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.

The Conformist (1970)

Some critics say The Conformist is an important, thought-provoking film. I guess they are right, because it provoked me to think about a question that has bothered me for some time: Why do I keep watching these weird foreign films just because critics tell me they are important and thought provoking? As is typical for a weird foreign film, there is a lot of decadent sex. For example, the protagonist figures his half-brother is giving their mother morphine and having sex with her, so he has a fellow fascist slap him around. And by George, that is the last we hear about that! I guess this is what foreign directors call “character development.” If so, there is plenty more character development in this movie.

Anyway, as the title indicates, the protagonist just wants to conform and be like everyone else. So I guess he figures a good way to conform is by being an assassin. And to have more character-developing sex.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Prior to the release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, whenever a bunch of people in a movie embarked on a project to obtain a great deal of money, something always went wrong. In some cases, the project was illegal, and given the Production Code in force at the time, the criminals had to die or be arrested, as in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). In It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the treasure hunters are not criminals, but the buried treasure was stolen loot, so they all had to be arrested in the end. But even when the enterprise was entirely legal, there was an unwritten rule that it must fail, that pursuing money per se was wrong in some way and must not be rewarded. For example, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), there was nothing illegal about the three men prospecting for gold, but it had to fail nevertheless. When the two surviving members of the team realize that all their gold has been lost, they laugh about it. Presumably, even when the search for money was legal, it had to fail, the movie’s way of telling us we should be content with our lot. One slight exception is King Solomon’s Mines (1950 et al.). The people in the movie do manage to keep a handful of gems, but the vast treasure is lost for good.

And then came The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Three men set out to find buried treasure, and something incredible happens: the treasure does not turn out to be worthless Confederate bonds; it does not blow away in the wind; the men pursuing the treasure are not arrested; and only one of them dies, leaving the other two alive to split the loot. Nothing like that had ever been seen in a movie before, and the violation of the taboo against that sort of thing was exhilarating.

This amoral ending was perfectly in line, however, with all that had come before in that movie. Were it not for the advance notice provided by the tagline, “For three men the Civil War wasn’t Hell. It was practice,” we would not even realize that the movie was set in the Civil War when it begins. And it is only gradually that we become aware of the war, because it really does not seem to concern the three principle characters. The Ugly, Tuco (Eli Wallach), is a bandit, the Good, Blondie (Clint Eastwood), is a bounty hunter, and the Bad, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), is a hired killer, each pursuing his own business with no interest in the war. Only when they find out about the buried Confederate gold does the war take on significance for them. And as they pursue that gold, they walk through the war as if they were walking through a room. In one case, when the war gets in their way, they blow up a bridge so that the soldiers will leave the area, which has as an incidental byproduct the result that the pointless daily slaughter is brought to an end.

Actually, the amoral nature of this movie was no surprise, for it was also characteristic of the two previous Westerns by Sergio Leone featuring the Man with No Name, A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). This was a new kind of Western protagonist. He was not a law enforcement officer; he was not seeking to avenge someone’s death; and he was not trying to reform and hang up his guns. Instead, he was either a hired gun or bounty hunter who profited by his expertise with a pistol, and had no intention of changing his ways.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress on location in Hiroshima, where she meets Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect. She is married with children, and he is married too, but they have sex anyway, because they both cheat on their spouses on a regular basis. After a single night, they fall madly in love with each other, convinced that the sex they had was deep and meaningful, so deep and meaningful, in fact, that when they cheat on their respective spouses with other paramours in the future, as they have every intention of so doing, they think that it will never be as good as what they have with each other right now. Of course, if they were free to marry, they would probably be cheating on each other in a couple years too, but that either does not seem to occur to them, or it occurs to them, but they don’t care, because they are the kind of people who think they are entitled to cheat, because it is so deep and meaningful when they do.

Although the movie is set in Hiroshima, where reference is naturally made to the atom bomb, this proves to be nothing more than a way of providing an excuse for Elle to talk about what she was doing in France when the bomb went off. From there she eventually tells about how she loved a German soldier, who was killed by a sniper, and how she was ostracized for having sex with him, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She thinks that German soldier was the great love of her life, but given the kind of woman she is, we know that she would have been cheating on him in no time.

Since the movie is set in Hiroshima, and since Lui is a Japanese citizen, you might think Elle’s story about how she suffered so much during the war would be matched by a story from Lui about his experience during that period. Nope. All we get is that he was in the army. Well, after all, this is a French movie and not a Japanese movie, so it is only the French experience that the movie deems worthy of consideration.

Not that it matters, because these two people and their exaggerated sense of importance about their sex life are not worthy of consideration in any event.

Hair (1979)

It sure must be great to be such a free spirit that you don’t have to work for a living because you can always beg from people who do. And it sure must be great to be such a free spirit that you never have to wash your clothes or take a bath. And it sure must be great to be such a free spirit that you do not have to worry who the father is if you get pregnant, or, if you are a man, worry about supporting the woman you abandoned when she turns up with your child. And it sure must be great to be such a free spirit that you can display your superior attitude toward life by stomping all over the food that people were going to eat at a dinner party. And it sure must be great to be such a free spirit that you can steal a car just because the guy who owns it is uptight and therefore deserves to be treated with contempt.

What an insufferably sanctimonious bunch these lowlifes are! My flesh crawled all through this movie Hair. Thank goodness people do not put up with this nonsense in real life.

Gone With the Wind (1939)

Most movies can be discussed without comparing them to reality, but not so Gone With the Wind, owing to its paternalistic depiction of slavery in the Old South as something benign, in which the slaves are so well-treated that you would almost think their Southern masters were doing them a favor. The closest thing to slave beating in this movie is when Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) slaps Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) in exasperation. And an unnamed Ku Klux Klan is subtly presented (without sheets) as a force for good. Indeed, this movie is to slavery what The Godfather (1972) is to organized crime: a glorification of something despicable, a beautification of something ugly.

And yet the movie is tame compared to the book, written by Margaret Mitchell, which required a great deal of sanitizing to make it suitable for a Hollywood production. As an example of the sort of thing that had to be excised in the process of turning this book into a movie, there is the passage where Rhett Butler (Clark Gable in the movie) admits to Scarlett that he shot a black man for insulting a white woman: “He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”

In comparing the movie first to reality and then to the book, we get something of a paradox. By avoiding much of the really offensive material in the book, the movie becomes less realistic than its source, because the racist sentiments expressed in the book accurately reflect the racist sentiments of the white South at the time. However much we might deplore Rhett’s murder of an African American, such things undoubtedly happened in those days.

What is less clear is whether Gone With the Wind is feminist or traditionalist in its attitude toward women. On the one hand, Scarlett is portrayed as strong, resourceful, and shrewd, a woman who chafes at the ridiculous restraints placed on women during those times, and who breaks those restraints one by one as the story progresses. On the other hand, she is portrayed as a wrong-headed woman.  The essence of this idea is that a woman may not know her own mind, and when that happens, a man is justified in using coercive means to bring her around, thereby making her happy in spite of her objections.

Toward that end, Margaret Mitchell sets up a simple opposition in terms of which there is a right and wrong choice in whom one marries, resulting in two possibilities:  the man and woman are alike, which is conducive to happiness; and the man and woman are different, which guarantees misery. Early on in the novel, we find that Scarlett is in love with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard in the movie), and she is devastated to learn that he is going to marry Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland in the movie).  Her father (Thomas Mitchell in the movie) tries to console her, telling her that she could never be happy with Ashley, because they are so different from each other.  “Only when like marries like,” he says, “can there be any happiness.” As a way of underscoring just how much Ashley and Melanie are alike, it turns out that they are cousins. Apparently, the idea is that people you are related to will tend to be like you, and so marrying a cousin is conducive to happiness, even if just a tad incestuous.  In fact, we are told that the Wilkes always marry their cousins, the Hamiltons, which is why Ashley’s sister is going to marry Melanie’s brother. Scarlett starts to say, “But you’ve been happy, and you and Mother aren’t alike,” but she thinks better of it.  Her mother, you see, had been in love with her cousin (Oh my!), but her family objected, not because they were cousins, of course, but because he was a little too wild.  Unable to have the man she really wanted, she resigned herself to marrying a man she did not love.

Regarding the ways in which Ashley is different from Scarlett, his love of reading poetry and listening to music, for example, she asserts that she would change all that after they were married, but her father chides her for such foolishness, saying no woman ever changed any man.  And as far as he is concerned, the fact that Scarlett thinks she loves Ashley is no argument.  “All this American business of running around marrying for love, like servants, like Yankees!  The best marriages are when the parents choose for the girl.” Besides, he assures her, for a woman, love comes after marriage.  Scarlett’s father is the first man in her life who knows better than she does what will make her happy.

The next day, at the barbecue, Scarlett confesses her love to Ashley, and he admits that he cares for her too, but that he cannot marry her.  “Love isn’t enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are,” he tells her.  When she asks him if he loves Melanie, he dodges the question and starts talking about how alike they are:  “She is like me, part of my blood, and we understand each other.  Scarlett!  Scarlett!  Can’t I make you see that a marriage can’t go on in any sort of peace unless the two people are alike?”  And thus Ashley is the second man in Scarlett’s life who knows better than she does what will make her happy.

Right after that scene, she meets Rhett Butler, the third man in her life who knows what is best for her.  He falls in love with her at first sight, and somewhat later in the book he explains the reason he loves her:  “I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals.”  However, it is still Ashley that Scarlett loves, and her persistence in this regard is not presented as merely being an unfortunate circumstance, but is treated as morally unacceptable.  There is the sense that Scarlett is wrong not to accept Rhett’s love, that she is willfully refusing to give up her infatuation for Ashley when she could have Rhett, the idea being that when a man truly loves a woman, she is wrong to refuse him.  And it is this moral dimension that justifies the use of force.  Of course, it is part of this whole notion of the wrong-headed woman that when such force is employed, it turns out to be what she really wants.  The first couple of times Rhett uses force, it only involves aggressive kissing, and in each case, she forgets about Ashley and swoons with passion, leading her to accept Rhett’s proposal of marriage.

After they get married, she still loves Ashley, of course, on account of her being so obstinate. The tension builds, with Rhett becoming increasingly physical and threatening, until one night he carries her up the stairs and rapes her.  And of course it is just what she needs:  “Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast.”  But the effect proves to be temporary, and their marriage returns to its previous state of low-grade misery.

What is ironic is that this book was written by a woman. In The Forsyte Saga, on the other hand, another man rapes his wife for similar reasons, being frustrated by his wife’s love for another man. But in that case, the rape is so traumatic that it not only ruins their marriage, but also ruins things for the next generation. And this novel was written by a man, John Galsworthy, also in the early part of the twentieth century. In short, the novel written by a man was more feminist than the one written by a woman.

Back before the movie version had been made, when people read the novel without knowing how it would end, they probably thought Scarlett would eventually realize how much she really loved Rhett, and they would live happily ever after; or, failing that, she would be punished for her stubbornness. And indeed she is. She realizes just how much she loves Rhett only at the point where it is too late. To this extent, the movie is faithful to the book. But what those who read the novel did not expect was the destruction of Rhett. And this difference in what was expected and the actual outcome is the biggest difference between the movie and the book.

At the end of the movie, when Rhett leaves Scarlett, we feel relieved. He is through with her, and it is as if he has finally been cured of a sickness. There is the hint of a sneer when he tells her that he does not give a damn what happens to her, and there is a spring in his step as he heads out the door. But the depiction of Rhett in the novel is very different: “He looked at her steadily with dark eyes that were heavy with fatigue and there was no leaping light in them…. He was sunken in his chair, his suit wrinkling untidily against his thickening waist, every line of him proclaiming the ruin of a fine body and the coarsening of a strong face. Drink and dissipation had done their work….”

Although Rhett is only forty-five by that time, he seems much older, drained and exhausted, almost as if he is dying.  And much in the way people often express a desire to go back home as they near the end of life, Rhett talks about going back to Charleston, where his family is, in hopes of finding peace and reconciliation.

When Scarlett finally accepts that Rhett is leaving her, she says, “Oh, my darling, if you go, what shall I do?” Unlike the movie, where the tone of Rhett’s voice and the look on his face as he makes his parting remark is almost triumphant, making us want to say, “Good for him,” in the book, he is defeated, and his words are full of resignation and regret: “For a moment he hesitated as if debating whether a kind lie were kinder in the long run than the truth. Then he shrugged. ‘… I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t.’ He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly: ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn.’”

Whereas the movie stays with the notion that Scarlett is wrong-headed and gets what she deserves, the ending of the novel makes us realize that it was actually Rhett who was wrong-headed, and that he is the one who really pays the price for it. If Scarlett was foolish in thinking she could change Ashley regarding his tendency to spend a lot of time reading books and listening to music, how much more foolish was it for Rhett to think he could marry a woman who loved another man and somehow change that?