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?

Sleep No More

The sixth film in the Orson Welles retrospective that I was able to view was projected in 35mm.

Macbeth (1948, Orson Welles) is called a Mercury Theatre Production, but it was released by Republic Pictures--an independent studio. Seeing Welles emerge undaunted by lack of funds for costumes, sets, locations, and a large crew of technicians is most evident in this picture.

I couldn't believe it was almost two hours when I looked at my watch after exiting (I saw the version with an overture) this movie. Macbeth begins with an expertly crafted supernatural tension, and like The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Welles) feels like a quick nightmare. The plot device of the three witches telling Macbeth and Banquo their fates makes for a tight straightforward narrative structure which was rare for Welles at this time; except of course for The Stranger (1946, Welles). Also the Scottish palace sets contribute to the minimalism of the world of the story in their limited quantity and sparse landscapes, combined with Macbeth's drugged out looking two weeks he spends as King without sleeping make this movie a scary bad dream.

Another motif that springs up constantly with Welles is corruption at the highest levels of wealth or power, and Lord and Lady Macbeth are still jarring to one's sense of morals by today's standards. They're like hey what if we just killed everyone who is above you so you could be the highest boss. And what an oddly comic tone that underlies the horrific abrupt moment when Macduff's son is happily not at all worried about his missing father and prodding his mother to remarry right before some paid thugs break in and murder him. What? The child murder is so over the top I think it was a little funny. Damn.

So yeah, the locations and camera work aren't as baroque as Welles's earlier films, but the world of Macbeth has a compelling look throughout. And the girth of Welles stomping around with his horn goblet, regal robes and crown is commanding. While this may be the only of Welles's films that deal with supernatural elements, I guess this type of magic would make sense in interesting the famously practiced stage magician Welles.

John L. Russell photographed Macbeth, Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952), then a lengthy career in television before returning with the iconic and polished Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock). This film feels like it's always dusk or midnight. But one sublime frame worth mentioning takes place as Macduff returns to confront Macbeth in a duel to the death: a medium close-up of the armored Macduff is backlit, leaving him in complete darkness with his cross topped helmet towering toward the camera with foggy smoke bathed in waves of diffuse light behind him. This is another of Welles's films with a grand climax of action suspense that sees an arch villain thrown from a high place down into a plummeting death.

Again, how clever of Shakespeare to have guilt keep Macbeth from sleeping. This one definitely translates well to the screen in Welles's hands.

--Dregs