In the opening scene of Splendor in the Grass, which begins in Kansas in 1928, we see Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) and Wilma Dean “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) making out in his car, with a raging waterfall in the background to symbolize their passion.  Bud wants to have sex, but Deanie says they mustn’t.  Disappointed, Bud takes her home.

Sexual frustration is not the only thing that makes these two teenagers miserable.  They both have parents.  Deanie’s mother is worried that Bud will get her pregnant.  And even if she doesn’t get pregnant, her mother tells her that boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with.  They want a nice girl for a wife.  In fact, nice girls don’t like sex.  They just let their husbands come near them so they can have children.  Now, tell me again why boys want to marry nice girls.

Bud’s father, Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle), wants Bud to go to Yale.  Bud doesn’t want to go to Yale, saying he’s not a good student.  He wants to go to an agricultural college for a couple of years and then take over the family ranch and raise cattle.  He figures he could marry Deanie and take her to college with him.

Ace says, “Ranching’s no life.”  He prefers being an oil man.  In fact, when the movie begins, he has just hit another gusher, which is pumping a hundred barrels an hour.  He is the opposite of Rock Hudson in Giant (1956) and Melvyn Douglas in Hud (1963), who loved raising cattle and despised the idea of drilling for oil.  In general, we are supposed to think there is something wholesome and fulfilling about raising cattle, while drilling for oil is just about making lots of money.  Splendor in the Grass likewise expects us to make those associations, approving of Bud’s desire to work his father’s ranch, while feeling there is something wrong with the way Ace is interested only in his oil wells.

Ace has ill-concealed contempt for Deanie, thinking her family is beneath his own.  He too is worried that Bud might get her pregnant.  “You get a girl in trouble, and you gotta take the consequences,” he says, meaning Bud would have to marry her.  To avoid the risk of getting Deanie pregnant, Ace suggests that Bud find another girl and have sex with her instead.  In fact, later in the movie, we assume Bud does just that, ending his relationship with Deanie and then having sex with Juanita Howard, known around school for being no better than she should be.  But if Bud had gotten Juanita pregnant, she would have been the one he had to marry.  Different girl, same result.  Perhaps Ace knew that he was in a movie, which meant that nice girls like Deanie get pregnant if they have sex just once, whereas for sluts like Juanita, their very promiscuity seems to act as a kind of birth control.

Bud gets so stressed out about it all that he collapses and has to go to the hospital where he almost dies from pneumonia.  Deanie, on the other hand, tries to be like Juanita, first with Bud, but that doesn’t work, and then with Allen “Toots” Tuttle (Gary Lockwood).  But she changes her mind at the last minute.  Toots almost date rapes her, but she gets away and tries to commit suicide by jumping into the river so she will go over the falls.  She is rescued, but then has a complete mental collapse and has to go to an insane asylum.

It would seem, then, that the combination of sexual frustration and parental pressure has caused Bud and Deanie to collapse under the strain, physically in Bud’s case, mentally in Deanie’s case.  But that raises the question, why aren’t all their friends in high school also collapsing in one way or another?

As for sexual frustration, when Toots and some other guys are talking about Juanita, they agree that she isn’t like the other girls they know, who expect a guy to be satisfied with a goodnight kiss.  Given that, we wonder why those other girls in the high school aren’t filling up the psych wards in the local hospitals themselves, since they aren’t getting anymore sex than Deanie.  And couples break up all the time in high school, so the other girls are likely experiencing that as well.  As for the boys in high school, Toots and a few other guys on the football team might be using Juanita as an outlet for their sexual needs, but we don’t get the idea that she is servicing the entire male student body.  So, why aren’t most of the boys in that school having a bout of pneumonia themselves?

Does that mean the difference lies in parental pressure?  In Bud’s case, that might make sense.  Bud’s father is about as obnoxious as they come, and Deanie meets a guy named John in the mental institution, who says he is there because his father put pressure on him to be a great surgeon. But surely these are not the only two boys in that community whose fathers are putting pressure on them for some reason, so we have to wonder why the other boys in the high school are holding up so well.

As for Deanie, the only parental pressure that she experiences is that of her mother telling her not to have sex with Bud.  Now, it’s not like the mothers of the other girls at the high school are telling their daughters that it’s all right to have premarital sex.  We don’t even have to be shown a conversation between Kay (Sandy Dennis) and her mother to know that.  But Kay isn’t destined for a mental breakdown herself, nor are any of the other girls.

If it seems as though one of the moral lessons of this movie is that sexual repression is bad, that is belied by the situation with Bud’s older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden).  She represents the Roaring Twenties in the flesh, referred to as a “flapper.”  It is rumored that while in college, some “cake eater” got her pregnant and married her for her money, but Ace had the marriage annulled and got her an abortion.  Now back home, she continues with her wanton ways, not being one to suffer from the stress of going without sex. But the movie condemns her for her behavior.  Toward the end of the movie, we find out that she died in a car accident.  One of Deanie’s friends says, “We all knew something like that would happen the way she carried on.”  In other words, movie karma killed Ginny for being sexually liberated.  Sometimes you just can’t win.

While the characters in this movie talk about how the stock of Ace’s company, Stamper Oil, keeps going up and up, they have no sense of the doom that we know awaits them in the stock market. Deanie’s parents are lucky, at least in that regard.  When Deanie needs to be institutionalized, her father sells all his stock in Stamper Oil in order to pay for it, not realizing he is doing so just as it is reaching a top.  But Ace is not so lucky.  The crash wipes him out, and he jumps out of the window of a building, the form of suicide that was de rigueur for those ruined by the stock market crash in October of 1929, probably because the fall from a great height was symbolic of the fall in the price of stocks from their great height.  Mrs. Stamper, now a widow, is said to be as “poor as a church mouse,” forced to live with her folks Tulsa.

We are so used to watching movies in which someone is wiped out by the stock market crash that we accept this without question as we watch this movie for the first time.  But upon a second viewing, we realize that would not apply to Ace and his eponymous oil company. When the stock market crashed, the oil wells did not crash along with them.  Think of all the movies you have seen set in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, where people are still driving their automobiles, which still had to be filled up with gasoline.  That means that oil was still being pumped out of the ground, refined, and distributed, none of which would have happened unless it could have been done at a profit.

Presumably, Ace is the majority stockholder, which means that he is the principal owner of those oil wells and remains such, even if the price of the stock has plummeted.  As president of the company, he could continue to pay himself a salary out of the revenue stream produced by pumping oil, even though the price for a barrel of oil decreased somewhat after the crash.  And some or all of the profit made by the company could continue to be distributed as dividends.  The decrease in the price per share of the stock of Stamper Oil would not change that.  And Wall Street never puts a lien on your physical assets.

To get some idea of how much money would be involved, we might recall a scene from Giant that takes place in the 1920s.  Elizabeth Taylor is talking to a man and his wife who live on a small ranch, but who had a bit of luck.  A gusher came in the previous year, which is making them a million dollars a month.  Even allowing for a drop in the price of oil with the onset of the Great Depression, I’d say these folks would still be doing all right.  In any event, no one in that movie gets wiped out by the stock market crash.

We might imagine that Ace committed suicide because he was disgraced, no longer as wealthy as he once fancied himself to be.  But his widow would not end up being “poor as a church mouse.” There would still be plenty of money coming in from the sale of the oil being pumped out of the ground, allowing her to live in reasonable comfort, even if the amount was less than that in Giant.

In other words, we can easily imagine a less drastic outcome for the Stamper family than the one depicted in this movie, one in which they might have had to live a little less extravagantly, but that’s all.  But movie karma would not have been satisfied with that.  Ace had to be punished with nothing less than financial ruin and death for being a greedy oil man.  And that is in keeping with the melodramatic excess that infects the whole movie, as we have seen with Bud, Deanie, and Ginny.  It would be easy to imagine less drastic outcomes for them as well, for the simple reason that such outcomes would also be more realistic.

Well, Bud ends up married to Angie, a likable Italian girl.  They have a baby, and there is another on the way.  They are living on the ranch his father owned. (The ranch didn’t get destroyed by the stock market crash either.)  Deanie, who will soon be married to John, goes to visit Bud.  Angie is a little embarrassed by the way she is dressed, but after all, she is in the middle of doing housework and wasn’t expecting company.

Deanie, on the other hand, is rightfully embarrassed, realizing that she is overdressed.  We gather that she wanted to show Bud how well off she was by being smartly attired.  Of all the lessons of love that we learn along the way, overcoming this need to show those we once loved how happy we are without them is something of which very few of us are capable.

The title of this movie is from William Wordsworth’s “Ode:  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”  The relevant section is first cited by the teacher in Deanie’s English class, most of which is recalled by Deanie as she and her friends drive away from Bud’s ranch:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

              Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

              We will grieve not, rather find

              Strength in what remains behind….

I don’t get it.  With all the misery endured by Bud and Deanie while they were in high school, how those years can bring these lines to mind escapes me.  What “splendor in the grass”?  What “glory in the flower”?  If I were Deanie, I’d be relieved to know that I could finally put all that behind me.

If you’ve never seen Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you undoubtedly have at least seen a clip from the movie where James Stewart, as the title character, Jefferson Smith, is employing the filibuster in the Senate. Even if you have seen the movie, however, this might be the only scene you can remember.

Strictly speaking though, the filibuster doesn’t work, at least not in the sense we might have expected.  It’s not as though, when Smith is through talking, enough senators are persuaded that he has been unjustly accused of graft to allow him to keep his seat in the Senate.  No, toward the end of many hours of Smith’s speaking nonstop, fifty thousand telegrams from ordinary people are brought onto the Senate floor, denouncing Smith for corruption and calling for his expulsion. Utterly exhausted, Smith looks at some of the telegrams with tears in his eyes, and seeing that he has been defeated, collapses.  How dark must be my soul that I wish the movie had ended right there!

But before we get to how the movie did end, let us begin at the beginning.  We see a reporter on the phone to his office in the middle of the night, saying that one of the senators of the state has just died. Then we see the other senator from that state, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), calling Governor Hopper (Guy Kibbee), telling him that he will need to appoint someone to take the senator’s place.  In the other twin bed is Mrs. Hopper (Ruth Donnelly), who does not appreciate being awakened, and who makes sarcastic faces as she listens to her husband meekly take orders from Senator Paine. Normally, I wouldn’t make much of Mrs. Hopper, except that she is the only wife in this movie.  In real life, there is nothing wrong with either having a wife or not having one.  But in a movie, wives exist or not for a reason.  In this movie, the role of this one and only wife is to inform us that Governor Hopper is a weak man.  Senator Paine tells Governor Hopper to call political boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold).  Taylor is not in bed, either with or without a wife.  He is in the middle of a poker game, with his cronies, presumably.

The next day, Senator Paine tells Taylor that he is worried about the Deficiency Bill.  In it is a proposal for constructing a dam on Willet Creek in an area where a dam is really not needed. They have been secretly buying up all the property in the vicinity of the proposed dam under dummy names.  Paine is worried that unless the man appointed to the Senate can be counted on not to ask questions, a scandal may break out.  He thinks it might be better to let the Deficiency Bill die.  Taylor tells him that might make things worse.  He then tells Paine about the campaign he has started for him in all his newspapers, which means Paine may well end up being nominated for president at the national convention. Reluctantly, Paine agrees that Taylor’s choice for a replacement senator will allow the Deficiency Bill to proceed smoothly. Governor Hopper is then informed as to whom he should appoint.

Hopper presents Taylor’s choice to various political committees, but they become furious, saying they want someone else instead, a man who would fight for reform.  As this would likely be someone who would ask too many questions about the Deficiency Bill, Taylor tells Hopper that is out of the question.

At the dinner table that night, Hopper’s own children, most of whom are boys, seem to be aware of Taylor’s influence over him, making fun of him, and they tell him that he should appoint Jefferson Smith, who is an expert in woodcraft and is head of the Boy Rangers.  Smith recently made headlines when he singlehandedly put out a forest fire.  Throughout this movie, Smith is associated with boys and nature, each of which is supposed to be indicative of his basic goodness.  He apparently makes a living in his role as head of the Boy Rangers and by publishing Boy’s Stuff, a newspaper of interest to boys.

Hopper decides to appoint Smith, and Paine and Taylor eventually agree that having a country bumpkin as senator will work in their favor, since he will be too naïve to interfere with their plans. And since Boy’s Stuff is read by fifty thousand boys, that means votes, since the boys have a hundred thousand parents.  I guess girls can read the paper too, if they want.

At the reception where Smith is being honored as the next senator from the state, he is seated next to his widowed mother, Ma Smith (Beulah Bondi), with whom he lives.  In real life, people have different situations, so if a bachelor lives with his mother, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other.  But if a bachelor lives with his mother in a movie, that does mean something.  In this case, by emphasizing his role as child of a parent, it reinforces the boyish nature of Jefferson Smith.

No mention is made of Smith’s education level.  Once again, in real life, a man’s education level has no special significance by itself.  But in a movie like this, reference to his education is avoided for a reason. For one thing, we are supposed to think of Smith as being naïve, and his having a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, for example, would have worked against his supposed lack of sophistication. For another thing, he is too much like a boy for us to imagine him in college.  Physiologically he may be sexually mature, but psychologically he seems prepubescent.  I have a hard enough time imagining him in high school.  To say he is a virgin is an understatement.  We cannot even picture him taking a woman out on a date and giving her a goodnight kiss.

It is at the reception that Senator Paine realizes that Jefferson Smith’s father was Clayton Smith, when Jefferson tells of how the senator and his father went to school together and were great friends, recalling how his father said, “Joe Paine was the finest man he ever knew.”  The next day, while on the train the two men are taking to Washington, D.C., they reminisce.  Paine talks of how he and Clayton were both “champions of lost causes” when they were young. Clayton was the editor of a “little four-page paper,” which Paine compares to Jefferson and his little paper, Boy’s Stuff.  Paine then recalls Clayton’s last fight, which was against a mining syndicate:  “And all to defend the right of one small miner who stuck to his claim.  They tried everything.  Bribery, intimidation…  And then…”

Jefferson finishes the thought, telling of how his father was found murdered, shot in the back, slumped over his desk.  He concludes, “I suppose when a fellow bucks up against a big organization like that, one man by himself can’t get very far.”  The story of how one man went up against a ruthless organization and was defeated prepares us for what will be Jefferson Smith’s similar struggle and defeat later in the movie.

Smith gets to Washington D.C. in all his wide-eyed, open-mouthed innocence. He actually says, “Gee whiz!” on four different occasions.  He wanders off, visiting the monuments.  He looks affectionately down at a little boy reading out loud the Gettysburg Address that is inscribed on a wall, once more establishing an association between him and young boys.

In the meantime, we are introduced to the woman assigned to be his secretary, a hardboiled dame who is referred to by everyone as Saunders (Jean Arthur). She is contacted by Senator Paine’s assistant, Chick McGann (Eugene Pallette), who is desperately trying to find out where Smith has disappeared to.  She derisively refers to Smith as Daniel Boone, once more establishing a connection between him and nature. Incidentally, she already has suspicions about the proposed Willet Creek Dam.

Eventually, Smith shows up.  When surrounded by reporters, asking if he has any ideas he’d like to promote now that he’s a senator, Smith says he’d like to have a National Boys Camp in his state, to get the boys off the city streets, letting them spend a few months in the country during the summer, where they could “learn something about nature and American ideals.”  I’m sure the boys would learn about nature, but exactly how being out in the woods can teach them anything about American ideals is beyond me.  Let me try to imagine it:  “Look at that stream, boys.  The water moves freely, and freedom is one of the American ideals.”  Or possibly, “It has started raining, and we are all getting wet, because all men are created equal.”

This is to be distinguished from the conservative notion that people who live in rural communities or small towns are morally superior to people who live in the city.  We saw that idea fully developed in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).  However dubious these claims about shaping character may be, at least we understand them.  But that is to be distinguished from the claim that being out in the woods will teach boys about things like democracy, liberty, and equality, and do so in a manner that cannot be done in a city.

As for getting girls off the city streets and into the woods where they can learn about nature and American ideals, Smith isn’t concerned about them.  But I digress.

The reporters get Smith to pose for pictures making bird calls, and they quote some of the things he says, making him appear to be ridiculous.  This makes him furious.  Like Longfellow Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Smith becomes violent.  He seeks out the reporters and punches each one of them in the face. As with Deeds, we are supposed to applaud this behavior as being righteous. The basic goodness of men like Longfellow Deeds and Jefferson Smith, associated with small towns and rural communities, is not inconsistent with their physical attacks on others.  They are men of honor, totally justified in defending that honor with their fists when subjected to scorn or ridicule by the words of those that are smarter, better educated, and more sophisticated.  In neither movie are these two men arrested for assault.

Realizing that the reporters he punched in the face are right, that he is just an honorary stooge, he goes to Senator Paine in hopes that he can become more knowledgeable about things.  Paine encourages Smith to work on a bill for his National Boys Camp, imagining this will keep Smith out of the way.  As it turns out, Smith figures he will need about two hundred acres for his project in the very area where Paine and Taylor have been buying land for the Willet Creek Dam.

While all this is going on, we see that the Senate swarms with pages, who are young boys.  The principal one is played by Dickie Jones, who was twelve years old at the time.  All the other boys seem to be about the same age.  Pages that young did exist in the Senate at the time this movie was made, but nothing like this has ever been seen in any other movie set in the United States Senate. In Advise & Consent (1962), for example, we don’t see any young boys at all.  By this time, I hardly need to point out that this is the movie’s umpteenth way of making the association between Smith and young boys.

But as if that isn’t enough, Capra takes things one step further.  Initially, Saunders expresses her exasperation at having to deal with Smith:  “Me sitting around playing straight for that phony patriotic chatter.  Carrying bibs for an infant with little flags in his fist.”  But after helping him write his bill and guide him on how to proceed in the Senate from her seat in the gallery, she tells reporter Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell) how her feelings for Smith had changed: “I felt just like a mother sending the kid off to school for the first time. Watching her little fellow toddling off in his best bib and tucker.  Hoping he can stand up to the other kids.”  At a later point in the movie, Taylor refers to Smith as a “drooling infant.”

Capra seems to be embracing a philosophy especially associated with that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his book Émile, Rousseau averred that “all is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, all degenerates in the hands of men.”  In an earlier work, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, he argued that it is civilization that has corrupted man; for in a state of nature, he is noble and good. Modern liberal thought has been the heir to this legacy from the Enlightenment. Liberal politicians and social scientists, following in the footsteps of Rousseau, typically find the source of evil to lie in social influences, such as poverty, drugs, child abuse, and penal institutions, rather than in the individual himself.  Man, after all, is basically good. If a man becomes a criminal, it is because society has corrupted him.  Conservative thinkers, on the other hand, tend to place the blame for crime on the criminal himself.  If a man breaks the law, he alone is responsible.  If anything, conservatives tend to accept the Christian doctrine of original sin, that man is basically evil.  So, it is paradoxical that Capra, a conservative Republican, would be espousing the liberal philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, first by establishing an association between Smith and nature, and second by emphasizing his childlike mentality. The younger a person is in Rousseau’s philosophy, the less chance there is for him to have been corrupted by civilization.  Hence, the need to push Smith’s psychological age back toward infancy.

In any event, when Senator Paine hears that Smith’s bill involves the same land that he and Taylor have planned for their Willet Creek Dam, they try to talk Smith out of promoting his bill for a National Boys Camp. Smith refuses, and the next day, on the floor of the Senate, Smith begins to raise objections to the part of the Deficiency Bill that proposes the building of the Willet Creek Dam. At that point, Paine accuses Smith of having secretly bought up the land in that area in order to make money selling the land for his National Boys Camp, should that bill pass, and calls for Smith’s expulsion from the Senate.  Paine and Taylor have had documents forged with Smith’s signature to support that claim, which they bring before the Committee for Privileges and Elections.

Although I am primarily interested in the ideology being presented in this movie, I cannot allow this to pass without noting a logical absurdity.  The charge against Smith is that he has secretly bought up the land around Willet Creek, hoping to make a big profit if his bill for the National Boys Camp is passed.  But all Smith needed to do at his hearing before the Committee for Privileges and Elections was to point out that if he had surreptitiously bought up that land in hopes of making a lot of money, he would simply have supported the Deficiency Bill and made the same amount of money, if not more, when the Willet Creek Dam was built.  However, it does not occur to anyone to make this point.

And so, we now arrive at the iconic filibuster.  Smith holds the floor for hours, accusing Paine and Taylor of corruption.  Saunders passes Smith a note, telling him she is in love with him.  He is exhilarated, giving him the energy to continue the filibuster.

Because Taylor owns or controls newspapers and radio stations, he has them spread the lies about Smith back in his state and around the nation.  To counter this, Saunders comes up with the idea of having Boy’s Stuff print the truth.  She calls Smith’s mother, who agrees with the idea.  During their conversation, Smith’s mother calls Saunders “Clarissa,” and she calls her “Ma.”  It is clear that Saunders and Smith will get married when this is over.  However, if you think there will be a final scene in which Jefferson takes Clarissa in his arms and kisses her, you haven’t been paying attention.

As for Saunder’s idea about using Boy’s Stuff to get out the truth, Taylor’s henchmen destroy the papers as they are being distributed, assault the boy in charge of printing them, and run a bunch of boys off the road, injuring them. Ma Smith tells Saunders they have to stop.

And then arrive the fifty thousand telegrams accusing Smith of graft.  It was bad enough having to be attacked by Taylor’s political machine, and especially hurtful to be betrayed by Paine, but when the ordinary citizens from all around the nation send telegrams denouncing Smith, that is what really breaks his heart.  He manages to say a few words to Paine, reminding him about the lost causes he once believed in.  Smith then vows to continue, but it’s too much for him, and he collapses.

There is just one thing Paine needed to do at this point:  Nothing.  Smith would have been expelled and sent back home.  Paine and Taylor would have made millions on the land around Willet Creek after the Deficiency Bill passed.  And Paine would have gone on to become president of the United States.

Instead, what follows takes less than two minutes.  Paine leaves the floor of the Senate, and then a shot is heard. He had become so overwhelmed by Smith’s noble stand, and by his own wicked behavior, that he had taken out his pistol and tried to commit suicide.  When prevented from doing so, he rushes onto the floor of the Senate, saying that he has been lying about Smith, and that everything Smith has been saying is true.  Pandemonium breaks out as Smith’s limp body is carried off the floor.  The End.

I have never seen a pig in real life.  I have lived all my life in one city or another, so I did not encounter any pigs the way one might who lived on a farm.  I don’t recall seeing a pig in a zoo.  Nor did that surprise me.  I went to the zoo to see lions, monkeys, and elephants, not to see farm animals like chickens, cows, and pigs.

And so it was that my earliest familiarity with pigs was by way of cartoons. There was Porky Pig in the Looney Tunes cartoons, and there was Three Little Pigs (1933), produced by Walt Disney.  In this story, the pigs were harmless creatures, in danger of being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf.  As for Porky Pig, he was simply comical, not threatening to anyone.  My parents taught me the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy,” and when I was five years old, I had a piggy bank.

Eventually, I saw real pigs in the movies.  It was clear that taking care of pigs on a farm was not a manly chore.  Slopping the hogs was a task often performed by a woman while her husband was out plowing the north forty. Even children were capable of dealing with these animals.  In Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood leaves his young son, who is around twelve years old, to take care of the farm for a few days, telling him to keep the hogs that have fever separated from the rest.  In this movie, Eastwood plays a humiliated version of the Man with No Name, who has been reduced to the ignominious role of a hog farmer.

In The Wild Bunch (1969), after William Holden and his companions have wiped out an entire fort of Mexicans, bounty hunter Strother Martin arrives with his cohorts, and seeing all the corpses that can be looted, exclaims, “This is better than a hog killing,” suggesting that killing a bunch of pigs can be great fun.

In Hud (1963), there is a rodeo somewhere in the middle of the movie.  There are dangerous events in a rodeo, especially riding a brahma bull.  But then there is a little comic relief, the pig scramble, where a bunch of pigs are greased up, and the challenge is to catch one.  Paul Newman decides to participate in that event.  He tries to get Patricia Neal to come along and watch, but she decides to stay home, saying, “I don’t like pigs,” referring to Newman, punning off the fact that the word “pig” is used to characterize someone as disgusting.

The pig might even be used for barnyard sex.  In Deliverance (1972), there is a cracker that has apparently been used to having sex with pigs.  Of course, those pigs were sows, you understand. Nothing queer about this fellow.  But Ned Beatty reminds him so much of a sow that he just has to pull his pants down and pork him in the butt, even going so far as to twist Beatty’s ear, making him squeal like a pig.

In other words, given what I learned from cartoons and movies like these, I had no respect for pigs. As a result, I was somewhat taken aback when I found out that the Fourth Labor of Heracles was the Erymanthian Boar.  Was this worthy of Heracles?  Granted, he had to bring the boar back alive, which would be a bit of a challenge.  Still, I dismissed it as the result of having to find twelve labors for him to perform.  Someone was running out of ideas, so he came up with this one for lack of imagination.

But I was really confounded when I read about the Calydonian Boar Hunt.  It seems that there was this boar that was killing the cattle and laborers of Oeneus, King of Calydon.  So, there was nothing for him to do but to send out heralds, inviting the bravest fighters of Greece at that time.  Over a dozen showed up, most of whom I barely recognized, but which did include Theseus, Jason, and Atlanta.  “It took all these guys to kill some pig?” I said to myself in disbelief.  And not just any guys, but heroes of mythological stature.  I am clearly not alone in this.  There have been movies based on Jason and the Argonauts, and there have been movies based on the Trojan War.  But I have never seen a movie about the Calydonian Boar Hunt.

I have seen Home from the Hill (1960), though, in which killing a pig is a big deal and a major plot point.  However, I suppose I should start from the beginning.

The title of this movie comes from the poem “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.  After the credits, the last two lines of this poem are presented as a prologue, but the entire poem is short enough to quote in full:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

I’m not much on interpreting poetry, but I think I can handle this one.  The “author” is someone that has reached the end of his life and is reconciled to it. The last two lines have the word “home” in it. It is common for someone that approaches death to want to go home, whatever that is for him.  At the end of Gone With the Wind, for example, Rhett Butler tells Scarlett that he may go back to Charleston, where he was born, in hopes of finding peace.  In the novel, unlike the movie, it is clear that Rhett is nearing the end of his life.

The title of the movie Home from the Hill suggests that the death in question will be that of a hunter. In the opening scene, there are several men hiding among the reeds, preparing to shoot some geese about to fly overhead.  One of the hunters is Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum), big landowner in some rural county in East Texas.  Another is Rafe Copley (George Peppard), who notices that one of the dogs starts looking off to the left.  Rafe sees what the dog sees and pushes Wade to the ground just as we hear the sound of a shotgun going off.  In so doing, he saves Wade’s life.  Wade is hit in his shoulder, but today is not his day to die.

The other hunters catch the man that shot Wade.  Wade doesn’t know him, but he is apparently supposed to know the man’s wife.  The man tells him to leave his wife Ellie alone.  Wade tells the man that he must have problems at home, meaning that he isn’t able to satisfy his wife sexually, and so she has to look elsewhere for that.  As far as Wade is concerned, any self-respecting man would leave a wife that cheated on him, not try to get her lover to quit having sex with her.  Having sized him up, Wade tells the other hunters to let the man go, even allowing him to keep his shotgun. Wade isn’t worried.  He can tell that this fellow isn’t man enough to shoot him again, saying, “You don’t have another shot in you.”

The doctor that treats Wade says he is going to get killed one of these days, if he keeps poaching on other men’s preserves, but Wade says that he figures he has the right to cross over another man’s fences whenever he’s out hunting. Needless to say, the words “poaching” and “hunting” refer to Wade’s habit of having sex with other men’s wives.  It turns out, as we learn from his conversation with Rafe, regarding the wife of the man that shot him, that Wade doesn’t know which one she was, even though the husband said her name was Ellie.  We also learn during this conversation that Wade does more than just employ Rafe for various purposes.  He also supports him for some reason.

When Wade gets home, his wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker) has already heard the news by way of three anonymous phone calls.  She comments that the husband that shot him had only been married to his wife for three months. Three months?  Most women have to be married for at least two years before you can reasonably expect to have a chance with them.

Anyway, if Wade can’t remember which one Ellie was, he must have had a lot of women during that three-month period.  Like the doctor, Hannah says that one of these days some husband will kill him. Inasmuch as Hannah and Wade no longer love each other, she doesn’t much care if Wade gets himself killed, except to ask what she will tell their son.  Wade says to tell him it wouldn’t have happened if there was something for him to stay home for.  Hannah says that they won’t tell him anything and walks out of the room.

Their son is Theron (George Hamilton), who is seventeen years old.  We see him walking around town on Saturday night, not quite knowing what to do with himself.  A bunch of men, the hunters that were with Wade in the opening scene, are sitting around whitling or playing a harmonica.  One of the men refers to Theron as Wade’s boy, but another corrects him, saying he’s Hannah’s boy.  In fact, he’s such a momma’s boy that Wade has never taken him hunting with him, so they figure Theron doesn’t even know there is no such thing as snipe hunting at night.  When Theron walks near them, they start conning him into going snipe hunting.

They leave him out in the middle of the woods, holding a sack and blowing a birdcall.  Two hours later, Theron still hasn’t shown up.  The men are surprised, one saying that most figure out they’ve been had after fifteen minutes.  They are about to go get him when Wade shows up looking for Theron, saying his mother is worried about him.  They take him out to where Theron is, still holding the sack and blowing the birdcall.

In a community where hunting is held in such high esteem, Theron has suffered the ultimate humiliation. When they get home, Wade follows Theron to his room.  Theron wonders why he was so easily fooled. Wade tells him that he would have taken him in tow long ago, were it not for a promise he made to his mother when Theron was born.  “To keep me in short pants for the rest of my life?” Theron asks, indignantly.

“Something like that,” Wade replies.  He looks around the room.  It is said that a person’s room is like an animal’s lair.  By examining what is in a cave where an animal lives, you can tell what kind of animal it is. In the center of Theron’s room is a table with his stamp collection on it and some rocks that he has been collecting as well.  Off to one side is a telescope.  Hanging on the wall are picture frames displaying various collections:  butterflies, seashells, arrowheads.  Also on the wall is a large map of the world.  We see a badminton racket and a tennis racket.  In addition to a bed, there is a turquoise-colored armchair.  Finally, there is a small fireplace.  “This is a boy’s room,” Wade says. “Come on downstairs.  I’ll show you how a man lives.”

Apparently, Theron has never before been downstairs to see Wade’s den.  The color theme of the room is cordovan.  There are rifles and shotguns displayed on the wall, with additional rifles in a cabinet, every one of which is kept loaded.  Also on the wall are the heads of stuffed deer, and fine fish specimens are displayed in their own section.  Three hound dogs are lying around the room, ready to go on a hunt at a moment’s notice.  In front of a leather chair is a bearskin rug.  There is a fireplace so big that if you didn’t mind bending over, you could get yourself completely inside of it. Above the mantel is the stuffed head of a boar.  Earlier in the evening, the men responsible for the snipe hunt made reference to the fact that Wade had killed the last wild boar in the county.  Wade gets himself a beer, sits down in the chair, and addresses Theron, standing before him:

I had something from my father that his father gave to him.  I’m going to give it to you.  It’s late, but it’s not too late.  You know, one of these days, I’m going to die, Theron.  You’re going to come into forty thousand acres of land:  cotton, beef, goats, timber.  It takes a special kind of man to handle that.  The kind of man that walks around with nothing in his pocket:  no identification, because everybody knows who you are; no cash, because anybody in town will be happy to lend you anything you need; no keys, because you don’t keep a lock on a single thing you own; and no watch, because time waits on you.  What I’m saying is you’re going to have to stand up and be counted. You’re going to be known in these parts as a man, or as a momma’s boy.

Theron swears that what happened that night will never happen again.  Given that declaration, Wade tells him to throw away all those toys in his room, that from now on he’ll be learning in the woods. He will learn to hunt, not to bring meat home for supper, but to confront dangerous animals that require courage to face, because what every man really hunts is himself.  This is the third meaning of the word “hunt.”  The first was for food, and the second was for women.  But now the word is given existential significance.  In order for someone to prove to himself that he is a real man, he must put himself in danger by confronting an animal capable of killing him.

When Hannah finds out what Wade has planned, she becomes angry, reminding Wade of the promise he made her when Wade was born, that promise being the only reason she stayed, even though behind the locked door of her bedroom.  Wade defiantly says that it was seventeen years ago and that he is breaking that promise.  Wade turns Theron over to Rafe to learn about hunting, and after a while, Theron becomes a good hunter himself.

Then comes the night that the same men who set Theron on a snipe hunt come over to Wade’s house to tell him that a wild boar, one that has probably come over from Louisiana, is tearing up their farms.  This is like the opposite of the Calydonian Boar Hunt.  Whereas Oeneus enlisted great hunters to help him kill a boar, these hunters are coming to Wade to get him to kill a boar, saying they just rent the land they live on from him, so it’s his responsibility.  The rational approach to this problem would be for Wade to lead these hunters in search of this boar.  Then, when they found him, the whole bunch of them could have just let that pig have it from all sides.  But Wade decides this is Theron’s chance to live down the snipe hunt, so he sends Theron into the woods, basically by himself, with Rafe as backup.  But even that was not good enough as far as Theron is concerned, so he ditches Rafe and heads out by himself, killing that boar with one shot as it charges toward him.

A little more than a year ago, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said people need AR-15s to kill “feral pigs.” Now, I’m all in favor of banning assault rifles, but I have to admit that if I had to go after the boar in this movie all by myself, I’d want an AR-15.  Wade gave Theron a rifle with a lever action, telling him he will get only one shot, and then he should climb up a tree with low branches. With an AR-15, however, Theron would have been able to just empty his clip and turn that pig into sausage. But in that case, killing that pig wouldn’t have any existential significance.

As it is, Theron is now a real man.  Well, almost.  Theron is still something of a momma’s boy when it comes to girls.  He wants to ask out a girl named Libby (Luana Patten) to a dance, but he can’t work up the nerve.  So, he talks a reluctant Rafe into asking her for him.  That’s pretty dorky, but amazingly enough, she agrees to the date.  Unfortunately, Theron gets the worst of both worlds. Whereas those men that took Theron on a snipe hunt agreed that he was Hannah’s boy, Libby’s father, Albert (Everett Sloan), thinks of him as Wade’s boy.  Not wanting his daughter to be the next conquest of a Hunnicutt male, he refuses to let Libby go out with him.

It turns out that after Wade and Hanah returned from Europe where they spent their honeymoon, Hannah then being four-months pregnant, she found out that Wade had an illegitimate, five-year-old son named Rafe.  That is why she has refused to have sex with Wade all these years.  And that is why Wade has become such a womanizer.  And perhaps that’s why Wade now seems to prefer married women, having learned the mistake of having sex with a woman that is single.  Now when he gets some man’s wife pregnant, it’s not a problem, because she’s already married.  The cuckold gets cuckooed.

Meanwhile, Libby starts seeing Theron on the sly, without her father realizing it.  She introduces Theron to the ways of love.  And now his passage into manhood has become complete. Unfortunately, Libby gets pregnant, the very thing her father was worried about, except that she seduced Theron rather than the other way around.  Just as she is about to tell Theron about her situation, he tells her that after learning about the awful marriage his parents are stuck in, and about the way his father has refused to acknowledge Rafe as his son, he has decided he doesn’t want to ever marry anyone, and so he breaks up with Libby.

She’s too nice to force him to marry her.  One day in the grocery store, she runs into Rafe.  In desperation, she tries to rope him into marriage, but she can’t pull it off.  However, he is in love with her too, and his experience as an illegitimate child makes him especially sympathetic to her plight. He asks her to marry him, and she tearfully accepts.  After all, these were the days in which a woman could be ruined for life. Her parents know she is pregnant, but she refused to tell them who the father was. They are so grateful that Rafe is willing to marry her that they leave the house to them, apparently for good. The movie doesn’t tell us where her parents went to live, but Rafe and Libby have the place to themselves.  Rafe is such a nice guy that on their wedding night, he tells her nothing has to happen unless she says it happens, and he sleeps in a separate room.  But not long after that, she invites Rafe into her bed, for she has come to love him now.

After she has the baby, there is a christening at the church.  Those same hunters we have seen throughout the movie notice that the baby has the Hunnicutt look, and they figure that Wade must be the father and that he paid Rafe to marry Libby.  Albert, Libby’s father, overhears them.  He goes over to Wade’s house, quietly removes a rifle from the cabinet, and shoots Wade when he turns around.

And that’s too bad, because Wade and Hannah had just reconciled, agreeing to return to Naples, where they had been happy in the first months of their marriage.  So, even though Wade was already home, in the literal sense, and had been living there all these years, this return to Naples would be a kind of returning home in a figurative sense, to a place of peace.  But since the desire to return to a place that is home has a strong association with death, it is fitting that Wade ends up dying before he and Hannah can actually make that trip.

Theron discovers his dying father.  Not knowing who killed him, but seeing whoever it was drive off in Wade’s truck, he gets a rifle and chases after him. When he catches up with Albert, he almost shoots him, but stops.  However, Albert raises his rifle, and Theron kills him in self-defense, right after which Rafe arrives.  Rafe tries to get him to come back, but Theron says he could never face Libby again, having killed her father.  In addition, he probably realizes that he was the father of Libby’s baby.  He tells Rafe he is leaving.

This final scene occurs near Sulfur Bottoms, a low-lying area emitting marsh gas and full of quicksand. Twice before, Theron has been warned that not under any circumstances is he to go into Sulfur Bottoms, once when Wade first brought him out in the woods to hunt, and again when Wade sent Theron out to hunt the wild boar.  Having been twice presaged, this third scene near Sulfur Bottoms is of undeniable significance.  If home represents death, granting the peace that people imagine they will find when they go to Heaven, then Sulfur Bottoms is that other form of death, the death that is punishment for one’s sins, the death of Hell.  It is clear that Theron intends to go into Sulfur Bottoms, as a way of doing penance for the sins of his troubled soul.

In the final scene, Rafe finds Hannah at Wade’s grave.  She invites him to read the tombstone.  At the bottom, it says that Wade was the father of Raphael and Theron.  Rafe invites Hannah to come live with him and Libby, so that she won’t be alone in the big house, and she can help Libby with the baby, her grandson.  She accepts.  In what is the final line in the movie, Rafe says to her, “Let’s us go on home,” once again expressing a desire for peace.  It is fitting that the words are uttered in a cemetery, making the link with death once again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you kidding?” he says affectionately.

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

That was a first in the movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.