Unplanned (2019) and Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (2018)

Unplanned is a pro-life movie distributed by PureFlix, the production and distribution company that gave us God’s Not Dead (2014), and if you’ve seen the latter, you’ll know what to expect from the former.  It is the sweet, loving, pro-life Christians pitted against the mean, selfish, abortionists.

The movie is based on a book by Abby Johnson, telling of her personal experience with abortion and her work at a Planned Parenthood clinic until she converted to being pro-life.  She goes to work for Planned Parenthood thinking she is helping women avoid abortions, but is eventually told that things like birth-control and counseling are not what’s important, because it’s abortions that bring in all the money.  And they need to meet their new growth target by doubling the number of abortions in the upcoming fiscal year.  When Abby protests that Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization, she is told, “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.”  And just in case we still have any doubts that Planned Parenthood is evil, we are informed that George Soros supports the organization.

The movie intends to be persuasive, but not in the manner of a discursive argument.  The question of when human life begins is only touched on, just to enough to give us a sense of Abby’s overall view of things.  At a family gathering, Abby says that life begins with viability, before which it is just undeveloped tissue.  Others object that viability changes with technology.  Her mother disapprovingly says that life begins at conception.  But we can expect no more than that from a movie.  If a movie is to persuade, it must do so dramatically and through images.

Dramatically speaking, conversions can be persuasive.  Typically, there is an appeal to an experience one has had that others have not, and it is hoped that by relating that experience to others, they can be converted as well.  In the case of Abby, her experience is that of having had two abortions herself and working at a Planned Parenthood clinic where she witnessed an actual procedure.  It is this latter experience that differentiates her from most of us.  Lots of women have had abortions, but few have worked in an abortion clinic.

The experience consists of two sorts:  pain and gore.  As for pain, in the scene where Abby participates in an abortion, the young woman having the procedure is crying from the pain, notwithstanding the pain medication she was presumably given.  I am guessing that the point of this is to discourage women from having an abortion.  But if the pain of having an abortion is supposed to be an argument against this procedure, then it is undermined later when Abby has a baby and seems to undergo even greater pain from childbirth.

Abby also goes through the pain of having abortions herself:  the first being a surgical abortion; the second, a chemically-induced abortion, using RU-486.  The latter is portrayed as being excruciating, especially soon after taking the pills, followed by eight weeks of cramping.  If it’s really as bad as all that, then I guess women would be well-advised to opt for a surgical abortion instead.

The second part of the experience is the gore.  We get to see a fetus sucked out through a catheter, and after Abby takes the RU-486 pills, we get to see gobs of embryo fall out of her vagina onto the floor or being dumped into the toilet.  The we see her sprawled out on the bathroom floor surrounded by embryo blood and goo.

I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination how Abby eventually quits Planned Parenthood and joins a pro-life organization, bringing joy to the hearts of her family at the return of their prodigal daughter.  Instead, I’ll comment on something about the movie that surprised me.  My pro-life friends are always harping on late-term abortions, and one has recently started expressing moral outrage over what he calls “after-birth abortions.”  Whereas people that are pro-choice are perfectly comfortable with abortion-on-demand during the first trimester, doubt and uncertainly increase the further along a woman gets in her pregnancy.  And it is there that a lot of pro-life advocates choose to make their case, sensing weakness in the pro-choice position during the later months.

I expected this movie to focus on that as well.  In fact, I had recently seen Gosnell:  The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer, which is all about that sort of thing.  According to this movie, if Dr. Gosnell, who ran a filthy, disgusting clinic, was a little late getting around to performing an abortion, the drugs that the technicians had already administered would sometimes result in the fetus/baby coming out before he got there, still moving, still alive.  No problem, Gosnell would just grab some scissors and snip the spinal cord.  However, what he was doing was illegal, and he is now spending the rest of his life in prison for murder.

At first, I thought this movie might be pro-choice.  After all, this was about illegal abortions.  However, the movie argues that pro-choice advocates are the real villains, because it was fear of them that led Republican Governor Tom Ridge to end annual inspections of abortion clinics, allowing Gosnell to operate with impunity.   Furthermore, at Gosnell’s trial, a Dr. North testifies as to how legal abortions are performed.  As she goes into detail, the look on her face shows signs of distress, almost horror, as if it never occurred to her before what a terrible thing she had been doing, notwithstanding the fact that she had performed thirty thousand of them, making it clear that the distinction between Gosnell’s illegal abortions and those of the legal sort is insignificant.

Anyway, I thought Abby’s moment of truth would come when she witnessed the Grand Guignol of a late-term abortion of the sort Dr. North described.  Much to my surprise, all the abortions in Unplanned are in the first trimester.  There is reference later in the movie to a new facility that will allow for more abortions to be performed up to the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, but we see none of that.  In a way, this makes sense.  When pro-life advocates make their case against late-term abortions, they are implicitly conceding the field to those that are pro-choice when it comes to early abortions.  Instead Unplanned is determined to attack abortions in the place where pro-choice advocates feel secure, in hopes of putting an end to all abortion.

Though I have said that this movie intends to be persuasive, yet I doubt those who made it are under any illusions that those of us who are pro-choice will actually change our minds.  They probably don’t even expect us to watch this movie.  I did so out of curiosity.  Rather, it is intended to strengthen the resolve of those that are already opposed to abortion.  In fact, my pro-life bridge partner said she was especially eager to see this movie.

God Bless America (2011)

At the beginning of God Bless America, before we can see anything, we hear the sound of a baby crying.  Is there any other animal, when in its infancy, that makes a sound as maddening to its parents as that of a baby to its human mother and father?  And to the next-door neighbor?  In any event, the next thing we see is the eye of that neighbor, whose name is Frank, unable to sleep, in part on account of his migraines, but mostly because of the neighbor’s crying baby and their loud television, which is right up against the paper-thin wall next to Frank’s bedroom.  But what mostly offends Frank is the overall obnoxious stupidity the emanates from his neighbor’s apartment, some of it coming from the television, and some of it from the mouths of the neighbors themselves, who are inconsiderate and think themselves entitled to do as they please.

Frank says he wants to kill them.  But he especially wants to kill the baby.  The next thing we see is Frank busting through the door with a 12 gauge, pump shotgun, blasting the television and then the husband.  The wife holds up her baby, hoping to enlist his sympathy, but Frank blows it away, leaving nothing behind but an empty-handed, blood-drenched mother as we hear Brahms’ “Lullaby” playing in the background and as we see the look of peace and contentment on Frank’s face.  It’s a fantasy, of course, soon interrupted by the sound of a crying baby.

Frank’s whole world is full of people like his neighbors:  his fellow workers, his doctor, his ex-wife and daughter, and pretty much everyone on every channel of his television as he continually works the remote.  Worst of all is the show “American Superstarz,” featuring guest Steven Clark, singing “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” off-key and with a whiny voice.  Ironically, the song asks, “Do you like the things that life is showing you?”  He is so awful that he becomes a sensation, someone people love to insult and ridicule.  When Frank gets to work, his coworkers are talking about Steven Clark, and he fantasizes about killing them too.

But just before that, he stops to say hello to Karen, the receptionist, who smiles at him and seems friendly.  They usually sit together at lunch.  He gives her a book that he had told her about, which she seems to appreciate.  Later, she walks by Frank’s cubicle and smiles at him, almost flirtatiously.  But then Frank is called to the office.  Karen has reported him for sending her flowers at her home, and now she doesn’t feel safe working there.  He is fired.  Then Frank goes to see his doctor, who tells him about his inoperable brain tumor.  It has not been a good day.

Actually, the day started off with Frank calling his ex-wife to see about having their daughter Ava spend some time with him, but Ava is a spoiled brat who doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.  Mother and daughter both have long, blond hair.  When Frank gets home and starts watching television, there is a show about a horrible, self-centered girl named Chloe, who is about to have her sixteenth-birthday party.  She and her mother both have long, blond hair.  Then Frank turns off the sound on the television because the phone is ringing.  It is Ava.  She starts screaming, “I hate Mommy, I hate Mommy,” while we see Chloe on the television in the background, who also seems to be screaming about how she hates her parents because they ruin everything.

Frank takes down his service pistol and starts to commit suicide.  But then he has a better idea.  He goes to Chloe’s outdoor birthday party and shoots her, as a substitute for killing his own his own daughter.  Then his anger gives way to guilt, and he writes a suicide note to Ava, saying she will be better off without him.  This ambivalence toward his daughter also shows up in his attitude toward Brad, a policeman that is planning on marrying Frank’s ex-wife.  On the one hand, he resents Brad as an interloper who will take his place as husband and father; on the other hand, he doesn’t want to kill Brad because that way he will suffer.

When Frank shot Chloe, a sixteen-year-old girl named Roxie saw him do it and was awed.  She manages to find Frank in a hotel room, just as he has put the barrel of his gun in his mouth, and interrupts his plan to commit suicide.  For her, Frank has great potential, killing Chloe being just the beginning.  She starts jumping up and down on the bed at the thought of going on a killing spree.  Frank tells her to quit that, because someone just made that bed.  Now, Frank was sitting on that bed when he was about to pull the trigger, which would have gotten his brains and blood all over the bedspread, but suddenly he is worried that Roxie will get the bedspread all wrinkled.

This is just one of many instances in which Frank seems to have a peculiar sense of what is right and wrong.  Roxie, on the other hand, is completely amoral.  She wants to kill people simply because they are irritating, like twihards, people who give high-fives, and NASCAR fans.  But as she slowly brings Frank around to the idea of killing more Chloes, he says it would have to be only those that deserve to die, people that are mean or rude.  When she suggests Chloe’s parents, he is persuaded.

They go to the house where Chloe’s parents live.  Frank tells Roxie to stay in the car.  He knocks on the door, and when it opens, he pushes his way in, announces who he is and shoots the father.  His gun jams, and the mother starts running through the house with Frank in pursuit.  Suddenly, we see him stop.  Roxie had apparently entered the house too and found a butcher knife, which the mother ran right into and is now impaled.  Roxie slowly brings the phallic knife upward, and if you didn’t know better, you might think the two women were having sex from what could be looks of ecstasy on their faces.  Then the blood from the mother starts squirting all over Roxie like some kind of twisted cumshot.

Frank admits that murdering Chloe’s parents felt pretty good, but he wants Roxie to go back home to her parents.  She gets Frank to let her come along by telling him how her mother is a crack whore whose boyfriend rapes Roxie after her mother passes out.

Roxie asks Frank if he thinks she is attractive, but he refuses to answer that question and any others having to do with sex, because she is too young.  She asks, “So it’s OK to kill a teenager but not to fuck one?” and Frank answers “Yes.”  Now, within the movie, Frank does not have sex with Roxie because she is too young, but from outside the movie it is clear that she was made too young so that they could not have sex, in part to underscore Frank’s peculiar moral code, and in part to keep a heightened sexual tension between them.  That sexual tension is reinforced in various ways.  To get Frank to sleep in the same bed with her in the hotel room, she puts pillows between them, saying, “The walls of Jericho,” alluding, of course, to It Happened One Night (1934).  Later on, they end up on the dance floor together, and she looks good in his arms.

The movie makes it clear that their agenda has nothing to do with politics.  When they murder a television commentator, it turns out that in some ways, Frank agreed with the man’s politics while Roxie did not.  But that didn’t matter.  They killed him because he was rude and offensive.  Typical is their killing of the man who deliberately took up two parking spots.  And then there is the classic scene in which they shoot people in a movie theater for talking on their cell phones.

Frank finds out that he was misdiagnosed, that he does not have a brain tumor.  And then he finds out that Roxie came from a normal family and had normal problems for a teenage girl.  He breaks off their relationship, and she ends up back home.  But it’s clear they miss each other.

Steven Clark’s performance keeps recurring throughout the movie.  There is even a report that Steven attempted suicide, presumably because people were making fun of him.  We know American Superstarz will be Frank’s final destination, determined as he is to kill all those that have been mean and hurtful to Steven.  Frank walks out onto the stage with an AK-47 and dynamite strapped to his chest.  Roxie is in the audience, and she yells out to Frank telling him where there is a security guard, allowing Frank to turn and shoot him.  Then she joins him on the stage.  The theater fills with police.  Frank gives his speech about people being mean to those like Steven, causing him to attempt suicide.  But Steven interrupts the speech,  saying that wasn’t the reason.  He was upset only because he was afraid they would not let him be on television anymore.

Frank realizes that Roxie was right all along, that people don’t deserve to die because they are mean, but because they are irritating.  He looks at Roxie.  He tells her she is a pretty girl and hands her the AK-47, pulling out his pistol as he does.  They begin spraying the room with bullets, until their bodies are pumped full of lead, uniting them in death.

The Young Philadelphians (1959)

Part I

In the opening scene of The Young Philadelphians, we hear the voice of a narrator:  “A man’s life, they say, is the sum of all his actions.”

As we eventually learn, the narrator is Anthony “Tony” Judson Lawrence, played by Paul Newman.  I have doubts about his attribution, “they say,” because with only one exception, I never hear anyone say anything like that.  But if Tony had begun his narration by saying, “According to Jean-Paul Sartre, man is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is,’” that would have set the wrong tone for this movie.

Sartre was a big believer in free will, asserting that a man is responsible for everything that he does.  To blame others for one’s life is to act in bad faith.  However, Tony proceeds to do just that as he continues his remarks:  “But his actions are sometimes the result of the hopes, dreams, and desires of those who came before him.  In that sense, my life began even before I was born, on an afternoon of June, 1924.”  Tony is taking a stance in direct opposition to Sartre, denying that one’s actions are always a choice freely made, espousing instead a form of determinism, which is a theme of this movie.

While Tony is saying all this, we see a church of much grandeur where a wedding is taking place, and we learn that those attending the wedding are part of the Philadelphia Main Line.  I must confess that I didn’t even know there was such a thing before I saw this movie, but I gather that it is a society consisting of the most elite upper class in America:  they are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; they have old money; their ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Looking back, I guess that is why such a big deal was being made about that wedding in The Philadelphia Story (1940).

If I may be permitted a reference to Sartre one more time, one of his principles was that existence precedes essence.  In the Main Line, however, it seems that essence precedes existence.  If a man is not to the manor born, there is nothing he can do to belong to it.

Watching the wedding take place from across the street is Mike Flanagan (Brian Keith). He is an Irish immigrant.  Owing to his construction business, he has become financially successful, but he has only new money. He is mooning wistfully over the woman that has just married another man.

That woman is Kate Lawrence, née Judson.  She is not actually part of the Main Line, but is only marrying into it.  Her husband is William “Bill” Lawrence III (Adam West), scion of a most prestigious family.  The reception being over, they arrive at their swanky hotel room.  Kate is ready to have sex.  She goes into the bedroom and removes her blouse.  As Bill walks in, she stands there, presenting herself.  She still has on her slip, her skirt, and her shoes, but we are probably supposed to imagine that she has removed the rest of her clothes as well.

He says she is lovely.  She moves into his arms, saying, “I hope I can make you happy.”

He kisses her as passionately as he can, but then turns away, saying, “I’ve done you a terrible wrong, Kate.  I can’t make you happy.  It was my mother who wanted this marriage, to give her a grandson, just as your mother wanted you to be a Lawrence.  But I can’t love you, Kate.  I can’t love anyone.”  When she tries to console him, he pushes her away, saying, “Don’t pity me,” and runs out of the hotel room.

You see, Bill is a homosexual.  He probably thought he would be able to fake his desire for Kate, but now realizes he cannot.  Once more, we should probably use our imagination, that it would only be after they got in bed and he failed to get an erection that he realized he could not go through with it.  This reinforces the deterministic theme of this movie.  Bill has no free will when it comes to his sexual nature.

Of course, one must wonder, didn’t they ever drive over to lover’s lane to make out?  Had they done so, Bill would have realized right then that marrying Kate was out of the question.  For that matter, did Mike and Kate ever do a little necking?  If not, how could he be so much in love with her at the time of her wedding?  Instead, the movie would have us believe that such behavior would have been unacceptable for someone who either belonged to Main Line society or aspired to do so.

In the next scene, Mike is bringing a prostitute to the little shack he lives in.  But Kate is there, waiting for him.  He sends the prostitute away with some money.  In tears, Kate says Mike is the only one she can talk to.  Clearly, he is the man she really loves.  They have sex, and because this is the only time they do so, movie logic requires that she become pregnant.  She returns home, where her mother tells her that Bill died in an accident as a result of driving at a high rate of speed, undoubtedly intending to kill himself.

Nine months later, the baby is born, whom Kate names Anthony Judson Lawrence.  Bill’s mother, Mrs. Lawrence, visits Kate at the hospital.  It appears she hired a private detective, who found out that Bill was a homosexual, from which she was able to figure out that the baby is not her grandson.  She offers Kate a lot of money, probably enough to allow her to live comfortably for the rest of her life, but Kate must give up the name Lawrence.  She refuses the offer.

In the next scene, Kate has returned to her mother’s home with the baby.  Mike, who has stayed away for nine months out of consideration for Kate’s situation, has come to visit her.  She is cool to him.  Moreover, she asks him not to visit her anymore.  She does not want her son’s future to be anything other than that of a Lawrence, and having Mike around might spoil that.  Mike wants to marry her, but she refuses.  She says her grandmother came to this country as a servant. It has taken three generations to acquire social position, and she is not giving that up.

The judgment of this movie is that there is something repulsive about Kate’s being willing to give up the man she loves so that her son can be part of the Main Line.  We know in general that people in a movie should marry for love.  If a man’s desire for success or a woman’s desire for fame interferes with that, we know they are wrongheaded.  But at least success or fame was something they struggled to acquire.  The idea that someone is superior simply by virtue of having been born into the right family is offensive.  Of course, I merely betray my working-class origins in saying so.  Which makes me wonder, how do people that are upper class feel about movies like this one, movies that have contempt for them?  Probably, they regard such movies as unworthy of their consideration.

Part II

Years pass, and we see that Tony is in his junior year at Princeton.  During the summer break, he has taken a job at Mike’s construction business (something Kate disapproves of).  Not only does Tony have Mike’s genes, but we are also reassured by the fact that he is engaged in physical labor, conferring on him a certain honest masculinity, especially since he wears a wife beater.

A truck backs into a car, and that is when we meet Joan Dickinson (Barbara Rush), who will become Tony’s love interest.  She is one of two young people that are part of Main Line society but take their social position as being unimportant, if not something of a nuisance.  The other is Chester “Chet” Gwynn, played by Robert Vaughn.  Chet is Tony’s best friend.  As we see Chet introducing Tony to people at a party, we notice that Chet’s wrist is always a bit limp.

Chet has two uncles. Uncle Morton (Robert Douglas), guardian of a fortune left to Chet, of which Morton feels Chet is not ready to take possession.  Uncle Shippen is a world-famous geneticist, known for his investigations into the influence of heredity and environment in one’s life.  As we find out later, he was the executor of the estate of Mrs. Lawrence, Bill’s mother, and he found notes she left behind about Bill’s homosexuality.  After Chet has introduced Tony to his two uncles, Shippen says to Morton, “Interesting heredity there.”

Chet warns Joan that her love for Tony may be ruined by social pressure, as was his marriage, which only lasted two days before his parents got it annulled, with money changing hands.  He assures her that, unlike himself, Tony won’t give in to pressure the way he did.  He tells her not to wait, to get Tony to marry her right away.  When she asks how, he replies, “The same way women have been getting men to marry them since the Stone Age.”

In the next scene, we see Tony and Joan in a secluded area among the trees, kissing and petting.  She is ready to have sex, but before that happens, he asks her to marry him, to elope that very night.  She says she is already packed and ready to go.  But when they stop off first at Tony’s house to get something, Kate is waiting for them along with Joan’s father, Gilbert Dickinson (John Williams).

Dickinson promises to be Tony’s preceptor, giving him a position with his law firm, ultimately making him a partner, provided he postpone the marriage for a few months.  Of course, Dickinson intends to see to it that they never marry.  We know he will always find new reasons for further postponements.  Presumably, he doesn’t think Tony is quite good enough for his daughter, and Kate thinks the chance for Tony to become a partner in a major law firm more important than his marrying for love.

As noted above, when someone in a movie chooses success over love, he is wrongheaded, and such is the case with Tony.  Blinded by ambition, he agrees to Dickinson’s proposal without considering Joan’s feelings.    When he tells her that for practical reasons the marriage will have to be “postponed,” she knows what that means.  Recalling what Chet had said about Tony’s not giving in to pressure, she says to her father, “Chet was wrong.  You only had to make the offer attractive enough.”

Disillusioned about love, Joan immediately sails for Europe, eventually marrying someone her father approves of.  When Tony finds out about it, he blames her for being unfaithful.  He becomes cynical, almost ruthless in his desire to make it big.  When the opportunity presents itself, he abandons the Dickinson law firm for that of John Wharton (Otto Kruger), spending time at Wharton’s house while working on a project.  As a result, Wharton’s young wife (Alexis Smith) falls in love with Tony, coming to his bedroom one night after her husband has fallen asleep.  Tony knows that it would be dangerous to have sex with her, but he also knows the saying about a woman scorned.  So, he tells her he doesn’t want just a fling, saying he is madly in love with her.  He says he wants her to leave her husband so they can be married.  Horrified at the idea of losing her social position, she tells Tony that her coming to his room was a mistake and apologizes, her passions cooled, her pride intact.  After she leaves, Tony says, “Whew!”

The Korean War breaks out, but Tony’s ambitions are only briefly interrupted.  When it is over, he returns to Wharton’s law firm.  At first, he is stuck in a small office, but after he manages to steal a wealthy client from Dickinson’s firm, he is moved to an office that is much larger and nicer looking.  He now smokes a pipe, but it comes across as a little phony, as a way of advertising that he does not work with his hands, but only with his mind.  Moreover, he appears to be emulating Wharton, who also smokes a pipe. By way of contrast, Mike smokes a manly cigar.

For some reason, Tony still lives with his mother.  I don’t believe we are supposed to think of him as a mama’s boy, especially since he is, after all, played by Paul Newman, but I do have to wonder why he doesn’t get his own place.  Maybe it’s another one of those Main Line things.  Early in the movie, on the other hand, Mike Flanagan lived alone and still does.  Had he been living with his mother, Tony would never have been born.

Part III

During the Korean War, for reasons which were not explained, Tony was a lieutenant while Chet was only a private.  In any event, Chet lost his arm during a battle. He descends into alcoholism, becoming an embarrassment to Main Line society.  He is accused of murdering Uncle Morton, who has been refusing to let Chet have any of the money that was left to him.  Uncle Shippen puts pressure on Tony to go through the motions of putting on a defense, allowing Chet to be convicted and eventually put in a “proper institution” for the rest of his life. Otherwise, Tony’s position at Wharton’s or any other law firm will be jeopardized.  Also putting pressure on him is the threat of exposure regarding his mother.  Kate tells Tony that Mike is his real father, and Mike tells him that her adultery will be made public if Tony does not cooperate with the wishes of those that want Chet to be found guilty.

Joan’s husband had been killed during the war.  Little by little, she and Tony had started seeing each other again.  But now she tells Tony it might be better for Chet if another lawyer handled the case.  She cares about Chet, and she recalls how Tony once before gave in to the lure of success, fearing he might do so again and betray Chet.  She says she knows he can’t help being what he has become, but she still loves him anyway.  This makes him angry, and he breaks up with her.

Tony rises above the social pressure, defending Chet by means of a courtroom stunt that would have made Perry Mason blush.  In addition, Tony subtly suggests that if Uncle Shippen tells what he knows about Kate, Tony will tell what he knows about Bill.  Finally, when it becomes clear that Uncle Morton probably committed suicide because he had a painful brain tumor and only a year to live, Chet is acquitted.  The prosecuting attorney congratulates him, saying that if he keeps this up, he will be more than just a Philadelphia lawyer, implying that a successful career in politics awaits him.  Joan tells Tony that he was wonderful.  He says what he did was necessary.  But he means that only in the moral sense, not in a physical or psychological sense, which would be deterministic.

And so it is that if a man’s life is the sum of his actions, Tony is looking pretty good:  he stood by his friend, protected his mother’s honor, enhanced his career, and ends up getting the girl.  That is to say, he and Joan will get married live happily ever after. 

Whether Tony’s decision to defend Chet was an act of free will, or whether it was the result of having Mike’s genes, who can say?

Kitty Foyle (1940) and Tom, Dick and Harry (1941)

Kitty Foyle begins as a comedy, and quite a funny one, I must say.  But once the title character falls in love, the movie becomes a melodrama.  Just like real life, I suppose.  Tom, Dick and Harry, on the other hand, is a comedy all the way through.  Ginger Rogers starred in both, the former being made a year before the latter, and in both movies, she must choose which man she will marry (or at least spend the rest of her life with).  In watching these two films, one gets the impression that those in charge of production at RKO were so pleased with the success of Kitty Foyle that they wanted to do something like that again.  But in order to avoid simply following the same formula, someone added a joker to the deck, with a few elements from the first movie making their way into the second.

Kitty Foyle, which has the subtitle, The Natural History of a Woman, begins with a prologue announcing that it is the story of a “white collar girl.”  It goes on to say that since she is a comparative newcomer to the American scene, it will consider her as she was in 1900.  Said 1900 old-fashioned girl has men scrambling to give up their seats on the trolley for her, with one lucky man having the privilege of doing so.  Subsequently, we see him sitting with her on her porch, wooing her with a ukulele.  He impulsively kisses her on the cheek.  She is shocked at the liberty he has taken.  Realizing he must do the honorable thing, he proposes marriage.  She is delighted, having used her womanly wiles to trap a man, while the man wonders how this could have happened to him.  We see them again after they have married.  He arrives home from work, turning over his entire paycheck to her, though she hands him back a coin, for the trolley, presumably.  Then he discovers that she is going to have a baby, and he kneels beside her, worshipping her now more than ever.  This is an amusing depiction of the idea that women had it made in the old days, that it was when they had few rights that they had real power, as expressed in the nineteenth century poem “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rules the World.”

This is followed by an intertitle that reads, “But this was not enough.”  We see scenes of the women’s suffrage movement, with that same woman now holding a sign that reads, “Let the hand that rocks the cradle guide the state.”  However, once she gets her equal rights, men not only ignore her on the trolley, but when one man gets up to leave, another pushes her aside so he can have the seat for himself.  Quite frankly, I could have stayed with this woman for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, another intertitle tells us that once women began working “shoulder to shoulder” with men, the men became indifferent to the presence of women, leading to that “five thirty feeling,” presumably a woman’s feeling of loneliness at the end of the day on account of not being married.  The point of all this is that a woman now has a harder time getting a man to marry her.  We see a bunch of women on an elevator talking about how much they like having a man or how much they wish they had one.  One woman, however, expresses an independent point of view, saying that a woman can be happy without a man.  “What’s the difference,” she asks, “between men bachelors and girl bachelors?”  Then we see Ginger Rogers, as the title character, exiting the elevator while making her entrance into this movie by answering, “Men bachelors are that way because they want to be.”

This is a familiar premise in the movies, that women want to be married.  No such assumption is made regarding men.  A man may eventually want to marry some woman in particular, but a woman wants to get married as a matter of principle.  The corresponding premise for men in the movies is that they are perfectly happy being bachelors.  They typically do get married, of course, and for no better reason than they are in love.  But for women in these movies, things are not so simple.  Women want to get married even before they have some particular man in mind, and when there is some man in particular for them to think about marrying, considerations other than love enter in.

One consideration is the man’s socio-economic status.  From the time she was a young girl, Kitty has been fascinated with a Main Line social function in Philadelphia known as the Assembly.  By chance, she meets Wyn Strafford, and as soon as she finds out that he is one of the elite, she falls in love with him.  He falls in love with her too, but their class difference makes for difficulties, especially after they get married. When she meets his family, she finds out about their expectations for her, which apparently include sending her to finishing school so that she can comport herself properly at social functions.  And she learns of the hold they have on Wyn.  Kitty wants her and Wyn to move to New York, where they won’t have to bother about all this Main Line stuff, but the Strafford money is in a trust that would require them to live in Philadelphia at Darby Mill house, otherwise Wyn will lose his inheritance.  Kitty is offended, saying she will not go to school to get her rough edges polished off.  She announces disdainfully that she didn’t marry Wyn for his money, that she married a man, not a trust fund.

That’s a fine speech coming from her.  After seeing the way she was awed by those attending the Philadelphia Assembly, and after seeing her become enamored with Wyn the minute she found out he was a Main Liner, we are now supposed to believe that she cares nothing about class and money.  All she cares about is true love, and she is indignant that Wyn’s family is not egalitarian enough to accept her just the way she is.  Well, we all act from mixed motives, and when we do, they don’t stand out as discreet items for our inspection, but blend together into single result, making it easy for us to imagine we have acted from the best of intentions while suppressing those we would rather forget.

When she realizes that Wyn would never be happy if he had to forgo his inheritance, the two of them trying to make a go of it as a working-class couple in New York, she leaves him and gets a divorce.

Kitty has a baby and it dies.  So, what’s the point?  Her pregnancy was not inevitable, especially since she and Wyn were only together as a married couple for less than a week.  Well, in one sense, it was inevitable.  When a woman in a movie has sex with a man just one time, she gets pregnant. Presumably, Kitty and Wyn had sex more than once in the few days they were together, but that’s close enough to practically guarantee pregnancy in a movie.  (This rule does not apply to prostitutes or women that regularly have one-night stands, of course.) In any event, given the pregnancy, the death of the baby was not inevitable, since healthy babies are born every day.  But in another sense, the baby’s death was inevitable, because the plot required it, as we shall see.

On the rebound, she starts dating Mark Eisen, a doctor who is more concerned with helping the poor and needy than in making money.  Still, he wants to marry her, and she could be comfortable with him.  She accepts his proposal.  But as she is preparing to meet him later to get married, Wyn shows up, and it is clear they truly love each other.  He says he has left his wife and is going to South America.  And he wants Kitty to come with him, even though he has no intention of getting a divorce.

I’m not sure what the significance of South America is in these movies about the upper class.  In Stella Dallas (1937), the title character tells her daughter she is going to get married and move to South America to get away from it all.  Isn’t that a little extreme?  I understand wanting to get away from one’s family, because they can be a nuisance, but is it necessary to run that far?  Can’t they just move to Kansas or something, some place where everyone speaks English?

And I don’t mean to overthink this thing, but what will they live on?  Wyn will be disinherited, just as he would have had they moved to New York.  So, instead of his getting a job in New York, and, as Kitty put it at the time, living in a small apartment with a pull-down bed, eating meals in drugstores, going to a movie once a week, and trying to save a dollar or two against the day he may lose his job, now they can do all that in South America.

In any event, Kitty must choose:  have a respectable, comfortable life with Mark or be Wyn’s mistress.  And herein lies the answer to the twofold question, why did Kitty have a baby, and why did it die?  It is easy to understand why the baby had to die.  Kitty would not have been able even to consider living illicitly with a man if she had a child to raise.  It is one thing for her to live in sin with only herself to consider, but to make her child have to bear the disgrace as well would have been unthinkable in this movie.  But that only answers half the question.  Why was it necessary for her to be pregnant in the first place, aside from the reason given above?

When Kitty reflects on Wyn’s proposition, she thinks about how she will be regarded in society, and she wonders how their arrangement will fare as she gets older.  But one thing she never wonders about is what will happen if she gets pregnant.  In fact, we don’t wonder about that either as we watch this movie.  Why not?  Because once a woman in a movie has a baby that dies, she never has another.  Sometimes, after breaking the news to the mother that the baby was stillborn, the doctor then goes on to tell her that she cannot have another.  But that scene is not necessary.  Movie logic precludes another baby regardless.  So the death of Kitty’s baby allows her to consider living with Wyn without worrying about the possibility of getting pregnant again.  Kitty doesn’t know she is in a movie, of course, but we do.  And if we are not worried about her getting pregnant again, why should she?

Still, her life with Wyn would not be easy.  Normally in the movies, the woman chooses the man she loves, but since life with Wyn would be disreputable, she chooses a respectable life with Mark.  Or rather, I should say, by having Wyn’s proposition be an immoral one (by 1940 standards), the movie allows her to choose Mark, the man she does not love.  We are glad that Kitty makes the morally acceptable choice, but we are also glad the she is marrying within her class.  We don’t hold it against women in the movies for wanting to marry into the upper class, but it makes us uncomfortable nevertheless.

This is another difference in the movies between men and women.  A man like Wyn might have to choose between marrying within his class and marrying down, but we seldom see a movie about a man having to choose between marrying within his class and marrying up.  When we do see such a movie, the man’s desire to marry up is felt to be wrong.  But when a woman has a desire to marry up, we are more understanding.  We have misgivings, wondering as we do in this movie whether she can find happiness in a family worried about her lack of polish and refinement; and we may be relieved, as we are here, when she settles for someone in her own class.  But we don’t really think the less of her for wanting to marry into the upper class as we do with a man.

We now turn to Tom, Dick and Harry.  Instead of just two, there are three men in this movie that Janie (Ginger Rogers) must choose among.  Tom (George Murphy) is a car salesman, and he corresponds to Mark:  he and Janie are in the same class, and he can provide her with a comfortable life.  Dick is a millionaire playboy, and he corresponds to Wyn:  he is a member of the elite, and Janie wonders if she would fit in.  Finally, Harry (Burgess Meredith) is a trickster figure, who throws the formula out of whack:  he is an auto mechanic who cares nothing about getting ahead or making a lot of money.

In Kitty Foyle, the characters occasionally reflect on their situation.  In fact, Kitty literally does so when her image in the mirror tells her just how things will be in South America.  But Tom, Dick and Harry seems to take this to a whole new level, especially when Janie is with Harry, who waxes philosophical on her unrealistic dream of marrying into the upper class.  But we meet him later.  When the movie begins, Tom and Janie are in a movie theater, which is a reflexive device right there.  We don’t see the screen.  We only hear the voices of the actors.  It doesn’t sound like any movie that ever actually existed, but rather a parody of one we have already seen.  It is the final scene of the movie, and a man, who is rich and upper class, is telling a working-class woman that he wants her to come away with him, to someplace where they can get away from it all, to South America.  She is reluctant, thinking that he just wants her to be his mistress.  But no, he wants to marry her.  She is so happy, she cries.  They kiss.  The End.

It is a cloying variation on Wyn’s offer to Kitty, but it is just the kind of ending that Janie likes, for she too dreams of marrying someone rich and upper class.  After the movie, she and Tom discuss whether the movie was true to life, whether a rich, upper-class man would marry a poor, working-class girl.  Janie says it is, because he loved her.  Tom doesn’t think so, but that is because he doesn’t want it to be true to life.  He plans on proposing to Janie, and he doesn’t want her head full of foolish notions about marrying up.

The next day after work, Janie is standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the bus, when Harry pulls up in front of her driving an expensive car.  Not realizing that Harry is just a mechanic, and that he is delivering the car to a rich customer, who turns out to be Dick, Janie flirts with him and eventually becomes so brazen as to get in the car with him.  After taking her home, Harry makes a date with her for later that evening.  He shows up with what looks like two small bunches of violets, which is, perhaps, just a minor quotation of Kitty Foyle, where Wyn takes Kitty to New York, and just before entering an exclusive speakeasy, he buys her two bunches of violets.  More importantly, when they are seated at a table, she asks Wyn why he brought her to New York.  She explains:  “When I was going to high school in Manito, Illinois, it’s quite a small town and everybody knew everybody else’s business.  So, when a man wanted to take somebody out, he didn’t care particularly about being seen with her, he’d always take her up to Chicago.”  He says it’s nothing like that, although we suspect it is just like that when we see how cowed Wyn is by his family and their expectations.  In Tom, Dick and Harry, when Janie finally manages to meet Dick, he asks her to go on a date with him to Chicago, which Janie gleefully accepts, unencumbered as she is by Kitty’s worldliness.

All three men want to marry Janie, and she dreams of marrying each of them and then all of them at once.  As for that last dream, on their wedding night, we see the bedroom, and it is of the Production Code sort, with its respectable twin beds.  But then, with Janie sitting in one bed, all three men get in the other.  She wakes up and realizes she must choose.  The next morning, she chooses Dick because he is the man she has dreamed of marrying all her life.  She kisses Tom goodbye.  And then she kisses Harry.  Earlier in the movie, whenever she kissed Harry, they heard bells chiming, something that never happens when she kisses Tom or Dick.  And now, in kissing Harry goodbye, she hears them again.

In Kitty Foyle, we knew that Kitty liked Mark, but it was Wyn she loved.  In Tom, Dick and Harry, it is neither like nor love, but sexual arousal that clinches the deal.  Janie tells Dick goodbye, hops on the back of Harry’s three-wheel motorcycle, and off they go.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

In many ways, The Devil and Daniel Webster is different from all the other Faustian tales we have encountered over the years.  Not better, just different.

First of all, in most such stories, the Faustian character is a bachelor, one notable exception being Damn Yankees (1958), in which Joe Boyd is a married man.  But in any event, they all live comfortable lives.  They sell their souls because they are discontented.  As a result, we never understand why they would be so stupid as to agree to spend an eternity burning in the fires of Hell for a few decades of whatever it is they want:  wealth, power, fame, sex, or a baseball team that can beat the Yankees.

In The Devil and Daniel Webster, on the other hand, Jabez Stone (James Craig) is a poor farmer for whom everything seems to be going wrong.  In particular, the note on his farm is due the next day and he doesn’t have any money, meaning he will lose the farm.  He supports his mother, Ma Stone (Jane Darwell), and his wife, Mary (Anne Shirley), who falls off the wagon and is unconscious.  In his utter exasperation, he says that it’s enough to make a man sell his soul to the Devil.  Needless to say, the Devil, who goes by the name of Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston), shows up ready to make the deal.  At least this makes some sense.  Every man has his breaking point, and Jabez has reached his.  We might actually believe that a man might make a Faustian bargain under such desperate circumstances.

Second, in all other Faustian tales, the two principal characters are the man who sells his soul to the Devil and the Devil himself.  But in The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Faustian character is not in the title.  Rather, it includes some third character.  In fact, so prominent is the role of Daniel Webster in this movie that I’m almost surprised they found room in the title for the Devil.  Now, we all know who Daniel Webster is, a politician of note in the years leading up to the Civil War.  But the excessive adoration of Webster that this movie evinces is beyond anything most of us would ever have imagined.

Third, in most Faustian stories, the Devil lives up to the letter of the contract, but not the spirit.  He grants the Faustian character his wishes, only to undermine them in some way.  As Roger Ebert once argued, the Devil should do everything he can to satisfy the Faustian character so that he will tell all his friends about the good deal he made.  A little word-of-mouth advertising might net the Devil a few more souls.  In this movie, however, Mr. Scratch doesn’t pull any sneaky tricks.  He allows Jabez access to a big supply of gold coins, which solves most of his problems right there.  Mr. Scratch even goes beyond what was required in the agreement, beyond just the money.  He protects Jabez’s wheat against a hailstorm that destroys the wheat of all the other farmers.  And he sees to it that the Jabez family gets Belle (Simone Simon) for a maid so that Jabez can have an affair with her.  As a result, for seven years, the agreed upon length of time Jabez has before he must die and go to Hell, Jabez is on top of the world.

When Jabez first comes running into the house to tell his mother and Mary about the Hessian gold that he found underneath the barn, Ma Stone is suspicious.  “Most outlandish thing I ever heard tell,” she says.  “Doesn’t seem right somehow.”  Now, we all know that Jane Darwell has played in a lot of movies in which she has down-to-earth common sense and gritty wisdom, but this is a little too much.  On that very morning, the sheriff has stopped by to tell them that they will be thrown off the farm the next day.  They can’t sell the pig because he just broke his leg.  Mary’s tells Jabez the butter money is gone because she needed it to pay the vet to treat the horse.  He decides to sell the bag of seed he was going to use for the spring plowing, but it rips open and spills out onto the mud.  And then, ten minutes after Mary has fallen on her head and was knocked unconscious, Jabez comes running into the house to tell about the Hessian gold he just found.  And yet, Ma Stone suspects something.  Like what?  Does she think Jabez just committed highway robbery?  It’s almost as if she suspects Jabez must have sold his soul to the Devil.  Why accept a natural explanation like buried Hessian gold when there is a perfectly good supernatural explanation ready at hand?

In any event, for seven years Jabez is a happy man.  It is only when his time is up that he starts bellyaching, claiming that he has been cheated, which he has not.  He says, “You promised me prosperity, happiness, love, money, friendship.”  Mr. Scratch replies that all he promised him was money and all that it could buy.  More to the point, Jabez had the love of his wife, but he not only cheated on her, but also mistreated her.  He had friends, but once he got his hands on the money, he started taking advantage of them, until no one liked him anymore.  In short, he becomes such a jerk that we really don’t care if he does go to Hell.

That is what makes the intercession by Daniel Webster seem so unwarranted.  But intercede he does.  After admitting that the document in which Jabez signed over his soul is properly drawn, Webster says, “But you shall not have this man! A man isn’t property!”

This just a touch ironic in light of Webster’s speech promoting the Compromise of 1850 and his support for fugitive slave laws on the grounds that slave owners were entitled to the protection of their property.  However, the year in which this scene takes place is 1847, back when his opposition to slavery in principle was perhaps a bit more credible.  But then, this movie was made in 1941, long after we knew better.  In fact, one might say that Webster had made something of a Faustian bargain himself.  So, maybe he does belong in this movie.

All that may be beside the point, however, because when Webster says that Jabez is a “man,” he probably means a white man.  And not just any white man, but an American citizen.  Since slaves were neither white nor American citizens, their status as property undoubtedly seemed acceptable to him:  “Mr. Stone is an American citizen,” he continues, “and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince.”

Mr. Scratch takes exception to the notion that he is a foreigner.  When asked if he is claiming to be an American citizen, he replies:

And who with better right? When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck. Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? ’Tis true, the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. To tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in the country than yours.

That much having been established, Webster demands a trial by jury, saying that if he cannot persuade the jury to let Jabez go, then Mr. Scratch gets Webster’s soul too.  The jury consists of wicked Americans who now reside in Hell as the result of once having made the same deal that Jabez has, men such as Captain Kidd and Benedict Arnold.  In addressing the jury, Webster goes on at great length about how wonderful it is to be an American, which is just one long non sequitur.  But then he appeals to the fact that they all wish they had a second chance, so why don’t they give Jabez a second chance?  By doing so, he argues, they will be standing up for freedom, for America.

And so, Jabez is acquitted.  I guess the point of this story is that if you are an American citizen, you can sell your soul to the Devil and get away with it.  Perhaps this is what they mean by American exceptionalism.

Adam’s Rib (1949)

Does Adam’s Rib give us a glimpse into what life was like in America in the late 1940s, or does it just tell us about what movie audiences expected to see on the big screen in the late 1940s?  Looking back that far, it is hard to tell.

The theme of the movie is the double standard regarding the sexes, which in those days meant, among other things, that when a man had sex outside of marriage, either before marriage or with another woman after he was married, it was no big deal; but if a woman had sex outside of marriage, either before marriage or with another man after she was married, her behavior was shameful.  Arising out of this general attitude was the unwritten law, which held that a man should not be punished for killing his wife’s lover, especially if he caught them in flagrante delicto.  But the same latitude was not extended to the wife, should she kill her husband’s lover.  It is the assertion of this movie that the double standard is wrong, that men and women should be treated equally.

On the one hand, this movie would seem to be premised on the idea that this double standard was widely accepted by society at that time, not only as the way things were, but as the way they ought to be as well.  On the other hand, if the double standard were as firmly accepted by society as this movie would have us believe, then a movie like this that challenged that double standard would have been regarded as scandalous and unfit for viewing.  In other words, the audience had to be somewhat receptive to the idea that the double standard was unfair in order for this film to be successful.

When the movie begins, we see dizzy Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) following her philandering husband Warren (Tom Ewell) on his way to an assignation with Beryl Caighn (Jean Hagen).  The movie is unrelenting it its determination to show us that Doris is klutzy and simpleminded.  For example, we see her looking at the instruction booklet just before firing the revolver she has in her hand, as if pulling the trigger was something complicated.  The purpose of depicting her in this way, one must suppose, is so that we won’t hold her morally responsible for shooting her husband, which she manages to do after firing wildly around the room.  Later, she testifies that she was not trying to shoot anyone, but only trying to scare Beryl into leaving her husband alone.

The scene shifts to the Bonner household, where Adam (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda (Katherine Hepburn) are being served breakfast in bed by their maid.  This is not a special occasion, like an anniversary.  It is just another workday for this married couple.  Who do you know today that gets served breakfast in bed by a maid just before going to work?  I refer back to my question in the first paragraph:  Was this normal in 1949, or was this something people expected to see when they went to the movies?

Anyway, Amanda says that Adam was making strange sounds in his sleep, which she mimics.  Because the idea of infidelity is already in our heads, we suspect he was dreaming about having sex with another woman.  We are justified in inferring as much, since the scene would be pointless otherwise.  But given that this movie is about the double standard, we might ask why it wasn’t Amanda who was making strange sounds in her sleep as she dreamed of having sex with another man.  In other words, this movie is presuming the cliché that men are dogs, given to lusting after other women in a way that is not characteristic of the fair sex.  This is just one example of the way in which this movie is guilty of the very double standard it sets out to challenge.

Whatever the case, she spots the article in the newspaper about Doris shooting Warren, smiles broadly, and says, “Hot dog!”  When she says the husband survived, Adam says, “Shame,” a sarcastic response to Amanda’s genuine delight.  She says it serves him right.  Later, after they leave the bedroom, the maid sees the story and says, “Attagirl.”

It turns out that Adam is an assistant district attorney, and he is assigned to prosecute Doris, while Amanda is also an attorney, who decides to defend Doris.  We know this is unrealistic, just a plot device, something that would never be allowed to happen in real life.  During the trial, Amanda keeps trying to make the case that there is an unfair double standard for men and women, especially when it comes to the unwritten law.  However, Amanda does not explicitly say that she believes it should be all right for a woman to kill her husband’s lover.  As a further complication, that argument would not apply in any event because Doris did not shoot Beryl, but Warren.  Perhaps Amanda meant that the unwritten law also allows the husband to kill his unfaithful wife, and so that should apply to the woman as well, allowing her to kill her unfaithful husband.  We don’t know, because Amanda does not say that either.  This unwritten law seems to be an unspoken law in this movie as well.  In the end, we get a watered-down version, in which Amanda argues that Doris was just trying to protect her home by scaring Beryl, and shooting Warren was an accident.

Now, it is not just the men in this movie that believe in the double standard.  Amanda’s secretary approves of the double standard just as much as the men presumably do.  When asked by Amanda, “What do you think of a man who’s unfaithful to his wife?” the secretary says, “Not nice, but….”  But when Amanda asks, “What about a woman who’s unfaithful to her husband?” the secretary answers, “Something terrible.”  At the same time, the secretary seems to resent the very double standard she embraces, because upon hearing that a woman shot her husband, she says it serves him right, even before knowing any of the details of the case, including the infidelity.

So far, we have had three women express their attitudes about a woman shooting her husband:  Amanda, her maid, and her secretary.  Each has expressed a feeling of satisfaction that justice has been served, and each is on the side of the woman.  There are no women presented who express a contrary attitude.  The implication is that all women feel this way.  This drains the trial of suspense, because all Amanda has to do is make sure there are women on the jury.  Even one woman would be enough for a hung jury, leading to a mistrial.

We have already noted that Doris is portrayed as being a dimwit, so as to make her less culpable.  Her husband Warren, on the other hand, is depicted as being a real jerk, who says on the witness stand that he does not love his wife and does not know why he married her.  Furthermore, he admits that he beats her regularly, often knocking her to the ground.  Earlier in the movie, Doris tells Amanda that the first time he hit her, he broke her tooth, the upper-left molar, no less.  The point of this depiction is to make him seem to deserve being shot.  These characterizations are so heavy-handed as to make the story completely one-sided.  After all, a man does not have to be a wife beater to be unfaithful, and his wife does not have to be addlebrained to shoot him in a jealous rage.

This movie does not have the courage of its convictions.  If it really wanted to challenge the double standard, it would have had Doris kill either Beryl or Warren.  Instead, Beryl is left unharmed, Warren has suffered no permanent injury, and Doris didn’t mean to shoot him anyway.  Moreover, the movie could have made Warren out to be guilty of adultery only.  Instead, by having him be a man who beats his wife, the real justification for shooting him overwhelms the ostensible one.  Even those in the audience that might disapprove of a woman shooting her unfaithful husband are forced to be on Doris’s side because she has a husband who will knock her teeth out.  Essentially, the movie admits it would not be able to successfully challenge the double standard on its own terms.  It had to make the man guilty of more than just adultery, and it had to make the woman guilty of less than murder.

When it comes to the question as to whether women should be treated the same as men in such matters, the movie tries to have it both ways.  During the trial, Amanda calls to the stand three women who are seen to be equal to men, if not superior to them, both mentally and physically, the point being that women should be treated the same as men.  So, why not have a movie in which, say, the chemist, the woman with several advanced degrees and responsible positions in both the public and private sector, be the one who shot her husband?  Flipping back and forth like a Necker cube, the movie wants us to acknowledge that women are equal to men, while at the same time it tries to elicit our compassion for a helpless, weak woman who would be the last person you would offer up as an argument for gender equality.

At this point, I must comment on another prejudice, one not made explicit in the movie, but which is definitely present nevertheless.  Aside from an occasional woman seen briefly with no speaking part, Doris is the only blonde in the movie.  All the rest are either brunettes, red heads, or elderly women with gray hair.  As if the movie had not already made it painfully obvious that Doris is not very bright, those making this movie must have decided that this had to be reinforced by the dumb-blonde stereotype.  But that is not all.  During the trial, when Amanda is summing up and wants to drive home her point about the double standard, she implores the jury to imagine Doris as a man.  We see Doris transform into a man with dark hair.  And then she points to Warren, asking them to imagine him as a woman, at which point he changes into a woman with blond hair.  I guess the idea is that only a woman can be a dumb blonde.

There is another aspect to the double standard that this movie accepts in the very act of supposedly challenging it.  Doris says she was just trying to scare Beryl into leaving her husband alone, and Amanda refers to Beryl as a “homewrecker,” the idea being that Warren was just a victim of her womanly wiles.  Women are seldom vouchsafed such understanding when they cheat on their husbands.

Anyway, the conflict between Adam and Amanda spills over into their marriage, causing them to break up, leading to apparent infidelity, threats with a fake gun, making up, but with fake tears, and hints of further conflict to come.  But at least their reconciliation seems to make sense, sort of.  What does not make sense is the reconciliation of Doris and Warren.  After she is found not guilty by the jury, Doris and Warren become a loving couple, embracing each other and their three children, ready to go back home and live happily ever after.  As noted above, we are supposed to believe that their marital problems were really Beryl’s fault, and now that she has been scared off, everything will be fine.  I’ll bet Warren beats Doris as soon as he gets her alone, and I’ll give him a week before he starts cheating on her again.

Of course, the reason for their reunion is that a more realistic ending for them would have been unthinkable.  The audience at that time might have approved of a woman shooting her husband, but not divorcing him.  Suppose Doris had turned to Amanda after her acquittal and said, “Will you help me get a divorce from that louse?”  And while I’m on the subject, suppose Amanda had decided she was fed up with Adam’s insufferable attitude toward her on account of the way she defended her client in court, and she decided she would get a divorce as well.  That would have offended the audience of 1949 far more than the movie’s challenge to the double standard ever could.

Scream (1996)

People in movies often refer to movies.  And why, not?  They are a big part of our lives.  However, when it comes to remakes, it is necessary that the characters in those movies be unaware of the original.  For example, in the remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the characters exist in a world much like our own with one notable exception:  it is a world in which the original movie does not exist.  Of course, the 1978 version alluded to the original when Kevin McCarthy was seen running down the street screaming, “You’re next!”  But that was just an inside joke with the audience.  No one in the movie said, “Isn’t that the actor who was in that body snatcher movie?”

Remakes aside, the characters in a horror movie are usually unaware of horror movies in general. The very title I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) tells us that this is a late entry into the genre.  And yet, it appears that no one in this movie has ever seen a werewolf movie.  When law enforcement officers are perplexed about the nature of a recent murder, Pepe the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff), having looked at a photograph of the murder victim and crossed himself in terror, says he knows what killed the boy.  He tells Officer Stanley (Guy Williams) that the boy was killed by a werewolf.  Speaking with an East European accent, Pepe tells of a how in the Old Country, when he was a little boy living in a village in the Carpathian Mountains, there was a story, passed down from generation to generation, of men who became like wolves when the evil eye was upon them.  Stanley acts as though he has never heard of such a thing, and Pepe has to explain to him what a werewolf is.  In real life, Stanley would have said, “Oh yeah, there was a wolf man in that Abbott and Costello movie I saw last week at the Bijou.”

In defense of this decision to make characters in a horror movie seem to exist in a world where no one has ever seen a horror movie, the reason is that it would be like breaking the fourth wall, which interferes with our ability to suspend disbelief.  Had Officer Stanley alluded to having seen a werewolf movie, it would have reminded the audience that what they were watching was also just a movie, which would undermine the movie’s ability create an atmosphere of terror and suspense.  When this happens, the movie tends to also be a comedy.

I can’t say that An American Werewolf in London (1981) is the first movie in which people have an awareness of werewolf movies, but it is the first one to do so in a big way.  Two American college students, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are hiking through England.  They stop at an inn called the Slaughtered Lamb, and one of them comments on the pentangle on the wall, saying, “Lon Chaney Jr. at Universal Studios said that’s the mark of the wolf man.”  After they leave, they are attacked by a werewolf.  Jack is killed, but David is only wounded.  Jack comes back from the dead to tell David that all that stuff about werewolves is true, and that David has become one himself.  It is interesting that though these two characters are Americans, yet the setting is in England, much in the way that the Lon Chaney character, Lawrence Talbot, in the movie referred to above, The Wolf Man (1941), returns from America to his ancestral home in Wales, and it is there that he first learns about werewolves.  In other words, in the Old World, they know about werewolves from legends they are told from the time they are young; here in the New World, we know about werewolves from the movies.  Unless we are in a movie, and then we might be oblivious.

In Fright Night (1985), teenager Charley Brewster suspects that his new next-door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge, is a vampire.  That would be scary enough, but the real dread is oedipal.  Vampires in the movies always seem to have sexual implications, and Charley’s mother, who is divorced, is attracted to Dandridge.  It is not uncommon for a teenage boy to be disturbed by the prospect of his mother having sex with another man, especially an attractive mother who tells her son in the middle of the night about a dream she had:  “I was at this white sale and suddenly realized I was stark naked.”

Now, you may be thinking I’m going overboard with this Freudian interpretation.  And indeed, if such a thing happened in real life, a mother telling her son about a dream she had in which she didn’t have any clothes on, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.  But writer and director Tom Holland, who also was the writer for Psycho II (1983) and Child’s Play (1988), a couple of other movies about a boy and his strange relationship with his mother, deliberately wrote that line into this movie.  He could have had Charley’s mother tell her son any one of a hundred other dreams, but Tolland, with malice aforeplay, decided to have her tell her son about a dream that encourages him to imagine her naked.

Anyway, Charley consults his friend, Evil Ed, who knows a lot about vampires from watching movies on the eponymous late show.  One item on Evil Ed’s list of vampire traits is that a vampire cannot enter your house unless invited in.  Wouldn’t you know it, no sooner does Charley get back home than he finds Dandridge in his house, having been invited in by his mother, who seems to find Dandridge quite charming.  In Freudian terms, the house represents her vagina, which Dandridge has entered after having been invited to come inside.

But while Charley is apprehensive about his mother’s fondness for the vampire next door, Dandridge is smitten by Charley’s girlfriend Amy, who reminds of his lost love.  Charley’s unconscious desire to keep his mother to himself is recapitulated openly by his jealousy over the fact Amy also desires Dandridge, even to the point of having sex with him, something she never did with Charley. Of course, that was actually Charley’s fault.  Just as Amy was taking off her clothes so that they could finally have sex for the first time, Charley lost interest in her when he looked through the bedroom window and saw that a vampire was moving in next door.  Dandridge’s sexual relationship with the two women in Charley’s life, merely suggested in one case, fully consummated in the other, establishes a psychological identity between Charley’s mother and Amy.

As informative as Evil Ed has been, Charley turns to Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell), former actor in vampire movies and host of Fright Night, which features vampire movies.  He also claims to be a vampire killer.  He is a Van Helsing character, except that in the old movies, Van Helsing’s knowledge about vampires came from books, but now such knowledge comes from the movies.  Vincent helps Charley kill Dandridge, allowing Charley to regain possession of both his mother and Amy.

The next stage in the evolution of movie awareness in horror films came with There’s Nothing Out There (1991).  The movie begins in a video store in which Sally, a teenage girl that works behind the counter, is all alone.  There is a television in the store featuring a movie in which a girl is apparently being chased by a mad slasher, since the store seems to feature almost nothing but movies of mad slashers chasing pretty girls.  Someone enters the store and begins chasing Sally.  It turns out that she is dreaming, having fallen asleep at the wheel, and the car crashes in the woods.

Presumably, she does work in such a store, which has led her to have a dream in which she is threatened by a mad slasher, just like all those movies she is surrounded by every day.  This scene makes us aware of the interaction between art and life, between dreams and reality, something that has always existed, but by this time has become intensified by the invention of the videotape recorder.

By coincidence, a large space frog has fallen from the sky and lands right near her car.  It further damages the car trying to get to her so that, as we later find out, it can mate with her; for it is a given in such movies that teenage girls are the most sexually desirable creatures in the universe.

Meanwhile, seven teenagers decide to spend spring break in a house in the woods, owned by the parents of one of the teens.  As they pass by Sally’s deserted and demolished car, surrounded by a police car and an ambulance, Mike says it’s a shame that this has spoiled their plans, but they must turn around and go back home.  The others in the car think he has just been spooked by the scene itself, but Mike points out that it is suffused with meaning that he has gleaned from renting every horror video that has ever been made.  The scene with Sally’s car, he avers, is what is technically known as the warning stage.  It is worth noting that the other six teenagers are couples, and that Mike is the only guy without a girl.  This is significant for two reasons:  first, only a nerd who can’t get a date would have the time to see all those horror films; second, virgins stand a better chance of surviving a horror film than their sexually active companions.  Anyway, they ignore his foolishness and press on, with Mike saying, “There’s mistake number one.”

When they arrive at the house, Mike enunciates some rules needed to stay alive, such as not wandering off by yourself in the woods and not going skinny dipping.  Later, another group of teenagers arrive.  They appear to be low class and scroungy, all doped up on marijuana, and they go skinny dipping in the pond.  Turns out they thought they had arrived at the “camp by the lake,” undoubtedly an allusion to Camp Crystal Lake of Friday the 13th (1980).  They leave when they realize their mistake.  Mike declares that this is a foreshadowing, saying, “Those kids were born to be murder victims and just paid us a visit.”  As for Mike’s friends, one couple does go skinny dipping, and another couple does wander off into the woods, all destined to become victims of the space frog.

At first, Mike uses his horror-movie knowledge to thwart the alien, but he eventually comes to suspect that he and his friends are actually in a movie.

In the end, Mike comes up with the idea of using mirrors to confuse the space frog, allowing him and two remaining companions to trap the frog in the oven.  And thus it is that by reflecting on horror movies, Mike kills the frog through reflections in the mirrors.

The ideas in this film reached their apotheosis in Scream (1996).  The movie begins with a scene in which Casey (Drew Barrymore) is home alone at night in a fully-lit house that almost seems to have more windows than walls.  She receives an ominous phone call, and instead of hanging up immediately, she keeps talking to the caller.  This is typical of women in movies who receive such phone calls, where they say things like, “Why do you keep calling me while I’m naked?”

But instead of the creep on the phone asking her what color her panties are or whatever, this guy asks her trivia questions about horror movies.  And this is just the beginning of such allusions.  As audiences of Psycho (1960) were said to be shocked by the fact that a major star like Janet Leigh was killed off early in the movie, so too is Drew Barrymore’s character Casey likewise killed off earlier than one might expect for a star of her standing.

Casey and her boyfriend are killed by a character that eventually came to be referred to as Ghostface, who is both scary and funny.  When thwarted in his attempts to stab someone, he takes what might be called variations on pratfalls.  And yet we are brought back from these scenes of mirth to horror when he succeeds in plunging his knife into one of his victims.

Though seemingly a minor character, the most essential person in this film is Randy, a teenager that works in a video store and is an expert on horror films.  He is like a combination of Sally and Mike in There’s Nothing Out There, except more so.  He enunciates the basic rules for surviving a horror film:  don’t have sex; don’t drink or do drugs; and never say, “I’ll be right back.”  But even he fails to take advantage of his own expertise in such matters, as when he is is drunk, watching a horror film, presumably Halloween (1978), yelling at Jamie Lee Curtis to “Look behind you!” while he fails to look behind himself, where he would have seen Ghostface standing behind him, holding a knife.  Nevertheless, his expertise in this area allows him to correctly identify one of the two killers early in the movie, and he further acts as a guide through the movie by drawing inferences from horror films to the situations the teenagers find themselves in.  In the sequel to this movie, he draws inferences from sequels, and in the third film he draws inferences from trilogies.

But Randy is not the only one doing this.  The two killers, who take turns dressing up as Ghostface, are also guided by their study of horror films.  One of them says that they even took notes while watching them.  And just as Mike in There’s Nothing Out There wonders if he and his friends are actually in a horror movie, one of the killers in Scream tells his girlfriend Sidney, protagonist and ultimate target of Ghostface, that life is a movie, “Only you can’t pick your genre.”

Going one step further, the sequel to Scream includes as a plot point a movie called Stab, which is based on what happened in the movie Scream, and it has sequels paralleling the sequels to Scream.  So, not only are the characters in these movies aware of the horror movies that came before, but they also live in a world where there are movies based on what happens in this movie, not external to it, like Scary Movie (2000), but within the movie itself.

I suppose it is possible to go even further with this principle of people in horror movies referring to horror movies, shaping their behavior according to what they have seen in horror movies, and even believing they are in a horror movie.  But the question is whether it is possible to do better than Scream with this idea.  I don’t think so.

Dark Victory (1939) and The Hasty Heart (1949)

As a disease movie, Dark Victory might have been believable in 1939, but it is certainly far-fetched today.  Bette Davis plays Judith Traherne, a young, rich woman with all the character flaws that might easily come from being rich:  arrogant, spoiled, frivolous.  Transcending all this, however, is her intensity, which makes even her ordinary actions seem like vices.  Just watching her walk across a room will wear you out.  By way of contrast, her boyfriend, Alec, played by Ronald Reagan, is cool and relaxed.

Judith suffers from headaches and double vision.  Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald), her secretary and friend, finally gets her to go to the doctor, and, not surprisingly, she is a bad patient.  Despite her resistance, she is diagnosed as having a glioma, a malignant tumor in the brain.  She consents to having surgery, but upon its completion, the prognosis is negative.

Negative, but preposterously artificial and precise:  she will live less than a year, but she will have absolutely no symptoms until just a few hours before she dies, at which point her vision will begin to fail and things will become dark.  The doctor says this is a rare case, which is an understatement, since it is so rare as to be nonexistent.

Well, they went to a lot of trouble to create this disease for this movie, so we know that something is up.  Presumably, the point is to pose the question, what effect would the certainty of death have on someone once all the symptoms leading up to death had been eliminated?  Judith will still be young, pretty, rich, and otherwise healthy.  She has no accompanying complications, like still needing to work in order to pay the bills or worrying about who will care for her children, of which she has none.  It is only death in all its purity that she must deal with.

Moreover, there is no indication that she is even remotely religious, so she must face death with no hope for a future life.  Nor can we believe that she has the consolation of philosophy, for the above-mentioned intensity of her personality suggests that she has been too busy living life to have spent much time reflecting upon it.  To be sure, neither religion nor philosophy can fully prepare anyone for death when it comes, but Judith has no cushion at all.

Dr. Steele (George Brent), who performed the brain surgery, and Dr. Parsons (Henry Travers), Judith’s family practitioner, agree not to tell Judith that she is going to die.  We have doubts about the ethics of their decision, made all the more suspect when Steele confides in Ann about Judith’s condition.  After Steele and Judith fall in love and decide to marry, she accidentally finds out about her negative prognosis.  She becomes angry, accusing Ann of getting Steele to marry her out of pity.

As a result, the marriage between Steele and Judith is off, and she apparently descends into drunkenness and promiscuity, including affairs with married men.  At least, that’s what the movie let’s us think for a while, until it makes us aware that it is mostly malicious gossip.  She almost has an affair with Michael (Humphrey Bogart), her horse trainer, but then realizes that this is not how she wants to spend what is left of her life.  That is not surprising.  Most people want more out of life than just drinking and screwing.  Similarly, at different points in the movie, the subjects of euthanasia and suicide are broached, but quickly dismissed.  That too is not surprising, for most people believe that deliberately ending an unhappy life, one’s own or that of another, as not being the answer either.  At least, that is the attitude of this movie.

So, what is the answer?  At first it would seem that the movie says we should live a life of deception and delusion.  To begin with, the doctors and Ann lie to Judith about her condition, the idea being that she will be better off not knowing.  Right after Steele tells Ann the truth, Judith joins them and gives Steele a present, some cufflinks “from a grateful patient,” she says.  The act of giving him a present gives her an idea.  She declares that it is her birthday, not literally, but figuratively, in the sense that her life has a new beginning, now that she has been cured.  She suggests that they get together every year to celebrate, not realizing that by this time next year she will be dead.  Though Steele and Ann think they are doing the right thing by concealing the truth from Judith, yet there seems to be something so wrong about letting her live in a fool’s paradise.  They deprive her of dignity for the sake of a false happiness.  Then, after Steele and Judith reconcile and get married, they become deliberately oblivious to her illness, acting as though there is nothing wrong with her.  Finally, just as Steele gets word of an invitation to attend an important meeting in New York regarding his work, Judith experiences a dimming of her vision and realizes she will soon die.  But she deceives her husband, encouraging him to go on without her, which he does.

But this cannot be the answer.  It is one thing to go on with your life without dwelling on the finality of death, but it is quite another thing live in perpetual denial.  There is something almost desperate about their forced happiness.  And it is untenable.  When Michael casually refers to the prayers he has been saying for Judith, she flinches.

But before Steele leaves, she becomes realistic, speaks frankly about her fate, and says that she is prepared for the end.  Still unaware that Judith can no longer see very well, Steele reluctantly leaves on his trip.  Judith then tells Ann she wants to die alone, so that her husband will know that in the end she was not afraid.  This is what we have been waiting for, courage and honesty in the face of death, and the peace that comes with resignation.

This movie is similar to The Hasty Heart (1949), set in a makeshift hospital in a jungle in Burma just after the end of World War II.  Colonel Dunn, who appears to be the chief surgeon, tells the men that are still recovering from wounds or malaria that a new patient, a corporal that goes by the name “Lachie” (Richard Todd), will be arriving soon.  On the last day of the war, a piece of shrapnel damaged one of his kidneys, which had to be removed.  He has just about recovered from the surgery and appears to be well.  Normally, he could get along with just one kidney for the rest of his life, but the doctors have discovered that the other one is defective.  For the next few weeks, the kidney will do the work of two and then collapse.  At that point uremic poisoning will set in and he will die.

All this is more believable than the disease in Dark Victory, but just barely.  It seems a bit of a stretch that doctors in an army hospital in the jungle in Burma would be able to diagnose a kidney that is still functioning as being defective, and then give the prognosis that he will apparently be in good health for a few weeks and then die.  However realistic all that may or may not be, it is clearly designed to serve the same function as in Dark Victory, to allow someone to face imminent death free of all symptoms.

Colonel Dunn has not told him, however, much in the way that the doctors in Dark Victory decide not tell Judith.  And just as the doctors in Dark Victory told Ann about Judith’s prognosis, Dunn tells the men in the ward about Lachie, and he asks the men to keep the secret as well and to be extra nice to him.  Once again, we have to wonder about the questionable ethics of not telling the patient that he is going to die, and then telling others who are not even related to him about his terminal disease.  And just as Judith has no family when she is diagnosed with her disease, so too does Lachie have no family, “no ties.”  Because of this, Dunn has decided not to let Lachie go back home to Scotland as he so dearly wants.  Instead, Dunn has taken it upon himself to decide that Lachie will be better off if he is kept in this hospital, surrounded by men who have been ordered to be friends with him.

Lachie’s personality is every bit as intense as that of Judith.  By way of contrast, Ronald Reagan, playing the role of “Yank,” is also in this movie, and here too he is cool and relaxed.  Lachie hates the world and everyone that is in it.  The explanation given for his misanthropy is the fact that he was born illegitimate.  However, we have a hard time believing that this alone could make anyone as surly and hostile as he is.  Had Yank been born illegitimate, we have the feeling he would have shrugged it off and made the best of it.  In other words, Lachie’s personality is just one more contrivance, something made up for dramatic purposes only.

Patricia Neal plays a nurse, Sister Parker.  She comes up with the idea of having a birthday party for Lachie, in which she and the men in the ward buy him a complete outfit consisting of a kilt, brogues, and other appurtenances, all of which is rather expensive.  As in Dark Victory, we have the theme of a birthday for someone who will never live to see another, yet does not realize it, celebrating a beginning instead of facing the end.  Lachie is finally touched by their gesture of friendship.  He begins to think he has been wrong about people.

Soon after, he falls in love with Sister Parker, asking her to marry him.  She says, “If it makes you happy to think of us being married, then that’s what I want too.”  Now, you or I would surely have balked had we received an answer like that to a proposal of marriage.  And we would have wondered why a nurse and other men in a ward, whom we had only known for a couple of weeks, would have spent so much money buying us gifts.  But Lachie’s social skills are such that he suspects nothing.

And so it is that both movies feature references to the three most important events in a person’s life, birth, marriage, and death, each of which justifies an announcement in the newspaper, and for each of which we get a certificate.

Having gone this far with this deception, the only proper thing would be to see it through to the end.  That is, when Lachie’s kidney begins to fail him, everyone should act surprised and sad.  But no, just as Lachie has come to believe in friendship and love, Colonel Dunn tells him that he can go home after all.  Moreover, because his is a special case, he gets priority and can even go home by plane.  Why is he a special case? Lachie wants to know.  Dunn says he has been ordered to give him the facts of the case, which is that he is going to die soon.

We may have had misgivings about the way the doctors handled Judith’s case, but at least Ann really was her friend, having been so before Judith was diagnosed, and Dr. Steele really did love her and want to marry her.  But this handling of Lachie’s case is cruel.  He sees immediately that the men were just pretending to be his friend and that Parker only pretended to want to marry him, that they gave him “a fool’s religion to die on.”

To make matters worse, after Dunn tells Lachie he is going to die, he doesn’t bother to tell the men whom he ordered to befriend Lachie that Lachie knows everything.  He just walks past them, letting them make fools out of themselves by continuing to carry on the charade.  Of course, when Parker finally tells them that Lachie knows the truth, they all protest that they only pretended at first, but now they really are his friends, and so forth and so on.  “Well, then,” Lachie replies, “should I be proud that you liked me only because I was about to die?”  Just as Judith suspected Steele proposed marriage out of pity, Lachie accuses Parker of accepting his proposal for the same reason.  She replies, “Surely there’s pity in every woman’s love.”  That answer is even creepier than the one she gave to his proposal.

Needless to say, through one more contrivance that we need not bother with here, Lachie is finally convinced that Parker and the men really are his friends, and he decides to stay.  In the end, we are glad that he finally opens his heart, choosing to die among the only friends he has, just as we were glad in Dark Victory, when for the sake of those she loves, Judith chooses to die alone.

 

The Music Man (1962) and The Rainmaker (1956)

The Music Man is a musical about a traveling salesman, “Professor” Harold Hill (Robert Preston), who is also a con artist.  According to his nemesis, Charlie Cowell, an anvil salesman, Hill’s latest swindle is to sell small towns on the idea of a boys’ band.  After collecting money for the musical instruments and for the uniforms, he leaves without fulfilling his promise to teach the boys how to play because he doesn’t know one note from another.  In so doing, he ruins things for legitimate salesmen like Cowell, who get chased out of town by citizens ready to literally tar and feather them and run them out on a rail.

But, Cowell goes on to say, just as the train that he and other salesmen are on crosses the state line, Hill wouldn’t have the nerve to try to pull that stuff in Iowa on account of the surly, no-nonsense people that Hawkeyes are known be.  Unbeknownst to him, Hill is also on the train, and he cannot resist the challenge, so he disembarks before Cowell and the other salesmen can put their hands on him.

Hill’s first encounters with the citizens of River City make it clear to him that this will be a tough sell, so he needs to create a problem that he can then promise to alleviate by means of a boys’ band.  When he hears that a pool table is being added to the billiard parlor, he creates a distinction between billiards, which improves the mind and builds character, and pool, which encourages sloth and introduces young men to the ways of sin.  A boys’ band, he promises the townsfolk, will keep their sons away from the pool table.

Hill learns that a big obstacle to his plan will be the town librarian, a maiden who gives piano lessons, wears glasses, and will see right through him.  Hill realizes he will have to make love to her to keep her from spoiling his plans, which he will be more than happy to do when he finds out how beautiful she is.  Said librarian is Marian (Shirley Jones), the only person in town of any appreciable intellect. She has somewhat scandalized the town because it is falsely rumored she had an affair with “Old Miser Madison,” an unappreciated philanthropist, who gave the town their library, but who left the books to Marian for their safekeeping.  Many of these books are regarded as being of a salacious nature, though we recognize them as classics.

Marian lives with her mother and her brother, Winthrop (Ron Howard), who is unhappy and withdrawn because he has a lisp.  Her mother is exasperated with Marian’s high standards regarding men, which may result in Marian’s becoming an old maid.  Marian, on the other hand, simply wants a man who will love her and not merely be interested in possessing her sexually.

Marian finds proof in a reference book that Hill is a fraud just as the musical instruments arrive in town.  She is about to expose him, but then she sees how happy Winthrop is, and how he is no longer afraid to express himself on account of his lisp.  She tears the incriminating page out of the book and keeps it to herself.  Moreover, she realizes that everyone in town has become happier on account of Hill’s presence, leading her to start falling in love with him.

Hill and Marian make up a sexually dangerous couple, dangerous in the sense that we fear that he will take advantage of her.  As Cowell says to Marian later in the movie, “That guy’s got a different girl in every county in Illinois, and he’s taken it away from every one of them.”  The pronoun “it” in that sentence has no antecedent, but we may assume it to be their virginity.  Hill and Marian stand in contrast to a sexually safe couple, Tommy and Zaneeta.  Zaneeta is the daughter of Mayor Shinn (Paul Ford), who doesn’t want his daughter having anything to do with the likes of Tommy.  But we know that there is no danger that Tommy would seduce Zaneeta and then abandon her.  Instead, we figure they will end up happily married.

Hill’s only instruction to the boys with their new instruments is what he calls the “think system.”  He tells them to think Beethoven’s Minuet in G.  Eventually, the uniforms arrive, money is collected, and it is time for him to abscond, but not before collecting what he calls his “commission,” which involves some dalliance with Marian.  He gets her to meet him at the footbridge, a rendezvous for young lovers, a bridge where young girls cross over to the other side, as it were.  They start kissing.  But then he finds out that she knows he is a fraud, yet she doesn’t care, owing to the happiness he has brought her and others.  She pulls the incriminating page out of her bosom and hands it to him, saying, “I give it to you with all my heart.”  Soon after, they learn that Cowell has informed the townsfolk that they have been bamboozled.  As a result, they are now looking for Hill to tar and feather him.  Marian tries to get him to run, assuring him that she understands and that it is all right.

I believe we are supposed to use our imagination here.  It would be no big deal for a traveling salesman to kiss a woman a couple of times and then leave town.  In other words, it was not merely the page kept in her bosom that Marian gave to Hill, but herself as well.  Only when understood in that way is her telling Hill it is all right for him to leave her of any significance.  Furthermore, the way the scene is filmed is also suggestive of this interpretation.  As Hill and Marian kiss while standing on the middle of the footbridge, and it is a kiss of sensual longing, we see their reflection in the stream below.  Something drops onto the stream, distorting the image to the point that it is just a blur.  This is reminiscent of the fireplace trope, in which the camera pans away from the kissing couple and focuses on the fire, allowing us to imagine that they are having sex.  When the image becomes clear again, their expressions have changed, and they seem to be in the afterglow of sex, as reality slowly begins to set in once more.  Now aware of the cool night air, she asks Hill to walk her home so she can put something on to keep her warm.

The fact that Marian let Hill “kiss” her while knowing he is a fraud causes him to fall in love with her, which in turn keeps him from leaving town before the mob can get to him.  The townsfolk are about to tar and feather him, but they think better of it when they slowly realize, as Marian has, that Hill has brought them a lot of happiness.  Still, he did cheat them out of the money paid for musical instruments and uniforms.

But then the boys’ band appears in their cheap uniforms.  They manage to play a rather sad version of the Minuet in G.  One by one, however, the parents of the boys get excited by the fact that their sons are actually playing in a band.  In their imagination, the boys become accomplished musicians outfitted in brilliantly colored uniforms, led in a parade by Hill, arm in arm with Marian.

At this point we might note that it is not only the dreams of the people of River City that come true regarding the boys’ band, but the dream that Hill has had as well, for earlier in the movie we see him fantasizing about actually being a band leader, and then feeling disappointed that he is not.

What exactly is this movie telling us?  That by being the victim of a fraud we can find happiness?  There is no question but that people sometimes think they have found happiness while they are being swindled, only to be brought to grief when later they discover they have been lied to.  The misery they experience then makes a mockery of their false happiness, which they would have been far better off without.  Winthrop’s tears when he finds out the truth are a gesture in that direction, but Marian is able to persuade him and everyone else that they are better off for what Hill has done.

Or is this movie telling us that as long as we realize we are being victimized, that makes it all right?  Finally, if both the con artist and his mark have the same wish, which is that the promises of the con man actually be fulfilled, will that make those promises come true?  Is that the key to happiness?

Perhaps my saying that the movie is “telling us” something is inapt.  Rather, we might better ask ourselves why this story appeals to us.  Why do we enjoy the fantasy that by succumbing to a fraud we can find love and happiness?  The movie could not successfully tell us this or anything else were we not already receptive to it.

While I was mulling this over, I kept getting the feeling that the movie reminded me of something.  Finally, The Rainmaker (1956) popped into my head.  It has the same formula, so let’s review it first, before trying to understand the message that these two movies have in common.  The con artist in this movie is Bill Starbuck (Burt Lancaster).  His thing is to get farmers to give him money to make it rain.  But just as Harold Hill could not read a note of music, Starbuck has never been able to make it rain.  Hill had to manufacture a problem to be solved, the morally corrupting influence of pool, whereas the problem in The Rainmaker is real, a drought.

Corresponding to Marian is Lizzie (Katherine Hepburn), a woman who is in danger of becoming a spinster.  According to her father and two brothers, she is too intelligent for her own good, which was pretty much the same attitude Marian’s mother had toward Marian.  The idea is that a man doesn’t like it when he meets a woman that is smarter than he is.  That’s probably true.  I don’t know what I’d do if it ever happened to me.  In any event, in addition to being a major reason for still being unmarried, the intelligence of these two women is essential for our believing that they knowingly allow themselves to be taken in by the con.

Lizzie’s older brother Noah (Lloyd Bridges) corresponds to Charlie Cowell.  He is the one who knows Starbuck is a swindler and is the one most against him.  Her younger brother Jim (Earl Holliman) believes Starbuck can make it rain, and he even helps out by beating a drum.  He and his sweetheart, Snookie Maguire, constitute the sexually safe couple corresponding to Tommy and Zaneeta in The Music Man, as opposed to the sexually dangerous couple, Lizzie and Starbuck.

Starbuck gets Lizzie’s father to pay him to make it rain, while allowing him to sleep in the barn for the time being.  While Starbuck works his gizmos, Lizzie’s father and brothers try to get Deputy File (Wendell Corey) to come to dinner, but he cynically says he does not want to get married.  Lizzie is humiliated when she finds out, and in her frustration turns to Starbuck.  Like Marian, she knows Starbuck is a fraud, but he makes her happy by seducing her.

In the end, Lizzie’s father and Jim realize that Noah was right, that Starbuck is a fraud, but because of the happiness he brought Lizzie, they do not want to press charges, and even Noah goes along with that in the end.  Starbuck gives them their money back and leaves.  But no sooner does he get about a mile out of town than it starts to rain.  Just as the boys’ band is actually able to put on a great performance at the end of The Music Man after the townsfolk are willing to let Hill go, so too does it start to rain in this movie after Lizzie’s family is willing to let Starbuck go.  Just as Hill wished he actually were a band leader, so too has Starbuck wished all along that he could actually make it rain.  Filled with jubilation, he returns, collects the money, and asks Lizzie to come with him.  At the same time, Deputy File realizes he loves Lizzie and asks her to stay.  She accepts, realizing that Starbuck was just for a night, not for a lifetime.  This is, perhaps, the main difference between the two movies:  Hill and Marian are together at the end of The Music Man; Starbuck and Lizzie are not together at the end of The Rainmaker.

Now let us try to answer the question raised previously:  What are these two movies trying to tell us?  That we should allow ourselves to be victims of a fraud because it will make us happy?  That when we know the swindler for what he is, and when he knows that we know, his flim-flam will be transformed into reality, and his dishonorable intentions will turn into true love?  This cannot be the message of these two movies because it is all too obvious that it just isn’t so.

Furthermore, if that were the message, the sexually safe couples in these two movies would serve no function.  Both movies were made before the sexual revolution, a time in which couples were supposed to wait until they got married before having sex.  Furthermore, both movies were set at an earlier period than when they were made, 1912 for The Music Man and in the 1930s for The Rainmaker, in which we may imagine that the prohibition against fornication, especially for women, was even stronger.  In The Music Man, the safe couple in question are so innocent that it would never occur to us that they would actually have sex, but in The Rainmaker, the required sexual restraint is made explicit when Jim tells how he almost had sex with Snookie, but then stopped because he realized that would be wrong.  Therefore, we are supposed to regard what happens with the dangerous couples as being exceptional and not behavior that should be emulated.  And Lizzie’s subsequent rejection of Starbuck’s offer for her to come with him in favor of staying put and marrying Deputy File underscores that point.

Though we pay scant attention to the subplot of the sexually safe couples in these two movies, yet they allow us to indulge the fantasy of giving in to a seduction, first in the form of the sexually dangerous couple, and then in the form of the promises of a swindler in general, by reassuring us that prudence and the moral order still prevail.  Unleavened by the sexually safe couples, these stories might have been taken to suggest that we abandon all reason and live in fool’s paradise.  This we would be unable to go along with, and the fantasy would be spoiled.

Crimson Tide (1995) and The Sum of All Fears (2002)

In the movie Crimson Tide, Russian rebels take control of nuclear missiles, which they threaten to launch, starting nuclear war with the United States, if their demands are not met.  Leaves are canceled, and Commander Hunter (Denzel Washington) is assigned to be the executive officer aboard the Alabama, a nuclear submarine, whose commanding officer is Captain Ramsey (Gene Hackman).

When we first see Hunter, he and his wife are throwing a birthday party for their daughter, who is five years old.  He also has an eight-year-old son.  When we first see Captain Ramsey, all we see is a dog, which we assume is the extent of his “family.”  So, we know we are supposed to like Hunter, but be suspicious of Ramsey.

Ramsey is contemptuous of Hunter.  When interviewing him, Ramsey smirks when he reads that Hunter spent a year at Harvard.  Even though Hunter was at the top of the list for replacing the submarine’s executive officer, Ramsey belittles Hunter by pointing out that it was a short list.  He further shows what he thinks of Hunter by saying that the previous executive officer was the best he ever had, implying that Hunter will never be able to measure up.  When Ramsey finds out that Hunter likes to ride horses, his favorite being an Arabian, Ramsey disingenuously remarks that he wouldn’t be able to handle an Arabian.  “Just give me an old paint,” he says, sharing a knowing chuckle with the Chief of the Boat.  They clearly regard the riding of an Arabian horse as elitist.  Then we find out that Ramsey is a sexist and misogynist, as he goes on to compare horses to high school girls:

Yeah, horses are fascinating animals.  Dumb as fence posts, but very intuitive.  In that way, they’re not too different from high school girls.  They might not have a brain in their head, but they do know all the boys want to fuck ’em.  Don’t have to be able to read Ulysses to know where they’re comin’ from.

What do you bet that Hunter is a Democrat, and Ramsey is a Republican?

In any event, Ramsey strikes us as a bully, making fun of a subordinate who just has to sit there and take it.  He is small-minded and petty, holding a grudge against Hunter on account of his education, indirectly referring to him as an “egghead.”  Later on, Hunter’s friend, Lieutenant Ince, explains to Hunter what we have already figured out:

To him, you’re Annapolis, Harvard, expert on theory, well-versed in world affairs. Ha!  He’s had his head up his ass driving ships for the last twenty-five years.  He’s probably a little paranoid about that.  I mean, Navy’s all he’s got.  Navy and that little rat-dog of his.  That’s why his wife left him.

Now, the scriptwriters could have made him a widower, having Ince say, “Navy’s all he’s got.  Navy and that little rat-dog of his, ever since his wife died.”  But that would have made him a sympathetic figure, and we couldn’t have that.  In fact, the writers didn’t even vouchsafe him a no-fault divorce.  Instead, the writers had Ince say that his wife left him, from which we are to imagine that she just got fed up with him because he was an insufferable jerk.

Try to imagine that it was Ramsey who, at the beginning of the movie, was filming his granddaughter’s birthday party when the call came in for him to prepare to ship out, while it was Hunter whose wife left him.  That would have made this an interesting movie, with both Ramsey and Hunter playing less predictable roles.  Instead, we get a simplistic opposition—good family man versus bad family man—leading to a predictable outcome.

After they have boarded the submarine and left port, Ramsey expresses his one regret about heading out to sea:  “My last breath of polluted air for the next sixty-five days,” he says, as he inhales on his cigar.  “I don’t trust air I can’t see.”  Now we know he is a Republican.

Tension builds between Ramsey and Hunter.  Then they receive orders to launch nuclear missiles to take out the rebel missiles.  Before they can do that, they are almost torpedoed by a Russian submarine, which causes some damage.  The end result is that they lose communication with Washington, D.C. just as a final message was coming through, of which they get only a fragment.  Ramsey is determined to proceed according to the last complete order received, which was to launch nuclear missiles at the rebel missile sites.  Hunter argues that they should not proceed, because the message fragment might have been an order to cancel the launch.  Let other submarines, which are not damaged and out of communication, do what needs to be done, he argues.  When Ramsey tries to break protocol and replace Hunter, so that he can have someone concur with his order to launch, the result is a mutiny and then a counter mutiny.

Perhaps the most condescending part of this movie is the way the sailors are depicted as being deep into pop culture.  It’s not so bad when they play trivia regarding submarine movies like The Enemy Below and Run Silent Run Deep, but when they get into fights over the Silver Surfer and have to be inspired by comparisons to Star Trek, we have to wonder what kind of sailors are on that submarine.  Actually, the question we really have to ask is, what kind of regard do the scriptwriters have for the intended audience?  They are obviously appealing to all the science-fiction and comic-book nerds that will be watching this movie, so that they can see themselves as fitting right in on that submarine, just like real men.  And they are presumably appealing to movie-nerds like me as well, to make us suppose we would fit right in too, but I have no illusions on that score.

After Ramsey retakes command of the submarine, radio contact is on the verge of being restored.  He agrees to wait three minutes for a confirmation to launch.  While they wait, in order to keep from being bored, he starts talking to Hunter again about horses:

Ramsey:  Speaking of horses, did you ever see those Lipizzaner stallions?

Hunter:  What?

Ramsey:  From Portugal.  The Lipizzaner stallions.  The most highly trained horses in the world. They’re all white.

Hunter:  Yes, sir.

Ramsey:  “Yes, sir,” you’re aware they’re all white or “yes, sir,” you’ve seen them?

Hunter:  Yes, sir, I’ve seen them.  Yes, sir, I’m aware that they’re all white.  They’re not from Portugal.  They’re from Spain.  And at birth, they’re not white, they’re black.

While I admit that it’s cute the way the scriptwriters use these conversations about horses as a unifying theme for these two men, I have to wonder about the emphasis being placed by Ramsey on the fact that the horses are white.  Is this supposed to be an indirect way for Ramsey to express his attitude of white supremacy?  And is Hunter’s response supposed to suggest that these horses are essentially black, since they are born that way?  It seems almost too dumb to countenance.  And yet, if that is not the point of this conversation, then what is?

In the end, radio contact is restored, proving that Hunter was right:  the order to launch missiles had been cancelled.  Subsequently, at a hearing on these events, Ramsey is allowed to be magnanimous in defeat, taking early retirement and recommending Hunter be given his next command.

Any chance for suspense in this movie is undermined by the fact that the ending is completely predictable.  First of all, in any movie you have ever seen in which someone wants to launch nuclear weapons, that person is either crazy, as in Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); evil, as in The Dead Zone (1983); or wrongheaded, as in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977).  So, we know there is no way that it is going to turn out that Ramsey is right and Hunter is wrong, though we can try to imagine two possible endings going against this formula.

Ending One:  Ramsey succeeds in launching the missiles. And it is good he did too, because all the other American submarines in the area had been taken out by Russian submarines.  As a result, the missiles controlled by the rebels are destroyed, and even the Russians are grateful for Ramsey’s bold and decisive action.  Ramsey is promoted to admiral, while Hunter is court-martialed and sentenced to thirty years in military prison.

Ending Two:  Hunter succeeds in preventing Ramsey from taking out the rebel sites.  As a result, the rebels are able to launch their missiles, full scale thermonuclear war breaks out, hundreds of millions of people die immediately, and the Earth is poisoned with radioactivity.  Hunter realizes he was wrong, as he and the other members of the crew slowly begin dying of radiation sickness.

Needless to say, those two endings, though certainly possible in real life, are unthinkable for a movie.  On the Beach (1959) has the world coming to an end as a result of nuclear war and the radioactive fallout that follows, but it is not an example of Ending Two because no one on the nuclear submarine is to blame.  Notably, this movie did not come up during the trivia game about submarine movies.

The race of the two officers also makes the outcome predictable.  We cannot simply switch the roles of these two actors, because Gene Hackman is about twenty-five years older than Denzel Washington.  But let’s use our imagination.  Suppose they had selected Morgan Freeman to play Captain Ramsey and Brad Pitt to play Commander Hunter.  And then suppose that everything that happened was otherwise the same.  For example, Morgan Freeman punches Brad Pitt twice in the face for refusing to go along with the missile launch.  But in the end, Morgan Freeman is proven to be wrong.

While something like that could happen in real life, this too would be unthinkable for a movie.

Of course, we could have Morgan Freeman’s Ramsey turn out to be right, launching the missiles and saving the day, while Brad Pitt’s Hunter is court-martialed, as imagined in Ending One above.  That would preserve the requirements regarding race, but at the expense of violating the principle that whoever wants to launch nuclear weapons is crazy, evil, or wrongheaded.

Finally, there was no way that the wholesome family man was going to turn out to be wrong, while the man whose wife left him was going to turn out to be right.

Suffice it to say that the ending of this movie is triply predictable:  the officer that is (1) African American, (2) a good family man, and (3) opposed to launching nuclear missiles must prevail over the officer that is (1) white, (2) a bad family man, and (3) in favor of launching nuclear missiles.

A variation on this interplay of nuclear weapons and African Americans occurs in The Sum of All Fears (2002).  In that movie, a bunch of neo-Nazis have decided to do what Hitler should have done:  get the Americans and the Russians to fight each other.  To that end, they purchase a nuclear bomb on the black market, which they intend to detonate in the United States, thereby precipitating World War III.

In the first part of this movie, we aren’t too worried, because Morgan Freeman plays William Cabot, Director of the C.I.A.  Should the neo-Nazis succeed in their plan to explode the nuke, he will provide the wise counsel that President Fowler (James Cromwell) needs to keep from launching a misguided attack on the Russians.  However, when the nuclear device goes off at a football game, Cabot is mortally wounded.  Now there are nothing but white males running things in the White House, and they are all becoming emotional and irrational.  They want to launch a nuclear strike against the Russians.  We know they would be wrong to do so, because it was not the Russians that were responsible for nuking that football game.  But that knowledge is superfluous, because we already know that anyone in a movie that wants to launch nuclear weapons is in the wrong.

Things are worse in Russia.  At least here in the United States, after the death of Cabot, there are still some low-level, African-American officers and intelligence analysts to help keep things on an even keel; but over in Russia, they don’t have any African Americans at all.

Therefore, it’s all up to Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck), Cabot’s top analyst in the C.I.A.  He knows that the bomb’s plutonium was manufactured in the United States, so the attack must be a rogue operation.  But he can’t get through to the president because he and all his top aides are white, and they won’t listen.

Ryan goes to the Pentagon, but things don’t look good.  They’re all white, and they won’t listen.

But wait!  There’s a black general.  Oh, thank God!  He’ll listen.

And listen he does, allowing Ryan to save the day.

And so it is that if you are going to make a movie about the possibility of nuclear war, the only way the movie will have any suspense is if you make it look as though there are no African Americans around to keep the white males from blowing up the world.