Philadelphia (1993)

In the movie Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a lawyer with a prestigious law firm.  In the opening scene, he successfully defends a client against what he calls a “nuisance suit,” as “an example of rapacious litigation.”  And so, if you did not know anything about this movie beforehand, you would correctly suspect that before the show is over, he will be bringing suit against someone himself.  And when he does, the lawyer whom he accused of bringing a frivolous lawsuit against his client, ambulance chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), ends up being his attorney.  In particular, the partners of the law firm he worked for say that they fired Beckett for incompetence, but Beckett claims they fired him because he had AIDS, which he concealed from the partners in addition to concealing the fact that he was gay.  Beckett explains during the trial that he decided not to tell the partners he was gay when he heard them telling crude jokes about homosexuals.  Those who produced this movie made sure that the jokes were not funny, lest we get confused and start sympathizing with the partners.  Actually, the movie never makes it clear exactly what happened regarding Beckett’s firing.  Beckett believes that someone figured out he had AIDS and sabotaged his work in order to justify dismissing him for incompetence, but we never find out for sure.

This movie is contemporaneously set in the early 1990s.  It was a transitional period.  During the 1980s, when AIDS was first identified, there was no treatment.  I remember seeing a lot of people whose bodies were ravaged by that disease.  The sight of them filled one with pity and dread (we see examples of such at the clinic where Beckett goes to have his blood monitored).  The dread was especially acute, because at the time, no one knew how contagious it was or what the vectors of transmission were.  Was it airborne?  Could it be transmitted by mosquitoes?  We knew that blood and semen could transmit the disease, but we also wondered about saliva and sweat.  By the 1990s, however, research had pretty much established that AIDS was caused by HIV and that blood transfusions, dirty needles used by drug addicts, and unprotected sex, especially between two men, were the primary methods of transmission.  Today, we seldom hear the word AIDS.  Instead, we speak mostly of HIV, because treatment has advanced to the point that we no longer see those pitiful victims that looked like the walking dead.

And so, the aversion to touching or being around AIDS victims, a perfectly rational fear in the early 1980s, came to be regarded as manifestations of ignorance and bigotry by the 1990s.  If someone was known to have AIDS, it became almost obligatory to hug him, as a way of demonstrating that one was enlightened on the subject.  And so, throughout this movie, we see Beckett being hugged on numerous occasions, more than you would normally see in a movie.  And we see other people trying to put distance between themselves and Beckett, whom we are supposed to regard as wrongheaded, if not morally bankrupt.

Before taking Beckett’s case, Miller asks a doctor about AIDS.  When the doctor assures him that HIV cannot be spread by casual contact, Miller is skeptical, pointing out that we are still learning new things about the disease every day.  Actually, this is a good point, though the movie allows it to die with this scene.  If even today someone did not want to hug someone with AIDS, just in case doctors turn out to be wrong, I would not blame him.  But the movie would.

In fact, the movie is completely one-sided in this matter.  Beckett is almost righteous in his disregard for people’s fears.  There is a scene in a library where a librarian, realizing he has AIDS, suggests that he move to a private room to continue his research, but Beckett refuses.  People in the immediate vicinity begin moving away.  In another scene, when he tells his family about his plans to sue, he is holding a baby, feeding it with a bottle.  The mother offers to take the baby back, and we suspect she is nervous but too polite to insist.  Beckett seems oblivious to the possibility that she might be worried and continues to feed the baby.

Even if the people in the library and the mother of the baby are being foolish in their fears, that does not mean that Beckett is in the right to refuse to accommodate them.  For example, my mother was a little superstitious, and she used to think it was bad luck to put money on the table.  As a result, I never put money on the table in her presence, even if she was visiting me in my apartment and it was my table.  Despite the fact that she was the one who was foolish and I was the one who was rational, it would have been rude of me to plop some money down on the table.  By the same token, no matter how irrational people’s fears of contracting AIDS through casual contact may be, Beckett should have been sensitive to those fears and allowed people the distance they needed to feel comfortable.  But this movie does not recognize any such obligation on Beckett’s part.

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

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

Of course, the attitude of the movie is that it is wrong to blame the victim, but let us note that the movie also lacks the courage of its convictions.  It establishes that Beckett was and still is in a monogamous relationship, as it were, and that he just had a moral lapse one night.  In other words, the movie did not have the courage to make Beckett a man given to promiscuity, a “degenerate” who had had anonymous sex on innumerable occasions in movie theaters and restrooms for over a decade.  That would really have tested us.  Instead, the movie is saying that it is wrong to blame the victim, especially when the victim, while not being totally innocent like the woman who had a transfusion, is almost innocent.

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

Midway through the trial, Miller comes over to Beckett’s place to go over the testimony Beckett will be giving on Monday.  Instead, Beckett wants to talk about the opera music that he has playing.  Like most people, including me, Miller does not much care for opera.  Beckett explains what the opera is about and what emotions are being expressed through the singing.  The intensity of his performance is bizarre.  I don’t know.  Maybe if you are dying from a dreadful disease, you can get a little more worked up about things than the one normally would, but it all seems to be a bit much.  While his overwrought description of the aria was going on, I could not help but think of the movie Pretty Woman (1990).  In that movie, Julia Roberts plays a streetwalker who ends up being the girlfriend of a corporate raider played by Richard Gere.  He takes her to see an opera, presumably the first one she has ever been to, and we see her crying during a particularly moving scene.  In other words, in both movies, a major character practices a form of sex that many regard as deviant and likely to spread disease.  And in both movies, these characters are deeply moved by an opera, as if to say they have such great souls that they can appreciate art in its highest form with a passion that we philistines can scarcely imagine.  It just wouldn’t have been the same if Beckett had been listening to N.W.A., explaining to his lawyer with great emotion, “And here is the part where he gets his sawed off shotgun and they have to haul off all the bodies.”

Lifeboat (1944)

Lifeboat is a movie made during World War II, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  It begins with a freighter that was on its way from America to England, having been sunk by a German U-boat.  The captain of the U-boat gave orders to fire upon the lifeboats, after which the U-boat itself is sunk.  One lifeboat manages to survive, and one by one it is populated by British and Americans of all walks of life. Finally, Willi (Walter Slezak), a German, is pulled aboard.  Some, such as a John Kovac (John Hodiak), who worked in the engine room, want to throw the German overboard, while columnist Connie Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), radioman Stanley “Sparks” Garrett (Hume Cronyn), and industrialist Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) (i.e., a woman and two weak men, appeasers all) argue successfully that they should let the German stay.

As the movie progresses, we see that while the British and Americans share what they have with the German, he conceals from them that he has a flask of water, some food and energy tablets, and a compass, by which he tries to steer them away from Bermuda and toward an area of the ocean occupied by German ships.  He further conceals that he was the captain of the U-boat.

Of particular interest is Gus Smith (William Bendix), who has been wounded in the leg. When we find out that he loves to dance, we know right then his leg is doomed.  Sure enough, it becomes gangrenous.  As it turns out, Willi was a surgeon before the war and says that he can amputate.  We get the sense that he enjoys the idea of removing Gus’s leg, much like the sadistic doctor in King’s Row (1942), who unnecessarily amputates the legs of Ronald Reagan.  Gus does not want to have his leg removed, saying he’d rather die than live with one leg, because he is afraid that he will lose Rosie, the girl back home whom he loves.  He fears that she might not want to marry him if he comes back without one of his legs, especially since she loves to dance as much as Gus does.  To make matters worse, Gus has a rival, Al Magaroulian, whom Rosie used to date, and who is also a good dancer, even though fallen arches have kept him out of the war.  Gus is afraid Rosie will go back to Al if he has his leg removed.  But eventually he relents, and Willi performs the surgery with no better anesthetic than brandy.

Later in the movie, while everyone is sleeping lethargically from dehydration, Gus catches Willi sipping a drink of water from his flask.  To keep Gus from telling the others about the water, Willi pushes him overboard.  When the others awaken from hearing Gus’s cries for help, they realize Gus has drowned, and they ask Willi why he didn’t do something.  Willi does not, of course, tell them that he pushed Gus overboard to keep him from talking.  Instead, he tells them that Gus voluntarily jumped overboard, and that he thought it would be best not to do anything about it:

You can’t imagine how painful it was to me.  All night long, to watch him turning and suffering and nothing I could do for him….  The best way to help him was to let him go.  I had no right to stop him, even if I wanted to.  A poor cripple dying of hunger and thirst. What good could life be to a man like that?

It probably didn’t help that earlier in the movie, when the passengers in the lifeboat were voting on whether to throw Willi overboard, he heard Gus vote to toss him into the ocean.

Then the other passengers find out about the water and food that Willi has been concealing.  They attack Willi, both the men and the women, forcing him overboard and to his death.  But one person does not take part in the attack.  It is Joe “Charcoal” Spencer (Canada Lee), an African American.  The idea seems to be that killing Willi is essentially a lynching, something that Joe would be sensitive about and find repugnant. He even tries to stop the nurse, Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), from participating in the killing, though she breaks away from him.

More likely, the true motivation was external to the film, in that those who made the movie were afraid that theaters in the South would have refused to show a movie in which a black man takes part in the killing of a white man, even if that white man is a Nazi.  In fact, earlier in the movie, when they were voting on whether to throw Willi overboard, Rittenhouse asks Joe how he wants to vote. Joe asks, “Do I get to vote too?” When told that he does, he says, “Guess I’d rather stay out of this.” This too was probably to placate the South, which would have bristled at seeing Joe get to vote right alongside white people.  Instead, southern audiences were undoubtedly pleased to see that this Negro knew his place.

One of the women brought aboard the lifeboat has a baby that drowned.  Eventually, they decide to give the baby a burial at sea. The passengers know that a prayer is in order, but are not sure which one. Rittenhouse says that any prayer will do, and he begins saying Psalm 23, the one that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd….”  However, Rittenhouse begins to falter after a couple of lines. But then Joe picks up where he left off, for he knows the entire thing by heart, and finishes it reverently.  One might suppose that the movie is depicting this as something admirable, but it is actually condescending.  African Americans in the old movies were always allowed to be more religious than white people, not because they were better than white people, morally speaking, but because their lesser intelligence made it possible for them to embrace their simple beliefs with an unquestioning faith.  In movies like The Green Pastures (1936) and Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959), it is clear that their religious notions are naïve and childlike, something white people approve of in black folks with an affectionate smile, but would be incapable of taking seriously themselves.

After they kill Willi, they realize that he was the only one who knew enough and had strength enough to row them to safety. Rittenhouse says, “When we killed the German, we killed our motor.”  But Joe says, “We still got a motor,” as he looks up toward the heavens.  Rittenhouse is dismissive when he realizes Joe is talking about God.  Here again, religion enters the movie through an acceptable vehicle, through a black man, while the white people remain skeptical, thereby retaining their dignity.  All this is a prejudice of the movies I’m talking about here, not necessarily how things were in real life.

Joe is only one of two people on the boat that is married, the other being Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), the woman with the dead baby. That leaves the way open for romantic possibilities.  Sparks ends up proposing to Alice, who had been having an affair with a married man and was miserable on account of it.  She accepts his proposal.  Kovac seems to be angry at the world, especially at Rittenhouse, who is a capitalist, while Kovac is a prole.  And he resents the fact that Connie is high class.  Little by little, she loses the symbols of her wealth, her mink and her diamond bracelet, for example.  As a woman stripped of such adornments, she might be suitable for Kovac.  Finally, it turns out that she is from the same side of the tracks as Kovac.  She uses her lipstick to put her initials on his chest, right alongside all the other initials of women tattooed on his torso.  We wish Sparks and Alice happiness with their marriage.  As for Kovac and Connie, they’d better just make it a fling.

Eventually, there is another sea battle, and it becomes clear that they will soon be picked up by an Allied ship, but not before they pull another German aboard who proves to be just as bad as Willi, though he is weak and soon overpowered, leaving the survivors to wonder, “What are you going to do with people like that?”

Yes, Nazis are evil, but are we all that good?  Consider Willi’s justification for letting Gus drown.  The lie that Willi thinks will be an acceptable justification for “allowing” Gus to drown is actually repugnant to the other survivors, who listen to his words in horror. And we who watch this movie are likewise repulsed by Willi’s callous remarks.  But now let us ask ourselves why those who made this movie (John Steinbeck, Jo Swerling, and Alfred Hitchcock) put this into the story.  We already knew Willi was evil before he killed Gus. When Mrs. Higley tells Willi he killed her baby when he ordered the lifeboats to be fired upon, Willi is so bored that he yawns and lies down to get some sleep.  She becomes so distraught that she drowns herself. But if a murder on the lifeboat was needed to really drive home the point that Willi was evil, it was not Gus that had to be killed.  It could have been Connie who saw Willi sneaking a sip of water.  When she confronts him, he snaps her neck and dumps her overboard.  That would certainly make it clear that Willi was evil!  But I suspect people would have hated that movie.

The point is that those who made this movie had a special reason for killing Gus off beyond making it clear that Willi was evil, which was overdetermined in any event. They did it to make those in the audience feel better, believing that the audience would have been uneasy if the movie had ended with Gus still alive in that lifeboat.  (It is for a similar reason that the mother with the dead baby had to commit suicide, because it would have been depressing to still have her alive at the end of the movie too.)  Sure, Rosie might not have cared about Gus’s leg, marrying him anyway because she truly loved him.  In a movie like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Hollywood could make sure that things would turn out that way.  In that movie, Cathy O’Donnell marries Harold Russell, despite the fact that both of his forearms have been replaced by prostheses, and despite the fact that her parents wanted her to break off the engagement.  But in real life, we know things do not always work out that way.  Rosie and Gus were not even engaged.  Instead of being like O’Donnell, Rosie might have tried to put a good face on the situation for a couple of months and then broken up with Gus and gone back to Al Magaroulian.  Since this movie is limited to what happens in and about that lifeboat, Hollywood could not guarantee a happy ending for Gus and Rosie, leaving the audience with dark forebodings as to what will happen when Gus gets back home.

Furthermore, the movie even indicates that Rosie will not remain true to Gus.  When Kovac and Connie try to convince Gus he needs to have his leg amputated, he refuses, saying he doesn’t want to live with just one leg.  (In a way, he is in agreement with Willi.)  Connie gives Gus a long, sentimental talk about how women are, how Rosie would be heartbroken to find that Gus allowed himself to die because he didn’t have faith in her.  Gus finally seems persuaded, but Connie turns away, saying, sotto voce, “God forgive me.”  By this we are to understand that she knows Rosie will not stick with Gus, and we know we are supposed to agree with her assessment.

And so, rather than leave the audience suspecting that Rosie would desert Gus, which would have been depressing, those who made this movie killed Gus off, allowing the audience to leave the theater feeling much better about the movie than if Gus had lived.  You might even say that Gus’s death was necessary for there to be a happy ending.  But does that not imply that those who made this movie were essentially in agreement with Willi when he asked, “What good could life be to a man like that?”  If they were right in their assessment of the audience’s reaction to an ending in which Gus is still alive, then does that not imply that the audience at that time felt the way Willi did?  Of course, there is a big difference between saying a man is better off dead and saying that the death of that man made the story better.  But both stem from the same sentiment.

And so, just as the audience gets the consolation of religion through Joe, while not being guilty of indulging in his silly superstitions, so too does the audience get the benefit of evil through Willi, while not being guilty of consciously wanting it.

Straight Time (1978)

There was a joke going around back in the early 1960s, “Do you ever watch The Untouchables and catch yourself pulling for the good guys?”  It really is amazing how easily a movie can get us to pull for the criminals, making us hope they get away with their crimes.  This is done primarily by making the criminal the protagonist, and also by having that criminal played by a major star.

Is Straight Time that kind of movie?  At first, I thought so, but as I got further into the movie, I came to the conclusion that Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman), a criminal just being released from prison after spending six years behind bars for burglary, was just not sympathetic enough to make me want him to get away with anything.  In fact, I thought the movie was a good illustration of why most people are unwilling to give a convicted felon a second chance.  But after watching the movie, I read some reviews and found that some critics saw Max as a victim of the difficulties of going straight in general and of his parole officer Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh) in particular.  This in turn made me wonder if the people who made this movie, director Ulu Grosbard among others, wanted me to be sympathetic to Max after all.

The first two sentences of a plot summary on IMDb is typical:  “After being released on parole, a burglar attempts to go straight, get a regular job, and just go by the rules. He soon finds himself back in jail at the hands of a power-hungry parole officer.”  Well, I take exception to two parts of that summary, that Max attempts to “just go by the rules,” and that the parole officer is “power-hungry.”

The first thing we see Max do is order a hot dog and then “forget” to pay for it.  Then he shows up late for his meeting with his parole officer, who wants to know where he stayed the night before, because he did not show up at the halfway house, which was required as one of the conditions of his parole, something Max agreed to upon his release from prison.  Max says, “Because I just spent six years in prison.  I just wanted to look at the lights.  I wanted to feel free.  I wanted to walk around and not have somebody tell me that I gotta get in bed at ten.”

Well, isn’t that nice.  Max believes that what he wants is more important than the rules.  Of course, that’s why he has such a long rap sheet in the first place, because he thought that the fact that he wanted something that belonged to someone else was more important than the rule that prohibits stealing.  The rest of us know that we have to try to satisfy our wants while complying with the rules, but apparently six years in prison was not enough to teach Max that lesson.

If I were parole officer Frank, by this time I would be disgusted.  He tells Max he has an attitude problem, which he most certainly does.  But Max is either dense or purposely acting that way, because he asks what kind of attitude he is supposed to have.  Frank patiently explains the facts of life to Max:  “Well, you don’t decide whether or not you go to a halfway house.  I mean, you come to me, we discuss it, then I decide.”  Sounds reasonable to me, but I guess this is what the critic on IMDb meant by saying that Frank was a “power-hungry parole officer.”  I would have told Max to get his ass over to the halfway house, and that once he had checked in there, he could come back to my office and we could start talking about his finding a job.  But Frank is more generous than I would have been, saying, “I’ll make a deal with you, Max.  If you find a place to sleep today and a job by the end of the week, you don’t have to go to a halfway house. Fair?”  More than fair, as far as I’m concerned.

At the employment agency, Max is given some tests, one of which is typing.  The employment agent who is testing him is Jenny (Theresa Russell).  She tells Max three times that his time is up, for him to stop typing, but you know how Max is about the rules.  He doesn’t want to stop typing, so he figures that entitles him to keep going.  Jenny finally has to rip the paper out of the typewriter.

Max goes to visit his friend Willy (Gary Busey), who has apparently also done time.  After Willy leaves the room for a minute, his wife Selma (Kathy Bates) tells Max that it would be best for him not to come around, because Willy has been doing well going straight, and she is afraid that Max might not be a good influence on him.  And then she makes a further observation:  “You’re on parole now, Max.  Well, you really shouldn’t even be seen with Willy, right?”  So here we are again.  A condition of Max’s parole is that he not associate with convicted felons like Willy, but I guess Max wanted to see Willy, and as we know, what he wants always trumps the rules.

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary seems to be another critic who sympathizes with Max, saying that Frank is venal.  Now, “venal” means “corrupt or willing to be bribed,” but there is nothing to indicate that about Frank.  He just seems to be doing his job trying to run herd on a bunch of lowlifes like Max.  Peary also says that Frank intends to send Max back to prison, but I see nothing to indicate that.  If Max had followed the rules by going to the halfway house and avoiding Willy as he was supposed to, everything would have been fine.

Instead, just as Selma feared, when Willy goes over to Max’s motel room, he does himself up with a nice fix of heroin, and then carelessly leaves behind evidence of the deed, causing Frank to bring Max in for a drug test.  His urine tests clean, but after that he breaks parole completely and goes back into a life of crime.  But even in that realm, Max cannot go by the rules.  Another friend of his, Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), agrees to rob a bank and later a jewelry store with Max, but in both cases, Max refuses to leave the establishment when the allowed amount of time that they agreed to is up.  “You’re like a two-year-old child,” Jerry tells Max in exasperation.

I don’t even want to talk about how stupid Jenny is for dating Max and wanting to stay with him even after she finds out that he has gone back into crime.  He leaves her behind at a diner where a bus will take her back to Los Angeles, telling her she can’t go with him because he says he wants to get caught.  Oh brother!  Now, it is one thing to say that about somebody else, but it sounds artificial and hokey when someone says that about himself.  Besides, if he wants to get caught, he can just turn himself in.  Presumably, we are supposed to imagine that Jenny won’t be implicated, but she was seen leaving the office with him after he shot a policeman, and the car he drives off in belongs to her, so this is not realistic.

Peary argues that part of the problem is that it is hard for an ex-con to go straight:  “[Max] may be a habitual criminal, but it’s important for us to realize that if he really did intend to go straight come hell or high water, being an ex-con makes that a near impossibility.”  On the contrary, the movie indicates that going straight is indeed possible.  Not only did Max manage to get himself a decent job at the National Can Company, but it is also evident that both of his friends, Willy and Jerry, managed to go straight and do all right holding down jobs.  In fact, what causes Willy and Jerry to go back into crime with Max is not that society makes things hard for them, but that they are basically no good, that they prefer crime to holding down a job and living an ordinary life.

In addition to the question as to how we are to interpret this movie, either like a bleeding-heart liberal, who sees Max as someone who just needed a chance but was victimized by Frank, or like a law-and-order conservative, who thinks that Frank was just doing his job and that Max caused his own problems by not following the rules, there is the question as to which interpretation was intended by those who made this movie.  According to a review published by Variety when the movie came out, those who made this movie at first promoted the former before shifting to the latter:  “Viewers are asked initially to believe that M. Emmet Walsh, the assigned parole officer, is a sadistic person who delights in hassling his charges. But given the circumstances, he does not emerge as a heavy. Indeed, Hoffman’s too-easy lapse into his old ways absolves any blame on The System. Hoffman’s character would have defied the parole supervision of a saint.”

Finally, there is the question as to how much the actors starring in these roles influence our judgment.  Vincent Canby of The New York Times says:  “Max is shrewd, self-absorbed, tough in superficial ways, and doomed. He defines the meaning of recidivism. In real life you wouldn’t trust him to hang up your coat. In Straight Time, in the person of Dustin Hoffman, he’s a fascinating character, made romantic only to the extent that an actor of such stature invests him with importance that is otherwise denied. Max is strictly small-time.”

Peary says, “If Robert De Niro had played [Max], with Martin Scorsese as director, we’d probably be too repulsed by him to feel any of the necessary empathy.”  Another way to look at it is to imagine if the movie had been about a parole officer played by Dustin Hoffmann, one of whose parolees was played by M. Emmet Walsh.

In any event, the movie as it stands, with the actors that star in it, is one of those movies that tell you something about yourself, depending on how you react to it.  Apparently, I’m just a law-and-order kind of guy.

A Thousand Clowns (1965)

I saw A Thousand Clowns when it was released in 1965, while I was in my second year of college.  It is one of those movies that praise nonconformity, making the case that it is wonderful to be a free spirit, defying convention, and living life to the full.  Other well-known movies in this nonconformist genre are You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Auntie Mame (1958).  These movies make me say to myself, “Thank God for conformity!  Otherwise, life on this planet would be unbearable.”

Jason Robards plays Murray Burns, the nonconformist of this film.  His nephew Nick (Barry Gordon) lives with him in an apartment.  Murray glories in not making much sense, but the fact is, the world he lives in does not make much sense either, because it is a fake world, written to suit the purposes of the story.

When the movie opens, Murray and Nick are out on the street in New York City, early in the morning.  Murray starts hollering at the people in the apartment buildings that they need to clean their windows.  Later in the movie, Nick says that Murray hollers all the time:

He hollers.  Like, we were on Park Avenue last Sunday, and it’s very early in the morning.  There’s no one in the streets, see, just all these big, quiet apartment houses, and he hollers, “Rich people, I want to see you all out on the street for volleyball.  Let’s snap it up!”

And Nick is right.  Murray talks loud and hollers throughout the movie.  He is not content merely to be a nonconformist in his own quiet way, but feels compelled to put his nonconformity on full display for the benefit of the whole world.

Murray makes fun of the people who are going to work in the morning, which he refers to as a “horrible thing.”  He used to have a job working for a guy named Leo, writing jokes for a children’s show called Chuckles, the Chipmunk, but he quit and has been receiving unemployment checks for five months. Nick mentions that in school he wrote an essay on the benefits of living on unemployment insurance, which has precipitated an investigation to see if Murray is fit to have custody of Nick.

Let’s stop right there.  First of all, people who get laid off can receive unemployment checks, and so can those that quit for a good cause, such as a medical condition.  But you don’t qualify for unemployment benefits if you simply got tired of working and quit.  Second, social workers do not take children away from their homes because the person taking care of them is receiving unemployment checks.  The whole point of unemployment insurance is to allow people to have something to live on, which includes taking care of their children, until they find another job.

Nevertheless, two social workers, Albert Amundson (William Daniels) and Dr. Sandra Markowitz (Barbara Harris), come calling on Murray to see whether or not Nick should be taken away from him and put in a foster home.  Amundson is a typical character in a nonconformist movie, someone who is anal, who thinks everything must be in its place, and that everyone must act in strict accordance with his sense of propriety. And as the world never manages to live up to his rigid standards, he always seems to be on the verge of losing control of himself.  The movie needs such a character to convince us that conformity is bad, so nonconformity, by default, must be good.  In other words, if Amundson were your typical social worker, a fairly normal person, we would conclude that Murray was wrong to act the way he does.  By making Amundson so ridiculously uptight, the movie hopes to persuade us that Murray’s way must be the right way.  William Daniels, who plays Amundson, is perfect for this kind of role, if such a role is required, which is the case here, unfortunately.

After Murray talks loud and acts crazy in front of Amundson and Markowitz for fifteen minutes, with Nick doing the same, we eventually get the serious reason why Nick is with Murray.  When Nick was five, his mother abandoned Nick, leaving him at Murray’s apartment.  No one knows who the father was.  Normal social workers would be glad that a relative is taking care of Nick and would probably want him to have legal custody, because that is preferable to putting Nick in a foster home. But not so in this movie.

And then, just to add to the absurdity of it all, Nick does not have an official name.  The explanation given is that since Nick was a bastard, his mother decided not to give him a last name.  And since she didn’t give him a last name, she didn’t want to give him a first name either.  As I mentioned above, this is a fake world.  If an unwed mother refuses to name a child, the name will be assigned by the state, typically giving the child the mother’s maiden name, and picking a common first name to complete the process.  The only way her child could avoid having an official name would be if there were no birth certificate.  So, what did his mother do, have him under a bridge?

Dr. Markowitz is a fairly normal person and thus more like a typical social worker. However, she was engaged to Amundson, and they quarrel while at Murray’s apartment.  He leaves without her, and she becomes hysterical.  But soon it is that she and Murray fall in love.  And you know what that means.  She wants him to give up his nonconformist ways and get a job.  And the principal reason why Murray should do this, according to the movie, is emphasized over and over again, that only by getting a job can he retain custody of Nick.

Amundson returns the next day to explain the situation to Murray:

Late yesterday afternoon, the Child Welfare Board made a decision on your case. Now, uh, the decision they’ve reached is based on three months of a thorough study.

Since Murray has been receiving unemployment checks for five months, the investigation apparently started two months after he quit his job.  Boy, that Child Welfare Board is really on top of things!  Amundson continues:

Our interview yesterday was only a small part of that.  Quite thorough.  I want you to understand that I am not responsible personally for the decision they’ve reached….  Months of research by the board and reports by the Revere School show a severe domestic instability, a libertine self indulgence, a whole range of circumstances severely detrimental to the child’s welfare.

Amundson informs Murray that it is the board’s decision to remove Nick from his home and find a place for him where he can lead a normal, wholesome life, even though he admits that Murray loves Nick:

Now, I believe that you are a danger to this child.  … I wish this were not true, because it is obvious you have considerable affection for your nephew.  It shows in your face, this feeling.  Well, I admire you for your warmth, Mr. Burns, and for the affection the child feels for you.

Meanwhile, all over the city, children are being physically and sexually abused, but it appears the Child Welfare Board won’t have time to get to them.  They’re too busy worrying about Murray’s bohemian life style.

The most reasonable spokesman for conformity is Murray’s brother, Arnold (Martin Balsam).  He tries to explain to Murray the virtues of conformity, with special emphasis on the fact that the state will take Nick away from him if he does not get a job.  But while he goes on at length trying to persuade Murray to go back to work, the one argument that never seems to occur to him or anyone else in this movie is the one that is the most obvious:  eventually the unemployment checks will stop, and with no source of income, Murray will be evicted from his apartment, and he and Nick will have to live under that bridge where presumably Nick was born.  The steady drumbeat of how the state will take Nick away from Murray, if he does not get a job, is supposed to distract us from the main reason people have jobs, even if they do not have a child to take care of, which is that they need a paycheck.

The way this movie is oblivious to the need for a job, for the simple reason you need money to live on, reminds me of a guy I knew in my senior year of college.  When I mentioned something about having to find work after I graduated, he dismissed my concerns with disdain, saying, “You don’t have to work. That’s just what you’ve been brainwashed to believe by the establishment.”  He said this without irony, as if the fact that he had been sleeping on his friend’s couch for the last six months was a permanent option, and one available to us all.

Auntie Mame is similar to A Thousand Clowns in that both movies involve someone who has custody of a nephew, but at least Mame has enough money to live independently when the movie starts.  It’s a whole lot easier to be a nonconformist when you’re rich.  The family members in You Can’t Take It with You, on the other hand, are not rich, but they are contemptuous of ordinary work, just as Murray is. They have the philosophy that everyone should just do what he wants to do, and somehow enough money can be made doing whatever that is to get by.  But they are like that guy I knew who slept on his friend’s couch, for they are supported by Jean Arthur’s character, the one person in the family with a real job.

Just as Amundson is supposed to make conformity look repulsive in this movie so that we will side with Murray in his refusal to conform, so too are the jobs Murray is offered so repulsive that we are supposed to side with Murray in his refusal to go back to work. But he lives in New York, and there are more jobs in that city than those that have something to do with producing a television show. Nevertheless, Murray agrees to go back to work for Leo, writing material for Chuckles, the Chipmunk.  But Arnold warns him that he won’t be home free just because he has a job:

Now, my agency lawyer gave me all the facts.  The most the board will allow you is a probationary year with Nick, a trial period, and the board’s investigators are going to be checking up on you every week, regularly:  checking to see that you still have your job, checking with Leo on your stability, checking up on the improvements in your home environment.

They will be watching his every move!

So, there is little for Murray to do but take that job and marry Sandra, allowing him to retain custody of Nick.

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic, which was published in 1986, Danny Peary remarks that the movie, once a cult hit, no longer holds up:  “Today its sellout conclusion, in which the nonconformist lead character willingly sacrifices his way of life because of familial responsibility, doesn’t sit well.”  He suggests that the movie The Kid (1921), a Charlie Chaplin movie, had a better resolution.  But for this movie to have an ending like the one in The Kid, that would have required that Nick’s mother turn up, having become a wealthy woman somehow, ready to regain custody of Nick and, presumably, to let Murray sleep on her couch.

But more to the point, the movie is no longer the cult hit it once was, not because of the “sellout conclusion,” but because people no longer buy the premise.  I’m sure that guy I knew in college, who was contemptuous of the notion of having to work for a living, wore out his welcome, sleeping on his friend’s couch, and eventually had to face the cold, cruel world that expected him to get off his butt and get a job. Society no longer puts up with nonsense like that once you turn thirty.  He and a lot of other idealistic hippies may have loved A Thousand Clowns while being supported by their parents or managing to sponge off others, but found that it lost its charm when they ended up having to go to work to pay the bills just like everyone else.

Has No Always Meant No?

I was in high school in the early 1960s, a hopeless virgin, and thus I was always eager for any advice I could get from some of the guys who seemed to have a way with women.  A common refrain at the time was, “When a girl says No, she means Maybe, and when she says Maybe, she means Yes.”

Well, that advice did me no good.  For one thing, when a girl said No to me, she usually sounded pretty serious.  In fact, a girl could stop me with a glance.  If anything, I needed encouragement.  So, as a practical matter, No meant No to me, regardless of what I was being told by those supposedly in the know.

It was during those high school years that the movie Hud came out, 1963 to be exact.  I expect that most people have seen this movie, but in brief, the title character is played by Paul Newman.  He is a big stud in a small Texas town.  His nephew Lon (Brandon De Wilde) is a virginal teenage boy who admires Hud and wishes he could be like him.  They are both attracted to Alma (Patricia Neal), who is their housekeeper.  Alma admits to being sexually aroused by Hud, especially when he has his shirt off, but she is leery of him, because she thinks he is a “cold-blooded bastard.”  She regards Lon with affection, but she is practically a mother to him, and thus never thinks of him as a lover.

One night, when Hud is drunk and angry, he goes to Alma’s cabin, breaks open the door, and starts trying to rape her.  There is a fierce struggle as she tries to fight him off.  Suddenly, Lon bursts in and grabs Hud, pulling him off.  Hud almost bashes Lon’s face in, but stops, lets him go, and leaves the cabin.

I saw this movie with my parents at the drive-in when it first came out.  Both of them said that Alma wanted to be raped and that she was irritated that Lon stopped Hud from giving her what she wanted.  I voiced my reservations, but they dismissed me as being naïve.  I figured that was a losing argument, so I gave up.  A few years later, my girlfriend and I watched the movie, and she also said that Alma wanted to be raped.  I had always wanted to ask a girl if No meant No, but I figured that would lead to the absurdity of the Liar’s Paradox, so I never bothered.  But since this particular girlfriend had already taken my virginity, I guess she felt comfortable telling me that sometimes No means Yes.  Well, technically, Alma never said the word “No,” but her actions clearly implied it.

Having already been dismissed as naïve by my parents, I didn’t even bother expressing my doubts to my girlfriend.  But I never believed for a minute that Alma wanted to be raped.  It was different with an earlier movie that Patricia Neal had been in, The Fountainhead (1949), in which it is clear that her character Dominique wanted to be raped.  Or rather, as the novel on which it is based makes clear, it was because she had been raped that for the first time in her life she experienced sexual ecstasy.  Perhaps this role became part of Patricia Neal’s persona, making it easy for people to believe that she wanted to be raped in Hud as well. As for me, I have seen the movie many times over the years, and I always think about my parents and my girlfriend when the scene with the sexual assault takes place, but I have never seen any reason to change my mind.

But then I bought Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies.  I have read a lot of books on film criticism, but I have avoided Kael for years, because she seems to spend too much time praising weird foreign films.  Anyway, I finally broke down and bought this book, in which is included an essay on Hud, written in 1964.  In it, she maintains that Alma wanted to be raped, and she gives reasons in support of her position:

Alma obviously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him; she wants to be treated differently from the others.  If Lon hadn’t rushed in to protect his idealized view of her, chances are that the next morning Hud would have felt guilty and repentant, and Alma would have been grateful to him for having used the violence necessary to break down her resistance, thus proving that she was different.  They might have been celebrating ritual rapes annually on their anniversaries.

One of the objections to this theory is that Alma leaves the next day, but to this, Kael replies:

No doubt in Hud we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kaufmann [a film critic] says, “driven off by his [Hud’s] vicious physical assault.”  But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because a frustrated rape is just too sordid and embarrassing for all concerned—for the drunken Hud who forced himself upon her, for her for defending herself so titanically, for young Lon the innocent who “saved” her.

That makes three women, my mother, my girlfriend, and Pauline Kael, who subscribed to the theory that Alma wanted to be raped.  All three women, however, voiced these opinions in the 1960s, which means their attitudes could have been the same as those who made the movie, all of them sharing what might have been a 1960s Zeitgeist of consensual rape, if you’ll pardon the expression.

In other words, even if they were right, they were right about a movie made in the 1960s.  And this raises the question as to whether there could be a remake of this movie, not that I would want to see one.  That is to say, if producers in Hollywood decided that Hud was old enough to justify a remake, inasmuch as a lot of people like their movies fresh, especially since it could be made in color this time, and if this remake followed the original, especially regarding the sexual assault, how would people react to this movie today?  Surely not the way my parents, girlfriend, and Pauline Kael once did!

Or am I just being naïve again?

Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962)

Invasion of the Star Creatures is a low-budget spoof of equally low-budget science fiction films.  Just to make sure everyone is in on the joke, the credits open with, “R.I. Diculous Presents An Impossible Picture.”  It is filled with silly situations and corny jokes, but it is rather amusing, if you are in the mood for this sort of thing.

On an army missile base, Private Philbrick and Private Penn are normally in charge of such things as washing the garbage cans, but are assigned by Colonel Awol to be part of a team investigating a cave that opened up as the result of a nuclear test explosion.  The team discovers seven-foot-tall plant-like extraterrestrials, sort of like the alien in The Thing from Another World (1951).  However, these plant creatures are just slaves, their masters being two tall, beautiful women, reminiscent of movies like Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958).

The two privates are captured by the vegetable monsters and brought before the two women, Professor Tanga and Dr. Puna.  Philbrick wonders aloud what Space Commander Connors would do, an allusion to such radio and television characters as Captain Video and Captain Midnight, or the television show Space Patrol (1950-55).  The women tell Penn and Philbrick they plan to return to their planet, after which Earth will be invaded and conquered.  Then they show the privates the room where they grow the plant men.  We see flower pots, most of which have a hand sticking up out of them.  When they prepare to leave the room, Philbrick says goodbye to the plant hands, one of which waves bye-bye.

Although there are warrior men back on their planet, the women don’t seem to know anything about love, so Philbrick teaches Dr. Puna what “kiss” means. She swoons, allowing Penn and Philbrick to escape.  They return to base and tell Colonel Awol that he must stop the spaceship from blasting off.  Awol does not believe them and orders them to be thrown into the guardhouse, assuming them to be drunk.  But when Philbrick swears on his Space Commander Connors’ secret ring, Awol asks to see the ring.  When Philbrick shows it to him, Awol shows Philbrick his.  They utter the secret code words and do the hand signal.  Then they discover they both belong to the same stellar squadron, and it turns out that whereas that Awol is only a junior flight leader, Philbrick is a senior flight leader, which means Philbrick is now in command.

The three of them head back to the cave.  Penn says the three of them will not be enough to stop the space broads from taking off.  Just then, a bunch of Indians come along, whereupon it turns out that they also are members of Space Commander Connors’ flight squadron, only one of the Indians is General flight leader, and proves it with a badge pinned to his bare chest.  So now, the Indian is in command.

But they all have a pow wow, during which the Indians and the colonel get drunk.  Penn and Philbrick go back to the cave and manage to blast the rocket ship off into space, marooning the two women.  But Dr. Puna gets Penn to teach Professor Tanga what “kiss” means.  They all get married and live happily ever after.

I saw this movie a couple of times in the 1960s on the late show, and I liked it so much that I bought my own copy on DVD recently.  I was looking forward to one of my favorite jokes in the movie, when Penn and Philbrick try to get telepathic control of one of the plant men.  The way I remember it, Penn says, “Focus on his eye.”

But as the eyes of the plant men are spaced really far apart, Philbrick asks, “Which one?”

“The one next to the carrot,” Penn replies.

Imagine my disappointment when I found it was not on the DVD.  Then I noticed that IMDb says that the television version is ten minutes longer than the theatrical version.

I guess I’ll have to wait for the director’s cut.

No Escape (2015)

No Escape is principally a fantasy film for husbands who are failures.  A lot of men feel they have let their wives down, and in this movie, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has done so in a big way.  From the dialogue we learn that he used to be in business for himself, but he eventually had to give that up.  So, he takes a job with Cardiff, a water company, requiring that he relocate his family to some unnamed country, which would have to be either Laos or Cambodia, which means he and his family are strangers in a strange land, where they don’t speak the language and where the food being sold in the marketplace would cause you to lose your appetite.  They check into a hotel where the phone doesn’t work, some of the lights don’t come on, and there is nothing but snow on television.  And this looks like the best hotel in the whole city.  It all proves to be too much for Jack’s wife Annie (Lake Bell), and in the middle of the night he finds her sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying.  In other words, if things had proceeded normally from this point, this would have been a movie of misery, probably resulting in Annie’s taking their two children back to the United States before long and filing for divorce.

But then there is a coup, the prime minister is assassinated, everyone in the American embassy is killed, and the police are overrun by mobs of revolutionaries, whose ultimate goal is to slaughter every Caucasian foreigner in the country, especially employees of Cardiff.  As horrible as that sounds, it gives Jack a chance to redeem himself, as he leads his family this way and that through one melodramatic situation after another, even to the point of killing a man who was threatening them.  And he does this killing in full view of his wife.  And she thought her husband was a failure.  Hah!

On the plane coming over, they met Hammond (Pierce Brosnan).  Given Brosnan’s James Bond persona, we are not surprised when he turns out to be a British spy.  But he is not just a spy who is getting along in years.  He is a corrupt version of James Bond.  Now that the Cold War is over, his services are put to ends more pecuniary than patriotic.  After coming to the rescue of Jack and his family, he confesses to being the ultimate cause of the revolution.  His job is to get countries to borrow money for projects, such as waterworks, knowing that they will never be able to pay back the loans. Being hopelessly in debt, the countries have no choice but to let corporations like Cardiff come in and make big profits at the expense of the impoverished citizens.  Normally, things work out well, and the citizens don’t even realize how it all happened.  But this time, things did not work out well, and so the people have risen up to take their country back.  In other words, Hammond continues, they are trying to protect their families just as Jack is trying to protect his.

That’s cute.  But Hammond’s explanation of what is going on comes across as a little bit forced and artificial.  Even if Hammond’s explanation were true of how things work in the third world, his flippant attitude is not realistic.  Most people try to justify what they are doing.  A real life Hammond would have tried to say that he was ultimately helping the people of the country, and that the profits made by Cardiff were just one more way in which the free-enterprise system works for the greater good.  But one gets the feeling that this more nuanced approach, which would have allowed us to gradually see through his self-deceiving justification, would have taken too much time.  So, the scriptwriters had Hammond just blurt it all out with no apologies.  We get a two-minute information dump, and that’s that.  Then it’s back to kill or be killed.

Speaking of which, the unrelenting obsession on the part of the revolutionaries to kill every Caucasian foreigner they can find seems to be a little much.  And when the leader of a squad of these killers tries to force one of Jack’s daughters to pull the trigger on a revolver and shoot Jack in the head, while holding a pistol to the head of that same daughter, he reminded me of some Snidely Whiplash character tying a girl to the railroad tracks.

And then along came Jones.  Or rather, along came Annie.  You see, in times past, it was all right for the man to save the helpless woman, but that is no longer acceptable.  And so, about halfway through the movie, Annie begins doing her share, even to the point of bashing the brains out of the guy trying to force her daughter to shoot Jack.

Finally, as the ultimate irony, Annie rows a boat containing her family across a river to Vietnam, where they find sanctuary.  From there, presumably, they will go back to the United States and stay there.  And so, thanks to the revolution, they live happily ever after.  Without that, Jack would have been a failure with a miserable wife on his way to a divorce.

Made for Each Other (1939)

Movies that were popular when they were made tell us something about the culture that produced them, but sometimes it is hard know whether the movies depict things as they really were or only as the way the audience wanted them to be.  This is especially so for the movie Made for Each Other, in which one cannot help but wonder what the attitude of the audience was toward love, God, and housewives in 1939.

The movie starts off as a comedy, drifts into drama, plunges into melodrama, and then closes as a comedy, the overall result being uneven and unsatisfying, especially since the parts of the movie that count as comedy are not all that funny.  It begins by announcing in a prologue that of all the people in New York, John Mason (James Stewart) is one of the least important.  We see a hand flipping through a telephone book until it finds the name John Mason, followed by the abbreviation “atty,” indicating that he is an attorney.  Given this, it is hard to avoid the implication that the measure of a person’s importance is his occupation.  Now, this movie was made during the Great Depression when a lot of people didn’t even have a job.  And of those who did have employment, most would not have had a college education, let alone have had the luxury of obtaining an advanced degree, such as by going to law school.  In other words, most of those in the audience would have been “less important” in this sense than John Mason, and yet the people that made this movie must have assumed, perhaps rightly, that the audience would accept this evaluation of John as one of the least important people in New York are perfectly reasonable.

Anyway, he works for a law firm, and while on a brief trip to Boston to get a deposition for an upcoming case, Higgins versus Higgins, he met a woman named Jane (Carol Lombard) and married her.  It really is amazing, looking back now from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, how unthinkable that would be today.  Of course, even in 1939, when this movie was made, marrying a woman after having known her for only a few days would have been exceptional.  But people did fall in love and get married in those days far more quickly than now.  That is not surprising, considering that before the sexual revolution, a lot of people never had sex until they got married, and so couples were often in a hurry to tie the knot.

But it is not simply that people could not wait to have sex with each other.  Rather, there was a widespread belief at that time that marriages were made in Heaven.  This belief is expressed in the title of the movie.  So, once you met the person you were made for, there was no reason to hesitate.  Today, few people still believe this sort of thing.  We fall in love and have sex, not necessarily in that order, and then we fall out of love and break up.  We do this a few times with a few different people, and maybe when we find someone we really seem to get along with, we finally decide to get married, usually after living together for a while.  And then, as often as not, we end up getting divorced anyway.  And thus it is that today we look upon the notion that people are “made for each other” with a jaundiced eye.

Be that as it may, when John returns to the office, Carter, his chief rival for being made the next junior partner of the firm, suggests that senior partner Judge Doolittle (Charles Coburn) might be displeased with the news, owing to the expectation that John would marry Doolittle’s daughter Eunice.  John dismisses that as just a rumor.  But he is embarrassed and hesitant about telling Doolittle, so we have to wonder.  It is never clear what John’s relationship with Eunice really amounted to, whether they even ever went out on a date.

John and Jane prepare to go on their honeymoon by taking a ship to Europe.  In their cabin, there is a small bed, which is just barely big enough for the two of them.  They get on the bed and try it out.  A lot of people believe that in old movies, if a man and woman got on the same bed, at least one of them had to have one foot on the floor.  There is nothing about that in the Production Code, and this is one of several movies that prove that the rule never existed, such as Fallen Angel (1945) and The 39 Steps (1935), in the latter of which the couple are not even married.  The honeymoon, however, is called off when John has to go back to the office, because the continuance he thought he had for Higgins v. Higgins has been rescinded, with the trial scheduled for the next Monday.  He gets no sympathy from Doolittle, who is contemptuous of honeymoons.

Somewhat later, with John’s mother Harriet living with him and Jane, they have Doolittle, Carter, and Eunice over for dinner.  John thought he was being groomed for being made a partner, but Doolittle announces that the new partner will be Carter, owing to the recommendation made by Eunice, presumably because she is a woman scorned.  Having your boss over for dinner, who then picks that time to let you know, in front of your wife and other guests, that you have been passed over for the promotion you were hoping for would certainly make you feel as though you were one of the least important people in New York.

Jane has a baby, after which there follows a lot of helpless-husband and interfering mother-in-law routines that are supposed to be funny.  Maybe they were funny in 1939.  As I noted above, things were very different back then from the way they are now.  And one way in which they are different apparently is in the status of a housewife.  For some time now, it has been deemed inappropriate to ask a married woman if she works.  The implication of such a question is that housewives do not work, when in fact they do a lot of work, raising children, cleaning house, cooking, and so forth.  Well, that may be the way things are today, but judging by this movie, one has to wonder how things were back then.

From the beginning of their marriage, John and Jane have had a cook.  That is breathtaking all by itself.  How many people do you know have a full-time cook?  Anyway, the cook tells Jane that her job is to prepare meals, and that Jane can wash the diapers herself.  Jane is devastated.  She tells the cook she is fired.  Of course, she immediately hires another one, presumably someone who will wash the diapers as well as cook the meals (Ew!), and from what we can glean later in the movie, someone who will clean house as well.  In other words, this apartment has two women in it, John’s wife and mother, neither of whom has a job, and between the two of them, they cannot cook their own meals, wash the baby’s diapers, or keep house in general.  Well, maybe housewives today “work,” but I am not so sure about the ones in the 1930s, if this movie is any indication.  However, this may be a piece with the notion that a lawyer could be one of the least important people in New York.  That is, if the audience could believe this about John, perhaps the audience could accept the idea that it was perfectly appropriate for Jane to have a cook, even if those in the audience were doing good just to put food on the table.

John despairs about the fact that he was not promoted and given a raise, making it a bit of a struggle to pay the bills.  Jane tells John he should just barge into Doolittle’s office and demand a raise, saying Doolittle cannot do without him.  That makes me cringe.  One should never ask for a raise with that attitude.  One should always assume that the boss will say no, and be prepared for that.  Anyway, Jane pumps John up enough to do it, but before John can demand his raise, Doolittle tells him that business is off and everyone will have to take a twenty-five percent cut in pay, and that he himself will be making a substantial reduction in his drawing account.  As John leaves the office, we hear Doolittle talking to a commissioner on the phone, saying that he wants to buy that house on Park Avenue.

John goes out and gets drunk, coming home at two in the morning.  He drops a bottle of milk, waking up the new cook Lily (Louise Beavers).  All right, just a darn minute.  Now they have a live-in cook?  Well, maybe cooks have to live in the house for which they prepare the meals.  How would I know?  In any event, as we see in the next scene, she is also a nanny, because she is taking care of the baby in the park.  This is the fifteenth woman that Jane has hired, although it is the first one we have seen that is African American.  Perhaps it is on account of Lily’s black wisdom that Jane values her so much, as when Lily says, “Never let the seeds stop you from enjoying the watermelon.”

Because of the cut in pay, the Mason family starts going into debt, even to the point of having collection agencies being sicced on them.  Jane looks for a job, but cannot find one.  Finally, she is so desperate, she has to let go of Lily.  Now she will have to work in the home, just like a modern housewife.  In fact, John gets so depressed that he has turned his wife into a “household drudge” that he decides that they should get a divorce so that she won’t be married to a failure.  In other words, whereas today, a housewife may take umbrage at the suggestion that she does not work, back when this movie was made, if a housewife actually had to do housework, that was something to be ashamed of.

In the course of lamenting their marriage, John even says that maybe they should not have had the baby.  Uh-oh!  You know what that means.  It’s punishment time.  While they are at a night club being miserable with each other on New Year’s Eve, Jane calls home and finds out that the baby is sick.  He is rushed to the hospital, where he is diagnosed with an infection so severe that unless they can obtain some of the new, experimental serum, the baby will die.  John goes to Doolittle’s house, wakes him up in the middle of the night, and makes him put on his hearing aid.  Presumably, this hearing aid represents the fact that Doolittle often does not listen, figuratively speaking, to the needs of others.  John tells him that on account of the cut in pay, his baby has had to sleep in the dining room, causing him to get pneumonia.  Doolittle agrees to pay for the cost to get the serum.  Unfortunately, it will have to be flown in from another state during a blizzard.  Chances are, the pilot will not make it.  Communication with the pilot is lost, and it is beginning to look hopeless.

While watching over the baby, Jane bemoans the fact that there is nothing she can do.  The nurse, who is also a nun, is standing behind her with a knowing, almost smug look on her face.  She tells Jane there is one more thing she can do.  She leads her to the chapel, where Jane prays to a statue of Jesus.  I would have given anything for that scene to be followed by one in which we see the plane crash into the side of a mountain.  Well, that didn’t happen, of course.  The pilot bails out of the plane and crawls to a farmhouse, and the farmer calls the hospital.  The serum gets there on time, and the baby is saved.

It is interesting to note that we no longer see scenes like this in mainstream movies.  They still make religious movies, of course, in which people pray and God answers those prayers.  But if no mention is made of religion for most of a movie, a scene right at the end where somebody prays, bringing about a miracle, never happens any more.  It is a scene like that which spoils Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), at least for those of us watching it today.  But people must have been more open to the idea of divine intervention back in those days, accepting it casually as something that happens all the time.

After the baby is saved, we see the pilot and Doolittle having drinks in the bar.  Four rounds were bought, none paid for by Doolittle.  When the pilot comments on this, Doolittle indicates that he can’t hear him on account of his hearing aid.  This scene is followed by one in which John has been made a junior partner, with no reason given whatsoever.  From the juxtaposition of these scenes, we can only conclude that the one is the cause of the other, that John was made a partner because Doolittle has suddenly become all sentimental about the baby.  Either that, or because he was impressed by John’s nerve when John barged into his house the night the baby got sick.  Right after getting his promotion, John gives an angry lecture to all the other partners, from Carter on up to Doolittle, loudly asserting that there will have to be changes made at the law firm, and demanding that these changes be implemented immediately.  All the partners listen submissively.  Apparently John is now one of the most important people in New York.

What does it all mean?  A fair amount of emphasis was given to the scene where Jane prays to God to save the baby, so perhaps the idea is this.  John tells Jane they should get divorced, and he wishes that they had not had the baby.  God punishes John by making the baby sick.  Jane prays to God, who then relents and allows the baby to be saved.  Through this miracle, John and Jane are reconciled, and Doolittle’s heart is melted, leading him to give John a promotion.  And this is all in accordance with God’s plan.

Or maybe not.  Even in the old days, movies did not require divine intervention for there to be a narrative rupture arising out of an unbelievable change in character in the final reel.  How much the audience of 1939 would have seen the hand of God in all this is hard to say from our present, less credulous perspective.

In any event, given this promotion, there can be little doubt that Jane has hired Lily back to be a live-in cook, maid, and nanny again.  Now she doesn’t have to work in any sense of the word.

Insignificance (1985)

Insignificance imagines how four cultural icons, referred to as the Professor (Michael Emil), the Actress (Theresa Russell), the Senator (Tony Curtis), and the Ballplayer (Gary Busey), obviously corresponding to Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, and Joe DiMaggio, might have met and interacted.

Early in the movie, Einstein and Marilyn are in the same hotel room together, and by using a bunch of props that happen to be available, like balloons and flashlights, she gives a lively demonstration of her understanding of relativity theory, much to Einstein’s delight.  Presumably, this scene is supposed to warm our hearts that Marilyn, whose screen persona was that of a dumb blonde, was actually smart enough to grasp the essentials of Einstein’s theory.  And, by extension, it is supposed to make us feel smart in the bargain, for what Marilyn is saying is easy to understand, so those watching the movie who have little familiarity with the theory are flattered into thinking they understand it too.

Unfortunately, Marilyn has it all wrong.  That is to say, Terry Johnson, who wrote the script for the play and the screenplay for the movie, got it all wrong.  Johnson, by way of Marilyn, makes a mistake not uncommon for someone making his first attempt to understand the idea that a clock moving at a high rate of speed will run slow, according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.  If, as a clock on a spaceship moves away from the Earth, it sends a signal back to Earth every second, it will appear to be running slow, because each successive signal has farther to travel.  But it doesn’t take a genius like Einstein to realize that you have to take into account the spaceship’s speed and distance from the Earth.  In fact, allowing for that speed and distance in recording the signals coming from the clock is something any second-rate physicist would know to do.  Actually, it is probably something that would occur to a liberal arts major.  The time dilation predicted by Einstein’s theory, however, is an actual slowing down of a clock that can be observed even after you allow for the extra time it takes for each signal to reach the Earth.

As a result, the movie’s attempt to show how smart Marilyn is completely fails.  It reminds me of the gaffe in The Wizard of Oz (1939), when the Scarecrow tries to show how smart he has become once the Wizard has given him a diploma.  He supposedly enunciates the Pythagorean Theorem, but he botches it so badly that he enunciates a formula that is not true of any triangle that has ever existed.

In the case of The Wizard of Oz, however, one’s enjoyment of the movie is not impaired by the Scarecrow’s mistake even for those who are aware of it.  Insignificance, however, would not have been much of a movie even if Marilyn had gotten Einstein’s theory right, and the fact that she didn’t only makes things worse.

Excalibur (1981)

There have been many movies based on the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  Of those I have seen, Excalibur is my favorite.  Except for “O Fortuna” and some original compositions for this movie, most of the music for Excalibur comes from Richard Wagner’s operas, about which a few preliminary remarks are in order.

The Music of Richard Wagner

Those who regularly attend the opera are probably appalled at the way Wagner’s music has been appropriated for a mere movie.  But from my lowbrow perspective, Wagner’s music has never before been put to such good use.

It is not surprising that much of Wagner’s music is dark and heavy.  He was, after all, influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, who is known for his pessimistic philosophy. Wagner, in turn, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, who praised Wagner in his The Birth of Tragedy, but became critical of him in his subsequent writings.  Both Wagner and Nietzsche were appropriated by the Nazis.  In the case of Nietzsche, his philosophy of the will to power undoubtedly appealed to the Third Reich, while Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen glorifies the Teutonic warrior gods and heroes of Norse mythology, with whom the Nazis readily identified.  It also helped that Wagner was an anti-Semite.

As a result, if you are watching a movie in which a character is associated with Wagner, he is probably evil. In Brute Force (1947), for example, Hume Cronyn is Captain Munsey, Chief of Security in a prison. During a conversation he has with the prison doctor, it is clear that Munsey is a fascist. He says kindness is weakness, and weakness makes a man a follower instead of a leader.  When the doctor quotes Jesus about the meek inheriting the earth, Munsey says that is contradicted by science, which says the weak must die so that the strong may live.  The doctor says Munsey enjoys inflicting pain.  Munsey inflicts some of that pain on the doctor.  In a subsequent scene, Munsey, while wearing a wife beater, repeatedly hits one of the inmates with a rubber hose while we hear the overture from Tannhäuser in the background.  It is not background music, however.  When the prisoner is first brought into Munsey’s office, we see that the music is coming from Munsey’s record player.  It helps put Munsey is the proper mood.  After hitting the prisoner with that rubber hose several times, and finding that he still won’t talk about the prison break Munsey knows is being planned, he walks over to the record player, turns the music from that Wagnerian opera up twice as loud, and then really starts whipping that prisoner.  The actor playing the part of the prisoner Munsey is torturing is Sam Levene, who was a Jew.

On a lighter note, in Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen tells his friend about the tall, blond guy looking at him in the record store while saying they were having a sale this week on Wagner.  He is sure that he did this because Allen is a Jew.

In The Stranger (1946), Orson Welles plays a man who was a high-ranking Nazi during the war, but now is in America, hiding under the name of Charles Rankin, employed as a professor of German history.  He pretends to despise the Nazis in particular, and Germans in general, all the better to deflect any suspicion as to his past.  When asked for his opinion, as an objective historian, as to whether Germany would ever want to go to war again, he replies that a psychiatrist is needed more than a historian, giving us insight into just why there is such a fit between Wagner’s music and the Nazis, especially regarding his Der Ring des Nibelungen:

The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred. Conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations.  He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing.  Not the German.  We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain. But we learned from our casualty lists the price of looking the other way.  Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German. No, he still follows his warrior gods, marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried. And in those subterranean meeting places that you don’t believe in, the German’s dream world comes alive, and he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic Knights.  Mankind is waiting for the messiah, but for the German the messiah is not the prince of peace. No, he’s…  He’s another Barbarossa, another Hitler.

At this point, he is asked about the reforms being effected in Germany.  Rankin continues:

I can’t believe that people can be reformed except from within.  The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany.  The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. All men are created equal, liberté, egalité, fraternité, but in German….

His brother-in-law points out that Karl Marx was an advocate for freedom, but Rankin dismisses the objection, saying that Marx was a Jew.  His father-in-law says in that case, there is no solution.  But Rankin disagrees, suggesting there is a final solution, so to speak:  “Annihilation.  Right down to the last babe in arms.”  When his wife expresses surprise that he is advocating a Carthaginian peace, he replies that the world hasn’t had trouble from Carthage for two thousand years.  In this way, one of the architects of the holocaust hides the role he played in that by pretending to be in favor of a genocidal elimination of all Germans.

And who can forget the way the “Ride of the Valkyries” was used diegetically in Apocalypse Now (1979) to accompany the attack of the helicopters on a North Vietnamese village.  “Yeah, I use Wagner,” says Robert Duval, who plays a psychopathic colonel.  “Scares hell out of the slopes.  My boys love it.”  Just before the attack, we see a school teacher bringing young children outside to play, but scrambling to get them back inside as the first notes of this music reaches their ears.

The inverse is also true, in a way.  In any movie set in World War II, showing a Nazi listening to Wagner or hearing him praise his music, as in The Night of the Generals (1967), is to be expected. However, if a German in such a movie ostentatiously avoids Wagner’s music, then we know he is basically a good German. The movie Das Boot (1981), for example, is set on a German submarine during World War II. When the crew enthusiastically sings “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a marching song associated with British soldiers in World War I, we know we are supposed to like these Germans.

I noted above that purists object to using music from an opera as background music for a movie. Beyond that general complaint, many are bothered by the fact that Excalibur is based on the British legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, while Wagner’s music is German. The fact that Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal are Wagnerian operas based on Arthurian stories is still not enough to appease their sense of propriety.  Worse, the prelude to Tristan und Isolde is used as background music for the story of Lancelot and Guenevere, not for Tristan and Iseult proper.  The fact that both are stories of a love triangle is no excuse.  The music from Götterdämmerung is unquestionably associated with Siegfried, a Teutonic knight, rather than a British one.  The fact that Siegfried, like Arthur, has a magical sword worthy of having its own name, which was stuck in a tree, which only someone special could remove, suggesting an affinity between the two legends, is not thought to be sufficient justification for using that music in this movie. Finally, there are those that object to the fact that the music associated with the title sword in Excalibur is from “Siegfried’s Funeral March,” their complaint being that funereal music is inappropriate as a leitmotif for a weapon; although they might begrudgingly concede that this grim music, which we hear at the very beginning of the movie, foretells the tragic end toward which the events of this story move.

But enough of this.  Suffice it to say that there are those who prefer the opera, and there are those who would rather watch a movie.  As for this movie in particular, given what has been noted above regarding movies where characters associated with Wagner are understood to be evil, does this not mean that using Wagner’s music for Excalibur implies that King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are evil?  It does not, for a simple reason.  It is only after Wagner became associated with Nazi Germany that Wagner’s music acquired that evil connotation, and then only for movies set during or after World War II.  Even Wagner’s anti-Semitism would probably have been overlooked as a nineteenth-century commonplace had it not been for the holocaust.  I am sure that those who attend the opera never regard Tristan, Isolde, Parsifal, or Siegfried as evil.  For similar reasons, Wagner’s music could be used for Excalibur without fear of putting the legend of King Arthur in a bad light.

As a final note of irony, although The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a silent film, music was scored for it, intended to by played by an accompanying orchestra.  This music has been added as a soundtrack for subsequent viewing.  When the Ku Klux Klan is riding to the rescue of a white family as they are besieged by a mob of black men who are intent on killing the men of the family and raping the women, we hear the “Ride of the Valkyries” in the background. Because the movie was made before World War II, the music was intended to glorify the Klan and make the audience thrill to their heroism. The evil connotation this music had in Apocalypse Now does not apply to The Birth of a Nation, even though we might think it should.

The Movie

In discussing any story about King Arthur, one first must distinguish between the historical King Arthur and the King Arthur of legend:  of what we know of the historical King Arthur, there is too little on which to base a movie; of what we know of the legendary King Arthur, there is too much. Therefore, when one sets out to tell a story about the legendary Arthur, it is not merely that the author is likely to take liberties with the source material.  He must do so, or else the result will be a ponderous mess.

The Sword

Mostly, it is a matter of simplification, which involves eliminating many of the characters and stories about them.  In Excalibur, the title tells us that the unifying principle of this movie about King Arthur (Nigel Terry) will be a sword.  Its purpose is to unite the various warring tribes of England into a single kingdom.  In many versions of the Arthurian legend, Arthur becomes king by pulling a sword out of a stone; then, somewhat later, he receives Excalibur, a completely different sword, from the Lady of the Lake.  That is one magical sword too many.  But it gets worse.  In Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, the basic source material for this movie, there is another story about another sword sticking out of another stone.  And then there is still another story about a sword in a scabbard that only someone special could remove.  Apparently, the idea of a sword sticking out of something that can be removed only by one person was so fascinating that it ended up being used a couple more times; but the effect is to make it seem rather commonplace, as if there were swords sticking out of this or that all over England, and every other Tuesday some knight would run across one and try to pull it out.

Less is more, and so later versions of the Arthurian legend tend to have only one sword sticking out of one stone, the one Arthur pulls out, and it is the same sword Excalibur that comes from the Lady of the Lake. So it is with the movie Excalibur.

Merlin (Nicol Williamson) secures Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake for Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) to help him wage war against the Duke of Cornwall and become ruler of all England.  It is Merlin’s hope that the truce will result in a permanent peace, enforced by this enchanted sword.

Rape

And so it would have been were it not for a disruptive force that recurs throughout this movie, brought about by women.  At a party at Cornwall’s castle celebrating the truce, Cornwall has his wife Igrayne (Katrine Boorman) entertain the guests by dancing.  As soon as Uther sees her, he knows that he must have her, and says so openly in earshot of her husband.  Needless to say, the truce is broken.

Uther’s army lays siege to Cornwall’s castle and tries to batter down the gate, but to no avail.  And so, Uther makes a pact with Merlin that if he can gain access to the castle and possess Igrayne, whatever issues from his lust will be Merlin’s.  What follows is a great scene in which the beautiful, naked Igrayne is being ravished by Uther in a full suit of armor.  (And I knew a woman who complained just because her husband didn’t shave first.)  Nine months later, Igrayne gives birth to Arthur, and Merlin shows up to collect.  Uther gives up the baby, but then changes his mind and chases after Merlin to get him back. However, as Uther is no longer trusted on account of his having betrayed Cornwall, he is ambushed by men intent on killing him and gaining possession of Excalibur.  Mortally wounded, Uther denies them possession of the sword by plunging it into a stone.  Seeing this, Merlin makes the pronouncement that only the future king of England will be able to draw it out.  It is in this way that the movie fuses Excalibur and the sword in the stone into just one sword.

Igrayne cannot be blamed for cheating on her husband when Uther has sex with her. Instead, she is effectively raped, because Merlin’s magic allowed Uther to take on the appearance of Cornwall, thereby deceiving her.  And so, while Cornwall was getting himself impaled by a lance, Igrayne was getting impaled by Uther, who gives her his seed just as Cornwall expels his last breath of air.

There are those, however, who might say she was just asking to be raped, what with her voluptuous dancing, all scantily clad in front of Uther and his men, purposely teasing their passion.  In all seriousness, in this and what follows, there is a suggestion that it is the women who are at fault for all the disruption they cause.  This shouldn’t surprise us.  Men have been blaming women for causing trouble ever since Adam blamed Eve for what happened in the Garden of Eden.

Adultery

Years later, Arthur pulls the sword out of the stone, proving that he is to be king, but many knights have doubts, and another civil war breaks out, in some ways paralleling the first one.  Once again, the man who wields Excalibur wins, the opposing sides are reconciled, and there is a celebration, this time at the castle of Leondegrance (Patrick Stewart).  And once again, there is a woman who dances and who will prove to be a disruptive force, but not quite in the same way.  This time the woman is Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi), but at least she is only the daughter of Leondegrance and not his wife.  As she dances, she is more modestly attired, and Arthur does not merely lust after her as Uther did Igrayne, but has fallen in love. And this time, instead of Uther betraying Cornwall to possess his wife, it is Guenevere who betrays Arthur when she has sex with Sir Lancelot (Nicholas Clay).

Another excellent movie based on the Arthurian legend is Camelot (1967), which is different in tone and style.  For one thing, it is a musical; for another, it is lighthearted, at least in part.  The unifying theme of this movie is also indicated by its title:  Camelot as an ideal place and time.  Arthur (Richard Harris) has ideas about the law and courts that should replace the barbaric notion that disputes were to be settled by force of arms.  There is something almost pathetic about this Arthur, however. When the movie begins, he comes across as timid and fearful.  Admittedly, he is anxious about meeting Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman he is to marry, but most of the movie is about his relationship with her.  And from the song she sings, we find that she wants the exciting life of a maiden, in which men fight over her, and not have to enter into an arranged marriage.  She and Arthur meet by accident, and she finds she likes him.  But liking a man and loving him are two different things, so we are not surprised when she falls in love with Lancelot.  As a result, Arthur becomes a cuckold, and that of the worst kind, a wittol.  I don’t mean to go full Nietzsche, but I can’t help thinking that Arthur’s avowed preference for right over might is an expression of weakness. Presumably, we are supposed to admire him for rising above his feelings of jealously, for having an inner strength, but when a man knows his wife is cheating on him and allows it to continue without protest, it is hard not to harbor feelings of contempt.  Eventually, thanks to conniving on the part of Mordred, Arthur is forced to condemn Guenevere to be burned at the stake for her adultery, but she is saved by Lancelot, and the two of them escape to France, soon followed there by Arthur. Too bad Arthur didn’t think of no-fault divorce when he was musing about more civilized ways of behaving. In any event, regarding this rescue of Guenevere by Lancelot, Camelot follows the story as told by Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur and T.H. White in The Once and Future King; but though it is for many a favorite part of the legend, yet it is omitted in Excalibur, perhaps because it would have made the movie too long.

As for Excalibur, there is only suspicion at first, voiced by Sir Gawain at the Round Table, that Guenevere is in love with Sir Lancelot, and that is why he absents himself from their fellowship, which is true.  But while Lancelot nobly tries to resist Guenevere, she proves too much even for him when she seeks him out in the forest and overcomes him with her love.   Later that night, Arthur discovers them together, naked and sleeping in each other’s arms.  Unlike the Arthur of Camelot, this one isn’t putting up with any of that. He plunges the sword Excalibur into the ground between them, thus marking the end of his marriage to Guenevere.

Incest

Another difference between Camelot and Excalibur is this:  in the basic legend, which Camelot mostly follows, Mordred is a man at the time when Guenevere is condemned to die, whereas he has not yet been born when Arthur learns of Guenevere’s infidelity in Excalibur.  And this brings us to a simplification that may actually be the elimination of a complication that arose out of a desire to conceal a story that was originally quite simple.  In Bulfinch’s Mythology, Mordred is simply referred to as Arthur’s nephew. However, in the movie Camelot, we learn that Mordred is Arthur’s bastard son.  In The Once and Future King, White makes it clear that Mordred was both nephew and illegitimate son of Arthur, the result of an incestuous union between Arthur and Morgause, his half-sister. Presumably, the producers of Camelot wished to avoid the notion of incest and mentioned only that Mordred was Arthur’s illegitimate son, just as Thomas Bulfinch avoided the topic by referring to Mordred only as Arthur’s nephew. True, Morgause is said to be Mordred’s mother in this movie, but her being Arthur’s sister is not mentioned.  Excalibur returns to the original story and makes it clear that Mordred was both nephew and son of Arthur.

Continuing the Theme of Incest in Le Morte d’Arthur

While not in this movie, there are a couple of stories in Le Morte d’Arthur that intensify the dread of incest.

The May-Day Massacre.  First, because Arthur had sex with his sister, the offspring of that incestuous union, Mordred, is destined to kill Arthur, ending the kingdom, and bringing ruin upon the land.  Merlin is aware of this, and he tells Arthur that a child born on May Day will be the cause of Arthur’s death.  So, Arthur rounds up all the male babies in England who were apparently born around that time, loads them all on a ship, and sends them to sea where they die in a shipwreck. But wouldn’t you know it!  Mordred is the one baby that survives.  A stranger finds him and raises him until he is fourteen years old.  Well, that trick of killing a bunch of babies didn’t work for Herod either.

Once again, however, it is all the woman’s fault.  Arthur did not know Morgause was his sister, so he was blameless.  Well, almost blameless.  He knew she was married.  But as far as the incest is concerned, Morgause knew what she was doing when she seduced Arthur.

An Oedipal Tease.  Second, when at one point, Mordred became ruler of England in Arthur’s absence, he forged some letters purporting to tell of Arthur’s death while fighting Lancelot.  He called a parliament and asked them to make him king, intending to clinch the deal by marrying Guenevere.  In other words, Mordred, the bastard son of the incestuous union of Arthur and his sister Morgause, intended to marry Arthur’s wife, who is practically his stepmother.  However, the plan fell through and the marriage never took place.

Back to the Movie

Speaking of Morgause, another simplification in Excalibur is that of Morgana (Helen Mirren), the third and most disruptive woman in this movie, a composite character consisting of Morgause and her sisters Morgan le Fay and Nimue, a woman whom Merlin fell in love with and to whom he revealed many secrets of necromancy.  Nimue is sometimes identified with Viviane, the Lady of the Lake.  The Lady of the Lake, by the way, is not the woman whose hand reaches above the water holding Excalibur.  In Le Morte d’Arthur, the Lady of the Lake and Arthur have a conversation about that hand sticking out of the water holding a sword, and she tells him to go get it.

The movie has its own way of blaming the woman for Arthur’s incest.  Morgana makes herself appear to be Guenevere, and Arthur allows her to make love to him, distraught as he is for having just lost the real Guenevere.  And so, if we may rightly say that Uther raped Igrayne by magically taking on the appearance of Cornwall, so too may we say that Morgana raped Arthur by magically taking on the appearance of Guenevere.

Morgana wants Mordred to become king of England.  Over the years, she uses much of her magic to keep herself looking young, but she is tricked by Merlin, at which point she becomes old and ugly. Now that she is no longer sexy and beautiful, Mordred has no more use for her, so he strangles her. This, along with the kisses she gave him on the lips, earlier in the movie when he was growing up, is a contribution by John Boorman, the director, adding a hint of incest between mother and son.

The Holy Grail

Being the offspring of an evil union, Mordred is naturally evil himself.  His birth, in combination with Guenevere’s adultery, and the loss of the sword Excalibur, causes England to go into decline, beset by famine and pestilence; and Arthur, who is one with the land, also goes into decline, coming close to death. He sends his knights off to find the Holy Grail, which will restore England to peace and prosperity. Perceval finds the Grail, restoring Arthur to his former strength when he drinks from it. Arthur calls his remaining knights to arms to fight a third civil war against Mordred.  Knowing that Guenevere has become a nun, he first goes to the convent to forgive her and say that, perhaps in the hereafter, they may be together again.  She agrees.  She then returns Excalibur to him, which has been in her care all this time.

The Death of Arthur

Almost everyone dies in the final battle.  In Le Morte d’Arthur, Arthur thrusts his spear into Mordred, who then forces himself forward on that spear until he can strike Arthur with his sword.  In Excalibur, this is reversed, which is an improvement:  Mordred impales Arthur with his spear, and it is Arthur who pushes forward on that spear until he can use Excalibur to kill Mordred.

Only Percival remains, taking on the role of Sir Bedivere as another simplification. Before Arthur is taken away by three queens to the vale of Avalon, he tells Percival to return Excalibur to the Lady in the Lake. Percival is reluctant to give up the sword, but Arthur says that some day another king will come, and the sword will be there for him when he does.  But that future king is Arthur himself, the king that was once and will be again.