Thursday, March 31, 2016






     

 


Watchingwell    

               Curated classic films        

                















Created Realities
The kind of film that I have in mind today creates such an alternate reality that it results in some uncertainty in the mind of the viewer about the rules by which this film reality operates.  In these films when we watch we don't know what will happen next or how it will end because things that look familiar act in very unpredictable ways. All film begins as an idea in someone's mind and is imagined into being.  So my selections are obviously possessed of some extraordinary level of imagination in that a universe is created that is not quite the one we know and yet is so fascinating that it draws us in completely.

         The first film in this category is The Wizard of Oz (1939, Metro Goldwyn Mayer).  It seems an obvious choice but sometimes the familiar can be  overlooked.  
 The difference between it and the book by L. Frank  Baum from which it was adapted is that there is an unspoken agreement between the actors in the film and the audience where the actors acknowledge that they know the audience knows that they are really humans and not a lion, a tin man or a scarecrow.  The agreement is that everyone plays along as if they are.  This goes beyond the suspension of disbelief in other dramatic presentations where we know that characters are really actors playing roles.  Because of the remarkable synthesis of actors, director, costume designer, makeup artist, set designer, and the rest of the creative team, the characters in The Wizard of Oz become separate entities from the human actors who play the roles. I have seen Bert Lahr in other films, and he does not remind me of the Cowardly Lion, because in the role of the Cowardly Lion, he became submerged in the character in a way he never did before or since.  The same is true for Ray Bolger and Jack Haley, who play Scarecrow and Tinman, respectively.  All the other actors also went right on with their careers, never playing roles that resemble these characters, so that in this  one film, the characters remain unique.
    A great work of film art usually reveals more and more of its greatness each time we view it.  I have seen this film a dozen times and each time I have marveled at the humor and creative whimsy tucked into the corners of scenes, like the lyrics to "Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead" or the Lion pushing down his tail as the characters try to sneak unnoticed into the witch's castle.  It is an example of serendipity where all the elements come together at one moment in time (I know, it takes longer than that to make a film) to create a truly unique work of art.  It is true that it came out in 1939, that greatest year of the greatest era in American film, but it is quite different in style, even from other films of  that era that were meant for children.

I hesitate to recommend Jean Cocteau's fantasy, Beauty and the Beast (1946, DisCina),  particularly when the well-received Disney animated feature of the same title from 1991 is, for many, the defining film version of the fable.  But perhaps the fact that so many are familiar with the animated version is why it presents excellent opportunities for comparisons that will reveal the imaginative properties of the Cocteau film.  The first property that I require in this category of film that it creates a reality in which we are not sure of the laws, and so we cannot predict what will happen.  In the Disney reality, we know the rules, and while suspense may be created, and sad things sometimes happen, the end is predictably happy.  There is much more uncertainty in the Cocteau version.  The Beast sounds reasonable, but he is a beast.  Is he really good?  What will happen to the girl?  We cannot predict.
The Beast lives in a palace where the walls seem to be alive, as a malevolent force or not, costumes change as people move from room to room, and sometimes they move by magic.  It is a world of angles that is slightly threatening.  But somehow the Beast is sympathetic since we see him through the girl who is good.  It is harder to extract that meaning here than it is in the Disney film and that is its value.  The film requires more thought.  It is not a child's film but it can be viewed with different levels of meaning, including the fable that a child could understand.

       Continuing in the French vein, I recently saw again, Mon Oncle (1958, Gaumont Distribution), the Jacques Tati film that follows the adventures of Monsieur Hulot.  The strange thing about comedy is that one film you see when you're young and think is hilarious can turn out to be less so as an adult, and another film that made you laugh so hard it hurt still makes you laugh just as hard.  Mon Oncle is in the latter category.  Monsieur Hulot carries his own universe around with him, even in commonplace surroundings, but when he encounters the sterile, ultra-modern world of his sister and her husband, we expect chaos to ensue but just aren't sure what form it will take.  Hulot comes into this world to spend time with his nephew, who adores him, because the sterile world is not a child's world and his uncle takes him away from it.  With his uncle, he gets to play with other boys and get dirty and eat snacks from less-than-clean vendors, things that would make his mother faint.  But each time the boy and his uncle return, they are out of place, too human to fit into the mechanized efficient home of the parents.  The parents fume and fret over Hulot's influence, but they are kind people and try to find Hulot a job with a business acquaintance, which doesn't work out, try to find him a companion by hosting a garden party (I am laughing as it write this), and when this, too, doesn't work  out, the brother-in-law takes him in at his firm. This, also, hilariously, doesn't work out.  
       All the things that don't work out are never Hulot's fault.  He is always well-meaning and cooperative.  He just attracts disaster.  There is something so gentle about him, and the world he inhabits, however, that he is always able to go on his way, with his pipe firmly in his mouth, certain that he has done nothing wrong.  It is really the genius of Tati's creation that as disastrous as he is, nobody can dislike him.  He differs from Chaplin's "Little Tramp" because Chaplin's character is an instigator -- he creates mischief, he can become angry, whereas, Hulot never changes.  Chaplin's tramp is the man carrying the plank of wood that knocks people down as he turns.  Hulot is the plank.

Where Hulot calmly bicycles away from the scenes of chaos, in the universe of the Marx Brothers, there is no safe place.  In their world, the rules are not just different from ours, there are no rules. In A Night at the Opera
(1935, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), we see the familiar outlines of a plot, so we are more vulnerable to the surprise attack of the fantastic.  One night, I was watching  A Night at the Opera with some teenagers who had never seen it. When Margaret Dumont opened the door to the outrageously stuffed stateroom, and people spilled out like water, the teenagers collapsed with laughter.  I remember thinking that for fifty years people of all ages had been reacting the same way at the same moment.  It is precisely because this film is slightly more conventional than their earlier films that the unexpected absurdities, like people spilling in a heap and Harpo walking up a curtain, have more impact.  In this film, the brothers are dedicated to destroying everyone and everything with pretensions -- the arrogant tenor, the haughty impresario, the famous aviators, the police, the dignified Margaret Dumont, and finally, the opera, itself.  In my life, I have attended a few performances of Il Trovatore, the victimized opera in the film, and I can never listen to the overture without expecting at a certain point, the orchestra to begin "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", or a battleship backdrop to fall down behind a tenor singing in his fifteenth-century costume.

The madness that we associate with the Marx Brothers is really not madness but the characteristic lack of inhibitions they display in insulting or joking or breaking rules of convention.  All this happens at dizzying speeds of language and movement.  Real madness is not usually treated as humor in film, but there is one small gem of near-cult status, They Might Be Giants (1971, Universal Pictures), starring the extraordinary team of George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, with Jack Gilford and an ensemble of excellent supporting actors.  

Scott plays a mad, but brilliant lawyer who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes battling Dr. Moriarty.  Joanne Woodward plays the psychiatrist Scott's brother has hired to sign off on his commitment, to get control of Scott's wealth.  The psychiatrist's last name happens to be Watson, and Scott's expression on learning this, alone, is worth the price of admission or the rental.  When Scott's character convinces "Dr. Watson" that he really has enemies, the two join in a mindless plan to escape and defeat his nemesis.  Their adventure takes them through the back streets of New York City where they meet with an assortment of eccentric characters who are all a little mad, or are they?  The literate script written by James Goldman examines the question, while creating a world where, as the expression goes, "there are more out than in".  George C. Scott is so brilliant in his madness that he convinces his psychiatrist and most of the other characters that he could be right.  The title of the film comes from a reference to Don Quixote, who the Scott character explains was mad in thinking that windmills were giants, but to consider that they might be giants is not madness, but genius.

     Stanley Kubrick's mastery was evident in all his films, but for many, his greatest achievement was 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968, Metro Goldwyn
Mayer). The film was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, from whose novel it was adapted.  If you want imagination, you could not do better than the work of Arthur C. Clark, a man who literally imagined the future.  The images from that film, -- the special effects, the silence of space, the technology that it predicted made it so different from any previous science fiction film that it changed the genre forever.  Considering that the film was released in 1968 before digitalized special effects and before the first moon landing, it is a breathtaking creative achievement.  It has other qualities to admire, like the novel, optimistic view of the future, not the dismal, violent one we usually see. But it is not blindly so.  It also has one of the most frightening villains of all time -- HAL 9000.

 Filmmakers have given us many pessimistic visions of the future.  I don't particularly admire their dark visions and the generally oppressive look of the sets.  I often wonder why no filmmaker has thought to create a future in which someone might want to live.  However, science fiction is one of the most effective displays of creative imagination because it offers freedom from scientific reality (although the best of the genre is grounded in real science knowledge).  In spite of what I have written, I still like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982, The Ladd Company) because it is such an artistic version of the
dark future that it manages to absorb me into its reality.  This is a very detailed picture of the future Los Angeles with its permanent smog cloud, which is why it is always dark, although my personal recollection of Los Angeles smog is that it is hazy, but very bright.  It is hard to top Los Angeles in the present for a vision of where we're heading, but the visual effects in the film are quite stunning, from the tall skyscrapers to the teeming streets to the bizarre makeup.  There is a plot that involves renegade humanoids that is not about killing their human masters, but rather a more poignant reason that addresses the question of what defines the term human.

       One cannot talk about visions of the future without mentioning one my personal favorites, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Universum), the 1927 silent classic. I saw this first when I was quite young and I found it mesmerizing.  The story
no longer works (if it ever did) as a political statement about machines and exploited workers, and the story doesn't make a lot of sense.  The familiar science fiction staples, like the mad scientist and the evil robot were original in this 1927 film.  We can still marvel at the scale of the fantastic sets, casts of thousands, and amazing special effects.  In this day of digital film making, Metropolis looks like a painting, its unusual camera angles and extremes of shadow and light removing it even further from reality.

        There is one more vision of the future that is neither dark nor pessimistic.  It is the remarkable animated feature of 2008, WALL-E from Pixar Studios.  Like other Pixar works (Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo), there is outstanding artwork and crayon-box color, but in WALL-E, they have outdone former efforts and added a thoughtful plot with a serious theme.


 The theme involves an Earth so filled with garbage that humans have moved into orbit, leaving only robots to stack the garbage into towers of rubbish.  Only one robot remains in operation as the film opens, and we see it going through its daily routine, all alone except for a pet cockroach, in one amazing, prolonged sequence that is practically silent.  There is very little dialogue throughout as the robot is the main character and yet we don't notice because we are intensely involved visually.  It is difficult to compare this film to cartoons, the mastery of the medium has moved it to its own category..  There are scenes of such technical and aesthetic achievement that it is astonishing.  It is not strictly science fiction because it is witty enough to be comedy.  But underneath the laughs, there are heartfelt truths that make us empathize with an animated machine, in which we recognize the humanity of its creators.


          There is another animated feature that, for me, most closely resembles the experience of reading a wonderful story, where we are taken on a journey that we cannot abandon until it is done and we have found out everything.  It, too, is not necessarily a children's film, although children can enjoy it.  The film is Princess Mononoke (Toho Company), the 1999 creation of the master of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki.  Miyazaki's films are quite well-known in the United States -- many of my students knew the ones  I have  seen.  The best known, the 2001Spirited Away, is as amazing as Princess Mononoke, and I could have included it on this list of films of the imagination.  The  only difference is that with Spirited Away, it is necessary to listen to the dialogue to appreciate it fully, for it is a wonderfully intricate story.  But even those who are not following the story in Princess Mononoke very closely will still be dazzled by the breathtaking appearance of the action moving across the screen.  This is a beautiful film.  The detail in the landscapes is unequaled.  It has to do with heroes and humans and the natural world. It has action, adventure and ideas.   Although it takes place in a mythical past, and so is not about the future, it is a cautionary tale about what we sacrifice when human progress is seen in isolation from our environment. 

         This film is no less of an arts experience than watching a ballet or examining a painting.  It is as enlarging of one's horizon as listening to a symphony orchestra or watching a play.  In it, we enter another reality.  This is the essence of imagination:  the power to invent worlds, better worlds, and once imagined, created in art and reality.








Wednesday, March 2, 2016



Watchingwell         

 Curated classic films

                                       






Heroines


     I read somewhere that The Awful Truth (1937, Columbia Pictures), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and directed by Leo McCarey, is really about a woman battling a patriarchal society. Although I find this and other interpretations interesting and it forces me to look at the film again, it is also true that my original, overall impression of the film holds up. I probably saw the film for the first time on television when I was a child or a very young person. At the time, I believe I had a kind of unconscious meter which measured the way women were portrayed. Either I was able to enjoy the film without reservation or there was something which prevented me from doing so, something which made me uncomfortable. 

      As much as I enjoyed the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy film partnership, for example, I never liked Adam’s Rib (1949, Metro Goldwyn Mayer). As an adult, I can see what it was that bothered me, but as a child, I would not have known necessarily why it was that this particular film, in a long list of films in which these two actors appeared together, would strike me as off-key.



      In the film, which was written by the husband-and-wife team of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Hepburn and Tracy play a married couple, both of whom are lawyers. In the beginning, all seems very modern – the couple is the model of equality, even their nicknames for each other are the same, only his “Pinky” is spelled with an “i” at the end. Hepburn’s character explains this to a male friend of the couple who flirts shamelessly with her, much to her husband’s annoyance. This annoyance, by the way, is a tip-off that this is going to lead to trouble down the line, and, more important, the Tracy character is being set up to act the fool. 
   
      Trouble comes into their lives in the form of clients on opposite sides of a case of attempted murder. Hepburn’s character, Amanda, takes on the defense of a woman that her husband, Adam, played by Tracy, is prosecuting for attempting to shoot her philandering husband. Amanda takes the case without consulting Adam and when he finds out, he is annoyed, but, since he feels that his case is open and shut, he seems mostly to be annoyed because his wife will surely lose. After he sees the way she plans to present the case for the defense, he becomes angry and accuses her of making a mockery of the courtroom because she employs some theatrical tactics in trying to win the jury’s sympathy for her client. Since one might be under the impression that a lawyer is ethically obliged to do just that, his self-righteous defense of courtroom proprieties (that seems to suggest the screenwriters believe he is correct), is not very convincing. 

       Neither is it convincing when his anger escalates, the professional conflict invades their home life (a bad sign to professional women), and he packs his bags and moves out. Married people are quick to move out in comedies, and they’re not running off with another woman or man, they are playing people who are so injured that they cannot stay if they are to maintain self-respect. Watching this as a child, however, the Tracy character did not win my sympathy. I felt at the time that he was being unreasonable although we were supposed to think that he was the rational one of the two and Amanda was, for all her professional experience, an emotional woman.
    
     This is a popular film with critics, directed by George Cukor, and with a witty script and first-class cast, including Tom Ewell, Judy Holliday and Jean Hagen. I think most believe that this is comedy and fun is being made of all of the characters, and that nothing insidious is to be made of the fact that the husband-lawyer and the husband-philanderer are representing the law and the wife-lawyer and the wife-defendant are guilty of the crime and the defense, itself. I’m not so sure that intent that is not insidious always means the results are not.

     When I began to re-examine the other Hepburn-Tracy films, I realized that there are several where these same kind of roles are involved – he has the reasonable, almost wise part, and she is the bright, but flawed, almost silly character. In one of their most well-regarded pairings, the 1942 film, Woman of the Year (Metro Goldwyn Mayer), we are given the same, basic division, except that in this case the Hepburn role is worse than silly, she is every terrible cliché about career women – driven, selfish and incapable of even the most basic skills on the home front. As if this were not enough, she is made to seem downright diabolical by bringing home a war orphan as a good deed, without revealing the slightest emotional connection to the event. It is Tracy’s character who makes this connection with the child and returns him to the home where the audience is convinced that he will be better off. It is Tracy who leaves (as the injured party), convinced the marriage can’t work. In the end, Hepburn’s character, having just accepted the “Woman of the Year” award for outstanding achievement in her profession, must renounce her competence outside the home and show Tracy that she can make breakfast in order to prove herself truly worthwhile, and so win him back.




     In the disastrous scene in the kitchen, she has no idea how anything works and is made to look foolish. Only in that state, can she be sympathetic. Even her clothes are unsuitable for the kitchen – her fashionable career outfit keeps slipping off her shoulders when she needs both hands free. A clearer message could not have been sent than the one of this misfit struggling in alien territory: This is what happens when women become outstanding outside the home. Tracy’s character does tell her as he surveys the wreck she had made of the kitchen that she does not have to be a housewife to suit him, that, in effect, all she needs to do is to stop trying to be too outstanding. But, the viewer knows the lesson that has been learned. The title of the film, “Woman of the Year”, is clearly ironic.

     It is a mistake to lump all the Hepburn-Tracy films together, however, even though it seems that they are playing the same roles over and over. It seems that way because they play off of each other in the same way, the chemistry is the same, and they rarely play against type. As expert actors, they knew how to make the words seem to fit their personalities, but the words make all the difference. 

    One of the more interesting films that they made together is the 1952 film, Pat and Mike (Metro Goldwyn Mayer), also written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. For some reason, being out of the nineteen-forties had a liberating effect for Hepburn, judging from her roles, even though the fifties were thought to be rather stultifying as decades go. In Pat and Mike, she plays a character, loosely based on Babe Zaharias, the greatest female athlete of her time. Hepburn is superbly talented at several sports, and turns pro with the help of a less-than successful manager played by Tracy. She is high society, he is a streetwise promoter, but they find a common ground in that she needs him to help her become successful and he needs a winner. They agree on a formula for working together and splitting the profits – “five-oh/five-oh”.
She is a business commodity to him, but at the same time, he realizes that she outclasses him as he compares her to a thoroughbred racehorse. He does not discourage her career; he pushes it, as it will be profitable for him. On the other hand, she has a fiancé. The fiancé is not particularly supportive of her career, in fact, he is patronizing at times. To make it worse, when her fiancé watches her play, she falls apart. Tracy’s character, appalled at the thought of his ticket to fame and fortune being jeopardized, keeps them apart.
     
     In the end, it is Tracy’s character that she chooses as a life partner, because a real partnership is possible with him. Not that the Tracy character has no adjustments to make. At one point, his male pride is put to the test when Hepburn rescues him from some gangster types with a display of ju-jitsu that draws the applause of onlookers. His character, as written and as interpreted by Tracy, is willing to look foolish and yet come to terms with the fact that he loves this superior woman, a very different message than the one from Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib.

     Other films Hepburn made with Tracy in the forties, Keeper of the Flame (1942, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), Without Love (1945, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), Sea of Grass (1947, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), State of the Union (1948, Liberty Films), are serious dramas and the chemistry is slightly different, a tribute to their acting abilities. The plots of these films require that they relate differently. However, whether as a wife, a widow, or a career woman playing opposite the formidable screen presence of Spencer Tracy, Hepburn is never overshadowed. Nor was she when she was playing opposite any of the major stars, like Cary Grant (three films), James Stewart, Fred MacMurray, or John Barrymore. This is true even though her career spanned sixty years and many different historical and cultural contexts in which to portray women. Watching her as a child, I didn’t have this perspective, and so didn’t really see her in that tradition as a strong woman. Even though she played an intrepid aviatrix in Christopher Strong (1933, RKO Radio Pictures), her films of the thirties were about strong-minded, but feminine, and sometimes insecure, women.

     Probably, my favorite Katherine Hepburn film is Bringing Up Baby (1938, RKO Radio Pictures), the quintessential screwball comedy. Actually, it is one of

my favorite films in which Katherine Hepburn happens to star. Directed by Howard Hawks, co-starring Cary Grant, it works so well as a film that my childhood comfort meter did not register any offense at the scatterbrained character played by Hepburn. I thought it was funny and I think we tend to judge comedies first by whether they make us laugh. On the other hand, when they offend me, they are not funny. 

     But the thing about Katherine Hepburn which commands respect, even when she is playing an idiot (or is she?) like the character in Bringing Up Baby is that she has the look of a patrician. She operates with ease in a summer frock or a Chinese costume, complete with coolie hat, in an evening gown or golf togs, dealing with servants, driving cars, and generally getting her way. When she plays tennis or golf on film, we get the impression that she really plays tennis and golf. There is a confidence in the way she wears clothes, including trousers, which along with the Bryn Mawr accent, tells us that she may act the scatterbrain, but that is an assumed persona, that she is definitely in charge of her life.

     These images had greater weight with me when I was young, I think, than the dialogue. For example, what could be more independent than the working woman as portrayed by Hollywood in the nineteen thirties? She was practical, capable, and nobody’s fool. She wore a smart, little hat and had an envelope clutch tucked under her arm, and although, this might have been the fashion of the day, it forever symbolized for me what independence looked like.




     As a child I was inspired by the scripts that made Jean Arthur‘s character smarter than James Stewart’s in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939, Columbia Pictures), and Myrna Loy’s Nora in The Thin Man (1934, Metro GoldwynMayer) the equal of her husband played by William Powell, but the images that Ginger Rogers presented on the screen of a woman who needed to work for a living, even if her chosen career was in show business, were also influential. Even when she was in a glamorous evening gown, dancing with Fred Astaire, we had already been made to understand that this was not her normal attire. Strangely, Astaire’s character was always in formal clothes, but Rogers only wore formal clothes when she danced. This accentuated her working class status, compared to the guy in white tie and tails. She was the serious one, whereas, he was casual, she was disciplined, he was often unreliable. But despite Astaire’s higher class status in their films, Rogers played characters who would not stand for any nonsense. Astaire’s character had to reform in order to win her heart. 

     Whereas in the thirties, the working heroine was “plucky” or had “spunk”, the career woman of the nineteen-forties had to be a little more cynical. Compare the wardrobe of Ginger Rogers in her light summer dresses of the
thirties with the wardrobe of Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe (1941, Frank Capra Productions) with dark-painted fingernails, a serious hat on her head, and padded shoulders in her coat. This was the picture of a feisty woman dressed for business, someone who does what she has to do to succeed. This is a dark film, with a foreboding of world events. Stanwyck’s character has a hard edge and her clothes have hard edges. She played a writer again in Christmas in Connecticut (1945, Warner Bros.) and devises an 
elaborate scheme in order to keep a mink coat that she has
purchased in the beginning of the film, an item she clearly cannot afford.  Here is a woman who not only has to work for a living, but has to plot and scheme to get ahead.  In the end of both of these films, she trades her ambition for love, thus instructing us about the perils of getting too ambitious. I don’t remember if this was the reason, but I preferred other Stanwyck films like The Lady Eve (1941, Paramount Pictures),Ball of Fire (1941, 
Samuel Goldwyn Company), Golden Boy (1939, Columbia Pictures), and
The Mad Miss Manton (1938, RKO Radio Pictures). In these films, Stanwyck’s characters didn’t trade anything; they moved the plot, and the others, including the male co-star, had to adjust to her.



     The grim events of war time did not prevent some lighter comedies from being made about the career woman and few female stars handled these roles as convincingly as Rosalind Russell. Even though she played an aviatrix, very similar to Amelia Earhart in Flight for Freedom (1943, RKO Radio Pictures), and the crusading nurse in Sister Kenny (1946, RKO Radio Pictures), the roles I liked best were the sophisticated and witty women who could always outsmart her opponents. Her wardrobe and her physical stature matched the strong roles she played: a judge in Tell it to the Judge (1949, Columbia Pictures), an executive in Take a Letter, Darling (1942, Paramount Pictures) and the fast-talking newspaperwoman in His Girl Friday (1940, Columbia Pictures).




     In this great Howard Hawks comedy, Russell, as reporter, Hildy Johnson, trades some of the fastest dialogue ever filmed with Cary Grant, the newspaper editor, Walter Burns. Russell’s story of getting married and leaving the newspaper game is paralleled by the story of Roy Williams, who is about to be hanged for murder. At the beginning of the story, Hildy is dressed smartly for a visit to the newsroom to say goodbye. By the end, her outfit is wrinkled; her hat is smashed and turned around, all in the service of getting the story. At all times, she is one step ahead of her slightly dishonest and scheming boss, at one point tearing up the story she has just written, which everyone acknowledges was a great piece of writing, because Burns reneged on their agreement. This is an exercise of so much power that we are shocked. At the end of the film, when Hildy and Walter are standing together, sighing in relief that they have avoided a serious predicament, they are casual and relaxed. They look like equals. Russell was tall and her stature was a nice alternative to the dainty female figures that one usually saw on the screen.

     Possibly, because so many films were made in the decades before 1950, there seems to be more variety of female roles and appearance. When I saw these films, they were already outside the era in which they were created, and so I saw them out of any context. For some reason, the films of the thirties and forties were more enchanting to me. They were so far from my reality that they were true escapism. But they presented such novel images of women that they gave me ideas about style and elegance that never left me. They were as influential on me as the images I saw in the neighborhood theater.