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RETROSPECTIVE – THE UNQUIET AMERICAN. Transgressive Comedies from the U.S.
October 7 – November 5, 2009 in cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum.
Curated by Jonathan Rosenbaum.
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Apparently once upon a time - as the title of Graham Greene’s 1955 anti-American novel, The Quiet American, set in Vietnam, suggested - certain Americans, even mischievous ones, could be regarded as “quiet”. But even when Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919), around the turn of the century, advised a friend to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” one can doubt how accurately this might have described American behavior. And over a century later, in an era just after the eight-year rule of George W. Bush, Americans often seem neither quiet nor modest about their ignorance but actually loud and boastful about it. This is what suggested the title of my retrospective, “The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S.,” positing a kind of reckless, unbridled, and often solipsistic American spirit, at once exhilarating and dangerous, spreading anarchy, chaos, and other kinds of messes wherever it goes. At their best, these comedies tend to be well aware of this spirit, using it as a tool of discovery as well as an object of satire and social critique.
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Conspicuously absent from my deliberately eclectic survey are the middle-class comedies of Woody Allen, which to my mind are a little too pleased with themselves to register as either quiet or transgressive (although, if the series had been larger, I would have included What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, an early effort that Allen usually omits from his own filmographies). More characteristic of what I have in mind are the hysterical working-class comedies of Jerry Lewis (such as The Ladies Man), as well as the pop-art satire of Frank Tashlin about comic books (Artists and Models) and advertising (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) And when it comes to a more upscale milieu, I prefer the more jaundiced views of American wealth offered in Laughter, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Christmas in July, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Avanti! – or even the alienation towards working-class life exhibited in Albert Brooks’s Real Life and Lost in America.
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I’ve used five thematic categories for my selections. “Americans Abroad” stretches from such obvious (if neglected) inclusions as The Three Caballeros, Mr. Freedom, and Ishtar to the less obvious Matinee (1993) of Joe Dante--a successor to Tashlin who charts clear links in 1962 between war nerves and the horror movies of William Castle. “Class Tensions and Ethnic Tensions” includes both the black cinema of Wendell B. Harris, Jr. (Chameleon Street) and the edgy (if implicit) Jewish anti-Semitism of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, not to mention Warren Beatty’s take on both class and race in Bulworth. “Cultural Tensions” incorporates an American child’s hatred for high European culture (The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., 1953), Jack Smith’s scandalous appreciation of Hollywood in Flaming Creatures (1963), and Douglas Fairbanks’ scorn for Freudian fashion (When the Clouds Roll By, 1919). “Deconstructive Anarchy and Romantic Anarchy” makes room for the pleasures of demolishing huge sets (Steven Spielberg’s 1941), patriotism (Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, and cinema itself (courtesy of Tex Avery, Albert Brooks, Dave Fleischer, Spike Jonze, and Buster Keaton). And finally, “Sexual Tensions”--a quintessential American subject, as viewed by George Axelrod (Lord Love a Duck), George Cukor (Adam’s Rib), Jerry Lewis (The Ladies Man), Howard Hawks (Monkey Business), Jim McBride (Hot Times), Hal Roach (Turnabout), John Waters (Female Trouble), and others.
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