Man of Flowers (1983)

The title character of Man of Flowers is Charles (Norman Kaye), who saw his mother naked when he was a little boy, and has been obsessed with his mother and naked women ever since. He pays a psychiatrist to listen to him talk about his mother, and he pays a woman named Lisa (Alyson Best) to take off her clothes the way his mother did, giving Paul Cox, the director, an excuse to film some full frontal nudity. In between, Charles writes letters to his dead mother, addressed to himself, and goes around looking for statues of naked women to feel up.

But I guess that was not enough for Cox, so he gave Lisa a girlfriend, who is a lesbian, and they have sex together, and we get to watch. But Charles wants to watch too, so he pays them for the privilege. And that was not enough for Cox, so when Charles goes to look at the art of some guy named David (Chris Haywood), we get to see David with a naked woman. And then when Charles kills David so he can have Lisa for himself (just to watch, not to touch), he has a sculptor disguise David’s corpse as a statue. A naked statue, of course.

Now, lest we get the idea that Charles is a pervert (or that Cox is a pervert for wanting to make a movie like this), we have Lisa’s assurance that Charles is a kind, sensitive, sweet man. And then Cox wraps the whole seedy tale up in a lot of art: we have the organ that Charles plays for the church, we have operatic music unrelentingly going on in the background, we have sculpture and paintings, we have arrangements of flowers, and we have an art class, where a woman poses nude.  All this gives the movie class.

In other words, Cox really put some lipstick on this pig.

Maniac (1934)

As usual with exploitation films, Maniac presents us with unmotivated spectacle supposedly justified as educational: different kinds of mental illness are described in captions, followed by disconnected scenes of nudity and gore, such as a man popping out a cat’s eyeball and eating it as a tasty morsel.

The reason the impersonator of a mad scientist ate the cat’s eyeball was that the cat ate the heart that was going to be used to bring the real mad scientist back to life after the impersonator shot him because the mad scientist wanted him to commit suicide so that he could bring him back to life and show the world. Of course, the mad scientist had already brought a woman back to life earlier that evening by injecting super adrenaline into her body in the morgue, but that did not seem to be enough for one day.

We get to see the woman stripped almost completely naked and raped by a patient who is accidentally given a shot of the super adrenaline while under the delusion that he is the orangutan in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She was pretty good looking too, which was why the two workers in the morgue were glad to have her body when she was first brought in.

Lean on Me (1989)

Before the movie Lean on Me begins, there is a prologue.  This one, however, is not exculpatory, just a statement to the effect that what we are about to see is a true story.  When the movie proper starts, we see Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) teaching class at Eastside High School in 1967. His students are intelligent, well-groomed, and well-behaved. The boys wear dress shirts with neckties.  He quits because the teachers union has sold out to the school board or something vague like that. Twenty years later, he is the principal of a grade school, where gum stuck under the desk is what passes for a discipline problem.  Back at Eastside High, however, the situation has become so bad it makes the one in Blackboard Jungle (1955) look like the Blackboard Tropical Rainforest. The students are the meanest, most vicious bunch of high-school hoodlums ever displayed on the big screen.  So, whereas in Blackboard Jungle, there was a contrast between two different schools at the same time, here the contrast is between the same school at two different times.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention one more difference:  much like the good school in Blackboard Jungle, all the clean-cut, intelligent students in Eastside High in 1967 were white; most of the students in the school twenty years later are black, many are brown, and a mere handful are white.

When I first started watching this movie, I wondered if the movie had been produced by the Ku Klux Klan, because it comes across as a racist’s worst nightmare, a depiction of what happens when you let those that aren’t white take over. But since the story is true, I guess those were the facts, and the people making the movie just went with it. And it helped that Clark was African American himself, which offset the racist implications. And while we are on the subject, you know that grade school with the bubblegum problem?  All those children were white as well.

Anyway, when Clark is asked to become the principal to help improve the students’ test scores, I wondered how he could possibly do anything with them. Well, I don’t want to take anything away from Clark, but not only does he have a bunch of burly security guards with him when he arrives, but on the second day, he also expels all the troublemakers. Anybody could straighten out a school with dictatorial powers like that. Think how much Dadier could have accomplished in Blackboard Jungle if, backed up by his own goon squad, he could have expelled West and his gang on the second day of class. And teachers that don’t do exactly what Clark tells them to do are suspended or fired at will.  By the time he is through, this school doesn’t even have a bubblegum problem.  In the end, the remaining students, who are still mostly black and brown, are seen to be basically good students that end up doing well on their test scores.  This counteracts any suggestion there may have been that the problems with Eastside High was that the students were no longer white.  But if the movie has ceased to be an argument for white supremacy, it has now become an argument for fascism.

Toward the end, a girl tells him she is pregnant, and he tells her he will talk to her about it later. We never hear that conversation or find out what she did about it. That way those who are pro-life can imagine her keeping the baby or giving it up for adoption, and those who are pro-choice can imagine her having an abortion. Hollywood has always known how to have things both ways.

Black Girl (1966)

Apparently, the movie Black Girl is supposed to show us how black Africans are mistreated by white French people. The movie begins in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, where Diouana, a black woman, is desperate for work. She has doors slammed in her face, and finally is told to sit on a particular corner and wait for someone to come by who wants a maid. Day after day, she and a lot of other desperate women sit and wait to be hired.

Along comes “Madame,” a white French woman looking for a governess. She selects Diouana, presumably because she is the only woman who does not crowd around her trying to get the job. After taking care of the children for a while, Diouana agrees to go to France with Madame and “Monsieur.” Though Madame makes Diouana a lot of promises about how nice it will be for her in France, when they get there, Diouana discovers that she is expected to be a maid and a cook as well as a governess. As a result, she never gets to see France. In fact, she never even gets to leave the apartment. She feels like a slave. Furthermore, Madame is very demanding, and always complaining that Diouana is lazy. Granted, this is not a great job, but it is a job. It’s better than the desperate struggle she endured trying to find work in Dakar.

After what appears to be several months, the situation has deteriorated to the point that Diouana begins acting insolent, and she refuses to work out of resentment for the way she is being treated. Monsieur, who seems much nicer than Madame, has apparently been holding her wages for her, which amount to twenty thousand francs.

It is at this point that the clash of cultures really leaves me bewildered. I don’t know what twenty thousand francs was worth in 1966, but it sounds like a fair amount of money, presumably enough for Diouana to book passage back to Dakar, with enough left over to cushion herself until she finds work with a nicer family.  If that is not quite enough money for that purpose, she could just keep working for Madame and Monsieur until she does save enough.  But no. She commits suicide by opening up her veins.

Monsieur tries to do the right thing by returning Diouana’s belongings to her mother, along with the wages she earned. But her mother, whom we know to be desperate for money, refuses to take it. I guess it has something to do with pride, but after all, Diouana earned it, so what’s the big deal?

In other words, while I agree that Madame was not a nice person to work for, I just don’t see that Diouana’s situation was so bad that she had to give up and take her own life. I would have just taken the wages and split.

Lured (1947)

Lured is about a man who likes to send the police cryptic poems about certain women before they disappear.  Only after these women have been reported missing are the police able to figure out that they were the ones in the poems.  So far, eight women have vanished in this fashion.

Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is a dime-a-dance girl, or rather, since the story is set in London, make that a six-pence-a-dance girl.  A coworker tells her she has answered an ad in the personal column from a good-looking man from a good family, and that she is going to quit her job and go away with him.  Sandra tells her that is dangerous, but her friend says she is not worried as long as she has her bracelet with elephants as a good-luck charm.  The next night, her friend disappears.

Sandra goes to Scotland Yard and talks to Inspector Temple (Charles Coburn). They soon realize that Sandra’s friend is the woman in the most recent poem, which referred to elephants.  Sandra agrees to work for Scotland Yard as bait by answering every ad in the personal column that seems as though it might be from the man they are looking for.

Just before Sandra’s friend disappeared, she had made an appointment to audition for Robert Fleming (George Sanders), who is looking for dancers for one of his night clubs.  He has a partner, Julian Wilde (Cedric Hardwicke), who functions as his secretary and accountant, and who lives in the same house with Fleming.  Eventually, Sandra and Fleming fall in love and plan to marry.  But before that happens, she answers several ads with no result.

Finally, she goes to work as a maid where she is introduced to Dr. Nicholas Moryani (Joseph Calleia), who is looking for women willing to go to South America.  The women are forced to become night club hostesses or servants.  But after Temple has him arrested, he says that Moryani would not have bothered with cryptic poems in carrying out his enterprise, and the killer or abductor they are looking for is still out there.

After incriminating evidence is found in Fleming’s desk drawer, he is arrested.  But the real killer turns out to be Julian, of course.  He killed the women because he was jealous that they preferred Fleming over him.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this movie is the way it gives people acceptable motives by the censorship standards of the day, when we can readily discern the real motives that are at work.  In various ways, Julian is coded as a homosexual.  His last name is Wilde, the same as that of Oscar Wilde, the notorious homosexual of the nineteenth century.  He often holds a cigarette between his thumb and several fingers rather than between his index and middle finger, the way most people do.  It has an effeminate look.  And reading poetry was another subtle indicator of homosexuality in old movies.  In other words, Julian killed beautiful women because he hated the fact that Fleming was attracted to them instead of to him.

Also, the idea that the women were shipped all the way to South America just to be hostesses and maids is laughable.  Such women would have been forced into prostitution.

La Grande Illusion (1937)

What a lovefest! Although it is set in the middle of World War I, La Grande Illusion shows everyone getting along fabulously. A German and a French officer regard their class as more important than their nationality, the German being very sad when he has to shoot the Frenchman. A Christian and a Jewish officer become pals and celebrate Christmas together, at a time when anti-Semitism was quite common. A German widow protects two French officers who have escaped, falling in love with one of them. They plan to get married after the war. When the two escapees make it over the Swiss border just as the Germans arrive, the Germans are relieved that they do not have to shoot them.

In the face of all this brotherhood-of-man stuff, we are forced to conclude that the whole war was just some big misunderstanding among friends.

Kate & Leopold (2001)

Kate & Leopold is a time-travel love story.  Leopold (Hugh Jackman) is a tall, good-looking aristocrat from the nineteenth century who goes through a time portal and ends up in the twenty-first century. He falls in love with a woman named Kate (Meg Ryan), and befriends her brother Charlie (Brecklin Meyer), who is a funny-looking little-guy.  For the record, Hugh Jackman is 6′ 2″ tall, whereas Brecklin Meyer is 5′ 5″.

Leopold and Charlie end up one evening at a nightclub, where they sit at a table with some beautiful women, one of whom is Patrice, with whom Charlie is in love. Charlie tries his best to amuse the ladies, Patrice in particular, getting nowhere, while Leopold comes off like the strong, silent type, to whom the women are obviously attracted. Later, as they are walking home, Leopold tells Charlie that he is a Merry Andrew, a buffoon, and that is why he gets nowhere with women. As proof that his way is superior, he produces Patrice’s phone number, which she gave to him at the nightclub.

This raises the question, if Leopold had acted like a Merry Andrew, and Charlie had tried being the strong, silent type, showing off his knowledge of the Louvre, would it have been Leopold or Charlie whom the women found desirable? In fact, the movie might have been more interesting had the actors switched parts. If Charlie had been tall and good looking, played by Hugh Jackman, but was a flop with the ladies, while Leopold had been a funny-looking little-guy, played by Brecklin Meyer, who succeeded with women in general, and with Kate in particular, on account of his Victorian manners and aristocratic demeanor, then that might have been interesting. Not realistic, but interesting.  As it is, while Charlie was fated to be homely and short, he has to endure the additional insult of being told by a tall, handsome man that he is doing it wrong.

By the way, Patrice is played by Charlotte Lopez, who is 5′ 7″, so she is a couple of inches taller than Brecklin Meyer, even when she’s wearing flats.

Because there is nothing surprising about a tall, good-looking man succeeding at love, regardless of which century he comes from, the movie ends up being routine and predictable, notwithstanding the stuff about traveling through time.

In Alfie (1966), the title character, played by Michael Caine, goes through the entire movie breaking the fourth wall in order to give advice and commentary on how to handle women.  I don’t suppose I need to say that Caine is handsome and tall, 6′ 2″ to be precise, so for those of us in the audience who, physically speaking, are not so fortunately endowed, we have to wonder if his advice would apply to us.

In any event, he makes a distinction about displaying a sense of humor that Leopold did not.  He has just finished having sex with a married woman, who steps away for a moment so that Alfie can talk to us in the audience:

A married woman. Every one of them in need of a good laugh. It never strikes their husbands. Make a married woman laugh, and you’re halfway there with her. It don’t work with the single bird. It’d start you off on the wrong foot. You get one of them laughing, you won’t get nothing else. [Then he refers again to the married woman.] Just listen to it. It was dead glum when I met it tonight. I listened to its problems, then I got it laughing. It’ll go home happy.

There may be something in what he says.  A woman that is single and unattached, even if she never intends to get married, cannot help but evaluate a man according to whether he would make a good husband, which is to say, whether he would be responsible, give her security, and be a provider for her and her children.  This is serious business, which requires a serious man.  A married woman, on the other hand, need not be concerned about such things when she has an affair.  An irresponsible, lazy, unambitious fellow who can give her a few laughs and make her feel pretty again may be all she needs.  Of course, not all women have affairs to the same end.  For some, an affair is a transition to a future ex-husband.  But if all she wants is a little on the side, she may find that a man with a sense of humor is just what she needs.

Of course, I still don’t believe that a man like Michael Caine, who is tall and handsome, would strike out with single women just because he supposedly made the mistake of making them laugh.

In any event, Patrice is not married in Kate & Leopold, so according to Alfie’s philosophy, Charlie should not have tried to be funny.  However, what neither Leopold nor Alfie seems to realize is that when a man lacks their physical charms, he might play the clown to avoid being pitied.

Judgment Night (1993)

In Judgment Night, we find that Frank (Emilio Estevez) is a married man with a recently born baby. That means it is time for him to settle down and forget about going out with the guys to have a good time. After all, his wife is stuck home with the baby, so why shouldn’t he be forced to stay home too? Instead of doing the right thing, however, he goes out with his three bachelor friends to see a boxing match, and for this sin he must pay. But if Frank must be punished for leaving the little lady at home with the baby, we know that his friend Ray (Jeremy Piven) is going to get the cinematic death penalty, because he has a pistol stashed in his RV.

They get stuck in traffic and take a shortcut through the Chicago slums, see a man murdered, and must flee from the killers who don’t want any witnesses. Since the police seem to have abandoned this part of town, we find it hard to understand what the killers are worried about. Fortunately, they are worried, because that means the rest of the movie consists of the four friends being chased through the slums or trying to take a stand and fight back.

With few exceptions, if a civilian in a movie has a gun that he bought himself, he must die, and that is what happens to Ray. However, civilians are allowed to use a gun effectively if they did not buy it themselves, but either someone else buys it for them or they opportunistically pick up the gun of the person who owned it, and that is what happens here. Ray’s friends pick up his gun and use it to fight the killers.

Frank manages to survive the evening, but he has learned his lesson, vowing to stay home with the wife and baby from now on.

Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)

It is often said that Intolerance:  Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages was not well-received at the time, because it was over three hours long, and because it jumped back and forth among four different stories from four different time periods. Well, what was true then is still true today. The only way this movie deserves praise is if we handicap it for when it was made, or because we feel obliged to show deference to D.W. Griffith, who directed it.

In watching this movie, it soon becomes clear that the intolerance referred to in the title is religious in nature, for in each of the four stories, it is religion that causes all the suffering (actually, in the fourth story, it is more a matter of women becoming morally righteous as they age and lose their looks). Oddly enough, after showing how much misery is caused by religion (or moral righteousness) for over two thousand years, at the end of the movie, the heavens open up and God’s grace is shed on earth, right in the middle of a war, causing everyone to stop fighting and love one another. So, I guess religion is bad, but God is good. Except, you have to wonder, What was God waiting for? If he was going to intervene and stop all the religious killing, he could have done that a long time ago.

In three of the stories, good people die, but in the fourth story, set in modern times, the innocent man about to be hanged is saved by a melodramatic, last-minute confession from the real murderer. The reason for the difference is inexplicable. There is no indication that progress has been made over the centuries, for religious or moral intolerance is depicted as being just as prevalent today as in the past. If the innocent man had been hanged, that would at least have provided artistic unity for the four stories. As it is, the man’s reprieve is capricious. D.W. Griffith probably figured the audience deserved at least one happy ending, especially since no one was going to believe that business about God’s belated intervention in the middle of a war.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

If I told you I just saw a movie made in Italy in the 1960s where people stare at each other while the wind blows, and with the sound of horses whinnying or roosters crowing in the background, you would probably guess that I had seen a spaghetti Western by Sergio Leone. But no, it was this Jesus movie, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Because the movie is filmed in gritty black and white, you would almost think that documentary footage of the life of Jesus had been found.

Unlike other Jesus movies, this one actually has Jesus talking about sending people to Hell. Other Jesus movies play it safe with the Beatitudes. There might be mention of the “gates of Hell” as Jesus gives Peter the keys of the Kingdom, but that is about it. However, the Jesus in this movie spends half his time talking about Hell and the people who are likely to go there.

This movie does have one thing in common with Hollywood Jesus movies: there is not one word about divorce being a sin and that those who remarry are committing adultery. No Jesus movie has the guts to touch that subject.