F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote to a tippling friend, “ldquo;You can drink all of the cocktails some of the time and some of the cocktails all of the time, but . . . think about it, Virginia.”rdquo; Fine things can be managed by banter, as Fitzgerald knew, who wrote, along with Congreve and Shakespeare himself, the best banter in the language. But I have quoted his sentence here as an example of a form that for want of a better term I call the parodic anti-type.
A good deal of the point and force of Fitzgerald's sentence comes, of course, from its echoes of the more famous sentence of Lincoln. And that is what defines the parodic anti-type: a reversal, or mockery, or ironic treatment of the conventions or the style or the audience's expectations of an established form. Now what I want to propose is that a goodly number of the best movies of recent years have taken the form of the parodic anti-type, that the anti-type can manage matter that the old straight forms cannot, and that some of the old straight forms have died out or are dying out because nobody can believe the assumptions or conventions behind them. Three movies seem to me to have had most to do with bringing all this about.
The sire of all the anti-types was Beat the Devil (1955), by John Huston out of Truman Capote, which had the tightest and most literate script of any movie known to me. It baffled the critics the first time around, though, and many moviegoers too, by its seeming incompleteness. The critics allowed as how it seemed awfully clever, but beyond that they chiefly talked about how limpid the photography was, etc. Some of them even suggested it was all a hoax, very arch of course, but somehow unfair to the public. The critics were looking for an explicit moral in a movie that worked almost entirely by form. Beat the Devil was the parodic anti-type of scores of intrigue thrillers like—to name the best of them—The Maltese Falcon, and its comedy arose from reversing the action of such movies and permitting a simpleminded, conventional Englishman to beat a gang of international con-men and killers out of some uranium fields in British East Africa—“ldquo;Tell the truth and beat the devil.”rdquo; The action, the atmosphere, the stock characters of the old intrigue thrillers were simply stood on their heads. Beat the Devil was a brilliant movie, I think, but it involved, as parody generally does, a certain amount of miniaturizing or diminishment—the antitype carves cherry stones admirably, but it cannot blast big forms from rock. The Maltese Falcon, for all its murky complication of plotting, had greater range and emotional power, I think, than Beat the Devil. Or, to use other examples, High Noon is a better movie than even such an excellent parody as the Czech film, Lemonade Joe. In the first, we get something like epic, the straight heroic, and its qualities are range, power, dignity. In the second, we get mock-epic, the anti-heroic, and its qualities are sophistication, the cool head, good sense.
The second of the movies that brought the anti-type to its present prominence would be Around the World in 80 Days (1956), in which for the first time a heroic-scale budget was risked on a mock-heroic movie. The nerve and the money came from Mike Todd and the script from S. J. Perelman, one of the finest parodists of the age. If the idea of doing a Jules Verne book straight seems absurd today, Around the World in 80 Days had a lot to do with making it so. And that, I think, is a gain. For the first time ridiculous books can be treated ridiculously in the movies, and a lot of new energy gets released thereby. It is something like the moment at San Francisco fires—in San Francisco, fires outdraw any other dramatic form—when the possibilities of melodrama have been played out and the kid shouts the classic line, “ldquo;Hey, my ma's in there!”rdquo; to see what can be managed by way of farce. The movies found themselves in this situation in the early 50's because most of the possibilities of the old straight forms had been worked out. And not only that, but the necessity of competing with their own past—the movies being shown on television—required that they try something different. As, first of all, a delightful movie, and secondly, a great financial success, Around the World in 80 Days proved that the anti-type could work and brought along in its train a lot of imitations, not only here, but also in Europe, making the anti-type the nearest thing there is at present to an international form. At least I cannot think of a straight form that in the last few years has produced as much good work in so many countries as this one has: from France, That Man From Rio; from Italy, Divorce Italian Style; from the United States, The Pink Panther; from England, A Hard Day's Night; from Czechoslovakia, Lemonade Joe. And the list could easily be extended. For example, I think it would be legitimate to classify a movie like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold as an anti-type because it proceeds by reversal not only of the atmosphere of the standard spy thriller, but also of the message of such movies, that spying is a heroic or glorious enterprise.
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Dr. Strangelove is the strongest of the movies yet made in the antitype form and the one which proves that the form can manage “ldquo;big,”rdquo; intractable subject matter. It parodies all the air-force movies from Eagle Squadron to Twelve O'clock High to those old epics in which Ronald Reagan repaired the Nor-den bombsight with wire made from the fillings in his teeth, and dropped a blockbuster down the smokestack of the factory that Greer Garson pointed to with her cigarette lighter. Dr. Strangelove, script by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and the late Peter George, was an intelligent and, with the exception of the Strangelove character, a wonderfully controlled movie. It identified, quite rightly it seems to me, the United States Air Force as a major threat to life on the planet and then, refusing to be put off by the monstrousness of this, proceeded to examine coolly and parodically the heroic ideal of the airman. And that badly needed doing. The charge is frequently made against movies like Dr. Strangelove that they are merely irreverent and mocking and that however clever they may be, they honor nothing beyond stylishness and cleverness. That, I think, is a mistake. The moral constant in the anti-types is the admonition to hang on to one's brains, to cast a cold eye on heroics, which is good advice at most times, certainly relevant in these. And further, I know of no straight air-force movie that ever acknowledged that the enterprise which many of them celebrated, the bombing of the German civilian population in World War II, was both morally indefensible and laughably ineffective. So that in its willingness to raise uncomfortable questions and in the poise with which it manages them, the anti-type has sometimes proved both more honorable and more artful than the type.
The genre has of course produced some pretty trumpery movies too—the James Bond ones come to mind, with all their hardware and their total lack of meaning or style. And it has produced movies that are a lot sicker than anything they attack—The Loved One, for example. But when we see how regularly the nostalgic attempts to recover the old straight forms fail—Harper, for example, in which Paul Newman ended his marathon impersonation of Marlon Brando only to do his impression of Humphrey Bogart in a detective story; or The Chase, in which Marlon Brando did his impersonation of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront; or the new version of Stagecoach which fell entirely flat—then I think we're forced to acknowledge that at least the anti-types don't make that mistake. And when we remember that the first of the anti-types came along in the early 50's, after a decade of Esther Williams and Random Harvest and the propaganda movies, we can be grateful to the anti-types for having turned their back on all that. The ideal relationship between the type and the anti-type is, I have no doubt, the amicable one implied by Socrates when he argued that the greatest tragic writer would also be the greatest comic writer. But at most times, the real relationship is closer to the one between father and son, with the inventive son defining himself by opposition to the father. And the anti-heroic forms seem to me to have most vitality these days.
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Among current examples of the. form there is first of all John Schlesinger's Darling, which declares itself right from the start as an anti-type by means of the framing device on which the whole movie depends. It opens and closes with shots of a magazine that looks like the Ladies' Home Journal featuring a picture of the Julie Christie character on the cover and the story of her life in its pages. The movie proceeds as a parody of such “ldquo;life stories”rdquo;: it tells the truth. In other words, it tells what is never told in such features. In the movies as well as in the ladies' magazines, these stories used to go one of two ways: the girl was “ldquo;good”rdquo; (Princess Grace) and her story was Cinderella, or the girl was “ldquo;bad”rdquo; (Diana Barrymore) and her story was Too Much, Too Soon or The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning. Darling was both and neither, that is to say, a refreshingly honest movie. Julie Christie played an amoral but wonderfully vital little chit who by prettiness and con Works Her Way Up From Obscure Origins through a more or less sincere affair with a literary intellectual (Dirk Bogarde), who Loves Her Truly But Is Married To Another. Another affair follows with a sleek cat (Laurence Harvey), who Has Connections and Can Help A Girl With Her Career, leading to Success As A Model and Marriage to A Count With A Villa (José de Villalonga). The ironic and very moral point is that she finds the marriage boring and tries to go back to the literary intellectual, who is having none of it. Her life is almost literally a parody of the success story, and the movie makes the point strongly but without direct preachment. Darling was tedious in places and one or two sequences seemed forced—notably a scene at a Paris party where the guests play a transvestite game involving some unusually repellent homosexuals. This episode seemed to derive more from the desire to imitate the famous party scenes of La Dolce Vita than from any inherent necessity in the story. Nonetheless, Darling was refreshingly honest and spirited, and its mockery of the moral and intellectual clichés of the old movie biographies of women had a lot to do with making it so—as did Julie Christie, of course.
Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou had some funny minutes—Lee Marvin provided both of them—but it was a fat, offensive movie full of the worst kind of self-congratulation for its own stylishness and haughtiness; spoofing the bad old Westerns, it still carefully hedged its bet by keeping enough of the old form, a straight love story, to please everybody. The result was a clumsy alternation of the straight and the parodic and a movie that had no meaning. Oldrich Lipsky's recent film, Lemonade Joe, on the other hand, struck me as the best parody Western ever to come out of the barn. I remember Destry Rides Again and Along Came Jones as pretty pleasant movies, but neither of them had, I think, the bite or the zaniness of Lemonade Joe, nor were they fully parodies. And Paleface was just a tissue o£ Bob Hope's wisecracks, not a movie at all. Lemonade Joe was so broadly played and hence so fully visual that it could have made its way without dialogue at all, and yet for all this visual, almost meta-verbal quality, it commented very acutely on the old Westerns by playing off absolute authenticity of costume and setting against a zanily stylized story. “ldquo;Lemonade Joe”rdquo;—if you can imagine Roy Rogers squared (Roy Rogers2), you will have him about right—cleans up the town and wins the hand of Winifred, the blond ingenue daughter of Mr. Goodman. To do this, he has to overcome the gambler, Mr. Badman, and to repel the advances of sultry “ldquo;Tornado Lou,”rdquo; the dance-hall girl who loves him because of his innate nobility. The movie has a field day with the hero's innocence and the connection between his innocence and his business activities—as holder of the franchise for Kolaloka Lemonade he stands to profit by barring liquor in the town—and another field day with the pattern of sexual behavior in the old Westerns which made the heroes indifferent to the beauty of dark girls with souls and brains, and always married them off to their insipid blonde school-marm sisters or mothers, a pattern that appears in even so good a movie as High Noon. Lemonade Joe also took a few stylish jabs at the straight dramatic clichés of the old Westerns—the ambush at the pass, the hero shot pointblank ten or twelve times and shrugging it off (“ldquo;It's only a flesh wound”rdquo;) and those songs with scraps of Spanish in them, sung in that cretinous Southwestern whine. The main role was acted to perfection, I might add, by Carl Fiala as “ldquo;Lemonade Joe,”rdquo; and the actors who did “ldquo;Tornado Lou”rdquo; and Mr. Badman were almost as good.
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Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker was a parody too, only not on purpose. It came out that way because it tried to orchestrate stock responses by stock methods, and nothing is so sure to produce triteness and deadness. It told the story of an embittered European Jew, Rod Steiger, whose wife and children have been killed in concentration camps and who has himself survived one—this part is managed by internal monologue flashbacks. He comes to America and sets up a pawnshop in Harlem, where he fronts for the operations of a Negro ganglord and prospers enough to keep up the vestiges of a life he scorns. He is represented as emotionally dead, and he consistently turns back attempts by the other characters to make any human contact with him. Things go along this way until a day when the pawnshop is held up by thugs and his young Puerto Rican assistant catches some bullets intended for the boss and dies, at which point Rod Steiger sees the light and, able to love again, begins to weep.
There are words to describe this kind of story, I suppose—fake, bogus, pretentious are the ones that come to mind. I suppose there is even a perfectly reasonable answer to the question of why the young Puerto Rican should have let himself get killed to save a man who had always treated him most boorishly—the answer would be that this was a Stage Puerto Rican. The movie attempts in the flashbacks, not with entire success, I think, to establish that before the war the Rod Steiger character had been a happy, decent man and that his time in the concentration camp had shattered and embittered him. So the audience has some reason to sympathize with him. But the Puerto Rican assistant doesn't see the flashbacks and for no reason at all gives up his life for Rod Steiger. It just doesn't wash, and there it is, right at the center of the movie.
And moving out from the center, here is a sampling of the other clichés in The Pawnbroker. Intellectual-Dramatic: Rod Steiger gives the “ldquo;Now-you-listen-to-me-kid-and-you-listen-hard”rdquo; speech that he has given in every one of his outings since On the Waterfront (1954), the last movie in which Group Theater melodrama worked. The speech comes at 1:12 of the fifth round this time and has to do with there being only two absolutes in the world, the speed of light, discovered by Einstein, and money, which thinking men like Rod Steiger presumably discover for themselves. It's a crude enough idea in any case but woefully out of place coming from the pawnbroker, for whom money has not done all that much. Clichés of characterization: A Whore With A Heart Of Gold, A Social Worker Who Understands (For She Too Knows What It Is To Have Lost The One You Love), A Philosophical Negro (Though Only A Black Man Perhaps In The Eyes of the World, His Mind Is On Higher Things), Assorted Stage Puerto Ricans (Right Kind And Wrong Kind), The Kid Down The Street Who Is Monkey On The Back. Clichés of photography: the idyllic pre-war scenes shot in that broken slow-motion way now used chiefly in shampoo ads on television. Musical clichés: a pseudo-jazz score by Quincy Jones, the Negro Whiteman. Clichés of acting: straight Method stuff. Of casting: Brock Peters as the Negro ganglord is every bit as right and as convincing as Representative Cross Section Negro 3.9 in the telephone company ads. Put them all together and they spell Mother.
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The Shop on Main shop on main street, directed by Street, directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, was everything that The Pawnbroker was not—alive, moving, and basically honest. I say this knowing that there is a predisposition to look for a certain kind of movie dealing with the killing of the Jews, a kind of movie that would give everybody a good cry and then let everybody off the hook—a lighthearted atrocity story or one that was just bittersweet. And The Shop on Main Street looked once or twice as though it were about to go that way but didn't, or didn't, at least, until one sequence at the end. I thought it was a very poised and artful movie, and it got that way largely by working as the anti-type of straight melodrama, by making a parodic molehill out of a mountain and then showing that the mountain was a mountain after all. Set in Czechoslovakia in the early years of the war, the movie followed the fortunes of a small town carpenter, Anton Britko, whose pompous brother-in-law, a minor Nazi functionary, gets him appointed Aryan Controller of a sundries shop run by a half-daft old Jewish widow, Mrs. Lauterman. The shop, it turns out, has had its stock depleted by earlier expropriations, and Mrs. Lauterman is kept going by a charity fund paid into by the Jews of the town without her knowledge. Britko is paid from the same fund to keep up the pretense with the old woman by posing as her assistant in the shop. This he does, and the arrangement goes along prosperously and pleasantly enough for him—though he gets to like the old woman so much that he has fantasies about being married to her, he is canny enough never to pass up his salary—until the day comes when all the town's Jews are forced into the square for removal to concentration camps. Fearing for his own skin and yet wanting to save the old woman, Britko gets drunk and in a rage at her failure to understand what is going on in the town finally shouts the truth at her, whereupon she, between fear and astonishment and a mad-drunk pushing around from Britko, falls down and dies. Britko hangs himself then, and the movie ends with an after-death fantasy sequence in which Britko and Mrs. Lauterman as bride and groom or dandy and belle cakewalk off while the town band plays.
The last sequence, though theatrically right and beautifully photographed, struck me as rather soft in its eagerness to cancel out the brutal deaths which came just before it, and the prospect of more of them. And Britko's suicide, though well within the emotional range of a drunken carpenter, yet lies open to the old objection of Samuel Johnson to this way of wrapping up an action, “ldquo;Sir, suicide is always to be had.”rdquo; The movie might have been stronger had it permitted Britko to sober up and then see himself in the mirror next morning, but I think these matters are better judged by one's experience in the theater than by general precepts. And it certainly seemed at that point that the movie had earned Britko's suicide.
The Shop on Main Street wandered a little in the second half and had a patch of talkiness in the departure speech of the Jewish town barber, where it moralized explicitly. But this one lapse aside, its meaning was beautifully located in the action and in the characters, and they took on a poetic power of parable and suggestion that The Pawnbroker with all its emotional blackjacking lacked. And even more impressive, The Shop on Main Street dealt with evil whereas there was nothing in The Pawnbroker that couldn't be written off to social conditions, except perhaps the Nazis in the flashbacks, and if they had been around much longer I have a hunch The Pawnbroker would have explained that they weren't random samples.
