The Saddest Clown

One of the first comedies I have any immediate memory of watching is Buster Keaton's 'The General'. I recall sitting in front of the television with a bowl of popcorn in my lap and staring at that silent wonder. Oddly enough, I have no memory of actually laughing. But then, I never laughed at 'A Night at the Opera' until I was much older, either. But there must have been something in the sad-faced, unsmiling, intensely likable little clown that made me love him, because I watched 'The General' over and over again, on an old VHS rented from a college library. Now, several years since then, I am a film student. If I wanted to, I could analyze every joke, every sight gag, and try to discern why it works. I could attempt a genre analysis, or question where Keaton's sympathetic representation of the South during the Civil War fits into the contemporary historical discourse. But all of that, while interesting in itself, would do nothing to contribute to that warm, wonderful feeling I had when I was eight years old, when cinema's saddest clown first popped up on my television screen.

'The General' might be Keaton's best known film--it is the one the tends to appear on Best Comedy lists. But in many ways, as time has gone on, I find myself preferring his more manic works: 'Our Hospitality', 'Sherlock Jr.', 'Steamboat Bill Jr.', 'College', etc. Most of the set-ups are intended to showcase Keaton's remarkable physical talent: the storm at the end of 'Steamboat', the various athletic activities in 'College', the ever-present chase sequences in 'Hospitality' and 'Sherlock'. 'The General', in this sense, is his most perfectly realized narrative film, in that it constructs a story interesting in itself, that would hold the viewer's attention even without the gags. Try as I might, I cannot quite recall the entire story of 'Sherlock Jr.', except that it involves a dream sequence, a damsel in distress, and a typically useless detective who saves the day.

It's difficult to even attempt to write about Keaton because his work, more so even than that of his silent-era compatriots, is so visual, the very embodiment of pure cinema. Keaton rarely, if ever, smiles in his pictures, yet he is never dour. The audience never truly laughs at him, as we do at the violence perpetrated by the Three Stooges, because he is the likable little guy. More often than not, he is also very perspicacious. In 'Our Hospitality', he concocts scheme after scheme to keep from the leaving the house of his enemies who, following their genteel Southern code, will not kill him as long as he's a guest in their home. And the way he avoids leaving the house is a sight to behold, rushing in and out of doors, faking out the two brothers and their father who try their best to get him to leave. At the conclusion of the picture, after he has rescued the girl he loves in a miraculous (and seemingly effortless) feat of daring involving a log, a rope and a waterfall, the men of the family discover him and the daughter embracing in her room, having just been married. As the men put down their guns and welcome him to the family, Keaton watches them warily. And then, in the best gag the film has yet offered, he proceeds to unload a veritable stockpile of weaponry from his clothes. The little clown was prepared for all eventualities.

Keaton's career was ultimately a sad one.  Like so many of his silent-era compatriots, the advent of sound injured his box office take.  He succumbed to the travails of alcoholism and appeared in only a handful of films, among them as a washed up silent star in 'Sunset Boulevard'.  His last great performance was as Charlie Chaplin's old partner in 'Limelight' in which, for five glorious minutes, the two greatest clowns of the silent screen proved yet again that one does not need noisy jokes or silly voices to make perfect comedy.  Just the brilliance, the sheer genius, to know what makes people laugh.  

It is easy to be nostalgic for those good ol' days, particularly when the best comedians today have little to offer but scatological humor and tired re-treads of the same old schtick.  It would do to remember that men like Keaton made the least humorous things funny: poverty, war, starvation, natural disasters.  Keaton found the absurdity in such devastating occurrences.  He made sure that the little guy always won.  After Dane Cook, Will Ferrell, and the Apatow Factory have all gone the way of the dodo, the saddest clown will still remain, an unsmiling reminder of just how funny life can be.  

Planes, Trains, and Cinema

The day that trains ceased to be the most popular form of transportation was a sad day for cinema. For decades they had been the stars of countless thrillers and screwball comedies, exploited for their twisting narrow claustrophobia, the privacy of their first-class berths, and the serendipity of public dining cars where you could be seated at a table with anyone (or someone very specific if you bribed the steward). Trains allowed for a cross-section of the population to be in close proximity for a short while and then go their separate ways. Tennis stars and oedipally stunted dandies, men on the run and cool worldly blondes, heiresses and impoverished musicians, notorious vamps and missionary priests, cross-dressing fugitives and sex-kittenish ukulele-players, shy wallflowers and impecunious charmers, millionaires and entire “Ale and Quail” clubs--fate brings all these together for a time to forward the plots of their various cinematic journeys. In fact there seems to be no other form of transportation more suited to film. Cars provide room for only a few passengers and buses are at once too communal and too confined to offer the same variety of plots that a train can. Which isn’t to say that buses and cars don’t have their place in movies (the road movie is a whole genre in itself), but simply that they don’t touch on the breadth of possibilities that trains offered in their hey-day.

Trains have played a vital role in film history from its very start. Arguably the first horror film and the first western featured trains. The “horror” film is a little actuality by the Lumière brothers in 1895 of a train arriving head on into a station, which according to the advertising sent the audience fleeing for the exits in fear for their lives. The western is The Great Train Robbery from 1903, one of the most effective early film narratives. The comedic value of locomotion, however, was most thoroughly explored for the first time in the 1920s by Buster Keaton. He gave us two of the most delightful train journeys in silent film history, Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927). Both films are comedies of Southern manners, and Our Hospitality begins the long and very fruitful tradition of a fateful romantic entanglement beginning in a shared train compartment. This would continue in screwball comedies and thrillers throughout ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. By the ‘60s most trains came equipped with a mysteriously obliging blonde who would unquestioningly aid our desperate heroes in their hour of need.

The great writer/director of the early 1940s, Preston Sturges, understood well the comedic value of the atmosphere of those close quarters, from the awkward athletics involved in jumping on and off the freight cars of Sullivan’s Travels, to the awkward athletics (and sensuous possibilities) of a stranger climbing in and out of an upper berth in Palm Beach Story, to even more awkward revelations which can occur in the privacy first class sleeping compartment of a honeymooning couple in The Lady Eve. Still the unimpeachable master of both locomotive comedy and suspense is Alfred Hitchcock, and The Lady Vanishes from 1938 is the quintessential train movie, encapsulating all the romantic, comedic, and thrilling possibilities which train travel lends itself to. Iris Henderson is a young English woman traveling in a central European alpine nation as the world teeters on the brink of war, more importantly she teeters on the brink of marriage to a “blue-blooded cheque-chaser,” and a teetering flowerpot meant for rather whimsical old governess thrusts her into the midst of an international situation. Stuck on a train with a slight concussion Iris is forced to rely on her fellow passengers, the majority of whom wish to convince her that she is hallucinating. It is Hitchcock at his most sparkling, and its locomotive setting shows the director in his element. He was fascinated by the way people were thrown together through train travel. The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Suspicion all deal with the romantic possibilities in meeting strangers on trains. Strangers on a Train though, plays with the opposite possibility--sharing a train compartment with a psychopath.

Today most people travel by airplane rather than trains, and though they are used for pretty much the same purpose, an airplane is far more limiting cinematically than a train. Their cabins are too big for privacy, and the various nooks and crannies are too small to provide good cover. There is no place to hide on a normal airplane, so directors often create huge multi-layer luxury-liners of jets, which so little resemble the planes that us plebs fly on that it is hard for audiences to connect them with their own experiences. The Jodie Foster film Flightplan exemplifies this problem. The pitch might intrigue--“The Lady Vanishes, but on a plane”--but in order to allow a vanishing to occur the director destroys any claustrophobia that might be invoked by making the plane itself is so huge that it seems like a flying office building. The familiarity that the movie tries to breed by being set in a space that the majority of its audience have been at one time or another is negated as Jodie Foster’s character descends into the bowels of this beast whose vastness is belied by the confines of its fuselage.

None of this is to say that it isn’t possible to make a good movie set on an airplane. Only a month before the release of Flightplan Wes Craven’s admirably tense airline thriller Red Eye came out. This film exploited rather than fought the fact that there is no place to hide on a plane, and used to great effect the terror familiar to every traveler of having a seatmate from hell. An absolutely top-notch B movie (complete with a ludicrous final act) it doesn’t try to take the elements of a train thriller and simply set them on a plane, but finds a way to work with its environment rather than struggle against it. Hitchcock would have been proud.

In The Eye of the Beholder

What makes greatness in acting? There are any number of lists out there, some fan-made, some critical, some created by 'legitimate' organizations like AFI or BFI, listing the '100 Greatest Actors of All-Time'.  A number often top the list: Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and, more recently, Johnny Depp.  There seems to be little disagreement that those actors are indeed great, though their order of greatness is, like any other 'Top' list, open for debate.  And what about the ones put down lower on that same list, or the ones not there at all? Is Peter O'Toole, for instance, really a greater actor than Humphrey Bogart? Is Cary Grant a lesser performer than Gregory Peck?

We tend to think of the 'Method Men' of the 1950s onwards as being somehow greater than the actors of the classical Hollywood era, or their classical counterparts of the stage.  Marlon Brando is 'authentic' in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' in a way that Humphrey Bogart simply is not.  But, consider how authentic 'Streetcar' really is.  It is, after all, a Tennessee Williams play.  Brando's performance is wrenching and raw, but I defy you to name one person of your acquaintance who remotely resembles Stanley Kowalski (and if you can, you might want to run as far away as possible).  Brando is not being realistic, he's being hyper-realistic, externalizing raw emotion and power.  But his performance is as inauthentic as you can get outside of a sociopath.

So authenticity is a bit of dubious category to discuss great acting.  So what is? Here follows my personal criteria, open for debate as always, but it at least gets at some definition of what it takes to be labelled 'great'.

Naturally, I have my own preferences and my own attitudes.  Certain actors who are labelled 'great' leave me scratching my head, or walking out of the theatre.  I am consistently underwhelmed by performers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Jude Law, and Russell Crowe, all of whom have been severally called the 'greatest actors of their generation'.  Heath Ledger seems to me to be one of those actors who might have been, but will never be.  Nannina, I know, reacts badly to Jack Nicholson, whom I consider to be in the realm of the greats.  Personal preference shall probably always play a role when we try to agree what actors are great, good, mediocre and poor.  But I think we can be brought to agree on at least a few things.  

Disclaimer: obviously, I'm talking about all male actors here.  Female actors deserve their own article and I don't have the energy to combine the two. 

   1.  Charisma

Probably the most important factor.  A great actor is one who demands audience attention.  If he is on screen, the audience's eyes must be drawn to him.  Most remarkable is when two charismatic actors share the screen--see Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine duke it out for two hours in 'Sleuth'.  A great actor can also point up the lesser qualities of his co-stars, as his charisma dwarfs otherwise good actors.  A charismatic actor can make a bad guy charming and attractive (Alan Rickman in 'Die Hard'), so much so that we all feel some little sadness at his final, inevitable death.  Charisma is probably undefinable, often subjective, but seems a necessary factor and does not merely relate to physical attractiveness.  You can find an actor charismatic without ever finding him attractive, and it is his charisma (not his abs) that draws you, and the camera, to him.  

2.  Breadth of Character

The ability to portray diverse, contradictory characters seems a necessity for an actor to be truly considered great.  This does not mean that the actor's persona must, therefore, vanish beneath a veneer of characterization.  Most great actors become known for being themselves.  I do not think it goes against an actor to bring his star persona to the screen.  Cary Grant was always Cary Grant, to be sure, but he was also a comedian, a lover, even (nearly) a villain.  The star persona can sometimes be a millstone and prevent the actor from appearing as a true other, a character outside himself.  But his ability to play that persona, and to counteract it, as Henry Fonda did in 'Once Upon a Time in the West' or Grant attempted to do in 'Suspicion', can in itself be called greatness.  Too often we dismiss actors for playing themselves.  What they are really playing is a star persona, a larger-than-life figure of the imagination.  That takes ability.  It can also lead to greatness.     

3. Vocalization

Forgive me for this, but it is my strong belief that a great actor must have a great voice.  Whether the refined, classically trained intonations of a Gielgud, or the nasal, everyman-ness of a Brando or Nicholson, much of the strength of an actor lies in his ability to articulate his lines.  Some actors, like Brando or Dean, founded their acting style in not being understood, making mumbling an act of art.  This style of performance, founded in the Method, works perfectly for certain roles: it would never do for The Wild One to speak Shakespeare.  But it can also limit an actor.  To continue to use Brando as an example, his performance as Marc Antony in 'Julius Caesar' has been derided (rightly, I think) as a case of two acting styles meeting and failing to mesh.  Stanley Kowalski does not belong in ancient Rome and Shakespeare's language does not sit easily on Brando's tongue.  You can't mumble out 'Friends, Romans' and create the desired effect.  His voice feels wildly out of place, particularly surrounded by actors like James Mason and John Gielgud, whose refined voices and classical backgrounds slip perfectly into place in a Shakespeare drama.    

4. Ability

This is what it all comes down to.  A great actor, simply put, can really act.  He can make you feel his character's desperation, humanity; he can find beauty in the ugliest of characters, nuance in the most perfect.  And this does not merely go for drama.  Comedians are consistently undervalued in the list of great actors, but every actor has admitted that tragedy is much easier than comedy.  Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd: all deserve their places in the pantheon.  We tend to award dramatic performances, but how difficult was it for Chaplin to make us laugh at a man eating his shoe? Or for Keaton to find physical humor in a house falling down? Some of Cary Grant's best performances are so good because they do not dwell on the dark side, but give us the joy of seeing a handsome man making a fool of himself, of him making us laugh.  So ability does not merely fall into the realm of tortured characters self-destructing, but also in joyful characters managing against all odds to turn their pathos to humor.  

So here I have shown my colours.  I could give you my personal list of great actors, but in truth they are too numerous and, I feel, impossible to rank.  I cannot in good conscience put Brando or Dean at the top of a list that must include Olivier and Redgrave, and how can one compare? At the very least I can say that, while we must always disagree about this or that performer, we can emphatically agree that there are the great ones out there, who consistently give us moments and movies to argue about, analyze, and enjoy.  Perhaps ultimately greatness is in the eye of the beholder.       

Sink or Swim

I possess a rather unfashionable opinion. An opinion which eleven years ago was once so widely held for a few months that everyone in the interest of not following the crowd unanimously decreed that hence forth (effective around February 18th, 1998) it would be utterly and unforgivably démodé. The opinion is this: “Titanic” is a great film, and I don’t mean this statement to be tempered with any face saving “fors”, “in so far ases”, or “ifs”. “Titanic” certainly has its flaws, and if one element had been out of place it would not be great, as the evidence of the deleted scenes show us (for those who don’t possess the 3 disc ultimate edition the deleted scenes are almost uniformly terrible, and the alternate ending is one of the worst that I have ever seen), but beneath that is a movie that against almost insurmountable odds succeeds.

First of all full disclosure: I saw Titanic in theatres when I was twelve at least five times that I can count, though I’m probably forgetting a sixth, which was pretty much par for the course for a twelve year old girl back in 1997. And I scoured the internet for every picture from the film I could find to create a scrapbook version of the movie in chronological order, complete with quotes (it really is a little like watching the film, but takes less time), which was perhaps a bit obsessive even for a twelve year old girl in 1997. Now that I have guaranteed that none of my friends will ever talk to me again I shall endeavor to claw my way back into your good graces by explaining why.

Well first and foremost I will give you one reason that did not enter into the equation back when I was twelve, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nothing annoyed me more back then than when some condescending fifty-something leaned over and with a wink said “I know why you like Titanic.” Was it so unbelievable to them that I could come to a decision not based on effervescent intoxication of preteen hormones? I actually had to argue my case so frequently that a positive dislike of Leonardo DiCaprio formed that wasn’t dispelled until 2003 and “Catch Me if You Can”. It was the world the movie immersed me in that I loved. The history fascinated me; a PBS documentary on the Titanic that came out in ’95 moved me to tears. The Gilded Age fascinated me. The costumes fascinated me. Sure, I enjoyed the story of Jack and Rose, but it never made me cry, what made me cry were the incidental details on the periphery. The true stories that Jack and Rose ran through in their roller coaster ride for survival – Ida and Isidor Straus lying side by side in their first class berth as water floods beneath them, the middle class father bidding farewell to his wife and two daughters (one of whom is an avatar for real life survivor Eva Hart who recalled her father’s last words to her as “Hold mummy’s hand and be a good little girl”), Captain Smith’s empty-eyed return to the wheel house when he realizes that there was nothing more he could do, Victor Garber’s gentle pathos as the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews. It is the band’s final dirge for the sinking boat, so wonderfully mournful, that strikes the exact right note. Far more moving to me than Rose’s tearful promise to Jack is Father Byles’ recitation of Revelations 21 at the stern of the ship while performing his last mass. These are all real events and real people. That James Cameron was able to include these stories without exploitation or disrespect is the film’s greatest accomplishment. It heightens our understanding of the real tragedy while also deepening our emotions for the fictitious one. It is this combination of reality and fantasy that the genre of the historical epic is based on, and it fails nine times out of ten. Back in 1997 it seemed inevitable that "Titanic" would fail.

In the years after its release on December 19th 1997 “Titanic” has become known for its incredible success, becoming the box office record holder (though it must be said that it would fall from its lofty position if inflation were taken into account) and winning eleven academy awards, tied for first with “Ben-Hur”, and “The Return of the King”. What is forgotten is the fact that “Titanic” was supposed to be “Waterworld” in terms of failure. It was predicted to be mentioned in the same breath as “Heaven’s Gate” and “Cutthroat Island”. It’s budget ballooned from $110 million to $200 million, then the most expensive movie ever made (again not counting inflation), its release date was notoriously shoved back from July 4th weekend to December, never a good sign for a film, and it was over three hours long limiting the number of times that each movie theatre could show it, plus it had no big stars to bring people in. Bill Mechanic, the chairman of Fox which along with Paramount financed the move, when asked by the New York Times about what he had learned from the experience of making “Titanic” replied, “It's a growth experience. Hopefully you won't make the same mistakes again” (NYT Dec 22, 1997). “Titanic” a mistake? It seems unthinkable now, but back in 1997 no one thought that it would make a profit. It was supposed to sink like its subject and namesake. It was a cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris and excess. It was supposed to bring Fox and Paramount down with it, and even after it had been in the number one box office position for three weeks in a row Larry Gerbrandt, a top media research consultant described “Titanic” as being “symptomatic of a fundamental problem in Hollywood. This is the fact that there's an important difference between not losing money and getting a decent return on your investment. The idea is to make a lot of money. When all you do is break even on your biggest film, you do nothing for your bottom line” (NYT Jan 5, 1998). With our hindsight it seems impossible to link “Titanic” with noble failure.

Perhaps it was too popular. Perhaps it won too many awards, but you cannot deny that it deserved the technical Oscars it received. It has the best production values I have ever seen on screen, and possibly the most effective and judicious use of special effects in the past two decades. If you can tell me which scenes were real, which scenes were done with miniatures and green screens, and which were entirely digital I’ll give you a lollipop. But the reason that it is a great movie goes beyond sets and special effects, costumes and cinematography. I am very skeptical about films that are over two hours long (if it is a romantic comedy then ninety minutes is my limit). A film has to earn its running time, and in the countless times I’ve seen it “Titanic” has never bored me. At three and a quarter hours it doesn’t flag. Sure my aunt fell asleep while watching it, and I am willing to accept that there are people out there who never liked it, but whether you like it or not people will still be watching “Titanic” fifty years from now, and any film that is able to connect with that many people over such a long period of time deserves to be given the title great.

Isn't It A Lovely Day to Be Singin' in the Rain: Astaire vs. Kelly and Why I Care

For years, ever since I had the somewhat dubious delight of renting and watching the entirety of  'An American in Paris', I have wondered something: why does Gene Kelly, a man known the world over as one of the finest dancers of his generation, not only not impress me, but annoy me? What is it about his movement that causes me to cringe? Why do I prefer to put on 'Swing Time' rather than 'On the Town'? Why, in short, do I prefer Fred Astaire?

I am not myself a dancer, but I can appreciate good dancing as much as any layman.  I enjoy the elegance of good choreography; as a drummer, I delight particularly in good tap.  And as a woman I appreciate a healthy display of male athleticism and ability.  Perhaps, I thought, my peculiar hang-up, my dislike of Kelly is the same as my inexplicable dislikes of Christian Bale, Montgomery Clift, and a number of other actors, male and female, who simply get on my nerves through no intrinsic fault of their own, through no lack of ability or talent.  We all have our types; perhaps Kelly is simply not mine.  

Then, I came to realize something from an offhand comment thrown out by a film studies professor I just happened to be listening to.  The key differences between Kelly and Astaire, two dancers often compared to each other, are quite simple: Kelly is more athletic, a more bound mover; he also either dances alone or with male partners.  Astaire either dances alone, or with female partners.  At first I thought, how very progressive of Kelly! And then it came to me, my reasons for disliking Kelly.  

It is not that he was progressive, but rather that his performances make dancing the prerogative of men.  Dancing in his hands (or feet) ceases to be the interplay of two bodies flowing in tandem with each other, of two people moving across the floor in synchronicity and understanding, and becomes an athletic performance, the artistic equivalent of a narcissist saying 'Look what I can do!' Even when he dances with women, he does not really dance with them; he dances around them.  They become objects for him to twirl about, not performers in their own right.  He cannot really abide to have a woman equal him in ability.  He never tapped with Anne Miller or Ginger Rogers, who quite frankly would dance him right off the stage.  Most of Mr. Kelly's female partners are either not allowed to equal him if they can, or seem hand-picked they really can't.  Debbie Reynolds in 'Singin' in the Rain' is very nice to look at, but her few dances with Kelly mostly consist of him moving around her.  Leslie Caron is likewise nice, and talented, eye-candy, but is again sidelined in favor of Kelly's overblown balletic histrionics.  Kelly seems much more at ease jumping over chairs with Donald O'Connor than he does putting his arm around Reynolds.  Women are not partners for Gene Kelly; they are props.  

When Astaire wants to dance with an object, he dances with a hat rack; when he dances with a woman, he actually dances with her.  Watch any one of his films with Ginger Rogers.  Each dance is meticulously constructed to prove just how compatible, and combative, these two people are.  'Night and Day' in 'The Gay Divorcee', one of the first true Astaire/Rogers numbers, was meant to, in Astaire's own words, be a substitute for sex; anyone watching the film comes away with the sense that they've just watched a love scene being enacted, in which lips never touch and clothes never come off.  Astaire and Rogers complement each other; their movements are meant to flow continuously together, they mirror one another on many occasions.  Ginger Rogers once famously said that she 'did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels'.  Astaire may always lead, but the focus is rarely on one performer or the other; the dance is not built to show off his physical prowess, but the synchronicity of a couple's movements.  On the occasions when Astaire dances alone, he does so less with a desire to 'show off' (he is never, in other words, proving to Rogers what he can do) and more with the desire to entertain: most of his solo dances take place on stage in front of an audience.  

In fact, if Astaire ever does begin to 'show off', he is usually put promptly in his place.  His tap in front of Rogers in 'Top Hat', where he sings and then dances to 'Isn't It A Lovely Day', begins as a solo performance.  He steps away from her, about to show what he can do.  But Rogers quickly joins him, doing everything he does (and often then some).  Finally, the couple come together and their dance is a joyous union.  Narcissism takes a back seat, even if it is sometimes present.

All of the dances in the Astaire/Rogers films serve in some way to advance the narrative, from the playful dancing of 'Isn't It A Lovely Day' to the more sombre performance in 'Swing Time' of 'Never Gonna Dance'.  They find, lose, and regain each other, all through dance.  Kelly's dances, by contrast, sometimes do not advance the narrative.  His predilection for extended 'dream' or balletic sequences in his films often stop the story flat (see 'An American in Paris', 'On the Town', and 'Singin' In The Rain' some time, if you don't believe me).  He often dances when he feels most alone, giving vent to his desires without the object of desire being present.  Astaire perpetually chases the desire; if Rogers (or Charisse, or Hayworth) is not present, has left him, he often chooses not to dance.   

There are always exceptions, of course, for both men: Astaire dances for, not with Rogers, to 'I Won't Dance'; Kelly and Caron dance together in 'An American in Paris'.  Astaire's later films betray a search for a 'new Ginger', with Fred pairing off with Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Joan Fontaine (!), Judy Garland, and even, God save us, Audrey Hepburn (in another of the long line of films in which Hepburn is paired romantically with a man old enough to be her father).  But I would argue that these films still establish what is so likable about Astaire as a performer: he must have a female partner.  A brilliant dancer in his own right, he is at his best with a woman of equal ability standing opposite.  

Astaire, then, in my opinion, keeps dancing sexual.  His elegant performances with Rogers are love scenes in themselves; no kiss is needed.  Kelly, by far the better looking male of the two, might as well be dancing in front of a mirror.  He is far more interested in making himself look good than he is in flowing with his female partners.  (Astaire, by the way, did not have a corner on the 'older man/younger woman' market: for sheer weirdness, watch an elder Kelly chase after Catherine Deneuve in 'The Young Girls of Rochefort').  Astaire appreciates the importance of the female counterpart.  Kelly might as well be dancing with that hatrack.   

    

 

We've come from "His Girl Friday" to "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"

One of the most pernicious fantasies in which modern filmgoes, critics, and theorist persist is the “look how far we’ve come” mentality. While I cannot deny that Hollywood’s portrayal of ethnic minorities has improved over the course of the century (though apparently Eddie Murphy can still play an owner of a Chinese restaurant with the same stereotyped ticks which Mickey Rooney affected in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), when this mentality is applied to the portrayal of women it hits a serious snag. So by all means let us discuss how far we’ve come.

I have just completed watching Louis Feuillade’s eight-hour silent crime opus, “Les Vampires.” The chief criminal mastermind of the serial, shown throughout 1915 and 1916, was Irma Vep, whose cunning plots stayed always an inch (and often times miles) ahead of our intrepid, and rather boring, hero the newspaper reporter Philippe Guérande. Irma Vep, played by Musidora, is the right-hand woman to the Grand Vampire, the nominal head of the gang, but while Grand Vampires come and go (there are three of them), Irma Vep is forever. She wriggles in and out of each episode clad in black cat-suits and voluminous fur coats, captivating, immoral, and sharply intelligent. She is far more intriguing than say the “villainess” of a recent week’s number one movie who, like so many, doesn’t even have the decency to be human. A female villain today can be omnipotent only so long as she is safely circuits and switches not flesh and blood. “Les Vampires” perhaps is not a revolutionary feminist statement, but it was made five years before women could even vote in the US, and thirty years before that became a possibility in its native France. The advances made in the subsequent generations aren’t necessarily reflected on celluloid. By the time the final episode of “Les Vampires” was shown Musidora was a star, and she went on to write, direct, produce, and act in several features of her own.

Still Irma Vep was a villain and as such was not held to the same standards as the cinematic “good girls” of the same era. People like to make the point that the liberated woman was demonized in these early days of cinema and was always punished for her disregard for social norms. But then where does this place the “serial queens” of the early silent era. “The Hazards of Helen” was a long-running American serial which began a few years before “Les Vampires” reached screens. It’s heroine, Helen, repeatedly had to prove herself in a male dominated world, and her job as a railroad telegraph operator gave her plenty of opportunities to. She is intelligent, athletic and resourceful, and though she is rescued by a handsome hero from time to time (there were over a hundred episodes, they had to change up the formula occasionally), the vast majority of the episodes had her leaping from moving vehicles, or racing a motorcycle over a rising drawbridge. These days, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, women just get in the way of the action, they’re rarely asked to participate in it. The last act of an action movie has become the province of the hero, and no matter how active the heroine she is sidelined for the dénouement not wanting threaten the masculinity of the Adonis who will win her in the end. We like to think that it has always been that way, and that these days with action heroines like The Bride, Trinity, and Fox (“Kill Bill”, “The Matrix”, and “Wanted” for the uninitiated) things are getting better for our amazons, but back in 1934 when Hitchcock made his first version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” it is Leslie Banks, the hero of the piece, who is taken out of commission in the final act, and Edna Best is the only one capable of saving her husband and daughter.

Hitchcock’s heroines, especially his early ones, have a resourcefulness and intelligence that you don’t often find in movies today. While James Stewart is confined to a wheelchair in “Rear Window” it is left to Grace Kelly to be the active half the relationship, climbing fire escapes and shadowing the villain. In “Shadow of a Doubt” it’s Theresa Wright’s young Charlie who has the brains to see her charming uncle for what he really is, and the heroine of “Notorious” goes into the lion’s den to spy, unlike the heroine of “Notorious Redux” AKA “Mission Impossible II” where the heroine goes into the lions den so that the men can spy using a microphone implanted on her body. In fact these days the importance of a female character lands more and more on her body. Hollywood seems to be reluctant to have a female lead, and only seems to give in when it is obvious that it is absolutely necessary for the character to be female… namely she needs to get pregnant at some point in the film (they tried once still keeping the character male, but Schwarzenegger’s “Junior” left a little to be desired). People accuse Hayes Code many times as being a measure used to keep women in their place, but I actually think it did more for women than people realize. It allowed them to be more than bodies, since their bodies became taboo it was their minds that made them desirable. Sure, Claudette Colbert’s legs are praised, but watching her in “Palm Beach Story” or “It Happened One Night” it’s her wit that makes her sexy. In Hayes Code era women often were able to seduce their men through dialogue, rather than anatomy, and far from silencing women it was a time when women’s voices were heard most strongly both on screen, and on the page. Perhaps later I’ll go into the female screenwriters in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, but that's a whole other article in itself.

"On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.” – Anthony Lane

The Woody Allen Factor

Finally, after much to-do, I got around to seeing Woody Allen's newest entry into the 'Woody Allen Canon', 'Vicky Christina Barcelona', at the Angelika in Greenwich Village.  I have always been prepared to like Allen's films.  Indeed, I am one of the defenders of the less-than-perfect late 90s pictures, such as The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Small-Time Crooks.  But Allen has truly entered his latest renaissance.  Far from the pessimistic world-view of Match Point, or the screwball-comedy schtick of Scoop, Vicky Christina Barcelona should rank right up there with the vintage Allen films that crop up on 'Best-Of' lists the world over.  It represents Allen's return to a balance of comedy, tragedy, and romantic pathos, an honest examination of love, sex, madness and the artistic mindset.  

The plot happily avoids typical cliches of the 'stranger in a strange land' motif.   This is not, in other words, Under the Tuscan Sun.  Vicky and Christina find their romantic painter in Juan Antonio, played with warmth by Javier Bardem.  But Juan Antonio does not know more than either woman; he merely has a different outlook.  The film avoids endorsing either the uptight and pragmatic Vicky, the passionate and unfocused Christina, or, for that matter, the elegant and fiery Juan Antonio.  The solution to life's mysteries, particularly love and art, evade them all.

Vicky Christina Barcelona also represents a return to a deeper interest in the concerns of women, a la Hannah and Her Sisters.  Juan Antonio may be the catalyst for Vicky and Christina's self-examination, but the film is much more interested in that self-examination than it is in normative heterosexual relationships.  The man provides an outlet for self-expression, but he remains little more than a cipher through which to view these complex female characters.  Even Juan Antonio's muse, his ex-wife Maria-Elena, is more of an artist.  She hands him his art, inspiring it and shaping it, so that there is no great art without her.  Far from being a male fantasy about having two (and eventually three) women at once, the women dominate the film and the man.  This is more about their desire, and their art, than it is about his.    

Allen has made much of his pessimism and his atheism, which appear to go hand in hand.  But ultimately, Vicky Christina Barcelona is a hopeful film, a film about real life.  There is a sense that both nothing and everything has changed.  The return to New York may represent a return to the uptight bourgeois world they at first abandoned, or it may represent a new phase in the lives of the two women.  Juan Antonio and Barcelona has not provided the answer to the central desires of Vicky and Christina, but there is no indication that New York will give them any more closure.  Life will continue to be about searching for what they want, what they need, what gives them fulfillment.  But it is not a fruitless search that will leave them empty.  Both Vicky and Christina experience transitory fulfillment and happiness, both find something they lacked.  All in all, the film is less pessimistic than any of Allen's more recent films.  While it cannot claim to provide answers, it does raise some fascinating questions.