…I can’t wait for next semester Honours subject on Film and Psychoanalysis if stuff like this will be on the course.
Billy Wilder cracked that the times were almost right for “a movie about a young man who has a passionate love affair with his mother. At the end he learns that she is not his mother and he commits suicide.”
- The Dame In The Kimono, Leonard J Leff & Jerold L Simmons
Am discovering that I am very interested in film censorship. Thinking of doing something concerning it for my thesis in a year. Am doing a subject vaguely concerned with censorship of all art this coming semester not because I think it will be great, but because it may have a little to do with this and I can always research into that particular area.
Was reading about a seminal point of the breakdown of censorship, Joseph Breen requested to see the shooting script for Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1943), and Hughes obliged even though he was an independent producer without Association membership. But even though he had obliged when not necessary, his final print of the film, at an initial screening, exposed his cheek at skirting the Code- that although his script was passed, his ‘immorality’ was transposed within the diegesis. Jane Russell’s breasts, and both talk and unmistakable references toward a plethora of illicit sexual encounters being the major culprits.
Breasts!
So ironically then, and as a nice kick in the arse for the PCA, the publicity agent Russel Birdwell built interest in the film, in order to get it released, by emphasising Jane Russell and her breasts. His plan worked out so well that people wanted to see her, magazines wanted to publish her and everyone knew who she was before her debut film had even been released. Nice work. Leff and Simmons record a reporter’s findings that in a three week period during 1942, ‘photos of Russell had decorated the covers of eleven national magazines, while stories about her had appeared in 532 dailies and 448 Sunday papers.’
After this the PCA and Breen seemed to ease up. ‘Producers “have got hep to the fact that plenty of real crime takes place every day and that it makes a good movie”,’ according to author of the story Double Indemnity, which became a film in 1944. But I’m not sure that it’s so simple to say that they did loosen up; according to Leff and Simmons, although much of the anger and feeling of the novel of The Postman Always Rings Twice was removed/rediced in the film script, ‘Breen predicted that “the overall flavor of lust” would bring the boards down.’ The subtle infusion of lust in the film is definately powerful, expressing passion and desperate violence without the need to be any more blatant. But still, the minor offense of lust was still much on the Administration’s radar. The picture did get produced though- and although the screenwriter apparently claimed that Lana Turner’s forty-one white costumes would suggest that she kept her pants on, this was, thankfully, not the actual message sent in the film.
A dressing gown, a revealing outfit.
‘The Seal on The Postman would close the parenthesis on an era of Code enforcement; it would tell Hollywood to purchase the most salacious books and anticipate Production Code certification.’ Which left the slate open for some pushing of the proverbial envelope in the late 40s and 50s. And some intense audience enjoyment at the Administration’s ignorance.
Watched first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer since February tonight. Am sick, inside the house, and in the mood for easy comfort. Although picked a non-comforting episode, because those are always the best kind. Made me sad about some things, good to indulge in moping.
Have to record Spike’s beautiful speech here.
You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love till it kills you both. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other till it makes
you quiver but you’ll never be friends. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood, blood screaming inside you to work it’s will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.
Categories: television
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
When the wolf in sheep’s clothing Harry (Robert Mitchum) chases the children up the cellar staircase, his outstretched arms and corpse-like profile are an iconic symbol of desperate cruelty, and of fear. Later, when a larger group of children form a line behind their adopted mother (Lillian Gish) and follow her through the town, the image is almost as scary. Although she takes care of the children, and is a beautiful motherly figure, the decorum with which she operates, although devoted, is chillingly tainted. As though she could snap at any moment.
Categories: cinema
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972) is a love story about people. Not about their lives, but about the people there, now, living, not as they have lived. Names do not matter, rather it is spaces, bodies, noises, smells. It is these transient, untangible things which bring people together, keep them together (in love?) in Bertolucci’s imagined Paris. Jeanne (Maria Schneider) breaks it off with her conventional partner (Jean-Pierre Léaud) because, she says, he makes her do things she has never done. So does Marlon Brando, in fact, but the reason she returns to him is because they, when together, are out of sight. She is not fulfilling a sexual or romantic scenario for the camera, for a record of a ‘love story’. It is just for herself. In this case, love is not about performing.
But in a final scene in a Parisian ballroom, love becomes something of a performance for Marlon. He is no longer the man who said, ‘Well, if you look real close you’ll find me hiding behind my zipper.’ But the performance of the tango does not involve real emotion, claims the lady in control. For the couple, though, they appear in love on the dance floor, and it is in the darkened, empty tables, that it disappears. What is Bertolucci doing, then?? Showing the unsustainability of living in the present, without peripheral lives, with only bodies? Can no one survive with only themselves?
Categories: cinema
‘The Code has become the loose suspenders that hold up the baggy pants of the circus clown. It allows the pants to slip dangerously, but never to fall.’
- Stanley Kubrick, 1959
The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949)
Robert Mitchum: Can I tell you a story?
Jane Greer: As long as it isn’t too sad. See, when I hear sad stories I cry, and when I cry I can’t drive.
And you just know that they’re going to sleep together. One of the greatest moments of that era of cinema and one that I have remembered for years.
Categories: cinema
