I Lost It at the Movies Read online

  Isn’t this Welfare State life just about what the Soviet worker looks forward to? Greater comfort, more material goods, less work. This endpoint of controlled, socialized capitalism doesn’t seem very different from the ideals of industrialized life under the Soviet system — except that in the Welfare State one is not officially required to be enthusiastic. The worker feeds the machine, and if he doesn’t want more material goods then what does he want? He may, one has the nagging suspicion, begin to want the romance and adventure of wars and catastrophes. Nobody in this parody of the good society is neglected or mistreated. Nobody cries out. We must supply our own cry of rage.

  These films, even I’m All Right, Jack, Expresso Bongo, Sapphire, and Tiger Bay share a true horror — the people live without grace. They live in little ugly rooms, and they get on each other’s nerves, and their speech is charged with petty hostilities. The main difference between the English working class and the American working class experience may be the miracle of space — our space and the privacy it affords us — which allows for day-to-day freedom of thought and action.

  Thinking about the attitudes toward life in this group of films, I became aware of a lack they have in common. For years, I’ve been making fun of the way the movies use love as the great healer, the solution to everything. And I suddenly realized that in these films, for all their sex, the only satisfactory love affair is in Room at the Top — and the hero sacrifices that for position. I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this desolate view of the human spirit — but it’s rather scary. Life without beauty, without hope, without grace, without art, without love — and Crowther finds it “strong and optimistic.”

  [1961]

  Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

  As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those who attack American “materialism” was first aroused by the refugees from Hitler who so often contrasted their “culture” with our “vulgar materialism” when I discovered that their “culture” consisted of their having had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. And as the cultural treasures they brought over with them were likely to be Meissen porcelain, Biedermeier furniture, oriental carpets, wax fruit, and bookcases with glass doors, it wasn’t too difficult to reconstruct their “culture” and discover that it was a stuffier, more middle-class materialism and sentimentality than they could afford in the new world.

  These suspicions were intensified by later experience: the most grasping Europeans were, almost inevitably, the ones who leveled the charge of American materialism. Just recently, at a film festival, a behind-the-iron-curtain movie director, who interrupted my interview with him to fawn over every Hollywood dignitary (or supposed dignitary) who came in sight, concluded the interview with, “You Americans won’t understand this, but I don’t make movies just for money.”

  Americans are so vulnerable, so confused and defensive about prosperity — and nowhere more so than in Hollywood, where they seem to feel they can cleanse it, justify their right to it, by gilding it with “culture,” as if to say, see, we’re not materialistic, we appreciate the finer things. (“The hunting scene on the wall of the cabana isn’t wallpaper: it’s handpainted.”) Those who live by making movies showing a luxurious way of life worry over the American “image” abroad. But, the economics of moviemaking being what they are, usually all the producers do about it is worry — which is probably just as well because films made out of social conscience have generally given an even more distorted view of America than those made out of business sense, and are much less amusing.

  The most conspicuous recent exception is Hud — one of the few entertaining American movies released in 1963 and just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. Hud is a commercial Hollywood movie that is ostensibly an indictment of materialism, and it has been accepted as that by most of the critics. But those who made it protected their material interest in the film so well that they turned it into the opposite: a celebration and glorification of materialism — of the man who looks out for himself — which probably appeals to movie audiences just because it confirms their own feelings. This response to Hud may be the only time the general audience has understood film makers better than they understood themselves. Audiences ignored the cant of the makers’ liberal, serious intentions, and enjoyed the film for its vital element: the nihilistic “heel” who wants the good things of life and doesn’t give a damn for the general welfare. The writers’ and director’s “anti-materialism” turns out to be a lot like the refugees’ anti-materialism: they had their Stefan Zweig side — young, tender Lon (Brandon de Wilde) and Melvyn Douglas’s Homer, a representative of the “good” as prating and tedious as Polonius; and they had their protection, their solid salable property of Meissen and Biedermeier, in Paul Newman.

  Somehow it all reminds one of the old apocryphal story conference — “It’s a modern western, see, with this hell-raising, pleasure-loving man who doesn’t respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we’ll fool them, he doesn’t get the girl and he doesn’t change!”

  “But who’ll want to see that?”

  “Oh, that’s all fixed — we’ve got Paul Newman for the part.”

  They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience does not believe in their villainy except to relish it, as with Brando; and there are others, like Newman, who in addition to this rapport, project such a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness that the audience dotes on them, seeks to protect them from harm or pain. Casting Newman as a mean materialist is like writing a manifesto against the banking system while juggling your investments so you can break the bank. Hud’s shouted last remark, his poor credo, “The world’s so full of crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or not,” has, at least, the ring of his truth. The generalized pious principles of the good old codger belong to no body.

  The day Hud opened in San Francisco the theater was packed with an audience that laughed and reacted with pleasure to the verve and speed and economy, and (although I can’t be sure of this) enjoyed the surprise of the slightly perverse ending as much as I did. It was like the split movies of the war years — with those cynical heel-heroes whom we liked because they expressed contempt for the sanctimonious goody guys and overstuffed family values, and whom we still liked (because they were played by actors who seemed contemptuous) even when they reformed.

  It’s not likely that those earlier commercial writers and directors were self-deceived about what they were doing: they were trying to put something over, and knew they could only go so far. They made the hero a “heel” so that we would identify with his rejection of official values, and then slyly squared everything by having him turn into a conventional hero. And it seems to me that we (my college friends) and perhaps the audience at large didn’t take all this very seriously, that we enjoyed it for its obvious hokum and glamour and excitement and romance, and for the wisecracking American idiom, and the tempo and rhythm of slick style. We enjoyed the pretense that the world was like this — fast and funny; this pretense which was necessary for its enjoyment separated the good American commercial movie — the good “hack” job like Casablanca or To Have and Have Not — from film art and other art. This was the best kind of Hollywood product: the result of the teamwork of talented, highly paid professional hacks who were making a living; and we enjoyed it as a product, and assumed that those involved in it enjoyed the money they made.

  What gave the Hollywood movie its vitality and its distinctive flavor was that despite the melodramatic situations, the absurd triumphs of virtue and the inordinate punishments for trivial vice — perhaps even because of the stale conventions and the necessity to infuse some life that would make the picture seem new within them — the “feel”
of the time and place (Hollywood, whatever the locale of the story) came through, and often the attitudes, the problems, the tensions. Sometimes more of American life came through in routine thrillers and prison-break films and even in the yachting-set comedies than in important, “serious” films like The Best Years of Our Lives or A Place in the Sun, paralyzed, self-conscious imitations of European art, or films like Gentleman’s Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of the Hollywood “problem” picture, which is morally solved in advance. And when the commercial film makers had some freedom and leeway, as well as talent, an extraordinary amount came through — the rhythm of American life that gives films like She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, the Rogers-Astaire musicals, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, Pat and Mike, The Crimson Pirate, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Sleep, or the more recent The Manchurian Candidate and Charade a freshness and spirit that makes them unlike the films of any other country. Our movies are the best proof that Americans are liveliest and freest when we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

  Taking Hud as a commercial movie, I was interested to see that the audience reacted to Hud as a Stanley Kowalski on the range, laughing with his coarseness and sexual assertiveness, and sharing his contempt for social values. Years before, when I saw the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire, I was shocked and outraged at those in the audience who expressed their delight when Brando as Stanley jeered at Blanche. At the time, I didn’t understand it when they laughed their agreement as Stanley exploded in rage and smashed things. It was only later, away from the spell of Vivien Leigh’s performance, that I could reflect that Stanley was clinging to his brute’s bit of truth, his sense that her gentility and coquetry were intolerably fake. And it seemed to me that this was one of the reasons why Streetcar was a great play — that Blanche and Stanley upset us, and complicated our responses. This was no Lillian Hellman melodrama with good and evil clay pigeons. The conflict was genuine and dramatic. But Hud didn’t have a dramatic adversary; his adversaries were out of Lillian Hellmanland.

  The setting, however, wasn’t melodramatic, it was comic — not the legendary west of myth-making movies like the sluggish Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West. The comedy was in the realism: the incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr. Pepper signs, paperback books — all emphasizing the standardization of culture in the loneliness of vast spaces. My West wasn’t Texas; it was northern California, but our Sonoma County ranch was very much like this one — with the frame house, and “the couple’s” cabin like the housekeeper’s cabin, and the hired hands’ bunkhouse, and my father and older brothers charging over dirt roads, not in Cadillacs but in Studebakers, and the Saturday nights in the dead little town with its movie house and ice cream parlor. This was the small-town West I and so many of my friends came out of — escaping from the swaggering small-town hotshots like Hud. But I didn’t remember any boys like Brandon de Wilde’s Lon: he wasn’t born in the West or in anybody’s imagination; that seventeen-year-old blank sheet of paper has been handed down from generations of lazy hack writers. His only “reality” is from de Wilde’s having played the part before: from Shane to Hud, he has been our observer, our boy in the West, testing heroes. But in Hud, he can’t fill even this cardboard role of representing the spectator because Newman’s Hud has himself come to represent the audience. And I didn’t remember any clean old man like Melvyn Douglas’s Homer: his principles and rectitude weren’t created either, they were handed down from the authors’ mouthpieces of the socially conscious plays and movies of the thirties and forties. Occupied towns in the war movies frequently spawned these righteous, prophetic elder citizens.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater, while Homer was clearly an upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy, worse, made him inhuman — except for the brief sequence when he isn’t a spokesman for anything, when he follows the bouncing ball and sings “Clementine” at the movies. Hud, the “villain” of the piece, is less phony than Homer.

  In the next few days I recommended Hud to friends (and now “friends” no longer mean college students but academic and professional people) and was bewildered when they came back indignant that I’d wasted their time. I was even more bewildered when the reviews started coming out; what were the critics talking about? Unlike the laughing audience, they were taking Hud at serious message value as a work of integrity, and, even in some cases, as a tragedy. In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist found that “Both the portraits and the people are completely without compromise — and therein is not only the foundation but also the rare achievement of this film.” In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight said that “it is the kind of creative collaboration too long absent from our screen . . . by the end of the film, there can be no two thoughts about Hud: he’s purely and simply a bastard. And by the end of the film, for all his charm, he has succeeded in alienating everyone, including the audience.” According to Bosley Crowther in the New York Times:

  Hud is a rancher who is fully and foully diseased with all the germs of materialism that are infecting and sickening modern man . . . And the place where he lives is not just Texas. It is the whole country today. It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture that nurtures indulgence and greed. Here is the essence of this picture. While it looks like a modern Western, and is an outdoor drama, indeed, Hud is as wide and profound a contemplation of the human condition as one of the New England plays of Eugene O’Neill. . . . The striking, important thing about it is the clarity with which it unreels. The sureness and integrity of it are as crystal-clear as the plot is spare . . . the great key scene of the film, a scene in which [the] entire herd of cattle is deliberately and dutifully destroyed . . . helps fill the screen with an emotion that I’ve seldom felt from any film. It brings the theme of infection and destruction into focus with dazzling clarity.

  As usual, with that reverse acumen that makes him invaluable, Crowther has put his finger on a sore spot. The director carefully builds up the emotion that Crowther and probably audiences in general feel when the cattle, confused and trying to escape, are forced into the mass grave that has been dug by a bulldozer, and are there systematically shot down, covered with lime, and buried. This is the movie’s big scene, and it can be no accident that the scene derives some of its emotional power from the Nazis’ final solution of the Jewish problem; it’s inconceivable that these overtones would not have occurred to the group — predominantly Jewish — who made the film. Within the terms of the story, this emotion that is worked up is wrong, because it is not Hud the bad man who wants to destroy the herd; it is Homer the good man who accedes to what is necessary to stop the spread of infection. And is all this emotion appropriate to the slaughter of animals who were, after all, raised to be slaughtered and would, in the normal course of events, be even more brutally slaughtered in a few weeks? What’s involved is simply the difference in money between what the government pays for the killing of the animals and their market value. It would not have been difficult for the writers and director to arrange the action so that the audience would feel quick relief at the destruction of the herd. But I would guess that they couldn’t resist the opportunity for a big emotional scene, a scene with impact, even though the emotions don’t support the meaning of the story. They got their big scene: it didn’t matter what it meant.

  So it’s pretty hard to figure out the critical congratulations for clarity and integrity, or such statements as Penelope Gilliatt’s in the Observer, “Hud is the most sober and powerful film from America for a long time. The line of it is very skillfully controlled: the scene when Melvyn Douglas’s diseased cattle have to be shot arrives like the descent of a Greek plague.” Whose error are the gods punishing? Was Homer, in buyin
g Mexican cattle, merely taking a risk, or committing hubris? One of the things you learn on a ranch, or any other place, is that nobody is responsible for natural catastrophes; one of the things you learn in movies and other dramatic forms is the symbolic use of catastrophe. The locusts descended on Paul Muni in The Good Earth because he had gotten rich and bad: a farmer in the movies who neglects his humble wife and goes in for high living is sure to lose his crops. Hud plays it both ways: the texture of the film is wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful sequence is needed to jack up the action values, a disaster is used for all the symbolic overtones that can be hit — and without any significant story meaning. I don’t think the line of Hud is so much “controlled” as adjusted, set by conflicting aims at seriousness and success.

  It hardly seems possible but perhaps Crowther thought the cattle were symbolically “fully and foully diseased with all the germs of materialism that are infecting and sickening modern man.” Those sick cattle must have something to do with the language he uses in describing the film. “It is a drama of moral corruption — of the debilitating disease of avaricious self-seeking — that is creeping across the land and infecting the minds of young people in this complex, materialistic age. It is forged in the smoldering confrontation of an aging cattleman and his corrupted son.” Scriptwriters have only to toss in a few bitter asides about our expense-account civilization and strew a few platitudes like, “Little by little the country changes because of the men people admire,” and the movie becomes “a drama of moral corruption.”