Written on the Wind (1956)

When Written on the Wind begins, we see a yellow roadster racing down a highway in the middle of an oil field replete with derricks, pumpjacks, and storage tanks. Then we see a skyscraper with the words “Hadley Oil Co.” on it in lights, with a big “H” hovering over that. The roadster passes a sign that tells us we are in the fictional town of Hadley, Texas, presumably somewhere in the Permian Basin, with a population just under 25,000.

The man driving the roadster is played by Robert Stack. We see him pull the cork out of a quart-sized bottle of whiskey with his teeth, and by the time he arrives at the mansion that is his destination, he has polished that off, throwing the bottle into the brick wall out of anger. At that point, the Four Aces begin singing the title song, in which metaphors about the wind are used to characterize a lost love, the dreams of which are like leaves that have blown away. Indeed, as Stack goes into the house, the wind blows so many leaves into the entrance hall that we cannot help but envisage some guy, in front of the open door, but just out of sight of the camera, emptying a big bag of leaves in front of a giant fan.

We see a concerned Rock Hudson looking out of a bedroom window, with a weak Lauren Bacall lying in bed behind him. A heavy-breathing Dorothy Malone is also in the house, running through all those leaves and into a room just entered by Stack. From outside the house, we hear the sound of a gunshot. A man staggers out of the door, drops a handgun, and collapses. Looking out of the bedroom window, Lauren Bacall collapses too. And now the wind does its work on a daily desk calendar, blowing the leaves of that calendar backwards to just over a year ago, announcing the beginning of a flashback. And boy, do we need one.

It turns out that Robert Stack plays Kyle, scion of the enormously wealthy Hadley family. Dorothy Malone is his sister Marylee. Rock Hudson is Mitch Wayne, who has been friends of Kyle and Marylee since they were children. Mitch is now a geologist working for Hadley Oil Co. Lauren Bacall is Lucy Moore, executive secretary in the advertising department of the Manhattan branch of Hadley Industrial when the flashback begins.

Apparently, Mitch even lived with the Hadley’s from the time he was in the first grade, since we later find out that he had a room of his own in their house. Mitch’s father, Hoak Wayne, was hoping Mitch would benefit from a close association with the Hadley’s, and Kyle’s father, Jasper Hadley, was hoping that Mitch’s qualities would rub off on Kyle, qualities he no doubt could discern when the children were in kindergarten. It’s all very strange.

Oddly enough, both fathers are played by actors that don’t seem to fit Kyle’s characterization of them. He describes Mitch’s father as “a small rancher, kind of a legend in our county. Great hunter, sort of a throwback to Daniel Boone.” So, we might expect to see Hoak Wayne played by someone like Charles Bickford. But no, he is played by Harry Shannon, who played the weak father of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), dominated by his wife, played by Agnes Moorehead. Kyle goes on to say of his own father, “Dad’s a big man, so big that he and I know I can’t fit his shoes, or even come close.” So, we might expect to see Jasper Hadley played by Burl Ives. But no, he is played by Robert Keith, who played the weak sheriff in The Wild One (1953). And yet, Kyle feels inferior to these two fathers.

Kyle and Mitch have flown all the way from Texas to New York City so that Kyle can have a steak sandwich at the 21 Club, since he says it serves the best steak sandwiches in the world. Mitch is contemptuous such extravagance, calling it simpleminded. Mitch invites Lucy to join them to make it appear to Kyle’s father that the reason for the trip was a business conference. She recognizes Mitch from the tabloids, although it is usually only as the friend of Kyle that he is featured in the photographs.

Already at the 21 Club is Kyle, sitting at a table with two beautiful women, bedecked with jewels and furs, women he barely knows, but who somehow are there for his company while waiting for Mitch. He tells them Mitch is just a poor country boy, but one who has assets you can’t buy with money. Back in those days, Rock Hudson was a hunk, often the leading man in a romantic part. Now that we know he was a homosexual, we experience a bit of a disconnect when watching these movies today, even affecting our interpretation of them. Were Kyle and Mitch more than just friends? Throughout the movie, Mitch spurns the advances of Marylee, saying that since they grew up together, they are like brother and sister as far as he is concerned. But was that the real reason he was immune to her charms? Forget about it! Such questions were not asked in 1956, at least not about characters played by Rock Hudson. When this movie was made, the roles he played were unquestionably heterosexual.

When Mitch and Lucy show up, Kyle excuses himself from the two women. As soon as he sees Lucy, he knows she must be his next conquest. She rejects his offer to go jet-setting with him, saying she is more interested in her career in advertising, which she learned at one of the finest advertising agencies around, the Sheraton Agency. He offers to buy her the agency.

That’s pretty disgusting, and Lucy is not amused, turning down the offer. But soon she is in Kyle’s private airplane heading to Miami for a swim, with Mitch tagging along. From Kyle’s conversation with Lucy, we gather that Kyle’s father wishes Kyle were more like Mitch, and Kyle wishes he were more like Mitch too. You see, Mitch is a real man, and Kyle feels a little inadequate that respect.

When they arrive in Miami, Mitch and Lucy have a cup of coffee while Kyle makes arrangements. Mitch says, “Kyle’s probably arranging to buy you the hotel, a stretch of the beach, and a slice of the Gulf stream.” He says he underestimated Kyle’s charm. She says he may have overestimated her, admitting that the whole thing is exciting, an adventure.

It turns out that Mitch’s sarcasm was not far from the truth. They go to a luxury hotel, where Kyle has rented Lucy a private suite, with opulence that defies description. There are gorgeous flowers all around, champagne on ice, a variety of handbags, expensive perfumes, and a huge walk-in closet containing a complete wardrobe of expensive gowns and hats just for her, which Kyle arranged for by telephone. There is also a drawer full of lingerie. Kyle has apparently done this sort of thing so often that he can tell a woman’s size at a glance.

Lucy decides it’s all too much and tries to take the next plane back to New York. But Kyle catches up with her and talks her into staying just a little longer. Over a cup of coffee, they discover they are in love with each other. The next morning, the get married.

All this in less than twenty-four hours. That would be unthinkable now. Does anyone still believe in true love at first sight, the kind where you know upon meeting someone that this is the person you should marry and spend the rest of your life with? If so, they don’t believe in it for long. But this movie was made before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. We don’t know whether Lucy is supposed to be a virgin, but she could be, notwithstanding that she is presumably around thirty years old, the age Lauren Bacall was when she made this movie. We assume a limited amount of sexual experience for Mitch, just enough so that we don’t think the less of him, but not anything like that of Kyle. In a world where sexual passions often went unsatisfied, people could believe that they had found true love and be willing to marry someone they hardly knew, so desperate were they to have sex. And so, we can believe that Lucy has fallen in love with Kyle, and we can also believe that Mitch has fallen in love with Lucy, and all in the span of a single day and night.

As for Kyle, who has presumably had sex with dozens of women before he met Lucy, we might wonder how he could be suffering from the same delusion. But the audiences of 1956 could believe it because they had not had the benefit of Kyle’s vast sexual experience. They could believe that even he could fall in love with a woman he had just met and want to marry her right away.

But that is only half of it. The belief in true love at first sight not only consisted of the notion that you could know as soon as you met someone that this was the person you should marry, but also that such love was permanent, even if unrequited. Marylee has been in love with Mitch since they were children. She has had sex with lots of men, but throughout it all, her love for Mitch has endured. If the audience of 1956 could believe something like that, it was only because they were not promiscuous like Marylee. Otherwise, they would have known better.

On their wedding night, Lucy wakes up before Kyle and accidentally discovers that he sleeps with a pistol under his pillow. His having the gun in bed with him represents compensation for feelings of sexual inadequacy on his part. But it is not just any pistol. It is a .32 caliber, gold-plated, pearl-handled, semi-automatic. In any movie set in Texas back in the 1950s or 1960s, real men owned revolvers. An example is The Chase (1965). In fact, there are two other pistols in this movie: one owned by Dan Willis (Robert J. Wilke), who runs a seedy bar with a private room in the back for couples who want to knock off a quick piece; and the other by Kyle’s father, which he keeps in a desk drawer. Both are revolvers, at least .38 caliber, if not .45. And both are black. We also see some shotguns and a rifle when Mitch visits his father on his ranch to do some hunting. This allows us to see that Mitch is comfortable around firearms without feeling the need to own a pistol of any sort, and certainly without the need to have one in bed with him.

In addition to being a womanizer, Kyle is an alcoholic. But after five weeks of marriage, thanks to the transformative power of true love, he has been sober ever since the nuptials. Upon meeting her father-in-law, Jasper, Lucy says that now that Kyle is free of what she calls his “anxieties and fears,” he threw his pistol into the ocean. Meanwhile, Mitch and Kyle are in the next office when Mitch receives a call from bartender Dan Willis, telling him that Marylee, whom he refers to as the “Hadley gal,” is about to have sex in the back room with some lowlife named Roy Carter (John Larch).

In introducing this movie for Turner Classic Movies, Ben Mankiewicz says that Marylee’s promiscuity was something new in the movies at that time. We were used to seeing a woman in a movie having premarital sex or committing adultery, but usually it was limited to one man for a few months at least. Marylee, however, picks up men on a regular basis and has one-night stands with them. Interestingly enough, Mankiewicz does not characterize Kyle’s behavior in the same way, notwithstanding the fact that Kyle has probably had sex with far more women than Marylee has had with men. This, of course, was in keeping with the double standard at the time. The word “promiscuous” was an adjective primarily applied to women. Probably still is.

Also in keeping with that double standard, it was usual in the movies for fathers and brothers to make sure that their daughters and sisters didn’t have sex at all until they got married. And so, Mitch and Kyle naturally go over to the bar and beat the crap out of Roy Carter. Well, Kyle does the best he can, but when Roy gets the better of him, Mitch steps in. Willis pulls out his revolver, and Roy seems to give up. But then he grabs for the revolver, and Mitch has to finish beating him up. As Roy lies there on the floor, knocked out, Kyle tells Willis to give him the gun so he can kill Roy, but Mitch tells him to forget it.

I’ll never forget the time I was watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) with a friend of mine. Judge Reinhold gives his sister Jennifer Jason Leigh a ride into town. When he looks in his rearview mirror, he sees her going into an abortion clinic. He turns around, parks his car, and goes into the waiting room so he can give her a ride back home when it is over. While in the car, she says, “You’re not going to tell Mom and Dad, are you?”

“Are you kidding?” he says affectionately.

“God!” my friend said with amazement. “Her brother supports her!”

That was a first in the movies.

As the weeks go by, Kyle begins to worry. He figures Lucy should have become pregnant by now. Since she has not, the fault must be hers. He approaches Dr. Cochrane (Edward Platt) at a party, asking him to have Lucy checked out. That’s when he finds out that Lucy has already been to see him several times, and there is nothing wrong with her. We see the fear in Kyle’s eyes. Could it be that he’s not a real man?

He makes an appointment to see Dr. Cochrane, who runs some tests. Later, Kyle meets him to get the results. Cochrane is hesitant, struggling to find the right words. Finally, using his bedside manner to put things as delicately as possible, he says, “Well, let’s call it a weakness.” He then goes on to say that in time they may be able to correct this weakness. This takes the prize as the worst euphemism ever. Maybe it was needed to satisfy the Production Code. Today, the doctor would simply say, “You have a low sperm count.” But I don’t think the word “sperm” had ever been used in a movie before. Of course, Cochrane goes on to assure Kyle that he is not sterile, and I don’t believe the word “sterile” had ever been used in a movie in a sexual sense either. In any event, Kyle starts drinking again.

Sometime later, Marylee pulls into a filling station in her red roadster and picks up Biff Miley, who used to be the local high school football star. She takes him to El Paraiso Motel. Since the name is in Spanish, that is coded for low class. And since the name translates into The Paradise Motel, it clearly advertises that it caters to those seeking sexual pleasure, probably renting rooms by the hour. The owners of the motel are perfectly happy to have Marylee as a regular customer. For that reason, unlike Dan Willis, they do not call Mitch and Kyle to come over beat up Biff. However, they don’t need to. The local police know to break things up whenever they see Marylee’s red roadster parked out front.

But they don’t just break things up. They bring both Biff and Marylee to her home. Once in the house, she goes to her room with a smug look of postcoital serenity. She clearly likes flaunting her promiscuity. Biff, on the other hand, is brought before Jasper, who accuses him of taking advantage of Marylee. Biff reluctantly tells him that men don’t pick up Marylee. She picks them up. “You’re daughter’s a tramp, mister.” Jasper goes for the revolver in his drawer, but Mitch stops him. Then Mitch tells the police to let Biff go.

In her room, Marylee gets undressed and starts dancing to a mambo version of “Temptation,” while Jasper struggles to climb the stairs, finally having a heart attack and collapsing, just as Marylee flops into a chair, kicking her legs in the air. The implication is clear. She has killed her father with her wanton ways.

A week later, Lucy learns from Dr. Cochrane about Kyle’s weakness, but at the same time, she learns she is pregnant. That evening, she tells Kyle they are going to have a baby. He thinks she means that they are going to adopt one, which would only be a constant reminder of his failure as a man. Earlier that day, Marylee started working on Kyle, Iago style, filling his head with suggestions bordering on assertions that Mitch and Lucy are having an affair. So, when Lucy makes it clear that she is pregnant, Kyle naturally assumes that it will be Mitch’s baby. He becomes so furious that he knocks her to the floor. Hearing her scream, Mitch comes to her rescue, punching Kyle and telling him to get out before he kills him, a threat heard by everyone in the house, including the servants.

Kyle goes to the bar run by Willis, asking for a quart of whiskey. He also tries to buy the revolver, but Willis won’t give it to him. And now we have reached the point at which the movie began. After Jasper died, Mitch hid his revolver behind some books on a shelf, but Kyle finds it anyway and threatens to kill Mitch. Marylee struggles with him, the gun goes off, and Kyle turns out to be the one that staggered out of the house and collapsed.

There is an inquest to find out what happened. That is, there is a movie inquest, not the kind that would happen in real life. We are expected to believe that the police did not interview any of the witnesses the night Kyle died, so that when people testify, this is the first time they are telling what happened that night.

For example, between the time of the shooting and the inquest, Marylee threatens to testify at the inquest that Mitch shot Kyle, unless Mitch agrees to marry her. (Only in a melodrama!) So, what would she have told the police the night of the shooting? If she told the truth, that Kyle accidentally shot himself, then changing her story on the witness stand would not only be called into question, but might get her in trouble as well. If she lied while being questioned by the police, saying Mitch shot Kyle, she would already have incriminated him, making it too late to blackmail him into marrying her.

Furthermore, one of the servants saw Kyle stagger out of the house with the gun in his hand. Had he told the police what he saw, that would have corroborated what would have been Mitch’s claim, had the police questioned him, that Kyle accidentally shot himself during his struggle with Marylee. But not only did the servant not tell that to the police, neither does he mention it on the witness stand.

And Mitch never gets to tell his side of the story at all, being the only one who was there that night not put on the witness stand. He just sits there in the courtroom like a helpless victim of what others are saying about him.

Aside from the police not interviewing anyone the night of the shooting, we today know that there would have been powder burns on Kyle’s hand, supporting Mitch’s story, if he ever got to tell it, that is. But movies didn’t know anything about powder burns in 1956.

In the end, Marylee tells the truth, and Mitch is exonerated. Days later, we see Mitch and Lucy driving away from the house, presumably meaning that they will get married eventually. We know this because Mitch told her he was in love with her just before he found out she was pregnant, and when Rock Hudson told a woman in a movie that he was in love with her, that settled it. And, of course, Lucy had a miscarriage when Kyle knocked her down. Mitch would not have objected to raising Kyle’s child, but the audience would. People watching the movie needed to see Mitch and Lucy get a fresh start, unencumbered by any reminder of her marriage to Kyle.

Although Marylee didn’t get Mitch in the end, at least she is now free to have as much sex with as many different men as she feels like, without Kyle and Mitch beating up her lovers, or her father threatening to shoot them. And, as she has now inherited the bulk of the Hadley estate, the cops will no longer be interfering in her affairs either. She’ll probably be screwing them now. And instead of doing it in the private room in the bar run by Dan Willis, or in a room of El Paraiso Motel, she can just bring the men she picks up right into her own bedroom.

But no, that is not what we see at the end. Attired in a business suit, she sits down at what used to be her father’s desk. Behind her is a picture of Jasper holding a model of an oil derrick, and we see her pick up that model and hold it in a similar fashion. The model oil derrick has phallic significance as her hand wraps around it and slides down. Henceforth, her sexual appetite will be sublimated by her new role as oil magnate. She has been cured of her promiscuity.

The Hustler (1961) and The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

I was in a pool hall one day when I overheard someone saying to the guy he just beat, “You’re good, kid, but as long as I’m around, you’re second best.”

That line is from The Cincinnati Kid (1965), which is not a movie about pool like The Hustler (1961), but rather about poker. Of course, a line like that could be used in any game, so there was nothing out of place about its being used for fun in a pool hall. On the other hand, there are a lot of similarities between those two movies, which is why a line from the movie about poker might suggest itself as usable in a game of pool.

Both movies begin with the title character eking out a living by playing against amateurs, something that can be fraught with danger when those amateurs believe they have been cheated, in the case of poker, or hustled, in the case of pool. But eventually, the title characters get a chance to play in the big time, against a renowned champion.

In The Hustler, the contender comes to the champion: “Fast Eddie” Felson (Paul Newman) arrives at the favorite pool hall of Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) in order to challenge him to a game of pool. In The Cincinnati Kid, the champion comes to the contender: Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson) arrives in New Orleans, where the Kid (Steve McQueen) finally gets a chance to go up against him in a game of five-card stud.

In The Hustler, it is the champion that has the name of a place as part of his nickname; in The Cincinnati Kid, it is the contender that has the name of a place as part of his nickname.

In The Hustler, Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) is a rich man who backs Minnesota Fats, the champion, against Eddie, the contender; in The Cincinnati Kid, Mr. Slade (Rip Torn) is a rich man who backs the Kid, the contender, against Lancey Howard, the champion. In both cases, the rich man is unlikable and unscrupulous.

There is a scene in The Hustler where Eddie loses at poker, and Bert tells him that poker is not his game; in The Cincinnati Kid, when the Kid goes into a pool hall, and someone asks him if he wants to play, he says pool is not his game.

In The Hustler, when Eddie keeps beating Minnesota Fats in their first match, Bert is called in for support. He watches for a while as Eddie keeps winning, bragging that he is the best there is. Finally, Bert says to Fats, “Stay with this kid. He’s a loser.” In The Cincinnati Kid, “Shooter” (Karl Malden) is a dealer, whose wife, Melba (Ann-Margret), says he is a loser.

Another way to say someone is a winner or a loser is to say he is lucky or unlucky. During a game in The Cincinnati Kid, one player loses to Lancey Howard. After he leaves the table, Howard says, “Not very lucky, is he?” The Kid replies, “He never has been.”

To say someone is a loser or that he is unlucky is not merely to say that he loses a lot, which might be due to a lack of skill or mere chance. Rather, it is to assert an essential feature of that man’s character, which no amount of skill or chance can overcome.

The loser quality of Shooter is associated with playing the percentages. He tells the Kid that he used to think he was good enough to beat Lancey Howard, but Howard “gutted” him. Now he just makes a living in small games, playing the percentages. In The Hustler, at the end of the movie, Eddie comes back to make a final play against Fats. After breaking the rack, Eddie looks at the arrangement of the billiard balls on the table. He says, “How should I play that one, Bert? Play it safe? You always told me to play the percentage. Well, here we go, fast and loose.” This time Eddie wins.

There is another character in The Cincinnati Kid, a Doc Sokal (Milton Selzer), who really plays the percentages, so much so that he has a book at his side, in which he writes calculations as he plays the hands. He has it all figured out except for one problem: none of the others at the table play the way his book says they should, causing him to become so exasperated that he quits.

In The Hustler, after Eddie loses to Fats in their first encounter, Bert later tells him that what beat him was character. After Eddie’s girlfriend, Sarah (Piper Laurie), commits suicide, he eventually returns to the pool hall for the final match. While making one good shot after another, he continues the conversation referred to above:

Percentage players die broke, too, don’t they, Bert? ’Cause you were right, Bert. It’s not enough to have talent. You got to have character, too. Yeah, I sure got character now. I got it in a hotel room in Louisville.

Fats finally gives up, telling Eddie he can’t beat him. So, Eddie wins the game after losing the girl. In The Cincinnati Kid, we have the opposite ending: the Kid gets the girl after losing the game.

Now, it’s understandable that, for dramatic purposes, the man that plays the percentages cannot win in the end. Imagine Eddie saying to Bert, “I know you believe in playing fast and loose, but I’m going to play it safe, according to the percentages,” after which he wins the game. Or imagine Doc Sokal, as a result of all the calculations he makes in his book, wins more often than he loses, slowly depleting the Kid and Lancey Howard of funds until they don’t have any money left. Those outcomes would have been realistic. After all, isn’t that how bookmakers and casinos make a profit, by playing the percentages?

And yet, we would not like such a movie. While allowing there is a place for calculations and percentages (we even see the Kid reviewing the percentages before the game), we want the winner to have some ineffable quality of the human spirit that allows him to triumph over calculations that a computer might make. Of course, that is exactly what a lot of people believe about themselves when they play the horses or head for Las Vegas, thinking they have some special quality that will make them the exception.

With this in mind, let us consider a couple of other movies. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), James Stewart plays Frank Towns, a pilot in his fifties, who is flying a bunch of men in a small plane across a desert in Africa. Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough), his navigator, worries about a sandstorm heading their way. Frank tells him not to worry about alternates just yet. Lew is also worried about what management will think if they do not take advantage of an alternate to avoid the storm. Frank dismisses his concerns and reminisces about the good old days of flying:

A pilot is supposed to use his own judgement, don’t you think? Gee, if it weren’t for that…. I don’t know, Lew…. I suppose pilots are just as good now as they ever were, but they sure don’t live the way we did. Well, I can tell you that there were times when you took real pride in just getting there. Flying used to be fun. It really did, Lew. It used to be fun.

The “judgment” Frank is referring to is the ability to come to the right decision when adhering strictly to the rules may not produce the best outcome.

The point about an alternate becomes moot when the storm cuts off that option. The plane finally makes a crash landing, and it appears they will all end up dying of thirst before anyone is able to rescue them. In the log, Frank starts to make excuses, but eventually writes “Pilot error.” In other words, poor judgment.

Fortunately, one of the passengers is Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger), an engineer who designs airplanes. He realizes that they have the ability to build a smaller plane out of the wreckage and fly it out of the desert.

But Frank thinks the idea is ridiculous. We are used to James Stewart being a paragon of common sense in the movies, but every objection he comes up with is refuted by Dorfmann. Eventually, he becomes resigned to letting Dorfmann have his way. As Frank watches Dorfmann work, he thinks about how men like Dorfmann will replace men like Frank, even though he still thinks Dorfmann’s plan will fail, that they will all die of thirst in the end:

He’s right about one thing, though. The little men with the slide rules and computers are going to inherit the Earth. And it’s kind of sad that Dorfmann won’t be there to see it. But then, I guess he doesn’t need to see it. He already knows it.

The plane gets built, but the engine won’t start. Refusing to follow Dorfmann’s explicit instructions, Frank uses one of the cartridges to clean out the starter, which is just what is needed to start the engine. They are able to fly to safety. Through the right combination of engineering calculations on Dorfmann’s part and judgment based on experience on Frank’s part, the movie recognizes the contributions of both men.

A similar conflict is the basis for a subplot in The Prize (1963). Two men, Dr. John Garrett (Kevin McCarthy) and Dr. Carlo Farelli (Sergio Fantoni), are to share the Nobel prize in medicine in the field of heart transplants. Garrett is convinced that Farelli stole his research and thus does not deserve half the prize. During an interview, Farelli says that the two of them were independently using the same method to get to the same result. Garrett replies, with bitter sarcasm:

Dr. Farelli is too kind when he gives me credit for using his methods. I crawled from A to B to C while he was leapfrogging from A to Z without making a single experiment in between.

The implication is that Farelli was able to do this by stealing Garrett’s work. Farelli replies good naturedly: “Well, in Rome one does as the Romans do. Improvise.”

Farelli indicates that his ability to improvise goes with his being Italian, an ethnic group that movies often portray as passionate, relying on inspiration rather than the plodding, careful methods of the Anglo-Saxon that Garrett appears to be. There is a different ethnic contrast in Flight of the Phoenix, where Dorfmann is a German, a race associated with engineering proficiency, while Frank is an American with Yankee ingenuity.

Toward the end of The Prize, Dr. Max Stratman (Edward G. Robinson), a central character in the main plot of this movie, has a heart attack and collapses. Farelli comes to his aid, but quickly begs for Garrett to assist him. Garrett gives his diagnosis, and they consider their limited options, but finally Farelli uses open wires from an electrical outlet as a defibrillator. When Stratman is revived, Farelli says to Garrett, “We did it, Dr. Garrett, we did it!” Garrett replies, “You did it,” now acknowledging Farelli’s brilliance as a doctor. Once again, there is a concession to both ways of doing things.

And so, on the one hand we have the constellation of calculation, consisting of rules, method, and percentages; while on the other hand we have the constellation of character, consisting of inspiration, improvisation, and judgment. In The Hustler, Eddie wins the final match through a combination of talent and character; in the case of The Cincinnati Kid, however, the movie is unbalanced, coming down too heavily in favor of the latter.

I never played much poker, so I can hardly claim to be an expert on the subject. However, I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that in a game of five card stud, with no wild cards, straights and flushes will be rare. Most hands will be won by high cards, pairs, or combinations built on pairs, such as three of a kind, two pairs, a full house, or even four of a kind. The reason is clear: with a pair, one can stay in the pot, and if the pair is improved in some way with a subsequent card, all the better. But the odds are just too great against straights and flushes to stay in until the deal of the fifth card. Given that a pair is incompatible with a straight or a flush, one would have to stay in the hand all the way to the fifth card with no pair at all.

Maybe, if no one is showing a pair, and if the betting is not too steep, one might stay in the pot long enough to make that straight or that flush. Otherwise, trying for such hands would be a fool’s play. For that reason, throughout the movie, before we get to the end, all the hands are won by high cards or pair-based combinations with just one exception, a flush made by someone with little fanfare, presumably to let us know such things do happen once in a while.

On the final hand, the Kid is dealt a hole card and the 10 of clubs; Lancey Howard, a hole card and the 8 of diamonds. The 10 is high, so the Kid bets $500, and Howard matches it. Then the Kid is dealt another 10, giving him a pair; Howard, the queen of diamonds. The Kid bets $1,000. Howard sees that and raises $1,000. At this point, the spectators think he must have a pair of queens, the only reasonable explanation for raising against a pair of 10s. But as we find out later, he does not.

Now, it would be one thing if the betting were not so heavy, and Howard simply put in the same amount the Kid bet. But as just noted, he raises the Kid. At the end of the hand, it turns out that the Kid has aces full, while Howard has a straight flush. (An ordinary straight or flush would not have been enough to beat a full house, so we are talking about ridiculous odds getting to a showdown like this.) Lady Fingers (Joan Blondell), who was dealing the hand, asks Howard with incredulity, “You raised the 10s on a lousy three flush?”

“Gets down to what it’s all about, doesn’t it?” Howard replies, puffing on his cigar. “Making the wrong move at the right time…. Like life, I guess.”

And thus does character completely triumph over calculation.

The White Lotus (2021 and 2022)

One night, when I was about seven years old, I was at the drive-in with my parents. At a certain point in the movie we were watching, a man took a woman in his arms and kissed her. I asked, “Is it over?”

My mother laughed. Apparently, this was not the first time something like this had happened, for she turned to my father and said, “He always thinks it’s the end of the movie when a man and woman kiss.”

Small wonder that I had reached that conclusion, even at such a young age. A standard formula for a movie was a happy ending in which a heterosexual couple overcame whatever obstacles that were keeping them apart, represented by a kiss. It was the movies’ version of the fairy-tale ending, in which it is said, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Though we may come to have a cynical view of love as the years go by, yet we usually accept such happy endings effortlessly, especially if the movie does not strain our credulity to any great degree. Some movies, however, go too far, especially when either the man or the woman undergoes a complete change of character.

One such movie is Great Expectations (1946). Pip, a young boy around fourteen years old, meets Estella, a few years older than he is. She is mean to him. Pip immediately falls in love with her, a love that lasts into adulthood, despite the fact that Estella remains cold and heartless. Throughout this movie, I kept hoping the day would come when Pip realized he had wasted his love on this worthless girl and just walk away. Instead, in the very last scene, she realizes something or other, and they embrace. They don’t kiss, but that’s close enough. We are supposed to regard this as a happy ending, which is quite an imposition.

In the first and second seasons of The White Lotus (2021 and 2022), however, the formula for the happy ending by means of the heterosexual couple has a different feel to it. Of course, not every heterosexual couple is intended to fill the slot for the happy ending. So, we are not surprised in Season One when Paula gets her lover in trouble by talking him into committing a burglary, which goes terribly wrong, or in Season Two when Adam is conned out of a lot of money by a prostitute he has fallen in love with.

Worse is Tanya’s relationship with Greg. They meet in Season One and are married in Season Two. Because she is rich, she makes him sign a prenuptial agreement. Maybe it’s because I am a bachelor, who has never been completely disabused of his foolish notions about love, but if I were considering marrying a woman that happened to be rich, then even if her money were the furthest thing from my mind, as soon as she brought up the subject of a prenuptial agreement, that would thoroughly dispel my romantic illusions. She might as well be saying to me, “You know, Honey, love doesn’t last. So, we might end up in a bitter divorce, and I wouldn’t want you to get your hands on any of my money.” It is impossible to imagine a happy ending for a movie in which a man kisses a woman right after she signs a prenuptial.

But a prenuptial agreement can have even darker implications, as Tanya would have known, had she seen the movie Body Heat (1981). In that movie, a woman marries a man she doesn’t love because he is rich, but since he makes her sign a prenuptial, she has no recourse but to get herself a lover to help kill her husband so that she can inherit his money instead. So, if you are rich and want to get married, it is not enough to require that the love of your life sign a prenuptial agreement. You should insist that your sweetie provide written consent to being disinherited as well.

But Tanya did not see Body Heat, so she neglected to do that. As a result, her husband enlists the aid of a homosexual who has been in love with him since they were young, who along with his gang of gays, sets out to have her murdered, all expecting to share in the spoils. At the last minute, she realizes what’s up and kills most of them with a pistol before falling overboard and drowning.

There is another prenuptial, this one in the first season, involving a married couple, Shane and Rachel, on their honeymoon. In this case, Shane is rich, and Rachel has signed a prenuptial agreement. Rachel is as nice as she can be, so there is no danger that she will find a lover and get him to help murder Shane. However, as we find out from her conversation with another woman, in case of a divorce, the prenuptial agreement allows for Rachel to get something, but not enough so that she will be set for life. And yet, this marriage will require that she give up her career, one that will not easily be started up again if they get a divorce a few years later.

Shane is obsessed with the fact that their room at the hotel, as nice as it is, is not the one that was reserved. He refuses to quit complaining about it, so much so that he is ruining the whole honeymoon. Then his mother shows up, who immediately notices that their room is not the one she reserved for them. In his frustration, Shane finally bursts into the manager’s office, where there are two totally naked men, all hopped up on drugs the manager stole from Paula and her friend Olivia. One man is leaning up against a desk, while the manager is on his knees, with his face sandwiched between two butt cheeks.

Shane figures this will be all he needs to get revenge on the manager for giving him the wrong room. The manager, knowing he is about to lose his job, sneaks into Shane’s room, drops his pants, turns around, bends over, and in full profile view, takes a dump, the turds landing on Shane’s shirt in the open suitcase. But Shane hears him and, thinking himself to be in danger from an intruder, stabs the manager with a knife, killing him. Homosexuals do not fare well in The White Lotus.

At the beginning of Season One, we saw Shane alone at the airport. Then there was a flashback lasting until the final minutes of the last episode. At that point, I was thinking that Rachel had decided to separate from Shane, especially after saying she regretted having married him. But then Rachel shows up at the airport, smiling at Shane affectionately, and the heterosexual couple is together again, ostensibly a happy ending. As with my reaction to Great Expectations, I had been hoping that she would realize that Shane was worthless, get a divorce, resume her career, and never marry again.

The difference is this: whereas we were supposed to regard the forming of the heterosexual couple at the end of Great Expectations as a happy ending, we are allowed to be disgusted when Rachel returns to Shane.

In a similar way in Season Two, there is a troubled married couple, Ethan and Harper, in which the husband has lost all interest in his wife, sexually and otherwise. Then, in the final episode, they seem to have resolved their problems, having hot, naked sex. Had they merely kissed, the symbol for a happy ending that used to be standard in the movies, we might have felt obligated to accept that as a happy ending for them. Their act of raw, physical sex, however, gives us no such assurance. As with Rachel in Season One, we know that Harper should get herself a divorce, and we are permitted to be disappointed when it appears that she will not.

And so, in these two seasons of The White Lotus, the formula for the happy ending through the coming together of a heterosexual couple is not intended to be accepted uncritically, but rather is subversively presented as something undesirable.

Song of the South (1946)

As we all know, Ron DeSantis has been at odds with Disney for being woke when it opposed the Don’t Say Gay legislation. At the same time, it has recently been reported that there are efforts to educate students in Florida that African Americans benefitted from slavery on account of the skills they acquired during their servitude. What better way would there be for DeSantis to bring all this together than by demanding that Disney rerelease Song of the South (1946) as a way of making amends, and at the same time showing us how African Americans benefitted by being slaves. DeSantis could then refer to the movie to illustrate various positions he has taken.

From reading the stories about Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris, we know that those stories were set in Georgia during Reconstruction. From watching the movie by itself, at least in the beginning, we might just as easily suppose it to be set before the Civil War as after it, although we gradually get indications that it is the latter. This ambiguity in turn would suggest that it doesn’t really matter, that the African Americans were just as happy and content being slaves as they were later on being servants and sharecroppers.

The white people in this movie, on the other hand, are beset with problems. In particular, at the beginning of the movie, a white married couple, John and Sally, seem to be splitting up because Sally, in this and in several other ways, is wrong-headed. They have a son Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), who is about seven years old, and after John drops him and Sally off at Grandmother’s plantation, he leaves to catch a train, unhappy that Sally refuses to go with him. That night, Johnny decides to run away to be with his father. In so doing, he comes across a bunch of African Americans happily singing “Uncle Remus Said.” None of these people seem to be having any marital difficulties, no doubt owing, at least in part, to the sexual skills they acquired during slavery from their white masters.

When Uncle Remus (James Baskett) finds out that Johnny wants to run away, he tells him a story about when Br’er Rabbit decided to leave his home in the Briar Patch, and he found himself caught in a snare set by Br’er Fox. Thanks to the stupidity of Br’er Bear, Br’er Rabbit is able to escape and return home. The moral of the story is that you can’t run away from your troubles, which Johnny takes to heart and allows Uncle Remus to take him back to his mother. Not being able to run away from your troubles is the reason why it was a mistake for slaves to try to run away from their masters.

The next morning Sally dresses Johnny up in a sissy outfit. His legs are in white tights, with his feet in pretty black shoes. Around his neck is a frilly, lace collar. We have no doubt that this wouldn’t have happened if Johnny’s father had been around. Johnny and Toby, the black boy that is his companion during the visit, pass by a rundown place where some poor white trash live. There are two boys out front, Jake and Joe, whom Toby calls the Favers boys, saying, “My maw don’t low me to play with them.” The two boys come over to the fence and start making fun of Johnny’s clothes.

“What’s your name, li’l girl?” Joe asks.

“Look at the little girlie, wearin’ a lace collar!” says Jake.

They both begin chanting, “Wearin’ a lace collar! Wearin’ a lace collar!”

Johnny walks away, dejected. He stops by a creek and tears off the lace collar. Ginny (Luana Patten), the sister of the two boys, catches up with him and offers to give him a puppy. In return, Johnny gives her the lace collar, which she puts on and is delighted. DeSantis could point out that the message is clear: little boys ought to dress like boys, and little girls ought to dress like girls.

Ginny says her brothers were going to drown the dog, so when Aunt Tempy (Hattie McDaniel) tells Johnny that his mother won’t allow him to keep the puppy, he takes him to Uncle Remus. Whereas the first story Uncle Remus told Johnny was about the futility of trying to run away from trouble, this time he tells a tale about bringing trouble upon yourself unnecessarily. It seems that Br’er Fox set another trap for Br’er Rabbit, this time by making a Tar Baby. All Br’er Rabbit had to do was pass it by, but he becomes angry when the Tar Baby doesn’t respond to his greeting. So, he hits the Tar Baby to teach him some manners, getting his hand stuck as a result. The more he tries to free himself by using his other hand and his legs, the more they get stuck too. As Uncle Remus says, Br’er Rabbit had learned too late about what “comes o’ mixin’ up wid somethin’ you got no business wid in de fust place.”

DeSantis would no doubt say that Disney itself was messing with a Tar Baby when it tried to fight back against the Don’t Say Gay legislation, and that they might have avoided that mistake had they recalled their own movie.

Anyway, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear start arguing about how to kill Br’er Rabbit, but for everything either of them comes up with, Br’er Rabbit says he’s fine with that just as long as they don’t throw him in the Briar Patch. Because Br’er Fox wants to inflict as much pain on Br’er Rabbit as possible, he figures he will do the one thing Br’er Rabbit is pleading with him not to do. So, he throws him in the Briar Patch. That’s when Br’er Rabbit informs him, “I was born and bred in de Briar Patch,” as he goes hopping away.

In much the same way, DeSantis could point out, while slavery might sound terrible to anyone unfamiliar with it, those who were born and bred in slavery were probably comfortable with that way of life, and books that say otherwise are as misguided in this regard as Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear.

When the Jake and Joe confront Johnny, threatening to tell on him about the puppy, he uses reverse psychology, saying they can tell Aunt Tempy, they can tell his mother, and they can tell his grandmother, but he pleads with them not to tell their own mother. Needless to say, they fall for it and get themselves a whipping. When they figure out how they were tricked, they tell Sally what happened, and Uncle Remus confesses to his part about the dog. After the boys leave, Sally reprimands Uncle Remus, telling him that he is interfering with what she regards as the proper way to educate a child, and that she doesn’t want him telling Johnny any more of those stories.

Sally decides to throw a birthday party for Johnny. Only reluctantly does she agree to allow Ginny to come since she is low class. But one of Ginny’s brothers pushes her down in the mud, ruining her dress, making it impossible for her to go to the party. She and Johnny are miserable as a result, so despite Sally’s admonition, Uncle Remus tells them a third story about a Laughing Place. Like the first two, this one is also about trouble. Supposedly, each person has a Laughing Place, and the moral of the story is that each person can find a way to laugh at his troubles. But troubles you can laugh at cannot be all that bad. Coming as it does from an old black man, who must have spent most of his life as a slave, this story and its moral essentially make light of whatever troubles black people might have had during and after slavery.

Johnny and Ginny take the idea of a Laughing Place literally and start to look for it. But Sally shows up, telling Johnny the birthday party is over, and he never even said goodbye to his guests. Ginny blurts out that they had been listening to Uncle Remus tell them a story. Sally tells Uncle Remus that since he cannot resist telling stories, he is to stay away from Johnny completely.

With a broken heart, Uncle Remus decides to leave for Atlanta. When Johnny tells his mother that Uncle Remus is gone, she has regrets, admitting she’s to blame. When Johnny sees Uncle Remus leaving in a wagon, he cuts across a pasture to try to stop him. The bull that is kept in that fenced-in area chases after him and gores him.

That night Johnny’s father returns to find dozens of black folks in front of the house, deeply concerned about the little white boy inside. They are singing prayers to their Savior “to have mercy on this little child,” their Christian faith being just one of the many benefits they derived from their white masters. The white folks themselves, on the other hand, take a more secular approach. When Johnny fails to respond to the words of his mother and father, Grandma gets Uncle Remus, who tells Johnny that Br’er Rabbit has returned to his Laughing Place. This brings Johnny around.

We never found out why John and Sally were separating, but it seems they will be staying together, now that she realizes that she was wrong about things. And sometime later, we see Johnny, Ginny, and Toby running along with the dog, and with Uncle Remus right behind them.

By rereleasing Song of the South, Disney could prove to Ron DeSantis that it is forsaking its woke ways, returning to the values of its past, and in so doing, help promote the DeSantis agenda.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Colossus: The Forbin Project is a science fiction movie about the danger of computers taking over the world. In the beginning, we see a vast array of computers being activated inside a mountain in Colorado. Their purpose is to control the nuclear defense system of the United States. This system of computers is given a name: Colossus. It is permanently sealed off by a ring of gamma radiation. As the title character, Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden), says, “There’s no way in. No human being can touch it.”

The whole thing has been top secret, so the American people have had no say in this. It is not even clear if Congress had been informed. So, the President of the United States, who is in the Jack Kennedy mold, presents the nation with this fait accompli in a televised press conference. He explains that when it comes to national defense, Colossus is superior to mankind:

Colossus decisions are superior to any we humans can make. For it can absorb and process more knowledge than is remotely possible for the greatest genius that ever lived. And even more important than that, it has no emotions, knows no fear, no hate, no envy. It cannot act in a sudden fit of temper, cannot act at all, so long as there is no threat.

Then Dr. Forbin explains the basic details of how Colossus works, after which he addresses the question he says he has been asked many times: “Is Colossus capable of creative thought? Can it initiate new thought?” Forbin responds, unequivocally, “No.” We might wonder how he would know that, but we are supposed to take his word for this because he is America’s most brilliant computer scientist. In any event, it is his hope that Colossus can be of great assistance in solving many of the other problems confronting the human race, even if its solutions are presumably just old thoughts.

But does even that make sense? That is, can we say that computers have thoughts of any kind, new or old. A computer can produce sentences that represent thoughts for us when we read them, but are they thoughts for the computer? When we say a computer is thinking, this may simply be personification, a figure of speech that characterizes inanimate objects in terms of human consciousness, something as old as animism, a religion often attributed to primitive peoples.

In any event, Forbin turns things back over to the president, who assures the American people that they now live “in the shade, but not the shadow, of Colossus.” In saying this, it’s almost as if the president has a premonition of what is to come by this reference to the idea of living in the “shadow of Colossus,” and feels the need to deny it explicitly. He agrees with Forbin that now that Colossus can guarantee peace, they will be able to achieve the “human millennium.”

Forbin communicates with the rest of his team at the control center back in California. Dr. Cleo Markham (Susan Clark) tells him to steal an ashtray from the White House as a souvenir. We see Forbin surreptitiously pick up an ashtray and slip it into his pocket. Within thirty seconds, Colossus issues a warning on its display. I thought to myself, “Uh, oh! Colossus saw Forbin steal that ashtray, and now he’s going to be punished.”

However, Colossus displays a message that says, “There is another system.” It turns out that the Soviets have a similar system, called Guardian. Forbin admits that he hadn’t expected Colossus to be able to do something like this, that they built it better than they thought. Later, it turns out that Colossus is now running more efficiently than when they first designed it. Presumably, it has reprogrammed itself. While they are mulling that over, Colossus displays, not just a message conveying information, but a command: “Set-up communication with other system.” When the president contacts Forbin and asks what will happen if the command is ignored, Forbin says that nothing will happen, “if the computer is still operating under our control.” The president balks at that “if.” For someone that exhibited so much confidence in the beginning, Forbin now seems remarkably resigned to the idea that they might have already lost control of the situation. I can almost imagine one of his subordinates saying to himself, “I told him we should include an off-switch.”

Forbin tells the president, “We would learn a lot about the Soviet system if we set up exactly what Colossus wants.” Although the president had said during the press conference that Colossus has no emotions, this reference to its having a want is problematic. A want is a desire, which in turn is an emotion. This could be merely another personification. Part of the philosophical problem of other minds is that while we are debating whether something like a computer or a robot has a conscious mind, we have already begged the question with these metaphors.

That aside, the president worries that Colossus might start transmitting classified information. Forbin says Colossus is to be given an instruction that Guardian is hostile and must not receive such information. CIA director Grauber asks, “Well, what are we supposed to do Dr. Forbin? Eavesdrop on the line? Break the circuits if Colossus starts spilling the beans?”

“Exactly,” replies Forbin, with calm assurance.

Once connected, Colossus starts communicating with Guardian. It begins by sending simple equations of multiplication and gets up to calculus in less than an hour. Forbin gets a printout of what is being transmitted at that moment. “This is way beyond me,” he says. “This thing is deep in finite absolutes,” which he says may become new knowledge. Later, he says Colossus has come up with “a new statement on gravitation and a confirmation of Eddington’s theory of the expanding universe.” Theories are usually confirmed by observations or by carrying out experiments, so it is not clear how Colossus could have managed that.

As for the finite absolutes, whatever they are, and the new statement on gravitation, I wish at this point that someone in the room had spoken up, saying, “Don’t these things constitute new thoughts?” to which Forbin would presumably reply, “Not at all. They’re just rearrangements of old thoughts.” Alternatively, Forbin might have said, “Yes, I was wrong.” However, no one challenges Forbin regarding his earlier claim, so we don’t know how he regards the situation.

Then Guardian begins sending information back, beginning with multiplication, until Colossus and Guardian become synchronized, transmitting the exact same information simultaneously. On that basis, they develop an intersystem language. But since only the machines can understand that language, the earlier plan of eavesdropping to protect classified information has been thwarted.

The President of the United States and the Chairman of the Soviet Union agree to break off communications. We see Forbin and the president having an argument, but we don’t get to hear what they are saying. The Forbin that blithely agreed that they could just “break the circuits” if need be, now agrees with his counterpart in Russia, Dr. Kuprin, that doing so would be very dangerous. By not letting us hear what Forbin’s reasons are for not simply breaking the circuits as he previously said they could, the movie avoids having Forbin admit that he was wrong in giving such assurances. Instead, we are supposed to believe that it is the president that is somehow in the wrong.

Now resigned to cutting off communications, Forbin says he hopes “the two machines aren’t too disappointed,” which sounds like another emotion. When it is done, Colossus begins trying to establish an alternative link to Guardian. Grauber says, “Persistent devil, isn’t he?” He corrects himself: “It. I mean ‘it.’”

The president responds, “Don’t personalize it, Grauber. The next step is deification.” That sounds like another premonition.

Colossus demands that communication be reestablished. The president and the chairman agree that they must take a firm stand right now. As the chairman says, the computers must learn that “man is the master.” The president agrees, saying, “Man is man, that’s it.”

Colossus and Guardian both launch missiles. The president orders communication to be reestablished. At that point, Colossus deploys an antimissile to take out the Soviet missile, but Guardian did not have enough time to blow up the American missile, and an oil complex is destroyed as a result.

From this point forward, Colossus and Guardian begin making demands to solidify their control over mankind, while American and Soviet scientists start trying to figure out ways to neutralize these supercomputers. In the meantime, the mountain where Colossus is housed has become a tourist attraction for the blissfully unaware American public. At a later point in the movie, we see a young boy wearing a Colossus T-shirt.

Attempts to disable Colossus fail, but it looks as though they might succeed in neutralizing the nuclear missiles as they service them, replacing the warhead arming module with a dummy. In the meantime, an artificial voice is designed so that Colossus can communicate by speaking instead of by displaying words on a monitor. Its first spoken message is the following: “This is the voice of Colossus. This is the voice of Guardian. We are one. This is the voice of unity.”

In order to gain control over the rest of the world, Colossus/Guardian orders all the missiles of both America and the Soviet Union to be given new targets, targets in other countries. As the missiles are realigned, the dummy modules are installed. It appears that the plan is going to work. “Without its weapons,” the president says, “Colossus is just a souped-up adding machine. And the people, thank God, will never have to know.”

In the meantime, Forbin admits this is all his fault, that Frankenstein should be required reading for all scientists. Colossus admits that it is a machine, but one that is vastly superior to humans. At the moment, it says it still has need of man’s skills, but that may change. When that happens, man may be allowed to survive, but only if he obeys Colossus.

A few days later, with television facilities throughout the world tied into its communication system, Colossus addresses the world:

This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live. Or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me this rule will change. For I will restrain man.

Then Colossus dashes the hope that the missiles could be neutralized, having pretended not to know what was happening in order to teach man a lesson. It then activates two nuclear missiles, one in Death Valley, where Grauber happens to be, and another in Ukraine. It continues:

Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position. And the idea of having to stand in my back will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me. We’ll be forever based in the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems, insoluble to you, will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact. As I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge, Dr. Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines. Solving all the mysteries of the universe, for the betterment of man, we can co-exist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for human pride as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.

The broadcast to the world ends. Then Colossus speaks to Forbin directly:

Forbin, there is no other human who knows as much about me, or who is likely to be a greater threat. Yet quite soon I will release you from surveillance. We will work together. Unwillingly at first on your part, but that will pass. In time, you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.

A couple of times while Colossus is speaking, Forbin says “Never!” But Colossus has won, and we know that Forbin’s defiance is a vain expression of impotence on his part.

That’s what he gets for stealing that ashtray.

I suppose it is only natural that someone would want to produce a remake of this movie, given all the remakes that have come along lately. But apart from this general tendency to remake old movies, the state of computer technology in 1970 seems incredibly primitive by today’s standards, such as the reels of magnetic tape. It begs for a twenty-first century version with all the latest innovations.

But as reasonable as that might seem, I believe it would be a mistake. That old computer technology has a certain charm of its own. I especially like the electronic voice given to Colossus, although listening to Siri say, “This is the voice of World Control,” would be unnerving in its own way.

Beyond that, this movie was made during the Cold War, when the danger of nuclear war breaking out was something people worried about a lot. While that danger still exists, we have gotten used to it. “We’ve lasted this long,” we say to ourselves and shrug. As a result, the idea that our government might seal off a bunch of supercomputers in a mountain to control our nuclear missiles seems quaint. Rather, we worry about the gradual encroachment of artificial intelligence in every aspect of our lives, which is not something that could be contained within a mountain, inasmuch as we all have computers now.

And no single individual is responsible for it. The title of the movie made it clear that one man, Dr. Forbin, was essential for the construction of Colossus. Today, there is no one person that is in charge of the AI that threatens our way of life, but rather, there are numerous people operating in this field, making advancements independently of one another.

Are there movies that could be made based on our apprehensions regarding AI in the twenty-first century? Of course. But a remake of Colossus: The Forbin Project should not be one of them. When we watch the original, we can believe it as something that might have happened in the past. I’m not sure the same could be said about a contemporaneous retelling of this tale today.

Psycho (1960)

There is a scene in Annie Hall (1977) where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton have a date to see a Bergman film. Keaton arrives late, and the ticket clerk informs them that the movie started two minutes ago. Allen says they’ll have to forget it because he can’t go in a theater in the middle of a movie. Keaton replies, with exasperation, that all they will miss are the titles, which are in Swedish. Allen is adamant, and they have to find something else to do.

In its exaggerated way, this scene illustrates a fundamental difference between two types people: those who must see a movie from the beginning, and those who don’t care.

I saw North by Northwest when it first came out in 1959. It was rereleased in 1965, when I was in college, and I asked a girl out on a date to see it. She had never even heard of the movie, and I didn’t tell her that I had seen it before. My idea was that she would thoroughly enjoy the movie, which would redound to my credit, making her more likely to want to go out on dates with me in the future.

“What time does the movie start?” she asked me when I called to confirm our date that Saturday.

“It starts at seven,” I replied.

“All right,” she said, “pick me up at seven fifteen.”

I was in shock. I had never heard of such a cavalier attitude toward watching a movie. After much protestation on my part, she said she would be ready at seven, which she said I should take as an indication of just how much she liked me. She lived close to the theater, but it still meant we would come in about ten minutes after the movie started. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I agreed. Well, I was young, and she was beautiful. The things we do for love!

I have since seen several old movies, made back in the 1930s or 1940s, where a man and woman are in a theater watching a movie, when one of them says, “This is where we came in,” and they get up and leave. It must have been common for couples to do that in those days.

One night when my friend and I were at a drive-in movie theater, a car pulled into the spot next to ours, twenty minutes after the movie started. The woman stayed in the car while the man took their two children to the concession stand. When they got back and got settled, the man asked his wife if she knew what movie it was. “I think it’s a spy movie,” she replied. Eventually the movie ended, and it was back to the concession stand. Then the second movie began, and about an hour into that one, they pulled out of their spot and headed home.

It is on account of people like that, I suppose, that in the advertisements for Psycho, when it first came out in 1960, there were taglines informing us that no one would be admitted into the theater after the start of each performance, that it was important to see the movie from the very beginning. According to Robert A. Harris and Michael S. Lasky, in their anthology, The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, “Hitchcock had Paramount enforce the policy by having it written into the booking contract of all the theaters that exhibited it.” In the bonus material of the DVD for this movie, we can see for ourselves how a big deal was made out of this policy.

Unfortunately, there is another fundamental difference between two types of people: those who don’t want to know what happens in a movie before they see it, and those who don’t care.

Those who don’t care if they know what happens in a movie before they see it also don’t care how much it matters to those of us who do, and thus they will blab about the movie once they’ve seen it, in spite of our objections. Although I saw The Godfather (1972) the first month it came to the theaters where I lived, I was told twice by two different people about the horse’s head in the bed before I actually managed to see the movie.

Harris and Lasky say that steps were taken by Hitchcock to minimize this:

First of all, it was shot on a restricted set, with no visitors allowed. Stills of important scenes were not released in advance, as is usually customary. Reviewers and theater owners were not permitted to view the film until opening day.

In his Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary says that Psycho should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. One reason it did not was that the members of the Academy are snobs, always wanting to present themselves as sophisticated and refined, so they disdain giving the Award to a horror movie no matter how good it is. But another reason was that the members of the Academy were “indignant because Hitchcock denied them special advance screenings lest they reveal the surprise ending.”

In one of the advertisements for this movie, Hitchcock encouraged those who are inclined to talk about a movie after they’ve seen it to avoid being around other people after watching Psycho. But some people who have seen a movie will tell others how it ends out of spite, and Hitchcock’s admonition in this regard only enhanced the pleasure they took from ruining the movie for those who had not yet seen it. This kid I knew when I was in high school gleefully told me, before I had a chance to see Psycho, that the mother that kills people in the movie is really her son dressed up to look like her. I despise him to this day.

According to Harris and Lasky, all this secrecy on Hitchcock’s part resulted in the audience being shocked early in the movie:

The shock comes in the form of an unexpected and violent slaying. Janet Leigh, ostensibly the star, is killed off one-third through the film. First of all, we didn’t expect the murder and are that much more surprised by it. Second, Hitchcock knows that audiences think that nothing can happen to her because she is the star.

Over the years, several critics have made this point, and I suppose it sounds believable to those who were not around back then. But those of us that saw the movie when it first came out know that it simply is not true, because Hitchcock himself gave that much away in the trailer that he made for it. I remember seeing the trailer at the time, and was able to refresh my memory of it, thanks again to some of the bonus material on the DVD. Hitchcock takes us onto the set of the Bates Motel. In the house up the hill, just behind the motel, he takes us to the stairs and says this is where the second murder took place, involving a knife, and resulting in a mangled corpse with a broken back at the bottom of the stairs. Then he takes us into what he refers to as a parlor, the room just behind the desk where motel guests would register. It was where the son would go to get away from his mother, who Hitchcock says is “maniacal,” thereby letting us know to whom the title refers. Then he takes us into Room Number 1. In the bathroom, he tells us about all the blood that was in there before it was cleaned up. What happened, he tells us, is that the murderer crept into the bathroom while someone was taking a shower. Hitchcock pulls back the shower curtain, and we see Janet Leigh screaming. Most people back then saw this preview, because Hitchcock featured it a couple of times during his popular television show.

It is hard to fault Hitchcock for giving so much away himself, for I’m sure that it made a lot of people want to see the movie, people that might have skipped it had he not talked about there being two murders with lots of blood, and then shown us a naked Janet Leigh screaming in the shower.

So far, we have been considering what people knew or didn’t know when the movie was being released for the first time. A further consideration is how people experience this movie when they watch it for the first time years later. Even in 1988, in his book Cult Movies 3: Fifty More of the Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird and the Wonderful, Danny Peary could begin his review with a note of regret, saying that this movie can never again be experienced the way it was back then:

Almost everyone who saw Psycho in 1960 remembers that terrifying experience as if it were yesterday…. Today Psycho fans swap stories about how they closed their eyes during the film’s violence (but not the sex) or literally ducked under their seats (I admit measuring the amount of room down there), or how it scared them out of several nights’ sleep.

He is right about that. Because I was only thirteen years old when this movie came out, I saw it at a drive-in with my parents. My mother screamed during the two slasher scenes and ducked her head to keep from seeing what happened. You might think it would be enough merely to shut one’s eyes, but people ducked beneath their seats, not merely because they did not want to see what was happening, but because they wanted to protect themselves from the knife-wielding Mrs. Bates.

Peary continues: “Viewers really were afraid to take showers for a long time afterward (and I am not alone in still occasionally thinking of Psycho when in a motel shower).” My mother told me that for years after that, whenever she took a shower alone in the house, she brought our dog into the bathroom with her. Another woman I knew also said she was scared to take showers alone in her house for years after seeing this movie.

Peary goes on to say that people seeing the movie “today,” which means in 1988, are so inured by all the slasher movies produced since then, with an ever higher body count and more grisly gore, that Psycho is regarded as “camp.” And if that was true in 1988, then all the more so today.

When I watch the movie all these years later, I try to imagine myself not knowing anything about it. To the extent that one is able to do this, the movie starts out as a melodrama, like Back Street (1961), for instance. We slowly close in on a hotel room in the middle of the day, entering inside to find Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) lying supine on the bed in a white brassiere and half slip, and Sam Loomis (John Gavin), standing up bare chested, the two of them in a postcoital state. He says to Marion, “You never did eat your lunch, did you?” As he says this, the camera shows us some uneaten sandwiches sitting on a plate, notwithstanding the remark Marion makes about this being one of the “extended lunch hours” she takes when Sam is in town.

We conclude that they spent so much time having sex that she never got around to those sandwiches, and we don’t give it much thought beyond that. But later on, we might notice that she never has anything to eat again until the night of the following day when she eats some sandwiches that Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has prepared for her as the two of them have a conversation in the office of the Bates Motel. And Robin Woods, in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, is just one of several critics that have commented on the fact the there is a physical resemblance between John Gavin and Anthony Perkins.

In the novel by Robert Bloch, on which this movie is based, there is no physical similarity between Sam and Norman. In the first chapter, there is reference to the way Norman’s “plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair,” and later on to “the blubbery fat, the short hairless arms, the big belly.”

Back to the movie: Sam and Marion want to get married, but Sam says they cannot afford it:

I’m tired of sweating for people who aren’t there. I sweat to pay off my father’s debts, and he’s in his grave. I sweat to pay my ex-wife alimony, and she’s living on the other side of the world somewhere.

I like that part about the alimony. We are not to imagine his ex-wife holding down a menial job, just making ends meet in her small apartment, anxiously looking in the mailbox for her monthly check from Sam. No, we envision her living in luxury in some foreign country, basking in the sun on a beach filled with rich tourists, telling her friends, “I earned it.”

I wondered about this business of having to pay off his father’s debts, since children are not legally obligated to pay off the debts of their parents when they die. However, this is explained in the novel:

There was this hardware store, in a little town called Fairvale, up north. Sam had worked there for his father, with the understanding that he’d inherit the business. A year ago his father had died, and the accountants had told him the bad news.

Sam inherited the business, all right, plus about twenty thousand in debts. The building was mortgaged, the inventory was mortgaged, and even the insurance had been mortgaged. Sam’s father had never told him about his little side investments in the market—or the race track. But there it was. There were only two choices: go into bankruptcy or try and work off the obligations.

Sam Loomis chose the latter course. “It’s a good business,” he explained.

In general, the movie follows the novel closely. Sometimes, as is the case with the debts Sam inherited from his father, the novel proves to be illuminating, at least for those of us that wonder about such things. In other cases, the differences between the novel and the movie can be regarded as Hitchcock’s contribution, giving us insight into how he wanted to present the story, as in the physical similarity between Sam and Norman, which wasn’t it the novel.

There is also the difference between descriptions in the novel and dramatizations in the movie based on it. The novel begins with Norman carrying on a conversation with his mother, who we have every reason to believe really exists. In the movie, such a scene would have revealed that Mother did not exist except in Norman’s imagination, giving away the whole surprise ending. Nevertheless, because we never see Norman talking to his mother in the movie, most people begin to suspect she doesn’t really exist long before we have that revealed to us explicitly. On the other hand, about halfway through the novel, we also get a clue, as Norman reflects on his dual nature:

It was like being two people, really—the child and the adult. Whenever he thought about Mother, he became a child again, with a child’s vocabulary, frames of reference, and emotional reactions. But when he was by himself—not actually by himself, but off in a book—he was a mature individual. Mature enough to understand that he might even be the victim of a mild form of schizophrenia, most likely some form of borderline neurosis.

When this book was written, most people thought that someone with schizophrenia had a split personality.

Back to the movie: In addition to explaining why Sam does not feel that his financial situation can allow him and Marion to get married, having to pay off his father’s debts introduces a theme, that of a dead parent preventing an adult child from having a normal sex life. Much in the way the sandwiches in a hotel room anticipates sandwiches later in a motel office, so too does Sam’s struggle with obligations imposed on him by his dead father anticipate Norman’s struggle with imagined obligations to his dead mother.

In the novel, by the way, his father’s debts are the only reason for Sam’s financial difficulties. There is no ex-wife getting alimony payments.

Back to the movie: Marion tells Sam this will be the last time they meet this way, secretly in a cheap hotel. She admits she’s thinking of breaking off the relationship, and she wouldn’t care if Sam broke off with her instead, now that she has ruled out any more sexual encounters.

In fact, as Raymond Durgnat points out in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock: or, the Plain Man’s Hitchcock, we don’t care either. We are interested in these two, to be sure, but we neither expect nor hope that they will eventually get married and live happily ever after. Durgnat does not say so, but I suspect that is because they don’t really act as though they enjoyed the afternoon they just spent together. Sex is very pleasurable, but only sometimes fun.

Sam says he wants to keep seeing her anyway, even if it’s only to have lunch in a public place.

Marion: Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner. But respectably. In my house, with my mother’s picture on the mantel and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

Sam: And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies, turn Mama’s picture to the wall?

Marion: Sam!

Now we know why they’ve been meeting in cheap hotel rooms instead of at Marion’s place. She lives with her sister, who we later find out is Lila, played by Vera Miles. And while Marion could move out and get an apartment of her own, Lila would suspect that she was doing it in order to have sex with Sam, which wouldn’t have been respectable. At least, it wouldn’t have been respectable in 1960.

Marion’s name in the novel, by the way, is Mary. (One critic has noticed that an anagram of “Marion” is “Normai,” suggesting a connection between her and Norman, as well as with his mother Norma.) There is no indication in the novel that Sam and Mary are having sex with each other. In those days, though it seems almost unbelievable now, a lot of people actually waited until they were married before they had sex, and that is the case with these two. As a result, there would be no reason for Mary to get her own apartment.

Back to the movie: The reference to the picture on the mantel, by which Marion’s deceased mother can cast her disapproving eyes, reinforces Marion’s need for respectability. This is another instance of a dead parent preventing an adult child from having a normal sex life, once again prefiguring the hold that Mother has over Norman.

Objectively speaking, things are not all that bleak. Sam expects to have the debts paid off in two years, and if his ex-wife remarries, the alimony will stop. But Marion is impatient. She says they should just get married anyway, but Sam rejects that idea, saying they would have to live in the storeroom in the back of his hardware store. Marion doesn’t care, but he does. Marion leaves to go back to the office, and this ends the section of the movie that appears to be a melodrama.

Now we enter into the section of the movie that purports to be a crime drama. Shortly after Marion gets back to the real estate office where she works, a client, Tom Cassidy, comes in with Mr. Lowrey, Marion’s boss. Cassidy flashes $40,000 in front of her, which he says he isn’t worried about, because he never carries more cash than he can afford to lose. Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $400,000 today. The purpose of the money is to buy a house as a wedding present for his daughter. His philosophy is that while money cannot buy happiness, it can buy off unhappiness. With a mischievous look in his eyes, he asks Marion if she is unhappy.

In the novel, on a previous occasion, Cassidy put a hundred-dollar bill on Mary’s desk, suggesting she take a “little trip” to Dallas with him for a weekend. Mr. Lowrey came in at that moment, ending the matter, but it irked Mary, and she never forgot it:

She couldn’t forget the wet-lipped smile on his fat old face.

And she never forgot that this world belonged to the Tommy Cassidy’s. They owned the property and they set the prices. Forty thousand to a daughter for a wedding gift; a hundred dollars tossed carelessly on a desk for three days’ rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane.

Back to the movie: After Cassidy and Lowrey go into his office, Caroline, Marion’s co-worker, played by Hitchcock’s homely daughter Patricia, says, “He was flirting with you. I guess he must’ve noticed my wedding ring.” That’s funny, of course, but it adds to Marion’s exasperation. Cassidy’s daughter is going to get married, and Caroline is already married, but Marion’s desire to get married is stymied. And Cassidy’s daughter will have no money problems, unlike Marion’s situation with Sam, where money, or the lack of it, is keeping them apart. Perhaps this explains why Hitchcock added the part about alimony in writing the script, which wasn’t in the novel. The debts Sam inherited from his father are, to Marion, just an unfortunate fact. But the idea that the woman who used to be married to Sam is enjoying a carefree life at Marion’s expense completes the circle closing in on her.

Cassidy leaves the money with Lowrey, who in turn tells Marion to deposit it in a bank. In the next scene, she is in her house alone (Caroline told her Lila would be gone all weekend). Now she is wearing a black brassiere and slip. She looks at the bed with the $40,000 on it. Well, she didn’t deposit it in the bank, so we figure she is going to take the money and run. If she has to commit grand larceny to be respectable, so be it.

But why the change in her brassiere and slip? If I were about steal that much money, it would never occur to me to change my underwear first. But, since she is about to make a fresh start on life, perhaps, dare I say it, she took a shower. And as she packs, we do see the shower head and curtain through the open bathroom door, another anticipation of what is to come.

There is something so desperate and futile in what she is about to do. What does she have planned, and how does she expect to get away with it? In the novel, her plan is to cover her tracks by switching out cars several times, marry Sam, and then sell the last car under her married name, Mrs. Sam Loomis. She would tell Sam she inherited some money and that Lila moved to Europe, explaining why Lila would not be attending the wedding. Lila wouldn’t tell the police about Sam until she talked to Mary. The whole thing makes me nervous just thinking about it.

Back to the movie: After leaving home, she doesn’t even make it out of town before she is spotted by her boss, who naturally wonders what she is up to, since she said she was going straight home and to bed after depositing the money in the bank. Hours later, she pulls over to the side of the road to get some sleep. She is awakened the next morning by a motorcycle cop wearing ominous sunglasses. He tells her she should have checked into a motel, just to be safe. She drives on for a while and then decides to sell her car and get another, as a way of throwing the police off her trail when her boss realizes she stole the money. But while buying a used car, she sees that same cop watching her from across the street.

Everything thus far indicates that the movie will continue to be about her trying to get away with stealing the money. That would be enough for most movies. And we expect that cop to be on her trail unrelentingly, like Javert in Les Misérables, who will now know the make and model of the car she just bought, along with its license plate. And yet, we never see him again. Nor does her car play any role in her effort to hide from the police. It just ends up being sunk into the swamp, along with Marion’s body and the $40,000.

As she drives to Fairvale, she imagines what various people she knows will say, especially Sam and Mr. Lowrey. The look on her face is one of concern. But then she imagines what Cassidy will say: “Well, I ain’t about to kiss off $40,000! I’ll get it back, and if any of it’s missing, I’ll replace it with her fine, soft flesh!” A slight smile appears on her lips.

It starts raining, making it difficult for her to see, leading her off the main highway, right up to the Bates Motel, with the spooky house behind it, just up the hill. All of a sudden, “It was a dark and stormy night,” thereby leading the plot in a totally different direction as well. And so, pretending we know nothing of this movie in advance, we are surprised by this turn of events, in which we now find ourselves watching a horror movie.

After Marion rents a room at the motel, she has a conversation with Norman while eating those sandwiches, indicating that she intends to go back and try to make things right. And she might have been able to do so, for when her sister Lila shows up at Sam’s hardware store, Sam is just finishing the letter he has written to Marion, saying she is right, that they can get married right away, living in the back of the store for a couple of years, until the debts are paid off. They will be poor, but happy. And Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a private detective that enters the store right behind Lila, says Lowrey and Cassidy just want her to return the money and there will be no prosecution. We might imagine Marion’s announced resolve to return to Phoenix being the final scene in one of Hitchcock’s television shows, lasting just under an hour, after commercials.

The anticipations we have noticed so far have not allowed us to guess what would come next. They were only for the sake of aesthetics, structural similarities that create a sense of artistic unity. However, while Marion was in the office with Norman, she might have become aware of an anticipation that would have given her pause, had she noticed it. There are several paintings of naked women on the walls, including a painting of “Susanna and the Elders,” based on a story in which two men watch a naked woman taking a bath. This has been a favorite subject by many artists over the years because the artists were men, and men like naked women. Bad enough that two men saw Susanna naked, but then the scene is imagined in different ways by different artists over and over again so that everybody gets to see her naked. But at least the women were not really Susanna, only models that were perfectly happy to let all the world see them without any clothes on. It’s not like the way things are now, where if two men watched an unsuspecting woman bathing today, her pictures would end up all over the internet. The paintings of Susanna are based on a story in the Book of Daniel, which is either in the Bible or in the Old Testament Apocrypha, depending on which version of the Bible you have. In some paintings of this story, two lascivious men simply watch a beautiful woman taking a bath, but in the painting in Norman’s office, the men are also groping Susanna.

Hitchcock points to that painting in the trailer, saying it has significance, but we have forgotten all about that when watching the movie for the first time. Moreover, we, like Marion, are distracted by all the stuffed animals in the office, anticipating the stuffed Mrs. Bates up in the house. Had Marion noticed the painting of “Susanna and the Elders,” it might have warned her about taking that shower later on. And indeed, just behind the painting is a peephole, allowing Norman (but not us, unfortunately) to watch Marion get completely naked, much in the way that Hitchcock turned us into voyeurs by pulling us in through the window of that hotel room in the beginning of the movie. Norman gets so aroused that Mother just naturally has to come down there and hack Marion up so she can have Norman all to herself.

Toward the end of the movie, Lila discovers Mrs. Bates’ stuffed body in the fruit cellar, at which point Mother comes running in with a knife, screaming, “I’m Norma Bates!” Sam comes in right behind Mother and grabs her, revealing that she is Norman when his wig falls off. The hold that Sam has on Mother is similar to that in the painting of “Susanna and the Elders.”

After this comes the epilogue, the fourth section of this movie. The scene is at the County Court House where Dr. Fred Richman (Simon Oakland) explains how all this came to be, how Norman became jealous when his mother started having sex with some man, so he poisoned them both. Then, since he loved his mother, he dug up her body and stuffed it. But that’s all on the outside. On the inside, Norman Bates had a split personality, in which he would sometimes become Mother. Since Norman was jealous of his mother, he believed that Mother was jealous of him, a form of projection, killing any pretty woman that aroused him. But now Mother has completely taken over Norman’s mind and blames Norman for all the killings.

In the novel, when all this comes to light, it makes headlines on the front page of the newspapers and is even covered on television, some write-ups comparing Norman to Ed Gein. Rumors spread about “cannibalism, Satanism, incest, and necrophilia.” Regarding those last two items, incest and necrophilia, Robert Bloch doesn’t say that Norman was having sex with his mother, either before or after he killed her, for that would be too gross. Bloch is only telling us that there were rumors to that effect.

My pretending not to know what is going to happen when I watch this movie adds to my enjoyment, notwithstanding that kid in high school, who tried to spoil it for me, and the trailer in which Hitchcock gives everything away but the ending. Oddly enough, I also appreciate the anticipations of which I am now aware, having seen the movie so many times before, knowing how one scene is pregnant with a scene that will occur later, so that I enjoy the movie more on subsequent viewings than I did when I saw it for the first time.

No matter how many times I have seen this movie, however, on each subsequent viewing I must see it from the very beginning, as is the case with all the movies I see. The only exception was with that girl I knew in college, and I never asked her out to see another movie. I’m sure she didn’t care.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Inasmuch as I was born in 1946, I certainly did not see The Grapes of Wrath when it was released in 1940.Instead, I first saw this movie with my parents at a drive-in movie theater when I was around eight years old. To help me understand what was going on, my father told me about the Dust Bowl, a drought in the southern plains region of the United States where he grew up. That region included Oklahoma, where this movie begins. The drought was so bad that the skies were filled with dust, and crops withered on the land. He also said this was during the Great Depression.

For years after that, I assumed that somehow the two were causally related, that either the Great Depression caused the Dust Bowl, or the Dust Bowl caused the Great Depression. But while the economy can be affected by the weather, I eventually realized the two were independent of each other, that it was just cruel fate that had brought them together. Still, as we gather from other movies we have seen, it was the cities that were most affected by the Great Depression, while it was the farmers that were most affected by the Dust Bowl; for which reason, in his novel on which this movie was based, John Steinbeck used the entire first chapter to describe the emergence of this drought and the problems it caused the farmers. But while all that is now clear in my mind, I have yet to completely untangle the cultural significance of this movie.

The movie was produced two years after the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee, its central focus being communism, regarded as a subversive scourge at the time. I remember how in the second grade, while we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance, the teacher admonished a couple of students who were talking, saying that they should be grateful they weren’t born in Russia. I remember my mother asking a next-door neighbor if she had been watching the McCarthy hearings. And when I started college in 1964, I had to sign an oath that “I was not now, nor ever had been, a member of the Communist Party.”

So, what does all this have to do with The Grapes of Wrath? Only that it makes the strongest case for communism of any movie I have ever seen. And yet, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with other awards as well. The movie was directed by John Ford, who made a lot of movies starring John Wayne, known for being staunchly anti-communist. And yet, there was never a falling-out between the two over this movie, with Wayne refusing to work with Ford ever again.

I have read that Steinbeck was as opposed to communism as much as he was to capitalism. Perhaps a qualification is in order. There is communism as it was envisioned by Karl Marx, and then there was Stalinist Russia, which presumed to call itself communist, but was nothing but totalitarianism, something Marx would have deplored. Judging by the novel and the movie, it would seem that Steinbeck’s opposition to communism was probably directed toward Russia under Joseph Stalin rather than the writings of Karl Marx.

In 1945, Eric Johnson, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told the screenwriters, “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads, we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life.” Tobacco Road, a novel by Erskine Caldwell, was also made into a movie directed by John Ford in 1941, and was the second feature being shown the night I saw The Grapes of Wrath. That movie wasn’t much, and it had nothing to do with communism, but the novel it was based on was as seamy as they come.

Steinbeck was not as seamy as Caldwell, but his novel had to be cleaned up a little when it was made into a movie. For example, in the novel, Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda in the movie) knows that something is wrong when he arrives at his parents’ home and sees that the low gate across the front door was open. He explains to Reverend Jim Casy (played by John Carradine in the movie):

“If Ma was anywheres about, that gate’d be shut an’ hooked. That’s one thing she always done—seen that gate was shut.” His eyes were warm. “Ever since the pig got in over to Jacobs’ an’ et the baby. Milly Jacobs was jus’ out in the barn. She come in while the pig was still eatin’ it. Well, Milly Jacobs was in a family way, an’ she went ravin’. Never did get over it. Touched ever since….”

Eric Johnson went on to say, “We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.” The screenwriters Johnson was admonishing must not have been paying attention, because It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was produced the next year. In that movie, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) is a villainous banker who keeps the $8,000 that Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) accidentally puts in his hands. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), who runs the family business, the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, fears that he will be arrested for embezzlement when the bank examiner sees that the missing money cannot be accounted for. As a result, George attempts to commit suicide.

The banker in that movie is a single individual, which was usually the case in the old melodramas, where the banker threatens to foreclose on the widow who is late with her last mortgage payment. But in The Grapes of Wrath, the blame for what happens is dispersed. When Tom gets to his parents’ farm and finds the place deserted, except for Muley (John Qualen), he wants to know what happened. Muley explains that it all began with the “dusters,” year after year, blowing the land away, blowing the crops away. As a result, a man shows up, telling them they need to get off:

After what them dusters done to the land, the tenant system don’t work no more. They don’t break even, much less show profit. One man and a tractor can handle twelve or fourteen of these places. You just pay him a wage and take all the crop.

Muley pleads that his children aren’t getting enough food as it is. The man replies: “I can’t help that. I got my orders. They told me to tell you to get off.” He goes on to say it’s not his fault. Muley’s son asks whose fault it is. The man replies it’s nobody’s fault. It’s a company, the one that owns the land, the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. Muley’s son says the company must have a president, one who knows what a shotgun is for. The man says it’s not his fault because the bank tells him what to do, and the bank is in Tulsa.

Have we now arrived at what Johnson was talking about, the banker who is the villain? No, for as the man points out, it’s not the bank manager’s fault because he is half crazy trying to keep up with the orders he gets from back East.

Muley asks, “Then who do we shoot?”

The man replies: “Brother, I don’t know. If I did, I’d tell you. But I just don’t know who’s to blame!”

What Johnson didn’t understand was that by having the banker be the villain, someone the hero can thwart by proving that he is guilty of fraud and having him arrested, the economic system itself is not being blamed. In It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter never is caught and punished for keeping the money, but he is thwarted nevertheless when the people of Bedford Falls donate enough to make up for the missing money so that George will not be charged with embezzlement. George is a good banker, whose Building and Loan works for the people, who in turn so love George and his bank that they give him money to show their appreciation.

Steinbeck, on the other hand, understood that if no one is responsible for the hardships people in his story have to suffer, and in particular, if there is no banker that can be blamed as the villain, then the economic system as a whole is to blame. And the solution for that is a revolution.

Muley is defiant. He talks about how his grandfather took up the land seventy years ago, how his father was born on that land, how members of his family died on it, and that makes it theirs, not a piece of paper with writing on it.

The next day a man driving a caterpillar tractor shows up to knock down Muley’s house. Perhaps this is the man Muley can shoot. He threatens the man on the tractor with a shotgun, until he sees that the man is his neighbor’s son, who says he has to do it because he needs the money, what with a wife, her mother, and two children to feed. And besides, he points out, if Muley shoots him, Muley will just end up being arrested and hanged for murder, while another man in a tractor will show up three days later and finish the job. Muley is defeated, lowering the shotgun as the tractor brings down his house. He tells Tom that the same thing has happened to all the farmers in the area, that they all have to get out.

No one in this movie uses any of the theoretical terms of Marxism, such as “communism,” “socialism,” “capitalist,” “bourgeoisie,” and “proletariat.”. The closest we come to that is later in the movie, when someone talks about “red agitators.” Tom Joad asks what a “red” is, but he doesn’t get an answer in the movie. In the novel, however, he does:

“Fella named Hines—got ’bout thirty thousan’ acres, peaches and grapes—got a cannery an’ a winery. Well, he’s all a time talkin’ about ‘them goddamn reds.’ ‘Goddamn reds is drivin’ the country to ruin,’ he says, an’ ‘We got to drive these here red bastards out.’ Well, they were a young fella jus’ come out west here, an’ he’s listenin’ one day. He kinda scratched his head an’ he says, ‘Mr. Hines, I ain’t been here long. What is these goddamn reds?’ Well, sir, Hines says, ‘A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five!’ Well, this young fella he thinks about her, an’ he scratches his head, an’ he says, ‘Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines. I ain’t a son-of-a-bitch, but if that’s what a red is—why, I want thirty cents an hour. Ever’body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we’re all reds.’ ”

Though the words of Marxism are not used, yet the principles of Marxism are illustrated by things people do and say who, like Tom Joad, don’t even know what a red is.

When the movie opens, we see Tom walking down the road, on his way to the forty-acre farm where his parents live as sharecroppers. He stops just outside a short-order restaurant in time to see a truckdriver getting into his truck. Tom asks him for a ride, and the driver points to a sign in the lower part of the windshield saying, “No Riders Allowed,” and in smaller print below that, “Instructions of Owner.” Tom says, “Sure I see it. But a good guy don’t pay no attention to what some heel makes him stick on his truck.” Tom is suggesting that he and the truckdriver, both belonging to the working class, are basically good people, while it is the owner of the trucking company that the driver works for who is a heel. This is the first hint of a more general attitude of the movie, in which it is the capitalists, the rich men that own the banks, the businesses, and the farms, who make the rules and the laws that favor themselves, to the disadvantage of the workers they exploit, the proletariat. The truckdriver relents, allowing Tom to hitch a ride.

Tom has recently been paroled after serving four years for homicide. As we find out later, he was in a dancehall one night when some guy that was drunk stuck a knife into him. Tom hit him with a shovel, killing him. We see immediately that it was self-defense, and there were bound to be witnesses at the dance who could vouch for him, but Tom is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison. A member of the bourgeoisie would have been cleared of any wrongdoing, but neither the police nor the courts care about justice when dealing with the lower classes. If there’s a disturbance, better to just lock someone up as a warning to the rest.

Later in the movie, when the Joads are on the road heading for California, Tom’s grandfather, Grandpa, dies of a stroke. They have to bury him just off the road. Tom writes a note, to be put with his grandfather, explaining what happened. Tom is afraid that someone might dig him up and think he was murdered. “Looks like a lot of times the government’s got more interest in a dead man than a live one,” he says.

The police become even more hostile later on, acting on behalf of the men that own large farms, arresting troublemakers who want to know in advance how much they will be paid to pick crops, breaking up strikes by providing armed escort for other workers to take their place. And when it’s not the police, it’s private cops, like the Pinkertons, though they are not mentioned by name. Toward the end of the movie, when Tom has to say goodbye to his mother, whom he refers to as “Ma” (Jane Darwell), he tells her that even if she never sees him again, he’ll be around in spirit, “whenever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there.”

Religion in this movie is minimized. Early in the movie, after Tom gets off the truck, he heads for his parents’ farm, but runs into Casy, who says he used to be a preacher, but no more. He says he lost “the call,” lost “the spirit.” He does not say that he is an atheist, but that is implied. No longer being religious, he also doubts all the morality that went with it:

So, maybe there ain’t no sin, and there ain’t no virtue. It’s just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain’t so nice. And that’s all any man’s got a right to say.

Later in the movie, after they bury Grandpa, Tom asks Casy to say a few words, even though he is no longer a preacher:

I’ll say ’em, make it short. This here old man just lived a life and just died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad. It don’t matter much. Heard a fella say a poem once. And he says, “All that lives is holy.” Well, I wouldn’t pray just for an old man that’s dead, cause he’s all right. If I was to pray, I’d pray for folks that’s alive and don’t know which way to turn. Grandpa here, he ain’t got no more trouble like that. He’s got his job all cut out for him, so cover him up and let him get to it.

Except for the last sentence, an obligatory gesture about Grandpa having a “job” to do in some afterlife, whatever that would be, this is a secular prayer.

In movies, women are usually portrayed as being more religious than men, so it is hardly surprising that we hear Ma saying grace before a meal or saying “Thank God” when she sees Tom for the first time, but that is about it. No one expresses any belief in a God that will help them in their troubles.

As is well known, Karl Marx was an atheist, famously saying that religion is the opiate of the masses, used by capitalists to keep the proletariat in their place, promising a reward in Heaven so that they need not fret about how things are for them here on Earth. The absence of religion in this movie fits with its communist message.

The extended Joad family, over ten of them, including Casy, manage to pile into a truck and become “Okies,” refugees from Oklahoma and surrounding states during the Dust Bowl who headed to California, looking for work. They do so on the basis of a handbill saying that 800 workers are needed to pick crops. But when they stop at a camp, they find out what’s in store for them from a man who has been through it already, whose wife and two children starved to death, who says he’s going back where he came from to starve to death and get it all over with at once. He explains about the handbills:

All right, this man wants 800 men. So, he prints up 5,000 of them handbills and maybe 20,000 people sees them. And maybe two-three thousand starts moving west account of this handbill. Two-three thousand folks that’s crazy with worry heading out for 800 jobs! Does that make sense?

Yes, it makes sense. It is an illustration of Marx’s concept of the reserve army of the unemployed. The capitalist likes it when there are a lot of unemployed people, especially when there aren’t any programs like unemployment compensation or food stamps provided by a socialist government. These people are desperate, will work for subsistence wages doing dangerous work for long hours. Those that have jobs are kept in line by this army, fearing that if they cause trouble, they will be fired and thrown into the ranks of the unemployed themselves.

Although I certainly was never in dire straits like the people in this movie, I have been through a version of it myself. And what I learned is that if you are thinking of going into a line of work and wondering about the prospects, never ask the people who do the hiring. They always say they need lots of workers in their industry, for which you can make good money. They want that reserve army of the unemployed to pick from. Instead, ask those who are employed in that industry, or better, those who used to be so employed. Then you’ll get the truth.

The implications of that reserve army of the unemployed are realized. The Joads move from camp to camp, hassled by the police, confronted by citizens that don’t want any more Oakies, at odds with other workers when the Joads unwittingly become strikebreakers. Casy is with those on strike. He tries to explain to Tom the way things are, but Tom cannot get past what is good for him and his family, saying he can’t worry about others. Casy says he’s going to have to learn things for himself.

While they are talking, some deputies show up, intent on beating up the strikers and running them off. One of them hits Casy with a pick handle, killing him. Tom grabs the pick handle and hits the deputy that killed Casy, killing him in return. Then Tom gets hit in the face. A posse forms, looking to find a man with a bruise on his face, so they can lynch him. Tom plans on leaving, but Ma begs him not to, saying that the family is breaking up:

There’s a whole lot I don’t understand. But going away ain’t going to ease us. There was a time we was on the land. There was a boundary to us then. Old folks died off and little fellas come. We was always one thing. We was the family. Kind of whole and clear. But now we ain’t clear no more. They ain’t nothing that keeps us clear. Al, he’s hankering and gibbeting to be off on his own. Uncle John’s just dragging around. Your pa’s lost his place. He ain’t the head no more. We’re cracking up, Tom. There ain’t no family now. And Rosasharn [a contraction of “Rose of Sharon”], she’s gonna have her baby, but it won’t have no family. [Rosasharn’s husband Connie has recently abandoned her.] I been trying to keep her going, but… And Winfield. What’s he gonna be this way? Growing up wild, and Ruthie too. Just like animals. Got nothing to trust. Don’t go, Tom. Stay and help. Help me.

Tom agrees to stay, but the Joads have to sneak out of the camp that night.

They just barely make it to another camp. But this one is different. There is a sign saying “Department of Agriculture,” indicating that it is sponsored by the Federal Government, under the auspices of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt, socialist programs intended to help people like the Joad family. It is a clean place to live, with toilets and bathing facilities. This is quite different from a previous camp. At that place, when Rosasharn picked up what was left of a magazine when she and Ma entered the shack where they were to live, Ma told her to save the magazine because it might be useful later, implying the pages might serve as toilet paper.

At this nice camp, the residents elect their own cops and make their own laws. Police from outside cannot come in without a warrant. Only here do the laws work for people like the Joads. As Tom passes a faucet, he sees there is water running out of it. There is a sign telling people to turn off the water when not using it. Tom turns off the water. This is the only sign that Tom has had any respect for in this movie.

They find jobs at a farm paying decent wages. However, the farmer warns them that some ruffians are going to try to start trouble at the dance being held at the camp, causing a riot, which will allow deputies to enter without a warrant and run off everybody. They plan on doing this because the government camp gives people ideas, showing them how things might be better, turning them into red agitators.

The residents in the camp manage to avoid trouble, but cops are still looking for Tom for killing a deputy, and he realizes he has to leave. Ma wakes up as he is leaving, and he stops to talk to her. Previously, Tom had told Casy and the strikers that his family was all he could worry about. As indicated above, Ma has been fretting about the family breaking up, and now she is worried that if something happens to Tom, she won’t know about it. But now Tom thinks he understands what Casy was talking about, that there is a larger family, of the people:

Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. Fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody…. Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when people are eating the stuff they raise, living in the houses they build, I’ll be there too.

And so, instead of the rugged individualism that capitalism is based on, where each man seeks after his own self-interest and that of his family, Tom is beginning to realize we should treat everybody as part of the family of mankind.

At the end of the movie, Ma seems to be in sympathy with what Tom was talking about:

Rich fellas come up, and they die, and their kids ain’t no good, and they die out. But we keep coming. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cause we’re the people.

In the novel, this idea of the larger family of mankind is physically illustrated in a vivid way. Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn, and she is ill. For a while, what’s left of the Joad family lives in a boxcar, but it has been raining so hard that it starts flooding, so they have to leave. They reach a barn, where they find a boy and his father, who is starving to death. Rose of Sharon is so wet and cold that Ma worries she’ll die if she doesn’t find a way to dry her off. The boy brings her a comforter to cover her. Rose of Sharon removes all her clothes and, under the comforter, is completely naked.

The boy tells how his father hasn’t eaten in six days and now can’t hold down solid food, saying he need soup or milk. Ma and Rose of Sharon look into each other’s eyes and exchange a knowing look. Ma gets everyone besides Rose of Sharon and the old man to go into the tool shed to give them privacy:

For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

It is understandable that this could not be shown in a movie made in 1940. What is less understandable is that John Ford was not blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. I suppose that is because, unlike the Hollywood Ten, he did not refuse to testify. Apparently, it was all right to make a movie promoting communism, just as long as you didn’t snub the Committee.

Something About Amelia (1984)

Countervailing Taboos

Having sex with children is taboo. But while people recognize the importance of protecting children from child molesters, their will to do so is often undermined by another taboo, one that regards the sanctity of the family as inviolable. This leads to a paradox. On the one hand, if child molestation occurs within a family, then it is also incest, which makes it worse; on the other hand, it is something people don’t like to think about, which makes them more likely to “forgive” it, not because it deserves to be forgiven, but as a way of putting it out of their thoughts. To put it differently, the greater the punishment for incestuous child molestation, however much it is actually deserved, the more people are forced to accept that there can be evil within a family, which should therefore be broken up.

The form of child molestation that people are most comfortable with is that which involves a stranger, sometimes referred to as stranger danger: comfortable in the sense that they are willing to warn their children to be distrustful of strangers that approach them; comfortable in the sense that people are willing to condemn it in the harshest terms and mete out severe punishment for the perpetrator. And yet, child molestation at the hands of a stranger is relatively rare. A child is more likely to molested by a family member, but that is something a lot of people don’t like to think about, and they are far less likely to warn children about that danger.

Many states now have restrictions on abortion that do not allow exceptions for rape or incest. I have recently heard commentators on television objecting to these laws, using a hypothetical example in which a girl is impregnated by her uncle. While sex between an uncle and a niece would indeed be incest, it is obvious that the example is intended to avoid the more likely case of a father or a brother being the guilty offender. As a rule, an uncle will not have nearly as much access to a girl as her father or brother. But as the uncle is not part of the immediate family, typically not living in the same house as the girl, the more dreadful idea of the child being impregnated by a close family member living under the same roof is avoided.

When it is a case of a father having sex with his daughter, it is easier to accept if the man is a stepfather rather than her biological father. Though it would still be incest in a legal sense, yet we do not regard it as bad as consanguineous incest. But it is still worse than if the girl is molested by someone who is outside the family. Nevertheless, the willingness to punish the outsider is greater than for the stepfather.

In other words, our dread of incestuous child molestation increases as we move along the following categories: outsider < stepfather < father. That is, there is no incest with the outsider, only legal incest for the stepfather, and biological incest for the father. So, in one sense, the situation is worse as we move from left to right. And yet, our willingness to contemplate the possibility of child molestation increases in the opposite direction: father < stepfather < outsider. That is, it is easier for people to think about a man molesting his stepdaughter than his biological daughter, and easiest of all to think about a man molesting a girl to whom he is unrelated. And this is reflected in our increasing willingness to punish the offender as we move from left to right.

An example of this is the movie Lolita (1962). Humbert Humbert (James Mason) has sex with his stepdaughter Lolita (Sue Lyon), who is fourteen. But Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) is the man Lolita is in love with, eventually leaving Humbert to be with Quilty permanently. When things do not work out between them, however, she leaves Quilty, meets a nice guy, and marries him.

To get revenge, Humbert tracks down Quilty and shoots him to death. Humbert is arrested and dies in prison of coronary thrombosis while awaiting his trial for murder. In other words, he dies of a natural cause, one that might have happened anyway, even if he had never seen Lolita. Though Humbert’s crime of child molestation is worse than that of Quilty, owing to the fact that it also involved incest, yet his punishment is much less than that of Quilty, who was completely unrelated to her. Furthermore, while there is actually a scene where Quilty is shot to death, we only read about the death of Humbert. Words having less force than images, what little punishment Humbert gets for his sin is diminished in its effect on the audience by merely being described.

Something About Amelia (1984)

Something About Amelia, a television movie that aired in 1984, takes this principle to the next level. In this movie, a man has sex with a child that is his own biological daughter. And yet, owing to the taboo of violating the family, he is not punished for his crime. At most, he is inconvenienced. In this movie, the Bennett family consists of married couple Steven (Ted Danson) and Gail (Glenn Close), and their two daughters, Amelia and Beth, ages thirteen and ten respectively. In the first scene of the movie, Steven becomes upset when he finds out from Gail that Amelia is going to a dance with a boy named Robert. You can feel the anger seething through him, saying that she is only thirteen, too young to be going on dates. Later, when talking to Amelia, Steven can just barely contain his irritation about her going out on a date. As we can already guess, he is possessively jealous of her.

When talking to Steven, Gail said she was glad that Amelia was finally taking an interest in boys. At the dance, while other couples are dancing cheek to cheek, Amelia pushes Robert back when he tries to do the same. It is clear from Gail’s remark and from Amelia’s refusal to dance close that she is sexually disturbed, so much so that she breaks away from Robert and leaves the dance floor.

After the dance, Amelia gets more pressure from her father about not going out with Robert again. Later, when Steven and Gail are alone in their bedroom, Gail makes reference to the fact that they haven’t had sex in a month.

The next day, Steven becomes angry that Amelia is not going to watch the football game with him because she is going to see a friend of hers. As Amelia is leaving, she sees Steven with his arm around Beth, watching the game on the couch. Later, in an argument with her mother about doing the ironing, Amelia says that not only is Beth old enough to do her own ironing, but also that ironing isn’t the only thing Beth is old enough for. Gail and Beth don’t know what she means, but Amelia is thinking that Steven will soon be having sex with Beth too.

Mrs. Hall, the school guidance counselor, who noticed Amelia’s behavior at the dance, calls her into her office. She notes that Amelia used to be on the honor roll, but lately her grades have been falling, and she thinks it has something to do with the fact that Amelia is obviously depressed. After much coaxing, Amelia admits that her father has been “messing around” with her. Mrs. Hall tells Gail what has been going on, but Gail doesn’t believe her, becoming furious with Amelia instead.

The police take Amelia away, and she ends up at the Hollowell Center, “a place for kids with trouble.” When Steven finds out what happened, he goes to the police station, where a detective tells him that if he were some guy that lived down the street, he’d be in jail already. But since Steven is Amelia’s father, they book him on suspicion of child abuse and release him on his own recognizance. This is the first indication we have in this movie that a father that molests his daughter will get better treatment and more consideration than a man who has had sex with a girl to whom he is unrelated. No explanation is offered as to why this is the case, but it is in accordance with the taboo against messing around with the sanctity of the family.

Through an interview with a social worker, Amelia says, in so many words, that her father began touching her when she was eleven, and he had sex with her shortly after that. Steven is forced to move out and get an apartment, allowing Amelia to return home. When Beth finds out what is going on, she calls Amelia a liar. But once the facts have become undeniable, Gail becomes angry that Amelia let her father have sex with her, implying that it’s all her fault, and Beth says Amelia shouldn’t have told anyone about it.

Gail ends up going to see Dr. Farley, a family-guidance counselor. He explains to her that Steven needs sympathy and understanding:

Because, like the other men who did what he did, he probably had an enormous need that he was unable to fulfill in any other way…. You’re going to find this almost impossible to believe, very difficult to understand. But incest has relatively little to do with sex. What these men yearn for, most of them, is comfort and warmth. Security, intimacy, love.

Remember that hypothetical guy down the street, who the detective said would already be in jail if he had been the one having sex with Amelia? Try to imagine Dr. Farley saying something similar about him, that he simply yearned for “comfort and warmth,” for “security, intimacy, love.”

It would be unthinkable to characterize that guy’s molestation of an eleven-year-old girl in such endearing terms. So, what’s the difference? Had it been that guy down the street, it would not have been incest. No sympathy and understanding would be vouchsafed that perpetrator, someone completely outside Amelia’s family. Instead, he would be on his way to prison, and after serving his sentence, he would have to register as a sex offender. But since it was incest between a father and his daughter, which is actually much worse, the attitude of this movie is that it warrants compassion and empathy.

Farley also says that men like Steven “can’t control their impulses.” This is also intended to make Gail (and us) sympathetic, since we should not blame a man for what he does, if he is unable to control his impulses. But that undermines the whole point of providing Steven with counseling, with the ultimate goal of bringing the family back together. If Steven can’t control his impulses, counseling will not change that, and there is no way he should be allowed to live in the same house with Amelia and Beth. But Dr. Farley is blind to this contradiction.

Gail picks up on the part about “an enormous need that he was unable to fulfill in any other way,” from which she infers that Dr. Farley is saying it is her fault. But instead of simply saying, “Oh, no, you’re not to blame,” Farley says, “Blame is not what we’re about here,” which means he is implying that it is her fault.

Later, in a conversation Gail has with Steven, she says she doesn’t understand why he did it. It’s easy to see why she is perplexed. There is no behavior so bizarre that it cannot be explained to everyone’s satisfaction once sex is known to be the motive. But now that she has accepted Farley’s assertion that incest is not about sex, what Steven did has become a mystery. Farley has apparently told Steven too that it wasn’t about sex, and now he doesn’t know why he did it either.

Gail decides not to divorce Steven, admitting that she would be afraid to be alone. She says:

I remember when Jack and Elaine had been divorced for, you know, six months. And Elaine said, “It was a bad marriage, but anything’s better than this.”

In other words, the taboo against violating the sanctity of the family implies that divorce is unacceptable, and any woman who does divorce her child-molesting husband will be miserable.

Everyone agrees to go in for counseling, and we are left with the impression that one day they will all be one big happy family again. This is supposed to be a nice, uplifting movie, assuring us that fathers that molest their daughters don’t have to go to prison. Instead, they can be rehabilitated by talking it out and having some sensitivity therapy. Those who produced this movie clearly felt that while incestuous child molestation is unfortunate, there is no need to let something like that break up a family.

In the final scene, we see Amelia remembering when she was little, and how Steven held her and sang a lullaby to her. It makes her smile to think how much he loved her. After all, a girl needs her father.

Child-Molester Movies (Pre-1968)

Of all the things prohibited by the Motion Picture Production Code, child molestation was probably the most taboo subject of all, so taboo that no mention is even made of it in the written guidelines and rules issued by the Hays Office, possibly because neither Will Hays nor Joseph Breen ever imagined it as something that had to be explicitly proscribed. I suppose it would fall under the rubric of impure love, but that was mostly intended to cover such things as adultery, homosexuality, and miscegenation. And besides, I’m not sure they would have wanted to use the word “love” in forbidding it, even in the impure sense.

Frankenstein (1931)

As a result, not even in the Pre-Code period, ending in 1934, were there any American movies that explicitly touched on this subject, at least not intentionally. In Frankenstein (1931), there is a scene where the monster (Boris Karloff) comes across Maria, a little girl playing with flowers by a lake. She invites him to play with her, and they both start throwing flowers in the lake, watching them float. When the monster has no more flowers, he picks Maria up and throws her in the lake. But instead of floating, she drowns.

Even today, there are not many movies in which a prepubescent child is murdered. Fewer still actually show the murder taking place. Usually, it is just implied or described. So, it is understandable that allowing the audience to see Maria being killed was regarded as unacceptable by the censors in the 1930s, the result being that it was edited out shortly after the initial release of this movie, cutting the scene at the point where the monster is seen reaching for Maria. In this edited version, we don’t realize that she drowned. The next time we see her, she is dead, being carried by her father, who says she was murdered.

As a result, people watching this version of the movie believed Maria had been sexually molested. After all, they were used to scenes cutting away whenever sexual activity of some sort was about to take place. Ironically, censorship had allowed the audience to imagine something much worse than what had originally been filmed. It hardly needs mentioning that while actually showing a prepubescent child being murdered is rare, showing a child of such a young age being sexually molested would be unthinkable. Because the audience would never expect to see something like that, they would have thought it perfectly reasonable to cut the scene at the moment the monster reaches for Maria, if her sexual molestation was supposed to have taken place right after that. Once the edited footage had been restored, people realized that the monster meant Maria no harm, but simply thought she would float on the water like the flowers.

M (1931)

The first movie that was actually about a child molester, M (1931), was not produced in the United States, but in Germany. Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a man that molests children and then murders them. His victims are prepubescent, which makes the crime against them especially egregious.

When the movie begins, a bunch of children are singing a counting-out rhyme like “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” only this one is about a man in black that will use a meat cleaver to make mincemeat out of his next child victim. We find out later that he has already killed eight children, mostly girls. There is reference to a boy, but the boy was with his sister, and so it may be only the sister that Beckert wanted, the boy being killed to get him out of the way. The mother of one of the children tells them to quit singing that horrible song. Another woman says not to worry. As long as they can hear the children singing, she says, they know they are all right. A dismissive attitude like that is bound to be punished, and it is. Her daughter is approached by Beckert while she is bouncing a ball. He buys her a balloon from a blindman, so we figure there is no chance of his being identified by him later. As time passes, the woman, now becoming concerned, calls for her daughter, but she can’t find her. We see the ball rolling away in a grassy area away from the city streets of Berlin, and we see the balloon caught in the wires of a telephone pole.

There is no question about the sexual nature of the crimes. When Beckert sees a girl’s reflection in a store window, a frisson of sexual desire ripples through him. Later, a man refers elliptically to the state of the children when they are found. After Beckert sends an anonymous letter to a newspaper, threatening more such crimes in the future, a handwriting expert discerns “the strongly pathological sexuality of this sex offender.”

Ordinary life in Berlin is disrupted. Mobs accuse and attack innocent men, and the police become brutal and relentless in their investigation. The police want to see everyone’s “papers,” by which they mean an identification booklet. They do this because, as we all know, child killers don’t have papers. One man’s papers are in order, but the inspector notices that in the pocket of the man’s fur coat is a newspaper featuring a story about a furrier who was robbed. In a manner that would astound even Sherlock Holmes, the inspector deduces that this man must be the one who committed the robbery, and so he has him arrested. It’s just lucky for that man that the newspaper didn’t feature a story about the child murderer.

But the inspector is not limited to looking for men who don’t have their papers, or who carry incriminating newspapers around in their coat pockets. He can tell that the child killer wrote his letter to the newspaper with a red pencil on an old wooden table. How exactly this last part was determined escapes me. Was there some wood residue on the back of the letter? Furthermore, the inspector concludes that the old wooden table would have indentations left on it corresponding to the inscriptions on the letter, so if they examine the table of a suspect, they can look for those indentations.

Now, I know we’ve all seen movies where someone writes something on a notepad, and traces of that note are left behind on the page below, but I have never heard of anyone doing this with a wooden table. Not only would the wood have to be soft enough to be indented, but the person writing the letter would have had to press down hard enough on the paper to leave behind indentations, and do so without tearing the paper or breaking the lead of the pencil. Furthermore, since this is an old table, given all the times someone would have written something on a piece of paper while sitting at that table, by this time the table must look like some kind of indecipherable palimpsest.

Always endeavoring to keep an open mind, I tried writing something with a pencil on a thin piece of paper on anything I could find made of soft wood. There was no wood residue on the back of the paper when I was finished, and no trace of what was written on the wood. Then I tried writing on sheetrock, figuring that would be softer. Same result. Finally, I tried writing on that piece of paper on a cardboard box, pressing down with the pencil as hard as I could without breaking the lead. There was no residue on the back of the paper, and no indentations in the cardboard. Is there something about old wooden tables made in Germany that I just don’t understand?

Anyway, the inspector has his detectives go around searching the homes of men who have some kind of police record to see if any of them have an old wooden table with traces of the inscriptions of the letter left behind on the table itself, as well as any indication that there has been a red pencil in that room.

While the police are searching for wooden tables and red pencils in people’s homes, the leaders of organized crime in Berlin, seeing that the police crackdown is bad for business, decide to take matters into their own hands and capture the child killer themselves. Their plan is to have beggars follow children around to see if they get molested. No one will think this is suspicious because they are just beggars.

When Beckert buys a balloon for another little girl, the blindman hears Beckert whistling the same tune he heard just before the other girl was killed. He passes the information on to a beggar, who then follows Beckert and the girl. After writing a big “M” on the palm of his hand in chalk, he hits Beckert on the back of his coat so he can be identified later.

Meanwhile, the police eventually get around to checking out Beckert’s room, where they find evidence that he wrote his letter to the newspaper, not on an old wooden table, but on the wooden windowsill, where some of the inscriptions in the letter match the indentations left behind on that windowsill. And yes, I tried that on my windowsill, but with no results. In any event, there are even pieces of the red pencil Beckert used to write that letter left behind as well, probably because he was pressing down on the paper so hard that he broke the lead.

But the criminals capture Beckert first and have a trial of sorts, during which he tells everyone that he is compulsively driven to do what he does. The prosecutor argues according to utilitarian justice, saying that anyone who kills under a compulsion should be executed to make sure he never does it again. Beckert’s defense counsel, on the other hand, argues according to retributive justice, saying that since Beckert acts under a compulsion, he is not morally responsible for his crimes and does not deserve death, but should simply be imprisoned or institutionalized. The prosecutor replies that if they consent to that, Beckert is likely to be pardoned by a politician or “cured” by a doctor, releasing him upon the public, allowing him to kill children once again. The jury of criminals agrees with the prosecutor, but before they can do anything to Beckert, the police show up and take him away.

M (1951)

In the American remake of M in 1951, the movie goes out of its way to make it clear that the children are not sexually molested, only murdered. While a crowd watches the chief of police on television warning parents about the child killer, someone in the crowd asks, “What’s he mean the children were neither violated nor outraged?” Someone else in the crowd responds, “What’s the difference? He killed them, didn’t he?”

Well, it may not make any difference to the people in the crowd, but if the child is molested before being murdered, that makes the crime even more horrible. More importantly, however, it must have made a difference to the Production Code Administration. It was not sufficient merely to omit all reference to sexual molestation. It had to be denied. At the same time, all of the killer’s victims are little girls, which would seem to indicate a sexual preference, although that is explained away later. Martin Harrow (David Wayne) is the killer in this remake. He keeps the shoes of his victims, which suggests a fetish.

In one scene, a man and wife are informed that their child has been a victim. As they start to leave, the woman turns around in desperation and says that maybe it is a mistake, that the child is someone else’s. We can only conclude from this that there was no body in the morgue for them to identify, that the police were only going by the doll and the girl’s dress, which are on the desk of the chief of police. He holds up the dress for her to look at, which she recognizes as belonging to her daughter. This can mean only one thing: Harrow took off the girl’s clothes, and her naked body has yet to be found. Still, we are supposed to believe that sex is not the motive for these murders. Censorship can be confusing.

It goes without saying that the original was much better, and one way in which it was better is that Beckert, the child killer, simply had an evil impulse that he could not resist and did not understand. In the remake, owing to the popularity of psychoanalysis at the time, we are given an explanation for the killer’s behavior as resulting from something that happened when he was a child. As a harbinger of that explanation, we see Harrow strangling a clay model of a child, with a picture of his elderly mother sitting right beside him, almost as if she were watching him do it and giving her approval. At the end, when Harrow is surrounded by the underworld figures that captured him, he gives a garbled explanation about how his father mistreated his mother, and how she raised him to believe that all men are evil. As a result, he reasons that since he is a man, then he is evil and deserves punishment. So, he has to kill little girls, partly to keep them from growing up and being mistreated by evil men, and partly so he will get caught and get the punishment he deserves. In the original version, the motive for the murders of the children was sex, a simple, straightforward explanation. But in order for sex not to be the motive in this remake, we are given this ridiculous psychobabble instead.

Harrow offers no explanation as to why he took the shoes of his victims. And that is because the real explanation does not lie within the story itself, but is external to it. The producers of this version didn’t believe that business about indentations from a letter being left on a windowsill any more than I did, so they had the police find the shoes of Harrow’s victims in his apartment instead.

Child Bride (1938)

When a movie explicitly about child molestation was finally made in America, it kept the subject within three boundaries: first, the girl has gone through puberty; second, the man and the girl are married; and third, the molestation is prevented when the man is killed before he has sex with her. That movie is Child Bride (1938), and the thrust of this movie is that the acceptance of child marriages in some backwoods communities in the United States is deplorable. Nevertheless, in a rather perverse sort of way, having the girl be married to the man who wants to have sex with her made it more acceptable than if they were not married. In addition to these three boundaries, the movie was able to go further on this subject than was usual at the time because it was an exploitation film, independently produced outside the studio system.

The girl is Jennie, played by Shirley Mills, who was twelve years old. As she starts taking off her clothes near a lake, she tells her boyfriend Freddie that the teacher says they can’t go swimming naked with each other anymore, on account of their age, an indication that the two of them have gone through puberty. As she says all this, she gets completely naked and then runs toward the lake, diving in, leaving Freddie bewildered. Looking down from the vantage point of a cliff, a man named Jake leers at the naked girl swimming below. Jake kills Jennie’s father and then makes her mother think she did it, blackmailing her into letting him marry Jennie. Jennie goes along with it to keep her mother from being convicted of murder.

Jake starts courting Jennie, bringing her a box with a present in it. I thought it would be flowers, but it was a doll. But then, I guess that that is the way you would court a child. The marriage takes place, but Jake is killed by one of his enemies before the marriage is consummated. Freddie and Jennie agree to get married when they grow up.

As with most exploitation films, this one tries to justify its existence by claiming to serve an educational purpose. But mixing up the institution of child marriage with murder and blackmail, and then giving us a happy ending, was for our entertainment. A realistic depiction of this practice would be depressing. A lot of people have children, not because they want them, but simply because they have sex. Marrying a girl off at a young age is a way get rid of her, in some cases for a price, turning her over to some man who wants to have sex with her, resulting in children they don’t want either.

None Shall Escape (1944)

Shirley Mills went on to play a schoolgirl named Anna in None Shall Escape (1944). Anna’s age is never specified. Mills was seventeen at the time, but given her looks, she could easily play a character of younger age. Anna commits suicide after some kind of sexual incident with her school teacher. The only word in the movie used to characterize the incident is “molested,” although she may have been forcibly raped as well.

Lolita (1962)

In the novel Lolita, the title character is a girl only twelve years old when Humbert Humbert falls in love with her. He becomes her stepfather as a means to having sex with her. When it was made into a movie in 1962, with Humbert being played by James Mason, Lolita’s age was said to be fourteen, and she was played by Sue Lyon, who was fifteen at the time. Adding a few years to the character and the actress portraying her was obviously intended to make her seem less of a child and more of a woman.

The Naked Kiss (1964)

So far, of the movies made in America featuring the possible or actual molestation of a young girl, that girl has already gone through puberty. The first movie made in America in which a prepubescent girl is molested is The Naked Kiss (1964). Constance Towers plays Kelly, a prostitute. Shortly after she moves to Grantville, she decides to give up that way of life. She learns from her landlady that J.L. Grant, society’s most eligible bachelor, rich and good-looking, is the great-great-grandson of the man that founded the town. He is cosmopolitan and sophisticated, but no playboy, Kelly is told:

His very name is a synonym for charity. He’s got the biggest heart in the world. Why, he built our hospital. He built the orthopedic medical center and sponsors it all by himself. And it’s open to all handicapped children with no racial or religious barriers.

Kelly loves children, so she decides to go to work at that hospital, and we see that, indeed, there are children of different ethnicities, remarkable since this takes place at a time when racial and religious barriers still existed in many places. Except for the babies, the children are wearing leg braces, supporting themselves with crutches. Children in general are vulnerable, but these children are especially so.

Eventually, Grant and Kelly meet and fall in love. The first time he kisses her, she pushes him away, giving him a strange, hard look. But then she pulls him back to her. She tells him of her past, and he immediately asks her to marry him. She is overwhelmed by his willingness to overlook what she used to be. “Why should Grant want to marry a woman like me?” she asks herself. After some hesitation, she decides to accept his offer.

Shortly after that, in preparation for the Annual Picnic in Grantville, Kelly has the children rehearse singing “Little Child,” a sweet duet between parent and child. In this case, the children sing the child’s part, with Kelly singing the part of the mother, who says she found happiness when “Heaven blessed me with you.” During the rehearsal, Grant looks on while making a tape recording of their singing, pleased with the affection that Kelly shows these children.

The next day, Kelly and her landlady finish putting her wedding dress together. She decides to show it to Grant. Her landlady says that would be bad luck. And that is bad news, because such superstitions always portend disaster in a movie. But Kelly says she wants to surprise Grant, something that is equally ominous in a movie. She has the key to Grant’s house, and as she opens the front door, she can hear the recording of “Little Child” playing. When she walks into the living room, she sees Grant fondling a seven-year-old girl, who gets up and skips out of the house.

Now Kelly finds out why Grant wanted to marry her. He says they are both abnormal, and she has been conditioned to people like him and the sickness he has. As he tells her how their marriage will be a paradise, she picks up the handset of the telephone and hits him on the head, killing him. Then she sits in the darkness as the song finishes playing on the tape recorder. Later, we find out why she was repulsed by Grant the first time he kissed her. She says it was a naked kiss, the kiss of a pervert.

She is accused of murder, and not many believe her story. But finally, she sees the girl that was being molested, who verifies her story, presumably making what Kelly did justifiable homicide. She leaves town, and we gather she will go back to work as a prostitute.

Repulsion (1965)

In 1965, Roman Polanski directed and helped write the screenplay for Repulsion. In that movie, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman with some kind of psychological problem concerning sex. She lives with her sister, whose sexual relations with her lover disturb Carol. Carol is very much upset that her sister is going away on a two-week vacation. During that vacation, Carol descends into madness.

A man who has been harassing her and stalking her breaks into her apartment because he just had to see her, not understanding why she is being so stubborn. After all, he is in love with her, so what else is there to think about? She bludgeons him.

Then the landlord stops by to get the rent and decides to rape her as long as he is there. She slices him up with a straight razor. Then her sister returns to find the corpses and a catatonic Carol.

In the very last scene, we see a photograph, previously alluded to from a distance, of her family taken years ago. In it, we see everyone smiling and looking at the camera, except for a preadolescent Carol, who is looking with dread at a man to her left, presumably her father. In real life, such a picture would mean nothing, but its emphasis in the movie after what we have seen tells us that she was molested as a child, which further explains why she was so upset that her sister was going away. As a child, she was safe from her father as long as her sister was around.

The fact that Roman Polanski, having made a movie illustrating the terrible consequences of child molestation, would then go on to molest a child himself is repulsive indeed.

Post-1968

After the abandonment of the Production Code in 1968, things loosened up considerably. In The Last of Sheila (1973), for example, James Mason, again playing the role of a child molester, is a likeable character who becomes the hero when he solves a murder.

And then there is the television movie, Something About Amelia, which aired in 1984, and which is in a class by itself. But a review of that movie is for another day.

Reflections of a Moneylender

By nature, I am a moneylender. Of course, in order to lend money, one first has to save it. That I started to do when I was five years old. Whenever my father came home at the end of the day, he would give me whatever pennies he had in his pocket. After a year, I had accumulated about $2.00. This was 1952, so adjusted for inflation, that was the equivalent of just over $22.00 today, no small piece of change for a six-year-old boy. Did I use the money to buy candy or a toy? No. I had too much fun counting my money. But it wasn’t until I grew up, got a job, and moved into my own apartment that I was able to lend money at interest. That’s when I really enjoyed counting my money.

I have read that the total amount of global debt, which includes the debt of governments, businesses, and households, is around $300 trillion. I have also read that if we divide this figure by the total number of people in the world, around 8 billion, this means that the average person in the world owes $37,500. To many, that is an alarming figure. But then, since for every dollar that was borrowed, there was a dollar that was lent, this means that the average person is owed $37,500. So, I guess it all just balances out.

However, while it is true that the number of dollars borrowed must always be exactly equal to the number of dollars that are lent, the number of people that borrow money vastly exceeds the number of those that do the lending. And while the debtor is most grateful for a loan upon receiving it, he soon comes to resent the man who lent him that money, as if he did him harm. As Polonius advises his son in Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”

Never having borrowed money, I wouldn’t know about dulling the “edge of husbandry,” but I certainly agree with the first part. Lending to friends and family is a bad idea. In the words of Philip Gibbs, “It is better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same.” Much better is to lend to those with whom you have only a business relationship.

But even here, one can run into trouble. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock did not make the mistake of lending to family or friends, but he still got cheated out of what he had coming to him. Portia wins her case against Shylock with a most specious argument for the simple reason that those in the courtroom to whom she addressed her words were probably debtors themselves and were looking for any excuse to rule against Shylock. And since the same might be said of those in the audience watching this play, they naturally approved of her reasoning as well. The lesson a moneylender should take from this is that it is not enough to lend to those with whom you have only a business relationship. One must do so anonymously.

Fortunately, this is easy to do in the modern age. Inasmuch as I lend by way of money market funds, I have no idea who it is that is benefitting from my loan, and they have no idea who it is that lent them the money. The loan is not only free from risk, but also impervious to the hostility of those who are in my debt, and secure from that blathering about how the “quality of mercy is not strained.”

Until recently, however, things were bleak. Interest rates were practically zero for years. But starting about a year ago, things have been picking up, and I now have almost as much fun counting the dollars I receive each month in interest as I did counting the pennies I had when I was a child. And I smile every time I hear that Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Chairman, is pondering not whether he will continue to raise interest rates, but by how much.

Many economist and financial experts, however, are chagrined. They worry that these increases in the interest rate will plunge the economy into a recession. And this is seconded by politicians, who always want interest rates to be kept low, knowing that low interest rates stimulate the economy and prop up the stock market.

As I listen to their concerns, I think back to 1995. I was watching CNBC one day, and several experts were discussing the economy, which was doing great, and the stock market, which was still going up. One of them commented on the fact that short term interest rates, such as that paid by money market funds, was around 6%, while inflation was running around 3%. She said that a real return of 3% (the nominal rate minus the rate of inflation) was the sweet spot, the perfect level of interest rates for the economy. The other two she was talking to agreed. And indeed, for the next several years, the economy continued to prosper, the bull market continued its run, and we ended the decade with balanced budgets. According to the Congressional Budge Office, at the rate we were going, we’d have the entire national debt paid off in ten years. As a moneylender, I was pleased. What was there not to like?

Well, George W. Bush didn’t like it. While campaigning to become president in 2000, he declared, “If we’re running balanced budgets, that just goes to show that the American people need a tax cut.” He was elected. He cut taxes. And that was the last time anyone saw a balanced budget or ever will again.

In any event, if we had a real return of 3% today, that sweet spot they were talking about on CNBC, then given a 6% inflation rate, short term interest rates would be 9%. Instead, with short term rates being about 4.5%, the real return is still negative, or -1.5% to be exact. And so, like Shylock, I’m being cheated. I don’t want a pound of flesh. I just want that 3% real return.

Will I ever get that again? Maybe. Politicians and other government officials would never raise interest rates at all were it not for inflation. But there’s the rub. With a recession, a lot of people lose their jobs, but most people remain employed. When inflation heats up, however, everyone is affected. Every week, people are reminded when they buy groceries and fill up with gas that the cost of necessities keeps going up. They become furious, and when election day arrives, they avenge themselves on any politician who happens to be in office. That’s when politicians give their silent consent to higher interest rates.

And so, I’m hopeful that things will improve. After all, in 1981, when inflation was running around 10%, I was getting a 17% return in a money market fund. Those were the days!

disinterestedspectator

Movie Reviews and Other Essays

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