This week was a good one for movie viewing, I managed to catch an amazing marathon of lady-centric pre-Code movies on TCM, accompanied by an original little talking head doc about the joys of pre-Production Code cinema featuring such lights as Camille Paglia (for whom I don’t have much use), Molly Haskell (who is all right by me), and professional commentarian Rudy Behlmer (about whom I don’t have much of an opinion at all).

It’s not that movies suddenly started being sexist when they brought the Hays Code in, they were plenty sexist before, but more that in general the movies were less moral, or in other words more fun. However much I enjoy them and the movie nerd in me is not at all disappointed to see stuff like this coming out of the archives, I wonder why TCM is pushing their DVD sets of pre-Code movies (aka before there were rules about the portrayal of sexuality), and I assume that it has at least something to do with their salaciousness. The sexual content isn’t particularly shocking for a 21st century audience (ladies in bras! implied sex outside marriage!), but because of the Production Code and the even-more stringent rules placed on TV in the early days, most people associate all pre-1960s media with Andy Hardy-like innocence and a Pleasantville-style denial of sexuality or drugs or toilets or the idea that good doesn’t always prevail. This is obviously not true and most smart people know this, but I think most of them still get a thrill out of seeing Stella Dallas in her underpants. Nevertheless, the sexist selling points don’t mean the whole enterprise should be thrown out, especially considering how much less sexist these movies are than many of the ’40s and ’50s Hollywood melodramas I so adore.

  1. Night Nurse (William A. Wellman, 1931): So this is the story of how Barbara Stanwyck (very young and brunette) is working as a night nurse to these two sick kids, but they are only sick because of their corrupt doctor, their drunken mom, and the scary chauffeur who wants to get at their trust fund (played by a very young and attractive Clark Gable, who’s always running around in boots, roughing ladies up). Somehow the fact that the children are dying of malnutrition and not actually being fed despite their desire for food doesn’t really motivate anyone else coming in contact with them (their apparently constantly drunk mom, their governess/maid, the other nurse) think that maybe something should be done about that. Except good ol’ Barbara Stanwyck. Luckily, with the help of a friendly bootlegger and a doctor she knows from her training, she saves the day! Oh yeah, and she hooks up with the bootlegger. Who solves most of the plot’s problems by threatening people with violence and actually has Clark Gable killed. That is how the movie ends: he tells Barbara that he had Gable killed, and they drive off together. Yay! I am making it sound kind of terrible, but it is actually a pretty good time. There is lots of action, it’s fast-paced, the acting is great (Stanwyck’s great, and so is Joan Blondell as her more cynical nursing peer).
  2. Three On A Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932): This was less cheerfully amoral that Night Nurse, but it was also a way better movie by almost any other measure. So you’ve got three school chums: Ann Dvorak (the popular successful girl — which of course at this point in time means marrying a rich dude), Joan Blondell (the bad girl), and Bette Davis (the good girl). Bette Davis was apparently the least famous at the time and doesn’t really do anything in this movie besides apparently leave her lucrative office job to work for as a governess for her best friend, so I won’t really talk about her. But of course the other “good” girl and the “bad” girl wind up switching places: Ann Dvorak runs away from her rich husband to hook up with some sketchy guy and party and drink and neglect her (totally adorable) child, while Joan Blondell doesn’t really care what Ann Dvorak does, but doesn’t think the poor kid should be dragged into it, so she goes to Mr. Ann Dvorak to intervene on the kid’s behalf and eventually they wind up getting married, so she literally takes her friend’s place. Anyway, the biggest revelation in this movie is Dvorak’s performance, which really gets across the ennui of married life and the fun of being a drunk, as well as her desperation when she and her son get kidnapped (by a young, shockingly hot Humphrey Bogart). The other thing that really distinguishes it is the details: you don’t just hear how she’s neglecting her son, you literally get Ann Dvorak lounging with a cocktail when the little boy walks in, filthy, begging for food. She’s all like “Eat this”, and you get a close-up of some half-eaten hors d’oeuvres (devilled eggs and stuff). So harsh.
  3. Female (Michael Curtiz, 1933): Nonetheless, this was my favourite of the group, and it will be pretty easy to see why once you read the IMDB summary: “Alison is owner and successful manager of an automobile factory. She also has a good relation to her employees – especially the male ones, which she is known to invite to her bed for some time and then dump quickly. Only the inventor Jim Thorne refuses her offers – will she fire or marry him?” It’s awesome because she’s basically Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, back when that was really edgy; she even talks about how she’s got no use for marriage and that she can have sex just like a man. Her bachelorette pad is totally amazing also: the art director deserves mega points for putting her in this huge modernist house (actually the Ennis House by Frank Lloyd Wright — I can imagine what a more explicitly feminist Thom Anderson would do with that one) with animal prints everywhere and a giant rhino head on the wall of her seduction room. Of course, at the end, she reforms and decides to get married and give up all this crazy career nonsense, but the fact that this character existed at all, let alone that she is so much fun, makes it hard to take the neat ending seriously at all
  4. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994): Right after watching this I kind of disliked Exotica — having seen too many movies that slowly put the pieces together like this one did, I didn’t think the “surprises” at the end were surprising enough and I felt like the other stuff, the stylistic and thematic tricks were too weak to make up for that — but it has grown on me the more I think and read about it. It is, at the very least, delicately balanced and complex. It is kind of ingeniously Canadian to have Mia Kirshner strip to Leonard Cohen though. Oh and on a more shallow note, though I couldn’t find any good pics online, Don McKellar in this movie looks unsettlingly like John Darnielle.
  5. Turkish Delight (Paul Verhoeven, 1973): I…don’t really know what to do with this movie. I always enjoy Rutger Hauer, clearly. I also took great pleasure in its generally infantile attitude toward sex and bodily functions — there’s a penis-stuck-in-the-zipper scene, 25 years before There’s Something About Mary — but then toward the end it turned melodramatic. Like, the main character literally sets a bird free, on a beach, at sunset. It goes on from there. I’m pretty sure it was fabulous, but I don’t really know, like, what my fake essay I would write if someone made me write an essay on this tomorrow would be. Probably something about the body? I could talk about how crazy Olga looks at the end with all the make-up and the dyed hair and her talk about boob creams and whatnot, and that artificiality is linked to her cancer (oh yeah, she gets cancer after she leaves him to go to America). The America connection is interesting in itself, too. Apparently it’s the most successful Dutch movie ever though. turkish3.jpg
  6. The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988): To be clear, this is the Dutch original I’m talking about, not the 1993 remake with Jeff Bridges and Keifer Sutherland. I thought I’d seen the remake, but now I’m not positive. Anyway, this movie is excellent: it’s a sharp little thriller with a cold, cold heart, aka one of my favourite kinds of movies from way back. It’s apparently been compared to Hitchcock a lot, which I get. The fact that the “mystery” is mostly solved early on — there’s never any question about who kidnapped the missing woman, just about what he did to her — and the trouble the hero’s obsessive need to know finally gets him in. (Per the linked Criterion essay, the French title is L’Homme qui voulait savoir or The Man Who Wanted to Know.) I’ve said before that I’m not a particularly easy viewer to surprise, but the ending to this one caught me completely off guard. From Kim Newman’s aforementioned essay:
    It delivers a shattering twist ending, but has a depth and lasting creepiness that makes it repay repeat viewings. Hitchcock always argued for suspense over surprise, but The Vanishing delivers both: the first time you see it, the mystery is intriguing and the solution horrible; the second time, when you know what’s coming, it takes on a more tragic, even more horrifying dimension.
  7. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008): [Spoilers for new movie, behind cut] The critics haven’t been particularly kind to this movie and I kind of get why. It starts off as a clear ’80s comedy homage, owing a huge debt to Ivan Reitman in particular, it veers into Gondry’s usual whimsical tribute to the handmade (it’s kind of a nice complement to The Science of Sleep which I also liked more than many other people), and winds up with the kind of cheesy Frank Capra ending (with all the community spirit and the whatnot) that gets me every time. Of course, the central problem (Danny Glover’s local community video store is condemned) doesn’t really get solved and the visual style is a little…grittier than either ’80s comedies or Depression-era populist melodramas. See, some people would think that makes for a somehow bad or confusing movie.
    Me, I think it’s awesome. Especially because I can nerd out over the fun theoretical implications of local community one-of-a-kind remakes of big Hollywood cultural touchstones (ironically featuring actual Hollywood stars), or the way the Fats Waller movie valorizes local legend over actual known historical facts (and is also gorgeous, with the black-and-white, and the Busby Berkley-esque human organ). All in all, I enjoyed the hell out of this (and I think Alex liked it too), but I realize the officially mixed reviews mean it’s not for everyone. It’s also possible that I enjoyed it because I was prepared for it to not be that good. I’d seen the beginning of Amanda from Pandagon’s review, but not the meat of it (because I didn’t really want to find out too much about the movie before I saw it). Her main beefs were that it romanticizes poverty and that it is overly nostalgic. I can kind of see where she’s coming from with the nostalgia:
    The other theme is a knee-jerk defense of nostalgia, which was the prime focus of the movie and was most definitely not a subtle thing—the characters are surrounded by record players that don’t even play LPs, but all 45s. Why? Because even though one of the lead actors is a famous rapper, the characters in this movie seem to prefer to spend all their time listening to jazz records and nothing made in the past few decades. [...] A lot of the old cars and old clothes the characters wear are linked to their poverty, so it didn’t bother me, but because of the knee-jerk “older is better” mentality of the movie, there were times when it not only got uncomfortably close to romanticizing poverty, but it went way over the line.
    Where the conflict lies should be obvious—the movie is so laden with nostalgia that it romanticizes the VHS tape as some sort of ideal technology from the past that allowed people to express themselves. What is completely ignored is that the explosion in amateur video art was the result of the invention of digital technologies, not analog.
    I get where she’s coming from with that argument, it is a weird position to take; but it didn’t strike me when I was watching the movie; it was more a matter of people doing the best to be creative with the materials they had on hand, which happened to be VHS tapes because it would have rung less true if the poor characters had had access to digital cameras and editing equipment. I also kind of hear her complaint that “we get clobbered with this incoherent defense of unadulterated nostalgia that embraces poverty for its ability to keep people from moving forward with the times,” but again, I think that reading the movie like it’s supposed to be a direct reflection of reality is a mistake: I think of it more as a fable, itself remixing bits of American movie cliche; which is why I didn’t mind the cartoonish bit with Sigourney Weaver bulldozing their tapes. It didn’t seem (to me) like Gondry was like “yay poverty,” but again, that he was celebrating a community that made a whole lot out of very little. If you look at the end of the movie, I think it’s clear why Gondry ended on the clapping crowd without actually having the demolition crew go away or Danny Glover repair the store — leaving us hanging makes us ask the unanswered question: “So is everything solved now?” and the clear answer is “No, the store is doomed, but, wow, they sure did accomplish something.” Showing that people can be creative even if they don’t have very much isn’t the same as romanticizing poverty: it’s giving poor people agency without suggesting that talent or artistic endeavors can necessarily effect meaningful social change. Plus, to be fair, how many other American movies right now even show the working class?
    I do agree with Amanda that Gondry should have spent more time showing the actual remakes, given the paper thin plot, and how much fun they were.
    8. Driving Miss Daisy!