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.”

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.  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.

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.  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.

Skyfall (2012)

You know there are too many gadgets in our lives when even James Bond is sick of them, for Skyfall expresses an unconscious revulsion against the very gadgetry in which this franchise once gloried.

The first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), had no gadget. In that film, a man from Q-branch gives Bond (Sean Connery) a Walther PPK, to replace the Beretta, which the man dismisses as being fine for a lady’s handbag. It would not be until From Russia with Love (1963) that Bond would get his first gadget from Q, a black briefcase, with all sorts of nifty stuff in it. But the die was really cast in Goldfinger (1964), when Bond was given an Aston Martin, with machine guns, an ejection-seat, and I forget what all else. After that, no Bond movie was complete until Q (Desmond Llewelyn) performed the ritual of giving Bond his gadget. Like technology itself, it had acquired a life of its own. But in Skyfall, Q (Ben Whishaw) gives Bond (Daniel Craig) another Walther PPK, to replace the one he lost, thereby bringing us full circle, back to that first movie, when all a spy really needed was a gun.

The movie starts with Bond chasing a bad guy. The bad guy has stolen an important hard drive, and Bond is getting lots of assistance from a technological control center. This is just to get us in the mood, to remind us of the technology that now saturates our lives. Then Bond is shot and falls to his death, which may be inferred from the fact that the movie just leaves Bond suspended below the water, unconscious. We never see him coming to and swimming to the surface, or being rescued by some bikini-clad Bond girl, as would usually be the case. The rest of the movie should be interpreted as Bond’s hallucinatory fantasy in the final moments of his life, where he dreams of a return to a simpler world. This is suggested by the theme song, which has the lyrics, “For this is the end / I’ve drowned and dreamt this moment.”

When we next see Bond, he seems to be in some tropical paradise, safe from the world of gadgets. But he realizes it is not enough to hide from those gadgets. He must return to London and stamp them out. It is after he gets back that he has the encounter with Q. When Q gives Bond the Walther PPK, plus a routine tracking device that is really no big deal, Bond seems surprised. Q asks him if he was expecting an exploding pen, and then notes derisively that they don’t do that anymore. Well, thank goodness for that. It’s not just that we are tired of that cliché. In a world full of gadgets, what could Q have possibly given Bond that would have stood out from all the technological clutter that now constitutes just so much background scenery?

Later in the movie, there is a parliamentary inquiry, at which M (Judi Dench) is the key witness. The argument being made by one of the ministers is that we don’t need secret agents anymore, because now we have technology. Just then, the bad guys burst in the door and begin shooting up the place, almost killing the contemptuous MP, until that obsolete secret agent James Bond shows up to save the day. Looks like that parliamentary inquiry is over.

MI6 had by this time already retreated underground in an effort to be technologically inaccessible, but now Bond decides to go all the way, and retreat to his childhood home in Scotland. Ultimately, this expresses a desire to return to the safety of his mother’s womb, where not even an ultrasound can get to him. But first, he goes to a secret garage, where he and M get in the old Aston Martin of Goldfinger days, because that way they cannot be tracked. But then he arranges things with Q so that he can be tracked. Well, how much logic do you expect in a man’s hallucinatory dream? Besides, it’s just another expression of his ambivalence to technology. In order for Bond’s plan to work, he needs the very technology he is fleeing from. Later, we find out the real reason for his bringing the Aston Martin. It’s so the dang thing can finally be destroyed. In this way, Bond avenges himself on the gadget that really started it all.

When Bond and M get to the house, they encounter the gamekeeper Kincade (Albert Finney), from whom we learn that Bond has been an orphan since childhood, and he is thus incapable of having the maternal protection that he unconsciously seeks. In fact, the situation is reversed. M becomes his mother-substitute, and he must protect her, instead of the other way around. In any event, the house has not changed in all these years, which means that it has remained unsullied by all the technological innovations of the intervening years. Bond, M, and Kincade lay their weapons on the table. Aside from Bond’s pistol, there is an old rifle, a shotgun, and a knife, the most primitive weapon of the bunch. Right then, we know that it will be the knife that kills the villain, a slap in the face to all the gadgetry Bond has had to endure for fifty years now.

When M, his mother-substitute, dies, Bond realizes that he will never be able to escape from this gadget-saturated world, that there is no going back to those days of innocence, when you could go a whole week without someone inventing something. The movie should have ended with M dying in his arms, as Bond’s dream comes to an end, and death, not his mother, embraces him, giving him the sanctuary of the grave.

Instead, the final scenes, which are not part of his dream, are merely a device to suggest that there will be more Bond movies to come. I suspect that in the next one, Q will be back with a real gadget again. There is just no getting away from them.

Four Daughters (1938) and Young at Heart (1954)

In the movie Four Daughters, there is a musical family consisting of a widowed father, Adam Lemp (Claude Rains), who plays the flute, his sister, Aunt Etta, and his four daughters:   Ann (Priscilla Lane) plays the violin; Kay is a singer; Emma plays the harp; and Thea plays the piano.

Neither Ann nor Kay has a boyfriend.

Emma has a suitor named Ernest, whom she jokes about marrying. However, she does not love him, and for her, that is very important. She talks about wanting a “storybook” romance, a “knight in shining armor on a white horse,” while Ernest is always hesitant and awkward in her presence. As a result, she figures she will end up an old maid.

Thea plans to marry Ben (Frank McHugh), whom she does not love, but that doesn’t matter to her. She says that love is overrated. What is important is that Ben has lots of money and can provide her with status. This would not be so bad if she were good at faking it, as some gold diggers are, but throughout the movie it is obvious that Thea finds Ben irritating and doesn’t like it when he tries to be affectionate.

Ann and Emma both make disparaging remarks about Ben’s looks.  Moreover, his personality is made out to be just as unattractive.  Thea invites him to dinner.  When he arrives that evening, he compliments her on the lovely house her family has, and then he compliments her on how beautiful she looks.  So far, so good.  But then we get the following:

Ben:  I hope my watch is right.  I’ve been driving around the block, afraid I’d be here too early.

Thea:  You’re right on time, as usual.

Ben:  Well, that’s my long suit: punctuality.  I believe in hitting appointments right on the nose!

The reason for this dialogue is to make punctuality out to be a cringeworthy character flaw.  For that reason, Ben is made to go on about it, showing him to be obsessed with being on time.  Later in the movie, at Adam’s birthday party, Ben’s present to Adam is a watch.

At this point, I must confess to being punctual myself, and I have done something similar to what Ben did on many occasions.  But one night stands out from the rest.  I had a date with a girl when I was in college.  I was to pick her up at seven o’clock. Never having been to her house before, I left early, just in case I had trouble finding it. However, I located her house at ten minutes before seven. I pulled around the corner, drove down the street, and parked my car.  At seven, I drove back around the block, and pulled up in front of her house.  Her father answered the door when I knocked, saying that Sarah wasn’t ready yet, but for me to come inside.  I had a pleasant conversation with her father for about ten minutes, and then Sarah came down the stairs.  The fact that she was running a little late didn’t bother me one bit.  But as soon as we got in the car, she began lecturing me that a gentleman never shows up exactly on time for a date, because if the lady is running late, it makes her look bad.

I have read five books on etiquette:  one by Emily Post, one by Amy Vanderbilt, and three by Miss Manners. I have never read what Sarah was talking about in any of those books.  But one rule of etiquette stands out above the rest:  you should never make someone feel bad by telling him he broke a rule of etiquette. After all, she never had to go out with me again, if I was so crude and boorish as to show up on time for a date. She should have acted as though nothing was wrong, and then said she already had a previous engagement the next time I asked her out.  Needless to say, there never was a next time.

The moral of that tale is that people that run late resent people that are always on time, and they are at pains to put them in the wrong, making such people out to be uptight, while those who run late are held out to be free spirits.  In the movie Nora Prentiss (1947), those in the movie who are punctual are shown to be stuffy and dull, while those who are often late are happy and carefree.  A doctor who is always on time shows up late for work one morning.  He says it was because it was such a nice day that he drove through the park on the way in.  We rightly suspect he will soon be having an affair, cheating on his mirthless wife, who is always obsessed with her schedule.

In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), the title character, played by Maggie Smith, receives a note from her superior while she is teaching class.  It reads:  “Dear Miss Brodie, I hope it will be convenient for you to see me in my office this afternoon at 4:15.”

Miss Brodie is not amused.  She reads the note aloud to her class, saying, “4:15!  Not 4:00, not 4:30, but 4:15.  She thinks to intimidate me by the use of quarter hours.” When Miss Brodie shows up at exactly 4:15, the clock in the office just striking the quarter hour, she says, somewhat snidely, “I was afraid I might be late … or early.”

The idea is that punctual people not only have the bad taste to always show up on time, but they expect the same of others.  Of course, it is folly to try to change anyone. If a friend, a lover, or an employee continually shows up late, either accept it with a smile, or find someone else.

And then there was this one guy I knew who said that he always showed up late for appointments because he didn’t like to wait.

Following the punctuality scene with Ben, his interaction with the family that night is uncomfortable. While offering Ben some wine, Adam presumes to pat Ben on his chest.  When Ben makes a weak attempt at humor and nervously laughs, Thea’s sisters make fun of his laugh, mocking him.  At the dinner table, Ben sips some water, only to have the family embarrass him when they start saying grace without any warning.  A couple of times, later in the movie, Ben starts to tell a story, but others in the room pay no attention to him, talking right over him as if he weren’t there.

In general, Ben is always good natured and friendly, with never a mean word to say about anyone. And yet, everyone in the movie treats him badly.  Either they make fun of him, despise him, or ignore him.  Nor does the movie want us to take his side, but rather expects us to be in agreement with those who have contempt for him. Admittedly, he is not tall and handsome.  He is not witty or clever. If it weren’t for his money, no one would have anything to do with him.  He’s just a nice guy, but that doesn’t count for much, not in this movie and not in this world.

As is typical in a melodrama, once we are acquainted with a stable family or community, a bachelor comes along and stirs things up. In this case, the bachelor is Felix, a handsome composer.  As an example of just how charming he is supposed to be, he tells everyone where to sit at the table in their own home.  Furthermore, he thinks he is being oh-so cute when he flirts with the elderly Aunt Etta, acting as if she is young and pretty. She appears to be flattered by it, as old women always are in the movies when young men pull this routine.  I suppose in real life, there are old women who like this attention, but lot of them hate that kind of patronizing attitude, because it only underscores just how old and unattractive they have become, and makes them appear silly and foolish for being taken in by it. This might have been especially painful in Aunt Etta’s case, since she later refers to herself as a spinster.  Of course, the men who do that sort of thing always seem pleased with themselves, imagining that they are bringing a little happiness into the life of an old woman.

But just like Aunt Etta, everyone in the family is charmed by him, and we are supposed to find him charming as well.  As a result, all four sisters start falling in love with him. And they certainly don’t treat him the way they did Ben.  None of them make fun of the way Felix laughs.  When Adam offers him some wine, he does not pat him on the chest.  At dinner, the scene cuts off before the family says grace, so Felix is spared any embarrassment on that score.  Later in the movie, after Felix has won a contract with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, he excuses himself, saying he has to catch the train to Seattle.  Just to remind us one more time that punctuality is something to be despised, Aunt Etta says, “Can’t you miss your train? You know, they’ll never believe you’re a great musician in Seattle, if you get there on time.”

As if one bachelor were not disrupting enough, another one enters the community, a man named Mickey (John Garfield), who excels at playing the piano.  Felix needs Mickey to help him with his composing.  Felix explains to Adam that there is no telling when Mickey might show up:  “He’s an hour late now, but he may not be here for a week.  In fact, he may not get here at all….  He’s just a little, well, unpredictable.”

Since Mickey is not at all punctual, that means we are supposed to like him before we have even met him.  When he finally arrives, his hair is mussed, his tie is loose, and his shirt is not fully tucked in. Later on, when talking to Ann, he says that the Fates are against him, determined that he will always be a loser.  It has never occurred to him, apparently, that being undependable and looking like a slob might have more to do with being a loser than the Fates.

Normally, people speak of fate when they wish to express a kind of personal determinism, but Mickey puts it in the plural:  “The Fates, the Destinies, whoever they are that decide what we do or don’t get.”  This makes us of think of the Moirai of Greek mythology, but we don’t believe for a minute that Mickey embraces that pagan religion. This is the movie’s way of letting us know he is an atheist.  At another point in the movie, Mickey says to Ann, “Allah be with you.” Because he is obviously not a Muslim, we take this as another expression of his atheism.  We can’t imagine him saying, “God be with you.”  Of course, since he is an atheist, movie logic required that he come to a bad end.

Felix asks Ann to marry him, and she accepts. They announce their engagement at her father’s birthday party. Because Mickey has fallen in love with Ann, he is crestfallen.  And as Ann’s three sisters are also in love with Felix, they are all upset too. Kay, who had been procrastinating about going to Philadelphia to study on a singing scholarship, immediately announces that she intends to do just that. Thea, who had been stalling Ben about setting a marriage date, announces that she will marry him in June. Ernest, thinking that Emma will be similarly disposed, suggests getting married, but she rebuffs him, and goes into the kitchen to cry.

On the day of Ann’s wedding, Mickey not only tells Ann that he loves her, but also reveals that Emma was heartbroken when she found out that Felix was going to marry Ann instead of her. At first Ann does not believe it, but later she sees that it is true when, standing outside, she looks through the kitchen window and sees Emma and Felix together.  Emma helps Felix with his cravat, and then starts crying when Felix leaves the room.  In what can only happen in a movie, Ann leaves Felix standing at the altar and elopes with Mickey.

When an event in a movie is of great significance, and yet is not dramatized, that is sometimes because had it been so dramatized, we wouldn’t have believed it.  Let us, therefore, imagine said dramatization.  Because people are in the house getting ready for the wedding, Ann cannot go inside and pack.  As soon as she walked in through the door, they would expect her to put on her wedding dress.  Therefore, she must elope with Mickey with only the clothes on her back.  She doesn’t even have her purse with her.  We’ll have to assume that the impecunious Mickey actually has some money on him, so he can buy tickets for the train, pay the first month’s rent for an apartment, and then buy some clothes and a purse for Ann.

But let’s not forget the dialogue we must imagine for ourselves when Ann proposes to Mickey:

Ann:  Mickey!  I just realized you are right.  Emma loves Felix.  So, I’ve decided to jilt him so he can marry her instead.

Mickey:  That’s noble of you.

Ann:  And now I want to marry you.

Mickey:  But you’re in love with Felix, not me.

Ann:  I know, but I have to fool Emma into thinking I love you so she’ll feel free to marry Felix.

Anyway, let’s return to the movie as it was actually filmed.  Contrary to Ann’s expectations, but not ours, Felix does not marry Emma on the rebound.  In fact, Emma ends up marrying Ernest after all.  Later in the movie, she tells Ann how much she admired the way Ernest took charge at the wedding, explaining to the guests what had happened.  And in doing so she contrasts Ernest with Ben, whom she regards as an incompetent blowhard.  Poor Ben.

Four months later, Ann and Mickey are struggling financially. When they go back home for a family reunion at Christmas, Mickey notices how Ann reacts when she sees Felix again, realizing she still loves him. As often happens in a melodrama, things get so messed up and complicated that someone has to die in order for things to get straightened out, and that is what happens here. Between not being able to provide for Ann, and her still loving Felix, Mickey decides to commit suicide by driving really fast in a snowstorm. Apparently, he had never read Ethan Frome. Well, things don’t turn out that bad, but he does wind up in the hospital, living just long enough to say a few words to Ann before he dies. In the next scene, we see it is spring. Felix returns, and it is clear that eventually he and Ann will get married.  This is a happy ending, but it is compensatory, softening the tragedy of Mickey’s death.

There are numerous changes in the remake, Young at Heart (1954), one of which is that all the names are different.  (Don’t ask me why.)  Kay’s character has been eliminated as superfluous.  Here are the rest:

Ann = Laurie (Doris Day)

Emma = Amy

Thea = Fran (Dorothy Malone)

Adam = Gregory

Aunt Etta = Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore)

Ben = Bob (Alan Hale Jr.)

Ernest = Ernie

Felix = Alex (Gig Young)

Mickey = Barney (Frank Sinatra)

There is only a hint of Bob’s punctuality, and he does not make a big deal out of it the way Ben did.  In the original, Aunt Etta says to Felix, “You know, they’ll never believe you’re a great musician in Seattle, if you get there on time.”  In the remake, Gregory says to Alex, “No one will believe you’re a real composer if you show up at every rehearsal.”  These changes in the script were probably made by someone who regarded punctuality as a virtue and took exception to the way it was demeaned in the original.

Bob gets much better treatment in this remake than Ben did in the original.  When we first see Bob and Fran, they are kissing.  We never saw Ben and Thea kissing, for she had a physical aversion to him.  Gregory does not pat Bob on the chest, and Laurie and Amy do not make fun of his laugh or disparage his looks.  In the original, when Emma tells Ann how Ernest took charge of things at the wedding, she said, by way of contrast, “Ben, who blows the loudest trumpet, he couldn’t do a thing.”  In the corresponding scene in the remake, Amy tells Laurie how Ernie took charge of things at the wedding, but without making any negative remark about Bob.

Barney does not die in the end.  However, this happy ending is suspicious, because we never see him get out of the hospital, which is usually the case when someone’s recovery is to be understood realistically. See, for example, The Glass Key (1942), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Godfather (1972).  Another movie that fails to provide such a scene is Vertigo (1958).  Because there is no scene showing James Stewart getting out of the psychiatric hospital, I believe the second half of that movie is really James Stewart’s dream, while he remains in a catatonic state.  The closest we come to a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene in Young at Heart is when we see Barney being wheeled into a room for surgery.  But even so, there is no scene following surgery, where the doctor says the operation was a success.  We immediately go from Barney apparently dying in the hospital at Christmas to Barney singing at the piano in the Spring, surrounded by the entire family, including his wife Laurie.  The whole thing just seems fake.  For that reason, it is easier to accept this ending as the dream of a dying man.

Furthermore, for the first time in the movie, Barney seems to be happy, instead of being the disgruntled loser that he has been through the whole movie.  It is one thing for someone to make a miraculous recovery after almost dying.  That can happen.  But as far as personality goes, people don’t change that much.  For him to go from being terminally grumpy to inexplicably cheerful, without any attempt to show us dramatically how such a transformation was possible, that just isn’t believable.

I suppose the explanation for this change in personality is the fact that Laurie has had a baby.  She had just found out that she was pregnant at Christmas, when Barney tried to kill himself.  And now Laurie wishes the baby Happy Easter.  So, this must be over a year later.  I should have thought the novelty of a baby would have worn off on Barney by that time, especially now that he knows he has another mouth to feed.

Although Four Daughters is about a musical family, and there is music played or sung at times, it just doesn’t strike me as being a musical, although I would not argue the point if someone said otherwise. Young at Heart, however, is definitely a musical, and perhaps that accounts for the difference.  It’s not just that we expect musicals to end happily, though not all of them do, but it is easier for us to accept an artificial, tacked-on happy ending when the movie is a musical than when it is a melodrama.  Still, the ending is so abrupt and unrealistic that it is easier to imagine that it is Barney’s hallucinatory dream just before he dies.

This is similar to another musical, Young Man with a Horn (1950).  In that movie, Kirk Douglas is a grumpy trumpet player.  When he finds out that his wife, Lauren Bacall, is a bisexual who has decided to go full lesbian and run off to Europe with another woman, his life starts going downhill. He ends up living on the street, where he collapses.  A cab driver, who happened to be driving by, brings him to a place for alcoholics, but Douglas has pneumonia and must be transferred to a hospital.  His two friends, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael, are with him at what appears to be his deathbed scene.  When he hears the siren of the ambulance coming to get him, he says that’s the note he’s been looking for all his life, which is a bit delusional by itself.

And then, with only a brief explanation by Hoagy Carmichael, who has been narrating this movie, as to how Douglas turned his life around, becoming a good person and a great musician, we see Douglas and Doris Day performing together.  His trumpet playing is given a reverb effect to make it seem ethereal.  Once again, given the absence of a scene showing him getting out of the hospital, along with a complete character change that is only described, not dramatized, that final scene lends itself to a dream interpretation.

The Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990, and 2016)

It is traditional in the movies to portray gangsters as having problems of a sexual nature.  In Little Caesar (1931), Rico (Edward G. Robinson) despises women and love, calling it “soft stuff.”  Some critics even argue that he is a repressed homosexual.  In The Public Enemy (1931), Tom Powers (James Cagney) is a misogynist who smashes a grapefruit in a woman’s face.  In Scarface (1932) and its remake (1983), Tony (Paul Muni and Al Pacino respectively) is incestuously possessive of his sister.  In White Heat (1949), Cody Jarret (James Cagney) has an Oedipus complex.  In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) is impotent.  In The Long Goodbye (1973), Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) smashes a coke bottle across the face of his girlfriend to prove to Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) how serious he is about wanting to know where his money is.  In Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Noodles (Robert De Niro) brutally rapes his childhood sweetheart.  Needless to say, these movie gangsters were incapable of having a normal family life.

The Godfather (1972) broke with that tradition.  Both Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) are portrayed as good family men, who are never even tempted to cheat on their wives.  It is a cliché in gangster movies that gangsters come to a bad end, such as by being riddled full of bullets and left dying in a gutter.  Vito does get riddled full of bullets and lie in the gutter, but he pulls through.  Years later, while playing with his grandson in the garden, he has a heart attack and dies, just the way a good family man should.

Michael’s marriages do not run terribly smooth, but that is not because of any sexual or emotional problems on his part.  Instead, the trouble comes from external sources, like when his first wife gets blown to bits by a car bomb.  But mostly he is able to run the family business without letting it interfere with his marriage, as when he and his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) go to church and become godparents to his sister’s baby while he has the heads of the other five crime families wiped out.

There is, however, one little problem with Michael’s marriage to Kay, a problem that women seem to be especially sensitive to.  When I first saw this movie in a theater, my friend and I happened to be seated next to a couple of young women.  Throughout the movie, whether it was the horse’s-head-in-the-bed scene, the scene where Sonny (James Caan) is machine-gunned to death, the scene where Moe Green (Alex Rocco) gets a bullet in the eyeball, or any of the other vividly violent scenes in the movie, I heard not one peep from the two women on my right.  But one scene did bother them.  When Connie (Talia Shire) accuses Michael of having her husband killed, which he did, Kay begins to wonder if it is true.  She asks Michael about this later, and he becomes angry, telling her never to ask him about his family business.  She begins to tear up, and he relents, saying that this one time he will let her ask him about his family business.  When she indicates a repeat of the question as to whether he killed Connie’s husband, Michael looks at her tenderly, and with sincerity in his voice says, “No.”

At that point the women on my right were audibly outraged, one of them saying, “Oh, you bastard!”  I have since talked to other women about this scene, and many of them agree that they were not bothered so much by all the killing going on in the movie as by Michael’s lying to his wife.  Of course, given the patriarchal attitude of the movie, his lying was to protect her from knowing the harsh truths of the world, which only men are able to deal with.  As Vito says to Michael, “Women and children can be careless, but not men.”

In The Godfather:  Part II (1974), Michael is still a good family man, but just as families in general seem to be breaking apart, so too is Michael’s family being strained by divorce, abortion, and sibling rivalry.  In particular, the sibling rivalry between Michael and Fredo (John Cazale) leads to an act of betrayal, which almost gets Michael assassinated.

Fortunately for Michael, other fraternal bonds seem to be intact.  When Michael is called up before a Senate investigating committee on organized crime, he denies all wrongdoing.  When he realizes that Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), who mistakenly thinks Michael tried to have him assassinated, plans to testify against him, Michael flies Frankie’s brother in from Sicily to sit in the committee room.  When Frankie sees his brother, the thought of violating the law of omertà with his brother watching is too much, and he refuses to testify.

Admittedly, a lot of people interpret this scene differently.  They believe that Frankie refused to testify against Michael because he was afraid Michael would kill his brother.  But think what it would take to kidnap a Mafia don in Sicily, who is normally surrounded by bodyguards, get him on a passenger plane, bring him to the United States Capitol with all kinds of security about, and where the brother could scream for help at any time.  Beyond that, this interpretation is too crude.  It is far more in keeping with Michael’s understanding of the bond between brothers that the presence of one could instill a sense of shame in the other.

On the other hand, those who have no family are in trouble.  We learn early on that Michael is going to have problems with Senator Pat Geary (G.D. Spradlin) in his move to take over the Tropigala casino.  To ensure his cooperation, when the senator visits a house of prostitution run by Fredo, he is drugged.  When he wakes up, the prostitute that he had tied to the bedposts as part of a game lies there disemboweled.  We know that Al Neri (Richard Bright), Michael’s favorite hitman, is the one who killed her, but the senator is made to think he did it.  Michael’s foster brother and consiglieri, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), tells the senator, “This girl has no family.  Nobody knows that she worked here.  It’ll be as though she never existed.  All that’s left is our friendship.”

The murder of the innocent prostitute is just one of the dark notes in Part II that were absent in The Godfather, where everyone who is killed by the Corleone family deserved it.  In this sequel, when people are killed, we don’t always feel that they deserve it, or the manner in which they are killed is dissatisfying.  Frankie Pentangeli is pressured to commit suicide.  When Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) is assassinated by Rocco Lampone (Tom Rosqui), an important man in Michael’s organization, he is shot by the police.  Kay essentially puts a hit on Michael’s future son by having him aborted, because she wants all this Sicilian stuff to end.  And Fredo is shot in the back of the head while saying a Hail Mary.

Throughout this movie, there are flashbacks to when the young Vito Corleone, née Andolini, (Oreste Baldini and Robert De Niro) first came to America and slowly became head of a crime family.  Unlike the problems besetting Michael and his family, Vito’s family life is good.  In fact, his family feeling is so strong that he goes back to Sicily to satisfy a vendetta against the man who killed his father and brother, even though the man is so old he belongs in a nursing home.

Although Part II is a great movie, it is logically flawed, and in such a way that once noticed, it is impossible to ignore. Early in the movie, Michael walks into his bedroom, where Kay is sleeping. She wakes up and asks him why the drapes are open. He looks around at the open drapes, apparently sees something outside, and drops to the floor as submachine-gun bullets riddle the bedroom. The compound is sealed off, and Michael gives orders that the gunmen be taken alive, but they are found shot dead shortly thereafter.

Now, presumably these hitmen had an escape plan.  The fact that Michael is not dead should not have made any difference in that plan.  So, there was no reason to think that these men would need to be killed before they were captured.  Furthermore, the one who killed the hitmen had to find them before anyone else did, notwithstanding the fact that these men would have been running for their lives.  Was he standing right behind them ready to kill them regardless of the outcome?

Michael tells Tom that there is a traitor in the family, and so he is turning power over to him while he, Michael, disappears for a while. Though Tom is only a foster brother (and not Sicilian), and though Fredo is Michael’s older brother, yet Michael does not turn temporary control over to Fredo because “he is weak and stupid.”

From the beginning, the word “family” has been used ambiguously:  first, in the ordinary sense of people that are related to one another by blood; second, in a slightly extended sense to include someone that was adopted, not a minor consideration in the Mafia, where being Sicilian and connected by blood is of utmost significance; and third, in a figurative sense that includes all the people that work for a family in the first or second sense.  In the first movie, the ambiguity was interesting, but here it takes on a more ominous significance.  In what sense does Michael mean when he says there is a traitor in the family?  He probably meant it in the third sense.  But Fredo turns out to be the traitor in the family in the first sense.

And it is here that the story becomes illogical.  Are we supposed to believe that Fredo is the one who sneaked into the bedroom and opened the drapes while Kay was sleeping? And does that also mean that Fredo was the one who executed the two hitmen before they could talk? If he did all that, I am ready to believe that he was the one who set up his father Vito for the hit in the first Godfather movie. But given his character, we cannot believe Fredo did any of these things.  He says he didn’t know it was going to be a hit, and we believe him, because he’s weak and stupid, just as Michael said.

In that case, however, we have to ask what it was that Fredo did that was so bad. Fredo says that Johnny Ola (Dominic Chianese) enlisted his aid because Michael was being tough in the negotiations about Cuba. So what does that mean? That occasionally Fredo was supposed to say to Michael, “Don’t you think you’re being a little tough in the negotiations?”

Furthermore, the person who did open the curtains and executed the hitmen is the real traitor in the family, in the third sense of the word. There are plenty on the compound who might have done that, and that person, whoever he is, is still a threat to Michael. It might even have been Al Neri. But Michael seems to be unaware of this obvious implication.  Though he has Fredo killed for being disloyal in some way that is not clear, yet he has no concern about the man still on the compound that facilitated the attempted assassination.

These first two movies have been combined from time to time, telling the story in chronological order, eliminating the flashback structure of The Godfather: Part II, and adding additional footage that was never seen in the theaters.  More recently, HBO presented Mario Puzo’s The Godfather: The Complete Epic 1901-1959 (2016), which is the best one thus far.  The additional footage typically spends more time introducing characters, explaining how certain situations came to be, or killing a few more people off as part of a vendetta. None of it is necessary, for we never had any trouble following the story by using our imagination.  But if you just like the first two Godfather movies so much that you think you would enjoy a leisurely stroll through the history of the Corleone family, The Complete Epic may be the version for you.

Of course, if the additional footage had shown Fredo opening the curtains in the bedroom and then putting a silencer on his gun before killing the assassins so they wouldn’t be able to talk, then that would have been something else entirely.

Regarding The Godfather:  Part III (1990), this is a movie that should never have been made: in part because it is in itself a bad movie, and in part because it tends to infect the two great movies that came before it.  The story itself might have been all right, but there are way too many lines stolen from the previous two movies and repeated in this one.  In fact, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), who is Sonny’s bastard son, made me think of Don Quixote.  In his eponymous book, Quixote goes mad reading books about knight errantry and starts seeing the world in those terms, even though the days of chivalry and knighthood have long since passed, and he ends up looking ridiculous.  In Part III, it is almost as if Vincent went mad watching the first two Godfather movies of this trilogy over and over again, and then went onto the streets trying to play Godfather, even though the modern world no longer seems appropriate for that sort of thing.  And the speed with which he goes from street punk to head of the Corleone family is not plausible.

On the other hand, with all the allusions and quotations from the first two movies crammed into this one, you would think the characters in this third movie would also be familiar with what has come before, but not so.  In the first movie, Vito tells Michael that the traitor in the family will be the one who comes to him with a deal to meet with the heads of the five families.  And sure enough, when Tessio (Abe Vigoda) tries to set up a meeting, Michael knows he is a traitor and has him killed.  But in this third film, when Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) tries to set up a meeting between Michael and other mobsters, Michael suspects nothing.  Even when Altobello refers to Michael’s father, that does not jog Michael’s memory.  And sure enough, although we in the audience know it will be a hit, Michael is oblivious.

In my opinion, a big opportunity was missed.  First, they should have had fresh dialogue.  Second, they should have eliminated the Vincent Mancini character.  Third, they should have allowed Michael to be assassinated, followed by a struggle over the Corleone empire between Connie, who wants to continue the criminal activities of the family, and Kay, who wants to realize Michael’s dream of making the Corleone family legitimate, but who in the meantime needs Al Neri, who is loyal to her, to protect her from her sister-in-law.  That would have been an ironic end of the Corleone patriarchy.

Instead, all we got was a bad movie.