Retro-View
This Retro-view is the return of a column featuring reviews about film, music, or books that have not been released recently, but are still noteworthy.
EVAN JOHNSON STAFF
Are you in a troubled relationship? Are your boyfriend’s genitals small and unsightly? Has you girlfriend’s paunch grown too aggressively bulbous? Why not put on a movie? You’ll see that there are many beautiful people in relationships more hopeless and dysfunctional than even your own. Here are three movies that might help. For starters there’s David Cronenberg’s the Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum, who looks like nothing more than a strange insect posing unsuccessfully as a human, plays eccentric physicist Seth Brundle. Brundle meets aspiring journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) at a science trade show, and even though nobody likes journalists, the two quickly fall in love. During a brief bout of jealousy involving Quaife’s ex-boyfriend Stathis, Brundle gets drunk and decides, understandably, to teleport himself across the room using his newly developed teleportation pods. Unfortunately, he inadvertently fuses his DNA with that of a fly. Oops!
Brundlefly’s subsequent transformation seems to provide a number of sexual metaphors: most obviously, it evokes puberty (particularly in Brundelfly’s fascination with the viscous and milky-white secretions that insist on emerging from various parts of his body), but it also suggests the strange combination of self-conscious body-loathing and wide-eyed curiosity that can accompany the early stages of a new sexual relationship.
Anyway, things deteriorate in a truly revolting, Cronenbergian fashion until the doomed relationship is finally over and poor Veronica Quaife is scarred for life, if not by the tragedy of her lover’s death then by the fact that, after learning that she’s been impregnated by Brundlefly, David Cronenberg himself appears as the gynecologist performing the necessary abortion.
Even better than the Fly, however, is Byron Haskin’s 1954 melodrama Naked Jungle, in which Charlton Heston plays Christopher Leiningen, a despotic plantation owner who must deal simultaneously with the confusing feelings brought on by the arrival of his mailorder bride (Eleanor Parker) and the army of man-eating ants (“marabunta!”) that threatens his chocolate plantation.
This schizophrenic premise is at least as great as it sounds and is based on Carl Steven- son’s excellently titled story Leiningen vs. the Ants, though screenwriter Philip Yordan wisely ratchets up the romance and melodrama. The resulting film barely even mentions the ants before the halfway mark, instead choosing to chronicle the harsh and awkward early stages of Leiningen’s marriage.
Leiningen, sporting a sweaty chest that extends all the way down to his belt, first tries to break his wife like he would a rebellious peon, until he learns that she’s been married before, at which point he decides that she’s nothing but “another man’s leavings” and must be sent back from whence she came. Through all of this Joanna is remarkably patient, but eventually Leiningen is able to open up and reveal the sensitive, inner Leiningen, the one that reads poetry and whips only naughty peons. Then the ants come and the couple falls in love.
The film is certainly drawing some kind of connection between the awakening of sexual/romantic feelings and the unwavering onslaught of a scourge of angry insects, but Leiningen’s imposing manliness is so potent and horrific in itself that it hardly needs an entomological metaphor to compound it, so I doubt the perspective is Joanna’s. It is possible, then, that the ants here stand in for woman. Woman — not a single, lumbering monstrosity (that’s man — as in the Fly) — but a fluid community of minor horrors.
The whole thing is sumptuously realized, beautiful, brilliant, hilarious, but it’s not as great as Cat People, the exquisite and atmospheric 1942 art-horror collaboration between director Maurice Tourneur and producer Val Lewton. In the case of Cat People, the dysfunctional relationship doesn’t involve insects, but does involve horrific transformation. The already improbably feline actress Simone Simon plays Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian woman who believes that she will transform into a deadly panther if she becomes too angry, passionate, or sexually aroused. As a result, she shies away from the affections of her husband Oliver, and their marriage inevitably suffers.
When Oliver decides it’s time to leave Irena, he bravely tells her that he’s in love with another woman. “Ah,” says the film’s dapper psychiatrist Louis Judd, “the story grows more and more charming.” The aftermath of this break up leads to a genuinely chilling night-time pool scene in which bathing “other woman” Alice Moore is stalked by an angry panther that may or may not be Irena.
I suppose it’s possible that the film is suggesting that there is something terrifying and supernatural about female sexuality, but it could just as easily be decrying this very notion and suggesting the exact opposite, that such retrograde versions of sexuality are themselves dangerous and unnatural. Whatever it’s saying, it has the ring of emotional truth. That’s a cop-out, I suppose, but just see Cat People and try not to love it.
