Tag: 1970s

‘Sexual Freedom in Denmark’ or ‘Language of Love’ in ‘Taxi Driver’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movies in movies5 Comments

MarqueeWhen I started this blog, a friend and colleague, John Jebb, had an immediate reaction: “You’ve got to do Taxi Driver.”

He was right.

The movie-in-movie scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film is strange, unique, and hard to forget. The taxi driver of the title, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), has somehow wangled a date with his dream girl, Betsy (Cybill Shephard at her 1970s dreamiest). Travis isn’t the savviest guy out there, and his choice of activity for the date, a double feature at a 42nd Street grind house, is spectacularly off. (The clip starts with a look at street drummer Gene Palma, a Times Square fixture in the 1970s and ’80s.)

It gets worse. Eventually, Betsy bolts.

At this point a curatorial note is in order. The Lyric marquee lists two films — Sometime Sweet Susan, an actual 1975 porn film, and Swedish Marriage Manual, which isn’t listed in IMDB or any other reference site I could find. IMDB says the movie on the screen in Taxi Driver is Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1969). But I think it’s more likely to be the Swedish Ur kärlekens språk (1969), translated in the U.S. as Language of Love. If anyone knows for sure, I would be interested in hearing from them.

Back to Taxi Driver, I have to say I find this scene a bit much. One has to suspend one’s disbelief enough just to accept that Betsy would agree to go out with Travis, and that he would be so out of touch to think that a skin flick is an appropriate first date. But the idea she would agree to walk into the movie and stay for as long as she does strikes me as way over the top. The genius.com website has a version of Paul Schrader’s screenplay, with some character notes, starting with Travis’s reaction to Betsy’s initial discomfort at the double bill:

Travis seems confused. He is so much part of his own world, he fails to comprehend another’s world. Compared to the movies he sees, this is respectable. But then there’s also something that Travis could not even acknowledge, much less admit: That he really wants to get this pure white girl into that dark porno theatre.

Travis makes an awkward gesture to escort Betsy into the theatre. Betsy looks at the tickets, at the theatre, at Travis. She mentally shakes her head and walks toward the turnstile. She thinks to herself: “What the Hell. What can happen?” She’s always been curious about these pictures anyway, and – like all women, no matter how intelligent – she’s been raised not to offend her date. A perverse logic which applies even more in offsetting circumstances like these.

I don’t know. It seems to me that Schrader and Scorsese were mainly trying to get as much uncomfortable awkwardness into one scene as they possibly could. If so, they succeeded.

Update: Ben Zimmer, a good friend of Movies in Other Movies, found and sent along “‘This is a dirty movie’ – Taxi Driver and ‘Swedish sin,’” a 2011 article by Elisabet Björklund that answers some of the questions I raised above.  She writes:

The film being shown is not an actual Swedish film, but a construction that has been cobbled together. The makers of Taxi Driver have been quite creative in making the film-within-the-film seem Swedish. All the footage is taken from the American sexploitation film Sexual Freedom in Denmark …, but a Swedish soundtrack has been added. This composite may be construed as a parody of Swedish films with sexually explicit content from around the time of the sexual revolution.

She goes on to describe the “added” soundtrack:

The first images show a man sitting at a desk talking to a woman.  In Sexual Freedom in Denmark, the scene is an interview by Ole Lassen – the Danish cicerone or narrator of the film in the parts shot in Denmark – with journalist Lizzie Bundgaard. In Taxi Driver, however, the scene has been manipulated to make it appear that we are watching a therapy session. On the soundtrack a man’s voice informs us in Swedish that many people have been able to eliminate old habits and patterns of behaviour through consultations. Then a woman’s voice says, ‘My parents were very strict. They told me that the body was the house of God. Sex was dirty, something to be ashamed of.’

Did this Swedish dialogue and narration come from another movie, or some other source, or did Scorsese and Schrader concoct it? Björklund acknowledges she doesn’t know, and thus there remains one open question about the sequence.

 

“Brief Encounter” in “A Touch of Class,” “84 Charing Cross Road,” and “Truly Madly Deeply”

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movie in theater, Movie on TV set4 Comments

The 1945 British film Brief Encounter — directed by David Lean, screenplay by Noel Coward, based on his play — may hold the record for the movie that’s watched in the greatest number of other movies. In addition to the three examples discussed in this post, IMDB’s valuable (though sometimes overpopulated) “Connections” department lists it as being featured in The Mirror Has Two Faces, Till There Was You, and Brick Lane, as well as the TV movies The Heidi Chronicles, Daisies in December, and The Care and Handling of Roses, plus various television episodes.

Why the attraction? It’s not simply that Brief Encounter is a classic. (In 1999, the British Film Institute voted it that country’s second best movie of all time, behind only The Third Man.) Beyond that, the film, with its thoroughly decent, stiff-upper-lip, and ultimately self-sacrificing lovers — the black-and-white photography being a kind of spartan objective correlative — is an emblem for a certain vision of romance, and thus a counterpoint to (and occasionally model for) the many, many other kinds of romance that movies portray.

In Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class (1973), the contrast couldn’t be starker. After meeting cute what seems like eleven times, the characters played by the startlingly young, slim, sharply dressed, and good-looking Glenda Jackson (Vickie) and George Segal (Steve) embark on a strictly-for-sex affair. In Brief Encounter both of the lovers are married, but here Vickie is divorced, which hints at the unequal dynamics at play. Steve wants to have it both ways, which is in keeping with his me-me-me sense of the world; he’s always shown scurrying off from the opera intermission to shtup Vickie at their love nest, then hurrying back to his seat next to his wife before the end of the next act. The puzzlement of the movie is why Vickie — who, as a Glenda Jackson character, is required to be clear-eyed and intelligent — doesn’t dump Steve.

The answer — that she has fallen in love with him, and he with her — is supplied in the movie-in-movie scene, in which they watch Trevor Howard breaks bad news to Celia Johnson. The scene is asked to do the work that’s absent in the screenplay, their boo-hooing supposedly showing the relationship has reached a new level of intimacy and care. Then the alarm rings, and Steve scurries back to his family.

David Jones’s 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) is about an American writer, played by Anne Bancroft, who carries on a two-decade correspondence (1950s and ’60s) with the buyer at a London bookshop, played by Anthony Hopkins. He’s married and they never meet; the love that Brief Encounter reflects is her Anglophilia. Her fascination with the film seems to extend to the ash of her cigarette (yes, young’uns, smoking in cinemas used to be allowed), curling and lengthening but so wrapped up in the oh-so-Englishness of the movie that it doesn’t drop.

And now for something different, Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly Madly Deeply. The love story here is between Nina (Juliet Stevenson) and her  boyfriend, Jamie (Alan Rickman), who keeps turning up even though he is dead. But this is no Ghost: Jamie is sniffling, needy, and annoying. And so are his movie-buff mates, who show up at en masse, wrap themselves in cozy duvets, and make trainspotting comments while watching the 1917 Charlie Chaplin comedy Easy Street. (Like many movie buffs, myself include, they are prone to error; one guy identifies the big comic as “Eric Stewart Campbell”; in fact, his given name was Alfred Eric Campbell. It is true that he died in a car crash shortly after making this film.)

The guys may be well-schooled in cinema, but they’re not too sophisticated to be wrapped up in Brief Encounter, reciting the final lines along with the Johnson character’s husband, and slow clapping their approval after “The End” rolls.

 

 

 

 

‘Father of the Bride’ and ‘Red River’ in ‘The Last Picture Show’

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movies in movies, TV in movies2 Comments

bogdanovich-last-picture-show1Set in rural Texas in 1951, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) is informed and sometimes seemingly suffused with the entertainment of the period. That’s most noticeable on the soundtrack. Pop music provides a near-continual backdrop, including such songs (according to the American Film Institute website) as

“Blue Velvet,” “Slow Poke,” “A Fool Such as I,” “Kawliga” and “Jambalaya.” The onscreen credits include the following acknowledgment: “For their music we thank Hank Williams; Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, courtesy of MGM Records; Eddy Arnold; Eddie Fisher; Phil Harris; Pee Wee King; Hank Snow, courtesy of RCA Records; Tony Bennett; Lefty Frizzell; Frankie Laine; Johnnie Ray, courtesy of Columbia Records; Johnny Standley; Kay Starr; Hank Thompson, courtesy of Capitol Records, Inc.; Webb Pierce; Jo Stafford, courtesy of Decca Records.”

The list conjures up on a pre-rock-and-roll world and time all by its lonesome. Bogdanovich frequently uses the music as ironic counterpoint to the characters’ world. In one early scene, the town icy beauty, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shephard), applies cold cream to her face while Tony Bennett’s Hank Williams cover “Cold, Cold Heart” plays on the radio.

And in Jacy’s house the television set is constantly going; on it we see scenes from Your Show of Shows and Strike It Rich. As her parents are wealthy and miserable, the latter game show counts for more ironic commentary.

But the movies are key. Although The Last Picture Show was adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, both the title and theme were perfect for Bogdanovich, a movie critic before he started directing and, then and now, a champion of classic American film. Both plot developments and the era see to it that the “picture show”–in better times the center of town life–must close. As the cashier/popcorn vendor/manager tells high school friends Duane (Jeff Bridges) and Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), “Nobody wants to come to the shows no more. Baseball in the summer, television all the time.”

The Last Picture Show is anchored by two movie-in-movie scenes in which the idealized material on the screen contrasts ironically (again) with the grim reality the characters are living. In McMurtry’s novel, the characters go to the movies to see the 1951 Ronald Reagan-Doris Day melodrama Storm Warning, described this way by IMDB:

Marsha Mitchell, a traveling dress model, stops in a southern town to see her sister who has married a Ku Klux Klansman. Marsha sees the KKK commit a murder and helps District Attorney Burt Rainey in bringing the criminals to justice.

Bogdanovich switches it, big time. Early on Sonny meets his steady girlfriend, Charlene (Sharon Taggert) at the picture show to watch a scene in the affectionate comedy Father of the Bride (1950) in which the Spencer Tracy character greets his daughter, Elizabeth Taylor.

Tracy: What’s happened to you? You look different.

Taylor: I do?

Tracy: Yeah. You look all lit-up inside. You’re not wearing your usual deadpan look, your how-did-I-get-in-this-family? look.

Sonny and Charlene move to the back row for a make-out session. All the while Sonny keeps his eyes on the illuminated visage of the girl of his and so many young men’s dreams, Elizabeth Taylor.

At the end of the novel, McMurtry’s characters watch an Audie Murphy western, The Kid from Texas. Bogdanovich swaps this one Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. One possible reason for the switch is that the Hawks film is in black and white, as is The Last Picture Show–a daring move for a studio film in 1971. Another is that Red River is one of the greatest westerns of all time, maybe the greatest. And the scene that unfolds before Sonny and Duane and the other one or two patrons  is one of the most thrilling examples of anticipation and release–and use of close-up montage–in the history of movies, the start of the cattle drive. As Duane says to Sonny as they walk out, “That was a good movie.”

One final touch. Outside the picture show lobby in the Father of the Bride scene is a poster advertising a coming attraction, another western, John Ford’s Wagon Master.  It happens to have been the first starring role of one of Ford’s company of “players,” Ben Jonson. It’s the same Ben Jonson who plays the moral center of The Last Picture Show, Sam “the Lion,” stealing the picture and winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.