Rape and Race in the Movies

In Sergeant Rutledge (1960), which is a Western directed by John Ford, a black soldier faces a court martial for the rape and murder of a white girl. At the end of the movie, someone else, a white man, of course, confesses to having committed the crime, and the title character is acquitted.

The movie To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is, along with a few subplots, a story about a black man who is accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s. Most of the white people in the town are ready to lynch him, being sure that he is guilty. By virtue of some rather fortuitous evidence, that the black man does not have full use of his left hand, it is clear that the white woman lied about being raped. The town is so prejudiced, however, that he is convicted anyway.

In the movie Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976), nine black teenagers are accused of raping two white girls. Once again we are in Alabama in the 1930s. Once again there is a lot of prejudice in the town and a presumption that the African American youths are guilty. Once again, it is pretty clear that the white girls are lying. The boys are convicted anyway.

At the time these movies were made, the typical reaction of the audience was to deplore this racial prejudice, especially in what was regarded as the ultimate outrage in the Jim Crow South, the rape of a white woman by a black man. This obsession was made especially clear in the movie Birth of a Nation (1915), the racist classic that justified the formation of the Ku Klux Klan as the only way to keep black men from molesting white women.

Interestingly enough, there is one thing that these four movies have in common. No such rape of a white woman by a black man ever takes place. It is threatened in Birth of a Nation, a white man did the raping in Sergeant Rutledge, and the rapes are spurious in To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys; but in none of these movies is there a rape of a white woman by a black man. The reason why this is so in the latter three movies is obvious, because the point was to create sympathy for African Americans, who are often treated unfairly. In the case of Birth of a Nation, however, an actual rape of a white woman by a black man would have been too horrible to contemplate.

From completely diverse motives then, movies in which a black man actually rapes a white woman are rare, a couple of exceptions being Deep in My Heart (1999) and The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck (1988), movies you have probably never even heard of, let alone seen. A slightly more well-known movie in which this rare cinematic event occurs is Death Wish II (1982), about which more later. In most cases, however, there is only the accusation of rape, which turns out not to be true. And the way in which the accusation turns out not to be true in To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys is that the white women lied.

Another movie in which a man of color is accused of rape but is exonerated when it turns out that the woman lied is A Passage to India (1984). The movie is set in India in the early part of the twentieth century when it was still under British rule. A white Englishwoman accuses an Indian of trying to rape her, but she recants on the witness stand. It is our impression that her lie was not deliberate, but rather that she became hysterical as a result of being unable to come to terms with her repressed sexuality.

I must confess that when I saw these movies when they first were made, I accepted the idea that the women lied as not only being plausible, but perhaps more importantly, as in no way being inconsistent with the progressive attitude of the movies. In other words, such things go on in the world, but that does not guarantee their being depicted in a movie. To take the example already alluded to, that of black men raping white women, while such things do occur in real life, they are almost nonexistent in the movies. And with the exception of Birth of a Nation, the reason is a desire on the part of the movie industry to portray African Americans (or Indians, in the case of A Passage to India) in a positive light. But that same industry, the same producers in fact, had not the slightest qualm about making the women be the villains as part of their progressive agenda. Their conscience was undoubtedly as clear on this score as mine was when I watched these movies with approval. The fact that women do sometimes lie about being raped is not an explanation, for what is real and what we want to see in a movie are two different things.

Over the years there has been a gradual awareness of the prejudice against women when it comes to rape. A lot of men used to think (and some still do) that rape is not a big deal (who can forget the old advice to “just relax and enjoy it”?). Some rapes are dismissed as not being “legitimate” or as not being “rape-rape.” In other cases, women are said to have brought it on themselves by dressing provocatively or by egging men on. And finally, some are thought to be vindictive, seeking revenge for having been scorned.

Slowly, social consciousness is finally coming around to a more progressive attitude about rape, one that takes women seriously when they make this charge. Unfortunately, women do sometimes lie about rape, as in the notorious case about “Jackie,” whose alleged rape was reported and then retracted by Rolling Stone magazine. But that is reality, over which we have no choice. Where we do have a choice is in deciding what is acceptable to put in a movie. Given the climate today, it seems to me unlikely that a major motion picture will soon be produced that involves a woman falsely accusing a man of rape. In particular, I have to wonder if To Kill a Mockingbird could be made today. Hollywood is always looking for a movie to remake, especially if the original was a big hit. And since the original was filmed in black and white, some might regard a remake as justified in that this time it could be filmed in color. But I don’t think so. I suspect that a movie in which a woman lies about being raped might be as unacceptable today as a movie about a black man raping a white woman. It is ironic that the movie we once embraced for its progressive denunciation of racism, we might now have to regard as flawed for the misogynistic way it played off a prejudice against women who claim to have been raped.

Of course, To Kill a Mockingbird is even less likely to be remade now after the release of another novel by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, which is actually the first version of To Kill a Mockingbird. An editor advised her to rewrite the story, which she did. To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a girl named Scout, whose father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s. Though Atticus proves that Robinson is innocent, a prejudiced jury convicts him anyway. Later, when Scout and her brother are attacked by Mayella’s father, Bob Ewell, Boo Radley, a mentally retarded man, saves them by killing Ewell. Atticus and the sheriff pretend to accept the story that Ewell fell on his own knife.

Gregory Peck, who played Atticus in the movie, has on occasion played a bad man, as in Duel in the Sun (1946), but when he plays the good guy, no one can surpass him for being morally upright. In fact, sometimes he is so good that it is a little too much to bear. He is almost nothing but superego, an embodiment of moral rectitude. I often suspected that the reason Atticus’s wife has been dead for some time when the story begins is so that we won’t think of him having sex, which might make us think him capable of being motivated by a strong passion rather than by the light of reason informed by knowledge of right and wrong. Also, the love between a father and his daughter, which a lot of people think is the more important feature of the story, would lose some of its intensity if there were a mother for Scout and a wife for Atticus with whom the love would have to be shared.

As there will not likely be a remake of To Kill a Mockingbird, so too is it doubtful there will be a movie based on Go Set a Watchman, though for very different reasons. In the earlier version of the story, Scout, as Jean Louise, returns home at the age of twenty-six to find that her father has an id. He denounces the Supreme Court for Brown v. Board of Education, because he is opposed to integration, he despises the N.A.A.C.P., and it is revealed that he once attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. At one point, he says, “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people,” and he asks his daughter, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

There has never been anything like this. The disconnect between the saintly, much-revered Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird and the racist of Go Set a Watchman borders on blasphemy.

When watching the movie, I always had misgivings in To Kill a Mockingbird when Atticus shoots a dog with rabies. I figured the point was to prepare the way for when Boo (Robert Duvall) kills Bob Ewell (James Anderson), who figuratively is a mad dog that needs killing. But it bothered me that the mob that comes to lynch Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) probably had exactly the same attitude, that Tom was a mad dog that needed killing. I always had a sense that the movie was inadvertently justifying lynching.

But now I am not so sure it was inadvertent. In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise, as the grown-up Scout, is portrayed as disillusioned by what she discovers about her father, saying to him, “I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for.” On the surface, one would think that Harper Lee is expressing her disapproval of racism through this character. But that may be just a front, a pretense of disapproval as a devious way of advocating her racist views through Atticus. Furthermore, Jean Louise’s views are not that different from his. At one point in her discussion with her father, she says, “We’ve agreed that they [Negroes] are backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human.” And so, perhaps the killing of the mad dog really was a subliminal way of justifying lynch mobs.

Whereas in To Kill a Mockingbird, Robinson is convicted, in Go Set a Watchman, he is acquitted. I take this as a southern defense of the South’s judicial system during the Jim Crow period. Go Set a Watchman is saying that a black man accused of raping a white woman can get justice. In other words, the book has it both ways. Through the mad dog metaphor, it justifies the lynching of evildoers in the old days, while at the same time assuring us that when a black man was actually innocent, he was likely to be acquitted, even by an all white jury.

There are those who argue that To Kill a Mockingbird, as book or movie, stands on its own, and that authorial intent, as revealed by Go Set a Watchman, is irrelevant. For most of us, however, the latter contaminates the former, and few people will ever be able to regard To Kill a Mockingbird in the same light again.

To return to the main issue of this essay, the way the movies handle rape across racial lines, African Americans turn out to be innocent of rape charges in To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys because the white girls lie about being raped. In Sergeant Rutledge, however, the white girl is not only raped, but also murdered, and so the device of having the girl lie about being raped is not available. Instead, it turns out that a white man actually raped and killed her. However, some of the blame for what happens still falls on the girl.

The main female character of this movie, Mary Beecher (Constance Towers), is a strong, independent-thinking woman. However, most of the rest of the women in this movie are a bunch of simpleminded old biddies, whose purpose in life is to be scandalized by the shameful behavior of others. One of the things that scandalize these women is the behavior of Lucy Dabney (Toby Michaels), the girl who is subsequently raped and strangled. The women chastise her for riding a horse astride. But Lucy says, in front of Chandler Hubble (Fred Libby), who we eventually find out is the one that actually raped her, that as long as she says her prayers and behaves herself, her father doesn’t care if she rides around like Lady Godiva. It is also worked into the conversation that her mother is dead. In other words, Lucy does not have a simpleminded old biddy for a mother to instill the proper sense of decorum into her.

At the end, Lieutenant Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter), whose job it is to defend Rutledge (Woody Strode), beats a confession out of Hubble while he is on the witness stand. Hubble admits that he had to rape Lucy because of the way she walked, the way she moved her body. You see, what with Lucy’s having her legs spread-eagled when she rides a horse and putting into Hubble’s mind the image of her being naked while on that horse as well, it was just too much for him. In other words, the movie is just a hair from blaming the victim, although it stops short of that, blaming the circumstance of her not having a mother to raise her properly instead. One might think that the real blame for the rape would fall on Hubble, the man who raped her. But the movie portrays him as having acted under a sexual compulsion (especially since his wife is deceased, thereby depriving him of a normal sexual outlet). The point seems to be that it is up to women to behave in such a way as to not unleash the demon in men such as Hubble.

One way to make rape across racial lines more suitable for movie audiences is to lessen the color difference between the man and woman. This can be done in two ways, by having the man belong to a race less dark than that of an African American, or by making the white woman be a brunette instead of a blonde. In the movie The Searchers (1956), for example, Debbie, a dark-haired girl of about eight, is abducted by the Comanches, and the rest of the movie consists of Ethan (John Wayne) and Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) searching for her. As the years go by, it becomes clear that Debbie is getting to the age where the Indians will start having sex with her. The thought of such defilement makes Ethan want to kill her, and even Laurie (Vera Miles) agrees that Debbie’s mother would have wanted Ethan to put a bullet in her brain. Just to get us in the mood for what is coming, Ethan and Martin check out some girls that had been captives of the Comanches to see if one of them is Debbie. We see three girls who are all crazy to point of either screaming or laughing maniacally. And they are all blonde. But later, when at last they find Debbie, who is about thirteen and is one of the squaws of the Comanche chief, the principal villain of the film, she seems just fine. And, as she is played by Natalie Wood, she is a brunette. The idea seems to be that white brunettes can tolerate being raped by men of a darker race, because they have a dark aspect themselves, and thus can absorb the shock; but blondes cannot, for they are so white and pure that the violation destroys them.

The Searchers is another movie for which there will never be a remake, because Indians have all been replaced by Native Americans. Native Americans are peace-loving indigenous people, who are close to Nature, at one with the environment, full of shape-shifting spirituality, and whom we stole this land from and treated atrociously. Indians, on the other hand, are vicious savages that scalp men, rape women, and subject their captives to horrible tortures. Unable to hold their liquor, they are always going off the reservation, impeding our Manifest Destiny. The last time Indians in this sense were in a Western was in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), where they tried to rape a white woman. Since then, if a woman in a Western supposedly gets raped by a Native American, it always turns out that it was white men who did it, as in the movie The Lone Ranger (2013). If an Indian actually scalps someone, as in Dances with Wolves (1990), it is a bad Indian, as opposed to the good Indians (i.e., Native Americans) in the movie who would never do such a thing. In other words, when it comes to raping white women, Native Americans have achieved the same immunity in the movies that African Americans have: it practically never happens.

On the other hand, when rape is only threatened, then the difference in color can be as extreme as possible. Consider, for example, the movie King Kong (1933) and its remakes in 1976 and 2005. As many critics have observed, these movies subliminally play off the white man’s fear of black lust for white women. And in each version, it is a blonde that King Kong captures and falls in love with. Having Ann Darrow played by a brunette just would not be the same. She has to be a blonde to make the thought of rape as horrible as possible, which the movie is able to suggest with impunity because their difference in size makes any actual rape impossible.

As noted above, one exception to the general rule that African Americans do not rape white women in the movies is Death Wish II (1982). However, color difference is minimized to make the rape more palatable. Actually, there are two women in this movie that are raped. The first one is gang raped, and two of the men that rape her are dark-skinned African Americans. However, the woman is Latina, and this reduces the color difference. The second woman, however, is a Caucasian, but she is raped by a light-skinned African American, once again reducing the color difference. Also, she is a brunette rather than a blonde, thereby further reducing the difference.

Even so, this movie is definitely an exception. Since then, movies that depict rape across racial lines typically have the man be white and the woman be dark, as in A Time to Kill (1996) or 12 Years a Slave (2013). We are fortunate to still have white males available for the depiction of the worst forms of evil and depravity in general and of rape in particular.

Double Indemnity (1944)

There is nothing new about a woman and her lover killing her husband. That’s been going on since Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon. What inspired James M. Cain to write Double Indemnity was the additional feature of insurance, as in the case of Ruth Snyder, whose murder trial Cain covered as a journalist in 1927. While having an affair with Judd Gray, she got her husband Albert to take out a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, one that promised to pay extra in case the insured died by accident or by some violent means. This added a whole new dimension to an old story.

Let this be a warning to all husbands. The whole point of life insurance is to provide for your loved ones, say your wife and children, in the event of your death. The manner of your death has nothing to do with their dependency on you as a breadwinner. Their needs will be the same whether you die in your sleep or fall off a cliff. So, if your wife seems to be taking an undue interest in the double indemnity clause of the policy you are considering, this should occasion a moment of reflection.

My mother once told me that a man might be averse to taking out a life insurance policy for fear that after his death, his wife will squander all the money on some younger man. But if the policy also has a double indemnity clause that the wife keeps asking the salesman about, she may already have that younger man, with special plans for him later. Some believe Albert refused to take out that policy, for just that reason, but with the connivance of the insurance salesman, anxious to get his commission, Albert’s name on the policy was forged.

Killing Albert turned out to be something of a challenge, but after several attempts, Snyder and Gray managed it. They were sloppy, however, leaving behind incriminating evidence. Eventually, they turned on each other, as if that would help. Both of them died in the electric chair.

Never mentioned in the story of Ruth Snyder is that, in all likelihood, there was a time when she and Albert loved each other very much. They took their vows in all sincerity, fully believing every word of the ceremony, “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.” That last part turned out to have a significance neither of them could have imagined at the time.

One of the painful things about the movie Two for the Road (1967) is the way it keeps jumping back and forth between the four stages of love: when the man and woman first meet, their courtship, their marriage, and the affairs they have after love has died. The movie won’t let us forget how these two miserable people were once so much in love. But in real life, we do forget. And so it was, in all probability, that while Ruth and Judd were cuddling in bed, they convinced themselves that she never felt that way about Albert, and Judd never felt that way about his wife. More importantly, it never occurred to them that the contempt, if not hatred, they presently had for the ones they married, they might someday have for each other.

Have there been stories in which men have murdered their wives for the insurance money? Yes, of course. But such stories just do not capture the imagination in the same way. Perhaps it’s because men are more violent than women, more likely to commit murder, so we are not as shocked when a man murders his wife. I regularly hear about men killing their wives or girlfriends and whoever else happens to be in the room on the nightly news. And that’s the local news I’m talking about. As for women, perhaps it’s because we tend to be sentimental about women, seeing them as being more caring, loving, and nurturing than men are, and so it is more shocking when a woman murders her husband. Still, there have been movies made in which a man murders his wife for money, such as Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), but they just don’t horrify us as much as when it is the woman that murders her husband.

Just as there is nothing new about a woman murdering her husband, neither is there anything new about murder being committed for money. But when it is money being paid out by an insurance company, money also becomes a motive for solving the crime. Cain also made an insurance policy part of the plot in the The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was made into a movie in 1946. Normally, if the beneficiary of a policy is charged with murdering the policyholder, the insurance company will delay paying the claim: if the beneficiary is acquitted, the company will pay; if he is convicted, it will not. In this movie, however, it is the other way around. The prosecutor waits to see what the insurance company’s investigators come up with. When these top-notch investigators fail to find incriminating evidence, the insurance company pays the claim. That is when the prosecutor realizes he doesn’t have a case. I don’t think that’s the way things work in real life, but the idea is that a police detective gets paid whether he solves a crime or not, but when an insurance company stands to lose a lot of money, they will try much harder to prove foul play.

As another example, an insurance investigator solves a crime in The Killers (1946) because his company had to pay off when the money stolen was never recovered. In a similar way, money is also the motive in films noir in which a private detective solves a crime when the police failed to. So, instead of the police solving the crime as part of their duty to enforce the law, films noir cynically reject this idealistic notion by making money the central motive of the investigation rather than justice.

In the case of Snyder and Gray, the police solved the crime all by themselves. The insurance policy merely supplied the motive. But in his novel, Cain wisely made Keyes, Claims Manager for General Fidelity of California, the principal detective on the case. Keyes seems to have uncanny powers of intuition when it comes to spotting insurance fraud. In the movie, he refers to it as the “little man” inside his chest, who gives him indigestion whenever a phony claim comes before him. But it is an intuition distilled from years of having immersed himself in statistics and actuarial tables, along with dealing with insurance fraud directly. In the movie, there is a scene in which Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is talking to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), the insurance salesman who conspired with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to murder her husband and make it look like an accident. With disgust, Keyes says the inquest was over with in forty-five minutes. “Verdict, accidental death.” Neff asks what the police figure. Keyes replies: “That he got tangled up in his crutches and fell off the train. They’re satisfied. It’s not their dough.”

In the novel, Walter gets Phyllis to show up at the inquest with a minister. “Once a coroner’s jury sees that it’s a question of burial in consecrated ground,” Walter informs the reader, “the guy could take poison, cut his throat, and jump off the end of a dock, and they would still give a verdict, ‘in a manner unknown to this jury.'”

There was another improvement made by Cain over the case of Ruth Snyder. She had her husband take out a life insurance policy with an extra payout for accidental death. Cain made the policy one of accident insurance by itself. Happening to be in the neighborhood, Walter Huff (“Neff” in the movie) decides to stop by the house of one of his customers, Mr. Nirdlinger (“Dietrichson” in the movie), in hopes of getting him to renew his automobile insurance. As it is the middle of the day, he has little hope of finding him at home, but decides it’s worth a try.

Once he gets past the maid, he finds himself talking to Mrs. Nirdlinger. She tells him her husband is thinking about switching to the Automobile Club. After a while, Huff begins to suspect she wants him to split the commission with her in exchange for getting her husband to renew with General Fidelity of California. Huff informs the reader that there is a lot of that going on, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a reputable insurance agent like himself would participate in. But while those thoughts are going through his head, he finds himself appreciating her figure beneath her blue pajamas. He is wondering if his ethical standards would be able to resist splitting a commission with an attractive woman like Mrs. Nirdlinger.

“But all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair. ‘Do you handle accident insurance?’”

Huff informs the reader that accident insurance is sold, not bought, so her asking about it out of the blue is most unusual. In addition to that, the payout is substantial, for which reason it lends itself to insurance fraud. Finally, unlike life insurance, no physical examination is required, and the insured doesn’t even have to know anything about it. All the insurance company wants is the money for the premium, and “there’s many a man walking around today that’s worth more to his loved ones dead than alive, only he don’t know it yet.”

Another improvement made by Cain over the Snyder case is that of having the wife’s lover be the insurance salesman, someone that knows what a claims adjuster will look for, and knows where people committing insurance fraud tend to slip up. There is a scene in both the book and the movie in which Keyes is upset about a policy that Walter sold on a truck that later became the basis for a fraudulent claim. Walter points out that he had attached a memo saying the man should be investigated first. This lets us know that Walter is also alert to the possibility of fraud, which is why Keyes later tries to talk him into becoming his assistant. And so, whereas Snyder and Gray committed a clumsy murder that even an ordinary flatfoot could see through, the novel becomes a game of wits between two men, each an expert in the insurance business, making it a story in which one of them sets out to commit the perfect crime that will escape the detection of the other.

Cain’s novel is in the form of a first-person narrative, in which Walter tells us how he became involved in a scheme to murder a man’s wife. In this way, we are privy to his thoughts, such as his suspicion that Mrs. Nirdlinger wanted a cut of the commission, his forebodings about her interest in accident insurance, and his commentary on the sinister aspect of such insurance. And, like most such novels, it is told in the past tense. Movies, on the other hand, are usually in the present tense, and we merely watch events unfold. Only through dialogue do we get any insight into what someone is thinking. Therefore, in order to better represent such a novel as a movie, it should be told in flashback, which is what is done here.

The flashback, however, is not simply a way of making a movie unfold like a first-person narrative in a novel, for the flashback form also gives us some idea how things will end up. And so it is that whereas in the novel, the story begins with Walter telling us why he happened to show up at the Nirdlinger house in the middle of the day, in which case we haven’t the slightest idea that anything bad is going to happen to him, the movie lets us know right off that something bad did happen, and Walter’s narration will explain what led up to it. Just as Cain made improvements over the Snyder case in writing his novel, the movie makes improvements over the novel, and this flashback device is one of them.

During the credits, while we hear ominous music, we see the silhouette of a man moving toward us with the aid of two crutches. We sense that he is dangerous, but this is contradicted by the crutches, for how could a man in his condition, we wonder, be dangerous? As the credits end, we see a city street late at night. A car going fast almost crashes into some men doing repairs underneath a sign that says, “Los Angeles Railway Maintenance,” foreshadowing the role that a train will have in this story. The car swerves and continues to speed recklessly along the streets, though no one is in pursuit. Finally, it pulls up in front of a building. A man gets out with a coat draped over him. It looks like the same man that was in silhouette. The elevator operator lets us know that the man is Walter Neff. He lets him out on the twelfth floor, which is the main office of Pacific All Risk Insurance Company.

When he gets to his office and removes his overcoat, we see that he has been shot, a small spot of blood near his left shoulder, incapacitating his left arm, much in the way that the man in silhouette had an incapacitated left foot. He removes his fedora, and with a little difficulty, uses his thumbnail to ignite a match so he can light up a cigarette. Once he takes a drag and exhales, he is ready. He puts a new cylinder in the Dictaphone, addressing an office memorandum to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager. He remarks that what he is about to say may sound like a confession, but he doesn’t like that word. He says he just wants to set him straight on the Dietrichson claim.

In other words, he’s not worried about his wound, and he’s not worried that he is about to incriminate himself in a couple of murders. He tried to pull off the perfect crime, and almost did so, fooling even Keyes, the one man he most feared would see through his scheme. It is important to him to let Keyes know how it all went down, where Keyes went wrong, and why. He then begins where the novel did, with his decision to stop by the Dietrichson house, which he says must have cost somebody $30,000, if he ever finished paying for it. (The year is 1938, so that would be well over $500,000, adjusted for inflation, in today’s dollars.)

Another improvement in the movie over the novel is due to the fact that Billy Wilder, the director, got Raymond Chandler, author of novels like Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep, to help with the screenplay. And so, whereas there is something a little hurried and abrupt about Cain’s style of writing, Chandler, who said he never cared for Cain’s novels, was able to smooth out the story and give it some style. For example, when Walter Neff arrives at the Dietrichson house for the first time, he notes the smell of honeysuckle in the air, leading him to ask, “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

What I like about that line is the way it introduces another element in the crime beyond motive. Early in his confession on the Dictaphone, Neff admits to committing murder, saying he killed Mr. Dietrichson for money and for a woman. But it’s not merely that sex was a motive for the crime, along with the money. Rather, it’s the effect sex had on his attitude about murder that is important. Sex has a way of soothing our conscience, keeping us from having the feelings of guilt that we should. Usually, this just makes it easier to violate some sexual taboo. But it can also make it easier to do something evil that is not sexual in nature. A man and woman in love can sometimes talk themselves into committing a crime they would never dream of doing otherwise. The crime becomes an expression of their love for each other. It’s so sweet that they would even kill for each other. Hence the remark about honeysuckle.

In the beginning, Phyllis tries to get Walter to allow her to get accident insurance on her husband without his knowing about it. She hates her husband, but has no definite plan to murder him. She is just hoping that once she gets the policy, her husband will have an accident in the oil fields and die. We later find out from her stepdaughter Lola that Phyllis may have contributed to her mother’s death while acting as her nurse during an illness. According to Lola, while her mother had a fever, Lola walked into the bedroom and found that Phyllis had the windows wide open, letting in the cold winter air. After the mother died, Phyllis then married Lola’s father. This kind of opportunism is probably what Phyllis had in mind for her husband once she got him the accident policy: wait for propitious circumstances, and then help them along a little. Making Phyllis a nurse was another improvement on Cain’s part over the Snyder case. It reinforces those sentimental feelings we have about women, alluded to above, about caring and nurturing, all the better to unnerve us when she turns out to be coldblooded.

Limiting Phyllis’s dark past to what she did with Lola’s mother in the movie is a major improvement over the novel, where it turns out the Phyllis is a serial killer from way back. As a pulmonary nurse, before killing the first Mrs. Nirdlinger, she had already killed three children, making it appear they died of pneumonia. She did this because she was related to one of them and, as executrix, was able to take possession of the property herself. The other two children were killed just to keep the police from focusing on the one she made money off of. Then it turns out there were five mysterious deaths before that, two of which Phyllis profited from. And Lola will be next, so that Phyllis can get whatever she has as well.

But it gets worse. In the novel, Phyllis says she doesn’t hate her husband. As she agrees to go along with the plan to murder him, she says, “I haven’t any reason. He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman. I don’t love him, but he’s never done anything to me.”

Then comes a strange justification. She says, “He’s not happy. He’ll be better off—dead.” In a sense, she knows it’s not true, but she says it’s based on a strange notion she has:

“I know it’s not true. I tell myself it’s not true. But there’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness… Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself it’s terrible. But to me, it doesn’t seem terrible. It seems as though I’m doing something—that’s really best for him, if he only knew it. Do you understand me, Walter?”

Later in the movie, Lola says that before her father died, she saw Phyllis trying on a black hat, pinning on a veil, as if preparing for how she will look in mourning. But Lola sees more than that in the novel. She tells Walter she plans to go to the police and tell them what she knows:

“I’ll tell them everything they need to know. I told you there was plenty more, besides what I told you. I’ll tell them to ask her about the time I came in on her, in her bedroom, with some kind of foolish red silk thing on her, that looked like a shroud or something, with her face all smeared up with white powder and red lipstick, with a dagger in her hand, making faces at herself in front of a mirror….”

At the end of the novel, after Phyllis and Walter try to kill each other, Keyes doesn’t want the bad publicity of a trial, so he just puts them on a ship sailing south without either of them realizing the other one is on the ship too. When they meet each other, Phyllis suggests that they could be married, but not with any illusions about their having a future. But then she decides she has a different marriage in mind, saying the time has come “For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I’ll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I’ll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart.” Walter says he’ll give her away, meaning he will join her. There is a shark following the ship. They agree to wait until the moon is up so that they can see the dark fin of the shark when they dive into the water to meet their death. These are some of the last words Walter writes:

I’m writing this in the stateroom. It’s about half past nine. She’s in her stateroom getting ready. She’s made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks. She’s got that red thing on. It’s awful-looking. It’s just one big square of red silk that she wraps around her, but it’s got no armholes, and her hands look like stumps underneath it when she moves them around. She looks like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice for souls in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Instead of letting it be a story about a woman who has come to hate her husband and wants to kill him for the insurance money, as in the case of Ruth Snyder, Cain has turned the Phyllis of his novel into a fantastic monster. The movie wisely returns to the idea that Phyllis is just your ordinary psychopath, one that you or I might inadvertently find ourselves married to, and not some utterly deranged serial killer.

At first, all Walter was hoping for was to have an affair with Phyllis. But when he hears about her plan to get the accident policy on her husband without his knowing about it, Walter immediately realizes that she is dangerous, and he gets up and leaves, picking up his hat as he heads for the door. There follows a scene that many people miss, while others catch it, but think it is a goof. That night, as Walter broods over his situation with Phyllis, she shows up at his apartment. When he opens the door, she says, “You left your hat today.” A lot of people, including professional critics, think that Walter did leave his hat behind at her house. Others, having noticed that Walter picked up his hat on the way out the door, conclude that this is a mistake. However, it is obvious that Phyllis has no hat in her hand as she stands in the doorway.

What Phyllis is doing is amusing herself with the remark about the hat. If a man has recently met a woman and would like to see her some more, he may pretend to leave something behind at her home. We don’t wear hats so much any more, but an umbrella is a good substitute. Then the man can call her up the next day and say, “Did I leave my umbrella over at your place yesterday?” When she says that he did, he can then ask if it would be all right to drop by and pick it up. With a little luck, one thing will lead to another. Phyllis is alluding to that ruse by making believe she has his hat and is using it as an excuse to see him. In so doing, she is essentially saying, “We both know why I’m here.”

At least, we figure she is there to have sex with Walter. But during his confession on the Dictaphone, Walter says, “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. And I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?” That remark, “I didn’t get the woman,” always puzzled me. Didn’t he get the woman when she came over to his apartment, once before the murder, with the hat routine, and again after the murder, when Walter says Keyes will be watching her, and they will have to quit seeing each other for a while? We’re all used to scenes fading out in old movies, where we are supposed to imagine the man and woman having sex, and there was a fade out at a critical moment in the second visit to his apartment. Well, I finally figured that he meant that while they did have sex once or twice, he still didn’t get the whole woman. But you never do. That’s why they call it a piece. In the novel, however, it is clear that they did not have sex on either night that she came over to his place or at any other time. All they did was plan the murder. I should think a man would want to have sex with a woman before agreeing to kill her husband, but I’m just an armchair philosopher, so what do I know?

On the night she and Walter trick her husband into signing the application for the accident insurance, Walter hears him say he is taking a trip to Palo Alto. Walter tells Phyllis to get him to take the train. He knows that getting killed while riding a train is so rare that the $50,000 policy will pay off at twice that amount owing to a double indemnity clause in the policy, which would be over $1,800,000 adjusted for inflation. In the novel, Walter plans on murdering her husband on a train right from the start, without the slightest idea of how to get him on a train. The movie is better in having the possibility of an accident on a train just fall into their laps.

In the novel, Phyllis tells Walter that her husband wants her to go with him to Palo Alto, saying, “He’ll raise an awful fuss if I don’t go.” Walter dismisses that problem:

“Yeah? Listen, don’t give yourself airs. I don’t care if it’s a class reunion or just down to the drugstore, a man would rather go alone than with a wife. He’s just being polite. You talk like you’re not interested in his class reunion, and he’ll be persuaded. He’ll be persuaded so easy you’ll be surprised.”

“Well, I like that,” she says. (The woman who’s planning on killing her husband is indignant that he doesn’t want her company.)

“You’re not supposed to like it,” Walter replies. “But you’ll find out.”

By chance, Mr. Dietrichson breaks his leg. That too turns out to be to their advantage. On the night of the murder, Walter hides in the backseat of the car that Phyllis will use to drive her husband to the train station. In the novel, Walter says, “Believe me it’s an awful thing to kibitz on a man and his wife, and hear what they really talk about.” Just another one of Cain’s disparaging remarks about marriage, based on his personal experience, no doubt.

They kill her husband before he gets on the train. In the novel, Walter says, “I took one of the crutches and hooked it under his chin. I won’t tell you what I did then.” I guess Cain felt it would be indelicate to go into details about the way he used the crutch to break the man’s neck.

Then Walter pretends to be the husband and boards the train, jumping off soon after, before the train can pick up much speed, after which they dump the husband’s body on the tracks. Because Neff put his own leg in a phony cast and got on the train with the crutches, people were confident they had seen Dietrichson get on the train. As Keyes says later, the witnesses had the crutches to look at, so they never really saw the man at all.

In the novel, after Walter gets back to his bungalow, the enormity of what he has done begins to overwhelm him:

I dived for the bathroom. I was sicker than I had ever been in my life. After that passed I fell into bed. It was a long time before I could turn out the light. I lay there staring into the dark. Every now and then I would have a chill or something and start to tremble. Then that passed and I lay there, like a dope. Then I started to think. I tried not to, but it would creep up on me. I knew then what I had done. I had killed a man. I had killed a man to get a woman. I had put myself in her power, so there was one person in the world that could point a finger at me, and I would have to die. I had done all that for her, and I never wanted to see her again as long as I lived.

That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.

Eventually, Walter tells Phyllis that they will have to quit seeing each other for a while, until Keyes is through investigating. In the novel, he says, “That night I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed.” Perhaps the prayer went something like this: “Dear God, please don’t let Keyes find out that I killed Phyllis’s husband.”

All right, back to the movie. Suspecting that Mr. Dietrichson was murdered, Keyes realizes it would be easier to murder him before he got on the train, which is what happened, rather than kill him on the train. That means that Phyllis must have had a male accomplice pretend to be her husband. Keyes starts having her house watched. As a result, Walter and Phyllis have to stop seeing each other until the investigation is over. Phyllis’s stepdaughter, Lola, had a boyfriend, Nino Zachetti, but they broke up, and soon he and Phyllis start having an affair. Keyes concludes that Nino is the accomplice in the murder and calls off the surveillance. He tells Walter he is going to reject the claim, daring her to take it to court.

What follows from this point on seems to make no sense. Walter goes over to Phyllis’s house intending to kill her, and she slips a pistol under the cushion so that she can murder him. Let us consider the situation from Phyllis’s point of view. Unless we assume she is psychic, she does not know of Walter’s plans to kill her. So, what does she hope to gain by killing Walter? The police have already dropped the case, but if Walter is murdered, the police will not only investigate his death, but it might make them reconsider her husband’s death as well, since Walter supposedly sold him the policy. Furthermore, shooting Walter in her house will not only get blood all over the place, but she will then have to dispose of the body. What is she going to do, cut him up in the bathtub like the guy in Rear Window (1954), and then make several trips to the city dump with the body parts in a suitcase?

The prudent thing for her to do is to just sue the insurance company. If she wins, she can give Walter his cut and all will be well. If she does suspect Walter wants to kill her, then she should simply refuse to let him come over to her house. After all, he is not going to gun her down on Main Street. Therefore, it makes no sense for her to shoot Walter.

Now let us look at it from Walter’s point of view. By this point, Walter has obviously given up on getting his share of the money, because she cannot very well collect and split with him after he kills her. So, what does he hope to gain by killing Phyllis? All Keyes knows is that Phyllis has been seeing Nino, which means she has been having an affair with a younger man. Big deal. Keyes says he has investigated Nino’s movements on the night of the murder, and they cannot be accounted for. We later find out from Lola that he broke a date with her the night of the murder, claiming he was home sick. But that is not exactly evidence that will convict a man of murder. In any event, we know that Nino did not do it, so he is not going to get tripped up in a cross examination in court, as Keyes seems to think. With nothing more to go on, Keyes has little chance of successfully denying Phyllis’s claim in court, and it certainly would not be enough for the police to reopen the case. Walter should just continue to stay away from Phyllis. Whether she wins her case, and if she does, whether she splits the money with him, there is no point in killing her. And there is always the chance that she might win and pay him off anyway.

But let us assume that beyond all reason, Walter is afraid that enough would come out in the civil suit that would lead the police to reopen the investigation into the death of Phyllis’s husband, and make them suspect not Nino, but Walter. In that case, Walter should simply turn in his resignation at the insurance company and go to Mexico for a while. If Phyllis’s lawsuit does not lead to a new police investigation in which he becomes a suspect, he can always return to the United States later; if it does lead to a new investigation, and he does become a suspect, he can continue to hide out in Mexico. But his killing her will definitely cause the police to investigate. Walter’s plan is that Nino will be blamed for Phyllis’s murder. But Nino might have an alibi for that night. As it turns out, Nino was coming to see Phyllis just as Walter was leaving the house, but Walter could not know Nino was going to do that. Walter tells Phyllis, just before he kills her, that he knows Nino will be coming to see her in fifteen minutes with the cops right behind him, because it has been all set up. Now, how would he know that? And set up for what? If they plan on arresting him, they should just go to his apartment. Furthermore, Nino would have no motive for murdering her. If anything, the police might end up suspecting Walter. Therefore, it makes no sense for Walter to kill Phyllis.

Since Nino was coming over to see Phyllis, that means that if she had successfully killed Walter, Nino would have walked in the house and seen Walter’s corpse lying on the middle of the living room floor. And then what? Will Phyllis ask him to help her dispose of the body of the man that helped her kill her husband? How likely is he to go along with that? He was fine having sex with Phyllis, but I doubt that he would want to get mixed up in a couple of murders.

However, it is reasonable to assume that two people who have committed a murder and are afraid of getting caught might not be thinking clearly. In fact, if they had been thinking clearly, they would never have committed that murder in the first place. It is especially hard to believe that a man could have an affair with a married woman, conspire to kill her husband, and not have it occur to him that one of these days she may turn on him too. And so, I suppose that if people are foolish enough to commit such a murder, they would be foolish enough to think that killing their partner in crime would solve their problems. So, their behavior makes sense on an emotional level.

You really have to give those hormones credit!

Regarding Henry (1991)

In Regarding Henry, the title character (Harrison Ford) is a partner in a law firm. He is arrogant, ruthless, and demanding, as unpleasant at work as he is at home. Then he gets shot in the head during a holdup, and after a little therapy, becomes a really sweet, loving family man who realizes that when he was a lawyer he did things that were wrong.

This is not realistic. My guess is that if brain damage caused a personality change, it would more likely be for the worse. But stranger things have happened, so I suppose the combination of a bullet in the head and lack of oxygen could destroy the part of the brain that makes a man a jerk. The question is, regardless of how likely or unlikely such an event may be, why pick this particular scenario to base a movie on?

The head and the heart are the two major components of a man’s personality, and the question that has occurred to people over the years is, Which of the two is more important? Of course, it is not as though intelligence and a pleasant disposition are mutually exclusive, and that if you have one, you cannot have the other. There are doubtless many geniuses that are kind and loving, just as there are simpletons that are mean and cruel. But if you had to choose, which of the two would you want more of?

Movies often say that the heart is more important than the head. In A Chump at Oxford (1940), Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy find themselves at Oxford, where a bump on the head restores the intellect and character of the man Stan used to be, Lord Paddington, brilliant scholar and athlete. He is also arrogant and condescending, treating Ollie with contempt. Another bump on the head, however, turns Stan back into the good-natured simpleton that we are familiar with, much to Ollie’s delight. A couple of other movies that champion the heart over the head are Harvey (1950) and Forest Gump (1994).

On the other hand, if a man is a genius, a certain amount of unlikable personality traits will be tolerated. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, is often portrayed as austere and aloof. In Flight of the Phoenix (1965), Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) does not suffer fools gladly, but we suffer him gladly because he is so brilliant. And the eponymous character in the television show House (2004-2012) is often shown to be rude and obnoxious, but all is forgiven because we thrill at watching a superior intellect at work. Furthermore, we vicariously enjoy the arrogance of these characters, since we ourselves often chafe at having to be so darn humble and polite.

Needless to say, Regarding Henry comes down on the side of the heart. But as I said, I don’t think it is very realistic. A more likely outcome would be that a man like Henry would still be the same obnoxious person he was before, only less able to express himself.

This is not helped by the fact that the matter of their finances is never really addressed. Henry’s daughter Rachel (Kamian Allen) asks her mother Sarah (Annette Bening) if they are going to be poor, for which Sarah has no good answer. The advice she gets from a friend is not to tell anyone about the dire nature of their finances, but to go out with some friends and spend lots of money, as if keeping up appearances is the solution to Sarah’s problems. Sarah does have a job, they do find a less expensive place to live, and they eventually pull Rachel out of a private school, although the movie would have us believe that it is for emotional reasons rather than financial ones. In short, we do not have enough specifics to draw any definite conclusions about their finances, but I would have expected more drastic cutbacks in expenditures than that. So, when Henry resigns from his law firm, the sense of financial doom still seems to be hanging over them, even if the movie seems to be in denial about that.

The point is that our credulity is already strained by the premise that an obnoxious man would be transformed by brain damage into a wonderful person. The additional unreality of their financial situation pushes our ability to suspend disbelief just a bit too far.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Deeds (2002)

In 1935, Clarence Budington Kelland wrote a short story in serial form for The American Magazine entitled “Opera Hat.” This became the inspiration for the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, released the following year. The movie eventually gave rise to a television series from 1969 to 1970, and to a remake in 2002 under the name Mr. Deeds.

“Opera Hat”

In the first installment of “Opera Hat,” we are introduced to Longfellow Deeds, so named because his mother loved poetry. When he grew up, he became a poet himself, writing verse for greeting cards, from which he made a fair amount of money, although he had additional income from a business inherited from his father. He also learned to play the tuba, for that instrument was inherited from his grandfather, and thus played the tuba whenever a brass band was organized in Mandrake Falls, where he resided.

One day he is visited by a lawyer, one Lathrop Cedar, informing him that his uncle, Mr. Semple has died. As Deeds is the sole living relative, he is the heir to Mr. Semple’s estate, making Deeds a millionaire many times over. Cedar says, though without explanation, that it will be necessary for Deeds to move to New York, taking up residence in a mansion on Fifth Avenue.

It is further brought to Deeds’ attention that Mr. Semple was the president and major stockholder of the Continental Opera Company, and Deeds quite naturally is asked by the Board of Directors to continue in his place, especially since they expect him to continue subsidizing the opera, which always loses money. This doesn’t make sense to Deeds. Even today, the common man wonders why he must pay taxes to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports the kind of art he is not interested in, which includes opera, of course. But no matter how many times there has been a populist backlash against such funding, the elite always manage to triumph in the end. What the common man fails to understand is that these money-losing art forms confer a certain amount of dignity and prestige on him through the taxes he pays in their support, even while he seeks out entertainment by going to the movies or listening to country-western music.

Having arrived in New York, Deeds soon finds that while people belittle him for his greeting-card poetry, which has supported him comfortably in Mandrake Falls, respectable poems never make any money for the poets that compose them. It is further brought to Deeds’ attention that it is not the authors, poets, singers, and dancers that matter, for they are not “society,” and a man in Deeds’ position should not fraternize with them, a sin of which he has already been guilty three times over by that point in the story. These artists, he is informed, are just a means to an end, the end being the way they allow the upper class to display their superiority, such as by having a box in the opera house with which to impress their acquaintances.

In the end, Deeds decides to turn the Opera Company into a money-making business by having radio broadcasts of the operas, during which there will be commercials to sell soap. During the thirty-eight weeks when operas are not being performed, the opera house will hold amateur hours in which people will compete to be the bass, tenor, alto, and soprano in the next season’s operas. Also during this period, there will be “tabloid opera.” As Deeds points out, the biggest problem with opera is that “it’s too long between tunes.” His plan is to get rid of all that in-between stuff, keeping only the good parts, in which case each opera can be performed in half an hour. That way, people won’t get bored.

Complicating matters, however, is the fact that he is threatened by a lawsuit from a woman claiming to be Mr. Semple’s common-law wife. The woman is a ballerina, who claims to have had a daughter by Mr. Semple. And there is evidence in the form of letters where the word “wife” is used several times, although Deeds is suspicious since they are all typewritten. He wonders why men put such incriminating information in letters. While pondering the matter, it occurs to Deeds that men could avoid being compromised in this manner if they used the poetry in greeting cards to express their affection. He gets to work composing poems that speak of love, but in an ambiguous way, leaving the man a loophole in case he is sued for breach of promise.

The matter is complicated further when this ballerina is murdered. Deeds is determined to solve this mystery. In the end, it turns out that the ballerina was already secretly married to a man she was ashamed of. In contempt of her husband, she cuckolded him on a regular basis, for which reason he killed her. Not only did this demolish the lawsuit brought by her as Semple’s supposed common-law wife, but Deeds discovers his secretary, Mr. Bengold, had used Semple’s typewriter to compose those letters, and he is dismissed.

Along the way, Deeds had become acquainted with Simonetta Petersen, secretary of Madame Pomponi, a great soprano of the opera. He asks Simonetta to go to the opera with him, but when he arrives to pick her up, she asks him why he isn’t wearing an opera hat. He answers that it would be a symbol for a new way of life, which he is not ready to embrace, since the matter with the common-law wife was still pending, and he might end up back in Mandrake Falls. After solving the murder, he decides he wants to marry Simonetta, but he keeps fumbling at the proposal, so she finally just asks him to marry her. After an appropriate amount of kissing, he puts on his opera hat.

Before turning to the movie, which should be evaluated on its own terms, I nevertheless wish to point out the major differences between the short story and the movie. In the short story, as may be gleaned from the title, the way Deeds must deal with the opera is a major part of the story, whereas it is a minor plot point in the movie. And no murder takes place in the movie. Rather, the lawsuit concerning a common-law wife is dismissed by Deeds as a fraud in about five minutes, not to be heard of again. In “Opera Hat,” Cedar is an honest lawyer, whom Deeds still has in his employ at the end of the story. When they first meet in Mandrake Falls, he and Deeds carry on an intelligent conversation about the inheritance. There is no reporter out to write stories about Deeds in order to make fun of him. Deeds expresses no interest in seeing Grant’s tomb. It never occurs to him to give any of his money away. There is no sanity hearing. And, most important of all, Deeds never hits anyone, nor does he express any desire to do so.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

In the opening scene of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, we see an automobile moving along a winding road in the mountains at a high rate of speed before crashing through a fence and plunging over a cliff. Not knowing anything else about the man driving the car, we figure he was reckless, irresponsible, and got what he deserved. Then we get a montage of newspapers with big headlines above the fold, telling us that the man was Martin W. Semple, a financier worth twenty million dollars. We see newsboys selling papers to customers anxious to get a copy. As this is a Frank Capra movie with typical populist sentiments, the fact that Semple was rich is just one more reason we are not supposed to like him.

Adjusted for inflation, the value of the Semple estate in today’s dollars would be $377,000,000. But while that might be correct as far as purchasing power is concerned, in terms of what it represents in the mind of the public, it just isn’t enough. People wealthy enough nowadays to get that kind of attention from the media make that much money in a single year. So, when this movie was remade in 2002 as Mr. Deeds, the screenwriter knew he couldn’t simply adjust for inflation and let it go at that. Because the rich have gotten richer, the size of the estate had to reflect this new reality. As a result, that twenty-first century Mr. Deeds inherits forty billion dollars.

The newspaper says Semple died while he was on a tour of Italy. In a Frank Capra movie, good people live in small towns and hardly ever go anywhere, let alone vacation in some European country, so this guy Semple must have been decadent. Later in the movie, we find out he was quite a womanizer, sometimes having as many as twenty women in his house at one time, just for him, although his valet admits that he never knew what Mr. Semple did with them. Of course, twenty women is silly. But if the valet had said that Mr. Semple would sometimes have two women just for himself, the realistic possibilities that would bring to mind might have met with objections from the Hays Office.

The newspapers are anxious to find out who the heir to the Semple fortune is, but John Cedar, the executor of the estate, is not letting that information out. He and others that were trustees of Semple’s investments are guilty of embezzlement, and they need to get to the heir first so they can persuade him to allow them to continue in their present position as trustees, with Cedar having power of attorney. That way they can continue to cover up their crime.

The heir turns out to be Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), a country bumpkin living in a small town called Mandrake Falls. His first name is ironic, for he writes short poems for greeting cards. Cedar, Cornelius “Corny” Cobb (Lionel Stander), and a Mr. Anderson travel to Mandrake Falls as soon as they find out where Deeds lives. When they get there, they see a sign that is supposed to greet new arrivals to the town. With ill-disguised contempt, Cobb reads what it says: “Welcome to Mandrake Falls / Where the scenery enthralls / Where no hardship e’er befalls / Welcome to Mandrake Falls.” This is presumably a sample of Deeds’ poetry.

This sets up a paradox. We know that in this populist Capra film, we are supposed to dislike the elite of a big city; and that we are supposed to like the unsophisticated citizens of a small town. But viewed objectively, we know that we would roll our eyes and scoff at that piece of poetry, just as Cobb does.

Anyway, they are looking for Deeds, so they decide to ask the agent at the freight office where they can find him. What follows is a form of supposed humor based on the idea of taking what someone says in the narrowest sense of the words without consideration for what is ordinarily understood. As an example of what I mean, imagine that a teacher says to a student in the eighth grade to sit down, so the student immediately sits on the floor. When the teacher tells him to get off the floor, he stands on a chair. He thinks he is being funny. Some of his classmates may think so as well. Meanwhile, the teacher is thinking, “I need to find myself another job.”

Fortunately, most people grow out of this adolescent form of humor by the time they reach high school, but Frank Capra apparently never did. So, when Cedar asks the agent that is sorting packages in the freight office if he knows Longfellow Deeds, the agent answers that he does and then walks away. When the agent returns, Cedar says he wants to get in touch with him. The agent says he won’t have any trouble at all, and then walks away with another package. When Anderson asks him where Deed lives, the agent tells him where his house is, even though he knows Deeds is not home, but in the park.

At one point, Cobb says it must be a game he’s playing, much in the way the adolescent in my example is playing a game. But the agent is not playing a game. This is the way he thinks. Nor are we given to understand that he is the village idiot, but rather is typical of the citizens of Mandrake Falls. As I said previously, we know we are supposed to like small-town folks in a Capra movie, while disliking big-city sophisticates, but this sure is asking a lot.

Eventually, Deeds arrives home from the park, where his housekeeper tells him three men are waiting to talk to him. What follows is another form of supposed humor, which consists of an inability to carry on a conversation. That is, when someone says something to us, we are expected to respond in a way that recognizes what has just been said, and then continue with that line of thought. But when Cedar tells Deeds that he has just inherited twenty million dollars, he and his housekeeper start talking about lunch. The issue of lunch having been settled, Deeds starts playing his tuba. When Cedar reminds Deeds of the inheritance he just told him about, Deeds says, “I wonder why he left me all that money. I don’t need it.” The idea is that simple folks like Deeds, living in a small town, are so content with their lives that their happiness cannot be improved upon with additional money, no matter how much it is. Eventually, Cedar persuades him to come to New York with him, though he never gives him any reason why he should. Deeds agrees, saying he would like to see Grant’s tomb. When they get to New York, Deeds moves into the mansion Mr. Semple lived in, complete with servants.

In It Happened One Night (1934) and in Meet John Doe (1941), two other films directed by Frank Capra, there is a cynical reporter that is out to get a story on someone that is good and decent, but with whom the reporter ends up falling in love, and that device is used in this movie as well. Louise “Babe” Bennett (Jean Arthur) is a reporter who wants to write a series of stories about what a hick Deeds is. She tricks him into falling in love with her by pretending to be a damsel in distress, which has long been a fantasy of his, allowing her to get the inside information she needs.

Deeds keeps saying he wants to see Grant’s tomb, and eventually Babe takes him there. Babe says most people are disappointed, no doubt referring to the architecture, to the look of it. But Deeds gets all emotional thinking about what it represents, saying it all depends on what you see. When Babe asks him what he sees, he replies:

Me? Oh, I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great soldier. I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee with a broken heart, surrendering, and I can see the beginning of a new nation, like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as President. Things like that can only happen in a country like America.

The first thing we notice about this is Deeds’ emphasis on the fact that Ulysses S. Grant was not some city slicker that grew up in New York, but someone that supposedly grew up on a farm. I say “supposedly,” since a quick glance at Grant’s biography says nothing about his being a farm boy. Presumably, he did grow up in a small town, however, which is in keeping with the idea that growing up in a small town is good and wholesome. In fact, when Babe says she grew up in a small town too, we know that means her essential goodness will eventually come through, making her sorry for what she wrote about Deeds in the newspapers, and making her suitable for his future wife.

The Civil War had been fought less than a hundred years before this movie was made. Perhaps it had more significance for people back then than it does today. There is certainly no expressed desire to see Grant’s tomb in the 2002 remake of this movie. Our sentiments regarding the Civil War have changed as well. As we today see monuments to confederate generals being removed from the public square, and schools and military bases named after them being given new names, we are struck by Deeds’ reference to General Lee’s “broken heart” when he surrenders. Whereas today there is a tendency to refer to such men as traitors, back when this movie was made, the men that fought for the South were still thought of as basically good people, and the whole war was just an unfortunate misunderstanding among patriotic Americans. Deeds says that when he looks at Grant’s tomb, he sees thousands of marching men, which is an image that goes with the glory of war, when uniforms are cleaned and pressed, and men are still alive and whole.

Eventually, Deeds decides to help people who have become homeless during the Great Depression by giving them land to farm. And from what I gather from watching The Grapes of Wrath (1940), there should be plenty of farm land available, inasmuch as people like the Joad family had to abandon their farms during the Dust Bowl, becoming the very homeless that Deeds is worried about. In fact, it was a man that forced his way into Deeds’ house, threatening him with a gun, that gave him the idea. The man said he lost his farm after twenty years. He can’t find a job, and he has to stand in bread lines. It turns out that there are thousands just like him, men and their families going hungry because they lost their farms. So, if they lost their farms, whether on account of the Dust Bowl or some other reason, what good will it do to give them another farm? Won’t they just go broke all over again? But the agrarian myth of the goodness of the yeoman farmer as the backbone of America is strong enough in the minds of people like Capra to make them oblivious to that contradiction. And besides, it fits right in with Deeds’ sentimental notions about the way Grant grew up on a farm.

Anyway, to prevent the money from being given away in this fashion, Cedar makes a deal with a relative of Deeds to have Deeds declared mentally incompetent, giving the relative the inheritance, from which Cedar will take his cut. At the same time, Deeds finds out that Babe is the reporter that has been writing all those stories making fun of him. She had planned on telling him how she had deceived him, and he might have forgiven her. But in standard melodramatic fashion, he finds out about her deception from Cobb, and thus feels utterly betrayed, not believing anything she says. Before returning to Mandrake Falls, he starts giving away the money to all those homeless farmers, but some men from the sheriff’s office arrive with a warrant for Deeds’ arrest on the grounds that he is insane. He becomes so depressed as a result that he refuses to defend himself at the sanity hearing that will determine whether he should be kept in a mental institution.

During that hearing, Cedar calls as a witness Dr. Emil Von Holler, an Austrian psychiatrist, who speaks with an accent. He is presently in America on a lecture tour. In other words, Cedar is not calling, say, a Dr. Jake Jones from an American university to testify about Deeds’ mental state, but someone from the same country where Hitler was born, a country that would soon become part of the Anschluss. So, we know what we are supposed to think of this guy. He explains the difference between the mood swings of a normal person, which are confined to a narrow range, and those of a manic-depressive, which lurch from one extreme to another. This is the one part of the movie that actually makes sense and is realistic. Speaking as a layman, it seems to me to be the correct diagnosis.

If a normal person inherited as much money as Deeds has, he might give a portion of it to charity, but he would never give it all away, even if he were perfectly happy before he got the inheritance. But I gather that is what a manic-depressive might do when he is in one of his manic phases. I had a neighbor once who said her husband had been diagnosed as being manic-depressive. She said that one day he picked up a hitchhiker and gave him the car. Fortunately, it was found abandoned a few days later.

Furthermore, if a normal person were placed in a mental institution against his will by people trying to get possession of his money, he would get a lawyer and defend himself. He would not sit there listlessly at his own hearing, refusing to utter a word, even if he were despondent on account of his having been betrayed by a woman he thought was the damsel in distress that he had dreamed about. But a manic-depressive, in one of his extreme states of melancholy, could reach a state of depression so dark that he would not care if he were institutionalized for the rest of his life.

We are supposed to reject this diagnosis on the part of the psychiatrist, however. Instead, we are supposed to think of Deeds as a saint, someone who is too good for this world, whose despondency is the result of being overwhelmed by a realization of how evil other people are. And yet, even if the diagnosis is correct, that in itself would be no reason to confine someone to a mental institution. Cedar, representing Deeds’ relatives, who want to get possession of the fortune, argues that Deeds needs to be locked up because his scheme to give all his money away, making farmers out of the homeless, threatens to cause civil unrest and undermine the very foundations of our nation. “Our government is fully aware of its difficulties,” he continues, “and can pull itself out of its economic rut without the assistance of Mr.Deeds or any other crackpot.”

The association of this corrupt lawyer with the idea of that it is up to the government to solve our economic problems rather than private citizens, however rich they may be, is in keeping with Frank Capra’s politics. Being a conservative Republican, he was opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, and this was his way of besmirching those that advocate government intervention in an economic crisis. It is the wont of conservatives, as they inveigh against putting people on the public dole, to praise the work of private charities, to which they are quick to tell you they have contributed so much of their time and money. To hear them tell it, these charities used to meet all the needs of the poor until government handouts spoiled everything by making people think their own private contributions were unnecessary. Of course, Capra was under no illusions that there was someone like Longfellow Deeds that would end the Great Depression with his largesse. Rather, Deeds is the personification of individual initiative, of the common man and his desire to help his neighbor exaggerated for dramatic effect.

The idea that the eleemosynary excess of Longfellow Deeds would cause civil unrest is preposterous, and no court would take such an argument seriously. Deeds’ unbridled philanthropy might be a justification for having a court-appointed fiduciary take control of the inherited fortune for Deeds’ protection, although I doubt it. But it would be in no way a reason for locking someone up in an insane asylum after you’ve already taken his money away from him.

On the other hand, what would justify Deeds’ being institutionalized, but doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves, is that he routinely assaults people: a lawyer claiming to represent Mr. Semple’s common-law wife; two poets in a restaurant; a photographer, in a scene we only read about in the newspaper; two psychiatrists, in a scene we only hear about from Cedar; Madame Pomponi, an operatic diva, along with other guests at Deeds’ house; and Chuck Dillon, a man back in Mandrake Falls to whom he gave a black eye, according to testimony given by the Falkner sisters. Now, anyone who goes around pushing and punching people is either going to be arrested and put in prison or confined to a mental institution for the criminally insane.

And that doesn’t even include the people Deeds threatens to punch but never does. In one scene, he and Babe are on some kind of open-air transport, where he hears two women laughing at what they read about him in the newspaper, though they are not aware Deeds is present and within earshot. He says, “If they were men, I’d knock their heads together.” Then he turns around and looks at a man who had said nothing, but is only reading a newspaper. Deeds turns away and then turns back and glares at the man again, almost as if he is so furious he wants to hit him in the face. His hostility is unnerving. But it is part of the populist ideology that there is something clean and honest about hitting someone with your fists, as opposed to the biting humor, the irony, and the cruel wit of the city elite.

Because evidence of the assaults are interspersed with the goofy stuff Deeds does, such as playing the tuba while people are trying to talk to him, feeding doughnuts to a horse while asking the horse if he wants a cup of coffee, jumping on a fire engine, walking in the rain without a hat, and stripping down to his underwear in public, shouting, “Back to nature!” the effect is to make the assaults seem as harmless and frivolous as the goofy stuff.

Also, the assaults are minimized by the way the are introduced as evidence at the hearing. With only one exception do we hear from a victim of an assault, to wit, Madame Pomponi, the operatic diva. Because Deeds has also inherited the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors that promotes the opera, Pomponi arranged for a big party at the Deeds mansion for all those associated with the opera. But Deeds got fed up with them and “threw them out.” It is hard to know just how literally we are supposed to understand this. We can imagine Pomponi and the other guests being pushed out the door when Deeds decided to get rid of them.

In the more serious cases, we only hear from witnesses to the assault rather than the victims. For example, instead of bringing the Falkner sisters to New York to testify, among other things, that Deeds gave Chuck Dillon a black eye when he beat him up, Cedar could have brought Dillon himself to testify, but he didn’t. Instead of having a waiter testify as to the assault of some poets at a restaurant for the literati, Cedar could have subpoenaed the poets themselves, but he didn’t. Cedar points to the two psychiatrists on the panel, seated next to the judge, saying that they were violently attacked by Deeds, but he does not have them take the stand and testify to the assault themselves. Needless to say, these secondhand reports at the hearing do not have nearly the impact that testimony from the victims themselves would have, especially if we had been able to see Dillon’s black eye or the swollen lip of one of the poets.

Just as the judge and his associates presiding over the hearing are about to confine Deeds to a mental institution, Babe jumps up and gives an impassioned plea in his defense, during which it comes out that she is in love with him. Her editor backs her up. Then Cobb comes to his defense, followed by outbursts from the farmers sitting in the courtroom. This inspires Deeds to defend himself at last, taking the stand.

Now, you might think he would apologize for hitting people, explaining his behavior in that regard. But no, he begins by explaining why he plays the tuba, saying it helps him think. He compares this to nervous behavior exhibited by others in the courtroom, like doodling or biting one’s nails. This goes on for two-and-a-half minutes. At this point, Cedar objects, and you think to yourself, “All right, now he’s going to change the subject to the way Deeds goes around punching people in the face.” Instead, he sticks to the goofy stuff: “Let him explain his wanderings around the streets in underclothes, his feeding doughnuts to horses!”

And so now we now have to listen to Deeds justify his feeding doughnuts to a horse and his running around in his underwear, which he easily dismisses as the result of his being drunk for the first time in his life. Then he points out that he read in the newspaper that Cedar’s son had been doing silly stuff while he was drunk. Tu quoque!

Then Deeds turns to the Falkner sisters. They were the ones that testified to Deeds behavior back in Mandrake Falls, saying he was “pixilated,” which meant that he was balmy. They are portrayed as silly, old women who had to sit on the witness stand together because they are so timid. It turns out that they live in the house owned by Deeds, and that they don’t have to pay rent. After pointing this out, Deeds asks them if they still think he is pixilated. They say that he is. In fact, they say that everyone in Mandrake Falls is pixilated except them. In fact, they say the judge is pixilated too. But what Deeds does not refer to in cross examining the Falkner sisters is their testimony about how he beat up Chuck Dillon back in Mandrake Falls.

Then the judge turns to the serious subject. No, not the stuff about where he goes around hitting people. The judge seems oblivious to that too. He wants to know about Deeds’ fantastic idea of giving away his inheritance. Deeds makes two points. The first is that the money has just made him miserable, what with all the vultures trying to get at that money. The second is that he believes that those that have a lot should share with those that have so little.

And so, during Deeds’ defense, the subject of the assaults never comes up. But then, having concluded his defense, he says there is one more thing he wants to do. At this point, he punches Cedar so hard that it knocks him out. Surely, the judge and the other two members of the panel can’t overlook this assault. They retire to consider the matter. When they return, the judge declares that not only is Longfellow Deeds sane, but also that he is the sanest person that has ever been in his courtroom. The case is dismissed.

Suffice it to say that much in this movie is unrealistic. The real question is, what is it about this movie that people like? We are not like Longfellow Deeds, nor would we want to be like him. Oh, we might want to have his wealth once he inherited it, and a man might wish he were tall and handsome like Gary Cooper, but take away his money and his looks, and we wouldn’t want to trade places with him at all. Nor would we want to live where he did, in Mandrake Falls. He is a virginal bachelor who never married because he dreamt of saving a lady in distress, a naïve yokel living in a small town, where everyone seems a little dotty. Apparently, people like the idea that there are places like Mandrake Falls, even though they would not like to live there themselves and would not fit in if they did. It is one of those adorable cultures, like the Quakers in Friendly Persuasion (1956) or the hippie commune of Easy Rider (1969), that people regard with affection, much in the way parents will smile lovingly as they watch their children at play. It is the idea that people like Longfellow Deeds live in towns like Mandrake Falls that people find appealing, even though they have no desire to be like him or live where he does. You wouldn’t even want to be around someone as prone to violence as he is, unless, of course, he happened to have twenty million dollars and be in one of his manic moods.

Mr. Deeds (2002)

In producing a remake of a classic movie, thought must be given to justifying its existence. For some, it is sufficient justification that the movie will be in widescreen and in color, for a lot of people don’t like old, black-and-white movies. Another justification might be that it will be set contemporaneously, attuned to present-day sensitivities. Both of these Mr. Deeds manages at achieve. Perhaps to further justify its existence, those that produced this movie decided to modify the tone. Although there is quite a bit of silliness in the original, Mr. Deeds takes silliness to a whole new level.

Deeds (Adam Sandler) does punch some people in this movie too, but in the context of this hyper-silliness, we never wonder why he isn’t arrested, or at least sued, as someone with forty billion dollars surely would be. However, there was one character in this movie I was hoping Deeds would punch: John McEnroe.

When I was in college in the 1960s, I took tennis to satisfy my physical education requirement. We were told that tennis was a gentleman’s sport. For example, if a judge accidentally called a ball outside, when the tennis player on that side of the net could see that it was really inside, it was not uncommon for him to purposely stand back and let the next ball go, thereby cancelling the point that was unfairly given to him. But then along came John McEnroe. I don’t know if he was the first tennis player to be rude and obnoxious, but he was definitely the worst. Although he retired many years ago, tennis has the McEnroe taint on it to this day. It has not been the same since. But much to my chagrin, Deeds never puts his fist in the face of John McEnroe.

Whereas everyone in the original movie was white, this movie makes the required gestures to ethnicity. We see Deeds carrying an elderly black man across the street in Mandrake Falls. And when he decides to give his money away, it is to the United Negro College Fund. Finally, whereas the lawsuit involving a common-law wife in “Opera Hat” was a fraud, complicated by a murder; and whereas it was also a fraud in the original movie, though quickly dispensed with; in Mr. Deeds, there really is a woman that gave birth to a child by Preston Blake, uncle of Longfellow Deeds.

Based on information in his diary, discovered by Babe (Wynona Ryder), this woman is an Hispanic maid that worked in the Blake Media Building where Blake had his office. Blake had sex with this woman one night while working late, and nine months later, she had a baby. That child turns out to be Emilio Lopez (John Turturro), Deeds’ butler.

I say “Hispanic,” but there is some puzzling dialogue in this regard. At one point in the movie, when Cedar (Peter Gallagher) refers to Lopez as being Puerto Rican, Lopez replies, “I hail from Spain, sir.” However, Lopez later says that he never knew who his father was, and his mother died while giving birth to him. So, who told him he was from Spain? For that matter, why does he speak with an Spanish accent? Did he pick that up in a foster home? And by what coincidence did he end up being Blake’s servant upon becoming an adult? And as long as I’m nitpicking, why didn’t the maid come to Blake six weeks later, saying, “I’m pregnant. What are we going to do?” There is nothing in his diary to indicate he was aware she was going to have a child. Well, regardless of the answers to those questions, Lopez inherits all the money, though giving a billion to Deeds as he and Babe head back to Mandrake Falls to get married and live happily ever after.

There is no sanity hearing for Deeds in this remake, although there might need to be one for the people that made this movie.

A Social Security Miscellany

Most of the Republicans running for the presidency want to cut Social Security. In fact, it is easier to list the ones that say they do not want to cut Social Security: Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump.

As far as the Democratic candidates go, things look pretty good. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley want to increase the Social Security benefit. Hillary Clinton was pretty noncommittal about Social Security in 2008, which was worrisome, but I think we can put her down as saying she is opposed to cutting Social Security today.

This is especially good news considering how grim things have been during Obama’s presidency. He started off with the Cat Food Commission, and then threatened us with a Grand Bargain, followed by attempts at sequester giveaways. It was called “showing leadership.” After promising in no uncertain terms that he would not reduce the COLA for Social Security by using the chained CPI the way John McCain wanted to do during his 2008 campaign for president, Obama soon started offering to use chained CPI in his negotiations with the Republicans, and even unilaterally included it in his budget in 2013. And this was after Joe Biden promised unequivocally in 2012 that there would be no cuts to Social Security during a second Obama administration. Yet we heard not a peep from Biden when Obama started pushing the chained CPI right after being reelected. Technically, Biden’s promise was kept, but that was in spite of the efforts of the Obama administration, not because of them. Even Nancy Pelosi was arguing that using the chained CPI would not be a cut, but only a more realistic measure of inflation that would strengthen the program.

But that seems to be in the past. Now it is only the Republicans we have to worry about. Collectively, they propose four different ways to cut benefits: raise the retirement age, reduce the cost-of-living adjustment, means test the program, and privatize it. All the different ways of cutting Social Security are bad, but the chained CPI is the most insidious. It can be characterized as just a statistical adjustment to bring the COLA in line with actual inflation, which is why so many Democrats have been in favor of it, thinking they could sleaze it right past us.

To see what effect the chained CPI would have in the future, we might consider what effect it would have had in the past. In 1975, the government started automatically making cost-of-living adjustments to the Social Security benefit based on the CPI-W, which tracks the CPI so closely that we need not worry about the difference. The average Social Security check today is $1,332. During the 40 years since 1975, annualized inflation has been 3.8%. So, adjusted for inflation, the equivalent Social Security check in 1975 would have been about $300. The difference between the chained CPI and the CPI-W varies, but it averages around 28 basis points (or 0.28 of a percentage point). Therefore, had the chained CPI been in effect since 1975, the average COLA would have been 3.52%. That hypothetical $300 check in 1975 would have been increased to $1,197 today. So, those who say that the chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation must be deeply chagrined at the way the average Social Security beneficiary is ripping off the government by receiving an undeserved extra amount of $135 every month.

Needless to say, there are those who argue that not only does the CPI (or CPI-W) not overstate inflation, but it actually understates it, especially for people on Social Security. Martin O’Malley has proposed using the CPI-E, because it more closely tracks the cost of living for the elderly. The difference between this and the CPI-W also varies, but the CPI-E tends to be more than the CPI-W by about 10 basis points (or 0.10 of a percentage point).

To settle this issue, I hereby introduce into this statistical analysis an anecdote, a much maligned form of evidence. As anecdotes go, however, I think this one is pretty good. In 1975, I was living in a large one-bedroom apartment near downtown Houston. In 1981, I moved to a very similar kind of apartment in the same area, and I have lived there ever since. I use the cost to live in such an apartment as my personal measure of inflation because rent (including utilities) is a large part of my budget, is easy to keep track of, is a necessity rather than a luxury, and is of consistent quality (my apartment is older than it used to be, so the quality is a little less, but I won’t quibble). In 1975, my rent was $175 per month. Today, my rent is $1,030. This means that the annualized rate of increase in my rent over the last 40 years has been 4.53%. In short, according to my anecdotal measure of inflation, the CPI understates inflation by 73 basis points (or 0.73 of a percentage point).

Honorable mention in this debate must go to Ted Cruz, who wants to use the CPI – 1 to determine the COLA for Social Security, because he says that the CPI overstates inflation by 1 percentage point. Therefore, instead of an annualized COLA of 3.8% over the last 40 years, it should have been 2.8%. The hypothetical check in 1975 of $300 would today be $905 instead of that $1,332 check that those greedy geezers cash every month.

The Republican frontrunner is Donald Trump, who, as noted above, is opposed to cutting Social Security, so that is two points in his favor (but subtract a point because he wants to partially privatize it). But I doubt that he will win the nomination, and if he does, I doubt that he will win the election. So, Mike Huckabee aside, if one of the other fifteen Republicans wins the nomination and then the election, his coattails will probably increase the Republican presence in Congress by enough to facilitate cuts to Social Security by various means, including the chained CPI.

Republicans have always hated Social Security and wanted to kill it or at least cut it, going all the way back to 1935. What is remarkable today is how many of the candidates are being so forthright in their eagerness to make these cuts. One would think that the self-interest of the voters would preclude that sort of thing. Unfortunately, short-term self-interest and long-term self-interest are two very different things, and that is what the Republicans are counting on.

The Social Security Trust Fund is projected to run out of money in about twenty years. The only alternative to a benefit cut to bring the program into balance is a tax increase. “What would you rather have,” the Republicans are asking the voter, “a benefit cut in the future or a tax increase right now?” Sad to say, there are a lot of people for whom the prospect of living in poverty when they are old just does not instill the same horror as having a little more taken out of their paycheck today. It is for this reason that not even the Democrats running for president have suggested increasing the payroll tax. Instead, Sanders and O’Malley have advocated increasing the cap on the payroll tax, and Hillary, with her usual caution, says she is receptive to the idea. The Republicans will characterize this proposal as typical class warfare, another soak-the-rich scheme of the Democrats.

While Republicans shrewdly exploit the short-term self-interest of the electorate, which gives too much weight to the present over the future, these same Republicans conveniently assume the very opposite in justifying the cuts they want to make. They assure seniors that the cuts will not affect them, but only those below, say, the age of fifty. (Of course, that would not be true if the chained CPI were to be used for the COLA, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.) The idea is that by proposing changes that affect only people who are younger, Republicans would be giving those young people plenty of time to make adjustments. In other words, those younger voters, the very people who would let loose with a FICA scream if they saw a few more dollars being taken out of their paycheck owing to an increase in the payroll tax, will prudently set those same dollars aside and invest them wisely once they are informed of future benefit cuts.

Few people openly embrace the idea of paternalism. It suggests that some people, though they are adults, yet they must be treated like children who do not know what is best for them, while others must take the role of their parents and make decisions for them. Republicans especially like to vilify big government in this light, saying that it is presumptuous for the government to think it knows better than you do what is good for you. Admittedly, paternalism does not make a good fit with the ideals of democracy, liberty, and equality.

But the fact remains that there is a need for paternalism, for many people are indeed like children. No matter how much money they make, they will spend it all, living paycheck to paycheck. And then, not satisfied to spend today with no thought of the future, they will even borrow from that future so they can spend even more today. If they have an IRA or a 401k plan, long before they reach the age at which they should be able to retire, they will have borrowed against it or emptied it our entirely. Even those who are more responsible and prudent will find themselves beset with the imperatives of the present. The more money one has, the more others seem to need it. Those who cannot be tempted by frivolous expenditure may find themselves emptying out their bank account for the sake of someone they love.

That is the beauty of Social Security. Money is taken away from people before they have a chance to spend it. No matter how foolish they are, they cannot squander it, and they cannot be sued for it. No matter how great the need is of some loved one, they cannot borrow against it. But the need for Social Security, its ability to protect people from their own worst instincts, may be undone by those very instincts if they lead voters to put a Republican in the White House who will immediately move to cut Social Security, and then use the savings for another tax cut.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Before reviewing Odds Against Tomorrow in particular, it will be worthwhile to consider its place in the history of the movies when it comes to depicting black crime.

African American Criminals in the Movies

Prior to 1960, movies in which we saw an African American committing a crime were rare. There were, of course, those movies featuring an all black or mostly black cast, such as Hallelujah (1929) and The Emperor Jones (1933), not to mention those low-budget films like Underworld (1937) and Dark Manhattan (1937). Since these movies featured mostly black actors, it was to be expected that the bad guys would be black along with most everyone else.

Native Son was an important novel of the twentieth century, but no American studio would touch it. A low-budget version was made in Argentina in 1951, in which Bigger Thomas was played by Richard Wright, who was also the author of the novel. Bigger is a black man who commits several crimes, including murder. In the novel, Bigger rapes his girlfriend Bessie before he murders her, but the rape is not in the movie. For a black man in the movies, rape is always a worse crime than murder. In the movies referred to in the previous paragraph, there are murders. Usually, it is one black man killing another black man, although in The Emperor Jones, Paul Robeson, while on a chain gang, kills a white guard by hitting him in the head with a shovel. The actual blow, however, is snipped out of the film. We see Robeson rear back with the shovel, and then we see the guard lying still on the ground. But in any event, there are no rapes in any of these films.

When it came to movies made within the Hollywood studio system, however, we seldom saw a black man commit a crime prior to 1960. One of the men that attack Scarlett on the bridge near shanty town in Gone With the Wind (1939) was black, but he was a minor character, briefly seen, and with no speaking part. We may see a black man who is doing time, as in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), from which a crime may be inferred, but the crime itself is never seen. In The Defiant Ones (1958), the crime is described, but again, it is not seen. Of course, even then, that for which Sidney Poitier’s character, Noah Cullen, was convicted makes him a sympathetic figure: he hit a white man that pulled a gun on him while trying to evict him from his farm. And on top of that, we really know we are supposed to like Noah when we find out he had a five-year-old child when he was arrested. In real life, evil men have children just like everyone else, but evil men in the movies usually do not have preadolescent children. (One exception would be The Prince and the Pauper (1937).) In other words, Noah is not the typical criminal in a movie that the audience wants to see pay for his crime, either through imprisonment or death.

Technically speaking, we do see Noah and John “Joker” Jackson (Tony Curtis) commit two minor crimes while escaping from a prison farm: they break into the general store of a turpentine camp in hopes of getting some food and some tools to break the chain that holds them together; and then they hit some guy while trying to get away after the noise they made breaking into the store wakes up the men in that camp.

In his Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Donald Bogle gives a reason why, for several decades, there were so few black criminals in movies having the cachet of a major Hollywood studio: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) presented the “brutal, black buck” so vividly, creating such a controversy, that no one would dare do anything like that again. From then on, “the Negro could not be depicted in the guise of an out-and-out villain.” Instead, he goes on to say, the black male was pretty much relegated to comic roles: “Not until more than a half-century later, when Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) appeared, did sexually assertive black males make their way back to the screen.”

It is to be noted that Sweetback does not rape anyone or even threaten to do so, unlike Gus and the other black men in The Birth of a Nation, who try to rape white women, but are prevented from doing so. There is even an unwillingness to make a movie in which a black man rapes a black woman, although Black Caesar (1973) provides us with an example of that. According to Bogle, just emphasizing a black man’s sexuality was too threatening all by itself. That is why no studio would provide funding for Sweetback. The actual “crimes” in this movie consist of his beating up two white cops and later killing a couple of others, though they all deserved what they got.

It would not be until Death Wish II (1982) that an African American rapes a white woman in a movie. Charles Bronson reprises his role as Paul Kersey, who is still taking care of his daughter, devastatingly traumatized by being raped in the original Death Wish (1974). She is raped again in this sequel, but this time by an African American. However, his skin is light, so as to lessen the effect. Two dark-skinned African Americans rape the housekeeper, but she is played by Silvana Gallardo, who was of Venezuelan, Sicilian, Cuban and Native American descent. In that way, the color difference is lessened as well.

Regarding color difference, Kersey’s daughter, Carol, is played in the sequel by Robin Sherwood, a brunette. Her a dark aspect, at least as to her hair color, also helped to lessen the interracial contrast. This device of minimizing the color difference would seem to have been completely set aside in The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck (1988), where the raped woman is played by Kathy Shower, who is as white and blond they come. She is raped by what appears to be an African American, except that he is not an American, and he is apparently not of African descent either. Rather, he is a cannibal in the jungles of Sri Lanka, presumably making him Asian. So, the device of lessening the color difference in this case is applied to the rapist.

In Switchback (1997), Danny Glover plays an African American serial killer, which is unique as far as I know. And yet, this stirred no controversy. But if we had also seen him raping the white women he killed, which often happens with serial killers, the movie would have caused a riot, if it ever managed to get shown in the theaters at all.

An unusual item for our consideration is Deep in My Heart (1999), which was based on a true story, in which a white woman is raped by a black man in the early 1960s. It’s a made-for-television movie, so naturally there is no explicit scene. We see a man grab a woman at night on a dark street and force her to the ground. Then we see her lying there afterwards. It’s so dark that we only know that he is an African American because she tells her husband she was raped by a “colored.”

During the rape scene and its aftermath, we don’t hear the sort of background music you would expect, grim and discordant. No, what we hear is ethereal music, almost blessing the occasion. After telling her husband what happened, this woman, who soon will be the mother of the child of the man that raped her, gets on her knees, removes the Rosary hanging from a crucifix, and begins praying, jumping right to the prayer to Mary, the supreme mother in Christianity, especially for Catholics.

There are other sentimentalizing aspects about this rape. In narrating the story many years later, the woman, played by Anne Bancroft, says that she had just had a baby four months earlier. We tend to be sentimental about women that are mothers of infants. Furthermore, she tells us that she was still breastfeeding. Logically, it would not seem to matter how she sees to her baby’s nourishment, but we are informed about this because there is a presumption that mothers that breastfeed are more loving and caring than those that don’t. When she gets pregnant, her husband is so sweet and wonderful that he wants to keep the baby, even if it isn’t his. When it turns out to be the baby of the black man that raped her, she decides to give it up for adoption, thinking the child, a girl she names Barbara, will be better off that way.

Much melodrama follows, involving foster parents and then adoptive parents, followed by Barbara’s successful search for her birth mother when she grows up, with recriminations and then reconciliation. In then end, Barbara’s extended family, including her own children, are all together, posing for a picture. The only family member not there is her father, the rapist. But given the overall tone of this movie, it wouldn’t have surprised he if he had shown up for the picture too, asking for forgiveness and being welcomed with open arms.

The point is that the rape of a white woman by a black man in this movie is not depicted as something evil, but more like a seemingly unfortunate, natural event, one which turns out to be for the best in the end. It reminds me of what Richard Mourdock said during a debate in 2012, while running as the Republican candidate for Senator of Indiana, when asked if he was in favor of allowing a woman to have an abortion in the case of rape or incest:

I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

Deep in My Heart was directed by Anita W. Addison. Whether she meant for this movie to express a pro-life attitude similar to that of Mourdock, I cannot say. But as she was African American herself, it seems reasonable to suppose that she made this movie to push back against white fear of black lust, which regards the rape of a white woman by a black man as one of life’s worst horrors.

Needless to say, this belief that a rape was part of God’s divine plan would be harder to accept if the woman was also murdered. Returning to Native Son, it is noteworthy that the 1986 and 2019 versions of this novel omitted both the rape and the murder of Bessie. There is still a great deal of reluctance to portray a black man doing something so evil, even if it does take place as part of a story that is supposed to elicit sympathy and understanding for African Americans.

Actually, the decision not to include the rape and murder of Bessie in these last two movie versions probably transcends the general reluctance to portray a black man in that way. Those who produced these two versions undoubtedly thought that the accidental killing of Mary, the daughter of the man who hired Bigger to be the family’s chauffeur, would have been enough to communicate the terror a black man might have felt in his situation. But I dare say even the African Americans in the audience might have found themselves losing all sympathy for Bigger were they to have seen him rape and murder his girlfriend, let alone those of us that might have a blind spot in these matters on account of being white.

In general, black criminals in the movies are usually motivated by money or revenge. Perversion and cruelty are motives mostly reserved for white criminals.

Odds Against Tomorrow

As far as I can tell, aside from the movies with a mostly black cast, the first mainstream movie made after The Birth of a Nation in which an African American character is actually seen committing a major crime is Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). But a heavy price had to be paid for that privilege. The black criminal is contrasted with a white criminal in a manner so simplistic that it is suitable only as a lesson for children in Sunday school.

There are two main characters: Earle Slater, who is white, and Johnny Ingram, who is black. Over and over, throughout this movie, we are shown how Earle is bad and Johnny is good. Therefore, white people are not superior to black people. Therefore, racism is wrong.

Using Robert Ryan to play Earle gives the movie a head start in making its point, inasmuch as Ryan had often played unlikable characters, and had played a bigot in both Crossfire (1947) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). In the opening scene, a group of children are playing, and a little black girl accidentally runs into Earle. He picks her up and calls her a pickaninny. (He continues to use derogatory racist terms disparaging African Americans throughout the movie.) Then he goes into a hotel. He is rude to the clerk, who is white, but is even ruder to the elevator operator, who is black, refusing to respond to his attempts at casual conversation. When he gets to the room he is going to, ex-cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley) offers Earle a chance to be part of a bank robbery. During the conversation, we find out that Earle has an explosive temper, which goes with the fact that he has served two stretches in prison, one for assault with a deadly weapon, and one for manslaughter, which he later says he enjoyed. Earle is reluctant to take the job when he finds out he will be working with a black man.

After he leaves, Johnny arrives. Johnny is played by Harry Belafonte. He is really nice to those same children Earle saw earlier, and he is nice to the elevator operator, and he is nice to Dave Burke. Gosh, he’s nice! During their easy-going, polite conversation, it turns out that Johnny is basically law-abiding, but he plays the horses and is in debt. He is reluctant to take a job robbing a bank, but eventually agrees to because he needs the money to pay off a loan shark.

Johnny is sexually respectable. He is a divorced man who supports his ex-wife with alimony. He is still in love with her. Earle is supported by Lorry (Shelley Winters), a woman he is shacked up with. He cheats on her.

Johnny is a wonderful father to his daughter, and is happy to babysit her when his ex-wife needs him to. When Lorry asks Earle to babysit the neighbor’s child, he becomes angry and rude, and he refuses to do it.

I noted above that one of the ways a movie guides us into liking a criminal is by giving him a young child. That is why it is Johnny and not Earle that has the young daughter.

In addition to Johnny’s being a better person than Earle regarding their moral qualities, Johnny is also smarter. When there is a snag in the plan to rob the bank, Johnny is the one who figures out a solution.

Just before the holdup, the three men separately kill time, waiting for nightfall. Johnny is sitting by a river when suddenly he sees what appears to be a white baby floating in the water. He is alarmed and runs over to rescue it. But it is just a doll. Johnny is relieved.

While Earle is sitting in his car, he sees a cute little bunny rabbit. He smiles as he gets out his shotgun. When the bunny tries to run away, Earle shoots it just for fun.

The only thing that makes this movie tolerable is that it is built around a bank heist, which eventually takes place, but it all goes bad. When Dave gets shot several times by the police, Earle is worried that Dave will talk when the police get their hands on him, possibly getting him to give up his accomplices. Johnny, on the other hand, cares about Dave and tries to save him. When Dave shoots himself in the head, Earle is happy, but Johnny is sad.

In the end, Earle and Johnny end up killing each other, blowing up a bunch of tanks with flammable liquid in the process, leaving only their charred bodies behind. The police are unable to tell which one is which, because now Earle is just as black as Johnny. Therefore, racism is wrong. Sunday school is over.

Heaven in the Movies

Because Heaven does not exist, it is purely the product of our imagination. Unlike the world we live in, where we must continually adjust our conceptions to fit reality, resulting in much disappointment, Heaven never suffers the limitations of experienced reality, but is free to realize our every hope and dream.

Of course, owing to our religious upbringing, we are usually provided with a conception of Heaven before we have a chance to imagine one for ourselves, and thus the imaginings of others may impose themselves on us before we have a chance to make a significant contribution of our own. Those who are independent enough in their thinking to reject the conception of Heaven acquired in childhood and replace it with their own are independent enough in their thinking not to believe in Heaven at all. And yet, in some way or other, Heaven has been imagined by different peoples at different times, and so, it would seem that in some way or other the different conceptions of an afterlife must be suited to us.

There are four different conceptions of Heaven. The first is that it is a refuge from the pain and suffering of this world. All of us have suffered at one time or other, and in such circumstances, relief from that suffering is all we care about. And so, the more suffering there is for a people, the more likely they are to conceive of Heaven in this way. An example of this is Heaven Is for Real (2014). In that movie, a family is under a lot of stress, because the husband, a pastor, has several jobs, but they are still in debt and overwhelmed financially. Their four-year-old son almost dies from a ruptured appendix, and in the hospital, while being operated on, goes to Heaven temporarily. In addition to describing what Heaven is like visually, seeing Jesus and angels and whatnot, the message is that everything will be all right, that deceased loved ones are there, and they are happy.

The second is that it is place where one exacts an imaginary revenge on those one hates. St. Thomas Aquinas said that the saints in Heaven will be able to witness the suffering of the damned so that their bliss will be more delightful for them. But most of us do not hate that much, which is why many people who are religious do not have a Hell as part of their conception of an afterlife. At most, they have a Heck. Consequently, Heaven conceived in conjunction with Hell as places where divine justice is meted out no longer appeals to us either.

The third conception is that it is a continuation of the life we presently have. We find this sort of thing in the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology and in the Asgard of Norse mythology. In the movie Hud (1963), after the funeral service for his grandfather, Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde) says, “He ain’t in any loaf-around eternal life. He’s the way he always was, enjoying his good horses, looking after the land, trying to figure out ways to beat the dry weather and wind.” While this conception might be more suitable for those of us who have been fortunate enough to find life worth living, we have difficulty taking it seriously. In particular, it makes no sense that a rancher would worry about the dry weather and wind in Heaven when there would be plenty of food for everyone, assuming people eat in Heaven, which is unlikely. In general, most of what we do on Earth makes sense only when done on Earth. In Heaven, such Earthly activity would be lacking in purpose. About the only way to make sense of this idea is that his grandfather would be suspended in an ideal state, with no sense that he had died, looking over his land and his livestock in perpetuity. Perhaps that was the idea behind the river Lethe of Greek mythology, to drink from which would cause forgetfulness. His grandfather would have no sense of the passage of time, because in each succeeding moment, he would forget the moment that came before it.

But this is a false happiness, which appeals to us and repels us at the same time. Lonnie may want to think of his grandfather that way, but is it something he would really want for himself? In any event, Lonnie apparently does not take his sentimental notions seriously either, given what follows. When the preacher tries to console him by saying that his grandfather has gone to a better place, Lonnie replies, “I don’t think so. Not unless dirt is a better place than air,” thereby contradicting what he said just moments before.

The fourth conception is the adolescent’s Heaven, a place where one can party all the time, get drunk, get laid. This conception is not confined to adolescents, of course, for Islam promises the men that are faithful that they will have seventy-two virgins in Paradise. And yet, as delightful a sensual afterlife seems to be, it seldom appeals to the mature mind. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that such delights are often deemed sinful, and thus there is a disconnect between condemning them here on Earth while praising them in Heaven. More likely it is the fact that while most of us enjoy that sort of thing once in a while, an eternity of such goings-on seems a little pointless.

In short, none of these conceptions of Heaven really appeals to us. And this is strange, because, as noted above, Heaven can be whatever we imagine it to be. As evidence that these conceptions do not appeal to us, we might note the way movies portray Heaven. Movies, even when they are about life on Earth, are products of the imagination, so all the more so are they suited to presenting depictions of Heaven.

The movie The Green Pastures (1936) is a movie that depicts Heaven as imagined by African Americans, specifically, rural blacks living in the South, and it fits into the third category. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the movie depicts Heaven as white people imagined that southern, rural blacks would imagine it. White audiences were comfortable with this depiction of Heaven, because they could smile condescendingly at what they regarded as the naïve notions of the black race. This attitude is underscored by having the camera close in on the eyes of black children in Sunday School just before Heaven is portrayed on the screen, making it doubly clear that what we are watching is a childlike portrayal of Heaven. In other words, white audiences were not asked to take this view of Heaven seriously.

To a certain extent, The Green Pastures also belongs in the fourth category, in that Heaven seems to be one long picnic. Angels fish for pleasure, eat good food, smoke cigars, and go dancing on Saturday night. There is no explicit mention of sex, but with all the little cherubs about and references to mammies, one gathers that angels get married and have children. On the other hand, things in Heaven are pretty tame compared to the drinking, gambling, and philandering taking place on Earth just before the Flood, so the Heaven in this movie does not quite realize the adolescent’s conception of Paradise.

My next example is the movie Heaven Can Wait (1943). This is a comedy in which a man, Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), dies and is resigned to go to Hell for his sins, all of which are of a sexual nature, such as cheating on his wife. He is in luck, though, for the Devil (Laird Cregar) is most pleasant and understanding. In fact, with a Devil like that, there would seem to be no need for a God. After hearing of Henry’s infidelities, the Devil decides that Henry is not suitable for Hell and will spend eternity in Heaven. In the original ending, Henry gets on the elevator and tells the operator he is going up. At the next floor, however, a beautiful woman gets on, saying she is going down. The operator looks at Henry, who says, “That’s OK. Heaven can wait.”

The implication is that Henry is not in much of a hurry to get to Heaven, where he will probably have to spend eternity being faithful to his wife, assuming they even have sex in Heaven, which is doubtful. Therefore, he decides to see if he can get a little on the side just one more time before being condemned to Heaven. Unfortunately, that original ending met with objections and was deleted, which not only resulted in a lesser movie, but also left people wondering what the title meant.

This movie is not to be confused, of course, with a movie of the same name made in 1978, which was a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). For simplicity’s sake, I will discuss Heaven Can Wait (1978) only, for the two movies are basically alike. Joe Pendleton (Warren Beatty) is a professional football player who dies in an accident. But when he gets to Heaven, instead of meeting the traditional St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he meets Mr. Jordan (James Mason), who realizes that Joe was not supposed to die just yet. But since Joe’s body has already been cremated, a new body will have to be found for him belonging to someone recently deceased.

What is striking about this movie is that though Joe has just learned that there is God and a Heaven, yet all he cares about is getting a body that will allow him to play in the Super Bowl. Now, if I found out I would have to go back to Earth, the first question I would have asked Mr. Jordan would be, “Is there a Hell, and if so, what do I have to do to stay out of it?” There is no more important question one could possibly want an answer to than that. And whatever the answer to that question was, I would never again be able to concern myself with worldly goods like football, but would be spiritually transformed.

But that aside, the point is that Joe doesn’t care about Heaven. Granted, when he finally gets the body he needs, his memory is wiped clean of all that took place between the accident and his winning the Super Bowl. But during the time in between, he is totally indifferent to Heaven (or the Hell that I would be worried about). The implicit message of this movie, as well as the original on which it was based, is that life on Earth is worth more than an afterlife in Heaven.

A movie with the opposite structure is Stairway to Heaven (1946). Whereas in the movie just discussed, a man dies who was not supposed to, in this movie, a man who was supposed to die does not. Actually, the movie begins with a disclaimer, saying that the movie is a story of two worlds, the first of which is that of our life here on Earth; the second, in the mind of a young airman. It then goes on to deny “any resemblance between this imaginary world and any other world, known or unknown.” But whether the Heaven depicted is the imagination of this British World War II pilot, Peter Carter (David Niven), or is supposed to be the real Heaven as imagined by those who produced the movie, the result is the same: the Heaven so imagined is the pits. Not surprisingly, then, Peter does not want to go to Heaven as he was supposed to, but wants to continue to live on Earth, especially since he just fell in love. This results in the need to have a trial to see whether Peter gets to stay on Earth or must go to Heaven.

Heaven is undesirable for four reasons. First, it is colorless, both literally and figuratively, with only the scenes on Earth being in color. Second, it is lifeless, both literally and figuratively, for with the exception of the new arrivals (who are in such a jolly good mood, they get on your nerves), everyone else in Heaven is lethargic and dull. Third, souls in Heaven are prudish beyond all reason. We all know that there is no sin in Heaven, which is part of what makes it so boring, but in this Heaven, you are not even allowed to say, “Holy smoke!” Fourth, there is no love in Heaven, but there is hate. Conductor 71, having dismissed love as the feeling of the moment, says that the prosecutor in Peter’s case hates Peter’s guts, as part of a hatred for the British that has lasted for two centuries, on account of his having been an American killed by the British during the American Revolution. This hatred turns out to be petty and spiteful beyond belief.

Apparently, Heaven in this movie is really caught up in World War II, because they have a special Aircrew Section just for the pilots of the Allied forces. We never get to see the Aircrew Section for the Axis Powers for some reason. The receptionist, or whatever she is, shows a newly arrived pilot where they keep the files on everyone on Earth: Russian, Chinese, black or white, Republican or Democrat. She doesn’t mention anything about the files of Germans, Japanese, or Italians. Gosh! You don’t suppose they all went to Hell, do you?

Just about the time we have settled into the idea that this business about Heaven is the hallucination of a man who has jumped out of a plane without a parachute, it turns out that his hallucinations are caused by a brain tumor, the symptoms of which began six months before he jumped. So, it is ambiguous as to whether the tumor is the hallucination of a man who is falling to his death, or the leap out of a burning plane is the hallucination of a man with a brain tumor.

Anyway, brain surgery is performed on Peter while his trial is taking place in Heaven. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of which should prevail, the Law of Heaven, or love on Earth. Finally, June (Kim Hunter), the woman Peter loves, is willing to die in Peter’s place, thereby proving that she loves him, the result of which is that they both get to live. The judge quotes Sir Walter Scott’s poem about how love conquers all, the last line of which says, “For love is heaven, and heaven is love,” an assertion that stands in contradiction to all that has come before. At the same time, the surgery back down on Earth proves to be a success. So, Peter and June will get married and live happily ever after. Or rather, they will be happy until they die. Then they will go to Heaven and have to exist in that dreadful place for eternity.

Regardless of whichever conception of Heaven one imagines or is seen in the movies, one thing that always bothers me is the lack of privacy. Now, I realize that there is no need for bedrooms or bathrooms in Heaven, since there typically is no sex in Heaven and certainly no need to excrete waste material. But I would still find it maddening not be to be able to get away by myself once in a while. And yet, in any depiction you have ever seen of Heaven, you never see someone walk into his own little room and close the door behind him.

Because Heaven does not seem to have much appeal, it is understandable that people would turn to reincarnation as an alternative. That would make sense. If life is so much better than Heaven, then the best thing is just to keep being reincarnated. The movie that makes this point is What Dreams May Come (1998), in which the connection between Heaven and the imagination is even more explicit than the preceding one.

A lot of people used to believe that marriages were made in Heaven. Today, people speak of being soul mates. Whatever expression one uses, that is the idea behind the marriage of Chris (Robin Williams) and Annie (Annabella Sciorra). They have two children who die in a car crash, leading Annie to have a mental breakdown. They almost get a divorce. A year later, Chris also dies in a car accident.

He eventually makes it to Heaven, which is a wonderful place shaped by the imagination. But since Heaven is created by the imagination, so too is Hell. According to traditional Christianity, people who commit suicide go to Hell, and New Age philosophy is apparently in agreement on this point, if this movie is any indication, where people do not go to Hell because they are evil, but because they got confused and committed suicide. In other words, life is so wonderful that suicide cannot possibly be a rational act, no matter how miserable one is, so anyone who hates life enough to commit suicide must be confused. When Annie kills herself, she is trapped in Hell by her confusion. Chris manages to rescue her, but all the other suicides remain in Hell for eternity. Too bad for them.

Anyway, Chris and Annie make it to Heaven where they are safe. But Chris suggests that they be reincarnated so that they can meet each other again and experience another life together. Of course, that means taking a chance of becoming confused, committing suicide, and going to Hell, with little likelihood of there being another rescue. Who in his right mind would chance it? But the idea is that life is so wonderful that it is even better than Heaven, even worth the risk of committing suicide and being eternally damned.

Of course, that wonderful life involves such things as having your children die in a car accident, having the marriage deteriorate to the point of almost getting a divorce, and then having a husband die in an accident. Who wouldn’t want the chance to experience something like that again? Who wouldn’t forgo Heaven and risk Hell to experience such misery and suffering once more?

The thrust of all these movies is that life on Earth is preferable to an eternity in Heaven, even if that life turns out to be pretty miserable. How are we to make sense of this? I can think of only two possible explanations. The first is that human nature is suited for life on Earth, which means a life filled with struggle, even if it is a struggle we often lose, causing us misery and pain. Regardless of whether life is worth living, or whether it would have been better had we never been born, it is all we know. We simply are not constitutionally suited for Heaven, and thus the idea of it makes us uncomfortable. The other reason is that even people who are religious only half believe it, like Lonnie in the movie Hud, and thus are inclined to cling to the only existence they are sure of rather than waste their lives worrying about something that may well be nothing but a product of their imagination.

The Final Phase of Feminism

I didn’t know anything about feminism when I was in high school, back in the early sixties, nor, apparently, did any of the girls I dated. At least, it never came up in the conversation. Mostly, I was too busy thinking about sex. Thinking, not doing, because aside from a little kissing and petting, I was unable to achieve my ultimate goal, the Holy Grail of lust and desire. Eventually, I began to think that either it did not really exist, or I was not destined to partake of that mystery. Overhearing my lament one day, one of the guys sitting at my lunch table took pity on me, and decided to give me the benefit of his wisdom. “Listen here, boy,” he said. “I’m going to tell you about women. You have to find ’em, feed ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em,” he said with the authority that comes from being six feet tall and having broad shoulders.

The last one puzzled me. “Forget ’em?” I thought to myself. “Why would I want to do that?” I knew that if I ever managed to go all the way with some girl, I would never forget her. In fact, I would probably hold on to her for dear life. But the second one, “feed ’em,” I completely disregarded. I figured it was there merely for the sake of fourfold alliteration: he needed four words beginning with “f” to make it sound right. Years later, I read a column by Miss Manners, where she said that when it came to courtship, many things had changed over the years, but one principle remained inviolate: the gentleman must take the lady to dinner. But at the time, I regarded it as completely unnecessary. “Better to eat before you went out on a date,” I thought. “Then you have more time for sex.”

When I got to college, I was still a virgin. Though I would never have admitted to anything so disgraceful, yet one of my fraternity brothers could tell that when it came to girls, I was floundering. So, he took me aside and said, “Listen here, boy. I’m going to tell you about women. When you take them out on a date, you’re going to have to go to a really nice restaurant and slap that money down.”

That was most unwelcome advice, given my impecunious condition. I had a small allowance from my father, which was enough to take a girl to a drive-in movie, and spring for a couple of Cokes and a bag of popcorn, but this dinner thing was out of the question. To afford that, I would have to get a part-time job. It was all I could do to take twelve hours a semester in my exacting major of philosophy without adding that to my schedule. In fact, it was at this point that I first realized that as much as I wanted sex, I dreaded work even more. So, as with the advice I had received in high school, I once again disregarded the idea that I would have to “feed ’em.” There had to be another way.

Fortunately, there was. It was the sexual revolution. Now, I know some people say that there was just as much sex in the old days, but people just didn’t talk about it. Well, if that is so, they sure had me fooled. When I was in high school, just getting to third base, where articles of clothing were actually removed, was something a guy could take pride in; and as for going all the way, that was so rare that when tales of such were told, one had good reason to doubt their veracity. So, this theory that the only effect of the sexual revolution was conversational is one that does not accord with my experience or the experience of my friends. In fact, the difference was profound. When I started college in 1964, every girl I knew was adamant about the importance of being a virgin when she got married. And my fraternity brothers were in complete agreement on that point: it was important for a girl to be a virgin when she got married. Four years later, any girl on that campus who was still a virgin was trying to do something about it. So, in the sexual anarchy of the late sixties, I finally managed to lose my virginity, notwithstanding the fact that I had yet to pony up for a steak dinner.

What saved me was the fact that the girl who took my virginity already had a boyfriend, who was stationed in Vietnam, and so I was just filling in for him while he was out of town. And that meant that a drive-in movie, a couple of Cokes, and a bag of popcorn were all the expenditure required of me to finally enjoy the ultimate embrace.

In fact, as I later discovered, a paramour operates under different rules from that of a woman’s boyfriend or husband. Several years after I got out of college and went to work (ugh!), I began a flirtation with a married coworker, and things had advanced to the point where it was time for me to make my move. A guy that I worked with could see what was going on. “Are you and Sally fooling around?” he asked.

“Well, I was thinking about asking her out to dinner,” I answered, figuring it was high time that I took the advice given to me twice before.

“You can’t take her to dinner!” he said, alarmed. “The night has a thousand eyes,” he explained. “I made the mistake once of taking a married woman to dinner, and while she and I were looking at the menu, who should walk in the door but one of her friends and the guy she was dating. Of course, we invited them to sit down and have dinner with us. And, of course, I ended up picking up the tab. And not just for the meal, because every time a round of drinks was bought, I bought four.” Therefore, he concluded, it was neither necessary nor advisable to take a married woman to dinner. “All you need,” he said, “is a room and a bottle. And since you are a bachelor living alone in an apartment, you already have a room. Just find out what she likes to drink.”

Now, I know people who cannot think about socializing except in the context of food and drink. And thus it might be argued that many people simply enjoy this sort of thing for its own sake, and not just as a necessary prelude to sex. But that does not mean that the man should foot the bill. And this leads me, finally, to the issue of feminism. The final phase of feminism will be achieved when either it is no longer necessary to “feed ’em” in order for sex to take place, or, if dinner is desired for its own sake, the woman pays for her own meal and drinks.

Over the years, I have debated several women on just this issue. I remember one woman in particular, one of my dancing partners, with whom I had just such a discussion. She didn’t mind going out Dutch treat, because we weren’t having sex. I was of the opinion, however, that the one did not necessarily imply the other, and I thought it would be nice if we made our already enjoyable relationship even better. To this, she took a dim view. “You make me pay my own way, and now you want a kiss?” she asked, shaking her head at the audacity of my presumption.

I explained to her that by so doing she would achieve the final phase of feminism. “No woman can count herself a complete feminist,” I averred, “until she goes Dutch treat with a man with whom she is sexually intimate.” We discussed the matter at length, during which time she pointed out that it was against all human nature, or, at least, all female human nature, to behave as I suggested. She noted that it had been firmly established by sociobiologists that the way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach, that a man must let a woman know that he will provide for her and take care of her in order to gain her favor. In fact, she went on, this principle even extended back into the animal kingdom, and did not originate with cavemen.

“But the whole point of having a big brain,” I replied, “was to be able to override our bad instincts. True feminism can hardly be grounded on the mating principles of the Stone Age.”

I could see her squirm. Finally, she went for the ultimate justification of behavior, beyond which there is no appeal: “I can’t help it,” she said. “It’s the way I was raised.”

Boy, had I heard that one before! But I knew that people could be very selective about parental influence. “Listen,” I said. “Were you raised to have premarital sex?”

“Uh … no,” she answered hesitantly.

“And didn’t you tell me you started screwing when you were fifteen?”

“Uh … yes.”

“Well,” I said, as I prepared to deliver the coup de grâce, “the way you were raised didn’t count for much there, did it?”

So, you see, I won that argument. That is to say, an impartial debate judge would undoubtedly have scored more points in my favor. Unfortunately, there is another sense in which I lost that debate.

There is no doubt that women have come a long way in the feminist movement. But I lay it down as an absolute that the final phase of feminism will not be achieved until the “feed ’em” part of the formula has been eliminated once and for all.

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

Gentleman’s Agreement is a story about a journalist who pretends to be a Jew in order to find out what it feels like to be a Jew. The journalist is Phil Green (Gregory Peck), a widower who lives with his mother (Anne Revere) and his son Tommy (Dean Stockwell). The three of them have moved to New York, where Phil has been hired by John Minify (Albert Dekker), editor of a prestigious, liberal magazine, Smith’s Weekly, to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism.

Minify is pushy. He invites Phil to come to a social gathering at his place, having decided that Phil needs to meet some people, and when Phil tries to beg off, Minify insists. We also find that Minify finishes people’s sentences for them. He not only knows what he wants, he knows what he wants people to say, and he is in too much of a hurry to let them say it.

At the party, Phil meets Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire), who is divorced. Her ex-husband is also at the party, and they are on friendly terms. As Minify says, with a bit of contempt, their relationship is “civilized.” Now, I’ve always made an effort to remain on good terms with an ex-girlfriend, but I never wanted to be at a party where I knew she would be, where I would doubtless have to watch her put on a show about how happy she was with another man, while I would have to pretend that I was completely indifferent to it all. However, the point of their relationship is to show how polite these people are, polite even in their prejudice against Jews, as we eventually find out. This is kind of anti-Semitism this movie focuses on, as opposed to that which is rude and obnoxious. Hence the word “gentleman” in the title.

Kathy also is Minify’s niece. She has to remind Minify that she is the one who has been after him to publish a series of articles on anti-Semitism for almost a year, after a Jewish school teacher was forced to resign. Phil says it’s “funny” that she was the one that first suggested that series of articles. In response to this remark, Kathy suggests that Phil makes up his mind about people too quickly, especially women. This apparently inspires no reflection on Phil’s part, because the next morning, at breakfast, Phil mentions to his mother that he will be writing a series of articles on anti-Semitism, and again he says it’s funny that Minify’s niece suggested it originally. His mother responds, “You don’t say. Why women will be thinking next.”

In both these scenes, we side with Kathy and Phil’s mother in their bringing attention to a prejudice Phil seems to be harboring about women. Maybe Phil should pretend to be a woman to find out what that feels like. In all seriousness, these scenes make it clear that we in the audience are more enlightened than Phil is regarding women, and by extension, about prejudice in general. As we watch this movie, in which Phil struggles to write that series of articles on anti-Semitism, the movie places us in the position, not of being lectured to, but rather of patiently waiting for Phil to reach a level of awareness in such matters as we have already achieved. Having been so flattered, we are more likely to express our approval of this movie.

Tommy asks what anti-Semitism is, and Phil explains that some people don’t like Jews. When Tommy asks what a Jew is, Phil responds that Jews are people that go to churches called “synagogues.” That has to be the most superficial definition of a Jew I have ever heard. That’s like defining a woman as someone that uses the ladies’ room. Although, now that I think of it, maybe that is the definition of a woman nowadays. Anyway, I was waiting for Phil to say something to the effect that Jews are descendants of the people written about in the Old Testament, who believe there is just one God, whom they call Yahweh, but who don’t accept the idea that Jesus is the son of Yahweh, and thus are not Christians. But we get nothing of the sort. A lot of Christians in the audience of 1947 might have been offended to hear such a definition, which consists, in part, of a denial that Jesus is the son of God, thereby stirring up the very feelings of prejudice against Jews that this movie is hoping to avoid. So, it’s safer to be superficial.

Phil is having a difficult time figuring out how to approach the subject. He tells his mother that he is getting nowhere: “When I think I’m getting onto something good, I go a little deeper, and it turns into the same old drool of statistics and protests.” Then he thinks about his Jewish friend Dave Goldman (John Garfield), wishing he were here with him, realizing he’d be the guy to talk to. This leads to him to a new line of thought:

Hey, maybe that’s a new tack. So far, I’ve been digging into facts and evidence. I’ve sort of ignored feelings. How must a fellow like Dave feel about this thing? …Over and above what we feel about it, what must a Jew feel about this thing? Dave. Can I think my way into Dave’s mind? He’s the fellow I’d be, if I were a Jew. We grew up together. We were the gang. We did everything together. Whatever Dave feels now, indifference, outrage, contempt, would be the feelings of Dave, not only as a Jew, but the way I feel as a man, as an American, as a citizen.

His mother suggests he write Dave a letter. He sits down at the typewriter. But then he sees the futility of it all, imagining himself writing a letter, expressing his frustration in doing so to his mother:

What do I say? “Dear Dave, give me the lowdown on your guts when you hear about Rankin [a racist member of the House of Representatives] calling people ‘kikes.’ How do you feel when Jewish kids get their teeth knocked out by Jew-haters?” Could you write that kind of letter, Ma? That’s no good, all of it. It wouldn’t be any good if I could write it. There’s no way to tear open the heart of another.

Let us call this problem, as Phil understands it, the inadequacy of words to communicate feelings. There are two senses in which words might be used in an effort to communicate feelings. One is to use words that denote feelings, such as “outrage” or “contempt.” The other is to use words to describe situations that might induce feelings in the person hearing or reading those words, as in “Jewish kids get their teeth knocked out by Jew-haters.” Both types were mentioned by Phil above, but neither is capable of successfully communicating the feeling a Jew has, according to Phil’s way of thinking.

In some cases, people will insist on the inadequacy of words even when they are the ones using words to describe their situation. It is not uncommon for someone, listening with a sympathetic ear to his friend’s troubles, to say, “I know just how you feel,” only to have that friend respond, with irritation, “You don’t know how I feel!”

Eventually Phil comes up with the idea of pretending to be a Jew, as the only way to find out how it feels. When he finally reveals that on a previous occasion, he pretended to be an Okie in order to write about the plight of the Okies, and that on another occasion he pretended to be a coal miner in order to write about coal mining, we are a little incredulous that it took him so long to think about pretending to be a Jew. Having done this sort of thing twice before, it should have occurred to him right off.

And yet, in the end, this really doesn’t make much sense. Essentially, what Phil is getting at is that all Dave can do when asked to write back a letter telling how it feels to be a Jew is to provide what may be called a verbal description of his feelings. That is, he can write about his experiences, all the discrimination he has encountered, the hatred others have for him, and the humiliation he feels, but these will still be just words. The words will denote feelings or describe situations that might induce feelings, but there can be no way to ensure that the feelings expressed by the words he uses will be effectively communicated to Phil when he reads them. That is why Phil believes he must pretend to be a Jew, so that he can experience the feelings himself and know for sure what feelings those words are supposed to communicate, but which might not actually do so when they are written by Dave, and Phil merely reads them in a letter.

But in that case, we are getting nowhere. After Phil goes to all the trouble of pretending to be a Jew, when his sits down to write those articles, all he can do is provide another verbal description, one not much different from the one Dave might have written. The people who read Phil’s articles will be in exactly the same situation that Phil would be in reading Dave’s letter. They will read the words, but they cannot be sure that what Phil felt when he pretended to be a Jew is being captured by the words he uses to express those feelings. Following Phil’s reasoning out to its logical conclusion, the only way the Gentiles that read the articles he writes can know what Phil really felt is for them to pretend to be Jews themselves.

Anyway, when he finally does start pretending to be a Jew, he is shocked by all the prejudice he encounters, as when he tries to check into a high-class hotel and is refused service because it is “restricted.” Well, what did he think was going to happen? In fact, he seems to know less about anti-Semitism than anyone else in the movie. We get the impression that the person most ignorant about anti-Semitism has been picked to write an article about it. But again, this is the movie’s way of allowing us in the audience to regard ourselves as more enlightened on this matter than Phil is.

Even though Phil has decided that the inadequacy of words to communicate feelings precludes the possibility of learning anything by talking to Jews, we nevertheless cannot help but suppose that he might actually get a little insight from such discussions, not only from Dave, who knows Phil is not a Jew, but also from his Jewish secretary, Elaine Wales, who believes Phil is a Jew. Basically, she passes for a Gentile, having changed her name from Estelle Walovsky. Had she not done so, she says, she would never have been hired at Smith’s Weekly. The fact that Phil was hired doesn’t surprise her, because she says it’s different for writers than it is for “small fry,” employees like her. When Phil finds that out that there is a tacit policy on the part of the personnel department not to hire Jews, he tells Minify about it, who is ashamed he didn’t know this was going on in his own magazine, a policy he immediately changes, requiring an ad be placed in the newspaper for a secretary, stating that religion is a matter of indifference.

Thinking Phil is a Jew like her, Elaine says she worries that this change in policy will allow the “kikey ones” to be hired, the vulgar ones that are loud and use too much rouge. This is something most of us have encountered with other races, religions, or nationalities, where someone is embarrassed by his own people, so to speak, when they act crude and low class. It is to be noted, by the way, that there are no Jews in this movie that are loud or wear too much rouge. That sort is only described, not depicted. Just as Elaine wants to exclude them from where she works, so too are they being excluded from this movie. Otherwise, we might end up being sympathetic with Elaine’s attitude, and that certainly would never do.

Phil never knew there was a form of anti-Semitism among Jews themselves. In other words, he definitely had something to learn from Elaine. But instead of pretending to know what she is talking about, and agreeing with her somewhat in order to get some more insight in the matter, he becomes angry and demands that she not use words like “kike.” Having done so, Phil can be sure that this is last time he will learn anything about what it is like to be a Jew from Elaine. You can’t find out what someone is truly thinking and feeling if you act shocked and disapproving at what he or she is saying. In fact, Kathy has commented on this trait of his, saying, “Your face takes sides, as if you were voting for or against.” A journalist like Phil would do far better cultivating a cosmopolitan manner, presenting a face that feigns sympathy with whatever someone is saying, no matter how much he might despise it, as the best way to learn more about how that person thinks and feels. Instead, we are treated to one of Phil’s displays of righteous indignation, which forecloses the possibility of his gaining any further insight from Elaine or any of the other people in this movie who dare to express prejudice in his presence.

Later, Phil meets Professor Lieberman (Sam Jaffe), another Jew, but one that is not religious. He is philosophical about anti-Semitism, making jokes about it. And when Dave finally arrives in town, we see that he is not especially interested in anti-Semitism. In short, three very different Jews are depicted in this movie, each one of which has a different attitude about anti-Semitism. In other words, Phil’s quest to find out what it feels like to be a Jew is compounded by the fact that it all depends on the Jew.

Dave has an opportunity to move up in the firm he works for as the eastern representative, but he will have to find a place for himself, his wife Carol, and their children to live in the New York area. This may be a challenge, since there is still a housing shortage, owing to the war that has only recently ended. After much effort to find a place to live, however, Dave gives up, telling Phil he will have to turn down the promotion and stay in California.

By this time, Phil and Kathy have become engaged. She owns a house that she had built while she was married, though she and her husband got divorced before they actually lived in it. It would be perfect for Dave and his family, but since they are Jews, Kathy says she cannot rent it to them, explaining that people with houses in nice neighborhoods have a gentleman’s agreement not to sell or rent to Jews. She deplores the whole business, but she is not up to being ostracized by everyone in the neighborhood for breaking that agreement. As a result, Kathy and Phil quarrel, and they break off their engagement. But this raises the question, why is it that Kathy knows about this sort of thing, while Phil has never heard of it before? Maybe Kathy should be the one to write the series of articles.

Better still, why not have a Jew write the articles? A Jew would have a lifetime of experience about anti-Semitism and not have to rely on just a few weeks of pretending to be a Jew. And while it might not be possible to find Okies or coal miners capable of writing a series of articles on their experiences, for they would likely be poorly educated, there should be no shortage of Jews with the writing talent needed to put their thoughts on paper. It would still be just a verbal description, with all the limitations noted above, but it would likely be a better, more informed verbal description than the one composed by someone who was just pretending to be a Jew for a few weeks.

The reason is clear, though no one in this movie dare give voice to it: the articles would not be regarded as legitimate unless the Jewish experience could be validated by the testimony of a Gentile. Christians reading the articles would not trust a Jew. They would suspect he was lying about the abuse he has suffered in order to make them feel guilty, thereby gaining an advantage over them.

In that case, instead of hiring a Gentile to pretend to be a Jew, Minify should have hired a Jew to pretend to be a Gentile. He could have hired someone like Dave to write the articles, who would then sign them under a name like Phil Green, claiming that he only pretended to be a Jew so he could know how it feels to be one, thereby giving the articles the needed cachet of Christian authenticity.

Doing this would solve another problem, which is that there is no guarantee that by pretending to be a Jew, Phil would have the feelings that Dave has on account of his actually being a Jew. Since Phil is not a Jew, it is hard to believe that he would feel the effect of prejudice the same way a Jew would. Phil acts deeply offended when he encounters prejudice, but it is still from the secure position of someone who knows that this charade is only temporary, and he will soon return to his place in society as a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. The inadequacy of words to express feelings is only made worse by the fact that Phil is not likely to have the feelings that Dave does anyway. Or the feelings that Elaine has, or those of Professor Lieberman.

Furthermore, if I had pretended to be a Jew in order to be able to write about anti-Semitism, every time someone “offended” me, I would gleefully sneak off to the restroom to write down notes, thinking, “Boy, this is going to be good stuff for that series of articles I’m going to write.”

In the end, Kathy realizes she has been wrong to go along with anti-Semitism, so she rents her house to Dave. As a result, Phil is willing to forgive her and marry her. The series of articles promises to be a great success. Phil’s mother suggests that as a result, the twentieth century may turn out to be “everybody’s century, when people all over the world, free people, found a way to live together.”

Or maybe not.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was published just before the turn of the twentieth century, and years later was made into the classic movie The Wizard of Oz.

In the introduction to his book, Baum says that while children have always loved fairy tales, “the time has come for a series of newer ‘wonder tales’ in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.” Therefore, he says this book “aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”

It is not clear that his tale is as much of a break with the past as he imagines. In place of the dwarf, we have the Munchkins. The Good Witch of the North and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, would seem to fall into the fairy category. However, I really have to wonder about his claim to have left out the “heartaches and nightmares.” The Wicked Witch of the West seems comparable to the one in the story about Hansel and Gretel or Sleeping Beauty.

In both the book and the movie, the moral of the tale is that there is no place like home. And in both the book and the movie, home is dreadful, though each in its own way. In the book, Dorothy lives with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in a pitifully small house of just one room. Outside the house, things are just as bleak:

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

As for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, things are even worse:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

The only friend Dorothy has is her little dog Toto, who makes her laugh and whom she loves. It is interesting that Baum made Dorothy an orphan, when it would have been just as easy to make her the daughter of Henry and Em. In a lot of fairy tales, such as the one of Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel, there is a stepmother, with the suggestion that the child or children are unloved and unwanted. Once again, Baum does not seem to have distanced himself from the traditional fairy tales as much as he imagined.

I don’t know if tornados were called “cyclones” in Kansas in the nineteenth century, but that is how the book refers to them, one of which suddenly starts coming their way. There is a trap door in the house leading down to a small hole to hide from such cyclones. Dorothy tries to follow Aunt Em down the hole, but the house is lifted into the air before she and Toto can get down there. Eventually, it drops the house down into the Land of Oz.

Because the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her, the Munchkins she ruled over are most grateful. The Good Witch of the North gives Dorothy the silver shoes that the Wicked Witch used to wear. Then she tells her that if she wants to go back to Kansas, she will have to follow the yellow brick road to Emerald City where the Wizard of Oz may be able to help her. Later, after she has met the Scarecrow, who decides to accompany her in hopes that the Wizard will give him a brain, he asks her why she wants to go back to Kansas:

“I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.”

“That is because you have no brains” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

The Scarecrow sighed.

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

I suppose it makes sense that a little girl like Dorothy would feel that way, for young children are terrified of being separated from their parents. But if she were a few years older, a teenage Dorothy would probably have said, “Kansas sucks. I’m never going back.” In any event, the ultimate moral of many fables and fairy tales is that we should accept our place in life, an agreeable sentiment for most people, inasmuch as they have no choice.

In the end, the Wizard of Oz agrees to take Dorothy back to Kansas, but his hot-air balloon accidentally leaves without her. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, tells her that she need only click her silver shoes together, and she can go back to Kansas whenever she wants. Too bad the Good Witch of the North didn’t know about that, or Dorothy could have gotten back to Kansas that afternoon.

But at least that makes sense. In the movie, there is only one good witch, Glinda (Billie Burke), the Good Witch of the North. When the Scarecrow asks her why she didn’t tell Dorothy (Judy Garland) before that she could go back to Kansas any time she wants, Glinda replies, “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it herself.” In other words, we are being asked to believe that if Glinda had told Dorothy that she could return to Kansas right away, something like the following conversation would have taken place:

Glinda: Now that you are wearing the ruby slippers, you can go back to Kansas any time you want by clicking your heels together.

Dorothy: I don’t believe you.

Glinda: Just try it. You’ll see.

Dorothy: No!

Glinda: Well, in that case, I guess you’ll have to follow the yellow brick road to Emerald City and ask the Wizard of Oz for help. He might be able to get you back to Kansas.

Dorothy: Sounds good to me.

Anyway, in the book, Dorothy clicks her heels and winds up back in Kansas, telling Aunt Em, “I’m so glad to be at home again.”

As an aside, before Dorothy leaves the Land of Oz, each of her three friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, end up ruling over some of the inhabitants of Oz, with the suggestion that this is a happy ending for them and for those that are to be ruled over. All four witches ruled over some portion of this land, at least until the wicked ones were dispatched. And, of course, the Wizard ruled over Emerald City before he left. In short, there is no such thing as democracy in the Land of Oz, nor any hint that having a democratically elected leader would be desirable. Here, too, we find that Baum is in line with traditional fairy tales, which always seem to take place in a kingdom, not in some democratic republic. When the traditional fairy tales were first told, kingdoms were the norm. But as Baum was an American citizen claiming to present a modern fairy tale, one about a girl living in Kansas, we can only assume that his reason for not making the Land of Oz be a democratic republic is that he believed that being ruled over by an absolute monarch is something dreamy and wonderful. A lot of people seem to feel that way.

In many ways, Dorothy’s home in the movie is a better place than the one in the book. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em seem nice enough, even if they are too busy saving chicks to listen to Dorothy when she tries to talk to them in the opening scene. And we get the sense that there is a town nearby, within walking distance, so the farm is not so isolated.

However, there is one sense in which home is worse. There is a Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) in the movie, whom Toto has bitten. As a result, she has gotten an order from the sheriff to take possession of Toto and have him “destroyed.” Toto manages to escape, but Dorothy realizes that Miss Gulch will be back. As a result, she decides to take Toto and run away from home. But at the end of the movie, she seems to have forgotten all about that. She talks as though it was foolish of her to run away from home:

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any farther than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

But her “heart’s desire” was to save the life of her little dog. As Dorothy lies there in bed, saying how she is never going to run away again because there’s no place like home, we know that Miss Gulch will be back the next morning with that same court order to take Toto away.

In the book, Dorothy’s adventures in the Land of Oz really happen, but in the movie, it is all a dream. When the cyclone hits, Dorothy is knocked unconscious, and Oz is just a place she dreams about. The three hired hands that work on the farm in the movie become the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion; Miss Gulch becomes the Wicked Witch of the West; and Professor Marvel becomes the Wizard of Oz.

Margaret Hamilton said that when her agent told her that MGM wanted her for The Wizard of Oz, she was thrilled, since that was her favorite book as a child. But when she asked what part she would be playing, he said “The Witch. What else?”

But maybe the answer to his question, “What else?” should not have been as obvious as he thought it was. When Dorothy first lands in the Land of Oz, Glinda arrives and asks Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Dorothy denies being a witch at all, saying, “Witches are old and ugly.” Glinda laughs, saying that she is a witch. Dorothy apologizes, saying, “But I’ve never heard of a beautiful witch before.” Glinda replies, “Only bad witches are ugly.”

Apparently, that is what Margaret Hamilton and her agent assumed as well, otherwise, she might have asked him, “Which witch?” And that raises the question, why not have Margaret Hamilton play Glinda and let Billie Burke play Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West? Some might argue that it would be too much to expect a child to understand that someone who is ugly may be good and kind, while someone who is beautiful may be evil and cruel. But notwithstanding Baum’s remark that children do not need to be taught a moral in a modern fairy tale, would not this be the most important lesson a child could learn?

In any event, some people might suppose that Toto is safe, arguing that Miss Gulch died during the cyclone, because she also corresponds to the Wicked Witch of the East, who died when the farmhouse landed on her. And just for good measure, as the Wicked Witch of the West, she dies again when Dorothy throws a bucket of water on her. Well, Dorothy may have killed off Miss Gulch as a witch in her wish-fulfilling dream, twice even, but that is no reason to think the real Miss Gulch is dead. In the dream, the farmhouse had been picked up by the cyclone and had landed on the Witch, crushing her. But nothing like that happened to the farmhouse in the real world. So there may be no place like home for Dorothy, but it’s the dog pound for Toto, at least for a few days until he is put to death.

As noted above, the sister of the Wicked Witch of the East, the Wicked Witch of the West, threatens Dorothy and her friends until Dorothy accidentally throws water on her, causing her to melt. Once the Witch is gone, her minions, the Winged Monkeys, are quite happy about the situation. It turns out that they were not evil themselves, but only did the Witch’s bidding because they were afraid of her. Now that she is dead, they can be good Winged Monkeys.

Condensing all the evil into a single person, the Wicked Witch of the West, and then eliminating that person is all right for a fantasy movie, but it is simplistic thinking like that that has serious consequences in the real world. I suspect that George W. Bush and his advisers believed that Saddam Hussein was a “Great Man” like the Wicked Witch, and that all they had to do was get rid of him, and the citizens of Iraq would start singing “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” as they established a Jeffersonian democracy.

In the book, we soon realize that the Scarecrow, who hopes the Wizard of Oz will give him a brain, is actually smart; that the Tin Woodman, who hopes the Wizard can give him a heart, is actually kind; and that the Cowardly Lion, who hopes the Wizard can give him some courage, is actually brave. They just lack self-confidence. So, the Wizard gives each of them something that will make them feel better about themselves: some bran mixed with pins and needles to stuff in the Scarecrow’s head; a heart made of silk and stuffed with sawdust to place in the Tin Woodman’s chest; and a bowl of liquid from a green bottle for the Cowardly Lion to drink.

In the movie, instead of relying on the power of suggestion, the scriptwriters took a slightly different tack, one that contradicts the Great Man theory referred to above, implying instead that no one is any better than anyone else. Because the Wizard of Oz is a fraud with no special powers, he cannot give the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, or the Cowardly Lion some courage. But being a fraud, the Wizard believes that the people who are supposedly intelligent, philanthropic, or brave are also frauds themselves. College professors are no smarter than anyone else; they just have diplomas. Philanthropists are no more generous than anyone else; they just have testimonials. Heroes are no braver than anyone else; they just have medals. So, he gives the Scarecrow a diploma, the Tin Man a testimonial, and the Cowardly Lion a medal. And now they are just as smart, generous, and brave as any of those so-called college professors, philanthropists, or heroes. I suppose this must be reassuring to those that are not all that smart, charitable, or brave, which would presumably include most of the people that watch this movie. In a way, this is a piece with the no-place-like-home theme. Just as the latter is intended to make us accept our lot in life, so too is the depreciation of professors, philanthropists, and heroes intended to make us accept who we are.

Once the Scarecrow gets his diploma, he believes the Wizard and thinks he is just as smart as all those college professors. Suddenly inspired, he enunciates what he takes to be a theorem of geometry: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh joy, rapture! I’ve got a brain!”

It sounds as though the scriptwriters were thinking of the Pythagorean Theorem, which applies to right-angled triangles, not to isosceles triangles. But even if we allow for that correction, substituting “right-angled” where he says “isosceles,” it is still wrong. It is not the square roots of the sides that are related in that way, but the squares, to wit: The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In fact, it does not matter what kind of triangle we are talking about, there is no triangle that satisfies the condition that the sum of the square roots of two sides will equal the square root of the third. It is an impossible triangle.

As the Pythagorean Theorem is something known by most high school students, let alone by college professors, maybe a diploma counts for something after all. Fortunately, even if you do have a brain, you can still enjoy The Wizard of Oz, provided you don’t use it too much while watching this movie.

Addendum

And if you think I’ve been taking this movie way too seriously, now I’m really going to cross the line.

To be proven: There is no triangle such that the sum of the square roots of two sides is equal to the square root of the third.

Assume there is such a triangle of sides a, b, and c:

√a + √b = √c

Square both sides:

(√a + √b)² = (√c)²

Expand the binomial:

a + 2√a•√b + b = c

Now, it is clear that

a + 2√a•√b + b > a + b

And for any triangle, the sum of the lengths of any two sides is greater than the length of the third:

a + b > c

Combining the two, we get the following:

a + 2√a•√b + b > a + b > c

Therefore, by transitivity:

a + 2√a•√b + b > c

But this contradicts the conclusion arrived at above that the two quantities were equal.

a + 2√a•√b + b = c

Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, there is no such triangle. Q.E.D.

disinterestedspectator

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