“The Artist” (2011): how to fall in love

The scene: an old 1920s theater with Art Deco designs and original (i.e., uncomfortable) chairs. Most of the audience is over age 65. They show us some previews and then the curtains on either side of the screen scoot in a bit, narrowing the view, because The Artist was filmed in the aspect ratio of 1.37:1, just like old movies were. That very shape of that screen — virtually unseen in my lifetime except to watch old movies on TVs that used to be shaped like this (still are, for us old-school types) — makes me feel warm and happy, as if someone has handed me a down duvet to curl up in.

I have trouble understanding the rumblings from anti-Artist critics. This is a post about why.

I giggled from the film’s very earliest silly moments. I found myself so attached to Uggie, the dog, that I considered getting a dog. And I cried: the big melodramatic moment came and I was truly moved, with big affectionate tears running down my face. What a relief: after watching the trailer approximately 30 times, I had fretted the full-length film couldn’t live up.

That’s the thing, you see: director Michel Hazanavicius has created a primer for audiences unfamiliar with classic film, and what he teaches is how to fall in love with cinéma. For the rest of us who already love those early films, it’s a love letter. A very different love letter than the one Martin Scorcese created with Hugo, and one that’s more affecting.

For me, the key to the film is that it understands the central, simple brilliance of early film: The Artist asks only that you to fall in love with the two main characters, and especially to enjoy their falling in love. Peppy Miller (Bejo) lands a role in the new big film starring George Valentin (Dujardin), and she winds up as an extra in a silly scene in which he must dance with her briefly as he makes his way across the room. But as we see in a series of takes, he keeps flirting with her, joking, each time requiring a new take — and each time it’s a little harder for him to get back into character to start the scene again for a clean take.

In short: director Michel Hazanavicius isn’t pedantically telling us about the history of cinema. (I found Hugo delightful but a bit pedantic.) Rather, he’s given us a way to connect emotionally with cinema that most of us aren’t familiar with, and which gives unexpectedly pure delight. Some filmgoing pleasures are old ones, with a few sight gags tossed in.

Hazanavicius’s interviews have been great to read in part because it’s clear he feels his love for old film so passionately. Asked by a reporter for Chicago’s The Score Card about the differences between this and his earlier OSS 117 film, he explains:

The most important change was the absence of irony. There’s no irony in this movie. Quick into writing this movie, I watched a hundred silent movies. The ones who aged the best were melodramas and romances. And even the issue with Charlie Chaplin is that people think he is a comic, but his films are melodramas. Pure melodramas, nineteenth century dramas.

There’s no winking at you. The film isn’t saying, I know that you know that I know this is all stupid, even if it’s sweet. This is a 21st-century version of a classic silent film.

The closest it comes to a wink is when the film plays with sound. There are a couple of early scenes, designed to get us to laugh, that introduce us to the experience of watching a film with no sound. The subject of sound becomes a prominent theme — whether films will use it, whether audiences prefer it, whether Valentin might be right about resisting the big transition to talking film. Sometimes it’s used initially to prompt laughter, like at the beginning of a dream sequence.

But that sequence quickly turns to eerie nightmare, showing us what Valentin really fears: irrelevance. And somehow that scene is resonant beyond the gag at the center of it — making us viewers feel the threat of sound, and the safety of silence, at least in Valentin’s eyes.

The best melodramas always have dark elements, characteristics that ring true. One of these is Valentin’s hubris. I don’t want to oversell the film’s story — it’s determined to remain light melodrama — but nevertheless I found it surprisingly touching to see how Valentin wrestles with his pride and growing public insignificance.

What made that story so appealing, I think, was the paired tale of Peppy Miller’s rise to stardom and how she experiences her own expanding success as being related to Valentin’s fall — that is, the fall of a man she loves without disguise. Her need for him is something that you almost feel corporeally from those scenes of her very long arms. Again, I don’t want to oversell this story; maybe my appreciation for it is predicated on hearing so many critics accuse Hazanavicius of creating a mere pastiche. Suffice it to say that I believe some critics have underestimated the story’s resonance.

Of course I can see that director Hazanavicius creates a number of scenes by quoting from all manner of earlier movies — Astaire and Rogers, James Whale’s Frankenstein, The Thin Man, even Citizen Kane. Yet again to fly to his defense, I see those quotes as being done out of an abiding love of film and a consciousness of the way film is always quoting from itself. (Remember The Ides of March and Moneyball? Constant references to other films!) If you watch movies purely out of a desire to see something new, you’re depriving yourself of some of the joys of cinema.

So, what’s the difference between “quoting from” other films and “creating a pastiche”? Again, I’d say it has to do with whether the film ultimately seems self-conscious, ironic, winking at us. Maybe some viewers see The Artist as an amalgam of other things, but that wasn’t my experience, and nor was it Hazanavicius’s intention, according to his interviews.

Most of all, I believe Hazanavicius chose silent film, specifically, for a good reason: to teach us something we’ve collectively forgotten. He wants to show what film could do when we had to use our eyes so searchingly. Within a few days of seeing the film — and reading a few more reviewers who called this a gimmick or a form of pandering — I became more convinced that the director may not be a pedagogue, but he certainly wants us to learn something in the course of watching this film.

To wit: in my theater, you could hear the viewers gradually starting to laugh more, to intuit the internal logic of a silent film. Even though most of them were 65+years old, it’s hard to imagine any of them had ever seen a silent film on the screen while they were growing up. They started vocalizing non-words more — with silent film, you don’t need an audience to be silent — so you could hear people uttering things like, “ahh,” “oh!” and “wow” (especially when Jean Dujardin tap-danced). That low-level, unobjectionable audience murmuring enhanced the experience of watching, contributed to the communal pleasure. But it’s something we had to learn in the course of watching it.

I have the teensiest of complaints about ‘s The Artist – that some scenes felt like a mishmash of 1920s, 30s, and 40s influences, and that however charming she is, Bérénice Bejo seemed too tall and twiggy for the era — but my full range of emotions during the course of the film shows the limitations of my small criticisms. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I just burbled with the unmitigated pleasure of watching film, like when I saw the pitch-perfect grizzled face of Malcolm McDowell in a bit part (below). Oh, hang on, I experienced the same when I re-watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the frothy Top Hat (1935) on New Year’s Eve.

And oh, Jean Dujardin! He can look beefy during his Douglas Fairbanks scenes, “who, me?” disarming during his William Powell scenes, and fantastically light on his feet during his Gene Kelly scenes; egotistic early on, depressive later. And when he gets himself into a love scene with Bejo … well, he has a gravity, and a genuine sense of surprise and feeling, that makes us feel as if we’re falling in love, too. (In a way, we are.)

It’s strange that I loved the film this much and yet it took so long to express it here — I saw it nearly a month ago. It seems so horribly stereotypical that I, as an academic, would formulate a pile of tedious words to analyze something that’s like a visual soufflé. But there you have it — academics are bound to try to deflate the beautifully, improbably fluffy in order to understand how it works.

Should it win Best Picture and Best Actor at the Oscars? I think its only serious competition is Hugo and, as I’ve indicated, there’s no question for me that The Artist is better. I’ll also have to see Demián Bichir in A Better Life before I weigh in on Question #2. It’s my opinion that the Oscars put up a weak list this year (where is Poetry? where is Higher Ground? why are Moneyball and The Help up there?), and that given those lists, I’m rooting for The Artist. What can I say? Michel Hazanavicius shows us how to fall in love with cinema, and in love with a love story — and I went there with him. I hope you do, too.

“Kenny” (2006): full of it.

Let’s not beat around the bush: run — don’t walk — to see Kenny, the multiple prize-winning mockumentary about an Australian port-a-loo employee who spins his philosophy of life and lets us see some of the multiple humiliations one experiences if one earns a living dealing with other people’s shit. This film is hilarious, full of the best one-liners about excrement you’ve ever heard, and surprisingly touching, and Kenny (Shane Jacobson) outdoes the entire cast of This Is Spinal Tap as a fully-realized, utterly believable character — so much so that by the end my partner couldn’t believe it wasn’t an actual documentary.

The bad news comes at Kenny like crap through a goose. He’s newly divorced and his ex-wife hates him. Talking with a co-worker about marriage, he suggests that he should “cut out the middle man; find someone you hate and buy them a house.” Then there’s his widowed father who won’t let Kenny touch a single surface in his house. “Death in the family has different effects on different people,” Kenny philosophizes. “For some families, it brings them closer together. But for other families, like our circus, it’s Christmas cards at twenty paces.” Nor does he get any respect for his work. “I’d love to be able to say ‘I plumb toilets’ and have someone say, ‘now that is something I’ve always wanted to do’.”

The thing is, you can’t help but develop a serious affection for the man within about ten minutes. Even more so when you see him dealing not just with all that excrement, but also human weakness all around him. By the time he gets to fly all the way from Melbourne to Nashville, Tennessee for a convention, you’ve got almost the same slack-jawed look on your face that he’s got as he observes a world he’s never seen.

When I run the world (now there’s a phrase that doesn’t get enough use in my household), I’m going to hold weekly Kenny quote-a-longs that will outdo any Rocky Horror or Big Lebowski standard. When he says, “There’s a smell in here that will outlast religion,” you find yourself marveling a bit that he’s willing to throw himself into the job with the fervor he does. He is good at his job, and you start to see that his odd combination of kindness and stubborn self-determination makes his life harder, but also makes him more noble.

It’s available through Netflix and even has subtitles (!) for those worried about keeping up with the Australianisms. (Apologies for the earlier version of this post, for it is most certainly not streaming through Netflix.)

Bitter pill week

Here at Feminéma I seem to have reserved everything I hate for the same week: a dentist’s visit (and a filling replaced), a haircut with a new guy at the salon (always unpredictable, liable to result in tears), an eye exam (I got an A, but I always approach these with dread), and piles of essays from all my students. No wonder I’ve been a bit AWOL from blogging. But here’s how I survive such a bad sense of scheduling:

Reruns of Arrested Development (2003-2006). They’re streaming on Netflix and are the funniest, most condensed nuggets of dysfunctional family goodness available. I can hardly wait to see again the episode in which the siblings try to conduct an intervention with their mother. This show offers such an important public service that it really ought to air every night at 11:30pm.

New to me: Lark Rise to Candleford (2008-present), a BBC One show that Nan F. turned me on to that might as well have been prescribed by an herbalist. It’s all streaming on YouTube and tells the story of Laura, a teenager from a poor hamlet at the turn of the century who goes to town to work for her independent, delightful cousin Dorcas (Julia Sawalha, right). Brendan Coyle of North and South and Downton Abbey plays Laura’s hotheaded father; that man’s wicked little smiles and crinkly eyes win me over every time. In recommending Lark Rise I must admit it will appeal solely to those with a taste for costume/period pieces, but somehow its resolutions of the petty dramas of small villages leave me prepared to sleep well at night.

And reserved for tonight: Hanna (2011), with Saoirse Ronan kicking ass against, well, whoever, but Cate Blanchett included. Because when I feel oppressed by what I have done to myself, I turn to revenge flicks. Ronan has quickly become one of those rare young actors I watch carefully; she surprises every time (like in Atonement!). Tonight I attend a retirement party for a dear colleague, one of those rare, exceptional men; I’m going to insist that my Dear Friend recover with me afterward in a dark theater, regenerating through (watching) violence. Then perhaps I’ll come home, watch an episode of Arrested Development, and get some rest.

After all, JustMeMike and I have to work up our online conversation about Claire Denis’ White Material this weekend!

Palate cleanser

I have much more to say about the hullabaloo over funny women lately (the new Tina Fey book, the New Yorker essay about Anna Faris, and on and on) but mostly I’ve been inspired by the Self-Styled Siren and Glenn Kenny to post a palate cleanser. But unlike those esteemed critics’ choices, mine’s lowbrow: from Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, the brilliant Parker Posey as the high school senior all too eager to torture the new freshmen girls — mastering both physical and verbal humor.

Posey’s only one small part of this amazing ensemble cast (Matthew McConaughey has never been better, and he keeps his shirt on for the entire film!) but I wish she were more recognized for her genius. In fact, I want to watch this film all over again.

Clara Bow, topheavy with IT (1927)

“She’s a ripping sort, really,” someone says about Clara Bow’s character in It.  “She’s really topheavy with ‘IT’.”  Bow was the It Girl in the late 20s not just because she was popular.  “It” denoted a personal charisma that seemed to ooze from the pores of a few special individuals and not at all from others.  Perhaps sex appeal had something to do with it, yet Bow’s high-test caffeinated activity conveyed more best-girl good nature than the languid, sexy sultriness of other stars, from Louise Brooks to Gloria Swanson.  I’ve seen only two of Bow’s films (It and Wings, both made in 1927) and in both she conveys the same sparkly, occasionally goofy willingness to bounce around the screen.  Critics have simplified this to mean sex appeal, but I see a girl I’d have liked to go out dancing with.

First and foremost, Clara Bow was adorable.  She had a pile of indomitable curly hair cut in some kind of proximate of a 1920s bob, with enormous dark eyes and round, youthful cheeks better suited to hamming it up onscreen than to come-hither looks.  If we want to talk about “it” as meaning sex appeal, we must specify that her appeal came from the flirtatious fun that Bow insists on having in these films rather than something more serious; she’s the girl you take to the rides at amusement park and who has a hard time keeping her skirt from riding up to show her garters, as in the clip below.  What she showed onscreen was a willingness to show a little skin — but only in that offhand, accidental way that was both funny and a little titillating.  Bow was that good-time girl who was probably chaste but who showed an intoxicating familiarity with the men around her.  In It she sets out to win the heart of the department-store owner, and she does.

Turns out, It was a Hollywood vehicle specifically designed to shine Bow’s star.  The filmmakers took a fluffy 1926 article from Cosmopolitan by Elinor Glyn, paid Glyn piles of money, and transformed it into a narrative about a shopgirl who turns the heads of wealthy men and eventually that department store man.  They even gave Glyn major writing credits for the film (though it had virtually nothing to do with her article) and had her walk into the restaurant at the Ritz to discuss her idea, as if it were as significant and complex as the theory of relativity:

["IT" signifies] self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not — and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.  That’s “IT”!  If you have “IT”, you will win the girl you love.

That pronouncement sets the tone for the rest of the film, which remains as unserious as Bow could keep it.  But one can’t help being convinced via her manic energy and that preposterously loopy head of hair that she really did have “it,” and that you want to watch her keep performing it onscreen.  The dreariest part of the film is when we are reminded, again and again, of Glyn’s simple idea.  Not that it weighs Bow down in the least.  As David Thomson puts it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, she appears as “a lipstick butterfly veering between old adages and fresh opportunities.”  I’m going to keep watching.

The delights of “The Good Fairy” (1935)

I complained a couple of months ago about the un-Lubitsch-like “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), and fretted secretly that I might have already seen all the magical light comedies of the 30s and 40s. But I’ve rediscovered my old-movie faith after watching “The Good Fairy,” written by the pitch-perfect Preston Sturges (adapted from a Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnár) and starring the effervescent Margaret Sullavan — she of “The Shop Around the Corner” fame.  Whereas in “Shop” she could be ever-so-slightly grating, an actorly move that made the conclusion even more satisfying, in this earlier film Sullavan is nothing but lovely.  She plays a quintessential naïf:  Luisa Ginglebusher, a girl who leaves the orphanage where she’s spent her whole life to work as an usherette in a grand Budapest movie theater.  As she leaves, the orphanage’s matron reminds her to continue to do a good deed every single day, an imperative that combines inextricably in Luisa’s mind with the tales she’s been telling the orphanage’s younger girls about the good fairy who does good deeds and helps the weak.  Luisa wants to be the good fairy.  Despite all that innocence, Sullavan manages to exude a kind of gravitas that makes this film very Lubitsch-like (it was actually directed by William Wyler) — that is, it always manifests a sweet melancholy just a little bit below the surface of the movie’s antics.

Sullavan has a great face, but not one you immediately categorize as beautiful.  As David Thomson puts it, nailing it as usual, ”One realized that she was beautiful when her face lit up in response to the events of the film.  Above all, she seemed vulnerable, haboring her strength and the chance of happiness.”  That’s certainly the case here, made even more clear by the director’s use of glowing closeups to accentuate her face — we watch her weep a little as she watches a sad scene in a movie, or as she beams in response to good news.  Luisa is so innocent that every single emotion washes over her face for us to comprehend.  We may not exactly understand one so naïve, but we love her.

apologies for the watermark; it was the best copy I could find.

“The Good Fairy” is a post-Hays Code kind of sex comedy — that is, it pivots on the question of sex and female chastity without ever seeming risqué.  The plot really starts to cook in the theater, where her innocence proves to be catnip for men.  Approached by a dark-looking Cesar Romero who offers her beer and sandwiches, clearly as a first gambit to get into her knickers, she flails desperately to get away from him and succeeds only by announcing that she’s married — then races into the arms of a grouchy theater patron named Detlaff (Reginald Owen, with the bowler above).  Detlaff takes a paternal liking to Luisa and invites her out for a fancy evening at the elegant hotel where he works as a waiter; little does he realize that her catnip qualities will only attract more dangerous attention there.  The most persistent is the simultaneously dapper and bumbling Konrad (Frank Morgan, who later did the same routine as the Wizard of Oz), the millionaire president of a South American meat-packing concern, who sweeps her into a private dining room and promises her furs, baubles, and lovely dresses.  The vigilant Detlaff recognizes the risk of such a sugar daddy, and warns her to put Konrad off; yet again, she gets out of a jam by pronouncing that she’s married.  Unperturbed, Konrad declares that he’ll win her heart by making her husband rich enough to buy her lovely things — that way, when she wears them she’ll know they’re really from him.  Luisa decides that this is her opportunity to do someone a good deed, so she opens the phone book, randomly chooses a name, and tells Konrad that this is her husband.

She chose well:  Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall) is indeed poor and deserving, a lawyer who adheres strictly to a code of ethics and assists the poor, though he’s perhaps a little too serious.  Konrad bestows him with a crazily lucrative contract, a wad of spending money, and instructions to replace all his shabby office furniture.  In fact, he’s in the middle of admiring his new purchases — most of all the mechanical pencil sharpener, in a mini-moment custom-made for movie-watching delight — when the curious Luisa walks in to meet the object of her good-fairy magic.  Sure, Max is a bit forbidding with his sanctimony and a beard that ages him badly, but she decides he could use more of her help — to start with, in finding a new suit and a shave.  So in good 1930s movie fashion, they go shopping together with his newly fat wallet, during which she convinces him to take off his dreary beard (“Never let it be said that a Sporum ever refused the request of a Ginglebusher,” he says as he complies), transforming him into a much more dashing young man.  To thank her, he buys her a “genuine foxine” wrap, an item she loves better than any sable coat from Konrad — and she poses with her new “fur” in front of one of those infinite mirrors, secretly doing a little dance.  But because Konrad is bound to believe the foxine is far too cheap for the lovely Luisa, her budding romance with Max is heading quickly for the rapids — and for a happy conclusion.

Considering how quickly these studios were pushing out the films during the 30s, we should feel especially blessed when we find one that doesn’t feel utterly dated.  But “The Good Fairy” is so much better than that.  Between Sturges’ crisp dialogue, Sullavan’s utter watchability, and director Wyler’s choice of great shots (Wyler later married Sullavan, making me wonder whether he was just a little bit in love already with her glowing, unusual face), the film sparkles.  Isn’t it the season to rediscover our faith in sparkling old movies?

Movies as therapy: “Holiday” (1938)

I can’t describe this evening as gracefully as my Dear Friend does here, but let’s just say that sometimes a night of comfort food (baked ziti), a bottle of red, lots of conversation, and a great old movie comprise the panacea for those mid-semester doldrums.  But this is no ordinary doldrum.  She and I spend a lot of our time fretting about integrating work and our intellectual lives in ways that feel true and honest.  Sometimes it seems my Dear Friend is the only person who hasn’t become one of the Pod People – one of those unblinking Panglosses who claims that our university is the best of all possible worlds.  How perfect, then, that our mostly accidental choice of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday” would discover likeminded souls. 

Johnny Case (Grant) has fallen in love overnight with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on a ski vacation, and has returned to New York to meet her family and whisk her off to be married.  He’s surprised to learn, then, that she hails from that Seton family — owners of a mansion and a social reputation and a whole lotta stultification.  This is bad news for Johnny, because he’s ready to take a holiday from work — and the only person in the Seton family who really gets it is Julia’s older sister Linda (Hepburn), who loves her sister so much that she’s willing to grill Johnny to make sure he’s a good man:

Linda:  “How does your garden grow, Case?  Is life wonderful where you are?” 

Johnny:  “It can be.”

Linda:  “But it hasn’t been?”

Johnny:  “Well, I don’t call what I’ve been doing living.”

Linda:  “And what do you recommend for yourself, doctor?”

Johnny:  “A holiday!”

Linda:  “For how long?”

Johnny:  “As long as I need.”

Linda:  “You mean just to play?”

Johnny:  “No.  No, I’ve been working since I was 10.  I want to find out why I’m working.  The answer can’t just be to pay bills, to pile up more money. …”

Linda:  “Yes, but what is the answer?”

Johnny:  “Well I don’t know.  That’s what I intend to find out.  The world’s changing out there.  …I want to find out where I stand, how I fit into the picture, what it’s all going to mean to me.  I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office, so as soon as I’ve got some money together I’m going to knock off for a while.”

Linda:  “Quit?”

Johnny:  “Quit!  I want to save part of my life for myself.  There’s a catch to it, though: it’s got to be part of the young part — you know, retire young, work old.  Come back to work when I know what I’m working for.  Does that make sense to you?

Linda:  “That makes a lot of sense.”

It does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  Such that it doesn’t really matter that the movie feels a bit stage-y at times (it was based on a stage play).  The action — i.e., the talking — takes place mostly in a few rooms.  But it’s not all talking.  Grant shows off the physical aplomb that initially brought him to the U.S. as a tumbler with a troupe of acrobats:  he flips furniture, does a tumbling run with a backflip, and charms us just as utterly as he does Katharine Hepburn’s Linda — and in bad suits, too.  His charm is all the more impressive when we meet the full Seton family, most grimly realized in Linda and Julia’s louche, drunken brother Ned (Lew Ayres), who drinks to blot out the tedium.  No wonder Linda is so disgusted when her sister proves herself to be too much a Seton to deserve Johnny:  Julia refuses to marry him unless he abandons his cockeyed ideas about a holiday from work, for she wants him to be a “success” just like her long line of business tycoons.

And did I mention the hats?  Okay, this movie doesn’t crackle as pristinely as “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) would a couple of years later, but that film has the same cooks in the kitchen:  director George Cukor with screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, based on plays by Philip Barry — but who cares if a movie proves to balm your nerves the way “Holiday” does on a Friday night?  And with that, my grading woes were forgotten.

Female desire and “Design for Living”

There’s something in Ernst Lubitsch’s “Design for Living” (1933) that I haven’t seen in other films of the same era:  female sexual desire.  Mix that into a ménage à trois between Miriam Hopkins and two men — Frederic March and Gary Cooper — and you have a whole lot of things I hadn’t seen on screen until now.

Very loosely based on a Noël Coward play (which was itself very loosely based on the personal lives of stage actors Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, who were two of Coward’s best friends), and completely rewritten by Ben Hecht and reimagined by Lubitsch, the film centers on Tommy, a playwright, and George, a painter, who both fall for sparky young advertising artist Gilda.  Within days she finds she’s fallen, too; except she’s fallen in love with both of them.  “A thing happened to me that usually happens to men,” she explains:

“You see, a man can meet two, three, or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then by a process of interesting elimination he’s able to decide which one he prefers.  But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice.  Oh, it’s quite all right for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out.”

For about five minutes this poses a serious problem for the men, who seem to face a crisis in their friendship.  But they’ve missed the solution Gilda is proposing:  That the three of them experiment with a purely platonic arrangement of living together in the same, shabby Montmartre apartment, with Gilda serving as their “mother of the arts” to spark and hone their creative genius.  To make this threesome work, they make what they call a “gentleman’s agreement”:  “No sex.”  And indeed, she’s responsible for their subsequent success.  First, she barnstorms a producer’s apartment to drop a copy of Tommy’s new play on his desk.  “It’s a woman’s play!” she pronounces triumphantly, and everyone in the room sits up and pays attention.  (I was initially going to dedicate this post to that line alone.)  Soon Tommy is whisked off to London to see it through rehearsals and opening night.

With him away, Gilda and George can no longer repress their passion for one another.  She’s always had a tendency to be slightly louche, and to throw herself onto beds in a serio-comic pose of female disconcertion.  Realizing that sex with Tommy is now an inevitability, Gilda throws herself onto the bed and pronounces, “It’s true we have a gentleman’s agreement — but unfortunately, I am no gentleman!”  (Fade.)

Tommy is crushed when he hears of this development, when he comes back to Paris and finds George temporarily out of town, he sadly reminds her of their previously happy life by pointing to his old typewriter they’ve kept, even though it’s in sorry shape:

Tommy, accusing:  “You didn’t keep it oiled.”
Gilda:  “I did for a while.”
Tommy:  “The keys are rusty.  The shift is broken.”  Gilda slides the carriage, causing the typewriter to “ding.”  They look at each other with surprise.
Gilda:  “But it still rings!”  He walks over to be close to her.
Gilda, repeating:  “It still rings.”
Tommy, meaningfully:  “Does it?”
(Fade.)

So he and Gilda take a turn indulging in a night of passion — which they regret as soon as George returns.  Horrified by the prospect of losing them and destroying the men’s friendship, she runs off and marries Edward Everett Horton, a tedious advertising suit.  But Tommy and George reconcile and determine to find her again.

In other pre-Code films, women either deploy sex as a means of gaining power (Barbara Stanwyck in “Baby Face,” for example, which I described briefly earlier this month) or to signal their looseness (Jean Harlow in virtually anything before 1933).  Seeing Hopkins genuinely drawn to both men – and unable to control her sexual desire for them – makes one realize what movies might have been able to say about female sexuality if it hadn’t been for the Code.  This film genuinely wants its audiences to imagine a situation in which one woman might have two live-in lovers — a situation that doesn’t end in tears and melodrama.  Lubitsch always keeps the tone light, but the subject matter is fairly radical.

Even more radical were the queer overtones in Tommy and George’s relationship, which Coward’s play explored in detail.  But just because they’re subtle in the film doesn’t mean they’ve been erased.  From the outset, we know that this is a genuine triangle; these men love each other just as much as they’re attracted to Gilda, and to ruin their love would be just as tragic as one man losing the woman.  It wouldn’t be long before the Code would truly stub out such images.

“Design for Living” is ultimately one of those near-miss kinds of films — its dialogue doesn’t quite sparkle, and its actors never quite stop being talky and self-conscious.  Gary Cooper was 31 and at the height of his beauty, but not yet at the height of the comic skills that would appear so gracefully in “Mr. Deeds Comes to Town” (at 31, Cooper had already appeared — incredibly — in 61 films).  Compared with her male co-stars, the relative newcomer Hopkins appears the most suited for the film’s scope, and she looks increasingly terrific in every glamorous outfit.  The “Lubitsch touch” that made other films radiant — “The Shop Around the Corner,” “Ninotchka,” “Trouble in Paradise” — doesn’t quite jell here.

But to see a comedy from 1933 that takes for granted that a woman has independent sexual desire, and that this will not lead her to abjection, regret, or early death:  how rare it is.  As Gilda herself puts it to her husband on their wedding night, as he pronounces that he has “forgiven” her for her earlier sexual peccadillos, “Forgiven me?!  Forgiven me for what?”  Thank you.

Querulous sex and screwball comedy

It’s simply wrong to remember the screwball and romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s as wholly innocent or de-sexed.  Sure, the Hollywood Production Code eliminated a lot of the open sexuality of the earlier era, forbidding all on-screen representations of sexual contact.  Yet those rules led screenwriters to create a host of scenarios that nominally adhered to the rules yet found ways to make them erotically charged and even risky. 

I can’t think of a better example than Jean Arthur in my favorite film of hers, “The More the Merrier” (1943).  To use an apt phrase of David Thomson’s, Arthur had a “rare querulous quality” onscreen that, he suggests, resulted from her ambivalence about acting and Hollywood more generally.  After serving as a forgettable ingénue in several dozen silents and early talkies, she remade herself in the mid-30s by bleaching her brunette hair and utilizing that distinctively froggy voice to great effect in films such as “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It With You,” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  By that time, her unique combination of innocent idealism and worldly wisecracking seemed perfectly pitched for the era’s films.   

“The More the Merrier” has a slow start, but viewers shouldn’t give up: the film really starts to jell after a somewhat belabored first twenty minutes of antics.  Premised on the wartime housing shortage in Washington, D.C., young working girl Arthur rents her spare room to the elderly Charles Coburn, who presumptuously determines to improve her love life by finding her a “high-type, clean-cut, nice young fella.”  Coburn promptly rents half of his room to the wry, laconic, tall and handsome GI Joel McCrea, who beautifully underplays his part.  The film starts to cook as soon as McCrea appears onscreen, and is propelled by the tensions over sexual propriety between the two roommates—highlighting Arthur’s delicate querulousness.  It consistently returns us to its favorite image: a scene shot through the windows of the apartment’s two adjoining bedrooms, with each room’s bed sharing the same wall, showing us how close Arthur is to McCrea as they lie in bed—even as the wall assures us they’ll behave themselves.  

The best scene comes when Arthur and McCrea are wandering slowly back to the apartment one night after a night of cocktails and dancing, passing through what appears to be a sea of couples necking on stoops and sidled up against trees.  Nervous, she natters on with questions about his previous girlfriends and transparently false assertions of confidence in her engagement to the awful Mr. Pendergast.  McCrea responds only in the most cursory way, fixing his attention on getting some small touch of her skin—what amounts to small physical battle between them.  It’s a scene equivalent to those choreographed Fred and Ginger dances enacting the pleasurable friction of resistance.  McCrea doggedly tries to put his arm around her, touch her arms, run his hand along her neck; Arthur dodges.  His arm snakes underneath her cloak; Arthur evades, yet positions herself for more.  When they finally clunk down on the steps to her apartment building, McCrea’s offensive begins in earnest.  Now offering mere grunts for responses, he insistently caresses her arms, her shoulders, her back.  

In a perfect movie moment, Arthur succumbs.  Her chatter is interrupted by the pleasure she takes in his increasingly successful kisses—and when he hits the sweetest spot on her neck, she simply has to pause mid-sentence:  her eyes close, her neck extends, and her chin lifts as she concentrates fully on the kiss’s delight.  At the end of the kiss, her eyes widen, her absurdly long false eyelashes bat a few times with brilliant comic disconcertion, and she stutters as she completes her meaningless sentence.  The die is cast: she reaches for his face and indulges in a long, passionate kiss on the lips.  Arthur’s great knack here is to remind us that we’re watching a comedy, yet still leave no question about the passion between them.  As they slowly walk upstairs to the apartment—that dangerously private, intimate space, where only a wall separates their beds—the tension continues to rise, and the film must create a crisis to relieve it. 

Post-Code films attain their delicious tension all the more because they could show such delimited physical contact.  Considered in that context, the motif of the wall between the two beds becomes all the more sexy, enhancing desire while demanding physical separation.  McCrea and Arthur whisper pillow talk to one another through the wall and display to us in highly intimate closeups that all the boundaries between them have crumbled; only the wall sustains their chastity.  Even at the height of the Code’s influence, writers and actors undermined it with images of erotic intimacies all the more effective for the walls that fell, Jericho-style, only after these movies ended and the theater lights came back on.

Return of the funny woman

A few posts ago, I lamented a movie/TV world in which (again, to quote The Onion) women can be “sexy and tough. Sexy and smart. Sexy and professional.”  Sexy and enough of a right-on sheila to make a totally guy movie and win the Academy Award for Best Director.

At the risk of contradicting myself, I want to celebrate the return of the funny woman on TV — specifically in the form of Sofia Vergara of “Modern Family.” Let’s face it, folks: we don’t usually let our women be sexy and funny. This makes Vergara ever more of a delight, as she uses her crazy curvaceousness to be even funnier. Contrary to The Rules from way back in the 90s, which instructed women never to be funny lest they fail to snag a man, Vergara is terrific.

I’m not going to say she steals the show, which is a true ensemble cast of funny people (Eric Stonestreet deserves a paean of his own for his portrayal of Cameron); nor am I going to make too much of the show overall, which is distractingly entertaining yet light in the same manner as “30 Rock.” Rather, Vergara is perfect as the hot young trophy wife — who, once she establishes her part, doesn’t let the trophyness take over — of the aging Ed O’Neill character. She’s best when she’s sparring with him. “You’re too funny,” she tells him stone-faced when they’re fighting. “I’m going to share that one with my next husband when we’re spending all your money.” Then she slits her eyes, purses her lips, and looks to the camera for confirmation from the viewer — employing a physical humor that most gorgeous women won’t/can’t muster onscreen. Vergara is naturally funny.

Okay, invariably the writers draw heavily on two stereotypes: the Hot Latina and the Spanish-English disconnect. A lot of her lines are variants of the malapropism. When she sternly instructs her husband to be supportive of their son, she quotes the saying, “‘You be the wind in his back, not the spit in his face.’” She pauses, reconsiders the wording in English, and adds, “It’s gorgeous in Spanish.” If the show didn’t muster a whole array of cultural stereotypes (the prissy gay man, the exasperated housewife, the too-smart and slightly malicious middle child), I might feel the need to be offended. But in general the show takes no prisoners in the same manner that “The Simpsons” or “South Park” allowed stereotypes to set the stage rather than delimit their characters and scenarios.

I’m a big fan of Tina Fey, and I think Vergara follows in her footsteps. But “30 Rock” worked at cross-purposes in its early seasons: it got a lot of its humor from Liz Lemon’s attraction to meatball subs and Cheesy Blasters (which contained so many hormones that she got a false positive from a home pregnancy test), yet it kept putting Liz into gorgeous evening gowns, reminding us that Fey is really sexy despite her funniness, self-deprecation, and dietary weaknesses. What were they doing, trying to reassure us that “30 Rock” wasn’t just a “woman’s show”? (It’s a relief to see that more recently the show has abandoned that tendency, allowing Lemon to play up the physical humor with terrible haircuts, etc.)

In contrast, we take for granted Vergara’s character’s hotness — and then we let it go because she does funny things from there on out.  She’s a pleasure.