Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies

Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies

by Brody Wilder Yesterday, 7:25pm PDT

WINNER: The Grapes of Wrath
I have never read the 1939 novel / communist manifesto on which this was based, which puts me of a piece with the film's own director, John Ford (he admitted as much in a 1957 interview, "With just the slightest trace of whimsy and bravado"). Reading is gay, and Ford was as masculine as they came back then - which was even more masculine than they come today, due to some frog-altering chemicals we put in the water that I won't get into here. But it was man-made ecological disaster of a different sort that served as the impetus for this story, specifically the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was what happened when an unusually wet period led speculators to mechanically cultivate huge swathes of land that was previously considered unfarmable, destroying the topsoil and removing the native grasses that held everything in place. When the cyclical droughts inevitably returned, prairie winds turned the dry, fresh earth into airborne sandpaper thick enough to choke out the sky, rendering the land not only unfarmable but downright uninhabitable.

The crisis compelled thousands of starving Oklahoma sharecroppers - pejoratively known as Okies - to head west, in search of those sweet fruit-picking jobs so coveted by anti-immigration crusaders today. This is the story of one such family. They say California is the place you ought to be, so patriarch Henry Fonda loads up his truck and moves to Beverly (Hills, that is; you know a dramatic work is good when it can survive such direct parody). Their journey along Highway 66 - Granny tied to the roof in her rocking chair, etc. - brings the family into further conflict with their capitalist economic system and its often overzealous enforcement apparatus. What I imagine as the bleakness of the novel is here mitigated by suspenseful scenes of moment-to-moment survival, and an incongruously hopeful ending courtesy of big brother Department of Agriculture. Had to be pulled from screens in the Soviet Union when audiences realized that even the poorest Americans could afford a car.

Saturday's Child: His Girl Friday
For the third year in a row, director Howard Hawks and capital-M Movie Star Cary Grant deliver the goods, this time with a characteristically fast-talking adaptation of the 1928 Hecht-MacArthur play The Front Page. Already the beneficiary of a straightforward but enjoyable cinematic adaptation in 1931, The Front Page tells the story of a newspaper reporter who plans to leave the cynical business and marry his sweetheart, only for his conniving editor to rope him into one last assignment. His Girl Friday hits upon the groundbreaking idea of gender-swapping the reporter, introducing(?) an element of sexual tension to the relationship between two newspapermen who just can't seem to quit each other.

Taking place on the night an anarchist is set to be executed for the crime of killing a negro cop in a city where the black vote matters, the one area in which the remake falters is its politics. Where the assassin was once a noble true-believer in workers liberation, he's here reduced to a simple-minded dunce who got his head all filled with nonsense by those soapbox preachers in the park. Thus shifting the blame from robber barons colluding with government to put down collective action, to red rabble-rousers having just too goshdarn much freedom of speech - a change mandated by the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 (it wasn't all about removing topless pinup photos from the background of bullpen shots, though it was also about that).

Not a Musical: Angels Over Broadway
The Front Page author Ben Hecht tried his hand at directing with this Runyonesque New York City story. A shameless con man (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), sexy showgirl (Rita Hayworth), and sloshed playwright (Thomas Mitchell) team up to save a suicidal embezzler by scrounging together $3,000 before sunrise. Another one-crazy-night movie, for which I am an avowed sucker, featuring character actors who could carry the Titanic playing erudite scumbags struggling to perform one good deed. I think I rate this higher than most because it's a perfect storm of my particular cinematic proclivities.

You Know, for Kids: Christmas in July
If I were to pick one Preston Sturges comedy to explain what the Coens were pastiching in The Hudsucker Proxy, it would be this one. When malicious co-workers convince a big-dreaming office drone that he's won a $25,000 coffee slogan contest, the earnest aspiring ad-man is immediately promoted to executive and cut a fat cheque, which he proceeds to spend like it's going out of style. What happens when the truth comes out? If you enjoy this breezy 67-minute crowd-pleaser, you'll want to move on to Sturges' 83-minute epic of political satire, The Great McGinty, which released the same year and took home the Oscar for best original screenplay. Oh, for the days when great filmmakers actually respected your time!

My Baby She Wrote Me: The Letter
Bette Davis reunites with Jezebel director William Wyler for this steamy tropical noir. Davis plays the bored wife of a British rubber plantation owner who guns down a fellow expat in cold blood. She claims to have acted in self-defense - more specifically, in defense of her "honour" (old fashioned slang for vagina) - but her attorney isn't convinced. His investigation turns up the titular letter, held by the dead man's Eurasian widow, which could seal his client's fate unless he conspires to retrieve it. From here, the production code forced events to diverge from the W. Somerset Maugham play on which the film was based (itself inspired by a true crime story from Kuala Lumpur), and things get a wee bit racist in the mad dash to make everyone pay for their sins. It's precisely that inescapable fatalism, though, which separates '40s noir from '30s melodrama. So I'll allow it.

The Becky Was a Stacy: Rebecca
Speaking of melodrama. Actress Gale Sondergaard's decision to play the vengeful halfbreed widow in Wyler's The Letter left her unavailable to play the vengeful lesbian housekeeper in Hitchcock's first American picture, Rebecca - the role she would be best remembered for today, had she taken it. A young woman marries one of those tortured aristocratic widowers who lives in a house old enough to have its own name, Manderlay, a cliffside English manor haunted by the (literal or metaphorical?) ghost of her predecessor. I don't want to oversell it, but this classic gothic potboiler includes both a coroner's inquest and a collapsing ceiling. The Castle Grayskull playset of glossy black-and-white psychodramas.