Caveats for Caregivers (4)

This is my fourth essay on caregiving, first published on another website on May 4, 2012.

You know you are getting old when you hang a pendant around your neck with a button on it. Now, I know you have seen that commercial where the woman falls in the bathtub and lies there, unable to move, until her daughter shows up four hours later. As horrible as that prospect sounds, there are two reassuring features about that commercial: first, it was not her son that found her in that situation; and second, at least there was someone, daughter or otherwise, who had the key to her house and came over to see her that same day. If I fell in the bathtub and broke my hip, no one would find me until the landlord decided to evict me for not paying the rent. And so, around my neck the pendant hangs.

On the one hand, a medical alert system allows us to keep our independence, in the sense that it allows us to continue living alone instead of moving in with our children (if we have children, that is). But on the other hand, it is an acknowledgement that we need some kind of assistance, even if it is only from the operators who are ready to help us should we fall, something that never crossed our minds when we were young. By hanging that pendant around your neck, you are made aware of the fact that you are losing your independence in the very act of trying to preserve it.

But that we can joke about. The real loss of independence begins when we give up the keys to the car, knowing we will never drive again. Then what? Setting aside the question of cost, a not insignificant consideration, the next logical step in trying to preserve some degree of independence is having people come to our home to provide us with various goods and services, such as transportation to the store, help with bathing, and Meals on Wheels. Or, we can move into an independent living community, which is essentially an apartment complex replete with all sorts of amenities for the elderly, such as a shuttle to take people to various stores, bathrooms that have grab bars, and a cafeteria on the premises. When it is no longer safe for us to be around an oven, or when we cannot remember to take our medicine, we can move into an assisted living facility. And finally, when our mental or physical limitations become severe, we give up the last vestige of independence and move into a nursing home.

I once imagined that my mother would proceed through each of these stages in just that sequence, in what might be thought of as a natural progression. However, because she had me to help her, she never needed to be in an independent living facility, and then, all of a sudden, she went to the hospital, and from there to the nursing home. For the next two months, a nursing home was exactly what she needed. But then she got better, at which point, putting her in assisted living became a genuine possibility. Not only would the cost be less, but also she would have a private room. And, inasmuch as my plan met with the approval of the nurse practitioner and other professionals in the nursing home, I decided this was the thing to do. What may be critical to what follows, however, is that this was the reverse of the natural progression.

I cannot, of course, speak for all assisted living facilities. I can only relate my limited experience in this matter, which you may regard not as laying down a set of absolute truths about all such facilities, but as something to be aware of as a possibility. First, there was a fee to “enter the community,” which was a thousand dollars at one place and two thousand dollars at another I considered. Second, they required thirty-days notice in case my mother should need to move out. To put these two items in context, it must be borne in mind that at this stage of life, a lot can happen in thirty days. In other words, I might have paid the fee and moved my mother in, only for her to undergo a sudden decline in health two days later, necessitating a move back to the skilled nursing section, forgoing the fee and a month’s rent in the process.

Then I found out that the rooms were not furnished. Maybe I should have known better, but I thought the rooms would come with a hospital bed, a dresser, a chair, a lamp, and so forth, just like the rooms in a nursing home. They did not. Fortunately, the manager had a lot of donated furniture in storage that he let me borrow at no charge, or else I would have had to spend a lot of money setting it up. The bed could have been a real problem. My mother needed more than just a twin bed; she needed a hospital bed. Fortunately, again, the administrator was able to get Medicare to pay for a rental.

Then I had to buy sheets, towels, wash cloths, and the like. In other words, stuff that was supplied automatically in the skilled nursing section would have to be supplied by the tenant in an assisted living unit. At the department store, as I was about to buy three sets of sheets for my mother’s bed, I had the good fortune to be waited on by a woman with experience in such matters (she had been a caregiver for her father). She informed me that a hospital bed needed extra long sheets, since hospital beds are slightly longer than twin beds.

As for the towels and wash cloths, you may be wondering why I didn’t just use the towels and wash cloths that my mother had had in her apartment. The answer is that I had already let go of her apartment, and had found it necessary to throw away a lot of good stuff that was simply impossible for me to stash in my own place. So now I was going to have to replace much of what I had just thrown away. One of the CNAs (certified nursing assistants) told me that I would need towels not only for my mother to dry with after bathing, but also for the CNA to wipe up the water on the floor that would inevitably be there when she used the handheld showerhead to wash my mother. Without giving it a second thought, I bought a bunch of white towels. When she saw them, the CNA announced, in a manner that would brook no exception, that I would have to buy colored towels, because white towels must never be put on the floor. I was so awed by the gravity of her demeanor that I accepted this pronouncement without question. As I had already put my mother’s name on the towels with a marking pen so that the laundress would know to whom they belonged, it was too late to return them. So I bought a bunch of colored towels, and put them in the cabinet next to the white ones. Three days later, I saw another CNA, who had just bathed my mother, wiping up the water on the floor with one of the white towels.

Then there is the toilet paper. Even that had to be supplied by my mother, which is to say, by me. Now, I was not worried about the cost of the toilet paper or other sundry items (facial tissues, soap, toothpaste, etc.). The problem was that even with the availability of a shuttle to go to the drugstore, my mother was not really capable of handling money or remembering what to buy. And while I visited her every day, and would normally be able to buy the items myself, I do get sick from time to time. A mere cold can incapacitate me for a week. What would happen if I got sick just when my mother needed more toilet paper? In fact, I had surgery scheduled for myself the next month, and I could not be sure how long I would be convalescing. In other words, when my mother was in the skilled nursing section, the room was furnished and supplied automatically, and even should I be sick for a month, I would know that she would be completely taken care of. In the assisted living section, the situation was somewhat more precarious.

After about six weeks in assisted living, my mother fell twice, each time in the middle of the night. Since the assisted living section is less staffed at night, I was told I would have to hire a sitter for her during the nighttime. This additional cost would have completely defeated the purpose of having my mother in assisted living, and so I moved her back to the skilled nursing unit, where, with hindsight, I guess she really belonged.

I hope that I will not be misunderstood. Assisted living is perfect for many people, and the one where my mother briefly stayed was excellent. I simply was not prepared for all that was involved in placing my mother in an assisted living facility, the result, no doubt, of backing into it from a nursing home, instead of following the natural progression.

Caveats for Caregivers (3)

This is my third essay on caregiving, first published on another website on April 25, 2012.

Having just put my mother in a nursing home the previous week, I was anxious to get over there to console her, since she was positively distraught. However, I had to make a deposit, so I was standing in line at the bank, thinking about all the things I needed to do. I would have to empty out her apartment, which meant deciding what to keep, what to give away, and what to throw away. I needed to drive across town to get help applying for the Aid and Attendance Benefit from the Veterans Administration. Unfortunately, I did not have much faith in the car I was driving, which the garage had lent me, because my old heap needed to be in the shop for extensive repairs (seven weeks worth, as it turned out). Moreover, I had just discovered that I would have to become the representative payee (see “Caveats for Caretakers (1)”) for each of her three government checks, and I was wondering how involved that would be. And, as the pièce de résistance, I had just found out I would need to go into the hospital for some minor surgery.

“What next?” I asked myself.

“Your driver’s license is about to expire,” the bank teller informed me, as she proceeded to record my deposit.

At this point, I guess I should mention that I live in Texas. I don’t know how it is in other states, but from the time I arrived at the driver’s license office until the time I renewed the license and was heading out the door was three hours and forty-five minutes. Considering all the other problems I had to contend with, this was an inconvenience indeed. “Oh well, at least that’s over with,” I said to myself as I got to my car. And then it hit me. Since my mother has dementia, I carry her driver’s license around with me. I looked at it, holding my breath. Sure enough, her license would expire in four months.

Now, obviously, she would never drive again. But she would need a photo ID, since that is one of the first things they want to see when you go the doctor, a hospital, or a nursing home. I could see the ordeal unfolding before my eyes. I would have to get wheelchair transportation. I would have to hire an attendant to help my mother go the restroom, which she would surely need to do during a four-hour wait.

“There must be some kind of exception made for people like my mother,” I thought. And since this must happen all the time to people in nursing homes, I asked one of the administrators at the nursing home if she knew what usually happened in such situations. She did not have the slightest idea. The head nurse had no experience in such matters, and I even drew a blank with the social worker.

I went to the appropriate website, but my question was apparently one that is not frequently asked, and nothing seemed to fit my particular problem. I looked at the contact number. You know you are in trouble when the contact number is not toll free. It’s not the cost of the call that worried me, but the attitude that this phone number represented, that they were really not interested in hearing about my problem or helping me solve it. The woman I spoke with, however, was quite helpful, and she had some good news. For people who are homebound or in a nursing home, Texas has a policy of sending someone out to photograph the person and do all the paperwork. Unfortunately, the woman informed me, I would have to go out to the driver’s license office in person to set it up. “Don’t bother to try to get them on the phone,” she cautioned me. “It’s impossible.” I tried anyway. It was impossible. So, back I went to the driver’s license office. For this situation, which could have easily been handled over the phone, I only had to stand in line for forty-five minutes (not to mention the commute, which was the better part of an hour). I was told that someone visits homebound people or those in nursing homes once a month, and that I would be contacted sometime next month. I asked for a contact number, just in case. I did not get one.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose. I was contacted, and a couple of state employees came to the nursing home. They took my mother’s information, took her photograph, and then tried to get her to sign the form. Unfortunately, my mother was too confused to sign her name or even to make a mark. So, one of the state employees told me to sign for her.

“Do you want me to sign with my power of attorney?” I asked.

“We don’t accept power of attorney,” she replied. (There it was again, the government’s mantra.) “Just sign her name for her,” she said.

And so, I signed my mother’s name, and within a few weeks, my mother received her photo ID, with my version of her signature right there at the bottom. “If I need to forge my mother’s name on some document,” I thought to myself sardonically, “the signature will be a perfect match with the one on her photo ID.”

As noted above, none of the employees in the nursing home were aware of this service provided for people that are homebound. For this reason, I have told this tale, to make the reader aware of a service that may be available, depending on the state in which one lives. I would only add that one should not wait until the driver’s license is about to expire. As soon as you are sure that your mother will never drive again, start making arrangements right away to get her a photo ID to take its place.

In the opening paragraph, I referred to the Aid and Attendance Benefit that is available to veterans who have served in wartime and their spouses. The benefit may be as much as $1,700 per month. If you think your mother may qualify, ask the social worker at the nursing home about it. She will probably be able to give you a contact number of a government employee who can assist you with this. My first effort was with someone at the VA, but the nursing home directed to me to a county employee, without whose assistance I would have long since given up. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the claim to be processed. The odds are very good that you will have to put your mother on Medicaid before she ever receives anything, at which point she will no longer be eligible for the benefit (it will be reduced to $10).

Caveats for Caregivers (2)

This is my second essay on caregiving, first published on another website on April 16, 2012.

“We don’t accept cash.”

She must have misunderstood me. When I offered to pay cash, she must have thought I was about to reach into my pocket, like some character from Mad Men, pull out a fat money clip, and begin peeling off hundred dollar bills until I got what I wanted.

“What I meant was,” I said, anxious to reassure her, “I could write you a check for the difference.”

“We wouldn’t know what to charge.”

“Well,” I continued, still not fully appreciating what I was up against, “I could put up a big deposit, and you could refund whatever you don’t use. Or I could just give you my credit card.”

“We don’t accept cash.”

Maybe I should start at the beginning. A little more than a year ago, my mother had to go to the hospital. After she was there for about a week, she was still not well enough to go home, but neither was she sick enough to stay in the hospital. So, a social worker stopped by my mother’s room to help me select a skilled nursing facility. A skilled nursing facility provides care or therapy for people who have been released from a hospital, but are not ready to go home. Medicare will pay most of it for 20 days, after which there is a co-payment for about 100 days.

The social worker suggested three such facilities, and I picked the one closest to where I lived. What I did not realize at the time was that a temporary stay at a skilled nursing facility is an opportunity to try out a nursing home. In other words, the typical nursing home, providing long-term care, is often combined with a skilled nursing facility, providing temporary care. In many cases, the rooms are the same: someone who goes into a skilled nursing facility for therapy, but then undergoes a serious decline in health, requiring long-term care, will not even have to change rooms.

Medicare, of course, does not pay for long-term care. I knew that if my mother should have to stay in a nursing home, she would soon run out of money, at which time I would have to get her on Medicaid. When I happened to mention this to the woman in charge of admissions, she informed me that they did not accept Medicaid. As I had naively supposed that all nursing homes accept Medicaid, this came as a surprise. Moreover, I realized that an opportunity had been lost. I had inadvertently selected a skilled nursing facility that would not be suitable for my mother, financially speaking, should she ever need long-term care. Had I selected one that does take Medicaid, then from my mother’s temporary stay there, I would have known whether to bring her back when she needed to stay somewhere permanently. With this in mind, if you want to find out which nursing homes in your area accept Medicaid and which do not, I recommend medicare.gov.

After about a month, my mother was released, and she returned to her apartment. As it was close to my apartment, and as I was retired, I was able to spend a lot of time over at her place attending to her various needs, like shopping, cooking, and cleaning. But after a few months, she had to go to the hospital again. As before, she needed to be released to a skilled nursing facility, and this time I selected one that would accept Medicaid, especially since it appeared that this time she might have to stay for good.

However, the admissions coordinator informed me that GEHA (Government Employees Health Association), the insurance my mother had in addition to Medicare, was not a supplemental policy, but rather a secondary one, a distinction I have yet to fully grasp. The practical consequence was that GEHA would not pay for the portion that Medicare did not cover. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we will not be able to admit your mother.”

I had already been through this with the previous nursing home, but in that instance, I was simply told that I would be responsible for paying the difference. All I could figure was that the woman I was now talking to must be used to dealing with poor people, who cannot afford to pay anything out of pocket. “Oh, that’s no problem,” I assured her, “we can pay cash for whatever Medicare does not cover.”

“We don’t accept cash.”

And thus began the surreal conversation with which this story opened. I called the social worker at the hospital. She offered to call the nursing home herself. Ten minutes later, she called me back to tell me that the situation was exactly as I had described it. I selected another nursing home. In this case, the woman in charge of admissions did not even bring up the subject of payment. After my mother was released from that place, I received a bill and paid it.

Hopefully, the cash-refusing nursing home is just an anomaly. But it is something to be on guard against, in case it turns out to be the beginning of a trend. In particular, in selecting a supplemental insurance policy, it might be a good idea to find out how much it covers of skilled nursing care.

There is one more thing you need to know about skilled nursing facilities. A lot of nursing homes have waiting lists. If you are hoping to get your mother into a nursing home, it may take months to get her admitted. And I am not just talking about the really nice nursing homes for rich people, the ones that do not accept Medicaid, like the first place my mother stayed in. I once took a tour of a nursing home that looked like a cheap hotel where they rent rooms by the hour. And they had a waiting list! But if your mother enters a nursing home directly from the hospital, by way of the skilled nursing unit, she will move to the front of the line. In fact, once she has a room there, they are unlikely to ask her to leave, should it turn out that she needs long-term care.

Officially, everyone is treated equally. It is whispered, however, that when it comes to waiting lists, preference is often given to those who can pay privately for a while. The reimbursement from Medicaid is not generous. A Medicaid bed is better than an empty bed, but not that much better. With too many Medicaid beds, a nursing home may end up having to close its doors. It needs a certain proportion of the more remunerative private-pay beds in order to cover its costs. Therefore, a prospective applicant who can pay privately for many months is more desirable than one who needs to get on Medicaid right away. So, if you need to put your mother in a nursing home, and she can pay privately for a while, you should casually mention this fact when talking to the person in charge of admissions.

Now that I think about it, it might not be a bad idea to have one of those Mad Men money clips after all.

Caveats for Caregivers (1)

Beginning in 2012, on another website, I wrote a series of eight essays based on my experiences in taking care of my mother in the last years of her life. I have decided to publish them here as well, with very few changes from when I originally wrote them. One change is that I have replaced the word “caretaker” with “caregiver,” which seems to be the preferred term today. Although one may be a caregiver for different family members or even for a friend, in giving advice to other caregivers, I will assume, for convenience and ease of expression, that the loved one is the caregiver’s mother, as will often be the case. This first essay was originally published on April 10, 2012.

Seventeen years ago, my mother and I decided to take the advice one so often hears about getting one’s affairs in order. We went to a lawyer and had her draw up a will, medical power of attorney, directive to physician, and durable statutory power of attorney for each of us. Regarding this last document, it requires a physician’s statement attesting to incapacity or incompetence for its execution. This turned out to be very difficult to get.

A little more than a year ago, my mother had a seizure, which permanently affected her physically and mentally. I decided it was to time to execute the power of attorney document. The attending physician in the hospital expressed reticence about providing the necessary letter. My mother’s bills needed paying, so the next day I brought in a couple of checks made out to the cable company and the electric company. The nurse said that owing to my mother’s mental state, she was not allowed to sign documents. So, I whipped out the power of attorney and asked her if she would have the doctor put that in writing so that I could execute the document and sign the checks myself. She referred me to the doctor who was there for the weekend. He said I would need to wait until Monday to speak to the aforementioned attending physician. On Monday, I spoke to a third doctor, who said that the attending physician had gone on vacation, and she also refused to provide the needed letter. “What about these bills that need to be paid?” I asked. “Just have her sign the checks,” she replied. So, my mother, who didn’t know what was going on, and was having hallucinations, signed the checks and the bills got paid.

A question occurred to me: Was this legal? I doubt it. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that it is illegal to knowingly get a mentally incompetent person to sign a check or other document. What I have discovered, however, from this and subsequent incidents, is that there are things that are illegal but acceptable, though no one will ever come right out and say so. To qualify for this category, two conditions must be met: (1) You must not be doing it for your own personal gain; and (2) you are only trying to get for your mother that to which she is legally entitled. Meet both of these conditions, and there are many health care workers and civil servants who will look the other way, because they know you are in a catch-22 situation.

The next time my mother went into the hospital, I decided to try again. I asked the attending physician on that occasion for the necessary letter. He referred me to my mother’s neurologist. The neurologist opined that the letter should come from the attending physician. So, I gave up. Fortunately, my mother continued to sign whatever I stuck in front of her.

Eventually, my mother’s cognitive ability declined to the point that I was able to get her primary care physician to provide me with the necessary letter. From my first attempt to obtain this letter until I finally succeeded was nine months.

When I went to my mother’s bank, which is also my own, and gave one of the bank officers a copy of the power of attorney, accompanied by the doctor’s letter, the bank officer looked at the power of attorney document and said, “Oh. It’s too old.” “But the whole idea,” I replied, somewhat stunned at the remark, “is to have this drawn up in advance, while you are still mentally sound.” After discussing it with the manager, she accepted it, possibly because my mother and I had been doing business there for twenty years. In general, you should speak to the financial institutions in which your mother has money to find out if they have special rules or forms to fill out before you contact a lawyer about drawing up a power of attorney document.

The power of attorney document that my mother signed clearly states that I have the power to handle her Social Security checks and any other federal benefits or pensions. It might just as well have stated that I have the power to jump over the moon. Now, my mother is a triple dipper. She receives a check from Social Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Defense. They all have one thing in common: they do not accept power of attorney. Instead, they each require that I become her representative payee. Not one person in a hundred has even heard of this expression, including, apparently, my lawyer.

You might suppose that there would be one procedure for becoming a representative payee, which would then apply to each agency or department. But that would require the application of reason and common sense. Instead, each agency or department has its own rules, regarding which there is no coordination or reciprocity. Of the three, the Office of Personnel Management proved to have the most onerous conditions. They sent me a letter saying that in lieu of my being my mother’s court appointed fiduciary, I could become her representative payee by sending in a doctor’s statement and two affidavits from two people stating my mother’s condition and incapacity. As I am a bachelor and an only child, there is no one else in my family who could sign such an affidavit. The only people who know firsthand what my mother’s condition is are the nursing home employees where she presently resides, and nursing homes have a policy of not allowing their employees to sign affidavits.

As an added obstacle, each affidavit would have to state why it is that I have not become my mother’s court appointed fiduciary. When I read this letter, I thought to myself: “How is anyone supposed to know why I have not become my mother’s court appointed fiduciary, when I don’t know the answer to that myself?” I suppose the answer would be that I thought my power of attorney would be enough. But how would a prospective affiant know that unless I told him? And my telling him would not provide the independent information that the affidavit is supposed to represent.

The result is that I am now in the process of becoming my mother’s legal guardian. This will allow me to become her representative payee, which will give me the power to handle her Social Security checks and any other federal benefits or pensions. At least, that is what my lawyer tells me. Maybe this time she is right.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes (1938) was released a little less than a year before the outbreak of World War II, but about a month after the signing of the Munich Agreement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that with this document, he had secured “peace for our time.” This will forever be despised as an act of appeasement, although I can’t say that I share that sentiment. Though Alfred Hitchcock, who directed this movie, is primarily concerned with entertaining us, yet one suspects that the movie is also being presented as a cautionary tale against such appeasement, against pacifism and complacency.

The movie begins in the fictitious, Germanic-sounding country of Bandrika, which is ruled by a dictator. A bunch of people planning on traveling by train are waiting in a hotel lobby, two of whom are Charters and Caldicott, portrayed by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, a comedy team that began life with this movie. As they wait, they express their concerns about the last report they heard, “England on the brink.” From their conversation, we wonder if England is on the verge of going to war. Eventually, we find out that they are worried about a cricket match. Pace the British, cricket is a sport the rest of the world thinks is ludicrous. And the obsession with cricket on the part of the characters that Radford and Wayne subsequently played in other movies became a trademark gag. From time to time, we see them reading about that cricket match on the back pages of the newspaper, while the serious political news on the front page is ignored. They represent the dangerous complacency of the British people.

On account of an avalanche, the train cannot continue on its way, so everyone has to seek accommodations at the hotel. Charters and Caldicott are forced to occupy the maid’s quarters, consisting of a narrow bed intended for just one person. The maid, Anna, is an attractive woman, though slightly bigger than either of the two men, whom she looks at flirtatiously when she finds out they will be sleeping in her room, much to their discomfiture. Apparently, one of the two men sleeps in pajamas and the other does not. For the sake of modesty, presumably, they share the pajamas, Charters wearing the tops; Caldicott, the bottoms. At one point, when the two men are squeezed into the bed, Anna barges right in to put her hat back under the bed and to retrieve some other articles of clothing. Charters moves his body in front of Caldicott so that Anna can’t see his nipples.

Earlier, when three young American women seem to be getting the royal treatment by the hotel manager, Caldicott dryly remarks, “the almighty dollar.” One of the women, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), is soon to be married. A friend proposes a toast, “To Iris, and the happy days she’s leaving behind, and the blue-blooded cheque chaser she’s dashing to London to marry.”

It’s an old story, a rich American woman marrying an impecunious British aristocrat for the sake of a title and a coat of arms, which apparently is more important to her father than it is to her. She refers to herself as being an “offering on an altar.” Love is not involved, but that doesn’t bother her, saying that she’s been everywhere and done everything, so she might as well get married. Once happiness has lost its charm, you might as well slam the door on it forever.

There is one bright spot about being married, however. That way you can have an affair. Adultery is fun, at least in the beginning, as we learn from another couple, Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker) and Margaret (Linden Travers). They are both cheating on their spouses. Todhunter had no qualms in the beginning about openly carrying on with her, but now he insists on separate rooms for the two of them. His passions having cooled somewhat, he is worried that a divorce would spoil his chances of becoming a judge.

Anyway, after Iris’s friends leave, she finds it impossible to sleep because of the noise being made by Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the guest in the room above her. You know the type, someone that thinks it’s his God-given right to make as much noise as he wants, and who cares nothing about how much it disturbs his neighbors. And like most inconsiderate neighbors, he believes that anyone who complains about the noise he is making is the one who is in the wrong.

When he refuses to quit making so much noise, she bribes the manager to have him removed from his room, so Gilbert barges into her room and acts as if he will have to sleep in her bed, threatening to tell people she invited him to sleep with her if she complains. This forces her to call the manager and get him his room back. We know we are supposed to smile at this obnoxious behavior of his, regarding it as charming and endearing, because he is tall and good looking.

Charters and Caldicott end up at a table with Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an elderly governess, returning to England now that her charges have grown up. She comes across as whimsical and sentimental, boring the two men with her talk about the beautiful mountains and the lovely people of Bandrika, saying, “Everyone sings here. The people are just like happy children, with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts.”

“lt’s not reflected in their politics,” Charters replies dryly, but as Miss Froy parts from them, she says that we should not judge a country by its politics, noting that the English are quite honest by nature. The implication is that the British government is not honest (and that means the government presided over by Neville Chamberlain). The idea is that the people of a country can be betrayed by their government, but that the goodness of ordinary folks will ultimately prevail, clearly a populist sentiment. This is ironic coming from her, since she turns out to be a part of the British government herself, a spy, to be exact.

She returns to her room, and just below her balcony, which is on the second floor, a man is serenading with a guitar. She drops a coin out the window for him, not realizing he has just been strangled. As we later find out, the melody being played is a coded message consisting of the vital clause of a secret pact between two European countries.

It must be a rather sophisticated code, for the simple melody is about sixteen bars long, all in one octave. If each note corresponds to a word, there is a vocabulary of about twelve words to work with. Of course, we can expand that vocabulary by taking into account the length of each note. I estimate we could increase the vocabulary to thirty-six words, given the melody we hear in the movie.

On the other hand, the notes might represent letters and numerals, and thirty-six different notes and their lengths would be just enough for every letter and numeral there is. But then, it would have to be a mighty short clause.

In either event, the code is limited by the requirements of euphony. A disagreeable combination of notes could not be serenaded on the sly, as a way of passing on the information to Miss Froy, so the number of possible combinations is constrained. And like most melodies, much of it is repetitive anyway. Notwithstanding all these limitations, the secret clause has somehow been thus encoded.

The person that strangled the man with the guitar knows that Miss Froy has the coded message, so he tries to kill her by pushing a flower pot out of a second-story window to land on her head while she is looking for her bag at the station prior to boarding the train. But Iris was bringing Miss Froy her glasses, which she dropped, and the pot lands on her head instead, giving her a concussion. Miss Froy ends up taking care of her on the train, but after Iris takes a nap, she wakes up to find her gone.

Charters and Caldicott saw Miss Froy on the train, but they pretend not to have seen her, because they figure nothing really bad could have happened to her, and they do not want the train delayed, lest it cause them to miss the cricket match they hope to see when they get back to England. Todhunter pretends not to have seen her because he fears getting involved in an inquiry that might expose his infidelity. The only one who takes her seriously is Gilbert, the noisy neighbor.

All those that are neither British nor American on that train act suspicious and untrustworthy, being either German or Italian. Whereas Charters, Caldicott, and Todhunter merely deny having seen Miss Froy, the Germans and Italians deny she ever existed. For example, when Iris asks the Italian magician and the German baroness in her compartment what happened to the lady that was sitting opposite her, they say there was no such woman. Admittedly, this lets us know immediately that they are part of a conspiracy to deny Miss Froy’s existence, but in real life, such a tactic would be both unnecessary and unwise. How much easier and less suspicious it would have been for them to say, “Oh, she got up and left the compartment a little while ago.”

Furthermore, it is inconsistent with phase two of their conspiracy, which had already been planned. When the train stops, a patient with bandages around her head is brought onto the train. Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas) is a brain surgeon, and he says he will be operating on her when they get off the train at the next stop. But in reality, the supposed patient is a woman who dresses up like Miss Froy, while the real Miss Froy is then wrapped up in the bandages and put under guard by a fake nun.

But this woman substitute contradicts the story that Miss Froy does not exist. The Italian that claimed that Miss Froy never existed now tells Iris and Gilbert that she came back. They go to see her, but it’s a different woman. As a result, whereas before, Iris was told that the bump on her head made her hallucinate the woman sitting across from her in the compartment, now she is told that there is such a woman as she described, only she’s German, not British, and her name isn’t Miss Froy.

Needless to say, if all the conspirators wanted to do was stop Miss Froy from taking the musically coded message to England, they should have strangled her and unceremoniously thrown her off the train.

Eventually, Gilbert finds evidence that Iris is right. They pull a reverse switcheroo, removing the bandages from Miss Froy and putting them on her imposter, and that woman is taken off the train at the next station. They are assisted by the fake nun, who is British, once she realizes Miss Froy is British too. In fact, as it becomes clear that Miss Froy is in danger, most of the British passengers on the train begin pulling together. Thus, the movie is optimistically saying that once the British people are shaken from their complacency, they will rally together and defeat the foreign aggressors.

The one exception is Todhunter. Though he is British, yet he wants to surrender to the soldiers trying to get control of the train, saying, “I don’t believe in fighting.” He is derided as being a pacifist and compared to Christians who got thrown to the lions. When he insists on surrendering on his own, getting off the train waving a white handkerchief, he is contemptuously shot, falling to the ground and muttering that he doesn’t understand. So much for pacifism. Of course, we all knew he was doomed the minute we found out he was cheating on his wife. Margaret is spared, however, probably because she was already separated from her husband, saying at one point that he knew he would not be seeing her again.

Miss Froy admits she’s a spy and gives the melody code to Gilbert, in case she doesn’t make it. Before she leaves the train, she says, “I hope we shall meet again under quieter circumstances.” At first, I thought this was an allusion to Vera Lynn’s song, but that apparently was not published until the following year. Because she is the last person you would expect to be a spy, her example implies that the rest of us have no excuse for not doing our part. If a little old lady can risk her life in the fight against evil enemies, dodging bullets as she runs across the countryside of a hostile nation, then we all are capable of making at least some small contribution ourselves.

When they all get back to England, Charters and Caldicott find out that the cricket match has been canceled. Iris sees her fiancé and hides from him, deciding to elope with Gilbert instead, because he is tall and good looking. Just wait until the honeymoon is over, and he returns to being the inconsiderate jerk he was when she first met him. In any event, the idea of marriage puts the “Wedding March” in Gilbert’s head, and when they get to the Foreign Office to pass on the code, he can’t remember the tune. But then we hear the tune being played on a piano, and it turns out to be Miss Froy playing it, having made it back to England after all. Apparently, she didn’t know how to decipher the code herself, or else she would have just walked in and stated the secret clause in words.

Of course, as has often been observed, she could have called the Foreign Office from Bandrika and hummed the tune over the phone.

Pretty Woman (1990) and Philadelphia (1993)

Because Pretty Woman intends to be a modern mixture of Cinderella and Pygmalion, with an allusion in the movie to the title character being a princess who is rescued from a wicked queen by a knight on a white horse thrown in to boot, it hardly seems appropriate to criticize this fairy tale as being unrealistic. Suffice it to say that it is far-fetched that a rich, handsome man like Edward (Richard Gere) would not find the right woman until he met Vivian (Julia Roberts), a streetwalker who is so perfect that she even likes the opera. Perfect for him, that is, not for me. My perfect woman likes watching movies, and I leave the ones that like going to the opera to men like Edward.

Though this movie made no pretense about being realistic, yet there is one reality too stark to be ignored, and that is disease. Once upon a time, a man in a movie could marry a prostitute, and the audience would accept this without thinking about her having some kind of sexually transmitted disease. We never worried while watching Stagecoach (1939) when the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) decided to marry Dallas (Claire Trevor), who was a whore with a heart of gold. Because venereal disease was something people rarely spoke of, especially in the movies, they rarely thought about it while watching these movies.

But today we live in a world where it is impossible to think about sex without also thinking about getting an STD, especially if it is sex with prostitutes. And therefore, it was necessary for this movie to assure the audience that Vivian was in good health. Consequently, we are not surprised when Vivian says to Edward, when they first meet, that she is safe: “Look, I use condoms always. I get checked out once a month at the free clinic. Not only am I better in the sack than an amateur, I am probably safer.” Maybe prostitutes normally say that sort of thing to their customers, maybe not. I wouldn’t know. But if it sounds a little forced and artificial, we accept this bit of dialogue as necessary to keep us from thinking about disease when they eventually have sex. The movie could not afford to rest content with this one reference to condoms, however. To drive the point home, Vivian later produces her rainbow assortment of condoms for Edward to pick from.

But still, they are not quite ready for sex. That is, we in the audience are not quite ready for them to have sex. Apparently, we need a few more assurances. Therefore, in a subsequent scene, Vivian tells Edward that she does not kiss on the mouth. She says this is for emotional reasons: “Kit’s always saying to me, ‘Don’t get emotional when you turn tricks.’ That’s why no kissing. It’s too personal.” So, later in the movie, when they do start kissing, we know that they are getting emotionally involved. But the real reason for her having this restriction on kissing is so that we know there has been absolutely no exchange of bodily fluids, not even saliva, with any of her past customers.

In a movie about sex, we are not surprised if there is a bathtub scene, especially one in which both the man and the woman are in the tub together. But as there are two bathtub scenes in this movie, we have to wonder if the purpose is more than just erotic, if they are meant to make us think of Vivian as clean. This is not to say that taking a bath would act as a prophylactic against the transmission of disease. Rather, it is more about the association of ideas than logic. The cleanliness associated with bathing is supposed to support our belief that Vivian is sexually clean as well.

But the scene that really shows the extent to which this movie wants to assure the audience that she is safe to have sex with is the dental floss scene. Let’s face it. Most people do not floss during a date. I suppose a woman might, because she can carry the floss around in her purse. But even so, there is normally no need to have a scene involving personal hygiene in a movie, unless, of course, personal hygiene is important for some reason. As with the bathing, flossing will do nothing to prevent the transmission of venereal disease, but the movie is trying to suggest to us that any woman who flosses during a date must be so clean she could not possibly have AIDS, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, or crabs.

Still, under normal circumstances, if a woman decided to floss her teeth on a date, she would close the bathroom door, and her date would not dream of just walking in. But if he did interrupt her while flossing, she would simply stop what she was doing to see what he wanted. She would not hide the floss as if it were something shameful or embarrassing, the way Vivian does in this movie when Edward walks in on her. But the purpose of Vivian’s hiding the floss is so that there can be a big dramatic scene and discussion about it, one which cannot escape the attention of the audience, much in the way that her display of condoms for Edward to pick from drove home the point in a way that could not be missed either.

So, with the condoms, monthly visits to the free clinic, a ban on kissing, a couple of baths, and some dental floss, the audience can finally relax and quit worrying about whether Vivian has a disease, even if the opera she and Edward went to see was La Traviata, a story about a courtesan who dies of tuberculosis.

Whereas the title character of Pretty Woman did not have a venereal disease, despite our apprehensions in this matter, given the fact that she was a prostitute, the protagonist of Philadelphia does have such a disease as a result of some risky behavior of his own. In this movie, Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a lawyer with a prestigious law firm. In the opening scene, he successfully defends a client against what he calls a “nuisance suit,” as “an example of rapacious litigation.” And so, if you did not know anything about this movie beforehand, you would correctly suspect that before the show is over, he will be bringing suit against someone himself. And when he does, the lawyer whom he accused of bringing a frivolous lawsuit against his client, ambulance chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), ends up being his attorney.

In particular, the partners of the law firm he worked for say that they fired Beckett for incompetence, but Beckett claims they fired him because he had AIDS, which he concealed from the partners in addition to concealing the fact that he was gay. Beckett explains during the trial that he decided not to tell the partners he was gay when he heard them telling crude jokes about homosexuals. Those who produced this movie made sure that the jokes were not funny, lest we get confused and start siding with the partners. Actually, the movie never makes it clear exactly what happened regarding Beckett’s firing. Beckett believes that someone figured out he had AIDS and sabotaged his work in order to justify dismissing him for incompetence, but we never find out for sure.

This movie is contemporaneously set in the early 1990s. It was a transitional period. During the early 1980s, when AIDS was first identified, there was no treatment. I remember seeing people whose bodies were ravaged by that disease. The sight of them filled one with pity and dread (we see examples of such at the clinic where Beckett goes to have his blood monitored). The dread was especially acute, because at the time, no one knew how contagious it was or what the vectors of transmission were. Was it airborne? Could it be transmitted by mosquitoes? We knew that blood and semen could transmit the disease, but we also wondered about saliva and sweat. By the 1990s, however, research had pretty much established that AIDS was caused by HIV and that blood transfusions, dirty needles used by drug addicts, and unprotected sex, especially between two men, were the primary methods of transmission. And while our fears of contracting this disease have been reduced by this knowledge, it also helps that treatment has advanced to the point that we seldom see anyone with obvious symptoms, such as extreme weight loss.

And so, the aversion to touching or being around someone with AIDS, a perfectly rational fear in the early 1980s, came to be regarded as a manifestation of ignorance and bigotry by the 1990s. Throughout this movie, we see Beckett being hugged on numerous occasions, more than you would normally see in a movie, even a movie about someone dying of a disease. In this way, we are informed that those doing the hugging are enlightened on the subject. On the other hand, we also see other people trying to put distance between themselves and Beckett, whom we are supposed to regard as wrongheaded, if not morally bankrupt.

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

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

Of course, the attitude of the movie is that it is wrong to blame the victim. More importantly, it allows the people in the audience to be smug in their sense of moral superiority, self-assured that they would never blame the victim the way some in the movie seem to. But let us note that the movie also lacks the courage of its convictions. It establishes that Beckett was and still is in a monogamous relationship, as it were, and that he just had a moral lapse one night. In other words, the movie did not have the courage to make Beckett a man given to promiscuity, someone who had had anonymous sex on innumerable occasions in movie theaters and restrooms for over a decade. That would really have tested us. Instead, the movie is saying that it is wrong to blame the victim, especially when the victim, while not being totally innocent like the mother who had a transfusion, is almost innocent. In so doing, the movie makes it all too easy for people in the audience to congratulate themselves in how right-thinking they are in this matter.

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

Midway through the trial, Miller comes over to Beckett’s place to go over the testimony Beckett will be giving on Monday. Instead, Beckett wants to talk about the opera music that he has playing. Like most people, including me, Miller does not much care for opera. Beckett explains what the opera is about and what emotions are being expressed through the singing. The intensity of his performance is bizarre. I don’t know. Maybe if you are dying from a dreadful disease, you can get a little more worked up about things than you normally would, but it all seems to be a bit much.

While his overwrought description of the aria was going on, I could not help but think of the movie Pretty Woman, which is why I decided to discuss both movies in a single essay. In that movie, when Edward takes Vivian to see an opera, presumably the first one she has ever been to, we see her crying during a particularly moving scene. In other words, in both movies, a major character practices a form of sex that many regard as likely to result in contracting a disease. And in both movies, these characters are deeply moved by an opera, as if to say they have such great souls that they can appreciate art in its highest form with a passion that we philistines, with our sexually respectable lives, can scarcely imagine. It just wouldn’t have been the same if Beckett had been listening to N.W.A., explaining to his lawyer with great emotion, “And here is the part where he gets his sawed-off shotgun, and they have to haul off all the bodies.”

How Same-Sex Marriage Would Have Resolved a $22,222.22 Moral Dilemma

Did you ever wish you had a rich uncle? Well, I once did. Unfortunately, because he was straight, he married a woman, and they had two children. So, even when I was just a lad, some sixty years ago, I knew I would never see a cent of that money: when he died, it would go to his wife; and should she predecease him, his children would naturally get it all.

As a result, when I received a call from a genealogist about ten years ago, saying that a mysterious relative of mine had died, and that I might be entitled to part of the estate, the thought of my uncle and his millions never crossed my mind. Instead, I was waiting for the man on the other end of the line to get to the part where this mysterious relative had been a Nigerian prince, and that for a few thousand dollars, I could clear away one or two legal obstacles standing between me and a large fortune. Much to my surprise, he asked for no upfront money. Instead, he was willing to disclose the name this relative, and pursue the inheritance for me, for one third of whatever I got.

My girlfriend thought that I should find out who this relative was on my own, and cut this interloper out completely. But that would have required effort on my part. Besides, by letting him have a third, I knew he would be motivated to get as much for me as he could. I believe it pays to be generous with one’s associates. So, I signed the contract, and sat back and waited for results.

It turned out that he had also contacted three of my cousins with the same deal, and so we all signed the same agreement. Now, I wondered why two of my other cousins, William and Sandra, were not included in the deal. I started to mention them, but then it occurred to me that this might entitle them to an equal share, and whatever the inheritance was, I knew it would go further split four ways than six. Besides, I said to myself, their father, the above-mentioned rich uncle, would be leaving them a lot of money anyway, so why bother them with more? So anxious was I to suppress all thought of those two undeserving cousins that it prevented me from realizing that one of them might be the mysterious relative in question.

As it happened, my uncle and aunt had died some years back, unbeknownst to me (as you can see, we weren’t close), and that somewhere along the way my cousin William had died as well, the entire fortune going to Sandra. I had only met Sandra once, for a couple of minutes, after which she excused herself and went to her room. Consequently, I did not know much about her. And one of the things I did not know was that she was a lesbian. From what I could piece together from various sources, she had fallen in love with a woman named Betty. Since there was no same-sex marriage at this time, Betty would have had no legal right to any of Sandra’s money in the event of her death. To rectify this deficiency, Sandra made out a will, leaving everything to Betty. As so often happens, the glow of love faded away, and they started getting on each other’s nerves, leading to a breakup. Soon after that, Sandra fell in love with a woman named Caroline, and soon after that a new will was drawn up, exactly like the first, mutatis mutandis.

When Sandra died, Caroline took it hard, but Betty took it harder. There she was with a will in her possession, leaving her all of Sandra’s money, which, had the affair lasted just a little longer, would now be hers. Sandra had spent most of it along the way, but there was still about two million dollars left, and Betty could not sleep for thinking about what had slipped away. Convinced that this prior will must be worth something, she hired a lawyer to contest the will that left everything to Caroline. Caroline was unmoved. As she saw it, she had the more recent will, and there was no need to let Betty have a dime. Things bogged down, and Sandra’s estate was frozen, with neither Betty nor Caroline able to put her hands on any of it.

Betty’s lawyer got creative, and asked the above-mentioned genealogist to search for missing heirs, in hopes of further complicating the case, thereby forcing Caroline to be reasonable. It worked. He found four cousins, including me, and through a lawyer associated with the genealogical agency, it was expressed that Sandra’s cousins were most distraught at her passing, were even more distraught at being cheated out of their rightful share of her estate, and were prepared to seek remedy before the court to see that justice was done.

Caroline was still of the opinion that the will left everything to her, and that was the end of it. She did not appreciate some of the finer points of the law, which her lawyer was at pains to impress upon her. With a trial by jury, he pointed out, anything might happen. To put it crudely, they might wind up with several jurors who were of the persuasion that homosexuality was a sin, deserving more of punishment than reward, the result being that the money might all go to the cousins, and none to either Betty or Caroline. “Pay the two dollars,” he advised her. Well, make that two hundred thousand dollars, half to Betty, and the other half for the cousins. Reason prevailed, and she made the deal.

None of this would have happened if same-sex marriage had been legal. Sandra would have married and divorced Betty, who would have received some kind of settlement. Then Sandra would have married Caroline, who would have inherited everything with far less fuss. Any large estate stands a good chance of being contested, but a spouse with a will leaving her everything is hard to beat. Same-sex marriage would have given first Betty, and then Caroline, the same established rights and financial security mostly taken for granted by opposite-sex couples. And that is the way it should be.

In the absence of same-sex marriage, however, Betty and Caroline were left to fight it out in a less certain arena. And the difficulties did not end with them, for they extended even to the cousins. As noted above, one hundred thousand dollars was granted to us four cousins to divide among ourselves, with the genealogist getting a third of each. At least, that is what it would have meant, had not fate intervened once more. One of my cousins died just one week before the deal was made. I figured that meant her husband would get her share. That is because, like Caroline, I did not appreciate some of the finer points of the law, which cut the husband out completely. That meant $33,333.33 for each of the remaining three cousins, or $22,222.22 each, after the genealogist got his cut.

I felt bad for my cousin’s husband. By all rights, he should have gotten his fair share. The proper thing to do would be for me to give him a portion of my own inheritance, and to suggest to my other two cousins that they do the same. But then it occurred to me that if I were going to give any of the money away, I should give all of my portion to Caroline. After all, Sandra wanted Caroline, the woman she loved, to have her money, and not some indifferent cousins about whom she cared nothing. As I could not resolve the question as to who was more deserving, my cousin’s husband or Caroline, I decided to keep the $22,222.22 until such time as my conscience should guide me to do the right thing. Moral dilemmas can be notoriously problematic, and thus the issue remains unresolved to this day.

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

There must have been a lot of suspicion concerning secret clauses in pacts between European governments in the years leading up to World War II, because there were two Hitchcock movies based on such a clause: The first was The Lady Vanishes (1938); the second, Foreign Correspondent (1940). Whereas The Lady Vanishes was made before the outbreak of World War II, Foreign Correspondent was released about a year after it had started. And whereas the former had a British orientation, the latter was made from an American perspective. What both movies have in common, however, other than a secret clause between two nations, is a contempt for complacency and a distrust of pacifists.

Regarding the complacency, the movie begins with the following prologue, which praises foreign correspondents in contrast to all those Americans who thought everything was just fine.

To those intrepid ones who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America…. To those forthright ones who early saw the clouds of war while many of us at home were seeing rainbows…. To those clear-headed ones who now stand like recording angels among the dead and dying…. To the Foreign Correspondents—this motion picture is dedicated.

Oddly enough, all this florid prose regarding foreign correspondents is immediately contradicted by the opening scene and several other scenes thereafter. Mr. Powers, editor of the New York Globe, has nothing but contempt for those foreign correspondents. He is handed a cablegram from London, which is what he has been waiting for. It is dated August 19, 1939, less than two weeks away from Germany’s invasion of Poland, which started World War II. The cable says that according to a high official, there is absolutely no chance of war this year, on account of late crops. I guess the idea is that everyone will be too busy with the harvest to fight a war.

Powers throws the cable down. “Foreign correspondent,” he says with disgust. “I could get more news out of Europe looking in the crystal ball…. They all make me sick.”

The foreign correspondent that sent the cable is Stebbins (Robert Benchley), who, we later learn, makes no pretense of being of any value, just passing on government handouts back to the states, and then spending the rest of his time drinking, fooling around with women, playing cards late into the night, and then betting on the horses the next morning. Later in the movie, a woman says that most foreign correspondents are “greasy.”

But as far as Powers is concerned, the main problem with foreign correspondents is that they are all intellectuals. Powers continues with his rant:

I don’t want any more economists, sages, or oracles bombinating over our cable. I want a reporter. Someone who doesn’t know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo. A good, honest crime reporter. That’s what the Globe needs. That’s what Europe needs. There’s a crime hatching on that bedeviled continent.

That line of thought leads Powers to think of Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), the crime reporter that beat up a policeman. He sends for Jones, who thinks he’s about to be fired for that reason, and thus has an insolent manner. But Powers believes that beating up policemen is a virtue, so Jones is just the sort of man he needs.

Powers asks him about the crisis in Europe. “What crisis?” Jones asks. Powers smiles. He answers that he is referring to the impending war. Jones says he hasn’t been giving it much thought. That’s just what the anti-intellectual Powers is looking for, someone blithely ignorant of what is going on in the world. He offers Jones the job of going to Europe to cover “the biggest story in the world today.” Jones admits he is not equipped to cover that story, but says he could read up on it. But Powers forbids it: “No reading up. I like you just as you are. What Europe needs is a fresh, unused mind.” In the background are two massive bookshelves filled with books. In other words, Powers has undoubtedly read all those books, and he knows better than anyone that they are of no value.

“Foreign correspondent, huh?” Jones asks. “No,” Powers replies, “reporter.”

So, foreign correspondents are a generally worthless lot, mostly because they read books and think. Of course, this movie is condescending. It presumes that the audience consists of people who don’t read books and think, and the movie is flattering them for their mindless ignorance.

In light of all this, one must suppose that after the movie was filmed, someone started worrying about the newspapers that employ foreign correspondents. Those newspapers might retaliate by publishing reviews unfavorable to the movie, resulting in bad box office. As a result, the prologue was added as a way of making amends. And inasmuch as the working titles of this movie while scripts were being written were Personal History and Imposter, it may be that it was also thought wise to make the title of this movie be Foreign Correspondent, as another way of preemptively atoning for all those disparaging comments.

While Powers wants crime reporter Johnny Jones to go to Europe to get the facts, he realizes that the newspaper must keep up appearances. He tells Jones that he will be writing under the name of Huntley Haverstock. You see, people that read newspapers need to believe that their foreign correspondents do read books and think, something they would never believe of a “Johnny Jones.”

Powers says the man of the moment over in Europe is Van Meer, a Dutch diplomat, whom he refers to as “Holland’s strongman.” According to Powers, “If Van Meer stays at the helm of his country’s affairs for the next three months, it may mean peace in Europe. If we knew what he was thinking we’d know where Europe stands.”

A diplomat in Holland is essential to preventing war? Jones was thinking that maybe Hitler was more important, but Powers gives him a dismissive look. Anyway, Van Meer has signed a treaty with a diplomat in Belgium, and Jones is assigned to find out what is in that treaty. So, some agreement between Holland and Belgium is the key to determining whether Europe will remain at peace or go to war.

This sounds like a joke. The Rome-Berlin Axis; the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact; the Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the United Kingdom and Poland—these were not the treaties that mattered. It was some Dutch-Belgium treaty on which depended the peace of Europe.

While Jones is still in Powers’ office, he is introduced to Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), leader of the Universal Peace Party. It turns out that Fisher has an attractive daughter, Carol (Laraine Day), with whom Jones eventually becomes romantically involved.

After Jones arrives in England, he meets Van Meer while both are on their way to the luncheon being held by the Universal Peace Party at a hotel. Van Meer wishes there were more men like Fisher, promoting peace. Jones tries to get Van Meer to talk about the possibility of war, but all Van Meer seems to want to talk about is birds:

Look at those birds. No matter how big the city, there must always be parks and places for the birds to live. I was walking through the park this morning, and I saw several people feeding the birds. It’s a good sign at a time like this.

Jones rolls his eyes in exasperation. They arrive at the hotel, where we hear an orchestra playing a Viennese waltz, perhaps as a way of inducing a little doubt in our minds as to the nature of this Universal Peace Party. Soon thereafter, Van Meer disappears. Later, Jones gets a cable telling him to go to Amsterdam, where Van Meer will be giving an important speech. When Jones greets Van Meer in Holland, the diplomat appears not to recognize him. Moments later, he is assassinated. Jones, Carol, and another reporter, Scott ffolliott (George Sanders), team up to chase the assassin and try to find out what is going on.

What makes the Dutch-Belgian treaty really special is that it has a secret clause, known as Clause 27, so secret in fact that it is only known to the two people who signed the treaty, because it was never written down. This raises the question as to how anyone, other than the two signatories, knows of the existence of Clause 27.

To find out what is in Clause 27, the spies kidnapped Van Meer with the idea of torturing him until he talked. But to keep the world from knowing that Van Meer had been kidnapped, they got a man who looked like Van Meer to take his place and then had him assassinated. Presumably, the impostor did not know about that part of the plan.

This was not making full use of a valuable resource. Having secured an imposter, the spies could have attacked their problem from two angles. While torturing the real Van Meer to find out what was in the clause, the imposter could have engaged the Belgian diplomat in a conversation about Clause 27, expressing doubts and asking for reassurances. Alternatively, he could have told the Belgian diplomat that he changed his mind and would no longer honor that clause.

In any event, this is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes. Just as Miss Froy, who knows the vital clause of a secret treaty between two countries, disappears and is replaced by a woman that looks like her in that movie; so too in this movie does Van Meer know of a secret clause in a treaty between two countries, and he disappears and is replaced by a substitute. In each movie, the protagonist knows that a real person had been replaced by a substitute, but has trouble convincing others of this. In each movie, someone who says he believes the protagonist turns out to be an enemy spy, in whom the protagonist puts his or her trust, thereby putting him or her in danger of being killed by the spy.

Back to the movie at hand. If the world thinks Van Meer has been assassinated, then that means that as far as everyone else is concerned, only the Belgian diplomat knows what is in Clause 27. Van Meer might have trusted this other fellow, but can we expect the country he represented to honor a secret clause whose content is known only to the diplomat of the other country and take his word for it? So, with Van Meer’s faked assassination, it would seem that the clause has just become worthless.

Moving right along, if I had been Van Meer and the spies started torturing me to tell what was in Clause 27, I would have just made up something. After all, it’s a secret, so how would the spies have known the difference?

But enough of this. Clause 27 is obviously what Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin,” something the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care. But a MacGuffin should meet some minimum standard of believability. Personally, I found the whole business about Clause 27 to be palpably absurd, to the point that I found it distracting. While I was supposed to be enjoying all the danger and intrigue—Jones sneaking around in the windmill, someone falling from a cathedral, the spies torturing Van Meer—I kept being bothered by the nagging thought that there is no way Van Meer and his secret clause could have prevented war. We had no trouble believing that the vital clause in The Lady Vanishes was important, and for three reasons: World War II had not yet begun; it was left to our imagination which two countries had agreed to that clause; and the clause was not supposed to prevent war, but merely be an important piece of intelligence as war became more likely. Foreign Correspondent was released after the war had already begun, which means after Germany had already invaded Poland. What possible agreement between the Netherlands and Belgium could have prevented that?

When Jones discovers Van Meer in the windmill, the diplomat has been drugged and can hardly think. But he manages to tell Jones, “All that I can tell you is that they are going to take me away by plane like a bird. Always there are places in the city where birds can get crumbs.” Once again, Jones is frustrated by all this talk of birds. In any event, Jones cannot rescue Van Meer while the spies are still in the windmill, and soon after, Van Meer disappears again.

Fisher, the leader of that pacifist organization, actually turns out to be a spy, and is the one that arranged the kidnapping. You just can’t trust those peaceniks. This makes things difficult for Jones and Carol. When they first meet, he makes a derogatory remark about “well-meaning amateurs” that think a pacifist organization can prevent war. She bristles, noting that these well-meaning amateurs will be doing the fighting if there is war. This gets them off to a bad start. Later, when Jones realizes that Fisher is a spy, he doesn’t want to believe Carol is part the spy ring, and she is reluctant to believe anything bad about her father.

A day arrives in which both ffolliott and Jones say that war is going to break out “tomorrow,” and we learn from Fisher that England has already started with the blackouts. Earlier, we were supposed to believe that if Van Meer remained alive with his knowledge of Clause 27, war might be prevented. But now that war is inevitable, the significance of Clause 27 has changed. Now we are supposed to believe that knowledge of this clause will help Germany win that war, if the spies can find out what it is.

The spies take Van Meer to a room above a restaurant where they start torturing him. Fisher arrives and pretends to be his friend, trying to get him to tell about the clause. When Van Meer finds out that Fisher is a spy as well, he says to all of them:

You can do what you want with me. That’s not important. But you’ll never conquer them, Fisher. Little people everywhere, who give crumbs to birds. Lie to them. Drive them, whip them, force them into war. When the beasts like you will devour each other, then the world will belong to the little people.

The little people that feed the birds! What is this, a Frank Capra movie? But this was the implication of Miss Froy’s remark in The Lady Vanishes, when she said you can’t judge a country by its government, that it’s the ordinary people that are important. This praise of the little people, taken in conjunction with Powers’ anti-intellectual attitude and his approval of the way Jones beat up a policeman, shows that both movies share a populist ideology, although it’s more pronounced in this one.

A few minutes earlier, ffolliott was caught snooping around and brought into the room at gunpoint. He watches as the spies finally inflict some method of torture on Van Meer so gruesome that we are not allowed to see what it is, but only see the faces of ffolliott and the woman holding a gun on him as they react in horror. Van Meer agrees to talk. He says, “In the event of invasion by an enemy….” At that point, ffolliott starts scuffling with the spies, and then jumps out the window. Figuring the jig is up, the spies take off. Van Meer is rescued, but falls into a coma.

War does break out the next day. Fisher decides to leave England and fly to America, taking Carol with him. Jones and ffolliott also get themselves a seat on that plane. However, the plane is damaged when it is fired on by a German destroyer. Immediately, the captain of she ship sends a message to the radioman, who tells the pilot, “It’s the Germans. They’re sorry. They thought we were a bomber. She’ll rescue us straight-away.”

That certainly is sporting of them. You can tell that this is early in the war. In a later Hitchcock movie, Lifeboat (1944), after a U-boat torpedoes a merchant ship, the captain orders the lifeboats to be fired on before the submarine itself is sunk in return. I guess by that time the hatred of the Germans had reached the point where an audience was not ready to accept decent behavior on the part of a German captain, and would be willing to believe nothing but the worst about him.

The plane crashes into the ocean. Many scramble onto a wing of the plane, but when it proves unable to support everybody, Fisher redeems himself by getting off and drowning. Maybe. While Fisher was on the plane, Van Meer had recovered, telling Stebbins that Fisher was a spy. Fisher had intercepted a telegram, intended for ffolliott, saying that Fisher was to be arrested when he arrives in America. Knowing that he probably would be executed for espionage, he may have just been looking for an easy way out.

This is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes. In neither movie is the pacifist an upright, moral character who just happens to be misguided in his beliefs. Rather, he is depicted in both movies as unsavory. Not content to portray pacifism as merely naïve or imprudent, these movies vilify it. In The Lady Vanishes, the pacifist is a cad, an adulterer who promised the woman he was having an affair with that they would get married, but changed his mind when he realized a divorce would hurt his career. In Foreign Correspondent, the pacifist is not really interested in peace, but working with the enemy to help them win the upcoming war. And as punishment, both pacifists die in the end.

Jones manages to get his story back to the states. Unfortunately, Jones is never able to file a report on what Clause 27 said, or explain why it mattered. Perhaps it was an agreement as to how the Dutch and the Belgians planned to divide up Europe after the war.

Anyway, he returns to England, continuing to be a great foreign correspondent, sending important stories back to his newspaper, under the name of Huntley Haverstock. In the final scene, he is making a live broadcast over the radio when the bombs start falling all around them, causing the lights to go out. Instead of taking shelter, he continues to broadcast fearlessly, Carol remaining by his side, as he refers to the lights literally as well as metaphorically:

I can’t read the rest of my speech because the lights went out. So I’ll have to talk off the cuff. That noise you hear isn’t static. It’s death coming to London. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out. Hang on. This is a big story. You’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here except stand in the dark, let them come. It’s as if the lights were out everywhere except in America. Keep those lights burning. Cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang onto your lights. They’re the only lights left in the world.

The speech, of course, is intended to rouse America from its complacency and pacifism as we hear “The Star Spangled Banner” being played in the background. But I would have given anything for ffolliott to walk in at that point, saying, “You realize, of course, that without electricity, the microphone stopped working when the lights went out.”

The Searchers (1956)

When The Searchers begins, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his home in Texas in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, in which Ethan fought on the side of the South. Because the idea of returning home has a connotation of reconciliation, acceptance, and even resignation, the three years delay in Ethan’s return suggests that none of those things apply to him. And indeed, the grim look on his face as he is greeted by his brother Aaron tells us that this is far from being a happy homecoming.

One thing Ethan is definitely not reconciled to is the defeat of the South, as we learn from a conversation he later has with Reverend Sam Clayton (Ward Bond), who was a captain during the war and now is a captain of the Texas Rangers. Clayton says he didn’t see Ethan at the surrender, to which Ethan replies, “Don’t believe in surrenders. Nope, I still got my saber, Reverend. Didn’t turn it into no plowshare neither.” From further conversation, we gather that Ethan has been something of an outlaw since the war ended.

We are all familiar with the apologetic interpretations of the Civil War, how it was all about state’s rights and only incidentally about slavery, as if the war might just as easily have been fought over the rights of the states concerning eminent domain. But not only would the war not have been fought had the issue not been one of slavery, we can go one step further: there would have been no war had the slaves been white. In that case, slavery would have been phased out peacefully. But prejudice against the black race was even more fundamental than that of slavery per se. And that, in all likelihood, is the main reason Ethan cannot be reconciled to the defeat of the South.

Ethan’s racism against the black race, however, never explicitly comes up in this movie, but his animosity toward the red race certainly does. After becoming reacquainted with Aaron’s family, including Aaron’s wife Martha, their son Ben, and their two daughters, Lucy and Debbie, they all sit down to dinner. Then Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) arrives, and the look on Ethan’s face is one of hostility. “Fellow could mistake you for a half-breed,” Ethan says, though Martin replies that he is only one-eighth Cherokee. We find out that Aaron’s family took Martin in as a baby when he was discovered by Ethan after Martin’s family had been massacred by Indians.

As is typical of racism generally, it is not the other race as such that incurs the most animosity, but the idea of miscegenation and the offspring it produces, both of which are regarded as abominations. That Ethan’s ire can be aroused by as little as one-eighth “Indian blood” speaks to the degree to which this bothers him.

It is the next day that the aforementioned Reverend Clayton shows up at Aaron’s house, gathering up a posse to go after whoever it was that rustled some cows belonging to Lars Jorgensen. Aaron starts to go with Clayton, but Ethan says he’ll go instead, telling Aaron to stay close to home, since it might be Comanches that took the cows. It turns out that not only was it Comanches, but stealing the cows was only a ruse to get them away from the settlement. When they get back, they find that it is Aaron’s family that has been attacked, the Comanches raping and killing Martha, killing Aaron and Ben, and abducting the two daughters, Lucy and Debbie.

After the funeral for the family, the same posse sets out after the Comanches, but most of them return, leaving only Ethan, Martin, and Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.), who is in love with Lucy, to carry on. After Lucy is found dead, Brad gets himself killed charging into the Comanche camp alone. From then on, it’s just Ethan and Martin that continue looking for Debbie. As the years pass, it becomes clear to Ethan that Debbie (Natalie Wood) is old enough to be raped by her captors, and the idea of miscegenation bothers him so much that he is determined to kill her. Martin, on the other hand, is determined to stop him from doing so.

This frustrates Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles), who has been impatiently waiting for Martin to marry her, and who almost marries someone else, until Ethan and Martin return home briefly, interrupting the wedding. They had met with Scar and found out that Debbie is now one of his squaws. She seems to have adjusted to living with the Comanches, who she says are her people now. This surprises us, because Ethan and Martin had earlier visited an army outpost where there were some rescued captive girls. They were beyond traumatized, either screaming or laughing maniacally. Why the difference?

I can think of only two reasons, which have more to do with movie logic than with reality. The three girls at the outpost were all blondes, whereas Debbie is a brunette. Her dark aspect makes the difference between her and the Indians less stark than between those same Indians and girls that are blondes, who are extra white, as it were. Therefore, according to the thinking of those who made this movie, Debbie could tolerate being raped better than those blond girls could. The second reason is Debbie’s religious status. Early in the movie, Clayton asked Debbie if she had been baptized, and she replied that she had not, despite the fact that she was about nine years old. I suppose the idea is that technically she is not a Christian yet, but still a heathen. Hence, according to the thinking of those who made this movie, her being raped by Scar, who is also a heathen, does not constitute the outrage that it would were she officially a Christian. I know that seems like a stretch, but why go to the trouble to put that conversation about baptism into the movie if it wasn’t intended to have any significance?

In any event, Martin tells Laurie he has to go with Ethan to get Debbie back, because Ethan tried to kill her the last time they saw her. We expect Laurie to understand, but when Martin says he has to fetch Debbie home, she responds with a vehemence that almost exceeds that of Ethan: “Fetch what home? The leavings of Comanche bucks, sold to the highest bidder, with brats of her own?” When Martin says that Ethan will put a bullet in Debbie’s brain if he is not there to stop him, she replies that Martha would have wanted Ethan to do that.

But when they finally rescue Debbie, Ethan relents, and he and Martin take her back home to live with the Jorgensens. Martin and Laurie will marry. Ethan leaves, never to return.

In most movies, what you see is what you get. Everything of significance is either depicted visually or is revealed to us through dialogue or narration. This is especially so in Westerns, which tend to have simpler plots and less complicated characters. But The Searchers is an exception, for there seems to be much in this movie of significance that is concealed from us. And just as the idea of searching consists of looking for something, of wanting to see what cannot presently be seen, so too is wanting to see and not being able to see a recurring theme of this movie.

For example, Ethan will not let Martin see the results of the massacre; Ethan shoots two bullets into the eyes of a dead Comanche so he will wander forever without being able to find his Happy Hunting Ground; when Brad wants to know if Lucy had been raped, Ethan yells, “Do I have to draw you a picture?”; and Martin accidentally gets himself a squaw, whom he inadvertently nicknames “Look.”

But there are things we do not get to see in a more figurative sense, as when we use the word “see” to mean “understand.” We keep getting the sense that there is more to this story than the movie is telling us, at least explicitly, for it does leave us some tantalizing clues. For example, it is peculiar that an Indian hater like Ethan would be able to speak Comanche. It is not as though when he was in high school, he might have opted to take a course in Comanche instead of Latin. We might have accepted his ability to speak the language of the Comanches without supposing it to have any special significance were it not for the emphasis it is given toward the end of the movie. When Ethan is speaking to Scar (Henry Brandon), the Comanche chief that abducted Debbie, Ethan comments that Scar’s English is pretty good, pointedly asking, “Did someone teach you?” implying that he learned it from Debbie. A little later, Scar replies, “You speak pretty good Comanche. Someone teach you?” This symmetry of comments suggests that Ethan might once have been married to a Comanche woman, from whom he learned the language, before the murder (and presumed rape) of his mother turned him into an Indian hater. His hatred for miscegenation might then be explained by the revulsion he feels for having been guilty of it himself.

Early in the movie, when Ethan first arrives at his brother’s ranch, it quickly becomes clear that Martha is in love with Ethan. Presumably Ethan feels the same way about her, but whereas she is obvious about it, we would never suspect anything just from watching or listening to Ethan. At first we are not sure if the characters in the movie pick up on Martha’s behavior, or whether it is only those of us watching the movie who are supposed to notice it. However, when Clayton sees Martha stroking Ethan’s coat and gives a knowing look, we realize that Martha is being obvious to everyone, as people in love often are. And that means it is obvious to her husband.

The first time I saw this movie, I figured that Martha and Ethan had once been in love, but that Ethan was not ready to get married and settle down, and so she married Aaron on the rebound, which she soon came to regret. In most movies, there would eventually have been a scene in which their past relationship would have been made explicit, but we never get such a scene in this movie, because Aaron and Martha are massacred by the Comanches early on, and the relationship between Ethan and Martha is never even alluded to after that.

The second time I watched this movie, I noticed that Aaron is hostile to Ethan. When Ethan asks about a deserted ranch that he saw on his way in, Aaron says that the people who lived there decided to clear out and went back to chopping cotton. Then Aaron says that before the war, when Ethan had his own ranch, he could see that Ethan wanted to clear out too, and he asks him why he didn’t (implying that Ethan should clear out right now). Martha expresses dismay and Ethan takes offense.

Now, if we assume that Ethan had once been in love with Martha, who then married Aaron, it would be strange that he would stick around if he also was tired of trying to make a living on his ranch. He would then have had two reasons for clearing out, for it can be downright unpleasant to see the woman you love married to another man, especially your own brother. But if, on the other hand, Ethan and Martha fell in love after she married Aaron, and they started having an affair, then his sticking around would make perfectly good sense. And Aaron, suspecting as much, would naturally feel animosity toward Ethan.

And once we accept the idea that Ethan and Martha had an affair, the next thing that occurs to us is that Debbie might be his daughter and not just his niece, for she is just the right age to have been conceived before he left for the war. The idea that Ethan wanted to kill Debbie because she had been defiled by the Indians was already bad enough when we thought she was his niece. Once we accept the idea that Debbie is his daughter, the tone of the movie really becomes dark.

When it is just Ethan, Martin, and Brad searching for Lucy and Debbie, they come across some tracks going off into a canyon. Ethan says he will check it out. This is followed by what seems to be an unnecessary conversation about firing a shot as a signal as to where Brad and Martin will be, wherein Ethan responds that they have to be quiet, and he will meet them on the other side. When Ethan catches up with them again, he sits on the ground and compulsively digs his knife into the dirt several times. Later, we learn that he found Lucy in the canyon, and that she had been raped. Now, if Ethan is determined to kill Debbie because she has been defiled, then we have to acknowledge the possibility that Ethan found Lucy alive and killed her for the same reason. If we grant that interpretation, then that explains the conversation about not making noise. Because he could not risk firing a shot, Ethan would have had to kill Lucy with his knife. And his digging the knife into the dirt could be explained as an obsessive desire to clean the blood off it, much in the way Lady Macbeth obsessively tries to wash the blood off her hands, despite the fact that they are clean. This is further confirmed by the fact that after finding Lucy, Ethan seems far more upset than he was upon finding Martha’s body after she was raped and killed.

In other words, it is possible to interpret this movie in a way that makes it more disturbing than it already is, but such an interpretation could not be made explicit, owing to the Production Code in force at that time. But then, this movie could not be made at all today, because years ago all the Indians in the movies were replaced by Native Americans, and they never rape anyone.

Goldfinger (1964)

The first half of Goldfinger, the third movie in the James Bond franchise, is great. In fact, the first five minutes is great, even if it does not seem to have much to do with the rest of the movie. But following that opening scene, Bond (Sean Connery) is assigned to investigate Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe). He is a jeweler who buys gold legally, most of it in England, and then ships it to another country like Pakistan where he sells it for three to four times the price he paid for it. This is the great crime that requires the attention of England’s best secret agent?

Later, Bond finds out about Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger’s plan to nuke Fort Knox, destroying the gold, and causing his own horde of the metal to skyrocket in value. Quite by accident, then, Bond’s being assigned to investigate Goldfinger turns out to be appropriate, even if serendipitously so.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) gives Bond the famous Aston Martin with the machine guns, ejector seat, and much more, but even so, he eventually is captured by Goldfinger. The laser that almost cuts Bond in half also cuts the movie in half, the first part making it half of the greatest Bond movie ever made. Then comes the second half of the movie, the point at which it starts being silly, when Bond wakes up on the plane and a woman introduces herself as Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). In fact, this is the point at which the whole Bond franchise starts being silly, with subsequent Bond movies becoming bloated with girls, gadgets, and wisecracks, on the principle that if some is good, then more is better.

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Movie Reviews and Other Essays

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Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Caveats for Caregivers (4)

Caveats for Caregivers (3)

Caveats for Caregivers (2)

Caveats for Caregivers (1)

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Pretty Woman (1990) and Philadelphia (1993)

How Same-Sex Marriage Would Have Resolved a $22,222.22 Moral Dilemma

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

The Searchers (1956)

Goldfinger (1964)