Gotham Diary:
Foreplay
1 May 2014
There was no need to take NyQuil last night, and I slept for about ten hours in deep comfort — even the dreams were entertaining — so, yes, I’m feeling much better this morning, thanks, my cold a one-day misery sandwiched by decline and recovery.
But I’m not feeling quite up to researching what I might have said in the past about a favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr and Mrs Smith, which Kathleen and I watched last night, laughing all the way through (Kathleen especially — she hadn’t seen it in years).
First, let me say that I have always loved this movie for itself. I don’t love it because nobody else does. In his otherwise exhaustive masterpiece, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, James Harvey doesn’t discuss it, even though he’s rightly keen on Carole Lombard. The Hitchcock crowd, on the whole, tends to dismiss Mr and Mrs Smith as a labor of love for Lombard, not for his craft. The humor is indeed pretty subtle. It is almost entirely expressed by Lombard’s ever-changing face, which betrays her character’s slides from pretension to loss of control and back again with the eloquence of a silent-screen goddess — but toned down for sound. You have to want to watch her to catch what she’s doing; neither the actress’s fine-grained shifts nor the filmmaker’s setups cast her performance in high relief. To some degree, Lombard hides behind lavish outfits and her beautiful blonde hair.
You have to want to watch a woman who is being a pain in the ass, is what it comes down to. If you don’t, she remains a pain in the ass, and that may explain the the film’s unpopularity. If you do, though — and why wouldn’t you? this is Carole Lombard we’re talking about — she becomes a figure of fun. Great fun.
Prowling beneath the sleekness is sex. Hitchcock always made sexy movies, but none moreso than this. Robert Taylor doesn’t work his face quite as hard as his costar does, but when he’s not looking boyishly absent or eager, it is registering some aspect of lust. That great sex is what holds the marriage of Mr and Mrs Smith together is basically the moral of the story.
This moral must be demonstrated because David and Annie Smith are living under false pretenses. Their marriage is “officially” founded on rules of conduct that Rousseau might have dreamed up. Annie insists on absolute honesty at all times, no matter what. David complains that this rule gets them into a lot of trouble, but he complies. Annie wants her marriage to be exceptional, ideal. She wants her marriage to be something that she doesn’t really want.
The film begins with a manifestation of one of the rules. The Smiths have been in their bedroom for three days, as they have obliged themselves to do until they have made up after a fight. It’s a funny, almost vaudevillian scene, with trays of dishes littering the carpet, surrounding the unshaven David as he plays solitaire, waiting for Annie to wake up — or to stop pretending that she is asleep. Reconciliation amusingly effected, Annie shaves David while singing the praises of their high-minded marriage, and the discussion of rules continues at the breakfast table (a second breakfast), where the two of them indulge in a sweet duet of apology and self-recrimination that, for the repeat viewer, reveals the dynamic of this marriage. (Annie remarks brightly that she shouldn’t make David so jealous — why, you might think that there would be a rule about that, but there isn’t, because Annie’s flirtations are subterranean and in fact designed to attract her husband.) David, now spruce and dressed for work (he is an attorney), truthfully answers Annie’s question of the day — would he marry her again if he had it to do over again? — with an honest negative. On the whole, he would prefer to be free — no marriage. Since Annie has promised not to be angry at the truth, her withered response to David’s candor is muted, but it does take a while to bring an honest smile back to her lips. Ideal marriage, indeed.
So, even before the action begins — with the news that Mr and Mrs Smith are not in fact married, not legally married, owing to a technicality — we know that they are not really married, not yet. They will have to get married again. The immediate and only serious casualty of this brilliantly foreshadowed reversal is Annie’s list of rules, and Annie breaks them as ruthlessly as David. To anyone watching the movie for the first time, what follows is a more or less madcap version of the Grecian Urn’s chase and flight, but anyone who has seen Mr and Mrs Smith before will recognize what’s really going on: foreplay. Out in the open, finally. Right there on screen, for all to see, with little or no help from cigarette smoke (no time for that) — and the only bared skin is Jack Carson’s bust.
Perhaps that explains the film’s poor reception: its banked carnality is too intense for the screwball audience, and at the same time no substitute for a murder.
***
It is actually pleasant today, so the papyrus plants finally got potted. I had worried that they would die in the shipping boxes — they arrived on Monday — but there was no way that I could drag myself out onto the balcony in the cold, damp rain. It was arduous enough to lug two sacks of potting soil across the street from Gristede’s. The plants were of course just fine, packed to endure delays in replanting.
On my way to the store, I ran into my old French prof, the retired restaurant manager (a very famous one in its day) with whom I spoke French for a few hours every week for a few years, starting about ten years ago. During the time of his tutelage, I built up a ready stock of greetings and everyday remarks, but afterward, abetted by the fact that I only rarely seemed to run into him in the building, and then often with Will in tow, I lost such proficiency as I had attained, and now, meeting him in the narrow walk along our driveway, I froze. What swept over me was not français but “FRENCH!” — a tongue-tying panic. Had I felt less awkward (and had I not been preoccupied by the hope that my errands would not prolong my cold, which promised to be ending), I should have backed up toward the lobby to continue our conversation.
If I did not, on the contrary, push on, so as to avoid blocking pedestrian traffic, a capital sin in my book, it was because I had been thinking of the prof ever since the suicide of our neighbor. On the day that it happened, I was talking about it with the fellow in the package room, curious to know if he had seen anything. His windows would have provided an unobstructed view of the body, had it not been for the scaffolding surrounding the building in connection with the balcony re-railing project. When he said that he heard a noise but saw nothing, I thought of the prof, because he lives on the second floor, at a level with the tops of the scaffolding, directly beneath our neighbor’s apartment.
I got no further than mumbling Were you at home when… “J’étais là. J’ai téléphoné la police.” He described hearing an incredible sound; he thought that the scaffolding itself was collapsing. When he looked out, there she was. Before I could commiserate, however, he moved on quickly to complain about the building, which as of yet had neglected to remove the slipper that had fallen off during the fall and been left behind. He has spoken to the management, to no avail. At first, they made references to the inviolability of a “crime scene.” Then they more frankly counter-complained that they didn’t have the time. There it lies, outside his window, from one day to the next.
If we had talked longer, I might actually have voiced two rather dark questions. Did you know who it was right away? and May I take a picture of the slipper from your balcony? When I see him again, I may pose the first question. I hope that he’ll be able to tell me that the relic has been removed.