ampersandology: film. culture. words.: 1950s

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

There's one film that leads the discussion of Famous Last Films, and that's The Misfits (1961). Arthur Miller originally wrote the screenplay as a Valentine's Day present to his then-wife Marilyn Monroe, and in the years since, The Misfits has acquired a misty nostalgic sheen to it; it stands as a kind of talisman that film buffs can point to and say, "Look. Here. This is when the change started."

Whether or not that's accurate, it certainly is a tempting mythology. Starring Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, the entire production seems like cinematic kismet, as the film details the efforts of an aging cowboy (Gable) to rustle up mustangs to sell, while befriending an aimless divorced woman (Monroe) and rodeo drifter (Clift). Here, the symbolism starts to work overtime: the horses are sold for dog food, but the cowboy can remember the days (the good old days, in case you were wondering) when these same horses would be sold for children's fairs.

All three of its stars were approaching the end of their careers, though of course none of them knew it: Gable was a lifelong alcoholic and would collapse from a heart attack two days after filming; Clift, whose had only escaped his matinée idol good looks by being uncommonly talented, had been very badly disfigured in a motorcycle accident some years before and had never quite found his footing in Hollywood after that.

And then, of course, there is Marilyn Monroe, whose troubled life have filled a thousand pages of a hundred books far more impressively than I could attempt here; I will mention, however, that she had to attend the film's premiere on a pass from the psychiatric ward she had checked herself into for narcotics abuse.

Gable, who'd begun his career as an extra in silent films, was one of the last leftovers from the studio system, one of the last holdouts of the traditional, stoic masculine screen image that actors like Clift had fought hard to reinvent. Watching him in The Misfits is a little like witnessing the end of an era. And it's not just Gable: in their own ways, both Monroe and Clift were also the last of their kind, both raised in a largely studio-based Hollywood system that would begin to crumble in just a few years.

It's hard to watch The Misfits without all of this in mind; I tend to judge it as a haunting punctuation to three bright and troubled lives. Is this always the case, I wondered? It's a morbid tendency I've always nursed: the minute I hear that a famous Hollywood name has passed on, it's usually my first instinct to check their IMDb page for the last movie they completed.

Why? I'm not entirely sure, though I think it may have more to do with my need for symmetry. It touches me deeply when a star's last film provides some kind of symbolic closure on a life lived in the public eye; it disturbs me greatly when it seems arbitrary, or happenstance.

Discuss!

Audrey Hepburn - Always

By 1989, Audrey Hepburn had begun the slow descendant of a successful star on the downswing; after her Oscar-nominated turn in 1967's Wait Until Dark, she worked only occasionally while raising her family or promoting the charities closest to her heart (as a child who'd grown up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the plight of impoverished children hit her especially hard). In a career marked by style, charm and gamine grace, this treacly remake of 1943's A Guy Named Joe is an oddity on an otherwise impeccable resume.

Hepburn plays an angel to Richard Dreyfuss' downed airline pilot, and her charming, ever so maternal grace is a comforting distraction. The first clue to the film's general quality is how many genres it straddles: billed as a romantic comedy drama, Always strikes me as a jack of a couple of trades, but master of none. Also, many critics consider it a direct forefather to Ghost, so at least we know who to blame for this:

by Jillian Leigh, Ampersandology

Part One is here.

In the last post, I talked about some possible origins of the homage—the old boys of New Hollywood, and their love of referencing their heroes and peers on the screen. Now, to start off this look at actual homage, let’s dive into 2003’s The Dreamers.

The Dreamers, set in 1968 during the student rebellion in Paris, follows Matthew, a young American student and blossoming cinephile. Every day he sits in the front row at the Cinémathèque Française, describing what takes place in the synapses of the patrons there as something near religious in its estacsy. He eventually befriends Theo and Isabelle, brother and sister who claim to be twins. Exotic and intelligent, the pair absorb Matthew into their home, and the days devolve into a lazy game of obscure film trivia and sexual one-upmanship.

The film was based on Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents, but Bertolucci insisted on infusing the screenplay with references to his favorite films. The Dreamers therefore becomes a love song to the films of long-forgotten eras...and Bertolucci ain't subtle.

The characters are explicit in their debates (the slapstick ballet of Buster Keaton versus the pathos of Charlie Chaplin) and reenact scenes from their idolized films in an attempt to stump each other. They let Matthew know he’s part of the group by chanting the “one of us” refrain from Freaks (1936). The three race through the Lourve to beat the record in Bande à part (1964), pin up foreign posters of Blowup (1966) and, in my favorite moment, wrap themselves into their favorite narratives: Isabelle claims that she was born on the Champs Elysees and that her first words were “New York Herald Tribune, New York Herald Tribune.” This is, of course, a direct conscious reference to the heroine of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), helpfully accompanied by the exact scene in question.

It's built in with the reverence that many of these films inspire, and when the reality that they have created in their self-referential cinematic crashes around them, the trio disbands. I always wonder what kind of message this is really sending about film lovers and their passions—is it really the purest kind of devotion, or is it a self-aware mockery of the same, suggesting it can only exist in a vacuum?

A little theorizing gives us three basic types of homage: by frame, by character or by theme.

FRAME

Being a visual medium, frame homage is the most obvious and easily recognizable way to reference another film. Take The Crowd, made in 1928 by director King Vidor. It was a groundbreaking film, and ahead of its time, depicting the metropolitan workspace as a cold, unfeeling place where dreams are squandered. John Sims (James Murray) is a cog in the machine, once believing he was destined for great things but now resigned to his neutered existence as #137 out of who knows how many. He marries, has kids, and is doomed to watch his children repeat his same mistake. Born on the fourth of July, I like to think of Sims’ character as Vidor's sly dig at the American Dream—after all, what’s more American than capitalistic obscurity?

A landmark film, and this image from the film has become iconic: a visual representation of Sims’ obscurity and wasted potential. So Billy Wilder chose to famously pay tribute to it in his 1960 masterpiece The Apartment (yes, I said masterpiece!). He even gives his lead, C.C. Baxter, a number to underscore how minuscule he is in comparison to the big scheme; “I work on the 19th floor,” Baxter says in his opening monologue. “Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.”

What’s key here is not the similarity of these two shots, but how they differ. The Crowd places the camera high above the ant-like employees, emphasizing their detachment from the real world and their identical station. But Wilder chooses to angle the lens on the ground, framing the scene so that the vast scope of the space is truly realized, with row after row of diligent employees and bright, unflattering lighting (here’s some trivia for you: this set was actually only about a third of a the size it appears—Hollywood magic and trick perspective gave the illusion of an expansive office space). What The Crowd started, The Apartment finishes, rescuing Baxter from obscurity by plucking him off the corporate ladder and turning him into a self-aware, happily unwound cog. Sims couldn't escape his lot in life, but Baxter fights for his freedom (and the girl).

OTHER NOTABLE REFERENCES

Dressed to Kill/Psycho
Director Brian de Palma has often been accused of ripping off Hitchcock like it was going out of style, and none is the senior director’s influence more clear than in 1980’s Dressed to Kill. Watch the trailer—the moody lighting, the densely weighted dialogue, the ramshackle editing of murder scenes (the execution of which, by the way, never seem to match the wounds on the victim’s body)--you can find it all done first (and quite frankly, done better) in 1960's Psycho. And then there’s this shot—not to spoil either film, but come on, Brian. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice?

Rashomon/Now, Voyager
Two drastically different films—Now, Voyager (1942) and Rashomon (1950)— made years apart but bearing uncanny similarities. A mysterious woman, face hidden by an unusually large headpiece, tilts up her chin for the potent reveal of a lovely face. Trying to trace a line of connection between these drastically different films may be a shot in the dark— but what strikes me here is the symbolic threads between them: in the latter, the samurai’s wife is introduced in the film for the first time, in one of several retellings of the same event, and still no closer to revealing the truth. In the former, we’ve already seen Bette Davis, but only as a hollow echo of her inner self: here, stepping out from the shadow of her mother, she is the girl underneath finally reaching the surface. Both shots delve into the art of revelation, attraction and identity. Plus, great hats!

CHARACTER

Down With Pillow Talk
Evoking a famous character can be its own shorthand—put any surly kid in a red leather jacket and blue jeans and suddenly you’re channeling James Dean. Sometimes the character reference is more obscure, daring the film to pick apart the reference to get some hidden clue to the themes and influences of the film at large. And rarer still, it’s a loaded commentary on a certain era or film genre, and serves as the jumping off point for a mouthful of cultural criticism.

No film proves this like 2004's Down With Love. Barbara Novak is the author of a new book that glorifies having sex like a man (in this case, without love) that's taken the world’s female population by storm, empowering housewives and single gals alike. Catcher Block is the journalist determined to take her down and get things back to normal so he can happily continue his life as a cad. So he poses as an out of town bumpkin and seduces her with a false identity, hoping to trick her into falling for him and thus invalidating her book’s philosophy.

It was advertised as a send-up of all those Doris Day/Rock Hudson pairings of the 1950s and 1960s, but what everyone failed to point out how it was less a send-up than the unofficial remake of Pillow Talk, perhaps one of the most famous Day/Hudson outings. The idea of switching identities to trick the female love interest. Rock Hudson did it first, right down to the fake accent. But the translation, for the most part, works; with the freedom to explore issues that would have been taboo, or at the very least, unfashionable for a mainstream romcom in the late 1950s, Down With Love manages to both shed light on the assumptions of its predecessor and muddle up commentary on the role of gender in society--both past and present.

Everything—from sets, costumes, credits and visuals (note the split screen effect during phone calls—straight out of the playbook)-is lovingly reproduced, but none so thoroughly as the characters of Catcher Block and Barbara Novak, standing in for Hudson and Day, respectively. Zelleweger nails Doris Day’s throaty, pursed lip caricature of exasperation, doing her best to act like her attraction to the scandalous Catcher is nothing more than a buzzing gnat. And McGregor manages to edge Hudson’s traditional masculinity with a hint of mischievous, wide-eyed schoolboy.

But what these two characters really accomplish, besides bringing to life a pretty neat cinematic experiment, is a fulfillment of the kind of gender explorations that the older vehicles couldn’t match. A Rock Hudson/Day picture of the late 1950s and early 1960s promised a battle of the sexes, sure, but only guaranteed it for the first two thirds, at which the female character would give in just in time for the two to happily pair off. But in the updated version, their counterparts are free to explore the innuendo and inequality lying underneath those nearly-stock characters. Watch the scene where Barbara and Catcher converse on the phone, with the split screen cleverly edited to simulate every sex act in the book; can you call it innuendo when the gag is so explicit?

OTHER NOTABLE REFERENCES

Rachael in Blade Runner/Mildred Pierce in Mildred Pierce
The first time I saw Rachael’s hairdo in Blade Runner, I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. And that somewhere was on top of Joan Crawford's frankly terrifying visage in 1946's Mildred Pierce. And this got me thinking: what were they going for here? Mildred Pierce is a woman who builds her life around making her snotty, entitled brat of a daughter, Veda, happy. What exactly does that have to do with a 21st century replicant programmed to believe she's actually a human being? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense: Rachel is channeling the kind of rigid, business-like exterior that Mildred later relied on to run her life.

Mutt Williams in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull/Johnny in The Wild One
Honestly? I can’t say much more about this one without blushing. Why do I blush? Because I feel personally embarrassed for Spielberg, and partly responsible. This isn’t a character inspired by another, this is tracing paper and an old copy of the studio stills. But bless him: I can’t blame the guy, because he’s so love with film that he probably just thought he was sending a Valentine to the hungry, angry ghost of Marlon Brando. But look, Brando didn’t tolerate his shtick being stolen the first time (by James Dean, who used to study the way the older actor sat in a chair and then ripped it wholeheartedly for his starring role in Rebel Without a Cause a few years later) and I really don’t think putting SHIIIIIA on a harley would get him tickled pink. I'm just saying. I don't think the ghost of Marlon Brando is going to be any more sane and/or genial than his corporeal being. Marlon Brando could eat Shia LeBeouf for breakfast and save the magnificent embers of his arrogant youth for lunch.

THEME/STYLE

Wes Anderson

More common, and more touching, I think, is when a director chooses to embrace or continue the themes that their cinematic heroes began. And one director who has turned this into a sweetly childlike habit is Wes Anderson. Wes Anderson’s influences are usually bolded on the screen—his work has shared qualities with J.D. Salinger’s novels, Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip, the French New Wave and the 1970s auteur crowd. But one influence that stands out is the oeuvre of Orson Welles. Welles and Anderson share a handful of thematic haunts, revisiting them over and over. There is the pervasive exploration of the once great family name, tarnished by years of scandal, misuse and betrayal. Welles, of course, went epic, because I'm fairly certain he didn't know any other way, using The Magnificent Ambersons to cover an entire generation of the embittered, Southern family. For Anderson, it was more localized: in The Royal Tenenbaums, he creates an alternate New York City and sets up scene in a single household over a period of roughly two weeks. But the strains are echoed throughout both films: the betrayal of blood and the closed sense of space.

Matt Zohn Seitz breaks it down succinctly in his essay The Substance of Style:

Anderson and Wilson’s script for The Royal Tenenbaums contains many acknowledgments of Welles’s second feature, Ambersons, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a prominent small-town family in decline. There’s a similarly palatial, cone-topped family home, significant action blocked on and around imposing wooden staircases, and a sense of collective anxiety born of the feeling that time has passed a once-important family by and the community knows it. Both movies feature novelistic third-person narration, by Welles in Ambersons and Alec Baldwin in Tenenbaums.

Then there’s the fixation on tracing the fall those who live under great scrutiny and crumble with the pressure. These films, more often than not, center around great men and their steep decline—it’s a pattern both directors indulge often and with abandon. Welles, obviously, did it loudest with Citizen Kane, his magnum opus right out of the gate, and his examination of a life from every angle. Citizen Kane may be the flashiest digression on the subject, but he revisited the idea often, with Touch of Evil, Othello, The Stranger---even his documentary about infamous forger Elmyr de Hory, F for Fake, deals with the same sense of glorious, inevitable decline.

Anderson, too, revisits this idea over and over again—you get the feeling that Mr. Blume in Rushmore and Steve Zissou have more in common than simply being played by Bill Murray. His male leads all bear the smudged luster of a bright past: they’re over the hill, with their best days are behind them, and to make matters worse, they’ve got a generation of upstarts nipping close at their heels. With Anderson’s interpretation, it’s usually the families that suffer most acutely from the fall of their patriarchs. In The Darjeeling Limited, a trio of brothers are left broken and in search of some piecemeal idea of their father’s legacy. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou explores a son's desire connect with his absentee father at the cost of his own personal idenitity. And in The Royal Tenenbaums, three children have been left orphans of neglect thanks to a father who never thought to make amends until he needed a place to stay.

What makes that last comparison even more potent is the fact that the Tenenbaum children are failed child prodigies returning to their childhood home: wunderkinds who fizzled out under the weight of their family’s damages. I can’t help but think of Welles himself, who directed Citizen Kane when he was 24*, and famously spent the next forty years battling bloated expectation, studio interference and a rather persuasive alcoholism. In the end, the boy genius was crippled by his own heady potential and never really made anything to truly rival his first film, notoriously remarking, “Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one.”

OTHER NOTABLE REFERENCES

Blade Runner/Metropolis

Let's break down the thematic strings tying these two together: both are set in the dystopian future, both deal with the reality of robots among civilization, and the perils of losing touch with our humanity and relying on slaves. But more importantly, both portray the creators of these robots as something near god-like, with the robots believing in their divinity and trusting that he (Rotwag in Metropolis and Tyrell in Blade Runner) can solve the woes of their short, dependent lives.

The Good German/Casablanca

Exhibit A:

Enough said.

Next: Now that we've seen how homage can work in film, let's move onto the prince of thieves himself: one Quentin Tarantino.

*Yeah, I know: 24. Orson Welles makes the rest of us look like lazy slobs. Until he became one himself, of course.

ampersandology: film. culture. words.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

The Gothic in Film and Moving Pictures

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Great Stars and Their Last Films

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Homage and Rip Off, Part Two: A Breakdown of Onscreen Shorthand

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