The Splendor and Misery of Hollywood

I was tired the other day. Didn't sleep well, plus, too many emotions about minor things, like broken cars. So I decided to watch an "entertaining" film. The result, is both enchantment and disappointment.

Sudden Fear (1952). The film hailed by Truffaut and featuring Joan Crawford, Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame.

The film is very well made, based on intelligent script, and the acting is stunning. What's not to like?

But yet, I was struck by how formulaic it is. There are tennis courts, and swimming pools and exercise machine for our body. There are crossword puzzles or chess and math problems for our mind. I guess, there should be films to exercise our emotions and our minds. In fact, that's what Hollywood and now the endless TV dramas do so well. Emotional and intellectual exercises. Full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Yes, I guess our body feels good after being exercised.

But there is a difference between working hard as a fisherman or lumberjack and doing fifty pushups or laps.

There should be a difference between learning something about yourself and the world and living intensely and vicariously through someone else's drama.

To come back to the film. Based on the 1948 story by some Agatha Christie wannabe and shot in 1952 on beautiful SF locales. The world has just gone through the war. McCarthy is at the door. Real issues, real choices, real dilemmas. But not for Hollywood.

We have rich, talented, charming, noble, generous heiress turned playwright, Crawford, and a couple of grifters (Palance and Grahame), who are not happy with the way she distributes her money.

I imagine Crawford embodies Anglo intelligence, nobility, naivete and skills, and the two others stand for unruly greed, lust, and eroticism. Like Germans and Russians.

Their confrontation is extremely well done, there are sufficient amount of intellectual and emotional twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your sofa, but ultimately, it is pleasantly wasted two hours.

Have I learned anything? Not much except that Crawford could act, that Grahame was unbelievably cute, and that Palance was actually a Ukrainian, whose real name was Vladimir/Volodymyr Palahniuk.

Well, in all fairness, there was one glimpse of tragic insight in the film, when Crawford, as a playwright, suddenly realizes that she is now the plaything in somebody else's play, and that she can't hide from reality through her scripts, but then the film quickly returns to familiar terrain.

There is a well known book about Socialist Realist fiction, that claims that it is highly ritualistic and formulaic, follows a particular masterplot, and is kept together by a particular paradigm: the protagonist moves from the realm of spontaneity into the realm of revolutionary consciousness.

Obviously, reading the same story all over again is tiresome, even if somewhat educational.

Hollywood, of course, looks better, and exercises wider range of thoughts and emotions, but ultimately, it is the same formula, the same masterplot, and the same paradigm: all kinds of Davids fight all kinds of Goliaths. Davids mostly win due to their strong brains, fists, computers, or dedication to the American Dream, but sometimes lose when Goliaths prove too evil or powerful.

Good film, which actually takes us to the other side of rituals and formulas, is very hard to find. But we all need our exercises, especially at this time of Covid passivity.