It was either Jodie Foster or I who said “20 years in, you look back at the roles you’ve played, the work you’ve done, and you connect your younger self with those roles. You begin to see patterns develop in your career that reflect who you were and are at each stage.” Or something like that.
Today is special for two reasons:
One year ago today, I started this little film review newsletter, Review Roulette
Approximately eight hours ago, this morning, I submitted my PhD thesis, A Cold War Christmas: Reflections of American Politics and Culture in Hollywood Christmas Films, 1946-1961
As I said last week, I am so grateful for each and every one of you who takes the time to read the words I write. I spend a lot of my time thinking and writing about movies and culture and American history, and I cannot believe it is the life and career I get to lead. Every day is like Christmas morning to be able to wake up and do what I love even when I hate it. So, thank you for saving me this space in your life and for welcoming me into your inbox.
When Jodie Foster and I think back on my career to date, I definitely do see a pattern. In undergrad, I had two theses for my degrees in Classical languages and US history: respectively, classical reception in neo-Classical children’s literature and racist depictions of Chinese and Japanese characters in US comics and cartoons, 1890-1945. For my first Master’s, I studied ancient Greek and Roman literary, dramatic, and mythological depictions of demons attacking women at key reproductive moments as well as the symptom profiles in ancient medical texts that matched those attacks, exploring how women with reproductive diseases – such as endometriosis – processed their pain and experiences by blaming them on demons. For my second, I analysed the classical reception of the goddess Venus in a post-war Timely-to-Marvel-Comics comic book Venus and what those late 40s, early 50s depictions of her could tell us about gender dynamics in mainstream American culture in that period. Jodie Foster and I agree that I’ve always had a thing for pop culture – from any era – and how it makes life more bearable, how it portrays lives as they are lived, and how it has a fluid relationship – reflecting and refracting – the cultural, political, and social atmospheres of the moments in which they were made. And now I get to do all of that with film – Christmas films to be exact.
If you will indulge me, I thought that this week I would do something a little different and share a short excerpt of my thesis with you all. For the uninitiated, my thesis looks at the political, cultural, social, and economic influences on the post-war, early Cold War period with a particular focus on how those influences impacted Hollywood and, in turn, how those impacts on Hollywood manifested in Hollywood outputs in the period, specifically through a case study on the seemingly “non-political” genre of Christmas films. Lots of layers, lots of influences; the dissertation goes into significantly more detail over 99,987 words/373 pages. It looks at things like shopping trends in real life and on screen, the FBI investigating It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), how the Supreme Court threw a curveball that was actually a grenade into Hollywood, stuff like that.
This excerpted section is from my final chapter which discusses Walt Disney’s and Frank Capra’s individual political and professional experiences over this 15-year period between 1946 and 1961 and what happens in their careers as a result of those experiences. Their choices in the – to put it lightly – fraught political climate, their filmmaking instincts, and their financial situations led them down very different paths, yet each filmmaker produced their own Christmas films that were released in the same week of December 1961 to drastically different successes: Babes in Toyland and Pocketful of Miracles, respectively. In this bit, I compare the tones of those two films with another, Billy Wilder’s 1960 hit The Apartment (which I have reviewed separately here!).
An Excerpt from A Cold War Christmas -
Thus far this chapter has presented the case for the upwards trajectory of Disney’s multimedia empire and the downward spiral of Capra’s dwindling career. Both filmmakers had quite similar inclinations when it came to work, demanding obsessive control over their film projects. As Capra spiralled throughout the 1950s, he gradually lost control of his productions and was made to defer to the studio heads, stars, and financiers of his films. Disney, on the other hand, meticulously grew his empire to ensure complete creative control over every aspect of the Disney brand, even films with other directors attached that were produced by Disney. These two filmmakers diverged wildly and to an extent swapped positions from the 1930s and early 1940s versions of themselves that Sklar captures. By 1961, the two have fully embodied opposite ends of a spectrum of influence, prestige, and power in the motion picture industry, and Capra has lost the three audiences Sklar identifies – “the ticket-buying public, the critics and the commentators on films, and their Hollywood co-workers”.[1]
Simultaneously, within the content of films and as a reflection of the growing harshness of the wider world so commonly experienced by Capra himself over this decade, Hollywood proved no longer content with merely the light-hearted fare evidenced in the rise of comedies, musicals, and romances identified by Jones. Even in these genres of film, a darkness had begun to creep in showing the cracks in the perfect performative normalcy of the earlier 1950s and echoing the growing refusal to perform that normalcy as the US committed further to foreign containment policies, culture wars, and the publicly declared willingness to use the atomic bomb. This darker edge manifests in multiple films from this period including Disney’s own 1960 Swiss Family Robinson in which a family of refugees is marooned on an island after being shipwrecked by pirates. Swiss Family Robinson was at the time and still is a much beloved escapist film featuring darker elements of a family fleeing war, facing life-threatening pirates, and becoming stranded. Swiss Family Robinson was the fourth highest grossing film of 1960.[2]
Another film in this vein is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment from the same year. As The Apartment was not a family-friendly film produced under the Disney brand, it could include far more adult themes than Swiss Family Robinson but still have that darker edge to an otherwise generally comedic or entertaining film. The Apartment follows C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) a low-level office worker with aspirations above his station. As Baxter is a single man with his own apartment and knows that the executives in his company are prone to extra-marital affairs, Baxter leverages his property as a private space for those affairs with the expectation of professional quid pro quos. Baxter’s boss, personnel manager Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) and three other executives exploit this opportunity and have little regard for Baxter himself and even less for the women they bring to the apartment. Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), mistress to Sheldrake and Baxter’s crush, realises that Sheldrake will never leave his wife for her when he leaves her a $100 bill after their Christmas Eve session. Distraught at the implication on her character and not knowing whose apartment they are in, Fran attempts suicide and is found by Baxter when he returns home. Baxter nurses her back to health, trying and failing to convince Sheldrake that he should care about Fran as a human. Ultimately, Fran decides to leave Sheldrake and pursue Baxter romantically as he showed her a kindness no other man in the film seems to possess.
The Apartment won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1961. This film is generally a well-structured comedy that maintains a light-hearted tone even in its portrayals of the darkest moments, perhaps due to Lemmon’s gentle and positive demeanour throughout. It also carries a biting commentary on the men of the executive class portrayed in the film and addresses misogynistic attitudes towards women directly. Baxter’s begging on Christmas Day for Sheldrake to show Fran even an ounce of kindness or remorse or attention fall on a man whose primary concern in that moment is his wife finding out about his actions. He does not see his affair partner as human and has no empathy for the mental position she is in to have hurt herself in this way. Wilder’s film is a masterful balance of comedic tones delivering an emotionally devastating plot that carries with it a condemnation of the social inequalities of men and women. It pitches a central villain in Sheldrake and a romantic couple to root for in Baxter and Fran, and it does not address large systemic issues apart from the implied corruption of corporate relationships. Instead, it manufactures a problem that can be dealt with within the confines of the film to deliver a happy ending and a moralistic shaming of misogynistic behaviour.
Similarly, Babes in Toyland pitches a central villain and romantic couple, manufactures a resolvable conflict, and chides at the murder and kidnapping plots while delivering a picture-perfect happy ending. However, in a departure from The Apartment, it not only portrays but actively celebrates misogyny and extreme social conservatism in the portrayal of Mary’s character. Babes in Toyland is adapted to the moment to fit the audience and the times by delivering those darker plot points in a light-hearted tone popular in this period. Pocketful of Miracles, however, misses the target in this way. A comedy in itself, Pocketful leans into a Depression-era plot and tone with a depth of sadness throughout much of the film, an overtly acknowledged reality that Annie’s escape into her millionairess persona will come to an end and she will have to go back to facing life’s hardships when the credits roll. Without a central villain, Pocketful’s real conflict is that life is difficult, unfair, and economically unjust. This tone falls entirely too short of matching the expectations of Christmas films at this point, as the culture has changed so drastically in the 15-year period between Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and his Pocketful of Miracles.
[1] Sklar, Movie-Made America, 197.
[2] "Pictures: All-Time Top Grossers", Variety (Los Angeles, January 6, 1965), ProQuest.