A Face in the Crowd - 1957

A Face in the Crowd (1957) chronicles its era, lambastes it, and foreshadows future evils of an unchecked demagogue. Perhaps it also marks the end of the noir era of film in its intended righteous ending. It is that ending, however, that contradicts the realities of the future, the cynical realities of our own era. It might be the weakest moment of the movie.

Andy Griffith makes a magnificent film debut as the noxious “country boy” whose meteoric rise in the media is made possible by a gullible public and the machinations of a canny promoter played by Patricia Neal.  Both turn in stunning performances. Their co-dependent professional relationship becomes personal, and intensely psychological as both nearly go off the deep end in mental breakdowns by the movie’s conclusion.

The film is a parable, and starts, rightly enough, as Miss Neal and a radio crew discover Mr. Griffith as a vagrant in jail, a colorful character they exploit for a whimsical program.  We have beginning shots of men playing checkers, whittling, as tropes for the sleepy Southern town with the eerie fatigued complacence of a society willfully decaying.  A gentle bluesy guitar over the credits is a deceptive lulling feel, but there are menacing shadows even now.  The character Andy Griffith plays; and the director, Elia Kazan; and the writer, Budd Schulberg, constantly flick us with contradictory images – warm and kind, and then backstabbing and threatening.  They keep us off balance, and so too will Patricia Neal’s character be swept in and kept off balance throughout the film, falling deeper under the spell and sinking deeper into danger, but it is a quagmire she has created. By the end of the movie, she and Griffith have become allegories of our modern era.

Long post.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

She is a roving reporter for a small-town radio station run by her uncle.  Her show is called “A Face in the Crowd” and today she gleefully interviews drunks and vagabonds at the county jail for amusing material.  The sheriff is sweet on her, so he rouses the inmates and orders them to perform.

Not particularly craving the spotlight, the hungover Griffith is at last persuaded to play his guitar for the pestering radio crew.  He tells folksy stories, and the camera looks beyond the easy rambling of Griffith to Patricia Neal’s delight in finding such good material.  Her gossamer parade of expressions reveals an increasingly intense curiosity about Griffith, her captivation for a man so poetic, earth-bound, and gloriously independent. 

Filling a void in local radio programming—or hitting a nerve—“Lonesome Rhodes” finds an appreciative audience who identifies with him and whose identification with him he will find easy to exploit.  Soon, he has a regular radio program and will use his “voice” to charm the citizens and call down revenge on the sheriff in pranks when he finds his loyal audience will do his bidding.  Lonesome Rhodes, or Larry, has a mean streak.

Neal and her protégé next move to a television program at a small station and a regular sponsor.  Part of Lonesome’s charm for the audience is that he playfully bats the sponsor’s name and product around insultingly, like a cat knocking expensive glass tchotchkes off the coffee table and with about as much concern for consequences, and the audience loves him for his seeming bravado, daring to talk back to authority, telling it like it is.  The very fact that he doesn’t seem to care who he offends, boyishly admitting his lack of social graces with a shrug of his shoulders, endears him to his audience.

We see he makes use of people who latch on to him, but his closest relationship is with his “Mama Guitar” which “beats a woman every time” and is a psychological reference to the mother who slept around and who left him with a misogynistic attitude toward all women.  He continually puts the moves on Miss Neal, who with mature wariness for the grifter, rebuffs him.  However, when one prank gets him in hot water with the sponsor and Griffith is set to leave for good, she invites him into her bed.  Is it because she can no longer contain her desire for him, or because it is all she has left to keep him there?  Neal is more refined and genteel than Lonesome Rhodes, and has kept him at bay with her superiority, but she is no less a compromising person.

Anthony Franciosa plays the aggressive office boy-turned-mogul, a symbol of the new TV age, who joins the Lonesome Rhodes gravy train and propels him to an even larger TV market in New York City.  He takes kickbacks from advertisers and crows, “It’s not illegal if they don’t catch you.”   He will later leave Griffith in the dust when he is no longer of use to the shallow, but even shiftier, Franciosa.

Walter Matthau plays one of the Silent Generation’s men in the gray flannel suit, a writer of intellect and ideals on the writing staff of the program, who is constantly put down by Griffith because Mr. Matthau makes the naïve, if pardonable, confession that he matriculated at Vanderbilt University.  His intellectualism, as well as his decency, is a threat to the homespun (gutter-spun, actually) Griffith, who pathologically resents anyone who has more than he does—more education, more talent, more money, more importance, more fame.

But Lonesome Rhodes continues to keep us off balance with antics that are sometimes kind and always nervy.  He brings forth an African-American woman and says she has had a personal calamity, a fire, and asks his audience to donate money.  Thousands of dollars pour in, and she is able to buy a new home for her family.  Matthau remarks under his breath to Neal in admiration at the moment of surprise when he first brings the lady on stage that putting a Black person on TV took nerve here in Nashville.  It did take nerve, but was his generous stunt because he is impulsive and innocent, or because he knows it is nervy and the establishment won’t like it, and so he can’t help himself but to taunt them?  Lonesome Rhodes, as Patricia Neal discovered early on, is an irresistible character.

But the behind-the-scenes staff doesn’t like him.  Matthau is an underling, and he must submit to and endure Griffith’s teasing and bullying, but more insufferable for Matthau is the attraction Patricia Neal feels towards Andy Griffith’s character.  Matthau is in love with her, but in addition to the pain of not being her romantic choice is the anger and disgust he feels towards her for her inexplicable desire for such a phony, manipulative sociopath.  We are meant to see and accept her desire for him, but the hold he has on her is never explained in a psychological or emotional sense.  She is an intelligent, ambitious professional woman.  Matthau may not want to concede her sexual preference for Griffith, and he puzzles over her lowering herself to someone clearly not in her league.  At last, he must accept that the woman he has put on a pedestal is as unscrupulously ambitious as Griffith (it was she who gave him the marketable nickname, “Lonesome” Rhodes,) and that is their strongest bond. 

Griffith does not really need her sexually—he is a womanizer, and in one scene painful to Neal, chooses a young Lee Remick for his second wife.  (A delightfully wry Kay Medford is the first Mrs. Rhodes, who happily watches his climb to fame as long as it means large alimony checks.) He judges a baton-twirling contest and lusts after the innocent 17-year-old played by Miss Remick in her film debut—who enters the Faustian menagerie through her own consuming ambition to be the wife of a big star, and escape from the boredom of her small town.

Apart from these wonderful performances dancing or fencing in their tangled relationships is the broader look at American society at the end of television’s first decade. Once Griffith rides to the top of the ratings and is firmly in the public eye, the movie shifts into high gear and we are slapped with a series of images that parody society even as they unflinchingly document the era.  First is the maniacal Vitajex musical commercial montage, a barrage of tasteless images of coy, seductive females, an animated pig who turns into a wolf by achieving sexual prowess through taking the little yellow pill, Griffith’s in-your-face laugh to a crazed doo-wop tune, a mesmerized audience, and sales charts. 

The uncomfortable flicks of sinister motives, sinister doings grow from merely being less subtle to sinking into out-of-control obvious, and the journey following the increasingly manipulative Lonesome Rhodes and his handler drags us into a Madison Avenue film noir nightmare. His penthouse apartment, and the studio control booth, are all angles and shadows.

Vitajex is Griffith’s commercial sponsor, a diet supplement (made of some sugar and nothing nutritional) promoted in a buttoned-down and boring way by company man played by Paul McGrath, who finds himself totally usurped by Griffith.  Griffith takes over the sales talk and promotes it as a powerful vitamin to enhance the male libido.  McGrath will end up in the hospital from a heart attack when Griffith has destroyed his career.

Cameos by real-life journalists and media figures of the day such as John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, and Walter Winchell stamp the movie with topical cachet, and even Edward R. Murrow’s name is bandied about. Lonesome Rhodes gets his picture on the cover of Life and Look magazines.

Griffith’s ego climbs with his ratings.  The man behind Vitajex, retired General Haynesworth, played by Percy Waram, who has king-making aspirations, wants Griffith to do the same for the general’s chosen presidential candidate, right-wing Senator Worthington Fuller, played by Marshall Neilan, as he did for Vitajex. 

General Haynesworth believes the masses need to be led by a strong hand.  Fifth Avenue and Big Business join hands to utilize the entertainment media to make their candidate President, with graft, favors and kickbacks to follow, and a social reconstruction that serves only the right people. We’ve seen it happen in presidential races, but A Face in the Crowd gives us an uncanny simplistic blueprint as to how it’s done.

We realize the fun and games that has amused and diverted us has led to the potential for serious evil, especially as Lonesome Rhodes, unchecked in his self-absorbed quest for power, is not merely content with making anyone he chooses President, but he wants a place in the cabinet for himself. The money isn’t enough, the fame isn’t enough, the power isn’t enough.  Having a warship and mountain named after him isn’t enough.  He wants everybody to love him, to give him absolute adoration. He invents a canned laughter and applause machine for his program, and has one installed in his apartment. We see he is a sick man, but he always was, even back in the sweaty jail cell with his guitar.  He was harmless then; someone else had to launch him and profit by him.  Who is the guiltier?

He has left a trail of enemies along with his cult fans, plenty of people to whom he has done dirt, but none more so than Patricia Neal, who keeps coming back for more.  Walter Matthau, who abandoned ship months previously to maintain his integrity, returns, having left to write a book on the phony rise of Griffith (another foreshadowing of our modern era of tell-all political books). He finds Miss Neal in a bar, nervously smoking and sipping her drink while morosely watching Griffith on the TV over the bar.  He frankly points out Griffith’s manifold sins, and she weakly defends him, and herself, by saying she keeps him from worse impulses, in effect, she is, as the modern phrase goes, “the adult in the room.”  She is practically a shaking wreck over the moral morass she is beginning to acknowledge.

Only in the final moments of the film will she accept responsibility for the monster she has made when she realizes the fascist horror about to be unleashed upon America as can only come from the hand of a demagogue.  She flees her apartment when Griffith, weary and half-crazed, expects to return to her bed now that he has thrown out Lee Remick.  He discovered his child bride having an affair with Mr. Franciosa, who throws it in his face.

The next evening, Griffith will perform his show live as usual, and afterwards, he plans to attend a political dinner where the sponsor’s chosen presidential candidate will crown Lonesome Rhodes Secretary of Morale, something we will need in time of war. Senator Fuller, the “isolationist” who says he knows what is best for America, is evidently full of big plans, including getting rid of Social Security because Daniel Boone didn’t have unemployment insurance and social security benefits.

Patricia Neal, desperate and nearing a nervous breakdown, hides in the dark control booth watching the show, because she cannot face Griffith’s overbearing personality to tell him she wants out, knowing that even if she had the strength to leave, she would still be responsible for the monster she created.

When at the very end of the show, as the credits roll over the recorded theme song (which, without shame, is a hymn), Griffith is still on set, aping for the camera to play the show off, and mocking and belittling Senator Fuller, mocking the millions of “stupid idiots” who watch his show, showing off for the cast and crew like a class clown looking for attention. The television audience cannot hear his words because Griffith’s mic is dead as the theme song plays over the rolling credits, so he knows he is safe.

The control booth technician, disgusted by months of working behind the scenes for the bullying star, wishes aloud that the public could only hear that.

In a flash, the remark wakes Patricia Neal out of her inertia, and she lunges forward and thrusts the control to turn on Griffith’s mic.  His words, his hypocrisy, his cruelty, his abominable ego pours out over the airwaves.  The techie tries to stop Neal, but sobbing, she has thrown her body over the console and will not relent until the show has ended.

The sponsor is aghast.  The Senator is insulted.  The millions of “stupid idiots” who adored him are incensed.  When Griffith, not knowing he was caught by a hot mic (another foreshadowing of modern political realities), heads for the elevator so he can rush to the political dinner, the elevator operator calls out, “Going down!” and we know there is a double meaning.  In a rush of calls to the network switchboard, we see the career of Lonesome Rhodes taking a very public, real-time nosedive.  Anthony Franciosa, even now, is grooming a new “country boy” for a replacement.  The sponsor, the network, and the public will abandon Griffith.

Will Patricia Neal abandon him at last?  When Walter Matthau finally finds her still hiding in the control booth, she is emotionally helpless, as one in shock.  Griffith calls on the phone, pleading for her support because nobody has come to his party, everyone has called to cancel.  He is bewildered and needs her to put things right.

Matthau insists that she tell him she’s through with him, to have the courage to tell him that she was the one that turned on the mic and betrayed him.  He takes her to the hotel ballroom where Andy Griffith paces like an animal in a cage, frothing at the mouth and demanding revenge for whoever scuttled him.  It takes the last bit of strength she has, but Miss Neal claims responsibility not only for the creation of his career, but for the ending of it.

It is this emotional climax, this roller-coaster ending to the film that sweeps away the moody, menacing film noir aspect to this movie and to the genre and replaces that genre with something noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly liberal in their message.  Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, “Enough.  Our turn in the sun now.”  Ironically, both director Kazan and writer Schulberg participated in the witch hunts by naming names to save themselves, attempting to expunge their own earlier communist affiliations.  They knew something about being compromised and compromising others.

Such films of this movement, if it was a movement, explored social issues with strong writing, a breath of fresh air in a stagnant, repressed era.  These introspective, thought-provoking, soul-stirring, and conscience-poking liberal-message TV shows and movies would form a brief, if brilliant period.  Maybe it was the Kennedy assassination that brought it to an end, for after that came a period of films where predominantly there was no message, no great theme, and women’s roles were weakened and diminished. The most successful films were mega-expensive blockbusters, the ratings system was created to categorize films that increasingly featured coarse language and explicit sexual scenes, and if there was a point to the film, it was only to shock and to dare the audience to be entertained by it. Most films did not strive for a lesson learned, or an inspirational message, lest they risk being labeled unrealistic, or even more damaging at the box office: family friendly.

Looking back on A Face in the Crowd from an era where the story came true, we may marvel with condescension on the naïve conclusion to the parable that a megalomaniac could be rendered harmless by a changed public opinion, or that public opinion could even turn sour on such a folk hero manufactured to custom fit the most base, coarse, and ignorant instincts of millions of Americans, who by their fecklessness hold the lives of millions of other Americans in their guilty hands.  However satisfying Lonesome Rhodes' comeuppance may be, it doesn't ring true. 

Senator Joseph McCarthy, to be sure, did have his downfall at the hands of such as Murrow, and a courageous Republican Senator who defied her party: Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the first to publicly denounce McCarthy on the Senate floor.  If this, along with the careers of Will Rogers and Arthur Godrey were influences for A Face in the Crowd, the movie nevertheless uses Neal and the audience as those most culpable and therefore to be ones who right the wrong.

But how often does that happen in real life, let alone in the area of public opinion where being wrong is so humiliating that we can never admit to it?

We have a greater appreciation for film noir these days, rediscovered and named in the 1970s.  Our cynicism today is less articulate and less stylish than in those gritty/glamorous films we love, but we have experienced disillusionment, and so we these days we identify with that darker world of film noir. 

To be idealistic and progressive requires courage, a respect for humanity and for human intellect, to prize compassion above all else, and a willingness to stubbornly try, try again.  It is often irascible, and certainly nitpicking.  It also requires a leap of faith that a better world is even possible.  Noir has no use for this dreaminess, and so the stark black-and-white world fades in the new liberal message films.  But even A Face in the Crowd is not so optimistic, and does not extend its message of a lesson learned beyond Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau.  It does not stoop to that level of naiveté. The powerful triumvirate of politics, big business, and the media has not been changed by the revelation about Lonesome Rhodes. Probably not the public either, who are not really chastened, just mad at being played for saps.  They will be back.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Secretariat (2010) & Casey's Shadow (1978)

This week we’re going to talk about horses. Four movies, three horses, two blog posts, and one blogathon. More about that later.

In this season of thoroughbred horseracing where every two weeks we have another event -- the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and coming up, the Belmont Stakes -- most of us follow these events on television. I watch them every year, mainly because of the excitement that I still remember as a child watching one horse called Secretariat win each one of them, one by one.

I was reminded of that thrill several months ago when flicking channels I caught a few minutes -- only a few minutes -- of the film “Secretariat” (2010). I want to say it was more than the rush of nostalgia that came over me for those days, but I really had the strangest feeling of time travel and being in the moment once again. It had something to do with the race announcer shouting his incredulous superlatives at Secretariat’s speed, and partly having to do with the frocks and neck scarves of Diane Lane, but for a few moments I was there. That’s where the idea for this series began.

Horse races take only a couple minutes, but reading this post is going to take up your whole lunch hour. Another Long Post from Another Old Movie Blog.

This two-part series is about a sense of personal nostalgia, but also the way the movies take this idea of nostalgia and use it as a device for storytelling. We’ll be comparing films made in particular eras -- in this case the 1930s/40s and the 1970s -- and contemporary films set in those eras which always tends to clean up the past a little. We remember things a little brighter than they were.

We’ll be talking about horses insofar as how we project our thoughts and our feelings and our greatest desires upon them. The horses here are champions, and we like to think they like to be champions. But, despite all the horse whispering that goes on, we really don’t know what they think. We love them, and we manipulate them.

Today we’re going to discuss “Secretariat”, and “Casey’s Shadow” (1978) that take us to the 1970s. Friday we have “Seabiscuit” (2003) and “The Story of Seabiscuit” (1949) that take us to the 1930s. We’ll conclude on Friday, rather than the usual Thursday post, so we can latch onto the horse blogathon sponsored by Page over at My Love of Old Hollywood.

Secretariat and Seabiscuit were real horses. Casey’s Shadow is a fictional character, and that film is based on a short story by John McPhee that was originally published in the New Yorker magazine April 29, 1974. It is about a real race, however, the Ruidoso All-American Futurity held in New Mexico, which is called the richest horse race in the world. Secretariat and Seabiscuit were thoroughbreds, but Casey’s Shadow is a quarter horse, which excels at shorter races under a quarter of a mile. It is the most popular breed of horse in America, and they can be found anywhere from racecourses, to working ranches.

We hear a lot about breeding in these movies. Breeding, and training, and heart, a sense of courage in the horse, and the jockey, and sometimes in the owner. There’s also lot about money changing hands.

When Secretariat won those three important horse races in 1973, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and Belmont which together are called the Triple Crown, he was the first horse to do it in 25 years. (At this time, I’ll Have Another just won the Preakness, and so with a Kentucky Derby win already under his belt, he may be the first horse in 35 years to win the Triple Crown. We’ll have to wait and see next weekend. The last horse to win was in 1978. There were three winners that decade.)

Secretariat became a rock star, featured on magazine covers and the talk of everyone everywhere. Even for those of us who grew up in suburbia and had very little contact with horses knew his name. Children sped on their bikes down the street pretending they were riding Secretariat.

The early 1970s was an age where sports heroes began to take off in popular culture. I’m not sure if it was because of the disillusionment with Vietnam War, Watergate, or the general cynicism that began to creep into our society, but we looked to sports for heroes, and they came by the bushel full in the 1970s. Tennis stars became household names, and Muhammad Ali of course, and baseball players began to garnish fabulous salaries. The Super Bowl started becoming an event in popular culture and not merely a sporting event, giving birth to the Super Bowl Party and the end cap display of nachos in grocery stores. Sports moved from the back page of the newspaper to the forefront of our consciousness.

And then there was the mighty Secretariat, no less a hero because he was a horse.

“Secretariat” (2010), put out by the Disney studios, carries that familiar tone of Disney films as a feel good movie. The early 1970s looks cleaned up a bit, and some of the dialogue with “feeding” lines and clichéd keep your chin up speeches sounds a bit clunky here and there. Still, the movie catches enough of a flavor of the era to remind someone who remembered it firsthand of the excitement of that horse’s victories.

But I’m not sure it packs enough of a punch to instill this sense of understanding for someone too young to remember. “Seabiscuit”, which we’ll talk about on Friday, does.

When we are young we soak ourselves in popular culture: TV, music, commercials, everything is grist to the mill of our development. The older we grow, the less influenced we are by popular culture, the less we even care about it.

It is a true story of owner Penny Chenery Tweedy, a woman in a male-dominated sport -- the sport of Kings. She is a Denver housewife and mother of four, whose father owns a horse farm in Virginia. She grew up in a world of orderly stables, green pastures set off by neat white fences, a grand house with a dark paneled den laced with photos of horses on the walls, and shelves and mantles lined with trophies. Her elderly parents die, and she must dispose of their estate. Her brother, who is a university professor and has no interest in the horses, wants her to do this quickly. He fears a six-million dollar estate tax. We should all have such worries.

But she does care deeply about the horses and her family heritage. Mainly from sentiment, and being her father’s girl, she plays hooky from housework off and on for the next three years and raises a new colt, putting off the sale of the farm until she can race him. Diane Lane plays Penny in a warm and sympathetic manner. She is gutsy, but every inch a lady, a southern gentlewoman -- with no trace of Virginia in her speech -- who is trying to be supermom to everybody. She is full of pep talks, and a little horse whispering.

We are involved more with the people around Secretariat than the horse. John Malkovich plays the French-Canadian trainer who dresses colorfully and speaks colorfully, and lapses into French when provoked. He’s a thin-skinned bundle of neuroses, a great character to play. Though he occasionally berates the jockey, he wishes him “Bon chance” when he mounts to ride.

I think my favorite is Margo Martindale, who plays Elizabeth Ham, the secretary to Diane Lane’s father, whom Miss Lane has also inherited. Martindale gives Eve Arden a run for her money in the supportive and wisecracking friend category. It is she who gives Secretariat his name.

Fred Thompson and James Cromwell are among the wealthy gentlemen horse farm owners who cross paths with Diane Lane, and Nestor Serrano as a less genteel rival.

We get snatches of Miss Lane’s family life, her ersatz hippy daughter (though to be fair, most teens in the late 1960s and early 1970s if they aspired to the hippy counterculture really were ersatz, only playing at the game), and her lawyer husband who wants his wife home and out of the horse business. After a few wins and some feel good speeches, her husband comes around and the kids see what a great mom they have because she’s doing her own thing, which is groovy, and being successful at it, which is groovier still.

A cute bit where she and Nelsan Ellis, who plays the groom, Eddie Sweat, wash the horse to the background of “Oh, Happy Day”. This is reprised at the very end of the film when we see the final burst of glory that the amazing horse gave when he won his third race, clinching the Triple Crown.

He rounds the final turn. Along with a reprise of Lane’s voiceover of the Book of Job (39:22) which introduces the film -- “He laughs at fear, afraid of nothing...he cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds…” -- we get the joyous burst of “Oh, Happy Day” and that magnificent horse wins, just as he did in 1973, by an astounding 31 lengths. His speed records at the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont still stand.

I especially like that the end credits give us cameos on the what happened to the characters (though they do not mention Penny Chenery Tweedy’s divorce the following year from her husband), and show the real Penny, an elderly, but still spirited lady, sitting as an extra in the stands.

The crowd scenes in these movies show how important these shots can be to the tone and “reality” of a movie. In “Secretariat” the crowd scenes are shot very tight, in small groups. After all, hiring numerous extras and CGI are expensive. To maintain “1973” we have to shoot carefully chosen setups with a small group of actors in appropriate costumes and hair styles. The crowd scenes in “Secretariat” feel very tightly controlled. They seem stagy.

The horse racing scenes of necessity must be controlled, but this is done fairly well. We get our share of thundering hoof beats and panting, snorting horses, though most of the drama in the movie is centered on Diane Lane.

Among Penny’s speeches: “Our father came from nothing. And his legacy to me isn’t money. It’s the will to win, if you can, and live with it if you can’t.” A fine and sensible legacy, but her brother wants none of it, “If you stumble and fall, you don’t just make us fools, you make us beggars.”

And her husband, played by Dylan Walsh, “When your horse people call the house they don’t ask for Mrs. Tweedy. They ask for Ms. Chenery. Is that who you’ve become?”

We may have grown tired of the chauvinist streak in characters who today sound like cartoons for doing it, but we have to remember that the women’s movement was in its early days. His sentiment is genuine. What did not sound genuine to me was a reporter’s marveling at another horse “turning in awesome workouts,” and her daughter commenting on seeing Lane on TV, “Mom looks awesome.” This was years before we turned “awesome” into a meaningless word parroted with unrelenting foolishness.

She should have been "far out".

A favorite shot: when a little girl takes Secretariat’s picture. She’s holding one of those 110 Kodak cameras with the flash bar on top. How many of you had one of those?

“Casey’s Shadow” (1978) is both brisk in its 1970s reality -- it was after all filmed in the era it depicted so there’s nothing artificial here -- and strangely lulling in the direction of Martin Ritt, who takes us on the journey of another horse to both victory and tragedy, and dealing with each with a shrug. There are no platitudes here, and this is not a “feel-good” movie. There is humor, tinted by the 1970s cynicism that grew even stronger the farther we get away from the sight of Diane Lane in her formal gown, complete with opera gloves, talking to her horse.

The pace is slow -- the movie’s pace, not the horse’s -- and this reflects the original short story, which is quite long and leisurely. Movies are not made this way anymore, and neither are short stories. Our attention span has taken a hit in the last 30 years or so.

The story is set in the back Cajun country of Louisiana, where Walter Matthau plays a horse trainer, who drifts in and out of his Cajun accent, and sometimes goes by the nickname of Coonass.

His wife has left him. We don’t know exactly when or why, but he seems little disturbed by it. The youngest of three boys, Casey, mopes about and gets into trouble with great regularity. Casey needs somebody to look out for him, and Papa Walter’s not doing the job.

Neither Casey, played by Michael Hershewe, nor his middle boy, have southern accents, though his eldest son, Buddy, played by Andrew Rubin, does attempt one.

Rubin is good in his role as the 20-something lad following in his father’s footsteps as a trainer of quarter horses. Happily for the family, he has a far greater sense of responsibility than his dad, and Buddy is one who looks out for Casey, and tries to get meals on the table. He warns his father there is no food in the house. The gentle young man bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. He blows his stack when the others do not do their chores and the house looks like a pigsty.

Actually, pigsties are neater than their tumbledown house. No neat white fences here. Both the house and the barn look like they’re about to fall down.

In “Secretariat” we are introduced to the idea of breeding through sires and dams, and how important bloodlines are to determine not just the health of a horse, but the spirit. We get more lessons on breeding in “Casey’s Shadow”, but not just about quality horses. What makes a quality human is also explored.

Alexis Smith plays Sarah Blue, a southern gentlewoman who owns and breeds champion quarter horses. Breeding quality is her mantra. Unlike Diane Lane, Miss Smith manages a credible soft southern accent. But, we do not see her even once in opera gloves. First, because we are in the late 1970s now, and styles changed with alarming swiftness. Elegance has been replaced by leisure suits. This I remember, too, from childhood.

Second, Sarah Blue is a hands-on owner. She has a reputation for sometimes sleeping with her prize horses in the stable, and spoiling her favorite horse with Milky Way bars. Smith makes her entrance in the film riding on a horse, accepting with dignified nods the men who respectfully call out, “Mornin’ Miz Blue” to her. She had made many “slinky walk” entrances in movies, but never on a horse. In her jeans and cowboy hat low over her eyes, she looks like a cross between Queen Guinevere and Paladin.

Another difference that distinguishes her from the dainty Miss Lane is a surprising yuk, yuk, yuk chuckle that sounds like Mortimer Snerd. At first I thought she meant to inject the flavor of cornpone in her character, but then it struck me that possibly this was close to how Alexis Smith really laughed.

Director Martin Ritt, whose “No Down Payment” we covered a few weeks ago, had a style of direction that leaned toward introspection and a natural feel for his characters and setting. “Casey’s Shadow” is shot with this leisurely sense of a natural setting, there is very little manufactured drama in terms of camera shots or lighting. Indeed, most of the film is shot outdoors.

Alexis Smith’s performance in this movie is probably the most natural and unaffected she ever gave, so it stands to reason Ritt would allow Smith’s own ridiculous laugh to rip out of her.

In his “Everything Was Possible - The Birth of the Musical ‘Follies'” (Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2003), author Ted Chapin called Smith’s laugh a cackle. Columnist Louella Parsons referred to “…that devastating laugh of hers,” (syndicated in Milwaukee Sentinel, May 27, 1948). “I haven’t known a girl to laugh like she does since Carole Lombard.”

I also got a chance to hear a clip of a 1980 radio interview where she does, indeed, rip out a maniacal giggle in between intelligent and ladylike remarks. It seems this was a goofy side of her Warner Bros. decided not to show in their carefully groomed ice princess.

Smith has the job in this movie of being the moral counterpart to Walter Matthau. He falls from grace big time, and his own code of ethics, which is simply, “Never run a hurtin’ horse.”

But he is only human, and greed is a very human failing.

Eldest son Andrew Rubin comes home with a new horse for their boss, Calvin Lebec, played by Harry Caesar. Mr. Caesar is at first disgusted because he wanted Rubin to buy a nice young colt to race, but what he came home with was an old mare. However, like Jack, who sold the cow for some magic beans, there’s a hidden opportunity here. The mare foals, and the colt that is born is the son of Alexis Smith’s famous champion horse.

In quarter horse breeding, artificial insemination is allowed (it’s not in the breeding of thoroughbreds), and through some shady deal, the semen is sold without Miz’ Blue’s control. And when it comes to breeding her horse, she is a bit of a control freak.

She hears about the young colt, and comes to buy him, but Walter has his own plans. He wants to take the colt, called Casey’s Shadow, to the Ruidoso race in New Mexico and win, and go to Tahiti “where the women don’t wear no tops.”

They strike a deal where she can buy the colt after the big race.

But events conspire to challenge Matthau’s single code of ethics: “never run a hurtin’ horse.”

First, Casey, who roams backwoods race courses looking for someone to con and beat at pool or matching pennies -- he is his father’s son -- twice injures the horse in foolish demonstrations and a race for money. Walter’s ready to kill him, but we begin to see it’s not just because the boy has done a cruelty to the animal; it’s because the animal is their fortune and the kid is blowing it.

As much as we want to throttle Casey for his shiftless and thoughtless behavior, the little boy also breaks your heart. His mother ran out of him, and his adored older brother Buddy will go away soon because Alexis Smith has hired him to be her new trainer. A rival trainer kills his pony (accidentally -- he had intended to kill Casey's Shadow).  Everybody leaves Casey. Walter pays little attention to anything but his beer.

By the way, though we watch the colt grow to a big, strong horse, the boy stays the same size over a period of two years. I think we’re not supposed to notice that.

They patch up the horse and he’s sound enough to run. They truck him from Louisiana to New Mexico in a horse trailer pulled by Matthau’s broken down pickup. Casey’s Shadow wins a qualifying heat. They’re one step away from going to Tahiti.  Where the women don't wear no tops.

But the horse hurts his leg. He’s limping a little bit. If Walter pulls out of the finals, Alexis Smith will still buy the injured horse. They’ll get $50,000 just for not running him. Walter will lose nothing.

His sons do not want him to race Casey’s Shadow, and neither does owner, Harry Caesar.

Walter is obstinate. He tells them, “This horse is my only chance. You see Sarah Blue offer ME a job, or Ted Patterson or anybody?”

He tries to explain his shift in values.

“I had my beer, farm, you kids. Seemed like enough to me. More than enough…then he come along.” He wants to, “Get my name in the record books…right up there along with Sarah Blue and God. I know it’s wrong to run a hurtin’ horse, Buddy, but I got to do it.”

Alexis plays high stakes, but the money means little to her. I wanted to know more about her character. Is she married, widowed, divorced? Does she have children? We see only that she is a woman of few words, runs her racing stables alone and does not seem to have the difficulty Diane Lane did of being a woman in a male-dominated sport.

When they saddle up the horses for the big race, Matthau and his team are stoic, all business, tightening, fastening, poking and prodding the horse like he is a boxer in the locker room getting ready for a match. Alexis Smith, however, combs her fingers through her horse's forelock, wipes his face, runs her hand over his eyes, carefully slipping on the blinkers, looking like she is dressing her child for school.  Any minute you expect her to lick her fingers and smooth down his hair.  She smiles at him.  Her pride and joy.  One senses she is simply more comfortable with horses than people.

When she sits in Walter’s pigsty of a kitchen talking business, she does not bat an eye over the mess around her. When his eldest son, in an endearing gesture, nervously plunks down what looks like a plate of Oreo cookies for their guest, she snatches one when she leaves because a real lady fits in anywhere.

Buddy is very careful about standing and taking off his hat in her presence, but he needs to remind Walter to do this. Walter sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. Especially when he’s drunk.

Matthau’s character is laconic, and larger than life despite his low-key amusement at hustling suckers at country racecourses. He is incorrigible, lovable somehow despite his lack of grace. But when this choice comes up that he has to make -- race an injured horse or not, this is where we determine the kind of man he is.

He races the horse.

The crowd scenes that show the limitations of filming in “Secretariat” here are grand shots. The cameras are brought to actual race days at Ruidoso, so the enormous crowd of onlookers are not actors. They are natural, in their own clothes and habits, paying attention or not paying attention, gabbing and drinking. We see people laying down their money at the betting booths, and scooping it up if they win. We hear the loudspeaker announcements. It’s like a documentary about racing.

It’s very absorbing, except for the scene where Casey’s Shadow wins the race and we see Walter Matthau hoot and holler and run onto the track. I couldn’t help but think of him as a movie star who plays a scene in front of a crowd who were told by the announcer, “We’re going to hold the sixth race for a few minutes so a movie can be shot. When Walter Matthau runs across the track, everybody cheer and clap.”

It looks artificial despite its ironically very natural setting.

Just like John Malkovich wishes, “Bon chance” to the jockey in “Secretariat”, Walter and Buddy wish “Bon chance” to the middle son who is the jockey on Casey’s Shadow. We never get to know much about him, except he’s girl crazy.

Then, after the jubilation of the win, they discover the horse is lame. For good. The vet recommends he be euthanized.

There’s no real loss here, in business terms. Alexis Smith will not buy the lame horse now, the deal is off, but she is not disappointed about that; there will be other horses. She is angry because Walter willingly destroyed a horse for his own personal gain.

“You knew this would happen,” she says. He did. It was never a matter of IF the horse got permanently injured. He knew it would be.

The horse is no longer needed now the race has been won and Walter's got the money and his name in the record books.  The animal is disposable.

His sons are disgusted with him, and the younger ones want to go with Andrew Rubin to his new job as Alexis Smith’s trainer. She takes them all in.

The last we see of her is when the boys are clambering over her horse trailer and she pokes Casey in the belly saying, “Welcome aboard, cowboy.”  We never get to find out if she turns into a surrogate mother.  Walter comes to apologize, and tells them that he has spent some of the winnings to get the horse an operation on his leg.

In the final scene, the boys go home with their father. Blood may be thicker than water, but one can’t help but feel they’d be better off with Miz Blue. She runs a tight ship, and they’d get three square meals a day with her.

Walter’s paying for the horse’s operation is not entirely altruistic. The horse will never race again, however as a champion it will earn high stud fees. No loss. Except to the horse, perhaps, who now must endure a long, painful ride home to Louisiana and perhaps pain the rest of his life. We don’t know.

We only see lovable scamp Walter Matthau and his three aimless boys going home together. It should be enough, and it’s not, even though these are the cynical years of the late 1970s where the kind of platitudes we see Diane Lane spout are too unrealistic, perhaps too embarrassing to hear anymore.

Perhaps this is what made an otherwise interesting film founder at the box office.

From a review by Robert H. Newhall syndicated in the Bangor Daily News, March 27, 1978, “…as a father he is a cipher, for he gives his sons no direction, no uplift at all…it is difficult to warm to Matthau.” He has kinder words for Smith, “As this upright woman, Miss Smith, always a Junoesque beauty, brings a class to the screen that is sadly lacking these days. Even in her small role, she is credible, giving the film an affirmative bias.”

Alexis Smith, interviewed by Ed Blank of the Pittsburg Press December 17, 1978, noted that she enjoyed working with Walter Matthau and admired Martin Ritt, “He brought out really human qualities in all in all of us. It was one of my best working experiences.”

In the New York Times of November 11, 1978, she noted that there were three directors in her film career from whom she felt she learned the most. These were Edmund Goulding, who directed her in “The Constant Nymph” (1943) see this previous post here, Frank Capra, who directed “Here Comes the Groom” (1951) see post here, and Martin Ritt of “Casey’s Shadow.”

I get a chuckle out of the ice princess, clad in jeans, strolling into a crowded bar for a business meeting to the background sound of “Ramblin’ Man” by The Allman Brothers Band.

TCM is showing “Casey’s Shadow” Friday, June 1st at 8:00 a.m., if you want to have a look. Let me know what you think.

Come back Friday for more horse racing, and two very different movies about the same famous champion, Seabiscuit, as part of Page’s Horseathon.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

Sometimes what’s happening in the movie is not just what’s happening in the movie, but is reflective of wider influences, either intentionally or unintentionally. To certain respects that is what Another Old Movie Blog is about; movies are not made in a vacuum. Consider “Strangers When We Meet” (1960), which stars Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, and Suburbia.

The plot, which involves adultery between the two stars who are married to other people, as well as the considerable screen presence of both these two actors, are strangely almost difficult to concentrate on when there are so many suburban artifacts to amuse and entertain. The big cars, just beginning their streamlined 1960s look in which they cruise from shopping plaza to home. The houses in the suburban subdivision, the stuff inside. It’s like looking at old family photos, like recalling from Kodachrome memory what you thought was forgotten.

Peg-legged Scandinavian-inspired furniture and decorative boxes on the coffee table that housewife Kim Novak fills with cigarettes. She bumps into Kirk Douglas at the grocery store, a circus of bright colors and food preservatives, a bazaar of angle parking and time saving meals for people on the go. No Diet Caffeine-Free Coke. No organic veggies or free-range chicken. No such thing as gluten allergies. Just modern pre-packaged foods with good nourishing things like salt and sugar, and plenty of cigarettes to have on hand for the guests. Grapefruit may be 19 cents a pound, but these two skip fresh veggies and fruit for the stuff in cans. It’s the modern way.

Douglas is a freelance architect who works at home. Driving his little son to the bus stop, he sees Kim Novak, the mother of another little boy, and takes an immediate interest. He is the pursuer and she the reluctant object of his interest. With a seemingly stable home life, a wife played by Barbara Rush, with whom he appears to have a good relationship, we are uncertain as to why he pursues Kim Novak so keenly. He does not seem a skirt chaser, and is absorbed more by his work than by anything else in his life. When he meets prospective client Ernie Kovacs at a restaurant to discuss plans for Ernie’s new house, Douglas is full of talk of design and is oblivious to the waitress, whom Kovacs ogles.

Kovacs, who is a novelist, and Douglas provide an interesting contrast between two men who are both self employed in creative endeavors. They have that in common, and there is an understanding between them because of it, the struggle to produce work that is meaningful and not merely commercial; the ever-present challenge to come up with something new. Do they still have what it takes? They soon have Kovacs’ new house in common as well, the big project Douglas hopes will prove a challenge for his abilities and an achievement for his reputation. It is as much Douglas’ house as it is Kovacs’, and there is even a subtle emotional battle between them as to whose house it really belongs to, the owner or the creator?

Kovacs, egotistical, emotionally brittle, and skirt chasing, is at a crossroads in his career. He fears failing, but also fears churning out the same material to play it safe. Douglas challenges him to take chances with his new book, to go out on a limb and write about what is most important to him, not to play it safe.

Douglas wishes to do the same with his work as an architect. This is perhaps the only bone of contention we see between Douglas and his wife. She runs the home with confidence and a sense of command. She appears to quash her husband’s artistic side for the more commercial aspects of his work, regretting his decision to go freelance, and badgering him to accept a safe and dull job with a firm he does not want.

When his relationship, at first only friendship, with Novak begins, Novak takes a keen interest in his work. She likes to discuss it. She has read articles about him. They discuss Kovacs’ last book, which they have both read. She does not insult Douglas’ artistic talent by demanding he forsake it. When he shows her the lot where he plans to build Kovacs’ new house, she takes one end of the measuring tape he hands her. We watch how far they can go.

Though Novak is the more reluctant of the two to begin an affair, we see that she is the more unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, dull and preoccupied, seems unresponsive and utterly lacking in passion for her. In one melancholy scene, an anxious Novak greets him half dressed, lights dim, their son sleeping over at a neighbor’s, trying to seduce her husband, pleading him to make love to her. His awkward brush-off is as baffling as it is heartbreaking. We are not given explanations as to his indifference, because we never really get to see his side of their marriage, but it would have been a different movie if this has been explored. We are shown their twin beds, and that’s all we get.

So desperate is Novak for a physical relationship that she confesses to Douglas a disturbing incident where she once allowed a man who made a pass at her to have sex with her, after she had taken enough sleeping pills to get her passively through the experience. If her emotionally damaged vulnerability is what also appeals to Douglas, then she displays plenty of that. But her lack of courage, her passivity, will also be the biggest hurdle in their relationship.

They fall in love, and for Novak it seems to begin when he calls her “Maggie,” which is what her father called her. To her husband she is Margaret, and to her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship, she is Margaret. Played by Virginia Bruce, mother once had an affair that hurt her marriage and destroyed her daughter’s affection for her. When her mother catches on to Novak’s affair with Douglas, there is a knowing look exchanged between them. We imagine that Novak has begun to understand that mother is a human being, just as we all must come to terms with our parents being human and messing up. This, too, unfortunately, is not explored in great depth.


Baby boomers will watch this film with the irresistible attachment of nostalgia. Many had dads who looked like Kirk Douglas in the movie, with the slacks and golf sweaters, the short haircut that never seemed to change. We never knew when 1960 dad went to the barber, because his hair was always the same. He wore a jacket and tie to a house party. 1960 dad did not dress like junior. He never put himself on the same level as junior. In many ways, he was a mystery to us.

Most dads did not work at home. If they were home, they were out of a job, or on vacation. When on vacation, they painted the house. Particularly in blue collar neighborhoods, vacation trips were rare. A day at the beach or the ballpark was a treat.

But even in the working class neighborhoods, the houses were not too different from one in the neighborhood of Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. Even if working class 1960 dad and mom could not afford the same furniture and artwork that the professional classes did, they bought cheaper copies, so it looked the same. They might have furnished the whole house from the S&H Green Stamp catalogue, but it looked like the same imitation wood grain Formica coffee table. When something big was purchased, like the first color TV or the hi-fi with the automatic record changer that played Nat King Cole and Andy Williams, the neighbors were brought in to see it.

Walter Mathau, who plays another neighbor in this intriguing suburban world, makes a comment that wives view their husbands as part of the furniture. One could say that the Baby Boomer kids viewed both their parents in that way. You went home from school, there was mom, and the TV. Dad was in the basement sharpening the lawnmower blades. They were part of the house, like the appliances.

The house was the whole world. The kids might rove in great wolf packs on the street on their Schwinn bikes, but the house was the center of the universe. Dad and Mom evidently felt the same way. A $10,000 mortgage was not taken lightly; it required all their commitment, to paying the thing down, and to each other. In a sense, their lifestyle was geared not just to living in the house, but living up to it.

Even if they managed on one paycheck, they might have still had two cars. Without the car there would be no suburbia, it was like the chicken and the egg. Everywhere you wanted to go was someplace else. You stopped walking downtown. You drove there. Then you drove past there and didn’t stop anymore. There was a whole new world of shopping plazas out on the highway that in many communities was called The Magic Mile. You needed a car. It was your passport to life. They created the world we live in today, where we need a car.

Kirk Douglas drives his two-tone big ol’ convertible with the fins to the site of Ernie Kovacs’ new house. We see the house going up, bit by bit. He drives to a seaside motel for trysts with Kim Novak. They drive and drive and drive, because gas is cheap and plentiful as water.

At one point they lie on the beach, and as she tenderly strokes his naked back, she asks him about his experience during the war, confirming that her husband had also spent time in the service. It was something 1960 dads had in common; they were almost all, except very young dads, veterans of World War II or the Korean Conflict or both, though they didn’t like to talk about it. Some moms, too. This was another reason why they were so adaptable, so eager for modern things. We may look back upon them as old fashioned, but they were the most forward-looking generation of all. When they looked back, all they saw were the childhoods spent in want during the Great Depression, and the friends they knew that had been killed in the war. They wanted to move on, right now, away from all that. They got there fast. They took the car.

If 1960 Dad was a mystery, then 1960 Mom was taken for granted. Her opportunities for a career were limited. She may have pondered this; we didn’t. She must have done more than shine up her flour and sugar canisters on the kitchen counter, but we never knew. She was always busy. When the new department store opened up out on the Magic Mile, she and dad went there in the car, dressed as if they were going out to a nice restaurant. She wore stockings. He shaved, again. It was a big deal. Mom never left the house without her white gloves.

She lived in a confining world, even if that world of her suburban house was partly of her own making. For her, the confinement started from the skin out. It was a prison of girdles and garters and chastity belts.

We don’t really know what Douglas’ wife does with her time, if he’s the one bringing their boy to the bus stop and doing the marketing. She puts the groceries away, (we have several scenes of her and of Novak in their separate kitchens) and he hoists his rear end up on the kitchen counter, which is a nice touch. It’s a suburban thing to do, sit on the kitchen counter. She looks busy, impatient, as if she has somewhere else she must be, but we are never told what else is happening in her life. She seems only an appendage of her husband.

She plans a house party, and the neighbors all show up, ladies in dresses, men in coats and ties. Douglas floods the charcoal briquettes on the patio barbecue with about half a can of lighter fluid. No state of the art gas grills, here. Not a propane canister in sight. Just dump enough flammable liquid on warm coals and admire the chest-high flames.

Kim Novak and her husband arrive at the party, too. If it is a tense moment for Kirk, who flies about the place trying to be busy, trying to outrun his guilt with another martini, it is a deeply sad revelation for her. She sees the home he has made with his wife. She chats with his little boy. When she retrieves her coat from their bedroom, she sees that their twin beds are pushed together.

The guests discuss crabgrass and parenting. Her boring self-satisfied husband discusses with the other guests how hard it is to be a good father. Asked if he thinks he is a good husband, he remarks, “I think I’m a good husband. I haven’t heard any kicks yet.”

Kim Novak is not one to complain. She is too passive. Her one attempt to confront his coldness to her failed. Later, when Douglas tells her they can’t continue as they are, she resists either breaking off or asking her husband for a divorce. She cannot make herself do anything but keep things as they are.

Douglas shows her his home office and tells her, “This is where I miss you most,” still equating his passion for her with his passion for his work, which only she understands.

The real catalyst at the party is Walter Matthau, in what must have been a fun role. Early in the film he appears to be a rather solid, pontificating, dull as dishwater suburban husband and father. He complains about another man’s off-color jokes. He is, by his own admission, old-fashioned.

Not entirely. He follows Kirk Douglas around as the party winds down, insinuating he knows Douglas is having an affair. We learn that Matthau lives a double life, and has affairs with other women. Pleased that Douglas has joined the club of unfaithful husbands, he gleefully needles him. Matthau tells him his wife already suspects, and Douglas is paralyzed by that thought.

Matthau has his own motives. When he discovers Douglas’ wife alone, Matthau boldly enters their home, interrupts her when she is about to take a shower, and attempts to seduce her. Her reaction to Matthau forcing himself on her is one of panic and hysteria, leaving Matthau more soundly rebuffed than if she had hit him with a waffle iron bought with S&H Green Stamps. His expression of humiliation is very subtle acting, and terrific. But his embarrassment does not last long. When confronted by Douglas, Matthau sneers accusingly, “How am I any different from you?”

It hits home to Douglas, and he is sickened. And though at first his angry wife confronts him about his affair, tells him to get out of her life, with Miss Rush getting some great dialogue here, she later recants and begs him to stay.

Kirk Douglas’ inner conflict isn’t solved, but he ends his wife’s pain by accepting a new job in Hawaii where he is to draft plans for an entire new city. Thousands of acres of pristine native bush will be paved over for progress, and Douglas’ eyes light up at the thought of it. His wife and kids will go with him on this five-year mission. They will escape suburbia to create a new one.

But 1960 Dad and Mom likely just grew older in their three-bedroom ranch. How much alarm they felt as years passed when they noticed their daughter’s skirts getting shorter and their son’s hair getting longer we need not imagine, because we remember. We were getting older, too, and about that time they stopped being fixtures in the house and became people instead, people with whom we sometimes argued. The political and social turmoil of later decades hit them pretty hard sometimes, but mostly they weathered it. Their house was their haven from the increasingly baffling outside world. With faith and hope, they exchanged the avocado kitchen appliances for “Harvest Gold.”

Today the neighborhood has changed a bit. The houses don’t look exactly identical anymore. It’s now a land of vinyl siding covering the old cedar shakes, and replacement windows. Additions were put on over the years, sunrooms, two-car garages. The people living in these more individual-looking houses are probably more diverse, too. A lot more of them, like Kirk Douglas, are working at home now.

Then one day there’s a “for sale” sign on 1960 Dad and Mom’s house. A 50-year tenancy is over. We see their stuff at the yard sale, all over the front lawn. Remember those electric carving knives? And the vinyl LPs of cocktail music. An archeological dig couldn’t come up with more telling artifacts.

Kirk Douglas meets Kim Novak at the building site of Ernie Kovacs’ house, really their pretend house, one last time to say goodbye. The house is finished. They walk through it. It is empty, Kovacs hasn’t moved in yet, so there is no furniture, no stuff. Just the house itself with all its promise.

The builder walks in to check a few things, and he thinks Miss Novak is Mr. Douglas’ wife. They do not bother to correct him. How odd, when they have expended such effort to escape their suburban prisons, they spend their last few moments together “playing house.”