“All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it? Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.”
***
I suspect I’d have been more impressed by The Ice Storm had I seen it in a theater the year it came out (1997) instead of on DVD this week.
The film, set in 1973 suburban Connecticut on Thanksgiving weekend, is undeniably stylish and even coldly haunting in parts, like the best work of Alex Colville.
However, Ang Lee’s “Asian” appreciation of social pecking orders (he is a great admirer of Ozu), which were on display in his previous film, Sense and Sensibility (1995) was underused in The Ice Storm, because everyone belongs to the same affluent class.
As well, too many bits of business that might have seemed fresh in 1997 – like the stoned girl’s head flopping onto one boy’s crotch; another boy’s death echoed in a Fantastic Four panel – now seem corny.
The Ice Storm is best remembered fifteen years later for its “key party” sequence.
(See this “controversial” 2003 parody ad for the Toyota Corolla):
These “key party” scenes in The Ice Storm aren’t particularly thrilling, or even salacious. We remember them because we wonder: did suburban 1970s squares really try to get in on the younger generation’s “free love” hijinks a few years after the fact?
A survivor of London’s “Swinging Sixties” told me he’d participated in one of these “spin the bottle for grown ups” get-togethers, but he’s my only primary source. It’s possible these suburban wife swapping “affairs” are an urban legend, like “rainbow parties” or “bra burning,” which only became “real” after someone invented them and spawned a moral panic.
I’m not spoiling much when I tell you that nobody at the “key party” in The Ice Storm has a great “swinging” experience. Almost everyone involved is bitter or reluctant beforehand, or miserable later.
You might think this is because the movie was made in 1997, twenty five years after the fact, and reflects society’s reluctant acknowledgement that the freewheeling 1960s and 1970s were a long, loud, colorful multi-generational social disaster of the first order. (Albeit with a decent soundtrack.)
In all the caper and “heist” films of the 1950′s and early 1960′s, the criminals were caught and punished in the end, but by the 1980′s and later it was standard practice to have them get away with the swag — or the violent revenge — with the closing credits rolling over the thieves lolling contently on some tropical beach. This tends to undercut your contention that during this era Hollywood upheld conventional morality.
ZZZ, can you illustrate your argument with many examples? I tried to find some, looking at the selections on Netflix from the Fifties vs. the mid-Sixties and later but I couldn’t find many. In the cases I did find where the crooks happily got away with the crime, the protagonist’s antagonist was usually some other, usually worse, criminal as in “The Sting” or Clint Eastwood’s westerns. It’s hard to say that “The Godfather” series had a happy ending, considering how many Corleones died unnatural deaths. In most of the post-mid-sixties crime movies I can remember, criminals came to a bad end as in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “Billy Bathgate”, “Casino”, “Fargo”, “A Simple Plan”, “Reservoir Dogs”, etc. There are exceptions, of course, such as “The Usual Suspects”, but in general I don’t see a pattern which would support your rule.
“Trading Places” and “The Italian Job” quickly come to mind. In “Trading Places”, the group that could well have committed trading fraud (they had advance information on a government report on the price of orange juice) are sitting on a beach enjoying adult beverages at the end of the movie. It’s a comedy, of course. “The Italian Job” (at least the remake, I don’t remember the original) has the gold thieves enjoying the fruits of their crime.
It had been many years since I saw “Tequila Sunrise” so my memory of the ending might be faulty but it may have a happy ending for the bad guys. Of course, I could be wrong.
I forgot to include “Oceans 11″ (at least the remake) about a casino heist. I never saw the sequels so I don’t know how they ended.
Jack Olsen, I can think of a good many examples of classic heist movies which follow ZZZ’s rule, if we define the heist film as involving an intricate plot to steal something valuable. A tragedy like “A Simple Plan” really doesn’t fit the “heist” formula, because the protagonists stumble into the money, and (as the title suggests) are always cobbling together something that ought to be simple but which only gets them more deeply into trouble. A true heist movie is like “Topkapi” (1964) in which a group of characters–con-man, acrobat, strong man, electronics expert–craft an elaborate plot to steal a dagger from the Topkapi museum in Istanbul–and almost get away with it. Or “The Lavender Hill Mob” in 1951, a lovely Ealing Studios comedy in which a complicated plot to steal gold bullion goes awry. The turning point seems to me to come in the late sixties. “How to Steal a Million” (1966)–also a comedy–creates an elaborate back-story in which the would-be thieves are in fact trying to correct a past wrong in stealing a statue from a museum, and therefore the audience can root for the thieves and remain on the side of right and justice. In “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968) the mastermind makes no pretence of virtue, and gets away with it. The real tipping point comes in 1969, with the first “Italian Job”–the thieves seem to have gotten away with a mass of gold bullion, stacked in weighty bars on the back of their getaway van, but as they zoom along the hairpin turns of a road into the Alps, they skid and slew around, with the van precariously seesawing on the edge of a gigantic chasm. The thieves, in the front of the van, could easily make their escape out onto the road, but the heavy gold would tip the van over into the abyss: the movie ends with them quite literally tipping back and forth, trying to figure out a way to get the gold and escape with their lives.
By the 1970′s and later, it was routine for the thief to get away with the gold: consider “The Silent Partner” (1978), or the remake of “Ocean’s 11″ (2001) or “Heist” (2001) or “The Good Thief” (2003) or “The Bank Job” (2007).
At the end of Body Heat, Kathleen Turner, having gotten away with two murders, is sitting on a beach sipping cocktails next to the cabana boy. William Hurt fares less well.
Also, one of my favorite war movies from the era. This has little to do with the fact that it’s a caper movie, and everything to do with the fact that the war movie part is played very tongue-in-cheek. “Kelly’s Heroes” ends with the protagonists stealing the German gold and escaping. They tried a sort-of pastiche of it, set during one of the Gulf Wars (“Three Kings”) but they wound up getting tangled up in issues such as where the gold came from, and whether they should intervene when local bad guys began abusing civilians. In “Kelly’s Heroes” they simply bribe the Germans and leave (one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in a movie occurs between Telly Savalas and Don Rickles. They’re discussing whether they’re going to get past the German guarding the bank to get the gold, and Rickles discovers that Savalas and the others haven’t tried to bribe the German yet: “Make a deal!” “A deal, what kind of deal?” “A DEAL deal. Maybe the guy’s a Republican. ‘Business is business,’ right?” I love that, Hollywood’s vision of corruption is a Republican…laughed out loud when I heard it, laugh every time I see the scene in the movie.
The most salient example I can think of where the bad guy (girl in this case) gets away with it is “Body Heat”. In at least one episode of “Miami Vice” (where Phil Collins guest stars) bad people get away with things. In “Blade Runner” the viewers perception of “bad guys” and “good guys” becomes the point of the movie. I can’t think of anything at all from the 50′s and 60′s where the bad guys get away with anything, my perception is these were all straightforward morality tales with the “correct” ending.
My understanding was that the first movie where the criminal was allowed to get away with it was a silly thing called “the hot rock”, which wasn’t until 72.
But one should also remember Dicken’s warning in the introduction to Oliver Twist, that the ending doesn’t matter if you glamorize the anti-hero throughout the rest.
They’re just movies, not de facto propaganda films or reflections of reality – just art. This is a mistake easy to make when one looks at so-called “documentary” photography like Robert Frank’s 1959 book “The Americans.” The penchant of Frank and his cohorts like Diane Arbus or Gary Winogrand to depict America as overcast, sad, conformist and racist or Michael Moore to use that word “documentary” to show a similar corruption of America is problematic enough because such work is supposedly “real.” It shouldn’t be a mistake easy to make with Hollywood films.
Movies like “Hud” and “The Last Picture Show” or “The Ice Storm,” which show a similar empty dreariness without invoking “reality” are therefore never to be confused with our actual nation any more than Indiana Jones merely because they invoke a kind of verisimilitude by presenting “realistic” fantasy. In fact so-called “documentary” work occupies the same artistic space as do entertainment films but without the prominent lines demarcating them from reality and that’s the rub.
It is the work of America’s “documentary” photographers and not Hollywood films that rise to the level of propaganda since the latter freely admit the make the stuff up while documentary photographers say “Look at what I “found” outside – America – it’s sad, stupid, unconsciously ironic and racist and it’s overcast everyday and black and white too.”
Movies have not been an art form since the late 30′s.
The vast majority of films are social and political statements. Films are to social engineers what butter is to popcorn – a condiment that masks the tasteless, nutrition-less substance being consumed.
Excellent article Kathy – loved the albeit with a decent soundtrack comment – clever, very clever and true!
Movies have been an art form from day one to now. That wasn’t my point. My point was that they don’t really succeed as propaganda even if they are because they are so clearly fictional. Just because people claim entertainment films blur the line between reality and fantasy doesn’t make it so; some people are easy to fool.
What blurs the line are films that purport to be “documentary” like Moore’s which are in fact propaganda and no more “real” than “Death of a Salesman.” The other people who blur this line are documentary photographers; “The Last Picture Show” is an almost perfect analogue to Frank’s “The Americans” and neither more real than the other yet the former is art and the latter considered a “real” and overview of American life in the late ’50s. Both are fake, made-up narratives.
Hud, The Last Picture Show and The Ice Storm were books before they were movies and all were faithful adaptations. Any “empty dreariness” should be credited to McMurtry and Moody. True, none depicts America as a whole, but then, neither author meant them to, certainly not McMurtry. Both, however, did capture some bits quite well.
ZZZ, you’re right, but as you said yourself, those “happy” endings were more 80s than 60s and 70s.
Think of the ending of The (original) Italian Job
I’m arguing that we misremember many seminal “do your own thing” 60s and 70s movies, and that it was in the next wave that the nihilism really started. For 60s and 70s directors, they seemed to be clinging to tradition while posing as radicals.
The next wave gave up the clinging and posing and just “went there.”
Dear Kathy I too grew up in TO. We moved out to the Guildwood area in the early 90′s. We had a couple in their late 60′s living next door who we befriended. They regaled us with stories of the key parties that took place on that particular street , in the late 60′s early 70′s.
They went on for a few years. The result was a bunch of divorces and some pretty mixed up kids who became aware
of what the mum’s and dad’s were up to on Saturday Nights. Need I mention Paul Bernardo grew up around the corner and his Dad was caught peeping in windows on a regular basis.
I remember a lot of westerns and religious movies out of the 60s. The 70s were lousy with car chases of one sort or another. Culturally, I remember my 60s upbringing with nostalgia. In speaking to my mother (who was a 20-something mother of two) regarding the “cultural revolution” and the unwashed masses that are now in control of everything, she said simply: I hated them then and I hate them now.
You have the makings of a book here, as all sorts of questions are raised. I can tell you that when I was a young teen and saw The Graduate on TV for the first time, I missed the whole point of the ending. Looked like a modern-day Young Lochinvar to me. As for less ambiguous pictures, you could say that the filmmakers had to have sad endings or the rubes would never go to see the films — sort of a self-imposed Hays code. But I don’t think that’s it. Maybe there’s just no dramatic interest in everything working out as the antihero hopes. Or maybe they realized that the facts of life are conservative. (Nah, couldn’t be.)
Goodfellas, being roughly based on a true story, can’t really be included, but the others qualify. And I surmise that whatever you think of the endings of the Godfather pictures depends on the priorities of your values.
Interesting observation. However, I think you underestimate how much the tragedy/drama appeals to the sort of people that are most likely to participate in sexual deviance. While a normal person is turned off by the idea of behaviors that will lead to misery and self loathing, the sort of person most likely to be attracted to sexually deviant or weird behaviors will not come to precisely the same conclusion. People who are attracted to extreme sexual behavior (often as a result of some psychological or moral problem) embrace the dysfunction that comes as a result of their behavior (up to a certain point obviously). Don’t underestimate the allure of the emotion of feeling sorry for yourself. The dysfunction becomes the excuse for a party lifestyle which provides a numbing effect but ultimately serves to continue the dysfunction. Example 1: homosexual men.
Movies like the ones you mention (I haven’t seen any of them so I trust your interpretation) covertly support the dysfunctional sexual lifestyles by galmourizing (as you note) the sad reality.
On the other hand, people involved in the movies back in the 1960′s and 70′s would likely have had some basic moral training and therefore some idea of the values they were rejecting, so I don’t doubt that at least some of the sorrow and negativity is genuine. I’d compare that to the falseness of the soviet documentary style film ‘American Beauty.’
My experience is that whether you think a cultural medium is a bad influence or sends a bad message is directly related to whether it’s something you do or enjoy.
Some of my acquaintances who’ve never played a video game think Doom or Grand Theft Auto destroys the moral fabric of our youth, yet they enjoy The Sopranos and spout out lines from Goodfellas and see no problem with themselves watching cinema glorifying and humanizing the Mafia.
It’s fairly easy to understand. If I like slasher films, I know it doesn’t make me want to hack up anybody, I don’t see any message to start hacking people, so no problem. If I don’t like slasher films, I’m worried that some nut case out there is getting inspired to go on a murderous rampage, so we need to squelch any potential messages, just in case.
These aren’t the movies that had a major cultural impact. They’re for want of a better term, ‘highbrow’ movies that critics liked and wannabe intellectuals praised and considered them ‘counter-cultural.’ Try checking out the more horrible drive in movies, as well as comedies, horrors and action flicks. Adventure movies just about vanished in the 70s, and remained rare ever since; everything’s about saving the world and of course having such a noble goal makes every other moral qualm irrelevant. Try ‘The Perfect Furlough’ and see if Hollywood was leading or following cultural trends. These movies which were supposedly so ground-breaking were way behind the curve. Look at the piano hall, not the opera.
Alain Charnier got away with it at the end of the French Connection, and Popeye and Sonny were split up as a team after Popeye infamously shoots his DEA antagonist Mulderig in the course of chasing Charnier.
I so dearly love ’70s cop and caper movies. The French Connection, Serpico, The Seven Ups, Dirty Harry, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Dog Day Afternoon.
Peter O’Toole and all the ladies in “What’s New Pussycat” look like they were having a pretty good time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0OqtzlDVRM
and the original “Pink Panther” (1963), another French bedroom-farce based movie with a pointless car chase scene was also a lot of fun. There were lots of movies and TV series that were based on these kind of comedies. Then there’s Austin Powers…
The original Libertas film blog had a Thanksgiving roundup that included The Ice Storm. I keep forgetting to add their comments to my favorite quotes file:
“(Deep breath…) Okay, this is how it works: In the 1960’s the best fed, best housed, most ungrateful and spoiled generation ever didn’t want a bunch of non-white, non-Christians in Vietnam to share the freedoms they enjoyed… So, they turned on their parents, turned on their country, ignored the noble civil rights movement, and became the hippie generation whose legacy is AIDS, drug abuse, and unwed mothers. The hippies told us they were protesting the war on moral grounds and yet the protests stopped when the draft did. Hmm? So, as the war raged on, the hippies became yuppies, embraced materialism in excess of anything their bourgeois parents ever imagined, moved to the suburbs, and clung to their self-destructive free-love-entitlement lifestyle at the expense of their kids. (Exhale.) And The Ice Storm is a damning indictment of that generation, that thankfully uses Thanksgiving somewhere along the way allowing me the pretense to get the above off my chest.”
Great quote from John Nolte, now the editor of Big Hollywood. Fortunately, it can still be found on the Wayback machine.
Hollywood couldn’t make a sudden, complete jump from one extreme to the other without causing a lot of controversy. So, in typical liberal fashion, they started with a small step away from one extreme first, and kept taking more small steps away until they eventually reached the other extreme. This manipulative strategy isn’t new or original.
No, Bonnie & Clyde and (especially) Easy Rider were pretty dramatic culture shifts for their day. And back then, there was still enough of an old Hollywood that it was rather shocked by the coarseness of the new tone. But as Andrew Breitbart once told me in an interview, Old Hollywood — by then it really was old and dissipated — gave up their power remarkably quickly.
’50s Hollywood had the same problem with TV that traditional publishers and photographers have with epub and digital: competing against themselves with the only cost that of a TV or computer. Hollywood had to up the ante with Cinemascope and epics and blockbusters but TV had an internal pricing system that left the consumer in free-land until cable and now we’re screwed again.
I remember seeing Bonnie and Clyde when it first came out. I remember being quite stunned by it.
Wordy is right- Driscoll, you are missing a nuance: the idea of being daring is part of selling many movies and other media products. That was part of the appeal of movies – with their lush visuals – from the very start, before the Hays code came in. Certainly after the 50s it was part of reaching younger audiences.
“Bonnie and Clyde” and “Easy Rider” worked like more mundane examples – such as sitcoms like “One Day at a Time” – in that “getting it” marked you as young and hip, even if your own life was more stable and ordered. Lather, rinse, repeat to shift society’s goalposts.
Nowadays the Left still talks breathlessly about “being transgressive” – a more open statement of the thrill of toying with – or trashing – conventions.
For every couple that actually swung, for every person that dropped acid/attended Woodstock/etc. – there are hundreds whose expectations and actions have been shaped by the public glamorization of the behavior.
Many of these movies are total bores.
They were probably designed to draw adults into theatres.
With their 18 and over ratings they promised sexual exitement, but didn’t really deliver the goods.
People went to them so that they could brag that they’d seen them.
I can provide two independent sources that key parties really did happen: I grew up in a very small Kansas town. I was the third generation to go to our local high school. When I was a pubescent back in the first Reagan Administration, it came out in my parents’ conversation I overheard about key parties that had taken place in the previous decade. My parents said the elite in our town participated, but they would never name names. As a high school senior I took psychology from the same man who had taught government to my mother. He mentioned one day about sexual immorality going on even in our town, and he cited key parties as an example. When I interjected, “Oh yeah, my folks said it was the more uppity-up who did it,” he was disconcerted that I already knew about it. He had to admit it was our local upper crust, but he wouldn’t name names, either.
There were suburban key clubs in New Jersey in the 60′s. It was quite the scandal.
anyone remember how depressing “Alice’s Restaurant” was?
I’m a younger boomer and started seeing those films about the time of Shampoo. While I didn’t see earlier ones, that ol’ 60′s/70′s “feel” of those clips is very familiar to me. It’s the same feeling that a young girl gets when a really creepy dude offers her candy. The minor cords start to play in her head and it’s just feels kind of… yucky.
eeech. Well written article. And so true, they live 50′s but talk 60′s
Another movie that I think fits this genre is Pleasantville. Wikipedia tells us that the moral is as follows: “Having seen Pleasantville changed irrevocably FOR THE BETTER, Jennifer chooses to stay behind in the alternate world for a while to finish her education, but David returns to the real world using the remote control.”
“For the better”. yeah right. The real moral of the story is that having learned from experience, Jennifer chooses to live in the 50′s so she can have a chance at happily ever after.