October Movies

[osprey_archer]

Julie owns a box set of classic Universal Monsters films, so we attempted to crammed as many of them into October as we could, although in the end we only managed two: the 1932 The Mummy and the 1931 Dracula, both of which feature women mind-controlled by the eponymous monstrous man into some sort of romantic relationship. I guess that’s just the most terrifying thing in the world in the 1930s? From the perspective of 2017 neither of these movies seemed particularly frightening (which is good, because I’m a total baby about horror movies).

I also saw a bunch of movies in theaters this month! Going to theaters by myself is my new favorite thing. Two of them I have already posted about, but I didn’t manage to get to Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which is about the creator of Wonder Woman and the two women who were the loves of his life and also in love with each other (at least according to the movie; there’s apparently some debate about how they felt about each other IRL) and all lived together in a love triangle in suburbia after the whole thing got the Marstons fired, on account of how the young lady was one of their students when they were both psychology professors.

...Frankly this sounds super unethical but hey, they seem to have been happy together, so I guess that worked out in the end. The sex scenes were hot like burning (there is one scene where Elizabeth Marston is wrapping a rope around Olive - not even tying her up, just wrapping it around - and Olive makes this sound - ) and I thought it was just really well done, overall.

Also, my mother and I went to see Ponyo on the big screen at the ArtCraft. (She’s never seen a Studio Ghibli film before! I may be able to entice her into watching Arrietty with me: she read The Borrowers to me in my youth.) I do like it, but it’s never been my favorite Ghibli film: I just can’t get over the essential weirdness of the fact that the sea sorcerer and the sea goddess decide that it’s a good idea to let the fate of the earth hinge on the faithful trueness of Sosuke’s love for Ponyo. Sosuke’s great, but - he’s five! How many people are forever faithful and true to the person they loved when they were five? Is Ponyo going to turn back into a fish if Sosuke’s attentions wander?

Other movies I saw this month: Steel Magnolias! Which has been on my radar forever as one of the famous movies about female friendship - I’m always seeing it “Movies about Female Friendship” lists like the one where I found Ghost World - and, unlike Ghost World, the female friendships here are actually strong and positive and really the main point of the movie, so that has restored some of my trust in those lists.

Having said that, it’s not really my kind of movie - I think you could classify it as a weepy and that’s just not my thing - but nonetheless I’m glad I’ve seen it and finally have it off my Netflix queue.

Also How to Steal a Million, an Audrey Hepburn movie that I first saw in high school and adored, and watched again this month and… did not adore as much. Not that I disliked it, but it did not cause the same enormous upwelling of delight that I remembered and I am concerned that this means that my sense of joy has gone into a state of hopeless atrophy.

Comments

[sartorias]

I want female friendship flicks in which someone is NOT dying of cancer.

[osprey_archer]

RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. Technically in Steel Magnolias it's not cancer that gets her, but making it another disease doesn't make it any *better*. Female friendship flicks where no one dies of anything at all! Unless it is a swashbuckling adventure film and one of the friends must die a heroic death to enable to the others to achieve their goal, that would be acceptable I suppose. But no disease deaths.

[sartorias]

YES. The buddy flicks don't require disease deaths. It's as if women's lives are trivial unless someone is croaking. Put-lleze.

[osprey_archer]

"Stories about women that don't center around heterosexual romantic fulfillment have to end in death by disease! I don't make the rules!"

- some Hollywood exec who totally does make the rules, probably.

[sartorias]

Oh, hell, yes. I can just hear the self-righteous tone.

[tamsin]

Is Arrietty good? I picked it up at the library last week.

[osprey_archer]

I enjoyed it! I am super overinvested in the book version of The Borrowers so naturally I quibbled pretty much everywhere that the two diverged, but Arrietty is still pretty good.

[sovay]

both of which feature women mind-controlled by the eponymous monstrous man into some sort of romantic relationship. I guess that’s just the most terrifying thing in the world in the 1930s?

It's a feature of White Zombie (1931), too. To be fair, I find the idea of a supernaturally coerced relationship as unpleasant as I do a relationship coerced by ordinary means, but isn't there some actual reincarnation/connection in the 1932 Mummy as well?

the female friendships here are actually strong and positive and really the main point of the movie, so that has restored some of my trust in those lists.

I just saw a delightful not quite pre-Code film called Lady by Choice (1934) starring May Robson and Carole Lombard which passed the female friendship test with flying colors: a young fan dancer with a string of Sally Rand-like arrests for indecency is encouraged by her publicist and her manager to adopt a mother (she never had or knew one) in order to scrub up her image; the mother she adopts is a hard-drinking, gambling, homeless mid-seventies hellraiser who was once a showgirl herself; they bond at once and while the last act eventually revolves around getting the fan dancer's romantic happiness sorted out, the core relationship in the film is between the two women. We thought there might have been some small interference from the PCA in that an obvious reveal concerning a third character is never actually revealed even though all signs pointed toward it, but otherwise it's very frank and really refreshing in its depiction of two flawed and interesting women whom the audience wants to see happy. Nobody has to die for bad decision-making. May Robson playing the elderly hellraiser is amazing.

[osprey_archer]

Noooo, why must you torment me with enticing descriptions of movies I will probably never get the chance to see? Lady by Choice sounds amazing but neither Netflix nor the library has it. Oh well.

I have the impression, which is so vague that I'm not even sure what it's based on so really I may be completely wrong - that pre-Code films tended to be better at female friendship than post-Code. Of course, that's not exactly a high bar to surmount...

Yes, in the 1932 Mummy, the female lead is the reincarnation of the princess Imhotep loved. He was mummified in the first place because he tried to raise her from the dead, and thereby tied their souls together for eternity or something like that.

However, the heroine is not aware of this consciously and basically goes into a trance every time that Imhotep awakens the princess within her, so it's still super creepy.

[sovay]

Lady by Choice sounds amazing but neither Netflix nor the library has it.

I'm sorry! I got the DVDs out of my library, so assumed it was readily accessible. I hope it comes around on TV for you sometime.

I have the impression, which is so vague that I'm not even sure what it's based on so really I may be completely wrong - that pre-Code films tended to be better at female friendship than post-Code.

I'd say that accords with my experience. Pre-Code films are shockingly and immediately better than Code-era films at women in general (gender in general, honestly) and relationships in general, romantic and not. They may have all sorts of weird rough edges, but they feel much more like the world. I am not sure the amount of damage done by the enforcement of the Production Code can be calculated, except that I think it held this country back decades and affects us even today.

However, the heroine is not aware of this consciously and basically goes into a trance every time that Imhotep awakens the princess within her, so it's still super creepy.

Fair enough!

[osprey_archer]

When I saw Clara Bow's It, I had pretty much resigned myself to the movie being wall to wall misogyny because of the premise - the importance of sex appeal! it's going to be all scheming vixens fighting over a man, right? - but actually it's not like that at all: there's a big subplot about Clara's character's friendship with a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock, and is now living with Clara, and in general Clara doesn't seem to see other girls as The Enemy a la Scarlett O'Hara.

Silent films really do seem like a different world than post-Code talkies, and not just because they are silent. (I realize not all pre-Code films are silent, but those are the ones I'm comparatively familiar with.) I've always meant to watch more silent films, but probably I would need to find a silent-film-watching buddy for that project to really get off the ground.

[sovay]

there's a big subplot about Clara's character's friendship with a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock, and is now living with Clara, and in general Clara doesn't seem to see other girls as The Enemy a la Scarlett O'Hara.

I loved It—it was the first place I saw Clara Bow and its handling of the unwed mother character was one of the things that got my attention. I'm not sure where the zero-sum idea of female friendship entered the American mainstream, but I do associate it with the coming of the Code and its programmatic, artificial ideas about men's and women's roles—I have seen rivalry between women in pre-Code films and women who behave badly about men, but I have also seen a lot of women who stick together, even in situations that have nothing to do with men.

Silent films really do seem like a different world than post-Code talkies, and not just because they are silent. (I realize not all pre-Code films are silent, but those are the ones I'm comparatively familiar with.)

So strictly speaking the term "Pre-Code" is usually reserved for the brief window of sound pictures prior to the enforcement of the Production Code, but I agree that the social attitudes visible in silent film are much closer to pre-Code talkies than post-Code ones, especially late silents where much of the cast and crew are the same people who would be making pre-Code pictures in a couple of years. I used to think of silent/sound as being the major divide in early Hollywood, but I'm really coming to believe it's pre-Code/Code. There were actors who survived the transition to sound who did not survive the transition to the Code. The ones who made it all the way through increasingly I think are the outliers who just look normal because of survivorship bias.

[edit] I've always meant to watch more silent films, but probably I would need to find a silent-film-watching buddy for that project to really get off the ground.

I hope you can find one! There are some amazing things in silent film.

[osprey_archer]

The idea that women are inherently rivals seems to have been at least a subterranean current in English & American culture for a long time - hence Isabella in Northanger Abbey declaiming that she intends to show men that women can be true friends, and then totally undercutting her words with her actions.

But it definitely seems to become the overwhelmingly dominant strain of thought in the thirties. I've read some early women's histories from the 1970s and 80s and there's this sense of delighted incredulity as the authors discover that women in the past had friendships with each other. Supportive friendships! That were important to them! That's how thoroughly that cultural shift managed to efface that entire side of the human experience.

Someday my silent film buddy will come! I have faith. And also too many movies to watch already, so there's plenty to keep me busy while I wait.

Are there any good books about the transition to the Code and how it changed movies? I've read a bit about the silent/sound divide, but nothing about the Code itself.

[sovay]

That's how thoroughly that cultural shift managed to efface that entire side of the human experience.

The same thing happened to queer representation, which is part of the reason Richard Barrios wrote Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003), which I am enjoying very much. It affects post-Code movies, too: I was surprised the first time I saw a woman with an "atypical" role in film noir. The more noir I've watched, the more I've realized that the spectrum of female representation and agency is actually much wider than the narrow band of femme fatale/good girl which has been handed down through popular reception and neo-noir. Kirk Drift strikes again.

Are there any good books about the transition to the Code and how it changed movies?

Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) are two of the best books I have found about pre-Code movies, the actors and actresses who flourished in them, and the changes that were wrought on the representation of sexuality and gender by the enforcement of the Production Code. Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (1999) is supposed to be seminal, but LaSalle writes so much better about movies and actors that I'd start with him.

[osprey_archer]

My library has Dangerous Men! I'll start with that one and request Complicated Women through interlibrary loan if I feel so moved.

[brigdh]

I love Ponyo, but that is mostly because I'm fonder of ocean imagery than, say, small towns or bathplace mythology. I do have to agree that the end compromise seems both unfair and nonsensical.

[osprey_archer]

The ocean imagery is totally gorgeous, it is true. I really love the bit where Ponyo's running on the waves alongside the road, completely unaware that she may be just about to drown her beloved Sosuke if she doesn't get the waves to cool it a little.

I do wonder what's going to happen if they get in a big fight, as five-year-olds are wont to do. Will Ponyo stomp back down to the water and demand to be made into a fish again? Can she become a magical fish person again? I'm not sure she's old enough to decide for the rest of her life whether she wants to be a human or a magical fish person, anyway, especially when the basis for her decision seems to be (1) ham and (2) Sosuke.

[sovay]

I do wonder what's going to happen if they get in a big fight, as five-year-olds are wont to do.

I will have to rewatch this film, because I don't remember the ending hinging on Sosuke's eternal fidelity so much as his ability to love and accept Ponyo whether she's a fish or a person or both or whatever, which seems like a pretty reasonable thing to assume can survive fights and growing up.

I loved it when I saw it because it was one of the most interesting variations I'd seen on The Little Mermaid," and because of Fujimoto, and because it made me want a bowl of noodles with ham.

[osprey_archer]

I'm fairly sure that the ending is no-take-backs anyway; Ponyo is going to remain a girl whether or not she and Sosuke love each other forever. Hopefully she remains happy with this choice once she gets a bit older!

[missroserose]

I had precisely that thought when I watched Ponyo - that seems like an awful weight of expectation to put on a five-year-old! But in my mind they grow up to be the sort of best friends who've known each other forever and go to rock concerts together and can call each other at 3 AM when they've had a fight with their partner and will call each other out when they're being a jerk. Love takes many forms. :)

Speaking of which, I had So Many Conflicting Feelings about Professor Marston. I loved Elizabeth (there may be some self-identification gonig on there, heh) and I really liked that it didn't (as I initially feared) try to portray her as all enlightened and Beyond Your Human Jealousy - she's intelligent but just as prone to human failings as anyone. I loved the G-String King - I kinda want a whole movie about his life, now. And yeah, those sex scenes. Whoof. But the ethics of the situation definitely twigged me a bit, and I was very frustrated at how Olive kept being put into a passive role (and not in a sexy way) - by the end it felt like her entire role in the story was to be a pretty symbol for Elizabeth's alternating self-discovery and self-hatred. To a degree the emotional payoff in the final scene made this work better, but it still felt like lazy storytelling - I wanted to know more about the life she'd gone off and built when Elizabeth kicked her out of their house in suburbia. And the whole subplot/framing story about the comic burnings felt largely unresolved and superfluous. It just felt like they were trying to tell too many stories (the conception of Wonder Woman! the Marstons' unconventional relationship! the midcentury comics backlash! the period's underground kink world! Elizabeth's discovery of her sexuality!) and fell down on most of them. I wanted to love it so badly and I...couldn't quite. Still, it's nice to see a portrayal of kink and polyamory in the media that's positive and creative and happy-making.

ETA: Oh! And Steel Magnolias. (I have All The Thoughts on movies today, apparently.) So, interesting story: this is one of my mother's favorite movies, and I watched it with her when I was a teenager and had many of the same thoughts you did - I'm not a big one for weepies, it felt kind of manipulatively tear-jerk-y. Then when I was visiting her recently, Perseverance Theatre (the one professional theatre in Alaska, who're really quite good) was putting on a production of the play, so I bought us tickets. And I was surprised at how much more I enjoyed it. I genuinely don't know if it's because I have a lot more female friends now, or if it was something about the show itself. I'm tempted to say the latter - they had a killer cast, and the woman playing M'Lynn took a very different tack on the breakdown scene at the end - less showy and more intense. It felt more genuine to me. But interestingly, my mother said she preferred the movie version, though she wasn't sure if that was because it was the one she was used to.

[osprey_archer]

I did a bit of research after I saw Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (by which I mean I read some reviews) and apparently the frame story didn't even happen: there were some comic book burnings, but Marston was never called before any kind of board to account for his kinky comic book. The film could have cut it entirely and it would have improved both historical accuracy and pacing; it would have left room for, say, a scene exploring Olive's life without the Marstons.

Although apparently that never happened either: the neighbors never objected to (or possibly even found out about?) their triadic relationship, and so Olive never got kicked out. I think perhaps the thing came about to create the setup for the last scene, where Elizabeth and William go down on bended knee to ask her to stay (and to be fair that's a great scene) - but the same effect could have been achieved some other way, maybe.

I've heard that the stage play for Steel Magnolias is different than the movie, so perhaps that also played a part in your different reaction to the story?

[missroserose]

Seriously, none of that was based on fact? Cripes. Yeah, I would've taken an entirely different tack telling that story, then. I get that biopics are tricky because people's lives don't fall into neat three-act structures, but none of that even contributed structurally. Did the screenwriter have to come up with conflict to fill out a relatively smooth story, maybe? It's true, that last scene is pretty great, but still.

I was wondering that too about the play - it followed the plot beats I remembered pretty well, but it's been literally half my life since I watched the movie so I'm certainly forgetting some details. The primary difference was that the entire thing took place inside the hair salon, but I wonder if that didn't contribute to the tightness of the script. not being spread out in different locations really concentrated the women's relationships (although I was a little sad that by definition that meant we didn't get the scene of Ouiser using her compact mirror to check out the dudes in the locker room - that was by far my favorite moment in the movie). It made sense that the salon would be where they'd let out their strongest emotions, because it was their safe space.

[osprey_archer]

I suspect the filmmakers probably did feel that they needed to drama Professor Marston and the Wonder Women up a bit - and perhaps thought that modern viewers wouldn't buy it if this whole triad thing didn't cause a scandal, even though that is in fact the truth? 'Everyone knows that in The Past the neighbors always noticed aberrant sexual arrangements and censured them 100% of the time," Joe Average Viewer scoffs.

[artemis_wandering]

I want to see Professor Marston. It's interesting because I've been hearing for years as a comics fan about the polyamorous relationship, and then this movie comes out regarding that, and then his daughter (granddaughter?) says its all fake. I'm rooting for the movie version, frankly. Glad its good!

I wish we had more female friendship movies.

[osprey_archer]

Oooh, I hope you get the chance to see Professor Marston! It's definitely worth a look. And I would take the daughter's word with a grain of salt, because kids usually don't know all about their parent's sex lives, you know? The adults were probably rather more discreet about things than they were in the movie.

I think I ought to write my own rec list of female friendship movies. I'm not sure whether it should be focused on personal favorites or include everything with a lot of female friendship even if, like Steel Magnolia, it's not my favorite kind of movie...

I think there are few enough female friendship movies that putting them all on the list would probably be best. I'd just have to annotate it well to give people an idea what they're getting into.

[artemis_wandering]

I'm sure you could do a detailed rec list based on genre and maybe * your fav ones. Of course, that's a lot of work. :) But I'm sure people would appreciate it!

Yeah, that's what I thought to regarding the family (not knowing) - although I'm also sad she thinks its a bad thing. There are happy poly families who are out to people these days and if I suddenly found out that my grandparents let's say had been in a happy triad for some time, I'd be shocked - because this is my family who are ultra conservative - but I'd embrace that happily and not feel like it was a threat or going to look bad. But I also hold a different opinion than many to begin with.lol