Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy

One of the greatest worldly battles of time is, of course, the battle of the sexes. And Adam’s Rib, directed by the great George Cukor in 1949, is one of the greatest films ever to deal with this particular topic. Not in the least because it stars an extraordinarily famous Hollywood couple, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose love for each other shines through even when they are bickering, and even when they are seriously and painfully fighting. Just look at the screenshot above to see how close these two are. Setting this drama in a courtroom, where their love is pitted against oppositional positions by law, makes it a particularly interesting film and sets up a good many future courtroom love stories.

That this film was made in 1949 is particularly amazing, with the visual portrayal of the relationship between Hepburn and Tracy (as Amanda and Adam Bonner) being so explicit as though Cukor wanted to tempt censors – a feature of the couple’s home movies pushes the point, with a silent film-type insert cutting away to from a closed door to ‘Censored’. It is the dialogue, though, which yet again saves a great film from over-censorship, as it very slyly if at all refers to anything risque or sexual – and the script gets you past Joseph Breen. And luckily, as is often the case with films of this era and particularly Cukor’s work, the dialogue is one of the best things about Adam’s Rib, definitely creating a lively environment for the sharpness of Hepburn and Tracy’s relationship. The film was written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, the latter whom starred in Harold and Maude (1971), and Gordon’s eccentric but incredibly intelligent personality in the later film is definitely shown developing in the earlier one.

The similarity between these two films is definitely material, and not just convenient. Although it is not a battle of the sexes film per se, Harold and Maude is based around equality of sex, and also of age. The four lovers in both films fight for something they believe in, and in the end they all get what they want. Not to mention the notable presence of liquorice in both films – first, Tracy threatens Hepburn with a fake gun made out of liquorice, then Maude offers some to Harold at the first funeral meeting.

With many more years together as a couple, Hepburn and Tracy are a solid picture of togetherness in Adam’s Rib – to paraphrase Judy Holliday’s character, they are together with no space in between them.

These are ‘aesthetics of taste’, writes Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, found in

certain young cinephiles who substantially change their opinion of the cinema, sometimes in an exuberant or dramatic way, after each film they have seen which has strongly attracted them: the new theorisation is tailored each time to the precise measure of this unique and delicious film, and yet it is indispensible that it be sincerely experienced as ‘general’ to prolong and amplify, to sanction the vivid momentary pleasure they obtained on seeing the film.

(10-11)

From Two or Three Things He Knows, J. Hoberman, Village Voice, November 16 2004 –> here.

“Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” Fitzgerald wrote in The Last Tycoon. Godard is one of them.

In Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), the first sight we get of Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is his arm, his hand, signing a cheque (sign of power), playing chess (a game of power, calculation), before we see his face. This suggests that, Humphrey Bogart having all the charisma that he had in Hollywood and in the cinema, that Curtiz wanted to give his lead an image o being powerful outside of Bogie’s famous persona. As they say, human beings are Casablanca’s primary commodity. But Casablanca is going to be a great film even without Bogart, Curtiz tells us, although we know it would not nearly be the same without him. Of course he made everything that he touched amazing. Even the way he smokes his cigarettes – or the way he picked up his cigarette, before we saw that it was him.

‘What is your nationality?’

‘I’m a drunkard’

‘And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.’

I have written previously about the startling effect of a cinematic apparatus controlled by emotion, rather than convention. And just like in A Star Is Born (1954) where George Cukor allows for the inclusion of shots that have gone out of focus, John Cassavetes in Opening Night (1977) lets his camera go out of focus to retain the raw and unavoidable emotional involvement that his camera and his actors provoke.

The camera flashes out of focus in the opening few minutes of the film, but  following this it remains very much in focus, barely allowing his audience a chance to look away from the faces of his actors. This reveals their beauty but also their imperfections, weaknesses, perhaps thoughts. This heavy use of the close-up creates an intimate frame for us as audience to view the characters, but also draws us into the experience of the film – noticably, rather than watching we are being taken along.

This also may help us to accept the characters, but not necessarily assist in understanding them. I am still struggling to get into the mind of Myrtle (Gena Rowlands), neurotic and confused and depressed.

But while we get all these close ups there is one characters who, significantly, we did not really get to see as we saw everyone else. That was, in a sense, the director’s other woman, his wife Dorothy (Zohra Lampert). For who is more important in a director’s life than his leading lady? – this showbiz ‘tradition’ is scrutinized and harshly criticized by Cassavetes. Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara) directs the play The Second Woman written by Sarah Goode (a beautifully aged Joan Blondell) with Myrtle in the title role. The ’second woman’ being the older woman, one spent of youth and in the ’second’ stage of life. Although the second woman is, really, Manny’s wife, in the shadows, not forgotten but – we’re not sure – not loved? Does he love Myrtle? – when he kisses her on the cheek and she says ‘be careful’ to him, is this because they had an affair the evening before? Or because she knows of the delicacy of his other, his ’second’, relationship. Everyone knows, Cassavetes shows this. The actor, to the director, will never be the second woman.

The Tenant (Polanski, 1976) is a psychological horror film, its restraint accentuating those moments which are  harsh, sharply intense. Roman Polanski, acting as the lead man Trelkovsky, is very gentle himself (look at him, he’s very sweet), which affects the spectator into a meek state of mind, so that everything that happens to him jolts us in much the same way. We are made almost passive, like him, so the aggression of the effects and the horror is made stronger.

A staircase – threatening, nervous. Classic space of psychotic thriller.

Trelkovsky is a Polish man living in France, a French citizen, but his legitimacy for being there is constantly doubted. His immigrant status is held suspiciously against him. And he is doubly an outsider; in the country, and in the building complex where his apartment is located. He is coded as ‘different’, as one who at first does not respect the rules (although unintentionally) and never forgiven. This active and verbal exclusion works on his psyche as a neurotic lack of trust, leading to distortion of reality and distortion of all people around him. As he is the only one whose mind is in this neurotic space, everyone else is thus excluded, and everyone, in his mind, is against him.

In a review of the film here, this:

In another, a ball bounces with supernatural uniformity before his third floor window; upon closer examination, we find that it’s actually a human head. In a less imaginative film, an explanation would arrive, killing the enigma by consigning it to the supernatural or to a dream. But Polanski declines to make sense of it for us, and we leave the film with the mystery unresolved.

This is incorrect. The ball is not a human head ‘upon closer examination’. It begins as a ball. As Trelkovsky notices it, the film’s identificatory state slips into his mind – he sees it as a human head. Is it actually? It is true that this remains unresolved, and the mystery is part of Polanski’s mastery. It could be. But it could also be a part of Trelkovsky’s mind, the reality he is creating for himself which is really a distortion, but for him, to make the rest of the events fit into an explanation, this is what he sees.

More later, maybe…

Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955) shares qualities with Gene Kelly musicals – An American In Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Singin’ In The Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952), Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967). It’s bright, colourful, the sewer has rainbow pipes and bright orange facilities. Richard Dyer writes in ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ (from Movies and Methods: An Anthology) that there are five qualities of a musical that qualify a film as utopian: abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, community (1985:228). Guys and Dolls has all of these. And Frank Sinatra is beautiful – I would want to marry him too.

It’s interesting though that in this film he has an addiction – gambling – and in The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger. 1955), a heroin addiction. Constructing him as a public figure with addictions which are detrimental to his wellbeing at the same time as him having links to the mafia.

Although I generally don’t like Madonna’s dancing and think she should actually hire some choreographers some day, she is so hot in this clip:

Wow, I just love it.

Even though Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008) was a pretty bland film, its final moments struck a chord with me, reminiscent of the final message of The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1984)- that in spite of everything, the cinema really can make everything okay for people.

It makes things okay because even though in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia (Mia Farrow, actually in both films – I hope only because of the similar message!) is betrayed by a man who says he will care for her, leaves her husband and is left with absolutely nothing during the American Depression. But she enters a movie house, watches the image of Fred and Ginger on the screen, and we can see her forget her life. There’s a reason why Edgar Morin called the cinema a ‘marvel’ (The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man). It becomes of us that when viewing a film we can recognise a changed reality, as within the film ‘anything might happen’, so in our reality, too, anything in our dreams could happen (Wendy Everett, Screen 1998). That’s why, after crying in this film, I could finish it feeling slightly uplifted.

Uni. Yay. And also, I get to do readings which tell me things like this. 

 US President George Bush remarked of skateboarders, ‘just thank God they don’t have guns’ 

Like, wtf? Ignorant dick. Can I slap him?