V We generally become interested in movies because we enjoythem and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don’t have the same values as theofficial culture supported at school and in the middle-class home. At themovies we get low life and high life, while David Susskind and the moralisticreviewers chastise us for not patronizing what they think we should,“realistic” movies that would be good for us—like “A Raisin in the Sun,” wherewe could learn the lesson that a Negro family can be as dreary as a whitefamily. Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it’s pretty hard tomake us queue up for pedagogy. At the movies we want a different kind of truth,something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybeamazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. We get little things even in mediocreand terrible movies—José Ferrer sipping his booze through a straw in “EnterLaughing,” Scott Wilson’s hard scary all-American-boy-you-can’t-reach facecutting through the pretensions of “In Cold Blood” with all its fancy bleakcinematography. We got, and still have embedded in memory, Tony Randall’ssurprising depth of feeling in “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao,” Keenan Wynn andMoyna Macgill in the lunch-counter sequence of “The Clock,” John W. Bubbles onthe dance floor in “Cabin in the Sky,” the inflection Gene Kelly gave to theline, “I’m a rising young man” in “DuBarry Was a Lady,” Tony Curtis saying“avidly” in “Sweet Smell of Success.” Though the director may have beenresponsible for releasing it, it’s the human material we react to most andremember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty asbeautiful as ever. There are so many kinds of things we get—the hangoversequence wittily designed for the CinemaScope screen in “The Tender Trap,” theatmosphere of the newspaper offices in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey,” the automatgone mad in “Easy Living.” Do we need to lie and shift things to falseterms—like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her actinghad made her a star? Wouldn’t we rather watch her than better actresses becauseshe’s so incredibly charming and because she’s probably the greatest model theworld has ever known? There are great moments—Angela Lansbury singing “LittleYellow Bird” in “Dorian Gray.” (I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend who didn’talso treasure that girl and that song.) And there are absurdly right littlemoments—in “Saratoga Trunk” when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, “You’re verybeautiful,” and she says, “Yes, isn’t it lucky?” And those things have closerrelationships to art than what the schoolteachers told us was true andbeautiful. Not that the works we studied in school weren’t often great (as wediscovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for(and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admirethem for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what mighthave been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing inthem, and subversive, too, had been coated over.
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- X% y3 ^. K/ E3 p1 D* G/ z( o Because of the photographic nature of themedium and the cheap admission prices, movies took their impetus not from thedesiccated imitation European high culture, but from the peep show, the WildWest show, the music hall, the comic strip—from what was coarse and common. Theearly Chaplin two-reelers still look surprisingly lewd, with bathroom jokes anddrunkenness and hatred of work and proprieties. And the Western shoot-’em-upscertainly weren’t the schoolteachers’ notions of art—which in my school days,ran more to didactic poetry and “perfectly proportioned” statues and which overthe years have progressed through nice stories to “good taste” and“excellence”—which may be more poisonous than homilies and dainty figurinesbecause then you had a clearer idea of what you were up against and it waseasier to fight. And this, of course, is what we were running away from when wewent to the movies. All week we longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary—theanonymity and impersonality of sitting in a theatre, just enjoying ourselves,not having to be responsible, not having to be “good.” Maybe you just want tolook at people on the screen and know they’re not looking back at you, thatthey’re not going to turn on you and criticize you.
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. w- k o. Z! w& j, ?! V, [/ {3 E公仔箱論壇 Perhaps the single most intense pleasureof moviegoing is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilitiesof having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture.And yet this is probably the best and most common basis for developing anaesthetic sense because responsibility to pay attention and to appreciate isanti-art, it makes us too anxious for pleasure, too bored for response. Farfrom supervision and official culture, in the darkness at the movies wherenothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty andconstraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses. Unsupervised enjoymentis probably not the only kind there is but it may feel like the only kind.Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schoolscannot recognize. I don’t like to buy “hard tickets” for a “road show” moviebecause I hate treating a movie as an occasion. I don’t want to be pinned downdays in advance; I enjoy the casualness of moviegoing—of going in when I feellike it, when I’m in the mood for a movie. It’s the feeling of freedom fromrespectability we have always enjoyed at the movies that is carried to anextreme by American International Pictures and the Clint Eastwood ItalianWesterns; they are stripped of cultural values. We may want more from moviesthan this negative virtue but we know the feeling from childhood moviegoingwhen we loved the gamblers and pimps and the cons’ suggestions of mutteredobscenities as the guards walked by. The appeal of movies was in the details ofcrime and high living and wicked cities and in the language of toughs andurchins; it was in the dirty smile of the city girl who lured the hero awayfrom Janet Gaynor. What draws us to movies in the first place, the opening intoother, forbidden or surprising, kinds of experience, and the vitality andcorruption and irreverence of that experience are so direct and immediate andhave so little connection with what we have been taught is art that many peoplefeel more secure, feel that their tastes are becoming more cultivated when theybegin to appreciate foreign films. One foundation executive told me thathe was quite upset that his teen-agers had chosen to go to “Bonnie and Clyde”rather than with him to “Closely Watched Trains.” He took it as a sign of lackof maturity. I think his kids made an honest choice, and not only because“Bonnie and Clyde” is the better movie, but because itis closer to us, it has some of the qualities of direct involvement that makeus care about movies. But it’s understandable that it’s easier for us, asAmericans, to see art in foreign films than in our own, because of how we,as Americans, think of art. Art is still what teachers and ladies andfoundations believe in, it’s civilized and refined, cultivated and serious,cultural, beautiful, European, Oriental: it’s what Americaisn’t, and it’s especially what American movies are not. Still, if those kidshad chosen “Wild in the Streets” over “Closely Watched Trains” I would thinkthat was a sound and honest choice, too, even though “Wild in the Streets” isin most ways a terrible picture. It connects with their lives in an immediateeven if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement,if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if wehave so little drive that we accept “good taste,” then we will probably neverreally begin to care about movies at all. We will become like those people who“may go to American movies sometimes to relax” but when they want “a littlemore” from a movie, are delighted by how colorful and artistic FrancoZeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew” is, just as a couple of decades ago theywere impressed by “The Red Shoes,” made by Powell and Pressburger, theZeffirellis of their day. Or, if they like the cozy feeling of uplift to be hadfrom mildly whimsical movies about timid people, there’s generally a “HotMillions” or something musty and faintly boring from Eastern Europe—one ofthose movies set in World War II but so remote from our ways of thinking thatit seems to be set in World War I. Afterward, the moviegoer can feel as decentand virtuous as if he’d spent an evening visiting a deaf old friend of thefamily. It’s a way of taking movies back into the approved culture of theschoolroom—into gentility—and the voices of schoolteachers and reviewers riseup to ask why America can’t make such movies. f7 ~+ _& L# A0 L( }! z
VI Movie art is not the opposite of what wehave always enjoyed in movies, it is not to be found in a return to thatofficial high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only moreso. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitementsustained longer and extended into new meanings. At best, the movie is totallyinformed by the kind of pleasure we have been taking from bits and pieces ofmovies. But we are so used to reaching out to the few good bits in a movie thatwe don’t need formal perfection to be dazzled. There are so many arts andcrafts that go into movies and there are so many things that can go wrong thatthey’re not an art for purists. We want to experience that elation we feel whena movie (or even a performer in a movie) goes farther than we had expected andmakes the leap successfully. Even a film like Godard’s “Les Carabiniers,” hellto watch for the first hour, is exciting to think about after because its onegood sequence, the long picture postcard sequence near the end, is soincredible and so brilliantly prolonged. The picture has been crawling andstumbling along and then it climbs a high wire and walks it and keeps wantingit until we’re almost dizzy from admiration. The tight rope is rarely stretchedso high in movies, but there must be a sense of tension somewhere in the movie,if only in a bit player’s face, not just mechanical suspense, or the movie isjust more hours down the drain. It’s the rare movie we really go with,the movie that keeps us tense and attentive. We learn to dread Hollywood“realism” and all that it implies. When, in the dark, we concentrate ourattention, we are driven frantic by events on the level of ordinary life thatpass at the rhythm of ordinary life. That’s the self-conscious striving forintegrity of humorless, untalented people. When we go to a play we expect aheightened, stylized language; the dull realism of the streets is unendurablyboring, though we may escape from the play to the nearest bar to listen to thesame language with relief. Better life than art imitating life.5.39.217.76; v4 s/ V- n6 G
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If we go back and think over the movieswe’ve enjoyed—even the ones we knew were terrible movies while we enjoyedthem—what we enjoyed in them, the little part that was good, had, in somerudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, someaudacity, some craziness. It’s there in the interplay between Burt Lancasterand Ossie Davis, or, in “Wild in the Streets,” in Diane Varsi rattling hertambourine, in Hal Holbrook’s faint twitch when he smells trouble, in a few ofRobert Thom’s lines; and they have some relation to art though they don’t looklike what we’ve been taught is “quality.” They have the joy of playfulness. Ina mediocre or rotten movie, the good things may give the impression that theycome out of nowhere; the better the movie, the more they seem to belong to theworld of the movie. Without this kind of playfulness and the pleasure we takefrom it, art isn’t art at all, it’s something punishing, as it so often is inschool where even artists’ little jokes become leaden from explanation.
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+ P1 P5 W4 G# Y/ N0 P9 L2 V公仔箱論壇 Keeping in mind that simple, gooddistinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, itmight be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a workof art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably inthe movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, manyreviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there’s that culturalsnobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of theeven bigger annual masterpieces. In foreign movies what is most often mistakenfor “quality” is an imitation of earlier movie art or a derivation fromrespectable, approved work in the other arts—like the demented, sufferingpainter-hero of “Hour of the Wolf” smearing his lipstick in a facsimile ofexpressionist anguish. Kicked in the ribs, the press says “art” when “ouch”would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist (generallyon the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) andespecially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there isa tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to makeup for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time. And so arevenge-of-a-sour-virgin movie like Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” istreated respectfully as if it somehow revealed an artist’s sensibility in everyframe. Reviewers who would laugh at Lana Turner going through her femmefatale act in another Ross Hunter movie swoon when Jeanne Moreau castssignificant blank looks for Truffaut.5.39.217.765 I- r% \6 u; l2 U5 s
% s0 l1 O$ z" e% ntvb now,tvbnow,bttvb In American movies what is most oftenmistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it’scombined with a genuflection to importance; then you have “a movie the industrycan be proud of” like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or such Academy Award winners as“West Side Story,” “My Fair Lady,” or “A Man for All Seasons.” Fred Zinnemannmade a fine modern variant of a Western, “The Sundowners,” and hardly anybodysaw it until it got on television; but “A Man for All Seasons” had the look ofprestige and the press felt honored to praise it. I’m not sure most moviereviewers consider what they honestly enjoy as being central to criticism. Someat least appear to think that that would be relying too much on their owntastes, being too personal instead of being “objective”—relying on theready-made terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which,to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climateof importance around a movie). Just as movie directors, as they age, hunger forwhat was meant by respectability in their youth, and aspire to prestigiouscultural properties, so, too, the movie press longs to be elevated in terms ofthe cultural values of their old high schools. And so they, along with theindustry, applaud ghastly “tour-de-force” performances, movies based on“distinguished” stage successes or prize-winning novels, or movies that are“worthwhile,” that make a “contribution”—“serious” messagy movies. This ofteninvolves praise of bad movies, of dull movies, or even the praise in goodmovies of what was worst in them.
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This last mechanism can be seen in thehonors bestowed on “In the Heat of the Night.” The best thing in the movie isthat high comic moment when Poitier says, “I’m a police officer,” because it’sa reversal of audience expectations and we laugh in delighted relief that themovie is not going to be another self-righteous, self-congratulatory exercisein the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition. At that point the audience sparksto life. The movie is fun largely because of the amusing central idea of ablack Sherlock Holmes in a Tom and Jerry cartoon of reversals. Poitier’s coloris used for comedy instead of for that extra dimension of irony and pathos thatmade movies like “To Sir, with Love” unbearably sentimental. He doesn’t reallyplay the super sleuth very well: he’s much too straight even when spouting thekind of higher scientific nonsense about right-handedness and left-handednessthat would have kept Basil Rathbone in an ecstasy of clipped diction, blinkingeyes and raised eyebrows. Like Bogart in “Beat the Devil” Poitier doesn’t seemto be in on the joke. But Rod Steiger compensated with a comic performance thatwas even funnier for being so unexpected—not only from Steiger’s career whichhad been going in other directions, but after the apparently serious opening ofthe film. The movie was, however, praised by the press as if it had beenexactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover itwasn’t going to be (except in its routine melodramatic sequences full of fakecourage and the climaxes such as Poitier slapping a rich white Southerner orbeing attacked by white thugs; except that is, in its worst parts). When I sawit, the audience, both black and white, enjoyed the joke of the fast-witted,hyper-educated black detective explaining matters to the backward, blunderingSouthern-chief-of-police slob. This racial poke is far more open andinoffensive than the usual “irony” of Poitier being so good and so black. Foronce it’s funny (instead of embarrassing) that he’s so superior toeverybody.9 Y0 {: w; ^4 l4 f: l, c' W
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“In the Heat of the Night” isn’t initself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it’san entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller. The director NormanJewison destroys the final joke when Steiger plays redcap to Poitier byinfusing it with tender feeling, so it comes out sickly sweet, and it’s too badthat a whodunit in which the whole point is the demonstration of the Negrodetective’s ability to unravel what the white man can’t, is never clearlyunraveled. Maybe it needed a Negro super director. (The picture might have beenmore than just a lively whodunit if the detective had proceeded to solve thecrime not by “Scientific” means but by an understanding of relationships in theSouth that the white chief of police didn’t have.) What makes it interestingfor my purposes here is that the audience enjoyed the movie for the vitality ofits surprising playfulness, while the industry congratulated itself because thefilm was “hard-hitting”—that is to say, it flirted with seriousness and spoutedwarm, worthwhile ideas.TVBNOW 含有熱門話題,最新最快電視,軟體,遊戲,電影,動漫及日常生活及興趣交流等資訊。4 @4 H8 H, w, I9 P) ?6 T
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Those who can accept “In the Heat of theNight” as the socially conscious movie that the industry pointed to with prideprobably also go along with the way the press attacked Jewison’s subsequentfilm, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” as trash and a failure. One could even playthe same game that was played on “In the Heat of the Night” and convert the“Crown” trifle into a sub-fascist exercise because, of course, Crown, thesuperman, who turns to crime out of boredom, is the crooked son of “TheFountainhead,” out of Raffles. But that’s talking glossy summer-eveningfantasies much too seriously: we haven’t had a junior executives fantasy-lifemovie for a long time and to attack this return of the worldly gentlemen-thievesgenre of Ronald Colman and William Powell politically is to fail to havea sense of humor about the little romantic-adolescent fascist lurking in mostof us. Part of the fun of movies is that they allow us to see how silly many ofour fantasies are and how widely they’re shared. A light romantic entertainmentlike “The Thomas Crown Affair,” trash undisguised, is the kind of chic crappymovie which (one would have thought) nobody could be fooled into thinking wasart. Seeing it is like lying in the sun flicking through fashion magazines and,as we used to say, feeling rich and beautiful beyond your wildest dreams.
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' F+ ]6 v% F/ ~: o: `# d Q But it isn’t easy to come to terms withwhat one enjoys in films, and if an older generation was persuaded to dismisstrash, now a younger generation, with the press and the schools in hot pursuit,has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art. Collegenewspapers and the new press all across the country are full of a hilarious newform of scholasticism, with students using their education to cook upimpressive reasons for enjoying very simple, traditional dishes. Here is acommunication from Cambridge to a Bostonpaper:5.39.217.76" h$ e! a$ q4 }+ M
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TVBNOW 含有熱門話題,最新最快電視,軟體,遊戲,電影,動漫及日常生活及興趣交流等資訊。& X- }5 j9 t6 d0 Y
To the Editor:
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6 S! M( ]) W% l- T' _9 R) i公仔箱論壇 “The Thomas Crown Affair” is fundamentally a film about faith between people.In many ways, it reminds me of a kind of updated old fable, or tale, about anultimate test of faith. It is a film about a love affair (note the title), witha subplot of a bank robbery, rather than the reverse. The subtlety of the filmis in the way the external plot is used as a matrix to develop serious motifs,much in the same way that the “Heat of the Night” functioned. 7 ^3 i; F" P" l8 Y* C6 t
Although Thomas Crown is an attractiveand fascinating character, Vicki is the protagonist. Crown is consistent,predictable: he courts personal danger to feel superior to the system of whichhe is a part, and to make his otherwise overly comfortable life moreinteresting. Vicki is caught between two opposing elements within her, which, forconvenience, I would call masculine and feminine. In spite of her glamour, atthe outset she is basically masculine, in a man’s type of job, ruthless, afterprestige and wealth. But Crown looses the female in her. His test is a test ofher femininity. The masculine responds to the challenge. Therein lies thepathos of her final revelation. Her egocentrism had not yielded to his.tvb now,tvbnow,bttvb' C& Q/ p5 `, U1 s+ U: Q- ?
In this psychic context, the possibility of establishing faith is explored. Themovement of the film is towards Vicki’s final enigma. Her ambivalence iscommensurate with the increasing danger to Crown. The suspense lies in how shewill respond to her dilemma, rather than whether Crown will escape.
+ C9 h. p% {7 Itvb now,tvbnow,bttvb I find “The Thomas Crown Affair” to be a unique and haunting film, superb inits visual and technical design, and fascinating for the allegorical problem ofhuman faith.* K' Z8 C: ? Z
“The Thomas Crown Affair” ispretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into falseterms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false towhat we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to beashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popularentertainment, it’s even more priggish for a new movie generation to be soproud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trashwithin the acceptable academic tradition. What the Cambridgeboy is doing is a more devious form of that elevating and falsifying of peoplewho talk about Loren as a great actress instead of as a gorgeous, funny woman.Trash doesn’t belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the funof trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take itseriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and triflingand entertaining.5.39.217.76$ Y- C( n! D; ~: k" p+ H
5 I" r9 z7 g. K8 |, ]) Y1 sTVBNOW 含有熱門話題,最新最快電視,軟體,遊戲,電影,動漫及日常生活及興趣交流等資訊。 It’s appalling to read solemn academicstudies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight ofthe primary reason for seeing films like “Notorious” or “Morocco”—which is thatthey were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive andfaintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what’s good in them, what relates themto art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity. There is talk now aboutvon Sternberg’s technique—his use of light and décor and detail—and he is, ofcourse, a kitsch master in these areas, a master of studied artfulness andpretty excess. Unfortunately, some students take this technique as proof thathis films are works of art, once again, I think, falsifying what they reallyrespond to—the satisfying romantic glamour of his very pretty trash. “Morocco”is great trash, and movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannotappreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.The kitsch of an earlier era—even the best kitsch—does not become art, thoughit may become camp. Von Sternberg’s movies became camp even while he was stillmaking them, because as the romantic feeling went out of his trash—when hebecame so enamored of his own pretty effects that he turned his human-materialinto blank, affectless pieces of décor—his absurd trashy style was all therewas. We are now told in respectable museum publications that in 1932 a movielike “Shanghai Express” “was completely misunderstood as a mindless adventure”when indeed it was completely understood as a mindless adventure. Andenjoyed as a mindless adventure. It’s a peculiar form of movie madness crossedwith academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candybar and cleaning an “allegorical problem of human faith” out of your teeth. Ifwe always wanted works of complexity and depth we wouldn’t be going to moviesabout glamorous thieves and seductive women who sing in cheap cafés, and if weloved “Shanghai Express” it wasn’t for its mind but for the glorious sinfulnessof Dietrich informing Clive Brook that, “It took more than one man to change myname to Shanghai Lily” and for the villainous Oriental chieftain (Warner Oland)delivering the classic howler, “The white woman stays with me.”
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! e9 G: b" t+ v ~" W" J* JTVBNOW 含有熱門話題,最新最快電視,軟體,遊戲,電影,動漫及日常生活及興趣交流等資訊。 If we don’t deny the pleasures to be hadfrom certain kinds of trash and accept “The Thomas Crown Affair” as a prettyfair example of entertaining trash, then we may ask if a piece of trash likethis has any relationship to art. And I think it does. Steve McQueen givesprobably his most glamorous, fashionable performance yet, but even enjoying himas much as I do, I wouldn’t call his performance art. It’s artful, though,which is exactly what is required in this kind of vehicle. If he had beenluckier, if the script had provided what it so embarrassingly lacks, the kindof sophisticated dialogue—the sexy shoptalk—that such writers as Jules Furthmanand William Faulkner provided for Bogart, and if the director Norman Jewisonhad Lubitsch’s lightness of touch, McQueen might be acclaimed as a suave,“polished” artist. Even in this flawed setting, there’s a self-awareness in hisperformance that makes his elegance funny. And Haskell Weller, thecinematographer, lets go with a whole bag of tricks, flooding the screen withhis delight in beauty, shooting all over the place, and sending up thematerial. And Pablo Ferro’s games with the split screen at the beginning aresuch conscious, clever games designed to draw us in to watch intently what isof no great interest. What gives this trash a lift, what makes it entertainingis clearly that some of those involved, knowing of course that they wereworking on a silly shallow script and a movie that wasn’t about anything of consequence,used the chance to have a good time with it. If the director, Norman Jewison,could have built a movie instead of putting together a patchwork of sequences,“Crown” might have had a chance to be considered a movie in the class and genreof Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise.” It doesn’t comenear that because to transform this kind of kitsch, to make art of it, oneneeds that unifying grace, that formality and charm that a Lubitsch couldsometimes provide. Still, even in this movie we get a few grace notes inMcQueen’s playfulness, and from Wexler and Perro. Working on trash, feelingfree to play, can loosen up the actors and craftsmen just as seeing trash canliberate the spectator. And as we don’t get this playful quality of art much inmovies except in trash, we might as well relax and enjoy it freely for what itis. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his lifeenjoyed trashy American movies; I don’t trust any of the tastes ofpeople who were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find theirway through trash.
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There is a moment in “Children ofParadise” when the rich nobleman (Louis Salou) turns on his mistress, thepearly plebeian Garance (Arletty). He complains that in all their yearstogether he has never had her love, and she replies, “You’ve got to leavesomething for the poor.” We don’t ask much from movies, just a little somethingthat we can call our own. Who at some point hasn’t set out dutifully for thatfine foreign film and then ducked into the nearest piece of American trash?We’re not only educated people of taste, we’re also common people with commonfeelings. And our common feelings are not all bad. You hoped for somealiveness in that trash that you were pretty sure you wouldn’t get from therespected “art film.” You had long since discovered that you wouldn’t get itfrom certain kinds of American movies, either. The industry now is taking aneo-Victorian tone, priding itself on its (few) “good, clean” movies—which arealways its worst movies because almost nothing can break through the smugsurfaces, and even performers’ talents become cute and cloying. The lowestaction trash is preferable to wholesome family entertainment. When you cleanthem up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring oftheir art, their greatness, is in not being respectable. |