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A critical study of the image of marriage in the contemporary American cinema

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A critical study of the image of marriage in the contemporary American cinema

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Content A CRITICAL STUDY n OF THE IMAGE OF MARRIAGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA by Michael Anthony Callahan, S.J. A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Communication) August 1971 UMI Number: DP22319 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22319 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 -1 3 4 6 U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90 0 0 7 Pk. t> C m '72. This dissertation, w ritte n by under the direction o f /t.ia.. Dissertation C om mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The G ra d u ate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of require ments of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y D a te Se_ptembe.r.._l 9.71__ DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ' ' Chairman / .j& L r* ~ .... ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I i To the American Film Institute for providing a j l graduate fellowship in Education which enabled me to pursue1 ; the research necessary for this study. ■ ‘ ! To my dissertation committee: Professor Arthur Knight, Chairman, and Drs. Allan Casebier and Bernard Kantor for stimulating this research. : i And most of all, to my married friends, especially J ; the Daniels and the Chermacks and the Rapps. One morning Linus begged off writing a book report on Ethan Frome for i Miss Othmar because, "Not being a married person, I think it is impossible for me to understand the emotions involved in this novel."1 Since I share Linus' unhappy state, it was most important for me to have a close personal contact with a good number of married couples who quite dramatically jcontrasted with the image of marriage presented in the con- i ! temporary American cinema. Without their example and their i j inspiration, this work could never have been attempted. To i j them it is lovingly dedicated. t I 1Charles Schulz, "Peanuts," Los Angeles Times, Sept, 20, 1970 ("Comic Supplement") p. 1. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................. 1 "One little Indian living all alone. He got married and then there were none" (l)--The Problem of the Study (3)--The Significance of the Study (4)--Defini tions of Terms Used (5)--Method of Procedure (9)- - Review of.the Literature (10)--Other Sources for the Study (12)--Organization of the Remainder of the Study (13) PART I. MARRIAGE AND THE MOVIES CHAPTER I. THE GRADUATE LOOKS AT MARRIAGE ............. 16 "Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think you’re the most attractive of all my parents’ friends." (18)-- "The sower of our marriage . . . the mire of this vile crushing marriage." (29)--"I didn't need anybody to lure me away from the duties I owed you." (40)-- "You do not act like a broad to whom sex isn’t im portant." (50)~"It’s not what I can get, but what I’ll settle for." (68) CHAPTER II. THE GRADUATE LOOKS AT LOVE . ..............85 I "I don’t know what I |ant to do but I can tell you i what I don’t want to do--I don’t want to to what my 1 parents have done." (95)--"Listen, darling, they're playing our song." (100) --"Why/^an*t we go > on the I way we've been going? Why do we have to get married?" j (124)--"It doesn’t matter who you slepp with, it's I why you love." (132)--Summary of Part I (143) | PART II. MARRIAGE MOVIES AND SOCIETY j jCHAPTER III. THE MOVIE-GO-ROUND .........................148 I I j "We don't censor the movies. We just tell the exhi- | bitors what pictures they can’t show." (156)--"Why do iii all the stories end after they get married?" (165) j --"They’d put fucking in Macy's window, if you gave ! them a chance and they’d argue till they were blue in < the face that it was ’art.’" (175) CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND .................... 189 "It was a marriage like any other marriage." (195)-- j "Next major institution headed for massive demyth- ! ologizing: marriage." (205)--"I've had thirty tur- j gid years with you, Harold." (211)--"Little by little the look of the country changes because of the people we admire." (218)--Elsa: "We could have gone off." Michael: "Off? Into the sunset?" (225)--"Granted that marriage is a faulty, decrepit thing, still, right now, it’s the only game in town." (231)-- Summary of Part II (238) CONCLUSION................................................ 241 FILMOGRAPHY ................................. 246 BIBLIOGRAPHY 302 INTRODUCTION "One little Indian, living all alone. He got married, and then there were none." \ --Mother Goose, "Ten Little Indians" After nine violent deaths the traditional nursery ; rhyme ends happily as the tenth little Indian gets married and lives happily ever after. At least that is how this j innocent children's rhyme would have been interpreted just j i a few years ago. However, after some of the recent changes) ! in society and particularly after the radical transitions j I in the portrait of marriage by the contemporary American j cinema, a present day Mother Goose exegete might be inclined’ / to read the poem in a newer, more tragic sense. The unkind--- est fate of all is reserved for that final Indian who chose! i 1 marriage. From that moment on, truly, "and then there were ; none." | Why the new reading at this late stage in history? ;The answer is a complicated analysis of many factors in the i ^changing nature of modern life, but the public conscious- i i ness of these transitions seems not only to have triggered I ! a change in the way the American motion picture has been portraying marraige, but also to have provided a clue to I jthese changes. Granted the traditional, conventional pat- . - : 1 2 ! terns of thought in Hollywood, nourished by the same pap it i was so long accustomed to dish out to its ready-made j entertainment-minded audiences, the conversion is all the more remarkable. If it is true that there are only seven * original plots, a glance over the endless stream of cellu- j i loid that has unrolled from the Hollywood dream factories j » during the past sixty years would tend to indicate that six j of them have been largely neglected. The vast majority of j | these films have been variations on a single theme: boy j meets girl, boy loses girl,, boy finds girl again, they i i marry and live happily ever after. The storybook land never tired of retelling its magic tale of happiness and the enchanted audiences never ceased to be enraptured by it.: The Sixties was a decade of revolutionary change, a : i time for breaking old traditions and seeking new meanings. Political, social, economic, and moral changes engulfed the whole world, and the concerns of modern man were reflected by his communications media: the written word, television, the motion picture. For the latter the transformation was i hot only an effort to be relevant to the needs and aspira- i jtions of society as a whole, but also a last gasp for breath I amid the strangulation of economic catastrophe. The result I was a sexual revolution on the motion picture screen which was closely synchronized with society’s own convolutions. A new film audience came into existence, one which claimed the motion picture as its own special art form, the only meaningful art form of the twentieth century. In turn they demanded a new sense of realism and insight in the ! films presented. The result, in part^was a sharp increase1 in the number of motion pictures dealing with the subject 1 I of marriage--with what happens to those in society who j accept it and to those who reject it. The focus of the i Hollywood love story shifted from the traditional fairy | tale romances to the happy-ever-after land beyond the final! i fade-out. Many of the films suggested that wedding bells lead more often to a bed of thorns than to the promised bed of bliss. Others suggested that the only hope for happi- | 1 i ness lay somewhere outside of the traditional concept of marriage. Both of these aspects, with their relevance to and their impact on society, will be studied exhaustively in this dissertation. The Problem of the Study j j In the light of what has been already stated, an attempt will be made (1) to outline the two distinct reac tions to marriage as depicted in the contemporary American cinema: that of older couples who have already become dis- Jenchanted with their marital status and that of younger ! |couples contemplating the plunge into wedlock; (2) to demon strate the specific reasons for these divergent reactions I as well as to indicate occasional areas of agreement; r. (3) to place these contemporary films within a socio-histor- ical context which will explain how and why this transfor- I mation took place; and, finally, (4) to judge the accuracy : i - of these filmic allegations and their true relevance to ! ' society. j : i / ; i The Significance of the Study : I With Americans looking less to the silver screen as j a diverting source of entertainment and more as an art form j / 1 of considerable social significance, the films themselves i have looked more seriously at the human condition. Over j i the past half-dozen years, most of the serious American | films have dealt with interpersonal relationships, partic- : ularly as they exist or, more often, fail to exist within I marriage. The reasons for this change from the traditional ;romantic patterns and the accuracy with which this portrait is limned become an important meter for gauging the growing maturity of the American film. Is the new realism just the ! old romanticism in a new mask? Can the screen be a mean ingful forum for the discussion of the key problems within i American society? Can such discussion lead to fruitful I ‘ ends, changing thought patterns and influencing social i Sdevelopment? I i j Not only are the answers to these questions still a mystery, but the questions themselves have not yet been asked in a meaningful context. To zoom in on the contem porary films about marriage is to begin to formulate them. No books and few articles even touch on the subject, so | there is both need and value. Both in the basic subject matter and in a uniquely extensive use of the films them selves as resource matter, this study will be trekking through virgin territory, hopefully clearing a path for the i sociologists, psychologists, and theologians who are sure to follow. Definitions of Terms Used A critical study emphasizes the fact that the pri mary concern is the analysis and evaluation of the presen tation of marriage in a certain cycle of films. Placing i i these films within the historical development of the Amer- ican cinema is important only insomuch as it helps to ! unfold the interrelationship between this filmic image and the larger society. Marriage is a social institution by which one man and one woman are joined together in a special and intimate union whereby they are socially and legally dependent and through which they can found and maintain a family. The I [ratified, legal aspects of this contractual public agree ment are very significant in the following discussions. 1 The Image of Marriage is the overall portrayal of I [marriage in the films under investigation. As such, it I extends beyond this or that line or situation to the overall feel of the individual film, and beyond individual films to the overall impression given by the whole block of films. One or another motion picture might deviate from the var- ! ious general themes uncovered without challenging the con clusions drawn from this research. Likewise, in a film such', as How to Commit Marriage, it is not the happy ending and the double wedding ceremony that count, but the continual j attacks upon the institution of marriage which have occu- ; v pied almost every minute of the film's running time. I i The contemporary period encompassed within the j scope of this study was arbitrarily extended from Christmas! ! 1967 until Christmas 1970. A three year period provided both an adequate sample of films drawn from the peak of the marriage movie cycle and also a manageable total for j in-depth study. j ; t I The first date is coincidental with the release of j The Graduate, a film acclaimed by many critics as the begin ning of a new era in the American cinema. In 1967, Stanley i jKauffimann called The Graduate "a milestone in American film |history. Milestones do not guarantee that everything l iafter them will be better, still they are ineradicable."1 i jWhen protests met his acclamations, he reiterated his judg- jment the following year: "in cinematic skill, in intent, in sheer connection with us, The Graduate is, if I may 1Stanley Kauffmann,"Cum Laude," The New Republic, Dec. 23, 1967, p. 38. 7 ■ repeat it, a milestone in American film history."2 Hollis Alpert greeted the film’s debut in similarly extravagant manner: "the freshest, funniest, and most touching film of the year . . . the American film may never be quite the i same again." Though The Graduate does not deal as specif ically with the subject of marriage as some of the other ' films to be discussed, still the twin loves of Benjamin fori Mrs. Robinson and for her daughter, Elaine, provide a use- ’ ful microcosm for the investigation of all the moves about marriage. Although the second date was established chiefly | as a matter of convenience, the appearance at Christmas of l 1970 of Love Story provided a remarkable contrast to the ! cycle which had gone before, as well suggesting a new era J to come. Critic Charles Champlin commented: "unless we are all mad [Love Story] will be an enormous success and almost certainly the most influential movie of the year, A heralding more to come." Though Time’s cover story on I Ali MacGraw and the impact of Love Story accurately stated that "It is perhaps too early to tell whether the new roman- ! I i 2Stanley Kauffmann,"Postscript," The New Republic, Feb. 10, 1968, p. 37. ! 3 i Hollis Alpert, "Mike Nichols Strikes Again," Satur- jday Review, Dec. 23, 1967 , p. 24. j ^Charles Champlin, "'Love Story' Tells It Like It Always Was," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 20, 1970 ("Calendar"), p. 1. 8 I ticism is a wave or a ripple,"^ certainly both films were ! hugely, instantly popular and marked sharp departures from ' the customary film fare of the period. Incidentally, the contemporary period as designated is also by way of primary emphasis rather than exclusion, and films from other eras will also be introduced wherever pertinent. ! American refers to the fact that this study is tied , i not only to the motion picture but also involves its inti- j mate relationship to society. As such, the foreign film i i | becomes less important for this study, except where it has j i I had an effect upon American film production or American society. Cinema refers primarily to film releases of the major Hollywood studios and independent releases channeled through the ordinary distribution links into theaters. ! Films made primarily for television, underground films, student films, shorts, documentaries, and the like are i ^ I excluded from primary consideration, since it is precisely ! . the interrelationship between the mainstream of Hollywood j film production and the segments of society which view.th,ese[, films that is at stake. ^"Ali MacGraw: A Return to Basics," Time, Jan. 11, 1971, p. 45. r , f { i p l 9 ; Method of Procedure Most of the miscellaneous limitations of this study j have been indicated already under the careful definition ! of terms. A few other points might be noted. • Comprehensive as the research was during this three j t year period, not every single American film made during the! I time was personally viewed. Critical reviews were consulted ; as a guide, but there is always the chance that some sig nificant film was accidentally overlooked since the critics ! were interested in other matters beyond the scope of this study. However, a glance at the Filmography will indicate I I that few omissions have occurred. I It should also be noted that the statements in films such as these can suffer from the essential duality of the motion picture industry. The film maker is not only exer cising his artistry but he is also attempting to make a film’ that will return a sizeable enough windfall to his backers i i that he will be permitted to make another movie. Making a i meaningful statement on marriage (or on anything else) is a (difficult task within a stodgy, traditionalized system pri marily interested in making money. There can be a sharp disparity between what the artist feels and what his film jeventually says, but even this limitation is relevant in a i Jstudy relating artistic efforts to their influences on the itastes (and pocketbooks) of a social order. 10 Review of the Literature Even in the.context of a dissertation on cinema, the literature employed is rather unusual: it is a cross- section of the films themselves. No printed material of } major importance was involved either in the conception or the execution of this work. The primary sources, first and ( foremost, are the films themselves. i All the quotations from the films are taken directly I and verbatim from the sound track: except where specific ally noted to the contrary. Since no other significant . information could be feasibly added, the ordinary footnote ; citations for these quotes are omitted as long as the film : source and speaker identification are adequately supplied i r f the text. The key films which proved most valuable^ for the purposes of this study were: Airport, The April Fools, 'The Babymaker, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Cactus |Flower, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Faces, Goodbye, Columbus, ■The Graduate, The Grasshopper, The Happy Ending, How to I 1 Commit Marriage, . 1 Love My Wife, Jenny, John and Mary, I--------------------- | £ °These are not necessarily the best films on the subject but simply the most frequently quoted and discussed in this study. Films often make their best statements through striking visual terms and understated omissions, while flashy, talky dialog sequences make for easier quotes in a content-oriented treatise. Lovers and Other Strangers, Loving, Three Into Two Won't Go , i ■ _ _ ^ -.. Two for the Road, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Women in Love. Among these and other significant films, The Graduate provided the handiest microcosm for the whole ‘ I era being discussed. Likewise, Loving seemed the best sum- . mary of the older marriages dissected in Chapter One while ' John and Mary was a typical example of the younger atti- j tudes examined in Chapter Two. I The works of printed literature most often cited are j probably the Playboy series by Arthur Knight and Hollis ! 7 1 Alpert on "The History of Sex in CinemaM/ and the lavishly illustrated volume by Mayer and Griffith on The Movies.^ Both histories are especially helpful because of their con stant attention to the changing patterns of morality both on the silver screen and in society. Among sociological texts 1 considered, Blood's Marriage^ and Kirkpatrick's The Family j as Process and Institution^O stimulated thought the most. ^A twenty part series running haphazardly in Playboy jfrom April, 1965, through January, 1969. Related articles ,appeared in the November and December issues of both 1969 and 1970 to bring the series up to"date. , ^ ^Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer, The Movies (New York: Bonanza Books, 1957). j ^Robert 0. Blood, Jr., Marriage (New York: The Free Press, 1969). I ' " *®C1 if ford Kirkpatrick, The Family as Process and j Institution (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 195S). Although thousands of critical reviews were consulted in the preparation of this study, their helpfulness was quite limited due to the uniqueness of the subject. The dual trips to The Graduate by Stanley Kauffmann and Hollis Alpert were the most valuable reviews for present purposes. : Extensive readings in the growing literature about film and • a close perusal of the major cinema periodicals supplemented' I the reviews. ! i i Other Sources for the Study j Chief among the key resource areas were the closed files of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures in New York City. Not only did they prove a gold mine of information on the ways in which censorship actually oper ated, but the separate files on every motion picture relpasaf ! during the past ten years included from a dozen to as many j I - as a hundred critical reviews on the film clipped from news-] jpapers and magazines around the world. The ready access ;made thorough research comparatively easy. ; Other valuable library facilities employed included jthe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, i !the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library, i land the university libraries of the University of Southern i I . 'California, the University of California (Berkeley and I jLos Angeles branches), and Loyola University. For the eval- t uative section of this work, Master of Arts Degrees in Phil- 13 osophy, Theology, and English Literature were a primary source, as was personal experience in marriage counseling. I Doctoral work in cinema-communications and a summer with t Cinema Center Films were also of incalculable value. I Organization of the Remainder of the Study i i Chapter I will use the relationship of Benjamin in [ The Graduate to Mrs. Robinson as a microcosm for the study j i of husbands and wives already married for several years. j The attitudes of these couples will be analyzed and classi- i 'fied. ; I Chapter II will turn to the relationship of Benja- 1 min to Elaine Robinson in order to understand the viewpoint' i of younger couples, whether contemplating wedlock or not, j i t toward the institution of marriage. Again the reactions | ,will be catalogued and a comparison made with the results j of the first chapter. | I Chapter III will provide an' analytic history of the I !filmic trends and the events in the surrounding social order which culminated in the contemporary cycle of marriage 'films. Causes and explanations for the explosion will be explored. • ! Chapter IV will evaluate the position taken by these • films and discuss it in relationship to the past history of i i ithe motion pictures and the current tenets of the social f sciences. 14 The study will conclude with a summary section and complete Filmography and Bibliography. PART I MARRIAGE AND THE MOVIES 15 Chapter I THE GRADUATE LOOKS AT MARRIAGE Among the top grossing motion pictures of all time, j I The Graduate stands alone in combining mass popular appeal i I with probing social comment. Amid the fluff of musical ; i comedy and the spectacle of biblical orgies stands an I | unlikely hero, Benjamin Braddock,^ home from the college : ^Granted the importance of the film within this study, a plot outline seems essential. When Benjamin Brad- idock (Dustin Hoffman) returns home from college trailing clouds of glory, he is quickly engulfed in the materialistic; surroundings of his parents (William Daniels and Elizabeth ; Wilson) and seeks solitude to think over the values of his life. His recollection is shattered by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) who tries to seduce him. Benjamin finally suc cumbs to her charms and they begin a lengthy, rather absurd affair. When Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) returns from college, Mrs. Robinson makes Benjamin promise not to date her. Against his own wishes, the inev itable date finally comes and Benjamin falls in love with Elaine. When Mrs. Robinson threatens to expose the awful 'truth to Elaine, Benjamin breaks the news first. Elaine ^returns to college, vowing never to see Benjamin again. He follows after her insistently, gradually winning back her |affeetions. This time her father (Murray Hamilton) inter cedes and somehow convinces her to marry a nice, stuffy medical student. Seconds after the ceremony is over, Ben- Ijamin arrives and whisks Elaine off. Escaping on a city [bus, they sit silently contemplating their future life [together as the film ends. The 1967 Embassy release was jdirected by Mike Nichols, produced by Lawrence Turman, and photographed by Robert Surtees, from a screenplay by Calder jWillingham and Buck Henry based on the novel by Charles Webb. 16 17 wars to tilt at the windmills of conventional morality. In his twofold relationships--to the aging Mrs. Robinson and to the lovely Elaine--Benjamin manages to summarize much of what the contemporary American cinema has been say-; i ing about the institution of marriage. Though there is ; unanimity on some points, a surprising duality has emerged j in the films themselves, depending to a large extent on j whether marriage is seen through the eyes of an older par- j ticipant like Mrs. Robinson or through the vision of a j i younger contemplator like Benjamin or Elaine. The two I chapters of Part I will investigate these disparate atti- ! i tudes in the light of Benjamin's two loves. j For many of the critics appraising The Graduate, a fatal flaw seemed to be the stylistic split in the film, breaking it structurally in half. Even some of the more i t enthusiastic critics like Tom Milne, conceding that "it f (isn't often one gets even half a film as funny as this," |felt "when the graduate falls in love with Mrs. Robinson's :daughter (Katharine Ross) that the film begins to trail 1 downhill." While admitting the sheer brilliance of the ! satirical moments of the first half of the film, it is i vital to recognize that the structural change in the film jis not only justifiable, but intrinsically necessary for i I_________________________ 2 Tom Milne, "The Graduate," Observer Review (London) August 11, 1968, p. 23. conveying the film's theme. The change in filmic styles is not an arbitrary shift dictated by whim, but grows out of a change in Ben jamin himself. He does not change "from the hero of a serious comedy about a frustrated youth to the hero of a glossy romance; he changes as Benjamin," remarks critic Stanley Kauffmann. "He could not have been assured with Mrs. Robinson any more than he could have been ridiculous 7 and uncommanding with Elaine." Inasmuch as Benjamin relates differently to the two women, he also sees them and the world around them in different ways as well. Why there should be such a difference is at the very core of ■ this study. This initial chapter will investigate Mrs. Robinson and her world. "Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends." --Benj amin i As Benjamin floats down from the clouds like some I super-hero of film's fantasy kingdom to begin his painful I !Purgatorio, he seems a perfect incarnation of twentieth i ;century alienated man. If not a man for all seasons, he ! [seems very much in place as a hero for the late Sixties.^ j j ^Kauffmann, "Cum Laude," p. 37. i 4 j The media were quick to elevate actor Dustin Hoff- ! man to a new type of hero status after the release of the film and its immense popularity. Cover stories in Life -(—Dusty—and--the_Duke-,!L-July--ll-,—19-69L, pp..—36^A5-^a_coniparj 19 • Gliding along on a supersmooth sidewalk at the airport that , does the walking for him, caught in "The Sound of Silence"'* all about him, Benjamin has plenty of time to contemplate both his past and his future. If he sees nothing to excite J j him about his life, he finds plenty of reasons for despair. ; i Swept immediately from his thoughts to the noisy dis-j traction of his graduation party, he is immersed in an alienj world threatening to drown him in inch-deep waves. Two 1 societies are neatly contrasted here, like Robert Dupea's ! twin worlds in Five Easy Pieces or Adam Gaines’ Adam at J I 6^ a.m., but the antithesis is not rooted in college life in j opposition to city society, but in two generations and their| varying ideals. ! The Braddocks, the Robinsons, and their friends have ! "made it" and their hollow laughter^ is the covering sound for a deep-rooted failure to communicate. They are people who need things, not other people. There is a gap between i l ison of film heroes John Wayne and Hoffman) and Time ("The Moonchild and the Fifth Beatle," Feb. 7, 1969, pp. 50-54-- Stars and Anti-Stars like Mia Farrow and Hoffman) seemed particularly interested in overlapping the characters of Benjamin and Hoffman himself, finding threads of the gradu ate in the actor and relating them to the anti-heroes of the Sixties. I | "People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening." "The Sounds of Silence" by Paul Simon, Eclectic Music Co. (BMI), is played over the title sequence. I | The objective correlative used so effectively by John Cassavetes in Faces and Husbands. 20 Benjamin and his parents’ generation, but it is not based on authority; it is based on ideals. The discrepancy lies less in what they think than what they feel. In discussing the reasons why he was attracted to the property, director Mike Nichols explained: I'm, to this day, startled and inarticulate when peo ple consider it a picture about the generation gap. What interested me was the idea of people acquiring objects*that the objects then turn the people into objects and that's, as far as I was concerned, what was the core of The Graduate and that's what we thought about when we made it.7 The clink of the objects, the jingle of the money, the noise of the party are sounds from another galaxy as far as Benjamin is concerned. Disgusted by his own success in college, Benjamin finds the prospect of joining the dreary treadmill of materialism even more revolting. The result is an unsureness about everything, a paralysis of action. At the graduation party, a fat lady, seeking to bask a little in his reflected glory, tries to chat idly with him. "We're all so proud of you," she chortles. "What are you going to do now?" "I was going to. go upstairs for a minute," Benjamin replies. "I mean about your future, your life?" she continues. "That's a little hard to say." But it is not so much his future of which Benjamin is unsure-- Directly quoting - Nichols in an interview. Barry Day, "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Mr. Nichols!" The Critic, April-May, 1969, p. 48. 21 it is himself. Both become very difficult for him to talk about. Yet, as he indicates to his father somewhat later, if he does not know exactly what he wants to do with his life, he is quite certain what he does not want to do with it: he does not want to be anything like his parents. Dad: "What is it, Ben?" Ben: "I'm just worried." Dad: "About what, Ben?" Ben: "My future, I guess." Dad: "What about your future?" Ben: "I don't know. I just want to be different I guess." Different from what? Different from everything that his parents represent. Different from the people he sees around him. Different from the world he glimpses from afar through sheets of glass and panels of water always threatening to engulf him. And what, precisely, is wrong with Benjamin's par ents? They seem reasonably happy in their marriage and reasonably content with life. Mr. Braddock is a successful 8 lawyer and Mrs. Braddock is a conscientious housekeeper ®And the law partner of Mr. Robinson. A relatively large numbef of the marriage movie protagonists are profes sional people: doctors, lawyers, and the like. Riches have something to do with the problem ("The only reason more middle-aged men don't have mistresses half their age," says Joe Lampton in Life at the Top. ; "is that they can't afford it.") Likewise Joe suggests that the simple blue collar worker is able to find a sort of happiness with his jwife that the sixty-thousand-dollar-a-year executive is helpless to achieve. However the general trend of these : films is to ^suggest that, rich or poor, in sickness or in__ 22 and a plush party-thrower. They show a continued concern for their son throughout his many strange moods, willing to humor his rather )unhumorous foibles, willing to give him anything for his love. And, of course, that is exactly the problem. They have grown altogether too used to buying his love with expensive presents--the Alfa Romeo for grad uation, the frog-man suit for his twenty-first birthday. Each gift has a price |ag attached, with a value set en tirely in dollars rather than sense. As Benjamin's dad jparades his unwilling son before the birthday guests in the ghoulish guise of some Kafkaesque beetle after a meta morphosis, he braggingly remarks that Ben's "going to give us a practical demonstration of what I feel safe in saying is a pretty exciting birthday gift--and it better work or I'm out over two hundred bucks." If it does not work, Mr. Braddock would also be out a son but it is quite clear where his priorities are to be located. Breathing hard, perhaps even gasping for life as well as air, Benjamin retreats to the quiet womb of the swim ming pool to escape the value systems of another generation. Much of the visual magic of the first half of The Graduate is merely a photographic, cinematic equivalent for the health, marriage is never for better, but always for worse. 23 ! I way Ben looks at the adult world. Not just cut off from ' this world, he is actually a lonely universe in himself. > I He is wholly depeopled by water and glass; he speaks to ■ them from the opposite side of the wide-screen image, and j they do not listen anyway. He walks among them at busy ! i parties or ear-shattering discotheques where no one is I really listening to anyone else. The low-key lighting of the predominantly colorless sets creates sharp contrasts | 'in the edgy areas where Benjamin stands so often in the ; I dark. There is a hardness to the reality shown here and : there seems no place in it for the soft-edged humanity of Benjamin Braddock. So Benjamin seems to drop out of society. He floats on a raft in the family swimming pool, "just drifting" as he explains to his father. Mr. Braddock does not mind his son's occasional insubordination, the unknown (as yet) affair, or his lackadaisical ways, but he is upset over the apparent waste of his own hard-earned money. "Would you mind telling me, then, what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?" Ben jamin nonchalantly replies, "You got me." * | Benjamin sees little value in the rat race which has i become an essential part of his parents' existence. If the i audience occasionally becomes impatient with his alienation and confuses it with laziness or inability to act, it must be remembered that this is the logical response to the hyperactivity and materialism which has drawn his parents away from him. I Benjamin can find even less consolation in the other , l adults of his limited world view, the Robinsons, even i though he finds Mrs. Robinson "the most attractive of all ! I my parents' friends." Repelled by her original seductive | offer, Benjamin finally yields to her offer even while ! reminding her: "If you think I come here for any reason i beside pure boredom, then you're wrong." The accuracy of j this self-judgment is evident in the brilliant sequence silently depicting the run of their affair. The events of Benjamin's days begin to intermingle with his nights so that he walks from a conversation with his dad beside the pool straight to the hotel room and Mrs. Robinson. Watch ing television in bed with her is disturbed by a question from his father. The shots cut dizzily back and forth i 'until, as Benjamin dives into the pool, the shot is perfect ly match cut with another shot of him diving upon the bed and Mrs. Robinson. The confusion which is his life at this (stage is superbly represented in the photographic style of i (the film. | j The affair which began on a note of angst proceeds jwith the same desolate style. Benjamin feels pity for his benefactoress, not love. Discovering that her marriage 25 has disintegrated into an empty farce that has driven her forth from the home, he wonders how it ever began in the first place. The starting point for their love proves to have been something less than the traditional fairy tale romance. Benjamin: "Why did you marry?" Mrs. Robinson: "See if you can guess." Benjamin: "Well I can't." Mrs. Robinson: "Think real hard, Benjamin." Benjamin: "I can't think of why you did unless--you didn't have to marry him or something, did you?" Mrs. Robinson: "Don't tell Elaine." Benjamin: "Oh no, you had to marry him because you got pregnant." Ultimately Benjamin has discovered the answer to his ques tion because he cannot imagine any other reason why two people so obviously unsuited to each other would have been married in the first place. She was once an attractive, intelligent art major and he was a struggling, ambitious law student. Trapped into a marriage by a momentary fling in the back of a Ford, they have grown cold over the years, to each other and to life. For if Benjamin comes to the hotel room out of "pure boredom," Mrs. Robinson's motivations seem born of bitter desperation. She hasn't slept with her husband for five years. Even with Benjamin she tries to avoid any sort of conversation or basic communication above the animal level. When she is forced to speak, as in the opening scenes when I |she is first trying to seduce Benjamin, her words are all 26 ; filled with lies from beginning to end.® Benjamin's one prolonged attempt at communication with her concludes with his bleak remark, "Let's not talk about it. Let's not talk at all." The inability to communicate is expressed in a wide variety of cinematic ways. During most of their scenes together, Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are isolated in space. They speak to each other across rooms, constantly moving and constantly maintaining objects between them--a fish- j bowl, a piece of furniture, the empty space of the room. | I In their first rendezvous at the hotel, Benjamin calls I Mrs. Robinson on the telephone although they are separated ! merely by a few feet.-*-® Even when they are together in a shot, Nichols tends to isolate their two heads as far apart as possible on the widescreen. Furthermore, Ben- ! .jamin tends to be in the dark areas of the screen (where he is groping for light and air) while Mrs. Robinson in her ,jet black dresses stands in a shaft of light against a sparkling white wall, knowing exactly what she is about. ! ■ i S 9 ! Among others: that she came into his room looking !for the'.bathroom, that she can't drive the car home, that her husband will be home in a few minutes, that he won't ;be home for hours, that she is afraid of the dark house (which is adequately illumined), that she needs help unzip ping her dress, that she wants her purse from downstairs, that she isn't trying to seduce him, and' so forth. -*-®And the ever present wall of glass’ , , the phone booth. 27 : Most of the splendid scene when Benjamin tries to talk to ! Mrs. Robinson is played in the dark, with the light turned/ on periodically for visual relief in what is, after all, a film. But Benjamin remains predominantly in the dark until he meets Elaine. t Toward the conclusion of that conversation Benjamin discovers that the woman who claimed rio interest in art was * 1 once an art major. At first he thinks he has misunderstood! her words and then almost immediately realizes how close to ■ the truth they were. "Art? But I thought you . . . I J I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years." His weak explanation comes rather closer to the truth, per haps, than he suspects. The question is whether Mrs. Rob- j ,inson has lost interest in art or in life over the years. j Mr. Robinson is more the hale fellow, well-met, fil ling Benjamin's reluctant glass with Scotch despite Ben's pleas for bourbon while encouraging him'to be taking it a i | little easier right now than you seem to be. Sow a few ■wild oats; take things as they come. Have a good time with ;the girls." Mr. Robinson understands his wife so poorly that he sees no differences in her eyes despite the affair whose dramatic irony shines so clearly through his words. i jHe suspects no infidelities until she admits them and then iblames neither himself nor his wife when he confronts Ben jamin. 28 Mr. Robinson: "You want to try and tell me why you did it." Benjamin: "Mr. Robinson?" Mr. Robinson: "Do you have a special grudge against me? Do you feel a particularly strong resentment?” Benjamin: "No.” Mr. Robinson: "Is there something I said that caused this resentment or is it just the things I stand for that you despise?" Benjamin: "I'm trying to tell you that I don't resent you." Mr. Robinson: "You don't respect me terribly much either, do you?" Benjamin: "No, sir." Benjamin cannot understand Mr. Robinson's excitement be cause his disrespect is not a personal thing. It is "the things I stand for" that Benjamin resents, and those things are common to Benjamin's parents, the Robinsons, and all his parents' friends. They are so common in fact that Ben jamin cannot see why the Robinsons ttfould bother getting a divorce to end a marriage that is already really over. Mr. Robinson: "I do think you should know the conse- i^quences of what you've done. I do think you should know that my wife and I are getting a divorce soon.” Benjamin: (Startled) "But why?" Mr. Robinson: ("Shouting) "WHY?" Benjamin: "Listen to me. What happened between Mrs. Robinson and me was nothing; it didn't mean anything. We might just as well have been shaking hands." Mr. Robinson: "SHAKING HANDS!" Though Mr. Robinson finds Benjamin's metaphor a little weak junder the circumstances, it is not too far from the truth. If the Robinsons' own relationship was something less than iphysical, then the rather far-fetched affair that Benjamin !has just admitted having had with Mr. Robinson's wife was 29 i nothing more. The first half of The Graduate ends when Mrs. Robin son forces Benjamin to spring the news of their relationshipV to Elaine. As the horror swells in Elaine's eyes, Benjamin; i turns to leave and sees Mrs. Robinson standing next to the j door. The rain has made her makeup run, her hair is in disj’ array, her dress clings flatly to her shivering body. The | I weight of years has suddenly caught up to her as she speaks s softly to her former lover. "Benjamin. Goodbye, Benjamin." And she finishes her farewell, the camera suddenly zooms back with startling speed. The quick change from a moder ate telephoto lens to a wide angle flattens her against the wall with the sort of forced perspective change which j i could never have been achieved with an ordinary dolly shot. > Again the photographic style suggests the interior state ! of being. It is a dreary state for the Robinsons and the 1Braddocks of the contemporary cinema. i ; "The sewer of our marriage . . . the mire of this vile, crushing marriage." I --Martha, Who * s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In Benjamin's sterile relationship with Mrs. Robin- I 1 son and in the Robinsons' own emptiness can be found most of the seeds of discontent which sprouted up in the film portraits which followed, eventually flowering into a jun- I jgle.of angry weeds nearly choking the cinemas of the Seven- I i jties. From the limbo-like world to which most married coup-? 30 les were consigned to live happily ever after at the final fade-out suddenly popped a new breed of film couples, resur rected ten years later in the post-Graduate era, alive and very much kicking. Just as the American film has suddenly become conscious of these couples, so will this investiga tion, with the relationships and attitudes of The Graduate serving as tour guide. 11 This section will attempt to describe the typical married couple as depicted in these films. No judgments will be made at this point on the accuracy of these etch ings. Rather, an initila viewing will establish their The word is carefully chosen. Not every single film treats marriage in the same way nor does every film contain all the themes discussed in this chapter. However, there is an extraordinary consistency running through this group of films that reveals certain patterns and attitudes. These are the focal point for this study. Isolated excep tions exist but the nearly universal agreements are the significant thing. In her superb book on the heroes of the Forties, Running Away from Myself (New York: Grossman Pub lishers, 1969) , Barbara Demmg stressed the value of making a selection of films to illustrate the whole without fear ing the occasional exception: "If by the end of this book those analyses I do make seem legitimate to the reader, if the images I trace in films representative of a variety of genres seem together to compose a world that is consistent with itself, perhaps the reader will be willing to assume that any other films chosen from these years would con tribute to the same portrait of ourselves." (Ibid. p. 7) Hollywood is no longer as monolithic as it was in the early Forties, the heyday of the studio system, but the trends which run through this cycle of marriage movies are closely related. The quotations are taken for the common qualities rather than their univocal reference to the particular film from which they are drawn. The results should be typical for the whole genre of films. 31 details so that a more accurate assessment can be made in the second part of the study. The couples selected for this section will normally be in their thirties or forties with ten or more years of marital experience behind them. However, what really counts throughout is a certain mari- 12 tal age rather than a strick chronological factor. The basis for the discrepancy in attitude is founded on other factors. Like the Robinsons and the Braddocks, most of the couples in these films have struggled through hard times to reach a measure of success in material things which has gradually come between them. Perhaps the jet set rich who have grown up with wealth have also learned how to cope with it; perhaps they lack a degree of dramatic credibility. In any case, the heroes and heroines of these films can usu ally look back on a time of love and happiness before the grind of getting and spending came between them. They may retain a sort of happiness but it is too often dulled by the dollar signs drooping from the sleeve cuffs. Not just Benjamin and his generation are contemptuous of this preoccupation with riches. Even these admirable successes can look back longingly on many an occasion to the 12 Thus Janice and Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run are ancient, marriage-wise at twenty five, while the willing- jness of Howard and Cathy to abandon their respective spouses ,and fly off to Paris together like April Fools marks them jas young at heart in terms of these films. halcyon days before fortune smiled upon them and their Midas touch turned their world to ashes. In Two for the Road, for example, Maurice asks Mark, "Your wife is happy?"; and Mark replies, "It doesn't take much to make her happy, j A villa, a swimmihg pool, champagne . . . simple things j like that."13 I The wife is usually not so easily pleased. She j feels abandoned by a husband more in love with his job than! with her. Even so simple a film as The Love Bug can observe' in the words of the mechanic, Tennessee, that "Most guys ! spend more time and trouble on their cars in a week than on their wives." The wives would be quick to agree; they've been jilted for a jealous job. When Citizen Kane responds I to his wife's complaint about the long hours at the office j ! by reassuring her, "My dear, your only correspondent is :The Enquirer," Emily responds with a touch of bitterness: "Sometimes I think I'd prefer a rival of flesh and blood." I Though the pressures of a job were occasionally shown as a source of discord in marriage in those earlier, !happier days of film history, the interplay between job and wife was generally reversed. What the husband did for a living was the focal point of the story; the fact that his wife was disturbed by his dedication to his job was i i I. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . — ...I.. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . ^Frederic Raphael, Two for the Road, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), p. 113". 33 treated more as comic relief from its tensions or another incidental pressure making it difficult for him to func tion effectively.14 Thus in High Noon when Grace Kelly as Amy threatens to leave her husband of a few hours if he dares to remain in town, her challenge is neither a job conflict nor a marital difference but merely a dramatic trick to heighten the tension of the showdown. She is actually showing her love for him and their troubles are Thus, in a film like The F.B.I. Story, agent Chip Hardesty comes home after a hard day catching another of the ten most wanted men only to find the problem of the week at home. The domestic conflicts are added to give continuity and a personal touch to the episodic elements that are the real plot. Likewise, lawyers, detectives, and sheriffs also had plenty of troubles at home to keep things going between cases. But the focus was always on ; the crime stopper rather than his marriage. Bullitt and They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! follow the same old-fashioned ,pattern. Similarly, the sport star under stress looked to his loyal wife for inspiration but little more. Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees or Grover Cleveland Alex ander in The Winning Team find their filmic conflicts on the playing fields. However, the situation is generally 'reversed for contemporary movie athletes. Number One ' quarterback Ron Cat1 in completes more passes off-field than ion and his wife's career as a famous dress designer is as |much a threat to their insecure marriage as his own ten- ! sions. The dynamics of race driving also relate success on 1 the track to personal affairs in films like Grand Prix and i Little Fauss and Big HHalsy. Winning * s Frank Capua sees : the need to make a change when he apologizes to his wife, jElora, with the explanation, "I'm driving good but my life i is crap." About the only profession in which the marital scenes behind the action are filled with richness and love is the Mafia. In The Brotherhood Frank's happy marriage becomes the counterpoint for his somewhat less than joy ous occupation. simply dissolved when she returns just in time to dispatch ; the final baddie with a sort of marital coup de grace.^ The circumstances have not changed a great deal when I Cindy berates her husband Mel for spending all his energies i on his job in the 1970 smash, Airport. She argues that he j should have made a special effort to be home for their gala j j dinner, especially after "You promised a week ago." "A j week ago I didn't know we'd have the worst damn storm in six years," is his reply. "You always have some excuse," | is hers. Though Cindy keeps hoping that "Someday he'll come home for some other reason than to just change his clothes," a difference lies in Mel's realization that :"Maybe she's right. I'm just looking for excuses to keep J i from going home." It isn't the pressures of the job that : 15 Yet the comparison is not altogether fair. If she had been married for ten years instead of a few hours, the buckboard might have kept rolling straight ahead. Hell- fighters tells the story of two men fighting dangerous oil fires. The older one, Chance Buckman, seeing the tensions of his dangerous life and their effect on his wife, finally decided "if she was ever to be happy, he had to get out of Iher life." Years later when his daughter Tish marries fel- :low fire-fighter Greg Parker, she insists on standing by |him despite the dangers. "I'd rather have one year or one |day or one hour of happiness with Greg than the years of {loneliness you've had," she tells her mother. Chance tries jto keep her away ffom danger but Greg insists, "She'll go Iwherever she wants to go because she is my wife." This time jthe marital juxtaposition is the main subject of the film jwith the fire-fighting brought in periodically for visual relief. The two relationships also summarize rather neatly the directions of the first two chapters. 35 breed problems at home; rather it is the tensions of home life that encourage full-time devotion to the job. Meanwhile, the wife is aware that it was her own sort of commitment to the success cycle that led to this state. It was this quality that sharply differentiated Mrs. Robinson according to Nichols'. she seemed to me~someone who had made a poor choice 1 ' t^knowingly. She said, MA11 right, screw it, I'll give up whatever that other thing is"--and whatever it is it's something between people, some personal* experience of<other people--in exchange for clothes, rings, and fur coats. It's the worse bargain you can make. To exchange seeming something to other peo ple for being it. That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the exper ience of being alive for the appearance of it.16 When the opening of Pandora's Box seems the result of her own bad judgment, the wife cannot help but despair. The more she seems to fail him, the more the husband seeks refuge and meaning in his work. Sepaking of Loving, An drew Sarris mentions the way his art begins to supply some of the warmth of life for Brooks Wilson, a warmth that vrife and girl friends somehow fail to kindle. Not the least of merits of Loving is its acknowledge ment that a man's job is of more than passing impor tance in the living of his life. Indeed, making a living is often the largest part of making a life.l? ^Day, "Hey, Hey, Mr. Nichols!" p. 49. 1 7 Andrew Sarris, "Loving," Village Voice, March 12, ,1970, p. 31. James Arnold also spotlights this core prob lem of job and success as a marital misfortune quite well: 36 The camera carefully details the care with which Brooks turns out his less than classic illustrations. Working at home, his retreats to the artist’s studio are not just an engagement with the craft which pays his bills, but also an escape from the whining voices of wife and daughters, the nosey encroachments of impertinent neighbors, and the shattering screeches of Baby Lionel, the cat always under foot. His studio is a dimly lit womb which shelters him from total destruction. In challenging the needs and responsibilities of his job, Selma, like many another wife of this period, is likewise attacking the integrity of her husband, and both challenges are cunningly intertwined. The directions change in life and the very things that linked the couple together once upon a time begin to generate seeds of discord instead. Open hostilities will i 18 erupt occasionally, but the ordinary responses in these films are apathy and adaptation. Flareups are quickly for- ,"'Winning' can be taken as a parable about the problem in Imany American marriages: the success mystique which drives la man so hard, mentally and physically, that home becomes :chiefly a place to mix drinks, worry and fall into exhaus- jted sleep." James Arnold, "'Winning' Ultimate in Cool iMovies," Tablet (Brooklyn), June 5, 1969, p. 11. 1 8 J Particularly in progenitors of the cycle like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Faces. The films that followed these tended to treat marriage more as a swamp than a snake pit. Hatred, like love, requires strong emo tions and personal commitment, qualities lacking in some of the later protagonists. gotten^^ but the root causes linger and seethe. The prob- lem according to Blood (speaking of a larger society) is simply that, "Most couples lose their initial enthusiasm. Although prizing the partner at first, each gradually takes the other for granted and sees him or her more prosaic ally."^ There is a tapering-off sensation that is more ruinous to love than "a rival of flesh and blood." As a result the husband comes to look on the home simply as a place to stay, a momentary respite between the real hours on the job. His life touches his wife’s only as an isolated incident of relaxation in an otherwise busy and productive day. The wife is just a housekeeper, a live-in maid. When Mr. Robinson comes home to find Benjamin in his parlor ("Standing guard over the old castle, are you?") he suspects no hanky-panky but merely wonders why his wife needs any help in maintaining her spotless domain. Like the Braddocks' home, the Robinsons' is immaculately pre served and furnished, even down to Elaine's empty room. "Living in the trap that they have created out of their own needs, in a world of false values and always, but al- ■^Moments after their latest quarrel has brought a stroke upon his wife, Morris Mishkin in The Angel Levine can quite sincerely shake his head in puzzlement when asked the cause by the doctor. "I don't know,” he says, "We were talking the way we always do." 2^Blood, Marriage, pp. 325-26. 38 t 21 ways competing with the Joneses,” they try to ward off i outside woes in their own cheery little escape hatch of a home. However, by the time the husband returns to it late at night, after a busy, demanding day, he tends to seek his wife for one purpose only. Perhaps she has had just as, difficult a day, but he tends to dismiss her problems as utterly insignificant next to the almost cosmic responsi- 1 f bilities which are his normal burden. The gnawing uneasi- J 22 i ness that she has become a sort of sex machine makes j I the wife timorous about their relationship, a condition bordering on frigidity.^ The distaste, however, is based less on sexual matters than on the realization that a dull- i ness and routine has set into their lives that makes sex i ^lgtein, "Loving,M Film Daily, Feb. 26, 1970, p.3. 22 The term is used by Tina Balser in Diary of a_ Mad 1 Housewife, in an argument with her lover, George Praeger. ;"You don*t need a woman, you need a sex machine," she says. "It would sure simplify things a lot," he responds. The already married couples seem to try to keep relations on jan almost animal or machine level of communication rather •than on the level of human, interpersonal communication. ^Thus Purity Hoxworth's frigidity in The Hawaiians is the result of royal inbreeding rather than sexual trauma. Likewise, her husband's anguished cry, "All I know is if I ever needed you, I need you now and all you want me to do i£ to roll over on some beach and play dead," is based as much on the madness which separates her from the hopes and fears of his ambitions as on her unavailability as "sex machine." Frigidity was more common as a plot device in the adultery- centered films of the Fifties and early Sixties. 39 ; just another job.2^ She can sense in his attitudes the sort of feelings that Harry reveals to his drinking bud- ; dies in Husbands. "Aside from sex--and she’s very good at ' it--I like you guys better." Later on Harry also remarks, "I hate that house. I only live there because of that woman--the legs, the breasts, the mouth." No wonder the ! contemporary cinematic wife does not seem to "show a pleas-; i ant enthusiasm when you mount her," to use Old Lodge Skins' subtly understated phrase from Little Big Man. Instead, after a particularly horrible day at home alone, Tina Bal- j i ser in Diary of a Mad Housewife weakly answers Jonathan's i I trite "Hey, Teeny, how about a little ol' roll in the hay?"' by saying, "Jonathan, not tonight. I'm too tired." Snidel^ replying, "Christ, is there anything you can do anymore?" Jonathan misses the anguish in his wife's tone and the fact that her motivations are far removed from frigidity. Surely, though, the wife has a unique role as child- i :bearer and rearer of the family offspring? Aside from what i the Pill, the population explosion, and women's lib may do f jto these functions, even this traditional role is called I jinto doubt by The Babymaker. Tish Gray, the hippie stand- [in mother remarks that her decision to bear a child for ! I-------------------: ----- i 24 The argument between Wilma and Johnny in Lovers and Other Strangers about who owes one to whom seems more appropriate for an office conference than a marital bed. » 40 i money is not so very different from the rest of American womanhood. "It's an easy way to earn a living. Every mother in America earns her living that way," she explains. Shaw claimed that "Marriage and motherhood - is the greatest slavery invented by man," says Tish. By dispensing with ! the latter, one might also dispense with the former. j i "I didn't need anybody to lure me away from j the duties I owed you." --Henry II (to his wife) in Becket j The typical husband in these films would readily j agree that marriage is a form of slavery, but he sees quite ! t clearly where the freedom lies. Certainly not in the handsi i of a wife who has turned home into a fight ring. When Mel ; i comes bursting into his Airport office noticeably ruffled, he spies the question in his secretary's eyes and responds, ' "If you're wondering whether we had another fight, we dl;dn’ 'tij^ ? s Just a continuation of the same old one." It is a short I step from Tanya's consoling eyes to her even more consoling embraces as Mel finally discovers. ; This is a sharp change from earlier screen eras when I the temptation always came from without, often in the per- ! 26 ! son of the vamp such as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. i I I I --------------------- i j c ; ^The Bakersfeld's daughter Roberta has run away !from home because "She couldn't stand the constant fighting |any more, the atmosphere of hate." Cindy remarks, "we don't’ I have a home anymore; we have a waiting room." ! i ________^In the stylish phrases of Knight and Alpert: "The 41 Whether as the Vamp in the 1910*s or as the Woman of the City a decade later in Murnau's Sunrise, she functioned as the classical siren luring men to their destruction out of a sort of diabolic delight. For her, men were not merely playthings; they were crea tures to be conquered, subdued into abject slavery to her every whim, and cast aside only after the final shred of self-respect had been stripped away.27 Between the various vamp followers of the next few decades and the Other Women of the Sixties, the sharp difference lies not so much in their motivations as in those of their victims. In the contemporary American cinema a revolutionary change has come about in the motives for adultery. Now the impetus comes not from some outside lure but from the seeds representation of true love on America's silver screen was never more spiritual than the treacly version offered prior |to the First World War. Simpering little girls with rib bons in their hair were constantly being led to the altar by upright young men who had just succeeded, generally by fisticuffs rather than mental agility*, in foiling the mus tachioed villain who dared to leer in her direction. Mar riage inevitably meant housekeeping and children, and the occasional male interloper who intruded upon this idyllic .existence was promptly and righteously repudiated. More often, in that innocent age, it was the Other Woman who [tried to break up a marriage." Knight and Alpert, "The History of Sex in Cinema--Part Two: Compounding the Sin," jPlayboy, May, 1965, p. 134. Barbara Deming suggests ano- jther reason for the demise of the Vamp by the Forties: "It jwas once the lost woman, the Vamp, from whom the hero had to endure wear and tear. This Home Wrecker is now extinct since the hero no longer knows where he lives." (Deming, Running Away from Mvself, p. 70.) i 27 ! Knight and Alpert, "Sex in Cinema--Part Two," p. 135. 42 of discontent within the home itself. If the home does not breed the sort of battlegrounds occasionally found, still it is little more than a place where husbands spend the night. The wife has definite, desirable functions: maid, cook, housekeeper, child-rearer, sex machine. But caught up in mortgage payments and the constant pressures of his job, the husband tends to identify her with the negative aspects of his life rather than with any positive virtues. If it were not for her, he would have the time and inclina- 2 8 tion to enjoy himself and to work only as much as need be. Instead he must slave away at a job that never quite makes ends meet. Both the home and the job come to represent a sort of slavery in his mind if not in reality as well. A siren does not walk into his life and carry him away from his beloved. Rather, because he finds no love at home, he goes forth to seek it elsewhere, in arms that do not also hold those awful responsibilities. Beyond persons and things lies a simple mathematical formula: Marriage is slavery and a mistress is freedom. Hardly a new statement (and perhaps a dead one long JO ^ Superbly shown throughout Loving and especially when Selma takes Brooks house-hunting. " The sad trip ends with her explanation, "I knew they were getting a divorce. The realtor said we could get a great buy.” She thinks her husband’s discomfort is due to their mindless invasion of privacy at a moment of anguish for another couple. Rather, it is due to Brooks' realization that a decision to buy a house will anchor him forever in hopeless debt. 43 since) but there is a difference now. The Newsweek critic complained of How to Save a Marriage--And Ruin Your Life: Against the cardboard skylines of New York City, this indoor drama manages to pack in every marital cliche compiled since divorce was invented. Every girl is desperate to be married. Men aren’t to be trusted. Marriage is a snare for men. Wives don't understand, but mistresses do.29 Yet what is being discussed in these films is really very much removed from the comic cliches of the nagging, shrew ish wife"*® or the prostitute with a heart of gold.^^ The role of the mistress represents a qualitative change in these films. In the first place, adultery is the norm in these films, not the exception. As such it plays a supporting role for the main conflict rather than the conflict itself. A twist like the wife swapping of All the Loving Couples or the incest of Glass Houses is need to spice up the inter est. Often one or both of the partners have lovers in the 3 2 wings. Even though, a,-partner caught ^wit-h . . a ; jfihg"err';in;;t^e. 29Paul D. Zimmerman, "Connubial Cliches," Newsweek, January 29, 1968, p. 84. •^Phyllis Diller as Mrs. Zero in The Adding Machine (so bad it was never released) or Anna Magnani as Rosa in The Secret of Santa Vittoria belong to another era even now. 7 1 J Like Irma La Douce or Gloria Wandrous in Butter field 8^ or Holly GoTTghtly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, com plete with radiant stars, rich color, and lush musical 'scores. 32 A particularly Gallic charm as in My_ Night at 44 I 1 cookie bowl is most indignantly denounced by an equally guilty mate,^ still the realization seems to exist that there are and will be extramarital affairs. Since the affair is usually dramatized from the hus band's point of view, the wife is the unknowing partner. ' i Still she suspects, often knows in other ways. When Jody i asks Richard Burrows in _ I Love My Wife, "It's been 34 days.! Have I become that unattractive to you?" she knows the J change in regularity is not simply .a coordinate of her ! t weight, just as she knows that Richard's "I'll probably be ■ i home later than usual; I have a staff meeting tonight" por-j i tends more than a meeting of staffs. Like Tina Balser in i Diary of a Mad Housewife who has been too busy with her j own business affairs to notice her husband’s, she will give a shrug of recognition and admit: "I knew it all along without really knowing." There is so much infidelity around that the reac- i i tion to its presence ranges more often to nonchalance or ! enthusiastic approval rather than the traditional duel at ! dawn. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George (who has j Maud's where Maud and Vidal both openly acknowledge their side interests. The cuckolded husband bent on murder in The Unfaithful Wife wins his victim's confidence by saying "We have an arrangement in our marriage. We have come to an agreement in our marriage where we simply have to be free." * Richard berating x Maria in^Faces,. for^example. 1 ---------- . ^ _ Y—... • > - . / ---- already announced that "Musical beds are the faculty sport ; i around here") breaks into bemused laughter when he spies Nick and Martha through the upstairs window. Neither of The April Fools can break through their spouse's walls to j i make them realize that they are about to be abandoned for ; i another. Howard's wife is too busy redecorating the house ; and keeps hanging up the phone; Gunther refuses to listen j to Cathy because "I'm not going to let you spoil my day.” j In Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice "The Hallelujah Chorus" ' would be a fitting musical background for Carol's proclam- i I i ation of her husband’s infidelities if it had not already j been used in the film. "I want to share something very j I I beautiful with you," she tells Ted and Alice. "Bob had j an affair when he was in San Francisco." Bob does not j I quite show the same blase' quality when he has to share similar news but he does manage to add that his wife's ; lover "was very decent about it actually: he offered to I ! give me tennis lessons." These are the humorous extremes | but the fact of infidelity remains almost a given in the ; contemporary American cinema. Unlike the vamp who walked into the husband's life uninvited, the modern mistress is sought out as a refuge I j | for a marriage already gone stale. The husband's eye falls I j upon a younger girl, unattached, beautiful. He finds it j easy to imagine himself as the Great Lover surrounded with 46 a harem of lovely ladies like Guido in 8 1/2 or beset like Tolen in The Knack with such a white-on-white multitude of dream girls that all choice becomes impossible. Yet great as her charms may be, the future is limited for she is , wanted only as a mistress, not as a wife. > i The ultimate crystallization of this sort of dream \ was probably the 1953 English film, The Captain's Paradise♦ ; t Sea captain Jimmy St. James has a wife^ in each of two I ports. Better yet, they are very different sorts of peo- I I t pie: Nita is a night club singer and a wild liver; Maude t is quietly domesticated and peaceful. Both love their j ! Captain dearly. Though the film gives indications that j I the crisis will be a sudden meeting between the two wives, j i the ultimate crisis develops when Maude wants more and more j to become a swinger while Nita begins to yearn for the i :quiet domestic life and an occasional home-cooked meal. : It is the move toward domesticity that frightens i many a wayward husband back to his wife. As the mistress's [ :feelings move from temporary bliss toward something resera- jbling love, she begins to want and need the undivided love I !of her man. First she becomes jealous of the time and j ^"In the British version of The Captain1s Paradise, Guinness was married to two wives; but America*s Code authorities, apparently preferring adultery to bigamy, al tered the film to make it seem as if he was married to only one.” Knight and Alpert, "Sex in Cinema--Part XIII: The Fifties--Sex Goes International," Playboy, Dec. 1966, p. 256. 47 money spent on the wife, then of being the recipient of stolen hours; finally she seeks the status and security of wife. Even if she doesn’t want to break up the existing marriage, she begins to look elsewhere for a full-time lover and she realizes her subordinate state more and more. Toni in Cactus Flower goes so far as to attempt suicide because of a non-existent wife. "I’ve decided I want a man of my own, exclusive, no halfies." Like the Girl in The Seven Year Itch who went only with married men because, "No matter what happens, he can’t ask you to marry him, " Toni finds that times change. The happy mistress often becomes the jealous husband-hunter. As her feelings toward marriage change, as the pres sures on the harried husband increase, he sees what seemed like The Captain * s Paradise or the perfect Arrangement transformed into a grotesque nightmare. As a reviewer for the Eastern Kansas Register remarked about the latter: The person who has rekindled his creative frustration while putting a band-aid on the frustrations of his marriage is his young, free-swinging mistress, Gwen (Faye Dunaway). Prior to the suicide attempt, Eddie’s wife had found out about the mistress and this cozy arrangement turned into a tunnel with light at both ends but nothing but frightening shadows for the man in the middle. 3*5 Eddie's alte.r ego, who confronts him in seeming flesh at. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I X c I Bill Donnelly, "The Arrangement," Eastern Kansas j Register, Dec. 5, 1969, p. 11. j various points throughout the film, taunts him as "a hero who hasn't even to the courage to leave his wife." He has left her years ago and yet he will never leave her. Even when he goes to make love to her, he sees the image of Gwen in his wife's eyes and she knows it. The images intermingle like the confused muddle of reality in the m brief sequence describing Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Rob inson. Life, at least for the hero attempting to make sense out of the arrangement, is just a blur. The more mistresses attempt to push heroes like Harry Angstrom#of Rabbit, Run or Brooks Wilson of Loving into making a decisive move, the more they retreat into the arms of the menacing wife. They are uneasy about leav ing their wives in the first place, for despite their dis comfort at home, they dread the insecurity of the real world just as much. Somewhere, deep within them, lies a sense of moral obligation of the sort that Hal tries to explain to his mistress toward the end of Lovers and Other Strangers Hal: "Here it is in a nutshell. I’m the kind of man who, when confronted with the fact that I've been married to the same woman for thirty years, who's given me two wonderful children, it becomes pro gressively more difficult for me to know that I've \ J /given her any more unhappiness than I've already given her. What I'm trying to say is . . .” Kathy: "... That you'll never leave Bernice." 'Or, as Richard says more directly in I _ Love My Wife, "I have I (this goddam guilt. I don't love her but I can't leave her." i 49 ; Apart from any guilt feelings, the husband also has a bit of good sense. He has been through one unhappy mar riage already and knows what a terrible thing it can be. He blames marriage itself for many of his problems as will ! I be seen in Chapter IV. He understands its corroding power ; and suspects it may well be just as effective this time as J the last, no matter how superior their true love may be. i It is precisely as an escape from wives and marriages that' J I the mistress has been sought out--recall again that she didj l not accidentally intrude upon a previously happy home in I f this filmic cycle. There are distinct advantages in having! both wife and mistress as long as the Arrangement can be handled; he has no desire to give up the one for the other. Ruth insists that everything will be fine if she and Harry settle down together, but the more she insists, the more he sees another little Janice in embryo. The film ends as Rab{? bit begins to run yet again. Why should the husband want I I to give up the perfect arrangement for some eager young thing anxious to altar her situation at the local church i i I at his expense? Julian in Cactus Flower sums up the basic s I philosophy of husbands with a mistress on the side quite I (beautifully: "I have the perfect set-up. Why spoil it by j getting married. •^Julian is only pretending to be married to protect himself from the danger of a marriage-minded mistress. In 50 : There are still other factors discouraging another ! i fatal plunge. The very sense of freedom and exaltation which drew him to this girl in the first place naturally begins to vanish in direct proportion to the fervor with which she wishes to enter upon that state whose snares she : was originally designed to untangle. As she yearns more j and more for wedded bliss, the husband yearns less and less I for her. When Ursula in Women in Love says, MA11 men are j either lovers or husbands; why not bothtf" Birkin replies, j "No, the one excludes the other." Perhaps the same thing i might be somehow paraphrased to cover the situation of wives and mistresses in the contemporary marriage movies. "Wives should always be lovers, too," according to the cau- t tion of the popular song,^ but the functions seem so dras-J tically diametric as to be hopelessly irreconcilable. "You do not act like a broad to whom sex isn't important." j --George (to Tina) in Diary of a Mad Housewife I Almost all of the films about marriage have fea- |tured male protagonists,^® but the rise of women's lib i t i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ The Grasshopper Christine uses almost the same words to tell} why she won't marry the boy with whom she is living: "We love each other, but why spoil it by getting married?" t 7 "Wives and Lovers," by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Famous Music Corp. . (ASCAP) ~*®Men tend to be the protagonists in all motion pic tures for various practical reasons. The relative roles in 51 : i should, prompt more films from the distaff side of the chasm! just as the Playboy mystique contributed to the films al- ' X Q ready discussed. Even in the male-dominated films some conclusions can be drawn about the woman's role in these unhappy unions, while the female protagonists of films such: as The Happy Ending, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and The ; Grasshopper give an indication of the problems and frustra-! i tions of the everyday housewife. i For the most part, the films dealing with marriage ! from the male point of view simply sketch the wife in very \ vague terms, showing just enough of her to offer a contrast to the husband's hopes and dreams. The key word for most of these wives is contentment. They are apathetic, lost in! i their work around the house, unaware and uncaring for theirj husbands. That this is the male film maker's presupposition*; society are a factor which may gradually be liberated. The :preponderance of male film makers accounts for a viewpoint !especially among writers. The latter, besides generally feeling that women function in the reactive rather than the active sense in drama, also realize an economic dilemma. ;If they write an action film for Paul Newman and he turns 'down the part, other bankable superstar males like Steve iMcQueen, Robert Redford, Lee Marvin, or Clint Eastwood can |take over with little or no rewriting. Among the few [female superstars a Katharine Hepburn role would hardly do [for Barbra Streisand, Ali MacGraw, Sophia Loren, or Julie Andrews. ^"The extremes of both the Playboy philosophy and |women's liberation have caused considerable questioning within society of the traditional attitudes toward the in stitution of marriage." "Lovers and Other Strangers," Catholic Film Newsletter, Aug. JO, 1970, p. 70. 52 comes out clearly from the following remarks of director John Cassavetes about his film, Faces. Men are more complex than women and they seem to be the real victims. I try to show this in Faces. Men exist for confusion. Confusion keeps them going. Dash ing around, the business lunch, a little hanky-panky with a prostitute, getting drunk with some buddies-- adventurous, daring, .huh? Meaningless. Empty, mean ingless little actions that fill up a day. With a woman, it's simpler. She can exist if there's some order and if her fantasies are at least partially fulfilled. If you know what a woman's emotional needs are, you're half way h o m e .40 Many of the English critics would also qualify for "Male Chauvinist Pig" awards for their reactions to heroines like Mary Wilson in The Happy Ending or Barbara Harmon in Divorce American Style who rebel against this sort of pigeon-holing by their film husbands (if not by the film makers as well). Thus Barbara's problem is totally in the mind according to critic Alexander Walker. Nothing as crude as adultery here; the grounds for disharmony are for more basic to the American way of life. He's simply got it made job-wise, money-wise, status-wise, so there's nothing left for her to do but decide she's unhappy.41 “ ^Quoted in "Cassavetes: Why Do Marriages Go Sour?" by Patricia Bosworth, New York Times, Dec. 1, 1968, p. D15. 4^Alexander Walker, "Divorce American Style," Eve ning Standard (London), Aug. 17 , 379 6 7 , p. 378 . This was even truerof their comments on The Happy Ending. For ex ample: "What ails her would be evident to any woman who gets on with running a household, a job, and a family: she hasn't enough to do. A course in good works or advanced tatting would do wonders. But then there wouldn’t be a ifilm." Margaret Hinxman, "But not this woman's picture," j Sunday Telegraph (London), May 3, 1970, Part III, p. 6. Or to much the same, effect.:___"The whole fil m Jb r i n g s _ t o„ m i n d__ 53 Yet the very statement being made here is that those meaningless actions of the husband at least have a sort of variety and interest, whether real or imagined, that the dull, routine household duties of the wife can never hope to achieve. The wider the gap becomes between the husband's responsibilities and thedresponsibilities of his wife, the more critically she is likely to respond. Thus Joe1s lower class hero works in''a' factory from 9 to 5 for $160 a week and seems quite happy with his soap-opera watching wife, j Mary Lou. But Bill Compton's wife is often left alone while he earns his sixty thousand a year executive salary working late at the office. It is the success motif all over again as so nicely expressed in this excerpt from Divorce American Style. Richard: "Fifteen years of working my tail off, pray ing that I could just stay in the right spot long enough. Fifteen years of that, Barbara, and you're with me, you're with me all the way. And then, two years ago, when the world opens up, when we begin to see a little bit of daylight, when we have some of the things you've always dreamed of, when we finally have it made, you decide that you're unhappy. Why? Just answer that." Barbara: "Why? You want to know why? It's you, it's what happened to you. It started when Delaney made you a general manager. All of a sudden I don't know you. You're a big shot. You want me to love you for the money you earn and things you buy. Well, what Bernard Shaw said about the happiest people being those who haven't the time to think whether they're happy or not," says Derek Malcolm, "The Happy Ending?" Guardian (London), April 30, 1970, p. 16. Perhaps the attitude betrays dis respect ibr all Americans, not just women.___________________ 54 I'm not a pagan, Richard. I want to worship a man, not some image in gold.” The ordinary time and concern for making a living is accept- able, but the extraordinary expenditures of the success ful executive are bound to cut into the time and concern which should be devoted to the family. The wife inevitably balks at this, and, unless there is an understanding reached quickly, the husband withdraws into the security of his job. The wife is then left to fill up her life as best she can. What fills up her life more than anything else is her children. Like her, they are abandoned by the husband so they can share somewhat her feelings, forming her one solid contact with sanity and reality. "That's what mar riage is all about," says Wilma in Lovers and Other Stran gers , as she sees her children playing happily near the pool. The psychiatrist in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is quick to point out the latter's Freudian slip in prior ities when she says, "I like my husband and I love my child." This is the reason why the Mad Housewife's great est torment is the devious methods Jonathan uses to turn the girls against her. When she tries to stand up for the rights of the children over the unreasonable demands of mere hired help at the ill-fated party, Jonathan ridicules her concern by making fun of her in front of the children. j Jonathan: "She wants to have a poodle party instead of I a people party." 55 Their Daughters: (Laughing together) "A poodle party!M Tina: "You lousy bastard." This is the same sort of anguish felt by Brooks Wilson in Loving when his daughters seem to form an overpowering co alition with their mother. Much as he truly loves them, they also serve as a concrete representation of the obli gation trap which is choking him. Still, as the respon sibilities of job, wife, mistress, and would-be-mistress constrict him ever more tightly, Brooks might be tempted to run like Rabbit Angstrom4^ were it not for his two lit tle girls.43 Whatever other outlets there may be for the weary wife in the way of social clubs and family visits and beau ty parlors can be lumped with the household drudgery under 42 It is only after Janice accidentally drowns the new baby that Angstrom finally runs for good. 43 The children often serve as a device for dramatic irony. Thus Ted tells Bob about his near infidelity while his children play happily in the pool at his feet (in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice). Likewise, in A Guide for the Married Man, Ed Stander instructs Paul Manning on the fine art of seduction while they watch over their respec tive children playing on the merry-go-round. The children are nearly always sympathetic (even when they are another straw on the husband's camel-like back) and usually the longtime losers. Plato in Rebel Without a Cause tells how, "I used to lie in my crib at night and listen to them fight ing," just like the score-keeping children in Divorce Amer- ican Style. The latter film's most touching scene is the [Sunday afternoon division problems faced by divorced par ents. Splitting up the multi-familied kids focuses on the [real tragedy in these films. 56 what Gundrun refers to in Women in Love as "an eternity of domesticity." This is the normal, dull state of existence for the movie wife. It may well be that she once had yearn ings toward this sort of life style while she was still a mistress or a husband-hunting debutante; but it is rather likely that her understanding of that rainbow land beyond * the honeymoon is something more along the lines described in Fanny Brice's "romantic" reverie, "Sadie, Sadie," from Funny Girl: Fanny: I'm Sadie, Sadie, married lady, Still in bed at noon. Racking my brain deciding Between orange juice and prune. Nick says nothing is too good for me, And who am I not to agree? I'm Sadie, Sadie, married lady, that's me! Chorus: She's Sadie, Sadie married lady-- Fanny: Meet a mortgagee! Chorus: The owner of an icebox-- Fanny: With a ten-year guarantee. Oh, sit me in the softest seat; Quick-;-a cushion for my feet! Do for me, buy for me, lift me, carry me, Finally got a man to marry me. I do my nails, read up on sales, Ail day the records play. Then he comes home, I tell him-- Oy, what a day I had today! I swear I'll do my wifely job: Just sit at home, become a slob 44 I'm Sadie, Sadie, married lady, that's me!44 44The versions of this lyric as used in the original iBroadway musical, the screenplay for the film, and in the ifilm itself each differ slightly. The Broadway version is lused here as written originally by Bob Merrill with music Iby Jule Styne. (ASCAP) The newly-wed wife may boast like Christine in The Grass hopper that, "I'm going to be the perfect housewife. I | want it that way," but time passes and she quickly becomes : bored with groceries, housekeeping, waiting at home--with her happy marriage. "I just can't make the domestic j scene," Christine finally concludes. "I just don't want j , , i my life to be a cliche." Their marriage is 'saved' by 1 4 5 1 Tommy's brutal murder at the same moment. J j Having been nourished through childhood with the | i romantic images of marital bliss, the wife finds the clank-I I ing of pots and pans all the harder to handle. Tina's j housework under the main titles of Diary of a Mad Housewife j t is rather akin to the construction worker attacking a | decaying street with the tender caresses of a jack hammer. i The strident and grinding shrieks of rumbling washing i machines and whirling vacuum cleaners smash constantly through her dreams of a heavenly happy-ever-after in her marriage. As Kirkpatrick comments about the mate selection I process in general, it is a sort of bargain as much as a ; measure of love. "Both sexes obviously want desirable J There's sure to be a TV sit-com soon featuring a husband handling the household chores for a liberated career woman. He won’t enjoy things any more than^she did, or than Count Alfred found Queen Louise's idle consort in the wrily comic musical by Ernst Lubitsch, The Love Parade. 58 traits of character and personality, but mate selection seems to involve the/exchange of feminine attractiveness for social and economic rewards.During those long hours of dreary housework with alien machines screaming their monstrous threats at her, the modern wife has a lot of time | to think about the wisdom of her bargain and yearn for the J days before she was "Sadie, Sadie, married lady." i Once upon a time when the wife discovered that she did not live happily ever after, she might have been a lit- ; { tie unhappy about the discovery but it was relatively easy I I for her to adapt to the situation for there was little ! alternative, nothing else to dream of. She might warn off others (like the poor little old woman scrubbing her clothes I i against a rock, surrounded by her brood of howling child- ' ren in the D.W. Griffith classic, Broken Blossoms, who tells ;Lucy "Whatever you do, dearie, don’t get married!") but she was content to let bad enough be for herself. Now, like ithe rich man suddenly gone bankrupt or the champion athlete i i mysteriously crippled, the anguish is all the greater be cause of the past glory and realization of the full extent Jof the disastrous misfortune which has happened. The un- i 'knowing, unfeeling protagonist cannot attain melodrama, ! ^ , j much less tragedy. In her review of Wanda, Pauline Kael - - - _________ i j ^Kirkpatrick, Family as Process, p. 274 . 59 discusses the nature of that particular anti-heroine and coincidentally relates her to the very problem at hand. We've all known dumb girls, and we've all known unhappy girls; the same girls are not often, I think, both dumb and unhappy. Wanda is a double depressant--a real stringy stringy-haired rag mop. That makes her a sort of unprotagonist; generally you'd have to have something stirring in you to be that Unhappy, but she’s so dumb we can't know why she has become a drifter instead of staying home with her hair in curlers, watching soap operas and game shows, and maybe even looking after her kids.47 Wanda may be too dumb to know any better, but in that she is the exception. Indeed, it seldom happens thus with most contemporary heroines. The wives in these films are often noticeably brighter than their husbands --certainly far too bright to be rele gated to the limbo world of the live-in maid. The husbands, although they have problems on their own, do not help mat ters very much by making their own little contributions toward keeping their wives in the twilight zone. To take an example, Jonathan congratulates his Mad Housewife Tina for being able to look intelligent in a discussion with a second-rate novelist like George Praeger. "I'm damn proud you can hold your own talking to someone like that," he ; chortles, surprised she can do anything at all--unaware that iis comments add little more than a stinging insult or that r ~ j i 47pau^ine Kael, "The Current Cinema: Eric Roemer's Refinement," The New Yorker, March 20, 1971, p. 138. 60 what has captured her rapt attention is a seduction propo sal. He forgets that long before she became a Mad House wife she was a Smith grad and remains a far better conver sationalist than her pompous husband. Likewise Mrs. Robin son seems the same sort of bright, intelligent woman t trapped into a dull marriage with another less than bril- I I liant lawyer. The following long passage, actually aimed at faulting the film, makes some intriguing points in this area: I am not sure if it is Nichols' fault or that of Anne Bancroft, an actress whose intelligence is hard to ignore, but for anyone interested in recognizing it, Mrs. Robinson is easily the most admirable character The Graduate. You see it clearly in the bedroom scenes, especially when Ben says to her, "Can we talk about something, Mrs. Robinson?" and she curtly an-. ' swers that she hardly feels they have anything to talk about. She is exactly correct, of course, since Ben can barely speak, much less converse intelligently; and if the audience is not smart enough to see what she needs is a simple distraction from her own dis illusionment with upper-middle^classism, not a hope lessly sophomoric discussion with a wet-behind-the-ears collegian--not a false, sentimental and contrived love affair with a youth-lover, but pure and simply, a sex ual orgasm. It is exactly her refusal to "talk" to Ben that illustrates her perception and intelligence; and it is her world-weariness that marks her as a woman worth looking at twice.48 Tom S. Reck, '"The Graduate1 Reclassified," Com monweal , May 2, 1969, p. 203. Also see Nichols' own remarks on Mrs. Robinson: "I think she is the most interesting per son in the picture. She is the most considerable person. The moment that I decided that I wanted to doThe Graduate iwas in reading the novel when Benjamin asks her--after [they've just had this conversation on art which she, says i jshe doesn't know anything about--"What was your major sub- | Iject at school?" At first she won't answer but finally she. 61> Whether or not this is something of an oversimplification of the movie's point of view--or even a deliberate bit of sabotage upon it--the insight remains valid: that Mrs. Rob inson has nothing to say either to her husband or to Benja min, a seemingly inevitable consequence of the allotted role of the housewife in a society planned and run by hus bands. At the end of the week, after her lengthy exile in the world of pots and pans, interrupted only by the tiny crises of the day or the hurled insults of the husband dash ing through on the way to another meeting, the beleaguered housewife is confronted by a suddenly tender husband ask ing about "a little ol' roll in the hay," to use Jonathan's phrase again* ■Perhaps she will plead the discomfort of a headache once again, but if she does do so, the cause may well be lack of, use. However, the husband is generally so very far distant from the feelings of his wife that he is not even conscious of her reluctance, much less of its roots. Even when she states her mind openly, as in the hilarious bedroom scene in Bob and Carol, it will malce little says, "Art." That sort of clicked for me because that was when I decided that.I knew Mrs. Robinson. She had been Benjamin--she had been at the same point Benjamin is m the [picture--and had come to where she is presently with full {knowledge. She is a very intelligent and cynical woman. iShe knows what's happening to her." (Day, "Hey, Hey, Hey, J ■Mr. Nichols!" p. 50.) j 62 difference. When Alice protests, "Now do you want to do : it just like that with no feeling on my part?” Ted oozes a ' quick reply, "Yeah," and eventually gets her to agree. It ; is a common motif that recurs in many of the marriage movies' in one shape or another. ■ Having chased desperately after her mate in order to[ avoid the dreaded spinsterhood, the wife tends to work al- I together harder than the husband to keep the relationship ; I going. Once, in her frustrated desperation over a spouse I who cannot be pleased no matter how hard she tries, Jody inj | I Love My Wife laments, "What do you want of me? I’m eightj I pounds lighter than when I married you . . and she goes , I on to catalog her other efforts. Having ballooned to gi- j gantic proportions bearing Richard's children, the return to a svelte shape was a sizeable sacrifice which Richard, \ whose only conquered temptation was to put some effort intoi , i i his marriage, does not even notice. No matter whether the |focus of the story is on the husband or on the wife, trying i I to work things out in the marriage seems to be the latter's I sole responsibility. i I The wife is seldom shown straying, even in the few cases where she is the protagonist of the story. The Mad Housewife is literally driven into her affair with George j Praeger and even here returns freely to Jonathan (who has also been roaming) "to try to pick up the pieces" as she 63 puts it. Part of the cause for this relative fidelity is probably the age-old double standard of morality which was the theme of Adam* s Rib way back in the Forties. Amanda Bonner summarized it quite neatly in that film: "A man who is unfaithful to his wife is not nice. A woman who is un- 4 9 faithful to her husband is terrible--a scandal.* Even if times have changed, perhaps audience sympathies still run in traditional directions, at least on a subconscious level. In any case, if she becomes involved with another man, the information is usually withheld from her husband until he has been forced to make his own decision; then it can function as a justification for the action he has resolved upon or as an ironic counterpoint to it.**® It ^9In the Playboy Panel on the new morality, most of the clergymen involved felt that the double standard was a thing of the past, particularly because of the far greater control over unwanted pregnancies which formerly focused on the woman almost entirely. Bishop Pike summarized the panel feeling: "Happily, we're getting away from the situation in which a young man feels free to be promiscuous but still cherishes the notion that the girl he marries automatically has to be a virgin or she's no good. In matters of both freedom and responsibility, there seems to be less and less differentiation between men and women, boys and girls. It's about time, I'd say." "The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality," Playboy, June, 1967, p. 155. S^For example, when Mel, the superintendent of Air port , decides to abandon his wife who has been making life so bitter, she comes to him with the news that she has found another man, "someone who makes me feel wanted." When Cathy finally makes her husband understand that she is leaving him in The April Fools, Gunther confesses his own lapses in jorder to convince her to stay. It does just the opposite iby justifying her as the already offended party while fur- [ther infuriating him through the humiliation. _______ 64 seems unlikely that the wives will have equal rights to promiscuity with their mates until women’s lib takes a firmer hold of the camera. In the meantime the wife sits at home and wonders why she got married in the first place. Once upon a time, like Rosy Ryan in Ryan * s Daughter, she had been full of hopeful expectations that marriage would transform her whole being. "Will it make me a different person?" Rosy asks Father Collins. Marriage closes quickly about this helpless butterfly with its sticky petals. Stripped of the i romantic ideal by the down-to-earth reality, all she can do is cry out in anger and dismay, "There must be more!" The inevitable passage of time and the romanticizing effects of memory allow weary wives to look back upon the "good old days" when everything was sweetness and light. There was a time of peace and love--otherwise they certain ly would hot have been drawn to each other--but it has evaporated by now, leaving a ring around the finger and nothing more. "Sounds corny," says Jonathan in the moving scene after his fortunes crash down upon him and his Mad Housewife, "but we were idealistic iveren't we, Teen. And then it was all gone." The long road to this moment of realization is not an easy one to chart ("How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?" asks Eleanor I 7 65 . in. one of The Lion in Winter1s famous inversions) and it would be a task beyond most husbands and wives. Yet the wives of these films, putting aside the mops. and brooms of their kingdoms, look back with sparkling , I clarity to the very moment that first hinted at their down- . fall. Joanna recalls the beginning of Two for the Road * s rough ride when she says to Mark: "You haven’t been happy ■ since the day we met, I know. If only you were ten years | younger and you knew then what you know now." Mark replies( enthusiastically, "You can say that again!"52 Even the un-j ,married feel somewhat the same as Getting Straight demon- : strated. Attempting to put down Jan, Harry complains about! something or other. "I don't know what you are, but I know what you were when I met you." She snaps back smartly, "Yeah--a lot happier." 51Jody asks her husband in I Love M^r Wife, "Where , did we go wrong?" and he answers with typical bitterness, "It’s coming out later this year in twenty six volumes." , Even the present volume seems barely scraping the surface. j c 2 Raphael, Two for the Road, p. 41. At one point I in Lovers and Other Strangers , Johnny challenges his wife ] in a similar vein: "I get the feeling you're trying to I make my virility look impotent." "Oh yeah," she replies, j "when did that feeling first hit you?" "The day I married j you," he growls. The wish to have known then what one knows now is a cause of heartache in many areas but especially for these wives. After a mild spat in J _ Never Sang for My Father, Margaret, the aging mother, remarks, "It's a sEame children can't see their parents when they're young and in love and courting.” The second chapter will show that the younger couples now do see their parents and avoid the marital trap. 66 Like the young woman in One Potato, Two Potato, who ■ u' " ‘ — — — — — — — • tries to apologize to a new boy friend for her first, failed marriage with the words, "We got married before we really knew what it was about,” most of these wives feel they were j i hopelessly ill-prepared for marriage. Yet they are even j S more frustrated because they cannot see what sort of prepa- j i ration would ever have been adequate. There is a sense of existential doom hanging over their thoughts as they think ! of the hurdles that towered before them as they hobbled ; along the winding, rutted road to happiness.^ c The sense of bitterness tinged with helpless frus- i tration is reminiscent of the famous passage in A Farewell 1 to Arms when Lieutenant Henry must resign himselF to the ! inevitability of Catherine’s death: ”Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to ilearn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you syphillis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.” Ernest Hemingway, IA Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, j T9$7''*ea.]j: ---------- Yet in another age when the beloved dies young before ;the even more inevitable death of their love, this becomes ;a happy ending to the story while living "happily” ever !after becomes the tragic ending of the marriage film. What .would have happened if Jenny had not died in Love Story? Her tale could no doubt have been told in a few years m !the style of Diary of a Mad Housewife or The Happy Ending. !Both those features also dealt with bright young ladies who I married promising lawyers amid the rosiest of romantic v I glows. i Even husbands who experience deep disappointment in 'marriage, like Duff in Nothing But a Man or Shaughnessy in Ryan's Daughter, apologize for leading their wives to ruin by marryingthem. Duff blames his own easy-going ways more thaii society's rebuffs. Rosy’s adultery results from the JL.ll-majt.ch.ad_'* unronj__as_much_as from_her_jown_„wejikn_e„ssje„s_.____ * — •-•« ^ • • ' - > ■ 67 i i The choices have been, made long ago, so now all that remains are the regrets. The wife spends her dreary days dreaming of all the fairy tale princes she might have wed, all the men in her life before and after Mr. Right. Instead she had to marry this barB*^ to discover the true Mr. Wrong.' "It's always like that,” says the movie-maker hero of Love j is a Funny Thing. "People meet ten years too early or too late." Meanwhile the husband is also drooling for the daysj * before he became the "Prisoner of Zenda," as Rocky calls j ! all married men in Love with the Proper Stranger. He l chases after his secretary and dreams of some light at the ; i end of his long dark tunnel. Happiness past has led to | ! misery present. Even in the sharp-toothed, quick-springingj trap of marriage, they tend to acknowledge that the root I ;causes of their frustrations stretch deeply into themselves and cannot simply be attributed to that other "barb." As Pauline Kael wrote about these sad and lonely people in her jreview of Loving: the film "looks at the failures of mid- i dle-class life without despising the people; it understands i ithat they already despise themselves."55 Only one course I f ■I..1— I I II. Il'll. . . . . . . . . . . .11 H IM I. . . . . . I I III. •^The phrase is used by Richard Burrows when bemoan ing the fact he met Jody instead of Helene who is also mar ried. "Why couldn't we have met each other instead of the two barbs we married?" | 55Pauline Kael, "The Current Cinema: Recognizable |Human Behavior," The New Yorker, March 7, 1970, p. 92. 68 ! of action seems left open for them. i ’ ’It's not what I can get, but what I'll settle for." ; --Joe Lampton, Life at the Top j Despite the years of anguish and the heaping up of > lies and abuses, the husband and wife tend to stick together! in their personal replica of hell. Together and alone they . live a lie rather than a love. Whether for the sake of the I children, society, their neighbors, or simply from an ad- | vanced state of atrophy, they elect to stick together and ! suffer in silence rather than rock the boat in hopes; of rescue. I i If it had not been for Benjamin opening the coffin j ; of the Robinsons! marriage, they would probably have been content to ride along without interest or love. Whether for the sake of Elaine, the Braddocks, or whatnot, it might not have seemed necessary to sever their relationship to [each other beyond its already dangling limbs. Like most of ,the middle-aged couples being discussed, at best, they were I indifferent, unhappy occupants of the same house. The i {opening credits of How to Commit Marriage depict all the tiny, horrifying disasters of any two people living together: S^That is also something of an exaggeration from the wife's point of view. "I'm lonely," says Louisa in What < a i Way to Go! "Lonely?" asks Edgar, "in that big beautiful [house I built for you?" "I'm the only one that's ever in it!" the wife finding a golf ball in her shoe, the confusion of hair spray and shave cream cans, the nightly struggle for the common blanket, the fights over TV shows. Nothing very momentous, but, by the time the montage ends, Elaine is ask ing for a divorce. Besides the various typical, tiny hazards of living i I together, there is also a basic resentment directed toward ; the other person. No matter how shining and virtuous he or j she actually is, this constitutes half of the problem after I all. Each becomes the scapegoat for the other's hostility, i i Harry Angstrom comes home to be greeted hot only by his I baby's healthy cries but also by Janice's prompt rebuke. ! | "You walk in the door and the baby starts crying. She was j all right until you came in." The line from Rabbit, Run j I is just a step away from "I was all right until you walked into my life." The transferral of meaning is short and easy: The couple has come to exist simply and totally as J individuals with no common feelings, interests, or love. | t Even when they remain on totally amicable terms, when one of ;them does not even suspect the partner's predicament, their relationship could hardly be called "love.” When Howard tries to tell his wife he is running off to Paris with a blonde in The April Fools, she pays no attention to him jwhatever. In despair he finally mutters. "No love, there is no love between us, Phyllis. I don't think we even like each other." Going right on about her decorating with no regard for his words, she writes off his heartache with an j off-hand, "You're too emotional." Beyond the insensitivity shown by Phyllis is a sort : of blindness induced by myopia which is common throughout. . Like most of the older spouses, she is so completely wrapped1 up in her own personal interests and desires that she can- | not see her husband's turmoils. Having settled into pat- i terns of behavior that draw their meaning apart from the I interrelationship of husband and wife in marriage, they no | longer have anything in common. They simply have nothing i C 7 i to say to each other any longer. The lack of communica tion becomes one of the chief sources of marital breakups. | Barbara relates the steps in Divorce American Style: "We just started to disintegrate. One day we weren't talking, then we weren't touching. Our whole relationship--every- tthing we had together--just started to unravel, to shred." The pattern is really nothing new. For example, during the "temporary marriage" in the 1936 comedy drama j Libeled Lady Gladys looks across the breakfast table at j constant motif running as a joke throughout Two I for the Road follows this general pattern. Mark asks, ;"What kind of people just sit in a restaurant and don't say 'a word to each other?" and Joanna answers the puzzle, "Mar ried people." (Raphael, Two for the Road, p. 71) The ques tions vary but never the answers. Mary says in The Happy Ending, "We’ve got nothing to say to each other. Fefore we married you never stopped talking. Now you talk only to clients." 71 her masquerade husband and laughs at his reading the news paper most intently. "This certainly looks married--a lit tle too married if you ask me." Orson Welles brilliantly chronicled the rise and fall of a whole marriage across a i i breakfast table in Citizen Kane. The final shot of the mon tage finds Kane and Emily at opposite ends of the table, each reading a different newspaper, totally in silence. Similarly, in Double Indemnity when Phyllis is trying to | I enlist Walter Neff's help in doing away with her husband, j i she describes her sad state in the worst terms imaginable in order to win Neff's sympathies. She says that she is forcec to just sit there knitting (an obvious waste of Barbara Stanwyck’s talent) while he listens to the radio .-58 "Some times we sit here all evening and never say a word to each other." The same sort of home life is shown in Brief En counter and countless others, a good recent example being i S^The films have made surprisingly little use of TV as a source of alienation in the home or as a means of show ing it. Mary Wilson's escape from life was to watch Casa blanca once again and dream of the promised Happy Ending |she had missed in life. Perhaps the large number of profes sional people as heroes keeps the tubing down. Jan mentions 'at one point in Getting Straight that, I'm so middle class !l might even enjoy watching TV with my husband," but Harry hardly seems the type. In Rabbit, Run the dumpy wife, Jan ice, is usually enveloped in the TV set whenever Harry looks for her help. The middle-class couple in Joe find the soap operas a means of unity and communication as Mary Lou fills Joe in on everything that happened to their melodramatic friends during that day's episodes. Few couples even TV together. 72 The Gypsy Moths. Now that so much more can be shown on the movie screen, the static nature of such a situation prompts other treatments, although this one still seems valid. There cannot be quite the same sort of communica tion after many years of marriage as there was upon a first encounter, but its lack seems to result from something in the person rather than a breadth of years. They have nothing to say to^ each other precisely because they feel nothing for each other. The lack of communication stems not from an absence of thoughts but from an absence of feelings. Thus, the aging Mr. Sherman in The Grasshopper suggests that he will divorce his wife and marry Christine if she will have him on these terms: My family's all grown up now. You're certainly not going to believe that old story about my wife not understanding me. After thirty two years Stella and I understand each other all too well. We're just not that interested. They have nothing to say to each other because they do not speak, not vice-versa. The silence is deadening to their lives. One might suppose that at least in coming to terms with each other, in putting aside the atmosphere of hate and the constant fighting which has become a common attri bute of marriage in the eyes of some of the younger gener ation,5^ the state of peaceful co-existence would be an 5®In addition to the children counting punches in the improvement over the former marital squabbles. Actually, ' 1 it is another barrier to any meaningful relationship. Most! psychologists see distinct value in bringing out the latent j hostilities instead of burying them within oneself. It is 1 perhaps significant that the violent angers of Who * s Afraid1 of Virginia Woolf? and Faces^ both end with reassertions j t of love. If the same sort of committal is missing from ; I the denouement of Loving, Selma's blows have at least rained some hew hope into an arrangement which was dead be fore through a type of silence. This is not to encourage j therapy beatings but only to note that nothing could be ] arguments, there is also the attitude of young couples living together. Toby is afraid that Paxton Quigley doesn't love her in _ 3 iri the Attic because they have no spats. She; tells him, "Everyone, including Simone de Beauvoir, says we're not in love until we fight. Listen to me, Paxton, why don't we ever fight?" Perturbed as he is at her rea soning, he wants to express his love for her in any way he can, so they both throw dishes on the floor and then make love. In a similar vein Robert notes a sullen look and jasks his marathon partner, "You mad at me or something to day, Gloria?" "Why the hell should I be mad at you? You !think we're married or something?" Quoted from They Shoot Horses, Don * t They? Screenplay by Robert E. Thompson (New York: Avon Books, 1970) p. 233. j ^Harry (Ben Gazzara) resorts to physical rather than jemotional violence in Cassavetes' Husbands. "Gazzara's com bat with his wife --physically bringing her to her knees in ja forced confession of love, grabbing her mother's throat las a murderer grabs a hostage, beating both women in a fu tile assault on an unshakable maternal alliance--is one of the funniest marital blitzkriegs ever filmed," says Paul D. Zimmerman, "Three Musketeers," Newsweek, Dec.; 21, 1971, jp. 100. When even this fails to draw words, Harry knows Ihe's through. 74 worse than the false calm which is dubbed "a coming to j terms with love." At least the ability to reach out to 1 I each other in bitter games, to weep, to stir up some emo- | t tions gives hope for an eventual rebirth to the emotion of love. As long as the wall stands, there can be no commun ication.^ If, as Cool Hand Luke puts it, "What we have here is j a failure to communicate," what are the causes of the fault?} I Mostly it seems to be rooted in a deep disrespect for one"sj spouse. The Girl in Move shows part of the reason why her . ' i marriage lasted only one week when she describes what she thought of her husband: "I suppose it was for the best. j He was so dumb, I couldn't have stood another week of mar- ! i I riage to him."°^ Harry Angstrom echoes her words when he 61"A tangible wall of silence and suffering clamps down between the pair, breeched finally by the husband's ,halting acknowledgement of their mutual need to try to pick !up the pieces." ("Winning" Catholic Film Newsletter, May • 15, 1969, p. 34) Words are the only drills through this :wall. 1 i This is almost a longevity record compared to some (other recent marriage movies. Daisy's overnight marriage jto Wade Lewis apes many a real life Hollywood romance in |the movie-based story, Inside Daisy Clover. In Where's iPoppa? Louise tells Gordon,"This is the first nice thing that's happened to me since I was married." "You're mar ried?" he asks. "Married and divorced." "How long were jyou married?" asks Gordon. "Thirty two hours," Louise |answers. "That's not very long." "It was eternity," she isays rather firmly. In There's a Girl in My Soup Robert !Danvers manages to seducea bride at her wecTding reception (when she goes to her room to change for the honeymoon. .Colin Slade seduces his about-to-be's mother U£ in the Cel- |lar after checking his wristwatch to make sure they won't 75 i I speaks with his old coach in Rabbit, Run. "You married that adorable little Janice Springer," Tothero says, "She's: nice." Rabbit quickly corrects him: "She's dumb. She's such a mess." Later he explains to Ruth that he will have to go back to his wife when the baby comes due because, i i "It's my baby she's having. She's so dumb I don't think i i i she can do it without me." There is a deep-seated hatred [ behind these words as well as an exalted sense of self^3 that combine to make a person basically incompatible. I i The love which once nourished the relationship has j i gradually dired up not for big reasons but for small. Joan explains that, "Our problems are just so immense because of all the hurts and disillusionments that have built up over j I the years." They are nothing very significant but they have turned Joan and Richie into another pair of Lovers and Other Strangers. "From the time I was fifteen I just loved Richie from afar," says Joan. "Well, I don't know whether i ;it's me or Richie that's changed, but it's just no big deal anymore." The bloom is off the rose, the weeds have crept ibe late for the ceremony. Perhaps the infidelity medal .should go to Humbert Humbert who weds the chatterbox Char- jlotte simply to be near his beloved Lolita. None of the |group show much understanding of the commitment involved in I the marital vows so their poor records make good sense, if jnot good marriages. i ^Neither "The Girl" nor Rabbit seems particularly [bright, so this could all be a defense mechanism to justify jtheir own failings, both intellectually and in their mar- I riages. ________ _______________________________________ into the flower bed. No big hurts, no adulteries, but no love either. They have been married just five years. Now is the time to end the marriage before the marriage ends them. Otherwise they will soon be sitting in silence at the opposite corners of the Cinemascope screen, unable to communicate, perhaps uninterested in doing so. Or when they speak, imitating the words of the real-life couple in Allan King's, A Married Couple: He says: "That's right, you're going to drive me to work when I want to go, goddammit, because that's what I want to do when I want to do it." She says: "The one thing I regret is this morning when I told you I loved you."64 Better to walk away from the wreck of their love than to stay on until love becomes impossible. Most of the couples stay put, however, clinging to gether in their misery, not in order to gain mutual sup port but in order to preserve the appearance of a happy marriage for the benefit of others. To strangers and even to close acquaintances they seem to be h a p p y .65 Although The Graduate does not supply the scene when the Braddocks ^"Dissection of a Marriage," Time, Jan. 26, 1970, p. 79. ^5In the very act of enlisting Tish to become The Babymaker, Mrs. Wilcox says, "My marriage is not in trou ble . Just the opposite. All of our friends say we're the happiest couple they know." As well as one of the sickest, too, perhaps. 77 discover the news about their son's relationship to Mrs. Robinson and through it the news about the Robinsons' own relations, one can almost hear the gasp of surprise leap ing from their lips. For they have all been masters at the chief parlor game of the older couples, pretense. Pretense is all that remains in place of happiness, the exchange of "seeming something to other people for being it."6^ Pretense is most of all removed from the real notion of marriage. When Mark questions the idea of the facade, the dialogue is as follows: Joanna: "How long is what going to go on?" Mark: "The pretense that we're happy." Joanna: "You've never pretended we were happy! So who's pretending?" Mark': "You are. That you want to stay with me. That we're happily married." Joanna: "Those two are entirely different things!" Mark: "You don't have to tell me."6? They have learned to live together in peace if not happi ness and to pretend at something more. But, then, this is the normal function of married couples according to the very bitter judgments of Three into Two Won't Go. As their shattered marriage goes down for the final count, Steve quietly assesses what happened: "It was all right as long as we kept pretending." Frances counters, "That's what 66From the Mike Nichols quotation on page 35. 67Raphael, Two for the Road, p. 138. 78 - most couples do." The whole point of their story has been I lost upon them as participants. Ella has not broken up a ! marriage but has acted only as a catalyst in bringing to ' ! light the fact that the marriage does not really exist ; under these terms of pretense. j I Pretense often adds a note of dramatic irony within \ ! the films. A young couple having trouble with their mar- ! I riage--often nothing much worse than the fact that he got | i the wrong present for Joan in Lovers and Other Strangers -- i sollicit advice from an older, happily married couple. The : latter jumps to the challenge of helping these unfortunate i youngsters from their rich, loving experience, even though the audience has just been tipped to the fact that these j i most beneficent guides have just banged their way through ! the final fistfight on the way to the divorce lawyers. That's the basic plot for Period of Adjustment as well as r I How to Commit Marriage♦ In the latter the Bensons have just j :filed for divorce when their daughter, Nancy, comes to an nounce her marriage plans. They worry that her beau will t jnot be able to support her in the normal splendor to which Ishe is accustomed but she reassures them: "It's only a small scholarship but for the rest we'll live on love like you and mom do." Frank manages to choke down his reaction. Instead of revealing the truth of the prospective divorce, he decides to conceal the news until after the big church 79 wedding. In the best comic tradition, Frank gets the final decree on the way to the services and manages to drop it just-before the ceremony. Nancy is so shocked at the hypo crisy involved in her own parents' pretense of a happy mar riage that she and David go off to live together, rather than marry and thereby risk this fatal contagion. Somehow or other, despite all their problems, despite how little they mean to each other and how much they yearn for freedom and for someone else, they remain together, i living not in love but in despair. "What's love got to do with it?" asks Gunther in The April Fools. "This is the twentieth century." The wrinkles are beginning to show on their faces and on their souls; they are immediately iden tifiable- -they look married. Despite everything, as the parents in Lovers and Other Strangers state it so very often, "they’re still together!" Ah, yes, and that is precisely the cause of their personal tragedy in the movie maker's manual: they are still together. If the dream image cultivated by Holly wood built toward a sublime fade-out of programmed happi ness, a new sort of dream image has blossomed in the current crop of marriage films. Even in the rockiest grounds new shoots can take root and blossom with the hopes that spring eternal in human breasts. Now, instead of the lasting 'happiness promised by marriage, the dream has been for the jtemporary relief granted through divorce. Speaking of 80 Divorce American Style, English critic Alexander Walker wrote: "Watching their marriage break up in a series of exquisitely funny sequences, we get a warmly glowing feel ing that it couldn't happen to a nicer couple.Any of the older couples in these films deserve a fairer shake from life than they are shown receiving; the film makers suggest that shake comes from the ultimate split of divorce. They are the ones who live happily ever after. Yet there are very feitf couples brave enough to make the choice of happiness and even fewer that stick to it. The "American style" divorce mentioned above ends unhappily when Richard and Barbara Harmon wind up back together, just like Frank and Elaine Benson in How to Commit Marriage. Both couples go through the whole legal proceedings only to be drawn together again by the laws of romantic comedy. For the rest, divorce becomes the shining dream, replacing the gaudier fantasies of knights in * armor and buxom beauties left from another era. In _ 3 in the Attic Paxton Quigley is kidnapped by the young girls he has been three-timing and subjected to the terrible trio's fiendish plan to literally love him to death. When their efforts at last begin to show some effect, Eunice taunts him with the cry, "You can't peter out like this. Man, you've got every man's dream." ^Walker, "Divorce American Style" p. 18. 81 For the older generation this may no longer be true. For the married man the dream seems less the constant conquest than a simple moment of p e a c e .68 The peace which husband and wife seek , is usually a i solitary one, a freedom from the other, pure and simple, rather than a desire for someone else. Once bitten, they regard the loving arms of mistress or lover as a relief from the present torture rather than a landing field for ever after. In the Arrangement type of film there is a basic unhappiness with the mate but also a similarly basic unwillingness to make a new commitment. For someone like Hal in Lovers and Other Strangers, the status quo is the ideal. If Bernice were to die suddenly, he would yelp with glee at the chance to marry Cathy, start out the door in a burst of speed, and freeze in his tracks. To begin a full new relationship with someone else, with all the obligations and guilts of the old one still fresh in mind, requires a boldness and bravery which Hal and the rest have already clearly shown they lack. This is a supposition, of course, but one that makes much sense in the context of the films. Besides, there is no easy out for the frustrated spouse; ^^Both the nature of the romantic dream in the art and literature of the twentieth century and, particularly, the role of the happy ending in the Hollywood film will be treated extensively in the second part of this study. 82 the Bernices of this world live on intolerably, while the Hals sit and dream of an end to their miseries. In the Thirties the impossible dream of the Depres sion films was typified by the multi-starred, multi directed If^ J _ Had a Million. Money was the solution to every problem in those days. The dream was to be one of those perfect strangers picked at random from the telephone book by a crusty old financier giving away his fortune. As each of the lucky nouveaux riches in the film decides what to do with his instant fortune, each of the hungry, despair ing figures in the shadowy theater could share vicariously in the million as well. In Fox's 1952 star compendium, We're Not Married, five couples suddenly discover that the Justice of the Peace who married them was not properly authorized. Steve Gladwin greets the news with a delighted chortle: "Heaven has finally blessed our little union with an annulment." The fade-out finds most of the couples back together once again, ^ even Steve who is again quarreling with his beloved "Panther Girl," Ramona, at the happy ending. One suspects that the subject matter might be don'e 69 Jeff and Annabel stay together but technically not married, so she can enter the Mss America contest; Hector who dreams of freedom keeps thew news a secret rather than suffer through the dating game all over again, a perfect example of the present type; the news reaches Fred Melrose at the very moment a property settlement is revealing Eve I wed him for his money. Only the Melroses actually break 1 up. somewhat differently today. Now the dream of the American male can be summarized by the words of the lawyer Potter in The April Fools. "You know how many divorces I handle each week and each time I pray: ’Lord, let this be mine."’ The end of the film finds Potter still praying hopefully as Howard leaves for Paris with a dream girl in the best Hollywood traditions. Potter represents the conventional, middle-aged marriage, atrophied, unable to change; Brubaker represents the younger generation who are open to whatever changes are necessary in order to achieve their ultimate goal of happiness. The two men do not differ much in age but there is a crucial difference in attitude, which will be examined more fully in the next > chapter. Perhaps the conclusions for this first chapter might be best summarized with a remark from an older film, the 1933 classic, The Thin Man, which reads with new layers of meaning in 197 0. As Nick prepares to risk his neck in an abandoned warehouse, Nora cautions him to be careful. He is a little surprised by her concern after the witty, flippant exchanges which have characterized the dialogue throughout. "The little lady says it like she cares," he chuckles. Hurt a bit that she has allowed her feelings to show, she answers j(referring in the third person to the husband standing next jto her), "I don't care--it’s just I've gotten used to him." By the late Sixties most of the movie husband and wife teams have truly ceased to care. They have no love for each other and even their bitter hatred is something tinged with a basic torpor enervating their whole beings. For better or for worse, they have gotten used to one another. This very process of accommodation to an absense of meaningful love, both prevents a deepening of the bits of love which still exist, and simultaneously induces a state of stag nation which creeps into every facet of their lives. Un happy as the couple may be, they would rather sit in their current corner and stare at the wall than mount the mari tal merry-go-round for another chance at the'brass ring. Like the Benthamite carefully weighing each possible plea sure against corresponding pains, these conservative coup les sit in silence, suffering the unique anguish of modern existential society: the tragedy of limited man. Chapter II THE GRADUATE LOOKS AT LOVE The relationship of Benjamin to Mrs. Robinson was a comparatively accurate mirror for reflecting the images of the Robinsons, the Braddocks, and so many other "happily married" couples in the contemporary American cinema. Still no one film encompasses all the trends and themes so The Graduate was merely a base from which the discussion might grow rather than a solid summary in itself. Similarly, the second half of this watershed film provides a jump-off point for discussing the concept of love as understood by the younger generation of motion picture lovers. Even though Benjamin's love for Elaine Robinson is less typical of the overall themes emerging from these films than his love for her mother was, it seems an equally beneficial be ginning for this investigation of rather wider areas of thought. If the net tossed forth does not quite catch up every fish in the sea, as it surges through the flowing ebbs and currents with a bubbling urgency, it can dredge up quite a meal nevertheless. Reviewing Benjamin's character a bit, it should be recalled that his primary motivation in the first half of 86 the film was negative instinct: he did not know what he wanted to do; all he wanted to be was something different from his parents. Benjamin's college successes gave him a frightening intimation of how easy it would be for him to slip into his father's bag--the sort of madhouse world run i by the inmates where all the answers come in one word ency clopedia like "Plastics" or "Sex" or "Money.Benjamin may not quite know where he is headed, but he is determined that the path will lead him away from everything that he has been.; A direction finally comes in the person of Elaine jRobinson. Mrs. Robinson exacts a promise from Benjamin never to take her daughter out and he is perfectly willing to abide by his word. Of course hostile Fates intervene, helped *At Benjamin's graduation party as he is struggling to escape from the non-people around him, a very serious man buttonholes him and draws him aside: Man: "I just want to say one word to you, just one ; ^vord." Benjamin: "Yes, sir." Man: "Are you listening?" Benjamin: "Yes I am." Man: "Plastics, There's a great future in plastics." jdanding down his password to the world of high finance with all the care of the Sibyl sifting through the leaves at Cu- |nae, the man inevitably provokes one of the movie's biggest jlaughs from the younger generation. A college graduate like Benjamin is especially put off by one word problems and so lutions; their easy acceptance by his parents' generation is one reason for Benjamin's alienation. 'Incest' stands for a |vhole series of social conventions and taboos, for example, jbut Benjamin will make his decision based on situation ethics Which are grounded in the particular circumstances of what | his affairs with Elaine and Mrs. Robinson really mean, rather] than on some universal, immovable, unfeeling natural law. i Within his system there can be no meaningful one-word solu tions. Older views of Citizen Kane may have leapt on the 87 along by the funbling matchmaking of his parents,^ and Ben- jam finally agrees to take Elaine out to save the peace. While Mrs. Robinson sulks at home watching "The Newlywed Game" on television, Benjamin escorts her daughter to a Go- Go joint which produces a degree of nausea beyond what he had hoped for. At the moment when Elaine runs from the club in tears ("missing quite an effect there"), Benjamin finds a |new direction in his life. His eyes are opened at last. Though the film tries to suggest that Elaine has grown up overnight and Benjamin never really saw her beauty i before, the two families have;bben intimate for so long that this becomes both an unconvincing and a deceptive explana tion for what is happening here. The night Benjamin drove Mrs. Robinson home from the party, she lured him up to the empty bedroom to show him Elaine’s picture, an exact repro duction of her present full bloom. This is several weeks before the assignation at the Taft Hotel. Benjamin says at explanation of "Rosebud" but Benjamin would agree with Thomp son's comment: "I don't think any word can explain a man's life." 2 First his father argues, "Elaine’s back from school. T think it might be a nice gesture if you asked her out." When this meets with no reaction he adds, "I suppose she's not good enough for you. I guess I'll just have to tell Mr. kobinson you're too busy every evening doing God knows what . . ." With Benjamin already quaking, his mother joins ■the battle: "If Benjamin absolutely refuses, then I'll just have to invite all the Robinsons over on Thursday." He agrees. 88 the time, "Elaine certainly is an attractive girl."^ Mrs. Robinson’s image is also reflected from the sheet of glass covering the portrait so that Benjamin sees them both. The beauty of each of the Robinson women is only a quarter-inch deep as Benjamin acutely realizes. The depth of Mrs. Robinson’s beauty remains on the surface throughout their affair as she carefully intends. Yet in their first moments together, Elaine's true beauty shines forth as she runs from the club. Having taken her out strictly to avoid offending his parents,^ Benjamin realizes the unpardonable dispespect he has shown to this gentle, sensitive girl. His only justification is a vapid, "I’ve had this feeling ever since I’ve graduated, this kind of compulsion I’ve had to be rude all the time, you know what I mean?" In a rude world he has hardly been noticed which makes him all the more appreciative of Elaine's mov ing reaction. When the tears finally subside, a new Ben jamin takes his girl out: to a drive-in restaurant for a milk shake and a hamburger. ^Echoing, of course, his judgment, "I think you’re the most attractive of all my parents’ friends." She tells him, "I want jrou to know I’m available to you and if you won’t sleep with me this time ..." and then adds apologet ically, "I find you very attractive." ^Benjamin does offend Mrs. Robinson very deeply by the date despite his good and prudent reasons for going on it. Someone had to be offended in the situation and it is j significant that he chooses "his beloved." He could really] care less that he offends any of them at this point. | 89 The inner change in Benjamin is accompanied by an external visual change of utter simplicity and electrifying dramatic intensity: for the first time Benjamin, like those million marquees touting Garbo’s version of Anna Christie proclaimed, talks! Benjamin and Elaine sit in the car sip ping their shakes with the window rolled up. The camera is outside the car and another Simon and Garfunkle song plays on the sound track so that the audience hears none of the conversation. Nothing is heard precisely because there is no need to hear specific words. The crucial point of the scene lies in the fact that Benjamin has at last found some one to whom he can speak. If ending communication spells the death of love in the first chapter, beginning communi cation likewise indicates the birth of love. Apart from anything he says, the fact that Benjamin is speaking, the words just as seen if not heard, becomes an objective cor relative for his whole state of being. The reason is sim ple enough for the change as Benjamin notes to Elaine a lit tle later: ’ ’ You're the first thing for so long that I've liked--the first person I could stand to be with.” In turn, Elaine is wise enough to guess that Benjamin was acting this way in order to cover something up. Finally she asks him directly, "Benjamin, are you having an affair?” He admits to an interlude and tells Elaine that the woman jWas married with a son. Elaine continues to probe for in- jformation, but unlike Benjamin who dug into Mrs. Robinson's j 90 love life out of frustration and curiosity, Elaine is seeking a single, relevant fact. Elaine: "Did they ever find out?" Benjamin: "No." Elaine: "And it’s all over now?" Benjamin: "Yes." Elaine: "I'm glad." Once she discovers that the affair is over, her questioning can end as well. If Benjamin represents many of his peers through his discovery of communication as the key to real love, Elaine demonstrates another mark distinguishing them from the older generation: the ability to forgive and for get, to let bygones truly be bygones. Mrs. Robinson mis understands the latter trait when she threatens Benjamin: ; Mrs. Robinson: "Listen to me, Benjamin. You are not to see Elaine again. I can make things quite un pleasant ." Benjamin: "How?" Mrs. Robinson: "In order to keep Elaine away from you, I am prepared to tell her everything." Benjamin cannot believe that she would dare take such dras tic action. i i i ! ' Benjamin: "I don’t believe you." i Mrs. Robinson: "Then you better start believing." | Benjamin: "I just don’t believe you would do that." ; ; Mrs. Robinson: "Try me." I I Suddenly grasping the seriousness of her threat and seeing ! that she does not forgive and forget, Benjamin’s disbelief turns to another level of belief in himself and in Elaine. < The race is on. Instead of accepting either black mailed anguish or simple resignation, Benjamin dashes 91 breathlessly through the driving rain to be the one to break the news first, confident of Elaine's easy acceptance. However, understandably enough, she is deeply shaken by his news. As the camera pulls gradually into focus to state visually that Elaine has heard and fully comprehended the horrible revelation, she lets out a sob. Elaine: "Oh no." Benjamin: "Elaine." Elaine: "Oh my God... Get out of here." Benjamin: "Don't cry." Elaine: "Get out. Out! OUT!" As Benjamin leaves the house, the final image shows Mrs. Robinson flattened against the white wall, recalling the !lonely isolation which has been the uncomfortable habitat of Benjamin throughout the first half of the film. Benjamin's widescreen wasteland dissolves into a whole new photographic world with the film's next shot. i !Benjamin is peeking through the trees outside of the Robin son house, trying to catch a glimpse of Elaine. Telephoto . 1 :lenses have replaced the wide-angle ones in order to suggest | the fact that Benjamin is gazing from afar, as if through field glasses. But the shot is merely an initiation into a^ I whole new way of looking at the world, through an intimate j t ’ iloving caress rather than with a stand-offish shrug. In- ; i i stead of being isolated from a Mrs. Robinson with whom he j i is most intimate, instead of speaking to her from opposite ! sides of a vast motion picture screen or over the phone or j ! in the dark of the hotel room, he is seeing everything ! 92 t close up in the tight vision of the telephoto lens. Even separated by a hundred feet from his beloved, he is both emotionally and cinematically closer to her than he has ever been to Mrs. Robinson. A new sort of dramatic and photographic involvement begins for Benjamin at this point. Having communicated with Elaine through words at last, he is not about to let a little thing like incest stand in the way of love. The focus shifts somewhat to Elaine at this point in the film5 since Benjamin has made a 5Jacob Brackman discusses this shift in the decision making emphasis of The Graduate in his lengthy essay on the film in The New Yorker, July 27, 1968, pp. 36-41 and 50-58. He suggests that the first third of the film revolves upon the question: what will Benjamin do with himself? The next ; third asks, according to Brackman, how is Benjamin going to ;get out of the affair with Mrs. Robinson? Thus, claims Brackman, "The question we expect the final third to answer . is something like: Will Benjamin find his way back to his linitial dilemma, come to terms with it at last, and resolve it?" (Ibid, p. 38.) The film, however, instead of answering ;Brackmari * s’ questions, poses some of its own. "Suddenly, he > 'is overflowing with energy and sense of direction. After moping aimlessly through two-thirds of the picture, he is ^transformed, through his pursuit of Elaine, into the con- ; ventional man, resolved upon his chase. On these terms, his 'success is assured. Once you really know what you're after,! in the movies, it's mostly a question of going out and get ting it." (Ibid, p. 38.) But the question Brackman is ask- jing for is an a priori one. The change is not an arbitrary 1 |one but one which is firmly rooted in the changes trans- | piring within Benjamin himself. No one could have doubted | jthat Sheriff Will Kane would stand by his duty in High Noon j and yet the tensions mount superbly and the final outcome i jloses none of its impact as a result. Because of his inde- [ jcision in the first half of the movie and despite his trans-j 'formation through love, Benjamin's perseverance seems ratherj less than certain and the obstacles to his success seem al- j most insuperable. It remains very much his story until the very end. The irresponsible Benjamin has not so much vanished as turned into a new embodiment of the steadfast Will Kane. 93 ; lasting choice for once,6 transcending the absence of commitment to anything which has been his previous chief Characteristic. He follows his dream girl to Berkeley, wondering why there is need for pursuit, while Elaine won ders how Benjamin could dare to follow her. Elaine: "Benjamin, you're...I don't know what to say." Benjamin: "Maybe we could get together sometime and talk about it." Elaine: "Really incredible." But even under the mistaken impression that Benjamin has raped her mother,7 Elaine is able to listen to what Benjamin is saying with heart and lips just long enough to touch upon a new belief in him which will be vital later in the story. Her mother would have heard nothing at all. 6Benjamin's dad complains, "This idea sounds pretty half-baked," but Benjamin replies, "No. it's not; it's completely baked. It's the best decision I've ever made." ' 7Having followed Elaine to Berkeley, Benjamin wins :some right to argue his case first hand. This leads to a 'confrontation during which Elaine reveals her mother's many jlies. "I want you to leave," she says. "Well, look, I love iyou," Benjamin counters. "How could you do that, Benjamin? j |You just hate everything. How could you possibly rape my !mother?" After a couple of further explosions, he finally Icalms her down and explains his side of the story. If the ; jrape charge seems a bit much, at least it is in keeping with ‘the rest of Mrs. Robinson's character and it helps to ex plain why Elaine has turned from Benjamin. She is alienated not through a mere social convention, however basic a taboo | it may involve, but rather by an actual crime which suggests! jan inability on Benjamin's part to love anyone or anything j in a truly human manner. Elaine's basic feelings toward j Benjamin have not really changed. Nevertheless, in believipgi her mother's lies, she is forced to doubt the honesty of his feelings toward her. Joined with his tendency just to drift, | all these doubts cause her to write in the "Dear Benjamin" note: "I love you but it would never work out." 94 Still, Benjamin keeps urging her on to love and marriage, despite everything that she feels so deeply. One day she comes to his tiny flat and asks for a kiss to check her feelings. Benjamin asks again if she will marry him and she concedes a tiny doubt which is all the ammunition he needs. Elaine: "I might." Benjamin: "Is that so? You might marry me?" Elaine: "Yes." Benjamin: "When?" Elaine: "I don't know." Benjamin: "How about tomorrow? I don't mean to be pushy, but..." Elaine: "I don't know. I don't know what is happen- , ing." Benjamin: "You mean you're confused. Look, don't be confused. We're getting married." Elaine: "I don't see how we can." Benjamin: "We just can!" The methodology does not matter to him anymore now than it did in the past; only what lies ahead counts. The bridges behind them can be burned and the gulfs between them can be j jcrossed. All that matters is the open road to happiness Istretching out before them. : i . ( After Mr. Robinson's visit to Berkeley, Elaine drops ; I ;out of school and goes to Santa Barbara to marry the stiff, i i o 1 Istraight medical student, Carl Smith.0 The convincing argu-| ^With the same sort of curiosity that propelled him ; to ask about the Robinson's marriage and their private life i together, Benjamin quizzes Elaine. When she admits, "I said! I might marry him," Benjamin wants to know how Carl proposed.) Chuckling a bit herself about his stiffness, Elaine reveals "He said he thought we’d make a pretty good team." The scene may help prepare the audience for the climax which im plies they will live on unmarried.___________________________ 95 merits of Mr. Robinson are never revealed to the audience, probably because they could not be realistically presented. Elaine’s mercurial affections lack both credibility and a consistency with everything else the film says and means.9 She leaves a note for Benjamin which discloses all that he needs to know about her feelings. Dear Benjamin, Please forgive me because I know what I am doing is the best thing for you. My father is so upset. You've got to understand. I love you but it would never work out. The only thing Benjamin understands about the note is the fact that Elaine still loves him and desires his welfare 'above her own and that it does not matter how things work out as long as she loves him. He will take his chances on I this moment in time and worry about the future when it !comes along. Love wins the day, but in an unusual manner s which will be discussed toward the end of this chapter. ”1 don't know what I want to do but I can tell you what I don't want to do--I don't want to do what my , I parents have done." ! --Peter, Nobody Waved Goodbye ! ! Like Benjamin himself, most of the youthful protago-' 1 i ! i inists of the contemporary cinema are less certain of what i I i |they want to do and be than they are of what they do not j ; | I want to be. Their chief common trait is the fact that they i have viewed close-up the effects of an unhappy marriage-- ! 9As well as shattering Brackman's hypothesis. 96 , their parents'. This has been a traumatic experience for each of them which has gone a long way toward shaping their overall outlooks on life. If former generations lived in this same shadow of unhappiness, they either failed to grasp this fact adequately (probably, according to these film makers, because the motion pictures had not yet uncovered this conspiracy among their elders) or else because they did not know how to handle it. The current generation, as de picted in these films, not only sees the problem but an immediate solution as well: when in doubt, simply be careful tto avoid doing or being anything like one's parents. Like Benjamin, they may not know what goal they are seeking, but they certainly understand marriage, the gaol they are I escaping. | A few examples among many will suffice since this 'basic generation gap problem has qxisted for decades apart 'from this special matrimonial context.In the film that I -^One especially insightful critic noted this recent-; ly: "Audiences seeing Giant during its current reissue will smile at some of its old-fashioned melodrama but they may j I find the picture altogether more intriguing and interesting i ifrom the viewpoint of the Seventies. The film is clearly j 'less about Texas than about the problems which film makers j 'discovered * during the Sixties: the gap between nouveaux j iriches parents and their idealistic offspring, racial pre- ! Ijudice (this time toward Mexicans), the waste of war, and imarital incompatibility." ("Giant," Catholic Film News letter , Nov. 15, 1970, p. 91.3 Besides the recent spate of youth films and the traditional minor family conflicts ranging in intensity from Life with Father and Meet Me in j St. Louis through Joe (originally titled The Gap until that j topic became overused and the hard-hat confrontation in New | 97 really set the style to follow, Rebel Without Cause, James Dean as Jim genuinely loved his father, a fact that appalled him all the more as he saw him cringing from every responsi bility and decision because of a shrewish wife. "I'll tell you one thing," he says at one point, "I don't ever want to be like him." Dean's manifesto was taken up by the whole generation for whom he was the prime idol. To close in the full circle it might be handy to recall the very moving scene from Five Easy Pieces in which Bobby Dupea is finally able to talk to his father. Having been driven from home ;long ago by his father's demands, Booby now confronts a man t who can no longer order--who cannot speak at all. "I don't know but if you could talk, we wouldn’t be talking," says Bobby during their very symbolic conversation. "That's » pretty much the way it got before I left." The same sort of ^symbolic lack of communication keynotes the frozen meetings i 'between Oliver and his father in Love Story. They speak in bitter words (Father: "If you marry her now, I won't give jyou the time of day." Oliver: "Father, you don't know the ! ! i York City suggested a more newsworthy angle) and Long Day1s i Journey Into Night, one should also mention all the Amencan- International beach blanket biggies and cool chopper classics. The adults in these films were consistently mocked and made fun of by the detached young heroes of the jstories. However, this resulted less from basic theoretical differences than from the practical state of things. Most iof the adults encroaching on the youth world of these films were inept fools whose continual bumbling created constant crises which the innocent protagonists were then forced to resolve. 98 time of day."), and their few meetings occur in photo graphic wastelands reflecting the inner lack of feeling. They meet in the snow after the hockey game and after the death of Jenny, in the monstrous coldness of Barrett's own Xanadu, and across a business desk when Oliver comes to beg a loan "because I got a girl in trouble." The closest they come to real communication is over the telephone when Jenny almost convinces Oliver to wish his father a happy birthday. .Even here the distance in miles cannot make him forget the far greater distance in generations. Yet it is important to remember that the films in ;question may make use of the differences between parents and offspring to help dramatize the problems which exist between husbands and wives, but it is the latter which generally take precedence throughout the films of the late Sixties. In the first place, the generation gap is old hat at best and thus is best relegated to the background. The children j >of the Depression saw their fathers reduced to empty hulks ; ■ 1 'unable to provide the basic necessities for their families, i Growing up and fighting a war to protect their families, i ' ■ jthey settled down during an oppulent age, intent on pro- j i viding perfect happiness for their families through the j financial security of material success--the essence of true J happiness in their eyes. Yet their children would gladly | ! I trade it at once for the warmth and love which had to be sacrificed while their parents were struggling to the top. ; 99 Their financial security is the very element which dimmed the children's recognition of its desirability as Alpert has commented: But The Graduate was not meant as an attack on a generation: it merely tells a story, as effectively as the makers knew how to do it. To understand the story it is necessary, however, to understand that Benjamin Braddock belongs to a milieu that has been termed the affluent society. He has never known financial in security- -he has grown up among gadgets, among cars and swimming pools--and this he has taken so much for granted that it literally has no meaning for him. His parents, f on the other hand, had presumably known hard times; they knew the value, for them, of money, of material success, of things. When Benjamin comes of age, literally and symbolically, he finds himself vaguely rejecting all I that his parents hold so.dear. He finds himself a kind of object, the proud-result of proper rearing, a reward of his parents' struggle in his behalf. Somehow, he feels, this is wrong, but he doesn't know what is right. The rest of Benjamin's generation share his reaction. Un able to be content with the pretense of happiness and morality, these youthful heroes feel a deep disrespect for the father who has no time for the love of wife and children jand an equally passionate antipathy toward the mother who j pushed her husband into this trap through her greedily \ j ' J Materialistic demands. ; i i i - ..... - - - -......... -..... t j ! HHollis Alpert, "'The Graduate' Makes Out," Satur day Review, July 9, 1968, p. 15. In the original novel, For jmstance, Benjamin hocks his treasured Alfa Romeo for the .cash to continue living in Berkeley in pursuit of his ^apparently hopeless quest. Love transcends wealth. Since jthe repeated journeys up and down the Pacific Coast provide most of the visual beauty during the film's final sequences, the car is retained but it is certain that Benjamin's attitude toward objects also remains unchanged. 100 Beyond the whole success syndrome is the acute realization that behind the facade of wealth and happiness lies a dismal despair born directly from the unhappy mar- iage. The youth embarking on life hesitantly surmises that it was precisely the marital commitment which made his parents into beasts, which robbed them of ambitions toward nobler goals, and locked them into themselves and into the meaningless conventions of society. "Listen, darling, they're playing our song!" - -Passim, "The Late, Late Show." If the parents have become infected with a bitter 9 cynicism toward life, the children seem to have been vacci- i nated with a correspondingly heavy dose of romanticism. Their somewhat exaggerated idealism leaves them fragilely open to others. It is a quality which is both total and sincere. When Bob and Carol go to the Institute, for ex ample, the great revelation for Carol is the degree to which she hides her feelings and the extent of her inability to i I ! iopen herself to her husband or to anyone else. The simple ; jact of hugging becomes a source of deep, emotional ex pression. Bob and Carol are just far enough along on the i i ‘ < cinematic time scale toward fossilization that their nearly traumatic encounter session is able to produce a change in j their lives with the help of some extraordinary efforts on J 12 A statement to be fully explored in Chapter Four. 101 their part. The same is true to a certain extent of Ted and Alice although they have a harder time without the catalyst of a trip to the Institute, the secret revelations of Bob and Carol helping to bridge their openness gap. Most of the older couples studied are open only in the bitterly invective sense of George and Martha in Who * s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? However, the case is quite different for the flower children of the current cinema. Their openness, in contrast to the lies and deceits of their parents, is a primary characteristic. Often, as in Bob and Carol and friends, it becomes a plot gimmick to cause humor and some consternation I ifor the older generation. Either by poking fun at their parents’ evasions or through their almost total openness ! iwith strangers, they shock one segment of the audience even I iwhile delighting another. A truck driver picking up Chris- I !tine, The Grasshopper, discovers that she is going to Los l . | iAngeles to move in with a boy friend she met in Las Vegas. | | i ;"Oh, you’re gonna get married then?" the truck driver asks. , I | "No," she answers, "we're just going to live together." The I ' ' jman is shocked far more by her casual statement of things I than by the facts themselves. Similarly, after Tish Gray agrees to become The Babymaker, she warms up the Wilcoxes | l ' 'with the news that she and her boy friend "have been living ! together for six months now." They ask how he feels about ! I jher unique employment opportunity--becoming the mother of 102 of another man’s child. "He doesn’t know anything about this," she answers. "What's he going to say about this?" they ask, a bit at a loss for words. She neither knows nor really cares because she is very confident of their love: "We have a very open r e l a t i o n s h i p . ” ^ whatever turns Tad on ■is fine with her and she is confident* that he will give her the same degree of choice.^ jn both these cases what the 'heroines are stating can be summarized as follows: if the ■fact of living together can be accepted, then there is no I reason why a total openness about that fact should not also |be accepted with the same degree of openness. Anything less jcomprises just the sort of hypocrisy which these youthful couples most fervently oppose. Those who reject either the .fact or its open expression are not worth serious consider ation . I ! In his review of the motion picture version of the i 1 7 | In this particular case the question is not one of ; isexual promiscuity or straying affections, but simply a ibusiness proposition entered upon in much the same way as a .prostitute supplies her body but not her heart to a customer. | ^Actually, Tad does not take the news as optimisti cally as Tish had hoped and the situation eventually becomes junbearable for both of them. Tad complains finally, "Jesus, jl feel like I’m married and got a pregnant wife and I'm I .tired of it." Tish agrees later that, "I haven't been fair j ito you. You're not the father and I've been wanting you to j ■treat me as if you were," but her insight comes too late to j jsave the relationship. Openness itself cannot salve the jwounds caused by the extraordinary stresses which Tish has J placed upon both of them. Significantly, the final break comes when Tish finds Tad with another girl and becomes j bitterly jealous herself. j 103 D. H. Lawrence novel, The Virgin and the Gypsy, critic Charles Charaplin discusses the wider significance of this attitude of openness, both in the youthful protagonists of that film among others and in society in the larger sense. It was clear in his own day that D. H. Lawrence was the prophet of a new day in man-woman relations. But few in his own day could have said just how accurate a prophet Lawrence would prove to be. But from the perspective of a half-century we can see how precisely Lawrence was describing the turning point: the painful dying of old attitudes, the painful birth of new attitudes freer and more unashamedly sensual than the old.15 Candor is not so obviously a moral virtue of the first order even if it has come to hold that rank in the contemporary cinema as a result of the hypocrisy and deceits of another ,age. A key reason for the change is certainly the respon sive chord which this sort of frankness strikes in the youthful audiences. This new age of innocence feeds on the sort of wild , romanticism which is normally associated with the films of : bygone eras. The critics in general have been quick to ! j jsalute the radical change from realistic treatments to a new ;romanticism in such recent films as Love Story, Wuthering ) Heights, Fools , First Love, and Ryan * s Daughter. Yet in the films dealing with youth rebellions the handling of plot elements and themes have often been extremely romanticized, j I even as the films plead a stern realism under the guise of | 1 c Charles Champlin, '’’Virgin' Relates Freer Attitudes to New Morality." Los Angeles Times. Aug. 30, 1970. VI. p. 1. I 104 . a new sort of morality. For example, the scenes of campus riots and police brutality in films like Zabriskie Point, Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement, and R.P.M. draw cheers and laughter from youthful audiences rather than shudders of fearful recognition, just as the ineptitudes surrounding the actual treatments of serious subjects con cerning the young in Tell Me That You Love Me,Junie Moon or The People Next Door usually do also. They may be young but they are not as easily fooled by the pretentiously dishonest in "their" art form as audiences once were. They laugh with the magic musicals of Busby Berkeley but at The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart. i Another detailed, specific example may help to make I this point. On the plot level the atmosphere of permissive ness has created a number of love-at-first-sight romances which do not quite jell with the seeming realism. Thus the title figures in John and Mary strike up a casual conver sation in a single's bar and hop into bed without even ; i bothering to exchange names. The "realism" and "daringness", of the story help to conceal the ancient romantic con- j ventions.16 The basic question mutates only slightly from ; l • ["Will boy get girl?" to "Will boy want girl?" Likewise, in j iThe April Fools Howard spies a beautiful blonde across the j crowded party floor. Though the audience is already clued j > t . . . . . . I 16John and Mary's flashbacks are particularly senti- | mental. _______ __________________________ : ---------------- 1 105 in on the fact that she is the hostess and his brand new boss's wife, he is unaware of her status when he attempts to strike up a conversation. "Hi," he says, "my name's Bru baker." "I'll get my things," Cathy responds immediately. By the following night they have abandoned their respective spouses and flown off together to Paris, the home of roman tic love. In both these films the cute meet has been re placed by the quick make, but not much else has really changed from Hollywood's golden era. Cathy and Howard enjoy a brief courtship told through a compendium of current cinematic cliche's which have already developed to a degree of self-parody. A discussion of the cinematic tricks used in creating a romantic mood will help 'to define the differences between realism and romanticism, as well as investigating both in theoretical and practical terms how widely spread this new romanticism, in a thinly I idisguised form, has really become. The recent progenitors of most of the photographic t itricks are not Love Story and Ryan's Daughter, but two i :heavily romantic foreign films of the mid Sixties, Bo Wider-t jberg's Elvira Madigan and Claude Lelouch's A Man and A Wo- > man.*7 In the former very long focal length lenses were i ______________________________ j j l7Another potent influence which reacted quickly to i this stimulus was the television commercial, Hollywood's j normal gestation period for films is about two years which j accounts for some delay in the impetus given by these films. 106 used, often in combination with neutral density filters, so that even outdoors in bright sunlight a very shallow depth of field could be maintained in the photographic images* Both the foreground and background elements often were out of focus, removing the characters from the real world to a romantic spot of their own where all the rough edges were smoothed away. What supplementary lights were used were heavily diffused in order to smooth the images even further, much as the portrait photographer might retouch a negative to provide the customer with an image of himself as he would' like to be rather than a realistic image as he truly is. In the latter film swirling cameras tracked hypnotically around ;the lovers in dizzying circles as they ran together on the i glistening sands beside the undulating waters.1* * In the television commercials and the Hollywood film ‘ versions, the lovers run together across fields of flowery ! incandescence with nauseating regularity. When not romping i I ithis way through the Elsian fields of Central Park, Catherine; i * » iDenueve as Cathy is photographed with even greater radiance ! 1 j 'against Richard Sylbert's predominantly white sets so that ' jshe seems to float elegantly in the same sort of sweetness I ! and light that clothed her in Jacques Demy's more openly j jromantic fable, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or in the awk- j | __________________________ j i^Even in the big city life these devices can work. I jThe telephoto lenses can isolate the lovers in a crowd as jWell as alone. Loving's credits glimpse Brooks and Grace, (brilliantly stating their fading love in visual terms.______ 107 ward remake of the granddaddy of the weepy romances, Mayer- ling. The result is the almost ultimate Hollywood star image. Makeup and diffusion remove any hint of a wrinkle on the face, just as the story has already removed any tinge of wrinkled reality. Variety mocked this school of artificial life in its deft review of Jenny: Love blooms briefly in the cinematic cliche of the day. In old films people always embraced to crescendoing violin strings. Today true love is an extended shampoo commercial.19 Besides diffusion on the lights, extreme examples can be obtained by rubbing vaseline directly on the camera ■lens for a softening effect that radically distorts the hardnesses of reality. A good use of this technique was the i dream sequence of a last visit to mother in Bonnie and Clyde. However, combining shots like this or like the love scene in Ryan1s Daughter or the wedding sequence from Lovers and Other Strangers (which also utilized long lenses and jslowly moving cameras) with the rest of a film shot in a 'largely different style often produces a wrenched feeling in I I the viewer. Still images slowly dissolved together also seem to j provoke a distinctly romantic feeling, judging from the trip; i to the museum in To Sir with Love and the New York interlude; from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not to mention the j . — _ - . . . . . . . . . " t | 19Rick., "Jenny," Variety, Dec. 24, 1969, p. 20. "iuV < / fine coining attraction trailer for Love Story. The princi ple here seems to be that a removal from real life by the isolation of the moment has a romanticizing effect. Slow- motion photography has produced the same result, sometimes seemingly against the real intentions of the film makers. Following the example of Bonnie and Clyde, death instants have been slowed down to add impact to the moment in The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and many others. As with the slow-motion, long-lensed campus riots, jthe effect has more often been a peaceful surcease to tur moil rather than the tense moment of truth intended. I Already in the 1967 comedy, A Guide for the Married Man, these various cliches could be treated somewhat tongue- in-cheek. Ed Stander introduces a shot of lovers running across a field in slow motion toward each other with the i Sline: "Remember how it was when you first met her..." Most I iof the fun in Robert Downey's Putney Swope was found in the parodies of the television commercials. Still, The Happy 'Ending and The Sterile Cuckoo were able to make relatively | successful use of these techniques while still maintaining a straight face, partly because the use was rooted in the , i way the main characters actually looked at life. The ulti mate example, perhaps, is probably from Women in Love. At one point director Ken Russell had his gifted cameraman, Billy Williams, turn the huge Panavision camera on its side in order to have the lovers run together in slow motion, j 109 assuming all sorts of new Freudian twists in the process. Other areas reinforce the romantic techniques begun by the camera's visual images. The mood of these dreamy interludes depends greatly on the editing style, often featuring relatively long, slow dissolves of one image into another. Appropriately enough, the opening sequences of Jenny (which makes ample use throughout of all the romantic techniques here chronicled) takes place at a drive-in movie where the heroine becomes pregnant while watching the lushly romantic father of the long dissolve, George Stevens' A Place in the Sun. In an era of jump-cutting scenes in order to endistance and alienate the audiences,20 the use of the i 20Some contemporary directors following along the path first tread on the stage by Brecht and other avant- garde playwrights have deliberately aimed at keeping audi- Iences from becoming emotionally involved with the actors and I the actions of the play or film. In place of the tradition al Aristotelian catharsis, a sort of visceral implosion at ' ;the end of the play resulting from a deep involvement with i the tragic problems of the chief character, these artists :have sought to elicit a strictly intellectual response, jMichael Klein explains the reasons for this technique quite I well. "Dislocation, like Brecht's alienation, is an effect; iit is experienced by the audience or reader because it is : jpotential in the art object. When the spectator is alien- i jated, he is distanced from a play or film or story, so that; ;he may respond with the creative intellect. The artist, in; !employing the technique of dislocation, attempts to prevent; 'this, because he fears his audience will think in conven- j itional patterns. He may fragment the narrative, use an un- ; i reliable narrator, distort space, alter the temporal j !sequence, etc., to this rhetorical end. The dislocated j jreader or viewer, confused by distortions in the narrative,i has to accept the author's view to make sense out of the material." [Michael Klein, "The Literary Sophistication of Francois Truffaut," Film Comment, III (Summer, 1965), p. 110 slow dissolve becomes the ultimate soothing technique for joining disparate pieces of film.^1 In a dissolve the film editor overlaps two pieces of film in the laboratory printing 24.] Thus, in order to keep the response on this intel lectual level without, at the same time, allowing the viewer to impose his own categories upon the material, the director jars and jolts his narrative out of natural chronology. Time and space are altered, perceptions bent, and frequent reminders that this is actually a film are inserted--all in order to keep the viewer from thinking rationally about what he is seeing and drawing conclusions about it based on his own preconceptions rather than on the artist’s materials. The dislocated viewer cannot make any sense whatever out of the artwork unless he gives up his own viewpoint for that of auteurs such as Michqlangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Alam Resnais, the later Bergman, Truffaut, and Richard Les ter. Nothing is morerlaughable, though, than the novice jdirector employing this sort of editing style because it is the "in" thing when;the nature of his romantic tale demands ijust the opposite. 21whenever two disparate pieces of film are joined ;together there is a more or less abrupt, more or less ■ jolting change in the image on the screen. Perhaps a tiny figure is suddenly replaced in one twenty-fourth of a second by a huge closeup of a face completely filling the screen; perhaps a predominantly dark and gloomy image is instantan eously altered to a blisteringly bright one; perhaps a ver- ■ticle composition twists quickly into a shift of axis that sgives a distinctly horizontal look to the next image. Even jthe normal shifts of heads in an ordinary dialog scene jcause a slight degree of discomfort which is readily ac cepted. The jump in itself is not objectionable; indeed, ! iwhen carefully coordinated with the length and rhythm of the 'individual shots, this is what editing is all about. Master! .editor and director Sergei Eisenstein created his astounding montages precisely through his strong shifts in composition ! .and tone from shot to shot. Similarly, German G. W. Pabst ; found that making the cuts between individual shots during ' covering movements within the scene helped to cover up the jump between shots. In The Love of Jeanne Ney he pioneered ' what he liked to call "the invisiBTe cut," but the term re- : mains vastly hyperbolic, even in this supreme example of | super smoothness in continuity cutting. Cuts are meant to j be seen but not consciously felt. Ill so that instead of the sudden, jolting replacement of one image by another, there is a gentle fading of the first one and an equally gentle birth of the second one taking its place. The transition may be short (often simply to bridge a gap when a necessary shot is missing or when the two shots have so little visual continuity that a quite noticeable jump would occur on the screen) or long (the smoothest medium of transition from shot to shot). That the long dissolve should be used so often in films claiming realistic credentials at the very moment when audiences have at last become accustomed to other editing styles,^2 seems strangely I contradictory. i : Another area of obvious romanticizing is the musical score. To a film which the director may have conceived in ' educative process was needed to introduce the natural smoothness of the dissolve, but the employment of the jump-cut in Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard demanded view ers to make a vast leap forward in film grammar. Involved is a deliberate deviation from the normal chronology of things. For example, an actor who is seated in one shot is [standing in the first frame of the next shot, without bene- ! fit of the required intervening time to change positions. The switch in position could have been disguised by a cut- j ;away to something else in the room. This was always prefer-] able to the obvious "mistake" of having the person change , position impossibly between shots. But Godard, like Melies | long before him, is not ashamed to let his audience revel in ithe trickery of the camera, as long as it allows him to tell| his story better. Godard tells this story Breathlessly, j moving along insistently without regard for the normal j 'cinematic conventions. As a result of the efforts of Godard! [and others, especially the TV commercial, audiences will now! readily accept a cut from a man outside a building to the same man at his desk on the twentieth floor. This is less a jump cut than a short cut. 112 i realistic terms, a quick-buck producer will sometimes add during the editing stage a title song or a romantic score in order to insure the studio investment. The subtle appropri ateness of the musical score to the dramatic development of the film is often less important than the possible financial windfall which can result from a smash hit song or album. The original cast album for the movie version of The Sound of Music has sold over five million copies, a tidy indirect profit for that boxoffice giant. Another smash hit might never have been produced were it not for the hopes of an eventual profit in the record stores. United Artists finally backed the first Beatle film, A Hard Day's Night, on this basis, fully expecting the film to bomb in the theaters. The two areas can be cunningly intertwined: the film grossed six million dollars in the United States and Canada alone on an investment of less than four hundred thousand l dollars while the album joined the regular parade of million sellers by the Beatles. Likewise, hummers or whistlers of a hit tune like "Lara's Theme" from Dr. Zhivago or "Raindrops ;Keep Failin' on My Head" from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance j ' , - T - , — - j |Kid are likely to slip into the theater for a peek at the ( I ; ifilm itself. j ! i Whatever the financial considerations that may have j i led to the present emphasis on the musical score and in j particular on the title song, it is certain that the first emphasis must be placed on the contribution which the music 113 makes to the artistic mood incorporated in the film as a w h o l e , 23 and not to its financial success. Nevertheless, 2^Yet a minor controversy has raged for years over what sort of musical score serves the film best. On the one hand film composers like Dimitri Tiomkin have long held that the best film score is the one which is not heard. For him the music should always be a subsidiary element, influencing the audience almost on a subliminal level, keying the emotions but not becoming a full entity in itself. As soon as the audience starts listening to the music, the mood of the film as a whole is broken. Other composers, perhaps in fluenced a bit by the side effects of a hit song, argue with ; Cecil B. DeMille that, "If you can’t whistle it, it's no good." Compromises are sometimes possible. A fine score like The Reivers by Johnny Williams or Goldfinger by John IBarry or Z _ by Mikis Theodorakis can serve the filmic mood superbly and yet provide a rich reserve of untapped excel lence for subsequent careful listenings on the original isound track album or tape. Even so showy a score as Burt Bacharach's for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which counterpointed rather than complemented the film*s action, becomes a newly throbbing sensation apart from the picture. Time once summarized the role of film music quite well: "The function of the film score has always been the same: to touch the essence of the moment on screen. When it iworks, it comments on the action as words and pictures sel dom can--warning of perils, praising the good, cursing the bad. A good score can enrich an actor's performance or make ithe heart flip at the camera's glimpse of the sky. The new movie music being written in Hollywood accomplishes all this jwith a freedom and imagination all but unknown to films ten ; iyears ago. An art has emerged from within a craft." ("Com posers: To Touch a Moment," Time, January 17, 1964, p. 70.) The romantic film is a special sort of emotional ex- jperience which requires a total artistic effort if it is to work at all. If one element fails or is out of keeping with jthe rest, the elaborately constructed house of cards wobbles! :and falls to the ground. It is essential that the proper sort of score be chosen to capture the mood. Because Jimmy :Webb was the nowest of now musicologists, he was selected to jwrite a now score for Love Story. When the result utterly j Idestroyed the film's mood, it was scrapped and Francis Lai j ichurned out another of his lush delights, perfectly honed to( the film's romanticism. Composer Lalo Schifrin had worked ! well x\rith director Mark Rydell on The Fox so he was hired to do the music for Rydell's next film, The Reivers. His very 114 economic considerations are never very far from the heart of Hollywood and the result has been an easy sort of romanti cizing in film music, even when the theme might seem to call for a harsher (and less saleable) score. Whatever their filmic appropriateness, however, one cannot fault the melo dic musings of such current day composers as Henry Mancini (Darling Lili, Gaily, Gaily, Sunflower), Michel LeGrand (The IThomas Crown Affair, Sweet November), Rod McKuen (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Francis Lai (Hello-Goodbye, Live for iLife, Rider on the Rain), Burt Bacharach (Casino Royale, The April Fools, What * s New Pussycat?), and even Mozart (Elvira Madigan). ! The last named top forty composer raises the issue of using already existing materials. Aside from other consider ations, 24 a song which already has a meaning in another ‘ typically jazzy syncopation ruined every scene. Johnny 'Williams whipped out a brilliant, multi-variegated score in just five weeks, splendidly conveying the mood of the film and picking up an Oscar nomination in the process. (Both stories related by Cinema Center president, Gordon Stulberg, jin a personal interview with the author in Hollywood, Janu- ; ary, 1971.) I One thing is certain: more than ever before film music has become a key element for an audience grown up in a; 'double-channeled, McLuhanesque cacophonous civilization. i 24-Many people suspect that the use of pre-existent i music is a choice made out of monetary motives: simply to j save the money which might have been spent for an original ! score. However, stringent copyright laws, high royalties, ! and strict union regulations make the opposite the normal j case in Hollywood. Often the company must pay not only the t |original musicians who recorded the piece but also the local; jmusicians who lost a job. The largest expense over the j 115 context can add an unintentionally romantic note to the mood, simply by its basic familiarity. Like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca who melt whenever ”As Time Goes By” is played by Sam once again, young lovers have "their” songs which mean something special, something romantic to them. Nowadays those soft strains are as likely to be the acid rock of The Jefferson Airplane or Chicago. The conglomerate sound track of an Easy Rider or The Strawberry Statement can partake of a very thorough sort of romanticism which would go totally original budget for Easy Rider was due to the decision not to use an "original” score"! ([Producer Peter Fonda in a personal interview with the author, Hollywood, August, i 1969). With films like Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate, the use of pre-existent materials was an unexpected last- minute substitution. In both cases the film makers decided to go with inexperienced film composers because of their top pop hits. When the scores did not come up to snuff, the songs which had created the interest in the first place were used instead of the new scores especially composed for the films. Thus "Everybody's Talkin'" by Fred Neil became a hit for the second time, a year after it appeared on Nilsson's Aerial Ballet album. Mike Nichols used only one of the new songs composed by Simon and Garfunkle for The Graduate, the Grammy winning "Mrs. Robinson." The rest of the score was a potpourri of their old tracks ("Sounds of Silence," "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," "April Come She Will" and "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine.") Sometimes the overtones in an'already familiar piece of music can give a new and desired stimulus to its use in the film, but these same qualities can also destroy the mood of the picture through the preconceptions associated with the music in the minds of the viewers. Although "Also Sprach Zarathustra" works quite well in 2001 : A Space Odys sey, its effect in Catch-22 and The Strawberry Statement is quite dismembered. Likewise, the feelings one brings to I "The Blue Danube" are never quite overcome by their use j in 2001, despite Mr. Kubrick's copious arguments to the j contrary. I i 116 unnoticed by first-time trippers among non rock-oriented critics. J There have always been love at first sight romances on the screen but the circumstances are quite changed now. In lavish musicals like An American in Paris or West Side Story the hero glances across the crowded room and spies the girl of his dreams incarnate. Suddenly everything else ceases to exist for him and the film becomes a quest in the strictest knightly fashion to win the hand of the fair maid. But for Julie Christie as Catherine In Search of Gregory, the dream image is confused with a real-life per sonality which is very different. "At the airport, she spots a giant poster of Sarrazin, an auto-ball champion, 25These very eclectic tracks sometimes merely sur vive rather than prosper as a result. Easy Rider's score ranges from Steppenwolf singing "The Pusher" and "Born to Be Wild" to Jimi Hendrix wailing through "If Six Was Nine" to the blues of the Band's version of "The Weight" and the gay good humor of the Fraternity of Man pleading "Don't Bogart That Joint" and even embraces the "Kyrie Eleison" from the Mass in F_ Major by the Electric Prunes. The Straw berry Statement includes Neil Young's DDown by the-RTverT T and""The Loner" from his pre-Crosby, Stills, and Nash days (the group chirping "Long Days Gone" and "Helpless Buffy Sainte-Marie chants Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" side by side with the ubiquitous "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and the "Concerto in D Minor." In theory this new approach allows the musical coordinator to choose the ideal piece foi the ideal moment. In practice, however, the pieces begin to function more on their own, apart from their places in the film, conjuring up old, perhaps contradictory images, drawing attention to themselves and their other contexts : rather than truly "touching the moment" at hand. 26in West Side Story, Maria is immediately isolated I from the rest of the dance floor by optical printer tricks I and a love ballet is danced by the two star-crossed lovers. 117 and in her imagination he becomes the embodiment of her romantic fantasies about Gregory."^7 When she finally meets her idol in person, they quickly hope into bed together * even though he is not Gregory and falls far short of her idyllic image. If the problems of Brief Encounter seem non existent to the current generation, real dilemmas still do exist but on other levels. There has been a change in de gree in John and Mary, where the good night kiss is trans figured into the good night, but there is still a basic, romantic viewpoint. "Am I just a passing train you want to board for the night?" --Brenda, Lovers and Other Strangers The result of the sort of brief encounter growing out of these love-at-first-sight relationships is not some soul-shaking quest for the Holy Grail of perfect love but a milder goal: living together until it wears off. The mod ern filmic relationships are seldom the sort of one-night 7 Q stand depicted by In Search of Gregory, although they may begin that way as in John and Mary, Hard Contract, or The Only Game in Town among many examples. However, the rela tively vague commitment between people not quite involved with each other falls somewhere between simple promiscuity and the happy-ever-after resolutions of all those musicals 2^Rick., "In Search of Gregory," Variety. May 13, 1970, p. ITT" j 28phe needs of dramatic structure require that the |^stars interrelate in complex, meaningful situations. 118 of yesteryear. In Getting Straight Jan bitterly complains to Harry who is accustomed to bedding whatever pretty co-ed needs a little help on her grades in his class, "I didn't know you were ready to drop in to spend the night. I didn't know you were ready to make that sort of commitment." It is not a commitment which comes easily. "There's something else you ought to get straight in your head, just for the record," Mary tells John on the morning after. "I do say 'no' occasionally." Even having said 'yes' the obligation must remain open-ended--able to terminate anytime. After their first tentative night together playing The Only Game ,|n Town, Fran tells Joe, "You can move in with me if you like." "Both of us free to pull out any time we want?" he I asks. "Both of us free to pull out any time we want," she reassures him. Because any lasting commitment is a difficult step for these youthful protagonists, they become very uneasy about initiating any sort of relationship that requires an emotional involvement. Though John and Mary "begins \vhere romantic movies used to end--with snuggling in the per- 2 9 , r cales," John would just as soon it ended at the same spot; the next morning he does everything in his power to dis courage Mary from hanging around the place. Another gener ation had to marry or whore to find a friendly bed; but this* ^"The Moonchild and the Fifth Beatle," p. 50. 119 one discovers friendly arms almost everywhere but altogether fewer friendly hearts. The unions tend to be brief but monogamous:30 a fidelity to the partner of the moment with another just around the corner. There may yet be a deep sense of love between the partners, certainly deeper than the love shared by the older couples whom marriage has cor rupted. Living together brings feelings of happiness as a basic result, not those of guilt, since it is marriage that is basically immoral, not love. Though an adulterous age of oldsters have somewhat separated sex from love in the first place, the teeny top- 3®An exception is Paint Your Wagon whose ancient plot;, was revamped into a sexier musical form for the late Six ties. Elizabeth, who had been a Mormon wife, cannot see why polyandry should be any different from polygamy in the eyes of society. She finally convinces Partner who cries, "You show me anywhere on the long list of ten commandments where it says a woman can't have two husbands." Ben Rump- son pauses for a moment and then turns to his wife to utter the line which brings down the intermission curtain, "Eliza beth, we will be three for dinner." Like The Graduate, Paint Your Wagon takes careful aim on social conventions. However, the conventions of the musical comedy probably spread a protective bubble around the bubbles of social convention. More typical is the young girl in Joe who discourages Bill when he presses for another meeting. "When something happens once, it doesn't have to happen again." What she has given him freely was the product of the moment, not the promise of the future. Bill's hangup is as typical of the older generations in these films as the girl's acces- sability and spontaneity is typical of the younger. 31jan in Getting Straight pleads that, "There's no thing intrinsically immoral about getting married and liv ing in a split-level house. Yet, as the fourth chapter {notes more fully, she finally gets straight, like Harry, by { learning there is nothing less immoral than getting married, ! and living in a split-level House. ; t I 120 pers also regard the sex act as not necessarily relCted'.to true love. A number of young heroes, influenced by the Playboy philosophy, are no doubt guilty as charged by Brenda in Lovers and Other Strangers: '’ What do I mean to you? Am I just a passing train you want to board for the night?" There is always a yearning for something more ("As far as I'm concerned, a tumble with a willing lady is nothing un less there's some kind of emotion involved," says Travis McGee in Darker Than Amber)^ but there is often the con tentment with something less, with the casual fling, with the simple fun aspects of sex. In these terms sex can function simply as a part of the whole maturing process rather than as its culmination in matrimony. It becomes the means of growth more than the end of it. Thus Newt's experience with Big Mabel during the thunderstorm in The Learning Tree becomes one of the branches rather than the tiptop of the timber. Similarly, the young boys in The First Time, Last Summer, and Summer of '42 find something that must be worked through on the way to love. Perhaps Igor Sullivan in Cactus Flower summar izes this feeling best when he explains, "I've outgrown * z 2 "Whatever its Production Code rating, John and Mary makes the deeply moral distinction between love and sex--and not only is sex better when you really know the person or persons you are involved with, but so is comedy." | Arthur Knight, "A Look on the Bright Side," Saturday Review,* ^ I December 20, 1969, p. 38. j 121 that stuff. Sex is for teenagers." Love is something else. This does not mean that there cannot continue to be attempts at pure sex without an emotional involvement--that is precisely the manner in which John and Mary begin to dis cover something more. Rather than waiting and wishing and wondering, the young lovers are willing to try, try again. In Love with the Proper Stranger Angels hunts down the musi cian who fathered her present dilemma, not to capture him with a shotgun but in order to find a friendly doctor to terminate her trouble. She is amazed to see her one-time Galahad stare blankly ahead. "You don't know who I am, do you?" Rocky does not remember her at all. Likewise, George Praeger keeps emphasizing that what he and Tina are doing has nothing to do with love. "What difference does it make since you and I are just having a straight sex thing?"33 Even the progression toward an end can become a sig nificant step in the context of these films. The bruised and battered (both physically and emotionally) Christine is quite a different person at the end of The Grasshopper than ■^Some of the adulteries in the films are justified on these grounds. In Bob and Carol, etc., Carol fears that her affair may have been ill-conceived until Bob reassures her: "Is anyone hurt?" "No," she reflects, "it was a phys ical thing; it was just a sex thing." "No love," says Bob who had justified his own affair in San Francisco on simi lar grounds: "Carol, we had sex--that's all." On the other hand, Wilma asks in Lovers and Other Strangers, "Do you think Susan'11 be happy with Mike?" "Why, not?" says John-j ny, "they've been making it for a year." "Could be just ; physical," answers Wilma. "Yeah," says her husband, "well j that's a good place to start." I 122 at the beginning--older, perhaps wiser. The cost has been high for her and the future dull, but inside there is a new hope and confidence. "When the movie is over, she has got ten somewhere; she has really won the knowledge for which she has lost in innocence."^ Having worked through sex, she is finally ready to find love beyond it.^5 "Working through" is the key concept here. The . , youthful hero such as Benjamin Braddock is alienated, dis placed. He is yearning for something without 'qhite under standing what it is. Desirous as he is of getting straight, all he can do is wander down abandoned paths and explore new highways in search of a meaningful world in which he can dwell peacefully. In the meantime his happiness lies in the fact that he has remained pliant unlike his fossil- ■^Roger Greenspun, "'Grasshopper,* a Rare Truth," New York Times, May 28, 1970, p. 33. ■^Speaking of The Graduate Hollis Alpert comments, "This film-bred, film-loving generation has seen that the ending is aimed, in a double-barreled kind of way, at what might be called general moral complacency in America, and also at Hollywood morality, which, from time immemorial, has: felt it necessary to approve only the sexual love that occurs during the state of marriage, and that, up until only a decade ago, took place in twin beds, with at least one foot of the man on the floor." (Alpert, "’The Graduate' Makes Out," p. 32.) The Grasshopper, ' like its much better models Darling andTThe Graduate, studies the differences between sex and love, with the damning and redeeming effects each can have upon a person capable of distinguishing be tween them.i - This may sound like a minor objective but it is something which Hollywood morality was either unable or un- l willing to attempt for most of its history. 123 ized parents. Most of all he is unwilling to accept the status quo,to be unhappy for any reason. Mike’s toad-like dad in Lovers and Other Strangers hits the nail right on the head when he complains, "These kids today! They're only looking for happiness. jf the compliment is not really !intended, it is still dead on the mark. As Tish says in Hellfighters, speaking for the younger generation, "I'd rather have one year or one day or one hour of happiness with Greg than the years of loneliness you've had." Even the strangely, perhaps diabolically motivated girl in Three into Two Won't Go seems to be basing her destructive actions on this same quest. She agrees to run off with Steve at last, asking him to meet her at the local cinema where "There's a French film on. I want to see it. It's all about happiness." The movie, of course, is Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur, certainly not the film Ella should be seeing at the moment. Perhaps the goal of all her actions in break ing up the unhappy, meaningless marriage of the Howards is merely to help these prehistoric monsters trapped in the tarpit of conformity to escape fossilization and find some degree of happiness elsewhere. The Howards.would have been content to keep on pretending, but as Christine puts it in The Grasshopper, "It's very simple what I want--to be total ly happy, totally different, and totally in love." The dif- I ■ ■ • ■ ^ F r a n k ' s wife, Bea, says similarly, "Don't look for I happiness. Richie. ItJJll. only. ma_ke you miserable."________ 124 ference between Christine and the Howards, for example, is the fact that she will stop at nothing less. "Why can't we go on the way we've been going? Why do we have to get married?" --Fran, The Only Game in’ s Town The youthful hero seldom finds his happiness in mar riage; he seldom looks for it there. Where once all Holly wood films were working toward this ultimate climax, now the minority of younger couples seek their happiness beyond the marital rainbow and for quite different reasons. Once upon a time the couple might have married in order to hear the gentle pitter-patter of tiny tiptoes about their dream cot tage, for example, but the prime reason for marriage for the young couples in the contemporary American cinema is the pitter-patter of tiny heartbeats already being heard. Since Jerry is already somewhat terrorized by his affair with Pookie in The Sterile Cuckoo and intent on escaping her crazy little love nest, he is desperate when she announces one morning that she is pregnant. "Well," Jerry still re plies cheerfully, "I'll marry you, of course." When her pregnancy turns out to be hysterical,^ not only the wed ding plans fade but even the romance. And, of course, preg nancy was the cause of the ill-fated Robinson marriage. •^The phrase used in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? jto describe Honey's false pregnancy which prompted Nick to imarry her. Rachel, Rachel and Three into Two Won't Go are [two quite diverse uses of the same plot element. 125 However, marriage is not the necessary conclusion to an unplanned pregnancy. For some the easy solution is an abortion, though movie morals and dramatic structure usually require a dire conclusion to the attempt. At best the trip to the doctor will itself be aborted because of the revolt ing- appearances and circumstances (Love with the Proper Stranger) but the successful abortion is usually a traumatic experience for those involved (particularly in English films like The Pumpkin Eater, Alfie, Darling, and Ifp the Junction"). ( The possibility of death always exists and after watching the gruesome climax of The End of the Road, not many real- life ladies in-waiting would want to take the chance. Some decide to have the child out of wedlock (The L-Shaped Room, Thank You All Very Much) while others, even wives, may go on the run as soon as they discover their state, reflecting in the meantime on what to do (Jenny, My Sweet Charlie, The Rain People). The wife who marries under the best of cir cumstances is likely to be charged later with having trapped her husband into marriage. The one who marries while heavy with child (Generation, Love with the Proper Stranger) is courting doom for sure. When the prospective ’parents1 in The Babymaker are questioning Tish about her abilities to forsake the maternal instincts by giving up her child right after birth, she explains she has done this before. ”1 was too young. I didn’t want to be trapped.” Hard as the ac- i ! i tion may have been, it was easier for her to give up the I 126 newborn baby than the love of her already grown boy friend. Many of her contemporaries seem to feel the same way. Perhaps the best solution of all is the marriage-in- name-only convenience of the situation devised by Jenny. To a certain extent all the marriages in the contemporary Amer ican cinema are for the sake of convenience or convention,3* * rather than for true love anyway. Still pregnancy seems the prime motivation among the younger couples. The line best catching this reason, which is so often taken for granted in the movies, comes from the Broadway musical, Com pany. Like Mike and Susan in Lovers and Other Strangers, Amy balks at legalizing her long-term romantic liaison for fear of what will happen to her love.3® Finally, she pleads with her boy friend, Paul, ’’Here we are having this enormous wedding after living together all these years. People will think I'm pregnant." 3 8 Kaleidoscope tugged at the conventionality of mar riage and the happy ending back in 1966, when it did not dare to do much more in an adventure-thriller context. Bar ney says at the end, "Come on, Angel. Time to get married." She answers, "I wish we didn't have to. I mean, I love you completely and foreverly . . . but I wish we didn't have to get married and be like everybody else. Is living in sin a crime?" "It's frowned upon,” says Barney. "By whom?" An gel asks. "By me," says Barney. (R.B. and J.H.H. Carring ton, Kaleidoscope, unpublished screenplay, Los Angeles: G'ershwin-Kastner Prods., July 15, 1965), pp. 131-32. Sim ilar in film. ! 39"if j marry you, you'll leave me," says Fran in J The Only Game in Town, prime among the many reasons to say "no." • 127 Of course pregnancy will be less a plot device to bring about a marriage in the Seventies than ever before. The Pill or the diaphragm removes the danger beforehand and the liberalized abortion laws distill the horrors of so many films in the late Sixties. Even in the films discussed in this study The Pill was already more of a fun item than i a moral dilemma or a social force for sexual freedom. It can be a source of pathos as in Jenny when the heroine tries to explain hoitf she happened to become pregnant in the first place. Delano remarks, "You might have protected yourself, but it never occurred to me that you were fast," pointing out both her basic virtue and her equally basic stupidity. Sentimentally she explains, "Suppose I took a pill every morning and nobody asked me?" Elliot Gould cautions his sexual partners in Getting Straight, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and 1 ^ Love My Wife to be careful about their preparations for unfettered love-making. In the latter film Jody calmly laughs, "Don't worry, I never forget," and then pauses wfth the recollection of the daughter whose early arrival began the deterioration of their marriage. Finally she adds, "Well, almost never." A sight gag of her pregnant again follows immediately, apt indication of the brainlessness which drives Richard's affections elsewhere. On the face of it the stewardess's explanation in Airport I jmakes more sense. "I stopped taking the pills because I i [kept gaining weight, so instead of being plump, I'm pregl_,j 128 nant." Although Prudence and the Pill is the chief comic statement of all the difficulties of taking or not taking your Pill a day to keep the doctor away, Neil's angry re torts in Goodbye, Columbus, when he discovers that Brenda has not been taking the necessary precautions, sum up the xvhole situation in a sentence or two. "How can a sensible, middle-class Jewish girl go to bed night after night with somebody and not use any precautions whatsoever? Don't you know they make babies that way?"40 Neil trots her off to ^The xvhole passage throws light on the attitudes of youth toward sexual matters and is well worth quoting even at some length. It sounds, at times, as if it were lifted directly from The Graduate or Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (all three were products of completely different pro duction teams) which may indicate something of the contin uity of tone running through all the films. The scene takes place early one morning when the illicit lovers are shower ing together on the top floor of the family mansion. Neil: "I meant to ask you--about those pills, don't you have to take them in the morning, or doesn't it make any difference when you take them?" Brenda: "I don't take them." Neil: (Dropping the soap) "What did you say?" Brenda: "Hard, rub.!! ' > ' '’ Neil: "Brenda." Brendaf "Really hard." Neil: "What do you take?" Brenda: "Nothing. Turn off the water.” Neil: "Nothing." Brenda: "Listen, I tried the pills but they made me fat and they made me sick and besides every single day you read something new about them in the paper. So I decided I was better off with nothing." Neil: "Brenda, I'd like to talk to you about nothing. You mean nothing?" Brenda: (Hearing a cough nearby) "Is that Julia get ting up?" Neil: "You don't mean nothing." Brenda: "Hurry up, get out of here." Neil: "That's all you're worried about, that someone's 129 the friendly neighborhood gynecologist to be fitted with a diaphragm, but it is already too late: Brenda may not be pregnant but neither is their romance any more. Her thoughtlessness has rubbed the dream image from Neil's eyes once and for all.^ Though a pregnancy or social expedience or financial I conveniences may urge some couples into marriage, very few enter its sacred gates from the motive of love. An excep tion might be the hoary old romantic comedy dressed up like a frothy now film, something like How to Commit Marriage or one of the limping comedies based on a Broadway corigirial;. In general, even after living together for years the couple does not see marriage as a desirable end. More likely, going to find me in here?" Brenda: "What's the matter with you? Can't you hear that somebody's getting up?" Neil:' "How can a sensible, middle-class Jewish girl go to bed night after night with somebody and not use any precaution whatsoever? Don't you know they make babies that way?" If Brenda's preventative methods leave a little to be de sired, her attitude seems amazingly true to form otherwise. ^The final breach comes when Brenda's mother finds the diaphragm while Brenda is away at college. Neil first explodes at her stupidity and then sees the multi-dimen- sional aspects of her action. Why did Brenda leave the de vice where Mrs. Patimkin was almost certain to find it? "The film wisely leaves the audience with the same unre solved question with which the book ends: did Brenda want her mo ther to discover their affair because she was tired of Neil or because she felt guilty about going against the traditional morality of her parents; or because she wanted to force him to make a decision about them and their af- j i fair?" ("Goodbye, Columbus," Catholic Film Newsletter, ! April 15, 1969 , p. 26.) TITe answer must be multi-levelled.j 130 they will panic in its face as Mike does during the main titles for Lovers and Other Strangers: Mike: "Wake up!" Susan: "What is it? It's three o'clock in the morn ing!" Mike: "I'm not getting married. Remember what I said to you--'Susan, if I ask you to marry me, can I take it back if I want to' and you said I could, didn't you? Well, I'm taking it back. That's all, I'm taking it back." "Taking it back” makes far more sense than "going ahead with it." In the latter case the couples are almost traitors as Kelly reasons in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "Our gen eration fights a sex revolution and they get married. It's war, of course, but be careful not to get caught on the wrong side of no man's land. The chief fact of life for most young people in these films is the acute realization that everyone around them is breaking up, that all the marriages are going down the drain. One of Cathy's friends in The April Fools expresses this concern so well when she sees that the Gunthers are split ting up: "If two guys like you and Ted can't make it, what hope is there for the rest of us?" Cathy and Howard got some of their inspiration from the Greenlaws who found hap piness in marriage despite their years, but that couple was a lonely example not only within the context of The April Disparaging as she is of her youthful aunt and her iboy friend, Kelly herself is part of a triple wedding cere- !mony at fade-out time in the typical Meyer moral ending. 131 Fools but even within the wider cross-section of films in general. The point of most of the films is simply that there is no hope, anywhere, anytime. Even the contemporary commitment of living together is too much for many of the protagonists. At best it is the sort of halfway house suggested to The President's An alyst by his new girl friend when he proposes that they marry. "We could live together for a while,” she counters, "and then, if it worked out, we could get married.” Yet is her intention to work things out or to put them off for ever? In 3^ in the Attic Paxton Quigley spends the summer living with a college girl friend. When her parents find out the identity of her sometime roommate, they are irate. Finally the father bets he can get rid of Paxton simply by allowing him to love his daughter. Sure enough, when Toby offers him a semi-permanent arrangement, Paxton backs down, frightened of even that much of a restriction. As one of his buddies remarks, ”Once they start testing you ...” Love is the fearful thing because it can lead to marriage which may put an end to love. Fran cannot even bear to admit she loves Joe because for him the only game in town is marriage. "Say it," Joe pleads. "I can't.” "You can," he insists, "if I can say it, you can." Finally she utters her confession, her commitment to love: "I love you." 132 "It doesn’t matter who you sleep with, it's who you love.” --Colin Slade, Uj) in the Cellar As the couple settles into their relationship, whe ther actually married or not, they begin to mirror their parents. On their first night together in The Only Game in Town, Joe and Fran play a game, pretending that they have been married for years. Joe asks, "How long we been mar-) ried?" "Seems like forever," Fran replies. "If it weren't for the children I’d leave," says Joe. "Let's abandon T Z them!" A night together and they are already feeling the knots tightening. As The Babymaker becomes more and more domesticated through her pregnancy, her relationship with Frank falls apart, particularly due to an "Odd Couple" dis agreement over the housekeeping. And, the more demands Rayette makes on Bobby in Five Easy Pieces, the firmer his quivering resolve to go somewhere, anywhere new. As Benjamin and Elaine settle into their places in the back of the getaway bus speeding away from their fam ilies, the camera holds steadily on them as they become in creasingly restless under its searching eye like the sub jects of a Warhol improvisation slowly shedding inhibitions. Their spur of the moment movement toward love slowly changes from elated happiness to somber reflection. Though their relationship begins on an initially loftier plane than theii Jparents', yet their long-term prospects hardly seem any | more promising as director Mike Nichols has repeatedly j 133 stressed even apart from the convincing evidence of the film itself. Nichols insists, Benjamin is terrifically lost, rebellious. He’s always caught, behind a glass wall, under water. At the end he is just as lost as he was in the beginning. People say the second half of the film is romantic. But it’s not. I’m setting up a trap. I think 10 minutes after the bus leaves, the girl will say to him, "My God, I have no clothes!" At least they're out of the terrible world they lived in, but they're not to be envied. I think Benjamin will end up like his p a r e n t s .43 j Once the film has been completed the shot and all it implie^1 I must be understood from the work of art itself, not from the words of the director. Many of the young people in the audience were so alive to the feat which Ben accomplished in shaking loose from his drowning environment that they missed the full impact of the final shot. Still, it was certainly there to be grasped. Fellow director Richard Brooks found the implications clear and stated them with his customary bluntness, even though he thought he was ar riving at a conclusion not really intended by Nichols. See this is the only thing that was wrong with The Grad uate , which I thought was pretty good. Goddam it, he knows how to make a film. But you say at the end of this picture, "You mean to say this fellow pulls this girl out of this church, and they run away to get mar ried." If you let the picture go another two minutes, to the next morning, this has got to be a d i s a s t e r . 44 A *7 ^Quoting directly from Nichols’ lecture at Brandeis University. Leslie Aldridge, "Who’s Afraid of the Under graduate?" New York Times, Feb. 18, 1968, II p. 15. 44 Quoting from an interview with Brooks in Directors at Work, Bernard R. Kantor, Irwin R. Blacker, and Anne Kra mer , eds., (New York: Funk § Wagnalls, 1970), p. 56. 134 Whether or not this conclusion is fully justified by the shot itself, the character of Benjamin, much as it has changed along with the nature of the film itself, does not really suggest a totally bright future nor an overly happy- ever-after ending.45 The ending has provoked lively debate in several other areas besides the simple question of how happy it actually is, including a battle among critics and viewers and even the author of the original novel. This contro versy forms a useful tool for summarizing the attitudes not only of Benjamin but of the other young protagonists both of the current cinema and in the audience watching it. Although the screenplay is amazingly faithful to its source in plot development and especially in the actual dia logue, there is one quite notable change toward the end of the film. When Benjamin arrives at the church, the doors have been locked against his onslaught so the novel pic tures his rapid climb to the choir loft where he sees the terrible sight below: Carl Smith is waiting at the altar rail and Elaine is marching up the aisle to the somber ^*>”Even the 'happy' ending is shot in such a way that we are patently meant to feel that the young couple's future is hopelessly overshadowed by--what? Incest? The | primal curse? Anyway, whatever it is, it must be something l quite reassuringly nasty,” says John Russell Taylor in his 1 review, "A Film for the Great Lost Generation?” in The_' . J Times, August 8, 1968, p. 12. Forced to stare at tEem, the viewer must agree their non-wedding bed is studded with ■ ^ j thorns as well as roses. _ j 135 cadence of the massive organ. He screams her name and the organ stops. He threatens to jump from the loft when her father grabs Elaine and pulls her to her place at the rail. The minister opens his book and prepares to begin so Ben jamin screams again. Elaine turns again toward the plead ing voice, this time for good, and a free-for-all ensues with Benjamin eventually slugging Carl, Mr. Robinson, and even the minister into submission. They escape from the Church together and run several blocks to catch their magic bus to nowhere. Nichols1 'vers ion of The Graduate is quite similar except for one significant difference: when Benjamin fin ally climbs to the choir loft and looks out on the v i e w , 46 the organ is playing a recessional rather than a proces sional --the ceremony has already taken place. ’ ’The dis traught Benjamin, madly seeking his lost Elaine--the pure, the good, the holy--manages to reach the church, but not -? •' . (as is invariably the case in a Doris Day movie) in 48 ~ * ' time ...” and author Webb, for one, finds it completely out of keeping with Benjamin's character. He argued his case in a letter to the New Republic, complaining about A. f\ The choir loft, significantly, like so much of Ben jamin's world, is totally enclosed in glass so that he must shout with the sounds of silence. He is heard at last. ^Alpert, '"The Graduate' Makes Out,” p. 32. j 48 Ibid. ! 136 Stanley Kauffmann's two laudatory reviews of the film and his special enthusiasm for the film's basic morality. "What is truly daring," claimed Kauffmann, "and therefore refreshing, is the film's moral s t a n c e . "^9 Webb protests that the film is precisely and ultimately immoral just where the original novel was most notably moral. As a moral person he does not disrespect the institu tion of marriage. In the book the strength of the climax is that his moral attitudes make it necessary for him to reach the girl before she becomes the wife of somebody else, which he does. In the film version it makes no difference whether he gets there in time or not. As such, there is little difference between his relationship to Mrs. Robinson and his relationship to Elaine, both of them being essentially immoral.50 Webb also distinguishes between the Benjamin of theffirst half of the film, who, although still a "highly moral per son" in Webb's judgment, "evinces a cynicism and defeatism which are clearly a reflection of the society he finds him self in. In the second half of the book he overcomes these r * 1 feelings of self-defeat, or at least begins to. Pre cisely because of the change that has taken place in Ben jamin due to the influx of love from Elaine, he would not fall into the same sort of moral decadence as he did in his relationship with Mrs. Robinson according to Ben's creator. 4 9 Kauffmann, "Cum Laude," p. 22. "^Charles Webb, "Letters to the Editor," New Repub- ;lie, May 4, 1968, p. 40. I 51Ibid. 137 Webb seems to have missed a key implication of his own book. It is precisely because of his affair with Mrs. Robinson and the enlivening effect of his contact with Elaine that he will not allow a moral decadence such as her marriage to Carl Smith to exist. She wrote to him in her farewell note, "I love you but it would never work out." If she.does not I love Carl, it cannot work out and that is all that counts for Benjamin. Elaine is racked only for a moment by the tortuous decision she must make. Should she be faithful to her.newly acquired marital vows simply for the sake of up holding them or should she choose love with no regard for social conventions? The choice is obvious to her, a choice which would be just as obvious after ten years of marriage as after ten minutes. The change which Nichols has made in the ending of the book not only avoids the last-minute rescue cliche of Benjamin getting there, against all the odds, just in time 52 to save his beloved from the worst of fates, but it also adds meaningful resonances to the themes of the film as a whole. More than anything else, The Graduate is about the choice of love over conventional behavior, the most signifi cant. of its many bequests to the youth films of the contem porary American cinema. Rather than give up the girl he C J Among the most eminent ancestors are It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story. Compare~~The Graduate j and its ending with the poorest copy so far, B.S., I Love YouJ 138 loves because society might dub their union incestuous, rather than abandon her to a life of security and limited happiness in the arms of a man she happens to have married, Benjamin acts dynamically. Mrs. Robinson may shout that, "It's too late!" (meaning, "You're doomed to a life of un happiness because you said 'I do."') but Elaine can retort, "Not for me!" ("I'll say /I don't after all’; I don't mind retracting my words in order to regain my happiness.")53 i The whole change in the ending fits so beautifully, so in tegrally into the pattern of development throughout the story that Kauffmann can scarcely believe that Webb is ser ious in his complaint.^4 "I still don't understand how the author of this novel, even though possibly upset at having been brushed off in all the furor about the film, can equate morality with marriage-licenses so absolutely.55 Is Webb, who wrote the book in 1963 when he was roughly a chrono logical contemporary of Benjamin, now in league with the Robinsons and the Braddocks and all those who caused this 53The difference here is clearly the youth factor of fossilization versus adaptability. Even after Will Cade accidentally kills his own son for Libby's sake in A Walk in the Spring Rain, she goes back to her husband with the excuse that, "Only the young are free to choose." Elaine would argue that she has committed and yet always remains free to choose. 5 4 At one point he even suggests that Webb's complaint ! is really a black-humored parody from the pen of Nichols' | old partner, Elaine May. ! 55Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, May 4, 1968, p.40. 139 rebellion among the young protagonists? What matters here is not whether the ending is the same as that of the book or not; what matters is how well it works in the film. Because of all those previous films in which the hero would arrive at the golden moment to res cue the heroine with wavering emotions, the audience is lured into the sort of trap of which Nichols spoke in the Brandeis interview quoted above on page 133. Brackman etches the implications very lucidly: Benjamin arrives after--instead of, as in the novel and in previous films, before--the ceremony is over. Benjamin's crying out to Elaine before the vows would mean simply "Don't marry him! Marry me!" After the : sacramental kiss, his cry means "It doesn't matter that you married him--or that I slept with your mother! We know what is real!" The chase to the altar puts us in a familiar frame of mind: We forget that the vows are only a ritual; the chase assumes a conventional ur gency- -maybe he will be too late! Then Nichols craftily steps outside the convention.56 The audience reads, the film on one level up to this moment, just as Webb appears to be reading and writing it. The brilliant change which the screenwriters/director make ^Brackman, p. 40. One reader suggested the fol lowing in a letter to the editor: "That Benjamin runs off with his girl after the ceremony instead of melodramatically interrupting it m the middle, underscores the triumph of people over ritual, of feelings over accepted patterns. The young couple will make it because they are young, be cause they are idealistic, as their older counterparts are not . . . The marriage ceremony is not 'obscenely inter rupted'; if it had not been interrupted, it would have been obscene." Heir Ribalow, "Honoring 'The Graduate,'" New York Times, Feb. 25, 1968, Sec. II, p. 8. "Obscenely inter- j rupted" comes from another reader's violent objection to j I the film's immorality. j 140 reiterates the theme so that it takes on a far more univer sal bite. Instead of the moral being "Don't let incest stand in the way of happiness," it becomes "Don't let any thing stand in the way of happiness." It is never too late to start anew as long as one starts right. The ending "is a bold stroke that is not only effective," says Alpert j^Tmt also gives the story more meaning. We now see clearly Mrs. Robinson's tragedy, that she was-unable to break out of the hollow formality, the prosperous smothering surface of her own marriage."^7 More will be said eventually of the ending of The Graduate within the wider context of Hollywood's happy end ings. In the meantime this chapter might aptly conclude with some final reflections on the film by Hollis Alpert. But, if that old Production Code has been forsaken, if Doris Day has at last been soundly spanked for her virginal sins, hasn't morality triumphed after all? Of course it has. Mike Nichols, perhaps without >fu$Ty realizing it, has lined up old Hollywood with avant- garde Hollywood. He has contrived a truly moral ending, and a most positive one at that. Honesty wins the day. Sex without love has been put in its place. Ancient taboos have been struck down. Material values have been shown to be hollow. As uninhibited and refreshing as The Graduate is, we are still left in fantasy land. "Most of us," a friend of mine ruefully commented, "still miss the bus." On the other hand, perhaps the reason this nevvly mature generation has taken so to The Graduate is that it thinks, assumes, imagines that it can make the bus. Mike Nichols told of meeting, recently, one of the leaders of the Columbia University rebellion. "In a way," he told Nichols, "it was what the strike was all •^Alpert, "'The Graduate' Makes Out," p. 32. 141 about. Those kids had the nerve, they felt the neces sity to break the rules." The Graduate represents a breakthrough of sorts in the Hollywood scheme of1-things, aside from its fine acting ,,;i:t;S[.^echnical accomplishment, its Vastly enter taining qualities. For it has taken aim, satirically, at the very establishment that produces most of our movies, mocked the morals and values it has lived by. It is a final irony that it has thereby gained the large young audience it has been seeking and has been rewarded by a shower of gold.58 V; Nqrwasthis' particular message of The Graduate lost on the conglomerate executives of the new Hollywood. With the same sort of total commitment with which their predecessors had launched a series of floating disasters like Sweet Char ity, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Camelot, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Star 1 in the wake of the titanic success of The Sound of Music,8 ^ sinking Hollywood in a typhoon of red ink, they now embarked on the luxury cruise of the Now film with the same leaky results. For every Graduate or 58 Ibid. 5^Aud ience research is a largely forgo-lyt'en area in film--executives respond only to what makes money but with little comprehension of why. Renata Adler commented in the New York Times, Aug. 11, 1968, II p. 9, on the two very dif ferent audiences that came out in huge numbers for The Sound of Music and for The Graduate. She speculated that movie moguls might yet tap other reserves to lead them forth from doom. Hollis Alpert noted a largely young audi ence for The Graduate in a random sample he took one Satur day evening in "Carnal Capers," Saturday Review, Mar. 16, 1968, p. 53. By the time of his longer article, '"The Grad uate ' Makes Out," the picture had changed enough for him to mention "older people have begun to intermix with the young crowd. Either The Graduate has begun to reach deep into that amorphous audience that makes the large hits, or the elders have become curious about the movie their off spring have been going to see again and again." (Page 14.) * N ✓ 142 Easy Rider reaching port, twenty other hopeful flagships sank into oblivion. Still, the films studied in the survey were a fascinating lot. Despite the faults to be noted in the last chapter, they will likely prove a far more inter esting group than the imitations of Love Story and Airport, which will soon come spinning off the assembly lines. 143 Summary of Part I _ From the survey which has preceded, certain similar ities and differences appear in the attitudes of the film characters studied. In general, quite divergent points of view toward the nature and substance of the married life are found in the portrait of couples married approximately ten years or more as opposed to individuals or couples in their early twenties, whether married or not, whether livirg with someone or not. The general trends fall into ten categories 1) For the older couples money, social standing, and sues cess often fill up the void left in their marriages by the absence of love. The youthful protagonists feel that it is money, social standing, and success that causes such voids, so they are careful to allow none of these, nor anything else, to stand in the way of love and happiness in their idyllic love nests. 2) The older couples often put'up a pretense of happiness as an external wall while they actually live together as strangers, having no common traits, interests, com munication, love. Their children regard this as pure hypocrisy and care nothing about the external show un less it reflects an internal reality as well. 3) The husbands find sex the whole meaning of marriage I (seeking it elsewhere simply for convenience) while the 144 wives find their meaning in the children and the home. The youthful couples try to find their meaning in a community of interests and interrelations, but tend to become easily discouraged if these break down at all. 4) Despite their anguish, the older couples are still a little too comfortable and a little too bored with life to seek a way out. Instead they suffer in relative silence. The younger generation is absolutely intoler ant of all unhappiness, making them prone to instant decisions whose long-range effects might be ultimately worse. 5) The older marriages develop in one of two ways: into a battlefield or into a stone wall; anger or apathy. The younger couples reject both of these alternatives. Yet the longer the latter live together, and especially if they marry, their relationships come to look more and more like their parents*. Thus they continue in a state of flux, ever looking for the perfect partner, ready to abandon the present one over minor quarrels. 6) The extra-marital affair is usually an escape from the prison of marriage. The temptation comes from a hatred of the present home rather than through the sexual al lure of another person. Adultery, however, is very much the norm since all these homes are unhappy. For the youth affairs come one at a time, easily begun and ended, since the couple lives together happily or not at 145 O all. Infidelities are simply acts of mechanical sex, unfeeling expressions of freedom, not of love. 7) The dream of the middle-aged man is to have two "wives” functioning in separate, complementary ways: as kinky sex partner and as careful homemaker. In place of this idyllic world he will settle for no wife at all or any wife other than the present one. Younger protag onists still yearn after the dream romances of yester year but tend to associate them with marriage. Girls seek less the security of marriage than the dream of happiness. 8) Both agree that marriage is a trap, the cause of all the problems in the first place. 9) Older couples decide to stick things out in stagnation rather than risk a new commitment which might be just as bad or even worse. The essential characteristic of the youths is their insistence on happiness at any price. They cannot understand how anyone can settle for less. 10) Married partners may try adultery as an escape from each other but they shy away from making a new commit ment. Younger people are very slow to make any sort of commitment to anyone; their trial and error procedure aims at the momentary experience with little interest in reaching a permanent arrangement. In contrast to their elders* dreary, well-founded realism, they are 146 infected with a jubilant romanticism which fosters all the same old love-at-first-sight relationships and a basically optimistic approach to the problems of life. _ j PART II MARRIAGE, MOVIES, AND SOCIETY 147 Chapter III THE MOVIE-GO-ROUND Although the subject of marriage in the contemporary cinema is properly wide and valid as a study in itself, it seems most valuable to look beyond this basic theme to its roots in the history of the American motion picture. Why did the cycle of miserable marriage movies arise at this moment in time? How involved in its rise were Hollywood's former images of marriage? What factors brought about this phase, how accurate was it, how long is it likely to endured By placing the survey within the context of a developmental history of Hollywood, brief as this one must of necessity be, a hint at the interrelationship between the films and the larger frame of society can be made in the next chapter, pointing the way for future studies by sociologists, psy chologists, anthropologists, and the like. From the very beginning, movies have been interested in the fairy tale dream of the handsome boy meeting the beautiful girl, winning her after the various complications made her loss seem inevitable, and finally marrying her to live happily ever after. Even films which would normally fall somewhat outside of this context are often revised to 148 149 be crushed into the familiar Procrustean bed of the boy- meets-girl story.1 Departures from the norm were few and far between, often resulting in financial disaster at the boxoffice. But what was the norm? A composite of all those thousands of love stories might run roughly like this. John and Mary meet quite accidentally one day, having lived next door for years and having gone to school at the same little red schoolroom, but never having really noticed each other before. Suddenly their eyes meet for that symbolically "very first time" and, if images of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress do not actually run through their minds in visible cartoon bubbles, their romantic attraction is no less certain. The boy quickly brags that the Rolls Royce handily parked at the corner is his and the girl is ^The director in Hellzapopin tells Olsen and Johnson, "We've gotta have a love story. "Why?" they ask. "We got ta have a love story because every movie has one," he an? swers. Halliwell comments on that truly off-beat film, "This crazy farce now seems insufficiently daring: there's actually a love interest!" Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer's Companion, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. 464. It was simply unavoidable and even the occasional war film which managed to accomplish the task would usually feature a half-clad victim of war's ravages on the lobby poster, even though she failed to appear in the film itself. Some times the results of following this basic law were quite amusing, as were the attempts to circumvent it. In their Faulkner adaptations, and especially The Sound and the Fury, screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. , would preserve the downbeat Faulkner feeling for nine-tenths of the film and then tack on a love story at the very end to satisfy that need, having done an honest job at least part of the way. 150 duly impressed by his Adonis looks, but even more so by his humble honesty in admitting his immense wealth so calmly and coolly. After all, the only thing she cannot abide is dishonesty. Two-thirds of the film then involve his des perate attempts to keep up the ruse, each one contributing further complications. Finally the bubble bursts and the simple lie has grown into such an avalanche that the girl is convinced she could never love such a congenital perjurer.) They break up forever, each contemplating horrible fates: he decides to commit suicide by holding his breath, while she thinks about marrying fat Albert, the millionaire's dull son. Just as she is setting out for the church, John drives up in a rented Rolls Royce, waving his med school diploma. Mary realizes her folly in ever doubting him; they run off together to marry and live happily ever after. Typical enough, if not in all particulars, at least in its general construction. Whether the initial meeting led to instant attraction or to instant rejection, a period of trial would develop, followed eventually by final and ultimate happiness. Or so it seemed for some seventy years. The very first famous film was The May Irwin-John C. Rice Kiss, which scandalized the world of 1896 despite its very quiet modesty. Yet it established many of conventions for the future Hollywood motion picture industry, as historian Terry Ramsaye pointed out so very delightfully in his charm- » |ing, A Million and One Nights: 151 It was perhaps the world's first educational motion picture: the kiss had come to the screen and the future of the art was from that day assured. Every development of the motion picture since may be summed up as a drama tic artifice for preliminary action leading up to the presentation of the same identical pictured ciimax, the "close-up, fade-out clinch." See any screen any day for specimens of this^hardy perennial.2 If no longer quite so universal a phenomenon, the romantic film was long the basic staple in theater pantries. The first genuine trend of special interest within the scope of this study has already been mentioned in pas sing: the arrival of Theda Bara and the various vamp fol- lo\«ers. From its heyday during the first world war through Murnau's 1927 classic, Sunrise, and right up to present day counterparts like the girl in Three into Two Won't Go or various campy parodies, the vamp seems almost the necessary alternative to the cloying heroine of the Mary Pickford mold who was the ordinary screen figure. Nevertheless, the vamp's carefully managed plans would always fail in the final reel, with her eventual comeuppance and the punished hero's contrition and reconciliation with his long-suffer ing soulmate an absolute inevitability. The end of the war found a new direction through the films of the pre-biblical Cecil B. De Mille. This earlier era of corn ground out of De Mille featured film's eye- opening discovery of the bathroom and the boudoir. Amid • 2Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 192(T) , p . 2TT8. 152 bacchanalian costume balls inflated with the heat of fre quent single-entendres, De Mille found fame and fortune by a foresightedness which is interestingly similar to the cur rent trends: De Mille had something with which to replace the plus that a star name gave to a film. He had and has a form of extra-sensory perception that makes him aware of an approaching tidal wave of public taste long before any one else, least of all the public itself, has detected the faintest ripple--or perhaps he just knows how to take a ripple and magnify it into a tidal wave.3 The ripple he chose to magnify at this particular moment was the occasional ripple of discontent between spouses. Instead of young lovers, his films began to treat of a happily married couple which was growing a little tired of the endless rapt contemplation of each other which was their movie heritage. It was a new kind of love story that departed radically both from its predecessors and from the trends which were to follow. Of all the innovations De Mille introduced to the screen of the postwar era, this was the most revolu tionary. Before Cecil 'love' was the exclusive preroga tive of the young and unmated; such married couples as were to be seen were drab, gray figures in the back ground . . . De Mille suddenly presented the movie audi ence with husbands and wives who were human, all too human, and he began his pictures where his predecessors left off, with the honeymoon over and the man and woman sitting down to dinner together night after night, pon dering their bargain. Presently appeared the serpents in their shaky Eden. Villains or vamps they would have been earlier, on calculated malice bent, but De Mille showed them as unable to control their actions, sin- ! cerely and fatally attracted to the married hero or j heroine.4 I ^Griffith and Mayer, The Movies, p. 123. 4Ibid. , pp. 132-33.____ _______________ I 1 5 3 I The typical De Mille ploy for picturing degeneracy, whether! i 1 . in ancient or contemporary times, involved the unfortunates; I coming to their senses just in the nick of time; here, just; when their marriage was about to fail. The temptation to destroy the marriage, unlike the recent samples of similar sort, generally came from without and fed upon marital dull ness rather than being totally generated by it. A reconcil- fati’ on. was possible, therefore, though the implication was ♦ , clearly stated that the couples had better shape up if they wanted their happiness to last. The films ended with every one happy, especially the audience which relished the vi carious delights it tasted, while feasting on the forbidden fruit growing along the path to inevitable punishment. ! Since some questioned his policy of portraying vice jfor its salutory healing effects upon the audience, De-Mille,- [ ;silenced the occasional heretics by abandoning ship just as ;the public outcry began to build, dashing off to the realm j of biblical orgies where no one could possibly mistake his :sincerity. If the censors found it hard to fault the ear lier products where everyone was dutifully married, they found it nearly impossible to cope with C.B. now that he had turned religious. A firm pattern was established for the future: show all the degeneracy you want so long as the wrong-doers are punished in the final reel.5 3This was the basic operative principle to be adopted The next significant trend for this selected histor-! I ical survey was the emergence of Valentino and a whole hostj of Latin lovers. All those earlier heroines who would nevet ! even think of sinful desires suddenly fell head over heels : for handsome male animals. The thought of raising a family : or settling in suburbia prodded along these ladies less than the animal magnetism of their heroes. With girls like ■Clara Bow having It, too, the screens of the early Twenties : erupted with a sense of sexuality seldom found before or since. f : However, on-screen Hollywood seemed somewhat tame :later by the Production Code. Just about any crime could !be depicted in gruesome detail as long as it was appropri ately punished. Thus all the perfect crime capers are ul timately resolved with the stolen treasures, somehow, and ; usually quite implausibly, untroved. This particular con- ‘ cept has been changing in the contemporary cinema also. For : example, in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, anti-hero Eli i Kotch walks away with ETs ill-gotten goods, punished only ; by the realization that his labors would have been less I Herculean and more bountifully rewarded if he had settled 1 with the girl of his dreams, who turned out to be a mil- |lionaire. In Games, after helping a husband drive his jpretty wife mad, Lisa calmly poisons him and walks away free with all the money. Perhaps the most ingenious case of let ting the punishment fit the crime occurs in Hal Prince's Something for Everyone. A callous footman murders several people and seduces every boy and girl in sight in order to win the lovely hand of a ravishing countess. At the moment of ecstasy her ugly, repulsive daughter bribes her way to wedded bliss through the most elemental of blackmail dipeats> But the criterion of a moral ending as demonstrated by The Graduate or John and Mary is that it grow directly out of the preceding action. Tn The Graduate everyone, with the possible exception of Carl Smith who had no busi ness hoping for any more, got exactly what he deserved in the exact proportion that he deserved it. 155 icompared to the antics occurring off-screen in the film capital. The never-solved murder of director William Des mond Taylor, the drug death of Wallace Reid, and the mys- ;terious fate of actress Virginia Rappe crushed out the careers of Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and Mary Miles Minter among others. The public which might have accepted such exotic events surrounding Theda Bara or Valentino |rebelled when comic figures of apparent sweetness and light became embroiled in such scandals.^ Shouts of condemnation 6The problem of scandal was a serious one for early istars and most studios put "morals clauses" in their con tracts so delinquent stars could be punished. Yet the film ,audience showed a curious double standard of morality de fending on the star’s screen image. Both the Knight-Alpert series in Playboy, "The History of Sex in Cinema" and the ;book Sex in the/Movies by English Critic Alexander Walker . (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968--known in England under :the title The Celluloid Sacrifice) document the frequent ifalls from grace and the curious absolutions granted cer- I tain stars and withheld from others. Ingrid Bergman was jbanned from Hollywood for several years after her volcanic ieruptions with Rossellini during the stormy filming of !Stromboli, mostly because her forbidden relationship con trasted so sharply with her screen image as a nun in The Bells of St. Mary and in the title role of St. Joan. With I Elizabeth Taylor, however, the loves and lusts led to gal- I Ions of printer's ink down the sink and little problem X' ■ otherwise. As happened with>*Mae West, the efforts of the public defenders of morality to depose Elizabeth may have led only to an increase of popularity for her on-screen image since the off-scfeen personality became such a perfect complement to it. Today, instead of hiding the news of such liaisons, the publicist or even the star is likely to spread the news. Another sexual maverick was Marlon Brando who "had offspring from Tahiti to Beverly Hills, all from dif ferent mothers, some of whom he married and others he did not." James Bacon, "Marriage: A Dying Hollywood Institu tion," Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Feb. 14, 1971, p. G-3. Matings like those of Katharine Ross and Conrad Hall (Look, June 10, 1969, pp. 33-36) and Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim 156 1 * for Hollywood as the new Babylon led to the foundation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1922 with "absolute authority to police the morals of ' the industry and to reform, or rather establish, its pub lic relations. "We don't censor the movies. We just tell the exhibitors what pictures they can't show." --A lady on a local censor board The establishment of this moral police force by the ■ industry was the beginning of a fifty-year series of vague 1 attempts to placate the public and to ward off both local and national censors boards. Cutting bits and pieces from films to satisfy local censor boards from city to city is i harroitfing both to the economics and the art of the motion (Look, May 13, 1969, pp. 70-75) were all the rage of the magazines a few years ago. The loves of Vanessa Redgrave .were similarly trumpeted at the time of the release of Isa dora in which she played a thoroughly emancipated woman. Other widely-known, less than legal unions included in the latest count are Michael Sarrazin and Jacqueling Bisset, iBarbara Hershey and David Carradine, Genevieve Waite and "Papa" John Phillips, Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas, Dick Martin and Dolly Read, and Julie Christie and Warren Beatty, among many others. Edgar Morin wrote in 1960, "Be fore 1930 the star could not be pregnant; today she is a mother and an exemplary one." Edgar Morin, The Stars (New York: Grove Press, Inc., I960) p. 32. The starts life often changes drastically to fit his current screen image. ^Griffith and Mayer, The Movies, p. 182. ^Quoted in Murray Schumach* The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (William Morrow and Company, 1964j p~. Z03. Un- fortunately the two are quite closely related. ! 157 * picture. National censorship would be more feasible, but even less tolerable, because of the loss of control and the easy access to political overtones. Any sort of stop-gap hodge-podge was infinitely preferable on a voluntary inter industry level. Within twelve years the powers changed radically and made the new Code office one of the most pow erful influences on the development of film art in America. In 1922, the Hays Office, as it was quickly dubbed, was just a prestige desk to quiet criticism, with little * authority and probably less to do than the job of Postmaster General which had been the former plum for Will Hays. Still iwhen 1927 brought dirty words to match the dirty pictures, I Hays issued a list of 11 "Don'ts" and 27 "Be Carefuls" for ; i film makers. Three years later a full blown "Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Mo tion Pictures" along with a supplement of "Reasons Support-. !ing the Preamble of the Code" was drawn up by Martin Quig- lley and Father Daniel Lord, S.J. The members of the MPPDA i (ratified the new moral Code on March 31, 1930 and it became the law of movie land.9 9A few key prohibitions that had an influence on the development, or lack thereof, of the marriage movies might be profitably quoted at this point. From the general prin ciples: "1. No picture shall be produced which \\rill lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sym pathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil, or sin." This (and the following quotes) is from the reprint of the Code in Raymond Moley's The Hays Office (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1945) 158 Yet despite the high-sounding prose and the lofty ideals of the Code, the situation worsened during the early days of the depression. The gangster cycle blasted across the cinema screens in one direction, while Mae West burst forth from them in every other. Finally, Henry J. Forman’s Payneful summary of the menace to Our Movie Made Children gave a pseudo-scientific base to what'every parent could see only too clearly with his own eyes. It was a moment for decisive action, for someone to step into the situation ■ with a plan. The house-cleaners who stepped into this moral vac- | uum were mostly church leaders, a little more basically • concerned with the wide-open state of the film of the time , than even the local censors. There had been isolated re- i i bukes from church figures such as Cardinal Dougherty, who i I i — 1 ■ I | p. 241. From the "Particular Applications": "II. Sex. The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing. 1. Adultery, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be ; explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively." (Ibid., p. 242) And from the Reasons: "Out of regard for the sanctity of marriage and the home, the triangle, that is, the love of a third party for one already married, needs careful handling. The treatments should not throw sympathy against marriage as an institution. Scenes of passion must be treated with an honest acknowledgement of~Human nature and its normal reactions. Many scenes cannot be presented without arousing dangerous emotions on the part of the im mature, the young, or the criminal classes. Even within the limits of pure love, certain facts have been universally regarded by lawmakers as outside the limits of safe presen tation." (Ibid. , p. 247) . 159 ;had outlawed all movies for his Catholic parishioners in Philadelphia, but in 1934 all the individual efforts consol- ; idated when the National Legion of Decency was formed to j I I stave off the apocalyptic catastrophe. The threat of mass j :boycotts under pain of sin finally gave teeth to the Hays Office. A few months later Hays was given the power to levy $25,000 fines against member companies who vdqlated the strict Code principles.^ More significant, perhaps, in those pre-consent decree days was a further agreement 'not to show films without the Code seal in any member's theater chains. I Although the Legion of Decency had been founded to !advise Catholics (and only Catholics) what their personal [ moral responsibilities might possibly be, producers soon ifound it profitable to consult both the Legion and the Code joffice in advance to find out how they would react to a I questionable scene. Even so, once the scene was put on i i jfilm, it became a whole new ballgame with the censors paw- I |ing over the final print with magnifying|glasses and sciss sors to determine what might undermine the moral structure of America. Bishop William A. Scully and his various con freres steadfastly insist that "The Legion is not a 'cen- 10, , This fine--a paltry sum compared to the income from any picture--was levied only once, and never collected.' Kenneth MacGowan, Behind the Screen (New York: A Delta Book, 1967) p. 359. ’ 160 I j soring' body. In fact, the Legion refuses to be categor- ! ized as a censoring agency. It is engaged simply in the ! imoral appraisal of motion pictures.Whatever they want | :to call it, the Legion was clearly happier preventing im- ;morality than merely condemning its existence later on-j 'The effect of the two-pronged attack by Legion and Code was to have a profound bearing on the evolution of the American film for the next thirty years. The technique was simple and the ramifications were ■ wide-spread. The producer of Tom Swift and His Magic Monkey :would submit his script to the Hays Office and they would isay it was okay with them, of course, but that the Legion !would be down his throat and keep all the Catholics from i :attending unless he made one tiny change in the . . . i |Despite this production foresight, the Legion might still i |give the film one of its two unfavorable ratings: B, objec- i jtionable in part for all, or, worse still, the dreaded C, j condemned, totally objectionable for all Catholics. B's were to be avoided as much as possible; cuts were often made in the final film in order to win one of the higher ratings: A-l, morally unobjectionable for all, or A-2, unobjectionable for adults and adolescents. C’s were the ultimate threat and no major studio was willing to be branded in public as a moral perverter by releasing a film H-William A. Scully, "The Movies: A Positive Plan," America, March 30, 1957, p. 727. with this rating.Any change would be made in order to j i avoid the limbo of a C and the prospect of a nation-wide J I boycott by Catholics. I ; | Since cuts and changes after the completion of a : film are both more agonizing and more expensive, pre-cen sorship of scripts and counselling on "difficult" situations was provided by both sources. The urge to tackle new sub jects or treatments was naturally snipped away in the bud, : Even today the stigma has not completely vanished and the company executives try to avoid having any of their major releases condemned. When the new screen freedom first erupted, the distribution arms ofthe studios would |normally circulate the C-rated films under the banner of jwholly-owned subsidiaries operating out of the same office. ! Main titles were often redone simply so Blow-Up could go lout as a Premier film and The Fox as a Claridge release, ,even though the profits accured to M-G-M and Warner Bros, ijust the same. Even during the summer of 1970, after most lof the studios had suffered the taint of condemnation, Fox 'followed the release of its back-to-back X-rated, condemned jgems Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls I with the relatively milder Move and was thoroughly shocked Jwhen the latter also rated a C . The New York office of the !Legion's modern equivalent, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP), was bombarded with phone calls from angry Fox executives. Once upon a time Move would have been shown to NCOMP well ahead of release and cuts in the "final version" of the ;film would probably have been negotiated by both parties in hopes of a better rating. Nowadays NCOMP has relinquished all interest in this sort of censorship and the dickering is strictly for the MPAA's ratings. Currently new films are still being screened for NCOMP's rating system, but more for the critical reviews in their nationally circulated bi-weekly, the Catholic Film Newsletter. Since the three Fox films opened in New York City the same week as their NCOMP viewings, their ratings were of largely academic in terest. Nevertheless, the files full of lengthy correspon dence over a single line of dialogue in Happy Anniversary or the darkening of a single shot in The Professionals are ample testament to the blood-curdling efficacy of both offices over the years. _____________________________ 162 ! before the final artistic achievement got a chance to stand on its own merits. More and more the producers looked to ■ _ i ■ the Code office to exercise responsibility for them, while they made a game of repudiating it at every turn. More and more they wanted to know how far they could go, what words they could use and what words they had to forgo.^ Arbi trary rules and classifications grew up tall while imagin- ; ation began to wither on the stalk. Confusion over what : was actually prohibited or allowed added to the basic prob- lem, but made little actual difference, since the general : attitude among film makers was an uncomfortable shrug of ; the shoulders. "Why bother taking chances?"-^ i -^Laws seem to come into existence as often through 1 questions as through actual violations, at least in the moral order. Since the censors held the top hand, the di- | rection of change was not toward the producer arguing that i "They showed this in a Columbia film last year; why can’t , we?" but toward the censor saying, "They got away with that I last year at Fox so we’re making sure no one else tries it.' Besides the current struggles for a G or GP instead of an R, the same sort of bargaining in the worst sense goes on every day in television. The network censors go over every line of a proposed script and their power is ab- . solute. The author, having spent the summer of 1968 at i C.B.S. during the height of the controversy over TV vio- j lence, could pour forth reams on the arbitrary, self-defeat ing nature of the TV censors’ reasoning, but perhaps that belongs to another book. •^The recent volume on the operation of the Code during these years, Jack Vizzard’s See No Evil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 197 0) describes a good number of myth ical notions about things which were not actually prohib ited by the censors. In particular, Vizzard, one of the Code censors for many years, points out that the double bed was never prohibited technically, but a harmless scene in the 1938 film Mad Miss Manton, had run afoul of the British 163 With the Legion pushing the sanctity of marriage, the joys of family•life, and large families (which always | became easier to maintain through the simple expedient of ■adding another member), and the absolute rejection of di- j ! vorce under any circumstances, the portrait of marital life| i almost had to be a rather blah bed of bliss. Meanwhile the 1 Production Code was pushing its own sets of do's and don'ts i with the absolute insistence that every transgression be i punished in due course. Though neither group really ;in;-. . tended the direct result of its own actions, any realistic : and meaningful image of marriage became impossible for many [years. Writing in the late Forties, anthropologist Hor- i I tense Powdermaker commented on the great similarities be- i tween the Hollywood taboos and those of the most primitive i : societies : I f c i Among the Stone Age Melanesians in the Southwest j Pacific there is a taboo on sex relations before a j fishing expedition to insure a good catch. In Holly wood there is a taboo on portraying in a movie any indication that a marriage has been consummated, and censors because of a double bed. ’’ Henceforth, each time a bedroom scene appeared in a script submitted to the Produc tion Code office, a note of warning was inserted in the letter, letting the production manager know that twin beds would be needed for England." (Ibid., p. 115) Vizzard thus discounts the prohibition by saying it never really existed in America, but the Code office is clearly using the Britisl situation to its own advantage, to save adding yet another prohibition to its already lengthy list of no-no's. Just as they worked so often in cahoots with the Legion, they are operating on the same procedural base here as well. In addition, it might be noted that Vizzard catalogs several undispelled mythical prohibitions. Still, the Same’^effect! for the same reason: to prevent hostile forces from interfering with the catch--at the box o f f i c e . 1 5 i Among the taboos specifically treated by Miss Powdermaker, | : i one has sp.ecial reference for this study: All suggestions of sexual intimacy in and out of mar riage are taboo. Producers are regularly cautioned that a married man and woman should not be "overly eager to exercise their marital privileges."16 In practice, however, being "overly eager" not only extended to the absence of the double bed and the censoring of a DO NOT DISTURB sign outside the stateroom door of a young mar- > |ried couple, but even to mild gestures of affection between man and wife. - * - ' 7 The strict prohibitions also extended to j I I any suggestion of sexual intimacy or physical contact out- !side of marriage. The passage of time was not marked by a i 1 s • Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, The Dream Factory j (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1950) p. 55. Miss •Powdermaker speaks only of the Production Code problems, perhaps unaware of the New York based influence of the Le- igion of Decency. During her anthropological expedition to Hollywood she interviewed almost a thousand people involved in one aspect or another of film production. Their exper ience would normally be restricted to battles with the lo cal censors. After the films were completed and the Code Seals added, the films would be submitted to the Legion of ficials by the company front offices in New York City. The creative forces might suspect that some sort of dirt had been done to their films by an alien hand, but they would rarely be consulted for advice or consent in the snipping. These were the sorts of decisions that could best be made by the steak and potato executives representing the power structures of church and commerce. 16Ibid., p. 59. 17"The MPAA asked for omission of a scene in which a man was buttoning his wife's dress and kissed the back of her neck." Ibid. , p. 55. 165 gradual relaxation of the rules, but by an ever tightening rein upon the creative potentialities of American film makers. "Why do all the stories end after they get married?" --Marge Wilson, The Happy Ending So the movies entered on a new age of innocence in i the Thirties. There were never so many penthouses in mo tion pictures, as during those days when people were jump- I ing off them. It was a basic necessity that the movies j keep a stiff upper lip during this time of crisis. j , _ i Hollywood proceeds in a mood of optimism in order to permit its public to forget the effects of the "Great | Depression." The happy ending becomes a requirement, a dogma. Most films are tinted with an agreeable fan tasy, and a new genre, the bright comedy, is enthroned I after Frank Capra's Ijt Happened One Night. i :Americans might titter over the quivering "walls of Jeri- i cho" or shudder with Rhett Butler's mildest of obscenities, | "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,”1 - 9 but the new movie I goddesses were not Theda Bara or Mae West but Shirley Tem- I jpie and Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien. Literary clas- isics, lavish comedies, and eventually war films crowded the I !silver screen for the next two decades. The second world war unified national feelings but the pin-up girl over every *^Morin, The Stars, p. 17. ^ Gone with the Wind was rated B by the Legion be cause of the line and ran into censors problems across the nation as a result of this most mild utterance. 166 k [ bunk was not a Playboyish foldout, but the basically whole- ' i some Betty Grable. "To millions of men in camps and com- j I bat zones, this girl-next-door ordinariness seemed somehow more real, more desirable, more attainable than those dia- 7 0 phanous darlings of their peacetime yearnings." This whole twenty-year period was a time of simple categories ‘ and simple identifications that favored the restrictive categorizing of Legion and Code. 1 Yet there were isolated images of marriage that were .reasonably accurate and meaningful, even at the height of ; the incubator period. The first and best of all these was ! the daffy and delightful pairing of Nick and Nora Charles J 1 ^he Thin Man series. "In the 30!s Myrna Loy and William | Powell gave us our first believable vision of a sophisti- ! 21 ■cated modern marriage," says Richard Schickel, who de- , scribes this vision a little more at length in his volume jon the nature of the Hollywood star image: j Together they created an image of marriage a La mode j which many couples, all unknowing, are still imitating. | Independently wealthy, Nick Charles affected a kind of I mocking indolence, tended to drink too much, and some- i times in his amiable pursuit of clues, to lose sight of ! the forest for the trees. He did the big thinking for the pair but Nora had a shrewd eye for the telling de tail and a deliciously wifely way of bringing him down to earth. Nick treated her with indulgent whimsy, pre- ^Knight and Alpert, "Sex in Cinema--Part XI: Sex Stars of the Forties," Playboy, October, 1966, p. 150. 7 1 Richard Schickel, "A Very Human Comedy," Life, October 3, 1969, p. 17. 167 I tending to think of her as a scatterbrain, a mannerism I which both seemed to know was a necessary indulgence of] his male vanity. ' Theirs was the best cinematic representation of the workings of the modern male and female intelligences, how they clash and how they mesh. In the context of detection these qualities were thrown into high relief, and the wit and style of the films, though glossier I than life, made them enormously entertaining figures inj a depression-plagued world that was particularly hard j on the institution of marriage. Nick and Nora reassured us that cohabitation can b e . . f u n . 2 2 | Reassuring as their winks and witty repartee made things , seem, the audience, with the firm assistance of the Code, : remained a little like Asta in the final scene of The Thin ; Man. As Nick and Nora decide to crawl into the lower berth of the pullman car, the friendly little mutt stretches out ,on the upper berth, after firmly placing a tiny paw across i his curious eyes. It was a fitting symbol for Hollywood's ;attitude toward sex and marriage during the next few i |decades. | Marriage was not absent from the screens of these !years, but the restrictions of the censors made it a rather jlittle splendored thing. The conflicts between man and ]wife were devoid of humanity and reduced instead to stock t jcomic cliches. The best known family portrait of the period ! was the Blondie series which had made an easy transition from the comics to the movie screen. All through the For ties the bumbling Dagwood Bumstead popped up like clockwork ^Richard Schickel, The Stars (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962) p. 127. twice a year. If no other couple quite supplanted the pop-I ularity of the Bumsteads nor seemed quite so typical of ! i I American family life, it is perhaps interesting that their | ! i eclipse coincided with the popular explosion of the long- running series of Jtfaand Pa Kettle comedies. Perhaps Amer- j ica had just been waiting for a more antiseptic couple all j along. i Whatever marital problems appeared in these films I tended to be basically superficial and easily solved, iEveryone knew that movie households were Cheaper by the Dozen, even during the darkest days of war and depression. When the father in Meet Me in St. Louis comes home to an nounce his bright new promotion and the family's happy tran-j 1 .sition to the big city life of New York, a few tears from i !his wife, Esther, and little Tootie quickly convince him to jgive up fame and fortune for the happiness of his little i (family, just the sort of decision that the contemporary films suggest no real life fathers were actually making. Although tensions could occasionally develop between movie spouses over alcohol or job pressures or even another woman, the couple's own incompatibility was never treated. There is a simple explanation for the latter state. Allusions might be made in a cloaked way to forbidden sub ject matter like homosexuality or drugs, for /instance, but there was simply no feasible way of treating incompatibility within the strict scrutiny of the Code. A whole shorthand was developed by film makers to indicate simply that the ! i couple was in love or that they had been unfaithful to their ■ spouses. Such legerdemain was hardly suitable for an in- depth study of the tensions of marriage, but, then, these ! were not supposed to exist within the domain of the happy- ever-after. The movies used to use symbolic substitutes for sex acts--a blazing fire or the embers dying, trains and tunnels, exploding fireworks, and so on--or else by a pussycat smile of satisfaction (Scarlett O'Hara) or a hostile look of frustration or just a bored expres sion. 23 There was no way of indicating much more. I Nor was there much desire to do so. The movies were : a fixed part of American life and the studios were most un willing to rock a very seaworthy boat. The Supreme Court had ruled in /1915 that the motion picture was not entitled i | to the privileges of the free press, since it was essential- i j ly a form of entertainment rather than a form of communi- t cation. Leave the messages to Western Union said the stu dio bosses, and just give the audiences what they want: reS laxation and freedom from all the realities of home life. ^Pauline Kael, "The Current Cinema: Lust for ^ ' 'Art,'" The New Yorker, March 28, 1970, p. 100. She adds, "Now, when the performers are naked and are either simulat ing or actually having intercourse, the directors clue us in by the same old methods. And it becomes ludicrous to watch two people thrashing around if, in addition to that, we have to wait for acted closeups or some symbolic action to tell us how it is." Ibid., pp. 100-01. If anyone had suggested a treatment of the very problems which may have driven some of these couples to the movies j that night, he would have been branded a madman and ex- i ported instantly from the magic kingdom of Hollywood. i j Some who tried to touch on the social issues at the j i core of some of America's problems received an even deeper,j I more lasting name of opprobrium: communist. The McCarthy , hearings and the House Un-American Activities investiga tions of Hollyivcod revealed that some of the creative art- 1 ists there, particularly the writers, were deliberately attempting to give a false, downbeat portrait of America to the rest of the world through their films. Whatever the ; truths uncovered by these witch hunts, one thing was cer tain: Hollywood was running scared and what portrait could i | be falser than to hint that some American homes might be ! less than blissfully happy, that some storybook heroines ! ! failed to live happily ever after? Why should anyone want | to change the profitable patterns that motion pictures had I | followed so wisely and so well since their very beginnings? No one really wanted to do so until the close of the Forties and then there suddenly seemed to be no other choice. The comfortable old patterns of distribution which featured solid profits for almost any film through a fixed, predictable audience suddenly collapsed. The chief factor, of course, was the rise of television. At last there was a challenger for the movies’ traditional place as the manu facturer of American dreams. The motion picture industry i reeled under the severe cutback in theatrical revenues. ! j ( Coincidentally, at almost the same moment as the ad vent of television, a crucial legal decision also attacked the roots of the industry power structure. For years the major companies would produce films which would then be dis tributed to theater circuits owned and operated by these same companies. Each of the majors would grind out forty or fifty features a year simply to fulfill this commitment : to themselves. The need was independent of the creative i process and could be satisfied by just about anything that I flickered on a movie screen. The independent theater ;owners were frozen out of the competition for the best films ‘ i ; and finally brought suit for unjust restraint of trade. i |After many delays the government ruled that the procedure I of one power owning and production, distribution, and ex- Ihibition of films was indeed a monopoly under the anti-trust laws. The studios squawked vociferously that they would be ruined, but had no choice but to sign a consent decree in l ;1948 whereby they agreed to divest themselves of one of their triple-threat interests. The natural one to go was, of course, the exhibition arm. At the time, the resultant drop in revenues was yet another staggering blow to film economics. However, the concurrent cutback in production due to the financial situation and to the fact that an ob ligation to produce a certain number of films each year for the company theaters no' longer existed brought about an eventual product shortage and a stiff seller’s market that persists today. Competition led to a strict survival-of- the-fittest film philosophy. The race was on to lure the customers back into the movie palaces. The first chase was for bigness and gaudiness. Gim micks like ever bigger and wider screens, three-dimen sional optical illusions, lurid color, and stereophonic sound, exotic aromas to match the filmic quality, and mas sive crowd scenes .were churned out to impress the proud 1 possessors of new black and white television sets away from the jumpy seven-inch image. But between free dishes and !bingo nights, the producers finally realized that most of j [ the customers would rather have a good movie instead of a I ilion in the lap. t ! The next natural step for the dream factory was to !produce films which were not and could not be shown on the home screen. Apart from a cultural and moral revolution, ;some of the change in screen subject matter was, therefore, ! |very clearly linked to Hollywood's economic revolution. Yet |even without the drastic economic upheavals in the Holly wood of the late Forties and Fifties, a reaction to twenty years of trivia would probably have been inevitable anyway. A radical change in the content of motion pictures probably would have occurred in any event, for the in dustry Production Code, long the arbiter of cinema mor ality, clearly had lost its effectiveness by the end 173 I i o£ the Forties.24 j i Now the rate of change was drastically accelerated. j I Even so, not very many of the newly independent \ ^producers had either the courage or the desire to challenge the system. In their turn, the major studios were still Iwary of both the Code Office and the Legion of Decency. The^ liberalization of filmic treatments depended more on the j [practical base than on the theoretical one. In this area no i one could match the Prussian pragmatism of Otto Preminger, iFirst, in 1953 Preminger released a rather innocuous, almost inane comedy called The Moon is Blue which was condemned by ,the Legion and denied the Code Seal because of its vulgar : language--mainly the word "virgin." United Artists distrib uted the film anyway, holding their corporate breath. i IDespite some isolated Catholic boycotts, the film made a I ismall profit. Three years later Preminger filmed The Man I —— — I [with the Golden Arm despite a specific Code injunction sg against any film treatment of the subject of drug addiction. jThe Legion of Decency had no formal, printed guidelines so they could rate the film strictly on its treatment of the subject,25 but the Code Office was forced to withhold their 24Knight and Alpert, "Sex in Cinema--Part XII; Holly wood Prows Up," Playboy, November, 1966, p. 162. 25The Legion was not really thrilled over the whole treatment, as a matter of fact, finding the gruesome drug scenes acceptable, but objecting to the low moral tone and the illicit sexual relationships with a B rating. 174 . seal from an honest film which they basically liked. The result was the first of three revisions of the . MPAA Code of Self-Regulation within a ten year period. Now responsible treatments of drug addiction were allowed. At the same time the Legion of Decency was ready to begin an ! overhaul which was related to the changing notion of the church in the modern world. In 1957 Pope Pius XII issued a memorable encyclical letter on the mass media, Mirandi Pror- sus ("On these marvellous new devices"), which began the ! Catholic cinematic revolution. An A-3 category was added 'to the Legion of Decency lists to signify acceptable enter tainment for adult audiences only, and in 1963 a rarely I used designation of "separate classification" was redubbed ■A-4 to cover the adult-adult films like Tom Jones, La :Dolce Vita, and The Collector. By 1965 the transformation ; ivas complete: the Legion had changed its name to the | National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and had given i |an award of merit to John Schlesinger1s Darling, which it I |would certainly have condemned a year earlier. The Code icompleted its cycle the following year with a completely new Code of Self-Regulation with just eleven basic stan dards replacing the endless lists of words and actions for bidden in the earlier version.^ How this relatively rapid ^^Among the various standards set forth, the follow ing are particularly relevant. "Indecent or undue exposure of the human body shall not be presented. Illicit sex re- r , ; 175 turnabout took place is most enlightening for the purposes of this chapter. ; ' I i I "They'd put fucking in Macy’s window, if you gave them a chance and they'd argue till they were blue in the face that it was 'art.'" --Censor Joe B r e e n 2 7 The Fifties and Sixties finally began the process of breaking down the.Code by the irresistible drops of water. i In the desperate attempt to increase audiences, producers kept slipping more and more sexual matters into their films. Many would find their best scenes falling on the cutting ! : room floors, but the tiny cracks began to show more and more. When the censors yielded a point here on picture A, ! they were also forced to yield a similar point on picture B, perhaps just a little less justifiably. In the state of j financial panic gripping the industry, the Code Office felt i I compelled to make the sort of concessions it would never | have allowed under better circumstances. | The direction that most of these films took was not j ! toward a realistic, honest investigation of love but toward lationships shall not be justified. Intimate sex scenes violating common standards of decency shall not be por trayed. Restraint and care shall be exercised in presenta tions dealing with sex aberrations." The Motion Picture Code of Self-Regulation (New York: Motion Picture Associa- tion oF America, Sept. 20, 1966) pp. 5-6. It has already become evident that the prescriptions of the new Code will last no longer than the old ones, if they still exist in theory even now. ^Quoted in Vizzard, See No Evil, p. 36. i 176 [ * t unmentionable perversions. Occasionally the aberrations ] ; ’ ! remained unmentioned, lurking in the background of obscure i i I references and dark glances, but the films began to feature them more boldly in an attempt to shock audiences back into! the theaters. The emphasis was not on the human qualities and dimensions of love, but on the "negative, unattractive, , and unhappy expressions of the sexual drive."28 The sub tleties of Tennessee Williams filled the screens of the ; Fifties, before yielding to considerably less subtle treat ments during the Sixties. | Another source of stimulation during this changing era was the rise of the foreign film on American screens. :Much as the artistic elements of such film makers as Berg man, Fellini, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Truffaut, Ray, and others contrasted with the assembly-line productions of |Hollywood, a key factor in the foreign film explosion was jalso quite evidently their free and open sexuality. If the financial landslide resulting from Vadim's And God Created Woman was one of the chief reasons for the nouvelle vague i ----- -------- ----- l in France, its epic closeups of the Bardot landscape were hardly less significant for the future of the motion pic ture, both foreign and domestic, in America. Contrasting the hard-edge honesty of the foreign ? f t Knight and Alpert, "Sex in Cinema--Part XII: Hol lywood Grows Up," p. 179. > 177 t .film were the inept innuendoes of the Doris Day films of the| ■late Fifties. Leering and lamentable as they were, at leastj they were a move away from perversions toward a fumbling j acknowledgement of human sexuality which had long been lack-; iing in the Hollywood film. In films such as Pillow Talk andj i Lover Come Back Doris was inevitably cast as a young lady about town who would sacrifice anything to preserve her |virginity until the wedding chimes. If the demands upon her seemed superhuman at times and if she seemed superna'ively l dumb at others, at least the implication existed that a real bed existed somewhere in the happily-ever-after land beyond :the final fade-out, and not some fluffy, ethereal bed of iroses. But if "professional virginity has had its Day,"29 the end of the Fifties saw the invasion of the British with 1 ia cycle of films which directly influenced the American marriage movies, the "Angry Young Man" kitchen dramas. In (films such as Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer, A Kind of Loving, This Sporting 'Life, A Taste of Honey, and countless others, husbands and j wives were seen bickering and fighting. Though they showed that a different sort of marriage could exist, quite removed from the Hollywood style, their ultimate effect upon Ameri- 29"New Pillow Talk," Time, Dec. 19, 1969, p. 78. 178 ! t i cans was dulled somewhat through repetition, the selectivity ! of their art house outlets, and their differing cultural j base. However, the ramifications of one of them, Room at j 1 i i the Top, were notably sharp. Joe Lampton's rise to the top ' was accomplished over the bodies of everyone who stood in j i the way. For the final step he had to choose Susan and i i success over Alice and love. The choice was familiar to j i many Americans and its outcome, in a fine sequel called Life, I at the Top, mirrored quite closely the marriage-ten-years- i - jafter films which form the mainstream of this study. Re viewer Jack Moffit wrote of Room1s conclusion: t The picture ends with his marrying the girl with money. With a final closeup expressing great humanity and tenderness, Harvey makes one hope and believe their lives, eventually, may be happy.30 Life at the Top almost seems conceived as an answer to this hopeless misreading of Lampton's rise and fall. However, t .the sequel was little seen in America, unlike its Oscar- iwinning, extremely successful predecessor. Perhaps audience (acceptance still yearned for a happy, ending to marriage. In jany case, Room at the Top drove yet another nail into the i Code office coffin by becoming the most successful English import of the decade despite having been denied a Code Seal. Changes in the movies were imitating the changes in society rather than initiating them. The Kinsey reports had | ^Jack Moffit, "Room at the Top," Hollywood Reporter, plarch 31, 1959, p. 3._______________ ; 179 j already tumbled across the headlines, indicating that not I i every couple was happy and not every individual was faith- j 31 ■ ful, before or after marriage. Americans found a new pre-j i i i occupation with sex. If Shirley Temple had been the pin-up ; i i girl typifying the Thirties and Betty Grable was her Forties^ j counterpart, then the moral transformation of the Fifties j iwas most appropriately marked by the Marilyn Monroe calen- ' ,dars. j i In the Sixties the movement of the Hollywood film was away from the unmentionable subject to the unmentionable parts. Nudity had been the not very well kept secret of i Bardot’s success and it proved an enticing aroma for sudden ly culture-minded Americans panting their way in and out of SlThe two chief works were Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell 'B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Hu man Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1948), and Sex ual Behavior in the Human Female by Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin iand Paul H. GeTxhard, published in 1953 by the same company. jAside from their basic act of calling human sexuality to Imind, the two volumes also indicated various statistics jabout American sexuality which must have surprised devotees |of the American motion picture. Among the findings of isignificance for this survey: Premarital coitus was experi- jenced by 50% of all females and ranged from 98% of all males with a grammar school education to 68% of the college gradu ates (Human Male, p. 330); homosexual experiences touched 28% of all females and 50% of all males (Human Male, p. 487); extramarital experiences of coitus occurred for 26% of fe males and 50% of males (Human Male, p. 437); and Kinsey even established that 12.8% of males had engaged in coital play by the age of 12 (Human Male, p. 162). Whatever the actual validity of Kinsey's various statistics, his figures at least revealed that movie audiences were rather more aware of the facts of life than their films gave them the credit for being. 180 ; - i j ,the art theaters. At first Hollywood began making relative-j ;ly barren product just for export, with well-covered dupli- ! i i cate set-ups for the home market. Then, as each film becamej a little more daring than the last in the Hollywood battle of tit for tat, the wraps finally came off. Neither the Production Code Office nor the Legion of Decency were particularly happy over this development. The 1 'former, still saddled with its lists of rules and regu lations, was forced to make some decisions that it did not really want to make, such as withholding a Seal initially i from Who * s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which the Legion then j approved for adults. Production Code chief Geoffrey Shur- j lock felt that the public should be the final arbitrer. Whatever they decided to see was by that very fact conformed with the contemporary community standards. If the public does not approve of what is going on in the motion picture jtheaters , it will refuse to go into them. Let the public be ! 3 ? Ithe final judge, Shurlock insisted. The sharply diminish- j jing attendance figures seemed irrelevant to his arguments. | At first the Legion held a steadfast line against all I Inudity. A stand had to be taken at some point against the increasing licentiousness; this seemed the ideal spot. Con- 32The source was a personal interview in Hollywood in! March of 1968, just before Shurlock’s retirement. Caught in a hopeless last-ditch stand against advancing moral changes, Shurlock had little relish left for his job at the time. 181 1 * demning The Pawnbroker less for itself than for what it ; • i might usher in, the Legion lost most of its remaining bits i 33 ^ of credibility among Catholics. The result may have been j an A for prophecy but it probably meant an ultimate F for ■ film censorship causes. Within a year the Legion had lost j both its name and its influence. ! I ' ! i _ . .--------------- . . . ---------- .... I j - ^ T h e Legion objected to The Pawnbroker in the follow ing terms: "An acceptable classification is denied to this .film for the sole reason that nudity has been used in its treatment. Although nudity is not in itself obscene and 1 might even have an artistic function in a film of quality, i it is never a necessity or indispensable means to achieve dramatic effect. The present film is no exception because the director could have accomplished his artistic objectives iby the less literal and more demanding method of indirection. The good of the motion picture industry as well as of the national community requires that a marked effort on the part ^of some producers to introduce nudity into film treatment j be discouraged, for such treatment is open to the gravest of ’abuse." Films, 1965: Reviews, Commentary and Ratings (New jYork: The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, j1966) , pp. 49-50. (The name of the Legion had been changed iby the time this anthology of classification remarks for the [previous year had been issued, but the original objection [Was written under the old title.) Commenting later on the jcase in America, Legion director Little justified the actior with a little more background: "Once the Legion approved 'nudity in films, for any reason, a dangerous precedent would jhave been set. Before long, the competitive pressures on (the average producer would most certainly result in a trans- ,fer of neitfsstand pornography to the screen. We know what we ^are speaking of, because in the last two years 34 films, of Jwhich 20 were major American productions, would have been released with scenes employing nudity had not the producers irealized that they would then have been condemned." Msgr. [Thomas F. Little, "The Modern Legion and Its Modern Outlook," j America, Dec. 11, 1965, p. 746. Msgr. Little is speaking only of films actually submitted to the Catholic judging board which then acceded to the demands for cuts in order to avoid the condemned rating. The changes ranged from the lab darkening Claudia Cardinale's first appearance in The Pro fessionals to snips out of the "three nameless broads'" m The Americanization of Emily. 182 1 t I The move toward film nudity was also a move toward j other sorts of candor. Adult themes were attacked directly j i instead of through mystic veils of symbolism. The reali-y ; * i zation finally hit the public that the motion pictures were j not just casual entertainment but could also function as | \ meaningful forms of human communication. This was the key moment in the whole pre-history of the contemporary marriage movies. The same audiences which took the De Mille romances as frothy fun and the English kitchen sink epics asj alien dramatic forms suddenly realized that the cinema could make artistic statements on the human condition and grew anxious to hear the prophetic words. Once that moment 'occurred, the doors were open to the realistic treatment of the nature of love and marriage, to the investigation of ithose problems which touched audiences most closely and i i ;deeply. i The most popular cycle of the early Sixties needs a i ispecial mention before drawing this historical overview to a i {close, even though it would seem to be quite irrelevant to ! jthis study on first glance: the spy spoof. Over one hundred ispy films were released during the Sixties, most of them aching to cash in on a little of the fabulous success of the James Bond series. Agent 007 typified the heroes and anti- heroes of the Sixties in many of his characteristics: a rug ged, yet handsome appearance, technical and athletic virtu osity in every possible endeavor, an ultimate coolness in the face of danger, and a casual deftness in the handling ofj :his eager women. Bond became the perfect embodiment of the ! i ' ' I Playboy philosophy of life, the heroic dream of the American male during the early Sixties. j The Playboy empire of publisher Hugh Hefner grew to j ;epic proportions during this period and its influence on thej sexual mores of American society can scarcely be overesti- | I mated. Whether Playboy simply tapped the drives and desires| already about to burst forth or whether it helped to create and nourish them to fruition does not matter here. Over- : I I simplified as it was both in its own essence and in its j exaggerated interpretations, the Playboy philosophy of life held up all the ideals of materialism that had grown ' _ Xl ^ throughout the American society and parlayed them into a i !single-minded pursuit of pleasure through the use of things ;and of other people. The Playboy is a master of elegant living, knowing all the tiny details of the best foods and i _ . Iliquors and life-styles,34 but most of all he is the master ; ^Examples in the Ian Fleming novels about James Bond jare really too numerous to cite but the best, perhaps, is the meal at Blade’s which consumes the’whole of the fifth ichapter of Moonraker (New York: The Macmillan Company, jl955) . This sort of knowledge is the aim of "The Playboy Advisor" section of the magazine. In the Bond films it was Tikewise a source of vicarious envy and satisfaction, even ]though the buxom qualities of Bond's various feminine con quests were even more evident. After all, if one possesses this sort of Playboy suavete, the women will naturally all follow. 184 of people. Women fall at his feet, adoring his masculinity and thinking only how they can best serve him with no re gard for themselves. No wonder Women's Lib was an imme diate outgrowth. The spy spoofs of the Sixties epitomized all the dreams of the Playboy world. Not only were such noble pro tagonists as Bond, Derek Flint (Our Man Flint, In Like Flint) and Matt Helm (The Silencers, Murderer1s Row) en gaged in the sort of epic struggle long familiar to film fanciers, but their goal was not just the immediate salva tion of some poor cow town or a struggling dirt farmer, but the liberation of the whole world from apocalyptic destruc- ^^Hefner has protested that his viewpoint is really not anti-feminist: "Though we are sometimes accused of having a dehumanized view of women, our concept actually offers the female a far more human identity than she has had historically in the Western world. It is our religious tradition that has tended to look upon woman as a deperson alized object,or possession, by continually associating her with its*antagonism toward sex. Sometimes the emphasis has been placed upon feminine purity and chastity; but whether they were considered creatures of the Devil, or placed upon a pedestal, their status in our antisexual society has always been that of an obj ect rather than a human being." "The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality," pp. 156-57. Nevertheless, the woman remains an object here as well, but so much more evidently one that the inevitable reaction to such a denigrated state had to be voiced loud and clear. The criticisms of theologians like Harvey Cox still stand, and one can almost imagine Ralph Nader launch ing a crusade to repackage the concept of woman after the false advertising afforded by the Playboy school of thought. Most of the male protagonists of the marriage movies con sciously or unconsciously follow Hefner's general tenets, while the female protagonists are just as sharply rebelling ( against them. 185 tion at the hands of some mad scientist.3* > Through it all they preserved a superb proficiency joined to a complete nonchalance. Flint discovered the killer in a tiny restau rant in Marseilles from the fleeting aroma of bouillabaise clinging to the poison dart he had fired. Bond, sensing a bullet about to strike him in the back, whipped around in the midst of a waltz step to use his pretty partner for a breastplate. Natural enough, since Bond and his confreres were accustomed to use their lovely ladies as "pleasure units" and then to discard them quickly after they had served their temporary role. Some of the middle-aged men in Chapter One seem al most like James Bonds gone to seed.3? Still fancying them- 7 The form of these adventures seems almost deliber ately copied from the structures of the ancient myths. The hero sets out on a journey full of unexpected, horrible dangers, defended by his quick wit and a protective amulet ttfith magical powers to defeat just the sort of danger that actually does appear. As he approaches the hidden fortress of the villainous dragon, he must first fight off the fero cious monsters guarding the castle with his magic weapons and then penetrate its innermost ring for a hand-to-hand, struggle of cosmic proportions with the chief dragon. ' > Often, like Theseus, he is aided by a lovely lady who has been victimized by the dragon and who becomes the reward of his priceless efforts. Bondian overtones and comparisons are countless. 7.7 Though On Her Majesty's Secret Service might have seemed a little oTd hat under the best of circumstances, its audiences (from the author's own observance and the reports of friends) would jeer with derision toward the end of the film when Bond proposes to Tracy. To go to bed with her was •the expected thing, but to propose marriage was simply un believable in the fantasy context which was Bond. Bond's |inarriage in You Only Live Twice had been strictly business, 186 selves to be great lovers, neatly balancing the demands of wife and mistress without ever really committing to either, they find their relationships stultified by the fact that they are based too often upon the personal satisfactions of the moment. They exist in a world of the imagination in which everything must center around themselves and their own needs. Having hoped once for the idyllic life of the movies, the dreams of Playboy and of Bond, they wind up with something less which they are still unable to compre hend. The direction out of their blind alleys remains a mystery right to the end. Two movements sprang in part from the attitudes that were so much at the center of the Bond image: the youth movement and its repudiation of the idolatry of the mater ial thing and the liberated woman's rejection of the worship of the female body apart from its enlivening spirit. Many films of the late Sixties rejected both the world of plast tics and the Alfie sort of hero who calls his lovely birds just like his seduction in From Russia with Love; here it was a matter of love and totally unacceptable to the audi ence. Variety said of the conclusion, "Bond not only falls in love^ but proposes and gets married, thereby threatening an end to the bachelor fantasies of millions of ticket buy- jing Walter Mittys. But the escapists need not fear. Ro!r'_; mance still lives. In the last scene, the new bride is machine-gunned seconds after the ceremony, by Savalas, sur prisingly alive after having his neck broken in a horrendous ibrawl with Bond on a runaway sled.” Rick., "On Her Majesty's ;Secret Service," Variety, Dec. 17, 1969, p. I T T . None of j Bond * s miraculous deeds or escapes had been too hard to swal-J low until he fell into the bourgeois trap of marriage. | 187 "it." The spy spoofs killed themselves off by sheer abun dance, but even the dreamy audiences of the Thirties would have laughed at some of these fantastic rhapsodies. For life in those times was not really as simplified as the nos- talgis world of the film would have one believe. What was simple was the vision of life which most movies gave us. And one day there will have to be a heretical examination of the clean and uplifting films we are all nostalgic about now, and whether they shaped us, or simply comforted us with evasions and left us to cope with reality as best we c o u l d . 38 Even in those times there were yearnings for the real world, the one quite removed from the motion picture palaces. It remained a world apart, through the deliberate design of the film makers and especially of the Code as Vizzard re lates : The Code was an instrument designed to present re ality on the screen not as it was but as it should be. Its purpose was to protect audiences from the reality out of which they entered the theater, and into which they were going to r e t u r n . 39 Yet much as the audiences might identify with Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire when she cries out in anguish: " I don't want realism; I want magic!" some thirty years of fantasy had to prompt an eventual response along the lines of Rosy' s lament in Ryan' s Daughter1 : ' "There must be more!" Somewhere, sometime, the American film had to turn toward 38Charles Champlin, "Judy Garland Films Reflect a Simple Time," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1970, IV, p. 1. 39yizzard, See No Evil, p. 20. 188 realism, especially in its portrait of family life. The change came late, when all the other factors in society were favorable to such a revolutionary transformation, and it was a profound and far-reaching one. Chapter XV THE MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND Somewhere between the search for fleshier and flesh ier subject matter and the real desire of film makers to communicate something valid about life was born the current deluge of miserable marriage movies. Through the new real ism of the foreign films, the copious writings about film as the new art form, and their own changing .lifestyles, cinema audiences had been gradually prepared for a medium with a message. Suddenly, a type of film which had never been attempted before seemed the only kind of film worth making. How did this happen? Perhaps film makers were aware at last that films must touch people in the very marrow of their being. Speaking of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Variety wrote a paean to the aims of the contemporary cin ema : This film's subject is perhaps more important to most couples than any war in the Far East or any economic recession. It's what's happening in the sex revolu tion. Morals are rapidly changing. People are more in telligent, more educated and more liberal than ever be fore. And yet, in our fast-paced, automated society, it's possible that people are losing their emotions, their capacity for joy, love, and understanding.1 ^Rela., "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,'* Variety, July 2, T9W, p . T T ----------------------------- - ------ ! 189 ! 190 Nothing can touch them closer than the intimate relation ships within the family. Hollywood has long been consid-^; ered, perhaps unfairly because of the wealth of publicity about the least of events there, the divorce capital of the world.2 Every successful star or director seems to have gone through multiple divorces along the rocky road to com- patibility--the sort of luxury that middle America has lacked due to conventionality and finances. Thus the filmic inspiration quite naturally grows out of personal experi ence. Back in the Forties, Miss Powdermaker noted how a sort of myopia could obscure the poetic vision of the film maker: But neither the structure nor the atmosphere of Hol lywood is conducive to helping writers broaden their experiences, sharpen their insights and become good movie writers, either as they wait for good fortune or after they get it. Their private life away from the studio does little to offset the disadvantages of the assembly line on which they work. The isolated sub urban quality of most of the areas in which Hollywood ^The success game can put a strain on any relation ship. James Bacon gave a number of reasons in an article on Hollywood marriage: "It’s tough to keep a marriage go ing in Hollywood--tougher than it is in most towns. When an actor marries an actress, there's a race for the mirror every morning . . . You seldom find an actor or actress who hasn’t been to the altar at least twice. Some of them have been married so often that they should be listed in the Yellow Pages under matrimony . . . Sometimes a couple will marry when both are struggling performers. If one makes it and the other doesn't, it’s almost a certainty that there will be a divorce. Especially if it's the girl who becomes a star and her husband becomes known as Mr. Star.” James Bacon, "Marriage, Hollywood Style,” Los Angeles Herald- I Examiner, Oct. 25, 1970, pp. G-l and 0-3♦ Bacon adds the I long, lonely waits between shots, especially on location, ! t h e f i t s o f t e m p e r a m e n t , e s p e c i a l l y w h e n t h e a c t o r i s o u t L o f — w o r k , — a n d - r e a d y - a c c e s s t o c o n s o l i n g , - a t t r a c t i v e s t a r l e t s ; 191 people live has been mentioned. The writer’s social life is usually with other writers, occasionally with producers and directors, but almost always confined to people connected with the making of motion pictures. This means a withdrawal from the everyday life which might provide experiences and new ideas for movies.3 The situation isn't quite, so bleak today in a world filled with the communications revolution and with movies being shot in every dark corner of it, but the basic problem still exists to a certain extent. The men most responsible for creating the original theme, the writers, are still the ones most likely to be cooped up in their Hollywood man sions, Even if they work from a play or novel, their ini tial attraction to the piece and a certain degree of the treatment still comes from their personal experiences and from the experiences of the other people around them. But there is danger of a creative overkill in the process. Limited experience, whether based on insights into the very poor or the very rich, can lead to generali zations that are drastically extended and oversimplified. The current state of marriage in the films may be an accur ate portrayal of the Hollywood situation and yet fail as a representative reflection of the American scene as a whole. Even worse, perhaps, is the tendency to project this exper ience upon everyone else, while very conscious that it holds no validity for oneself--a dangerous sort of ration alization, The real springboard for the dive into these i nn m i ■ ■ mu ■» "■■■"" I _^Powdermaker, Hollywood The Dream Factory, p. 134.___________[ 192 marriage movies was John Cassavetes’ Faces. Speaking of the inspiration for the film, the director stated: I was bugged about marriage. Not my marriage. Gena and I have always disagreed out in the open, we never hold back. But I was bugged about the millions of mid dle-class marriages in the United States that just sort of glide along. Couples married 10-15 years, husbands and wives who seem to have everything--big house, two cars, maid, teen-age kids--but all these creature com forts have made them passive. Underneath, there’s this feeling of desperateness because they can’t communicate. What’s worse is most couples aren’t even aware they can’t communicate. The whole point of ’’Faces" is to show how few people really talk to each other . . . In this day of mass communication and instant communica tion there is no communication between people. Instead, it's long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody's really laughing. It's more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: "I am here and I don't know why."4 This is exactly the feeling which Cassavetes conveys so beautifully in his film, but if it is not based on his own experience, is it so certain that Cassavetes is seeing through the shell game of American marriage accurately-- that he is not just reading his own desired notions into it? A million people see Faces and all its successors and pret ty soon the conclusion to be drawn is that Richard and Maria are the typical American couple. One could laugh at the Bumsteads or the Kettles and feel infinitely superior to them, ineffably removed from them. Even George and Martha with their imaginary little bugger might be dismissed as dramatic fireworks. But with films like Loving and John and Mary, the glass is held to-, close to nature to escape the ^Quoted in Bosworth, "Cassavetes: Why Do Marriages Go Sour?" p. D 15. » ......... ' ___ 193 glare. There is not just a quantitative leap in these films but a qualitative one as well. The realistic veneer gives an immediacy to the action which forces the viewer to assent both to its truth and to the ramifications of that truth. As such, this new realism may, indeed, be the worst sort of old romanticism. For if, as Webster says, romanticism basically con sists in ’ ’ reasserting imagination and sentiment and empha- i sizing individualism in thought and expression as against J the formality of classicism’ ’^ then the rebellion against a cinematic, sociological heritage is, in itself, a sort of romanticism. The neoclassical writer found his art in the strict imitation of nature, while the romantic writer found I his in a never-never land--almost the reversal of what is being intimated here. And yet, the key to the romantic imagination is the approach to the person: ’ ’ The romantic, valuing originality, spontaneity, and the individual and his development (rather than the stable group), asserted his own personality.”6 The whole purpose in a film like Loving or Faces is not the emphasis on the utter reality of the treatment, but the salutary insight into the personality of ^Webster*s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. § C, Merriam Co., I960) 735, ^Sylvan Barnet, Morton Berman, and William Burto, A Dictionary of Literary, Dramatic, and Cinematic Terms (Bos^- ton; Little, Brown and Company, 1971) p. IB. 194 the protagonist, a person who may well be quite removed from the world as actually experienced by a director like Cassavetes, or else too immediate, too unvaried a part of it. Perhaps by popping all the balloons nearby, one’ s own bal*? loon seems to float more happily. Perhaps by souring every one else's grapes, one's own grapes taste a little fresher. Nevertheless, the impact of the films suggests a personal involvement with the subject matter which accounts for much of their dramatic power if not also for their origins. Movies about marriage have become a special sub species of the art form, and for the most part they have been very good--executed with great passion and flashing insights, partly I suspect because the people who made them were dealing with materials which are extremely close to their own experience and their own urgent concerns.7 Most of the films show the desperate urgency of the best of the romantics rather than the cool detachment of the neo- classicists . Conjectures about the accuracy of the image of mar riage in the contemporary American cinema depend, of course, on a great deal of sociological investigation which has not yet been attempted. Enough for the moment is the realiza tion that the very sort of evidence presupposed by many of these films as facts remains supposition. No matter how heartily the film makers attempt to create reality through 7charles Champlin, "A Mess of Movies Look at the Mess of Marriage," Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1970, p. 1. 195 their works, they are still limited somewhat by its exis tence in the real world. The remainder of this study will deal with some of those limitations. "It was a marriage like any other marriage." --Jed Leland, Citizen Kane Though the films studied in this cycle differ on many important details, especially in the varying outlooks of the youthful protagonists and middle-aged couples, they seem to agree on the root causes for the disintegration of the state of marriage in modern society: marriage. More than any other reason, more than materialism, Playboy phil osophy, generation gaps, and so forth, the films place the fault in most contemporary marriages at the doorstep of marriage itself. If love-making puts an end to the dream of free flight in Brewster Me Cloud, marriage puts an end to the dream of happiness in the rest of the films Using the same technique of examining exactly what the films themselves say about something, the obsolescence of mar riage, the one sharp area of agreement between these quite diverse protagonists, will be briefly examined. The best thing that any of the films can muster to say about marriage as an institution is that it may once have served the purposes of someone, somewhere, although it clearly serves no purpose today. One of the songs in Com- j pany neatly captures this spirit: 196 And as for settling down and all that, Marriage may be where it's been But it's not where it's at.8 Either marriage as institution has outlived its usefulness, or perhaps, as Richard Burrows complains in I_ Love My Wife, people have outlived the usefulness of marriage in a very literal sense. There's nothing really wrong with the institution of marriage--when it was invented in the Third Century B.C. The average lifespan then was 31 years. But now. with penicillin and Medicare . . . it's ridiculous. . Longer lifespans and mobile, fickle existences make the lifelong commitment of marriage an impossible burden in the modern world* Marriage is outmoded at best. The younger protagonists look upon marriage as the trap which snared their parents. They are less interested in challenging it than in avoiding its sharp teeth. Why bother going through an ancient ritual which may well make them feel less married than they already feel, less in love than they actually are? For them, marriage is no problem at all, a straw man hardly worth battling against. There may be a bit of tasty meat left, but hardly enough to risk the wrath of the vultures and parasites still surrounding the 8From "Have I Got a Girl for You," from Company with book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, * 9Quoted for convenience from the printed production notes on the film, Murray Weissman, "I Love My Wife," (Uni versal City; Universal Press, Feb. ITT, p. 1. The line, singled out in the notes as the film's key concept, is substantially identical in the film. 197 decaying carcass. In Lovers and Other Strangers Mike strug gles to free his wounded paw from the iron trap of marriage before it snaps shut upon him forever. Finally, he pleads in desperation, "Susan, someday maybe I'll get good and stoned, we'll go off and we'll do it. That way I won't feel like I’m married." The problem, to a certain degree, is just the tra ditional, deeply human fear of something new and challeng ing. But a special fear is implicit in all these films: the fear that marriage will, indeed, put an end to love. The question goes back at least to the days of D.H. Law rence, and two films based on his works were released in 1970 to pose the query yet again. As the two sisters stroll through the cemetery in the opening scenes of Women in Love, the subject of marriage all too naturally comes to mind. "Ursula, do you really not want to get married," Gudrun asks. "It's bound to be an experience of some sorts." As a pram passes conveniently by, Ursual answers, "More likely to be the end of experience." Lucille like wise asks her sister in The Virgin and the Gypsy, "Don't you wish to fall in love and get married?" And the wiser Yvette responds, "From one chicken coop to another?" Ful fillment in love occurs outside of marriage for Lawrence, J in a passing affair with a gypsy, in an unconventional ar rangement outside of society's guise. Otherwise love is a ; J kind of death in which the lovers embrace most completely | 198 when they are entwined in death at the dark depths of a lake bottom. That is the way contracts and obligations work; they strip away the real potentialities for love, say these film makers. In Two for the Road, for example, Mark as a young hitchhiker says, "I have no intention of marrying for at least forty years. Not that I have anything against sex. It’s contracts I don’t go for. Promises of long service and good conduct.”1® Mark lives long enough in the ser- vice of marriage to see the truth of his words. He recalls the very moment when their relationship began to fall apart; Mark: ’ ’When did you start being as snide as this?" Joanna: "Right after we got married. Didn’t I?" Mark: "Did we get married?" Joanna: "Oh yes. Don’t you remember? When sex stopped being fun." Mark: "And started being official. I remember."11 Marriage stops being fun and becomes a deadening snare al most at once according to these movies. Its effects show immediately in the face ("You don’t look married," Cathy tells Howard at their first meeting in The April Fools) , and spread quickly throughout the being. The deterioration is a part of the essential nature of marriage, for divorce restores the well-being. Right after he gains his freedom in How to Commit Marriage, Frank notes of Elaine, "I never ^Raphael, Two for the Road, pp. 41-2. **Ibid,, pp. 88-9. 199 noticed when we were married, but you're fairly attractive." Likewise, the protagonists of Morgan!, Some Kind of a Nut, and Divorce American Style all see a new radiance shining forth from their formerly beloveds almost at the very sec ond the divorce decrees become final. However, the most studied statement along these lines was in The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom, a variant on the formula of The Captain*s Paradise. The lady of the title shares her home not only with a dull, successful husband but also with a romantic lover hidden away in the attic. Come finale time, Mrs. Blossom has di vorced her husband and married the lover, but now, of course, the former husband has been secreted in the attic so that he too can have a turn at being a lover. "All men are either lovers or husbands. Why not both?” asks Ursula in Women in Love. ’’No,” says Birkin, "the one excludes the other." Marriage presents this sort of dilemma to the pro tagonists: do they choose love outside the walls of mar riage or do they choose the marital status quite apart from the possibility of love? To choose the latter and still hope to achieve the former is a foolish dream, quite worthy of its inevitable broken bubbles. Even the wedding ac couterments suggest its arbitrary, strictly-for-the-record nature. A number of the English films have zeroed in on the empty, city hall ceremonies uniting the hopeful and yet hopeless young people, while American companies have bene- 1 f fitted from the far more grotesque obsequies of Las Vegas. ! 200 After the disgusting rites of Homicidalt the huge butcher knife twisted into the fat belly of the Justice of the Peace seemed a most appropriate tip. Hardly less appalling was Christine and Tommy’s wedding in The Grasshopper, with its careful depiction of all the empty ceremonies involved in legitimizing a love which already existed free and true and stripping it of its inner meaning. A cheap brass a T;; r i n g , 12 <iime store photos, legal forms, and the revolting rites themselves were all devoid of feeling, performed strictly for the record--and a scratchy one at that. Lovers And Other Strangers seems an exception with its deliberate shift to extreme romanticism during the footage of the wed ding, but the reason may be either something of a cop-out from the unconventional way in which it had been treating marriage throughout, or, like Love Story, it may simply be saying that even marriage can have some significance for the young person who makes it his own thing instead of so ciety’s. Similarly, the death of the marriage through di vorce is paralleled by a similar death of the home where the marriage took place, as shown in the heartbreaking scene in Loving where Brooks and Selma look at the bargain house which is now for sale, cheap. Some of the same tone is l^The wedding ring is the special symbol of their union and thus the pawnbroker in The Happy Ending, who^__, a trades in misfortune, tells Mary when she comes looking for money, "Lady, no wedding rings please. Who wants to buy someone else’s heartaches?" 201 caught in Alex in Wonderland and Divorce American Style. Yet the average couple has chosen marriage and they are doomed by their decision, left with quite crippling a choice. They can try the Arrangement which leads only to more anguish and an eventual, even sadder choice; perhaps to another, even worse marriage. Or they can choose di vorce. Although Divorce American Style paints a frighten ingly vivid portrait of the agonies of divorce, David sum marizes the question in Two for the Road when he says, "If something is dead, the best thing is to bury it. The quick er the better,"13 Divorce becomes the happy ending, thej out which only the best, most daring couples take. For the rest, the majority of middle America saddled with neither courage nor imagination, the third choice is the only feas ible one--sticking it out. It is a bleak lesser of evils as Pauline Kael points out in her splendid review of Loving: Miss Saint lets us see that the wife doesn't have many illusions about her husband or herself. She knows what will happen to her if he leaves; there's not much she can do except try to hang on, and it's a humiliating position. Her reasons are an elaborate blend of children, convention, convenience’ •-the same things that hold together most couples 13Raphael, Two for the Road, p, 129. ^Pauline Kael, "Recognizable Human Behavior," p. 32. 202 according to these films. Couples generally have nothing ' in common anyway,no more than love and marriage them selves have anything in common, any essential relationship. Thus this sort of double occupancy seems quite suitable. It even passes for happiness to the outsiders who are urged to "forget peace, forget tranquility, have children, get married, and be miserable like the rest of us."1^ Make do and make believe. Many of the films go further and challenge not only the practical working out of marriage in modern society, - but its conceptual base as well. Why would anyone ever want to get married in the first place? What does the appro val of society add to individual love? Why spoil the love which prompts marriage with the hate which marriate prompts? All of these questions pop up in Lovers and Other Strangers as well as many other films. Mike argues incontestably, if not quite convincingly in Lovers, "If you don’t get mar ried, you don’t have to get a divorce." The possibility l5In Goodbye, Columbus when Neil hears that some of Brenda's relatives have moved out West for their asthma* he is elated. "That’s terrific," he says, "Why?" asks Brenda. "I guess it gives them something in common," he says. "Only their asthma." "That's more than most married couples have in common," he explains. Much of the film's theme concerns these two young people from different worlds with nothing in common. Their marriage could have ended only in disas-'; ter. J-^As Frank advises his already mothering daughter in How to Commit Marriage. | 203 that one might live happily ever after no longer fits into the equation. Happiness is best found by the man who has "had the wisdom never to marry. He is, therefore, a completely hap* py man," explains Charles, the gentleman1s gentleman in How to Murder Your Wife. His master's drunken marriage will eventually prompt plans to carry out the suggestion of the title. Those who have taken the leap of faith are left to dream the impossible dream. Bound by the bubble that has burst, they find, like Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days, that the attraction of marriage ceases moments after the union is consummated, and the dream image swiftly be* comes one of escape from the clutches of marriage. The hopes and promises are great, but people change right after the ceremony as Irene indicates even within the innocuous context of Hello Dolly1: "We'll heat them all up and then drop them cold. It'll be good practice for after we're mar ried." Joking as her tone may be, the ghastly truth behind her statement would strike a dart of terror into the hearts of many of the protagonists of these films--not because it comes as a startling surprise, but because it confirms what they had felt all along. Marriage is a joke at best in these movies, as Crowther suggests in his review of How to Murder Your Wife: "Marriage is classed as a mere invention jon the order of the infield-fly rule. It is something to bej 'shunned by those uncaptured and rebelled against by those j 204 who are hooked."I7 It is a business contract to be entered upon in order to win a prize (The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) or to avoid the draft (Jenny) or when one is too drunk to know any better (How to Murder Your Wife, Lovers and Other Strangers). Even a marriage entered upon with full maturity and judg ment is likely to turn out just as phony and meaningless. Is there even the possibility of happiness in mar riage? When Jerry first argues with Brenda about love in Lovers and Other Strangers, he challenges her to "name me one married couple you know that's happy." Brenda responds, "The Burtons." A girl friend once saw them through the window of their parked limousine and thought they looked happy, certainly happier than any of the couples she sees close-up at the wedding. Still, this total seems opulent from the exchange the Burtons themselves made within the context of The Sandpiper. More typical of the consensus of the marriage films, Dr. Hewitt says to Laura, "I'm inter ested in your attitude toward marriage," and she replies quite directly, "I'm withholding judgment until I see a happy one," If she keeps watching the motion picture screens, her chances are rather faint. *7Bosley Crowther, "Screen: Plotting a Spouse's Demise," New York Times, January 27, 1965, p. 26. 205 "Next major institution headed for massive demyth- ologizing o marriage." --Malcolm Boyd18 If the happy marriage has become an absent element in modern society, part of the reason must be the attitudes toward it, as much as the institution in itself. For exam ple, some of the very couples who complain most bitterly of the way their marriages have turned out have entered into( this state under basically self-destructive circumstances, j The consent which they have given to each other is a matter I of the moment rather than the lasting commitment which is at the heart of the marital contract. Marriages in these films last a few days, a few hours.Infidelity is not the rare exception, but the common fact. The telephone al lows Cass in Midnight Cowboy to make love with Joe Buck even as she pledges her fidelity to her husband, a device also used in Love Is a Funny Thing. Much as Bob and Carol may claim that their adulteries are simply a physical thing of no particular relevance to their marriage, inasmuch as sex is the most intimate aspect of marriage and so very much at the core of the expression of its love, adultery be comes a profound betrayal of the partner which cannot help 18Malcolm Boyd, Book of Days (New York: Random House, 1968) p. 93. ^There are several examples of extremely brief mar riages on page 74 (below) but even more significant is psy chological infidelity already operative even before the I ceremony.______________________________ _ _____ 206 but interfere with the bond as Blood points out: The varieties of adultery are endless. Sometimes it is a kind of premarital intercourse for a second marriage, the physical expression of a new love which has already superseded the old. Sometimes it is a casual fling by a traveling man who considers himself a good husband. Always, however, it threatens the solidarity of mar riage socially by potential new involvements and psy chologically by destroying the uniqueness of the hus band -wife intimacy.20 Yet so many of the characters in these films have little or no comprehension of this basic concept in marriage. When Ella asks Steve whether he picks up girls on the road and goes to bed with them very often, the unhappy protagonist of Three into Two Won * t Go responds, "Not as often as you according to your little notebook."21 she points out with a logic and subtlety lacking in Steve and most of his peers that, "I*m not married." The difference may be slight in the contemporary world, but it still remains; to ignore it is to lack an insight into the essential notion of marriage. Even if these films and their heroes are seeing mar riage through a glass darkly these days, at least they are confronting it face to face instead of pushing it off into some musty corner of an artificial dream world far removed from the realities of life. The dusty half-truths that clung to the concept of marriage, covered over with the cob 20Blood, Marriage, p. 384 21 ‘’■ ‘ •Ella's little notebook rater her copious bedmates jon their sexual prowess, Steve got an A- because "nobody !gets an A.” 207 webs of Hollywood, have been blown free at last. A process somewhat akin to the "demythologizing” which has affected so many areas of twentieth century society has set in. The phrase, first coined by biblical scholar Robert Bultmann to describe his efforts to interpret the life of Christ in strictly existential terms, apart from the mythical over tones inherent in the mode of its expression, has come to signify any sort of decultization or debunking process. One of the chief contributions to this demythologizing ten dency has been the communications revolution, which has provided the wealth of information needed to fill up the spaces formerly held by suspicions and half-truths. Besides the theological interpretations of the bible, another example of the effect of this procedure upon reli gion might be the new personalism in the liturgical ritual and a humanization of its ministers, which has resulted in part in the transfer of allegiance from ivory pulpits to picket lines and ghetto gutters. In politics everyone has become an expert in foreign and domestic issues except for the colorless, undistinguished candidates for office. The whole system of corruption and bribes, which was known but tolerated in the past, has exploded into a dynamic issue.22 22ihe gap in attitudes toward the political rogue in' the Frank Skeffington mode in The Last Hurrah and the de feated Adam Clayton Powell just ten years later is almost |breath-taking. j 208 Mention has already been made of the change in the image of the movie star from previous generations, but this is only a slight quiver compared to the tremendous quakes and upheavals throughout society. Small wonder that marriage and the family were finally emancipated from the dreary image which had been theirs for so many years on the sil- ver screen. The twentieth century has seen an uprooting of all value structures so that none of the old reliables seem certain any more. Changes rooted in the extreme mobility of an urban based society of suburbs linked together by airport * way stations, in the instantaneous dissemination of complex political and social ideas, in the leisure world created by high wages and advanced technology,^ in the void of life values engendered by two world wars and the atomic bomb, and in developments as diverse as the long distance phone and the Pill have challenged the traditional moral notions of America. Film makers have been just as hard pressed as everyone else to reevaluate their own be-# liefs, and then to make them known creatively to the rest of struggling mankind. Yet, intentionally or not, in order to make their Or on the opposite side of the coin, the sudden j pressures encountered by the slightly aging executive or i | the aerospace engineer suddenly fired from a complex job, , I E.g. Keith Bose, "Fired at 49," Look, Dec 1, 1970, pp. 44-49^1 209 statements bear more weight, some of the film makers have attempted to set up a logical dilemma which makes all coun ter-arguments impossible. The theorem is simple: anyone subscribing to the vague possibility of marital happiness is either saying so out of a sense of conformity and con nivance, or else is such an absolute dolt that he knows no better, The couples who can no longer stand each other, but who stay together for the sake of the children, their neighbors, or whatnot, are abundant throughout the films that have been studied. Steve insisted in Three into Two Won't Go that "It was all right as long as we kept pretend ing," and Frances speaks, apparently for many of the film makers, when she answers, "That's what most couples do." The Howards share in the general attitude that marriage is a bad thing, that all couples are unhappy, that they are merely subsisting together at best rather than finding any sort of marital fulfillment or happiness. Yet there do seem to be some happy couples somewhere within society-- they can be discounted only by claiming they are a sham. H.L. Mencken quipped sardonically, "Who are happy in mar riage? Those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those so shrewd that they pre fer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.In Scrooge | - — — i w . iw i. mi w i— .mu. i.i 'I — i ■■ " ^^Quoted here from a chapter heading in Ruth Dick son's diatribe on the sham of marriage, Marriage is a Bad Habit (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, Inc., 1968J7 p. 33. 2X0 Ebeneezer finds a new horror: "If there’s one thing in the world worse than a ’merry Christmas,’ it’s the hypocrisy of a happy marriage with some love-sick female, "2- The situation is strangely reminiscent of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers: everyone is a pod except for the film maker of the moment who is telling it like it really is. No special point need be made of the dolts who know no better than to put up with the limited ambitions of mar riage. They are not portrayed by the contemporary cinema except as background characters to the three-dimensional conflicts which make up the main story interest. The clos est movies have come to this lately are the Currans in Joe, but the film was clearly conceived as Bill Compton’s tale with the Currans merely background material touching his problem. Peter Boyle’s performance changed not only If the Playboy shies away from marriage as an infringement on his sexual activity, the liberation lassies reject it as the most tangible example of their historical subjugation. Lord Henry, Wilde’s alter ego in The Picture of Dorian Gray, says at one point in the film: ’’ Marriage itseTf is merely a habit--a very bad habit," and at another, "The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception quite nat ural." ^^The updating of the original idea is intriguing. Scrooge asks his nephew why he got married and then mocks the innocent response. "’Because you fell in love!’ ~ growled Scrooge, as if that were the only thing in the worl<3 more ridiculous than a merry Christmas." Charles Dickens, IA Christmas Carol (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., j T964 ed.} p. IS» Some of the film makers feel, no doubt, !that Scrooge would be saying today, ”Bah, marriage!" 211 the title but also some of the emphasis during the editing stage, but the needs of dramatic confrontations and the urge to take the everyday audience at least to a higher level of everyday problems has kept this alternative to a minimum. "I've had thirty turgid years with you, Harold." -Charles, Staircase The preceding discussion would almost suggest a deliberate attempt at conspiracy among creative artists to present a false portrait of the world as they see it, in order to assure a greater catch at the box office. Neither the end result nor the means taken to achieve it seem seriously worth positing, except in very special circum^ stances. Yet there do seem to be some valid reasons for suspecting at least subconscious conditioning which may have led to an at least incidentally false portrayal of marriage. One factor already mentioned is the somewhat extraordinary divorce rate among the top film makers and Hollywood execu« tives. Another reason may be the alleged high proportion of homosexuals in the creative arts. The Broadway theater has long been conscious of the homosexual influence of a good number of playwrights, actors, directors, and other craftsmen on the subject matter and the treatment of many of its plays. Many of these quite talented artists made no secret of their affiliation while the creations of others spoke louder than words. Obviously, 212 the homosexual writer has his own views on love and mar riage, views quite in opposition to the "normal” views of heterosexual society. In recent times Broadway has been able to speak openly of the problems of the homosexual in telling, mature dramas such as The Boys in the Band and Staircase, but some of the earlier works cloaked their com ments under the guise of comment on a heterosexual mar riage. Such, supposedly, was the case with Edward Albee’s Who1s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The story has been widely circulated that the first draft of Virginia Woolf dealt with two pairs of lovers, all male, and that this version was scrapped only because it appeared too hot to handle at the time. The rewriting needed to transform the bickering homosexuals into George and Martha of Albee’s classic was almost minimal according to the oft-told tales.26 The implications for the whole cycle of marriage films that followed on the rages of Vir ginia Woolf are breath-taking. ^Late in 1970 John Springer, a press agent for sev eral top stars announced a limited engagement on Broadway of Who*s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with the original, origin al cast: Richar3FBurton as George, Henry Fonda as Martha, Warren Beatty as Nick, and Jon Voight as Honey. Albee was furious: "The playwright flatly refuses to permit' it,” claimed Springer, "on the grounds that it might tend to confirm a recurring rumor that he has steadfastly denied-- namely that the drama, as first written, dealt with a homo- I sexual situation, and that the author subsequently changed iit to a heterosexual story.” "Albee Nixes Homo ’Virginia 1 Woolf,*” Variety, Nov. 18, 1970, pp. 1 8 76. Later, Albee jdenied being approached by Springer--still refusing, though. 213 Whether this particular case is true or not, the typical portrait of a homosexual marriage in these films makes a useful juxtaposition to the middle-aged marriages of the first chapter. The couples are inevitably merely existing together rather than finding love and happiness together. They engage in constant lover’s quarrels over every little thing in bursts of catty jealousies. Don and Michael argue in The Boys in the Band over a toothbrush ("because I’m sick and tired of you using mine”), while Hank and Larry fight over outside loves. The longer the lovers dwell together, the more they come to resemble the spouses of an unhappy marriage. Charlie screams in Stair case, "I've heard it,.I've heard it, dear. You’ve nothing left that I haven't seen or heard a thousand times.” The lines might have been lifted intact from Virginia Woolf. Like the latter, Staircase and similar tales born of open hostility, end with a tender reconciliation of the lovers who find they cannot live with each other nor, worse still, without each other. Charles finally realizes when Harry tries to commit suicide: "God, what would I have done with Harry gone?” Although none of the stories end with a full affirmation of true love, except perhaps for the tragedy of The Killing of Sister George, they do end positively. The couples remain together out of a real need for each other, I not simply for convention or mere convenience. I j If homosexual hangups are, at last, being depicted 214 as homosexual hangups instead of heterosexual ones, the heyday of the homosexual story has still not come full cir cle, judging from some of the reactions to the latest and best of the group, The Boys in the Band. OnJthe one hand the homosexual community picketed the film version in some cities because it was an unfair (e.g., downbeat, unroman ticized) picture of their existence, while middle America boycotted the film amid angry condemnations of Hollywood.27 Neither reaction is particularly surprising, suggesting that the market for the undiluted homosexual drama is quite small, especially once the initial curiosity has worn off. Then, wonders critic James Arnold, If there is appeal, will it be for the right reasons, and without spreading the life-style to the impression able and ignorant? Thus, it may be more honest and psychologically valid to show "Virginia Woolf" as about four men rather than two men and two, women. But would the audience buy it? Would they buy it only out of sick sexual curiosity about "queers"?^® Whatever the guise under which these stories are spun, they contain interesting overtones for the purposes of this study. Like young unmarried couples, they come to resemble more traditional marriages as they live together. Not only because of the dramatic structure but also because ’ 1 1 i ' n,, '11 |i j. )H T 27 Producer Robert Radnitz noted this reaction while on a recent promotional tour for one of his own. films. (Personal interview with the author, Hollywood, March, 1971] 28james Arnold, "'The Boys in the Band' . . . is Not a Musical," Tablet (Brooklyn), July 16, 1970, p. 1.4 M 215 of the psychological dimensions of role-playing associated with such a relationship, they tend to take on separate sexual characteristics, one male and one female. This trait extends beyond mere dominance and superficial sexual attri butes to the most incidental facets of behavior. Yet these roles vary according to the actual sex of the protagonists. In the homosexual dramas the male figure tends to be sloppy, disorganized, domineering, and extremely promiscuous, while the female figure tends to a tidying fussbudget obsessed with jealousy preserving the home which is cracking apart. However, in the Lesbian dramas such as The Fox or The Killing; of Sister George just the opposite is usually the case. The sharpest image of a marriage within the context of a male-male relationship was a play and film which only incidentally treated the homosexual overtures of this rela tionship, The Odd Couple. Two men, immediately limmed as straight by the fact that they play poker and have just sep arated from their wives, 29 find themselves living together by a series of strange circumstances. pelix quickly be comes home-i&aker and kitohen chief30 along with the whole 29a false stereotype of the homosexual, In The Boys in the Band, for example, great care is taken to demonstrate that Hank is the best athlete of the group, married with several children, and still a happily practicing homosexual. | 30Cooking is not particularly unmasculine--most of the top chefs in restaurants are men--but the role played by !the wife ^cook is quite special. Compare John's expertise at a souffle in John and Mary with Felix's approach to cooking.! 216 mantle of femininity. As Felix becomes more picky and squabbly, Oscar is reminded increasingly of the wife he fled. Likewise, Oscar assumes the nasty habits of the male inconsiderateness, sloppiness, gruffness, a lack of punc tuality. The whole joke of Simon's satire is the way these two men, having escaped the nooses of their wives, promptly begin to mirror their former existences. The final blow comes in the form of infidelity when Oscar pleads his need for a woman (another woman?) to keep from going mad. He brings the cuckoo Pidgeon sisters right into their modest little love nest and the feathers begin to fly. Not only does the meal go awry because of Oscar's callous disregard for time, but the occasion becomes a thoroughly traumatic experience for Felix. He begins to function on a largely neuter level since the Pidgeon sisters become a challenge to his home-making skills (when Oscar's lateness ruins the souffle) and to his ability to relate to Oscar on a per sonal level (by their very presence). Oscar's open infidel ity in bringing the challengers into the home leads to a divorce,31 with Felix going off to happiness, while Oscar is left in his private hell of loneliness. Hopefully, this long excursus on the homosexual film 31The same sort of blatancy Charlie displayed in ! I Staircase when he brought his boy friend home; it is the j difference between Bob's affair in San Francisco and Carol's j adultery with the tennis pro in the family bedroom. 217 and the ease with which a relatively straight vehicle can be interpreted in these terms, will indicate how easily the homosexual writer can twist the actual facts of marriage to fit his own conceptions of life and to play his own little jokes with the in-crowd. Yet most of the homosexually-oriented films have, ironically, shown a strong yearning for marriage which has been altogether absent from the heterosexual films being studied.32 Perhaps marriage becomes a sort of status sym bol for those denied its societal approbation. Several re cent films have dealt with a single stranger becoming part of a family and seducing in turn the various members of it, male and female alike: Teorema, Something for Everyone, Baby Love. Thus Angel, Ange1 Down We Go ends with Bogart leaving the funeral of the woman he has seduced (along with her daughter) in the company of her husband who has gladly taken her place. But Entertaining Mr. Sloane is the clas sic in this area. When a tug-of-war develops between Kath and Ed over the affections of the handsome Adonis of the title, a compromise is finally reached. After the ultimate double ring ceremony in which Sloane is formally, if not officially, married to both Kath and Ed, they take turns 32The imaginary child in Who*5 Afraid of Virginia Woolf? takes on new levels of meaning in the Homosexual ver- jsion of the play, in accord with recent news items of homo sexuals applying for marriage licenses or to adopt children. i . . . i entertaining him for six-month periods. Clearly something j for everyone, but probably more of a thrill for the homo sexual viewers in the audience (like the play’s author, Joe, i . | Orton) than for the heterosexual viewers who might regard | a marriage of any nature, much less this very strange unionj as anything but a happy ending.33 | "Little by little the look of the country changes because of the people we admire." --Granddad, Hud. When the funny old fuddy-duddy, Osgood, becomes in- , fatuated with Jerry's drag disguise in Some Like It Hot, his pal, Joe, tries to explain why the pair should not mar- ; ry in the first of the homo-hetero comedies. "Listen to me, Jerry, there are laws and conventions," Joe pleads, adding almost as an afterthought, "It's just not being done." That last, crowning argument seems to typify much j of the reasoning behind the cinema's modern approach to j marriage. Yet the debates must stand on the facts rather than on the a priori assumptions of Certain film makers. ^One other rare exception to the general flight from boy*meets-girl stories ending in wedded bliss was the 1970-71 mini-cycle of movies about priests falling in love. Yet only Pieces of Dreams ended with the traditional form of fade-out and Its pair of mismatched lovers is far less likely to achieve marital happiness than Benjamin and Elaine are. Like Love Story, their tale simply ends before it can runVthe natural course of all the other contemporary movie marriages. Meanwhile, the tragedies besetting the lovers in The Priest1s Wife and The Act of the Heart seem far more gruesome than those encountered m any of the films studied. ; 219 f ; With the lack of penetrating sociological surveys, it is too early to dismiss the existence of marriage within society on the grounds that it should not exist. Glancing into the crystal ball or waving the magic wand can be re- j * . i : vealing at times, but sociology depends on a complex i assessment of facts for its conclusions. j Perhaps as Richard says in Divorce American Style, j "The trouble with marriage today is simple: marriage is ! i : work and nobody wants to work." In this sense, the films ; i 1 may have done a severe disservice to society by stating ! ■that the trouble with marriage is marriage itself. By en« J couraging couples in trouble to give up the impossible ;dream, to cease struggling against insurmountable odds, to forget about individual effort in a doomed battle of the !sexes, the films may have brought unhappiness where happi- i ness could have reigned. By portraying the institution of I marriage as a hopeless prison with insurmountable walls, the films may have created an attitude toward marriage |throughout society that did not really exist for most of i its members. At the very least the films have played a key jrole in accelerating the development of these ideas if not in actually spawning some of them. Yet even this sort of pessimistic, "abandon hope all ye who enter here," approach to marriage may have proved a valuable service in countering the false glow around mar* riage once floating out of Hollywood, If there was an f overemphasis on the icebergs waiting to sink every marital ! i bark during the past few years, the waters were at least ; clearly marked. In the past, the reefs were under the sur- i face and the film captains kept shouting, "Full speed i ahead; there is nothing but smooth sailing as far as the eye can see." Along these lines a freshman college student recently wrote: I have grown up in a family in which the parents j are seemingly, and to the best of my knowledge, hap- j pily married. I would be prone, then, to rush into ! marriage on the assumption that all marriages resemble my parents*. The movies, among other things, have shown me that not all marriages are happy.34 The conclusion is aptly worded, not that all marriages are j unhappy, but that not all marriages are happy. The films have too often overstated the facts for dramatic or other ! reasons; this distinction nicely catches the essence of their insights. If things went wrong for this or that |couple on the silver screen, they may well go wrong for me. : w t ' ^Quoted from a Cinema 190 class assignment paper at 'the University of Southern California, written by Jeff Dore, !Oct. 18, 1970, p. 1. In The Family as Process and Institu- 1tion, sociologist Clifford Kirkpatrick- cites "Happiness of parents' marriage" as the most scientifically verified con tributor to subsequent marital success, ranking just ahead of "adequate length of acquaintance, courtship, and engage ment," "Adequate sex information in childhood," "personal happiness in childhood," and six other factors including similarity in religious and ethnic background, and in ma turity and chronological age. (p. 350) The manager in Air- port says, in the midst of his marital troubles, "My mother and father, God knows they had their ups and downs but some how or other they always worked it out." Few examples of "Working it out" exist in these films. The film world finally joins the rest of humanity after so j f many years of happier than thou endings. | Conscious of the false dream images of the Hollywood] I i past, some of the film makers have become involved with ! . this recent rash of marriage movies just in order to zero ' 1 in on these images. In a sense these films have made a positive contribution to the present problem by fostering ; false concepts and expectations in marriage; at least this is the thesis of Richard Brooks* The Happy Ending, starring the director’s real life wife, Jean Simmons. ; This contemporary drama opens with a flashback to the courtship period of Fred and Mary Wilson, filmed in the best 1970 romantic style with glittering snow scenes, : fuzzy long lenses, and a plethora of slow dissolves tied ! together by a typical Michel Legrand score. Nurtured on | years of movie watching, Mary walks down the wedding aisle I ' with visions of Elizabeth Taylor on the arm of Spencer | Tracy in Father of the Bride dancing in her head along with l. | shots of dreamy lovers like Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard ! in Smilin* Through and Clark Gable and Greta Garbo in | Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fail. Over this romantic fan tasy of "ideal" movie marriages appears the superimposed movie title: "The End." The happily married couple kiss and the happily ever after fade begins. But this film is just beginning, very pointedly at the spot where most previous movies ended. It is the morn 222 ~ ing of Mary's sixteenth wedding anniversary and the real ization that she is just "a zombie killing time" while she j serves "life imprisonment in an institution called mar-' I riage" is weighing down upon her more than ever. Eye- j opening Bloody Marys and coughing through the cigarette i smoke at a frighteningly energetic Jack LaLanne on the tube! do not make this particular daybreak any more promising than the 5479 that went before it. Fred Wilson may be a little dull and colorless to his wife, but he is almost movie star romanticism compared to most of the men in the other films discussed. A success- i ful lawyer and a faithful lover who ' puts up patiently with her increasing moodiness, Fred's basic fault is simply that he just does not quite measure up to the sort of storybook prince which Mary had been led to expect from the endings ;of all those movies she had so devoutly consumed during her i ; dreamy youth. Mary's marriage is not bad; it has simply i |become meaningless for her. The problem is not success or t ’adultery or alcoholism for her but the complacency and mono- t I tony of marriage itself. As she watches Casablanca for the !Hundredth time, her husband asks how she can do it again and again. "Dead and buried they're more alive than we are," is her retort. The final fade-out of The Happy End ing finds Mary split from her husband, pondering the ques tion asked her earlier by a friend: "It can't be that marriage puts an end to love?" If not marriage itself, Brooks is saying, then at j least the false image of it given by the Hollywood film j can indeed put an end to love by raising the sort of un- i i reasonable, even impossible expectations that a union with ; a mere human being can never satisfy. An eager idealism outstrips reality and views the beloved through rose-colored i glasses. This process of idealization ''projects into the , partner my own ideals of what she should be,"31’ Sometimes both partners will engage in the process simultaneously ■(the love-at-first-sight relationships of the movies) and they become incapable of recognizing their state. But the 1 day of reckoning must come eventually and the shock can « # I often be traumatic for the marriage founded on such shaky i t legs. Idealization thrives on the absence of real inter action, but, as Blood points out: As interaction increases, knowledge converts the dream I image into awareness of the real partner. Awareness punctures the dream bubble and brings the relationship down to earth. This earthly reality is frequently less | attractive than the idealized image.36 Many years earlier Levy and Munroe labelled this problem as i j"disillusionment" in their book on the family and their i • , I > long description of a typical housewife’s let-down, even during those happy days, would be worth quoting in full if jit were not already seen so fully in the Mary Wilsons and 35Blood, Marriage, p. Ill, 36Ibid., p. 112. 224 I Tina Balsers and the Mrs. Robinsons of the contemporary | i cinema. A short portion of her thoughts as she washes j another dreary load of dishes will give the flavor of the ! passage: j She is remembering five o’clock with Jim waiting at \ the corner, of dinner and dancing, of going to the j movies, or a concert, or the theater, or just a long j ferryboat ride. Of the difficult goodnight kiss and the ecstatic knowledge that soon she would have Jim j all the time for always. She is thinking rather wryly j of how entrancing, how full of promise this battered j dishpan looked when it first emerged from pink tissue j paper at the shower the girls gave her. She may even I think, a little cynically, as she surveys the gray grease-pocked surface of her dishwater, of the foaming pans of eternally virgin suds she expected from her perusal of the advertisements. Well, she’s married now. She has her own house, her own dishpan, her hus band and her baby. All the time and for always. She doesn’t even go to the movies any more because there’s no one to stay with Junior.3? i Though the Mary Jane of this description has been caught up ; in the normal sort of dream image of marriage, the degree !of her disappointment is not so important--after all, mar riage must be less exciting than the courtship process--as her adaptation to the change. Maslow has pointed out that j only the immature try to continue living in the dream world i !of idealization. One of the characteristics of true love in his analysis is the ability of the partners to drop their defenses in a reasonable amount of time and reveal their real selves together with faults and weaknesses,38 The 3?John Levy and Ruth Monroe. The Happy Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1945) ppT 60-bT.----- 38A .H, Maslow, "Love in Healthy People.” in Ashley 225 dream of the happy ending seems very much a part of human nature; the exchange of reality for its unreasonable ex pectations is an even more essential part of the maturing process.39 Elsa: "We could have gone off." Michael: "Off? Into the sunset?" j --The Lady from Shanghai j i In an ending mocking the happy endings of the Forties, i Michael O ’Hara finds his dream girl has turned into the : demon murderess who has played him for a fool, has tried to pin the rap for her own blood lust upon the simple sailor. : Like Brigid 0 'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon or the anti heroines of most of the Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane) tales or so many of the truly femme fatale breed described in Montagu, The Meaning of Love (New York: Julian Press, 1953) pp. 57-93. A thorough', insightful discussion of the whole problem. I 39The whole question of reasonable and unreasonable j expectations in marriage is crucial to the-purposes of this ! dissertation but the problem has not been settled by any means. If a somewhat middle position has been taken here, ! it should be noted that one sociological study done in I St. Louis in 1959 even concluded that most couples entering I upon marriage were very aware of the false images conjured up by the majority of the Hollywood films of the day. Grasping the inherent difficulties of marriage, they felt that they would basically succeed--not in the romanticized fashion of the movies--but through hard work and deep love. (Personal interview with sociologist E. Paul Hilsdale who conducted the survey. June, 1970, in Los Angeles.) Yet there is certainly a degree of romanticizing even here that is neither totally avoidable nor totally undesirable. The reverse impression of the contemporary films would wipe out all hope with an existential burst of unconquerable angst. Deming's Running Away from Myself, Elsa Bannister pleads > i f for a reprieve in order to share in the happy ever afjering* 1 which she has blocked through her crimes. The hero had been lured by her siren call to do anything for love but , now he must reject love for justice. Exit the dream of j the happy ending, j If the happy ending has exited from the contemporary cinema, it has been less a rejection of the preceding dream ' than the coalescence of the previous treatment. The dreams have simply changed, completely, radically. Instead of happiness ever after, the hero of a film like Loving dreams merely of peace. This sort of limited goal leads, of necessity, to a limited sort of happy ending. After the adulterous revelation at the party, Brooks and Selma stand 1 dazed and breathless in the snow after she has rained blows i ‘about his defenseless hulk. Perhaps the film should begin at this point in time rather than end here, but the title 'roll at this instant, at this momentary lull in an obviously I i jcontinuing storm, sharply suggests that there is no easy ! i way out of their problems--that a divorce would be just as i filmic a cop-out on their complex situation as his refusal to make a commitment and her convenient blindness had been earlier in the story. Rather than end this tragic comedy with a tacked-on solution, happy or not, the film makers have elected for a thoughtful, open-ended story that hints more directly at the human issues involved. The quiet Ill survival with honor which was Hemingway's motto is the only sort of denouement which fits; anything else is a gross Hollywood dream. Having moved from the role of dream factory to bub- j j ble breaker is a significant mark of Hollywood's own matur-J ing process, suggesting that, despite Love Story, things j will never be quite the same again. The films have become | l too conscious of joking about their own fantasies to take j them again with the same seriousness. Spoofs and satires j i need a liberalized viewpoint in audiences and creators alike. Can future films produce dashing heroes out of the twenties after all these years and after the sparkling teeth of The Great Leslie in The Great Race or the parodies of himself that John Gavin crafted as Grant Granite in 1 Pussycat, Pussycat, I_ Love You or as Trevor Graydon (com- jplete with the Halleluja Chorus in the background) in jThoroughly Modern Millie? Even the hate-everybody satire of Where's Poppa? mocked the mistiness of love-at-first- sight when the young nurse's first image of her prospective Iboss became a knight on horseback while he saw her as a jblushing bride all in white. It is Marian the Librarian I compiling an impossible list of qualities she hopes to find in "My White Knight" in the song from The Music Man or Catherine in desperate Search of Gregory, the man of her dreams, of Angie in Love with the Proper Stranger,"waiting for a guy on a white horse like outa a Hollywood movie," as 228 J her brother Dominic puts it. • The danger, of course, is that no one can ever mea- : i sure up to these impossible standards, leading to inevit- j i able heartbreak. The destruction seems as certain (_as Snowj j White praying that "Someday My Prince Will Come" and biting1 into the poisonous apple in order to receive her dream: ! V * * . and I wish that he will carry me off to his castle and that we will live happily ever after."^® By setting upj hopeless ideals, happiness itself becomes hopeless, elusive! ! as some of the French directors have been especially quick I : i to point out. Julie abandons one suitor in The Bride Wore | : I Black because, "He is looking for the ideal woman whom he J will never find because she exists only in his dreams." Similarly, when Claude tries to ask forgiveness of the girl he jilted in a last-minute chase of his lovely English teacher, his fiancee agrees to go through with the wedding if he will come to terms with his dreams and realize them i ( Ifor what they really are. ! Isabel: "You will never be happy, Claude. The woman j you want doesn1t exist," j Claude: "But I have her. She1syou." I Isabel: "No. And if you had the English girl you’d ! want someone else."2 ** ^®From Disney’s 1938 version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. ^Quoted for convenience from the novelization of the film Marry Me I Marry Me t by Claude Berri, translated by June P. Wilsonand Walter B. Michaels (New York: Popular Library, jl969) p. 116. The original film dialogue made the point 'rather more effectively. __________________________ 229 I ! • Knowing the gradual wistfulness that will seep into their j relationship through the erosions of time, Isabel sees fully i the danger that Claude will romanticize not only his fleet-' ing, foolish interlude with the English teacher, but even j their own, less airy courtship. Whether one sets up goals and figures that cannot be matched in reality or whether one engages in wishful thinking after making contact with the reality, the end result of disappointment is still a !direct product of the dream.^2 There is a fairy tale atmosphere to many of these ! . j films that seems quite at odds with their^apparently real istic approach. Instead of concentrating on the Cinderella transformation of the ugly duckling into the beautiful swan, most of these films are more interested in the wait • for that change or the realization that it is not coming. Thus, in Me, Natalie, the heroine is hoping for a miracu lous Hollywood ending to her adolescence, something right |out of Gigi or My_ Fair Lady. Her anxieties are eased a i 'bit by a friendly uncle who calls her his '’Little Princess.” ' A A Adjustment to sexual daydreams was found to have a high degree or correlation to successful marriage in the research of Leonard Ferguson, "Correlates of Marital Hap piness” in Journal of Psychology, IV (1938) p. 289, and by Gilbert Hamilton, AHesearch in Marriage (New York: A. § C. Boni, 1929) p. 324. In these real life studies as in the films, the problem seemed more strictly associated with the distaff side of the marriage, even though the woman was more often sought for the stuff of dreams while the man’s attrac tiveness was generated on a more pragmatic level of busi ness acumen and practical good sense. 230 ; Even if a lot of frogs are being kissed in the contemporary' cinema, most of them are remaining frogs rather than turn* j ing into elegant princes.43 i Yet, if much of the function of the film in times i i ; past has been the creation of an imaginary world of fan- ! tasy where audiences steeped in the harsh realities of a | ! day-to-day desperation could escape to a better life, the j effort to shatter such dreams becomes a dramatic, drastic ! I i | change in itself. The laws of romantic comedy had become j 'hopelessly at odds with the real state of things, with the j way people really act, then and now, but their absolute reversal does not automatically insure a new law of drama- i ;tic realism. The fairy tales may have found a new sort of !ending but sadness is no less absurd in the world of Leib niz than happiness in the world of Schopenhauer. Thus the bitter pill being dispensed today is no more a cure-all than all those sugar-coated pills of the ipast. If once upon a time the movie audiences went home I ! ielated by seeing their favorite stars in happy little prob- 43The use of actual, literal fairy tale imagery is relatively common and quite fascinating. The shining knight and the fair lady was just mentioned but there are many other examples. In The April Fools Howard is the ugly frog who is turned into a prince by the kiss of a beautiful lady , Aside from word games along this line, a stuffed frog fig ures in the plot resolution. Even as realistic a hero as Halsy Knox in Little Fauss and Big Halsy twists out: "Some times when I'm drunk, I really think they're princesses, and then, when I wake up, I find out they're just pigs." lems of no consequence, having vicariously shared in an ad-; venture in movie wonderland, now they can return home at ! : • i least slightly reassured that their own world is not as ! harshly cracked into pieces as that of George and Martha or! some other movie-mangled couple. The films must find an audience of some type to which they bestow a degree of pleasure; depending for survival on an audience of maso- I chists is very risky financing. It may well be, as Zavattini insisted,that the I ordinary person doing the ordinary thing is the real stuff j of film art, but the needs of dramatic convention often re- ! quire something more. Film economics require an audience j f land the realistic schools such as the "Angry Young Man" j films of the late Fifties in England or the neorealistic | film of post-war Italy have limited appeal in both breadth and depth. The audience wants to get away from everyday i I reality. The occasional study of real life problems in a idownbeat way had better be a break from the ordinary films 'of the time, as well as a particularly incisive job in it self, if it hopes to succeed. "Granted that marriage is a faulty, decrepit thing, still, right nqw> it^s the only game in town." ; < -\-*Joe, The Only Game in Town If Joe's encouragement to Fran is now accepted as a ^Cesare Zavattini, "Some Ideas on the Cinema," Sight; and Sound, October, 1953, pp. 64-69. f 232 : t i 1 i trite exaggeration, perhaps a middle ground may be found, : i If marriage is not exactly what it was cracked up to be j during the long history of Hollywood, perhaps it is not j I exactly snake eyes either. "Marriage is a beautiful mis- j take that two people make together, " Marianne explained j i long ago in the Lubitsch masterpiece, Trouble In Paradise, ! I If it is not the most perfect of human institutions, the j fault may well be the humans who are running the game. It j can be better as well as worse. If "people never really know each other, even married people, " as Ellen claims in I. Walk the Line, the defect may not be entirely the result of marriage itself, ( Marriage must be built on love, the forgotten factor i in so much of the discussion. Some of the films have built :marriage on pregnancy, convenience, or convention; as such it is doomed. The attributes of this intimate sort of love are quite different: openness and communication between j the partners sharing common goals, desires, and most of all, jneeds. Basic to the true expression of love is the emo- jtional need to come alive, to feel, to be vulnerable to I !each other in terms of a commitment at least for a time. jAnais explains her strange attraction to Matthew Short in t Fools with a term used quite often in various films: "He's alive; he makes me feel alive." The song chirped at one i point in their love affair adds: 233 ] Someone who cares, Someone who dares to love you, 1 Who thinks enough of you, ' To always be willing to share.*5 Once that aliveness and openness is felt, it matters no j longer that Anais has a psychotic husband or that Matthew is old enough to be her father. The thing is to be happy for the moment--and maybe for tomorrow if things work out. As in Love Story, the death of Anais at the end is not really a tragedy since what matters more than years of time are cen- j i turies of depth. Matthew and Anais had happiness for a time, a happiness that lasted through their relationship and that is far better than the contentment which most coup-! i i les derive from making do. Critic Charles Champlin noted a core appeal of their tale for the modern audience, one that penetrated the occasionally inept scripting: I think that "Fools,’1 too, has chosen the most ap^ preprints time in recent years to be born, a time in which we feel an increasingly urgent need to be reminded of the healing, redeeming, and transforming power of : the lpye between a man and a woman in any world--even Love can perform this sort of transformation, but it means being willing to take a chance, to commit oneself to another. Love means always being ready to say you're sorry! I In Godard's A Woman is a Woman, a title card reads: ! 4^From "Someone Who Cares," the love theme from Fools by Alex Harvey as sung by Kenny Rogers. j Champlin, "'Fools' Makes Bid for Love," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 25, 1970, IV p. 1. "It is because they love each other that things will go wrong for Emile and Angela." Yet it is also for this rea son that things will always go right. Without the commit ment and involvement of Fools and Love Story, there would be no sense of tragedy whatever. It is only because the people loved each other that their lives came to have a meaning at all, an existence interdependent upon each other and transcending the tiny cosmos of each individual ego. Chet moans in Faces, "Nobody cares, nobody has the time to be vulnerable to one another." Justaas in bridge, the pen alties of vulnerability are greater but so are the rewards. Despite everything that the films have been intimat ing, this sort of relationship can exist within a marriage as well as outside one. Nothing in the very nature of the f marital state prevents true love--one of the very character- | istics of love is its ability to climb all walls and ford 'all streams. Are the bars of this prison made of real jsteel or with the filigree webs of the imagination? Does jstepping across the magic line really transform the hand- jSome prince into the ugly toad as the films insist? Would I ithe couple be any happier, any surer of themselves apart jfrom marriage? Has marriage simply become the kicking boy for the couple's own insecurities and failings along the way? Have the relaxed religious and social conventions, Ithe ease of divorce laws, the misconceptions existing before i jmarriage tempted couples to run away from their problems 235 without really trying to solve them? Is the revolt direc- I ted less against marriage in itself than against the mech- j anized, automated society which extends its touch into this! most personal area of human relations?^? The challenge to j i the conventions of society is always a useful, provocative ! i one and the current questioning of marriage is worth som- j * ber investigation and reflection. The recent surge of j , films concerned with marriage has posed a question which only time and responsible scientific investigation can properly answer. The question itself is not the same thing ’ as the answer. I Near the climax of They Shoot Horses, Don * t They? the young protagonists wind up together again after several of their subsequent partners have dropped out of the brutal i ! marathon dance. Rocky glibly rejoices over their popular ' reunion as he chortles over the loudspeaker: i "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl: j that's the story of our sweetheart couple, Robert and Gloria. Yowsah, yowsah! Now I'm no Hollywood seen- I ario writer, but I know what the end of this story I should be . . ." t j The ending of Robert and Gloria's story comes with a bullet I through the head, not with a final fade-out into the movie J land of happy ever afters. The Horace McCoy novel on I -X ' . ! which the film was based was one of the biggest sellers of A "7 In THX 1138 love becomes the ultimate crime against a state which controls its subjects' every move or feeling. the Depression, but there was no hope or desire to make a ’ film out of the downbeat story at that time. The fact thatj 1 every screenplay had to end the same way restricted artis- i J tic creativity during the "Golden Age of Hollywood" in a ! most unfortunate way, just as the new technological revolu tions such as sound and color and wide-screen processes stunted screen art until the film makers could Hearn to i cope with these new tools of their trade. The unfolding j (and undraping) of the sexual revolution on the screen also, i put an occasional cramp in the artists' concern for what j * - t : they were saying. i Thus the unique virtue of the recent cycle of mar- riage movies may well have been that it marked a widespread attempt to embrace the new freedom of the screen and chan- inel it in a meaningful direction. If the films have tended |to oversimplify the situation at times or to be overly pes- i ,simistic now and then, still the state of the motion pic- t |ture in the Seventies seems to be really richer artistically j if not financially, because of this intriguing experiment. I Rocky's day, when every scenario writer turned out the same familiar ending, was the poorer for that predictability. I This brief, brilliant flurry of creativity has added the unhappy ending to the repertoire, and that is a significant step since it denotes a greater concern of the film makers i for the unhappy people in their audiences along with their real problems and concerns. By the end of the Seventies, 237 perhaps they will be providing some answers for the prob lems which they raised so provocatively during the Sixties ~...." ~ 2sn i Summary of Part II i The argument of the second part of this study traced; the origin of Hollywood's preoccupation with the love storyj and the happy ending throughout most of its history. To a j certain extent this emphasis was a matter of dramatic j structure: j We all knew in the old movies that after boy met girl, lost girl and got girl, they lived happily ever after, and we didn't want to see them do it because there are few things duller to watch in a movie than two people living happily ever after. But to a great degree it was an enforced decree of the film ; hierarchy that wanted to preserve its public from the cor ruption of life as it was, giving them instead a taste for , life as it ought to be. Hollywood might well have been content to tell the I same old story for the rest of the century if a tremendous ! social upheaval had not gripped the country--along with an i ; even more impressive economic struggle right in Hollywood. 1 J The advent of television, the consent decree which stripped Ithe film companies of their theater circuits, the rise of | the foreign film, the new technological advances, the sex- i I ual revolution, rising production costs, and, most of all, the changes in censorship engineered by Hollywood itself brought about a transformation on the screen, over Holly wood's nearly dead body. If money talks, its absence made 48RUssell Baker, "Observer; New Frankness Gets Boy and Girl," New York Times, Jan. 8, 1970, p. 40. 239 the silver screen speak most eloquently in a new and dif ferent tongue. The result was, in part, the miserable marriage movies recently pouring out of the film capital. j These films often argued that marriage was the worst| of ills besetting a troubled modern society and that the | i i root cause of the ineffectiveness of marriage as a bridge j to true love was the institutionalized nature of marriage itself. Yet this massive attack on marriage by the contem porary American cinema may have its sources less in a so ciety-wide dissatisfaction with marriage than in the con viction that the absurdity of contemporary "marriage is a nice, safe, not very controversial problem.49 Likewise, .film makers who have had a relatively high rate of divorce may look upon the institution of marriage in a bitter, un- i happy way that reflects their own viewpoint accurately I enough, while not being at all representative of the larger i |segments of the social order. The homosexual influence iwithin the dramatic arts may also have tipped the scales j ' junduly against the role of woman, both within and outside jof marriage, while pressing the snare of marriage upon the ! preponderantly male element in the creative end of motion ! ipicture production. Added to the obvious fact that good i marriages cannot yield the same dramatic confrontations as bad, the result has been a one-sided view, whatever the ^Champlin, *«a Mess of Movies," p. 12. 240 j ; I validity of that view may actually be. j Yet these films have made an interesting departure j from the dream world of the past Hollywood product which soi often found its purpose in creating a never-never world in which the audience could escape from reality. Many of the marriage movies have cited the Hollywood fantasies as one | ;cause for the disappointments experienced in some marriages j ] which kept seeking that movie-land dream. In i. Love My ' \ Wifet for example: Richard: ’’ We’ve shared so much and I love you but I keep looking for more.” Jody: ’’ There is no more. The rest is a blonde movie star on a fifty-foot screen promising you eternal love until a director yells cut and she goes home to the same problems as you and I." If there has been an occasional over-reaction to marriage in some of these films, still the very fact that film j ‘ i makers have suddenly distinguished the real world from the I reel world seems a mark of high encouragement for the fu- j :ture of the Hollywood movie. Delightful and relaxing as the motion picture has been, its potential as a force of i powerful social statement has been utilized within the Hoi- ! I Ilywood context all too seldom. At one point in John and ! Mary, he apologizes for pushing her a bit too hard, say ing, ”1 was just trying to get to know you.” She stammers in return, "You haven’t made a bad beginning, you know.” If the contemporary marriage movies are not quite the last word, they haven’t made a bad beginning. CONCLUSION Inasmuch as the chief points in this study have been: examined in a number of lights throughout its course and j restated in the form of conclusions at the end of each j part, it seems appropriate to use this section of the manu-| I script to approach the larger question hovering over this i i ' whole dissertation: the interrelationship of film and so- , ciety. Cinema has become the twentieth-century extension of drama, which has traditionally been less interested in j ; sheer entertainment than in the communication of ideas. Rising originally from a root within liturgical functions, ■ the play has often been linked wijgh concepts of morality. 1 Yet drama was never an artificial form created from without ibut grew up from the people in response to their needs and jdesires Even in medieval times the play began to serve the !people in very special ways: i When the plays passed out of the hands of the priests into those of the people, when they moved from the church to the churchyard, then to the inn, the mar ketplace, and eventually into the theater, plays began to reflect the interests and concerns of medieval folk. As the problems dealt with became more and more realistic, more related to life and the social and re ligious order of things, more and more street language was used. Actually, until the days of mass literacy, the thea- 241 ter was the main vehicle for the spread of ideas.* I Theater retained this characteristic to a large extent in America but the Supreme Court decreed in 1915 that the j guarantees of free speech and free press within the United j States Constitution did not apply to the motion picture, \ since it was essentially a form of entertainment. \ i j Yet more and more in contemporary America the film j i has been recognized as an art form, America’s unique contrif I bution to this basic yearning of man. As with the drama and with any art form, it must be related to the needs and desires of the people if it is to have meaning and purpose. Too long the American motion picture was content to dwell iin its own little world, removed and remote from reality. It performed valuable functions, but by its very limited |scope of interests it failed to relate to the people in the way which it was so extraordinarily fitted to do. For the wonder of it all is the fact that film can 'relate to society, performing valuable services for its members. Joseph Morgenstern touched on this relationship jin his second review of Bonnie and Clyde: Art cannot dictate to life and movies cannot transform life, unless we want to retool the entire industry for I the production of propaganda. But art can certainly i reflect life, clarify and improve life.* ^Jacqueline Bouhoutsos, "Science and Movies Face Same Dilemma," Los Angeles Times, Apr. 26, 1970, G, p. 1. 2Joseph Morgenstern, "A Thin Red Line,” Newsweek, Aug. 28, 1967, p. 83. 243 ] t » Films are not so much related to society in the sense that ; i they dramatically influence it in one direction of another^ i as they are born out of a society which supplies the inter-} ests and concerns which become the filmic subject matter. | The formal link between these two models is the ; assumption that major political, social, and economic changes in the larger society tend to affect art, lit erature, or film by being channeled or filtered through the social structures which constitute their social matrix.^ J As long as the film makers closed their eyes to the greater) , society or were unable to deal with its most intimate prob-l | lems because of restrictions from other causes than their art, this potential was thwarted and both art and society suffered as a result. The move away from the compulsory happy ending and the silver linings to every Hollywood cloud ^Occasionally the influence can be quite positive, 1 not merely in the sense in which the underwear manufacturers saw their sales drop when Clark Gable revealed his bare ; chest in It Happened One Night, but in the way that The Grapes ofTratn prompted legislative reforms for the benefit I of the migrant worker. Television is still the instantan eous disperser of information and thus holds the upper hand in the field of forming public opinion, but the motion pic ture shows a revitalized potential of late in the political area which is quite encouraging. Art and propaganda are at ! such extremes of the spectrum that it seemed impossible I that they could ever mesh, yet in films like The Battle : of Algiers, Medium Cool, and even some of the marriage , mQvie^ Indicate that the merger is both possible and fruit- j ful. I ^George A. Huaco, The Sociology of Film Art (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), p. 18. The book deals with the social temperaments of three filmic movements involved intimately with their times: German Expressionism 0>°th the tyrant films and the street films), Soviet Expressive Realism, and Italian Neorealism. 244 I i I signals a new maturity for the motion picture. Once upon a time every film had to fit into a mold, j i I To suppose that every real life couple entered upon mar- t I riage with the starry-eyed gaze and the obvious inexper- ! ience of the eleven year old lovers of Melody was as false ! ■ . i then as now. The difference in awareness shown by latter- j day movie protagonists both reflects life’s realities bet- | ter and helps to influence them. If heroines such as Mary : Wilson in The Happy Ending find domesticity an intolerable burden in the future, at least they will place the blame on the right doorstep; they will not be able to dismiss per sonal responsibility with the plea that the movies fooled them about life. Speaking of Mary, Stephen Farber wrote; She has no sense of personal identity, for she had been conditioned to believe that her domestic iden tity- -Housewife and Mother--would see her through a lifetime; but now it seems too late to confront her self, too late to begin asking questions she should have asked two decades earlier.5 i B y beginning to ask this.sort of question now, the motion r ■ - " V ‘ - ; ^ I picture atones in part for whatever contribution may have i i been the result of its avoiding of the crucial issues of 1 ' * 1 j society for so long. i j Asking the questions, confronting the problems is ' not the end of the line, but it ijs the beginning. At least the motion pictures have made a valid start, not only in 5Stephen Farber, "The Happy Ending," Film Quarterly XXIV (Fall, 1970) pp. 57-SF7— — ^ examining the reality of marriage in modern American so- 1 ciety but through this means also delving in a new way intoj ; ' J the order of reality according to Hollywood. I Toward the end of Lovers and Other Strangers, the ! fat old Italian father once more asks his son about the real i I sons for his prospective divorce: "What's the story, j Richie?" The son tries to explain. "I don't know. I was j i just too young when I got married. I didn't know who I j 1 was--what I wanted. When we first got married we cared. ! We're strangers." The father shrugs a bit and then comments that, "We're all strangers, but after a while you get used ; I to it--you become deeper strangers. That's a sort of love.*' | If Frank's idea of love still falls rather short of the i classic notion of agape, his words remind one of how far i the motion picture has moved in the past fifteen years. From the fairy tale world of fluffy pillows and happy faces ; through dark alleys of perversion and rolling hills of bar- |ren bodies and minds to a grasping pursuit of tiny truths |and meaningful moments. If the films still do not know !quite what they are and what they want, at least they are » ! iconcerned with finding out. For once the accent is not on the element of "stranger" in Frank's definition but on the notion of "deeper." The Hollywood film may not yet have the right answers but at last it is looking for them in the right direction and in the right way. FILMOGRAPHY 246 247 FILMOGRAPHY1 ACT OF THE HEART Universal 1970 Written, produced and directed by Paul Almond. Cinema tography by Jean Bofferty. Cast: Genevieve Bujold (Martha Hayes), Donald Suther land (Father Michael Ferrier). ADAM AT SIX A»M, National General (Cinema Center) 1970 Directed by Robert Scheerer. Produced by Rick Rosen berg and Robert Christiansen. Screenplay by Stephen and Elinor Karpf, Cinematography by Charles Rosher. Cast: Michael Douglas (Adam Gaines), Lee Purcell (Jerri Jo Hopper), Joe Don Baker (Harvey Gavin), and Meg Foster (Joyce). ADAM'S RIB M-G-M 1949 Directed by George Cukor. Produced by Lawrence Wein- gerten. Screenplay by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. Cinematography by George Folsey. Cast: Spencer Tracy (Adam Bonner), Katharine Hepburn (Amanda Bonner), Judy Holliday (Doris Attinger), and Tom Ewell (Warren Attinger). All films mentioned in this study are listed al phabetically with cast and crew credits, as are certain other key films of the period covered. The films are iden tified by releasing companies with the date following the usage of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even though an executive producer may have been the cre ative force on a given film, that often honorific designa tion has been dropped and only the actual producer is credited. Full writing credits are given, including the basis for the screenplay. Since characters are always called by their screen names in the text, cast lists are (supplied, but generally only for the roles which figure in the discussions. Sources for this Filmography included Variety, Film Daily Year Books, New York Times Film Reviews,! Film Facts, and the individual film files of the Academy j !of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. i 248 THE ADDING MACHINE Universal (1969--Never Released) Written, produced and directed by Julius Epstein, from the play by Elmer Rice. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Phyllis Diller (Mrs. Zero) and Milo O'Shea (Zero). AIRPORT Universal 1970 Written and directed by George Seaton, from the novel by Arthur Hailey. Produced by Ross Hunter. Cinema tography by Ernest Laszlo. Cast: Burt Lancaster (Mel Bakersfeld), Dean Martin (Vernon Demerest), Jean Seberg (Tanya Livingston), Dana Wynter (Cindy Bakersfeld), Jacqueline Bisset (Gwen Meighen), Maureen Stapleton (Inez Guerrero), Van Heflin (D. 0. Guerrero), and George Kennedy (Patroni). ALEX IN WONDERLAND M-G-M 1970 Directed by Paul Muzrursky, Produced by Larry Tucker. Screenplay by Muzursky and Tucker. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs, Cast: Donald Sutherland (Alex) and Ellen Burstyn (Beth). ALFIE Paramount 1966 Produced and directed by Lewis Gilbert. Screenplay by Bill Naughton from his own play. Cinematography by Otto Heller. Cast: Michael Caine (Alfie), Shelley Winters (Ruby), Vivien Merchant (Lily), and Julia Foster (Gilda). ALICE'S RESTAURANT United Artists 1969 Directed by Arthur Penn. Produced by Hillard Elkins and Joe Manduke. Screenplay by Venable Herndon and Penn. Cinematography by Michael Nebbia. Cast: Arlo Guthrie (Himself), Pat Quinn (Alice Brock), James Broderick (Ray Brock), and Shelley Plimpton (Reenie). ALL THE LOVING COUPLES U-M 1969 Directed by Mac Bing. Produced by Bill Schwartz. Screenplay by Leo V. Gordon. Cinematography by Carl F. Marquand. Cast: Barbara Blake (Kathy Osborne), Lynn Cartwright 249 (Natalie Soberman), Paul Corai (Mike Corey), Scott Graham (Dale Osborne), Paul Lambert (Irv Soberman), Jackie Russell (Thelma Corey), Gloria Mannon (Liz Burnett), and Norman Alden (Mitch Burnett). AN AMERICAN IN PARIS M-G-M 19 51 Directed by Vincente Minelli. Produced by Arthur Freed. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography by Alfred Gilks and John Alton. Cast: Gene Kelly (Jerry Mulligan) and Leslie Caron (Lise Bourvier), THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY M-G-M 1964 Directed by Arthur Hiller. Produced by Martin Ranso- hoff. Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky from the novel by William Bradford Huie. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. Cast: James Garner (Lieut. Charles E. Madison), Julie Andrews (Emily Barham), and James Coburn (Lieut. Comdr. "Bus” Cummings). AND GOD GREATED WOMAN Kingsley-International 1958 Directed by Roger Vadim. Produced by Raoul J. Levy. Screenplay by Vadim and Levy. Cinematography by Armand Thirard. Cast: Brigitte Bardot (Juliette), Jean-Louis Trintig- nant (Michel), and Curt Jurgens (Eric). ANGEL, ANGEL DOWN WE GO American International 1969 Written and directed by Robert Thom. Produced by Jerome F. Katzman. Cinematography by Jack Warren. Cast: Jennifer Jones (Astrid), Jordan Christopher (Bogart), and Holly Near (Tara). THE ANGEL LEVINE United Artists 1970 Directed by Jan Kadar. Produced by Chiz Schultz. Screenplay by William Gunn and Ronald Ribman from the story by Bernard Malamud. Cinematography by Richard Kratina. Cast: Zero Mostel (Morris Mishkin), Harry Belafonte (Alexander Levine) , and Ida Kaminska (Fanny Mishkin). 250 ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS Universal 1969 Directed by Charles Jarrott. Produced by Hal B. Wallis, Screenplay by Bridget Boland, John Hale, and Richard Sokolove from the play by Maxwell Anderson. Cinematography by Arthur Ibbetson. Cast: Richard Burton (Henry VIII) and Genevieve Bujold (Anne Boleyn). ANNA CHRISTIE M-G-M 1930 Directed by Clarence Brown. Screenplay by Frances Marion from the play by Eugene O'Neill. Cinematography by William Daniels. Cast: Greta Garbo (Anna). THE APARTMENT United Artists 1960 Produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond. Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. Cast: Jack Lemmon (C. C. Baxter), Shirley MacLaine (Fran Kubelik), and Fred MacMurray (Jeff Sheldrake). THE APRIL FOOLS National General (Cinema Center) 1969 Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Produced by Gordon Carroll. Screenplay by Hal Dresner. Cinematography by Michel Hugo. Cast: Jack Lemmon (Howard Brubaker), Catherine Denueve (Cathy Gunther), Peter Lawford (Ted Gunther), Sally Kellerman (Phyllis Brubaker), Charles Boyer (An dre Greenlaw), Myrna Loy (Grace Greenlaw), and Jack Weston (Potter. Shrader). THE ARRANGEMENT Warner Bros. 1969 Written, produced and directed by Elia Kazan from his own novel. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Kirk Douglas (Eddie), Deborah Kerr (Florence), Faye Dunaway CGwen). B. S., I LOVE YOU Fox 1971 Written and directed by Steven Hillard Stern. Pro duced by Arthur M. Broidy. Cinematography by David Dans. Cast: Peter Kastner (Paul Bongard), JoAnna Cameron (Marily/Michele), Joanna Barnes (Jane Ink), and Louise Sorel (Ruth). 251 BABY LOVE Avco Embassy 1969. Directed by Alastair Reid. Produced by Guido Coen. Screenplay by Reid, Coen and Michael Klinger. Cinema tography by Desmond Dickinson. Cast: Linda Hayden (Luci), Keith Barron (Robert), Ann Lynn (Amy), and Derek Lamden (Nick). THE BABYMAKER National General 1970 Written and directed by James Bridges. Produced by Richard Goldstone. Cinematography by Charles Rosher, Jr. Cast: Barbara Hershey (Tish Gray), Collin Wilcox- Horne (Suzanne Wilcox), Sam Groom (Jay Wilcox), and Scott Glenn (Tad Jacks). BARBARELLA Paramount 1968 Directed by Roger Vadim. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Screenplay by Jean-Claude Forest, Vadim, et al., from the comic strip by Forest. Cinematography By CTaude Renoir. Cast: Jane Fonda (Barbarella) and John Phillip Law (Pygar). BAREFOOT IN THE PARK Paramount 1967 Directed by Gene Saks. Produced by Hal B. Wallis. Screenplay by Neil Simon based on his play. Cinema tography by Joseph LaShelle. Cast: Jane Fonda (Corie), Robert Redford (Paul), Charles Boyer (Victor Velasco), and Mildrid Dunnock (Ethel). THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS Allied Artists 1968 Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Produced by Antonio Musu, Screenplay by Franco Solinas and Pontecorvo. Cinema tography by Marcello Gatti. Cast: Yacef Saadi (Kader) and Jean Martin (Colonel Mattieu). BECKET Paramount 1964 Directed by Peter Glenville. Produced by Hal B. Wallis. Screenplay by Edward Anhalt from the play by Jean Anouilh. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. Cast: Richard Burton (Becket) and Peter O’Toole (Henry). 252 THE BELLS OF ST, MARY’S RKO 1945 Produced and directed by Leo McCarey. Screenplay by Dudley Nichols based on the story by McCarey. Cinema tography by George Barnes Cast: Bing Crosby (Father O’Malley) and Ingrid Bergman (Sister Benedict). BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS Fox 19 70 Produced and directed by Russ Meyer. Screenplay by Roger Ebert from a story by Ebert and Meyer. Cinema tography by Fred J. Koenekamp. Cast: Dolly Read (Kelly MacNamara) and Phyllis Davis (Susan Lake). THE BLISS OF MRS. BLOSSOM Paramount 1968 Directed by Joseph McGrath. Produced by Josef Shaftel. Screenplay by Alex Coppel and Denis Norden from a play by Coppel. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. Cast: Shirley MacLaine (Harriet Blossom) , Richard Attenborough (Robert Blossom), and James Booth (Am brose Tuttle). BLOW-UP M-G-M 1966 Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Produced by Carlo Ponti. Screenplay by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond. Cinematography by Carlo di Palma. Cast: David Hemmings (Thomas), Vanessa Redgrave (Jane), and Sarah Miles (Patricia). BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE Columbia 1969 Directed by Paul Mazursky. Produced by Larry Tucker. Screenplay by Mazursky and Tucker. Cinematography by Charles E. Lang. Cast: Robert Culp (Bob), Natalie Wood (Carol), Elliott Gould (Ted), and Dyan Cannon (Alice). LE BONHEUR Clover 1966 I Written and directed by Agnes Varda. Produced by Mag Bodard. Cinematography by Jean Rabier and Claude Beausoleil. Cast: Jean-Claude Drouot (Francois), Claire Drouot (Therese), and Marie France Boyer (Emilie), 253 BONNIE AND CLYDE Warner Bros. 1967 Directed by Arthur Penn. Produced by Warren Beatty. Screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton, Cinema tography by Burnett Guffey. Cast: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Michael J. Pollard (C. W. Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), and Estelle Parsons (Blanche). THE BOYS IN THE BAND National General (Cinema Center) 1970 Directed by William Friedkin. Written and produced by Mart Crowley, from his own play. Cinematography by Arthur J. Ornitz. Cast: Kenneth Nelson (Michael), Laurence Luckinbill (Hank), Keith Prentice (Larry), Peter White (Alan), Cliff Gorman (Emory), Leonard Frey (Harold), Frederick Combs (Donald), and Robert LaTourneaux (Cowboy). BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S Paramount 1961 Directed by Blake Edwards. Produced by Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd. Screenplay by George Alexrod from the novella by Truman Capote, Cinematography by Fritz Planer. Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Holly Golightly). BREATHLESS (A BOUT DE SOUFFLE) Films-Around-the-World 1959 Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Produced by Georges de Beauregard. Screenplay by Godard based on an idea by Francois Truffaut. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel) and Jean Seberg (Patricia). BREWSTER MCCLOUD M-G-M 1971 Directed by Robert Altman. Produced by Lou Adler. Screenplay by Doran William Cannon. Cinematography by Lamar Boren and Jordan Cronenweth. Cast: Bud Cort (Brewster McCloud), Sally Kellerman (Louise), Shelley Duvall (Suzanne Davis), and Jennifer Salt (Hope McFarland). THE BRIDE WORE BLACK United Artists 1968 Directed by Francois Truffaut. Screenplay by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard from a novel by William Irish. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Cast: Jeanne Moreau (Julie), Jean-Claude Brialy (Corey), and Charles Denner (Fergus). BRIEF ENCOUNTER Universal 1946 Directed by David Lean. Screenplay by Anthony Havelock-Allan, Lean, and Ronald Neame from the play by Noel Coward. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. Cast: Trevor Howard (Alec Harvey) and Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson). BROKEN BLOSSOMS United Artists 1919 Written and directed by D, W. Griffith, from the story, "The Chink and the Child," by Thomas Burke. Cinematography by G. W. Bitzer. Cast: Richard Barthelmess (The Yellow Man), Lillian Gish (Lucy), and Donald Crisp (Battling Burrows). THE BROTHERHOOD Paramount 1968 Directed by Martin Ritt. Produced by Kirk Douglas. Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Cast: Kirk Douglas (Frank), Alex Cord (Vince), and Irene Papas (Ida). BROTHERLY LOVE M-G-M 1970 Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Produced by Robert Emmett Ginna. Screenplay by James Kennaway based on his novel, Household Ghosts, and his play, "Country Dance." Cinematography by Ted Moore. Cast: Peter O'Toole (Sir Charles Ferguson), Susannah York (Hilary Dow), and Michael Craig (Douglas Dow). BULLITT Warner Bros. 1968 Directed by Peter Yates. Produced by Philip D'Antoni. Screenplay by Alan R. Trustman and Harry Kleiner based on the novel, Mute Witness, by Robert L. Pike. Cinema tography by WiTliam A. Fraker. Cast: Steve McQueen (Bullitt) and. Jacqueline Bisset (Cathy). BUONA SERA, MRS. CAMPBELL United Artists 1968 Produced and directed by Melvin Frank. Scteenplay by Frank, Sheldon Keller, and Denis Norden. Cinema tography by Gabor Pogany. Cast: Gina Lollobrigida (Carla Campbell), Shelley Winters (Shirley Newman), Phil Silvers (Phil Newman), Peter Lawford (Justin Young), Marian Moses (Lauren Young), Lee Grant (Fritzie Braddock), and Telly Savalas (Walter Braddock). BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID Fox 1969 Directed by George Roy Hill. Produced by John Foreman Screenplay by William Goldman. Cinematography by Con rad Hall. Cast: Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy), Robert Redford (The Sundance Kid), and Katharine Ross (Etta Place). BUTTERFIELD 8 M-G-M 1960 Directed by Daniel Mann. Produced by Pandro. S. Ber man. Screenplay by Charles Schnee from the novel by John O’Hara. Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Gloria Wandrous), Laurence Harvey (Weston Liggett), and Eddie Fisher (Steve Car penter) . CACTUS FLOWER Columbia 1969 Directed by Gene Saks. Produced by M. J. Frankovich. Screenplay by I. A. L. Diamond from the play by Abe Burrows. Cinematography by Charles E. Lang. Cast: Walter Matthau (Julian Winston), Ingrid Bergman (Stephanie Dickinson), Goldie Hawn (Toni Simmons), and Rick Lenz (Igor Sullivan). CAMELOT Warner Bros. 1967 Directed by Joshua Logan. Produced by Jack L. Warner. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner from his play based on the novel, The Once and Future King, by T. H. White. Cinematography by Richard H. fTline. Cast: Richard Harris (Arthur), Vanessa Redgrave (Guenievere), and Franco Nero (Lancelot). CAN! HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS? Universal 1969 Produced and directed by Anthony Newley. Screenplay by Herman Raucher and Newley. Cinematography by Otto Heller. Cast: Anthony Newley (Hieronymus Merkin), Joan Collins (Polyester Poontang), and Connie Kreski (Mercy Humppe). 256 CANDY Cinerama 1968 Directed by Christian Marquand. Produced by Robert Haggiag. Screenplay by Buck Henry from the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. Cast: Ewa Aulin (Candy), Richard Burton (McPhisto), Walter Matthau (Gen. Smight) , Ringo Starr (Emmanuel), John Astin (Daddy and Uncle Jack), Marlon Brando (Grindl), THE CAPTAIN’S PARADISE United Artists 1953 Produced and directed by Anthony Kimmins. Screenplay by Alec Coppel. Cinematography by Ted Scaife. Cast: Alec Guinness (Henry/Jimmy), Yvonne DeCarlo (Nita), and Celia Johnson (Maude). CASABLANCA Warner Bros. 1943 Directed by Michael Curtiz. Produced by Hal B, Wallis, Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip Gf Epstein, and Howard Koch from the play, ’’Everybody Comes to Rick's,” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Cinema tography by Arthur Edeson. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Rick), Ingrid Bergman (IIsa), and Paul Henrid (Captain Vic or Laszlo). CASTLE KEEP Columbia 1969 Directed by Sydney Pollack. Produced by Martin Ranso- hoff and John Galley. Screenplay by Daniel Taradash and David Rayfiel from the novel by William-Eas.tl.ake. Cinematography by Henri Decae. Cast: Burt Lancaster (The Major), Jean-Pierre Aumont (The Count), and Astrid Heeren (The Countess). CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF M-G-M 19 58 Directed by Richard Brooks. Produced by Lawrence Wein- garten. Screenplay by Brooks and James Poe from the play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography by William H. Daniels. Cast: Paul Newman (Brick) and Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie). CATCH-22 Paramount 1970 i Directed by Mike Nichols. Produced by John Calley and | Martin Ransohoff. Screenplay by Buck Henry from the i novel by Joseph Heller. Cinematography by David 257 Watkin. Cast: Alan Arkin (Yossarian), Arthur Garfunkle (Nate- ly ), Paula Prentiss (Nurse Duckett), Orson Welles (Gen eral Dreedle), Charles Grodin (Aarfy Aardvark), and Olimpia Carlisi (Luciana). CHASTITY American-International 1969 Directed by Alessio de Paola. Written and produced by Sonny Bono. Cinematography by Ben Coleman. Cast: Cher (Chastity), Barbara London (Diana Mid night), and Stephen Whitabke (Eddie). CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN Fox 1949 Directed by Walter Lang. Written and produced by Lamar Trotti from a story by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth. Cinematography by Leon Shamroy. Cast: Clifton Webb (Frank Gilbreth), Jeanne Crain (Ann Gilbreth), and Myrna Loy (Mrs. Lillian Gilbreth). THE CHRISTINE JORGENSEN STORY United Artists 197 0 Directed by Irving Rapper. Produced by Edward Small. Screenplay by Robert E. Kent and Ellis St. John from the autobiography of Christine Jorgensen. Cinema tography by Jacques Marquette. Cast: John Hansen (George/Christine). CITIZEN KANE RKO 1941 Produced and directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Herman J. Manciewicz and Orson Welles. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Cast: Orson Welles (Charles Foster Kane), Joseph Cotten (Jed Leland), Ruth Warwick (Emily Naughton), and Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander). THE COLLECTOR Columbia 1965 Directed by William Wyler. Produced by Jud Kinberg and John Kohn. Screenplay by Stanley Mann and Kohn from the novel by John Fowles. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg) and Samantha Egger (Miranda Grey). THE COMIC Columbia 1969 I | Directed by Carl Reiner. Written and produced by i Reiner and Aaron Ruben. Cinematography by W. Wallace 258 Kelley. Cast: Dick Van Dyke (Billy Bright), Michele Lee (Mary Gibson) , and Nina Wayne (Sibyl). COOL HAND LUKE Warner Bros. 1967 Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Produced by Gordon Carroll. Screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank P. Pier son from the novel by Pearce. Cinematography by Conrad Hall. Cast: Paul Newman (Luke) and George Kennedy (Dragline). CRAZY QUILT Continental 1966 Written, produced, directed, and photographed by John Korty. Cast: Tom Rosqui (Henry) and Ina Mela (Lorabelle). DADDY’S GONE A-HUNTING National General 1969 Produced and directed by Mark Robson, Screenplay by Larry Cohen and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. Cast: Carol White (Cathy Palmer), Paul Burke (Jack Byrnes), and Scott Hylands (Kenneth Daly). THE DAMNED Warner Bros. 1969 Directed by Luchino Visconti. Produced by Alfred Levy and Ever Haggiag. Screenplay by Nicola Badalucco, Enrico Medioli, and Visconti. Cinematography by Armando Nannuzzi and Pasquale De Santis. Cast: Helmut Berger (Martin von Essenbeck) and Ingrid Thulin (Baroness Sophie von Essenbeck). DARKER THAN AMBER National General 1970 Directed by Robert Clouse. Produced by Walter Seltzer and Jack Reeves. Screenplay by Ed Walter from the novel by John D. MacDonald. Cinematography by Frank Phillips, Cast: Rod Taylor (Travis McGee) and Suzy Kendall (Vangie/Merrimay). DARLING Embassy 1965 Directed by John Schlesinger. Produced by Joseph Janni. Screenplay by Frederic Raphael. Cinematography by Kenneth Higgins. Cast: Julie Christie (Diana Scott), Dirk Bogarde (Robert Gold), and Laurence Harvey (Miles Brand). 259 DARLING LILI Paramount 1970 Produced and directed by Blake Edwards. Screenplay by Edwards and William Peter Blatty. Cinematography by Russell Harlan. Cast: Julie Andrews (Lili Smith), Rock Hudson (Major William Larrabee), and Jeremy Kemp (Von Ruger). DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND Columbia 1966 Written and directed by Bernard Girard. Produced by Carter De Haven. Cinematography by Lionel Linden. Cast: James Coburn (Eli Kotch) and Camilla Sparv (Inger Knudson). DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE Universal 1970 Produced and directed by Frank Perry, Screenplay by Eleanor Perry from the novel by Sue Kaufman. Cinema tography by Gerald Hirschfeld. Cast: Richard Benjamin (Jonathan Balser), Carrie Snodgress (Tina Balser), and Frank Langella (George Prager). DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE Columbia 1967 Directed by Bud Yorkin. Produced by Norman Lear. Screenplay by Lear based on a story by Robert Kaufman. Cinematography by Conrad Hall. Cast: Dick Van Dyke (Richard Harrison), Debbie Rey nolds (Barbara Harrison), Jean Simmons (Nancy Downes), Jason Robards (Nelson Downes), Van Johnson (A1 Year ling) , Joe Flynn (Lionel Blandsforth), and Lee Grant (Dede Murphy). DOCTOR ZHIVAGO M-G-M 1965 Directed by David Lean. Produced by Carlo Ponti. Screenplay by Robert Bolt from the novel by Boris Pasternak. Cinematography by Freddie Young. Cast: Omar Sharif (Dr. Zhivago), Julie Christie (Lara), and Geraldine Chaplin (Tonya). LA DOLCE VITA Astor 1961 Directed by Federico Fellini. Produced by Giuseppe Amato and Angelo Rizzoli. Screenplay by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello), Anouk Aimee 260 (Maddalena), Anita Ekberg (Sylvia), and Yvonne Furneaux (Emma). DOUBLE INDEMNITY Paramount 1944 Directed by Billy Wilder. Produced by Joseph Sistrom. Screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from a story by James M. Cain. Cinematography by John F. Seitz. Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff) and Barbara Stan wyck (Phyllis Dietrichson). EASY RIDER Columbia 1969 Directed by Dennis Hopper. Produced by Peter Fonda. Screenplay by Fonda, Hopper, and Terry Southern. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs. Cast: Peter Fonda (Capt. America), Dennis Hopper (Billy), and Jack Nicholson (George). 8-1/2 Embassy 1963 Directed by Federico Fellini. Screenplay by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaino,. and Brunello Rondi. Cinematography by Gianni de Venanzo. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Guido Anselmi), Claudia Cardinale (Claudia, the dream girl), Anouk Aimee (Luisa), and Sandra Milo (Carla). ELVIRA MADIGAN Cinema V 1967 Written, produced and directed by Bo Widerberg. Cinematography by Jorgen Persson. Cast: Pia Degermark (Elvira) and Thommy Berggren (Sixten). THE END OF THE ROAD Allied Artists 1970 Directed by Aram Avakian. Produced by Terry Southern and Stephen Kesten. Screenplay by Dennis McGuire, Southern, and Avakian from the novel by John Barth. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. Cast: Stacy Keach (Jack Horner), Harris Yulin (Joe Morgan), and Dorothy Tristan (Rennie Morgan). THE ENTERTAINER Continental 1960 Directed by Tony Richardson. Produced by Harry Saltz- man. Screenplay by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale from Osborne's play. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Laurence Olivier (Archie Rice). 261 ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE Continental 1970 Directed by Douglas Hickox, Produced by Douglas Kentish. Screenplay by Clive Exton from the play by Joe Orton. Cinematography by Wolfgang Suschitzky. Cast: Beryl Reid (Kath), Harry Andrews (Ed), and Peter McEnery (Mr. Sloane). THE FBI STORY Warner Bros. 1959 Produced and directed by Mervyn Le Roy. Screenplay by Richard L. Breen and John Twist from the book by Don Whitehead. Cinematography by Joseph Biroc. Cast: James Stewart (Chip Hardesty)^and Vera Miles (Lucy Hardesty). FACES Continental 1968 Written and directed by John Cassavetes. Produced by Maurice McEndree. Cinematography by A1 Ruban. Cast: John Marley (Richard), Lynn Carlin (Maria), Gena Rowlands (Jeannie), and Seymour Cassel (Chet). A FAREWELL TO ARMS Paramount 1932 Produced and directed by Frank Borzaga. Screenplay by Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett from the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography by Charles Lang. Cast: Gary Cooper (Frederick Henry) and Helen Hayes (Catherine). A FAREWELL TO ARMS Fox 1958 Directed by Charles Vidor. Produced by David 0. Sleznick. Screenplay by Ben Hecht from the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography by Piero Portalupi and Oswald Morris. Cast: Rock Hudson (Frederick Henry) and Jennifer Jones (Catherine). FATHER OF THE BRIDE M-G-M 1950 Directed by Marvin Stuart. Produced by Pandro S. Berman. Screenplay by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett from the novel by Edward Streeter. Cinema tography by John Alton. Cast: Spencer Tracy (Stanley T. Banks), Elizabeth Taylor (Kay Banks), and Joan Bennett (Ellie Banks). 262 FELLINI SATYRICON United Artists 1970 Directed by Federico Fellini. Produced by Alberto Grimaldi. Screenplay by Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi, and Brunello Rondi from the novel, The Satyricon, by Petronius Arbiter and other ancient works. Cinema- tography by Giuseppe Rotunno. Cast: Martin Potter (Encolpio), Hiram Keller (Ascilto), Max Born (Gitone), and Hylette Adolphe. FIRST LOVE UMC 1970 Directed by Maximilian Schell. Produced by Schell and Barry Levinson. Screenplay by Schell and John Gould from the story by Ivan Turgenev. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. Cast: John Moulder Brown (Alexander) and Dominique Sanda (Sinaida). THE FIRST TIME United Artists 1969 Directed by James Neilson. Produced by Roger Smith and Allan Carr. Screenplay by Joe Heims and Smith from a story by Bernard Bassey. Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. Cast: Jacqueline Bisset (Anna), Wes Stern (Kenny), Rick Kelman (Mike), and Wink Roberts (Tommy). FIVE EASY PIECES Columbia 1970 Directed by Bob Rafelson. Produced by Rafelson and Richard Wechsler. Screenplay by Adrien Joyce from a story by Rafelson and Joyce. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs. Cast: Jack Nicholson (Robert Dupea), Karen Black (Rayette Dipesto), and Susan Anspach (Catherine Van Ost) . A FOOL THERE WAS Fox 1914 Directed by Frank Powell. Produced by William Fox. Screenplay by Porter Emerson Browne. Cast: Theda Bara (The Vampire), Edward Jose (John-- the Fool), and Mabel Frenyear (Kate--the Wife). FOOLS Cinerama 1970 Directed by Tom Gries. Produced by Henri Bollinger and Robert H. Yamin. Screenplay by Robert Rudelson. Cinematography by Michel Hugo. 263 Cast: Jason Robards (Matthew Short), Katharine Ross (Anais), and Scott Hylands (David Appleton). THE FOX Warner Bros. 1967 Directed by Mark Rydell. Produced by Raymond Stross. Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino and Howard Koch from the novella by D. H. Lawrence. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. Cast: Sandy Dennis (Jill), Anne Heywood (March), and Keir Dullea (Paul). FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE United Artists 1964 Directed by Terence Young. Produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum, adapted by Johanna Harwood from the novel by Ian Flem ing. Cinematography by Ted Moore. Cast: Sean Connery (James Bond) and Daniela Bianchi (Tatiana Romanova). FUNNY GIRL Columbia 1968 Directed by William Wyler. Produced by Ray Stark. Screenplay by Isobel Lennart from her libretto for the play. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Cast: Barbra Streisand (Fanny Brice) and Omar Sharif (Nicky Arnstein). GAILY, GAILY United Artists 1969 Produced and directed by Norman Jewison, Screenplay by Abram S. Ginnes from the novel by Ben Hecht. Cinema tography by Richard Kline. Cast: Beau Bridges (Ben Harvey), Melina Mercouri (Queen Lil), Brian Keith (Francis X. Sullivan), Margot Kidder (Adelaine), and Melodie Johnson (Lilah). GAMES Universal 196 7 Directed by Curtis Harrington. Produced by George Edwards. Screenplay by Gene Kearney from a story by Harrington and Edwards. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. Cast: Simone Signoret (Lisa), James Caan (Paul), and Katharine Ross (Jennifer). I THE GAY DECEIVERS Fanfare 1969 t ! Directed by Bruce Kessler. Produced by Joe Solomon. Screenplay by Jerome Wish from a story by Abe Polsky 264 and Gil Lasky. Cinematography by Don Birnkrant. Cast: Kevin Coughlin (Danny), Larry Casey (Elliot), Brooke Bundy (Karen), and Michael Greer (Malcolm). GENERATION Avco Embassy 1969 Directed by George Schaefer. Produced by Frederick Brisson. Screenplay by William Goodhart from his play. Cinematography by Lionel Linden. Cast: David Janssen (Jim Bolton), Kim Darby (Doris Bolton Owen), and Peter Duel (Walter Owen). GETTING STRAIGHT Columbia 1970 Produced and directed by Richard Rush, Screenplay by Robert Kaufman from the novel by Ken Kole. Cinematog raphy by Laszlo Kovacs. Cast: Elliott Gould (Harry Bailey) and Candice Bergan (Jan). GIANT Warner Bros. 1956 Produced and directed by George Stevens, Screenplay by Fred Guioi and Ivan Moffat from the novel by Edna Ferber. Cinematography by William C. Mellor. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Leslie Benedict), Rock Hudson (Bick Benedict), James Dean (Jett Rink), and Dennis Hopper (Jordan Benedict III). GIGI M-G-M 1958 Directed by Vincente Minelli. Produced by Arthur Freed. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. Cast: Leslie Caron (Gigi) and Louis Jourdan (Gaston). GLASS HOUSES Columbia (1970--Unreleased) Directed by Alexander Singer. Produced by George Folsey, Jr. Screenplay by Alexander and Judith Singer. Cinematography by George Folsey, Sr. Cast: Bernard Barrow (Victor), Deirdre Lenihan (Kim), and Jennifer O'Neill (Jean). GOLDFINGER United Artists 1964 Directed by Guy Hamilton. Produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn from the novel by Ian Fleming. Cinema tography by Ted Moore. 265 Cast: Sean Connery (James Bond), Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore), Shirley Eaton (Jill Masterson), and Gert Frobe (Goldfinger). GONE WITH THE WIND M-G-M 1939 Directed by Victor Fleming. Produced by David 0. Selz- nick. Screenplay by Sidney Howard from the novel by Margaret Mitchell. Cinematography by Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan. Cast: Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) and Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara). GOODBYE, COLUMBUS Paramount 1969 Directed by Larry Peerce. Produced by Stanley R. Jaffe. Screenplay by Arnold Schulman from the novella by Philip Roth. Cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld. Cast: Richard Benjamin (Neil) and Ali Mac Graw (Brenda). GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS M-G-M 1969 Directed by Herbert Ross, Produced by Arthur P. Jacobs. Screenplay by Terrence Rattigan from the novel by James Hilton. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Peter O’Toole (Arthur Chipping) and Petula Clark (Katherine). THE GRADUATE Embassy 1967 Directed by Mike Nichols. Produced by Lawrence Turman. Screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry from the novel by Charles Webb. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Benjamin Braddock), Anne Ban croft (Mrs. Robinson), Katharine Ross (Elaine Robinson), Murray Hamilton (Mr. Robinson), William- Daniels (Mr. Braddock), Elizabeth Wilson (Mrs. Braddock), and Brian Avery (Carl Smith). GRAND PRIX M-G-M 1966 Directed by John Frankenheimer. Produced by Edward Lewis. Screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur. Cinema tography by Lionel Linden, Cast: James Garner (Peter Aron), Yves Montand (Jean- Pierre Sarti), Eva Marie Saint (Louise Frederickson), Brian Bedford (Scott Stoddard), Jessica Walter (Pat Stoddard), Antonio Sabato (Nino Barlini), and Francoise Hardy (Lisa). j THE GRAPES OF WRATH Fox 1940 266 Directed by John Ford. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson from the novel by John Steinbeck. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Cast: Henry Fonda (Tom Joad) and Jane Darwell (Ma Joad). THE GRASSHOPPER National General 1970 Directed by Jerry Paris. Written and produced by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall from the novel, The Passing of Evil, by Mark McShane. Cinematography by Sam Leavitt. Cast: Jacqueline Bisset (Christine), James Brown (Tommy Marcott), and Joseph Cotten (Richard Morgan). THE GREAT RACE Warner Bros. 1965 Directed by Blake Edwards. Produced by Martin Jurow. Screenplay by Arthur Ross from a story by Ross and Edwards. Cinematography by Russell Harlan. Cast: Jack Lemmon (Professor Fate/Crown Prince), Tony Curtis (The Great Leslie) , and Natalie Wood (Maggie DuBois). THE GREAT WHITE HOPE Fox 1970 Directed by Martin Ritt. Produced by Lawrence Turman. Screenplay by Howard Saekler from his play. Cinema tography by Burnett Guffey. Cast: James Earl Jones (Jack Jefferson) and Jane Alex ander (Eleanor). A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN Fox 1967 Directed by Gene Kelly. Produced by Frank McCarthy. Screenplay by Frank Tarloff. Cinematography by Joe McDonald. Cast: Walter Matthau (Paul Manning), Robert Morse (Ed Stander), and Inger Stevens (Ruth Manning). THE GYPSY MOTHS M-G-M 1969 Directed by John Frankenheimer. Produced by Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts. Screenplay by William Hanley from the novel by James Drought. Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. Cast: Burt Lancaster (Mike Rettig), Deborah Kerr (Elizabeth Brandon), William Windom (V. John Brandon), 267 Scott Wilson (Malcolm Webson), Gene Hackman (Joe Browdy), Bonnie Bedelia (Annie Burke), and Sheree North (Waitress). HAPPY ANNIVERSARY United Artists 1959 Directed by David Miller. Produced by Ralph Fields. Screenplay by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodrow from their play, "Anniversary Waltz." Cinematography by Lee Garmes. Cast: David Niven (Chris Walters) and Mitzi Gaynor (Alice Walters). HAPPY END Continental 1968 Directed by Oldrich Lipsky. Screenplay by Milos Macourek and Lipsky from a story by Lipsky. Cast: Vladimir Mensik (Bedrich) and Jaroslava Ober- maierova (Julie), THE HAPPY ENDING United Artists 1969 Written, produced and directed by Richard Brooks. Cinematography by Conrad Hall. Cast: Jean Simmons (Mary Wilson), John Forsythe (Fred Wilson), Shirley Jones (Flo), Lloyd Bridges (Sam), Dick Shawn (Harry Bricker), Tina Louise (Helen Brick- er), and Kathy Fields (Marge Wilson). A HARD DAY'S NIGHT United Artists 1964 Directed by Richard Lester. Produced by Walter Shenson. Screenplay by Alun Owen. Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor. Cast: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (Themselves). HARD CONTRACT Fox 1969 Written and directed by S. Lee Pogostin. Produced by Marvin Schwartz. Cinematography by Jack Hildyard. Cast: James Coburn (John Cunningham) and Lee Remick (Sheila) . THE HAWAIIANS United Artists 1970 Directed by Tom Gries. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Screenplay by James R. Webb from the novel, Hawaii, by • James A. Michener. Cinematography by Philip H. ' I Lathrop. f 268 Cast: Charlton Heston (Whip Hoxworth) and Geraldine Chaplin (Purity Hoxworth). HELLFIGHTERS Universal 1968 Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. Produced by Robert Arthur. Screenplay by Clair Huffaker. Cinematography by William H. Clothier. Cast: John Wayne (Chance Buckman), Vera Miles (Madelyn Buckman), Katharine Ross (Tish Buckman), and Jim Hutton (Greg Parker). HELLO, DOLLY! Fox 1969 Directed by Gene Kelly. Written and produced by Ernest Lehman, based on the musical play by Michael Stewart from the play, "The Matchmaker," by Thornton Wilder, and other works. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Cast: Barbra Streisand (Dolly Levi), Walter Matthau (Horace Vandergelder), Marianne McAndrew (Irene Molloy), and E. J. Peaker (Minnie Fay). HELLO-GOODBYE Fox 1970 Directed by Jean Negulesco. Produced by Andre Hakim. Screenplay by Roger Marshall. Cinematography by Henri Decae. Cast: Genevieve Gillis (Dany), Michael Crawford (Harry England), and Curt Jurgens (Baron De Choisis). HELLZAPOPPIN Universal 1941 Directed by H. C, Potter. Produced by Jules Levey. Screenplay by Nat Perrin and Warren Wilson from a story by Perrin and the play by Olsen and Johnson. Cinema tography by Woody Bredell. Cast: Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (Themselves). HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH United Artists 1968 Produced and directed by Clive Donner. Screenplay by Hunter Davies from his novel. Cinematography by Denis Lewiston. Cast: Barry Evans (Jamie McGregor), Judy Geeson (Mary Gloucester), Angela Scoular (Caroline), Sheila White (Paula), and Adrienne Posta (Linda). HIGH NOON United Artists 1952 ! Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Produced by Stanley I Kramer. Screenplay by Carl Foreman from the story, 269 "Tin Star," by John W. Cunningham. Cinematography by Floyd Crosby. Cast: Gary Cooper (Will Kane) and Grace Kelly (Amy Kane). HOMICIDAL Columbia 1961 Produced and directed by William Castle. Screenplay by Robb White. Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. Cast: Jean Arless (Emily/Warren). THE HONEYMOON KILLERS Cinerama 1970 Written and directed by Leonard Kastle. Produced by Warren Steibel. Cinematography by Oliver Wood. Cast: Shirley Stoler (Martha Beck), Tony LoBianco (Ray Fernandez), Mary Jane Higbee (Janet Fay), Kip McArdle (Delphine Downing), and Barbara Cason (Evelyn Long). HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE Cinerama 1969 Directed by Norman Panama, Produced by Bill Lawrence. Screenplay by Ben Starr and Michael Kanin. Cinema tography by Charles Lang. Cast: Bob Hope (Frank Benson), Jackie Gleason (Oliver Poe), Jane Wyman (Elaine Benson), Maureen Arthur (Lois Grey), Tina Louise (Laverne) , JoAnna Cameron (Nancy Benson), Tim Matthieson (David Poe). HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE United Artists 1965 Directed by Richard Quine. Written and produced by George Alexrod. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Cast: Jack Lemmon (Stanley Ford), Terry-Thomas (Charles), and Virna Lisi (Mrs. Ford). HOW TO SAVE A MARRIAGE AND RUIN YOUR LIFE Columbia 1968 Directed by Fielder Cook. Produced by Stanley Shapiro. Written by Shapiro and Nate Monaster. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. Cast: Dean Martin (David Sloane), Stella Stevens (Carol Corman), Eli Wallach (Harry Hunter), and Anne Jackson (Muriel Laszlo). HUD Paramount 1963 Directed by Martin Ritt. Produced by Ritt and Irving Ravetch. Screenplay by Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. 270 from the novel, Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Cast: Paul Newman (Hud Bannon), Patricia Neal (Alma), Melvyn Douglas (Granddad), and Brandon de Wilde (Lonnie). HUSBANDS Columbia 1970 Written and directed by John Cassavetes.. . Produced by A1 Ruban. Cinematography by Victor Kemper. Cast: Ben Gazzara (Harry), Peter Falk (Archie), John Cassavetes (Gus), Jenny Runacres (Mary Tynan), Jenny Lee Wright (Pearl Billingham), and Noelle Kao (Julie). I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) Grove 1969 Written and directed by Vilgot Sjoman. Produced by Goran Lindgren. Cinematography by Peter Wester. Cast: Lena Nyman (Lena), Borge Ahlstedt (Borge), and Peter Lindgren (Rune). I LOVE MY WIFE Universal 1970 Directed by Mel Stuart. Produced by Stan Margulies. Screenplay by Robert Kaufman. Cinematography by Vilis Lapenicks. Cast: Elliott Gould (Richard Burrows), Brenda Vaccaro (Jody Burrows), and Angel Tompkins (Helene Donnelly). I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER Columbia 1970 Produced and directed by Gilbert Cates. Screenplay by Robert Anderson from his play. Cinematography by Morris Hartzband. Cast: Melvyn Douglas (Tom Garrison), Gene Hackman (Gene Garrison), Dorothy Stickney (Margaret Garrison), and Estelle Parsons (Alice). I WALK THE LINE Columbia 1970 Directed by John Frankenheimer. Produced by Harold D. Cohen. Screenplay by Alan Sargent from the novel, An Exile, by Madison Jones. Cinematography by David M. Walsh. Cast: Gregory Peck (Sheriff Tawes), Tuesday Weld (Alma McCain), and Estelle Parsons (Ellen). IF I HAD A MILLION Paramount 1932 I I Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen ■ I Roberts, Norman McLeod, James Cruze, William A. Seiter,! and H. Bruce Humberstone. Screenplay by Claude Binyon et al., from a story by Robert D. Andrews. Cast: Charlie Ruggles (Henry Peabody), Charles Laugh ton (The Clerk), Gary Cooper (Gallagher), George Raft (Eddie Jackson), W. C. Fields (Rollo), and Jack Oakie (Mulligan). IN LIKE FLINT Fox 1967 Directed by Gordon Douglas. Produced by Saul David. Screenplay by Hal Fimberg. Cinematography by William H. Daniels, Cast: James Coburn (Derek Flint) and Jean Hale (Lisa). IN SEARCH OF GREGORY Universal 1970 Directed by Peter Wood, Produced by Joseph Janni and Daniele Senatore. Screenplay by Tonino Guerra and Lucile Laks. Cinematography by Otto Heller. Cast: Julie Christie (Catherine), Michael Sarrazin (Gregory), and John Hurt (Daniel). INSIDE DAISY CLOVER Warner Bros. 1965 Directed by Robert Mulligan. Produced by Alan J. Padula. Screenplay by Gavin Lambert from his novel. Cinematography by Charles Lang. Cast: Natalie Wood (Daisy) and Robert Redford (Wade). INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS RKO 1956 Directed by Don Siegel. Produced by Walter Wanger. Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring from the novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredricks. Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Miles) and Dana Wynter (Becky). IRMA LA DOUCE United Artists 1963 Produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond from the play by Alexandre Breffort. Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. Cast: Jack Lemmon (Nestor) and Shirley MacLaine (Irma). ISADORA Universal 1968 Directed by Karel Reisz. Produced by Robert and Ray mond Hakim. Screenplay by Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton from My Life by Isadora Duncan and Isadora Duncan, An Intimate Portrait by Sewell Stokes. Cinematography~by Larry Pizer. Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Isadora Duncan), Jason Robardsj (Paris Singer), John Fraser (Roger), James Fox (Gordon 272 Craig), and Ivan Tchenko (Sergei Essenin). IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT Columbia 1934 Produced and directed by Frank Capra. Screenplay by Robert Riskin from a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Cinematography by Joe Walker. Cast: Clark Gable (Peter) and Claudette Colbert (Ellie). JENNY ABC 1970 Directed by George Bloomfield. Produced by Edgar J, Scherick. Screenplay by Marvin Lavut and Bloomfield from a story by Diana Gould. Cinematography by David L. Quaid. Cast: Mario Thomas (Jenny), Alan Alda (Delano), and Marian Hartley (Kay). JOAN OF ARC RKO 1948 Directed by Victor Fleming. Produced by Walter Wanger. Screenplay by Maxwell Anderson and Andrew Solt from the play, "Joan of Lorraine," by Anderson. Cinematography by Joseph Valentine. Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Joan) and Jose Ferrer (The Dauphin). JOANNA Fox 1968 Written and directed by Michael Sarne. Produced by Michael Laughlin. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Genevieve Waite (Joanna), Glenna Forster-Jones (Beryl), Donald Sutherland (Lord Peter Sanderson), Calvin Lockhart (Gordon), and Christian Doermer (Hendrik). JOE Cannon 1970 Directed and photographed by John. G. Avildsen. Pro duced by David Gil. Written by Norman Wexler. Cast: Dennis Patrick (Bill Compton), Peter Boyle (Joe Curran), Audrey Caine (Joan Compton), K. Callan (Mary Lou Curran), Susan Sarandon (Melissa Compton), and Patrick McDermott (Frank Russo). JOHN AND MARY Fox 1969 Directed by Peter Yates. Produced by Ben Kadish. Screenplay by John Mortimer from the novel by Mervyn Jones. Cinematography by Gayne Rescher. 273 Cast: Dustin Hoffman (John), Mia Farrow (Mary), Michael Tolan (James), Sunny Griffin (Ruth), and Marian Mercer (Mags Elliott). KALEIDOSCOPE Warner Bros, 1966 Directed by Jack Smight. Produced by Peter Medak. Screenplay by Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. Cast: Warren Beatty (Barney) and Susannah York (Angel). THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE Cinerama 1968 Produced and directed by Robert Aldrich. Screenplay by Lukas Heller from the play by Frank Marcus. Cinema tography by Joseph Biroc. Cast:.. Beryl Reid (Jane--Sister George), Susannah York (Alice McNaught), and Coral Browne (Mercy Croft). A KIND OF LOVING Governor 1962 Directed by John Schlesinger. Produced by Joseph Janni. Screenplay by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse from the novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography by Denys Coop, Cast: June Ritchie (Ingrid) and Alan Bates (Victor). THE KNACK...AND HOW TO GET IT United Artists 1965 Directed by Richard Lester. Produced by Oscar Lewen- stein. Screenplay by Charles Wood from the play by Ann Jellicoe. Cinematography by David Watkin. Cast: Rita Tushingham (Nancy), Michael Crawford (Colin), and Ray Brooks (Tolen), THE KREMLIN LETTER Fox 1970 Directed by John Huston. Produced by Carter De Haven and Sam Weisenthal. Screenplay by Huston and Gladys Hill from the novel by Noel Behn. Cinematography by Ted Scaife. Cast: Patrick O'Neal (Rone), Barbara Parkins (B. A.), and Bibi Andersson (Erika). THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI Columbia 1947 Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Welles from a play by Sherwood King. Cinematography by Charles Lawton, Jr. Cast: Orson Welles (Michael O'Hara), Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister), and Everett Sloane (Arthur Bannis ter) . 274 THE LAST HURRAH Columbia 1958 Produced and directed by John Ford. Screenplay by Frank Nugent from the novel by Edwin O'Connor. Cinema tography by Charles Lawton, Jr. Cast: Spencer Tracy (Frank Skeffington). THE LAST OF THE MOBILE HOT SHOTS Warner Bros. 1969 Produced and directed by Sidney Lumet. Screenplay by Gore Vidal from the play, "The Seven Descents of Myrtle," by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Cast: James Coburn (Jeb), Lynn Redgrace (Myrtle), and Robert Hooks (Chicken). LAST SUMMER Allied Artists 1969 Produced and directed by Frank Perry. Screenplay by Eleanor Perry from the novel by Evan Hunter. Cinema tography by Gerald Hirschfeld. Cast: Barbara Hershey (Sandy), Catharine Burns (Rhonda), Richard Thomas (Peter), and Bruce Davidson (Dan). THE LEARNING TREE Warner Bros. 1969 Written, produced and directed by Gordon Parks from his novel. Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. Cast: Kyle Johnson (Newt). LIBELED LADY M-G-M 1936 Directed by Jack Conway. Produced by Lawrence Wein- garten. Screenplay by Maurice Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer from a story by Wallace Sullivan. Cinematography by Norbert Brodine. Cast: Jean Harlow (Gladys), William Powell (Bill Chandler), Myrna Loy (Connie), and Spencer Tracy (Haggerty). THE LIBERATION OF L. B. JONES Columbia 1970 Directed by William Wyler. Produced by Ronald Lubin. Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Jesse Hill Ford from the novel by Ford. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Lee J. Cobb (Oman Hedgepath), Anthony Zerbe (Willie Joe Worth), Roscoe Lee Browne (L. B. Jones), Lola Falana (Emma Jones), Lee Majors (Steve Mundine), and Barbara Hershey (Nella Mundine). 275 LIFE AT THE TOP Columbia 1966 Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Produced by James Woolf. Screenplay by Mordecai Richeler from the novel by John Braine. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Laurence Harvey (Joe Lampton), Jean Simmons (Susan), and Honor Blackman (Norah Hauxley). LIFE WITH FATHER Warner Bros. 1947 Directed by Michael Curtiz. Produced by Robert Buck ner. Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart from the play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Cinematography by Peverell Marley and William V. Skall. Cast: William Powell (Father) and Irene Dunne (Vinnie). LITTLE BIG MAN National General (Cinema Center) 1970 Directed by Arthur Penn. Produced by Stuart Miller. Screenplay by Calder Willingham from the novel by Thomas Berger. Cinematography by Harry Stradling, Jr. Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Jack Crabb), Faye Dunaway (Mrs. Pendrake), Amy Eccles (Sunshine), Kelly Jean Peters (Olga), and Chief Dan George (Old Lodge Skins). LITTLE FAUSS AND BIG HALSY Paramount 197 0 Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Produced by Albert S. Ruddy. Screenplay by Charles Eastman. Cinematography by Ralph Woolsey. Cast: Robert Redford (Halsy Knox), Michael J. Pollard (Little Fauss), and Lauren Hutton (Rita Nebraska). THE LION IN WINTER Avco Embassy 1968 Directed by Anthony Harvey. Produced by Martin Poll. Screenplay by James Goldman from his play. Cinema tography by Douglas Slocombe. Cast: Peter O’Toole (Henry II), Katharine Hepburn (Eleanor), and Jane Merrow (Alais). LIVE FOR LIFE United Artists 1968 Directed by Claude Lelouch. Produced by Alexandre Mnouchkine and Georges Dancigers. Screenplay by Pierre Uytterhoeven. Cinematography by Lelouch. Cast: Yves Montand (Robert Colomb), Candice Bergen (Candice), and Annie Giradot (Catherine Colomb). 276 LOLITA M-G-M 1962 Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Produced by James B. Harris. Screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov.from his novel. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: James Mason (Humbert Humbert), Shelley Winters (Charlotte) , and Sue Lyon (Lolita). LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Embassy 1962 Directed by Sidney Lumet. Produced by Ely Landau. Screenplay from the play by Eugene O'Neill. Cinema tography by Boris Kaufman. Cast: Katharine Hepburn (Mary Tyrone), Ralph Richard son (James Tyrone), Jason Robards (Jamie Tyrone), and Dean Stockwell (Edmund Tyrone). LOOK BACK IN ANGER Warner Bros. 1959 Directed by Tony Richardson. Produced by Harry Saltz- man. Screenplay by Nigel Kneale from the play by Johm Osborne. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Richard Burton (Jimmy Porter), Claire Bloom (Helen Charles), and Mary Ure (Alison Porter). THE LOVE BUG Buena Vista 1968 Directed by Robert Stevenson. Produced by Bill Walsh. Screenplay by Walsh and Don DaGradi. Cinematography by Edward Colman. Cast: Dean Jones (Jim), Michele Lee (Carole), and Buddy Hackett (Tennessee). LOVE IS A FUNNY THING United Artists 1970 Written and directed by Claude Lelouch. Produced by Alexandre Mnouchkine and Georges Dancigers. Cinema tography by Jean Collomb. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Henri) and Annie Giradot (Francoise). THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY Ufa 1927 Directed by G. W. Pabst. From the novel by Ilya Ehren- berg. Cast: Edith Jehanne (Jeanne), Brigitte Helm and Uno Henning. (Only information available.) THE LOVE PARADE Paramount 1929. 277 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Screenplay by Ernest Vajda and Guy Bolton from the play, "The Prince Consort,” by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel. Cinematography by Victor Milner. Cast: Maurice Chevalier (Count Alfred), Jeanette MacDonald (Queen Louise) , and Lillian Roth (Lulu). LOVE STORY Paramount 1970 Directed by Arthur Hiller. Produced by Howard G. Min sky. Screenplay by Erich Segal. Cinematography by Dick Kratina. Cast: Ali Mac Graw (Jenny), Ryan O’Neal (Oliver Bar rett IV), Ray Milland (Oliver Barrett III), and John Marley (Phil). LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER Paramount 1963 • s Directed by Robert Mulligan. Produced by Alan J. Pakula. Screenplay by Arnold Schulman. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. Cast: Steve McQueen (Rocky), Natalie Wood (Angie), and Herschel Bernardi (Dominic). LOVER COME BACK Universal 1961 Directed by Delbert Mann. Produced by Stanley Shapiro > and Martin Melcher. Written by Shapiro and Paul Henning. Cinematography by Arthur E. Arling. Cast: Doris Day (Carol Templeton) and Rock Hudson (Jerry Webster). LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS ABC 1970 Directed by Cy Howard. Produced by David Susskind. Screenplay by Renee Taylor, Joseph Bologna, and David Zelag Goodman from the plays by Bologna and Taylor. Cinematography by Andrew Laszlo. Cast: Bea Arthur (Bea), Bonnie Bedelia (Susan), Michael Brandon (Mike), Richard Castellano (Frank), Robert Dishy (Jerry), Harry Guardino (Johnny), Marian Hailey (Brenda), Joseph Hindy (Richie), Anne Jackson (Cathy), Diane Keaton (Joan), Cloris Leachman (Bernice), Anne Meara (Wilma), and Gig Young (Hal). LOVING Columbia 1970 Directed by Irvin Kershner. Written and produced by Don Devlin from the novel, Brooks Wilson, Ltd., by J. D. Ryan. 278 Cast: George Segal (Brooks Wilson), Eva Marie Saint (Selma), Nancie Phillips (Nelly), Janis Young (Grace), and David Doyle (Will). M*A*S*H Fox 1970 Directed by Robert Altman. Produced by Ingo Preminger. Screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. from the novel by Robert Hooker. Cinematography by Harold E. Stone. Cast: Donald Sutherland (Hawkeye), Elliott Gould (Trapper John), Sally Kellerman (Hot Lips), Jo Ann Pflug (Lt. Dish), and John Schuck (Painless Pole). MAD MISS MANTON RKO 1938 Directed by Leigh Jason. Produced by P. J. Wolfson. Screenplay by Philip G. Epstein from a story by Wilson Collinson. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Melsa Manton) and Henry Fonda (Peter Ames). THE MAGIC GARDEN OF STANLEY SWEETHEART M-G-M 1970 Directed by Leonard Horn. Produced by Martin Poll. Screenplay by Robert T. Westbrook from his novel. Cinematography by Victor Kemper. Cast: Don Johnson (Stanley Sweetheart), Linda Gillin (Shayne/Barbara), Michael Greer (Danny), and Dianne Hull (Cathy). THE MALTESE FALCON Warner Bros. 1941 Written and directed by John Huston from the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Produced by Hal B. Wallis. Cinema tography by Arthur Edeson. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Sam Spade) and Mary Astor (Brigid 0'Shaughnessy). A MAN AND A WOMAN Allied Artists 1966 Written,, produced, directed, and photographed by Claude Lelouch. Cast: Anouk Aimee (Anne Gauthier) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Jean-Louis Duroc). THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM United Artists 1955 Produced and directed by Otto Preminger. Screenplay by Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer from the novel by Nelson Algren, Cinematography by Sam Leavitt. 279 Cast: Frank Sinatra (Frankie Machine), Eleanor Parker (Zosh), and Kim Novak (Molly). A MARRIED COUPLE Contemporary 1969 Produced and directed by Allan King. Cinematography by Richard Leiterman. Cast: Billy and Antoinette Edwards and their son, Bogart. MARRY ME! MARRY ME! Allied Artists 1969 Written, produced and directed by Claude Berri. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. Cast: Claude Berri (Claude), Elizabeth Wiener (Isa belle), and Prudence Harrington (Helen). MAYERLING M-G-M 1969 Directed by Terence Young. Produced by Robert Dorf- mann. Screenplay by Terence Cook from the novel by Claude Anet. Cast: Catherine Denueve (Baroness Maria Vetsera), Omar Sharif (Crown Prince Rudolph), James Mason (Emperor Franz Joseph), and Ava Gardner (Empress Elizabeth). ME, NATALIE National General (Cinema Center) 1969 Directed by Fred Coe. Produced by Stanley Shapiro. Screenplay by A. Martin Zweiback from a story by Shapiro. Cinematography by Arthur J. Ornitz. Cast: Patty Duke (Natalie Miller), James Farentino (David Harris), and Martin Balsam (Uncle Harold). MEDIUM COOL Paramount 1969 Written, directed, and photographed by Haskell Wexler. Produced by Tully Friedman and Wexler. Cast: Robert Forster (John), Verna Bloom (Eileen), and Marianna Hill (Ruth). MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS M-G-M 1944 Directed by Vincente Minelli. Produced by Arthur Freed. Screenplay by Irving Brecher and Fred J. Finklehoffe from the novel by Sally Benson. Cinema tography by George Folsey. Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Smith), Mary Astor (Mrs. Smith), Leon Ames (Mr. Smith), and Margaret O’Brien (Tootie). MELODY American Continental 1971 280 Directed by Waris Hussein. Produced by David Puttnam. Screenplay by Alan Parker. Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Cast: Mark Lester (Daniel), Tracy Hyde (Melody), and Jack Wild (Ornshaw). MIDNIGHT COWBOY United Artists 1969 Directed by John Schlesinger. Produced by Jerome Heil man. Screenplay by Waldo Salt from the novel by James Leo Herlihy. Cinematography by Adam Holender. Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Ratso), Jon Voight (Joe Buck), Silvia Miles (Cass), Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley), Jennifer Salt (Annie), and Bob Balaban (The Student). MISSISSIPPI MERMAID United Artists 1970 Written and directed by Francois Truffaut from the novel, Waltz into Darkness, by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich). Cinematography by Denys Clerval. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Louis) and Catherine Denueve, (Julie). MONSIEUR VERDOUX United Artists 1947 Written, produced and directed by Charles Chaplin. Cinematography by R. H. Totheroh, Curt Courant, and Wallace Chewing. Cast: Charles Chaplin (Henri Verdoux), Martha Raye ! (Annabella), and Mady Correll (Mona). THE MOON IS BLUE United Artists 1953 Produced and directed by Otto Preminger. Screenplay by F. Hugh Herbert from his play. Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. < ' Cast: William Holden (David Gresham), Maggie McNamara ' ' (David Slater), David Niven (Patty 0‘Neill). t I jMORGAN! Cinema V 1966 I ! i i Directed by Karel Reisz. Produced by Leon Clore. j Screenplay by David Mercer. Cinematography by Larry ; j Pizer. j I Cast: David Warner (Morgan) and Vanessa Redgrave j (Leonie). 1 281 I MOVE Fox 1970 Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Produced by Pandro S. Berman. Screenplay by Joel Lieber and Stanley Hart from Lieber's novel. Cinematography by William Daniels. Cast: Elliott Gould (Hiram Jaffe), Paula Prentiss (Dolly), and Genevieve Waite (Girl). MURDERER'S ROW Columbia 1966 Directed by Henry Levin, Produced by Irving Allen. Screenplay by Herbert Baker from the novel by Donald Hamilton. Cinematography by Sam Leavitt. Cast: Dean Martin (Matt Helm) and Ann-Margret (Suzie). THE MUSIC MAN Warner Bros. 1962 Produced arid directed by Morton Da Costa. Screenplay by Marion Hargrove from the play by Meredith Wilson and Franklin Lacey. Cinematography by Robert Burks. Cast: Robert Preston ("Professor" Harold Hill) and Shirley Jones (Marian Paroo). MY FAIR LADY Warner Bros. 1964 Directed by George Cukor. Produced by Jack L. Warner. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner from his musical play based on the play, "Pygmalion," by George Bernard Shaw. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Cast: Rex Harrison (Henry Higgins) and Audrey Hepburn j (Eliza Doolittle). | MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S Pathe Contemporary 1970 1 i j Written and directed by Eric Rohmer. Cinematography by, i Almendors Machuel. Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Man), Francoise Fabian ' (Maud), Antoine Vitez (Vidal), and Christine Barrault ; (Francoise). I ! | MY SWEET CHARLIE Universal 1970 | Directed by Lamont Johnson. Written and produced by j Richard Levinson and William Link from the play by David Westheimer. Cast: Patty Duke (Marlene) and A1 Freeman, Jr. (Charlie). 1 282 MYRA BRECKINRIDGE Fox 1970 Directed by Michael Sarne. Produced by Robert Fryer. Screenplay by Sarne and David Giler from the novel by Gore Vidal. Cinematography by Richard Moore. Cast: Raquel Welch (Myra), Mae West (Leticia), Rex Reed (Young Man), John Huston (Buck Loner), Farrah Fawcett (Mary Ann) , and Roger Herren (Rus^ty) . A NEW LEAF Paramount 1971 Written and directed by Elaine May, Produced by Howard W. Koch and Hillard Elkins. Cinematography by Gayne Rescher. Cast: Walter Matthau (Henry Graham) and Elaine May (Henrietta Lowell). NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE Cinema V 1965 ; Written and directed by Don Owen. Produced by Owen and Roman Kroiter. Cinematography by John Spotton. Cast: Peter Kastner (Peter) and Julie Biggs (Julie). ■ NOTHING BUT A MAN Cinema V 1965 Directed by Michael Roemer. Produced by Robert Young, i Roemer, and Robert Rubin. Screenplay by Roemer and | Young. Cinematography by Young. Cast: Ivan Dixon (Duff) and Abbey Lincoln (Josie). I - NUMBER ONE United Artists 1969 j Directed by Tom Gries. Produced by Walter Seltzer. Screenplay by David Moessinger. Cinematography by Michel Hugo. Cast: Charlton Heston (Ron Catlin), Jessica Walter ! ' (Julie Catlin), and Diana Muldaur (Ann). I j i ! THE ODD COUPLE Paramount 1968 i j I ! Directed by Gene Saks. Produced by Howard W, Koch. j I Screenplay by Neil Simon from his play. Cinematography| by Robert B. Hausen. ! Cast: Walter Matthau (Oscar) and Jack Lemmon (Felix). | ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER Paramount 197 0 ! I I Directed by Vincente Minelli. Produced by Howard W. | Koch. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner from his musical play. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. 283 Cast: Barbra Streisand (Daisy Gamble) and Yves Montand (Dr. Marc Chabot). ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE United Artists 1969 Directed by Peter Hunt. Produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum from the novel by Ian Fleming. Cinematography by Michael Reed. Cast: George Lazenby (James Bond) and Diana Rigg (Tracy). ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO Bawalco 1964 Directed by Larry Peerce. Produced by Sam Weston. Screenplay by Raphael Hayes and Orville Hampton. Cinematography by Andrew Lasxlo. Cast: Barbara Barrie (Julie Cullen Richards) and Bernie Hamilton (Frank Richards). THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN Fox 1970 Directed by George Stevens. Produced by Fred Kolmar. Screenplay by Frank D. Gilroy from his play. Cinema tography by Henri Decae. Cast: Elizabeth Raylor (Fran), Warren Beatty (Joe), and Charles Braswell (Lockwood). ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: "COMPANY" Talent Associates 1970 Directed by D, A. Pennebaker. Produced by Chester Feldman. Cinematography by Pennebaker, Richard Lea cock, and Jim Desmond. Cast: Original Broadway cast of the musical comedy, "Companyj" The play was produced and directed by Harold Prince. Book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Produced on Broadway, April, 1970. 1 Cast: Dean Jones, Larry Kert (Robert), Barbara Barrie : (Sarah), Charles Kimbrough (Harry), Beth Howland (Amy),1 Elaine Stritch (Joanne), Charles Braswell (Larry), Donna McKechnie (Kathy), and Susan Browning (April). ! i OUR MAN FLINT Fox 1966 j i Directed by Daniel Mann. Produced by Saul David. I Screenplay by Hal Fimberg and Ben Starr from a story by Fimberg. Cinematography by Daniel Fapp, j Cast: James Coburn (Derek Flint) and Gila Golan (Gila)' 284 THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT Columbia 1970 Directed by Herbert Ross. Produced by Ray Stark. Screenplay by Buck Henry from the play by Bill Manhoff. Cinematography by Harry Stradling and Andrew Laszlo. Cast: Barbra Streisand (Doris) and George Segal (Felix). PAINT YOUR WAGON Paramount 1969 Directed by Joshua Logan. Written and produced by Alan Jay Lerner ftom his musical play. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. Cast: Lee Marvin (Ben Rumson), Jean Seberg (Elizabeth), and Clint Eastwood (Pardner). , THE PAWNBROKER Allied Artists 1965 Directed by Sidney Lumet. Produced by Roger H. Lewis and Philip Languer. Screenplay by David Friedkin and Morton Fine from the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Cast: Rod Steiger (Sol Nazerman). THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR Av.c.o Embassy 1970 Directed by David Greene. Produced by Herbert Brodkin. Screenplay by J. P. Miller from his teleplay. Cinema tography by Gordon Willis. Cast: Eli Wallach (Arthur Mason), Julie Harris (Gerri Mason), Deborah Winters (Maxie Mason), and Rue McClanahan (Della). ‘ PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT M-G-M 1962 ! Directed by George Roy Hill. Produced by Lawrence i Weingarten. Screenplay by Isobel Lennart from the play1 ' by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography by Paul C. ; v o g e i . ; ! Cast: Jim Hutton (George), Jane Fonda (Isabel), and j ! Anthony Franciosa (Ralph Bates). ( ] PETULIA Warner Bros. 1968 I I J I I Directed by Richard Lester. Produced by Raymond Wagner.!' i Screenplay by Lawrence B. Marcus from the novel, Me and! the Arch Kook Petulia, by John Hasse. Cinematography by Nicholas Roeg. Cast: Julie Christie (Petulia), George C. Scott | (Archie), Richard Chamberlain (David), and Shirley j Knight (Polo). i THE PHILADELPHIA STORY M-G-M 1940 Directed by George Cukor. Produced by Joseph L. Man- kiewicz. Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart from the play by Philip Barry. Cinematography by Joseph Rutten- berg. Cast: Cary Grant (C. K. Dexter Haven), Katharine Hep burn (Tracy Lord), and James Stewart (Macaulay Connor). THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY M-G-M 1945 Written and directed by Albert Lewin from the novel by Oscar Wilde. Produced by Pandro S. Berman. Cinema tography by Harry Stradling. Cast: George Sanders (Lord Henry), Hurd Hatfield (Dorian Gray), and Angela Lansbury (Sibyl Vane). PIECES OF DREAMS United Artists 1970 Directed by Daniel Haller. Produced by Robert F. Blumofe. Screenplay by Robert 0, Hirson from the novel, The Wine and the Roses, by William E. Barrett. Cinematography by Charles F. Wheeler, Cast: Robert Forster (Fr. Gregory Lind) and Lauren Hutton (Pamela Gibson). PILLOW TALK Universal 1959 Directed by Michael Gordon. Produced by Ross Hunter and Martin Melcher. Screenplay by Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin from a story by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene. Cinematography by Arthur E. Arling. Cast: Rock Hudson (Brad Allen) and Doris Day (Jan Morrow). A PLACE IN THE SUN Paramount 1951 Produced and directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown from the novel, An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. Cinematography by William c7 Mellor. Cast: Montgomery Clift (Clyde Griffiths), Elizabeth Taylor (Sondra Finchley), and Shelley Winters (Roberta Alden). POINT BLANK M-G-M 1967 Directed by John Boorman, Produced by Judd Bernard and Robert Chartoff. Screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse from the novel, The 286 Hunter, by Richard Stark. Cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop. Cast: Lee Marvin (Walker), Angie Dickinson (Chris), Sharon Acker (Lynn) , and John Vernon (Reese). THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST Paramount 1967 Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker. Produced by Stanley Rubin. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. Cast: James Coburn (Dr. Schaefer) and Nan Butler (Joan). THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES RKO 1942 Directed by Sam Wood. Produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Screenplay by Herman J. Manciewicz and Jo Swerling from a story by Paul Gallico. Cinematography by Rudolph Mate. Cast: Gary Cooper (Lou Gehrig) and Teresa Wright (Mrs. Gehrig). THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE Fox 1969 t Directed by Ronald Neame* Produced by Robert Fryer and James Cresson. Screenplay by Jay-Presson Allen from, her play based on the novel by Muriel Spark. Cinema tography by Ted Moore. Cast: Maggie Smith (Jean Brodie), Robert Stephens (Teddy Lloyd), Pamela Franklin (Sandy), and Gordon Jackson (Gordon Lowther). THE PROFESSIONALS United Artists 1968 i i Written, produced and directed by Richard Brooks, from : the novel, A Mule for the Marquessa, by Frank O’Rourke.1 Cinematography by Conrad Hall. 1 Cast: Burt Lancaster (Dolworth), Lee Marvin (Farden), ; and Claudia Cardinale (Maria). ! PRUDENCE AND THE PILL Fox 1968 i ■ i ! Directed by Fielder Cook. Produced by Kenneth Harper ! and Ronald J. Kahn. Screenplay by Hugh Mills from his ' novel. Cinematography by Ted Moore. > Cast: Deborah Kerr (Prudence Hardcastle), David Niven > (Gerald Hardcastle), and Judy Geeson (Geraldine). ! THE PUMPKIN EATER Columbia 1964 f j Directed by Jack Clayton. Produced by James Woolf. j Screenplay by Harold Pinter from the novel by Penelope j 287 Mortimer. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Anne Bancroft (Jo), Peter Finch (Jake), and James Mason (Conway), PUSSYCAT, PUSSYCAT, I LOVE YOU United Artists 1970 Written and directed by Rod Amateau. Produced by Jerry Bressler. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Celli , Cast: Ian McShane (Fred), Anne Calder-Marshall (Millie), John Gavin (Grant Granite), Severn Darden (Dr. Farquardt), and Joyce Van Patten (Anna Farquardt). PUTNEY SWOPE Cinema V 1969 Written.and. directed by Robert Downey. Cinematography by Gerald Cotts. Cast: Arnold Johnson (Putney) and Stanley Gottlieb (Nathan). R. P. M.* *REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE Columbia 1970 Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, Screenplay by Erich Segal. Cinematography by Michel Hugo. Cast: Anthony Quinn (Perez) and Ann-Margret (Rhoda), RABBIT, RUN Warner Bros, 1970 Directed by Jack Smight, Written and produced by Howard B, Kreitsek from the novel by John Updike, Cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop. [ Cast: James Caan (Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom), Anjanette Comer (Ruth), Carrie Snodgress (Janice), Melodie John- ! son (Lucie), Henry Jones (Mr. Angstrom), Arthur Hill (Jack Eccles), and Jack Albertson (Tothero). I RACHEL, RACHEL Warner Bros, 1968 i [ Produced and directed by Paul Newman. Screenplay by ! Stewart Stern. Cinematography by Gayne Rescher. Cast: Joanne Woodward (Rachel Cameron), James Olson I (Nick), Estelle Parsons (Calla Mackie), arid Kate Har- ; | rington (Mrs. Cameron). i i • I THE RAIN PEOPLE Warner Bros. 1969 | Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Pro duced by Bart Patton and Ronald Colby. Cinematography by Wilmer Butler. , Cast: Shirley Knight (Natalie), James Caan (Killer Kilgannon), and Robert Duvall (Gordon). 288 REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE Warner Bros, 1955 Written and directed by Nicholas Ray. Produced by David Weisbart. Cinematography by Ernest Haller. Cast: James Dean (Jim), Sal Mineo (Plato), Natalie Wood (Judy), and Jim Backus (Dad), THE REIVERS National General (Cinema Center) 1969 Directed by Mark Rydell. Produced by Irving Ravetch. Screenplay by Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. from the novel by William Faulkner. Cinematography by Richard Moore. Cast: Steve McQueen (Boon Hogganbeck), Mitch Vogel (Lucius McCaslin), and Sharon Farrell (Corrie). RIDER ON THE RAIN Avco Embassy 1970 Directed by Rene Clement. Produced by Serge Silberman. Screenplay by Sebastien Japrisot and Lorenzo Ventavoli. Cinematography by Andreas Winding. Cast: Marlene Jobert (Mely) and Charles Bronson (Dobbs). ' LA RONDE Janus 1950 Directed by Max Ophuls. Produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim. Screenplay by Jacques Natanson and Ophuls from the play, "Reigen," by Arthur Schnitzler. Cinema tography byChristian Matras. | Cast: Simone Signoret (The Girl), Danielle Darrieux ' (The Wife), Simon Simon (The Maid), Gerald Philipe i (The Count), and Anton Walbrook (The Master of Cere monies) . i | ROOM AT THE TOP Continental 1959 * j Directed^-by Jack Clayton. Produced by John and James ! Woolf. Screenplay by Neil Paterson from the novel by ■ John Braine. Cinematography by Freddie Francis, i Cast: Laurence Harvey (Joe Lampton), Simone Signoret , I (Alice), and Heather Sears (Susan Brown). ! i jRYAN•S DAUGHTER M-G-M 1970 j I Directed by David Lean. Produced by Anthony Havelock- Allan. Screenplay by Robert Bolt. Cinematography by Freddie Young. Cast: Sarah Miles (Rosy), Robert Mitchum (Charles Shaughnessy), Trevor Howard (Father Collins), and j Christopher Jones (Major Randolph Doryan), i 289 TH.E SANDPIPER M-G-M 1965 Directed by Vincente Minelli. Produced by Martin Ran- sohoff. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson from a story by Ransohoff. Cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Laura Reynolds), Richard Burton (Dr. Edward Hewitt), and Eva Marie Saint (Claire Hewitt). SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING Continental 1961 Directed by Karel Reisz. Produced by Tony Richardson. Screenplay by Alan Sillitoe from his novel. Cinema tography by Freddie Francis. Cast: Albert Finney (Arthur) and Shirley Anne Field (Doreen). SCROOGE National General (Cinema Center) 1970 Directed by Ronald Neame, Produced by Robert H. Solo. Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse from the novel, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Cast: Albert Finney (Scrooge) and Michael Medwin (Nephew). THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIO United Artists 1969 Prdduced and directed by Stanley Kramer. Screenplay I by William Rose and Ben Maddow from the novel by Robert Crichton. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. Cast: Anthony Quinn (Italo Bombolini) and Ann Magnani (Rosa Bombolini). j THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH Fox 1955 i i Directed by Billy Wilder. Produced by Wilder and : Charles K. Feldman. Screenplay by Wilder and George Alexrod from the play by Alexrod. Cinematography by ! Milton Krasner. | Cast: Marilyn Monroe (The Girl) , Tom Ewell (Richard | Sherman), and Evelyn Keyes (Helen Sherman). - i THE SILENCERS Columbia 1966 I i i I Directed by Phil Karlson. Produced by Irving Allen. Screenplay by Oscar Saul from the novels of Donald j Hamilton. Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. ! Cast: Dean Martin (Matt Helm), Stella Stevens (Gail), ; and Daliah Lavi (Tina). 290 SMILING' THROUGH M-G-M 1932 Directed by Sidney Franklin. Screenplay by Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin. Cinematography by Lee Games. Cast: Norma Shearer (Kathleen Clare) and Leslie Howard (Kenneth Wayne). SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS Disney 1938 Directed by David Hand. Produced by Walt Disney. Screenplay by Ted Sears et a_l. from the Grimms' fairy tale. SOME KIND OF A NUT United Artists 1969 Written and directed by Garson Kanin. Produced by Walter Mirisch. Cinematography by Burnett Guffey and Gerald Hirschfeld, Cast: Dick Van Dyke (Fred Amidon), Rosemary Forsyth (Pamela), and Angie Dickinson (Rachel). SOME LIKE IT HOT United Artists 1959 Produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond. Cinematography by Charles Lang, Jr. Cast: Marilyn Monroe ("Sugar" Kane), Jack Lemmon (Jerry), Tony Curtis (Joe), and Joe E. Brown (Osgood Fielding). SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE National General (Cinema Center) 1970 Directed by Harold Prince. Produced by John Flaxman. Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler from the novel, The Cook, by Harry Kressing, Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Angela Lansbury (Countess von Ornstein), Michael' York (Conrad) , Jane Carr (Lotte von Ornstein), and 1 Anthony Corlan (Helmuth von Ornstein). THE SOUND AND THE FURY Fox 1959 j i i Directed by Martin Ritt. Produced by Jerry Wald. Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. from the novel by William Faulkner. Cinematography by Charles G. Clarke. Cast: Yul Brynner (Jason) and Joanne Woodward (Quentin). 291 THE SOUND OF MUSIC Fox 1965 Produced and directed by Robert Wise, Screenplay by Ernest Lehman.from the musical play by Howard Linsay and Russel Crouse. Cinematography by Ted McCord. Cast: Julie Andrews (Maria) and Christopher Plummer (The Captain). STAIRCASE Fox 1969 Produced and directed by Stanley Donen. Screenplay by Charles Dyer from his play. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. Cast: Richard Burton (Harry) and Rex Harrison (Charlie) STAR! Fox 1968 Directed by Robert Wise. Produced by Saul Chaplin, Screenplay by William Fairchild. Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. Cast: Julie Andrews (Gertrude Lawrence), Daniel Massey , (Noel Coward), and Richard Crenna (Richard Aldrich). :THE STERILE CUCKOO Paramount 1969 Produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula. Screenplay by Alvin Sargent from the novel by John Nichols. Cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. Cast: Liza Minelli (Pookie Adams) and Wendall Burton (Jerry). STOLEN KISSES United Artists 1969 ! Directed by Francoise Truffaut. Produced by Marcel Berbert. Screenplay by Truffaut, Claude de Givray, and Bernard Revon. Cinematography by Denys Clerval. ! Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud (Antoine), Delphine Seyrig (Fabienne), and Claude Jade (Christine). I THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT M-G-M 1970 ! j . i ! Directed by Stuart Hagmann. Produced by Irwin Winkler | and Robert Chartoff. Screenplay by Israel Horovitz from the novel by James Simon Kunen. Cinematography by j Ralph Woolsey. Cast: Bruce Davidson (Simon) and Kim Darby (Linda). ! ' , . . . . . . jA STREETCAR NAMED.DESIRE Warner Bros. 1951 I Directed by Elia Kazan. Produced by Charles K. Feld- ] man. Screenplay by Tennesse Williams from his play. 292 Cinematography by Robert Burks. Cast: Marlon Brando (Stanley), Vivien Leigh (Blanche DuBois), and Kim Hunter (Stella). STROMBOLI RKO 1950 Produced and directed by Roberto Rossellini. Screen play by Rossellini, Art Cohn, Renzo Cesana, Sergio Amidei, and G. P. Callegari. Cenematography by Otello Martelli. Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Karin) and Mario Vitale (Antonio). THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES M-G-M 1968 Directed by Ulu Grosbard. Produced by Edgar Lansbury. Screenplay by Frank D. Gilroy from his play. Cinema tography by Jack Priestly. Cast: Patricia Neal (Nettie Cleary), Jack Albertson (John Cleary), and Martin-Sheen (Timmy Cleary). SUMMER OF *42 Warner Bros. 1971 Directed by Robert Mulligan. Produced by Richard A, Roth. Screenplay by Herman Raucher. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Jennifer O'Neill (Dorothy), GaryGrimes (Hermie), and Jerry Houser (Oscy). SUNFLOWER Avco Embassy 1970 Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Produced by Carlo Ponti and Arthur Cohn. Screenplay by Antonio Guerra, Cesare Zavattini, and Gheorgis Mdivani. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. Cast: Sophia Loren (Antonia), Marcello Mastrioanni (Giovanni), and Ludmilla Savelyeva (Masha). SUNRISE Fox 1927 Directed by F. W. Murnau. Produced by William Fox. Screenplay by Carl Mayer from the novel, A Trip to Tilsit, by Hermann Suderman. Cinematography by CFarles Rosher and Karl Struss. Cast: Janet Gaynor (The Wife), George O'Brien (The Husband), and Margaret Livingston (The Woman of the City). SUNSET BOULEVARD Paramount 1950 Directed by Billy Wilder. Produced by Charles Brackett Screenplay by Brackett, Wilder, and D. H. Marshman, Jr. Cinematography by John F. Seitz. Cast: Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond) and William Holden (Joe Gillis). SUSAN LENOX: HER RISE AND FALL M-G-M 1931 Produced and directed, by Robert Z. Leonard. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock from the novel by David Graham Powell. Cinematography by William Daniels. Cast; Greta Garbo (Susan Lenox) and Clark Gable (Rodney). SWEET CHARITY Universal 1969 Directed by Bob Fosse. Produced by Robert Arthur. Screenplay by Peter Stone from the play by Neil Simon, based on the screenplay for the film, The Nights of Cabiria, by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pmelli, and Enni'o Flaiano. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Cast: Shirley MacLaine (Charity), John McMartin (Oscar), and Ricardo Montalban (Vittorio). SWEET NOVEMBER Warner Bros. 1968 Directed by Robert Ellis Miller. Produced by Jerry Gershwin and Elliott Kastner. Screenplay by Herman Raucher. Cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp. Cast: Sandy Dennis (Sara Deever) and Anthony Newley (Charlie Blake). A TASTE OF HONEY Continental 1962 Directed by Tony Richardson. Screenplay by Shelagh Delaney from her play. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Rita Tushingham (Jo), Murray Melvin (Geoffrey), and Dora Bryan (Helen). TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON Paramount 1970 Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, Screenplay by Marjorie Kellogg from her novel. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Cast: Liza Minelli (Junie Moon), Ken Howard (Arthur), Robert Moore (Warren), James Coco (Mario), Emily Yancy (Solana), and Fred Williamson (Beachboy) . 294 TEOREMA Continental 1969 i Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Produced by Franco Rossellini and Manolo Bolognini. Cinema tography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini. Cast: Terence Stamp (Visitor), Silvano Magano (Lucia), Massimo Girotti (Paolo), Laura Betti (Emilia), Anne Wiasemsky (Odette), and Jose Cruz (Pietro). THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH Columbia 1969 Directed by Waris Hussein. Produced by Max J. Rosen berg, and Milton Subotsky. Screenplay by Margaret Drabble from her novel, The Millstone. Cinematography by Peter Suschitsky. Cast: Sandy Dennis (Rosamund). !THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP Columbia 1970 Directed by Roy Boulting. Produced by M. J, Frankovich and John Boulting. Screenplay by Terence Frisby from his play. Cinematography by Harry Waxman. Cast: Peter Sellers (Robert Danvers), Goldie Hawn (Marion), Nicky Henson (Jimmy), Gabrielle Drake (Julia), John Comer (John), and Diana Dors (John's wife). THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS! United Artists 1970 Directed by Gordon Douglas. Produced by Herbert Hirschman. Screenplay by Alan R. Trustman and James R. ! Webb, based on the character created by John Ball. Cinematography by Gerald Finnerman. Cast: Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs), Martin Landau (Rev. Logan Sharpe), and Barbara McNair (Valerie Tibbs). iTHEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? ABC 1969 , j Directed by Sydney Pollack. Produced by Irwin Winkler i ; and Robert Chartoff. Screenplay by James Poe and j Robert E. Thompson. Cinematography by Philip H. j ; Lathrop. I j Cast: Jane Fonda (Gloria), Michael Sarrazin (Robert), ! j and Gig Young (Rocky). I THE THIN MAN M-G-M 1934 I ! j | Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. Screenplay by Albert j | Hackett and Frances Goodrich from the novel by Dashiell j Hammett. Cinematography by James Wong Howe, j Cast: William Powell (Nick Charles) and Myrna Loy (Nora Charles). THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR United Artists 1968 Produced and directed by Norman Jewison. Screenplay by Alan R. Trustman. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. Cast: Steve McQueen (Thomas Crown) and Faye Dunaway (Vicky Anderson). THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE Universal 1967 Directed by George Roy Hill. Produced by Ross Hunter. Screenplay by Richard Morris. Cinematography by Russell Metty. Cast: Julie Andrews (Millie), Mary Tyler Moore (Dorothy), James Fox (Jimmy), John Gavin (Trevor Gray- don), and Carol Channing (Muzzy Van Hossmere). 3 IN THE ATTIC American International 1968 Produced and directed by Richard Wilson. Screenplay by Stephen Yafa. Cinematography by Burgi Contner. Cast: Christopher Jones (Paxton Quigley), Yvette Mimieux (Tobey), Judy Pace (Eulice), and Maggie Thrett (J ane). THREE INTO TWO WON'T GO Universal 1969 Directed by Peter Hall. Produced by Julian Blaustein. Screenplay by Edna O'Brien from the novel by Artdrea Newman. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Rod Steiger (Steve Howard), Claire Bloom (Frances Howard), Judy Geeson (Ella), and Peggy Ash croft (Mother). THX 1138 Warner Bros. 1971 Directed by George Lucas, Produced by Laurence Stur- hahm. Screenplay by Lucas and Walter Murch. Cinema tography by Dave Meyers and Albert Kihn. Cast: Robert Duvall (THX 1138), Donald Pleasence (SEN) , and Maggie McOmie (LUH). TO SIR WITH LOVE Columbia 1967 Written, produced and directed by James Clavell from the novel by E. R. Braithwaite. Cinematography by Paul Beeson. Cast: Sidney Poitier (Thackeray), Judy Geeson (Pamela Dare), and Lulu (Barbara Pegg). 296 TOM JONES United Artists 1963 Produced and directed by Tony Richardson. Screenplay by John Osborne from the novel by Henry Fielding. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. Cast: Albert Finney (Tom Jones), Susannah York (Sophie Western), and Hugh Griffith (Squire Western). TROUBLE IN PARADISE Paramount 1932 Produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, adapted by Grover Jones from the play, "The Honest Finder," by Laszlo Aladar. Cinema tography by Victor Milner. Cast: Miriam Hopkins (Lily), Kay Francis (Marianne), and Herbert Marshall (Gaston). TWO FOR THE ROAD Fox 1967 Produced and directed by Stanley Donen, Screenplay by Frederic Raphael. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Joanna), Albert Finney (Mark), William Daniels (Howard Manchester), Eleanor Bron (Cathy Manchester), and Georges Descrieres (David). 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY M-G-M 1968 Produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. Cast: Keir Dullea (Bowman) and Gary Lockwood (Poole). ULYSSES Continental 1967 Produced and directed by Joseph Strick. Screenplay by ! Strick and Fred Haines from the novel by James Joyce. Cinematography by Wolfgang Suschitzky. : Cast: Milo O’Shea (Leopold Bloom),.Barbara Jefford ! (Molly Bloom), Maurice Roeves (Stephen Daedalus), and j Joe Lynch (Blazes Boylan). j i THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG A1lied‘Artists 1965 i Written and directed by Jacques Demy. Produced by Mag ! Bodard. Cinematography by Jean Rabier. J Cast: Catherine Denueve (Genevieve) and Nino Castel- : nuovo (Guy). 297 THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE Allied Artists 1969 Written and directed by Claude Chabrol. Produced by Andre Genoves. Cinematography by Jean Rabier. Cast: Stephane Audran (Helene), Michel Bouquet (Charles), and Maurice Ronet (Victor). UP IN THE CELLAR American International 1970 Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker from the novel, The Late Boy Wonder, by Angus Hall. Produced by James H.Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Cinematog raphy by Earl ?Rath./ Cast: Wes Stern (Colin Slade), Joan Collins (Pat Camber), Larry Hagman (Maurice Camber), Judy Pace (Harlene Jones), and Nira Barab (Tracy Camber). UP THE JUNCTION Paramount 1968 Directed by Peter Collinson. Produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan and John Brabourne. Screenplay by Roger Smith from the novel by Neil Dunn. Cinematography by Arthur Lavis. Cast: Suzy Kendall (Polly), Dennis Waterman (Peter), and Andrienne Posta (Rube). THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY Chevron 1970 | Directed by Christopher Miles. Produced by Dimitri de : Grunwald. Screenplay by Alan Plater from the novel by D.H. Lawrence. Cinematography by Bob Huke. Cast: Joanna Shimkus (Yvette), Franco Nero (Gypsy), Harriett Harper (Lucille), Honor Blackman (Mrs. Faw cett), and Mark Burns (Major Eastwood). : A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN Columbia 1970 I Directed by Guy Green. Written and produced by Stir- 1 ling Silliphant from the novella by Rachel Maddux. j I Cinematography by Charles B. Lang. j I Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Libby Meredith), Anthony Quinn j (Will Cade), and Fritz Weaver (Roger Meredith). | A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH Fox 1970 j 1 I Directed by John Huston. Produced by Carter De Haven. I Screenplay by Dale Wasserman from the novel by Hans { Koninsberger. Cinematography by Ted Scaife. Cast: Anjelica Huston (Claudia) and Assaf Dayan (Heron of Foix). 298 WANDA Bardene International 1971 Written and directed by Barbara Loden. Produced by Harry Shuster. Cinematography by Nicholas T. Proferes. Cast: Barbara Loden (Wanda). WE'RE NOT MARRIED Fox 1952 Directed by Edmund Goulding. Written and produced by Nunnally Johnson. Cinematography by Leo Tover. Cast; Victor Moore (Justice of the Peace), Fred Allen (Steve Gladwyn), Ginger Rogers (Ramona Gladwyn), David Wayne (Jeff Norris), Marilyn Monroe (Annabel Norris), Paul Douglas (Hector Woodruff), Eve Arden (Katie Wood ruff) , Louis Calhern (Fred Melrose), and Zza Zza Gabor (Eve Melrose). WEST SIDE STORY United Artists 1961 Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. Produced by Wise. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman from the musical play by Arthur Laurents as conceived by Robbins. Cinematography by Daniel.L* Fapp. Cast: Natalie Wood (Maria) and Richard Beymer CTony). WHAT A WAY TO GO* Fox 1964 Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Produced by Arthur P. Jacobs. Screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green from a story by Gwen Davis. Cinematography by Leon , Shamroy. Cast: Shirley MacLaine (Louisa), Paul Newman (Larry : Flint), Dick Van Dyke (Edgar Hopper), Robert Mitchum i (Rod Anderson), Gene Kelly (Jerry Benson) and Dean ■ Martin (Leonard Crawley). ' WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT? United Artists 1965 i I i Directed by Clive Donner. Produced by Charles K. Feld man. Screenplay by Woody Allen. Cinematography by i Jean Badel. ! j Cast: Peter O'Toole (Michael James), Peter Sellers J | (Fritz Fassbender), and Romy Schneider (Carol Werner). ! ! WHERE'S POPPA? United Artists 1970 j I 1 ' Directed by Carl Reiner. Produced by Jerry Tokofsky ! and Marvin Worth. Screenplay by Robert Klane from his novel. Cinematography by Jack Priestly. Cast: George Segal (Gordon Hocheiser), Ruth Gordon 299 (Mrs. Hocheiser), Ron Liebman (Sidney Hocheiser), Trish Van Devere (Louise Callan), and Rae Allen (Gladys Hocheiser). WITHOUT A STITCH VIP 1970 Directed by Annelise Meineche;. Produced by John Hil- bard. Screenplay by Meineche and Hilbard from a novel by Jens Bjorneboe. Cinematography by Aage Wiltrup. Cast: Anne Grete (The Girl). WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Warner Bros. 1966 Directed by Mike Nichols. Written and produced by Ernest Lehman from the play by Edward Albee. Cinema tography by Haskell Wexler. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Martha), Richard Burton (George), Sandy Dennis (Honey), and George Segal (Nick). THE WILD BUNCH Warner Bros. 1969 Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Produced by Phil Feldman. Screenplay by Walon Green and Peckinpah from a story by Green and Roy N. Stickner. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Cast: William Holden (Otis Pike),.Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom) , and Robert Ryan (Thornton). WILD IN THE STREETS American International 1968 I Directed by Barry Shear. Produced by James H. Nichol son and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Screenplay by Robert Thom. Cinematography by Richard Moore. Cast: Christopher Jones (Max Flatow), Shelley Winters (Mrs. Flatow), and Diane Varsi (Sally Leroy). ! ! WINNING Universal 1969 ! Directed by James Goldstone. Produced by John Foreman, j Screenplay by Howard Rodman. Cinematography by Richard | Moore. j Cast: Paul Newman (Capua), Joanne Woodward (Elora), " j ! and Robert Wagner (Erding). ! i : j THE.WINNING TEAM Warner Bros. 1952 j Directed by Lewis Seiler. Produced by Bryan Foy. J Screenplay by Ted Sherdema. Cinematography by Sid . Hickox. I Cast: Ronald Reagan (Grover Cleveland Alexander) and Doris Day (Mrs. Alexander). 300 WIVES AND LOVERS Paramount 1963 Directed by John Rich. Produced by Hal B. Wallis. Screenplay by Edward Anhalt from the play, "The First Wife,” by Jay Presson. Cinematography, by Lucien Ballard. Cast: Janet Leigh (Bertie Austin) and Van Johnson (Bill Austin). A WOMAN IS A WOMAN Pathe Contemporary 1961 Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Produced by Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti. Screenplay, , Godard based on an idea by Genevieve Cluny. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Alfred Lubitsch), Anna Karina (Angela), and Jean-Claude Brialy (Emile Recamier). WOMEN IN LOVE United Artists 1970 Directed by Ken Russell. Written and produced by Larry Kramer from the novel by D. H. Lawrence, Cinematog raphy by Billy Williams. Cast: Glenda Jackson (Gudrun Brangwen), Alan Bates (Rupert Birkin), Oliver Reed (Gerald Crich), and Jennie Linden (Ursula Brangwen). WOODSTOCK Warner Bros. 1970 Directed by Michael Wadleigh. Produced by Bob Maurice. Cinematography by Wadleigh, David Meyers, Richard Pearce, Donald Lenzer, and A1 Wertheimer. IWUSA Paramount 1970 Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Produced by Paul Newman ' ! and John Foreman. Screenplay by Robert Stone from his ! novel,Hall of Mirrors. Cinematography by Richard 1 Moore. ! Cast: Paul Newman (Rheinhardt), Joanne Woodward i i (Geraldine), and Anthony Perkins (Rainley). j ! " i | WUTHERING HEIGHTS American International 1970 Directed by Robert Fuest. Produced by James H. Nichol son and Samuel Z, Arkoff, Screenplay by Patrick Tilley from the novel by Emily Bronte. Cinematography by John Coquillon. Cast: Anne Calder-Marshall (Catherine) and Timothy Dalton (Heathcliff). 301 YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE United Artists 1967 Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Produced by Albert R* Broc coli and Harry Saltzman. Screenplay by Roald Dahl from the novel by Ian Fleming. Cinematography by Freddie Young. Cast: Sean Connery (James Bond) and Akiko Wakabayashi (Aki). YOURS, MINE, AND OURS United Artists 1968 Directed by Melville Shavelson. Produced by Robert F. Blumofe. Screenplay by Shavelson and Mort Lachman from a story by Madelyn Davis and Bob Caroll, Jr. Cinematography by Charles F. Wheeler4 Cast: Lucille Ball (Helen North) and Henry Fonda (Frank Beardsley). Z Cinema V 1969 Directed by Costa-Gavras. Produced by Jacques Perrin and Hamed Rachedi. Screenplay by Jorge Semprun and Costa-Gavras from the book by Vassili Vassilikos. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Cast: Yyes Montand (Z), Irene Papas (Helene), and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Judge). ZABRISKIE POINT M-G-M 1970 Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.., Px.oduced,by. Carlo Ponti. Screenplay by Antonioni, Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, and Clare Peplo. Cinematog raphy by Alfio Contini. Cast: Mark Frechette (Mark), Daria Halprin (Daria), and Rod Taylor (Lee Allen). BIBLIOGRAPHY 302 30 BOOKS Agee, James. Agee on Film (Reviews and Comments). New York: Beacon Press, 1964. Alpert, Hollis. The Dreams and the Dreamers. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1062. ________ , and Andrew Sarris (eds). Film 68/69, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969. Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. New York: The New American Library^ r965. Barnet, Sylvan, Morton Berman, and William Burto. A Dictionary of Literary, Dramatic, and Cinematic Terms. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 19/1. Baxter, John. Hollywood in the Thirties. New York: A. S Barnes and Co., 1968. Berri, Claude. Marry Me l Marry Me I Translated by June P Wilson and Walter B. Michaels. New York: Popular Library, 1969. Blood, Robert 0., Jr. Love Match and Arranged Marriage. New York: The Free Press, 1967T ________ . Marriage♦ New York: The Free Press, 1969. Bobker, Lee R. Elements of Film. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.,1969. Boyd, Malcolm. The Book of Days. New York: Random House 1968. Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade * s Gone By. . . New York: Alfred A, Knopf, Inc., 1968. Buchler, Ira R. and Henry A. Selby. Kinship and Social Organization. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. Cogley, John. Report on Blacklisting. Vol. I: Movies. New Yorlc: THe Fund for the Republic, 195^ Crist, Judith. The Private Eye, the Cowboy, and the Very Naked Girl. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. D’Arcy, Martin C., S. J. The Mind and Heart of Love. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947. Deming, Barbara. Running Away from Myself. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1964ed. Dickson, Ruth. Marriage is a Bad Habit. Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, Inc., 1968. Dunne, John Gregory. The Studio. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Films, 1965-1970: Reviews, Commentary, and Ratings. 5 Vols. New York: The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 1966-1971. Fleming, Ian. Moonr.aker. New York: The Macmillan Com pany, 1955. Forman, Henry '"James . : Our Movie Made Children. Introduc tion by Dr. W. W. Charters. New York: The Mac millan Company, 1933. Fromm, Erich. The Art.of Loving. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1956. Gardiner, Harold C., S.J. The Catholic Viewpoint on Censorship. Garden City: Hanover House, 1958. Gessner, Robert. The Moving Image. New York: E. P. Dut ton and Co., Inc., 1968. Getlein, Frank and Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. Movies, Morals, and Art. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961. Griffith, Richard and Arthur Mayer. The Movies. New York: Bonanza Books, 1957. Halliwell, Leslie. The Filmgoer's Companion. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970. Hamilton, Gilbert. A Research in Marriage. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1929. Handel, Leo. Hollywood Looks at its Audience. Urbana: The University of Illinois Presis, 1950. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 1957ed. Higham, Charles and Joel Greenberg; Hollywood in the Forties. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co.,1968. Houston, Penelope. The Contemporary Cinema. Baltimore: Penguin Books , 1963. Huaco, George A. The. Sociol»ogy of Film Art. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965. Hunnings, Neville March. Film Censors and the Law. London: George! Allen and Unwin Ltd. , 1967. Hunt, Morton M. The World of the Formerly Married. New York: McGraw-Hill Company " J 1966. Hurley, Neil P. Theology Through Film. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers^ 1970. Huss, Roy and Norman Silverstein. The Film Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Inglis, Ruth A. Freedom of the Movies. Chicago: Univers-: ity of Chicago Press, 1947. Jacobs, Lewis. The Emergence of Film Art. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969ed. Jones, Mervyn. John 6 Mary. New York: Bantam Books, 1969ed. Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965. j Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Boston: Little, Brown andj Company, 1968. Kantor, Bernard R., Irwin Blacker, and Anne Kramer (eds.). ; Directors at Work. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, j 1970. | Kilpatrick, James Jackson. The Smut Peddlers♦ Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1960. Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: E.B. Saunders Co., 1941T ________ , and Paul H. Gebhard. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: E. B. Saunders Co., 1953. Kirkpatrick, Clifford. The Family as Process and Institu tion. New York: The RonalcfPress Company” T9T55T Knight, Arthur. The Liveliest Art. New York: The New American Library, 1959e3^ Kronhausen, Eberhard and Phyllis. Pornography and the Law. New York: Ballentine Books, 1959. Lawson, John Howard. Film the Creative Process. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Levy, John and Ruth Monroe. The Happy Family, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1945. Levich, Marvin, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Criti- | cism. New York: Random House, 1963. Lewis , C. S; The Allegory of Love. London: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1948. Lindgren-, Ernest. The Art of the Film. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963. i Lynch, William F., S.J. The Image Industries. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1959. MacCann, Richard Dyer. Film: A Montage of Theories. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1966. ________ . Film and Society. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964, iMacGowan, Kenneth. Behind the Screen. New York: A Delta j Book, 1967ed. iMcCoy, Horace. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Together ! with the screenplay for the film by Robert E. j Thompson. New York: Avon, 1970. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964. 307 Masters, Dr. William H. and Virginia E. Johnson. Human Sexual Inadequacy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company" 1070. ________ . Human Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 196( k Mayer, Arthur. Merely Colossal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Mayer, Michael F. Foreign Films on American Screens. New York: Arco, 1965. Moley, Raymond. The Hays Office. New York: The Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1945, Morin, Edgar. The Stars. New York: Evergreen Profile Book, 1960. The Motion Picture Code of Self-Regulation. New York: Motion Picture Association of America, 1966. Murphy, Terrence J. Censorship: Government and Obscenity. ! Baltimore: Helicon, 1963. I i The New York Times Film Reviews 1912-1968. 6 Vols. New York: The New York Times and Arco Press, 1970. ^ Nygren, Andreas. Eros and Agape. London: Westminister Press, 1953. jPackard, Vance. The Sexual Wilderness. New York: David i McKay Company, Inc., 1968. 1 Pius XII, Pope. Mirandi Prorsus ("On these Marvellous New ; ; Devices"). America Press, 1957. Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood The Dream Factory. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950. Rahner, Karl and Herbert Vorgrimler. Theological Diction- ; { ary. New York; Herder and Herder, 1965. ; |Ramsaye, Terry. A Million and One Nights♦ New York: j Simon and Schuster, 192<>7 Raphael, Frederic. Two for the Road. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Robinson, David. Hollywood in the Twenties♦ New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1968. 308 Rotha, Paul and Richard Griffith. The Film Till Now. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. , l560ed, Ryan, J. M. Loving (Brooks Wilson Ltd.). New York: Pyramid Books7 1970. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton and“T;"o“ 1968. ________ . Interviews with Directors. New York: The Bobbs-Merril Co., In c T , 1967. Schickel, Richard and John Simon (eds.), F i lm 67/68. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. ________ . The Stars. New York: Bonanza Books, 1962. ; Schumach, Murray. The Face on the Cutting Room Floor. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1564. Seldes, Gilbert. The Great Audience, New York: The Viking Press, 1950. The Public Arts. New York: Simon and Schuster, ----------195F:----------------- : Siebert, Fred S. , Theordore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963. Snelling, 0. F. 007 James Bond: A Report. New York: 1 The New American Library, 1964. ! Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. : New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969. ! ! ! I I I Stephenson, Ralph and J. R. Debrix. The Cinema as Art. ' ; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 19‘ 65. ! ! j | Thomson, David. Movie Man. New York: Stein and Day, 1967J i ■ ' j Thorp, Margaret F. America at the Movies. New Haven: Yald | University Press, 1939. I j • . I I Vizzard, Jack. See No Evil. New York: Simon and Schus- J j ter, 1970. | ! i Walker, Alexander. Sex in the Movies. Baltimore: Pen- | guin Books, 1968. Released in England under the ‘ title: The Celluloid Sacrifice. I 309 Webb, Charles. The Graduate. New York: The New American Library, 1963. Webster 1s New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield: G. and C. Merriam Co., 1960. Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1922ed. Wolfenstein, Martha and Nathan Leites. Movies A Psy chological Study. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. ARTICLES Adler, Renata. "Can a Good Movie Happen By Chance?" New York Times, August 11, 1968, II, 1, 9. "Albee Nixes Homo’Virginia Woolf.’" Variety, November 18, 1970, pp. 1, 76. Aldridge, Leslie. "Who’s Afraid of the Undergraduate?" New York Times, February 18, 1968, II, 15. i "Ali MacGraw: A Return to Basics." Time, January 11, 1971, pp. 40-45. ' Alpert, Hollis. "Carnal Capers." Saturday Review, March 16, 1968, p. 53. "’The Graduate’ Makes Out." Saturday Review, July 9, 1968, pp. 14-15, 32. ! ________ . "Mike Nichols Strikes Back." Saturday Review, j December 23, 1967, p. 24. Arnold, James. "’The Boys in the Band’...is Not a Musical." Tablet (Brooklyn), July 16, 1970, p. t 14M. j j ________ . "’ Winning’ Ultimate in Cool Movies." Tablet I i (Brooklyn), June 5, 1969, p. 11. | j ■ ■ | Bacon, James. "Marriage: A Dying Hollywood Institution." Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, ' bruary 14, 1971, p. G-3. ________ . "Marriage, Hollywood Style." Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, October 25, 1970, pp. G-l, G-3. ! 310 Baker, Russell, ' ’Observer: New Frankness Gets Boy and Girl.” New York Times, January 8, 1970, p. 40. Bose, Keith. "Fired at 49." Look, December 1, 1970, pp. 44-49. Bosworth, Patricia, "Cassavetes: Why Do Marriages Go Sour?” New York Times, December 1, 1968, p. D 15. Bouhoutos, Jacqueline. "Science and Movies Face Same Dilemma.” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1970, G, 1- 2. Brackman, Jacob. "The Graduate." The New Yorker, July 27, 1968, pp. 36-41, 50-58. Champlin, Charles. "'Fools’ Makes a Bid for Love." Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1970, IV, 1. ________ . "Judy Garland Films Reflect a Simple Time." Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1970, IV, 1. _____ . "'Love Story' Tells It Like It Always Was." Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1970 ("Calendar"), pp. 1, 29. ________ . "A Mess of Marriage Movies Look at the Mess of Marriage." Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1970, pp. 1, 12-13. ________ . "'Virgin' Relates Freer Attitudes of New Moral ity." Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1970, VI, 1, 23. "Composers: To Touch a Moment." Time, January 17, 1964, p. 70. ! Crowther, Bosley. "Screen: Plotting a Spouse’s Demise." j New York Times, January 27, 1965, p. 26. I 1 Day, Barry. "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Mr. Nichols I" i Critic, April-May, 1969, pp. 46-51. i j "Dissection of a Marriage." Time, January 26, 1970, p. I 79. Janu;, I Donnelly, Bill. "The Arrangement." Eastern Kansas Register. December 5, 1969, p. 11. "Dusty and the Duke." Life. July 11, 1969, pp. 36-45. 311 Erlich, Henry. "Jane Fonda: Shining in Two New Roles." Look, May 13, 1969, pp. 70-75. ________ . "Katharine Ross: The Elegant Tomboy." Look, June 10, 1969, pp. 33-36. Farber, Stephen. "The Happy Ending." Film Quarterly, XXIV (Fal 1,—37570) ,57-58. Ferguson, Leonard W. "Correlates of Marital Happiness." Journal of Psychology, VI (1938), 285-94. "Giant." Catholic Film Newsletter, November 15, 1970, p . T T "Goodbye, Columbus." Catholic Film Newslatter, April 15, 1969, p, 26. , Greenspun, Roger. "'The Grasshopper,' a Rare Truth," New York Times, May 28, 1970, p. 33. Hinxman, Margaret. "But not this woman's picture." Sun day Telegraph (London), May 3, 1970, III, 6. Kael, Pauline. "The Current Cinema: Eric Roemer's Refine ment." The New Yorker, May 20, 1971, pp. 136-40. . "The Current Cinema: Lust for 'Art.'" The New Yorker, March 28, 1970, pp. 97-101. , ________ . "The Current Cinema: Recognizable Human Be- ; havior." The New Yorker, March 7, 1970, pp. 92-93. I Kauffmann, Stanley. "Cum Laude." New Republic, December ! 23, 1967, pp. 22, 37-38. '________. "Letters." New Republic. , May 4, 1968 , p. 40. 1 ' : ________ . "Postscript." New Republic, February 10, 1968, 1 pp. 20, 37. ; | Klein, Michael; "The Literary Sophistication of Francois j ! Truffaut." Film Comment, III (Summer, 1965), 24- ; I 29. ! i • ‘ Knight, Arthur and Hollis Alpert. "The History of Sex in j Cinema." Twenty parts with four supplements. j Playboy. 1965: April, May, June, August, Septem- j ber, and November. 1966: February, April, August^ September, October, November, and December. 1967: I 312 January, April, June, and November. 1968: April and July. 1969: January. Supplements on the films and stars of 1969 and 1970 appeared in Novem ber and December of each of those years. The specific items quoted came from "Part Two: Com pounding, the Sin," May , 1965, pp. 136-38, 177-82; "Part XI: Sex Stars of the Forties," October, 1966, pp. 150-60, 164-87; "Part XII: The Fifties-- Hollywood Grows Up," November, 1966, pp. 162-85; "Part XIII: The Fifties--Sex Goes International," December, 1966, pp. 232-58. ________ . "A Look on the Bright Side." Saturday Review, December 20, 1969, p. 38. Little, Msgr. Thomas F. "The Modern Legion and Its Modern Outlook." America, December 11, 1965, pp. 744-46. "Lovers and Other Strangers." Catholic Film Newsletter, . August 30, 1970, p. 70. Malcom, Derek. "The Happy Ending?" Guardian (London), April 30, 1970, p. 16. Maslow, A. H. "Love in Healthy People." The Meaning of + _ - ~ L o v e Edited by Ashley Montagu, New York: , Julian Press, 1953, pp. 57-93. ;Milne, Tom. "The Graduate." Osberver Review (London), j August Ti,‘T9’ 68, p. 23. Moffit, Jack. "Room at the Top." Hollywood Reporter, * March 31, 195IF7 p. 3. ! "The Moonchild and the Fifth Beatle.” Time, February 7, ; 1969, pp. 50-54. 1 j Morgenstern, Joseph. "A Thin Red Line,” Newsweek, August I i 28, 1967, pp. 82-83. ! : I j "New Pillow Talk." Time, December 19, 1969, p. 78. j I "The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality." ! ! Playboy, June, 1967, pp. 55-78, 148-61, j i i I "Publicist Springer Sex." Variety, November 25 , 1970, p. j 48. j Reck, Tom S. "‘ .The Graduate' Reclassified." Commonweal, May 2, 1969, pp. 202-04. 313 Rela. "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.” Variety, July ttivgv, p*-----------------6.---- ------------- Ribalow, Meir. "Honoring 'The Graduate.'" New York Times, February 25, 1968, II, 8. Rick. "In Search of Gregory." Variety, May 13, 1970, p. IT. ________ . "Jenny." Variety, December 24, 1969, p. 20 "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." Variety, December 17, 1969, p. 16. Sarris, Andrew. "Loving." Village Voice, March 12, 1970, p. 31. iSchickel, Richard. "A Very Human Comedy." Life, October 3, 1969, p. 17. Schulz, Charles. "Peanuts." Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1970 (Comic Supplement), p. T. Scully, William A. "The Movies: A Positive Plan." America, March 30, 1957, pp. 726-27. Stein. "Loving." Film Daily, February 26, 1970, p, 3. Taylor, John-Russell. "A Film for the Great Lost Genera tion?" The Times, August 8, 1968, p. 12. ; Walker, Alexander. "Divorce American Style." Evening | Standard (London), August 17, 1967, p. 18. Webb, Charles. "Letters to the Editor." New Republic, | May 4, 1968, p. 40. "Winning." Catholic Film Newsletter, May 15, 1969, p. 34. ; ' i t ! Zavattini, Cesare. "Some Ideas on the Cinema." Sight and j Sound, October, 1953, pp. 64-69. j j Zimmerman, Paul D. "Connubial Cliches." Newsweek, I January 29, 1968, p. 84. j i . "Three Musketeers." Newsweek, December 21, 1970!, p. 100. | 314 UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS Carrington, R. B. and J, H. H. "Kaleidoscope ." Unpub lished screenplay. Los Angeles: Gershwin-Kastner Prods., July 15, 1965. Dore, Jeff, "Marriage." Unpublished class assignment. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, October 18, 1970. Weissman, Murray. "I Love My Wife." Mimeographed produc tion notes, “Universal City: Universal Press, February 10, 1970. PERSONAL INTERVIEWS Fonda, Peter. Producer. Los Angeles, California. August, 1969. Hilsdale, E. Paul. Sociologist. Los Angeles, California. June, 1970. Radnitz, Robert. Producer. Hollywood, California. March, 1971. Shurlock, Geoffrey. Chief Censor. Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America. Los Angeles, California. March, 1968. Stulberg, Gordon. President, Cinema Center Studios. Hollywood, California. January, 1971. Sullivan, Patrick J., S.J, Executive Secretary of the National Catholic Office for Motion. Pictures. New ; York City, New York. July and August, 1970. ; i I

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Creator Callahan, Michael Anthony (author)

Core Title A critical study of the image of marriage in the contemporary American cinema

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Knight, Arthur (committee chair), Casebier, Allan (committee member), Kantor, Bernard (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-689108

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