Arrival (2016)

Linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has a baby girl, raises her through her childhood, and then suffers through the heartbreak of finding out that her daughter will die of an incurable disease at a young age.

Then twelve flying saucers land in different parts of the world.  People start panicking and governments begin mobilizing, which I suppose is only natural.  But let’s face it.  If they wanted to kill us, then given their advanced technology, there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it.  Be that as it may, because of Banks’ language skills, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows up in her office to enlist her in translating the language of the aliens.  Weber plays her a snippet of the aliens talking, which lasts just a few seconds, and he asks her what she makes of it, as if anyone could translate a completely alien language from such a small sample.  I was hoping her reply would be, “He said, ‘Take me to your leader.’”

Banks says she would have to interact with the aliens in person to be able to communicate with them.  Weber refuses and says he is going to Berkeley to see if Dr. Danvers will work for them instead.  Banks says, “Before you commit to him, ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation.”  Is this a trick question?  The translation of the Sanskrit word for war has to be “war”; otherwise, it’s not the Sanskrit word for war.  Presumably, she is talking about the etymology of that word, which is “gavisti,” rather than its translation.  In that sense, I suppose you could say that the “translation” of the Spanish word for pregnant is “embarrassed,” for example.  Anyway, the whole point of this is Banks’ way of letting them know that Danvers is second rate.  When Weber finds out that Danvers thinks the translation of “gavisti” is “an argument,” whereas Banks knows that it is actually “a desire for more cows,” Weber knows that he must give in to her demands to meet with the aliens.  Thank goodness Weber didn’t enlist Danvers for the job!  With his second-rate language skills, he might have caused an intergalactic incident.

On her way to the aliens in Montana, she meets Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist.  He quotes from the preface of one of her books, “Language is the foundation of civilization,” and then tells her she is wrong, because, as he puts it, “The cornerstone of civilization isn’t language, it’s science.”  I guess this is the movie’s way of introducing some kind of science-versus-the-humanities conflict into the story, but we cannot help but feel we are being manipulated into being on Banks’ side, for it is beyond obvious that you can have language without science, but you cannot have science without language.  And just in case we missed it, the point is further driven home when they arrive at the place where Banks is going to get some facetime with the aliens so she can learn how to speak Alienish.  Donnelly asks if the aliens have responded to things like Fibonacci numbers.  Weber has to point out to him that they are still working on the responses to the word “Hello.”

However, even Weber seems a little obtuse on this point.  He later complains that the vocabulary list that Banks has constructed has words like “eat” and “walk,” which he calls grade school words.  Didn’t he take a foreign language course when he was in school?  We all know that you have to start off with common words like “eat” and “walk” in the beginning, that you have to learn how to say things like, “Where is the library?” before you can start having complicated discussions about whether the aliens intend to kill us.  Once again, the movie forces us to identify with Banks, because everyone else in the movie seems to be a little bit thick.

Now, it seems to me that if the aliens have the technology to travel light-years across space, they have the technology to receive our television broadcasts, by which they could have learned to speak English before they ever got here.  But the problem with that, according to the movie’s version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if the aliens learned to speak English, it would rewire their brains, and the next thing you know, they would become rational like us.  That would never do.  So, Banks has to learn Alienish, which will rewire her brain so that she can grasp the mystical premise of this movie, which has something to do with the Eternal-Now and the Oneness-of-Allness.  This is why, presumably, their written sentences are basically circles with curlicues.  Our sentences have a beginning and an end, but the circular expressions of their thoughts defy such a linear manner of thinking.  I guess you might call it circular reasoning.  Anyway, the practical consequence of this mystical premise is that the future has already happened.  In fact, the aliens are helping us now to become One with each other so that three thousand years later, we will help them.

Furthermore, what we saw at the beginning of the movie is actually what will happen later after she marries Donnelly, and all the flashbacks she was having about her daughter were really flashforwards.  In one of those flashforwards, she tells her daughter that Daddy became angry and said she made the wrong choice, after which he divorced her.  The choice in question had to do with her deciding to have a child even though she knew the child would die from a rare, incurable disease.  My guess is that he said something like, “Why the hell didn’t we go to a fertility clinic and get the bad gene removed?”  But that would just be the same old, rational, scientific, linear way of thinking that comes from speaking English.

When Is a Good Man not a Good Man? When He Is a Family Man.

It sometimes happens in watching a movie that one will be struck by something that others may not even notice, something that had it been edited out and left on the cutting-room floor would never have been missed. So it is with the movie 99 Homes (2014).

The movie is set sometime after the bursting of the housing bubble.  It is a time when there is more money to be made evicting people from their homes than building new ones.  In particular, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a construction worker who can no longer find work building homes, and as a result, he and his family are evicted from theirs for failure to make mortgage payments.  On the day of their eviction, Nash tells Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), the real-estate broker in charge, that he was born in that house. This being said by a man in his twenties, such a house would normally be paid off by that time, which means he probably refinanced the house along the way to help pay the bills.

The Nash family, consisting of Nash, his mother, and his son, quickly put as much of their stuff as they can into their pickup truck and wind up at a cheap motel in the bad part of town.  When he realizes his tools were stolen by the crew that moved his stuff out to the curb, he goes back to his house and gets in a fight. Because Carver needs someone with Nash’s fierce determination to assist him in evicting people, he offers him a job.

At first we believe that Nash will simply be helping Carver do stuff that is legal, however unsavory it may be.  But soon we find that his job also involves scamming the banks and the government, stealing appliances and air conditioners so that Fannie Mae will give them a check to put the stuff back in the house they took it out of.  This makes Nash a little uneasy, as it does us, but bankers have always been fair game in fiction. The idea of the banker foreclosing on the widow with a baby because she is late with her last mortgage payment has been the stuff of melodrama since the nineteenth century, and those who rob banks to get even are romanticized. Nevertheless, when Nash’s mother finds out what he has been doing, she takes his son and goes to stay with her brother, “Uncle Jimmy.”

Eventually, it becomes more than just cheating the banks and the government. When Frank Greene, a homeowner whose family is about to be evicted, threatens to foul up a multimillion dollar deal for Carver by contesting his eviction, Carver gives Nash a forged, backdated document to take to court. Nash really becomes conflicted by this, because this is cheating a family just like his own.  He decides not to deliver the document, but the court clerk, who is in on the deal, snatches it out of his hand and gives it to the judge, who approves the eviction.

This leads to an armed standoff, where Greene fires warning shots from inside his house.  Nash steps out from behind a car and walks onto the grass with his hands up and tells Greene that he cheated him with a forged document. Greene surrenders, and we get the sense that with Nash providing evidence, Carver will soon be heading to prison.

That is the movie in a nutshell.  But an offhand comment made in the middle of the movie caught my attention.  Carver asks Nash why he isn’t married, to which Nash responds that he doesn’t have time for it.  “I don’t trust a man who’s not married,” Carver says.  “Nobody does.”  At first, that would seem to be a preposterous contradiction.  Carver, as we have seen, is not only ruthless in evicting people from their homes, but he is also willing to break the law to do so. He also cheats on his wife.  But then we realize there is no contradiction here. He is not saying that married men are more trustworthy than single men, but rather that they are so regarded.  In other words, a single man might be just as trustworthy as any married man, but it is a fact of human nature that people are more likely to trust a man who is married than one who is not. Carver would prefer that Nash be married, because it is easier for a married man to cheat people than it is for a single man, owing to this prejudice in favor of the trustworthiness of the former over the latter, however misguided that may be.

Well, that would account for the rest of mankind, but why would Carver be more likely to trust a married man when he knows from the example of himself just how misplaced such trust can be?  That leads to a paradoxical distinction between two different kinds of trustworthiness.  Some men can be trusted because they are basically good, and some men can be trusted because they cannot afford to be good.  As Tallyrand said, “A married man with a family will do anything for money.”

If this is what Carver has in mind, that a married man burdened by the responsibilities of a family will not be able to afford the luxury of doing the right thing and therefore can be trusted to do the wrong thing when necessary, then Nash actually is effectively more like a married man than a single one, in that he has his mother and son to support.  (We gather that when Nash was young, his girlfriend got pregnant, had a baby, and then took off, leaving the child with him.) In fact, it is only after his mother and his son go to live with Uncle Jimmy, where they will have food and shelter no matter what happens to him, that Nash is free to do what is right.

In general, whether one is married or has a family without actually being married like Nash, one is not as free as a single, unattached person to do all the things he or she would like, whether for good or ill.  We tend to think of the bachelor as someone who is more likely to indulge his vices or commit crimes, with good reason, I fear, but it is also true that anyone who aspires to be a saint will find family life to be a hindrance.

This is undoubtedly what Jesus had in mind when he said, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). You are not supposed to divorce your wife, of course (Matthew 19:19), but you are supposed to hate her.  That might be said of a lot of married men, unfortunately, but I doubt if for religious reasons.  In the parable of the Great Banquet, a rich man invites a lot of people to have dinner with him, which I suppose is analogous to Jesus inviting people to enter the Kingdom of Heaven with him. An excuse offered by one man for declining the invitation was, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” (Luke 14:20).  In a pinch, a man might be better off castrating himself:  “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:12).

Obviously, Jesus was addressing his remarks to men rather than to women, not only because women cannot be eunuchs, but also because he says that a man must hate his wife, not that a woman must hate her husband. Notwithstanding this oversight, women are capable of becoming saints just like men, though there are more officially recognized male saints than female.  On the other hand, from a casual perusal of the movies, it would seem that women make better movie saints than do men.  St. Joan of Arc, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Bernadette get lots of screen time, whereas the only male saint to get that much attention from movie producers is St. Francis of Assisi.  They all pretty much have in common the fact that they are single.  Elizabeth Bayley Seton had been a wife and mother, but one suspects that she would never have made it to sainthood had she not been widowed.

Traditionally, bachelors have always been looked upon as being of doubtful character, in part because they were suspected of homosexuality.  Even when that was not the issue, however, there was the sense that there was something wrong with them.  Of course, by “bachelor” I mean a man who not only has never married but has never lived with a woman as well.  I once knew a couple that had been living together for seven years and had a three-year-old child, but they still counted themselves as being single.  If possession is nine-tenths of the law, cohabitation is nine-tenths of being married, even when common-law status is not invoked.  With women, on the other hand, it has traditionally been different, as if they were more to be pitied than censured.  The “old maid” was usually thought of as a woman unable to attract a man, and the “spinster” was a woman forced to support herself for want of a husband.

The idea of a man being so spiritual that he rises above his sexuality is part of the awe afforded to priests.  The Protestant version of the priest, who likely is married, may strike us as more dependable and down to earth, but he no longer seems special the way a Catholic priest does.  However, it is the entanglements of marriage that really get in the way of one’s spiritual aspirations.  So, what does a man or woman do who wishes to become a saint only after having become married? As a rule, I suppose one gives up the dream of becoming a saint owing to one’s family obligations.  But there are a couple of movies that suggest that abandoning or neglecting one’s family is permissible and even laudable.

In the movie The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Peter Fry (Dean Stockwell) is a war orphan because his parents died during the London blitz of World War II trying to help war orphans.   This is premised on something supposedly noble, but which is in fact quite irritating. When Peter was very young, his parents left him with an aunt so that they could help the war orphans in London. Even if one of his parents felt the need to participate in the war effort, say, the father, we would expect the mother to stay with her son and take care of him; but they both figure they have more important things to do than raise their own child. When the aunt gets word that Peter’s parents are dead, she passes him on to other relatives who don’t want him either. This continues until he ends up with his grandfather (Pat O’Brien).

We are supposed to think of those relatives as being cold and selfish, but after all, they did not bargain on having to raise someone else’s child. It is actually Peter’s parents who are selfish. They are that strange breed of do-gooder who becomes so enamored with the idea of saving the world that he neglects his own family. Without pausing to be sure that Peter would be raised to maturity by a loving relative happy to take care of him if they died in the war, they just dumped him on his aunt and took off.

There is one moment in the movie when Peter concludes, correctly in my opinion, that his parents cared more about other children than they did him, but the movie insists that he is wrong, and at the end Peter is seen as understanding that they really did love him and that what they did was right and good. As insistent as the movie is in this regard, it still leaves us with a feeling of revulsion for parents who would abandon their child so they could devote themselves to some higher purpose.

Another movie along these lines is Magnificent Obsession (1954).  The movie is based on a karmic principle explained by analogy with electricity.  The way it works is that if you do good things for people without letting other people know about it, and you refuse any attempt on their part to repay the debt, you build up a spiritual charge of good karma that rewards you. If you allow them to repay the debt, the spiritual force is discharged. Most people are grounded, never accumulating a charge, because they allow people to return the favor. If you tell other people about your kindness or charity, the spiritual force will dissipate, as with a wire without insulation.

The story begins when the reckless behavior of the rich, irresponsible playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) inadvertently causes the death of Dr. Wayne Phillips, a man who had been initiated into the secret karmic principle. Dr. Phillips was such a good man that he used up all his income and borrowed against all his assets to do good deeds, leaving his wife, Helen (Jane Wyman), and his daughter, Joyce (Barbara Rush), nothing.  You might be appalled that Dr. Phillips did not provide for his wife and daughter in the event of his death, that he was so caught up in the idea of helping strangers that he neglected his family, grabbing up all the good karma for himself while his wife and daughter are left destitute. And yet, the movie insists that we are to admire Dr. Phillips.

Being a good man and being a good family man may be two different things.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

The twentieth century is when art became ugly.  Oh, I’m not talking about the kind of art that philistines like me enjoy.  I’m talking about that highbrow, elitist art consisting of ridiculous paintings, nonsense novels, discordant music, and weird foreign films.  By the twenty-first century, the novelty of ugliness had begun to wear off a bit, but it can still be counted on to appeal to those who believe that an appreciation of ugliness is the mark of refinement.

Nocturnal Animals is not a weird foreign film, of course, but it could pass for one.  Right off the bat, the movie presents its highbrow bona fides by displaying disgustingly obese, naked women, dancing in place, in what turns out to be an art exhibit.  The woman who has arranged all this is Susan (Amy Adams).  Her life is as ugly as her art show, notwithstanding all the opulence in which she dwells.  Her husband cheats on her.  She can’t sleep.

She receives in the mail an unpublished novel from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal).  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that it is an ugly novel.  It is about a man named Tony, also played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Susan’s mind as she reads the novel.  Just in case we might wonder if she is projecting by making this identification between the author and the protagonist, there is an earlier discussion between Susan and Edward when they were married, presented in a flashback.  She criticized something he wrote, telling him he needs to write about someone other than himself.  He says all authors do that.  They don’t, of course.  As Nietzsche once said, “Homer would never have created an Achilles or Goethe a Faust, had Homer been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust.”  But in this case, Edward has created a Tony because he is a Tony.

Anyway, in this novel, Tony, his wife, and his daughter are traveling across west Texas when they are waylaid by a bunch of psychopathic punks.  The movie wallows in the misery of a family being brutalized, resulting in the rape and murder of the two females.  With the aid of a lawman named Andes, who is dying of lung cancer, Tony is able to track down the killers.  Andes kills one of them, and Tony kills the other.  However, the one Tony kills lives just long enough to hit Tony in the head with a poker, blinding him.  Tony staggers outside, falls, and accidentally shoots himself, resulting in his death.

In reading the novel, Susan is deeply moved, even more than she was moved by watching a bunch of naked, four-hundred-pound women jiggle their decaying flesh.  Why is she moved?  Well, it probably has to do with the abortion she had after Edward got her pregnant.  She never meant for Edward to find out, but for some reason he just happens to show up at the abortion clinic just as she finished having it done.  So, you see, the death of Tony’s daughter corresponds to the death of Edward’s aborted child.  And the rape and murder of Tony’s wife corresponds to Susan’s infidelity, because turning Susan’s voluntary lust and betrayal into a gangbang rape is Edward’s imaginary revenge against her.  And just as Edward knows that he is weak, Tony is too weak to save his wife and child.

The death of Tony in the novel corresponds to Edward’s suicide, the novel being one long suicide note, which basically says, “You ruined my life by rejecting my love.”  This is not made explicit, but it is obvious.  When Susan emails Edward, saying she wants to see him, he emails her back, agreeing to meet.  She goes to a restaurant, but Edward never shows up.  Of course not.  He’s dead.

For people like me, this is an ugly novel within an ugly movie.  No wonder it got rave reviews.

The Big Sleep: The Book and the Adaptations

Leigh Brackett was one of the screenwriters, along with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, hired by Howard Hawks to help turn The Big Sleep into a movie, which is notorious for having the most convoluted plot in the film noir canon.  In The Big Book of Noir, page 138, she makes the following comment:

True, the plot was so tangled and complicated that we all got more or less lost in it.  But it only got that way if one paused to look too closely.  Otherwise, the sheer momentum of the action carried one along, and why quibble?  . . . I did witness the historic occasion upon which everybody began asking everybody else who killed Owen Taylor, and nobody knew.  A wire was sent asking Chandler, and he sent one back saying, “I don’t know.”  And really, who cared?

After the movie was made and shown to the public, Brackett says that the audiences had pretty much the same attitude:

Audiences came away feeling that they had seen the hell and all of a film even if they didn’t rightly know, in retrospect, what it was all about.  Again, who cared?

She is right, of course.  I shouldn’t care.  But I do.

I first saw The Big Sleep on the late show, back when the late show was how most of us saw old movies fifty years ago.  About forty years ago, I saw the 1978 remake.  Sometime after that, I read the novel by Raymond Chandler.  About twenty years ago, I saw the 1945 pre-release version.  And off and on, through the years, I’ve seen the 1946 version about seven or eight more times.  And yet, I still found myself wondering what really happened.  And so, I set about the task of getting to the bottom of this mystery.  I reread the novel, read the original screenplay, and watched every version of this story all over again.  I think I may have hurt myself.

I suspect that most people would agree with Brackett.  They enjoyed watching The Big Sleep and have no need of a thorough analysis of what happened, who did it, and why.  But on the outside chance that there may be one or two others in the vicinity of my blog that might be interested in the results of my research, I am putting it all down on electronic paper.

The Novel

Rather than give a synopsis of the novel, I think greater clarity can be achieved by approaching the story in a different manner.

The Dramatis Personae

First, let us consider the characters in this novel, organized into groups:

The Sternwood Household.  General Guy Sternwood is a frail, old man with a sizable fortune.  He has two daughters in their twenties:  Vivian and Carmen.  Vivian is married to Rusty Regan, but he has recently disappeared.  There is also Vincent Norris, the butler, and Owen Taylor, the chauffeur.

Eddie Mars’ Casino.  Eddie Mars runs a gambling casino.  He has some hoodlums that work for him, the worst of which is Lash Canino, a killer.  Eddie is married to a woman named Mona.

Geiger’s Bookstore.  Arthur Gwynn Geiger owns a bookstore that pretends to sell rare books out front, but rents out illegal pornography in the back.  He has an assistant, Carol Lundgren, who lives with him as his homosexual lover.  Geiger has a secretary named Agnes Lozelle that waits on the customers.  She has two boyfriends:  Joe Brody and Harry Jones.  General Sternwood had once paid Joe Brody $5,000 to leave Carmen alone.  The general is under no illusions about the vices his daughters indulge in, so it is not clear what he thought Carmen was doing with Brody that she couldn’t do with someone else.

Philip Marlowe and the Law.  Philip Marlowe is a private detective.  He used to work for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator, under the supervision of Bernie Ohls.

The Ultimate Cause

By the time we get to the end of the novel, where Marlowe finally reveals the ultimate cause of the events that ensued, we are so worn out from it all that we are barely paying attention.  We are just glad that things are being wrapped up at last.  This is even more so in the 1946 adaptation, where Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is talking so fast and in reference to events not fully spelled out that we just assume he knows what he is talking about on account of his authoritative voice.  Therefore, let us begin where the novel ends, so to speak, where we finally find out what started it all.

Owen Taylor Loves Carmen.  Owen Taylor was in love with Carmen.  They had run off together once, with him thinking they would get married, but with Carmen just out for a good time.  Taylor got thrown in jail on charges of the Mann Act, but Vivian persuaded the police that he wanted to marry her, so they let him go.  The Sternwoods kept him on as the chauffeur.  He gave Carmen a little pearl-handled .22 caliber revolver as a present, with the engraving, “Carmen from Owen.”

Carmen Murders Rusty Regan.  Vivian has been married three times, the last to Rusty Regan, who used to be a bootlegger.  Carmen offered herself to Regan, but he declined.  As a woman scorned, and a psychopath at that, she talked him into taking her to a secluded place and teaching her how to shoot the pistol Owen gave her.  When he set up a target for her and walked back toward her, she shot and killed him.

Vivian Asks Eddie Mars to Help Cover Up the Crime.  Carmen went home and told Vivian all about it, “just like a child,” as Vivian puts it.  Carmen has epileptic seizures, and the novel seems to suggest that this is why she is crazy.  Perhaps that was the thinking in those days.  Anyway, in part to protect her sister from going to prison, but mostly to protect her father from having to live with the knowledge of what Carmen has done, especially since her father was quite fond of Regan, Vivian turns to Eddie Mars for help.

Vivian knows Eddie because she is a regular patron at his casino.  Their spouses knew each other even better.  Rusty was in love with Mona, but she married Eddie instead.  So, Rusty ended up marrying Vivian on the rebound.  But Mona didn’t care for Eddie’s illegal activities, the least concerning of which was operating the casino, so she left him.  Eddie didn’t much care that she left, and they remained on good terms.  Soon after, she and Rusty started having an affair.

Eddie Mars Plans to Blackmail the Sternwoods.  When Vivian asked Eddie for help disposing of Rusty Regan’s body, he had Canino put it in the sump near where Regan was killed.  Eddie figures he will be able to blackmail Vivian after that.  She makes her payments to Eddie by losing at the roulette table.  When General Sternwood dies, his daughters will inherit his millions, and that’s when Eddie really expects to cash in.

This is a cushy deal, but Eddie is worried.  If Regan’s disappearance comes to the attention of the police, they might investigate, suspecting that Eddie had him killed for fooling around with his wife Mona.  While carrying out that investigation, they might find out that Regan was murdered by Carmen.  That would put an end to the whole blackmail scheme.  Therefore, he asks Mona to go into hiding for a while so that the police will simply think she and Rusty ran off together.  She still loves Eddie, so she agrees to stay in a house Eddie has in the hills.

That takes care of the police, but Eddie is in a hurry for the general’s money.  He wants to know if the old man knows what Carmen did.  If so, Eddie can blackmail him immediately without waiting for him to die.

Eddie Mars Uses Geiger as a Cat’s Paw.  Geiger knows nothing about Regan’s murder, but goes along with what Eddie Mars asks of him.  In exchange for supplying Carmen with drugs, Geiger gets her to sign some promissory notes, supposedly representing gambling debts, amounting to $3,000.  The way Eddie figures it, if the general knows Carmen murdered Regan, he will suspect that Geiger’s demand for money is an indirect form of blackmail regarding the murder.  In that case, he will pay up.  And that will mean the serious blackmail of the general can begin immediately.  But when General Sternwood refuses to pay, Eddie knows that the general is not aware that Carmen murdered Regan, and that he has to wait until the general dies, when the daughters will inherit all his millions.

Philip Marlowe Enters the Story

Upon receiving the notes from Geiger, General Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe to deal with him.  And that is where both the novel and the adaptations begin.  My purpose here is not to give a complete synopsis, but only to explain what led up to this point, to give the ultimate causes while the mind is still fresh.  From this point forward, the novel and the movie versions can be followed with a better understanding of what is going on.  However, there are a few more plot points worth mentioning.

The Gang’s All Here.  Several times when Marlowe goes somewhere, an amazing number of people show up at the same place.  For example, Marlowe follows Geiger to his home and parks outside.  But Joe Brody is parked down the street too.  And so, apparently, is Owen Taylor.  And then Carmen shows up.  If Marlowe had followed Geiger the night before, Geiger would probably have just listened to the radio for a while and then gone to bed; if Marlowe had waited until the day after, Geiger would already be dead.

A couple of days later, Marlowe goes over to Brody’s apartment.  Agnes is also there.  In the 1946 movie, Vivian is there too.  And then Carmen shows up.  She has her .22 revolver with her, demanding the pictures that Geiger took of her naked.  Marlowe takes the gun away from her and sends her home.  Then Carol Lundgren shows up and shoots Brody.  Once again, Marlowe’s ability to be at the right place at the right time is uncanny.

The Death of Owen Taylor.  There are three opinions in the novel concerning the death of Owen Taylor, that it was an accident, suicide, or murder:

The uniformed man said: “Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the rain. Drunks will do anything.”

“Drunk, hell,” the plainclothesman said. “The hand throttle’s set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”

Ohls looked at the man with the towel. “What do you think, buddy?”

The man with the towel looked flattered. He grinned. “I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off the guy plowed an awful straight furrow down that pier. You can read his tread marks all the way nearly. That puts it after the rain like the Sheriff said. Then he hit the pier hard and clean or he don’t go through and land right side up. More likely turned over a couple of times. So he had plenty of speed and hit the rail square. That’s more than half-throttle. He could have done that with his hand falling and he could have hurt his head falling too.”

Ultimately, we have Marlowe’s authoritative voice to settle the issue, where he says Taylor was murdered:  “He had been sapped and the car pointed out the pier and the hand throttle pulled down.”  In the 1946 movie, Marlowe also dismisses both accident and suicide as the cause of death, leaving murder as the only possibility.

After Marlowe turns Lundgren in for killing Brody and reports the murder of Geiger, District Attorney Wilde suggests that Brody might be the one that killed Taylor, but Marlowe argues against it:

“What makes you so sure, Marlowe, that this Taylor boy shot Geiger? Even if the gun that killed Geiger was found on Taylor’s body or in the car, it doesn’t absolutely follow that he was the killer. The gun might have been planted—say by Brody, the actual killer.”

“It’s physically possible,” I said, “but morally impossible. It assumes too much coincidence and too much that’s out of character for Brody and his girl, and out of character for what he was trying to do. I talked to Brody for a long time. He was a crook, but not a killer type. He had two guns, but he wasn’t wearing either of them. He was trying to find a way to cut in on Geiger’s racket, which naturally he knew all about from the girl. He says he was watching Geiger off and on to see if he had any tough backers. I believe him. To suppose he killed Geiger in order to get his books, then scrammed with the nude photo Geiger had just taken of Carmen Sternwood, then planted the gun on Owen Taylor and pushed Taylor into the ocean off Lido, is to suppose a hell of a lot too much. Taylor had the motive, jealous rage, and the opportunity to kill Geiger. He was out in one of the family cars without permission. He killed Geiger right in front of the girl, which Brody would never have done, even if he had been a killer. I can’t see anybody with a purely commercial interest in Geiger doing that. But Taylor would have done it. The nude photo business was just what would have made him do it.”

Marlowe seems to be denying that Brody killed Taylor, but what he is really denying is that Brody killed both Geiger and Taylor, for Marlowe believes Taylor killed Geiger.  As for Brody, he previously admitted to Marlowe that he was the one that hit Taylor in the head with a blackjack.  Let’s look at the line cited above:  “He had been sapped and the car pointed out the pier and the hand throttle pulled down.”  The natural way to read this is that the person that sapped Taylor is also the one that made his death look like an accident.  As Brody has admitted to the former, then he is the one responsible for the latter.

Carmen Tries to Murder Marlowe.  Finally, Marlowe gives Carmen her revolver back.  She had once offered herself to Marlowe, but he had declined, so you know what that means.  She asks him to teach her to shoot.  They go to where she had previously killed Regan under the same pretense.  But Marlowe has filled the pistol with blanks.  She shoots at Marlowe again and again, emptying her gun, thereby confirming what he had suspected.  She then has an epileptic seizure.  He takes her home, telling Vivian to have her committed, or he will go to the police.  As for Eddie Mars and the blackmail scheme, Marlowe says he’ll talk to him.  Having recently killed Canino, Marlowe expects Eddie to be intimidated enough to leave the Sternwood family alone.

The 1944 Screenplay

The screenplay written in 1944 is in some ways different from both the novel and the movies.  Regan’s first name is now Shawn, and Vivian was never his wife, for she is now referred to as Mrs. Rutledge, divorced, presumably to make her available to Marlowe as a love interest.  It wouldn’t do to have Marlowe and Vivian be a romantic couple while she should be mourning her murdered husband.  This was not important in the novel, where Marlowe has no interest in her romantically.  In fact, the Marlowe of the novels never seems to be interested in women romantically, not even when he’s kissing them.  Some critics have accused him of misogyny, but I think that is too harsh.  Rather, he’s just so hardboiled that when he’s on a case, no womanly wiles can distract him from doing the job he was hired for.

But in the screenplay, not only is Vivian a woman that Marlowe shows an interest in sexually, he is also allowed a little nookie from the proprietress of the bookstore across from Geiger’s place.  After he gets some information from her about Geiger, they have a few drinks and then have sex.  Just before Marlowe leaves, she says, “A couple of hours, an empty bottle, and so long, pal,” her way of saying she knows this was just for the afternoon, not the beginning of anything more.  Marlowe also says, “So long, pal.”  It’s mutual.  She’s just as hardboiled as he is.

In the 1946 movie, however, it is only Marlowe that uses the word “pal” in saying goodbye to her (Dorothy Malone), and when he does, her shoulders droop, for she realizes he has no intention of seeing her again.  I always feel sorry for her when I see that scene.

Anyway, as Regan is no longer General Sternwood’s son-in-law in the screenplay, he is now just an employee.  And from the way the general talks, he was employed as a paid companion.

After Raymond Chandler admitted to Howard Hawks that he didn’t know who killed Owen Taylor, the authors of the screenplay apparently cared a little more than Brackett would have us believe, because they decided to solve that murder for him, revealed in a conversation Marlowe has with the district attorney:

Wilde:  So Taylor killed Geiger because he was in love with the Sternwood girl.  And Brody followed Taylor, sapped him and took the photograph and pushed Taylor into the ocean.  And the punk [Carol Lundgren] killed Brody because the punk thought he should have inherited Geiger’s business and Brody was throwing him out.

Marlowe:  That’s how I figure it.

This is the simplest solution to the murder of Owen Taylor.  Brody was not a killer, but he admits to hitting Taylor with a blackjack, knocking him out.  If you hit someone with a blackjack hard enough to knock him out, you’ve hit him hard enough to kill him.  When Brody realized that Taylor was dead, he decided to make his death look like an accident.  Then he quite naturally denied doing so when Marlowe questioned him.

Notice that Wilde gives ownership of Geiger’s business as the reason Lundgren killed Brody, whereas in the novel, Lundgren was in love with Geiger, and he mistakenly killed Brody for revenge, thinking Brody had killed Geiger.  In 1946, the Production Code did not allow references to homosexuality, so a different motive was provided.  There is no need to repeat the various homophobic remarks made by Marlowe in the novel, but there is one that is revealing as an apparent stereotype of homosexuals when the novel was written.  At one point, Lundgren hits Marlowe on the chin.  Marlowe says, “It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.”

The final scene in the screenplay takes place in Geiger’s house.  After Carmen fires blanks at Marlowe, revealing that she murdered Regan as Marlowe suspected, Carmen says there is nothing he can do about it.  If he goes to the cops, she will tell what happened, and it will be a big scandal in all the newspapers.  Vivian will go to prison too for helping to cover it up.  And her father will find out about it, which will make him miserable.  Marlowe admits defeat, saying he wouldn’t want that to happen.

I wondered about that part in the novel where Marlowe tells Vivian to have Carmen committed.  How exactly was Vivian supposed to have Carmen committed to an insane asylum against her will, without telling the police about the murder?  This screenplay ending makes more sense.

Anyway, Carmen is triumphant.  As she starts to leave, Marlowe gives her his hat and coat like a gentleman, even though she just tried to kill him, saying that she will need them because it is raining.  But Marlowe knows that Eddie Mars is just outside the house, waiting to shoot him when he leaves.  So, when Carmen leaves, Eddie mistakes her for Marlowe and shoots her.  Then Marlowe shoots Eddie.  With both Carmen and Eddie dead, the whole blackmail scheme has come to an end.

The 1946 Movie and the 1945 Pre-Release Version

As noted above, the screenplay has Marlowe agree that Joe Brody murdered Owen Taylor.  In the movie, Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) merely says that Brody’s denial that he killed Taylor does not make sense.  Consider the discussion in the movie where Brody finally explains that he got the naked pictures of Carmen by taking them away from Taylor after hitting him with a blackjack:

“He [Taylor] skidded off the road and came to a stop.  So I came up and played copper.  He had a gun. He was rattled, so I sapped him down.  I figured the film might be worth something, so I took it.  That’s the last I saw of him.”

Marlowe is skeptical:

“So you left an unconscious man in a car way out near Beverly.  And you want me to believe somebody came along, ran that car to the ocean, pushed it off the pier….”

In a movie, there is a world of difference between having Marlowe positively affirm that Brody killed Taylor, which is the original screenplay version, and having Marlowe say that Brody’s denial that he killed Taylor doesn’t make sense, which is the movie version.  In the absence of a confession on Brody’s part, we need to hear Marlowe’s authoritative voice assert that Brody killed Taylor.  But we never quite get that.  Therefore, there remains the sense that the death of Owen Taylor is never accounted for.  For this reason, most people that have seen this movie will be resistant to the idea that Brody killed Taylor, if you suggest it to them.  At least, that has been my experience.

Also noted above, the novel has Lundgren kill Brody because he was Geiger’s lover, and he thought Brody had killed Geiger, but the screenplay avoided this homosexual motive, giving control of Geiger’s pornography racket as the reason why Lundgren killed Brody.  However, the movie drops this economic reason and returns to the novel’s homosexual motive, but only in the form of a queer flash.  In the screenplay, when Marlowe takes Lundgren to Geiger’s house at gunpoint, he hands Lundgren the key to the house, which Marlowe had pocketed on the night of the shooting, and tells him to open the door with it.  But in the movie, he does not give Lundgren the key.  Instead, he tells Lundgren to use his own key to get in, implying that he lived with Geiger.

The 1945 pre-release version of this movie followed the screenplay in allowing Marlowe and Vivian (Lauren Bacall) to be a romantic couple, and the 1946 version went even further in establishing their relationship.  In the novel, it is Mona, Eddie’s wife, that helps Marlowe escape; in the movie, Vivian is also at the house with Mona, and Vivian is the one that helps him escape from Canino (Bob Steele).

The movie follows the screenplay in killing off Eddie Mars at the end.  Marlowe tells Bernie Ohls that Eddie killed Regan, even though he knows it was Carmen.  Since Carmen is not killed off, the movie reverts to the questionable idea of having her committed.

The 1978 Remake

In 1978, the movie was remade by Michael Winner, in color and widescreen, set contemporaneously in England.  Perhaps all these differences were meant to keep us from comparing it too closely with the original.  But notwithstanding the fact that it is it is filled with good actors, it falls flat.

This remake more closely follows the novel in some ways, while departing from it in others.  Vivian (Sarah Miles) is again Rusty Regan’s wife, and she has no romantic relationship with Marlowe (Robert Mitchum).  It is Mona, not Vivian, that helps Marlowe escape from Canino (Richard Boone).  And not only do we see Carmen, now going by the name of Camilla, firing her pistol with blanks at Marlowe, but we also see her shooting and killing Regan in an imagined flashback.

In the novel, Marlowe is still handcuffed behind his back when he shoots Canino.  But in both movies, the handcuffs are in front when Marlowe shoots him.  That’s too bad, because having Marlowe shoot Canino while his hands are cuffed behind him is quite an image.  It was illustrated that way on the cover of the paperback I bought so I could read the novel.

One thing that amused me was the pornography angle.  In the novel, Marlowe follows one of Geiger’s customers after he leaves the store with a package.  The customer gets scared and drops the package.  Marlowe opens it up, finding a book with both text and pictures.  He characterizes it is as “indescribable filth,” for which reason he doesn’t describe it.  Such a scene is not in the 1946 movie, but it is in the 1978 remake.  Marlowe gives a similar characterization of the book:  “indescribably filthy.”  In this case, however, we get to see the pictures he is looking at when he says they cannot be described.  They are nothing but pictures of naked women with their breasts exposed.  The pictures are no more revealing than a Playboy centerfold from the 1960s.  Later in the movie, Marlowe comes home to his apartment to find Camilla in his bed, completely naked.  She throws back the covers, and we see full, frontal nudity, including her pubic hair.  And so, if the book from Geiger’s bookstore has pictures that are indescribably filthy, then by its own standards, this movie is even filthier, even if it is only R-rated.  Obviously, they should not have allowed us to see those harmless photos of naked women as Marlowe expresses his disgust with what he is looking at.

Finally, this version tries to justify its existence by directly addressing the death of Owen Taylor.  Instead of availing itself of the screenplay solution, which was that he was killed by Joe Brody, this movie has Marlowe say that Taylor’s death was suicide.  The idea is that Taylor wakes up after being sapped, realizes the naked pictures of Camilla have been taken from him, and drives his car off the pier at a high rate of speed.  This contradicts what Marlowe said in the novel and in the 1946 movie.  It is also not realistic.  If Taylor wanted to commit suicide, it would have been simpler for him to shoot himself in the head with his revolver.  Driving a car into the ocean may not quite do the trick, but I guess the Owen Taylor of this version had never read Ethan Frome.

Farewell, My Lovely:  The Book and the Adaptations

If you are not clear on the distinction between an ordinary detective movie that was filmed a long time ago in black-and-white, a film noir, and a neo-noir, then you might try watching the three adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.  Before comparing these movies, however, let’s review the novel itself.

The Novel

This novel, published in 1940, is not as complicated and confusing as The Big Sleep, the novel Raymond Chandler wrote before writing this one, but it comes pretty close.  So, rather than follow Philip Marlowe, the private-eye narrator, through all the dead ends and red herrings that he is subjected to before he solves this mystery, let’s consider the events as they actually occurred.

Velma Valento betrays Moose Malloy

Velma Valento is a beautiful song-and-dance girl that works at a night club named Florian’s in the fictional town of Bay City, California.  That is where she comes to know Moose Malloy, who also works there.  He is an extraordinarily huge man, the bouncer of the joint, and he falls madly in love with her.  He robs a bank in order to have the money he needs to spend lavishly on Velma, but he makes the mistake of confiding in her.  Rather than let Malloy spend that money on her a little at a time, she turns him in for the reward so she can get a lot of money all at once.  After Moose is convicted and sent to prison, she quits Florian’s and goes to work as a singer at a radio station owned by Lewin Lockridge Grayle, an old and sickly man, but one who is worth $20,000,000. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $400,000,000 today.)  He soon falls in love with Velma.

Jessie Florian goes to work for Lindsay Marriott

Several years later, Mike Florian dies.  He was the owner of the nightclub where Velma worked, and he leaves the place to his widow Jessie.  But as the neighborhood has been going downhill, she ends up selling it for not much money to a black man named Montgomery.  Needing a job, she goes to work as a servant for a family by the name of Marriott.  One member of that family is Lindsay Marriott, who is an announcer at the radio station where Velma is employed.  Apparently, it is a small world in Bay City.

One day Jessie hears Velma singing on the radio and recognizes her voice.  She goes to the station and sees that she is right.  She doesn’t know that Velma turned Malloy in for the reward, but she knows enough about her past to be a concern.  Therefore, Velma has Marriott buy her off with an expensive radio and monthly payments in exchange for holding the trust deed on her house, which means he could throw Jessie out on the street if she doesn’t keep her mouth shut.

Velma becomes Mrs. Grayle

But it’s not Marriott’s money that is paying for all this.  Velma is getting it from Mr. Grayle, whom she has agreed to marry, after telling him about her situation with Malloy.  He agrees to marry her in Europe and then sell his radio station, thereby making it difficult for anyone else to track her down. She not only becomes Mrs. Grayle, but changes her first name to Helen as well.

Having purchased the silence of Jessie Florian, Velma now has to worry about Marriott, letting him have enough money so that he doesn’t have to work anymore.  He becomes her regular companion, to which Mr. Grayle turns a blind eye.  He has what we would now call his “trophy wife,” and that is enough for him.

Moose Malloy gets out of prison

But then Malloy, having served an eight-year sentence, is released from prison.  He wants to find Velma, the woman he still loves. He buys himself a fancy suit of clothes and goes back to Florian’s. The place still has the same name because it would cost too much to buy a new sign.  While he is standing outside looking at the place, he is noticed by Philip Marlowe, who becomes curious about the guy.

Malloy goes inside to find Velma, and Marlowe ends up following him in.  Inasmuch as the nightclub serves only a black clientele, there is a lot of friction and physical confrontation, until Malloy ends up killing Montgomery, who pulled a gun on him.

The police are not really interested in the murder of a black man, which Marlowe refers to as a misdemeanor.  But to curry favor with Nulty, the detective in charge of the case, Marlowe agrees to see if he can find Velma as a way of getting information on the whereabouts of Malloy, who took off after killing Montgomery.

This leads him to Jessie Florian.  He doesn’t get far with her, but after he leaves, she contacts Marriott, telling him that Malloy is out of prison and looking for Velma, and that there is a private detective named Philip Marlowe that is also on the job.

Velma kills Lindsay Marriott

When Velma finds out about this, she decides that Marriott is the weak link to her past, someone who would probably fold if things got too hot.  So, she decides to kill him. Jessie doesn’t realize that Velma has become Mrs. Grayle, so she is not a problem anymore.  However, Malloy ends up killing her anyway while trying to find out about Velma.  But that comes later.

Velma tells Marriott that she is worried about Marlowe and wants him killed.  Marriott has come to enjoy all the money she has been supplying him with, so he agrees to do it.  She gets him to go to Marlowe with a phony story about how her necklace, made of Fei Tsui jade, had been taken from her during a robbery, and now the jewel thieves are willing to sell it back for a fraction of what it is worth.  The idea is to get Marlowe to go with him to a secluded place, where the exchange is supposed to occur.  That is where Marriott is supposed to kill Marlowe.  Instead, Velma is waiting for them.  When Marlowe leaves the car looking for the jewel thieves, she blackjacks Marriott several times, so viciously that his brains end up on his face.  When Marlowe returns, she hits him with the blackjack too, but only once, just enough to knock him out.  She is afraid of the heat that could come from killing a private detective who might have friends in the police force.

Velma frames Jules Amthor

There is another reason Velma does not kill Marlowe:  she needs him alive to tell the made-up story about the stolen jade, to distract the police and keep them from suspecting that she had anything to do with Marriott’s death.  After killing Marriott, she planted a cigarette case on him, in addition to the one he already had.  This one had three marijuana cigarettes in it, each one with a mouthpiece made from a business card.  (I didn’t know marijuana cigarettes could be rolled with a mouthpiece, but so they were.) Each business card said, “Jules Amthor, Psychic Consultant,” whom she had visited on several occasions. The idea was to make Marlowe think Amthor had something to do with the robbery and murder of Marriott.

Anne Riordan becomes Marlowe’s helpmate

When Marlowe recovers from being sapped, a woman named Anne Riordan shows up, who just happened to be driving by.  She later finds out that the jade that was stolen (supposedly) belonged to Mrs. Grayle.  As a result, Marlowe makes an appointment to see her, to find out if she wants him to try to get the jade back for her.  Mrs. Grayle leads Marlowe to believe that Marriott was a blackmailer of women.  Marlowe suspects that he might have fingered her for the robbery.

Dr. Sonderborg keeps Marlowe doped up

Then Marlowe pursues the Amthor clue.  He suspects that Amthor had a lot of rich women for clients.  If they wore expensive jewelry, he might let a gang of jewel thieves know about it. Marlowe goes to see Amthor and ends up being roughed up by one of Amthor’s hoodlums and then by some crooked cops, who drop him off at a small hospital run by a Dr. Sonderborg.  Marlowe is drugged, but eventually manages to escape.  The hospital is a front for all sorts of illegal activity, especially drug dealing. Another activity is that of providing a hideout for criminals on the lam. That’s why Marlowe sees Malloy there.  As I said, it’s a small world in Bay City.

Velma kills Malloy

Eventually, Marlowe figures it all out.  He gets word to Malloy to come to his apartment through a gambler named Laird Brunette. He gets Mrs. Grayle to come there too. Malloy hides in the next room while Mrs. Grayle and Marlowe talk.  Marlowe tells her he knows she is Velma, that there never was a robbery, and that she was the one that killed Marriott. When Malloy realizes it is Velma that Marlowe is talking to, he comes out of the room, still holding a gun absentmindedly in his hand. But Velma puts five slugs in him. She tries to kill Marlowe, but runs out of bullets.  So, she just takes off.

Velma kills herself

She ends up working in a nightclub in Baltimore.  A detective recognizes her and confronts her, but she shoots him three times, killing him.  Then she shoots herself in the heart.  Twice.  Marlowe says she did it to protect her husband, the one man that really gave her a break.  With his money, she could have beaten the murder rap against Malloy, claiming self-defense.  And they could never have proved she killed Marriott. But she wanted to spare her husband the pain of a scandal.

Nevertheless, because she was the wife of a rich man, the whole business brings a lot of people down. Although Amthor and Sonderborg had nothing to do with Velma’s treachery, they are casualties in the case, with both of them leaving town, running from the law, Amthor being caught in New York.  The bad cops in Bay City lose their jobs.

The Falcon Takes Over (1942)

As may be surmised by the title, the first movie version of this novel was transformed into a vehicle for a very different kind of detective than the hardboiled Philip Marlowe. Rather, he is an amateur sleuth known as The Falcon, a refined English gentleman who, in this movie, goes by the name of Gay Lawrence, played by George Sanders.  He makes a good living in the bond business. The movie is part mystery, part silly comedy. If you have ever labored under the misconception that a film noir is any black-and-white crime drama made in the 1940s or 1950s, this movie will disabuse you of that misapprehension.

Lawrence has a chauffeur named Goldy, who functions as a sidekick, with the usual kind of humor that such characters are given to.  Moose Malloy is played by Ward Bond, who is a big man in his own right, but made to look even bigger with padding. The nightclub that used to be Florian’s is now a high-class establishment, full of white people, and going by the name Club 13, the sort of place that Lawrence often frequents in formal attire.

By way of contrast, consider the opening line of the novel:  “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro,” referring to the street on which Florian’s was located.  This alone reminds us of the times in which this novel was written, back when “Negro” and “colored” were the polite words our mothers told us to use rather than those preferred by our fathers.  Or preferred by Philip Marlowe, for that matter.  Though he uses the polite word “Negro” here, Marlowe uses a variety of racial slurs throughout the novel.  In a movie made today, if a character used the words Marlowe does, we would know that he was the bad guy, and that we were supposed to dislike him.  But when this novel was written, those were the days when one could be a racist without fear of censure; for we are supposed like Marlowe, and his racist remarks were just supposed to be the sort of thing a hardboiled private eye would say.  The reference to “mixed blocks” tells us that this part of town was becoming undesirable on account of all the African Americans that had been moving in.  But what would a man like Gay Lawrence be doing in that neighborhood?  Hence the transformation to a nightclub in the nicest part of town, catering to café society.

In this movie, as well as the two that follow, we pretty much encounter the same dramatis personae, but with variations.  They each want different stuff, do different things, serve different functions, and have different relationships with one another.  Some characters are added, combined, or deleted.  There are even variations on their names.  It would be tedious to enumerate and analyze them all, only a few being worthy of comment.

For example, as noted above, the racism of the novel is eliminated in this movie by changing the clientele of Club 13, formerly Florian’s, from black to white.  Although there was plenty of racism in movies made back in those days, it was seldom as stark as that in the novels.

Another difference is the treatment of homosexuality.  In the novel, Marlowe refers to Marriott as a “pansy” on account of his mannerisms.  But in this movie, Marriott (Hans Conried) merely comes across as weak.

Then there is the matter of motive, Velma’s reason for hiding from Moose Malloy.  In this movie, Malloy took a manslaughter rap for his boss.  But that means Velma didn’t turn him in for the reward money, so it is not clear why she is paying off Jessie Florian not to tell Malloy where she is, or why she changed her name.  All we can figure is that Malloy is the kind of guy who could kill a woman out jealousy and would be too strong for anyone to stop him.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

The second movie version of this novel is Murder, My Sweet, made a couple of years later.  This is a genuine film noir, and it closely follows the novel in plot, style, and tone, though with some simplifications that are usually necessary when bringing a novel to the screen.  Raymond Chandler used the words “sleep,” “farewell,” and “goodbye” in three of his novels, each a metaphor for death. However, the studio executives decided they needed a title with a literal meaning.  Dick Powell had been chosen to play Philip Marlowe.  Previously, he had starred in musicals, singing and dancing. The producers were afraid that if they used the same title as the novel, people would think it was another musical.

This movie is told mostly in flashback, which mirrors the first-person narrative style of the novel.  In addition, flashbacks are common in films noir, for they can give a movie a fatalistic tone, inasmuch as the events of the past cannot be undone, especially when the flashback begins after something bad has happened.  In The Falcon Takes Over, there is no flashback.  Everyone seems to have free will, and anything can happen.  But when Murder, My Sweet begins, Marlowe is being interrogated in a police station, accused of murder, and his eyes have bandages over them.

In the story that he relates, Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) hires Marlowe to help him find Velma (Claire Trevor), unlike in the previous version and in the novel, where Lawrence/Marlowe just accidentally encounters Malloy in front of Club 13/Florian’s. Instead, they go to Florian’s together. This time the place is white, but low class.

The next day Marriott shows up to hire Marlowe, saying he wants his company when he is supposedly going to buy back the stolen necklace.  The elevator operator comments that he is a cute, little fellow, and that he smelled nice too.  Later on, Mr. Grayle refers to him as a “foppish” man. This counts as a queer flash, about as close as the movies could come to homosexuality in the days of the Production Code.

Once again, Velma’s motive for hiding from Malloy is unclear.  There is no reference to her having turned him in for a reward.  In fact, we don’t even know why he was in prison.  Nor does she seem to be afraid of him.  Toward the end of the movie, she tries to get Marlowe to kill Amthor for her because he was blackmailing her, since he knew of the affairs she had had.  But she does not ask Marlowe to kill Malloy.

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

In this third adaption, made in 1975, Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) says he was sent to prison for robbing a bank, returning to the reason for his incarceration in the novel. And Velma (Charlotte Rampling) turned him in for the reward, just like in the novel.  Therefore, she once again is afraid of Malloy, and she has a strong motive for trying to keep him from finding her.

This adaptation takes its title from the novel. By this time, Chandler’s novels had come to be revered as classic detective fiction, so the title was too valuable to just set aside as it was in the first two movies.  The movie has elements of the film noir style, unlike The Falcon Takes Over, but it does not qualify as film noir, primarily because there is a self-conscious aspect to it, which is what distinguishes neo-noir from film noir proper. Unlike the traditional film noir, this version was made in color.  But it would not have changed its category if it had been made in black-and-white, because the day had passed when studios made black-and-white movies to hold down the cost.  By the 1970s, movies that were made in black-and-white were done so for artistic reasons. So, we would have been saying to ourselves, “Oh, it’s in black-and-white, just like a film noir.”

Then there is the setting.  Just as a choice had to be made about color versus black-and-white, so too did a conscious choice have to be made between the original setting and a contemporary one.  The 1970s just do not have the same cultural feel as the 1940s. For example, if a private detective in the 1970s wore a trench coat and a fedora, we would think he was some kind of Don Quixote who had seen too many films noir and was trying to be like those romanticized detectives of fiction.  For that reason, perhaps, the movie was set in the 1940s.  But now when we see Robert Mitchum as Marlowe in a trench coat and a fedora, we check these items off, as if they were on a list of things that every film noir private detective must have.

Furthermore, there are a few elements from the 1970s that work their way into this movie, which we know to be deliberate choices made by the producers.  These 1970s situations and values retrojectively put into a story supposedly set in the 1940s are also what place this and other movies like it in the neo-noir category.

One such choice consists in adhering more closely to the novel than the earlier versions.  In the novel, Florian’s has become a “Negro” nightclub.  In the two previous movie versions of the novel, the studio executives kept the nightclub white, possibly to avoid upsetting the 1940s audience on matters of race.  By 1975, showing Florian’s as being a black establishment was not only more acceptable, it was almost hip. Movie producers were by that time looking for ways to have more blacks in their movies, and so following the novel in this regard was made to order.

Other stuff is thrown into the movie that was neither in novel nor in the previous versions in order to reflect the zeitgeist of 1975. An extraneous mixed-race couple is added to the plot.  That could hardly have been a commonplace in the 1940s, so it calls attention to itself as rather forced.  Jessie Florian says that it ruined the career of the husband, who was white, for “marrying a nigger.”  In this way, the movie allows its audience to feel smug, regarding itself as superior to the past as it deplores the racial prejudices of those times.  In the novel, it was Marlowe, among others, who used racial slurs like that.  In this movie, other people use racial slurs, but Marlowe uses only the polite words of the 1940s, “Negro” and “colored.”

If putting a miscegenous couple into this movie seems forced, the fact that they have a child for Marlowe to care about is even more so.  I suppose the fact that Marlowe is friendly with a mixed-race child lets us know we are supposed to like him, as if we needed a push in that direction.  In any event, it was around this time that children started gratuitously showing up in movies that would have been better off without them.  Sappy sentimentality simply does not belong in a film noir, but I guess this is another difference between that genre and neo-noir.

Then there is Jules Amthor, who has become Frances Amthor, a lesbian.  With the end of the Production Code, it was now possible to feature homosexuality explicitly. However, there was no felt need to treat such characters sympathetically.  Instead, she is a huge woman, portrayed as the stereotypical butch dyke.  Her presence in the movie might be indicative of the fact that there was less censorship in 1975 than in the 1940s, but it is in no way an expression of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality. In fact, whereas Marlowe refers to African Americans with polite words only, he refers to Marriott as a “fairy.”  The movies of the 1970s showed more deference to African Americans than they did to homosexuals.

A Future Remake

It’s about time for another remake, one suitable for the twenty-first century. It will probably have to have a simpler plot in order to make room for all the CGI action sequences.  But more important than that are the issues of homosexuality and race.

A gay character will be required, of course, for that is one of the boxes that need to be checked off when making a movie like this today.  But that does not mean having a homosexual like Marriott or, in the case of the last remake, Frances Amthor, both of whom are portrayed by means of negative stereotypes. Rather, having Philip Marlow himself be gay should meet with approval from today’s audience.

Actually, this has already been done in a way.  In the movie Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (2005), Michelle Monaghan grew up reading hardboiled novels about a private eye named Jonny Gossamer.  Robert Downey Jr. is in love with her, and he also knows a lot about those novels too.  He tries to understand the mystery he gets involved in by reference to things that happened in those novels. Jonny Gossamer is the equivalent of Philip Marlowe, and the movie is divided into chapters named after Raymond Chandler’s books, the last one being Farewell, My Lovely.  The real hardboiled private eye that Downey meets is gay. In fact, his name is Gay Perry.  So, he has the same first name as Gay Lawrence, the Falcon, though with a different connotation, of course.  Since Perry is played by Val Kilmer, he is a real man, not like the effeminate Marriott of the novel and the movies.  Also in keeping with the sensitivities of the twenty-first century, Perry doesn’t like secondhand smoke.

Another box that must be checked off today is the miscegenous couple.  As noted above, there was such a couple in the last remake, but they were minor characters.  In a twenty-first century remake of Farewell, My Lovely, Moose Malloy and Velma Valento should fill that slot.  However, it will have to be Velma that is black and Malloy that is white.  It simply wouldn’t do to have Moose Malloy be a big, hulking black man looking for his white Velma, who is desperate to get away from him.  That simply would not bespeak of the enlightened, progressive attitude that a mixed-race couple in a movie is supposed to represent nowadays.

San Francisco (1936)

San Francisco is one-third musical, one-third catastrophe movie, and one-third religious movie.  The musical third is just a showcase for Jeanette MacDonald in the role of Mary Blake.  We don’t really relate to this movie as a musical, and so we become impatient with her numbers while waiting for the catastrophe, the 1906 earthquake.  But this catastrophe, in turn, merely provides the basis for its religious themes of sin, suffering, and redemption.

Clark Gable plays Blackie Norton, who runs the Paradise Club, an establishment catering to vices such as drinking, gambling, and ogling pretty women.  Blackie is an atheist, who, according to his friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy), doesn’t believe in anything, which means Blackie is a cynic as well.  However, we also see that he has a good heart underlying his sneering façade, for he shows concern about people getting out of a burning building, offers to make a charitable contribution, pays for an organ for Tim’s church, and plans to run for Supervisor, a political office that will enable him to enact regulations preventing more fires like the one we see in the beginning of the movie.

Tim tells Mary about Blackie’s good heart, saying in general that no one is all bad, an absurdity on which I will not bother to comment.  The important thing about this conversation he has with Mary in this regard, however, is the smug look he has on his face, which only gets worse as the movie wears on.  A lot of people suppose that belief in God and moral goodness are linked together in some essential way, and this was especially true in 1936, when this movie was made.  Therefore, Blackie’s atheism in conjunction with his good heart, we are being guided to believe, is unsustainable.

Mary gets a job in Blackie’s nightclub as a singer.  Her operatic voice seems totally out of place in a joint where people want to indulge their vices, but that is sort of the point.  Soon she is offered a chance to sing in the Tivoli Opera House.  One of the musical numbers sung by Mary during the course of the movie is from the opera Faust by Charles Gounod.  You know the story.  A man sells his soul to the Devil so he can get laid.  Presumably Blackie’s attempt to possess Mary recapitulates Faust’s seduction and ruin of Marguerite, which is why Tim contends with Blackie for Mary’s soul.  After she breaks off her engagement with Blackie, Mary sings in the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, about a courtesan who dies from tuberculosis, possibly suggesting the unhappiness that Mary will experience if she goes ahead with her plans to marry Jack Burley for his money and social position, a man whom she does not love.  Also, Burley will allow her to continue to sing at the Tivoli, while Blackie wants her back at the Paradise.

Early in the movie, we see Blackie and Tim in the boxing ring, in which Tim knocks Blackie to the mat, as he usually does, according to Blackie.  It is important to establish that Tim can lick Blackie in a fight, because later in the movie, when Blackie and Tim are arguing over Mary, Blackie punches Tim, who just stands there and takes it with a hurt look on his face, the blood trickling down from his lip.  In other words, Tim is turning the other cheek in spite of his superior ability at fisticuffs.  If the movie had not featured that boxing scene early on, we might suppose that Tim’s reluctance to strike back is out of cowardice and weakness, that he is hiding behind his collar.

Though Mary loves Blackie, yet it bothers her that he doesn’t believe in God.  Blackie responds, “God?  Hey, isn’t he supposed to be taking care of the suckers that come out of the missions looking for something to eat and a place to sleep?”  Some might answer that it is God that inspires the people that run the missions.  But as Mark Twain once noted, “If  you will look at the matter rationally and without prejudice, the proper place to hunt for the facts of His mercy, is not where man does the mercies and He collects the praise, but in those regions where He has the field to Himself.”

This challenge returns to us toward the end of the movie where God indeed has the field to Himself, for when the earthquake begins, God does nothing to prevent it, and the result is that many people die or suffer crippling injuries.  Of course, we are probably supposed to understand this earthquake as Old Testament style, wrath of God punishment for the Barbary Coast.  As Blackie wanders around looking for Mary, he keeps running into people looking for God.  Mrs. Burley, the mother of the man whom Mary was planning to marry, says of her son’s death that it is God’s will and that it’s God’s help they both need now.  This brings out the great paradox regarding the connection between religion and suffering:  the more suffering people experience, the more likely they are to turn to God; and yet, the more suffering people experience, the more we wonder why an all-powerful, loving God would let them suffer.

Eventually, Blackie finds a place where the injured are being cared for, where Tim is offering them comfort.  One might expect that in the face of all the death and destruction that has befallen the city, Tim would look as grief stricken and overwhelmed as everyone else including Blackie.  But no, Tim has a look of serenity on his face when Blackie sees him, and that look stays on his face right through the end of the movie.  Earlier in the movie, when the Barbary Coast was indulging in all its wantonness—drinking, gambling, carousing—Tim’s facial expression was often grim and disapproving.  But now, with all the pain and misery around him, Tim is in his element.  As the city burns, as people die before his eyes, as he hears people cry out for the loss of their loved ones, Tim is truly at peace.  This is especially so when he sees Blackie.  Now, at last, Blackie will see.  There must be a God after all.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  All this devastation brought about by the earthquake doesn’t prove there’s a God.  At most, it only proves that people need God.  But that nice distinction exceeds the critical acumen of those that made this movie.  More to the point, if people need God, then they need priests like Tim.  For years, Tim had to endure all of Blackie’s scoffing and sneering, but now the day of triumph is at hand.  Blackie is truly humbled, confused by all the suffering and misery that he does not comprehend, as he stands before Tim, who has known all along that this day would come, and whose heart is filled with joy.

When Blackie asks Tim if he has seen Mary, Tim takes him to a place outdoors where survivors of the earthquake have found refuge.  There is Mary, singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” accompanied by those around her, while a mother holds her dead child in her arms until others gently take him away from her and she collapses in tears.  It is all so heavenly.

When Blackie sees Mary, he says to Tim, “I want to thank God.”  And then we see it, the spectacle that exceeds even the earthquake:  Blackie Norton, on his knees, tears in his eyes, giving thanks to God, while Tim looks on smiling sweetly.

When Mary sees Blackie on his knees in prayer, she comes to him, and now we know that Blackie will finally have Mary’s love.  Just then, someone yells that the fire is out, at which point everyone becomes happy, shouting that they will rebuild San Francisco, marching over the hill, back to the city, as they sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  When you consider that within less than the length of one full day, husbands have lost their wives, wives their husbands, parents their children, and children their parents, they seem to be holding up remarkably well, all of which testifies to the power of faith and the glory of God.

Is Trump the Modern David?

After a hiatus of many years, I decided to take up bridge again. Like me, most of the people I play bridge with are retired. Like me, most of them are Caucasians, with a smattering of Asians. But unlike me, most of them are Republicans.  I have never seen so many Rolexes on so many wrists in my life. Golf is a regular item of conversation.  And a few weeks ago, I played with three people who were all discussing the best place to get a Lexus repaired, inasmuch as they each owned one.

In between hands there is ample opportunity for conversation, from which I am able to gather much intelligence on how Republicans think.  Last summer, for example, I was invited to play bridge with three women.  I figured the hostess was a Republican when I saw her bathroom.  Any time I see a bathtub that is custom designed instead of the plain old white bathtub I have showered in all my life, I figure a fair amount of wealth must be involved.  This was confirmed by the dishwasher that played music when it was opened.  Anyway, after a couple of hours of bridge, the subject of politics came up.  “Who are you voting for?” I asked one of them.

“Well, I’m not voting for a Democrat,” she replied.

“That’s not the question,” I said.  “The big question this year is whether you are going to vote for Donald Trump.”  It turned out that all three women were big Trump fans.  From there the conversation drifted around to Obama, whereupon another of the women said he was a Muslim.  I was, of course, familiar with birtherism, and so I listened to her remark with dispassion.  It’s amazing what you can learn about people if you just let them talk without showing any sign of disagreement or disapproval.  Besides, why allow politics to interfere with an enjoyable afternoon of bridge?

The woman followed up on her birther comment.  “That’s why he doesn’t wear jewelry during Ramadan,” she averred.  That one I was totally unprepared for, and I involuntarily exploded with laughter.  I have never been invited back.

When I got home, I Googled “Obama,” “jewelry,” and “Ramadan,” and sure enough, there actually was a story about that starting in 2010 when Obama was seen not wearing his wedding ring.

Last week, I was playing with a couple of other women, and they were discussing the recent testimony by John Brennan. They were praising Trey Gowdy’s relentless interrogation of Brennan, saying that Brennan was not able to answer Gowdy’s demand to know if there was any evidence of collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.  Once again, I listened to all this in silence.  But then, one of the women said that she didn’t trust Brennan, because he had converted to Islam.  I managed not to react with laughter to this one, and it was with great self-restraint that I kept from rolling my eyes.  As before, I went home and Googled “Brennan” and “Islam,” and sure enough, there was another such story making its way around the internet.

It is good that I was able to restrain myself this time, because I have noticed that Republicans are getting a little sensitive lately.  Last summer, a man asked me, “Have you ever seen anyone put the media in its place the way Trump has?”  I disingenuously agreed that I had not.  After the election, another man commented that “Trump plays the media like a violin.”  But I haven’t heard such talk lately. Instead, Republicans have become angry at the way the media has been treating Donald Trump, more unfairly, to hear them tell it, than they have treated any other president.

Anyway, there was one such conversation I heard at the bridge table about two months ago that has been wandering around in my brain ever since.  One of the women said that she thought that Trump got elected president through divine intervention.  Personally, I thought it was Russian intervention, but what do I know?  Then a discussion ensued in which references to Trump were interspersed with references to David, the David of the Old Testament, that is.  It was Trump this and David that.  Finally, I had to ask, “Are you saying Donald Trump is a modern David?”  In so many words, the answer seemed to be yes.

I never really did understand why David was such a big deal.  After all, was he not associated with many great sins?  Now, by “sins” I am not talking about his genocidal slaughter, as told in 1 Samuel 27, for example, because genocide is widely approved of throughout the Old Testament.  No, I am referring to sins that are condemned in the strongest terms in the Old Testament itself: homosexuality, adultery, and murder. In particular, David’s sins consisted of his homosexual relationship with Jonathan (1 Samuel 18 and 20; 2 Samuel 1), his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, and the murder of her husband Uriah (2 Samuel 11).

These sins were not overlooked in the conversation I listened to at the bridge table. On the contrary, they were emphasized, the idea being that David had God’s favor in spite of all that.  In short, the divine intervention that supposedly brought about Trump’s election was in spite of whatever sins Trump may be guilty of too.  So what was it that made God love David, which is to say, what is it that makes religious people love David?  I already said that the genocidal slaughter he was responsible for is not regarded as a sin, but more than that, it seems to be what redeems him. The fact that the first thing we learn about David as children, that he slew Goliath, is our first clue. Strength, might, force, conquest, power—these are the things for which all else is forgiven.

Those Republicans I mentioned that have lately become angry at the way Trump has been mistreated by the media were doubtless gladdened when Greg Gianforte assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs, because of the redemptive nature of force.  We may deplore such an attitude in this particular case, but what if it is applied on the grand scale?  As things worsen for Donald Trump, the temptation to overcome his domestic difficulties through war may become irresistible.  It has long been known that there is a tendency to rally around a president in times of war, which leads many to suspect that some wars are started for just that purpose.  But Trump seems especially susceptible to this logic.  And when I think about all the gushing over Trump that I heard for a whole week on Morning Joe following his modest military strike on Syria, I can only imagine what a full scale war would do for his ratings.

The Middle East is messy.  Besides, been there, done that.  But what about a military strike on North Korea?  Sure, millions would die on the Korean peninsula and possibly in Japan, but if the slaughter of innocents at the hands of David made him one of the most admirable characters in the Old Testament, then death and destruction in the Far East may be just what Trump needs to ensure God’s favor.

An American Tragedy:  The Book and the Adaptations

In 1906, Chester Gillette drowned Grace Brown in a lake because he had gotten her pregnant, a crime for which he was put to death in the electric chair.  An American Tragedy, a 1925 novel by Theodore Dreiser, is based those events.

In the novel, the man is Clyde and the woman is Roberta.  There is another woman, Sondra, whom Clyde wanted to marry, but she may be a completely fictional character.  The first film adaptation of An American Tragedy, released in 1931, has the same title as the novel, and the three principal characters have the same names.  The second adaptation, directed by George Stevens in 1951, has a title that is different from the novel, A Place in the Sun, and the characters have different names.  Don’t ask me why.  To help keep things straight, here are the identities:

George (Montgomery Clift) = Clyde

Alice (Shelley Winters) = Roberta

Angela (Elizabeth Taylor) = Sondra

In A Place in the Sun, George is raised in a poor family that does street missionary work.  But he wants more out of life than that, so he hitchhikes to California where his rich uncle lives, hoping to better himself through that family connection.  He gets a job working in his uncle’s factory, where one of the strict rules is that he is not to date any of the girls that work there, which would include Alice.  But as luck would have it, he runs into Alice at a movie theater and ends up walking her home.  They start seeing each other, and one night he comes into her room at a boarding house, one thing leads to another, and they end up having sex.  They continue seeing each other, and I naturally thought they continued having sex during this period.  I have no doubt that Chester Gillette, the real George, and Grace Brown, the real Alice, did have sex more than once.  But reality is one thing, and a movie is something else.  And so, one night when George comes over to visit Alice, she says, “George, we’re in trouble.  Real trouble, I think.”  He asks her what she means.  She replies, “Remember the first night you came here?”

That’s when I had to laugh.  There it was, the standard formula:  a woman has sex just one time, and sure enough, she gets pregnant.  It’s almost as if a good form of birth control for unmarried couples in a movie is to have lots of sex.  Otherwise, why not let George and Alice have regular sex for two or three months before she ends up getting pregnant?  I understand the dramatic aspect of pregnancy arising from just one moral lapse, but there comes a point where the formula is so overused as to be absurd.

Anyway, during the time between their one act of fornication and Alice’s realization that she is pregnant, George has met and fallen in love with Angela, who is rich and upper class, and to his amazement, she has fallen in love with him and wants to get married.  This is everything he has ever hoped for.  But then he finds out Alice is pregnant.

He tries to get her an abortion, but the doctor he arranges for her to see tells her to go home to her parents.  Eventually, the idea of killing her takes hold of him.  He hears about how sometimes people drown when they are out on the lake, and he recalls that Alice said she did not know how to swim.  And so, he suggests that before they get married, they should have an enjoyable afternoon out on the lake.

Now, in the novel, Clyde doesn’t actually kill Roberta.  He planned to drown her and make it look like an accident.  He gets her out into the middle of the lake in a rowboat, knowing she cannot swim.  But then he thinks he cannot do it.  But then he thinks he will.  He might as well be picking petals off a daisy:  “I kill her, I kill her not, I kill her, I kill her not.”  Anyway, she ends up falling overboard and drowns just as he was thinking, “I kill her not.”  Notwithstanding all the planning he put into this murder that he changed his mind on at the last minute but which had the same result anyway, his identity is discovered, he is tried for murder, convicted, and executed.

This was not the first time Dreiser used the idea of a man being indecisive about committing a crime until the contemplated criminal act accidentally happens just as he was thinking he would not commit the crime.  In Carrie (1952), the movie based on Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, Lawrence Olivier’s character is tempted to steal money from his boss when he is closing up one night and finds that the safe has been left open.  He takes the money out of the safe, puts it back, takes it out, and so on, until just as he decides he won’t steal the money, the safe accidentally closes and locks while he still has the money in his hands, leading to his downfall.

In a couple of respects, the first adaptation of An American Tragedy is better.  For one thing, it is more faithful to the true story on which it is based.  What I regard as more important than that, however, is the actress that plays the part of Roberta is Silvia Sidney.  We readily believe in her naïve innocence.  She seems like the Roberta of the novel, a woman we like and feel sorry for.  As noted above, however, in A Place in the Sun, Alice is played by Shelley Winters.  I don’t know what Shelley Winters was like as a person, but her screen persona simply is not the sweet, innocent virgin for whom we are supposed to have sympathy because she was taken advantage of by a man.  In fact, the hostess for a showing of this film on Turner Classic Movies, Alicia Malone, said that this movie was a turning point in Winters’ career.  Before that, she was typically cast as a blonde bombshell or as a sexpot, and it was for that reason that George Stevens, the director, refused at first even to consider her for this part, saying she was “completely wrong for this plain, meek, little factory girl.”  I don’t know why he relented.  Someone like Betsy Blair would have been far more suitable for the part.  In any event, it was not much of a turning point for Shelley Winters, for afterwards she still seemed suited for roles in which she is a hard-boiled broad, as in Alfie (1966) or Bloody Mama (1970).  As a result, when she is taken advantage of by a man in a movie, we are more likely to think she is dumb than naïve.

Partly as a result of this difference, we are sad when Silvia Sidney’s Roberta drowns.  As for Shelley Winters’ Alice, however, I know I am supposed to feel sorry for her, and I do a little bit, but the fact is that I never really mind when Shelley Winters dies in a movie.  I find her to be a little irritating, and so whenever she dies in a movie, I experience her death more with a feeling of relief than with a sense of loss.  For example, the fact that she drowns in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) does not spoil my sense that the movie has a happy ending.  A third movie in which Shelley Winters drowns is The Night of the Hunter (1955), murdered by her newlywed, psychopathic husband, played by Robert Mitchum.  Now, Robert Mitchum’s character, Harry Powell, is supposed to be as bad as they come, so you would think they would have allowed him to kill a more likeable actress, like Debbie Reynolds, for instance, so that we would really think Harry is evil.  But I believe they picked Shelley Winters to be his victim so that we would not spend the rest of the movie feeling sorry for her.  In other words, the movie has a happy ending, in part, because the earlier death of Shelley Winters’ character does not strike a sour note that resonates through the rest of the movie.

If A Place in the Sun had starred an actress to play Alice who would have been more believably innocent and whose death would have been more disturbing, then we would have been appropriately outraged that George would have even thought about abandoning her, let alone make elaborate plans to murder her, just as we are when we read the novel or watch the first adaptation.  But with Shelley Winters playing the part, her death really seems to be just a plot point, and we almost end up feeling sorrier for George, played by the likeable Montgomery Clift, than we do for Alice.

Within the novel and the two adaptations, Clyde (George) is punished for a murder that he did not commit, even though things accidentally happened as he had planned.  But when we step outside the novel and the adaptations, we may ask why the story was written this way.  After all, murders take place every day, but how often does someone plan a murder, change his mind at the last minute, only to have the person he was planning to murder accidentally die in a manner similar to what he had planned?  I submit that the answer to that question is, “Never!”  This is strictly a figment of Dreiser’s imagination.  As for the true story this was based on, Chester Gillette deliberately killed Grace Brown with a blow from his tennis racket, knocking her into the lake, where she drowned.

Furthermore, there are doubts as to whether there was another woman, nor need there have been one.  Gillette may have murdered Brown simply because he didn’t want to marry her.  It would have at least been realistic had there been another woman, but she too may have been dreamed up by Dreiser.  As far as the novel goes, Sondra is not just another woman.  She is upper-class.  And throughout the early part of the story, we are made aware that Clyde is ambitious, for it is the theme of ambition that accounts for the word “American” in the title.  As a result, we doubt that he ever loved either woman.  Or rather, he loved Sondra, but only because she was rich and upper-class.

There are many movies in which women try to rise socially by marrying into the upper class, and often as not, they succeed.  But while we are sympathetic to a woman’s attempt to marry up, we do not extend the same attitude toward men.  Men are allowed to marry down for the sake of love, but when they try to marry up, we just don’t like it.  In fact, it may even be that this is the real reason Clyde is punished, for not being content with his lot in life, since the novel goes to great lengths to make it clear that he did not commit the crime for which he was charged.

The other day, I happened to watch Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005).  It readily calls to mind an earlier movie of his, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which someone also gets away with murder and lives happily ever after.  Also, we see the protagonist reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which is also about a man that commits a murder.  Finally, music from various operas is heard throughout the movie.  Operas often involve lust and murder, or so I’ve been told.

About halfway through this movie, however, I began to notice similarities between this movie and An American Tragedy.  But there were also many differences, and I figured that including a discussion of Match Point in this review would be a stretch.  But then it occurred to me that whenever I fancy that I’ve had an original thought, it usually turns out that lots of other people have already had that thought.  So, I Googled it.  Lots of other people have already had that thought.  One critic suggested that since the story is set in England, the movie’s title should have been A British Tragedy.  The identities are now as follows:

Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) = George = Clyde

Nola (Scarlett Johansson) = Alice = Roberta

Chloe (Emily Mortimer) = Angela = Sondra

Chris, like Clyde, is ambitious.  He is a tennis player.  I don’t know if that has anything to do with the fact that a tennis racket was the murder weapon used by Chester Gillette, but I suspect the main reason is to supply us with a simile.  In the opening scene of the movie, we see a tennis ball being hit back and forth between two unseen players.  Suddenly, the ball hits the top of the net and bounces straight up.  The match will be determined by which way the ball falls, on which side of the net, a matter of sheer luck.  We hear Chris saying that as in tennis, so much of life is a matter of luck.

There are a lot of differences here and there between this movie and the ones discussed above.  For one thing, Chris and Nola don’t have sex just one time as did their counterparts in A Place in the Sun.  (As for the novel and the first movie version, I think they had sex just once, but it’s been a long time since I have read the former and seen the latter.)  Moreover, Chris is already married to Chloe when he gets Nola pregnant.  And whereas Clyde (George) lost interest in Roberta (Alice) as soon as Sondra (Angela) became available, in this movie, Chris is indifferent to Chloe, to whom he stays married in order to keep his position in her father’s business, but he is madly passionate about Nola.

Unlike the novel and the movie versions, where having an abortion is attempted but thwarted by the fact that it is illegal, in this movie, regardless of whatever the law is in England at this time, Nola has already had two abortions and could easily have a third when Chris gets her pregnant.  She decides she doesn’t want to have another one, saying that it is high time he left Chloe and married her.

This was a good way for Woody Allen to finesse this situation.  First, he probably wanted to avoid the cliché of a woman getting pregnant after doing it just once.  Second, Scarlett Johansson’s screen persona doesn’t suggest a woman that is pro-life.  So, he makes it clear that she has had sex with other men in the past, and many times with Chris.  Then he has her reject the solution of having an abortion, not as a matter of principle, but because she has already had two abortions, and she just doesn’t want to do that anymore.  So, what is different this time?  A woman’s attitude toward abortion is sometimes determined by her feelings for the man that impregnated her, and Nola is in love with Chris.

Chris decides to get out of this difficulty by killing her.  Having secreted one of his father-in-law’s shotguns out of the gun room, he uses it to kill an elderly lady that lives next door to make it look like a home invasion to steal her jewelry and prescription drugs.  Then he kills Nola just before she enters her apartment, making it look as though she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You would think that his killing Nola because her pregnancy threatens his comfortable life with Chloe would be sufficiently horrible all by itself.  But when he kills the elderly woman next door to cover his crime, that is an even greater evil.  It is not simply that killing two people is twice as bad as killing one.  It’s that the murder of the woman next door is decidedly more cold-blooded.

After the murders are discovered, the police read Nola’s diary and ask Chris to come in for an interview.  Before going there, he throws most of the woman’s jewelry into a river.  As he walks away, he realizes he still has the woman’s wedding ring.  He throws it toward the river, but unbeknownst to him, the ring bounces off the guardrail just like that tennis ball at the beginning of the movie.  It does not go into the river, but falls back on the pavement.  That appears to be bad luck for Chris.

Chris hallucinates one night, seeing himself in a conversation with Nola and the murdered neighbor.  Like a Greek chorus, they tell him he is doomed and will be punished.  He says, “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished.  At least there would be some small sign of justice.  Some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.”

We find it hard to believe that Chris would engage in this philosophical commentary at this point, even if he does read Dostoevsky and go to the opera.  Instead, we can’t help but regard this as Woody Allen’s statement on the story he is presenting us, delivered through the mouth of Chris.

It turns out that the fall of the ring on the pavement was actually good luck.  Just as one of the detectives figures out what really happened, another detective tells him the ring was found in the pocket of a drug addict with a long rap sheet, acting as confirmation of the original theory that it was a home invasion with Nola as collateral damage.  Now that guy will be punished for those murders he didn’t commit.  The movie ends with everyone in Chloe’s family being happy about the baby that she and Chris finally had.  Chloe’s father says he is sure the baby will be great at whatever he chooses to do, but her brother says he just hopes he will be lucky.

In An American Tragedy and its movie versions, Clyde (George) was not actually guilty of murder.  His decision not to kill Roberta (Alice) just as she accidentally falls into the lake and drowns is a matter of chance, like the tennis ball that might fall on one side of the net or the other.  But in Match Point, it is not the death of Nola that is a matter of chance.  It’s not as though Chris was thinking to himself, “I kill her not,” when he stumbles, causing the shotgun to go off accidentally.  Rather, the murders are an act of free will, not involving any element of chance.  It is only a matter of luck that he got away with it.

And so, the moral of this story is, there ain’t no moral.

Why Isn’t There a Children’s Day?

When children are at an early age, they learn about Mother’s Day.  About a month later, they learn about Father’s Day. Actually, Father’s Day is just another Mother’s Day in disguise. You see, if it were really a holiday for Dad, Mom would let him go to the pool hall or bowling alley and swill beer all day with the other fathers.  But no, Dad has to stay home and play the role of the fully domesticated male, whose life centers around the family, which is just the way Mom wants it.

In any event, it doesn’t take long for children to ask, “Why isn’t there a Children’s Day?” to which the standard answer is, “Every day is children’s day,” by which is meant that parents spend their lives doing stuff for their children, so if the kids think they are going to get a special day on top of that, they can forget about it.  Now, there is such a thing as Children’s Day, but not in the sense that children have in mind.  That is, they see Mom get a present on Mother’s Day and Dad get a somewhat less expensive present on Fathers Day, but they themselves never get presents on Children’s Day, and without the presents, the so-called Children’s Day is just a lot of talk.

And maybe the children have a point.  Adults get special treatment and consideration, if they have children.  For example, I have heard stories of parents getting off work to take care of their children while their single coworkers have to stay late and make up the difference.  Moreover, I have heard of criminals getting leniency if they have a child they have to take care of.  In other words, having a child can get an adult benefits that his or her childless counterpart does not.

All this is anecdotal, however.  I have no statistics.  I don’t have any children either. But what I do have is the movies.  And since art reflects life, and life reflects art, then from what I see in the movies, I figure something must be going on.

There was a time when the heroes of crime dramas and westerns were mostly bachelors.  Occasionally, a child might be featured to give the audience something to worry about, as in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), or to provide a point of view, as in Shane (1953).  But mostly, children were marginal characters, if they appeared in a film at all.

In the 1980s, heroes started becoming family men, as in Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988), and children played larger and larger roles, as in Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2 (1991), both of which feature heroes who are mothers. In fact, God himself became a child in Exodus:  Gods and Kings (2014).

Recently, however, the villains have started having children too.  Now, it was one thing when the heroes were portrayed as having children, for that was only supposed to make us love and admire them even more.  But when the villains have children, it definitely interferes with our natural desire to see them come to a bad end, and so much so, that they typically get away with their evil deeds.  How can we enjoy seeing a villain get what he deserves, whether by being killed or sent to prison, if we know that there is a little girl left behind, crying because Daddy is gone?  That is why in Shane, the Riker brothers do not seem to have wives or children.

Of course, when I say “children,” I am referring primarily to prepubescent children.  In My Darling Clementine (1946) and other Wyatt Earp films, we are not bothered by the fact that the chief villain, Ike Clanton, has sons, because they are all adults.  Conversely, if we are suspicious of a man’s character in a movie, the fact that he has no children, even though he is married, only adds to our misgivings, as in the movie Whispering Smith (1948).

We were able to forgive Vito and Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972), for instance, because they both loved their children.  But that movie was, at that time, an exception. Usually, gangsters died the way the title character of Scarface (1983) did.  Scarface might have been married, but that did not impede his glorious, blood-splattered death, especially since his wife was a sourpuss. If they had had a child, however, the final scene where Scarface introduces the horde of killers to his “little friend” would have been spoiled by our misgivings on that account.  Actually, one of the reasons we liked Scarface was that he refused to fulfill a contract, because it would have meant killing the man’s wife and child too. But as long as the child was not Scarface’s, we still got to see him pumped full of lead.

For this reason, villains seldom had children in the movies.  But that has changed. Now villains have children much more often, and such is the sanctifying nature of those children that these villains are redeemed.  In other words, villains are purposely being given children so that they can get away with their crimes with full audience approval.  In fact, they even get to live happily ever after.

For example, in Gone Girl (2014), a woman fakes evidence to make it look as though her husband murdered her, so that he will go to prison.  She leaves town with a lot of money, but when she is robbed, she needs to figure out another plan. She looks up an old boyfriend and goes to stay with him.  They start having sex, and just as he is getting to the good part, she slits his throat. Then she tells the police the guy abducted her. Normally, she would be punished for her crimes, as she rightly deserved.  But at the last minute, she turns out to be pregnant. Oh well, that changes everything.  Now her husband takes her back, and they live happily ever after.

Because this pregnancy saves this woman at the last minute, we are abruptly jolted from wanting her to get her just deserts to wanting her to get away with it all on account of the baby she is going to have.  Other movies, however, let us know about the children in advance, so we know to pull for the bad guy right from the beginning.  Moreover, they usually provide us with a throwaway villain who doesn’t have children, so that we can still enjoy seeing him come to a bad end, while allowing the villain who does have children to get away with it.

For example, in Hell or High Water (2016), which is a modern western, two brothers rob banks.  We really aren’t worried about the banks losing money, because wasn’t it the banks that caused the Great Recession somehow? Anyway, one brother is mean and vicious. The other is basically a nice guy. Guess which one has children. That’s right, even though innocent people are killed in their crime spree, the one with the children gets away with it, especially since he only wanted the money for those children.  There is a hint that the surviving bank robber will eventually get his just deserts at the hands of a retired sheriff, but we don’t really buy it.  If it didn’t happen on the big screen while we were watching the movie, it just didn’t happen.

In the movie Logan Lucky (2017), the main character plans a heist of a race track vault.  Just as bankers seemed to be fair game in Hell or High Water, so too do race tracks seem to be fair game as well, so we figure he just might get away with it.  But the fact that he has a little daughter, whom he adores and loves to spend time with, absolutely guarantees that he will not come to a bad end.  And just as there was a hint that the sheriff in Hell or High Water might eventually arrest the bank robber who had a child, there is a hint in Logan Lucky that the FBI agent, who shows up in the local bar at the end, might someday crack the case, but we don’t buy that either.

In the movie Don’t Breathe (2016), there are three villains.  One villain is really disgusting, obnoxious, and mean.  We know that he has been put in the movie to satisfy our need for justice, to see a bad guy get what he deserves. Needless to say, he doesn’t have children.  A second villain is a nice guy, but he doesn’t have children either, so he too is doomed.  Being nice is not enough.  A third villain, a young woman, has a young sister that she takes care of, all motherly like, so we know she is going to get away with her crimes.

These three villains burglarize houses.  They decide to escalate to a home invasion of a blind man, who they figure has lots of money stashed away in the house.  The blind man lost his daughter in an automobile accident, so that makes us really feel sorry for him.  Turns out, however, that this guy has the woman who killed his daughter chained up in the basement, so he is a villain too, actually a worse one than the three burglars. The blind man got the woman pregnant, because he wanted a replacement child.  Oh, well that’s different.  I mean, if he wants a child, he must be all right.  Except, we are a little bothered by the idea of his raping the woman he has chained up. But never fear.  He didn’t rape her.  He artificially inseminated her.  When that woman ends up getting killed, he plans on making the female villain take her place, artificially inseminating her too.  But she gets away. So, in the end, the female villain gets away with her crimes, because she has a little sister she loves and takes care of. And the blind man who is a monster gets away with his crime, because he lost a child and just wanted another one.

And so, if these movies are any indication, having a child will let you get away with murder and other such horrible crimes.  At the very least, they give you an excuse to get off work early. Therefore, it is time for adults to show their appreciation and declare a national Children’s Day.  And I mean one in which the children get presents.

Wilson (1944)

Having finished watching Wilson, I decided to compare it with other biopics of American presidents.  I was surprised how few presidents have had movies made based on their lives.  Abraham Lincoln gets the award for having the most, and he is the only president so featured prior to Wilson save Andrew Johnson.  After Wilson, there is a movie about Andrew Jackson in the early 1950s, and that is just about it until we get to the 1960s when American culture underwent radical change with the movies following suit.  And needless to say, movies about presidents after Nixon and the Watergate scandal would never be the same.

Regarding the pre-1960s biopics of American presidents, it is clear why they are so few in number.  They are insufferable, being both boring and cloying.  Notwithstanding all the money that was spent on the elaborate sets in making the movie about Woodrow Wilson, it is completely lacking in entertainment value.  Nothing bad about Wilson is depicted.  For example, we don’t find out anything about what a racist he was.  But those who produced this movie were not content simply to omit anything even slightly negative in his character.  Like those who made movies about Lincoln during this period, they felt compelled to go way beyond mere omission and make the case that Wilson was no mere ordinary mortal, but rather was too good for this world, on a moral and spiritual plane high above his contemporaries, all but canonizing him for sainthood.