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Marriage and the necessity thereof was an obsession of the period. In What a Way to Go!, Louisa May is wed five times, attaining the then real-life plateau of Elizabeth Taylor, America's reigning empress of glamor, whose prodigious rate of husband turnover had nevertheless become an international joke. The frequency of treatment and inevitability of outcome of such films as A Guide for the Married Man, How to Murder Your Wife, Marriage on the Rocks, etc., suggest the urgency felt in redressing the moral imbalance wrought by Ms. Taylor on a public accustomed to having Hollywood validate society's traditional values.
The fluffiest movies of the early to mid 1960s are also united in their almost complete disavowal of and disdain for "cinematic technique." It was a parodistic, anti-intellectual movement in which nameless directors deployed the primitive visual language and spatial artificiality of cartoons. Synthetic, implausibly implausible, and heavy-handed (e.g., when in What a Way to Go!, Gene Kelly's Pinky Pinkston, a fabulously popular film star, is stampeded by fans, the cut is to a charging herd of elephants), these movies revel in bashing the kind of symbolic and speculative cinema then prevalent in Europe (not uncoincidentally, Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel, and Antonioni all did their signature work during this period). Indeed, What a Way to Go! features, among other contemptuous gestures, a low-ball parody of the Godardian jump cut when Mitchum asks, "Have-I-Told-You-Lately-That-I-Love-You?" in the space of ten different, equally lavish sets.
David Bowie said adults were
"just taller children." That seems
to describe this ruthless elite
from Preminger's Advise and Consent.
Paralleling the Age of Fluff was the rise of the political thriller, which by 1963 had displaced film noir as the exorcisor of America's newer, more insistent demons. Film noir had derived from a vague, intellectual conviction that superiority as a world power did not translate into an improvement in human character. But the political thriller took its cue from events whose immediacy everyone could understand. In John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), democratic government comes within a heartbeat of a Stalinist takeover. Similarly, in the same director's Seven Days in May (1964), it is a megalomaniacal general who nearly outfoxes an idealistic president. Other films, though not of this genre, touched on topical themes. Advise and Consent (1962) and The Best Man (1964) suggested that the nation was run by men ill suited to the demands of the nuclear age. In the early James Bond films, a British superman repeatedly comes to America's rescue, intimating that our ingenuous nation was no match for duplicitous European "allies." Both The Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines concerned international competitions to claim technological superiority. Even a comedy as innocuous-seeming as 1965's The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! played on anxieties that Fortress America was far from impregnable.
Tracy Reed and George C. Scott
in Dr. Strangelove
The aforementioned political thrillers tiptoed melodramatically around the possibility confronted head-on by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1963): that positions of power were occupied by nuclear trigger-happy madmen. Strangelove's impact was reinforced by the virtually simultaneous release of Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964). In its probity Fail Safe provided a plausible underpinning to Kubrick's wild speculations, effectively nullifying Strangelove's opening disclaimer of likelihood. The synthesis of the two films made nuclear Armageddon seem a matter of when and not if.
Was there a relationship between these seemingly disparate trends in American movies? To a degree, the hysterical abandon of films like What a Way to Go! (the title itself being the well-known response to news of a rapturous demise) is understandable when viewed against the fear of impending nuclear holocaust. In the same context, the overloading of films with leading actors in supporting and even bit parts suggests the movies as figurative lifeboats, affording the only kind of survival available — the immortality of the silver screen. The piling on of scenery and costumes was likewise a desperate act, an orgy of consumption before the final bell (witness the famous pie fight in The Great Race).
But while Hollywood may have been preaching "Eat, drink, and be merry," it nevertheless took care to endorse marital fidelity. It was as though every film of What a Way to Go!'s ilk was composed of a Saturday night and a Sunday morning, in which excessive revelry was absolved in a cleansing sermon. One had to be prepared to meet one's maker. In A Guide for the Married Man, for instance, Walter Matthau comes this close to consummating the affair whose meticulous planning comprises the film's narrative. Instead, suddenly conscience-stricken, he hurries home to wife Inger Stevens, while his amoral mentor, Robert Morse, is caught in flagrante. Matthau's return to the nest is musically accompanied by "There's No Place Like Home," in which the audience is encouraged to sing along by following a bouncing ball, no less.
Finally, the vulgar and philistine tone of these films, while inevitably partially attributable to the influence of television, can also be seen as a sarcastic thank you — or an unsarcastic fuck you — addressed to our European betters, the effete and in many cases dead philosophers over whose political theories (and territory, preferably) the Big One would finally be fought, spoiling everybody's fun. To be sure, much of the strained tone of the films of this era can also be attributed to Hollywood's not yet having broken the barrier of what it could depict onscreen. Sex, if it was addressed at all, was still presented in the customary wink-wink fashion. Even What a Way to Go!, for all its recklessness and its roster of heart throbs, was in fact utterly sexless. It remains the perfect dysfunctional family film.
If the period 1961 to 1967 attracts further scrutiny, Shirley MacLaine may emerge as its key figure. As a performer capable of Method-style underplaying and an entertainer/comedian adept at expressing comic hysteria, she was perfectly placed to bridge the transition from message movies (Some Came Running, Career, Two for the Seesaw) to massage movies (My Geisha, Irma La Douce, What a Way to Go!, The Yellow Rolls Royce). She even found time, in this the Age of Cameo, for a walk-on in that seminal rat-pack picture Oceans 11. (Ms. MacLaine was a charter member of Frank Sinatra's Clan, giving her entree into the darker canyons of the New Frontier.) She would end this period with the long-forgotten John Goldfarb Please Come Home (1965), a would-be parody of Cold War machinations that did nothing for the careers of anyone involved with it. It was in fact an awful film, not even deserving of a cult following, but like What a Way to Go!, it is significant for having sounded the death knell of one of American cinema's least disciplined and most telling episodes.
September 1996 | Issue 17
Copyright © 1996 by Jonny Held
ACCESS: With the sad exception of What a Way to Go!, most of the films mentioned in this article are available on videotape or laserdisc. (As always, we advise you NOT to rent from Blockbuster, an extreme right-wing corporation that routinely censors movies and consistently works against your interests as a free-thinking citizen.)
MORE 1960s: A look at American independent narrative cinema of the 1960s
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