Monthly Archives: August 2024

  • 3 Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Altman (1977)

    Reviewing Robert Altman’s Images in late 1972, Pauline Kael described Altman as ‘almost frighteningly non-repetitive … [he] goes out in a new direction each time’.  Some four years later, he was non-repetitive even within the same film:  3 Women is part poignant social comedy, part cryptic psychodrama.  The result is frustrating but never less than absorbing.

    3 Women is set in the present day, in the town of Desert Springs, California (a nearly real place:  the film was shot on location in Desert Hot Springs, CA).  Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) works at the local ‘rehabilitation and geriatric center’, helping clients use the hydrotherapy pool, and so on.  Her hard-to-please supervisor rates Millie ‘one of our best girls’ and tells her to induct a new employee, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), recently arrived in California from her native Texas.  Naïve, socially awkward Pinky instantly takes a shine to her mentor, whom she considers a model of style and sophistication.  Well-groomed Millie certainly takes care with her hair and her clothes but she’s grateful for this admiring attention.  She can often be heard rattling on about her life outside work – the men she’s dating, the latest recipes she has devised – but Pinky is the only person listening.  When Millie’s flatmate moves out, Pinky takes her place.

    The routines, hierarchies and atmosphere of the girls’ workplace are described with a light yet incisive touch.  The martinet supervisor (Sierra Pecheur) and the fatuous doctor in charge (Craig Richard Nelson) are played a bit obviously but co-workers of Millie and Pinky like Doris (Maysie Hoy) and Alcira (Belita Moreno), exuding fixed opinions and boredom at the same time, are convincing.  The images of elderly people being eased into the pool or snoozing in a bath are sad but lulling:  these men and women seem to be in a safe, if stupefied, place.  There are nice, funny details:  Pinky, at a loose end on her first day at work, pootling around in a vacant wheelchair; the edge of Millie’s skirt protruding below the bottom of her car door as she drives away.  And the two principals’ conversations are very enjoyable.  Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, contrastingly extraordinary camera subjects, are beautifully natural performers.  Much of the dialogue between them was improvised, particularly by Duvall, who has the lion’s share of it.

    Signs of 3 Women’s portentous-pretentious side are there from an early stage, though.  Millie, like Pinky, hails from Texas; they share the birth name Mildred, which Pinky conceals because she hates it; their co-workers also include a pair of identical twins (Leslie Ann and Patricia Ann Hudson).  Alone in the apartment, Pinky unlocks her secret diary and reads avidly.  Gerald Busby’s somewhat dissonant flute and strings score is magnetic but, since it’s incongruous with what’s on the screen, a continuing reminder that there’s more to Altman’s story than meets the eye.  Then there’s the third title character, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who runs a bar with her husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier).  Willie is a much more conspicuous figure when she’s not serving behind the bar.  She’s an artist, producing large-scale murals and outdoor floor paintings that depict stylised naked figures, with phalluses and breasts strongly emphasised.  What’s more, Willie is visibly pregnant.

    For most of the film it’s Edgar rather than his wife who interacts with the two younger women.  His character, too, might seem freighted with cultural significance.  Edgar claims to have been the lead actor’s stunt double on the 1950s TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp; the Harts’ bar is part of a venue called Dodge City, which includes a largely disused shooting range.  But Robert Fortier does a fine job of humanising Edgar, even when he turns out to be a boozy lech (he appears to be the only man that Millie actually sleeps with).  The central relationship in 3 Women meanwhile builds to show the growing desperation of Millie’s social pretence.  To the other young tenants of ‘Purple Sage Apartments’, she’s ridiculous:  they don’t bother to conceal their sniggering contempt for her.  Millie, who knows she’s a figure of fun but tries to ignore it, becomes more and more resentful of klutzy, clinging Pinky.  It’s the last straw when Millie makes elaborate preparations for a visit from her previous flatmate, Deidre (Beverly Ross), and the two guys she says she’ll bring with her, and it doesn’t happen.  The threesome, who arrive while Millie’s out, just as quickly drive off, once Deidre has told Pinky to let Millie know they’ve decided to go to Dodge City instead.  Pinky duly conveys the message.  A furious Millie blames her and says it’s time she moved out.  Distraught at Millie’s rejection of her, Pinky jumps from the apartment balcony into the communal swimming pool, way below.

    It’s a pivotal moment when 3 Women abandons the benign shallows of the hydrotherapy pool for the psychic deep end.  Whereas Pinky’s suicide attempt fails and she eventually wakes from a coma, the film never recovers.  Pinky returns to the land of the living suffering from what hospital staff term ‘temporary amnesia’ but the symptoms were predicted earlier in the film.  Her strikingly elderly parents (Ruth Nelson and John Cromwell), whom Millie contacts while Pinky lies unconscious in hospital, arrive from Texas; when their daughter comes to, she doesn’t recognise them.  She returns to live with Millie but no longer the meek appendage she was before.  Pinky is now the boss and does the things that Millie, not she, used to do – drinking and smoking, sleeping with Edgar, shooting at Dodge City.  And she hates being called Pinky; she yells at Millie that her name’s Mildred.  Millie, for her part, becomes submissive.

    The film isn’t short of echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), in which personal identity is permeable and human relationships are power struggles.  Liv Ullmann’s character in Persona has renounced the power of speech; in 3 Women Janice Rule’s Willie is a non-speaking role until the closing stages.  But Altman’s realistic treatment of Millie’s and Pinky’s lives isn’t a good fit with the enigmatic, allusive imagery on which Persona depends and which 3 Women imitates, though intermittently and superficially.  Pinky’s personality is undoubtedly unstable after the suicide attempt but you get the sense that this is dictated less by an underlying premise than by what Altman needs to happen in the story.  When Pinky has a bad dream she reverts to childish dependency, asking if she can sleep the rest of the night in Millie’s bed (Millie agrees).  During the night, drunken Edgar arrives to announce that Willie’s about to give birth.  He has no intention of being with her for the occasion so the two girls drive to the Harts’ house, where Willie has gone into labour.  Millie tells Pinky to get a doctor; Pinky, now back in insubordinate mode, stands outside the house, staring implacably at Willie’s agony.  No medical help is called and the baby is stillborn.

    3 Women’s finale sees Millie, Pinky and Willie living, or at least working, together at Dodge City, where Millie runs the bar, wearing the hat and clothes that Willie used to wear, and Pinky, more little-girlish than ever, refers to Millie as her mother.  A delivery boy (Dennis Christopher, who registers in this tiny early role), unloading soda supplies from his truck, tells Millie he’s sorry to hear about Edgar’s death from ‘a gun accident’.  Millie doesn’t sound at all sorry about it.  In an interview at BFI in 2001, Robert Altman explained to Geoff Andrew that ‘3 Women literally came from a dream’.  Even though Altman dreamt that ‘I was making this film’ rather than the events of the narrative, you can’t help wondering if a dream is a good starting point for a screenplay.  Sylvia Plath was right that dreams seem ‘when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much’; but dreams recounted to someone else are a byword for boring them to tears – never mind if the dreamer happens to be a creative artist.

    I like 3 Women, even so.  Its great merits include, as well as Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, Chuck Rosher’s lighting, which is expressive in various locations – the parched expanse of Dodge City, the hushed rehabilitation centre, Millie’s home.  Her favourite colours, she tells Pinky, are yellow and purple (‘I love irises’).  According to its name, purple’s in evidence on the outside of the block she lives in.  Inside her apartment, yellow and gold dominate the décor.  They’re prominent, too, in Millie’s extensive wardrobe, while Pinky dresses for her name – dusty rather than shocking pink, of course.  I’d seen 3 Women once before, in the summer of 1977, on its original UK release.  It has aged better than two of the three Altman films I returned to at his BFI retrospective in 2021 – better, that is, than M*A*S*H (1970) and Short Cuts (1993), not as well as the masterly Nashville (1975).

    8 August 2024

  • The Philadelphia Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1940)

    Autres temps, autres moeurs … In the prologue to George Cukor’s film a man exits a house and his marriage.  His wife, standing in the doorway, breaks one of his golf clubs in two.  The husband’s revenge parting shot is shaping up as a punch to her face until he changes his mind and merely pushes her over.  The aggressor is Cary Grant, in 1940 an increasingly well-liked leading man.  The woman on the receiving end is Katharine Hepburn, considered ‘box-office poison’ when The Philadelphia Story arrived in cinemas.  Audiences knew they were watching a comedy; even so, the effect of this domestic violence was remarkable – is even more remarkable in long retrospect.  Grant’s character, C K Dexter Haven, wasn’t considered a villain – even in comic terms – as a result of his behaviour; audiences who had found Hepburn an overbearing screen presence enjoyed her opening pratfall as if she – rather than her character, the entitled socialite Tracy Lord – had it coming.  Hepburn’s loss of dignity in the prologue heralds what’s to come throughout the film.  When she and Grant co-starred in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938), he was repeatedly made to look silly, often by her.  With the boot on the other foot, the movie-going public warmed to Katharine Hepburn.  The Philadelphia Story was one of the biggest popular successes of her long movie career.

    Not that it’s quite as simple as that.  The playwright Philip Barry, a friend of Hepburn, wrote the role of Tracy Lord specifically for her.  She had played it on Broadway and, when The Philadelphia Story proved a commercial hit there, bought the film rights.  Keenly aware of Hepburn’s persona and talents, Barry devised a highly effective combination.  He supplies plenty of opportunities for her to show off her sharp-tongued, maddeningly superior side, as Tracy runs verbal rings round others; by cutting her down to size, he also enables Hepburn to express Tracy’s emotional brittleness.  She does this affectingly thanks in part to another important aspect of her acting (though it’s a quality shared with the best of her contemporaries, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck):  Hepburn doesn’t bid for audience sympathy.  (Until this performance, her indifference to what audiences thought of her was probably a main reason why they found her dislikeable.)  George Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart, who adapted Barry’s play for the screen, show a similarly good understanding of both the leading lady and the source material.  That opening spat between Hepburn and Cary Grant is Cukor’s and Stewart’s invention.

    Despite its stage origins, The Philadelphia Story is a prime example of a specifically Hollywood sub-genre of the time – the ‘comedy of remarriage’[1].  The film’s prologue is followed by a ‘Two years later’ title.  It’s the eve of Tracy’s wedding to George Kittredge (John Howard) – a marriage of old and new money.  George is, as well as rich, handsome but more conspicuously boring:  he and wilful Tracy are evidently not made for each other.  If her romantic options were tying the knot with plodding George vs reconciliation with exasperating, charismatic Dexter, it would be no contest.  A third suitor, Macaulay ‘Mike’ Connor (James Stewart), is essential to the story, in more ways than one.  New York-based Mike, a journalist, and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), who’s also his girlfriend, are dispatched to Philadelphia to cover Tracy’s wedding – a major social event in the city.  Mike and Tracy have at least one thing in common:  moral censure of others comes easily to them.  The plot pivots on this high-minded pair being taken down a peg or two.

    Tracy divorced Dexter because he was easygoing to the point of drunken philandering; she’s similarly outraged by the marital infidelity of her father, Seth (John Halliday).  Now separated from Tracy’s mother (Mary Nash), he returns to the family home for the wedding, and the sake of good form.  (Dexter also returns for the occasion, not for the same reasons.)  Mike despises his employer, ‘Spy’ magazine, and its unscrupulous publisher, Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell).  Mike also detests the Lord family’s wealth and privilege.  Like Tracy’s surname, his given name is no accident:  Macaulay Connor aspires to be a serious writer.  He has published a book of short stories, which didn’t earn him a fortune.

    Liz Imbrie, who would rather make a living as a painter than as a high-society snapper, takes a rueful but more accepting view than Mike of the Lords’ opulent lifestyle – their acres of rooms, their fleet of domestic staff.  And the film-makers are amused, even charmed, by it.  Like plenty of social comedies before and since (all the way up to Emerald Fennell’s repellent Saltburn last year), The Philadelphia Story takes the view that the well-bred wealthy, however badly they behave, are more entertaining than their inferiors – whether those are servants or someone who, like George Kittredge, has worked his way up to prosperity.  Dexter is part of Tracy’s social set but not quite one of the idle rich.  He’s a designer of yachts, including the ‘True Love’, on which he and Tracy spent their honeymoon:  now his wedding gift to his ex-wife is a miniature of the yacht.  He also has connections with Sidney Kidd:  Dexter has been doing something or other for ‘Spy’ in South America and agrees with Kidd to get Mike and Liz into the Lord household by introducing them as friends of Tracy’s brother, a diplomat in Argentina (he doesn’t come back for the wedding).  Although Tracy doesn’t believe this, she reluctantly agrees to let Mike and Liz stay to cover the wedding once Dexter reveals that Kidd is sitting on a muckraking piece about Seth Lord’s affair with a dancer.

    The dialogue, always dynamically witty, is mostly very enjoyable too but there’s a startling interruption in a confrontation between Tracy and her father.  After justifying his womanising as a natural reflection of male ‘reluctance to grow old’ (this anticipates world-weary Rose Castorini’s ‘They fear death’ diagnosis in Moonstruck (1987)), Seth Lord proceeds to tell his daughter, brushing off her several interruptions, that:

    ‘I suppose the best mainstay a man can have as he gets along in years is a daughter. … A devoted young girl gives a man the illusion that youth is still his. … without her, he might be inclined to go in search of his youth. That‘s just as important to him as it is to any woman.  But with a girl of his own – full of warmth for him, full of foolish, unquestioning, uncritical affection … You have a good mind, a pretty face, a disciplined body that does what you tell it.  You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential.  An understanding heart.’

    Senior citizens of the patriarchy – whether represented by Seth’s breathtaking, brutal candour or by Tracy’s genial Uncle Willie (Roland Young), an inveterate bottom-pincher – are the hardest for modern audiences to take in The Philadelphia Story.  That both parts are well played gives them extra piquancy:  despite his antics, it’s hard not to enjoy watching Uncle Willie.

    What’s more, the set-up requires Tracy to acquire an understanding heart and (along with Katharine Hepburn) come down from her pedestal.  She finds Mike’s short stories in the local library, and likes them.  The two are already warming to each other when they both drink too much and go for a midnight swim together, after which George sees Mike carrying Tracy into the house.  Next morning, amid the competing hangovers (Hepburn’s is the best but Roland Young runs her a good second), George demands an explanation from his fiancée, who says she has none.  She knows that George has, misguidedly, idealised her – and that she doesn’t love him.  As the wedding guests gather, the engagement is called off and the scene set for a terrific finale.

    George isn’t alone in observing Mike and Tracy during the night:  the younger Lord sister, twelve-year-old Dinah (Virginia Weidler), who thinks Tracy should never have got rid of Dexter, is also keeping an eye on things, and reports what she sees.  Nothing daunted and regardless of Liz, Mike asks Tracy to marry him instead.  She turns him down, ‘Because I don’t think Liz would like it … and I’m not sure you would … and I’m even a little doubtful about myself’.  But when Tracy goes to explain to those-gathered-together what’s happened, she can’t go through with that either.  Her ex-husband seizes his chance.   It’s a pity the heroine’s learning humility is underlined in one of the film’s few false moments:  as her father prepares to give her away to Dexter, Tracy asks Seth how he feels and he replies, ‘Proud’.  But the remarriage makes undoubted emotional sense.  Earlier on, when George is puzzled by Dexter’s wedding present, Tracy recalls sailing on the real thing – ‘My, she was yare’.   George is even more puzzled so she explains that ‘yare’ means ‘Easy to handle, quick to the helm.  Fast, bright.  Everything a boat should be’.  Now Tracy tells Dexter, she’ll be yare too.

    George Cukor handles the cast impeccably.  Cary Grant and James Stewart, who’ve been known to be even more grating than Katharine Hepburn, are as delightful as she is here – especially Stewart.  His performance is a perfect balance of comedic and romantic, his playing drunk a wonder, particularly in a tête-à-tête with Grant.  Precocious, kooky Dinah could be a complete pain (as the equivalent character is in High Society (1956)) but she’s actually rather likeable – perhaps it helps Virginia Weidler, who was thirteen at the time, has the face of a rather plain thirty-five-year-old.  Ruth Hussey, as well as reliably hitting the target with Liz’s one-liners, is quietly affecting in the less showy role of long-suffering Liz.  All the bit players do well.  That prologue sequence isn’t only funny but also a very deft piece of scene-setting: the combined effect of the two things is just about elating – and that, like Tracy’s pratfall, is a taste of things to come.  Cukor lets his actors exult in the funny writing; he also keeps the film visually on the move throughout.  The Philadelphia Story is among the most entertaining and satisfying of all the Hollywood-golden-age romantic comedies.

    6 August 2024

    [1] ‘[The] Hays Code… banned any explicit references to or attempts to justify adultery and illicit sex.  The comedy of remarriage with the same spouse enabled filmmakers to evade this provision of the Code. The protagonists divorced, flirted, or even had relationships, with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together’ (Wikipedia).

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