jentleman film journal.

Fullness of Narrative in “Lawrence of Arabia”

Or, The AFI List Project, #7: Lawrence of Arabia

I don’t know that Lawrence of Arabia is the greatest movie ever made, because I’m not sure that, in questions of taste, it’s possible to affix such definitive and concrete labels. I am sure, however, that it belongs to that very select group of films that have to be a part of that conversation; it is one of the few movies in history that delivers both deep narrative complexity and substantial sensual entertainment. And, if we are to discuss film as a visual medium, there may be no higher example of the visual art of moviemaking than Lawrence, with its vast landscapes and vividly saturated photography. Seen in a movie theater, one becomes aware that it is something akin to a miracle of cinema.

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No Harm, No Foul: Butch Cassidy and the Construction of the Immoral Protagonist

Or, The AFI List Project #73: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

One consistent theme that I’ve touched on in the Journal is the idea that the filmed narrative thrives most when it depicts characters on the margins, or completely outside, of the world that we know and inhabit. In part, that’s because the particular genius of the movies is the ability to tangibly create worlds that the spectator conceives of only abstractly or not at all. Thus, film gives a window into the lives of those that are outside our everyday existence: superheroes, aliens, outlaws, and all the rest.

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Space Babies and Orbital Ballet: The Cinematic Non-Narrative of “2001”

Or, The AFI List Project #15: 2001: A Space Odyssey

For a movie so championed as a chilling parable of the final and necessary opposition between man and its mechanical creations, 2001: A Space Odyssey devotes remarkably little time to fleshing out the conflict between computer and the astronauts that it is trying to kill. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” has entered the lexicon as the most memorable line from cinema’s most celebrated piece of science fiction, but the movie is fixated on far more cosmic themes than Dr Bowman’s derring-do in dismantling his ship’s microchip brain. The origins of human behavior; the insignificance of man in the infinite scale of the heavens; birth, death, and resurrection – it is The Tree of Life, but better, in spaceships, and shot half a century earlier.

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Marx Madness: The Brother Act and Physical Comedy as Film Art

Or, The AFI List Project #60: Duck Soup

Comedy, especially satire, has never aged as well as drama, even from the ancient days. Aristophanes may be considered the first comedian, but it takes a thorough updating to make his satires watchable; the plays of his peers Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, meanwhile, can reliably be found, with few adjustments beyond translation, on stages across the world. It is no different in the movies: of the great comic acts of the first part of the century, it seems to me that only Charlie Chaplin’s films are still widely consumed, while the likes of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers are remembered more as names and through their influence on later films than for their works themselves.

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“The Artist”, “The African Queen”, and What A Movie Is About When We Say That It Is About Something

Or, The AFI List Project, #63: The African Queen

Cinematic purists were up in arms throughout the recent Oscar campaign because – rightly, as it turned out – The Artist was widely regarded as the movie to beat. In such circles, that movie was regarded as a charming but lightweight entertainment (‘slight’ was the word used by many, including myself) that was only garnering attention because of its silent-era conceit. It wasn’t, in other words, About Something; for all its charms, it didn’t deal with anything real in the way that flawed but ambitious movies like The Descendants or Moneyball or even Midnight in Paris did.

The problem, of course, is that, when we speak conceptually about movies being ‘about something,’ the construction is often used either totemically, to justify biasing one movie over another, or grandiloquently, to emphasize what makes a particular film great. That isn’t to claim that declaring There Will Be Blood to be ‘about America’ is false – but it is to claim that those of us who make such declarations very rarely attempt to explain just what they mean. That opens the door for populist protestations very much like those put forward by apologists of The Artist (‘Why does a movie have to be about something to be good?’) or counter-claims about different films (‘Yes, but you could say the same thing about this other movie’).

There is, in other words, an underlying question that no one has quite got around to answering, which is, simply, What is a movie About when we say that it is About Something?

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Flipping the Script: “Midnight Cowboy” and the (Male) Hooker with the Heart of Gold

Or, The AFI List Project, #43: Midnight Cowboy

For actresses, there are a couple of statistically good ways to go about getting yourself an Oscar statuette, but the best is probably playing a prostitute onscreen: at least thirteen Oscars have gone to actresses playing hookers of one type or another in AMPAS’s eighty-four year history, and even more have been nominated who didn’t win. For some reason – perhaps because it’s the antithesis of Hollywood glamour, or perhaps because it’s so far removed from the everyday experiences of most people, or perhaps simply because prostitution is seen as the lowest depths to which a woman can sink – good portrayals of prostitutes gain an air of being an especially impressive and difficult feat of performance.

What happens, though, when that gets turned around and our prostitute isn’t a down-on-her-luck young woman but a cheerful, young Texan? That question is the one that motivates Midnight Cowboy, in which a young man named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) gets fed up and leaves the small tragedies of his small Texas town with dreams of being a New York ‘hustler.’ Wearing his ostentatious red and blue shirts, cowboy boots, and buckskin jacket, he makes his way East and starts wandering around New York soliciting wealthy women to be his clients.

Narratively, this isn’t a movie about social issues so much as displacement. Joe Buck comes to New York with big dreams and an idea of how he’s going to make it, but he never figures out how to adapt to his new surroundings, mostly because he doesn’t quite want to: the issue isn’t that you can’t take the country out of the boy but that the boy doesn’t want to change. Somehow, his aspiration is to be the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. The story of the movie becomes, then, the story of his discovery that male prostitution and hearts of gold don’t mix very well.

Backing away from the specificities of Midnight Cowboy’s plot and setting, I’d like to examine it as an obvious and excellent example of ‘flipping the script,’ in the sense that it takes an ancient and well-worn theme – Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, remember – and turns it on its head to shake out previously un- or under-explored meanings. Midnight Cowboy is a clear-cut example because, in the cultural consciousness, prostitution is a transactional, gendered profession wherein men pay for services from women, so changing the gender roles is an obvious way to find avenues for new interpretations. That’s because, at least in the way that we have been taught to think, nothing that men and women do is as gendered as sex and because the extreme transactional nature of prostitution throws the contrasts and contradictions of that gendering into sharp relief. The hooker with the heart of gold can exist if she is a woman, because we can accept her as a victim, someone who has been forced by circumstance and society into a role that she cannot escape and in which she can therefore still be a damsel in distress.

Joe Buck is still a victim, of course, as Midnight Cowboy takes pains to illustrate in flashbacks to his life in Texas: he had no mother, his grandmother seems to have spent more time entertaining men than taking care of Joe, and it’s clear that something horrible happened to him having to do with his old girlfriend Annie. But it’s hard to hold onto the image of him as such, because Joe’s trouble isn’t that he has been forced into prostitution but that he dreams of being a hustler and can’t figure out how to do it. He has chosen this line of work, not been forced into it. He is earnest and amiable, a nice country boy trying to make it in a profession that demands an edge, and his kindness works consistently against him – the same sort of kindness that makes the archetypal hooker-with-heart-of-gold so appealing, though she usually has more wisdom and world-weariness than Joe does. Yet Joe is also young and able-bodied and strong, so for him there is always the option of violence. Choosing it, Midnight Cowboy suggests – backing up his aww-shucks appeal with strong-armed force, if necessary – is what will allow Joe to make it as a hustler. Success, for him, means recognizing and embracing the ugliness that underlies the life he has chosen.

That isn’t to say that movies featuring female prostitutes aren’t also about the ugliness of sex work: Monster is almost the literal embodiment of it, with Charlize Theron transfigured into a creature as physically ugly as the life she leads has forced her to become in spirit. The point is that Midnight Cowboy offers a new and different frame of reference. Because Joe hasn’t been forced to become a hustler – because he has chosen the profession for himself – the ugliness of it all isn’t taken for granted. As Joe comes to understand it, so too do we, which offers us an idea about a different aspect of the human cost of his profession. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

I’ve gotten this far without mentioning once the relationship between Joe and Dustin Hoffman’s Rizzo, which lies at the heart of the picture and which provides the movie with most of its emotional and narrative heft. That’s because, as far as my stated theme is concerned, that relationship is probably the most conventional aspect of the narrative, a prototypical bromance that just happens to feature a gigolo and a cripple. Midnight Cowboy’s flipping the script, and its most interesting element, is its substitution of Joe for the hooker with the heart of gold; and, to extrapolate outwards, the value of flipping the script, if successful, is how it enables access to new layers of truth and meaning.

That said, we can’t ignore the importance of Joe and Rizzo’s relationship, because without it there would be no reason to watch the movie. All the narrative innovation in the world doesn’t mean anything without a reason to care about what’s happening on screen (yes, I’m looking at you, Lars von Trier). Midnight Cowboy is interesting for its examination of Joe’s unsuitedness for hustling, but it’s good because the relationship between Joe and Rizzo is compelling enough to make that unsuitedness matter more than as a heavy-handed examination of social themes.

The Importance of the Ending

Or, The AFI List Project, #38: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

About a year ago, I read an article in the New York Times in which the writer was discussing his reaction to Schindler’s List. Unfortunately, the name of the writer and the exact content of his article have been lost to my memory, but the salient point was that he remembered not liking the film even though his wife assured him that he had. On a second viewing, he discovered the source of the debate: in fact, he had enjoyed the majority of the film, only to be disappointed in the closing act.

I say all this because watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has raised to me far more clearly the question of just how important the right ending is for crafting a good film. A frequent criticism that I find myself making, and that readers of the blog have almost certainly seen, is that the ending isn’t ‘consistent’ or that the film ‘falls apart in the third act.’ What I mean by that is that the film in question doesn’t stay true to the situation that it has created, and that in so doing the movie fails to accomplish what it has set out to do. Watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, however, I find myself presented with two questions about this view of narrative consistency. First, to what degree is it simply code for not liking the way that the director and producer chose to end their film? And second, how much should the ending matter in our overall assessment of a film, or any narrative medium?

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, if you don’t know, is a movie about a desperate American in Mexico (Humphrey Bogart) who decides to pitch in with two others and go prospecting for gold. Though the title makes it sound like it’s going to be an adventure story, the film, directed by the legendary John Huston, ends up being a nuanced psychological study of the effects of the promise of riches on Bogart’s increasingly unstable antihero Frank Dobbs, and asking questions about risk, death, luck, and trust along the way. Yet the ending seems to overreach, suddenly lunging for an overwrought irony rather than letting the chips fall as it seems that they should. The damage this ending does to an overall impression of the film is lessened by the reaction of the principals, but even so one is left with the feeling that Huston was trying to force his tale into producing an unjustified moral.

Moving away from the question of whether or not the ending fit, how much does unease with film’s ending justify a negative reaction to the film as a whole? For a plot-driven film, I think that it’s arguable that all of the film’s credibility rests on its conclusion. Try to imagine Shakespeare in Love with a happy ending: wouldn’t that have robbed the film of all of its narrative power? Well, one may say, the movie would have been just as witty and fun, and then we wouldn’t have felt sad at the end. Once one starts trying to imagine exactly how a happy ending would have been accomplished, though, I think the conceptual reaction that one might have liked it more loses some of its clarity, since there would have needed to be some significant twisting to get the plot to yield such an ending. The final result of that twisting could have only resulted in a cheapening of the film’s emotional impact. The power of the movie, after all, comes from the clash between Will and Viola’s desperate love and the realities of Viola’s social position. If (‘surprise!’) these turn out to be compatible in the end, then why have we just spent two hours being made to see how impossible the whole situation is?

Shakespeare In Love may be an extreme example, since changing from ending with the lovers’ inevitable separation to an ending in which they can be together would have been such a radical shift. Changing the nature of the ending would have altered the entire meaning of the film. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by contrast, the ironic conclusion doesn’t radically transform the movie’s meaning, as it’s the resolution of the last hanging plot point after its protagonist’s journey has already ended; it’s more a coda than a climax. Nonetheless, it’s a sour note to end on, seeing what has been a terrific, nuanced film suddenly shift gears to present us with a contrived irony — especially since an almost identical effect could have been achieved in a number of less obviously false ways.

That said, it’s also the case that we’re more willing to forgive certain films this fault than others: barring the possibility of there being a year-end heavyweight that I haven’t seen yet, Drive is almost certainly the best movie of 2011, yet it falls from sublimity to mild incoherence in its final forty minutes. Similarly, Inception leaves off with a maddeningly ambiguous shot that divided audiences. I hated the ending, but I still thought that it was one of last year’s best movies. So why am I willing to forgive these films the same fault that drives me crazy about movies like Avatar and almost everything directed by Martin Scorsese?

Without going too far in depth about the particularities of those films, I think the answer lies in the more fundamental question of narrative honesty. Truly bad films are dishonest from beginning to end. Their endings may not be inconsistent, but only because those the deck has been doctored so that such an ending can come about: the ending of Avatar is cheap and dishonest, but only because the rest of the film has been, too. More troubling are those cases where the ending seems at odds with what has preceded it, as is the case with Minority Report, wherein an edgy, excellent sci-fi thriller inexplicably devolves into cliché in the last twenty minutes. Even taking the good with the bad, though, one has to acknowledge these as failures. The endings of Drive and Inception, on the other hand, were weak in comparison with the rest of those films, but they didn’t betray their respective projects.

In a sense, the answer seems to be that the importance of the ending has to do with its scale: how important is the ending to the meaning of the film? Even if it’s unsatisfying, does it work? There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about Mike Nichol’s responding to criticisms of the ending of The Graduate by saying that he wasn’t sure if it was a good ending or a bad ending, but that he knew it to be the right ending. For some films, the best they can manage is the ‘right’ ending, even if it isn’t a good one; there are cases where, for whatever reason, it’s the only ending possible. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre doesn’t fit into this category — its ending is neither right nor good — but its effect on the meaning of the film is marginal enough that it can be forgiven. In such a case, a poor ending is something to note and criticize, but not something that should ruin an otherwise good film. It’s when the ending fundamentally changes and cheapens a film’s intellectual and narrative cohesion that it should have a significant impact on our opinion of that film.

The Farmboy, the Princess, and the Hooligan: Reclaiming “Star Wars”

Or, The AFI List Project #13: Star Wars

What is there to say about Star Wars that has not already been said? It’s probably the most famous movie ever made, and its parade of creatures, spaceships, and quotes have permeated the cultural consciousness to the point that to hear that someone hasn’t seen it arouses not so much surprise as confusion.

Amidst the avalanche of toys, sequels, prequels, novelizations, lunch boxes, comic books, card games, and whatever other merchandise this 1977 space opera has engendered, however, the original films have become closer to a reference point than a living cinematic object. For most of us — those of us who don’t dress up as Jedi and attend conventions — we use them as an ideal to stress just how bad the prequel trilogy was, but they occupy a deeply embedded space in the consciousness, something familiar and known, but only half-remembered.

I say this because, when you watch Star Wars again — and I am referring to THE Star Wars, the 1977 film that started it all — it doesn’t read quite like a ‘Star Wars movie’ as that has come to mean in 2011. Darth Vader isn’t even a true villain yet: he’s bad, sure, but he comes off more as the right-hand man of the coldly villainous Grand Moff Tarkin. The Jedi are referred to as a defunct religion, the power of the Force is only hinted at, the cast is small, and the plot is remarkably simple.

Indeed, watching this movie again, I was most struck by how unexpectedly intimate the story is. When I think of this series, I think of sprawling, complex storylines stretching across vast regions of interstellar space. Yet, outside of a few asides so that we can follow what’s happening to Princess Leia on the Death Star, this first movie maintains a simple structure and a single thruline: Luke Skywalker encounters the two droids and transports them to Obi-Wan Kenobi; they fly to Alderaan and must escape the Death Star, rescuing Leia in the process; they take part in the final battle. There are three cleanly delineated acts: one on Luke’s desert planet, culminating in their escape on Han Solo’s ship; one in the depths of space, first on the Millennium Falcon and then on the Death Star; and finally the climactic battle scene.

A simple story, then, but one that somehow manages to capture the imagination in a way that has only been equaled in my lifetime by the Harry Potter novels. And, as I look at that sentence, it occurs to me that the two have more in common with each other — and less than with, say, Transformers and Twilight, which may on the surface seem to be more in their respective traditions — than anyone has yet acknowledged.

Transparently, the two are similar because of their success at creating separate universes, which seem so real that you can almost believe them to be true. The trick in Harry Potter is the way that Rowling succeeded in so brilliantly blending aspects of common folktales into a single, comprehensive world. In the case of Star Wars, the success of its world creation in part comes from the highly touted ‘used future’ aesthetic that has become such an integral part of analyses of the film’s production design: the way that Luke’s landspeeder (a sort of hovering car) is banged up and dusty, or the way that the Falcon is always falling apart, rather than everything being shiny and bright and perfectly made. Just as important, though, is that the ‘used future’ aesthetic doesn’t extend through the entire film. Why does no one ever remember the fascistic beauty of the scenes shot on the Death Star, where everything is as dark, clean, and crisp as the other elements are battered? The contrast between Empire and rebels is stylistic as well as ideological (if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ can be thought of as ideologies).

Still, there is a more fundamental way in which Harry Potter and Star Wars are related, and it is in the deceptive simplicity of their stories. Neither is interested in revealing psychological truths or exploring complex motivations: their driving forces are elemental, and their morals simple. This has led to a general conception that their appeal is based on something that critics call ‘pure narrative’ or ‘pure storytelling’ — the same way that critics justified liking 2008’s eventual Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire. And, really, it is a justification, because it rests on the undying idea that things that are simple and popular and entertaining somehow can’t possibly be ‘really good,’ or qualify as ‘real art.’ It’s the same reason that you never see comedies winning Oscars. There’s a belief that quality — or at least ‘artistic’ quality, which is not quite the same thing — can only come from dramatic heft, and therefore that dramas are ipso facto better than comedies and action movies. ‘Pure narrative’ is nothing more than critical code for ‘I enjoyed this movie and thought it was better than most others, even though I usually dislike movies in this genre and even though it may lack the psychological depth of many of the movies that I prefer it to.’

In creating that code, though, the ‘pure narrative’ construction demeans these movies more than it praises them. Because, really, what makes the storylines of Star Wars or Harry Potter or even Slumdog Millionaire all that different from so many less accomplished plot-driven films? Star Wars isn’t a great story because of the Force or its deliberately mythological construction or even its spectacular special effects. Plenty of inferior films have those same elements. It is that the characters are so individual, and so memorable. The fact that Star Wars is completely uninterested in Han Solo’s psychology doesn’t change that he is more real, and more real to us, than any of those that inhabit, say, The Social Network — and that was both the best movie of 2010 and based on real life. Almost every character in Star Wars, and in Harry Potter as well, is a distinct, fully realized personality, down to R2D2, a robot who communicates entirely through beeps and whirs. Indeed, strangely enough, the least interesting character in the film is Darth Vader, who will of course grow into the most villainous creation in cinema in the latter two films. It is because its characters are so distinct that the ‘pure narrative’ has its power: we care about them, and so we care about whether or not they win through.

Han’s wisecracks, Leia’s sass, R2D2’s electronic raspberries, Luke’s longing and naivete: these are the things that we respond to, the living soul of this wondrous, imagined, ‘far, far away’ galaxy. The collective memory of Star Wars is trussed up in the trappings of everything that has come out of it, and perhaps that is to be expected. But let us recall for a moment that the reason we remember it, undiluted by merchandise, spin-offs, or sequels, is a simple, intimate story, made powerful by no more than a bunch of unforgettable characters and an indelible sense of wonder.

Story Second: The Film As Thematic Argument

Or, The AFI List Project #49: Intolerance

You’ve probably heard of D.W. Griffith, because he directed one of the most famous — and justly infamous — films of all time. It was the first cinematic epic, the first blockbuster, and also, despite James Cameron’s best efforts, the most unashamedly racist movie ever.

That movie was called Birth of a Nation, and it is not the work by Griffith that made its inevitable way onto the 2007 edition of the AFI’s Top 100 list (though it was #44 on the 1998 list). I can only assume that the reason for this is that voters balked at naming a movie glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as a seminal element of America’s cinematic heritage. Hence Intolerance got the metaphorical call instead, a movie that Griffith directed a year later and that, in being a silent, more-than-three-hours-long epic, bears at least a superficial resemblance to Birth. In fact, Intolerance was at least partly made as Griffith’s response to criticisms about the racial politics of the earlier movie.

That knowledge lends a surreal character to the experience of watching Intolerance, which is a self-declared exploration of the negative effects of intolerance throughout human history; essentially, Griffith is lambasting his critics for being intolerant of his own intolerance. Regardless, the movie must be interrogated for what it is, and that is a three-and-a-half-hour silent movie weaving together four parallel storylines that sound (silent?) forth on a shared theme. Each of these stories comes from a different era of history, and each has as its subject the failure of tolerance in a different epoch: the fall of ancient Babylon, the massacre of the Huguenots in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, and a twentieth-century story of the negative impact caused by Puritanical reformers, with snippets from the life of Christ thrown in for good measure. At first, intercutting between stories is sparse and each proceeds at its own pace, but as the movie proceeds and the stories come closer and closer to their inevitable conclusions, Griffith moves between them with ever-increasing rapidity.

I’ve noted in the past that I have little patience for silent movies, and combined with its fearsome run time that meant that I was unlikely to ‘enjoy’ Intolerance in the conventional sense. Still, the film is of interest in being the first example of a narrative film in which narrative turns out to not be the important thing. Griffith wants Intolerance to be didactic, to teach us about a theme rather than tell us a story: hence the title, which states without artifice what the movie is about. Nor does Griffith shy away from hammering his point home, with intertitles throughout explaining characters’ motives and directing interpretation of what is happening onscreen.

Plenty of movies want to make a point, of course, and most of them end up being pretty bad simply because they let their point get in the way of the truth of their story (see my article on ‘Fakers’ for more on this idea). Intolerance avoids that particular pitfall because it never claims to be telling a story, not really: it’s more a historical thesis than it is a narrative, and our judgment of its conclusion must therefore rest not on the truth of its story but on the truth of its history. And, for once, these are not the same thing, because, in each epoch represented, the ‘intolerance’ that is the connecting theme of the film is a part of the setting, rather than a part of the subject. In the segment on the fall of Babylon, for example, the ‘story’ is about a ‘Mountain Girl’ who falls in love with the prince of Babylon and, on discovering that the priests of Bel have betrayed the city to the Persians, vainly races to tell her prince about it. It may be the intolerance of the priests for the cult of Ishtar that creates the situation, but the plot revolves not around a conceptual victimization of the Mountain Girl at the hands of ‘intolerance’ but her concrete effort to race against time and warn her prince about the danger to the city.

The structure of Intolerance, with its four parallel stories centered on the same theme, bears some resemblance to a recently popular style of filmmaking that I have termed as ‘impressionistic’ because of the way that they seek to convey a rough idea of a concept or process that is outside the scope of a traditional narrative. The two best examples of this type, both of which emerged from the mind of screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, are Syriana and Traffic. Each of these movies sacrifices narrative in favor of a collage of interlocking stories in an effort to impart a general sense of the total meaning of a concept. In the case of Traffic, that concept is the drug trade, and the movie moves through a series of abbreviated, incomplete narratives to try to get at what the drug trade ‘is.’ Syriana is the same thing, just with oil instead of cocaine.

There is a significant difference, of course, in that the narrative lines of Syriana and Traffic are ‘horizontal’ while those of Intolerance are ‘vertical’: Griffith’s movie unites disparate stories across time by centering them on a recurrent theme, while Gaghan’s scripts deal with with the interlocking ripples of events happening at one time. The first is a ladder, the second a web. Nonetheless, the general principle is the same, as indeed it is with lighter fare like Love Actually: to create a movie that is about a concept rather than a story.

In its best moments, as in the montage of chases at the end of the movie, Griffith’s layering of the four stories increases the tension of the action, building suspense while also developing the parallels between the narrative lines. The problem that these movies create for themselves is that they have to meet two separate goals. In the first place, each of the substories has to be compelling, because if they are not the movie will lose the attention of its audience — especially when you consider that in order to effectively say anything meaningful, these movies have be quite long. Yet the filmmaker must do this while also putting forth a sound ‘academic’ argument — that is, as noted above, if Intolerance is to succeed, it must be able to convince us that intolerance was indeed the motivation behind each of the events that it portrays.

When the theme is love, as in Love Actually, a filmmaker has a lot of leeway, and no matter how incoherent some people may think that film is, it undeniably remains easy to watch because its goal is to be light. When dealing with more loaded material, though, the margin for error becomes increasingly slim. Traffic is probably about as good as any movie made with this structure has been to this point in history (unless we want to put The Battle of Algiers in the same category) but its dramatic needs still overcome its thematic ones in the end. Intolerance, meanwhile, puts forth the argument that past intolerances can be overcome through present enlightenment, but it never quite makes the leap to explain how. And, of course, any film constructed as an argument rather than a story runs the risk of seeming preachy, which, by way of Griffith’s maddening intertitles, Intolerance often does.

I don’t say this to take away from the ambition or originality of either Intolerance or Traffic, but to point out how the structure that gives these movies their raison d’etre can also work against them. In the case of Intolerance, it must be pointed out that it was made in 1916 and that it was – and arguably remains – the only movie to attempt this sort of vertical thematic exploration. For all its length, silence, and tiresome sermonizing, it still remains a window into the possibilities of a different kind of movie. I don’t know that that’s the kind of movie that I would want to see, but how will I know until it’s tried in a film that hasn’t become a historical oddity?

On The Road With Clark And Claudette

Or, The AFI List Project #46: It Happened One Night

It Happened One Night has earned a reputation, it seems, as either being a particularly fine example of the ‘30s screwball comedy or one of the best and longest-enduring entries in the rom-com genre. Neither of those, however, is a very accurate characterization: sure, it’s a comedy, and yes, the principals end up getting married at the end, but this is a road trip movie through and through, a Due Date for 1934, with Clark Gable replacing Robert Downey Jr. and Claudette Colbert representing a somewhat prettier and more socially competent (though equally out of her element) Zach Galifinakis.

The plot: Colbert plays young society heiress Ellen Andrews, who, after eloping with an aviator (I guess pilots were the rocks stars of the early part of the last century) is essentially kidnapped by her father and made to stay on his yacht; she escapes with the intent of making her way up from Florida to her husband in New York. Gable, meanwhile, plays Peter Warne a down-on-his-luck reporter who chances on Andrews and thinks he’s finally found his big scoop, since her escape has become big news and he father has been pulling out all the stops to try and find her. Warne commits himself to helping her get to New York, after which he’ll publish the story of their journey. Hijinx and love stories ensue.

The conceit of road movie — one on full display here — is the idea that throwing two apparently incompatible people together for long enough will make them like each other. In a way, that’s hard to argue with: making friends is often a process of sheer luck and change, and if you know someone for long enough it’s hard to not develop some sort of sympathy for them, even if they drive you crazy. (This, incidentally, has been the central theme of “The Office” for the past seven years.) I don’t know if it works as well here, though. Do we really believe that our hero and heroine are going to be able to endure each other for the rest of their lives? Or that they even really know each other?

Small, grudging points, I must concede, and indicative most of all of how little I walked away from this movie with beyond an increasing disquiet with Frank Capra’s need-shot, shoot-shot approach (you wonder if he even thought about how to shoot his scenes in advance) and, to be fair to the movie, a good time. It’s funny — Gable and Colbert have an excellent rapport — and the dialogue is well-constructed; it moves at a good pace, isn’t too hard on the eyes, and is dated enough to be hokey with getting to the level of overly ridiculous.

It also shows up the fact that, in making a Hollywood success, story is far more important than style — which might well be the coda to Capra’s entire Hollywood career. Capra’s films, at least the ones that I’ve seen, combine simple, fun, easy-to-follow storylines with generally low production value. They are, in other words, undemanding and entertaining — fully satisfactory entertainments. They also make people feel good, which may be their greatest draw.

I’m just having a hard time understanding what makes them more than that.