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.

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.

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.

When I was in college, I saw The Three Musketeers (1948), the one with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan.  I thought it a bit silly, all that smiling and laughing while he and the title characters fought with swords, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.  So, I decided to read the novel, written by Alexandre Dumas.  I struggled through one bewildering chapter after another, overwhelmed by all the complications and intrigues, until I finally gave up and returned to my studies, which I should never have neglected in the first place.

The novel was originally published in serialized form, and was the first of the D’Artagnan romances, the last of which was The Man in the Iron Mask, which I shall refer to as a novel, though it is sometimes regarded as the third part of a larger novel. These two novels are the most well known, but there is lots of other stuff in between. And even though I am now retired and have neither school nor work to make demands on my time, I admit that I simply am not up to reading all those D’Artagnan romances.

And yet, I am sympathetic to it all.  It was the nineteenth century when all this was written. There were no movies, no television, and certainly no internet.  As a result, reading stories in serialized form in regular installments in a magazine must have been a pleasant diversion in those days.  The reader, if he was enjoying the story, had no desire for it to end too quickly, and thus was not the least bothered by all the complications and intrigues that completely did me in when I was in college. Dumas, being paid as he was for each installment, was at pains to milk it for all it was worth, never hesitating to introduce new characters, who would allow for further complications and intrigues.

As a result, I contented myself with watching movie versions of these two novels, along with movie versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, the only other novel by Dumas with which most people are familiar. And that would have been the end of it save for variations in the versions of The Man in the Iron Mask that struck me as a story that was struggling against itself.  The movie versions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo have variations of one sort or another, the difference between one version and another being unremarkable, the only consideration being whether one has enjoyed the movie or not. In the case of The Man in the Iron Mask, however, there are significant differences between the novel and the movie versions, as there are among the movies themselves, differences that have resulted from more than the mere need to simplify the story in one way or another.  Instead, in whatever way the story is told, it can make people uncomfortable, and when the story is changed to put them at ease, others are likely to find it disturbing in a different way.  To explain what I mean, I have decided it will better to discuss the movies first and then the novel.

The Iron Mask (1929)

The first movie version is The Iron Mask, made in 1929.  D’Artagnan (Douglas Fairbanks) and the Three Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, all sleep together in one big bed.  The English translation of what is inscribed on the upper part of that bed is “All for one and one for all.”  This gives those words a whole new meaning.  Much of the movie consists of a lot of swashbuckling on their part, which need not be described in detail, except that they are typically smiling and laughing, just as they were in the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers, which also starred Douglas Fairbanks.

Queen Anne, wife of King Louis XIII, gives birth to a son, Louis, which is hailed as great news. But then she also gives birth to his twin, who is unnamed in this movie, referred to only as the “Twin Brother.”  He is regarded as bad news by Cardinal Richelieu, who fears his existence might mean revolution.  He decides this must be kept hidden from the people of France and arranges to have the Twin Brother taken to Spain. However, the Count de Rochefort, the villain of the piece, finds out about him, kidnaps him, and raises him for his own evil purposes.

Four years later, Louis, Dauphin of France, is a nice little boy, but the Twin Brother is a spoiled brat. Twenty years later, the Dauphin has become Louis XIV.  He is a good-hearted fellow.  But the Twin Brother, whom see practicing the signature of Louis, is mean-spirited and cruel.  Along with the Count de Rochefort, he plans to put King Louis XIV in prison and put himself on the throne.  Louis is kidnapped, and that is when he finds out about his twin.  De Rochefort says Louis will not be killed because that way he has something to hold over the Twin Brother, in case he gets any funny ideas.

To keep Louis from being recognized, the Twin Brother has an iron mask put over Louis’s head, and has him confined in the River Castle.  One day, Louis looks out the window of his cell and sees a man in a boat. He inscribes a message on a silver dish and tosses it out through the bars to the man below, promising a reward if he takes it to D’Artagnan.  He does so, and D’Artagnan figures out that Louis must have a twin brother, and that twin has usurped his throne.

D’Artagnan sends for the Three Musketeers, and the four of them rescue the king and bring him back to the palace, each of those Three Musketeers losing his life in the fighting as they do so. D’Artagnan and King Louis XIV put the iron mask on the Twin Brother’s head and have him sent to a prison for the rest of his life.

Then D’Artagnan dies from a wound he received during the fighting.  We see the souls of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis welcoming the soul of D’Artagnan to Heaven.  The four of them laugh at all those fools below that are grieving over D’Artagnan’s corpse.

As noted above, in this movie, as in the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers, they are always smiling and laughing, even when engaged in a sword fight.  This is a childlike depiction of them, which puts the audience in a childlike posture as well.  As such, it was probably deemed necessary to reassure the audience the way one reassures children, making it clear that the death of these men is not something sad, but rather that they are smiling and laughing now in Heaven as they did on Earth.

One of them says, “Come on!  There is greater adventure beyond.”  They turn and walk away, with the words “The Beginning” on the screen.  This is a modern conception of Heaven, one in which we imagine our loved ones doing in Heaven what they enjoyed doing on Earth.  This may be momentarily comforting, but when that is thought through to its ultimate conclusion, we experience a feeling of revulsion.  Are we to imagine them swashbuckling for eternity, sword fighting with the souls of Richelieu’s men, with nothing ever being accomplished thereby?  I should think that would get to be old after a few thousand years.

In the movies, Heaven is something that should be held out only as a hope, not made explicit, as it is here.

The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)

In the 1939 version, King Louis XIII (Albert Dekker) is informed by an adviser named Colbert about the twin brother, who is called Philippe.  They decide to let D’Artagnan (Warren William) raise him in Gascony. However, they express their regret that there is no D’Artagnan for the doctor and the midwife, implying that they must be killed to keep the secret from getting out. You know, just a couple of cold-blooded murders for the greater good of France.

That greater good of France being that the first-born son becomes Louis XIV (Louis Hayward), who is a “profligate, spendthrift, and a tyrant,” one who finds it amusing to watch people being hanged while betting with Fouquet on whether the rope will break. Louis knows nothing of his twin brother, but Fouquet had overheard people talking about the twins when they were born and used that knowledge to rise to a powerful position.  But he now intends to have D’Artagnan and Philippe (Louis Hayward) hanged, and so he gets the king to allow him to send troops to Gascony to arrest them for not paying their taxes.

Meanwhile, at D’Artagnan’s estate, we see him, the Three Musketeers, and Philippe sitting around the table having a jolly good time.  Philippe has been raised to be just the like these other men, and he is a swell fellow.  In the previous movie, Louis XIV was good and the Twin Brother was evil.  In this movie, it is Louis who is evil, and Philippe who is good.

The king’s men, numbering ninety in all, arrive to arrest D’Artagnan and Philippe. Though there are only five to resist them, those five manage to kill about half the king’s men in the ensuing sword fight. And then, right while they are in the middle of doing all this killing, there is an inexplicable cut in the action, and we see Philippe, D’Artagnan, and the Three Musketeers, with nary a scratch on them, smiling and laughing, having surrendered for some reason, and being taken back to Paris.  I rate this scene as the ultimate swashbuckling absurdity in any movie ever made about D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers.

Regarding this scene of five men fighting against ninety of the king’s men, it is worth comparing this to what happens in Chapter V of The Three Musketeers.  This is where D’Artagnan is about to fight a duel with each of the Three Musketeers when five men of the cardinal’s Guards show up.  Discounting the presence of D’Artagnan, who was not at that time a Musketeer, Athos expresses dismay over the odds:

“There are five of them,” said Athos, half aloud, “and we are but three; we shall be beaten again, and must die on the spot, for, on my part, I declare I will never appear again before the captain as a conquered man.”

But that is the difference between the novels of Dumas, which tell the stories seriously and realistically, and these early movies, which are silly and juvenile.

Fouquet does his best to hang the lot of them before Louis can find out about Philippe, but Colbert thwarts him.  When Louis sees how much Philippe looks like him, he decides it will be useful to have Philippe perform dangerous or unpleasant tasks expected of the king, while he, Louis, gets to drink wine and make love to his mistress. Philippe goes along with this in exchange for which his companions are spared.

When Louis finds out that Philippe is his twin brother, however, and not just someone who happens to look like him, he decides Philippe must be disposed of.  Louis chooses not to hang him because he would not enjoy seeing his likeness dangle from the end of a rope.  Instead, he has him locked up in the Bastille with an iron mask on his head.  D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers find out about this and free him from the Bastille.  They go to Louis’s bedroom, put the mask on his head, and send him to the Bastille.

As in the 1929 version, Louis writes a message on a silver dish, but since this is an evil Louis, the message is addressed to Fouquet.  Fouquet and his men free Louis. Philippe, D’Artagnan, and the Three Musketeers engage them on the road, but one by one the Three Musketeers die in battle. Fouquet is killed and Louis’s carriage goes off a cliff and into the river below, where he drowns, still wearing the iron mask.  This is a merciful ending for the evil Louis, unlike that for the evil Twin Brother of the 1929 version, who will wear the iron mask in prison for the rest of his life.

D’Artagnan gets Philippe back to the Cathedral for his marriage to Maria Theresa (Joan Bennett), at which point D’Artagnan dies from his wound.  We then see his soul and the souls of the Three Musketeers, mounted on the souls of their horses as they ride in the sky.  This is a bit of an improvement over the 1929 version because we don’t see them laughing at the fools below that are grieving over their deaths.  But I suppose something like this was still deemed necessary in order for the audience to regard this as a happy ending.

Let us note that unlike the 1929 version, where Louis is king at the end, this version ends with an imposter on the throne.  But since he is Philippe, who is good, then as far as I was concerned, that was all for the best.  His being an imposter didn’t bother me one bit.  But then, I have always been completely indifferent to matters of royalty and the order of succession.  For those who do care about such things, however, this might be unsettling.

When Queen Elizabeth II died recently, I was amazed at the nonstop coverage that went on for the better part of a week. According to what was reported on the news, half the world, over four billion people, tuned in to watch her funeral ceremony.  And that was in addition to the coverage of the royal family of England that we have been treated to over the years, which a lot of people seem to obsess over, for as long as I can remember.

In other words, even today, right here in America, there are a lot of people for whom the royal order of succession is important, even to the point of believing that kings rule by divine right.  Such people undoubtedly feel uncomfortable watching this 1939 movie in which Louis, the rightful heir to the throne, is killed and replaced by Philippe, an imposter, thus thwarting the will of God.

The 1929 version avoided that outcome by having Louis be good and the Twin Brother be evil. Then, at the end of the movie, when Louis had become king again, it was the good brother who was king, and who was also the one who had a sacred right to be king.

The Man in the Iron Mask (1977)

In the 1977 version, as in the preceding 1939 version, Louis XIV (Richard Chamberlain) is evil, and Philippe (Richard Chamberlain) is good.  In the 1939 movie, however, in order for the good brother to be king at the end, Philippe, the younger twin, had to replace Louis, who was older and thus had a right to be king.  And so, when the movie ended, Philippe, the imposter, had permanently usurped Louis’s throne.

This 1977 version avoids the 1939 outcome by having Philippe be the older brother. The first minister of Louis XIII told the king that one of the twins died and faked a burial.  The minister purposely allowed the younger son to become Louis XIV, having secretly raised Philippe, the older son, in order to have power over Louis when he became king.  The minister has since died, but D’Artagnan (Louis Jordan) knew about this and had his men arrest Philippe and put him in the Bastille for safekeeping.  But Philippe is accidentally recognized by the Chevalier Duval, who brings Philippe’s existence to the attention of Fouquet (Patrick McGoohan).

Therefore, at the end of the movie, when Philippe replaces Louis as king, it is not only the good brother that becomes king, but also the one who has a right to be king. Philippe has to go by the name “Louis” for the rest of his life, so to that extent he is still an imposter.  But since Louis was an unwitting imposter himself, being the younger brother, then Philippe is the imposter of an imposter, and so it all just cancels out.

But the main thing is that for all those people that would otherwise have misgivings, who would feel distraught at the idea of having someone be king who was not intended to be so by virtue of the order of succession, they will be pacified.

I didn’t mean to rush past the fact that it was D’Artagnan who saw to it that Philippe was initially imprisoned.  In his discussion with Colbert, they agree that it is better at the present time not to tell Philippe that he is the twin brother of Louis, while they keep him locked up.  That way, they agree, even if the guards torture Philippe by putting him on the rack, he won’t be able to tell them a thing.

Fouquet informs Louis of his twin brother.  Louis orders Fouquet that not a single drop of royal blood be spilled, lest they tempt Providence by doing so.  Apparently, they figure that they will not incur the wrath of God if they slap an iron mask on Philippe and move him to another prison, where they intend for him to remain for the rest of his life, because that is what they do.

D’Artagnan rescues Philippe and, at a party hosted by Fouquet, Philippe successfully passes himself off as Louis, while condemning the real Louis to have the iron mask put on his head, which he is condemned to wear in prison for the rest of his days.

Now, it may seem that by making Philippe be the older brother, that solves the problem of having him become king in a way that will not offend those who would be bothered if he were the younger brother, and thus had no right to sit on the throne.

But what this movie gives with one hand, it threatens to take away with the other. After Philippe has replaced Louis, he dances with Louis’s wife, Maria Theresa, the queen. Through what can only be called a woman’s intuition, she discerns the Philippe is not Louis, and subtly lets him know that she knows the truth.  As they engage in a hypothetical discussion about “just suppose” and “what if,” she lets Philippe know that she will play along with this charade so long as the children she has already had will retain their royal status, including the right of her oldest son to become king of France. Philippe agrees.  Therefore, while Philippe, being the older brother, is by right the king of France, the queen’s children are the offspring of Louis, which puts them at some remove in the order of succession.

But wait!  She and Philippe presumably never have any children after the switch, so her oldest son will therefore have the right to be king, though as a historical point, he died before Louis XIV did.  But at least the great grandson of Maria Theresa and Louis became Louis XV, so I guess it’s all right. Whew!

The Three Musketeers are not in this version.  This allows for a change in tone.  We don’t see D’Artagnan or anyone else in this movie smiling and laughing while sword fighting.  D’Artagnan does not die in the end, and given this change in tone, there would have been no need to see his soul ascend to Heaven even if he had.  Furthermore, it is not clear that D’Artagnan would deserve to go to Heaven in any event, given what he did to Philippe.

In the 1929 movie, D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers are morally upright by whatever standard of right and wrong one applies.  In the 1939 movie, D’Artagnan deceives Philippe while he is being raised, not letting him know that he is the younger brother of Louis.  But since Philippe has had a happy childhood and is enjoying life as a young adult, the deception would seem to be morally forgivable.  In this 1977 version, however, D’Artagnan’s moral character is disturbing, for he was the one that initially had Philippe imprisoned, even though it meant he might be tortured.

A major theory of ethics is utilitarianism, one version of which holds that the right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  A standard problem that arises within this theory is that it would seem to justify putting an innocent man in prison if society as a whole would benefit.  As opposed to this, there are those who advocate a deontological theory of ethics, which holds that some actions, like knowingly imprisoning an innocent man, are intrinsically wrong.  So, whereas a utilitarian might see D’Artagnan’s action in this respect as right, since it is for the greater good of France, a deontologist would say that what he did was wrong regardless of the consequences.

This issue was actually present in the first two movies, especially in the 1939 version, where Louis XIII and Colbert have the doctor and midwife murdered to keep the birth of Philippe a secret, but this 1977 version is the first in which it is the moral quality of D’Artagnan’s actions that are suspect.

Of course, we are suspicious of this notion of doing what is best for the greater good of France anyway, when it might simply be a matter of doing what is best for the greater good of those who happen to be in power and want to hold on to it.  Inasmuch as it was Louis XIV who said, L’État, c’est moi, we may be excused if we are not persuaded by this justification of what is best for France.

Finally, we must return to the importance that some people place on royalty and the order of succession.  Just as some people would argue that imprisoning an innocent man is wrong, as is the case in this movie, so too would others argue that violating the order of succession is intrinsically wrong as well, as was the case in the 1939 version.  Those espousing the utilitarian theory of ethics, on the other hand, would say either action would be justified, so long as civil war and anarchy are averted as a result.

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

In the 1998 version, Louis is evil, and Philippe is good, both men being played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Three Musketeers have retired, going their separate ways, with only D’Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne) remaining with the Musketeers.  Athos (John Malkovich) has a son, Raoul, who plans to become a Musketeer and marry Christine, the girl he loves.  But Louis wants her for himself, so he pulls a David and has Raoul returned to combat, ordering that he be placed at the vanguard of the assault, in front of the cannon, where he will be killed.  Then Louis has his way with Christine, who later hangs herself in disgust.

Athos wants to avenge Raoul’s death by assassinating Louis, but Aramis (Jeremy Irons), who has become a Jesuit, has a better idea.  It seems that Louis XIII confessed on his deathbed to his son, soon to be Louis XIV, that he had a younger twin brother Philippe. Immediately upon becoming the new king, Louis had Aramis go to where Philippe had been secretly raised, take him to the Bastille and imprisoned there, with an iron mask over his head.  Aramis gets Athos and Porthos (Gérard Depardieu) to go along with his plan to sneak Philippe out of prison and switch him out with Louis. Eventually, the plan works:  Philippe is put on the throne, and Louis is put in the Bastille with the iron mask on his head.

As evil as Louis had been in this movie, it would have been perfectly satisfying to let it go at that. However, one suspects that those who made this movie decided that a 1998 version of the good Philippe precluded the possibility of his letting Louis spend the rest of his life in prison with an iron mask on his head.  But if we had seen Philippe pardoning Louis and allowing him to spend the rest of his days in the countryside, we would have been disappointed with such a wimpy ending, if not incredulous that Louis would have acquiesced and not tried to regain the throne.

So, the movie tries to have it both ways by use of a narrator.  At the beginning of the movie, we heard a narrator saying something about how the story of the man in the iron mask was part fact and part legend. Now, at the end of the movie, the narrator returns with his part-fact-and-part-legend commentary, telling us that “it was whispered among his jailers” that the “prisoner” received a pardon and spent the rest of his days in the countryside.  The pardon thus being only a possibility, and words having less force than a visualization in any event, we are spared the offending scene of Philippe granting that pardon.

The whole business about who is the older brother with the right to be king is dispensed with. Their real father is D’Artagnan, who had an affair with Queen Anne, and so neither twin has a right to be king.  I suppose the idea was that we wouldn’t worry about which brother had the right to be king, since neither brother had that right.  But I suspect that those that care about such things were bothered by the fact that at the end of the movie, a bastard sits on the throne.

D’Artagnan dies in the end, but we don’t see his soul leave his body and rise to Heaven, something I doubt a modern audience could watch without groaning.  We made allowances for the 1929 and 1939 versions, but could not do so for a version made near the end of the twentieth century.  As for the Three Musketeers, there is none of that silliness we have come to expect, the three of them smiling and laughing as they swashbuckle.  That childlike characterization of them having been eliminated, the need to reassure the audience with depictions of souls ascending to Heaven was obviated.  Furthermore, had there been such a scene, we might have wondered why the soul of Aramis was not descending into Hell, given what he did to Philippe.  So, just to be on the safe side, I suppose, the movie avoids having them die anyway, the issue then being moot.

Aside from being guilty of adultery, which is no longer the great sin it once was, D’Artagnan is basically good in this movie.  It is Aramis, however, whose moral character is now in question, inasmuch as he not only had Philippe imprisoned in the Bastille, but also had that iron mask put on his head, intending for Philippe to remain that way for the rest of his life, which I regard as pure evil, only helping to free Philippe from prison when it suited his purposes, owing to a change in circumstances.  You really have to be a staunch defender of utilitarianism to think what he did was right.

The Man in the Iron Mask (novel)

As noted in my introduction, I never finished reading The Three Musketeers.  Nor have I read The Man in the Iron Mask, and I certainly did not read the stuff in between.  By what presumption, you might well ask, do I now propose to discuss this final novel of the D’Artagnan romances?  Well, the same way I managed to get through college.  If assigned to read some work of literature that was too long and ponderous for my taste, I would make do by reading those parts of the book the professor seemed to regard as important, and then get the rest from Cliff Notes.  While not using Cliff Notes for the purpose at hand, the internet has provided me with a summary, and from it I figured out which passages of the novel itself to read, which is also available online.

Before this novel even begins, Aramis, who is now the bishop of Vannes, has learned from a former lover, Madame de Chevereuse, that King Louis XIV has a twin brother.  And he has learned from from Baisemeaux, the governor of the Bastille, that there is a prisoner that looks exactly like King Louis XIV. In Chapter I, on the pretense of hearing that prisoner’s confession, Aramis gets to see this prisoner alone. Through a long and involved conversation, we learn that this prisoner, whose name is Philippe, was raised as a child by a nurse and a preceptor, in a secluded house surrounded by high walls.  Other than those two, he has seen very few people, one of whom we gather was his mother, Queen Anne.  He has never even been allowed to see his own reflection in a mirror, for there were none in the house, and Philippe does not even know what the words “mirror” or “looking-glass” mean.

But then one day, concerning an incident in which a letter from the queen fell into a well, the significance of which I had a hard time following, it seems that this alarmed the queen so much that she had Philippe’s nurse and preceptor killed, and then had Philippe transferred to the Bastille, where he presently resides. In the 1929 and 1939 movie versions, we always figured the queen knew she had twins, but men made the decision to conceal this fact from the people of France, and we concluded that she was relatively blameless.  In the 1977 and 1998 versions, she is told that one of the twins died right after being born. But here, we might well count her as one of the villains, more so than Louis XIV, who knew nothing of this, for she is the one who now condemns her own son to his undeserved fate.

Aramis shows Philippe a mirror to look into, and also shows him a picture of the king, convincing him that he is the king’s identical twin brother.  In case you are wondering, Philippe is not, at this point in the story, wearing an iron mask.

Aramis explains his plan to put Philippe on the throne in place of Louis.  Philippe is reticent, but Aramis eventually gets him out of the prison anyway.  In Chapter IX, Aramis tells Philippe that he is the “natural and legitimate heir to the throne of France.” However, Aramis cannot be trusted.  He also indicates the Louis has been responsible for Philippe’s imprisonment, when in point of fact, Louis knows nothing of Philippe at this point in the story.  It may be that Aramis is saying all this, not because it is true, which it is not, but to get Philippe to go along with his plan, part of which, as we find out in Chapter X, is for Philippe, once he is king, to help Aramis become pope.

They pull off the switch, with Louis being kidnapped by two masked men, who are Aramis and Porthos. They take Louis to the Bastille, telling the governor that they made a mistake when they took Philippe out of prison and are now returning him.  The governor believes the story and locks Louis up in the cell Philippe was in.

In all the movies we have considered, one brother was good and the other was evil.  In the 1929 version, it was Louis who was good, and the Twin Brother who was evil.  In the subsequent three movies, it was Louis who was evil, and Philippe who was good. But in every case, it was the good brother that was king in the end.  As for the novel, though it is not simplistic in its contrast between the brothers regarding their moral qualities, as is the case in all the movies, yet we nevertheless must conclude that, morally speaking, the worse of the two brothers is Louis, the one who is king at the end.

First, there is a comment by Aramis in Chapter I that if Philippe becomes king, it will be for “the good of humanity.”  However, Aramis may simply be saying that to justify his actions.  At the end of Chapter XXIV, however, D’Artagnan admits that Philippe might have made a better king.

Second, while Philippe intended to keep Louis in prison for the rest of his life, he believed that this was what Louis had intended for him, based on what Aramis had told him, and thus was only repaying Louis in kind.  But it was Louis that not only imprisoned Philippe once more, but condemned him to the awful fate of wearing that iron mask.

Third, Louis’s ingratitude toward Fouquet is shocking.  Just before he was put in the Bastille, Louis was planning on arresting Fouquet for embezzlement.  Aramis tells Fouquet of the switch, thinking he will be pleased to be free from arrest now that Philippe is king.  But Fouquet cannot in good conscience go along with this scheme. Instead, he goes to the Bastille and has Louis released. Once Louis regains his power as king and has Philippe arrested and returned to prison, now wearing an iron mask, he then has Fouquet arrested and put in prison too.  In other words, so strong was Fouquet’s belief that it was of the utmost importance that Louis be king, since he was the older brother and had that right, that he acted against his own self-interest by getting Louis back on the throne, where he would once again be made to suffer from the king’s displeasure.

It is suggested in Chapter XXIII that the reason the king shows no gratitude toward Fouquet is that Fouquet saw him in the Bastille looking a wreck from the brutal kidnapping, and acting weak and scared:

Louis, recalled to himself by the change of situation, looked at himself, and ashamed of the disordered state of his apparel, ashamed of his conduct, and ashamed of the air of pity and protection that was shown towards him, drew back. Fouquet did not understand this movement; he did not perceive that the king’s feeling of pride would never forgive him for having been a witness of such an exhibition of weakness.

Louis even begins blaming Fouquet for his abduction, saying, “You should have foreseen it.” What Fouquet should have foreseen was just how ungrateful Louis would be.

In the 1929 and 1939 versions of this story, Louis throws a silver dish out of his prison cell with writing on it, asking for help.  As a result, D’Artagnan in the former and Fouquet in the latter get Louis out of prison. In Chapter XXXI of the novel, it is Philippe, now wearing the iron mask, who is the one that tosses the silver dish out the window. But as there is no one to help him, since it was the king who ordered him confined there, he merely asks people to pray for him. Athos and his son Raoul pick up the dish. But then D’Artagnan shows up, takes the dish away from them, and scratches out the message.  Since D’Artagnan was the one who took Philippe to the prison and had the iron mask put on his head, under the king’s orders, Philippe’s silver dish accomplishes nothing.

If we imagine this being in a movie, this futile, pathetic gesture would be painful to watch.  For that reason, this incident with the silver dish is either transformed into an efficacious event in the first two movies, allowing the prisoner with the iron mask to escape, or it is eliminated entirely, as in the last two movies.

This business with the silver dish occurs about halfway through the book.  Save for one brief moment later on, Philippe is never referred to or thought of again.  Not only is Philippe condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison wearing the iron mask, but he is pretty much forgotten about as well.  Given the title of this novel and the horrifying image it creates, it is surprising how once Philippe is put back in prison, now wearing an iron mask, he is hardly given another thought, his terrible fate seemingly a matter of indifference to everyone else in the story.

In the Epilogue, D’Artagnan is mortally wounded.  He says, “Athos—Porthos, farewell till we meet again! Aramis, adieu forever!” This is followed by the last line of the book:  “Of the four valiant men whose history we have related, there now remained but one. Heaven had taken to itself three noble souls.”

Why this distinction between his farewell to Athos and Porthos on the one hand, and to Aramis on the other?  Of the three, Aramis is the only one still alive, but D’Artagnan could just as easily have said “till we meet again” to him as well, implying that Aramis’s soul will arrive in Heaven too when he eventually dies. By saying “forever” in his goodbye to Aramis, D’Artagnan, it would seem, does not expect to see Aramis in Heaven when Aramis eventually dies because, being guilty of trying to put a pretender on the throne in place of Louis, he had committed a mortal sin in his effort to subvert Louis’s divine right to rule, for which Aramis must spend eternity in Hell. What D’Artagnan did, on the other hand, taking Philippe back to prison and putting an iron mask on his head, which Philippe will be condemned to wear for the rest of his life, D’Artagnan did to make sure that Louis’s place on the throne would be secure, all for the greater good of France, the preservation of the royal order of succession, and in conformity with what had been ordained by God. Because D’Artagnan has been the hero of this novel and all those that came before it, and because his noble soul is taken into Heaven, it is clear that Dumas would have us approve of what D’Artagnan did, and therefore that God would approve as well.

As I commented in the review of the 1929 version, it is perfectly acceptable when people on Earth express a hope for a future life, that they or their loved ones will go to Heaven.  It becomes problematic only when Heaven is made explicit.  And so, the fact that D’Artagnan believes he will see Athos and Porthos again in Heaven, while expressing regret that Aramis will be sent to Hell, does not strain our credulity.

In Chapter LVII, however, Dumas does more than have people merely talk about Heaven.  When Athos’s son Raoul dies, Athos sees his son’s soul ascending to Heaven:

At length he gained the crest of the hill, and saw, thrown out in black, upon the horizon whitened by the moon, the aerial form of Raoul. Athos reached forth his hand to get closer to his beloved son upon the plateau, and the latter also stretched out his; but suddenly, as if the young man had been drawn away in his own despite, still retreating, he left the earth, and Athos saw the clear blue sky shine between the feet of his child and the ground of the hill. Raoul rose insensibly into the void, smiling, still calling with gesture:—he departed towards heaven. Athos uttered a cry of tenderness and terror. He looked below again. He saw a camp destroyed, and all those white bodies of the royal army, like so many motionless atoms. And, then, raising his head, he saw the figure of his son still beckoning him to climb the mystic void.

Perhaps it is on the basis of this passage that those who produced the 1929 and 1939 movie versions of this story thought it appropriate to have us see the souls of D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers rise into Heaven as well.

Conclusion

It is clear that Dumas had a fondness for royalty and took seriously the order of succession, so much so that he believed it warranted having an innocent man imprisoned for most of his life, the latter half of it with an iron mask on his head.  But whereas God would be forgiving of what was done to Philippe, he could not forgive Aramis, who tried to violate the order of succession by putting Philippe on the throne, for which reason Aramis must burn forever in the fires of Hell.

As I noted above, even here in America, where our Founding Fathers rejected the idea of royalty and a hereditary order of succession, where we now regard all men and women as equal, there still lingers among many in this country a fondness for monarchy.  For them, the importance of the hereditary order of succession is a value that competes with the importance of a monarch’s moral qualities.  In the novel, the order of succession wins out over moral worth, but not so in the movies, where this struggle expresses itself in the different ways, but with moral worth always winning out in the end.

Furthermore, although atheism had begun to flourish during the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and was gaining traction throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, I suspect Dumas believed that there was a God and a future life for the immortal soul.  Instead of merely letting this be the hope on the part of the faithful, he guaranteed it, as it were, by having Athos actually see his son’s soul rise to Heaven.

As for religion in general, when a likable character dies in a movie, it is seldom felt necessary to make it clear that the person’s soul has gone to Heaven, and when that does happen, it is usually enough that someone utter words to that effect.  And this has become increasingly so over the last hundred years, so that we are less likely to hear about Heaven in a movie today than we might have in the early part of the twentieth century, unless it is a production from Pinnacle Peak Pictures, of course.

The references to the soul surviving death in this novel, made explicit in the case of Raoul, arose out of a sincere belief in God and immortality on the part of Dumas.  The need to ensure that the souls of these characters went to Heaven became even greater when the decision was made to portray D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers as childlike in the first half of the twentieth century.  And needless to say, that absolutely precluded any scene where we see the soul of Aramis being dragged down to Hell.  In the latter part of the twentieth century, the subject of souls going to Heaven in the last two versions of this story was avoided entirely, evincing a more secular attitude today than there was in the past.

Before considering the movie Panic in the Year Zero, some general remarks about nuclear-war movies are in order.

Nuclear-War Movies

Nuclear war, should it ever occur, would be a dreadful thing.  But from that it does not follow that a movie about nuclear war will induce a feeling of dread in its audience. And so it is with a lot of subjects that, in themselves, are dreadful, but the presentation of which in a movie can be quite enjoyable. Murder is something dreadful, but murder mysteries are fun.

Perhaps that is because few of us are in fear of being murdered.  We take precautions, of course, but the prospect of being murdered does not weigh heavily on our minds. Cancer, on the other hand, is something that threatens us all.  And certainly, a movie about someone dying of cancer might be expected to induce a feeling of dread, such as Cries & Whispers (1972).  But other movies in which cancer plays a role can be quite enjoyable, such as Rebecca (1940).  Of course, it might be argued that the woman who has cancer in that movie, though she is the title character, is never seen, but only referred to.  However, in Dark Victory (1939), the protagonist, played by Bette Davis, has terminal cancer and dies in the end.  And while this movie is a tearjerker, it is not dreadful, but actually uplifting.

Whether a movie about nuclear was will be experienced as dreadful or not depends in part on the way the story is presented, and in part on the attitudes of those who watch the movie.  In the 1950s, the threat of a nuclear attack was thought to be a real possibility.  There were a lot of civil defense and military films produced by the government to prepare its citizens for nuclear attack, the most well-known being Duck and Cover (1952).  In this partially animated short, featuring Bert the turtle, who has the advantage of being able to duck into the shell he carries around with him, children are advised to seek shelter in case there is a warning that an attack is imminent.  We hear air-raid sirens, at which point children go into buildings, preferably into those with a bomb shelter.  In some cases, adults wearing civil defense helmets advise them where to go.  Since bombers were the principal means by which atomic bombs would be dropped in those days, it was expected that there would be such warnings.  If there was no warning, the first indication of such an attack would be a flash of bright light, at which point the children were advised to avail themselves of whatever cover was at hand, protecting their head and neck primarily.  Being a child myself back then, having been born in 1946, I remember that we would regularly have nuclear-attack drills.

I also remember the films.  In the 1980s, I began hearing about all the trauma children like me experienced in those days.  That’s not the way I remember it.  I used to like it when we were able to get out of class to see one of these films.  I especially liked watching the way buildings were flattened by the atomic bomb. Other students my age seemed to have similar attitudes.  When I was in junior high, some smart aleck posted a sign on the wall that read as follows:

In case of nuclear attack:

1. Bend over.

2. Put your head between your legs.

3. And kiss your ass goodbye.

As noted above, during the 1950s, the principal means of delivering nuclear bombs was by airplanes. Every day, twenty-four hours a day, planes loaded with nuclear bombs would head toward Russia, prepared to proceed to their targets should they receive an order to do so.  In Strategic Air Command (1955), James Stewart plays Dutch Holland, a professional baseball player.  He was a pilot during World War II, and now, being in the reserves, he is called back to active duty to fly the long-range bombers that carry a nuclear payload in case World War III should break out.  His wife Sally (June Allyson) really shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about the important work men have to do, but being a woman, she is all sentiment and feeling, and she just doesn’t understand her husband, who has to make all the big decisions in their marriage without consulting her, because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Halfway through the movie you’ll be wishing that war would break out, and that Dutch will get the order to proceed to a target inside Russia.  Instead, in an effort to keep us from being bored, the movie manufactures moments of dramatic tension:  a seemingly hostile situation just turns out to be a drill; an engine catches on fire, causing a crash; a bomber almost runs out of fuel, and Dutch has to land in the fog. It makes you sympathetic to the device in Top Gun (1986), in which a dogfight occurs between American fighter planes and those of an unnamed enemy, even though the country is not at war.  Let’s face it. Military movies set during peacetime can be pretty dull.  In fact, life during peacetime can also be pretty dull.  I sometimes wonder how many wars are started because someone got bored.

During the crash that occurred because the engine caught on fire, Dutch injured his shoulder.  This eventually leads to his being discharged, giving us the typical Hollywood ending:  Dutch got the satisfaction of doing the right thing by deciding to make a career out of being in the Air Force in spite of Sally’s objections, and Sally gets her way when he is forced to return to civilian life.  Of course, with an injured shoulder, it is unlikely that he will ever play third base again, which is in keeping with the sense of sacrifice that the men of SAC must make to keep this nation safe.

In 1964, two movies were made based on these long-range nuclear bombers:  Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  The former was played straight, intended to fill us with dread; the latter was a satire, meant to be enjoyed.  Both movies, however, have an interesting twist.  The threat is not an attack by the Soviet Union, but rather a failure in the American defense system, one that allows the crews of American bombers to believe they have a legitimate order to attack Russia, even though the Russians have done nothing to warrant it.  In Fail Safe, it is an accident that some bombers receive an order to attack Russia; in Dr. Strangelove, a mentally unbalanced American Air Force general deliberately orders a nuclear strike. In both movies, a bomber manages to drop a nuclear bomb on Russia.

In Fail Safe, Henry Fonda, as president of the United States, has a nuclear bomb dropped on New York City as payback for the unintended strike on Moscow.  The fact that the president’s wife happens to be in New York at the time really makes this dreadful.  Dr. Strangelove, which is too well known to warrant even a minimal synopsis, is great fun.

Subsequent movies have played on this theme, in which America might inadvertently start a nuclear war rather than having it begin with an attack by the Russians, as was the principal fear in the 1950s. However, unlike the two movies above, an attack on Russia is averted in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), The Dead Zone (1983), War Games (1983), and Crimson Tide (1995).  That fact that nuclear war is completely avoided makes it easy to treat such movies as entertainment.

Movies in which nuclear war does break out are usually intended to fill us with dread, and they tend to be ambiguous as to who started it. In the early 1980s, there was some concern that President Ronald Reagan would get us into a nuclear war.  In response to this, there were protests and calls for disarmament. Perhaps as a result of this movement, The Day After was produced in 1983, in which escalating tensions build up between the United States and the Soviet Union until full-scale nuclear war breaks out. There is no sneak attack, and both sides seem to be partially to blame for what happens. This movie falls into the dreadful category, although it sometimes seems as though the point of the movie is that nuclear war will ruin everyone’s sex life.  An even more dreadful nuclear war movie is Testament (1983), where we never find out how the war started.  Another nuclear-war movie made during this period is Threads (1984), a television movie produced by the United Kingdom.  It too is supposed to be in the dreadful category, but we are reassured by the fact that Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” has survived.

Finally, there are the movies in which we learn about a nuclear war that has already taken place.  On the Beach is intended to give us that feeling of dread, no doubt owing to the fact that it was made in 1959. Since then, however, the nuclear war that took place at some time in the past merely allows us to enjoy stories of adventure in the post-apocalyptic world, notably the Mad Max movies.

The 1980s seem to be the last time the threat of nuclear attack was high on the list of things to worry about.  I live in Houston, and at the start of that decade, an air-raid siren could still be heard every Friday at noon as a test to make sure it was still working.  A few years later, this practice was discontinued. Nuclear-attack drills in school have been replaced by active-shooter drills.  Fallout shelters have been replaced by safe rooms.

Panic in the Year Zero

Panic in the Year Zero was made in 1962, when a sneak attack by the Soviet Union was still regarded as a genuine threat.  Early in the movie, nuclear war begins when just such a sneak attack is initiated, though by an unnamed enemy.  This movie is unusual in that it is intended to be enjoyed, despite such a scenario and the year in which it was produced.  Imagine an episode of Father Knows Best, a television show that ran from 1954 to 1960, in which the Anderson family finds itself having to deal with such an attack.  Except for the absence of someone corresponding to Kathy, the daughter still in grade school, there are corresponding characters in the Baldwin family in Panic in the Year Zero:  Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland); Ann (Jean Hagen), Harry’s wife; Rick (Frankie Avalon), their son; and Karen (Mary Mitchel), their daughter.

Frankie Avalon was twenty-one when this movie was made in 1962, but was still playing teenage roles, as in this movie.  Mary Mitchel was only one day younger than Avalon, but plays a teenager as well. One wonders, would it be considered politically incorrect to let adults like Avalon and Mitchel play teenagers in a movie made today, as a form of ageism, much in the way it is frowned upon to let actors play ethnicities and gender identities that are not really theirs?

In any event, when the movie begins, we hear a jazz score, which tends to suggest a loosening of the restraints of civilization.  At the same time, the camera focuses on a car radio.  In addition to the numbers and a vertical bar indicating the approximate locations of the AM stations, we see two marks that are immediately recognizable to those who were around when this movie was made:  the CONELRAD stations located at 640 and 1240 kHz.  In case of atomic attack, American citizens could tune in to those two stations and find out from the government what they should do or where they should go.

We see Harry with his fishing rod, standing in front of his car with a trailer attached. He and his family are about to embark on a trip to the country where they can do some fishing.  In other words, the Baldwin family will be away from Los Angeles when nuclear war breaks out, and they will be in good shape for surviving in the aftermath. However, it is important that it is a fishing trip and not a hunting trip they are going on.  Civilians who own guns when a movie begins usually end up being killed, as a kind of cinematic punishment.  But civilians that do not own guns when the movie begins, but acquire them later, after they find themselves in danger, are likely to survive and defeat the bad guys.

As the Baldwin family drives down the road, a couple of hours after having left town, they become aware of flashes of light behind them.  Harry says he is going to stop and check the rear window on the trailer, but that is not the real reason.  He suspects the flash may indicate something ominous, and he does not want to alarm his wife Ann. This is the first indication that Harry, being a man, is able to handle the truth, while Ann, being a woman, must be protected from the harsh realities of life.

Eventually, they see a mushroom cloud rising from the west.  They decide to call Ann’s mother to see if she knows anything.  And there, in the middle of nowhere, is a phonebooth on the side of the road, all by itself. Boy, was that a long time ago!

However, the telephone lines to Los Angeles are dead.  Up till now, Harry has been just like Robert Young in Father Knows Best, easy going and relaxed, but now he acquires an edge.  He is still the one in the family who knows best, but as the patriarch, he must now set aside his genial attitude and become firm and resolute in what must be done. But while Harry gets to be the one who can see the big picture, using reason and a realistic understanding of the Hobbesian world they are about to enter, Ann is consigned to the role of silly, emotional female.  When Harry says they cannot go back to Los Angeles, Ann cannot believe he is just going to forget about her mother.  Karen is not much better, being the other female in the family, who can’t believe her father doesn’t care about “grandma.”  Of course, Harry knows that Ann’s mother is dead by now, a fact the women in his family just cannot face.  Over and over, during this movie, Harry has to reprimand Ann for whining and being irrational, and he does so in a loud voice.  I felt sorry for her.  Then, I began to feel sorry for Jean Hagen, who had to play this part, similar to that of June Allyson’s character in Strategic Air Command.  But finally, I began to feel sorry for the women of those days who suffered from such stereotypes.

As noted above, the Baldwin family didn’t start out with guns.  But Harry decides they now need them, as well as a lot of other supplies.  Not having the cash to pay for it all, he robs a hardware store, using the very pistol he just purchased.  That is a bit of a cliché in the movies.  In real life, customers are not typically allowed to load up the gun they are about to purchase.

Rick helps his father pull off the robbery.  Being the other male in the family, he is rational and competent too.  However, being young, he is a little too eager to violently engage in this world of every man for himself.  In fact, he seems to be having a good time.  When Harry punches out the owner of a filing station in order to steal his gasoline, Ann is shocked, but Rick just grins.

The Baldwin family has two problems.  First, there is the general panic on the part of people like themselves.  Second, there are three jive-talking hoodlums they have to confront.  When these punks start roughing up Harry, Rick shoots one of them with a shotgun from inside the trailer.  The hoodlums take off. Harry asks Rick why he almost missed the guy, just barely wounding him in the shoulder. Ann admits that she pushed Rick’s arm to keep him from killing the guy.  Harry admonishes Ann, telling her they would have killed him and Rick, and then, in so many words, would have raped her and Karen.  Rape is a major theme in this movie, although the word “rape” is never used. One almost gets the feeling that the purpose of the women in this movie is either to be raped or be in danger of such.  After Ann gets back in the trailer, Rick gets a dreamy look in his eyes, saying, “I could have blown that guy’s head off.”  Harry gives Rick a stern lecture, telling him he mustn’t like doing this sort of thing.

Harry figures they would be sitting ducks living in the trailer, so they ditch it, cover the car with foliage, and take up residence in a cave.  When listening to a radio, they hear that looting has been taking place and that all those responsible are guilty of treason and will face the death penalty. Looks like Harry just might be in some trouble.

By coincidence, Ed Johnson, the owner of the hardware store Harry robbed, and his wife have made their way to the same area and have taken up residence in the trailer. It turns out that Harry was right to abandon it, for he and Rick later discover the couple have been murdered, and the wife raped.  But every cloud has a silver lining. That’s one less witness to the looting Harry’s been doing.

It turns out that the three hoodlums they encountered earlier have taken up residence in a nearby farmhouse.  And while Harry and Rick are burying the Johnsons, two of the hoodlums come across Karen and rape her, a really wild jazz score playing in the background.  Ann hears Karen screaming. She redeems herself somewhat by taking a couple of shots at the two men, but she doesn’t hit either of them because such competence would have been in conflict with the stereotype to which she must conform.

When Harry and Rick find out, they go to the farmhouse, and Harry kills the two hoodlums that raped Karen, the third one being out at the time.  They find Marilyn, who lived there with her parents before the hoodlums killed them.  She has been repeatedly gangraped by the three hoodlums and others as well.  Rick talks his father into bringing her with them.  The next day, Rick makes a move on Marilyn, but she recoils.  I guess he figured the rape had worn off on her by that time.

When the third hoodlum shows up, he shoots Rick in the leg, but Marilyn shoots and kills him.  She is allowed to be a competent female because she was raised on a farm, as opposed to urban females like Ann and Karen, who just get emotional.  Since Rick is losing a lot of blood, they are forced to leave camp and go back to civilization in search of a doctor.  While in the car, the radio says that the “enemy” has asked for a cessation of hostilities.  This enemy could not possibly be any other than the Russians, but they are not mentioned specifically.

After being stopped by some soldiers, who are restoring order in this post-apocalyptic world, they are directed to a hospital where Rick will be able to get blood.  It might be thought that the rape of the two teenage girls in this movie would preclude the possibility of regarding this movie as having a happy ending, but that is not the case. Although rape is, in itself, something dreadful, it, like murder, cancer, and nuclear war, can be featured in a movie meant to be enjoyed.  This is especially so if the movie is one in which women are depicted as being of little value, expect in their role as something for men protect or avenge.

When I was five years old, my parents had to work.  So, during the day, they put me in what then was called a nursery, but which today would be called a daycare center. One day, all the children were gathered together into a room where a young woman told us a story.  It was about a little girl who wouldn’t eat her dinner.  As a result, something bad happened to this little girl, though I forget exactly what.  I was as gullible as a five-year-old child could be, and so I took this story to heart.

Then it was time for lunch.  On the plate that was set before me was a lump of something called fishcake. If its appearance was unappetizing, its taste was even more so.  The scales fell from my eyes.  The young woman had told us that story so that we would not be like that little girl, but would eat this lunch as we were supposed to.  We were being manipulated by that story, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t eat the fishcake either. Nothing bad happened to me.

I had a similar feeling the first time I saw The Caine Mutiny as a child.  There was something about it I didn’t like, as if the story was an attempt to manipulate me.  I saw it again just recently, and I had the same feeling.

But first we need to put our minds back into the past.  The story is set during World War II; the novel which was the basis for this movie was written in 1950; and the movie itself was produced in 1954. As a result, in both the novel and the movie, the word “war” had positive connotations.  Most people would rate World War II as one of the best wars America ever fought.  The stirring, patriotic music that plays during the credits of this movie was undoubtedly heard by the audience back then without the slightest sense of irony.  Since then, wars have lost much of their glory.

When this movie begins, a ceremony is taking place in which men “from all walks of life” have been made ensigns in the United States Navy after three months of training. One of these ensigns is Willie Keith, played by Robert Francis, an actor you have probably never heard of, in part because he died young, but mostly because he is nondescript.  When the story is over, he will be in the final scene as well. He functions as someone the audience is invited to identify with, someone who is almost as much a spectator to the events in this movie as the audience is.

He has a romantic relationship with May Wynn, played by an actress of such little distinction that she changed her name to that of the character she played in this movie, as if that would help her with her career.  In other words, she is a minor actress, a suitable movie mate for Robert Francis.  In this way, there is no danger that they will distract from the main part of the movie, where major actors play a role.  Many critics have dismissed Willie’s relationship with May as just the obligatory love interest. However, it is more than that, because it forms the basis for a domestic mutiny. Willie is under the thumb of his domineering mother, whom he dare not disobey any more than he would disobey a commanding officer. The maternal jealousy on the part of his mother is something with which May must contend, which will not be easy, since she is a singer in a nightclub.

Once again, we must put our minds back into the past.  Back then, women that sang in nightclubs in the movies were morally suspect.  They were not above having sex before marriage.  And even if they didn’t, they seemed too worldly wise to be respectable, much more so than their more innocent counterparts, who still lived at home with their parents, or at least had a nice job like that of a school teacher.  That is why, in Imitation ofLife (1959), Annie (Juanita Moore) is devastated when she finds out that her daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) is singing in a nightclub, or why Mildred (Joan Crawford) is heartbroken in Mildred Pierce (1945) when she finds out that her daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) is singing in the nightclub owned by Wally (Jack Carson). In other words, May is someone that Willie’s mother would not approve of.

In any event, although May is at the ceremony where Willie becomes an ensign, he does not introduce her to his mother, telling May later that the time was not right.  He ends up breaking his date with May because his mother had other plans for him, but finally shows up at her nightclub while she is in the middle of a number.  After she finishes, Willie gets her to sit down with him, and they quarrel about his mother and her hold on him.  Finally, he tells her he has only forty-eight hours before he ships out, and he suggests that instead of going to some club for entertainment, they could just….  At this point, she puts her fingers against his lips to keep him from saying it, that he wants to spend the next two days having sex with her.  Having thus been propositioned, she responds, “Will you marry me?”  He tries to make excuses, protesting that he loves her, saying if only there were more time.  She replies, “I forgot who I was. Just another nightclub singer for a big weekend.”  She gets up and leaves in a huff.  We are inclined to regard him as a cad, but it’s not that. He just can’t break away from his mother.  Two days later, his mother sees him off at the dock.  He tells her not to cry.  Being a widow, she says, “I can’t help it.  You’re all I have left.” A mother’s hold on her son always becomes stronger when his father dies.  He kisses her on the cheek and says, “Goodbye, sweetheart.”

When he has his first look at the USS Caine, a minesweeper, it is the worst looking excuse for a ship ever seen, full of scroungy-looking sailors, all sloppily dressed.  Willie is then introduced to Lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray).  He takes Willie’s orders, remarking with sarcasm, “They transform ex-civilians into men without minds.”  This is a harbinger of what is to come, when the question will arise as to whether a bad order should be followed mindlessly.

He continues to make such derogatory remarks about the Caine in particular, and the Navy in general. At this point, we might wonder what a man with that attitude is doing in the Navy as an officer.  Not that I take exception to his attitude.  It’s just that we wonder, what is he doing here?  But again, we must place ourselves in the past.  Had he not taken that same three months of training Keith did to become an ensign when the war started, he would have been drafted and had to serve in the army.  Rather than suffer that fate, he probably figured that he would do better in the Navy. And he does do better, for on the Caine he has time to work on his novel.

This is the guy I immediately identified with.  But before the movie is out, Tom will be the villain of the piece.  Not the kind of villain that you have to admire for being shrewd and brave, like Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste (1939), for example, but one who turns out to be a trouble-maker and a coward.  All this comes later, of course, but this is where it ties in with my fishcake story.  This movie is trying to manipulate me into not being like Tom.  It’s not going to work.

Tom introduces Willie to Executive Officer Steve Maryk (Van Johnson), who in turn takes him to meet the captain, Commander DeVriess.  If the seamen were sloppily dressed, at least they were dressed. DeVriess is sitting there naked except for a towel. He is rude to Keith, making snide remarks about his Princeton education.  This reminds me of Crimson Tide (1995), another mutiny movie, where Gene Hackman makes snide remarks about Denzel Washington’s Harvard education.  Does the Navy have something against an Ivy League education?  In any event, I guess one of the fringe benefits of being a commanding officer is that you get to belittle your subordinates, and they have to just stand there and take it.  It must be a bully’s paradise.

Owing to connections through his Uncle Lloyd, Willie has a chance to transfer to a better assignment as part of the admiral’s staff.  But Devriess intimidates him, making him feel as though he would be worthy of contempt if he accepted it.  So, Willie says he’ll stay on the Caine, something Tom says he’ll come to regret. But Devriess himself has been wanting off the Caine for two years, and when he finally gets the chance to transfer to another ship, his ass is gone.

He is replaced by Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart). Queeg is a by-the-book officer, and he sets about making the Caine shipshape, requiring the crew to dress appropriately. However, he is so much of a martinet that when he issues a bad order, the men are afraid to question it or take initiative themselves to prevent a bad result.  Then he insists that the bad result was not his fault, but just an accident.  In particular, Queeg becomes so upset that a sailor does not have his shirttail tucked in that he neglects the fact that the ship is sailing in a circle as a result of his last order.  When a man at the helm tries to warn him, Queeg yells at him for interrupting him, and then goes back to reprimanding Willie for allowing the sailor to leave his shirttail out.  As a result, the ship cuts the tow line, and the target is set adrift.  To retrieve it would result in the Caine getting back to port last, and that would look bad.  So, Queeg begins insisting that the tow line broke on account of a bad cable.  Then he starts being nice to everyone, hoping they will be sympathetic and overlook what happened.  But that lasts only a few minutes.  He soon starts being unlikable again.

The ship is ordered to return to San Francisco.  This time Willie introduces May to his mother, both of whom are at the dock.  Then he and May go to Yosemite.  If I have correctly decoded the signifiers that were needed when movies were made under the guidance of the Production Code, then they had sex. The next morning, he asks her to marry him.  But she suspects he is proposing only because it’s the “decent thing to do.” Fearing his mother’s disapproval, which she says will result in an unhappy marriage, she says “No.”

When Willie returns to the ship, Queeg calls the officers together, saying that “certain misleading reports were sent to the Force Commander.”  As he says this, the camera focuses on Tom, who has an insolent look on his face.  He presumably sent in a report about the tow-line incident, telling what really happened.

Queeg announces they have been ordered to take part in an invasion, escorting marines until they are close to shore.  But during the invasion, Queeg gets scared, ordering the ship to turn around sooner than it should, abandoning those marines.  He orders a yellow dye marker thrown overboard as they retreat as a way of telling the marines they can follow it as a safe path to shore, even though that path has not been cleared of mines.

As a result, someone later comes up with a song, “Yellowstain Blues,” referring to the color of the dye and the fact that Queeg figuratively wet his pants.  While they are singing the song, Willie worries that Queeg might hear them.  Tom dismisses his concerns, saying, “It’s about time you got over being impressed by people in authority like parents and ship’s captains.”  In so doing, he makes the link between the two mutinies to come, the one against Queeg, and the other on Willie’s part against his mother.  Willie says, sarcastically, “Thanks Dad.”  And this recalls the fact that if Willie’s father were still alive, his mother would not be so possessive, and his father would put a check on her maternal jealousy in any event.  It’s sort of the flipside of the Oedipus complex.  Freud said that a man has an unconscious desire to kill his father and marry his mother.  But if this is true, it also holds that as long as the father is alive, he retains possession of the mother, leaving the son free to find his own woman.

In any event, Queeg calls the officers together.  As happened with the incident involving the tow line, Queeg starts appealing to their sympathy and understanding regarding his recent act of cowardice, saying they all need to work together, for the sake of the “family.”  After he leaves, Steve says he liked the speech, but Tom is unimpressed.  He argues that Queeg is mentally unbalanced and paranoid, mentioning, among other things, the two steel balls Queeg rolls around in his hand whenever he becomes agitated.  Steve orders Tom never to speak of this again.

But in the very next scene, we see Steve reading a book entitled Mental Disorders.  The seed has been planted.  He then begins to keep a medical log, recording events that are indicative of mental illness. These events culminate in the Case of the Missing Strawberries.  Queeg becomes obsessed with finding out who ate some strawberries without authorization.  He becomes convinced that someone made a copy of the key that would have allowed for such pilferage.  He turns the ship upside down trying to find the key, which will tell him who the culprit is.  Of course, there is no such key.

Steve is finally convinced.  He and Tom and Willie sail over to the admiral’s ship to report the situation. However, Tom begins to realize that it would be a mistake to say anything.  They will only be causing trouble for themselves.  He says they need to forget the whole thing.  Willie asks him if he’s scared.  Tom admits it, saying, “I’m too smart to be brave.”  Steve gives up as a result.  They return to the Caine just as a storm is coming up.

It turns out to be a typhoon.  The safe thing to do is head into the wind, but the last orders they had from the fleet before they lost communication were to head away from the wind.  Steve says they don’t know what the fleet’s orders are now.  Queeg insists that they continue to follow the last orders and head away from the wind.  This too is like the situation in Crimson Tide, where a break in communications sets up the question, should we follow the last order received, or should we use our best judgment under the circumstances? And, of course, both situations are like that in the poem “Casabianca,” in which a boy on a ship is given orders by his father to stay at his post. Unbeknownst to him, his father is subsequently killed.  As the ship goes up in flames, while the rest of the crew abandons it, the boy remains at his post in the face of certain death, calling to his father to tell him what to do.  The ship is completely destroyed in a huge explosion when the fire reaches the magazine.  The last two lines of the poem are the following:  “But the noblest thing which perished there / Was that young, faithful heart!” The moral is that it is better to die obeying an order than to survive by disobeying it, even if that order was no longer appropriate, given the change in circumstances.  Interestingly, the boy’s father is also the commanding officer of the ship, making the connection between parental and military authority that is also being suggested by this movie.

In the end, Steve relieves Queeg of his command, thereby committing mutiny.  He turns the ship into the wind, and the ship survives the storm.

When they get back to San Francisco, Willie gets a call from May.  Although they have broken up, she is worried because Ensign Harding called her and said Willie was in trouble.  Ensign Harding was able to leave the Caine before the typhoon hit because his wife had become seriously ill.  May asks Willie if his mother is there with him.  He tells her she isn’t.  She had to go to New York to be with Uncle Lloyd, who is sick.  He tells May he loves her and wants to marry her, but she still refuses.

Now we must ask the question, why was this business about a sick Uncle Lloyd written into the script? Apparently, it serves the function of separating Willie from his mother without his having to openly break with her of his own free will.  It would be like Queeg having to leave the Caine before the typhoon hit because Mrs. Queeg had become seriously ill, just like what happened to Ensign Harding.  Then there would have been no mutiny.  But in this case, the domestic mutiny is avoided in a way that the mutiny on the Caine was not.  We know that this is the first step toward getting Willie and May married, but it won’t be because Willie finally had the moral courage to choose May over his mother, but because fortuitous circumstances did the work for him.

Anyway, a Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer), a lawyer, talks to Steve, Willie, and Tom to see whether he will defend them in a court-martial.  He tells them he thinks what they did stinks, and that they might all be hanged.  Tom suggests they get another lawyer, but Greenwald says that eight other lawyers have already turned the job down, so there’s no one else.  That’s weird.  Even Charles Manson could get a lawyer.  Well, I wouldn’t know personally, but I guess that’s just one more difference between being a civilian and being in the military.

Tom backs Steve’s position that Queeg was paranoid and went to pieces at a critical moment. Greenwald brings his attention to the fact that even though Tom did not take part in the mutiny, he counseled Steve that Queeg was mentally unfit, and so he can be found as guilty as Steve and Willie. Tom becomes uncomfortable and leaves the room. Later, on the witness stand, he gives weaselly answers, denying that he ever suggested that Queeg was mentally unfit.

It is unlikely, however, that it would have helped Steve had Tom told the truth.  All he would have done was incriminate himself along with Steve.  The only thing that saves Steve is Queeg’s testimony. Little by little, Queeg becomes rattled under cross-examination.  Finally, when he starts talking about the missing strawberries and the imaginary key, while rolling those two steel balls in his hands, it becomes clear to the court-martial that he is indeed delusional and paranoid.  As a result, Steve is acquitted, which means Willie is in the clear as well.

The officers throw a party to celebrate.  Tom walks into the room.  When Steve says he’s surprised he had the courage to show up, Tom says he didn’t have the courage not to.  Then Greenwald arrives, drunk.  He says he feels guilty for what he did, since Queeg was defending this country while Greenwald was studying law, Tom was a writing a novel, and Willie was “tearing up the playing fields of Princeton.”  Boy, these guys in the Navy really seem to resent an Ivy League education.

At least, they seem to in this movie.  For all I know, the United States Navy might be perfectly happy to have officers that have graduated from an Ivy League University.  But in the movie, this resentment is an expression of anti-intellectualism, which despises men like Willie, on account of his education, and Tom, on account of his ability to write a novel.  They are regarded as elitists who think they are smarter than their superior officers, giving them the right to disobey bad orders.

In the novel, while Greenwald says he is a Jew, and that it was men like Queeg that kept his mother from being melted down into a bar of soap.  This is ironic, since a lot of German soldiers were tried as war criminals precisely because they did obey orders.  Anyway, this is a non sequitur.  Queeg’s service prior to the Caine has nothing to do with whether he had become mentally unbalanced.

But Greenwald continues.  It turns out that everything would have been all right if everyone had been nice to Queeg.  But they didn’t all rally round when Queeg gave that speech about the need for understanding and family feeling after he ordered the ship to abandon the marines during the invasion.  That’s what drove him over the edge.  They were mean to him.  Then Greenwald throws some champagne, which is yellow, in Tom’s face, saying he is the bad guy, because he was the trouble-maker who instigated the whole thing.

Because Greenwald speaks with an authoritative voice, and because he gets the last word on this matter, then according to movie logic, that means he is right.  But there’s just one problem with that. We saw what happened on the Caine, and Queeg was nutty as a fruitcake.  But a fruitcake is one thing, and a fishcake is something else.  I’m not swallowing what this movie has served up.

The movie ends with a copout regarding Willie and May too.  After the trial, he calls her, and for some reason not given, she now agrees to marry him.  He says they will get married first, and tell his mother afterwards.  Why wait until afterwards?  Is he still afraid of his mother?  In any event, we never get to hear the conversation in which Willie tells his mother he has married a nightclub singer. And so, for all that talk about how the marriage will not work because his mother will never approve, we are supposed to forget about that.  I guess the idea is that if a man has the courage to participate in a mutiny, he should have the courage to stand up to his mother, even if the movie did not have the courage to show him doing so.