Month: April 2019

You’ll notice I haven’t had the best track record with avant-garde experimental film.  The only way I could make sense of L’Age D’or was to compare it to Monty Python; Limite I had no idea what was going on, and Un Chien Andalou sent me into full-on body horror.  So I approached Meshes Of The Afternoon with some trepidation.

And…lo and behold, I think I kind of “get it”.

Perhaps it’s because it feels more like a hyper-extended dream sequence.  I’ve always been fascinated by dreams – there’s a joke that implies that someone else telling you about a dream they had at length would be tedious, but I’d actually be fascinated, and might happily volunteer to pitch in and help you speculate about what it might “mean” (or laugh with you if you conclude it was triggered by something you ate).

This film feels exactly like the kind of dream I’d rub my hands over.  Filmmaker and artist Maya Deren is the “star”, a woman whom we first meet wandering down a leafy Los Angeles street and entering a little cottage.  After giving the room a look-over – studying a couple of items carefully, like a bread knife and a record player – she settles into an armchair for a nap, where she dreams that she’s walking down a leafy Los Angeles street and enters a little cottage, where her double is asleep in an armchair; so she goes to the window, where she sees herself walking down a leafy Los Angeles street towards the cottage to let herself in…

There is a lot of that funky dream-logic going on.  Things loop back on themselves again and again, random objects take on unexplained significance, or spontaneously disappear and reappear, or move around the room.  The bread knife turns into a house key.  One of the multiple Mayas in the room suddenly sees she has ink or blood on her hands.  A mysterious figure in a cloak with a mirror for a face wanders up and down the street, and eventually into the house, over and over again.  A handsome man enters the cottage towards the end, but treads the same path as the mirror-faced figure.

The other experimental works I’ve seen haven’t grabbed me the way this one has – perhaps this had just the right level of implied import to trigger my “come on, that’s got to mean something” Jungian-analysis button.  It’s also tantalizingly short, leaving you thinking that maybe if there were just one more scene you’d get the key that unlocked it all.  But no, this is all there is.

This film established Maya and her then-husband Alexander Hammid as innovators in avant-garde filmmaking (he held the camera and he’s the man who enters the house).  Her style in this film particularly has influenced a couple of David Lynch’s films, and in more recent years some of the images have left their stamp on music videos (this is where Janelle Monae got the idea for the mirror-faced figures in the video for “Tightrope” in particular).

This film really snuck up on me and gave me a sucker punch.

The whole thing is set in an around a small town in Nevada in the 1880s. The very beginning is really trope-y – Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and his buddy Art Croft (Harry Morgan) are a pair of drifters who are making one of their periodic stops in Bridger’s Well, a Podunk of a town where the saloonkeeper advises them that all there is to do in town is “eat, sleep, drink, play poker or fight”.   Gil and Art opt for option 3, but Gil is antsy after hearing about an ex-girlfriend who’s left town and quickly adds on option 5, picking a fight with another bar patron and forcing the saloonkeeper to knock him out with a whiskey bottle.  When Gil comes around (thanks to Art throwing a bucket of water in his face), he just shrugs and goes back to drinking.

This was the point where I rolled my eyes a little and paused to make dinner, remarking to Alex as I did that “so far it seems like it’s just checking off a list of ‘things that need to happen in a Western’.”  But when I went on, dinner in hand, I realized that that was all just setup for the real story, something that affected me so much I went back to Alex after and said “I take back everything I said.”

The real story kicks off when a ranch hand from the Kincaid property outside town rides in sounding an alarm – several head of the Kincaid’s cattle have been rustled, and someone was found shot dead on the Kincaid property.  Not sure who – their face was too badly damaged – but Kincaid isn’t around, so it’s probably him.  Most of the patrons in the bar quickly tumble out to fetch their horses and form a posse, with “Major” Tetley (Frank Conroy), a wealthy self-styled veteran, spurring the posse on.  Major Tetley drags his son Gerald (William Eythe) into the fray as well to “make a man out of him”.  Gil and Art join reluctantly, knowing that suspicion will fall on them if they sit out; but Gil does persuade the local judge to come by first and try to quell the passions of the crowd first. But by the time they come back, the crowd is about 20 strong and everyone’s at a fever pitch, so all the judge can do is warn them that they need to bring the suspects back alive so they get a fair trial.  The crowd nods and says a whatever-you-say mumble and then hits the road, finding three suspects in the mountains in short order – three men sleeping by a campfire, beside a herd of cattle bearing Kincaid’s brand.

The posse wakes the men – young aspiring rancher Donald (Dana Andrews), and his two assistants, feeble-minded elderly Alva (Francis Ford) and Juan Martinez (Anthony Quinn) who speaks no English.  Donald quickly protests that he bought the cattle fair and square and knows nothing about Kincaid’s murder.  But the posse is dubious – and out for blood – and subjects the three to a lengthy trial by kangaroo court, treating their eventual guilty verdict and execution by hanging as a foregone conclusion the whole while.  Gil and Art, and a handful of others, do dissent, but their influence may not be great enough to stop it…

The whole thing is meant as a cautionary tale against mob violence, with a denouement that reminded me of The Bacchae. What stood out even more so for me, though, was the initial growth of the mob – some of the participants join as a way to Prove Themselves, some are just mean, and some (Gil and Art) are joining in out of peer pressure.  And some are joining in out of fear – the town has been plagued by rustlers in recent weeks and this is a chance to finally stop that lurking dread.

But mostly it felt like the biggest reason people had for joining in was simply that it was something to do. Bridger’s Well had only one saloon, everyone had probably played poker with each other several times over, and as the saloonkeeper says early on the only single woman in town was 82 years old and blind.  Everyone in town was probably itching for some kind of break in the monotony, and the mob presented a chance to do something that many people jumped at without thinking.  Mind you, I’m not claiming that that’s the only reason people might have joined the posse, or that they would have admitted to this themselves, but I suspect that this was lurking underneath their thinking.

“Mob justice” takes a different form today – these days it’s threats in email and SWATTing (“SWATTING” means to call in a fake report of a violent crime-in-progress at the house of someone you want to harass).  The consequences aren’t always as dire as those that befell Donald and his ranchhands, but sometimes they can be.  And it’s got me wondering whether “because it’s just something to do” might be fueling a lot of the mob mentality here as well.

So – remember those true-crime type of TV shows from the 90s and Aughts which had a dramatic recreation of key points of the crime in question?  And remember how some of them used the actual participants in the story in the recreations?  That is precisely what Fires Were Started does as well.

Early on in World War II, British fire departments soon found themselves overwhelmed by the special challenges of fighting fires during wartime; bombs would blow up water mains as well as houses, and the sheer number of fires started during air raids was staggering. Initially Great Britain formed a series of “Auxiliary Fire Brigades” as part of their Civil Defense program, which were meant as backup to each community’s own regular fire service.  But the Auxiliary Brigades faced considerable logistic problems – poor communication, an all-volunteer staff, and most damaging, equipment issues (auxiliary brigades were all issued the same pump trucks, but each community had different-shaped hydrants, so the pump trucks often couldn’t access the hydrants in the communities where they were stationed).  After a couple years the UK rolled out a nationalized wartime fire service to cope with the burden.

Director Humphrey Jennings chose to make a “docudrama” set just before the nationalized service was rolled out, illustrating the struggles of the former “regular firefighters and auxiliary” system.  It’s a slice-of-life glimpse into the workings of one London fire brigade, showing staff on daily patrols, hanging around the station, and responding to an alarm.  The only nod to a plot is to have a character for whom this is his first day on the job, a plot point that lets some of the others introduce him around to various characters and have people explain things to him for our benefit.

This is not a fast-paced film. A lot of attention is paid to the nuts-and-bolts procedural work – the cleaning of the machines, the unrolling and setting-up of the pump trucks, the communications hub tracking the locations of each stations’ trucks.  We do see an actual fire fight, too, but as much attention is paid to the unrolling of the hoses before the team gets to work and the rolling-up of hoses after as it is to actually fighting the fire. Backdraft this ain’t.

Part of the pacing and the granular detail, however, may be because Jennings cast actual firefighters for this project, recruiting one or two staff from each stationhouse in London so no one station was left too short.  While Jennings had a general idea for the overall plot, the firefighters were free to contribute smaller detail within each scene, and most of the dialogue was ad-libbed.  This interview excerpt by one of the firefighters gives a fascinating “making-of” view.

And even though the earlier bits did feel like they dragged some, the non-fussy “performances” from the cast gave things a freshness and immediacy that carried over the slow bits.  It also lent a weight to the one or two things you could call “stunts” – there’s a scene when an injured firefighter is being lowered down off the roof via a rope, and even though he’s pretty solidly locked into place, when a sudden jolt made the cable spin unexpectedly I found myself gasping.  There’s even a fair bit of wartime solidarity-raising; the main fire sequence takes place near a dock where a munitions supply ship is prepped for launch on the following morning, and the firemen are working as diligently as they are to ensure the fire doesn’t spread to the ship and its ammunition.  The final sequences include one of the exhausted firefighters remarking after the fire is out that the unaffected ship is “a sight for sore eyes”, and the shots of the weary firemen returning to their station are intercut with the munitions ship safely setting sail for the front.

Still, it’s more of an intellectually interesting film than it is an emotionally arresting one.  Not anything I can see myself revisiting, but still intriguing.

This was weird, yo.

Cat People is a sort of psychological horror film – the story of Irina (Simone Simon), a young woman from a small town in Serbia now living in New York.  She is sketching the black panther at the Central Park Zoo when she catches the eye of engineer Oliver (Kent Smith), who strolls over to chat her up. Irina is hesitant at first, but she’s also lonely, and the pair begin a whirlwind romance that leads in short order to marriage.

There’s just one eensy problem – Irina seems weirdly obsessed with old Serbian folktales about an evil family from her village; in moments of high passion, they would turn into cats. In fact, she’s not just obsessed – she’s convinced that she has a personal connection to the tale.  She’s so spooked that she insists on she and Oliver sleeping in separate rooms after their marriage until she can get past this fear.  The smitten Oliver goes along with her at first, teasing her gently about her fears.  Then he starts to push her towards seeing a psychiatrist.

He starts spending more time with a work colleague, Alice (Jane Randolph), who’s always had a crush on him; meanwhile, Irina is strangely compelled to visit the zoo panther again and again. And one night as Irina heads back home from the zoo, she spots Oliver and Alice in a coffee house and starts getting a little miffed…

So: this is definitely a B movie. The acting is not all that great, the plot is ridiculous (and a little bit lurid). The movie’s depiction of psychiatry is completely ridiculous.  There are even moments you could chalk up to exploitative skin-flashing – Irina curled up and sobbing in frustration in a bathtub, Alice having a swim in a skimpy bathing suit (well, skimpy for the 1940s).

But alongside the cheese there are some genuinely creepy elements. When it comes to terror, the monster you can’t see is always more frightening than the one you can – and director Jacques Tourneur knows this full well, throwing several scenes into dim lighting and hinting at a lurking menace rather than outright showing it.  That swim Alice takes is in an indoor pool at night, lit only by the glow of the moon outside a window; the light reflecting off the ripping water throws rippling shadows on the walls, shadows which might or might not start to look catlike as Alice swims. Especially when she starts hearing a growling panther in the room.  There’s another growl during a later scene with Oliver and Alice at their office, interrupting their discussion about Irina – and this time Oliver thinks he can smell Irina’s perfume.

Spookier still is a scene where Alice is wending her way homeward after a coffee outing with Oliver, walking alone on a footpath that takes her under some bridges.  At least she thinks she’s alone – Irina has been spying on the couple, and when Alice takes her leave, Irina follows her. At first we see them both – Alice passing into and out of the pools of light from the streetlamps, Irina following after her just far enough behind.  We hear Alice’s distinct step; we hear Irina’s steps just after, quickening as they follow her.  Then we stop seeing Irina.  But we hear her still.  And then Alice starts to hear her too, casting fearful glances behind her as she walks.  Alice’s step quickens.  So does the sound of Irina’s steps.

Then Irina’s footsteps suddenly go silent. And we hear what might be a low growl.  …It might also be the bus pulling up to the stop where Alice has paused, but she’s creeped out enough to hastily board the bus even though it’s going the wrong way.  But as the bus is pulling away, Alice sees strange movement in the bushes right near where she’d been standing.

It’s just bizarre that Jacques Tourneur knew how to make something genuinely that unsettling, but didn’t seem to notice how flat everyone’s acting was.  Still, the film did well enough at the box office, and even inspired a 1980s remake that fleshed out the plot some and threw in a couple of sex scenes (the remake is perhaps wisely not included on the 1001 list).  The film also introduced Tourneur to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, now regarded as one of the pioneers of the film noir style.  Tourneur and producer Val Lewton worked with Musuraca frequently, often in other similar B-movie fare, but Musuraca’s technique left a chilling stamp on their works.

Mrs. Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) is doing quite well when this film starts.  It’s 1939, and times are prosperous again.  Her architect husband Clem  (Walter Pidgeon) makes enough for them to live a comfortable middle-class existence in a suburb outside London – not too wealthy, but enough for them to have a house on the Thames and pay for piano lessons for daughter Judy and a cat for little Toby and send their oldest Vincent to Oxford, and still allow Kay to splurge on the occasional new hat.  But wealth doesn’t go to their heads, like with Lady Beldon up in the big house in town; they’re polite and charming to everyone, so much so that the kindly old railway stationmaster, Mr. Ballard, wants to name the new breed of rose he’s developed after Kay, and even pit his “Mrs. Miniver” rose against Lady Beldon’s own blooms.  Things are ticking along quite nicely for everyone.

….And then war comes and things start to change.

Not as fast as all that, though.  It’s only in retrospect that I realize how cleverly this film works –  I actually felt like the first half was a little slow and plodding, but only later did I realize it was lulling me into the easy comfortable groove that the Minivers were enjoying, with family teas and occasional dances at the social hall, and their regular visits to church each week, all the Minivers dutifully filing into the pew opposite Lady Beldon and her pretty granddaughter Carol.  There is the occasional reminder of the war –  Vincent enlists in the RAF, the family is encouraged to set up a shelter in their basement – but at first it seems a grand adventure, with Vincent close enough to home to still pop in for family dinner and spin tall tales for little Toby, and woo and win Carol Beldon.  Even when Clem is one of the many men summoned to the town hall for an “emergency” at 2 am one morning, they think nothing of it at first, and make time for quick glasses of sherry while they wait for the civil defense agent to arrive.

That’s actually the point that the film turned for me – because when the civil defense agent does arrive, he orders that all the men present were summoned because they own boats, and they’re to immediately go get them and head to the coast, to await further orders.   As soon as he said that I guessed – correctly – that they were about to be sent to Dunkirk.  We never see Clem in Dunkirk, mind you; but I’d seen the 2017 film and knew he was about to head into some heavy stuff.  And Vincent is called up on his first air mission at the same time, leaving Kay behind to fret about them both.  But she’s also got her hands full constructing the family shelter and keeping an eye out for a rumored fugitive German pilot that’s supposed to be skulking about town.  The air raids are starting to come more frequently as well.  Both Clem and Vincent come home in one piece and in good spirits, but we definitely kept a vigil with Kay, and that sense of cozy security has started to erode.  Within only a couple scenes we’re watching the family huddle in their air raid shelter and seeing great craters dot the lovely English town where the Minivers live.  Then the damage from the air raids creeps closer to the Miniver’s own house – and household.

And the Minivers stiff-upper-lip through it all, even as things get worse and worse.  The Minivers’ little boat is in sorry shape after Dunkirk, but when Kay remarks on it and asks what happened, Clem just waves things off with a smile – don’t fuss about the boat when he’s okay. During a scary air raid, as the whole family huddles in their shelter, Kay tries to soothe her children by calmly reading them a chapter of Alice in Wonderland.  Lady Beldon goes on with her flower show, serenely inviting all attendees to shelter in her own basement when an air raid interrupts the proceedings.  Everyone tries to carry on in the face of war despite it growing nearer and nearer. And that is why the beginning went on so long, I realized – I needed to be grounded in the “before” to really get what they were losing, and appreciate how brave the Minivers and their neighbors were.

As a piece of propaganda it’s an absolute masterwork.  It’s one of the first Hollywood films not to pull its punches against the Third Reich, and Churchill applauded its depiction of English fortitude and bravery, predicting that it would boost American support of the Allies.  FDR was so struck by a lengthy speech towards the film’s end that he had it translated into German and printed on leaflets the US Airforce dropped over German cities.  Even Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels acknowledged the power of the film – “…its refined powerful propagandistic tendency has up to now only been dreamed of. There is not a single angry word spoken against Germany; nevertheless the anti-German tendency is perfectly accomplished.”

But its propaganda is not so blatant as to keep this from being a good film in and of itself. There’s an impressive sequence showing the boats heading off to Dunkirk, a whole flotilla of little tugboats and pleasure craft silently puttering on down the Thames by moonlight. First there are just a few, then a dozen in the next shot, then a few dozen next, and on and on until there’s a massive fleet gliding down the Thames, filling up the whole river.  It’s a stirring image.  I was also quite charmed by the romance between Carol Beldon and Vincent; she meets him before the war, when he’s come home spouting lofty ideals about the class system – she punctures his puffery with a remark so cutting I’m half tempted to use it on Twitter (I’m not sharing just so I can keep it for myself – it’s that good).  Speaking of Vincent, his casting was literally the only thing I didn’t quite accept; Greer Garson seemed awfully young to have a college-age son, and something about Kay’s relationship with Vincent seemed just a shade overly-intimate.  Not to the point that I was creeped out.  But enough that when I later learned that Garson was actually dating the guy who played Vincent in real life that I thought “oh, that explains it”.

But still this got under my skin to the point that I caught myself involuntarily saying “oh no” when someone’s death is reported towards the end.  I couldn’t really relate to the Minivers at first blush – but by the end I’d been made well enough acquainted with their little world that I felt their losses as keenly as they did. That’s almost a miracle.

I was aware of the existence of Ernst Lubitch’s To Be Or Not To Be before seeing it – only because Mel Brooks re-made it in the early 1980s.  And after seeing it, I have to say that Mel Brooks remaking this film makes complete and utter sense.

Jack Benny stars as Josef Tura, the leader of a theater in Warsaw.  When the story begins, it is right before the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and Tura and his team are deep in rehearsals for a new play, “Gestapo”, a satire spoofing Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. When a government official stops by to urge them to stop – they don’t want to anger the actual Hitler – the troupe simply mothballs the set and costumes and re-mounts Hamlet, with Josef playing lead and his wife Maria (Carole Lombard) as Ophelia.  It’s familiar ground for the company – so familiar, in fact, that Maria knows exactly when she’ll have long breaks in between scenes and uses the time to welcome besotten admirers backstage to her dressing room (not what you think – she’s a flirt, but keeps it innocent and stays faithful to Josef).  Maria is entertaining one such swain – a young pilot named Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack) – when the Germans make their move and invade.  Sobinski hurries off to enlist, while Maria joins the rest of the cast in the basement, where they huddle together to withstand an air raid.

As the war wears on, Sobinski ends up in the British R.A.F. as part of a loyalist Polish division, while much of the theater troupe has secretly begun working for the Polish resistance.  When Sobinski discovers that a “Polish Resistance Leader” named Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) is actually a Nazi spy, and is currently en route to Warsaw to meet with officials there, he makes a daring flight to Poland to warn Maria.  As the company is debating how they can divert Siletsky, suddenly someone remembers – hey, don’t we still have the set and costumes from Gestapo that we never used?  And didn’t we all think that Bronski looked uncannily like Hitler when we were in rehearsals?  Maybe we can use all of that somehow…

There’s more to the story than that, but it gives a good idea, and I don’t want to give much more away than I have already, as it’s a really clever clockwork of a story.  There’s a bit of a subplot woven throughout – Josef eventually learns that Sobinski was hanging out in Maria’s dressing room and she has to soothe his ruffled feathers – but most of it is a tale of a group of zany actors getting the better of the Nazis.  And it’s all definitely played for laughs – the SS Officer stationed in Warsaw is an utter buffoon, and the schemes that Tura and his troupe come up with outsmart the enemy easily (and even outsmarted me at one point!).

That poking fun may have worked to the film’s detriment at the time.  The film came out a few short months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and people were not in a joking mood about the war.  It was a little too soon, many critics complained.  Others took a dim view of some of the jokes – at one point, one Nazi with a low opinion of Tura’s acting talent quips that “Josef Tura did to Hamlet what we’re doing to Poland”.

Lubitsch stuck by his film, however. He firmly believed in using comedy to belittle those in power and knock them down to size.   “What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology,” he argued in a response to one critic.   Jack Benny’s father also reportedly walked out of the first screening, horrified at seeing his son in a Gestapo uniform.  Benny had a heart-to-heart with him afterward about the film and Lubitch’s thoughts on using comedy to poke fun at the Third Reich, and his father tried again – and went on to see the film another 46 times.

There was an poignant moment as well.  Felix Bressart plays a company member, Greenberg, who early on opines to a friend that he wishes Tura’s troupe would do The Merchant Of Venice sometime, since he’s convinced he’d make a great Shylock.  He’s even got one of the speeches memorized, he says – “Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? …If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”  It becomes a frequent refrain for Greenberg – he says it ironically to a friend in the Ghetto, he recites it when he’s trying to impress other actors.  And towards the end of the film, when Greenberg is tapped to cause a distraction and lure a group of Gestapo soldiers out of an opera box, he knows exactly what he wants to say – Greenberg draws himself up to his full height, looks the Gestapo officer right in the eye, and asks, “….Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?….”

This film may have been a little too soon for 1942 audiences, but I greatly enjoyed it.

So, watching Now, Voyager was seriously thought provoking for me. Although not for the reason you may think.

At the time of its release, it was heralded for handling psychotherapy and mental illness in a uniquely sensitive way; a trait that still wins this film applause today.  Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, the youngest daughter of a super-strict Boston Brahman matriarch (Gladys Cooper).  Charlotte has grown up the target of her mother’s verbal and emotional abuse and repressive control.  But Charlotte has a sympathetic sister-in-law who brings a psychotherapist along for a visit one day so he can have a look-see.  Mrs. Vale protests mightily, but after only five minutes with Charlotte and her mother, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) sizes up the situation, tells Mrs. Vale off and drags Charlotte off to his sanitarium in Vermont.

Charlotte is much better after a month (although the place looks more like a resort, so it’s no wonder), but is still uneasy about heading straight home right away, so with Dr. Jacquith’s encouragement she embarks on a six-month cruise.  She has a marvelous time, and turns out to be quite the social butterfly.  Most significantly, she meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), who’s hitching a ride on the cruise to make a business meeting in Buenos Aires.  Jerry is married, but unhappily so, and is the father of two girls – the youngest of which, Tina, is suffering the same kind of maternal neglect that Charlotte did. Charlotte’s confidences about her own troubles help Jerry to understand and support Tina, and Jerry’s kindness and attention brings Charlotte out of her shell even further.  Of course this leads to the pair falling in love – but they part at the end of the cruise, since Jerry won’t divorce his wife.  Jerry still can’t resist sending a corsage to Charlotte’s house in Boston as a parting gift – it arrives just as she’s about to finally see her mother again, and the gesture gives her enough confidence to finally assert herself and her autonomy.  Mother and daughter live under a kind of chilly truce for a while, with Charlotte even getting engaged to a distinguished Boston blue-blood, but a chance meeting with Jerry again shakes her up to the point that she breaks her engagement and calls her mother out for her neglect – a double-whammy shock which causes Mrs. Vale to suffer a fatal heart attack.  Wracked with guilt, Charlotte heads for Dr. Jaquith’s sanitarium again.  And on her first day there, she sees a surprisingly familiar face – Jerry’s daughter Tina, whom she recognizes from a picture he showed her. Thinking the girl can use a friend, she reaches out…

So here’s the thing.  I read a quick 25-words-or-less plot blurb before watching, and wrote it off as the kind of melodrama I usually don’t like.  And I still don’t.  I’ve always felt this kind of plot was formulaic; it presents a woman whose sole path to happiness seems to be via Finding Love, and even worse, it denies the lead her heart’s desire and holds up sacrifice as a noble thing (the famous last line, “let’s not ask for the moon when we have the stars” is presented as romantic, but to me it sounds defeatist).  There’s a lot of sturm und drang along the way, a lot of chance meetings and tragic misfortunes, cruel twists of fate and at least two scenes with dramatic confrontations between two female relatives where one of them is finally confronting the other over some long-lasting mistreatment.  Alex inadvertently hit on a modern word for the genre after I told him that it was a classic example of the three-hanky picture; he hadn’t heard that term before, and I told him it was an older term for this kind of melodramatic, sentimental film with a woman going through various trials and tribulations and affairs of the heart.  “Oh,” Alex said, “you mean it’s like a Lifetime or Hallmark Channel movie.”

And he’s right.  And I further realized that I’ve been sneering at the contemporary version of this kind of film for years – the overwrought melodrama, the heightened plot twists.  Now, Voyager even includes the old trope of the character who undergoes a “stunning transformation” in appearance, which really just boils down to her giving up wearing glasses and doing her hair different, which I rolled my eyes over at first.

But interestingly enough that is also what gave me pause.  Bette Davis tried to do a bit more to alter Charlotte, to be fair, and it’s an example of the trope that works a little better than usual.  There’s not much that can be done to “ugly” up Bette Davis, but they really try – Davis insisted on padding inside her costume to make her look fatter, a really stodgy pair of glasses and a Mary Todd Lincoln hair style with some fake bushy eyebrows.  It’s a marked difference from the “after” – Davis’ usual slim figure, stylish gowns and swept-up hair showing off a slim neck.  Davis also carries the difference emotionally – the “before” Charlotte is nearly mute, while the “after” Charlotte is gracious and charming.  It may have been a cliché, but it was a cliché that I realized that I bought in this case.

And that made me analyze my reaction a bit further.  I’ve protested in the past that I disliked this kind of film because the heroines ended up having to sacrifice happiness, and that was unrealistic – but on the other hand, I also take a dim view of the rom-com because the lead always gets happiness, and I also thought that was unrealistic.  Was the problem the films, I wondered, or was it me?  Have I been unfair to an entire genre of film?

What I finally realized is that it wasn’t the content of films like this that galls me – it’s the segregation.  This is something that discusses emotional abuse, neglect, psychotherapy, coming into one’s own and asserting one’s self, being a responsible parent – these are all things that affect men as well as women.  It isn’t even women who are the only ones with emotional stakes in this film – Jerry has some seriously high emotional stakes, and goes through some intense growth as well.  This could have been a film for everyone.  But it wasn’t billed that way – it was billed as being a film “for women”, for them to just have a cathartic cry over before going back to their own lives.  Lives which might have been similarly troubled; but instead of being encouraged to take more of the kind of control that Dr. Jaquith was encouraging for Charlotte, the women in the audience were being encouraged to get all the crying out of their system in the theater so they could suck it up and cope with the status quo at home.

It may be unfair of me to expect third-wave feminism from a 1940s drama. But it may be women like me back then who were starting to get sick of this kind of thing who paved the way for third-wave feminism in the first place.