My Little Chickadee

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE   ***1/2

Edward F. Cline

1940

IDEA:  After being driven out of town for not being "respectable" enough, a woman works toward her redemption by marrying a braggadocios conman.

BLURB:  It may not be as naughty as her pre-Code work, but My Little Chickadee is pound-for-pound one of the funniest films in the Mae West catalogue. Taking elements of the Western milieux from Goin’ to Town and Klondike Annie, Edward F. Cline’s film sets the actress’s famous wanton loucheness against the moral hypocrisy of 19th-century settlers, whose far graver dissolution makes West’s Flower Belle Lee seem a saint in comparison. Of all the unscrupulous characters, nobody is more proudly so than W. C. Fields’ Cuthbert J. Twillie, a blowzy, drunken grifter who lumbers through the film boasting of his murderous exploits, abusing his Indigenous assistant, and scamming anyone in sight. That such a loathsome galoot is almost instantly appointed sheriff says all one needs to know about the ostensible civility of white colonial society. Despite the casual racism that still slips through - this is a 1940 Hollywood Western, after all - My Little Chickadee is quite pointed in its lampooning of phony “law and order” morality, as well as the intended role of marriage to chasten and control women. West and Fields wield their signature outsize personas like comedic steamrollers, memorably clashing as they issue bon mots with reliable, hilarious dexterity. The final line - a reversal of Fields’ patronizing terms of endearment followed by West’s defiantly sashaying hips - is the perfectly sassy capper.

The Phantom of Liberty

THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY   ****

Luis Buñuel

1974

IDEA:  From the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808 to contemporary France, an array of characters enter and exit through tenuously related vignettes.

BLURB:  Much of the power of Buñuel’s films lie in how they create the impression of a crumbling Symbolic order through signs that are not only legible, but deceptively mundane; it’s only in the steady accumulation of audiovisual juxtapositions and narrative displacements that one really perceives the extent of the erosion. This is especially true of the films the director co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière, and particularly The Phantom of Liberty. Structured like a serial string of anacoluthons, the film proceeds with a dream logic that defies the grammar of linear narrative progress. Characters’ present activities and goals are consistently interrupted or dropped, only for the focus to be redirected toward other unrelated episodes and pursuits, in a sidewinding stream of deferrals, disavowals, and substitutions. The effect not only mimics the scrambled nature of dreams, but sardonically conveys the desultoriness and apathy of the film’s bourgeois characters, who can neither seem to get anything meaningful done nor find good reason for their behavior. Buñuel’s juxtapositions - monks mortified by S&M, the (failed) law and order of a police academy giving way to the connotations of abjection suggested by the image of guests dining on toilets - sharply set into relief the porousness and contradictions of our social mores and structures, whether it’s religious dogma or the very organization of space. The fissures that emerge from his mischievous inversions and subversions don’t so much explode reality as subtly destabilize it, diffusing our naturalized rules and rituals into a still somehow operating disarray. Even in the disruption of revolution, however, The Phantom of Liberty queasily reminds us how power still finds a way to pervert.

Blonde Venus

BLONDE VENUS   ***1/2

Josef von Sternberg

1932

IDEA:  A former entertainer from Germany returns to show business after immigrating to the US, in order to raise money to send her ailing husband abroad for medical treatment.

BLURB:  Across the robust portfolio of characters she authored in the films of Josef von Sternberg - all arguably among the most variegated, fascinating, subversive female roles in early Hollywood cinema - Helen Faraday stands out as perhaps Dietrich’s most complex. This nominal Venus is less a vamp or a romantic lover than an iridescent, nearly cubist embodiment of a myriad conceptions of femininity, ones that both stem from and upend patriarchal gender dualisms. She first appears swimming nude in a wooded watering hole, a shimmering earthly sign of the eternal feminine. Then, Sternberg makes an ingeniously disorienting transition to another nude bathing body, this time of her young son in the near future, establishing the primal bond that will define Helen as Mother - the only in the Dietrich/Sternberg catalog. One consequently expects Blonde Venus to settle into a familiar mold of women’s melodrama, to reinscribe the role of the sacrificial mother in the schema of the heterosexual nuclear family. But Sternberg is not one to play by the books. Instead, Helen jinks in tandem with the mercurial, sometimes haphazard-feeling, and proudly unbelievable script, pin-balling between maternal domesticity and promiscuous showbiz spectacle, vanquishing the distance between devoted mother/wife and fallen woman. Maybe the most radical aspect of Blonde Venus is the odd, shifting psychosexual triangle made of Helen and her husband and child, which mixes obviously Oedipal dynamics with a rejection of same, resulting in an anti-phallic structure that almost entirely removes Herbert Marshall’s passive father from the picture. The power, after all, resides in Helen, in Dietrich’s enigmatic and inexhaustible mutability, in a woman who defies the expectations and categories of a male-authored world.