Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 2: Female
Turner Classic Movies recently premiered and released a DVD boxed set featuring Pre-Code Hollywood films starring women, as well as a documentary about this time period (early 1930s), before it was decided that films as well as their stars had to meet certain morals (I admittedly only know a little about this era, between it being glossed over in film classes and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon). Since my broke ass is still holding out for cable a la carte, I’ve been getting these DVDs from Netflix.
Like Three on a Match, Female is only 62 minutes long. Unlike Three on a Match, Female seems to take place at a certain time, not flashing forward through the years, so we don’t have to watch faux newsreels.
Ruth Chatterton stars as Alison Drake, the CEO of a car company. She is one tough and fast-talkin’ broad, as they used to say. She also (seemingly) beds the more attractive men that work for her, only to balk when they start doing things like giving her flowers during office hours and act all mushy and hurt when she rejects their advances at work. When they get too sensitive about it, she does things such as transfers their jobs to the Montreal plant. Even in the beginning when an old schoolmate friend (who is married with children, of course), she explicitly states that she’s not into the idea of getting married or having children. During a party at her mansion that she doesn’t even want to attend, after too many men either propose marriage or kiss her ass too much, she leaves and goes to the city where she runs into a man who just came into town. He treats her normally, but of course she doesn’t tell him who she is. In a twist as old as movies themselves, he is the new inventor she just stole from a rival company. She is of course, smitten, and starts not acting like herself, although not exactly in a screwball comedy way.
Needless to say, I thought Alison was awesome up until the end. After her last line and the fade out, I immediately shouted “THE HELL?” because I was so disappointed. I would recommend watching this movie, because up until the last 10 minutes it is extremely ahead of its time, but then it reverts into well, the same conversation that pops up to this day, at least if the term “mommy wars” means anything to you.
Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 2: Three on a Match
Turner Classic Movies recently premiered and released a DVD boxed set featuring Pre-Code Hollywood films starring women, as well as a documentary about this time period (early 1930s), before it was decided that films as well as their stars had to meet certain morals (I admittedly only know a little about this era, between it being glossed over in film classes and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon). Since my broke ass is still holding out for cable a la carte, I’ve been getting these DVDs from Netflix.
Three on a Match stars Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, and Bette Davis as three childhood classmates whose adult lives take different paths. The film starts out in the year 1913 on the first day of school in an unnamed city and jumps through a lot of time throughout the entire film, usually with the way of showing newspaper headlines and the like (ah, I remember 1913 well…oh wait, my great-grandfather was 3 then, and my maternal grandparents weren’t born until 1935 and 1936, 3 and 4 years after this film came out). Mary Keaton likes to show off her black bloomers while doing gymnastics on the playground, and Vivian Revere disapproves of both black bloomers and doing gymnastics on the playground, as well as her little boyfriend talking and hanging out with Mary, who later skips class to go smoke with Mary and another boy. Ruth Wescott is not shown until the next scene where the teacher asks where those three students are, and she stops Vivian from tattling. Later on, they graduate (I can’t remember if this was a year later or like, 6 years later – if it’s the latter, I guess they couldn’t afford a third set of actresses to play the girls at an even younger age). Mary is almost denied graduation but allowed a last minute reprieve, Vivian is going to some fancy schmancy school, and Ruth the valedictorian is forced to go to business school (a.k.a. secretary school) due to lack of money. As the years pass, wisecrackin’ Mary (Joan Blondell) is put in jail (or juvenile detention, it’s never made clear). When she is let out of the big house, she gets a job as a singer, and in the course of one day runs into Ruth (Bette Davis) and Vivian (Ann Dvorak). They have lunch together. Ruth is a poorly paid typist, and Vivian married into money, has a small son, and is completely and utterly unhappy with life.
In a somewhat revolutionary idea (considering “separate vacations” seems only to be catching on in this decade), Vivian and her husband agree that she should go on a three-week vacation, with her adorable son Junior in tow. Before the cruise ship sails, Vivian runs into Mary again, who has various entertainment men in tow just to have a going away party for someone else. Vivian leaves Junior with a ship nurse and goes off to party, where she drinks a lot and gets together with one of Mary’s cohorts, who convinces her to get off the ship with him before it sails. She takes Junior and goes missing for weeks. Mary knows where she is, but fails to convince her to let her and Ruth take care of Junior, whom Mary is pretty much neglecting. So Mary tells Vivian’s husband where she is and they take Junior, and soon enough Vivian and her husband get a divorce, and Mary marries Vivian’s ex-husband (Ruth kind of gets the short end of the stick and gets to be Junior’s governess).
Since the movie is only 62 minutes long, things move kind of quickly. It’s not too long after that Mary marries Kirkwood that the film gets a bit dark in relation to Vivian’s life. The guy she left her husband for (Mike) is pretty much a useless louse, and all they do is party until her money runs out. Vivian becomes an alcoholic and a coke addict. Mike owes money to gangsters Ace and Harve (Humphrey Bogart). He tries to blackmail Kirkwood with information about Mary’s dark past (which Kirkwood seems to both know and be in denial about), and Kirkwood kicks Mike out of his office. In a twist of fate, Mike makes a supremely stupid move that even Vivian doesn’t agree with. It of course, is her downfall.
(Serious spoiler ahead)
To me, even if I do not have more than a passing knowledge of “Code” cinema, this film sort of has it’s foot set in both Code and Pre-Code times. The female characters are somewhat complex for their time (at least as much as a 62 minute film can portray complex characters): Mary is a (somewhat) bad girl gone nice; Vivian is a good girl gone bad that these days would be diagnosed with Post-Partum Depression and called a “Desperate Housewife”; Bette Davis as Ruth only has 10 lines, but is the smart girl with a shit job (heyyyy). But nonetheless, the “bad” mother meets a terrible death, even if it was done to save her child. It was a rule in “Code” cinema that a bad person always suffers the consequences of their actions. Still, there’s the whole “separate vacation” deal, Ace plucking out his nosehairs, some characters being perfectly okay with having to kill a child.
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Despite my best intentions, I never quite finished my intended three film early-Robert Aldrich perspective at the end of 2007. The only early film of his I posted about was Kiss Me Deadly, and it is perhaps the only post on this blog so far that I want to expand or re-write. I did watch The Big Knife and Attack!, and while they are good, they are also pretty depressing, so I never felt the urge to write about them.
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte came after Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Aldrich’s first big film, which was made I believe after he spent some time in Europe after making the controversial The Big Knife and Attack! almost back-to-back. Hush would be his second collaboration with Bette Davis.
If you ever wanted to see classic actors in their middle-age doing somewhat exaggerated Southern accents, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte is for you! The credits don’t come in until 16 minutes into the film, where we learn Charlotte Hollis’ back story: her wealthy father disapproves of her affair with a married man named John (Bruce Dern) and their intent to elope. He demands that John break it off at the party that night. And so he does. But not too long after, he is brutally hacked to pieces, and Charlotte comes back to the party with blood on her dress. What’s both odd and a bit genius about this pre-credit sequence is that we never see Charlotte’s face, nor who exactly kills John.
After the credits, we flash-foward almost 40 years later to 1964, and Charlotte is crazy old lady of her small town. She lives in the run-down house on the plantation that her father owned. She was never convicted of John’s murder because there wasn’t enough evidence. She sort of suspects that her own father killed John. Her only friend is her servant Velma (Agnes Moorehead), who is quite protective of her. Unfortunately, the state is trying to kick her off the property to build a bridge and a highway. Charlotte blames it all on John’s rightful widow, Jewel, and hopes that her cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) will come and help her fight the government’s ruling, but Velma is dubious. Lo and behold, Miriam does arrive a day later. Miriam has no intention of helping Charlotte out much though, and makes weak promises about going to Baton Rouge to fight for the land, which causes Charlotte to lash out at her during dinner with her doctor and old friend (and Miriam’s old boyfriend) Dr. Drew (Bayliss) (Joseph Cotten). They make plans to help Charlotte pack up her belongings since she will be evicted in 10 days.
Not too long after Miriam arrives that Charlotte has more breakdowns and believes that she is seeing John in the house, usually late at night in the music room. When Miriam comes down to investigate one night, she and Charlotte find a decapitated hand inside the piano. Hush oscillates for a good while between maybe being a haunted house movie and maybe being a psychological thriller. It’s kind of a long movie, but it has a strong build-up, and it’s not until the last 45 minutes or so that the viewer finds out what the film’s and the characters true colors are. It’s a good movie. Hush starts out feeling a little campy what with everyone’s fairly exaggerated Southern accents and mannerisms, but it wears off a bit except with Drew at the end, where Joseph Cotten kind of portrays him as an over the top drunk. The scene where he is playing the piano in his tuxedo and singing made me cringe a little in fact. Not that he had a bad singing voice, it just seemed weird and somewhat out of place. I should admit that one of the final scenes is funny in a campy way. Look, no one fucks with Bette Davis. It wasn’t until I was searching for a good image from the film to use in this post that I found that this film has been adapted into a spoof play for gay audiences titled Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte.
I think what I’m trying to say is that this one isn’t as out there and over the top as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Although I could be wrong, since I only seem to watch Baby Jane every 5 years or so.
The Third Man
Depending on how you want to look at it, I may have made the mistake of looking up the review of The Third Man at The Criterion Contraption blog earlier today. I hadn’t read Matthew’s review of The Third Man in about a year. Much to my discovery, I realized that I was probably going to hit the same notes, but without the awesome “Gareth Keenan investigates!” reference. So instead of repeating someone else, just go read his review instead if you wanna get a feel for what the movie is about, then come back over here.
Over the past 4 years or so, The Third Man has become one of my favorite movies. And as everyone knows, it’s hard to write about the films you love the most. It’s during the past couple of years that subsequent viewings have caused me to become briefly obsessed with it for a few weeks. After viewing it for roughly the third time last year, I read the BFI Film Classics book on the film. Oddly enough, I don’t remember much about it, other than the fact it discussed Carol Reed’s other films, the possible homoerotic element that was made more obvious in Graham Greene’s original script or story (c’mon, y’all know that if “homoerotic/homosocial elements” aren’t discussed in a serious film critique, you get booted out the club!), and of course this picture on the cover (although it may have been the long shot of it, not the close-up):
Allow me to go all girly on you for a moment. I will always and forever have a crush on this shot in the film and it’s big reveal of Harry Lime, the character everyone has been talking about for the past hour. Orson Welles was foxy back in the day. Granted, 10 or so years later he wasn’t so foxy, but whatever. I tend to be a sucker for tall, dark, and handsome villains shot in black and white, Anthony Perkins in Psycho being the first time I was fooled (I was 15). Although it probably wasn’t until last year that I realized that Harry Lime was actually a pretty bad guy, that’s how completely dazzled I was by Orson Welles in this movie. Don’t worry, my boyfriend is a perfectly nice guy.
The Criterion Collection put out a new edition of The Third Man last year. It comes with a booklet with a few essays, and a lot of beautiful pictures that look as though they were screenprinted in silver ink. I’m not quite sure if there are too many more extra features than there were on the original Criterion release, but it does feature two or three old radio broadcasts of “The Adventures of Harry Lime”, which were voiced by Welles. The Harry Lime in the radio shows were more of an international playboy type that helped fight crime, and not as evil as the film version of Harry Lime.
Other things to mention:
1. Contrary to popular belief, Orson Welles did not direct this movie. He didn’t write it. All he wrote was the “cuckoo clock” speech outside the ferris wheel scene:
“Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. “
2. Alida Valli went on to play sort of villainous characters in 1970s Italian horror movies, most notably, Mother Superior in Killer Nun, the head dance teacher in Suspiria, and the nurse in Inferno. She only passed away two years ago, but I doubt she’ll be in The Mother of Tears, the final film in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy.
Yes, it is indeed hard to write about the films you love. Blame it on the Roomba.
Shadow of a Doubt
Despite being a bit of a Alfred Hitchcock nerd in high school, I haven’t seen all of his films. I just checked IMDB, and before seeing 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt, 1948’s Rope was previously the oldest Hitchcock film I had seen. Most of his silent films are available now in cheapo DVD box sets put out by companies who usually don’t give a crap about quality, so I’ve been hesitant to pick any of those up (granted, they’re also available via Public Domain BitTorrent sites too for free). So what I’m saying is that, I was ill-prepared for a Hitchcock film that wasn’t very glamorous. The only dash of glamour in the movie comes from the suits Joseph Cotten wears. They’re really well-made and nice. Of course, looking back it was likely a subtle clue.
Shadow of a Doubt takes place in a small California town and is about a family whose lives are shaken up by a visit from Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton), the mother’s brother. Her eldest daughter is also named Charlie (Teresa Wright), a girl in her late teens who believes that she and her Uncle Charlie share a telepathic connection (I think most girls go through this as a teenager, so don’t worry, this isn’t an early-model Carrie) because he sent a telegram saying that he was coming to Santa Rosa just as she was about to send a telegram asking him to come. Not too long after Uncle Charlie arrives, lavishing gifts on the family, two men posing as survey takers contact the mother about interviewing the family, to which she obliges, although it makes Uncle Charlie nervous and upset, and he refuses to take part. The younger of the two men asks Teenage Charlie out on a date, and it is on that date that he tells Charlie that he is actually a detective, and her Uncle Charlie is a suspect in a series of murders that occurred on the East Coast. Charlie, understandably, is upset, but also starts to become suspicious on her own seeing how her Uncle Charlie has been tearing bits of her father’s newspaper out, has never had his picture taken as an adult, and gets angry when the two survey takers-cum-detectives take his picture without his consent.
It’s actually kind of a slow-moving movie, but in a good way. The tension builds and there is more action in the last 30-45 minutes that ends in a too-brief chase-on-a-train scene (I like old-school train scenes). All the characters are likable, even Uncle Charlie to a point. Teenage Charlie is like any other teenage girl, and while I was a little puzzled by her and the younger detective falling in love so quickly, I guess it makes sense for an overdramatic teen. Joseph Cotten displays his range well in this film which starts off as “nice but mysterious” but veers into “creepy and mysterious”. Peter “I’m a Orson Welles and Hitchcock expert” Bogdanovich claims on the extras that this was the only heavy role that Cotten ever played, which isn’t true, but I sort of doubt that Bogdanovich has ever seen Sergio Corbucci’s The Hellbenders. Hume Cronyn plays the family’s neighbor, who along with Charlie’s banker father, is obsessed with true crime stories. They spend much of their free time together discussing how they would kill one another, which is really weird, but kind of a fun quirk for a movie made in 1943.
All right, now for the spoiler bits/op-ed portion. I say skip unless you’ve seen the movie or really wanna see me ponder things.
Seriously…go.
Even as good suspicions and evidence began piling up against Uncle Charlie, I sort of rooted for him just on the basis of “why is it so bad not to want to have your picture taken or to want some privacy?” This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and it’s been made obvious just in my posts on Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead alone, as well as my perpetual “one foot in, one foot out” stance in the zine community, where it has always been or felt very imperative that women my age and younger write about their personal struggles or their personal life, but yet something I’ve yet to fully succumb to in the 8 or 9 years I’ve been involved with zines. And while I kind of hate the term when used on the internet, even “in real life” I’m a pretty low-key, private, and quiet person, who yeah, doesn’t like to have my picture taken. I’m not gunnin’ to be famous or even popular really, and I don’t quite understand people who are in pursuit of either on either Youtube or Myspace or wherever. As I told a friend via e-mail the other day, I’m just happy when one or two people get what I’m talking about or have seen the films I’m writing about on this blog, which was rarely the case when I made film zines.
Anyway, in relation to Shadow of a Doubt, while I felt there were times that maybe Hitchcock was going towards a twist ending (I had my suspicions about the detectives in particular) where maybe Uncle Charlie wasn’t the killer, it of course did not go that way. It would’ve been an interesting take though.
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