One of the paradoxes about the movie Gone with the Wind, as well as the book on which it is based, is that, politically speaking, though reviled by many on the left, yet there is much in it that they might otherwise find congenial to their way of thinking.

First, it is feminist. Its protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), who starts out as just another Southern Belle, but who rises to meet the horrors of war, lives up to her vow, “I’ll never be hungry again,” and who then manages to “beat the Yankees at their own game” during Reconstruction.

At one point in the novel, she realizes that the male-dominated world she had grown up in was based on a lie:

A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.  Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true, but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind.  Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words.  She sat quite still, with the heavy book across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise, thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came.  Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.

Second, it is secular.  In the novel, it is said of Scarlett that “religion went no more than lip deep with her.” Reflecting on the hardships forced upon her and her family after her return to Tara, she gives up on religion altogether, irritated whenever she sees her sister Carreen praying:

If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers. Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.  She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.  God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.

Third, it is anti-war.  When the movie begins, the Tarleton twins are heartbroken when Scarlett tells them there isn’t going to be any war.  The next day, at the barbeque, the men are talking about how they will defeat the North in the war that is now inevitable, that the Yankees will turn and run after only one battle, because gentlemen always fight better than rabble.  In the movie, only Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) are opposed to the war:  the former saying, “Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars, and when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about”; the latter noting sarcastically that it is hard to win a war with words, that with its industrial might, the North will be able to overwhelm the South.  In the novel, an old man, Mr. McRae, who is hard of hearing, becomes furious when he is told what the others in the room are arguing about:

“War, is it?” he cried, fumbling about him for his cane and heaving himself out of his chair with more energy than he had shown in years.  “I’ll tell ‘um about war.  I’ve been there.”  It was not often that Mr. McRae had the opportunity to talk about war, the way his women folks shushed him.

He stumped rapidly to the group, waving his cane and shouting and, because he could not hear the voices about him, he soon had undisputed possession of the field.

“You fire-eating young bucks, listen to me.  You don’t want to fight.  I fought and I know.  Went out in the Seminole War and was a big enough fool to go to the Mexican War, too.  You all don’t know what war is.  You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having the girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero.  Well, it ain’t.  No, sir! It’s going hungry, and getting the measles and pneumonia from sleeping in the wet. And if it ain’t measles and pneumonia, it’s your bowels.  Yes sir, what war does to a man’s bowels—dysentery and things like that—‘

Shortly thereafter, word comes that war has been declared, and the young, Southern boys are ecstatic, giving the Rebel Yell while firing their revolvers.

Little by little, we begin to see the miseries of war of which Ashley and Mr. McRae spoke. Scarlett’s first husband, Charles Hamilton, dies ignobly of dysentery.  Both of the Tarleton twins are killed.  Later, we see a nurse writing down the last words of a dying soldier in a letter to his mother, saying, “I’ll never see you or Pa again.”  Dr. Meade tells a soldier that his leg is gangrenous and will have to come off, even though they are out of chloroform. Finally, when Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) is about to have her baby, Scarlett goes to get Dr. Meade down by the railroad, where countless men are lying side by side, beyond all consideration of triage, dying from their wounds.  As the camera pulls back, we see the tattered Confederate flag in the foreground.

But for all that, the movie’s attitude toward slavery makes it irredeemably offensive to many of those on the left, owing to its “Southern point of view.” By that expression, I do not mean it is the attitude of everyone who lives in the South, nor restricted to those that do. Rather, it is meant to refer to those who believe that slavery was a benign institution, and who are still sympathetic with the Antebellum South. There is no better expression of this attitude than that of the prologue:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave.  Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

The inclusion of the phrase “Master and Slave” in all this implies that this way of life did not just happen to involve slavery, but rather that slavery was essential to it, a necessary complement to a way of life that was noble and fine, as opposed the egalitarian North, which was vulgar and crass.

In Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks:  An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, he discusses the five principal categories of black characters in old movies.  Gone with the Wind, the movie, has four of those five.  The Mammy is, of course, Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel. The very word suggests that she was like a second mother to the girls growing up on the O’Hara plantation.

The Buck, a big, muscular black man, is Big Sam (Everett Brown).  When he rescues Scarlett from two assailants as she crosses the bridge near Shantytown, his heroic action exemplifies the bond of affection that had existed between master and slave.  Just before that happens, we see him in in Shantytown, where it is obvious that his freedom has not made him happy. After the rescue, Scarlett’s husband, Frank Kennedy, gives Big Sam money to get back to Tara, knowing that he will otherwise be arrested.  Tara is where Big Sam had been a slave, and he is happy to return there, just as he would be happy to be a slave once more.

As an aside, Roger Ebert once said that In the Heat of the Night (1967) was the first movie in which we see a black man strike a white man.  He clearly had forgotten about Gone with the Wind.  Not only do we see Big Sam hit a white man with his fist, but he is never punished for doing so either.

The Tom, as in Uncle Tom, a black man that is loyal to his white masters, is Pork (Oscar Polk).  He is content being a slave.

Finally, the Coon, a black person who is funny on account of being simpleminded, is Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), who needs to be under the protection of her white masters.  At one point in the movie, we see Prissy walking down the street, in no hurry to get anywhere, singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” in particular, the part of the song that commiserates with the hard life of a darky:  “A few more days for to tote the weary load….”  The joke is that Prissy has never had to work a hard day in her life.

The Coon, by the way, was the preferred type during the Jim Crow South.  In a book on sociology that I read once, it commented on the fact that a lot of people believe that when a black man was lynched, it was because he had raped a white woman.  Far less serious reasons were often given by those who participated in these lynchings, however, one of which was that the black man “wasn’t funny enough.”

At one point in the movie, Melanie is expecting a baby.  Prissy assures Scarlett that she knows what needs to be done to deliver a baby.  But when the moment arrives, and Dr. Meade is too busy taking care of wounded soldiers to attend to Melanie, Prissy admits that she lied, that she doesn’t know anything about “birthin’ babies.”  Scarlett becomes so angry that she slaps her.  This is what passes for slave-beating in Gone with the Wind.

Scarlett takes over from Frank the running of the lumbermill, which employs prisoners, who are mistreated by Johnny Gallagher, whom Scarlett employs as a foreman.  When Ashley complains about using enforced labor, Scarlett points out his hypocrisy, noting that he didn’t seem to mind owning black slaves.  He replies, “That was different.  We didn’t treat them that way. Besides, I’d have freed them all when father died, if the war hadn’t already freed them.”  In other words, for those who might still object to slavery in any form, even if only as a benign institution, the movie lets us know that slavery would have eventually been phased out by the more enlightened Southerners themselves, that the War of Northern Aggression was unnecessary.

Scarlett eventually marries Rhett.  Thanks to his wealth, they are able to move into a mansion, and she brings Mammy, Pork, and Prissy to live with them as servants. The fact that they gladly do so indicates that they will be just as happy being servants as they were being slaves.

If the movie whitewashes slavery in the Old South, it also softens much of the material in the novel. To put it differently, if the movie had been more faithful to the novel, the audiences would have seen a darker version, one that might have been acceptable to some white folks in the South, but which would have been disturbing to many others.  In these differences between the movie and the novel, however, it is the novel that is more realistic.

For example, of the five types of black characters mentioned in Bogle’s book, only the Mulatto is absent in the movie.  In the novel, Dilcey does not really count as a mulatta because, while one of her parents was black, the other was an Indian.  She is married to Pork, and Prissy is their daughter. Mulattoes are problematic because by their very existence they imply that a white man had sex with a black woman, or that a black man had sex with a white woman, neither possibility being compatible with what is acceptable in the idealized version of the Old South.  At least, it would not be acceptable if the white parent were a Southerner.  On the other hand, mulattoes are perfect for besmirching the Yankees.  In The Birth of a Nation (1915), there are two villains in that movie, both mulattoes:  one is a woman, who is living up north as the mistress of a senator; the other is a man, who has moved down south as a carpetbagger and has become a powerful leader of the recently freed black population.  In Gone with the Wind, the novel, there is much talk about all the “yellow babies” that have been showing up ever since the Yankees arrived, both during and after the war. The existence of mulattoes is completely avoided in the movie so as to avoid the uncomfortable idea of miscegenation.

In the movie, after Scarlett is attacked on the bridge, Frank and Ashley get together with some other men and burn down Shantytown.  There is no explicit reference to the Ku Klux Klan, and we certainly don’t see them wearing sheets.  In the novel, however, Frank and Ashley are members of the Klan, which finds the men that attacked Scarlett and kills them.

Of all the ways in which the movie softened much of what went on in the novel, there is one that stands out from the rest.  In the movie, Rhett is placed under arrest because the Yankees believe that he has made off with the Confederate Treasury, which is plausible, since he did a lot of blockade-running, for which he received payment in gold.  Eventually, the Yankees let him go, presumably because he purposely lost when playing cards with the officers, and they wanted him to be able to pay his debts to them.

In the novel, he is still suspected of possessing Confederate gold, but the charge brought against Rhett was that of killing a black man.  He gets himself released by a government official with whom he had corrupt business dealings during the war. Scarlett says she would take an oath that he wasn’t innocent. Rhett replies:  “No, now that I am free of the toils, I’ll frankly admit that I’m as guilty as Cain.  I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”

Not even in The Birth of a Nation could I have imagined a line like that.

In 1857, prosecutors in France brought charges of obscenity against Gustave Flaubert after he published his novel Madame Bovary. After he was acquitted, his novel became a best seller, of course. The best thing an author can do to promote his book is to get it banned somewhere.

It is strange that the title is Madame Bovary.  If you didn’t know better, you might think the story was going to be about Charles Bovary’s mother.  Then you might think it was going to be about his first wife Héloïse.  By the time you get to his second wife Emma, you might think, “I hope this one is it!” This confusion could have been avoided had the title been Emma Bovary, but I guess “Madame” was used to emphasize the fact that Emma is a married woman.

There have been many movies or television series based on this novel, only three of which I have been able to see.  In comparing the 1949 version with the 1975 television series and with the 2014 movie, the most striking difference is the faces. Hollywood sure knew how to pick actors with star power in those days: Jennifer Jones as Emma, Van Heflin as Charles, and Louis Jordan as Rodolphe. The 1975 and 2014 versions are full of ordinary faces, so unremarkable that one might easily forget who’s who.  For this reason alone, the 1949 version is the most enjoyable to watch and easiest to remember. Strictly speaking, the 1949 version is actually about the trial of Flaubert, played by James Mason, where he tells us how we are supposed to understand his novel, so that we won’t think it obscene.

An important difference between the 1949 version and the novel is the way the former improves the character of Charles Bovary.  In the novel, his first wife is much older than he is, and she is described as being “ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds.” He marries her because she has money.  The novel says something about her being the woman his mother picked out for him, which is a little creepy right there.  But it also says, “Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money.”  All right, so it doesn’t work out the way he planned, this wife being something of a termagant, but his intention remains the same, that of marrying for money rather than for love.

The 1949 version leaves out this first marriage, as does the 2014 version. Perhaps the constraint of time was a factor, since the longer 1975 version includes it.  What every version of this novel must include, however, is the part about Hippolyte, played by Henry Morgan in the 1949 version (another interesting face).  In the novel, Emma pressures Charles to perform an operation on Hippolyte, who has a clubfoot. She figures that if the operation is a success, she will rise in society as the wife of the brilliant surgeon who performed it.  However, the operation is a failure, and the leg ends up having to be amputated.  As a result, Emma feels disgraced and becomes even more contemptuous of Charles than ever before. Such is the case in the 1975 and 2014 versions.

In the 1949 version, however, Charles realizes his limitations at the last minute and refuses to perform the operation.  The difference is that while Emma still feels contempt for her husband, in this case for what she regards as his failure of nerve, we admire him for doing the right thing.  So, just as this movie avoids having Charles be a mama’s boy and a second-rate fortune hunter, so too does it avoid having him be an incompetent surgeon who should have known better.

This change in the story cannot be attributed to any need to conform to the Production Code, which does say that surgical operations should be treated within the careful limits of good taste.  But if that had been enough to change the story of this novel, the movie King’s Row (1942) could never have been made, since that is the movie where a malicious doctor amputates both of Ronald Reagan’s legs. No, this movie simply wants us to like Charles Bovary. But even with the omissions and modifications, he still comes across as someone whose wife will cheat on him.

And cheat she does, for the story is about an adulteress who ends up committing suicide.  You would think that her suicide would have satisfied the prosecutors, the novel having punished Emma for her misdeeds.  We can only wonder what would have happened had she run off with Rodolphe as she had wanted, the two of them living happily ever after.  Flaubert would probably have been drawn and quartered.

Actually, it is not the adultery per se that brings about Emma’s downfall, but her willingness to go into debt to buy herself beautiful clothes and to furnish her house with fashionable finery.  It doesn’t cost much for a woman to have an affair, and Charles was enough of a cuckold that she could have gone from one lover to the next with impunity.  On the other hand, had she been completely faithful to Charles but still spent extravagantly to satisfy her vanity, her ruination and his would have been the same.

In any event, it might be that the prosecutors were upset that while Emma was punished in this world, Flaubert allowed her to escape punishment in the next. After Emma consumes arsenic at the chemist’s shop, she goes home to die. Charles tries to save her but eventually calls for a priest, who administers the sacrament of extreme unction.  The novel tells us that “her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.”  Moreover:

The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought.

Maybe this is what offended the prosecutors.  Emma had been absolved of her sins through divine intervention, and who would dare to question the will of God? Flaubert is assuring us that instead of burning forever in the fires of Hell, Emma is now in Heaven, smiling sweetly as she looks down on those she left behind.

About twenty years later, Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina, in which another adulteress ends up committing suicide.  Like Emma, she also has a child that she is willing to abandon to be with her lover, which makes her adultery especially reprehensible.  And like Emma, she escapes eternal damnation by way of last-minute repentance.  Just as Anna throws herself beneath the wheels of a train, she regrets having done so, saying, “Lord, forgive me all,” after which she is sliced in two.

Of course, there are those who would say that God did not intervene to prolong the lives of Emma and Anna, giving them enough time to repent, that it was just good luck on their part that they managed to slip through that Christian loophole at the last minute, causing God to shake his head in exasperation, saying, “Once again, a sinner gets off on a technicality!”

A guy I knew who had worked for the Federal Aviation Administration told me about how he had once listened to some cockpit tapes of the final moments before a plane crashed.  He said that the last words uttered by the pilot or copilot were mostly either “Oh, shit!” or “Mommy!”

Needless to say, the ones that said “Oh, shit!” were expressing a realistic understanding of their impending doom; the ones that said “Mommy!” had regressed to their infancy.  It is my wish to die in my sleep some night, but if I should have to meet my end in a terrifying situation, I hope I’m the kind of guy who says, “Oh, shit!”

In general, I find it disturbing when someone’s mind gives way owing to an inability to face the reality of death.  It’s not that I am finding fault or blaming anyone who cannot accept that reality.  I am simply unnerved by it.

My parents had a dog, which they loved.  The dog lived for many years, but one night my mother got up to see what was wrong with her, only for her to die in my mother’s arms.  She woke my father up to tell him what happened. For the rest of the night, my father continued to pet the dog, insisting that she was only sleeping. Finally, in the morning, he accepted her death, and they had her buried.

In Gone With the Wind (1939), Rhett Butler and Scarlett have a daughter, whom they name Bonnie.  She is afraid of the dark, so she must have a light on in her room when she sleeps.  When she dies after being thrown from a horse, Rhett refuses to let her be buried because of her fear of the dark. He threatens to kill Scarlett when she insists that the funeral is set for the next day.  Only after a long night with Melanie does Rhett finally allow Bonnie to be buried.

The part of about Rhett’s refusal to accept Bonnie’s death is only a small part of Gone With the Wind.  In Mulholland Dr. (2001), on the other hand, the entire movie is predicated on the denial of death and the events that led up to it.  It is a story about a woman, Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), who is so frustrated, depressed, and guilt-ridden that she pulls out a revolver and shoots herself in the head.  In the last moment of her life, she denies the horror of committing suicide with a fantasy about how things really are:  how she is destined to be a movie star, and that it is only dark, mysterious forces that are temporarily standing in her way; and how she has found true love with another woman, a woman that someone is trying to kill for some reason. That fantasy is the first part of the movie, and we eventually see how characters and events have been rearranged and substituted from the reality that is revealed in the second part:  how she had failed to get anywhere in the movies; and how the woman she loved had rejected her, and how in anger she had paid someone to kill her.  In referring to “the reality of the second part,” I mean only the physical reality.  As Diane’s mind begins to give way, she starts having hallucinations, but in this case, we know that they are not real.

Mulholland Dr. is a well-known and much-praised movie.  That cannot be said about the movie Siesta (1987), which a lot of critics did not care for, and which did not do well at the box office. However, it tapped into my dread of the inability to face death, and for that reason, I suppose, the movie made a lasting impression on me.

In that movie, Ellen Barkin plays a daredevil skydiver.  She agrees to jump from a plane at 25,000 feet without a parachute, falling into a huge net while it is on fire. As she falls through the air, she hallucinates that she is still in Spain.  By believing she never made it back to the United States, that means she cannot now be falling through the air to her death.

The title of this movie denotes sleeping during the day, when one is normally awake.  Sleeping suggests dreaming, which may take the form of a nightmare. However, sleep can also be a metaphor for death.  At the beginning of the movie, Barkin is asleep on the ground near an airport. She is wearing a red dress, a color that by itself suggests blood, but in addition, she has actual blood on her, which does not seem to be hers. Overhead, vultures are flying. This fantasy represents her impending death while at the same time trying to deny it.

Periodically, as Barkin tries to understand what is going on, supposedly over in Spain, where she is trying to get back to Los Angeles in time to make her jump, we abruptly see her in a black outfit, leaping from the plane and falling through the sky.  Each time the movie did this, it gave me a sickening feeling.

It will never be the same.

I’m thinking about some of the political movies that I enjoyed watching once, back when I was living in a fool’s paradise.

In All the President’s Men (1976), two reporters for the Washington Post uncover evidence that eventually leads to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Nothing like that will ever happen again, now that the Supreme Court has given the president immunity for such things as using the Department of Justice to obstruct justice.  Today, the president that was once and will be again would probably order the FBI to bring charges against such treasonous reporters, assuming that the owner of the newspaper didn’t fire them first.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was one of my favorites.  But now, instead of an elaborate plot involving brainwashing and assassination in order to put a Soviet agent in the White House, Russia was able to get its candidate elected president by ordinary, democratic means.

In Advise & Consent (1962), we see the Senate struggle to confirm the president’s nominee for secretary of state, one Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda).  Information has come to light that the nominee was once a member of a “communist cell,” where he supposedly said that communism would come to the United States gradually.  From some of the nominee’s speeches, it is feared that he will be all too willing to yield to the demands of the Soviet Union.  But with a name like Leffingwell, what would you expect?

In a few months, we can expect a different kind of struggle within the Senate.  Since the president-elect himself can be counted on to cozy up to the Russians, there is not much point in worrying about his nominees in this regard.  The Republicans need only ask themselves whether they should confirm those nominees in the usual way, thereby displaying their fealty, or simply allow for recess appointments, dodging the matter altogether.

One of the senators in that movie commits suicide when his past catches up with him, in particular, his homosexual relationship with another soldier when he was stationed in Hawaii.  At first, I thought this was one more feature of the movie that was outdated.  But then it occurred to me that the Supreme Court may not only invalidate same-sex marriage but even recriminalize sodomy as well.  So, perhaps this plot point will live to see another day.

Seven Days in May (1964) was thrilling, watching generals plot a military coup, in which President Lyman (Frederic March) would be removed from office and replaced by General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster).  There were several indications that these senior military officers were basically fascists, while the president and his allies believed in the Constitution, the rule of law, and democracy.

General Scott and other senior men in the military were worried about the fact that President Lyman was too trusting of the Russians, and that action had to be taken immediately before he allowed the Soviet Union to gain a military advantage over the United States.  This concern on the part of the generals in the movie is similar to that which exists between actual generals of today and our once and future president.  As in the movie, these actual generals are concerned that the re-elected president will play into the hands of the Russians.

Unlike the movie, however, it is a fascist president that that attempted a coup, not the generals, who are the ones that believe in the Constitution.  As a result, they may be subjected to courts-martial for being disloyal.

As with Advise & Consent, there is a sexual component in this movie as well.  General Scott wrote some love letters to a woman with whom he was having an affair, and this evidence of adultery is considered as a way of thwarting the coup, forcing Scott to resign under threat of scandal.  However, President Lyman decides to eschew such scurrilous methods. Unlike the threat of a homosexual scandal in Advise & Consent, the possibility of a heterosexual scandal of the kind found in Seven Days in May now seems quaint.  In a world where a politician can be found liable for sexual abuse and then go on to be elected president, love letters revealing an adulterous affair in the past aren’t worth the price of the postage stamps by which they were mailed.

And so it is that these movies must now be viewed as artifacts of twentieth-century America, revealing a time when people believed in the strength and integrity of their constitutional republic.

I suppose if we want to see a political movie that still has relevance, there’s always Triumph of the Will (1935).

The title character of Hud, played by Paul Newman, is a psychopath, and just enough so that we envy him. To be unburdened by our conscience is something we often long for.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), for example, when the former title character drinks his potion and becomes the latter, his first words are “Free! Free!” Of course, Hyde is too evil for us to want to be like him.  After all, we don’t want to kill anyone. We just want to be able to have sex with a married woman and then point the finger at our nephew when we get caught, the way Hud does at the beginning of the movie.

It also helps that Hud is good looking, whereas Hyde is ugly.

Anyway, the movie is set on a cattle ranch owned by Hud’s father, Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas). Hud’s nephew is Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde). They have a maid, Alma (Patricia Neal).  At one point in the movie, while Hud is drunk, wearing a wife beater, and feeling ornery, he tries to rape Alma in the small shack she occupies right near the main house, but Lonnie grabs him and pulls him off her. Hud becomes so angry that he starts to hit Lonnie in the face, but he has just enough of a conscience to stay his hand. He gives up and leaves.

The movie was based on a novel, Horseman, Pass By, which I have not read, only summaries.  In that novel, the maid’s name is Halmea, and she is African American. Lonnie is unable to stop Hud from raping her and can only watch as Hud does so.

That the movie changed black Halmea into white Alma is not surprising. Even if the Production Code had allowed it, I’m not sure how audiences in 1963 would have reacted to seeing a white man rape a black woman.  However, there is another consideration other than that of race.  Had Hud in the movie actually raped Alma, we would have despised him for that, and the Production Code, if not just ordinary movie morality, would have required that he die in the end.  But since he failed in his attempt, as a result of what little conscience he had, what he did was forgivable.

Am I wrong to say that?  I might have hesitated in this regard were it not for the fact that a lot of people say that Alma wanted to be raped.  On my own, that thought would never have occurred to me.  After my mother saw the movie, however, she said that Alma wanted Hud to take her by force. My girlfriend said that Alma was irritated that Lonnie prevented Hud from raping her.  A third woman, Pauline Kael, said the same thing in her book I Lost It at the Movies:

Alma obviously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him; she wants to be treated differently from the others. If Lon hadn’t rushed in to protect his idealized view of her, chances are that the next morning Hud would have felt guilty and repentant, and Alma would have been grateful to him for having used the violence necessary to break down her resistance, thus proving that she was different.  They might have been celebrating ritual rapes annually on their anniversaries.

I still don’t see it.  But I’m just a man, so what do I know?

Before we get to that attempted rape in the movie, all the cattle on the Bannon ranch have to be destroyed because they have hoof-and-mouth disease. They contracted it when Homer bought some Mexican cows to add to his herd.  As a result, the Bannon family is impoverished.  It is suggested to Homer that he might drill for oil, but he doesn’t like the idea.  As a result, Hud gets a lawyer, intending to take possession of the ranch owing to his father’s incompetence. When Homer finds out about that, they start arguing. Hud says that he’s going to get control of the property, one way or the other. Homer replies:

Why, you’re badly mistaken about all this.  I’ll be the only one to run this ranch while I’m alive.  After that, you may get part of it.  I don’t know. But you can’t get control of this place. No way in the world.

Homer could have said that when he died, Hud and Lonnie would inherit the ranch, but he most decidedly did not say that.  He said that Hud may get part of the ranch.

Earlier in the movie, when they first find out the cattle are diseased, Hud says to Homer:

You’ve had twenty-four of my thirty-four years working for you on this ranch, and, Daddy, you’ve had top-grade cheap labor.  I’ve shoveled manure for you.  You’ve got my calluses. For what?  Your blessings the day you die? No, damn it. I want out of this spread what I put into it.

I will only add that Hud doesn’t even have his own place.  I can’t imagine being thirty-four years old and still living at home with my father.

A man with a lot of money will sometimes turn his children into slaves, getting them to spend their lives doing his bidding for the sake of an expected inheritance, only for him to decide late in life that his children are unworthy and leave it all to the church or to some teenage tart, figuring it’s his money to do with as he pleases. That is why there are laws to prevent that sort of thing, and that is why we see some justification in what Hud is doing.

Before Hud is able to get guardianship of the property, Homer falls off his horse and is mortally injured. Lonnie tries to reassure him that he’ll be all right, but Homer says he wants to give up:  “Hud there’s waiting on me. And he ain’t a patient man.”  Right after saying that, he dies.

Therefore, like the attempted rape, the guardianship is only attempted as well. Our attitude toward Hud might have been different had he actually succeeded in getting possession of the ranch and putting his father out to pasture.

In the novel, Lonnie goes to get help, and while he is gone, Hud shoots Homer, saying he did it to put him out of his misery.  That would also have been too much for us had that scene been in the movie. As noted above, we no longer want to identify with a psychopath in a movie once he kills somebody.

And so it is that the movie softens the character that is in the book, and in so doing, allows us to interpret his behavior sympathetically, even if we have misgivings as we do so.

As noted earlier, I have not read the book.  I didn’t see anything in the summaries about Hud’s having been drafted.  In the movie, however, as Lonnie prepares to leave the ranch for good after Homer’s funeral, Hud says to him that he is a “little bit green” to be going off on his own:  “I was about your age when I went in the Army. Your granddaddy bought me a Mars candy bar at the station, and said, ‘Character’s the only thing I got to give you. Be a man.’”

Lonnie replies, “Well, I guess he was kind of worried, your trying so hard to get out of the draft.”

I did not see this movie when it first came out in 1963.  When I did finally see it at the drive-in with some friends of mine in 1968, we all laughed in a grim sort of way.  Our college deferments were just about up, and we were all trying to figure out some way to dodge the draft.  So, while Lonnie’s remark was supposed to indicate one more way in which Hud was a shameless character, by 1968, dodging the draft had acquired an entirely different connotation.

More to the point, given that this movie wants to portray Hud as an unscrupulous character, wouldn’t it have been better to have him succeed in dodging the draft? Or would that be like the attempted rape of Alma and Hud’s attempt at guardianship?  That is, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to rape her, whereas we would not have done so had he succeeded; and we find it easier to accept what Hud was doing about trying to get possession of the ranch when Homer’s death makes that unnecessary.  By the same token, then, we are able to forgive Hud for only attempting to dodge the draft, whereas we might not have done so had he succeeded in that case either.

That old movies should frown on draft dodgers is not surprising.  In For Me and My Gal (1942), Gene Kelly deliberately breaks his hand to avoid being drafted but ends up redeeming himself heroically. In Mr. Lucky (1943), the title character played by Cary Grant dodges the draft, but ends up having a change of heart and decides to do what he can for the war effort.

With the advent of the Vietnam War, attitudes about the draft changed for a lot of people.  In fact, one thing good about that war was that you could dodge the draft without shame.  After I pulled it off, everyone was happy for me:  my college professors, my friends, my parents.  In fact, even the sergeant at the draft board, after reading the doctor’s recommendation, said to me with a big smile on his face, “Congratulations, you just got yourself a I-Y deferment.”

Going beyond that, I knew a girl who said she would never have sex with a man who had been in the Army, indicating that a man should have the moral courage to refuse to serve.  In Hamburger Hill (1987), a soldier gets a Dear John letter from his sweetheart, breaking up with him, because her college friends have persuaded her that it is immoral to have a boyfriend who is a soldier.  There are also remarks in that movie about girls back home “fucking for peace.”  We’d come a long way since D.H. Lawrence, when asked why men go to war, replied, “Because the women are watching.”

And yet, these changes in attitude notwithstanding, I have never seen a movie in which someone dodged the draft and then went on to live happily ever after, unless he first redeemed himself in some way.

The draft was ended in 1973, so we can only speculate as to what our attitude toward a draft dodger would be today.

For a long time, I had heard about the movie Johnny Belinda, and I knew it was about a woman who was deaf, so when I finally got around to watching it, I naturally assumed that she was the title character. But no, her name is Belinda MacDonald, played by Jane Wyman.  As a result of being raped, she is impregnated.  She gives birth to a son, whom she names Johnny.  I should have thought that his name would then be Johnny MacDonald, but nothing is ever said to that effect.  I have never heard of an illegitimate child being given the mother’s first name as his surname, but I suppose she could do that if she wanted to.  No one in the movie says that his name is Johnny Belinda, but given the title, I assume that is the idea.

Most of the time when we watch an old movie, we simply make allowances for the censorship in place at the time of its production, in particular, the Motion Picture Production Code.  Perhaps because this movie is about rape, I found myself paying closer attention to the way this story is told than I might otherwise.

The word “rape” was not forbidden as such, but on those rare occasions when it was uttered, it was more likely to be used in the sense of despoiling, as in, “the rape of Europe had begun” in Mission to Moscow (1943), rather than in the sexual sense.  So, it came as no surprise that no one used the word in this movie.

The movie is set on the island of Cape Breton in the province of Nova Scotia.  The chief industry there is fishing.  As for the rest, there are farmers and merchants. The people that live there are portrayed as backward and ignorant.  It is no surprise, then, that Belinda is not only referred to a deaf and dumb, but is also called “the dummy.”  I can’t say what the people on Cape Breton were really like in 1948, or whether someone in Belinda’s situation would have been treated better in New York or Los Angeles, but that seems to be the way the movie wants us to see things.

Into this community has arrived Dr. Richardson (Lew Ayres), replacing the doctor recently deceased. One night he is summoned to the MacDonald farm where lives Belinda, her father Black (Charles Bickford), and her aunt Aggie (Agnes Moorehead).  They are dirt-poor farmers, and a cow is having trouble giving birth. It is there that Richardson meets Belinda and learns of her condition.

It is our introduction to her as well.  She is portrayed as childlike, although her age is never specified. Jane Wyman was over thirty years old when she made this movie, but that doesn’t mean that Belinda is supposed to be thirty.  Maybe she is supposed to be a fifteen-year-old girl.  Adults often played the roles of teenagers in those days.  Alternatively, it may be that Jane Wyman’s persona in 1948 was naturally childlike.  However, in the movie Stage Fright (1950), made only two years later, she comes across as the mature adult that she was.  In any event, the result is that when she is raped, it is as if a child has been raped.

The next Sunday, instead of going to church like everyone else, Richardson prepares to go fishing on the MacDonald farm, having been given permission to do so by Black as his fee for delivering that heifer.  The women of the community, represented by three old biddies in particular, are scandalized by the fact that Richardson has been living there three months and has never attended church. This is not uncommon in the movies.  As a general rule, if the protagonist is a bachelor, he probably believes in God, but he does not go to church.  If he is married, then he does go to church, from which we infer that going to church is something for women, who bring their domesticated husbands there with them. The Production Code says, “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith.” And yet, the way the movies depict bachelor protagonists as avoiding church, there is the implication that these characters have disdain for churchgoing, as if it is beneath them. Presumably, this was permitted by the Production Code as long as these bachelor protagonists did not actually say how much they disliked religion.

Richardson’s real reason for going to the MacDonald farm is to try to teach Belinda sign language, with which he was already familiar from having worked with deaf children at a hospital, and which he has been reviewing from a book he has.  He also gets her to start lipreading.  Eventually, he teaches her how to read and write.

Richardson has a cook and housekeeper named Stella (Jan Sterling).  She is in love with him, but it is unrequited.  Her boyfriend is Locky (Stephen McNally), a surly captain of one of the fishing boats. One day, when she sees him looking at Belinda, she becomes jealous, saying, “One thing, she’d never tell on you,” but then admonishes him to stay away from her.

That night at the dance, the three old biddies are watching what is going on.  One of them remarks of a woman on the dance floor, “She looks right spry for a woman who’s just had her arteries cut out.” Another corrects her, saying it was not her arteries.  She leans toward her and whispers something so low that we cannot hear what she says.  We often hear what people whisper in a movie, but not here.

That something is apparently the word “ovaries.”  I guess the censors regarded that word as too suggestive of sex to be permitted utterance in a movie.  The earliest use of that word in a movie that I could find was in 1970 in the movies Getting Straight and Tropic of Cancer.

But why is this scene in the movie?  Presumably it was to show how silly these old biddies are, thinking they have to whisper the word “ovaries” to each other even though no one else was around to hear them. But if these women are silly, thinking the word “ovaries” has to be whispered, how silly were the censors back then to believe that audiences should not be allowed to hear that word at all? If it be argued that there might have been children in the audience, then we are saying that children could watch a movie in which a woman was raped, but not one where the word “ovaries” was said out loud.  It’s almost as if the censors wished everyone were as deaf as Belinda, then no dirty words would ever be heard.

Stella quits dancing with Locky, telling him he is drunk.  He notices that Black and Aggie are riding out of town to visit their sister who has taken sick.  Seeing his chance, he goes to the MacDonald farm and rapes Belinda.  She becomes sullen after that, flinching if someone touches her. Richardson has been away treating sick people, and when he comes to see her, he is able to cheer her up a little.  He offers to take her to a town to see a diagnostician, thinking something might be done about her inability to hear.

When they arrive in the town, they pass by a store that sells women’s clothing.  In the display window, there is a brassiere and, I believe, a full slip.  She points to them, asking in sign language what they are.

This brings us back to the fact that she is portrayed as childlike, one too young to be wearing such undergarments.  Of course, as we soon find out, she is old enough to be pregnant.  Since Jane Wyman is a small-breasted woman, perhaps Belinda’s family figured she could do without such things.

We watch this scene through the display window from inside the store.  In other words, we are not allowed to hear what Richardson says to her.  The word “brassiere” was used in the movie Three on a Match (1932), but that is a Pre-Code movie.  It also is used in The 39 Steps (1935).  So, the word is more acceptable than “ovaries.”  Nevertheless, we are not allowed to hear what Richardson says to her, once again putting us in the position of being deaf like Belinda, right where the censors want us.

We watch Richardson struggle, trying to figure out what to tell her.  Finally, he distracts her by pointing to a scarf, which he buys for her.  Apparently, he decides that she is not old enough to know about such things, that she is like a child.

Richardson finds out from the diagnostician that Belinda is pregnant.  But the word “pregnant” is not used.  Instead, there are variations on phrases that include the word “child,” as when the diagnostician refers to Belinda’s “expected child,” or when Richardson tells Aggie that Belinda is going to “have a child.” The word “pregnant” was pretty much avoided in those days.  Where it occurs, it is usually in a foreign film like Fanny (1932), which is also Pre-Code, or used in a figurative sense, as in Hamlet (1948), where Polonius says, “How pregnant sometimes his replies are!”

Because “being pregnant” and “going to have a child” denote exactly the same state of affairs, the difference must be a matter of connotation.  There is something ominous about being pregnant, whereas there is something warm and cuddly about having a child.  I’ll go one step further.  It is not said that Belinda is “going to have a baby.”  That is too much like “being pregnant,” a dreadful anticipation for an unmarried woman.  Richardson does not tell Black about this, afraid that he will want to kill the father, no matter what words are used to indicate Belinda’s condition.

Black decides that Belinda is doing so well he will take her to church, something he did only once, years ago.  Richardson goes with them.  As noted above, a male protagonist will go to church once he is married, and this indicates, as if we could not already guess, that he and Belinda will eventually marry.

When Locky arrives at church, Belinda reacts with fear in her eyes, something noticed by Richardson, from which he gathers that Locky must have raped her. Anyway, it is announced at church that Stella and Locky will be getting married soon.  Stella has a lot of money that she inherited from her uncle, and this is the chief reason Locky wants to marry her.

Eventually, Aggie has to tell Black that Belinda is going to have a child.  He becomes furious, demanding that Belinda tell him who the father is.  Richardson shows up at that point and tells Black that she has repressed it, that “it’s blotted out of her mind.”  He manages to calm Black down, saying that even if he found out who the father was, bringing it before the community to exact revenge would only be more traumatic for Belinda.  Then Richardson goes to Belinda’s room and tells her she is going to be a mother, which has even more of a positive connotation than “going to have a child.”  As it sinks in, she becomes happy at the thought. When she has the baby, she loves it dearly.

I suppose there are some women who are raped, have the rapist’s baby, and then come to love that baby. But I suspect there are others that would be horrified at the prospect of having the rapist’s baby.  Telling such a woman that she is “going to be a mother” would be the height of presumption, effectively telling her that she is obligated to love that baby.  Instead, she might detest it, being filled with loathing when she sees it, determined to give it up for adoption.

But that’s real life.  I have never seen a movie in which a woman detested her baby.  Even in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where Satan himself rapes Rosemary (Mia Farrow), when she looks at the baby that she has given birth to, you see the love in her eyes and the joy in her heart.  In It’s Alive (1974), a woman has a baby-monster on account of some birth-control pills she was taking.  It kills every doctor and nurse in the delivery room and then goes out of the hospital to continue its killing spree.  It eventually makes its way back to its mother, who in turn loves her baby-monster.  And in The Brood (1979), we even get to see Samantha Eggar licking the blood off the psychoplasmic baby that she just removed from its external fetal sac.

A possible exception is the baby-monster in Demon Seed (1977), where Julie Christie is raped and impregnated by a supercomputer.  When she sees what she has given birth to, she seems dubious.  However, her child has developed so quickly that it already looks like a seven-year-old girl.  Mothers are no longer obligated to love monstrous children once they are past the baby stage, as in Village of the Damned (1960).

Let us return to movies about normal babies.  If a woman does give up her baby, it is never with great relief to be rid of the damn thing, but usually out of desperation and with much heartache, as in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Even in the movie Juno (2007), which ends happily, the title character cries after giving birth, knowing she will be giving up the baby for adoption.

Anyway, Locky spreads a rumor that Richardson is the father.  If this movie were made today, suspicion would probably fall on Belinda’s father.  But Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, would have turned purple had there been the slightest hint of that in the script.  That aside, given what Locky has been suggesting, no one wants Richardson’s services as a doctor anymore. Because of Belinda’s shame, people in town stop extending the MacDonalds credit. Richardson offers to marry Belinda, but Black says he would be doing it only out of pity, so that idea is put to rest.

A storm comes up, so everyone scrambles to prepare for it.  As a result, no one is in the house when Locky show us to buy some ground barley.  He sees the baby and starts talking to it when Black walks in, none too pleased to see him.  Locky forgets himself, saying the baby is the “spitting image of his father.” Realizing his mistake, he quickly leaves, with Black following.  They start fighting near a cliff, and when Black slips and struggles to cling to the ledge, Locky refuses to save him, letting him fall to his death.  He leaves, and no one in the movie ever finds out that he murdered Black.  They think it was just an accident.

Richardson decides to leave Cape Breton and take a job in a hospital in Toronto. When he explains this to Belinda, she starts crying and hugs him.  He realizes that she is in love with him, as he is with her.  We can tell they are going to get married. He kisses her, but only on the cheek.

However, he first has to get things ready at his new job and find a place for them to live.  In the meantime, the Town Council has a meeting.  It is decided that something must be done to uphold the honor of the community in light of the shame Belinda has brought upon them.  The baby should be taken away from her and given to the newly married Locky and Stella.  Otherwise, the godless child will run loose like an animal.

Locky and Stella ride over to the MacDonald farm to get Belinda to sign a release and give them the baby. Stella goes in by herself.  Belinda refuses to sign the release, outraged at the idea of giving up her baby. Stella goes back outside and tells Locky they are being mean trying to take away her baby, saying, “She’s his mother.”

Locky replies, “I’m his father,” horrifying Stella.  He goes in the house to get the baby, and Belinda kills him with a shotgun.

She is tried for murder.  At first, Stella plays dumb, but as the trial wears on, especially after Richardson is implicated as the father, she bursts out in court, telling what she knows.  Belinda is acquitted. She and Richardson leave Cape Breton for good, taking Aggie with them, the farm having been sold.

Let us return to the moment right after Belinda has been found innocent.  She comes to Richardson and starts using sign language.  He takes her hand and says, “I know Belinda.  You don’t have to say anything.” He holds her face in his hands affectionately.  Then she turns to get her baby.

It is the end of the movie.  Richardson and Belinda are going to get married and live happily ever after.  In any other movie made back then, the man and woman would kiss.  But not here, not even the little peck on the cheek we saw earlier. Although the Production Code forbade “excessive and lustful kissing,” it still allowed kissing that was unquestionably erotic, as when we saw Locky and Stella kissing at the dance.  So, why don’t we see Richardson take Belinda in his arms and give her a passionate kiss, to which she responds sensually?

As has been noted, Belinda is childlike.  For him to kiss her that way would be like kissing a child in a sexual way.  But that only pushes the question back one step. Why did the movie render Belinda’s character as childlike so as to preclude passionate kissing?  And the answer to that is that she had been raped.

A decent woman that has been raped in a movie might end up finding love and getting married, but if a raped woman is seen, either previously or subsequently, to have strong sexual desires, her moral character is called into question.  To see Richardson kissing Belinda on the lips would remind us of when Locky kissed her on the lips, thereby undermining her innocence.

In the old days, women who were raped were often said to have brought it on themselves by dressing provocatively, and a defense against a charge of rape was the testimony of other men who had had sex with her.  In other words, a woman that enjoyed sex could not truly be raped.  Any indication that Belinda was looking forward with lustful anticipation to frolicking in bed with Richardson on their honeymoon would be unthinkable.  It would suggest that what Locky did to her was not really so bad, that she might even have liked it.

Therefore, Belinda had to be desexualized.  We are supposed to believe that she will be happily married to Richardson, and that would imply a reasonably satisfying sex life, at least for him.  On her part, she will be passive, enjoying it to some degree, but mostly because she sees that it pleases her husband.

Before watching A Summer Place recently, the only movie I had seen with Sandra Dee was Imitation of Life, which was made in the same year, 1959.  She had only a supporting role in that movie, however. As a result, my conception of her was largely formed by that song in Grease (1978), sung by Stockard Channing, which begins as follows:

Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee
Lousy with virginity
Won’t go to bed ’til I’m legally wed
I can’t, I’m Sandra Dee

Later on in the song, Channing refers to Troy Donahue, who is also in A Summer Place:

As for you, Troy Donahue
I know what you wanna do
You got your crust, I’m no object of lust
I’m just plain Sandra Dee

Little did I know that A Summer Place would contradict those lyrics.  In fact, my expectations were lowered to such an extent that I wasn’t expecting any eroticism in this movie at all, especially that provided by Sandra Dee’s character.

The setting of this movie is Pine Island, Maine, where lives the Hunter family.  Because it might be difficult keeping track of who’s who in thIs review, here are the members of this family for easy reference:

The Hunter Family

Father:  Bart (Arthur Kennedy)

Mother:  Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire)

Son:  Johnny (Troy Donahue)

Aunt:  Emily (Beulah Bondi)

We gather that Bart’s father was old money, whose ancestors may even have come over on the Mayflower.  But now the Hunter family doesn’t have any money, no doubt because Bart is an alcoholic who made poor business decisions.  As a result, they have been forced to turn their mansion into a summer inn, where they barely get by financially.

There is a second family, the Jorgensons:

The Jorgenson Family

Father:  Ken (Richard Egan)

Mother:  Helen (Constance Ford)

Daughter:  Molly (Sandra Dee)

Twenty years ago, Ken had worked for Bart’s father as a lifeguard, but he became a research chemist and is now new money, being a millionaire.

Bart receives a letter from Ken, which reads as follows:  “Dear Bart Hunter, I am chartering the yacht Ramona at Nassau and taking my wife and daughter for an extended cruise. I’d like to end up at Pine Island for the summer.”  Bart reads the letter to Sylvia, saying that Ken purposely worked in the part about the “yacht” and the “extended cruise.”  He says that Ken undoubtedly heard that the Hunter family had been wiped out financially, and he wants to come to Pine Island and gloat. Bart imagines Ken saying to himself, “Maybe Bart Hunter will carry my bags. I might even give him a tip.”  Bart intends to turn him down.

Sylvia insists that they cannot afford to be proud, that they need the money.  She even goes so far as to say they can let the Jorgenson family have their rooms in the mansion, while the Hunter family will stay in the gardener’s cottage out back.

Bart is incredulous:  “In the servants’ quarters?  Where he even slept himself before with the hired help? That’s ridiculous.”

Sylvia may have another reason for wanting to let the Jorgensons stay at their inn. When Bart first mentioned Ken’s name, she turned around suddenly, accompanied by dramatic music, suggesting that there may have been something going on between her and Ken at one time.  Anyway, she wins the argument.

The scene shifts to the yacht, where we learn that it is Helen, not Ken, who wants to act superior. She bought Ken some yachting clothes, including a cap bearing the insignia of the Nassau Yacht Club, to which Ken does not belong.  Not wanting to pretend to be something he is not, he throws the cap out the porthole, telling Helen that people on Pine Island will remember he used to be a lifeguard, and he does not want to try “putting on the dog.”

As they approach Pine Island, Ken goes up on deck and calls Molly to join him. She looks through binoculars and sees a boy, Johnny, looking at her through binoculars.  She says to her father:

There’s a boy up there watching me. There he goes. Funny feeling, being looked at without knowing it. Remember that family that lived next door to us back home? … Their son used to look at me…. Well, his bedroom was right across from mine. And one night, I felt naughty and went right on undressing so he could see. And then all of a sudden, I got terribly ashamed, and I ran to pull the curtains down. I’ll never forget, I had hot and cold flushes all over me afterwards. Wasn’t that awful?

I have to admit to feeling flushed myself, listening to Molly talk about getting undressed in front of a window so the boy next door could see her naked.  And then it occurred to me that since she was talking to her father, that meant that for the purpose of that scene, I was identifying with her father, and that meant that her erotic story was tinged with incestuous desire.

This reminded me of the movie Fright Night (1985), where the attractive mother of a teenage boy tells him about a dream she had where, all of a sudden, she was “stark naked.”  I’m not sure how many women would tell their teenage sons about some dream they had where they were naked, but I would advise against it.  It’s hard enough to suppress such thoughts without having your mother put that image into your head.  Of course, the scriptwriter purposely had her tell her son about a dream like that in order to add Oedipal angst to his problems.

By the same token, the scriptwriter of A Summer Place purposely had Molly tell her father about getting naked for the boy next door.  Unlike me, however, Ken seems unaffected by this.  He merely tells Molly that everyone has done something he is ashamed of.  In any event, this is the first instance in this movie of a motif in which would-be lovers look at each other through the windows of their bedrooms.

Apparently, Helen believes that Molly’s body, even when fully dressed, is something to be ashamed of. Molly runs to Ken for support, saying Helen wants her to wear an “armor-plated bra” and a “cast-iron girdle.”  Helen enters the room and starts arguing with Ken, who takes the bra and girdle away from Molly and sends her out of the room.  He accuses Helen of trying to de-sex Molly.

At first, this confused me.  I could understand how making Molly look flat-chested would diminish her sex appeal, but why the girdle?  Isn’t that supposed to make a woman look prettier by giving her an attractive shape?

As I thought about this, I remembered a girlfriend I had once who had two books on her bookshelf, The Joy of Being Single and How to Marry the Man of Your Choice.  I guess she was covered either way.  On evenings where I had to wait for her to get ready for our date, I would read portions of that latter book. The author, Margaret Kent, had some pretty good advice.  One such piece of advice for a woman was to “dress friendly.”

By that she meant that a woman should dress in a manner that would make it easy for a man to imagine undressing her.  When I was in high school, I had a girlfriend who “dressed friendly.”  When we went to the drive-in, I had no trouble at all removing her clothes, which was as it should have been, allowing us to indulge our passions without obstacle or delay.

A year later, while in college, I had another girlfriend.  One night at another drive-in, while we were doing some heavy petting, I ran into her girdle.  I don’t know how much trouble it is for a woman to remove a girdle and later put it back on, but I suspected it would not be easy at a drive-in movie theater, so I never managed to get past that thing.  I still loved her, of course, and would have continued to do so nevertheless, had not her fiancé shown up unexpectedly one night.  The main thing, however, is that she was not dressing friendly.

In other words, while the bra Helen wanted Molly to wear would have taken away her sex appeal by making her look flat-chested, the girdle was intended to act as an impediment to the consummation of male lust.  Ken has a permissive attitude about Molly’s sexuality, however, and he throws the bra and girdle out the porthole.

When the Jorgensons arrive at the inn, Bart’s aunt and godmother, Mrs. Emily Hamilton Hamble, recognizes Ken, asking him if he is still a lifeguard.  She muses about Molly, saying, “Hardly proper to be so pretty. Seems to me that all the nice girls I know are either too fat or too thin or have bad skin and thick ankles.” Mothers of girls like that don’t have to bother with bras and girdles.  Such girls have a natural protection against indecency.

When the Jorgensons are shown their two-bedroom suite, Helen says she and Molly will take one bedroom, and Ken can have the other.  No more need be said regarding that arrangement.  Then Helen tells Molly to be sure to clean the toilet seat.  In those days, it was often said that you could get syphilis off a toilet seat.

When Ken looks out his bedroom window from the second floor, he can see through the window of the gardener’s cottage on the ground floor, where Sylvia looks back at him, recalling Molly’s adventure in front of open windows.  They gaze into each other’s eyes, once again suggesting that there used to be something between them.

That evening at dinner, Sylvia begins explaining about her and Bart’s decision to live at Pine Island all year, telling of the “bright dreams” she had before concluding with this:

And then after the summer season was over, I was going to abandon all convention, go back to nature. Take off my clothes, walk on the beaches in the sun, swim once again in the moonlight.

Once more, I started feeling flush.  In none of the movies I had seen starring Dorothy McGuire was she supposed to be sexy, so my expectations for her in this movie were like those I had for Sandra Dee.  But hearing her talk about walking the beaches naked during the day and swimming naked at night was having an effect on me like that of Molly’s strip tease with the curtains open. Fortunately, before she said all this, Johnny offered to show Molly the grounds, and they left the table, so he was spared having that image of his mother placed in his head.

Meanwhile, Johnny and Molly have paused by a fountain featuring a statue of Cupid.  She offers herself to be kissed.  When Johnny asks, somewhat gauchely, where she learned to kiss so perfectly, she tells of how she and a boy in high school used to kiss regularly, even though they were not going steady.  Although it is only kissing that they are talking about, Johnny is in awe of how casual she is about sex and more experienced than he is.  When they return to the inn, she asks him if they will be able to see each other from their respective bedroom windows.  When he says they will, she says she will wave goodnight.

Unfortunately, Helen saw them kissing.  When Molly returns to her bedroom, she overhears Helen telling Ken, “Your daughter didn’t waste any time,” saying she let Johnny “kiss and maul her,” that her behavior was “cheap.”  She says Molly must have Ken’s Swedish blood in her, saying, “I’ve read about how the Swedes bathe together….”  Clearly, being naked is the theme of this movie.

After Helen returns to the bedroom she shares with Molly, we find Molly getting undressed, down to her slip and removing her stockings.  Molly tells her mother that she should argue with her and leave her father alone. Helen admonishes her:

Must you parade before open windows like a strip-teaser? The way to get accepted here on Pine Island is certainly not by prancing past open windows and giving away cheap kisses behind the inn.

Molly goes to the window, where she can see Johnny looking up at her.  She smiles, waves, and lets him look at her before pulling down the shade.  Then she goes to the next window, smiles, waves, and lets him look some more.

Helen tells Molly that she has no objection to Johnny, that he would make a good catch, but that she has to “play a man like a fish.”  Molly agrees and then goes to say goodnight to her father.

She gets right in bed with him and snuggles up really close.  She asks him why he married her mother. He answers that he was lonely, that he once loved another woman, but “she married the other guy.”

Molly asks why they don’t share the same bedroom, but she knows the answer already, that Helen is anti-sex:

She says all a boy wants out of a girl is that, and when the girl marries, it’s something she has to endure. I don’t want to think like that, Papa. She makes me ashamed of even having a body. And when I have a naughty dream at night, she makes me feel like hanging myself.  How can you help what you dream?

As she says this, she looks up at her father tenderly, her lips parted and within inches of his lips.  He looks down at her with affection, assuring her that she can’t help having those naughty dreams.  He tells her that the sole reason for our existence is to love and be loved.

And then, to disabuse us of any naughty thoughts we might be having ourselves, she kisses him lightly on the cheek, says goodnight, and leaves the room.

Eventually, Ken and Sylvia happen to be alone together in the attic, where they confess that they never stopped loving each other.  Sylvia says Bart knew there was something wrong on their wedding night. They agree to meet in the boathouse that night.  However, because of a vent connecting the attic with the room below, Aunt Emily overheard everything.  We thought she was a prude, but she turns out to be a woman of the world, suggesting that Sylvia get a divorce. Sylvia is afraid she would lose custody of Johnny.  In that case, Aunt Emily suggests having an affair.

When Ken and Sylvia meet that night, they discuss those options.  Like Sylvia, Ken is afraid he would lose custody of Molly in case of a divorce.  As a result, they agree to have an affair, Sylvia saying, “I’m perfectly willing to come to you whenever you want me,” and Ken saying, “I love you too much to speak.”

Meanwhile, Johnny and Molly take a boat ride, but the sea gets rough, and their boat capsizes, forcing them to spend the night on a small island.  Nothing happens between them, and the Coast Guard rescues them the next day.  Unfortunately, Ken had to go to Boston for a few days, so he is not present to protect Molly from Helen’s suspicions.  She brings Molly to their bedroom where a grim-faced doctor is waiting. Helen says to her, “Take off every stitch you’ve got on, and let him examine you.” Molly becomes defiant, insisting she did nothing wrong.  Helen leaves the room, and the doctor forcibly grabs Molly as she becomes hysterical.  It is left to us to imagine the doctor making her to get completely naked so he can examine her hymen.

After this, there is much melodrama.  Molly runs away, Johnny threatens to kill Helen, Helen calls the sheriff, Ken returns from Boston and says he wouldn’t have blamed Johnny if he had killed Helen, and Helen says that would have made it easier for him to have sex with Sylvia, having found out about their affair from the groundskeeper.  Both sets of parents get divorced, and their children hate them for it, while being sent off to different schools.

Ken and Sylvia get married and move into a new home.  They invite Johnny and Molly to spend a couple of weeks with them.  Johnny and Molly agonize over whether they should be good or bad, but finally give in to their desires and have sex.  They are so young and innocent that they don’t realize that if you are in a movie, and you have sex just once, the girl always gets pregnant.  And so, she does.

But it has an upside.  Now that Johnny and Molly have been bad, they find they are able to forgive Ken and Sylvia for being bad, who in turn see to it that Johnny and Molly get married.  Bart’s ulcers are so severe that he will have to go into a hospital permanently, so the inn is turned over to Johnny and Molly, who will run it from now on and live happily ever after.

It’s interesting that at no point in this movie do Johnny and Molly discuss using birth control.  But then I remembered this other girl I knew in college.  As she explained it to me, one night at the drive-in, if an unmarried man and woman get carried away and have sex, God will forgive that.  But if they use birth control, then they are acting with deliberation, which makes it a mortal sin.  That dampened my desires.  I never even found out whether she was wearing a girdle.  A couple of years later, she got pregnant and had to get married.  But not to me.

Those in charge of enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code would probably have agreed with her.  For all the loosening of censorship by 1959, birth control was still taboo.  As a result, contrary to what was said in the song from Grease, Sandra Dee might lose her virginity in a moment of passionate love, but it would have been unthinkable for her to tell Troy Donahue use a rubber.