Walter Lang | Desk Set / 1957

free association

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phoebe and Henry Ephron (writers, based on a play by William Marchant), Walter Lang (director) Desk Set / 1957

 

I have never been able to understand why the 1957 Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle Desk Set has been treated so unkindly by numerous critics. As the Time Out critic observes: “Most reviewers agreed at the time that Hepburn got far more out of this mere bauble of a sex comedy…than it deserved.”

 

    The Kanins, who wrote Hepburn’s and Tracy’s Adam’s Rib, were generally wittier writers than the Ephrons, but their shrill version of feminism in their 1949 film, where Hepburn (as Amanda Bonner) takes sexual equality to ridiculous heights by demanding an athletically-gifted woman lift her opposing-lawyer husband over her head. Similarly absurd is Ring Lardner’s and Michael Kanin’s presentation of Hepburn (as Tess Harding) in Woman of the Year of 1942 as a brilliantly multi-lingual internationalist who adopts a Greek boy more as a symbolic gesture than as a someone who she might actually wish to love and nurture. In both of these National Film Registry movies, the errant Hepburn is forced to retreat to the position of a housewife, particularly in Woman of the Year, where she slinks back into the kitchen in an attempt to make waffles (disastrously) to appease her ignored husband.

     In The Desk Set, on the other hand, Hepburn (as Bunny Watson) is beloved by Richard Sumner (Tracy) primarily because she is brilliant and capable of witty conversation. He even has an opportunity to test her intellectual facilities, taking her on a date to the cold winter roof of the company skyscraper instead of the fancy restaurant she was hoping for. But, if nothing else, he quickly perceives her special intellectual capabilities. The only retreat she is asked to make in the Ephrons’ script (based on the 1955 Broadway play by William Marchant, a gay man who was a close friend of Noel Coward, and wrote a book on his friendship with him) is from her apparent fear and disdain of his EMARAC* computer, which Sumner later utilizes to propose to her and which, accordingly, Watson quickly comes to embrace, while recognizing it, nonetheless, as an equal suitor for her fiancée’s future love.

 

     And surely the straight-speaking Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill, and the other working women of the network reference department do far more for women’s rights than does the confused and abused housewife, Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday). Indeed, without men in their lives, Watson even proposes a possible lesbian relationship where the two move in and raise cats together. Blondell, who played in her long career many a lesbian, insists she loves men and reminds Bunny that she prefers the opposite sex as well.

      Mike (Gig Young) is a far superior foil for Sumner’s attention than the evidently gay song-writer, Kip, played by David Wayne in the 1949 comedy. If Stevens and Cukor are simply better directors than The Desk Set’s Walter Lang (and I’m not certain I might effectively argue that position), Lang makes up for it in the wonderful late evening pajama-party-dinner scene where Mike finally realizes that he may not be the only man in her life and in result of which Sumner is portrayed later, during the drunken Christmas Eve celebrations at the office, as a loopy version of a dashing romantic lover in a sombrero traveling up and down the “Mexington Avenue” subway line. The homey sequence in the up-stairs stacks of the reference library, wherein, for some of the few moments of any Hepburn-Tracy film, the couple actually do seem to be radiantly happy in each other’s presence, tops almost any other intimate on-screen moment during their studio concocted romance.

      Although both Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib tackle important topical subjects—the equality of the sexes and World War II internationalism—Desk Set takes on an equally vital topic concerning the future of human workers in an age of increasing dependence upon computers—a topic, in fact, fairly ahead of its time. Seldom has a film more specifically honed in on the issues of “the age of anxiety” than in The Desk Set, where even the mention of an Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator sends employees rushing off to their union offices and sends the legal department’s Smithers into a near nervous-breakdown. Even the commonsensical Watson—a kind of would-be detective in her attempts to track down Sumner’s reason for having turned up in their “little iron lung”—expresses her fears that such computers might ultimately make the human race obsolete.

 

   Fortunately, the computer’s vaguely Turing-like mathematician-creator (he is after all, a man who adds things up, a “sumner”) is a fairly bumbling and loveable fool who, apparently disinterested in the opposite sex—at least early on in this tale—wears different colored socks, confuses the days of the week, and generally doesn’t give a fig for the accoutrements of power and wealth. In short, he is a lot like the absent-minded “prof” as friends described Turing.

      His gradually growing attraction to the Head of the network reference department—required by all movie plots—is also a bit like Turing’s attraction to Joan Clarke: her intelligence makes her easy to talk to, and the domesticity she offers is appealing. His real love—again a bit like Turing’s hand-built home computer, named after his beloved childhood friend, Christopher—is, as Watson describes Sumner’s machine, Emily EMARAC! After all, this relationship has to at least pretend it is exclusively heterosexual—although that fact doesn’t stop Bunny from wondering whether Sumner might not be the marrying kind (“Don’t you like women?” she queries him in her intimate conversation with him in the library stacks).

     I doubt, in fact, if the original playwright or the Ephrons knew anything about Alan Turing, but it seems almost beyond coincidence, surely, that when a telephone caller asks Sumner to name Santa’s reindeer, the computer creator answers first with the names of five of the seven dwarfs (Dopey, Sneezy, Grouchy, Happy, and Sleepy) before finishing up with Rudolph and Blitzen. Given what I’ve noted above about Turing’s own reactions to Snow White, which he described as one of his favorite films, it does indeed seem difficult not to suspect the reference here is to the British mathematician.

     Similarly, Watson’s discovery that Sumner spent the war in Greenland—a far bigger, and less green island than England, but still implicating Turing’s isolated existence at Bletchley— doing something so secret that even she couldn’t track it down, again hints at the author’s possible knowledge of Turing. 

    The film takes the relationship no further, and it is doubtful that, except for a few individuals, the audiences of the day would ever have made any connection with the British genius. Indeed, it doesn’t matter whatsoever in the story—except that the Turing machine of this tale is just what the mathematician predicted it might become: a machine with an intelligence that makes it, at first, very difficult to distinguish from a human being. Emily EMARAC, at least as presented in The Desk Set, appears, in “her” “fits” of bad behavior, likely to continue to win Sumner’s heart, even if Watson has fully captured his admiration and affection. As Watson, herself, expresses the situation: her experience has been that most of the elderly men she has seen who appear to be cruising as they circle the block, are simply looking for a parking space. And even the computer Sumner has programmed answers the question of whether Bunny Watson should or should not marry him with a firm, “No!”

       We can forsee a future for them, in which Watson sits at home with her Holmes reading him endless stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha before he rushes off to solve the newest mystery of Emily EMARAC’s temper tantrum. In the original play, in fact, Sumner does not win over the brilliant Watson, but Mike, who proposes to her over the far simpler dictating machine.

     I suppose those who read Desk Set primarily as a sex comedy, might find it somewhat disappointing. But as a statement of the future human species interactions with machines it is quite fascinating and truly forward looking, particularly when one recalls that Turing committed suicide only a year before the production of the play. Better to have a computer in a world where, as Bunny Watson recognizes, it is necessary to “associate many things with many things.”

   

*The running titles of this film spell the computer’s name as EMMARAC, but have consistently referred to it as EMARAC in connection with the words the initials refer to, choosing to also write electromagnetic as one word.

 

Oscar Sunday, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2015).

Sven Schnyder | Paxmal (The Station In-Between) / 2021

the journey

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tobias Imbach and Sven Schnyder (screenplay), Sven Schnyder (director) Paxmal (The Station In-Between) / 2021 [19 minutes]

 

Two gay Swiss middle-aged men, Theo Klein (Peter Fischli) and Louis Brandt (Carlos Leal) are on voyage from their home to Paxmal, the location of a peace monument built by Karl Bickel single-handedly over a period of 25 years from 1924 to 1949. The Greek-like temple with art work by Bickel representing the beauty of life and spiritual renewal was built near the small town of Walenstadt facing the Churfirsten mountain range.

     They carry with them an urn filled with the ashes of Louis’ husband Samy and Theo’s best friend, a man who has evidently been killed in a homophobic attack. Although details of the attack are scare within the film itself, it appears that Theo may have been with Samy at the time of the attack since he sports a broken wrist.

        Although the two men shared the life of Samy, they couldn’t be more different. Louis is a rather dour, somewhat conservative individual who is cynical on showing any open emotions, while Theo is a sentimental, open-hearted being, who will gladly cry on anybody’s shoulder and is disturbed from his friend’s lack of emotion about the terrible event. The only truly expressive thing about Louis is the bright lime green watch he wears, on which several travelers comment. It was Samy’s, and he explains that he simply needed a watch to tall time; it is now wearing for its sentimental value. Even the train conductor (Julia Monte) refuses to believe his explanation.

        On this special train-line, moreover there is even a so-called Concierge (Clovas Kasanda), who not only greets them, reporting this is his 65th trip to the remarkable Paxmal, but who looks after them throughout the voyage, at one point offering to share with them some power dope he’s smoking in his pipe.

      It is just what the up-tight Louis needs, and before the ride is over he and Theo both are thoroughly enjoying themselves, despite the seriousness of the event.

 

      Although the film doesn’t make clear why they have chosen to take Samy’s ashes to Paxmal, it apparently is the place where he was born, since they are met by Samy’s mother Erna (Margherita Schoch), still furious after the 20 years since her son left his wife for Louis. Louis confronts her that he is not at all sorry that he met Samy, enjoying some the best years of his life with him and that his only sorrow is that she is Samy’s mother. But almost as quickly as she expressed her fury, slapping his face and pummeling his chest with her clinched fists, she breaks down into tears, nestling her head against his body.

        Louis hands her the urn as a small band breaks into music, the foursome and town dwellers marching in procession presumably on their way to the memorial.

         When the two men reach the temple, they discover a Buddhist-like man wearing a short dress. They bow to him, presenting the urn. He only laughs speaking in a quite colloquial language as he exclaims, “Boys, whoa!” explaining that he too is a visitor. There is no place in this shrine to life for an urn, he argues, Theo and Louis suddenly unable to even comprehend why they have come so far then. His answer is the obvious one: it is for the sake of the journey.

        They sit for a while, pondering the situation, and in the very next frame we see them back at the station awaiting the train back. For moment Louis puts down the urn on the platform; a second later a train going in the opposite direction speeds past, overturning the pot as the ashes come pouring out. The men look down at the “disaster” and begin to laugh. What else are they to do. The train arrives, briefly stops, and when it pulls away the grievers have disappeared back into their daily lives.

        Swiss director Sven Schnyder’s lovely fable—and beautifully filmed by Sebastian Klinger— turns a horrible event and the sorrow that follows into a sweet on the road movie wherein, like Bickel’s figures on the Paxmal wall, these two gay men undergo a spiritual adventure which renews their lives.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

François Truffaut | Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) / 1962

traces of civilization

by Douglas Messerli   

 

Jean Gruault and François Truffaut (screenplay, based on the book by Henri-Pierre Roché), François Truffaut (director) Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) / 1962

 

As those many film-goers and readers who have seen François Truffaut’s 1962 picture or have read the earlier novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim is the tale of the triangular interrelationships between two men, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre), and a woman Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) presented over a number of years. The close friendship and male bonding between Jules and Jim is described as similar to the inextricable pairing of








Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, while, quite obviously, calling up images of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet—who pondered the failures of 19th century culture—and remind one of the cinema comics, Laurel and Hardy, with Jim playing the tall and lean Stan Laurel, and Jules playing the shorter, rounder-faced and loveable—but in this case still quite handsome Oliver Hardy. Although their interactions are obviously heterosexual, there are intimations—through their athletic encounters in the gymnasium, where they share showers and massages—of, at least, of a homoerotic attraction. At one point in the film, they refer to their own relationship as “queer.”

 

    Early in the film they both bed a number of the same women, particularly since it is Jim who introduces Jules to romantic trysts; but it is, finally, Catherine, who most attracts them, for her beauty and, more importantly, her impetuous behavior. For the two slightly pedantic “fools,” Catherine, a proto-feminist figure, is irresistible in her ability to bring out the insignificance (and comic silliness) of their lives, and they soon determine to join her in a vacation chateau, where they seem content to share her. She, in turn, entreats them to join her on ridiculous activities such as searching for traces of civilization in the countryside about (the three discovering all sorts of lost objects, from shoes, cigarette packages, cups, hats, etc.) and frolicking, a bit like children, in the slightly “befouled,” but nonetheless Prelapsarian paradise.

     When Jules determines to go further in his encounters with Catherine, with the intention of marrying her, things begin to take a slightly more serious tone. Although outwardly the trio attempts to remain open about sexuality and to refrain from jealousy and expressions of sexual dominance, these very issues rear their head in Jules’ disquisition on Baudelaire’s attitude towards women and in Jim’s passive silences in response; Catherine reacts, as she will increasingly throughout the tale, with an impetuous act that runs counter to her two friends’ muted attempts at self-preservation, by jumping into the Seine. Fortunately, she survives the act.

     Outwardly, then, the film presents itself as a being about the battle of the sexes in which both men, in thrall to the feminine, attempt to resist their own temptations to manipulate or control their “Queen.” Catherine, on her part, refuses to settle into a normative domestic world, continuing to goad both men with numerous outside affairs and through her erratic behavior, while still playing upon their own desires for domesticity and progeny. In the larger world in which they exist, their sexual experimentation is destined, alas, to end in tragedy, as Jim, finally exhausted with the flirtatiousness and unpredictability of Catherine’s version of “love”—l’amour for him as opposed to Jules’ more stolid and abiding notion of the same emotion Liebe—attempts to leave her, only to be destroyed by the “Queen Bee” for his attempt to abandon “the hive.”

     I had not seen Jules and Jim since I was a youth, and, although I think I comprehended much of the above at that time, I also felt removed from the story, in part because of the inscrutability of the woman, and her lovers’ obsessive devotion to her. I was, after all, a young exclusively gay man, with little experience with women (as I perhaps am still today), and had, for that reason, had difficulty with all of Truffaut’s primarily heterosexual fables. If I felt any sympathy with the characters, it was clearly with Jules, who remained with Catherine out of faith and marital commitment, as well as demonstrating a strong sense of responsibility to their daughter, Sabine. He was a tender being, more interested in insects, ultimately, than in human beings, a loner (described as “a monk”) who had long ago abandoned his windmill battles at the side of his Quixote.

      This time, however, I realized that Truffaut was also telling us other tales in his focus on the sexual alliances which seemed so central to the film’s story. First, the tale of Jules, Jim, and Catherine is a story of photography and the cinema itself. Early in the film, their mutual friend, Albert shows slides in the manner of La Belle Époque, the era when the film begins. Soon after, as the figures frolic throughout the landscape, their capers are presented more in the manner of a Charlie Chaplin film, as they seemingly improvise their silly antics, the film speeding up to match the frantic movement of the little tramp, along with momentary friezes, in which the moving images are transformed into still photographs, reminding us again of the photographic roots of cinema. Soon after, Truffaut infuses his film with a sense of the scratchy documentary style of World War I filmic images, presumably many of them borrowed from war-time archives. Jim’s visit to Jules’ and Catherine’s Alpine-like chalet in the Black Forest corresponds with a cinematic rendition of post-war romances in which loving images of domesticity alternate with interludes of romantic trysts and stylized representations of longing.

     These scenes are followed by Jim’s return to Paris where the scenes appear to be much more related to the Jacques Prévert-influenced tales of the underground city, which transform, soon after, into much more contemporary (clearly new-wave inspired) street scenes and bar-crawls, including the comic story-telling of the erotically uncontrollable Thérèse. By film’s end, Truffaut’s movie takes on images that might remind us more of scenes from Open City, with Catherine’s careening, out-of-control car circling a square (and foretelling the last major scene of the film) and with a newsreel rendition of the German book-burnings, particularly the one on May 10, 1933. Jim and Catherine’s mad drive across a partially demolished bridge certainly suggests the soon-to-be war-time destruction, and the film’s final scenes clearly represent post World-War II realism, as the camera focuses on the burning bodies and burials that would become common in post-Holocaust imagery.

     In short, this movie about obsessive love is also a film-within-a-film about the ways we perceive reality through photography and celluloid, which helps, of course, to redefine not only the way we see the world but how we experience the truth.

    Just as importantly, moreover, is how this film applies love as a metaphor for cultural and national distinctions and the inevitable struggles that result. Love, in other words, stands in for war throughout this film, and the seeming vagaries of these figures’ love-lives can be directly connected to their national distinctions. If Jules and Jim begin as inseparable friends, like Germany and France, they soon must go to war with one another. Although they are both terrified of destroying one another, they both seem active in the battles that destroy everyone else around them.

     Jules’ Alpine chalet could not be more different from Jim’s urban Paris, or even from their shared country chateau in the earlier part of the film (in fact, another interpretation of this film might involve just the architectural images presented in Truffaut’s cinema). This is a film, we must remember, in which most of the action occurs between the wars, and we must recognize that the prize both men seek, Catherine, symbolically speaking, is the cause of the great discord documented throughout the film.

     The French-born Catherine, moreover, is verbally abused by Jules’ German-speaking parents, which leads her to abandon him almost before the marriage vows have been blessed. And her several extra-marital affairs must be recognized as her seeking a way out of the idyllically constricted German life to which she has committed herself. If the French have “won” the first war, the Germans will, at least temporarily, dominate the French in the brewing Second World War, which is on the horizon by film’s end.

    Catherine’s and Jules’ return to Paris may suggest their personal moral positions, indicating their inabilities to remain in Germany at the time of such growing discord, but the battle continues, suggested through their once again rural idyll of a mill-house abode and through Catherine’s clearly war-like endeavors (in the form of her motorized terrorizing of the square outside Jim’s window, a gun with which she threatens to shoot Jim, and her own threatened suicide). Her “final solution,” taking her former lover and herself to their grave with another kind of dive in the river waters, is merely a reiteration of the violent actions Jules must now face in France from his own compatriots (Catherine is, after all, still his wife). If he and his daughter have survived the war of love, he may not be able to survive the battles of the nationalities ahead.

      The search the threesome underwent early on in the film for traces of civilization, may be harder to perform for Jules in the spiritually empty landscape that he must now face. Throughout the film, all the characters read, sharing books and ideas; but after the German book-burning events, he may find little literature left to help him interpret the world he now faces.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

Wilfrid North | Bunny's Honeymoon / 1913 [Difficult to obtain or lost]

the cure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Thomas (screenplay), Wilfrid North (director) Bunny’s Honeymoon / 1913 | difficult to obtain or lost

 

In this 11-minute film from 1913, John Bunny is visited by his niece, Valeria (Dorothy Kelly) who explains that she is love with an alcoholic young man whom her father won’t let her marry. The father has given the kid a break, but having encountered him drinking once more, he has demanded that his daughter break off with her relationship.

      What can she do? How do you cure a drunkard?

      Always looking for an opportunity to show off his cross-dressing skills, Bunny brings the drunken kid, Cutey (Wally Van) home, whereupon he dresses up in feminine attire and hires out several children for the morning ritual. When the boy awakens, a bit woozy, the very next morning he is told that Bunny is his wife, previously widowed and left with a passel of badly behaving brats.

      Shocked by the situation, Cutey vows that alcohol shall never again cross his lips. And Valeria and he can now be happily married.

       You might say that Bunny has gone a bit too far in this one, bringing hope to a cute drunken boy and luring him into bed in drag, all to be witnessed by children and adolescents. But silent film writers and directors, it seems, seldom realized the implications of their comic devices. Or perhaps they realized all too well and chuckled at their audiences' ready acceptance.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2022).

Wilfrid North | Bunny's Dilemma / 1913

no wedding bells

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilfrid North (director) Bunny’s Dilemma / 1913

 

In her 1914 interview with John Bunny—only a year after the 11-minute movie I am about to discuss—the famous Djuna Barnes describes the actor as not at all being the humorous figure he is in the movies:

 

“Having pieced together necessities of the soul and the humor that gets past with the solemnity that holds the two down to earth as ballast, and having attained with the piecing a weight nearing the 300 mark, John Bunny, moving picture actor and little friend to the thin, looks at you out of prolonged almond eyes wherein is the shadow of the veil drawn aside, and a great sadness that seldom reaches his public.”*

 

Bunny spends most the interview touting his intelligence for having left the stage to appear in movies, and his determination to make movies better. But despite his declaration of his love of baseball, the sea, his wife, two boys, and friends, his greatest joy seems to be the idea of being “set...adrift in a log.” In short there is something in Bunny’s comic performances that is also sad, a kind of loneliness that accepts the status quo with equilibrium the way Buster Keaton would later come be described as a “comic of resistance” as opposed to those comics like Chaplin, the Marx brothers, and others who were comics of “energy, enterprise, mischief, and mayhem.”**

      Even when Bunny acts to counter and protect himself from what he sees as danger ahead, it backfires on his character, leaving him after with even less that that with which he began. He is left without, lonely, sad, a bit like being adrift in a log.

       A perfect example of this is the 1913 film Bunny’s Dilemma, directed by Wilfrid North, who was evidently the go-to director for cross-dressing comedies of the second decade of the 20th century.

      In this instance, Bunny was living apparently with a man described by the script as “Cutey” (Wally Van), but who the Moving Picture World synopsis names as Jack Holmes. Why the two men are living together is never established, but as in many of Bunny’s films it takes only the slightest of circumstances to get Bunny to dress up as a woman.

     The cross-dressing transformation is occasioned in this case by a message he receives from his Aunt Eliza (Flora Finch), who announces that she shall soon be arriving to visit him, and be bringing along her cousin Jean or in the original script Sally (Lillian Walker), whom she desires him to marry.

      Since Bunny has managed to be a bachelor all of his life, his sees no reason to change his ways, and to trick the insistent aunt, whom he has never met, he confides with his roommate “Cutey,” the two of them cooking up a plan where Jack will masquerade as Bunny, and Bunny will dress up as a female maid.

     No sooner has Bunny gotten into female dress than the aunt and Jean arrive, the younger woman being so beautiful that he is tempted to immediately disclose his real identity. But Jack, also quite smitten with the guest, immediately takes over, demanding the maid to set out preparing tea and dinner, while he begins to flirt with the young lady, Bunny stubbornly watching over them as he performs his activities with regret.

 

     By this time Bunny has become so smitten with Jean, that he writes her a letter, pushing it under her bedroom door. In the letter he sweetly asks her to meet him in the arbor near the garden early the next morning.     

      She, believing it is the attractive “Cutie” Jack, quickly prepares for the early morning tryst, but as she quietly passes Aunt Eliza’s door the old woman hears her footsteps, and, rushing out of her room, confronts her cousin. Seeing the letter in the girl’s hand, she grabs it from her, declaring that Jean will not be able to keep that appointment, determining that she herself will take her place.

       Covering over her face entirely with a hat and veil, she arrives at the arbor, where Bunny flirts with her, finally attempting the raise her veil for a kiss, when he is startled to discover that it is not the beautiful Jean, but his aunt.

       Even more painful is Bunny’s discovery that Jean and Jack, in the meantime, have crept to the spot out of curiosity, observing the entire farce.

       Bunny’s crestfallen face breaks even the stern visage of Aunt Eliza who opens her heart just enough to allow Jack to bear off Jean as the prize, she willingly accepting his offer. Poor Bunny sits meditating on his sins of deception, eventually deciding that it is all for the best. He will never marry.

        Perhaps, we must admit, he is among those whom in his day were described as not being the marrying kind, another word for a homosexual when there were few proper words in the US to describe someone like him.

        Bunny himself was happily married, so he claimed; but his character, just as Barnes described him, seems alone and endlessly sad.

 

*Djuna Barnes, “John Bunny” in Interviews (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press), p. 120.

**See Adam Gopnik, “Silent Treatment: The Case for Buster Keaton,” The New Yorker (January 31, 2022).

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).