I got to watch another new one: the good ol' Grapes of Wrath. I'm starting to run out of things to say in these little preambles, so I'm just going to jump right into the movies.
Is Some Like It Hot the funniest American movie of all time? It's the highest-ranked comedy on the 100 Years...100 Movies list (as well as #1 over at their 100 Years...100 Laughs list from back in 2000), so it seems like the folks over at AFI think so. I'm inclined to disagree with that assessment, although I'm not strongly inclined. Some Like It Hot is a very, very funny movie, and considering the generally short shelf life of film humor, that's an even more impressive feat than it would be anyway. A good deal of the credit has to go to the screenplay, which is as razor-sharp as one has ever been; nobody's perfect, the movie reminds us in its final seconds, but golly if Some Life It Hot's screenplay doesn't come close, especially with that closing line. It's all too common to have a frontloaded comedy, with all the best jokes in the first forty-five minutes, but even with the best, most consistent comedies, how many leave their biggest laugh to the very last sentence of the movie? I'm not always as head-over-heels for famous movie quotes as the rest of society seems to be (I'll admit, I was expecting a little more from "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"); "Nobody's perfect," though... even I can't knock that. It's also a line that gets at another reason this movie's humor has aged particularly well: that gender roles are treated with a level of fluidity uncommon even in modern comedies. Being a complete non-expert on the topic, I'd guess that you'd have to look to somewhere in European cinema to find a movie of the era more ahead of its time on the subject. What's cool about all the subversion of gender is that it puts Some Like It Hot into that rare class of comedy films that work not just on the merits of their jokes but also on their intricate thematic merits as well. It's even rarer for a non-satirical movie like Some Like It Hot to work this way. So yeah, great stuff.
This movie is dark. Not in a thematic or narrative sense (and maybe that's a problem—more on that later), but like literally dark, as in dimly lit. So much of this film's action is obscured by night and shadow; there's a supercut to be made of all the shots in this movie that present characters speaking with their mouths completely hidden by blackness. Maybe not a particularly interesting supercut, but hey, you heard it here first! All that darkness is quite visually arresting, and it's by far the most striking feature about this movie for me. Really, it's frequently beautiful. And yet, for all of its literal darkness, I can't help but feel that the movie could do with more thematic darkness. Either that, or I'm just having trouble separating the film from the John Steinbeck novel it's adapting. Here's the thing: this movie ain't nearly as good as the book. As much as I realize how that's a tiresome evaluation to make of a movie, considering they're different media and all, but this movie navigates such a distracting dichotomy between being absolutely faithful to the novel and completely disregarding the novel's thematic intent that I can't ignore the comparison. It's unfortunate that the film has lost almost all of the biblical/mythic feel of the novel; however, I can deal with that. If it makes your movie better, whatever. The real sticking point is that darn ending, which just feels like a big, fat lie to me, although again, my judgement may be impaired by my prior associations with the novel. I suppose I shouldn't have been expecting anything as utterly strange as the novel's real ending (spoilers: it involves a young woman breastfeeding a starving man), but why is the film's conclusion so intent on optimism and that you-can't-crush-us spirit when one of the main threads of the novel was that yes, you can crush us? While the novel rails against a society that destroys its lowest economic tier, the movie just kinda shrugs and says, "Eh, the problems are bad, but those guys will find a way to survive." Despite the novel's best attempts, I'm not a socialist, but it's still depressing to see such a strongly felt sentiment as Steinbeck's watered down like that.
By my reckoning, E.T. is the single best movie Steven Spielberg has ever made. It's certainly the most best "Spielbergian" feature in his filmography, by which I mean that it has the most successful employment of his trademarks: suburban melancholy, cinematic lyricism, sentimentality, brisk plotting, and, most of all, people gazing upward in awe as the camera approaches their face. Schindler's List might be a "better" movie in strict terms of craft and gravity, but it's mostly better in a way that subdues those Spielberg hallmarks, as it should given the weight of its subject matter. That being said, E.T. is way more subdued than a lot of people give it credit for. I feel like people retroactively graft the tone of the film's final fifteen minutes (i.e. the post-resurrection chase, by far the most flamboyantly Spielbergian sequence of the film) onto the movie as a whole. That's certainly what I did for years. But you know what? Most of E.T. is way not like the movie's rambunctious, fanciful, tear-jerking, sort-of-silly-but-still-wonderful last fifteen minutes. Maybe you guys remember all this better than I did, but upon rewatching this movie a year or two ago for the first time since maybe middle school, I was seriously taken aback by how quiet and stark most of the movie is. It's not so much a movie about a boy and his magical alien friend as it is a movie about a lonely, confused, bullied boy whose childhood is disrupted by the messiness of the adult world and his lost, lonely, equally confused alien friend. I remembered all that loneliness and confusion being in the subtext of the film, but I had totally forgotten (or maybe even not realized—I was not the most observant middle schooler) the hushed, beautiful way that Spielberg's direction thrusts those emotions to the foreground of like eighty percent of the movie [1]. Such is the tremendous power of the movie's still moments—Elliott letting the dishwater's steam obscure his face, for instance, or the many snippets of his mother's phone conversations that slip in and out of the background throughout the film—that it almost feels like a mistake when the movie breaks free of such restraint at the end and becomes a loud action setpiece, backlit by a positively deafening John Williams score. Almost. For all its messiness and tonal whiplash, that last sequence infuses E.T. with exactly the joy, catharsis, and sheer wonder that it needs, flying bikes, rainbow exhaust, and all. And dang it, I cry every single time.
Another three down! Next time: three movies about heroic white guys bucking the system. Until then, be sure to let me know what you think!
If you want, you can go back and read the previous post in the series, #s 19-21 on the list, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #25-27, here.
1] Not to overstate the quietness or anything. You won't find Ingmar Bergman's name in the credits. I mean, it's still a movie in which we get E.T. flying Elliott's bike across the biggest moon you've ever seen, which holy cow, if that isn't one of the greatest images in film ever, I don't know what is. Still, the relative stillness of the film is striking.
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