Pull down your pants and slide on the ice…
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Yes! My fave is The Naked Kiss. The feminism in it might be inadvertent, but it works for me!
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I will have to check that one out then. I really enjoyed the noir, “Pickup On South Street” (1953) with Richard Widmark & Jean Peters, I think that was his first film I had ever seen. I first saw it on TCM’s Noir Alley, and if you haven’t ever watched that, the host talks about the production of the movie they are showing that week.
At that time, a lot of the noirs were being done in collaboration with the FBI and Hoover was allowed to screen the movies before they were released. Since this one had FBI agents (characters) in it trying to break up a spy ring, and they were using the FBI name in the marketing, he was called out to Hollywood to screen “South Street.”
There is this line that I loved, and this was before I knew about this part of the story, where Widmark’s character (a pickpocket who has stolen a purse unaware that it contains microfilm) is being interrogated by the agents who were following the girl as she was going to make the drop, and they try and convince him to give them the purse because it is the patriotic thing to do. He replies quite sarcastically and smugly, “you’re gonna wave the flag at me?!” and laughs them off.
This was right in the middle of Hoover’s ultimate supremacy, Joseph McCarthy, HUAC, red-baiting, and the height of that nonsense. According to Eddie Muller, the host of Noir Alley, Hoover was very upset about this line and wanted it removed from the film and lobbied the studio head to have it taken out. But the head went to bat for Fuller on this occasion and as a result they had to change the lobby placards that had FBI on them, and maybe the agents in the movie weren’t referred to as the FBI, I don’t remember that exactly.
It goes hand-in-hand with what you said about his commentary on the internment camps in 1951, he was well ahead of his time in his observations and critiques, and so it is awesome to watch these time capsules and think about how revolutionary and risky it must have been to go against the grain with the social commentary.
Interesting observation concerning the film you recommended and some of his others I have watched, he must have been a nipponophile because I have watched two other films he wrote and produced that were about Japan or Japanese-American culture: House of Bamboo (1955) and The Crimson Kimono (1959). The House of Bamboo was shot in color, in Yokohama and Tokyo, so it is pretty awesome to see the high quality color footage of these places from the 50s.
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I didn’t think it was so much inadvertent as it was rooted in its day. It was his take on the melodrama (aka “Women’s Film”) with the pulp fiction mentality he had long before entering film.
If you were a fan of the show The Americans, one episode really leaned hard into a close parallel with Thelma Ritter’s death scene monologue on Pickup on South Street at the hands of communist agents. Played somewhat ironically given the protagonists are communist agents.
I would argue it does hold up and was ahead of its time. There are distinct episodes where hawkeye’s womanizing is called out directly. Multiple times the shoe is on the other foot and he is the victim of the same callousness he displays in his relationships (a la the movie Boomerang) and he has to face his own issues in that arena.
Additionally, there are a couple select episodes wherein he is stopped in his tracts over his disregard for the opposite sex (Hey, Look Me Over, Inga, Hepatitis) and is put in his place by a female colleague.
One two-parter in particular (That’s Show Biz, a young USO perfermer falls for him and he explicitly tells her he is too lecherous for her and that he can’t take advantage of her feelings for him.
The early seasons definitely did not shy away from pointing out he was a womanizer and juvenile in that regard; but as the show progressed his character did evolve. I suspect this was due to the influence of a set of female writers and former Army nurse advisers.
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An unfortunate typo, in this context
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Fixed, sorry about that folks!
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