How Long Will a Cutting Edge Still Cut?

 

Hep As Was and Maybe Still Is

From Mark Vieira’s book, Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950, here is thought expressed by critic John T. McManus for PM magazine, circa October 12, 1944: “That ultra-aware modernism, “hep,” is a very handy word to have around for a picture like To Have and Have Not.” So what was it to be hep? Simplest definition suggests awareness of what is fashionable or new. Hep itself is progenitor to things or people we now call “hip,” or more often, “cool,” latter used enough to now be tiresome. Hep as descriptive goes back over a century. Jazz musicians kept it among a slang arsenal. As for application to movies, I would say hep is more knowing not only what will amuse today, but what will amuse for generations to come. Does anyone luck into being hep? Chances are better they are clairvoyant with eyes toward the future for what they and those to come will find funny. Hep then has everything to do with humor, for where are/were hep dramatists? McManus sees the future of To Have and Have Not when he refers to its “ultra-aware modernism,” latter to embody “modern character of quality of thought, expression, or technique.” McManus went on to credit To Have and Have Not for knowing “all the angles,” hepness “all over it.” He cites “healthy, democratic flesh tone, and it is not only skin deep.” Here was a critic eighty years ago who I believe was on to something. He “got” an entertainment that others then and since appreciate on “skin deep” and deeper levels. Does To Have and Have Not for us play ultra-aware modern as McManus proposed? It stays funny in ways we expect from Howard Hawks, and there’s no better “Bogie” to service his cult (assuming one remains), but hold … the Bogart cult at student level is no more. Does that rob To Have and Have Not of hep? We could say no for movies no longer cultish at colleges, for when are movies, any movies, projected to gathered groups on campus? To Have and Have Not nevertheless strikes me still as hep. TCM thrives on it, as do streamers and those who collect Blu-Ray. Question becomes who or what else is hep, long ago plus now? A list I’ll propose is short, coming down, and not surprisingly, to a single name which for me exemplifies not only hep, but exclusive membership to American folklore shared by no one else film-bred. Can anyone else guess who I mean?

As stated, hep in Greenbriar quarter equates with humor. That unfortunately lets out most of those we associate with drama. A hep movie need not be comedy, but must, I’d propose, have aspects of levity. Bonnie and Clyde is funny, more so violent, everything that happens still somehow unexpected. Bonnie and Clyde is in short hep. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is on the other hand un-hep for being self-aware hep, my impression of it since 1969. Film noir as a genre was defined late as such and so is hep by default, even where member titles are not necessarily so. Billy Wilder made hep noir with Double Indemnity but would not commit further, his Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole less clever than caustic. Laura is hep for clever plus caustic, and not self-congratulatory as to either. Few from the forties please in such modernist ways as Laura. Robert Mitchum, also of noir incubation, seems hep to a fault in Out of the Past, but less so after his reefer bust and a coming decade where a hipster stance seemed more studied, though I’ll credit him with great hep stand that was His Kind of Woman in 1951. Dick Powell relied on Chandler and Philip Marlowe to seem hep in Murder, My Sweet, but seems more so in the later Cry Danger, his last feature stand in noir category and a repository of wit as applied to otherwise familiar formulae. A truest hep of Classic Era stars may have been William Powell, who surprises still those who’d leave past personalities short of relevance. I’ve mentioned before a 1973 classroom run of The Thin Man to apx. 30 in attendance expressing delight that any actor as long past could come across so pleasingly modern. I’d not hesitate calling Powell hep for now and whatever future most of us have left.

Steve McQueen seems hep until you factor out Bullitt and The Great Escape. Like Paul Newman, McQueen did not appear in enough hep movies to rank hep for the ages. What both did offscreen, racing cars, cycles, and such, helps maintain the image in still-capture sense, as is also a case for one woman I might rank as hep, Louise Brooks, membership more for style and miles-high stack of portraits, which will have to do because so little of her survives in motion. Notice no Clara Bow as hep for her belonging resolute to an era she thrived in, but could not vault beyond. Women who did comedy stay in “screwball” category for a most part, and that dates the whole of them. Women in drama are dealt out surely as men given to same pursuit. Bette Davis, Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, would not have cared to qualify as hep even if extended the laurel, just as Gable, John Wayne, Cooper, certainly Brando and Clift to come … hep crown to set uneasily upon these brows, however others read them (did Brando wish to be cool even as others celebrated him so?). Cary Grant can delight, even seem modern for being timelessly appealing, but I’d not call him hep. There never was a Cary Grant cult, perhaps for his being so continuously and mainstream popular. There are moments however when Grant plays modern to startling degree --- look at North by Northwest in a crowded house, Grant registering in ways to still surprise, or maybe not, because audiences expect Cary Grant to deliver as if he was doing his act just yesterday. Maybe then we should call him hep/hip. Fred Astaire strikes me as a performer very hep once you get to know him. Anti-heroes might emerge hep even where not expected, let alone intended, like Paul Newman as Hud, James Dean as Jett Rink, others. Among horror icons, there is Vincent Price who was distinctly hep, ultimately cool, for knowing we saw through his act and appreciated his knowing. Was there ever a westerner who was hep? I might nominate The Man With No Name as embodied by Clint Eastwood, but it’s mainly the third one of those (Good, Bad, Ugly) to get that job done. As to hep born of television, and in western guise, could anyone apart from possibly James Garner as Maverick hope to qualify? But then Maverick was long ago, and not much seen today, so however hep he seemed in 1958, that was 1958.

Committed comedians were too often fall guys to be hep. Chaplin disqualified himself for pathos signaling. Harold Lloyd was so twenties entrenched as to seem quaint by the forties, another Clara Bow and then some. Harry Langdon was too strange to be anything other than object of niche devotion and baffled curiosity otherwise. W.C. Fields looked for awhile like a heppest clown around, but something skidded after protest times were passed, and now it seems we can’t give him away. Abbott and Costello, forget it, too forties if seeming wildly fresh upon then-arrival. Laurel and Hardy endure within their fully committed fanship, hepness or not a non-issue for devotees. None of Three Stooges seem hep, Shemp coming closest, Ted Healy too, the more so Ted, maybe a most modernist of long-gone comics. Bob Hope is another to belong too much to then, even as he tried swimming in streams that ran to seeming infinity, but think if Bob had gone down with one of WWII troop carriers he hitched rides on. He’d be a hep legend snatched from us in prime. The Marx Brothers seem obvious choices for hep placement, Groucho to rank prominent, his siblings just odd w/o him. The Marxes seem also to have fallen from current grace, or maybe it isn’t reasonable to insist on their continuing as favorites, like demanding students again swallow goldfish or jam into phone booths. One can go on speculating … argue even for Walter Catlett or Roscoe Karns as somehow hep, indeed make an argument for anybody, but comes now reveal of that name I earlier said was hierarchy of hep, one beyond comedy, beyond approach in fact by any other film personage, the single likeliest figure to sit everlasting upon Olympus that is popular culture, except he’s beyond mere “popular” and more like forever spirit capture of creative man. So who's this at summit of hep and so much else? I say Buster Keaton.