Since my return from West Virginia, where I enjoyed the comforts of modern life, the physical challenges of my cabin life I have felt more as a burden than a pleasure. Summer is no time for physical labor or being overly responsible. Just yesterday I brought in groceries – bread and milk and ice – and after putting the milk and ice in my cooler, I went into the garden and gathered some greens for my dinner. While there I inspected everything with all the satisfaction proper to a proprietor. When I had returned I found an unusually large and confused chipmunk by my backdoor. In a few seconds I understood his hesitation: he had found a fabulous trove of food and was loathe to leave it. He kept trying to determine if I was really a threat, and making feints toward his discovery. This trove was my loaf of bread, a couple of inches of which he had gnawed off in just a few minutes. In other circumstances I might have admired his industriousness, but in my curmudgeonly mood I was just annoyed that I couldn’t even put down a loaf of bread for a few minutes without it becoming part of an ecosystem.
So being in Westchester on Saturday, I took the opportunity to complete the katabasis to the City, for there is a reason why I live in the Catskills and not Alaska: namely that I only half-belong here in the mountains. Another half of me belongs in the city. I ate in a restaurant on Saturday night, and then drove down to the Battery, which was throbbing with life – as was the whole seafront, for whatever reason, for it was never so active at night in my memory. The next day I spent the hot part of the afternoon in the air-conditioned theaters of the Film Forum with a friend, and saw The Story of Temple Drake.
This was part of a series devoted to “Pre-Code Hollywood” – the raunchier films made in the 1920s and 1930s before decency standards (the “Code”) were imposed on film companies. The plot of Temple Drake is hence surprisingly ambitious and “modern”: a Southern belle (named Temple Drake) cavorts around with numerous men before being stranded by a car crash in the backwoods of the South, where she is kidnapped and raped. She then stays with the rapist, refusing to be taken home to her father, until in utter moral conflict she kills him. (There is more to the plot, but I will omit the remainder). The Film Forum promotional material quotes a film expert who proclaims that this movie’s lurid atmosphere “almost singlehandedly brought about the Code crackdown,” and another expert calls it “a model of Pre-Code immorality… that a major studio undertook so disreputable an enterprise is an index both of Paramount’s financial straits and the lure of the vice film as a quick fix in the early 1930s.”
The movie was hardly great, but as so often with these Film Forum retrospectives, I felt that I got a great deal more out of seeing this film than seeing a new studio release. First of all, I hardly knew that this era of filmmaking existed, the “Pre-Code” era: I imagined that the innocent behavior of older films was due to real innocence, not legal stricture. Second, the older films really are different, and this is especially apparent when “modern” subject matter such as rape is portrayed. The older films move through plot at a tremendous pace – the movie was scarcely more than an hour long – and they feel far less emotionally manipulative, even though they often have melodramatic acting (in fact, the melodramatic acting, at times, feels like insulation from the emotions of the movie, not amplification; but this may be in part due to the cultural remove). But certainly the major elements of emotional manipulation are absent: images of blood or wounds, long close-ups, long sequences without dialogue, a full orchestral score, etc. Temple Drake has no time for such things, and as such it feels more like a story of Boccaccio or the Arabian Nights; there a story of ten pages would provide plot enough for a trilogy of modern novels. This brevity allows the experience of emotion without the totalitarian apparatus of manipulation which accompanies modern writing and filmmaking.
My Film Forum expeditions started last winter during the Fritz Lang retrospective because I was dating a girl who lived in the Village not far from the Film Forum. We probably went to about a dozen shows that winter – mostly double features, too, which was so much fun that both of us still get indignant at paying full price for only one movie (“What? Ten bucks for just one movie??”). New Yorkers of course get to visit the Film Forum all the time; I can only hope that Jove will give me more such afternoons.
One Comment