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 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?