None of these ladies appear to be saying no to David Niven in this dream sequence from The Lady Says No.
The flick: The Lady Says No (Ross-Stillman Productions, 1951; distributed by United Artists, 1952) [buy the set]
Current IMDb rating: 5.3
Director: Frank Ross (husband of star Joan Caulfield; this was his only directing credit, but he produced The Robe, Of Mice and Men, and The Devil and Miss Jones)
Actors of note: Joan Caulfield (The Unsuspected, Blue Skies; had an affair with Bing Crosby; reportedly Joss Whedon's favorite actress), David Niven (Oscar winner for Separate Tables; The Guns of Navarone, Murder by Death, three Pink Panther movies, a great deal more), Frances Bavier (The Day the Earth Stood Still; Aunt Bea from TV's The Andy Griffith Show), Henry Jones (Vertigo, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, way more), James Robertson Justice (The Guns of Navarone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), Lenore Lonergran (Westward the Women), Peggy Maley (The Wild One, Anchors Aweigh)
The gist of it: Life magazine photographer and man's man Bill Shelby (Niven) travels to Carmel, CA to photograph Dorinda Hatch (Caulfield), author of the best-selling book, The Lady Says No, which is evidently some kind of proto-feminist broadside. Bill is surprised to find that Dorinda is a sexy young woman and not a dried-up spinster, and he's sure that the comely lass was just parroting ideas she got from her stuffy old Aunt Alice (Bavier), whose scruffy, vagabond husband Matthew (Justice) has just returned home from one of his customary lengthy absences. Bill and Dorinda go into full-on "battle of the sexes" mode, alternately fighting and flirting, and eventually they get another couple, newlyweds Potsie and Goldie (Jones and Lonergran), involved in their shenanigans. It gets to a point where Potsie and Bill have barricaded themselves in a trailer, and it's up to Dorinda and Goldie and the police and the United States Army to get these feuding couples back together. Along the way, there's a lot of shouting from everyone on the subject of gender roles until Dorinda wises up and tosses her book in the ocean. Gloria Steinem, eat your heart out!
Frank Loesser
My take: Y'know, it's tricky to review a "battle of the sexes" comedy from 1951, because men and women were playing by a whole different rule book then. It's tough for me to say what's decent and what's indecent and what's reasonable and what's unreasonable for these people because I don't live in their world. People today expect the art and culture of the past to conform to our modern-day values, and I think that's misguided. Every Christmas, for instance, I see at least two or three articles (probably more) which declare the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to be a defense of date rape, with the assumption that the man in the song has slipped roofies in the girl's drink and is going to have sex with her when she's unconscious. Now, honestly, do you really believe that the tune's author, Frank Loesser -- the man who also wrote the songs for Guys and Dolls and who originally performed "Baby" with his own wife, Lynn Garland -- was going around drugging and raping women and then writing Christmas songs about it? The drugs we now call "roofies" were not even synthesized until 1972, which is 28 years after the song was written! We've gotten very jaundiced as a society, and it causes us to suspect the worst in everyone. And when you expect the worst, of course, you're never disappointed.
Joan Caulfield
That being said, the sexual politics of The Lady Says No are fairly repugnant by the standards of any age. At least, I think they are. The characters in this movie are so unrealistic and inconsistent, especially Dorinda, whose personality changes several times per scene, that it's difficult to know what they believe about anything. And if I were casting the role of a testosterone-fueled, macho adventurer -- a traveling photographer who documented his exploits in a book called I Shot Borneo -- I'm not sure that dapper, gentlemanly David Niven would be my first choice. Most of the plot of this movie revolves around the contents of Dorinda's book and the effect the book has on its readers. Frustratingly, we never get a solid idea of what's in that book, apart from the fact that the author doesn't approve of men whistling at women on the street. And besides, the movie is not really interested in letting its characters truly hash out their issues regarding male-female relationships. The Lady Says No is too busy with pie fights, slapstick barroom brawls, and wacky car chases to really concentrate on the matter at hand. Still in all, it was difficult not to cringe at a scene in which Dorinda visits Bill's trailer and negotiates with him for the return of an embarrassing photo (don't get excited; it's nothing sexual), and Bill uses this opportunity to get Dorinda to kiss him. In another scene, Bill pays for Dorinda's drink and then says he has a "mortgage" on her. By the end, Bill is blatantly telling Dorinda what to think, and she's grateful for it! I rolled my eyes, but I think if I'd been a woman, I might have been violently ill. Apart from that, The Lady Says No is a swing and a miss, I'm sorry to report. David Niven's charming as always (oh, for the days when a pencil mustache signaled sophistication!), and Joan Caulfield brings a lot of energy and wit to her character. Cinematographer James Wong Howe films her in a very flattering way, too, which helps the film somewhat. But I couldn't help feeling that Niven was too just old for her. Actually, they're only separated by 12 years, but he looks older than his age and she younger than hers. Or maybe their personalities just don't fit. In Murder by Death, Niven is paired up with Maggie Smith, who's 24 years younger than he is, and they're somehow a perfect fit.
Is it funny: The blogger says no. Maybe one joke in twenty reaches its intended destination. A few of the film's would-be comic setpieces just flop, such as an interminable sequence at a dive bar called the Wharf Rat, where Dorinda flirts with various men, including Potsie, to make Bill jealous. Or maybe that's not what's happening. Her motives and methods change so often, it's tough to be sure. I sort of liked an early scene in which Dorinda elaborately humiliates Bill in front of an all-female audience at some kind of social meeting, but the scene went on so long I forgot what she was trying to prove and why he was passively allowing her to cut his necktie (symbolism, I wonder?) and draw on his face with lipstick. The one scene I really enjoyed was a totally bonkers dream sequence set in a fantasy version of Borneo where Bill has a harem and Dorinda is followed around by a little man in a hideous monkey costume. What this scene has to do with anything is beyond me, but it at least got my attention.
My grade: C
P.S. - As for the matter of racial stereotyping, I'll have to plead nolo contendere. The movie has exactly one African-American character, a woman who is seen frantically jitterbugging at the Wharf Rat to the strains of an all-white jazz combo. She seemed to be wearing a waitress' uniform, but she was standing outside the door of the ladies' room. Who this woman was or what she was supposed to be doing was beyond my ken. The movie holds on her for a moment, though, so she must have some significance.
The poster promises "gay new Cinecolor," but Here Comes Trouble is strictly black-and-white.
The flick: Here Comes Trouble (United Artists, 1948) [buy the set]
Current IMDb rating: 5.6
Director: Fred Guiol (Hay Foot, Why Girls Love Sailors, 45 Minutes from Hollywood)
Actors of note: William Tracy (Hay Foot, The Phantom of the Opera, Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith), Joe Sawyer (Hay Foot, Gilda, How the West Was Won), Emory Parnell (The Maltese Falcon, The Andromeda Strain, and so much more), Betty Compson (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, A Slight Case of Murder), Joan Woodbury (The Bride of Frankenstein, The Ten Commandments)
The gist of it: Officious yet gullible Dorian "Dodo" Doubleday (Tracy), returning to civilian life after a stint in the Army, picks up his old life where he left it, i.e. working as a newspaper copy boy at the Tribune and romancing his boss' lovely brunette daughter, Penny. Penny's father, irritable newspaper editor "Windy" Blake (Parnell), despises Doubleday and thus promotes him to the dangerous job of police reporter, hoping that the local gangsters -- angered by the newspaper's anti-mob crusade -- will kill him. On his new beat, Doubleday runs into his old Army buddy, Ames (Sawyer), a big palooka who's recently joined the police force and is so desperate to make good that he's arresting everyone in sight. Despite their total ineptitude at virtually everything, Doubleday and Ames find themselves at the center of a major news story involving organized crime, a shady burlesque theater, a sexy dancer named Bubbles La Rue (Woodbury), blackmail, bribery, and a diary which could bring down the city's crime boss.
A more serious approach.
My take: A kind of goofball, funhouse-mirror version of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Here Comes Trouble focuses on the plight of veterans returning home from World War II and trying to reestablish themselves in America. Like the characters in that Oscar-winning film, Doubleday and Ames have to contend with personal and professional strife, but here it's played for lighthearted slapstick rather than pathos. Exploding cigars, sneezing clowns, and accidental judo flips are the order of the day here. Despite the wholesomeness of Doubleday, the ultimate goody-two-shoes, Here Comes Trouble has a surprising undercurrent of sex and violence. It's strongly implied, for instance, that Mr. Blake cheated on his insufferable wife (Compson) with Bubbles at a convention in Chicago and will do anything to keep this information a secret. And Blake's total nonchalance at sending Doubleday to be murdered by thugs is, to say the least, eye-opening for what is supposed to be a carefree romp. Far from being patriotic or reassuring, Here Comes Trouble presents America as a place where the police are incompetent, the so-called "crusading" newspaper editor is actually kind of a dirtbag (his reporters seem like pretty slimy guys, too), and a city's real business is conducted in hushed tones behind closed doors. You have to wonder how Mr. Blake made enough money to afford the seemingly palatial mansion where he and his family live. The Tribune's motto, written in a very stylish art deco font on the wall of the bullpen, goes: "Is it news? Is it interesting? Is it fit to read?" Compare that to the more-direct motto of the small-town paper in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951): "Tell the truth." The cops, meanwhile, are seemingly impotent against an organized crime ring which has permeated the town, even its legitimate businesses, and everyone -- Penny included -- is all too quick to believe that the totally-innocent Doubleday is a murderer. In short, it's a pretty rotten country we've provided for our returning GIs. On the plus side, Mr. Blake has a very nice private bathroom adjoining his office, complete with a shower. In its glory days, print journalism was quite a racket. One last thought here: is the fate of Bubbles La Rue meant to be some kind of moral judgment on her character and, if so, what does that say about gender roles and sexual politics in the 1940s?
Is it funny: For the most part, yes. Certain sequences in Here Comes Trouble, particularly a scene with Doubleday and Bubbles winding up together in Mr. Blake's bathroom while the oblivious Mrs. Blake visits her nervous husband's office, had me laughing out loud. Others, like a scene in which Doubleday's fellow reporters haze him by ruining his new clothes and smearing his face with black ink, just didn't work for me. The ending of Here Comes Trouble is almost exactly the same as that of All Over Town: a murderer runs around a theater trying to evade capture while the cops and all the other characters stumble all over each other in a madcap pursuit, and the audience just thinks they're being treated to a great show. This final sequence goes on too long and deflates the comedy just a bit in the home stretch, but I have to admit I chuckled when Doubleday managed to lose his trousers and ended up in his striped boxer shorts for the last five minutes of the flick. Underwear is always comedy gold.
My grade: B+
P.S. - Yes, there is one stereotypical Negro in a menial role here. This time, it's an elevator operator who reacts with wide-eyed astonishment at Doubleday, who is blissfully unaware that his coworkers have made him look like a bearded hobo.
My preliminary attempt at mapping the feature films of the Coen Brothers.
With the imminent release of Joel and Ethan Coen's next feature, Inside Llewyn Davis, I thought it was a good time to discuss an aspect of the brothers' career which has thus far escaped critical notice. Taken in total, their films provide a portrait of our nation from one coast to the other. Their America is a skewed, surreal and often dangerous place populated by misfits, outlaws, rebels, big shots, and fierecly independent eccentrics. While American society becomes more and more homogeneous over time, most Coen films heavily emphasize the local customs, accents, and attitudes of the places where they are set. In a sense, the filmmakers have a vested interested in preserving the so-called "old weird America" before it's obliterated by television, the Internet, and nationwide retail and restaurant chains. I believe that the brothers are fascinated with American iconography above all other themes and have used their movies to explore various American archetypes which loom large in our collective imagination. It goes without saying that a Coen film will be "weird" to one extent or another, but the particular flavor of "weird" depends on where the film is set and which American subculture is being satirized, venerated, or simply observed in the script. Marge Gunderson and the Dude may be contemporaries, for example, but they do not lead similar lives and would probably not have much to say to one another if they were seated side-by-side on a long bus trip. Meanwhile, Ed Crane's America is not Norville Barnes' America. Geographically, sure, it's the same place but philosophically, it's not even close. To better understand the Coen Brothers' attitude toward their homeland (or certain sections of it, anyway), I have organized their films geographically.
THE SOUTHWEST (Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas)
M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in the relentless Texas heat of Blood Simple.
Films:Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, True Grit, No Country for Old Men
More than any other region of the country -- even their native Minnesota or their adoptive California -- it is the Great American Southwest where the Coen Brothers have done their most potent myth-making. For them, this is a spooky and merciless place where guns, drugs, and money hold sway and where Revenge is often the law. Their first feature, Blood Simple, famously begins with a monologue by sleazy private eye Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who explains life in Texas to us: asking your neighbors for help is useless, he says, because "down here, you're on your own." Visser's cynical speech is accompanied by a series of eerily beautiful but foreboding shots of Texas, all composed as meticulously as a Mark Rothko canvas. We see highways, farmers' fields, oil derricks, and a drive-in theater, but not a human being in sight. This sets up a pattern the Coens will repeat in The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski: introduce the place first, minus the people, while an off-screen character narrates, and then let the camera "find" the movie's protagonist after a few minutes. The Texas we see in this movie is a desolate, barren, and hopeless place with plenty of wide open stretches where people can commit horrible crimes without police interference. A little over two decades later, the Cones returned to the Lone Star State for No Country for Old Men, a downbeat crime drama which makes Blood Simple look like a carefree romp in comparison. Here, the law maintains a token presence, represented by Tommy Lee Jones' grizzled Sheriff Bell, but is ultimately impotent against a new breed of pitiless super-criminals like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). "The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure," Sheriff Bell wearily tells us.
Raising Arizona: Bounty hunter Leonard Smalls is armed and unafraid.
True Grit and Raising Arizona are rather more optimistic than the Coens' two Texas films. How could they not be? In these movies, at least, the guilty are duly punished and the heroes are (more or less) satisfied at the end. But even here, the protagonists are often at the mercy of violent, ruthless men --Randall "Tex" Cobb's Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona and Josh Brolin's treacherous Tom Cheney in True Grit -- who are motivated solely by greed and who will gladly kill to further their own ends. These men have no permanent home and do not fear the law, so our heroes must face them and defeat them without help. One blogger, by the way, has actually written an article comparing Leonard Smalls and Anton Chigurh. Give it a read, won't you?
And while you're at it, I invite you to compare and contrast the opening scenes from No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple. Though the films were released 24 years apart, the stories in them occur only four years apart. No Country takes place principally in West Texas, along the Mexican border, while Blood Simple is set somewhere in Central Texas. Both films begin with thoughtful, contemplative monologues, but one of our narrators is an honorable man and the other an opportunistic swine. The question to consider here is: are these men being pessimistic or realistic when they describe the Texas they know?
George Clooney and pals seem about to be lynched in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Films:O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers
When it comes to covering the American Southeast, also known as the Deep South or the Old South, the Coen Brothers' attitudes are clearly rooted in nostalgia, folklore, and Hollywood romanticism than in any sort of reality. The Coens' South is a quaint, dusty, sepia-toned place where hobos carry bindlestiffs, freshly-baked pies sit cooling on windowsills, and there is nothing more sacred than Sunday service. And music, of course, is everywhere. It's just part of the atmosphere, flowing from every home and generating itself spontaneously in nature. The Coens have described O Brother as a "hayseed comedy," and term applies just as well to their remake of Ealing Studio's The Ladykillers. Although the former is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the latter in the mid-2000s, Mississippi seems not to have changed much in the ensuing seven decades. In fact, take out the references to rap music (or "hippity hop") and a few other modern-day trappings like convenience stores, and The Ladykillers could take place simultaneously with O Brother. Both films are farces about groups of inept criminals led by motor-mouthed "gentlemen thieves" who never limit themselves to one- or two-word utterances when they could accomplish the same goal with 50 words. Like George Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill, Tom Hanks' Professor Dorr uses his eccentric vocabulary and serpentine sentence structures to dazzle and disorient those around him. To put it simply, these fellas sure can talk.
As I said earlier, another thread which connects these films is their heavy use of traditional regional music. One group of thieves (in O Brother) actually does form a band along the way, while the other (in The Ladykillers) merely poses as one. It's possible that the Coens made these films simply for the opportunity to use old bluegrass and gospel recordings on the soundtrack. O Brother indeed created a chart-busting, Grammy-winning sensation with its companion album consisting of vintage 78s, field recordings, and songs newly recorded (most notably "Man of Constant Sorrow") in the style of days long past. Hurt by the film's critical and commercial failure, The Ladykillers soundtrack LP did not manage to do for old-time gospel what O Brother had done for bluegrass. The album is no less astonishing, though, and the music itself manages to raise the stakes of the film's plot. The Ladykillers is a dark comedy in which inept crooks are regularly killed off, but the religious music on the soundtrack constantly reminds us that the characters' actions may have far-reaching consequences in the Next World.
THE EAST COAST (New York, Washington D.C.)
Paul Newman enjoys a Monte Cristo against a backdrop of skyscrapers in The Hudsucker Proxy.
Films:The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller's Crossing [possibly], Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coens don't often head out East, but when they do, they tend to include a few common elements: men in well-tailored suits, rapid-fire dialogue peppered with brisk comebacks, copious alcohol consumption, and winner-take-all scenarios in which no quarter is asked or given. After all, it's a jungle out there. If you study the image above, you'll notice a distinct visual change from the Coen films set in the Southwest and Southeast. This being NYC in winter, the temperature has dropped considerably, and the film's color scheme has skewed to a blueish-gray hue in sympathy. Until Inside Llewyn Davis, which centers around the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, The Hudsucker Proxy was the Coen Brothers' one-and-only true "New York movie." Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese have basically spent their whole careers in the Big Apple, but the Coens visited the place with great hopes in the 1990s, met with financial ruin there, and didn't return for two decades. Now they're giving the place a second chance. From what I've seen in the trailer, Llewyn Davis is considerably more realistic than the completely fantastical, dreamlike New York of Hudsucker, a highly-stylized screwball comedy which is arguably the only Coen film to employ elements of the supernatural. The magical character of Moses the Clock Man (Bill Cobbs) is very much a precursor to the Stranger, the genial cowboy portrayed by Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski. In a way, Moses and the Stranger are East Coast and West Coast variations on the same role. Both are folksy storytellers who narrate their respective movies and watch over all the other characters like benevolent gods. (Perhaps it's telling of the difference between New York and LA that Moses intervenes when the hero, Norville Barnes, is in real trouble, but the Stranger simply watches from the sidelines.) Just as the Stranger kicks off Lebowski by giving us his personal take on Los Angeles, Moses welcomes us to The Hudsucker Proxy with a speech about the perils and pleasures of New York:
Elsewhere in the Coen filmography, we have a couple of hard-to-categorize outliers. Miller's Crossing is the duo's Prohibition-era gangster film, and it takes place in an undisclosed urban locale referred to only as "the city." I have arbitrarily placed the film in New York due to the presence of both Irish and Jewish gangsters, but the story could just as well be occurring in Chicago, Boston, or Philadelphia. It was shot in New Orleans, but no one in the film has any hint of a Louisiana accent so I have ruled it out as a setting. Wherever it takes place, Miller's Crossing is a handsome film which lends its various mob bosses, thugs, and gun molls a sense of old Hollywood glamour. It is interesting that the film, unlike most crime sagas, mixes urban and pastoral settings. The title location, for instance, is a forest clearing where bodies are dumped and executions carried out. Despite its grim function, the crossing still looks sumptuous and inviting due to the rich cinematography of Barry Sonnenfeld. Burn After Reading, on the other hand, does not portray its setting, Washington D.C., in such a flattering manner. This is a cold-blooded comedy of errors whose inept, unsympathetic characters routinely betray, threaten, and deceive one another. Fittingly, they inhabit what seems to be a godless, indifferent, and comfortless universe. This being our nation's capital, there are a number of massive government buildings which figure into the plot (including CIA headquarters and the Russian embassy), but these are portrayed in an unappetizing manner -- they're imposing rather than impressive -- and they must share screen time with such shabby, work-a-day locations as an unremarkable apartment, a blandly ugly gymnasium, and an uninspiring movie multiplex. There are some more photogenic neighborhoods in Burn After Reading, but these are inhabited by some of the movie's nastiest characters.
THE UPPER MIDWEST (Minnesota)
A storm approaches at the end of A Serious Man.
Films:Fargo, A Serious Man
It took a while for the the Coen Brothers to get back to their Minnesota roots, but when they did, they did so in a big way. Interestingly, Ethan Coen's 1998 short story collection, Gates of Eden, contains a fair amount of commentary on his family's home state. Minnesota, in fact, may be called one of the book's primary motifs. One character, for instance, uncharitably describes Minneapolis as a "strange frozen city where people's breath hovers about them, where fingers tingle and go dead, where spit snaps and freezes before it hits the ground." Another narrator is more forgiving:
The city had not much serious crime. It was dotted with scenic lakes. The people were polite. Many owned boats. In the summer they engaged in water sports; in the winter they skied. The solid northern stock seemed immune to the great miseries and grand passions upon which crime traditionally feeds.
Minnesota is the setting for two of the Coen Brothers' most accomplished and fulfilling works: Fargo and A Serious Man. As anyone who has seen these films can confirm, the characters indeed experience "great miseries and grand passions" and are nowhere near "immune" to these emotions, even though they maintain the outward stoicism for which the region is famous. (An old joke: "Did you hear bout the Norwegian who loved his wife so much he almost told her?") The perceived nothingness of the state, the utter blankness of Minnesota, is what makes the plots of Fargo and Serious all the more shocking. "A lot can happen in the middle of nowhere" went the tagline for the former. When local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) arrives at the site of a grisly roadside shooting, she guesses that the suspects are not from Brainerd. She's right, of course, but Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), the hapless car salesman whose kidnapping scheme is the catalyst for the whole movie, actually is from Brainerd. Evil lurks behind the blandest of facades.
The two films work as a diptych: Minnesota in winter, Minnesota in spring. Fargo gives us seemingly endless terrain blanketed in snow, while Serious lets us see what the place looks like after it's thawed out. Ironically, the lack of snow only serves to emphasize the featureless desolation of the land. A Serious Man largely takes place in a newly-built suburban community, and the lack of trees and vegetation gives the place an unsettling starkness. Struggling with the TV antenna on his roof, ineffectual college math prof Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is at least as pitiful as Jerry Lundegaard, who loses his composure while scraping the ice from his car window in a dismal parking lot after a business meeting with his father-in-law doesn't go as he'd hoped. Note how the high camera angle at the beginning emphasizes Jerry's laughable insignificance.
What separates Fargo from A Serious Man is ethnicity. Fargo takes us into the world of "Swedes, Poles, and German Lutherans" (Ethan's words again) which comprise much of the population there. The film's two most-noticed details were the characters' heavy Minnesotan accents (with frequent repetitions of "yah" and "you betcha") and their unflagging, almost superhuman politeness (a tradition dubbed "Minnesota Nice"). The use of dialect was the most controversial aspect of the film upon its initial release, with some critics dismissing the film entirely based on that aspect of the production. However, a great many more were charmed by the accent and found themselves imitating it after seeing the film. It's tough not to. The accent was certainly exaggerated for the film, a point which irked some native Minnesotans, but I feel it was done with affection. This was how the people of Minnesota must have sounded to Joel and Ethan growing up. Which brings us to that other Coen Brothers film set in their home state...
More bad news for Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man.
A Serious Man is very explicitly about the experience of being Jewish in Minnesota in the 1960s, surrounded by skeptical Midwestern Protestants on all sides. It's a world the Coens obviously knew first-hand, and it comes up again and again in Gates of Eden. Some of the details in this movie, such as the sister who spends all of her time in the bathroom, were first described in Ethan's book. Ethan also wrote with great humor about the drudgery of attending Hebrew school with its glowering, humorless rabbis and arcane lessons. It's no surprise that A Serious Man is the brothers' most openly religious film. The plot is essentially the Book of Job translated to LBJ-era American suburbia: a decent and devout family man, the previously-mentioned Larry Gopnik, suddenly faces a series of familial, professional, legal, and financial setbacks. Towards the end, just as his fortunes seem to be improving somewhat, a whole new set of problems descend upon him and the film ends on a note of dread, with many of Larry's issues left unresolved. Many viewers and critics intuited that God is personally and unfairly punishing Larry in this film, but that notion presupposes the very existence of God, which I don't necessarily think is a given in the Coen world. Larry might just be having a string of rotten luck. It's up to the viewer to decide whether or not these events have any theological significance. But what we can safely say is that poor Larry Gopnik is denied the solace afforded to Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo. She can take comfort in her loving husband and soon-to-be born child, while he can only pray for the best to a God who may or may not be listening and who may not even exist.
THE WEST COAST (California)
The Big Lebowski's Tara Reid at home in the land of fruits and nuts.
Films:The Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There
And now, from the Land of a Thousand Lakes, we travel two-thousand miles westward to the "Land of a Thousand Flakes," as Mad magazine once put it. A mere thousand seems like an awfully low estimate, though, especially from what we see of California in the Coen Brothers' movies. The rest of the country sees the state as a place where America's most shallow, greedy, deluded, and debauched individuals have gathered to take advantage of one another. The Coens tend to reinforce this idea through their work. Intolerable Cruelty takes place in a number of locations, including Las Vegas, but the film's main action centers around Los Angeles and gives us all the typical targets we'd expect from such a story: conniving lawyers, unfaithful husbands, gold-digging wives, bitter divorce cases, iron-clad prenuptial agreements, ridiculous reality television shows (America's Funniest Divorce Videos), and pets who are treated like spoiled children. In Gates of Eden, Ethan gives us a distinctly Jewish-American spin on the topic as he describes the fate of a Hebrew schoolmate:
For the next several months, Michael was a model student, if somewhat robotic, until his family moved to California, where (it was common knowledge) all meshuggenehs end up.
Of all the characters in the Coen canon, there are two whose lives somewhat mirror those of the brothers themselves. One is Barton Fink (John Turturro) and the other is Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid). Both Barton and Bunny travel to the Golden State in order to work in the exciting field of motion pictures: he as a writer, she as a starlet. Like the Coens, Barton is a nerdy, socially awkward Jewish writer, while Bunny (the former Fawn Knutsen of Moorhead, MN) is another transplanted Minnesotan*. Unlike Joel and Ethan, however, these two fail to find success in Hollywood. Having conquered Broadway, Barton is assigned to write a "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" and struggles to complete a first draft while getting embroiled in a gruesome homicide case. His move from New York to Los Angeles, a blatant cash-grab suggested by his unscrupulous agent, seems ill-advised from the start. The actual transition is suggested by an ominous shot of a wave crashing against a rock on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Like A Serious Man, Barton Fink can be interpreted as a biblical parable. The dilapidated hotel where Barton lives may be Hell, while his neighbor (John Goodman) and boss (Michael Lerner) make pretty good stand-ins for Satan and God. Like "Hotel California" by the Eagles, Barton Fink makes a case for Los Angeles as a kind of Inferno or Purgatory. Meanwhile, in The Big Lebowski (whose protagonist hates "the fuckin' Eagles"), the only screen work Bunny can get is in a cheaply-produced pornographic film called Logjammin'. The former high school cheerleader winds up a drug-addicted trophy wife who owes a hefty sum of money to the film's Hugh Hefner-esque producer, Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara). To summarize, then, the Coen Brothers do not present Hollywood as a place where people's dreams come true.
Customer service: Minnesota-style vs. California-style
The Big Lebowski is the Coen Brothers' definitive "California movie," and it serves as both a tribute to and parody of the so-called Land of Fruits and Nuts. While fans across the country and around the world have embraced the laid-back lifestyle of the film's hero, the Dude (Jeff Bridges), the film offers a panoramic view of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities. Those with an intimate knowledge of SoCal culture must experience an extra level of enjoyment when they watch this film. With the Dude as our informal tour guide, we travel to stuffy Pasadena, ultra-casual Venice, ritzy and exclusive Malibu, scuzzy Simi Valley, and humble North Hollywood, where a former television writer wheezes his days away in the iron lung which keeps him alive. Of course, we have an assortment of California kooks on hand, too, many of whom have convinced themselves they they are somehow part of the art world, music world, or movie industry. The Dude's shy, chubby landlord, Marty, gives an interpretive dance recital and (in classic Hollywood fashion) asks his constantly-in-arrears lodger to attend and give him "notes." Then there are the Nihilists (led by Peter Stormare): three washed-up German techno musicians who, in their desperation, have cooked up a ransom scheme which they hope will net them $1 million. (It won't.) Much higher up in the food chain is Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), a woman whose inheritance from her mother has allowed her to live the life of a bohemian artist in a stylishly-appointed loft where she drizzles paint onto a giant canvas while dangling nude from a harness. Her dear friend, the fey, giggling Knox Harrington (David Thewlis) is supposedly a "video artist" but seems more apt to be a trust-fund-draining layabout. And we haven't even gotten to the film's most celebrated supporting characters: belligerent Vietnam vet Walter (John Goodman), leering pedophile Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), and perpetually bewildered surfer and bowling prodigy Donny (Steve Buscemi). Before we leave Lebowski, it's worth pointing out that it was the follow-up to the critical and commercial triumph of Fargo. Since the films had several key cast members in common (Buscemi, Goodman, Stormare, and others), the public might have been expecting a quasi-sequel or continuation. The Coens, however, let us know within the first few minutes of The Big Lebowski that we're not in Brainerd anymore. While Fargo was peopled by impossibly cheerful cashiers, waitresses, parking lot attendants, and even prostitutes, Lebowski gives us California's brand of customer service. Apart from the Dude, the first human being we see in the film is an obviously-bored Ralph's checkout girl (Robin Jones) who glares with disgust at our hero as he writes a $0.69 check for his half and half.
* The Big Lebowski's theme music is "The Man in Me" by Bob Dylan, another Minnesota-born Jew who left his home state and, like Bunny Lebowski, adopted a new name (his real moniker is Robert Zimmerman) and a new persona to go with it.
Northern California noir: Frances McDormand and Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn't There.
We find a very different California in The Man Who Wasn't There, a James M. Cain-inspired noir tale set in 1949 and presented in gorgeous black-and-white. Our protagonist -- you'd be hard pressed to call him a hero -- is Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), an impossibly reserved and tight-lipped barber who lives with his adulterous bookkeeper wife (Frances McDormand) in the quiet suburban community of Santa Rosa. We're a long way from Los Angeles -- a good 427 miles north of the Dude's slovenly bungalow. These aren't the crackpots and showbiz wannabes of the Coens' other California flicks. These are solid, practical-minded folks, much closer in spirit to the characters in Fargo and A Serious Man. But just as with those films, the sedate setting of The Man Who Wasn't There is no deterrent to "great passions and grand miseries." Just like Jerry Lundegaard and phony millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski before him, Ed Crane tries to raise some cash through a scheme which directly endangers his own wife. In this case, he plans to blackmail Doris' lover (James Gandolfini) and use the proceeds to go in on a dry-cleaning business. This being a Coen film, the plan backfires spectacularly and the plot goes off on unexpected tangents involving Beethoven, UFOs, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Moody and haunting, The Man Who Wasn't There ranks among my very favorite Coen films.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So there you have it folks! We've managed to cover the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. As the map at the beginning shows, there's still plenty more territory for the boys to cover. They've yet to do a film set in the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest, New England, or anywhere in the Midwest besides Minnesota. Much of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions remain untouched as well. Still in all, their feature films function as a kind of prism through which we can view this wonderful, terrible country of ours -- distorting some of its features and bringing others into sharper focus.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)