dead.  The countess calls for the doctor, who uses a syringe to inject a drug in Ann’s arm.  After they leave the room, Ann decides to run away.  She manages to escape the grounds of the embassy, but eventually, as mentioned above, the sedative catches up with her and she falls asleep.  That’s when Joe finds her, as he leaves a late-night poker game.

We expect there to be a moment when she finds out that Joe is a reporter, causing her to feel hurt and betrayed, believing that he tricked her for the sake of a story; and that he will say that was true at first, but now he is in love with her; and then she will say she does not believe him, and so on. That is the formula for movies when there is deception about someone’s identity. In the 1952 movie version of The Prisoner of Zenda, for example, when Princess Flavia (Deborah Kerr) finds out that Rudolf Rassendyll (Stewart Granger), the man she fell in love with, is not King Rudolf (Stewart Granger), but just an impostor, she jumps to the conclusion that his courting her was part of the act, and thus she feels betrayed. In Roman Holiday, however, it is refreshing that Ann trusts Joe so much that one brief assurance from him is all she needs.

As with Princess Flavia, Princess Ann gives up the man she loves for the sake of her royal duties, but we have to wonder why. The Prisoner of Zenda was written in 1894, back when monarchs still mattered. At least, they still mattered in Ruritania, the fictional European country in which the story is set.  And in that movie, much is made of the danger of letting someone like Michael (Robert Douglas) seize the throne.

There is a similar theme in Adventures of Don Juan (1948), set early in the seventeenth century, in which the title character (Errol Flynn) and Queen Margaret (Viveca Lindfors) must forgo their deep love for each other owing to the need for the queen to remain on the throne.  Throughout the movie, the Duke de Lorca (Robert Douglas again) was acting as the power behind the throne, manipulating King Phillip III in order to bring about war with England, with the ultimate goal of increasing Spain’s power and expanding its territory in the New World.  Although Don Juan kills the Duke de Lorca in a sword fight, there is still the fear that if Queen Margaret runs away with Don Juan, someone else will take the place of the duke and lead the weak king astray to the detriment of Spain.

By 1953, however, monarchs in Europe had pretty much become nothing but tourist attractions. Before the movie The King’s Speech (2010) was made, not one person in a hundred could tell you who was King of England during World War II, which, in case you’ve already forgotten, was George VI.  (Actually, he was King of the United Kingdom, but who cares?)  Most people knew that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister during the war, on the other hand, because he actually had power.

After all, when King Edward VIII of England abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson, civil war did not break out.  Or, to put it in terms of Roman Holiday, England’s trade relations with other countries did not suffer.  So, it is hard to believe that Princess Ann could not abdicate without precipitating some kind of political or economic disaster.  In fact, I have my suspicions about King Edward VIII. The story is that he loved Wallis Simpson so much that he made the great sacrifice of giving up his throne for her. But I think he was just using her as an excuse. The idea of being a titular monarch, with no power, but lots of ceremonial duties, might have been maddeningly tedious to him, and he was glad to get out of it. Just to say, “I don’t want to be king because it’s boring,” would have been a great insult. But everyone understands that love conquers all, and with that as a cover story, he made his escape.

And this brings us back to Princess Ann. She hated her duties, and she loved Joe. There is no Robert Douglas character in this movie to threaten the kingdom should she abdicate.  Besides, what could he do?  Screw up the ceremonies?  In fact, it is not only the monarchy of Ann’s country that is all show and no substance.  When the doctor gave Ann a shot, a general that was also in the room fainted at the sight.  Even the military, apparently, consists of men whose rank is just honorary, awarded to men that will never face death on the battlefield.

How easy it would have been, when Joe indicates that he will not publish what happened between them in the newspaper, for her to immediately renounce her position and say she intends to marry him, the two of them walking away together to live happily ever after. She would have had to renounce her position on account of an unspoken rule, one with which we are all familiar, that those of royal blood must not marry commoners, as if they had cooties.  As it is, the boring life she has resigned herself to is just what she deserves, deserves for allowing herself to be trapped by some outdated taboo against exogamy.  It is a pointless sacrifice.

But let’s step back from this for a moment.  This movie is a romantic comedy, and as such, it should have a happy ending.  So, the first question we must ask is whether this is a happy ending.  It is not a happy ending per se, but one we are satisfied with nevertheless.  Why is that?

Some feminist film critics have pointed out that the movies are often oriented to the male gaze.  That is, the movies are filmed with the male point of view in mind, which even the women in the audience are expected to accept.  The way women in movies are portrayed as objects of sexual desire is the prime example of this, but it extends beyond that.  Let us note that while Ann must return to her boring duties, Joe remains a bachelor.  From the male point of view, this is not such a bad thing.  In fact, some would say being a bachelor is the ideal state for a man.  While we imagine that Ann will eventually have to marry a man out of a sense of duty, Joe will have his freedom and independence as along as he wants.  If he remains single for the rest of his life, fondly remembering Ann, that’s fine.  But if he does marry someday, it will be to a woman he loves, there being no sense of duty about it.

But suppose we switch the sexes, so that Ann is a reporter trying to get a story on Prince Joseph.  If, after they fall in love, he returns to his princely duties, we will feel sorry for her, especially if she never marries after that.  We no longer use the terms “spinster” or “old maid,” but the attitudes that led to the formation of these terms with their negative connotations remain.  As for Prince Joseph, would we not be contemptuous of a man that would give up the woman he loves in order to continue being a prince?  Had Edward VIII remained on the throne, giving up the woman he loves so that he could continue performing all those royal duties, that would never have become the subject of a movie.  Or, if it had, people would have left the theater feeling they had wasted their time and money on that one.

This double standard reminds me of the night my dancing partner and I were at a dance studio.  During a break in the dancing, we were talking to a male friend of hers.  We were all telling of the time in each of our lives when we were in love with someone and almost got married.  But in each case, things fell apart, and we were all still single.  At one point, this other fellow said, “You know, we’re all talking about the time we thought we were going to get married, but there’s a difference.”  Pointing to me, he said, “You and I almost lost our freedom.”  And then, pointing to my dancing partner, he said, “But she almost trapped a man!”  We got a good laugh out of that one.  At least, we two guys were laughing.  My dancing partner, not so much.

Suppose we switch the sexes in Adventures of Don Juan.  If Errol Flynn is King John, and Viveca Lindfors is Margaret, the woman he truly loves, his refusing to give up his throne for her would have left a bitter taste in our mouths.  And this is especially so when you consider that they had sex just before they parted.  Margaret would be an abandoned woman in that case.  It is standard in a movie that when a woman has sex with a man just once, she gets pregnant, so we would have had to watch Margaret riding away in a carriage while we feared she was in the family way.  But without a family.  As for the movie as it was, the fact that they had sex is just one more element of the happy ending.  Not only does Don Juan remain a bachelor, but he is a sexually satisfied one as well.  Queen Margaret, on the other hand, must stay with her husband, King Phillip III, who is shorter than she is and speaks with a lisp, so we know what kind of love life she is resigning herself to.  Referring back to the imaginary movie above, in which King John gives up Margaret, the woman he loves, in order to stay on the throne, let us further imagine that his wife, the queen, is as unattractive physically as King Phillip III in the actual movie.  For example, imagine that she is taller than King John and has a slight mustache.  Such a movie could never be made.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Since Don Juan and Queen Margaret had sex just once, then according to the formula, doesn’t that mean that she will get pregnant, especially by a man with the potency of Don Juan?  Of course, but since she’s already married, it’s not a problem.  And, as a matter of fact, the real Queen Margaret did have a baby in 1603, just about the time in which this movie was set.

Let us consider this formula more closely.  There are movies in which a woman has sex with a man just once without getting pregnant, but the woman is either a prostitute, as in Klute (1971), or the woman is given to having one-night stands, as in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).  Those exceptions aside, this is the reason Joe and Princess Ann do not have sex, even though we think they might when they return to his apartment, fully aware that they are in love with each other.  Had they done so, the movie would have ended with the matter of her likely pregnancy being unresolved.

In The Prisoner of Zenda, Princess Flavia is reduced to marrying a man she does not love, while Rudolf Rassendyll gets to remain a bachelor.  It is difficult to imagine switching the sexes on this one, what with the sword fight between Rassendyll and Rupert of Hentzau (James Mason), so a lot of reworking of the script would be necessary, more than I care to envision here.

There is no element of royalty in Casablanca (1942), but the asymmetry between the sexes is present here as well.  Rick (Humphrey Bogart) runs a café, where he broods over Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), the woman he still loves.  One night, she and her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), enter the café.  Ilsa never stopped loving Rick, but she feels a duty to her husband, who is important as a resistance leader working against the Nazis.  She is ready to throw all that away, however, and leave him for Rick.  They make passionate love, and in the afterglow, they agree that Rick will help Laszlo get out of Casablanca with the letters of transit, but that Ilsa will stay with Rick, never to leave him again.  But you know how it is.  After a night of sex, a man wakes up in the morning and sees things in a new light.  Now able to consider the big picture, Rick decides that Ilsa must remain Laszlo’s helpmate, staying with a man she does not truly love so that she can encourage the important work he does. Then Rick and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) head off to the Free French garrison at Brazzaville, to fight the good fight against the Nazis.  Once again, we are content.  Even though the two lovers will not be able to get married and live happily ever after, Rick remains a bachelor, and a sexually satisfied one at that.

It would be difficult to imagine a reversal of the sexes, but let’s try:  Ilsa is single and runs the café in Casablanca.  After she and Rick have sex, she tells him that he must remain with his wife, whom he does not love, because of the important work his wife does.  Then Ilsa goes off with Captain Renault….

No, it just won’t work.  We can’t switch the sexes on this one.  But the point remains.  When it is the man that gets to remain a bachelor, while the woman is condemned to a boring life, fulfilling her duty, we accept that as being, if not a completely happy ending, at least a fully satisfying one.  We would be unlikely to do so if the man resigned himself to a boring life, while forsaking the woman he loved with all his heart.

If it be granted that I am correct, that such movies have a happy ending of sorts, we might ask why the movies did not go all the way, giving us a truly happy ending in which the woman leaves her duties and stays with the man she loves.  In The Prisoner of Zenda, once Michael has been killed off, can we really believe that the Kingdom of Ruritania would collapse if Princess Flavia didn’t marry King Rudolf and eloped with Rassendyll instead?  If the kingdom can’t survive a princess running off with her lover, it is doomed anyway.

In Adventures of Don Juan, once the villains have been dispatched, why not let Queen Margaret abandon her throne and leave with Don Juan?  History precludes that possibility, I suppose, since the real Queen Margaret stayed with her husband until she died of childbirth in 1611, at the age of twenty-six.  But it is to be noted that without Queen Margaret’s influence on King Phillip III, Spain did not undergo the horrible political disaster that Don Juan feared, even though the king lived another ten years after her death.

As for Casablanca, we can easily imagine Ilsa wishing her husband the best of luck heading the resistance movement, but telling him that she must remain with Rick, the man she loves.  Are we to believe that the Nazis would have won World War II had she not stayed with her husband?  And, finally, had Princess Ann abdicated and married Joe, the consequences would have been trivial, about as eventful as her losing her shoe.

The reason, I suppose, is that there must be something inside us that wants order to be restored.  Restored from the male point of view, of course.  Regardless of a man’s marital status, he can identify with a husband just as easily as with a bachelor.  In the movies being discussed, the leading man is a bachelor, portrayed by a major star.  Therefore, that is the principal identification for the men in the audience.  But still, there will be some identification with the present or future husband, and that may create misgivings.  As a bachelor, a man likes it when a woman gives in to her passions for his benefit.  But as a husband, a man fears that his wife will give in to those very same passions with some other man.  And so, men can enjoy the way the bachelors in these stories are favored with a woman’s love, while at the same time being reassured that these women will ultimately know their place and submit to their wifely duties.  As for Princess Ann, we are confident that she is in control of her feelings.  We need not be apprehensive about her fidelity in the marriage that will someday be arranged for her.  In the movies involving royalty, the restoration of order in the kingdom recapitulates the restoration of order in the bedroom.

Say Anything… (1989)

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back again. This formula for a romantic comedy is all right when all you want to do is pass the time watching a mildly amusing movie. But when it is one of the movies listed in Steven Jay Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die, you expect a little more. I suspect it is the fact that Cameron Crowe wrote and directed Say Anything… that mesmerized critics into thinking it was something special.

In addition to the formula noted above, this movie also employs the standard Hollywood device of having a woman be forced to make a choice between love and something else, and then when she chooses love, as the formula requires, she ends up getting the something else too. Usually, the woman’s choice is between a boring but respectable man of whom her family approves and who will be able to provide for her in comfort, and a charming man that she loves but who is poor and irresponsible. But when she decides to marry the poor guy, it turns out that he actually has lots of money. The movie French Kiss (1995) would be an example of this.

In this movie, the woman is Diane (Ione Skye), and she herself is the boring but respectable person of whom her father, Mr. Court (John Mahoney), approves and who will be able to provide for herself in comfort owing to the fact that she is on her way to having a successful career after she gets out of college. This constitutes a slight variation in the formula. In any event, she must choose between her own education/career and Lloyd (John Cusack), the poor and irresponsible guy she loves whose idea of a career is that of being a kickboxer. Of course, there are movies in which a woman must choose between a career and a husband, but it is usually a glamorous career like show business, as in Imitation of Life (1959), not the kind of respectable career that Diane is pursuing.

Actually, Lloyd’s charm wears a little thin. He is living with his sister, who is a single mom, and he gets on her nerves with his antics. She makes a mark for the volume knob on his boom box, beyond which level he must not go, because it disturbs the neighbors. But he apparently does not care about that, because later in the movie, he takes the boom box and plays his and Diane’s song at volume ten near her house in the middle of the night to prove his love for her, probably waking up all the neighbors on the block. It is one thing to be irresponsible. It is another thing to be an inconsiderate jerk. One wonders just how long Diane is going to put up with him, especially since his plan seems to be to just let her support him, as when he tells her father, “What I want to do for a living is be with your daughter.” I guess you could say that in this movie it is the man who chooses between having a glamorous career like kickboxing and just being a house husband.

Presumably, as a way of avoiding the obvious formulaic nature of this film, a little trouble for Mr. Court with the Internal Revenue Service is thrown in. It begins rather melodramatically, with a couple of IRS agents showing up at his house at night. In real life, an auditor would begin his investigation by showing up at Court’s place of business, which is a nursing home, and asking to see the books. In a subsequent scene, an IRS agent does show up at the nursing home and asks ominous questions like, “Your income, Mr. Court, hasn’t changed substantially in seventeen years…. Why would you stay so long with an operation that is clearly not a growth enterprise?” Wow! Isn’t that incriminating!

By this time, we are starting to think that the IRS agents are absurd caricatures, and that Court will be vindicated in the end. But it turns out that Court really is guilty. However, if he has been stealing money from his patients, then it would seem he is in more trouble than just not paying his taxes. There should still be fraud charges to deal with. But the movie glosses over that.

Once we accept that Court is guilty of defrauding his nursing home patients and then not paying taxes on what he stole from them, there are further incongruities. For example, Court goes to a store to buy some luggage, but all his credit cards are rejected. At the same time, Diane discovers thousands of dollars in cash squirreled away in a drawer. So, why didn’t Court use the cash to buy the luggage? Cash leaves no tracks, and even the IRS would not have been aware of that purchase.

Beyond that, the movie seems to at first to suggest that Court was stealing all that money in order to provide for his daughter, and so we are supposed to like him for that. But then it turns out that he was using all of his ill-gotten gains to buy collectibles, like a nine thousand dollar juke box. In other words, he’s an idiot. The function of this IRS subplot is to break the excessive attachment between father and daughter so that she is free to leave him for Lloyd. But calling in the Feds so that a girl can leave home and marry the boy she loves is a bit much.

To Hell and Back (1955)

Audie Murphy was never much of an actor. The only movie he starred in that is worth watching is To Hell and Back, in which he does a decent job of acting, though one suspects that other actors could have done much better. And yet, the movie just would not have been the same without him.

In the book on which this movie was based, Murphy referred to his “thin frame and cursed baby face,” which made his commanding officer want to keep him away from the front, giving him light duty, but Murphy kept sneaking off with patrols and scouting parties. Eventually, the company commander gave up and put Murphy back in the front lines. Because our idea of a hero is someone who looks like Rambo, Murphy would never have been cast in this part had the movie been fictional. Even knowing that the movie was based on a true story, the audience might still have been incredulous had a little man with a baby face other than Murphy played the part. Imagine Elisha Cook, Jr. in that role. But by having Murphy play the part himself, we are forced to accept the fact that the kind of actor who plays the hero in a typical movie and the kind of man who is a real hero can be two very different things. And when we reflect on the fact that Murphy was thirty years old when he made the movie, we realize he must have really looked like a baby when he enlisted at the age of seventeen.

We all know that movies often diverge from the books they are based on, and so we usually just assess the movie on its own terms. There is one event described in the book, however, that is worth calling attention to, especially since almost no one has read it. Early in the war, when Murphy’s company is in Sicily, they come across a couple of Italian officers. Murphy describes the magnificent white horses the Italians mount and on which they ride away. Murphy raises his rifle, fires twice, killing them both. The lieutenant is appalled. He asks Murphy why he did that, saying he should not have shot them. Murphy argues back, telling the lieutenant that that killing the enemy is “our job.” Murphy notes that new men are trained to talk tough and act tough, but it takes a while before they accept the fact that they are supposed to “deal out death,” and that the lieutenant had not yet accepted that fact.

The Italian officers were the first two men Murphy killed, and it is the most unforgettable passage in the book, but there is no mystery why it never made its way into the movie. Generally speaking, we do not like to see our heroes shoot retreating men in the back in cold blood. In most war movies, bullets are flying back and forth, and so it is kill or be killed. But Murphy’s life was not in danger when he pulled the trigger. Better still, we like it when something happens that makes the war personal. Later in the movie, in the scene where Murphy charges up a hill and singlehandedly takes out two machine gun nests, what precipitates his heroism is the death of his friend, which makes him angry. But Murphy was not angry when he killed the Italian officers.

There is another reason why that event never made it into the movie. There is an unwritten law that in any movie set during World War II, under no circumstances will an American soldier be seen killing Italians, just as there must be no scene of Italian soldiers killing Americans. Granted, the early surrender of the Italians made the occasion for killing or being killed by Italians infrequent, but not so infrequent that the occasion did not occur in Murphy’s case. The Italians did not sneak attack us at Pearl Harbor, and the Italians did not run camps like Auschwitz. They were a pipsqueak nation that never had much of a chance to do anything to us, and so we suppress combat scenes between American and Italian soldiers.

Along these lines, in the typical combat movie made during World War II, there is the obligatory ethnic diversity: an Anglo-Saxon officer, a Mexican, a Pole, an Irishman, an American Indian, and always an Italian. We never see German-Americans or Japanese-Americans as part of the mix. Though a lot of Japanese-Americans were sent to concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as relocation centers, some still did serve in the American armed forces. But we don’t see them so much in the movies (though reference is made to one having done so in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)). But no combat movie is complete without an Italian as part of the company, America’s way of saying that the Italians were really not evil, they just got tricked by Mussolini.

Even if there is a remake of this movie, I doubt that Murphy’s killing the Italian officers would be depicted in it either. In fact, such a remake would undoubtedly have a scene showing Murphy suffering from PTSD after the war was over (regardless of whether that was true or not). In the 1950s, we were perfectly comfortable with the idea that soldiers fought World War II with an untroubled conscience. Today, the depiction of a soldier being in perfectly good mental health after the war is over might disturb us, especially after seeing him kill in cold blood.

Reflections on a Progressive Pope

The expression “love of God” is ambiguous:  it can refer to God’s love of man or to man’s love of God.  The expression “fear of God,” therefore, suffers from the same ambiguity, but not heretofore in any practical sense.  That is, since it makes no sense to speak of God’s being fearful, inasmuch as he is all-powerful, the phrase can only refer to man’s fear of God. Interestingly enough, a God fearing man is generally understood as being a man who fears nothing else, though what that fear accomplishes is hard to say, since it is not unusual to see a Western featuring a whiskey drinking, tobacco chewing, woman chasing, two-fisted, God fearing man.  A sniveling coward, on the other hand, who frets and worries over every little thing, would never be called a God fearing man, not because he does not fear God too, but because he is not man enough to qualify for that characterization.

But a remark made by Pope Francis a little less than a year ago introduced the possibility that the phrase “fear of God” might actually refer to God’s fear as well.  In his effort to soften the position of the Catholic Church on divorce and homosexuality, the pope said, “God is not afraid of new things.” Ironically, by denying that God is afraid on these matters, he opens up the possibility of God’s being afraid in other areas. Could the Deity be a man fearing God?

Of course, ever since Feuerbach, or perhaps even Xenophanes, it has been known that talking about God is just an indirect way of talking about man, and that what the pope is really saying is that Catholics in general, and the bishops in particular, should not be afraid of new things. But while we may understand the pope in this manner, surely the pope does not mean to be so construed.  Presumably, then, the idea is that God has the courage to declare that divorce and homosexuality are not sins.

There are only three ways to understand this.  The first is that God changed his mind.  He used to think divorce and homosexuality were sins, but now he realizes he was mistaken.  But that would mean that God is fallible and mutable.  Who wants a wishy-washy God, one who is always changing his mind about whether this or that is a sin, depending on who talked to him last, and, in any event, when he does change his mind, can we be sure if he has it right this time?  The whole point of having God be the foundation of morality is so he can lay down eternal truths about right and wrong.  If God is going to vacillate about such things and have to admit that he was mistaken, people will quit taking him seriously.

A second possibility is that we were mistaken about what God thought was a sin.  According to this way of thinking, God has never been opposed to divorce or homosexuality.  Putting men to death for lying with each other was never his idea, but just the ravings of a bunch of homophobic Jewish priests.  And he doesn’t know why Jesus kept saying that divorce was wrong except in the case of fornication, because he told him and he told him that no-fault divorce was the way his Father in Heaven wanted things all along. But if we were mistaken about what God thought in the past, how do we know we are not mistaken about what God thinks now?

A third possibility is that God does not change his mind per se, but that what is a sin at one stage of civilization may not be a sin at a later stage.  That is, back when Jesus was alive, divorce was pretty rough on women, and thus they had to be protected from being abandoned by men.  But now that we have child support, community property, alimony, and equal rights in the workplace, divorce is no longer the problem it used to be, and thus is no longer a sin.  It is not God that changed, but the circumstances.  In the case of homosexuality, however, most would prefer the second option, which is that this never was a sin, that we were mistaken about what God thought on the matter all along, and not that God once wanted homosexuals to be put to death, but given the different circumstances of the modern world, God is now all right with letting them live.

No matter which option we choose—God changed his mind, we were mistaken about God’s will, or there are different sins for different circumstances—every change is one more nail in God’s coffin, for it is impossible to avoid the impression that it is no longer God who tells us what is or is not a sin, but rather it is we who are deciding whether something is a sin, and adjusting our conception of God accordingly.  It is one thing to say man has free will when it comes to choosing whether or not to sin; it is quite another to say man has free will when it comes to choosing what is and is not a sin in the first place.  Freedom to believe what one wants about God soon leads to freedom from God altogether.

Part of the appeal of religion comes from the sense that there are eternal truths, that they were revealed to man long ago, and that we know what these truths are.  We may smile with amusement when the Catholic Church continues to use the Latin Mass, even though Jesus never spoke Latin, and no one else speaks it anymore either, just as we do when Protestants think that the King James Bible is the only translation that is sacred text.  But using the same words that have been used for centuries gives people a sense that they are receiving the unchanging word of God.  The footnotes provided by a modern English translation of the Bible may reflect the latest scholarship, but they do not inspire much reverence.

The Ten Commandments are revered as being the word of God, in no small part because they were written down over three thousand years ago.  Part of the problem with Mormonism is that it is only two centuries old, and even its founder, Joseph Smith, had to claim that his Book of Mormon was ancient in order to have any chance of being taken seriously.  And if someone comes along today and tells people that he has been talking to God, and has written down everything God said to him and published it in an e-book, he will be dismissed as a crank.  What is modern, up to date, and new is inimical to religious feeling.

Therefore, the Catholic Church faces a dilemma:  either it can refuse to change, thereby alienating people who are divorced and living in sin, or who are homosexuals; or it can change to suit the times, thereby vitiating the feeling that one is conforming to the eternal word of God.  If it chooses to modernize, it will keep more of its members, but will there be anything left for them to believe in?  Being an atheist, I prefer that the Church change its views on divorce and homosexuality, not only because tolerance in these matters is a good thing, but also because the more a religion changes, the weaker it becomes.  The more the Church changes the word of God, the less likely people are to believe that it is the word of God.

So, if God is not afraid of new things, maybe he should be.

As progressive as this pope seems to be regarding homosexuality and divorce, he may not be as progressive as people first thought regarding animals.  One of the things children want to know is if their pets will go to Heaven when they die.  As a bachelor, I am not sure what I would have said if I had had a child who asked me that question, but my guess is that I would have told a bald-faced lie and said, “Yes.”  I suspect many parents do the same, regardless of their religious beliefs.  And thus it was a big story for a while when it was reported that Pope Francis said, in response to that question, “Heaven is open to all creatures.”

However, it turns out that Pope Francis did not say that.  Instead, Pope Paul VI said, “One day we will again see our animals in the eternity of Christ.”  I am not sure what to make of that. When I was a child, I used to imagine Heaven as a place where our souls went when we died, and they were shaped like our bodies, and that my dog’s soul would be there, shaped accordingly as well.  Somehow, I don’t think that Pope Paul VI’s phrase about seeing our animals “in the eternity of Christ” exactly matches my childlike vision.  It sounds more like one of those vague statements we sometimes hear from politicians.

In any event, what Pope Francis said was, “Sacred Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this marvelous plan cannot but involve everything that surrounds us and came from the heart and mind of God.”  That is nothing but the usual general statement about God’s divine plan, which is used to justify this world with all of its shortcomings.  And so, the heart-warming story about Pope Francis saying that pets go to Heaven turns out to be apocryphal.

But now it appears that the pope thinks that people are placing more importance on animals than was intended by God in his marvelous plan, according to an article by Thomas D. Williams:

Francis also had strong words for what is wrong with the world and the way people’s values get twisted.

According to the Pope, the worst problems in the world today are poverty, corruption and human trafficking. He also expressed his astonishment when he read about what people spend money on.   “After food, clothing and medicine,” he said, “the fourth item is cosmetics and the fifth is pets. That’s serious.”

In fact, for an “environmental pope,” Francis seems to think that people pay altogether too much attention to pets.

“Care for pets is like programmed love,” he said. “I can program the loving response of a dog or a cat, and I don’t need the experience of a human, reciprocal love.”

The Pope said this kind of trade-off is “worrisome.”

So, not only did the pope not say that pets go to Heaven, but he also seems to think less attention should be paid to them right here on Earth.

At first, being an atheist and in the habit of disregarding the pronouncements of religious leaders, my initial reaction to simply to dismiss the pope’s remarks.  But then it occurred to me that there was much wisdom in what he said.

When I was twelve years old, my parents asked me if I would like to have a dog.  I said, “Yes,” of course.  Then they said, “You will have to be the one who feeds the dog and takes it for a walk.”  I willingly agreed.  This was unfair.  I had no idea what my future life as a teenager would be like, and so I had no idea what kind of sacrifice this would entail.  But my parents knew, and they took advantage of my innocence and extracted from me a commitment at a time when I was hardly of age to enter into a binding contract.

At first, everything was just fine.  I fed my dog and walked him, played with him, and loved him.  But then I went through puberty and discovered the importance of girls.  And then it was that I began to experience a conflict in priorities.  For example, there was this one day in which Charles, one of my friends, pulled up beside me in his car one Saturday afternoon while I was walking the dog.  “Hey, John,” he said.  “Donna’s parents will be gone for the weekend.  She’s going to have a bunch of her girlfriends over there, and she wanted me to get a bunch of guys together and come over so we can party.  As soon as you’re through walking the dog, I’ll give you a ride over there.”

“I can’t,” I said, “because at five o’clock I have to feed the dog.”

“Oh,” he said.  “Well, that’s too bad.  Donna said she had a girl all picked out just for you.  But don’t you let that worry you none.  I’ll be making out with her while you’re still opening that can of dog food.”  And at that point, he peeled out, the tires blowing dust into my face as he sped off.

It was just as the pope said.  I needed “the experience of a human, reciprocal love,” and instead, all I got was the love of my dog when I emptied the can of Alpo into his bowl.  Petting a dog is no substitute for petting a girl.

My dog died when I was a senior in high school, and it broke my heart.  But a year later, while I was in college, my parents began talking about getting another dog.  Some people may have their values twisted, as the pope said, but mine weren’t.  I laid down the law.  “This will be your dog,” I told my parents sternly.  “You will walk it and you will feed it.”  They nodded in agreement. This turned out to be a much better arrangement.  I could love the dog the way a grandparent loves a grandchild.  But when there was a girl available to give me the reciprocal, human love I needed, I was able to give her my full attention, while my parents were home taking care of their dog.

I never got another dog.  Years later, one of my dancing partners, who had a couple of dogs herself that I would play with when I visited her, asked me why I did not get a dog of my own. “Why buy a dog,” I asked, “when you can pet one through the fence?”  Anyway, as I said, we were dancing partners, and while some dancing partners are also lovers, many are not, as was the case with us.  This did not seem to bother her.  “Dancing is better than sex,” she would often say.  But the two were not mutually exclusive, and besides, such a bold hypothesis should be put to the test, I figured.  So, one night, when the mood seemed right, I sat next to her on the couch while we had a discussion about the meaning of life or some such, and was just about to make my move, when her two dogs jumped up onto the couch and in our laps, demanding attention.

Once again, I found myself in agreement with the pope.  My dancing partner’s twisted values resulted in her caring more about playing with her dogs than receiving some of that reciprocal love she could have gotten from another human being, namely me.  The pope said, “I can program the loving response of a dog or a cat.”  He sounds like a computer geek in saying that, but one thing is for sure, you can’t program the loving response of a woman, and so I have to agree with him on that point.

Anyway, when my dancing partner had to go out of town for a while, she asked me to take care of her dogs while she was gone.  I agreed.  “You can sleep over here, if you want, to keep them company,” she offered.  And so, the only time I got to sleep in her bed was when I slept with the dogs.  But when she returned, she told me she had met someone and had fallen in love. He did not dance, and he did not have a dog, and so I guess without dancing and dogs to distract her, she found the space in her life for love.  Well, three’s a crowd, and it was not long before I was looking for another dancing partner.

One girlfriend I had, after asking me why I did not have a pet, and hearing my tale of woe, bought me a cactus.  It was the perfect gift for a bachelor who does not want the responsibility of taking care of a pet or taking care of a wife and children for that matter.  And so it was that when I saw the final episode of Mad Men, when Pete gave Peggy a cactus, I began to wonder if there were something archetypal involved.  Peggy had given up her baby, had never gotten married, and did not have a pet.  But now she had her cactus.  There was a sense of completion in that.  But then, Matthew Weiner spoiled it by having her and Stan hook up at the last minute. Sometimes a dramatist does not realize when his story has ended.

Well, I found out that the cactus had to be watered once every two weeks, and so I would mark that on my calendar, and then worry whether I would forget to look at the calendar.  And I would have to put it on the balcony in front of my apartment to let it get some sun.  But then I would have to worry if it rained, because it is not good to let a cactus get too much water.  This wore me out.  After three months, I came home one day to find that the cactus had been stolen.  A great burden was lifted off my shoulders.

But I had learned an important lesson.  I will never get another cactus.

Sanders of the River (1935)

The title character of Sanders of the River, Commissioner R.G. Sanders (Leslie Banks), is a British officer who has picked up the white man’s burden and made Nigeria a better place for the Africans who populate it. We know they are happy, because they are always singing. The British do not sing, however, because running an empire is serious business.

Bosambo (Paul Robeson) is a good African chieftain who loves being ruled by Sanders and the British Empire.  He sings a lot.  Mofolaba (Tony Wane) is an evil African chieftain who hates being ruled by Sanders and the British Empire. He doesn’t sing at all.

When Sanders goes on vacation, Mofolaba spreads a rumor that Sanders is dead.  Apparently there is a cult of personality surrounding Sanders, because the place just falls apart as a result.  We see lots of animals running about, so even they are upset.

War breaks out, and Sanders has to return. While he was gone, a couple of smugglers had been selling gin and rifles to the natives, which is against the law. But the rifles don’t seem to do the natives any good, because they continue to use spears. Bosambo is captured by Mofolaba.  As the boat Sanders is on races to save Bosambo, an officer commands an African worker who is operating the boiler to put more wood on the fire for more speed. The African replies that the boiler will blow. But the British officer is not cowed by mere physics, and he contemptuously dismisses the warning. The boiler backs down and humbly submits to British authority, just like everything else.

Thanks to British assistance, Bosambo is able to kill Mofolaba.  Sanders names him King of the Peoples of the River, and they all live happily ever after.

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

Set in France in the 1950s, Murmur of the Heart is a coming of age story about an obnoxious fourteen-year-old boy, Laurent Chevalier (Benoit Ferreux).  He has two brothers almost as obnoxious as he is and a father who is not bad in the obnoxious department himself. His mother is Clara (Lea Massari), who seems to be a nice, warm-hearted, loving person.She needs to ditch that family, but when she gets the chance to run off with her lover, who is just as obnoxious as her family, I guess she figures, “What’s the point?” and doesn’t bother.

There are a lot of miscellaneous plot points involving the First Indochina War, a priest, a brothel, and a heart murmur, all which manage to get Clara and Laurent into a situation where they will have to share a hotel room.  Because Clara is so affectionate and sensual, we quickly figure out that we are being prepared fora little oedipal hanky-panky. Now, if this were a Hollywood movie in which a boy had sex with his mother, he would turn into some kind of Norman Bates psycho.  But this movie was made in France, which means we are watching a weird foreign film, which means the incestuous affair will probably be a deep, meaningful, transformative experience for the lad. I assumed that as a result of this, he would stop being obnoxious and start being nice, warm-hearted, and loving, just like her. Nope. By the end of the movie,he is still his same old rotten self.

Before they have sex, his mother says that they will just do it one time, and then they will never talk about it again. Oh sure! For all her worldly experience, she does not seem to know much about men. You can’t give them a taste and expect them to go away and forget about how good it was.She had a husband who was very jealous when they were first in love, and she had a lover who was very jealous, and now she thinks her son won’t end up being a jealous lover too? Of course, the movie indicates that they will forget about the fact that they had sex, because Louis Malle, the writer and director,wanted it that way. But it’s not realistic, so don’t try this at home.

Not that I would know personally, but I suspect that having sex with your mother would be enough excitement for one evening. But as soon as Clara falls asleep, Laurent gets dressed and heads on down the hall for a little action with someone his own age. He wakes up one girl, comes on to her like an insufferable jerk, and when she runs him off, he heads on down the hall to the next one, where, for some mysterious reason, he actually scores.  The point of this is that he is now a man of the world who has a way with women.  I guess doing it with Mom was a transformative experience after all.

In a time when gender equality is the ideal, the double standard regarding the sexes is looked upon with disfavor. This movie makes us realize that in some respects, the double standard will never be completely eliminated, nor should it. Just imagine a similar movie, but one in which a man has sex with his fourteen-year-old daughter, which the movie would have us regard as being a meaningful act of love. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because the movie Beau Pere (1981) is pretty much just that, except that the man is her stepfather.  Needless to say, it was made in France.

Finally, because Laurent is Catholic, I could not help trying to imagine how his next confession is going to go. I wonder how many Hail Marys you have to say for having sex with your mother.

The Hanging Tree (1959)

In The Hanging Tree, a Western directed by Delmer Daves, Dr. Joseph “Doc” Frail helps Rune (Ben Piazza), who is a thief, escape from those he stole from, but since Frail is played by Gary Cooper, who is tall and good looking, we figure that makes what he is doing all right. He then blackmails Rune, forcing him into slavery, but since it’s Gary Cooper, what he is doing must be for the best somehow.

When Elizabeth (Maria Schell) is discovered suffering from exposure and dehydration, needing the attention of a doctor, Frail refuses to leave the bedside of a woman who he knows is going to die in a couple of hours anyway. It is a standard principle of triage that a doctor should help those who can be helped and not waste time on those who cannot, but since it’s Gary Cooper, we figure he must be doing the right thing somehow. Besides, the person who thinks he should leave the dying woman and help Elizabeth is Frenchy, played by Karl Malden in an unsavory role, so he must be wrong somehow.

When Frail finally arrives at the house where the men who found Elizabeth had taken her, Frail expresses his disgust with the fact that the house is dirty, asking the old man who lives there why he doesn’t clean the place up. But that can’t be rude, because it’s Gary Cooper, so we figure the old man deserves to be insulted.

Frail keeps Elizabeth, who is temporarily blind, in a cabin, allowing no one else in except himself and Rune. When ladies from town come to check on her after she has been there for a while, Frail refuses to let them talk to her. And Elizabeth, after finding out that he made the women leave, asks if she is a prisoner. Normally, it would be perfectly reasonable for concerned citizens to be allowed to ask Elizabeth if she is being kept there against her will, if she would like to leave. After all, if it were Frenchy keeping her in a cabin and not letting others talk to her, we would suspect that he was keeping her as a sex slave. But it is not Frenchy, played by Karl Malden; it is Frail, played by Gary Cooper. And besides, the women are really just a bunch of busybodies. And if Elizabeth thinks she is being kept there as a prisoner, that is just too bad, because it’s Gary Cooper who is doing it, and so he must be right to disregard her wishes.

And then, when Elizabeth finally gets her sight back, she goes to a lot of trouble to prepare a special dinner for Rune and Frail, but Frail would rather play poker instead. But we have to overlook this, in part because it’s Gary Cooper, and in part because of some dark secret from his past. As best we can figure from rumor and from what Frail says, he caught his brother and his wife having sex. When he killed his brother, his wife was so horrified that she shot herself and died, after which Frail burned the house down. If it had been Frenchy who did something like that, we would hate him for it, but since it was Frail who did it, we are expected to be understanding.

This is not to say that Frail does not do good things. Even if he were not played Gary Cooper, we would still approve of much of his behavior: letting Rune go free after a while; curing Elizabeth; letting some poor folks borrow his cow so their daughter can have milk; secretly funding Elizabeth in her determination to make her own way; and saving her from being raped by Frenchy. But it is still remarkable how much latitude we allow a character in a movie if he is played by an actor with an established persona of moral rectitude, especially if he is tall and good looking.