The Myth of the 1950s (II)
High Society and The Opposite Sex versus The Philadelphia Story and The Women.
Cinematically, the cultural distance from the 1950s to the 1960s is not so vast as that between the 1950s and pre-war America. We see this vividly and somewhat sadly in the case of three attempted 1950s remakes of classic movies of divorce and remarriage: Let’s Do It Again (1953), a remake of The Awful Truth (1937); High Society (1956), a remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940); and The Opposite Sex (1956), a remake of The Women (1939). All three remakes have bounties to offer—their transformation into musicals; their vivid color and eye-catching clothes; their stars, from Frank Sinatra to Joan Collins. None touch the originals for depth or power, however. The very titles of the remakes indicate their simplification and flattening in comparison with the originals.
High Society (1956) and The Philadelphia Story (1940)
I have discussed Let’s Do It Again in an earlier post, noting how it replaces class with mere wealth, and eros with horniness—offering obviousness instead of play. The year the movie was released was the year Playboy magazine was launched, and that is the better cultural index than notions of a buttoned-up 1950s.
High Society, which brings together Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Grace Kelly, is a more enjoyable movie, but just as much an example of the postwar dispensation. The movie’s original, The Philadelphia Story, was George Cukor’s sublime adaptation of Philip Barry’s deceptively layered play about the divorce and reunion of Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn, in both Broadway production and movie) and C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant in the movie). As has been pointed out by other writers, most notably Stanley Cavell, The Philadelphia Story carries on an elaborate conversation with Shakespeare, especially the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Just like that play, the main action of the movie takes place in the days leading up a wedding “of national importance” (as Hepburn likes to say about her fiancé and her fiancé likes to say about himself). In Shakespeare’s play, Theseus has defeated his bride-to-be in battle but now hopes that marriage will bring about a different sort of relationship.
Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword,
And won thy love, doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph and with revelling.
The Philadelphia Story also asks how a wounding between the sexes can be healed, how marriage or other social institutions might transform the injuries done by men to women and vice versa.
And like Shakespeare’s play, Barry’s play and Cukor’s film are presided over by moonlight. The moon is all over this movie: not actually seen, but endlessly referred to, from the crucial backstory about Hepburn climbing drunk and naked onto the roof, “arms out to the moon and wailing like a banshee” as Grant recalls, to Virginia Weidler’s puckish kid sister Dinah, whose name was Diana until Hepburn changed it.
Diana is of course the goddess of the moon—and of virginity. One of the central questions of the movie is how we are to understand virginity in a society that does not link it to marriage—certainly not to a second marriage. Hepburn’s Tracy has somehow remained a virgin, psychically at least, despite her first marriage to Grant. She breaks his scepter (golf club) in the opening scene, after all, and he complains that she never wanted a husband but rather “a high priest to a virgin goddess.”
This criticism, which so wounds Hepburn, matches her father’s judgement that she is a “perennial spinster, no matter how many husbands,” just as her contempt for her ex-husband’s drinking matches her contempt for her father’s philandering. Always just below the surface, the film asks what modern maidenhead means, and how the transition from it into matrimony is to be understood, if the ancient rituals of Hymen no longer apply.
Moonlight and marriage are two of the lexicons of Midsummer lovingly taken up in Barry’s play and Cukor’s film. There are others: dreams, blindness, and the ambiguities and restoration of sight, for instance. But The Philadelphia Story is not any sort of “retelling” of Shakespeare. It is not that Hepburn is Titania and Grant is Oberon, or that Jimmy Stewart is Bottom and Dinah is Puck, but that they get to play with these wonderful, venerable masks as they make sense of their desires and responsibilities. C. S. Lewis speaks to the wisdom of this movie when he speaks in The Four Loves of the error in the modern “portentous solemnisation of sex.” Rather, he counsels, “sensible lovers laugh. It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp.”
This Shakespearean laughter is absent in High Society. Grace Kelly, though beautiful, is not Hepburn’s marble goddess who must be turned into flesh and blood (and fire). Even though she imitates Hepburn’s performance well throughout the film, she never needs to step down from her pedestal because she is never up on one to begin with. Before her ex-husband (Crosby) even says anything, she is already pacing the room agitatedly and pouting like a child. Hepburn dives knife-like into the swimming pool; Kelly never enters the water except offscreen.
The remake is not elemental. The nature of sex, of virginity, of marriage are not explored here as primal experiences of the meeting of women and men. High Society may be a stylized musical but it is also decidedly contemporary and specific. Crosby throws psychoanalysis at Kelly. Her fiancé is vanquished not because he does not respect the mysteries of virginity and sex, but because he is simply behind the times, un-hip, not on board with women having sexual experience prior to marriage.
Similarly, the slippery nature of class in America, a Tocquevillian dimension central to The Philadelphia Story, is dispensed with in an interrupted line in High Society: “Oh, class my—.” The original break between Kelly and Crosby, a flaw of weakness presented as alcoholism in The Philadelphia Story, is in High Society a frivolous kind of snobbery on Kelly’s part. Crosby may be fantastically wealthy and live in a palace, but he likes popular music, jazz. Kelly complains that he could have been “a serious composer, or a diplomat, or anything you wanted to be. And what have you become? A jukebox hero.”
The contradictions of class—and race—in America might have been a piquant aspect of the remake had it dared to follow its changes from the original just a bit further. High Society is set, not in Philadelphia, but in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1954, the wealthy Elaine and Louis Lorillard launched the Newport Jazz Festival, which in the movie is the implicit rationale for Louis Armstrong and his band showing up, and for Crosby’s duet with Satchmo explaining jazz music to a ballroom full of white socialites.
But the movie plays it safe. We never find out why Kelly is so hostile to jazz and popular music. The black musicians are a Greek chorus, not part of the plot, and so it is left to Sinatra and the typically wonderful Celeste Holm to represent the hoi polloi in parts played by Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey in the original.
No doubt a full-throated satire on race and class in 1950s Newport would be unimaginable at the time, but the timidity as compared with The Philadelphia Story in its time is still notable. Crosby is not a Theseus, he’s just the cool dude who hangs with black musicians. The press, in the persons of Sinatra and Holm, isn’t a hard-bitten interface between upper and lower classes. Unlike Stewart and Hussey in The Philadelphia Story, magazine reporters Sinatra and Holm don’t even know that they aren’t welcome at the wedding, and are abashed and apologetic as soon as they find this out.
The Opposite Sex (1956)
Why do men who should know better
Gape at a well-filled sweater?
What’s there about it that keeps them craning their necks?
The answer is the opposite sex
High Society was a box office success and some of the musical numbers (the Crosby-Sinatra “Well Did You Evah”) still give much pleasure. The Opposite Sex lost over a million dollars and, as indicated by the Sammy Cahn lyrics above, none of the tunes are very memorable. But then, only in Hollywood would a pitch of “let’s remake the all-female movie The Women but we’ll include men” seem like a good idea. (See my earlier post on The Women and Clare Boothe Luce, the author of the play the George Cukor film was based on.)
If Luce and Cukor offered a savage look at sexual and societal dynamics through a lens focus made sharper by the exclusion of any male character in the cast of over a hundred, the very title of The Opposite Sex tells us that women here are seen entirely from the perspective of men. The filmmakers evidently didn’t realize that this renders the movie pointless.
Almost everything falls off from the 1939 original. Sexuality is obvious as a hip shake to a drum snap. The sublime catfight between Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard is a kitchen brawl here that just looks painful and sad. There is no scene indicating the impact of the divorce on the daughter, as in Virginia Weidler’s extraordinary performance in the original. June Allyson in the lead just seems tired, in contrast with the energy and matronly vivaciousness provided by Norma Shearer in the original. Leslie Nielson plays Allyson’s husband; it is probably not his fault if, after Airplane and the Naked Gun franchise, it is now impossible to watch him without expecting a gag.
What is good—great even—about the movie is how it looks when Joan Collins is in it. Clothes, colors, figure, eyes, lips—all glow with an outrageously lush sexual energy like something out of Vogue, or Playboy—not the naked pics but the cartoons and illustrations by 1950s and 60s artists such as Jack Cole, E. Simms Campbell, Al Stine, Erich Sokol, and Doug Sneyd.
And the crude obviousness of the remake delivers one literally striking moment, when a triumphant Collins all but points to her spectacular breasts in front of betrayed wife Allyson. The message is not about anything so subtle as eroticism or sexual pleasure, it’s all about flesh and resistance to gravity. In response, Allyson gives Collins a smack to the face that sends her earrings flying off. Apparently, filming had to be paused until the hand mark on Collins’s cheek went away. There is at least a kind of honesty here.
The intellectual coin of the realm here is mid-century Freudian psychiatry. A musical number with Dick Shawn and Jim Backus features a quartet of circling psychiatrist couches, as they sing the title song.
More significant is the alteration to the central line of Luce’s play and Cukor’s movie. In The Opposite Sex, Ann Sheridan tells her friends that they envy Allyson because “she has the grace to be what she is.” Which is what, they ask? “A woman,” is the answer, as in the original. But when they follow up with: “And what are we?” Sheridan has this to say:
Females. The lost sex. Substituting fashion for passion, and the analyst’s couch for the double bed.
This is a reference to the psychoanalytic bestseller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. I have already noted the book’s influence on another movie from the same year, Hilda Crane. Given the extent of its influence at the time, I will again promise a look at the book and its primary author, soon.