“I Confess” (1953)

Alfred Hitchcock and Religion Don’t Mix

Critics often comment on the influence that a Catholic upbringing had on Alfred Hitchcock. Something to do with fear and guilt.  Granted that this is correct, it seems that this influence resulted in many good movies being produced.  Paradoxically, however, this applies only to the movies that had nothing to do with religion.  Of the two movies where religion was involved, the results were inferior.  In the case of 
The Wrong Man (1956), a miracle occurs which saves the protagonist at the expense of the movie.

In the other religious movie by Hitchcock, “I Confess” (1953), no miracle occurs, but the story is about a priest.  As we watch this movie, we cannot help but wonder if Hitchcock’s Catholic upbringing constrained his treatment of this protagonist.  Of course, we cannot be sure about this, for Warner Bros. and the Hays Office also put limits on Hitchcock’s treatment of a man of the cloth.

The original source for this movie was Nos Deux Consciences, a French play produced in 1902, in which a priest hears a confession about the murder of another priest.  Then he is accused of committing the murder himself, but cannot tell who the real killer is on account of the sacramental seal of the confessional.  He is convicted and sentenced to die by guillotine.  After he gets his head chopped off, they discover that he was innocent.

According to commentary on the DVD, Hitchcock wanted the priest to be executed in the end, just as in the play, but Joseph Breen of the Hays Office would not allow it.  But even in small ways, the story as presented in the movie comes across as inhibited.  For one thing, it is lacking in humor.  In a lot of Hitchcock’s movies, there is some comic relief, often provided by the protagonist.  But the priest in this movie is mirthless.  The only thing that counts for humor is weak:  another priest keeps bringing his bicycle into the rectory, leaning it up against a wall, after which it falls over.  This is so not-funny that it would have been better to leave it out completely.

There Is No Sex in This Movie

The movie involves a flashback, but an analysis of the film might proceed more smoothly if we consider the events as they occurred chronologically.  The setting is Québec just before the outbreak of World War II. Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) and Ruth (Anne Baxter) are a young couple.  As told by Ruth in the flashback, she is very much in love with with Michael, who she says loves her.  But we never actually hear Michael tell Ruth that he loves her.  On the DVD commentary, this flashback is compared to the one in Stage Fright (1950), a Hitchcock film in which the story told in a flashback turns out not to be true, a lying flashback, the first ever to take place in a movie. Apparently, François Truffaut thought the flashback in ”I Confess” was also a lying flashback, for it tells of what happened from the dreamy perspective of a young woman in love, without giving us any direct insight into what Michael is actually thinking and feeling.

With the outbreak of the war, Michael enlists, something Ruth wishes he had not done. He refuses to marry her, saying that there are too many widows already.  There is something a little detestable about a man who does exactly what he wants to do, and then tells the woman that he is doing it for her benefit.  In any event, compared to all the movies we have seen where couples, desperately in love, get married just before the man is sent off to fight a war, Michael’s excuse makes him out to be something of a cold fish.  Sure enough, as the war drags on, he stops writing Ruth letters, none of which were love letters in any event.  She says the letters were all serious.  She ends up working as the secretary of Pierre Grandfort, a member of Parliament, whom she eventually marries. We know he must be a good husband, because when we first encounter him, he is arguing before the House of Commons that female teachers should receive pay equal to that of the male teachers, as opposed to a conservative member of Parliament who claims that it would wreck the economy.

The war ends, and Michael returns.  Ruth meets him as he gets off the ship, and they agree to meet the next day.  She is still in love with him, and does not tell him she is married.  They spend the day in the countryside, where he talks about how the war changed him.  She tries kissing him, but he pulls away, cool to her attempt at lovemaking.  Suddenly a storm comes up.  They are forced to seek shelter in a gazebo, where they spend the night.  This immediately made me think of The Aeneid, where Aeneas and Dido hide in a cave when a storm comes up, and they end up becoming lovers.  That may be the first, but certainly not the last time that a storm has proved conducive to lovemaking in a work of fiction.  As a result, when Michael and Ruth do not have sex when they hide from the storm, it is a bit of a let down.

In addition to the fact that they do not have sex, there are two other sanitizing features in this scene: Michael has not yet become a priest, and he does not know Ruth is married.  Imagine the opposite: Michael, now an ordained priest, has sex with Ruth during the storm, even though he knows she is a married woman.  Juicy!  But as it is, Michael’s innocence is preserved at the expense of sapping this movie of any vitality.

In the play that was the source for this story, the priest does have sex with a woman, gets her pregnant, and she has a child out of wedlock.  According to the commentary on the DVD, Hitchcock wanted Michael to have sex with Ruth, but before he had become a priest.  And he wanted her to have an illegitimate child.  I hate to be technical, but I don’t think the child of a married woman would be illegitimate, even if it is the child of her lover rather than her husband.  Furthermore, that would seem to violate a general principle concerning sex and pregnancy in the movies, which is as follows:  if an unmarried woman in a movie has sex just one time, she always gets pregnant; but if a married woman in a movie has sex with another man, she never gets pregnant.  In any event, Hitchcock was not allowed to follow the play in this regard either.

The next morning, the owner of the estate, a Monsieur Villette, discovers them and makes a remark suggesting Michael and Ruth were having sex.  Outraged, Michael knocks him down.  Then Villette sees Ruth, realizing she is Madame Grandfort and addressing her as such.  As a result, Michael and Ruth do not see each other again for five years.

But then Villette finds himself in a “tax scandal.”  He tells Ruth that she must get her husband Pierre to use his influence to get him out of trouble, or he will tell about that night in the gazebo.  She refuses, saying that her husband would never get involved in anything shady.  Villette keeps putting pressure on her.  She turns to Michael, now Father Logan, and gets him to meet her one night.  She tells him her problem, and he becomes angry, saying he will take care of Villette.  Then he goes back to the rectory.

A Religious Villain

Somewhat later, he looks out his window and sees someone entering the church. Logan goes down to see who it is and finds Otto Keller, the sexton, praying.  Logan asks if he can help him. Keller replies:

No one can help me.  I have abused your kindness….  You gave my wife and me a home, a job, even friendship.  I felt you would let me be your friend.  So wonderful a thing for a refugee, a German, a man without a home.  You will hate me now….  You trusted me.  You saw that my wife and I were not common servants.  It was you who found more pleasant tasks for us, working here in the rectory.

But notwithstanding his reference to how well he and his wife have been treated, he adds a remark somewhat incongruous with that:  “It was my wife, working so hard.  It breaks my heart.”  Following this, Keller confesses to Logan that he accidentally killed Villette while trying to rob him.

Later, Keller confesses again to his wife, Alma.  He says he stole the money because it broke his heart thinking of her working so hard.  Here we go again.  Just as Michael came up with that lame excuse for refusing to marry Ruth, saying there were too many widows already, Keller tells his wife that he didn’t steal the money for his own selfish reasons, but rather he did it all for her.

Anyway, he says he figured that with $2,000, they could start a new life.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be a little over $22,000 today.  I don’t know what kind of new life a married couple could start with that.

Keller wore a priest’s cassock the night he robbed and killed Villette in order to throw off suspicion in case someone saw him.  A couple of school girls did see him, and they tell the police that they saw a priest leaving Villette’s house.  The result is that Logan falls under suspicion, especially when Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) sees him meeting Ruth on the street the morning after the murder, just outside Villette’s house.  But Logan can’t defend himself against the charge of murder because he cannot reveal what he heard in the confessional.

I wondered about this.  Can a priest really allow a murderer to continue to walk the streets, possibly killing again, simply because the killer confessed to the murder to him?  I looked into it, and apparently it’s true.  I even came across one article in which a priest admitted to the way “I Confess” bothered him:

People wonder, “Can the priest ever reveal what is said in confession?” The simple, straight answer is “no.”   … (Just as an aside, a great movie which deals with this very topic is Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, which deals with a priest who hears a murder confession and then is framed for the murder.  As a priest, I was in agony during much of the movie.)

There seems to be a conflation of what Logan cannot say to the police regarding what he heard in the confessional and what Logan does not want to say to the police because it regards his relationship with Ruth.  When Larrue interrogates Logan, asking about the woman he met in front of Villette’s house, or who he was with the night of the murder, it is easy to blend his refusal to answer for personal reasons with his refusal to reveal who murdered Villette.  But the fact is that he could easily have answered Larrue’s questions.  We might imagine him saying the following:

The woman was Ruth Grandfort, whom I knew before the war.  Villette was blackmailing her because he thought we were having an affair.  It wasn’t true, of course, but Ruth asked to meet me that night, because she didn’t know what to do about it.  We agreed to meet at Villette’s house the next morning, which is why you saw her talking to me on the street.  This is a personal matter, inspector, so I trust you will be discreet with the information I have given you.

Anyway, having failed to get this information from Logan, Larrue eventually finds out the woman in question was Ruth, and he brings her in for questioning, along with her husband Pierre.  Ruth tries to give Michael an alibi, telling Inspector Larrue that she was with Michael that night, when she told him that she was being blackmailed.  This is where the flashback occurs, when she tells how she and Michael were in love before the war.  Pierre already knew about her love for Michael before the war, but the investigation really brings things out in the open, leading to marital discord. Ruth tells Pierre with brutal frankness that she never loved him and that he can leave her, for all she cares.  She could have lied, saying she no longer is in love with Michael, that she cares about him only as a friend, telling her husband that he is the one she truly loves now.  Maybe he wouldn’t have completely believed her, but he would have accepted it, and their marriage could have been saved.  Instead, she proudly asserts that she has never deceived him in this matter, as if that were a virtue.  But when a woman reaches the point where she is no longer willing to lie to her husband, that marriage over.  I guess that’s what happens when a woman marries a man she doesn’t love because she is still in love with a man that never loved her.

However, it is all for naught.  When she and Logan parted at 11:00, there was still time for him to murder Villette, for the autopsy establishes that he could not have died before 11:30.

The supposed time of death of Villette is an inconsistent mess.  The school girls said they saw the priest leaving Villette’s house between 11:00 and 11:30, which would mean Villette did die before 11:30.  So, either they were wrong about the time, or the coroner was wrong about the time of death.  Furthermore, Larrue says that since Madame Grandfort and Father Logan parted at 11:00, “You can do a lot of things in thirty minutes,” suggesting that it was in that time period that Villette was murdered.  But Logan wouldn’t have had to kill Villette in that thirty-minute time period, because the autopsy said Villette could not have died before 11:30.  The murder would have had to take place after that thirty-minute period.  Finally, Pierre tells Ruth the next morning that the autopsy report showed that Villette died at exactly 11:30.  And later, during the trial, the crown prosecutor also says the murder took place at 11:30.

In order for all this to make sense, the autopsy should have said that Villette died sometime between 11:00 and 11:30.  That would be consistent with what the school girls said, and it would make sense of Larrue’s remark about doing “a lot of things in thirty minutes.”  Pierre’s remark should have been, “The autopsy showed that Villette could have died as late as 11:30,” and the crown prosecutor should have made a similar statement in court.

In any event, Larrue now knows that Logan had a motive for killing Villete.

The Employment of Spiritual Technology

That would be bad enough, but when Keller tells his wife what he did, saying that Logan told him he must give back the money, which would presumably mean admitting to the murder, he suddenly gets an evil look in his eye.  We know what he’s thinking.  Now that he has absolution, he will still go to Heaven, but he is safe here on Earth as well, for Father Logan cannot tell what he knows.  But he does not simply sit back and let Logan be accused.  He lies about when Logan returned to the rectory. Whereas Logan got back to the rectory at 11:15, and he saw Keller entering the church somewhat later than that, Keller says he saw Logan entering the church at 11:45, thereby making it seem as though Logan had time to murder Villette. He says Logan appeared to be distressed and wanted to be left alone.  But, he goes on to say, he did not want to leave him because he wanted to help him, because Logan had been so kind to him and his wife. On a later occasion, he suggests that Logan was acting like a guilty man.  Then, he even takes the cassock he wore, which has Villette’s blood on it, and plants it among Logan’s things for the police to find later.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  He might have been absolved of the murder, but is not the prohibition against bearing false witness against your neighbor one of the Ten Commandments? Won’t he go to Hell for that?  Not at all.  He’ll just wait until Logan is convicted and hanged, after which he can go out and get himself another priest and confess to that, thereby ensuring his future felicity.

If this sounds farfetched, it really is not.  Religious belief falls on a spectrum ranging from the moral to the magical.  The more one believes that the important parts of a religion are about doing good and eschewing evil, the less one cares about the magical side, which may be dismissed as silly superstition.  But those who are on the magical end of that spectrum will care more about material gain than about what is right and wrong.  It is not unheard of for such people to use religious magic to protect them while doing something immoral or illegal.  Keller is clearly located way over on the magical end of that spectrum, using religious magic for his own evil ends.

The Half Trial of Father Logan

Eventually, Logan is put on trial for murder.  But it is only half a trial. We never see the defense attorney cross examine the prosecution’s witnesses, call his own witnesses to testify, or present his closing argument to the jury. The only thing he does of any significance is object a couple of times, but the crown prosecutor continues with his line of questioning unimpeded. Speaking of which, the prosecutor often stops asking a witness questions so he can give his theory of what happened. We know that movies take liberties in their presentations of trials, but the absence of an objection from the defense at these points is preposterous. In any event, when the jury comes back with a not-guilty verdict, it strikes us as arbitrary, for we never heard anything from the defense casting doubt on the accusation. In fact, for all practical purposes, Father Logan might just as well not have had a defense attorney, whose part is so minimal that he is not even listed in the credits.  Hitchcock could have made this his cameo.

This reminded me of Helter Skelter (1976), a television miniseries about Charles Manson, including his trial. There too, we have a defense attorney that is practically nonexistent. The day before the closing arguments are to begin, the prosecuting attorney tells his wife how worried he is about the summation he will have to give, because so much depends on it. I remember thinking to myself, “Is he kidding? Everyone knew Charles Manson was going to be found guilty. No special skill was required from the prosecutor in giving his closing argument.” In fact, I was wondering what closing argument would be heard from the defense. That was where the real challenge lay. So, in the next scene, we see the prosecutor give his all-important summation, while I waited patiently for him to finish so I could hear what the defense attorney would say. But my patience went unrewarded, because we never got to hear from the defense attorney at all. And that is why Helter Skelter is inferior. In general, when a trial takes place in a movie in which we never hear from the defense, it is completely lacking in dramatic value.

Returning to “I Confess,” let us consider how the trial might have been made more interesting by having Logan’s attorney do more than just make an occasional fruitless objection.  While Logan may have been unable to reveal what was said to him in the confessional, he is not bound to remain silent about other matters, especially anything that happened before he heard the confession.  When being questioned on the witness stand by the crown prosecutor, Logan asserts that much of what Keller said was not true, but his own attorney makes no attempt to get him to elaborate on this matter.  Had he done so, we might have heard the following:

Defense attorney:  Father Logan, was Otto Keller already in the church when you returned to the rectory?

Father Logan:  No, he was not.

Defense attorney:  Do you know when he arrived at the church?

Father Logan:  Yes, it was after 11:30.

Defense attorney:  So, when Keller says he followed you into the church and found you there kneeling, that is not true?

Father Logan:  No, it is not.

Defense attorney:  Do you know any reason why Keller would lie about this matter?

Father Logan:  I cannot say.

Anyway, Father Logan is found not guilty by a jury that says they think he did it, but there just was not enough evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, and the judge even goes one step further and says he disagrees with the jury, that they should have convicted Logan.  As a result, the whole town ends up being against him, aside from Ruth, of course. That is totally unrealistic. In real life, we would expect him to have some supporters who believed he was innocent. The unanimity of the townsfolk in this regard is as one-sided as the trial, and therefore just as simplistic.

More Guilt for Logan, Less Guilt for Keller

Just as it would have been more interesting had Father Logan been guilty of something, such as having sex with Ruth, so too would this movie would have been far more interesting if, instead of trying to incriminate Logan, Keller had given evidence that would have helped him, short of admitting that he was the one who was guilty. He could have told Larrue that he saw Father Logan get back to the church too early to have committed the murder, not only giving Logan an alibi, but cleverly giving himself one at the same time. This testimony from Keller in defense of Logan would have created an even greater degree of moral tension. Logan would not only have to keep it a secret that Keller killed Villette, but he would also have to accept that the alibi that Keller provided for him was a genuine effort to help exonerate him, making him grateful to Keller.

An Evil Man Gets His Eternal Reward

In the end, Alma cannot stand it when Logan is being attacked by the mob outside the courthouse. She points to her husband, trying to say he is the one who is guilty.  Keller shoots her to keep her from talking. So much for his excuse that he was doing it all for his wife.  We already knew that Keller was evil, but this is even worse. Fortunately for Alma, just before she dies, another priest performs the last rites as she asks to be forgiven.  As a result, her soul goes to Heaven.

Then Keller runs off.  He kills a chef in a hotel kitchen.  Then, by means of a kind of logic that can occur only in a melodrama, Keller concludes that Logan has told the police what he knows, and thus blurts out the fact that he killed Villette while the police are within earshot.  Subsequently, the police shoot him.  Logan goes over to Keller, who asks for forgiveness.  Logan makes the sign of the cross, while uttering the words, “Te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” at which point Keller dies.  As a result, his soul ascends to Heaven, where he will join his wife, allowing them to share eternity together.

As a final improvement for this movie, imagine that Keller dies before Father Logan can reach him.  “Too late, Father,” Inspector Larrue says, “that’s one confession you’re never going to hear.”

Just as the miracle in The Wrong Man was a distraction, forcing us to think about divine intervention when the movie would have been much better if it had restricted itself to the natural world, so too does “I Confess” irritate us with the mechanics of salvation, forcing us to think about the arbitrary rules concerning confession that will allow a man to commit three murders and then get off on a technicality.

Frenzy (1972)

Frenzy is an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  It is misanthropic, misogynist, misogamist, homophobic, antifeminist, and illogical.  Other than that, it’s quite a good movie.

When the movie begins, a British official, presumably the Minister of the Environment, is giving a speech along the banks of the River Thames, promising that it will soon be a clean river again, free of pollution, “clear of the waste products of our society.”  As an example of said waste products, a naked woman is seen floating face down in the river with a necktie around her neck.  From the remarks of the crowd, we gather there is another serial killer in London, one that strangles women with a necktie.  The government official is deeply concerned:  not about the woman, but that it appears to be his club tie that’s wrapped around her neck.

The scene changes, and we see a similar tie being tied around the neck of Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). He has a room upstairs from the pub he works in, and he begins the day by having a glass of brandy. The manager sees him do it, accuses him of stealing drinks, and fires him.  As they exchange words, we see that Blaney has an explosive temper.  His co-worker, Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), walks in and defends Blaney, saying he always pays for his drinks. The manager says he’s either a thief or a boozer, and he doesn’t need either one.  Besides, he says, Blaney spends too much time “pulling on your tits,” and the customers talk about it.  Babs snaps back, “What about you?  Always fingering me.”  The ugly side of sex is a theme of this movie.

Babs knows Blaney doesn’t have much money on him, but he’s too proud to borrow any money from her, or rather, borrow any more than he already has. He heads over to the fruit market, which is run by his friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). Unlike Blaney, Rusk is easygoing and has a good sense of humor. When he hears that Blaney has been fired, he pulls out a wad of cash and offers it to him, but Blaney refuses.  Failing that, Rusk gives him some grapes, quoting his mother (who is quoting Mae West):  “’Beulah, peel me a grape.’  That’s what my ol’ Mum used to say when I was a kid.”

Just then a police sergeant walks up, telling Rusk how much of a headache the necktie strangler is causing them. Noting that Rusk is a bit of a ladies’ man, he asks Rusk to let him know if any of his girlfriends have a “near miss” with someone like that.

“Sure,” Rusk replies.  “Mind you, half of them haven’t got their heads screwed on right, let alone knowing when they’ve been screwed off,” he smirks, pleased with his witticism. He starts to introduce the sergeant to Blaney, but he has disappeared.  We are, of course, supposed to wonder if Blaney is the necktie strangler.

Blaney steps into a pub to have another brandy.  While in there, two distinguished-looking men enter, one apparently a solicitor, the other, a doctor.  In a lighthearted tone, they begin discussing the necktie murders.  A slightly plump, grey-haired barmaid serves them a couple of pints.  Being informed as to what they were talking about, she says, with a naughty look in her eyes, “He rapes them first, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, I believe he does,” the solicitor says with amusement, giving his companion a knowing look.

With a similar look of amusement, the doctor adds, “I suppose it’s nice to know every cloud has a silver lining.”

“Oh,” the barmaid says, acting as though she is shocked.

Now, it is true that when this movie was made in 1972, women were still being advised that if rape is inevitable, they should just relax and enjoy it.  And this advice was not only proffered by the men, but I heard women say this as well, including my own mother.  Still, it was always assumed that the woman would survive the rape she enjoyed.  To suggest deriving pleasure from being raped, knowing that strangulation might follow right after the man had his climax, is beyond gross.

While the doctor is speculating on the nature of the sexual psychopath behind the murders, saying they are most likely to kill when their desires are frustrated, we see Blaney being especially rude to the barman regarding the amount of brandy in his glass when he asks for another.  The doctor continues, saying that these psychopaths usually don’t have a linking motive, which makes them hard to catch.

“Let’s hope he slips up soon,” says the solicitor.

The doctor replies:

In one way, I rather hope he doesn’t.  [The solicitor looks surprised.] Well, we haven’t had a good, juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade.  Foreigners expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs, and littered with ripped whores, don’t you think?”

Blaney leaves the pub.  Rusk greets him from his room on the second floor. His mother sticks her head out too, for she is visiting him.  We can see that Rusk truly loves his mother.  In real life, this would be a good thing; in a movie, a bachelor that loves his mother arouses suspicion; and in a Hitchcock movie, that is the sign of a psychopath.  So, we’ve been warned.

Earlier, Rusk told Blaney to place a bet on a horse named “Coming Up.”  (Hitchcock could have picked any name he wanted for this horse, so the inclusion of the word “coming” is deliberate.)  He asks Blaney if he took his advice, since the horse won and paid twenty-to-one.  Blaney lies, saying he placed a bet and made a killing.  As he walks down the street, he becomes furious that he didn’t have the money to bet on the horse, throwing down the grapes that Rusk gave him earlier, and stomping on them.

He decides to visit his ex-wife at her business, the Blaney Bureau, offering “friendship and marriage.” As he walks up the stairs, a Miss Barling (Jean Marsh), apparently a secretary, is congratulating a couple that the Blaney Bureau has brought together, who plan to get married.  They are physically mismatched, the woman being taller and wider than the man.  But they do have a shared interest in beekeeping.  As they head down the stairs, the woman informs the man about her first husband, how he got up at 5:30 every morning, cleaned the whole house without waking her once in fourteen years, and then brought her a cup of tea at 9:15, while she was still in bed.  And then she brushes some dandruff off his shoulder, saying they’ll have to do something about that.  After viewing that example of matchmaking success, Blaney goes into the office.

As we gradually learn, Miss Barling is a manhater.  We are probably supposed to read her as a lesbian:  she is not pretty, her hair is pulled back tight on her head, she wears thick-rimmed glasses, and she has a stern look on her face. She informs Mrs. Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) that Mr. Blaney is here to see her, and he goes into his ex-wife’s office.  It’s not clear why he has come to see her.  He’s too proud to ask for money.  Apparently, he just wants to vent his spleen.  He starts making snide remarks about the lonely-hearts business, saying that in an age where people think marriage is a “living hell,” he is surprised that she has any clients at all, obviously resentful of the fact that she divorced him several years ago. When Brenda asks him to lower his voice, he naturally raises his voice, saying she ought to marry off “Vinegar Joe” out there, referring to Miss Barling, preferably, he says, to a seven-hundred-pound Japanese wrestler to “iron out her creases.”  Brenda tells Miss Barling to take the rest of the day off. As she is leaving, she hears a loud noise as Blaney slams his hand down on a desk, making her think he has hit Brenda.

He finally calms down and agrees to have dinner with her that night, at her club.  While at dinner, he again becomes so agitated that he breaks the glass he is holding.  He doesn’t realize it until later, while sleeping at a Salvation Army hostel, but at some point during the evening, she slipped twenty pounds into his raincoat pocket.

The next morning, while Miss Barling is at lunch, Rusk shows up at the Blaney Bureau.  Even though Blaney and Rusk were friends, going back to when they were in the same squadron in the Royal Air Force, and even though Blaney was married to Brenda for ten years, she was apparently never introduced to Rusk.  He is going by the name of Robinson.  Brenda says they have been unable to match him with women that are willing to submit to his peculiarities. But Brenda is the one he wants anyway. What follows is an extended rape scene.  With each thrust into Brenda, Rusk says, “Lovely!” while Brenda recites from Psalms 91, a prayer to a God that has no intention of getting involved in the matter. Finally, Rusk reaches an exquisite orgasm.

It is at this point that I must pause for a speculative comment.  I can’t remember for sure, but I believe it was in 1971, a year before this movie came out, that I first heard a woman say that rape was not about sex.  That seemed counterintuitive to me, but I let it go.  My guess is that Hitchcock was also acquainted with this notion, and he decided to have some fun with it cinematically when he made Frenzy. For that reason, he made it abundantly clear that Rusk is in sexual ecstasy while raping Brenda.

Up to this point, Brenda has thought that this was just an ordinary rape, but then Rusk says, “You bitch!  Women!  They’re all the same, they are.  I’ll show you.”  When he removes his tie, she realizes that he is the necktie strangler. She screams and struggles, but is strangled all the same.  Rusk helps himself to the money in Brenda’s purse, as well as the apple she was eating for lunch, and leaves.

Shortly after that, Blaney returns to the Blaney Bureau, perhaps to thank Brenda for the money she gave him.  The door is locked, so he leaves, just as Miss Barling is returning from lunch, and she sees him.  Minutes later, she discovers Brenda’s body.

Blaney calls Babs at the pub and asks her to pack up his stuff and meet him. She does so, but instead of using the money Brenda gave him to find some inexpensive lodgings while he looks for a new job, he figures this is a good time for him and Babs to check into a nice hotel and have sex in style.  It costs him twelve pounds for one night.  Converting pounds to dollars and adjusting for inflation, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars today.  Babs wonders where he got the money.  He tells her he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, but this morning he collected an old debt.  At the hotel, he checks them in as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde, presumably as a joke, because the real Oscar Wilde was a homosexual.

Meanwhile, the police are at the Blaney Bureau.  Chief Inspector Tim Oxford (Alec McCowen) arrives. Miss Barling tells him that she saw Blaney leaving just before she arrived, and she also tells him how violent Blaney had become the day before.  He asks her if she can describe Blaney, and she gives, as Oxford admits, an “extraordinarily precise description.”

“In my job,” she says, as she stares straight back at him, “I’ve learned to keep a sharp eye on men, Inspector.”  Because Oxford is as nice a man as you could ever hope to meet, he is taken aback by being implicitly included in her animosity toward men.

Thanks to her description, published in the newspaper, the porter at the hotel realizes the next morning that the so-called Oscar Wilde is the man the police are looking for.  As he says to the woman that registered Blaney and Babs, “You know, Glad, sometimes just thinking about the lusts of men makes me want to heave.”

He calls the police, but by the time they arrive, Blaney and Babs have sneaked out the back way, for they too have seen the newspaper, which was delivered to their room that morning.  They end up sitting on a bench in a park.  Babs is suspicious, suspecting he raped and murdered Brenda.  Blaney argues that it would be ridiculous to suppose a man would rape a woman he had been married to for ten years.  The idea is that a man’s passion for his wife, even an ex-wife, would have diminished to the point that rape would be out of the question.  That is, it would be out of the question, if rape were about sex, and from Blaney’s point of view, that’s exactly what rape is about.  Later in the movie, the same reasoning is advanced by the wife of Inspector Oxford, giving sexual indifference after years of marriage as the reason Blaney is not the necktie strangler.  She says their own marriage is proof of that.  Whereas the marriage between the Blaneys ended in a bitter divorce, the marriage between the Oxfords survives through mutual sufferance.  But in both cases, there is an absence of sexual passion.

In response to Blaney’s argument, Babs replies that she’s always hearing about kinky things.  (Like raping a woman for some other reason than sex, perhaps?)  Then it occurs to Babs that he got the money for the hotel room from Brenda.  Since he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, he did not have the money until the next day, when he raped and killed her, she concludes.

Blaney replies that he didn’t know about the money until later, that Brenda had sneaked it into his raincoat.  Babs doesn’t believe that at first, but then agrees that if he had known about the money, he would never have spent the night with a bunch of old men.  Therefore, she concludes, Blaney did not rape and murder Brenda.

That argument makes my head hurt.  The obvious explanation, from Babs’ point of view, is the one she originally advanced:  the reason he spent the night where he did was that he had not yet raped and murdered Brenda, after which he stole her money.  And that, of course, is the theory of the case as far as the police are concerned.  That Babs would be persuaded by Blaney’s argument is ridiculous.

Speaking of the police, at the building of the New Scotland Yard, Sergeant Spearman (Michael Bates) is watching Inspector Oxford devour his breakfast. He tells Spearman that his wife is taking a course in gourmet cooking, and they’ve never heard of the principle that “to eat well in this country, one must have breakfast three times a day, and an English breakfast at that.”  Ugh!  I eat food in the morning, but I haven’t eaten what you might call a traditional breakfast, either American or British, since I was in college.  That’s when I had a revelation:  you don’t have to eat stuff like eggs, toast, and grits in the morning; you can eat a cheeseburger or have a pizza.

Anyway, with all the evidence they have accumulated against Blaney, they figure he is their man. Spearman asks what men like Blaney are like.  Oxford replies, “Oh, they vary, but not a lot.  The thing to remember is they hate women, and are mostly impotent.”  Spearman balks at the notion of impotency.  Oxford elaborates:  “Don’t mistake rape for potency.  In the latter stage of the disease, it’s the strangling, not the sex, that brings them on.”

It’s clear that Oxford has embraced the rape-is-not-about-sex theory, but to the point of absurdity. All the victims of the necktie strangler were found dead. The only way the police could know that the women had been raped would be by finding semen in the vaginas of those women; the only way semen could be found in the vaginas of those women would be if their vaginas had been penetrated by a penis; the only way a penis can penetrate a woman’s vagina is if it is erect; and the only way a penis can be erect long enough for penetration and ejaculation would be if the man is not impotent. Q.E.D.  Of course, this is Hitchcock’s ultimate jab at the claim that rape is not about sex. It’s almost as if Hitchcock is saying, “Well, if rape is not about sex, then there is no need for the rapist to have an erection.”

Babs quits her job at the pub.  Like Blaney, she also had a room above the pub, and needs a place to stay.  Rusk offers her his place while he will supposedly be out of town.  She becomes his next victim. Blaney has two friends who could give him an alibi, but they don’t want to get involved.  He turns to Rusk, who is only too glad to help, allowing him to stay at his place. But he plants evidence, Babs’ clothes and purse, in Blaney’s bag and calls the police.  That’s when Blaney realizes Rusk is the necktie strangler, but no one believes him.  He is convicted and sentenced to prison, swearing revenge against Rusk.

However, Inspector Oxford begins to have doubts.  He gets a photograph of Rusk and shows it to Miss Barling.  She identifies him as Mr. Robinson, saying they didn’t want him for a client because he wanted women who enjoyed certain peculiarities.  When asked if Robinson would go to other agencies in search of women who were masochists, who liked being hurt, she says he would.  Once again staring straight at Oxford, as if to let him know that her attitude toward men applies to him as well, she says, “Men like this leave no stone unturned in their search for their disgusting gratifications.”

After that, things wrap up nicely.  Just as Inspector Oxford collects enough evidence to convince himself that Rusk is the necktie strangler, Blaney escapes from prison and heads for Rusk’s apartment. He gets inside, and seeing what he thinks is Rusk sleeping in bed, he bashes “his” head in three times with a tire iron.  But the hand of a woman slides out of the sheets.  Pulling down the covers, he sees Rusk’s latest victim, strangled with a necktie.  At that point, Oxford comes in through the door, and Blaney thinks he will be blamed for this murder too.  But then Rusk comes in through the door with a trunk. Inspector Oxford observes, “Mr. Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie.”

But now let’s take a step back and consider this movie again.  Blaney is unworthy or our concern.  As the manager of the pub says, even if Blaney is not a thief, he’s a boozer.  Indeed, we see Blaney having three brandies while it’s still morning.  He’s irritable and has a bad temper.  He would not be a nice person to know.

Furthermore, he is irresponsible.  Having just lost his job, he should be out looking for a new one.  Instead, he wastes what little money he has on the two more brandies I just mentioned.  The last thing he should be thinking about is playing the horses, but he becomes furious when he wasn’t able to place a bet on Coming Up.  When he finds that Brenda has slipped twenty pounds into his pocket, he squanders twelve pounds on that hotel room instead of using the money to find an inexpensive flat to live in while he looks for a new job.  And as an indication of how vain he is, he even takes pleasure slapping down the money, letting the woman who manages the hotel know that he has plenty of cash.

Let us imagine an alternative movie in which Blaney is the necktie strangler, who raped and murdered his ex-wife out of resentment for how well she was doing in her own business.  In that case, Rusk not only would be innocent, but let us further imagine as well that he never patronized the Blaney Bureau.  As the sergeant said, he was popular with women, so he would have no need of the Blaney Bureau for help in fixing himself up with a date.  Rusk is likable, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to stand by his friends.  We might even imagine Rusk saving Babs at the last minute before Blaney has a chance to kill her, and Rusk and Babs end up being the heterosexual couple that satisfies the formula for a happy ending.  Moreover, it would be a clever twist to have the bachelor in a Hitchcock movie that loves his mother turn out to be the good guy.

As it is, the likable Rusk turns out to be guilty, while the unlikable Blaney is innocent and ultimately vindicated.  But while we were sorry that Babs was one of Rusk’s victims, her death made the movie more palatable, in a peculiar sort of way.  If Babs had not been killed off, we probably would have had her and Blaney be together at the end, ostensibly a happy ending, but not one that we could really accept.  Brenda divorced Blaney for a good reason, and we don’t believe any woman would be happy with him, including Babs.

On the Rehabilitation of Judas

As is often the case around the time of Easter, a lot of Jesus movies are shown on television, and last Easter I decided to binge-watch a bunch of them.  I like to compare the story of Jesus as told in the movies, one with another, and all of them with the Bible.  My reasons for doing so are various.

One reason is rather silly, but I like it too much to give it up. When Jesus was born, the three wise men saw his star and decided to follow it.  We often see paintings depicting their journey, with the star about twenty or thirty degrees above the horizon, and occasionally such a scene occurs in a movie. Oddly enough, even when the wise men are close enough to see at a distance the place where Jesus is lying in the manger, the star still marks off the same angle above the horizon. I keep hoping that one of these days they will make a movie in which we see the three wise men leaning way back on their camels, looking straight up, whereupon one of them says, “Well, the star is directly overhead, so I guess this barn must be the place.”

On a more serious note, I like to see how miracles are presented.  While The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) is unabashed in its presentation of the miraculous, so that we see Jesus walking on water, the other movies downplay this element. In King of Kings (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), for example, we do not see such miracles, but only hear about them.  The recently produced Killing Jesus (2015) similarly eschews the outrageously miraculous, only showing Jesus curing people of bodily ailments, which might easily be thought of as conditions that were temporary anyway, or as hysterical conditions alleviated through the power of suggestion.  In other words, the people who make movies know that many in the audience do not believe in miracles or even that Jesus was the Son of God.  If they were to see a multitude being fed with a basket of loaves and fishes, they would snicker and begin to distance themselves from the movie.  To appeal to those of a secular bent, the producers tend to keep the supernatural to a minimum, to tell the story as it might have happened even if there is no God.

In a similar vein, Jesus is no longer good enough for modern audiences, and the producers realize that they need to clean up his act.  In fact, if you made a movie in which Jesus were shown saying some of the things he actually said in the Bible, audiences would get up from their seats and walk out, and many people would be calling for a boycott.  For example, Matthew 5:32, “…whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.”  If someone were to put that in a Jesus movie, he would be taken out into the market place and stoned.

The most important part of Jesus’s rehabilitation is the purging of all references to Hell, damnation, and punishment of sinners. Once again, the great exception is The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which Jesus speaks at length about people going to Hell and being punished for their sins, just as he does in the title Gospel.  In The Big Fisherman (1959), when Jesus gives Peter the keys of the Kingdom, he makes a passing reference to Hell, as he does in Matthew 6:18, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” But in presenting this scene in The Greatest Story Ever Told and in Killing Jesus, the last part of that line is suppressed, innocuous though it is.

It occurred to me that the reason for bowdlerizing the Bible in this way was to make the movies suitable for children.  But these same movies have no problem having other characters, such as John the Baptist, talk about lust, fornication, adultery, incest, and Hell.  In The Greatest Story Ever Told, a man talks of sinners being punished by God, and even though Jesus says pretty much the same thing in the Bible, the movie Jesus rebukes him, saying God is all about forgiveness.

But while the rehabilitation of Jesus is understandable, owing to the need to bring his moral character in line with what is agreeable to modern thinking, as I watched these movies, I was struck by the parallel rehabilitation of Judas. The Bible gives us a straightforward reason as to why Judas betrayed Jesus. He did it for thirty pieces of silver.  As a motive, money is sufficient to explain any crime, no matter how evil it may be.  Not all crimes have money as a motive, and not all people can be moved to commit such crimes for money. But given that it is the motive for some evil deed, we have no trouble accepting it.

And yet, most of the movies I watched were at pains to give Judas another motive. Once again, the major exception was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which told the story straight. The Passion of the Christ (2004) does so as well. But all others felt the need to conjure up another reason.  In Killing Jesus, Judas is shown to be fearing for his life. And when he makes the deal, he is told that his life will be spared, to which he replies, “That must be why I do this.”  The same motive, along with a couple of others, is given in the silent version of King of Kings (1927).  On the intertitle, it says, “And so it was that Judas, bitter…panic stricken…desperate…all hope of earthly kingdom gone, betrayed his Lord for thirty pieces of silver.”  At the bottom of the intertitle, there is a citation of chapter and verse: Matthew 26:14-15.

I didn’t remember that one, so I looked it up.  In my Bible, at Matthew 26:14-15, it says, “Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.”  I guess Cecil B. DeMille, who directed this movie, must have had a different translation.

Apparently, all this business about Judas being bitter, panic stricken, and filled with despair was DeMille’s substitute motive for what he really thought was going on, according to Doug McClelland in his book, The Unkindest Cuts: The Scissors and the Cinema:

[DeMille’s] feelings were close to shock when the Cinema people lopped off virtually all of the opening episodes containing the affair between Mary Magdalene and Judas.  After this, neither Magdalene nor Judas made much sense to him as characters.  He viewed it as unlikely that a man would betray a King for “a lousy 30 pieces of silver.  There must have been a dame in the background,” he told us in a tone of finality. [page 59]

Cherchez la femme!  Well, you can look for the woman, if you like, but you won’t find anything about Mary Magdalene and Judas having an affair in the Bible.  And how would that explain anything, anyway?  If Judas and Mary were already having sex, what would be the point in betraying Jesus?  Well, I suppose we should not try to criticize a plot point that was cut out of the picture.  We can simply content ourselves with adding sex to the fabricated motives that are attributed to Judas.

In the remake of King of Kings (1961), Judas is given a very different motive. According to the narrator, Judas betrays Jesus “to test and prove forever the divine power of the Messiah.” The idea, I suppose, is that when Jesus made short work of the Roman legion, laying them waste, everyone would see that he was the Son of God.  The only problem with that is it’s not in the Bible.

In The Greatest Story Ever Told, no motive is given at all.  Judas appears to be confused.  He goes to the priests and says he will tell them where Jesus is, but they have to promise not to hurt him, because Jesus is a wonderful person, who never did an unkind thing in his life. Except for getting them to promise not to hurt Jesus, he asks for nothing in return.  Later, we see the high priest counting out thirty pieces of silver, to which Judas says that he didn’t do it for the money.  Needless to say, that is not in the Bible either.

In The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jesus conspires with Judas. He asks Judas to betray him so that he can bring salvation to all. This is actually an old theory, put forth in the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, thought to have been written in the second century, so apparently people have been making excuses for Judas for a long time.

Part of the reason may be due to the long struggle over free will versus predestination. On the one hand, Judas cannot be thought evil unless he acted of his own free will.  On the other hand, it appears that Judas was destined to betray Jesus, suggesting that he was compelled.  With too much free will, one gets the Pelagian heresy, in which Jesus’s death on the cross was unnecessary, because man is capable of salvation without help from God. Without free will, however, it would seem that man cannot be blamed for his sins.  Some argue that Jesus simply knew in advance what Judas would do of his own free will, a theory known as single predestination. Others, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, deny that man has free will.  In their theory, known as double predestination, God does not merely know what will happen, he ordained it from the beginning.  But whether it was an act of free will or predestination, there is no reason to find another motive for Judas. Either he was greedy and betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver of his own free will; or God ordained in advance that Judas would betray Jesus for money, using Satan as his instrument (John 13:27).

The motive of money being equally compatible with free will and predestination, there must be another reason why so many movies, along with the books they are based on, feel the need to root around for other motives. Either Judas was afraid for his life, or he wanted to keep having sex with Mary Magdalene without any interference from Jesus, or he thought he could prove Jesus was the Messiah, or he was confused, or he was acting at the behest of Jesus.  What they all have in common is that they exonerate Judas or mitigate his act of betrayal.  Unlike Dante, who placed Judas in the frozen lake at the bottom of Hell, right next to Satan, we no longer want to think of Judas as evil.

The rehabilitation of Judas is a necessary corollary to the rehabilitation of Jesus.  We cannot have a movie depicting a Jesus who never mentions Hell or eternal punishment, who is all about love and forgiveness, and still keep the same old Judas, who deserves to burn in the everlasting fire.  In order to change Jesus into a better person than the one we find in the Gospels, we have to make Judas a better person as well.

Out of Africa (1985)

It is hard to watch a movie like Out of Africa with such an unsympathetic protagonist.  That protagonist would be Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), whose autobiography this movie is based on.  When the movie begins, we find that Karen has been trying to sleep her way into being a baroness. But once the baron has his way with her for a while, he tires of her and reneges on his promise to marry her. So, she turns to his brother Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who she knows does not love her, and offers him a deal: if he marries her, she gets to be a baroness, and he gets access to her money. He accepts, and they leave Denmark and go to Africa to start a vanity farm in the year of 1913.

Having made her Faustian bargain, she starts right off being a sourpuss about the whole thing. You know, acting as if she is being neglected, as if her husband doesn’t love her, especially when he feels free to do as he pleases. As he explains to her, she may have bought the title, but she did not buy him. Admittedly, he is a bit of a jerk, but isn’t that what you would expect from a man who would marry a woman for her money? After a while, we start to like her, but every time something bad happens, as when Bror gives her syphilis, we think, “Well, that’s what you get for marrying a man who doesn’t love you.” She gets the Salvarsan cure, but there is no indication that Bror is treated for the disease, and we have to wonder if she continues to have sex with him, especially since she becomes upset by his continued infidelities. Fed up with him, she tells him to move out of the house and get a place in town. But she does not want a divorce, because then she wouldn’t have anybody. Huh?

She eventually starts having an affair with Denys (Robert Redford), who is a big game hunter. Denys is a believer in free love, figuring he can continue to come and go as he pleases, which hurts her feelings, because she has fallen in love with him and wants him to spend more time with her. He is surprised and dismayed by her attitude, but I could have told him that would happen. Exasperated, she tells him that everything has a price. Well, she ought to know. Denys is not willing to pay the price of being domesticated, so they split up, and he eventually dies in an airplane crash.

As for that all that money she had, between the cost of supporting her husband and that of trying to grow coffee in Africa, she ends up so broke she has to mortgage the farm. Everything depends on her bringing in a good crop.  Then, right after the crop is harvested, it is destroyed in a fire. When asked if she had insurance, she responds, “That’s for pessimists.” As I said, it is hard to have sympathy for her. So, she loses the farm and has to go back and live with her family, which she admits she has nearly bankrupted. She removes the white gloves from a servant’s hands, saying that was a mistake, and in saying goodbye to another servant, asks him to call her by her first name. I guess that means she finally realizes that being a baroness was just so much vanity. A lot of people like this movie, presumably because Africa is filmed so beautifully, and because her lover Denys is filmed so beautifully. But if she had stayed in Denmark and not wasted her money buying a farm and a title, she could have led a financially secure life and possibly found a man without a title who loved her and wanted to marry her.

The Hopeless Gunman

Hollywood makes a lot of movies in which people use guns.  It does so for the simple reason that a lot of people enjoy these movies, which makes them quite profitable.  Toward this end, all sorts of people are seen using guns in the movies, in different times and places, and in all sorts of circumstances.  There is one type of person, however, who Hollywood has decided should never be allowed to successfully use a gun against another human being, especially a handgun.  This person, whom I shall call the hopeless gunman, has the following properties:

(1) He was born after the turn of the twentieth century.

(2) His profession does not require him to carry a gun, nor has he ever had such a profession in the past.

(3) He is basically law-abiding, mentally sound, and of good moral character.

(4) He owns a handgun, which he bought under ordinary circumstances.

(5) His use of that handgun is or would be legally justified, as in the case of self-defense, or morally justified, even if not strictly within the law.

(6) He is a man.

This hopeless gunman, as I have defined him, always fails miserably when he tries to use a handgun against another person.  If someone in a movie does use a handgun successfully against another person, he will deviate from the above definition in at least one way, and often more than one.

Let us begin with the first component of the definition.  In movies set before the turn of the twentieth century, everyone is assumed to be able to use guns effectively.  This is especially so in Westerns.  But with the closing of the West about a hundred years ago, the era of universal competence with guns came to an end.  Therefore, the hopeless gunman is someone born after the turn of the twentieth century.

Within the modern, urban setting, there are, of course, people who carry guns as part of their job.  Law enforcement officers, private detectives, and military personnel in movies are assumed to be competent in the use of guns.  Though no longer in the military, veterans in movies are able to use guns effectively too, having been previously so trained, as in Taxi Driver (1976) or Rolling Thunder (1977).  Anyone in a movie who carries a gun as part of his profession or is a veteran does not meet the second condition for being a hopeless gunman.

Criminals in movies are always competent with guns, using them successfully to rob a bank or wipe out some rival gang. Now, whereas those who carry guns professionally are trained in the use of firearms, criminals typically are not.  In many cases, the mere fact that they are criminals seems to be a sufficient guarantee of proficiency with a handgun.  In Once Upon a Time in America (1984), for instance, Robert De Niro plays a hoodlum who goes to prison as a teenager for killing someone with a knife.  Years later, when he gets out, he immediately goes on a robbery and kills someone with a gun, because for some unexplained reason, he knows how to shoot.  In any event, a criminal is not a law-abiding citizen, and therefore does not satisfy the third condition for being a hopeless gunman.

Staying with the third condition, we note that people that are mentally ill can be good with guns in the movies.  In True Romance (1993), Christian Slater plays a man who has hallucinatory conversations with Elvis, in one of which Elvis tells him to go out and kill someone.  Slater conceals his gun on his person and then goes out and does just as he was told. Because he kills a pimp to protect a prostitute, the killing is presented as morally justified, which means he satisfies the fifth condition for being a hopeless gunman.  But because he has hallucinations and is therefore a little crazy, he does not meet the third condition, which is that of being mentally sound.  We already mentioned that the protagonist in Taxi Driver is a veteran, and he therefore does not qualify as a hopeless gunman.  In addition, he seems to be mentally ill, and thus he would fail to meet the third condition of being mentally sound as well.  Interestingly, he also kills a pimp to protect a prostitute.

An ordinary citizen in the movies can use a rifle or a shotgun to go hunting with no problem.  And he has no trouble killing zombies or monsters, as in Tremors (1990).  But when he tries to kill another human being with his handgun, he stands in danger of being a hopeless gunman.  In Judgment Night (1993), a bunch of friends decide to go to a boxing match.  Early in the movie, Jeremy Piven reveals that he has brought along his semi-automatic pistol, and we immediately feel a sense of foreboding, for he seems to meet all the conditions of the hopeless gunman.  And indeed, later in the movie, when he and his friends are being chased by gangsters trying to kill them, his pistol does him no good at all, and he ends up being killed.

A ludicrous example of the hopeless gunman is in the movie The Threat (1949).  Charles McGraw plays a vicious killer named Kluger, who escapes from death row and kidnaps a bunch of people.  One of them, an ordinary guy named Joe, manages to secrete his handgun on his person while he waits for a chance to use it.  When Kluger falls asleep, Joe pulls out his gun.  But when Kluger wakes up and sees that Joe has the drop on him, he just starts walking toward Joe, talking to him in a soothing tone of voice, saying it was a mistake to pull out the gun. “Come on, give it here,” Kluger says, as he gently reaches out his hand and takes the gun away from Joe without any resistance. “Now, isn’t that better?” Kluger asks. Joe smiles and says, “Yeah.” And then Kluger shoots him dead.  All Joe had to do was pull the trigger and kill Kluger.  But he was a hopeless gunman, and so he ended up being disarmed and killed in this humiliating fashion.

There is, however, one way for a civilian to use a handgun effectively against other human beings for a legitimate purpose, and that is if he was not the one who bought the gun, which means he does not meet the fourth condition.  In the movie just mentioned, The Threat, shortly after Joe dies, a woman gets her hands on Kluger’s handgun and pumps two slugs into him.  She deviates from the definition of the hopeless gunman in three ways:  she did not buy the gun herself; she is a woman; and she is a gangster’s moll, meaning she is not of good moral character.  As a result, she avoids being a hopeless gunman by not meeting conditions three, four, and six in the definition, making her more than qualified to use a gun effectively.

In Death Wish (1974), Charles Bronson starts killing bad guys after his wife has been murdered and his daughter raped.  He does so with a gun that is surreptitiously given to him by a friend.  Referring again to Judgment Night, after Jeremy Piven dies, his friends pick up the gun and are able to use it effectively. In Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), the driver of an ice-cream truck owns a gun, but he is killed, along with a young girl. Then the father of the girl picks up the gun and shoots the man who killed her.   In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Sal Mineo shoots a hoodlum in self-defense with his mother’s handgun. And on and on it goes.  It is really amazing how many examples there are of a civilian using a handgun effectively when he did not buy it himself, and how few are the movies in which a gun is used effectively by a civilian who bought the gun originally, and those few are invariably women.

But even when the citizen is a woman, which would allow her to use the gun effectively anyway, the fact that she did not buy the gun herself further removes her from the category of the hopeless gunman.  In Blood Simple (1984), Frances McDormand is able to kill a private detective in self-defense with the gun her husband gave her.  In Freeway (1996), Reese Witherspoon is given a gun by her boyfriend to hock for money, but she ends up using it to shoot Kiefer Sutherland.  In Ms. 45 (1981), a woman takes a handgun off a man who raped her and starts using it to wipe out the city scum.

The difference between a man who buys a handgun and one who receives the gun as a gift or who opportunistically picks one up is the element of machismo.  And it is this difference that accounts for the exception made in the case of a woman.  When a woman meets all the other qualifications for being a hopeless gunman, including buying a handgun herself, we do not hold her guilty of machismo, for this is a masculine trait.  We figure the woman has a good reason for buying the gun, and not merely that she is trying to prove to herself how tough she is the way a man might be suspected of doing.

In the movie Jagged Edge (1985), Glenn Close is about to be murdered by a serial killer when she whips out a revolver and shoots him dead.  We do not see her purchase the revolver, but there is no reason to think she did not buy it herself.  In Death Proof (2007), a woman is effective in using a handgun she bought herself against a maniac.  In The Brave One (2007), a woman having been attacked by thugs gets herself a gun and uses it to get revenge on them.  Nevertheless, movies prefer not to rely solely on gender to distance the protagonist from machismo, and that is why in most of the movies discussed above where a woman uses a gun effectively, there are reasons beyond merely her sex that exempt her from being a hopeless gunman.  As another example, in Gloria (1980), the title character is a woman who presumably bought her own handgun, but since she was a gangster’s moll, the fact that she is not of good moral character would have allowed her to kill gangsters with it anyway.

Finally, in the fourth component of the definition of the hopeless gunman, there is the requirement that he not only must buy the gun himself, but also that he must buy it under ordinary circumstances.  In Panic in the Year Zero! (1962), for example, a man buys a handgun only after realizing that nuclear war has broken out, and that he and his family will have to try to survive without the benefits of civilization.  Technically, it could be said that he steals the gun and other supplies when the store owner refuses to take a check, thereby making him a criminal.  But he promises to pay the owner of the store later, and we believe him.  The point is that the machismo factor is present only if the man buys the handgun under normal circumstances, when there is no immediate threat he must deal with, rather than in an emergency.  Another example would be Cape Fear (1962) and its remake (1991).  The protagonist gets himself a gun only after his family is being terrorized by a killer.  In both of these examples, because the handgun was obtained under circumstances that were not ordinary, the protagonist is not a hopeless gunman and is able to use the gun successfully.

The trope of the hopeless gunman in the movies is an ideological choice, not a reflection of reality.  Just going by what I see on the nightly news, ordinary citizens win their fair share of gun battles against criminals, sometimes in attempted robberies, but especially in home invasions.  And it is reasonable to suppose that many of them meet all six components of the definition listed above.  But men like this are nowhere to be found in the movies.  It is clear that Hollywood opposes the idea that people are better off if they own handguns to protect themselves, portraying men who do buy handguns for that purpose as hopelessly inept and motivated by a sense of machismo.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

Whatever our opinion of love and marriage, we usually agree as to how a movie depicts them, whether it represents them as something desirable, as is usually the case for romantic comedies, or something to be avoided, as is often the case for films noir.  An exception to this is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).  Most people think of this movie as romantic, which is to say, as one that represents love as something beautiful.  It is a story about a woman who falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain.  And though she cannot marry him, of course, yet he is the man with whom marriage would have been ideal.  In reality, this movie has a dark view of love and marriage, and is quite cynical at its heart.

When the movie begins, Mrs. Muir (Gene Tierney), a widow, decides to move into a house with her daughter and her maid.  She is made aware that previous occupants moved out, claiming the house to be haunted, but she is undeterred.  One day, she sits in a chair and falls asleep.  Now, it is axiomatic that when a character in a movie falls asleep in a chair, there is a good chance that what follows is a dream (falling asleep in a bed is too ordinary to have any significance). And so, we immediately become suspicious, especially when the ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison) makes an appearance. Is the ghost real, or is she just dreaming him?

In any event, they get acquainted. And when she finds she is hard pressed for money, she becomes a ghost writer for this ghost, telling his story as a sea captain.  When she meets Miles Fairley (George Sanders) at the office of a book publisher, she finds herself attracted to him, and they start seeing each other.  Captain Gregg decides to take his leave. He tells her while she is asleep that he is only a dream, and that she wrote the book herself. Now, is this a real ghost telling her this, or is she just dreaming that a ghost is telling her he is a dream?

Years later, she sits in the chair and falls asleep again, and so once again we wonder if what follows is another dream or if we are still in the first one. The scene that does follow is one in which she finds out her daughter Anna is about to be engaged. Anna and Mrs. Muir have a talk in the kitchen, where it turns out that when Anna was a child, she had seen the ghost of Captain Gregg too, and they discuss whether they both saw a real ghost or simply had the same dream.

This is followed by another scene many years later, in which Anna writes that her daughter, Little Lucy (“Lucy” being the same first name as Mrs. Muir), has married a captain (an airplane captain, but you get the idea). Mrs. Muir is tired and decides to take another nap in that same chair. She falls asleep and dies. Or she falls asleep and dreams that she dies. Or she is still in the first dream, and only dreams that she sat in the chair and died?  And by now we are completely confused as to what is real and what is a dream.  In any event, she is now a ghost and is finally united with Captain Gregg.

However we interpret this movie, it has a rather paradoxical attitude about marriage. On the one hand, it follows the usual Hollywood line for that period that marriage is essential for happiness. On the other hand, there is an undercurrent throughout the movie that marriage is not conducive to happiness, that it is something to be avoided. In the opening scene, Mrs. Muir announces to her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, with whom she is living, that she is going to get her own place and move out. Her in-laws object, suggesting that it would be indecent. To this, Mrs. Muir responds, “I’ve never had a life of my own. It’s been Edwin’s life and yours and Eva’s, never my own.”  Since there is no indication that her husband was a bad man, the implication would seem to be that there is something oppressive about marriage itself, that it involves the sacrifice of one’s life for the sake of others.  In fact, she later admits to Captain Gregg that Edwin proposed to her just after she had read a romantic novel, and thus she got her own feelings for Edwin confused with the feelings elicited by the book.  The suggestion is that love and marriage sound good when we read about them in romance novels, but they are something quite different in real life.

After Mrs. Muir rents the house, Mr. Coombe, the man who brokered the deal for her, comes to visit her intent on proposing marriage, saying that she needs the “protection of a man,” which is absurd, coming from someone like him, with his high-pitched voice and nervous manner. Captain Gregg is disgusted, referring to him as a “herring-gutted swab,” and gets rid of him by causing Coombe’s car to start rolling away by itself.

As mentioned above, after Mrs. Muir writes the book about Captain Gregg’s adventures, she takes it to a publisher, where she meets Miles Fairley and soon falls in love with him. We are suspicious of him, because he is played by George Sanders, who often plays characters that are smarmy and decadent. She intends to marry him, but it turns out that he is already married with children. Worse yet, his wife knows that Fairley does that sort of thing to women on a regular basis, and it seems to be no big deal to her.

In a subsequent scene, however, Mrs. Muir tells Anna she saw Fairley years later at a dinner party, where he cried because his wife had finally had enough and left him. She also mentions that he was “bald and fat.” But if Fairley had turned out to be a decent man, and had married Mrs. Muir, he would still have become bald and fat, because that happens in marriage.  And so, if the deterioration of Fairley’s looks causes Mrs. Muir to be thankful she did not marry him, does it not follow that the inevitable deterioration of a man’s looks is a good reason for her not to marry anyone at all?

This theme of deterioration is reinforced by analogy with a post.  An old man carves Anna’s name into a post on the shore, and he tells her it will be there forever and a day. And yet, as the years pass, we see it slowly rot away and fall over. Is this not a metaphor for marriage, which begins with the illusion that love will last forever, only for it to slowly decay and fall apart?

Now, we know that the idea is that for a woman to be happy, she must marry the right man, and the right man in this case is Captain Gregg. And so, at the end of the movie, when she dies, and she and Captain Gregg are together again, apparently forever, we know that she is finally happy. And she and Gregg both have their good-looking, youthful appearance, forever apparently. In other words, Gregg will never become “bald and fat.”

The three real men in Mrs. Muir’s life, her husband Edwin, Mr. Coombe, and Miles Fairley, were not suitable for her for different reasons, and only a dream-ghost was the right man. In short, real people can never measure up to what we find in romantic fiction or in our dreams.  The further implication of this story is that a truly happy marriage is itself a dream, and that in real life, one is better off remaining single. As Mrs. Muir says to her daughter, “You can be much more alone with other people than you are by yourself, even if it’s people you love.”

Labor Unions and the Movies

As we head into the 2016 presidential campaign season, we can expect to start hearing references to working-class origins, either that of the candidate himself or his ancestors.  During the last presidential Republican primary in 2012, Rick Santorum spoke glowingly of his grandfather’s “big hands,” which he got from working as a coal miner.  Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, talked about her coal-miner grandfather.  In a previous election, Joe Biden didn’t have his own coal-miner grandfather, so he borrowed Neil Kinnock’s, though he soon had to give him back.  And so it appears that a politician just loves having a coal miner in his family, though I doubt if he would want his daughter to marry one.

Presumably, these millionaires that run for president need some way of proving that they are essentially just like us, and they trot out their coal-mining ancestry to show that they have not forgotten where they came from. Their wealth notwithstanding, they are working class, same as us, and thus have our interests at heart.  Of course, it doesn’t have to be coal mining. During the Republican National Convention of 2012, we heard speech after speech by politicians trying to establish their blue-collar bona fides, with tales of hard work and tough times.  While few of them could boast of having a coal miner in their family, they managed to find reasonable working-class substitutes.  Soon they may start hiring genealogists for this purpose.

Even God saw the good in it, which explains why Jesus’ stepfather was a carpenter.  God knew what he was doing when he made sure Mary got married to someone who worked with his hands, rather than to a money lender or tax collector.  God wasn’t worried about his son getting elected, of course, but he knew that a working-class background would go a long way in establishing his son’s moral worth, a point not lost on modern politicians. In other words, in addition to showing that they are just like us, politicians try to establish a connection with certain kinds of work as evidence of virtues like integrity, trustworthiness, courage, and even piety.

In the song Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn sings about the way her father loved his children, and the way her mother read the Bible every night. Undoubtedly, there are also coal miners who get drunk, beat their wives, and screw their daughters, same as might be found in the general population, but we are persuaded of the purifying effects of hard work, and thus are predisposed to embrace her idealized portrayal of a coal-mining family. In The Razor’s Edge (1946), Larry Darrell is on an existential quest, precipitated by his experiences during the Great War.  He turns down a job as a stockbroker and goes to work in a coal mine instead.  He says that while he works with his hands, his mind is free to think about other things, like the meaning of life.  In How Green Was My Valley (1941), Roddy McDowall plays Huw, the youngest child in a coal-mining family.  He is given a good education, with the opportunity to pursue a professional career, but he chooses to go to work in the coal mines instead, notwithstanding all the misery and mistreatment suffered by his father and older brothers.  He does not explicitly state his reason for doing so, but we get the impression that he goes down into the mines as a matter of pride, as if to prove that he is just as good as the other men in his family.  As opposed to these movies that romanticize working in coal mines, a cold splash of reality is provided by Harlan County U.S.A. (1976).  The movie is a documentary about a strike that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky.  Even though the events took place in 1973, at a time when most of us took modern conveniences in America for granted, the movie informs us that houses for the families of coal miners do not even have indoor plumbing.  The women start having babies at sixteen and have rotten teeth by forty.

Still, the association between coal mining and virtue remains strong.  If the industrial revolution had taken place two thousand years ago, I am sure that God would have seen to it that Mary had a coal miner for a husband instead. But carpentry was good enough, as is any job where you either produce some basic resource, as in coal mining, or you make or repair something, as in carpentry.  In Office Space (1999), a man who hates his soul-crushing job sitting at a computer in a claustrophobic cubicle finally achieves peace and contentment doing construction work in the open air.  And farming always has the aura of spiritual purity, as in Easy Rider (1969), where a bunch of hippies work the land rather than sell out by working for the government or big business.

When it comes to honoring the worker, there is no difference between liberals and conservatives.  But when those same workers band together and form a union, the difference becomes profound.  It would be a gross oversimplification to say that conservatives invariably despise unions, while liberals wholeheartedly adore them, but there is no doubt that unions tend to find support on the left of the political spectrum, and opposition on the right.  As a result, there are movies about unions reflecting each of these attitudes.  Examples on the left are many, such as Salt of the Earth (1954), Norma Rae (1979), and Matewan (1987), in which the companies are the villains, and the unions formed by the workers are an unqualified force for good.

Examples on the right are fewer in number.  We have On the Waterfront (1954), of course, in which the union is so corrupt that the union boss and his henchmen are the villains, not the shipping companies that need the longshoremen to load and unload their ships.  Rather, the union boss and his men exploit both the shipping companies and the workers.  But most movies that express an anti-union sentiment do not make that the central part of the story.  Rather, the story tends to be mostly about something else, such as organized crime or communism, with the unions being associated with these evils, but only as a minor part of the movie.  The Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, was very anti-union, with Pinkerton detective being the hero, no less.  The fact that none of the dramatizations of this novel ever capture its full anti-union sentiment testifies to the general pro-union bias that prevailed in the movies for a long time.  The novel was based on a true story concerning the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century.  A movie based on that story, The Molly Maguires (1970), however, is pro-union, unlike the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And then there are movies which, in accordance with a well-established Hollywood tradition, try to have it both ways.  In The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), the business tycoon is shocked to see a picture of himself in the newspaper being hanged in effigy by workers trying to form a union in a department store he didn’t even know he owned.  He goes undercover as an employee and ends up becoming so sympathetic to the plight of the workers that he ends up helping them form the union.  In other words, the capitalist is a good person, and the workers forming the union are good people too.  The villains are just some underlings who have caused the discord between labor and management.

Because there are more leftwing, pro-union movies than rightwing, anti-union movies, it might seem that the nation is more favorably disposed to unions than not.  However, I have noticed that since 1990, all the pro-union movies are set before that date, while recent anti-union movies are set contemporaneously.  This suggests that the left must look nostalgically back to the past, while the right can make its case in the present.

For example, Bread and Roses (2000), Made in Dagenham (2010), and Cesar Chavez (2014) are pro-union movies, based on actual events that occurred before 1990:  the 1980s for the first; 1968 for the second, and the late 1960s through the early 1970s for the third. On the other hand, Waiting for “Superman” (2010) is an anti-union documentary concerning the decline in education in America, depicting events that have occurred quite recently. The film places the blame for all our educational ills on the American Federation of Teachers, which stands in the way of progress by insisting on tenure.

This is a new kind of worker in a union movie, one who does not work with his or her hands, and certainly does no physically demanding labor.  The workers, that is, the teachers, are associated with children, however, and the teachers benefit from that association.  As all politicians know, having children is even more important for political success than having a coal-miner grandfather.  Bill Clinton, except when he had to address his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, never gave a speech in which he did not refer to children.  And Jesus certainly cashed in on this association, insisting that his disciples allow the children to come to him.  Today, it would be called a photo op. The downside of such association, however, is that much evil befalls those who are accused of harming children, as is the case with those who belong to the teachers’ union.  Since the union is depicted as failing the children out of a selfish concern for tenure, the unionized teacher becomes the scourge of our education system, as depicted in Won’t Back Down (2012), another anti-union movie in a contemporary setting.

As an exercise, try to imagine a movie set in the present that portrays the teachers’ union in a favorable light.  In general, public employees’ unions suffer from the same fate:  no one has ever made a mainstream movie that presents them in a positive manner.  Whatever the merits of the case, leftwing, pro-union movies about civil servants do not exist.  Police and firefighters’ unions might get more sympathy, owing to the public’s favorable attitude toward first responders, though even here there are no movies depicting the police or firefighters being treated miserably and having to go on a bitter strike to redress their grievances.  And as for ordinary civil servants, the kind disparagingly referred to as bureaucrats, there are absolutely no pro-union movies about them.

Of course, part of the problem is that public employees have decent wages and benefits of which a lot of people are envious, as opposed to people who do hard work for low pay and no benefits, depicted in the pro-union movies mentioned above.  The notorious example is that of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), which illegally struck in 1981, during the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  The result was that Reagan fired the workers who refused to return to work.  As columnist George Will pointed out at the time, because their salaries and benefits were quite good, they made an “unsympathetic proletariat.”

Returning, then, to the kind of work traditionally found in a union movie, we have North Country (2005).   The story begins in the year 1989, and it is about a woman who tries to make a living working in an iron mine.  This would seem to be a liberal-slanted movie, inasmuch as it is a feminist film about sexual harassment.  But the animosity toward Charlize Theron’s character is for the most part shared by both labor and management.  The union members, who are mostly men, are cruel and obscene in the way they treat the few women who work there.  So while the movie is liberal in its feminist stance, it is conservative in the negative way it portrays the union and its members.

The television show The Wire, which is set in this century, featured a corrupt longshoremen’s union in the second season, so technically that makes it rightwing in its negative attitude toward unions.  But then, everyone in that show was corrupt, including the good guys, so maybe we should not try to make too much of that.  Still, the union does not come off looking very good.

To sum up, every movie or television show involving unions that is set in a period of time after 1990 presents unions negatively.  All the movies that are pro-union, regardless of when they were made, are set before 1990, as if the story must take place in a remote, mythological past in order for us to see the union as good.  The fact that no one is willing or able to make a pro-union movie set in contemporary times is an ominous indicator of public sentiment.

Baby Face (1933)

In the movie Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, a young woman who has been pimped out by her father to steel-mill workers and politicians since she was fourteen years old.  She is persuaded by Mr. Cragg, a German cobbler, to leave Pittsburg and put her talents to use in a big city like New York.   When she and her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) get to New York, Lily decides to apply for a job with Gotham Trust, a bank that occupies every floor of a skyscraper.  As she rises figuratively by having sex with the men that work there, she also rises literally from floor to floor.  We expect executives in a movie to be reasonably attractive, as middle-class professionals.  But before she gets to them, she first has to land a job in the firm to get things started, which requires that she have sex with a funny-looking guy with a whiny voice in the personnel office.  That makes us a little queasy.

Furthermore, where she has sex with some of the men is pretty seedy as well.  When she has sex with that guy in personnel, they do it in the office of the head of that department, who is out to lunch.  From him she moves on to a junior executive played by John Wayne, whom she casts aside once she sets her sights on his boss, Mr. Brody.  She lures Brody into the ladies room after work, where they immediately start doing it. Unfortunately, in his haste to satisfy his lust, Brody leaves the door open, and Mr. Stevens, a higher-ranking executive, catches them in the act.  Brody loses his job as a result, which means Lily has no more use for him.  The hapless fellow is not only unemployed now, but desperately in love with Lily as well.  She brushes him off when he shows up at her apartment, telling him to go back to his wife and children.  Lily almost loses her job too, but she pretends that Brody followed her into the restroom and was able to take advantage of her because she couldn’t afford to lose her job.  Stevens understands her situation, and he gets to understand it even better when he starts having sex with her.  By that time, she has risen enough in the firm for her to afford a nice apartment where they can rendezvous.

But soon she figures that working as Stevens’ assistant is not good enough and that she needs a promotion.  So, she arranges to have his fiancée catch them embracing in his office.  Heartbroken, his fiancée tells her father, Mr. Carter, First Vice President of the firm, who decides Lily must be fired.  She is fired, after a fashion, as she transitions to being Mr. Carter’s kept woman in a swanky apartment with servants.  She and Chico are still friends, but as Chico is African American, she pretends to just be Lily’s maid when others are around.  We begin seeing Lily draped in diamonds and furs, while Carter also makes contributions to her bank account.

Just as Brody showed up at her place, pleading to see her again, so too does Stevens show up at her new place, also expressing his love for her.  When he discovers Carter in the bedroom, he shoots him.  Outside the bedroom, as she hears the shot, Lily stands there impassively.  Seconds later, while we are still looking at Lily, we hear the shot of Stevens shooting himself in the head.   With an almost imperceptible start at the sound of that second shot, she continues to have a blank expression on her face.  Then she walks into the bedroom and silently surveys the carnage.

This love-nest, murder-suicide causes a scandal for Gotham Trust.  Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), the playboy grandson of the founder of the firm, is called in to straighten things out.  But it isn’t long before he falls under her spell and marries her.  When he finds himself being unfairly accused by the board of directors of causing the bank to fail through mismanagement on account of his relationship with Lily, he tells her they will need to raise a million dollars for his legal defense, that she will need to cash in all the stocks and bonds he has given her, along with all the other valuables she had accumulated previously.  But she isn’t having any of that, so she and Chico book passage for Paris.  On board the ship, however, she realizes she loves Courtland.  When she gets back to their penthouse, she finds that he has tried to commit suicide.  She has the elevator operator call a doctor.  She knows she will have to cash in all the loot she has accumulated over the years to pay his legal bills, but that’s all right, because they love each other.

Even though the movie was severely edited before it was released to the theaters, it remained the most notorious movie of the Pre-Code era.  The first time I watched this movie, what I saw was this edited version.  At that time, it was thought that the original version was lost forever. But what remained was enough for it to become one of my favorite movies. When a copy of the original version was found, the movie that I already thought was great became even greater.  Today, we would call it the director’s cut.  Both versions are available on DVD in Volume One of TCM’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection.

The original version was modified for theatrical release in three ways. The first form of editing is the sort we usually expect: stuff is cut out. In one scene, after Lily decides she is through turning tricks for her father/pimp, she wrestles with a politician who has paid for her services. In the original version, he refers to her as “the sweetheart of the nightshift,” but that line is snipped out for the theatrical version. In the original version, she thinks she is rid of him and pours herself a beer. When he grabs her from behind and puts his hand on one of her breasts, she breaks the beer bottle over his head, and then nonchalantly returns to her beer. That was cut out for the theatrical version. And then there is the scene that takes place when Lily and Chico hop a freight to get to New York. A guard threatens to call the cops and have them put in jail, but Lily has sex with him in exchange for letting them stay on board. That was eliminated in the theatrical version. There are many other bits and pieces edited out, too numerous to mention. In general, what we easily suspect or infer of a sexual nature in the theatrical version was made a little more explicit in the original.

The second form of editing consists of added footage that was never filmed originally. In the original version, Lily rides in the ambulance with her husband Courtland after his attempted suicide. Even though they will have to spend all the money they have to keep him from being convicted for malversation, they look at each other fondly, knowing that even without that money they will live happily together, at which point the movie ends. In the theatrical version, the part where they look at each other with love in their eyes is edited out. What follows is a scene in which Lily is punished by having her return to Pittsburg where she started, with her husband going to work as a laborer in a steel mill, forcing her to live amongst the lowlifes she wanted to get away from.  This added scene was required in order for it to pass muster with the censors.  We don’t see Barbara Stanwyck in this scene, because by that time she was already busy making another movie.  It is merely described by members of the board of directors.

The third form of editing was that of changing the words of Cragg, the German cobbler who is Lily’s mentor. In the first scene in which Cragg and Lily are together, in the speakeasy her father owns, he asks her if she read the book he lent her. In the original version, we find out that the book was written by Friedrich Nietzsche, who Cragg says is the greatest philosopher that ever lived. In the theatrical version, that line is suppressed, so we don’t know the name of the book or who wrote it.  As to the name of the book, I shall venture a guess.  Lily says she had a hard time understanding it, which suggests that it was Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Moreover, this was the work in which Nietzsche proclaimed the coming of the superman, which is what Cragg believes Lily can become.

After her father dies, when his bootleg still explodes, she visits Cragg at his shop. He tells her she must leave the town they are in or she is lost, that with her youth and looks she has power over men, that she can be a master instead of a slave. In the original version, he quotes from The Will to Power, in which Nietzsche says that no matter how we idealize it, life is nothing but exploitation.* He tells her to exploit herself, to use men to get the things she wants. In the theatrical version, however, we do not see the title of the book or get the quote from Nietzsche. Cragg’s remarks about Lily’s exploiting herself and using men are removed and replaced by something quite different: he tells her to be clean and to remember the difference between right and wrong.  This is quite the opposite from what we might expect from a student of Nietzsche, the philosopher that wrote Beyond Good and Evil.

Along the lines of suppressing Nietzsche and modifying Cragg’s advice, the other forms of editing are also used. In the original version, Lily comes home to her plush apartment in New York to find that Cragg has sent her another book by Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season. She turns to a passage emphasized by Cragg in which Nietzsche says that to get what you want, you must “crush all sentiment.”** In the theatrical version, we do not get to see that quotation, the title of the book, or its author. Instead, we have footage added after the original version had been filmed in which she finds a letter from Cragg inside the book.  In that letter Cragg tells her she has picked the wrong way, that life will defeat her unless she regains her self-respect. Just to make sure we understand Cragg’s admonition as supposedly arising from his Christian faith, the closing just above his name says, “Merry Christmas.”  And this too is quite the opposite of what we might expect from a student of Nietzsche, the philosopher that wrote The Antichrist.

As noted above, I saw the theatrical version first. I had read that the Nietzsche stuff had been suppressed. Nevertheless, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. Apologists for Nietzsche are often at pains to say that he has been misunderstood. The movie Rope (1948) is a good example. In that movie, a college professor, played by Jimmy Stewart, talks about the superman, who is so superior he has the right to eliminate those who are inferior. When he finds out that a couple of his students decided to eliminate an inferior acquaintance by murdering him, the professor is appalled that they misunderstood what he was saying. And so, I figured Baby Face would have been in that vein even if some allusions to Nietzsche had been left in. But in the original version, Lily did not misunderstand Nietzsche, as explained to her by Cragg.  In fact, Cragg would have been disappointed to find out that Lily gave in to sentiment instead of crushing it.  This modification is the most radical way in which the movie was edited for theatrical release.

*Although this has the flavor of Nietzsche, I have not been able to find that quotation in The Will to Power, neither in the Walter Kaufmann translation with which I am most familiar, nor in that of Anthony A. Ludovici, which was part of a project overseen by Oscar Levy, and which would have been available to those who wrote the screenplay for this movie.

**As with the other quotation, I have not been able to find this one in Thoughts Out of Season.  Furthermore, the paragraph just above the passage and the one just below it appear to be duplicates, suggesting that it was fabricated.

Hollywood vs. Abortion

It has long been a standard complaint by conservatives that there is a liberal-media bias, not only in the presentation of the news, but also in the dramas and sit-coms we see in movies and on television. In 1992, Michael Medved published Hollywood vs. America, in which he indicted Hollywood for its assault on our values and virtues.  Through its various movies, he argued, Hollywood makes fun of religion, undermines marriage, promotes promiscuity, and bashes America.  The movies are violent, foul-mouthed, offensive, and degenerate.  The book makes for a really great read.  One thing Medved does not do, however, is accuse Hollywood or the television networks of promoting abortion, for the very simple reason that they don’t.  In fact, for the most part they condemn it.

There are four ways in which movies can condemn abortion:  (a) The movie can portray the woman who has the abortion as immoral or unlikable; (b) abortion can be shown to be harmful; (c) abortion can be associated with misery and regret; or (d) the movie can show us how having the baby is a rewarding experience that makes everyone happy.

In order to properly analyze Hollywood’s attitude toward abortion in the movies, we must distinguish among three different types:  (1) Movies made before 1973, when abortion was illegal, (i.e., before Roe v. Wade); (2) movies made after Roe v. Wade, but in which the story takes place before that decision, when abortion was still illegal; and (3) movies in which the story takes place after abortion had become legal.

Not surprisingly, movies made when abortion was illegal, especially those covered by the Production Code, in effect until 1968, invariably condemned abortion by one or more of the four methods listed above.  In A Place in the Sun (1951), for example, a man gets a woman pregnant and then tries to get her an abortion.  When that fails, he murders her.  In Detective Story (1951), several women have died from botched abortions.  The abortionist is pursued by a police detective, who then discovers his own wife had an abortion from that doctor.  He is so disgusted that their marriage is all but ruined.  But then he gets killed in the end anyway, asking his wife to forgive him in his dying breath.  In Peyton Place (1957), a young woman is raped by her stepfather and gets pregnant.  A doctor refuses to give her an abortion, but then she falls and has a miscarriage.  This is a typical Hollywood solution:  deny the woman the abortion, allowing her to remain free of sin, but then give her the benefit of an abortion through a substitute.  In The Interns (1962), a doctor steals some pills to give a woman an abortion, gets caught, and is no longer allowed to practice medicine.  In the television show Maude, the episodes “Maude’s Dilemma, Parts I and II,” (1972), the title character worries about the fact that she is pregnant at the age of forty-seven.  Finally, she and her husband tearfully decide to have an abortion.  In Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), a man and woman have a one-night stand and she gets pregnant.  She wants to get an abortion, but he decides against it because he does not trust the abortionist.  They end up falling in love and getting married instead.  This has become the favorite Hollywood ending, the woman choosing not to have the abortion and living happily ever after.

One possible exception is Blue Denim (1959).  A teenage boy gets a girl pregnant.  First, she almost has an abortion, but her father and the boy’s parents prevent it at the last minute.  Second, she almost goes away to have the baby, presumably to give it up for adoption, but at the last minute, she and the boy decide to get married.  They love each other, but there is one sour note.  His parents talk of how his chances of going to college and becoming an engineer or a lawyer are foreclosed.  In fact, he will not even be able to finish high school.  The boy says he’ll get a job in a filling station or something.  I thought that at the end, the boy’s parents would tell them they will support them, letting the couple live with them while they put the boy through college.  But that doesn’t happen.  Their future is as bleak as the “straightjacket” the boy’s father says it will be.  Apparently, there was a need for a compromise.  On the one hand, the abortion is prevented, allowing for a partial happy ending where they will get married and keep the baby; on the other hand, teenagers in high school having premarital sex had to be condemned and shown to have bad consequences, thereby precluding a completely happy ending.

In the second type of movie, the ones made after 1973 but set during the illegal period, abortion is still presented negatively, though somewhat more sympathetically.  Godfather II (1974) was made just after Roe v. Wade, but set in the 1950s.  When Kay tells Michael about her abortion, she says, “It was a boy, and I had it killed!”  Such defiance on the part of a woman, saying that she had the abortion and she is glad she did, would never have been allowed while the Production Code was in force.  In fact, this was the first movie in which someone actually used the word “abortion.”  Nevertheless, Kay is pretty much miserable for the rest of the movie.  In Dirty Dancing (1987), a movie set in 1963, a young woman suffers from a botched abortion.  In Cider House Rules (1999), which takes place in Maine mostly during World War II, an abortionist is portrayed as being basically a good guy, but is sort of a pathetic character that is addicted to ether, eventually dying from an overdose.  His protégé is against abortion, but ends up reluctantly performing one on a woman who is a victim of incestuous rape.  In Mad Men (2007-2015), we find out that Joan had an abortion when she was younger, but she is redeemed:  she decides to have the baby when she gets pregnant again, in conformity with the preferred Hollywood outcome.

It is not surprising that movies set before Roe v. Wade would present abortion negatively, for that was a time when not only was abortion illegal, but also when it was shameful for a woman to have premarital sex in the first place.  What is surprising is that in the third type of movie, made after the sexual revolution and the legalization of abortion, Hollywood still condemns abortion.  A pregnant woman almost never has an abortion in this third type of film, deciding instead to have the baby.  A case in point is the movie Alfie (1966) and its remake (2004).  In the 1966 movie, which belongs to the first type, Alfie gets a married woman pregnant at a time when she and her husband have not been having sex.  He helps her get an illegal abortion, and is deeply distressed to the point of tears when he looks at the fetus lying on the table.  He later talks to a friend about the unborn child, saying that he “murdered him.”  In the remake, which belongs to the third type, we are led to believe that the woman had a legal abortion, but she later reveals to Alfie that she had the baby instead.  That part could have been left out of the movie and we would never have missed it.  But Hollywood went out of its way to say, “We were only kidding about the abortion.  She had the baby.”

In Knocked Up (2007), a friend of the father-to-be suggests an abortion.  But so taboo is the subject that he can only utter something that rhymes with “abortion,” at which point the father-to-be quickly dismisses the idea.  The woman he got pregnant has the baby, and she and the father become a loving couple.  In Juno (2007), the title character changes her mind about having an abortion when she gets to the clinic, in part owing to her conversation with an abortion protester, no less.  She ends up having the baby and giving it up for adoption.  Then, she and the boy whom she had sex with end up being happily in love.  But this movie does more than merely encourage women to give a baby up for adoption rather than have an abortion.  It also makes the case that there is nothing wrong with being a single mom at the same time. The husband of the adoptive couple is portrayed as immature.  Just before the baby arrives, he tells his wife he wants a divorce. The wife decides to go ahead and adopt anyway, and we see her happily holding the baby in the hospital.  So, the movie is saying that both giving up the baby for adoption and being a single mom are good alternatives to abortion. In Murphy Brown (1991-1992), the title character gets pregnant and decides to have the baby and raise it herself, since the man who got her pregnant has an aversion to being a father and husband.  This show was made famous when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized it for disparaging the importance of fathers in raising children.  Michael Medved, whom I referred to above, also complained about the way movies and television promote the idea that being a single parent is just fine, as in the case of Murphy Brown.  But he overlooked the fact that in so doing, the movies are actually making a case against abortion by showing it to be unnecessary, something one would think Quayle, Medved, and other pro-life people would welcome.  Given the way unmarried women in movies and television casually have babies, the implicit message is that there is absolutely no need for a woman to have an abortion.  Have the baby and be happy, the movies and television shows seem to say.

On the other hand, when an abortion does occur in this third type of movie, it is condemned by one or more of the first three methods listed above.  In The Last American Virgin (1982), after a boy gets a girl pregnant, he refuses to have anything to do with her.  Another guy, who is in love with her, manages to come up with enough money for her to have an abortion, after selling some of his possessions and borrowing money from his boss.  But after she has the abortion, she gets back together with her former boyfriend, who wants her back now that she is no longer pregnant.  The guy who helped her get the abortion ends up looking like a fool.  Obviously, she is no good.  In House of Cards (2013- ), Claire, a ruthless woman with no scruples, has had three abortions in the past, and for that she is punished:  when she realizes she wants to be a mother, she finds out it may be too late.  Of course, the old abortion-substitute method is still useful.  In Citizen Ruth (1996), the title character is a pregnant lowlife, who becomes caught up in a tug of war between pro-choice and pro-life groups.  The movie goes between the horns of the dilemma by having Ruth miscarry.

There are two great exceptions to Hollywood’s condemnation of abortion.  The first is Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).  This the rare movie in which a major character, who is sweet and likable, gets pregnant, casually has an abortion with no regrets, and then lives happily ever after.  The movie has a remarkably clean conscience about abortion.  When her older brother finds out that she is having an abortion, he completely supports her, which goes against the stereotype of the older brother that is puritanical about his sister’s sex life.  I was stunned when I saw this movie.  Mistakenly, I thought that a milestone had been reached in movie morality. But I was wrong, for it was completely anomalous.  Movies soon reverted to the standard formula:  having an abortion is bad; having the baby is good.

Over thirty years had to pass before there was a second exception to the rule that movies usually condemn abortion, Obvious Child (2014), and what an exception it is.  This movie not only portrays abortion in a positive light, as in the case of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it also expresses utter contempt for the pro-life point of view.

I always focus more on the content of a movie than on formalist considerations, but I could not help but notice that the movie was filmed in a 2.35:1 ratio, the widescreen format typically used for action movies, instead of the more common 1.85:1 ratio that tends to be used for romantic comedies. This movie intends to present its pro-choice message in a big way.  Speaking of romantic comedies, that is exactly what this movie is.  Donna (Jenny Slate) is a struggling comedienne who does stand-up, and she is just as funny offstage as she is on.  Her humorous take on life persists throughout the film, and even her abortion provides material for one of her comedic routines.  People who are pro-life need the subject of abortion to be taken seriously, and this movie refuses to do that, treating it instead as something to joke about.

When the movie starts, her boyfriend breaks up with her right after one of her performances, and for a while she is upset.  Then she meets Max (Jake Lacy), and she has the best one-night stand you ever saw.  But you know what that means.  In movie logic, if a woman has sex with a guy just once, she gets pregnant.  She goes to an abortion clinic to make sure, and when the test comes back positive, she says she wants an abortion.  The doctor tries to talk to her about options, but Donna says she is not interested in hearing about those options, and simply wants an abortion.  In this way, the movie snubs the pro-life alternatives.  Speaking of which, we never see the outside of the abortion clinic, and thus we never see pro-life people hurling insults and carrying signs saying “baby killer” and whatnot.  The movie ignores them, much in the way Donna ignores the options the doctor keeps mentioning.

Donna is a Jew.  This is important for two reasons.  First, it allows for a crucial joke to be told.   Because Donna’s humor is always about stuff going on in her life, when her boyfriend breaks up with her, her depression over the breakup enters into her performance.  Supposedly she bombs, but actually her jokes are still funny.  And one of her jokes is about the holocaust.  If she were not a Jew herself, such a joke might have come across as anti-Semitic.  But being a Jew, she is inoculated against that charge.  So, why does the movie need a holocaust joke anyway?  This movie makes its attacks on the pro-life movement not through direct argument, but through the association of ideas.  A lot of pro-life advocates try to equate abortion with the holocaust, arguing that abortion clinics are like the showers at Auschwitz.  This movie undermines that argument by treating the holocaust itself as material for humor, refusing to take that analogy seriously, just as it refuses to take abortion seriously.

Second, it allows for a cultural contrast between her and Max.  When Donna first meets Max, a friend comments that Max is very much a Christian.  This is ominous, because we associate the pro-life movement with Christianity. Therefore, when Max comes back into her life after she has decided to have an abortion, we expect that when he finds out, he is going to take a strong pro-life position, waxing sentimental about the baby, and being appalled that she would even consider doing such a thing.  But as it turns out, he is all for it, completely upending our expectations.  In a similar way, when Donna tells her mother about her situation, her mother tells her about the illegal abortion she had in college, which worked out fine and was for the best.  And Donna’s roommate Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) is also an abortion veteran, with no regrets.  In other words, no one in the movie represents the pro-life position.  It is deemed unworthy of consideration.

Much of the humor in the movie is scatological.  There were several fart jokes, on and off stage, including a scene in which Max urinates outside while accidentally farting in Donna’s face.  There is a joke about what fluids do to a woman’s panties, a joke about diarrhea, a joke about anal sex, and a funny scene in which Max steps in shit.  When Donna’s boyfriend breaks up with her, he does so in a unisex restroom, and there are several references to his “dumping” her. Furthermore, when Donna and Nellie are in the bathroom doing a pregnancy test, Nellie sits down on the toilet to have a bowel movement.  I have no problem with bathroom jokes, but they keep appearing so relentlessly throughout the movie that it becomes clear that they are intended to have some kind of significance.  Their purpose is to get us to form an association between the embryo and fecal matter.  The message of this movie is that having an abortion is just a way of taking a reproductive dump.  Therefore, whereas the pro-life people argue that the embryo is a human being and that killing it is murder, this pro-choice movie answers that the embryo is just waste material that needs to be excreted.

Finally, abortion is shown to be perfectly compatible with romance.  The abortion takes place on Valentine’s Day, and Max brings Donna flowers and accompanies her to the clinic.  He says it is the best Valentine’s Day he has ever had.  Later, when they are back home and she is recovering from the procedure, they decide to watch Gone With the Wind.  This, coming at the very end of the movie, is emphatic by position.  They are going to watch one of the great romantic movies of all time, and it is just the right movie for these two lovers, who we believe will eventually get married and live happily ever after.

As effective as this movie is in making its pro-choice case, I suspect that Hollywood will play it safe in the future and continue to make movies that condemn abortions when they occur and reward women who have the baby instead.

On the Need to Reform Our Present System of Naming Children

Like David Copperfield, I was born.  Immediately thereafter, my parents decided it would be a good idea if I had a name.  In that regard, their judgment was sound.

Then sentiment took over, and they decided to give me the same name as my father.  My father had reservations, because when he was a boy, he knew a kid who had the same name as his father.  Everyone called this kid “junior,” which my father thought was icky.  The fact that my father did not like this kid only intensified that feeling.  In order to spare me the fate of being tagged with a moniker like that, my father insisted that I be a “second,” which is to say, the Roman numerals “II” were added to my name on my birth certificate.  I think my life would have been easier if the blank on that certificate following the word “father” had been filled with the word “unknown,” allowing me a name that was all mine, with neither “jr.” nor “II” following it.

For the first fifteen years of my life, I was subjected to the “lecture.”  I would be told, by those who think such things important, that I should never have been a second.  Only if my father had been a junior, or if I had been named after an uncle, they informed me, would that have been appropriate.  This lecture was delivered to me through the years by various people, and I became weary of hearing it, even if they never tired of saying it.  So, about the time I entered high school, I took matters into my own hands, and dropped the “II.”  This took care of the lecture, but as I was still living at home, I needed some way to distinguish my mail from that of my father, and so the dreaded “jr.” took its place.  A year later, I got my first driver’s license, with the “jr.” on it, and that made it official.  When I finally moved out and got an apartment of my own, I dropped the “jr.” as well.  But with a birth certificate with a “II” on it and a driver’s license with a “jr.” on it, there really was no escaping these suffixes, one of which will probably, despite my protestations, end up on my tombstone.

Meanwhile, there were my relatives to deal with, and for that purpose the “-y” was added to my first name, as in “Johnny.”  There are two problems with this kind of name-formation.  First of all, names like “Johnny,” “Billy,” and “Charley” are diminutives, which just do not have the stature and maturity of the names of their respective fathers, “John,” “Bill,” and “Charles.” Worse, they are phonetically indistinguishable from “Johnnie,” “Billie,” and “Charlie,” which are girls’ names.  With the addition of a single “-y,”, I was not only rendered a small version of my father, but was also feminized at the same time.

And then there is the use of the word “Little,” uttered before the first name, as in “Little Pete.” This last way of trying to undo the confusion of having two people in the same house with the same name is the worst of the lot.  All the ones previously considered only suggest that the person so named is derivative of someone else, a diminished version of what came before.  With the use of the word “Little,” the reduced stature of the person so referred to becomes explicit.

And all this to satisfy some strange masculine pride in one’s own name!  The whole point of having names is so that, through utterance or inscription, we can indicate the person of whom we are speaking, and do so in an unambiguous manner.  And just when we need it most, as when two males are to live under one roof, vanity triumphs over reason, and the son winds up with the same name as his father, as if it were some precious heirloom that must be handed down from one generation to the next.  I say this is a masculine trait, because the cases where a mother names her daughter after herself are so rare that I have personally only known of two of them.  The feminine solution to undoing the ambiguity that was deliberately created is for the daughter to take on a nickname, like “Sweetie.”  In any event, I have certainly never heard of a woman named after her mother going by the sobriquet “Judy, jr.,” for example, or “Little Judy.” And “Judy, II” would make us suppose her to be royalty.

But the problem is mostly confined to men, and it is toward this vain sex that we must focus our attention.  In particular, it is time to abolish the custom of allowing a man to name his son after himself.  And while we are at it, it is time to abolish the custom of having the wife change her last name to match her husband’s.  There is no reason for a woman to lose her identity by taking on her husband’s name, especially when she is likely to get divorced five years hence. And what surname do we give their children, you ask?  Well, children belong more to women than they do to men. They are the ones who do most of the child rearing, and who get custody of the children when that divorce finally arrives.  Therefore, we should give the children the woman’s last name.

This last proposal, by which all male children would have first and last names different from those of their fathers, may sound like something on the feminist agenda.  If so, it would not be the first time that men have benefited from the feminist movement.  With this reform, every boy could grow up to be his own man, with his own name.