"Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned." William Butler Yeats
Nathan Juran's 1958 B-movie, cult classic, full-of-camp Attack of the 50-Foot Woman is barely a step above anything Hollywood's worst, all-time director Ed Wood would make (such as Glen Or Glenda? of 1953). So why bother with it? Sometimes, what makes a film so bad, is that it's so obvious: a great drama is great because it successfully encodes all its conflicts into sterilized and acceptable plot sequences, but B-movies will often be brash and brazen about what they are wanting to say, and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman hits the limit for the brash and brazen. Anyone who has seen the film knows the word spoken most is "Harry!" for William Hudson's Harry Archer, the husband of mega-rich Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes who is always crying out for him).
While this isn't the approach I am going to take towards the film, I feel it necessary to mention that Nancy's immense stature, on a political level in 1958, could easily be referencing the United States becoming a super-power on the world scene. In 1957, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in for a second term, and his strong approach to world activities--including catching up in the Space Race with the Soviets who had launched the Sputnik satellite that year--really formed the identity of the United States and basis for our policies, for years after his administration ended. The launching of the Sputnik by the Soviets is the reason why the term "satellite" is used in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman instead of "flying saucer" or "UFO."
Yet, overall, my money is going on this being a kind of modern Adam and Eve story, with Attack of the 50-Foot Woman being about a bad husband as, we shall see The Incredible Shrinking Man is about a bad wife. The listing I made of films in the 1950s referencing the story of Adam and Eve wasn't an exercise in history; there is a reason why "Harry!" is the most (to a ludicrous level) spoken word in the film (please see The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the 1950s). Please note in the poster above, the hand of the giant coming to get Nancy in her car. It's covered with hair but when we see a full shot of the giant, his head is bald. The lack of hair on the head shows a lack of thoughts, a lack of intelligence (nothing is there) but what is there (the head) is plain for all to see so this translates into Harry's motivations for marrying and then trying to get rid of Nancy: it's plain for all to see.
One of the title cards for the opening showing the desert.
The desert which Nancy drives through (the first moments we see her) when she encounters the alien provides us with a tragic sense of how "dry" her marriage is (which we can contrast to her drinking problem, because she doesn't find love in her husband, she takes to the bottle to "water the desert" that are her emotions; which is why everyone thinks she's been drinking when she tells them about seeing the giant man, she wants Harry's attention). The 30 foot-tall alien is symbolic of Harry, because--like the alien--he wants Nancy's diamond, the "Star of India" (there are a couple of references to elephants in the film, likening the diamond from India to Nancy's very identity).
After seeing Harry flirting with Honey, Nancy drives off into the desert and sees the alien. As she tries to get away, her car engine stalls. If we can take that "alien" to be Harry and Nancy finally seeing Harry for what he is because of the events of that night, then, symbolically, Nancy not being able to get her engine started means she "loses heart" over leaving Harry because she needs him so much... no, it doesn't make sense, but when they are at home that night, that is exactly what happens, she talks about how much she needs him, and it's easier for Nancy to accuse Harry of flirting and making an effort at getting him to drop Honey then to outright leave him and fully realize he's cheating on her.
Harry means "hairy" in the film, specifically, that Harry is a man fueled by is appetite for money; Honey Parker his mistress, tells him, "We have the same sickness, money," and regrettably, Nancy has $50 million dollars. But Harry is "hairy" because of his appetites for drink, money and sex. The alien, then, is Harry, 30 feet tall who appears to be "dominating" Nancy by his height; he's an alien because he has become "alien" to her, no longer acting like her husband, but someone who is single. The "satellite" or bubble the alien arrives in is symbolic of the way of Nancy "seeing through" the charade/wall that Harry had been putting on with Nancy about his "innocent" relationship with Honey. Nancy and Harry going out that evening was the "vehicle" (like the alien craft) for Nancy to realize what Harry really was (the alien revealing himself to Nancy) and it happening on the road symbolizes the road of their lives together/relationship.
The only shot I could find of the giant alien in the upper-left corner. Please note Nancy's clothes, of course, no where does she actually put on this outfit, but this is a trend in 1950s films with women: women will be seen to change their clothes several times for no apparent reason, but that's because women in the '50s were "always changing" themselves and the clothes merely illustrated their mood changes and role changes. The outfit Nancy wears looks rather primitive, as if invoking the caveman era (we will see Scott Carey wearing a caveman-esque robe in The Incredible Shrinking Man) and this intentionally takes us back to that "Adam and Eve" theme running throughout the 1950s and re-examining the most fundamental beliefs about relationships.
As the film opens, it's with a newscast of people around the world who have spotted this "satellite." One in the Barents Sea, another in Cairo, then one is Auckland, New Zealand and the telecaster says, "It should be passing over our California desert any minute." Why does this happen? Because in each case, it was spotted by a man, and that means, generally, men of the 1950s, all over the world, could see what kind of man Harry Archer really was: someone making his living off a woman. At one point, when the Sheriff and Jess, Nancy's life-long butler, have found the alien's craft, they enter and see large diamonds in balls and deduce that the diamonds power the alien and the craft in some way. In another scene, as Harry gets Nancy ready for bed after her encounter, he takes the diamond from around her neck and puts it in his shirt pocket, then shows it to Honey that night and tells her it will be hers if she waits a little longer.
Honey Parker and Harry Archer at Tony's Bar discussing Nancy.
Nancy's diamond, then, literally keeps Harry going to get rid of her so he can be with Honey; it (and the money used to buy the diamond) fuels Harry to even be willing to commit murder. Another interesting detail Attack of the 50 Foot Woman utilizes are the scratches around Nancy's neck where her doctors speculate the alien took the diamond necklace from and which is probably how the radiation (causing her gigantic stature) entered her system.
To me, this is the best moment of the B-film, when it takes on some film noir characteristics. Harry has decided to take Nancy's life by giving her a lethal dose of one of her sedatives, in the very immediate foreground of this shot. As he prepares to go up the stairs to her room, the light (left side wall) casts Harry's shadow against the stair well until it "unites" with his figure, going up the stairs. At the base of the stairs, he has turned his back on a portrait of a woman, literally meaning that he has turned his back on Nancy "as a woman," and this is the reason why she suddenly becomes a monster. The ascent up the stairs means that he is fully conscious of what he is doing and is ready to do it.
When an animal hunts another animal, it is customary to "go for the jugular," the large vein in the throat and that's exactly what Harry has done to his wife, clawed at her to get to her wealth, symbolized by the great diamond she wears. No where is Harry's lowliness as a man and husband more apparent than when Harry and Nancy have been driving through the desert, looking for the alien, and they spot it; Nancy gets out of the car and is attacked by it, but Harry turns and drives off, leaving her there. This is when Nancy gets the diamond stolen and the radiation exposure. This has two purposes symbolically. Recall, that even when Nancy is 50 feet tall, the deputy says, "I'm not going to shoot at a lady," to let us know that he still sees Nancy as human and a lady, not like Harry who sees others as he sees himself: a monster.
Harry went to save Honey but wouldn't save Nancy.
The reason Harry and Nancy drive out into the desert looking for the alien is that it illustrates the confrontation. Now viewers of the film will say, they had a confrontation the night before but those were just the verbal confrontations. This is how "sick" Nancy is: when she shows the alien to Harry, she's showing Harry himself, how gross he has become to her, and she rejoices about it, because she's right. She can't rejoice that Harry loves her, she can only rejoice that she wasn't imagining that Harry was cheating on her and trying to use her for her money, she was right he really is (think of Ingrid Bergman's character in the 1944 thriller Gaslight when her husband--like Harry Archer--tries to convince his wife she's going crazy and she's happy to find out she's not, in both cases, he really was after her wealth and trying to kill her).
Harry, in the driver's seat (like what Honey was talking about) looking for the alien with Nancy when she spots "flashes of light" which symbolically indicates the "flashes of understanding" and illumination about what Harry has done in the past (her looking behind her, reviewing their relationship). At one point, Jess and the sheriff take a station wagon Nancy has and they go and look for the alien. The alien picks up the station wagon and demolishes it: if the alien is Harry, and station wagons can symbolize a family vehicle, then Harry's unwillingness to have children with Nancy contributes to his dehumanizing of her, because it is "natural" to want to have children and re-produce, it is unnatural to avoid doing so.
The second way this scene communicates to us is by showing us how Harry, a very "small man" in moral stature now, prefers a small woman: Honey Parker. Like honey, Honey drips and oozes but is also very sticky, and like her last name suggests, Harry thinks life with her will be a "park" compared to Nancy. But Harry Archer is an "archer," he shoots everything down and kills it with his un-Cupid-like archery skills (this is why Honey and Nancy both die). Honey is used to invoke "sweet as honey," but not in a good way, more like a cavity-way, because the appetites of both "Harry the hairy" and "Honey the sticky," everyone knows who to blame for Nancy's troubles.
As Nancy goes on her rampage throughout town looking for Harry, a young couple who get into a car and start making out sees Nancy heading for them. It serves as a warning to them (and to all young couples) not to get married because of their sexual appetites and lusts, i.e., not to let sex become the "vehicle" (the car they are parked in) of marriage because marriage is so difficult, it requires more than money and attraction to make a marriage work. This shot displays Nancy's state of being well: while we could dismiss it, saying it was just the clever projection of her image over the backdrop screen to make her look big, it also means that Nancy is only a shadow of her former self.
Why does Nancy grow to become the 50-foot woman?
When Harry decides to give Nancy a lethal injection of her sedative, it's also, at least on one level, symbolic of the sex act (injecting her) and basically raping her, dismissing her humanity, just as he turns his back to the portrait of the woman at the foot of the stairs, he turns his back on Nancy's humanity and human needs. So, to Harry, if she's not human, she's a monster, a monster to him just as Harry is a monster to Nancy. That's why Nancy keeps saying "Harry!" throughout the film, our name and our recognition of our name is a unique and singular identifying feature of us as individuals and human beings (as in Silence of the Lambs, when the Senator makes a commercial appealing to her daughter's captor and uses her daughter's name over and over again). By invoking Harry's humanity, Nancy wants to remind Harry of her humanity, but by the time she's 50 feet tall, it doesn't really matter anymore.
Nancy taking her husband "in hand." Please remember this shot, it's important.
When Nancy picks up Harry, and he says that she's squeezing him to death, it's because Harry didn't hold Nancy when he had the chance and when she needed him the most. Like in When Harry Met Sally, and Harry (Billy Crystal) rhetorically asks how long a man has to hold a woman after sex until he can leave, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman's Harry only wants to have the world served up to him, he doesn't want any responsibilities he has to fulfill.
Nancy grows to be 50 feet tall because she has $50 million dollars.
What would normally be an asset for a man (wealth) becomes a lability for Nancy, rather obnoxiously pointed out by the news broadcaster. The image just below, with the electric tower, is really great because it shows how much "power" Nancy has and how she's using it destructively (destroying herself by falling for a "small man"). In terms of the 1950s, this is the point of the "power struggle," that when women have power (literally, the image below) they use it to harm themselves and others because if a woman cannot find a man that can dominate her (Harry was 30 feet tall to Nancy, she wanted him to dominate her and be worthy of her respect and love, but he wasn't) she turns against herself and her gifts and qualities that should have been used to give life and happiness to others (the power lines below), and in turn, happiness to herself, becomes destructive to her (please see The Medusa Within: Clash Of the Titans for more on the dual nature of women).
And, lastly, the references to elephants.
The reference the newscaster makes to elephants, and then the elephant syringe the doctors order to give the gigantic Nancy her medicine, all points to the same dehumanization by the townspeople that Harry did to Nancy: Nancy was nothing but her fortune symbolized by the diamond from India (where there are elephants). When the sheriff goes to investigate the alien Nancy saw, he tells the deputy that, because Nancy pays the taxes around there, they are going to go and have a look.
Nancy chained like an animal with meat hooks.
In relationship to the atomic bomb being dropped, it was easy for people to reduce others to their economic values (or less) because life became so cheap in World War II (including the horrors committed in concentration camps and just the things that people do during wars). Instead of valuing life more because of the dramatic loss of life, people valued other people even less, and it is the social documents that film presents to us that reminds us of how culture and society changed and how film documented that change.
Honey hiding under a table because she doesn't want Nancy to find her.
In conclusion, it's typical of scientists in the 1950s to say that they have absolutely no idea of what is the problem, or the solution, or the cause, or the future of a disease or other phenomena, and part of that, I believe, is because it has to do with the most complicated being on earth, the human, and our mind, specifically when it involves love. My point of going through these films is to try and establish a counter-thesis to the long-held assumption that these films are really about aliens or monsters that symbolize the Communists and instead are about ourselves, and how the changes socially and culturally taking place in America in the 1950s were reflected in our art.
All one has to do is examine a time line of films made during the 1950s, year by year, to see the battle lines of gender warfare being drawn out, stars taking sides, casualties mounting and points being scored and lost on both sides, as the mundane daily lives of Americans clearly picked sides until, regardless of how desperately Hollywood was trying to teach Americans lessons of the consequences of what they were doing, America changed forever, from the macro demographics of the work place to the micro politics of each individual family and relationship.
In the 1950s, there are three references to Adam and Eve: in 1950, both All About Eve(winner of Best Picture that year) and Adam's Rib were made (as well as Victor Mature’s and Heddy Lamar’s Samson and Delilah with David and Bathsheba in the next year and Jean Simmons and Richard Burton in The Robe) then The Three Faces of Eve was made in 1957 and for which Joanne Woodward won Best Actress. Likewise, in 1957, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was made, starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum, which provides us an idyllic island in the middle of the Pacific war, with an illustration of Adam and Eve on their island.Why is this important? It shows that there was a desperation to re-examine and understand the most basic relationship that there is, that between a man and a woman, and how that knowledge was being used to create a battle plan against dangerous attempts to change the dynamics of relationships.
This is truly a great film; if you haven't seen it, do, it's not only great for Christians to watch, but provides an invaluable insight into the gender debates raging in the 1950s, and I do mean "raging."
There is a fourth film made during the 1950’s referencing the Christian understanding of, not only how God created the world, but the order which establishes the world: East of Eden starring James Dean. When we think of James Dean today, even when we think of the 1950s today, we think of Rebel Without A Cause, but the important fact is, it’s East of Eden which earned more money than Rebel, and earned Dean his Academy nomination (posthumously since he died in the car crash). In East of Eden, Dean's mother plays a prostitute who abandoned her family to own a brothel and made quite a bit of money doing it. But in the middle of all this is Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments of 1956, starring Charleston Huston and is still a classic today.
"So let it be written, so let it be done."
Why is this listing of films important?
It maps out the shifts in thinking, the central arguments of what was going on in marriages, families, Churches, the work place, and within individuals in a way regular political history cannot illuminate for us. Two films complimenting each other well, is Roman Holiday of 1953 (for which Audrey Hepburn won her Oscar for Best Actress) and Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest of 1959. In Roman Holiday, Princess Ann is a member of the royal family who wants to step off her pedestal and enjoy life; in North By Northwest, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) has slipped off her pedestal and wants Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) to put her back up there, which he does at the end when they are together.
These are the tensions that women's changing roles created and their own inner battles between their sexuality, religion, emotions, social standing, economic freedom and personal needs were the constant material for films throughout the 1950s. Women represented by Princess Ann in Roman Holiday had been on a pedestal before World War II, and going into the factories to work and being without their husbands and fathers, forced them to adapt to new ways of life. Regardless of what we think, these are facts that we can clearly trace back to films and the ways in which both men and women were being torn apart inside and out.Were women going to continue being women or were they going to start being men? Were women going to continue to be the civilizing force of society and culture or were they going to give free reign to their appetites and do whatever they wanted? That is the question film was asking in the 1950s.
William Wyler's 1953 romantic comedy, Roman Holiday.
The Three Faces of Eve succinctly summarizes the inner-conflict of women in the 1950s; this isn't the story of just one woman torn between being a "self-effacing housewife" and mother, and Eve Black, the fun-loving promiscuous woman, but every American woman: there were career women torn between their economic roles and their desire to have a family, then there were housewives torn by a feeling of responsibility and desire for a professional career and ever greater demands by society, culture and their family. The Three Faces of Eve is based on an actual case, but once it hits the big-screen, we can see how clues hidden in other films here and there were pointing to this exact same phenomena all over the country, in nearly ever family.
Joanne Woodward as Eve Black in The Three Faces of Eve.
Elmer Gantry, from 1960 starring Jean Simmons as Sister Sharon Falconer and Burt Lancaster in the title role, would bring woman back down from her pedestal in a very religious context: while Shirley Jones plays an Oscar-winning prostitute (shocking considering that she had been playing a prim and proper lady in Oklahoma!), Sister Falconer is a devout Christian evangelist, going around and preaching revivals but, in the end, is seduced by Gantry. After her seduction, Sister Falconer holds a revival meeting in a tent and a man comes forward whom she heals of deafness and then the tent burns down, ending her career as a female preacher. The opening of the man’s ears isn’t a sign of power she has gained as a result of being seduced, that she has been given power and liberty in being freed of the bonds of her virginity, rather, the man is the audience, whose ears are now opened to hear the message, not the message Sister Falconer is preaching, but the whole film: women must be protected or society will burn down and they must be protected from men.
Shirley Jones in her Oscar winning performance as a prostitute in Elmer Gantry
To Feminists, this is pouring hot coals over their head: “Protected from what or whom? Women have every right to indulge their sexual needs just like men and anyone who suggests that women should be at home barefoot and pregnant should be mummified because you are so obviously out-of-touch with reality." I think it's reality, though, that supports what I am saying, not only reality in the 1950's, but reality today. The primary difference between Feminists and those propounding a "more traditional femininity" is that Feminists think of themselves first and only in terms of economical and social standing; women who support femininity think of those who depend upon them, their husbands and children, and think of themselves in terms of what they can offer others, the emotional care and nourishment they can provide to individuals and society.
There is another major difference between Feminists and the feminine. Like Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins (1964) singing, “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they are rather stupid.” Feminists have reduced men to political, social and economic entities (void of humanity and life) just as Feminists claim men reduced women to dumb baby-making machines (non-political entities void of thought and talent).
Ray Milland and Jane Wyman in The Lost Weekend. His appetite for alcohol is waged against her appetites apparent by her leopard-skinned coat, but they work everything out in the end, because she has faith in him. Feminists would, of course, laugh at this, but being that "help mate" to man, helping him get to heaven, is why woman is at the pinnacle of creation and why she should humbly nourish the love within herself so she can give it to others who are in need of it.
After World War II, the crisis happening with men and their sense of masculinity, their individual and collective identities (best summarized immediately after the war in The Lost Weekend of 1946, the story of alcohol addiction, which won both Best Picture and Ray Milland’s Best Actor Oscar), were bulldozed over by women who were concerned with putting themselves on men's levels, that to Feminists was "equality," but to traditional femininity was being lowered, because woman was created as the pinnacle of all other things; for this reason, (as I have stated elsewhere in my discussion on Irene Adler and Mary Morstan from Sherlock Holmes) films were trying to understand why women would want to go from being a Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, to being Eve Kendall in North By Northwest?
In the middle of all this is a woman not associated with Feminism, known throughout the world for her acting and beauty who made a definite stance, but as been discriminated against by Feminists: Elizabeth Taylor. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958) illustrates in the marriage of Cooper and Mae Pollitt the “hen pecked husband” dominated by his wife, while Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) and her wounded husband Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman) show us a broken marriage trying to be fixed, but a marriage of emotional equality and equality in sacrifice.
If we know where we have been, we can see the direction we are going in, and the films Miss Taylor did in the 1950's made their completed statements throughout the 1960s. The epic Cleopatra (1963) intimately portrays the full days of a queen and the lonely nights of a woman, delivering a most succinct message to women of what their choice is (either advance in the political sphere or in the emotional sphere but both at the same time is not possible), but it is a choice, they can’t have it both ways, because then they will end up with neither. Butterfield 8 of 1960, for which Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar, graphically details the insecurity and consequences of the sexually promiscuous woman and the damage she brings to herself, others and society at large when she gives free rein to her appetites (it’s a wonderfully done film and I hope to post on it soon).
Why are the 1950s important? Why should we bother with it?
This summer, Battleship is going to be released. While we could say that there have been a steady stream of alien films since the 1950s, films such as Transformers, Cowboys & Aliens, The Thing, Apollo 18, these films have linked us back up with the 1950s and will build upon the vocabulary established there and it was in the science fiction genre that the gender battle found its strongest weapons and so made its strangest statements that were being made in the great dramas of the day, but were better articulated in the sci-fi shows. Before we can explore film noir, or the big epic films, I will do some of the smaller, sci-fi films and then build upon that. Then, as films continue being released, we will all ready have a solid, stable vocabulary to build upon.
The future is in their hands, what will they choose to do with their lives?
As I said, films that win awards decide what films will be made in the future and help us fill out those local area "Guess the Oscar Winner" ballots so we can win free movie tickets; however, I am not alone in this but I am in the minority, the Screen Actors Guild Awards are not very reliable determiners of who will win the Oscar, but in and of itself, it is a prestigious award that carries quite a bit of weight in Hollywood; so, winner listed first, nominees in the category following:
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
You have probably never heard of Demian Bichir, but he has been placed in the company of George Clooney and Brad Pitt as a candidate to receive this year's Academy Award for Best Actor in a leading role for his performance in A Better Life directed by Chris Weitz. Mr. Bichir is absolutely fantastic in this role because you not only see his pain, but you see him trying to hide his pain, you see him want to get angry but choose not to for the sake of his son Luis (Jose Julian, who himself does a fabulous job, I would much rather see him up for Best Supporting Actor than Christopher Plummer in Beginners) who is in a fragile position as he makes decisions between LA gang life on the streets or a future working and earning an honest living.
Demian Bichir as Carlos and Jose Julian as Luis in A Better Life.
A Better Life is closely based on the Italian Neo-Realism film from 1948 The Bicycle Thief/Bicycle Thieves which won an Honorary Oscar for Best Foreign Language film and is usually in critics' top ten list of best films ever made. There are some important differences between the two films: The Bicycle Thief takes place in post-Fascist Italy, after the disastorous reign of Benito Mussolini who got Italy into World War II on the side of the Nazis. The Bicycle Thief is an incredible yet simple parable of how the "vehicle" of Italy getting back on its feet after the catastrophes of World War II were proving futile and hopeless. Likewise, A Better Life provides us with a view of the difficulties of making it in today's economy but also takes the time to show us how doing the right thing doesn't always pay off in monetary terms, but does pay off.
The Bicycle Thief, critically acclaimed as one of the greatest films ever made.
You are bound to have an oppinion on the question of immigration by Mexicans into the United States, and ABetter Life does show you what their life is like, but it is also full of valuable symbols that holds up a mirror to our country and shows us sides that perhaps we didn't know existed. One symbol is a constant in Catholic iconography (Carlos is Catholic, we know this by images hanging up within his home) and Carlos is a gardener, a lawn man. The spiritual significance is that our souls and their spiritual growth are often likened to a garden, as in the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Olives, and after Christ's Resurrection, Mary Magdalen mistakes Jesus for the gardener. In terms of the film, Carlos is capable of the hardships he is about to undergo because his garden/soul is well-tended and he knows who to grow "the flowers of virtue" instead of the weeds of sin and vice.
Carlos up in a palm tree as part of his job just as Santiago steals his truck from him. When Carlos has climbed to the top of the palm tree, he admires the beautiful view he sees, and then sees his truck stolen. The view symbolizes wisdom because wisdom can see far and wide compared to fools who can only see what is in front of them, and it is the wisdom that Carlos' hard life has taught him that aids him in getting through this trial. Being "up a tree" correlates to Christ hanging on the Tree of the Cross (Carlos is using a strap system to climb up it, literally hanging onto the tree) and also reminds us of Zacchaeus who climbed up the tree to see Christ passing.
The flowers of virtue within Carlos' soul are shown again and again throughout the film: one example is when he and Luis have finally found Santiago, the man who stole Carlos' truck, and Carlos discovers that Santiago sold the truck and sent the money back home to Mexico. Luis will not stop kicking and beating Santiago, on the parking lot ground, but Carlos realizes that is not the way to deal with him and makes Luis stop, although it appears that Santiago has ruined his life. The greatest moments of acting, however, come from the horrible moments he has with his son, desperately trying to both bond with his son and show him his love for Luis while still respecting the man he is becoming and yet chastizing him when he doesn't have the right morals and position on something.
There's a scene where Carlos and Luis have found the nightclub where Santiago washes dishes but it doesn't open until later, so they go to a nearby rodeo. In The Bicycle Thief, this corresponds to the part where father and son go to a restaurant and have a rarely enjoyed meal. While The Bicycle Thief compares the two classes, Carlos compares his son to the native Mexican heritage from which he came to the streets of LA; while The Bicycle Thief shows father and son eating, A Better Life shows father and son watching aspects of their homeland that they no longer have contact with and "eating that up," as a kind of spiritual nourishment for the tasks still ahead of them (granted, Carlos and Luis do have a mean while at the rodeo, however, the colors, language, music and activities are their main focus, not the food).
This is an apartment where Santiago was living when he stole Carlos' truck. When Luis and Carlos enter, there are people everywhere in the small place, sleeping and living in every inch. They are able to find it by Luis calling his dad's cell phone which was in the truck when Santiago stole it. The phone symbolizes "the calling" to which Carlos made an act of faith by buying the truck and going into business for himself and Santiago stealing the truck, the vehicle of making Carlos' dream come true, was also stealing Carlos' calling to be a gardener. This is repeated in the prison when a gang member walks by Carlos and steals his $5 "calling" card from him and Carlos, holding onto the man's arm, gets it back by an act of emotional strength over brute physical strength.
Towards the end, when Luis has come to see his father before Carlos is deported, Luis brings him a bag of "things" he will need but that is really symbolic (because Luis has displayed so much anger and disrespect towards his father throughout the film) of Luis giving his dad the spiritual and emotional things he will need to get through this journey; similarly, Carlos answers a question Luis put to him while they were at the rodeo: "Why do all these poor people have children? Why did you have me?"
But when Luis and Carlos go to the rodeo, it symbolizes how they are not only riding their own untamed fears over what will happen if they do not find the truck, but the gaps in their relationship with each other. I could be mistaken, however, I believe Luis has an image of the Virgin Mary on his T-shirt, which means that Mary is "on his heart," and protecting him from the rabid influences that are trying to work against him.
While he is in chains, in a prison, about to be deported, Carlos, who has had everything taken from him down to his bare skin, gives Luis the emotional and psychological things Luis will need to get through his journey he is to take. One of those things being the song that they had heard at the rodeo, and what it means. Luis figures out that it wasn't his mother who had sung it to him when he was a baby, as Carlos told him, but that Carlos himself had sung it to him. The song is about a man who wanted a pair of shoes with a duck's bill on the end of them, but the shoemaker cheated him and gave him plain shoes instead. The purpose of this is that the shoes symbolize Carlos' will, how he wanted one thing in life, a better material life for he and Luis, but God gave him a different life, that doesn't seem better, but when we see Luis at the end, we know that only because of the events that have taken place, Carlos' hopes for Luis to have a better life have come true.
With director Chris Weitz, the marks of a great director are all over this film.
In conclusion, we all say that we want a better life, but like the hip-hop song Luis listens to in the film, we generally think of that in terms of better material living, not better spiritual, psychological and emotional living, but A Better Life makes it clear that both Carlos and Luis have gotten a better life by receiving the fruits of the spirit, the gifts of faith, love and patience that we never want God to give us, but which He desires to give us abundantly, and which comes to us in the very moments when we believe we have lost our life, but He is giving us Life.
The atomic cloud over Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945.
On August 6, 1945, mankind committed an act of mass murder that would forever haunt us. President Harry S. Truman decided to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan that was as devastating to the human soul as Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. The world has not been the same since. Just as Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, so the entire world seemed to be in revolt against mankind for spreading nuclear radiation that spread like sin itself.
Why is any of this important?
Granted, it was decades ago, and radiation never caused giant rabbits to overrun Washington D.C., or attacks from giant lobsters to destroy a high school dance, and massive tarantulas never carried off the women folk; but the most influential directors in Hollywood today grew up with those films where those things did happen, and they still reference them in their work. Further, the visual language with which we are familiar today really started becoming mainstream then, and it's in these "campy" sci-fi films that some of the most basic moral dogmas are encoded at a time when everything seemed uncertain. The following clip is a Turner Classic Movies channel documentary called Watch the Skies, about the influence of sci-fi films on Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, James Cameron and all of American society (the rest of the hour long documentary may be viewed at Youtube here).
So if TCM has all ready solved the importance of sci-fi films, why am I covering?
I think they are all wrong.
Films such as Them! and The Thing From Another World, and Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Blob and The Monolith Monsters, wasn't about them, the Communists, they were about us, the ones who dropped the bomb, the world we created and what we became when we dropped the bomb: those giant ants, rabbits, spiders, tomatoes, whatever you want to cite, wasn't about everything else growing so big, it was about how smallwe became when we indiscriminately unleashed the effects of technology against a city of humans utterly unprepared for what we were going to do. It wasn't that aliens were attacking us, but that we had become alien to ourselves and couldn't recognize ourselves anymore. The "alien within us" effected us from the country's status as a superpower to our sexual relationships and the relationship between parents and their children.
The climax of giant creature-features.
I am not, under any circumstances, making a historical judgment on whether or not it was the right thing to do by dropping the bomb, but the questions and doubts lingering in the unconscious of people living after the dropping of the bomb and for whom the sci-fi films of the 1950's provided that catharsis of seeing, not them, but ourselves is the center of my focus.The science fiction, giant creature-feature films didn't end until 1975 when budding director Steven Spielberg made his film Jaws, "regarded as a watershed film in motion picture history, the father of the summer blockbuster." I will be going into extensive analysis on Jaws, but, like Them! or any of the other giant creature features, the Great White shark was a giant, 25 feet long, and like the films Spielberg grew up with, it directly dealt with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is really the cornerstone to what was happening from 1945 throughout the 1950s. Watch the Skies says that The Incredible Shrinking Man is really just the opposite of creatures becoming giants (part 2 of the film), but I hold that it's the exact same thing, because size is relative, when ants become giants, we become ants. In The Incredible Shrinking Man, Scott Carey, on a boat off the California coast, is overtaken by a radiation cloud and from that day on, he begins getting smaller and smaller. The following trailer for the film doesn't show any of the great clips from The Incredible Shrinking Man, (we'll save that for my upcoming post) but it is narrated by none other than the great Orson Welles (please note how this still image in the trailer you see here resembles the poster art for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo):
But the point is, as men were getting smaller women were becoming larger. This is the basic point of my contention with Spielberg, Lucas, Scott and Cameron: their interpretations of the 1950 sci-fi thrillers as vehicles of paranoia about Communism doesn't apply to other genres of film at the time, the film noir or Westerns, or dramas. Rebel Without a Cause has moments and hints of the Cold War (Plato being cold all the time, for example) but there isn't anything about Communism or suspected Communism in there, but the film is full of how small and insignificant Jim (James Dean) feels and how "the kids" at school treat others (please see James Dean vs Charles Darwin: Rebel Without A Cause).For an historical analysis of film to work, we have to be able to trace aspects of it to other genres and the Communist threat isn't there. However, the sexual role reversal as a result of radiation contact is evident in the 1958 film, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman:
What is the conflict between the man who is shrinking into nothing and the woman growing into a colossal? As I mentioned, both of the mutant sizes are the result of radiationthey didn't win the war, the bomb won the war, and that feeling of shame, and the responsibility of killing women and children because of the bomb dropping on them, was what caused men to lose their self-respect, and that is the radiation cloud which causes men to grow small and simultaneously caused women to become empowered, because the men lost the war on the front line, but the women won the war on the home front; it wasn't just the Rosie Riveters from war production faculties that "rose up" (grew) to the challenge of supplying the Allied Powers with war equipment, but that men shrunk from their duty to solidly defeat the enemy.
This horrible dichotomy was at least partially repressed by the incredible rise of consumerism in the 1950s, the "buying power" that a loss of power here could be compensated by a gaining in power there. These are bits and pieces that we can find in films such as The Best Years of Our Lives, The Asphalt Jungle, Sunset Boulevard, many Westerns such as Shane and nearly all the film noir films.
Robert Mitchum, Out of the Past, 1947.
I am making some pretty bold claims, however, I have also been researching them for over ten years and in great films and bad films, the same holds true that we were more interested in ourselves artistically than in the Communists (which was mostly a political agenda that individuals could capitalize upon for their careers). I will be posting on films throughout the next month on this topic and within this theme to explore how Hollywood could make a great films like James Dean's East of Eden and the same year make It Came From Beneath the Sea! and the two films be basically about the same thing, concerned with the same consequences.
While this isn't the approach I am going to take towards the film, I feel it necessary to mention that Nancy's immense stature, on a political level in 1958, could easily be referencing the United States becoming a super-power on the world scene. In 1957, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in for a second term, and his strong approach to world activities--including catching up in the Space Race with the Soviets who had launched the Sputnik satellite that year--really formed the identity of the United States and basis for our policies, for years after his administration ended. The launching of the Sputnik by the Soviets is the reason why the term "satellite" is used in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman instead of "flying saucer" or "UFO." 
Yet, overall, my money is going on this being a kind of modern Adam and Eve story, with Attack of the 50-Foot Woman being about a bad husband as, we shall see The Incredible Shrinking Man is about a bad wife. The listing I made of films in the 1950s referencing the story of Adam and Eve wasn't an exercise in history; there is a reason why "Harry!" is the most (to a ludicrous level) spoken word in the film (please see The Decade Of Turmoil: Film In the 1950s). Please note in the poster above, the hand of the giant coming to get Nancy in her car. It's covered with hair but when we see a full shot of the giant, his head is bald. The lack of hair on the head shows a lack of thoughts, a lack of intelligence (nothing is there) but what is there (the head) is plain for all to see so this translates into Harry's motivations for marrying and then trying to get rid of Nancy: it's plain for all to see.
Nancy grows to be 50 feet tall because she has $50 million dollars.
And, lastly, the references to elephants.
