I watched “The Public Enemy” (1931) for the first time; blown away, totally. Once again, I am floored by James Cagney’s power as a screen actor. I’ve seen many excellent analyses and histories of the film online, including this one, that rightly emphasizes the sexual aspect of Cagney’s character, i.e., his rather mama-infantalized nature, andthis one that focuses more on its place in cinema history. As the latter study notes, despite being associated with the classic gangster-flick story arc of rags to ill-gotten riches, and then downfall, Tom Powers never gets to be more than a successful hood working for others. And his character never grows out of the adolescent stage of frustrated inarticulate rage at the world and fixation on his Ma, not unlike his character in “White Heat.”
The scene shown in the image above is one of the most famous in Cagney’s career, so much so, that he came to regret having done it. People were always sending grapefruits to his table as he ate in restaurants. There are a lot of stories about the scene and how it came to be: Cagney claims that he and Mae Clarke improvised it as a joke to shock the stage crew and that the director decided to work it into the final cut. I first saw a clip of this scene when I was very young, and I always heard it referred to as a moment of supreme pre-code comedy, but that is a misreading of the scene, as pre-code.com points out.
Tom’s mistress is trying to have a conversation with him over breakfast about their relationship, its present and future, if it has one. Tom is already bored with her, and he’s playing the field, getting ready to make it with the Jean Harlow character. His response to her attempts at dialog is to growl and push a grapefruit into her face. Seen out of context, you could take it as comic, but in the context of the film action, it is simply a brutal revelation of the stunted mental life of Tom Powers. Another spoiled, violent, mama’s boy who is a war with society, and women, and reacts with violence when he’s drawn up short by his own inadequacy and inability to articulate his feelings.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)The Story of Temple Drake (1933)The Grissom Gang (1971)
When I first read No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) by James Hadley Chase, I had no idea what I was in for. After all, this is the crime novel that set George Orwell back on his heels, as he described in his famous essay of 1944, “Raffles and Miss Blandish.“
So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939…
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book. To begin with, its central story bears a very marked resemblance to William Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere...
…The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour.
I read the Orwell piece years ago, before I encountered Mr. Chase (whose real name is René Lodge Brabazon Raymond), so I read it over again after reading the novel and was puzzled by some of his remarks. A gangster has an orgasm before being knifed? I didn’t read that in the book. Did Orwell read the book, or just go on what he had heard about it? That was before I found out about the complicated publishing history of the novel, detailed in this exhaustive blog post. The violence and sex in the book caused such an uproar that subsequent editions toned down some of it, but Orwell knew only the Ur text. Chase himself, in the early sixties, revised the text to make it seem less dated, so there is a scene in which the gangsters sit watching large television sets, and another in which police helicopters take part in a rescue…while everything else is circa 1935! Getting a hold of that original edition is an expensive proposition, but I’m on the case! I’d also like to know the source of the title, but I’ll get back to that.
The central theme of the story is the rape/abduction of a young woman by disreputable thugs. The rape theme is ancient, of course. The word used to refer to forcible abduction, for purposes of gaining wives, concubines, or slaves, not the violent act of sexual assault, which may have followed the taking, of course. We have the Sabine women being raped, Zeus raping Europa,
Abduction of the Sabine Women – Nicolas Poussin
innumerable other seduction/rapes of women by Zeus, and perhaps most relevant, the abduction/rape of Persephone by Hades. For it is into a modern mythical/realistic underworld that Temple Drake and Miss Blandish are dumped.
Sanctuary (1931) by William Faulkner, is built around the stuck up, superficial flirt, Temple Drake, who finds herself abandoned to the desires of Popeye, a sickly, impotent, psycho, and his family of half-wits, booze runners, and semi-human beasts. Faulkner later claimed he wrote it for money, and quickly, and the first draft was rejected by his publisher as too indecent. He thought better of it soon after, but then Faulkner went to work again on the text: Today, it is possible to read the original text as well as the published version, shades of James Hadley Chase and Miss Blandish.
The book was praised by some, but for most, it was a moral outrage to be denounced and banned. However discreet and indirect Faulkner was in his prose, Temple is in fact raped by the impotent Popeye with a corn cob, a rather disturbing image when all is said and done.
I think the theme of Popeye’s rape of Temple is echoed in the 1944 stupendous film noir, “Laura,” when Waldo Lydecker, gay or impotent, not sure which, tries a symbolic rape murder of Laura with a shotgun, but she’s too quick for him.
Whatever else he may have had in mind while he was writing it, the book does blow the lid off many aspects of Southern “gentility,” social hypocrisy, the criminal justice system, and maybe the whole idea of civilization itself, a pretty neat trick for any novel.
The novel has been adapted for the movies several times, but the most famous, or notorious I should say, since it is not well known, is the first, “The Story of Temple Drake” (1933), with a sensational Miriam Hopkins playing the flirty, clueless, seductive and stupid Temple who falls into the world of a bunch of backwoods bootleggers dominated by a slick city gangster named Trigger. This film has brilliant, dark, expressionistic cinematography, and the rape scene by Trigger, standing in for the Popeye half-wit,is truncated with a scream, but the lead-in makes clear what is going on. Corn cobs are all around to clue in those literate enough to have read the original text. Hopkins said, “...if you can call a rape artistically done, it was,” but art or not, the film led to the Hays Code having real teeth so that subsequent films dared not go where Temple had gone. Linking all this together, Trigger was played by Jack La Rue, who reappears in the Miss Blandish film as the murderous Slim.
Miriam Hopkins as Temple awaiting her fate
Jack La Rue as Trigger
At the conclusion, Temple is called to testify in the murder trial of an innocent man whom she can clear if she reveals her dishonored state. After a struggle, she does so, and faints dead away. Faulkner’s Temple perjured herself, leading the innocent man to be lynched.
Fourteen years separate the Temple Drake/Hopkins film from the Miss Blandish/La Rue film, and in between, there was the super best seller, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a reworking of the Sanctuary story line. This was Chase’s very first novel, and though he was a Brit, he set it in America. That was part of what got Orwell seething; the importation of American low-class vulgarity into the British cultural landscape, but they loved it! The novel completes the transformation of the abductors from a community of backwoods low lifes to an urban crime gang, this time lead by a murderous woman, perhaps inspired by Ma Barker.
Early paperback, original text? (1941)
First American paperback, revised text
Different title, revised text
Another later paperback edition
In Chase’s story, some small-time hoods get wind of a roadside club where Miss Blandish (she’s never named, I believe) is going to go out slumming with her beau, while wearing her diamonds worth fifty grand. They catch up with the drunken partyers but the snatch goes bad when the boyfriend plays the chivalrous knight and knocks down a high-strung thug whose response is to beat him to death. Now with a murder rap hanging over them, the hoods run for their hideout, planning to extort a ransom for the girl, kill her, and make their escape. Their plans are derailed when some members of the infinitely more violent and competent Grisson Gang (Grissom in subsequent tellings, and hereafter in this blog) spot them, put two and two together, and trail them to their hideout.
The goings on at the hideout are grim – that’s where the masochistic crook has his pre-knifing orgasm – and the small timers are rubbed out by the Grissom Gang, led by the murderous, psychopathic, and emotionally childlike Slim. They return to their headquarters with the girl and the jewels. Ma, the brains of the outfit, realizes that the authorities have no reason to suspect their involvement; all the evidence leads to the small time thugs, whose bodies have been carefully hidden and the gang murders several inconvenient people who might have information tying them to the kidnapping. Ma executes a ransom collection for several hundred thousand dollars, planning to kill the girl upon receiving it, but Slim has other plans. Despite having never shown an interest in the opposite sex, Miss Blandish’s beauty has led him to an awakening. He wants to be her Beast…forever, whether she wants him or not. Ma is troubled by this new complication – killing the girl is so much simpler – but her murderous son is not to be crossed or the entire gang could be torn apart.
After beating Miss Blandish into submission, Ma instructs her in her new role in life, to please Slim. With the help of drugs administered continually by a former doctor in the gang, Slim has his sex slave. Ma disposes of the hot ransom money at a discount and seizes a local nightclub from its terrified owner, turning it into a “legit” front for their outfit, and raking in the real money. Miss Blandish is kept in a locked chamber where Slim visits her regularly.
All good things must come to an end. A pesky detective working for Mr. Blandish figures out what went down with the jewel snatch and kidnapping, and locates Miss Blandish. The Grissom Gang is expunged in a hail of bullets, but not before taking out a lot of coppers. Miss Blandish is freed, but throws herself out of a window to her death at the first opportunity. Orwell, perhaps speaking as a typical clueless male of his era, says that she had grown so accustomed to Slim’s caresses that she could not live without them, but to me it is obvious that Miss Blandish was psychologically devastated by her months of being raped, and ended her life out of shame and despair.
After WWII, after Orwell had his hissy fit in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” we get to a film treatment of the novel. The film is British, and most of the actors in it are as well, and they sound it too, despite that the film is set in the United States. Jack La Rue, the only American actor in the film, casts off Trigger to reappear as Slim, transformed into a slick urban gang leader in the prohibition era USA. Instead of playing with switchblades, he works out his inner demons by endlessly throwing a pair of black dice. In fact, “Black Dice” was considered as a possible name for the film, and it is the name the gang gives to the club they take over. But we are in a different moral universe with this film, derived from a successful stage treatment of the book, and one far removed from Faulkner and James Hadley Chase.
Yes, the Grissom Gang trails the small timers to their lair, there is a gunfight, and the gang takes possession of the jewels and the girl, but these two are already connected. The movie opened with Miss Blandish in the lap of society luxury, receiving yet another enormous vase of orchids in celebration of her engagement, but this one has for a card only a note with two black dice and the words, “Don’t do it!” She tells the servant to send them back. “There will be no orchids for Miss Blandish today.” The title of the novel is never explained in the text: I take it to be an ironic existential comment on her fate.
Linden Travers as Miss Blandish
Ma Grissom
Slim’s gang catches up with the small-timers
Miss Blandish at home in a different sort of society
Once Miss Blandish overcomes her shock at being abducted, she calms down and eventually realizes that Slim was the source of the orchids urging her to not get married. And now they are together! How exciting! She feels alive, truly alive for the first time after a stifling existence among the upper crust. Slim is not the deviant half-wit of the source texts, but a smooth operator, attractive, seductive, a bit violent at times, but wonderful to be with. In one scene, Miss Blandish says, “Oh, I know you’ve killed people. You’re cold, you’re hard, you’re ruthless — but …” All in self-defense: they embrace rapturously. Their lips crunch together in a heavy kiss that set a record for duration at that time in cinema. The end comes in the same way – slick or not, they are gangsters – and Miss Blandish kills herself, this time, for precisely the reason Orwell suggested: She cannot bear to return to society life and be without Slim’s caresses. I wonder if Orwell would have enjoyed seeing his misinterpretation of the novel’s text used to conclude what a number of critics have called the worst movie ever made?
At last, we come to “The Grissom Gang” (1971) by Robert Aldrich. (More than fifty years ago! Time for a remake?) We’re back in the USA, Depression Era, but the film is in painfully full color. Everyone sweats, a lot. Ma and her gang mean business, and Slim is back to being a sadistic, emotionally stunted mama’s boy, but he is humanized, a bit. The book’s plot has been snipped here and there to streamline the story, but the brutality of the gang is dark as the night. Mr. Blandish, payer of the ransom, is played by the Aldrich stalwart, Wesley Addy, and is given a truly nasty character more in keeping with the world of Sanctuary than Miss Blandish: He’d rather his daughter be retrieved dead than alive and thoroughly soiled by the ordeal.
Slim and Miss Blandish
Ma preparing for the end
Sweaty and angry Miss Blandish
Daddy Blandish reunited with daughter
Ma and the gang have died in a blaze of gunfire – Ma enjoying every minute of it – and Slim is trapped with Miss Blandish in a barn surrounded by the cops. He declares his love for her; after all, if not for him, Ma would have bumped her off long ago. But he does truly love her in whatever simple and twisted fashion is possible for him, and now it’s time for her to return to her home, so there’s nothing in the world for him but to go out and face the bullets and die. Miss Blandish, who has never become hardened to the killing around her during her ordeal, begs him not to go. “Don’t die for me Slim. I’m not worth it.” She realizes that Slim’s wretched love is the only love she has ever had, and she is grateful for it. But he does go, and he is shot to pieces.
Miss Blandish mourns her abductor, rapist, and worshipper
After gazing on Slim’s corpse for a few moments, Miss Blandish is confronted by her father who is clearly disgusted to see her in such a state. She tries to explain: “I was just trying to stay alive. He loved me…” Dad doesn’t understand. He stalks off, telling her that Mr. Fenner, the detective who cracked the case, will see to her. The final scene shows the two of them driving off in a car, she looks back at the barn, bewildered. They’re off to that hotel Fenner has arranged for her, away from the prying press. Will she jump out of the window as she did in the book? Aldrich doesn’t tell, but it certainly seems a good bet.
I watched King Kong (1933) today; an old favorite. No need to bother with the mediocre remakes. Why try to imitate or improve on a mythic original? I won’t comment on the sexual subtext, or the racial (barely sub)text of the film. Let me just say that I still react to its magical horror with the same delight as when I was six or seven years old and first saw it. It has all the cliches, before they were cliches – pure!
But what struck me today as well was the way in which it is a tale of our headlong heedless stupid destructive capitalist consumerism long before it was common to take such satirical and critical positions in the movies. Elon Musk is buying Twitter, for 45 billion dollars, so that he, stable genius that he is, can save free speech for us. His story, and that of the Facebook founders, and other Silicone brained tycoons as well, remind me of Denham.
Carl Denham sails to Skull Island, provokes the natives and Kong, leaves behind devastated villages and a wrecked society to bring Kong to NYC as a spectacle. Immediately, the show goes wrong, Kong escapes, stamps out lives and wrecks property as he searches for, and then escapes with Ann Darrow. After he is killed, he lies like a pile of rotting garbage on the sidewalk that some street sweeper, like the one in the old Mad Magazine cartoon, will have to clean up. Denham is unfazed, still cocky, despite the destruction and death he has brought to the city in pursuit of show business wealth. He’s already meditating his next coup de theatre.
Kind of like Musk et al, amassing great wealth by unleashing these internet/social media/web things on us with nary a concern about how they may derange or destroy our politics, society, culture, or well being. And like the paying spectators at the Kong premier, we may gripe about the ticket price, but we go along too.
I sort of liked Terrence Mallick’s film “The Tree of Life,” although I regard it as a failed attempt to convey profound ideas. How can you not enjoy a film with such ravishing photography and a quirky, jarring editing style to evoke reminiscences of childhood? But that empathic dinosaur scene…too much.
Are we supposed to take this seriously as a depiction of the evolution of empathy in organisms? It’s just a fantasy or fairy tale representation, which is okay, but not in a film with such pretensions to deep revelations. The simplistic and incredible nature of the action is presented with state of the art animation that is jarring and discordant. Whaa…what did we just see? Did I…was that?…the shy stegosaurus of cricket creek? Ridiculous.
A lot of the flicks I watch are movies that came out when I was a kid, but that I didn’t get to see, or didn’t quite understand. I have seen Cool Hand Luke (1967) before, but my primary recollections of it are from the Mad Magazine satire, “Blue Eyed Kook” July ’68. I just watched it, and though it has its appeal, I found myself remarkably detached and uninterested in the fate of this white chain gang somewhere in the troglodyte South. What did strike me was depth of the Christ symbolism and story in the representation of Luke’s journey/Passion.
Luke is imprisoned for some drunken tomfoolery, and set to work on a road gang, mostly clearing brush. He figures as a kind of existential beat-era anti-hero, with his laconic apercus, e.g., “Sometimes having nothing is a pretty cool hand,” when he thoroughly bluffs his way to wining at poker and is anointed with his sobriquet by Dragline (George Kennedy.) He is temperamentally compelled to sass and rebel, although it comes out in bursts between periods of apparent cooperation with the “system.” In a final soliloquy in an abandoned church where he gets his death wish fulfilled, he asks God why He made him “this way.” The dialog is totally stagey and false: nobody who has his impulsive and uncooperative character is likely to have the self-awareness displayed in those last words of his.
That he has a death wish is made clear several times in the film, including one moment when he explicitly implores God to strike him down. His personal relationship with the “Old Man Upstairs” is one element of his Christ status: Like Jesus, he has a heavy burden to bear, and he does not always feel up to it. That burden is to bring light to the darkness of the prison, the uneducated, beaten-down, spiritually defeated inmates. After being initially hostile enough to him to pulverize him in a boxing match, Dragline becomes his indefatigable promoter and apostle, amplifying his message of purpose and life through his endless storytelling and myth-making. The boxing match was simply one of Luke’s trials to endure, as he establishes himself as The Messanger.
At each violent juncture in Luke’s stay in the camp, the inmates react, usually positively. They are inspired by him, and live out their hopes and aspirations through him, so much so, that Luke must admonish and rebuke them for “hanging on him.” They should “get out there,” themselves, he tells them after one failed escape attempt returns him beaten but unbowed to the camp, instead of feasting on his stories of freedom outside. Soo…why did he send them that faked photograph of himself with two women that got the men going so much? Was he mocking them? When Luke is finally reduced to a pitiable, pliable, obedient state through a night of grueling torture, the men turn on him and regard him with contempt, flicking their cigarette butts at him, and turning away, as though they could have done better. He let them down. His burden is heavy…
There’s lots of explicit Christian symbolism in this film: Luke is left in a crucified posture after he ingests fifty hard boiled eggs to win a bet, a bit of (unintended?) comedy. No surprise he meets his end in an abandoned church. After all, the church, established religion, has abandoned him. As has society. After all, we are all simply alone. And we can’t even get help from one another – there’s that “failure to communicate” business.
It’s a real period piece, this film. It fits so well into the culture of anti-establishment gestures and rhetoric, the scorn, ridicule, and distrust that were heaped on previously respected institutions as a result of the 60s counterculture, and most of all, the horrible war in Vietnam. But seen at the remove of fifty-five years, it seems pretty tame. Almost innocent. Would that our problems were so clear cut and easily identified.
The only scene in this movie that stays with me as something truly impressive rather than contrived is the meeting between Luke and his dying mother. A marvelous scene, and his mother (Jo Van Fleet) was wonderfully acted.
The new Little Island on the Hudson River Waterfront, NYC
I took a look at the new addition to the Hudson River waterfront, the Little Island, and it set me off on an extended internal riff about illusions and the artificial. Coincidentally, I finished up my little foray into the Chelsea district of Manhattan by visiting the Museum of Illusions, a sort of “chain museum,” in that it has sites in many cities. It was very well done, and a lot of fun.
Shades of The Lady from Shanghai, et al…
As for the new park, it is certainly in the grand tradition of 18th garden follies, as the review in the NYTimes commented. The planting is lush, the views are spectacular, the engineering is amazing (although I have had a hard time finding out just exactly how those “tulip” buckets were constructed), but the whole thing is just a little bit…weird and kooky. There is a strong Disneyland feeling, and maybe that’s intentional, but the place feels like a an expensive bauble strung to the waterfront necklace of NYC. Good thing that Diller is footing the bill for maintenance for the next twenty years, because as the Times noted, it’s likely to cost a “king’s ransom.”
I suppose you could say Little Island is more E.A. Poe “Garden at Arnheim than Disneyland, but in any case, we’re firmly in the realm of the artificial. Not fake, mind you, but the product of artifice. And that’s art, with a capital, or maybe lower-case ‘A’. If it were a a little bit on the perverse side, it might have pleased Huysman’s Des Esseintes in A Rebours, but it’s definitely a family place. And after all, it’s no more ‘naturalistic’ than this favorite space for tourists the world over:
Bethesda Fountain in Central Park
Olmsted gave us a little bit of rus in urbe, nature in the city, but in this more European section of Central Park, he leaned Continental and gave us a little bit of the (Italianate) city in nature, in the nature in the city… Yeah, it’s all how you look at it.
Not too far from this spot is what may be the most visited location in the park, Strawberry Fields, a mosaic in the pathway memorializing John Lennon, near the street entrance across from The Dakota (home of Rosemary’s Baby) where he was murdered. And we know what John Lennon said about reality…and was he just echoing something he’d read?
As I rode public transit across the GWB and downtown on the A-train, I was reading this book from the 1970s that I picked up from the NYRB:
This book is one sustained illusion, a piece of artifice that is amazing to contemplate. It is the story of an empire that existed somewhere in the near east, somewhat contemporaneously with the Roman Empire, except that the Roman Empire is never mentioned, and it seems to be the Roman Empire, except not. Maybe it’s the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the geography seems to match that better, but it really doesn’t matter, because it’s all entirely invented.
The book is a novel, an elaborate historical invention that parallels historical reality, or what we think of as historical reality, or what writers tell us, or have told us, is historical reality, and so on, and on. It is deeply and delightfully ironic and satiric, includes a raft of footnotes that are either completely invented, with authors, sources, journals, and books cited, or sometimes partially invented, and often somewhere in between, requiring a bit of research to determine just where they stand on the line between reality and illusion.
The tone of the book is familiar to anyone who has read a lot of history of the Middle Ages or the Roman and Greek periods of Western Civ that is now slightly old fashioned, that is, stuff written before 1970, say. The cover of the NYRB paperback features an engraving by Piranesi, that consumate re-inventor of the imperial past: his painstaking historical accuracy sometimes gave way to incredible flights of fancy, as in this image, and sometimes it’s not easy to tell if he is giving us reality or fancy, but of course, the reality crumbled to dust long ago.
Reading this book, I had a vague sense that I had heard it all before, and not from the history that I had read, but I didn’t identify the source of this feeling until today. It’s Star Wars! That inexhaustible film franchise is another form taken by the lure of the artificial.
In Star Wars, we have a totalized artificial history that is the mirror of The Glory of the Empire. The novel looks back in time and creates an artificial empire, the movie series looks forward. The novel creates an artificial history that mimics and borrows from actual historical reality and seems as if it could have happened just as the author wrote it. (Of course, the conceit of the novel is that he is writing it as other authors, chronicleers, wrote it, so we have texts written on top of texts…all quite in the manner of J. L. Borges.) In Star Wars, we have a fantastical future realm that lifts all the historical cliches wholesale into an imagined sci-fi future that nobody could believe is real, and that the creators don’t intend anyone to take as real: it’s fantasy for fun.
Star Wars begins from a hazily imagined pas and present, and projects into the phantastical future. What’s so disconcerting about The Glory of the Empire, is that it starts from a perfectly observed present, and imagines a past that we almost feel must have existed given what does exist now. One passage that uses this technique so well is a description of the reunion of the Emperor to-be Alexis with his mother, from whom he has been separated for twenty years. We are told of frescoes by Piero della Francesca that depict this scene – and we can almost believe they exist, especially when we read the footnotes! – and given the paintings by the master that do exist, shouldn’t these be among them? Not to mention the fact that the text goes on to tell us of the immense influence of this narrated/imagined scene on the subsequent history of western art. The passage concludes with a “quotation” from one of Proust’s novels in which a character dies on viewing the frescoe by Piero.
Personally, I have no taste for Star Wars. I prefer my fantasy, my illusions, my artifices with a heavy does of irony and satire. Why would I want to see all the cliches of politics and human folly simply reenacted with high-tech impossible gizmos? But that’s me.
Speaking of artificial islands sculpted into paradisaical gardens, is there ever anything new?
Two guys who get what they want; make their dreams come true.
Benjamin gets Elaine in The Graduate, but that last scene goes on a wee bit too long. Did Elaine just throw her life the wrong way?
Joe marries Susan, and into the money, just not the way he had planned it in Room at the Top. Susan thinks he’s getting sentimental after all, poor girl.
The other day, I watched L’Innocente, Visconti’s film of 1971 based on a story by D’Annunzio. It was his last film, and certainly not up to the level of Senso. A narcissistic, decadent, fin de siecle rich guy, Giancarlo Giannini, likes to have affairs, despite being married to a woman who is nearly goddess-like in her voluptuousness, i.e., Laura Antonelli. (She, by the way, turns in a fine performance here: not what I expected from the Queen of Italian soft-core sex farces of the 1970s.)
When his wife, oppressed by her desperate situation, takes a lover, he suddenly rediscovers her attractions. Her lover dies on an African expedition, but she is pregnant with his child. Her husband, now infatuated with her, demands that she have an abortion, and she refuses, ostensibly on religious grounds (He’s an atheist and freethinker.) but really because she wants the child of her dead lover, whom she mourns secretly.
Possessed by old fashioned jealousy and self-absorption – “I’m a man sick with melancholy, and I enjoy my sickness,” he says – the husband murders the baby. He thinks that his wife has been seduced into loving him again by his vigorous and slightly kinky erotic ministrations to her, and that she will accept the death of the baby, and move on, with him. He is wrong – she sees through him and realizes that he killed the baby, and she reveals her measureless hatred of him, confessing that she only pretended to love him again to protect her baby whom she loves as she did his father.
He confesses all to his former mistress, an icy countess (Jennifer O’Neal) and says he is ready to take up with her again. She, despite her relative lack of conventional morals, and her rather cavalier way of dealing with his infanticide, says she’s no longer interested. She calls him a monster, in a nice way, of course.
Having nothing to live for now – only mere existence stands before him – our existential ‘hero’ shoots himself in the heart while the countess looks on. He wanted her to see how he stands by his principles. Ho hum…
The costumes are fantastic, and the stifling perfume of the period’s opulence, for this particular class of beings, is, of course – after all, this is Visconti – overpowering in its presentation. But the story is rather mechanical, and for me, D’Annunzio’s stories are simply a bit ridiculous.
Since I spend so much time looking at old art, I sometimes see things in films…
I guess Visconti knew Italian painting as well as I do. The painting of Jupiter taking on the form of a cloud in order to possess Io (at top, by Correggio) must have been in his mind when he filmed the scene of Giannini carefully and deliberately arousing his wife while making clear his complete (so he thought) dominance of her (below).
I only heard about Pretty Poison (1968) from the NYTimes obituary for the director, Noel Black. He spoke of it after it flopped and was pulled from the theatres, saying:
“Essentially, we saw it as a story with many comedic elements in a serious framework — a kind of black comedy or existential humor of which ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is a prototype,” he said. “We hoped people would take it on more than one level.”
Let’s just stay at one level, not sure if it’s high or low: it has one of the strangest femme fatales I have ever seen in film.
Anthony Perkins plays a disturbed parolee named Dennis Pitt, a man who deals with his discomfort with the world by spinning outrageous fantasies, this time about his being a tip-top secret agent. He spots Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld) practicing with her high school marching band, goes to work on her. She seems to be a sweet, impressionable young girl, and the whole thing seems unbelievably corny and silly for a while, as he flirts with, and then woos her with his dark persona of an international man of mystery.
He has a destructive bent, and he enlists her in his plot to sabotage a local factory. Sue Ann knows her way around a wrench, big or small, pulls this one out of her blouse, and gets to work.
They are discovered by a night watchman, and Sue Ann calmly bonks him on the head with her wrench. He’s not dead, so she pushes him the water and then climbs onto him to drown him. Ride ’em, cowgirl!
She explains, it’s easier this way, isn’t it?
From here on in, we’re in Gun Crazy, Bonnie & Clyde, and yes, Dr. Strangelove territory. Those crazy kids, but which one is really crazy? Maybe Anthony Perkins isn’t so typecast here as we thought?
The blue Sunbeam roadster is a nice touch. Sue Ann’s toy.
Nothing for it but to shoot her mother, get married, and make off to Mexico, her idea. He isn’t quite up to killing Mom, so she does it while he’s sick in the toilet. Some heavy handed imagery here…
“Oh Dennis, I feel like we’re already married. What do people do when they’ve just been married, Dennis?”
“Oh, uh…I don’t think I can right now…” No problem, she says. They’ll just get rid of the body and then skedaddle.
“Dennis, I’m so hung up on you. I’ll always love you.”
“Yes, I’m quite impressed with your capacity for loving.”
Posted by Lichanos 
Journey to Perplexity 