A Slight Problem with Ethical Relativism

Though the moral character of atheists is neither better nor worse than the moral character of people that believe in God, yet there does seem to be a difference in conviction. And that is perfectly understandable. A common conception of God is that he is infinitely wise and good, and in one way or another, through sacred text, revelation, or one’s own conscience, God informs us of what is good and what is evil. People with strong religious beliefs will tend to be firm in their convictions about right and wrong, owing to their sense that they have the word of God on which to rely.

Others, while still believing in God, are less sure about the reliability of sacred text, the revelations of others, or even their own conscience, which often urges them down one path, only to later reprimand them for not taking another. They figure there are things commanded or forbidden by God, but they just aren’t sure what they are. This uncertainty leads to tolerance of other religions, in which one regards them as different expressions of the one God common to all, thereby reinforcing one’s doubts in matters of morality, for different religions command and forbid different things.

Taking this to its ultimate conclusion, those totally lacking in belief are fully aware that they must rely on themselves alone when it comes to morality. Through some combination of instinct, experience, cultural influence, and prudence, they muddle their way through various moral difficulties, hoping that they are doing the right thing.

Not being absolutely sure about what is right and wrong leads naturally to the conclusion that nothing is absolutely right or wrong. Atheism does not entail ethical relativism, but they tend to go together. From the fact of cultural relativism, that different cultures have different views as to what is right and wrong, there tends to be an inference to ethical relativism, that what is right or wrong is relative to a particular culture, with no culture having a greater claim on the truth in such matters than any other.

When I was young, ethical relativism was cast in the most reassuring terms. Through such examples as belching Arabs and promiscuous Polynesians, I found the idea of moral relativism to be quite congenial. Other cultures with their different ways seemed benign, even cute. When I got to college, I eventually majored in philosophy, where I discovered that the issue was far more complicated than I ever imagined. However, I remember one textbook in ethics that had a chapter on ethical relativism. It posed such questions as to whether it was all right to marry more than one wife, kill a hornet, commit incest, or have slaves, if you treat them well. The point was that each of these actions were regarded as forbidden in some cultures or religions, while others held such things to be morally permissible.

These issues were a touch more serious than the examples to which I was first exposed, but they were not alarming. I could imagine living among people who believed differently from me on such issues without too much discomfort, although I might find not being able to kill a threatening hornet somewhat inconvenient.

The past was more problematic, for history is replete with examples of societies that once practiced all sorts of cruelties and atrocities with a clean conscience and even a feeling of righteousness about it all. But as they were in the past, there seemed to be the sense that they could be safely ignored. It was only modern cultures that need be considered.

Well, we have come a long way since those halcyon days in which one could accept the tenets of ethical relativism as proof of one’s sophistication and enlightenment. Nowadays, when one thinks of the differences between one culture and another regarding what is right and wrong, it is things like genital mutilation, child brides, forced adultery, and honor killings that come to mind. And now, as if we needed one more example, we have the situation of boys being held as sex slaves on military bases by some of our Afghan allies, while our own soldiers are being told to accept such practices as just a cultural issue, in what might be the most perverted application of moral relativism ever embraced by our society. I find it impossible to say, “Well, in that culture, such things are morally permissible. We must not be judgmental and presume to impose our values on others.” Instead, I want to say, “That culture is morally depraved. And it needs to be crushed!”

How about this for a moral absolute: It is wrong to chain an eleven-year-old boy to a bed so that he can be repeatedly raped no matter how much he screams. It is easy enough to agree that this is absolutely wrong, although I have no theoretical justification for such a claim. At best, all I can say is that it feels like a moral absolute.

As long as I am in my absolutist mode, I am also appalled that relatively little attention has been paid to this story. On the other hand, there has been an excessive amount of coverage on Pope Francis. As long he was getting so much coverage, it would have been nice to hear him say a thing or two about boys being kept as sex slaves on our military bases, especially since he could have tied it in with the rape of boys by priests, but he said nothing, alas. Perhaps in the next debate Carly Fiorina might talk about the boys being raped with their legs kicking and hearts beating, but I doubt it.

Of course, unlike fetuses, there are no videos of boys being raped, and we tolerate a lot of things as long as we don’t have to see them. Logically, there should be no difference between seeing pictures of boys being raped and only hearing stories about them, but such is human nature. After all, that is why ISIS made pictures of their beheadings instead of merely telling us about them, because they knew it would disturb us more and possibly goad us to war with them. And that is why the CIA destroyed the images of torture so that our moral outrage would be much less.

But videos do not tell the whole story. After all, it is not American little boys that are being raped, but only little boys in Afghanistan, who are probably going to grow up to be terrorists anyway. As Jeb Bush might point out in the next debate, at least President Obama is keeping us safe.

Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959)

Imitation of Life began life as a novel by Fannie Hurst, published in 1933. By the next year, it had been made into a movie. Although the 1934 version of this novel, directed by John Stahl, leaves out the first part of the book, beginning after the protagonist is already a widow with a daughter, it follows the book more closely than does the 1959 version, directed by Douglas Sirk. Both movies won awards of various sorts, though neither quite managed to get the Oscar for Best Picture.

Both movies are something of a paradox. On the one hand, the critics did not seem to care for them. Writing for the New York Times in 1934, Andre Sennwald made the following comment: “Despite the sincerity of John M. Stahl’s direction, he scarcely manages to conceal the shallowness of the play’s ideas, the commonplace nature of its emotions, nor the rubber-stamp quality of its writing.” As for the 1959 version, Danny Peary, in his book Guide for the Film Fanatic, says the movie is “impeccably made Hollywood trash.” It would be easy to furnish more disparaging remarks regarding these two movies, but these will have to suffice for reasons of space.

On the other hand, these movies provoke strong emotional reactions that vary depending on the person who watches them, and they likewise lend themselves to different interpretations as to the significance of the story and whether we should approve or disapprove of what happens. In particular, there are those who say that the message of these movies is that we should all accept who we are and not pretend to be something we are not. Others see these movies as telling us we should know our place and stay in it. All of this is further complicated by the fact that Stahl presents his movie to be taken at face value, whereas some critics say that Sirk tends to be ironic and subversive in his direction.

So as to avoid anachronisms, I shall, when it seems appropriate, use the terms for African Americans that were in use when these movies were made. It is one thing to speak generally of how African Americans were portrayed in old movies, but it is quite another thing to actually use the term “African American,” which bespeaks of an enlightened attitude regarding race, to discuss a movie replete with prejudice and demeaning racial stereotypes, resulting in an incongruous combination of connotation.

We begin with 1934 version, in which there are four main characters. As they are listed in the credits at the beginning of the movie, they are Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), Jessie Pullman (Rochelle Hudson, as the grown Jessie), Delilah (Louise Beavers), and Peola (Fredi Washington, as the grown Peola).

In the very title of his book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, Donald Bogle lists the five major categories for African Americans in the movies, especially those before the civil rights movement. Delilah has the physical features of a mammy, a usually overweight black woman with motherly characteristics. However, despite her sex, she is really a tom, a Negro that wants nothing more out of life than to serve his white master. This depiction of the Negro servant, as demeaning as it is, nevertheless constituted progress in humanizing such characters, as can be seen when contrasted with movies featuring Stepin Fetchit, the ultimate coon. As for Delilah’s daughter, Peola, she is a tragic mulatto.

Fredi Washington, who plays Peola, had some problems of her own along those lines. According to Thomas Doherty, in his book Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934, she was legally a Negro, so she could not play the part of a white man’s girlfriend in the movies. But at the same time, if she played the part of a black man’s girlfriend, it would look as though a Negro had himself a white woman. So, when she played in The Emperor Jones (1933), she had to wear dark pancake makeup.

Already we see the elements of discrimination against African Americans in 1934, for as you may have noticed, in the opening credits Delilah and Peola are not given last names. So, even though this movie was supposedly portraying a Negro servant in a positive light, an unconscious prejudice is revealed right there in the beginning.

As for the plot, one morning while Bea is struggling to get her daughter Jessie ready for the day nursery so she can hit the streets trying to sell maple syrup, Delilah shows up answering an advertisement for a maid and cook, although she has the wrong address. One of the qualifications in the advertisement is that she must be colored, presumably because she would work for less wages than a white housekeeper. Eventually, she convinces to Bea to let her work for her just for room and board for her and her daughter Peola. As Delilah explains to Bea, her daughter appears to be white because her father had light skin.

One morning, just as Bea is leaving to try to sell some more maple syrup, Delilah gives her a rabbit’s foot. You have to laugh. They are trying to portray Delilah in a positive light, but then they give in to the stereotype of the superstitious Negro. Well, at least in the movies, good luck charms do bring good luck. Bea decides that Delilah’s pancakes are so good, owing to a secret recipe, handed down to her by her mammy, who got it from her mammy, that she should open a restaurant featuring Aunt Delilah’s pancakes, with the maple syrup business on the side. Things work out well.

As the daughters grow up, Peola, who is slightly older than Jessie, helps Jessie with her homework. Bea comments that Peola seems to be pretty smart. Delilah replies that they start out that way, and they only become dumb later. At first, I thought what she meant was that it is too dangerous to be an uppity Negro, so they have to pretend to be ignorant and poorly educated as they get older. However, there are one or two scenes where Delilah does slip into the coon category, that of the Negro that is funny on account of being simple-minded, so maybe we are supposed to take what she says seriously. And besides, we have to wonder if Peola is allowed to be smart in this movie on account of her having white blood in her.

The tragic part of the tragic mulatto begins when Jessie says that Peola is black, causing Peola to cry, insisting that she is white. Bea tells Jessie to apologize, but Delilah shows her wisdom in saying that there is no good in that, that it’s something Peola will have to accept. She goes on to say that it’s not Jessie’s fault or that of anyone else. However, she also says it’s not the Lord’s fault. I’m not quite sure how she reached that conclusion.

This is followed by the worst day in Peola’s life. Jessie has stayed home sick, supposedly, and is playing Old Maid with her mother. It’s pouring down rain, and Delilah is worried that Peola, who forgot her umbrella and rubbers, will get sick too, so she picks up her rain gear and heads out to her school. The wisdom shown by Delilah when Peola was crying about being called black seems to have left her, for it never occurs to her how her appearance in Peola’s classroom will affect her daughter. When she enters the classroom, the teacher says she must be mistaken, since there are no colored girls in her room. But then Delilah spots Peola trying to disappear behind a book. She asks the teacher if Peola has been passing, and the teacher sadly answers yes. Peola says, “I hate you,” several times to her mother and runs out into the rain, rendering the entire traumatic experience for naught. And as several critics have noted, most children would be horrified if their mothers showed up with their rubbers even if race were not a problem.

When a fellow named Elmer Smith advises Bea to “Box it,” meaning to put Delilah’s pancake recipe in boxes and sell them in stores, she takes his advice and makes Elmer her business partner. The brand name is “Delilah’s Pancake Flour,” with Delilah’s picture on the box as well. But when they decide to incorporate after becoming successful, Delilah refuses to sign the papers, which would give her a twenty-percent share in the business, making her rich. Instead, she goes full tom, saying she wants nothing more than to continue to work for Bea as her maid and cook. Bea tells her she will put her share in the bank for her, and Delilah says she would like the money to be spent on a grand funeral for herself when she dies. It will be her sendoff to glory.

This appears to be another black stereotype, the white man’s conception of the Negro’s childlike religious notions, the kind we see in The Green Pastures (1936). It is a literal, physical understanding of religion. Toward the end of the movie, when Delilah goes into elaborate detail about all the trappings of her funeral procession, this is no mere expression of vanity, as it might be if a white person in a movie wanted such a fuss being made over him. Rather, Delilah thinks she needs to make a good impression on the Lord. Speaking to Bea, she says, “I want to meet my Maker with plenty of bands playing. I want to ride up to Heaven in a white velvet hearse.” We would probably have a feeling of revulsion if it were Bea that said she wanted a lavish funeral when she died. And we would think her silly to talk as though God would be impressed by the band that was playing or the hearse that would be transporting her to Heaven. But the movie asks us to smile at Delilah’s notions, the way we might tenderly listen to a child talk about his letter to Santa Claus.

African Americans are often portrayed as more religious in the movies than their white counterparts. And if true, this should not surprise us, for as we learn from Nietzsche, Christianity began as a form of slave morality, one that promised Heaven for slaves, for the weak and the downtrodden, while Hell awaited their masters, those with money and power. Therefore, Christianity perfectly suited African Americans when they were slaves and for the next century as they suffered from the aftermath of that period of bondage. And in many ways, this suited white people too, because it helped to keep blacks in their place, along the lines of Marx’s observation that religion is the opiate of the masses. It is no coincidence that right after Delilah says she does not want to become rich, she starts talking about her funeral, for Jesus taught that we should despise worldly goods and think of our reward in Heaven.

Ten years pass. Bea is rich and lives in a mansion. She throws a party for the swells, and everybody is rich, elegant, and white. Downstairs, where Delilah and Peola live, Peola is miserable. No one has told Peola she is not invited to the party. No one has to. It’s just understood. In her frustration, she looks in the mirror and insists to her mother that she is white. But her difference from her mother is more than just her skin color. Her physiognomy also indicates a Caucasian influence. And whereas Delilah speaks the dialect of the southern Negro, Peola’s English is impeccable. Moreover, while Delilah weighs two-hundred-and-forty pounds, Peola has a slim figure, allowing for graceful movement.

Upstairs, Elmer’s friend, Stephen Archer (Warren William), an ichthyologist, meets Bea. They eventually fall in love and decide to get married. But she wants to hold off on telling Jessie for a while, who is coming home from college during a semester break, to give her time to get to know Stephen.

About the same time, Peola, who apparently agreed to go to one of those high-toned Negro colleges in the South, has apparently left, according to a letter that Delilah receives from an official at that college. Bea and Delilah head south to look for her. Though Peola could have all the money she wanted by remaining part of the Bea/Delilah household, yet she seems to have found happiness working behind a counter selling tobacco products. But Delilah comes in and spoils everything.

When Delilah brought Peola her rubbers at school that day, she said she didn’t do it on purpose, and so we wrote it off as inadvertent, as a blind spot she had to her daughter’s suffering, though we didn’t know how could have been so oblivious. But now there is no excuse. Delilah comes in the store, acting all pitiful, insisting that she is Peola’s mammy. Peola denies knowing her, telling those around her that she doesn’t know the woman. But then Bea comes in and asks Peola how she could do this to her mother. Peola runs out of the store. Of course, while I’m seeing Peola’s side of it, the movie seems to insist that it is Peola who is in the wrong, that nothing is more important than a mother’s love, and that Peola has hurt her mother terribly. And there are doubtless those who would agree with that way of looking at it. This is one of those different ways of reacting to the movie that make this story so interesting.

When Bea and Delilah return home, they find that Peola is already there, waiting for them. She apologizes to her mother for what happened, but then tells her she is going away for good, and that should they pass on the street, she asks her mother not to speak to her or recognize her in any way. After she leaves, there is a decline in Delilah’s health, to the extent of putting her on her death bed, and we are supposed to conclude that she is dying of a broken heart. She does die, and then we see the grand funeral that Delilah always dreamed of. Peola shows up in the crowd on the street, tearing up, until she can stand it no longer, calling out “Mother” and rushing to embrace the coffin just as it was put in the hearse.

In the midst of all this, another mother-daughter problem has been in the works. While Bea and Delilah were out of town, Stephen was graciously keeping Jessie entertained. For him, she was just the child of his fiancée, but Jessie had been falling in love with him. Through a combination of coincidental scenes that could only happen in a movie, Bea found out about Jessie’s infatuation without either Stephen or Jessie knowing that she knows. In real life, Bea and Stephen would go ahead and get married, knowing that Jessie would go back to college and fall in love with someone else in no time. Stephen says as much when Bea tells him she knows.

But this is a domestic melodrama, the theme of which is a mother’s sacrifice for her daughter. Bea tells Stephen that their marriage would make for an impossible situation, that she cannot marry him at this time. She tells him to go to his islands and study fish, and that when the time is right, when Jessie has found someone else, she will come to him, if he stills wants her. Stephen leaves. Jessie comes out in the garden where Bea is, and Bea reminisces about the day she first met Delilah. For what it is worth, in the novel, Bea’s love interest is Frank Flake, who is sort of a combination of Elmer and Stephen, but then again, not really. Anyway, he is eight years younger than Bea, and she gives him up so he can marry Jessie.

Before quitting this essay, I suppose something must be said about those foot massages. Twice in the movie, Delilah massages Bea’s feet. My reaction was the one that occurs to most people, that despite the fact that Bea and Delilah are friends and business partners, a scene in which Bea massages Delilah’s feet would have blown the lid off. But others, such as threemoviebuffs.com, have seen a lesbian subtext in this, especially since in both foot-massage scenes, they talk about men and love or the lack thereof. And that reminds me of Pulp Fiction (1994), in which there is a discussion between Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta about how some guy got in trouble with Uma Thurman’s husband for giving her a foot massage. Jackson dismisses the whole thing as ridiculous, saying there is nothing sexual about a foot massage. Travolta says that since it is not sexual, would Jackson give him a foot massage, since, he says, he sure could use it. Jackson gets angry at the suggestion that he would give a foot massage to a man, because he realizes he has been caught in a contradiction. Another hint at a lesbian subtext is the scene in which Bea kisses Jessie on the lips. And at cinematasmoviemadness.com, it is suggested that the reason Bea is so willing to break off the engagement is that, being a lesbian, she never really wanted to marry Stephen in the first place. None of this would ever have occurred to me on my own. I just figure that women do stuff with each other that men would not.

Speaking of sex, the movie makes no reference to Peola’s love life or the absence of such. But we think about it, especially when she seems determined to pass for white. Presumably, since she decides to go back to that Negro college at the end of the movie, we can assume she will marry a black man. Her love life is made explicit in the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, however, to which we may now turn.

In this 1959 remake, there are several changes. For one thing, the setting is contemporaneous, at least when we get to the end of the movie. That is, it begins in 1947 and ends in 1958. Furthermore, the names have been changed. Bea has become Lora Meredith (Lana Turner); her daughter Jessie has become Susie (Sandra Dee, when grown); Delilah has become Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore); and her daughter Peola has become Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, when grown). Unlike the 1934 version, Annie’s last name is listed in the opening credits, so I guess we can count that as progress in race relations.

On IMDb, Annie is said to be a black widow, “black” in the sense of being African American, of course. However, in the movie, Annie says that Sarah Jane’s father left before she was born. Annie never refers to this man as “her husband,” but only as “Sarah Jane’s daddy.” So, whereas this movie gives Lora the respectability of being a widow, it would seem to be playing into the racial stereotype of the morally irresponsible black man who would abandon a pregnant woman.

For that matter, whereas in the 1934 version, Bea refers to having had a husband that died, Delilah only refers to Peola’s “pappy,” there being no reference to her having had a husband or to her being a widow. Perhaps this was a deliberately created ambiguity. For the progressives in the audience, the movie offered them a humanized Negro servant, depicted in a positive light. They were allowed to assume the best about Delilah and put her into the widow category. As for those depraved souls that were inclined to think the worst of the black race, they were allowed to imagine that Peola was a bastard.

As for the plot of this version of Imitation of Life, Lora wants to be an actress. One day at the beach, she meets Annie, a black woman that is taking care of a little girl who appears to be white, but who turns out to be colored. Lora ends up hiring Annie as a maid, and they all live together from then on. Whereas Delilah’s pancake recipe is a key to Bea’s success, making them equals in their business relationship, despite Delilah’s refusal to become a stockholder in their corporation, in this movie, it is Lora’s success as an actress alone that results in her becoming wealthy. Though Lora and Annie may be friends, Annie’s economic relationship with Lora is never more than that of her maid and cook.

While at the beach, Lora also meets Steve Archer (John Gavin), a photographer, with whom she forms a romantic attachment. The movie implies that Lora should have given up her aspirations to be an actress and married Steve, staying at home to be a good wife and mother. And it implies that Sarah Jane should have accepted the fact that she was colored, and not try to pass for white. Because they prefer imitation over authenticity, they both forgo happiness, until the end, when Sarah Jane openly declares that Annie was her mother at her funeral, and when Lora agrees to give up her career and marry Steve. As for this latter, the love triangle between Steve, Lora, and Susie ends more realistically, if somewhat melodramatically, with Susie accepting the marriage between her mother and Steve, planning to go to college far away.

There is a foot-massage scene in this movie as well, and it’s no wonder Lora’s feet are sore, since she is always wearing high-heeled shoes, just as Bea did in the original. Lora is even wearing heels when they are all at the beach at the beginning of the movie. As David, her favorite playwright, says when Lora says she wants to act in the new Stewart play, “That? What part? Not the dull social worker with high dreams and low heels? … No clothes, no sex, no fun.” But it is perhaps worth noting that both movies avoid the outrageous scene in the book regarding feet: rising from her death bed, Delilah manages to get down on the floor and start kissing Bea’s feet, after which she collapses and dies.

Strangely enough, our twenty-first century perspective is likely to make some people more supportive of Lora but less supportive of Sarah Jane. As for Lora, we now believe women are perfectly in their rights to want a career. Some women prefer to be homemakers, allowing themselves to be completely dependent on their husbands financially, and we wish them luck in their choice. But women who want a career of their own have every right to pursue one, and we regard any man who would object as patriarchal.

After all, Steve could have agreed to let Lora continue to pursue her career as an actress after they got married, but that was obviously out of the question as far as he was concerned. And it was out of the question for the 1950s audience as well. There was an assumed emptiness in the life of a career woman, even if she got married; for she was bound to neglect her husband and miss out on the deep satisfaction of giving herself completely to her family. Steve is resentful of the way she puts her own ambition before his love, because he thinks his love for her should have been the overwhelming consideration. An underlying assumption in the movies in those days was that if a man truly loved a woman, she was wrong not to accept his proposal of marriage, for it was thought that she would never again have a chance for happiness. How the woman felt almost didn’t seem to matter. It was the man’s love that was determinative.

The dialogue makes this perfectly clear. Right after Steve proposes marriage, but before Lora gives him an answer, she gets the job offer she has been waiting for:

Steve: I don’t want you to go.

Lora: Do you realize what this could mean to me?

Steve: I’m not asking you not to go down there. I’m telling you.

Lora: What makes you think you have that right?

Steve: Because I love you. Isn’t that enough?

Lora: No, Steve, I’m sorry.

In the movies of the 1950s, a woman was supposed to give herself to a man unconditionally, and not be thinking about “What if?” But attitudes have changed. We now believe a woman is better off if she is financially independent, in case the marriage goes bad, as marriages so often do. We are more likely today to think Steve was wrong-headed, and to be a little disappointed at the end when Lora says she is going to give up her career and marry him.

As for Sarah Jane, some people may be less supportive about her desire to pass for white, because today being an African American is not supposed to be something bad, something to be ashamed of. A lot of people would say she should have been proud of her African heritage. Well, that’s a nice attitude to have in the twenty-first century, but considering the prejudice against African Americans in the 1950s, not to mention the laws requiring segregation, trying to escape from such oppressive conditions seems perfectly reasonable. I would have tried to pass for white had I been in her situation. Actually, Sarah Jane’s problem may not be so much that she tries to pass for white as that she insists that she is white.

Whereas Steve’s attitude toward Lora’s ambition makes us uneasy today, a lot of people feel equally uneasy about Annie. In the introductory scene at Coney Island, Annie refers to how Sarah Jane’s light skin bedeviled her where they used to live (probably the South), and so they moved. She sees how Sarah Jane hates the black doll that Susie tries to give her. And when they are discussing what color Jesus is, Sarah Jane says, “Jesus is like me. He’s white.” In other words, Annie knows how Sarah Jane feels. And yet, just as in the 1934 version, she shows up at her school to give her an umbrella and her rubbers without the slightest thought that she might embarrass Sarah Jane. We might give Annie a pass on that, but later, when Sarah Jane tries to make her own way performing in a night club, Annie shows up and ruins that for her daughter too. The way Annie disapproves of the night club, you would think it was a den of iniquity and that Sarah Jane was doing a striptease, but she is reasonably attired and merely singing and dancing in a sexy but respectable way. On the other hand, maybe it looked worse to the audience of 1959. And I must admit, the men in the night club are loud and crude.

Annie should have warned Sarah Jane of the dangers of trying pass for white (“What if you have a baby, and it comes out black?”), but then supported her daughter whatever her decision was. The possibility that Peola would marry a white man was avoided in the 1934 version, but it is made explicit in the 1959 remake. Sarah Jane gets herself a white boyfriend, played by Troy Donahue, who becomes angry when he finds out her mother is a “nigger” and brutally beats her. While the fact that this movie showed Sarah Jane as actually having a white boyfriend may be thought of as a weakening of the Production Code, which forbade miscegenation, I can’t help but think that in order to do this, they picked an actress that was white, unlike Fredi Washington, who was of mixed race like Peola.

Actually, in Fannie Hurst’s novel, Peola nipped the baby problem in the bud by having herself sterilized. She estranges herself from her mother, marries a blond engineer, and moves to Bolivia, passing for white permanently. In previous reviews of the movies Stella Dallas (1937), Kitty Foyle (1940), and Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941), I remarked on this theme of running off to South America to get away from one’s family. There must have been some kind of mystique about South America in the early part of the twentieth century as a place to get away from it all and get a new start. I suspect this trope was spoiled when the Nazis fled there so they could get a new start themselves.

Anyway, Sarah Jane gets another job dancing, at a more respectable night club. This time her mother finds her, not to spoil things again, but just to say goodbye. She is finally reconciled to the fact that her daughter wants to pass for white. Also, she knows she is dying. Of course, just as in the 1934 version, Sarah Jane shows up at Annie’s funeral, tearfully crying out for her mother while embracing her coffin.

This movie seems to say that Steve knows what is best for Lora, and that Annie knows what would be best for Sarah Jane. And there are those who would agree with them. But I agree with those who say they should not have tried to impose their values on others, and instead allowed them to live their lives the way they wanted to.

The 39 Steps (1935)

Speaking as a bachelor, one who has never even lived with a woman, let alone been married to one, I can only look upon marriage as an outsider, gleaning what information I can from those with experience in the matter. I gather that marriage suits some people, others not so much.

Even people who are in love and looking forward to a life of connubial bliss will, in anticipating the wedding, refer to it affectionately as “tying the knot.” But the idea of being “handcuffed to a woman” would be an unlikely metaphor, if one wished to suggest a pleasant coupling with a permanent companion of the fair sex. Rather, that expression would put the idea of marriage in a bad light. It is not as bad, however, as referring to one’s wife as “the old ball and chain,” for at least handcuffs allow the woman the dignity of being an equal partner in that misery.

Although The 39 Steps is similar to other movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock where an innocent man gets caught up in a situation in which he must flee from the police while pursuing some spies in hopes of proving his innocence, such as Saboteur (1942) or North by Northwest (1959), it is unique among them as being the only one in which the protagonist is literally handcuffed to a woman for some time during the movie. As such, we cannot help but think of their situation figuratively as well, in the sense referred to above. It should not be surprising, then, that the theme of marriage as an unpleasant business recurs throughout The 39 Steps.

At the beginning of this movie, we see a man enter a place called Music Hall, somewhere in London, purchasing a ticket for a seat in the “stalls,” which is British for the central seats up front in a theater. Just as he sits down, the Master of Ceremonies introduces a man called Mr. Memory, a man with a photographic memory, who has memorized millions of facts about sports, geography, history, and science. He asks the audience to challenge Mr. Memory with questions. “Ladies first,” he says. With this, the theme of misogamy gets underway.

“Where’s my old man been since last Saturday?” a woman hollers out. There are jeers from others in the audience, purporting to answer her question:

“On the booze!”

“In quod [prison]!”

“Out with his bit [young woman]!”

The jokes being over, the audience begins asking serious questions, mostly about sports. Whenever Mr. Memory answers a question in great detail, he asks, “Am I right, sir?” The response is always in the affirmative.

But questions implying the sorry state of marriage persist. When a man asks what causes pip [infectious coryza] in poultry, his wife scolds him, saying, “Don’t make yourself so common.”

When someone asks, who was the last British heavyweight champion of the world, someone yells out, “My old woman!” Mr. Memory gives a serious answer to the question, then asking, “Am I right, sir?” He is assured that he is right.

Someone asks how old Mae West is. Mr. Memory says, “I know, sir, but I never tell a lady’s age.”

Finally, the man we saw entering Music Hall in the beginning turns out to be played by Robert Donat, who asks how far Winnipeg is from Montreal. The purpose of this question is to let us know he is from Canada and just visiting. We later find out his name is Richard Hannay.

The man who asked how old Mae West is keeps asking, becoming belligerent. A policeman goes over to restrain the man, and a scuffle breaks out involving several members of the audience, fists flying. The Master of Ceremonies makes a final crack about marriage, saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please! You’re not at home!”

We see a pistol firing a shot and then another shot. Panic breaks out, everyone heading for the exit. Hannay gets thrown together with a good-looking woman and helps her out the door. When outside, she asks, “May I come home with you?”

“What’s the idea?” he replies.

“I’d like to,” she says.

“It’s your funeral,” he shrugs, another case in which the figurative will turn out to be literal.

We assume Hannay thought she was trying to pick him up, and he was agreeable to the idea of having sex with her. That’s not much of a sin, not even by the standards of 1935, but he will soon be punished disproportionately for it, nevertheless.

As it turns out, she is a spy, going by the name of Annabella Smith. She says she is “freelance,” meaning she works for whoever pays her the most money. She refuses to say which country she is from, but she is played by Lucie Mannheim, a German actress, and she speaks with a foreign accent. At the moment, she is working for England, trying to prevent a secret vital to the air defense of England from leaving the country. She had followed two spies to Music Hall, but when they spotted her, she fired two shots with her pistol to create a diversion.

She should have asked herself why those two spies would be at Music Hall, because that was an important clue, as we find out at the end of the movie. In any event, she tells Hannay that the two spies are with the 39 Steps, without exactly explaining what that is. Heading this organization, she says, is a dangerous man with a joint missing on the pinky of his right hand. She asks Hannay for a map of Scotland, saying there is a man she must meet there.

That having been established, let’s back up for a minute. When Hannay and Annabella got on the bus just outside Music Hall, the two spies did not jump on the bus with them, so there is no indication they were followed. Hannay and Annabella got off at a hotel, where Hannay said he had just rented a furnished flat, so recently that there are still dust covers draped over the furniture. And yet, within ninety seconds of their entering the hotel, the spies are just outside, at a phone booth, trying to get Hannay on the phone.

Even if we allow that the spies surreptitiously followed them to the hotel, there is no way they could know which flat he had rented. And even if they did, there is no way they could know what his phone number was. And what would that conversation on the phone have been like anyway? “Mr. Hannay,” I suppose they might ask, “may we speak to Annabella, please?” In any event, Annabella tells Hannay not to answer the phone.

Hannay tells Annabella she can sleep in his bed, pausing just long enough to titillate us, before adding that he’ll sleep on the couch. Early the next morning, Annabella staggers into the living room with a knife in her back, clutching the map of Scotland, telling Hannay he will be next. Then the phone starts ringing again.

I had enough trouble trying to imagine the reason for the first phone call. This one really stumps me. Let’s try to imagine it anyway in a conversation between the spies:

Spy Number 1: Did you kill Annabella?

Spy Number 2: Stabbed her with a knife.

Spy Number 1: Did you kill Hannay while you were up there?

Spy Number 2: What for?

Spy Number 1: Annabella may have told him everything she knows. I’ll try getting him on the phone again.

Spy Number 2: What for?

Spy Number 1: If he is still home, you can run back up there and kill him too.

Meanwhile, there is phone call that did not take place. Had I been in Hannay’s position, I would have called the police and explained what happened. Instead, Hannay decides he will have to go to Scotland and find the man Annabella was going to see, so that that man can call the police and explain what happened.

In order to make his escape from the two spies waiting outside the hotel, he tries to bribe the milkman into lending him his coat and hat as a disguise. He explains about the spies and the murdered woman in his flat, but the milkman doesn’t believe him. Then he tries another approach. “Are you married?” he asks the milkman.

In keeping with this movie’s low regard for marriage, the milkman replies, “Yes, but don’t rub it in.”

Hannay says he is a bachelor, who has been having an affair with a married woman in the hotel, and the two men outside are her brother and husband. The milkman smiles, now a willing conspirator in helping Hannay get away, undoubtedly wishing that he were still a bachelor who could have sex with married women, the best kind of sex there is, and the safest too, aside from the danger posed by cuckolded husbands.

Hannay manages to make his escape that way. He boards a train heading for Scotland. The spies spot him and try to catch the train but fail. In the compartment Hannay enters, a salesman in ladies’ lingerie is explaining to another man about his company’s new line of corsets, much prettier than the old sort. To prove his point, he holds up an example of the old sort, a flat-boned corset.

“Brrr!” the other man replies, as if experiencing a chill. “My wife!”

When the train stops, the salesman buys a newspaper. It has a story about Hannay and the murdered woman, which Hannay is able to read while sitting across from the salesman. The police board the train, looking for him. Hannay sees a woman, whose name we later learn is Pamela, played by Madeleine Carroll, alone in a compartment. He enters and forcibly embraces her, kissing her, so the police will think they are lovers. He apologizes, explains who he is, and claims to be innocent. But when the police enter, she gives him away. Nevertheless, he manages to escape.

Using the map he removed from Anabella’s hand after she died, on which she had encircled a place called Alt-na-Shellac, Hannay tries getting there on foot. He arrives at a “croft,” which is what they called a small, rented farm in Scotland, with use of a shared pasturage. He finds out from the crofter that there is an English professor at Alt-na-Shellac, but as it is fourteen miles away, he asks if the crofter can put him up for the night, which he agrees to do for “two and six,” but don’t expect me to translate British currency into American dollars.

They go to the man’s small house, where a woman is at the door. As she appears to be much younger than the crofter, Hannay asks, “Your daughter?”

“My wife,” comes the curt reply.

Theirs is a miserable marriage. All the previous digs at marriage were jests compared to this. The woman is comely enough, not as good looking as Annabella, nor as pretty as Pamela, yet we feel she could have done better. But then, this is 1935, a time when women were much more in need of a husband as a way of making it in this world than they are today, so she probably had to take what she could get. We sense she is attracted to Hannay, and we wish he could take her away from her husband, who is a mean-spirited, religious fanatic, but it was not meant to be.

If there is such a thing as a woman’s intuition, she has it in spades. From his interest in a newspaper article about the murder, she figures out that he is Hannay. He admits everything, and she believes his explanation. The crofter can tell something is going on between them, but he figures it is sexual. In the middle of the night, she sees a car approaching, and she wakes Hannay, telling him it must be the police. When the crofter catches them, Hannay tells him about his situation. While the crofter is talking to the police, trying to find out if there is a reward, the woman helps Hannay escape, giving him a dark coat so he won’t be spotted. She says that when her husband finds out it is missing, “He’ll pray at me, but no more.” Hannay kisses her affectionately on the lips and leaves. She looks down, sad to be left alone. Later, when the crofter finds out about the missing coat, he hits her in the face.

With the police in pursuit, Hannay makes his way to Alt-na-Shellac. Unfortunately, it turns out that the professor who lives there, Professor Jordan, to be exact, has a missing joint on his right pinky. Presumably, Annabella did not realize that Jordan was the very man she warned Hannay about.

Jordan offers to let Hannay take the easy way out by committing suicide, presenting him with a pistol for that purpose. Now, I would have agreed with the suggestion, taken the pistol from the Jordan, and then used it to make my way out of his house. But that doesn’t occur to either man because this is a movie, and even in a good movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, people do stuff they would never do in real life.

As a parenthetical aside, Jordan’s gun is a semi-automatic, but he refers to it as a revolver. I have lost count of the number of old movies I have seen where a semi-automatic is referred to as a revolver. On the other hand, I have never seen the reverse situation, a movie in which someone refers to a revolver as a semi-automatic.

Anyway, Hannay refuses to shoot himself, so Jordan shoots him instead. Hannay collapses, and Jordan believes him to be dead. But it turns out that the crofter’s coat had his hymn book in it, which stopped the bullet. When Hannay comes to, he makes it to the local sheriff’s office. But the sheriff doesn’t believe him, and a handcuff is placed on his right hand. At that point, Hannay crashes through the window and makes another escape. He blends in with members of the Salvation Army marching down the street before leaving them and entering a place called Assembly Hall, where he is mistaken for the featured speaker. While trying to bluff his way through a speech with a lot of platitudes, who should walk in the room but Pamela, the woman on the train, just one of those outrageous coincidences often found in the movies. Soon after, the two spies enter the room, and Pamela, mistaking them for the police, informs them of what they already know, which is that the speaker is Hannay.

They “arrest” Hannay and insist that Pamela come along with them to the police station. Hannay figures out that these men are not the police, but spies. When the car is forced to stop on account of some sheep, one of the spies attaches the other end of the handcuff onto Pamela’s left wrist to keep Hannay from escaping, which he does anyway, dragging Pamela with him, unwillingly, since she still thinks the two men are the police.

After they get away, she tells him it is futile for him to go on like this, trying to escape. “What chance have you got tied to me?” she asks.

Reminding us of the figurative sense of their situation, he replies, “That question’s for your husband.”

Because she still believes Hannay is a murderer, he is able to compel her cooperation with threats, along with some physical force. He decides they will spend the night at an inn, pretending to be a married couple. The owners of the inn are a married couple themselves, the husband smiling knowingly as Pamela signs them in, figuring they are only pretending to be married, but the wife believes they are married in fact, and she is happy for them, since they seem to her to be so very much in love. Because Pamela is acting under duress, it is strange that the wife interprets her behavior in that way. This is similar to a scene in Saboteur, in which a married couple witness Robert Cummings kidnapping Priscilla Lane, dragging her into a car against her will, and the wife says, “My, they must be terribly in love.”

Hannay and Pamela got wet hiding under a waterfall during their escape. In their room, Pamela cannot remove her wet coat, of course, but she does remove her stockings, with Hannay’s hand following hers down to her feet as she does so. Then they turn to the matter of the bed. Reluctant at first but resigned to the fact that they will have to share that bed, she climbs on it, Hannay following.

Possibly because of all the twin beds married couples used to occupy in old movies, there is the notion that a man and a woman in an old movie, even if they were married, could not both be on the same bed unless one of them had at least one foot on the floor. That rule is nowhere the Production Code, and there are numerous movies in which this supposed rule is violated even though receiving the seal of approval from the Production Code Administration. Still, it is interesting that while Hannay lies flat on the bed, his head resting on a pillow, Pamela falls asleep sitting up, resting against the headboard, rather than lying down next to him.

But just as we are accepting this situation of a man and woman in an old movie being on a bed together, we begin to wonder about their need to use the toilet. That reminds me of a crude joke about when you know the honeymoon is over, but it would be indelicate of me to repeat it here. Suffice it to say that the movie leaves that to our imagination.

When Pamela wakes up, she manages, with some effort, to slide her hand out of the handcuff. She starts to escape, but just as she leaves the room, she overhears the two spies down below, using the telephone, referring to the 39 Steps and something about Professor Jordan clearing out and picking up someone at the London Palladium.

Realizing that Hannay has been telling her the truth, she returns to the room. She looks at Hannay, still asleep in the bed, and she affectionately pulls the blanket up and around him so that he will be warm and comfy. She wants to go back to sleep, but she can’t bring herself to get back in that bed with him, so she tries sleeping on the couch. But the room is cold, and she is uncomfortable. She looks back at Hannay and the blanket she covered him with. She gets ahold of the blanket, slides it off him, and uses it to cover herself. Now she is warm and comfy and able to go to sleep. I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but I’ve been told that marriage is like that.

When Hannay wakes up the next morning, she tells him what happened. The two of them head back to London. Hannay goes to the London Palladium, which is a respectable establishment, catering to the middle class, as opposed to the rowdy, working-class patrons of Music Hall. After all, someone like Professor Jordan would be out of place at Music Hall. Pamela goes to Scotland Yard. Having previously phoned them from the inn about the plot to smuggle vital secrets of the Air Ministry out of the country, she is told that they made inquiries, confirming that there are such secrets, but no papers are missing.

I guess we are supposed to forget that there is such a thing as microfilm and that pictures may have been taken of those papers, after which they were returned to keep anyone from realizing there has been mischief, much in the way Zachary Scott did in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) or James Mason did in 5 Fingers (1952), which was based on a true story.

In any event, they let Pamela go so they can follow her, and she leads them to Hannay, just as Mr. Memory is being introduced. At the same time, Hannay spots Jordan in a private box just to the right of the stage, and he sees him showing Mr. Memory his pocket watch, indicating that time is of the essence. Just as Hannay is about to be taken into custody, he realizes that Mr. Memory is working with Jordan and has memorized the papers containing the vital secret. Running back into the stalls, he demands, “What are the 39 Steps?” Mr. Memory hesitates. When Hannay repeats the question, Mr. Memory answers, saying that the 39 Steps is an organization of spies.

Critics speculate as to why Mr. Memory answered the question about the 39 Steps truthfully. I believe it was a point of pride with him. He could not bring himself to say, “I don’t know.”

Just as Mr. Memory is about to say which country the 39 Steps works in behalf of, Jordan shoots Mr. Memory. Jordan is captured, and Mr. Memory, in his dying moments, surrounded by Hannay, Pamela, and the police detectives, reveals the vital engineering secret he has memorized. “Am I right, sir?” he asks. Assured by Hannay that he is, Mr. Memory dies a happy man, glad that it’s now off his mind.

While this is happening, we see the right hand of Hannay and the left hand of Pamela come together and hold on to each other. We gather that they will soon be handcuffed together again, only figuratively this time, by getting married. Notwithstanding the cynical attitude this movie has expressed about marriage throughout, we accept this as a happy ending.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

The 1950s means different things to different people, but it seems to suggest a time of conformity, shared values, and stability, a time when people could speak confidently of the American character. It was during this decade that consensus history was in vogue. Needless to say, those days, if they ever really existed, are long gone.

I say this because The Bridge on the River Kwai seems to be based on ideas of what it means to be an American as opposed to being British, ideas that may have been valid when this movie was made, but might readily be called into question today. Whether this movie expresses the ideology I suggest is one thing; whether it represented a realistic difference between American and British attitudes is another thing; and whether any of this is still relevant sixty-five years later is still one more thing.

Cynicism

In an opening scene of this movie, we see crosses marking graves alongside some railroad tracks, giving us a sense of the price paid by Allied prisoners of war, forced by the Japanese to work on a railroad in Burma during World War II. Then we see the men that are working on that railroad. They appear to be poorly nourished, yet forced to do hard labor, barely able to swing the hammers that drive spikes into the ties that hold the rails together.

The scene shifts to William Holden, who plays US Navy Commander Shears. Along with an Australian soldier, Corporal Weaver, he is just finishing burying a soldier that recently died of beriberi. Unlike the frail prisoners of war we just saw, Shears looks to be in good physical shape. At first, we might suppose that this is just one of those things we are supposed to overlook in a movie. There have been actors who gained weight for a role, but I don’t think any actor ever starved himself so as to look malnourished. On the other hand, we soon find out that Shears routinely steals stuff from the soldiers he is assigned to bury so that he can bribe the Japanese captain, with whom he has become friendly. This allows him and Weaver to get admitted to the hospital, where they do not have to exert themselves. After the Japanese guard leaves, Shears makes some sarcastic remarks over the grave they just dug, saying the man died for “the greater glory of…. What did he die for?”

Well, this is certainly no John Wayne movie. I mean, John Wayne would have been too old for this part anyway, but that aside, it would have been unthinkable for him to express that kind of antiwar cynicism. In fact, it would be unthinkable for him to be a prisoner of war in any event, because that would mean he would have had to surrender. John Wayne might get killed in a movie, but never surrender. Holden, on the other hand, is suited to this role. He was similarly cynical in Stalag 17 (1953), where he was a German prisoner of war, dealing in various schemes to make his life comfortable, often wagering that his fellow prisoners will get killed trying to escape. That proved to be short-sighted, to say the least, since he incurred the wrath of his fellow Americans, getting himself beaten up as a result. In this movie, his egoism is more enlightened.

The contrast with John Wayne movies raises the question as to whether cynicism was thought to be an American trait in the 1950s, since John Wayne could often be heard mouthing a lot of sentimental stuff in his war movies. I have read that during World War I, the doughboys sang songs; during World War II, the American GIs made wisecracks. So, if it was an American trait back then, it might have been a recent one. In any event, Shears is the only American in this movie, and he is the only one who is cynical as well.

Egalitarianism

We might wonder how a man with the attitude of Shears ever became an officer, but we later find out that he is really an enlisted man. He was on the USS Houston, which was sunk early in the war, but he and an officer became separated from the rest of the crew. The officer ended up getting killed, so Shears helped himself to the fellow’s uniform, figuring that as an officer, he would receive better treatment at the hands of the Japanese, and not be expected to do any manual labor. This brings out another character trait of his, which is his contempt for the distinction between officers and enlisted men. This is not unexpected coming from an American, steeped in the idea that all men are created equal. The distinction between officers and enlisted men, as far as Americans are concerned, is artificial, a fiction necessitated by the needs of war.

Individualism

As he and Weaver make their way to the hospital, a battalion of British soldiers is arriving, led by Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness). They are whistling the “Colonel Bogey March,” which is indicative of a camaraderie among the British soldiers, their esprit de corps. We cannot imagine Shears participating in such whistling, or singing a song with other soldiers. The fact that he is the only American in the camp emphasizes his individualism, another trait Americans were known for, as opposed to the British soldiers and their sense of the collective.

Colonel Saito, the commanding officer of the camp, asserts that the British officers will help build a bridge over the River Kwai, right alongside the enlisted men, something Shears found out to his chagrin, his scheme to avoid such work by pretending to be an officer having been in vain. Nicholson, however, takes the distinction between officers and enlisted men as having profound significance, which is not surprising, considering that England is a country where class distinctions are fundamental, where being a duke, baron, lord, etc. is a matter of birth. When Saito insists that the British officers also do manual labor, Nicholson refuses to allow his officers to comply, willing to endure being beaten and tortured rather than yield on this matter. He prevails in the end because Saito is behind schedule in getting the title bridge built, and he needs Nicholson’s cooperation.

Pragmatism

Not surprisingly, we find out that Colonel Nicholson was ordered to surrender by his superiors. Otherwise, we can easily imagine that a man of his sort would have preferred to fight to the end. Shears refers to him as having the kind of guts British officers had in 1914, when they went “over the top with nothing but a swagger stick,” the kind of guts, he says, that “can get us all killed.” Shears, we have no doubt, had he been in Nicholson’s position, would have preferred surrendering to being killed. However, the conditions in the camp are so harsh that Shears and Weaver have been planning an escape. Nicholson, however, figures that his orders to surrender require that neither he nor any of his men make such an attempt. He believes that one must obey the law, or else there is no civilization. Shears says there is no civilization in the jungle, so the law is irrelevant. In short, Shears regards the law as having value only as long as it is useful; Nicholson sees the law as transcending mere practical considerations.

But then, halfway through the movie, everything goes into reverse, and the difference between American and British attitudes begins to collapse when it comes to the distinction between officers and enlisted men. Shears escapes from the camp and winds up in a British hospital, where he pushes his luck by continuing to pretend that he is an officer in order to get better treatment. Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), a British officer, finds out about this and coerces Shears into agreeing to go back into the jungle with him so they can sabotage the bridge, which will allow Shears to avoid being prosecuted for impersonating an officer. Since two other officers will be going along, including a Lieutenant Joyce, Warden says he will give Shears a “simulated rank of major” for the purpose of the mission, so that the rigid distinction between officers and enlisted men will not have to be observed.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, Nicholson is anxious to get the bridge built, and to build it as an example of British engineering excellence. The other officers are in favor of surreptitiously delaying the building of the bridge and making sure that it is inferior, so as to minimize their assistance to the enemy; but Nicholson thinks that building a bridge that will redound to British glory for hundreds of years is more important than its effect on the war, dismissing the suggestion that what he is doing could be construed as collaboration with the enemy, even treason. Furthermore, when he realizes that they are behind schedule, he violates the very code he fought for, and gets the officers to work alongside the enlisted men. He even asks men in the camp hospital to get out of their beds and pitch in, men so sick that not even Colonel Saito would have ordered them to work.

Heterosexuality

Shears is a womanizer. The main reason he continued to pretend to be an officer when he got to the British hospital was so that he would be able to fool around with the nurses, who are officers themselves and off limits to enlisted men. We even see one of those nurses doing the walk of shame one morning, after leaving his room. Then, when he joins Warden and the others in the trip back through the jungle to the prisoner-of-war camp, he seems to be making progress with one of the Asian female bearers that have come along. I don’t know if he got himself some of that on the way, but had he survived, it is certain he would have gotten some on the way back.

Meanwhile, the British soldiers decide to celebrate the completion of the bridge by putting on a show. The first part of the show consists of men dressed up like women, singing and dancing like the Rockets. Then, Grogan (Percy Herbert), who is a big man, is dressed like a woman. He sings a duet with a small man, the only one who in the show who is dressed like a man, at the end of which, Grogan picks him up in his arms and carries him off the stage. After the show is over, it is time for Colonel Nicholson to make a speech. Apparently, Grogan was in no hurry to get out of his short skirt and crop top, since we see him in the audience, still dressed up like a girl, while Nicholson is speaking.

Needless to say, there is no way Shears would have participated in a show like that. And if I may be permitted to bring up John Wayne again, we can’t imagine him in drag either.

Isolationism

Another trait thought to be characteristic of Americans back when this movie was made was their reluctance to get involved in foreign conflicts. It was the basis for American isolationism, which is as old as George Washington’s farewell address, warning of entanglements in European affairs, and John Quincy Adam’s speech saying America does not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Shears represents this attitude at the level of the individual. He knew he would eventually get caught impersonating an officer, and his plan was to apply for a medical discharge, saying, “I impersonated an officer because I went off my rocker in the jungle.” We may easily infer from this that Shears would have avoided the whole war by dodging the draft, had he been able to do so. Failing that, he probably joined the Navy to avoid ending up in the Army as cannon fodder. But his plan didn’t work, and he wound up being blackmailed into a commando mission to destroy the bridge.

Humanism

During an incident where they come across some Japanese soldiers, Warden gets shot in the foot. He tries to press on, but he eventually gives up and tells the rest of them to go on without him. Joyce says they may not be able to come back that way after the mission is over, to which Warden replies, “If you were in my shoes, you know I wouldn’t hesitate to leave you here.” This leads to the following exchange:

Shears: He doesn’t know it, but I do. You’d leave your own mother here if the rules called for it.

Warden: You’ll go on without me. That’s an order. You’re in command, Shears.

Shears: I won’t obey that order. You make me sick with your heroics. There’s a stench of death about you. You carry it in your pack like the plague. Explosives and [suicide] pills go well together. With you, it’s just one thing or the other: destroy a bridge or destroy yourself. This war is just a game. You and that Colonel Nicholson are two of a kind. Crazy with courage! For what? How to die like a gentleman. How to die by the rules. The only important thing is how to live like a human being! I’m not gonna leave you here to die, Warden, because I don’t care about your bridge and your rules. If we go on, we go on together.

And so, in spite of himself, Shears ends up being the commanding officer in charge of the mission, risking his life trying to destroy a bridge he cares nothing about, in a war he cares nothing about.

Shears and Joyce manage to attach explosives to the bridge, and then set up a plunger at a distance for Joyce to use when an expected train with Japanese dignitaries will be crossing that bridge. But in the morning, the river has gone down, and Nicholson spots the wire. Suspecting sabotage, he gets Saito to help him find where the wire leads. It was one thing for Nicholson to build the bridge, telling himself that it was good for his men to have work to do, but trying to prevent that bridge from being destroyed is undeniably collaboration with the enemy. Even after Joyce uses his knife to kill Saito, and tells Nicholson he is operating under British orders to destroy the bridge, Nicholson restrains him, calling for help from the Japanese soldiers on the bridge. A bullet hits Joyce, killing him.

Shears swims the river, intent on killing Nicholson, but he is shot before he can do it, cursing Nicholson with his last, dying breath. When Nicholson sees who it is, he suddenly realizes the enormity of what he has done. A mortar fired by Warden stuns him, and he falls on the plunger, causing the bridge to be blown up, just as the train has started to cross, thereby plunging it into the river. The scene is ambiguous, but I think we can cut the colonel some slack, allowing that he intended to push the plunger anyway, as a way of redeeming himself.

Although we naturally have identified with Shears throughout the movie, there is a doctor who, though British, also allows for audience identification, since he represents common sense. At the end of the movie, as he beholds the spectacle, he says, “Madness!” a sentiment with which Shears would have been in complete agreement.

The Rain People (1969)

In The Rain People, Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight) discovers that she no longer wants to be married, let alone have a baby now that she is pregnant. So she gets in her car and takes off. After driving for a while, she picks up a hitchhiker, Jimmy Kilgannon (James Caan), hoping to have some uncomplicated sex with him. The mistake is not that she thought she could have sex without getting involved. Her mistake, and it is a common one, is not realizing how complicated and involved things can become even if you don’t have sex at all.

It turns out that Jimmy cannot take care of himself on account of a brain injury sustained while playing football, and he has neither friends nor family to help him. She only thought she was trapped before. But it is a whole lot easier to desert a husband and abort a fetus than it is to abandon someone who is helpless, especially when he has a kind heart.

Fortunately, this is a movie, which resolves the problem by having him die in the end. Though she tried to leave him several times, she wishes he were still alive and could take care of him. But we in the audience know it was for the best. Trouble is, people get themselves in messy situations like this in real life, but there is no Hollywood ending to save them.

The Southerner (1945)

Sam Tucker (Zachary Scott) is the title character in The Southerner. He makes decent money picking crops in the summer and operating a bulldozer in the winter, but decides he wants to get his own farm. Three different people, in three different ways, tell him it is a mistake, that there is a good living and security in working for wages, but too much risk and privation in trying to start a farm. But he won’t listen, because he just wants to own his own farm.

Sure enough, everything goes wrong. He and his family almost freeze to death, almost starve, and a child almost dies of pellagra. He prays to God, asking him to tell him what to do. As far as I’m concerned, God has already tried to tell him what to do through the advice he was given and through the hardships he and his family have suffered, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

He sticks it out, and when the cotton is finally ready for harvest, it is completely ruined by a rain storm. Disgusted, he says he is through, and he is going to get a job at a factory. And just for a moment, I thought, “Good. He has finally come to his senses, and the movie is going to have a happy ending.”

Who am I kidding? No movie would ever end like that, even though it should. Instead, faith and optimism and pluck take over, and he is going to stick it out. Uplifting music. Credits. The End.

Scaramouche (1923 and1952)

The Novel and the Adaptations

Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution, written by Rafael Sabatini, was published in 1921. It was made into a movie, simply titled Scaramouche, in 1923. It was then remade in 1952. That the remake is the better movie is not surprising: this is often the case when the original was a silent film. Somewhat surprising, though, is the fact that the 1952 movie is so much better than the novel.

In one sense, perhaps, this is not true. When introducing this movie on Turner Classic Movies, Robert Osborne said that reading the novel was a great way to learn about the French Revolution. I’m willing to concede that point. At least, the novel accomplishes this goal better than did the 1952 movie, which does not so much teach anything about the French Revolution as it presupposes our familiarity with it. Instead, my preference for the movie over the novel is based, first of all, on its entertainment value, in which it excels; and second, for the way it realizes certain ideas, ideas perhaps nascent in the novel, but brought to fruition in the film.

There are different reasons for this, which I shall refer to as the occasion warrants, but only in a limited way. There are so many differences between the novel and the 1952 movie that it would be tedious just to enumerate them, let alone go into any detail. Just as the characters in the commedia dell’arte, of whom Scaramouche is one, can be combined and rearranged to tell different stories, so too are the characters in the novel combined and rearranged to tell a somewhat different story in this movie as well. The 1923 silent film is far more faithful to the novel, and to that extent, it suffers from the same defects.

Fraternité

The theme of the 1952 version is the brotherhood of man, the fraternité of the slogan, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger) is the bastard son of an unknown aristocrat who has supported him for years as a way of buying his silence. His lover is Lenore (Eleanor Parker), an actress with a traveling troupe that performs in the commedia dell’arte. Though they plan to get married, yet one can see a certain playfulness between them, and thus we never take their relationship too seriously. Philippe de Valmorin (Richard Anderson), Andre’s adoptive brother, is to be their best man, but the marriage plans get interrupted when Andre finds out that soldiers are looking for Philippe, having discovered that he is the author of subversive pamphlets, entitled Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, under the nom de guerre “Marcus Brutus.”

Needing a little extra money to help Philippe go into hiding, Andre goes to the lawyer Fabian, who has mediated the allowance payments, in order to get an advance. When Andre finds out that the allowance has been cut off, he compels Fabian to tell him that his father is the Count de Gavrillac. With Philippe by his side, he journeys to the Gavrillac estate to insist that the allowance be continued. Along the way he meets and falls in love with Aline (Janet Leigh). Unlike his relationship with Lenore, this love is serious, the love of his life. But, alas, he soon discovers that she is the daughter of the Count de Gavrillac, and thus is his sister. Later, he also finds out that the Count de Gavrillac has died, thereby explaining why the allowance has been stopped. He does not tell Aline about her father’s shameful secret, and so she does not realize that they are brother and sister. But she knows that Andre is in love with her, and she does not understand why he starts pretending that he is not.

He and Philippe stop off at an inn, where they run into Noel, Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), who realizes that Philippe is Marcus Brutus, the author of the pamphlets. He was first made aware of them by Marie Antoinette (Nina Foch), who is his lover, after she reprimanded him for his excessive dueling. When we first see him at the beginning of the movie, he is engaged in three successive duels, killing one man, crippling another for life, the third being spared only because the Queen’s men stopped it. The reasons for the duels are frivolous. For example, the gravamen of the duel that crippled Noel’s opponent was that the man had the “effrontery to put himself at the right of the Cardinal at dinner.” She says he must quit killing other nobles for the sport of dueling at a time when they must all stick together, referring, of course, to the stirrings of the French Revolution. It is then that she shows him the pamphlet that someone had slipped under her pillow, another of which the King found on his breakfast tray. Noel promises to take care of “this Marcus Brutus” personally.

And so, rather than have Philippe arrested, Noel provokes him into a duel so he can have the pleasure killing him himself. After tormenting Philippe for a while with his sword, Noel runs him through. Andre picks up Philippe’s sword and tries to kill the Marquis. He has no sword-fighting ability, however, and is easily thwarted. Noel toys with Andre, which gives him the chance to pull a pistol from a holster attached to a horse. Pointing the gun at Noel, Andre says he is not going to kill him with that weapon, swearing that he will kill Noel with a sword, making him die the way Philippe did. Having thus threatened Noel, he has to flee, with soldiers in pursuit. To avoid being imprisoned, Andre joins the troupe as Scaramouche, a stock character who wears a mask. This gives him time to take fencing lessons.

Meanwhile, at the behest of the Queen, Noel reluctantly agrees to marry Aline, so that his noble family can continue, but he soon falls in love with her. Eventually, Andre is ready to meet Noel in a duel, but complications keep them apart, owing to the devices of Lenore and Aline, who conspire to prevent the duel, for they both love Andre and are afraid he will be killed. Finally, one night at the theater, Andre, as Scaramouche, spots Noel in the audience, removes his mask, and the long-awaited sword fight begins. And yet, when he finally has his sword at Noel’s breast, he finds that he cannot kill him. Later, he discovers the reason from his adoptive father. It seems that Andre’s real father was not the Count de Gavrillac, but the previous Marquis de Maynes, and thus he and Noel are brothers. As his adoptive father tells him, he could not kill his brother. This also means that Andre and Aline are not really brother and sister, and thus are free to marry.

The idea that Andre cannot kill Noel because, unbeknownst to him, they are brothers is not realistic, at least in its most literal sense. Not only are we being asked to believe that Andre, through some mysterious power of intuition, could sense that he and Noel were brothers, but we are also supposed to accept the notion that this would keep Andre from running him through, even though men have been killing their brothers since Cain killed Abel. But this is to be understood in both the normative and metaphorical sense, with “could not” standing for “should not.” That is, a man should not kill his brother, and so, given the brotherhood of man, no man should kill any other man. It is in this figurative sense that just before his duel with Philippe, Noel said, “A de Maynes is no man’s brother,” although he also thought he had no brother in the literal sense as well. In any event, all the uncertainty as to who is the brother (or sister) of whom throughout this movie, leads us to the question, “Who is my brother?” for which the answer is “Everyone.”

Liberté

As noted above, there are several differences between this movie and the novel on which it is based. An important one is emphatic by position, the opening line of the novel: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” To accept the idea that the world is mad, as Andre does, is to understand the futility in trying to do anything about it. There is something liberating about accepting the inevitable, allowing one to see the humor in a situation instead of fighting it. Philippe represents the contrary view. He believes something can be done to rid France of its aristocratic tyrants. As a result, he is serious about that struggle, and is exasperated with Andre in that nothing ever seems to matter to him.

The attitude of Andre Moreau, the one referred to in that opening line, is one that rises above this world by laughing at it. In order that this trait of Andre be admirable, however, it is essential that the primary object of humor for him is himself, which is why, in the 1952 version, he often plays the fool, even before he does so professionally as Scaramouche.

And so, it is important that the development of his character in this regard will exemplify what is said about him. This is not easily achieved in a novel. When Andre joins the troupe that performs in the commedia dell’arte, taking the role of Scaramouche, we have to imagine that the performances are funny. In the 1923 movie, there is the opportunity to render the performances of the troupe as being funny, since now we can see them, but the movie fails to realize this possibility. In the 1952 remake, however, the performances are hilarious. It is pure slapstick, which can often fall flat, but no matter how many times I have seen this movie, I find myself laughing all over again at the antics on the stage.

But even before Andre trod the boards in the 1952 version, he is portrayed as having a great sense of humor, even being something of a trickster. He refuses to take anything seriously, making jokes when his friend Philippe shows him the pamphlet he has written inveighing against the tyranny of the aristocrats. His relationship with Lenore is likewise humorous, even when they are fighting and she is bonking him over the head with a saucepan, their relationship offstage being much like that when they are performing. This sense of humor is not as evident in the novel. And in the 1923 movie, Andre comes across as mirthless. In fact, in the opening scene of that silent film, a poacher has been killed on orders from the Marquis, and has been returned to his home by the gamekeeper, who warns others in the village that this is what will happen to them if they do any poaching themselves. Philippe is horrified. Andre looks down upon the corpse, and in the intertitle, we are told who he is, along with the opening line of the novel. I suppose that looking at a dead man might cause one to think that the world is mad, but this is the wrong moment to tell us that Andre has a gift of laughter, especially when he has a somber look on his face. Moreover, Philippe is soon after killed in a duel with the Marquis, which is even more depressing for Andre. In the 1952 remake, however, Andre’s gift of laughter is well-established during the first part of the movie, so much so that one might suppose one is watching a romantic comedy. When Philippe is killed, that sobers Andre up, sure enough, but only after we already know of Andre’s sense of humor. It is always better when a movie can show us a man’s character rather than tell us about it, especially when, as in the 1923 movie, what we see mostly contradicts what we have been told.

In the novel and the 1923 movie, Andre is a lawyer. In the 1952 remake, there is no indication that Andre has a profession at all. We know he’s been educated. When Philippe shows him the pamphlet he has written, the one he has put his heart into, railing against injustice, Andre flippantly comments on all the grammatical mistakes in it, as a way of showing his indifference to its content. Despite his education, however, Andre does not have a job, his allowance being sufficient to permit him to enjoy the good life. It is easy to imagine such a man, a bachelor of independent means and no responsibilities, joking about the madness of the world from which he can easily remain aloof. His life, if not his politics, is certainly one of liberté.

In the novel and the silent film, Andre goes from being a lawyer, to making his living acting the part of Scaramouche, and then to becoming a fencing instructor. In the 1952 version, the only job he ever has is that of Scaramouche, in which he remains through the rest of the movie. This places greater emphasis on his gift of laughter.

In the novel and silent film, he starts out as a cynic and becomes idealistic. In the remake, he retains his cynicism right to the end. This too is more fitting. Idealists tend to be a serious lot; cynics, on the other hand, will more readily see the humor in a situation. In the 1952 movie, Andre joins the Estates-General of 1789, not because he cares one whit about politics, but because he hopes to encounter Noel there and challenge him to a duel, while at the same time enjoying the immunity from arrest that his membership in the Estates-General grants him. He is a reluctant hero, one who acts only for personal reasons, in this case to avenge the death of Philippe, but which just happens to promote the public good as well.

Égalité

In the novel and the 1923 version, the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr (corresponding to the Marquis de Maynes in the 1952 version) turns out to be Andre’s father. This works against the brotherhood-of-man metaphor to such a degree that we may conclude that it was never intended to be the theme of the novel in the first place. Brothers may be equal, in accordance with égalité, but the relationship between father and son is anything but one of equals. Making the Marquis be Andre’s brother in the 1952 version is such an improvement that it is a wonder that Sabatini failed to take advantage of this plot point in writing his novel.

In the novel and silent film, Andre and Aline regard each other as cousins, but not by blood, since Andre does not know who his parents were. Therefore, Andre does not mistakenly believe that she is his sister, as in the 1952 version. Once again, this remake is better than the novel or the silent version in the way it brings out the brotherhood-of-man theme.

Another difference worth noting concerns the fencing skills of the main characters. It is a cliché in stories like this that the villain is thought to be the greatest swordsman in all France, only the hero turns out to be even better. And so it is that in the book, when Andre takes fencing lessons, he becomes so good that he is hired as a fencing instructor. His skill is of such quality, however, that he has to pretend to lose to the owner of the fencing academy when they practice together. Otherwise, Andre would embarrass the owner, who is a proud man, and Andre would lose his job as an assistant instructor as a result. When the owner is killed during a riot, Andre inherits the school as the master fencing instructor.

At first, the 1952 movie seems to be setting up that kind of situation. While Noel and Philippe are fencing, Andre insists that the duel is nothing but murder, because Noel is the greatest swordsman in France. But later, Andre watches through a window and sees Noel practicing with his fencing instructor, who knocks the sword out of Noel’s hand. It is then Andre realizes that Noel can be beaten. And when Andre takes lessons himself, he is never as good as his instructors. In one scene, as the master fencing instructor watches Andre fence with one of the assistants, he tells Andre that the assistant could have run him through a dozen times. In other words, Noel and Andre are gifted amateurs, but neither is as good as the professionals who teach them, which is definitely more realistic.

When the climactic sword fight occurs in the theater, almost everyone of significance seems to be there, especially Lenore (as Columbine), Aline, and Andre’s adoptive parents. Noticeably absent, however, are the fencing instructors. That is for the best. Otherwise, they would have been looking on, shaking their heads, saying, “He left himself wide open that time,” and, “I’ve told him and I’ve told him not to thrust before the second parry of that sequence.” But as the instructors are not there spoiling the mood, Noel and Andre are able to treat everyone to the greatest sword fight in all Hollywood.

In the novel, the most that happens between Andre and the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr when they cross swords is the latter is slightly wounded, ending the duel. There is no moment of realization on Andre’s part of just how wrong it is to kill another man, no mystical vision of the brotherhood of man as experienced by Andre in the 1952 movie as he holds his sword to the breast of Noel, now helpless before him.

Descending now from the sublime to the peculiar, as the two men prepare to fight that duel in the novel, they remove their shoes. If, as Robert Osborne said, the novel is authentic in describing how things were in France at that time, then I have learned something I never knew, that men took off their shoes before dueling with swords. I have never see that in a movie, not even in the 1923 version.

Anyway, when Andre later finds out the Marquis is his father toward the end of the novel, he gives him a travel permit, allowing him to go to Austria. This will presumably make it possible for the Marquis to be of service in that country’s efforts to support King Louis XVI of France. Ugh! In the 1923 version, the Marquis gets killed by the mob that is rioting in the streets, which is something of an improvement, I suppose.

In the 1952 version, although Andre does not kill Noel, he has humiliated him with the sword, much in the way that Noel did to Philippe. That psychological defeat is sufficient. And though Andre at first berates himself for not killing Noel as he vowed, yet he cannot help but see the joke that fate has played on him in his failure to avenge the death of his adoptive brother at the hands of his real brother.

Because I saw this movie several times before reading the novel, I assumed that Noel would eventually get his head chopped off along with the rest of the aristocracy. In that way, while Andre may have renounced his desire for revenge, and even came to laugh about it, I was able to imagine that Noel would get what’s coming to him physically as well. And given all the differences between the novel and this movie, it is easy to continue to imagine this outcome upon subsequent viewings, and not suppose that Noel ends up in the service of the Emperor of Austria.

After that, one can readily believe that Andre goes back to the stage and continues playing the role of Scaramouche, sidestepping the whole Reign of Terror. In fact, the next we see him, his having married Aline, Lenore pulls a final, farewell prank on him as she leaves the stage to become the mistress of Napoleon.

Rafael Sabatini, was published in 1921. It was made into a movie, simply titled Scaramouche, in 1923. It was then remade in 1952. That the remake is the better movie is not surprising: this is often the case when the original was a silent film. Somewhat surprising, though, is the fact that the 1952 movie is so much better than the novel.

In one sense, perhaps, this is not true. When introducing this movie on Turner Classic Movies, Robert Osborne said that reading the novel was a great way to learn about the French Revolution. I’m willing to concede that point. At least, the novel accomplishes this goal better than did the 1952 movie, which does not so much teach anything about that revolution as it presupposes our familiarity with it. Instead, my preference for the movie over the novel is based, first of all, on its entertainment value, in which it excels; and second, for the way it realizes certain ideas, ideas that seem to be nascent in the novel, but brought to fruition in the film.

There are different reasons for this, which I shall refer to as the occasion warrants, but only in a limited way. There are so many differences between the novel and this movie that it would be tedious just to enumerate them, let alone go into any detail. Just as the characters in commedia dell’arte, of whom Scaramouche is one, can be combined and rearranged to tell different stories, so too are the characters in the novel combined and rearranged to tell a somewhat different story in this movie as well. The 1923 silent film is far more faithful to the novel, and to that extent, it suffers from the same defects. Therefore, the focus of this review will be on the 1952 remake. In this remake, the protagonist is referred to simply as Andre, and I will also refer to him as such when discussing the novel, where he is actually referred to as Andre-Louis.

As is often the case with stories set in France around the time of the French Revolution, the theme of Scaramouche (1952) is the brotherhood of man, the third part of the slogan, Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger) is the bastard son of an unknown aristocrat who has supported him for years as a way of buying his silence. His lover is Lenore (Eleanor Parker), an actress with a traveling troupe that performs in commedia dell’arte. Though they plan to get married, yet one can see a certain playfulness between them, and thus we never take their relationship too seriously. Philippe de Valmorin (Richard Anderson), Andre’s adoptive brother, is to be their best man, but the marriage plans get temporarily interrupted when Andre finds out that soldiers are looking for Philippe, having discovered that he is the author of subversive pamphlets under the nom de guerre “Marcus Brutus.”

He and Philippe stop off at an inn, where they run into Noel, Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), who realizes that Philippe is Marcus Brutus, the author of the pamphlets. He was first made aware of them by Marie Antoinette (Nina Foch), who is his lover. She reprimanded him for his excessive dueling. When we first see him at the beginning of the movie, he is engaged in three duels, killing one man, crippling another for life, the third being spared only because the Queen’s men stopped it. The reason for the duel that crippled his opponent was that he had the “effrontery to put himself at the right of the Cardinal at dinner.” She says he must quit killing other nobles for the sport of dueling at a time when they must all stick together, referring, of course, to the stirrings of the French Revolution. It is then that she shows him the pamphlet that someone had slipped under her pillow, another of which the King found on his breakfast tray.

Rather than have Philippe arrested, Noel provokes him into a duel so he can have the pleasure killing him himself. After tormenting Philippe for a while, Noel runs him through. Andre picks up Philippe’s sword and tries to kill the Marquis. He has no sword-fighting ability, however, and is easily thwarted. Noel toys with Andre, which gives him the chance to pull a pistol from a holster attached to a horse. Pointing the gun at Noel, Andre says he is not going to kill him with that weapon, swearing that he will kill Noel with a sword, making him die the way Philippe did. Having thus threatened Noel, he has to flee, with soldiers in pursuit. To avoid being imprisoned, Andre joins the troupe as Scaramouche, a stock character who wears a mask. This gives him time to take fencing lessons.

Meanwhile, at the behest of the Queen, Noel reluctantly agrees to marry Aline, so that his noble family can continue, but he soon falls in love with her. Eventually Andre is ready to meet Noel in a duel, but complications keep them apart, owing to the devices of Lenore and Aline, who conspire to prevent the duel, for they both love Andre and are afraid he will be killed. Finally, one night at the theater, Andre, as Scaramouche, spots Noel in the audience, removes his mask, and the long-awaited sword fight begins. And yet, when he finally has his sword at Noel’s breast, he finds that he cannot kill him. Later, he discovers the reason from his adoptive father. It seems that Andre’s real father was not the Count de Gavrillac, but the previous Marquis de Maynes, and thus he and Noel are brothers. As his adoptive father tells him, he could not kill his brother. This also means that Andre and Aline are not really brother and sister, and thus are free to marry.

The idea that Andre cannot kill Noel because, unbeknownst to him, they are brothers is not realistic. Not only are we being asked to believe that Andre, through some mysterious power of intuition, could sense that he and Noel were brothers, but we are also supposed to accept the notion that this would keep Andre from running him through, even though men have been killing their brothers since Cain killed Abel. But this is to be understood metaphorically, with “could not” standing for “should not.” That is, a man should not kill his brother, and so, given the brotherhood of man, no man should kill any other man. It is in this figurative sense that just before his duel with Philippe, Noel said, “A de Maynes is no man’s brother,” although he also thought he had no brother in the literal sense too. In any event, all the confusion as to who is the brother (or sister) of whom throughout this movie, leads us to the question, “Who is my brother?” for which the answer is “Everyone.”

As noted above, there are several differences between this movie and the novel on which it is based, but in many ways, this 1952 movie is better. Let me begin with a simple example. This is the opening line of the novel: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” The idea that the world is mad is one that sees the futility in trying to do much about it. At best, you can try to stay out of the way and try to keep this mad world from hurting you. What better setting could there be for such an attitude than the French revolution and its Reign of Terror?

Such resignation would seem to be depressing, and to some it might well be so. But once we have accepted the inevitable, the way is open to see humor in the situation. Not everyone will admire someone who takes this attitude toward the world. They may believe that evil must be fought against, even if it triumphs in the end. But the attitude of Andre Moreau, the one referred to in that opening line, is one that rises above this world by laughing at it.

And so, it is important that the development of this character will exemplify what is said about him. This is not easily achieved in a novel. When Andre joins the troupe that performs commedia dell’arte, taking the role of Scaramouche, we have to imagine that the performances are funny. In the 1923 movie, there is the opportunity to render the performances of the troupe as being funny, since now we can see them, but the movie fails to realize this possibility. In the 1952 remake, however, the performances are hilarious. It is pure slapstick, which can often fall flat, but no matter how many times I have seen this movie, I find myself laughing all over again at the antics on the stage.

But even before Andre trod the boards in the 1952 version, he is portrayed as having a great sense of humor, even being something of a trickster. He refuses to take anything seriously, making jokes when his friend Philippe shows him the pamphlet he has written inveighing against the tyranny of the aristocrats in the days leading up to the French Revolution. His relationship with Lenore is likewise humorous, even when they are fighting and she is bonking him over the head with a saucepan, their relationship offstage being much like that when they are performing. This sense of humor is not as evident in the novel. And in the 1923 movie, it is completely absent. Andre comes across as mirthless. In fact, in the opening scene of that silent film, a poacher has been killed on orders from the Marquis, and has been returned to his home by the gamekeeper, who warns others in the village that this is what will happen to them if they do any poaching themselves. Philippe is horrified. Andre looks down upon the corpse, and in the intertitle, we are told who he is, along with the opening line of the novel. I suppose that looking at the dead man might cause one to think that the world is mad, but this is the wrong moment to tell us that Andre has a gift of laughter, especially when he has a somber look on his face. Moreover, Philippe is soon after killed in a duel with the Marquis, which is even more depressing for Andre. In the 1952 remake, however, Andre’s gift of laughter is well-established during the first part of the movie, so much so that it one might suppose one is watching a romantic comedy. When Philippe is killed, that sobers Andre up, sure enough, but only after we know of Andre’s sense of humor. It is always better when a movie can show us a man’s character rather than tell us about it, especially when, as in the 1923 movie, what see mostly contradicts what we have been told.

In the novel and the 1923 movie, Andre is a lawyer. In the 1952 remake, there is no sense that Andre has a profession at all. We know he’s been educated. When Philippe shows him the pamphlet he has written, the one he has put his heart into, railing against injustice, Andre flippantly comments on all the grammatical mistakes in it, as a way of showing his indifference to its content. Despite his education, however, Andre does not have a job, his allowance being sufficient to permit him to enjoy the good life. It is easy to imagine such a man, a bachelor of independent means and no responsibilities, joking about the madness of the world from which he can easily remain aloof.

In the novel and the silent film, Andre goes from being lawyer, to making his living acting the part of Scaramouche, and then to becoming a fencing instructor. In the 1952 version, the only job he ever has is that of Scaramouche, in which he remains through the rest of the movie. This places greater emphasis on his gift of laughter.

In the novel and silent film, he starts out as a cynic and becomes idealistic. In the remake, he retains his cynicism right to the end. This too is more fitting. Idealists tend to be a serious lot; cynics, on the other hand, will more readily see the humor in a situation. In the 1952 movie, Andre joins the Estates-General of 1789, not because he cares one whit about politics, but because he hopes to encounter Noel and challenge him to a duel. He is a reluctant hero, a favorite type in American movies, one who acts only for personal reasons, in this case, to avenge the death of Philippe, but which just happens to promote the public good as well.

In the novel and the 1923 version, the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr (Marquis de Maynes in the 1952 version) turns out to be Andre’s father. This works against the whole brotherhood-of-man theme. Brothers may be equal, in accordance with égalité, but the relationship between father and son is anything but one of equals. Their relationship in the novel undermines the whole metaphor. Making the Marquis be Andre’s brother in the 1952 version is such an improvement that it is a wonder that Sabatini failed to take advantage of this plot point in writing his novel.

In the novel, Andre and Aline regard each other as cousins, but not by blood, since Andre does not know who his parents were. Therefore, Andre does not mistakenly believe that she is his sister, as in the 1952 version. Once again, this remake is better than the novel or the silent version of 1923 in the way it brings out the brotherhood-of-man theme.

My favorite difference, however, concerns the fencing skills of the main characters. It is a cliché in stories like this that the villain is thought to be the greatest swordsman in all France, only the hero turns out to be even better. And so it is that in the book, when Andre takes fencing lessons, he becomes so good that he is hired as a fencing instructor. But his skill is of such quality, that he has to pretend to lose to the owner of the fencing academy when they practice together. Otherwise, Andre would embarrass the owner, who is a proud man, and Andre would lose his job as an assistant instructor as a result. When the owner is killed during a riot, Andre inherits the school as the master fencing instructor.

At first, the 1952 movie seems to be setting up that kind of situation. While Noel and Philippe are fencing, Andre insists that the duel is nothing but murder, because Noel is the greatest swordsman in France. But later, Andre watches through a window and sees Noel practicing with his fencing instructor, who easily knocks the sword out of Noel’s hand. It is then Andre realizes that Noel can be beaten. And when Andre takes lessons himself, he is never as good as his instructors. In one scene, as the master fencing instructor watches Andre fence with one of the assistants, he tells Andre that the assistant could have run him through a dozen times. In other words, Noel and Andre are gifted amateurs, but neither is as good as the professionals who teach them, which is definitely more realistic.

In the novel, the most that happens between Andre and the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr when they cross swords is the latter is slightly wounded, ending the duel. As the two men prepare to fight that duel, they remove their shoes. If, as Robert Osborne said, the novel is historically authentic, then I have learned something I never knew, that men took off their shoes before dueling with swords. I have never see that in a movie, not even in the 1923 version.

Anyway, when Andre later finds out the Marquis is his father, he gives him a travel permit, allowing him to go to Austria, where he can be of service in that country’s efforts to support King Louis XVI of France. Ugh! In the 1923 version, the Marquis gets killed by the mob that is rioting in the streets, which is something of an improvement, I suppose.

In the 1952 version, though Andre does not kill Noel, he humiliates him with the sword, much in the way that Noel did to Philippe. That psychological defeat is sufficient. Nevertheless, because I saw this movie several times before reading the novel, I assumed that the Marquis de Maynes would eventually get his head chopped off along with the rest of the aristocracy. In that way, while Andre may have renounced his desire for revenge, I was able to imagine that the Marquis de Maynes would get what’s coming to him physically as well. And given all the differences between the novel and this movie, it is easy to continue to imagine this outcome upon subsequent viewings, and not suppose that de Maynes ends up in the service of the Emperor of Austria.

After that, one can readily believe that Andre goes back to the stage and continues playing the role of Scaramouche, sidestepping the whole Reign of Terror. In fact, the next we see him, having married Aline, Lenore pulls a final, farewell prank on him as she leaves the stage to become the mistress of Napoleon.

The Chase (1966)

In The Chase, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) is a born loser. Actually, there are two types of born losers, so a distinction is in order: first, there are those who fate has decreed shall always lose out no matter what they do; and then there are those who are losers of their own free will. Bubber Reeves is a little of both.

It does seem that fate has dealt him a few bad hands. When he was young, he was sent to reform school for something he did not do (stealing some money), but which began his life of crime, stealing watches, cars, and, apparently, an airplane. When he escapes from prison, his fellow escapee murders a man and takes off with the man’s car, leaving Bubber behind. And when he hops on board a freight train he thinks is headed for Mexico, it turns out that the train is headed north, in the direction of his home town, somewhere in Texas. Of course, fate also made Bubber the best looking guy in the county, which he should have been able to work to his advantage, reform school or no reform school.

That he does not turn his good looks to his advantage leads us to the fact that Bubber is also the second kind of born loser. He keeps making bad choices. At one point in the movie, he says to Lester Johnson (Joel Fluellen) that Lester owes Bubber, because Bubber took a rap for him once. Gee, that was a nice thing to do. But having already spent time in reform school for something he didn’t do, you would think he would have had enough of doing time for other people’s crimes. In any event, I wouldn’t take a rap for anybody, especially if I already had a criminal record.

Another bad choice was made while in prison. With only a year and three days left in his prison sentence, he makes a break for it because he was served a bad pork chop. Finally, even if he did hop the wrong freight, he did not have to get off at the one town in North America where everyone would know him, the town where he grew up, and where law enforcement would likely be looking for him. Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) says, “Bubber knows better than to come back here.” No, apparently he doesn’t.

Then there is Edwin Stewart (Robert Duvall), ultimate lickspittle and cuckold. He was the one who stole the money for which Bubber was blamed. He seems to be sorry for what he did, but then he rats out Bubber to gain favor with his boss, Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall), so he is just as despicable as a mature adult as he was as an immature adolescent.

Edwin is married to Emily (Janice Rule), a sexy, sultry adulteress. She not only is obvious in the affair she is having, which Edwin pretends not to notice, but she also embarrasses Edwin in front of his boss, and belittles him openly because he is such a wimp that he does not carry a gun, unlike most of the men in that town. Yes, to be a real man in this small Texas town, you have to carry a gun. And it must be a revolver. Semi-automatics are for Yankee city slickers.

Between crimes and jail time, Bubber apparently had time to get married to Anna (Jane Fonda), who is presently having an affair with Jake Rogers (James Fox). They try to help Bubber get out of town, but with no success, because one of those pistol-packing citizens shoots Bubber to death on the steps of the sheriff’s office. This may sound like an unhappy ending, but it could have been worse. If Bubber had been captured and sent back to prison, they might have served him another bad pork chop.

Joe (1970)

If there is one thing that best explains why so many people remain firm supporters of Donald Trump in spite of it all, it is white supremacy. Racism has always been with us, of course, but today it is more desperate than ever, for demographic trends indicate that the white race will no longer constitute a majority in the United States before this century is out. And Trump supporters believe he is their best hope for keeping America white. But even when America was overwhelmingly white, with no sense that things would ever be otherwise, there were plenty of people who feared and hated anyone who was different. And so it is that while we see examples of bigotry every day, it can be interesting to take a look at how it expressed itself in the past. For that purpose, we have the 1970 movie Joe.

Early in the movie, Bill Compton, a respectable businessman, kills his daughter’s drug-dealer boyfriend in a fit of rage after she overdoses and almost dies. In shock over what he has done, he goes into a bar to have a drink. In the bar is Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a man who hates blacks, hippies, homosexuals, and communists. He gives full vent to his spleen. In one sense, Joe’s rant is dated, couched in terms of the cultural changes of the 1960s. But in another sense, it is a timeless expression of bigotry, one that it is just as fresh in the twenty-first century as it was back then.

Schopenhauer said a great dramatist like Shakespeare knows that when the villain speaks, he’s right. Examples of this may be found in The Razor’s Edge (1946), when Isabel argues that Larry is a fool for thinking he has cured Sophie; in Shane (1953), when Ryker makes his case against the homesteaders, and in Hud (1963), when the title character argues for selling off diseased cattle. In the end, we reject these villains. But while they speak, even if just for a moment, we are captivated. And so it is with Joe.

When Bill first walks into the bar, Joe is mainly complaining about the blacks, the way they burn down cities and get welfare. The government even gives them free rubbers, he says, but they sell the rubbers to buy booze and then have more babies so they can get more welfare. Little by little he gets around to the hippies, doing drugs and having orgies. However, this is not really a change of subject, because for Joe, blacks, hippies, homosexuals, and communists are not unrelated, but rather are all of a piece. And yet, it is difficult to brings these groups under a unifying concept, or at least to show how they are all interrelated. But toward that end, he says things like, “Forty-two percent of all liberals are queers.” Of course, as far as Joe is concerned, liberals are communists, and the hippies are all a bunch of anti-American commies, having orgies on Easter. The bartender gives Joe a quarter, telling him to give everyone a break and play some music on the juke box. Joe goes over to the juke box and stares at it. The bartender says, “What’s a matter, Joe? You’ve got all those opinions, and you can’t pick a record?” to which Joe replies, “The goddamn nigger loving hippies have even fucked up the music.”

Perhaps a separate comment about communism is in order. Just as hippies could no longer exist after the end of the Vietnam War, so too does it seem that communists could no longer exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However much we might still regard Russia, China, or North Korea as enemies, it is their nuclear weapons we worry about, not their communist ideology. The right still fears socialism, of course, as evidenced by the political rhetoric of the day, but socialism is something we mostly associate with Canada or the Western democracies of Europe, countries whom we regard as our allies. Those opposing “Medicare for all” are more likely to point to Great Britain, unfairly or not, as an example to bolster their case against socialized medicine than to the healthcare system of Russia.

Now, for Joe, the Russians would have merely been the ultimate example of communists. He is the kind of guy who would have said to any hippie complaining about the evils of American capitalism, “If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you move to Russia?” And his mantra back then was “Better dead than red.” But this is no longer the case among the far right, which has come to have a more favorable view of Russia than one might have ever thought possible, as can be seen in an article at Vox.com, which features a picture of Trump supporters wearing shirts that say, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” The article explains this shift in attitude toward Russia as “negative partisanship.” But I say the real reason is that the Russians are white.

In any event, at one point in his vituperative spiel, Joe says he’d like to kill one of those hippies. Bill tells Joe that he just did, because it makes him feel good to admit his crime to someone who understands, though he quickly says he was just kidding. Later, when Joe realizes that Bill actually did kill a hippie, something he has always wanted to do, but probably never would have on his own, he calls Bill up and says he wants to get together. The two of them form a deadly combination, resulting in a massacre of hippies. Inadvertently, Bill kills his own daughter, Melissa (Susan Sarandon), who happens to be among them.

The first time I saw the movie was in 1970, when it was first released. As the years passed, my memory was that Bill and Joe killed a bunch of harmless, peace-loving hippies. But having seen the movie again recently, I realize that the hippies are not portrayed sympathetically. Early in the movie, when Melissa enters the room she shares with her boyfriend, he is taking a bath. She gets in the tub with him, and he immediately gets out, criticizing her for being a rich broad who never had to earn a dollar in her life, just sitting in the bathtub on her fat ass. It is not clear whether he is merely indifferent to her romantic gesture, or whether he despises her, but either way, he treats her like dirt.

Speaking of dirt, that reminds me of their feet. Notwithstanding the bath, their feet are filthy. Back in those days, having dirty feet was de rigueur for hippies, because that was a way of displaying contempt for the rules of society. And just to make sure we know they have the required dirt and grime, when they get in bed together, the camera films them from the end of the bed so that we get full view of the bottoms of four filthy feet.

It is a sordid scene: a squalid room, a syringe, a bowl of pills. Melissa’s boyfriend is so rude and obnoxious that we don’t feel sorry for him when Bill brutally murders him. But while Melissa is a frail for whom we have some pity, we are put off by the way she lets herself be mistreated and by her own irritating behavior when she is on drugs. However much we may feel sorry for people addicted to drugs or caught up in abusive relationships, this movie does nothing to promote such sympathy, encouraging feelings of revulsion instead.

After Melissa recovers from the drug overdose, she runs away from the hospital and returns home, only to overhear her father admitting to killing her boyfriend, and so she runs away from home too. With Joe’s help, Bill starts looking for her. They meet some hippies from whom they hope to get some information about Melissa. In the process, Bill and Joe end up participating in an orgy of sorts, and we get the spectacle of Joe’s naked beer gut coming down on top of some hippie chick as he prepares to have sex with her, but not before remarking that he doesn’t need any foreplay, which he regards as proof of his manhood. While this allows us to see how crude Joe is, it also illustrates some of that hippie promiscuity he was grumbling about earlier. Furthermore, the hippies are thieves, for they rob Bill and Joe of their wallets. In other words, the hippies are portrayed as unlikable, scroungy, and immoral.

Bill and Joe track them down. Earlier, we saw Joe’s gun collection, and he has a couple of those rifles in the trunk, which he says they will use to scare them. But things get out of hand and the massacre ensues.

I saw the movie at the drive-in, so I was unaware of any audience response. But a friend of mine said that she saw the movie in a theater, and she was horrified at the way the audience cheered at the end, because, as she characterized it, “They got rid of a bunch of dirty hippies.” I have since read that this audience reaction was quite common. I was surprised at the time, but now I realize the movie encouraged that response. And so, what I once took as being a criticism of bigotry, I now have to wonder whether this movie just went a little too far in giving us the villain’s point of view, or whether there might have been an intentional justification of such, with an exculpatory tragic ending tacked on in the final reel to disguise the movie’s right-wing sympathies.

Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

“Let’s see,” you are saying to yourself, “which Hitchcock movie was Saboteur?” That was the one where the bad guy is hanging from the Statue of Liberty until he loses his grip and falls to his death.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, the bad guy’s name is Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd). The movie begins in an airplane factory during World War II. At the end of the day shift, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) and his friend Ken Mason are heading to the counter where food is served when they bump into Fry, who spills his mail on the floor. Barry picks it up to give it to him, but Fry is surly and unappreciative. As Fry walks off, Barry sees a hundred-dollar bill that was left behind. Remembering the name he saw on the envelope, he finds Fry to give it back to him, but Fry takes the money without saying anything in the way of thanks.

Suddenly, fire breaks out where the planes are painted. They all rush to that area. Fry hands Barry the fire extinguisher, but Mason takes it from him and runs toward the fire. We see Mason being consumed in an inferno. It turns out that the extinguisher was filled with gasoline.

When interviewed by the police, Barry tells them what happened, but when it turns out there is no record of a Frank Fry working at the plant, they suspect that it was Barry that started the fire and knowingly handed Mason the gasoline-filled extinguisher. Barry gets away before the police can arrest him. He decides he must find Fry to prove that he exists, thereby clearing himself of the charge.

It is a familiar trope, the innocent man eluding the police so that he can clear himself by bringing the guilty party to justice. Has anything like that ever happened in real life? I doubt it. But no matter how unrealistic that may be, it works quite well in the movies. And while on the subject of what is not realistic, I must say that there was absolutely no reason for Fry to hand Barry the extinguisher. Whoever got there first would pick up that extinguisher himself, there being no need for Fry to make sure that it happened. He should have been heading for the exit while everyone else was preoccupied.

Along the way, in his search for Fry, Barry has to kidnap Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) because she thinks he is the saboteur, and she would otherwise go to the police. “You look like a saboteur,” Pat says to Barry accusatively. Inasmuch as Barry is played by Robert Cummings, what are we to make of this remark?

First of all, there is reality. We all know that as a general rule, saboteurs do not have a distinctive look. Now, inasmuch as World War II had just broken out, I suppose that if Barry had been Japanese or German (someone with blond hair and a slight accent), her remark would have been appropriate. But Barry does not appear to be either German or Japanese. (No, I didn’t forget about the Italians, who were also one of the Axis Powers. But even in World War II, Hollywood always portrayed Italians as patriotic Americans, even if they were gangsters.)

Second, there is typecasting. A movie producer might call up Central Casting and say, “We’re making a spy movie. Do you have anyone who looks like a saboteur? If so, send him over for an interview.” And then they might send over someone like Norman Lloyd.

Or they might send over Alan Baxter, who plays Mr. Freeman, another saboteur. Baxter often played sinister characters, but in this movie, he is also effeminate, presumably a homosexual. When this movie was made, explicit references to homosexuality were forbidden by the Production Code, so movies had to be content with queer flashes. Believing Barry to be a fellow spy, Freeman talks to him about his family:

Freeman: Sometimes I wish my younger child had been a girl. In fact, my wife and I argue over a little idiosyncrasy I have. I don’t want his hair cut short until he’s much older. Do you think it’d be bad for him?

Barry: I don’t know. It might be.

Freeman: When I was a child, I had long golden curls. People used to stop to admire me.

Barry: Things are different nowadays. A haircut might save him a lot of grief.

Back when this movie was made, anyone who appeared to be a homosexual was either a weakling or a villain, both of which apply to Freeman. In any event, when asked to send over someone that looked like a saboteur, Central Casting might send over Normal Lloyd or Alan Baxter, but they would not send over Robert Cummings.

Because neither reality nor typecasting would make anyone say of Robert Cummings that he looks like a saboteur, it is odd that Pat would say that he does. Furthermore, she has a very good reason for thinking he is a saboteur, which has nothing to do with his looks. When she first met him, she saw that he was wearing handcuffs, and she realized that he was the fugitive the police were looking for.

Actually, it is precisely because Barry does not look like a saboteur that he is able to avoid the police. Earlier in the movie, Barry is arrested. After he bolts from the police car when it had to come to a stop, he jumps from the bridge into the river below. The truck driver that had earlier given him a ride recognizes him, and he misdirects the police so that Barry can escape, giving Barry an “OK” hand signal. Now, why would he do that? I would have helped the police by pointing out where Barry was hiding. All we can conclude is that the truck driver figured Barry did not look like a criminal, so he helped him escape.

Barry takes shelter in the house of a blind man, Philip Martin. It is here that Pat makes her entrance into the movie, because she is his niece. When she arrives at her uncle’s house shortly after Philip and Barry have become acquainted, she sees the handcuffs that her uncle already knew about on account of his acute hearing. She says he should have turned Barry in to the police. Her uncle accuses her of being cruel. He assures her that Barry is not dangerous. And besides, he argues, a man is innocent until proven guilty. (That’s a nice piece of circular reasoning: since he hasn’t been proven guilty, he is innocent; and an innocent man shouldn’t be turned over to the police.) Now, because Philip is blind, he obviously cannot be coming to these incredible conclusions simply on account of Barry’s looks. However, he can hear the sound of Barry’s voice, and by virtue of that kind of appearance, Philip tells Pat that he can see intangible things like innocence.

Pat pretends to go along with what her uncle wants, which is to take Barry to a blacksmith to get the handcuffs off, but she tries to take him to the police instead. That doesn’t work, however, and after some complications, they find themselves in the company of some circus freaks. Some of them want to turn Barry over to the police, who are inspecting the circus trucks, but the deciding vote belongs to the bearded lady, who blathers about how fine it is that Pat has stuck with Barry through his difficulties, and therefore they must be good people; much in the way, I suppose, that we know that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were good people on account of the way Bonnie stuck with Clyde through his difficulties too. It makes about as much sense as when earlier a man and a woman saw Barry kidnap Pat, dragging her into a car against her will, and the woman said, “My, they must be terribly in love.” Apparently, Barry doesn’t look like a rapist or a serial killer either.

What these three instances—that of the truck driver, the blind man, and the bearded lady—have in common is that appearances, in one form or another, make people decide to thwart the police and help the fugitive. Toward the end of the movie, Charles Tobin (Otto Krüger), one of the villains, says of Barry that he is noble, fine, and pure, and that is why he is misjudged by everyone. But save for the police, who are simply going by what evidence they have, Barry is not misjudged by others. The point of this mistaken remark is to show just how much evil foreigners underestimate Americans. The idea is that Americans, being basically noble, fine, and pure, can readily see the goodness in others, which is why they are willing to help a fugitive from justice escape from the police: they can just tell from Barry’s appearance that he is noble, fine, and pure. Of course, Otto Krüger is of German descent, which is why he was selected to play this part.

There is one point in this movie where Barry’s appearance works against him. He and Pat end up at a charity affair being given by a Mrs. Sutton, a wealthy woman that is also one of the spies. It is here that the conversation with Tobin occurs. Barry and Pat manage to escape onto the dance floor, where there are a lot of people that do not realize that Mrs. Sutton and Mr. Tobin are spies. But when Barry tries to tell one of the guests that “the whole house is a hotbed of spies and saboteurs,” he is dismissed out of hand. You see, it’s a formal affair, and as the guest points out to Barry, who is just wearing a suit, “You’re not even dressed.” It all goes to show that ordinary citizens like the truck driver, the blind man, and the bearded lady are the real backbone of this country, while the snooty rich are more concerned with maintaining their privileges over the rabble than in protecting this country from the enemy.

There is a scene where Fry and his fellow saboteurs try to sink a ship as it is being launched. It appears that Barry has thwarted him. But later, while Fry is in a car, he looks out the window and sees a ship lying on its side in the water. As long as that shot was going to be in the movie, Hitchcock should have let it appear that Fry was successful in his second act of sabotage. Instead, we find ourselves wondering, “Well, did he sink that ship or not?”

That he might have sunk that ship led to objections on the part of the War Department, and Hitchcock said that the Navy opposed having this scene in the movie because it made it look as though they failed to do their job in protecting that ship. So, while the government is printing posters that say, “Loose lips sink ships,” that same government doesn’t want us to think that ships actually get sunk.

This is followed by a scene in which Fry, in his effort to escape, runs into a movie theater. Just as he starts firing his gun, someone in the movie starts firing his gun, making it difficult to tell which shots are real and which are part of the movie.

So, what with Pat’s initial reluctance to believe that Barry is innocent, the man at the ball refusing to believe Barry because he is not formally attired, and this scene in the theater, there are some gestures in this movie toward the message that appearances can be deceiving. But overall, the casting works against this message, reassuring us that you can tell just by looking who is noble, fine, and pure on the one hand, and who is base, gross, and adulterated on the other.

If this movie had been intended to alert Americans of the danger of enemy agents in their midst during World War II, it would have cast against type, letting Otto Krüger, Norman Lloyd, or Alan Baxter play Barry, the innocent man, and letting Robert Cummings play one of the spies. Then the movie would have driven home the point that you cannot tell by a person’s appearance whether he is good or evil. Let’s imagine Norman Lloyd playing the role of Barry, the innocent man. In such a movie, Pat’s remark that Barry looks like a saboteur would make sense, and the truck driver, the blind man, and the bearded lady would be suspicious of Barry instead of trusting. Finally, when the married couple see Barry dragging Pat into the car, they would immediately call the police. Instead, the movie seems intent on assuring the wartime audience that they can just rely on appearances, which is a much more comforting notion.

Hitchcock complained about being forced to use Robert Cummings in this movie, thinking him wrong for the role, on account of his comic face. Given this insistence on the part of Universal that he use Cummings in this movie, Hitchcock should have turned this fait accompli into an asset by making him be the saboteur.

Perhaps it was in reaction to the simplistic casting of that movie that he decided to make Shadow of a Doubt the next year, in in which appearances, instead of being dependable, turn out to be deceptive. In this movie, Joseph Cotten plays Charles “Charlie” Oakley, a man who murders rich widows. Needless to say, audiences in 1943, watching a movie about a serial killer, would have expected to see someone like Laird Cregar in the role of the killer, not Joseph Cotten.

As we watch the opening credits, the music we hear is “The Merry Widow Waltz,” played with just a hint of discord, while we see good-looking men dancing with older women. The music is from The Merry Widow, an operetta about a woman who has inherited a lot of money from her deceased husband. It was composed in 1905, and it was based on a play first performed in 1861. The idea of a merry widow was the exact opposite of what was expected in those days. In Gone with the Wind, after Scarlett’s first husband has died, she is miserable; not because he died, for she never loved him, but because of what she realizes is now required of her:

She was a widow and her heart was in the grave. At least everyone thought it was in the grave and expected her to act accordingly…. Not for her the pleasures of unmarried girls. She had to be grave and aloof…. The conduct of a widow must be twice as circumspect as that of a matron.

“And God only knows,” thought Scarlett…, “matrons never have any fun at all. So widows might as well be dead.”

… Widows could never chatter vivaciously or laugh aloud. Even when they smiled, it must be a sad, tragic smile. And most dreadful of all, they could in no way indicate an interest in the company of gentlemen. And should a gentleman be so ill bred as to indicate an interest in her, she must freeze him with a dignified but well-chosen reference to her dead husband. Oh, yes, thought Scarlett, drearily, some widows do marry eventually, when they are old and stringy. Though Heaven knows how they manage it, with their neighbors watching.

It must have been a great comfort to men in those days to know that in the event of their death, their wives could never again be truly happy. And it must have been a comfort to married women as well, for they would have fumed at the idea that should some other woman happen to become a widow, she would be free once again to enjoy the pleasures of being single.

And if a merry widow should also be rich, like the one in the operetta, that would only add to the feelings of resentment, for it would bring to mind the idea of a husband who works hard, accumulates a sizable fortune, and then dies at an early age; after which, the wife, having gotten her hands on all that money, foolishly squanders it on some good-looking young man that will flatter her with attention.

Solon said that you should count no man happy until he is dead, for it is only then, in the words of Aristotle, that he is “beyond the reach of evils and misfortune.” But as Aristotle goes on to say, we may even be reluctant to say that a man had a happy life if, after he dies, he is dishonored in some way. Though Aristotle does not give this as an example, yet the idea that a widow might fritter away her deceased husband’s entire fortune on some silly gigolo could be just the sort of thing Aristotle had in mind. In fact, the thoughts a man might have of his wife cavorting in this manner after he is dead might just drive him to an early grave.

I remember my mother telling me that the reason a man might be reluctant to buy life insurance is that he can’t stand the idea that his wife will spend all that money on some boyfriend. And, as a matter of fact, six months after my father died, my mother got herself a facelift. Another woman I knew had for years chafed under her husband’s insistence that they buy used cars only, drive them until they dropped, after which he would buy another used car. But when he died, she put him in the ground, and then went right out and bought herself a brand new luxury automobile. “I earned it,” she said. I’ve always thought of that line as being the divorced woman’s mantra, but I guess it works for widows too.

And then there was the suggestion of sexual license. As they used to say in the days before the sexual revolution, once the pie has been cut, there’s no harm in helping yourself to another piece. Therefore, it was expected that a widow might more readily give in to her passions than would a maiden of younger years. In Horse Feathers (1932), Groucho Marx becomes president of a college, where his son, who has been in that college for twelve years, is “fooling around with the college widow.” Groucho tells him he’s ashamed of him, saying, “I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows.” Now, a college at that time might have denied admission to a divorced woman, a shameful status in those days. But a widow was more to be pitied than censured. Her innocence had to be presumed by those considering her admission to a college, even if suspicions lurked to the contrary; for her knowledge of the delights of sexual intimacy would no doubt leave her lusting for more.

In a lot of the Marx Brothers movies, Groucho would pursue some rich widow for her money, and more often than not, that widow would be played by Margaret Dumont. She was in her late forties or fifties when these movies were made, and she had a matronly appearance. Moreover, she was little bigger and taller than Groucho. This made them a comic couple. But in Horse Feathers, the college widow was supposed to be a threat to campus morality on account of her being sexually desirable and accessible, for which reason the role was played by Thelma Todd.

These negative attitudes toward widows are harbored by Charles Oakley. Later in the movie, while sitting at the dinner table with his sister and her family, he compares women in a small town with those in the big city:

Women keep busy in towns like this. In the cities it’s different. Middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working, and then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the best hotels every day by the thousands, drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money. Proud of their jewelry, but of nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women.

The weakest parts of Shadow of a Doubt are the scenes that involve the detectives, none of which make any sense. They want a picture of Oakley so they can show it to witnesses to see if he is the Merry Widow Killer. All they need to do is bring him in for questioning and take his picture, not to mention putting him in a lineup. Failing that, they could have photographed him when he walked right toward them at the beginning of the movie. Furthermore, they had previously told his landlady that they wanted to talk to him, so why didn’t they talk to him right there on the street? After he walks past them, they follow him. What for? Do they think that by following him, they will catch him in the act of killing another widow? I could go on, but what would be the point? Suffice it to say that everything involving these detectives is not just unrealistic, for every movie is that to some degree, but distractingly so, and to an extent that interferes with our ability to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the story. And it is a shame, because with a few changes in the script, they could have been left out entirely.

It is the rest of the movie, the parts where the detectives play no significant role, that the movie really engages us. When it begins, it is clear that Oakley has just killed another widow, after first getting his hands on her money. But it is not the money he cares about. He hates these women, and it gives him great satisfaction to kill them. But now, thoroughly sated from his recent murder, he is weary, listlessly lying in bed, with some of the money carelessly allowed to fall on the floor. He finally decides to visit his sister and sends her a telegram, ending it with “and a kiss for little Charlie from her Uncle Charlie.”

This “little Charlie,” his niece Charlotte Newton, (Teresa Wright), is first seen lying supine in bed in a way that matches her uncle when we first saw him. At first, she too is listless, as her uncle was, but she suddenly decides to send him a telegram, inviting him to come for a visit, right after he has sent her mother a telegram saying that he is coming. On my own, I would never have thought of these scenes as indicating anything other than an affinity between an uncle and his niece. However, several critics have noted that these matching bed scenes are a suggestion of incest. Young Charlie’s fascination with her uncle is a little unsettling in this regard. She places importance on the fact that they both have the same first name, at least in the diminutive form, and she is convinced that they are alike, that they have a special connection between them, a common fancy of someone in love. And she acts like a girl in love.

When her uncle arrives, Charlie let’s him sleep in her bed. Now, don’t get excited. She moves to the room of her precocious, younger sister Ann, where there is an unused twin bed. But if subliminal desires of incest are being suggested in this movie, her letting Uncle Charlie sleep in her bed is another hint.

That evening, he gives young Charlie a ring, not realizing it has an engraving on the inside, “T.S. from B.M.” Later, she reads in the newspaper that the initials of the deceased husband of a recently murdered widow were “B.M.” Both “T.S.” and “B.M.” are abbreviations for expressions involving feces, “tough shit” and “bowel movement” respectively, which is a way of suggesting something foul associated with the emerald ring. The ugliness hidden underneath beauty is the theme of this movie.

In a similar way, the town where young Charlie lives is one of those warm, wholesome towns, representing the goodness of America. But Uncle Charlie says these appearances are deceiving. Later in the movie, after young Charlie has figured out that her uncle is the Merry Widow Killer, he says the rest of the world, including the town where she lives, is no better than he is:

You’re just an ordinary little girl, living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every day and know there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day. At night, you sleep your ordinary sleep, filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did l? Or was it a silly, inexpert, little lie? You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something!

And what Uncle Charlie says of the world applies to young Charlie herself. As the movie keeps emphasizing, and as young Charlie keeps insisting, she and her uncle Charlie are very much alike, “like twins” she tells him. The idea that her uncle is her evil twin comes to mind, but she has her dark side too, as becomes clear later in the movie. Because young Charlie is played by Teresa Wright, a wholesome-looking young woman, rather than an actress whom we might see playing a femme fatale in a film noir, the contrast between her innocent appearance and the evil that emerges from within her is stark.

Earlier in the movie, while young Charlie is still blissfully unaware that Uncle Charlie is the Merry Widow Killer, she is so psychically in tune with him that she starts humming “The Merry Widow Waltz,” while setting the table for dinner. But she can’t seem to remember the name of the melody. Ann says, “Sing at the table, you’ll marry a crazy husband.” This may be another incest hint. Young Charlie is pleased when some of her friends think Uncle Charlie is her beau. And as Uncle Charlie is crazy, perhaps he is the man she unconsciously wants for a husband.

Instead of just letting her recall the name of the waltz, Uncle Charlie purposely spills his wine just as she is on the verge of uttering it. Later, when he sees an article in the newspaper about the Merry Widow Killer, he tears that section out. Discovering this, she concludes that there must have been something in the paper he wanted to conceal, though she imagines it to be of minor importance. She tells her uncle she knows a secret about him, referring to something that must have been in the newspaper, and reprising an earlier remark she had made: “I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.” She thinks the secret is something wonderful, but he becomes alarmed, charging at her and grabbing her wrists so hard that he hurts her. His guilty behavior arouses young Charlie’s suspicions, causing her to go to the library, where she finds the article mentioned above. This leads to his downfall. Had he not done these things, she might never have suspected anything at all.

Murdering widows for their money appears to be quite remunerative, inasmuch as Uncle Charlie deposits $40,000 in the bank (over $650,000, adjusted for inflation). As he is leaving the bank, he is introduced to another rich widow, a Mrs. Potter. She has come to the bank to get some money so she can go shopping. “There’s one good thing in being a widow, isn’t there?” she says laughing. “You don’t have to ask your husband for money.”

When young Charlie figures out that her uncle is the Merry Widow Killer, she does not turn the ring over to the detectives and tell them what she knows, because she is afraid it will hurt her mother to find this out about her brother. Many of those same critics that noticed the theme of incest have also argued that the relationships in this movie constitute an allegory of sexual abuse within a family, one in which a girl feels she cannot tell her mother that her father is molesting her. Only instead of the daughter not wanting her mother to know the truth, too often it is the mother that does not want to know the truth when her daughter tries to tell her. Here too, on my own, that would never have occurred to me, but it does seem to resonate, now that it has been brought to my attention.

And so, instead of telling the detectives, she tries to get Uncle Charlie to leave town, hinting at first, but then becoming more insistent. He quickly picks up on the fact that she knows. It is then that he makes the remarks about widows quoted above. Young Charlie defends them: “But they’re alive. They’re human beings.” Uncle Charlie replies:

Are they? Are they, Charlie? Are they human, or are they fat, wheezing animals? Hm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?

While all this has been going on, young Charlie’s father, Joseph (Henry Travers), and a next-door neighbor, Herb (Hume Cronyn), who lives with his mother and is always coming over while the Newton family is having dinner, enjoy discussing the murder mysteries they have read in books. Joseph thinks the best way to kill someone is by hitting him over the head with a lead pipe, but Herb objects to that form of murder because then you don’t have any clues. Joseph says he doesn’t want any clues, of course, but Herb has confused getting away with a murder in real life with committing a murder that would make a good mystery. As a result, he prefers exotic poisons. The fun they have discussing murder mysteries unnerves young Charlie, who is trying to deal with the real murders committed by her uncle.

At the same time, the detectives have confided in young Charlie that her uncle is one of two suspects they have been investigating. They are pretty sure her uncle is their man, but out of consideration for her mother, they agree to arrest her uncle out of town, if Charlie can get him to leave soon. But then, the other suspect ends up being killed when, in the act of fleeing from the police, he runs into the propeller of an airplane. Uncle Charlie and young Charlie overhear Joseph and Herb talking about it. Herb says they had to identify the suspect, who was all chopped up, by his clothes. “His shirts were all initialed,” Herb says, “‘C,’ ‘O,’ apostrophe ‘H’.”

We have already seen that the initials on the ring were abbreviations for feces, so I wondered if these initials were supposed to have significance, especially since the dialogue gives them emphasis. That is, the scriptwriter could simply have had Herb say, “They identified him by the initials on his shirts,” without specifying which initials they were. But other than the fact that “C” and “O” are also Charles Oakley’s initials, and “CO” is the symbol for carbon monoxide, which soon comes into play, not much comes to mind. I suppose the “H” could stand for Hitchcock, another cameo of a sort.

One might also ask why the scriptwriters chose this form of death for the other suspect, one that involves mutilation. The reason is that had he died, say, by being hit by an automobile, the detectives could have photographed him, thereby allowing his picture to be shown to witnesses for identification. And so, this absurd idea that the detectives cannot photograph Charles Oakley against his will, unless they are sneaky about it, is being applied to this other suspect as well.

Once Uncle Charlie hears that the police have called off the investigation because they think the Merry Widow Killer is dead, he is delighted. But then he remembers that he had all but admitted to being the killer when young Charlie confronted him. He sets out to murder her to make sure she doesn’t talk. His first attempt is by loosening part of a step on the stairway she often uses, but she catches herself when it gives way. The second attempt is with carbon monoxide, by trapping her in the garage with the motor of the family car running. Fortunately, Herb hears her screams and alerts her family to her situation.

Notwithstanding young Charlie’s plea that these widows are “human beings,” in the end, she cares more about protecting her mother from any unhappiness than she does the lives of Uncle Charlie’s future victims. She insists that he leave town, with the threat of giving the ring to the police, even when she knows who his next victim will be, the Mrs. Potter mentioned above, the rich widow he met in town. In fact, Mrs. Potter is sitting right there in the living room of young Charlie’s home, and she will be leaving on the same train as Uncle Charlie. This would have made young Charlie an accomplice to his next and subsequent murders had he simply left town as she wanted. We can imagine her reading in the newspaper about his murders of widows in the future, but still remaining silent, her mother’s feelings being more important to her than the women being strangled by Uncle Charlie.

In another scene, she tells him, “Go away, or I’ll kill you myself.” And so she does. The scene in which she pushes him into the path of the oncoming train can be understood as merely the accidental result of her effort to get away from him, and it would have been an act of self-defense in any event. But what happens matches what she says she would do. Of course, there is no way her dark side is anything like that of her uncle, the reason being that her uncle had a head injury when he was young. He skidded on his bicycle and was hit by a streetcar, much in the way he has now been hit by a train. It was this earlier accident that allowed his dark side to flourish, instead of being held in check the way it is for young Charlie. Or the way it is for the rest of us, for that matter.

Still, I wonder what she told her mother when they scraped Uncle Charlie’s body off the railroad tracks.

disinterestedspectator

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