Warning if you suffer from depression don't watch this film

 

Katzelmacher (1969, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is another one of Fassbinder’s bleak little gloom dumps. Its languor is a cinematic device to convey depression. 5 women. 5 men. Its theme, sex is currency, money is currency. Its entire runtime devoted to gossip, prejudice, hypocrisy, spiteful bickering, backstabbing, deception, borrowing and lending money and sex interchangeably among a friendgroup living in a low rent apartment building in a neighborhood we get the sense they all grew up not far from. And it depicts everything there is to say about society. Because what else is there to say?

     The moral of the story here is if you have the looks, you charge for sex. If you don’t, you pay for sex. Life in a nutshell. Through the first act the whole time the boyfriens of the 2 women keep talking about some risky plan what they’re discussing is their intentions to each pimp out their own girlfriends. That’s a new one for the dudebros. But it’s also integral to defining the infrastructure in this microcosm. And one of the two dudes makes his money as secret rough trade to a regular.
     Fassbinder maintains his ongoing theme, exploiting the wellbeing of others for profit. Katzelmacher is a dead end. This little community suck the life out of each other. When the foreigner arrives, him being from another country is only the surface, the deeper meaning is he is different because he has hope, tenderness, and if not happy to be alive, at least he appreciates his existence and what he has. That’s why he’s a target. That’s why MARIE (Hanna Schygulla) wants him. That’s why they click him in the street. And that’s what crushes his tender affection for her. That’s why his slumlord in the making landlady overcharges him (and begins her search to do the same to as many more foreigners as she can).
 
The style of Katzelmacher is as oppressive as its substance. It might be the only movie ever made where noticeably every single camera setup is flat. As in lines in each frame run perfectly level, parallel along x axis. Nor does the camera ever move. Save for one instance, which is repeated often, and the only time music is used in the film (a sparse piece for solo piano), a leading 2 shot where characters walk and talk outside the building, maybe a courtyard.
     Then there’s ROSY, the one woman who openly accepts money for sex, who when doing so, or socializing with anyone in her flat, is shot in an all-white walls vacuum void. ELISABETH (Irm Hermann) is the only one with any real money. And Rosy is the only one capable of earning a living by having sex for money. But by the end of the film it becomes apparent Elisabeth will live comfortably, probably becoming wealthy. Yet Rosy has dreams of being in showbusiness that everyone, including us, are made to clearly understand has no chance of happening. I don’t read this as some sob story boo hoo critique as much as I accept is as a refreshingly succinct take observation.
     And as brutal depressing as Katzelmacher is, by the final act it proves too much, to the point I can’t bear it any longer, and then it becomes hilarious. Full circle. Just like life. Hey, things aren’t so bad after all.

Art is colder than entertainment

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) takes what made the Hollywood delinquent films of the 1950s cool and gets rid of everything else about them. What remains is smoking cigarettes, wearing a leather jacket, and acting tough. Yet it also places this conception of cool in more of an everyday real life relatability. At times it even seems to distance itself from the patently convenient moralizing that comes with the crime genre. It feels like an Andy Warhol exercise in the crime aesthetic via a fuck you to what Quentin Tarantino gets so excited about.
     The film opens with this great shot of its central protagonist FRANZ, played by Fassbinder himself, sitting reading a paper, when a dude asks him for a cigarette and Franz says no. The dude takes the newspaper Franz’s reading and throws it on the ground. Good one. Franz beats the crap out of him, then goes back to his paper. The tone here is so plain. Boring. But the action explodes from nowhere and it’s funny. It’s cool. It’s dangerous. It’s tough.
     Franz is thrown in some place where some group called the syndicate keep forcing him to join. But he refuses. The syndicate is an organization, and if Franz joined he’d belong to a system of criminals. No way. Franz does his own thing. And cares about nothing, which is what makes him so cool as a fictional character. Ulli Lommel is BRUNO, a twerp Franz meets who’s also being held in the building where the syndicate is rounding up potential recruits. Bruno wears a fedora and drives a sedan that looks like it’s from the 1940s, as in he’s playing gangster dress-up. 
 
After Franz is released from the syndicate, Bruno tracks him down. Franz stays in a flat with JOHANNA, played by Hanna Schygulla, who will go on to be the best thing to happen to Fassbinder’s film career. Schygulla is sultry, cute, curvaceous, and perfect in her role here as the woman Franz is pimping out. Pimping her out? In real life not cool. In this movie, very cool. 
     It’s cool because she and Franz don’t have to have square jobs to make a living. When Bruno finds Franz, he moves in with them. Why? How obnoxious. Later we see Franz arrange for Bruno to get his chance with Johanna. Schygulla is the coolest with her hair and how great her ass looks in those jeans, with leather riding boots, a glass of wine, as a record plays just splays herself out on the rug like she doesn’t have the energy to even care about trying anymore, when Bruno attempts to suck on her breast. And she laughs because he’s such a dork. So Franz slaps her. Franz forces Johanna to sell her body. But she refuses to give Bruno a freebee. Why? Because her feminine intuition tips her off that he's syndicate. Syndicate in this case is code for mainstream commercial genre conventions. Crappy cookie cutter crime movies. Johanna is our surrogate. We are here because we find the same type of movie abhorrent. Status quo. 
     The movie ends with a heist where we find out Bruno is working for the syndicate. They tell him “Mr Strauss says get rid of the girl.” But Johanna called the cops before the heist and so they shoot Bruno down in the street. And by now we get to fully appreciate exactly how Love Is Colder Than Death isn’t the crime genre movie we might’ve thought it was. Franz never shot anybody. He let Bruno. And why did Franz trust Bruno? Because he wanted a friend? No way. Because the syndicate is mainstream genre bullshit and so is Bruno. When the syndicate couldn’t get Franz, they tried to take the one thing he cares about, his girl. But they can’t. Franz doesn’t even care about her anyway. We care. But we don’t care about Bruno. And after the cops kill him, the couple toss his corpse out of the car and aren’t at all too broke up about it. The last shot of the movie is the car driving away and Johanna tells Franz, “I called the cops.” And he replies, “whore.” It’s truly hilarious in its understatement. 
 
There’s also this thing with the gun. First we see Franz fiddling fondling that pistol as if he’s more interested in the gun than he is in Johanna. And later when Franz is in custody and Johanna strips nude and lays on the bed next to Bruno, he’s fussing with the gun in the same way. But the difference is Bruno shoots people (and gets shot). Franz doesn’t. Lack of affect, affiliation, showing no emotion is cooler than felony violence.
     Formally, Love Is Colder Than Death uses many direct reverses between two characters, where they each look directly into the lens. This austere, flat, imposing compositional structure is conducive to Fassbinder’s distancing manner of dialogue, which is very sparse, with long pauses in between sentences and reactions, sometimes delivered by one of the characters staring off in another direction entirely. Being a fan of the later works of Nicolas Winding Refn, especially laughing aloud along with how ridiculously slow the dialogue is in Too Old to Die Young, I have to appreciate how at home this style is in all of Fassbinder’s films—the dude invented it. 
     Yet despite such a bleak austere aesthetic, this thing is totally hilarious. Not all the time. But there are a few choice moments for sure. The one that proves the most pertinent for what this film achieves as satire is when they’re buying illegal weapons from that dealer, and poking fun at chic overly stylized genre *cough Tarantino* indulgence, when Bruno dramatically close up looks ahead at camera and slowly removes his sunglasses, the dealer says “Why did you take off your glasses?” And anytime a character is gunned down, the film doesn't even try to sell it as believable. No squibs. No smoking gun. Sound effects sound amateurishly inept on purpose.
     If anything I think this movie is saying what’s really tough is a character like Franz, who is pressured to sell out his independence, betrayed by some jerk that thought he'd be stupid enough to befriend out of loneliness yet easily discards said traitor like trash because he never really was, and selfishly be honest about using his girl. Fassbinder here has begun his path as master of using artifice to express authentic emotions. Avoiding fake genre confines, fake societal confines, in order to portray the anguish of being yourself. It's setting up one of Fassbinder's largest themes: emotional opportunists, exploiting others to survive. Franz never cared about Bruno, so he uses him like the cheesy crime melodrama plot exploits the emotions of audiences who are gullible enough to let them. And Franz living off Johanna selling her body is Fassbinder living off us the audience by operating on our emotions through his art. As we'll soon see Fassbinder is best suited for audiences whom are emotional masochists.

Eraserhead plot analysis

Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch) is about how darkness can control you and embracing the light as a way of overcoming it. The prologue is MAN IN THE PLANET operates the controls in a shack with a hole in its roof, on a planet, in HENRY SPENCER’S head. These are dark forces within any of us. In this case, Man in the Planet releases the ANIMAL FETUS HEAD MOUNTED ON AN APPENDAGE CREATURE into a puddle. Puddles are a recurring motif in Eraserhead. 

     Back in his apartment, when Henry gets the torn in half photo of MARY X from his dresser drawer it shows that he was heartbroken and has since attempted to move on from her. Sex is mysterious in Eraserhead. In the home of Mary X, there’s a foreboding air of sex and terror. There’s something filthy about the way Mr. X has put all of the pipes in the part of town they live in; and something ominous about the way he refers to it as the hellhole it's become. There’s a depravity about him. And the repetitive squishy sounds of the man made chicken gushing ooze from its orifice as MRS X groans with her head tilted back achieves a frightening sexual tone. The shot where the subjective camera moves through the living room is Henry’s trust in Mary going out the window.
     Back at Henry’s apartment we begin to see the first of several shots of his window with the only thing visible beyond it being a brick wall. The mailbox in Henry’s lobby is significant. When he checks it and there’s that small pouch, he goes outside to open it—it’s something he doesn’t want Mary X to know about. Inside it is a small squiggle that’s his sexual desire. Oh and the Animal Fetus Head Mounted on an Appendage Creature no longer has the appendage form it did before entering our world via the metallic interdimensional puddle. It’s bandaged below the neck now. It’s not a baby. It was never meant to be thought of as a real baby. Eraserhead exists in a world where reality and dream logic have merged. So if the Animal Fetus Head Creature isn’t a baby then what is it?
     I don’t think we’re supposed to ask in the literal sense what the Animal Fetus Head Creature is. It’s a means by which Mary X and her family have coerced Henry into becoming entangled with its care. And because he can’t care for it in any proper sense of the term, then what’s it doing in his apartment? So meanwhile Henry’s put his libido squiggle in the little sack in a cabinet stash spot. It’s begun to rain outside. Mary X has left again for the night. The Animal Fetus Head Creature gets sick. Henry then goes to the stash cabinet, but doesn’t open it. Then, notice a shot of the mailbox. (The mailbox isn’t in Henry’s apartment though, it’s downstairs in the lobby. Why this shot? Because Henry’s thinking about some other form of desire or hope that could help him get away from this annoying creature.) But when Henry tries to grab his coat, the thing freaks out. So he can’t leave.
     Now we begin to see what Henry’s been watching when he props his elbows up laying on his bed like he’s watching his favorite TV show, LADY IN THE RADIATOR. She represents Henry’s option to embrace the light. She’s an escape from the darkness (Man in the Planet) controlling Henry. The proscenium arch links her with staged entertainment, an elevated art that enhances your emotions, spirit, or mind. (And take note that doors to the proscenium open similarly to the way the elevator doors in his lobby do.) The remainder of what we get in this middle part of the movie is Lady in the Radiator stomps many smaller Animal Fetus Head mounted on Appendage Creatures as she smiles at us (Henry). Then Lady in the Radiator recedes back into darkness. Next Mary X is back in Henry’s bed, the sound design emphasizing the sound of her teeth chattering in her sleep and the wet sounds of her eye socket as she sweaty writhes in cocoon of bedsheets, spilling out a litter (like the dog with the puppies in her home earlier) of newborn Animal Fetus Head mounted on Appendage Creatures that Henry throws at the wall obliterating them. At this point the cabinet with the squiggle (Henry’s sex impulse) becomes animated and takes on a life of its own. It refuses to stay in the cabinet—as BEAUTIFUL GIRL ACROSS THE HALL calls on Henry for sex.
     When Henry and Beautiful Girl Across the Hall embrace, they’re in something like a giant steaming puddle of white in the middle of his bed. And when the woman submerges below the surface the top of her head resembles a mound of a woman’s pubic hair. Sex between Henry and Beautiful Girl Across the Hall takes him into the proscenium, but at the moment he travels to his next place, the white liquid is seen as to open up like (the elevator doors and) Lady in the Radiator’s proscenium doors—this is there to indicate a sublime (transcendent) ascendance. Also before Henry goes into the radiator there are shots of Beautiful Girl Across the Hall terrified by the appearance of a large lump that resembles Henry’s planet.
 
I think in Eraserhead everything to do with Mary X is experienced in a reality that operates according to the logic of a nightmare. And everything that has to do with Beautiful Girl Across the Hall is experienced as a reality that operates according to the logic of a wet dream. Now the final part of the narrative after Beautiful Girl Across Hall comes over occurs in Henry’s psyche. We get “In Heaven Everything is Fine.” When Henry touches her everything fades to white; he’s practicing. He can’t fully overcome darkness on his first try. When he stops, Lady in the Radiator disappears, and quickly replaced by Man in the Planet.
     When Henry’s head pops off and an Animal Fetus Head sprouts up, he clutches the rail in the proscenium in a way identical to how Beautiful Girl Across Hall did right before she and Henry had sex in his room. A rock is wheeled in that cracks a stream of dark liquid (Henry’s peace of mind). Then his head is sold for erasers. I think this construct is depicting how Henry’s lust is battling his increasing succumbing to the dark taking him over, as is his professional-creative life. He works as a printer. He creates. His head being turned into an eraser is the opposite. He destroys.
 
Upon Henry’s return to reality from his psyche exploration, back in his apartment he looks through his window (for the first time brick wall is gone) and sees someone outside down below beating someone up in a puddle. Then Animal Fetus Head Creature taunts him mercilessly. But a closer shot outside again now shows there’s nothing happening at the puddle. It’s Henry finally beginning to see a world beyond his inner struggles, finding that courage. And his fears at seeing an attack are what the darkness delights in, but looking again realizing that they aren’t there is overcoming the fear.
     When Henry sees Beautiful Girl Across Hall with other dude she sees Henry’s head for a moment with replacement Animal Fetus Head (dark has claimed him). So Henry overcomes the dark and cuts to the heart of his torment (literally cutting into the guts of Animal Fetus Head Creature). And the lamp shorts out just like the lamp shorted out at the dinner when Mrs X first burdened Henry with taking care of Animal Fetus Head Creature. Man in the Planet explodes. Henry literally embraces the light. 
 
In conclusion, I think Henry might’ve been a virgin before he met Mary X. Or she was his first love. And she dumped him. Ghosted him. And it hurt. Everything else that happens in his reality occurs according to nightmare logic, stemming from them having sex, possibly guilt induced. What if Mary got pregnant? What if her mother Mrs X claimed he’s the father of a baby? Even though Henry knows beyond a reasonable doubt that he couldn’t be. What if he had to take care of it anyway? What if it was hideously deformed, sick, taunted him? What if Mary bailed (like she did the first time) and left him to raise it? What if she had more? And the implication that Mr X is depravity and Mrs X is lust and they are the source of terror sex disease. Nightmare.
     Similarly, I think Henry might’ve only seen Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in passing. And his sex dream logic fantasizes that in his mailbox the pouch is this virility, like magic beans out of a fairytale, that make him so desirable to her that she’ll make the first move, knocking on his door in the middle of the night and outright initiating sex. 
     And throughout all this, Henry needs to get back to work. His vacation needs to end. It’s imperative he find his way back to Lady in the Radiator, his muse. And it doesn’t hurt that after he defeats Animal Fetus Head Creature garmonbozia is released from it like magma. In Eraserhead the elevator is only ever seen going up. The appearance of elevator-like doors to the stage where Lady in the Radiator is found is what uplifts us: heaven, spirit, art, cinema, inspiration; the white liquid elevator doors also include sex in this bliss.

The human race is having a nervous breakdown

Do you believe in equal rights for women? Adam’s Rib (1949, George Cukor) is a courtroom romcom that asks us to consider a topic that’s always been fertile for laughs: the double standards that exist between the male and female sexes.

     Mother of 2 treated like shit by her husband. He beats her. He cheats on her. She infiltrates love nest and opens fire. He’s lightly wounded. The other woman uninjured. ADAM (Spencer Tracy) is old fashioned. He believes men and women are different. His wife AMANDA (Katherine Hepburn) believes in equality. Anything a man can do a woman can do better. If a man catches his wife cheating and kills her it’s sad. But if a woman were to catch her husband cheating and kills him it’s horrifying. Why? What’s the difference?
     Adam’s the prosecuting attorney. Amanda’s defending MRS. ATTINGER (Judy Holliday). The defendant is found not guilty. In her closing argument there’s a scene where Amanda asks the jury to consider sexual relativism. There’s a tribe somewhere where the female sex rule and the males are subservient. And “every living being is capable of attack if adequately provoked.”
     During her closing remarks though we also get a series of singles on the other woman, Mrs. Attinger and Mrs. Attinger where the jury is asked to consider them for a moment as if they were the other sex. So three consecutive shots where each of them transforms into the binary counterpart gender to that of their trad cis one. And in the movie, in the court case, the point is to see that Mrs. Attinger would get away with it; free of our stringent moral condemnation, were she a man. However. In a way something else happens.
     When each of the two women are in their drag king shots—thanks to John Waters movies for where I picked up that term—there’s something dramatic about it. Serious. They’re dashing. But when it’s finally on Tommy Ewell, in drag, he’s a clown act. He looks ridiculous. Of course it’s played for laughs. But I think it brings up an interesting point to ponder about society. Am I allowed to say that there are trans and nonbinary people that I’ve taken seriously, yet there have also been times when that initial reaction has been less so?

 

Adam and Amanda have a dream domestic life together. I derive so much comfort vicariously when he’s going through the fridge and sorting through the lamb, chutney, wine and on a whim they decide on curry. They’re happy. The get along at home and argue in court.
     After the verdict they’re on the rocks. The neighbor is coming onto her and Adam busts in pistol drawn. Amanda breaks down and decries “Adam, no one has a right to [murder their spouse].” So Amanda won the legal argument, but Adam won the moral argument. Tricky?
     They reconcile. At home Adam mentions running on some Republican platform, to which Amanda counters that she’s interested in running against him as a Dem. Adam then threatens to cry if she does. She’s incredulous. He proves to her that when he cried during the legal division of their assets with the accountant as part of their divorce he was faking. The final word in the movie is that the whole time some part of Adam has known there’s not really that much of a difference between the sexes.
     But they both agree to the compromise that there is. A little difference. And I’ve always thought Americans, if not all people, are wired in some way to respond to a good fight between two opposing forces. They will it into existence. Like a boxing match. Like all the sports between two teams. Democrat vs Republican. Men vs Women. Prosecution vs Defense. God and the Devil. Good vs Evil. Adam and Eve. Free will vs human nature. Will and representation. Spirit vs the flesh. Shot reverse shot. Film and video.

Youth belongs to youth. Beauty to beauty

Things have gotten pretty dark. Some of these postwar films are vicious. I’m mostly thinking Monsieur Verdoux and A Foreign Affair. They weigh on you. They’re heavy with death. What better to follow them up with than a movie that attempts to return to the silly, exasperated, manic tantrum explosive type of farce where it all began?

     Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges) is a fundamental screwball nightmare warning condemning age-gap romantic entanglements, by showing the requisite jealousy, insecurity, and paranoia they bring; though it also both brings the era of the Golden Age to a close and cathartically resets it.
     As an allegory for jealousy, it’s fitting that the report SIR ALFRED CARTER (Rex Harrison) receives that his wife DAPHNE (Linda Darnell) is unfaithful gradually begins with its unsolicited, unwelcome, unavoidable boring into his conscience. He rips it up, throws it away, kicks the dustbin out of the room; burns it; destroys all copies of it. But it’s spectral-elusive. You can’t destroy something that’s not of this world. It’s sad, the wisdom SWEENEY the detective leaves the great conductor with, that men should just be happy if they get an hour or a week with a beautiful woman, because it can’t last. It isn’t viable. Nature commands that they leave you for someone younger, better looking.
     The cucked conductor imagines three different scenarios to deal with his wife’s cheating—a passage that makes up the middle of the movie. They each comprise parts something like: revenge, moral high ground, and game of fate. The first sequence is the most elaborate. When the conductor takes a straight razor and murders his wife, frames her lover, and gets away with it, after being cleared in court there’s this shot of him laughing belligerently, and I’m laughing right there with him. 
     But in the third fantasy, when the conductor confronts his wife, with deranged delight he tells her about knifing her and that “my dear, your head nearly came off,” murder stops being funny. It’s like Unfaithfully Yours has some psychic connection to Nicole Brown. This movie reminds us that once dark impulses reach a certain point, they’re not even funny in movies. Even worse, the scene after this the conductor keeps trying on leather gloves that are too small for him to fit his hands into.
     So how does Unfaithfully Yours reset the comedy mechanism? The second act at the concert performance was all in his head. Now as the third act begins, he attempts to carry out his plans in real life. But he can’t. To turn real life into the illusion is impossible. What ensues is an inescapable slapstick routine that forces upon him the futility of attempting to leave the illusion. He’s in a comedy. Its tone is incontrovertible. 
     And as we sensed all along, his wife never was cheating. I was kidding earlier. The movie has nothing against age-gap relationships. Nor does it dissuade anyone from finding the woman of your dreams and living happily ever after with her. The joke was on him. And the joke was on us. For the rule of screwball is be careful when jumping to conclusions based on misleading appearances. 

Some like it cold

So what have we learned from The Golden Age about love? That those who are best suited for it are thieves, spoiled shallow wealthy brats, narcissists, tyrants, emotional masochists, greedy capitalists, those suffering from mental illness, con-artists, social climbers, career opportunists, blackmailers, murderers, but most of all those driven by the sex impulse? And how it helps to pass yourself off as someone you're not? 

     Why does the screwball show us all this? What’s the point? Because cinema’s greatest power is to communicate emotion. Love is irrational. Emotions ignore reason, that’s what makes them emotions. What seem like the worst character traits to the intellect ring true as the course of nature in pursuit of sex and love because they’re emotionally authentic. Relatable. Emotions, like cinema, are illusions; some for love, some for tears.

 

Here's a great character in a comedy we haven’t seen yet, a Nazi slut. A Foreign Affair (1948, Billy Wilder) throws us in the middle of the crossfire, looked at from any angle as survival instinct or self-interests ensnared by motivations and circumstances beyond their grasp; their hearts, their bodies, goods to be bought, sold, or traded on the blackmarket of human whimsy. It’s about a frigid woman and a whore. One incapable of love and one who offers it freely. But in the end who’s to say which is which?
     Jean Arthur is FROST. Dietrich is VON SCHLUETOW. Wilder inherited subtlety, innuendo, double entendre, sneaking in jokes and the like from Lubitsch. Dietrich’s name is supposed to suggest slut. When Jean Arthur’s character is asking how to spell “sloot-oh,” the officer throws in “with the umlaut.” If anything, I will say A Foreign Affair is fair to both women; fair to both sides. What I take from it is that Americans and Germans are pretty much the same. Germans aren’t all Nazis. Well, some are. Some will always be. Some were caught up in it and then tried to move on. And for many, it wasn’t easy. When Erika Von Schluetow says a woman goes with whatever’s in fashion, she’s saying transactional sex, hairstyles, outfits, make-up looks, shoes, joining the Nazis, (can) all (be) frivolous, impulsive, meaningless temporary fixations. And I believe her. For who’s to judge a woman’s character? Who knows what it’s like for her? What she was up against?
     The first tenderness for me is in Act II when Frost recounts her woeful account of what would lead her to nearly cry her eyes out of her head. But the first pain is approaching the second act break when PRINGLE confronts Erika with that line “How much of a Nazi were you?” (We know what he really means by that.) Afterwards when Pringle takes Frost on a date to the Lorelei and Erika is singing and spots them, that’s the low point for me. Erika is made to feel used up. Love can make you feel like that.
     It’s even worse when Erika tells Frost about what happened to her after the war. “What do you think it was like being a woman when the Russians first stepped in?” My imagination conjures up the worst. However. At the end the when the COL arrests Erika and she solicits him, out of indignant resignation he orders a bunch of MPs to see to her—yet we are given to surmise instead she’s in for a gangbang. And she’s coy about it. At this juncture I rethink everything from earlier. Maybe she made up stuff about the Russians to manipulate Frost? Maybe she doesn’t love Pringle. When he’s in her room at the beginning and with her neck in his hands he says “Why don’t I choke you a little? Break you in two. Build a fire under you, you blonde witch,” this could likely be more of an affair of passion.
     Pringle is a man. A man who uses Erika for sex like she uses him for military protection. When Frost brings Pringle that chocolate cake with I love you written again and again in frosting, he sells it—poignant image. So the fitful ending is Pringle is stuck with Frost. Erika, those GIs are finished running a train on her, walks away free and clear. But what about Frost?
     Frost is the only one who doesn’t realize she’s being used. And therefore it’s her I feel sad for. Erika tells her: “Some people are lucky at love. Some people are jinxed. You shouldn’t even sit down at the table.” But Frost is also a congresswoman from Iowa who’s getting married to the war hero Army Captain from her home state. So I think I’m safe in concluding that A Foreign Affair is about people not necessarily being what they appear; that there’s more to it. Don’t judge people based on moral prejudices. Sex, love, what’s the difference? When it comes to matters of the heart it’s every man for himself blackmarket. Or, some people are lucky and some people are just jinxed. But who’s to say which is which?

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Charles Chaplin) is a poisonous disillusionment melodrama black screwball serial killer satire existential tragedy morality tale that posits the thesis that good and bad are arbitrary. It’s about accepting your destiny. Or the motto I live by: don’t let no one get you down.

     M. Verdoux has this dichotomy depicted in an early scene where he’s murdered one of his wives and burns her remains out behind their house in an incinerator, but he won’t step on a caterpillar. He and the household where he resides with his real wife and son are vegetarian. There’s a bit of moralizing where he tells his son not to pull the cat’s tail. The warning that follows is violence begets violence. We think this foreshadows M. Verdoux's guillotine fate to atone for his murders; but really the subtext is the irony that confronts the matter of justifying survival amidst economic depression and world wars.
     M. Verdoux kills old women and ugly women. Even the families of the women he murders and their social circles are depicted as obnoxious, argumentative, and deplorable. The funniest of these wives is the character Martha Raye plays, ANNABELLA BONHEUR, an embodiment of economic resentment. Annabella is sour, loud, ill-mannered, and frivolous with her new money winnings from the lottery. 
     The midpoint is when M. Verdoux meets THE GIRL, a Belgian refugee he unwittingly lures into a scheme wherein he intends to experiment with a new poison formula, who rekindles his faith in humanity. She’s sweet. Pretty. Young. He identifies with her because she just got out of jail for theft (to survive). And he shares something else in common with her. They both loved and took care of an invalid. It’s sappy shorthand for good natured sacrifice but I’ll let it slide. Because in the end the difference between them is she marries into the industrial military complex, so killing millions will afford her wealth and luxury, but he only murdered 14 women so he’s merely an expendable derelict sentenced to death.
     The film gives the impression that M. Verdoux’s ultimate destiny is the guillotine. But that’s oversimplifying. There’s also earlier that line from Schopenhauer, it’s the approach of death that’s terrifying though. Notice how after the stock market crashes in 1932 and there’s the guy with the gun to his head, and the guy plummeting out the window, then we hear what happened to M. Verdoux’s family. We hear that his home was foreclosed on. (But he gave his wife the deed on their 10th wedding anniversary.) So that means we weren’t shown or told, but must assume that he mortgaged that home at some point. He loses his family. But again we don’t get to know how or why. These crucial plot points withheld from us prefigure his destiny.
     Monsieur Verdoux is telling us never to give up the fight. And if its sentiment is that the world was falling apart during the great depression because of the collapse of financial institutions, and global military conflicts, that’s pretty much as true today as it was then. So it’s okay to keep your zest for bitterness intact. And love. Just don’t fall into despair. It lulls the mind into indifference. 
     At first it’s weird how often Chaplin looks at the camera. And how blatant he is when it comes to grandstanding. But it all becomes part of this character he’s created. He took Landru as jumpoff then made M. Verdoux completely his own. I can’t get enough of his romantic pickup lines and false flattery cooing he uses on all the dowagers, spinsters, and uggos. Monsieur Verdoux might be the first screwball legitimately to get away without a hint of sex. It might also be the first black comedy? And yeah for all its misanthropic farce, I do think it balances out with Chaplin’s tender metaphysical allegory. Also why don’t I ever get tired of watching this movie?

Lubitsch's final film is my favorite

Cluny Brown (1946, Ernst Lubitsch) is a profoundly bleak screwball where the oppressive force of the upper class is no better than the hopelessly stifling plight of the lower class. Concurrent alongside this there’s its basic premise, which introduces a cockney twentysomething orphan whose naivete precludes any instinct she might have to restrain her wanton sexual desperation and her chance encounter with a middle-aged fuckboy whom the narrative deliberately positions on an unavoidable course as a reoccurring mentor to her by way of random events.

     Plumbing is code for sex. In the first act CLUNY BROWN (Jennifer Jones) is introduced knocking on the door of these two men to unclog a drain, her first words, “Should we have a go at it?” They get her drunk. After she’s unclogged it she’s sprawled on her back cooing how she feels chirrupy and like a Persian cat. And when she’s at Friar’s Carmel Manor, the master of the house has that line: “You mean to tell me young girls go in for plumbing nowadays?” to which Cluny replies, “It’s such fun.” And her first night staying there, when the heads of the domestic staff catch her leaving the room of the playboy BELINSKI (Charles Boyer), she exclaims: “I wish I could roll up my sleeves and roll down my stockings and unloosen the joint bang bang bang bang.” The Act II break is Cluny shames the mother of her fiancé at a dinner party at his home because she springs into action with her plumbing skills in the middle of a speech he’s giving. And later, with disdain he reprimands her as being a disgrace because she’s “subject to pipe impulses.”
     How should we take their respective promiscuous tendencies? Is she a slut? Is he a player? Or are they just the way they are by nature and should be free from moral judgment? In Cluny Brown it appears to be all for laughs anyway. Or does it? The theme of Cluny Brown as told to us is: knowing one’s place. With the philosophical implication who’s to say what one’s place is? Who knows what one’s place is? Act II begins with Cluny being courted by the local chaste pharmacist WILSON, played with the same nasal British lilt he voiced the caterpillar with in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Richard Haydn. There’s a scene in his residence where he shows Cluny this picture painted by hand he’s quite taken with hanging on his wall, which she bemoans: “Poor little sheep. He hasn’t much future. Just mutton.” You think the subtext is it’s she who by marrying Wilson will settle for the rest of her life in the same dead end he has.
     Except I don’t buy the ending one bit. It’s atrocious. Are we seriously to believe that after everything we’ve seen, how dutiful the Cluny we’ve come to know is, that she’s to abruptly leave her obligations to both her employer and fiancé? And all because the old lech bought her a pair of black silk stockings? And even if she were to run away with him, what would they live off of? The reality setting in could maybe be a life in poverty grifting a living as Bohemian scenesters. But no. Cut to: he’s overnight a bestselling mystery writer?
     And who could expect him to remain faithful to her? We saw how he nearly sexually assaulted MISS CREAM (great name) in her bedroom. Bolenski’s a chronic philanderer and habitual liar. Methinks the movie really ends in the diegesis point where Cluny is sick to her stomach because Wilson told her she ruined the festivities. And that because high and low class British society are both so cold and ineffectual to treating Cluny as a human, we have to realize how sad reality is. And wonder were she to run off with the only other person who she could have thrillingly satisfying sex is would be using her and throw her away when he’s finished with her, that would be the no future existence, just mutton. Just another piece of meat to him.
     Jennifer Jones as a hot master plumber indefatigably headstrong brimming wide-eyed with joy trying to find her place in life is escapist magic. Cluny Brown is escapist magic. Bolenski gets into the old screwball mistaken identity mixup as a Czech professor war refugee seeking asylum from Nazi occupation. But he’s really just an opportunist out for a good time who’s trying to get laid. This movie is a diversion that isn’t interested in real life conflicts. But Bolenski takes the free ride. And Bolenski forcing himself on Miss Cream is the only way her ANDREW finally proposes. Andrew only recognized his need for Miss Cream out of sexual jealousy and possessiveness. 
     Lubitsch is devious subversive. In Cluny Brown sex shows everything that’s wrong in the world. But just like real life, on the surface it works as an immensely enjoyable farce. And it’s up to us if we want to disregard the ending as a put on or not. I don’t think Cluny ever leaves Carmel Manor. And perhaps more than any other scene I’ve ever seen, when she’s happy having tea with four lumps and crumpets, it’s so perfectly beautiful. Then when they realize she doesn’t belong, that she’s the new maid, it crushes her (and me). “You thought I was somebody else didn’t you? Have I done something wrong?” is when she came to know her place in life. And the movie conveys that feeling. What it’s like to stumble into a point in life where you could be anything you wanted, and then it becomes clear that access to certain areas are off limits. The emotions of processing that. 

Swindler's list

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, Leo McCarey) is an insufferable Nazi screwball romance patriotic propaganda piece that asks what if screwball antics were in the service of dealing with WWII? The funniest thing it’s got going for it is the names of the principal characters sounding like the kind of dirty jokes Terry Southern might’ve snuck in: BUTT, TOOL, and LUBE.

     Ginger Rogers is KATHERINE BUTT-SMITH. And her character can be called upon when her country needs her. She sacrifices her diamond bracelet, the man of her dreams, and her own life for the greater good. She even forges her own passport and gives it to a Jewish maid so that the woman and her two children can escape. In this world we’re to accept that sticking the Jewish woman’s photo over her own using chewing gum as adhesive won’t be caught by the Nazis or border checkpoints. 
     Cary Grant is PATRICK O’TOOLE. He seduces Butt-Smith. And there’s a scene early on where he impersonates her tailor and his tape measure springs to attention becoming an unwieldy force of its own. It’s funny to think about whose idea it was to blend harrowing Nazi occupied Europe espionage thriller with lewd screwball farce. Maybe funnier than the finished product. There’s even a scene where the couple are mistaken for Jews (because Katherine still has the maid’s passport) and they end up in a concentration camp. 
     Okay there is a kinda funny bit where O’Toole has to do a radio broadcast out of France telling the USA that Hitler isn’t so bad, where they workshop his script by committee and strongly reject phrases about Hitler using words like “boundaries,” and “will stop at nothing.” Among the plot holes, or at the very least slightly implausible elements, there’s the fact that at no point are the couple cautious about the possibility Von Luber will just kill them until the very last scene where he’s on the same ship attempting to flee as a war criminal to relocate in America. Psyche. Katherine overpowered him and threw him overboard instead.
     And the happy ending is that Von Luber can’t swim. Because we’re all happy he’s dead, as long as there’s a built in disavowal of guilt mechanism. And the message spelled out for us is that the Nazis forbade expressing individual thought, which is unacceptable. And good thing they were defeated. 

The serious side of screwball

There’s something wholesome about Woman of the Year (1942, George Stevens). There’s a scene early on at a baseball stadium that sets the tone for the whole thing. It’s something like a romantic domestic hangout movie. Neither of the two leads are ugly to each other for a change. Nor is there any cynicism, nihilism, or cruel defamation of either of the sexes. Woman of the Year is however a clash of culture, class, and gender screwball romantic platitude (propaganda?) honoring the sanctity of marriage.

     The thing about the rules of the game is when it’s love we’re dealing with, suspension of disbelief can stretch pretty far. I know Tracy and Hepburn were an item, so the chemistry there is palpable. But do I buy TESS HARDING falling for SAM CRAIG? How could a wealthy, polyglot, steeped in international affairs, strong, independent, star columnist fall for a sports writer who takes a cheap shot at her in one of his articles? The absurdity of it is ripe for screwball. There’s maybe even a possible subtle cue it could be read as Tess wants to get laid; Sam Irishes because he wants to marry. Whether or not you view it this way, what follows in a more emphatic comedy of trad gender role-swapping.
     The midpoint is Tess and Sam consummating the marriage. Shortly thereafter, Sam becomes the woman and Tess the man. It all starts when Sam gets his feeling hurt because Tess doesn’t notice his new hat. And then he has to cook dinner for everyone. Then Sam gets over-emotional, and distant because he feels like Tess’s heart isn’t committed to their relationship. What happened? Did sex have anything to do with it?
     Right before they sleep together, Sam is overtly masculine. He is an expert on sports. He’s assertive. Confident. Calm. And right before they make use of their nuptial bed and there’s that screwball misleading appearance gag with the Jew who escapes Hitler in Tess’s bed, Sam invites his riffraff crew over and seems bent on fighting to preserve his tough guy identity. Yet after they’ve shared their night of passion (the cut way before anyone can even come close to glimpsing), Sam becomes femininized. It’s funny then, less far-fetched in today’s modern culture but still fun. I’m just trying to highlight and emphasize the abrupt implausible shifts as characteristic of the screwball nature of Woman of the Year.
     The film’s climax is a set piece that plays around with the way Tess doesn’t know her way around a kitchen, but wants to prove her subservience as a way to reclaim their marriage. The film’s resolution is Sam bashes GERALD, Tess’s (male) secretary over the head with a bottle of champagne that she was to christen an ocean liner with, to show he’s putting an end to her career once and for all so she can be his wife. Or so it seems? The ending is such a mess. You know I’m saying it: screwball context it gets away with it. But even for screwball, this is a big ask. How will they resolve their marriage? There’s no way Tess should quit her career to be a wife. She’s like one of the most successful important, literally “outstanding woman of the year.” 
     I think Woman of the Year is an early example of one of those Hollywood movies that have an ending on the surface to appease the masses and morally just set; but the rest of us know there’s no way that ending is meant to be taken seriously. What happens when we ask ourselves would Hepburn really take a role of an empowered woman who gives up everything to be a docile wife? And if not, why would she take the role? The only way I can reconcile these questions is to imagine she means it as a send up; a put on; the ultimate screwball sentiment being if you actually buy this ending the joke’s on you. All this despite knowing George Stevens would never be complicit in something so subversive. I really do feel bad. I thought for once I’d found a screwball that wasn’t underhanded.

     Unless marriage really meant that much to Hepburn. And the dream doesn't have to correspond to real life. It can be funny. Tender. Sweet. Hopeful. Impossibly perfect.