Flicker (2 page)

At the time, I was treading water at UCLA. My parents back in Modesto had me programmed for law school—my father's profession. I went along with the idea; anything that kept me out of the post-Korean War draft would do, and the easier the better. But it would never have occurred to me that the movies—this leftover childhood amusement—might be the subject of deep study and learned discourse.
What was there to say about these cowboys and gangsters and glamour girls I had been watching since infancy in a state of semihypnotic fixation? I was bemused by the aesthetic furies that agitated my film-buff friends, the heady talk, the rarefied critical theory they exchanged among themselves as we sat drinking coffee at Moishe's after an evening at The Classic. I envied their expertise and sophistication, but I couldn't share in it. A great deal that fired them with ecstasy left me stone cold, especially the heavy-duty silent films in which The Classic specialized. Oh, I could handle Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton. I had no trouble enjoying a kick in the pants, a pie in the face. But Eisenstein, Dreyer, Griffith struck me as lugubrious bores. Movies without sound (and at The Classic, too penurious to hire a pianist, the silents were shown
silent
, unrelieved by a hint of musical distraction, only the harsh liturgical rasp of the projector filling the hushed and lightless shrine) were my idea of a retarded art form.

What a young savage I was among the gourmets at The Classic's banquet table. I came with a voracious appetite for movies, but no taste. No, that's not true. I had taste:
bad
taste. Appalling taste. Well, what would you expect of someone raised on a steady diet of Monogram westerns, the Bowery Boys, Looney Tunes? For such items (I blush to say), I was blessed, or burdened, with total recall; no doubt it is all still buzzing around in my deep memory, a zany chaos of fistfights and pratfalls. At the age of ten, I could rattle off verbatim a half-dozen Abbott and Costello routines. At play in the streets, I could reconstruct in precise detail the shoot-em-up Saturday matinee exploits of Roy Rogers and Lash La Rue. My Curly the Stooge imitations were a constant household irritant.

Kid stuff. Later, in my high school years, the movies became kid stuff of another order. They were mirrors of the adolescent narcissism that blighted America of the fifties. It was that period when middle-class elders were finding all the illusions they needed on television, the family hearth of the new suburbia. By default their offspring became the nation's moviegoing public. Suddenly Hollywood found itself held to ransom by randy teenagers on wheels. Given the primary use the kids were making of drive-in theaters as do-it-yourself sex-education clinics, it was needlessly generous of the moviemakers to provide their work with any content at all. Make-out movies didn't exist to be watched; a blank screen would have done just as well. But those who came up for air long enough to take notice were apt to
find that screen flooded with corrupting flattery, tales of moody youth grievously oppressed by insufficiently permissive parents who failed to take their least whim with the utmost and immediate seriousness. Like millions of others my age, I grasped at what I took to be a lifelong license
not
to grow up and rushed to pass myself off as the reincarnation of martyred James Dean—the surly slouch, the roguish clothes, the finely greased ducktail. A leather-clad, motorcycle-mounted Marlon Brando was constantly before my mind's eye, a wishful image of the perpetual untamed adolescent I wanted to be.

All this had nothing to do with the art of film; it was simply the stalled identity crisis of my generation. What was it, then, that drew a born-and-bred vulgarian like me to The Classic and its elite clientele? If I said it was a fascination with foreign films—especially with the French and Italian imports which the art houses of the time relied on to pay their bills—that might suggest some sudden refinement of taste. But no. Not immediately. Not consciously. Let me be honest. To begin with, the attraction was totally glandular. For me, as for thousands of moviegoers of the forties and fifties, foreign films meant sex—sex of a frankness American movies of the time weren't even trying to rival. For at least a few young, romantic years, European eroticism became my standard of grown-up sophistication.

Where else did I have to turn? I harbored every young man's curiosity about the mysteries of maturity. But the American movies that dominated my fantasy life were no help. On the contrary, they populated my head with treacherous delusions of womanhood. During that era of canting Eisenhower piety, the screen was peculiarly cluttered with a succession of vestal virgins—Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr—who seemed to have been welded into their clothes at birth, and whose lovemaking reached its absolute libidinal limit with a dry-lipped kiss. Between the clavicle and the kneecap they had been anatomically expurgated by the Legion of Decency. Is this what I was to believe of women? Every bone in my pubescent body told me nothing human could draw a living breath and remain so antiseptic.

Yet, when Hollywood tried to smuggle a stronger dose of sex appeal through the tight cordon of censorship that surrounded it, things got even more bewilderingly unreal. The result was no improvement upon Nylana the Jungle Girl who had, for lack of anything better, been functioning as my make-believe love-slave since the age of ten. Jane Russell, Linda Darnell, Jayne Mansfield … their intimidating
torsos, cantilevered and cross-braced, with cleavage calibrated to the last permissible millimeter—so much and no more—might have been fabricated by a team of structural engineers. Even Marilyn Monroe, the movies' closest approximation to sluttish abandon, always looked to me like a windup fiberglass doll designed to titillate by the numbers. Off camera, I imagined she was packed away in the special-effects storeroom along with King Kong and the Munchkins.

The Great Change came one Saturday during my senior year at Modesto High, when, in the company of two buddies, I drove to San Francisco on secret sexual maneuvers. Our object was to infiltrate the old Peerless Theater on Mission Street, then terminally tacky but still advertising “The Hottest Burlesque West of New York.” Unable to pass ourselves off at the door as grown men, we grudgingly settled for second best: a selection of Tempest Storm strip flicks at an equally seedy showplace down the street. This was also “Adults Only,” but the gates weren't so closely guarded. Slipping by the near-comatose ticket-taker, we eagerly seated ourselves in the oppressively grungy auditorium amid an audience of scattered single males slouched down to the ears in their seats. For the next hour, we were treated to a dimly photographed parade of bored and beefy ladies whose perfunctory bumping and grinding was more often off camera than on. When we finally got to Tempest Storm, she was as blurred an image as all the rest and no less concealed by tassles and bangles. This erotic delight was followed by a bonus: a silent reel of posture shots featuring a dozen or so rigidly positioned “artist's models” morosely shifting this way and that. Whenever the girls failed in their maladroit efforts to make sure that not more than the permissible half-nipple was revealed, chop! the film got edited with a meat-ax. Even seen from beginning to end a second time, these were meager rations, barely enough to give us the satisfaction of vindicated manhood.

Afterward, our lust unslaked and the night still young, we cruised the streets fruitlessly looking for more of the same. Finally, when we'd drifted out of the Tenderloin into more respectable parts of town, we were ready to give up and begin the long drive home. But then, in one of the city's better neighborhoods, we happened upon a demurely lit first-run movie house whose marquee advertised a film called
The Lovers.
This sounded promising, and indeed there were posters of a man and a woman and a bed. We decided to make a few exploratory passes.

The theater seemed suspiciously tasteful, much too swanky for a
porn show. The glass doors were polished, the lobby inside carpeted, the man who took the tickets was dressed in jacket and tie. Moreover, the audience going in wasn't the scruffy crowd with whom we'd shared Tempest Storm's charms. The men buying tickets looked well-dressed, intelligent, reputable. They looked like our fathers, for God's sake! Moreover, they had
women
with them. How could a guy enjoy dirty movies with females present? We knew there had to be a catch. There was. This wasn't an American movie. It was
French.
That's why it cost so much. A whole dollar. More than Tempest Storm. Our doubts grew stronger when one of my companions perceptively noted, “It says subtitles.” He made the observation as if he'd discovered a dubious clause in the small print of a contract. “That means they put all the talking in words at the bottom of the screen.”

A foreign film. A film you had to
read.
Of course I'd heard about such movies. I'd even seen one the year before: Brigitte Bardot, though in a toned-down and domesticated version. With voice dubbed and bare posterior expurgated (how else could she have gained admittance to Modesto?) she'd come off seeming vastly overrated to me, a poor substitute for Mamie Van Doren, suffering from out-of-sync lips. Given our prurient mission that evening, the movie at hand seemed even less likely to be the merchandise we were shopping for. Still, it looked as if we might have no trouble getting into the place. There were young guys getting past the usher at the door, no questions asked. We could probably pass for college age—not that the management showed signs of caring. After a brief consultation, we decided to gamble the buck. It was a night for running risks.

As a mordant commentary on bourgeois marital habits, Louis Malle's
The Lovers,
that season's rage of the art houses, was lost on me. Nor did it matter in the least that to the critics' way of thinking, the story was feather-light and much too preciously played. But what did I know about critics? What did I know about thinking? For me, the movie was an excuse for the camera to loiter deliciously over the intimate details of an illicit love affair. A man and a woman share a bed, a bath. She yields to his touch with the easy grace of water stirred in a pool. Their lovemaking flows as lyrically as the gorgeous music that accompanies their brief romance. (A Brahms sextet, as I later learned. An unusual bit of film scoring.) I sat in the presence of this erotic dream dizzy with desire, convinced that, at last, I'd experienced the
real thing. This
was what it was all about—men and women together, the great guarded secret of what they did and how
they did it when it didn't have to be done in the backseat of a car or in the uncertain privacy of somebody's parents' living room.

What did I see that was so arousing? It wasn't the few quick glimpses of nudity, nor the occasional caress that freely strayed across the woman's body. Rather it was the natural ease with which this man and this woman carried it off. So cool, so casual. When we see the lovers in the tub, we can tell they're really bare; there are no strategically positioned bubbles or reflections. But the camera, so cleverly handled, doesn't strain to reveal or conceal. When the woman rises from the water to reach for a towel, once again the camera is totally relaxed. It doesn't stare salaciously—the way I would've stared salaciously. Rather, like the true eye of an experienced lover, it scans the passage of her breasts, her navel, moving across this charged terrain with matter-of-fact nonchalance. Intimacies like these, the film seemed to say, are the unspectacular facts of adult life. One takes them in easy stride. For didn't we, the audience, know all about these things?

Like hell we did!
Not me. Not my friends. Nevertheless, the film invited a blasé acceptance. And it was getting what it asked for. Because (my God!) in a theater filled to capacity, no horse laughs, no wolf whistles, never a giggle or gasp. This was some classy audience. Of course, all of us, adolescent and adult, were being artfully cued. Perhaps I even knew it. But I also enjoyed it, especially as the cueing was being done by this stunning actress who played the woman, Jeanne Moreau—or, as I remembered her name then, “jeany More-oh.” No great beauty by Hollywood standards. A plain face with bad skin. An unremarkable body. Rather limp and smallish breasts. But precisely for that reason, she took on a pungent reality. There could actually
be
such a woman. This is how she'd act in her bedroom, in her bathroom. And the way she moved, with such compliant carnality, I could imagine she was indeed naked under her clothes. Who could believe such a thing of Doris Day?

My buddies, I recall, were unimpressed. The film held no magic for them. They thought it compared poorly with Tempest Storm's more ritualized gyrations. (Also, they were outraged by the absence of popcorn.) But I left the theater intoxicated with Jeanne Moreau, by her suave, slightly bored permissiveness. I wanted more of these films. I wanted more of these women. Which was too much to expect of drowsy Modesto. But when, soon after, I moved to Los Angeles to start college, I was on the lookout for all the foreign movies I could
find and so finally made my way to The Classic, where I quickly caught up on the whole postwar repertory of French and Italian films. I took in the heavy as well as the light—
Shoeshine
and
Open City,
along with
Beauties of the Night
and
House of Pleasure
—because you could never tell. In the middle of a grindingly morose neorealist drama, some deliciously unashamed sexual byplay (all I was really watching for) might suddenly light the screen.

By then, there were opportunists by the score cashing in on the belated American sexual revolution, filling slick magazines and slicker movies with topless vixens, buxom playmates. A few years farther down the line we would be treated to a surfeit of X-rated skin flicks that loaded the screen with genital gymnastics and full-frontal gynecology. But I'm recalling an illusion of another order, one that worked by understatement and elegant insouciance. Sometimes, in the Italian films of that period, the passions of men and women were lent a more bracing physicality by being blended into the rough grain of everyday life. Italian moviemakers admitted (almost reveled in) the existence of dirt in the streets, soiled clothing, cracked plaster. In super-hygienic, middle-class America, where I'd been raised, such grunginess was rarely on view. Yet, by some subtle magic that became my earliest appreciation of the art of film, these exotic images of a tawdriness I'd never experienced actually managed to make “real life” as I'd known it seem artificial, lacking the organic vitality they possessed. Silvana Mangano, laboring at the harvest in
Bitter Rice,
pauses to wipe her brow. Her hair is a magnificent straggly chaos. Her ample body streams with real sweat. There is damp hair beneath her upraised arm. Her shirt, loosely knotted at the midriff, gapes in the wind to bare the lush curve of her pendulous breasts. Nipples press assertively against the clinging cloth. Only a passing mirage on the screen. But to my captivated eye, the woman is palpably
there.
Almost discernibly, she smells of the earth, of forbidden female odors.