teach me the art of war

I'm bouncing around the media landscape like a pinball at the moment. No idea why but I'm having a great time! Icon in honour of Bela Lugosi, who is forever and always a vampire in my heart if not in this specific film selection.

His Girl Friday (1940): This is a really fun screwball comedy about a slick, dodgy newspaper editor trying to win back his journalist ex-wife by manipulating her into covering one last story for him. Hildy is a brilliant reporter who excels at her aggressive, fast-paced job and is very much "one of the guys" among her colleagues - including her ex-husband Walter, hence the divorce. Walter's life revolves around the newspaper; he even cancelled their honeymoon so they could both rush to the site of a breaking story. Hildy pines for a more traditional feminine life in which she is romanced and protected, free to maintain a peaceful home and raise children while her husband works a steady, predictable job to provide for them. To that end, she has left Walter and become engaged to insurance salesman Bruce. The meat of the movie is a chaotic farce in which Walter deploys a wild barrage of sneaky, often criminal tactics to lure Hildy away from Bruce and reawaken her love for her career (and, by assumed extension, for him).

The gender dynamics in this were fascinating. Hildy's professional competence is about the only thing the film takes seriously; through all the wacky hijinks she is universally respected as a good reporter, with no trace of any "for a woman" caveat. (Nearly every other woman who appears onscreen is a secretary or telephone operator, and in brief interactions Hildy is as collegial with them as she is with her more "esteemed" fellow reporters, but they don't really feature much one way or another.) Of course Hildy's whole inner conflict revolves around the unchallenged premise that women, as a class, belong in the domestic sphere; but Hildy herself is the only character who seems to view the issue along gendered lines. For everyone else, it's about journalists vs non-journalists; people who can be satisfied with staid domestic life (of whom Hildy's classically masculine new fiancé is the prime example) versus people who crave the thrill and challenge of the fast-paced media world. The other career reporters all shake their heads and predict a swift end to the whole Hildy/Bruce business. No way will anyone as thoroughly like them as Hildy be able to stand the tedium of the American picket-fence dream for more than six months. I'm not saying it was some kind of feminist statement in the modern sense; I just enjoyed the nuance of how Hildy's femininity was handled. She was a great character.

The Devil Bat (1940): Bela Lugosi stars as a mad scientist with a vendetta against his employers, the owners of a cosmetics firm who have gotten rich off his designs while paying him only a tiny fraction of the profits. His genius plan for revenge is twofold: firstly he has engineered himself a giant bat large and strong enough to kill a man, and secondly he has trained the bat to become enraged at the scent of a specific chemical, which he has put into a specially formulated aftershave. Target applies aftershave to neck. Bat swoops in to tear out jugular. Bam! Greedy capitalist gets what he deserves.

This was every bit as ridiculous as I hoped it would be. It's billed as straightforward horror, but it's really more of a bat-themed, lightly murderous comedy. A lot of the action is driven by a pair of madcap journalists investigating the story, whose antics include things like using taxidermy to produce fake photos of the devil bat, doctoring out the wires that made it fly but forgetting to remove a label from the wing that says "Made in Japan". I was honestly cheering for the doctor, partly because his evil plan is so delightfully (ahem) batshit, and partly just because, you know. Bela Lugosi. Unlike the other two films in this post, this one is very much not a must-watch of 40s cinema, but it's certainly a why-the-hell-not, especially since its runtime is barely over an hour. I had fun.

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Hardboiled private detective Sam Spade gets hired under false pretences for a job that leads to the death of his business partner and ends up embroiling him in a violent, competitive criminal scheme to gain possession of an unthinkably valuable historical artefact known as the Maltese Falcon. This is, of course, one of the films noir and has all the elements you'd expect: a cynical, street-smart protagonist, a beautiful femme fatale for him to have dangerous chemistry with, a supporting cast of gangsters who are forever double-crossing each other.

I'm kind of drawing a blank on what to say about this one, but I honestly really loved it and it has whet my appetite for more film noir. The pacing is much slower than today's modern crime thrillers and that really worked for me; the latter tend to stress me out so much that I have to be in just the right mood to watch them. This was tense and exciting without forcing me to lie down afterwards. The whole chiaroscuro aesthetic was absolutely gorgeous. My favourite moment was when the femme fatale slaps a gangster, who goes to hit her back, only for Sam to leap in and bellow in the man's face, 'When you're slapped, you'll take it and you'll like it!' Iconic, honestly. Sam Spade is a true ally to femdom fans everywhere. More men should learn from his example.