Fake Death, Fake Love
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Fake Death, Fake Love Normal love is the title of a film by Jack Smith, who made Flaming Creatures, and judging from a sizable excerpt I saw, it has nothing to do with...
...In The Yellow Rolls-Royce...
...What has happened to "normal love," then, in contemporary movies...
...Hero and heroine snatch a night of love in the Rolls...
...but honesty lies dead and everybody loves it...
...In the second episode, a gunman of the Capone gang, "vacationing" in his native Italy with his moll-fiancee, is suddenly recalled to the States for a little gangland killing...
...What remains for our hero but to enact an elaborate ritual murder on a dummy representing his wife, and have this photographed and ultimately converted into coast-to-coast tabloid comic-strip fare...
...The noxiousness of that one was close enough to the surface-if one can speak of surface in something so two-dimensional for even the reviewers to recognize its distastefulness...
...wife-murder as something one plans and executes with fiendish delight-but, of course...
...Though at first full of Continental sweetness, and thus lying naked in bed all the time yearning to be made love to, the delicious creature is promptly re-educated by a middle-aged American wife...
...The lady gets the message and vanishes...
...but the question is what lurks underneath the seemingly anodyne vulgarity...
...though it improves on it in one respect: The background music is no longer ladled from the same soup that usually fills the Hollywood Bowl, but intelligently combines Western modernism with traditional Japanese elements...
...In the first...
...Otherwise, the film is chiefly distinguished by an honest treatment of the dehumanizing effect of war even on those behind the lines, some good photography (except for one gibbous moon straight out of Madam Butterfly), and rather trivial plotting...
...In Jean-Luc Godard's abominable Band of Outsiders, sex is yet another subnormal, subhuman caprice, perversely dubbed "love," and neatly blending with the Brownian movement of the brainless, feelingless particles passed off as people in this picture...
...tall grasses...
...If I knew what arms to take up against the sick minds of the censors, I would gird my loins forthwith...
...getting married as an instantaneous albeit crapulous rapture...
...furtive and blacked out: the little spiceless spice in some contrived, improbable or threadbare anecdote...
...But there is one all-important thing more...
...being married as a drag poorly compensated for by the gorgeousness...
...He regains his freedom and his butler...
...She now unremittingly buys expensive clothes, and, what is worse, wears many of these integuments to bed...
...in bad farce, as here...
...by proxy-and is...
...comes the most genuine 100-proof cop-out: The wife returns and is perfect down to her genitrix, and we get a double-happy ending...
...the car is bought by an ante bellum British peer for his beloved wife as an anniversary present...
...It should be, if any compulsion were tolerable, compulsory viewing for all ages and all sexes...
...The cartoonist first enacts for his butler's camera every breathtaking adventure of his cartoon hero, so that the camera's unlying eye can be translated with unimpaired authenticity into the daily syndicated comic strip...
...And let no one say, "But this is farce...
...the hero of this inhuman comedy perceives marriage as the end of a blissful harem existence...
...During the bombing of Ljubljana and after, as chauffeur to the partisans under Luftwaffe strafing, the isolationist widow proves a committed heroine...
...Axelrod beats out of his typewriter or jerks out of his pen...
...Sex is hasty...
...This is the poetry of innocent animality, far more moving and meaningful when dealing with human beings than when gushing about tame lionesses and pet raccoons...
...In The Yellow Rolls-Royce...
...Now, is this all Mr...
...so that both master and butler can end up overmastered-happily overmastered, mind you...
...love and/or sex are treated with a discreet smirk as the blinds of the Rolls come down and out comes Shirley Mac-Laine's bathing suit...
...She also redecorates the apartment according to the latest feminine mystique, and gets her husband drummed out of his last woman-free stronghold, his club...
...Instead, our society's most contemptible charlatans and hypocrites, the censors, have already snipped out part of one of the loveliest scenes of the film: a very long shot of the lovers, naked, chasing each other against a nocturnal background of river shore and...
...Terence Rattigan, the writer...
...and Anthony Asquith, the director, have strung together three episodes in the life of a luxury vehicle...
...wins over judge, jury, D.A...
...She has even brought her remarkably youthful mother along...
...Or even to "normal sex," a celebration of which in the cinema is apt to be a crashing bore like Jorn Donner's To Love...
...the joke is only on the audience...
...He takes over his defense in a trial that bears even less resemblance to reality than the rest of the film, and, by means of an impassioned oration-demonstration...
...Anyhow...
...It is instructive to examine the image of love and sex some current films convey...
...thereupon, lest the boy be slain, she returns to her unlovable fiance...
...It is the great American Liebestod: fake death, fake love...
...The film is the most ardent and unflinching celebration of sex...
...sensuality and inexhaustibleness of a wife who is demanding and possessive...
...It is...
...There lies, first, the masturbational wish fulfillment reverie of that lovely species of American male, the Eternal Freshman with Delusions of Sophomoricness, whom Axelrod tirelessly celebrates in all his works...
...Let no one tell me "caricatures, not celebrates"-next thing we'll be told that Al Capp does not love and envy Li'1 Abner...
...For Axelrod has not even the courage of his convictions, the guts to accept the consequences of his Steigian dreams of glory...
...The people involved are far from admirable, and the conditions of their intercourse are downright grubby...
...This is the story of a successful cartoonist living in a resplendent New York town house with a suave and prodigiously British butler, and, at night, an unending stream of willing beauties...
...Today when the arts are more and more infected with deviant sexuality, and the no less unfortunate deviation of asexuality posing, worse yet, as sexualityOnibaba is nothing less than a boon...
...No, the best piece of self-abuse is yet to come...
...meanwhile the moll gets a chance to have her last happy fling with a lovable Italian gigolo in the capacious Rolls...
...But who awaits him with outstretched arms in bed...
...whereupon he gallantly insists that she do the best thing she can do-"go back there and tell them what you have seen here.' The film emerges as a great commercial for Rolls-Royce: first in love as in war, and indestructible either by age or by Stukas...
...After marriageless marriage and mur derless murder...
...but when he finds her in it betraying him with a younger man, he disconsolately sells it...
...whereat her husband is tried for murder and is about to be found guilty...
...How to Murder Your Wife, a film that has received assorted accolades, is the latest concoction of George Axelrod, who, after one charming comedy, The Seven-Year Itch, has supplied the stage and screen with ever more offensively unsavory and unfunny fabrications, the penultimate of which was Goodbye, Charlie...
...Granted that it is hard to posit canons for normal love, we nevertheless have as good a working definition of it as we have of, say, poetry-a term we can use to good effect without being able to define it definitively...
...Yet what radiates from this sex is, in its humble way, comparable to the last chapter of Ulysses: a glorious affirmation of release, joy and appeasement...
...His wife, yieldingly nude again...
...After all this, Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (The Demon) comes as a desperately needed corrective...
...even if it were for real, exculpated of amid universal acclaim...
...At a drunken stag party, an Italian beauty contestant emerges from a cake (oh, not nude, never fear, just nudish), and our hero, using the social pull great artists enjoy, intoxicatedly marries her on the spot...
...Honest farce comments on life, however waggishly...
...harmlessly...
...ON SCREEN By John Simon Fake Death, Fake Love Normal love is the title of a film by Jack Smith, who made Flaming Creatures, and judging from a sizable excerpt I saw, it has nothing to do with either normality or love...
...In How to Murder Your Wife, the corruption lies under several layers of varnish, and there is no dearth of eyes willing to be blinded by the gloss over the dross...
...and spectators to a loud roar of approval for uxoricide...
...In the last episode, the handsome widow of an arch-Republican American millionaire ends up smuggling a Yugoslav patriot (he is clearly a Communist, but the film prefers to identify him as "patriot;' going so far as to equip him with royalist sympathies...
...Let us look in greater detail at two films in which love and sex are mauled and ridiculed, and at another in which, whatever the limitations of the film may be, sex emerges as the great and joyous thing it is...
...moreover, commodious enough to provide ample Lebensraum (or, perhaps, in this case, Liebesraum) for such unlikely lovers as the Athenaesque Ingrid Bergman and the smaller but hefty Omar Sharif, and can probably accommodate even the step-ladder on which Sharif must have stood during the perpendicular love scenes...
...In the dreary and overblown Zorba the Greek (a film which, to my mind, proves conclusively the mediocrity of its once promising scenarist-director, Michael Cacoyannis, and the superficiality of its star, Anthony Quinn), sex is always awkward, stealthy, ludicrous or degrading, and the brutal murder of one's lovely sexual partner is to be accepted as a colorful bit of local folkways...
...Decked out with gross gags and humorless witticisms, the film is infinitely more vulgar than a mere summary can convey...
...The film is nowhere near so good as Shindo's The Island...
...into Yugoslavia in the trunk of the Rolls, on the eve of the German Blitzkrieg...
...It shows with equal faithfulness the ecstasies of its fulfillment and the agonies of its frustration...
...She has long since caused the butler to leave in disgust, and cooks starchy dishes which, by a peculiarly female black magic, fatten only her husband...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4
