The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes (1938) was released a little less than a year before the outbreak of World War II, but about a month after the signing of the Munich Agreement.  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that with this document, he had secured “peace for our time.”  This will forever be despised as an act of appeasement, although I can’t say that I share that sentiment. Though Alfred Hitchcock, who directed this movie, is primarily concerned with entertaining us, yet one suspects that the movie is also being presented as a cautionary tale against such appeasement, against pacifism and complacency.

The movie begins in the fictitious, Germanic-sounding country of Bandrika, which is ruled by a dictator.  A bunch of people planning on traveling by train are waiting in a hotel lobby, two of whom are Charters and Caldicott, portrayed by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, a comedy team that began life with this movie. As they wait, they express their concerns about the last report they heard, “England on the brink.”  From their conversation, we wonder if England is on the verge of going to war.  Eventually, we find out that they are worried about a cricket match.  Pace the British, cricket is a sport the rest of the world thinks is ludicrous.  And the obsession with cricket on the part of the characters that Radford and Wayne subsequently played in other movies became a trademark gag. From time to time, we see them reading about that cricket match on the back pages of the newspaper, while the serious political news on the front page is ignored. They represent the dangerous complacency of the British people.

On account of an avalanche, the train cannot continue on its way, so everyone has to seek accommodations at the hotel.  Charters and Caldicott are forced to occupy the maid’s quarters, consisting of a narrow bed intended for just one person.  The maid, Anna, is an attractive woman, though slightly bigger than either of the two men, whom she looks at flirtatiously when she finds out they will be sleeping in her room, much to their discomfiture.  Apparently, one of the two men sleeps in pajamas and the other does not.  For the sake of modesty, presumably, they share the pajamas, Charters wearing the tops; Caldicott, the bottoms.  At one point, when the two men are squeezed into the bed, Anna barges right in to put her hat back under the bed and to retrieve some other articles of clothing.  Charters moves his body in front of Caldicott so that Anna can’t see his nipples.

Earlier, when three young American women seem to be getting the royal treatment by the hotel manager, Caldicott dryly remarks, “the almighty dollar.”  One of the women, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), is soon to be married.  A friend proposes a toast, “To Iris, and the happy days she’s leaving behind, and the blue-blooded cheque chaser she’s dashing to London to marry.”

It’s an old story, a rich American woman marrying an impecunious British aristocrat for the sake of a title and a coat of arms, which apparently is more important to her father than it is to her.  She refers to herself as being an “offering on an altar.”  Love is not involved, but that doesn’t bother her, saying that she’s been everywhere and done everything, so she might as well get married.  Once happiness has lost its charm, you might as well slam the door on it forever.

There is one bright spot about being married, however.  That way you can have an affair.  Adultery is fun, at least in the beginning, as we learn from another couple, Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker) and Margaret (Linden Travers).  They are both cheating on their spouses.  Todhunter had no qualms in the beginning about openly carrying on with her, but now he insists on separate rooms for the two of them.  His passions having cooled somewhat, he is worried that a divorce would spoil his chances of becoming a judge.

Anyway, after Iris’s friends leave, she finds it impossible to sleep because of the noise being made by Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the guest in the room above her.  You know the type, someone that thinks it’s his God-given right to make as much noise as he wants, and who cares nothing about how much it disturbs his neighbors.  And like most inconsiderate neighbors, he believes that anyone who complains about the noise he is making is the one who is in the wrong.

When he refuses to quit making so much noise, she bribes the manager to have him removed from his room, so Gilbert barges into her room and acts as if he will have to sleep in her bed, threatening to tell people she invited him to sleep with her if she complains.  This forces her to call the manager and get him his room back.  We know we are supposed to smile at this obnoxious behavior of his, regarding it as charming and endearing, because he is tall and good looking.

Charters and Caldicott end up at a table with Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an elderly governess, returning to England now that her charges have grown up.  She comes across as whimsical and sentimental, boring the two men with her talk about the beautiful mountains and the lovely people of Bandrika, saying, “Everyone sings here. The people are just like happy children, with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts.”

“lt’s not reflected in their politics,” Charters replies dryly, but as Miss Froy parts from them, she says that we should not judge a country by its politics, noting that the English are quite honest by nature. The implication is that the British government is not honest (and that means the government presided over by Neville Chamberlain). The idea is that the people of a country can be betrayed by their government, but that the goodness of ordinary folks will ultimately prevail, clearly a populist sentiment.  This is ironic coming from her, since she turns out to be a part of the British government herself, a spy, to be exact.

She returns to her room, and just below her balcony, which is on the second floor, a man is serenading with a guitar.  She drops a coin out the window for him, not realizing he has just been strangled.  As we later find out, the melody being played is a coded message consisting of the vital clause of a secret pact between two European countries.

It must be a rather sophisticated code, for the simple melody is about sixteen bars long, all in one octave. If each note corresponds to a word, there is a vocabulary of about twelve words to work with.  Of course, we can expand that vocabulary by taking into account the length of each note.  I estimate we could increase the vocabulary to thirty-six words, given the melody we hear in the movie.

On the other hand, the notes might represent letters and numerals, and thirty-six different notes and their lengths would be just enough for every letter and numeral there is.  But then, it would have to be a mighty short clause.

In either event, the code is limited by the requirements of euphony.  A disagreeable combination of notes could not be serenaded on the sly, as a way of passing on the information to Miss Froy, so the number of possible combinations is constrained. And like most melodies, much of it is repetitive anyway. Notwithstanding all these limitations, the secret clause has somehow been thus encoded.

The person that strangled the man with the guitar knows that Miss Froy has the coded message, so he tries to kill her by pushing a flower pot out of a second-story window to land on her head while she is looking for her bag at the station prior to boarding the train.  But Iris was bringing Miss Froy her glasses, which she dropped, and the pot lands on her head instead, giving her a concussion. Miss Froy ends up taking care of her on the train, but after Iris takes a nap, she wakes up to find her gone.

Charters and Caldicott saw Miss Froy on the train, but they pretend not to have seen her, because they figure nothing really bad could have happened to her, and they do not want the train delayed, lest it cause them to miss the cricket match they hope to see when they get back to England. Todhunter pretends not to have seen her because he fears getting involved in an inquiry that might expose his infidelity.  The only one who takes her seriously is Gilbert, the noisy neighbor.

All those that are neither British nor American on that train act suspicious and untrustworthy, being either German or Italian.  Whereas Charters, Caldicott, and Todhunter merely deny having seen Miss Froy, the Germans and Italians deny she ever existed.  For example, when Iris asks the Italian magician and the German baroness in her compartment what happened to the lady that was sitting opposite her, they say there was no such woman.  Admittedly, this lets us know immediately that they are part of a conspiracy to deny Miss Froy’s existence, but in real life, such a tactic would be both unnecessary and unwise.  How much easier and less suspicious it would have been for them to say, “Oh, she got up and left the compartment a little while ago.”

Furthermore, it is inconsistent with phase two of their conspiracy, which had already been planned. When the train stops, a patient with bandages around her head is brought onto the train.  Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas) is a brain surgeon, and he says he will be operating on her when they get off the train at the next stop.  But in reality, the supposed patient is a woman who dresses up like Miss Froy, while the real Miss Froy is then wrapped up in the bandages and put under guard by a fake nun.

But this woman substitute contradicts the story that Miss Froy does not exist.  The Italian that claimed that Miss Froy never existed now tells Iris and Gilbert that she came back.  They go to see her, but it’s a different woman.  As a result, whereas before, Iris was told that the bump on her head made her hallucinate the woman sitting across from her in the compartment, now she is told that there is such a woman as she described, only she’s German, not British, and her name isn’t Miss Froy.

Needless to say, if all the conspirators wanted to do was stop Miss Froy from taking the musically coded message to England, they should have strangled her and unceremoniously thrown her off the train.

Eventually, Gilbert finds evidence that Iris is right.  They pull a reverse switcheroo, removing the bandages from Miss Froy and putting them on her imposter, and that woman is taken off the train at the next station.  They are assisted by the fake nun, who is British, once she realizes Miss Froy is British too.  In fact, as it becomes clear that Miss Froy is in danger, most of the British passengers on the train begin pulling together.  Thus, the movie is optimistically saying that once the British people are shaken from their complacency, they will rally together and defeat the foreign aggressors.

The one exception is Todhunter. Though he is British, yet he wants to surrender to the soldiers trying to get control of the train, saying, “I don’t believe in fighting.”  He is derided as being a pacifist and compared to Christians who got thrown to the lions. When he insists on surrendering on his own, getting off the train waving a white handkerchief, he is contemptuously shot, falling to the ground and muttering that he doesn’t understand. So much for pacifism.  Of course, we all knew he was doomed the minute we found out he was cheating on his wife.  Margaret is spared, however, probably because she was already separated from her husband, saying at one point that he knew he would not be seeing her again.

Miss Froy admits she’s a spy and gives the melody code to Gilbert, in case she doesn’t make it. Before she leaves the train, she says, “I hope we shall meet again under quieter circumstances.” At first, I thought this was an allusion to Vera Lynn’s song, but that apparently was not published until the following year. Because she is the last person you would expect to be a spy, her example implies that the rest of us have no excuse for not doing our part. If a little old lady can risk her life in the fight against evil enemies, dodging bullets as she runs across the countryside of a hostile nation, then we all are capable of making at least some small contribution ourselves.

When they all get back to England, Charters and Caldicott find out that the cricket match has been canceled.  Iris sees her fiancé and hides from him, deciding to elope with Gilbert instead, because he is tall and good looking.  Just wait until the honeymoon is over, and he returns to being the inconsiderate jerk he was when she first met him.  In any event, the idea of marriage puts the “Wedding March” in Gilbert’s head, and when they get to the Foreign Office to pass on the code, he can’t remember the tune.  But then we hear the tune being played on a piano, and it turns out to be Miss Froy playing it, having made it back to England after all.  Apparently, she didn’t know how to decipher the code herself, or else she would have just walked in and stated the secret clause in words.

Of course, as has often been observed, she could have called the Foreign Office from Bandrika and hummed the tune over the phone.

Pretty Woman (1990) and Philadelphia (1993)

Because Pretty Woman intends to be a modern mixture of Cinderella and Pygmalion, with an allusion in the movie to the title character being a princess who is rescued from a wicked queen by a knight on a white horse thrown in to boot, it hardly seems appropriate to criticize this fairy tale as being unrealistic. Suffice it to say that it is far-fetched that a rich, handsome man like Edward (Richard Gere) would not find the right woman until he met Vivian (Julia Roberts), a streetwalker who is so perfect that she even likes the opera. Perfect for him, that is, not for me. My perfect woman likes watching movies, and I leave the ones that like going to the opera to men like Edward.

Though this movie made no pretense about being realistic, yet there is one reality too stark to be ignored, and that is disease. Once upon a time, a man in a movie could marry a prostitute, and the audience would accept this without thinking about her having some kind of sexually transmitted disease. We never worried while watching Stagecoach (1939) when the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) decided to marry Dallas (Claire Trevor), who was a whore with a heart of gold. Because venereal disease was something people rarely spoke of, especially in the movies, they rarely thought about it while watching these movies.

But today we live in a world where it is impossible to think about sex without also thinking about getting an STD, especially if it is sex with prostitutes. And therefore, it was necessary for this movie to assure the audience that Vivian was in good health. Consequently, we are not surprised when Vivian says to Edward, when they first meet, that she is safe: “Look, I use condoms always. I get checked out once a month at the free clinic. Not only am I better in the sack than an amateur, I am probably safer.” Maybe prostitutes normally say that sort of thing to their customers, maybe not. I wouldn’t know. But if it sounds a little forced and artificial, we accept this bit of dialogue as necessary to keep us from thinking about disease when they eventually have sex. The movie could not afford to rest content with this one reference to condoms, however. To drive the point home, Vivian later produces her rainbow assortment of condoms for Edward to pick from.

But still, they are not quite ready for sex. That is, we in the audience are not quite ready for them to have sex. Apparently, we need a few more assurances. Therefore, in a subsequent scene, Vivian tells Edward that she does not kiss on the mouth. She says this is for emotional reasons: “Kit’s always saying to me, ‘Don’t get emotional when you turn tricks.’ That’s why no kissing. It’s too personal.” So, later in the movie, when they do start kissing, we know that they are getting emotionally involved. But the real reason for her having this restriction on kissing is so that we know there has been absolutely no exchange of bodily fluids, not even saliva, with any of her past customers.

In a movie about sex, we are not surprised if there is a bathtub scene, especially one in which both the man and the woman are in the tub together. But as there are two bathtub scenes in this movie, we have to wonder if the purpose is more than just erotic, if they are meant to make us think of Vivian as clean. This is not to say that taking a bath would act as a prophylactic against the transmission of disease. Rather, it is more about the association of ideas than logic. The cleanliness associated with bathing is supposed to support our belief that Vivian is sexually clean as well.

But the scene that really shows the extent to which this movie wants to assure the audience that she is safe to have sex with is the dental floss scene. Let’s face it. Most people do not floss during a date. I suppose a woman might, because she can carry the floss around in her purse. But even so, there is normally no need to have a scene involving personal hygiene in a movie, unless, of course, personal hygiene is important for some reason. As with the bathing, flossing will do nothing to prevent the transmission of venereal disease, but the movie is trying to suggest to us that any woman who flosses during a date must be so clean she could not possibly have AIDS, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, or crabs.

Still, under normal circumstances, if a woman decided to floss her teeth on a date, she would close the bathroom door, and her date would not dream of just walking in. But if he did interrupt her while flossing, she would simply stop what she was doing to see what he wanted. She would not hide the floss as if it were something shameful or embarrassing, the way Vivian does in this movie when Edward walks in on her. But the purpose of Vivian’s hiding the floss is so that there can be a big dramatic scene and discussion about it, one which cannot escape the attention of the audience, much in the way that her display of condoms for Edward to pick from drove home the point in a way that could not be missed either.

So, with the condoms, monthly visits to the free clinic, a ban on kissing, a couple of baths, and some dental floss, the audience can finally relax and quit worrying about whether Vivian has a disease, even if the opera she and Edward went to see was La Traviata, a story about a courtesan who dies of tuberculosis.

Whereas the title character of Pretty Woman did not have a venereal disease, despite our apprehensions in this matter, given the fact that she was a prostitute, the protagonist of Philadelphia does have such a disease as a result of some risky behavior of his own.   In this movie, Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a lawyer with a prestigious law firm.  In the opening scene, he successfully defends a client against what he calls a “nuisance suit,” as “an example of rapacious litigation.”  And so, if you did not know anything about this movie beforehand, you would correctly suspect that before the show is over, he will be bringing suit against someone himself.  And when he does, the lawyer whom he accused of bringing a frivolous lawsuit against his client, ambulance chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), ends up being his attorney.

In particular, the partners of the law firm he worked for say that they fired Beckett for incompetence, but Beckett claims they fired him because he had AIDS, which he concealed from the partners in addition to concealing the fact that he was gay.  Beckett explains during the trial that he decided not to tell the partners he was gay when he heard them telling crude jokes about homosexuals.  Those who produced this movie made sure that the jokes were not funny, lest we get confused and start siding with the partners.  Actually, the movie never makes it clear exactly what happened regarding Beckett’s firing.  Beckett believes that someone figured out he had AIDS and sabotaged his work in order to justify dismissing him for incompetence, but we never find out for sure.

This movie is contemporaneously set in the early 1990s.  It was a transitional period.  During the early 1980s, when AIDS was first identified, there was no treatment.  I remember seeing people whose bodies were ravaged by that disease.  The sight of them filled one with pity and dread (we see examples of such at the clinic where Beckett goes to have his blood monitored).  The dread was especially acute, because at the time, no one knew how contagious it was or what the vectors of transmission were.  Was it airborne?  Could it be transmitted by mosquitoes?  We knew that blood and semen could transmit the disease, but we also wondered about saliva and sweat.  By the 1990s, however, research had pretty much established that AIDS was caused by HIV and that blood transfusions, dirty needles used by drug addicts, and unprotected sex, especially between two men, were the primary methods of transmission. And while our fears of contracting this disease have been reduced by this knowledge, it also helps that treatment has advanced to the point that we seldom see anyone with obvious symptoms, such as extreme weight loss.

And so, the aversion to touching or being around someone with AIDS, a perfectly rational fear in the early 1980s, came to be regarded as a manifestation of ignorance and bigotry by the 1990s.  Throughout this movie, we see Beckett being hugged on numerous occasions, more than you would normally see in a movie, even a movie about someone dying of a disease.  In this way, we are informed that those doing the hugging are enlightened on the subject.  On the other hand, we also see other people trying to put distance between themselves and Beckett, whom we are supposed to regard as wrongheaded, if not morally bankrupt.

In any event, the issue of the case was whether the law firm illegally fired Beckett because he had AIDS, or fired him because of incompetence on his part, which would have been legal.  Therefore, the question as to how he contracted the disease was irrelevant.  Nevertheless, we are not surprised that the question arises as to Beckett’s behavior, whether he contracted AIDS through reckless actions on his part.  A woman who had once worked for the partner who first noticed Beckett’s lesion is brought on the stand to testify on the part of the plaintiff (Beckett).  She had had AIDS too, but she told her employers.  The point is that the partner would have realized what the lesion meant from his experience with her, in which case knowledge that Beckett had the disease by at least one of the partners would be established, a necessary condition of proving that that was the real reason for Beckett’s firing.

Under cross examination, it turns out that she contracted the disease when she was given a transfusion after giving birth.  In other words, she got AIDS through no fault of her own.  That the occasion was when she had a baby even associates the event with motherhood.  You couldn’t want a more saintly innocent victim than that.  So, we know what is coming, an attempt on the part of the defense attorneys to blame the victim.  Sure enough, when Beckett gets on the stand, he is asked about whether he had ever been to the Stallion Showcase Cinema, a gay pornographic movie theater where men in the audience sometimes have sex with each other.  Beckett admits to having been to the theater three times in 1984 or 1985, and that he had sex with a man in the theater one time.  He also admits that he knew about AIDS at the time and that his actions could have endangered Miguel Alvarez (Antonio Banderas), the man he was living with at the time and still is.  The point of the defense is that Beckett is not an innocent victim, but someone who contracted the disease in rather seedy circumstances in full knowledge of the danger to himself and his lover.

Of course, the attitude of the movie is that it is wrong to blame the victim.  More importantly, it allows the people in the audience to be smug in their sense of moral superiority, self-assured that they would never blame the victim the way some in the movie seem to.  But let us note that the movie also lacks the courage of its convictions.  It establishes that Beckett was and still is in a monogamous relationship, as it were, and that he just had a moral lapse one night.  In other words, the movie did not have the courage to make Beckett a man given to promiscuity, someone who had had anonymous sex on innumerable occasions in movie theaters and restrooms for over a decade.  That would really have tested us.  Instead, the movie is saying that it is wrong to blame the victim, especially when the victim, while not being totally innocent like the mother who had a transfusion, is almost innocent.  In so doing, the movie makes it all too easy for people in the audience to congratulate themselves in how right-thinking they are in this matter.

After much testimony from various witnesses, the case is turned over to the jury for deliberations, if you can call it that.  All we hear is one man, presumably the foreman, telling the other jurors that the case for the defense does not make sense.  That’s it.  No one has a dissenting view.  In fact, no one else says anything, except to mumble agreement.  The closest thing we get to a dissent is when the jurors are being asked one by one how they stand on the issue, and juror number ten says, “I disagree.”  This is not supposed to be a jury movie, of course, like Twelve Angry Men (1957), where an Ed Begley character could express bigotry toward homosexuals or where a Lee J. Cobb character could reveal that his prejudice stemmed from the fact that his son was gay, before finally coming around to the proper verdict.  But surely they could have done better than what we got in this movie.  Alternatively, if time simply did not permit, it would have been better to leave out the jury-deliberation scene altogether.  That’s what most trial movies do.

Midway through the trial, Miller comes over to Beckett’s place to go over the testimony Beckett will be giving on Monday.  Instead, Beckett wants to talk about the opera music that he has playing.  Like most people, including me, Miller does not much care for opera.  Beckett explains what the opera is about and what emotions are being expressed through the singing.  The intensity of his performance is bizarre.  I don’t know.  Maybe if you are dying from a dreadful disease, you can get a little more worked up about things than you normally would, but it all seems to be a bit much.

While his overwrought description of the aria was going on, I could not help but think of the movie Pretty Woman, which is why I decided to discuss both movies in a single essay.  In that movie, when Edward takes Vivian to see an opera, presumably the first one she has ever been to, we see her crying during a particularly moving scene.  In other words, in both movies, a major character practices a form of sex that many regard as likely to result in contracting a disease.  And in both movies, these characters are deeply moved by an opera, as if to say they have such great souls that they can appreciate art in its highest form with a passion that we philistines, with our sexually respectable lives, can scarcely imagine.  It just wouldn’t have been the same if Beckett had been listening to N.W.A., explaining to his lawyer with great emotion, “And here is the part where he gets his sawed-off shotgun, and they have to haul off all the bodies.”

How Same-Sex Marriage Would Have Resolved a $22,222.22 Moral Dilemma

Did you ever wish you had a rich uncle?  Well, I once did. Unfortunately, because he was straight, he married a woman, and they had two children. So, even when I was just a lad, some sixty years ago, I knew I would never see a cent of that money: when he died, it would go to his wife; and should she predecease him, his children would naturally get it all.

As a result, when I received a call from a genealogist about ten years ago, saying that a mysterious relative of mine had died, and that I might be entitled to part of the estate, the thought of my uncle and his millions never crossed my mind.  Instead, I was waiting for the man on the other end of the line to get to the part where this mysterious relative had been a Nigerian prince, and that for a few thousand dollars, I could clear away one or two legal obstacles standing between me and a large fortune.  Much to my surprise, he asked for no upfront money.  Instead, he was willing to disclose the name this relative, and pursue the inheritance for me, for one third of whatever I got.

My girlfriend thought that I should find out who this relative was on my own, and cut this interloper out completely.  But that would have required effort on my part.  Besides, by letting him have a third, I knew he would be motivated to get as much for me as he could.  I believe it pays to be generous with one’s associates.  So, I signed the contract, and sat back and waited for results.

It turned out that he had also contacted three of my cousins with the same deal, and so we all signed the same agreement.  Now, I wondered why two of my other cousins, William and Sandra, were not included in the deal.  I started to mention them, but then it occurred to me that this might entitle them to an equal share, and whatever the inheritance was, I knew it would go further split four ways than six.  Besides, I said to myself, their father, the above-mentioned rich uncle, would be leaving them a lot of money anyway, so why bother them with more?  So anxious was I to suppress all thought of those two undeserving cousins that it prevented me from realizing that one of them might be the mysterious relative in question.

As it happened, my uncle and aunt had died some years back, unbeknownst to me (as you can see, we weren’t close), and that somewhere along the way my cousin William had died as well, the entire fortune going to Sandra.  I had only met Sandra once, for a couple of minutes, after which she excused herself and went to her room.  Consequently, I did not know much about her. And one of the things I did not know was that she was a lesbian.  From what I could piece together from various sources, she had fallen in love with a woman named Betty.  Since there was no same-sex marriage at this time, Betty would have had no legal right to any of Sandra’s money in the event of her death. To rectify this deficiency, Sandra made out a will, leaving everything to Betty. As so often happens, the glow of love faded away, and they started getting on each other’s nerves, leading to a breakup.  Soon after that, Sandra fell in love with a woman named Caroline, and soon after that a new will was drawn up, exactly like the first, mutatis mutandis.

When Sandra died, Caroline took it hard, but Betty took it harder.  There she was with a will in her possession, leaving her all of Sandra’s money, which, had the affair lasted just a little longer, would now be hers.  Sandra had spent most of it along the way, but there was still about two million dollars left, and Betty could not sleep for thinking about what had slipped away. Convinced that this prior will must be worth something, she hired a lawyer to contest the will that left everything to Caroline.  Caroline was unmoved. As she saw it, she had the more recent will, and there was no need to let Betty have a dime. Things bogged down, and Sandra’s estate was frozen, with neither Betty nor Caroline able to put her hands on any of it.

Betty’s lawyer got creative, and asked the above-mentioned genealogist to search for missing heirs, in hopes of further complicating the case, thereby forcing Caroline to be reasonable. It worked.  He found four cousins, including me, and through a lawyer associated with the genealogical agency, it was expressed that Sandra’s cousins were most distraught at her passing, were even more distraught at being cheated out of their rightful share of her estate, and were prepared to seek remedy before the court to see that justice was done.

Caroline was still of the opinion that the will left everything to her, and that was the end of it.  She did not appreciate some of the finer points of the law, which her lawyer was at pains to impress upon her.  With a trial by jury, he pointed out, anything might happen.  To put it crudely, they might wind up with several jurors who were of the persuasion that homosexuality was a sin, deserving more of punishment than reward, the result being that the money might all go to the cousins, and none to either Betty or Caroline.  “Pay the two dollars,” he advised her.  Well, make that two hundred thousand dollars, half to Betty, and the other half for the cousins.  Reason prevailed, and she made the deal.

None of this would have happened if same-sex marriage had been legal. Sandra would have married and divorced Betty, who would have received some kind of settlement.  Then Sandra would have married Caroline, who would have inherited everything with far less fuss.  Any large estate stands a good chance of being contested, but a spouse with a will leaving her everything is hard to beat.  Same-sex marriage would have given first Betty, and then Caroline, the same established rights and financial security mostly taken for granted by opposite-sex couples.  And that is the way it should be.

In the absence of same-sex marriage, however, Betty and Caroline were left to fight it out in a less certain arena.  And the difficulties did not end with them, for they extended even to the cousins. As noted above, one hundred thousand dollars was granted to us four cousins to divide among ourselves, with the genealogist getting a third of each.  At least, that is what it would have meant, had not fate intervened once more.  One of my cousins died just one week before the deal was made.  I figured that meant her husband would get her share.  That is because, like Caroline, I did not appreciate some of the finer points of the law, which cut the husband out completely.  That meant $33,333.33 for each of the remaining three cousins, or $22,222.22 each, after the genealogist got his cut.

I felt bad for my cousin’s husband.  By all rights, he should have gotten his fair share.  The proper thing to do would be for me to give him a portion of my own inheritance, and to suggest to my other two cousins that they do the same.  But then it occurred to me that if I were going to give any of the money away, I should give all of my portion to Caroline.  After all, Sandra wanted Caroline, the woman she loved, to have her money, and not some indifferent cousins about whom she cared nothing.  As I could not resolve the question as to who was more deserving, my cousin’s husband or Caroline, I decided to keep the $22,222.22 until such time as my conscience should guide me to do the right thing.  Moral dilemmas can be notoriously problematic, and thus the issue remains unresolved to this day.

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.