107.2Abstract (summary)
Though Wiene's superlative expressionism is rare in the history of film, it has not disappeared. Expressionism lives. When Alfred Hitchcock opens The Lady Vanishes (1938) with an obviously "false" set-up of a toy car wending its way across a Tyrolean tabletop, it's a rhetorical device, not a sign of laziness or economisering. It's one way to say "Once upon a time ..." before unwinding a fanciful tale of grandmotherly espionage and burgeoning love. Similarly, the blatant back projection and the obviously painted slum backdrop in Marnie (1964) are appropriate metaphors for the crippling disjunction between the heroine's present awareness and her suppressed past. More currently, in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), the houses, streets, storms, and beflowered cheerleader reveal not just where the plots happen but what they mean.
In this film Chaplin's basic trope is that people who see by the "city lights" are blind to human worth. The suicidal, wealthy drunk can only recognize Charlie's worth when he's blind drunk. Sober, he doesn't recognize him. The flower-seller appreciates Charlie's worth only so long as she's blind to his social/economic station. When she finally sees him, she is first prompted to condescending amusement, as she witnesses his humiliation. She recognizes him only when she touches him to give him a coin. That is, he is properly identified by his touch and by generosity, not by his shabby, humiliated appearance. The theme of deceptive appearances coheres most of the visual gags in the film, such as a paper streamer mistaken for spaghetti, a bald head for aspic, and the woman's dance invitation he intercepts. Charlie mistakes a modern dance number in the nightclub to be a fight, then turns a prizefight into a dance when he tries to win the money for the girl's eye operation.
That change is also reflected in the culture's most mythic sports. The semiotics of baseball preserve the culture's pastoral past. The infield is the uniform course that, if the pitch is properly dealt with, invites one to run through safe bases and score by returning home. The outfield -- whose dimensions may vary from stadium to stadium -- is the unmeasured wilds beyond this skeleton of community, the reminder of the pre-suburban outland. In contrast, football is a game of steady grabbing of land, one ten-yard block at a time, against equally heroic resistance. Here the primary focus is on the immediate yard of embattled ground, not the ball. The culture's switch from baseball to football as the all-American game mirrors the nation's growth from a country of small towns to one dominated by the great city. "The boys of summer" remain icons of nostalgia, a remembrance of things past, an eternal adolescence manifest in the elderly managers still dressing in the boys' uniforms. But it's the behemoths of the fall -- whose coaches wear business suits -- that speak for the contemporary psyche in America. Baseball sustains the myth of small-town America, football the industry, violence, and pressure of the modern city. Of course, hockey is Canada's European play of finessing space for a goal, like soccer -- but on ice.
When the lights dim and the screen flickers, we see not just a story, but a vision of the urban world as conjured behind the eyes of a Hitchcock or a Scorsese. The way our eyes and ears take in everything from the hue of the city sky to the "tone" of its concrete has been carefully imagined and rendered by a team of hundreds of creative minds, each one an expert in some facet of the grand illusion -- the drift of evening fog, the sound of shoe leather on pavement, the ambience of an empty street. For over a hundred years the cinema has both reflected our vision of the metropolis and helped to shape that vision -- an inevitable process in a century when so much centred on the worlds of city and celluloid.
IN the beginning was the ward. The mental ward. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) was far from the first movie, but it established a truth that cinema has tended to hide ever since -- that the setting, like every other component of a film, primarily serves the function of metaphor. It evokes more than it is. Wiene used grotesque painted backdrops to represent the city streets. These expressionist streets, with their jagged edges, violation of perspective, and ominous shadows, express the madness and chaos of the agonized mind. That is to say, the setting did not document a real physical space but expressed a mental state, an attitude, a theme. Although the more realistic cinema has eschewed the extremity of this eccentric film, cinema continues to use the city backdrop as a figure of speech. To hijack Minor White's observation on photography: in cinema the city is not just what's there but what else is there.
Though Wiene's superlative expressionism is rare in the history of film, it has not disappeared. Expressionism lives. When Alfred Hitchcock opens The Lady Vanishes (1938) with an obviously "false" set-up of a toy car wending its way across a Tyrolean tabletop, it's a rhetorical device, not a sign of laziness or economisering. It's one way to say "Once upon a time ..." before unwinding a fanciful tale of grandmotherly espionage and burgeoning love. Similarly, the blatant back projection and the obviously painted slum backdrop in Marnie (1964) are appropriate metaphors for the crippling disjunction between the heroine's present awareness and her suppressed past. More currently, in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), the houses, streets, storms, and beflowered cheerleader reveal not just where the plots happen but what they mean.
CITIES have often inspired lyrical tributes. Walter Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a montage of images of that metropolis from dawn to dusk, finds both metaphor and the poeticized mundane in the minutiae of daily life. Observations of an excursion to the beach provide more satiric insights in Menschen am Sonntag (1929), directed by Robert Sidomak and Edgar Ulmer, and co--authored by Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder (inchoate masters all). Woody Allen opens Manhattan (1979) with an equivalent serenade to that city's splendours, his editing choreographed to Gershwin. Allen's city abounds with scenes and places of cultural richness and beauty, each one a refuge from storms and barbarism. This film was originally received as a social comedy of rigorous morality, but Allen's notoriety since has inflected it into the pretentious rationalization of a middle-aged man "dating a girl who does homework" (Mariel Hemingway). In this city of sophisticated corruption, the hero's moral high ground becomes the artist's evasion.
Allen's closing shot in Manhattan -- his hero in tragic close-up when apparently he has lost his beloved teenybopper -- specifically evokes Chaplin's City Lights (1931). There Chaplin's Tramp-with-No-Name falls in love with a blind, penurious flower-seller (Virginia Cherrill) and with great sacrifice funds the operation that restores her sight. In Chaplin's last shot the tramp is unreservedly joyful that his beloved can see -- even though her sight dispels forever her illusion that her benefactor is a handsome, wealthy man. After the tramp's sacrifice, what compounds his heroism is his total selflessness. His unmitigated joy reveals that he has harboured no expectation of winning her, so he has no hopes that will be dashed by her disenchanted vision of him. While her dream of a wealthy lover is ruined, Charlie's selfless dream is fulfilled.
This shot exemplifies Chaplin's dictum that tragedy is close-up, comedy long shot. That is, comedy views the human against his social landscape, in his material world, upon the surfaces where pratfalls happen. In contrast, tragedy explores the human in isolation with his fate, abstracted from his quotidian being (i.e., the close-up). The close-up at the end of City Lights is tragic because it expresses the selfless joy of a hero who is doomed to failure, loss, rejection, solitude. In this case, his loss is due to his virtue, his generosity. But this tragic shot concludes a film that is very much bound up with the particulars of life in the city, the comic vision.
For Chaplin the city usually emblematizes the society from which his poor tramp is excluded. His happy ending usually shows him walking away up a country road, typically alone, with his over-reaching shoes, ill- fitting posh suit and cocky bowler, and armed with his thin, bending cane -- the solitary figure indomitable. It's not just that -- as the proverb should have it -- "It's better to have loved and lost," Period, but that Chaplin places his faith in the figure whose self-sufficiency and pluck inure him to the rejections and defeats he inevitably experiences in the city.
In this film Chaplin's basic trope is that people who see by the "city lights" are blind to human worth. The suicidal, wealthy drunk can only recognize Charlie's worth when he's blind drunk. Sober, he doesn't recognize him. The flower-seller appreciates Charlie's worth only so long as she's blind to his social/economic station. When she finally sees him, she is first prompted to condescending amusement, as she witnesses his humiliation. She recognizes him only when she touches him to give him a coin. That is, he is properly identified by his touch and by generosity, not by his shabby, humiliated appearance. The theme of deceptive appearances coheres most of the visual gags in the film, such as a paper streamer mistaken for spaghetti, a bald head for aspic, and the woman's dance invitation he intercepts. Charlie mistakes a modern dance number in the nightclub to be a fight, then turns a prizefight into a dance when he tries to win the money for the girl's eye operation.
In the opening scene, the tramp is discovered sleeping in the lap of a public monument to "Peace and prosperity." The shabby figure in the lap of stone-cold luxury gives the lie to the city's complacent assumptions. As he struggles to extricate himself from the embarrassing situation, he is physically unable to stay on the level with the society's anthem. The gag is a metaphor for the cross-purposes of the tramp and the society. With the statue's help he thumbs his nose at the indignant, nonsensical society. The whole film satirizes the unfeeling veneer of the modern city, its illusions of progress and prosperity despite the plight of its poor and helpless. (Pray Adam Sandler doesn't think to do a contemporary remake!) It also traces the tramp's growth through love from the hypocritical manners of the urbane (e.g., his initial scolding of the newspaper boys, his covert appraisal of the nude sculpture) into a person of genuine and generous feeling.
Unlike Chaplin's suggestion of an Everycity for his Everyman, Hitchcock had a gift for "casting" cities. The titular unease of Vertigo (1958), with its hero's repeated falls from grace, in love as in life, cries out for the rollercoaster streets of San Francisco and the romantic/religious mysteries of its Spanish past. The themes of intrusive voyeurism and its corollary, frigid alienation, in Rear Window (1954) are uniquely served by the tenements of New York, where a wall of windows reveals a cross-section of private lives dubiously exposed in their varying stages of disintegration, like a wall of TV dramas.
In I Confess (1953) Hitchcock used Quebec City for his Manichean investigation of the vulnerability of virtue. A priest (Montgomery Clift) is charged with a blackmailer's murder but is bound to secrecy by the killer's having confessed to him, instead of the police. With few exceptions, the postlapsarian citizenry are malevolent, cruel, judgmental. The Quebec City setting lends a weighty religiosity to the drama, with its steep streets, mortally tempting gardens and gazebos, all those compelling "direction" (i.e., one-way) traffic signs, and the towering cathedra and Stations of the Cross. This city is shown to embody Catholicism -- or at least to express the rich complexity and guilt of a committed Catholic mind. In his signature appearance Hitchcock is the first character we see. He walks in dark silhouette across the high horizon, against the direction of the opening traffic signs that point us to the window of the murder scene. He moves against the mortal grain, aloof from the rules and tensions of ordinary mankind. This initiating spirit is the maker/Maker of the film, the human surrogate of The Creator (or "The Enforcer," to quote the Bogart poster the priest passes later). Like the killer, by walking away from the crime this god figure forces others to face up to it.
Of course, Hitchcock does not consider crime to be exclusively a city phenomenon. It's human nature. So he delights in discovering murderous propensities in that site of traditional American innocence, the small town. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943) an urbane merry widow killer (Joseph Cotten) comes to a small town, but the middleaged men there already debate expeditious methods of gruesome murder. The sinister hardware store in Psycho (1960) and the demonic visionary in the coffee shop in The Birds (1963) also attach the terrors of life to small-town Americana. The Trouble with Harry (1955) provides the apotheosis of this theme. In gorgeous, autumnal Vermont, dead Harry is continually resurrected and reburied by the citizens who individually assume themselves guilty of having killed him. But hope, love, and the earnest and fertile imagination take root and blossom in such essential awareness. If murder and guilt happen anywhere there are human beings, some of Hitchcock's crimes seem characteristic of the crowded and busy city: the misidentification in The Wrong Man (1956), the aloof inhumanity of the penthouse killers in Rope (1948), and the general amoral smugness from which his heroes are shaken in Strangers on a Train (1951) and all his James Stewart and Cary Grant films.
As the Hitchcock canon suggests, the most popular genres of American film explore the paradoxes and ambivalence of the city. And why not? Arguably the single most important phenomenon in the history of the United States has been the development of its cities, the metamorphosis from wild frontier to urban jungle.
That change is also reflected in the culture's most mythic sports. The semiotics of baseball preserve the culture's pastoral past. The infield is the uniform course that, if the pitch is properly dealt with, invites one to run through safe bases and score by returning home. The outfield -- whose dimensions may vary from stadium to stadium -- is the unmeasured wilds beyond this skeleton of community, the reminder of the pre-suburban outland. In contrast, football is a game of steady grabbing of land, one ten-yard block at a time, against equally heroic resistance. Here the primary focus is on the immediate yard of embattled ground, not the ball. The culture's switch from baseball to football as the all-American game mirrors the nation's growth from a country of small towns to one dominated by the great city. "The boys of summer" remain icons of nostalgia, a remembrance of things past, an eternal adolescence manifest in the elderly managers still dressing in the boys' uniforms. But it's the behemoths of the fall -- whose coaches wear business suits -- that speak for the contemporary psyche in America. Baseball sustains the myth of small-town America, football the industry, violence, and pressure of the modern city. Of course, hockey is Canada's European play of finessing space for a goal, like soccer -- but on ice.
But I digress. Back to the popular genres -- the musical, crime film, and Western -- and their take on the city.
THE musical propagates the myth that the city is the paradise of opportunity, the community of generous spirits, the testing ground and validation of individualism (albeit harnessed to the harmonies of the troupe). Why, every town in Kansas must have a Mickey and a Judy ready to "put on a show" of Ziegfieldian pizzazz. Typically, the young, beautiful, talented heroes emerge from the farms and towns to become stars in the city. The City is New York -- which is so alluring it's a threat to the old-fashioned 1903 family of Vincent Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis (1944). New York is where everyone -- even blustery fathers like Leon Ames -- must move to prove their advancement.
If one is to believe the Hollywood musical, such as Richard Quine's My Sister Eileen (1955), the stranger to New York has only to erupt into song and/or dance in the street and she is immediately supported by a horde of loving, dependable strangers (what we might call "Blanche Dubois Syndrome"). In Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' West Side Story (1961) this aestheticizing of reality extends to turning gang warfare into jazz ballet -- as rape is in Stanley Donen's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), but that's country folk.
New York is the high life, where champagne flows, everyone is elegant, and wealth, love, and fame await those who qualify -- not by birth (as in old, obsolete Europe) but by that most egalitarian qualification of the elect -- talent. This is the theme of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a pathetic housewife (Mia Farrow) wins the heart of a fictitious character -- and even, briefly, that of the actor who portrays him (Jeff Daniels both) -- by her virtue, sincerity, and her knack with a ukulele. Hollywood's fantasies of the glamorous city sustain the realistically deprived.
These same values propel the crime film. Nonentities grow into "stars" by exercising their individualism, transcending societal norms, scampering up the ladder of the city's nightlife, one rat-a-tat success at a time. In both genres the city represents opportunity, rivalry, the testing ground for individualist ambitions in tension with codes of restraining community. Both genres celebrate individuals' triumph of will, eccentric characters, and the happy blend of ambition and talent. Before the hoofer becomes a star and the gunsel transforms into head honcho, they have to pay their dues to the team, biding their time, whether holding up the chorus line or stepping to the boss's measure. Both genres show heroes espousing style and dash, whether the top hat and tails of the musical or the shiny new suit that always marks the start of a gangster's rise.
In both genres the city streets are paved with guilt -- and sometimes gold. Where the musical thrives on colour -- the opulence of wealth and glamour, even in the pre-Technicolor shimmering silvers of black and white Astaire-cases to paradise -- the crime film lives in and exposes the shadows. It's the post-psychoanalytic cinema, exposing the dark alleys behind the glamorous nightclubs. A Star is Born could be the title of any of those films named after a legend: Capone, Bugsy (Siegel or Malone), The Godfathers, Lepke, Machine Gun Kelly, Scarface, Lucky Luciano. With the exception of Bonny and Clyde all the major gangster epics are big city figures, because the challenge and rewards of the teeming urban society signify crime. A Legs Diamond could rise and fall in either genre.
But of all the genres, it is the Western that is primarily about the city. Paradoxically, true, for what we mainly see is the pre-city, the desert and at most the small towns from which the cities sprang. This is a classic case of the presence of absence. The Western chronicles the culture's transition from the wild to the settled, from the loner's range to community. As the Western details the beginnings of the city, it provides a nostalgic recollection of the pre-urban golden age, its lost Eden, its innocent infancy. That's why so many Westerns are titled after cities/states (Carson City, Santa Fe Trail, Dodge City, Virginia City, 3:10 to Yuma, Vera Cruz, San Francisco, Dallas, In Old Arzona, Tulsa, Dakota, In Old Oklahoma, Cheyenne, and of course the ever-popular Saskatchewan) or emblems of the country's settlement (Union Pacific, Western Union, Winchester 73, The Tin Star, The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, The Iron Mistress -- which incidentally refers to Jim Bowie's knife, not a rusty lover) or people from iconic places (The Man from Utah, The Man from Laramie, The Virginian, The Oklahoma Kid).
Some of the Western's most important scenes catch the turning point of frontier into civilization. In John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) the nomadic gunman Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) evolves into the model sheriff when he rides into the incipient town, gets a haircut and shave at the barbershop, puts on his Sunday suit and does a stiff, determined dance with the civilized Clementine (Cathy Downs) on the clean floorboards of the unfinished church -- before dispatching the villainous Clantons at the OK Corral. The city-culture woman here represents an advance upon the earthier Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) as Grace Kelly does to Katy Jurado in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). But the latter patrician pacifist learns from the rougher heroine the need to shoot a man in the back to save her husband.
The structure of Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) can be called analytic nostalgia, specifically as it harkens back to the origins of the legalized community. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife (Vera Miles) return to the old town for the funeral of the unknown Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). As a young lawyer Stoddard built his political reputation on the story that he killed the notorious outlaw, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Now Stoddard reveals that he never in fact performed the heroic feat. The real hero was Doniphon, who from the shadows shot Valance before the villain could kill the wounded lawyer. This film captures the ambivalence of the modern order. For the law to take its hold, there has to be a civilized outlaw, in the shadows, to support it. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it won't survive without a gun to protect it. When he spurns the credit for ridding the community of the lawless villain, Doniphon loses his girl (Miles), throws away his future, and watches his maladroit friend rise to fame -- and relative fatuity. As the villain's name subtly reminds us, liberty is ambivalent. At the same time, the corruption and the orchestrated chaos of the early political convention, which launches Stoddard's career, reminds us of the negative valence that persists in the world of the city.
Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1961) brilliantly calibrates that transition. Here the Western town already has sidewalks and a policeman (not a sheriff) to keep the pedestrians on them. Taking advantage of the community's cultural openness, someone has imported a camel to race against the horses of the locals -- an early from of urban con. As antiquated lawmen come upon hard times, the iconic Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea (Scott assuming McCrea's persona of Buffalo Bill) dig deep to reaffirm their unfashionable ethic and self- respect. Their elemental dignity transcends the savage brothers' marriage in a brothel and the inveigled bride's vicious Bible-thumping father. (The moral theme of this fable fades in the film's British release title, Guns in the Afternoon.)
In the Western film, the city is as ambivalent as progress -- because it represents progress. While the city brings new community it also brings the compromise of traditional values. In John Ford's seminal Stagecoach (1939), the eponymous ship of fools crosses the savage wilds between -- get this -- Apache Wells and Lordsburg. Not all the savages are those pesky redskins dispatched to bite the Monument Valley dust. The town is characterized by a larcenous banker and a vigilante committee of high sassiety women. Virtue resides in the outcasts, the drunken doctor, the noble gambler rejected by his Old South family, the golden-hearted whore, and the ex-con, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne). By sending Ringo and the ex-whore-elect (Claire Trevor) off to Ringo's homestead, the sheriff wants to "save them from the blessings of civilization." In the pastoralism of the Western the city is a mixed blessing indeed.
Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1972) is a surrealistic exorcism of the progressivist view of the Western town. Eastwood plays a ghostlike figure who emerges from a mist, disappears in another, and in between scourges the oceanside town of Lago. He renames it Hell and has it painted entirely red, a rather candid form of urban renewal. The good citizens of Lago dread the return of a trio of killers fresh out of prison. They give the spectral hero a community carte blanche -- whatever it takes to protect them. But the hero is none other than the shade of their former sheriff, whom none of the townfolk aided as he was bullwhipped to death by the very same villains. When this hero goes to the barber shop, instead of getting a simple clip and shave he kills three men and rapes the town tease. No Henry Fonda hero he. As the spineless new marshal explains, "the price of progress" is doing what has to be done for the good of the community, which includes seeing the previous sheriff killed so he won't reveal that the town's big mine is actually on government land. With its situational parallels and town- gunman tensions, this film plays Experience to the Innocence of High Noon (incidentally, as Eastwood's Pale Rider did to George Stevens' Shane).
Before Eastwood slipped out of his saddle to play his modern San Francisco detective, Harry Callahan, he rehearsed his urbanization with Coogan's Bluff (1968, director Don Siegel). This time the Westerner's savvy, skills, and intuition exceed the petty restraints and restrictions of the urbanites. Eastwood plays an Arizona deputy who has to track down an escaped killer through the exotic canyons of modern New York City, where the licentious savages are the hippies.
Films that depict a cowboy figure out of place in the modern world remind us of the Western's relationship to the city. In John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) Joe Buck (Jon Voigt) is an ambitious stud who comes up from the chorus line in Texas intending to become a star gigolo in Manhattan. Instead he discovers grace and camaraderie with the guttersnipe "Ratzo" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who dies as he nears his illusionary Nirvana: Florida. Far superior (and less known) is David Miller's Lonely are the Brave (1962), where Kirk Douglas plays an idealistic ex-con cowboy in search of frontier freedom. But he's pursued by the modern technocrat sheriff (Walter Matthau) and killed with his fine black steed on the freeway by a truck full of toilets (driven by Carroll O'Conner before he was Archie Bunker). The city kills the cowboy, but in urbanized America the cowboy spirit survives.
In the Canadian equivalent, Peter Pearson's classic Paperback Hero (1972), Keir Dullea plays a rural Saskatchewan hockey star who has bought into the American Western myth so completely that he's unaware he has become a parody. His inability to discriminate between himself and his delusion proves fatal. Perhaps his illusions of martyrdom save him from growing old and self-aware. Here the town has no real place for the delusions of a self-styled cowboy. Of course, the central distinction of this film is the additional theme of the Canadian killing himself with an American posture -- a point slightly mitigated by importing an American b-level "star" to play the Canadian playing at being the American hero. The Canadian serious film industry was young then.
So which is the real city -- the land of shimmering opportunity or the strangling jungle of shadows and corruption? My point is that there is no real city in the movies. For some Out-of-Towners (Arthur Hiller, 1970; Sam Weisman, 1999) it proves to be The Band Wagon (Vincent Minnelli, 1953), for others The Rat Race (Robert Mulligan, 1960). There are instead thousands of fantasies about the naked city. You pay your money and you see someone else's choice of fantasy. The city of film is a figure of speech, a poetic setting. It's what the artist chooses to make of it. Like life.
MAURICE YACOWAR is professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary.
Word count: 4164
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Summer 2000
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