The Talkies / A Tale of Two Movies
Bowman, James
A Tale of Two Movies by James Bowman L ook here upon this picture, and on this. The first is a typical "blockbuster" thriller, A Clear and Present Danger, and representative of the Hollywood...
...To Ramon and his circle it is a well-known fact that after the war the notorious American AFL-CIA sent its agents to Europe to snuff out genuine socialism...
...It is "the last decade of the Cold War" and the immediate post-Franco period in Spain...
...But Aurora, who turns out to be considered a great beauty by everyone else, does not show up and the concert turns out to be by a painfully atonal avant-garde composer called Vinyl Hampton...
...This series of reversals of expectations is one of the film's major themes, and the process continues here as Aurora's place is taken by the beautiful Monserrat (Tuska Bergen...
...In no time at all he is desperately in love with her and thinking of marrying her...
...Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) is the young sales representative in Barcelona for a big, Chicago-based American company...
...He sends to Colombia a supersecret elite force of U.S...
...No," he says, "I wasn't using `promiscuous' pejoratively...
...The president (Donald Moffat, who has played more corrupt authority figures than you have had hot breakfasts) determines to avenge a friend, killed by monumentally cruel and greedy Colombian drug-dealers with no obvious susceptibility to anything recognizable as human feelings...
...He wants a plain, even a homely girl and hopes that, undistracted by physical beauty, he may "look into...
...Here the subtext is that authority is corrupt because it is dominated by white males—like the boy's no-good father and the lawyer's no-good ex-husband...
...At least in A Clear and Present Danger there are allowed to be some good guys...
...As Roger Ebert has said: "Watching this movie, I realized that although I'd seen a lot of amazing things on the screen before, I'd hardly ever seen young WASPs earning a living...
...Ramon claims that the Americans must have planted the bomb themselves...
...He says that he is bothered by the romantic illusions that feminine beauty gives rise to and finds "the whole thing of falling in love with incredibly attractive women really bad...
...I wish just once," he later storms at Fred, "I could go out with a girl without her thinking that I'm encased in black leather underwear...
...you see things in black and white...
...Monserrat is involved with an anti-American journalist and admirer of Philip Agee called Ramon (Pep Munne) who, like Ted, is a theorist of feminine beautybut takes exactly the opposite view: that beauty is "a memory of the divine...
...Of course Barcelona, the Movie of the Month, requires more in the way of thought than your average blockbuster—which may in some small part account for the fact that it is less than a blockbuster itself—but its freshness and wit make the extra effort to think relaThe American Spectator October 1994 67 tively painless...
...Anti-Americanism is rife, and these two young men are representatives of two American archetypes...
...The country can't afford another scandal," says the President, when what it really can't afford is more crummy films like this proclaiming to the world that America is governed by right-wing homicidal idiots...
...The filmmakers cannot help it: such clichés are so much a part of the world that the industry's assiduous mythographers have created over the last twenty James Bowman, The American Spectator movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...troops to blow up a few drug operations...
...Likewise, the Spanish-American War began when the U.S...
...Sixth Fleet...
...Once again we find ourselves in the all-too-familiar world in which a corrupt president, meant to remind us of Ronald Reagan, and his even more corrupt subordinates are hell-bent on involving the U.S...
...the second, Barcelona, is a comedy with a serious side to it but could only have been made by someone with roots outside the Hollywood culture...
...Moreover, the sexual revolution has come late there and with a vengeance...
...Here, too, all authority is corrupt...
...He cannot let her know of this "extremism," however...
...It is clear from the start that Ted disapproves of and even rather dislikes his cousin...
...One day his cousin, Fred (Chris Eigeman), a naval officer, arrives on his doorstep and announces that he has been sent on as advance man for a proposed visit to the city by the U.S...
...All Ted's ideas about beauty and homeliness and romantic illusions go straight out the window...
...Suddenly, Ted takes on a new interest...
...Even when it comes to women—as it soon does, since Fred is uninterested in the architectural glories of the city—Ted is earnestly Puritan...
...blew up its own battleship, the Maine, in Havana harbor...
...Boy, do we connoisseurs of Hollywood's technicolor truths know how wrong that is...
...People expect it to be good, and, although Clancy himself is said to be very unhappy with the picture, it is presumably not bad enough for them to notice how dull and predictable it is...
...In Barcelona this is not all that easy to do...
...Fred is a joker and fun-loving iconoclast whose irreverence is tempered by a deep loyalty to the good old U.S...
...Why does routine stuff like Danger, by Phillip Noyce out of Tom Clancy, starring Harrison Ford as the CIA man, Jack Ryan, make over $100 million while Barcelona, by Whit Stillman, the American Spectator alumnus and maker of the delightful Metropolitan (1990), will be lucky to make a tenth of that...
...Ted is the earnest and hard-working Puritan for whom religion and commercial interests are inseparable...
...Ted is a prig but, a likable one...
...You're such a prig," Fred tells him...
...I wasn't using prig pejoratively," says Fred...
...Johnson" who wears tight leather thongs under his clothes to give himself a masochistic thrill...
...It all amounts to a continuing demonstration of the proposition that, as a Truffaut character somewhere puts it, life has more imagination than we do...
...His distaste for promiscuity shows, but it does not impose itself as a judgment on others...
...A dedicated salesman, Ted's leisure-time reading runs to "Franklin, Emerson, Carnegie, and Bettger...
...Ha Ha...
...From this point on, events move swiftly to a climax...
...Like children who are warned not to treat as pets livestock being raised for the table, we are kept from getting to know these guys...
...Partly, it is because the Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford combination is a brand name...
...Fred says that "it is a well-known fact that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence...
...t takes someone like Whit Stillman, from outside the film culture, to make a film that is not burdened with that culture's simple-minded view of America...
...Instead, his Puritanism is all focused inward, a part of the complex of earnest striving and self-improvement that preoccupies him...
...For what is striking about these classic American types is their ability, in the face of such surprises, to adjust their prejudices without sacrificing them completely...
...It is a brilliant line...
...It would be nice to think that such flexibility and open-mindedness really is a common trait among Americans, but the sclerotic culture of Hollywood that marginalizes movies like this one certainly seems to suggest otherwise...
...Anti-Americanism becomes more serious when a bomb goes off in the local USO and an American sailor is killed...
...What is it about that culture...
...In post-Franco Barcelona, as one girl says, "there is something fascist about a boy who immediately wants to marry a girl he is involved with...
...in a secret and illegal war...
...All these gorgeous girls, Ted tells Fred, are remarkably promiscuous...
...of A. They find themselves living among those who are by turns bewildered and hostile to all that they take for granted...
...So far from being a thrilling thriller, it is not even surprising...
...The next day he finds himself identified as such on the front page of the newspaper...
...Somehow this is how anti-Americanism is discredited, not by the absurdity, in American eyes, of the plots of the AFL-CIA or by the discovery on the part of the beautiful Barcelonans that American food is not really so disgusting as they had heard or even by the wit and attractiveness of the two central characters...
...James Earl Jones, a wise and lovable senior official stricken down by cancer, is the only sympathetic authority figure...
...her eyes and see her soul...
...Subtlety is actually associated with evil here, as when a corrupt presidential aide tells Ryan: "You're such a Boy Scout...
...Fred enjoys tweaking him by telling girls that his cousin is "an admirer of the Marquis de Sade and a follower of Dr...
...It's a problem," Fred agrees nonchalantly...
...All the way through, the expected things do not happen and unexpected ones do, prejudices are upended and firm opinions proven wrong, including the two cousins' opinions of each other...
...Do you think any Trade Fair girl would go out with you if she knew what a pathetic, Bible-dancing goody-goody you really are...
...They can only be stopped by the sole incorruptible cog in the machinery .of power, who slips out of gear and reveals to the good guys of a congressional oversight committee the hopeless corruption all around him...
...He, however, is impotent...
...Fortunately for Fred, he is quite impervious to insults and criticism from his morally superior cousin...
...The soldiers are all good, clean-cut, patriotic American boys and fine fighting men, but they are generic creatures, all but completely indistinguishable one from another...
...The world is gray, Jack...
...A horrid little brat of a child, threatened with murder by a ruthless crime syndicate, and his criminally irresponsible lawyer, played by Susan Sarandon, together find little to choose between taking their chances with the would-be killers and submitting to the protection of the FBI and the police...
...When Fred catches him in the act once he says: "What is this, some kind of weird, Glenn Miller-based religious ceremony...
...In fact, "I'm the best PR guy you will ever have...
...But while they are arguing with Ramon, something he says suggests that Fred is a CIA agent...
...0 ne night Ted is invited by what he thinks is an appropriately homely girl called Aurora to what he thinks is a Lionel Hampton concert...
...years that they can imagine no other...
...When he is not trying to make himself a better salesman, he reads the Bible, which he keeps hidden in a copy of the Economist, while doing a strange, kicking dance to recordings of big band swing...
...The first is a typical "blockbuster" thriller, A Clear and Present Danger, and representative of the Hollywood culture...
...That's a problem...
...The city seems to swarm with stunningly beautiful women, all of whom work at the Trade Fair...
...But if there is a certain inevitability to the film's central act of violence, it is hemmed in with a series of surprises, right down to which cousin ends up with which girl...
...Then, as Ryan turns on his heel with a very cross look on his face (the drama in this film largely consists of Harrison Ford giving people very cross looks), the aide calls after him, "Gray...
...He also persuades Monserrat to stay with him, as Ted will want to marry her and take her back to Chicago where she cannot possibly live because of the "crime, consumerism and vulgarity"—to say nothing of the fact that there is no culture there whatsoever...
...But the hyperfeminist slant is only obligatory in films starring Miss Sarandon...
...The same can be said of the assumptions behind another brand-name thriller, Joel Schumacher's version of John Grisham's The Client...
...Moreover, it represents sympathetically but subtly that whole side of life that Hollywood either casts as characteristically ill-doing or simply ignores...
...Brave soldiers in the field being betrayed by their superiors is as much a contemporary Hollywood cliché as "I'm guessing that the boys on the Hill don't know about this" or "the press is going to have a field day with this...
...The film is riddled with such lines...
...CI 68 The American Spectator October 1994...
...Guess what is going to happen to them...
...asks Fred in wonderment...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
