Ten Films That Showed Hollywood How To Live

Some Like It Hot (1959)

What does that title mean? It's become a phrase that's often tossed around in a very cool way--as if hot (as in sexy, wild, crazed, abandoned, etc.) had also become "hot" (as in "Does he/she think he/she's hot, or what?"). In short, "hot" and its wildness became a terrific act, a campfire.

Some Like It Hot has a world only film can make, one in which we zip along on a night train with an all-girl band--and we're talking honeys--from frigid Chicago to sun-drenched Florida. Every detail of this world is cheerfully cliched. Pursued by gangsters intent on tidying up after a massacre, what can our boys do (just a tenor sax man and a bull fiddle player) but go all the way? They're in show business, aren't they? And sooner or later, that boils down to acting. So they put on heels and dresses, no matter the initial outrage to their own self-image. But they aren't just doing themselves up in drag--there's something sweet in the feeling of silk next to the skin.

No one would accuse Billy Wilder or Some Like It Hot of being gay, or even bisexual.

This is, after all, a movie in which we can indulge the fantasy of being perpetually kissed by, and nearly smothered under the pendant breasts of, Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn and Tony are together at the end for nothing less than the big bang and the black hole that men offer women. But somehow, along with offering up so much comedy that no one can complain (or escape), Some Like It Hot also proposes the giddy potential of acting gay. Jack may just settle for being Joe E. Brown's girl with the diamonds and a pampered life--you always want to follow the money. For the community of Hollywood, Some Like It Hot was the moment when the sexual safety net was cut down, and a guy was free to think about clothes and how he looked, and even to indulge in swift, cutting banter. "Going gay" became a routine.

Psycho (1960)

The influences Hollywood had already absorbed from its own movies by 1960 will leave the astute reader in little doubt about what had to come next--the validation of insanity. Or, I'm Crazy But That's OK Because Mother Still Talks to Me.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was set in Phoenix, Arizona, on the open highway and at a nearly deserted rural motel, but Norman Bates was still a Hollywood kind of guy. He was, to begin with, a striking example of the new adolescent sensibility (he does, in his way, take over the family), and of the new surreptitious gay attitude (which finds Janet Leigh so breathtakingly, eye-stoppingly heterosexual she has to be removed). But what made Psycho so seminal a movie was the way, at the 35-minute point, its energy and momentum hit a switch and the train just abandons Janet Leigh's character for sad-sack Norman.

At the moment of transition, Norman gets his rocks off and is able to be himselves. The psycho jumps up, sharp as a knife, and says Me, me, it's a movie about me! (This is truly the eternal party game in Hollywood.)

Precisely because Norman has been, hitherto, the most melancholy and sensitive person in the picture (take another look, if you doubt that), the killing is a liberation for him, a shrugging-off of blame. The subtle consequence of this--we are talking 1960, when murder was murder--is to establish the killer as a kind of misunderstood victim. It's a whole other side of the film that Norman's knife acts out our urges of aroused voyeurism; Hitchcock has stealthily led us to the point where Norman can show us our crazy side. It should surprise no one that Hollywood folk, who were, in fact, pioneer psychiatric patients as early as the '30s, should be the first to embrace the handy notion that perpetrators are victims. And now that we're all dysfunctional ... bring on the Menendez brothers.

The Godfather (1972)

The Godfather and _The Godfather Part I_I are the Machiavellian texts for modem Hollywood (the code formerly known as The Prince). They happened to provide everything the business ever wanted for itself--huge box office plus critical esteem, which is having your cake and eating it--but even more important, they established a religion of Cake.

Consider first how the chronicle of the Corleones is studded with axioms on how to succeed--"We made him an offer he can't refuse," "Whoever comes to you [with the news], he's the traitor," all the way down to, "If history has taught us anything, it says you can kill anyone." Those are sacred principles for the executive class in Hollywood--and they are all to be uttered with Michael Corleone's sad, chilly authority, as in, "It's not personal ... it's strictly business."

It's too easy to say that Michael is clearly intended to be understood as a bad man, that the first two films in the series chart his moral deterioration. Francis Ford Coppola couldn't resist the man's withdrawn charm, and neither can anyone in a studio. He is a model, a sinister paragon, a man required to make decisions so as to protect the causes of family, business and, ultimately, order. Michael is lethal but tidy paranoid and vengeful but representative of pure power in a potentially chaotic world. The movie respects him on first sight. And every Hollywood power-player has ever since measured himself by that standard--Am I respected? (As in, do they need me to greenlight their money?)

The family is a metaphor for the studio, of course, and Michael Corleone's silk suits and flawless self-denial (no women, no drugs, no diversions for him) make the icon that every picture business demon salutes in the mirror as he leaves the washroom to face his day and destroy all enemies. Which means anyone else, everyone else. In the end Michael will kill a brother and exclude a wife (women altogether are shut out of inner circles and private rooms). The rhetoric of family and studio is a fine veil disguising the monomania of the boss--the mad one, the kid in charge.

American Gigolo (1980)

Richard Gere in American Gigolo is not so much a prostitute as a sexual secret agent. He comes discreetly to service the household. With that supercilious smirk, he accommo¬dates all freaky tastes. He has an intricate expertise, like the rifling in an expensive gun. The quiet hired lover even resembles a hired killer. And so, with American Gigolo, Hollywood began to see how sex really did verge on death. The first lesson in Paul Schrader's fine but creepy film was that the engineered orgasm is a shudder gambling with fatality. (This was a movie made just before AIDS was understood.) Why not gamble? What else is there in 1980's open, empty life but that dread thrill--and the perfect wardrobe to gamble in, a stupefying panorama of designer shirts?

The extreme aesthetic of American Gigolo--the grays, aquas and teals; the steel; the cars as streamlined as the ethical exhaustion--is also a kind of anaesthetic, and a mummy's wrapping against further decay. Art in the high end of the showbiz world--where dinner parties are held to show off fresh acquisitions--is the syrup that coats all the other poisons in life. This art must be as cool as stone, though--vivid yet inert, spectacular but as shallow as Lycra. Indeed, this is an art that mimics the thinness of film stock--all that showiness on so wafery a base. It's not so much post-modern as mod-erne modish--the creative gesture, like the sign of the cross a devout Mafia hood makes before offing someone.

Richard Gere is the perfect actor in this style--hetero enough to pass, but with every knowing wink to gay and bi, except that all urges are ultimately surpassed by that other love, the best one (it has no critics), self-love. Those shirts of his are not just clothes or costume, they are the soul worn as a sleeve.

Pages: 1 2 3