Bellamy the Deflowerer: THE WEDDING NIGHT (1935)

If you want to see the cruel extreme barbarism of the sudden implementation of the Catholic Legion of Decency's enforced production code (which overtook Hollywood in 1934), look no further than 1935's THE WEDDING NIGHT, starring Gary Cooper, Ralph Bellamy, and Anna Sten (the 'other' Garbo). It helps when considering the Christian backlash hooplah about the 'morning after' pill to see a film like this, and realize the extent of female subjugation in pre-industrial European culture, and the way it survives today in xtreme Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam and with some Mormons.

Ralph Bellamy with his wild hair, expertly applied peasant-stock eye-liner, and traditional Polish farmer garb actually gives Cooper a run for the money here in the god-like looks department. He's way too good looking to be so dumb, and what's this brood of crafty Polish tobacco farmers doing up in Connecticut in 1935, living next door to dissolute drunk writer Cooper's getaway lodge? Well, you can guess when Cooper's going to do when he dips those ink-lined lashes Sten's way.

See, Cooper's wife has stayed back in New York City, but Cooper moves up  to the lodge, you know, for inspiration for his next book? Anna Sten and her family's provincial Polish culture is just the ticket, he thinks. The film thus sees the code mandate of 1934 as a property dividing line, between the home-grown social 'dissolution' of the post-WW1 Depression era of women's equality and hurrah for the next who dies, and a very fundamentalist old world patriarchy proletariat still thriving and yet to be smashed in Europe by the Nazis. Without that common enemy, those old-school Poles get mighty narrow-mined. Their dissolute neighbor next door is demonized as brutally as the Nazis would later do the Jews; meanwhile the property-greedy father and his obsession with land grabs hints at the outmoded values soon to be be read as the very reason for the barbarism inflicted upon them. As The farmer says to his daughter when she refuses to harness herself to the Bellamy plow, "stop making me hit you!"

Cooper's never been too convincing as a writer, but here he at least is convincing as a self-hating intellectual for whom literary 'research' has been the rationale for seducing women, book after book, so now he can't even remember whether the book is in service of the affair or vice versa (like a male Catherine Trammel) Sten is a fine actress and Sig Rumann is properly terrifying in an unusual role (for him). The code-enforced shock ending is of course that Sten must die, because her father pledged her to Bellamy, and was paid the dowry, and she refused to run away from the ceremony before saying "I do," which is the only proper thing for a bride standing on the lip of the 20th century. She blew it. That she loves Cooper instead but still goes through with the Bellamy wedding spells her death under the draconian rubrics of the code. But if she'd just run out to the car and driven off and grabbed Cooper and fled to the city before saying she did, well you could roll the credits right then. But the post-34 censor had his eye on adulterers, even if they'd been forced into a marriage that was only minutes old.

And so... in the post-34 world of Hollywood, once-free women starting dropping like flies. At least they had time to take long Garbo-esque death scenes, but there's a thin line between good death scenes and the bitter aftertaste of deaths being forced by a code no one making the film has any faith in.  Religious censorship bleeds into the nature of the post-code era's stories -- where women marry even knowing it means their death, because marriage is the ultimate validation of woman, and then she may breed and create more Christians who can carry forth this fine, wretched, evil tradition of yoking the women to the Bellamies. Imagine the tale of Little Red Riding Hood if the Catholic Legion of Decency decided to update the story so that Red gets a chaperone through the woods, and the woodsman--her husband--regularly belittles her in a smirky way when she's caught talking to wolves. That wolf would be played by Cary Grant... the woodsman? That's right! It's no accident Bellamy is in THE WOLFMAN playing just such an impotent hunter.

To drive the point slamming home, the titular night of the film is a long wedding night for Sten and Bellamy at Rumann's house. Upstairs: Sten, joylessly, is being 'prepared' for deflowering by the glum matrons of the clan upstairs in her room. Downstairs Bellamy gets drunker and his cronies (and even Sten's father) encourage him to get up there and lay some pipe like they're the sloppy seconds-craving would-be-rapist brothers of the groom in Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The message is clear: the boys get to drink and goad each other on in lusty gang rape-tinged misogyny while the women, depressed and apathetic as if dressing a deer, prepare the next virgin for her code-sanctioned marital assault. Again, the message is that not only does marriage legitimize sex so you can have it right under your parents' roof, it frees you from the uncertainty of 'taking possession' of your spouse in copulation. In other words, she doesn't get to say no --only the dad does on her behalf. Even screaming for help they'll just laugh and roar below.

Fundamentalist Christian adages against a woman's right to choose her own mate seem barbaric to most free thinking people these days but after the WEDDING NIGHT you may understand its origins better. It's not really the fault of the Bellamy - he's not a bad guy. He's been led to expect he will get a wife handed to him via her father, and his confusion when it's otherwise is not his fault --empathy takes the ability to think outside one's own immediate social mores, which he is mentally unable to do. Though many conservatives are desperate to pass bills that would revert woman's rights back to the patriarchs, nowadays at least, they can't get very far. The best they can do is close an abortion clinic now and again as they lament the loss of their old property, the Fertile Womb, so squandered in the hands of its wasted young women owners.

So yeah, drooling sexual relatives are written into the rocks of Plymouth but when a sensitive poet soul like Sten's comes along, that kind of violent burlesque of socially controlled reproduction is shocking and un-American. It's one thing if the girl is plain and not very bright and maybe can't get a date on her own. But if she's a smart, poetic beauty, her assigned Bellamy will crush her like an orchid under the plow. When choosing between the Bellamy for life (in Albany, too!) vs. Gary Cooper for a just one weekend in Manhattan, is there any real choice? You got to grab Cooper.

 

The worst that can happen is he'll dump you and you'll wind up destitute and abandoned on the streets of the East Village, but that is nothing in comparison to being kept down on the farm under the yoke of Bellamy's unconscious, never-been-outside-of-the-box sense of entitlement. Just ask One-Eye: (see: Bob Hope Vs. The Canadian Svengalis).

Thus the Coopers and Grants are like missionaries of pre-code enlightenment, bringing hope to the dark areas of the New England tobacco belt. Now more than ever, we need to ridicule our Bellamies, ban the incoming burkas of our immigrants, and rescue Mormon girls before they're married to lecherous cult leaders, or mangled and castrated by hideous outmoded practices. I don't blame the Bellamies, or even the Rumanns --this is all they know. But the chain's gotta break somewhere. For too long our tall beautiful men and fast-thinking wabbits have held back, given the Bellamies and the Elmer Fudds the benefit of the doubt, presuming their old ways must have some merit. Our reward has been a trail of broken Stens. I say no more! Not one Sten, Bellamy! Not one Sten...

The Return of the Great 70s Dad: Nicolas Cage in KICK-ASS

I thought the age of great 70s dads was done, but that was before I saw KICK-ASS (2010), in which a truly cool father (Cage) manages to slide past the doting widower daddy ("mommy's in heaven!") morons of Hollywood to finally do what Batman should have been doing all along: using firearms, gutting mobsters with exotic weaponry, and teaching his 11 year-old daughter to be a pint-sized killing machine.

This is the kind of film where you see something genuinely subversive -- kids as instruments of lethal vengeance-- and know instantly that a dividing line will form between film critics that are cool (i.e. they get intentional subversion of the treacly overprotective cinema status quo) and the dull self-appointed moral guardians (i.e. status quo dogma-eating suckaz) as easy to demarcate as a scroll down the rotten tomato meter. My old editor at Popmatters, Cynthia Fuch's discusses for example the one-note presence of Marcus, Nic Cage's old cop buddy who raised Hit Girl while Nic was in the slammer, framed for his wife's murder :

Marcus serves one purpose here, to deliver the film’s not-so-earnest injunction against Big Daddy’s monomaniacal exploitation of his daughter: “You owe that kid a childhood!” With that done, the movie can proceed apace, exploiting her in every way it can think of. Serving as Kick-Ass’ mentor, savior, and inspiration, she’s abused and abusive, horrified and horrific, tearfully vulnerable and ingeniously cruel. (4/16/10)

Hahah! Well, frankly, if there wasn't some uptight backlash against all this "exploitation" the character wouldn't have nearly enough subversive zing, so I'm glad at least some critics felt the need to jump on this, like they have to make sure we know it's wrong WRONG WRONG to train our daughters to be assassins. "You owe that kid a childhood?" Really? What's a better childhood than not having to go to school and spending all your time hanging out with your cool superhero gun nut father? What is she missing? Facebook chats? Sexual subjugation and elementary school belittlement? Tedium in front of the TV? Wasted hours playing with dolls and engaging in clique-y slumber party backstabbing?



Even more inflammatory is a review by someone named Prarie Miller:

... let's just say that it's reached the point in movies where pedophiles could conceivably launch a movement protesting that double standard filmmakers get away with all sorts of exploitative behavior with children in movies that would land predators in the real world in handcuffs. It would seem that we're talking a line here between reality and fantasy, with the emphasis on a different kind of graphic at work, and a line that has been seriously crossed (Newsblaze)

 Yeah, Prarie, let's just say that... wait, what? Are you seriously using the phrase "in movies" redundantly in a sentence? Do you even know where the line between reality and fantasy is? It's not in a comic book movie, anywhere! Ever!  Don't you see that this girl assassin is a direct and intentional affront to your hypocritical projecting? More than anything, we love Hit Girl for the very reason that we know she will get you all up in arms; we know that some serious standing-up to nervous industry suits must have gone on to prevent their meddling with the script and turning her bullets into, say, tranq darts. Hit Girl is a triumph for the very reason that she kills her victims without qualms! She's an emblem for child empowerment rather than for child victimization mentality, which the Praries of the world prefer, and misread as saintliness.

Of course, as I say, without the whack-job moral guardian fringe ringing their alarm bells, you wouldn't wake up to realize that finally something genuinely ballsy is happening in a superhero movie -- a gleeful finger in the eye of the still-lingering remnants of the Hollywood moral production code and the whole "Won't someone think of the children" hysteria of films like Cage's "worst dad" film, KNOWING. Actually, Hit Girl's the first 'free' kid I've seen since 1979 and OVER THE EDGE, or the other cool kids I wrote about last week in my slam against Michael Cera (since amended), like Tanner from THE BAD NEWS BEARS!

I'm also reminded of one of the story threads in D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1919), wherein a moral crusader matron is out to rescue the exploited children of the slums, so she can drag them away from their loving mothers and throw them into a giant orphanage where they can be safely ignored in long rows of cribs by uncaring city employees. I think any girl who had the choice to be raised by Nicolas Cage and trained full time in the art of killing vs. being forced to go to some dumb public school and then come to a distracted babysitter while a single righteous mom works double shifts would choose the former. Watch fucking BLUE CAR and see how bad it could be.

Hit Girl is lucky she gets to spend all her time with a cool, loving father and when you consider (as I've written about in SALT) the usual back story of female assassins--their cruel schooling and tough surrogate parents--Nic's kindly Tod Browning-ish scheme of vengeance is a breath of fresh cool air.  He even takes his daughter to get ice cream after shooting slugs into her bullet proof vest and gives her cool butterfly knives in a big swanky box. This was the first film I've seen since about a single father-daughter pair bond that didn't make me want to wretch, and even makes me want to be a father if I could ensure I had a daughter into knives and not a dorky son into superhero comics.

For an example of the latter, let's examine another case of superhero childhood with (in this case surrogate) dad and no mom, HELLBOY.

Now, I liked the first HELLBOY which involved the origin of an adopted demon child by a squad of rough and tough American GIs in WW2. The child demon grew up a cigar-smoking badass, as if he'd been raised by Sam Fuller. But then in the insipid sequel we get this treacly homespun flashback of Hellboy as a goofy nerd, watching Howdy Doody with his glasses and buckteeth and wearing his jammies and getting tucked in by a loving and responsible... zzzz, I turned it off right at that moment. What the hell happened, "Hell" boy? Prarie got to you, didn't she?

Then there's the drably hypocritical "clean" conscience of heroes like Batman--on whom Cage's Hit Man is cheekily based--who would never, say, shoot a real gun at the Joker or something, because "killing is wrong," -- no guns, Alfred! So he has to invent all these bizarre non-lethal weapons so he can wipe out whole blocks with collateral damage (chasing the Joker around Gotham, he totals dozens of cars and I'm sure incurs a lot of fatalities), but as I've written before, he's as "innocent" as our precision bombers over Baghdad - though to their credit at least the military's not squeamish about shooting a bad guy up close.

Anyway... as Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz is a revelation. Fresh air finally becomes breathable once you see an 11-year old girl eviscerate a room full of thugs and do so with a convincing air of detached cool and scary intellect we haven't seen since Anna Paquin in THE PIANO. QT had to do it in anime with the Lucy Liu backstory in KILL BILL, but that was all dark to be begin with. The juxtaposition of the day-glo highschool coming of age shenanigins in the dorky comic book guy side of things and the colorful costumes make the bloody merciless killing of KICK-ASS's pint-sized avenger all the more striking. We're just not used to it, it's original! Hollywood has this unofficial policy that good girls don't shoot guys - that's why Jamie Lee Curtis has to drop her Uzi before it's allowed to shoot everyone in TRUE LIES.

It's so liberating. One wants to go back in time and rescue Patty McCormack from her mom in THE BAD SEED and teach her to fight crime-- an army of bloodthirsty children stalking the streets! Pedophiles dying right and left. If Nic Cage's Hit Man could become a role model for all the dads of tomorrow, what a blood-stained, crime-free world we would have.

Moretz is next scheduled to appear as the vampire kid in the remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (above). I can't wait to read the uptight film critics' anxiety that seeing blood-sucking children onscreen sends the wrong message to parents everywhere: "Children are meant to be locked in their rooms with bibles and homework, not allowed to kill adults willy nilly!" Yeah, you wish, downpressa!