Watchingwell
Curated classic films
Mind Games
Oh, the various ways the misguided, or the frankly evil, try to fool you! They try to make you believe something that isn’t true, make the truth a lie, see something that isn’t there, or doubt your own sanity. From films that deal with this kind of behavior, can we learn from how the characters hang on to reality?
One of the best known of these titles has even entered our vocabulary to describe just such a situation. Currently when someone is trying to make you doubt your sanity, you can say they are gaslighting you, from the 1944 classic, Gaslight, directed by George Cukor. Ingrid Bergman, in an Oscar-winning performance, is being driven mad by husband, Charles Boyer, who although evil, still has this enchanting accent – the way he pronounces “Paula” like “Pola”. Swoon. If you haven’t seen this, you should.
Using an inexplicably-popular plot device, there are at
least five films that use twins as a vehicle for playing with your mind. Maya
Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
Clearly not in these films.
No less than the most famous face of the silver screen, Greta Garbo, tried to convince us that she was herself and her sister in her last film, Two-Faced Woman from 1941. Actually, she tries to convince co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays her husband, so that she could see if he was being unfaithful. Not the comedy caliber of their earlier work from 1939, Ninotchka, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, this effort, directed by George Cukor, had the reputation for being so mediocre that it was the cause of Garbo’s early retirement. But that turns out to be a myth because she was planning another project after this but it fell through, and then the country was going to war, so maybe it seemed to her that audiences would be wanting a different kind of movie. So the film gets a bad rap. Not that Two-Faced Woman is a great movie, but any film with Garbo is interesting.
Well, we can suspend a lot of disbelief for a comedy, but in dramas, not so much. It’s strange to me that filmmakers thought people seriously can look so much alike that no one in their lives, except the dog, notices that a substitution has been made. Bette Davis made not one, but two films, where she played twins. The first, in 1946, A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, features Bette as both an evil twin who sets her sights on Glenn Ford, the good sister’s sweetheart, and also the good sister. Glenn doesn’t know which one he’s dealing with half the time. The dog knows.
The second one was Dead Ringer from 1964, directed by her co-star from Now Voyager, Paul Henreid, which is given a slightly more realistic treatment. The sisters have spent a lifetime apart, with very different fortunes. When the rich one dies, the other tries to step into her life. There are more complications than she realizes. And there is the dog.
Olivia de Havilland plays twins in The Dark Mirror from 1946, directed by Robert Siodmak. A murder is committed by one of them, but neither is telling. The police use a psychiatrist, played by Lew Ayres, to determine which. Further confusing complications ensue when he falls in love with one of them.
Both actresses appear in the 1942 drama, In this Our Life, directed by John Huston (with an uncredited Raoul Walsh). Bette Davis is the devious sister of Olivia de Havilland and operates as a spoiled, southern belle, indulged by her family, especially her uncle (Charles Coburn), who seems to admire her ruthlessness. This was a rather bold film for its time, in that there is a character played by Ernest Anderson, a young black man with ambition, who is encouraged by the good sister but set up by the other to take the blame for a crime she commits. The way Davis plays this is rather chilling, pretending to be his friend, all the while contributing to the case against him. The deception in this case is not from the sisters – they are not twins, but from the Davis character alone.
Let’s not forget the most devious mind-twister, twin plot, The Other, the 1972 film directed by Robert Mulligan. This is an unsettling adaptation of Tom Tryon’s novel. I can say no more without spoiling the effect – if unsettling is the effect you like.
Mind games are played for definite purposes – sometimes criminal, sometimes for pure self-interest, and some for more noble motives.
James Stewart is targeted for deception because he has a useful malady (acrophobia) for a crime that is planned in Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Since the deception involves Kim Novak playing two characters, we, the audience, are never fooled, and always wonder why James Stewart is.
But perhaps he is just the kind of actor who can pull it off – look at how he made us believe he was hanging around a giant rabbit in Harvey (1950), directed by Henry Koster.
There are many instances of deception in the political sphere. Sometimes it seems there is little else. A prime example is the character, Willy Stark, in All the King’s Men (1949), directed by Robert Rossen, who begins his political career as a genuine populist, but deceives himself and the public, ultimately betraying all the people who believed in him. From the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, by Robert Penn Warren, Broderick Crawford, in an Oscar-winning performance, portrays the main character, loosely resembling the career of Huey Long.
For deception in pursuit of a worthy cause, Clifton Webb stars in The Man Who Never Was (1956), the true story of British attempts to convince Germany that the Allies would be invading Greece, and not Sicily, as they believed. The plan was to acquire a corpse and plant him in the sea off Spain, as if his plane had crashed, with credentials and secret plans. Also starring Gloria Grahame, with skilled direction by Ronald Neame.
Gantry (1960). But sometimes, the deception mesmerizes the seller as much as the audience. Directed by Richard Brooks, Burt Lancaster won the Oscar for his portrayal, as did costar, Shirley Jones.
Burt’s competition that year in the Best Actor category was Spencer Tracy for his portrayal of a fictionalized Clarence Darrow who triumphed over the defender of the Bible’s version of creation in Inherit the Wind (1960), directed by Stanley Kramer. We can take a lesson on how to combat self-deception from the way Tracy’s character logically made his case for the compatibility of freedom of thought and Christian beliefs.
The one area where you’d think there was no room for
deception would be science. Science has
agreed upon principles of determining what is known and what is only
hypothesized. And yet, sometimes the scientific evidence supporting a
hypothesis is disputed when the theory is inconvenient to the powerful. Henrik Ibsen’s play about this subject, An
Enemy of the People was made into a motion picture in 1978, directed by George Schaefer, with Steve McQueen in the role of the main character, a doctor who discovers the water supply for the town’s tourist attraction is dangerously polluted, and is prevailed upon to keep it quiet for the fortune of the town and its powerful people. Considering that the play was published in 1882, we seem to have progressed very little in how these competing interests are weighed. Substitute climate change for polluted springs.
Last, we come to what is, in my opinion, the most inspiring tribute to the responsibility of scientists to seek the truth, The Story of Louis Pasteur, from 1937. Directed by William Dieterle, it stars Paul Muni as Pasteur, in one of his best “biography” roles, winning an Academy Award for the portrayal. This is a respectable account of Pasteur’s research and the resistance of the medical and scientific community to his theories about “microscopic” causes of disease. In one scene, he is forced to renounce his own theories about bacteria in exchange for the medical services for his daughter from one of his most scornful critics. He asks only one favor – that the doctor washes his hands. In this scene we have a microcosm of how self-interest often thwarts progress, and the lesson that we should never display such hubris as to believe that we know all there is to know.
