It (2017)

It is set in Derry, Maine in the late 1980s.  Ben, a chubby kid who has recently moved there, says, “Derry is not like any town I’ve ever been in before.”  Well, that’s for sure.  In Derry, the bullies-to-victim ratio is so high that bullies have to stand in line to get their turn at tormenting their victims.  Said victims belong to a group known as The Losers Club.  Ben quickly gets to join, for it is clear that he is Loser material, especially when the chief bully, Henry, carves his initial into Ben’s belly.

Another new member of the group is Beverly, who was introduced to us sitting on the toilet while mean girls poured filthy water on her for being a slut.  At least, that’s the rumor.  What those girls don’t know is that Beverly could not have been having sex with half the boys in town, because her father has been molesting her for years, and he is too possessively jealous to allow her to have anything to do with boys.

And she is not the exception.  You see, in the town of Derry, after the Losers spend the day being bullied by all the kids in school, they get to go home and be bullied by their parents.  Actually, even the bullies get bullied by their parents in Derry, Maine, as when Henry’s father ridicules and humiliates him in front of his friends.  But it’s not just parents.  All the adults bully the children in this town, because it takes a village.  For example, when we first meet Ben, he is in the library reading about the history of Derry.  The librarian belittles him for spending time there reading books.  “Don’t you have any friends?” she asks derisively.

In other words, Derry is a nightmare town, a place where children are continually tormented by those around them.  So, Ben was exactly right when he said that Derry is not like any town he had ever been in before.

Oh wait!  I almost forgot.  Ben wasn’t talking about all that.  He was talking about the way people, especially children, disappear at a rate of six times the national average, and it is especially concentrated in recurring periods of twenty-seven years.  As he and the other Losers soon find out, the culprit is Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.  You see, it’s not enough that they have to live in a town where the natural torments of bullying and child abuse are unrelenting.  They get a bunch of supernatural horrors piled on top of that.

Well, there’s a lot of running around and being scared by special effects, especially when the Losers finally decide they have to do something about Pennywise.  They figure out that he is in this old house enclosing a well.  At one point, Pennywise gets hold of Beverly and puts her in a trance, at which point she begins to float slowly upward.  Her friends realize that all the other children that have gone missing over the years are floating above her.  They pull Beverly down, but she is still in a trance.  Then Ben kisses Sleeping Beauty, and she wakes up.

You see, Ben has had a crush on Beverly for a long time, and he gave her a postcard with a love poem on it.  Beverly was deeply moved.  And so Ben and Beverly fall in love, right?  Wrong!  How could you possibly think that little chubby kid would get the girl?  Obviously, it is Bill, who is slender and a little taller, that Beverly wants.  In fact, she was disappointed to find out that the poem was not sent to her by Bill, but rather by Ben instead.  And so, poor Ben is bullied not only by Henry and his gang, and not only by the librarian, but also by the people that made this movie, who deliberately added to his torment by making him a loser when it comes to love on account of his looks.

We don’t get much by way of explanation as to the how or why of the supernatural in this movie.  There is some suggestion that Pennywise feeds on fear.  Well, no wonder he thrives in Derry!  Other than that, we never really find out what’s going on.  I admit that I have never read the book on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the miniseries based on this book.  Maybe there is an explanation somewhere in all that, but you won’t find it in this movie as a stand-alone story.  At the very end of the movie, the words “Chapter One” threaten us with a sequel, so maybe everything will be explained in that movie, but I doubt it.  In any event, I’ll never know, because I certainly won’t be watching it.

After Pennywise is dispatched, presumably because the Losers are not afraid of him, though they damn well should be, the floating children start to descend.  What does that mean?  Are they going to be brought back to life?  Are they going to be able to go back home so they can be bullied by their parents?  Are they going be able to go back to school so they can be bullied by their classmates?  Are the bullies that went missing going to be able to return and start making other children miserable again?  The missing children may not be left hanging in the air, but we are.

One more thing.  Beverly finally got tired of being her father’s sex slave, so she killed him by hitting him on the head with a toilet lid, leaving his body in the bathroom.  There is no hint of an investigation of this homicide.  I’m not saying this movie was obliged to present us with a big trial like the one in Peyton Place (1957), but without there being even a reference to what happens when you leave a skull-crushed father lying around, such as Beverly saying she’s glad that the grand jury believed her story, that too is left hanging in the air.  She just tells Bill she is leaving town to go live with her aunt.  Then they kiss.  Too bad for you, Ben.

Let us step back for a minute and examine the theme of this movie, which is fear.  Fear is a useful emotion, causing us to avoid danger or to flee from it.  But it is the dangers of this world that cause our fears, not the other way around, as this movie seems to suggest, which is that it is our fears that cause the danger, and that if we could just get rid of our fears, the dangers would go away.  There is such a thing as being unduly afraid of something, as in the case of phobias or superstition.  But Pennywise aside, the dangers in this movie are real.  They are not the imagined fears of a neurotic.

Now, it is certainly true that we sometimes have to overcome our fears in order to eliminate the danger, as when Beverly splits her father’s skull by whacking him with the lid of a toilet.  But it was not her fear of her father that caused him to molest her.  Or consider Ben’s situation with the gang of bullies.  Are we to believe that if he had not been afraid of them, his troubles would have been over, that they would not have held him while Henry carved his initial in his belly?  This movie conflates the perfectly reasonable notion that we sometimes have to stop being afraid of our enemies in order to defeat them with the nonsensical notion that our enemies exist because of our fears and that they will be eliminated by the mere absence of that emotion.

Rape Is about Sex

I remember first becoming informed that rape was not about sex around 1970. This was back in the days when the typical bookstore would carry numerous books written by Freud, of which I had read about a dozen.  As we all know, Freud argued that owing to the role of the unconscious in determining behavior, our motives are often hidden from us.  We think we know why we did something, but it turns out the real reason was something else, something we never suspected.  And, owing to the large role that sex played in Freud’s theories, the motive hidden in the unconscious often turned out to be a repressed sexual desire.  The theory that rape is not about sex certainly followed Freud, in that an unconscious motive is attributed to the rapist.  But it was a complete reversal of the usual Freudian formula:  instead of sex being the unconscious motive for something else, something else was asserted to be the unconscious motive for sex.

In general, I was a little skeptical of all the claims being bandied about in those days regarding the unconscious, whether by Freud or any other psychoanalyst, and so I merely noted this peculiar notion that rape was not about sex with indifference.  A couple of years later, I saw Frenzy (1972), a film by Alfred Hitchcock.  It is about a “necktie strangler” who rapes and murders women.  At some point during the movie, the detective tells a sergeant that most men like him are impotent.  The sergeant expresses surprise at this remark, and rightly so, I thought to myself.  That was carrying the rape-is-not-about-sex theory to an extreme.  After all, impotence is the failure to be able to perform sexually, owing to the inability to get an erection. In any event, the detective goes on to say that it is not the sex that gratifies the rapist.

The detective speaks with an authoritative voice in the movie, and so we know we are supposed to believe him.  But aside from squaring impotence with rape, there is the incongruity between his words and the rape that took place in the movie thirty minutes before.  In the history of mainstream cinema, no movie, made before or since, has depicted sex, consensual or coerced, in which anyone, male or female, experiences greater heights of sexual ecstasy than the necktie strangler in Frenzy.

What is remarkable about this movie is that, in discussing it with others, I have noticed that most people accept the pronouncements of the detective, notwithstanding their apparent inconsistency with the rape scene.  This is in part due to the authoritative voice of the detective, and in part due to the widespread acceptance of the rape-is-not-about-sex theory at that time.  I have seen people twist themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that the rapist never really got it up, let alone gratified himself sexually.  I suspect that this was Hitchcock’s idea of a joke.  He purposely put this contradiction into the movie between the words of the pompous detective and the scene of sexual passion, as his way of making fun of that theory.

This movie aside, I have heard this rape-is-not-about-sex theory discussed many times.  I have never known one woman to disagree with it.  And while a lot of men will also agree with it, I have noticed that a lot of men grow silent, particularly in mixed company.  Though a man may disagree with this theory, yet he will quickly realize how inadvisable it would be for him to say so. Imagine a man, upon hearing it declared that rape is not about sex, saying, “Oh no!  Rape is all about sex.  I mean, sometimes you want it so bad, you feel like holding them down to get what you want.” Any man that would say something like that, especially with women present, would be a fool. By the time that story got around, no woman would ever go out with him again.  And so, the theory largely goes unchallenged.

People often use force to get what they want.  Wars are fought for territory or natural resources, revolutions are fought to wrest power away from others, and criminals rob and steal to get money.  Given how much men want sex, why they should not use force to get that too is a mystery.  Alternatively, if we are willing to say rape is not about sex, why not say that robbery is not about money? Granted, there are cases where robbery does have an additional motive.  A gangster may be angry at society, or maybe he enjoys dominating his victims. But mostly, robbery is about money; and mostly, rape is about sex.

I have heard it said that there are two primary types of rapists, anger rapists and power rapists.  The former are motivated by “resentment and a general hostility towards women.”  But how do we make sense of this resentment and hostility unless it has a sexual origin?  It has only been recently that women have had anything other than sex about which men would be resentful. For millennia women have been denied status, property, power, rights, or anything else that might inspire resentment, and yet rape has been going on since caveman days.  Is it not more likely that the hostility toward women arises out of sexual frustration or rejection?

The power rapist, it is said, is motivated by his need to control and dominate his victim, and inversely, to avoid being controlled by her.  But if a man had no sexual desire for women, he would not likely bother with them at all.  How do we make sense out of this threat of being controlled by her, unless that threat be sexual?  In any event, the main reason a man would want to control and dominate a woman is for sexual purposes.  Sex is the end; dominance and control are but the means.  Without the former, there is no point to the latter.

The intensity with which some people defend this theory that rape is not about sex naturally makes one suspicious.  One cannot help but wonder if the purpose of the theory is to demean the rapist. We deny him the sexual motive, which he may regard as manly, something he can be proud of, and assert that he has anger issues and a need to dominate.  In other words, this thesis is an act of revenge against the rapist, undermining his masculinity by insisting that he acts out of insecurity and weakness.

In the end, the claim that rape is not about sex is speculative, almost metaphysical.  It is not the sort of thing that one can verify simply through observation.  Even if we could observe rapes, as we do in movies like Frenzy, all we would see is the use of force and violence in combination with sex.  We cannot observe the motive.  The best that can be done is to interview the rapist. But the whole rape-is-not-about-sex theory is premised on the idea that things are not what they seem, not even to the rapist himself; so his own assessment of his motives is not to be trusted, even granted that he is being sincere, which is a big assumption right there.  Such interviews may reveal the anger and power motives referred to above, but that gets us right back to the whole question of which is cause and which is effect.  The prima facie case is that sex is the cause of rape.  The theory that it is just the effect, an insignificant epiphenomenon of anger and power, is counterintuitive and unverifiable.

Consensual Sex and the Double Standard

In 2014, California enacted a law requiring college students to get consent before they have sex.  The language is couched in gender-neutral terms, so that technically the law applies to men and women, either gay or straight.  But the primary intent of the law is directed toward heterosexual couples, and it is only the consent of the woman that is of concern.  In other words, the law is written in such a way that it appears to grant equal protection under the law to both sexes, even though we all know that a double standard will and ought to be applied in its implementation.

It is women that need protection against rape, even in the case where force is not used.  This is for several reasons:  First, men are bigger and stronger than women.  Not only is this true on average, but men and women tend to select each other on the basis of size as well.  Although the law is not intended to cover cases where force is used, for that is already illegal and does not need additional legislation, the size and strength of a man compared to a woman can be a factor in cases where consent is ambiguous. That is, a man can simply wear a woman out physically, until she becomes too tired to resist.

Second, it is the woman that can become pregnant.  This puts her at a severe disadvantage compared to the man.  Though birth control may make pregnancy unlikely, and abortion may be available to terminate it, yet it is a big problem for women nevertheless.  And while the man may find himself forced to pay child support if she has the baby, she will still have the greater burden in caring for it and raising it.

Third, a woman is more likely to feel violated by a man than a man would feel violated by a woman.  A major reason for this difference is penetration.  Though a woman may be disgusted by the unwanted kisses of a man, or by his groping her, nothing can compare to being penetrated.  Furthermore, an erection is prima facie evidence of consent regarding the man, thereby undermining his ability to claim that he was similarly violated.  Apart from this, there may be psychological differences as well. Some men think of sex as a matter of conquest.  And it is part of nature of sexual conquest to have a “love ’em and leave ’em” attitude, resulting in one night stands, which can make a woman who surrenders to such a man feel betrayed, especially if he whispered words of love as part of the seduction.  In fact, whether a rape has occurred may depend in part on the subsequent behavior of the man.  If a man refuses to have anything to do with a woman after they have sex, and possibly even insults her, she may feel violated; if he calls her up the next day and asks to see her again, thereby beginning a long-term relationship, that is another thing altogether. In other words, whether a rape has occurred may have as much to do with the subsequent behavior of the man as it does with what happened just before and during sex.

Fourth, alcohol has one legal implication for women and a different implication for men.  People drink, in part, simply because it feels good.  But they also drink in order to get carried away.  I once had a girlfriend who, by her own admission, had been quite promiscuous in college.  During some pillow talk one night, she told me about all the one night stands she had when she was young, and I expressed amazement.  “I don’t think I could have a one night stand,” I said.  “In fact, I don’t think I would want to.  I would have to get to know a woman first before I would feel comfortable having sex.” Without the slightest hesitation, and through half-closed eyelids, she said, “That’s because you don’t drink, John.  Standing there cold sober, no one could do it.  But when you drink, you feel like you’re in love.  And it’s easy to have sex with someone you love.”

Alcohol not only lowers our inhibitions, it also gives us cover for inappropriate behavior. Drinking gives us a license for license.  We are more likely to misbehave if we know that others will excuse this misbehavior as being the result of intoxication. Therefore, a lot of people drink knowing it will not only make it easier to have sex, but also will be a prophylactic against shame the next morning.

The problem lies in judging when someone has consumed enough alcohol to get carried away, but not so much as to no longer be able to consent to sex.  And here the double standard may strike some people as unfair.  If the woman is drunk, her saying “yes” to sex does not constitute consent, but if the man has sex with her, he cannot use the fact that he was drunk as a legal justification against a charge of rape.   So we end up with the situation in which if a man and woman who are equally drunk have sex, she can claim to have been raped, because the legal implications of being drunk are different for men and women.

But even if the woman is sober and only the man is drunk, their having sex will not be construed as her raping him.  No one has ever watched The Way We Were (1973), and thought that Katie (Barbara Streisand) deserved to go to prison for raping Hubbell (Robert Redford), even though she had sex with him while he was too passed-out drunk to know what he was doing.

The double standard here regarding alcohol, not holding a drunk woman responsible for saying “yes,” while holding a drunk man responsible not realizing that she was too drunk to consent, is justified on account of the reasons given previously:  the size and strength of the man, the possibility of pregnancy, and the difference in the male and female psyches.

It is peculiar that the law seems to apply only to college students.  Although I support a double standard for men and women when it comes to sex, I hope we do not have a double standard for college students and all other adults. Presumably, women who are not in college are not fair game, and the “yes means yes” standard applies to them too.  It is only on account of the unique circumstance of young women living away from home and under the protection of a university that special legislation for coeds has been enacted.

Unfortunately, a double standard is a two-edged sword.  In affirming a double standard for sexual activity, we run the risk of having that double standard leach out into areas where it is inappropriate, such as in the workplace.  By saying men are more responsible for their drunken behavior than women, by saying women are psychologically more likely to feel violated and be traumatized by sex than men are, we run the risk of suggesting that women cannot be trusted with responsibility in the workplace, and that they are psychologically weaker than men.  It is partly for this reason that the law is stated in gender-neutral terms.  Although gender-neutral language allows the law to apply to gay couples too, I suspect that this gender-neutral language would still be there anyway, as if to suggest that a man has the same protection against being violated by a woman, and could thus bring charges of rape against her.  So, to keep from having a double standard for men and women in the workplace and in other contexts where sex should not matter, we pretend not to have a double standard for men and women in the matter of sexual activity.  I don’t doubt that someday a man will bring rape charges against a woman, saying he was too drunk to consent.  In anticipation of this event, allow me to smirk preemptively at such a claim.

This is our dilemma:  either we deny the existence of a double standard in matters of sex as being repugnant to egalitarian principles, and end up being forced to accept conclusions that are absurd or paradoxical; or we admit to the need to have a double standard in matters of sex, which leaves an opening for those who want a reason to discriminate against women elsewhere.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Its Remakes

There are not many movies about Heaven, but of those that exist, one often senses a feeling of diffidence on the part of those who produced them.  The reason for this, I suspect, is twofold.  First, it is difficult to present Heaven in a way that makes it as appealing as the Eternal Abode is supposed to be.  Second, religion is a sensitive subject, and they don’t want to offend anyone.  To this end, those that produce such movies may attempt to disarm their audiences in a variety of ways.

One such way is to present the story as a dream or hallucination.  For example, in The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), Heaven is merely dreamt by a trumpeter, and in Stairway to Heaven (1946), there is the suggestion that the story we see is the hallucination of a British pilot.  A second way of disarming the audience is through an exculpatory prologue, a disclaimer to the effect that the movie is not being presented as something factual, as if that were not obvious, but as merely a figment.  This device was also used in Stairway to Heaven.  Finally, the movies tend to be comedies, so silly that no one is likely to take them seriously.  Here Comes Mr. Jordan utilizes the last two of these techniques.  It is indeed a comedy, and it starts with a prologue, beginning with “We heard a story…,” where the “we” has no antecedent, but presumably refers to those who made this movie, asserting that the story is a yarn that someone told them, and they thought it was so interesting that they just had to turn it into a movie.

The main character of this movie is Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), a heavyweight prize fighter who plays the saxophone as a hobby.  I have never played a wind instrument, but somehow I just don’t think being smashed in the mouth on a regular basis would be good for one’s embouchure.    But maybe that explains why he plays it so badly.  Anyway, his manager is Max Corkle (James Gleason), the one who the prologue says told this story.  Max tells Joe not to fly his plane to New York, because it is too dangerous, but Joe pooh-poohs his concerns and decides to fly his plane anyway.  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that the plane crashes.

Joe finds himself among the souls of the departed, souls that are walking on clouds and are boarding a plane that will take them to their final destination, presumably either Heaven or Hell, depending on the situation.  This is another dodge.  Let’s give Joe the benefit of the doubt and assume that his final destination is Heaven.  As noted above, it is difficult to present Heaven as someplace you might want to be.  So, rather than have us see the place and be disappointed, we only get to see the plane that will take him there.

One would think that no technology at all would be necessary in the world of the spirit, but somehow the technology so envisioned in Heaven is often that presently available on Earth.  That is why, in the Book of Revelation, it is said that Jesus will use a sword to smite nations.  We might give that a pass, but it is downright ludicrous when Satan uses cannons to fight the good angels in Paradise Lost.  Anyway, the airplane was still a pretty impressive piece of technology in 1941, when this movie was made, so that may explain why there are airplanes in this movie, both the one in which Joe dies and the one that transports people to Heaven or Hell.  It was a technological improvement over the mode of afterworld transportation used in Liliom (1930), which was a train.  On the other hand, the train was good enough for The Good Place (2016-2020).

But only a handful of people seem to be boarding that plane.  Now, based on the population of the Earth in 1941, I estimate that about fifty thousand people died every day at that time, so one would have expected teeming masses instead.  And about this time you are probably thinking that I am taking this movie way too seriously.  But I did this to illustrate my earlier point, that these movies are given a frivolous tone so that either people like me will not bother to analyze them, or that others will dismiss us as being pedantic if we do.  Besides, the way I figure it, any movie that got the Academy Award for Best Story and also for Best Adapted Screenplay entitles me to criticize it for not making much sense.  However, I will try not to nitpick.  I will not, for example, ask if spending eternity checking off names before people get on a plane is as dreary for Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) as I would imagine it to be.  Instead, let us consider some of the more serious absurdities.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of this movie is Joe’s mentality.  That Joe is incredulous when he is told by Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton) that he has died is understandable.  But when he is finally convinced of this, his reaction is incredible.  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I would be awed by my encounter with Eternity.  “So this stuff about God and the immortal soul is true after all,” I would be saying to myself in amazement.  As an atheist, I suppose it is only to be expected that I would be stunned, but I dare say that even the most devout would be almost in disbelief to find out that their hopes for an afterlife had actually been realized.

Joe does not care about any of this, however.  His only concern is that he was supposed to fight for the title of Heavyweight Champion of the World.  And now that he is dead, his chance at the title bout is over.  Or is it?  No, it seems that Messenger 7013 messed up and removed Joe’s soul from his body before he crashed, thereby not allowing Joe to pull the plane out of its dive.  In fact, Mr. Jordan discovers that Joe was not supposed to die for another fifty years.  Joe is delighted to find that he will be returned to Earth.  Does this attitude not slight Heaven, assuming that is Joe’s destination?  It is as if Joe said, “Thank God I won’t have to go to Heaven for another fifty years!”  But that is a common attitude in movies about Heaven, to wit, that notwithstanding the fact that being in Heaven is supposed to be the most perfect form of existence a soul can aspire to, life on Earth is always thought to be preferable, much more preferable.

Because Joe’s body was cremated, a substitute will have to be found.  Joe wants a body that will allow him to become Heavyweight Champion of the World, but they need one that is fresh.  And of those that have recently died or are about to, a Mr. Farnsworth seems to be a good choice.  Mr. Farnsworth is a wealthy man who is in the process of being held under the water in his bathtub by his wife and his male secretary.  Joe doesn’t much care for the Farnsworth body, however, until he gets an eyeful of Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), the daughter of a man who unfairly ended up going to prison on account of Farnsworth’s illegal financial activity.

Joe is torn.  What is more important to him, getting to be Heavyweight Champion of the World, or marrying this woman he has fallen in love with?  Having just discovered the secret of Eternity, all Joe cares about is love and fame.  Now, you might say that Heaven can wait.  After all, Joe will get there eventually, so he might as well have some fun first.  Or will he?  If I had just found out that there really is a God, I would, as I have already said, be stunned.  But once I recovered from the shock and found out that I was going to have to go back to Earth, my question to Mr. Jordan, asked with much fear and trembling, would be whether there was a Hell, and if so, what I would need to do to stay out of it.  Nothing could be more important than that, certainly not boxing fame or the love of a woman.  Therefore, I would certainly want to know what the rules are for staying out of Hell.  Do I need to turn the other cheek?  That might be something of a disadvantage in the boxing ring.  Am I already in trouble for looking at Bette with lust in my heart?

But as I said, Joe’s simplistic mentality does not think about such things.  Instead, he decides he can have both love and fame by being Farnsworth, saving Bette’s father from prison, courting her, and at the same time, building up his body to get in shape to enter the ring.  But when he becomes Farnsworth, he still looks like Joe.  To Joe and to us, that is, not to everyone else.  This is so Robert Montgomery can continue acting the part.  I think it would have been more interesting to see a different actor take over at this point, allowing us to see how Joe’s soul operates within Farnsworth’s body, but the plot must conform to the needs of the actor who is the star of this movie.

In order to get back in shape, Joe gets in touch with Max.  At first, Max does not believe him, but the saxophone convinces him.  In other words, the function of the saxophone in this movie is to act as an attribute.  Since Joe keeps changing bodies, the only way Max can identify him is through this musical instrument.  I guess the saxophone’s soul survived the plane crash too.

Unfortunately for Joe, there is another thing he can’t seem to get through his punchy head, which is that there is no such thing as free will, for all has been ordained by God in advance.  Actually, that is not quite right.  One of the interesting things about a lot of Heaven movies is the way they never talk about God.  Mr. Jordan and the Messenger keep using the passive voice, saying that this or that was “meant to be” rather than saying, “God meant things to be that way.”  This is another dodge used by those who produce movies about Heaven.  It is so God cannot be blamed.  Or rather, it is so that the producers of this movie cannot be blamed for making God responsible for evil.

Joseph Breen, who was in charge of enforcing the Production Code, in addition to expressing his concerns about the use of religious concepts for humorous effect, cautioned that “certain religious groups will resent any expressed opinion on the controversial topic of predestination,” as cited by Gerald Gardner in The Censorship Papers:  Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office 1934 to 1968.   It seems pretty clear to me that with all this talk about how things were meant to be, the movie comes down on the side of predestination.  Kent Turner of film-forward.com says it is “one of the few rom-coms expressly for Presbyterians.”  But I guess the use of the passive voice was enough to satisfy Breen with the final product.

The particular evil in question for which God must not be blamed is the murder of Farnsworth.  The first attempt at murder by his wife and secretary failed, but on the second attempt, they succeed.  It is not clear whether Mr. Jordan deliberately misled Joe into thinking he could be Farnsworth for fifty years, or whether Mr. Jordan subsequently found out that Farnsworth would soon be murdered.  Mr. Jordan is always going around with a superior, smug look on his face, as if he knows everything, so one suspects he was being cute about letting Joe think he could be Farnsworth long enough to win the title and marry Bette.

Just before Farnsworth is to be murdered, Joe is told that remaining in Farnsworth’s body was not meant to be, as if there were some impersonal destiny that ruled the world.  But suppose instead that Mr. Jordan told Joe that he would not be able to continue using Farnsworth’s body because God wants Farnsworth to be murdered. The audience would be appalled.  And yet, that is the implication.  However, what is implied by a movie and what is explicitly stated are two different things.  Therefore, the issue is completely skirted by not referring to God at all.

Fortunately for Joe, a prize fighter named Murdock, whom Joe was supposed to fight, gets shot dead by gangsters right there in the ring during the title bout because he refused to throw the fight.  That way the other guy will win the fight, and the gangsters will get to collect on their bets.  Those gangsters!  They are so clever.  But it’s a break for Joe.  He gets to enter Murdock’s body, come alive at the count of nine, get up and win the fight.  But Joe figures there’s no glory in occupying Murdock’s body for a few seconds, just long enough to win a fight, so he wants another body that he can really call his own.

Mr. Jordan, however, washes away all memory of his being Joe or Farnsworth.  He now occupies Murdock’s body as if he really were Murdock.  The only one left with any memory of all this is Max, who tells the police where the body of Farnsworth can be found, much in the way that you or I might reveal where the body of a murdered man had been hidden without fear that the police might suspect that we had something to do with it.

The whole idea of finding another body for Joe was that he would otherwise be cheated out of another fifty years of life.  But it is Murdock’s body with Murdock’s brain he supposedly gets, and it has none of Joe’s memories.  As Leibniz once said, if you tell me that when I die, I will be reborn into another body, but will have no memory of my present life, then you might as well tell me that when I die, someone else will be born.  In short, Joe has still been cheated out of the rest of his life, while it is Murdock who gets revived, wins the title bout, and gets the girl.  Murdock and Bette have this feeling of having known each other before, but I don’t think Leibniz would have been impressed.  I know I’m not.

This movie was remade as Heaven Can Wait in 1978, using the same title as that of the play by Harry Seagall on which the original movie was based. Most of the differences are trivial.  Joe (Warren Beatty) is a professional football player who wasn’t supposed to die in an accident, and what this Joe cares about is getting a body that will allow him to play in the Super Bowl.  As we might expect, the plane has been updated to that of a Concorde.  Messenger 7013 has become The Escort (Buck Henry), who must hate his job, because he is a sourpuss.  Betty Logan (Julie Christie), whose name has undergone a different spelling, is not worried about her father, but about the environment.  And so it goes.

Even though the Production Code ended ten years before this version was made, those that produced this movie must have still had some misgivings about taking a stand one way or the other on the matter of predestination.  On the one hand, as with the original version, predestination is clearly implied.  When Mr. Jordan (James Mason) inquires as to when Joe was supposed to arrive in this afterworld, he is told that he was supposed to arrive at 10:17 AM, March 20th, 2025.  There are two things worth noting about this:  First, it is precise, down to the minute.  Second, it is what is supposed to happen.  Now, that sounds like predestination, sure enough.

Unlike in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, where the word “God” is never uttered, in Heaven Can Wait, there are several occasions in which someone uses this word, usually as part of an exclamation, but in any event, only by people on Earth.  Neither Mr. Jordan nor The Escort ever says the word “God.”  When The Escort informs Joe that he will not be able to use Farnsworth’s body to play in the Super Bowl after all, he avails himself of the passive voice, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be.”  And Mr. Jordan does likewise.  He says to Joe, “You must abide by what is written….  There’s a reason for everything.  There’s always a plan.”  What he most decidedly does not say is, “You must abide by God’s plan, because he has a reason for everything.  That’s why he wrote it down.”

With or without explicit references to God, all this is in keeping with the doctrine of predestination.  But early in the movie, when Mr. Jordan asks The Escort what happened, The Escort confesses that he removed Joe’s soul just before the crash because he was afraid it would hurt.  Mr. Jordan reprimands him, saying, “Every question of life and death is a probability until the outcome.”  Well, that’s true for us mortals, who must consider what is likely or unlikely on a daily basis, but it makes Mr. Jordan sound like an actuary who works for a life insurance company.  In any event, this notion of the probability of an outcome does not square with the precise time and date given above.  Nor does it square with the notion that this was when Joe was supposed to die, with what was written, with the plan.  My guess is that those who made this movie were as uncomfortable with taking a firm stand on predestination as Joseph Breen was, and they were trying to weasel their way out of it with a contradiction.  When it comes to religion, that often seems to work.

The movie was remade again as Down to Earth in 2001, using the same title as the 1947 sequel to Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  Regarding the sequel, I was lucky.  It is not available on Netflix, so I have been spared the fate of having to watch it.  As for the remake that goes by this title, in this version, Chris Rock stars as the Joe character, but going by the name “Lance Barton.”  Lance is a professional comedian, and his problem is that he is not funny, and he always gets booed off the stage.  However, his best chance for success will be if, just before the Apollo Theater closes for good, he can win a slot in the Amateur Night Contest = become Heavy Weight Champion = win the Super Bowl.

Lance’s day job, so to speak, is that of a bicycle messenger, and when he sees Sontee Jenkins (Regina King) = Bette/Betty Logan walking across the street, he gets distracted and is hit by a truck and killed.  In this case, Keyes (Eugene Levy) = Messenger 7013 = The Escort, makes the mistake of plucking Lance’s soul from his body ahead of time, even though he is required to use a stopwatch to make sure souls are taken at the exact moment they are supposed to be.  When we first see Keyes, he says he hates his job, which was something we always suspected about his avatars in the first two versions.  It would have been blasphemous for Messenger 7013 to have said such a thing in 1941, and even in 1978, it would not have been acceptable for The Escort to say as much, though he is so miserable that we can hardly think anything else; but religion in the twenty-first century is no longer sacred, and the audience can hear Keyes make such a remark without thinking God would be offended.

There is no plane in this movie to take Lance to his final destination.  Instead, Heaven is like the hottest nightclub in town, and he finds himself standing in line with other people waiting to get past the velvet rope.  A good looking girl says that Mike put her on the list, and she gets to go right in.  But when some dork tries to gain entry, he is told to go to Hell.  Lance is admitted, and what he finds inside is an adolescent’s idea of Heaven, one never-ending party.  Mr. King (Chazz Palminteri) = Mr. Jordan runs the joint, and as he explains to Lance, “The food is great, the women are beautiful, and the music, Lance, the music is hot.  The fun never stops.”

I should have said this is Heaven as envisioned by a male adolescent, and a straight one at that, for this is certainly no gay bar.  Presumably, women exist in this Heaven to provide pleasure for the men, sort of like the seventy-two virgins for male martyrs in the Paradise of Islam.  That’s why this nightclub Heaven is always pleased to welcome women who die young, while they are still desirable.  I am trying to imagine a gender reversal, where a Josephine dies before her time, and is told by a Ms. Queen that the men in the night club are rich and powerful, and the marriage proposals never stop.  But I may be way off base.  I have known young males to indulge in such fantasies as presented in this movie, but no woman of any age has ever told me of her fantasies of Heaven.

In any event, regarding this nightclub Heaven as presented in this movie, most straight men would enjoy that sort of thing once in a while, but the prospect of being trapped in that nightclub doing the same thing over and over again for eternity is dreadful.  The only way it could possibly be enjoyable is if it involves some kind of eternal recurrence:  there you are in a fancy nightclub, feeling good from a couple of drinks, and dancing with a beautiful woman, who gives every indication she’ll be going home with you at the end of the evening; and then, after about fifteen minutes, your memory is washed away, and you start at the beginning again, on the dance floor with that same woman, oblivious to the fact that you have done this countless times in the past, and will do so countless times in the future.  Ugh!

Mr. King comes across as a wise guy, an Italian with mob connections.  When he realizes that Lance was taken before his time, which is precise to the minute, he says he talked to his boss and can fix things.  Lance asks, “You talked to God,” and Mr. King says, “Yeah.”  So, this is the first version in which someone in the afterworld acknowledges that there is a God, let alone indicates that God has agency, that he has chosen to allow Lance to be granted a new body rather than just have him stay in that nightclub.

One of the refreshing things about this version is that Lance quickly catches on to the mechanics of occupying the body of Mr. Wellington (Brian Rhodes) = Mr. Farnsworth.  In the previous versions, it was exasperating the way it took Joe so long to understand the rules.  One of the rules is that Lance continues to look like Lance to himself after he enters Mr. Wellington’s body, but not to others.  Occasionally we see him through the eyes of others, in which case he looks like Mr. Wellington, an older white man, who is mostly bald with just a little gray hair left.  So, when Lance is at the Apollo coming on like Chris Rock, telling black jokes to a black audience, as far as the audience is concerned, some white guy is making fun of them.  And when others see him with Sontee, that’s amusing too.  They are not only a mixed-race couple, as well as a May-December couple, but they also seem to be unsuited to each other as to their looks, for he is somewhat unattractive, while she is pretty.  But then, he’s a billionaire, and such men can usually have their pick.  In any event, when Lance moves into the final body of Joe Guy (Arnold Pinnock), another black comedian, he and Sontee make a more suitable couple.

Even though Mr. King admitted that he talked to God to get his approval for obtaining a new body for Lance, he resorts to the same old artifice when it comes time for Lance to give up Mr. Wellington’s body.  When Lance objects because he has just asked Sontee to marry him, and she said yes, Mr. King says, “You’ve got to play by the rules.”  When Lance keeps resisting, Mr. King says, “No one makes these rules, kid….  It’s fate.”  Unlike genuine predestination, in which God ordained everything that happens from the beginning of time, fate is an impersonal kind of necessity, which characterizes the rules, according to Mr. King.  Since God didn’t make the rules, he cannot be blamed for the rule that says that Wellington must be murdered.  So, whereas God is allowed to be an active participant in what happens when it is something good, like that of getting Lance a new body, he is nowhere to be found when something evil takes place, such as the murder of Mr. Wellington.

And so, as with the first two versions of this story, predestination seems to prevail in this movie, though cast in an impersonal form.  But I wonder if anyone cares anymore, the way Joseph Breen once feared they might.  In a review on christiananswers.net, the author noted the profanity, sex, and references to drugs in the movie, but said nothing about the issue of free will versus predestination.  Nor did any of the posted comments express concerns on this matter.  I searched for other Christian websites that might have a review, but I found none.

In any event, the most remarkable thing about this movie is that, unlike the reaction I had when watching its predecessors, I think this version is occasionally funny.  But, boy, am I in the minority!  I have already referred to the Academy Awards for Best Story and Best Screenplay for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and Elaine May got the nomination for Best Screenplay for Heaven Can Wait, but for the most part, the critics did not seem to care for Down to Earth.  Roger Ebert gave it one star, saying that it is “an astonishingly bad movie.”  I never laughed once while watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and I found Heaven Can Wait to be irritating.  But when I watched Down to Earth, at least it did make me laugh once in a while.  It’s not so good that I expect to ever watch it again, but as a one-timer, it’s not bad.

For the sake of completeness, I suppose I should at least note that there are four other remakes of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  First, there is Ice Angel (2000).  This is the movie that Roger Ebert might well have deemed an astonishingly bad movie.  It is unworthy of discussion.  I understand that there are a couple of versions made in India:  The Skies Have Bowed (1968) and Mar Gaye Oye Loke (2018).  From what little I know of the religions India, I don’t think that predestination would be as contentious an issue in that part of the world as it is for Christianity.  But my biggest regret is that I have been unable to see Debbie Does Dallas… Again (2007).  I looked for it on Netflix, but no luck there.  I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

Children of Men (2006)

Although the movie Children of Men was released in 2006, and the novel on which it is based was published in 1992, it seems well-suited to tap into the anxieties of today:  the resurgence of fascism; the influx of immigrants having dark skin, especially those who are Muslims; and the declining birth rate of Caucasians, especially Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic Christians.  However, these three elements are disguised, for it would be unseemly to make them explicit.

The movie is set in the year 2027.   The United Kingdom is one of the few places left that has a functioning government.  Refugees pour in, fleeing war and starvation, even though it looks like the kind of country that under normal circumstances you would want to get out of.  The government has become a police state, while terrorist groups, like the one known as “The Fishes,” wreak havoc throughout the city.  And why, you ask, is the world in chaos?  It’s all because women stopped having babies 18 years earlier.

Come again?  Why would infertility cause a breakdown in society?  I could imagine people walking around, looking a little despondent at the thought that mankind would be extinct in less than a century, but why that would cause a dystopian world is a mystery.  The movie just plops that explanation before us as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.  If anything, worldwide infertility would ease population pressures.  We already know that people who are single have a much easier time making a living than people who have children, so there is no reason to think there would be so much starvation.  It would be like the Malthusian principle in reverse.  Granted, things may get a little difficult in about 40 years, when everyone will be a senior citizen, but that would not explain the present situation.

The explanation for this incoherence was noted above.  It would not do to say that it was the white race that was suffering from infertility, while darker skinned refugees were breeding with abandon, which is what a lot of people really fear.  And so this is concealed by having it be the entire human race that has become infertile.  While this disguises the appeal to white angst, it does so at the expense of not making much sense, for the reasons given above.

Anyway, in the midst of all this, a woman named Kee turns up pregnant.  It is important that she is played by a black actress, Clare-Hope Ashitey.  Had a white actress played her part, the subliminal racist threat of a declining white population might have become too obvious to ignore.  In any event, she becomes a pawn in the struggle between the state and the terrorists.  As a result, there is all this running about trying to get possession of the baby, while Theo (Clive Owen) tries to get Kee to this place in the Azores where a group known as the Human Project has scientists who are trying to find a cure for this pandemic of infertility.  Before he can get her onto a ship named Tomorrow, she has the baby.  She had joked earlier that she was a virgin, but that was more than a joke.  We are supposed to regard her pregnancy as having religious significance.  We know this because when she gives birth, and at other times when there is a lot of emphasis on the baby, we hear heavenly background music.

I know that for some people, life is precious, but given the world this movie presents to us, it is hard to regard Kee’s pregnancy as a good thing.  Why would anyone want to perpetuate such misery?  A midwife named Miriam, who was taking care of Kee for a while, says that everything happens for a reason.  Well, looking at the misery and suffering that mankind has been reduced to, perhaps she is right.  The reason for the infertility is to put an end to the evil known as Homo sapiens.

Unfortunately, Kee makes it onto the ship that will take her to the Human Project, and as the credits roll, we hear the laughter of children in the background, suggesting that the cure for infertility will be found, thanks in part to women like Kee.  Of course, we have to ask ourselves, “Won’t these children grow up to be just like all those adults we have been watching kill each other for almost two hours?”  This little baby will grow up to be a terrorist; that little baby will grow up and become a member of the police force; and that other little baby over there will end up in a concentration camp.  Now, aren’t we glad the Human Project is going to succeed?

However, if this movie is an unconscious fear of the decreasing fertility of the white race, then we can interpret the Human Project as actually being the White Project, the idea being that if we can just get white people to start having more babies so as to outnumber those of darker skins, then Western civilization can be saved.

Damn Yankees (1958)

Damn Yankees (1958) is a musical about a man who sells his soul to the Devil for the sake of baseball.  It is the dumbest version of the Faust legend I have ever seen.

This is not to be confused with the fact that the story about Faust does not make sense to begin with.  According to the legend, Faust sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for worldly goods, such as knowledge or pleasure, and then, after twenty years or so, he will be forever damned.  Who in his right mind would make such a deal?  Evil may be fascinating, but stupidity never is, and we quickly lose interest in the fate of anyone stupid enough to do that. To put it differently, anyone who sold his soul to the Devil would for that reason have to be mentally impaired, and thus would deserve to be forgiven.  Of course, the Faust of legend is supposed to a great scholar, so that rules out the stupidity excuse.

If the Devil manifested himself one day in my living room, promising me whatever I wanted, pleasure, power, wealth, fame, or knowledge, if only I would sell him my soul, which would then mean suffering eternal damnation once I died, there is no way I would agree to such an offer.  What I would do, however, is spend the rest of the day saying to myself, “Wow!  All that stuff about God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, is true.”  And then I would completely change my life. From then on, I would turn the other cheek, give all my worldly goods to the poor, and never again look at a woman with lust in my heart. Thanks for the heads up, Satan!

I think that would be a perfectly rational choice on my part, for what could be more important in this world or the next than avoiding the fires of Hell?  But is this the reaction that Faust or the later Faustian characters have when they encounter the Devil? No, never, not once do they react that way.  Instead, with only a hint of hesitation, they condemn themselves to eternal torment for a mess of pottage.  In Goethe’s Faust, the title character sells his soul and gets to have sex.  In The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), a struggling farmer gives it up for seven years of prosperity.  And so it goes.  Why such stories have captured the imagination of people for centuries is beyond me.

A couple of movies have managed to transcend the inherent absurdity of the Faustian premise.  Bedazzled (1967) is religious satire, and it is hilarious.  When a movie makes us laugh, all sins are forgiven.  And Angel Heart (1987) is believable because the Faustian character in that story figured he had a way of cheating the Devil.

But as I said, Damn Yankees is the worst of the lot.  I tried to suspend disbelief, accepting for the sake of the movie that there is such a thing as the Devil and Hell, and I even tried to make allowances for Faustian imprudence on the grand scale. But even so, the thing just didn’t make sense.  It all begins in the living room of Joe Boyd, who is yelling at the television because his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators, is losing.  In his exasperation, he says he would sell his soul if the Senators had a slugger who could put the ball over the fence, beating the Yankees.  Suddenly, the Devil appears, going by the name Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston), ready to make a deal.  He says that in exchange for Joe’s soul, he will make Joe the greatest baseball player ever, who will help the Senators win the pennant.  He will make him Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter), and he will be twenty-two years old.  Joe has misgivings, thinking for a moment about his job and his wife Meg, but Applegate says this is too big a deal to worry about them.

In the end, Joe deserts Meg.  From the song she was singing earlier, lamenting how during baseball season, which is six months of the year, she is neglected, we gather that she and Joe are now in their forties.  She appears to be a housewife, a common role for women in the 1950s.  And so, after Joe leaves her, she continues in her role as a housewife without the slightest concern that there is no longer any income with which to pay the bills.  In other words, it is not just the supernatural part of this movie that makes no sense.

In making the deal, Joe insisted on an escape clause.  If he changes his mind before the last game of the season, by midnight of September 24, the deal is off. So, we figure that is how he will get out of the deal.  He will play baseball until then, and then back out at the last minute.  But that is not what happens.  To keep Joe from invoking the escape clause so he can go back to Meg, whom he misses, Applegate has a lost soul named Lola try to seduce him.  This results in complications and a few songs, but the end result is that Joe does not back out at the last minute.  He stays with the Senators.  And so, we figure Joe will continue helping the Senators win the pennant and then be dragged down to Hell.

And then, from out of left field, Applegate decides he is going to make the Senators lose the pennant.  But that would mean he would not be living up to his end of the bargain. So, we now figure that when, against all reason, Applegate makes the Senators lose the pennant, Joe will not have to go to Hell, because Applegate failed to fulfill the contract. No, that’s not it either, because in his effort to make the Senators lose the pennant, Applegate turns Joe Hardy back to Joe Boyd, thinking he will not catch the fly ball.  But Joe does catch the fly ball, and so the Senators do win the pennant.  So, that means Joe is going to Hell after all, right?

No, Joe goes back home.  For some reason, Meg takes him back, as if being abandoned didn’t bother her in the slightest. Applegate shows up, we think to collect Joe’s soul, but instead he acts as though Joe is in the clear.  He offers Joe the chance to help the Senators win the World Series in exchange for his soul.  I suppose if Joe had made that deal, then at the last minute, Applegate would have tried to make the Senators lose the World Series, but when he failed and the Senators won the Series anyway, Joe would go back home then too, and once again be in the clear, for reasons that don’t make sense, either in this world or the next.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) return to the small western town of Shinbone for the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne).  A local reporter and the owner and editor of the local newspaper want to know why an important politician like Senator Stoddard would come to the funeral of someone they had never even heard of.  Stoddard decides to tell them who Doniphon was.

Most of the story the reporters already know.  Stoddard came out West with nothing but his law books, and he was immediately made aware that the law counts for nothing in the territory when his stage is held up and he is beaten with a silver-handled whip by a vicious bandit named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).  He would have beaten Stoddard to death had Reese (Lee Van Cleef) not stopped him.  Later in the movie, Valance does the same thing to a newspaper man, Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brian), and again Reese has to stop him before he kills him.  Now, when a bandit played by Lee Van Cleef is the one who has to restrain the leader of a gang from being excessively brutal, you know that gang leader must really be evil.

The town marshal, Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), is afraid Valance, so he is worthless.  Doniphon is a match for Valance, but he basically just minds his own business.  All he cares about is Hallie, whom he hopes to marry.  The tension between Valance and Stoddard finally reaches the breaking point, and Stoddard picks up a gun he barely knows how to shoot and decides to meet Valance out on the street.  Things look pretty one-sided, but amazingly enough, Stoddard shoots Valance and kills him.  As a result, he becomes known as the man who shot Liberty Valance, propelling him into his political career.  He ends up marrying Hallie to boot.  Doniphon angrily goes home and burns up the house he was building for him and Hallie.

But then Stoddard tells the reporters something they did not know.  It turns out that it was Doniphon who killed Valance with a rifle from the other side of the street.  In fact, we see that when Stoddard fired his pistol, he shot way too high.  The thing that made Stoddard famous, then, is basically a fraud.  (We even have to wonder if Hallie would have married Stoddard had she known the truth.)  The owner of the newspaper wads up his notes and throws them in the furnace.  “When the legend becomes fact,” he says, “print the legend.”

This ending is reminiscent of Fort Apache (1948).  However, in this earlier film, we get the sense the people, especially children, need heroes, and so that is why the legend is made to prevail over the truth.  In this movie, however, we get the sense that the legend simply makes better copy.  But if that were true, we would not care for the movie.  That is, if Stoddard had been the one who killed Liberty Valance, the movie would have been just one more Western in which good triumphs over evil, and the hero gets the girl.  But just as this movie is far more interesting for having a twist ending, so too would the readers of the newspaper have found the truth to be more fascinating than the story they had previously been led to believe.  The local paper would have become nationally known as the one that broke the story about what really happened.

In many cases, the legend is more interesting than the facts.  Anyone who has ever read a paragraph or two about the real King Arthur knows that.  It is the story of the Round Table, of Excalibur, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the Holy Grail that matters to us.  Not so in this movie, however.  Here, the truth is more interesting than the legend.  That’s why it’s a good movie.

The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

The Horn Blows at Midnight is a dream movie.  Athanael (Jack Benny) plays third trumpet in a band. Just before the beginning of a live broadcast, he falls asleep during a commercial for Paradise Coffee, a decaffeinated brew that lets you sleep.  He starts dreaming and does not wake up until the last few minutes of the movie, when he falls off his chair.  Elizabeth (Alexis Smith), who plays a harp, asks him what is wrong with him.  He says, “Elizabeth, I just had the craziest dream. You know, if you ever saw it in the movies, you’d never believe it.”

Well, the audience for this movie didn’t believe it, of course, because they knew all along it was a dream.  But the more important consideration was whether they liked it.  In general, audiences do not like dream movies, presumably because it means that what they are watching is not really happening.  This is something of a paradox, because that is true of most movies, even those without dreams in them. After all, Hollywood has sometimes been referred to as the “dream factory.” Nevertheless, the audience can get into a movie they know to be fiction and experience it as something real, but when they know the movie is someone’s dream, they tend to lose interest.

Brief dreams are not a problem, of course, and they may even enhance our enjoyment of the movie, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).  It is the longer dreams that test the audience’s patience. That is why most dream movies do not let the audience know until the end that what they are watching is a dream, as in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Woman in the Window (1944).  Even so, we feel somewhat cheated at the end.  Laura (1944) was originally intended to be a dream movie, and director Otto Preminger even filmed an ending making it explicit, but he wisely left it out of the movie.  In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), we are never really certain whether the ghost is real or dreamt, and this allows us to tentatively accept what we are watching as real.  But in The Horn Blows at Midnight, the dream begins early in the movie, which we know to be such right from the start, and it goes on until just before the end.

A link between reality and the dream comes in some remarks Athanael makes in the beginning.  He tells the first and second trumpet players, who correctly blamed him for playing the wrong notes during practice, that they will be punished someday for snitching on him.  When Elizabeth tries to console him for having to be just the third trumpeter, saying that at least he is making money and eating, he replies, “I’m an artist. I wish I’d never heard of food or money.”  He continues:  “It’s an ungrateful world, Elizabeth.  If I had my way, things would be different.  There’d be a lot of changes made.”

And that brings us to the second weakness of this film:  it is a Heaven movie. Even apart from the movies, Heaven is a problem all by itself.  No conception of Heaven ever really sounds all that appealing. Because it is hard to take Heaven seriously, movies about Heaven tend to be comedies. This provides them with a certain amount of immunity from criticism.  But that cuts both ways, allowing them to be subversive without seeming to be so, and that is the case with this movie.

Typically, as little time as possible is spent in Heaven itself, as in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or A Guy Named Joe (1943), allowing the events on Earth to reflect the influence of Heaven.  In fact, in the movie Heaven Can Wait (1943), we never even get to Heaven.  The protagonist spends most of his time in Hell recounting his sins. Because this is a comedy, we are not supposed to take Hell any more seriously than Heaven.  In general, Heaven movies suffer from the same problem as dream movies, which is that audiences know that what they are watching isn’t real. So, when the movie is a dream about Heaven, as in the case of The Horn Blows at Midnight, it is a movie about something that does not really happen, about a place that does not really exist.  Stairway to Heaven (1947), which holds the record for the most time spent in Heaven, is a movie that may also be a dream, but we are never sure one way or the other. That uncertainty allows us to regard what we are watching as possibly real.  In The Horn Blows at Midnight, on the other hand, there is no uncertainty in this matter at all.

Anyway, Athanael dreams that he is an angel who plays a trumpet in the heavenly orchestra.  The dream is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, in which the “ungrateful world” he referred to earlier is selected for destruction, owing to its unworthy inhabitants, and he is to destroy it himself by blowing the first four notes of the Judgment Day Overture on his horn exactly at midnight. So, he is sent to Earth, in accordance with the general principle that it is better to move the story out of Heaven as quickly as possible.  As an angel, he knows nothing about food or money, as per his wish while he was still awake.  He doesn’t seem to know anything about sex either.

The first and second trumpet players in real life are fallen angels in the dream. They try to keep Athanael from blowing his horn.  Oddly enough, we are expected to pull for Athanael, even though he wants to destroy the world, while pulling against the two fallen angels, who are trying to save it, though for selfish reasons, of course.  If a man commits a murder, he is evil.  If he goes on a rampage and kills a dozen or so, he is a mass-murderer.  And if he is like Hitler or Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions, he is a monster.  Athanael is trying to kill every last person on this planet, but since his orders come from Heaven, that makes it all right.

As another religious incongruity, five minutes before midnight, when Athanael is supposed to blow his horn, he meets a woman on the roof of the hotel.  She is crying because the cad she was in love with no longer wants to have anything to do with her.  Athanael assures her that everything will soon be all right, that her troubles will all be over with once she is dead.  But she misunderstands what he is saying and decides to commit suicide by jumping off the roof.  Athanael stops her, telling her that suicide is a mortal sin.  So, it’s all right for God to kill her and everyone else on this planet, but if she beats him to the punch and kills herself just a few minutes earlier, she must spend eternity in Hell.

It is to be noted, however, that the orders to destroy the world do not explicitly come from God, as if to hold him innocent.  This is typical.  We almost never see God in a Heaven movie.  The only exception is in The Green Pastures (1936), and that is because we are to understand that movie, not as portraying God and Heaven as they really are, but as conceived of by African Americans, understood to be a childlike race at the time that movie was made. And we do hear the disembodied voice of God in the blasphemous satire Bedazzled (1967).  Other than that, it is always some administrator that gives orders and makes decisions, so that whatever evil ensues, God can be held blameless.  In this movie, the orders come from the Deputy Chief of Operations.  So, does he get his orders from God?  No, that would be too close for comfort.  He gets his orders from the Front Office. We never see the Front Office.

Apparently, there are thousands of planets with people on them, but Earth is an inferior planet, a six-day job, practically slapped together.  The inhabitants have been warned about their evil ways through various natural disasters—”quakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts, plagues, everything”—but to no avail.  So, they must be all be killed.  Normally, Heaven has a demolition expert for such things, but he is busy destroying one of the larger planets.  So, as one of the trumpet players in the heavenly orchestra, the one least likely to be missed, Athanael has been selected for the task.

The Deputy Chief points to pictures of two angels, Doremus and Osidro, corresponding to the first and second trumpeters in real life.  He says they were sent to Earth on a mission some time back, but instead of performing the task they were assigned, they were unable to resist temptation and decided to stay on Earth.  Indirectly, this is an admission that Heaven is so boring that the two angels have chosen the pleasures of Earth over the so-called rewards of Heaven, even though it will mean they must go to Hell eventually.  When Doremus and Osidro realize that Athanael has arrived to bring about Judgment Day, they try to tempt him by taking him to a swinging party, assuring him that all that talk about Hell is just propaganda, otherwise there would be nobody left up there in Heaven.

Of course, neither the Deputy Chief nor Athanael dares to utter the word “Hell,” but refers to it only as the “other place.”  Doremus and Osidro likewise avoid that word.  This is typical in Heaven movies.  Everyone knows that the vast majority of mankind will burn in Hell for eternity, but it is not proper to speak of such things in a Heaven movie except in hushed tones, with euphemisms and circumlocutions, so as not to embarrass God.

I suppose Athanael is redeemed by the fact that in his wish-fulfilling dream, he falls to his death before he can blow his trumpet and end the world.  Perhaps he unconsciously realized that killing everyone on this planet would be wrong, even if that is what God wanted.

Whispering Smith (1948)

When Whispering Smith opens, we see a man riding his horse out of the mountains.  We hear some lazy music playing as the credits tell us that Alan Ladd is starring in this movie.  If you didn’t know better, you might think that winter has passed and Shane has decided to ride back into the valley to visit Joe and Marian Starrett and their son Joey.  Of course, this is absurd, because Shane would not be made for another five years.

In this movie, Ladd plays Luke Smith, also known as “Whispering” Smith, because, as it is later explained to us, he is so soft spoken, even when he has the drop on some railroad robbers.  This often happens, because Smith works for the railroad in the capacity of a private detective, Western style, of course.  But it would seem strange to call a man “Whispering,” however, as in, “How have you been, Whispering?”  So he is also called “Smitty.”

The lazy music comes to an end and is replaced something a little more grim as two men with rifles take aim at Smith.  They shoot, and the horse rears up and falls over landing squarely on top of the stuntman, who was presumably scraped away so that Alan Ladd could take his place, who, as Whispering Smith, doesn’t seem hurt at all.  He sees three men ride away, who we later find out are the Barton brothers, who Smith has been sent to bring to justice for robbing a train and killing a guard.  His horse needs to euthanized, Western style, of course, and Smith ends up having to walk the rest of the way.

The scene shifts to a train, where we meet wrecking boss Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston), hail-fellow-well-met.  It is his job to clear wrecks off the tracks, and he has just returned from performing that chore, nothing but a “rockslide and a broken arm,” as he puts it.  As far as he is concerned, the bigger the wreck, the better.  He deplores the way modern equipment and more frequent inspections will soon make his job obsolete.  We figure he just means that he likes the challenge, but later we find out that he has been profiting personally from these wrecks, claiming goods have been irreparably damaged and taking possession of them, when in fact they are still in good condition.

A conductor reaches out the window of the moving train and grabs a telegram (don’t ask me how).  It is from the president of the railroad, and it says that Luke Smith has been assigned to take care of the Barton brothers.  Murray waxes nostalgic about the old days, when he and Smitty (that’s what he calls him) first took jobs with the company, even rooming together until Murray married Marian.  Marian?  This is another Shane coincidence.  And just as Shane and Marian Starrett fell in love, though she was married to Joe, so too do we find out that Smith and Marian in this movie were in love too, but he never thought he was good enough for her, and she married Murray, figuring that Luke (that’s what she calls him) didn’t want her.  Later in the movie, Murray begins to catch on to the fact that there is something between the two of them, which strains the friendship.

Anyway, Smith manages to come aboard the train, which is then held up by the Barton brothers, two of whom Smith manages to kill.  He is also shot, but the harmonica in his pocket deflected the bullet, so he is not fatally wounded.  Murray brings him home with him, and Marian nurses him back to health.

Through conversation, we find out that Murray has a big ranch, and he offers Smitty a partnership to run it, but he is not interested, probably because he does not want to be around the woman he loves while she is married to his best friend.  Murray says he has to head into town to turn in his report on the train wreck, which is three days late, to “Shiny Pants,” George McCloud (John Eldredge), the new division superintendent.  Murray derisively refers to him as a “college guy,” who has “a little book called How to Run a Railroad.”  In other words, McCloud is not a real man, like Murray.

Then some cowhands come riding up, telling Murray that Rostro, a sheepherder, has been grazing his sheep in the North Flats again.  Murray tells them to take the dogs and run the sheep into the river.  Marian points out that the North Flats is government land, and that Rostro has a right to graze his sheep there if he wants.  Murray tells her to keep out of it.  “The trouble with Marian,” he says to Smitty, “she’s been mixing in things that are none of her business, and I’m going to break her of it.”  Even in 1948, the audience would have regarded this as verbal abuse, even if they might not have used that term.  So we are beginning to see the dark side of Murray.

Another clue to his dark side is the conflict with the sheepherder.  Even if we didn’t know that Rostro was within his rights to graze his sheep in the North Flats, we would know that Rostro is a good man and Murray is a bad man, because that formula, sheepherder good, cattleman bad, is almost without exception in a Western.  (The exception would be Devil’s Doorway (1950).)

Also adding to our suspicions is the fact that Murray and Marian do not have a child.  Now, a bad man in a Western might have adult children, like Ike Clanton in a Wyatt Earp movie, but he won’t have a really young child like, well, Joe and Marian in Shane, to bring that movie up once more.

Furthermore, Smith becomes suspicious about Murray’s ranch, wondering how he could have acquired it on the pay he receives from the railroad.  He suspects that Murray has been in cahoots with a thief and cattle rustler named Rebstock (Donald Crisp), who has a hired gun named Whitey Du Sang.  All in all, it is clear that Murray is corrupt.

Anyway, once Murray gets to town, he turns in his report to McCloud, asking him if he wants it written in “violet ink,” implying, of course, that McCloud is effeminate.  Later on, when McCloud arrives at a wreck, Murray offers him some brandy, saying it will “make a man out of you.”  McCloud confronts Murray, telling him that the merchandise that is in his wagon is not damaged, and that it is actually loot, and that what Murray is doing is what he, McCloud, was sent to stop.  Smith backs him up.  Murray becomes angry and tells his men to unload the wagon by smashing the boxes and bags as they do so.  One man tosses some material at Sinclair, saying, “Here’s a dress for you.”

Sinclair fires Murray and his men, and Murray becomes so angry that he decides to go in with Rebstock all the way, purposely causing trains to wreck so they can steal the merchandise.  Eventually, a guard is killed.  From this point, the movie follows an unimaginative plot.  Du Sang kills Rebstock and steals his money.  Smith kills Du Sang.  And finally, Smith has to kill Murray.  It is left to our imagination that Smith and Marian, after a decent interval, will get married.

But let’s back up a minute.  When a posse is formed to go after Rebstock and his gang for holding up the train and killing the guard, McCloud tells Smith that he can ride and shoot, and that he would like to come along.  Smith agrees.  Once the shooting starts, however, McCloud ends up being killed.

It would have been an interesting variation in the standard formula if after Smith killed Du Sang, McCloud killed Murray.  But the people who produced this movie apparently agreed, perhaps without being fully aware of it, that Murray’s contempt for McCloud as bookish and effeminate was justified.  And so, what could have been a refreshing change of pace became routine fare, an unremarkable Western barely worth the effort of watching it.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963)

I was just becoming an adolescent when The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis started playing on television in 1959, and like the title character of that show, I had no interest in being at home with my parents watching television. Like Dobie, I wanted be with my friends, but mostly, I wanted to be with girls.  And so it was that the show that I might so easily have identified with, I never saw.

But in the age of Netflix, it is now possible to watch old television shows on DVDs in the order in which they originally aired, and being retired with lots of time on my hands, I have lately been taking advantage of that possibility.  I say I have lots of time on my hands not only because I no longer have to work, but also because the attractions of youth have largely dissipated.  While I do have friends, the need to hang out with them incessantly, the way I did when I was a teenager, no longer exists for the simple reason that I do not have the need to get out of the house and away from my parents the way I used to.  As for women, while I still find them desirable, I am no longer willing to put out the effort, in part owing to the decline of passion that comes with age, and in part owing to the wisdom that also comes of age.

I don’t wish to give the impression that watching old television shows is the bulk of my entertainment.  I watch recently produced movies and television shows too.  Many of them are quite good, fortunately, but many more try my patience.  Sometimes a show seems so determined to check all the boxes of ethnic and sexual diversity that the story is overwhelmed by these unrealistic combinations of characters.  It might be argued that America has become a more ethnically and sexually diverse country than it was in the 1960s, and that is true.  But while some of that diversity might actually show up in our family or close circle of friends, it seldom does so to the degree that it does on the screen, where the amount of diversity we see is a result forced by the felt need to get it all in.

One of the charms of an old movie or television show is that there was no need for this.  Everyone could be white and heterosexual without anyone thinking there was anything politically incorrect about it.  This is important not because being white and heterosexual is intrinsically better than the alternatives, but because it makes for simpler dramatic situations.  Whether diversity is a good thing in real life is a different question from whether it is a good thing in drama.  If The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis were made today, Dobie’s best friend would no longer be the not-too-bright beatnik Maynard Krebs, but an African American who is always ready with sage advice.  Zelda Gilroy, the one girl that Dobie could actually have but did not want, because she was neither pretty nor sexy, would be replaced by someone who is gay, trying to convince Dobie that since he is getting nowhere with girls, he should consider having a boyfriend instead. Both these substitutes would have overwhelmed the simple plots and precluded the light humor that makes watching this show a pleasure.  Instead, the tension between white and black, on the one hand, and between straight and gay, on the other, would have made this a very different show.  And that would be just for starters. Thalia Menninger would no longer be a scheming gold digger, but a girl intent on having a professional career. And room would also have to be made in Dobie’s life for a Latino, an Asian,and a Muslim.

Could it still have been funny?  Maybe.  And if a show makes us laugh, nothing else matters. But when I watch a modern situation comedy that does not make me laugh, and I find myself at the same time being acutely aware of all the obligatory diversity that has been crammed into it, I cannot help but wonder if the latter is the reason for the former.