Roy (on the right): It's about a girl.
Roy's stepfather, Major Wetherby: About a what?
Roy: Well, about a girl.
Major Wetherby (to mother): I don't know what he's talking about.
Roy's mother (o.s.): A girl, darling, you know, a girl. A girl.
Major Wetherby: Yeah, yeah, yes, I know, a girl is. Well, what about it, boy?
Roy (Douglass Montgomery) meets Myra (Mae Clark) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid, each helping an elderly lady recover potatoes fallen from her basket. Fourteen days before he returns to the trenches, Roy, nineteen years old, falls for Myra, a sometimes chorus girl and hooker. He intends to marry.
"Identification...not only connects us to the protagonist onscreen but, at a deeper level, through our implicit understanding of cinematic language, to a basic sense of ourselves as cohesive subjects." - Todd Haynes introducing his book of screenplays for Far From Heaven, Safe, and Superstar.
Waterloo Bridge, a 1931 pre-code hyperdrama, is an early film by the forty-one year old James Whale. He directs with an eye for behavioral nuance, exhibiting an unusually prominent and sincere quest for the truth about his characters. There's more than mischief to the film.
There's mischief too. The narrative sometimes makes sharp-turns, or perhaps even performs a figure-8. It moves with surprising speed, passing through bouts of comedy, stretches of sympathetic character observation, and bursts of cinematic jubilance. When I watch pre-code films I wonder about the logic of the audience members' lives, so near the center of the depression. This is a narrative of hope struggle and strength, still questioning and being hurt by malevolent interior forces, not yet arrived at the cynicism of film noir, but headed for it, headed for worse, unaware.
Roy, if you can believe it, doesn't suspect Myra's "private income." He's unspoiled by reckless living, somewhat innocent. He's brave, but knows little of his enemy's nature. Myra knows the enemy well.
Whale shows deep concern for the nature of her dignity. She knows Roy's money comes from sweetness, which makes it different, but she wonders how to have a pure relationship with Roy.
Whale's characters, even when reciting pat, over-written lines, or under-performing as actors, maybe especially then, are connected with a pulsing sense of life. Curiosity in the true emotions of his characters brings him to explore the fringe details of their lives.
Backgrounds are often animated by gardeners pruning trees, or passing milk carts, everywhere the sense of the film opening into the lives of the living.
Were the lives of Waterloo Bridge's contemporaries as capricious and turbulent as the film, torn by internal and external forces, and are our lives now? The movie ends as it must, as truthfully as it could for its time. It might surprise you to know its final moment. I'd like to watch the 1940 post-code remake, and 1956's Gaby, to see how they handle some of the same questions Whales does here.
Myra's reluctance to legitimize the fiscal-sexual power of her femininity adds another layer to her determination. She wants to believe it's possible to preserve her personal integrity, and to establish customized boundaries based on life experiences and realistic expectations. The second time Roy offered her free money, and she attempted to refuse him, reminded me of a scene in the recent My Joy, a film separated by 70 years from this one.
Myra prostitutes herself for a degree of independence, and draws lines between her profession and romantic love, while Jean Harlow, in Red-Headed Woman, and Barbara Stanwyck, in Baby Face, each play a secretary who enters the pants of the man in the top floor office, in order to climb rungs on a social ladder from which they're otherwise excluded. They seek not nights with the men, not only a month's rent, but full lives of luxury and class.
There's mischief too, and open enjoyment of fulfilled desires. Harlow's journey in particular seems entirely joy-focused, as Red-Headed Woman deviates from the other two movies by never forcing the protagonist to change or learn from conflict. She jumps from one bed to the next without a glance back, either because she chooses not to confront the inner toll, or because for her there isn't an inner toll; it's an easy choice between gutter and glamor, and Harlow's Lil has freed herself from the social responsibilities of love and sex.
In this way Lil reminds me of Boudu from Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932. Homeless Boudu was taken in by the wealthy but rejected the prospect of change, and the film rejected the idea that Boudu must undergo a transformation or epiphany because of his contact with high society and comfort. Boudu, in the end, is Boudu, and Lil, in the end, is Lil.
No comments:
Post a Comment