old hollywood

Lagniappe Podcast: All About Eve (1950)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Old Hollywood classic All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis.

00:00 Movie of the Month

04:20 We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
11:58 Deerskin (2020)
17:38 Problemista (2024)
28:34 Nimona (2023)
32:26 Family Portrait (2024)
37:15 Aliens (1986)
41:00 The Birds (1963)
47:10 King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
54:10 Riddle of Fire (2024)

57:17 All About Eve (1950)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Podcast #188: Trouble in Paradise (1932) & The Lubitsch Touch

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Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)

00:00 Welcome

03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
05:48 Sorcerer (1977)
07:50 Reality (2023)
12:45 Savage Grace (2007)
16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
23:03 Rimini (2023)
28:08 Sanctuary (2023)

30:51 Ernst Lubitsch
39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932)
55:55 Design for Living (1933)
1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Babylon (2022)

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“Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles.”

Spending the holidays with family was a healthy shake-up for me after a couple years of COVID-related isolation, which only compounded my usual, longstanding reluctance to travel to rural & suburban Louisiana.  Getting outside the city meant getting outside my bubble, and I talked to a few distant loved ones about movies without being able to cite relatively popular artists like Bergman, Lynch, and Cronenberg as household names.  Meanwhile, actual household name Steven Spielberg’s magic-of-the-movies memoir The Fabelmans was being categorized as elitist snobbery for Julliard graduates on Twitter, and every movie without a blue space alien in it was drowning at the box office.  And if you count cameos, at least one movie with a blue space alien was drowning too.  Damien Chazelle’s Babylon sank while James Cameron’s Avatar sequel soared, and it was impossible not to fret over the two films’ disparate levels of success, since the madman Chazelle dared to include a few frames of Cameron’s Na’vi creatures in his film’s climactic Movies-Through-The-Years montage.  The financial failure of Chazelle’s star-studded movie industry drama sounds surprising in the abstract, but after a few days of talking about movies with people who don’t often Talk About Movies it makes total sense to me.  Caring about the craft & history of cinema as an artform is a niche interest, even when the cinema itself is populist media.  The thing is that Babylon is explicitly about that exact disconnect: the horrifying gap between how much general audiences love to be entertained by The Movies and how indifferent those audiences are to the lives & wellbeing of the people who make them.

The obvious reasons for Babylon‘s financial failure extend far beyond expectations that general audiences would share its nerdy academic interest in the century-old history of pre-Code Hollywood moviemaking.  If anything, Chazelle’s $80mil flop is most impressive in how eager it is to alienate its audience, regardless of its movie-nerd subject matter.  It’s a three-hour, coke-fueled montage on double-speed that not only indicts the unwashed masses for our indifference to the artistry behind our favorite movies but also assaults our eyes with every fluid the human body can produce.  Piss, shit, tears, blood, puke, and cum all dutifully grace the screen in their own time, with the piss & shit ticked off the checklist early on to help set the tone.  Modern-day movie stars Brad Pitt & Margot Robbie suffer the same rough transition from silents to talkies that has been mythologized as the downfall of Early Hollywood since as far back as 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. Only, their backstage debauchery between productions is cranked to a year-round Mardi Gras bacchanal never before depicted with so much onscreen hedonistic excess.  It’s enough to make you want to puke yourself, if not only from the carsick momentum of the film’s manic pacing, which rarely slows down from its intercutting dialogue barrages to stage a genuine scene of real-time drama.

Because its characters are more symbolic than dramatic (directly recalling past industry castoffs like Clara Bow, Louis Armstrong, and Anna Mae Wong), Babylon is often more interesting for what it’s trying to say on a big-picture scale than it is for its scene-to-scene drama.  I was particularly struck by the way its repetition of Singin’ in the Rain‘s talkies-downfall plot is directly acknowledged in the text, with Babylon consciously positioning itself as yet another example of Hollywood’s cyclical, self-cannibalizing nature.  When most movies cite the magic of cinema being greater and more enduring than the people who make it, it’s coming from a place of awe & respect for the artform.  Here, Chazelle projects pure disgust & horror.  In its mission-statement climax, our low-level-fixer-turned-high-level producer POV character Manny (Diego Calva) watches caricatures of his dead friends & colleagues mocked as comic archetypes at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain, then slips into a subliminal montage of the next 100 years of Hollywood-spectacle filmmaking, with each successive title—Un Chien Andelou, The Wizard of Oz, 2001, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Avatar, etc.—building on and borrowing from the past for its own in-the-moment splendor until there’s no splendor left to go around.  Chazelle even shamelessly participates in this ritual himself, as Babylon can easily be passed off a cruder, shallower Hail, Caesar! crammed into a Boogie Nights-shaped box. It’s an ungenerous reading of how cinema perpetually “borrows” from itself in a way that feels like homage but rarely acknowledges or takes care of the real-life people who built its founding texts.  And when Manny snaps out of it to gawk at the uncaring, unknowledgeable audience cackling at ghosts of his loved ones, the tragedy of his cruelly perpetual industry hits way harder than any of the character deaths that sparked his melancholy in the first place.

I was most impressed with Babylon in its scale and in its eagerness to alienate casual moviegoing audiences.  It likely would have been better received if it were a 10-hour miniseries that allowed each of its overlapping character arcs to breathe (especially since it already intercuts their stories like a long-running soap opera anyway), but its manic tempo is exactly what makes it special among the million other movies about The Movies, so it was probably better off flopping than capitulating.  I also love that Chazelle projects such a sour view of moviemaking as an artform, a compulsory practice he immediately likens to dragging a diarrheal elephant uphill.  The only reason I don’t fully love this movie is I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve already seen it all before (even if at half-time pace), but that kind of complaint only plays into exactly what Chazelle is trying to say about Hollywood’s cyclical history here.  Even his climactic montage’s assertion that cinema has already reached its end—a death knell also sounded by the hundreds of click-bait articles that auto-populate every time a major production like Babylon flops—feels like a self-cannibalizing repetition of Hollywood lore.  How many times has cinema already “died”?  Did it die when the talkies ended the silent era, when television became affordable, when television went prestige, when normies began to stream?  Every generation thinks they’re going to be the last, and although one day they’ll be proven right, the cinemapocalypse has yet to fully come to fruition.  In the meantime, artists can only watch in horror as their work and their peers are absorbed, digested, and regurgitated by subsequent art movements they do not understand, with no wide audience recognition for how they contributed to that greater continuum.  Even the populist Spielbergs of the industry become historical, esoteric references in the long run, and there will come a time when Chazelle’s own name is synonymous with The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, and Michael Bay as dusty antiques only of interest to high-brow academics.

-Brandon Ledet

The Adorably Morbid Children of the Classics

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As many stuck-at-home audiences have been over the past year of pure, all-encompassing Hell, I’ve recently found myself seeking out cinematic comfort food in the form of Classic Movies, the kind of Old Hollywood fare best enjoyed under a blanket with a hot toddy & a bar of chocolate. That impulse overwhelmed my viewing habits around this past Christmas especially, when the annual stress of the holiday and the burnout from Best of 2020 catchups had me seeking shelter in the feel-good Movie Magic of the Studio Era. I wasn’t watching these films with any specific critical purpose in mind, but I did notice a glaring, unexpected common thread between them that delighted me, if not only because it was a subversive contrast to the warm-blanket nostalgia feeling I was looking for. I started to detect an archetype of 1930s & 40s media that I hadn’t really considered being a hallmark of the era before: the adorably morbid child. I’m not referencing the vicious little monsters of later cinema like the pint-sized villains of The Bad Seed, The Children’s Hour, or Village of the Damned. It’s an earlier, sweeter archetype of the cutie-pie tyke who happens to be obsessed with death, decay, and general amoral debauchery despite their cheery appearance. In an era where studio-sanctioned art was cranked out to seek wide commercial appeal, creators had thoughtfully included proto-goth youngsters in their casts of characters for the real Weirdos in the audience — something I still greatly appreciated from the warmth of my couch & blanket nearly a century later.

By far the purest, most adorably vicious specimen of this archetype is Tootie from the 1944 movie musical Meet Me in St Louis. Based on its reputation as The One Where Judy Garland Sings “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, I didn’t expect much in the way of subversion out of this Old Hollywood Movie Musical. Maybe that’s why I absolutely fell in love with Tootie The Pint-Sized Sociopath, whose interjections of feral bloodlust into this otherwise cheery Studio picture got huge, consistent laughs out of me. It’s like Louise Belcher was cast as one of the March sisters in a musical production of Little Women, a delightful element of pure, out-of-nowhere chaos. Child actor Margaret O’Brien even earned second-bill for the role beneath Garland on the posters, despite being more of an occasional source of comic relief than a main-cast participant. While her older sisters & parents navigate romances, courtships, and harsh financial decisions of the adult world, Tootie lives out a mostly carefree childhood in turn-of-the-century Missouri where she staves off boredom by focusing on the more ghoulish aspects of life. Tootie frequently interrupts the plot to interject about all her dolls she’s buried in the cemetery, the minor acts of domestic terrorism she’s committed against the city’s streetcar tracks, or how “The iceman saw a drunkard get shot yesterday; the blood squirted out three feet!” Each time she pipes up in sugary sweet squeaks you know you’re about to hear about the gnarliest shit that’s ever happened in St. Louis, which is a hilarious contrast to the warmer, more nostalgic comforts of Judy Garland singing Christmas carols.

I might’ve assumed Tootie was a total cinematic anomaly had I not also revisited one of my personal favorite Christmas classics this year, 1934’s Hays Code defiant comedy-noir The Thin Man. Usually when praising The Thin Man, it’s unavoidable to focus on the playful, often violent sexual innuendo shared between married, martini-swilling detectives Nick & Nora Charles. On this rewatch, though, I found myself drawn to the morbid fixations of the teenage side character Gilbert, the son of the murder victim Nick & Nora are hired to avenge. Gilbert is much older than Tootie, and so his adorable morbidity as a teenage boy is a lot less striking at first glance. What’s hilarious about its effect on the film, however, is how freaked out the other characters are by his obsession with death & sexual perversion. Police are squicked when he gleefully asks, of his own father’s corpse, “Could I come down and see the body? I’ve never seen a dead body.” It doesn’t help at all when he plainly explains, “Well, I’ve been studying psychopathic criminology and I have a theory. Perhaps this was the work of a sadist or a paranoiac. If I saw it I might be able to tell.” Unlike Tootie’s family in Meet Me in St. Louis, Gilbert’s mother & sister aren’t at all amused by his faux-Freudian obsession with sex & death, best typified by his sister’s repulsed reaction to his confession that, “Now, I know I have a mother fixation, but it’s slight. It hasn’t yet reached the point of where I …” The censorship of the era would not have allowed that train of thought to go much further, but it’s almost worse that the audience’s imagination is allowed to fill in the blank. Gilbert is not nearly as funny nor as alarming as Tootie, if not only because death & perverse sexual urges don’t seem as wildly out of place coming from a teenage boy in a drunken noir as they do coming from a 7-year-old girl in a cheery movie musical. Still, he’s a hilarious intrusion on the plot & tone of the work, especially since every other character is so thoroughly freaked out by his enthusiasm for ghoulish subjects.

While I couldn’t think of another movie character from the 30s & 40s that fit the mold of a Tootie or a Gilbert, I do believe they share a sensibility with a newspaper comics icon from that same era: Wednesday Addams. While The Addams Family wouldn’t be adapted to television & silver screen until decades later, the wholesomely morbid characters originated in a single-panel newspaper comic that was substantially popular in the 1930s. Wednesday Addams isn’t as bubbly nor as sugar-addled as Tootie, but she mostly fills the same role: a subversively morbid child who’s just as adorable as she is fixated on death & mayhem. It might just be because I’m a child of the 1990s, but Christina Ricci defines the character in my mind, thanks to her dual performances in Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family (1991) & Addams Family Values (1993). While her performance (along with a career-high turn from Joan Cusack) is more deliciously over-the-top in the sequel, the often-neglected original film of the duo showcases her as occasional, adorable interjections to the plot the same way Tootie & Gilbert function in their respective films. The ’91 Addams Family movie feels spiritually in-sync with the source material’s origins as a single-panel newspaper comic, mostly entertaining as a never-ending flood of individual sight gags; it’s essentially ZAZ for goths. Wednesday mostly operates outside the main plot (which largely concerns her parents’ relationship with her prodigal uncle), occasionally interjecting as a hyper-specific type of sight gag: a young, adorable little girl with a hyperactive sense of bloodlust. Wednesday is mostly silent in the ’91 film, but the way she repeatedly murders her brother, leads a spooky familial séance, and sprays her school play audience in gallons of stage blood leads to some of the film’s most outrageously funny moments; it’s no wonder Addams Family Values gave her more to do in the spotlight, straying further from both the comic panel source material & the usual role of the adorably morbid child side-character trope.

One thing that stuck out to me when revisiting the Addams Family movie so soon after falling in love with Tootie is that it starts with a Christmas carol, and ends at Halloween. Similarly, Meet Me in St. Louis is often cited as one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time, but one of its major set-pieces involves Tootie participating in an escalating series of Halloween pranks while dressed as the ghost of a town drunk. Meanwhile, Addams Family Values includes an iconic Thanksgiving-themed stage play (despite being set at a sleepaway summer camp), and The Thin Man is set between Christmas Eve & New Year’s. It makes sense that these comfort-watch classics would be likely to be set around The Holidays, since that time of year is so prone to warmly comforting (and easily marketable) nostalgia. The uniformity of these three characters—Tootie, Gilbert, and Wednesday—across those similar settings is amusing as a codified trio, though, and I can’t help but want to seek out more adorably morbid children in classic films just like them. Surely, there must be more violence-obsessed tykes running havoc around otherwise even-keel studio pictures of the Old Hollywood era. If nothing else, I suspect the continued popularity of Wednesday Addams over the decades must have been an influence over classic movie characters I just haven’t met yet. I doubt any will be as delightfully fucked up as our beloved little Tootie, but I’ll be seeking them out anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Grand Hotel (1932)

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After years of watching homages to the genre it helped name & pioneer, I thought I knew what to expect from the ensemble-cast Old Hollywood spectacle Grand Hotel. Grand hotel-set screwball throwbacks to its interweaving-characters story structure (such as What’s Up Doc?, Big Business, and The Grand Budapest Hotel) set me up to expect a straight-up farcical comedy. I gasped, then, when Grand Hotel took a shocking tragic turn seemingly out of nowhere in its third act, a tonal shift that only caught me off-guard because of the expectations set by its much goofier spiritual descendants. I guess I should have been tipped off by the film’s Best Picture Oscar, given the Academy’s long-running aversion to recognizing comedies as a legitimate artform, but I was shocked all the same. Grand Hotel acts like a standard star-packed Old Hollywood screwball comedy for most of its runtime, then floods the screen with last-minute melodrama to pump itself up with an air of prestige. I don’t know that I preferred the dramatic conclusion to the comedic build-up, but it is kinda cool that a studio picture from nine decades ago managed to surprise me in its basic story structure.

Set at “the most expensive hotel in Berlin”, Grand Hotel chronicles the overlapping lives of unlikely acquaintances who could only cross paths because they’re staying at the same hotel: a prima donna ballerina, a down-on-his-luck factory worker, a blustering business executive, a suave cat burglar, etc. It’s the kind of early Hollywood production that feels more like a filmed stage play than it does cinematic poetry, but it’s packed with enough big-name stars from the era (dressed in exquisite gowns by the always-on-point couturier Adrian) that the limited creativity in its editing & camerawork doesn’t especially detract from its prestige. The most notable starpower is a generational changing of the guard, miraculously featuring both Greta Garbo & Joan Crawford in one movie even though they feel like they belong to entirely different eras. That crossover isn’t especially highlighted onscreen; the two actors somehow never share a scene even though they’re fighting for the romantic attentions of the same man. Still, Garbo’s depressive diva ballerina & Crawford’s hot-to-trot nude model/”stenographess” offer a fascinating contrast in morals & class, echoed in the social divides of the various characters that drift through each other’s lives.

Grand Hotel is purposefully, subversively funny when it wants to be. There are a lot jaunty class-divide jabs at capitalist pigs and Hays Code-era sex jokes like (to Crawford’s sultry stenographess) “Why don’t you take a little dictation from me sometime?” that keep the mood light & celebratory for most of the runtime. As a result, when the tragedy that concludes this interwoven, ensemble-cast story stops that line of humor dead, I reflexively shouted “Oh shit!” at the screen, totally unprepared for the last-minute tonal shift. I guess that’s the kind of genre-skewing shenanigans necessary to land a Best Picture Oscar for a Comedy (which this movie won despite being nominated in no other category), but it is a little jarring if you’re more familiar with the film’s descendants than you are with its own original reputation. I expected to enjoy a light yuck-em-up with my old pals Crawford & Garbo while they modeled pretty dresses & ran around a massive studio lot set. It turns out Grand Hotel‘s teeth are a little sharper than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Inserts (1975)

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When the New Hollywood movement made movies dangerous & vulgar again in the 1970s, there was a kind of nostalgia in the air for pre-Code filmmaking of the 1920s & 30s. It’s the same way that punk dialed the clock back from mid-70s stadium rock to straight-forward 60s garage. Counterculture touchstones of the era like The Cockettes, Cabaret, and Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle all pulled influence from an idealized vision of Old Hollywood hedonism in the industry’s pre-Code era. The forgotten X-rated drama Inserts is no exception to this indulgence in pre-Code nostalgia, but it takes a more direct, literal approach to mourning the loss of the Hollywood that could have been if it weren’t for the moralistic censorship of The Hays Code and it’s fiercest enforcer, Joseph Breen. While most 1970s artists were romanticizing the first couple decades of amoral Hollywood excess at its heights, Inserts instead visits the era at its death bed to have one final swig of liquor with its corpse before it’s hauled off to the morgue. It’s more of a grim memorial than a celebration, which likely contributed to the film being forgotten by critics & audiences over time.

A pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfuss stars opposite a pre-Suspiria Jessica Harper as a 1930s director/actress duo scrounging at the outskirts of the Old Hollywood system. Dreyfuss is the lead: a once reputable Silent Film director who floundered when the industry shifted into making Talkies. Bitter about his fall from fame and, subsequently, blind-drunk, he wastes his directorial talents by shooting stag pornos in his decrepit Los Angeles mansion. Harper enters his life as a wannabe actress who volunteers to shoot anonymous “inserts” for an incomplete porno that goes off the rails when its original star overdoses on heroin. In exchange, she pushes Dreyfuss to return to his former glory as a fully engaged, passionate filmmaker and to teach her the ropes of her desired profession as a Hollywood starlet. Their miserable struggle to complete the picture is sequenced as if in real-time, while other doomed characters drift in and out of the shoot (most significantly Bob Hoskins as a blustering porno financier and Veronica Cartright as a more, um, experienced performer). The whole thing feels like a well-written & performed but incurably misanthropic one-act stage play.

While Inserts is effectively about the death of Hollywood’s hedonistic first wave, visions of that fallen empire are mostly left to play in your imagination off-screen. Names like Strondheim, DeMille, and Gish are shamelessly dropped in non-sequitur anecdotes. Meanwhile, the much-buzzed-about new kid in town Clark Gable periodically knocks on the door of the mansion the movie rots in, but he’s never invited inside. Hollywood is changing outside, but it’s not deliberately leaving Dreyfuss’s drunken misanthrope behind; that’s a decision he’s made himself. We’re mostly left to rot with him in the choices he’s made: his choice of cheap booze, his choice of self-destructive associates, his choice of violent, vulgar “art.” The core of the film’s overwhelming sense of boozy, sweaty desperation is in his budding relationship with his newest starlet, Harper. The volatile pair turn shooting inserts for a throwaway stag porno into a game of dominance & mutual self-destruction. It’s a sick S&M game where he tries to scare her away from the industry by referring to her naked flesh as “meat” and acting as the domineering auteur. In turn, she playfully tops him from the bottom – mocking the sexual & creative impotence caused by his alcoholism in a humiliating display. Their collaboration is the act of filmmaking at its ugliest and most corrosive, an extreme exaggeration of the industry’s worst tendencies.

Inserts isn’t all smut & gloom. The film is viciously miserable, but it’s also shockingly amusing when it wants to be. It’s darkly funny the way a lot of stage plays are, often interrupting its cruelest offenses with a withering quip or a burst of slapstick humor. It constantly tempers its 1920s filmmaking nostalgia with Hollywood Babylon-style shock value in heroin addiction, necrophilia, and casting-couch abuses. Still, that nostalgia manages to shine through the grime, and the film mostly feels like a belated funeral for a well-loved era that was cut short by Breen & Hays. It might not be as fun to watch as a Richard Dreyfuss porno-drama sounds on paper, but it’s a rattling, captivating experience that deserves to be dusted off & re-evaluated now that we’ve all had enough time & distance to properly sober up.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bigamist (1953)

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One of the ways Ida Lupino was able to make the leap from actress to director in the Old Hollywood system was by framing her work as morality tales. That way, she could get away with making the first woman-directed noir The Hitch-Hiker—a throat-hold thriller from start to end—by passing it off as a lesson on the dangers of adultery with just a few throwaway lines of dialogue. Her directorial follow-up to that chilling cult classic is much more enthusiastically committed to exploring adultery as a moralistic theme, as you can tell by its attention-grabbing title: The Bigamist. Oddly, though, The Bigamist takes a much more wishy-washy stance on the dangers of adultery than The Hitch-Hiker, even though it dwells on the act for the entirety of its runtime instead of merely evoking it in a mood-setting prologue. The Bigamist is a morality tale about adultery (through its furthest extreme in polygamy) without ever outright condemning the act as a sin. It’s an engagingly ambiguous film in terms of reading its moral compass even now—more than a half-century after its initial release—but especially so for its time.

Edmond O’Brien stars as a traveling salesman who is racked with guilt because he’s hopelessly in love with both of his wives, who live in two distant cities. Joan Fontaine co-stars as his wife of 8 years, who has settled into a business partner role as the initial romantic spark of their marriage has dulled. Ida Lupino rounds out the cast as the salesman’s wife of 8 months, a fiercely independent West Coast waitress who reignites the salesman’s lust for life. The movie is set up like a murder-mystery noir where the salesman’s discomfort around anyone digging into his personal life is meant to spark the imagination of the audience. What nefarious acts could he possibly be up to on these business trips? The answer, of course, is right there on the poster and in the title: “Edmond O’Brien is The Bigamist.” Once the full details of his double-marriage lifestyle are divulged, the movie mostly dwells on the melodrama of his predicament, focusing especially on the unbearable stress of balancing a double life. The women both get their own moments of spotlight to convey their internal anguish, but this is largely the bigamist’s story, and it’s in daring to sympathize with the lout where the movie finds its moral ambiguity.

In a lot of ways, The Bigamist feels like an inverse of (and a precursor to) Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, in that it takes the husband’s love for both women seriously without poking too harshly at how the women might be working overtime domestically to make his traveling Lothario lifestyle possible. If anything, the film comes across as surprisingly pro-polyamory, since it entirely builds its melodrama on the guilt & harm of the salesman’s dishonesty rather than the usual fallacy that he can’t love both women equally at once. He initially cheats out of loneliness and confesses the transgression to his first wife in plain terms, who takes the admission as a playfully sarcastic joke since he’s just not the type to do such a thing. While most of his colleagues would just hire a sex worker to satisfy that urge, this lout can’t help but fall in love with his mistress, who initially asks that he reveal nothing about his personal life outside their relationship so as not to spoilt the mood. Both of his marriages are relatively functional in their own insular realms; what eats the bigamist up on the inside are the lies necessary to maintain his cross-country rouse. That’s a bold moralistic stance to take in a Hays Code era film where the leads have to sleep in separate beds for the sake of onscreen propriety.

Of the three leads, Ida Lupino is the most electric in her role as the salesman’s second wife. According to Wikipedia, this film has been cited as the first time the female star of a Hollywood film directed her own performance, which is pretty neat but also difficult to verify without several qualifiers. What’s much easier to verify is the strange real-life melodrama that played out behind the scenes between the director and her collaborators. Lupino had recently split with her ex-husband and creative partner Collier Young, who wrote & produced The Bigamist while at the start of a new marriage with Lupino’s co-star, Joan Fontaine. In that way, the film works just as well as a relic of Hollywood gossip as it does as a morally ambiguous noir. It even accentuates that Hollywood rumor mill DNA by setting the first scene of emotional infidelity on a bus tour of famous Los Angeles movie stars’ homes – including the homes of women like Barbara Stanwyck & Jane Wyman, who could have been cast in this just as easily as Fontaine (as well as the home of Miracle on 42nd Street‘s Edmund Gwenn, who does feature heavily in the movie as the nosy adoption agency bureaucrat who initially exposes the salesman’s bigamy). It’s a nice little meta touch for a movie so unavoidably steeped in Studio Era scandal.

Even speaking in general, Ida Lupino’s life & career are inextricably tied to Old Hollywood mystique. It’s incredible that she was able to manage as interesting & high-profile of a directorial career as she did in a system designed to lock women out of that creative process entirely. The Bigamist is not quite as immediately thrilling of example of her getting away with something within that misogynist paradigm as The Hitch-Hiker, but the longer you dwell in its moral ambiguity the more it feels like a one-of-a-kind anomaly. Like all of Lupino’s films (and even the filmmaker herself), it’s a wonder that The Bigamist was allowed to exist in its time at all.

-Brandon Ledet

What a Way to Go! (1964)

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Like many movie nerds, I frequently find myself wanting to champion oddball films that slipped through the cracks critically & financially in their time. Apparently, that urge to champion cinematic underdogs extends all the way up to major studio releases with enormous budgets and casts stacked to the ceiling with famous movie stars. The 1964 commercial & critical flop What a Way to Go! shouldn’t need any defenders. Its Old Hollywood brand of glitz, glam, and irreverent mayhem is staged on such an epic scale that its greatness is almost undeniable. Yet, it was met with a shrug in its own time and willfully forgotten in the half-century since, except maybe by the dorks who were raised on TCM & PBS re-broadcasts of studio classics. That lukewarm reception might have made sense in the cultural context of the mid-1960s, when audiences were hungry for the hipper, more stripped-down pleasures of The French New Wave and the still-percolating New Hollywood takeover. Watching it now, it’s difficult to fathom why it isn’t as fawned over as other titles from creative team Betty Comden & Adolph Green, who also penned The Band Wagon & Singin’ in the Rain. It has all the makings of a widely beloved classic, but none of the fanfare.

What a Way to Go! stars a young Shirley MacLaine as a frantic woman who’s desperate to rid herself of $200 million of inherited wealth. We learn in rigidly structured flashbacks (through a pointless therapy session framing device, the film’s one flagrant misstep) that she accidentally inherited these millions by becoming the widow of several absurdly wealthy men, each played by ultra-famous Old Hollywood studs: Gene Kelley, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, and Dick Van Dyke. MacLaine’s cursed widow only desires these men for their love & companionship, but each die in greedy pursuit of wealth after only brief bursts of marital bliss. Thanks to the subjectivity of filtering these tales through MacLaine’s memories, the film illustrates these comically tragic vignettes with zany proto-ZAZ visual gags more befitting of a Looney Tunes short or a Mel Brooks farce than a Studio Era comedy. Runaway caskets, avant-garde chimpanzee painters, and straight-up vaudevillian clowning flood the screen with manic-comic energy from start to finish, never allowing the film to drag the way these bloated-budget Hollywood showcases often do. Its Looney Tunes goofballery also clashes spectacularly with its lush, Oscar-nominated costume & production design – most wonderfully in a sequence where everything in MacLaine’s Hollywood mansion is painted an eye-searing hot pink except her. Everything.

The most easily identifiable confluence of the film’s unashamed silliness and willingness to hurl mountains of money at the screen is a recurring gag in which MacLaine’s relationships with her departed husbands are represented in minutes-long genre spoofs. When married to a podunk fisherman in a one-room shack, the film spoofs silent-era comedies from Charlie “The Tramp” Chaplin, complete with a squared-off aspect ratio & dialogue intertitles. When married to an ex-pat beatnik painter in Paris, it spoofs the black & white arthouse pretension of The French New Wave. The commitment to this recurring bit is so thorough that the film even spoofs its own time & genre in a self-labeled “Lush Budgett” production with hundreds of unnecessary set & costume changes that amounts to the equivalent of burning piles of money onscreen. What a beautiful fire, at least. My favorite image from What a Way to Go! is a promo still where MacLaine poses on the all-pink mansion set with a small selection of the beautiful, outrageous dresses she wears through the film. The brilliance of the Lush Budgett segment is that the film is fully aware of how ridiculous & unnecessary all this pageantry is to tell an amusing story. The tragedy of the film is that not enough people saw it to realize that it had that playful sense of humor about itself.

The circumstances of What a Way to Go!‘s release were all wrong. The film was tailor-written for consistent hitmaker Marilyn Monroe, who died before production. It was released in a time where its old-fashioned lush-budget pageantry was gradually being replaced with more experimental, barebones art cinema – a racket even the major studios were soon to enter. Looking back, though, I think audiences failed the film instead of the other way around. Its zany physics-ignoring sense of humor and eagerness to spoof every era of mainstream filmmaking (including its own) point to the film being way hipper & more up to date than it was initially credited to be. Meanwhile, it also functions just as well as a straight-forward specimen of Old Hollywood glamour, a self-justifying indulgence that proves the inherent artistic & entertainment value of big-budget spectacle. Watching charming movie stars perform in fabulous costumes on lavish sets is its own kind of valuable cinematic pleasure, just as worthwhile of preservation as its barebones arthouse nemeses. And this is a picture where you get to enjoy both! Its greatest sin was arriving on the cusp between those two worlds’ dominance, which also turns out to be its greatest strength.

– Brandon Ledet

Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood (2019)

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Once upon a time in the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino was a badboy troublemaker on the movie scene, heralding in a new era of post-modern indie filmmaking that could commercially compete with the major studios in a way that shook up the status quo. Then, over time, Tarantino became the status quo. The dream of the 90s indie scene faded away, but he remained largely unscathed as a Blank Check auteur who could make just about anything he wanted – no matter how self-indulgent, esoteric, or #problematic – merely because he was established at the right time and grandfathered in. That protected status cannot last forever. With Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood, the rebel-turned-Establishment director directly grapples with his inevitable obsolescence as an artist who’s no longer “needed” by the industry and whose time is approaching the rearview mirror. If Tarantino is still a movie industry troublemaker, it’s because his Gen-X sensibilities are now an outdated taboo among the youths, no longer a revolutionary paradigm shift. To pretend that he’s still cinema’s troublemaking badboy at this stage of his career would be embarrassing. Instead, he leans into his newfound status as cinema’s grumpy old man, and it’s oddly invigorating.

To address the approaching obsolescence of his Gen-X shock humor & political apathy, Tarantino dials the clock back to another inter-generational dust-up between institutional dinosaurs & idols-smashing youths: the fall of Old Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio & Brad Pitt star, respectively, as a has-been Old Hollywood television actor and his personal assistant/stunt double – a pair of aging knucklehead brutes who sense their days of usefulness in Los Angeles are nearly at an end. In real life, the death of the Flower Power hippie movement and the birth of the New Hollywood movie industry upheaval are often marked by the brutal murder of Sharon Tate & friends at the hands of the Charles Manson cult – the gruesome epilogue to the Summer of Love. In this film, Tarantino daydreams an alternate history where Manson’s brainwashed devotees were disastrously unsuccessful in their mission the night of Tate’s murder, and the New Hollywood takeover never took off as a result. Margot Robbie puts in a supportive, periphery performance as Sharon Tate, who thrives blissfully unaware of the dark forces surrounding her. Tate lives a carefree life as a rising star just next door to DiCaprio’s fictional Old Hollywood hangover, whose stubborn refusal to fade away gracefully and amorous exploitation of his personal assistant eat up most of the (sprawling, near three-hour) runtime. This is largely a plotless hangout picture between a childlike employer and his dangerously quick-tempered employee, two men who cover up the uncomfortable power imbalance of their relationship by disguising it as a friendship. The Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate is treated as an unfortunate distraction from enjoying the final days of these men’s relationship & industry as they near extinction; it’s an incident Tarantino would prefer to delay for all eternity so that Old Hollywood itself would never die.

I appreciate this movie most as a passionate argument for a sentiment I could not agree with less. I have no love for the traditional machismo & endless parade of cheap-o Westerns that clogged up Los Angeles in these twilight hours of the Studio Era. Still, it was entertaining to watch an idiosyncratic filmmaker with niche interests wax nostalgic about the slimy, uncool bullshit only he cares about. Even when Tarantino arrived on the scene as a prankish youngster in the 90s, his work was already mired in nostalgia for the dead genres & traditionalist sensibilities of the Studio System that died with the 1960s; he just updated them with cussing & gore. These early Gen-X remixes of old-fashioned crime pictures were at least stylized to be cool, though. Here, he extends that nostalgia for The Way Things Were to Old Hollywood relics that are hopelessly uncool, square even: radio ads, paint-by-numbers Westerns, network television, chain-smoking, toxically corny Dean Martin comedies, etc. The encroaching forces that threaten to break up this (largely alcoholic & abusive) boys’ club traditionalism are much easier to defend as hip & worthwhile (the looming presences of Roman Polanski & Charles Manson excluded): casual drug use, Anti-War counterculture youths, hardcore pornography’s intrusion on the mainstream, New Hollywood brats like Dennis Hopper (whose name is tossed off as an insult) & William Friedkin (whose early-career title The Night They Raided Minsky’s appears on one of many onscreen marquees), and so on. Positing that the stale machismo of Old Hollywood’s late-60s decline is preferable to the youthful auteurism that soon supplanted it is borderline delusional (and maybe even irresponsible), but it’s at least a distinct & interesting perspective, and it’s perversely fun to watch an increasingly bitter Tarantino defend it.

There isn’t much that’s new to the Tarantino formula here. The stylized dialogue, apathetic slacker humor, gruesomely over-the-top violence, post-modern restaging of ancient film genres, and pop culture name-dropping typical to his work all persist here in a stubborn, unapologetic continuation of what he’s always done. If anything, the director goes out of his way to accentuate his most commonly cited tropes, even rubbing our faces in his notorious foot fetish with a newly defiant fervor. Tarantino has not changed, and neither will your opinion on his merits as a filmmaker or a cultural commentator. What has changed is that he’s now fully transitioned from bratty upstart to outdated Establishment. Aware of his newfound status as an old fogie, he goes full ”Get off my lawn!” here by positing that it’s the children who are wrong, that Hollywood traditionalism deserves to live on infinitely unchallenged & unimpeded. He may not be able to prevent his own approaching obsolescence (nor the end of days for when the Star Power of household names like Pitt & DiCaprio actually translated to box office receipts), but he can at least express that frustration in his fiction by undoing a previous death of Traditionalism in Hollywood’s past. He doesn’t even pretty up the surface details of the era he’s defending to strengthen the argument. The actor & stuntman duo in the film are childlike, destructive bullies who treat life like a hedonistic playground. The films & TV shows they’re making are dreadfully boring. The brainwashed Mansonite children they stomp out to rewrite history are deserving of pity the film is stubbornly unwilling to afford them. It’s an embarrassingly uncool, conservative worldview to defend, but Tarantino is maybe the most amusing messenger to deliver it possible, considering his trajectory as a cinematic badboy turned (as the film’s hippie youngsters would label him) Fascist Pig.

-Brandon Ledet

Under the Silver Lake (2019)

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The very first line of spoken dialogue in Under the Silver Lake is a verbal reference to Turner Classic Movies. Every character’s shithole Los Angeles apartment in the film is lined with Old Hollywood movie posters. The score (from the director’s return collaborator Disasterpeice) is an oppressive Studio Era composition that swells & overwhelms the soundtrack in playful nostalgia. A pivotal scene in the protagonist’s amateur investigation of Hollywood’s seedy underbelly is staged at the foot of Hitchcock’s grave. This is a movie that very much wants to be understood as a prankish, tongue-in-cheek throwback to noir thrillers of ancient Old Hollywood past. The problem is that all that influence signaling is a flagrant misdirect. Under the Silver Lake plays much more like an echo of 1980s Brian De Palma oddities like Body Double & Blow Out than it does any Hitchcockian thriller it pretends to riff on. Since De Palma himself was already prankishly subverting Old Hollywood tropes, this continuation of that tradition is essentially a copy of a copy, twice removed from any detectable sense of purpose. It also suffers the misfortune of continuing De Palma’s leering heterosexual perversions into an era when they’re decades out of date, removed form any possible “It was a different time” excuses. Worse yet, it suffers the worst fate any film could ever stumble into: it’s a comedy that isn’t funny. Still, I found myself on the verge of enjoying it in nearly every scene, frustrated that I could never quite get there.

I was majorly disappointed by this film. It’s difficult to imagine there will be a bigger disappointment all year. The drop-off in quality between David Robert Mitchell’s debut feature It Follows (Swampflix’s favorite film of 2015) to this straight-to-VOD follow-up is about as steep as any I can remember from any director. And yet, if someone told me they saw a Southland Tales-level messterpeice in it I’d almost believe them. I don’t at all blame A24 for quietly dumping it into home-streaming distribution after purchasing it at the height of its festival-circuit buzz, but I can almost understand what its apologists see in it if I squint from the right angle. This is a twisty, farcical fantasy piece about a hipster LA loser (Andrew Garfield) who follows his own vanilla tits-and-ass prurience into a vast, impossible conspiracy network that secretly runs the entertainment industry (and, by extension, the world). Pop music cults, hobo royalty, serial dog murderers, and an ancient succubus assassin are major players in a vast, mysterious organization that the movie deliberately sets up to provide no possible satisfying answers. It’s a horned-up, surrealist, Madlibs-style approach to storytelling that I’d normally find majorly exciting, but in this case fails to entertain in two significant ways: its jokes are not funny, and it’s impossible to care about its fuckboy protagonist. Many people had issues with the logical & tonal inconsistencies of It Follows, but that film at last has a strong grasp on its sense of atmosphere & a main character whose wellbeing we’re actually invested in, whether positively or negatively (with the added bonus of using that POV for an identifiable thematic purpose). By contrast, Under the Silver Lake is just a sunshine-noir moodboard where things just kinda happen, until they don’t. It eats up two and a half hours of your time and then it’s over. You just move along with your day, case closed.

As with De Palma’s seedier works, the major question at the center of this titties-obsessed Madlibs mystery is how much its depiction of a mediocre man’s lurid, vanilla sexuality is a shameless participation and how much is open mockery. We spend the entire film looking through the eyes of a listless, cigarette-smoking slob who’s absolutely dogshit at having sex. He’s the kind of just-rolled-out-of-bed, low-effort hipster that makes you want to shout “Take a bath!” at the screen, yet when he actually does take a bath the result is entirely unsatisfying. That disgust is intentional, as everyone he encounters on his amateur sleuth trail makes a point to comment on his stench. This is a man who punches children, slags the homeless, and peeps on his undressed neighbors through his Hitchcock Brand™ binoculars. It’s doubtful that we’re supposed to think of him as an upstanding citizen. Still, the default-misogyny of his POV works its way into the film’s DNA. No woman’s breasts or buttcheeks will grace the screen without a proper close-up. Bikini-clad hotties bark like rabid dogs in go-nowhere nightmare sequences. Sex workers & actresses are both coveted & mocked for the supposed degradation of their trades. This is a movie that gets its kicks by indulging in the male gaze, then has a character verbalize the phrase “the male gaze” just so you know the exercise is self-aware. At least when De Palma indulged in the same self-aware prurience his own sexuality was mildly kinky & risqué. Under the Silver Lake’s sex drive is the microwaved leftovers of a mid-afternoon trip to Hooters; it’s the faux intellectual titties-fetish of a Playboy Magazine collector; it’s the inner sexual life of someone who still wears cargo shorts in the 2010s. It’s boring, it’s scared of women, and yet any commentary on the sexuality of American pop culture you can derive from what’s onscreen would be meeting this shapeless mess more than halfway.

For every pointless scene throughout this journey into Juggs Magazine mystique, I found myself genuinely straining to enjoy myself. There’s almost a Greasy Strangler quality to its repetition, awkwardness, and ham-fisted interpretation of genre where noir = window blinds & missing dames. I just wasn’t amused, or aroused, or intrigued in the ways the film wanted me to be, which ultimately made this feel like a lot of effort for zero payoff. Kudos to anyone who managed to have Southland Tales-style Messterpeice Theatre fun with it, because I’m truly jealous. The only line in the film that resonated with me in any significant way was “It’s silly to waste your time on something that doesn’t matter.” This move does not matter, and I feel very silly indeed.

-Brandon Ledet