Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lisa Parks

University of California–Santa Barbara

Jeffrey Sconce

Northwestern University

BRITTON ON FILM

THE COMPLETE FILM CRITICISM OF ANDREW BRITTON

edited by Barry Keith Grant

with an Introduction by Robin Wood

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

© 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Britton, Andrew, 1952–1994.

Britton on film : the complete film criticism of Andrew Britton / edited by Barry Keith Grant ; with an introduction by Robin Wood.

p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3363-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Motion pictures. I. Grant, Barry Keith, 1947– II. Title.

PN1994.B68 2008

791.43—dc22

2008019046

ISBN 978-0-8143-3550-5 (e-book)

To Art Efron, a mentor who taught me so much about criticism, and Robin Wood, who first showed me how to be a critic of cinema

Andrew Britton was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the United Kingdom in April 1952. He graduated in 1974 with a first-class degree in English and American Literature from King’s College, London, and went on to study as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick with noted film critic Robin Wood.

Britton’s career as a lecturer in Film Studies began at the same university in 1978, and he went on to teach at Essex University (1979–85), Trent University, Ontario, Canada (1985–88), York University, Ontario, Canada (1988–89), and Reading University, England (1992–93). He was also a guest lecturer at other universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States, including a term as a visiting professor at Queens University, Ontario, Canada in 1983.

Britton was a member of the editorial boards of the film magazines Framework and Movie and of the editorial collective of the Canadian magazine CineAction.  In 1989–90, he was involved in program research at the National Film Theatre in London, and in 1991, he was editor of the official program of the London Film Festival. Britton was also a joint contributor to The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (1979) and the editor of Talking Films (1991). His book Katharine Hepburn: The Thirties and After (released in the United States as Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist) was nominated for the British Film Institute’s Book of the Year Award in 1985.

Britton died of complications from AIDS in April 1994.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Robin Wood

Part One: Hollywood Cinema

Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire

A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film

The Devil, Probably: The Symbolism of Evil

Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam

Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment

Part Two: Hollywood Movies

Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or The Ambiguities

Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound: Text and Countertext

Detour

Notes on Pursued

The Family in The Reckless Moment

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny in The Lady from Shanghai

The Exorcist

Jaws

Mandingo

10

The Great Waldo Pepper

The Other Side of Midnight

Part Three: European Cinema

Sexuality and Power, or the Two Others

Their Finest Hour: Humphrey Jennings and the British Imperial Myth of World War II

Metaphor and Mimesis: Madame de . . .

Thinking about Father: Bernardo Bertolucci

Living Historically: Two Films by Jean-Luc Godard

Foxed: Fox and His Friends

Part Four: Film and Cultural Theory

In Defense of Criticism

For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp

The Ideology of Screen

The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and The Classical Style

The Myth of Postmodernism: The Bourgeois Intelligentsia in the Age of Reagan

Consuming Culture: The Development of a Theoretical Orthodoxy

Invisible Eye

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

I met Andrew Britton only once, and that was just briefly. It must have been in late 1986 or early 1987, when I was visiting Robin Wood and Richard Lippe in their Toronto apartment to deliver (this was before the days of e-mail and the Internet) a final copy of my essay on Tobe Hooper’s remake of Invaders from Mars for publication in their film journal, CineAction. Although at that time the journal still had the exclamation mark attached to its name, certainly the moment had nothing of the drama that Wood describes in his introduction to this volume of his first meeting with Britton, whom he was taking on as a graduate student. In my case, I had been chatting amiably with Robin and the other members of the magazine’s editorial collective when there was a knock at the door. It was Andrew, I believe just arriving or returning from the UK, for there was an intense and joyful connection that immediately arose between him and Robin when Andrew entered the room that implied a lengthy separation. I have a mental image of Andrew’s face, politely saying hello to me when introduced but already looking beyond and then moving past me, his attention fixed on Robin. The connection between them was so strong, so palpable, that it seemed to exclude all else, certainly a stranger like myself. There was nothing for me but to depart, and as quickly as possible, I humbly took my leave.

Although Britton had hardly taken notice of me, I certainly had been aware of him for years through his writing. The horror film and the American Gothic had long been an interest of mine, and I remember the pleasure I took upon first reading The Devil, Probably, his contribution to The American Nightmare, the landmark book on the horror film based around the retrospective that Wood programmed in 1979 for the Toronto International Film Festival (then known as the Festival of Festivals). Periodically, I would come across an essay by Britton, primarily through CineAction or Movie, and marvel at its erudition as well as the surgical precision with which he could critique a theoretical argument. Yes, he was merciless in his dissections, but he also was—there is no other word for it—funny. He possessed an inimitable ability to demolish a critical position while at the same time demonstrating a remarkably rich sense of humor. Coming to film studies with a background in literature, as I had—and suspected that Britton did as well—I particularly admired his ability to move with intellectual ease and assurance between cinema and prose fiction.

In the essay on Invaders from Mars that I discreetly deposited on the table on my way out after meeting Britton, I compared the film to the 1953 original, directed by William Cameron Menzies, in order to tease out the implications of what I called Science Fiction in the Age of Reagan. At the same time, Britton was publishing his much more ambitious and important piece Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment. His essay was astonishingly comprehensive in scope, monumental even, mine much more modest, but it was only one of a number of occasions when I took delight in discovering that this distinctive and always interesting critic was on a wavelength similar to mine.

Skeptical of theoretical trends, Britton was a critic who was remarkably attuned to the nuances of texts, whether cinema or literature. Consider his thorough readings of Meet Me in St. Louis and Now, Voyager as examples of his ability to provide fresh and compelling interpretations of canonical Hollywood films which have been the focus of much critical attention; by contrast, the essay on Mandingo shows how Britton managed to discover considerable value in a movie that otherwise had been completely overlooked by film scholars. Britton was able to question and resist the ideas of others because he was so persuasively detailed in his own analyses. Admirably, he did not shrink from exposing flaws even in important works by major artists, as he convincingly does, for example, in his discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout va bien. Britton’s grasp of theory, particularly Marxism and psychoanalysis, was extraordinary. His critiques of Screen’s theoretical views and Wisconsin formalism are the most convincing I know. Yet, although he was adept with theory, he was less a theorist than a critic. By this I do not mean to suggest that theory and criticism are mutually exclusive, and Britton’s work demonstrates as well as anyone’s how they might work together.

I became involved in this book at Robin’s suggestion. It was his initial idea to gather together his former student’s essays on film and criticism, and he entrusted the task to me as an editor of some experience. Because of my familiarity with Britton’s work and my shared opinion of its value, I agreed without hesitation to take on the job. Happily, my editorial labors, apart from the detective work involved in tracking down incomplete or missing references, have been a pleasure, for Britton’s prose, for all its critical complexity, is at once remarkably elegant and supple. He left little for even the most assiduous editor to do beyond converting spelling and punctuation to American English, adding release dates to film titles, and the like. Occasionally I have added an endnote or parenthetical explanation of an unfamiliar term.

In a way, my one personal encounter with Andrew Britton seems metaphoric of his place in the history of film studies. He was undeniably brilliant, but like all brilliant lights, he burned intensely and all too quickly. He produced this remarkable series of essays in just fifteen years, appearing for a brief moment on the critical horizon, and then he was gone. Although he seemed to have burst on the scene already a sophisticated and fully developed critical intelligence, he was not afforded the opportunity and time to grow as a film critic and produce the sustained body of work I have no doubt he would have. It is my hope, though, that the publication of this book will give to Britton’s film criticism and theory the recognition it so clearly deserves.

Barry Keith Grant

St. Catharines, Ontario

Acknowledgments

As the volume editor, I am grateful to a number of people for helping to make this book happen. Annie Martin, Acquisitions Editor at Wayne State University Press, provided her unwavering support for this project from the beginning. Professors Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox of the Department of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, were wonderful hosts during the summer of 2007 and generously allowed their graduate students to work on this project. Two of those students, Ph.D. candidates Bronwyn Polashek and Pamela Fossen, devoted their research skills to tracking down many of the incomplete references in the original essays. Kristin Harpster Lawrence at Wayne State University Press ably oversaw the book’s production, David Alcorn of Alcorn Publication Design provided the excellent design and packaging of the book, and Linda O’Doughda was astonishingly diligent in her copyediting of the manuscript.

My own Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, provided me with the necessary time to complete the manuscript. Justine Cotton, a Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Librarian at Brock, helped me track down some of the most mysterious references. Richard Lippe generously gave me access to his impressive stills collection, as did my colleague Jim Leach to his personal library. Andrew Britton’s sister, Vanessa Fox, provided the information for her brother’s biography. Malisa Kurtz provided invaluable assistance preparing the index, and Dan Barnowski applied his technical expertise to digitally scan and prepare all the essays from their original sources. Finally, thank you to Robin Wood, at whose suggestion this book came to be and without whom it would have been impossible.

Thank you to the following journals for permission to reprint material which was originally published in their pages:

CineAction. Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, 7 (December 1986): 36–51; "A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film, 26/27 (Winter 1992): 32–59; Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or the Ambiguities," 35 (August 1994): 29–40 (this essay first appeared in Australian Journal of Screen Theory 3 [1977] 7–25); "Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound: Text and Countertext, 3/4 (Winter 1986): 72–83; Their Finest Hour: Humphrey Jennings and the British Imperial Myth of World War II, 18 (Fall 1989): 37–44; In Defense of Criticism, 3/4 (January 1986): 3–5; The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and ‘The Classical Style,’ 15 (Winter 1988/89): 47–63; The Myth of Postmodernism: The Bourgeois Intelligentsia in the Age of Reagan, 12/13 (August 1988): 3–17; Consuming Culture: The Development of a Theoretical Orthodoxy," 19/20 (May 1990): 11–19.

Movie. "Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam, 27/28 (Winter 1980/Spring 1981): 2–23; Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," 31/32 (Winter 1986): 1–42; The Exorcist, 25 (Winter 1977–78): 16–20; Mandingo, 22 (Spring 1976): 1–22; 10, The Great Waldo Pepper, and The Other Side of Midnight, 27/28 (Winter 1980/Spring 1981): 105–8, 66–70, and 73–77, respectively; Metaphor and Mimesis: Madame de…, 29/30 (Summer 1982): 93–107; Thinking about Father: Bernardo Bertolucci, 23 (Winter 1976/77): 9–22; "The Ideology of Screen," 26 (Winter 1978/79): 2–28.

Framework. "The Family in The Reckless Moment, 4 (Autumn 1976): 17–24; Sexuality and Power, or the Two Others, 6 (Autumn 1977): 7–11, 39; and 7/8 (Spring 1978): 4–11; Living Historically: Two Films by Jean-Luc Godard," 3 (Spring 1976): 4–15.

"Detour and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny in The Lady from Shanghai" appeared originally in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 174–83 and 213–21, respectively; and "Notes on Pursued" in The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1996), 196–205. (The original, longer version of this essay appeared in Framework 2, no. 4 [1976]: 4–15.) The Devil, Probably: The Symbolism of Evil and "Jaws" appeared originally in The American Nightmare, ed. Robin Wood and Richard Lippe (Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979), 34–42 and 54–57, respectively. "Foxed: Fox and His Friends appeared originally as part of Fox and His Friends: An Exchange of Views by Bob Cant and Andrew Britton" in Jump Cut 16 (1977): 22–23. For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp appeared originally in Gay Left 7 (Winter 1978/79): 11–14. Invisible Eye appeared originally in Sight and Sound 1, no. 10 (ns) (1992): 27–29, and is reprinted here with the permission of the British Film Institute.

Introduction: Andrew Britton and the Future of Film Criticism

by Robin Wood

Our superior, gentlemen. Our superior in every way.

–Professor Carrington in Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World

Andrew Britton was, and remains, quite simply, the greatest film critic in the English language. But he was not, like Hawks’s monster from outer space, an intellectual carrot. His greatness lies as much in his humanity as in his intelligence. His neglect (I am tempted to say suppression) within most contemporary film studies programs is easily accounted for by that single word humanity. Humanity has not seemed to enter very much, over the past two decades, in the academic world of film studies (an absence that, to my mind, partly discredits it, though it has come up with the occasional usable discovery). In its place we have had theory. Theories can be useful (I have drawn on a number in my time), but when they become an end in themselves, they generally lose their utility. Over the last decade of academic film studies, we have witnessed many theories which come and go, the latest replacing the previous rather as in the fashion world. "Oh, Madam, we’ve just got this new theory in. Everyone will be wearing it soon. You really mustn’t be seen without it." And of course, academics will simply have to keep up. I have never, at any stage in my career, considered myself an academic in this sense, and I’m fairly sure Andrew felt the same, although we both taught in universities.

I have received hints recently, from various sources, that theory is on the way out: a startling pronouncement. Could it mean that film studies teachers will have to start watching movies again? Or watching them as something more than examples illustrating the latest theory? If this is indeed the case, this is the ideal moment for the rediscovery (for many, no doubt, the discovery) of Andrew Britton. I want to say at once to any academic or nonacademic with a serious interest in the cinema—and I hope this will not be mistaken for false modesty—it is more important to read this book than to read my own collected writings. It is my hope that its publication will initiate no less than a new era in film studies.

There are a number of reasons for Andrew’s neglect, which the present edition of his collected writings is intended to remedy. One reason is surely his quite devastating attacks on certain aspects of film theory: attacks which, to my knowledge, were never answered (because they couldn’t be?) but were merely ignored, in the hope that they would go away or be forgotten. (See the essays in part four of this book, Film and Cultural Theory). Another is that, in his relatively short life, he produced only one book, and his essays (spread over a number of different publications) have never before been collected. The book, ostensibly a study of Katharine Hepburn, has never been recognized for the major work it undoubtedly is. In my opinion, its release was mishandled, especially in its American edition published after Andrew’s death, when, against my protests, its original title, Katharine Hepburn: The 30s and After, was changed to Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist, despite the fact that its author states very firmly that Hepburn could not be considered a feminist although her career is of interest to Feminism. It is, in fact, a book that should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in the Hollywood cinema. It goes far beyond any narrow star study, with brilliant sections on genre, the meanings of stars, the phenomenon of cinematic partnerships (Tracy/Hepburn, Astaire/Rogers, Bogart/Bacall), along with detailed readings of Hepburn’s major films.

Andrew and I

When I first met Andrew I had recently begun a new life. I had returned to England from three years at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with a broken marriage and a new partner, John Anderson, who abandoned an extremely promising position with Universal Pictures in Toronto to live with me. I rapidly discovered that the world of film study had been transformed during my absence. Everything I stood for was passé, and semiotics (a word I had never encountered during my time in Canada) had taken over. I also discovered that I had in the meantime been set up as The Enemy (together, of course, with numerous others): I was branded an anti-intellectual, a relic of a now discredited humanism. After a year of despair in London I applied (without much hope) for a new film studies position at Warwick University, to initiate its first film studies program.

To my amazement, I was accepted: my first real ego boost since returning to England. John and I moved to Coventry (the nearest city); John bought a house with his savings (my own income going largely for child support), and he and I started a new life. After a year or so there was another source of amazement: a graduate student from Australia, Tom Ryan, now a distinguished figure in the Australian film community, wanted to come and study under me. I couldn’t understand why. Everything, then, was semiotics, the rudiments of which I was struggling to grasp, though more for the sake of understanding what was going on than from any sense that I might join the club. Everyone who was progressive was into semiotics, and I had always thought of myself, in some sense, as progressive. However, I readily (if with some trepidation) accepted my first graduate student guessing (correctly, apparently) that semiotics was as unfamiliar in Australia as it was in Canada. Tom moved in as our lodger. Another applicant soon turned up, however, this time British. I accepted him in fear and trembling, little knowing that he would transform my life.

I remember the morning I was to meet Andrew at Coventry station. It was very strange. I arrived early (I’ve always been afraid of keeping people waiting). I watched all the passengers emerge, scrutinizing all the faces to make out what I was letting myself in for. They dispersed, I waited. At last there was just one very tall, very dark-haired, slightly forbidding young man left. We looked at each other. We looked away. I looked at my watch. We looked at each other again. We looked away. I think I was the one who at last gave in to this mutually nervous exhibition of chronic shyness. I forced myself to go up to him and utter the momentous words, Are you Andrew Britton? And he was.

One of the first things I recall Andrew saying to me was that he had had to choose between me and Peter Wollen as his supervisor, and he had decided on me and Warwick. Peter’s admirable Signs and Meaning in the Cinema was (quite rightly) one of the key texts of that time, the most accessible of the many texts on semiotics that were appearing. I recall that I didn’t know how to respond; I just looked down at my feet and mumbled something about hoping Andrew had made the right choice, while actually feeling that he had made the wrong one. But at the same time, it came as the second great ego boost. Andrew, John, Tom, and I quickly bonded, together with a fifth member of what took on something of the closeness of a family, Deborah Thomas, who came over from America: another graduate student who chose Warwick and me because her thesis was on Ingmar Bergman, on whom I’d written a book and in whom the semioticians showed no interest. Deborah has since distinguished herself both as critic and as teacher in her admirable books (Reading Hollywood, Beyond Genre) with their meticulously detailed close readings, and she now lives permanently in England.

When (with the sponsorship of Peter Harcourt) I was offered a post at York University in Toronto, I leapt at it, largely because John, who had no legal status in Britain, wanted to return to Canada, where we separated while remaining close friends. Andrew followed, Richard Lippe became my new partner, and with occasional visits from Deborah, we continued as a kind of loose, mutually supportive family. In order to have legal status, Andrew entered into a marriage of convenience with a willing friend, but he never obtained more than a part-time and intermittent teaching position. Some years later he returned to England. Although it was never mentioned, I think we all knew that he had AIDS, at that time still a death sentence. He shut himself off from us completely, and died in his early forties. For a year afterward I frequently dreamed him alive, and woke up with a feeling of total desolation.

A Working Partnership

It didn’t take long for me to recognize in Andrew a far finer mind than my own, at once broader and deeper, able (apparently with little effort) to encompass wider issues, to assimilate ideas and theories of which I would catch only uncertain and hesitant glimmers, able to probe deeper into the problems films raised, to uncover implications that I would often miss. To watch him read was a remarkable experience in itself: his eyes would travel swiftly down a page over which I would struggle for perhaps ten minutes and still have no great confidence that I had grasped its essentials, and he would be able to tell you what had been said. And so the student and the teacher exchanged roles. I learned a great deal from Andrew over the ensuing ten years, which resulted in what I now see clearly as my most fruitful, confident, and creative period—the period in which I wrote the new sections of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (1989), Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986), and what I regard as my best book, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (1998).

There was no question here of cribbing. I don’t believe I stole Andrew’s ideas, and I never tried to imitate him. It was a matter, rather, of his humility and my awareness that he genuinely respected my work. If he was aware, on some level, of its inferiority to his own, he never manifested this in any way, conscious or unconscious. Given the outspokenness—the outright and sometimes brutal contempt—that was released upon those critics and theorists he despised, humility may seem a strange word, yet there was nothing false about it; there was nothing false about Andrew. He was a great critic because he was a great human being, the greatness manifesting itself consistently in his writing. Of how many of our critics can this be said? I managed to remain very much myself. It was his support and encouragement that were so important to me. He never at any time made me feel my inferiority, and I am sure that his enthusiasm for my work was genuine.

We swiftly developed a great affection for each other, and a mutual respect, and I believe my support was as important to him as his to me. This would not have been possible, of course, without a shared basis in our interests and aims, in our attitudes and allegiances, both in art and, increasingly, in politics. My early work has no clear political basis. My political interests began prior to my relationship with Andrew, in my greatly overdue coming out as gay, my commitment to gay liberation and then, as a natural consequence, to radical feminism. It was Andrew who added Marxism (or, in my case, more precisely, a loose kind of socialism, as I’ve never read Marx) to my agenda. He was sometimes critical of my work and had no hesitation in attacking me in print (see, for example, his discussion of The Deer Hunter in the essay Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment), clearly and rightly regarding such disagreements as beyond any personal relations. Above all, he was a person of innate and incorruptible goodness, the spirit of generosity very strong in him, however merciless to his professional enemies (for which see, again, the section on Film and Cultural Theory in this book).

Andrew was a great film critic because he was never just a film critic. Film has been with us for scarcely more than a hundred years; a great critic of anything should surely have a secure sense of belonging to a rich cultural tradition that goes back thousands. It is important for a critic to be grounded in (for example) Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Mozart and Mahler, Rembrandt and Klee. Andrew’s intellectual and emotional roots were in literature, music, and the visual arts as much as in film, and the sense of value implicit in his writings is fed by that wider tradition. At the same time, his approach to criticism was by no means restricted to the search for masterpieces: he could find interest and a degree of value in films generally passed over (and in some cases already forgotten)—see his short pieces on The Great Waldo Pepper and The Other Side of Midnight.

We shared an admiration for the work of F. R. Leavis, the great literary critic, yet our relationship to his work was somewhat different. I had the great good fortune to be at Cambridge University during Leavis’s tenure there, and I attended all his lectures religiously. To an extent, inexperienced and impressionable, I was swallowed up in the Leavis charisma, unable to distance myself or to achieve any independence of thought. Andrew had had no direct experience of Leavis, knowing him only from his books. For me, Leavis was for many years a kind of god figure, beyond doubt or question; to Andrew, he was one influence among many, though an important one, as I think is clear from Andrew’s writings. We took over from Leavis a certain attitude to criticism, summed up by Leavis’s familiar definition of the ideal critical exchange (This is so, isn’t it . . ./Yes, but . . .), and to art in general (the notion that great art is intelligent about Life). But we also felt the necessity to move beyond Leavis into a more explicitly critical concern with the political (in the widest sense) implications of films, whether this was expressed openly or implicitly. This has become even more urgent since Andrew’s death, though it consistently pervades his writings. We both knew that the serious critic can no longer (if s/he had ever wished to) pass down immaculate judgments from an ivory tower. Not only our civilization (or what is left of it) is at stake today but also the future of life itself, and our critical judgments must inevitably be affected by this condition. Andrew saw all this with admirable clarity, even in the years when global warming was little more than a scientific hypothesis. His work is always, implicitly, leftist and strongly committed.

Toward a Fully Responsible Criticism

Hopefully, the age of theory has not been wasted. Plausible theories of film should be available for reference, and theory classes should of course continue. However, certain points must be made. The theories with which I have come into (admittedly marginal) contact are not really theories of film but theories of mainstream cinema, and they should be designated as such. I have yet to hear of a theory that embraced (say) Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Walt Disney, and Stan Brakhage, nor would such a thing be possible. In fact, one of the chief functions of film theory, from its roots in semiotics onward, seems in effect to have been to establish the proposition Alternative cinema good, mainstream cinema bad, though this is sometimes misleading. When I first discovered the (in many ways admirable) texts of Raymond Bellour, for example, I assumed that he despised Hitchcock’s films and was ruthlessly demolishing them. It was only when I met and talked with him that I abruptly realized, to my amazement, that he admired them perhaps even more than I did. It remains true, I think, that for many film students today a great film is not an emotional and intellectual experience that can change or modify one’s sensibility, one’s way of looking at the world; it’s a piece of evidence to be slotted into the right pigeonhole. The lure of theory to the academic mind is obvious: the truth of a theory is alleged to be demonstrable (at least until the next one comes along and replaces it), whereas a value judgment, while it can be argued, cannot be proven. As soon as a theory is grasped, it can be manipulated by anyone, whereas a sense of value implies personal commitment and individual intelligence; it is not there to be applied to a given text. This is why theory is such a godsend to an all-too-common version of the academic mind: mastering the theory requires a certain kind of intelligence (a kind I myself have never possessed, as abstract thought loses me rather quickly), but a kind that does not demand the personal and concentrated application, emotional as well as intellectual, of the whole human being. The familiar phrase Oh, that’s merely academic is relevant here.

If the dominance of theory continues, at the expense of the detailed reading of actual films, their meaning and their value, there will be little left between the hermetic abstruseness of theory and the slick and superficial entertainment of most reviewers (who concern themselves only with the new releases). Academic film study will have closed itself off from any wider audience, and all continuity between academia and a wider public will be lost (it is fragile enough already).

Over the past few years, I have sensed a steadily rising disillusionment in academia generally, an increasingly widespread murmur that perhaps, after all, it has been a mistake to replace the study of films with the study of theories about them. The time seems ripe for Andrew Britton’s posthumous comeback, and I look forward to seeing his work disseminated among film students. His sharp perceptions, often unanswerable judgments, and at times brilliant wit should certainly appeal to them. These readings of individual films and of the work of major directors are surely unsurpassable in their depth of insight, their attention to detail, their fluent sense of the relations among director, genre, star presence, and historical/political background. We are living in a progressively deteriorating and collapsing civilization on a planet that may already be doomed by human greed and obstinacy. We cannot afford to lose the voices of intelligence and integrity, in whatever field, in what may be the ultimate battle for life. Here is a voice that must not be lost.

Part One

Hollywood Cinema

Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire (1986)

It should be said at the outset, in explanation of the method of this essay, that I wish to be concerned with the functions and thematic content of the Cary Grant persona. What follows is neither an account of Grant as a performer nor a biography or history of his career.

Obviously, much might be written on the subjects I have chosen to ignore. A theoretical interest in modes and traditions of performance could find no more complex and rewarding a theme than comic acting in the popular American cinema; and in Cary Grant, we have a striking, and highly specific, conjunction of diverse European and American comic conventions: British music hall, American vaudeville and variety, and the line of sophisticated comedy initiated by Ernst Lubitsch For a historian of the star system and its evolution, the details of Grant’s career would have their significance. Grant was the first major star to go independent: after his contract with Paramount expired in 1937, he was never again under exclusive contract to any studio, and he was centrally involved in the selection of his material and collaborating personnel.

The first of these subjects seemed to raise issues too large to be dealt with profitably in a short monograph on a single actor: the responsible discussion of performance (discussion, that is, radically unlike the familiar kind) would have demanded an attention to its contexts and lineage, and a range of comparative reference, which lie beyond the scope of this essay. The second, on the contrary, threatened either to narrow or to blur the focus: it acquired a secondary importance beside the things which it seemed to me most necessary to say about Grant.

These things concern definitions of masculinity, the use of comedy to criticize and transform traditional gender roles, and the extent to which characteristics assigned by those roles to women can be presented as being desirable and attractive in a man. I have chosen, accordingly, to concentrate on specific films and on Grant’s meaning as the hero of them.¹

There is a tendency to assume that the great stars are a known quantity. In an attempt to account for the appeal of Cary Grant, David Shipman writes:

It is his elegance, his casualness, his unaccented charm; he is, as Tom Wolfe put it, consummately romantic and consummately genteel—the old leathery charmer, in Alexander Walker’s words (regretting his earlier, more interesting existence as a hard-eyed cad). It certainly isn’t from acting ability: his range must be the most limited of all the great matinee idols. His gift for light comedy has been much touted, but it’s been a mite heavy at times and one can think of half a dozen names who were sometimes better. (254)

That is probably representative. The limited range needn’t detain us: the assumption involved is so clearly that which inspires Pauline Kael to remark that one does not necessarily admire an icon, as one admires, say, Laurence Olivier, but it can be a wonderful object of contemplation, and to suggest that Grant might have become a great actor if he had "taken more risks like None but the Lonely Heart. (Kael, The Man from Dream City," 26)

But the charm and the romantic obviously call for comment, and it may be useful to begin by emphasizing an aspect of them which is habitually ignored. Consider the dialogue of the love scene on the train in North by Northwest (1959).

EVE: This is ridiculous. You know that, don’t you?

THORNHILL: Yes.

EVE: I mean, we’ve hardly met.

THORNHILL: That’s right.

EVE: How do I know you aren’t a murderer?

THORNHILL: You don’t.

EVE: Maybe you’re planning to murder me, right here, tonight.

THORNHILL: Shall I?

EVE: Please do. [They kiss.]

THORNHILL: Beats flying, doesn’t it?

EVE: We should stop.

THORNHILL: Immediately.

EVE: I ought to know more about you.

THORNHILL: Oh, what more could you know?

EVE: You’re an advertising man, that’s all I know.

THORNHILL: That’s right. Oh, the train’s a little unsteady.

EVE: Who isn’t?

THORNHILL: What else do you know?

EVE: You’ve got taste in clothes, taste in food.

THORNHILL: Taste in women. I like your flavor.

EVE: And you’re very clever with words. You can probably make them do anything for you . . . sell people things they don’t need . . . make women who don’t know you fall in love with you.

THORNHILL: I’m beginning to think I’m underpaid.

The sense of an ironic lack, or refusal, of intimacy which this communicates is an inflection of something which is, in fact, characteristic of Grant’s love scenes, and of his playing of them. Alfred Hitchcock, characteristically, takes the exchange of sophisticated wit to the verge of the unpleasant: Thornhill’s self-regarding self-possession is assimilated, on the one hand, to the economic values of Madison Avenue and, on the other, to an irresponsible male sexual consumerism. In retrospect, of course, the irony is complicated by our discovery of who Eve is, but the revelation that Thornhill’s feeling of urbane mastery in the love scene is illusory doesn’t alter the fact that it is there to be cultivated. Indeed, it is the crux of the irony that prior to Eve’s deception of him (which, unlike his own sexual confidence, isn’t inspired by egotism), Thornhill has told her, honest women frighten [him].

The use to which Hitchcock puts Grant here isn’t unprecedented. In his fifth film, Blonde Venus (1932), Grant plays a wealthy businessman who uses the need of Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) for money to make her become his mistress. Two films later, he was cast as Pinkerton in a version (nonmusical!) of Madame Butterfly (1933). In Sylvia Scarlett (1935), he plays a confidence trickster who appears, at the outset, to embody for Sylvia (Katharine Hepburn) the promise of liberating adventure but who is gradually revealed to be cynically exploitative. In Indiscreet (1958), Philip Adams pretends to Anna Kalman (Ingrid Bergman) that he is married and unable to obtain a divorce so as to keep her as his lover while avoiding a substantial commitment to her.

Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946), the first two of Grant’s four films with Hitchcock, fully elaborate this aspect of the persona, subordinating it entirely to the director’s thematic concern with the male need to possess and subjugate female sexuality. In the Devlin of Notorious, sexual egotism becomes an extraordinarily convoluted misogyny—Devlin seeks to turn Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) into a whore so that he can then despise her for being one—and imagery and narrative movement link the romantic hero directly to his antagonist, Sebastian (Claude Rains): the film begins with Alicia’s relapse into alcoholism in response to Devlin’s refusal to trust her and ends with Sebastian’s attempt to poison her. Like his counterpart, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), in Marnie (1964), Devlin can accept the heroine only when she has been reduced to a state of complete emotional and physical prostration. The long-take kissing sequence, with its disturbingly impersonal sensuality (it anticipates the train sequence in North by Northwest), is usefully emblematic of these things. Asked by Devlin to explain her remark that this a very strange love affair, Alicia replies, Perhaps because you don’t love me.

It is not merely perverse to preface an account of Grant by noting a use of him which no one will argue to be fully characteristic. What these roles have in common is an urbane amoralism and irresponsibility, issuing in the exploitation of women; but irresponsibility—which turns out to be a key word in discussing Grant—can be defined in more than one way, and Grant is not only a lover figure but also a comedian. In Notorious and Suspicion, irresponsibility appears entirely negatively, as sexual opportunism, and Alicia and Lina (Joan Fontaine) are subtly complicit with their exploitation. Significantly, both women initially see the Grant character as a means of detaching themselves from, and rebelling against, fathers they hate, only to discover that they have become subject to another form of patriarchal oppression, to which they then succumb out of a masochistic fascination (Lina) or a self-contempt which the man relentlessly exacerbates (Alicia). The Hitchcock films are distinguished from, say, Indiscreet by the absence of the comedy of male chastisement. Stanley Donen’s film really takes off, after its turgid exposition, when Anna discovers that she has been deceived and sets about exacting retribution. And it is in general true that when, in comedy, the Grant character is closest to the cynical emotional detachment and exploitativeness of Devlin, he is partnered by an active heroine who contests the terms of the relationship between them and undertakes his spiritual education.

The comedy of male chastisement: Grant’s movies are full of scenes in which he is subjected to the most extreme discomfiture, humiliation, and loss of face by women. Bringing Up Baby (1938) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949) are obviously the most excessive cases—Howard Hawks takes the persona as far in this direction as Hitchcock does in the other—but examples are multiple. Consider the magnificent sequence in The Awful Truth (1937) in which Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne), masquerading as the sister of her ex-husband Jerry (Grant), discredits him in front of his new fiancée, Barbara Vance, and her upper-class family; or the sequence in Mr. Lucky (1943) in which Dorothy Bryant (Laraine Day) compels Joe Adams (Grant) to join a group of women war-relief workers and learn to knit while male passersby gradually gather, astounded, at the window; or the moment in Houseboat (1958) in which Tom Tinston (Grant), immaculately attired for work, finds the gangplank of the houseboat slowly subsiding beneath him, to the delight of Cinzia (Sophia Loren) and his children.

Given that the comedy of moments such as these is so often bound up with the undermining of masculinity—or, at the least, of male prestige and dignity—it is remarkable that the comedy is never hostile and that, since the Grant character is not ridiculed, the sense in which he appears ridiculous is a complex one. It is partly a matter of the loss of dignity being continuous with the loss of qualities which have no positive value whatever: the social world of the Vances in The Awful Truth and the diplomatic milieu of Houseboat are rejected by the films. At the same time, Grant’s acting characteristically conveys an ironic distance from, or pleasurable complicity with, his degradation: at first appalled and embarrassed by Lucy’s eruption into his fiancée’s home, Jerry is more and more delighted by it; Bringing Up Baby ends with David Huxley (Grant) admitting that the day he spent with Susan (Katharine Hepburn) was the most wonderful of his life. Here, loss of dignity involves the acquisition of a kind of irresponsibility which is very different from the kind Grant embodies in Suspicion.

Discussion can be focused by referring in greater detail to the great comedies of the late ’30s: the first of them, The Awful Truth, clinched Grant’s status as a major star. Leo McCarey’s film begins with Jerry Warriner stretched out under a sunlamp at his club, trying hastily to cultivate the tan which his wife will naturally expect him to have acquired during a supposed visit to Florida. Jerry’s deceit of her is accompanied by the conviction (quite unfounded) that Lucy has been unfaithful to him, and in the ensuing recriminations the two agree to divorce. If Jerry’s combination of possessive jealousy and duplicity is viewed negatively, his ebullience appears in a more favorable light in comparison with Lucy’s new suitor, Daniel Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), who may be described, with every propriety, as straight. Daniel offers Lucy a conventional respectability and probity and a conventional sexual role: he treats her with deeply felt but labored gallantry and deference, which will be her reward for uncomplaining acquiescence in the duties of a wife.

But while Jerry and Daniel are sharply distinguished from each other, they have in common a refusal to trust Lucy, which is rooted in two opposite but complementary forms of masculine complacency. Jerry takes for granted his own right to a life independent of his marriage, and to lie to Lucy about it, but he swells with proprietary indignation when Lucy claims the same right for herself. Daniel, in turn, assumes that Lucy can have no desire which life with him cannot satisfy. His sentimental chivalry is the counterpart of Jerry’s insincerity, and each man conceals a possessiveness which denies any freedom or autonomy to Lucy herself and is all too ready to conclude that she has broken her trust.

The action of the film consists in the comic correction of Jerry’s insincerity and the comic confirmation of his energy: that is, the function of the comedy is to distinguish between, and evaluate, two forms of irresponsibility. The insincerity and the associated proprietorship express a conviction of male sexual right, and correction takes the form of loss of face. Consider the sequence in which Jerry, convinced yet again that Lucy is having an affair with her singing teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D’Arcy), bursts into Duvalle’s apartment only to discover that Lucy is singing, to Duvalle’s accompaniment, before a large audience. Jerry attempts to save the situation by taking a seat at the back of the room, but he is further confounded when the chair collapses; and Lucy, delighted by his humiliation, converts the closing phrase of her song into a gentle laugh of triumph.

If The Awful Truth chastises male presumption and opportunism, the energies it affirms are energies Jerry shares with Lucy. Masculinity, as Ralph Bellamy invaluably embodies it, is presented—in that unadulterated form—as stolid, lumpish, and boring, and his peculiar relationship to energy is given to us in his performance on the dance floor and his rendering of Home on the Range. The tone of the reference to the western is crucial, both to an understanding of screwball comedy and to the significance of its supreme male practitioner. The West, where definitions of masculinity are concerned, traditionally provides the norm of potency and derives its meaning from its opposition to settlement and civilization—the domesticity which, in American culture, is synonymous with the oppressive power of women and which threatens the male with emasculation. The Awful Truth retains one part of this opposition and reverses the other. Civilization is still associated with femininity, but it appropriates from the West the free play of anarchic energy, and the western hero appears as the spokesman of repression, propriety, and constraint.

To say no more would be, of course, to simplify. Civilization in The Awful Truth is also the Vances, just as in Holiday (1938) it is the Crams and in Bringing Up Baby it is the dinosaur. It is an essential characteristic of the couples created at the end of these films that they cannot exist in established bourgeois society: The Awful Truth ends in a snowbound ski lodge in the mountains, Holiday on a liner between America and Europe, and Bringing Up Baby, most drastically of all, on a rickety scaffolding with the dinosaur, the film’s central image of bourgeois patriarchy, lying in ruins beneath it. If The Awful Truth recognizes the enabling possibilities of civilization, it also perceives that what is enabled is incompatible with civilization as it is and, indeed, expresses itself in defiance of it: Lucy’s disruption of the Vances’ dinner party, the departure of Linda (Katharine Hepburn) from her father’s house (Holiday), and Susan’s destruction of the skeleton (Bringing Up Baby) have obvious points in common.

The enabled is, in each case, a revision of bourgeois gender roles: it is the Grant character’s commitment to, and acquisition of, a subversive femininity, and the consequent redistribution of power within the couple, which makes the couple socially impossible. In each case, too, femininity partakes both of civilization and of the drives which civilization alienates. Femininity in Bringing Up Baby is not only the leopard but also Miss Katharine Hepburn, New England heiress, Bryn Mawr graduate, and notorious representative of high-toned culture. The anarchic energies released in these films do not subserve a fantasy of regression to a pre-cultural stage, and they have nothing in common with that model of the return of the repressed enacted by the Gothic, shared by Freud, and leading both, finally, to stalemate. We may feel that a return of the repressed is involved, but it doesn’t have the suggestion of dark primal forces which so often accrues to the monster in the horror film and which allows the genre to rationalize the reinstatement of repression. If the femininity which erupts in The Awful Truth, Holiday, and Bringing Up Baby is inimical to the society it disturbs, it is also associated, as is usual in the American tradition, with sophistication and refinement. This dual character makes the repressed that returns not the monstrous inhabitant of the seething cauldron of excitements (Freud’s own phrase) which precedes social life, and on whose containment social life depends, but the harbinger of a more free and pleasurable culture.

I have noted that, as regards Jerry, the comedy of The Awful Truth has two distinct functions, and it will be obvious that, throughout the film, he and Lucy visit humiliation on each other. Jerry’s insincerity and negative irresponsibility are very much a part of the world of the Vances in which he figures as urbane and eligible male and in which the aspects of sophistication to which the film is opposed are concentrated. The scenes of which he is the butt serve to chasten his presumptuous possessiveness of Lucy (the concert) and to expose and detach Jerry from the ethos in which insincerity is a constituent of urbane form (Lucy’s masquerade). Yet it is what Jerry and Lucy have in common that allows Jerry to function as he does in Lucy’s relationship with Daniel Leeson and that makes the hilarious sequence in which, concealed from his rival behind a door, Jerry repeatedly makes Lucy laugh at Daniel’s heartfelt recitation of his doggerel love poem by tickling her under the arm so unlike an exercise of power over her. It is always apparent that Daniel is Lucy’s drastic overcompensation for what is at fault in Jerry and that she recognizes, and resists, from the outset the staid sexual decorum that Daniel brings with him. Jerry, in the scene just mentioned, evokes Lucy’s own sense of absurdity: the scene would be distasteful rather than funny if we felt that anything more than politeness was involved in not laughing at Daniel’s poem.

The substance of this point can be demonstrated by comparing The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday (1939), the thematic parallels being so close. Hawks’s film is another comedy of remarriage in which, again, the marriage has broken up because of the Grant character’s irresponsibility, and in which the alternative man is played once more by Ralph Bellamy. The astonishing brilliance of His Girl Friday is legendary, but merely to place it beside McCarey’s film (or Bringing Up Baby) is enough to reveal the drastic limitations summed up neatly by Robin Wood: Given the alternatives the film offers, the only morally acceptable ending would be to have Hildy walk out on both men; or to present her capitulation to Walter as tragic. (Howard Hawks, 77) Walter Burns, of all Grant’s comic characters, is the closest to Devlin, but while in Notorious the loathsomeness of the character is clearly and consistently the issue, in His Girl Friday it isn’t, and by the time we get to Stick Hitler on the funny pages! the confusion of attitude could hardly be greater. The confusion is generated both by the transportation of the asocial male group of the Hawksian adventure film into the bourgeois world of the comedies and by Hawks’s inability to decide whether the group is implicated in that world or an answer to it. The indecision is reflected in the treatment of Hildy (Rosalind Russell). She is hardly a representative Hawks comic heroine: Bruce Baldwin would have to be played by Cary Grant rather than Ralph Bellamy to make that of her. At the same time, because Hawks does not really know what he thinks of the values of the group, he is unable fully to endorse the theme of the heroine’s assimilation to it characteristic of the adventure films. Hildy’s withering Gentlemen of the Press! in the aftermath of the journalists’ brutal harassment of Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack) implies a definitive judgment on the group to which the film gives great weight, but from which it is entirely unable to follow through.

The particular material of His Girl Friday deprives the male group of its value as a positive alternative to bourgeois society while also demanding a reconceptualization of the comic function of the Hawks heroine which Hawks is unwilling, or unable, to undertake. For, if Walter Burns scarcely needs to have alienated energy liberated, he is very much a candidate for the correction of male arrogance and complacency. Walter is obviously exploiting Hildy, and His Girl Friday demands—uniquely in Hawks’s comedies—an explicitly political and explicitly feminist development of the theme of the woman’s education of the hero. Such a development is hardly conceivable, and Hawks responds by producing a Hawks comedy in reverse: the film traces the process by which Hildy is worn down into submission and ends—astonishingly, after she has been reduced to tears—with her following Walter out of the Press Room weighed down by baggage which he refuses to help her carry.

The process by which Lucy is detached from Daniel Leeson in The Awful Truth is, for all the structural similarity, very different. In effect, Lucy and Jerry function as the return of the repressed for each other: each intrudes in turn to prevent the other’s entry into a world of family in the company of partners who respectively embody, in parodic form, the accumulated associations of West and East. That much of the film’s comedy consists in the dramatization of repression is particularly clear in McCarey’s use of Mr. Smith, the Warriners’ pet terrier. Mr. Smith, standing in for a child, clearly represents the marriage. The divorce hearing ends with a dispute over custody, and Mr. Smith is unable, when invited, to choose between the partners, though Lucy finally wins his preference by the underhanded stratagem of producing, surreptitiously, his favorite toy. In one of the film’s most sustained comic set pieces, Lucy finds herself having to conceal from Jerry the fact that Armand is in the apartment, and then, surprised by a visit from Daniel, to conceal the presence of both men from him. Having hidden the men themselves, Lucy notices the compromising presence of their bowler hats. Throughout the sequence, Mr. Smith, with pertinacious insistence and to Lucy’s increasing discomfiture, repeatedly retrieves the hats from their hiding place and returns with them, and the threat of scandal, to the parlor. The sequence ends with the eruption of Jerry and Armand from concealment and the besmirching of Lucy’s reputation, which puts an end to her relationship with Daniel. The comedy is beautifully succinct: Mr. Smith, as emblem of the marriage, acts through the submerged logic of Lucy’s forgetting of the hats and realizes her desire to check the onset of domesticity.

The use of Mr. Smith both as symbol of the Warriners’ union and as focus of the comedy of repression is crucial to the significance of The Awful Truth. In not being a child, but replacing one, Mr. Smith dissociates the marriage from reproduction, or the prospect of it. (This function is fulfilled even more strikingly in Asta the dog’s next incarnation—as George in Bringing Up Baby—where he actually deprives David of the phallus by burying his old bone in the garden, thus fulfilling David’s unexpressed desire to stay at Susan’s farm and to fail to complete the skeleton of the dinosaur. I will return to the sexual symbolism of Hawks’s film in greater detail later.) Indeed, far from representing a child, Mr. Smith (again, like George) seems at once to express and to provide an occasion for a kind of childlikeness in the couple. Consider the sequence in which Jerry and Daniel first meet at Lucy’s apartment. As Daniel and Lucy talk about the divorce, Jerry romps boisterously on the floor with Mr. Smith, and Lucy responds to Daniel’s evident surprise at such behavior by remarking merely, with a marvelously offhanded drop of the wrist, that that is her husband. Bringing Up Baby gives us an exactly analogous moment. Susan’s aunt, believing David to be a big game hunter, discovers him chasing after George through the shrubbery in a desperate search for the missing bone, and on asking Susan, in astonishment, if that is what David understands by big game hunting, receives the reply that David is playing with George. Both incidents turn on a discrepancy between the behavior of the Grant character and a conventional paradigm of masculinity (the West and Hemingway machismo, respectively), and in both cases, the fact that the discrepancy also involves an opposition between the liberation of energy and its constraint gives to playing with the dog a strong positive connotation. Masculinity appears here as a code learned from the book of myth, and we are invited to laugh at the decorous inhibitedness of the student.

Juxtaposing the central couples of The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and Holiday, we see that ideas of play and the childlike are fundamental to all of them, and that in each case play is directly linked to a rebellion against patriarchal sexuality. I have analyzed Holiday at length in my book on Katharine Hepburn and will do no more here than point to the significance of the playroom, and its association, through Linda’s mother (who died, Ned [Lew Ayres] tells us, trying to be a good wife), with oppressed and liberating non-phallic sexual energy. The principle of all three films is to identify play in the sense of recovered infantile polymorphousness (which is, effectively, the meaning of screwball) with sophistication, the apogee of cultivated adulthood. The sophisticated couple is the couple whose sexuality is no longer organized by the phallus. The characteristic co-presence in these works of the two apparently distinct comic modes of farce and wit is the expression of this thematic principle. The partners engage in roughhouse, epigram, and repartee; the anarchic consorts with the urbane; the infantile drives that precede maturity and civilization are suddenly definitive of them.²

The Grant characters in these films can be distinguished by virtue of their precise relation to these drives. In Holiday, they unite Linda and Johnny from the start: Linda’s commitment to the playroom and Johnny’s to his holiday represent two parallel forms of irresponsibility,