From fake happyendings to fake

unhappyendings
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By John Simon
 June 8, 1975

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Does the American cinema reflect accurately the society in which we live? To
answer this question for our day requires a brief retrospect. From the advent of
the talkies (which, to my way of thinking, marked the beginning of film as a
potentially mature art form) to somewhere in the sixties —it is hard to pinpoint
the exact moment, if indeed there was one—the American cinema was a vast
wish‐fulfillment industry, the expression of collective self‐delusion, self‐
gratification and self‐censorship, and had, with very few exceptions, little or
nothing to do with truth ort art.

In a recent article, Arthur Miller quoted a useful statement about America in the
eighteen‐forties from Alexis de Tocqueville: “The majority lives in the perpetual
utterance of self‐applause, and there are certain truths that the Americans can
learn only from strangers or from experience.” What prevailed in American
films of the thirties, forties, and fifties was, above all else, the happy ending. So
much so that several European languages coined a neologism, “happyend”—
pronounced in these languages as heppiend. It meant a joyous resolution of
complicated intrigues and overwhelming problems, allowing the hero and
heroine to fall in the last shot, against all probability, into each other's arms and
live, by implication, happily ever after.

What, more precisely, did this “happyend” mean, and how widespread was it?
There were, of course, movies that ostensibly ended sadly, with the death of the
hero or heroine (significantly, much more seldom both). But oven these were
disguised heppiends. If the hero died, it was defending his country, or rescuing a
child or dog from a fire—in the fulfillment of a heroic mission, or as expiation
for previously committed sins. If the hero was a gangster, his death was both
mandatory and expiatory, but, at the same time, brave and bought with the
blood of numerous lawmen, so that whatever the dark, ambiguous satisfactions
the film aroused in the audience's unconscious, the ostensible effect was still
that of a happy ending. And if the heroine died, this usually meant that she, too,
was paying some “debt to society,” or gaining release from some intolerable
sickness or marital impasse, or accomplishing something noble, with the
implicit understanding that her guy would, after a suitable period of mourning,
find solace in the embraces of some less complicated, more grass‐roots
American girl who, as often as not, was lurking about the film's periphery.

By far the most common, however, was the happyend pure and simple: wedding
bells, going off together, or just going into a clinch, with the final title, “The
End,” really meaning The Beginning of everything eternally blissful.

It is hard to say which spectators were more benighted: those who believed that
this is the way life is or could be, and therefore loved the picture; or those who
knew better, but loved the picture anyway. Now it might he supposed that the
representation of American life preceding the last shot, or last reel, was more or
less accurate, and that only the ending was a compromise with convention. In
some raw cases, this was indeed so; more often, however, the preceding events
and characterizations were equally hoked up.

Violently here and now‐Today's films are marked by “enormous intensification of

violence.” Right, Faye Dunoway in “Chinatown.” Above, the attach scene in “Death
Wish”: Gene Hochman in “The French Connection,” and Dustin Hoffman in “Straw
Dogs.”

Yet before we go on, we must answer the question: What's wrong with such a
happy ending? Don't people fall in love, get married, and, in some cases, remain
that way? Of course they do, but the emphasis in these films was nevertheless
false. For the Hollywood heppiend always implied that once The Problem is
licked—the war is over, the families are reconciled, the misunderstanding is
cleared up, there is more money somehow—and licked it always was, the closing
kiss ushered in a sempiter nally sunny future. There was a way of ending
European movies with men and women coming, or going on, together—take
Fellini's “The White Sheik,” Vigo's “L'Atalante,” Bergman's “The Naked Night”
(or, to descend a few notches, “The Baker's Wife,” “Hobson's Choice,” “Two
Cents' Worth of Hope”)—which would yet preclude the feeling of a
cellophanewrapped Ever After.

If we look back now at the major Hollywood movies in which harsh truths might
have been given believable utterance, we find almost invariably that some sort
of fudging or a variant of the happy ending disqualifies the entire film in which
it occurs. Typical is Billy Wilder's “The Lost Weekend,” with its totally
unconvincing last‐reel regeneration of the alcoholic hero, and the prospect of
bliss with his patient fiancée. Even more revealing, perhaps, is another Wilder
film, “Ace in the Hole,” where the hero‐villain's improbable death at the last
minute leaves us with a taste of quasi‐divine retribution, rather than general
greed and corruption, in our mouths. Still more typical is Kubrick's “Paths of
Glory,” where a bitter view of mankind (mind you, as a safeguard, the scene is
France, and the time, World War I) is glossed over by a last sequence reeking
with redemptive fellow feeling. Even when a milieu is truly sordid, as in Hawks's
“The Big Sleep,” the sordidness is nevertheless glamorous, and the film's
outcome happy. When a film was both vaguely realistic and less than sunny in
its ending, there was always some way of sugar‐coating the pill: The characters,
after all, were or became criminals (“Dead End,” “The Asphalt Jungle”), the
deaths were a kind of Liebestod (“Duel in the Sun,” “We Were Strangers” and,
even in its more naturalistic way, “You Only Live Once”), or the whole thing
was, under a mildly realistic veneer, just a tearjerker, like all the so‐called
women's films.

The nearest thing to frankness about the way we lived was to be found in certain
comedies. So, for instance, in Hawks's “His Girl Friday” and Joseph
Mankiewicz's “All About Eve,” both of which substitute for the happy ending,
not exactly an unhappy one, but an ominous note; yet the warning is lost for all
but the most discerning viewers in clouds of merriment or a haze of enviable
opulence. Even the one unquestionably great film that came out of Hollywood in
the period under discussion, Welles's “Citizen Kane,” has its version of a
bittersweetly gratifying ending: the revelation that Rosebud was the name of
Kane's childhood sled—that, in other words, the tough, mean old man recalled
on his deathbed his former innocence. And Chaplin's main social‐protest film,
“Modern Times,” ends with hero and heroine walking contentedly into the
promise of a sunrise. Later, in his very overrated film “Monsieur Verdoux,”
Chaplin did have the murderer‐hero die, a victim of social hypocrisy. But the
feebleness of the film—particularly in its sentimental and pretentious homilies—
militates against its efficacy.
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What it all means is that America was the home of a profound, unshakable
optimism, a country whose worst problems were the Depression and World War
11, the former not lasting all that long, and the latter ending in victory without
enemy action reaching American families and soil. This optimism combined
with puritanism to create a Production Code that kept even moderately seamy
or slightly erotic aspects of daily life nicely out of the pictures, and enforced a
kind of official innocence and hopefulness that most Americans managed to
harbor despite such slight setbacks as an occasional Teapot Dome scandal or
SaccoVanzetti affair. Officially, then, there was no anti‐Semitism, no black
ghetto or discrimination against Negroes (the best American antilynching film,
“Fury,” was made by a German, Fritz Lang, concerned a white victim, and ended
happily), and if dire poverty did exist in such a film as “The Grapes of Wrath,”
John Ford and Nunnally Johnson, the director and scenarist, nevertheless
substituted a fairly positive ending for Steinbeck's apocalyptic and catastrophic
one.

If it was not exactly a “perpetual utterance of selfapplause,” in Tocqueville's

phrase, it was yet a representation, by and large, not of American society, but of
that society as it wanted to see itself, or as the studio bosses wanted to see it. But
these moguls were men of the people, and their vision was geared to the box
office and derived from the popular novel's infantile insistence on chastity of
action and utterance, fascination with wickedness (but with the wicked always
punished in the end, while virtue triumphs) and a naive faith in one's country
and those who run it under God.

This was the view of America and of life that was first dented by the films of the
sixties, and that the films of the seventies have made great gashes in. What hap
pened was, in Tocquevillian terms, learning from “strangers”—the great,
exemplary films from Europe and, later, Japan; and from “experience” —the
unholy trio of Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon: three scourges almost mighty
enough to educate America out of its false security and genuine naiveté. And
there was more: racial unrest and black militancy, the series of political
assassinations, and the new economic and foreign‐policy crises. Just as the
dollar no longer bought everything throughout the world at bargain‐basement
prices, so a rumble from the Pentagon or White House no longer made foreign
governments bow low or fall. And when American intervention had its way—as
in certain Latin countries—large segments of our population greeted this not
with cheers butwith cat calls.

So, like other nations before it, America came of age through suffering, through
grim rites of passage. The movies, inevitably, began to echo the change. Being,
in the main, a popular rather than an elite art form, film does not lead and
shape public opinion the way great writers and thinkers have led and influenced
(usually posthumously) their readers. Yet, as a popular genre, film cannot afford
to lose touch with the hopes and fears, the needs and awareness of its clientele.
If the country has had a rude awakening, rude awakenings of one kind or
another are what the movies will purvey.

But there's the catch: of one kind or another. The trouble with rude awakenings
in a popular medium is that they are apt to be more rude than awakening, or, in
other words, excessively, indiscriminately, crudely rude. They end up peddling
impacts rather than ideas, effects rather than causes or even truthful
observations. The most obvious examples of this are the black‐exploitation,
politicalparanoia and disaster films. Yes, there is a black revolution of sorts
going on; so the black‐exploitation film panders to the militants and their white
partisans by showing black supermen outwitting and beating the daylights out
of white‐power figures, right and left. Yes, there has been a string of political
assassinations of a horrible and perhaps not wholly solved sort; so we have films
like “Executive Action” and “The Parallax View,” with conspiracies turning up
under every bed, carwling out from behind the doors of every seemingly
respectable business enterprise. And a film like “The Conversation” suggests
that the country has been transformed into two camps, the buggers and the
bugged, with the additional horror that the worm, or bug, turns, and that the
spied‐upon may be the sinister manipulators of the duped spies.

And yes, we have now had our share of great military, political and social
disasters. But there have been few if any story films about Vietnam, for example,
the earliest of these debacles, and the black problem has more often than not
been treated with ludicrous oversimplification. Even the few available
documentaries on these subjects have done very poorly or had difficulties in
getting released at all. What we do get, however, are disaster films like “The
Poseidon Adventure,” “Airport 75,” “Juggernaut,” “Earthquake” and “The
Towering Inferno.” Here we have the climate of calamity without any
troublesome consequences: This may be harrowing, but it is not the sort of thing
that might involve the whole nation, let alone, God forbid, us. But in the unlikely
event that it should befall us, we need only comport ourselves like Paul Newman
and Steve McQueen, and all will end well—at least for us.

More interesting (sociologically—we are not dealing with art here) than any of
these are the neo ‐ Fascist films, a bloody wave of which has lately been washing
over our screens. Certainly, there has always been much violence in American
movies, but of a simplistic, fairy‐tale sort: There were the good guys—cowboys,
cops, the U.S. Cavalry, G.I.'s, G‐men, T‐men, etc.—in short, Us; and the bad guys
—Indians, gangsters, Krauts, laps, Commies foreign and domestic — in short,
Them. When, in the first part of the movie, some of Us got it, it may have been
grimbut, thanks to the Production Code, not excessively gory. And when, toward
the end, all of Them got it from Us, it was brutal but just, and quietly cleansing
and uplifting.

The good old days? Not at all: lying, dishonest, dumb old days, simple‐minded
and stultifying and bourgeois‐reactionary, enshrining, among other things,
racism, xenophobia and smugly imbecile belief in American superiority and
infallibility. But today's permissive equivalent is uglier and gorier, with only one
dubious gain: There is now a good dose of self ‐ hatred mixed in with the
“righteous” violence. In today's movies, Americans have become as beastly as
the rest, or even beastlier, yesterday's Us having become today's Them, and vice
versa. This might, in its equally simplistic way, have some transitional value as a
corrective, but, in the long run, as we shall see, it is just as sterile as what went
before. In any case, the old cinematic dishonesty has not died out, either; it is
alive and well at its new address: television.

In these movies of the new violence—just as in the movies of the new sexuality—
sheer quantity, however spectacular, is not the most significant feature. True,
the enormous intensification of violence may dull one's sensitivity to the
meaning of cruelty and pain; but it is also possible that to people capable of
some kind of thought, saturation with violence may eventually bring about
boredom and revulsion. What is much more interesting is the neoFascism
behind many of these films, for example (to take only a handful of the best
known ones) “Dirty Harry,” the “Billy Jack” films, “Walking Tall,” the Sam
Peckinpah films culminating in “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” and
“Death Wish.” The Fascism here consists of the notion that order comes only
through strength, superior armed strength, and that only when the rightminded
individual virtuously kills off a number of vicious opponents does social,
political and even sexual sanity reassert itself.

In the more ingenious and insidious films—like “Dirty Harry,” “Death Wish”
and “Straw Dogs”—the idea is that the powers of law enforcement are corrupted
by wishy‐washy liberalism and misguided humanitarianism, and only when the
hero realizes that creeps are creeps and fit only for instant extermination by
himself does goodness come into its own. This is a kind of Fascism from above,
from a relatively sophisticated source, which exploits the frustrated, exacerbated
temper of the times by peddling the concept that leniency and scruples are the
problem and Every Man His Own Gunman the solution.

Meanwhile, the more primitive, populist films display a Fascism from below.
Here the enemy is direct and obvious corruption in high places, the System,
Them, and the Fascist‐hero is not the member of a privileged class (city planner
hi “Death Wish,” professor of mathematics in “Straw Dogs”) but some plain and
simple fellow who is elected sheriff (“Walking Tall”) or mysterious, half‐indian
outcast (“Billy Jack”), who helps the underdogs everywhere. In either type of
neo‐Fascist film, the hero must fight more or less singlehandedly, because even
among Us most people are corrupt, except perhaps in dians, school children and
an occasional golden ‐ hearted whore. In the rare case that such a hero is finally
defeated (“Alfredo Garcia”), he at least drags half the assembled powers of
darkness down with him.
The image of the person who gets it in the end has changed, too. There was
considerable sympathy for the Cagney‐Bogart gangster —though nothing so
subtle as the portrayal of the psychopath and other criminals in “M,” a
European film by Fritz Lang. In “Dirty Harry,” the villain is simply a vicious
pervert, a mad dog; in “Death Wish,” the villains are muggers who will kill and
rape as well, but have no further dimensions whatsoever; in the “Billy Jack”
films, the heavy is the Establishment, a tentacular, many‐headed monster with,
however, less than one brain.

The effect of these neoFascist films is to elicit a curious, unholy participation

from the audience. When the heroes of films like “The French Connection,”
“Straw Dogs,” “Death Wish,” “Freebie and the Bean” kill or manhandle their
victims, a great glee overcomes the spectators (just as in the black‐exploitation
films when “whitey” gets his): They laugh, cheer, applaud, sometimes even give
standing ovations. Somehow the implication is that, in an indiscriminately
vicious world, the only release and relief come from beating up or killing, from
taking the law into one's own hands and becoming Superman, Superblack,
Superwhatever. In the old days,it was the victory of the forces of right over those
of wrong, even if right was represented mainly by a solitary hero; now, however,
it is I (or my alter ego) against everyone else—Them, Us, the whole kit and
kaboodle. It is impotence suddenly becoming potent through bloodletting:
Every mugger killed by Charles Bronson is to the depressed audience an
orgasm, a social orgasm rather than a sexual one, and made all the sweeter by
restoring potency to the impotent.

But the powerless can also he indulged in their impotence, and there is also a
cinema of unbeatable darkness, of masochism rather than sadism, It peddles
simplistic defeatism just as the old movies peddled idiotic optimism. In film
after film—“The French Connection,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The
Godfather I and II,” “Serpico,” “The Last Detail,” “Chinatown,” even in such a
mere gambling film as “California Split,” the point is that nobody wins: In the
end, one way or the other, there are only losers. The first step in this
transvaluation was the series of films about good Germans, good Japanese, good
drug addicts and pushers. Then came the good Mafia, and the good
promiscuous sexualists; and, conversely, films about the imbecile or murderous
Allies in World War II.

Once the old bad values had been suitably confused and undermined, we were
at last ready for the new bad value: total, bleak despair. Consider now the new
commonplace: the deliberately contrived, universal unhappy ending of films like
“Easy Rider,” “The Last Detail,” “Serpico,” “Godfather II,” even “Dirty Harry,”
whose conquering cop‐hero ends by disgustedly throwing away his badge, and
“Chinatown,” where the gun that would mete out justice barely wounds the
archfiend at point‐blank range, whereas the gun that brings death and
heartbreak to the good, or better, people scores a deadly bull's‐eye under the
most prohibitively difficult shooting conditions. Such sophisticated,
manipulative unhappy endings are no better than the infantile “happyends” of
yesteryear: they are wish‐fulfillment fantasies of self‐justification for the
demoralized and powerless of today, replacing the triumphant wish‐fulfillment
fantasies of the barbarians of yes
The movies are now allowed to show sexual activity in some detail. But the price is
the sermonizing that follows it. The new motto is: ‘Promiscuity does not
pay.’ terday basking in false security.

It is worth looking more closely at some of the sophisticated new films, the
sophistication of most of which is only celluloid‐deep. Take the matter of the
new sexual freedom. The movies are now allowed to show sexual activity in
some detail, as well as abundantly suggest, if not actually record, acts rightly or
wrongly considered perversions. But what attitudes accompany these
revelations? Sniggering or moralizing. In “Lenny,” for instance, we see Mrs.
Bruce in bed with another woman, first watched and then joined by Lenny
Bruce. But, from beginning to end, this mini‐orgy is played lugubriously, the
principal participants not only not enjoying themselves, but also either visibly
suffering or audibly complaining; and the aftermath is all anger and bitterness.
In such a spirit, no one would have entered into this sexual bout, or persisted in
it for more than 30 seconds. But the price of including it in a major, commercial
movie is the sermonizing commentary that accompaniesand follows it.

Similarly, in a film like “Shampoo,” though there is a great deal of glib sexuality,
the protagonist, soon after affirming his enjoyment of the swinging life, is
shown miserably losing the one woman he really wanted. Yet preachment is not
the only payment to puritanism for the new permissiveness; derision, as I
suggested, is the other. Thus, all the sexual acts in “Shampoo” end in the comic
humiliation of one or the other partner, and sometimes both. Even in a film as
seemingly impudent in its iconoclasm as “M*A*S*H”,” the big sex scenes are
always coupled with some form of embarrassment, usually by someone being
caught and exposed in flugrante. The locus classicus here is the scene in
“Loving,” in which the act of adultery is watched on closed‐circuit television by
all the guests at the party, including the errant protagonist's wife. Clearly, the
motto “Crime does not pay” has been adapted to read, “Promiscuity [or sex]
does not pay,” except for the film makers who cash in on it.

What about political and social honesty in the new film? One tendency is to
minimize unsavory truths by keeping them offscreen or otherwise slut‐ring
them over. Thus, for example, Sydney Pollack made an honest and powerful film
in “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” but the society that was being anatomized
was America during the Depression. The poverty and hunger that reduced
people to nonstop jumping jacks in a dance marathon did not exist in 1969—or
so those who permitted the film to be made must have figured. But when the
same director came up with “The Way We Were,” dealing with McCarthyism
among other things, we did not see any of the Congressional witch‐hunts, only
one rather limply staged public demonstration against presumed left‐wing
Hollywoodites returning from a Senate hearing. This matter is, apparently, still
too sensitive to go into; indeed, one of the political scenes that can be found in
the published book version was cut from the film as released.

Corruption of a quasi‐political sort was to be seen in “Downhill Racer,” which

suggested that everything was not milk and ozone in the world of Olympic
skiing, even on our own U.S. team, but this story of what makes Sammy schuss,
though fairly hard‐hitting, hardly hit what one might consider very important
targets. More directly concerned with politics was “The Candidate,” a decent
enough film showing the questionable and self‐soiling ways in which even an
honest man gets elected Senator (and, by implication, anything else), but the
political corruption depicted was kid stuff compared with Watergate on your
home screen fairly soon thereafter. It is perhaps not coincidental that Robert
Redford was involved in the last three films mentioned, as he will be in a
forthcoming movvie about Watergate (though not about what it was or meant,
but only about how the scandal was unearthed). This would seem to mean that
political film‐making in America depends largely on the willingness of a star to
get involved in it. Certainly we owe, on the other side of the fence, “The Green
Berets” to John Wayne's extremerightism.

Typically, the most important political issue of the past 10 years was our
involvement in Vietnam. Yet there were, as I have already mentioned, no story
films about that war, although a few very bad or juvenile movies made more or
less explicit references to it, rather in the same spirit in which a gratuitous nude
scene is dragged into an otherwise undistinguished and unsalable movie. This
contrasts significantly with World War II, which was an inexhaustible cinematic
subject, both during and after the fighting, but there, of course, we were on the
side of the angels. Yet the public is obviously just as guilty as Hollywood: When
a fine film about Vietnam. Raoul Coutard's “Hoa‐Binh,” came to us from abroad,
it could make no headway with American audiences.

Taking an essentially neutral position—i.e., showing both humanity and

inhumanity among North and South Vietnamese alike, and not throwing
obvious stones at the Americans either —“HoaBinh” contented itself with
focusing on the sufferings of children, perhaps greater in this than in any other
war. Considered too tame by the doves, too incendiary by the hawks, and too
depressing by the great, gray, neutral mass, it undeservedly incurred almost
universal displeasure.

There was, in all these years, only one worthy American story film that squarely
confronted the major political issues of the times, and was critical of the way the
country is run. (I discount a movie like “Advise and Consent,” which is pure
hokum, or Gore Vidal's “The Best Man,” which, though a film a clef. presents
minor political skulduggeries too patty and cutely, at too many removes from
reality.) That worthy film was Haskell Wexler's “Medium Cool,” produced by
Paramount.

The film showed America's political and social troubles in the summer of 1968
as background for a tragic romance between a newsreel cameraman and a young
schoolteacher from Appalachia, caught up along with the woman's young son in
the riots and racial tensions surrounding Chicago's stormy Democratic
Presidential convention. Paramount fought Wexler all the way, demanding
innumerable cuts. The director capitulated on a few points, but stoutly held out
on many others. The film, a very respectable though by no means flawless
achievement, did well enough with the critics but fairly poorly with the public,
an X rating doing much to prevent it from reaching a mass audience. Yet what is
really interesting is the opprobrium it earned for Wexler, one of Hollywood's
previously most highly regarded zinematographers. So reactionary is the film
capital of America that when Wexler did photograph one film subsequently
(“American Graffiti”), he could he given only ancillary credit as a “visual
consultant” for his contribution.

That leaves the area of social commentary, which might tell us truthfully how we
live, or suggest ways in which we ought, or ought not to, do it. This category
contains the largest number of disappointments, ranging from the insufferable
cuteness of “Harry and Tonto” to the prettifications of “Lenny,” the latter made
all the more culpable by posturing as documentary truth. A social phenomenon
like the student rebellion of the late sixties begot a minor cinematic genre, but
the pictures in it—“The Strawberry Statement,” “The Magic Gar den of Stanley
Sweetheart,” “Getting Straight,” “The Revolutionary,” “R.P.M.” (screenplay by
Erich Segal)—were all edulcorations, trivializations or sensationalizations of
their subject. In the case of “The Activist,” even though the film‐makers went to
the lengths of hiring two college‐student lovers to play themselves and
something very close to their actual experiences on screen, the result was
nevertheless indistinguishable from the standard formula picture.

But, surely, the new young directors, who have come up the hard, independent
way (whatever that is), or were sponsored by the American Film Institute, might
be assumed to “tell it like it is.” Let us take two archetypal movies by this type of
filmmaker, Bob Rafelson's “Five Easy Pieces” and Martin Scorsese's “Mean
Streets.” In the former, we never really understand what ails the hero. He is a
malcontent among the working class, into which he escaped from his
bourgeoisartistic background; so he returns to the lovely Oregon setting where
his family lead comparatively graceful, music‐making lives, and once again
cannot stand it there. In the end, he hitchhikes toward Alaska without so much
as an overcoat. We never find out anything about his motivation, which would
be all right if we could become deeply interested in his daily doings, but we
can't. His only intense stirring is toward running off with his brother's fiancée,
which she understandably turns down. So off he goes to the frozen north,
presumably symbolic of death. The character seems much too aberrant — and
unexplainably so—to be representative of anything but dementia.

In “Mean Streets,” which is a mess even technically, the alternatives seem to be

growing up overtly criminal and absurd or growing up covertly criminal and
dreary. The basic friendship between the two youths coming of age in Little Italy
is never made believable, nor are other relationships examined with convincing
insight. Instead, we get mostly disjointed, flashy anecdotes of minor violence, a
soundtrack full of gratuitous period pop songs, and some of the fuzziest
photography this side of home movies.

The only serious and persuasive attempt by a film to comment on American

society in the last few years was Terrence Malick's “Badlands,” a free retelling of
the Starkwether‐Fugate case. A young psychopath and his 15‐year‐old girl
friend, after killing the girl's dour father, embark on something that is part
murderous crime spree, part Thoreauvian idyll — a bloody pastorale. There is a
strong sense of lost contact with reality: affectlessness based on mental disorder
in the boy, boredom and childish fantasies in the girl. What Malick conveys
magisterially is the way in which middleclass proprieties can coexist with
murderousness in the hero, sentimentality with amorality in the heroine. How
pathetic and even sympathetic the monstrous occasionally is! Though society is
not directly indicted, the film is rich in suggestive overtones vibrating in its
striking images. revealing disconnected scraps of lopsided dialogue, brilliantly
selected background music, and general emotional restraint, forcing us to think
about causes as well as shudder at effects. Despite generally favorable notices,
the film was a box‐office flop.

People who see great promise in new modes of movie financing might consider
the case of “Badlands”: Made with the writer‐director's own money, as well as
that of his friends, and with support from A.F.I., it was shot slowly, carefully,
exactly as Malick wanted it to be. Good reviews at the New York Film Festival
persuaded Warner Brothers to buy it, but not necessarily to promote and
distribute it wisely and widely. It ended up making no money whatever. (A
similar story, dealt with blatantly and factitiously, made “The Sugarland
Express” rather more successful)

Meanwhile, muddled or mendacious films that merely pretend to make social

comments‐like “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore” or “A Woman Under the
Influence” —are packing them in. Why? The one plays into the hands of the
Women's Liberation movement while peddling underneath the same old
Hollywood clichés; the other purports to show how the working class lives while
giving us a schematic, simplistic and ultimately quite incoherent view based on
foolish actors' improvisations rather than recognizable verities. But both films
have their “happyends” and so bring us back to where we began.

Let us ask ourselves again: Does the American film reflect accurately the society
in which we live? The answer seems to be no, if you mean honestly coming to
grips with the difficulties we face, the insufficiencies of the society that we have
fashioned and that, in turn, molds us. But the answer is yes, if you mean the
wish fulfillments and immature excesses, the crude farce and vulgar
melodrama, the fake unhappy endings that have partly supplanted the still
thriving fake happy ones. Yes, if you mean a still basically infantile movie‐
making that mirrors a still fundamentally childish society. ■

Muddled or mendacious films that merely pretend to make social comments are
packing them in. Some play into the hands of the Women's Liberation movement.