On bizarrely specific subgenres and/or typecasting.

Maybe you knew Peter Lorre starred in a movie about hands that take a man over and then are revealed to have murderous capacities and inclinations -- "Mad Love," which not only is fabulous on its own account but (so they say) was the film that convinced British censors finally to give up on film by film, scene by scene work and simply ban horror movies altogether, thus eliminating at one blow such a chunk of the market, and setting such a precedent for other wary censorship boards, that the justly celebrated Universal Horror pictures unit was shuttered.* BUT did you know that ten years later, in 1946, he played the English (!) private secretary of an eccentric composer living in Italy who, after his employer's death, becomes fixated on the idea that the composer's hands have survived him and are wandering around committing murders on their own? It turns out he's crazy and he's been the murderer all along. Nevertheless the Addams Family's The Thing has nothing on ... "The Beast with Five Fingers". Everything in the movie except Peter Lorre is more or less pointless. But the beast is cool.

This became a whole subgenre of horror movies, made as recently as the eighties to my knowledge, in which hands he wasn't born with and that seem to operate independently of the rest of his system bend a man (it is always a man, I think) towards depraved violence. Mostly newly-attached, à la Orlac, but certainly The Thing testifies to the continued amusement to be found in the disembodied sort as well. I believe there are a dozen or more horror movies based on this premise, or element.

I bring this up because I've just now seen Dennis Price, known mostly as Louis Mazzini in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in 1949, playing quite a similar character eight years later in a movie known alternatively as "The Naked Truth" or "Your Past Is Showing." Louis is an amoral striver bent on revenge against the relatives who disinherited his mother for marrying an Italian, ambitious for their rank and wealth. After much thought and study he is able to conceive and smoothly execute the murders of enough d'Ascoynes (all incarnations of Alec Guinness) to inherit it all. The movie ends ambiguously: he's certainly done better than the universally hapless and largely wicked and idiotic d'Ascoynes, but he has barely escaped a death sentence, albeit for the one death in the movie for which he isn't responsible, and seems less than half a step from returning under its shadow. It seems impossible that he should escape, but improbable that he should fare so much worse against this round of obstacles than against previous; and we aren't sure what to wish for, in several different ways. ("Kind Hearts and Coronets" has the rare distinction of combining farcical serial murder with a subtle exploration of the emotional and practical dilemmas of being in love with two people, who bring with them two sorts of lives and two visions of what he could be. It's like "Arsenic and Old Lace" with a touch of "Trouble in Paradise." And no, I can't think of a higher compliment I could have paid by comparison.)

"The Naked Truth" also ends with Price's character escaping from the frying pan (in this case a blimp) to leap, evidently, straight into the fire (the ocean, 200 miles from England). But it doesn't get so far as "Kind Hearts" in any direction. Price's part in it is large, but he is not, as in "KH&C," the center of every plotline and the narrator of every sequence. Still, the film begins with a series of visits his character -- Nigel Dennis -- makes to a series of prominent people who subsequently evince alarming levels of desperation. A scientist shoots him(?)self, an MP collapses on the floor during a speech, a model tries to gas herself (but only succeeds in blowing up her apartment), a novelist jumps from her window but lands safely in the grocer below's fruit barrels ... As in "Kind Hearts" Price's character wreaks more havoc and inflicts more pain than his social and financial ambitions require, without ever telling the wealthy, famous, and/or powerful people he blackmails -- that's how he sows his mayhem: after much thought and study he's conceived and executes a flawless strategy of blackmail unpunishable under British libel laws -- without ever telling them how he feels about them. Perhaps without fully admitting to himself how he feels about them. One can't maintain resentment and contempt in such exquisite balance for the long term without slipping in one direction and another: usually, for Louis and for Dennis, resentment. But revealed resentment is an open wound, and they bandage it with what is after all quite justified contempt for "their betters." (Dennis's brief but leisurely glance around Lord Mayley's large and expensively-furnished house, right after Dennis has mentioned that he inhabits a tiny and decrepit barge on the river, surrounded by condemned properties -- that glance, the accompanying slight motions of brow and lip, the almost-visible shrug of self-conquest, of restoring contempt to its rightful place as his ruling passion -- ah ... !)

I suppose the plots aren't quite similar enough to constitute a subgenre: it does make a difference whether you blow up a man's darkroom with him in it or just threaten to expose the follies of his youth. But the character is so similar -- just a little older, a little puffier, a little quieter, a little harder-bitten -- that it's hard to imagine it wasn't built around, or heavily tailored to, Louis Mazzini. Allusions to a well-known earlier role are a long tradition, but this isn't quite the same as Cary Grant playing a nasty sophisticated newspaper editor chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his (Grant's character's) ex-wife two years after having played a nasty sophisticated socialite chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his ex-wife. Cary Grant is always Cary Grant; his characters in "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday" form a natural pairing, but they're not very different from the nasty sophisticated powerful people he plays in "Suspicion," say, or "The Philadelphia Story." Similarly if Dennis Price had been cast as a conscienceless, resentment-driven, brutishness-abhorring, poor, clever, malicious man -- well, that's typecasting, but it's also the reason why types are cast: it works! An actor who can do xyz can do xyz again for you, if she's a professional. But this is like asking Cary Grant to partner with Katharine Hepburn to catch an escaped domesticated panther in Connecticut, and then sending him off to capture an escaped domesticated tiger on Long Island in another movie -- making this the main mover of the plot, but also the only thing importantly in common with the earlier depiction. I don't have any analysis to offer, just interest.


* Maybe you even knew that "Mad Love" was linked not only to the earlier, silent, German adaptation of the novel "The Hands of Orlac" -- but also to James Whale's famous (but not that great) "Frankenstein" and Tod Browning's notorious (and pretty okay!) "Freaks." Colin Clive, who as Frankenstein had stitched together disparate human parts into a monster of melancholy temperament and violent disposition, plays Stephen Orlac, a young composer and concert pianist who loses his hands in a train accident; brilliant humanitarian surgeon and secret torture porn fetishist (you think I'm exaggerating? Look at those Grand Guignol plays some time. The sample they show us involves a man interrogating his wife about her lover by applying burning hot pokers to her genitalia) Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), in love with Orlac's Grand Guignol actress wife, for her sake performs a double hand transplant -- stitching the hands of newly-executed Rollo, a homicidal knife thrower -- played by Edward Brophy, who if you click through you will find played a knife-thrower named Rollo in "Freaks," too. With hands attached but not reconciled to their new master, Orlac becomes a Frankenstein's monster, the unwitting subject of a horrifying experiment in playing God that we know can only end in violence and misery for both creator and creature. Later, Gogol pretends to be a revived Rollo, whose head Dr. Gogol has reattached to his neck, and who comes to warn Orlac about his hands.

... you didn't know all that? Well, it's neat, isn't it?

Oh, you did know it. Okay, good for you. You're a black-and-white horror film rock star.

On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.

I don't know anything about dance. I barely made it through the obligatory years of childhood ballet, and I can't tell a rumba from zumba. But I go to the ballet from time to time, and I have seen a lot of musicals -- some on the stage, some independent, some foreign, some more recent, but mostly, as with my movie knowledge in general, Hollywood productions from before 1960. I was raised to. My little sister claims to have thought, in the first grade (c. 1995), that Fred Astaire was the biggest movie star in the world; certainly she earned a laugh at Madame Tussaud's by asking where they kept their waxen Fred Astaire. ("In the basement, maybe, if it's still around ...") I've seen most of the movies whose songs reappear in "Singin' in the Rain," and been baffled on Broadway to see numbers from "Gold Diggers of 1933" (I think ... I think "We're in the Money") appear in a production of "42nd St." Of course I have seen movie musicals from the '60s and '70s -- the memorably bad "Daddy-O" (MST3K), "Don't Knock the Rock," and "Don't Knock the Twist" (TCM) besides "Jailhouse Rock" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Producers" and "Cabaret." But "musical" isn't a genre, unless (and maybe this is so) a single formal constraint can make a genre. Maybe any book whose plot depends on a crime is crime fiction, whether it's spooky, cozy, or lurid in tone, whether the prose is lush, spare, unprepossessing, funny or not, demanding or not, whether the story revolves around plot or character or atmosphere or message or something else, whether we know whodunit from the start or not until the last paragraph on the last page, whether it's an investigator's-eye or perpetrator's-eye-view, whether the end frightens, unsettles, baffles, or reassures us. And maybe "Duck Soup" and "Some Like It Hot" and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Team America: World Police" do belong to the same genre in the way relevant to this discussion. Maybe "The Long Goodbye" is sufficiently haunted by its theme music, or "Psycho" and "The Graduate" and "The Big Lebowski" sufficiently dominated by their soundtracks, to count, or border on counting. It's okay with me. But I'm talking about Hollywood musicals of the so-called Golden Age. The kind that flourished under the studio system, and at MGM in particular -- from "The Jazz Singer" through "The Bandwagon." The kind Busby Berkeley choreographed, the kind that produced long-term star pairings like Maurice Chevalier/Jeanette MacDonald, Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy, Ruby Keeler/Dick Powell, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse. The kind you associate with Lena Horne and Judy Garland and Howard Keel, with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, with Warren & Dubin and Rodgers & Hammerstein or Hart. The kind whose lavish choreography and intimate musical confession we most often see, now, in Walt Disney products. The kind "Singin' in the Rain" epitomizes and glamorizes. You'd know it when you saw it.

Well, although I am not especially interested with dance I find myself entranced by the dancing in many of these musicals. Of course I could never say no to a surreally symmetrical Busby Berkeley lady-flower transforming into an electrically-lit lady-guitar via overhead, underwater, and upskirt shots, of course, but what I want to think about here is dancing as acting, not dancing as auteur-ial vision. Berkeley has this way of using body parts, including even very close close-ups of faces, to distract from the humanness of wholes. When the dance does focus on a single individual, even she will be not whole and single but distortedly mirrored everywhere, as Ruby Keeler is in "I Only Have Eyes for You" from "Dames." There's something profoundly actor-undermining at work there. I'm sure the people who work on Berkeley's influence on the brilliant Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl have lots to say about it. Charming as Keeler is, and as good a dancer as she is, her dancing is dispensable. Not so with the kind of dancing I mean.

There is one paradigm of indispensable dancing in a Busby Berkeley movie: Jimmy Cagney in "Footlight Parade." He's featured in only one number, but while he moves Cagney is never not dancing. That his character is a workaholic dance creator is utterly plausible, since he seems even whilst immobile never not to be thinking of dancing. His dancing isn't as athletic as Gene Kelly's and it isn't as natural as Fred Astaire's. It isn't as abstractly expressive as Kelly's or as emotionally integrated as Astaire's. But it's extraordinary. As Garbo seemed simply to have more muscles in her face than other actors did, and finer-grained control of every visible bit of her, Cagney appears to have a double-jointed waist, if such were possible. His shoulders, hips, and feet can stand firm while everything in between jumps out. I once would have described the intense, effortless smoothness of his motion as "liquid." It isn't. Nor willowy. There's too much power there. He would clearly not bend with the remover to remove, nor alter when he alteration finds. He moves as though he were a set of muscles on an impossibly flexible skeleton. It's not liquid. It's serpentine.

I'm curious that he doesn't seem like a dancer when he plays a gangster. He's versatile enough, of course, but that kind and that degree of freedom of motion don't come and go with roles. And he did intersperse dance and criminal roles a bit throughout his career. But he doesn't seem interested in presenting dangerous grace in either sort of film. That might be a very great pity.

On Renoir and the unwitting personalization of class politics.

1. H&I saw "La Marseillaise" last week, previously having been exposed only to (multiple viewings of both) the most famous ones, "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game." Surprises: overtly -- even propagandistically -- patriotic, pro-revolutionary tone, and hokiness thereof; amount of time devoted to "ordinary people"; no blood until the end and then suddenly a fair bit; is that really what Swiss French sounds like?; Louis XVI the individual portrayed by far the most sympathetically. Not surprises: non-trivial amounts of time devoted to depiction and discussion of hunting and poaching; women come in three flavors: simple country girl (even in the city), devoted wholly to country or son, haughty soulless aristocrat (Marie Antoinette is not so different from the lady at the center of "Rules"); men fall hopelessly and causelessly in love instantly and/or dominatingly anyway; the only revolutionary who approaches having a character is depicted and repeatedly described as "a gentleman." Renoir doesn't much like aristocrats, but he can't see his way to attributing an inner life to anyone else. The scene of the maudlin aristos exiled in Prussia dreaming of restoration has more human-scaled emotion, more everyday detail, and quite possibly despite the cartoonish cliche of the pining post-revolutionary aristocrat more naturalistic dialogue than the whole rest of the film.

2. I sort of don't like "Rules of the Game" as much as everyone else (including h) does, but isn't Renoir wandering around in a bear suit desperately seeking someone to unzip it and let him out the most poignantly self-abasing director performance in film, basically? Andrew Bujalski, eat your heart out. (N.B. I'm not counting big directors acting in others' films, à la Lang in "Contempt" or von Stroheim in "Sunset Boulevard," just directors acting in their own films. Hitchcock as the before-and-after in a weight loss advertisement in a drifting newspaper during one of his thin periods in the '40s -- which is that from, "Foreign Correspondent?" or conceivably "Rope?" -- is rather good, too.)

3. Watched "Le Cercle Rouge" for the first time in, oh, more than eight years the other week, and was quite blown away at how much more I got out of it this time now that I was able to focus on things other than Alain Delon's hideous moustache. I'd like to say something about Melville too one of these days. Maybe even a tiny bit about his commonalities with Ozu! (Okay, mostly that they both practice the sort of monastic self-restraint that eventually displays themselves all the more vividly -- not that I consider them frauds for it as I do Saint Francis, since they never claimed to be effacing themselves for the greater glory of God! -- but also the surprising and touching love both have for America. Oh, I listened to an old radio interview with Melville on the Criterion DVD of "Bob" one time, and the man was a one-man imdb of Hollywood under the studio system -- plus anyone who lists great American directors of the '20s and '30s -- maybe he was talking '40s, too, can't remember -- and starts with Lubitsch, makes space for Clarence Brown and Sam Wood, but forgets about Capra -- is a lost soulmate to me.)

On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.

H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.

Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?

I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )

The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.

On the cruelty of Leo McCarey.

I have seen many, many American movies of the 1930s and early '40s. Last summer I was reading Stanley Cavell's book about what he calls "comedies of remarriage," Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell is a brilliant analyst with whom I have many and profound disagreements. I don't understand the importance of "having grown up together" to his understanding of the relationships in question, especially since it is a stretch and a metaphor (incestuous at that) to apply it to almost any of the movies he discusses. I can't see what he sees in Clark Gable's performance in "It Happened One Night," or what he and the friends he mentions missed in Claudette Colbert's. But my main blindness, or his, concerns the deep cruelty of many of the films he celebrates.

Here are the movies to which he devotes chapters: "The Lady Eve"; "It Happened One Night"; "Bringing Up Baby"; "The Philadelphia Story"; "His Girl Friday"; "Adam's Rib"; and "The Awful Truth." This last (Leo McCarey, 1937) he considers especially fundamental. ("On certain screenings, I have felt The Awful Truth (1937) to be the best, or the deepest, of the comedies of remarriage" [231].) As to me, I can barely watch it. Not because of Irene Dunne's brittle, mannered, frankly irritating performance as Lucy: I have accepted enough Hepburn (K.) movies that I have no right to complain on that basis. Not because the emphasis, throughout the movie, is on Lucy's purported dalliance with her music teacher when "their car broke down" on the way home from a trip and they spent the night together at an inn, although Cary Grant's Jerry seems at least as likely to have strayed, given that we know and Lucy knows that his two-week "trip to Florida" at the beginning of the movie was nothing of the kind, and we aren't told what it was. I have forgiven that sort of guiding double standard for men and women in more movies than I can count. It mars them, but need not ruin them. (Though perhaps I would love "Trouble in Paradise" a little less if Lubitsch hadn't revisited the theme of a beloved choosing between two lovers the following year, in "Design for Living," with a woman, one of the lovers in "Trouble in Paradise" in fact, as the chooser.)

Not because the movie argues explicitly and implicitly throughout that the basis of marriage is trust, and that the protagonists had lacked that at the beginning but have built it by the end, although the events of the film hardly give either or the viewer any reason for trust -- though that's getting close. (More specifically, the mantra is that a marriage is based on faith, but I'm not interested in McCarey's aggressive Catholicism here.) What the film offers instead is a sequence of pratfalls and humiliations, dealt out to Lucy and Jerry and to any poor innocent who happens into either of their paths. What brings Lucy and Jerry back together by the end of the film is a combination of two things, both represented by Mr. Smith, the dog because of whom they met and whose custody they share after the divorce: the nostalgia raised by their time apart, and the recognition that after all they can put up with each other (and the increasing recognition that no one else can). In other words, they deserve each other. Not they've earned each other, as McCarey and Cavell propose, but they deserve each other.

Each relishes nothing more than embarrassing the other: this is the main substance of their bond. McCarey conceives of romance as a hazing ritual. But let me show rather than tell -- though the showing be in the manner of my telling.

Jerry's attempt to show Lucy that he's got a shoulder as warm to lean on as she's found in Ralph Bellamy ends when the showgirl he's picked up performs at the night club they are all at. Lucy and Jerry look away from the distasteful spectacle of a gust of air blowing up her skirt at regular intervals (when she reaches the line "my dreams are gone with the wind"), though Ralph Bellamy's Daniel Leeson assures them that it "would go over big out West!" Of course, the showgirl's stage name (Dixie Belle Lee or some such) and Southern accent (which she tells Jerry she's exaggerated for the sake of business) are meant to have alerted us from the first instant that she is unworthy of our main couple. Leeson's Oklahoma roots, his appreciation of Dixie Lee's dance, his enthusiastic, gussied-up, jitterbuggy waltz with Lucy later at the same club, and the awful list of rhymes he calls a "poem" to her are sufficient proof of his unsuitability, though we know that he is, actually, kind and decent and devoted -- and, since it matters so much to the characters, terribly wealthy as well. For a supposedly moralized account of love, this is not very rational or charitable.

After a while Jerry (with the unwitting help of the despised music teacher) engineers a spectacle that sends Leeson back to Oklahoma. Lucy has already told her aunt that she's realized she couldn't have married him anyway, as she's "still in love with that crazy lunatic." So it is Jerry's turn to find another option, and Lucy's turn to intervene jealously.

Since Jerry's new paramour is a Manhattan debutante, she can't be disqualified immediately on class and regional grounds. Therefore, and also perhaps because he has no judgmental aunt, Jerry will not realize his error on his own. Therefore Lucy must help him. She chooses familiar mechanisms. First, pretending to be Jerry's sister (in from Paris), she pops in on his fiancée and family, acts like her idea of a vulgar showgirl, drinks ostentatiously, implies that their father had been a groundskeeper at Princeton, and performs the same "gone with the wind" number ("there were wind effects, but you'll have to imagine them for yourselves") as Dixie Rose Lee (who, incidentally, had seemed "like a nice girl" to her earlier). When Jerry tries to take her home, she gets them pulled over by the police and then pushes the car off the road, so that they have to stay at her aunt's cabin (not, as with the music teacher, an inn: because Jerry is part of her family, you see). And that's it. There they reconcile and decide to be remarried. They become officially divorced, after the ninety-day waiting period, only that night at midnight, after the remarriage has been assured.

****

And this is a romance? The protagonists are awful people -- I complain not of this, but because they are awful people with no redeeming features. (Was Grant ever otherwise so charmless in his black-and-white days? One can't blame Dunne but only the person who cast her in the first place.) The film ends with conversation about whether things are different or just the same as before -- Jerry's declaration that "you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different, except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool" -- and their joint resolution to make it "the same again ... only a little different." Admirable enough, if we had only been given a smidgen of reason to believe that either of them had changed a bit or learned a thing beyond the depth of each other's schadenfreude. But now McCarey wants to have it both ways: all those pranks, all that embarrassment, and now they're ready to be a little different -- only, really just the same again.

Here "The Awful Truth"'s close cousin "His Girl Friday" (Howard Hawks, 1939) is more honest, and consequently more brutal and more persuasive. Hildy (Rosalind Russell) comes back to Walter (again Cary Grant) and the newspaper he edits and she reports for not because either of them has changed but because she has realized that she is a more awful person than she had imagined -- that is, closer in character to Walter than to her fiancé (Ralph Bellamy as another simple, decent, rich hick). That self-knowledge is Hildy's gain, not Walter's, and it is her choice to come back to him: she is the one with alternatives (Bellamy and a quiet life outside of New York), the one who is able to imagine herself living a different life, the one for whom learning about herself is painful and for whom staying is a sacrifice. Walter can't imagine any other way. He expresses no regret and only superficial apology for the repeated humiliations he's imposed on Hildy, for his disrespect of her stated choices and decisions, for his neglect, for the way he uses her for the sake of the paper (and thus for his own sake), even for having her taken prisoner by his mob connections and leaving her alone with an armed convict on death row. Hildy has already divorced him for his neglect and exploitation and the instability of their life together, and repudiated him again because of his delight in humiliating her and deceiving the guileless, hapless, and feckless Bellamy. Over the course of the movie she learns that she is not much bothered by humiliation and doesn't much need stability, so long as she has excitement and power; and that she will have to find other ways of getting Walter's attention. She learns that she would rather be married to Walter and have to do all the work of the relationship, than not.

"His Girl Friday" is a difficult movie because Hawks asks us to accept that nevertheless marriage to Walter and to the paper is the best choice that Hildy can make for herself. What should we say of a movie that asks us to imagine that the best and truest marriage -- "based on faith" -- is a marriage between two Walters?