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Movies Move On
By William Sternman
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To paraphrase a favorite cliché, “The more things change, the more things change.” Especially in the movies.
Take bathrooms, for example. In the Thirties, movies about the upper classes often featured lavish bathrooms, many bigger than my present apartment. You could live in them, except for one thing: they never had toilets. Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer had no use for such mundane appliances.
It wasn’t till after World War II that a movie acknowledged, however obliquely, the more basic necessities of human existence. It was a British film, and I didn’t even see the taboo appurtenance; I just heard it flush. And I was shocked. Although I had always lived in homes with flush toilets, I had never seen or heard one in a movie; even at eleven I realized that they were movie unmentionables.
Nowadays, movie folk even dunk their faces in toilets. Trainspotting (1996) is just one example. Talk about your potty mouths.
Then there’s pregnancy. Although in the Forties, women in the “family way” were no longer confined to their homes to conceal their delicate conditions, those conditions were still confined to a kind of cinematic purdah. There’s a scene in The Great Lie (1941) in which Bette Davis reminds Mary Astor that she’ll be having her baby in less than a month. Not with that flat belly, she won’t.
As a matter of fact, you couldn’t even say, “I’m pregnant” or “I’m going to have a baby.” You had to announce it cute, so the kiddies in the audience (whose mamas might already be preggers for the nth time) didn’t get the right idea. In Roughly Speaking (1945), Rosalind Russell lets Jack Carson in on an upcoming blessed event by knitting booties. He walks past her, does a double take, and grinning, says something like, “You don’t mean…?” She nods happily, prevented by the censors from mentioning the event that dare not speak its name.
Otto Preminger defied those same censors by actually using the word pregnant in The Moon Is Blue. The moon wasn’t all that was blue in 1956, because another taboo word, virgin, also came out of the cinematic closet.
This is particularly ironic, since in those benighted days, all movie heroines were assumed to be virgins until they tied the wedding knot. (You had to be one, even though you couldn’t say you were.) Pity the poor girl who slipped! She was branded (The Scarlet Letter, 1926 and 1934), ostracized (How Green Was My Valley, 1941) or even had sextuplets, as Betty Hutton did in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). A fate worse than death, indeed.
Childbirth just seemed to happen spontaneously, even if you didn’t eat hot peppers. In Sea of Grass (1947), Katharine Hepburn is talking with Melvyn Douglas in one scene and in the next she has a child, presumably his. She too is ostracized, possibly for sleight of hand.
A sly and sophisticated writer like Joseph L. Mankiewicz could always get around the code of silence with indirection. After director Gary Merrill follows actress Bette Davis upstairs to what is presumably her bedroom in All About Eve (1950), George Sanders wryly observes, “Too bad, we're going to miss the third act. They're going to play it offstage.”
Similarly, in Bachelor Mother (1939), about a virgin (Ginger Rogers) who is assumed by her new husband (David Niven) to be an unwed mother, screenwriter Norman Krasna outflanks the censors by having the heroine point out to hubby that on their wedding night he is in for quite a surprise.
Is change in the movies always change for the better? Only if you’re willing to accept the tradeoffs. In Inherit the Wind (1960), Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) puts it this way:
Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You've got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man behind a counter who says, "All right, you can have a telephone; but you'll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline!"
So it is with progress in the movies. In exchange for explicit sexuality and street language and even visible toilets, we must sacrifice the subtler joys of innuendo, double entendre, implication, wit, and the ability to fill in the blanks with our own imaginations.
We’re also denied the exquisite pleasure of getting what the grownups are trying to keep from us.
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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
©
2004 Me Three