Category: Understanding Media and Pop Culture

“It Happened One Night” — A Tribute to this 5-Oscar Classic

Posted on November 13, 2013 at 3:59 pm

One of the most insightful people I know about movies is my friend Michal Oleszczyk, and he has written a marvelous essay  about one of my favorite movies, “It Happened One Night.”  The screwball romantic comedy about a runaway heiress and a fast-talking reporter won a Best Picture Oscar and Oscars for its stars, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and for director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin, the only five-Oscar sweep until “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Silence of the Lambs” many decades later.  Fans of the film — and those who have not seen it yet — will enjoy Oleszczyk’s witty and insightful love letter to this great film.

Pauline Kael famously said that American comedies of 1930s presented marriage and courtship as a vaudeville act, and love is indeed equaled with roleplaying throughout It Happened One Night. Peter and Ellie first click as a couple when they act out an impromptu scene to dupe the detectives sent by Ellie’s father. The entire mock-fight, taking place in a camping bungalow amidst lovingly depicted morning disarray, serves as the first instance of intimacy that’s enjoyed by both Peter and Ellie. As they impersonate conjugal strife all too plausibly (can it be that we get a glimpse into their much later married life?), they take physical pleasure in suddenly becoming a working-class bickering couple.

ithappenedonenight

The scene also includes one of the loveliest and most erotic pieces of business in the film: as soon as the detectives leave, Peter kneels before Ellie and buttons up her blouse, all the while congratulating her on the performance she just gave. He doesn’t have to look down her cleavage to signal his desire: putting on some clothes had rarely been that sexy (a point made even stronger by the fact that there’s hardly a costume change in the film – Peter and Ellie are like a pair of commedia dell’arte mimes, putting on identities even as their costumes remain the same). Even more than Dirty Dancing, It Happened One Night is a movie in which sexual bliss is signified by lovers’ harmony as performers.

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Classic Comedy Movie History Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Yes, There is More Violence in PG-13 Movies Now: Pediatricians

Posted on November 11, 2013 at 8:06 pm

Pediatrics, the journal of the pediatric professionals, has published a new study about the increase of gun violence in PG-13 movies, often more than in R movies.  It documents what parents have already figured out.

Violence in films has more than doubled since 1950, and gun violence in PG-13–rated films has more than tripled since 1985. When the PG-13 rating was introduced, these films contained about as much gun violence as G (general audiences) and PG (parental guidance suggested for young children) films. Since 2009, PG-13–rated films have contained as much or more violence as R-rated films (age 17+) films.

Even if youth do not use guns, these findings suggest that they are exposed to increasing gun violence in top-selling films. By including guns in violent scenes, film producers may be strengthening the weapons effect and providing youth with scripts for using guns. These findings are concerning because many scientific studies have shown that violent films can increase aggression. Violent films are also now easily accessible to youth (eg, on the Internet and cable). This research suggests that the presence of weapons in films might amplify the effects of violent films on aggression.

 

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

In DC: I’m Co-Hosting a Series of Pre-Code Films at the Hill Center

Posted on November 10, 2013 at 3:57 pm

I’m thrilled to announce that Margaret Talbot and I are co-hosting a steamy series of four films from the early 1930’s at Washington DC’s Hill Center, starting this Friday with Barbara Stanwyck’s “Baby Face.”

In a film and discussion series that will explore the history of sex and violence in the movies, censorship and the ratings system, we will present four gems of pre-Code cinema. For several years in the early 30s, producers, directors and screenwriters routinely flouted the moral guidelines known as the Hays Code. It wasn’t until July, 1934, when they were threatened with a nationwide boycott of the movies organized by the Catholic Church and its Legion of Decency, that the studios agreed to a stricter enforcement regime that would ensure they followed the rules. The movies that emerged from Hollywood in those first, “pre-Code” years of the 1930s are often racier, more cynical, darker and franker than movies would be for many years afterward.

In Baby Face (1933), Barbara Stanwyck literally sleeps her way to the top in the film that critic Mick LaSalle calls “lurid and black comic” and “the ultimate pre-code for pure outrageousness.” Stanwyck plays a small-town girl whose father sells her sexual services until she decides to deploy them for her own benefit. In a stunning scene, we see her take the elevator higher and higher in a big office building, seducing a man on each floor with more money and power than the one below. Look quickly — one of those men is a very, very young John Wayne. We will be showing the rare uncensored version of the film, with a steamy extra five minutes and without a tacked-on final scene — more men and less redemption.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture
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