Sam Wood’s 1942 melodrama Kings Row is most well-remembered for the moment when Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) wakes up after surgery, his legs amputated by a maniacal doctor (Charles Coburn), and screams, “Where’s the rest of me?” Reagan, who would later become President of the United States, maintained a sense of humor about his most famous screen appearance, titling his autobiography Where’s The Rest of Me?; presumably, he was less sanguine about his other most famous appearance playing sidekick to a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951, Dir. Frederick De Cordova). Detached from its context, the “Where’s the rest of me?” scene might seem overdone, ridiculous in its exaggeration, its crash of score; however, it acts as one signifying moment of the long tradition of stories like Kings Row set in small towns, that expose the darkness lurking beneath their sunny surfaces. It was based on a novel of the same name by author Henry Bellamann and released in 1940, and walks in the footsteps of works like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of overlapping short stories that examine the hypocrisy and secrets of the eponymous town’s residents. Wood was a studio craftsman who began his career in the silent era and handled a number of large A-pictures like Kitty Foyle (1940), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943). For much of the 1890-set first act, Wood uses a tried and true strategy to follow his child characters, placing the camera at a lower height, making the world seem big and foreboding as young Parris, Drake, Cassie, and Randy move through it. The town Kings Row is characterized by its secrets, its repressed desires, and hidden nightmares, which Wood suggests throughout the early part of the film. Placing the camera at a lower vantage point is a common tactic for filmmakers who feature children as main characters. This is especially useful when directors want to suggest a separation between the children’s world and the adults’ world, often to alienating or nightmarish effect. In the spectator, this produces dual identification—as you watch, you think about the world from the perspective of the children, but also with the detachment of an adult’s point-of-view that recognizes the way your viewership is being shaped. Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter One (2017) uses this strategy throughout the narrative; in adapting Stephen King’s famous novel to the screen over two films, the first installment features only the protagonists as kids. Muschietti repeatedly places the camera at roughly torso height for adults, making the world seem big, imposing, and threatening to the members of his Losers Club. I think It: Chapter One is only intermittently effective—mostly it falls down in the ridiculous characterization of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) and its overreliance on cartoonish CGI—but Muschietti’s technique is strongest when he is exploring the ways in which being a young person navigating an unfamiliar world can be incredibly frightening. In Kings Row’s first act, Wood establishes a number of the themes and settings that will become important throughout the remainder of the film. In this way, Kings Row solidifies its position as a classical work defined by its unity of meaning. A work is classical when it hangs together through a series of repeated motifs and symbols, employed deliberately and controlled precisely by the writing, performances, and direction. In early scenes in Kings Row, for example, young Drake and Parris wander through the railyard while Drake calls out the stations of origin for all the parked train cars; later, Drake will take a job in the same railyard and as an adult, walk through the same space, ticking off stations of origin before he is crushed by the falling cargo that results in his debilitating injury. Elsewhere, the motif of the staircase outside Parris’s grandmother’s property unifies his childhood, his adulthood, and the passage of time. Young Parris climbs up and over the short wooden staircase at the end of the film’s first act; Wood then dissolves to the same stairs years later, and the adult Parris (Robert Cummings) steps over, showing continuity and change simultaneously. The more things change in Kings Row, the more they stay the same, in other words. Parris will once again use the stairs near the end of the film when he visits the property, now having passed to another owner during his time abroad in Vienna. The swimming hole on the property and Drake’s buggy serve similar unifying functions. Films in the classical style establish symbols and motifs, and then use the rest of the work to add shading and dimension to them, harnessing specific storytelling techniques to defined ends. These works are precisely controlled, and have little room for incoherence. To this end, throughout the film’s first act, Wood establishes the film’s key ideas through dialogue and image, so that he can pay them off later. The early scene between young Parris and young Cassie at the pond, when they shed their clothes and swim naked, is both a reflection of the relative innocence of their youth and an ominous warning about the dangers of sexuality. Sexual anxiety marks a later scene between young Drake, Parris, and Randy in the barn when they play on the rings. Randy urges Parris to take his pants off so that he might have an easier time on the rings, but Parris sheepishly demurs, embarrassed not to be wearing anything underneath. Randy giggles. Wood pays off this sexual anxiety in the clandestine meeting between Parris and grown-up Cassie (Betty Field) in her father’s house. While Dr. Tower (Claude Rains) is away in St. Louis, rain pours outside, thunder and lightning crashes. Parris and Cassie embrace in the dark, and their union seems to call forth the vengeful wrath of nature; a particularly violent crash of thunder and flash of lightning accompanies their kiss. Now, this scene abruptly fades to black, but knowing the cinematic language of the Motion Picture Production Code encourages us to read this moment as sexual consummation. In the often reductive nature of female representation in many Classic Hollywood films, this sexual encounter between Parris and Cassie drives her insane, eventually leading to the circumstances of her murder by Tower. Rains’s serene performance, like many other things in Kings Row, masks a darkness lurking beneath. After he has killed his daughter and shot himself, dialogue reveals that he feared the onset of Cassie’s symptoms of madness and presumably killed her to spare her the same fate as her mother, who lived a cloistered life bereft of joy. Cassie’s relative age invites the possibility that her father really fears her sexual awakening, and his violent act is undertaken to suppress it. This anxiety over sexuality reinforces one of the film’s other narrative threads, which dramatizes the dawning awareness of psychology as a field of study. Kings Row follows in the tradition of a number of Classic Hollywood films in representing Freud on screen; Parris’s unnamed mentor in Vienna is—quite Freudian, in fact—something of a giggling sex fiend, lasciviously confiding in Parris over a woman. Because Kings Row is so overtly concerned with psychology, it invites Freudian readings; its chief representation of a subject that consumed Freud’s writings—castration—is Drake’s injury. His legs removed, he has suffered a form of castration, especially when placed in the context of Dr. Gordon’s vengeful desire to punish Drake for seducing and abandoning his daughter Louise (Nancy Coleman). Applying a Freudian lens to cinema is a common tool for viewing Classic Hollywood cinema, and in films like Kings Row, which seem like they were conceived in Freudian terms, it is all the easier to do. Throughout the film, Wood’s direction is stable, but occasionally marked by some surprisingly expressive flourishes. It is common in Classic Hollywood cinema, according to David Bordwell in his book The Way Hollywood Tells It (1), to “open on a close-up of a significant object and track back,” Wood takes at least one opportunity to play an entire scene in the context of an important object. In line with the film’s themes of darkness intruding into serene small town spaces, he opens a crucial scene with a close-up on a seemingly unimportant side table; a pitcher of water sits on it, with a doorframe occupying much of the frame’s foreground space. The camera peers past the pitcher of the water into the bedroom of the unseen and bedridden Madame Von Eln (Maria Ouspenskaya), catching Parris entering through the far door. Only after Parris walks past his grandmother towards the camera does its placement become significant. He discovers the most important object in the frame, the hypodermic needle containing the drug used to alleviate his grandmother’s pain, a palliative measure taken without his knowledge. Wood slightly reframes the shot when the needle is revealed and Parris confronts the nurse, but the distorted initial image that only slowly reveals its framing purpose is a bit of creative direction that aligns with the film’s overall interest in subterfuge. Elsewhere, Wood chooses interesting angles that make the world threatening, even in the characters’ adulthood. It is rare in Classic Hollywood prior to this film’s release date, 1942, to see the ceiling in staging. Most often, there were no ceilings, the open spaces instead used to light sets from the grids hanging above the sound stages. However, a number of film noirs made in the period started to use the newly present ceiling to press down on their characters, making the world seem oppressive and heavy. A number of film noirs are interested in claustrophobic spaces; though Kings Row is not a film noir, Wood uses the ceiling to express the same kind of oppressive sense of society’s crushing expectations. This strategy is here applied to the small towns across the United States, about which the film expresses deep ambivalence. Reagan wasn’t much of an actor, so he doesn’t quite pull off the final turnaround in Drake. Ann Sheridan, who plays Randy, was much better, so she carries him through those moments by selling his sudden ebullience. Reagan is much better in some earlier moments when expressing Drake’s self-pity; even before his accident in the railyard, Drake shows his depressive side when Randy comes to visit him with lunch. After he makes a typically self-flagellating comment, Randy subtly registers his pain and tries to cheer him up. The final moments of Kings Row cement its place as melodrama, as Drake suddenly sees the light and comes to accept his injury, backed by soaring orchestral music that follows the triumphant last images of Parris running across the field beneath his grandmother’s property to meet his new lover, Elise (Kaaren Verne). Kings Row’s settling of unresolved elements—Drake overcomes his defeat and Parris is reunited with his Cassie-substitute, Elise—marks it as a typical example of Classic Hollywood’s tendency to end films on hopeful notes. The crushing, debilitating pressure of small town life is washed away by the conclusion’s resolution of these tensions. As is the question with a number of noirs, however, is the final moment enough to erase the anxiety and malaise that marked the rest of the film?
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For the duration of Tokyo Story (1953), director Yasujiro Ozu tracks the camera one time; near the middle of the film, his camera moves slightly, slowly to the right, finding the two central characters, the elderly couple Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) and Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), sitting outside. The information contained within the shot is largely unremarkable, and generally indistinguishable from the rest of the film’s narrative. The moment stands out only because of the camera’s mobility, not because of any particular story or character detail. Throughout the rest of the film, the camera is, characteristically for Ozu, locked firmly to the ground, the story communicated in an extended series of single, expertly framed shots populated with meticulously staged actors. For an American audience viewing Tokyo Story, or any Japanese film, it can be tempting to essentialize: to make broad generalizations about Ozu’s representation of the whole of Japanese culture. For those with only cursory understanding of Japan and its people (much of it informed through films, to be perfectly honest), it is prudent to avoid this trap, but instead, read the film itself through Ozu’s definition of Japan. How does Ozu depict Japan in his film? Without broader knowledge of the country and its history, this approach makes Tokyo Story and Ozu’s other works comprehensible. As is the case with many of Ozu’s films, Tokyo Story rewards patience. It is deliberately paced, moving slowly through its 136-minute running time. Its narrative action is slight, and entire scenes come and go without seeming to really advance the story in any meaningful way. However, Ozu’s quiet approach masks subtle changes in character and build towards a climactic moment of emotional release. In his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader argues Ozu’s “career was one of refinement: he constantly limited his technique, subject matter, and editorial comment.” He was a filmmaker who thought small, not because he was incapable of taking on larger ideas, but because he was attracted to the quiet moments that characterized the difficult relationships between family members. A number of Ozu’s films focus on complex Japanese family dynamics; many of his characters are repressed, unable to articulate their true feelings until it is too late. In Tokyo Story, regret over things left unsaid dominates the final act of the film after Tomi’s death. Her children and her husband feel that they have not served her well. Keizo (Shiro Osaka) arrives too late by train, delayed by a business trip, and misses her final moments. Shukichi confesses to his neighbor that he wishes he had been nicer to Tomi while she was alive, and tells his children he should have made more of her brief dizzy spell during their trip to the spa at Atami. Ozu’s film lingers in these moments of sadness, which he captures through extending the camera shot past obvious points where edits might go. He finds small grace notes after a scene’s dialogue has concluded, when his camera retreats to a wide shot for a moment of silence before a fade to the next scene. Ozu likewise portrays his characters’ emotional stiffness through his aggressively geometric frames. Shooting in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio (the frame appears close to a square), he emphasizes the stultifying nature of the family’s homes by drawing attention to the vertical and horizontal lines that make up the spaces. The visual pattern creates the impression of a series of frames-within-frames, a common cinematic technique favored by a number of directors from around the world. In America, classic Hollywood director John Ford consistently used a similar technique, but to different emotional effect. In one moment in his 1956 Western The Searchers, he uses the frame of a bunkhouse to protect the audience from the horrific aftermath of a Comanche attack on a farm, with John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards silhouetted inside it. Ford made American epics, but Ozu’s interest was in human intimacy—or the lack thereof. A pair of striking shots early in Tokyo Story lay the ground work for a different set of family relationships, characterized by quiet repression. His camera comes to rest on a pair of spaces inside Koichi’s (So Yamamura) home, but there are no people in the frames. Ozu holds on each empty frame for a moment, reorienting the camera’s focus to the spaces between, rather than dramatic moments of character revelation. According to Schrader, “the estrangement results from the loss of the traditional family unity,” something sacrificed especially in the aftermath of World War II. The costs of combat obviously enter Tokyo Story through Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who was married to Tomi and Shukichi’s son Shoji, missing and presumed dead for the eight years since the conclusion of hostilities between Japan and the United States. Noriko has dutifully remained single, working at an office job; ironically, she is the most devoted to the elders out of any of the characters, much more so than Tomi and Shukichi’s biological children. Noriko shares a touching scene with Tomi when she has come to stay with her; they discuss Shoji’s memory, with Tomi urging Noriko to think of her own happiness, insisting that she has paid appropriate tribute to her lost husband and fulfilled her obligation. Noriko says that she is happy as she is, with her apartment and job, but Ozu’s camera tells otherwise. When Tomi looks away, Noriko cannot help but hide the sadness in her eyes; she cannot bear to admit to the grief and loneliness she feels inside, restricted by the repressive atmosphere around her. Ozu underlines the point a moment later when he shows the two of them lying side by side in bed, tears slowly streaming down Noriko’s cheeks while Tomi sleeps beside her. Scenes like this one, based not on dramatic, emotional confession but its suppression, match Ozu’s restrained visual style. The characters desperately try to control their own emotions, and the camera aids them in the effort by remaining strictly immobile. A later scene between Tomi and Shukichi covers similar emotional territory, but emphasizes Ozu’s interest in characters unwilling to confront their true feelings for fear of what they might find out about themselves. After the trip to Tokyo has concluded and the pair have stopped in Osaka after Tomi became ill on the train, they reflect on what they have learned about their children (and themselves) since they had seen them previously. “Children don’t live up to their parents’ expectations,” Shukichi laments. He covers his disappointment with a nervous laugh, and then begins to rationalize it away, trying to convince himself that their children are “better than most.” Tomi chimes in, agreeing: “better than average.” Neither parent will let the other feel the sting of disappointment for too long, and the scene concludes with the pair reminding each other how “lucky” they are. First Tomi says it, and then Shukichi repeats it, with smiles spread across their faces. Ozu’s next shot, a lingering wide where the two sit in silence calls their certainty into question. In addition to framing, Ozu makes remarkable use of staging. How directors block actors within the frame is crucially important in classical filmmaking both in Hollywood and abroad; today’s faster cutting and generally tighter shots have reduced its importance because the expansion of these techniques has deemphasized physical geography inside the frame. It is not uncommon to see classical directors make use of every piece of the frame, filling it with precisely placed actors and important objects, or in Ozu’s case, vertical and horizontal lines that make up the home’s doorways and furniture. This bears some influence of theater, wherein actor blocking and staging becomes a primarily vehicle for directors to express character relationships and conflicts; without the camera to comment on those shifting dramatic tensions, the placement of actors on stage becomes paramount. In classical filmmaking, which still leaned heavily in some cases on what the medium shared with the stage, the camera and the blocking/staging work together to express these dynamics. In Classic Hollywood, the camera itself often moves, tracking around a set to follow actors in motion. As we have seen in Tokyo Story, Ozu almost never moves the camera, so the blocking and placement of actors within the frame gains extra meaning. It is not true to say that no contemporary Hollywood directors are interested in staging. Wes Anderson, whose films are marked by their precise design (extending to sound, color, and costuming), is well-known for his interest in staging and placing actors in the frame; his camera is much more mobile than Ozu’s, but they share a certain interest in exactitude. I have always been fascinated by many aspects of Japanese cinema, but one of the things that most interests me is how different filmmakers respond to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war. Japan has a dubious monopoly on this particular kind of horror; while nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States and Chernobyl in Russia were obviously devastating, Japan remains the only nation on the planet which has suffered the deliberate use of nuclear weapons. It is impossible to imagine the impact that such catastrophic violence had on the collective psyche of its people; when I watch any Japanese film, especially those produced in the two or three decades immediately succeeding the end of the war, I am on the lookout for representations of it, no matter how oblique they may seem. In Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), a gangster forms an unlikely friendship with a doctor who treats him for tuberculosis. Kurosawa repeatedly returns to a haunting image of a brackish, bubbling pool of water in the run-down neighborhood where the gangster and the doctor live; the image serves as a metaphor for the illness that is local crime, but it also carries with it resonance of the nuclear bombs, as does the gangster’s tuberculosis, which can just as easily be interpreted as a stand-in for radiation poisoning. The era’s most famous representation of Japan’s nuclear devastation is, of course, Godzilla (1954, Dir. Ishiro Honda). It needs little introduction, but a close reading of the film represents the lizard as both a symbol of nuclear attack and Japan’s resilience in the face of it. The sequences of Godzilla destroying Tokyo are horrifyingly sad, especially coming just nine years after the bombs fell. In Tokyo Story, I have always felt the resonance of radiation poisoning in Tomi’s sudden illness and subsequent death. Without knowing for sure whether Ozu intended that reading, I can’t help but feel this is his way of grappling with the horror of the bombs’ aftermath. I think this rhymes with a pair of early shots from the film, seemingly unmotivated, of a factory spewing out black clouds from its smokestacks, poison filling the air. The children will later wonder whether the trip to Tokyo has played some role in their mother’s death. Maybe it has.
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