My annual summer film series for the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C. was this year presented jointly with and
on the premises of the Hudson Institute and focused on the theme of
the Pursuit of Happiness. For reasons too tedious to go into, there
were only six films instead of eight this year, but once again they
were meant in part to point a contrast between the movies of
Hollywood’s Golden Age (1930-1960) and the age of dross that has
come after it — and also after (not coincidentally) America’s
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Unlike the previous series,
however, this one finds not such a stark contrast in the before and
after. In some ways the later films are better than the earlier
ones. I guess that post-revolutionary Americans are a lot more
serious on the subject of the Pursuit of Happiness than they are on
those of Heroes, Love, or Crime, the subjects of the past three
summers, and so are less inclined to trivialize it.
The pre-1960 films were My Man Godfrey (1936) by
Gregory La Cava, starring William Powell and Carole Lombard,
Christmas in July (1940) by Preston Sturges, with Dick
Powell and Ellen Drew, Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston,
and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (also 1948) by H.
C. Potter, with Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas. Then,
rapidly skipping over the intervening 54 years — which comprised
heady pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary days
during which far too many people both in and out of Hollywood
mistook pleasure for happiness — we arrived at Alexander Payne’s
About Schmidt (2002), starring Jack Nicholson, Kathy
Bates, and Hope Davis and, finally, The Pursuit of
Happyness (2006) with Will Smith, Jaden Smith, and Thandie
Newton.
At the most superficial level, it was impossible not to notice
the extent to which the older movies assumed that the getting and
spending of money was desirable in itself and a necessary component
of the Pursuit of Happiness, if not (necessarily) the thing itself,
while the later movies found the mercenary motive to be suspect. In
the case of the movie called The Pursuit of Happyness this
was not so true of the movie itself — though there were in the
more-or-less true story of Chris Gardner (Will Smith) some hints of
the inevitable cultural doubts and defensiveness about making
money, at least in business — as in the reaction to it of critics
who found it politically incorrect. “How you respond to this man’s
moving story,” wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times,
“may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith’s and his son’s
performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that
poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the
result of heroic toil and dreams.”
Who indeed, in the New York Times’s view, could “buy”
anything so preposterous? Ms. Dargis’s sneering left her no room to
notice that the chief feature of Mr. Smith’s “winning” charm, and
that of his real-life son, Jaden Smith, who plays Mr. Gardner’s son
in the movie, and that without which the movie would certainly
never have been made, was that he was black. And even then it
probably wouldn’t have been made if not for its Italian director,
Gabriele Muccino, who, not having done an American movie
previously, presumably was unaware of his cultural faux
pas in suggesting that a black guy might succeed by dedication
and hard work. This Hollywood-types would call “blaming the
victim,” because it is supposed to imply that all the black guys
who don’t succeed, or whose success is more limited than that of
Mr. Gardner, may have fallen short of such success for some reason
other than white racism. They and their allies on the left
therefore have a vested interest in believing that success is
impossible for them.
Yet it is also true that even before the movies became racially
aware in the 1960s, their view of success was somewhat ambivalent,
to say the least. The country’s previous turn to the left during
the Depression had created a certain amount of suspicion and
dislike of the rich — “malefactors of great wealth,” as President
Roosevelt called them — that you can see hints of in My Man
Godfrey. To be sure, the frivolous, insensitive, and
dysfunctional Bullock family in that movie were much more
affectionately portrayed than their counterparts would be today —
as the imminent resuscitation of Oliver Stone’s caricature villain,
Gordon Gekko, in the sequel to Wall Street (Money Never
Sleeps) is set to remind us this month — but they still have
to be taught a lesson by William Powell’s Godfrey, the butler they
hire from the shanty town at the city dump who turns out to be a
Harvard-educated aristocrat, just like FDR himself, slumming it
among the allegedly “forgotten men” on the nation’s refuse
pile.
That movie ends with Powell’s Godfrey starting up, on the site
of the dump, a swanky nightclub that promises to be a nice little
earner for him and to provide good jobs for the dump’s former
denizens. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, it seems,
even if it has to be disciplined by social responsibility and good
manners. In Christmas in July and Mr. Blandings Builds
His Dream House, however, success is seen as being, at least
to some extent, capricious and uncertain rather than the product of
ingenuity and industry. And, just as the heroes of those films
could hardly be said to have earned the success that comes to them
in the end, those of Treasure of the Sierra Madre are
deprived of the success they have earned by what seems to
them to be the caprice of “The Lord or Fate or Nature, whichever
you prefer.”
WE DON’T KNOW A LOT ABOUT B. TRAVEN, the pen name of the man who
wrote the novel on which Treasure was based, but we do
know that he was an avowed Communist, and a nice summary of Marx’s
Labor Theory of Value is provided in the movie by Walter Huston,
the director’s father, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar as the old
prospector. It’s a wonderful movie, but it is also a reminder that
Hollywood’s left-wing political culture, which has allowed a hack
like Oliver Stone or a buffoon like Michael Moore to be hailed as
great directors, reaches far back into the past, well before the
revolutionary 1960s allowed the old left to emerge, blinking, from
the hidey-holes into which the House Committee on Un-American
Activities had driven them more than a decade before to join forces
with the emergent new left. Bosley Crowther’s review of
Treasure in the New York Times of January, 1948,
saw it as a movie about “greed” just as Vincent Canby’s review of
Wall Street in the same paper a month short of 40 years
later cited Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech as the highlight
of that movie. “After that, Wall Street is all downhill,”
Canby felt.
“Greed” is of course the left-winger’s code word for the desire
of someone other than himself or those belonging to such
politically or socially approved groups as film directors or pop
stars to make money. The word has lately made a comeback in the
Democratic left’s attacks on the Tea Party movement and its
members’ desire just to keep the money they have already made, as
if it were not really theirs in the first place but the presumptive
property of those well-intentioned, “progressive” élites who see it
as their job to help our benevolent president “spread the wealth
around.” That sort of political tom-foolery has prevented us and to
a considerable extent prevented our movies from examining the real
problems of success, wealth, and “happiness” in the sense that, I
think, Jefferson intended it in the Declaration.
Yet every now and then one slips through the cracks. Such, I
think, is About Schmidt, of whose qualities I think more
highly every time I see it. Its eponymous hero, played by Mr.
Nicholson, could hardly be considered a symbol of “greed” even by
Messrs. Stone and Moore. He is just a mid-level insurance executive
who has done well enough to be able to afford a nice home, a nice
car, a comfortable retirement, and an outsized Winnebago to enjoy
it in — and yet he thinks, not without reason, that his life is a
failure. At first he wonders if this is because he wasn’t ambitious
(or, perhaps, “greedy”) enough to become someone “semi-important”
in the world, but eventually he comes to see that his own pursuit
of happiness has simply missed, as so many of ours do, the
happiness that was there for the taking all along. That such a
movie could be made in this day and age inspires thoughts of hope
and change for Hollywood.
