The Talkies/Everything Old Is New Again
Bowman, James
Everything Old Is New Again by James Bowman This Christmas, according to the New York Times, nostalgia was'in. Erector sets and Lincoln Logs, reproduction Western Flyer bicycles and Fleet Arrow...
...wink...
...That we must all learn to trust one another like the members of one big, happy family is the kind of infantile moral appropriate to television and is probably as much a part of the Star Trek saga as cutely humanoid aliens...
...In character, however, he is mostly bovine, and his rages are probably less terrifying than those of most kids' daddies...
...Scorsese is, as always, very much a director's director, someone who can be relied upon to do the filmic bits of film-making extremely well...
...Real Trekkies loved the original television series because it brought them some kind of vaguely liberal political message every week...
...Like Bones, the surgeon, we "would pay real money if he would just shut up...
...He spends his time slaughtering cuddly animals, expresses a low opinion of women's intellects, thinks education is wasted on them, is vain and arrogant and expects Belle to jump at the chance to marry him, and turns out, of course, to be a bully and a coward...
...Fairy tales are meant to be scary in the way that life is scary to children...
...The message is that when an, evil empire breaks up after seventy years of threatening the peace and oppressing its own people there are bound to be Cold Warriors on both sides who have an interest in keeping the level of tension high, lest they find themselves out of work and having to live amicably with people they don't trust...
...It was inspired of Scorsese to make the Nolte ménage what is nowadays called a "dysfunctional family" instead of the Ozzie and Harriet goodie-goodies of the 1962 version...
...So far so good...
...The murderous outsider's amorous gesture is naturally contrasted with the loving father's violent one...
...Adults have sanitized it...
...Certainly, Belle (as Beauty is called in this Frenchified version) shows no fear of him at all, presumably because it would compromise her as the true feminist heroine that adult sensibilities have made her...
...The cuddly beast looks like an American bison except that he defies evolutionary logic by having the teeth of a carnivore rather than a ruminant...
...Undercutting the in-built nostalgia like that adds enormously to the terror...
...The film picks up this frame of reference and gets a few good jokes out of it...
...Those who have come to love it since enjoy the campy way its moral predictability is set into the exotic technology of a future only imaginable at warp speed...
...instead, we are meant to cheer when the only human male of marriageable age in the film gets offed by a manic-depressive in a buffalo suit...
...In fact, one scene in which Belle goes poking around the beast's castle has no point unThe American Spectator February 1992 51 less it is to suggest that a glimpse of recognition of the beast's eyes in a torn portrait of a man (could it be a prince...
...In fact, there is a whole invented subplot, too ridiculous for words, involving a male chauvinist hunter called Gaston, which is designed precisely to establish her feminist credentials...
...The most impressive scene in Cape Fear comes when DeNiro nearly seduces Nolte's 15-year-old daughter, coming close and putting his hand in what to the audience is a fearfully menacing way to her face...
...Outrageous...
...Naturally enough, the movies got into the act...
...Having built up both his muscles and his brains in prison, he determines to seek revenge against not only Nolte but his wife (Jessica Lange) and daughter (Juliette Lewis) in such a way that they will be half-dead with fear of him before he lays a hand on them...
...It might occur to me to object to the preachiness of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country but for the fact that the preachiness is obviously part of the nostalgic appeal...
...This is just a kind of mirror image of sentimentalism in which the dark forces that lurk beneath the surface of happy family life are rendered as harmless as the little upsets that the Cleavers or the Andersons were able to put right in twenty-one minutes week after week./t is the same kind of sanitizing and banalizing of potentially dangerous reality that I object to in the Walt Disney instant classic, Beauty and the Beast...
...Predictably enough, this film is Peter Pan with some demented fairy in charge...
...in Star Trek it is "the future...
...In the next scene the victim is back, none the worse for his experience...
...Likewise, introducing the idea of Nolte's guilty secret was a way of humanizing him at the same time that it made for moral ambiguity: he suppressed the evidence because he knew that Cady was guilty and a menace to society...
...In Hamlet, "the undiscovered country" is death...
...Meanwhile, a clock, a candlestick, and a teapot are singing and dancing away to beat the band...
...The original was a flimsy enough vehicle...
...But the nastiness is ultimately incoherent, both because she is obviously so happy being unhappy, and because it does not produce the consequences one normally associates with nastiness...
...It is as if the film were making a deliberate attempt to render everything it touches as banal as its message...
...who has no time for his own children until he is forced to return to Never-Never-Land to rescue them from the vicious Hook (Dustin Hoffman) and learn to be a child again himself...
...Father of the Bride, with Steve Martin in the role played by Spencer Tracy in the 1950 Vincente Minnelli version, is like its prototype: funny and touching and light as a feather...
...S teven Spielberg's Hook is not quite as bad as this, but then it has less to spoil...
...The question that the discriminating movie-goer wants answered, however, is whether these pictures have anything going for them except nostalgia...
...Then, in the next scene, there is a visual echo as Nolte puts his hand to her face to shake her for having been so stupid as to meet Cady alone...
...Reworking old material from sixties television shows or children's stories must be harder than remaking old movies, since the two remakes on offer this month are decidedly better than anything we've seen so far...
...What's the use of him if he isn't a real beast, if he hasn't scared the woman out of her wits before she learns to love him...
...The story is of an ex-convict called Max Cady (Robert DeNiro) who, having done time for sexual battery, holds a grudge against his former defense attorney (Nick Nolte) for having suppressed evidence about the sexual history of his victim that might have got him off...
...HARD TIMES...
...Even if you discount the fact that I consider any feature-length animation project as being at best an accomplishment on the order of that of the Indian gentleman who has, I believe, transcribed the entire New Testament onto a grain of rice, this film is tripe...
...Christopher Plummer, hamming it up as the evil Klingon general Chang, who quotes Shakespeare endlessly even while insisting that it is better in "the original Klingon," also tips us the knowing James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...The real beast in this film is Gaston, the hairy-chested hunter fawned over by bosomy village cuties who contrast strikingly with the rather androgynous Belle...
...B ut the Film of the Month is Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, a remake to beat all remakes and one of the most thrilling thrillers since the great days of film noir...
...But then he came to America and turned into a workaholic mergers and acquisitions artist (haven't we seen this somewhere before...
...I guess the little girls, at least, will get something out of it if they learn to stick with the guy who owns the castle instead of the handsome ne'er-do-well who spends all his time in the woods, hunting...
...The family is brought back together, after a fashion, by resistance to the Cadian tenor and presumably live happily ever after...
...The lawyer's failure to represent his client to the best advantage, like the girl's sexual awakening and disgust with her parents'_constant squabbling, are issues that are raised in terribly interesting ways but then left unresolved...
...now that it is almost entirely given over to whimsy and freighted with Spielberg's heavy cargo of meaning and message, it can go nowhere...
...has tipped her off that this isn't really a beast after all...
...Yet it all leads to nothing...
...asks Gomez (Raul Julia...
...I wonder how significant it is that the Shakespeare quotation in the film's subtitle is misapplied...
...Oh yes," replies Morticia (Anjelica Huston) with satisfaction, "completely...
...Star Trek and The Addams Family, Beauty and the Beast and Peter Pan, Father of the Bride and Cape Fear all came back from the past in new and updated versions to make us feel similarly refreshed by the familiar...
...Never-Never-Land turns out to be utterly predictable, morally speaking, since its silliness and magic are only so that Peter can be transformed and win back the affection of his son and so that Hook will be vanquished...
...You've got to wonder what kind of values kids are going to take away from a picture like this...
...Only this beast is not one that anyone has to love...
...At the same time, it is in its de-tail so absurdly unlike anything in the real world—right down to its three moons—that it might as well be a dream...
...Erector sets and Lincoln Logs, reproduction Western Flyer bicycles and Fleet Arrow sleds, Flintstones Cookie Jars and the Cleaver family refrigerator magnet all comforted those old enough to remember such things with the thought that neither they nor Santa Claus nor the solid world of the 1950s nor their childhoods had quite vanished from the face of the earth...
...I know that it is supposed to be for the kiddies, but I cannot forbear to protest against it on behalf of mature taste—partly because it is selling an adult product...
...It is only cute when Wednesday straps her brother Pugsley into a homemade electric chair and switches on the juice...
...It is true that she still marries the beast in the end and that he still turns into a handsome prince, but the thing is done in such a way as to make all but invisible the most terrifying thing about the story, which is the need to, love blindly, to love before we can know that it is safe to love...
...As with Scorsese's last film, Goodfellas, however, you get the feeling that he doesn't quite know what to do with the materials hehas so brilliantly assembled...
...For a brief period in the 1960s, TV's "The Addams Family" attempted to supply an antidote to this kind of bland sentimentalism by simply reversing it: everything nice was bad, everything bad was, if not nice, at least fun...
...The idea is that the boy who wouldn't grow up (Robin Williams) changed his mind when he saw the original Wendy's granddaughter and fell in love...
...You can understand how the New Yorker could slam the original for "complacency"—a vice its successor inherits in full measure—but for those who are not constantly indignant that there are, in advance of the millennium, both wealthy people and weddings, this is a fun picture, and Martin Short as the wedding consultant Frank (as in French currency rather than Sinatra) is a joy to watch...
...I suppose it was inevitable that when they started reviving the old favorites, somebody would think to resurrect Barrie's lost boys and pirates and, above all, his precious Edwardian fairies...
...Cape Fear is visually and dramatically exciting every step of the way and, if you are of a nervous disposition, will scare the pants off you...
...She transforms it into something both tender and exciting by kissing his thumb, and the two exchange a passionate kiss...
...There are signs that the creators of the series of films based on the TV show have become aware of this expectation in their audience and play up to it with little touches of postmodern self-mockery, such as having a solemn Spock intone: "There is an old Vulcan proverb" (pause): "Only Nixon could go to China...
...Unhappy, darling...
...Presumably they are too disturbing to the tender sensibilities of an audience that pays good money to be scared by physical terror...
...Dark forests, grotesque ugliness, arbitrary rules with terrible punishments for breaking them, weak parents who can't protect you anymore—these are the essential ingredients of others besides Beauty and the Beast...
...Let's take them in order...
...It would take a child already on the verge of a nervous breakdown to be afraid of anything in this movie...
...The experience is potent to Peter, perhaps, but can hardly mean much to anyone else...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
