Stephen Frears | Philomena / 2013

who’d have imagined?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope (screenplay, based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith), Stephen Frears (director) Philomena / 2013

 

I did not see Stephen Frears’ 2013 film Philomena when it first appeared in theaters. Actually, I should admit, that I chose not to. Although I love Judi Dench, who starred in this movie, I felt the film, given what I read in the reviews, was probably a bit too sentimental and, most importantly, predictable in its plot; based as it was, on the true story of Philomena Lee, who as a young pregnant girl, was literally sold in a four-year bondage to an Irish nunnery, forced to suffer the dangers of a breach birth, and whose child was sold by that institution to an American couple, I felt I could already smell the heavy breath of its panting searchers, as they uncover the unpleasant truths.

       It is hard to re-witness these events without feeling as does the journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) and Philomena’s daughter (Michelle Fairley) that these nuns were “evil” or, at the very least, “un-Christian.” If nothing else, their activities share some qualities with the Boston Catholic Church leaders revealed in Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015).

      But the surprise here, and the important difference between Philomena and all the other films and dramas like it is that, despite her sorrow, pain, and suffering at the hands of the nuns, she has not lost her faith and has found a way to forgive and perhaps even explain away the acts of these now elderly and dead sisters of mercy—despite the fact that they have continued to lie to her and have themselves, so the local populace insist, purposely burned the adoption papers (while saving Philomena’s own contract to sign away her rights to her own son) to hide their actions.

       Frears, to give him credit, lets the facts speak for themselves, without judging the “little old Irish woman” at the film’s center. But we also have to question that suggestion that Philomena is a kind of provincial simpleton, given her later easy acceptance and even eerie recognition that her son’s being gay (“I felt he was perhaps oversensitive”) and her determination to visit her son’s former gay lover. It is she who gets through the doorway to that important sliver of the past rather than the far more savvy, stubborn, and knowledgeable Sixsmith.

      And what the movie doesn’t quite highlight, but very subtly hints at, is that Sixsmith, fired from his job as a writer for the Tony Blair administration, is in many ways not so very different from Philomena’s son, who despite his being gay, worked for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Indeed, Philomena immediately notices what he misses, as she observes in an on-line photograph of her son, adopted and raised as Michael A. Hess, that Sixsmith had already crossed paths with her son in Sixsmith’s former role a journalist-photographer. Indeed, the men share much in common, particularly if we comprehend Sixsmith’s cynicism as surely being similar to defense mechanisms which Philomena’s son must have had to create as being a gay in Reagan’s administration. Michael A. Hess died from AIDS—the disease for which Reagan had refused to provide research funds.

      Predictably that “little old Irish lady” and the brash Sixsmith bond in ways that are subtle and hard to imagine, particularly given her preoccupation with popular romantic novels, the plots of which she recounts in enormous detail, the lack of “predictability” seeming to be the most important elements of her delight in the genre.

      In fact, what I described as my very fears about this film seems to be its central subject. Nothing about Philomena is quite to be expected. Even as we quickly perceive that these not so holy nuns were dealing in a kind of slavery and child abuse all in the name of the punishment for the young girl’s social and familial rejection on account of their supposedly sexual indiscretions, we cannot have “imagined” (as Philomena keeps claiming about her novels' plots) that she could possibly have joined with the generally agnostic and often caustic journalist, or he with her, to accomplish a bit of sleuthing that would have a profound effect on both of their lives.

     Even when they have finally accomplished much of what they set out to do, both come to switch positions: he suggesting that he won’t publish the story if she doesn’t wish it to be known, she determining that he should publish it.

     And then, the total “surprise” in the final encounter with the “terrible” Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), the last living member of the order during the days of its baby-selling activities, who, when confronted by Sixsmith, not only defends her actions but argues for their morality. It all reminds me a great deal of the 2016 French-Polish film I review below, The Innocents. In both these films, we perceive, belief is how you define it, what you make of it. And, quite clearly, Philomena has done the best job of carving out and living a life of a true faith.

       “I never saw that one coming. Who’d have imagined?” Philomena is fond of saying. Who indeed might have suspected that the little boy at the film’s beginning did, in fact, recall his mother and visited the Irish community in the hopes of finding her, and, most surprising of all, had asked his lover to bury him, along with the many pregnant mothers who did not survive childbirth, in that community’s cemetery. This seems simply to be something of fiction, not of truth. Yet, apparently, this is what occurred. And by film’s end both of these unlikely road buddies have found their way to previously unimagined new lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).

 

 

Thomas McCarthy | Spotlight / 2015

collaborating with evil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas McCarthy and Josh Singer (screenplay), Thomas McCarthy (director) Spotlight / 2015

 

Superficially, Thomas McCarthy’s 2015 film Spotlight bears resemblance to Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men. Both films deal with reporters from major American newspapers who, under duress and even threats uncover hidden information that diminish the influence and stain the reputations of major institutions, in the case of the earlier film, the American presidency, and in the more recent film, the Catholic Church. In the cities in which their respective powers dominate, Washington, D.C. and Boston, the citizens time and again, ignore and forgive the despicable crimes of their political and spiritual leaders, and it is only the ferocity and determination of good journalism that reveals the truth.

      Yet these films are vastly different in tone and significance. The Pakula work centers upon two cub reporters working together against almost impossible odds to not only discover the truth but to “make” their reputations, and in those attempts they take far greater chances and are forced to work far more quickly that the reporter-team working for the Spotlight column of The Boston Globe. Pakula’s film, accordingly, is far splashier and energized as the two, with the help of the beleaguered newspaper publisher, hone in on the shocking development that leads directly to the guilt of the President of the United States.

      Spotlight, on the other hand, is not only an ensemble piece of film-making, but is about an ensemble of journalists, working together as a team. McCarthy’s film, accordingly, circles in on its final subject, ruminating, questioning, challenging and doubting its own revelations as it moves through a series of investigations that include not only the priests who have abused children, but those who have suffered that abuse, their families, and the lawyers involved on both sides of the quick settlements between the suffering families and the church.

     Whereas All the President’s Men worked a bit like a quick peeling of an onion to get to its rotten core, Spotlight begins with a core that demands the team put the layers of reality back into place around it in order to perceive the very structure of the whole.

      The writers and directors of Spotlight might have easily made a splashy film revealing the names of priests and the cover-up of their behavior by Boston Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou), but have fortunately determined to see the larger picture, exposing not only the individual situations but the larger corruption of the church as a whole and the contagion of its church-going flock. Within the structure of the church is a network of family and community members, church supporters, priests, church leaders, law-makers and, yes, even reporters who fail the young boys and girls internationally, abetting in the selfish sexual actions of individuals who pretend to represent just the opposite.

      All of this might never have occurred, moreover, without the stimulus of change in the arrival at the Globe of a new, no-nonsense and quietly reflective editor, Marty Baron (Live Schreiber), a true outsider, a Miami-Jew suddenly in charge of the women and men of the Spotlight, who, even if they have not grown up in Boston, who seem themselves at home in the city. Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), for example, may have grown up in Ohio, but her mother had connections with the city, and her aunt is a stolid church-goer. Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), of Portuguese extraction, may not represent the more standard Irish and German Boston Catholic churchgoers, but as a child he enjoyed church, and grew up, nonetheless, in the Boston milieu. As the Armenian-rooted attorney Mitch Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) observes of Baron, it takes an outsider to want to pursue this subject. But then ardent reporters such as Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery), Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), and Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton) might contrarily be described as good ole boys in the Boston inner community, Robinson even attending the large Catholic school across the street from the Globe’s offices.

      And it is the moments throughout this film when each of these characters and others realize their complete entrenchment in the complacent society around them that we become involved in the film, becoming uncomfortable with easy assumptions. In the midst of seeking out the name of priests described as “on leave”—one of the several terms church leaders use to describe priests who have been found guilty of child abuse—Carroll discovers that one of the houses caring for the guilty priests, sits a few yards away from his own home, and rushes home to warn his own children with a refrigerator announcement. Pfeiffer is forced to keep her painful research secret from the aunt with whom she lives, and suddenly finds herself psychologically unable to attend church once a week with her. Rezendes is haunted by the fact that the files he discovers have long been available, but have been illegally frozen from public view. Robinson gradually perceives that one of the pedophiles was a coach in his own high school, and that one of his victims was a school friend of years earlier.

     Robinson’s old friend, Jim Sullivan (Jamey Sheridan), ironically, turns out to have been a lawyer for the multitudes of cases of small church settlements, linking him, finally, to over 70 local priests. And by film’s end, through the accusations of the public defender, Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), Robinson discovers that he, himself, has been guilty of refusing to pursue a story when he was editor of the Metro section that at least 20 Boston-based priests had been involved in pedophilia.

 

   Theirs’ and the entire community’s failures to pursue the claims of those who have suffered from these terrible sexual acts have helped to embitter the small survivor’s group (SNAP), headed by Phil Saviano (Neal Huff), as well as attorney Garabedian, who has worked tirelessly to help afflicted families without getting any significant judicial response or communal recognition.

     Even more remarkably, however, is that this carefully wrought and morally significant film not only ultimately points to the community in which these real events first came to light, but to the Catholic Church throughout the world. That the newspaper’s 2002 and 2003 analyses of what it had previously failed to explore received no response from the Church leaders and that the film was positively reviewed in several religiously-aligned newspapers suggests that, finally, the Spotlight’s ensemble reporting had a true effect on church and society.

     If such events will surely continue to happen in the future, we can at least hope that journalists and city leaders will no longer be able to bury them in print or hide them from their public filings.

     Ultimately, if the events recounted in All the President’s Men resulted in the downfall of a somewhat paranoid President Nixon and his advisors, Spotlight traces a larger arc in the possible resolution and admission of guilt for the thousands of young people robbed of their social innocence and spiritual faith. Possibly, the church may even find a way to help people to begin to believe in it once again.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015).

Roman Polański | Chinatown / 1974

the language of evil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Towne (screenplay), Roman Polański (director) Chinatown / 1974

 

Admirers have long sung the praises of Roman Polański’s excellent film of 1974, Chinatown. Jack Nicholson’s laconic, somewhat dim-witted, and yet witty Jake Gittes, Fay Dunaway’s fashionable but suffering beauty, Evelyn Mulwray, and John Huston’s conscienceless Noah Cross combined with the suave sets and costumes of 1937 Los Angeles, and the blaring jazz score by Jerry Goldsmith all worked together to make Polański’s film a true pleasure—despite the fact that Robert Towne’s script is often unnecessarily muddy and meandering.

      Of course, part of movie’s purpose is to confound, as in Gittes’ Chinatown experience; the inability at times to comprehend what’s going on also gives the film a sense of depth—which, when you truly come down to it, Chinatown does not actually possess. What seemingly begins as a story about matrimonial deceit quickly becomes a tale of American excess: the theft of public resources by the powerful and wealthy, and the same group’s assumption that they have right to commit incest and rape; the murders in this film, that of the good public servant, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) and an unsuspecting pawn, Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd), merely seem to be a by-product of those other presumptions.

     Despite his outward cynicism, inwardly Gittes is a good-guy dupe who almost by accident begins to put the truth together; yet, it’s also clear, he can’t really believe in the depth of evil, even though he suggests he has previously encountered it in his stint as a policeman in Chinatown. Although he asks a great many questions, he never seems to get the answers he desires—that somehow things will work out in the end. Even though he is punished for snooping, putting his nose where he doesn’t belong and having it slit by one of Cross’s henchmen, he never seems to have learned his lesson, and that is part of his charm.

       Yet that is precisely the tragedy of his life and the hundreds of others good citizens who simply cannot imagine that someone like Noah Cross (the clear representative of evil in this work) might truly be without any redeeming characteristics. The famous scene where Gittes slaps Evelyn as she attempts to explain her relationship to the girl she has hidden away in her butler’s home, gives evidence to the fact that the private detective of this tale cannot imagine that someone and the incidents surrounding her could represent more than one thing: in this case, the shadowy figure being a “sister” and a “daughter” both.

       Towne’s original script was determined, like Gittes’ mind-set, to set things straight, providing a happy ending. But Polański, always attracted to the darker realities, knew that as a would-be redeemer, Gittes had to see the woman he had tried to save die, and the girl Evelyn the mother/sister was trying to save returned into the paws of the monster, Noah Cross.

      The long tale of water rights through which one has to slog in order to get to the far simpler truth, gives the film a patina of truth-telling; after all, the development of Los Angeles has long been involved with water rights. And more than a decade earlier William Mulholland (the Mulwray figure of Chinatown), superintendent and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, had designed and engineered the Los Angeles Aqueduct, bringing water from Owens Valley into the city. Like Mulwray, who argues against building the dam that Cross and the city want built, Mulholland had built and personally inspected the St. Francis Dam, which on March 12, 1928 broke, killing around 600 people.

 

    But the other aspects of this film are mostly fictional, and it is those elements of the film that are truly at the heart of this work. In fact, the plot would perhaps have functioned just the same had Gittes not been required to wander the city’s beaches and canyons in search of diverted water.

    In short, the seemingly historical issues of Chinatown are more of a veneer spread over the story to help it seem far more mysterious that it truly is. The real issues here are as old as humankind: avarice and utter selfishness, which Polański suggests will always overwhelm those who may try to prevent it. Like the Biblical Noah, Noah Cross will survive at the expense of nearly everyone else, surely without feeling any need to be redeemed since he name alone suggests he has already been “saved.” And by film’s end we know that Gittes’ problems in Chinatown were not from the complexity of events but his inability to comprehend the language of evil.

     

Los Angeles, April 10, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).

Yasujirō Ozu | 父ありき(Chichi ariki) (There Was a Father) / 1942

sacrifices

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tadao Ikeda, Yasujirō Ozu, and Takao Anai (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 父ありき(Chichi ariki) (There Was a Father) / 1942

 

One might justifiably read Yasujirō Ozu’s 1942 film, There Was a Father, as a statement not only of the masculine bond between father and son, but how that bond is crucial to the survival of order in pre-World War II Japan. The father of this film, in this case, Shuhei  Horikawa (Chishū

Ryū), is a gentle authoritarian who imposes his views as a mathematics teacher not only upon his loving pupils, but upon his adoring son, Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsuda). A trusting and good boy, whose only complaints seem, at first, to be devoted the decayed condition of his shoes—his father is happy to buy him new shoe polish, but argues that the shoes are still wearable. Ryohei is a model son, who clearly will go on to high school and college, playing an important role himself in the society as is destined by his education.

      Throughout this film, moreover, the father, living as a widower (we never know the cause of his wife’s death) willingly embraces the pre-World War II Japanese moral values, even going so far as determining that he is no longer worthy of his position when a senior class trip he oversees ends in the accidental death of one of his pupils by drowning. The students who took the outlawed boat excursion had been told of the dangers of the waters, and had sneaked away from the general group to take their deadly voyage; yet Shuhei still blames himself, quitting his position as teacher as he attempts to sort out his life in his hometown if Ueda, where he decides to enroll his son in a Junior High School, while he travels to the distant Tokyo in order to find work in order to support his son’s education.       

    The day before he reveals this change to his son, the two go on a fishing trip, where they are shown, as critic Tony Rayns describes it, “casting their lines in unison and then the boy standing stock-still as his father casts again. The effect of that momentary refusal to act in sync is indescribably poignant,” which is reiterated in the dinner-time discussions between father and son when Shuehi reveals to Ryohei his plans. When the boy breaks down in tears, the father utters the horrible cliché that all males have been forced to hear from time immemorial: men don’t cry.

 

     Buy Ryohei does cry, even when, after suffering alone for years, he has achieved the position of a chemistry professor at a provincial school. After all the years of have living apart, Ryohei tells the visiting father—who has supported him by becoming a clerk in a Tokyo textile plant—that he plans to leave his teaching post and join him in the capital city. His father reacts strongly, insisting that it is the boy’s destiny to teach (we have already witnessed the young man blithely explaining to his students the chemical power of TNT), to help educate Japan’s future soldiers. This time, Ryohei is fully aware that adult males are not permitted tears, but he cries nonetheless, and we feel in his welling tears the years and years of loneliness and loss of familial life his has suffered. If Ozu is clearly telling us that something is amiss in this pre-war society, something that makes even grown men like Ryohei break taboo of public male lamentation.

      Another way of pointing to the failures of the father’s logic is that whenever father and son are together, as in many Ozu films, usually dining, we see distractions of life—a bevy of giggling women, the intrusion into the background of extraneous events—that distract us from Shuhei’s badgering clichés of societal order, and show us an energetic back-world that stands in opposition to the stand-offs between father and son.  Gradually we perceive that, in fact, Shuhei was perhaps not a fit teacher, but a man dedicated only to the order of systems such as his beloved mathematics.

     It is not accidental that his pupils had given him the name of “the Badger,” referring, in Asia, to the stink badger, a particularly dislikeable digging and burrowing animal who feeds on eggs, birds, earthworms, and small animals. Like the badger, Shuhei throughout this film, prefers to bury himself away from even his own beloved son. And perhaps it is no accident, that his obedient son, is nicknamed the “little badger,” a man who will not stand up to his father’s authoritarian viewpoints, but burrows himself away in the provincial village where he teaches.

     By film’s end, the son has finally passed his military medical exams, which make it clear that he will soon be off to war. On a 10-day leave from teaching to be with his father, the son and elder again fish together, this time in tandem. And without much protest Ryohei accepts his father’s demands that he marry the equally obedient daughter of Shuehi’s former teaching colleague, Hirata.

     During Ryohei’s stay, his father and Hirata are celebrated by their former students. Although the students tease and even mock their former teachers, it is clear that they still admire and love them. But in their celebrations we also see that the world has passed Shuhei by. These former boys are now almost all married and have, at least two children, one having already four. Shuhei and Hirata are now empty old men whose lives have passed. And these young, virile men will soon all be going off to war. To what purpose, we can only ask, has Shuhei and Hirata even educated them?

     We cannot be sure of precisely what that painful scene might actually have said about the war. The movie was censored by General Douglas McArthur, and this scene, in particular, was highly edited. Yet we know that the event surely has an effect on Shuhei and his dedication to the status quo, for when he returns home, having too much to drink, he becomes ill and dies soon after. Clearly, he has sensed that his time is over, a life lived in obedience but without most of the joys of loving and fully living life.

     The last scene of the film shows Ryohei returning by train (a symbol throughout this film of the distances that keeps father from son) with his new wife, an urn which holds his father’s ashes safely stashed away in the overhead. Ryohei, as we perceive, has become a man in his father’s mold, who will blindly go off to war, perhaps never to return to his far-too obedient wife, himself having never been able to experience the true ties of love he so desperately sought.

     Many critics, including Rayns, have argued that we do not really know what Ozu felt about the war. Ozu later served military duty twice (even though we know that some of the joys he had in his service was that we could take in Western movies such as Citizen Kane stationed in China and Singapore).

     But I would argue that this threnody of a film makes it quite clear that living one’s duty does not mean the same as living one’s life. Even if later Ozu’s sons and daughters of the sad Toyko Story seem mean and selfish in comparison with Ryohei’s loving obedience, they at least have their own lives to live, with their own problems to solve. Ryohei has little ahead, even if he survives the battles of the war. And, it is quite apparent, that he also is unfit to be a teacher.

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

Roy Del Ruth | Lady Killer / 1933

the shapeshifter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Markson and Lillie Hayward (screenplay based on a story by Rosalind Keating Shaffer), Roy Del Ruth (director) Lady Killer / 1933

 

Once the 1933 film Lady Killer introduces us to the movie theater usher Dan Quigley (James Cagney)—a young who refuses to stop chewing gum and games with dice in the men’s room during the run of the movie—is inevitably fired from his job, director Roy Del Ruth treats the script by Ben Markson and Lillie Hayward like an out-of-control locomotive racing down the tract and jumping off onto other lines with unpredictable results.

     Within only a few frames, the movie picks up Dan in a hotel in which an obviously flirtatious woman, Myra Gale (Mae Clarke), who accidentally drops her purse without noticing, allowing the film’s hero to run after and tracking her down. Myra introduces him to a secret card game into which Dan is quickly gets hooked where he loses. Minutes later he observes another stooge showing up at Myra’s door with a similar purse and Dan suddenly gets wise, before you can even blink an eye horning in on the crooked gambling group and making them a fortune by establishing a gambling casino for the rich and famous.

     The same customers, as we observe in one incident involving our underhanded hero, are fated to find themselves in accidents just outside their mansions, the victim (Dan) and a doctor just arrived on the scene (one of his gang members) suggesting he be permitted into the house until he can be transferred to a hospital. Within minutes Dan relays the layout of the house and the location of the family safe; and within hours his henchman have robbed it.

      But if you think this film is a crime story you’d be terribly mistaken since once the gang attracts the attention of the police and they break up and move on, Dan and Myra travel on that same locomotive to Chicago and finally Los Angeles, where now alone and with money, fate takes Dan in hand and places him as a extra on a movie set where he meets the beautiful star Lois Underwood (Margaret Lindsay) who, unlike Lina Lamont in relation to Don Lockwood in Singing in the Rain, is totally approachable and friendly to the stunt performer. And before you know it, with the help of hundreds of fan letters written by himself, Dan has become a popular movie star dating Lois.

      And for a short while Lady Killer forgets it’s even a movie about making it big in Hollywood, Lois hosting a big party for her birthday that Dan arranges to be crashed—in the style of the soon-to-be-popular screwball comedy—by a crate of wild monkeys, a band of yodelers, and a full-grown elephant, suggesting that he’ll do anything for love.

      Given the trouble he’s already gotten into in the first two-thirds of the movie, we’re hardly surprised when he takes Lois on a tour of his new apartment, he and she discover Myra in his bed.

     Somehow she and the old gang have jumped the tracks to meet up in Hollywood with their former partner, now, as they naturally see it, the perfect set-up for introducing them into the homes of the Hollywood rich and famous.

    But this time Dan’s gone straight for good, so he claims. Besides he now has to use all of his remaining cinematic energy in wooing Lois back after his faux pas of leaving a left-over dame in his bed. But as in dozens of movies after and some even before, the sins of the past come haunting the good deeds of the present. The gang, using the reliable Hollywood tour guides to introduce them to the best of the Beverly Hills bungalows, begin to rob the stars. But when Lois becomes a victim it’s too much for Dan, and he tracks down his old group, gun in hand, stealing back the jewels they’ve taken with the intention of returning them to the proper owner.

      Unfortunately, the police, who have been tracking the gang, are waiting outside the door, and given his previous ties with the same desperados and with the jewels nestling in his coat pocket, he’s arrested despite, for once, his total innocence.

     Despite her anger, Lois is still determined to bail him out; but when she arrives she discovers that some other friends have been there before her to get him out—the gang obviously, who now intend to kill him before he squeals about them.

     Wily Danny boy, however, arranges for the cop to trail him to the real perpetrators the crime, and after a wild and wooly chase scene complete with tommie-gun fight out between the criminals and the cops, Dan and Myra end up safely ensconced in a gully, while the police kill all the others but one, who shall now certainly have to tell the truth in order to save himself from the electric chair.

     Dan and Lois fly off to Mexico to get married, Myra gets a more lenient sentencing, and the audience goes home humming instead of looking over their shoulders in fear for their lives.

     And along the way they’ve been mightily entertained in a manner than must have sent shivers down Joseph Breen’s spineless back. Certainly, along with all the other such movies made in 1933, by the end the year he and his friends were so terrified by certain kinds of sex and violence that they were prepared to ban nearly any talk about sex and curtail violence unless it meant killing of any species that didn’t salute the US flag and go to Christian churches every Sunday.

     Cagney certainly seemed like he was enjoying the nice tough guy we was playing, at one point exuberantly pulling Myra by her hair out his bed and putting his foot to her butt in a kick out the door. At another point, when a film critic gives Lois a bad review based on personal matters, he pulls the stuffed-shirt away from his dining bimbo and delivers up in the bathroom where he forces the protesting gentlemen to literally eat his words in the form the newspaper clipping before throwing into a bathroom stall where impact of his body causes the toilet to flush—a sound echoing in our ears that will never again be heard in the movies or TV for several decades. 

       The Los Angeles police chief, having been sent word from back East of Dan’s being under suspicion, insists they arrest him for being a vag, presumably the cop lingo for vagrant, which when the word is spoken, in the instance, turns the lower mouthed vowel into a higher mouthed fricative.

       Meeting up with his godforsaken gang members, Dan brings them a basket of fruit, ready to hand out a grapefruit to Myra before thinking better of it (reminding the actor Cagney, obviously, of what how he previously applied that fruit to the same actresses’ face in 1931’s The Public Enemy) before delivering up the rest of the basket to one of his other old friends with the words, “I know you like fruit.”

      Dressed in the costume of satin high pantaloons for his role as an Italian count, Dan is confronted by a detective, the two of them engaging in an almost violent verbal interchange before, as he turns to leave, the cop stops, taps him on the shoulder, and says, “You mind if I tell you how sweet you look?”

      Violence against women and homosexual innuendos seem to come with the territory in Cagney’s films of the early 1930s.

       It’s too bad, however, that the writers and directors weren’t also able to link or at least portray on parallel tracts Dan’s voyages through the criminal world and those of Hollywood. In its satire of Hollywood filmmaking, it hints at how the industry robs the working and middle classes just as surely as the criminals steal from the rich. But its speed through the film’s 76 minutes, the filmmakers can’t seem to get up any true moral indignation for either profession, perhaps in part because Cagney infuses them both so much energy and charm. But if they might have bothered to truly interweave this strains of their shape-shifting genres, Lady Killer could have risen from a charming B-grade movie to become a true classic. As it is, it’s just about good enough to have become another real thorn in the already itchy asses of the Hays censorship committee.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).