By Jennifer Baldwin. This is about Film Noir, so here’s a flashback …
I went through a bit of a Glenn Ford/Gloria Grahame/THE BIG HEAT phase several years ago. I became obsessed with the movie and those two actors. I was like a junky, watching the movie over and over, memorizing lines, musing over the themes, showing the famous boiling coffee scene to anyone who would watch.
But eventually, no matter how much I loved THE BIG HEAT, it couldn’t withstand the over-obsession. I needed a new drug. I needed something else to give me that Glenn and Gloria fix.
Then I read about HUMAN DESIRE. It was made after THE BIG HEAT, starring Ford and Grahame, another scalding-hot 1950s noir directed by Fritz Lang. As soon as I found out about it, I had to have it. Only problem: it wasn’t on DVD. You couldn’t buy it in the store. It was as good as gone for someone like me out in the Michigan suburbs, with not a repertoire theater in sight.
I went into the shadows. I spent many a midnight hour searching the internet for a copy of the movie. I was bleary-eyed and half crazed with want. And then I found it. One of those online trading post/auction sites. Eight bucks plus shipping and handling and HUMAN DESIRE could be mine. It was someone’s homemade DVD copy, complete with fuzzy picture and bad sound, but buying it made me feel like I was the protagonist in my own film noir, swapping cash with some anonymous stranger on the black market for a “treasure” that was worn out and almost worthless.
But it was worth everything to me. I watched HUMAN DESIRE and loved it more than I had loved THE BIG HEAT. I don’t know if I loved it so much because it took all that effort to finally get a copy, or if I genuinely loved the movie more, but HUMAN DESIRE became one of my secret movie treasures.
Now it’s out on DVD, an official release from Columbia Pictures, with pristine picture and remastered sound, and I still think that it’s tops. I think it’s Gloria Grahame’s masterpiece. I think it’s misunderstood. I think Glenn Ford’s character is the real villain and that far from having a “happy” ending, it has one of the bleakest, most cynical endings in all of noir.
The misinterpretation of the film stems from the assumption that Grahame’s character is a traditional “femme fatale” evil woman type. She’s Gloria Grahame, after all, and she wants Glenn Ford to commit murder for her. But I couldn’t just slot her into the femme fatale role that easily. She might have murder in her heart, but it didn’t come there lightly. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)
By Jennifer Baldwin. Before photography (and then Photoshop) took over the movie poster business, illustrators and artists ruled. Billboards, lobby cards, one sheets — these were the domain of the movie art masters, the geniuses who plastered our imaginations with color and drama and a parade of disembodied heads all in various states of emotion. Nowhere, it seems, were the old movie poster artists more unbridled than in their posters for film noir. Violence and sex are everywhere, and the artwork is always fun. Sometimes the posters are lush and romantic, other times chaotic and carnal. But always interesting, always worth looking at. Whether the movies turn out to be good or bad, the posters always manage to sell them.
In fact, sometimes in the case of the old film noirs, the foreign artwork is better than the American. These foreign posters seem to get to the thematic heart of the stories because the artists weren’t as hampered by the studios to make sure a certain actor was featured or a movie star actress looked glamorous. And because foreign artists often had different sensibilities than their American counterparts, some of the best posters have a distinct strangeness to them that make the artwork even more compelling. These are my Top 6 picks for best film noir movie posters from foreign countries:
#6: Belgian poster for Criss Cross (Dir. Robert Siodmak, 1949) Bold, violent, unrelenting — the red crisscross that dominates the center of the poster might be a bit crude and obvious for a movie titled “Criss Cross,” but it fits this nihilistic, underrated classic perfectly. With Yvonne De Carlo’s gorgeous face looming enigmatically above it, the “X” threatens to cross out both Duryea and Lancaster, two men who are both on a road to annihilation thanks to their lust for Yvonne’s intoxicating femme. What’s even more disturbing than those crisscrossed streaks of blood, though, is the look of cool, indifferent “who cares” on De Carlo’s face. That “who cares” look, as blood rains down, is the essence of the film noir “dangerous woman.”
#5: Italian poster for T-Men (Dir. Anthony Mann, 1948)
The artwork for this poster is flawless. One of the great things about old movie poster art is the way it tells a story. It’s not just one thing — one face, one situation, one image. These old posters take us into the story of the film, almost like the sequential art of a comic book, where we move from character to character, situation to situation, image to image. This T-Men poster gives us pieces of the story, while leaving us hungry for more. The death of a beautiful woman; a bag full of money; a brutal interrogation; a shootout at the pier; and at the center of it all, a heroic Dennis O’Keefe, trying to stand up for what’s right, but surrounded by crime on all sides. Film noir is a black and white genre, yet an eye-popping poster like this one reveals all of the intense, explosive emotions roiling beneath the silver-dark black and white sheen.
#4: French poster for F.B.I. Girl (Dir. William Berke, 1951)
I’ve never seen F.B.I. Girl. From what I’ve read on the internet, it doesn’t appear to be a very good movie, despite the presence of one of the all-time noir pros, Audrey Totter. But damn, if this poster isn’t the coolest thing ever! Coolness, of course, is one of the attractions of the genre. In fact, some might even argue that film noir isn’t a real genre at all, just a style. And style is about aesthetics, about the “look” of something. In the case of F.B.I. Girl, the movie itself is irrelevant. This poster — the look, the attitude, the style of it — is all we need. There’s a sexiness, a romantic sensibility, to the artwork that seems appropriate for the French. The pinkish red coloring; the playful elegance of the woman in the foreground; the hint of sexual violence between the man and woman in the background — all of it adds up to a retro modern design that is still absolutely fresh. I would kill to have this poster framed and hanging on my wall.
#3: French poster for Notorious (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
Symbolic, highly stylized, and unlike anything that would have been done in America, this is Hitchcock’s Notorious as only the French can render it. There’s the romantic passion of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s love affair, which dominates the poster and hangs over every frame of the film; the wine cellar key that is at the center of Bergman’s espionage and the symbol for her duplicity; and a very stylized version of Claude Rains within the key itself, uniting Bergman’s two acts of deception and betrayal, the betrayal of her husband’s work and his heart. The blue coloring gives the poster a sad romanticism, like the farewell of lovers on a rainy train platform; while the gold works as both the golden hues of warm sunlight (Bergman’s character wants to live in the light) and as the menacing gold of the cellar key. Interestingly, Rains’ face is half gold, half black, perhaps as a symbol for how his character is an evil yet weak man, not so much a villain to be hated but one to be pitied. More than just an advertisement for a movie, this poster works as a compelling piece of art.
#2: Italian poster for Force of Evil (Dir. Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
This poster just IS noir. One of the few from the era to be almost entirely in black and white, it captures the essential paradox of the genre. The menace of the gun; the threat of violence from a heavy bathed in shadow; the trapped look on the face of illustrated John Garfield — all of the doom and psychological terror of these films, and yet, amidst the crime and despair, there’s a stark beauty to the image. This is the tension at the heart of the noir style: beauty within the darkness. These are dark films, with dark themes. Murder, blackmail, exploitation, cruelty, selfishness, greed. But the artists who create these films, the painters of shadow and light, the directors and cinematographers — they create something beautiful to look at out of stories filled with evil. The illustration for this poster looks like it could be a still photograph from the movie itself. Filled with fear and violence and menace, and gorgeous.
#1: German poster for Double Indemnity (Dir. Billy Wilder, 1944)
This is number one simply because it looks like the face of Barbara Stanwyck is emerging from Hellfire, her seductive wickedness consuming MacMurray and Robinson in an inferno of murder and lies. If that doesn’t sum up Double Indemnity, I don’t know what does. Stanwyck is all heat in this one, a ball of fire of the deadly variety. MacMurray and Robinson, in their monotone hues, look almost like ghosts, like men reduced to mere shadows by the power of Stanwyck’s evilness. The real relationship in the movie is between the two men, of course. When their friendship is destroyed because of Phyllis Dietrichson, it is that destruction that pains us in the end. She is the devil who comes between them, bringing everything to ruin. This illustration, more than any other, captures these themes. And even more than that, it’s just an electrifying visual design. Everything about this poster just makes me want to watch the movie again right now. It gives new life to a movie I’ve seen dozens of times. And that is the mark of great movie poster.
Okay, I’ll play:
3.) The Company She Keeps
4.) Man of a Thousand Faces
And, in a small role…
5.) 1973’s The Outfit. More on that last one in a bit.
(Also, her stint on Twin Peaks was nothing to sneeze at and kinda noirish in that weird, Lynchian way.)
She might not have made many memorable movies, but all it took for Jane Greer to become the queen of film noir was one role: Kathie Moffat in Jacques Tourner’s film noir masterpiece, Out of the Past.
Yes, Stanwyck was the ultimate spider woman as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, and made more half-baked films noir than Greer made films total. And yes, Gloria Grahame was the epitome of B-girl badness in films like The Big Heat and Human Desire. And, of course, glamourpusses like Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth both had signature roles in the dark den of Noir City.
But for me, Greer is the queen of noir because she was every dark dame wrapped into one. She was wicked temptress, misunderstood moll, glamour puss with a kiss of death, and also something even more off-kilter and sinister than her fellow femmes. Out of the Past‘s Kathie Moffat might just be more fatal than all of them because she isn’t just evil, she’s vulnerable too and that vulnerability – that quizzical beauty in her face, and pleading in her eyes – make her evil actions all the more horrible. We can tell that Stanwyck’s Phyllis – from the moment her anklet slithers across the screen – is definitely up to no good. We can tell she’s pure evil, even as Stanwyck imbues her with some small measure of humanity at the end. But Greer’s Kathie could have been good and that’s why she’s all the more terrifying. We want her to be good even as she lies, steals, and kills.
It’s the type of performance for which the word “enigma” was invented. The intoxicating allure of Kathie Moffat is summed up when she pleadingly tells Robert Mitchum that she’s not a thief. His response: “Baby, I don’t care.” She could be good, she could be bad, but in the end it doesn’t matter: she’s irresistible. And that is what makes la femme so fatal.
Greer’s teenage bout with Bell’s palsy is part of the mystique. It left half of her face paralyzed and it was only through tireless muscle exercises that she was able to recover movement in her face. But it also left Greer with a permanent, slightly lopsided smile. This lilt in her lips gives her face a certain mystery, as if we’re never quite sure what she’s thinking.
Jane Greer in "Out of the Past."
One of the best places to find out what the real Jane Greer was thinking is Eddie Muller’s delicious book, Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir. It compiles Muller’s interviews with Greer, as well as noirish dames Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, and Coleen Gray. If you are a fan of film noir, this book is a must-read. For one thing, we learn that Jane Greer was married to Rudy Vallee (a man twice her age!) when she was in her early twenties, and that he was a fetishistic creep with a bad porn habit who made Greer dye her hair an unflattering raven-black to suit his own predilections.
Greer was pursued by no less than Howard Hughes himself, but she ultimately rejected him and he in turn pretty much stalled her career at RKO just as she was coming off that career-making performance in Out of the Past.
So we can thank Howard Hughes and his wounded, paranoid heart for hampering the career of Jane Greer, queen of noir.
Jane Greer with Robert Mitchum in "Out of the Past."
But even though she never made another film noir as brilliant as Out of the Past, she never completely abandoned the dark streets of the crime drama. Enter The Outfit, a 1970s second-wave color noir that has enough cameos of old stars and character actors to make any classic movie fan point and cheer: Robert Ryan, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey, and of course … Jane Greer.
It’s a small part, but she still captivates. In fact, all of the old timers captivate, whether it’s the brief appearance of world weary Marie Windsor, pouring drinks behind a bar; or Elisha Cook, Jr. getting bossed around by the heavies (as usual); or Robert Ryan and Timothy Carey playing poker and planning hits.
The film stars Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker as two gunmen who go after a powerful crime syndicate for money and revenge. It’s combination heist flick, revenge story, and gritty crime noir. Written and directed by the underrated John Flynn, and based on a story by Donald Westlake, The Outfit is a solid example of the violent second-wave noir of the 1970s. It’s bloodier than an old school noir, and even more amoral. Duvall’s criminal, Earl Macklin, is not a good man. He’s not even a “misunderstood” criminal. He’s a bad guy who kills with ruthless ease. Even his cause – revenge for the murder of his brother – is tainted by the fact that his brother was murdered precisely because he and Duvall robbed a syndicate bank.
Jane Greer in "The Outfit."
Jane Greer plays Alma, the widow of the murdered brother, and for a change of pace she’s not a femme fatale or a dangerous woman. She’s simply a woman beaten down by the despair and death of the criminal world. There’s a certain tiredness to Alma’s character, and to Greer’s performance, that puts the lie to all of that noir cool we usually see in these types of films. Yeah, okay, Duvall and Baker embody charismatic criminal cool as they attempt to take down the Outfit. But that earlier scene with Alma is still hanging around the edges, reminding us that it all ends up tired and empty in the end. And who better to deliver that message than the former Kathie Moffat? The Outfit is now newly remastered and available on DVD through the Warner Archive Vault Collection.
I’ll be contributing a couple of posts, both here at Libertas and at my own blog, and I would encourage everyone who loves movies and film noir to contribute what they can to the fundraiser. The last time, “For the Love of Film” raised $30,000 for the National Film Preservation Foundation, and that money went towards the preservation of two early short films. Hopefully we can equal or surpass that amount this time. As I’ve written before, film preservation is a naturally conservative cause, so mark your calendars for February 14 and check out “For the Love of Film (Noir).”
By Jennifer Baldwin. Watching old movies has been a spotty pastime for me these last few months. Working full-time as a high school English teacher leaves me with less free time than I’d like to work on my “Classic Cinema Obsession” articles, so that’s why I’ve been pretty much absent from Libertas since Mad Men ended.
I also began writing for a new film website called Fandor, an amazing new site that allows subscribers to watch a wide variety of classic, foreign, and indie films directly on their computers. No downloads, everything is streamed on the site. And first-time subscribers get a one-month free trial, which is a great incentive to join.
Along with the films, Fandor also provides written commentary and informative essays about the films and filmmakers, including articles by yours truly. My first article for Fandor was on Tarkovsky’s haunting dream film The Mirror, while my second article was on the Josef Von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel. I’m also a participant in Fandor’s syndication program, which allows me to embed their films directly on my own personal blog, Dereliction Row. You can watch any of the films anytime you want if you’re a subscriber, or you can watch an individual film for a small rental fee. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in great cinema to check out Fandor.
So even though I have been overly busy with my day job as a teacher, I haven’t completely neglected my passion for classic films. And that’s what this “Classic Movie Journal” is all about. It’s my way to keep writing about old movies for Libertas, but in a more informal, less time intensive manner. Consider these my unvarnished, rambling, and passionate musings on all things old movies. Emphasis on the unvarnished and rambling, please.
So what’s rattling round in my brain this week? Well, as I mentioned above, I have been watching the new TCM documentary series about the history of Hollywood, and I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed. Normally I fall down at the feet of everything TCM does, but this time I’m not feeling it.
I don’t know if my expectations were too high, but the series has not lived up to them. I just finished watching episode four, “Brother Can You Spare a Dream,” which focused on the years 1929 to 1941, and I’ve found that the show doesn’t seem able to get to the essence of its topic each week. This week’s episode was all about Hollywood during the Depression, and how sound technology revolutionized the industry – and yet it never really delved into the cultural impact of the Talkies or the way the movies affected Depression audiences. It gave a little lip service to these topics, but I never felt the grand sweep, the overall impact that the movies had during these years. Through four episodes so far, there’s been nothing epic about this series.
From "The Great Train Robbery," (1903).
Part of the problem is that the show is divided in its attentions right from the start. It’s “Moguls and Movie Stars,” so the focus must be split between the businessmen and the artists. This is a pretty standard approach as far as an appraisal of Hollywood history goes, but the writing of the show has been muddled because of it. It keeps jumping back and forth between the machinations of the moguls and the rise and fall of various stars, but there’s no “through line” that connects everything to something larger. I was expecting a sort of myth-building history of America, as told through the history of Hollywood (something along the lines of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary). Instead, it’s just a very rote, very surface documentary that breezes through its topic like a Cliffs Notes version of history.
Maybe each episode isn’t long enough? Maybe it was a mistake to break down each episode by decade? I know I would have liked more than an hour to cover the tumultuous and groundbreaking 1920s. I’m not sure how to fix the problem, but I’ve found that each episode is highly disposable and I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from my Film Studies 101 class. What’s even more annoying is that I was expecting these earlier episodes to be the strongest of the series, since they would be dealing with the earliest years of Hollywood in which I know very little in comparison to the more popular decades of the ‘30s, ’40, and ‘50s.
Ginger Rogers in "Gold Diggers of 1933."
In last week’s episode, Shirley Temple was given about three minutes of screen time at most. Fred Astaire got maybe a minute. The few clips that we got were brief and usually did not include much dialogue. I mean, this is the 1930s, when dialogue was everything – and snappy, quintessentially American dialogue was the great innovation of the age. Instead, everything was pretty much thrown at the viewer in a helter skelter manner, the only guiding framework being chronology. This series needs more clever montages and filmmaking chops. As it is, it’s kinda boring.
Maybe I’m being too hard. The series is certainly professionally produced and the interviews with the relatives and descendants of the moguls at least provide some new, unique perspectives. Occasionally the documentary will delve into some little known area, such as the career of female director Alice Guy, or the pioneering work of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But overall, it’s familiar stuff. And it’s not even presented in a thrilling or heart-swelling way. If a documentary like this can’t even get a classic movie obsessed gal like me to swoon, then there’s something wrong. A series like this should get me all psyched up to go watch the movies that get mentioned in each episode. Instead, I find myself relieved when the episodes are over and not really in the mood to watch any of the movies discussed.
Maybe the final three episodes will surprise me. I haven’t watched the newest one that just aired on November 29, so there’s still time for redemption. As it stands now, though, this series has been a disappointment. Normally I worship at the altar of TCM, but not this time.
By Jennifer Baldwin. I’ve never been to Disneyland’s Tomorrowland theme park. In fact, one of my biggest regrets was not visiting Disneyland while I lived in L.A. The very name itself – “Tomorrowland” – seems to encapsulate the streamlined optimism and chrome-shiny futurism of the mid-1960s. TOMORROWLAND! It’s the kind of name that promises all the greatness of tomorrow, none of the dreariness of today.
In the season four finale, Don’s ready for Tomorrowland. It might be a little fake, a little false, just maybe a little too happy and sunny with optimism, but it’s The Future, it’s Tomorrow. Megan is Don’s Tomorrowland.
She’s everything Betty is not: patient, warm, caring, easy-going, independent. She gets along with Don’s kids; she doesn’t freak out when the milkshake gets spilled. She even seems to bring out the Dick Whitman in Don (though I wonder if it’s really Megan who brings it out or if it’s really the freedom of that California world, which always seems to unleash the inner Dick Whitman).
What I find interesting is that Megan doesn’t “know” all about Don’s Dick Whitman past and yet he seems to feel that she does know the “real” him. This is in contrast to the way Don acted with Faye. She knew his secret and yet he continued to put on a mask and play a part with her, the part of suave and damaged creative genius. I should have known Don and Dr. Faye would never work out.
Don & Megan.
With Megan – whether their relationship will last or not – Don does seem to be more boyish, more smiley and at ease (in other words, more like Dick Whitman). But as always with Don, I’m left wondering if this too isn’t an act, Don “playing” the part of Dick Whitman in order to fool himself. The last shot of Don, in bed with Megan in his apartment, looking out the darkened window suggests that Faye’s words to him hold some truth: Don only likes the beginnings of things.
But isn’t that true of all of us? Aren’t the beginnings always the best? When Tomorrowland first opened in Disneyland, it was new and exciting, a thrilling glimpse into a Disney-styled future. Over the years, Disney has tried to keep the park new and futuristic, with the underlying fear that if they’re not careful, Tomorrowland will become “Yesterdayland,” and who wants yesterday?
We all want something new, something fresh. That’s one of the first essentials of advertising, after all, as Don rightly pointed out in the first season finale. “New. It creates an itch.” We all have that itch, we all long for the thing that will satisfy our longings, the thing that will let us start over again, the thing that will take us into tomorrowland and a happy future. And isn’t that new thing just over the horizon? Isn’t it some new person who comes along, a new job, a new city, a new relationship, a new life we’ve always been looking for?
Unfortunately for us – and for Don – Tomorrowland will eventually turn into Todayland, and then Yesterdayland, but we keep itching for the New.
Joan & Peggy.
I’m as skeptical as Joan and Peggy about Don’s marriage to Megan. It smacks of the “boss marries his secretary” cliché that weaker men like Roger succumb to. This isn’t quite fair to Megan, of course, because she seems much more genuine, gentler, and deeper than vapid Jane. But she’s still a bit of a wild card in that she’s so new to Don, so new to us the audience, that who knows what will happen after the marriage and beyond. Will the shiny newness of Megan wear off and turn into the hard emptiness of Betty?
I imagine Betty was once that new and shiny thing in Don’s eyes as well, but now she’s a cold, bitter, emotionally stunted woman. I’ve gone from loving Betty as a character to hating her, but her final scene in this final episode of the season has made me kind of love her again. Here’s a woman who is so desperately messed up, it’s hard not to sympathize with her a little as she touches up her make-up in anticipation for her “accidental” run-in with Don. Poor Betty! She went for the “new” in Henry Francis, only to find that this “newness” gets old pretty fast. You can see it all on her face in that final scene with Don: “What if Don and I could be together again? What if things had been different? What if I made a mistake in marrying Henry? What if Don is still The One?”
Betty & Don.
I knew she still had feelings for him, but those final moments between the two of them (especially on her side) were filled with so much wistful regret, so much melancholy, I almost couldn’t watch. Beautiful acting by January Jones and Jon Hamm. I know it’s impossible at this point, but in my fairy tale head-version of the show, Don and Betty get back together after many long years of soul searching and maturing. They meet again when they are middle aged and reconnect – older and wiser now, they are ready to be together. It’s a fantasy, of course, and one the show is unlikely to fulfill. But isn’t that what we humans do? We wish for a fantasy that can never come true? In the future, just over the horizon, in Tomorrowland, things can start anew, we can find happiness.
But Tomorrowland is a façade. It’s not the future, it’s not a new beginning. It’s just pretend. It’s a theme park attraction masquerading as a real tomorrow. We’ll have to wait and see if Don’s new life with Megan will be a real future, a real tomorrow, or if it’s all just Tomorrowland.
Megan & Don.
Some final thoughts:
• It turns out I was wrong and my cousin was right: Joan DIDN’T have an abortion. She kept the baby and Greg thinks it’s his. I have to admit, I was not expecting that. Well done, all of you who guessed it!
• Poor Doctor Faye! I went from instantly disliking her to really loving her character, but it looks like Faye just wasn’t in the cards for Don. Oh well. I think she and Don could have been great together, but Don’s still looking for home and family (something he never had as a child), and Faye just wasn’t it. Once again, Faye has all the right insights. She said Don would be married by the end of the year, and so he is (just not to her).
• Is Bert Cooper gone for good? I hope not, since Robert Morse is a legend and a delightful presence on the show. Come back, Bert!
• Finally, I loved the call back to the first episode of the season – “Who is Don Draper?” – in Sally’s line to her dad, “Who is Dick?” when she saw the name painted on Anna’s wall. Don’s answer was interesting. He doesn’t really lie; instead, he admits that he is Dick, though he doesn’t tell his daughter the complete truth. But in finally admitting a small part of his Dick Whitman identity to Sally, I’m hopeful that Don will continue to integrate his Dick and Don sides, and eventually become a whole, complete person. I’m sure this development is way down the line (if we ever get there at all), but it was a nice way to bookend the season.
Who is Don Draper? He was a man who seemed lost and out of control for part of the season, a man adrift and despairing. He was also a man who began putting his life back together, who tried to find a new identity after his marriage. He tried to improve himself, began dating again, found some measure of happiness in a relationship with Faye (and now Megan). And in his California trip, even with Anna gone, Don seemed to become more like Dick Whitman, even if it was only for a week’s vacation. As for whether this change, this integration of his two sides will continue next season, we’ll just have to stay tuned.
“If you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.”
By Jennifer Baldwin. When you’re blowing smoke, you’re lying, B.S.-ing, kissing ass. We blow smoke all the time – at work, in our relationships, in our families. In advertising, you’ve got to blow smoke in people’s eyes in order to get them to buy the product. In the business world, when it comes to your clients, you almost have to blow a little smoke to keep everybody happy. Blowing smoke implies a certain kind of magic, like a magician’s trick, where everyone knows they’re being lied to, but they let it go because they’re enjoying the spell. The problem is, you can’t blow too much smoke, or everybody wises up and the spell is broken.
Glen and Sally.
You have to blow a little smoke when you’re a kid too. In this episode, Sally’s blowing smoke, both at her mother and at her psychiatrist, Dr. Edna. She’s found a way to get them off her back, to make them think she’s a good little girl again. I’m still not sure if Sally is sincere with Dr. Edna, or if she’s just learned how to play the game, but she’s definitely trying to put smoke in her mother’s eyes.
Midge, our favorite beatnik chick, has returned – and she’s blowing smoke as well. Midge just “happens” to run into Don at his office building and invites him over to her place to meet her husband and “maybe” buy a painting. Her story works for a little while; she gets Don to her apartment. But after her heroin-addicted husband spills the beans, Don realizes he’s been had. Midge and her husband are just a couple of junkies who need money to get high. He helps Midge out, but not after realizing he’s got smoke in his eyes.
Don and Midge.
Of course, Don’s trying to blow some smoke too. With SCDP falling down around him, he’s got to schmooze and placate and woo any client he can in order to keep his agency afloat. But Don’s no account man; he’s creative. He doesn’t understand the “business man” approach to things, the financial side that guys like Lane have hardwired into their bespeckled DNA. He goes after Heinz Beans, Vinegars, and Sauces way too hard; he’s got the whiff of desperation about him. His kind of magic doesn’t work in a restaurant business meeting. He’s creative, he doesn’t know how to handle accounts. Don’s blowing too much smoke at potential clients and where there’s smoke, so the client thinks, there’s fire.
Dr. Atherton’s meeting with Phillip Morris might seem like the solution, until, once again, Don realizes (much like in the situation with Midge) he’s been snookered. The Phillip Morris people were just blowing smoke, just using SCDP as a way to get a better deal with another agency.
Atherton says that SCDP — and Don specifically — are best at working with a cigarette company. “You’re a certain kind of girl and tobacco is your ideal boyfriend.” This is what people have been saying about Don and his agency. SCDP has been all about “blowing smoke” – blowing smoke at the public for years to get them to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sterling, Cooper, and the rest of them have been “addicted” to the smoke of cigarette money for too long.
Ken, Roger, Lane and Faye.
But Don’s sick of desperately kissing ass with potential clients like the guy from Heinz; he’s sick of letting other companies like Phillip Morris B.S. him. He’s sick of being that “certain kind of girl” who’s made for tobacco. He’s done with smoke. His new strategy is to be the agency that sees clearly, that shoots straight, that “stands for something.” It’s a way of “changing the conversation,” as Peggy suggests. He’s rebranding the agency. His New York Times full-page ad is a gamble, a creative risk. It’s that perfect kind of advertising B.S. that doesn’t feel like B.S. because it has the whiff — not of desperation — but of confession, of truth.
Not that Don’s suddenly turned crusader against the health ills of cigarette smoking. But he has turned against the “addiction” of being hitched to a tobacco company. It’s no coincidence that he meditates on Midge’s “Number Four” painting before penning his open letter to the public. Midge can’t stop using heroin as Don suggests; it’s got too strong a hold. Don realizes that fear has got too strong a hold on his company – fear that they’re a cigarette agency that might not land another cigarette account.
But as Don realizes, they’re afraid because they’re addicted to the security and the money that a cigarette company can bring. The honesty behind the ad, the thing that makes it so powerful and so dangerous, is that it’s Don’s confession that he’s not going to play scared anymore.
Of course, it’s a stunt, as Peggy slyly, jokingly points out. But it has the potential to work because it’s too reckless and fearless to feel like a “stunt.” It’s too foolhardy to seem like a trick or a lie. It’s just another ad, but instead of blowing smoke in people’s eyes, it’s blowing the smoke away. Don is the master of reinvention. SCDP doesn’t have to change their name or start over. They just have to change the conversation.
Betty.
Some other quick thoughts:
• Betty needs so much help! Poor woman. She has major trust issues (who can blame her?) and it’s in an episode like this, even as she’s being a witch to Sally, that I feel sympathy for her. I hope Dr. Edna can help her. I actually think Betty could be a pretty cool chick and a good mom if she could just work through all her myriad of issues.
• Don showed quite the charitable heart this episode, what with giving Midge all the money in his wallet and paying Pete’s share of the money to keep the company afloat.
• Bert Cooper’s departure cracked me up: “Get my shoes!” Then, shoes in hand, he bids farewell to the baffled underlings.
• Jared Harris’s delivery of that line about making sure fired employees don’t steal any staplers or tape dispensers – “They do disappear” – was perfect. I love his performance on this show.
Midge, Don & Perry.
• Also, in Lane Pryce news, apparently a swift whack of Father’s cane works wonders for reuniting a man with his wife and son. Farewell to the Playboy Bunny, it seems.
• And finally, Mad Men continues its streak of showing hippies and counter-culturals in a bad light. First season, it was Midge’s pretentious beatnik loser friends getting put in their place by Don. Last season, it was the hitchhiking draft dodger who clunked Don over the head and robbed him. This season, it’s Midge and her playwright hubby as con artist junkies who guilt Don into giving them money. Maybe that’s why Joyce and Abe and the rest of Peggy’s BoHo friends feel so false as characters – they’re not con artists or drugged-out junkie losers!
By Jennifer Baldwin. This is about Film Noir, so here’s a flashback …
