The girlfriend and I just watched “Touch Of Evil” for the second time ever. The first time was in a theater about 20 years ago, when my father ran the local Cinema 100, where every two weeks he would bring in an old classic to a local theater so people could see it the way it was intended. Surprisingly, the theater would always be nearly full for these shows, even though many of them were foreign and subtitled.
Anyway, “Touch Of Evil” wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered it.
I mean, stylistically, it was great, but the story didn’t hold up as well this time.
Possibly because this time, I ordered the DVD that was “Restored to Orson Welles’ vision” by someone who was not Orson Welles, using the 54 pages of notes Welles had sent to the studio after he’d been kicked off the editing process, begging them to make these changes.
Or, very possibly, I was just too tired to be watching a film of this caliber.
While browsing this morning I discovered that Panic In Needle Park is on Hulu. I hadn’t watched it in about 10 years. Not only is it a harrowing depiction of heroin addiction, and surprisingly graphic, is was Pacino’s first leading role and the movie that convinced Coppola to cast him as Michael Corleone.
Our 14 year old daughter my wife and I watched Gigi Saturday night. Gigi won at the time a record 9 Academy Awards in 1959 and starred Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Charon.
And…it does not hold up well, it probably should have never done so. Gigi is somewhere between 15 and 18 years old and Chevalier’s Sugar King playboy is anywhere between mid twenties to late thirties. It was so cringe inducing.
I made up for it by suggesting we watch Waking Ned Devine [again] Sunday night which went over very well. Nyuk nyuk.
Oops, I mixed him up with Louis Jourdan. Jourdan plays Gaston, the Sugar King. He was 37 when he played that role.
And yes, Chevalier was 70 and his singing “Thank heaven for little girls” was excruciating. The back drop for the scene where he sings this is in a park with children running around.
I dunno, I get that the film is problematic on many levels about sexual and class politics (and similarly to one of my other favorites of the time The Apartment can never be remade), but I have a soft spot for M. Chevalier in that role. You can understand that song as “old pedo man ogles little/teen girls” or more charitably “hetero man sings about how all women start out as little/teen girls but blossom into grown, interesting, attractive women.”
All that said, I prefer his duet with Gigi’s grandmother “Ah yes, I remember it well” or his paean to life experience “I’m glad I’m not young anymore.”
I’m going to have to think about that. I mean, we’re supposed to be thinking about the blatant sexist male attitudes and exploitation of women in The Apartment, right? It’s what the movie is attacking.
Here is the issue, one’s definition of a grown woman. In Gigi both Gaston and his uncle have no problem with bedding a teenager, nor do her grandmother or great aunt.
It’s possible, if you want, to revisit so many movies from back in the day, classic movies, and call them racist or sexist or pedo. But they were made in another era, when society and the culture was different. Were some movies made back then that “knew” what they were really doing, no doubt, but it is hard to judge all of them for that.
This is all true. Having said that Gigi was based upon a novella.
Which itself was based on a real story.
However in real life, she wasn’t groomed to be a courtesan, but “merely” married a man 40 years her senior at 18 (probably being courted at a younger age). A man who was a wealthy investor, owner of Le Journal, a Parisian newspaper, and mayor of Deauville from 1925 to 1928.
So the Novella, and by extension the musical, is showing us the mores of a time that had passed. It also isn’t doing it in a “very special episode of Gigi” way. I think all that makes it even harder to judge them.
Anytime. And interesting research. I can remember watching Gigi on weekend afternoons, probably in black and white, back in the mid-60’s.
As for the Apartment, last year we saw that at a local dinner theater. I also remember seeing the movie back in the day. I loved Jack Lemmon in those old movies.
That is a pic of Gigi (played by a mid-20s Leslie Caron IIRC) in her teenager outfit, sure. And the way the song is staged in the movie is kinda gross (although the song itself in isolation can be taken the other way I mentioned).
If I’m remembering the movie right, during various scenes between Gaston and Gigi when she’s dressed like that, before her “debut” at the fancy restaurant, he doesn’t treat her as an object of lust, but as a child. However, she is being groomed to eventually be his mistress, whatever her wishes in the matter [yucky, problematic]. Clearly, Caron is playing Gigi during most of the movie as an infantilized 17 year old* or something, on the verge of adulthood, who does like Gaston (played as an idle rich dude at least 15 years her senior) but not "that way " (yet?).
Anyway, after the “debut” at the restaurant/cabaret, when the whole “crisis” happens and Gaston sings the title song of the movie, supposedly having discovered that he’s “caught feelings,” said crisis is admittedly “resolved” in a rather facile fashion by his proposal of marriage** (implicitly kinda/sorta condemning the whole system of raising a young girl of a certain class to be a rich man’s mistress). That was good enough for the audiences of the late 1950’s, but not good enough for us.
*or whatever passed for “near the age of consent” in Belle Époque Paris.
**which to me indicates that Gigi as of then is not considered underage, at least for the standards of the time. Of course back then the standards were crazy. My own great aunt on my mom’s side was married off at 17 in the late 1920s, which was not at all considered unusual or scandalous.
See, that is where I disagree (or maybe I agree?). IMO, the audiences in the 50s understand that this a tale about a previous era. I think today we expect the artist to come out and apply a non-subtle opprobrium to the previous era with different mores.
I also think that Minnelli was no slouch when it came to themes, and prefers to tell the tale, and let the audience make the judgement about the situation, rather than tell the audience what to think about it.
By the way, this topic has fascinated me enough that I am actually looking for reviews from the period, but they are proving to be non-digital or paywall-ish…
I loved Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment (they were possibly the cutest movie couple EVAR, FIGHT ME!)
@scottagibson The reason I said it couldn’t be remade is that first, how do you improve on near perfection, but also, because despite its condemnation of the culture of predatory philandering/sexual harassment, it’s hard at the beginning of the film to give C.C. Baxter a pass for his casually letting a bunch of middle-aged married dudes use his apartment for their assignations. Jack Lemmon was such a crazy charming actor that he pulls it off, but I doubt the story could be told the same way and that another actor could today.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW
Summary
The other reason is that the sexual mores of the time were that “nice girls” didn’t have sex before marriage, which leads Baxter, who has really liked Fran Kubelik throughout the movie till the moment he understands that she’s Sheldrake’s extramarital squeeze, to suddenly treat her like shit. A modern retelling couldn’t do that and have people not sour on the hero. Now he redeems himself by nursing her back to health after her attempted suicide (yet another thing that’s kind of glossed over) and finally by telling Sheldrake where he can stuff the fancy job he bribed him with (although, even that happens after Baxter accepted it, knowing what a fucking sleaze Sheldrake was).
