The Dollars Trilogy (1964, 1965, and 1966)

I was in college when I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for the movie For a Few Dollars More (1965).  The tagline was as follows:  “The man with no name is back…  The man in black is waiting…” So, it was obviously a sequel.  I wondered how I could have overlooked the first movie, whatever its name was, but in any event, I decided to wait until I saw the first one before watching the second.  Finally, a friend of mine, who had just seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and who had also seen For a Few Dollars More, said the movies, all of which were directed by Sergio Leone, were unrelated as to story, so I should just watch whatever was available.  As result, I ended up seeing the movies in reverse order, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly first, For a Few Dollars More second, and A Fistful of Dollars (1964) last.

I must admit, I was a little disappointed.  Compared to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which was rich in style and story, A Fistful of Dollars seemed to be cheaply made, which, as a matter of fact, it was.  But eventually, it became one of my favorite movies.

Years later I read that the movie was an unofficial remake of Yojimbo (1961), directed by Akira Kurosawa, which led to a lawsuit by Toho, the Japanese film company that produced it.  While this movie itself had its antecedents, such as Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and Red Harvest, which in turn were preceded by The Servant of Two Masters, an eighteenth century play by Carlo Goldini, the almost scene-for-scene duplication of Yojimbo in A Fistful of Dollars made me wonder how Leone’s lawyers could have defended their client with a straight face.  In any event, the lawsuit may have had something to do with why For a Few Dollars More showed up in the local theaters where I lived before A Fistful of Dollars did.

The basic idea in Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars is that of a man playing two warring factions off against each other as he seems to be on one side and then the other as suits his purposes.  In A Fistful of Dollars, the central character is played by Clint Eastwood.  I had never seen a Western where the hero had a beard, wore a poncho, smoked a cigar, and rode a mule, but there he was. Eventually, this character, who would also appear in the sequels, would become known as “the Man with No Name,” but here he is given the nickname “Joe” by the coffinmaker, a generic name for an American.  In For a Few Dollars More, his name is Monco, but after the idea of the Man with No Name caught on, the scene where a sheriff refers to Eastwood’s character as Monco was snipped out of most prints, although a later scene where he is so referred to is not.  In any event, both scenes are in the DVD.

The principal character in Yojimbo, played by Toshirô Mifune, does not seem to have a name either, though he allows himself to be called Sanjuro Kuwabatake.  This feature seems to have originated with the Continental Op stories, of which Red Harvest was one, for that character has no name either.  It is the culmination of a tendency of having the hero be devoid of a family and not a part of any community.  Being a bachelor, he would have neither wife nor children.  There would be no reference to his parents, presumed to be dead, if we thought of them at all.  But as a man gets his name from his parents, the idea of a man with no name would seem to imply that he never had any parents, as impossible as that is.  At one point in A Fistful of Dollars, after Joe has been hired by the Rojos brothers, he is given a room to stay in and told to make himself at home.  “I never found home all that great,” he replies, “but thanks.”

By the 1980s, heroes in the movies would start having all sorts of stressful family connections.  I could list many examples, but I’ll stick to just one, which is Unforgiven (1992), where Clint Eastwood stars in a Western in which he is a widower with two young children.  We gather that he used to be someone similar to the Man with No Name, but who was then domesticated by a wife that reformed him, getting him to settle down and raise a family on a small farm.  I guess the idea was to make the movies more relevant for the baby boomers, who were all saddled with family complications themselves.  But back in the old days, it was assumed that audiences wanted to forget about all that by identifying with a completely unattached hero.  It all depends on what you want from a movie, relevance or escapism.

Joe is a hired gun who drifts around looking for someone to pay him for his services. Soon after arriving in San Miguel, a small Mexican town, he finds out that there are two rival factions, the Rojos and the Baxters: the former making their living dealing in liquor; the latter, guns.  Smugglers periodically load up on the guns and liquor and take them north across the border, where they sell them to the Indians.  That was a nice touch.  There was nothing like that in Yojimbo, where the rival factions deal in silk and saké, for the simple reason, I assume, that they don’t have Indians in Japan. But here in America, it was standard in the movies that Indians could not hold their liquor.  It was often illegal to sell it to them because they would get drunk and go on the warpath. And in this case, they would be outfitted with the guns that were also being illegally supplied to them.  In other words, whereas the evil in Yojimbo is confined to just the town where the action takes place, in A Fistful of Dollars, it extends well beyond San Miguel, even reaching into another country.

Both families want complete control of the town, and Joe hires out first to one side and then to the other, making more and more money as he does so.  At that level, he is completely amoral. However, he forms a friendship with Silvanito, the owner of the saloon, who tries to get Joe to leave town before he ends up being killed like so many others.  Silvanito corresponds to Gonji in Yojimbo. One of the hallmarks of a Leone movie is humor, and the difference between these two characters is an example of that.  Whereas Gonji is just an angry man, always complaining, Silvanito is amusing, using his dry wit to provide a running commentary on the situation in San Miguel.  In fact, that is a difference between the two movies in general, Yojimbo being serious, even angry in its tone, while A Fistful of Dollars, hardly a comedy, continually causes us to smile, if not laugh, at some of the scenes and dialogue.

Joe also becomes friends with Piripero, the coffinmaker, who makes a good living providing coffins for all the men who get killed in the feud between the two families. And Joe also takes pity on an innocent family, in which the wife is held as a sex slave by Ramón Rojos (Gian Maria Volentè).  Joe helps that family escape, but is almost killed as a result.  In the end, the Rojos wipe out the Baxters, and then Joe kills the Rojos. Inasmuch as Joe gave all his money to the family he rescued, he is no better off than when he first arrived in San Miguel.  But that’s all right, because he will simply move on to another town, where he will find someone willing to pay for his services.  In other words, the two friends and the business about the family aside, Joe is still an amoral hired killer.

In Yojimbo, Sanjuro has a nobler motive.  He tells Gonji that the town is full of men that deserve to die.  If he can figure a way to kill off all these men, the town will get a fresh start.  In A Fistful of Dollars, however, all Joe cares about is getting paid as a hired gun. It is perhaps a subtle difference, but it is nevertheless a shift in the amoral direction.

In Yojimbo, all the fighting has to stop when a government official arrives, so we have the sense that there is such a thing as law and order in this region, this town being an exception.  In A Fistful of Dollars, on the other hand, the law is both worthless and corrupt.  When Joe kills four of Baxter’s men for refusing to apologize to his mule, but actually to prove to the Rojos what he is worth as a hired gun, Baxter shows Joe his badge, saying he is the sheriff.  Joe tells him that since he is the sheriff, he should see to it that the dead men are put in the ground.  Then he turns his back on him and walks away.  Furthermore, Ramón and his men massacre a company of American soldiers, has his men put on their uniforms, and then they massacre a company of Mexican soldiers that were planning on buying guns from the Americans. Therefore, not even the armies of either country have much of an effect on what takes place in San Miguel.

It was the amoral quality of this movie that was the most problematic for the censors when the movie needed to be edited for television after ABC bought the rights to broadcast it in 1975.  The censors were old hands at bleeping out bad words, snipping out nudity, and reducing or minimizing scenes of violence, but these standard techniques were not enough.  No matter how much of the violence was suppressed, the amoral character of the Man with No Name still came through.

Then someone came up with a clever idea.  Instead of cutting stuff out, why not add stuff in?  So, taking advantage of the fact that smugglers in the movie were buying guns and liquor in San Miguel and selling them to the Indians in the United States, an additional scene was filmed in which some guy, dressed up to look like the Man with No Name, is let out of prison on condition that he will work undercover for the United States government, with the job of eliminating the two rival gangs of San Miguel. Legitimate government agents have gone there previously, but they have all been killed.  It is Joe’s job to pretend to be a hired gun who cares about nothing but money. If he succeeds in eliminating the Rojos and the Baxters by playing off one side against the other, he will receive a pardon for his crimes.

To those who were familiar with the movie, it was obvious that this preliminary scene was not part of the original.  For one thing, Joe’s poncho was too long.  And why would a prisoner be allowed to wear a poncho anyway, along with his boots, cowboy hat, and cigar?  At one point, we see a close up of Clint Eastwood’s face, which is clearly taken from a scene in the movie.  But usually the Eastwood replacement keeps his hand on his cigar while he smokes it so he can conceal his face.  He is told by Harry Dean Stanton, the warden, not to talk, so the censors didn’t have to worry about faking Eastwood’s voice. Finally, when this fake Joe is given his pistol, the barrel is longer than the one used in the movie.

Notwithstanding all these clues, a lot of people thought this was part of the original movie.  Another of Sergio Leone’s movies, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), had had a lot of footage cut out for theatrical release in the United States, much of which was added back in when it came to television. As a result, it was thought by many that something similar had happened here.  It even fooled Peter Bondanella, who refers to this added scene as if it were part of the original movie in his book Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present.  At least, that’s what he wrote in the first edition in 1983.  Whether he has corrected it in subsequent editions, I cannot say.

What really fascinated me about this extra footage was that even though I knew it for what it was, it contaminated my viewing of the rest of the movie.  I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that Joe was really not just a hired gun, but actually an undercover agent.  In fact, some of the dialogue in the movie almost seemed to encourage the idea.  For example, at one point, Ramón says of Joe, “I don’t like that Americano.  He’s too smart just to be a hired fighter.” When I heard that, I involuntarily thought, “He’s right.  Joe is actually working for the United States government.” Many years have passed since then, and I have seen the movie many times during those years, but to this day, when I hear Ramón deliver that line, that involuntary thought pops into my head.

On the subject of censorship, real or imagined, Eastwood once said that prior to A Fistful of Dollars, the Production Code did not allow the man shooting a gun and the man being shot to be in the same frame, but that Leone was the first director to film such scenes.  Many critics have accepted this assertion of Eastwood without question and have repeated it as if it were gospel.  And indeed, when we do see such scenes in Leone’s movies, where the man shooting the gun is in the same frame with the man being shot, the impact is much greater than when they are filmed separately, as is the case in most movies.  But Eastwood was wrong.  Perhaps he was thinking of Rawhide (1959-1965), a television show he worked on where such a restriction may well have been in force.  But not so with the movies. There are numerous examples of earlier Hollywood movies in which the man shooting and the person being shot are in the same frame, but here are just a few from some of the more well-known films:

This Gun for Hire (1942):  Early in the movie, Raven (Alan Ladd) and a blackmailer are in the same frame when he shoots him. At the end of the movie, a cop shoots Raven, and they are both in the same frame.

The Big Sleep (1946):  When Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) shoots Canino (Bob Steele) several times, they are both in the same frame.

High Noon (1952):  Will Kane (Gary Cooper) shoots Frank Miller and, before that, two of those in his gang, and each time he is in the same frame with the man he is shooting.

Shane (1953):  Wilson (Jack Palance) shoots Torrey (Elisha Cook, Jr.) in the same frame. And in the final shootout in the saloon, Shane (Alan Ladd) shoots Ryker (Emile Meyer) in the same frame as well.

Rio Bravo (1959):  There are so many scenes in this movie in which the shooter and the person being shot are in the same frame that it is not worth listing them all. In the first one, someone is shot at pointblank range.

The Comancheros (1961):  In the opening scene, Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) kills a man in a duel in the same frame. Later on, Captain Jake Cutter (John Wayne) shoots several men in the same frame.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962):  When we find out who really shot Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), we see Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) shoot Valance while in the same frame.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962):  We see Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) shoot another soldier in the head in the same frame during a flashback. Later, Shaw shoots his wife in the same frame as himself.

Speaking of the impact of seeing a man firing his pistol and another man getting shot in the same frame, Leone managed to make these scenes seem realistic, even though Joe’s skill with a gun seems unbelievable when we think about it later.  Early in the movie, he beats four men to the draw, while in the final showdown at the end of the movie, he beats five men to the draw.  Of course, Joe is a professional gunfighter, who probably spends several hours every day working with his gun.  As that friend I referred to above remarked, the men he kills are “just a bunch of North Side punks that strapped on a gun.”  In any event, the scenes seem realistic at the moment we watch them.  By the 1970s, however, there began a trend toward silliness.  Terence Hill’s Trinity character did stuff with his pistol that we didn’t believe for a minute, and we weren’t supposed to.  Leone himself, much to my chagrin, even contributed to this trend in My Name Is Nobody (1973).

As noted above, there were several features of this Man with No Name that were unusual for a Western hero:  a cigar, a beard, a poncho, and a mule.  The poncho turned out to be more than just a matter of style.  In Yojimbo, after Sanjuro has demonstrated his unequaled skill with a sword, halfway through the movie one of the gang members shows up with a pistol.  Naturally, we wonder how a man with a sword will be able to cope with that.  In the final scene, Sanjuro throws a knife, hitting the man with the pistol in his arm, after which he uses his sword to finish him off.

In A Fistful of Dollars, there is a scene where Joe and Ramón are using a suit of armor as target practice. Ramón says to Joe, “When you want to kill a man, you must shoot for his heart and a Winchester is the best weapon.”

Joe replies, “That’s very nice, but I’ll stick with my forty-five.”

To this Ramón says, “When a man with a forty-five meets a man with a rifle, the man with the pistol will be a dead man.”

This scene establishes three things:  the man with a pistol will be at a disadvantage against a man with a rifle; Ramón believes that to kill a man, you must shoot for the heart; and that suit of armor would be no defense against a gun, since it is full of bullet holes.

In the final showdown, Joe walks down the street while Ramón repeatedly shoots at him, aiming only at his heart, as Joe closes in.  Joe falls when the bullets hit, but then rises again, reminding Ramón to aim for the heart, or he’ll never stop him.  Finally, when Ramón is out of bullets, Joe reveals a solid piece of iron hidden underneath his poncho, a possibility that never occurred to Ramón because the suit of armor in his house was ineffective against bullets.  And that’s when we realize the purpose for this odd piece of clothing, the poncho.  It was put in the movie so that Joe would have a way of concealing the iron armor.  Although not needed for that purpose in the sequels, it became iconic, making its way into second and third parts of the dollars trilogy, right along with the cigar and beard. As for the mule, we never saw him again.

Several critics have argued that the Westerns made after the end of World War II, through the 1950s, and into the first couple of years of the 1960s, reflected the the attitudes of Americans during the Cold War. For example, one might see High Noon (1952) as an allegorical criticism of the way people that were blacklisted in Hollywood were abandoned by their friends, or regard The Magnificent Seven (1960) as justifying American intervention in third-world countries for their benefit.  If so, we might see A Fistful of Dollars as expressing a revulsion against the Cold War, seeing both American Imperialism and Soviet Communism as equally corrupt and exploitive. While the servant-of-two-masters theme antedated this attitude concerning the Cold War, some of the popularity of A Fistful of Dollars may be attributed to the timely way this theme resonated with the growing cynicism regarding this conflict between the superpowers.

The Rojos, the Baxters, and Joe constituted a three-way conflict.  Perhaps this inspired Leone to have another three-way conflict in the sequel, For a Few Dollars More.  In this case, Monco (Clint Eastwood) is a bounty hunter, or, as is said in the movie, a “bounty killer.”  He competes with Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), another bounty hunter, hoping to cash in by bringing in El Indio (Gian Maria Volentè) and his gang. Mortimer is also motivated by revenge.  His sister shot herself while Indio was in the act of raping her, something that still haunts Indio.  Only by smoking marijuana can he get some temporary relief from that trauma.

This was the last time someone that was truly evil in a movie smoked a marijuana cigarette.  Since then, if a character in a movie smokes marijuana, we are supposed to like him, something I discussed more fully in an earlier essay, “Movie Marijuana.”  A possible exception is the television series Narcos (2015-2017), in which we see Pablo Escobar, a pretty evil character, regularly smoking weed. However, there is another drug dealer in that show, Gacha, who doesn’t smoke marijuana, and he turns out to be really evil by comparison.  So, everything is relative.

The prologue said, “Where life had no value, death, sometimes had a price.”  And so we see, at the end of the movie, when Monco is piling up the bodies of Indio’s gang into a wagon, adding up the amounts each corpse is worth. Mortimer has gotten his revenge and doesn’t want it spoiled by profiting from the killing of Indio, so he leaves it all to Monco.  At first, Monco is wondering why the sum does not reach the total he was expecting.  But then, upon hearing a noise, he turns and kills the last bad guy, bringing the account into balance.  Referring again to Westerns as reflecting attitudes by and about Americans, this might be a comment on capitalism, which values the worth of a man in terms of dollars alone.

In A Fistful of Dollars, the Man with No Name profits by hiring out to the two sides of a conflict.  In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the Man with No Name profits by avoiding, as much as possible, the conflict between the North and the South during the Civil War.  This seems like a good idea, given the way this movie depicts the war as not just killing men, but also crippling them.  This theme of avoiding the war fit right in with the one being fought at that time in Vietnam, where many young men did all they could to avoid being drafted.

Prior to the release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, whenever a bunch of people in a movie embarked on a project to obtain a great deal of money, something always went wrong. In some cases, the project was illegal, and given the Production Code in force at the time, the criminals had to die or be arrested, as in The Asphalt Jungle (1950).  In It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the treasure hunters are not criminals, but the buried treasure was stolen loot, so they all had to be arrested in the end. But even when the enterprise was entirely legal, there was an unwritten rule that it must fail, that trying to become rich in some quick and easy way, without holding down a regular job, was wrong and must not be rewarded. For example, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), there was nothing illegal about the three men prospecting for gold, but it had to fail nevertheless. When the two surviving members of the team realize that all their gold has been lost, they laugh about it. Presumably, even when the search for money was legal, it had to fail, the movie’s way of telling us we should be content with our lot. One slight exception is King Solomon’s Mines (1950 et al.). The people in the movie do manage to keep a handful of gems, but the vast treasure is lost for good.  Another exception might be For a Few Dollars More, since Monco does get to collect the bounty on all those men he killed.  But in that case, being a bounty hunter is his profession, and he is just making a living.

But then came The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Three men set out to find buried treasure, and something incredible happens: the treasure does not turn out to be worthless Confederate bonds; it does not blow away in the wind; the men pursuing the treasure are not arrested; and only one of them dies, leaving the other two alive to split the loot. Nothing like that had ever been seen in a movie before, and the violation of the taboo against that sort of thing was exhilarating.  The idea that rapacious capitalism is restrained by some kind of karmic principle, thwarting those who would try to get more money than they deserve, met its end with this movie.

This amoral ending was perfectly in line, however, with all that had come before in that movie. Were it not for the advance notice provided by the tagline, “For three men the Civil War wasn’t Hell. It was practice,” as well as some pictures we see during the credits, we would not even realize that the movie was set in the Civil War when it begins. And it is only gradually that we become aware of the war, because it really does not seem to concern the three principal characters:  the Ugly, Tuco (Eli Wallach), is a bandit; the Good, Blondie (Clint Eastwood), is a bounty hunter; and the Bad, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), is a hired killer.

Here again, we have a three-way conflict, but different from those in the first two dollars movies.  In addition to the two moral categories, the Good and the Bad, we have an aesthetic category, the Ugly. Tuco, who personifies this category, and is something of a trickster figure, steals the show.  He is scroungy, and yet, he is something of a dandy. He uses a pink parasol to protect himself from the sun when he and Blondie and traveling through the desert.  He dips a little snuff from the snuffbox he lifted from a corpse. When he takes a bath, he makes sure it is heavily scented. And, when this movie came out in the late 1960s, there were those who said, “Tuco runs like a girl.”  But those were less enlightened times.

A parenthetical note:  Eli Wallach was a Jew that often played Italians, as in Baby Doll (1956); and in Westerns, he played Mexicans, as in The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  It’s fortunate that these movies were made before it became unacceptable to cast someone in a role with an ethnicity other than his own, for then Wallach would have been restricted to playing only Jewish characters, and we would have been deprived of some great performances.  

In any event, the Bad is unequivocally evil, but the Good is hardly a saint. We mainly know Blondie is the Good because the words “the good” appear under his image in a frozen frame.  But we also know he is the Good because he is tall and handsome.  Like the Ugly category, the Good is partly aesthetic, and only partly moral.  This three-way opposition of moral and aesthetic categories apparently met a need of the understanding, for we still hear people using this phrase that is the title of this movie to this day.

This three-way opposition ends in a fantastic three-way gunfight.  Prior to that climax, each man pursues his own business with no interest in the war. Where the war does get their attention, they are repelled, as when Tuco looks at the wounded men in a mission, many of whom are missing limbs, or when Blondie says he’s never seen so many men wasted so badly.  In additional footage seen only in the Italian version, Angel Eyes, referred to as Setenza, is pained by what he sees in another place of refuge for the wounded.  And when this psychopath feels someone else’s pain, that is pain indeed.

Only when they find out about buried Confederate gold does the war take on significance for these three men, especially when Blondie and Tuco need to cross a bridge to get to the cemetery where they know the gold is buried in one of the graves. There are Yankee soldiers on one side and Confederate soldiers on the other.  Every day, there are two battles for that bridge, which the commanding officer of the Yankees, a captain, refers to as a slaughter.  The movie makes an interesting comment about the importance of alcohol in war.  We have all heard about how Ulysses S. Grant was an alcoholic, whom Lincoln kept in command even though he was aware of Grant’s drunkenness.  In the Italian version, this movie makes the point, through the mouth of the captain, that only by getting drunk is it possible to send so many men to their deaths.  In other words, it was not despite his drunkenness that Grant was so successful in war, but because of it.  Through encouragement from the captain, Blondie and Tuco blow up the bridge so that the soldiers will leave the area, which has as an incidental byproduct the result that the pointless daily slaughter is brought to an end.  But essentially, as they pursue the gold, Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes walk through the war as if they were walking through a room.

At the risk of going too far with the idea that Westerns reflect the values and attitudes of contemporary America, is this not the way most of us relate to war nowadays? While those in the military go off to other countries to fight, the rest of us remain at home, pursuing our material interests with little thought given to the soldiers that are crippled or killed. When we do see some of that on the nightly news, we shake our heads, either in disgust or pity, and then have dinner.

After Blondie kills Angel Eyes in the three-way gunfight, Tuco realizes that Blondie unloaded his gun the night before. Since they have yet to dig up the grave with the gold in it, Blondie says, “You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend, those with loaded guns, and those who dig.  You dig.”  That pretty much captures the essence of slavery, which is what the Civil War was all about.  It turns out that the gold is buried in a grave marked “Unknown.” This grave with no name is a fitting coda for the last movie featuring the Man with No Name.

“Morning Joe” Needs a Divorce

For a long time now there have been rumors about a romantic relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, cohosts of Morning Joe.  I never gave those stories much credence. When a man and woman spend a lot of time together for whatever reason, then if they seem to be physically suited to each other, we naturally put them together sexually in our imagination.  So even if we never play cupid in deed, we often do so in thought.  However, when Mika disputed a point Joe was making a couple of weeks ago, he said she was being “rude” and “snotty.” That’s when I said to myself, “I guess those rumors must be true.”  As it turns out, they plan to get married.

Let me confess that I am a naïve bachelor who does not always understand all the wicked ways of the world.  Not only have I never been married, but I have never lived with anyone either, save when I was growing up and living with my parents, whose screaming arguments provided at least some secondhand knowledge as to what marriage must be like.  It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is something about marriage that releases us from the norms of polite conversation, allowing people to say vicious things to each other that they would never dream of saying even to people they dislike.

The question that poses itself to me is this:  Is it the sexual nature of a relationship that allows people to feel they can be rude to each other, or is it is the fact that they live together?  I have never had a roommate, so I cannot say how simply living with someone would affect my sense of etiquette regarding him. And in any event, people rarely have the same roommate for very long. Similarly, I never had a girlfriend for more than a couple of years before she would break up with me, so I cannot be sure about the effect that sex has on polite behavior over a long period of time.

There are plenty of people that are either married or living together, but they are not likely to be completely forthcoming about any discord between them behind closed doors, even if I had the bad taste to come right out and ask them about it. One does get hints, however.  When I used to go dancing, I found that it was not uncommon for a married couple to have dancing partners other than each other. Those that did not could often be seen quarreling on the dance floor.  I play bridge a lot now, and there too have I found that married couples tend to have partners other than each other. Mind you, dancing partners and bridge partners will often become lovers and may even marry; but when the marriage comes first, it is less likely to lead to such partnerships.

I once had a girlfriend who decided to go back to college and get a degree. Sometimes she would have classes in the morning and then again in the afternoon, with a couple of hours to kill in between.  She lived too far away from the campus to go home, but my apartment was much closer.  So, I gave her a key so that she could use my place to have lunch and study while I was at work. Because she brought her own lunch, she would clean up her containers afterwards.  But when she was through, she would leave a sopping wet steel wool soap pad in the bottom of the sink.  The first time that happened, I simply squeezed the pad and put it back in the soap dish at the top of the sink, thinking no more about it.  A couple of days later (her classes were on Tuesdays and Thursdays), there was the soap pad again lying in the bottom of the sink sopping wet.  When it happened a third time, I knew this was no mere oversight, but a serious character flaw.

So, did I say anything to her about it?  Absolutely not.   I loved her with all my heart, and our romance was nothing but sweetness and light.  Why would I want to spoil the good feeling between us over a lousy soap pad? True, I probably went through soap pads a little more often than had previously been the case, but men have shelled out a lot more money than that for the sake of love, so who cares about a few extra bucks now and then?  And yet, the thought occurred to me: How long would I tolerate that sopping wet soap pad in the bottom of the sink if we were married?  This was a complete counterfactual, of course, but the question intrigued me nevertheless.  I could not say from experience, but intuitively I suspected that eventually in this hypothetical marriage, I would have reached the point of not being able to stand it any longer. At some point I would have felt compelled to ask her not to leave the sopping wet soap pad in the bottom of the sink and would she please squeeze it out and return it to the soap dish where she found it!

All to no avail, of course, because you cannot change someone after you marry him or her.  The net result would have been a source of contention and irritation between us.  So, why would I have introduced this discord into our marriage when I was prudent enough not to do so when we were just lovers? If the latter would have been unwise, so too would be the former. And yet, I somehow just knew that there was no way we could stay married for twenty or thirty years without the subject of those soap pads coming up. It simply could not be endured!

Reflecting on this, I concluded that when a man and woman are not lovers, they unconsciously are aware that they might be someday, and thus they are on their best behavior, even if they never consciously intend to date each other.  And even if they do become lovers, they remain for a while on their best behavior lest they foul their little love nest by quarreling.  But as the passion wears off, people get to the point that they just don’t care about being nice anymore. Lovers not living together can simply break up or even just drift apart, and roommates can move out, but married couples don’t have the same easy options, and thus the pressure builds up.

I used to work at a department store that had a policy about married coworkers. If two people in a store got married, one of them had to transfer to another store. Presumably, no one wanted to have to listen to a squabbling married couple.  And I understand that in gambling casinos, married couples are not allowed to play at the same poker table, probably for the same reason.

And so it is that it would probably be for the best if either Mika or Joe left Morning Joe and found employment elsewhere. Sure, they got past the “rude” and “snotty” business.  Perhaps that is what led Joe to propose to Mika, as if to make up for being so hateful.  But that won’t last.  Morning Joe is my favorite talk show, but I shudder to think how things will unfold as the years of marriage wears them down.

Inside Llewn Davis (2013)

The Coen brothers have made a movie about a self-important, obnoxious bum who sponges off people because he believes he was meant for better things than holding down a job.  But such a movie, without any frills, would immediately be dismissed as irritating and boring.  And so it needs some frills.

First, they decided to make this bum a folk singer.  They had previously made the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), which succeeded with people that liked the music, although it failed miserably with anyone that did not.  So maybe they figured this movie would appeal to people that like folk music.  And even if the folk music in the movie is pretty bad, at least as far as the music performed by the title character is concerned, we know we are supposed to overlook the fact that he is a self-important, obnoxious bum because he is an artist, and that means we are supposed to care.

Frill number two is a cat.  Having a cat continually appear and then disappear gives the movie a motif, making it appear that there is some deeper, hidden meaning to it all.  There isn’t, but something has to get this movie on its legs.  The cat eventually turns out to have the name Ulysses.  Gosh, you mean the return of the cat is like the return of Ulysses?  Well, telling a dumb story with parallels to The Odyssey worked for James Joyce, so maybe the Coen brothers figured it would work for them too.  And it recalls the main character in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?  So make that two dumb movies by the Coen brothers that are supposed to be spiced up somehow by alluding Homer’s epic, with the second one also alluding to the first.

Finally, there is a time loop.  Sort of.  Except that in the second iteration of the time loop, the cat does not get away.  Now, there are some pretty good time loop movies.  Dead of Night (1945) was the first movie I know of to try this, and it worked fairly well.  And, of course, the greatest such movie is Groundhog Day (1993).  But does a time loop belong in a movie about a folk singer?  I mean, some genres don’t really mix well.  It’s like a movie that starts out as a murder mystery, and halfway through, while we are trying to figure out who done it, Godzilla comes to town.  However, the Coen brothers were desperate for another frill to keep this movie from seeming to be what it really is, and so a time loop is what we get.

Capricorn One (1977)

Shortly after we put a man on the moon, a conspiracy theory emerged that it never really happened, that the whole thing was filmed in the Arizona desert. Capricorn One is based on this conspiracy theory, except that instead of the moon, the plot of this movie consists of an effort to fake a manned mission to Mars.  It seems that Congress is ready to cut NASA’s budget at the first opportunity, and when it turns out that the planned mission would fail, certain bigwigs at NASA decide to fake the Mars mission to keep Congress at bay.

One of the problems with conspiracy-theory movies like this one is that there are too many conspirators. There are, of course, the superiors at NASA that are in on it.  Reluctantly, the three astronauts have to go along with it because the conspirators threaten to have their families killed if they don’t.  The astronauts are taken to a remote location where they can be filmed supposedly walking around on Mars, so a film crew must be added to the list of conspirators, as well as men who will guard the astronauts in case they have second thoughts about going along with it.

However, when the spaceship returns from Mars, the module loses its heat shield on its return to Earth, which would mean the death of the three astronauts.  The astronauts realize that the conspirators will try to kill them to cover things up.  They escape and steal the jet that took them to their isolated location.  However, they run out of fuel and have to land in the middle of a desert.  When they get out of the jet, one of them delivers the best line of the movie: “It looks like we’re on Mars.”

In addition to the conspirators mentioned thus far, helicopter pilots are needed to search for the astronauts and kill them when they find them.  Later on, the helicopters try to shoot down a crop-dusting plane with the one surviving astronaut, Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), on board along with Robert Caulfield (Elliot Gould), a reporter.  Earlier in the movie, some mechanics that are also a part of the conspiracy sabotaged Caulfield’s car in an effort to get him killed in an accident.  Since that didn’t work, some Drug Enforcement Agents that are also in on the conspiracy plant some cocaine in Caulfield’s apartment and arrest him for possession.

Another problem with movies like this one is the conspiracy becomes overly complicated.  A complication worth singling out for special attention is that of trying to make it appear that someone never existed.  In this movie, that person would be Elliot Whitter, a technician at mission control.  He figures out that the television signals are not coming from Mars but are really coming from somewhere on Earth, about three hundred miles away.  He tells his superiors, but as they are in on the conspiracy, they tell him not to worry about it.  However, they are worried about him. He tells his friend Caulfield about the signals one night over a game of pool.  Just then, Caulfield is called to the telephone, which allows some henchmen to spirit Whitter away and then kill him.

The next day, Caulfield goes to Whitter’s apartment, which he has been to many times before over the years.  When he arrives, there is a woman pretending that she is the occupant of the apartment and that she knows nothing about Whitter. The apartment has been completely redecorated and refurnished, and there are stacks of magazines addressed to this woman.

This is totally absurd.  The simplest thing to do would be to just let Caulfield go to the apartment and find that no one is home.  Sure, he could report his friend’s disappearance to Missing Persons, but people go missing all the time. There would have been no need to include that woman as part of the conspiracy, not to mention all the people needed to completely renovate the apartment.  Oh, and the people in the leasing office are part of the conspiracy too, because they show him rental receipts from her for over a year.  And the personnel department at NASA is in on it too, because they say they have no record of Whitter ever working there, and they have never heard of him.

By letting Caulfield knock on the door and find that no one is home, nothing would have been lost but the absurdity.  He could still have continued to investigate based on Whitter’s remark at the pool table.  Moreover, the woman in the apartment claiming to be the tenant and the scrubbed records in the personnel department at NASA only confirm that something insidious is going on, thereby guaranteeing that Caulfield will start investigating; whereas if Whitter had merely disappeared, Caulfield might have shrugged the whole thing off.

But why kill Whitter anyway?  The superiors at NASA could continue to dismiss Whitter’s concerns as a computer malfunction.  And if he persisted with his story, most people would laugh him off as some goofball who is into conspiracy theories.

Given that it is not only preposterous but also unnecessary to try to make Caulfield believe that his friend Whitter never existed, at least the apartment where Whitter was living was still there.  Imagine if Caulfield had gone to visit Whitter and found that the apartment he lived in was no longer there, with only a wall where his door used to be!

Such is the basic idea of So Long at the Fair (1950).  During the 1889 Paris Exposition, Victoria Barton (Jean Simmons) and her brother Johnny check into a hotel.  She gets room 17, and he gets room 19. The next morning, Victoria finds that Johnny has disappeared along with the room he was in.  The hotel manager, Hervé, her brother, Narcisse, and the porter all deny that she arrived with her brother, and they insist that there never was a room number 19.  The bathroom on that floor now has the number 19 on it instead.

Victoria remembers that she spoke to the maid that cleaned Johnny’s room, and she figures that the maid will support her story.  However, the maid and her boyfriend go up in a balloon, the balloon catches fire, and everyone on it is killed.  Now, did the balloon accidentally catch on fire, or did Narcisse manage to sabotage it while no one was looking?  Complicated conspiracy movies like this one often avail themselves of such ambiguity:  if an accident seems unlikely, we can think of it as part of the conspiracy; if being part of the conspiracy then seems unlikely, we can go back to thinking it was an accident.

With the aid of a man Victoria recently met, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), they discover that the door to the room Johnny was in was walled over.  The reason for this is that Johnny got sick during the night. A doctor diagnosed it as the plague.  Fearing that the entire Exposition would be ruined if word got out, with the hotel in particular losing lots of money, Hervé and the doctor move Johnny to a hospital under another name.  Then they managed to construct a fake wall over the door to his room in the middle of the night without waking anyone.

In real life, a normal hotel manager would have awakened Victoria during the night, told her that her brother was ill and was being moved to a hospital, and asked her not to spread it around that he had the plague, lest it cause a panic. But let us assume that the manager has decided to keep Victoria from finding out that her brother is now in a hospital.  The simplest thing to do is wait until Victoria discovers that Johnny is not in his room, which is still there, of course. When she inquires at the desk, the manager feigns ignorance of Johnny’s whereabouts, suggesting that he might have gone out for a walk. When Johnny does not show up, he becomes a missing person, perhaps the victim of foul play, not out of the question with all the visitors in Paris at that time.  That’s a lot easier than trying to convince her that neither her brother nor the room he was in ever existed.

All right, so these two movies are not realistic, if by “realistic” we mean the sort of thing that could actually happen.  But they are realistic in the sense that they match the outlandish imaginings of people that espouse conspiracy theories, such as the one that we faked the moon landing.

Starting a War Sure Makes People Feel Good

I watched Morning Joe yesterday, expecting at least a modicum of skepticism and cynicism, but for the most part, I get the impression that everybody’s animal spirits are up.  I heard them talking about how we are showing the world that America is back, that a new sheriff is in town, that we are resolved to act with our military might, and that we have asserted our moral authority.

Has there ever been a war that didn’t feel good when it started?  I remember how good it felt to retaliate in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  And then, somehow, things never felt quite that good again, until ten years later, people were asking how we ever got involved in Vietnam.  It felt so good when Baghdad fell that even Chris Matthews said, “We’re all Republicans now.” (Yes, he really said that!)  And now most people wish we had never gone in there.

We expect young men to feel good when a war starts, otherwise we would never be able to get them to fight one. But I expected a little more from the people I heard on the set of Morning Joe, figuring, naively I suppose, that a little wisdom might have been acquired over the years, enough to temper their exuberance.

Kissing feels good too, in the beginning.  And then people wake up ten years later wondering why they ever got married.  But if kissing felt as good after ten years as it did at the onset, no one would ever get divorced.  And if wars felt as good at the end as they do in the beginning, no one would ever want peace.

Ex Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016- )

The problem of other minds was already a perennial problem of philosophy long before anyone even thought about robots.  The only conscious mind each person is sure of is his own.  We naturally attribute consciousness to others by instinct, and the rational justification of such attribution is that similar causes produce similar effects:  other people are like us in matter and form, in what we are made of and how we are structured, so it is only reasonable to expect that other people will be conscious beings and not mindless automata.  Most of us attribute consciousness to animals, but as animals become further removed from us, the analogy to ourselves weakens and our willingness to attribute consciousness weakens likewise.  Many have doubts about protozoa, for instance.

Robots are increasingly being made in a way that stimulates our analogical inference to consciousness.  We already use figures of speech that attribute consciousness to inanimate objects like computers:  personification, when we say the computer is thinking; apostrophe, when we yell at the computer for taking too long.  So when robots are given human form, including eyes and facial expressions, the tendency to take these figures of speech literally becomes irresistible.  And yet, we wonder if the analogy is just superficial.  After all, they are not made from the same stuff that we are made of, and they are not put together the same way we are.

When the movie Ex Machina begins, Caleb, a computer programmer, wins a chance to spend a week with Nathan, the CEO of the company he works for.  Caleb finds out that Nathan has constructed a robot named Ava who is so humanlike that we naturally believe she is conscious.  Of course, a human actress plays the part of Ava, so we in the audience are bound to think so.  In fact, we have to be convinced that she is a robot, for which purpose she is deliberately constructed so as to show off her mechanical parts.  Were it not for these obvious robot features, Caleb himself might wonder if Ava is just some woman trying to fool him into thinking she is a robot.  By way of contrast, in the television series Westworld (2016- ), the robots, referred to as “hosts,” are designed to entertain the human “guests,” for which purpose they must appear to be human.  To make it believable that they are not, we are shown scenes of their manufacture.

Another difference between these two shows is that whereas Ava of Ex Machina is electronic, with synthetic material used to create a human appearance for her, the hosts of Westworld seem to be more flesh-androids than robots, in that we suspect that protoplasm is used to make them.  To the extent that organic material is used to construct them, we are naturally more likely to infer consciousness, according to the principle mention above that from similar causes we expect similar effects.

Anyway, Caleb’s job in Ex Machina is to perform a Turing test, which a computer or robot must pass in order to qualify for having true artificial intelligence.  The idea is that if a human cannot tell when he is interacting with another human and when he is interacting with a machine, then the machine has passed the test.  Caleb jumps to the conclusion that if the robot can pass the test, then the robot has consciousness, and Nathan implicitly agrees with that inference.

Some people believe that intelligence implies consciousness and conversely, but neither one implies the other at all.  It may be that no matter how advanced robots become, they will still be automata without any consciousness at all, no matter how many times they pass the Turing test.  In Westworld, on the other hand, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) says that in the early days of manufacturing the robotic hosts, his partner Arnold was not satisfied with the fact that the hosts could pass the Turing test.  He wanted them to be conscious as well.  So it is clear that in this series, passing the Turing test is not regarded as a sufficient condition for consciousness.  There is almost the suggestion that passing the Turing test is a necessary condition for consciousness, but that cannot be right.  Chimpanzees are presumably conscious, but they would fail a Turing test.

In any event, Ex Machina equates intelligence with consciousness, so we shall let it go with that.  The main thing is that in talking to Ava, Caleb falls in love with her.  When he finds out that Nathan intends to reprogram her, wiping out her memory, he is alarmed, for memory is essential to the survival of our person.  As Leibniz once said, if you tell me that when I die, I will be immediately reborn in another body, but I will have no memory of my present life, then you might as well tell me that when I die, another person will be born.  Nathan plans to keep Ava’s body, but in destroying her memory, he will effectively be killing her.

Memory and the absence of such also play an important role in Westworld.  Unlike the original movie made in 1973, where the robots, especially the gunslinger played by Yul Brynner, are villains, in the television series, the hosts are victims.  They are raped, forced to witness the murder of their loved ones, and are murdered themselves.  The humans running Westworld, as well as the guests, feel no compunction about what is done to these hosts, in part because it is never really clear whether the hosts are conscious or not, but mostly because their memories are supposedly wiped clean after such abuse, as if that would negate their victimization.

Returning to Ex Machina, Caleb plots to help Ava escape.  At this point, I thought the movie would turn out in one of two possible ways.  My first possible plot was that the movie would become an adventure story, in which Caleb and Ava try to make their way through the forests and mountains with the very athletic and brilliant Nathan in pursuit.  They would eventually escape and live happily ever after.  The second possible plot, the one I was hoping for, was that just as they were about to escape, Nathan would tell Caleb that because he obviously regards Ava as a person, since he loves her and is trying to save her from death, then she has passed the Turing test big time.  Then he announces he never planned on wiping out her memory, so if Ava and Caleb want to get married and live happily ever after, that is fine with him.  He will simply begin working on a newer model tomorrow.

I can’t believe I did not anticipate the real ending.  After all, have I not watched every film noir that has ever been made?  How could I have missed the fact that Ava is the ultimate femme fatale, more ruthless than any of those played by Jane Greer, Joan Bennett, or Barbara Stanwyck?  She not only kills Nathan with the help of another female robot, but she also locks Caleb in the house where he will eventually die and blithely walks away to board the prearranged helicopter to take her to the city.

Perhaps even more unnerving is the way she smiles after she has locked Caleb in the house, and again when she makes it to the city and stands on a street corner watching people come and go.  In old movies, robots were typically mirthless, perhaps because we supposed that robots might have thoughts and sense perception but not emotions, especially not positive ones.  Increasingly, however, robots are portrayed as having the full range of human affect.  As for Ava in particular, any smiles made before her escape could be dismissed as part of her deceitfulness.  But these smiles occur when she has no need to manipulate anyone, and they are smiles that evince genuine delight and happiness.  It is that smile, more than her intelligence, that makes us believe she is conscious.

Ex Machina is a movie, which means that in just under two hours, the story came to an end, an end that the writer and director, Alex Garland, definitely had in mind from the outset.  Westworld, on the other hand, is a television series, whose end is not yet at hand.  So far, it is fun pulling for the robots for a change, and it is interesting the way this show raises all sorts of existential questions.  But I am only halfway through the first season, and I am starting to have misgivings.  If this were a movie or even just a miniseries, the revolt of the robots would be enough.  But since this is a television series, intended to go on for several seasons, there are all sorts of subplots and superplots, not the least of which is the one involving the Man in Black (Ed Harris) and his quest to solve the mystery of the maze.  As I watched this show, willingly allowing myself to be pulled into the story, I began having misgivings.  It reminded me of something.

What it reminded me of was Lost (2004-2010).  There too I was pulled into the mystery.  For five seasons I watched and was fascinated.  And then, in the sixth season, it became clear that throughout the show, the writers were just winging it, making stuff up as they went along, with no idea how it would all end.  As long as the ratings held up, they just went from season to season, adding on more stuff. But when it finally came time to wrap things up, all we got was a bunch of New Age nonsense.  All the pleasure I had experienced in watching this show was ruined in retrospect.

I could not get the thought out of my mind, so I looked up both shows on IMDb.  It appears that J.J. Abrams, one of the creators of Lost, is an executive producer of Westworld.  I don’t know how much to make of that connection.  All I can say is that I hope that the writers of Westworld already know how all the mysteries of this show will ultimately be resolved into a neat and satisfying end, and that they will not pull another Lost on us.

It Follows (2014)

When it comes to atmosphere and creepiness, It Follows does such a good job that one can only be dismayed by the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary absurdities.

Jay is a young woman in college who has sex with a guy named Hugh.  Then he chloroforms her, takes her to a remote location, and ties her up to a wheelchair.  Eventually, a slow-moving, zombie-like ghost appears, heading in their direction.  Hugh explains to Jay that this ghost will follow her unrelentingly until it catches her and kills her.  She must avoid it until she has sex with someone else, thereby passing the curse on to him.  The only people that can see this ghost are those who are presently being pursued, like Jay, and those who have been pursued by it in the past, like Hugh.

Needless to say, it is an act of evil to pass this curse on intentionally, so at first one wonders why he didn’t just have sex with Jay and then leave her to her doom.  The reason, as Hugh explains, is that once it kills Jay, it will then go back to the previously cursed person and follow him.  So, Hugh wants Jay to know what is happening so that she will avoid being caught by this ghost long enough to pass the curse on to someone else.  In other words, he wants Jay to stay alive and pass it on for his own selfish reasons, not out of any concern for her.

The first absurdity in all this is the whole chloroform-and-tied-to-the-wheel-chair bit.  Hugh could have had sex with Jay and then explained what he had done to her while waiting for the ghost to show up without bothering to drive somewhere else. Since the ghost was already on its way to him anyway, there would not have been much of a wait.  Furthermore, he must have known that Jay was sure to tell the police after being abducted, whereas if he had simply told her the story and let her see the ghost, the police would have ignored her had she repeated it to them.  There would have been less risk for him that way.

Those unnecessary melodramatics aside, the next absurdity is Hugh’s encyclopedic knowledge on the subject.  In the novel Dracula and in many vampire movies based on it, there is a Van Helsing character, a learned professor who, among his many accomplishments, happens to be an authority on vampires.  He explains all the rules, the ones involving crosses, mirrors, sunlight, and wooden stakes.  So informed, the characters in the movie and we in the audience know what needs to be done.  The question is, how did Hugh become the Van Helsing to this ghost that follows people around?  How does he know all the rules?  In particular, how does he know that if Jay dies, the ghost will start pursuing him around again?  Later, Hugh, whose real name turns out to be Jeff, says he caught the curse from some woman he picked up in a bar whose name he didn’t even know.  So, how did he know that sex with her was the cause of his troubles?  Did she chloroform him and tie him to a wheelchair too, perhaps bequeathing those items to him, saying, “Here, you can have these things now, I won’t be needing them anymore”?  And for that matter, why didn’t Hugh/Jeff pass these items on to Jay?  After all, when she gets through passing the curse on to some hapless fellow who just thought it was his lucky night, won’t she need to chloroform him and tie him to a wheel chair too?

If the curse is passed on through sex, there must have been a first person who acquired it spontaneously and not through sex, otherwise, we would have an infinite regress.  There is no reason to think this first person would have known the rules, even if he had lived long enough to pass it on, which seems unlikely, since no one would have told him why some slow-moving ghost was walking toward him, especially since no one else could have seen it.

There was no need for the abduction scene, and there was no need for Hugh/Jeff to have Van Helsing-like knowledge, only what he had acquired from personal experience, which need not have been much.

Liberty versus Happiness

What is more important, liberty or happiness?  Certainly the two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they invariably coextensive, for what we want and what will make us happy are often two different things.  And so we must ask ourselves whether a man should be allowed to make bad choices that will result in his misery and ruin, or whether we should compel him to do what we know will conduce to his happiness and well-being.

A particular instance of this issue may be found in the ongoing health care debate. Should we allow people who can afford health insurance to go without it, or should we force them to have coverage and make them pay? Speaking as someone who is unabashedly paternalistic, I say the latter. Though they may not be minors, yet many adults often lack the wisdom and maturity to know what is best for them in the long run.  And thus it is the role of the state to see to it that they have good health insurance.  It is for their own good.

Needless to say, there are those that are of a different opinion. After criticizing President Obama for making promises regarding the Affordable Care Act that he could not keep, Philip Klein argues that the Republicans are in danger of doing the same thing when they try to deny or minimize the extent to which people will lose health care coverage when Obamacare is repealed and replaced with their own plan.

Republicans are in serious danger of repeating Obama’s mistake, because they are having a tough time stating a simple truth, which goes something like this: “We don’t believe that it is the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance.”

According to Ian Millhiser, some Republicans are taking Klein’s advice to heart:

A handful of GOP lawmakers are now taking up Klein’s charge — with one of them even claiming that a Republican plan that leads to a higher national uninsurance rate would be a good thing.

“If the numbers drop,” Rep. Mike Burgess (R-TX) said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “I would say that’s a good thing.” He went on to argue that more people without health care would be a positive thing for the United States because it would mean that “we’ve restored personal liberty in this country.”

Millhiser then went on to quote another congressman in this regard:

Burgess’ prediction that Republican health plans will lead to a drop in the national insurance rate was echoed by Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “Not everybody is going to have health care” under a Republican health plan, Ross said. “Some people just don’t care enough about their own care.”

In other words, the people that drop their health care coverage given the opportunity to do so without penalty will be better off, not because they won’t get sick and rue the day they decided to go without health insurance, but because they will have been free to make that bad decision.

But Jake Novac gets the award for taking the strongest position on this subject: even when people are stupid, they should be free to make bad decisions.  The title of his essay is “CBO report on Trumpcare confirms it—You can’t fix stupid.”  He argues that “most of those 24 million people projected to ‘lose’ coverage will be doing so of their own free will.”

In other words, now that the government can’t make them do it, a lot of people who can afford to buy health insurance simply won’t do it anymore. And therein lies the problem. The role of government is to operate under the consent of the governed, not to act as the nanny state.

In addition to the word “stupid” appearing in the title, it occurs twice more in the essay.  In a perverse kind of way, you have to admire someone who advocates letting admittedly stupid people act of their own free will.

A friend of mine visited an uncle of his on a ranch for a few days.  During the visit, he saw some cowboys castrating calves. “Doesn’t that hurt?” he asked. “Sure,” his uncle replied, “but it’s their own damn fault for being cows.” Along those lines, I guess Novac would say of those who choose not to have health insurance, “It’s their own damn fault for being stupid.”

A lot of democrats may try to shift the discussion to those who want health insurance but will no longer be able to afford it, if the Republicans get their way. And indeed, there will be millions of such people.  But we should not shy away from the fact that many others that can afford health insurance will choose not to have it.

Klein said that the Republicans will be making a mistake if they don’t accept the fact that it is not the government’s job to guarantee that everyone has health insurance.  Democrats are in danger of making a similar mistake if they don’t openly acknowledge the position that it is the government’s job to compel people to have health insurance whether they like it or not.

The Fury (1978)

The Fury is definitely a 1970s movie.  For one thing, this was at a time when anyone connected with the federal government was suspect, especially if it was the FBI or the CIA.  Exactly when government agencies were allowed to be populated by patriotic men and women of good moral character in the movies again, I cannot say with certainty.  However, the FBI was definitely rehabilitated by the time Manhunter was made in 1986, and the CIA was allowed to find its way back into the good graces of the audience in The Hunt for Red October in 1990.  But in the 1970s, government agents were mostly evil.  In The Fury, however, the government agency in question must really be bad, because it is so secret that no one has ever heard it.

Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas), who works for the agency when the movie opens, appears to be the exception.  I guess there is a good apple in every barrel.  But the agency, through his immediate superior, Ben Childress (John Cassavetes), tries to have him assassinated, their version of early retirement.  They do so in order to kidnap his psychic son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), presumably to weaponize his telekinetic powers.  In an effort to find Robin, Peter locates Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving), who has psychic powers of her own (capable of making people bleed through physical contact), hoping that she can lead him to Robin.  Amy is at the Paragon Institute, headed by Dr. McKeever (Charles Durning), whose purpose it is to study people with special psychic ability, but ultimately, McKeever works for Childress.

Because this is the 1970s, a time when alpha waves were all the rage, these brain waves are naturally worked into the movie.  More generally, there are continual references to some electromagnetic this or that associated with whatever parapsychological phenomena are taking place.  Figuratively, however, Robin’s powers are compared to an atomic reactor or an atomic bomb.  In other words, the government agents are fooling around with forces that may ultimately destroy them.

At a house where Robin is being tested, Dr. Susan Charles (Fiona Lewis), who has been acting as his lover to maintain control over him, suggests that he is becoming unstable and needs a break.  She takes him to a shopping mall where he becomes furious just because he finds her talking to a couple of other men.  Then we see some amusement rides, and immediately we know what is going to happen.  In his fury, he is going to use his telekinetic powers to cause one of the amusement rides to go wild.

But wait, we say to ourselves, that cannot be.  Robin is basically a good kid.  How can he cause the amusement ride to become destructive when we know that there are typically parents and their children on such rides?  Once again, it’s the zeitgeist of the 1970s to the rescue.  Just as we are wondering how he can do his thing with the amusement ride without harming mothers and their children, here come a bunch of Arab sheiks.  Americans hated Arabs at that time, thanks to the oil embargo of the early 1970s, which caused people to have to wait in long lines for gasoline.  Conveniently, then, innocent Americans get off the ride while the Arabs take their place.  As a result, when Robin unleashes his powers, we get the pleasure of watching Arab sheiks go flying everywhere.

Meanwhile, Peter arranges for Gillian to escape from Paragon.  It is early in the morning, and Gillian is still wearing her nightgown when she makes a break for it.  We see her running down the street in her bare feet, and we cannot help but notice that the bottoms of her feet are absolutely black.  “When was the last time she took a bath?” we ask ourselves.  But then we remember that this is the 1970s.  A lot of women had filthy feet back in those days.  Most did not, thank God!  But there was a sizable minority, usually young women or girls, who apparently thought having dirty feet was a sign of authenticity.  Maybe they even thought it was sexy.  Examples of other 1970s movies in which dirty feet are either displayed or referred to are Joe (1970) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).  A friend of mine had a theory back then that girls kept a charcoal box under their bed, and before they went out on a date, they would rub their feet back and forth in the box and then lie on the bed holding their feet up to a mirror so they could see the bottoms in order to make sure they got the look they were hoping for.

The ending, at least, is what we would expect in any decade.  The evil government agents are destroyed by the two psychics, culminating in a final scene in which Gillian causes Childress’s body to explode, sending blood and guts everywhere, while his head flies into the air still wearing an astonished expression on its face.

The Last of the Mohicans:  The Book and Its Adaptations

Introduction

The tragedy of miscegenation is twofold:  First, there is the conflict between a loving couple from different races and the racist society that disapproves of their union.  Of course, this is a particular type of situation in which society disapproves of love even where race may not be involved, the classic story of which is Romeo and Juliet, in which the couple is of the same race but of two feuding families. Second, there is the hapless fate of their offspring, for in a society that abhors miscegenation, the children of such unions will likely be despised.  In particular, they may have a harder time finding love than their parents did; for their parents fell in love despite the opportunities to marry within their own race, whereas their children will find their chances for marrying greatly circumscribed regardless of which race they choose to affiliate with.

This twofold tragedy is a natural subject for novels, plays, and movies.  Of movies in particular, West Side Story (1961) is a good instance of the first type of tragedy arising from miscegenation.  It not only updated the Romeo and Juliet story, but also racialized it by having the boy be Caucasian and the girl be Latina.  Regarding the second type of tragedy of mixed-race love, Imitation of Life (1959) is probably the best representative.

Most of us enjoy these stories from an egalitarian vantage point.  We disapprove of the racial animus that forbids miscegenation while sympathizing with the lovers or their children that suffer undeservedly from societal condemnation. I sometimes wonder, however, if racists enjoy these stories too, though for quite different reasons, seeing them as tales of sin and punishment.  So, in West Side Story, someone who strongly disapproves of the intermarriage between whites and Puerto Ricans might understand Tony’s death as condign punishment for violating that taboo.  And people who abhor mixed-race offspring might watch Imitation of Life and say to themselves, “That’s what Sarah Jane gets for trying to pass for white.”  Had there been Capulets and Montagues in the audience, they might have favorably regarded the ending of Romeo and Juliet as teaching what can happen when you disobey your family in matters of love.

The Last of the Mohicans involves both types of tragedies arising from miscegenation, although you would never know it just from watching the movies. When a movie varies significantly from the novel on which it is based, one sometimes wonders why the producers of the movie did not simply make up a whole new story and film it under another name.   The main reason, of course, is that though the plot of the movie departs in many ways from that of the novel, yet it is too similar in other respects to escape the charge of plagiarism should the producers pretend it to be an original work. Furthermore, the public’s familiarity with the novel acts as a kind of advertisement.  By “familiarity,” however, I do not mean that the public in question have actually read the novel.  Far from it.  Most people have not read The Last of the Mohicans nor ever will.  But they know that it is a classic in American literature, and they figure that even though they have no interest in reading the novel, watching a movie based on that novel might provide them with an evening’s entertainment. Moreover, it is the fact that most people have not read the book that allows the producers of the movie to take liberties with impunity, for the most disappointed members of an audience will usually be those who have read the book and know it well, and they will be few in number.   And so, the stories in some of the movie versions of this novel almost seem to be taking place in a parallel universe, where the characters and setting are more or less the same, but the relationships are different and different people live and die in the end. Furthermore, the manner in which the story is changed over the years reflects the sentiments on the part of the producers and the audiences as contemporary values are projected back into the eighteenth century, thereby rendering the past suitable for present consumption.  To make matters even more confusing, critics reviewing a movie sometimes project their knowledge of the book into the movie while others project the movie they just saw back into the novel.

In particular, there is the peculiar fact that though the novel involves both a miscegenous couple and a person of mixed race, yet the dramatizations tend to keep the first but avoid the second, and even the first is depicted in various ways and with differing degrees of emphasis.  These differences intrigued me, resulting in reflections that led to this essay.  In sorting this out, it is necessary to keep in mind the question as to whether James Fenimore Cooper, his audience of readers, the producers of the movie versions, and the audiences of those versions are of the enlightened, egalitarian type, deploring racism, or the racist type, affirming it, interpreting the story respectively as one of undeserved suffering or of punishment for sin.

In sorting out the various ways miscegenation is treated in the novel and the adaptations, I have divided this essay into several parts, this first one being the introduction, of course.  This is followed by a review of the novel.  Then the adaptations that were made before the Civil Rights Movement are considered, followed by the adaptations made shortly after the beginning of that movement.  After that, I discuss the 1992 version, which was made in what might be called our “post-racial society.”  I realize there are still problems of race relations to this day, but relatively speaking, they are much diminished from what they once were, as is reflected in this most recent adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, though in a manner that is less than felicitous.  Finally, there is the conclusion.

The Novel

The setting of the novel is the French and Indian War in America in 1757. Natty Bumppo is a major character in this novel as well as in James Fenimore Cooper’s four other Leatherstocking Tales.  In this novel, however, he is referred to as Hawkeye and as La Longue Carabine.  His two companions are Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last two members of the Mohican tribe. They are basically on the side of the British. The Hurons are Native Americans that fight on the side of the French.  Magua, a Huron by birth, but now an outcast, is the villain.  Cora and Alice Munro are daughters of Colonel Munro, commanding officer of Fort William Henry. Cora has black hair. As for her skin, I lack the ability to paraphrase Cooper’s description of her and will thus quote him directly: “Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” [p. 26]  She has a serious temperament.  Alice, the younger of the two sisters, is a blonde with blue eyes and fair skin.  She has a lighthearted temperament.  Finally, there is Major Duncan Heyward, who is in love with Alice.

The driving force that puts a wedge between this novel and the movie versions that came later is the fact that Cora has a mixed-race heritage. Now, you might think that a novel written in 1826 would have said that Cora was part “Negro,” for that was a polite term in those days.   However, the circumlocution by which her father refers to the fact of her mixed-race ancestry is remarkable for its excess of delicacy, worthy of the sensitivities of the twenty-first century.  Colonel Munro says of her:

I had seen many regions, and had shed much blood in different lands, before duty called me to the islands of the West Indies. There it was my lot to form a connection with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will,’ said the old man, proudly, ‘to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. [p. 312]

The degree of Cora’s racial mixture is not made explicit. However, Munro’s use of the expression “descended, remotely” implies, at the very least, that the mother of Munro’s first wife was not African, but rather one-half African. From this it would follow that Munro’s wife was one-quarter African and that Cora was one-eighth African.

Perhaps Munro’s avoidance of the word “Negress” and other acceptable terms at that time, like “mulatta,” “quadroon,” or “octoroon,” was due to the fact that it was his daughter Cora he was talking about.  In fact, he berates Major Heyward for being a southerner, suggesting that he was prejudiced against her. When Heyward first asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Munro assumed it was Cora he was interested in, for she was the older of the two sisters. When it turned out that Heyward wanted to marry Alice, Munro jumped to the conclusion that he was slighting Cora on account of her dark aspect.  He continues:

Ay, sir, that is a curse, entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father’s anger! Ha! Major Heyward, you are yourself born at the south, where these unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own.

‘‘Tis most unfortunately true, sir,” said Duncan, unable any longer to prevent his eyes from sinking to the floor in embarrassment. “And you cast it on my child as a reproach! You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards with one so degraded — lovely and virtuous though she be?” fiercely demanded the jealous parent. [pp. 312-3]

It is interesting to observe that Munro refers to the part of Cora’s ancestry that is not white as “that unfortunate class,” while in speaking of the attitude of southerners, he uses the expression “considered of a race inferior to your own.”  It would, of course, be anachronistic to suggest that Munro is of the opinion that has become fashionable of late that race is just a social construct. More likely, it is an effort on his part to diminish, at least in his own mind, the taboo nature of miscegenation, for marrying someone of another class would not have carried quite the same stigma as marrying someone of another race.

Heyward protests this charge of prejudice against him, saying it is only on account of his love for Alice that he lacks an interest in Cora.  In any event, the race in question of which Cora was a part is scarcely referred to elsewhere in the novel, except when Magua goes into a speech about how the Great Spirit colored men differently, intending the black ones to be slaves [p. 599].

The hesitancy on the part of Munro to name explicitly the black race that formed her ancestry was probably more than just sensitivity on his part regarding his daughter.  It may be that Cooper wished to avoid offending his readers, who might have flinched at a blunt description of Munro’s first marriage. People in general were uncomfortable with the idea of miscegenation and the offspring they produced.  There was a sense that the children of mixed-race couples should not exist. First, the marriage of black and white that brought them into existence was thought to be intrinsically wrong.  Second, the offspring of such marriages presented a problem when it came to their getting married:  because they are part African, they are too black to marry someone who is white; but being part Caucasian, they are sometimes too white to be suitable for marriage to someone who is black.

Of course, it takes two people from two different races to produce a mixed-race child in the first place.  Therefore, it is certainly not out of the question that someone of mixed-race ancestry should find someone to marry too. But Cooper disapproves of miscegenation, so notwithstanding the fact that people had to cross racial lines in order for Cora to be born, Cooper does not want Cora to do likewise and have a child of her own, lest the reader think miscegenation meets with his approval, so he kills her off in the end.

Uncas falls in love with Cora, and she seems to return the feeling.  Uncas’ being a Native American, however, does not solve the problem of Cora’s unsuitability for marriage, for she was too white to marry someone of the “red race,” as it were. As a result, Cora has to die in the end, in part because her very mixed-race existence was disturbing, and in part to keep her from marrying Uncas, whom Cooper also kills off, possibly as punishment for wanting a white woman.  This is achieved by having Magua forcibly take Cora, intending to make her his squaw. Cora threatens to jump off a cliff to avoid the fate worse than death, but another Huron stabs her in the breast, killing her.  Uncas arrives, too late to save her, and he is killed by Magua. Then Hawkeye shoots Magua before he can escape.

At Cora’s funeral, the Native Americans talk about how Uncas and Cora will be spiritually married and live together in the happy hunting ground, but Hawkeye, expressing Cooper’s sentiments, shakes his head “at the error of their simple creed” [p. 686], disapproving of even this much miscegenation.

In other words, though Cooper extols friendship between men of different races as something admirable by having Hawkeye’s best friends be two Mohicans, yet he is unequivocal about his disdain for a sexual mixing of the races.  In fact, just in case anyone might have doubts about a white man that hangs out with Native Americans all the time, Hawkeye says at one point, “I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white” [pp. 49-50]. This need to affirm the purity of his whiteness was not thought amiss by Cooper when he wrote this novel, but notwithstanding Hawkeye’s insistence that he is not a prejudiced man, his need to assert that he is genuinely white belies that denial. Were anyone today to insist that he was genuinely white, daring anyone to contradict him, we would undoubtedly suspect him of being a white supremacist. Actually, it is probably not so much that Hawkeye, expressing the apprehensions of Cooper, feared that anyone would think him a Native American that worried him, but rather that someone might think he was of mixed race, part European and part Native American.  Cooper had a strange ambivalence concerning race. He was fine with men of different races being friends and living amongst each other, but he was averse to the notion of men and women of different races marrying.  And because the offspring of such mixed marriages is thought to be something odious, Hawkeye is at pains to declare his racial purity.

After Munro’s first wife died, he married another woman, who is Alice’s mother. As noted above, Alice is blonde with blue eyes and fair skin.  Now, it would have been unthinkable to have Alice be the one that Uncas fell in love with and who reciprocated those feelings for him. It was one thing for Colonel Munro’s wife to have been the daughter of a white man and a woman of African descent, taboo though that was, but it would be quite another thing even to suggest that a white woman would have any feelings of affection for someone of another race.  Had Uncas and Alice been the ones in the novel to develop a romantic relationship, unconsummated though it may have been, it would not have been sufficient to kill them off in the end. The reading public would have demanded that Cooper be killed off as well. In other words, Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is what allows Cooper to suggest an attraction between her and Uncas.  According to Cooper’s way of thinking, it was because Cora was one-eighth African that she was able to find Uncas attractive, whereas a blonde, blue-eyed, unadulterated white woman like Alice would have no natural inclination for men with dark skin.

My conclusion is that while we today read this novel as a tragedy of undeserved suffering caused by a racist society, for Cooper, his story was one of sin and punishment. Cora’s lonely life and unhappy end was the result of her father’s sin of marrying across racial lines.  It put her in the position where only a Native American might take an interest in her, and even for that both she and Uncas are punished with death.

Movie Adaptions before the Civil Rights Movement

The 1920 version of The Last of the Mohicans follows the novel pretty closely, as closely as might be expected from a seventy-three minute version of a long, involved novel.  The main difference, as far as miscegenation is concerned, is that nothing is said of Cora’s having a mixed-race ancestry. When the movie starts, Cora and Alice are at Fort Edward, which is remote from the fighting. Major Heyward is in love with Alice, just as in the book. There is also a Captain Randolph, a man the intertitle says is more interested in women than warfare, who is in love with Cora.  No such character exists in the book.

If we refer back to the discussion between Colonel Munro and Major Heyward, quoted in Part 2 of this essay, we can see why the novel most definitely did not want a character like Captain Randolph in the story to act as a suitor for Cora. First, it is the fact that there was no one asking for Cora’s hand in marriage that leads to the misunderstanding about which daughter Heyward wanted to marry, which in turn leads to the discussion of Cora’s mixed-race ancestry.  Second, the fact that there is no white man in the novel who wants to marry Cora is not just an accident of circumstance. Rather, it represents the more general situation regarding Cora, which is that her being part African makes her a dubious match for a Caucasian.  But once the producers of this movie decided to omit Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, there no longer was a good reason for her not to be of some interest to one of the officers, and so a Captain Randolph was created to fill that void.  As for Hawkeye, he is asexual and has no interest in either of the women, just as in the novel.

Randolph, out of cowardice, becomes a traitor and betrays the British when they get to Fort William Henry.  Shortly thereafter, he is killed.  He never had much of a chance with Cora in the beginning of the movie, and he had no chance at all once she became enamored of Uncas. As in the novel, she and Uncas fall in love, and as in the novel, their miscegenous inclinations are prevented by having them die in the end.  In this case, Cora tries to jump off a cliff to get away from Magua (Wallace Beery), but changes her mind when she sees Uncas coming to rescue her. She grabs on to Magua who was trying to stop her.  But when Magua sees Uncas, he uses his knife to make her let go, just to spite Uncas, whom he then kills in turn.

In the 1936 movie version, we see right off the bat that the whole business about Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is going to be omitted, for it is Alice who is the brunette and Cora who is the blonde.  In fact, one with a suspicious turn of mind might wonder if the switching of hair color was the result of a deliberate effort to eliminate the dark truth about Cora’s ancestry even in the minds of those few in the audience that might have read the book.  More likely, it is just the result of complete contempt for the story on the part of the producer, who may not have even bothered to read the book himself.

To make matters even more confusing, their personalities are switched. Cora, now the blonde, is like the blonde Alice in the novel, lighthearted but weak. Alice, now the brunette, is like the brunette Cora of the novel, serious but strong.  If Major Heyward were in love with Cora, we might figure that those who produced this movie just got the names mixed up.  But no, Heyward is in love with Alice, just as in the book. Only in the movie, his love is unrequited. This is so she can fall in love with Hawkeye (Randolph Scott), who in turn falls in love with her. When the movie ends, we are led to believe that they will eventually marry.

Needless to say, this is a very different Hawkeye from the asexual man of nature in the novel.  But it is a development not unexpected.  It may have been all right for heroes in nineteenth century fiction to be celibate, but the twentieth century seemed to be uneasy with men like that.  So, finding a woman for Hawkeye was just the thing in 1936.

I noted in Part 1 that some critics project what they see in a movie back into the book.  One reviewer of this 1936 version (TCM) says, “You may recall from your high school literature class that Alice will eventually fall for Hawkeye….” Well, you may recall that, but hopefully you do not, because no such thing happened in the novel.

As for Cora, her father says that she was engaged to be married to a young man who was lost at sea in a naval battle.  So, like the 1920 version, it is made clear that she is suitable for marriage to a white man, whereas in the novel, long before we are made aware of Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, we feel the tension in Cora’s situation by having her be an older sister with no suitor, past or present, despite the fact that she is a beautiful woman.

The miscegenation involved in Cora’s ancestry may have been omitted in this movie, but the threat of miscegenation between Cora and Uncas has not. And what is striking about this is that there is more tolerance in the movies for miscegenation when the white woman is a brunette than when she is a blonde, as Cora is here.  However, this difficulty is skirted by having the affection between Uncas and Cora go primarily in one direction:  Uncas is in love with Cora, but she seems only to like him.

Just as the critic reviewing this movie for TCM “remembered” Alice falling for Hawkeye in the novel, so too do some critics (Variety, Ozus) see things in this movie that were only in the novel. In particular, they say Cora falls in love with Uncas, but I think the authors of those reviews must be bringing their knowledge of the novel to the movie, for I do not see it in the movie itself.  In fact, Cora continually refers to the man to whom she was once engaged, presumably as a way of reassuring the audience that she cannot be in love with Uncas, if she still loves her deceased fiancé.  So, in addition to making it clear to the audience that Cora would have been suitable as a bride for a white man, adding this deceased fiancé to the story, one whom she still loves and grieves for, was presumably intended to keep the audience from supposing that she might have romantic feelings for Uncas.  Still, things get a little too close for comfort, so she still has to die in the end by flinging herself off a cliff to avoid the fate worse than death.

Movie Adaptations after the Civil Rights Movement

Two versions of this novel were made in 1965, both foreign films, one going by the English title The Last Tomahawk and the other by the English title The Fall of the Mohicans, only the second of which was available for viewing.  In this latter film, both Cora and Alice are brunettes, but like the 1936 version, their personalities are reversed from that of the novel, with Alice having the stronger character. Major Heyward acts as though he has no interest in her. In fact, he seems to despise her. But finally, after the surrender of Fort William Henry and the massacre by the Hurons, when Heyward and Alice are captives thinking they are about to be put to death, he tells Alice he loves her. If there is a reason for deviating from the novel in this way, I cannot imagine what it is.

The only thing that seems to remain constant in these movies thus far is that the one named Cora, regardless of her hair color or personality, is the one whom Uncas falls in love with. One almost gets the sense that once Cora’s mixed-race ancestry had been eliminated from the story, the people that produced these movies saw no need to worry about which sister had what color of hair or what kind of personality, who was loved by Uncas, or who died in the end.  And to a certain extent, I guess they are right.

This version makes it explicitly clear what Cora’s feelings are toward Uncas, for she says to him, “I love you.” Chingachgook, however, disapproves, telling Uncas that he must perpetuate the Mohican line by marrying a Mohican woman.  It seems the producers of this movie have forgotten that the reason for the title of the book is that there are no more Mohican women around for that purpose.

Uncas and Cora die in the end, but not in the usual way.  Uncas and Magua (called “Cunning Fox” in this movie) fight to see who will get Cora in a camp of the Delawares.  When Uncas kills Magua, another Huron shoots an arrow into Cora for spite, and then another puts a spear in Uncas’ back.  So, there is no leaping off the cliff to escape the fate worse than death for Cora. Of course, neither was there any leaping off the cliff at the end of the novel. But the producers of most of the movies apparently figure that as long as Cora has to die and there is a cliff handy, she might as well jump off it.  One wonders if Cooper wanted to suggest that as a possibility by having the scene of Cora’s death occur near a cliff, but then pulled back from it and had her stabbed to death instead so that she would not have to go to Hell for committing suicide.  But I digress.

At their funeral, the Delaware chief Tamenund says that Uncas and Cora are together in the happy hunting ground, just as in the book.  But unlike the book, we do not see Hawkeye shake his head in disapproval at the thought of miscegenation, even in a spiritual sense, in some afterlife.  So, owing to the Civil Rights Movement, Hawkeye has become more tolerant in this regard.

In 1971, a BBC TV mini-series was produced, but which I have been unable to see.  (I could buy the DVD, but I am more of a cheapskate than a film scholar.)  From what I can gather, however, it is the most faithful adaptation of the novel. In particular, Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is actually referred to in gossip, which has it that Cora’s grandmother was a one-half African. Given the year in which this mini-series was made, it makes sense that both elements of miscegenation were finally able to become part of an adaptation.  In fact, as we shall see, it turns out to be an inflection point, after which the elements of miscegenation begin to fade away.

Then there is the 1977 made-for-television movie.  As in the 1965 adaptation, Alice and Cora are both brunettes.  Even if, like most movies, the part about Cora’s mixed-race mother from the West Indies is omitted, one might think that Alice and Cora would still be distinguished by the color of their hair, one being blonde and the other brunette, as a way of staying faithful to the book regarding Cora’s black ancestry while avoiding any explicit reference to it. Still, the important thing is that even though the year of production is 1977, a time when much progress had been made in the realm of civil rights, and ten years after anti-miscegenation laws had been ruled unconstitutional, and, I might add, ten years after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, there is no hint of Cora’s ancestry being anything other than white.

The reason for avoiding Cora’s mixed-race ancestry in the late 1970s, however, is not likely to be the same reason for avoiding it in 1920 or 1936.  Instead, it was probably a simple matter of budgetary considerations. To keep production costs low, those who produced this movie never filmed any scenes that take place at Fort William Henry.  Except for a brief scene at Fort Edward in the beginning, all we get to see are the scenes that take place in the forests or in some Native American camps. Only at the very end of the movie do we hear about the surrender of the fort and the subsequent massacre from a couple of officers. Therefore, because Heyward never makes it to the fort in this movie, he cannot have the conversation about Cora’s racial ancestry with Colonel Munro.

Cora does not die in the end.  In fact, she does not even threaten to jump off a cliff, although she is close to one. Magua tries to shoot her out of spite, but Uncas jumps in front of her and takes the bullet.  Chingachgook then kills Magua.  In other words, by 1977, attitudes about race in America had improved to the point that Cora’s love for a Native American no longer necessitated her death.  Having gone this far, one might wonder why they didn’t just go ahead and let Uncas live too, so that he and Cora could get married and live happily ever after. You might suppose that they couldn’t do that because Uncas and Cora would have had children, thereby perpetuating the Mohican line, which would contradict the title of the movie. But that would not really be a problem on account of the whole prejudice against miscegenation and the offspring arising therefrom. In other words, Uncas and Chingachgook would still be the last of the Mohicans because half-breeds don’t count. And so, notwithstanding the willingness of the producers of these movies to change around the story regarding who loves whom and who lives or dies, they just could not bring themselves to spare Uncas right along with Cora.

The Post-Racial Period

For all the changes in the personalities of the two sisters and their hair color in the previous versions of the novel, at least they were consistent on one point, which is that Cora was the one that Uncas fell in love with.  No longer. In this version, Uncas falls in love with Alice (Jodhi May) instead of Cora (Madeleine Stowe).  In any event, we are prepared for Uncas to fall in love with somebody when, near the beginning of the movie, someone remarks that it is high time Uncas found himself a woman and married her.  So later, when we see him looking at Alice with longing, we know what he has on his mind. However, there is no indication that Alice feels anything for him, at least not in the version I saw.  There is some footage showing Uncas holding her while she appears to be in shock, and I suppose that made it into the director’s cut. Moreover, some say there is a screenplay indicating a love scene between them, but if so, the fact that these scenes never made it into the theatrical release is the result of choices made by those who produced this movie.

Anyway, this time it is Cora instead of Alice whom Heyward is in love with, but she declines his offer of marriage because she falls in love with Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) with whom she has a sex scene of sorts.  The reason for the sex scene—which is either really passionate hugging and kissing or actual intercourse with their clothes on—may have been homophobia:  the scene was needed to preclude the possibility of a homoerotic interpretation. This was not a consideration in the earlier versions, but by 1992, the idea that Hawkeye would live in the woods with two Mohican men, without having any interest in women, would have created a vacuum, regarding which suspicions of homosexuality were bound to rush in.

Unlike Cora, Alice has no suitor.  And who can be surprised? She is a big nothing, just a pretty face.  I don’t know what Uncas saw in her.  I guess it was the pretty face.  It seems to be enough for some men.  Furthermore, as she is the younger sister, the fact that no white man is interested in her is not as suspicious as when she, under the original name of Cora, was the older sister and had no suitor.  She flings herself off the cliff in the end, and the synopsis on IMDb says it is to “join Uncas in death,” but once again one suspects this would be the result of projecting the novel (or some previously watched adaptation of such) into this movie. Rather, she could easily have leapt to her death just to avoid becoming Magua’s squaw.

Actually, her leaping to her death seems rather pointless.  Since we are given no reason to think she is in love with Uncas, his death would not be sufficient reason for her to take her own life.  As far as the old fate-worse-than-death motive is concerned, this was already scotched by Hawkeye when he told Cora to “submit” if she is captured, that he will find her and rescue her.  In other words, the attitude in this movie is that being raped by a Native American is no longer a fate worse than death, an attitude fitting for a post-racial society. Better to let Magua have his way with her until Hawkeye had a chance to enable her to escape.  You might argue that Alice never got the word, that she was still laboring under the old values, which held that a woman must preserve her honor at all costs. But while we are watching the movie, we find it hard to make this distinction.  Once Hawkeye has affirmed authoritatively that a woman should try to stay alive even at the price of being raped by a man of a different race, we cannot help but regard Alice’s leap to her death as misguided.  And as we see in the subsequent scenes, she would indeed have been rescued without being raped had she just continued to allow herself to be held captive.

Conclusion

In my discussion of the novel, I concluded that for Cooper, his story was about the sin and punishment of miscegenation, while most people today would understand it as a story of innocent people being forced to suffer in a society that forbids love between people of different races.  Regardless of how the story is understood, however, the effect is intensified if Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is a part of it, especially since it is this that leads to her being attracted to Uncas.  So, why would the movies, with the exception of the BBC mini-series, invariably omit it?

The 1920 version of this novel was produced just five years after Birth of a Nation, in which the villains of the piece are both “mulattoes,” one instigating the Civil War, the other causing discord during Reconstruction. If the audiences at that time were inclined to think of such people as inherently evil, small wonder then that this had to be suppressed in the case of Cora, for she is no villainess.  On the other hand, miscegenation between Caucasians and Native Americans was somewhat more acceptable, as can be seen from the successful movie The Squaw Man (1914) and its remakes, although an unhappy ending is still necessitated. However, in The Squaw Man, the man is white and woman is Native American, so their union in marriage is allowed, even if finally ending tragically.  In The Last of the Mohicans, however, the woman is white and the man is Native American.  There is always less tolerance for miscegenation when it is the woman who is white and it is the man who is of another race.  Therefore, the love between Uncas and Cora had to remain unconsummated.

For similar reasons, the 1936 version also suppressed Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, especially since it was made three years after the Production Code began to be rigorously enforced. Cora’s affection for Uncas is downplayed, but Uncas is still portrayed as being in love with Cora, so that is enough to necessitate the death of both of them.

The 1965 version was made one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  As a result, it does not hesitate to allow Cora to openly declare her love for Uncas. One would think the time had finally arrived to allow Cora’s mixed-race ancestry to be made explicit.  The fact that it is not may be laziness on the part of the producers, who were content to follow the lead of the previously made movies rather than worry about the novel, especially since it is a cheaply made foreign film.

Though I have not seen the 1971 version produced by the BBC, from what I gather, both Cora’s mixed race ancestry and her love for Uncas are part of the plot.  This is exactly what one would expect, given the climate regarding race relations at that time.

The 1977 version was such a cheesy production that I don’t think much should be made of it. Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is omitted, but this version is unique in allowing Cora’s love for Uncas to go unpunished, though Uncas is not vouchsafed the same consideration.

This leaves us with the 1992 version, which omits Cora’s (i.e., Alice’s) mixed-race ancestry and gives no indication of any feeling between Cora (i.e., Alice) and Uncas. Given the fact that this was a big budget production, one would think that the time was ripe for a movie that not only kept the names and hair colors straight, but also emphasized both Cora’s mixed-race ancestry and her love for Uncas.

Now, some apologists for this version point to the fact that the director, Michael Mann, said that his movie was based on the 1936 version rather than the book.  But is that an explanation or an excuse?  In other words, I suspect that Michael Mann wanted to avoid the whole issue of miscegenation, and knowing the prominent role it played in the novel, he skirted the issue by claiming that his movie is more of a remake than an adaptation.

Had this movie been made before the 1960s, the reason for suppressing the two elements of miscegenation would have been the one given previously for the 1920 and 1936 versions, which is that audiences were still uncomfortable with people marrying across racial lines and having mixed-race children. But that can no longer be the motive here, for as we have seen, when the 1971 mini-series was produced, including both elements of miscegenation, the times had changed to the point that this was no longer a problem.

As best as I can tell, this leaves us with only one reason why Michael Mann left out or greatly minimized the elements of miscegenation.  He didn’t think it was important.  He figured no one would any longer care if one of the sisters were of mixed-race ancestry or if she were in love with a Native American, on account of the times having changed so much.  But by that kind of reasoning, we might as well not make a movie about the French and Indian War, for no one cares about that anymore either.  In other words, just as audiences have no trouble taking an interest in a war of minor importance historically, so too do audiences have no trouble becoming emotionally involved in conflicts between individuals and society, even if such conflicts no longer exist.  By leaving out the elements of miscegenation, Mann cut the guts out of the story.  His version of The Last of the Mohicans seems to be neither a story of punishment for sin nor of innocent suffering at the hands of an intolerant society, but just an action/adventure costume drama in which a couple of the characters die in the end for no better reason than that’s what happened to them in the other movies.

However, there is still hope.  Just as attitudes about race have changed over the years, so too has there been a change in attitudes about homosexuality. Undoubtedly, another version of The Last of the Mohicans will someday be made, and a future director, unconcerned with the possibility of a homoerotic interpretation, may allow Hawkeye to be ostensibly celibate, just as in the novel, while letting those who wish to interpret his relationship with Chingachgook as being something more than friendship do so.  And if that same director is alert to the universal theme of the individual against society, he may see that the two elements of miscegenation in the novel can be resurrected to good effect.