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DAVID THORBURN: The aesthetic of connection, this aesthetic
of familiarity, this popular aesthetic operated
in Hollywood movies.
And I want to expand a bit on this idea
by talking about more explicitly what
might be called an anthropological view
of this matter, what could be called
the cultural work of movies.
One way I can make you think about the larger and more
significant implications of what the movies are,
of how to think about the movies,
is to ask you to think about the true implications
of certain words that we just take for granted.
For example, take the word entertainment
or the verb entertain, to entertain.
We think of it as-- we think of it
as a relatively straightforward term, as it is.
And we think of entertainment as some form of diversion
that takes us away from the serious things in life.
But I want to suggest to you that if we look closely,
even if we look at sort of the root of the word
and the way the word is used, and the variations on the kinds
of meanings that are associated with the word
entertainment or the verb to entertain,
we can see deeper implications.
For one thing, for example, let's just
take a standard dictionary definition.
There are three different senses in which
almost all dictionaries in English
would iden-- would define the verb to entertain.
They would say, to hold the attention of someone
is to entertain them.
A second meaning would be to extend hospitality to someone.
That makes sense, right?
But think when you extend hospi--
you're engaged in a communal, in a hostly act, right?
It's an act of generosity, an act of inclusion, right?
So forms of entertainment are potentially
community creating, gestures towards a community, acts
of hosting, right?
And they also, of course, are a bid for your attention.
And then there's a third meaning,
which is the most interesting.
To entertain, almost all dictionaries
will tell you also means, to hold in the mind.
I'm entertaining this idea.
I'm entertaining this thought.
I'm entertaining this possibility.
In other words, the word enter-- the verb to entertain
means to meditate, to think, to speculate, to consider
possibilities, right?
And when you attend an entertainment
in a certain sense, that's exactly what happens.
Exactly because the space of entertainment
is marked out by the society, by social convention,
as a place of diversion, as a place of relaxation,
as a place that is theoretically not a place of work.
Certain things are licensed or permitted because of that,
or encouraged.
Because you know you're kicking back,
it's not a serious place, what is likely to happen?
You're allowed, or at least by implication,
or permitted to entertainment possibilities that
in actuality might be scary or disturbing or unacceptable.
So that one of the ironies of entertainment
is that it can become a space, especially public forms
of entertainment in cultures, like Shakespeare's
public theater or likely public theater of the American movie
system in the studio era, these public spaces
can become spaces in which the body
politic, the political and social community,
entertains ideas about its own nature.
Entertains, considers, speculates, holds
in its mind accounts of its origins, stories of its values,
right?
And what we can say, then, is that the space of entertainment
becomes from, in a certain angle, in virtually
all societies, a space of discourse,
a space in which exactly because it's a space recognized
as not real, as make believe, is therefore licensed or allowed
to explore possibilities that might be too dangerous or too
disturbing to explore in other ways.
And we can see that certain features of the entertainment
systems of most countries and of most societies,
and certainly the entertainment system we're
calling the Hollywood studio movie,
are systems in which other features
of the-- other features of the formats
and organizational principles of the films
reinforce this idea that you're escaping
into a space that is also a space of exploration
and discovery.
That you're not escaping and running away exactly into forms
of diversion and hiding from the world, but in fact,
you're escaping into a space of freedom
in which you can consider possibilities
that might otherwise be too disturbing to think about.
And one way you can see how the formats encourage
that comes back to the argument I was
making about genres and stars.
Because think about, one of the most fundamental things
about the conventions of genre are
that audiences understand not only
sort of the costumes and the setting
and so forth, but also usually understand
the basic-- what do we call it-- the basic segments, a story
force, the segmentation of the story,
the stages through which the story is likely to go.
And they're likely, in many cases,
to have a pretty good idea about the nature of the ending
of a particular genre form.
They may not be absolutely certain about the details
of how it will work out, but they
have some pretty good ideas about-- for example,
the notion is that various forms of comedy
end on some sort of an affirming or a happy note,
even if the difficulties that are dramatized
in the text from the beginning are very serious and troubling,
right?
Not that every single comedy ends on a totally happy note,
but that's the expectation you have
when you come to see a comedy.
You expect an adventure with many difficulties
that are-- that will finally be resolved in some form.
And in fact, traditionally, one of the most fundamental ways
in which comic narratives and comic dramas are resolved
is in the act of marriage.
Because of course, marriage is a kind of reconciliation
of potential opposites.
It is a space of celebration in which
different families and different groups
and, in many forms of comedy, different social classes
are brought together.
So that the marriage itself becomes a social space that
replicates, if it's dramatized on stage or in the movie,
it replicates in some sense the communal space
of sharing that the audience is engaged in when
it's watching the text, right?
So you have expectations about the characters,
about the plots, about the basic formats,
and especially about the endings of genre forms.
Now what follows from the fact that you
know that genre forms usually end happily?
And indeed, that most-- that most Hollywood movies,
leave aside the question of comedy,
will end on a reassuring, or if not a happy, at least
a reassuring or a positive note.
You simply know that going in.
Even though that rule is sometimes violated,
it's not usually violated.
And when it's violated, it's often
violated in ways that are instructive and interesting.
But you have that expectation.
Well, the expectation that when you
get into the story, the expectation
you have as an audience member when you enter the story,
knowing that you are going to come to a happy ending, what
does that do?
It's a form of reassurance before you start.
There are theorists of folk tales and fairy tales
who argue that that's one of the functions of fairy tales.
That when a folktale or a fairytale
begins, once upon a time, many, many years ago,
in a land far away, and the story ends, and they all
lived happily ever after, what are the-- those
are ritualized or conventional beginnings and endings.
What do they contain?
They may contain terror.
They may contain Little Red Riding Hood being
raped or eaten alive, right?
But it's OK in a certain sense, because when
you come to the ending, you know that you'll be reassured.
So because you know that the ending will reassure you,
it enables an exploration of stuff
that would be scary and frightening.
There are child psychologists, for example,
who say that one of the important aspects
of storytelling to children is precisely this.
That the ritualized reassurance of once upon a time and they
all lived happily ever after are enabling conditions
that permit the exploration, that
permit the story to go into territories
that would otherwise be frightening and terrifying.
What I'm suggesting to you is that that's
a way of understanding adult entertainment as well.
And over and over again, the Hollywood film
will prove this principle out.
It will explore disturbing and frightening materials,
but in ways that are some sense legitimated or permitted
by the very fact that it belongs in an entertainment space,
by the very fact that it marks itself
as something that is a diversion,
a mere entertainment.
But I'd like to eliminate the word mere
because it's an inadequate and derogatory way of describing
an experience that often can be among the most
creative and valuable that people in a society can have,
right?
So one way then of crystallizing all of this
is to say that the Hollywood film for me,
in the studio era especially, represents
a particular form of what I would call consensus narrative.
What I mean by this term is something rather elaborate,
but I think very helpful.
What I mean by the term is this, that in most societies--
perhaps not in all, but in most societies--
all societies have many different sites
of storytelling, right?
People tell jokes to each other.
We go to the opera.
We watch-- we play video games that
are deep forms of narrative today, right?
So that's the coming-- probably the new form of narrative
that's emerging in our society today, are video games.
We hear stories in theaters.
We can hear stories in popular songs.
We read stories in novels, right?
There are stories all over.
And in fact, we get non-fictional stories out
of our newspapers and from our politicians.
These are usually even more outlandish, ridiculous,
and false than the fictional stories that we're fed,
although we often don't recognize that, right?
So we live in a sea, an ocean of narratives, right?
All societies have many different sites of it.
But in many societies, if not all,
there usually is a single site that by general acceptance
or consent is recognized as the space in which the stories that
are being told are intended for everyone, right?
The difference between what goes on in a wrestling match
or in a baseball game, also forms of narrative in a way,
or in an opera or in a theatrical piece and a movie
of the Hollywood era, or a television program in the great
era of television before, say, 2000 when new systems
so atomized and divided the television system that it began
to-- it began to imitate what happened to its ancestors,
the films, a generation earlier, losing its hold on the majority
of the population-- the idea is then that the idea
of a consensus story is the story--
it's the story form or the story system
that the culture recognizes as the one that reaches
the largest number of people.
And that by common agreement or consent--
not by law, but by something much richer and larger
than that, by a kind of communal agreement,
this space is recognized as the place in which the stories that
are told are meant to appeal to the largest number of people,
cutting across social class, cutting cross age and gender
differences, cutting across ethnic differences.
Virtually all societies have some space
in which some story system of one kind or another
that wants to appeal to virtually everyone exists.
Now it's important to understand that I
don't mean it's a real consensus, an authentic one.
That is to say, I don't mean that the stories that
are told there really embody the values universally of everyone
in the society.
Not at all.
Because these societies are limited in certain ways.
They have exclusions.
They have caste structures, and so on.
So the consensus narrative in 1920
was a consensus narrative that sort of saw African Americans
as second class citizens, right?
There was a lot of prejudice then.
Or it certainly was a patriarchal consensus,
which assumed that women belonged in the home,
and so forth.
I don't mean that the consensus is universally
embraced by everyone.
What I do mean, though, is that everyone in the society
recognizes that this is the consensus.
And even the people who descend from it
recognize that this is the space in which the central values
of the society are articulated, dramatized, and diffused.
And what makes this space-- these spaces--
so that another example, I mentioned one earlier,
in Shakespeare's day, the public theater of Shakespeare's time
was the equivalent of what I'm saying Hollywood
was in the studio era.
In the Middle Ages, it would be the Bible, right?
The central story promulgated through all-- virtually
everyone in the society had-- not only
had access to the Bible, when they went to church,
they received further discussion and elaborate propaganda
about how important and central the Bible was to their life.
So the consensus narrative system
was the one the church sustained in the Middle Ages, right?
In fact, one of the interesting things
is to watch in Western culture the way in which the consensus
story becomes more and more secularized.
And not only secularized, not only
freed from religious dispensation,
but also freed, in some sense, in many societies
from government control.
Right?
So in some societies, there is no such freedom.
So for example, the consensus narrative in the Soviet Union
was the story that was approved by the government.
It was-- and in fact, probably the majority of the population
dissented from that consensus, right?
So the consensus I'm talking about
is always a constructed one, right?
But that construction is still interesting.
And this is one of the exam-- one of the reasons,
for example, that today people will still
scream bloody murder if they see that on television,
the representation of minorities or women is prejudicial.
But you don't see anybody complaining about the fact
that there are such representations in books
or in theater any longer.
And the reason for that is that it's the consensus
system that matters to people.
It's the consensus space in which
it is assumed the values of the society
can be challenged or discussed, OK?
So what I want to suggest, then, is
we might think-- so we can think of the Hollywood film then,
all Hollywood movies, as belonging-- as participating
in the creation of what we can call the consensus story,
the most widely shared story about American society.
And it has many sides, right?
Part of the story has to do with how you define masculinity,
right?
And some of that burden is carried in every film,
but there are certain movies like war movies or Westerns
in which masculinity, tough guy-ness is the main issue.
And then there's some-- then we could say
the norms about family life.
Where do they come in?
Well, more often in comedies and in melodramas
that focus on families, right?
In other words, different parts of the consensus
are dramatized more fully in different genres.
But all the films together can be said broadly
to participate in a process whereby the central values
and assumptions of the society are rehearsed and repeated
and tested.
The central fact about this process
is that it's never finished, just like culture itself.
Culture's never a fixed, finished thing.
This is one of the deep insights of modern sociology
and anthropology.
I attribute it primarily-- specifically
to the great English sociologist and historian Raymond Williams
from whom I'm borrowing some of the ideas
on-- although the word consensus narrative is mine,
not his-- many of these ideas are
drawn from Raymond Williams' account of culture.
What he says is essentially that culture is constantly
making and remaking itself.
That every time you watch-- think about-- some of you
can see this example more fully with television
than with movies.
Remember, the argument of the course
is that at a certain point, sometime
in the 1950s or early '60s, television
supplanted the movies as the central form of narrative
in the American society.
Took over the job of being the consensus, the purveyor
of the consensus, the purveyor of the culture's
central values.
And in many ways, that was a liberating moment
for the movies.
Our course dramatizes that.
This week, we're looking at two screwball comedies
from inside the studio era.
Hereafter when we juxtapose two films,
one will be from the studio era.
One will be from the era after the movies no longer
carry the consensus, the responsibility
to be the consensus medium.
That's been taken over by TV.
And the differences are dramatic.
The differences are stark and exciting.
Both forms are interesting.
The post-consensus forms have great claims on us
because they're much freer.
They're not limited or constrained
by what we might call the central pieties of the culture.
The most obvious way you could see this is in nudity, right?
They can show-- attitudes-- and dirty language, right?
Think about-- you can see the stupidity and the arbitrariness
of these systems if you think about how
television worked today.
If you put on an American network show,
even a late night show by 10:00, 11 o'clock, at 9:00 or 10:00
a night, what you will get on those shows-- you might get
things very different from what you would have gotten
10 or 15 years ago, but you still
won't get full frontal nudity.
You won't get women taking off their clothes.
You won't see sexual activity.
You won't see very much dirty language.
You used to see none of it.
But if you click the channel one over and you go to HBO,
you could see the most disgraceful pornography
that you can ever imagine, right?
And you could hear people using the F word so often that it
runs out of your ears, right?
And they're right next to each other on the dial.
What explains the difference?
HBO doesn't belong to the consensus system.
The networks are still a vestigial survival
of the old consensus system.
And if you think about the difference between network
television, even today, and the movies or network television
and what's on HBO or Showtime, you
will see this distinction with great clarity, right?
So one of the things that this means
is that these systems of consensus narrative
have a tremendous claim on our attention.
They're more important, in some sense,
in a sociological or anthropological sense
than other forms that don't bear the burden of having
to tell the story, the consensus story of the society.
You remember I said culture's unfinished.
So are these stories, right?
The great thing about them is that they change, right?
That over time, they'll alter.
I'll come back to this question next time
when we talk about the Western.
We talk about how the Western alters
over time in ways that are tremendously
responsive to problems in the outer society.
A very clear example of the way in which genre constraints
can enable an exploration of serious subjects.
So we'll return to that next time.
For our purposes tonight, the primary point is this.
What the advantage of these consensus--
one of the advantages of these consensus systems
is that they can review a great deal to us about the societies
they serve.
We can say in a certain sense that the work or the job,
the anthropological function of these consensus systems
is to help the society figure out what it is.
So that one of the things that happens in these stories
is that-- and here I'm borrowing directly
on Raymond Williams-- we can think of a consensus narrative
as a discourse space, as a space for conversation, right?
Thinking of also remembering that genre,
in one way or another, could be thought
to carry some sub-category or some sub-element of the larger
consensus.
So masculinity and warrior behavior, and certain forms
of honor and courage are dramatized
in war movies and Westerns.
But certain aspects of family life
and of the relation between siblings
and of the relationship between parents and children
are dramatized in forms of melodrama and comedy, right?
And detective stories sometimes explore
the social and political implications
of particular societies more systematically and fully
than other forms.
But so take it all together.
The different genre forms may be said
to lay different emphases on the consensus,
but they all contribute to the consensus.
And one way they contribute is by constantly showing us
fissures and disagreements.
They don't all tell the same story.
What they tend to-- and this helps
to explain why movies are often either incoherent or partly
contradictory, right?
Movies are not simple, stable, unitary things at all.
One reason is they're made by so many people, right?
There's no single author.
There's a director, a writer, actors.
There's an army of subsidiary people who help.
Films are profoundly collaborative form.
And one of the effects of this is that in some forms,
the director's control may be imperfect,
and the star may distort the film in some way, or take it--
or in some films, the writer may be so powerful and so
imaginative, and the director's relatively
weak that a different kind of movie emerges, right?
So movies are different in that way.
And then, of course, they're also
different because they occur at different moments in time.
And those moments-- when they occur
in different moments in time, even
if they belong to a particular genre,
they may be responsive to later problems in the society
from ones that differ from the problems that
may have been the case 10 years earlier when the genre-- when
a different version of the same genre story
would handle the characters or the story
in a somewhat different way.
So what we can say, among other things,
is there's a tremendous value to the idea,
to the recognition that not only is culture
always unfinished or always sort of
struggling to figure out certain kinds of conflicts
and difficulties, but that our consensus narrative
systems are also a space that accommodates
that kind of disagreement.
And one way to conceptualize this
is to see that in almost all films,
and certainly the whole system, could
be said to dramatize or give voice
to three different strains or perspectives on society.
One is what might be called a traditional voice.
That is to say, these are old-fashioned ideas
that are still powerful, but they really
belong to an older era.
The second kind of voice you hear
is what we could call the dominant voice.
That is to say, the central values
that the majority of the people in the society now believe,
right?
A little different from traditional voices
that are more old-fashioned that are becoming vestigial.
And then on the other side, emergent voices, right?
New ideas, new attitudes that are coming through.
And you can feel this in every film.
You can feel this in every television program.
If you look at American television from the 1950s
to the 19-- say '90s-- let's say you've restricted yourself
to situation comedy.
What do you think you would see?
You would see a drama in which the American family undergoes
profound change.
What happens?
Women become more important, patriarchal values
become less and less powerful, children become more respected,
are treated less like appendages to the family.
And by the '80s and '90s, sometimes the children
have more dominant roles than the adults
and are often even shown to be wiser than their parents.
Something that would have been impossible
in the early 1950s, a more patriarchal era,
when the classic television program about families
was called Father Knows Best, right?
Whereas in later episodes, the father not only
knows-- doesn't know best, he knows least.
Or sometimes he's completely gone,
and it's women who are raising the children, right?
Well, what's going on in that process
has to do with the way in which the feminist movement
and a reconfiguration of our idea of gender,
our ideas of gender and family-- what's happening
is the situation comedy is the space in which those problems
are being dramatized over time.
And if you juxtapose a sitcom from the '50s and a sitcom
from the '60s, and a sitcom from the '70s and one from the '80s,
you can actually see that drama being enacted
in tremendously powerful ways.
I choose examples from television
because I want to choose examples more of you
are likely to have your own experience with.
But I could offer such instances from the history of movies
as well.
But almost none of you would have sufficient experience
with the movies to understand the examples.
So that's why I've chosen examples from television.
I hope some of you at least-- well, I know many of you
can't, because you didn't grow up on American television
either.
But some of you at least can get the idea
that I'm talking about here.
So the notion that-- so this is a way of explaining,
for beyond what the intentions of any particular movie
maker or producer would have, it's
a way of explaining and clarifying
the profound historical and anthropological importance
of the movies in American society.
And by implication, in other societies
as well because the argument applies in different ways
to those societies as well.
The notion is not that movies are unimportant today.
But they occupy a different niche in our consciousness
and in our daily lives than they did in the Hollywood era,
in the era of the Hollywood studios.
OK.
Capra and Hawks can be said to be
two characteristic instances, two characteristic examples
of really journeyman directors from the studio era.
I had intended-- let's put up the other-- I actually
had intended and had planned to give you a much more
elaborate, sort of brief biographical accounts
of each director.
But I don't have time to do that.
And what I'm putting up instead here
are just a list of some of their films.
You can see what a journeyman Hawks was.
He made very important screwball comedies.
Probably the dominant figure in screwball comedy.
Classic Westerns.
I've listed some of them there.
And he was also be a great director in other genres.
He worked-- it was very interesting that he could
work across genres in this way.
He may be the most diverse of all the classic Hollywood
journeyman professional directors
because he worked so well across so many categories.
There are recurring themes that show up across genre
in Howard Hawks' work.
And I'll mentioned some of them in a little while
when I try to introduce His Girl Friday,
one of his great screwball comedies.
Capra operated in a slightly more--
a slightly narrower range.
But like Hawks, he was an immensely successful,
immensely popular director during an era
when the studios were essentially
operating like gigantic factories in which the studio
heads where the primary bosses, and in which each studio,
especially the five major studios as well as many
of the smaller ones, were essentially
small cities, small factory cities for the manufacture
of movies, right?
Not just that they employed dozens, if not hundreds
of-- well, they employed hundreds, even
thousands of workers of different--
but they employed dozens of writers and dozens
of directors, and they had dozens of stars and actors
on contract, and they owned great lots.
And of course, they had an army of technicians,
of grips and best boys and camera people,
and post-production people and publicity people,
and various other factotums who took care of people.
And they probably had a more elaborate encyclopedia
of gophers than any other industry in history.
But the point is, in a sense that each studio was
a kind of manufacturing hub, was like
a great factory, the equivalent of General Motors or Chrysler.
But instead of making automobiles or toasters,
they were making these things that infiltrate our dreams.
A product I think much more powerful, disturbing,
and interesting, even than the most remarkable automobile
or toaster.
Two other things I should mention about both Capra
and Hawks, because they share this quality,
and they share it with Hitchcock as well.
They began their careers in the silent era.
They made a transition to the sound era.
Capra was a more successful silent director than Hawks,
but both had experience in the silent era.
Unlike some directors, were able to make
a very successful transition, along-- as Hitchcock
also did, and became major directors in the sound era.
The other significant thing to mention about both of them,
they both spent time in the Army.
They both kicked around.
They were not sure they were-- it wasn't as
if when they were born they said,
I want to be a movie maker.
They had all kinds of uncertainty in their lives.
They almost fell into movie making.
But there's one thing I think all of you
will find interesting.
And I love to mention this to my MIT students.
Both Capra and Howard Hawks studied engineering.
And Capra, in fact, got an engineering degree
from the University of Southern California.
When he couldn't get work as a mechanical engineer,
he began to cast around for other things,
and he ended up in the movies.
Howard Hawks didn't graduate, but he studied engineering
at Cornell.
I think he never graduated from Cornell.
But he studied engineering seriously.
And I don't think it's an accident that these directors
had engineering experience.
Because there's an organizational intelligence,
a practical intelligence, even genius
that every good director-- not to say great director
needs-- that is very will served by an engineering education.
So I encourage all of you, when you finish your degrees,
to go to Hollywood and become directors.
I won't say more about Capra and Hawks
now except to say again that they represented
a certain sense, the center of what a Hollywood director could
represent in the era of the studios, in the era
when the movies where the dominant form of entertainment
in American society.
I want to say a couple of things about each of the movies
that you're seeing tonight, the two different screwball
comedies.
One by Hawks, one by Capra, each representing
a characteristic tone of each director.
As I said earlier, you can think of Capra as a slightly more--
as a somewhat more sentimental and optimistic director.
If you want a quintessential-- a scene
that sort of distills this sentimental populism--
a sentimental populism is a good way of describing much
of Capra's work-- there's a scene
in It Happened One Night that captures this quality in him.
You can feel that-- you can feel its optimism and perhaps
its fakery.
But you want it to be true, even though you
know he may be imagining a nicer humanity than actually exists.
There's a scene on a bus in It Happened One Night.
A good deal of the film or a good part of the film
takes place as people are traveling.
It's a road film, in a certain way.
And there's a scene on a bus, a number of scenes on the bus.
But there's one very powerful scene
in which all of a sudden, after a certain dialogue occurs,
the people on the bus sort of rise
up and begin to sort of create a little musical number
themselves.
Watch how it happens.
And it's almost as if these strangers suddenly
become members of a musical troupe,
and they begin to interact with each other.
It's a fantasy of community that has
all kinds of sentimental, affectionate assumptions in it
that is no doubt an exaggeration,
but it tells us something about the sentimental populism that's
at the heart of Frank Capra's vision of life.
Let me say quickly a couple of words about each film now.
It Happened One Night is not the first screwball comedy,
but is the film that established screwball comedy
as a dominant genre.
There are films going back probably to 1930,
if not earlier, that could be identified
as screwball comedies.
And there are certainly films-- full screwball comedies
that existed before It Happened One Night.
But the success of It Happened One Night nailed the genre,
made the genre a popular one.
And I want to mention a couple of production notes
that are kind of interesting.
One of them is this.
Both the stars in It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert
and Clark Gable, had had significant careers before they
came to make It Happened One Night.
Gable had been in movies for over a decade.
He'd been in a whole number of films.
But he was a second rate-- a secondary player.
And he was a difficult man.
He was resisting assignments that he was being--
he was under contract to the MGM Studio,
which was the most elaborate and wealthy of all the studios.
And the head of MGM, Samuel Goldwyn,
was annoyed with Gable, because he was uncooperative.
They were sending him scripts he didn't want to do,
even though he was under contract to them
and theoretically had to do what they told him.
And because he annoyed Goldwyn, Goldwyn
decided to discipline him.
And the way he disciplined him is we said, all right.
I'm assigning you to Frank Capra who works for Columbia Studios.
You have to make a film that he's working on.
You have no choice.
You're under contract to me.
Gable was incredibly angry about this.
One of the reasons is Colombia was not a major studio.
It was a low-budget studio.
Capra was not yet a widely known director,
even though he had been directing since the silent era.
Gable felt that he was being imposed upon.
He was very reluctant and angry about the job.
The star, the female star, Claudette Colbert,
was also reluctant to take the job.
She had been in-- she was a stage star,
and she had been successful on Broadway.
But she'd had a checkered career in the movies,
some bad luck in the movies.
She'd made a film that was panned.
She was very reluctant to make any more movies.
And when she was asked, she resisted.
And she finally agreed only when they doubled her fee.
She normally would get $25,000 for a film.
This time she got $50,000.
But even when she accepted this, she still was reluctant.
She said, OK.
I will do this, but I have to be free to go
to spend Christmas with my friends and family
in Palm Beach.
The shooting has to stop no-- I will not work
late-- longer than December 23.
And so they had four very intense weeks of shooting
in which they-- in which they did their best
to finish the film.
And they didn't quite finish it.
But Claudette walked off the set and said, I'm done.
My contract-- I fulfilled my contract, and she left.
Capra hadn't yet filmed the final scene of the film.
When you watch the brilliant final scene of the film, which
Capra had to do without his stars
because Colbert had walked off the set,
you will see a magnificent example
of what we might call necessity being the mother of invention.
Because it's a brilliant, rich scene,
but he had to do it because he didn't have his actress there
in order to make the scene.
So watch for it when you come to it.
Another point about-- when Colbert left the film,
she was said to say to friends, I've
just completed-- I've just finished
the worst movie of my life.
This is a horrible film.
Gable was angry about the film, and thought
it was a piece of garbage.
In the advent, the film was the first film
to win Academy Awards in every major category.
It won for best film.
It won for best actor, best actress, best director, best
screenplay.
It was the first film to notch all five victories, right?
Like, it's better than a hat trick in hockey, right?
Like a perfect game for a pitcher, right?
The best-- very few films have ever done this.
And it turned every one of the major participants in the film
into major Hollywood players.
After this film, Gable became what--
came to be known as the King of Hollywood.
And for a decade and a half, he was the top-grossing actor
in Hollywood.
And all of his great work follows after this film.
He was in a series of classic Hollywood films
to the very end of his life in his last film
with Marilyn Monroe.
Anyone know what it-- written by Arthur Miller?
A film called The Misfits, his very last film.
He was dying when he was making that film.
It's very moving film.
You can see that he's dying of cancer in the film
if you look closely.
But he had a magnificent career.
He was one of the characteristic,
central, iconic actors of the studio era.
And this is the film that made him.
There's a moment in the film when
you see Gable and Colbert discussing--
they're forced to share a motel room,
and this is very risque in the 1930s.
Man and woman together, unmarried in the same room.
And in fact, they have separate beds,
but it's a very small room.
And she's nervous about it.
And one of the things he does is he
puts up a line across the room of, like, a clothesline,
throws a blanket over it, and he says, OK.
We'll stay on either side of the wall of Jericho.
And you'll see how the wall of Jericho
works out in the final scene when it comes down.
And there are moments where you could see the Colbert
character very nervous about the fact that she's alone
with a strange man in a motel room, and she's at his mercy,
in some sense.
And there is a kind of [INAUDIBLE] about this.
And there's a moment where we see them getting ready for bed.
Gable takes off his shirt, and he's not wearing an undershirt.
He's only wearing an outer shirt.
And it is said-- it has been said so often
I can't resist mentioning this to you,
even though I can't confirm it absolutely.
But it's mentioned so often in the scholarship
that I want it to be true.
It is said that the sales of undershirts in the United
States plummeted after it was discovered
that this actor wasn't wearing an undershirt.
(GRUFF VOICE) Because that's what men do, OK?
But there is a larger context for the film.
The film takes place during the Depression.
And even though it's a comic film about two apparently
mismatched creatures who will come together in the end-- can
you guess from the scene in Ball of Fire
what's going to happen to Gary Cooper and that sexy woman
by the end of the film?
Of course you know, don't you?
Why do you know it without ever having seen the film?
Because that's what comedy does, right?
The conventions of comedy do that.
And part of the pleasure in watching that is to say,
look how different they are.
Look how frightened he is.
Look how aggressive she is.
How could they ever get together?
But of course you know that they will.
And part of the pleasure in watching the film
is watching them get over those barriers.
Well, the same thing happens, as you'll see, in tonight's film.
But the gap between the Gable character and the Colbert
character is not just gender male and female.
It's also a class difference.
She belongs to the upper classes.
She has no experience with the outer world at all.
She's lived an incredibly protected life.
So that when she comes to terms with Gable,
she's coming to terms not only with certain inherited
forms of class prejudice.
She's also overcoming a certain kind of innocence and naivete
about her relationship to men, and her relationship maybe even
to her own sexuality.
So the film is a bildungsroman.
You know that word?
Novel about growing up?
About this woman who lived a very-- lives a very
sheltered life.
She's a very spoiled rich girl.
And the drama of the film is she becomes,
in a certain sense, begins to discover her own real nature,
begins to discover something about her own--
about her own character and about her own capacity
to judge the outer world.
She's very limited and foolish earlier.
The context of the film, then, is a dramatization
of this relationship.
But the background of the film is the Depression.
And as you'll see, this sexual and marital adventure,
this comedy of marriage, or eventual marriage,
takes place against a backdrop of suffering and unhappiness
and misery.
And it imparts a resonance and an importance to the film
that it wouldn't otherwise have.
Because there are scenes in these trailer homes
where the Colbert character, completely unused to having
to live a life like that of ordinary people,
is suddenly forced to confront what such lives are-- what
such a life is like, and it's part of her education.
So the context of the Depression is important.
A second fundamental thing, as I've already
implied by my anecdote about the undershirt,
is that the Gable character came to stand
for an ideal of American masculinity.
In the scene where he is first introduced, he's half drunk.
And it's important for you to understand the context here,
because it's not exactly celebrating drunkenness.
Although it partly is, I mean, he's a man's man, right?
We see him get drunk and talk on the telephone
to his editor boss, who fires him, right?
And he staggers out of the phone booth,
and he's talking to his friends, and he says, I'm the king.
This is where the word-- where the term the King of Hollywood
originates, in the lines that you see in the film.
But it's important for you to understand that part of what's
going on here-- it's 1934.
Prohibition has just been lifted, right?
And what's being dramatized there, it's illegal for him
to drink for the first time in whatever it is, a decade.
And the film is partly celebrating that, right?
So you're not supposed to think of him
as some ridiculous roustabout drunkard.
You're supposed to recognize that what's partly
being dramatized there is the new freedom that
has emerged in American society now that Prohibition
has been repealed.
And in that scene you can see something--
because his half drunkenness, we do see some of his inhibitions.
You can see something of his true nature there.
And what you discover is-- and you
can see this come out elsewhere in the film too-- something
that the Colbert character at first can't recognize.
That he has a heart of gold, that he's
a decent, admirable person, that he would never
treat anyone badly.
But he's also very self-reliant, and no one
can push them around.
He's a particular kind of-- represents a particular kind
of masculine ideal, right?
He can't be intimidated, but he'll never mistreat someone.
He has a kind of moral compass that guides his behavior, even
though it's implicit, right?
He's a bit vulgar.
He's suspicious of wealth and pretension.
The Gable character came to stand
for a particular kind of American masculinity
that was celebrated over and over again in American movies,
a kind of-- a type of the American male.
I've already said that one of the things the film does also
is dramatize a romance across social class.
And you might want to think about the way in which
the-- in almost all comedy, and certainly comedies that
involve-- comedies about marriage,
comedies about men and women, almost all such comedies
involve some notion of barriers of some sort that are placed
in the way of the consummation in which the text wants to end,
right?
And those barriers can take many forms.
But one of the most fundamental forms they take over and over
again is the barrier of class.
And one of the things that the Colbert character
and the Gable character both have to do
is get over their prejudices, get over
their blind spots about the social classes they
have less understanding of.
One of the most moving and powerful aspects of the film,
and I think you'll see this really powerfully,
is the way in which the audience comes
to have an understanding of the characters that
exceeds that of the characters.
And that there are many moments--
there are many moments in the film in which you
will understand how the characters are
feeling before they are able to acknowledge it themselves.
You can see them falling in love, for example,
without them being able to admit it to themselves.
And it's immensely-- think of what an immensely subtle trick
that is, to put the viewer in possession of information
or knowledge that the characters themselves don't have,
and what a rich kind of knowledge
and ironic perspective-- a rich kind of irony
that generates for the viewing of the film.
"A marriage of true minds" is a famous sonnet by Shakespeare
that begins, "let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments."
The impediments to the marriage of true minds in this film
have to do with the characters-- the Colbert character's naivete
with the prejudices and self-reliance of the Gable
character, with the social realities of the Depression.
And these barriers have to be overcome.
But "a marriage of true minds," what could the phrase mean?
A marriage of equals, a marriage of people
who are not different.
The deepest thing I love about this movie,
and the reason that I've come-- that I treasure this film, even
though there are many old-fashioned qualities in it
that make it feel old and distant, in some sense,
from contemporary society is its understanding of-- it's
the implicit, idealized understanding of marriage.
Because what the film really wants to suggest
is not that-- first of all, it suggests that these people are
drawn to each other sexually.
It's not embarrassed by the fact that they're
both physically beautiful people and that they feel attraction
for each other that they can't themselves
fully acknowledge or deal with.
But the second kind of attraction they have
is a mental attraction.
They realize that they're both deeply intelligent people,
that they're both people who are deeply verbal, that they
both have improvisatory powers, intellectual powers, that
distinguish them from other people.
That they're made for each other, essentially.
There's one scene that shows this.
Before they realize it, we realize it.
It's a wonderful scene.
They're hiding out in a motel.
And at a certain point, she's on the run.
Her rich father is searching for her.
And the Gable character's a reporter.
Says, I'll protect you and help you if you give me your--
if you let me have an exclusive story, because she's
such a rich heiress that she's big news.
So she agrees, and he's escorting her north,
hiding from the people who are searching for her, right?
And at a certain point, they're in a motel.
Some private cops knock on the door of the hotel,
and they come in, and they're searching for her.
And watch what happens.
What Gable and the Colbert character
do is they immediate-- Gable says, follow my lead.
And then when they come in, they begin
to play husband and wife having a tremendous quarrel.
And you can watch-- you can see that they're improvising it.
And you can see they're enjoying it.
And you can see how well they play with each other.
So in other words, it's a moment in which you
can see that it is a marriage of true minds,
long before the characters themselves fully
recognize how they are meant for each other.
That's a wonderful moment in which
their intimacy and there appropriateness for each other
is dramatized.
It's not only a physical or a sexual thing.
It's also an intellectual and a moral and mental thing,
a psychological thing.
They are-- it will be a marriage of true minds
if they can come together.
I want to end-- just finally mention-- I've
mentioned the ending already.
And I'll just say one more time that,
watch how the ending works out.
And you'll see a magnificent example
of a director dealing with contingencies he could not
possibly have anticipated.
And it's a wonderful example of a kind of inventiveness.
Seems to me, the film ends as well as it could end.
And it's better that the actors aren't there.
But he certainly-- when this happened,
I'm sure that Capra thought it was the end of his film
and that he was-- didn't know what
he was going to do to try to finish
his film without his star actress.
I have to be even briefer about His Girl Friday,
but I think it's a more straightforward film
in some respects.
It's a much less sentimental film,
and I hope you'll recognize how deeply-- how much more deeply,
unsentimental, even cynical, or at least deeply tough minded
and suspicious, skeptical Howard Hawks is about all
of the operations of the world.
Not only about individual human motives,
but about all human institutions.
Virtually everyone in His Girl Friday
is a cynical, self-seeking creep.
Even the primary characters, the Ros Russell character
and the Cary Grant character have
intriguish, manipulative elements in their natures.
And you can see especially that the Cary Grant
character is, in some respects, a very nasty piece of work.
He does terrible, terrible things
to poor Ralph Bellamy, the man that Ros Russell is
supposed to marry, her fiance.
He plays a sort of straight, sweet, straightforward kind
of person, very much in love with his girlfriend,
but completely-- how can we put it?
But he's a dummy.
He's stupid.
And even though he's very nice, you don't really like him.
You think he's a jerk.
The film makes you mean or nasty,
in some sense, because it makes you--
it makes you see things from the perspective of the Cary Grant
character.
It encourages you to be tough minded and skeptical.
And you do come away from the film thinking, oh, gee.
I've participated in the humiliation
of this poor, decent guy.
But anyway, he's deserved it.
He's such a stupid mark, right?
You can't-- you almost can't help that kind of reaction.
The film is based on what had been
a very successful play on Broadway,
some generation earlier.
And that play was made into a film in 1930
that was quite successful, directed by Lewis Milestone.
But the Hawks film is the classic version of it.
And Hawks does one thing that's very important,
that changes the original, changes
the play in a fundamental way.
In the original play, the character
played by the Rosalind Russell figure in the movie
is a male character.
And the great discovery or the great transformation
that was wrought in the film by Howard Hawks
was his decision to turn that character,
a guy named Johnson, from a male Johnson into Hildegard Johnson.
Hildy, Johnson, the character played by Rosalind Russell.
And as soon as he turned her into a woman,
he created his screwball comedy.
He created a wonderful kind of antagonist
for the Cary Grant character.
I've already indicated to you how many films
in different genres Hawks directed.
Remember that list I put up there was not
a complete list at all.
It was a selected list.
But it was some of the most important films
by each director.
And one of the things that's really interesting about Hawks
is that he directs Westerns and screwball comedies
and private eye films and war movies,
and a range of other lesser, sort of no-genre films as well.
And yet in all of them, there are certain throughlines.
You can recognize certain recurring themes
across these radically different films.
And one of the most fun-- and one of the way-- one
the most fundamental impulses in a Hawks
film, whether it's a Western or a war movie or a screwball
comedy, is an impulse to slow things-- well,
not to slow things down exactly, because his dialogue is
so rapid-fire.
But to sort of stop the plot, to interrupt the story
with a scene of argument.
He loves scenes of quarrel.
He loves scenes of discussion, of talk.
He loves talk.
And especially, he loves intelligent people
quarreling with each other.
And there's never been a director better
at eliciting from his actors quick, rapid-fire dialogue.
In fact, he developed a strategy for doing this.
He used to sit right next to the camera.
He didn't stand behind the camera.
He had a cameraman.
But he sat right next to the camera,
and he had his actors play to him,
only sometimes very close to him as they were acting.
And if you watch, especially some of the scenes
in this film, you will see what astonishingly
realistic performances he got from his actors
by this strategy.
He even encouraged certain forms of improvisation.
He would run through rehearsals first,
and then he would encourage, when he began to film,
scenes-- he would encourages his actors to improvise
and to improvise to his face.
And he creates a kind of electric authenticity
in his dialogue scenes that has a tremendous authority.
So the character plot I'm talking about
is this impulse to slow the plot down
or to stop the plot for scenes of argument and conversation.
And what constantly happens, whether he's
making a Western or a screwball comedy,
is his characters stop the action
and say, oh, what do you think is going to happen next?
If I do this, what will happen then?
As if the films begin to generate
a kind of meta-commentary about their own nature, right?
So they're incredibly talky films,
and the dialogue is fundamental to your-- the rapidity
of the dialogue is fundamental to your understanding
of the characters and to your understanding of the larger
film.
So his central scene then is a scene of quarreling intimacy.
You feel that they're quarreling,
but you also feel that no people could quarrel exactly
in this way if they weren't also intimate with each other.
And you'll see fully how it works out
when you see the film itself.
So finally, I want to say at least a word
to remind you how it actually-- although he's
tremendously entertaining line by line and scene by scene.
And never calls-- such a professional.
He never calls attention to his camera.
He's a very quiet filmmaker in that sense.
A real journeyman, a real professional.
He doesn't want you to think about him or his camera.
He wants you to think about what you're seeing.
There are limits to this strategy,
and we'll talk about what the limits are
when we look at certain other directors who
behave in other ways.
But there are also great strengths
to this, as you'll see when you watch tonight's film.
And something of his complexity is embedded here.
Because what you can find is he creates
scenes of immense comic energy, really generates real laughter.
But beneath the laughter, there's
a deep layer, a deep substrate of cynicism,
of skepticism, about human motives,
about the virtue of human institutions,
about the capacity of human institutions
and individual human beings for corruption and misdirection.
There's a kind of deep political and social cynicism
in the film that doubles the comedy
or complicates or deepens or roughens the comedy,
sours the comedy, in a way that makes
for a particular kind of complexity.
It's possible to argue, which some critics have,
that this film, more than any other that Hawks made,
combines laughter and cynicism in unique measures.
And I think together, these two films and these two directors
can mark at least a certain pole, certain poles
in the tradition of Hollywood filmmaking,
and especially in the tradition of screwball comedy.
You can feel the pull toward a kind of sentimental, affirming
impulse in Frank Capra, and the pull toward a kind
of cynical, distanced, complex, psychologically
deep, politically informed laughter,
even mockery in Howard Hawks.
And they represent two aspects, two elements,
almost poles within the larger story of the Hollywood studio
film.
Enjoy the films.