1960 Movies

Rutgers University Press
Chapter Title: 1960 Movies and Intimations of Disaster and Hope

Chapter Author(s): CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT
Book Title: American Cinema of the 1960s

Book Subtitle: Themes and Variations
Book Editor(s): BARRY KEITH GRANT
Published by: Rutgers University Press. (2008)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhxjc.7
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1960
Movies and Intimations
of Disaster and Hope
CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT
The year seemed to look forward to a period of radical social

change following a decade of repression and conformity. But this change
would quickly face compromises and contradictions, emblematized in the
white mainstream audience’s embrace of Chubby Checker’s watered-down
cover version of Hank Ballard’s rhythm-and-blues song “The Twist,” which
became an instant hit after Checker performed it on Dick Clark’s whitebread
television vehicle for rock ’n’ roll promotion, “American Bandstand.” Hugh
Hefner opened his first Playboy Club in February, and in May the first birth
control pill, Enovid, became commercially available, generating over a half-
million prescriptions in the second half of the year. The arrival of “the pill”
signaled the beginning of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement,
but changes in sexual restrictions were circumscribed by male prerogatives,
represented in Hefner’s “playboy philosophy,” the rise of skin magazines,
and the continued tendency by patriarchal commercial culture to objectify
and commodify the female body. Television featured some socially relevant
programming, perhaps most important CBS’s broadcast (on 25 November)
of the powerful documentary “Harvest of Shame” with Edward R. Murrow.
Exposing the impoverished and largely unacknowledged working condi-
tions of many Americans, “Harvest of Shame” appeared within the tele-
visual flow of popular but vapid fantasy worlds offered by such series as
“The Andy Griffith Show” (1960–1968), “My Three Sons” (1960–1972),
and “The Flintstones” (1960–1966), the last a family-oriented and animated
version of Jackie Gleason’s pioneering socially aware sitcom “The Honey-
mooners” (1955–1956). The activist group Students for a Democratic Soci-
ety (SDS) held its first meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in January, and in
February a sit-in by four African Americans at a whites-only Woolworth’s
lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, ignited dozens of similar
protests across the nation over the next few months.
Diplomatic relations with Cuba became increasingly strained, emphati-
cally with the election on 8 November of John F. Kennedy to the presidency.
22
1960 — MOVIES AND INTIMATIONS OF DISASTER AND HOPE 23
The new president subscribed to the domino theory of revolution in the

third world, and his so-called liberalism suggested to many the serious limi-
tations of liberal ideology. Kennedy’s perceived idealism translated into little
active support of civil rights; his foreign policy was clearly pro-incursionist,
if not as strident as that of his successors. During the same year, authentic
social progress made significant strides, as the civil rights movement gained
momentum and a crucial sit-in at Shaw College resulted in the April birth of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose aim was to
coordinate the use of nonviolent direct action against segregation.
These conflicting historical moments are relevant to understanding the
films of the year. If the cinema as an art form is any guide, the year was a
transitional moment whose contradictions reflect the conservative society
shaped by the Cold War and U.S. triumphalism after World War II but also
anticipate both the radical impulses of the coming years and the reaction
that would close off the progressive possibilities of the decade.
There were some weak contributions from usually noteworthy direc-
tors, a few of whom conveyed the regression that accompanied the social
progress symbolized by some of the more interesting films of the year. Otto
Preminger’s Exodus, often ranked high in Preminger’s oeuvre, is prominent
for several fine performances. But this mammoth film—enchanting for
many viewers because it was shot partly on location in and around Tel
Aviv—is either ignorant or disingenuous on the politics of Zionism and the
role of the West in the creation and political use of the state of Israel. Vin-
cente Minnelli’s Bells Are Ringing, while it features a flamboyant perform-
ance by Judy Holliday, lacks the density of the director’s best musicals,
while Elia Kazan’s Wild River is a flaccid, unconvincing work that probably
represents the limits of the filmmaker’s liberal sensibility. Robert Mulligan’s
The Rat Race repeats key ideas of much more distinguished films of the
period, as does Henry Hathaway’s slapstick “northern” western, North to
Alaska, a travesty when set against the past accomplishments of the genre
in the prior decade. Clearly, Hollywood was still capable of more than a few
gross errors even as it exploited the collapse of the system in fostering a
new creativity.
The westerns addressed the issue of race that had been tentatively
broached in some movies of the 1950s, just as the previous decade’s “social
problem” films influenced the western’s new approach toward race, pro-
ducing pictures whose indictments of white society became increasingly
stinging. John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge is one of the less remarkable of these
films, in part because of a strained effort that makes Ford look less than
sincere. The idealized Rutledge (Woody Strode) is another Noble Savage
24 CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT
incarnation that protests too much Ford’s late-career racial tolerance. Don
Siegel’s Flaming Star is more intriguing, mainly for the performance by
Elvis Presley as Pacer Burton, a “half-breed” caught in the middle of inter-
family conflict and social discord that seems more attuned to progressive
contemporary activities than Ford’s film. Siegel was one of the few direc-
tors to show Presley’s gifts as an actor. John Huston’s neglected The Unfor-
given, the story of a Texas family repressing the secret that their adopted
daughter is actually a Native American taken from a Kiowa settlement, is
a remarkably pointed attack on the racism of frontier America, and by
extension of bourgeois white society. If Audrey Hepburn is somewhat dif-
ficult to accept as the Kiowa foundling, the Bible-thumping Rawlins fam-
ily, who turn on Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) and his beleaguered kin, is
pointedly suggestive of the axiomatic response of white “settlers” to the
native population.
In the horror genre, the year saw the inauguration of Roger Corman’s
cycle of adaptations of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe with The Fall of the
House of Usher. This film, often twin-billed this year with Psycho, is perhaps
as crucial as Hitchcock’s work to the horror genre’s psychological bent.
House of Usher centers on a crazed, hysterical patriarchal figure, Roderick
Usher (Vincent Price), who is himself a victim of patriarchy’s oppression.
Usher sees the decaying social order over which he presides—here symbol-
ized by a crumbling mansion—collapse into ruins. Philip Winthrop (Mark
Damon), betrothed to Usher’s sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey), attempts to
rescue her from the moribund world of her controlling brother. Philip’s
near-miss escape from Usher and his flight from the fire that consumes the
Usher mansion have a morbid tone as the house, represented by a superb
expressionist model by designer Daniel Haller, burns and then sinks into
Poe’s infamous tarn. Roderick succeeds only in destroying Madeline, fore-
closing any hope for the future.
The tensions of the day are particularly well represented in Alfred Hitch-
cock’s Psycho, perhaps the most accomplished film of a year that produced
several works of distinction, and one that has since become canonical.
Adapted from Robert Bloch’s crude novel based on the crimes of reclusive
midwestern murderer Ed Gein, Psycho is very much part of the climate of
exploitation and sensation that had been flourishing for several years. It is
also a work that captures the extreme political tensions that continued long
after McCarthyism, in particular concerning “manliness” and the roles
assigned to the sexes. The story of a lonely, disturbed, and dangerous young
man who lives in the shadow of his deceased mother, the film has been
widely interpreted as a pivotal horror film for its suggestion that monstros-
ity must be defined as inherent to the bourgeois family structure rather

than an arcane social aberration: the crimes of Norman Bates (Anthony
Perkins) can be read as the consequence of the misdeeds of a sexually ram-
bunctious mother. The film is profoundly subversive, with its monster no
longer a creature of the night, or the product of a laboratory experiment
gone awry, but instead a boy next door, the logical product of a disintegrat-
ing social order. Norman’s mental condition necessarily raises questions
about the nature of the normal—a prescient examination of a hopelessly
repressive and oppressive society on the precipice. The family violence of
the Bates household is the explosion of rage against this society. That this
violence could not for long be contained within the family or directed at
oneself is a stunning revelation of this film, and will become obvious
enough in a host of films of the following decade.
■■■■■■■■■■ Satire as Horror

Billy Wilder’s much-acclaimed The Apartment wants to shield
its caustic aspect with comedy, largely through the performance of Jack
Lemmon as C. C. Baxter, the hapless bachelor and obsequious clerk to a
huge insurance firm who loans his apartment to various philandering exec-
utives in an attempt to gain favor. It is obvious that the favors have gained
him little, as Wilder establishes Baxter as a go-along, get-along flunky far
too narrow to understand the trap he has constructed for himself, making
the upbeat moralism that Wilder finally offers as Baxter falls in love with
elevator operator and boss’s mistress Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) seem
rather contrived.
But even with its comic shtick, the film is almost unremittingly grim in
its portrayal of the workaday world of postwar Manhattan, a city festooned
with the steel-and-glass skyscrapers of architects Philip Johnson and Mies
van der Rohe. Baxter’s employment on the central data floor of his com-
pany is depicted in a Kafkaesque image, a sea of endless, evenly spaced
desks under glaring fluorescent lights populated with flannel-suited male
clones and their female assistants, all miserable and resentful, all question-
ing in their resentment. Here, Wilder’s view is cynical rather than critical.
His vision of a society of dissatisfied, “cheating” husbands, for whom the
family is a façade providing security and social respectability but who con-
stantly require, for real fulfillment, access to such facilities as C.C. can pro-
vide, seems very plausible, as is the degree of predation to which men
routinely subject gullible, vulnerable young women. The degree of gullibil-
ity is very much open to question—Wilder assumes that the female is
simply a softheaded, easy mark. Wilder’s vision is extreme, his leering exec-
utives comic grotesques close to George Grosz’s expressionist sketches of
Weimar Germany, best suggested in C.C.’s manipulative boss J. D. Shel-
drake (Fred MacMurray). His is a character of such soulless cruelty as to
place him close to film noir were he not also a perfectly representative fig-
ure of American popular culture, the TV-sitcom dad who goes to a job we
never see and that has no perceivable impact on his emotional well-being.
In casting Fred MacMurray in the part, Wilder took the actor from his new
career as Disney icon and star of television’s “My Three Sons,” which
debuted this same year, to return him to his prior, and more sinister, screen
persona, thus subverting an image associated with the bogus tranquility of
postwar life. The Apartment suggests what really goes on at those big-city
jobs that allows dad to return apparently unruffled to his suburban com-
forts. Like Psycho, The Apartment raises questions as to how one defines
pathology in a world that denies neurosis and unhappiness.
Jack Lemmon’s distinctive comic flourishes and vocal inflections don’t
go far in making his C. C. Baxter entirely sympathetic; he is someone
uncomfortable in his own skin, whose nervous ticks and jangled speech
convey a person utterly lacking in conviction or self-possession—he simply
can’t be the mensch his neighbor, the kindly Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen),
wants him to be. C.C. is essentially a pimp, of his own self more than of the
women with whom he has no association whatever (such is the degree of
his alienation and worthlessness in the corporate pecking order of the Con-
solidated Life insurance company). Wilder’s cynicism is most evident in his
cop-out, boy-gets-girl ending, which seems quite capable of producing an
afterstory identical to the film we have just seen. Wilder’s practiced cyni-
cism in The Apartment will not allow a careful look at the assumptions of
gender relations in a culture predicated on heterosexual monogamy, where
the extramarital relationship is perceived as a nasty transgression rather
than a response to an untenable institution.
■■■■■■■■■■ Melodrama’s Summary Statements

One may argue that the pinnacle of melodrama was reached
with Minnelli’s Home from the Hill, one of the extraordinary accomplish-
ments of the form and a representative achievement not only of this year
but of the most creative and contentious phase of late Hollywood, being
one of the most complex indictments of patriarchal civilization. Captain
Wade Hunnicut (Robert Mitchum) is a Texas land baron presiding over a
rural town and his alienated family. At the heart of the film is the question
of legitimacy. The issue is most obviously manifest in the attempt by Wade’s

younger son to recognize his illegitimate half-brother; the more profound
relates to the legitimacy of male property rights and the patriarchal capital-
ist order, with Theron Hunnicut (George Hamilton) representing the male
child at first embracing, then rejecting, then becoming the logical con-
sequence of patriarchy. His close connection with his half-brother Rafe
(George Peppard) may suggest a homoerotic relationship, but this would
appear so only to a society that cannot conceive of tenderness between two
men. That this relationship comes about because Theron rebels against their
monstrous father, who refuses to acknowledge the illegitimate Rafe as his
lawful son, speaks to the film’s profoundly radical impulses, especially as it
develops the consequences of patriarchal assumptions.
Robin Wood remarks that patriarchy has as one of its victims the patri-
arch himself (Wood, Hollywood 134). The point is certainly relevant to Home
from the Hill, since Wade Hunnicutt’s need to take his son Theron from
under his mother’s wing and masculinize him leads to his own murder and
his son’s self-imposed exile. Among the film’s achievements is its complex
development of the complicated nature of patriarchy in modern America.
Wade’s attempt to shape Theron is not based simply on the overwhelming
ego of the macho male trying to find an extension of his self in his male off-
spring. Indeed, it is Theron who feels compelled to approach Wade to learn
to “be a man.” He has been made into a “mama’s boy” by his mother, Han-
nah (Eleanor Parker), as part of an agreement with Wade when she
learned, returning from their honeymoon eighteen years earlier, that he
had fathered the illegitimate Rafe and left destitute Rafe’s mother, Ann
Copley. Answering Hannah’s outraged demands, Wade turned over their
legitimate son entirely to her care, ostensibly so she could protect him from
learning his father’s sexually cavalier ways. The agreement also stipulated
that Hannah would remain in Wade’s house but would no longer share his
bed. Their marriage is thus a sham, with Wade continuing the sexual con-
quests that apparently long preceded it (although he blames his behavior on
Hannah). He becomes an emblem to the town both of power and deprav-
ity. By excluding the “white trash” Rafe, Hannah becomes complicit in the
creation of the crisis that destroys the Hunnicutt household in order to
maintain respectability, and complicit, too, in keeping Theron insulated in
a situation that will backfire.
Wade arranges that Theron participate in a snipe hunt with his tenant
ranchers, a necessary life lesson for the young man’s growth—but the hunt
is fake. The ranchers, essentially Wade’s vassals, attempt to teach Theron a
nasty lesson, demonstrating the pervasiveness of patriarchal assumptions and
the impossibility of keeping them in check: they are a kind of gossipy, ghoul-
ish chorus, made awful by the cruel humor Minnelli gives them. (Among
them are the actors Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor, and Chuck Robertson, who
filled the ranks of Hollywood westerns, often as brutes or idiots.) The tenant
ranchers take Theron into the nighttime woods (the sexual connotations
here hardly need Freud for explication) in search of snipes that don’t exist.
The ranchers giggle as Theron is left alone in the wild, blowing a whistle that
he has been told will draw the snipes. The whole exercise is centered on
nothing but the boy’s humiliation. Their sadistic glee, which Wade doesn’t
chastise, flows from their enjoyment of his immaturity, his failure to know
what it means to know the ways of the hunt and “being a man.”
The incipient violence of the town is manifest also in Theron’s would-
be father-in-law, Albert Halstead (Everett Sloane), a meek figure whose
notion of propriety and its violations spur the ultimate crisis of the film.
Halstead is a bastion of repression, representing a town that nearly ex-
plodes, unable to maintain the façade of propriety that can be kept in place
only at considerable cost. In Wade’s loss of control is nothing less than the
disintegration of a genre archetype. Finally Wade is shot and killed by Hal-
stead, one of the “respectable” citizens who embodies the small-mindedness
of the town and more than a little paranoia and hysteria. Home from the Hill
conveys less a sense of timelessness in its unnamed town than the idea that
time is irrelevant to long-entrenched, reactionary ideas. While the town
and landscape of Home from the Hill clearly convey the postwar years, the
cotton-pressing plant (with black workers singing field songs), the butler
Chauncey, and the housemaid suggest that antebellum Texas isn’t so dis-
tant, so reactionary are the town’s views of race and gender. The film com-
pares with Psycho for its sense of the past bearing down on the present,
suffocating the possibilities represented by the young. In Psycho, Marion
(Janet Leigh) and Sam (John Gavin) are crushed by a culture of sexual
repression, represented by Marion’s generalized guilt feelings and the psy-
chological and financial burdens imposed on Sam by his late father; in Home
from the Hill, Wade’s history and the narrowness of the town prevent
Theron’s relationship with Libby Halstead (Luana Patten) from flourishing.
For a moment, Theron, Rafe, and Libby would seem to represent a triad
beyond jealousy, theirs an idyllic arrangement destroyed not by their
actions but by the expectations of their society.
Rafe is perhaps the most compelling figure of the narrative. In his
apparent saintliness, his affection for his half-brother (returned many times
over when Theron learns of Rafe’s origins and rejection), and his regular
interventions, including his marriage to Libby after she becomes pregnant
by Theron who is turned away by her enraged father, Rafe would seem to
be almost a Dickensian character, the waif who grows to manhood on his
own but accepts his lot, with his rancor largely concealed by good cheer.
But as Michael Walker has noted, Rafe seems a highly complex, contradic-
tory character who, in his marriage to Libby and ultimate embrace of Han-
nah, continues patriarchy even as Theron, who murders Halstead and flees
from the town, portrays its fatal consequences, the notion that the sins of
the fathers are not only visited on the son but destroy the very thing the
patriarch is fixated on preserving. On the other hand, Rafe’s ascendancy
suggests that patriarchy does not need the niceties of legitimated bloodlines
for its continuation. In the final scene by Wade’s gravemarker, the illegiti-
mate Rafe even dresses in Wade’s style, with a new Stetson hat and a
sweater not unlike the one worn by the older man (Walker 33).
Perhaps as important, Rafe seems a bit of a throwback figure, the ide-
alized hunter Wade would like to be, or at least appear to be. He certainly
adorns himself in excessive trappings and carries a personal (manu-
factured?) legend. Yet one could hardly imagine Wade being able to live as
Rafe does in a primitive cabin. There, with his antique stone grinding
wheel, Bowie knife on his belt, and easy manner, Rafe embodies a lost mas-
culinity of myth and folklore combined with a romantic notion of the poor:
his abandoned mother, Ann, buried in a pauper’s grave, is at the founda-
tion of Rafe’s stolid but kind personality. Rafe is not the rebel figure one
might expect, given the misdeeds done to him. On the contrary, he is pres-
ent to support Wade at every turn (“I go where you go”), less to prick
Wade’s conscience than to move himself into place as the logic of the nar-
rative unfolds. Rafe is the full-bodied answer to the bourgeois propriety and
transparent sexual mores celebrated in the town (and demolished in the
film), shouldering responsibilities as Theron flees into the wilderness,
becoming the “man” Wade always wanted, if in a very fractured form. Rafe
would seem the ideal answer to Arthur Schlesinger’s crisis in American
masculinity, since he is both the perfect postwar domesticated male and a
competent hunter, a frontiersman of old quite comfortable in his own skin,
good-humored, with nothing to prove. He contrasts with a collapsed image
of hypermasculinity represented by Wade, one that postwar centrism
viewed skeptically even as intellectuals like Schlesinger engaged in hand
wringing over changes in American manliness.
It has been noted that Wade’s office/den, the site of Theron’s monstrous
(yet commonplace) education in the masculine ways of the world, is a bril-
liant piece of Minnelli décor. The antithesis of Rafe’s cabin, Wade’s home,
filled with excess, is a signal emblem of male hysteria, the domain of a man
The hypermasculine décor of the den of Capt.Wade Hunnicut (Robert Mitchum) in Home
from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, MGM). Digital frame enlargement.
who has little control over his life and his children, whose wife disdains
him: she refers to his past legend as a “great hunter” sarcastically, as if she
sees clear through the myth. With its rich wood paneling, massive red
leather chairs (one of which is essentially Wade’s throne, especially when
he positions himself on it to give the first of Theron’s lectures), refrigerator
stocked with beer, and walls adorned with animal heads, fishing gear, and
above all guns, Wade’s den screams out a particularly threatened masculin-
ity. His frustration with Hannah’s “locked door,” thus his inability to seduce
his own wife and reconstruct his image in her eyes, makes the point.
Wade’s dwelling is no less a boy’s hobby room than young Theron’s, a room
filled with a collection of “rocks, butterflies, and other toys” that Wade
views contemptuously, snidely telling him to “come and see how a man
lives.” Wade’s own toys replace his sex life with Hannah; his sexual exploits
with other women can be read merely as the predation of a rich man who
at heart is unable to sustain a relationship other than as a matter of
exchange. He is no Organization Man, but one can read Wade as the per-
fect embodiment of the postwar Schlesinger male. In place of the big game
hunting that previously defined him (and an image of an older America),
Wade’s hunting, as he explicitly states, is aimed at the domestic scene itself.

His predation of women highlights the nature of it. The “great hunter”
Wade targets the most vulnerable: it is instructive that the two key
moments featuring Wade as hunter are the goose hunt and the recounted
story of Wade and the poverty-stricken “sand hill tacky” who becomes
Rafe’s mother. The goose hunt itself is important. Although Wade warns
Theron that some of the animals decorating his den “put up a struggle
before they died,” it is deer and wildfowl that Wade kills, hardly the most
frightening of creatures.
The central mode of exchange is involved less with money, for which
Wade pretends only a passing interest (in a posture that shields the role of
wealth in sustaining his power), than with gun violence and the hunt. The
latter, as stated, extends to women as well as animals, the notion summed
up in the goose hunt during which Wade is almost killed by a jealous hus-
band. He later tells the admonishing doctor (Ray Teal), “I claim the right to
cross any man’s fences when I’m huntin.’” Theron’s “education” is there-
fore centered very much around hunting and gun violence, while Rafe
wants him to experience women (what Wade might call “another kind of
huntin’”). There is no irony, of course, but a thoughtful, uncompromised
logic, in the film’s denouement being so involved in gun violence, with
Wade murdered by the pathetic and confused Halstead in a shotgun blast
that destroys part of his den, including his red chair, and Theron tracking
down and killing Halstead in a replication of the hunt for the wild boar that
was Theron’s rite of passage. Theron’s revenge killing of Halstead, father of
the woman he loves, is a culmination of the lessons learned from Wade and
Rafe. The killing of Halstead in a swamp both repeats and reexamines the
expressionist, grotesque details of the hunt, with the marsh gas signifying
the poisoned heart of the hunter and the ultimate implacability of nature.
The wild boar may have functioned as a Moby Dick subdued first by Wade,
then by Theron, but in this narrative the animal is clearly exposed as a
metaphor for something more human. Although Wade earlier tells Theron
“what every man hunts is himself,” this admonition—familiar tough-guy
talk of the western—is itself lacking in self-awareness, and is merely a
means of instilling in Theron the notion of masculine self-discovery
through specified violent acts sanctioned by patriarchal culture. The killing
of the boar produces no more self-knowledge in Theron than the earlier
boar hunt produced in Wade. The legend of the “great hunter” is exposed
as a cover for the cruel and uncaring male.
Theron’s final act of gun violence is the capstone to the near-total
destruction of the bourgeois family. The killing of Albert Halstead may be
seen as excessive; Theron’s conversation with Libby in which he tells her of

his rejection of his parents, his refusal to travel their road, makes the point
efficiently enough. The final reconciliation between Rafe and Hannah, with
Rafe consoling the stricken woman with an invitation to come and spoil his
(actually Theron’s) and Libby’s son, is a happy yet melancholy ending that
recognizes the fragility of bourgeois arrangements. Rafe can still offer the
archetypal consolation of the homestead (“let’s go home”) precisely because
a series of mishaps, caused by the bourgeois need to maintain appearances,
has placed him in the middle class and in a position to offer solace to the
very people who have offended him. Through this solace, the film offers a
tentative recuperation of a manifestly irredeemable society. Patriarchy is
restored, even if the patriarch isn’t the one chosen for the role.
Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet is another distinguished
moment for the melodrama as it reaches a major key. An undervalued film,
Strangers differs from the major accomplishments in the genre of Minnelli,
Max Ophüls, and Douglas Sirk, all of whom brought to their work some
degree of distanciation, either through elaborate camera technique or exag-
gerated mise-en-scène. Their point was usually to give the viewer some
place from which to critically analyze a film without becoming removed
entirely from emotional involvement. Quine’s film allows no such position,
but instead uses a realist dramatic mode that, heightened in the manner of
the then-popular exposé—Confidential magazine is a representative if
degraded example—is astonishing in its candid portrayal of the emptiness
of marriage and postwar suburban life. The empathy allowed the spectator
is disconcerting as the breadth of the film’s condemnation becomes clear.
The extramarital affair of Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) and neglected
housewife Maggie Gault (Kim Novak) is a stunning and arbitrary expres-
sion of frustration with daily life, marriage in particular, its philandering
couple being a kind of random sample of the bourgeois population. Larry is
an architect unhappy with his work and his life; he lacks the opportunity
to create the works of art he sees himself capable of, hampered by the
demands of business and misunderstood by his wife, Eve (Barbara Rush),
who is too concerned with economic practicalities. Larry’s affair with Mag-
gie begins with a “brief encounter” at their children’s school bus stop.
Although Maggie is physically very striking, Larry’s pursuit of her seems
undermotivated. The motivation comes into focus when Larry develops a
business association, then friendship, with Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), a
dissolute hack novelist who commissions Larry to build a new house for
him. Roger’s frustrations complement Larry’s: he cannot write the Great
American Novel that he thinks he has in him and thereby win the respect
of critics who hold him in contempt. He drowns his self-disgust in alcohol,

womanizing, and sardonic humor as he and Larry form a relationship of
mutual support. The situation of the two male characters makes Strangers
When We Meet among the most intelligent reflections on male anxiety and
disempowerment in an era obsessed with the topic. The men’s relationship
reflects the film’s all-encompassing sense of alienation and hopelessness,
often in bleak existentialist terms suggestive of the contemporary European
cinema. The relationship also reasserts the male crisis as crucial to the film:
the “strangers” of the title refers as much to the Larry-Roger friendship as
to the affair between Larry and Maggie. When they part company in one of
the film’s last scenes, Roger tells Larry: “We meet as strangers and half the
time we part that way,” to which Larry responds: “If we ever really get to
know another human being, it’s a miracle.”
As Larry and Maggie proceed with their affair, Larry builds Roger’s
“oddball” house (Roger’s term), the gradual construction of which coincides
with Larry’s affair, the temporary disintegration of his life, and then the
ghastly, forced reaffirmation of Larry’s bourgeois and suffocating routine.
The two men wrangle over the details of the architecture, this wrangling an
expression of Roger’s insecurities, which Larry tries to assuage. The gesture
is reciprocated by Roger when Larry tells him of his affair with Maggie. By
film’s end, Roger has written a well-received novel that brings him no con-
solation. He tells Larry he envies him his wife and family. Yet this is not the
ultimate affirmation we may think the narrative intends. In the final scene,
Larry and Maggie meet in the empty, just-completed modernist house
intended for Roger, an expensive domestic domicile, a perfect emblem of
upscale living but a desolate shell. (In an earlier scene, Roger’s bimbo girl-
friend intelligently notes that the framed-out house “looks like a prison.”)
It is not so much the home that Larry and Maggie might occupy were it not
for their marital shackles and guilt as it is merely a representation of their
despair and the impossibility of sexual and emotional fulfillment under
bourgeois arrangements.
Strangers When We Meet consistently suggests that Larry Coe’s situation
is no aberration, that in fact every relationship in modern America is hope-
less. That this social crisis is pervasive is best represented in the party Eve
throws in an attempt to recapture Larry’s attention as her suspicions
mount. The conversation there, filled with banalities about the annoyances
of crabgrass and self-deceptions about what qualifies as a good marriage,
only furthers the tensions in Larry. (Kirk Douglas’s performance is superb,
his stricken facial expression well modulated to convey his character’s para-
noia and anguish.) Larry’s good-humored neighbor Felix Anders (Walter
Matthau), a seeming prude annoyed by lurid party jokes, suddenly reveals

another side of his wry, cynical wit as he starts to needle Larry with his
observations, in particular a gossipy remark about infidelity, the “tramp,
tramp, tramp” of what he terms the “itchy foot club,” that for him shows
that the desire for romance with one’s neighbor is a constant of suburbia.
The needling becomes vicious when Felix reveals to Larry that he knows of
Larry’s affair. His point is not blackmail but simply torment (Felix is an
unattractive and frustrated figure who clearly wants but cannot achieve an
affair), and preparation for making his own pass at Eve, whom he thinks
has been emotionally abandoned by Larry.
Felix is a sinister rendition of the male’s need for sexual adventure,
while Larry’s affair with Maggie suggests, at first glance, the “search for true
love.” Yet the Larry/Roger/Felix triad of male characters is in some respects
a composite. Roger’s pursuit of women is pathological, an addiction, like his
alcoholism, to cover his deep self-loathing. His cynical humor (well done by
Ernie Kovacs, a genius of early television whose famous surreal/absurd
humor sent up 1950s culture) is a mask for his inability to care about any-
thing, a problem he states explicitly to Larry. Felix wants merely to have
taboo sex and transgress for its own sake; he would seem to be the most
predatory and conscienceless of the trio, especially as he tries to seduce Eve
Coe. These characters are contrasted to Larry as if to show that extramari-
tal affairs can have a “pure” motivation, the pursuit of romantic love. The
point would seem to be given added weight by Maggie’s situation, includ-
ing her frigid husband who cannot conceive that she would have an affair
even as she essentially confesses it to him (so certain is he that she is his
property), her at first disdainful relationship with her mother (Virginia
Bruce), who had an affair that Maggie viewed with contempt, and, most
especially, her surprising revelation to Larry of her brief affair with a truck
driver. This revelation, which causes Larry momentary revulsion, under-
scores the deep dissatisfaction within the two sexes concerning marital
fidelity and erases all traces of the “double standard.” But Maggie’s story
helps to clarify Larry’s; when both characters are compared to all the oth-
ers and set within the fullness of the narrative, the search for true love is
portrayed as a delusion, the real issue being the bankruptcy of the marital
institution itself. In making such a case, Strangers When We Meet is an excep-
tionally radical gesture, a thoughtful challenge to a disintegrating Produc-
tion Code. Although the film opts for the restoration of normality, with
Larry and Maggie returning to their families, this is one of the bleakest
restorations in late Hollywood cinema: both characters are shown alone
and distraught in the final scene, Maggie in tears, Larry close to them.
■■■■■■■■■■ When the Impossible Could Occur

As one reflects briefly on Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry, per-
haps the year’s most controversial film, it seems extraordinary that it was
made at all. Despite the lengthy disclaimers before the main title, there is
no mistaking its unsparing assault not only on evangelism but on organized
religion and the society that sustains it. Elmer Gantry represents the writers
and directors of late Hollywood challenging a production and censorship
system teetering at the brink, and yet the film makes significant concessions
to that system. Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel, it retains most of
Lewis’s devastating vision of provincial small-town life, with its susceptibil-
ity to religious charlatans portrayed as nurtured by a cynical business cul-
ture (personified by George Babbitt, title character of another Lewis novel
who reappears in the book and this film Elmer Gantry) that prefers an
uncritical and intellectually backward public. Elmer Gantry himself, por-
trayed by the charismatic, larger-than-life Burt Lancaster in one of his most
representative performances, is designed to elicit far more sympathetic
interest than Lewis allowed his character. This Gantry is a hypocritical but
big-hearted huckster, not Lewis’s amoral—and rather dull—predator on the
public will. He is cynical but generous and self-aware. Although he says he
is a believer, he comes across as a skeptic, almost as much as the agnostic
newspaper columnist Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy), who is his critic and
amused friend. Such alterations, combined with the gender politics of the
film, hurt its contentious power.
Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons), a young revivalist recalling Aimee
Semple McPherson, is at first an ice queen totally enamored of her religious
mission and immune to Gantry’s charm as he joins and becomes the star of
her huge evangelical enterprise. But the two develop a romance, and as
Sharon falls in love with Gantry, he feels, rightly, that she is losing all touch
with reality, in particular their lucrative business empire. In the film’s apoc-
alyptic ending, Sharon dies as the panicked congregation flees from a flash
fire in the burning revival tent. Gantry consoles the survivors, who feel they
betrayed their spiritual leader, Sharon. After his doggerel prayer, which he
uses many times in the narrative (emphasizing his practiced manipulation),
he gives a knowing smile to Lefferts, who says he thinks Gantry’s words
were “real friendly,” after which the preacher again hits the road from
which he came, a hero vanishing into the wilderness. In Brooks’s render-
ing, Gantry is a relatively enlightened man for all his ruthless connivance
and demagoguery, while his female counterpart is totally bemused, suscep-
tible to beliefs that cause her downfall. Identified with the people to whom
Burt Lancaster plays the eponymous preacher in Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, United
Artists) as a hypocritical but big-hearted huckster. Personal collection of the editor.
she ministers, the benighted, impoverished midwestern working class, she

at one point tells Gantry that she is “Katy Jones from shanty town,”
although this revelation does little to develop her character. The female is
here portrayed as a primal force; she is linked to the people, portrayed as a
mob subject to wild, uncontrollable emotions. She is therefore unlike
Elmer, who is self-possessed, with a good sense of public gullibility. The
notion of Sharon as irrational force, with Elmer Gantry as self-knowing,
does some violence to Sinclair Lewis’s criticism of America and in particu-
lar the peddlers of organized religion. As is typical of popular narrative film,
the female principle is the most damaging for all the connivings of men.
If Sharon is the virgin (more or less) of the film, Elmer Gantry has its
corresponding whore in Lulu Banes (Shirley Jones), a one-time lover of
Gantry who, with the aid of her pimp, instigates a blackmail plot that tem-
porarily brings the preacher low. Having a heart of gold, however, she
refuses to follow through on her plot, invoking the wrath of the pimp. In
her defense, Gantry mobilizes a brutal and righteous retaliation (convinc-
ingly enacted by Lancaster, among Hollywood’s most physical, athletic
actors). He is all-forgiving, still holding affection for Lulu and identifying
with her hardscrabble existence. Unlike both Sharon and Lulu, Gantry is
from the people but not of them. He maintains the masculine virtues of
independence and rationality; he is amorous and kind-hearted yet able to
keep his emotions well in check. He is a force of nature, able to survive eas-
ily on his own and take and give punishment, the latter best demonstrated
when he makes short work of Lulu’s pimp, throwing him down a flight of
stairs in a semi-humorous scene that underscores Gantry as an archetypal,
if problematic, American hero.
■■■■■■■■■■ The Western in Transition

Elmer Gantry is a compromised work, but it nevertheless rep-
resents a significant challenge to American ideology typical of the year’s
films. The western, the most endemically American genre and often the
most conservative, continued a process of self-evaluation. Most representa-
tive is John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven, an adaptation of Akira Kuro-
sawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954). With its stirring score by Elmer Bernstein
(the main theme of which would be appropriated by Marlboro cigarettes
and, typically, nearly destroyed as a work of art in its own right), a cast of
actors on the cusp of stardom, and a plot that hearkens both to American
folklore and ancient myth, The Magnificent Seven gained a reputation as one
of the canonical “adult” westerns of the postwar period. The film is essen-
tially a tale of redemption, as seven rootless, morally pragmatic gunfighters
find meaning in their self-sacrifice to save a poor Mexican village from the
savage brigand Calvera (Eli Wallach).
Each member of the Seven is an archetype from the genre. Chris (Yul
Brynner) is the leader, a black-clad gunman whose outfit, deep voice, and
rather sinister outward demeanor would have coded him as the “bad guy”
in earlier westerns. A soulful figure, he is reflective about his wasted life and
the irony of what appears to be his final mission in service of people who
lack the usual treasure with which to buy his skills. Vin (Steve McQueen),
who becomes a second-in-command and sounding board to Chris, is the
gunfighter-as-cowboy, with a big smile, leather chaps, and sweat-stained
cotton shirt and kerchief. His good nature helps form the yin-yang con-
struct with Chris, for whom Vin also functions as conscience. Britt (James
Coburn) is the gunfighter as pure professional, a lanky killer adept with
knives and guns who has the least personal interactions of the film’s char-
acters, so emotionally removed is he from all concerns except perfecting his
own prowess, an old notion that in this film fuses his contribution to the
ultimate cause with his personal obsessions. O’Reilly (Charles Bronson) is
the film’s “half-breed,” a legendary killer of Irish-Mexican parentage whose

gruffness is softened by his deep emotional connections with the villagers,
facilitated by the village children who see O’Reilly’s fatherly aspect (as well
as the ethnicity that O’Reilly for a time wants to hide) and eventually can-
onize him. O’Reilly, as much as Vin, is the conscience of the Seven, scoff-
ing at gunplay and those who worship gunfighters as he speaks to the plight
of the poor. Lee (Robert Vaughn) is a dandy, the gunfighter-as-fetishist who
wears a neat three-piece suit and two sidearms. He is a man who has lost
his nerve and depends on the legend constructed around men like him in
order to continue. The “big reputation” of the gunfighter, a staple of the
western, is another convention that the film addresses; like Britt, Lee’s par-
ticipation in the rescue of the village is based more in personal rather than
collective, charitable concerns. Harry (Brad Dexter) is a high-rolling oppor-
tunist with a touch of happy-go-lucky shirker. He joins the Seven on the
assumption that there is a hidden agenda and that the game is being played
for much higher stakes than the few coins offered by the villagers. His own
redemption is perhaps the most questionable; while he returns at the last
moment to show solidarity with his comrades, his interest in the village is
minimal, and his final words are pleas for reassurance from Chris that he
was indeed playing for high stakes.
Chico (Horst Buchholz) is in many ways the film’s moral center, a cal-
low youth who overdresses the part of gunfighter as he aspires to the tra-
ditional role of acolyte, with Chris his unhappy mentor. But Chico becomes
far more than this, since as the only Mexican of the group he reminds the
Seven and the spectator of the dubious morality at the heart of the film.
Chico at first scoffs at the peasants, refusing his own origins in a poor Mex-
ican village “exactly like that one” (as Chris tells him before the Last Stand,
not as a way of dressing him down but making him come out from beyond
the dubious façade of pupil). By the end of the film, the Seven have very
much debunked the romance of the gunfighter. Chris tells Chico, who says
he hates the farmers, “Of course you hate them . . . because you yourself
are a farmer.” But Chico answers his mentor with an angry but focused
retort, asking, “Who made us what we are? Men like Calvera. And men like
you!” “What we are”: the question remains as to what this implies. Chico
seems to suggest that both Chris and Calvera are oppressors, forcing peace-
ful people to choose the way of violence or be destroyed. Such a notion has
long made The Magnificent Seven subject to divergent interpretations that
place it in a contemporary context.
The denouement of The Magnificent Seven is a Last Stand traditional to
the western, in which all but Chris, Vin, and Chico perish fighting Calvera’s
bandits and restoring the village. The blood sacrifice of the men is seen as
needed in order to revitalize a devastated society. The “benediction” scene
of the village children visiting the graves of the dead members of the Seven
makes the point easily enough. Chico decides to remain in the village, tak-
ing up farming with a young woman with whom he began a romance
earlier in the narrative. He therefore acknowledges his origins and the pure
life of the peasant, distancing himself from the fundamental amorality of
“men like you” (Calvera and Chris). One can read this, as Richard Slotkin
argues, as a valorization of American incursion into the Third World, espe-
cially as the United States embraced the “gunfighter” ethos of low-intensity
counterinsurgency operations in Cuba and Vietnam (Slotkin 474–86).
If one reads The Magnificent Seven as an approving fable about wars of
national liberation, a common question occurs: why can’t the Mexican
peasants free themselves? And if they really do need gunmen, aren’t there
plenty of these in their own nation? The film seems hugely patronizing,
unless one sees the Texas border town where the peasants find Chris and
Vin as a kind of evil cesspool from which the peasants need to temporarily
extract some dangerous medicine. As the film suggests at the conclusion,
while the villagers appreciate the good deeds of the Seven, they are happy
to see them go. Chris’s final line, reiterating the village wise man, is “Only
the farmers won . . . we lost, we always lose.” This might seem to valorize
the romantic image of the gunfighter as much as suggest his essential cor-
ruption, and that of the American militarist institutions for which he acts as
metaphor.
A more generous reading of The Magnificent Seven recognizes its decon-
struction of the gunfighter mythos and takes seriously Chico’s retort. Chris
is certainly not as cruel as Calvera, but like Calvera he represents a way of
life antithetical to humane civilization. The western has always had diffi-
culty with the very concept of civilization, the goal that the “winning of the
west” is ostensibly about. For all its high adventure, The Magnificent Seven
would appear to answer to the domestic centrism of the postwar era,
extolling domesticity as the noblest goal as Chico returns to the village.
■■■■■■■■■■ Davy Crockett versus Spartacus

The ideological conflicts of the year are most graphically por-
trayed in two historical epics, John Wayne’s The Alamo and Stanley
Kubrick’s Spartacus. The two films share much, yet no two films could be
more diametrically opposed ideologically. Both are historical epics: Sparta-
cus is about the slave revolt against ancient Rome, for many in the Left the
originary radical rebellion; The Alamo is about the Texas insurrection of

1836 of Anglo-American colonizers against the army of Mexican general
Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. Each film was beset with problems that, in
retrospect, underscore the ideological tensions that their narratives repre-
sent and which contained the films in their historical moment. Kubrick had
“creative differences” with actor/producer Kirk Douglas, the true author of
Spartacus, who thankfully kept Kubrick’s nihilist sensibility fully in check.
The Alamo was burdened by a terrible script—the fault entirely Wayne’s, for
whom the film may be his signature statement. The film’s disastrous pub-
licity campaign by Russell Birdwell contained the same clumsy, flag-waving
thinking that saturated Rightist James Edward Grant’s dialogue (Grant
played an important role in crafting the Wayne persona through the clipped
lines he wrote for Wayne in scripts dating back to the 1940s).
The Alamo, released on the eve of the election, was in many respects a
Republican campaign advertisement, filled with long-winded exhortations
about the need to, as Davy Crockett put it, “hit a lick for what’s right.”
John Wayne reluctantly took the lead role as well as directed, in order to
try to ensure box office grosses that didn’t materialize until years of re-
release. Some of the political diatribes, which often stop the film dead and
detract from some interesting if formulaic battle scenes, are outrageous. For
example, Alamo commander William Travis, the cannily cast Laurence
Harvey, delivers a blistering tirade on the foolishness of Jeffersonian
notions of equality, scoffing at “that rabble down there” (meaning his own
men), extolling a Great Man view of history in which only an inspired and
courageous few can step forward to hold back the barbaric hordes (in his
speech, there is no mistaking the film’s equation of 1836 Mexico with the
Soviet Union). Travis’s diction is mannered, accented by a strange mixture
of Carolina drawl and Oxbridge (due in part to Wayne’s hurried casting and
his changing conception of Travis). By contrast, Jim Bowie (Richard Wid-
mark) seems to represent Jacksonian populism. He despises Travis’s fop-
pishness, lying, and authoritarian view of command, preferring to talk to
his own men straight and in a plain-spoken, folksy manner.
Crockett acts as mediator, a populist who tries to remind these two men
of the value of compromise. In fact, Crockett, the central figure and locus
for audience identification (due to the Wayne star power and the earlier,
extremely popular Crockett craze brought on by Disney in the 1950s),
embraces Travis’s outlook but without the priggishness. Crockett isn’t
snooty and he appears to hold his Tennesseans in high regard, although he
decides to trick them into fighting for Texas anyway. There is a moment of
buffoonery when Crockett admits to his men his trickery in forging a
The populist politics of The Alamo (John Wayne, Batjac—United Artists) as represented
by Davy Crockett (Wayne) and Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark). Personal collection of the
editor.
threatening letter from Santa Ana, at which point the Tennesseans, por-
trayed as other than the brightest stars in the firmament, insist that Davy is
right about Santa Ana’s threat not only to Texas but to Tennessee. In order
to convey the idea that they just talked themselves into staying in Texas and
fighting, Davy gives a knowing little wink to one of his comrades. Wayne’s
is perhaps the screen’s best representation of Davy Crockett as master of
political chicanery, teller of Tall Tales, and “born liar” (Crockett’s self-
description during an introductory exchange with Travis). But beyond this
we see a right-wing ideological view complementing that represented by
Travis. Crockett may believe that the leader must retain the common touch
and not be a spoiled, stuffed-shirt aristocrat (John F. Kennedy, the subject
of Wayne’s ire, was often portrayed as such), but he must lead nevertheless.
The people cannot be trusted, especially when the nation is so obviously
under siege from a ruthless foe—no film of the period ever captured Cold
War paranoia better than The Alamo’s falsified account of the 1836 insur-
rection of white colonists who eventually conquered nearly half of Mexican
territory.
Suffice it to say that Spartacus can be fairly said to be a repudiation of

all that The Alamo stands for. While the film isn’t exactly accurate on the
facts of the Roman slave revolt, it doesn’t show such low regard for a his-
torical-materialist view of the world as to use history merely as a conven-
ience for making points about contemporaneous events, which is the case
with The Alamo. The Alamo pretends to uphold principles of democracy as it
shows contempt for the public itself (figured first in the white Texans),
while hardly representing the racial Other at all, except as frightening or
“noble” stereotypes. By contrast, Spartacus focuses on popular struggle,
delineating carefully the motives of power both in its Rightist, dictatorial
mode (Laurence Olivier’s oily Crassus) and bourgeois, liberal mode (Charles
Laughton’s overfed but sincere Gracchus). As leader of the rebellion, Spar-
tacus (Kirk Douglas) is obviously the film’s central figure, and Douglas’s star
power was crucial to the film’s creation. Yet there is a strong sense of the
collective hero (one of the most moving scenes in the film shows all the
recaptured slaves standing up and proclaiming themselves to be Spartacus
under pain of death), best portrayed in scenes of the slave army at rest or
play, or the Eisensteinian images of the piles of the dead following the
Roman victory. Such comparisons don’t seem at all strained when one con-
siders the lengths to which Douglas went to make Spartacus a Left statement
challenging Cold War ideology. The hiring of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo,
one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, whose name was featured promi-
nently in the credits rather than concealed by a pseudonym as it was dur-
ing the heyday of McCarthyism, was one aspect of this ambition that made
Spartacus the target of right-wing media attack dogs such as Hedda Hopper.
John Wayne not only despised the film’s politics but saw it as a threat to his
own historical epic, whose agenda could not be more different from that of
Spartacus.
The Alamo and Spartacus represent the decade to come, with the severe
reaction and retrenchment that met the most extraordinarily challenging
potentials. The political-cultural divide embodied in these films suggested
the potential for change. The struggle of Spartacus, despite the film’s excep-
tionally downbeat ending in which the slave revolt is crushed and the par-
ticipants all killed, contains an unswerving commitment to revolutionary
change that also looks fondly on human beings and their failings. The
despairing ending of Strangers When We Meet, with Larry Coe and Maggie
Gault facing a return to the bleak domestic household, seems far less deter-
mined by a studio adhering to conventional mores than a recognition, in
retrospect at least, that alternative sexuality and ways of living are desper-
ately needed. Elmer Gantry can only turn his back and walk away from the
hysterical middle-American population; within the decade that population

would tear itself apart, literally in the context of the civil rights and antiwar
movements, symbolically in the apocalyptic visions of several important
films. Apocalypse versus revolutionary transformation is a dialectic clearly
displayed in Elmer Gantry, Spartacus, and The Alamo. Elmer Gantry presents a
situation at the precipice, with a society too circumscribed by its unthinking
ideology to permit anything but a self-rending as its belief system collapses.
One could make a similar case about Home from the Hill, where the members
of the community can only re-create patriarchal structures, even as those
structures have destroyed nearly everyone in the narrative, including the
patriarch himself. Spartacus can envision a new world, one that The Alamo’s
extreme political reaction repudiates utterly. The Alamo may well be the
purest evocation of dominant U.S. ideology in the cinema, with its belief in
sacrificial bloodshed and utter annihilation—including self-annihilation—
in support of the most retrograde institutions (including slavery, despite the
film’s lame, mawkish, and implausible genuflections against that institu-
tion). The family, religion, charismatic male authority, property rights, and
militarism are all portrayed as destroyed by an inadequately policed racial
Other. The failure to be diligent about such policing, necessitating the apoc-
alypse as the New Golden Land slips from divine grace, is among the most
foundational of the poisoned narratives informing the nation’s so-called
civilizing experience. The Alamo recapitulates it with a seductive accuracy at
the height of U.S. confrontation with yet another contrived foe during the
peak of the Cold War. The year’s films are instructive today as a fore-
shadowing of what was achieved and lost since, and of the awful centrality
of consoling, regressive, always destructive visions to American narrative
and political life.

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Rutgers University Press

Chapter Title: 1960 Movies and Intimations of Disaster and Hope

Book Title: American Cinema of the 1960s

The year seemed to look forward to a period of radical social

The new president subscribed to the domino theory of revolution in the

ity must be deﬁned as inherent to the bourgeois family structure rather

■■■■■■■■■■ Satire as Horror

■■■■■■■■■■ Melodrama’s Summary Statements

of legitimacy. The issue is most obviously manifest in the attempt by Wade’s

Wade’s hunting, as he explicitly states, is aimed at the domestic scene itself.

seen as excessive; Theron’s conversation with Libby in which he tells her of

of critics who hold him in contempt. He drowns his self-disgust in alcohol,

Matthau), a seeming prude annoyed by lurid party jokes, suddenly reveals

■■■■■■■■■■ When the Impossible Could Occur

she ministers, the benighted, impoverished midwestern working class, she

■■■■■■■■■■ The Western in Transition

the ﬁlm’s “half-breed,” a legendary killer of Irish-Mexican parentage whose

■■■■■■■■■■ Davy Crockett versus Spartacus

originary radical rebellion; The Alamo is about the Texas insurrection of

Sufﬁce it to say that Spartacus can be fairly said to be a repudiation of

hysterical middle-American population; within the decade that population

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