Caged (1950) is a movie about women in prison.  When it opens, we see new arrivals getting off a bus.  One of them is played by Eleanor Parker, the protagonist, innocent of the crime for which she was convicted.  After many harrowing and frustrating experiences, and unable to get herself paroled legitimately, she receives a parole by agreeing to become part of a shoplifting ring run by an inmate with political connections, who is herself serving just a short stretch.  It is clear from a remark made by an old inmate, as well as the prison superintendent, played by Agnes Moorehead, that Parker will soon be back.

One of the repeat offenders, who arrives when Parker does, sees another prisoner she knows from before, scrubbing the floor.  The first woman sticks out her hand, saying, “Give me some skin!”  The second woman shakes hands with her, and then sticks her hand into a bucket of water and lye, pulls it out, and wipes it off.  The first woman reassures her, “No guy’s given me a tumble in months.” There is only one way to interpret that scene.  The first woman is a prostitute, and the second is afraid of contracting syphilis.

We expect to see Parker placed in a cell, but she is brought to a room full of cots instead.  She asks if she can write her mother a letter, but the guard, played by Jane Darwell, says, “No, not while you’re in isolation. You gotta stay here until your blood test comes back, so for two weeks, there’ll be no mail, no visitors, no nothing.”  There is a similar scene in Women’s Prison (1955), where new arrivals Phyllis Thaxter and Jan Sterling are put in quarantine for two weeks.

The reference to a blood test in Caged, along with a period of isolation, reinforces what we gleaned from the previous scene, that new arrivals are suspected of having syphilis. When I applied for admission to the University of Houston in 1964, I had to take a serology test.  When I asked what that was for, I was told that it was to make sure I didn’t have syphilis.  When I joined a fraternity a few months later, the other pledges and I were given a booklet, telling us what was to be expected of us. Under no circumstances, it said, were we to associate with anyone that had syphilis.  I thought that was strange.  How was I to know if someone had syphilis?  After all, if you could tell just by looking, there would have been no need for me to have a blood test in order to be admitted to the university. I finally concluded that this requirement that we not associate with people that had syphilis was a circumlocution for telling us not to have sex with prostitutes. In other words, for most people in those days, the association between prostitutes and syphilis was so strong that the mention of either one would naturally bring the other to mind as well.

Of course, my doctor might have checked for signs of exposure to other pathogens in my blood.  But going by what I was told was the reason for the serology test and what the pledge pamphlet cautioned us against, where it was syphilis and syphilis alone that was specified, it is clear that this disease was of central concern in those days.

In the scene described above, where a new arrival attempts to assure the inmate scrubbing the floor that she hasn’t been with a man in a long time, the prostitute is referring to the possibility of having gotten syphilis from a man.  That is unusual.  We figure she would have gotten it from a man, of course, but for most movies, once the disease had been traced back to a prostitute, that was the end of the inquiry.

In Dead End (1937), Claire Trevor lets her old boyfriend, Humphrey Bogart, know that they can’t be lovers again because she is “sick,” as a result of her being a prostitute.  They had been talking in the shadows, but now she steps into the light and tells him to look at her.  As he does, he pulls back with a look on his face of revulsion.  Maybe the idea is that you can tell by looking if someone has syphilis, but she looked just fine to me.  In any event, we know she must have contracted the disease from a man, but we don’t wonder who he was, and the absence of an explanation as to who gave it to her is not experienced by us as an omission.  On the other hand, if she had said something like, “I got it from that brother of yours,” that would have shocked us.

In Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullets (1940), Edward G. Robinson plays the title character.  At the beginning of the movie, we see him treating a young man who has contracted syphilis. The young man comes across as naïve and innocent, a lad who had a moral lapse one night and had sex with a prostitute. He says he is in love with a girl and wants to marry her, but Robinson says that’s out of the question. So, clearly Robinson does not want the disease to spread.  And yet, he does not ask the young man who the woman was that he had sex with, as a first step in trying to keep her from giving syphilis to other men.  His lack of interest in finding out who the woman was betrays an attitude on his part that there will always be prostitutes with syphilis.  It’s just a fact of life.  The best he can hope for is to find a cure for patients like the young man in this scene. Furthermore, he never considers the possibility that the woman in question may be as naïve and innocent as the young man in his office, a woman who needs treatment just as much as the man does.  The fact that she has syphilis automatically means she’s a whore, not worth worrying about.

It is curious, however, that in all the movies I have seen about men in prison or on a chain gang, none have corresponding scenes to the ones in Caged.  I have never seen a man disinfect his hand after shaking hands with another inmate, nor have I seen new arrivals put in isolation until their blood tests come back. Prior to the elimination of the Production Code in 1968, in movies made in America, it was assumed that the men in prison did not have syphilis.  Logically, this makes no sense. Even if we start with the idea that prostitutes are the ultimate source for syphilis, prostitutes have sex with men, of course, and the kind of men that end up in prison are probably just the kind that would have sex with those prostitutes.  It would only be reasonable to assume, therefore, that just as many men have syphilis as women.

And that assumption would probably be correct were it not for homosexuality.  I was not able to find any statistics on the prevalence of syphilis in men as opposed to women in years past, but at the present time, men are many more times likely to have syphilis than women, owing to the rate at which this disease spreads among homosexuals.  But during the pre-1968 period, in movies made in America, there was never any hint of homosexuality in movies about men in prison.  The men were always assumed to be as straight as they were healthy.

But while none of the men in prison were imagined to be homosexuals, that was the first thing people thought of regarding women in prison.  When Bette Davis was offered a part in Caged, she turned it down, saying she wasn’t interested in making a “dyke movie.”  She automatically assumed that the movie would be about lesbians. There are no corresponding stories about male actors turning down roles in movies about men in prison.  When Wallace Beery was offered a role in The Big House (1930), for instance, he did not turn it down, saying that he was not interested in making a “faggot movie.”

There is a theory in film criticism centering around the concept of the male gaze.  The basic idea is that most movies cater to the heterosexual male.  There have always been women’s weepies, of course, movies like Stella Dallas (1937), intended for a female audience, but these were the exception.  Most movies were made with the idea of pleasing the heterosexual male, as evidenced by the way the camera would linger more on a woman’s body than on that of a man.  Women and homosexuals might also enjoy these movies, but it was the heterosexual male that these movies were primarily designed to please.

Actually, this heterosexual male in male-gaze film criticism is a bit of a fiction, like the economic man or the prudent man, an idealized concept, but it will do.  This heterosexual male prefers that the sex in movies be heterosexual, but he doesn’t mind if a movie features a little lesbian sex as well.  As a general rule, however, he does not want to see movies about male homosexuality.  An extreme example of this can be found in pornography.  In a typical pornographic movie, most scenes will feature men and women having sex. However, there will usually be at least one scene in which two women have sex, because that way the heterosexual male gets to see two naked women instead of just one.  But there will be no scene involving sex between two men. That can be found only in a subgenre of pornography, the male homosexual video. In an episode of The Man Show (1999-2014), a television show that parodied the heterosexual male, Jimmy Kimmel warns of the danger of accidentally wandering into the section of the video store featuring gay porn.  As he is saying this, we see Adam Carolla apparently doing just that, screaming with horror as he looks at the picture on a video cassette.  “A shock like that,” Kimmel cautions gravely, “can traumatize the penis permanently.”

And so, when movies were made about men in prison, they were suited for the male gaze.  The heterosexual male did not want to see the men in those prisons being sexually attracted to each other.  If anything, there would be an emphasis on an inmate’s love for some woman he hopes is waiting for him, as is the case for Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946) and Victor Mature in Kiss of Death (1947).  But when that same heterosexual male went to see a movie about women in prison, he was open to the possibility of women having sex with each other, even hoping for such, although the Production Code was not likely to allow more than a hint of it.

The use of the word “caged” for the title of this movie about women in prison might have been intended to suggest that the women are being treated like animals, since it is animals that we put in cages.  But it also fits with the concept of the male gaze, because the reason we put animals in cages is so we can look at them.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the word “cage” appears in the titles of other movies about women in prison, such as The Big Bird Cage (1972), Caged Heat (1974), Caged Women (1980), The Naked Cage (1986), and Caged Fury (1990).  And while the word “cage” is not in the title of The Big Doll House (1971), the posters for the movie show women in a cage, with the tagline, “Their bodies were caged, but not their desires.”  Try to imagine that as a tagline for a movie about men in prison.  In any event, there is no movie about men in prison that has the word “cage” in the title.

So, does the movie Caged have lesbian sex in it?  No, it doesn’t, objectively speaking. But that doesn’t matter, because the heterosexual male wants it to be in the movie, and all he needs is an excuse.

First of all, unlike the two examples given above about a man in prison thinking about the woman he loves, no woman in Caged is dreaming of the day when she will be able to get back together with the man she loves, the one who is waiting for her. Typically, it was some man who led to an inmate’s downfall, and she despises him for it.  “If it wasn’t for men, we wouldn’t be in here,” one inmate says. Eleanor Parker’s husband got her involved in a robbery that she had no idea he was going to attempt, and sweet thing that she is at the beginning of the movie, she probably would have planned on getting back together with him when she got out, but he was killed during the aborted holdup. That would have been unlikely, though, according to one inmate, saying of Parker’s husband, “If he was alive, he’d have another dame when you get out anyway.”  One inmate killed her husband, while others were also there for murder, and one gathers that for them too, it was men they killed.  They remind me those women singing the “Cell Block Tango” in Chicago (2002), the key line being, “He had it coming.” Given that these women have such animosity toward men, the heterosexual male can easily imagine these women drifting into lesbian relationships.

Second, the heterosexual male might be able to hang his hopes on some other bits of dialogue. When one inmate fails to get paroled as she was hoping, she starts showing signs of having a psychotic breakdown.  One of the inmates expresses concern, but the head matron says, “All repeaters act queer when they get flopped back.”  The word “queer” in this context clearly has the ordinary meaning of “strange” or “peculiar.”  But undoubtedly it triggered a response in the heterosexual male looking for any sign of lesbianism among the women, for the male gaze hears as well as sees.  An inmate tells Parker, “If you stay in here too long, you don’t think of guys at all. You just get out of the habit.”  In other words, even where there is no resentment against men, a woman in prison will lose interest in them.  That paves the way for interest in other women.  At least, that’s the way the heterosexual male will interpret it.

The heterosexual male primarily wants to see lipstick lesbians, like the one in Girls in Prison (1956). In that movie, Anne is a new arrival.  A pretty inmate named Melanee makes sexual advances, petting her and stroking her.  Anne rebuffs her.  Later, Melanee says she hates Anne, and another inmate makes a remark about a “woman scorned.”  Eventually, Anne and Melanee end up wrestling in the mud, something I have never seen two inmates do in a movie about men in prison.

But the heterosexual male knows he must also be on the lookout for the bull dyke in such movies, and this leads to the third hint of lesbianism in Caged. Suspicion naturally falls on the head matron, referred to above, who is played by Hope Emerson. At six feet, two inches tall and weighing two hundred and thirty pounds, Emerson fits the stereotype of the butch lesbian.  There is a scene in which she gets dressed up, telling the inmates she has a date with some guy named Pete.  You might think that the heterosexual male would accept that he was wrong, that Emerson is just a big, heterosexual woman, but that would just go to show how much you underestimate the determination of the heterosexual male to see lesbians in a movie like this.  I read a review in which it was claimed that Emerson was lying about having a boyfriend as a way of concealing her sapphic desires.

After 1968, things became more explicit in movies about women in prison, like those with the word “cage” in their titles or taglines mentioned above.  Male homosexuality in the movies also became explicit, as in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Deliverance (1972), soon followed by movies featuring sex in a prison for men, a couple of the more well-known ones being American Me (1992) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994).  From what has been said previously, it might be thought that the heterosexual male would eschew such movies, but far from it.  Paradoxically, the male gaze is determinative even in movies like these, for the homosexuality is not presented as something positive, but rather as something to be dreaded or feared.  The heterosexual male feels sorry for John Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the way he is reduced to hustling homosexuals because he needs the money.  The male rape scenes in American Me and The Shawshank Redemption add to the horror he imagines to exist in prison life.  And after seeing Deliverance, he will probably turn down any offer to go on a canoeing trip, fearing that he might end up having to squeal like a pig.

As for syphilis, that was displaced by the onset of the AIDS epidemic, starting in 1981. Whereas syphilis could be treated with penicillin, AIDS was a death sentence in the early years of that disease, and then only after a long period of pitiful, physical deterioration.  And whereas it was the female prostitute that was associated with syphilis, it was the male homosexual that was associated with AIDS.  The movie Philadelphia (1993), while no doubt of much interest to homosexuals, still captured the attention of the heterosexual male, who could be grateful that he was attracted to women and did not have to go looking for sex in a gay pornographic movie theater like the Stallion Showcase Cinema.

The heterosexual male has come to expect a gay character in any movie he is likely to see nowadays, for that is a box that needs to be checked off.  And while he could just as easily do without such characters in the movies he watches, he may even benefit from their inclusion.  By magnanimously accepting a gay character in a movie, he will be able to convey to the woman who is his date for the evening that he is tolerant and broad-minded in such matters, traits that she is likely to find appealing in a man.

But this will be true only if the homosexuality in the movie is not presented as something erotic.  In that case, he is likely to run screaming from the theater, just like Adam Carolla.

The Best Years of Our Lives is a movie about three veterans that return to Boone City, a fictional, small midwestern town, after the end of World War II:  Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a captain in the Army Air Force; Al Stephenson (Frederic March), a sergeant in the Army; and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a sailor in the Navy.

They all face challenges adapting to civilian life after more than three years of war, but none more so than Homer, whose hands were burnt off during a fire on the ship that he was on, and who now has hooks to replace them.  I believe we are supposed to sympathize with the problems of all three men equally, but we are so overwhelmed trying to imagine how we would cope if we were in Homer’s situation that the problems of Fred and Al seem trivial by comparison.  Before the war, Homer planned on marrying Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), but now he is reluctant.  She insists she loves him, however, and they eventually do get married at the end of the movie.

Because we know the title of a movie before we watch it, we wonder about this one as the movie begins. Usually, it is an expression of resentment, what a woman might say when her husband divorces her:  “I gave him the best years of my life.”  The irony of the remark is that the years in which one is a young adult, from the late teens through the twenties, are the best years in the sense of their potential; but they may be the worst years in the sense of what actually happens, as when the years are spent in a miserable marriage.

Or fighting a war.  So, in one sense, the title refers to what these men had to go through at a time when they should have been enjoying the benefits of youth.  But in another sense, it may represent the attitudes of the civilians that cared more about their own hardships, what with sugar rationing and Meatless Tuesdays, than that of the soldiers that were off fooling around somewhere overseas. During an argument Fred has with his wife Marie (Virginia Mayo), after catching her alone in their apartment with Cliff (Steve Cochran), Fred says he can guess what she has been doing with other men while he was away.  She replies, “Go ahead and guess your head off!  I could do some guessing myself.  What were you up to in London and Paris and all those places?”

She continues, being the one person in this movie that gives voice to a phrase similar to the one in the title:

I’ve given you every chance to make something of yourself. I gave up my own job when you asked me.  I gave up the best years of my life! And what have you done? You’ve flopped. Couldn’t even hold a job at the drugstore.  So I’m going back to work for myself.  And I’m going to live for myself, too.  And in case you don’t understand English, I’m gonna get a divorce.

This Cliff character, by the way, seems to have plenty of money, which is why Marie has a date with him. When Fred tells him to leave, Cliff puts on the coat of his expensive-looking, dark suit with the kind of pinstripe often worn by movie gangsters.  Fred notices he is wearing the pin of an ex-serviceman.  Cliff says he hasn’t had trouble adjusting because he takes everything in stride.  We figure he makes his money in the black markets, probably starting while he was still in the army.

The marital difficulties of Fred and Marie are just one example in which we are not sure how we are supposed to interpret what is happening, since attitudes were different when this movie was made than they are today.  We get the impression we are supposed to be on Fred’s side, but we are not unsympathetic to Marie’s situation, looking at things from the vantage point of the present.

Another is the movie’s attitude toward any mental problems that returning soldiers might have.  The movie acknowledges such problems, but at the same time, there is resistance to the idea.  Early in the movie, as the plane the three men are on is heading to Boone City, Al says, “The thing that scares me most is that everybody’s gonna try to rehabilitate me.”  Fred says, “All I want is a good job, a mild future, and a house big enough for me and my wife.  Give me that much and I’m rehabilitated like that,” as he snaps his fingers.

Prior to the scene with Cliff, we learned that Marie had a job she liked, working in a nightclub, making good money.  But Fred wanted her to quit that job because it was “inconvenient,” what with her working nights.  At first, it was all right because he had some money saved up, but they blew through that.  One night, they start arguing about the fact that they are stuck in a small, one-bedroom apartment, not going anywhere, because Fred hasn’t been able to find a good-paying job.  Suddenly, Marie has a look of concern:

Marie:  Fred.

Fred:  Yeah?

Marie:  Are you really all right?

Fred:  Of course I’m all right. Why?

Marie:  I mean, in your mind. Is anything…?

Fred:  My mind?! You mean you think I’m going goofy?

Marie:  I’ve been wondering.

She’s been wondering on account of a nightmare he’s been having about a pilot that got killed who was a friend of his.  “The war’s over,” she says.  “You won’t get anyplace till you stop thinking about it.”

Rather than spend another dull evening at home, she tells him she still has some money saved, so they can go out, saying, “Dinner’s on me tonight.”  But he tells her that they are eating at home. She says she is going out by herself in that case.  As she starts to leave, he grabs her and jerks her around, forcibly holding her by both arms, saying, “You’re not going. You’ll eat what I cook.”

Now, we could interpret this scene as one showing how a soldier returning home from war was likely to lose his temper as a result of PTSD, so that even though he is in the wrong to insist on having his way about everything, and physically abusing her when she won’t obey, we should be understanding and sympathetic.  Perhaps Fred is in denial about what he needs in the way of rehabilitation.  On the other hand, one suspects that this may not be how people were supposed to react to this scene in 1946. Rather, they might have thought that Fred was in the right and perfectly justified in physically forcing her to stay home and do what he says.  At this distance, though, it’s hard to tell.

We have the same trouble interpreting another scene that occurred earlier.  While Fred is working as a soda jerk one night, with Homer sitting at the counter, another customer starts popping off about how we were duped into fighting the war, saying we fought the wrong people.  Needless to say, it is tactless and insensitive to tell a veteran, especially one whose hands have been replaced by hooks, that his sacrifice was in vain. Homer becomes angry and rips a flag pin off the man’s lapel and starts pushing him, at which point they start struggling.  Fred jumps over the counter, and we think he is just going to break it up, as he should.  Instead, he punches the man so hard that he crashes through a glass counter. Granted, Fred and Homer were provoked, but verbal provocation does not justify the use of physical force.  If this happened today, Fred would have been arrested and charged with assault.  More importantly, though, we would probably want to make allowances for his violent reaction, thinking it was an expression of PTSD.  But punching people in the movies in the old days was usually accepted as justified and praiseworthy, provided it was done by someone good-looking like Dana Andrews.  In other words, whereas we today we would regard Fred’s behavior as the result of his psychological problems, back when this movie was made, audiences probably thought what he did was healthy and clean.  In any event, the only thing that happens to Fred is that Mr. Thorpe, the store manager, fires him.

Speaking of Mr. Thorpe, in order to get a job working in that drugstore, which in many ways is more like a department store, Fred was interviewed by him. During the interview, we see Thorpe repeatedly using a nasal inhaler.  I have seen this in other movies, such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), where Gary Merrill plays a gangster that is always using an inhaler.  In another movie, one I can’t recall the name of, we see a man furtively using an inhaler, suspiciously looking to one side and then the other. In all these instances, I always had the feeling there was supposed to be something sleazy about what they were doing, but I never knew why.  I thought to myself, “The guy has an allergy.  So what?”  Years later, I found out that inhalers used to have Benzedrine in them, so these characters are giving themselves a little amphetamine kick with each sniff.  Therefore, if you see someone using a nasal inhaler in a movie made in the 1940s or 1950s, you are supposed to have a low opinion of him.  When the interview with Thorpe is over, Fred tells him to “take care of that cold,” obviously being sarcastic.

I don’t know much about the military, but it seems strange that Fred, who grew up in the poor part of town, and who was a soda jerk before the war, became an officer; while Al, a bank executive, whose family lives in a swanky apartment, and who presumably had a college education, ended up as an enlisted man. I suppose such things happened.  But the purpose of writing the story this way was to emphasize the egalitarian nature of the war, where one’s social status as a civilian could be upended in the armed forces, and then upended again after the war.  It was also important that there be at least one officer among the three men, and at least one enlisted man.  Had all three men been officers, the movie might have seemed elitist; had all three of them been enlisted men, the movie might have come across as populist.  Moreover, while officers and enlisted men are not allowed to fraternize while in the service, the fact that these three men can be friends as civilians is a further way to emphasize American egalitarianism.

Anyway, all Thorpe is willing to offer Fred is a low-paying job as a sales clerk, who will be expected to work the soda fountain some of the time.  “The war is over,” he tells Fred, a common refrain in those days by civilians who were tired of veterans acting as if they were entitled to special consideration.

Al is much luckier.  Mr. Milton (Ray Collins), the president of the bank where he used to work, wants him back.  After offering Al a cigar, Milton talks about how hard it’s been getting good cigars during the war, and how business conditions are uncertain, owing to strikes and ruinous taxes.  But he offers Al a promotion to vice president in charge of small loans, explaining that he will be valuable to the bank, owing to his ability to understand the needs of the veterans returning home from the war.

That sounds good, but the first person to come to the bank asking for a loan is a veteran that wants to buy a farm, but who has no collateral.  The fact that he wants to buy a farm tells us that he should get the loan, owing to the myth surrounding the yeoman farmer and his basic goodness, the backbone of America.  At first, Al’s prewar habits of sound banking make him reluctant.  But then he sees Homer in the bank cashing his disability check.  This reminds him that a lot of veterans need help, so he approves of the loan.  But when it is reported to Mr. Milton, he reprimands Al:

We do have a desire to extend a helping hand to returning veterans when possible.  But we must all remember that this is not our money we’re doling out.  It belongs to our depositors, and we can’t gamble with it.

Al promises not to do it again.

As for his family life, Al has been married for twenty years to Milly (Myrna Loy), with whom he has an adult daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright) and a son in high school.  He arrives home, somewhat unexpectedly, and so after the usual hugs and kisses, Milly calls her friend to explain why they won’t be coming over for dinner that night, saying, “Alice, this is Milly.  I’m terribly sorry, but we can’t be over.”  We see Al look at her with an irritated expression on his face.  But then Milly reverses herself, saying, “I mean, I’m terribly happy,” explaining that Al has just come home.  I see nothing wrong with her use of the word “sorry” in explaining why she has to break a dinner engagement.  It’s just a manner of speaking. Again, we have a situation that is hard to interpret all these years later.  Should we regard Al’s anger sympathetically on account of the trauma he suffered during the war, that he too is in denial about his need for rehabilitation?  Or is that just too twenty-first century?  One suspects that the 1946 audience thought Milly was wrong to use the word “sorry,” and that Al’s anger was justified.

The weakest parts of the movie are the drunk scenes, especially the one at a bar that is owned by Butch Engle (Hoagy Carmichael), who is Homer’s uncle.  He sells liquor, but he never lets Homer have any, lecturing him on the curse of drink.  He lets Homer have beer only, not the whiskey that Homer wants. However, Al and his family show up there on his first night since he got back, and so does Fred.  These two men get drunk. I think this is supposed to illustrate the way a lot of veterans tried to cope with their war experiences by turning to drink, but if so, they should have made it clear that this was a bad thing, just as Butch claimed.  Instead, as was the case with so many movies made in those days, their drunk behavior is supposed to be cute, and the scene is played for laughs.  It goes on way too long, and then it is followed by the obligatory hangover scene, which is played for laughs too.

At the beginning of the movie, when the three men first manage to get on a flight heading home, they pass over a graveyard of bombers, brand new, fresh from the factory, but no longer needed now that the war is over.  They are symbolic of the country’s attitude toward veterans, no longer needed.  Toward the end of the movie, Fred decides to leave town by catching a flight at the airport where all the junk bombers are.  While waiting for his flight, he climbs into a bomber like the one he used to fly, possibly reminiscing about a time when he felt useful and needed.  A foreman tells him to get out of the plane. Fred finds out from him that they are going to use the material from the planes for building prefabricated houses (houses for veterans, no doubt).  He asks for a job and gets it.

This is much better than the humiliating job he had at the drugstore because it is manual labor, which has the cachet of being good, honest work.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be regarded in the movies.  He tells Peggy, with whom he has fallen in love and will eventually marry, that he is now in the junk business, “An occupation for which many people feel I’m well qualified, by temperament and training.”

It is to be noted, by the way, that Fred is content with his situation, that he apparently has been “rehabilitated,” now that he has a good job and the prospect of marrying Peggy.  There is no scene, in other words, in which Fred seeks counseling for the mental problems that Marie was worried about.  It would seem that while the movie does acknowledge the stress that war can have on a man, even after the war is over, it is not something we need to worry about.  As long as a veteran is in good shape physically, his only real problems are economic, getting a job or a loan, and domestic, having to do with marriage and family.

The romance between Fred and Peggy began while he was still married, before Marie said she was going to get a divorce.  Peggy visits him at the drugstore where he is selling perfume and lotion for women, definitely a degrading job for a man by 1946 standards.  They agree to have lunch, which they do at a nearby restaurant.  It is Lucia’s, an Italian place where friendly people speak broken English with Italian accents.  It is easy to dismiss this as incidental, as it would be in real life. But this is a movie, and it would not have been filmed except with deliberation.  It really is interesting how many movies that were produced back then, both during and after the war, that went out of their way to show that Italians were basically good people:  those living in Italy were just misled by Mussolini, and Italian-Americans were always patriotic.  No need to have concentration camps for them as we did with Japanese-Americans. And, of course, it would have been out of the question to see Fred and Peggy eating sausage and sauerkraut at a German restaurant.

As a disease movie, Dark Victory might have been believable in 1939, but it is certainly far-fetched today.  Bette Davis plays Judith Traherne, a young, rich woman with all the character flaws that might easily come from being rich:  arrogant, spoiled, frivolous.  Transcending all this, however, is her intensity, which makes even her ordinary actions seem like vices.  Just watching her walk across a room will wear you out.  By way of contrast, her boyfriend, Alec, played by Ronald Reagan, is cool and relaxed.

Judith suffers from headaches and double vision.  Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald), her secretary and friend, finally gets her to go to the doctor, and, not surprisingly, she is a bad patient.  Despite her resistance, she is diagnosed as having a glioma, a malignant tumor in the brain.  She consents to having surgery, but upon its completion, the prognosis is negative.

Negative, but preposterously artificial and precise:  she will live less than a year, but she will have absolutely no symptoms until just a few hours before she dies, at which point her vision will begin to fail and things will become dark.  The doctor says this is a rare case, which is an understatement, since it is so rare as to be nonexistent.

Well, they went to a lot of trouble to create this disease for this movie, so we know that something is up.  Presumably, the point is to pose the question, what effect would the certainty of death have on someone once all the symptoms leading up to death had been eliminated?  Judith will still be young, pretty, rich, and otherwise healthy.  She has no accompanying complications, like still needing to work in order to pay the bills or worrying about who will care for her children, of which she has none.  It is only death in all its purity that she must deal with.

Moreover, there is no indication that she is even remotely religious, so she must face death with no hope for a future life.  Nor can we believe that she has the consolation of philosophy, for the above-mentioned intensity of her personality suggests that she has been too busy living life to have spent much time reflecting upon it.  To be sure, neither religion nor philosophy can fully prepare anyone for death when it comes, but Judith has no cushion at all.

Dr. Steele (George Brent), who performed the brain surgery, and Dr. Parsons (Henry Travers), Judith’s family practitioner, agree not to tell Judith that she is going to die.  We have doubts about the ethics of their decision, made all the more suspect when Steele confides in Ann about Judith’s condition.  After Steele and Judith fall in love and decide to marry, she accidentally finds out about her negative prognosis.  She becomes angry, accusing Ann of getting Steele to marry her out of pity.

As a result, the marriage between Steele and Judith is off, and she apparently descends into drunkenness and promiscuity, including affairs with married men.  At least, that’s what the movie let’s us think for a while, until it makes us aware that it is mostly malicious gossip.  She almost has an affair with Michael (Humphrey Bogart), her horse trainer, but then realizes that this is not how she wants to spend what is left of her life.  That is not surprising.  Most people want more out of life than just drinking and screwing.  Similarly, at different points in the movie, the subjects of euthanasia and suicide are broached, but quickly dismissed.  That too is not surprising, for most people believe that deliberately ending an unhappy life, one’s own or that of another, as not being the answer either.  At least, that is the attitude of this movie.

So, what is the answer?  At first it would seem that the movie says we should live a life of deception and delusion.  To begin with, the doctors and Ann lie to Judith about her condition, the idea being that she will be better off not knowing.  Right after Steele tells Ann the truth, Judith joins them and gives Steele a present, some cufflinks “from a grateful patient,” she says.  The act of giving him a present gives her an idea.  She declares that it is her birthday, not literally, but figuratively, in the sense that her life has a new beginning, now that she has been cured.  She suggests that they get together every year to celebrate, not realizing that by this time next year she will be dead.  Though Steele and Ann think they are doing the right thing by concealing the truth from Judith, yet there seems to be something so wrong about letting her live in a fool’s paradise.  They deprive her of dignity for the sake of a false happiness.  Then, after Steele and Judith reconcile and get married, they become deliberately oblivious to her illness, acting as though there is nothing wrong with her.  Finally, just as Steele gets word of an invitation to attend an important meeting in New York regarding his work, Judith experiences a dimming of her vision and realizes she will soon die.  But she deceives her husband, encouraging him to go on without her, which he does.

But this cannot be the answer.  It is one thing to go on with your life without dwelling on the finality of death, but it is quite another thing live in perpetual denial.  There is something almost desperate about their forced happiness.  And it is untenable.  When Michael casually refers to the prayers he has been saying for Judith, she flinches.

But before Steele leaves, she becomes realistic, speaks frankly about her fate, and says that she is prepared for the end.  Still unaware that Judith can no longer see very well, Steele reluctantly leaves on his trip.  Judith then tells Ann she wants to die alone, so that her husband will know that in the end she was not afraid.  This is what we have been waiting for, courage and honesty in the face of death, and the peace that comes with resignation.

This movie is similar to The Hasty Heart (1949), set in a makeshift hospital in a jungle in Burma just after the end of World War II.  Colonel Dunn, who appears to be the chief surgeon, tells the men that are still recovering from wounds or malaria that a new patient, a corporal that goes by the name “Lachie” (Richard Todd), will be arriving soon.  On the last day of the war, a piece of shrapnel damaged one of his kidneys, which had to be removed.  He has just about recovered from the surgery and appears to be well.  Normally, he could get along with just one kidney for the rest of his life, but the doctors have discovered that the other one is defective.  For the next few weeks, the kidney will do the work of two and then collapse.  At that point uremic poisoning will set in and he will die.

All this is more believable than the disease in Dark Victory, but just barely.  It seems a bit of a stretch that doctors in an army hospital in the jungle in Burma would be able to diagnose a kidney that is still functioning as being defective, and then give the prognosis that he will apparently be in good health for a few weeks and then die.  However realistic all that may or may not be, it is clearly designed to serve the same function as in Dark Victory, to allow someone to face imminent death free of all symptoms.

Colonel Dunn has not told him, however, much in the way that the doctors in Dark Victory decide not tell Judith.  And just as the doctors in Dark Victory told Ann about Judith’s prognosis, Dunn tells the men in the ward about Lachie, and he asks the men to keep the secret as well and to be extra nice to him.  Once again, we have to wonder about the questionable ethics of not telling the patient that he is going to die, and then telling others who are not even related to him about his terminal disease.  And just as Judith has no family when she is diagnosed with her disease, so too does Lachie have no family, “no ties.”  Because of this, Dunn has decided not to let Lachie go back home to Scotland as he so dearly wants.  Instead, Dunn has taken it upon himself to decide that Lachie will be better off if he is kept in this hospital, surrounded by men who have been ordered to be friends with him.

Lachie’s personality is every bit as intense as that of Judith.  By way of contrast, Ronald Reagan, playing the role of “Yank,” is also in this movie, and here too he is cool and relaxed.  Lachie hates the world and everyone that is in it.  The explanation given for his misanthropy is the fact that he was born illegitimate.  However, we have a hard time believing that this alone could make anyone as surly and hostile as he is.  Had Yank been born illegitimate, we have the feeling he would have shrugged it off and made the best of it.  In other words, Lachie’s personality is just one more contrivance, something made up for dramatic purposes only.

Patricia Neal plays a nurse, Sister Parker.  She comes up with the idea of having a birthday party for Lachie, in which she and the men in the ward buy him a complete outfit consisting of a kilt, brogues, and other appurtenances, all of which is rather expensive.  As in Dark Victory, we have the theme of a birthday for someone who will never live to see another, yet does not realize it, celebrating a beginning instead of facing the end.  Lachie is finally touched by their gesture of friendship.  He begins to think he has been wrong about people.

Soon after, he falls in love with Sister Parker, asking her to marry him.  She says, “If it makes you happy to think of us being married, then that’s what I want too.”  Now, you or I would surely have balked had we received an answer like that to a proposal of marriage.  And we would have wondered why a nurse and other men in a ward, whom we had only known for a couple of weeks, would have spent so much money buying us gifts.  But Lachie’s social skills are such that he suspects nothing.

And so it is that both movies feature references to the three most important events in a person’s life, birth, marriage, and death, each of which justifies an announcement in the newspaper, and for each of which we get a certificate.

Having gone this far with this deception, the only proper thing would be to see it through to the end.  That is, when Lachie’s kidney begins to fail him, everyone should act surprised and sad.  But no, just as Lachie has come to believe in friendship and love, Colonel Dunn tells him that he can go home after all.  Moreover, because his is a special case, he gets priority and can even go home by plane.  Why is he a special case? Lachie wants to know.  Dunn says he has been ordered to give him the facts of the case, which is that he is going to die soon.

We may have had misgivings about the way the doctors handled Judith’s case, but at least Ann really was her friend, having been so before Judith was diagnosed, and Dr. Steele really did love her and want to marry her.  But this handling of Lachie’s case is cruel.  He sees immediately that the men were just pretending to be his friend and that Parker only pretended to want to marry him, that they gave him “a fool’s religion to die on.”

To make matters worse, after Dunn tells Lachie he is going to die, he doesn’t bother to tell the men whom he ordered to befriend Lachie that Lachie knows everything.  He just walks past them, letting them make fools out of themselves by continuing to carry on the charade.  Of course, when Parker finally tells them that Lachie knows the truth, they all protest that they only pretended at first, but now they really are his friends, and so forth and so on.  “Well, then,” Lachie replies, “should I be proud that you liked me only because I was about to die?”  Just as Judith suspected Steele proposed marriage out of pity, Lachie accuses Parker of accepting his proposal for the same reason.  She replies, “Surely there’s pity in every woman’s love.”  That answer is even creepier than the one she gave to his proposal.

Needless to say, through one more contrivance that we need not bother with here, Lachie is finally convinced that Parker and the men really are his friends, and he decides to stay.  In the end, we are glad that he finally opens his heart, choosing to die among the only friends he has, just as we were glad in Dark Victory, when for the sake of those she loves, Judith chooses to die alone.

The twentieth century is when art became ugly.  Oh, I’m not talking about the kind of art that philistines like me enjoy.  I’m talking about that highbrow, elitist art consisting of ridiculous paintings, nonsense novels, discordant music, and weird foreign films.  By the twenty-first century, the novelty of ugliness had begun to wear off a bit, but it can still be counted on to appeal to those who believe that an appreciation of ugliness is the mark of refinement.

Nocturnal Animals is not a weird foreign film, of course, but it could pass for one.  Right off the bat, the movie presents its highbrow bona fides by displaying disgustingly obese, naked women, dancing in place, in what turns out to be an art exhibit.  The woman who has arranged all this is Susan (Amy Adams).  Her life is as ugly as her art show, notwithstanding all the opulence in which she dwells.  Her husband cheats on her.  She can’t sleep.

She receives in the mail an unpublished novel from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal).  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that it is an ugly novel.  It is about a man named Tony, also played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Susan’s mind as she reads the novel.  Just in case we might wonder if she is projecting by making this identification between the author and the protagonist, there is an earlier discussion between Susan and Edward when they were married, presented in a flashback.  She criticized something he wrote, telling him he needs to write about someone other than himself.  He says all authors do that.  They don’t, of course.  As Nietzsche once said, “Homer would never have created an Achilles or Goethe a Faust, had Homer been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust.”  But in this case, Edward has created a Tony because he is a Tony.

Anyway, in this novel, Tony, his wife, and his daughter are traveling across west Texas when they are waylaid by a bunch of psychopathic punks.  The movie wallows in the misery of a family being brutalized, resulting in the rape and murder of the two females.  With the aid of a lawman named Andes, who is dying of lung cancer, Tony is able to track down the killers.  Andes kills one of them, and Tony kills the other.  However, the one Tony kills lives just long enough to hit Tony in the head with a poker, blinding him.  Tony staggers outside, falls, and accidentally shoots himself, resulting in his death.

In reading the novel, Susan is deeply moved, even more than she was moved by watching a bunch of naked, four-hundred-pound women jiggle their decaying flesh.  Why is she moved?  Well, it probably has to do with the abortion she had after Edward got her pregnant.  She never meant for Edward to find out, but for some reason he just happens to show up at the abortion clinic just as she finished having it done.  So, you see, the death of Tony’s daughter corresponds to the death of Edward’s aborted child.  And the rape and murder of Tony’s wife corresponds to Susan’s infidelity, because turning Susan’s voluntary lust and betrayal into a gangbang rape is Edward’s imaginary revenge against her.  And just as Edward knows that he is weak, Tony is too weak to save his wife and child.

The death of Tony in the novel corresponds to Edward’s suicide, the novel being one long suicide note, which basically says, “You ruined my life by rejecting my love.”  This is not made explicit, but it is obvious.  When Susan emails Edward, saying she wants to see him, he emails her back, agreeing to meet.  She goes to a restaurant, but Edward never shows up.  Of course not.  He’s dead.

For people like me, this is an ugly novel within an ugly movie.  No wonder it got rave reviews.

The Coen brothers have made a movie about a self-important, obnoxious bum who sponges off people because he believes he was meant for better things than holding down a job.  But such a movie, without any frills, would immediately be dismissed as irritating and boring.  And so it needs some frills.

First, they decided to make this bum a folk singer.  They had previously made the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), which succeeded with people that liked the music, although it failed miserably with anyone that did not.  So maybe they figured this movie would appeal to people that like folk music.  And even if the folk music in the movie is pretty bad, at least as far as the music performed by the title character is concerned, we know we are supposed to overlook the fact that he is a self-important, obnoxious bum because he is an artist, and that means we are supposed to care.

Frill number two is a cat.  Having a cat continually appear and then disappear gives the movie a motif, making it appear that there is some deeper, hidden meaning to it all.  There isn’t, but something has to get this movie on its legs.  The cat eventually turns out to have the name Ulysses.  Gosh, you mean the return of the cat is like the return of Ulysses?  Well, telling a dumb story with parallels to The Odyssey worked for James Joyce, so maybe the Coen brothers figured it would work for them too.  And it recalls the main character in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?  So make that two dumb movies by the Coen brothers that are supposed to be spiced up somehow by alluding Homer’s epic, with the second one also alluding to the first.

Finally, there is a time loop.  Sort of.  Except that in the second iteration of the time loop, the cat does not get away.  Now, there are some pretty good time loop movies.  Dead of Night (1945) was the first movie I know of to try this, and it worked fairly well.  And, of course, the greatest such movie is Groundhog Day (1993).  But does a time loop belong in a movie about a folk singer?  I mean, some genres don’t really mix well.  It’s like a movie that starts out as a murder mystery, and halfway through, while we are trying to figure out who done it, Godzilla comes to town.  However, the Coen brothers were desperate for another frill to keep this movie from seeming to be what it really is, and so a time loop is what we get.