100 Days, 100 Movies: His Girl Friday (1940)

Director: Howard Hawks
Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell

If I had to describe this film in one word, it would be fast. It runs at a clip that is difficult to imagine; you have to see it (and hear it) to believe it. This Howard Hawks classic is more proof that Cary Grant can work with anyone, and provides the fabulous Rosalind Russell with the kind of smart, dizzy character she can play like no other. So hold on to your hat, because this one’s a rollercoaster.

His Girl Friday takes place over the course of about half a day and begins with Russell as Hildy Johnson, a newspaper reporter and recent divorcée. She returns to New York with some news for her Editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (Grant): she’s getting married and she’s quitting the paper. Walter is distraught, not only because Hildy has found someone else but because he’s losing his best reporter. The only thing to do, obviously, is sabotage her relationship and convince her that she can’t give up the paper… or Walter, for that matter. The first scene between Hildy and Walter sets the tone for the rest of the film, with the two engaging in some barbed, fast-talking sparring. Russell and Grant don’t have the best romantic chemistry (although it’s passable), but they have a comedic chemistry that’s hard to beat.

In the role Bruce Baldwin, the other man, Hawks cast Ralph Bellamy who was no stranger to playing the nice guy who loses the girl to Grant’s caddish charmer, having starred opposite Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth in 1937. The staid and straight-forward Bellamy is a good foil to the zany antics of Grant and Russell, and does more than just set the pins up for the two stars to knock down. His simple, sincere delivery of lines like “Mighty nice little town, Albany. They’ve got the state capitol there, you know” ensures that he gets his share of the laughs as well.

If nothing else, His Girl Friday is a testament to the talent of character actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, and of the ability of old Hollywood to use them correctly. Grant and Russell are the main attractions, of course, but some of the best scenes are ones that neither appears in. There are numerous scenes in the press room at the court house where a gang of reporters hang out playing cards and speculating about a trial they’re all covering, one which Walter used to get Hildy back in the game: Earl Williams (John Qualan) has killed a police officer and has been sentenced to be hanged, but may be reprieved depending on the decision of a psychiatrist, and on Governor, who has been using the case as a political ploy in the upcoming election. The reporters aren’t a just a “group,” but are individual characters whom we come to distinguish from one another according to their differing reporting styles. Through them, the film casts a cynical eye on the way news is made and reported – specifically how it’s filtered to the public depending on the source (Walter is also used to express this same cynicism, as when he calls his Copy Editor to implore “Never mind the Chinese earthquake for heaven's sake...Look, I don't care if there's a million dead...No, no, junk the Polish Corridor...Take all those Miss America pictures off Page Six...Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page...No, no, leave the rooster story alone - that's human interest”).

But the film also makes great use of Clarence Kobb as the Mayor, Gene Lockhart as Sheriff Peter B. (“‘B’ for brains”) Hartwell, Abner Biberman as Walter’s henchman Louie (who at Walter’s behest manages to get Bruce arrested on three separate occasions and kidnap his mother), and, in a small but memorable role, Billy Gilbert as Joe Pettibone, whom the Mayor and the Sheriff make the mistake of attempting to bribe. All of these actors add something indelible to the film as a whole. Thinking over the film afterwards, it’s amazing to realize how much of it Grant and Russell aren’t in and how you hardly notice because you’re being so thoroughly entertained even in their absence.

It will come as no surprise that Walter and Hildy end up back together at the end, both as colleagues and as a couple, but that’s okay. It’s also okay that there hasn’t actually been any growth in their relationship that would suggest that it would work the second time around (they spent their first honeymoon in a coal mine, covering a story; as the film ends they’ll be spending their second honeymoon covering a strike in Albany). Like I said, their chemistry is more of the buddy variety than the romantic one. What matters is what happens between start and finish, and given that it’s running time is only 92 minutes, a whole lot happens in this tightly wound and fast-moving comedic masterpiece.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Director: Arthur Penn
Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman

Any way you look at it, Bonnie and Clyde marks an important moment in American cinema. This is a watershed film, one that brutally wrenched itself free of the taboos traditionally enforced by Hollywood. Graphically violent and centering on a relationship where gender roles are inverted, it proved to be critically polarizing, and Warner Bros. more or less divorced itself from the film… that is, until the people declaring it a masterpiece began to outnumber those declaring it an abomination. Its place in the canon of American cinema is now firmly set, and forty years after its release, it remains a startling and thrilling film to watch.

The film begins with the first meeting of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), when she spots him looking like he’s about to steal her mother’s car. By this point, Bonnie has already been established for us as a restless spirit, as she sulks around her bedroom, hot and bothered by both the heat and boredom. She sees potential in Clyde, who dresses snazzily and has a vague sense of danger about him. Her intuition proves right and it isn’t long before Clyde has robbed and store and taken her on the run with him. The crime proves to be an aphrodisiac for Bonnie, who basically invites herself into Clyde’s lap as they’re in the process of making the getaway, but Clyde isn’t having any of that, and this is where the film really does become its own unique animal. The relationship between Bonnie and Clyde is, until well near the end of the film, platonically romantic. Bonnie loves Clyde and wants him; Clyde loves Bonnie but is impotent – an element which derives from the fact that the people behind the scenes were unwilling to let Beatty play Clyde as bisexual and this was the compromise that was reached. Many of the scenes between the two are marked by sexual frustration and by the inversion of traditional gender roles, as Bonnie is characterized as aggressively pursuing Clyde and Clyde is characterized not only by his passive inability, but also by his seeming lack of desire (in one scene, Bonnie informs Clyde that she wants to be alone with him. “I feel like we’re always alone,” he responds, oblivious to her meaning because he doesn’t connect to her in a sexualized way).

Along their travels, Bonnie and Clyde add a few members to their gang: C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) – the story’s Judas – and Buck (Gene Hackman), Clyde’s brother, who brings along his shrill wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons). Blanche and Bonnie prove to get along like oil and water, and Blanche’s presence causes problems between Bonnie and Clyde. Blanche, who doesn’t participate in the robberies, insists that she should get her own share of the loot, rather than having to share in Buck’s: “I coulda got killed same as everybody. And I’m wanted by the law same as everybody… I have to take sass from Miss Bonnie Parker all the time. I deserve mine.” Clyde, ever the diplomat, redistributes the money so that everyone, including Blanche, gets an equal share. What happens next is one of the most perfect and realistic moments ever captured on screen, when Clyde tries to hand Bonnie her new share, she stares daggers at him and then stops off, and Clyde just hangs his head, knowing that in his effort not to offend Buck, he’s royally pissed off Bonnie and now he’s going to pay for it.

At the time of its release – and, no doubt, even now – the film was accused of glorifying and romanticizing violence, which I don’t think is necessarily accurate even though the film was marketed in such a way as to play into that idea (tagline: “They’re young… They’re in love… And they kill people!”). It can certainly be argued that Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled end is one of the most glorious deaths in cinema, but I think that as a whole, the film really does work to demystify violence and separate it from romantic conceptions, underlying many key scenes with undertones that are initially comedic and then shifting suddenly to brutal, horrific violence in a way that leaves the audience unsettled. When people get shot in this movie, it hurts. They don’t just shake it off like super-human beings, as happens in most action films; they suffer from their injuries. In terms of the overall story, I think this film does a lot to de-romanticize the idea of love-on-the-run through both the graphic and frequent nature of its violence and the sexual frustration that marks Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship. It isn’t a pretty life they live together, and rather than being smooth, their relationship is depicted as being somehow unsatisfactory for both.

As Bonnie and Clyde, Faye Dunaway (who will forever have a free pass with me by virtue of being my favourite thing about three of my favourite movies – this one, Network and Chinatown) and Warren Beatty are perfect, neither shying away from the more controversial aspects of their characters. The supporting cast is excellent, even Estelle Parsons who spends much of the film shrieking and whining, which actually adds to the overall feeling of chaos. The direction of Arthur Penn is wonderful, drawing largely on European influences - most notably from the French New Wave - and creating a film that is at once distinctly American but at the same time distinctly unlike any other American film before it. If any one film can be credited for ushering in the auteur era that flowered between the end of the studio system and the beginning of the blockbuster “event” movie, this is it. It is a seminal American film.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Gone With The Wind (1939)

Director: Victor Flemming
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Hattie McDaniel

To say that Gone With The Wind is a problematic masterpiece is an understatement. It’s depiction of slavery is abhorrent, but it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t meant to be a history lesson. This is an epic romance which takes place in a fairytale South that never existed, a fact which is apparent in its foreword, which states: “Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…” With that as the set-up, you can’t expect to get anything other than a severely white-washed look at the era of American slavery. The world depicted in this film isn’t really worth exploring except for the way that it acts as a backdrop for one of the best characters of fiction, Scarlett O’Hara (played by the fabulous Vivien Leigh).

I find it strange whenever a woman describes herself as being “a traditional Southern woman, like Scarlett O’Hara,” because the entire point of Scarlett is that she’s not your typical woman - Southern or otherwise. Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) is the epitome of the nice, Southern woman while Scarlett is the iconoclast, a woman constantly going against the way things are properly done (such as when she insists on dancing when she’s meant to be in mourning). But it’s easy to understand why women would want to identify themselves with Scarlett, a woman who isn’t entirely likeable but who is cunning, who gets things done and who is, most importantly, a survivor. This isn’t a woman who shuts down and waits to be rescued; she pulls herself up and gets things done while the women around her (especially her sisters) whine and cry. Scarlett’s drive and self-sufficiency are admirable and no doubt a large part of why and how she entered into cultural mythology, especially when you take into account that both the novel and the film entered public consciousness during the Depression. When Scarlett says, “Tomorrow is another day,” she wasn’t just speaking for herself, she was speaking for everyone living a day-to-day existence.

Personally, I love Scarlett. Is she selfish? Yes. Is she a bitch? You bet. But every time she’s swatted down, she just gets back up again, more determined than ever. She’s also kind of hilarious. The relationship between Scarlett and Rhett (Clark Gable) is one of my favourites in film because despite the heavier scenes, there is a wonderful lightness and camaraderie between them. Rhett doesn’t just put up with her crap, he’s amused by it. He enjoys her little temper tantrums, her attempts at manipulation, and her need to be spoiled coincides nicely with his desire to spoil her (one of my favourite scenes between them takes place just after they’ve married and Scarlett is shovelling food into her mouth like it’s going out of style and Rhett jovially suggests that she might want to slow down).

However, as wonderful as the chemistry between Leigh and Gable is, it also presents something of a problem because it makes it all the more inconceivable that Scarlett could spend as much time as she does hung up on drippy Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard). It is believable to me that Scarlett would use the idea that she’s infatuated with Ashley to get under Rhett’s skin, but it takes a real suspension of disbelief to buy that Scarlett would sincerely want Ashley, who is such a non-entity that it’s surprising that even Melanie wants him. Howard apparently didn’t want the role, which perhaps explains the lack of “there” there, and his depiction of Ashley really does hurt the movie.

Of course, there are a lot of things that hurt this movie. It doesn’t particularly bother me that Scarlett is the heroine of the film and also a slave owner, because few things irritate me more than slavery/Civil War era films where a character is coded as “good” by being a Southern plantation owner whose slaves are free and work his or her land voluntarily – that’s an easy way out and not very realistic. I think it’s okay that Scarlett is a product of her time and place, a time and place where she would have been raised thinking that it was natural that she should be able to “own” other human beings, regardless of how wrong that concept actually is. Besides which, Scarlett is so self-centered that she probably assumes that everyone, black and white, male and female, is working for her in some capacity. That being said, however, the film’s depiction of slaves is deeply problematic, with the slave characters being either infantilized creatures with no hope of being able to take care of themselves (a character like Prissy), or cheerful people without any particular desire to be “freed,” who seem to want nothing more than to take care of the exasperating white people in their lives (a character like Mammy). If there is any depth to the slave characters, and in the case of Mammy, there certainly is, it is due entirely to the actors. Hattie McDaniel, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, brings shades to Mammy that wouldn’t otherwise exist and makes it almost believable that she’d stick with Scarlett rather than trying to make her way as a freed woman.

There are other problems, too. At 238 minutes, this is a long movie that manages to feel even longer than it actually is. The pacing of the film is bad, perhaps because it went through three directors (Victor Flemming, the credited director and the one who was given the Oscar, as well as George Cukor and Sam Wood, both of whom are uncredited for their work), but also because I think this might be a case of too literal an adaptation. Admittedly, I’ve never read the book Gone With The Wind and I know that certain things were cut out (like the fact that Scarlett had children with all her husbands, not just Rhett), but whenever I watch this, it just seems like the screenwriters were determined to cram everything from the book into the movie, which results in a film that tends to drag in places. There are some great sequences (the burning of Atlanta, the scenes immediately following the end of the war, that great shot where the camera pans back to show the wounded soldiers) but in between there are long stretches that seem to take days to watch. I have no problem calling this film a masterpiece, but it is a qualified masterpiece if ever there was one.

100 Days, 100 Movies: A Dream of Passion (1978)

Director: Jules Dassin
Starring: Melina Mercouri, Ellen Burstyn

A Dream of Passion is a difficult film. I can’t say that I “like” it, exactly, insofar as like denotes enjoyment, but I can definitely say that I have rarely had so visceral a reaction to a film, and that few films have stayed with me in quite the same way that this one has. This is a movie that gets beneath your skin and echoes through your psyche, it's images replaying in your head long after you've seen them. It is about an actress (Melina Mercouri) starring in a production of Medea, and it is about how Medea - the story and the character - has been reinterpreted in the centuries since Euripides wrote it, and how the myth has pervaded and informed our own culture.

Mercouri plays Maya, a famous Greek actress who has spent so much time abroad that she feels like a foreigner in her own country. Like Medea, she is treated as an outsider by the community, but this fact alone isn’t enough to help her connect with the character. Her director, frustrated by her inability to relate to the character, arranges for her to meet Brenda Collins (Ellen Burstyn), an American serving time in a Greek prison for killing her children after her husband leaves her for another woman. Maya visits Brenda but connection doesn’t come easily as they are separated by both the physical barriers of walls and particians, as well as the psychological barriers which Maya erects to keep herself from identifying with Brenda. There is a scene early in the film when Maya goes to the Collins house in an attempt to get a sense of things. She insists that she’s ready to put herself in Brenda’s place, but jumps back when the blinds are opened and she’s faced with the chalk outlines of the children’s bodies still etched on the floor. She doesn’t want to understand this, and this is what keeps her from being able to properly play Medea.

Slowly, as the film progresses, Maya and Brenda begin to merge in Maya’s mind. She imagines the night that Brenda killed her children, putting herself in Brenda’s place – but not fully. She images herself as Brenda when Brenda describes chasing one of her sons through the house and dragging him into the bathroom, but she never puts herself in Brenda’s place during the actual act of murder. She digs deeper into Brenda’s fragile psyche and then turns to her own. She has a long monologue during a party where she lays bare her soul, effectively clearing away everything which has been obstructing her ability to connect with her character. But now her director has another complaint: he’s afraid of the way that she’s playing Medea. She’s too calm, too composed. Through her understated performance we're made to understand one of the film's primary concerns: the impossibility of engaging a work of art without bringing your own baggage - emotional, political, psychological, etc. - to your reading of it.

In a modern context, a woman who murders her children to punish her husband must be insane. Dassin demonstrates this by increasing Brenda’s instability as she describes murdering her children and then sitting down at the kitchen table to eat cake. No sane woman could do this, and therefore an actress playing a character capable of this should be wild, frothing at the mouth on stage, her break from reality so obvious that we don’t have to fear it because we know that she isn’t rational, we know that we can explain her actions away and contain her through her own insanity. But Medea cannot be played that way because that’s not the way she was written. Medea is a character who is terrifying because she is so very sane. She’s cool and calculating and aware of what she is doing and why. Her husband, for whom she sacrificed everything, has left her and banished her from their home. She has nowhere to go and no other way to revenge herself than by killing their children, the sons who were meant to carry on his name. This worked in antiquity because the ancient Greeks were less, shall we say, sentimental about their children. Children weren’t people to be loved unconditionally (we are, after all, talking about a culture that sanctioned the exposure of babies at birth if they were sickly or if the household could not support them); they were a form of their father’s property. That is the context in which Medea kills them, that is the context in which her husband understands the loss, that is the context with which we cannot relate. When Maya plays Medea as someone quietly rational, it scares us. We want her to be insane, we want to be able to lock her up and throw away the key, because we don’t want to believe that anyone could be capable of her actions. We want her to be like Brenda, someone to whom we can’t relate.

The film's other main concern is the place of women in society. In a world where women are defined by their relationships with men, who marry them and make them "wives" and have children with them to make them "mothers," then what are we to make of women like Medea and Brenda and Maya (who, years ago, left her husband and had an abortion - one of the ways in which she is likened to Medea), who reject these societally prescribed roles which are seen as essential for the maintenance of society? These are women who don't easily fit, who can't quite be properly defined by the cultural language. The film itself never really comes to a solid conclusion in this respect - Maya is triumphant, but Brenda is still crazy and the two perhaps cancel each other out - but the questions it raises are intriguing, as is the way that it explores the subject.

Mercouri and Burstyn give tour de force performances and the direction by Dassin is measured and well-paced. He doesn't rush the story in order to get to the "big scene" - there is no such thing here. In the hands of a less capable director, everything would have led up to and down from Brenda's description of her crime. Instead we have here a series of scenes, each unfolding slowly, each revealing another layer, another undercurrent of the story, each folding us deeper and deeper into the psyches of these characters in this emotionally and psychologically intense film.

100 Days, 100 Movies: 12 Angry Men (1957)

Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Henry Fonda

Social issue movies always run the risk of being so dry and didactic in their eagerness to make their point, that the entertainment value of the films can get lost along the way. Sidney Lumet is a filmmaker who has always been able to find the right balance between the message and the medium, expressing what he has to say about the given subject without sacrificing his narratives to the level of tutorials. In 12 Angry Men he examines a facet of the justice system - namely how a jury renders its verdict - casting a critical eye on something we take for granted as being fair and just, when in truth it can be anything but. He also creates a riveting film experience out of just twelve characters - the jurors in a murder trial - and one room, proving once and for all that sometimes less really is more.

The trial in question is never seen and the defendant is seen only briefly in the opening moments. What we know about the case we learn in the jury room as it is debated and discussed. To eleven of the jurors, it’s an open and shut case and the deliberation is little more than ceremonial, something in which they will half-heartedly participate before rendering a guilty verdict. For Juror #8 (Henry Fonda), however, this will not do and he refuses to vote along with the rest, eventually making a deal with them so that they will discuss the case. He’s motivated less by the belief that the defendant is innocent than the belief that it is their duty as jurors to actually discuss the evidence rather than make a hasty pronouncement. Slowly but surely, he breaks down the prosecution’s case, turning one juror after another against a guilty verdict.

There are a number of memorable scenes in this film. In one, Juror #8 recreates the shuffling walk of a witness who claims to have seen the defendant fleeing the scene. In another, he produces a switch blade that looks exactly like the murder weapon, which the prosecutors have claimed is unique and could only belong to the defendant. In one of the most powerful scenes, Juror #10 (Ed Begly) makes a virulently racist speech about the defendant’s obvious guilt, throwing around phrases like “those people” as the other jurors, one by one, stand from the table and turn away, refusing to listen to him. The film deftly explores issues of race and class with regards to the justice system, and its success in this lies in the fact that it doesn’t go the obvious route of making the defendant the sympathetic protagonist, but rather by showing the prejudices and assumptions brought to the trial by people who’ve never even met the defendant. We don’t know exactly what is referred to by #10’s “those people,” but our brief glimpse of the defendant shows someone who is vaguely “ethnic” looking in a very general sense. There is also the presumption amongst many of the jurors that as someone from an impoverished family, the defendant is accustomed both to experiencing and perpetuating violence. Many of the jurors are ready to believe that the defendant is guilty simply because he appears to fit the mould of a “dangerous person” as determined by the dominant ideology. This attitude of course begs the question of how the defendant is supposed to get a fair trial by a jury of his peers when the jurors don’t consider themselves his peers, but see him very much as part of “them” who is in contrast to “us.”

The film’s strength lies not only in it’s message, but also in the way that it’s filmed. It begins with the jurors filing into the jury room on a hot summer day. The fan isn’t working and the room seems to swelter as Juror #8 holds out and begins making his case and most of the others fight him, refusing to be swayed. Watching, we feel how hot it is in that room just as we feel the tension that’s ever rising. There is a degree of intimacy in the way this is filmed that is heightened by the set itself. As the film progresses, the room seems to get smaller, more claustrophobic.

This film, which looks simple on paper, is amazing in its complexities, and in Juror #8, Fonda creates on of his many great characters, but the other eleven actors are also worthy of high praise. While they’re sequestered, we never get to know any of the jurors’ names, but we truly get a sense of each and everyone of their personalities, some of them are strong and determined to hold steady, while others easily succumb to a herd mentality and are afraid to speak up if they disagree, and one just wants to get the verdict over with so that he can make it to the baseball game in time. By showing us these people, the ways that some are swayed to change their minds, and the ways that others make up theirs, and the way that evidence can be presented without really being considered, the film makes a strong and critical commentary on a deep flaw in the justice system. The power of the film lies not in whether or not the defendant is guilty or innocent, or in whether #8 proves the defendant’s innocence, but in how the jurors come to the conclusion of their verdict. And that’s what makes a simple story about twelve men in one room so memorable.