Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 4, February 2003
Ken Mogg
Small World
Deborah Thomas's _Beyond Genre_
Deborah Thomas _Beyond Genre: Melodrama,
Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films_ Moffat, Dumfriesshire,
Scotland: Cameron
and Hollis,
2000 ISBN
0-9065506-17-4 142 pp. On page 36 of _Beyond
Genre_ Deborah Thomas says that she is going to
'recapitulate the argument so far'. While the ensuing
84-word sentence does start to describe an aspect of
Nicholas Ray's _Bigger Than Life_ (1955), an 'argument' is
slow to emerge. Unsettled, I decide to read the sentence
again -- and then the rest of the paragraph. But I still
don't find what I'm looking for. Instead, I'm simply
informed of the film's husband-wife resentments, and a
parenthesis tells me that James Mason's slippers are 'an apt
symbol of . . . [would-be] domestic comfort' (37).
None of this enthrals me. Oh, and the last sentence of the
paragraph is 86 words long. [1] In other words, I wouldn't
dream of calling Thomas an incisive writer, though she can
be both perceptive and industrious in describing aspects of
mise-en-scene. Indeed, that perceptiveness is her strength
and she applies it single-mindedly -- which of course is her
*weakness*! In the instance just cited she seems to say:
'Well, so far I haven't really got much of an argument, so
let me just carry on analysing, doing what I do best!' In
the same chapter, called 'Melodramatic Masculinities', about
the tendency of domestic melodrama to be stifling -- and to
set up 'an imaginary elsewhere' for the male protagonist to
retreat to -- it's ironic to read the following, this time
about _The Incredible Shrinking Man_ (Jack Arnold,
1955): 'By moving Scott
[Grant Williams] into so threadbare a symbolic
battlefield [as a cellar] away from the complexities
of human contact and the social domain, where much of
interest could have been said about masculinity in 'fifties
America, the film has painted itself into a corner'
(29). Ironic, because that's
pretty much how I see Thomas's book. First, the author
doesn't seem to me to possess (in a phrase of Truffaut's
about the films of Resnais) the 'secondary discipline' to
situate her perceptions in a broad arena: they remain
emanations of a largely theoretical bent, and the theory
itself is unexciting. (It may have some teaching merit,
though.) Second, hardly at all do you feel, as you read the
book, that Thomas is interested in the social domain in
general, as a place of complex, often bizarre realities;
hers is essentially an aesthetic temperament. Third, she
seems to have chosen the -- surprisingly few -- films
discussed in the book for their convenience, not just in
fitting her theory, but to being interpreted in terms like
'stuffy versus free' and 'safe versus
adventurous'. For example, in the final
chapter, on 'Romantic Fresh Starts', there's a remark about
_An Affair To Remember_ (Leo McCarey, 1957) and the scene
with Cary Grant's widowed grandmother in her hilltop
isolation: Grant's 'inflection is stiff and formal here,
befitting the airless qualities of this world' (103). (Why
do I think of Hitchcock's _Psycho_ (1960), and what Marion
Crane tells Norman, 'You'd know, of course!'? [2])
More importantly, Thomas's analysis of this brilliant film
has failed to win my full confidence at the outset. She
clearly is alert to its sophistication and its poetry -- no
question -- but in a somehow repressed way. She has trouble,
she tells us, with understanding the meaning of its
title-song which accompanies a wintry view of New York. (The
Empire State Building, where a key scene will occur, is just
visible in the background -- another icon of would-be
transcendence from on high.) The song runs as
follows: 'Our love affair is a
wondrous thing That we'll rejoice in
remembering. Our love was born with our
first embrace, And a page was torn out of
time and space. Our love affair, may it
always be A flame to burn through
eternity. So take my hand with a
fervent prayer That we may live and we
may share A love affair to
remember.' (99) I have no problem with the
presence here of both a future tense and a
future-conditional tense: it is surely the privilege of the
exalted state of mind of lovers that they may simultaneously
speak of their love as both eternal and as forever in
jeopardy. (An identical double-vision seems to me an
integral part of Hitchcock's magical _The Trouble With
Harry_ (1955) and of Harold Ramis's _Groundhog Day_ (1993)
-- the latter discussed in _Beyond Genre_, the former not.
The Hitchcock film even quotes from Shakespeare's 'Sonnet
116': 'Love's not time's fool . . .'.) Thomas, though, finds
the words of the song 'decidedly odd': 'They simultaneously imply
the early stages of a new romance . . . and anticipate
looking back on it . . . an invitation from one lover to the
other to embark on the love affair not so much for its own
sake as for the prospect of being able to look back on it
later when it's over.' (99) I find this an ugly
reading, a petty reading. (To invoke _The Trouble With
Harry_ again, a roughly similar prospect to what Thomas is
describing arises there when, late in the film, Sam (John
Forsythe) and Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine) get engaged.
Jennifer momentarily protests at losing her 'freedom', but
Sam insists that, with him, she'll retain it. 'You must be
practically unique, then', she responds. Meanwhile, the film
has intimated the approach of winter, an honest
acknowledgement of the mutability of all things -- but no
rebuttal of the almost Bergsonian trust in the power of the
'elan vital' to change the way time itself appears.
[3]) Crucially, I have no problem with the line, 'A
love affair to remember': I can conceive of a love affair
that is 'eternal', and in that sense not ended, yet which is
'remembered' by the lovers concerned, perhaps in their old
age, as a kind of shoring-up against bodily ruin.
Significantly, in _An Affair To Remember_, the Deborah Kerr
character ends up immobilised in a wheelchair, but the Grant
character has at long last found her again. 'So take my hand
. . .'. While reading Thomas's
analysis of _An Affair To Remember_, I kept hoping that a
note of incisive common sense might intrude for a moment:
something like Kierkegaard's 'Life is to be lived forwards
but understood backwards.' But it didn't happen. Similarly,
as Thomas described the intricacies of _Groundhog Day_ (at
the end of the chapter 'Comedic Masculinities', mainly given
over to comedies of the 1940s and 50s -- only two post-1990
films are discussed in the entire book), I was hoping for
some kind of acknowledgement that the film's philosophical
ideas were not entirely new: again Kierkegaard, with his
essay on 'Repetition', and Bergson, of _Creative Evolution_
fame, might seem worth citing. But this is a book born of
the _Movie_ school -- by which I mean the school of
'film-as-film' criticism, so excitingly pioneered in the
pages of _Movie_ which grew out of _Oxford Opinion_ in the
1960s -- whose founders were their own kind of brilliant
'movie brats' (forgive pun). That is, they tended to write
of films, and the film 'world', in a very reflexive way, no
doubt for specific polemical reasons. (Their bete noir was
the Establishment journal _Sight and Sound_, so stuffy in
its own way.) The original Editorial Board included Ian
Cameron (this book's publisher), V. F. Perkins, Paul
Mayersberg, and Mark Shivas, with Robin Wood and Raymond
Durgnat hovering somewhere in the wings. The latter two,
though, never seemed to exert sufficient influence to make
_Movie_ a truly liberated journal. The outcome is a book
like this. It is still citing the old _Movie_ favourites,
like Hawks's _Monkey Business_ (1952) and Minnelli's _The
Courtship of Eddie's Father_ (1953), as reference points,
but in a distinctly hermetic way. (Note: Deborah Thomas is
one of the current _Movie_ Editorial Board.
[4]) Personally, I'm not sure
that I don't like the film _Bedtime for Bonzo_ (Frederick de
Cordova, 1951) more than _Monkey Business_. I can see how
Hawks may have noted the former's strong points -- in
particular, its central performance by Bonzo the chimpanzee
-- but have felt that they were vitiated by the direction or
just not 'fun' in his rather elitist sense of that term. A
near-identical reaction against the humanist _High Noon_
(Fred Zinnemann, 1952) later prompted Hawks to make _Rio
Bravo_ (1959). But in both cases the original films are, if
not masterpieces, then at least small gems. I would say that
_Bedtime for Bonzo_ is a strictly one-off comedy,
[5] treating its *humane* theme about animal
consciousness in sometimes inspired fashion, and with an
unforced symbolism (Bonzo finally represents something like
'tamed love', hence the film's title which comes true when
Ronald Reagan marries Diana Lynn). [6] Also, it has
a stinging climactic line, delivered by Walter Slezak to the
university Dean, about stupid people with degrees -- meaning
those who can't see the wood for the trees! But clearly
Deborah Thomas has never watched _Bedtime for Bonzo_, is
unaware of its influence on the making of _Monkey Business_,
and (forgive me) probably remains largely reliant for her
estimation of a film's worth on how well it may be made to
fit certain notions she has inherited from
_Movie_. As they say at the end of
Hawks's _The Land of the Pharaohs_ (1955): 'We still have a
long way to go!' Melbourne,
Australia Footnotes 1. Allow me to quote the
following, though it is no doubt a two-edged sword (no
matter, I have always tried to bear it in mind, and maybe
some of my readers may want to do so, too!): 'An American
study showed that when sentence lengths reach more than
about twenty-five words, only ten per cent of readers can
understand them.' Gordon Wells, _The Craft of Writing
Articles_ (London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1983), p.
51. 2. Is _Psycho_ a melodrama
or a comedy? Questions like this one challenge the easy
categorisation that Thomas attempts to set up in her book.
(Satire/parody is especially a category that would probably
give her trouble if she were to address it.) She does
include a brief note on Hitchcock's film, about attics
versus basements as traditional places of concealment of
unwanted madwomen or madmen respectively (31), but it
strikes me as specious. 3. Towards the end of
Hitchcock's literally autumnal comedy, dialogue and visual
references (e.g. a wintry landscape over the mantelpiece in
Jennifer's house) evoke the coming change of seasons -- much
as scenes in both _Groundhog Day_ and _An Affair to
Remember_ do. Which only gives the films' warmth and
humanity something to fight, so to speak. By the way, Lesley
Brill, in _The Hitchcock Romance_ (Princeton University
Press, 1988) takes a roughly parallel course to Thomas in
his emphasis on 'romance' as a bridging (or amalgamating)
category, as opposed to 'pure' melodrama or 'pure'
comedy. 4. At least, she was in
1990, which is the date of the last issue of _Movie_ that
the Reference and Information Library of the Australian Film
Institute holds (_Movie_ 34/35, Winter 1990). But I believe
another issue has recently come out. Certainly, Thomas
refers in her book's Acknowledgements to 'my colleagues and
friends on the editorial board of _Movie_ . . . welcoming me
into their midst for the past eleven years' (7). 5. Its sequel, _Bonzo Goes
to College_ (1952), in which Ronald Reagan this time refused
to appear, is reportedly much inferior. 6. The film's ostensible
theme concerns the influence of heredity as opposed to
upbringing and environment. But other concerns run through
the film and contribute to its engaging quality. Ken Mogg lives in
Melbourne, Australia, and edits the hardcopy Hitchcock
journal _The MacGuffin_ and its website.
He is the author of _The Alfred Hitchcock Story_ (London:
Titan Books, 1999). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Ken Mogg, 'Small World:
Deborah Thomas's _Beyond Genre_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 4, February 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n4mogg>. Read a response to this
text: Deborah Thomas, 'A Reply
to Mogg and Chopra-Gant', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 6,
February 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n6thomas>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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