THESE THREE (William Wyler, 1936)

According to the production code governing the content of Hollywood movies in most of the 1930s (and beyond), “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Given the way that America (even more so) then viewed it, homosexuality was therefore taboo as either a subject or a theme, much less a visible reality. Directors, of course, might be able to sneak in a small coup or two, such as George Cukor, who was gay, did in Camille (1937) by making consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier’s one kind, loyal and steadfast friend a gay man; but such details could exist as faint hints only on the fringes of a film, not at the center of the action to which the mainstream (and censors) attended. When he suggested he might produce a film of The Well of Loneliness and someone remarked that its protagonist is a lesbian, Samuel Goldwyn is reputed to have said, “So what? We’ll make her an American.” Goldwyn didn’t produce a film of the Radclyffe Hall novel, but he did produce These Three, the first of two film versions by William Wyler based on Wyler’s friend Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, in which a schoolgirl’s vicious lie that they are lesbian lovers shuts down a private school and ruins the lives of two schoolteachers, one of whom commits suicide. The censors forbade Goldwyn and the studio involved, United Artists, from using the play’s title, from advertising any connection between the film and the play, and from announcing or even alluding to lesbians or lesbianism in any way. Thus the new title (and a good one it is), which refers now to the two young women, best friends, and the doctor they both love (one is engaged to marry him; the other is secretly in love with him), and thus the odd line in the credits, “Original Story and Screenplay by Lillian Hellman,” who not only rewrote her play to divest it of any trace of the matter offensive to the Hays Office, transforming the lie to one of heterosexual relations between the doctor and the schoolteacher to whom he is not engaged, but also drastically revised the play’s finish, eliminating the suicide and managing a reconciliation of the engaged couple. Wyler’s powerful and—this is rare for Wyler—affecting film rendered another version of the film superfluous, but after the huge success of his flimsy Ben-Hur (1959), with the Production Code (like the recent blacklist) a thing of Hollywood’s past, he made another film based on the play, this time retaining the original nature of the child’s lie, the suicide, and the play’s title. Universally, this fancier, more poetical film was rightly deemed inferior to These Three, the subject of this essay.

Hellman herself regarded the play’s allusion to lesbianism a “side issue.” Her focus was the force of a lie; her commentary (as she herself identified it) was aimed at fascism, particularly what was currently happening in Germany in the mid-Thirties. Even more particularly, Hellman, who was Jewish, worried about the scapegoating lies that Nazism aimed at German Jews in the midst of an enormously depressed economy. The later film version isn’t really about lesbianism either; part of the trouble with that film—Hellman didn’t write it; John Michael Hayes did, and he changed many things—is that it doesn’t seem to be much about anything.* Its mood is lugubrious, and its “tragedy” comes prettily packaged in highly decorative (rather than expressive) imagery. The urgency that Hitler gave to the first film is palpable. Indeed, the child, Mary Tilford, seems (like Hitler) the very embodiment of hatefulness—and she has a powerful ally: her grandmother, who believes her lies, and who, wealthy and powerful (unlike the schoolteachers, who are working-class and without social standing), marshals the community against Martha Dobie and Karen Wright so that each and every pupil is withdrawn from the school that the two young women own and operate. In both play and film, Hellman is careful to portray Amelia Tilford as another victim of her granddaughter, but in terms of the play’s anti-fascist allegory it’s clear that she represents those powerful entities, at home and abroad, that aided and abetted the rise of Nazism in Germany. (In the later version, no pity is extended to the grandmother, although the oblique misogynism that arises from this is tempered by the fact that Fay Bainter, playing her, gives the film’s most touching and accomplished performance.)

These Three opens at Martha and Karen’s college graduation: two shots, oppositely facing, show the row of graduates set against itself. The graduates are uniform in their dress and position, making a perfect line of individuals, but the diplomas in their hands are at different angles, further creating a subtle sense of distress, tension and self-division. The crowd of onlookers are graduates’ family members, but Martha and Karen, both orphans, have only each other; literally, one has her arm around the other. Karen’s 80-year-old grandmother has just died, while Martha’s Aunt Lily, the self-centered, appropriative personality who raised her, makes an unwelcome appearance at the ceremony. The two girls decide to open a school, using the country property that Karen’s grandmother bequeathed to her. It’s a financial struggle for them just to get started, for the property is in great disrepair, but they are given a boost by two individuals of some status: Joseph Cardin, a psychiatrist attached to the local hospital, and Amelia Tilford, one of the moneyed lights of the town, who sets the new school on a path of success by enrolling her ward, her granddaughter, Mary. (In the later version, the doctor, no longer a psychiatrist, and the rich woman are related, clarifying the sense in which power, while seemingly extended to buttress the teachers’ endeavor, is really arrayed against them, waiting to pounce.) Martha and Karen thus become surrogate mothers to a schoolful of young girls at least in part to offset, it is implied, their own motherlessness.

Joe and Karen fall in love and plan to marry, further encouraging Martha to keep her own feelings for Joe private, secret. But Aunt Lily, seeing the truth, needles Martha on the score of jealousy, in reality the projection of her own mean-spiritedness; an erstwhile stage actress long between engagements, she has pushed her way into the school, giving it, with her niece and Karen, a staff of three. (Ostensibly she teaches elocution, but mostly she disparages the children for their inability to read Shakespeare with genuine emotion.) One evening, Joe drops by after a hard day at the hospital to see Karen, who is (inexplicably—a mistake) away and falls asleep in Martha’s room. This is the germ from which Mary Tilford, who hates the school, will concoct the illusion of a moral cancer. Punished for repeatedly lying, Mary bolts the school and whispers in her grandmother’s ear just what Mrs. Tilford needs to hear to set into gear the monstrous act of closing the school. The three damaged by the lie—Martha, Joe and Karen—visit her and, in a memorable shot of their backs in a row, fail to win her over to the truth. They sue Tilford for slander and lose, partly because Aunt Lily has refused to testify; the judge publicly savages whatever is left of their reputations by proclaiming that the “innocent” Mary and another child, whom Mary has terrorized into supporting her lies, should never have been dragged through the ordeal. Can’t anyone see the truth? Does anyone care about the truth? Or is the whole point this: society must pretend that the two struggling, hardworking young women “can make it” while in fact working behind the scenes to defeat them and to blame them for this defeat? The hospital fires Joe and Karen breaks up with him, no longer sure that her fiancé and her best friend haven’t been lovers. Once given life, then, the lie has grown and increased the unnecessary toll it has taken. Ultimately, the truth comes out and Martha sacrifices every bit of her own happiness so that Joe and Karen, the two persons she loves, can be reunited.

Wyler, as Andrew Sarris has noted, is a meticulous craftsman, but in this instance he has managed to be something more; he has brought the melodrama to life. For one thing, he has made a fully breathing film rather than an embalmed “photographed play.” For another, he has found the means to suggest the presence of the invisible: the cancerous lie that we neither see nor hear except for the trail of its consequences. This sense of the organic nature of the lie, alas, would be completely missing from his ill-fated remake twenty-five years hence. But Wyler—like Hellman, Jewish—likewise may have felt in the 1930s under the gun, as it were, of Hitler’s and Nazism’s immediate reality and danger. All this seems to have dissipated by the time of the remake. There is nothing in the least bit allegorical about the later Children’s Hour.

Well cinematographed in black and white by Gregg Toland, and remarkably well edited by Daniel Mandell, These Three is also very well acted. Two of the performances, in fact, are brilliant: Miriam Hopkins, a poignant Martha, and Bonita Granville, a terrifying, manipulative Mary. (In the remake, Hopkins plays, hilariously, Martha’s aunt.) Joel McCrea, at his best, is charming as Joe, and Walter Brennan is also at his best as a “taxy” cab driver. Merle Oberon, who plays Karen, is very beautiful and she tries exceedingly hard, but even at her best, as here, she is a formulaic actress who selfconsciously speaks her lines, giving them a calculatedly moony lilt. The contrast between her and Hopkins, who is to the bone as Martha, is great.

A footnote. Composer Alfred Newman’s sweeping, heartrending main theme heard in The Razor’s Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946) was first heard in These Three ten years sooner. In These Three the theme embodies two impulses: sexual sublimation; (Martha’s) transcendence of sexual frustration. In The Razor’s Edge the same music embodies the protagonist’s spiritual odyssey, his thirst for knowledge, his entirely asexual aspiration. There is an implicit commentary here about the relationship between sex and spirit that has the music of one film glossing the same music of the other. My conclusion: film music composer as auteur.

* Martha’s suicide in the remake is motivated almost entirely by her discovery of a repressed sexual interest in Karen, which led the actress who plays Martha, Shirley MacLaine, to conclude that the theme of the piece is the grain of truth in a lie—a notion that completely contradicts the original impulse behind the play that the lie that Mary tells has no basis in fact. Indeed, in Mein kampf Hitler staked out the political strategy of telling a lie loudly and often enough that it becomes accepted as a given by the public. At the time of the release of The Children’s Hour MacLaine made hurtful statements the anti-Semitic implications of which perhaps she did not grasp. Sometimes actors promoting a film would be well advised not to speak at all.

BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Edward Yang, 1991)

Prior to his celebrated Yi yi (2000), Taiwan’s Edward Yang made Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, which suggests a cross between Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema and West Side Story. Rival gangs of youth, fighting over turf in the early sixties, represent those who already lived in Taiwan and those who fled there from the mainland as a result of the 1949 civil war in China. This is the time of Chiang Kai-shek’s “White Terror.” Xiao Si’r’s father actually moved to Taiwan a few years prior to the Civil War; but this career move proved only to undermine his familial and civic authority, and his son, reflecting his rudderlessness and disquiet, joins other children in a confrontational, unruly existence. The culmination, based on fact, is Nationalist China’s first juvenile homicide. Si’r is 14; Ming, his impoverished sweetheart whom he had promised to protect and whom he ends up killing when she asserts her independence, is 13.
     The film opens with a bare hanging light bulb being flicked on and barely illuminating the darkness: an indication of routine blackouts, but also a metaphor for the unmoored sense of identity that flight from Mainland China incurred. Indeed, most of the film unfolds in scarcely lit scenes of nighttime, in medium shots and long-shots that suggest the distance of not only political memory but also national prospects and clarity. Si’r’s father is interrogated with minute invasiveness by the secret police; his arrest costs him his job. His “crime” is tantamount to guilt by association.
     The children, unsure of who they are as a consequence of history as well as adolescence, gravitate towards American popular culture: basketball, John Wayne, rock ’n’ roll.
     Richly detailed even though character-driven, its color subdued, at times near-monochromatic, Yang’s film is long and absorbing.

SWING TIME (George Stevens, 1936)

Swing Time is the finest of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Like numerous other ’30s Hollywood films, it provides commentary on the Depression. Money, for instance, is a motif. Lucky, a dancer, makes a bet that causes him to miss the appointed time of his wedding. Lucky’s motivation isn’t money; he can’t resist the sport. But money is what motivates others to detain him by luring him into the bet whose outcome they know in advance. If Lucky marries, after all, he may leave the show he headlines for more respectable prospects, putting his fellow performers out of work. Arriving late to his intended’s home, where the wedding would have taken place, Lucky finds her father furious; but the successful businessman softens a bit when Lucky pledges to earn the man’s daughter by going to the big city and amassing money of his own. Money, his future father-in-law asserts, proves “character,” unawares, it seems, that he is commoditizing his own daughter. The names of both lead characters—the gambling Lucky (Fred Astaire), with his lucky quarter, and Penny (Ginger Rogers), the dance instructor he meets in New York—also refer to money.

At nearly every comical turn of their rocky relationship some misunderstanding between Lucky and Penny might disappear if Lucky only honestly confessed one thing or another: “I don’t have the right clothes to dance in,” “I gambled, against my word, but only because I was forced to,” and so forth. Partly because he feels honor-bound to the hometown girl he is engaged to, though, Lucky falls short of coming clean; and this imperils his “fine romance” with Penny, whom he feels honor-bound to keep ignorant of the engagement even as he takes exacting care not to make too much money lest the target sum he proposed to his intended and her father, finally met, trigger his return home to the altar. Thus the complicated script, by Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott, risks appearing farfetched in order to interrelate financial and romantic disaster, here posited with considerable irony since the romance with Penny must go south once Lucky is rich. It is a comic reversal that Depression audiences, beset with their own financial uncertainty, could delight in. (Or not: Swing Time did well, but not brilliantly, at the box office.)

Farfetched indeed, you say, that Lucky is constrained from making as much money as he can? That’s the point, though. The times are so out of whack, hence unpredictable, that reason needn’t apply. We mortals at best barely control our lives; often, life seems out of our control. Having been tricked into what seems, to his advantage, a sure bet, Lucky misses his wedding; and he and Penny lose their first chance to dance together professionally—as it were, Lucky loses his new lucky Penny—through the fault of neither, although Penny, in denial over how unlucky Lucky (and, by extension, she herself) is, chooses to blame him nevertheless. In a (very) lighthearted form, the world of Swing Time may even resemble that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; everything seems topsy-turvy. Even when things happen to go right, the element of uncertainty holds. Impossible things happen. Once frowning, a wall portrait now smiles; outside a picture window, the spectacle of snow falling becomes in a heartbeat vast sunlight. These tricks of editing and back projection suggest that nothing, good or bad, can be counted on. Countless people during the Depression felt the same way.

The film, of course, ends happily. Penny and Lucky, their other entanglements finally (and smoothly) undone, are about to marry—“I guess so,” is how Penny, laughing, puts it, upholding some piece of uncertainty to the last. (Like Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the film ends before there is a wedding.) The two then, in front of the vast, sky-high window, duet harmoniously as the snow turns to sunlight. This sublime moment of complicity between girl and boy, and between them and Nature, is given a challenging preface: a number of characters, Penny included, breaking into hysterical laughter—delightful, yes; also, out-of-control. But, as a couple, surely Penny and Lucky can weather the changeable weather. They and their audiences, whom they represent, certainly hope so.

In Swing Time, the Astaire-Rogers cycle reached a luminous and—courtesy of Jerome Kern’s music—melodious peak. The songs by Kern and lyricist Dorothy Fields, including “A Fine Romance” and the incomparably beautiful (and Oscar-winning) “The Way You Look Tonight,” are magical—as are the dances, by Astaire and Hermes Pan. These include, intricate and deft, the “Waltz in Swingtime,” and the glittering, dramatic dance to “Never Gonna Dance”—for me, also the best song. (When this dance lamenting hopeless romance quickly breaks into and out of a reprise of the hopeful “Waltz,” it’s a point through the heart.) Grounded, precipitous, delicate, robust, and shimmeringly mysterious, the “Never Gonna Dance” dance haunts with its grand passion and its soulful defenses against time. Astaire and Rogers are wondrous in both these dances—and, earlier, irresistibly nonchalant dancing to “Pick Yourself Up.” On the other hand, before (in blackface) Astaire, accompanied by triplicate shadows, starts in on his solo, an electric tribute to Bill Robinson (“Bojangles of Harlem”), the ensemble set-up is gaudy and grandiose—more Busby Berkeley/Bobby Connelly-Warner Brothers than intimate, elegant RKO. (At one point in the solo, special effects—there are a lot of them in this film—render Astaire-as-Robinson diaphanous in contrast to the three looming, substantial “shadows”—Why? Whatever; the effect is esoteric and unattractive.)

The acting is a pleasure, especially that of Rogers, Astaire, Helen Broderick and, as Lucky’s loyal sidekick (“. . . I know I’m not a pretty girl, but I’ll stick”), Victor Moore, who takes highest honors. Doubtless some credit for the warmth of the performances goes to director George Stevens, the cut-above-hack responsible for Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Greatest Story Every Told (1965); but, overall, his contribution seems minor. Indeed, only one of his other efforts qualifies as a modestly substantial piece of work: The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). However little he may have contributed to it, Swing Time will always remain Stevens’s one great film.

BACKWARD SEASON (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1950)

Dimitri Kirsanoff’s curve-around Arrière-saison is rigorous, forlorn, haunting.
     The opening closeup shows the interior window of a spare, remote cabin. A woman enters the frame, looks out. In the forest, a tree falls; the ax whacking at another tree belongs to the woman’s spouse. Outside the cabin, a dog runs in circles in a fenced-in pen, projecting the wife’s feelings of desolation, entrapment. Her spouse works with other woodcutters; the woman feels all alone. At lunch, no conversation passes between them. This is a silent film (apart from music), and the silence conveys the couple’s harsh, frustratingly secluded, noncommunicative life. A cut to outdoors shows leaves descending from a reflection of trees in a mirror-like pond—like all the shots of Nature here, the disclosure of a character’s feelings and mental state.
     The woman packs, leaves a note saying she will never come back. Before she departs, a panning shot of the stacked wood that her husband has cut extends her eye, suggesting what she feels stands between them: his labor; the geography and topography that this labor dictates.
     The man takes his wife’s parting letter in stride—we learn, because he has read these words before. The next day, he walks to work, ax on his shoulder; after a pan of an expanse of skeletal trees, as this image dissolves it opens up in the middle, to reveal the man at work, alone—the rupture of his life. A shot of the dog running in circles in its pen now projects his feelings.
     In the same frame, as the returning wife enters the door in the background, the dog runs in circles. The film ends with her at the window, looking out, wearing the same clothes she did at the beginning of the film.

VENOM AND ETERNITY (Isadore Isou, 1950)

I’ve been down this path before. I finally get to see a legendary movie that it turns out I cannot tolerate. Stan Brakhage, no less, called the film in question a “portal through which every film artist will have to pass.” More about this remark later.
     What is the film in question? From France, Isadore Isou’s 1950 Traité de bave et d’éternité, or, as we say in the States, Venom and Eternity. This one provoked riots when it was shown at Cannes in the early fifties.
     First off, take this as a given: I believe in every word that Isou says. I have nothing but contempt for those who judge a work of art on the irrelevant basis of whether they agree with its ideas or positions. But that matter never comes up here. I do agree with Isou’s assault on conventional cinema; I broadly agree with Isou, and I endorse as well all his particulars. But that doesn’t help me with his film!
     I felt Isou was screaming at me, especially in the first part. I don’t like to be screamed at.
     But then I calmed down and thought historically. I am watching Isou’s film from the vantage of the nouvelle vague’s transformation of cinema; Isou’s film predates, and could not guess there would be, the French New Wave. When you take that into account, Isou’s stridency becomes, at least, comprehensible.
     In any case, all those who possess a love of the movies will have to see Isou’s film, no matter what I say; all those who don’t, won’t bother. It is currently available on DVD, in Kino’s Avant-Garde Cinema 2.