Comedy Skates On The Edge
Will June Allyson in Pigtails Fool Van Johnson?
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posted by John McElwee at 5:20 AM
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Will June Allyson in Pigtails Fool Van Johnson?
Will June Allyson in Pigtails Fool Van Johnson?
6 Comments:
"Someone should list topics OK in a Classic Era that are taboo now." Great idea for a post!
Am thinking the vaults are full of stuff like TO YOUNG TO KISS, SUSAN SLEPT HERE, THAT HAGAN GIRL and MARGIE that hike eyebrows today. And what about the flip side of the coin, all the real life schoolgirl age actresses that played leading lady to middle aged leading men? Ann Miller, Joan Leslie, Mary Astor, Loretta Young and all those D.W. Griffith girls were still teens while in clinches with 40 and/or 50 year olds.
"Someone should list topics OK in a Classic Era that are taboo now."
Let's not even mention those Shirley Temple "Baby Burlesks".
The whole girl-and-employer thing. Not just the Cinderella fantasies of shopgirls, stenos and stewardesses marrying the men they served, but the endless gags about philandering execs and secretaries offering varying degrees of resistance. Even after "The Apartment", light fare like "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" could present sex in the office as Innocent Merriment. These days it's far from dead in media or in real life, but at least movies and TV shows tread more carefully. The amorous boss is more likely to be a villain than romantic lead, and work relationships are generally framed as between equals or rivals. Note that "Mad Men" caused a stir when it presented what used to be comic naughtiness in serious context.
Bums and hoboes used to be stock characters, either as comically lazy moochers or faintly subhuman creatures menacing farmgirls. Urban "street urchins" were often presented as feisty Peter Pans reveling in their freedom rather than pathetic and likely doomed children. The depression made a slight dent in those stereotypes as millions of People Like Us were put on the streets. But the happy hobo survived. In O. Henry's story "The Cop and the Anthem", there's nothing whimsical about the hungry tramp trying to get arrested. But when it was filmed for "O. Henry's Full House", the tramp became Charles Laughton, pompous and arrogant in his pursuit of comfort. As late as my own boomer childhood happy hoboes were a standard Halloween costume and Freddie the Freeloader was Red Skelton's most popular character. These days you get gags about loopy street people, but the well-known reality of homelessness has killed off Freddie the Freeloader. You can do stories about poverty, but treating it as cheerful or laughable is no longer a sure thing.
As for Freddie the Freeloader: I've lived in New York for almost 40 years and have yet to see a bum dressed in top hat and tails.
As a survivor of the 9/11 attack in New York City (I was in the North Tower as the first airplane struck) I'm no longer amused by the Eiffel Tower collapse at the end of THE GREAT RACE. What seemed a preposterous and larger-than-life sight gag is too frightfully real these days.
Dan Mercer considers taboo topics for modern movies:
My choice for a subject that would definitely be taboo these days is Margaret Kennedy's "The Constant Nymph." The novel was quite popular when it was published in 1924, as was the stage adaptation and the three movie versions that followed. When TCM rescued the 1943 Warner Bros. production from copyright limbo in 2011, most people recognized it for the minor classic that it is. They appreciated director Edmund Goulding's mise en scene, the superb score by Eric Wolfgang Korngold, and Joan Fontaine's astonishing achievement as the young Tessa.
Even then, however, there were those who found the idea of the love of a teenage girl for an older man to be entirely inappropriate. That both characters appreciated that their growing love could find no expression in this world, save in the platonic regard they felt for each other, save in the music she inspired him to write, was entirely irrelevant to them. They seemingly conflated any such relationship with sexual union, and could not recognize that the very qualities that precluded that also lent a certain poignancy to a real and genuine love.
If those who objected to such a story a few years ago are no more numerous now, still their influence will have grown out of all proportion to their numbers. Even a Greta Gerwig would have no more chance of mounting a new production starring, let us say, Saoirse Ronan or Chloe Grace Moretz, than Jodie Foster was of her planned film biography of Leni Riefenstahl.
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