The Talkies/It's a Man's World
Bowman, James
It's a Man's World by James Bowman W hen Charles Keating (yes, that Charles Keating) of the Citizens for Decent Literature said back in the 1960s that "more than anyone of his time, Russ Meyer is...
...Let's go," he says simply...
...It has taken a double hit James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...I'm sorry," says the general...
...Miss Maslin even complains that the plot (treachery, robbery, murder, rape, a manhunt, flight and pursuit, escape from certain death at least twice, revenge, swordfights to the death, that sort of thing) is "too ponderous and uninteresting" and the domestic byplay of the charismatic Neeson and his attractive 56 The American Spectator June 1995 mate, played by Jessica Lange, is all that kept her going...
...She calls Rob "about as bright as one of his cows...
...That's all the words needed between them, but it sums up what the code stands for...
...We don't like nothing soft," she purrs menacingly) that was so subversive...
...This is not true...
...They don't realize how rare it is that anyone does fight for noble-sounding causes...
...Those days are closing fast...
...Imagine fighting and killing people because you don't want to be dissed...
...Have you ever heard of such a thing...
...There's got to be someone who needs some killing," he pleads to his commanding officer...
...Kill...
...And when the major tells his trendily squishy love interest (Karyn Parsons) that her kind of "nurturing" can too easily turn into "neutering" or that he is glad that the boys hate him because "it will draw them close together and make them a team," we've got to wonder how such lines got past the Hollywood thought police...
...A Democrat for president")—so it becomes almost a shock when, in Major Payne, a sympathetic marine officer is allowed to punish his recalcitrant ROTC cadets by putting them in women's dresses and marching them around the campus chanting: "Got to earn my right to be called a man...
...CI The American Spectator June 1995 57...
...We're finished...
...those kilts, were bored or impatient with it...
...And the bad guys are precisely the ones who have no sense of the moral differentiation to be made between one form of violence and another...
...After a long pause during which the full meaning sinks in of what he is proposing—namely the three of them along with their companion, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), taking on an entire guerrilla army in vengeance for Angel—Lyle answers: "Why not...
...Instead, it was arbitrary, irrational, amoral...
...There is a similar kind of male bonding going on in Bad Boys by Michael Bay, where the ghetto game of mutualinsult called "the dozens" (the Elizabethans called it "flyting") is played by two cool young black stars, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, as the bullets fly around them...
...This may be why boy critics like Jack Kroll and Roger Ebert liked the picture, while girl critics like Janet Maslin and Rita Kempley, both of whom just couldn't get over (or perhaps under...
...Would you have me lie against my conscience to suit Montrose...
...In Rob Roy, directed by Michael Caton-Jones from the classic novel by Sir Walter Scott, it is John Hurt and Tim Roth who conspire to get the better of the noble Robert (Liam Neeson...
...And though the film has its flaws, I was impressed that the latter's manly virtues and his concern with honor are taken seriously and not, amazingly enough, mocked...
...We've killed them all...
...Sad yes, but not empty...
...What is confusing, perhaps, to those, like film critics, who are generally pretty pacific characters themselves, is that neither the good guys nor the bad guys are fighting for any noble-sounding cause...
...Pike straps on his gun, without a word, and looks in on the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson) in the next room...
...All of us...
...We gotta start thinking beyond our guns," says Pike meditatively as he reflects on the increasing difficulty of robbing railroads in 1913...
...You're finished...
...t would be nice to think, as one sometimes almost does, that the heroic, in particular, might make a comeback...
...the enemy dressed like us, and looked like us...
...Unfortunately, the dialogue written by Michael Barrie, Jim Mulholland, and Doug Richardson is more remarkable for volume than for wit or subtlety...
...It is only the history of world literature until a century or two ago, something that Miss Kempley apparently has little knowledge of and less interest in...
...Like zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, the knowing postmodern sneer chokes off all other life in our spiritual ecosystems, reducing both the heroic and the romantic to a joke...
...To watch today the reissued version of his 1966 film, Faster, Pussycat...
...It is an illustration, if one were needed, of what your mother always told you about filthy language's only being for those without brains enough to lend force to their words any other way...
...from feminism as well as postmodernism (the misogynist old man in Faster, Pussycat...
...And it is the same code that we see in Rob Roy and in all the narratives of men in battle throughout the ages...
...We started together, and we'll end together...
...who came to hate women when he was paralyzed trying to save one from an onrushing train says: "They let 'em vote, smoke and drive and put 'em in pants and what do you have next...
...To the outsider, death in battles that he does not share with the protagonists may look meaningless, but to Peckinpah it is shot through with the glory of a particularly pure (and, to most people today, repellent) form of masculine honor—however appalling its consequences may be both for the men themselves and a host of innocent bystanders...
...These are the real flaws of the film, or rather the directed nature of the narrative in order to stress them...
...Wow...
...But it is also characteristic of men in all-male fighting groups, and these we are still allowed to see, I guess, if they have an ethnic angle...
...No, it is not the awesomely cantilevered but always covered Tura Satana, who plays the killer go-go girl in Pussycat, nor the hilarious double entendres with which the dialogue is shot through ("Have a soft drink," says a hunky guy to one of the dancers...
...It begins in a whorehouse in a post-coital melancholy exacerbated by feelings of guilt and shame that their comrade, Angel (Jaime Sanchez), has been given up to the barbaric vengeance of the vicious Mapache (Emilio Fernandez...
...He just doesn't want to be dissed...
...The final sequence is one of the greatest-ever cinematic renderings of this subject...
...Whatever next...
...Of course, masculine honor has always been pretty obscure to women—as it is in the film, indeed, to Jessica Lange's Mary...
...As Hal Hinson of the Washington Post writes, "In place of the usual goodguys-vs.-bad-guys western conflict, Peckinpah created a universe in which there were no heroes . . . [and] violence had no moral logic or justification...
...Even a sympathetic critic like Roger Ebert, who understands that there is a "code" that motivates Pike and his gang, calls it a "set of sad, empty values" represented, to be sure, "with real poetry...
...The enemy was us...
...But, to her credit, she comes round in the end, for when Rob is downcast and ready to give up she tells him that honor is "the gift a man gives himself—that's what you told our boys...
...But the male bonding itself is simply the subject, and it is not to be scorned...
...That men who risk their lives in battle almost invariably do it for the reasons that Peckinpah's Wild Bunch do it: out of a sense of solidarity with their comrades in anns...
...It's not that Meyer, the director of the all-time camp classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a host of mildly titillating B-movies, was a pornographer...
...The trouble is that it has now been so long since we had a proper war that nobody recognizes it anymore...
...Rarely has there been a more succinct summing up of the moral logic of conflict, and of honor, but to modern critics that looks like "no moral logic"—or one that is so bleak and depressing that it might as well be none...
...Wow again...
...Rob asks her...
...Would you have stolen from yourself that which makes you Robert MacGregor...
...The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah has now been reissued in a "director's cut" that restores about ten minutes of original footage, and it reminds us of what movies used to be like before the postmodern virus entered the system...
...The old-fashioned movie morality tale about military discipline's molding a bunch of misfits into a team gets a new life here and is not merely sent up, although the context is comic...
...He is assigned to the ROTC because regular soldiering jobs seem temporarily to have dried up...
...Mark Helprin, the novelist, tells of how he came to regret his opposition to the Vietnam war when a British sailor listened to his fine sounding moral objections to serving and then said simply, "But they're your mates...
...It is in effect what Pike (William Holden) says to his men in explanation for what they do: "When you side with a man you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal...
...No longer could the wagons be circled toward off the enemy...
...And, like a woman, she replies: "No, to suit me and the boys...
...But for all his exaggerated bloodthirstiness and gung-ho qualities, there is still a serious side to him of a sort that is now, perhaps, only allowable in a black man...
...Kill!—which John Waters, the director of Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, calls the greatest movie ever made—is to be reminded of the innocence of what people thought of as dirty pictures back in those days...
...t seems that even Scotsmen will do—so long as they lived nearly 300 years ago and are up against the kind of pure evil that Tcheky Karyo supplies as the villain of Bad Boys...
...We're not used to hearing that kind of thing at the movies...
...Silly old Rob Roy...
...It was, rather, the killer cynicism of the postmodern sensibility to which Waters, like many others, has made his own contributions since...
...Anyone who watches The Wild Bunch knows at once who the good guys and the bad guys are...
...There are, it is true, too many instances of a corresponding form of masculine sentimentality—having to do with male bonding through whoring and drinking and laughing loudly together at things that are not really very funny—and a further overlay of sentimentality about the ending of a way of life as the modern world comes to the Old West...
...There aren't anymore...
...Like Charles Bronson, RR has no greater cause than vengeance...
...Miss Kempley is even more uncomprehending...
...And the story is still being played out on the streets where the term "dis" was invented...
...Well, yes, actually...
...Not king, not God, not country...
...T hat was not true back in 1969 when the Movie of the Month first came out...
...Poor Walter Scott only tells one of the most exciting, action-filled stories in history and all he elicits from modern critics is a yawn and some vague praise of the stars...
...The undercurrent of the action in 'The Wild Bunch,'" he writes, "is the sheer meaninglessness of it all...
...That is a reasoning that the Wild Bunch—like most brave fighting men—would have understood perfectly...
...Of course, the eponymous Major, played by Damon Wayans, is also a comic figure...
...He doesn't even recognize that his obsession with honor will lead to the destruction of his clan...
...It's a Man's World by James Bowman W hen Charles Keating (yes, that Charles Keating) of the Citizens for Decent Literature said back in the 1960s that "more than anyone of his time, Russ Meyer is responsible for the decay of moral values in America," he may have been right in a way that he could hardly have intended at the time...
...The conventional wisdom about this film is that it was a kind of precursor of our contemporary style...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
