Rough Stuff in the Movies
WAGNER, GEOFFREY
Rough Stuff in the Movies By Geoffrey Wagner This one is A blow-torch!" runs the current ad | for Pickup on South Street, a jolly little diversion about life as she is lived in these United...
...Nor do I. The straight anti-Communist propaganda movies of recent years (The Red Menace, I Was a Communist, etc...
...He has contributed to numerous literary periodicals both in the United States and in Great Britain...
...I would have been surprised if the hero had been so out-of-date as to show some courtesy to the girl...
...It is, indeed, an enlightening film to consider, in all ways...
...I once watched a movie fight, a short one, staged with the customary balsa-wood furniture at Denham, in England...
...The care with which these contusions have been made up, coupled with the sensuality of the caress (the new Pour-It-On or Swamp-Her kind of screen kiss), combines to make a repulsive spectacle...
...And such it certainly is...
...I am sure no one takes the direct propaganda movie seriously in Europe...
...It is not nearly as efficiently scripted or directed as Pickup...
...When From Here to Eternity reached England recently, two leading film critics independently criticized it for similar reasons...
...My argument here is concerned with how such movies misrepresent America overseas...
...its complete indifference to world affairs...
...It would not matter, of course, if this film were taken for what it is: a rather surrealist nightmare of everything America is not...
...The police chief, nicknamed "Tiger," is literally king of a pugilist jungle, the kind of Spillane cop who has to be forcibly restrained from kicking you in the teeth as you enter his office...
...No matter how venal you may be, you're okay if you're anti-Communist...
...I saw the former in Europe, and a revealing experience it was...
...Pete befriends this girl, Maggie Summers (Gloria Grahame) ; and, although she has lived in America all her life, she has apparently never come across a kind person before...
...The fight scenes in The Blue Dahlia and I Walk Alone were almost balletic in design and set the pattern for fights to come...
...Even if we in America are unable to stop mayhem on our screen to day (the kids love it), surely something might be don to prevent another Pickup from being exported to Venice Giving testimony before the Senate Foreign Relation Subcommittee investigating propaganda in foreign countries recently, Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, seemed oblivious of these weaknesses...
...And so it continues, the aggressive, well-heeled cops shooting at or grappling now with Pete, now with Maggie...
...What about living Pichel branding Tallulah Bankhead on the back in The Cheat...
...Of this movie, in fact, a Hollywood editor Herbert G. Luft, who himself actually spent some years in Dachau, writes: "A Foreign Affair has deserved the distinction c presenting one of the most revolting episodes eve projected onto the screen, namely, a love idyl, a rathe harmless one on the surface, yet by implication more cruel than a picture showing the furnaces of an extermination center with human ashes still smoldering The fiendishly devised contrast, a 'catch-and-get-me game, played against a room filled with archives c war-crime trials, makes the scene, to people wit memories, loathsome...
...its completely amoral outlook...
...The only person who otherwise seriously befriends Pete is a burlesque queen, herself an immigrant, though the clarinet player comes through in the end...
...Analyzing this kind of movie in Sight and Sound, Karel Reisz finds that "the affinities with Goebbels are undeniable...
...its frank outlay of brutality...
...let's face it...
...Yet, withal, The Glass Wall is put over with a certain air of factitious authenticity...
...The landlady is pressing Maggie for the rent and her son, Eddie, is pressing for something more than the rent...
...What Mirams does not pretend to indeed can not test statistically is the increase in brutality in the individual manifestation...
...It is an extremely crooked right hook...
...and one realizes that, although neither Gassman nor Mason can act, in the latter film Mason showed that he could at least be directed and that he possessed a certain personality...
...there...
...A voice informs us that Pete is seeking "freedom" and 'human dignity...
...But they do view with commitment the reasonably well-made vehicle interpreting American manners, such as Detective Story or even Pickup...
...For here are prostitute and con-man (guilty of three felonies) locked in gluey embrace and presented as the sympathetic characters...
...You can say that again, Mr...
...Once the girl steals two dimes from a pair of brutal shoe-shine boys, who are only prevented from beating her up by the threat of an accusation of rape...
...all these would make me, if I were responsible for the maintenance of American prestige abroad, ban this picture out of hand, before it has a really disastrous effect in foreign countries...
...Not so in The Glass Wall, a job packaged with Salome on the short-circuit run which has already aroused the surprised criticism of my colleagues in both England and France...
...I never met anyone like you before," she says to him, and again, "You're the first guy I met in my life who treated me decent...
...Mirams, were far more concerned with the acts and manner of violence in films than with the possibility of a movie like The Moon Is Blue "corrupting public morals...
...He observes that the hero of The Steel Helmet bashes in the faces of two Korean foes with his rifle-butt (he'd previously shot them, but they're still snoring), that the Commie villain in The Woman on Pier 13 is disposed of by a meat hook through the heart, and that in I Was a Communist a Commie-inspired American strike is broken up by police truncheons in a manner obviously approved by the makers...
...for what shocked the European audience was the implication behind the film, the brutally callous police office with its fingerprinting of the casual offender (Lee Grant), its lack of surprise at Jim McLeod's brutality, and, especially, the reaction of McLeod's senior when he learns of the beating-up of the suspect: "What's it going to mean to my job...
...She is the victim, we learn, of sweatshop methods in the shoelace industry...
...In both films, incidentally, the hero was beaten in such a way that some permanent physical disability would undoubtedly have resulted in real life...
...If you're not, you're kayoed...
...On one occasion, Skip knocks the lady out and then brings her round by dribbling beer on her face (having first had a swig himself, of course...
...But I still maintain that rough stuff has reached an almost insane particularity of sadistic delineation in some of our movies today...
...I counted seven socks, with Pete helpless on the floor, and this was after Eddie had got going...
...Morals are dictated by politics...
...From then on, he is chased, shot at, and slugged by Americans until he reaches the UN building at the end...
...runs the current ad | for Pickup on South Street, a jolly little diversion about life as she is lived in these United States...
...Gilbert Seldes doesn't seem to think so...
...his figures, however, are fascinating?3 per cent of Hollywood heroines guilty of assault and battery, "sympathetic" characters responsible for the majority of the killings, and the slap to the face of the heroine a virtual cliche...
...The Hollywood products were by far the most violent (although they included musicals and comedies), one feature totaling 25 exhibitions of violence, a term conservatively defined by Mirams...
...It paints a picture of America with a hole in it so big that, as Spillane's Mike Hammer puts it as he drills a victim with one of his specially-slit slugs, you could put your arm through without even getting wet...
...But this is only part of the story...
...Edgar Dale of Ohio State University in 1931, showed exactly half the ratio of crimes and acts of violence per picture found today by Mirams...
...It i often idle to call forms of culture fascist...
...She is so cold that she tries to steal a coat...
...An indifferent, lethargic crowd swirls past Pete, plucking listlessly at cigarettes, making for the delirious idiocy of the Broadway fun parlors, or drifting homeward in the shabby, trash-littered subway...
...yet, these propaganda films come close to being such, for what else do they do but apply the conditions of war and the thought-habits of war to peace and call the result America...
...Watching the scene in which the hero first slaps the heroine and then immediately clinches with her in a kiss, I realized that I was shockingly unsurprised...
...And still there remain those of us, like myself, who have emigrated to America of late and found something other than socks on the jaw...
...Johnston...
...Agreed...
...The other night, I saw The Cry of the Hunted, another brutal film going the rounds with Band Wagon and again starring Gass-man...
...It was a piece of choreography really, and the result of endless brooding behind the scenes...
...have proved notorious box-office flops, and there are lashings of mayhem here...
...Where else, as he puts it, would you like to slap a lady ?) Mirams's findings are easily supplemented from the cinema seat at any time...
...Candy retaliates by kayoing Skip with a bottle and, for her pains, is brutally beaten and kicked in the face by a Semitic-looking Communist agent who has just "blown the head off" an uncooperative stool pigeon called Mo (Thelma Ritter...
...And about the only clean thing on display is the subway...
...It is this kind of thoughtlessness and vulgarity tha it is essential to try to check, not to mention the making of a film like Invasion U.S.A., the message of which i that America must turn into a police state, or else...
...Frustrated in this effort by the clean-living European Pete, Eddie gives him a fearful beating, socking him over and over again...
...its acceptance of drunkenness as an endearing part of American Army life...
...Skip's waterfront hideout is an easily detected sentimentalism, yet the movie takes us with it...
...A similar survey, made by Dr...
...The first American whom Pete meets is a girl so poor that she drops her own instant coffee in a cup of hot water in a restaurant and sneaks a fellow-diner's half-consumed doughnut...
...However, as some of us are unfortunately aware, this is not American reality...
...A year ago, I saw Danish film showing a young couple embracing in the nude...
...Mo, the informer (now a "good" character), about to die, tells her killer, "I'm so tired you'd be doing me a real favor if you killed me now...
...Here we see Peter Kuban (Vittorio Gassman, villain of Bitter Rice), ex-DP, veteran of Auschwitz, landing in America...
...But this movie is not only spuriously serious...
...What of Cagney and his half grapefruit...
...Even Henry Miller at his most hep could not improve on this portrait...
...This is not even "Americanism with a good right hook," as a Boston City Councilor likes to call McCarthyism...
...The acting is no more than satisfactory, but the photography is of a high standard and the cutting literally excellent...
...In Hollywood, I am sure, far more time and trouble is taken over this aspect of the picture...
...I am concerned here, however, to point a finger rather at the kind of irresponsible movie-making that is losing America prestige abroad...
...Or take A Foreign Affair, which, with its tolerance of the black market, its "moida-da-umpire" democracy, and its unrelieved portrait of easy corruption of U.S officials by the "krauts," did America immense damage in Europe...
...The chase sequences, in which he has to prototype the alienated individual, are faintly reminiscent of Odd Man Out...
...To get out of this world, yes anything...
...Lacking the necessary papers, Pete has stowed away to reach America and what an America it is...
...For in Pickup everyone answers to money, everyone is corrupt...
...What he finds is treachery, vice and brutality...
...Recuperating in the hospital, Candy is visited by Skip, who leans over her bed and busses her, the while the camera pans to the far side, lingering deliberately on the ghastly bruises on her right cheekbone...
...it is actually sent to Venice to represent the U.S.A...
...Technically, this is not a good film...
...It will be objected that movies have alway been tough, and that I am merely one of those sourpuss critics bitching about what the masses most enjoy...
...This is the second of a number of articles on by-ways in American culture that we are printing from time to time...
...What about Gable (a man obviously ahead of his time) socking Lombard...
...The Scandinavian countries, which retail psychiatrists on their film-censorship boards, are by fa the most advanced in this matter...
...They are, indeed, the two responsible for the roping-in of the Red agents, one of whom, the non-Aryan Joey, is dragged face downward down a stone stairway by Skip and then drubbed and drubbed again to a helplessly grunting pulp...
...And yet the film is technically slick...
...In any case, I ask myself as I take my seat for some new "toughie" and the soporific scrunching of beaten skulls starts up on the soundtrack, is this mayhem what the masses really want...
...Panem et circenses may, of course, be a method of keeping the masses quiet, but that is something else again...
...Teagarden's trombone and a clarinet provide the incidental music, pouring out a cheap-jack, pollyanna sentiment that neatly guys the hero's authentic aspirations...
...Candy (Jean Peters), an ex-call-girl, is from the first tripped, slapped and slugged by her ex-convict husband-to-be, Skip (Richard Widmark...
...Pete is a hopeless Galahad, and unconvincingly acted by Gassman...
...a good deal of love-making, both amateur and professional...
...The first place he goes to is Times Square in the hope of finding a clarinet player he had met in Europe and who can provide him with the means for legal entry...
...Geoffrey Wagner, who also wrote "The Girlie Magazines" [The New Leader, April 5], is the author of The Venables, The Passionate Land and other novels...
...Dilys Powell, of the Sunday Times, wrote: "What is left is a story of a savagery alleviated but, oddly enough, more pointless...
...Referring to crass and stupid Russian movie being shown (fairly seldom) in Europe, Johnston com placently declared, "People quickly catch on to propaganda...
...I terrible expose of conditions in the United Stat Army before the attack on Pearl Harbor...
...I was told that the censors, like Mr...
...The Chief Government Censor of Films in New Zealand, Gordon Mirams, recently published his researches into film brutality in the Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television...
...and an indictment of American civilization with which, since it is made by Americans, it is not my business quarrel but which seems to me unfairly and inopportunely to put a weapon in the hands of America's enemies...
...And judging from Harlem, where I live myself and where these films, usually starring John Wayne, are shown all the time, it may also be a method of effectively silencing the cinema in our country, since the houses are being deserted...
...His first meeting with American terra firm a is on a packing case that splits his ribs...
...The first shots show us the Statue of Liberty and a tug-boat bearing the banner "welcome to America...
...Mirams scrutinized 100 pictures, 70 American and 30 from other countries, entering New Zealand over a four-month period...
...C. A. Lejeune, of the Sunday Observer, wrote: "In my opinion, this is not an export picture...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 24
