The Illusion of Depth

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...

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...

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...

If you follow any aspect of modern Hollywood (you know, the stuff I don't usually screen at these film nights) you will probably have noticed that there are a few topics which tend to dominate the discussions these days. In between chit-chat about  Star Wars and Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead , you will almost certainly have encountered people talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe . Everything, it seems, is a "universe" these days. Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to turn Facebook into a "Metaverse". Godzilla and King Kong have recently been punching each other to death in the latest instalment of what Universal Studios is calling its "Monster-verse" and Captain America, Iron Man, Thor et al inhabit something their fan base likes to call the Marvel Cinematic Universe . In the early days of comic books, superheroes usually travelled alone. Superman of the 1940s was never going to cross paths with Batman or Wonder Woman (except perhaps ...