Postwar Domestic Melodrama: The Home as a System of Control (with Patricia White)

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 move on to our next film. Um Mildred Pierce wrapped it Critique in a noir frame, needing a murder mystery to give us permission to put a woman’s ambition at the center with Leave Her to Heaven needs no such permission. This one opens in Technicolor and puts female desire front and center from the first frame and then treats it as monstrous. In Leave Her to Heaven from 1945, directed by John M. Stahl. Ellen Berent is a beautiful, wealthy woman who becomes obsessively devoted to her husband Richard, so much so that she’ll remove anyone she sees as a threat to their relationship, including his disabled brother and their unborn child Shot in Lush Technicolor, it is one of the most visually gorgeous films ever made about something so deeply disturbing. So With this film, uh I mean m man, I mean one, daddy issues, am I right? We’ve got a little uh electric complex going on. with this one. But I think it like I didn’t know this. This was kind of called like the first major color noir. And uh and that was interesting to me because you can definitely see that with the story here.

Patricia White
Yeah, no, it’s it’s such a in you know, in some ways I’d say on our list, I wouldn’t put it up there in terms of like, you know, auteurist masterpiece, where like many of the films on this list are. I mean, I will go to the Matt on the masterpiece word. Leave her to heaven is crazy. And I love that you recall that it is a noir because how can you have this much color, you know, and you have it one like the cinematography Oscar, you know

Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah, s gorgeous.

Patricia White
And you have Natalie Kalmus, who is the, you know, onset by contract technical or consultant because of the process has to be done I I’m pretty sure she’s credited on this one. There’s there’s another one where they have a different consultant, which I was surprised to see. And sc uh Cinema Scope. But yeah, so n sh yeah, we have a heroine who’s a femme fatale. Uh she she’s played by Gene Tierney, so we have a little, you know, there’s a little I guess Laura comes out the next year, so it’s not even really we don’t really know. But yes. The I’m gonna call it the you call it Electra. And I think, yeah, let’s keep it. I mean that’s the sort of popular format, but like Yeah, the daddy stuff. This is a woman who loves too much and drives everyone around her to to distraction. The fact that we stay with her and that she I mean she she does die as the production code would demand.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, right.

Patricia White
But even after her death she’s kind of pulling strings so there’s this, you know, like she wants to r wreak havoc on the people who s survive her through like poisoning herself but framing somebody for it and getting an old lover who happens to be the DA to m make some fake case. I mean, it’s just crazy stuff happens in this and this is one of the few that I haven’t like I I don’t have ready to hand what its source material was, but obviously Mildred Pierce, you know, was a you know, that was a hard boiled writer. This one feels like just like throw it all in there. The takeaways from the film are just the craziness of her badness and the locations And then the and the appropriate outfits to be worn in every location, right?

Andy Nelson
Oh, of course, of course.

Patricia White
Th but there was one connection to Other melodramas though that I did want to make, which is John Stahl directed the previous version of Imitation of Life one of the earliest versions of Love Affair, which is a y uh you know, much remade women’s picture. So has a lot of credibility from 30s vehicles um for women Um, so the fact that this is a woman’s picture in which she is thoroughly hateful, like love the villa you know, like love to hate. where where it’s the villainous, she’s a soap opera character. I mean, she does things that women do in soap operas, like give herself a miscarriage or switch out, you know, whatever, poison for gardening, you know, whatever. Those kinds of the the the deep attraction for the villain, Ness, um, I think is just what this movie is about

Andy Nelson
Well, and it’s an interesting inversion to kind of what we’re looking at with with other of these films, where this is a woman who refuses sacrifice. She refuses to share, she refuses to be reasonable. in many ways, which I think is interesting, she’s this monstrous character, but also the way the film kind of depicts it, she’s really kind of the only fully alive woman that we have in the film. And so what is it saying about that? Is that like is there a male gaze element to that? Like, you know, this this is like an ideal woman, but if if you have too much then it’s a then it’s a a monster?

Patricia White
Yeah, she’s a femme fatal, but she’s the heroine. And that’s just like a kind of very strange place to be I think there’s a female gaze and a male gaze element. I mean the female gaze, you know, whatever homo eroticism could be there, but also about like what she’s wearing. Like she’s just vividly the center of everything and she always has like an appropriate outfit and uh yeah just like I don’t think I need to watch this.

Andy Nelson
Even the appropriate sunglasses when she needs to drown the the brother in law.

Patricia White
I’ll put on my sunglasses while he goes under.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Wow, golly.

Patricia White
Um Deeply, yeah. So yes, you sh you that’s the same message from the noir, which is that, you know, the spider woman is gonna catch you. But I I think maybe you’re on to something that the that the male that’s implied by this movie is already in this kind of post-war I’m gonna say ’cause it’s straight out of feminist film theory, it kind of castrated space, right? Like that he there’s no one who can handle her. You know, she even killed her father. who she loved more than I mean, there’s no explicit reference, but the movie, as you said, has her riding very vigorously on a horse. dumping his ashes in their own special place in New Mexico.

Andy Nelson
Oh,

Patricia White
So there’s just, you know, there’s something almost Greek god excess about her. So this is a little disconnected, but I’m saying that we’re already hitting this place where there’s anxiety in the male viewer watching Film Noir. around what the femme fatale can do to him. I mean it’s there in his voiceover. He kind of can’t make sense of, you know, the fate that to to which he’s, you know, been consigned. Here there really isn’t, I don’t think, an even a uh like if you think about the structure of narration of the film, it’s like I’m really the only person who knows everything that ha that, you know, went down with Ellen and it’s the, you know, avuncular. friend of the family who is narrating the story to some other guy where like there’s no real validated, like you said, male character, our hero is a writer. So this one is just a hallucinatory film.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, and the the color really helps that because it really just it pops, it really explodes off the screen.

Patricia White
And they’re weird colors, which Technicolor always would do, where you’re like, why are you wearing that with that? And um

Andy Nelson
Yeah, it’s really punchy.

Patricia White
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Patricia White
And and I and I I s said it already a bit about the location. So we very deliberately go to a like a dude ranch in New Mexico and then we go to this back of

Andy Nelson
Back of the moon

Patricia White
Back of the Moon Bay, we go to Bar Harbor, we go to Warm Springs, Georgia. This is part of this whole like let’s encourage well both the movies can take you places that you might not be afforded to go. uh me might not be able to afford to go, but also this kind of obsession with travel and the capacity of post war consumption and the sort of continuum of entertainment options in the post war period. Television we’re trying to keep our w away because that is small scale and keeping you in your house, but there is this idea of more entertainment possibilities and and cinema scope, you know, drive-in ready.

Andy Nelson
Right, absolutely. 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. Let’s jump into The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952, directed by Vincente Minnelli. The domestic cycle doesn’t only play out in houses and marriages, sometimes it relocates its logic into another world entirely. And the bad and the beautiful does exactly that, taking the cycle’s central dynamics of glamour, ambition, exploitation, and betrayal, and running them through Hollywood itself. In this story, a powerful Hollywood Hollywood producer, Jonathan Shields, has destroyed the career of three people who helped make him successful. A director, a writer, and an actress. The film unfolds in flashback as each tells their story of how Shields used them and what it cost them. It’s an anti-Hollywood Hollywood film and a deeply strange one. It’s a fascinating entry, and I’m really curious because in some ways you could say it feels the most displaced from everything that we’re talking about. It’s not a domestic space at all, but a professional one. Although power dynamics you could say are very similar still. I’m curious, applying the emotional machinery of the post-war domestic melodrama to the film industry itself, how does that Change things. What are we doing differently with this one?

Patricia White
Ooh, yeah, interesting. Ca yeah, I’ve spent some time thinking about the the d Does it fit? How does it fit? And the ways that you know it was interesting because you had proposed Letter to Three Wives and you know and I had kind of I was just thinking of post-war fun movies and I had said something about all about Eve and they they have these similar structures where there’s like this kind of narration in which that it’s kind of irony is explicit, whereas that’s kind of hard with melodrama, right? Melodrama is kind of supposed to it has dramatic irony all the time, I suppose, but it doesn’t have irony of narration. So how could you tell a film about Hollywood that wasn’t, you know, in some ways ironic? But in the hands of Minelli, I think you also have something that that really brings the melodrama. And Minelli’s entries into this cycle. Um and there’s others like some came running which, you know, oh would have been a really nice not really domestic melodrama either. Because uh but it it would have been nice because it has Shirley MacLaine and there would have been a fun Shirley MacLaine thing going on with children’s hour. Um yeah what happens when you take it to Hollywood? Like so so I guess what I would say We were starting to get to it with the what are the Europeans bringing to American domesticity? Here we have what does film’s self-consciousness about itself bring to postwar American domesticity if that makes sense. So like the the yeah, the distance of the frame, the Hollywood frame

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
Allows us to then look at these ways of suffering of these characters that are determined by gender mostly class to a lesser extent, but somewhat there, in ways that are incredibly heartfelt. So like there’s just something about Minnelli’s films that are so like he’s not taking distance from his characters in ways that like many of these other directors are. And that’s just kind of weird because these characters are you like you just said, there’s a producer, the screenwriter, that they’re very like iconic and they’re whatever, like genius boy or you know th they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re made fun of for being like not like ordinary But there’s something super like emotionally resonant about it. So yeah, the film starts with you know, a funeral for a Hollywood mogul that Kirk Douglas character pays people to come to to mourn, you know, the death of old Hollywood and he’s trying to like, you know, both fulfill a paternal legacy and rebel. So we’ve got the Oedipal themes again. And like what is masculinity and what can masculinity be in this period. And even though this dude alienates Deeply the three characters. I don’t know if I fully spelt out the relationship to Letter of the Three Wives and All About Eve, but that the idea that there’s multiple nested flashbacks in which each person’s take on what the hell’s going down is focused on, right? Even though he’s alienated all of these people and you know, several of them are men, it’s actually got truer kind of feeling between the male characters than any other of the films that I could think of in our yeah.

Andy Nelson
Well it well, I mean I I think that’s uh Interesting because as I was thinking about it, I mean obviously I think the Lana Turner story as the actress who you know I think that that’s you can directly say, okay, I can see how that kind of relates to the domestic melodrama here. We’ve got this woman who is remade by this man who then discards her. And you could look at kind of the cost of ambition. and all of that that we’ve been talking about. But also when you look at at films like uh I’m thinking of Home from the Hill, where you’re looking at a father son relationship or just a big character of a father and his relationship with his uh with his community and and all of that. You can definitely see that a little bit within the story of Kirk Douglas’s character and and likewise written on the wind, you have like this this powerful this sun

Patricia White
Dow it’s a big man and then he’s playing my last or an actor

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Right, right. You’re you’re deal you’re dealing with that between this father and this son, and you’re seeing this self-dest in many ways a self-destructive character. Like like when Lana Turner comes over and finds the other woman at his place. Like there’s there’s a lot of similarity. And so I think and I think all of that carries that emotional weight that we’re that we’ve been talking about. So It’s a tricky one, but I do think there’s a lot going on here that still makes it fit nicely into all of this.

Patricia White
It goes on any list of Hollywood films because it’s a because of its aboutness of Hollywood. And it so I do think it it that’s there. I think you just did a really lovely job of talking about this. Again, these movies are not women’s pictures. They are male melodramas. Like this one is where we switch. Because the Lana Turner story is not the heart the beating heart of the film. I mean y you you’re she has the most spectacular car crash in you know just it’s just like uh like

Andy Nelson
Yeah. The crazy driver

Patricia White
I watch it sometimes just to be like, this is this is where I am right now. Like she comes out like without a scratch, but it’s just like, yeah, yeah.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah.

Patricia White
And so so yeah, it’s a film about the pathos of patriarchy, about how in this post-war period there’s no way that any kind of masculinity is ever gonna be what it once was, or what the dream of like America’s benevolent, you know, relationship to the world is gonna be. So what so what what are the most heartfelt ways that it’s gonna fuck up, right? And so and and what better place to stage that than Hollywood, right? We have to talk about Gloria Grahame. So Gloria Grahame, you know, obviously she’s in a lot of noir. She’s, you know famously and troubledly married to um Nicholas Ray for a time who we haven’t got to yet but will will. But she’s a Southern Belle. And she as an actor mind you, Lana Turner is perfectly cast in this movie as somebody who can’t act and needs to be taught you know, there’s just something so great about it. And and we have more to say about that too.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, we know.

Patricia White
in Imitation of Life. But Gloria Grahame’s performance here and her character, which is she’s horny. She’s horny for her professor husband, right? You know, we’ve got another writer guy. I really feel her trapped in this in her domestic space and that she gets to take this trip to Hollywood and she is sacrificed for it, right? Like she she’s in the way of this kind of male bonding experience, which is like, let’s make a movie. And so she has to be discarded and she’s literally you know, is in a fatal plane crash, which is very melodrama, right? Like that is overkill Right? Killing over and above what the plot demands.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
And so that to me also makes it fit the what do you do with a desirous woman and how does an audience feel with someone who has maybe, you know, an eighth of the film’s screen time, but is just absolutely indelible.

Andy Nelson
And it speaks to why she got an Oscar for it, because she was so powerful in in her in the small scream time that she had, yeah.

Patricia White
Yeah. So, you know, any list you give me, if you can I can put a Gloria Grahame film on it.

Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah. We talked about um in a lonely place in the film noir. uh conversation last month. And it’s just like, I mean, I’m like, anytime I can get Gloria Grahame in any conversation, I’m thrilled.

Patricia White
That’s exactly

Andy Nelson
You know, she’s she’s just one of my favorite people to wat to watch and talk about.

Patricia White
Yeah. Yeah.

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, and we’ve got a few more to talk about. In fact, let’s let’s move on to our next one here. Written on the wind from 1956, all the heaven allows showed us desire policed from the outside the community as the force that says no. Written on the wind takes the same circ palate and turns the destruction inward. Here the family itself is the source of catastrophe Kyle Hadley is the self-destructive heir to a Texas oil fortune who marries Lucy Moore, a woman he falls for almost impulsively. His childhood friend Mitch, who also loves Lucy. stands by helplessly why ky while Kyle spirals into alcoholism, jealousy, and paranoia. Kyle’s sist sister Mary Lee, wild, reckless, and desperately in love with Mitch Completes the four-person pressure cooker. When Kyle dies, the question of who’s responsible for what tears everything apart We’re really kind of pushing what we had just been talking about with Sirk into an operatic excess here with the wealth and the family pathology, and it’s all in beautiful technicolor. This one is is less about, I suppose, like what’s suppressed as to like what can’t be contained, right? Like we’re just kind of seeing Th just these things exploding and and all in excess because again, they’re this wealthy Texas oil family.

Patricia White
Totally. You know, You know, it’s Texas wealthy oil family. Let’s just say right out that like I mean when I’m studying these films in the eighties for the first time, you know, Dallas and Dynasty are going big time.

Andy Nelson
That’s exactly what I thought of when I I was like they had to pull from this directly.

Patricia White
Right.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
And from Home From the Hill, which is, you know, l I think less remembered.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Patricia White
So I think that uh Circ had a quote about everybody loves the it that it’s like this merry-go-round. And so to go back to that question of displacement, you know, everybody’s s yeah, like Marilee loves

Andy Nelson
She loves Mitch, yeah.

Patricia White
Mitch, Mitch loves uh Lauren Bacall.

Andy Nelson
Lucy, yeah, right.

Patricia White
Yeah, exactly. Lauren Bacall loves Kyle Y. Well, he is really good.

Andy Nelson
Good question, yeah.

Patricia White
Like Robert Stack is so good in this movie.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. It just I just have to say it’s it’s hard for me to watch Robert Stack in anything because all I picture is the crime show, you know, like it is uh

Patricia White
Yeah, the late life Robert said, but the voice and like

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Oh.

Patricia White
I think it I think um Elsaesser says something like the voice that sounds like it’s pumped out from one of those oil wells, right?

Andy Nelson
Oh, yeah, great, yeah.

Patricia White
So yeah. Yeah, so this one, so I do think you get like, yes, a much more you get this completely, like you said, operatic, I think very explicit critique of uh American consumerism and wealth, and you get again a kind of you get Rock Hudson as representing this sort of nature man alternative where there is, you know, some sense that he’s where the values, true values lie. But then again, he’s gonna, you know, go you know, whatever. He sticks with this family. He’s he’s he’s and he’s gonna go for oil in Iran. Like, you know, there’s he’s not he’s not outside either. I think that the written on the wind, the pace, the cutting, the motion, the color, the what does he call them? The split characters, the the the rich kids, uh Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone’s characters, uh Kyle and Marilee, the siblings. are so memorable that, you know, I do not teach, I hope, a cohort of college students without at least making them watch Written on the Wind. And they’re not hard to persuade that, you know, that as cornball as it is, you know, that there’s just something, you know, akin to that quote that in circles films, that there’s just this complexity going on Um so Circ f confesses his interest in those split characters who can’t get what they want. It’s not that he identifies with the rich ones, but the ones who are just eaten inside by some, you know, inability to, you know, whatever, fulfill their desires. So Kyle is an alcoholic, Marilee’s a nymphomaniac, both make for great symbolic uh use of props and costumes. So you have, you know, the movie starts with Kyle in his kitty what what his sister calls his kitty car, this yellow bright yellow sports car uh and uh you know w drinking and a gun and a shooting and then the movie’s a sort of flashback and it has a really good courtroom scene. Like it’s it’s much more efficient than the courtroom scene in Leave Her to Heaven. And Mary Lee, like, okay. We get to talk about both Dorothy Malone and Gloria Grahame, so thank you for inviting me to this. Yeah. So Dorothy Malone is so amazing in this movie. The way she holds herself. Oh, and I was talking about props. Her she wears this. red dress. Red is her color. She she has a red sports car. And she has red flowers in her room. And at a certain point she is so like frustrated by her inability to you know get Rock Hudson’s attention. And again, you know, Rock Hudson reads again, it’s not particularly heterosexual, you know, there’s like there’s little moment where he puts his hand on like the guy that she’s trying to seduce, and you’re like, that’s where the action is. she decides she needs to put on a Mambo record in her room and um undress and whirl around after she’s been busted, brought home by the cops for trying to like pick up guys. and like falls back in a frenzy and is kicking her feet in this chair and there’s this very long lap dissolve as her father has been kind of coming up the stairs, kind of a beaten and broken man, falls down the stairs, and the laptop makes it look like she’s just like kicking this pffff man at the bottom of the steps. Like it’s seriously using like displacement in like almost like a Freudian sense where something is in a dream where something is getting the meaning of something is elsewhere, but there’s something very like You can’t look away from that’s happening in front of you.

Andy Nelson
The the way that Sirk uses dissolves in all of these films is is masterful because there’s there’s a lot

Patricia White
Um

Andy Nelson
uh of interesting imagery that are combined with each other.

Patricia White
Yeah, it’s almost abstract.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Patricia White
Um and again and again the the the core is almost abstract. It’s what I was looking at before is just to make sure just to to say a bit about the team. So you know I said like Sirk, that like he worked, you know, like whatever. He was in experimental theater in very trained in in in Germany before he comes to the US. He’s Brechtian. And like Brechtian, wow, like that’s not something you associate with the melodrama where you’re supposed to be overinvested and Brechtian is distanced, right? You have the e you have the oh these are actors being actors and he really is that’s played up. But he gets to Hollywood and he gets like this producer Ross Hunter, cinematographer Russell Metty. And Universal’s just like, here, go make these this cycle of films. And he throws it all in them, right? And he’s like, Okay, you want me to use all this money for pink and purple w walls in this fake Miami hotel or recreate twenty one. Let’s do it, but let’s make every one of those objects like feel like they have this um psychic weight for these characters, like at the hotel, Lauren Bacall, who we start, we see as like an ad. Well, I guess she maybe is the secretary, but she could be Peggy in Mad Men, quite, you know, plausibly. She could if have risen to executive, you know, she is Lauren Bacall She just gets her head turned by Kyle Hadley and, you know, flies off to Miami with him and then like turns away from this pink and purple, completely outfitted hotel room with like it has a million gowns and purses and wraps and jewels in it and she’s like I think it’s beautiful, but I think of how ugly it would be in the morning. You know, so there’s some explicit acknowledgement of objects as carrying moral weight, but there’s also, but it’s happening everywhere in the movie. Again, like I mentioned very briefly that Dad’s a big man. I know I can’t fill his shoes. And then you dad is cast by a very short actor. Um so you know again that it’s like we’re in the realm of is patriarchy, you know, a viable structure or is it toppling? And then to be even more explicit about sort of patriarchy and phallic imagery, we have Marilee who uh at the end is seen caressing a an oil derrick uh in front of a portrait of her father with i mean like a desktop oil derrick

Andy Nelson
Yeah, a desktop right, yeah.

Patricia White
Yeah. In front of a portrait of her father with the oil derrick in the frame. So there’s this like, oh, the woman is the one who should carry it on. but what is she gonna bring to it? You know, there’s something sexualized in her gesture, and there’s something very, to my mind, satisfying because indeed she is the most like as you said of Gene Tierney’s character in, you know, Leave her to heaven, the most alive um part of this movie.

Andy Nelson
Well and that’s yeah, she for me was r kinda the most fascinating figure in the whole movie uh because there was just uh the way that the film Has her character play out, uh the treatm uh I guess you could say the ultimate treatment of her with her decision that she makes in the courtroom. and then ending up in the the powerful position of actually inheriting dad’s uh oil uh empire and that that final moment was like that’s that’s the last phallus that she’s gonna get to stroke. You know, she’ll she’ll never be she’s never going to be with Mitch. And uh but here she is, this powerful woman now. And I it’s like I don’t know, it it it was a fascinating glimpse into the the woman inheriting this patriarchal empire and and in a way kind of becoming the male figure.

Patricia White
Yeah, and and but which I c I think you can read in in again in in an in an ironic way, like if he’s saying that these happy I mean obviously he would say this would this was not a happy ending ’cause she she lost Mitch, but I don’t think Mitch was putting it out anyway. So um there I to me, yeah, to me that’s where we go straight to well, I don’t know, you know, um

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
Molly Haskell also had this distinction in the women’s pictures between the super women and the super females and the super women who could, you know. do do the masculine stuff and the super females who were, you know, manipulative bitches and got it all done anyway. And I I think she’s a superwoman. But definitely in Dynasty, you know, is is the destiny for the the the super female version of Marilee’s character where um yeah she would be able to to run it all um with feminine wiles. We don’t know. That’s the beauty of the night of the f of a feature film. It ends right there.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. I was just thinking it’s so fascinating because now now we have Demi Moore essentially doing the same thing in Landman, right? It’s just like this this thread. of that type of story that people are clearly drawn to.

Patricia White
Hmm. Was that your first time seeing Written on the Wind?

Andy Nelson
Yes.

Patricia White
Yay.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
So I’ll I’ll claim that with all the undergraduates, with the decades of undergraduates.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, there you go.

Patricia White
All right.

Andy Nelson
No, it was it was fantastic.

Patricia White
Yeah.

Andy Nelson
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. Let’s talk about uh going back to Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life, 1959. This is Sirk’s farewell to Hollywood, and he knew it because afterward he retired to Switzerland. having recognized that the visual system he developed for melodrama throughout the decade was complete, I guess you could say. This is in some ways the cycle’s most socially exposed film, and certainly it could be seen as its most devastating

Patricia White
Damn

Andy Nelson
Lora Meredith is an ambitious white actress who takes in Annie Johnson, a black woman, as her live in housekeeper. The two women and their daughters, Lora’s daughter Susie, and Annie’s light skinned daughter Sarah Jane, who is desperate to pass as white build a life together over many years. The film runs two intersecting maternal melodramas simultaneously, and by the end has exposed every comfortable assumption the cycle is built around motherhood, sacrifice, and the American dream. Yeah, we’ve got a race story, uh labor issues, we’ve got the struggle of of trying to pass as uh somebody else, maternal sacrifice, and uh I mean there’s Two mothers, two daughters, two different stories, this parallelism that’s going on through this whole thing, kind of exposing a lot of stuff that these other we’ll just say white maternal melodramas were leaving out And I thought that was interesting. I mean, and there’s we should say, certainly through today’s eyes, there are a lot of other ways that we can be reading things that are going on. with this story. Kind of like the the mammy sort of caricature that we have in here and and uh there’s a whole article I read uh or I had I’d found I couldn’t access it because it’s behind firewall or paywalls, but it’s um like What is wrong with with Sarah Jane and a lot of those sorts of stories? So there’s a lot of stuff going on here, but at the core of it, I think it really is this story about these characters. And yeah, it’s a powerful one.

Patricia White
Oh, powerful, powerful. Um, and before we said, like, oh, let’s just all end you know, let’s end our cycle with that funeral but we could also sort of end Hollywood a little bit, I mean, end the story about Hollywood with this the success of this movie. I mean, it was an enormous blockbuster. Like it was really popular and it was really remembered and it is a women’s picture. I mean, we’ve got four women in it. Like we’ve got like John Gavin in and out of the movie, but this one’s this one’s this one’s for the female audience. And it’s a remake of a 1934 film and it’s an adaptation of a Fannie Hurst novel. So we have like full-on women’s picture credentials, and I think that the I you know, I don’t wanna defer to I don’t think that Sirk was like very deeply able in 1959 to comment on the depth of what was happening in the civil rights movement in the US. But I do want to point out that he himself said that they had to like make her more mammyish because it would be so unrealistic in the nineteen fifties for her to stay on in this house because of all the things that had happened in the US. So to remake this 30s depression era material in which the women in in that movie are more clearly employer and employee and also more clearly um there’s a more extractive relationship between the between Laura what’s it between that the characters names are different in the but between the white mom and the black mom, because the black mom has a pancake recipe and so she becomes she becomes a trademark sh for um a pancake business and the white woman becomes a pancake entre entrepreneur.

Andy Nelson
I see, okay

Patricia White
That’s in the Hurst novel and that’s in the and and just to get another gr m amazing name in there, but Zora Neale Hurston was Hurst’s secretary when she was writing that novel. So there was some actual like um struggles around how to make sense of race and and e extractiveness and literal stereotyping in terms of product placement in the 30s version that was removed for the 50s version and made just more into like some weird pink fantasy life that they live in order to make color matter, so the colors of the film the pink, but also to make the race matter but in a very cirque way where you’re asking, what does it mean? What are people not seeing in these relationships? So so I’m kind of making this uh an argument for The film is absolutely about the possibilities of black women and white women and their, you know, where they could go or be, but it’s firmly centered on the white women but it’s asking you what it can’t see and what we can’t see. So so if that makes sense. I so I so I do want to say, yes. that it’s enormously emotionally affecting, both on the level of and that has nothing to do with the white women. uh on the level of Sarah Jane’s conflict around racial passing, which again is from a long-standing motif and important in black authored literature and film, um, as well as in a few um important Hollywood films. So Sarah Jane’s like conflict and she’s played by Susan Kohner, who is a non who was not who is white

Andy Nelson
Mex yeah. Well and Mexican American, yeah.

Patricia White
I mean her mom’s yeah, she has Mexican and Jewish ancestry, but um not black. And then uh one of more characters, Annie’s character, the black mom. her death. And so why does she have to die? That’s a good question. I mean, she has to die because that stereotype has to die, but also because that’s the maternal mellow. She’s r she dies for her daughter So she removes her black body from the world so that her daughter can like become part of Lana Turner’s family. Like it’s like so, yeah. But the pathos of those scenes, however not even s because there are multiple scenes, the pathos of those arcs is so affecting despite the absolutely surrealness of the overpacked mise en scene because Lana Turner’s characters, Lora Meredith is rich. So, you know, you have to ha and she’s tacky. So you have to have like just stuff everywhere in this film that is distracting you from these real, the realism of these emotions Um, so to so so to back up, how do we know that the film is kind of taking distance from its presentation, but also allowing you to feel the real conflicts? Well, we know because in the opening title sequence, we have like weird diamonds falling into the frame and somebody who’s not King not King Cole

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
Not Nat King Cole, Earl Williams, is singing this theme song, and the film is called Imitation of Life. And like, what does that even mean? I mean any Hollywood film could just be like have shooting script, imitation of life.

Andy Nelson
Yeah that’s right.

Patricia White
You know, any Hollywood film could be called that. So it tells you from the begin and then they go to Coney Island, which has a lot of, you know great real history, but clearly in this film is standing in for like well, it actually is standing in for leisure culture and racial mixing. possibility of re leisure culture and racial mixing, but it is standing in for leisure culture as escapism and the movies as escapism and is this movie’s imitation of life? Like when does it actually land on life And it lands on life, I would say, in these feelings that are just so intense and these performances like Susan Kohner is so good as Sarah Jane. And then Sandra Dee is so perfect as Susie and Lana Turner so perfect as

Andy Nelson
Yeah, she really is

Patricia White
an actress who when she tries to play a socially relevant part is like unconvincing. So the movie works, I guess, on layers and levels and displacements and again, as part of the Sirk trilogy It’s I think best proves the you have to hold together the women’s picture audience, the truth of emotion, and the the the pathos of women’s centrality and yet powerlessness and take it seriously and not trivialize and the truth of Sirk’s Brechtian influenced, you know, every frame, every camera height is always a weird thing with him. Like he uses the camera like on the floor a lot. Like there’s just these weird ways in which or or low at least, where you’re like you’re seeing elements of decor and you’re seeing characters as elements of decor and you’re seeing

Andy Nelson
Like through the arm of a chair or things like that, yeah.

Patricia White
That’s right. You’re seeing this sort of checkerboard effect of or I guess chess chess where the p pieces are being moved by

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
hands that are greater than ours. Are those hands American racism? Are they Hollywood’s fatuousness? Are they both at the same time? I think this movie holds them together the best.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, it’s a it’s a fascinating story and it really gives the characters, the these four actresses, the chance to really kind of play a lot within within the the Well, we’ll say the frame, the actual physical frame that Sirk is using, but also just the Yeah, yeah, which is wide, but also like the frame of their characters and and the and what they’re representing.

Patricia White
Which is why

Andy Nelson
And I think for me, I don’t know, the i i it’s hard to not look at that motel room scene where Sarah Jane is living uh at the end and and and Annie comes to uh to visit her and is you know, it like n kind of knowing like this is probably the last time I’ll see her because of you know the way that she reacts and just like that final goodbye and everything and then her friends show up and just the way that she has to depart. I mean it’s just it really kind of rips your heart out.

Patricia White
It’s the dry eyes

Andy Nelson
Ugh, that’s a tough one.

Patricia White
Yeah, I I cannot I always cry.

Andy Nelson
That’s a tough one, yeah.

Patricia White
Like you could say basically you say the word Stella Dallas and I cry and imitation of life I have to because it’s that’s the words. I don’t cry unless I watch. But that scene and let me let’s just say because we mentioned Sirk’s use of mirrors and screens already, but she does look in a mirror and she says the girl in that mirror is white, um, you know, which gets in all this meta stuff about casting or whatever. And so she’s faking with the friends, and then she says goodbye to her mother, and just under her voice says To us.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah

Patricia White
She says it to us. And so you can’t yeah, you ca and then the m the funeral scene I can’t get I mean the funeral scene is ridiculous.

Andy Nelson
Ugh. Uh, yeah

Patricia White
This is this Woman who has been self-effacing her whole life, Annie, and she’s like, But I’m gonna have a funeral that’s going to have like basically you’re gonna have to call in the prop department and get everything that’s left over from like gone with the wind, like all the horses and carriages and you know whatever.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Patricia White
And it’s shot through like a There’s one shot through like a basement shop that says costumes through it so there’s every opportunity to not cry and yet.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
You cry because this woman who’s so self-effacing is, you know, and she wanted this funeral, she wanted this spectacle, she wanted this black woman’s funeral to take over Fifth Avenue

Andy Nelson
Well, and just also a a great uh nod, like a a a a callback to when Lora, who’s so oblivious, was just like Oh, I didn’t know you had any friends. Oh my God. Wow. So and then to see like the street just full of people, I’m just like, okay, that was that was a payoff that was worth it.

Patricia White
Yeah, and to see black people who are not being asked to s I mean, they’re To allow them to be extras, because that is really what all Hollywood could imagine at that moment.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
I mean, not to say there aren’t some other that’s that’s another podcast.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Yeah, right, a whole other thing. 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 let’s uh end our conversation. We’re going to be looking at uh The Children’s Hour, 1961, directed by William Wyler. Everything we’ve really traced through the cycle with the production code and its pressure on desire, the way communities police what can and can’t be said. arrives at its most explicit point here where the code really is kind of breaking open. Here we have two women running a small private school together. and a malicious student spreads a rumor that they are lovers. The rumor destroys everything, the school, their reputations, their relationships, regardless of whether or not it is true. We’ve already kind of mentioned this is really kind of closer to the social problem film, which as you’ve said is also i it’s not starting here. It’s also had its long uh thread throughout uh throughout this period. Um, but I’m I’m curious, like, looking at this film and and trying to say, okay, how can we look at this through kind of this post-war domestic melodrama lens. uh how do you see what this story is trying to say and and and and this internal story of these two women, which I mean we’ll just say this school may as well be their home.

Patricia White
Right. And it is. I mean, you you get little spaces like, well, my room’s, you know, it’s very important that my room doesn’t have a keyhole, so these students, these kids are lying, you know?

Andy Nelson
Right, right, right, exactly.

Patricia White
The kids who know stuff that kids shouldn’t know and that like a lesbian character, Martha Dobie, doesn’t know about herself, right, until she says I ha it had to come back to me from the libel. It had to come back to me from the lie for me to know that there was something in me that was this. So yeah, so I mean w what I like about putting it here with these others is that it does for me, and this is my own scholarship, say that there are tensions between women that are erotic in maternal mal I mean in women’s pictures often. And we didn’t talk about it with imitation of life, but like why are they living together? You know? Why do they raise their children together? Is that just economic necessity? You know, what What do they get that they can’t get elsewhere? So I so I do think that I like to talk about like the queer possibilities of things that can’t be named, you know, because so much can’t be named in melodrama, so there they’re you know, they are there. And I like it because we get Wyler in here, who i you know, he directed a lot of really good women’s pictures, but not in this s time frame so much, so it’s nice.

Andy Nelson
This yeah

Patricia White
So so he directed the first version of the play, The Children’s Hour, right? really under the production code, so that they couldn’t even say that the school fell apart because there was a rumor that the headmistresses were a couple In that one, which was called These Three, there had to have another rumor go around, which was that one of them was in also in love with the man who Yeah. So the reason why I say that is that like the beauty of the unspeakable, like well I literally just What’s talking about it is that anything can be unsp can can you can fill in the unspeakable with anything.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
So these three stars Miriam Hopkins as one of the couple, and she comes back as the aunt who really sets the whole catastrophe in motion in this film. So that’s an also interesting. So so Wyler is kind of doing a reparative gesture for having erased the lesbian content. uh from the earlier film, but the lesbian content in the earlier film was about

Andy Nelson
Fascinating.

Patricia White
whether you could make lesbian content by not talking about it, right?

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
So which is all to say that it’s a weird time to make a f this film because the plays written in the 30s when there was a whole bunch of anxiety about college women and schoolmistresses and whatever and forms of female community And so why do we get around to making it in 1961? Is it 62?

Andy Nelson
Yeah, sixty-one, yeah.

Patricia White
And yes, because you can now say As a quote, they say, We just had a trial in which, as the judge put it, we were accused of having sinful sexual relations with each other. So like just the convolution of that, like I’m quoting a judge of a libel trial that was about, but that’s where you could say women having sinful sexual

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
But so anyway, so it got through, but everyone knew the play, so it was like it was never hidden in the earlier version or now.

Andy Nelson
Yeah.

Patricia White
So I’m a little bit on a tangent here. So um I think that the space of the school is a really lovely metaphor for the ways that women could make. The mastery of the domestic sphere into a possible other social world if that makes sense. So I mean it happens as like little women and she’s like, oh let me do a school and it’ll be progressive and it’ll have all this stuff. So it’s like an extension of the home that that is could be an extension of the prison of the home, which it is for a time in the children’s hour when the rumor is spread all the kids are all the girls are withdrawn from the school, they lose the case, the libel case, and the two of them Karen and Martha are like wandering around the house not knowing what to do with themselves and literally using a very good this is a very good while shot too. a really good melodr women’s picture melodrama trope, which is the woman at the window. Martha’s at the door watching a flatbed truck with a bunch of let’s just call them MAGA men, like standing in the back of the truck or pickup truck, but standing in the yeah, like upright, weirdly upright

Andy Nelson
Yeah, may as well be, yeah.

Patricia White
driving past the house, just staring at them, right? So that the domestic space that is supposed to be, you know, the women are always looking out the window, waiting for something to happen, or if they could get out, or whatever and now they’re being looked back in at as freaks. So what’s going on in there? So it’s so it could be a prison but it could also be a model. There could be things about reciprocity, about mutual aid, about how they share the share the workload about their educational philosophy. We don’t know a lot because the school gets shut down pretty quick, but there is a way in which the model of the home made larger as school, which is, you know, very kind of what happened in the nineteenth century in terms of first wave feminism, you know, could be valorized. And I’m gonna s stretch that and say I think a little bit of that is what’s happening with these movies. especially the ones that are about women, is that what’s happening in the relations among women in the movies or the potential for it Or even the critiques of the family that we’ve been talking about can be, what’s the word, scaled up So that the movies offer these kind of pictures of a domestic space that you could scale up that critique. You know, and so anyway. So, yeah, so but it’s handled, I’ve already mentioned the um and why it’s a while shot is that it’s incredible depth of shot there. Like he’s using and the and clearly this it’s a very stagy film because it’s based on a play, but it’s also because of the way that Wyler builds the sets. and makes them like real h places where people are interacting with each other spatially. And he does a lot with you know, foregrounding certain characters to s in so that you know whatever that Martha is starting to recognize that she in fact does desire Karen that way. And then I guess just to jump to like the most famous shot in the movie or the most famous sequence in the movie is that you know, the domestic sphere becomes fatal for this budding lesbian character who I guess Once she realizes that she is, does desire Karen and that she’s always been different, goes up to her room, locks her room. We see her right before I think the last shot of her is she’s kind of curled up with a blanket. And I’m like, no, I think that’s a bathrobe ’cause there’s like a a rope belt around that

Andy Nelson
Oh, well.

Patricia White
f and I I saw it for the first time this time. Karen, who’s an incredibly interesting character, played by Audrey Hepburn, and I think maybe the Europeanness comes back here too, which is like she’s not a European in the in the diagesis, but she has that lovely accent, she kind of doesn’t care that Martha is coming out to her. But now that Martha has realized this, she retires to the closet, right? She goes to her room and locks the door, and Karen goes for a walk, and then Karen realizes that sh she needs to run back to the house, grabs this incredibly heavy-duty candlestick that’s very handy, little like I mean, Audrey Hepburn is frail. breaks down the door and we have just this very famous shot of the shadow of two

Andy Nelson
Two legs hanging down, yeah.

Patricia White
Yeah, two two pumps, like a perfect, you know, 1960s.

Andy Nelson
Yeah

Patricia White
I l Martha has this line, I’m a sweater and skirt girl. We’re never we’re always in style. It’s the sweater, the skirt, and the pumps And the pumps are just kind of like a shadow across this overturned chair and rope, and we realize that Off screen, she’s hung herself. We dwell very closely on Karen’s absolutely uh, you know, very, very poignant. reaction shot to what she is seeing. And wow, that’s like pretty damning of the house as prison.

Andy Nelson
Oh yeah, yeah. Well and you hadn’t mentioned which I think is also important, just going back to Wyler and those shots, like that Great shot from above, like behind Shirley MacLaine, looking out the window down to the sidewalk out in front of the house, and you see Audrey Hepburn. w like far in the distance as she kind of like they turn and and look at each other and you have that again that connection between distance but also just the vastness of that uh of that space. And I think that is just another great shot to to include in there to kind of represent all of that.

Patricia White
Absolutely, and that they have this moment and then it’s a sort of belay and then that’s melodrama like hardcore and now now you’re really making me respect like the what is done to make this less of a play on screen because melodrama, you know, it’s always about the timing. It’s either just in time or too late. And So Karen gets this walk away from the house and then realizes she has to run back. But the movie also ends with Karen walking away from Martha’s funeral and And we get a couple insert shots of like James Garner, you know, her m now

Andy Nelson
X fiance

Patricia White
ex-fiance looking at her and not be you know, with a classic male gaze frame like, you know, really, I am looking, and she’s way in the distance and she just walks, walks, walks with this like Audrey Hepburn imposture. Where is she going? She’s walking right out of this space where I guess the domestic melodrama is the only way to tell a woman’s story. Like maybe we could tell a different story, you know, in the sixties. Sadly, we did, and it was like the sexual revolution and it was kind of like it took a while for us to get to a version of that that actually, you know, I would want to claim. as as you know, like maybe in the seventies we we we get some good ones.

Andy Nelson
Yeah. Right, right, right.

Patricia White
Yeah, so that’s it’s uh yeah.

Andy Nelson
Yeah, it took some time.

Patricia White
And I think that the that that that Karen’s uh not in a weird way, not unlike the George Peppard character, is that like the non, you know, flashy character is kind of representing some kind of, you know, ethical

Andy Nelson
Yeah, yeah 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.