Results

Introduction: Will the years ending in “9” please stand up?

Without begging the question of whether or not the cosmos follow an immense, self-orchestrated pattern (of which we can only observe a scant few threads), allow me to postulate that we like to create benchmarks.  Often, these benchmarks are arbitrary, aligned with the births of influential men and women, cataclysmic natural or man-made events, or diaphanous boundaries of the calendar year (or decade, or century, whatever).  “Eons,” “ages,” and “times” comprise human history, replete with chapters, subheadings, and questions for critical thought in countless academic textbooks.  Some choose to view history — in light of these distinctions — as cyclical.  As far as natural events, this may even be efficacious — how else is the reliability of almanacs explained?

For human events, these cycles and patterns are also widely perceived as informative, regardless of scientifically valid data or common sense.  (How else is the popularity of astrological predictions explained?)  Almanacs and yearbooks are consistently compiled for everything from scientific discovery to political thought to fashion.  Film, as is usually the case with anything, is no exception.

Hence, I have decided to take a retrospective look at each decade for the last fifty years, focused through the lens of the predecessors of our current calendar year, 2009. ¹  From 1959 to 1999, I will survey the films I have seen that may give a clue to the prospective quality of the coming year in film.  My methodology is suspect, unreliable, limited in scope and experience, and, of course, thoroughly arbitrary.

It’s no crystal ball, but if history is any indication, it may very well prove to be 100 percent accurate.²

1959: Cross-dressers, Frenchmen, and the Wrongly Accused

Ben-Hur remains untoppled at the top of the Oscar heap, sharing a record number of 11 wins with only Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  It is the story of a Jewish superhunk whose quest for vengeance is achieved, only to find that the power of Christ (in a special guest superstar appearance!) fulfills him.  Colonialism, compassion, bloodlust, personal faith, and masculine, ethnic, and religious identity construction all participate in the resonance of this quasi-Biblical epic, which boasts one of cinema’s most famous — and resilient — action sequences.  The Roman chariot race is the most stunning of the film’s several mini-climaxes, in which Charlton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur finally consummates his revenge against Stephen Boyd’s Messala, only to find that satisfying his thirst for retribution leaves him guilt-stricken and emotionally adrift.

Despite its ponderous length, so much of the film seems to reach across time and to speak to contemporary concerns that it remains one of the few unimpeachable “classics” that manages to surpass the enshrinement its success as a dramatic feature certainly warrants.

In another of ’59’s most seminal entertainments, a leading man very unlike Heston’s Ben-Hur shouldered the blame for a crime he did not commit — only Roger O. Thornhill shoulders this blame most unwillingly.  Thornhill (“George Kaplan” to his intimate foes) is one of Cary Grant’s most archetypal creations: absurdly comic, sardonic, irritatingly charming, a bit of a momma’s boy, and a reluctant, witty hero, whose hardiness emerges under only the most desperate (and unlikely) conditions.  While Ben-Hur was rooted in the political and religious upheaval of the Roman Empire’s occupation of Israel (and practically everywhere else in the known Western world, for that matter), North by Northwest is a fantastic feat of credulity-stretching magic, in which an improbable conspiracy is even more improbably thwarted by its own hapless patsy.  It’s the perfect mold of Hollywood escapism, held together by the sheer force of its director’s commitment to style and story, the charisma of its cast, the fleetness of its writer’s pen, and the virtuosity of its f/x crew and production designers… not to mention the essential, stirring atmosphere of Bernard Hermann’s indispensable musical services.

Laden with loads of potential signifiers and thematic texture, NxNW is nevertheless a wonderment of a crowd-pleasing diversion; a film whose agenda is no more or less than to persuade you to embrace its patently ridiculous conceits.  Every year, Hollywood delivers endless variations the thriller formula that are intended to pull the audience into a fantasy to which they can relate without being reminded of the reality awaiting them beyond the EXIT sign.  Consistently derided as substanceless, disingenuous, socially disengaged (or, horror of horrors, “bourgeoisie”) illusions that attempt to distract and enrapture their audience, the mainstream thriller that simultaneously functions as “light entertainment” is increasingly rare.  Wit and style can only be substance in the hands of a master like Alfred Hitchcock, whose meta-substance was the preternatural ability to give audiences exactly what they wanted (maybe even needed) nearly every time.

Rather than being the result of focus testing and abstracted from endless pie charts of demographics, Hitchcock serviced the entertainment needs of the mass audience via his technical craftsmanship and astute insight into the psychological components inherent in the stories he chose to tell.  He told these stories — sometimes ambiguous, sometimes disturbing, often psychologically probing — with clarity and precision, setting a mainstream standard that almost no filmmaker has matched with his kind of consistency.

American director Howard Hawks was close.  His Rio Bravo was a rejoinder to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (albeit seven years late), and stands today as perhaps the capstone of Hollywood’s classic era of traditional westerns.³  Besides a typically engaging performance from the great John Wayne (swaggering confidently with a persona cultivated from decades of labor in the business), Rio Bravo features an index of pop icons, from singers Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson (of the two, Martin was a natural actor, but Nelson’s odd combination of laconic demeanor and youthful energy made him perfectly cast) to sultry Angie Dickinson and indelible old coot Walter Brennan (who appeared in ’69’s western spoof, Support Your Local Sheriff!).

Though John Ford reigns as the undisputed master of the American western, Rio Bravo is probably my favorite single entry in the genre: a journeyman effort carefully calibrated to what an entire generation of both filmmakers and filmgoers was felt to expect from a cinematic representation of this rich, relatively young mythos.

What’s striking now about the film is how briskly it moves, considering how static it is in conceit — a prolonged standoff between lawmen and outlaws, with occasional eruptions of violence.⁴  The character arcs are straightforward western tropes, but the fascinating thing is that the film is character-based.  Rather than dynamic evolution or intense scrutiny, the cast is allowed to inhabit their archetypal characters, who migrate around town, personalities rubbing against each other, each interaction bumping each other closer to the expected endpoints, like a cinematic brand of predestination.  As a result, the film is comfortable, leisurely, instantly familiar and memorable — this conscious aversion to challenging the audience was itself a challenge to the revisionists and the brand of auteurist, more experimental filmmaking that would dominate the sensibilities of the best, most influential industry artists of the next two decades.  In retrospect, this radically conservative stance lends the film a more elegiac tone than was perhaps intended.  It only buttresses the integrity of a film that stood its ground as the world moved on around it.

Along similar ideological lines were Robert Stevenson’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People and Sleeping Beauty, a couple of Disney pictures that remain dazzling and diverting “family movies,” despite a regrettable anti-feminist streak.⁵  Maidens and daughters in need of rescue from Otherworldly forces (emphasis on “Other”) by suitors and fathers are standard characters in Americanized fairy tales, then and now.  (Further reading/viewing: Twilight, 2005/2008.)  Fittingly, another sort of fairy tale — the romantic (sex) comedy — emerged concurrently, epitomized in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day showcase, Pillow Talk.

Somehow, Pillow Talk has retained a remnant of its reputation as a sexy, boundary-pushing pinnacle of the “sex comedy” cycle of the 60s.⁶  Though the formula would evolve into witless, unimaginative star vehicles for starlets on the decline,⁷, being pretty funny and somewhat snappy, Pillow Talk is watchable enough, if a bit lackluster.  For me, it’s a difficult film to watch without reflecting on the tragedy of Rock Hudson, whose efforts to stay closeted during this era were so successful that I still hear of people that remain unconvinced he was really gay.

While Pillow Talk adopted a conventional approach to the battle of the sexes, the ever-subtle master of subversion, Billy Wilder, dropped an atomic (platinum blonde?) bombshell of a sex comedy as a genderbending romp, shattering conventions of identity and romance.  He served up a film cynically painting modern courtship as an elaborate charade, yet gently (and immortally) accepted the vicissitudes of love with stoic grace in the film’s final line: “Nobody’s perfect.”  (Whosoever that “nobody” may be.)

Constructed identities in Some Like It Hot are sources of entrapment and liberation, as Tony Curtis finds he cannot pursue his female quarry as one (false, female) identity without concocting another (also false, but based on Cary Grant), while Jack Lemmon finds that being a woman rather agrees with him (much to his consternation, when he stops to think about it).  At the epicenter is that divine mistress of perpetual mystery, Marilyn Monroe, about whose persona and “real self” volumes have been written by men and women who may as well have been writing about Sugar Cane (nee Kowalchek), her most emblematic role, if not her most iconic.⁸

Only Wilder could play with gender, identity, and sexuality in a narrative in which his characters’ lives literally depend upon their success at becoming someone else — or learning to embrace who they really are through the device of a false identity.  Wilder was sometimes gleefully ambiguous (as in his treatment of pedophilia in The Major and the Minor) or laceratingly blunt (as in his broadside against sensationalistic journalism, Ace in the Hole).  In Some Like It Hot, he coded his advocacy for a broader acceptance of multiple sexual identities in the mechanics of a broad farce.  Instead of a pandering, disposable confection, Some Like It Hot may be Wilder’s sharpest, most accessible, subtly progressive film.  Of course, those disinclined to acknowledge any sophisticated film’s thematic undercurrents can still enjoy it purely as a jaunty comedy about cross-dressing jazz players.

Hollywood’s most infamous cross-dresser delivered his anti-masterpiece in 1959: Plan 9 from Outer Space.  The most notoriously awful director of motion pictures in history, Edward D. Wood, Jr. is most widely “acclaimed” for this science fiction parable about the dangers of nuclear warfare. ⁹  Incompetent, sincere, and arriving just before the dawn of the age of the hipster celebration of irony, this cult film isn’t so much a testament to the indomitable spirit of the filmmaker (oblivious to his own inadequacy) as much as a testament to pop culture’s ability to reclaim just about any piece of junk and grant it a measure of status.  Without Plan 9, I’m sure we would still have groups of friends who sit around to watch terrible movies and make fun of them; the genius of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have found its way into the public consciousness one way or the other.  But it is worth taking a moment to reflect upon the fact that more people continue to search out and watch this — considered “the Worst Movie Ever Made” by that vague body politic we call Cultural Consensus — than some of the most critically-acclaimed films released each year, made by inventive, brilliant artists working independently or trying to break into international markets.  It is likely that there is a large number of people who have seen Plan 9 from Outer Space several times, but have never seen Au Hasard Balthazar.  Ed Wood and his crapsterpiece signify an entire arm of critical appreciation (or cult worship) that unearths buried treasures with no appreciable value, and champions these artifacts anyway.

Not that this is an invalid or valueless practice.  Infusing mass product with artistic respect was the stock-in-trade of the critics at Cahiers du Cinema, who made “authors” of Hollywood’s hired guns and found existential masterpieces in the postwar crime dramas that found their way to France in the ‘50s.  Francois Truffaut, one of the journal’s leading lights, became one of the leading lights of the Nouvelle vague when The 400 Blows was released to international acclaim.  One of the most acutely-observed coming-of-age stories I’ve ever seen, Truffaut’s unsentimental approach to intrinsically emotional material is fresh and invigorating.  Empathizing with his younger alter ego, Antoine Doinel, almost as an interested stranger, the film breathes with independence and a lucid apprehension of life’s harsh reality checks.

Grouped with the French New Wave (probably because he was, you know, French), Alain Resnais delivered the sensuous essay on memory, love, and war, Hiroshima, Mon Amour in the same year.  While Truffaut filtered his own memories through the lens of a narrative feature (rather, several narrative features, following the growth of Doinel over the course of many years), Resnais specialized in the stuff of memory itself, and human events that were simply too momentous to get a handle on.  Against the backdrop of Hiroshima (still partially in ruins), Resnais’s film approached the effects of wartime through the perspective of a woman engaged in a cross-cultural affair.  Conflating the microcosmic and macrocosmic, political and personal effects of deep-seated trauma, Hiroshima, Mon Amour occupies a unique psychological realm in which contemporary reality can be distilled into poetic lyricism and the past can be recalled through sharp vignettes that may or may not relate to cause and effect.  The instability of memory, emotional commitment, and political perspective are rendered as one and the same in audiovisual terms.  While Hollywood engaged these issues head-on, the more radicalized cinematic approach of Resnais is almost more accessible, less dictatorial — he allows the audience to come to its own tentative conclusions.

The spiritual void of Resnais’s intimate odyssey is mirrored in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket.  His hyperreal, distinct approach deconstructs reality in an even more obtuse, direct manner.  American filmmaker and critic Paul Schrader reveres Bresson, and this film in particular.  In a featurette included on the Criterion Collection’s DVD of Pickpocket, Schrader highlights the ways in which Bresson’s style disengages the viewer from the filmic experience, fracturing it, representing as accurately as possible the psychological and spiritual dislocation of the film’s character.  It interests me that a filmmaker so spiritually committed could make films that were so oblique; if Bresson wants to achieve transcendence through trial, it fascinates me that instead of creating a filmic experience that entirely fuses individual people with humanity and God, Bresson replicates the alienation of the human experience with excruciating precision, offering little solace in his approach or stories apart from a scant few moments of harmony or integration.  Suffering, wandering, and yearning predominate, yet there is a persistence in his characters — and the deliberateness of his craft — that very accurately captures the essence of faith.  Against all reason, against all odds, sometimes even against even the best hope, faith endures.  The rigor of a man surviving by grift and deception can serve as apt a metaphor for spiritual searching as a fallen prince on a desperate quest for vengeance.  The wrongly accused and the justly imprisoned tread the same path, just as cowboys and cross-dressing hacks make a stand for the articles of their faiths, and what emerges is a spiritual brotherhood, articulated within the confines of the silver screen.

_______________________________________________