Hollywood Intellect

HOLLYWOOD INTELLECT Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom, James D., 1951– Hollywood intellect / James D. Bloom. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2923-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-2924-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-4086-4 (electronic) 1. Motion pictures—Philosophy. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects. I. Title. PN1995.B4976 2009 791.4301—dc22 2009021362 ϱ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America What are intellectuals? —PROFESSOR ROBERT HAVEN FRENCH (LARRY GATES) IN SOME CAME RUNNING (1958) [H]is next movie will include a bibliography at the end, to refer viewers to the copious research he does on every project. “We make movies that raise many questions that can’t be answered. Our idea is to do unpolished movies . in a movie, you can start a debate.” —2007 INTERVIEW WITH JOSÉ PADILHA (BARRIONUEVO) Preface: “Intellectual Fantasies” It is a sad reflection of the limitations of intellectuals and artists all over the world to see history repeat itself in the contemptuous resentment with which they are greeting the arrival of the talking picture . between the incompetence of the commercial entertainer and the superior self righteousness of the intellectual, the talking picture is apparently doomed to grope blindly. ALEXANDER BAKSHY, 1929 [E]veryone’s “golden age of movies” is the period of his first moviegoing and just before. Sometimes we suspect—and sometime rightly—that our memory has improved a picture— that imaginatively we made it what we knew it could have been or should have been. The educated person who became interested in cinema as an art form through Bergman or Fellini or Resnais is an alien to me. There is a kind of young television watcher seeing old movies on for the first time who is surprisingly sensitive to their values . seems to have extreme empathy with the material in the box . but he may not know how to enter into a conversation. PAULINE KAEL, 1967 xi xii PREFACE Movies or Films Movies made me. “Cinema” or “film” helped form me, intellectually, but much less influentially. For decades I identified myself with the intellectually sophisticated, self-conscious “cinema”-minded film generation Stanley Kauffmann heralded over forty years ago in his famous essay “The Film Generation,” which—at least as caricatured in the 1950s—preferred discussing “the film” to any particular movie: When we returned to the table, Simp would be talking about “the dance” and her fiancé about “the film,” until Brenda finally asked him, “Which film?” (P. Roth, Goodbye 56) But long before I knew I was having a cultural experience and developing intellectually as I faced the screen, Hollywood pervaded my everyday little-boy world. Long before qualifying for Kauffmann’s “film generation,” circumstances had enlisted me, willy-nilly, in “the movie generation”—a generation Pauline Kael describes above as not bound to any particular span of years. If it was raining on Saturday—only if it was raining—I was packed into a stationwagon “way-back” and dropped at one of several neighborhood theaters—some grandly christened the Embassy, the Palace, or the Holly- wood, while others were more modestly named for towns and their main drags and cross streets, like Milburn, Sanford, and the Branford. I might watch a kiddy triple feature including a black-and-white war movie track- ing a Marine platoon’s retreat—“attacking in another direction”—over frigid Korean peaks (actually Orange County’s “whitewashed hills”) (Ed- wards 93) or the Third Infantry holding its beachhead under the guns at Anzio, a Francis the Talking Mule or an Abbott and Costello comedy, and a cartoon sequence; a Fess Parker Disney vehicle like Davy Crockett or Westward-Ho the Wagons!; a genre film like The Fly or House of Wax; or, during that halcyon interval between the full rigors of the Hays Office code and Jack Valenti’s ostensibly transparent MPPA rating system, age- inappropriate classics like The Apartment and North by Northwest. Occasion- ally, blockbusters like The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia, Exodus, or Around the World in 80 Days would prompt a full-fledged family outing, maybe even a day “in the city.” Day to day, though, movies mostly entered my life, after school, from the huge black steel RCA TV in the den. I gazed indiscriminately as Hollywood recycled thirty years of hits and misses on content-hungry emerging TV stations on such shows as Movie Four, The PREFACE xiii ABC Saturday Movie, The Early Show, and The Late Show. Million Dollar Movie, which opened with the Gone With the Wind theme and showed the same movie each week, five nights in a row, on a New York station made it hard for me to avoid memorizing each song in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Little did I know at the time that I was participating in “a powerful social ritual for millions . experiencing and defining the shared values of peers and family” (Czitrom 59). “There isn’t much for the art-cinema person on television” (Kael, “Movies” 501). So in an entirely separate sphere, as a college sophomore, I was initiated into a more cloistered “ritual” about a decade later, finally joining Kauffmann’s “film generation.” My initiation was a class with a prominent film theorist who exposed me to the likes of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, and, most memorably, Polanski’s Repulsion. At the risk of sounding philistine, the images and scenes with the most staying power for me—with the possible exception of Polanski’s close-up of a rabbit corpse in Repulsion—have come out of Hollywood. The fris- son prompted by the final shot in the 1958 version of The Fly (the camera looking down on the tiny human head faintly crying “help me”) still hasn’t entirely faded. So, too, the image in the more highbrow Americana clas- sic Night of the Hunter that helps make this 1955 movie one of the most “visually fecund” and much “plundered” “movies of the ‘Golden Age’” (Atkinson, “Houses”): the way Stanley Cortez’s camera closes in on Shel- ley Winters’s corpse wrapped in her wedding dress, sitting in her Model T at the bottom of the river with her hair billowing in the current like the surrounding weeds. My personal image-canon reflects the extent to which Hollywood “movies” and “art-house cinema” lie along a continuum, rather than in- habiting separate spheres. Insofar as European imports created “art-house cinema” in the United States and so spawned Kauffmann’s “film generation,” it too needs to be seen as yet another Hollywood product. For the French Nouvelle Vague, most influential in making art-house erudition such a mid-century mark of class and generational distinction and in turning “cinephilia into a legitimate aesthetic discourse” (V. Schwartz 148), built their movement on a “love of Hollywood” by “applying Hollywood formulas” and looking to Hollywood movies as a “source of inspiration” (V. Schwartz 149; Brody 61). Without my having made a single movie, they served as inspirations, cautionary as well as exemplary, for me as well, and, I’d wager, for millions of other kids my age. Some formative images have become resonant visual xiv PREFACE rhetoric and still haunt my understanding of what it means, for better and for worse, to be a man, especially an American man: ■ Jean-Pierre Leaud constructing his identity by repeating his own name and those of his two true loves before a mirror as he girds himself for the picaresque adventure before him at the beginning of Stolen Kisses. ■ Robert Mitchum strutting across the fields bellowing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in the Night of the Hunter. ■ Sinatra’s insouciant one-handed hold on a lit cigarette and a tumbler of scotch in Some Came Running. ■ Cary Grant lending a hand to Eva Marie Saint as their train enters a tunnel at the end of North by Northwest and Grant safely driving drunk at the beginning. ■ Jack Lemmon using a tennis racket as colander to fix Shirley MacLaine a spaghetti dinner in The Apartment. ■ Van Johnson in Battleground quizzing a suspected Nazi spy in a GI uniform about Americana. ■ Burt Lancaster terrifying sinners in Elmer Gantry. ■ Gregory Peck turning to address the courtroom in To Kill a Mockingbird. A lifetime of formative movie images refract one another so recursively that the indelible impact on me of the image of the Grim Reaper playing chess in The Seventh Seal may owe as much to Woody Allen’s parody of it in Love and Death. Finally, venue and memorable life events compound these images, so that my lasting recollection of the traffic and auto carnage in Weekend may owe more to the coincidence of my first viewing this movie, at the New Yorker theater, with my very first acid trip. Movies and Films Including the directors Wilder and Hitchcock and the writer James Agee in this grouping of memorable scenes confounds the difference between art- films and Hollywood movies, a difference once bluntly reduced by All the President’s Men screenwriter William Goldman to “audience size” (Which Lie 275).

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