Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967)

We haven’t shown a lot of suspense thrillers during the last five years of Film Club screenings. Part of the reason is that Film Club exists to present great movies you haven’t had the opportunity to see previously. But people tend to be skeptical or reticent or just plain foot-draggy about committing to something they’re unfamiliar with. This explains why Hollywood spends so much money on promotion (sometimes a third of the entire production budget); they want to acquaint you with the product so you won’t be intimidated by it even if that means spending millions on product tie-ins at McDonald’s. Hey, if you’ve played with the toy, the movie must be great.

Film Club doesn’t have millions of dollars. We barely get Blue Sheet announcements done on time. The consequence of that is that we end up asking you to come to see movies on faith rather than a (false) sense that you know what you’re going to be seeing. And often you don’t (although if you’re reading this, you did – thank you.) We’ve learned that some genres are easier sells than others – romance, action, animation, anything with Johnny Depp. Others are more difficult, and one of those is the suspense thriller.

When we elect to show a suspense thriller that’s older, two issues pop up. First, there’s the unfamiliarity with an “older” film. If you’ll allow us a soap box moment, let us just say that it’s sad how controlled Americans are by PR, advertising, and the productization of important things like art, politics, and even religion. Everything is packaged for us. Open the New York Times Book Review and 15 books will be reviewed, the same 15 books you’ll find reviewed in other literary journals, the same 15 books you’ll see ads for in literary media. Some of those books are very good, but 25 years ago some of the books reviewed and celebrated during any given week were also good, but have been forgotten. Why? Not because they turned out later not to be good, but because the marketing machine has moved on. Old doesn’t sell; new sells. And now you buy Twilight and Jim Butcher novels instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice novels. Those are old. No one is talking about them. And even if you did pick the old ones they might not feel the same as the newer ones.

That’s the second problem with the suspense thriller genre, the genre itself has evolved and when we look back we don’t see stories told in a familiar (there’s that word again) way, the way we’re used to. Watch Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) some time. See if you don’t laugh when Bela Lugosi slinks out of the shadows and raises his hands up, claw-like, like he’s about to play an awesome chord on an invisible piano. You can almost hear a million parodies getting ready to say “bluh, buh-luh, buh-luh; I vant to drink your bluhd!” Were people really scared by that in 1931? They certainly aren’t now.

Now we want realism. And we want blood (just like Dracula). And we want dismemberment. It shocks us to think that in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher genre, the hockey-masked Michael Myers terrorizes and murders all those high school kids, and there isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. Carpenter was going for psychological horror.

The same is true of Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Diabolique (1955), a terrific French film about a boarding school head-mistress who murders her adulterous husband and hides his body in the murky school swimming pool, only to find it missing when the pool is drained the following spring. Psychological horror.

And the same is true of Wait Until Dark (1967), tonight’s film about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) terrorized by three thugs who think a doll stuffed with heroin is hidden in her apartment. Although it’s directed by Terrence Young (who previously directed three of the first four James Bond films), this is Hitchcockian suspense. Does that genre still thrill? Are we still fitted with the buttons it pushes?

In the week leading up to this screening, every adult who noted that we’re showing Wait Until Dark has stopped to comment on what a great film it is, especially one scene in particular. The students we’ve chatted with, who don’t know it, are skeptical. Maybe they’re a little afraid. Because, really, the unknown is often scary. We’re more comfortable with the familiar. Maybe we should take more risks. After all, it’s only a movie.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

If you’re a modern film-goer, a disturbing moment comes a short way into Blake Edwards’s iconic 1960s romance, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly, comes home to her apartment late having forgotten her key and awakens her building superintendent, Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney, who chastises her:

“Missee Go-right-ree, Missee Go-right-ree,” he yells. “I protesssst. … You disturbuh me.”

That’s right. Mr. Yunioshi is Japanese, and he speaks with a heavy accent. As played by Rooney, he’s a buffoon. And to top it off, the film-makers have chosen to provide Rooney with huge buck-teeth and kooky large glasses that look like they’re increasing his near-sightedness rather than correcting it. There’s really only one phrase to describe it: racist stereotype.

Critics have another word for it – yellowface, or the portrayal of an Asian character by a white actor. Admittedly, Mr. Yunioshi occupies a very small space in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but he’s like the tip of an ugly iceberg. Pre-Civil Rights American film is full of this sort of thing. In 1956, for example, John Wayne played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Peter Lorre, a Jewish actor, played the title character in eight “Mr. Moto” films in the late 1930s. In Disney’s The Aristocats (1970), Paul Winchell voiced a feline character named “Chinese Cat,” whose only contribution to the catchy tune “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” is lines like “Shanghai Hong Kong Egg Foo Yung. Fortune cookie always wrong.” This is accompanied by his hitting the cymbal on his head until his eyes cross and playing his piano with his chopsticks. Hi-larious.

We no longer accept Caucasian actors in blackface, why would we not comprehend that those in “yellowface” as just as offensive? Perhaps we dismiss these sorts of images as the products of a less enlightened time, but we shouldn’t. A more difficult question is how should a more “enlightened” audience react?

We realize that this is an odd question to find in a “why we picked this film” essay. It would seem more of a reason not to pick this film. But Edwards’s movie is a classic. It should be watched. And its weaknesses as well as its strengths should be recognized, discussed, and accounted for. We might dismiss Rooney’s portrayal simply by saying “that was considered funny at that time,” but really a statement like that requires unpacking. Funny for whom? At whose expense? How does a culture make such an assumption? What is the result of a mocking, derogatory portrayal for the American community at large? Why did yellowface continue to be acceptable long after whites in blackface (or as Native Americans) became unacceptable?

You think it didn’t? Have you seen Balls of Fury (2007)? What is Christopher Walken (as Feng) doing?

Sadly, racial stereotypes like Mr. Yunioshi persist, in many forms and in diverse media. It’s up to us to recognize offensive images when they occur, begin the conversation that explores our relationship to them, and take steps to ensure that such derogatory ethnic humor never goes unremarked again.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser