Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001)

Regarding the Axis powers of the Second World War, we have always been willing to cut the Italians a big old break. The Japanese pulled a sneak attack on us at Pearl Harbor, and the Germans were responsible for the holocaust, but we like to think that the Italians were basically good people who just got carried away by Mussolini’s speeches. And so, an actual incident during the war, when the Italians teamed up with the Greeks to fight against their former allies, the Germans, fits right in with our inclination to grant the Italians favorable treatment.

In the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the Italian soldiers that occupy a Greek island have not seen any real action, but that is not surprising, because I have never seen an Italian soldier kill an American in a World War II movie. Moreover, they don’t seem to care about the war. They just want to sing opera. Isn’t that nice? The Greeks also seem to like the Italians better. Despite the fact that the Italians are still part of the Axis forces at this point in the movie, nobody seems to have a problem with the fact that Palagia (Penélope Cruz) is obviously in love with an Italian officer, Captain Corelli (Nicolas Cage), and even has sex with him; but another girl, who just gives a German officer a friendly kiss on the cheek, is lynched by the Greeks for being a traitor.

Reality or no reality, the decision by the Italians to fight with the Greeks against the Germans rather than simply handing over their arms when Mussolini surrenders to the Allies turns out to be a big mistake, because except for Corelli, they are all slaughtered by the Germans for being traitors. But then, that only makes us like the Italians even more.

Breezy (1973)

There has always been a clash between generations: the older person telling the younger one that his world view is naïve, and that one day reality will crush all his foolish notions; and the younger person telling the older one that he has wasted his whole life laboring under outdated notions. And there have always been May-December romances, in which sex gets mixed in with this generational clash. Though in one sense the story is ageless, yet the one depicted in Breezy seems very dated now. Between the sexual revolution of the sixties and the hubris of the Baby Boomers, the generation gap as it was then called had a unique tone to it that sounds flat today.

The title character (Kay Lenz) is a hippie chick of about twenty years, who sees so much good in people that even though she is almost sexually assaulted by a man who picked her up hitchhiking, her Pollyanna attitude is unaffected. In fact, she is such an exceedingly good-natured free spirit that she begins to get on our nerves. And, of course, when it comes to sex she naturally believes in free love.

And then there is Frank (William Holden). He is just as promiscuous as Breezy is, but since he is in his mid-fifties, we cannot call it free love, which seems to connote youth and innocence of a sort. Furthermore, he is grumpy about it. When we first meet Frank, he can barely force himself to be polite as he runs off the woman he just had a one night stand with. Eventually Frank and Breezy meet and eventually they start having sex. Society’s idea of an acceptable couple is one in which the man is of the same class as the woman is or slightly better. Check. He should be bigger and taller than she is. Check. They should be of the same race. Check. He should be about the same age as she is. Oops.

As often happens when a couple deviates from the societal norm, while the man and woman are alone with each other, everything seems fine. They fool themselves into thinking they don’t care what others think. But when they are around those others, what those others think starts becoming a lot more important than they thought it would be. At first, it is little remarks made by strangers. A saleslady refers to Breezy as Frank’s daughter. A waiter asks to see some ID before serving her a drink. Then they run into some of Frank’s friends. They are too polite to say anything about how young Breezy is, but they don’t have to, because they are obviously embarrassed by the awkwardness of the situation.

Breezy, of course, is oblivious, but Frank feels the heavy weight of society’s disapproval. To make matters worse, the next day one of his friends, Bob (Roger Carmel), compliments Frank on his nerve, his ability to have a fling without caring what others think. He says he would like to do the same himself, but he knows he could only be a meal ticket for a girl that young. Besides, Bob goes on to say, he would start thinking of himself a child molester. He says all this believing that Frank is free of such concerns, but it is obvious that he is actually giving voice to all the misgivings that Frank has been managing to repress.

At this point, the movie could have had a realistic ending, which would have been more satisfying. For example, Frank could have gone home and had a heart-to-heart talk with Breezy that their relationship was untenable on account of their age difference, that society’s disapproval was just making him too uncomfortable to continue on with it, and they could have parted as friends. Instead, the movie descends into melodrama and sentiment. First, Frank decides to end it by being mean and treating her with contempt, causing her to leave in tears. Then, Betty (Marj Dusay), the woman he was going with before he met Breezy, who loved Frank but gave up on him and decided to marry someone else, is in an accident in which her new husband has been killed. Frank goes to see her at the hospital, and she starts gushing about how she and her husband only had one week of marriage, but it was a beautiful week, and that is what really matters, and so on in this sentimental vein, which naturally functions as the lesson about life that Frank needed to learn. Frank then goes looking for Breezy and finds her. Of course she forgives him. He says, “Maybe we’ll have a year,” and they walk off happily together.

Not every movie needs to be realistic, of course, and sometimes a tacked-on happy ending is just what we want. But here it really doesn’t work.

Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Lean on Me (1989)

If you ask most people which movie the song “Rock Around the Clock” makes them think of, it will not likely be the movie of the same name made in 1956.  In that movie, a lifeless, ridiculous plot acts as a frame story to showcase some rock-and-roll bands when that kind of music was becoming popular in the 1950s. Young people in their rebellious stage like to shock their elders, so naturally we have a scene in which Bill Haley and the Comets perform at a prestigious and very proper girls school, scandalizing the matronly chaperones. The Comets wear suits, singing songs without suggestive lyrics or hip movements, but no matter, because the beat alone is indecent. So the movie has it both ways, allowing teenagers to enjoy the fantasy of shocking their elders, while the real elders watching the movie in the theaters would be reassured that rock-and-roll was quite harmless.

But there was another movie, made a year earlier, that most people associate with that classic number, and that was Blackboard Jungle.  The movie begins with an exculpatory prologue.  Such prologues were supposed to justify the depiction of immoral or degenerate behavior by the need to bring such matters to the attention of the public as a necessary first step to remedy the problem.  These prologues were disingenuous, to say the least, about as convincing as a statement expressing concern about the prevalence of pornography in our society and the need to make the public aware of the harm that it is doing, and then using that statement as a prologue to Behind the Green Door (1972).  These prologues disappeared after the Production Code was replaced by the ratings system in the late 1960s.

They are to be distinguished from the ex post facto prologues that now appear before the presentation of movies that never had them when first seen by the public.  The first one I recall seeing was for The Godfather Saga, which aired on television in 1977.  NBC added a prologue saying something to the effect that not all Italian-Americans were a bunch of gangsters. These prologues are not always in the form of the written word, but sometimes take the form of a discussion providing the proper social context and obligatory denouncement of the attitudes and values embodied in these films.  TCM did this for The Birth of a Nation (1915) about twenty years ago.  Notably, HBO recently chose to do this for Gone With the Wind (1939).  This was brought about by an opinion piece penned by John Ridley, who wrote the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave (2013).  He felt it would be unseemly to allow people to watch an unvarnished presentation of Gone With the Wind when they should be watching his 12 Years a Slave for their enlightenment and moral improvement.  But you can’t talk people out of enjoying a great movie.  Ridley’s movie may have truth on its side, but people will still be watching Gone With the Wind long after 12 Years a Slave has been forgotten.

The prologue of Blackboard Jungle justifies the movie we are about to see by deploring the scourge of juvenile delinquency and by the need to make us aware of its existence.  But while the words on the screen are somber and serious, what we hear while reading them is an exciting drum solo.  And as noted above in discussing the movie Rock Around the Clock, just that rock-and-roll beat alone was enough to worry the chaperones at a high school dance.  The animal rhythm induces movement in our bodies, making us want to get out of our chairs and dance, just as teenagers did in the aisles when this movie first came out.  Before the prologue has even finished, juvenile delinquency has been glamorized.

Then the movie proper begins and so does the song.  It fades out a little with the end of the credits.  We see Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford), who has just gotten off a bus.  In the background, we see children in bathing suits playing in the water issuing from a fire hydrant that has been opened.  One child, in a bathing suit, who seems to be about six years old, sees his mother and runs toward her.  She is angry.  “Come here!  What’s the matter?” she says as she grabs him while shaking her other upturned hand at him.  “You wanna be a bum?  Come here!”

We can hardly think of this child as a juvenile delinquent.  But the scene is emphatic by position, the mother’s words being the first bit of dialogue in this movie.  Her hand gesture and her use of the word “bum” lets us know she is Italian.  This is the first indication that juvenile delinquency is an ethnic problem.

Dadier crosses the street, and we get our first glimpse of North Manual High School, a vocational school where he hopes to get a job.  It is behind an iron fence, looking like the bars of a cage.  The school is for male teenagers only, but as the music picks up again, which has now become impossibly diegetic, we see two pairs of male students dancing what at that time was called “the bop,” but which is essentially jitterbug or swing.  In some movies, two boys dancing together would have homosexual implications, but that is not the case here.

In fact, it is Dadier who is marked as effeminate, when Artie West (Vic Morrow) whistles at him as one would at a pretty girl.  The fact his name is presumably French, being pronounced \dah-dē-ā\, doesn’t help, for it feeds into the prejudice, often seen in the movies, that anyone who is French cannot be a real man.  Even to be able to pronounce French words correctly is enough to create suspicion about someone’s manhood.  That is why John Wayne’s characters might be able to speak Spanish or the Comanche language fluently, but he always made a point of mispronouncing any word or name that was French.  It also doesn’t help that Dadier’s name sounds like the slang expression “Daddy-O,” which makes him the butt of much humor later on.

All the other guys on the grounds are moving with the music, including those shooting craps.  They are an ethnically diverse bunch, consisting of Irish, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and African-Americans.  Except for the black students, most of them have greaser haircuts.  A pretty blonde comes walking down the street, passing by the iron bars of the fence, trying to ignore the students.  One student uses a trashcan lid to keep the beat of the music, while others leer, whistle, and gesture.  One guy in particular has a bottle of soda pop, which he holds at his crotch, as he might an erect penis.  As she walks by, he flips some of the liquid out, simulating an ejaculation.

Dadier enters the school and goes to the offices, hoping to get a job teaching English.  That’s another effeminate indicator.  Maybe things have changed by now, but back in the 1950s, most English teachers in high school were women.  And this was a choice made by the screenwriter, or rather, Evan Hunter, the author of the novel this movie was based on.  He could have had Dadier teach mathematics or one of the manual trades like carpentry, but he deliberately picked English instead.

Dadier is nervous and unsure of himself while being interviewed by Principal Warneke, who notes that Dadier went to college at a “girls school,” which is another hint at his effeminate appearance and manner.  Dadier explains that exceptions were made for veterans after the war, his having served in the Navy.  It might be thought that Dadier’s masculinity is being redeemed somewhat by the fact that he fought in World War II, but if this were the point, the script would have had him say he was in the Army or the Marines.  Instead, there is an association of homosexuality with the Navy, so his service in that branch does nothing to counteract the suggestions of effeminacy.  Of course, Dadier is played by Glenn Ford, so we in the audience have no doubts about his manhood, but the people in the movie don’t know that yet.

Dadier speaks in a voice so soft that Warneke, speaking loudly and holding a ruler, almost as if he is going to swat Dadier with it, suggests he won’t be heard at the back of the class.  Dadier notes that he did some acting on the stage in college, and he could be heard on the back row.  As a demonstration, he quotes lines from Henry V:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger….

That’s all Dadier quotes, but the rest of the speech goes on in that vein, encouraging the men to “Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.”  Warneke notes that the speech is apt for the job, and Dadier is hired.  When Dadier asks about the discipline problem in the school, Warneke bristles at the suggestion, saying there is no discipline problem.

Dadier goes to meet the other teachers, who have collected in the gymnasium, one of whom is Jim Murdock (Louis Calhern).  His twelve years of teaching at that school have dispelled any illusions he might once have had about education.  He is now the school cynic.  We see him idly hitting a punching bag, saying he’s getting ready for the fall term.  One of the other teachers sneers at Principal Warneke’s denial that there is a discipline problem at the school, to which Murdock replies that there is no discipline problem at Alcatraz either.  Another new teacher suggests instilling obedience in these students with a ruler, reminding us of the one Warneke was holding, but Murdock says if you try that on one of these students, he’ll take the ruler away from you and beat you to death with it.  When one teacher suggests the possibility of teaching in an all-girls school as a safer alternative, Murdock advises him to think of those twenty-year jail sentences that go with it. He apparently has a dim view of any man’s ability to resist the advances that would inevitably be made by those love-starved girls.

This school, he says, and those like it are the garbage can of the educational system.  It’s the job of the teachers to keep a lid on that garbage can for a few hours a day so women can walk the streets without being attacked.  This recalls the earlier scene where a student repeatedly banged the lid down on the garbage can to the beat of the music while the pretty blonde walked by, just outside the iron bars of the fence.  At this point, another new teacher, Lois Hammond, says there must be some students who want to learn.  She is good looking and wears a tight sweater.  Murdock says she’s just asking for trouble, being dressed like that.

When Dadier says to him, “Say, these kids, they can’t all be bad, can they?” Murdock replies, “No. Why?”  Later in the movie, a teacher notes with surprise that these students don’t even know their multiplication tables, to which Murdock replies, “The only thing they know how to multiply is themselves.”  When asked how these students are ever graduated, Murdock says, “Graduated?  They just get to be eighteen.  Then they’re thrown out to make room for more of the same kind.”

As Dadier looks over the classroom he will be teaching in, he meets Josh Edwards, his opposite in terms of the masculine-feminine dimension.  For one thing, his name tells us he is Anglo-Saxon, not French.  For another, he teaches mathematics.  Again, things may be different now, but in the 1950s, most mathematics teachers in high school were men, just as most English teachers were women.  Finally, his reference to landing in Salerno tells us he was in the army during the war, as opposed to Dadier’s being in the navy.  And yet, he comes across as weak.  He is naïve, idealistic, and excited about teaching the students he just knows will be eager to learn.  We feel a sense of dread, knowing that he is doomed. And indeed, he is foolish enough to bring in his irreplaceable collection of swing records to play for the students, being sure they will enjoy them.  In a way, he is right.  They really enjoy it when Artie West starts whirling the records around the room, smashing them into pieces.

That night, Dadier has dinner at a restaurant with his wife Anne (Anne Francis), who is four-months pregnant.  She is worried, since she already lost one baby.  He tells her that there is nothing to worry about, that the baby will have her looks and his brains.  It’s amusing to hear how innocently those sexist lines were delivered in old movies.  After dinner, they step outside, just as some teenagers come drag racing down the street, sideswiping a car and flipping it over on its side just feet from where Dadier and Anne are standing.  This is the first indication that it’s going to be a struggle getting her through her pregnancy in this neighborhood.

When school begins the next Monday, everyone assembles in the auditorium.  At the microphone is Mr. Halloran (Emile Meyer), the one teacher in the school that seems to belong there.  He comes across as being so tough that none of the students would dare mess with him.  To get things started in that noisy room, he yells, “Shut up!”  And when he says “first,” he pronounces it \foist\.  The joke is that he is the one that teaches public speaking.  But in that school, that is just the kind of public speaking that is needed.

Dadier escorts the students in his homeroom class to the classroom, making the mistake of giving them orders, like, “No talking,” that they know they can flout with impunity.  Halloran would have yelled, “Shut up!” but Dadier is no Halloran.  A teenager of slender build comes out of the restroom with tears coming down his face.  When Dadier asks him what the problem is, he looks at all the toughs standing around and says, “Nothing.”  Dadier decides to go into the restroom to see what is going on.  Just before he walks in the door, we hear Gregory Miller (Sidney Poitier) asking another guy why he made the kid cry, so we know Miller is the good guy in this school.  But Dadier doesn’t know it yet, and he has an ambivalent attitude toward Miller, not being sure what to make of him.  He has no ambivalence about Artie West, however, with whom he shares an increasing mutual animosity.

Murdock gave the new teachers two rules to live by:  Don’t be a hero, and don’t turn your back on the class.  But Dadier breaks the second rule as he writes his name on the blackboard, with an explanation as to how to pronounce it.  Suddenly, a baseball is thrown at him so hard that, though it misses him, it breaks the slate of the blackboard.

By the end of that day, Dadier violates Murdock’s first rule, the one about not being a hero, when he saves Lois from being raped by one of the students.  Trying to get away from Dadier, he crashes through a window, but Dadier drags him back in.  The student’s face is cut in various places.  That night, when he tells Anne about what happened, she says that Lois was just asking to be raped, given the way she was dressed.  Dadier must have described that tight sweater.  By the next day, the story of how Dadier beat up that kid has lost nothing in the telling, leading all the students to become especially hostile to Dadier.  West arranges for his gang to beat up Dadier, with Edwards as collateral damage, causing Dadier to miss a week from teaching class.  He refuses to quit, however.  We understand that.  Dadier is the kind of man we expect to fight back.  What we don’t understand is why Edwards still ends up bringing in his collection of records.

Dadier is taken on a tour of another school by its principal, who was one of his professors in college. What a bunch of polite, well-mannered, well-dressed students they are, attending to their lessons, right after singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Now, I’m not going to say that all these students had ancestors that came over on the Mayflower, because I did spot one black student and maybe one that was Italian.  The students are seen doing their Latin lessons and carrying out experiments in the chemistry laboratory.  But more important than the fact that most of the students are white and intelligent is the fact that the school has both boys and girls in it.  Girls are a moderating influence on boys.  That is why I always shudder when I hear people argue that students do better when they attend an all-boys or all-girls school. The girls may do better in an all-girls school, but without girls around, boys become even more brutal than they already are.  I learned that every school day during the inevitable hour of physical education, always the low point of my day.  Anyway, the principal offers Dadier a job teaching at that school.  I would have gotten on my knees and wept tears of gratitude, but Dadier does the manly thing and returns to his “jungle.”

A police detective tries to get Dadier to identify the students that beat him up, wanting him to press charges.  We don’t know whether he really couldn’t see who it was in the dark, as he says, or whether he has decided to handle the situation himself.  In either event, he doesn’t seem up to it, for he starts losing his temper, even to the point of snatching the ruler out of Warneke’s hand when accused of using racial epithets in the classroom.  It was in the context of a discussion about insulting others with ethnic slurs, in which he gave explicit examples. We believe his protestations of innocence when he claims that he has no prejudices, but was only trying to make a point.  And yet, when he unfairly accuses Miller of reporting him to Warneke, he says, “You black…,” before catching himself, horrified to realize that he harbors those deep-seated prejudices that he thought he was free of.  As a further indication that he is losing it, he berates the other teachers for being more concerned with avoiding trouble than with actually teaching, though he admits he isn’t doing any better than they are.

There is a whole subplot concerning Lois, who wants to have sex with Dadier.  She is rather obvious about it, and West makes use of this by sending letters to Anne and calling her on the phone, telling her that her husband is having an affair with Lois, which isn’t true.  She becomes so stressed out, she goes into labor, and the baby is born premature.  While Anne is in the hospital, Dadier finds out about the letters, making him so angry that he wants to quit.  He vents his spleen to Murdock, who tries to argue him out of quitting, saying Dadier was finally getting through to the students, that they were even doing better in his class.  And there is a similar reversal with Anne, who is still in the hospital.  She wanted him to quit and get a job teaching at the good school, but just as he’s trying to tell her he is going to quit, she tells him she’s glad he didn’t quit, that she was wrong. Then the doctor comes in and tells them their baby son will be fine.  It is New Year’s Eve, and we sense that Dadier, having reached bottom, is now on his way back up.

I noted above that there were several indicators that Dadier was effeminate.  Had the baby been a girl, that would have been another such indicator.  I knew a guy once whose wife had a baby girl. Upon hearing about it, a woman he worked with said to him, “You mean you weren’t man enough to have a boy!”  Not many would admit to having the prejudice this woman did, but deep down, a lot of people regard the sex of a baby as a reflection on the father’s manhood.  There is even a crazy theory to rationalize these feelings, based on a study of rats. It goes something like this:  alpha males will tend to have male offspring, since they will also be alpha males, and thus get access to all the females; beta males, on the other hand, will tend to have female offspring, since females will get pregnant no matter what.  That way the reproductive potential of a male rat’s offspring will be maximized regardless of whether he is an alpha or a beta.  Whatever the validity of that study, when it comes to humans, the sex of a baby is just a matter of chance.  But in a movie, the sex of a baby is a choice made by the screenwriter.  The fact that the screenwriter chose to make the baby a boy is another indication that things are about to turn around.

The problem is not solved by making the school go co-educational like the good school. Rather, the movie’s solution is to concentrate all the evil into Artie West, and then get rid of him.  The detective that tried to get Dadier to press charges after he was beaten up gives a sociological explanation for juvenile delinquency, saying that these teenagers were just little children during the war, when their fathers were in the army, and their mothers were working in the defense plants.  No home life, no church life.  So, they formed gangs as a kind of family.  The result was that the gang leaders have taken the place of their parents.  And in this school, that means West.

It turns out that West wouldn’t have been bothered by Dadier’s pressing charges anyway.  The way West sees it, if he obeys the law, he’ll get drafted and maybe get his head blown off in some war; if he breaks the law and spends a year in jail, the army won’t want him.  That’s the way to stay alive.

When Dadier returns to school with the beginning of the new year, the moment for the showdown has arrived.  When West flagrantly copies answers from another student’s paper, Dadier tells him to bring the paper to him.  West refuses.  Miller tells him to bring Dadier his paper, as if to say, it’s not worth making a fuss over.  West calls him “black boy,” telling him to mind his own business.  They both rise out of their chairs, ready to fight.  This is the first time we have see a break between the two of them.

Up till this point, we have been hearing the buzzing of the machine shop in the class above them. But now things become silent.  You would think that silence in a movie would best be represented by the absence of sound, but it is best represented by sounds we ordinarily would not hear.  The most well-known example is that of crickets, which is often employed humorously.  Here it is the slow tick of a clock, one tick every second.  The tension builds as Dadier, having indicated to Miller that he should let him handle things, moves toward West, telling him they are going to the principal’s office. West pulls out a wicked-looking, six-inch, switchblade stiletto and flicks it open.  This is just another way that this movie, while supposedly condemning juvenile delinquency, is actually glamorizing it.  There probably wasn’t a male teenager in the audience at that time who didn’t wish he had a knife like that.  In any event, the students get out of their chairs, moving toward the periphery of the room, trying to stay out of the way.

Miller warns Dadier, “Take it easy, chief!  He’s crazy.  He’s high.  He’s floating on Sneaky Pete wine.”  Another student, Morales, says with alarm, “He’s going to kill him.”  It is at this point that most of the students in the class realize things are going too far.  One exception is Belazi, who tries to sneak up on Dadier from behind, but Miller punches him in the gut, taking him out.

Suddenly, we see another black student standing next to Miller, as Miller tells someone in West’s gang that he can have a gang fight, if he wants one.  If you weren’t playing close attention, you wouldn’t have noticed that there were two other black students in the room other than Miller.  The view of the classroom never had them in the frame, except in this scene.  But now it occurs to us that, though there are several black students in the school, yet none of them are bad.  Before the Christmas show, which Dadier was in charge of, we saw a group of them singing “Go Down Moses,” also known as “Oh!  Let My People Go,” a spiritual expressing a connection between the slavery of blacks in America and the slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt.  But that was about all we see of them. None of them were part of the gang that beat up Dadier and Edwards, for example.  This should not surprise us. Perhaps starting with The Negro Soldier (1944), the movies began portraying African-Americans in a more positive light, giving them roles of people with the same intelligence and moral character as whites, allowing them to break out of such categories as coons, bucks, and toms.

Let’s take another look at the four ethnic groups in this movie.  Each one has a representative character:  for the Irish, West; for the Italians, Belazi; for the Puerto Ricans, Morales; and for the African-Americans, Miller.  The order in which I have listed these four groups corresponds to increasing degrees of discrimination experienced by them during the 1950s.  Because the Irish and the Italians were experiencing the least amount of discrimination at this time, the movie felt safe in having all the juvenile delinquents come from these two groups.  The converse is not true, however. Not all the Irish and Italians are bad students.  Santini, for example, is Italian, but he is a nice guy, and he is the one that takes out Belazi with the flag pole when Belazi picks up the switchblade after Dadier knocks it out of West’s hand.  And the kid that was crying on account of being bullied, early in the movie, appeared to be Irish.

As the representative of the Puerto Ricans, Morales is likeable, harmless, and funny.  And he is the one that, after picking up the switchblade when dropped by Belazi, drives it into the top of a desk and then breaks off the blade.  In general, as with the black students, none of the Puerto Ricans are portrayed as juvenile delinquents.

Belazi aside, not even West’s gang wants anything to do with him once West pulls out that switchblade.  Realizing he is alone, West begins to show fear.  When Dadier gets hold of him and starts banging him against the blackboard, right near the spot where the baseball West threw at him broke the slate, West says repeatedly, “Not here!” for he feels humiliated and doesn’t want the other students to witness this.  When it is over, Dadier takes West and Belazi to the principal’s office.  As they leave the room, West puts his thumb to his mouth, an infantile gesture.

That’s a little too much. Leave the poor guy some dignity!  I would rather West have taken his beating like a man, but I suppose the movie needed to put him down in a big way.

In the final scene, we see Dadier and Miller outside North Manual High School, having a friendly conversation.  Dadier has decided to keep teaching there, and Miller has decided to stay until he graduates.  Then we hear “Rock Around the Clock” start up again as we watch Miller walking on down the street, looking cool.  Dadier smiles and then heads for home.

Another movie about a tough school is Lean on Me.  It was made in 1989, long after the term “juvenile delinquency” had become quaint.  There is a prologue at the beginning of this movie too, but it 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.  This could easily be the good school that Dadier went to visit right after he was beaten up.

Clark 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 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 it 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 the you-know-what 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 chewing gum 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, about three hundred of them.  And he carries around a baseball bat like some kind of Buford Pusser from Walking Tall (1973), which is definitely a step up from Warneke and his ruler.  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 chewing gum 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 the initial impression that Eastside High was having problems because the student body no longer consisted of white students only.  But if the movie has ceased to be an argument for white nationalism, 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.

By the way, just in case you are wondering what happened to all those students that were expelled by Clark, they all got themselves enrolled in North Manual High School.

Bitter Victory (1957)

Ideally, a movie should make sense on its own terms. It is a bad movie when scenes can only be explained by external logic, by what was going on in the mind of the director or screenwriter. John Ford was once asked, regarding the movie Stagecoach (1939), why the Indians chasing the stagecoach didn’t just shoot the horses, and his answer was, “Then there wouldn’t have been any movie,” which was an example of external logic. Actually, he was just being a smart aleck, because he could have said that the Indians wanted to capture the horses alive, which would have made sense, and more importantly, would have made the scene explicable in terms of internal logic alone.

A big problem with Bitter Victory, a movie about British commandos ordered to make a raid on Benghazi to steal documents from the German headquarters, is that too much of what happens in the movie is explicable only in terms of external logic. Nicholas Ray, the director, had some idea in his head about how things should turn out, which leads to one forced scene after another. The first one occurs in England before the commandos set out on their mission.  Captain Leith (Richard Burton) sees Jane (Ruth Roman) sitting at a table in a military night club. No sooner does he recognize her than Major Brand (Curd Jürgens) walks up beside him and asks Leith if he would like to meet his wife. What follows is a scene reminiscent of Casablanca, in which it becomes clear that Leith and Jane were once lovers, and cryptic remarks pass back and forth between them while Brand takes it all in, not understanding the particulars of the remarks but gleaning their general significance nevertheless. Because we have seen this sort of thing before, we question it more than we might have when seeing it for the first time.

In other words, the most natural thing for Leith to do when Brand asks him if he wants to meet his wife would be to say, “You mean Jane? I knew Jane before the war. I was just going over to say ‘Hi.’” Now, of course they would not admit they had been lovers, but there is no reason for Leith and Jane to deny they even knew each other, especially since their innuendoes make their previous relationship so obvious. By concealing that they knew each other and then making the concealment obvious, they only made things worse. So, why did they do this? Internal logic fails us here, and we are forced to reach for external logic. Ray wanted Brand to find out that Leith and Jane were once secretly lovers so that he would become jealous, and so Ray concocted this hurried, unrealistic scene to that end.

After the mission is complete, the commandos have to escape by walking through the desert.  However, two men are too injured to walk. Brand tells Leith he will have to stay behind with the wounded men until they die and then catch up with the rest of the men. That makes no sense. If they are going to die anyway, just leave them behind. Furthermore, in a much later scene, Brand reveals his orders, written down on a piece of paper, that their mission is so important that if men are wounded, they are to be left behind. Now it really makes no sense.

It gets worse. When Brand tells Leith to stay behind with the wounded, a soldier suggests making stretchers to carry them. Leith dismisses the idea, saying that the men would bleed to death in an hour. Sounds good to me. If they have scruples about leaving the men behind, carry them in stretchers for an hour, and then when they die, leave them in the desert. Instead, Leith stays behind with the wounded, and then, after everyone is gone, kills them. Actually, he only kills one of them, because he runs out of bullets. So then he decides to carry the other wounded man all by himself. You see, carrying a wounded man on a stretcher is a bad idea, but tossing him over your shoulder and staggering through the desert is a good idea. Conveniently, the man dies, and Leith is able to catch up with the rest of the men.

External logic to the rescue. The purpose of all this absurdity is to establish that Brand wanted Leith to kill the wounded for him, and then hold him responsible for doing so. That would be fine, if that could have been established coherently. But since internal logic fails us here, we have to reach for the director’s motivations instead.

After a while, the men run out of water. They come across a well, but before anyone takes a drink, someone suggests that the Germans may have poisoned it. The men put pressure on Brand to sample the water to see if it is safe to drink.  Rather than show fear, he takes a swig. It tastes all right, but Leith says it is too soon to tell. So, they leave the well without drinking any of the water. But if they were not going to drink the water regardless of what happened when Brand swallowed some, what was the point of Brand’s risking his life by drinking some of it in the first place? This contrivance can only be explained by Ray’s desire to show how Brand can be intimidated by his fear that others may think him a coward.

When Brand sees a scorpion crawling near Leith’s leg during a rest period, he does not warn Leith, hoping that Leith will be bitten. Mekrane (Raymond Pellegrin) sees the scorpion too, but does nothing. After Leith is bitten, Mekrane tries to kill Brand for letting the scorpion bite Leith. But if Mekrane cares so much about Leith, why didn’t he just walk over to the scorpion and step on it?

Finally, before Leith dies, he asks Brand to tell Jane that she was right and he was wrong. Instead, when Brand gets back to England, he tells Jane he did not hear what Leith said, but he probably said that he loved her. We know Brand is the sort who would lie about such a thing, but why this particular lie? As with the scorpion scene, I don’t think even external logic can make sense of this one.

If the movie is so illogical that not even external logic can make sense of some of it, we have to ask ourselves why film critics waste any time on it at all.  Now it is metalogic to the rescue.  Nicholas Ray is one of those directors that a lot of critics regard as an auteur, which means that all his movies will receive attention no matter how bad they are.

Bird of Paradise (1932)

In the movie Bird of Paradise, a bunch of men on a yacht stop off at a Polynesian island, where Johnny (Joel McCrea) and Luana (Dolores del Rio) fall in love. The rest of the men leave, but Johnny stays behind. He absconds with Luana, and they find an island paradise to shack up on.

But she is destined to be a virgin sacrifice for the Volcano God, and when it starts to erupt, the natives find her and bring her back. Johnny tries to rescue her, but he ends up becoming part of the sacrifice. He tells Luana there is only one true God, to whom he says the Lord’s Prayer. The sailors return and rescue them, but Luana voluntarily stays to be fed to the volcano. So, the Christian God loses out to the Volcano God, who gets his sacrifice.

She is not a virgin anymore, but what the Volcano God doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

 

I suppose Boudu Saved from Drowning is a funny movie, if your idea of funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. He then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting disgusting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.

The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching this movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)

In 1915, D.W. Griffith made Birth of a Nation, which was an entertaining movie, but had the slight drawback of being the most racist movie ever made.  To atone for this great sin, he had to do penance, and that’s why he made Intolerance:  Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages the very next year, whose message was that we should all be tolerant of one another, something the glorious Ku Klux Klan of the previous movie definitely was not. Intolerance was a boring movie, but it had to be done.  Unfortunately, it was also done to us, punishing us for enjoying Birth of a Nation, I suppose.

Griffith must have still been feeling guilty by 1919, because in that year he also made Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, in which he tried to atone for his racist classic one more time.  The very title may sound a little racist to our twenty-first century ears, but he probably thought it was an improvement over the source material, a short story by Thomas Burke entitled “The Chink and the Child.”

The Asian in both titles is Cheng Huan, played by Richard Barthelmess in yellowface.  He is a Chinese Buddhist who decides to move to London to bring enlightenment to the white race.  He is unable to bring said enlightenment to the British, however, no doubt because the people in England were not sure what to make of a man who was apparently incapable of using the muscles in his face to form an expression.  I guess that was Griffith’s idea of the inscrutable Oriental.  However, Huan is able to achieve nirvana on a regular basis at the local opium den.

Whereas Barthelmess played Huan without an expression, Donald Crisp played Battling Burrows with enough expressions on his face for the two of them. Burrows is a boxer who enjoys being cruel to his young daughter Lucy. In fact, the only time Burrows is not bullying or beating Lucy is when he is at the saloon or in the boxing ring.  But he insists that she put a smile on her face, and so Lucy uses her two fingers to force her lips into a smile, which is ludicrous.  Supposedly, Lillian Gish, who played Lucy, came up with that idea, and apparently Griffith liked it, because she does it over and over again. The reason for this, presumably, is that if she had simply forced a smile on her face the way a normal person might do, we in the audience might be so dull-witted as to think she was actually happy.

After a particularly severe beating, Lucy accidentally stumbles into Huan’s shop.  When the effect of his opium pipe wears off, Huan notices her on the floor and takes her upstairs to his bedroom.  His love for her is pure and noble, but expressed in such a way as to seem downright creepy.  But when her father finds out she has been in Huan’s bedroom, he beats her with a whip until she dies.  Huan goes over to where Burrows lives, and, discovering that Lucy is dead, pulls out a revolver and shoots Burrows several times, killing him on the spot.  Huan goes home and commits suicide by disemboweling himself with a knife.  I thought that was something a Japanese Samurai might do as a matter of honor, not something a Buddhist is likely to do, but then I wasn’t aware that Buddhists went around packing heat, so what do I know?

This movie is simplistically didactic, instructing us that an Asian might actually be a better person than a Causian.  And to benefit from that lesson, we have to sit through what may be the most miserable ninety minutes in cinematic history.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Early in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, two men argue about which is the better form of entertainment, operas or movies, with one guy saying that he prefers movies, because he doesn’t like all that singing in operas.  The joke is that what we are watching is both a movie and an opera, for every line in the movie is sung.

In a typical musical, most of the dialogue is merely spoken, with songs being sung occasionally for some special reason.  One of the things about opera that is strange is that people sing about ordinary stuff that hardly seems to warrant musical expression.  For example, at the very beginning of this movie, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), who works in a garage as an auto mechanic, is just about to leave for the day when his boss asks him if he can work overtime.  He says that would be inconvenient, and he suggests Pierre instead, who says he can stay late.  All this mundane conversation is sung to music, whereas it would only be spoken in an ordinary musical.  Fortunately, the music is pleasant and easy to take.  As in any opera, however, there are special musical pieces that stand out from the rest.  In this case, two songs in particular have been translated into English and recorded, which are “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch What Happens.”

Jacques Demy, who wrote and directed this movie, is often said to have borrowed the plot from Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy, plays that were made into movies, especially the first two of the three, Marius (1931) and Fanny (1932).  However, there are differences between these early movies and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that are so striking that they render the actual similarities superficial in comparison.

As for the story in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Guy and Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) want to get married. However, he is drafted to fight the war in Algeria. On his last night before leaving, they make love for the first time. And you know what that means. When a woman in a movie has sex with a man just once, she gets pregnant. We then figure that either Guy will be killed in the war, or he will forget about her and fall in love with someone else. Either that, or she will be so desperate about covering up the shame of her pregnancy that she will marry another man. At first, Geneviève’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), is a little distressed about her daughter’s pregnancy, but after a while, neither she nor Geneviève seems unduly concerned about it.  In other words, there is not sufficient desperation on the part of Geneviève to compel her to marry anyone.

Already we have several differences between this movie and corresponding parts of the Marseilles Trilogy.  In the latter, the two lovers are Marius and Fanny.  However, Marius is not forced to leave Fanny.  He simply would rather go to sea and satisfy his wanderlust than marry her, and Fanny sacrifices her happiness and lets him go.  As noted above, Guy would never have left Geneviève had he not been compelled to do so, for he wanted to marry her more than anything else.

In the process of trying to sell some of her jewelry to pay the bills, Madame takes Geneviève with her to a jewelry store, where they meet a jewelry wholesaler, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who immediately falls in love with Geneviève. Because he is rich and respectable, Madame wants Geneviève to accept his eventual proposal of marriage. She never really liked the idea of Geneviève’s marrying an auto mechanic, and in an effort to disparage Geneviève’s love for Guy, she earlier told her that she (Geneviève) did not know what love is all about, that it is more than becoming enamored with someone’s face.  This is ironic, because whereas Guy and Geneviève had gotten to know each other very well, all of Cassard’s love for Geneviève is based on his doing exactly what Madame ridicules, becoming enamored with someone’s face.

Surprisingly enough, instead of Guy forgetting about Geneviève, she starts forgetting about him. After only four months, she says it feels as though he has been gone for years, and that she is losing the feeling she had for him. She has to look at his picture to remember what he looks like. It is true that she has only received one letter from him in four months, but you have to figure that a man fighting a war might not have the luxury of writing regularly (in fact, he is wounded by a grenade).  In any event, in the letter she receives from Guy, he writes that he is looking forward to coming home after his military service is over, marrying her, and seeing their child.

This is another big difference between the Marseilles Trilogy and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  Fanny never stops loving Marius, even after she marries another man.  But Geneviève’s love for Guy simply fades away in spite of her efforts to hold on to it.

As a result of her waning feelings for Guy, Geneviève ends up marrying Cassard. The movie could have given her the standard motive of a woman desperate to cover up the shame of her pregnancy, as in Fanny, but it does not. It is unlikely that she would have married Cassard had she not been pregnant, but we still get the sense that her decision to opt for a marriage of convenience was made possible by the brute fact that her love for Guy had died.

Before Guy and Geneviève separate, they sing “I Will Wait for You.” The lyrics in the movie are a bit different from that of the popular recording of that song in English, but the thrust is the same. The two lovers express their undying love for each other. It reminds me of the movie Oliver (1968), in which Nancy sings the song “As Long as He Needs Me,” referring to her lover Bill, who has no need for her at all, and ends up murdering her. We have a similar irony with the song “I Will Wait for You.” Although the lyrics in the American version of the song say, “If it takes forever, I will wait for you,” Geneviève does not even manage to wait more than a few months.

Before being drafted, Guy was living with his dying aunt Élise (Mireille Perry), who was being tended to by a caregiver named Madeleine (Ellen Farmer).  After Guy returns and discovers that Geneviève has moved away and married Cassard, he talks to Aunt Élise to see what she knows about Geneviève.  He comments on several letters that were exchanged between Geneviève and himself, but most of them must have been written after she had married Cassard, since she earlier said she had only received one letter from Guy and that she did not know where to write him.  In these subsequent letters, she apparently could not bring herself to tell Guy about her marriage. In the course of his conversation with his aunt, he expresses surprise that Madeleine is still taking care of her.  “Hasn’t she married yet?” he asks, to which Élise offers as an explanation, “You know how well-behaved she is.”  Come again?  That’s a pretty cynical remark, even for a French woman.  In any event, he eventually marries Madeleine, who we sense has been in love with Guy all along.

Guy and Geneviève finally meet again when she pulls into the filling station that he now owns. She says she never expected to see him again, and that it was just by chance that she decided to pass this way. She offers no explanation as to why she married someone else, and he does not ask her why she didn’t wait for him to return. She asks him if he would like to meet their daughter Françoise, who is sitting in the car.  When he shakes his head No, we get the sense that this is neither from bitterness nor from any feeling that seeing his daughter would be painful for him.  Rather, his feeling for their daughter is like the love he once had for Geneviève, something that is simply gone.

In Fanny, when Marius returns and finds out what happened, he wants the child, but Fanny’s husband won’t give him up, and Fanny, who still loves Marius, stays with her husband, once more sacrificing her happiness for that of others (i.e., for her husband and her child).  But in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, when the former lovers finally meet again, Geneviève no longer loves Guy, Guy no longer loves Geneviève, and he is indifferent to the child they had together.

After Geneviève leaves the filling station, Madeleine and their son, who had been out Christmas shopping, return to the station, and we see that they are a happy family.

There is no villain in this movie.  No one is to blame for what happened.  That is just the way love is, a beautiful illusion that we think will last forever until it doesn’t.

The Crowd (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1934)

In 1928, King Vidor made The Crowd, a movie about John and Mary Sims, and then made Our Daily Bread in 1934, which is a movie about the same married couple.  Different actors play the roles in the two movies, but even if they had been played by the same actors, the second movie really does not seem to be a sequel to the first, especially since the son they had in the first movie is inexplicably missing in the second.

The Crowd is basically about a man, John Sims, who thinks he will make it big in the big city.  In fact, his father expresses those big dreams for him when he is born on July 4, 1900, as propitious a birth date as one could want.  As a child, his life is compared, somewhat superficially, with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  At the age of twelve, he expresses his dream of being big himself.  That is the day his father dies, suggesting that our dreams have a way of being interrupted by the harsh realities of life.

An intertitle sarcastically announces that John has become an adult, and that he is one of the seven million people in New York who believe the city depends on them.  That is a stretch, because a lot of people have no such illusions, but John certainly does.  He ends up with a job in which he is just one of a thousand people.  All in all, it is not a bad job:  he works indoors, sitting down, no heavy lifting.  He even has the opportunity to steal a little time from his boss trying to win a contest coming up with a good advertising slogan.  And there is no overtime apparently, because at the moment the minute hand indicates it is 5 o’clock, everyone leaves his desk and heads for the exit.

Bert works in the same office with John, and he lines him up with a blind double date, where John meets Mary.  Though Bert is a fun-loving guy, yet he is a better worker than John and eventually gets promoted.  Furthermore, Bert is not contemptuous of other people the way John is, sneering at the crowd and remarking to Mary that most people are a pain in the neck.  John sees a man juggling balls with an advertisement on the clown suit he is wearing.  He points out that the poor sap’s father probably thought he would grow up to be president.  Much in the way that Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) is destined to become the geek in a sideshow in Nightmare Alley (1947), so too is John destined to become the juggler in the clown suit as punishment for his derisive remark.

After kissing Mary a couple of times and seeing an advertisement (“You furnish the girl, and we’ll furnish the home”), John asks Mary to marry him.  They get married, but there is no home to furnish, only a small apartment with a Murphy bed, where John dreams about the big house he thinks they will eventually own.  After a while, it all starts to get on their nerves, and they start quarreling, although John is the one who does most of the complaining and sniping.  They almost split up, but then Mary tells John she is pregnant, and so they make up.  They have a son and soon after that a daughter.  And soon after that, they start quarreling again, with Mary growing weary of John’s dreams about making it big while Bert actually got a promotion.

While at the beach, John starts juggling balls to amuse his children, recalling the geek motif of the juggler in the clown suit.  Nevertheless, John comes up with an advertising slogan based on juggling balls, and it wins him five hundred dollars (about seven thousand dollars, adjusted for inflation).  After John buys some presents, they call their children through the window to come and get the toys he bought them.  Heedlessly, the children run across the street, and their daughter is run over by a truck and killed.

After a few months, John is still so upset that he cannot do his job.  Even though Bert is now his supervisor and would probably be understanding, John quits before Bert can say anything, throwing a tantrum, flinging his ledger on the floor, and saying, “To hell with this job.”  Oddly enough, when he gets home, Mary is in a great mood as she prepares food for the company picnic.  We have to wonder, if Mary has recovered well enough to think about having fun, why can’t John at least go to work and do his job?  In any event, John tries to get work elsewhere, but fails at one job after another, once again putting stress on the marriage.  In some ways, this reminds us of Penny Serenade (1941) and The Marrying Kind (1952), two movies in which a marriage ends up on the rocks on account of the death of a child.  Like those two movies, the idea is that a good marriage can ultimately survive such a tragedy.

Mary tries to make ends meet by sewing dresses while John hangs around the house depressed.  Her brothers come by and offer John a job, but he turns it down because it is a “charity job.”  John leaves and almost commits suicide by leaping in front of a train, but ends up finding work juggling balls in a clown suit.  He goes home to find that Mary is leaving him to go live with her brothers.  He talks her into going to a show with him, having purchased the tickets with the money he made, and at the theater having a good time, they see his advertisement of the clown juggling balls in the program, suggesting that he might succeed again in the future.

Apparently John fails to make a go of it coming up with advertising slogans, however, because in Our Daily Bread, we find that he no longer even has the job juggling balls while wearing that clown suit. An uncle gives them an opportunity to work an abandoned farm, and they decide to take it. I guess John is no longer too proud to take charity from one of Mary’s relatives.  Unfortunately, they know nothing about farming. A genuine farmer, who lost his own place, breaks down on the road, and John invites him and his family to join them. John then gets the idea of inviting other people to join the farm, using their diversity of skills to turn it into a cooperative commune.

Naturally enough, there are scenes showing how well this works out, but there are also scenes of trouble. There is a discussion of the kind of government they will have for themselves, and we get just a taste of political discord. There is a scene involving a troublemaker, who is quickly forced to behave himself. John tells Mary about one of the members of the commune trying to steal some stuff and sell it for his own personal gain. We want to see more of this, because there are not many movies premised on the idea of desperate families forming such a commune, and we are curious as to whether these elements of discord could be overcome. Unfortunately, the movie diverges from these issues.

First, it slides into a man-against-nature situation, in which drought threatens to ruin their crops. There are lots of movies about farmers struggling against the elements, and it seems a shame to waste time on that theme here. The only good thing that can be said in its favor is that they all pull together and build a path from the river to the crops for the purpose of irrigation, solving the problem through their own effort and ability. Another movie might have had someone pray for rain, followed by a downpour, so at least we were spared that deus ex machina.

Second, there is a diversion with no redeeming features at all. It concerns the arrival of a blonde femme fatale, who almost succeeds in getting John to desert his wife and the farm by running off to the city with her. Movies about a wicked woman making a good man go wrong can be lots of fun, but that plot element does not belong here. Besides, it is a little irritating the way Mary blithely takes John back after abandoning her, even if only temporarily.

The movie should have spent less time on the drought and none at all on the femme fatale, thereby leaving more time to dramatize all the difficulties in getting people to cooperate in such an enterprise, especially since many of us have doubts as to how well something like that would work out anyway.

MyRA, My Ass!

The federal government is now making available a new kind of savings account called myRA, which is a play on IRA, the individual retirement account.  It allows a person to have money deducted from his paycheck and deposited directly into a savings account.  The amount can be very small, and there are no fees.  The money is invested in United States Treasury securities, and no taxes have to be paid on the interest until it is withdrawn.  The original contributions, however, can be withdrawn without penalty.  When the maximum amount of $15,000 is reached, it will be rolled over into a Roth IRA.  All in all, it sounds pretty good.

But as you can no doubt tell from the title of this essay, I don’t like it.  Some people have voiced the objection that the return on the investment is piddling.  It is likely to keep you up with inflation, but there will be no real return of any significance, as opposed to investing in the stock market.  That worry is the least of my concerns.  In itself, there is nothing wrong with the myRA, notwithstanding the small return paid by the government securities.  In fact, for an individual with no savings, the myRA would be just fine even if it paid nothing in the way of interest.

There are three stages of investing.  In the beginning, what matters is not the return on your investment, but the fact that you are saving money at all.  You could just put the money in a sock and keep it in the drawer for all that it matters, because the interest on the first few thousand dollars is just not worth worrying about.  Later, as the amount of savings becomes substantial, the return on that money does become important.  There may even come a point where the return is greater than what you are able to contribute to your savings out of your paycheck.  Finally, there is the capital-preservation stage, where you have so much money that you no longer have to worry about saving any more or worry about getting a good return.  Your chief concern at that point is just making sure you don’t lose it.  The myRA is for people in the first stage, the savings stage, and so the objection about the paltry return is beside the point.

My objection to the myRA is not that it is bad for the individual that takes advantage of it.  Were I just starting out as a young man with no savings, I would probably open one myself.  My objection is what this represents ideologically.  To explain what I mean, I must start at the beginning.  I started working in the 1970s, around the time the IRA first became available.  Because I worked for a company with a profit sharing plan, the rules back then were such that I could not avail myself of this kind of account.  But when I lost that job in 1983, I rolled the money from the profit sharing account into an IRA.  At the time, the maximum contribution was $2,000 per year (about $4,800, adjusted for inflation), which I started making annually.  Because I was able to deduct the contribution from my taxes, the net result was that I contributed $1,700 and the government was contributing $300 (just over $700, adjusted for inflation).

I remember thinking at the time that while this was a good deal for me, it was wrongheaded as public policy.  Anyone who could save that much money every year did not need help from the federal government.  The people the government should be helping are the ones who are so poor they cannot put any money aside, because they can just barely make ends meet.  The $300 the government was giving me each year should have gone to the needy.  Of course, with an IRA, the taxes are only deferred and must eventually be paid when the money is withdrawn.  But now that I am retired, the first $12,000 I withdraw each year from that IRA is excluded from taxes thanks to the exemption and the standard deduction.  After that, I pay at the lowest tax bracket.  In short, I end up paying a lot less in taxes than I would have had I never opened an IRA.

By coincidence, 1983 is the same year the Greenspan Commission issued its recommendations for Social Security, which consisted of an increase in the payroll tax and an increase in the retirement age.  This really brought my objection to the IRA into focus.  I was all for the tax increase, but I didn’t like the increase in the retirement age.  I would have preferred that the retirement age be kept the same and the payroll tax increased even more.  In other words, instead of the government giving people like me a $300 tax subsidy, it should have put the $300 into the Social Security Trust Fund (I know the $300 would have been counted as general revenue, but it could have been diverted into the Social Security Trust Fund through adjustments in the tax code).

According to the government, “myRA® is designed to make saving for retirement easy for people who need it most – workers who don’t have access to a retirement savings plan at their job or lack other options to save.”  No, they are not the ones who need it most.  It is the people who are so poor they cannot save that “need it most,” not the ones that are well off enough to be able to set money aside.  And so, my objection tomyRA is the same as my objection to the IRA (my objection to 401k plans is similar but more complicated, because these plans encourage contributions from employers, which is a good thing).

But this is only half my objection.  Some people cannot save because they are too poor.  Other people cannot save because they are deficient in character.  These are the people that could set money aside in a myRA or even an IRA or 401k plan, but will not do so because they are profligate, spending all they earn and even borrowing so they can spend more.  They are the grasshopper in the well-known fable by Aesop of “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”

Now, on the one hand, people who fail to save because they lack the virtues of thrift and industry will often plead hard luck, attempting to place themselves amongst those that have not saved money through no fault of their own.  On the other hand, many people, conservatives especially, are prone to do just the opposite, to regard the people that cannot help being penniless as being where they are as the result of bad choices made of their own free will, and therefore getting what they deserve.

As important as this distinction may be from a moral point of view, we need to protect people from poverty in their old age in either case.  Regardless of whether someone fails to save as the result of circumstances beyond his control, or because he carelessly squanders his money with no thought of providing for his future, he needs the protection of the state.  That is why no voluntary savings program provided by the government can be a substitute for a program like Social Security, in which the savings are mandatory, cannot be withdrawn at will, and cannot be borrowed against.  People that lack the character to save will either not avail themselves of amyRA in the first place, or will participate in the plan for a while, but then take the money out as soon as a few thousand dollars accumulates and blow it on some frivolous expenditure.

Conservatives like these voluntary savings vehicles because they are essentially a way to reduce taxes, whereas the only way to maintain the Social Security benefit far into the future would be through a tax increase.  Rather than increase the payroll tax or lift the cap on that tax, conservatives prefer to cut the Social Security benefit by raising the retirement age again, reducing the cost of living adjustment, means testing the program, or even privatizing it.  The general refrain is that people of a certain age, say, fifty years or older, will not be affected.  Those under the age of fifty will then have time to adjust their plans for retirement, presumably by saving more.  For example, the Trustees Report for Social Security for 2015 says, “The Trustees recommend that lawmakers address the projected trust fund shortfalls in a timely way in order to phase in necessary changes gradually and give workers and beneficiaries time to adjust to them.”

But such thinking is either terribly naïve or willfully cynical.  The only adjustment that can be made by people too poor to save will be to resign themselves to even more poverty in the years ahead.  As for those lacking in character, they will not change their ways.  You could tell them when they reach the age of eighteen that there will be no Social Security at all when they get old, and they would still not save a dime.

People who have good jobs and can save their money, who are frugal by nature, and who are blessed with a modest amount of good luck can take full advantage of all these tax deferred savings plans, of which myRA is the latest variation.  But anyone lacking in money or character either cannot or will not save no matter how many of these plans the government comes up with.  This business about people having “time to adjust” is not realistic.  It is just a convenient assumption to ease the conscience of conservatives as they make plans to cut back on entitlements.

All these voluntary savings vehicles are of benefit only to those who really don’t need them, while being of no benefit to those who are likely to having nothing saved for their old age.  In other words, the myRA may appear to be a harmless way to encourage people to save, but it is ultimately the expression of an ideology of individual responsibility, one that says, “If you don’t use this plan to save your money, then you have only yourself to blame when you end up in poverty in your old age.”  The revenue the government forgoes in subsidizing the ants should instead be put into the Social Security system that protects the grasshoppers against their own worst instincts.