Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson takes you on a captivating journey through the ever-evolving landscape of film. Moreover, it offers a unique and engaging perspective on the art of cinema.
Andy Nelson
Welcome to Cinema Scope. I'm Andy Nelson. Each episode we map one genre, subgenre, or film movement, what defines it, what shaped it, and what it influenced. Today, we're turning inward. We've been tracing how post-war anxiety moves through Hollywood genre by genre, from moral crisis on the Western frontier to Cold War dread externalized as invasion and mutation in science fiction. to the Urban Shadows and Fatalism of Film Noir. This episode takes that same pressure and brings it home. Literally. We're looking at post-war domestic melodrama. what Hollywood used to call the women's picture, and what some of the most formally inventive filmmakers of the era turned into a genuine mode of social critique. These films don't externalize anxiety. They trap it inside the house, inside the marriage, inside the gaze of neighbors and the weight of respectability. The threat isn't a monster or a bomb or a crime. It's the home itself Functioning as a system of control. We're going to move through 10 films chronologically, five on the main show, and five more in the extended discussion for members. Joining me is Patricia White, Centennial Chair and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, where she also coordinates the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She's the author of Uninvited, classic Hollywood cinema and lesbian representability, and a BFI classic on Rebecca. Patricia, welcome to the show.
Patricia White
Glad to be here. Thank you, Andy.
Andy Nelson
I am thrilled to have you joining me here today to talk about this period of film, these post-war domestic melodramas. as Hollywood kind of pejoratively used to call women's pictures.
Patricia White
Yeah
Andy Nelson
Before we really kick in and and dig into all of this, I'd love to know like what is your history with this cycle or what kind of draws you to it?
Patricia White
Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, I've always been a fan of what I didn't know was called the women's picture. And that was A bit anachronistic because it's my mother's generation of movies, but I loved Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. I loved Joan Fontaine. So I loved certain movies that were in circulation on broadcast TV, you know, probably terrible prints on weird channels. And I always r was drawn to those. And then I was fortunate enough to go to college at the moment of sort of the rediscovery of the woman's picture. So I was instantly uh drawn to the classes that represented my overlapping interests. So I took women's studies and I took film studies. And the women's studies that I was looking at was not really taking these works seriously because so many of them are very much about what you can do with women's powerlessness, right? Which is a lot, it turns out. But the film classes were really highlighting the sort of explosion of interest in the melodrama, I'd say, as almost an overarching category for Hollywood film, right? I mean, almost all classical Hollywood is drama told through music as well as other things, but the melos, you know, was pretty heavy duty, like really heavily romantic. music scores telling you what to feel in pretty much any mode of filmmaking. And then the newspapers called many things melodramas that, you know, we today would not call melodramas. Oh, this is a crime melodrama, this is a whatever. But what was happening in the scholarship, and it was this was really, I think, the heyday of film studies kind of coming into the academy and saying, let's take previously kind of low culture forms, seriously. And that was the movies in general, maybe in the seventies, but by the eighties that was the trivialized movies like the woman's picture, right? So now while some women's pictures like Gone with the wind, you know, have the respect of multiple Oscars and, you know, huge box office. A lot of the films that were being kind of taken up And this is by both male critics who were really auteurist and kind of mise enoriented, and an emerging feminist cadre of critics who were interested in, say, the source material or the stars or the actual history of what was happening around gender in the forties and fifties, and most of these critics were either British or American. So in those countries, they were all kind of converging around a reevaluation of melodrama and thinking of it as maybe one of the ways that Hollywood did what it did best, which is take kind of a small scale, and if you think of like that square, which is the screen, and think of it as like a window into like a domestic space and tell a story in a really condensed period of time. Fortunately, most movies then were shorter than they now. In a pretty bounded space. and that was about characters and that were about characters who were iconic in some way because they were played by stars, so they had baggage of what the star brought. All of that kind of focused energy. and sort of intensity kind of was there in the melodrama. And that just was like a field day for critics. So I was super excited to take a melodrama class that spanned, you know, whatever, D. W. Griffith, of course, to contemporary soap operas. And there still were a lot of daytime soap operas in the seventies. And some of them I'm thinking of like Barbara Rush. Some of them had actors in them who had played in 40s and 50s women's pictures, right?
Andy Nelson
Oh, gotcha.
Patricia White
There's less real continuity of a storytelling form
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah
Patricia White
that had always been sort of aimed at women, but periodically tried to be kind of lifted up into sort of general interest, kind of the general interest in the post war period, we'll get into it like by the fifties was like sex or, you know, secrets. or would, you know, would get lifted up into general interest because, oh my God, Jean-Luc Godard thinks that Nicholas Ray is an axiom of the cinema, is cinema
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
they would periodically be lifted up as something that was worthy of study. And that tension between their popularity and their kind of Triviality or lowbrow status, but also kind of well-knownness, like you could kind of say Stella Dallas, and you'd you know know
Andy Nelson
Yeah, but yeah.
Patricia White
That that meant maternal sacrifice and that that, you know, had some significance even for like the women's movement, that there was some intensity there and that had this kind of critical attention that was pretty avid. That was just very intoxicating, right? You could love these movies on the emotional level. you could expand on them on the intellectual level. So that's I guess what we're gonna do today.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is going to be a great conversation. I'm looking forward to digging into this. Just so people know, we're going to be moving chronologically through 10 films. some on the main show and then we're going to save five for the members. The films we're looking at from 1945, Mildred Pierce. Also 1945, Leave Her to Heaven, 1949, The Reckless Moment, 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful, 1955, All That Heaven Allows. 1956, Written on the Wind, also 1956, Bigger Than Life, 1959, Imitation of Life, 1960, Home from the Hill, and 1961, The Children's Hour. If you'd like to access the member content, you can join for $5 a month or $55 a year. Just head to trustory.fm slash join. That's T-R-U-S-T-O-R-Y. fm slash join to learn more. Before we really dig in, I want to kind of like macroscopically just figure out like why is this important to talk about? And To get us there, before before we do that, I really want to figure out and talk to you about the distinction between drama and melodrama and why they operate differently. I found this quote from Sidney Lumet in Making Movies, his book, that says In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. And then he also went on to say, melodrama is a much maligned genre. I always think of melodrama as the thing we are all capable of that's swept under the rug. So there's a lot, I think, in there as to what he's saying about the emotion. And I don't know. Is it at the expense of realism? Uh like what are we looking at when we say drama, melodrama?
Patricia White
Yeah, that's an interesting distinction. And, you know, I'll go back to saying that the mellos in the drama, the music, is sort of generally speaking pervasive, it's cueing feeling and so emotion which can have a lot of realism in it, is predominating over sort of, you know, drama in the sense of like an Aristotelian drama of, you know, there's gonna be a tragedy and a downfall, or even like a crime drama in which it's driven by plot, right You're entering a space in which, and I'll generalize the melos, the music, to all the expressive elements of cinema. that are included in like mise en scène. So, you know, the decor, the the blocking, the costumes, the jewelry, the Things that again, as Lumet said, you kind of want to pretend aren't important, but you cannot sweep them under the rug because they are so determinative of how you're responding So drama, you know, maybe characters, I I'm not recalling the quote specifically.
Andy Nelson
The in drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.
Patricia White
Right. And so those characters are pre-given. I mean, it's not like Commedia del Arte in that way, that there's like there are like there's the victim, there's the villain. if you go back to real, you know, silent melodrama or stage melodrama, there's an instant recognizability to the character and it's not about their interiority, even though it might be about their emotion. It's like it's not about their like, you know, psychological problems, although All of these films are perva that we're gonna talk about are pervaded by pop psychology, Freudian psychology as it entered, you know, the US big time in this period. They're representing emotional states or they're representing iconic positions like the mother, the father, you know. the social outcast, the juvenile delinquent. So the character, the drama determines the characters in the sense that The they don't really have control over their fate, right? And that's kind of what we're getting into. We're getting into this kind of witnessing of chance, coincidence. uh sometimes pretty major action, even though we're looking at mostly domestic melodramas that are that are confined spatially, and that these things are were more witnesses to what happens to these characters than like getting inside their heads and figuring out like what we would do if we were them. We're so it's almost like we're like watching the whole thing like right.
Andy Nelson
Right.
Patricia White
So we're all capable of it if that's what Lumet said. Indeed the common sense version of melodrama is like overacting or exaggerating or reliance on coincidence or the last minute rescue or the, you know, arriving too late, all of those things. They have their as I said before, emotional realism insofar as the sense of helplessness or righteousness. that many of these characters feel are really kind of primal reasons for like engaging in you know, spectatorship, but any kind of entertainment. We want to see these archetypal characters and events. So yeah. And then It is maligned and it's maligned because it's associated with with women and with the powerless. And that I think is the other big insight, which is that Stories about the powerless are universal because we really don't have power over our fates. And so if we could destigmatize that association, then like the female character or the sort of racially marginalized character, uh that we might see in like later melodramas that or social problem films. Those are situations that uh socially are not unrealistic, but that were kind of making the position universal. And it's not something we want to do. We don't want to say we're, you know, we're victims
Andy Nelson
Right. And I think that's interesting because I uh the way I'm I'm hearing that is that they're like they each have their place. Drama can do some things that melodrama can't. But melodrama can do some things that drama can't. And looking at the excess and the feelings like that that come spilling out, right? Like the internal of of those stories. And I think that's It's very important and I think there's absolutely a place for it.
Patricia White
In the dark, especially
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, and in the dark, and and I wanted to bring this up too, because I think just d talking about the importance of this, especially as we're looking at post-war domestic melodramas, I I I think that there's definitely a conversation to be had about that connection to Film Noir, which is, you know, I just talked about that last month. and how there's a lot of the same underlying pressures in these stories. Th there's also a sense that desire is dangerous, right? We we see a lot of it. And the first few films we're gonna be talking about definitely are overlapping those two genres.
Patricia White
Absolutely.
Andy Nelson
I want to move into the origins and I want to kind of uh talk about like where where all of this starts, right? Uh you mentioned earlier things like Stella Dallas and and films that were earlier that are certainly what we would call the domestic melodrama, but W at what point does it become post-war domestic melodrama? And like it didn't just start in 1945 with Mildred Pierce. Like there's roots that we're going to be looking at. And so I'm curious about you know, with the domestic melodramas that had already been established in the thirties and forties and even earlier, going as you said, all the way back to to the silent era, absolutely.
Patricia White
Silent era, yeah. Or to the nineteenth century, if you read stage
Andy Nelson
Yeah, stage novels. I think there's a lot of places where we're getting a lot of these types of stories. How did Hollywood tap into what the audience wanted to start developing these stories?
Patricia White
I think the designation post-war is really important. You know, I think we went back and forth a little bit. Does that mean 50s or 40s?
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
And I really like that we hit forty five, um, which is you know, the the moment, the end of the war. So the women's picture, I think in the scholarship at least, is considered to be already very dominant in the nineteen thirties and then in the forties to answer your question about why the industry was, you know, so hot to to to go there was because the audience was predominantly female during the war because men were at least perceived to be overseas fighting the war So the upswing in films aimed y shamelessly at women's audiences and starring female stars who were not necessarily like glamorously beautiful, like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford was in part an economic decision. And a lot of those nineteen forties films aimed at the domestic audience in the sense of you know, not abroad, uh, because those women were in in fact not particularly domestic during that time. They're working in war plants, right? the films that were aimed at them tended to be even more about the fe the central female character and the paradoxes as I kind of mentioned before of her passivity and powerlessness, even as she's commanding this, you know, incredible emotional, you know, I'm thinking of like Bette Davis pretending that she can see even though she's going blind in order so that her that her husband doesn't know in Dark Victory. Even a title like Dark Victory, it's like the the things that are held in tension there are crazy. So I absolutely adore 1940s melodramas and I do think that they were more directed towards women's audiences. So what we see in this shift to this post war is a sense of both did we empower women too much by moving them into the workforce? And that's both white women in the war industry and black women maybe moving them into uh the war effort because they're already in the workforce. Did we empower them too much and now we have to teach them some lessons? And we'll teach them the lessons in these melodrama, you know, these very paradoxical dark victories that are happening always in these films where like the woman is like done all this stuff and then she's like, Oh, I all I really wanted was to get married to this guy at the end.
Andy Nelson
That's right.
Patricia White
You know, and you're like, okay, right.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, that redomestication I think is such an interesting part of all of this.
Patricia White
It absolutely.
Andy Nelson
You know, uh we're thanks for your help. Now now go back to the house. Right.
Patricia White
Exactly. And so the shift really has tensions at this point. And that's when in the scholarship, they started being called family melodramas or as we get into the fifties, you know, they're about Eisenhower America and the contradictions of the family under uh post-war capitalism and social conformity, um, moving to the suburbs, you know, having this life with the the the car and the picture window where everyone could, you know, look into your home as if it were a movie screen and probably see your television in there. Travel All of the sort of spectacular elements that we start to see, technicolor, widescreen, exotic locations really amping up. domestic decor. I'm sorry, just I am a field geek. So I have to say that during the thirties, when there was a depression, we also have an amping up of domestic decor, like with this incredible art deco. interiors that like no one could afford, but that's why you went to the movies because you saw them there.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
So you have this shift towards an audience that's understood to be you know, maybe led by the decision of the woman who picked the movie, but not exclusively female. And the protagonists are by no means in the set of films that we're gonna look at, like The Soldiering On Woman. There's all kinds of pathologies that ha that come up in the family. So we have these paternal pathologies. We have the problem of like, you know, youth. that's gonna go astray. And we have all this popular sociology coming out, like organization man, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, this book called Generation of Vipers that blames moms for the sapping of the energy of the American male. Like these books are being read by the screenwriters and they're kind of popping up in some of the pop psychology. So it's a really troubled period in terms of, you know, what messages we want from, you know, what the American family should be. And it's also a troubled period, as, you know, any film historian will say in terms of the studio system, right? So we start out with movies you know, made during a year when everyone's going to the movies, like nineteen forty six, and we end up in nineteen sixty one where we're like, oh my God, I think we're gonna have to do something. We've already had The divestment of the studios of their movie theaters, but we're also gonna finally have to do something about this production code and let something more adult come into into the movies because we have like, you know, a Supreme Court decision about the movie should actually be treated as protected speech and be able to So we there's a lot going on and there's a lot of like contradiction and that happens in the movies, each of these movies too.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, just other things that I've been thinking about, like I think The women coming home, but also there's just a boom of suburbs, right, of the whole space with the GI Bill and looking at places like Levittown, which is kind of like the cookie cutter
Patricia White
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andy Nelson
style that we'll kind of see as these homes become like the American dream. And also we're looking at the kind of that whole ideology of containment with the fear of communism and everything that's been going And uh and starting to do more policing with gender and sexuality and normalcy, we'll just put in quotes.
Patricia White
Yeah, very much so
Andy Nelson
Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff with all of this. And then as you as you mentioned, like TV is is kicking off and we're starting.
Patricia White
Speaking of containment, like taking this big widescreen thing, you know, and at least two of these movies have like two of the best television takedowns.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, oh I know. W yeah, one of the most iconic TV shots in film is in one of these films. Absolutely.
Patricia White
And two of them actually in I think both bigger than life, maybe that's bonus content.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
Um, and all that heaven allows have like the best TV scenes.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and uh we'll be right back. So one thing I like to talk about is like where these things fit in the cinematic family tree. This kind of fits the i I don't know. I well I guess I'm curious, where do you stand with this? Are we calling this a genre, a subgenre, a cycle? a mood like what is the post-war domestic melodrama? Let's start there.
Patricia White
I think l like I'm gonna, you know, be a scholar for a minute and you know say that there's so much debate about melodrama, and no, it's not a genre. So melodrama is a mode. I mean we've already kind of talked about like it's a it's a it's a mode of uh storytelling that happens through things other than the drama itself, right? It's not it's it's less about the script and more about the affective, expressive elements. But I would say that there's a cycle. I don't know that the ten films that we are going to talk about are all sort of in the same cycle. But I do think, and this might be again the influence of auteurist critics on me, But the idea of a sort of family melodrama or domestic melodrama that's distinctively post-war that includes Technicolor films by Nick Ray, Vincente Minnelli, and most notably Douglas Sirk. is a cycle. I mean there's definitely a sense in an economic way that people are at studio folks are saying this is working, let's do more of it. And that's a cycle. So I I think I would put it there
Andy Nelson
Yeah. I I think you could almost see like the different genres that we're tapping into in that mode or the cycle. Like there's a maternal melodrama with things like Mildred Pierce and imitation of life, suburban containment stories, masculine domestic crisis in a couple of our stories.
Patricia White
Yeah, male weepies.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, right.
Patricia White
Yeah, male melodramas.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah
Andy Nelson
Um some gothic desire, coded desire we certainly are gonna talk about. Um we also have an industry melodrama which will be an interesting one to throw into the mix. So I I think that it's it's certainly fascinating How would you say that it evolved over this period of time? Because I mean, obviously what we're looking at does kind of come to an end, like right about the children's hour, w our last film we're talking about, 1961, where things kind of shift into more of a uh a look at kind of like social issues and become like the social issues film. So from like the beginning of like the post-war cycle to the end, like do you see an evolution?
Patricia White
Amongst the films that we're going to talk about, yes, I think we go from from some of the traditional women's picture concerns to yeah, bigger s bigger canvas, both literally in terms of widescreen and like these kind of social problem things. And the sixties are gonna kind of I think the children's hour the social problems that Children's Hour represents started in the 40s too, right? So those are all so so in some ways I wouldn't use that as an endpoint. We have late films like Home from the Hill. And I guess we have a lot of just carryover into television. Um so there's not really an end to the domestic melodrama. Some of these, you know, like Peyton Place, which was on our original list, becomes, you know, one of the most important. So, you know
Andy Nelson
Boy, did that go on forever.
Patricia White
Yeah, in in the sixties.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah.
Patricia White
Precisely the sixties. But we do have a sense that old Hollywood is kind of dead by, you know, w you have sound of music in nineteen sixty four like, you know But then you have Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. So you have a sense that these are kind of dying with old Hollywood. So like late melodrama is kind of like late noir where there's just these internal things showing up and becoming more and more out of control. Kind of preparing the ground for some for the upsurge that will be new Hollywood. And we also have, we don't need the coded sex. Of the domestic melodramas when we get a serious influx of foreign films, which is happening during this period, and there's explicit sex in those. I guess cinema appreciation is also happening around that time. So you start to get, you know, Cahiers du cinéma like discovering all these auteurs, that getting translated into the US. the look for like, you know, new directors. So I guess there's just a like long transition period from, you know, the sort of mid fifties to the mid sixties where some of the juiciest, weirdest movies are made, not only in domestic melodramas, but noir, etc.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
So yeah, why is the need for it over? I think a lot of things. Like we I mean, and we're like high and Red Scare. You know, we have a film like Johnny Guitar that's not on our list because it's a Western, but it's also
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Oh yeah and I did yeah, I did talk about that in my postwar Westerns conversation.
Patricia White
Okay, great.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, so yeah.
Patricia White
Because yeah, so you so you have, you know, and that's Nick Ray and it's kind of resembling in some ways the same. I mean, there was the the desire problem and the decor kind of taking over. So you have, I guess the question is, is there an evolution, maybe devolution, into yeah.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, and I I think that's kind of like how I look at it because I mean in the beginning it definitely feels like very noir-ish. Like we're seeing a lot of the the kind of the darkness and And uh really kind of that post-war readjustment and everybody's kind of like this more this more psychological dread sort of weighing into those. And then it kind of explodes, as you already said, with this the cinema scope and the technicolor and just the beautiful widescreen interiors that we're getting and and the outfits and everything. And then it seems like with the collapse of the the production code and how we start seeing it cracking and everything I don't know, I guess the way that I would look at it is there's kind of a mutation of the post war specifically the post war domestic melodrama. that kind of shifts into more social problem films, the new Hollywood, and specifically the TV soap operas. I think that's really uh kind of where we end up seeing it go.
Patricia White
Yeah. And I think the TV soaps that are on screen, like if you think even of the like ways that I don't know the other like the Rock Hudson Doris day comedy, you know, sex comedies. You know, there's an adjacency to that kind of TV ready, banter oriented. And, you know, you I mean you have like Peyton Place. Like some of them are made in the sixties of these The the yeah, the end game.
Andy Nelson
Plus Douglas Sirk leaves.
Patricia White
Yeah.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, and and you know maybe that maybe we'll just call that the real marker of the end of all this
Patricia White
I think, yeah, I think the funeral at the end of of Imitation of Life kind of is probably, you know, in some ways, yeah, the death knell of a certain kind of Hollywood both sophistication and profligacy in terms of emotion and and a certain kind of production value spending, um, and it's a good place to good good place to end.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Right, right. Very very fitting. All right. Well before we get into the films, just a quick note again for listeners who want to go deeper. The conversation you're going to be hearing today is the public episode. Five films, a full exploration of the cycle. But Patricia and I are actually discussing ten films total. The five you won't hear today, Leave Her to Heaven, The Bad and the Beautiful, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life, and The Children's Hour. are part of the extended member discussion. And honestly, they're going to be rich conversations. So if you want to access those and uh every other member bonus episode, you can join for five dollars a month or fifty five dollars a year at true story dot fm slash join. Check it out. We'll be right back. Alright, you ready to start digging into some of these movies?
Patricia White
Yes
Andy Nelson
All right, we're gonna start with Mildred Pierce from nineteen forty five, directed by Michael Curtiz. Mildred Pierce is a divorcee who builds an a successful restaurant business from nothing to provide for her daughters, particularly her cold, ambitious daughter, Veda. The film frames her story as a noir mystery opening with a murder and a police interrogation before flashing back to show how Mildred got there. This is uh we're kind of looking at this as kind of a uh the origin point for our conversation. We've got maternal ambition, we've got class aspiration. the home as kind of an economy. Everything here that we're talking about is all wrapped in this noir of a woman put on trial essentially from the first frame of the movie. And I think that's a great place to start is this noir rapper for this that we're looking at, right? There's a flashback. We've got this murder mystery going on. She's a suspect before we even know her story. And Joan Crawford. I mean, come on, she's she is such a star in this in this movie and uh you know, having talked about her in sudden fear in the Noir conversation
Patricia White
Whoa, yeah.
Andy Nelson
last time. I mean she's she's a powerhouse of a performer and this was kind of a reinvention for her because she'd kind of been written off by Hollywood up to this point, right?
Patricia White
Yeah, no, this was she everything was riding on this film for her. So yeah, so Warner Brothers film, so you know, black and white made with the uh kind of uh tightness of the reins around like, you know, how it's gonna look. It's not it's not the the lavishness of the other things that we're gonna see. And that wraparound is an add-on, right? It's an add-on to both the James M. Cain novel, which comes out in the 30s, and is about the depression. And the movie feels like a depression era there's a Depression era ethos in it and Joan Crawford starred in so many of those Depression era women's pictures. So there's this kind of interesting throwback to that. But the s first script for the film followed, you know, the book. And th they were sent back to put this kind of noir wrap-around on it. It's, you know, sort of a self indulgent thing for me to say. Uh but I do want to say that there are noirish elements in women's pictures. from the beginning of the 40s and I would start with Rebecca there.
Andy Nelson
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Patricia White
So yeah, so there's a whole cycle of, you know, the way they're lit, some of the themes.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
are kind of infiltrating women's pictures proper and there's I guess crime in that but this one turning it into like, you know, we have the crime investigation paralleling the story and we get flashbacks narrated but not fully by Mildred Pierce telling the story makes this like, you know very firmly at least passed off as a film noir.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
So that so one of the big contradictions is that film noirs don't generally even go into people's houses. Like they go into their apartments You know.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
Um, they're, you know, special like, you know, whatever, LA bungalows, like domesticity and domestic roles are usually excluded from the noir world, which is a nighttime world. So Mildred Pierce is a, you know, in many many parts of it very much a daytime film. So how does that work? Well, that's, you know, catnip for the feminist critic, right? Because you're like you said it, you know, what is her crime? And her crime, you know, is loving her daughter too much. Um, she has two daughters. one of whom is a, you know, tomboy actually, you know, good-natured kid who conveniently dies, so that the exclusive relationship between Mildred Pierce and her walked off the set of a film noir daughter, Veda, can be um really at the focus of the script. So there's some continuity there between like sort of the overcloseness of Stella Dallas and her daughter that's so, you know, overpowering that she has to send her daughter away because her class background presents issues for her daughter's a capacity to rise socially, which again is a thirties. depression era narrative. So what do we do in this moment of so I think it's important that Mildred Pierce is kind of sh sh shot during the war. Like it is a wartime film. It's legitimately like, you know, let's make a women's picture, maternal melodrama. but it doesn't get released until, you know, people are coming back. So what what should that look like? Uh and its relationship to the war is very strange. Like there's mo references to not having stockings or, you know, the man short the the man shortage w you know, which leaves us with all of these CADs and losers that are, you know, make it impossible for
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, the so all the labor, all the decision making, all of the earning, all of the screen time really is is for the women. So it's very contradictory that way.
Andy Nelson
Well and there's an interesting element with Mildred also that I I think, you know, this again is post-war and she's She's a worker. She's a businesswoman. She starts up her own business. And it frame the film frames it as something that she's a s she's a success. It's an achievement. But also it feels like there's a little bit of a transgression. Uh the way that the the you know Veda sees it, it's like you're not giving me what I need. You need to be married to somebody who has all this money, and like that's the only way that you can actually have really provided for me.
Patricia White
Yeah, we're getting a really like punishing for her career ambition. So you can't both be a mother and a career woman. And And your maternity and that that is the book that I referenced before, Generation of Vipers, I think is really um important here because there is a pathologizing of Mildred's affection for Veda and her ambitions for her. So and the daughter has a weird notion of class, so she's uh very um you know her mother smells of grease her mother's business is not you know cosmetics which is like where some of the earliest women entrepreneurs both black and white kind of made their their their fortunes. It's domestic. It's cooking fried chicken. Um chicken and waffles joints all up and down the coast when they're you the the the the neon is great. And You mentioned the cookie cutter homes. You know, they her husband originally was kind of a real estate guy. He's not very effective. They first ref restaurant that Mildred takes over is in a model home, right? Or or I at least in the book it is. I don't know how explicit it is, but it's like the idea that these that there's a kind of you know, what we call it the second shift, like women who work and then, you know, go home and still work. This is also women who cook and then go to work and still cook. So Mildred's Mildred isn't sufficiently consumerist. Um and her daughter wants um the magic of postwar consumerism where you don't see the labor to happen. And you mentioned Joan Crawford. Uh she did win the Oscar for it. She, you know, kind of was so worried she wouldn't that she didn't like go, so she had to get it deli it you know, very drama there
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
But you know, she's a she you must have said this in sudden fear. Like she is not the subtlest actress
Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah
Patricia White
and uh a a critic who writes about fashion and how important fashion is in women's pictures and in these domestic melodramas, um, talks about the sort of first introduction to Mildred where she's wearing this enormous fur coat with these enormous shoulder pads that has such a tactility to it that she's like, you know, the the coat is where the feeling is. Like you can the tactility of the coat is the feeling because Mildred's face, Joan Crawford's face is like, you know, blank.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
Uh that's kind of an aside, but I think it's her performance and the kind of, you know, it becomes for us retroactively such an important film because of the revelations around Joan Crawford's own parenting, um, and the way that she's played in Mommy Dearest by Faye Dunaway that just show her as being kind of a monstrous mother. So I think the film is very sympathetic to Mildred and to go back to the fact that she does get to narrate her own story. I mean it starts I feels like I was born in a kitchen, right? That's a funny thing to say to the detective investigating the murder of your, you know, no good second husband, right So the the film is in is goes back and forth between putting us in this place where we are deeply empathic with Mildred and her female friendship. and also sort of judging of her excesses and and bad decisions. I mean like, don't marry that Monty eye, you know
Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah. Right. Some c some clear signs.
Patricia White
Maybe don't wear that swimsuit. I mean swim cap.
Andy Nelson
Well, okay, so how with with the way f fitting into like this post-war domestic melodrama mode, how do you view the ending? Do you view that it it punishes her or does it return her to like
Patricia White
Yeah
Andy Nelson
Is it a defeated freedom, like w or all of it?
Patricia White
I don't think she's free. You know, I'll I'll mention race, uh, which is v pretty underground. I mean, and it's a kind of you know, paradoxical that like, you know, Walter White and the campaign to make Hollywood to part of the NAACP to make Hollywood, you know, not have such stereotypical representations of African Americans based on their contributions to the war has the ironic effect of, you know, basically having no black people in many of these movies. But so I'm I'm circling back to your question about the end, which is that we have her literally kind of walking into the dawn remarried to a man that she seems to have very little affinity with, or, you know, getting back with her first husband, and women, white women, cleaning the floor of the courthouse. So we have this like No, I don't I think she's free in relationship to s her class, maybe, even though she might have lost all her money too, and is returned to kind of a domesticity Vita is Vita's exit is my favorite where she says, you know, don't worry, I'll get by. She's off to women's prison. So like that I want to see that movie. Um But there are some tensions in the movie between working women and working class women um around race. And so Butterfly McQueen, who's unforgettable anytime she's on screen is sort of hired to, you know, help Mildred and at certain points feels like they could do some of this work together, but at Veda's insistence, you know Butterfly McQueen becomes a status symbol, becomes a kind of reinscription of hierarchies of what kinds of acceptable womanhood there is during this period. So the ending of the film, you know, by reminding us that there are working women, these women scrubbing, and maybe perhaps even reminding us of other working women of color, et cetera, et cetera, or has a contradiction, but I think it's definitely, I feel like it's Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape who calls it like the step down, you know, the last five minutes of the woman's picture where like everything we've seen is erased, but it's also easy to forget it kind of. I mean it's easy to remember the eighty-five minutes before.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that's that's true. Let's shift to our next film, The Reckless Moment, uh, nineteen forty nine, directed by Max Ophüls. This film takes the domestic space and strips away almost everything else. No murder mystery frame, no gothic excess, just a woman, a house, and everything she has to do to hold it together. Uh Lucia Harper is a suburban housewife in California whose teenage daughter becomes entangled with a shady older man. When the man turns up dead, Lucia covers it up to protect her daughter, and then finds herself being blackmailed. Her husband is away on business. She has to handle it all on her own. I don't know, is this the most precise portrait of domestic competence as entrapment? Like we have her like
Patricia White
Well, yeah, good question. I think it's almost explicit in the movie. Um, I mean, I I would say there is this crime plot, right?
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
And and leave it to the exceedingly charming blackmailer played by James Mason to tell her you were a prisoner of your family. Can't you get away for one moment? So this is the mother who can't like go to town to try to get the blackmail money because uh people would think it was weird that she used the car twice in in the same week. This is the woman who can't tell her husband anything because everyone crowds around the phone when he makes And of course he's absent in a very again sort of a little bit referencing the war, but also kind of explicitly saying, you know, that the paternal power that, you know, the postwar period is really gonna try to restore is highly in doubt. Like, yeah, he's a successful businessman, but she has to both, you know, pick up the groceries and lift a whatever, f dead body into an outboard motor and drive it into a swamp and dispose of it and just really hope she hasn't left her grocery list in the you know, with the corpse.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right.
Patricia White
She's so relieved when she finds it in the pocket of her mink later. So I love this movie and I'll just do a shout out to to Todd Haynes. who in his movie Far from Heaven and we've already had Leave Her to Heaven and we're coming up on
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
All That Heaven Allows.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
So you know he's thinking about this set of films really draws heavily on the Reckless Moment as well as All That Heaven Allows, which is much better known. And, you know, incidentally, he too uh he also remade Mildred Pierce for HBO in a non-noir version, but that's also just as, you know
Andy Nelson
Right, yeah.
Patricia White
It's all edible issues, issues around sexuality within the family. So yeah, so this is about can the mom have desire? And I feel like with the reckless moment, so I love it because uh Haynes loves it and I think the reasons that we both love it are similar is that it is about female fantasy. It is about like what if this horrible life that I have that's perfect. You know, I have beautiful children and I ha they live in a again, they live in a very cool place and I'm I I'm really emphasizing that these films are about showing like new lifestyles to this like little, you know, island near Los Angeles that what if what if this, you know, sexy Irish m you know, blackmailer came into my life and really recognized my true worth as a woman. So it's like this little idol that that happens and of course it ends badly all around But the second reason being that this is told by Max Ofel. So the noir elements of this film yes, blackmail crime, are in the cinematography. You know, there's a lot of location shooting. There's a lot of really incredible lighting. that leads us to the um this woman is a prisoner of her of domesticity, of her role of the middle class white woman who is sort of both idealized and shown to be abjectly miserable. Like this she we have this overhead shot of her just sobbing on her bed. Um and then like having to like perk up to talk to her husband on the phone and, you know, give him the banal details of their day. Um so the just the the way the camera is handled and Ofel's
Andy Nelson
Well known for his camera, yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, especially for the mobile camera. So the mobility of the camera in relationship to the entrapment of the heroine is extremely poignant for and it's just it it it plays so effectively You know, I was like, Leave Her to Heaven is like a hallucination and this is like this kind of different kind of fever dream, just very compact, very like, did that really happen? You know? It's all washed away, like somehow the you know, the bodies of these men that die are kind of Yeah.
Andy Nelson
Ever yeah.
Patricia White
And she just
Andy Nelson
So they can just you know check it off, right.
Patricia White
Yeah. Goes away because she's she's not going to she she w would be believed because she's this white woman And then her kind of companion, who's the woman who her husband's gone, but this black she's a live in black maid, Sybil, who, you know, like Butterfly McQueen There there are some m cringe worthy moments of, you know, she calls her Mrs. I can't remember her name at the moment. But they like drive in a car together to kind of like catch the blackmailer and you have this sense of well, what if there were some kind of relationship between these women where they could kind of talk about like labor and possibilities and like what the hell's happening and changing in nineteen forty nine in the US and it It's just you feel it and you feel it from this I was gonna say, is this the first of our exile directors? And it isn't because Cortiz was also, you know, yeah.
Andy Nelson
Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah.
Patricia White
But I feel with OFLs you really get a uh what people will argue is a kind of European take on the promise of post-war America, which is that it ain't all that promising for many
Andy Nelson
I I wanna go back to go like just talking about the absent husband because I think that's such a fascinating element of this story because it really is this uh in some ways it kind of plays as this structural joke, right? Like like she's like that's part of the trap, right? She's She's enabled, she's she her competence is enabled because he's gone, but also everything that she do ha she does has to fit into the structure that he and hence like society and everything represents.
Patricia White
Let's call it patriarchy, yeah.
Andy Nelson
And so she's Yeah, right. She's managing all of this for somebody who's not even there. And I think that's a fascinating element of the story. And and when James Mason kind of steps in uh loosely for that. It's like he in some ways she wants him to fit, but but knows also that that's just not something that can actually happen. Especially I mean he's like this working class criminal. Yeah.
Patricia White
We don't know what his partner has on him that keeps him in that, you know, shitty business.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah
Patricia White
And that's why I think it's this kind of like, you know, daydream kind of whatever of like what if it wasn't you know, I hate to use again the the this theory term, but the paternal signifier, like it is, he's not, there is no real, you know, husband. 'cause he's not shown on screen, and that her desire should end, you know, when she's a mother. And I mean and and Mildred Pierce is highly transactional. Like she does get to like first fall in love with her um with Monty. Um and that that's sexual but much but that quickly becomes her writing him checks or proposing marriage to him so that, you know, she could have
Andy Nelson
Just yeah.
Patricia White
an aristocratic last name, like very, very transactional. So that the problem of women's sexual desire um after marriage and which Leave Her to Heaven is all about. Like she's always desirous that the movie really does say the absence patriarchy is the determinative factor and that again, I think is reflected in the way the noir shadows in the house, you know, we've got bars from the staircase, you know, ref uh keeping her in prison, we have doors that are being, you know, shut on her uh you know, on, you know, certain aspects of their life. her f her own father lives in the house and he's emasculated to a certain extent and her son is you know always half dressed. So you know, there's something about his incomplete masculinity. And so yeah, this idea that there is a m masculine competence somewhere that could reflect Joan Bennett's is, you know, undermined everywhere you look, uh or or killed off in the case of Mason.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, it's uh uh Foster Hirsch, who is my guest for the Noir episode last month. He had grouped this film in in a group of noirs that he says where ordinary women are suddenly invaded by crisis. And I think that's an interesting way to
Patricia White
Yeah.
Andy Nelson
to look at this because it does this uh you know these first three films that we're talking about really do tie in nicely with the melodrama and the noir, right?
Patricia White
Noir absolutely.
Andy Nelson
And I think we're getting a lot of that here.
Patricia White
We are
Andy Nelson
All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Andy Nelson
All right, uh, we're going to uh move to uh all that heaven allows. This is a big one. 1955, Douglas Sirk. We've moved through the cycle's first decade from the immediate post-war years into the early 50s, and now we hit the filmmaker who more than anyone else define what this cycle looks like at its peak. Cary Scott is a comfortable, widowed suburban woman who falls in love with Ron Kirby, her younger gardener. Her children disapprove. Her friends gossip. Her community makes clear that a relationship with someone of his social standing is unacceptable The film is about whether she'll choose her own desire or the approval of everyone around her and what either choice costs. This uh cycle's most th really it's the most formally complete statement. of this cycle, I think. You know, Sirk using Technicolor not as glamour, but really kind of as an argument. And I I'm gonna say like Technicolor in a way you don't you don't see often. I mean it's just exploding off of the screen in every frame. And it's so fascinating because you have beautiful surfaces everywhere, but they all feel suffocating And you have this community as this entity that is really kind of like their gaze is the real antagonist of your story here. I mean it's just this is a powerful film with Sirk coding emotion into the image more than the dialogue, I'd even say. And I I think that's such a fascinating element of Douglas Sirk throughout the films that he would make.
Patricia White
And I and I heard coating, C O A T I N G, but I think it's that too. It's there's this coding over it, which is like he's like, I used widescreen lenses and they made it seem hot. They make the surface seem hard and brittle like they have a coating over them, you know?
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah, right.
Patricia White
Yeah. I'm just gonna read a line from Tales of Sound and Fury Observations on the Family Melodrama by Thomas Elsaesser in 1972, which is the most like or text of kind of thinking of this as a j as a cycle.
Andy Nelson
Sure yep.
Patricia White
He talks about the justification for giving critical importance to mise en scène over intellectual content or story value in these films. And then he says It is also the reason, I don't know what the it refers to exactly, but oh, back to your original question. The what drama that this is not a drama, this is a melodrama. Like speech doesn't matter. What people say does not matter, right?
Andy Nelson
Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
Patricia White
So This is a justification for giving critical importance to Mise Encine. It's also the reason why the domestic melodrama in color and widescreen, as it appeared in the forties and fifties is perhaps the most highly elaborated, complex mode of cinematic signification that the American cinema has ever produced. because of the restricted scope for external action determined by the subject. And because everything, as Douglas Sirk said, happens quote unquote inside. So I just wanted to get that quote in because And actually there I would give another quote about this film before we get into my response to the wonderful way you framed it. But it's Rainer Werner Fassbinder saying what he loves about Sirk's films. And he says, I love them because in Sirk's films, women think. you have the sense in all that heaven allows that Cary, the Jane Wyman character, um thinks.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
And th those two things kind of seem well, I guess it's happening inside.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah, right.
Patricia White
But um yeah, so So this of all the films probably has one of I haven't totally researched it, but has one of the least literary source material. Like it's a it's a women's magazine story, right? And and so there's the sense that these movies look like and they look like women's magazines. that they tell stories that you might find in women's magazines like, oh my god, my daughter was involved with this guy and I and then I got blackmailed and he was sexy. Whatever. And this one is Rock Hudson is trimming my trees And for some reason wants to sweep me away from my absolutely impossible, you know, perfectly upwardly mobile, you know, college and post-college son and daughter to live in the pages of a women's magazine your Walden Pond to have, you know, whatever. Yeah. So so what do we make of all of that? It is uh about the house and about the house as trap and about the way that I think you could also call this slightly noirish tech use of technicolor because there are a lot of very strong shadows in the film and the use the color palette like these like blues and yellows And then there's a wit there's literally a stained glass window in the family home that casts a color wheel on the bed where somebody is sobbing, which is just like the scene in Reckless Moment where a woman is sobbing in the bed and, you know, there's some element of the house that distances you from like, oh, I want to copy that cool thing and instead lets you feel like you've entered into this psychodrama. that, you know, would be really hard to extricate yourself from and that psychodrama is the perfect American family. So we have again absent husband, again, title that makes no sense. All that heaven allows. And you said the gaze of the small
Andy Nelson
The community's gays, yeah.
Patricia White
the community's gays and specifically the the the club ladies and the middle class, I mean upwardly mobile, very uh country club, very status conscious. community is the antagonist. And and when Fassbinder literally remakes this movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul y it couldn't be more explicit. There's all these shots of just people like lined up staring at what in his film is a interage, interracial like cross-generational and interracial couple, so a mismatched couple. In in Sirk's film, it's simply Rock Hudson, who could not stare at Rock Hudson, um, matched with Jane Wyman, and she's older than he is, but like not much So they're not as scandalously, you know, mismatched, but they're scandalously mismatched because she's not supposed to have desire. And then there's also the both retrospective, because we know that Rock Hudson was gay, but also I think perfectly possible at the time reading that Rock Hudson was gay or was not really in it for the was in it for something else. Do you know what I mean? Like there's something about again his woodenness as an actor, his size, his his the way he's positioned in the frame and dressed and you know made to seem almost like a representative of hunky masculinity and not really someone who's you're getting you're not getting inside his head particularly, right?
Andy Nelson
Well, and it's a fascinating glimpse into a a type of person also. And I think like what you're saying is like he he he doesn't seem to care, like he doesn't care where he fits in. And he's I mean obviously we kind of meet I don't want to call them Bohemian, but it's just kind of like a group of carefree people who who have no interest in in making sure they fit in with the country club. crowd and that can just be free to enjoy themselves. And we meet somebody, the advertising friend, who had been in that circle and realized it was awful and he left. And so It is a community that they've kind of created, but it's too different from the other community that she's already part of. And I think Yeah, Rock Hudson is an interesting casting choice to play that that bridge because in so many ways he doesn't seem like the sort who should fit Uh but I mean here he is like I mean it it's interesting the way that that uh uh he's written because he's just like I mean he almost is like uh you know uh you know, the lover of the trees, like he's this this natural woodsman, but he just he seems almost too kind and caring to be like a real man in the country club sense.
Patricia White
Yeah. Yeah, he's kind of a mom. Like he's always like tying on tying her boots, or you know, you don't want your feet to get cold. So So there's ways in which, yeah, his desire is not that like there's like one of the country club men makes it like yucky pass at her and then another country club man who's really old says we should get married not for the sex but for the companionship and like you know and in fact this movie you know spoilers because it's a melodrama
Andy Nelson
Right, that's what everyone's pushing. That's okay. Yeah.
Patricia White
doesn't really let them be happy, even though it lets them be together. So the sex really like maybe happens. There's one fade. But my guess is that, you know, she goes from what her do her daughter, whom I kind of love 'cause she's studying Freud, um, and talks about the Oedipus complex.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. She's so great, yeah. So f so fifties. That was just like perfect yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, with glasses on and but which she has to take off to kiss.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.
Patricia White
And to go back to the house, which is where this whole all started, the daughter is trying to explain, you know, desire to some, you know, frat boy outside their family home, and they finally kiss underneath their mother's window and the mother pfft shuts the window. And it's so this very dramatic sense of, as you said, she's imprisoned in the house. Her face is reflected in the piano. she's sh shot repeatedly through windows that are like lit in blue so she's just, you know, almost like taxidermied in there and then most dramatically after everyone tells her she shouldn't marry this younger man, she should just get a television. She she has been persuaded to give him up and his traps reflected in the television, you know, on our widescreen screen.
Andy Nelson
From and just to say a gift from her children, like as kind of a consolation prize for, well, you gave him up, so here's your TV.
Patricia White
Her children. Here's your TV.
Andy Nelson
Like, wow.
Patricia White
And the TV never gets turned on. And in Fassbinder's film, the son kicks the TV and and in Todd Haynes's
Andy Nelson
No
Patricia White
remake of this movie, which also includes Reckless Moment and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The T the the husband is a television executive and you know they pose as Mr. and Mrs. Magnavox So which, so let me try to turn rambling into a theme. Displacement. There's displaced desire all over the place in this movie and much has been made of the fact that yes, the couple does get together and a beautiful d doe who is represented, you know, almost like yeah, that he is a he is a pagan god, basically, Rock Hudson, and this doe follows him, you know, is shown in their picture window.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, right.
Patricia White
But he's But he's injured and like she has to now take care of him. So the the happy ending is not super happy. And that was something that insisted on that irony being very, very visible to his viewers. So that displacement will always um happen in his movies. I wanted to go back to something you said about the alternative community because they do kind of start to appear in some of these films. So Minnelli's The Cobweb, it's actually set in a a mental institution, but like there's an art teacher and they make you know, so there is a sense that there should be a counterculture. Like it's just this is just this is also stifling. There's a literary reference to let me try to say it right Thorough, that's what you're supposed to say. And Walden Pond. I was at Walden Pond last week, so I was just reminded that we all we all mispronounce that name.
Andy Nelson
So you got you got corrected, right? Yeah. Interesting, yeah.
Patricia White
And the fact that Sirk is like all the things that you mentioned about the color palette, the mise en scène that gets in the way. So he has like he uses the same literal screen, like a decor screen, you see it both in Imitation of Life and in All That Heaven Allows. So it's like a let's pull it out because I really like this idea of you know people talking across furniture because they can't connect Much is made of his literary background, hi uh theatrical background, his y you know, intellectualness So that he's he has an intellectual relationship to this material, and he is in effect critiquing Eisenhower-American ideals. And I think this film pretty much holds up um under that, you know, argument, even though it's based on a magazine story and even though there's a big takeaway, which is like, yeah, what if Rock Hudson, you know, were my gardener If you know that that's that's that's trivial and women's picturey and all of that.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right
Patricia White
So it ye to me, yeah, this is maybe it's our middle film, but it's it's it's the one.
Andy Nelson
It's the big one, yeah. Right, absolutely.
Patricia White
It's the big one that shows you what a woman's picture that's full on about her desire and the conflicts of her desire. you know, how it looks different in the fifties than it would have in the forties. And that is this kind of consumerist gloss and social hierarchy consciousness.
Andy Nelson
Well, and it's it's it's a fascinating glimpse into what we're gonna see with Douglas Sirk. Let's uh move to Bigger Than Life, 1956, the second 1956 film, this one directed by Nicholas Ray The cycle has largely centered on women navigating a world that constrains them. This next film really turns that inside out, putting the husband and father at the center and watching him become the source of danger inside the home that he is supposed to protect. Here we have Ed Avery, a mild-mannered schoolteacher in suburban America, who's diagnosed with a painful arterial disease. and prescribed cortisone, a then new miracle drug. The drug works, but at high doses it become begins to transform him. He becomes grandiose, tyrannical, and eventually delusional convinced he's been chosen by God to purify his family. His wife and son are trapped in the house with a man they no longer recognize. This is a an inversion of the cycle we've been talking about, and it's it's possibly the most disturbing one that we're looking at. um where the home becomes a site of danger and not not a source of refuge and normalcy itself as kind of this mask that we're wearing that kind of falls off. And in in an interesting way, a post-war or a pointed like it's a critique of the post war masculine authority. And in some ways, like there was one moment that stood out to me as like, man, there are some elements here that are are frighteningly connected to to modern day, and it's when he goes on his rant at the PTA meeting and there's one dad afterward who's just like, this is the guy.
Patricia White
MAGA dad.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, I was like, this is the guy we should all be listening to.
Patricia White
Yeah.
Andy Nelson
And it's like, wow. They were back then too. Crazy, yeah.
Patricia White
No, I had this same reaction.
Andy Nelson
Wild ride.
Patricia White
I was like, oh my god, it's yeah.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
Wow. No, yeah. So First I guess I would say what could you say what could you say after All That Heaven Allows? And so I mean I'm sorry uh written on the Wind. Is there any movie you can talk about after Written on the Wind? And I I think it's It is probably bigger than life, because it true is, you know, l just like again a masterpiece, I think, of of this genre. And then when you said the home itself is threatened, um, I just wanted to to connect the staircases.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, for sure.
Patricia White
'Cause I just talked about the dad being kicked in the in the des m but falling down the stairs and and and dying. That is how he dies just out of weariness and in you know inability to control his nympho daughter and alcoholic son and not have the son he wants which is which is Rock Hudson and everyone wants everyone wants rock huds and then he is fully absent of all desire
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Everyone was, yeah.
Patricia White
Is and that's like this incredible, you know, w winding staircase with a red you know, carpet, whatever.
Andy Nelson
Oh, it's beautiful, yeah.
Patricia White
But in bigger than life, it's, you know, they live in a track house. Um, they they're in the, you know, they're in the Levittown. And things become very, very dark in this house and the climax of the film is Walter Matthau who's the gym teacher at the school where James Mason is the bow tied, you know, old fashioned Mr. Chips guy comes to like rescue the family and they tussle on the stairs and they break through the they break through the banister and fall down. And so Elsaesser again, I think, talks about the staircases and the the kind of rhythms of melodrama being super compressed, like the highs and the lows, you know, the coincidence and and that's why the story, which was like a New Yorker story about somebody who Yeah, you know, they become very compressed in the storytelling form of of of
Andy Nelson
Actually had something like this happen, yeah.
Patricia White
Hollywood film and that they kind of the staircase is the perfect emblem for it because like people are like, you know, not only the spaces of the house. So J Jane Wyman is a prisoner up in her bedroom. the reckless moment, mom is the prisoner up in her bedroom, upstairs. And then these staircases are places where, you know, people are having dramatic encounters or like just the whole thing falls apart. So yeah, I think that Bigger Than Life is the first this is the first one we've talked about with Nicholas Ray, but I think I mentioned him before. So, you know, he can he's coming off of doing Rebel Without a Cause, which easily could be on this list, but is just better known because it's the juvenile delinquent film.
Andy Nelson
Right, right, right.
Patricia White
But
Andy Nelson
Emasculated Dad in that film for sure, yeah.
Patricia White
Where's the apron?
Andy Nelson
Yep, yep.
Patricia White
Yeah. And um the homes of the of two of the three, you know, kids could be straight out of this this genre So Ray's interested in these themes, but he's also like bigger than life. Like he's making this kind of small story into this extremely like cosmic the delusion that he gets l is a biblical one that, you know, he has to sacrifice his son, as did Abraham. But but his wife's like, uh He didn't actually go through with it, but but James Mason, our b our charming blackmailer, um and who produced the film, which I thought was interesting.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, right, yeah.
Patricia White
is terrifying. I mean, and it has to do again with a very powerful voice that his his performance is really I mean, he's able to go from like, I am this, you know bowtie wearing to work and then I put on a cardigan and have a second job.
Andy Nelson
Ver very Mr. Rogers, yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, Mr. Rogers, exactly. Um second job dispatching taxis because this middle class lifestyle is completely unaffordable, we cannot do it. We can't buy the appliances we need. We can't go to the places that are represented on the posters, on our walls in our little house like they have, you know, then is
Andy Nelson
Oh, uh yeah, yeah, r all the Roman things everywhere, or you know, the different things from Italy, yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah. Yeah, there's they wanna go yeah, so the male
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
The crisis of the patriarch shown this explicitly also supports this You know, perhaps exaggerated, but I kind of with it argument that these films are, well, ostensibly, you know melodramas are critiques of American s culture
Andy Nelson
I well, I absolutely think that. And I think that's what's so fascinating because I mean in in in many ways. I mean, sure, we have this whole medical issue that he has, but I think a lot of it is also the cortisone really kind of becomes a metaphor because I don't think in some ways that Ed is just suddenly becoming this authorit authoritarian figure. I think in some ways you're seeing like there especially in that PTA scene and some of the things he's saying, I think a lot of it is probably already there. And this is just a tool that's amplifying it. And I think that's absolutely a critique of uh perhaps in some ways the way that the decade was overrun with with wounded and depleted men who were striving to become a bigger representation of what a man is supposed to be.
Patricia White
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I'm th I thought uh I'm thinking here of best years of our lives, which you know It it such a important movie. We're we probably shouldn't call it a domestic melodrama, but whoa, you know, it's like three separate ones.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
But in that movie, the the most high flying of the but also lowest class um of the three um servicemen who come back from the war and find it hard, played by Dana Andrews, has this incredible scene where he like goes back into like a junked fighter plane and realizes like he Oh, it's uh it's it's junked and like the front of it's cut off, so it's like completely like, ugh.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
And then he's kind of saved by the fact that he hears that all of the junked planes are each gonna be turned into post war housing. So like the so I'm even thinking of these little homes as like, oh my God, this like version of masculinity that was called upon during the war um and has now become the organization man, has become, you know, the madman, ad man. whatever, you know, they're now firmly in their little houses and they're like going they're they're going crazy. And what are the political consequences of that gonna be? And, you know, Nick Ray is a you know very outspoken leftist And I think that that's pretty clear that bigger than life is probably, you know, grandiosity and that that there is a national allegory there.
Andy Nelson
What do you how do you read the ending where, you know, he's Ed is subdued, uh he's kind of taken weaned from his drugs and everything, and the family's back together. But then the doctor's like, oh, he'll still have to take the drugs. It's just now you're gonna be managing it better. Do you think d uh Is there i is there a happy ending that we have here?
Patricia White
Here's what I get there, and I it is stolen, but also by Fassbinder, which I didn't even really realize till re-watching the movie, but he's like Oh yes, I recognize you're my son and you're my wife. That was this was important. There's this like red alarm light outside the clinic where he's recovering from his psychosis and they're allowed to go into the psychosis recovery room and they crawl in the hospital bed with him. So even though like on the level of like y so yes, he is still taking the drug, but the fact that the whole the the nuclear family is now like consigned to a s you know, hospital bed, that's where I read the ending of that movie.
Andy Nelson
That's yeah, all right.
Patricia White
I think we need some social organization.
Andy Nelson
There's the there's a pervasive illness.
Patricia White
I think we need some, you know, maybe we need some, you know, labor unions.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
I think we need some, you know, I think we see more than this domestic space.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, right. All right, we're gonna take one more break and we'll be right back. All right, let's move on to Home from the Hill, 1960, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Uh the cycle has kind of moved through maternal sacrifice, suburban containment, family pathology. and the racial fault lines underneath the American Dream. This next film stays in the domestic space but moves the center of gravity from the women navigating the system to the man who built it. Wade Hunnicutt is a wealthy, philandering Southern patriarch whose iron grip on his family is the organizing force of the entire community around him. His legitimate son, Theron, is raised under his thumb, trained to be a man in his image. Rafe, his illegitimate son, is kept at the margins, acknowledged informally, but denied everything formal When both young men fall for the same woman, and when the weight of Wade's history starts to collapse, the film reveals how thoroughly one man's myth of masculinity has poisoned everyone around him. I mean, Robert Mitchum, I've always loved. He we talked about him a lot in the film Noir, but watching him in this film, I'm like, this is this is a great next step for him to kind of continue and move into this space. I mean, wow.
Patricia White
Like to open the door to the den, and all of a sudden it's it's in color. Because all those war movies, he's so fierce and scary, and he's still fierce and scary, but like we let's just talk about the den.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, yeah.
Patricia White
We know this is the the death. So he has this bastion of masculinity, which is like deep blood red accents, and Minnelli does red like no one does red you know, and I'm thinking across his musicals and his melodramas here.
Andy Nelson
Sure, yeah.
Patricia White
A rack of guns on the walls, like Boars' heads, I mean wild boars in a yellow swamp are like part of the mise en scene of this movie.
Andy Nelson
Yeah
Patricia White
Like this movie is really we just keep topping over the topping.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, just these uh book taxiderming heads. So he has this manly den.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, heads everywhere, right.
Patricia White
And then, you know, we were talking about how the father in the other Southern melodrama oh and this one No, I forgot to say that um uh written on the wind, there is actually a crime. There was there is like a whole like southern cr like a tobacco farmer crime real life story behind that that was which was interesting to find after years of teaching it I kind of delved a little bit more into it. Yeah, this one, it's it's the opposite, right? He is the big man. Like he is, we finally meet the man that was missing from all the other films. Like The dad is dead, he's ashes and leave lever to heaven. You know, he's at the other end of the phone line. We're not really entirely sure he exists, but in reckless moment, bigger than life the contrast is is clear, but this is like an actual big man.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, he's a right. The y like in in Written on the Wind, he's a small man.
Patricia White
Yeah, they're written on the wind, he's a small man.
Andy Nelson
That's another contrast. Yeah.
Patricia White
And he this guy's a big man like Rock Hudson, but he's an actor and not a model. And um I mean not that I I I do love Rock Hudson in the I he's I think he's got great comic timing and he it's I'm not to say but I think he's directed.
Andy Nelson
He's great, yeah.
Patricia White
I think both Lana Turner, this isn't my aside, and Rock Hudson are directed to be wooden in the Sirk movies And I think that's good. Um anyway, yeah, so here we see him, and and I think the tragedy is with the sun. The tragedy is with the son who's being forced uh the who played by George Hamilton, Theron, who's clearly, you know his a ma he is a mama's boy. I mean she's makes him warm milk like how many times in that movie? Mom withholds sex from her husband. He finds it elsewhere. I think that this is it's not gay, but it's kinda gay. Like, I mean I do think the Theron and his relationship with his half brother, the bastard son, George Peppard, who, you know, really does want to acknowledge his his young his kin the kinship. There's a thing going on around possible forms of masculinity that could be possibly emerging around nineteen sixty, that could be queer, and that just Robert Mitchum is around to make sure that that does not happen. And so in the movie it's, you know, does the George the George um Hamilton character does have to have a sexual initiation, but like he's always wearing wearing like these guite jean outfits that I don't know, he's just cute in this way that is very like not it it is another form of masculinity. And and yeah. And so the pathos is is about could we could that emerge?
Andy Nelson
Well, and it's it it's an interesting glimpse into the the world of the family at this time, especially through these post-war domestic melodramas where the i in in many ways it we've been focused on the mother and here the mother has has specifically cut a deal, we'll just say, essentially, with Wade to say I will stay with you because you're going to give me control to raise our son. Now, first of all, how do you even get to that place where you need to make that decision? Like already this well of this relationship has been poisoned, right? Wade is already a toxic w just you know pollutant in in everything that he touches and we're seeing it right o right here which had to have been before they even had had the kid, right? And and and then, like, through all of this, like and she's she's poisoned, so she's pushing w um their son to be raised a certain way. And and all of that shifts at this point when we come into the film when when he's recognizing that, you know, people look at me wrong. And I why have you not trained me to be the hunter that you are? I'm your son. And and all of a sudden everything starts changing. And And I just think like that's when the poisoning really starts shifting from poisoning the wife to poisoning the son and and turning him into uh you know another monstrous version of what he had been.
Patricia White
Hmm. Yeah, no, I think that's really right. And so that we've got to this point of the yeah, the families completely disintegrated. Um, right? Like it's like they're not even pretending to lie in the same hospital bed together. Like they all have separate rooms. I mean and
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
And again, leave it to Minnelli to have like really separate rooms, like the decor that matches each character's, you know. whatever uh Gestalt is so perfect and over the top
Andy Nelson
And they're really like when they go to someone else's space, like like they come into the doorway and they're the the other person is like at the far end. Like it's a long hallway to get to that space. Like they really separate the spaces here
Patricia White
Yeah. I mean, and so I would say for Minnelli, like I've talked about color in Mise en Senne, but we really do want to talk about like, yeah, his use of space and his use of mobile camera is really, I think, important. because he's he's making these he's the l like we started out talking about these arguments about in characterization, but also about like the possibilities of repair um through, you know, camera distance and um I I was uh thinking a little bit about giant, uh w which you kind of can't not think about, uh I suppose.
Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Patricia White
In if you're thinking about like home from the hill and written on the wind I mean written on the wind is just so tight, but Yeah, but this one sprawls a little bit.
Andy Nelson
Definitely more epic. I mean close to it was like two and a half, three hours somewhere in there.
Patricia White
Yeah, and and and does doesn't need to be.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah.
Patricia White
Except for it I mean, in the in the sense that it's still very focused on this It's kind of small family, you know, kind of allegory.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
The mom I want to say a little bit more about. I do I love Eleanor Parker. She's so weird her performance is so weird in this film in in a kind of great way. Like she looks like she's on Valium. I mean she's pr she's she's
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right, interesting
Patricia White
doing this kind of drawl that's very kind of otherworldly. She's enacting these kind of, you know, post-war like I mean, God, we've already had the feminine mystique is written the year before. Um, so yeah, so we're really seeing this kind of she gets her moments of explosive like desire, but her desire is for her son, which is mis misdirected. But I do feel for her. And then we have the sexy women who are, you know, the lusty women who are probably, I think, representing a little bit of the cusp of, you know, uh sexual revolution. happening because it's coming in a way more from them than from their end.
Andy Nelson
Right, like and and I think Libby is a good representation of that for the for the young men, right? Right. She's she also feels very just to kind of like go back to like the Disney side of her, like she's very fun and fancy free. uh you know that's kind of like the the world that she she comes from just very light and I think that that plays well into this this era and these stories and feels very different from Eleanor. Uh well and in using her, I think I just want to get a sense from you because Rafe, we haven't really talked too much about Rafe, but such an important character in the story, and George Peppard, I thought, was Fantastic and really the most sympathetic character in the whole film. And I'm curious, like, how do you read his position in the film? Is is the is our sympathy like a a critique of the legitimacy or i is it like ultimately kind of reinforcing all of the questions that we have about about him and his relationship with his with his dad and Eleanor?
Patricia White
Yeah. I think we're with him. And I think that we're with him in kind of we s we're talking about a little bit in the other Minnelli film with um bad in the beautiful, which is that there's this way in which he's his his sensitive men, and this isn't the sensitive son per se, but he really is. that they they they have a kind of emotional truth to them. I mean, I feel like the struggle I don't know, yeah. I I think Rafe is um I mean f what a name, right? Rafe and Theron. It's like you're not telling us anything here. No, I think I think the film is is ha is happy with him being illegitimate. Like what is legitimacy?
Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah. Well and I think that's interesting, especially with the ending that we get with with him now taking on taking on the father role for for his brother's child and um the the grave and everything. Like it feels like it's it's It's trying to find a way to make it legitimized, you know. I think that's interesting.
Patricia White
Which I guess we should think of as a shift. I think we should think of it not as a reinscription of like, oh, let's just pret Yes, it is an acknowledgement and he gets to be part of the but the you know, he gets to be seen by by her and as real, but I think what we are seeing is an acknowledgement to of a rep generational shift to a new kind. And that dad moves into this appropriately ridiculous gravestone, um, which I guess I'll just call back to. There's this really hilarious moment in written on the wind where the sun no, sorry all that heaven allows, where the son, who's like a total cad, you know, who's only good for making martinis, and criticizing his mother is it refers to some like thing that's on the mantle that basically represents dad, right?
Andy Nelson
Oh, the big trophy, yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
And like like yeah, trophy that, you know, that they drink from or something. And that he says, this we can't get rid of that. Why'd you put that away? It's been in the family I don't know how long. So it just kind of says like why do we invest in these traditions? So I think Home From the Hill has this kind of fun way. in ending with this like we're investing in this ridiculous thing because we've we've been able to turn his patriarchal vitriol into a thing, one that's perfectly big on screen and Minelli knows how to do that, but that we are gonna understand generational legacy and what
Andy Nelson
Suits you're right, suits him, yeah.
Patricia White
masculinity could be and I'm thinking I guess I'm thinking of T and Sympathies coming, I'm not sure sequencing when it comes in the
Andy Nelson
Oh w we're not talking about that one. We've got uh the children's uh yeah.
Patricia White
No, no, no. No, but I'm just thinking about where where no no no.
Andy Nelson
Oh but just uh time wise, yeah, yeah.
Patricia White
Yeah, we're we're getting there.
Andy Nelson
Yeah.
Patricia White
But um no w um just when it's made that that you could that there, you know, that there's much more explicit ways of talking about other forms of masculinity. And yeah, I guess it's a little it's a little re-inscribing the nuclear fa nuclear family at the end, but it is and whatever. What giant does it too. It's like, let's have these Mexican kids as part of our family. I mean they try to put it all back in the field. I guess that's something I could say and haven't said. Melodrama takes everything that's political and puts it in the family, right?
Andy Nelson
Hmm, hmm, yeah
Patricia White
That's both good because there's politics in the family and we all know that and we don't say it enough It's also bad because the way it looks in the family is not like legible as politics and can't. You can't put it all there.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, right.
Patricia White
Especially not just white families, yeah.
Andy Nelson
That's that's actually an interesting way of looking at a lot of these films. I can see that through a number of them, you know. So
Patricia White
Like the conflicts are intractable because they are in the world out there. And these relationships are symbolizing them, yeah.
Andy Nelson
They're all yeah. Which yeah, speaks to the internal way that like I mean, inside the house, the internal feelings, all of that kind of like ties into the the whole idea of the domestic melodrama. Well, I mean, this has been a fascinating conversation, Patricia. Just like so many amazing films and such rich depth through all of them. And just as a note, like going from here, we've already talked so much about like the legacy of this as far as like the the soap operas and the and the the prime time melodramas that we had and you mentioned uh Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes has a couple things. We also had coming out of this in the seventies and eighties, a real uh growth of kind of the feminist film theory legacy with uh Laura Mulvey and Linda Williams and all these other uh people. And so yeah, I I just think that it's important to discuss i in this post war period Oh yeah.
Patricia White
So this one, Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, edited by Christine Gledhill is kind of a great anthology. Yeah.
Andy Nelson
Excellent. Okay, there's another one we'll make sure we include. But I mean, thank you so much for being here and and being part of this conversation because I think it's it's a rich period and it and in the scope of everything we're looking at, you know, in this mini-series I've been doing with the post-war, it's an important one. And I think it's very key to look at like what was going on in the home at this time and these films are just are full of so much uh rich storytelling in that regard.
Patricia White
Yeah, it's the consumer explosion and you're gonna see it on the screens that represent, you know, the places where people bought all the stuff that they're being told to buy. And that's different from yet some of the other, yeah. So my a pleasure to be here.
Andy Nelson
Yeah. Do you have plugs? Any uh uh I know you've got a couple books that you have and uh you already mentioned uh you are it on Instagram. Like do you want to plug a plug?
Patricia White
I'm not really on Instagram.
Andy Nelson
Oh, okay, okay
Patricia White
I mean I am. It's @pwhitephilly. I I would like to be more. I I'm of a generation of, you know Whatever. But um yeah, no.
Andy Nelson
Yeah, I hear ya.
Patricia White
Um I'm uh I'm yeah, I'm going to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference next week and that'll be fun. They're gonna interview me about like my trajectory through film studies. So uh I was thinking of yeah and and they they collect those interviews with various people in the field
Andy Nelson
Fantastic. Oh, good
Patricia White
Who entered it at different times and, you know, found different pathways. So yeah.
Andy Nelson
Well, I'll put links for your books and uh everything else in the show notes. Again, Patricia, thank you so much for being here.
Patricia White
My pleasure.
Andy Nelson
Next month, we're staying in the post-war aftershock, but the pressure moves from the private to the political. Where domestic melodrama traps anxiety inside the home, the next cycle takes the same dread and relocates it into institutions, secrecy, and the state itself. Next month, we're looking at post-war paranoia thrillers. Thanks for joining us on Cinema Scope, part of the TruStory FM Entertainment Network, music by ORKAS and Roie Shpigler. Find us and the entire Next Reel family of film shows at trustory.fm Follow at the nextreel on social media, and if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. As we part ways, remember, your cinematic journey never ends. Stay curious.