Couldn't Stand the Noise - NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)

"last time it was pink elephants..."

Why is booze funny? What makes this scourge of human civilization, Homer's "cause of, and cure for, all life's problems" so irresistibly funny even when unrepentantly horrible? Can we find out by examining the last film of W.C. Fields', the groundbreaking, surreal, meta-bizarro masterpiece, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)? Yes. As Fields says in Poppy, "Without purple bark sarsaparilla this mundane sphere of ours would be barren, bleak, and dank." And yet who made it so, Bill? Who made it so.... drunks is who!

"Oh, Uncle Bill... but I still love him."

When I was getting sober I vowed never to lose my affinity for Fields. He too tried sobriety, especially during a drying out period that saw the end of his Paramount days and 1938, the beginning of his Universal period. When he came back, though, his boozing had become a cornerstone of his schtick, which made it all the easier to cloak a re-descent. Hard drinking only figured in a handful of his earlier films. He barely got to drink at all in fan favorite It's a Gift. Some flask sneaking around a fire, another swig or three during the big final deal. Drank nothing at all in The Old Fashioned Way or Poppy (in both of which he wore a ridiculous, Ziegfeld-style clown costume), nothing in Tillie and Gus, and only had a few evening apple jack nightcaps in Man on the Flying Trapeze. Just being mean to children and never paying his boarding house tabs was enough to be a rogue in those days, apparently. But starting with Universal and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Fields had full script control, the kid gloves were off and the madness began, and it warsth chasherlesh.

Over the years I've grown comfortable with the idea of never being able to drink again (it's been 15 misera--I mean er-a beautiful years). The sorrows of life are the joys of art, as Ben Hecht would say. If you're an artist or writer, what better sorrow than strong spirits, the beautiful, wild demoness of drink? I was just too weak in the end to keep up with her. I had to let her go. Last I heard she was in Chicago and married with xx beautiful children--but I still love her.

Fields, slowly dying of alcoholism by the time of NEVER, could never shake her from his system the way I did. He tried. But trying isn't comedy and the eternal thirst becomes funny even at its most tragic level, the ultimate in heartbreak, through Fields' blearily-focused lens. I've used the metaphor before of climbing a rocky, snowy mountain as marriage, work, responsibility, chores, mortgages, nagging wife dogging you all the way, sobriety and then, when you're 3/4 of the way up the snowy mountain suddenly a beautiful girl comes sledding past shouting "jump on!" You have only a split second to decide. She's not slowing down. And even though a part of you has vowed to never cheat or jeopardize your home, you just jump on, clamp your hands around her waist and down you plunge, your wife's angry cries disappearing immediately into the background winds... replaced your wild--if strained--laughter.

Then you get to the bottom. And her boyfriend is waiting to punch you in the nose. The three wayward cupid children hover in the air, ripping their arrows from your hide in gentle arcs of pulsing red. She laughs, grabs her toboggan and takes the next chairlift while you lie there, your blood spilling all over the snow. What do you shout to yourself, if you're me or Fields? "Again! Let's go again!"

Again... no quarter given to thy foe, thyself, or rather that barren, bleak dank sphere, that mountain of barren rock you were scaling called marriage, family, work, gutter and lawn maintenance. Fields' love for booze reflects a very clear need to escape all this 'obligation,' to vamoose, to disappear into the mist, down the mountain on booze's reckless sled, and thus to let the vicious roundelay of sleeping, waking, eating, shitting, working, dying, recede like the fading cries of "Harrrr--Rold!" from an outraged shrew wife.  Even if the disappearance is only temporary, just time eased from its wearying consistency for half a tick, it's worth any price, any toll on health, wealth, or sanity.

Civilization has, in it's way, never been able to shake this wild demoness. Prohibition just drove the price up, and heightened the camaraderie, the shared joke with the speakeasy passwords. Part of the charm of setting a film like International House in China was the lack of prohibition; Americans came out there to get away from the madness of sanity. Once prohibition was repealed, things went back to normal, like it does a few months after you turn 21 and the thrill of unlimited access without need of a fake license wears off. So being sober means understanding the reality of booze, which is that getting blotto, never measures up to the warm glow anticipation of getting blotto. The buzz is like music, ephemeral, but in actual consumption of booze comes the fallout of hangover, sloppiness, missed deadlines, illness, depression, anxiety, amnesia, and the occasional 'missed launch' wherein you can be so shitfaced you can't stand up and yet horribly sober, miserably conscious of how un-enraptured you are,  no matter how drunk you get. (For a great description of this horror, read the last chunk of Kerouac's Big Sur).

People get into this loop with lovers all the time: you see a beautiful girl, meet her, click, it's magic; one booty call later and you shrink in horror just running into her on the street. Why not leave desire just as it is, desire? It sounds sad, but there's a unique freedom in it once you get over the initial sense of hopelessness. The absence of the desired object creates the longing, which is itself the reward. No romance is ever purer than when the lovers are apart. All it takes is the willingness to embrace Lacanian precepts and let them erode your delusions, like those nanobots in GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA arode the Eiffel Tower!

Now there are people who aren't alcoholics, so they don't know the true joy of the terror of addiction, the horror of convulsions and D.T.s or the giddy ecstasy of waking up feeling like death, pouring a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice highball, pounding it down in a single gulp, pouring another one, and sitting down to watch your favorite bender movie, SPECIES or APOCALYPSE NOW, and realizing it's only six AM on a Sunday, not six PM, like you feared. You have the whole day, hours left to try and taper off. For now, down the hatch! The agony and ache of your morning hangover vanishes and is replaced by ecstasy in a matter of minutes. Next thing it's six AM on a Monday, and you're thinking of reasons you can't come into work, putting that scratch in your voice for when you call your boss.  Godfrey Daniel!

The best way I've learned to explain it is on a mood count of 1-10, ten being exaltation and ecstasy, 1 being grimly depressed or suffering withdrawal, suicidal. The average person stays around a 5, and getting drunk brings them to a 6, maybe 7, then back down to a 4 for the next morning, then up to 5 again. But the average rating for gamma alcoholics suffering from low affect tolerance, like W.C. Fields and me, is 3, so below everyone else, and then drinking catapults to a perfect 10, then hits the bell and goes sailing downwards, arriving at 1, one way or the other, eventually. If you keep a steady buzz throughout the day, you can manage an extended wobble between 7-9, but the longer you keep that up the more harrowing, miserable, and lengthy your stay down at 1, over that toilet, beholding your skull reflection in the waters, because you're too sick to choke down the booze you need to stop you from being too sick to drink. My friends, when that happens, take a break from your six hour stint hyperventilating over the toilet and lean back on the cold tiles and think, "Erich and Fields were here!" And bask in the comfort that there's literally nowhere else to go but up -- or down to zero. And zero means you're off the scale - unconscious, dead, or having a massive orgasm --neither way. S


Fields made it to zero, as we all must, and hasn't worked a day since, but everyone of us still bouncing up this scale and back down longs to escape it, not just to return to the dubious joy of sobriety or alcohol but to transcend the scale altogether, to die, to be really drowned in a vat of whiskey.... that must be... glorious. But since it's too hard to kill yourself, or become a vampire, drink's a fine second, a temporary respite from the abyss of addiction, which it itself engenders (to paraphrase Nicholas St. John).

"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once dear, she drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm indebted to her for," says Fields. It's one of Sucker's more indelible lines, and probably true and it's packed with Lacanian paradox: in ruining his life, this blonde set him free. She was coming by on that sled. She brought him down to the 1 or the 2, allowing for more velocity on the  bounce up to 10. And that's what we alcoholics really love, the velocity. To shoot from a 1 to a 10 is way more awesome than going from 5-9. In fact you don't even really make 10 unless you get a good velocity going, a good bounce on the bottom spring. To savor the rush of the climb you need the bungee-style chance to press your face against the mortal coil Boiinnng, even sneer at it as it almost grabs you in its skeletal claws, and then suddenly you're bouncing off again, and all one's minor problems--debt, bad marriages, legal troubles, unemployment, bad reviews--recede-- DING! A winna! Everything but being alive and relatively uninjured is cake, minor little mosquito bites on a man running for his life. Such a man is Fields. In Never he even literally bounces, as if illustrating the blonde paradox.

Booze gets you down, and then it gets you back up, like Maxine in Night of the Iguana. She'll always get you back up. Yet at the same time it's the thing that drove you down to the depths in the first place. The technicolor joy of the first few cocktails is just a brief oasis between vast black and white stretches of inhospitable desert. But drunks are Lawrence of Arabia. Knowing how it almost killed me, still I idealize bourbon, reaching slowly with my outstretched fingers towards the giant Knobb Creek bottle in the liquor store window while Sara McLachlan sings "I will remember you / do you remember me?" in my headphones and gentle rain falls. Or as they say in AA, "happiness is never experienced, only remembered." Lacan might add, "by it's very definition!"

Fields knew this intrinsically, having had a horrible childhood, having run away from home due to an abusive father. He slept on the street or in unheated pool halls while teaching himself juggling. Still, he had no recourse to his messed up existence but to just try and easy does it 'til cocktail hour, and while he may be metatextually wasted out of his mind here and there onscreen (like the ride with the mayor in You're Telling Me) most of the time he's as nimble as a mountain goat, recycling old gags he's been kicking around since the old Follies days, but suddenly punting them through a darkly drunk prism.

 (with Carlotta Monti - Fields' mistress)

I have a similar, profound relationship to Never Give a Sucker and Even Break (1941), which aired at 5 AM on a local TV station one early Saturday morning in 1983, when I was 16, the morning before I had to go to my very first-ever day of work. I was tired, of course, having gotten up so early on a Saturday (our VCR timer was unreliable, so I'd get up early and sneak downstairs while my parents still slept, to edit out commercials and musical numbers), and then I had to get up a few hours later to stand and operate a creaky, noxious-fume spewing copier... nonstop for six hours, my chain-smoking boss lady leaping down my throat at the first pause in the clanking, as she stapled copies next to me. I was way too shy to ever ask for my breaks, presuming she would just give them to me at the appropriate time. She didn't.

But Fields had prepared me for just such a baptism of misery. All through the day his magic song echoed through my mind...

Chickens have pretty legs in Kans-assss.

I started smoking that very day.

When in Rome, dive.

 I bring up the first day of work story for a reason, and imagining that cozy airplane and comforting song all day created a soft warm feeling that resisted the crushing dehumanization of the copier. It was the first time I didn't need the actual movie to be playing to feel its benefit, SUCKER washed over me like the security possessed by someone who believes in and loves their god, their religion providing them in fellowship and brotherhood that booze provides the drunk in fellowship and isolation. The balm of the Superlonely.

"couldn't stand the noise..."

 LEVEL ONE: 

The Magic Drunk (oblivion) - altitude of cozy ecstasy

It's no coincidence that my two favorite films of Fields involve copious drinking and air travel of a uniquely Fieldsian character: the autogyro (in International House) and a giant airliner with an open air rear observation compartment and berths like a sleeper car in Sucker. For being 'up in the air' offers its own unique freedom - high in the clouds, free of all responsibility. One is essentially in heaven, Eden, free to drink into oblivion while surrounded by clouds which "look just as fleecy as... clouds" and being waited on by beautiful women.

Chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.... (2x)

Chickens lay eggs

big as nutmegs

Oh chickens they lay eggs in Kansas

Fields sings this awesome song while still in his berth after being woken by the stewardess. we see the women in earshot smiling wistfully, with the rush of the airplane in the background it becomes a scene of bliss, a mirror to the earlier scene of Gloria Jean's gypsy folk song while reaction shots of adoring lambs and donkeys intersperse and the camera tracks slowly back to reveal the diegetic, camera-within-the-shot, and microphone and lighting guys. There's a few feints at America's embattled neutrality involving a big mustachioed Russian with huge silk pants who gets "on the head hitted" with a croquet mallet Fields borrows from an Englishman. "I'm neutral, go ahead" Fields says (we wouldn't officially join the war until the following year). Fields seems to be angling for some humor of how uncomfortable it is trying to share space with a giant in an airport bathroom, but he loses his way and winds up with a gag about shaving each other by accident ("that's a hot one!"), and things you only notice after seeing it a few dozen times, are slowly revealed, ike how Fields quietly robs the Russian giant of the contents of his bathroom kit, just in a manner so slight and steady one basically has to focus only on his hands.

 LEVEL 2: 

The Plummet (after a bottle of golden nectar)

This thirst for freedom, the ferocity of chasing your dreams, even if the dream is destruction, even if it pulls you from the forward movement of time into a vertical plunge, this is the definition of America. Here, Fields jumps out the window and is taking a chance, that's the point, as he tells Og Oggilby in his previous film, The Bank Dick (1940): "My uncle, a balloon ascensionist, Effingham Hoofnagle, took a chance. He was three miles and a half up in the air. He jumped out of the basket of the balloon and took a chance of alighting on a load of hay."

"Golly! Did he make it?" Oggilby asks.

"Ah, no... no he didn't, Og. Had he been a younger man he probably would have made it. That's the point. Don't wait too long in life."

The Buddha could not have said it better. Then again, instead of taking a chance you can just stay in the airplane, and write a script about jumping... that's the transubstantiation of creativity at work. Just be smart enough to hide your bottle between your feet, instead of on the open air rear observation compartment window sill.

 LEVEL THREE: 

The Aerie - The Buzzard's Nest

The nest is the ideal halfway point between the uninhibited surrealism of International House and the average family man yarns of Fields' earlier Paramount days - Margaret Dumont is much cooler and more fun as a foil than either Jan Duggan (whose nonetheless pretty great) and Kathleen Howard, whose one-note shrillness can turn off potential fans of Man on the Flying Trapeze and It's a Gift. Dumont connects the film to the Marx Brothers and has her own weird sense of gravitas. As Molly Haskell says "the poise and unruffled splendor with which (Dumont) graces their films is ample testimony to their place in their hearts and in film history." (67) So while we may be somewhat enjoyably shocked by the first appearance of the mother, it's almost a relief to see Dumont since the first thing Fields sees turning around (after Ouilatta looks over his shoulder smiling innocently, "why, mother!") Fields beholds a giant, fanged Great Dane, implying that her mother is in fact the dog --like in The Omen!! 

The normal act of the 'old reprobate' is to make moves on the young daughter, and here in this surreal 'nest' there's nowhere else to go on the mesa but down, The mother (Margaret Dumont), Mrs. Hemoglobin and her fanged rottweiler are inescapable. She might move from outraged to flattered and preparing for her own squigilum rubber, but in some ways this even more alarming. The mesa top is small and we can see the whole thing in detail (above), the round bed on which Ouilatta Hemoglobin (Susan Miller) reclines, looking up in calm astonishment. But just as there's no man around, there's no escape from her mother, "a buzzard if ever there was one," as he later explains to visiting engineers Charles Lang and Emmett Vogan (below). So down he plunges. On a subtextual level, the daughter and mother (and dog) are inescapably joined. Just as Sue Lyon in Lolita inevitably turns into Shelly Winters (see Lyon in Winters) there's no freezing Ouilatta in time, she will become a great dane-Hemoglobin hybrid. His best bet for female companionship is celibacy, to avoid the Humbert Humbert trap and stay the good uncle role with Gloria Jean. It's his one redeeming trait.

LEVEL FOUR:

The Russian Village 

Director Cline and Fields incorporate one of Gloria Jean's Russian peasant songs via a mirculous scene in the Russian village bar. Fields is told that the buzzard who lives on the mountain top is rich, causing him to immediately have a moment of clarity about his undying love for Mrs. Hemoglobin. As the music swells slow and mysterieux in the background, he notes, eyes a-twinkle, "she has a good heart, too... in fact she seems like an awfully nice woman to me.... now that I come to think of it." The chorus of the Russian villagers grows louder and we cut back to Gloria Jean joining in the peasant song as her wagon rides up to the village ("How do I get to the Russian village?" - as if there's only one) the song and gypsies seem to coast into the town on the unearthly but achingly gorgeous vibe of their song, Gloria Jean wailing over the top in long sustained notes like a theremin, or Louis Armstrong. So the music here functions in a bizarre way: we don't often hear the music of a separate scene leak over into the other and perform an entirely seaparate function. And we're glad to see the pair re-united after Fields' sudden and strange departure.

LEVEL FIVE:

Esoteric Studios - Mr. Pangborn's Office (Reality)

It's always a bit of a wrankler when Pangborn slams the script down because we never get to learn what happens next, and this movie-within-the-movie is so much better than the 'real' that surrounds it. In the reality of Hollywood, Gloria Jean would lose her contract if she popped Pangborn in the proboscis, and if she didn't finish her contract might wind up behind the law suit eightball. Certainly the binding clauses of Hollywood and censorship seem to plague Fields, to the point he's expected to hide his drinking: "This scene was supposed to be in a saloon but the censor cut it out" he says while popping into an ice cream shop for a drink. It is allegedly true, but how- the only real gag in the whole thing is basically just Fields trying to get a scoop of ice cream into his mouth while his straw keeps wilting at the last possible second, and the ice cream vendor guy tries to swat a fly. "It's killers like you that give the west a bad name." One wonders what the original gag was like. Was Fields trying to get a drink to his lips but his hands were shaking so bad he kept spilling the shot? Man, I know that feeling. I've had to lower my lips down around a manhattan glass more than you'll ever know, sucking off the top until my shakes stopped. But oh what a glorious feeling when they did (that rocket up to 10).  

And of course the surrounding 'real' part of the film is memorable for the presence of Carlotta Monti (above) as Pangborn's receptionist, whose speaking to presumably her boyfriend when she says "You big hotty-doddy... you smoke vile cigars all day and drink whiskey half the night," which Fields presumes is about him and takes his five for a nickel Stingaroo cigars out of his pocket and leaves them on the table in penance. That's supposed to be the joke, Fields thinks she's talking to him, but she's on the phone, he doesn't see her ear piece. The double weirdness is that Fields is her boyfriend, and got her the part, and he does do the things she surely griped about in real life. Typical then, that Fields would include copious real life in-jokes understood perhaps only by himself, something I try to do in this blog! She's cute with little Norma Shearer arms, but it's sad that wound up an eternal mistress helper to the man and all she got was this part enabling her to complain through the wire-bars of metatextual prism. I've not read her book or seen the movie with Rod Steiger as Fields, as I'm afraid of losing even a gram of my love for the man. As you know from my first day of work story, I need him.

And I still love him.

CODA:

HIS LITTLE NIECE, GLORIA JEAN 

In the end, despite being all about the pursuit and abandonment of illusion, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break remains extraordinarily clear-eyed about the moment-by-moment inevitability of mortality. There's no delusion of a happy ending, except that Fields and his niece are going down south for awhile (maybe to Brazil like Orson Welles, on a 'good will' tour). The whole film occurs basically over a day at the studio, from the mom and niece separating for the day's work and talking about Uncle Bill. "Your uncle Bill is too good," the mom says. And he's still too good by the end.

Of course Bill's had cute girl daughters and charges before, from Poppy, Sally of the Sawdust, and has a pretty, loyal daughter in It's a Gift, You're Telling Me, and Man on the Flying Trapeze and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, a less loyal one in It's a Gift and The Bank Dick But this is the first time they haven't been of marriageable age. But they've always been 'good' to him, whereas very young girls and boys, such as Buddy and Butch, Gloria Jean's stand-up bass and accordion accompanists, are shits. When this mischievous pair sling-shoot Field's hat off she picks up a brick to throw back at them. "Count ten!" Fields advises.

But she's also there to add something no comedy could escape in the 40s, songs. What idiot decided comedy needed long musical breaks? Whomever he was, Fields thought he was an idiot too. That said, Cline and Fields refuse to just waste comedic or metatextual opportunities during the numbers. One of the songs, presented as a lengthy rehearsal on a busy under-construction set, is targeted by the film for being insufferably bourgeois even within the film itself, as all concerned groan about the corniness of the Pangborn's lengthy, tedious song. Hollywood's desire for respectability is here in full flower, what Shaw calls the Englishmen's mistaking virtue for being merely uncomfortable, going to see classical music concerts because they like the idea of themselves like classical music. This stuffed shirt squareness was usually the purview of MGM but Universal wanted to at least go through the motions. Fields and Cline are way too hip for any such airs. And we're shown shots of Gloria Jean's, the pianist's, and Buddy and Butch's boredom, and their revenge via spit out cherry pits, and Pangborn's smarmy interest as he conducts, after squashing the boogie woogie song "Uncle Bill wanted me to sing." In other words, Fields may not be able to get the songs he wants for Gloria Jean, or be allowed to go singer-less, but he can damn sure express his contempt for Universal's bourgeois aspirations. And he invites all concerned in on the conspiracy against the Pangborn effigy, even the singer herself.

Gloria's earlier screen test incidentally also involves gypsies. This time we start with her by the fire with he chorus, then slowly pans back as she walks forward, to reveal the camera, sound operator, and so forth. It' not really the first time we've been 'fooled' that way in films, but it serves Fields plans, not to be artsy but to express solidarity with Gloria Jean, and the need to fill the time with interesting reaction shots (lamb, mule, etc.) in a foreshadow of the adoring women smiling as Fields sings "Chickens have Pretty Legs in Kansas."

In other words, Fields loves Gloria Jean, and loves Carlotta Monti, and even, still, the beautiful blonde who drove him to drink, and doesn't even bear ill will to them or even to Pangborn's uptight head of Esoteric Pictures. In fact, he hasn't an enemy in the world (in his eyes at least) and at least none that cause him undue concern no matter how hostile they are. But he's still going down fast, like a plummeting anchor, to that final and eternal level, to the base of the mountain with the waiting boyfriend's fist, to the mighty number zero, where 10 and 1 are just as fleecy as... clouds, where there is no longer a difference between sky, buzzard nest, mountain, village, movie, reality, just the vat of whiskey drowning that all the poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst dream.

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Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO (1995)

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling, which is almost meta to begin with, since moviemaking is an intensely expensive venture (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino or two all its own) and no one knows for sure when they lay down big cash like that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about rolling dice is so meta it can't fail.

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as casino sites like http://www.jackpotcity.co.uk let you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. Robbery of a casino meant as a lark is far less, somehow, evil than the actual operation of one. But Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling, to  keep your tells in check and your sense of the odds present without resorting to card counting or cheating, you must be unlucky at love. And what in the end, is a priority? The smart gambler may deliberately sabotage his chances at a happy love life. Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO, in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too stupid to succeed.

I've already covered the delights of the here-and-gone beauty that is Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here). But what about 1995's overseen CASINO? A fine metaphor for the allure of gambling, and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys in suits smoking big cigars, who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers, and glitzy lights are the height of elegance. Their Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, or life. Who wouldn't want that kind of rush? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia, then the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds, grateful to not be lucky at cards after all?

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the curse of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautifully craggy old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just imitating himself.  Joe Pesci is now so typecast the only he can escape his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the ante. He doesn't drop the ball so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up oranger, belly paunchier, sneer frozen, and when he throws massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming, as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train, the gravity seems to weigh him down, broaden him around the edges as he sinks into self parody's disheartening mire.

Sharon Stone, critics dutifully adoring her all the while, falls into the same hole in the desert, turning a sad vixen's marriage into a brilliant if overly shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying to be a sad vixen Stanwyck knew that before you get to the raw tigeress force you need modulation, dynamics, some laugh. Hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? Whatever it is, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT, and TOTAL RECALL, knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry, a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone to reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women and knows how to get them to retract their claws and let down their hair, she falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats ("lots of holes in the desert") and beatings over owed vigs. Don Rickles, for example, as the pit boss, is like a bouncer from hell, his insult comic genius held in check like a pit bull on a leash. In the scenes where De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim, the film takes off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack.

But by the home stretch of the film, the tantrums of Sharon Stone in her Big Oscar Bid bogs it all down. Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen). We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy, then collapsing into tantrums. De Niro wouldn't seem such an unmitigated fool then. Instead he doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she can't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start-- bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't, even after having a kid. The only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for at least a good hour of CASINO, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him to a gunfight in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away.

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from one's own back yard, but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. If a man can find Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie, does he really need to do actual Shakespeare to prove himself? It's like with 'these' you don't know how to kill the bunny! 

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and drive for petit-bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their mix of boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING.

Sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. His house is packed with freeloader wannabes like BLOW, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice), and everything by Guy Ritchie.

And that's that.

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Favorite Critic Series - Molly Haskell

Molly Haskell is one of those brazenly feminist cultural critics who prefer to dazzle, excite, and thrill rather than deflate, demoralize, and despair. She's from the generation of women who came to prominence in the 70s, a time when feminism did not preclude casual heterosexual intercourse in an airport bathroom, and one felt one could do without condoms (or last names) as long as one was on the pill. Haskell's grand, seminal book, From Reverence to Rape, was a first of its kind, displaying an exhaustive (but never exhausting) knowledge of film history from the 1930s up through the then current 70s, evincing--in an era before home video--a familiarity with pre-code film, enough to know what few of the time could, that before 1934's huge step back, women ruled Hollywood. Competent female doctors, CEOs, aviators, and ambitious gold-digging social climbers abounded, making it all the harder to endure when, after 1934, they had to give all that up and do whatever their doltish husbands said. It was the cinematic equivalent of, say, taking back a woman's right to vote. But of course, it didn't stay that way, and after WW2 many women refused to return to their housewife-second class citizen status after working men's jobs, and Hollywood was right there with them. With her clear-eyed grasp of the whole spectrum of this struggle, Haskell locked onto the dark heart of feminist oppression and began to squeeze until its black blood ran across the page.

With the pain and despair of the post-code Handmaid's Tale-style reversal of social progress so present in her work, Haskell shouldn't be so fun to read, but her irrepressible love of movies never makes her half-full glass runneth over. Her book isn't just well-written and a stunning defense of the women's film, it's a point of no return --there can be no going back to your blissful state of patriarchal ignorance once you've read it, no way to dismiss the casual misogyny that runs deep through film history. One's perceptions are eternally expanded, but Haskell never even wakes the baby as the bathwater drains away --that is her miracle.

To say Haskell is one of my literary idols isn't doing her justice; her late husband Andrew Sarris is also an idol, the man who brought the auteur concept to America, but it's to Haskell I turn to get jazzed on wanting to see movies. Sarris can be very wrong (how can a man so smart and knowing about film be so wrong about Von Sternberg?) while Haskell's opinions have never forked from my own. Like Camille Paglia, she eschews banging her head against the patriarchal walls in favor of daring to walk around it, like Hitler through Belgium around the Maginot Line. Rather than whine for a man to come unlock the door, Haskell liberates herself. She was from that generation, the ones who didn't begrudge man his fiefdoms, just went and made their own, better verions. You can't even get mad at the dumb male fantasies that passed for art after reading Haskell because she shows you the way to still enjoy them despite your knew knowledge. She deflates the Stanley Kubrick mystique within a few sentences, not because of his misogyny per se but because it's not "a visceral explosion of deep Swiftian disgust [which she has no truck with] but a fashionable and fastidious distaste," then lets him go, like a fish that's under the limit, and you find she hasn't spoiled your appreciation of his work. She's not nitpicking, she's merely pointing out how much better, how broader and more of an enduring classic a film could have been if its maker hadn't been afraid of women.

In addition to their focus on the male proprietary gaze, many academic feminist film critics seem to feel obligated to push for a democratization of cinema. They want more races and classes and most of all, more plain-looking people in films so all of us can feel represented. These critics may be right from a certain standpoint, but who would wants to pay to see themselves after a hard day's work? No one imagines themselves in the movies as plain; in the dark we're all gods and goddesses, changing back to trolls and trogs only when the house lights rise, and Haskell gets that. She sees that glamor isn't a realm for females to waste valuable time looking pretty for the male gaze, but rather a tool with which to court androgyny. She points out that the big female stars of the 1930s and 40s all had a certain drag queen essence. She also defends actresses you'd think she'd be against: she points out the fallacy inherent in labeling Doris Day as some icon of 1950s bland hausfrauization, as if her tomboy aura masks her fear of sex. Haskell sees way, way past that but at the same time gestures towards the insufferably phony innocence of husband 'trap,' Debbie Reynolds -- "where Marilyn was false to her sexuality in the most innocent way, Debbie Reynolds was false to her innocence in the most calculating way," notes Haskell. Reynolds was "the professional virgin, and the final retribution for the polarization of women into good girls and bad... the sweetheart as purview of the wife, the justification of misogamy before the fact." (263)

Her spirited 70s 'lib' acumen illuminates the deep misunderstanding of film's ultimate function in so many of her contemporaries' writing, and how the 'no social group left behind' aesthetic robs everything it touches of resonant power even more so than the past moral codes once did. For Haskell, a film is better if its misogyny is overt, passionately-felt, instead of passive-aggressively engaging in virgin/whore dichotomies like ax-murders, turning each piece of a whole woman into separate, dysfunctions until the man can feel wondrously whole by comparison. I work at an art school and I've seen how over time actual free-thinking art has become more and more oppressed in favor of a 'safe' egalitarian aesthetic and I always stress to students how the 'women's lib' voice of the 70s was never about stripping sparkling surface glamor and beauty from art, lest some dull, plain person feel left out. It was about the right to enjoy sexual pleasure, or art, free from the suffocation of 'baby peer pressure' or feminist disgust, or the labels like 'slut' that float through our contemporary society.

Then of course one can just bask in Haskell's brilliant sentences, her use of beautiful, strange words, as in From Reverence's chapter on "The Woman's Film," when she writes about Michael Curtiz's acclaimed soaper Mildred Pierce:

 "Mildred's ambitions are from a "higher purpose" than self-fulfillment. Her words to Pierce, her first husband, elided into one sesquipedalian word, might stand as the motto of the woman's film: "I'lldoanythingforthosekidsdoyouundersandanything," she says, packing another homemade pie into a box for delivery." (The Woman's Film)

I read the book awhile ago and forgot just how refreshingly against Hollywood's nuclear family-worship it is. I always have to take a step or two back from film bloggers (who shall be nameless) who gravitate towards the empty-headed all-white, all-straight, kid-ridden post-code style embodied by, say, MGM. No offense against them, it's just to me too emblematic of all that's wrong in popular culture. Haskell sees just how passive-aggressively anti-woman this style is, with the wife or fiancee always determined to end the male's fun, to get him to settle down and to stop risking his life, to stop doing all the things we want to see him do. Showing the woman as buzzkill with no other idea in her head but getting her man to stop whatever he's doing and settle down "is a hoary Anglo-Saxon idea." (157):

 "Marriage becomes the heavy. The implication is clear: All the excitement of life--the passion, the risk--occurs outside of marriage rather than within it. Marriage is a deadly bore, made to play the role of spoilsport, the ugly cousin one has to dance with at the ball. " (The Woman's Film, 156)

In her follow-up to Reverence, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists, Haskell discusses some of the female icons of the era, including Mae West:

"Her image, complete with body language and voice, lifts buoyantly out of celluloid into space, like the inflatable life preserver that was named after her in World War II. She's a pneumatic floozy presiding over an army of panting camp followers, a Catherine the Great from Brooklyn, a Salome who adds on the layers instead of subtracting them, a Cleopatra whose infinite variety is debatable. ...Looking at her now, we can't but applaud this middle-aged woman (she was forty when she made her first film), undisguisedly rotund, flaunting an unliposcuted, unsiliconed body, and demanding her sexual privileges (72-3)

Haskell's book includes the word 'Rape' which I had to blacken out on my copy as even the word has become toxic to the point I was drawing stares in the subway while reading it, as if it was some unholy primer. And of course it's anything but. Haskell's ire isn't directed against sex, or even violence but the dangers of 're-telling' and Hollywood's misreading of the romance novel 'rape fantasy', noting that :

"The minute you describe a sexual encounter to another person it is transformed by the listener or reader into something else, in accordance with his or her fantasy life. I have become aware, in the process of telling of my being "felt up" in the movie theater or rubbed against in the subway, of that person's excitement. The odor and ugliness, the hostility of the actual experience, disappear in the re-telling; the episode is filtered through the imagination of the listener and turned into a sexual fantasy. To describe a sexual act is to launch a balloon whose destiny one can't control." (130)

She also deals with an issue that's become even more problematic in our 21st century landscape, the 'Mister Mom' fantasy of 'sensitive men raising children alone while their wives are bitches, missing, or dead' (Kramer Vs. Kramer, Author! Author!, Table for Five, etc.):

"Run these fantasies through the data processor and what do we get? The best woman is a dead woman, especially a dead independent woman! Next best is one who pulls a disappearing act in a manner that reflects badly on her character rather than the husband's. Third preference (where the woman is determined to hang in there and stay married) is an all-forgiving mother-wife, who looks the other way at her mate's peccadilloes and embraces the fruit of his waywardness afterward. Although the women's magazines like to tell us we can "have it all," the message of these movies is that we can't have much of anything... Presumably a great many women are paying good money to choke back tears over a doting Dudley Moore or a fumbling Al Pacino or a misty-eyed Jon Voight. We ought to instead be laughing these male mothers off the screen (126)

Lastly, a measure of her continued brilliance is found here and there in magazines and collections. She's appeared as a talking head on some TCM documentaries, curated some pre-codes, and so forth. She's the only critic to come to mind who understood the same thing I saw and liked about Lost in Translation, the understanding between Bill Murray and Scarlet Johannson that their budding love affair hinges on staying platonic, and the beauty and subliminal creative power that might be harnessed therein:

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigeur." (2003)

In the end it's not just that Molly Haskell is a genius with a staggering depth of film history at her fingertips, whose insights into the sexual politics of film are almost inhumanly free of malice, but that she creates a sense of excitement and hope that incorporates even feminist anger into its giddy breadth. In reminding us that 'our' ideas of sex and marriage were fostered by racist, sexist censors from the mid 1930s, Haskell vindicates actresses like Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Shirley MacLaine, and Doris Day, and shows us that film needn't have any correlation with reality, because reality is too busy trying to correlate to film as it is. If we can weed the censor's meddling out of our psyches, maybe sex--even one night stands--will no longer be a source of shame and regret, and marriage won't need to be defined by jealousy and suffocation. Maybe if everyone interested in film reads From Reverence to Rape growing up we can be as cool as we were in the 70s and like Europe still is, instead of being a nation bemoaning its lack of sex while persecuting 'loose' women as whores, never getting the irony. Come to Haskell, and that irony shall set you free for a million lays to come.

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Cuspidor of Greatness: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

The red man was the big man

and then came the great big white man 

a white man? / that's the right man.

The whites got the red and the reds got the blues, 

and the red white and blue was born. 

The above is a snatch of song sung by Wheeler and Woolsey, with dancing Native American maids all in rows, and while sardonic as fuckall it's rather callous, as if casting a bloody stain on America's conscience is the same as patriotism, and no one really seems to care, because now Native Americans have oil wells and gambling and educated spokespersons. But where exactly do Wheeler and Woolsey fit in? In DIPLOMANIACS (1933),  Woolsey can best be imagined by picturing a lipless George Burns aiming for Groucho Marx's arrogance and way with a cigar; Wheeler is like Nathan Lane pureed together with Frank McHugh, and slid under Charlie Chaplin hair oil. Always, always there's the sense that these guys are really stage show vaudevillians more than film stars.

Some great comics like W.C. Fields, Mae West (pre-code) and the Marx Brothers (at least pre-DAY AT THE RACES) have stood the test of time. They are eternal. Others, popular in the early dirty turn-of-sound 30s---Eddie Cantor, Jolson, Wheeler and Woolsey--have not been so lucky. They have faded into niches were only freaks like me do scrounge. But thanks to the Warner Bro. Archives, a horde of their surreal pre-codes are finally available on DVD, and man you can learn a lot about the era's social stigmas and stigmatisms and all the things the code would wipe away. I've already written about one such eye-opener, WONDER BAR (1934), and next week, Eddie Cantor's WHOOPEE! (1933). Why? How do I know? I follow my bliss: my hunger for pre-code surrealism is, however, always accompanied by my liberal PC brainwash afterburn, so I can't enjoy it unconditionally, there's always the deconstructing.

DIPLOMANIACS (1933) came out the same year as, and is very similar to, the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP, and was co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote W.C. Fields' MILLION DOLLAR LEGS the year before, and that it can be compared to them is an honor, for Wheeler and Woolsey have not aged as well as Fields or the Marxes. and unless you like both the Marx Brothers AND Laurel and Hardy you might find yourself put off by the freaky squareness of these boys, even if only in some uncanny way you can't explain. I don't care for the grotesque infantile tantrums of Laurel and Hardy. Something about them creeps me out. And there's something similarly sticky about Wheeler and Woolsy, some uncanny quality that makes their resemblance to other comedians of the day almost disturbing.

And man do they love to play dress up. Wheeler and Woolsey share the same sense of infantile queerness (they sleep in the same bed, and Wheeler is clearly 'the bottom') as Laurel and Hardy --is that why they creep me out? They lack the amok heterosexuality of the Marxes, or the singleminded pursuit of oblivion that elevates Fields to the pantheon of Acidemic greats. Woolsey does get drunk in one scene but he's really more interested in..... ugh.... soup. By the second time he asks for more soup in the first class dining room I'm feeling the polar opposite of watching Fields grab all the table service bottles on his way off the roof of INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933). Booze = funny. Soup= yuck! Why? Because food, like life, is gross. Drunkenness, divine. And as someone with near 15 years sobriety, I should know!

That said, if DIPLOMANIACS landed on the college revival circuit the way the Marx Bros. and Fields films did back in the late 60s-80s, it too might have garnered a hipster cult. The pair do, after all, embrace surrealism, as in the still above where they're sent aloft by being tossed up in a Native American blanket (from here on in I'm switching to 'Indian' for reasons that will be made clear) en route to the Lausanne peace conference or when they battle a tribble-like crawling scalp.  And fans of Broadway shows like THE PRODUCERS, or revivals like ANYTHING GOES (which I saw in London in 04) will probably feel themselves on very familiar ground. Some of the numbers have a lived-in, well-rehearsed feel, especially the scenes where Wheeler tries to shake a lovestruck vamp named Dolores (Marjorie White).  A definite scene stealer, she arrives in villain Louis Calhern's stateroom wrapped in plastic after the following bizarre and racist exchange between him and Hugh Herbert as a Fu Manchu-style villain sidekick trying to pass Yiddish off as Chinese:

Calhern: I need a vamp
Herbert: What kind?
Calhern: ...a female vamp!
Herbert: What color?
(...)
Calhern: A white one.
Herbert: White ones get dirty much too quickly
Calhern: Well, for this job she'll have to get dirty.

It's funny thanks to Calhern's robust delivery of the phrase "have to get dirty." But of course they make a mistake in presuming the boys are straight. Their resistance to cartoonish sexual come-ones is never seen as heroic or difficult, a telling sign perhaps. They have the closeted queer's malice towards straight sex, presuming brusque burlesques of hetero courtship will satisfy doubters as to their manliness. The boys sleep in the same bed, and Woosley is clearly the top, you can tell by his big erect cigar and Wheeler's BIRDCAGE-y nightgown (below). And then rather than getting their morning drink on like real men they're more concerned with mani pedis. "If we can get away with wearing these pants we can get away with anything," notes Woolsey, and when someone overhears him whispering that something's a secret, he asks "What's a secret?" and he replies "A secret is something you tell everybody, confidentially," you know he means Hollywood!

Working in the film's favor is the feeling that the filmmakers just saw the amazing LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932). The song sung in the boys' first Parisian morning clearly apes the famous opening montage of Parisian noises that ends with Chevalier saying "Paree / you are too loud / for me," and shutting his window. Here the lyrics include, "from the taxi honks/ it might be the Bronx but no / this is Paris." (not "Paree" but Wheeler sings a bar of "Isn't it Romantic" while rushing through a montage of lyrics). Another favorite moment occurs after the bulk of first class passengers leave the dining room, and the captain of the Geneva-bound ocean liner addresses the remaining gentlemen, and announces "as we are men of the world, let us consume alcohol." I knew that if I was seeing this with my fellow Fieldsian Max while splitting a 1.75 of Ten High, we'd have looked at each other in stunned delight, but he's married now with a kid, and I'm 15 years sober, and these guys are lightweights.

That all works maybe, though, in the context of the film, which I saw by myself at three AM high only on herbal tea and cigarettes, after finishing my big previous post on isolationist themes in the films of John Monk Saunders. For if nothing else this film, like MILLION DOLLAR LEGS is really about America's post-WWI, contempt for the United Nations, and the buffoonery of pols of Europe still bristling against the post-WWI border alterations.

What is being satirized in short, is the world political scene immediately prior to the Nazi's build-up in WWII, so these films provide an illuminating time capsule look at something that no longer exists, a sense of out-of-touch weakness in Europe that American comics saw as a great chance for satirization, and Hitler saw as a perfect chance to defy restrictions and commence militarization. When a bomb goes off at the Geneva conference in DIPLOMANIACS it just turns into an excuse for a crazy blackface musical number, one of the reasons maybe this doesn't get screened very often, and an insight into the idea of 'deathlessness' in comedy, ala Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, wherein blows and accidents that would kill or cripple a normal man just leave one with blackface and maybe an exploded cigar. Wishful thinking like that kept us neutral!

The second vamp is named Fifi and her kisses make men literally smoke under their collars and fall to earth a burned out mess. We're supposed to believe that one kiss from the lipless Woolsey's makes her smoke and fall to the ground, too. More believable is the concept that a mincing French attendant is considered too oafish when the boys get their hair and nails done in Paris, and overall there hangs some horror movie oddness, reminding us that an element of the grotesque was assumed in pre-code comics, for an example just dig the monstrousness of below poster, the eyes of all of them bugged maniacally or shadowed with lewd conspiracy. DUCK SOUP also satirized war, but it bombed; by then, apparently, the Nazis weren't comical. :

Then there are the other odd reminders of the pre-WWII sense of anything goes, As Dreamland Cafe (from where I lifted these images) points out:

One of the unnerving aspects of the film for a modern viewer is that there are several swastikas in the Indian costumes. Apparently swastikas were actually common in Southwest Indian design work until WWII. The Nazis had come to power in Germany by 1933, but it doesn’t appear that the film-makers were associating swastikas with them, even if the threat to world peace was on everybody’s mind.

World peace was on everyone's mind, and it's important to note that swastikas weren't just Native American (and Buddhist) symbols, but universal good luck charms (in 1931 Joan Blondell sells swastika key chains in BLONDE CRAZY).

The strange thing about the closet is, in hiding in plain sight and 'passing' their racist, misogynist mincing off as American straight, they broadened, and some might say weakened, the scope of what 'straight' was. Now such business--prancing, mincing, jumping into one another's arms, avoiding women like the plague but presuming they could get one to fall for them no problem if they cared to-- seems pretty closet queer. Whether it is or not, and the persuasions of Wheeler and Woolsey in real life, aren't really relevant. They might be unconscious even of their own closetedness. It happens, and probably happened an awful lot back then. But there's a side effect of the recent decades of positive social change: men still afraid of seeming gay can't do half the things they used to do, like mince and sleep in a negligee in the same bed as their best buddy. They also can't be racist, sexist, or crude without catching instant PC flak.

It's not that I'm PC myself, just trained like a bird dog to sniff and point. Thus Wheeler and Woolsey linger on the lip of the cuspidor of greatness, alongside Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, defeated in the end from draining down into the pot of cine-hipster rediscovery by their own propensity for blackface, and lack of any real gravitas causes them to slither back down the side.

At least their politics are hilariously bleak, the script sharp, lyrics clever,  the men very old, the women warm, the champagne cold, but over all lingers the presumption that hetero masculinity will continue to encompass this kind of infantile pre-feyness in the century to come instead of delineating certain attitudes and actions as either gay or straight, and either choice preferable to the double blind sneer of the unconscious closet. And so it has come to pass that what was once a good luck charm is now a symbol of a form of racism so vile it's permanently stained the fabric of our conscience, and our PC evolution has rightly rendered blackface and 'red man' tomfoolery accessible only via Warner's DV-R archive, by those brave few willing to shell out for the strange privilege. The Marx Brothers, Mae West, and Fields endure in the mass produced DVDs however, and if it's in part from the good luck of having avoided racism (1), fascism, doofusim, and misogynist objectification through most of if not all their films, well, I'll drink to that any day... So Oooga Booga to you too, you upstart! And if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, then you are just that thing!


NOTES:
1. Since posting I've been thinking about the moments of blackface in Marx Brothers films but they are brief and serve the story: in DAY AT THE RACES they cork up to hide from the cops, but it's after a big dance number that basically expands the "All God's chillun got guns" section of SOUP's "Going to War" number, where are all the black people come to the rescue of the brothers, and sing and dance wondrously and are at least legitimately black. Racist or not it gives work to a vast stock of blazingly talented and legitimately black singers and dancers and one senses throughout a kinship between the black cast and the Marxes. And one need only watch the sassy black maids sashaying after Mae West as she struts around her apartment in I'M NO ANGEL, and hear her rich bluesy voice to know that in other circumstances West could be their maid, and not feel at all chagrined. W.C. Fields splits a bottle of whiskey with an Indian, appears in blackface only to hide from a constable (in a scene edited from TV prints), and means Native Americans when he talks about carving through this wall of human flesh, carrying his canoe behind him. None of it seems 'unconsciously' racist --it is indirect, and more to paint Fields as a scalawag and mountebank full of nosegay, than as a tool for enhancing one's sense of superiority. Amen. 

ADDENDUM. Don't let this rant stop you from seeing DIPLOMANIACS! It's hilarious, essential and Manckiewicz wouldn't let you down. 

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