Foreign Correspondent (1940)

There must have been a lot of suspicion concerning secret clauses in pacts between European governments in the years leading up to World War II, because there were two Hitchcock movies based on such a clause:  The first was The Lady Vanishes (1938); the second, Foreign Correspondent (1940). Whereas The Lady Vanishes was made before the outbreak of World War II, Foreign Correspondent was released about a year after it had started.  And whereas the former had a British orientation, the latter was made from an American perspective.  What both movies have in common, however, other than a secret clause between two nations, is a contempt for complacency and a distrust of pacifists.

Regarding the complacency, the movie begins with the following prologue, which praises foreign correspondents in contrast to all those Americans who thought everything was just fine.

To those intrepid ones who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America….  To those forthright ones who early saw the clouds of war while many of us at home were seeing rainbows….  To those clear-headed ones who now stand like recording angels among the dead and dying….  To the Foreign Correspondents—this motion picture is dedicated.

Oddly enough, all this florid prose regarding foreign correspondents is immediately contradicted by the opening scene and several other scenes thereafter.  Mr. Powers, editor of the New York Globe, has nothing but contempt for those foreign correspondents.  He is handed a cablegram from London, which is what he has been waiting for.  It is dated August 19, 1939, less than two weeks away from Germany’s invasion of Poland, which started World War II.  The cable says that according to a high official, there is absolutely no chance of war this year, on account of late crops.  I guess the idea is that everyone will be too busy with the harvest to fight a war.

Powers throws the cable down.  “Foreign correspondent,” he says with disgust.  “I could get more news out of Europe looking in the crystal ball….  They all make me sick.”

The foreign correspondent that sent the cable is Stebbins (Robert Benchley), who, we later learn, makes no pretense of being of any value, just passing on government handouts back to the states, and then spending the rest of his time drinking, fooling around with women, playing cards late into the night, and then betting on the horses the next morning. Later in the movie, a woman says that most foreign correspondents are “greasy.”

But as far as Powers is concerned, the main problem with foreign correspondents is that they are all intellectuals.  Powers continues with his rant:

I don’t want any more economists, sages, or oracles bombinating over our cable.  I want a reporter.  Someone who doesn’t know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo.  A good, honest crime reporter.  That’s what the Globe needs.  That’s what Europe needs. There’s a crime hatching on that bedeviled continent.

That line of thought leads Powers to think of Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), the crime reporter that beat up a policeman.  He sends for Jones, who thinks he’s about to be fired for that reason, and thus has an insolent manner.  But Powers believes that beating up policemen is a virtue, so Jones is just the sort of man he needs.

Powers asks him about the crisis in Europe.  “What crisis?” Jones asks.  Powers smiles. He answers that he is referring to the impending war.  Jones says he hasn’t been giving it much thought.  That’s just what the anti-intellectual Powers is looking for, someone blithely ignorant of what is going on in the world.  He offers Jones the job of going to Europe to cover “the biggest story in the world today.” Jones admits he is not equipped to cover that story, but says he could read up on it.  But Powers forbids it:  “No reading up.  I like you just as you are.  What Europe needs is a fresh, unused mind.” In the background are two massive bookshelves filled with books.  In other words, Powers has undoubtedly read all those books, and he knows better than anyone that they are of no value.

“Foreign correspondent, huh?” Jones asks.  “No,” Powers replies, “reporter.”

So, foreign correspondents are a generally worthless lot, mostly because they read books and think. Of course, this movie is condescending.  It presumes that the audience consists of people who don’t read books and think, and the movie is flattering them for their mindless ignorance.

In light of all this, one must suppose that after the movie was filmed, someone started worrying about the newspapers that employ foreign correspondents.  Those newspapers might retaliate by publishing reviews unfavorable to the movie, resulting in bad box office.  As a result, the prologue was added as a way of making amends. And inasmuch as the working titles of this movie while scripts were being written were Personal History and Imposter, it may be that it was also thought wise to make the title of this movie be Foreign Correspondent, as another way of preemptively atoning for all those disparaging comments.

While Powers wants crime reporter Johnny Jones to go to Europe to get the facts, he realizes that the newspaper must keep up appearances.  He tells Jones that he will be writing under the name of Huntley Haverstock.  You see, people that read newspapers need to believe that their foreign correspondents do read books and think, something they would never believe of a “Johnny Jones.”

Powers says the man of the moment over in Europe is Van Meer, a Dutch diplomat, whom he refers to as “Holland’s strongman.”  According to Powers, “If Van Meer stays at the helm of his country’s affairs for the next three months, it may mean peace in Europe.  If we knew what he was thinking we’d know where Europe stands.”

A diplomat in Holland is essential to preventing war?  Jones was thinking that maybe Hitler was more important, but Powers gives him a dismissive look.  Anyway, Van Meer has signed a treaty with a diplomat in Belgium, and Jones is assigned to find out what is in that treaty.  So, some agreement between Holland and Belgium is the key to determining whether Europe will remain at peace or go to war.

This sounds like a joke.  The Rome-Berlin Axis; the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact; the Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the United Kingdom and Poland—these were not the treaties that mattered.  It was some Dutch-Belgium treaty on which depended the peace of Europe.

While Jones is still in Powers’ office, he is introduced to Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), leader of the Universal Peace Party.  It turns out that Fisher has an attractive daughter, Carol (Laraine Day), with whom Jones eventually becomes romantically involved.

After Jones arrives in England, he meets Van Meer while both are on their way to the luncheon being held by the Universal Peace Party at a hotel.  Van Meer wishes there were more men like Fisher, promoting peace.  Jones tries to get Van Meer to talk about the possibility of war, but all Van Meer seems to want to talk about is birds:

Look at those birds.  No matter how big the city, there must always be parks and places for the birds to live.  I was walking through the park this morning, and I saw several people feeding the birds.  It’s a good sign at a time like this.

Jones rolls his eyes in exasperation.  They arrive at the hotel, where we hear an orchestra playing a Viennese waltz, perhaps as a way of inducing a little doubt in our minds as to the nature of this Universal Peace Party.  Soon thereafter, Van Meer disappears.  Later, Jones gets a cable telling him to go to Amsterdam, where Van Meer will be giving an important speech.  When Jones greets Van Meer in Holland, the diplomat appears not to recognize him.  Moments later, he is assassinated.  Jones, Carol, and another reporter, Scott ffolliott (George Sanders), team up to chase the assassin and try to find out what is going on.

What makes the Dutch-Belgian treaty really special is that it has a secret clause, known as Clause 27, so secret in fact that it is only known to the two people who signed the treaty, because it was never written down.  This raises the question as to how anyone, other than the two signatories, knows of the existence of Clause 27.

To find out what is in Clause 27, the spies kidnapped Van Meer with the idea of torturing him until he talked. But to keep the world from knowing that Van Meer had been kidnapped, they got a man who looked like Van Meer to take his place and then had him assassinated. Presumably, the impostor did not know about that part of the plan.

This was not making full use of a valuable resource.  Having secured an imposter, the spies could have attacked their problem from two angles.  While torturing the real Van Meer to find out what was in the clause, the imposter could have engaged the Belgian diplomat in a conversation about Clause 27, expressing doubts and asking for reassurances.  Alternatively, he could have told the Belgian diplomat that he changed his mind and would no longer honor that clause.

In any event, this is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes.  Just as Miss Froy, who knows the vital clause of a secret treaty between two countries, disappears and is replaced by a woman that looks like her in that movie; so too in this movie does Van Meer know of a secret clause in a treaty between two countries, and he disappears and is replaced by a substitute.  In each movie, the protagonist knows that a real person had been replaced by a substitute, but has trouble convincing others of this.  In each movie, someone who says he believes the protagonist turns out to be an enemy spy, in whom the protagonist puts his or her trust, thereby putting him or her in danger of being killed by the spy.

Back to the movie at hand.  If the world thinks Van Meer has been assassinated, then that means that as far as everyone else is concerned, only the Belgian diplomat knows what is in Clause 27. Van Meer might have trusted this other fellow, but can we expect the country he represented to honor a secret clause whose content is known only to the diplomat of the other country and take his word for it? So, with Van Meer’s faked assassination, it would seem that the clause has just become worthless.

Moving right along, if I had been Van Meer and the spies started torturing me to tell what was in Clause 27, I would have just made up something. After all, it’s a secret, so how would the spies have known the difference?

But enough of this. Clause 27 is obviously what Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin,” something the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care.  But a MacGuffin should meet some minimum standard of believability.  Personally, I found the whole business about Clause 27 to be palpably absurd, to the point that I found it distracting.  While I was supposed to be enjoying all the danger and intrigue—Jones sneaking around in the windmill, someone falling from a cathedral, the spies torturing Van Meer—I kept being bothered by the nagging thought that there is no way Van Meer and his secret clause could have prevented war.  We had no trouble believing that the vital clause in The Lady Vanishes was important, and for three reasons:  World War II had not yet begun; it was left to our imagination which two countries had agreed to that clause; and the clause was not supposed to prevent war, but merely be an important piece of intelligence as war became more likely.  Foreign Correspondent was released after the war had already begun, which means after Germany had already invaded Poland. What possible agreement between the Netherlands and Belgium could have prevented that?

When Jones discovers Van Meer in the windmill, the diplomat has been drugged and can hardly think.  But he manages to tell Jones, “All that I can tell you is that they are going to take me away by plane like a bird. Always there are places in the city where birds can get crumbs.”  Once again, Jones is frustrated by all this talk of birds.  In any event, Jones cannot rescue Van Meer while the spies are still in the windmill, and soon after, Van Meer disappears again.

Fisher, the leader of that pacifist organization, actually turns out to be a spy, and is the one that arranged the kidnapping. You just can’t trust those peaceniks.  This makes things difficult for Jones and Carol.  When they first meet, he makes a derogatory remark about “well-meaning amateurs” that think a pacifist organization can prevent war.  She bristles, noting that these well-meaning amateurs will be doing the fighting if there is war.  This gets them off to a bad start.  Later, when Jones realizes that Fisher is a spy, he doesn’t want to believe Carol is part the spy ring, and she is reluctant to believe anything bad about her father.

A day arrives in which both ffolliott and Jones say that war is going to break out “tomorrow,” and we learn from Fisher that England has already started with the blackouts.  Earlier, we were supposed to believe that if Van Meer remained alive with his knowledge of Clause 27, war might be prevented. But now that war is inevitable, the significance of Clause 27 has changed.  Now we are supposed to believe that knowledge of this clause will help Germany win that war, if the spies can find out what it is.

The spies take Van Meer to a room above a restaurant where they start torturing him. Fisher arrives and pretends to be his friend, trying to get him to tell about the clause. When Van Meer finds out that Fisher is a spy as well, he says to all of them:

You can do what you want with me.  That’s not important.  But you’ll never conquer them, Fisher.  Little people everywhere, who give crumbs to birds.  Lie to them. Drive them, whip them, force them into war.  When the beasts like you will devour each other, then the world will belong to the little people.

The little people that feed the birds!  What is this, a Frank Capra movie?  But this was the implication of Miss Froy’s remark in The Lady Vanishes, when she said you can’t judge a country by its government, that it’s the ordinary people that are important. This praise of the little people, taken in conjunction with Powers’ anti-intellectual attitude and his approval of the way Jones beat up a policeman, shows that both movies share a populist ideology, although it’s more pronounced in this one.

A few minutes earlier, ffolliott was caught snooping around and brought into the room at gunpoint. He watches as the spies finally inflict some method of torture on Van Meer so gruesome that we are not allowed to see what it is, but only see the faces of ffolliott and the woman holding a gun on him as they react in horror.  Van Meer agrees to talk. He says, “In the event of invasion by an enemy….” At that point, ffolliott starts scuffling with the spies, and then jumps out the window.  Figuring the jig is up, the spies take off.  Van Meer is rescued, but falls into a coma.

War does break out the next day.  Fisher decides to leave England and fly to America, taking Carol with him.  Jones and ffolliott also get themselves a seat on that plane. However, the plane is damaged when it is fired on by a German destroyer. Immediately, the captain of she ship sends a message to the radioman, who tells the pilot, “It’s the Germans. They’re sorry.  They thought we were a bomber. She’ll rescue us straight-away.”

That certainly is sporting of them.  You can tell that this is early in the war.  In a later Hitchcock movie, Lifeboat (1944), after a U-boat torpedoes a merchant ship, the captain orders the lifeboats to be fired on before the submarine itself is sunk in return. I guess by that time the hatred of the Germans had reached the point where an audience was not ready to accept decent behavior on the part of a German captain, and would be willing to believe nothing but the worst about him.

The plane crashes into the ocean.  Many scramble onto a wing of the plane, but when it proves unable to support everybody, Fisher redeems himself by getting off and drowning.  Maybe.  While Fisher was on the plane, Van Meer had recovered, telling Stebbins that Fisher was a spy.  Fisher had intercepted a telegram, intended for ffolliott, saying that Fisher was to be arrested when he arrives in America. Knowing that he probably would be executed for espionage, he may have just been looking for an easy way out.

This is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes.  In neither movie is the pacifist an upright, moral character who just happens to be misguided in his beliefs.  Rather, he is depicted in both movies as unsavory.  Not content to portray pacifism as merely naïve or imprudent, these movies vilify it. In The Lady Vanishes, the pacifist is a cad, an adulterer who promised the woman he was having an affair with that they would get married, but changed his mind when he realized a divorce would hurt his career.  In Foreign Correspondent, the pacifist is not really interested in peace, but working with the enemy to help them win the upcoming war.  And as punishment, both pacifists die in the end.

Jones manages to get his story back to the states.  Unfortunately, Jones is never able to file a report on what Clause 27 said, or explain why it mattered. Perhaps it was an agreement as to how the Dutch and the Belgians planned to divide up Europe after the war.

Anyway, he returns to England, continuing to be a great foreign correspondent, sending important stories back to his newspaper, under the name of Huntley Haverstock.  In the final scene, he is making a live broadcast over the radio when the bombs start falling all around them, causing the lights to go out. Instead of taking shelter, he continues to broadcast fearlessly, Carol remaining by his side, as he refers to the lights literally as well as metaphorically:

I can’t read the rest of my speech because the lights went out.  So I’ll have to talk off the cuff.  That noise you hear isn’t static.  It’s death coming to London.  You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes.  Don’t tune me out.  Hang on.  This is a big story. You’re part of it.  It’s too late to do anything here except stand in the dark, let them come.  It’s as if the lights were out everywhere except in America. Keep those lights burning.  Cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them.  Hello, America, hang onto your lights.  They’re the only lights left in the world.

The speech, of course, is intended to rouse America from its complacency and pacifism as we hear “The Star Spangled Banner” being played in the background.  But I would have given anything for ffolliott to walk in at that point, saying, “You realize, of course, that without electricity, the microphone stopped working when the lights went out.”

The Searchers (1956)

When The Searchers begins, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his home in Texas in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, in which Ethan fought on the side of the South.  Because the idea of returning home has a connotation of reconciliation, acceptance, and even resignation, the three years delay in Ethan’s return suggests that none of those things apply to him.  And indeed, the grim look on his face as he is greeted by his brother Aaron tells us that this is far from being a happy homecoming.

One thing Ethan is definitely not reconciled to is the defeat of the South, as we learn from a conversation he later has with Reverend Sam Clayton (Ward Bond), who was a captain during the war and now is a captain of the Texas Rangers.  Clayton says he didn’t see Ethan at the surrender, to which Ethan replies, “Don’t believe in surrenders.  Nope, I still got my saber, Reverend.  Didn’t turn it into no plowshare neither.”  From further conversation, we gather that Ethan has been something of an outlaw since the war ended.

We are all familiar with the apologetic interpretations of the Civil War, how it was all about state’s rights and only incidentally about slavery, as if the war might just as easily have been fought over the rights of the states concerning eminent domain.  But not only would the war not have been fought had the issue not been one of slavery, we can go one step further:  there would have been no war had the slaves been white.  In that case, slavery would have been phased out peacefully.  But prejudice against the black race was even more fundamental than that of slavery per se.  And that, in all likelihood, is the main reason Ethan cannot be reconciled to the defeat of the South.

Ethan’s racism against the black race, however, never explicitly comes up in this movie, but his animosity toward the red race certainly does.  After becoming reacquainted with Aaron’s family, including Aaron’s wife Martha, their son Ben, and their two daughters, Lucy and Debbie, they all sit down to dinner.  Then Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) arrives, and the look on Ethan’s face is one of hostility.  “Fellow could mistake you for a half-breed,” Ethan says, though Martin replies that he is only one-eighth Cherokee.  We find out that Aaron’s family took Martin in as a baby when he was discovered by Ethan after Martin’s family had been massacred by Indians.

As is typical of racism generally, it is not the other race as such that incurs the most animosity, but the idea of miscegenation and the offspring it produces, both of which are regarded as abominations.  That Ethan’s ire can be aroused by as little as one-eighth “Indian blood” speaks to the degree to which this bothers him.

It is the next day that the aforementioned Reverend Clayton shows up at Aaron’s house, gathering up a posse to go after whoever it was that rustled some cows belonging to Lars Jorgensen.  Aaron starts to go with Clayton, but Ethan says he’ll go instead, telling Aaron to stay close to home, since it might be Comanches that took the cows.  It turns out that not only was it Comanches, but stealing the cows was only a ruse to get them away from the settlement.  When they get back, they find that it is Aaron’s family that has been attacked, the Comanches raping and killing Martha, killing Aaron and Ben, and abducting the two daughters, Lucy and Debbie.

After the funeral for the family, the same posse sets out after the Comanches, but most of them return, leaving only Ethan, Martin, and Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.), who is in love with Lucy, to carry on.  After Lucy is found dead, Brad gets himself killed charging into the Comanche camp alone.  From then on, it’s just Ethan and Martin that continue looking for Debbie.  As the years pass, it becomes clear to Ethan that Debbie (Natalie Wood) is old enough to be raped by her captors, and the idea of miscegenation bothers him so much that he is determined to kill her.  Martin, on the other hand, is determined to stop him from doing so.

This frustrates Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles), who has been impatiently waiting for Martin to marry her, and who almost marries someone else, until Ethan and Martin return home briefly, interrupting the wedding.  They had met with Scar and found out that Debbie is now one of his squaws.  She seems to have adjusted to living with the Comanches, who she says are her people now.  This surprises us, because Ethan and Martin had earlier visited an army outpost where there were some rescued captive girls.  They were beyond traumatized, either screaming or laughing maniacally.  Why the difference?

I can think of only two reasons, which have more to do with movie logic than with reality.  The three girls at the outpost were all blondes, whereas Debbie is a brunette.  Her dark aspect makes the difference between her and the Indians less stark than between those same Indians and girls that are blondes, who are extra white, as it were.  Therefore, according to the thinking of those who made this movie, Debbie could tolerate being raped better than those blond girls could.  The second reason is Debbie’s religious status.  Early in the movie, Clayton asked Debbie if she had been baptized, and she replied that she had not, despite the fact that she was about nine years old.  I suppose the idea is that technically she is not a Christian yet, but still a heathen.  Hence, according to the thinking of those who made this movie, her being raped by Scar, who is also a heathen, does not constitute the outrage that it would were she officially a Christian.  I know that seems like a stretch, but why go to the trouble to put that conversation about baptism into the movie if it wasn’t intended to have any significance?

In any event, Martin tells Laurie he has to go with Ethan to get Debbie back, because Ethan tried to kill her the last time they saw her.  We expect Laurie to understand, but when Martin says he has to fetch Debbie home, she responds with a vehemence that almost exceeds that of Ethan:  “Fetch what home?  The leavings of Comanche bucks, sold to the highest bidder, with brats of her own?”  When Martin says that Ethan will put a bullet in Debbie’s brain if he is not there to stop him, she replies that Martha would have wanted Ethan to do that.

But when they finally rescue Debbie, Ethan relents, and he and Martin take her back home to live with the Jorgensens.  Martin and Laurie will marry.  Ethan leaves, never to return.

In most movies, what you see is what you get. Everything of significance is either depicted visually or is revealed to us through dialogue or narration. This is especially so in Westerns, which tend to have simpler plots and less complicated characters.   But The Searchers is an exception, for there seems to be much in this movie of significance that is concealed from us. And just as the idea of searching consists of looking for something, of wanting to see what cannot presently be seen, so too is wanting to see and not being able to see a recurring theme of this movie.

For example, Ethan will not let Martin see the results of the massacre; Ethan shoots two bullets into the eyes of a dead Comanche so he will wander forever without being able to find his Happy Hunting Ground; when Brad wants to know if Lucy had been raped, Ethan yells, “Do I have to draw you a picture?”; and Martin accidentally gets himself a squaw, whom he inadvertently nicknames “Look.”

But there are things we do not get to see in a more figurative sense, as when we use the word “see” to mean “understand.” We keep getting the sense that there is more to this story than the movie is telling us, at least explicitly, for it does leave us some tantalizing clues. For example, it is peculiar that an Indian hater like Ethan would be able to speak Comanche. It is not as though when he was in high school, he might have opted to take a course in Comanche instead of Latin. We might have accepted his ability to speak the language of the Comanches without supposing it to have any special significance were it not for the emphasis it is given toward the end of the movie.  When Ethan is speaking to Scar (Henry Brandon), the Comanche chief that abducted Debbie, Ethan comments that Scar’s English is pretty good, pointedly asking, “Did someone teach you?” implying that he learned it from Debbie.  A little later, Scar replies, “You speak pretty good Comanche. Someone teach you?”  This symmetry of comments suggests that Ethan might once have been married to a Comanche woman, from whom he learned the language, before the murder (and presumed rape) of his mother turned him into an Indian hater. His hatred for miscegenation might then be explained by the revulsion he feels for having been guilty of it himself.

Early in the movie, when Ethan first arrives at his brother’s ranch, it quickly becomes clear that Martha is in love with Ethan.  Presumably Ethan feels the same way about her, but whereas she is obvious about it, we would never suspect anything just from watching or listening to Ethan.  At first we are not sure if the characters in the movie pick up on Martha’s behavior, or whether it is only those of us watching the movie who are supposed to notice it.  However, when Clayton sees Martha stroking Ethan’s coat and gives a knowing look, we realize that Martha is being obvious to everyone, as people in love often are.  And that means it is obvious to her husband.

The first time I saw this movie, I figured that Martha and Ethan had once been in love, but that Ethan was not ready to get married and settle down, and so she married Aaron on the rebound, which she soon came to regret. In most movies, there would eventually have been a scene in which their past relationship would have been made explicit, but we never get such a scene in this movie, because Aaron and Martha are massacred by the Comanches early on, and the relationship between Ethan and Martha is never even alluded to after that.

The second time I watched this movie, I noticed that Aaron is hostile to Ethan. When Ethan asks about a deserted ranch that he saw on his way in, Aaron says that the people who lived there decided to clear out and went back to chopping cotton. Then Aaron says that before the war, when Ethan had his own ranch, he could see that Ethan wanted to clear out too, and he asks him why he didn’t (implying that Ethan should clear out right now). Martha expresses dismay and Ethan takes offense.

Now, if we assume that Ethan had once been in love with Martha, who then married Aaron, it would be strange that he would stick around if he also was tired of trying to make a living on his ranch. He would then have had two reasons for clearing out, for it can be downright unpleasant to see the woman you love married to another man, especially your own brother. But if, on the other hand, Ethan and Martha fell in love after she married Aaron, and they started having an affair, then his sticking around would make perfectly good sense. And Aaron, suspecting as much, would naturally feel animosity toward Ethan.

And once we accept the idea that Ethan and Martha had an affair, the next thing that occurs to us is that Debbie might be his daughter and not just his niece, for she is just the right age to have been conceived before he left for the war. The idea that Ethan wanted to kill Debbie because she had been defiled by the Indians was already bad enough when we thought she was his niece. Once we accept the idea that Debbie is his daughter, the tone of the movie really becomes dark.

When it is just Ethan, Martin, and Brad searching for Lucy and Debbie, they come across some tracks going off into a canyon.  Ethan says he will check it out. This is followed by what seems to be an unnecessary conversation about firing a shot as a signal as to where Brad and Martin will be, wherein Ethan responds that they have to be quiet, and he will meet them on the other side. When Ethan catches up with them again, he sits on the ground and compulsively digs his knife into the dirt several times.  Later, we learn that he found Lucy in the canyon, and that she had been raped. Now, if Ethan is determined to kill Debbie because she has been defiled, then we have to acknowledge the possibility that Ethan found Lucy alive and killed her for the same reason. If we grant that interpretation, then that explains the conversation about not making noise. Because he could not risk firing a shot, Ethan would have had to kill Lucy with his knife. And his digging the knife into the dirt could be explained as an obsessive desire to clean the blood off it, much in the way Lady Macbeth obsessively tries to wash the blood off her hands, despite the fact that they are clean.  This is further confirmed by the fact that after finding Lucy, Ethan seems far more upset than he was upon finding Martha’s body after she was raped and killed.

In other words, it is possible to interpret this movie in a way that makes it more disturbing than it already is, but such an interpretation could not be made explicit, owing to the Production Code in force at that time. But then, this movie could not be made at all today, because years ago all the Indians in the movies were replaced by Native Americans, and they never rape anyone.

Goldfinger (1964)

The first half of Goldfinger, the third movie in the James Bond franchise, is great. In fact, the first five minutes is great, even if it does not seem to have much to do with the rest of the movie. But following that opening scene, Bond (Sean Connery) is assigned to investigate Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe). He is a jeweler who buys gold legally, most of it in England, and then ships it to another country like Pakistan where he sells it for three to four times the price he paid for it. This is the great crime that requires the attention of England’s best secret agent?

Later, Bond finds out about Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger’s plan to nuke Fort Knox, destroying the gold, and causing his own horde of the metal to skyrocket in value. Quite by accident, then, Bond’s being assigned to investigate Goldfinger turns out to be appropriate, even if serendipitously so.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) gives Bond the famous Aston Martin with the machine guns, ejector seat, and much more, but even so, he eventually is captured by Goldfinger. The laser that almost cuts Bond in half also cuts the movie in half, the first part making it half of the greatest Bond movie ever made. Then comes the second half of the movie, the point at which it starts being silly, when Bond wakes up on the plane and a woman introduces herself as Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). In fact, this is the point at which the whole Bond franchise starts being silly, with subsequent Bond movies becoming bloated with girls, gadgets, and wisecracks, on the principle that if some is good, then more is better.

Suspicion (1941)

Murder is a dreadful thing.  In real life, that is.  But in a movie, a murder can save us from something dreadful.

For example, in the movie Kalifornia (1993), a couple, played by David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes, decide go to California, but they are a little short on funds, so they advertise for a couple to ride with them and share the expenses.  Answering the ad is a low-class couple, played by Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis.  The trip becomes a most unpleasant experience, and Forbes especially can’t wait for it to end.  But then Lewis tells her that she and Duchovny are their best friends, threatening to be a part of their lives forever.

Fortunately, the movie provides a way out from this dreadful situation.  Brad Pitt turns out to be a serial killer, resulting in a succession of purgative murders, the last of which is Lewis herself, before Duchovny finally kills him.  Now Duchovny and Forbes will never have to socialize with Pitt and Lewis again.

In Play Misty for Me (1971), Clint Eastwood play a disc jockey that thinks he is going to have an uncomplicated fling with a fan played by Jessica Walter.  She says she understands that he already has someone else and does not want to complicate his life, but that is no reason they can’t sleep together if they feel like it.  But sex does strange things to people, and the next thing you know, Walter is madly in love with Eastwood.  Worse, she assumes that he feels the same way about her, completely forgetting about the assurances she gave him on the first night.  When he protests that he never told her that he loved her, she responds that there are ways of saying things that don’t involve words.  When he tries to break off with her, she becomes suicidal.  It looks as though he will never be free of her.

Fortunately for Eastwood, Walter becomes a knife-wielding psycho, who kills a police detective and threatens to kill Eastwood’s actual girlfriend.  In the nick of time, Eastwood shows up at his girlfriend’s house where he is attacked by Walter.  In self-defense, he punches her, knocking her through a glass door, over a balcony railing, and down a cliff to her death.  Now he is finally free of her.

Think how unbearable these two movies would have been without murder to save the day!

In Suspicion, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1941, Lina (Joan Fontaine), a woman on the verge of being an old maid, falls in love with Johnnie (Cary Grant) and marries him without knowing anything about him. That she did not know he was a congenital liar, a compulsive gambler, and a thief until after she married him might be understandable, although there were rumors that he cheated at cards and was the corespondent in a divorce case; but that she did not even know that he had no job nor any intention of getting one is ludicrous. Soon she begins to suspect that he murdered his friend Beaky (Nigel Bruce) to get his money and that he will try to murder her for the same reason, especially when he brings her a glass of milk right after an author of detective novels has told him of a poison that is in every home and is undetectable. In the last reel, we have one of those unbelievable character changes for which Hollywood movies are notorious, in which Johnnie realizes how bad he has been and is prepared to go to prison for his financial misdeeds, after having given up on the idea of committing suicide. And when Lina realizes that Johnnie is not a murderer, the way is open to them to live happily ever after.

This might have been three different movies besides the one actually produced.  In what could have been a great movie, Johnnie does murder Beaky, and he does give Lina a glass of milk with poison in it. She suspects as much, but she drinks it anyway because, if it does have poison in it, then that means Johnnie does not love her, so she does not want to live anymore. But before she does, she gives Johnnie a letter to mail for her, in which she includes incriminating evidence that Johnnie is a murderer. After Lina dies from the poison, Johnnie smugly drops the letter in a mailbox and walks away whistling, not realizing that he has sealed his doom. There is some debate as to whether this is the ending Hitchcock wanted, but that the studio imposed a happy ending instead, or Hitchcock intended all along to make the movie be about a neurotic woman’s overwrought imagination. It doesn’t matter who wanted what. This would have been a much better movie, because there would have been actual murders instead of just the possibility of murder.

The second movie that might have been would have had the same ending as the novel on which it is based, Before the Fact by Francis Iles.  In this version, similar to the previous one, Lina knows the milk is poisoned, but she drinks it anyway because she does not want to live, once she realizes that Johnnie would want to kill her, making her an accomplice before the fact to her own murder.  But there is no incriminating letter.  She loves Johnnie so much that she hopes he will get away with it, and even imagines that he will miss her when she’s gone.

I can’t help but think that the novel is an expression of misogyny arising out of resentment.  It is not uncommon for a plain, ordinary man to find himself longing for the love a woman who has given herself completely to some jerk that is unworthy of her affection.  It exasperates him that he would be so nice to her, but she would rather be mistreated by this other guy just because he is charming, good-looking, and tall.  In reading this novel, this forlorn fellow will have no doubt that if Lina is in danger of being an old maid, it is only because it would never even occur to her to accept the love of someone like him.  In fact, in the movie that was actually produced, there is just such a character.  At a ball that Lina attends, only because she expects to see Johnnie there, a homely, bald-headed man named Reggie, who is just barely an inch taller than Lina, reminds her of the dance she promised him, presumably having filled in his name on her dance card just a short time ago.  She apologizes for having forgotten, saying, “Why, of course.  Poor Reggie.”  As she dances with him, she is clearly distracted, looking around the room, wondering where Johnnie is.  When Johnnie does arrive, just as the dance has ended, Lina sees him and rushes away from Reggie without saying a word, leaving him standing there with a bewildered look on his face.  As Lina comes up to Johnnie, who has just crashed the party, he takes her in his arms and starts dancing with her.  As they swirl away to a Viennese waltz, a rejected Reggie sees the glow on Lina’s face and the excitement in her eyes, something he certainly never saw when she was dancing with him.  In short, Lina would rather be murdered by the man she loves than be loved by someone like Reggie that she can’t be bothered with. In reading this novel, a man of that sort may get an imaginary revenge against that girl he loved when he was young, but who never knew (or cared) that he existed.

The third movie that might have been would have been one in which there is neither a murder nor suspicion of murder (requiring a different title, of course). It is a movie that would have been unendurable. There would have been no relief from the fact that Johnnie has married Lina for her money and is annoyed to find out it does not amount to as much as he thought it would, especially when her father dies and does not leave her anything more than her usual allowance. We would have been left with Lina’s being married to a compulsive liar, who hocks her beloved chairs so he can bet on the horses; who believes he was not meant to have to work for a living, and when forced to take a job managing an estate, soon gets caught embezzling funds; and who cons Beaky into investing in a real estate venture that we know will only result in losing money as Johnnie squanders the investment on loose living. And there would have been no relief from the fact that Lina will continue to put up with this because she loves Johnnie.

In other words, we need at least the possibility of murder to be introduced halfway into the movie as a way of making us forget about what a horrible marriage this is. That Johnnie is a despicable human being even if he is not a murderer goes without saying. But there is something irritating about Lina as well, what with all her mewing about love as she puts up with Johnnie’s abuse. Finally, Beaky’s attitude toward Johnnie, that we must all forgive everything that Johnnie does, because, well, that’s just the way Johnnie is, is also annoying.  They all deserve to die.

Therefore, we have four versions of this movie, one actual, three possible.  The one in which there are two murders, the one that should have been made, would have been a great movie; the one in which there is only one murder, as in the novel, might have provided for the venting of some misogynistic spleen; the one in which there is only the suspicion of murder, the movie that was actually produced, is only fair; but the one in which there is not even the possibility of murder, just a miserable marriage, would have been dreadful.

 

 

From Russia with Love (1963)

With this second installment in the franchise, From Russia with Love, James Bond (Sean Connery) receives his first gadget: a black, rectangular attaché case filled with all sorts of neat stuff, none of which seems to be especially fantastic, as would often be the case in some of the later films.  Where the movie does diverge radically from reality is in the fact that the Soviet Union knows what he looks like, and yet Bond is still being sent out into the field as a secret agent. In fact, when the movie starts, we see some guy running around in a James Bond mask at a training camp where they practice killing James Bond.  Whereas in Dr. No. (1962), Bond was at pains to keep from being photographed, in this movie, MI6 gets information that a female Soviet agent, Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), having seen his photograph, has fallen in love with him and wants to defect, bringing with her a Lektor cryptographic device. In real life, once a spy’s identity and face is known, he is reduced to having a desk job from then on, but not so in the Bond franchise.

And this was just the beginning. As future Bond movies were made, he began to acquire superstar fame, so that all the world had heard of him and his ability to turn female enemy agents by having sex with them. In Thunderball (1965), a female spy speaks derisively of Bond’s talents in this regard, having just sampled them herself:  “James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing.  She repents and immediately returns to the side of right and virtue.  But not this one.  What a blow it must have been, you having a failure.”  Apparently, the producers of the movies figured that since everyone in the audience would already know who James Bond is, then the same would have to be true for the characters in the movies, especially the women.  Of course, just because the whole world knows who James Bond is, that doesn’t mean his name can be used back at the office, where he is still referred to as agent 007.

Bond’s lovemaking does appear to be transformative.  At one point in this movie, he ends up at a gypsy camp where two beautiful women want to kill each other on account of their both being in love with the same man.  They are in the middle of a vicious fight, possibly to the death, when the camp is invaded by some Bulgars with whom the gypsies have a blood feud.  In the ensuing battle, Bond saves the gypsy leader’s life.  As a return for the favor, Bond asks that the fight between the women be stopped.  Well, there is only one way to do that.  The two women are brought to his tent where Bond makes love to them both, curing them of their passion for what’s-his-name.

In the novel, it was the Russian agency SMERSH that Bond had to contend with, but here it is actually SPECTRE, a terrorist organization first introduced in the movie Dr. No. Ian Fleming said he recommended this change from SMERSH to SPECTRE in making Dr. No, because he was afraid that by the time the movie was released, the Cold War would be over, and the movie would seem dated.  Who does he think he’s kidding?  Nobody had any sense that peace was about to break out.  In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in the very month that Dr. No was released.  On the contrary, these films were made while the Cold War was still going strong, when Russians were still thought to be utterly evil, and so it seems strange that the movie would pull its punches in this way and make a terrorist organization be Bond’s nemesis instead.

I suspect capitalism is the answer. By not offending the Soviets, the movies could be shown in Russia and in any other country under their influence, thereby increasing the profitability of the franchise.  If I am right in my surmise, then it might be asked why Fleming did not just go ahead and say this was his reason for suggesting the change.  Well, how would it look for the author of James Bond novels to admit that he was willing to knuckle under to the Soviets for mere money?

The head of SPECTRE is referred to as “Number 1,” whom we see petting a cat.  As we know from later movies, a cat is the attribute of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  His chief strategist is chess champion Kronsteen, who comes up with the plan to get possession of the Lektor after Bond steals it from Russia with the help of Tatiana. The plan has already been alluded to above, except that Tatiana has not really fallen in love with Bond’s photograph.  She only pretends to do so, believing she has been so ordered by a Soviet Colonel, Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya), who actually has defected to SPECTRE.

During the interview in which Tatiana receives her instructions, Klebb starts caressing her, telling Tatiana that she must do as she is told or face death.  The scene is meant to be disturbing, but not because Klebb is going to make Tatiana have sex with her.  Forcing a woman to have sex in these early Bond films was represented as being perfectly acceptable.  In Goldfinger (1964), Bond gives Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) the rape she needs, causing her to abandon her villainous partnership with the title character.  In Thunderball, Bond threatens a physical therapist with the loss of her job if she does not have sex with him, and we are supposed to approve of his doing so.

Nor is it the fact that Klebb is a lesbian that is supposed to make us uncomfortable.  Although audiences in the 1960s were not as accepting of homosexuality as they are today, even back then the scene would not have bothered people had Klebb been a beautiful woman like Tatiana.  Instead, it would have been titillating.  Heterosexual men have always enjoyed having at least one lesbian sex scene in their pornographic movies, because then they get to look at two beautiful naked women at the same time.  Rather, it is the fact that Klebb is ugly that makes us squirm.  Fortunately, the movie fades out at this point, so we don’t have to look at Klebb getting her ugly all over Tatiana.

The plan works pretty well, up to a point, but Bond ultimately foils it. Klebb had enlisted Grant (Robert Shaw), one of those guys on SPECTRE Island that had been killing men wearing James Bond masks, figuring he was the man for the job.  Bond had not spent any time practicing on men who wear masks looking like Grant, so he was at a disadvantage, but he managed to kill him anyway and bring the Lektor from Istanbul to Venice, along with Tatiana, who by this time has genuinely fallen in love with Bond and wants to defect to the West.

Now, it should not be surprising that a spy of Bond’s caliber might triumph. After all, even a world chess champion will lose a game occasionally. The thing for Blofeld to do would be to get Kronsteen started on plan B. But no, we find out that SPECTRE does not tolerate failure, the penalty for which is death. And so, Kronsteen is put to death by one of Blofeld’s henchmen, who sticks him with a poison-tipped stiletto that flips out from the toe of his shoe. This raises the question, who would work for these people? A Russian chess champion would be able to live pretty well by simply playing chess, even if he did make a mistake once in a while. What would he have to gain by joining up with an organization in which mistakes warrant the death penalty? Of course, the point is to convey to the audience just how ruthless SPECTRE is. But there is a difference between being ruthless and being ridiculous.

Anyway, after Kronsteen’s execution, Klebb follows Bond and Tatiana to Venice, where she almost kills Bond with her own pair of poison-tipped stiletto shoes.  Tatiana saves Bond by shooting Klebb, but one might ask if that was necessary.  All Bond had to do was have sex with Klebb, and that would have made her want to start working for MI6, and it would have cured her of being a lesbian as well, as it did with Pussy Galore in the novel Goldfinger.  It would not have cured her of being ugly, however, and in a Bond movie, the penalty for that is death.

Despite the flaws, this is still one of the best Bond movies ever made.

Vertigo (1958)

Unless a movie is a fantasy, like The Wizard of Oz (1939), people tend to feel they have been deceived if they find out that most of a movie has just been a dream.  To keep the audience from feeling cheated in this way, some movies will be ambiguous as to whether what we are seeing is reality or a dream, and this is the case with Vertigo.

The movie begins with a close-up of a woman’s face. The camera moves in even closer on her eye, in which we begin to see swirling animation along with the opening credits. Moving into her eye suggests that we have moved into her subjective state, allowing us to see what she is imagining or remembering. And the animation is a further indication that what we are seeing is not real. One might be justified, even at this early stage, in wondering if the movie that follows is a woman’s dream.

After the credits, the movie jumps right into a chase sequence on the rooftops of tall buildings, when police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) slips and finds himself hanging from the gutter above the city street below, which causes him to have vertigo. A uniformed policeman tries to pull him to safety, but slips and falls to his death. When the scene ends, Ferguson is still hanging there, and we do not see him being rescued, nor is there any reference to his being rescued afterward, leading some critics to argue that the rest of the movie is his hallucinatory dream while he remains suspended.  However, my preferred point at which this movie becomes a dream is in neither of these two scenes, but comes somewhat later.

Presumably, then, Ferguson is rescued, but he is forced to retire on account of the acrophobia resulting from the incident on the rooftop.  In a subsequent scene, we meet Midge. In her conversation with Ferguson, whom she calls “Johnny” or “Johnny O,” we find out that they were engaged for three weeks while they were in college, but that she broke off the engagement, even though she says that she never married because he is the only man for her. From the surreptitious glances she gives him as they talk, we suspect there is more to the story than Ferguson is aware of. Barbara Bel Geddes, who plays Midge, is a nice looking woman, but she has no sex appeal. We can easily believe that she broke off the engagement when she realized that he had no passion for her. Platonic relationships are often characterized by saying that the man and woman are like brother and sister, but several remarks suggest that she is more like a mother to him. This implies that there is something naïve and inexperienced about Ferguson, as when they talk about braziers, and she says, “You know about those things. You’re a big boy now.”  Ferguson is a middle-aged bachelor. Today, a man who has been a lifelong bachelor would be assumed to have had sexual relationships along the way. But in 1958, when this movie was made, it was not uncommon for bachelors to be virgins, and that is probably the case with Ferguson.  This makes it easy to believe that he might become madly and obsessively in love with Madeleine (Kim Novak) later on in the movie.

This Madeleine with whom he eventually falls in love is the wife of an old friend, Gavin Elster, who asks Ferguson to follow her around. He is worried about her because she goes into dream-like trances, which he believes have something to do with her obsession with her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide.  Ferguson reluctantly agrees to follow her.  When Madeleine tries to drown herself in the bay, he rescues her.  Eventually, however, she manages to kill herself by leaping from a bell tower.  Ferguson was unable to stop her because his vertigo prevented him from keeping up with her as she ascended the stairs.  He feels responsible, and he ends up having nightmares, in which he sees himself falling the way Madeleine did. As a result, he winds up in a mental institution, in a catatonic state.

Supposedly, he gets out of the mental institution, discovers a woman named Judy, who looks like Madeleine, and begins trying to make the resemblance even greater by getting her to dye her hair and wear it like Madeleine, to dress like Madeleine, until he eventually discovers she really is Madeleine. Or rather, that the real Madeleine was murdered by her husband, and that Judy helped him do it by pretending to be Madeleine. When Judy got to the top of the bell tower, Elster was already there with his dead wife, whom he threw off the tower.  In the process of discovering that this is what really happened, Ferguson forces Judy to go back to the mission with him and once again ascend the stairs of the bell tower.  This leads to a climactic scene in which Judy accidentally falls to her death, which apparently cures Ferguson of his vertigo.

Though the movie can be understood realistically in this way, there is a good reason to suspect that the second half is just a dream. In any movie you have ever seen in which someone is in a hospital, there is almost always a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene, as in The Glass Key (1942), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Godfather (1972). But there is no such scene in this movie. And considering that Ferguson was in a psychotic state, the need for a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene would be even greater than in the examples just given, where only physical conditions were involved.

Instead, we get a discontinuous transition.  We see Midge in Ferguson’s hospital room, where he is staring off into space, oblivious to her presence.  She leaves the room and stops by the psychiatrist’s office, where she tells him that she does not think Ferguson is ever coming back.  Then she walks away, down the hall, where darkness slowly closes in around her, almost as if this were the end of the movie.  Suddenly, we see Ferguson outside the building where Madeleine once lived, and the fact that he had once been under the care of psychiatrists is never even referred to during the rest of the movie.

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed this movie, could have made it explicit that what follows is a dream by the well-known method of closing in on James Stewart’s eyes, allowing the image of his eyes to be slowly replaced by an overlapping image of Stewart standing outside Madeleine’s apartment.  But, as noted above, the audience would have lost its patience having to watch the entire second half of the movie while knowing it was just a dream.  Instead, Hitchcock allows us to watch the movie under the assumption that the entire movie depicts events that are actually happening, while at the same time giving us hints that at least some of the movie is a dream:  the closeup on the eye of a woman (Madeleine? Judy?) during the opening credits; Ferguson’s hanging from the gutter without being rescued; Madeleine’s dream-like trances; Ferguson’s nightmares; and the absence of any scene showing us that he has recovered from his catatonic trance and is being released from the hospital.

Other than Vertigo, there is one other movie in which there is no getting-out-of-the-hospital scene.  In the movie Four Daughters (1938), John Garfield plays a character who dies in a hospital.  But in the remake, Young at Heart (1954), Frank Sinatra, who played the corresponding character, Barney Sloan, did not like the unhappy ending, and so he insisted that Barney live instead.  The result is a tacked-on happy ending, in which Barney goes from dying in the hospital to suddenly being home and in great health.  Whether intended or not, one cannot help but interpret this final scene as Barney’s wishful dream in the hospital in the last moments of his life.  And considering that Barney had been gloomy and miserable throughout the movie, the fact that the final scene shows him playing the piano, happy and content, even further invites the dream interpretation.

In any event, by regarding the second half of Vertigo as a dream, the movie as a whole becomes more realistic. The murder plot revealed in the second half is far-fetched and would have been extremely difficult to arrange. Elster would have had to get his wife to wear the same clothes that Judy was wearing that night, find some reason to get her up to the bell tower, break her neck, and then wait for Judy to arrive before throwing the real Madeleine out of the tower.  And then he would have to hope that Ferguson would not look at the body and discover that it was a different woman.  There are easier ways for a man to get rid of his wife than that. The idea that Madeleine was mentally unbalanced, had found out about her great-grandmother and become obsessed with her story, leading her to commit suicide, is much easier to believe.

Furthermore, the Judy of the second half of the movie appears to be lower class, whereas the Madeleine of the first half strikes us as middle class.  We would have to believe that Elster was like Professor Higgins to Judy’s Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady (1964), but that once the murder was accomplished and Judy was abandoned by him, she lapsed back into her lower-class mannerisms.

Finally, Midge is not seen in the second half of the movie. She represents rationality and common sense, as well as being the woman Ferguson should have married. Her absence in the second half of the movie is an indication that only irrational forces are at work in his wish-fulfilling dream. By dreaming that the woman he loved really did not die that night, that she was involved in a murder plot to kill the real Madeleine, he absolves himself of any responsibility for her death.

Dr. No (1962)

When we first see Sean Connery in Dr. No, he is at a casino playing chemin-de-fer against a beautiful woman. She asks him what his name is, and we hear him say, “Bond, James Bond,” while he lights a cigarette, accompanied by his theme music. Oh, to be that cool! It makes you ache with envy.

When he is called back to the office, he is given no gadgets by Q.  Instead, he is issued a Walther PPK to replace his Beretta, which the man from Armorer refers to as suitable for a lady’s handbag. Looking back, you realize what the series could have been if only each successive film had not been compelled to try to dazzle the audience with increasingly fantastic gadgetry.  M insists that Bond use the Walther PPK because the Beretta jammed on him once and he spent six months in the hospital.  “A double-0 number means you’re licensed to kill,” M says, “not get killed.”

The trailer for this movie elaborated a little more on this license:  “James Bond, 007, licensed to kill, whom he pleases, where he pleases, when he pleases.”  There is nothing in this that limits him to killing only enemy agents, but rather includes British subjects.  In 1962, when this movie was made, and earlier, when the novels were first published, we accepted this idea, because back then we trusted the government.  If the government deemed it necessary to kill someone rather than arrest him and try him in court, then it did so for the greater good of mankind.  Then came Vietnam and Watergate, and such naive notions were shattered.  We came to realize that governments cannot be trusted, certainly not with a license to kill.  By the middle of the 1970s, if a movie had an FBI agent in it, he was probably evil, and if it had a CIA agent in it, he was probably a psychopath.  It would not be until the 1980s that federal agents could be portrayed in the movies as the good guys again.  British agents were cut a little more slack, in that England was not involved in the American scandals, and so Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was acceptable in 1979.  In any event, James Bond got a pass on all this, because by this time the Bond franchise had already been established.  But there is no way a spy with a license to kill could have been introduced in the second-half of the 1970s, unless he was going to be the villain.

By the time License to Kill was made in 1989, it was clear that we no longer had any misgivings on the subject, in that the franchise felt comfortable emphasizing it the title.  And as long as we are on the subject, I cannot let the moment pass with commenting on Casino Royale (2006).  The movie begins before Bond has become a double-0 agent and thus does not yet have a license to kill.  Through conversation we learn that in order for him to get one, Bond must make two confirmed kills.  That is like having a regulation requiring hunters to kill two deer illegally before they can get a hunting license that will allow them to kill deer legally.

Let’s get back to Dr. No.  Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate the murder of a British agent and to cooperate with the CIA regarding possible interference with rockets being launched from Cape Canaveral by radio jamming.  Because Bond is so cool, the government naturally issues him a sports card convertible to get around in.

That aside, the movie is more realistic than future Bond movies would be, especially in the way that on a couple of occasions Bond is careful to keep a woman from getting a photograph of him. By the second film, From Russia with Love (1963), his face is well-known to the enemy, which in real life would have meant a desk job from then on.  In later movies still, Bond acquires celebrity status, a superstar among spies.  I guess the producers figured that if everyone in the audience watching the movie had known for years that James Bond was a spy, then everyone in the movie must know he is a spy as well.

Another element of realism present in Dr. No is fear.  In some of the later Bond movies, especially those starring Roger Moore, he is so blasé about threats to his life that we never really feel as though he is in any danger. In this movie, however, he admits to being afraid and appears to be so on several occasions.  Notably, after he kills the poisonous spider that was crawling up his arm while he was in bed, he goes into the bathroom to vomit, giving us the sense that he was really scared. Had that sort of scene occurred in a subsequent Bond movie, he would simply have made a wisecrack about spiders, while fixing himself another martini.

Later on, he exercises his license to kill. For the first time in the history of cinema, the good guy commits a totally unnecessary, cold-blooded murder. He could easily have called the Jamaican police and had the man, Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson), arrested. After all, he had the police come to the same house a few hours before to pick up the beautiful woman who lured him there, so the police already knew the way. And they could have interrogated Dent for information. So, the killing is not only gratuitous, but also unrealistic. And yet, it is a great scene. In this case, the wisecrack, “That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six,” uttered just before he calmly puts a couple of slugs into his helpless victim, perfectly suits the situation (spoiled only by the fact that the gun was not a Smith & Wesson).

Bond figures that he should investigate an island called Crab Key, and when he gets there, he meets his first Bond girl, Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), wearing a bikini.  Because this was the first movie in the Bond franchise, those of us who saw it when it first came out were not expecting someone like her to turn up, nor would we have missed her had she been left out of the movie. But her presence on the beach seems perfectly natural. In later movies, we know to expect these inevitable Bond girls, whose presence in the story sometimes seems artificial and contrived.

Finally, there is Dr. No, who we find out is a member of SPECTRE, an organization of power-mad supervillains.  Bond is captured by Dr. No’s minions, eventually escapes, and then defeats Dr. No and destroys him and his island operation by causing a nuclear meltdown that would probably contaminate the area around Jamaica for many years to come, but no one worried about that sort of thing back then.

Compared to spy movies that had come before this one, Dr. No was quite impressive at the time.  But compared to what would come later, as each successive movie in the franchise would try to outdo all that came before, with those obligatory beautiful women, outrageous schemes of supervillains, unrelenting wisecracks, and, worst of all, incredible gadgets supplied to Bond at the beginning of each film that fortuitously came in handy later on, this movie may seem a little thin and meager.  But its relative simplicity actually makes it one of the best.

North by Northwest (1959)

Icebox Scenes in North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock is said to have formulated the principle of “fridge logic” when discussing the movie Vertigo (1958).  When asked about something in the movie that did not make sense, when Madeleine (Kim Novak) disappears from a hotel, he referred to it as an “icebox scene.”  The idea is that if there is an inconsistency or absurdity in a movie, but the viewer does not realize it until he gets home and starts pulling a piece of cold chicken out of the icebox for a snack, then the inconsistency or absurdity does not matter, because he has already enjoyed the movie.  Although as a historical matter, it is the movie Vertigo that is associated with this principle, North by Northwest exemplifies it like no other movie he ever made.

The first time we watch this movie, we experience it from the point of view of a man that gets mistaken for a government agent.  Although there are a few scenes that we see where the protagonist is not present, giving us a little extra information, we are pretty much in the dark about things as he is. But once we have seen the entire movie, it becomes possible to look at his situation objectively, or rather, from the point of view of the spies and the actual government agents.  It is then that we notice things that seem inexplicable.

When Hitchcock made that remark about fridge logic, people mostly watched a movie once and that was it. There was no cable television, no video cassettes, no DVDs, and no streaming.  An old movie might show up on television, on the Late Show, and a really good movie might be brought back to the theaters after several years, but that was something of an exception.  Today, it is not at all uncommon for people to watch movies several times, and this makes icebox scenes more problematic than previously. I have a friend who says he just can’t watch North by Northwest anymore because of all the stuff that doesn’t make any sense, and I confess that I have felt the same way at times.  And that’s a shame, for in other respects, this is one of the best movies Hitchcock ever made.

As a result, I set about the task of trying to rationalize the icebox scenes in this movie, and while I cannot say that I have been completely successful, I did manage to make it possible for me to watch the movie again and thoroughly enjoy it one more time.  The results of my efforts are presented here.  That being my purpose, I have decided that rather than start when the protagonist is introduced to us at the beginning of the movie, we should consider the relevant events in the order in which they occurred.

In addition to what is explicitly shown to us, it will be necessary during this analysis to provide information not depicted in the movie, but clearly implied by it, if we are to assume that there are rational explanations for any apprehensions we might have had while reaching for that piece of cold chicken.  This additional information will be contained in footnotes interpolated in the main text.

The Movie Rationalized

Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) is the head of a spy organization that smuggles government secrets out of the United States and delivers them to a foreign government overseas, presumably the Soviet Union.

Footnote 1:  The operation begins with an American traitor, who has access to classified information.  He photographs top-secret documents and puts them on microfilm. This traitor then turns these rolls of microfilm over a sculptor, who conceals them in small sculptures he has designed for just that purpose.  They are counterfeit items, the latest being made to look like a Tarascan Warrior.  The sculptor then passes these fake pieces of Pre-Columbian art on to an art dealer, who puts them up for auction. Posing as an art collector, Vandamm buys the sculptures at these auctions, which take place in various parts of the Northeast and the Midwest:  Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Then Vandamm takes the sculptures with him on flights to Europe from his private airport in South Dakota.

Footnote 2:  Vandamm’s personal secretary, Leonard (Martin Landau), thinks that all this business about buying counterfeit sculptures at art auctions is unnecessarily elaborate.  He says that the rolls of microfilm should be deposited in a drop, where he can then pick them up.  That way it can all be done in just one city, and fewer people will be involved. Vandamm says that’s just what the government agents would expect them to do.  So, while the government agents are busy trying to figure out where the drop is, Vandamm is free to buy the sculptures at auctions without arousing suspicion.

“The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll) works for the United States Intelligence Agency.  He is in charge of finding out how Vandamm obtains the secrets he is smuggling out of the country.  He has several subordinates working for him, including Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who is an undercover agent, working as Vandamm’s mistress.

Footnote 3:  It has never occurred to Eve or to the Professor that the secrets are on microfilm planted inside the sculptures that Vandamm routinely bids for at auctions.  They figure the microfilm is just left at a drop somewhere.

The Professor is worried that Vandamm may suspect Eve of being a government agent, so to mislead him on this matter, he decides to create a nonexistent decoy named George Kaplan.  He will be registered at various hotel rooms wherever Vandamm travels in order to participate in one of those auctions.  Clothes and sundries will be moved from hotel to hotel so that it will appear that there really is such an agent.

Footnote 4:  At the meeting when the Professor announces his scheme involving a nonexistent George Kaplan, one of his subordinates, a Miss Gleason, asks who will be responsible for registering in hotels and moving stuff from room to room.

“I thought I’d let that new guy, Clarence, take care of all that,” the Professor answers.

“In that case,” Miss Gleason asks, “why not just let Clarence pretend to be Kaplan?  That would certainly be simpler.  As long as he is going to have to register at the hotels, see to it that clothes and sundries are moved from one room to another, and book flights on trains and planes whenever Vandamm goes from one auction to another, we might just as well have Clarence stay in those hotel rooms as Kaplan. Furthermore,” Miss Gleason continues, “the whole point of this business of creating a fake agent named George Kaplan will be lost if the spies don’t know he supposedly exists. What better way to make sure the spies believe there is such an agent than to have Clarence be seen at those hotels, traveling on those trains and planes, and attending the various auctions that Vandamm goes to?”

The Professor points out that Clarence would then be entitled to some overtime pay if he did all that, and there just aren’t the funds available for that in this year’s budget.

Footnote 5:  Vandamm worries that he is suspected of being a spy.  He tells Leonard to find out if they are being followed around.  “Whenever we arrive in a city,” Vandamm tells Leonard, “check all the hotels in that city and see who registers in them around the same time. Then, when we travel to a new city, check all the hotels in that city to see who registers there.  Then compare the names on the first list with those on the second, and see if you can find a match.  If there is a match, then we’ll know he is a government agent assigned to my case.”

Leonard is appalled.  “Do you realize what that would entail?” he asks.  “Besides,” Leonard points out, “even if there is a match, the man could just be a genuine art collector, going to the same auctions you do.”

But Vandamm is adamant. After much effort on Leonard’s part, he reports back that there is a George Kaplan that seems to be following them around, and he is presently registered at the Plaza Hotel.

A couple of Vandamm’s henchmen, Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein), go to the Plaza Hotel.  They have Kaplan paged.  By coincidence, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), a Madison Avenue advertising executive, calls the pageboy to his table in order to send a telegram to his mother.  The spies think he is Kaplan responding to the page for Kaplan, and they force him into a car and take him to the magnificent estate of Lester Townsend, a United Nations diplomat.

Footnote 6:  At the Townsend estate, Valerian is the gardener, and his wife Anna is the housekeeper. Whenever the United Nations is in session, Townsend stays in the city, and Valerian lets Vandamm know that Townsend will be gone for a while.  It’s at times like these that Vandamm likes to throw parties at Townsend’s house, where he pretends to be Townsend.  That way he can impress all the girls, who will then have sex with him because they think he is a big shot.  He even has his sister pretend to be his wife, although the real Mrs. Townsend died years ago.  Now, it was at one of those parties where Eve met Vandamm, and being suitably impressed by his apparent wealth and influence, she had sex with him.  She thought he was Townsend and was married, but you know how it is.  It often happens that a woman would rather have an affair with a married man who is rich and powerful, than have an unmarried man of modest means and position all to herself. It was subsequent to this that the Professor approached her, and told her that her lover was not the enormously wealthy and highly respected Lester Townsend, president of UNIPO, but only Phillip Vandamm, who was just a spy.  So, when the Professor said he needed her help to find out more about Vandamm’s operation, she agreed, partly out of a sense of patriotic duty, but mostly out of pique.

When Thornhill is brought inside Townsend’s house, they put him in the library.  When Vandamm enters, Thornhill naturally assumes that Vandamm is Townsend and refers to him as such.  In turn, Vandamm refers to Thornhill as Kaplan, even though Thornhill is taller than he expected.  Thornhill insists that he is not Kaplan.

Footnote 7:  Vandamm knows that if Thornhill really is Kaplan, then he, Kaplan, would know that Vandamm is not Townsend.  In that case, there would be no point in his pretending to be Townsend while they are alone in the library.  One might expect him to say, “Come off it, Kaplan.  You know I’m Phillip Vandamm.”  But deep down in Vandamm’s subconscious mind, he suspects that Thornhill is not Kaplan, and the whole thing is a mistake.  After all, Valerian and Licht had gained entry into what was supposedly Kaplan’s hotel room, where they had a look at his clothes, which were for a much shorter man. That’s why Vandamm wasn’t expecting someone tall like Thornhill.  And so, owing to these subliminal misgivings, he continues to pretend to be Townsend.

When Thornhill apparently refuses to talk about how much he supposedly knows about Vandamm’s operation, the spies force him to drink a lot of bourbon, put him in a Mercedes that belongs to one of the guests, and try to make it looks as though he was so drunk that he drove off a cliff.  The plan does not work.  There is an automobile accident involving a police car, and Thornhill is arrested.

Footnote 8:  Anna points out that they need to clean the couch where some of the liquor spilled. Otherwise, when Townsend returns, he will know that there have been shenanigans going on in his house while he was away.  Vandamm agrees, but he is worried about something else. If the man they tried to kill really is Kaplan, he will report to his superiors what happened.  Knowing that he has been identified, the Intelligence Agency will take him off the case and put someone else on it. Fine.  But deep down in his subconscious mind, Vandamm still suspects that Thornhill is not really Kaplan.  In that case, Thornhill will return the next day with the police.  So, they’d better have a cover story ready, just in case.

Thornhill does return the next day, not only with the local police, but also with his lawyer and his mother.  The fake Mrs. Townsend pretends that they have all been worried about “Roger,” especially since he was so drunk that he “borrowed” Laura’s Mercedes.

Footnote 9:  Since Thornhill did return with the police, his lawyer, and his mother, something a real intelligence agent would not do, this confirms Vandamm’s subconscious suspicions that he is not Kaplan. But Vandamm has something else on his mind instead. What if Thornhill goes to the United Nations and tells Townsend about the party?  They will be so busted!  So, he sends Valerian and Licht to apprehend Thornhill again.  If he goes to the United Nations, they are to kill Townsend so that no one will ever know about all the parties they’ve been throwing at his house.

The fake Mrs. Townsend mentioned that her husband would be addressing the General Assembly that afternoon.  Thornhill decides to go to the United Nations, hoping to resolve the issue with Townsend in a public place.  When he gets there, he discovers that the real Lester Townsend is not the man that he met the previous evening.  When he asks Townsend who all those people were having a big party in his house, there was nothing for Valerian to do but throw his switchblade stiletto into Townsend’s back.  Of course, that’s the last party Vandamm and his friends will be able to throw at the Townsend estate, so they pack up and leave for Chicago.

Because Thornhill is photographed holding the knife he removed from Townsend’s back, he now has the police looking for him, thinking he is guilty of murder.  He finds out from the Plaza Hotel that Kaplan is supposedly going to the Ambassador East, a hotel in Chicago.  Hoping to make contact with this George Kaplan so he can be cleared of this murder charge, he gets on a train heading for Chicago.  On that train, he meets Eve.  When a couple of police detectives board the train later on, she hides him in her compartment.  While he is in the lavatory, she gives the porter a note to give to Vandamm, who is also on the train, asking what to do with Kaplan/Thornhill in the morning.  In the meantime, she and Thornhill have sex.

After leaving the train, Thornhill, believing there really is a Kaplan, accepts Eve’s offer to call Kaplan for him at the Ambassador East.  She goes to a phone booth and starts talking to someone. In another phone booth, we see Leonard, to whom she is apparently speaking. We do not hear what they are saying. When she comes out of the phone booth, she tells Thornhill where he can meet Kaplan.

There is commentary for this movie on the DVD, provided by the screenwriter, Ernest Lehman.  He says that Hitchcock shut down production for a whole day just prior to filming the phone booth scene. He had a problem with that scene, but he couldn’t ask Lehman about it because Lehman was in Europe at the time. Lehman said that Hitchcock was bothered by the fact that Leonard would not have known the phone number of the booth Eve was in.  But since he didn’t have Lehman on the set to ask him about it, Hitchcock decided to let it go.

That was not the reason, although I have no doubt that Hitchcock pretended it was, while keeping the real reason to himself.  What undoubtedly bothered Hitchcock was that a seemingly impossible conversation takes place in the phone booths.  But since no one else on the set seemed to have realized this, he figured he could get away with it as greatest piece of fridge logic ever. To see this, we have to keep in mind that Thornhill does not know Eve is Vandamm’s mistress working undercover as a government agent. Furthermore, he believes Kaplan exists and wants to meet him. Leonard, on the other hand, thinks Thornhill is Kaplan. And Eve knows that there is no Kaplan.

Footnote 10:  Now, to be revealed for the first time ever, here is the conversation that took place in the phone booths:

Eve:  He says he wants me to call Kaplan and arrange a meeting.

Leonard: What are you talking about? He is Kaplan.

Eve: But that’s what he says.

Leonard: He must be on to you. After all, a government agent like Kaplan, who has been following us for months, would know that you are Phillip’s mistress.

Eve: So, what shall I do?

Leonard: Oh, what the heck!  Tell Kaplan you talked to Kaplan, and that Kaplan wants to meet him.  [He then gives Eve instructions as to where the meeting will take place.]

Eve gets off the phone and tells Thornhill where he can supposedly meet Kaplan. Then follows the famous crop-dusting scene.

Footnote 11:  It has been said that there are easier ways to kill someone than getting him out into the middle of an open prairie so that he can be shot with a sub-machine gun from a crop-dusting plane flying overhead.  But more to the point is the fact that Kaplan, if he really existed, would not want to meet himself. And if he did want to meet someone other than himself, he would not agree to meet him alone, unarmed, and in the middle of nowhere. Only if Thornhill is who he says he is, would he believe that Eve talked to Kaplan, and that Kaplan wants to meet him in this isolated place. In other words, when Thornhill gets off the bus at Prairie Stop, that confirms the subliminal suspicions in Vandamm’s subconscious mind that Thornhill is not Kaplan, and the whole thing has been a big mistake.  But Vandamm is distracted.  He is worried that when Eve and Thornhill had sex, it was so good that she wants more. As a result, he is too jealous to worry about whether Thornhill really is Kaplan or not.

Well, you know what happens after that.  There is a climactic scene at Mount Rushmore, where the spies are killed or captured.  Thornhill and Eve end up getting married, and they live happily ever after.

Footnote 12:  The American traitor who has been using Vandamm as a courier ends up having to find someone else to transport the rolls of microfilm out of the country.  Fortunately for him, Vandamm’s replacement is content to pick the microfilm up at a drop, thus obviating the need for all that convoluted nonsense about sculptures and auctions.

Hopefully, the information I provided in the footnotes has cleared up any fridge-logic concerns you may have had.

You Can’t Take It With You (1938)

You Can’t Take It with You is one of those movies that show how wonderful it is being a free spirit, defying convention, and living life to the full.  It is premised on the profound insight that a goddamn job won’t make you happy.  A movie of this sort, however, must overcome a difficulty.  There are basically only two ways to avoid work, either by being rich or by depending on others for support.  As most of those in the audience work for a living by holding down a regular job, they will have a tendency to resent those that do not.

As a rule, we do not resent the rich per se, but only the idle rich.  No matter how much money a man might have, as long as he can be thought of as working in some manner or other, his wealth does not disturb us.  We might even imagine that he works harder than we do, putting in hours far beyond the traditional forty-hour work week.  It is only the rich that make no pretense at all of working, either because they just laze about all day, or because they party hard all night, that make us acutely aware of the unfairness of it all.

An example of the idle rich may be found in the movie Auntie Mame (1958).  The title character, played by Rosalind Russell, is financially independent when the movie starts, and she is free to live an unconventional life.  Then she loses it all when the stock market crashes, forcing her to have to hold down a few jobs, none of which she is suited for.  But then a rich oil man, played by Forrest Tucker, falls in love with her and marries her.  Then he dies, leaving her all his money, allowing her to go back to living life to the full.  The movie has many more complications, and I haven’t even mentioned her nephew, but no matter.  You get the idea.  If you have enough money, you don’t have to work, and if you don’t have to work, you can do your own thing.  In praising nonconformity in this way, the movie is essentially telling us we ought to be rich, as if we never thought of that before.  She clearly has advantages the rest of us don’t have, and she even looks down her nose at those who are not fortunate enough to be rich, saying, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

As for the freeloader, who depends on others for his support, it’s bad enough that we have to work while he does not, which is sufficient to cause resentment all by itself, but he does so at our expense.

An example of the freeloader is Uncle Murray in A Thousand Clowns (1965), played by Jason Robards.  He ridicules all the people in the city that go to work every day, while he collects unemployment checks, which are funded through the taxes paid by those that employ the very people he has contempt for.

Both Auntie Mame and Uncle Murray have a nephew.  It was important that the young relative in each case be a nephew rather than a child of their own.  We would look askance at someone who got married, had a child, and then decided to enjoy living unconventionally.  Once you have decided to have children, your days of being a free spirit are over.  But both Auntie Mame and Uncle Murray had custody of a nephew thrust upon them, so we can hardly blame them if they try to combine their duties as a guardian with their refusal to conform to the norms of respectability.

It was also important in each case that the young relative be a nephew rather than a niece.  A teenage boy exposed to such disregard for convention is no cause for alarm.  But the audience might have misgivings about letting a girl grow up in that environment, for there is the sense that girls need more protection and care than boys.

You Can’t Take It with You attempts to steer clear of either the Auntie Mame or the Uncle Murray solution to avoiding work as ordinarily understood.  It does so with limited success.  In fact, the difference between the movie and the play on which it is based is evidence of the tension that arises in trying to go between the horns of that dilemma.  First we’ll examine the movie, and then we’ll consider the play; because more people have seen the former than the latter.

The Movie

The movie begins on Wall Street, where Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) arrives in his chauffeur-driven, Rolls Royce limousine in front of a building with a plaque on it displaying the words “Kirby and Company.”  He has just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., where he testified before the “Securities Commission.”  He is serious and abrupt as he moves with brisk determination into the elevator, on his way to his office on the top floor, where people are waiting, as per his instructions by telegram.  He takes a minute to greet his son Tony (James Stewart), whom he has recently made vice president in the firm, telling him he almost sent for him because he might have liked the White House.  Before getting down to business, he orders a bicarbonate of soda on account of digestion problems he has.  He is one of the industrious rich, the opposite of the idle rich referred to above.

He tells his associates that there will be no interference “from the powers that be.”  The way is clear for Kirby and Company to become the “largest individual monopoly in the world,” controlling “every type of war material.”  He continues, saying, “With the world going crazy, the next big move is munitions.  And Kirby and Company will cash in on it.”  One of his subordinates comments with wry amusement, “A war wouldn’t be possible anywhere without us.”

Because it can be a challenge to make the audience sympathize with characters in a movie that flout the work ethic, those that do believe in work are often portrayed as being unlikable, making it impossible to identify with them.  By default, we are forced to side with the ones that don’t want to work.  That is what is going on here.

Anyway, the only thing standing in Kirby’s way to having a complete monopoly in war material is a man referred to as Ramsey.  He owns factories that make bombs and bullets, and he refuses to allow his business to be absorbed by Kirby and Company.  But Kirby has been buying up all the property surrounding these factories, twelve blocks worth.  Once he owns it all, Ramsey won’t be able to sell his munitions because he won’t be able to move stuff in and out of the factories.  He’ll have to sell out to Kirby.  I don’t suppose I have to mention that this is absurd.  Just because you own the all the property in a neighborhood, that doesn’t mean you own the streets.  But this a Frank Capra movie, and his movies are full of nonsense like this.

The only thing holding up Kirby’s scheme to buy up all the surrounding property is Martin “Grandpa” Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), who refuses to sell.  Kirby’s real estate agent Blakely tells him Vanderhof’s house is only worth $25,000.  (Adjusted for inflation, the house is worth over $450,000 in today’s dollars.)  He says he’s offered him $50,000, but he still won’t sell.  His associate, Mr. Hughes, says Vanderhof isn’t interested in money.

When Blakely is informed by a receptionist that Vanderhof has arrived, Hughes asks, “How did you get him to come here?”  We never get an answer to that question.  But while Vanderhof is just standing around, he goes over to a Mr. Poppins (Donald Meek), who is busy adding columns of figures.  Vanderhof asks him why he is doing that, and if he wouldn’t rather be doing something else.  Poppins admits he likes to invent toys, and he surreptitiously shows Vanderhof a bunny that rises out of a hat and then drops back down while music plays.  Vanderhof says that is what Poppins should be doing all the time.  Poppins says, “Some day I am going to do nothing else.  Some day, when my ship comes in.”  Vanderhof invites him to quit his job, come live at his house, which is full of people who just do what they want to do.  There he could work on his gadgets.

And now Poppins asks the big question, the question that hangs over this movie:  “But how would I live?”  Vanderhof answers, “The same way we do.”  Poppins persists, “Well, who takes care of you?”  Vanderhof replies, “The same one that takes care of the lilies of the fields, Mr. Poppins.”  This is an allusion to Matthew 6:28, which is part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his listeners not to worry about food and clothing, for the Lord will provide.

Blakely interrupts all this, offering Vanderhof a check for $100,000 for his house.  That’s over $1,800,000, adjusted for inflation.  Even if we stick with that original estimate of $25,000, which is, to repeat, over $450,000, adjusted for inflation, we must admit that it sure was nice of God to have provided the Vanderhof family with such an expensive house.  Anyway, Vanderhof shows no interest in the offer, telling Blakely that his eye twitch would probably go away if he took a vacation and went fishing.  Then he leaves, with Poppins chasing after him, having decided to become a lily.

When they arrive home, Poppins is introduced to the rest of the household.  There is “Grandpa” Vanderhof’s daughter Penny, who writes plays, and her husband Paul, who works on fireworks in the basement with a Mr. De Pinna, who used to be their iceman, but chose to become a lily too some nine years earlier.  There is Penny’s daughter Essie (Ann Miller), who makes and candy.  She is married to Ed (Dub Taylor), who delivers her candy to customers.  He also plays the xylophone and likes to print stuff up on his printing press.  Essie takes ballet lessons from a Russian named Kolenkhov.

I noted above that it was important that neither Auntie Mame nor Uncle Murray had a son, but were responsible only for a nephew.  In this case, Grandpa has a daughter, but she is in her early fifties.  In fact, there are no young children in the house at all.  Had there been, say, a fourteen-year-old girl living in that house, the audience might not have been so accepting of the environment she was being raised in.

Jesus didn’t say anything about God providing servants to cook and clean for you, but the lilies in this household have Rheba, a black woman, who is their cook and maid.  After all, being able to do just what you want to do does not include having to cook your own meals and clean your own house.  Fortunately for the white folks in the house, the Rheba hasn’t picked up yet on the idea that she should just do whatever she wants, otherwise she might forget about cooking and cleaning and just play the banjo.

Rheba is engaged to Donald (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), who is on relief.  Now, we’ve already had one explanation as to how the members of this family can get along without having a real job, which is that the Lord will provide.  But Donald has a more realistic solution, which is to live on the government dole.  “I ain’t done nothing,” he says, “but I’m sure tired,” to which Rheba replies, “You was born tired.”  In the play, he complains that every week he has to stand in line for half an hour in order to get his relief check.  He thinks the government ought to be run better than that, because waiting in line like that breaks up his whole week.

Most of those in the Vanderhof house could apply for relief, if they had a mind to, but they are white.  As noted above, people don’t like freeloaders, those that are able to avoid work only because they are being supported by others, in this case, ordinary taxpayers.  The movie allows this for Donald because he is black, since the audience of 1938 expected no better from the “colored folks.”  He provides a little humor as the shiftless “coon.”  Had the white people in the house been on relief and having a good time at the expense of those that work for a living, people in the audience would not have been amused.

Of course, if this movie were made today, Donald would have to be white.  Having one white guy in this household depicted as being a lazy, welfare cheat could be funny.  But cast an African American in that role today, and the audience would definitely not be amused.  Rheba could remain black, since it is almost obligatory to have a miscegenous couple in a movie like this nowadays.  And while we are at it, I suppose it would be better to have Essie be a man, so that he and Ed could be the gay couple.  But I digress.

There is one more member of the Vanderhof family yet to be mentioned, and that is Essie’s sister Alice (Jean Arthur).  She is Tony’s secretary.  They are in love and want to get married.  We learn from Alice that “Grandpa” Vanderhof used to have a regular job, but one day he quit.  (In the play, it says that Grandpa is seventy-five years old, and he quit that job thirty-five years ago.)  He could have been rich, she says, but he wasn’t having any fun.  After he quit his job, he started collecting stamps.  He’s now an expert, she says, and he gets paid to appraise collections.

In addition to this source of income, there are hints, here and there, that the activities pursued by others in the house also bring in some money, though we have to wonder how much.  Paul and De Pinna sell their fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Essie makes and sells candy, but she doesn’t want to open a shop, because it would interfere with her ballet lessons, the cost of which may well offset whatever revenue she brings in from selling candy.  Penny writes plays, but we don’t hear about any of them having been performed on stage.  At one point, Ed remarks that his income from the previous year was $85.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $1,500 today.

Adding it all up, we find it hard to believe that enough money is brought in to pay the bills, although that is more believable than the idea that God will provide for them like the lilies in the field.  As noted above, however, Alice is a secretary.  And while her income does not seem as though it would be enough to support the rest of her family, the movie would collapse without her.  While her relatives are engaging in activities that just look like hobbies, we are able to suspend disbelief and convince ourselves that they do bring in a little income with their stamps, plays, candy, and firecrackers, but only as long as Alice is there as the fundamental breadwinner.  But now the movie is teetering on making the rest of the family look like freeloaders, taking advantage of someone that works for a living.

When Tony and Alice are on a date, she tells him about how wonderful Grandpa is with his philosophy of just doing what you want to do, which is a whole lot more fun than holding down a job.  With feelings of regret, Tony tells of how in college he and a friend of his dreamed of figuring out how photosynthesis works, although no one in a Frank Capra movie would ever use a fancy word like that.  But then they graduated, and now his friend is selling cars while Tony has ended up being a banker.  He also mentions that his friend’s wife just had a baby, which as noted above, forecloses a lot of options when it comes to doing what you want rather than holding down a job.  Neither of them is very happy, but neither of them has the courage to do what Grandpa Vanderhof says they should.  But while this conversation is going on, we keep waiting for Tony to ask Alice, “So, why don’t you do what you want to do instead of being a secretary?”  But neither Tony nor anyone else in the movie asks her that question.  I might more easily believe that Mr. Kirby enjoys the prospect of becoming a war profiteer than I could ever believe that Alice is a secretary because that is what she loves doing more than anything else, because it’s so much fun.

Speaking of income, an Internal Revenue Agent shows up one night to talk to Vanderhof, because their records show that he hasn’t filed an income tax return for twenty-two years.  A ridiculous argument ensues between the two, in which Vanderhof says he hasn’t paid his taxes because he doesn’t believe in them.  He doesn’t think he would be getting anything from the government that he cares about.  The Internal Revenue Agent is flustered, as if the IRS has never come up against someone like that before.  After the agent leaves, Tony, who has arrived halfway through this conversation, tells Vanderhof that he might get into trouble for not paying his taxes.  Vanderhof allays his fears, saying, “No, not me. I was only having fun with him.  I don’t owe the government a cent.”  So, it looks as though appraising stamp collections is not as remunerative as Alice led us to believe.

Because selling fireworks on the Fourth of July would not bring in much income for the entire year, Poppins suggests promoting the Russian revolution as an occasion for celebrating with fireworks.  Ed says he can print up flyers to go in the boxes of candy that Essie sells, saying, “Watch for the Revolution.  It’s coming soon” and “Get your Red Flag from Sycamore.”  “Sycamore” is Paul’s last name.

Because Alice is just a secretary, Mrs. Kirby disapproves of her son’s plans to marry her.  She is such a snob that she makes Mr. Kirby seem like a halfway decent fellow.  As a result, Tony and Alice decide that the two families should meet to see if they will get along.

At this point, the Kirby’s are not aware that Alice’s family lives in the house that Mr. Kirby wants to buy, nor are those in the Vanderhof home aware that it is Mr. Kirby that is trying to buy their house.  Grandpa tells Alice that he doesn’t want to give up the house because it reminds him of Grandma, who still seems to have a presence there.  Moreover, when Grandpa goes outside to give the neighborhood children some of Essie’s candy, his neighbors tell him that their landlords have already agreed to sell their property if Grandpa does, the result being that they will be forced to leave their businesses and homes.  Grandpa assures them that he will not sell.

Anyway, the two families need to meet, but instead of bringing his parents over for dinner on the night he and Alice planned, Tony purposely pretends he got mixed up on the night of the dinner, bringing them over the night before.  His idea is so that his parents can see Alice’s family as they really are.  It is a disaster.  It looks as though the wedding is off.  But before the Kirby’s can leave in a huff, G-men come in through the door to arrest Ed for advocating an overthrow of the government with those flyers he’s been printing up.  While they are trying to explain that it’s all just to sell fireworks, those same fireworks accidentally go off in the basement, and everyone, including the Kirbys, are taken to jail.

The all end up in night court.  Mr. Kirby has four high-priced lawyers defending him, but the courtroom is packed with Grandpa’s friends.  Mr. Kirby begins to have doubts, to wonder if Grandpa is right, that it is more important to have friends than money, because you can’t take it with you.  Of course, it is one thing to tell Mr. Kirby, who is a man of great wealth, that he should retire and start having fun.  If he does so, he will simply be like Auntie Mame, someone who is able to be a free spirit because he is rich.  But you have to have enough money to pay the bills before you can spout that philosophy, which we haven’t yet convinced ourselves is true of Grandpa and his family.

As a result of the hearing in night court, Alice becomes fed up with Tony and his family.  She breaks off the engagement, quits her job, and leaves town, saying she just has to get away from it all.  Tony comes over to the Vanderhof house, trying to find out where she went, but they won’t tell him.  Everyone is sitting around moping.  I know I’m being a butt about this, but I couldn’t help thinking that they were depressed because their chief source of income had disappeared right along with the person that used to provide it.  Why, they might even have to get rid of the maid and start cooking their own food and cleaning up after themselves!

They get a letter from Alice saying how much she misses them, so Grandpa decides to sell the house and move everyone to where Alice is so they can all be together again.  It’s a sad situation, on account of the memories of Grandma and the situation regarding the neighbors, but it has to be done.  Once Mr. Kirby owns the house, he puts the final squeeze on Ramsey, bankrupting him, financially and emotionally.  After telling Mr. Kirby that he will die a cold and lonely death, Ramsey collapses and dies of a heart attack.

As a result, Mr. Kirby realizes Grandpa is right and sells the house back to him, which is fine with Grandpa, since Alice has returned and agreed to marry Tony.  Even Mrs. Kirby shows signs of coming around to the idea.  They are now one big happy family.

The Play

You know all that stuff about Mr. Kirby wanting to become a war profiteer with monopolistic power, trying to force Ramsey to sell by buying up all the property around his factories, but Grandpa Vanderhof doesn’t want to sell because he can feel Grandma’s presence, and how the neighbors are depending on him not to sell so they can continue to have homes and businesses in the neighborhood, but he decides to sell anyway so they can live with Alice?  None of that is in the play.

All three acts of this play are set in the Vanderhof house.  Act I is the night that the Internal Revenue Agent comes over, after which Tony arrives to take Alice out on a date.  As we are introduced to the household, there are the same hints that they might make some money selling candy and fireworks, but we have the same misgivings as to whether they provide enough income to pay the bills.  Instead of the $85 Ed made last year in the movie, in the play his income for the previous year is even less, $28.50.  Adjusted for inflation, that is like $525 today.  We learn that Grandpa likes to collect stamps, but there is no indication that he makes money appraising stamp collections.  What he really likes to collect are snakes, but there is no suggestion of any income resulting from that hobby.  It is Donald’s job to collect flies and bring them with him to feed the snakes when he comes to see Rheba.  So, once again we figure that Alice must be the principal breadwinner of this family, especially since there is no reference to the “lilies of the field” or the notion that the Lord will provide, aside from some routine remarks thanking God for their good fortune when Grandpa says grace.

Act II is the night that Tony, accidentally on purpose, brings his parents over to meet Alice’s family.  Before they arrive, De Pinna comments on how surprising it is that he came to this house eight years ago to deliver the ice, saw what was going on, quit his job, and has been living there ever since.  Grandpa remarks that the milkman did the same thing for five years before that.  When he passed away, however, they had trouble getting a death certificate for him, so they just buried him under Grandpa’s name, Martin Vanderhof.  More on this later.

In reading the play after having seen the movie, we find it surprising to see that the Kirby’s are really not so bad.  As already noted, Mr. Kirby is not aspiring to be a monopolistic, war profiteer.  As for Mrs. Kirby, she does not come across as the disapproving snob that she was in the movie.  They are what you would expect from a bank president and his wife:  perhaps a little stuffy, perhaps a little superior in their attitudes, but not the caricatures depicted in the movie.  To a certain extent, we sympathize with them.  We are supposed to be delighted by this crazy household, when in reality, none of us could stand being in that living room for more than a few minutes.

When Mrs. Kirby says she is into spiritualism, Penny insults her by saying it is fake and that believing in it is silly.  Then Kolenkhov demonstrates his wrestling skills by throwing Mr. Kirby to the ground, breaking his glasses.  These two incidents were in the movie, but there the Kirby’s seemed to deserve this ill treatment.  Here, we can almost admire the Kirby’s for their restraint.  Then Penny insists on playing one of those games that can embarrass people by getting them to reveal things that are personal.  I refuse to play such games myself, but the Kirbys go along with it, much to their regret.  After that, they politely try to excuse themselves and leave.  I can’t say that I blame them.

At this point, the G-men enter the house, looking for Ed, on account of the circulars he has been putting in boxes of Essie’s candy.  Only in the play, the circulars say things quite different from that in the movie:  “Dynamite the Capitol,” “Dynamite the White House,” “Dynamite the Supreme Court,” and “God is the State; the State is God.”  This last is often attributed to Trotsky.

In the movie, we thought the G-men were silly for getting all excited about circulars that said things like “Watch for the Revolution.  It’s coming soon.”  But distributing circulars like those printed up by Ed in the play would be a criminal act, and we would expect the government to take them seriously.  Moreover, when the G-men find a basement full of gunpowder, they reasonably suspect that the men down there were planning on blowing up those government buildings mentioned in the circulars.

As a matter of fact, the play is full of references to the Russian revolution and communism that were minimized in the movie.  Kolenkhov is always talking about how terrible things have been in Russia since the revolution, sneering at the Five-Year Plans.  Like himself and his friend, the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina, cousin to the Czar, she and others had to flee Russia, especially when Stalin rose to power.  She is now reduced to working in a restaurant where the manager does not like her because he is a communist.

In reading the play, therefore, we can’t help but wonder if there is a political message underlying it all, with the Kirbys representing capitalism, and the Vanderhof family representing communism.  In Act III, on the day after they have all been released from jail, Mr. Kirby tells Grandpa that he is opposed to the marriage because Grandpa’s philosophy is un-American, and he does not want Tony to come under its influence.  When Tony asks what is wrong with Grandpa’s philosophy, Mr. Kirby answers, “Matter with it?  Why it’s—it’s downright Communism, that’s what it is.”

Consider Karl Marx’s slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Now, it was part of Marx’s theory that the state would eventually wither away.  In such a world, there would be no one to tell the individual what he should do.  As a result, his “ability” would naturally express itself in an activity he found congenial.  Are not those making up the Vanderhof household members of a commune, one in which each person is acting according to his ability in some endeavor he enjoys?

Mr. Kirby’s assertion that Grandpa’s philosophy is un-American because it is communism is not in the movie.  Instead, we have a scene in which Grandpa makes a suggestion as to what kind of play Penny should write:

Why don’t you write a play about “ism” mania?…  You know, communism, fascism, voodooism.  Everybody’s got an “ism” these days….  When things go a little bad nowadays, you go out and get yourself an “ism,” and you’re in business.

Penny says that it might help one of the characters in her plays to have an “ism.”  Grandpa agrees:

Yes, it might at that.  Only give her Americanism.  Let her know something about Americans:  John Paul Jones, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Edison, and Mark Twain.

Needless to say, Lee’s name would be left off this list if the movie were remade today.  It was probably put there to appeal to Southern audiences.  But Grandpa is just getting started:

When things got tough with those boys, they didn’t run around looking for “isms.”  Lincoln said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”  Nowadays they say, “Think the way I do, or I’ll bomb the daylights out of you.”

Well, isn’t that nice?  More soldiers died in the Civil War, over which Lincoln presided, than in any other war in America’s history.  In fact, the number of men that died in the Civil War is just slightly exceeded by the total number of deaths in all the other wars America has fought combined.  And since it was a war in which Americans fought one another, you might say that it was the most American war of all, the one most representative of “Americanism.”  But to hear Grandpa tell it, it is only recently that people have decided to go to war with those they disagree with.  And it’s all because of those “isms.”  In other words, any notion that the Vanderhof household is un-American and represents communism has been squelched by this revisionist spiel.

In the end, Tony admits that he read some of the letters Mr. Kirby wrote to his father in which Mr. Kirby wanted to be a trapeze artist.  Later on, Mr. Kirby wanted to play the saxophone, but he says his father knocked those silly notions out of him.  Tony says he is not going to let that happen to him, so he’s quitting his job at the bank.  Grandpa makes Mr. Kirby realize that he hasn’t been happy working on Wall Street all these years.  As a result, Mr. Kirby no longer disapproves of the marriage, and he agrees to stay for dinner to get to know Alice’s family better.

All right, so where are we now?  As noted above, there is no talk about the lilies of the field in this play, of the notion that somehow the Lord will provide.  And we still find it hard to believe that the hobbies of that Vanderhof family bring in enough money to pay the bills.  Moreover, now that Tony and Alice will be getting married, she will be moving out of that house, so no longer will her salary as a secretary be contributing to the support of the rest of them.  In fact, she has already quit that job.

The solution to this mystery is provided early in the play, but in the chaos taking place in the Vanderhof living room at that moment, it tends to get lost.  The ridiculous argument between Grandpa and the Internal Revenue Agent is just like the one in the movie with one notable omission.  Instead of Grandpa telling Tony later on that he doesn’t owe the government a cent, Grandpa admits to the Internal Revenue Agent that he owns “property,” though we are not told what sort.  It might be real estate, stocks, bonds—we just don’t know.  But the income from that property, which he has been receiving for thirty-five years, since 1901, has amounted to between $3,000 and $4,000 per year.

Let’s take the average, $3,500.  Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about $66,000 per year.  Since no taxes have been paid on any of this money, it is the equivalent of having $66,000 per year in after-tax income.  Let us assume that this income represents a 5% return on the property that generates it.  That means the property is worth $1,320,000.  Combine that with the value of his house, adjusted for inflation, and Grandpa has a net worth of $1,770,000.  Now, we don’t know why Grandpa only acquired this income-producing property in the same year that he quit his job, but we’ll set that aside.  The point is that Grandpa has moved into the Auntie Mame category, someone who can be a free spirit because he has the wherewithal to afford it.  And the rest of the family, Alice aside, are like Uncle Murray, freeloading off Grandpa and Alice.

It is understandable why this was omitted from the movie.  All of Grandpa’s philosophy strikes us as facile when we become aware of his income and net worth.  Better to let us imagine that the members of Grandpa’s family are like the lilies of the field, eking out a living from their hobbies, as unrealistic as that might be, than to find out that money can buy happiness after all.

But will Grandpa be in trouble now that the IRS is wise to him, forcing him to pay back taxes with penalties?  Remember that contrived story about the milkman they buried using Grandpa’s name, Martin Vanderhof.  Well, Grandpa provided the IRS with a death certificate with his name on it, telling them he was only Martin Vanderhof, Jr.  So, as far as the IRS is concerned, Vanderhof’s debt to the Treasury Department died with him.  In fact, Grandpa says the IRS has even decided he is due a refund.  Mr. Kirby wants to know how he managed to pull that off, presumably hoping to evade taxes himself.  I’m not sure what the IRS will do when they see that the supposedly deceased Martin Vanderhof is still receiving that income from his property in the years to come, but that will be after the play has ended, and the audience has gone home, after which such implications fade away.

I suppose it might be argued that the Production Code required this change when the play was turned into a movie, since it forbade allowing criminals to get away with breaking the law and living happily ever after.  But if that were all, the movie could have had Grandpa agree to pay the back taxes.  The real reason for the change is to avoid having us find out that when Grandpa says, “You can’t take it with you,” he actually has plenty of it to leave behind.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, etc.)

When Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns home to Santa Mira in Invasion of the BodySnatchers (1956), he finds that a lot of his patients are worried about family members who no longer seem to be themselves.  Eventually, it turns out that the town has been invaded by a form of plant life from another planet.  The seeds grow into pods that take the form of anyone who goes to sleep in their vicinity.  These pod replacements, being plants, have no emotions, which is why they seem to be strange to their family members.

After a while, everybody in town has been replaced by a pod except Miles and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), the woman he loves.  When she gets taken over by a pod, he runs out onto the highway leading out of town, where he discovers a truck leaving Santa Mira full of pods, which will soon be taking over the rest of the world.  Miles runs down the highway screaming, “You’re next!  You’re next!”  That ending was considered too bleak, and so a frame story was added, in which Miles is picked up and interrogated by people who think he is crazy.  Eventually they believe him, and as the movie ends, we have the sense that the federal government will be brought in to stop the pods.

Critics debate whether this movie is an allegory for communism or the communist witch hunts. In other words, are the pod people supposed to be like communists or like the members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities? My own reaction to this movie, which I saw when I was ten years old, leaves me with no doubt. I was born in 1946, and in the 1950s I heard people talk about communists, and I saw shows on television dramatizing the dangers of communism. Essentially, communists were depicted as being cold and unfeeling, driven only by their ideology of world domination. This attitude is somewhat parodied in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), when the communist Dr. Yen Lo refers to guilt and fear as being peculiar American inventions, implying that communists are unencumbered by such emotions. Of course, that movie came much later. In any event, I was too young at the age of ten to say to myself, “These pod people are just like communists, because they have no emotions, and they want to take over the world.” But I know I immediately sensed the similarity between the pod people and what I had been told about communists.

Unfortunately, as good as this movie is, it has a big plot hole.  At first, a pod takes on the form of any person it is near when that person goes to sleep, duplicating everything but his emotions. The first time we see one of these pods in action is when Miles and Becky are called over to the house of some friends of theirs, Jack (King Donovan) and Teddy (Carolyn Jones).  They show Miles and Becky an unformed man lying on the pool table.  Ominously, it seems to be similar to Jack in height and weight.  Jack cuts himself when Teddy points this out.  Later, they fall asleep.  When they wake up, the “man” on the pool table has a cut in the same place on his hand.  In other words, it takes a long time for the pods to fully develop, and even when Jack falls asleep, he is still Jack.  We get the impression that a full night’s sleep is needed for the duplication process to be completed.

We never find out what happens to a person after he has been duplicated. Presumably he is killed and his body disposed of. But by the end of the movie, the presence of a pod no longer seems necessary, and the person himself is altered merely by sleeping instead of being replaced by a duplicate. Neither Miles nor Becky has slept near a pod, so no duplicate has been formed. Actually, a duplicate of Becky got started but never had a chance to be completed, and some later duplicates were destroyed by Miles.  In any event, when Becky does finally fall asleep near the end of the movie, there is no pod nearby. Moreover, she only falls asleep for a few minutes, whereas we saw earlier in the movie that it took hours for a duplicate to form. And yet, she is completely transformed. Furthermore, even if there were a pod nearby, the duplicate would not have had the time to take Becky’s clothes off her and put them on itself. Finally, when we return to the frame story where Miles has finished his narration, we are left with the sense that once he falls asleep, he is doomed. But again, there is no pod nearby, so there is no reason to think that his going to sleep will do anything.

The 1978 remake tries to justify its existence by filling in some of the plot holes in the 1956 original, but with mixed results.  When Matthew (Donald Sutherland) leaves Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) for just a few minutes, same as Miles left Becky, Elizabeth is transformed, but only because there was a pod nearby.  And when the transformation is complete, she crumbles into dust, while her naked duplicate stands up and takes over.  So, we have to give this remake two points for explaining what happens to the original body and not confusing the idea that a person is duplicated during sleep with the idea that a person is transformed during sleep.  On the other hand, we have to deduct a point for failing, like the original, to be consistent as to the amount of time needed for the duplication to take place.  At the end, Elizabeth has only been asleep for a few minutes before she has been completely duplicated by a pod.  Earlier in the movie, she had been asleep for the better part of an hour, and yet the pod her boyfriend placed near her still had not finished duplicating her.  Other scenes also indicated a lengthier time period for full duplication.

The 1978 version cannot help but be self-aware, because most people watching it had seen the original.  So, it is amusing to see Kevin McCarthy running down the street, yelling, “You’re next!”  And we have to smile when Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) plays music for her plants, because, she says, “Plants have feelings, you know, just like people.”

Speaking of Nancy, she is the last one that is still human at the end of the movie.  Because she also seems to be the least intelligent of the principal characters we have been following, we despair of her being able to stop the pods.  So the original downbeat ending of the 1956 version is preserved, more or less.

All things considered, the original is the best version by far, and that is mostly because of the stark contrast between the way people are before and after they have slept near a pod. The town of Santa Mira is full of friendly people. We see how warm and loving they are, and so when they are taken over by pods and become cold and indifferent, we experience a feeling of loss. In the 1978 remake, when Elizabeth tells Matthew that Geoffrey, the man she is living with, is different from the way he usually is, Matthew replies, “That can only be an improvement.”  That’s a joke, but you could actually say that about most of the characters in this movie, including Matthew himself, because so many of them are unlikable to begin with. Halfway through the movie, I was pulling for the pods.

In fact, the world itself seems to be a less desirable place to live, if for no other reason than the emphasis that is put on the ugly side of life.  For example, at one point, Matthew and Elizabeth pass by some theaters featuring live sex on stage.  In an earlier scene, Matthew, who works for the Health Department, enters a restaurant to do an inspection, wherein he finds a “rat turd” in the sauce, which he holds up in front of the manager and defies him to eat it.  Do we really need this?  The Production Code would not have allowed such a scene in 1956, of course, but that aside, this sort of thing would have been unthinkable in the original.

In Body Snatchers (1993), this remake is set on an army base. So, people walk around mindlessly obeying orders without any emotion, and then when they get taken over by a pod, they walk around mindlessly obeying orders without any emotion.  By the time we see The Invasion (2007), we realize that the only duplicates we fear are the remakes.

The novel on which the first version of this movie was based had an interesting ending. I haven’t read it in a long time, but the way I remember it, Becky and Miles are running away from a mob of pod people, just as in the movie. But when they come to the field where all the pods are growing, Miles uses gasoline to start a fire, which completely destroys the entire crop. When the mob of pod people see what happened, they realize their plans of replacing more humans with duplicates are ruined. Because they have no emotions, they are not angry and do not avenge themselves on Becky and Miles. Instead, they just turn around and walk back home. At the end of the book, Miles says that the population of Santa Mira is slowly declining, and if you ever happen to pass through that town, you will find that the people who live there are not very friendly.