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The Good Old Days (take only as directed)

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It's probably not surprising that a film series entitled Depression/Comedy would focus on films produced during the Great Depression (often with Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in various combinations). Slightly more surprising is our next film, which is every bit the Depression-era comedy, except it was made two decades later. Trust me. There is a reason why the 1930s is often remembered today as the Golden Age of Hollywood. Not only was this a decade of intense creativity, it was also a time when the "studio system" was working at its peak efficiency.  Each studio employed a full-time roster of writers, directors, performers etc who were uniquely positioned to pump out film after film after film for a Depression-ravaged audience that was desperate for everything they could get. The system functioned extremely smoothly, and the quality of the product was very high. But nothing lasts forever. At the end of World War II, everything began to change. The Hol
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A film about what now??

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One of the least shocking aspects of this week's film is the fact that it owes its existence to Charles Boyer and a cockroach. I should probably explain. In 1941, Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay for a film called Hold Back the Dawn . The story takes place in a small Mexican town just over the US border, where refugees congregate and wait (often for years) for their entry visas to be approved.  Billy Wilder had done his own stretch in just such a town, and the screenplay was written with a great deal of personal experience.  But the specific story he tells in the film follows the fortunes of a French/Romanian gigolo (ultimately played by Charles Boyer) who decides to shortcut his visa application by seducing and marrying a gullible American woman. One early scene in Wilder's script featured Boyer's character hitting emotional rock-bottom in his sweltering Mexican hotel room and conducting an existential conversation with a cockroach. Don't feel too badly if you know th
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The calla lilies are in bloom again...

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At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China. While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful  career . Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother. Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people . They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood a
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A Wife in Every Room

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In Bringing Up Baby , Cary Grant became the first person to use the word Gay (in its modern sense) in a Hollywood movie. One might hypothesize that by 1938, the film censors were starting to become more permissive about the subtext that was regularly being slipped into films of the era. One would be completely wrong to thusly hypothesize ( to hypothesize thusly ; excuse me). Film censorship in the late 1930s was just as draconian as ever: a year earlier they had insisted that a shot of a  gravestone  be cut from a film because the character in question had committed suicide, and it was "inappropriate" to show her receiving a proper burial. The word gay had only slipped through in Bringing Up Baby because no one at the Hays Office knew what it meant in that context. (I won't tell them if you don't.) Cary Grant certainly knew what it meant, and it's very interesting that he was the one who got to introduce the word to American film audiences. Because Cary Grant, th
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