redeeming families
by Douglas Messerli
A.B.
Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher (screenplay, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer),
George Stevens (director) Shane / 1953
Pier
Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Teorema
(Theorem) / 1968
Hugh
Wheeler (screenplay, based on the novel by Harry Kressing), Harold Prince
(director) Something for Everyone /
1970
Quite
by accident, I ordered two films from Netflix back to back that I would never
have thought to pair, but which share the same narrative and themes: George
Stevens’ 1953 classic, Shane, and
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 movie, Teorema.
On the surface, these films are obviously
quite very different; there is no real sex, for example, in Shane, while Pasolini’s Visitor has sex with
all family members, including their maid. Shane,
moreover, is clearly without the Marxist
and Roman Catholic messages of Teorema.
But for all that, the films are quite similar in their plots and significance.
As in the Pasolini work, a visitor (Alan
Ladd) appears out of nowhere and is quickly welcomed to live with a the family,
in this case working as a hired hand.
Almost as in Teorema the young boy, Joey (Brandon deWilde) immediately takes a
liking to the handsome visitor, as does Shane to the boy. Clearly, there
is no sexual relationship between the two (while there most certainly is one between the young
teen and the Visitor in Teorema),
but it is clear that Shane is absolutely worshiped by Joey, and, at one point,
Joey tells his mother even that he “loves” the stranger. Perhaps it is just their
good acting and the easy comfort with one another, but Ladd and deWilde do seem
absolutely delighted in each other's presence, winking and smiling every time their
eyes come to rest on each other.* Joey’s mother (Jean Arthur), knowing
that one day Shane will have to leave, warns her son not to love him too much.
Even if we acknowledge the fact that it is Shane’s ability to use a gun that most attracts the
boy, the obvious Freudian implications of that make it clear that it is the
Shane’s western masculinity that draws the boy to him. One of my friends
recently suggested that the relationship is so close to sexuality (which in
this instance would be pedophilia)—the boy, dressed only in his night shirt,
even visits Shane sleeping in the barn early one morning—that it is amazing
that the director “got away with it.” It might have been even more interesting
and controversial had Stevens been able to cast Ladd’s role with his first
choice, Montgomery Clift, a gay actor.
If her husband, Joe Starrett (Van
Heflin), demonstrates little jealousy of Shane, it maybe because, he too,
obviously is attracted to the man and enjoys his company. Hardly have the two
met when Shane sheds his shirt and helps Starrett remove a front-yard stump
that the farmer has been trying to remove for years. He, too, changes his whole
demeanor whenever Shane appears.
By single-handedly fighting and beating
the entire gang, Shane emboldens the Starretts and others to remain on their
land. And by determining to take on the gunslinger, Jack Wilson (Jack Palance)
Ryker has hired to kill Starrett, Shane saves his friend’s life. Even as Shane
wrestles Starrett to prevent him from going alone to Ryker’s headquarters, it
appears the two are more engaged in a sexual embrace than in a true battle, and
it takes a gun (again with all its Freudian associations) to knock him out. Once
Shane accomplishes the act, he immediately gets water to help the loser to be
quickly returned to consciousness.
Now that he has restored meaning to the
Starrett’s lives, he, like Pasolini’s beautiful hero, must leave, despite young
Joey’s moan of despair: “Shaaaane, don’t go.”
Of course, Pasolini has a very different
notion of families. If in Stevens’ tale the family is at the center of life,
crucial for the survival of his pioneers, the Italian director’s utterly
bourgeois family life has delimited and thwarted the desires and personalities
of its individual members.
Observing the stranger’s pants and
underwear laid out on couch, the bourgeois mother of this brood (Silvano
Mangano) undresses and lays out on the balcony to await the return of the
Visitor, at play with their dog. She too gets what she seeks.
Their daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) is the
next to seek his charms, and is finally awakened in the process to her own
sexuality.
Just as soon, having provided each of these insular individuals the love
they apparently needed, the angel-postman returns to announce the Visitor’s
departure. And over the few hours that remain each of the family members reveal
to the stranger how he has utterly changed them.
The “theorem” of Pasolini’s title has
been, clearly, that love changes everything; but the ways it changes each of them
remains the subject of the second half of the director’s film.
As I have already hinted, unlike Shane the stranger’s presence does not bring
the family closer together, but frees them to leave family life, some for
better and others for worse, depending upon their own abilities or inabilities
to face the past, present, and future.
The Daughter—who now claims she has
nothing to look forward too since the very best thing to have happened to her has been
the Visitor’s encounter with her—becomes catatonic and is carried off to an
institution.
The Husband, completely transformed by
his sexual revelation, seems to be the only one who embraces the
future. Giving away his large factory to his employees, he catches the eye of a
young good-looking man before stripping off his clothes in the middle of a
train station, and, metaphorically speaking, voyaging into a lava desert, a new
world in which he cannot imagine what he might find and in which may not
even survive.
The dissolution of the family brings these
individuals similar pleasures to Shane’s removal of the threats to family life
in the American work.
While writing on the two films above,
yet another film came to mind, with once again a very similar structure, and
yet again different results. Harold Prince’s Sommething for Everyone of 1970 begins with another handsome
stranger’s visit to a family, this family ensconced in a grand estate, even
though the Countess Herthe von Ornstein (Angela Lansbury) has little money left. The visitor,
this time round is named Konrad (Michael York during his pretty boy period)
and seems, at first, just to want to work for the family, quickly dispensing a
previous servant by revealing to the police that his room is filled with Nazi
memorabilia.
Konrad too has sex with nearly
everyone, first with the son, Helmuth (Anthony Higgins), and then with the
elderly Countess. But Konrad, rather than being an angelic visitor is most
definitely a demonic one, plotting, with the
family’s tacit agreement a marriage between Helmuth and a gauche, but wealthy
American family, the Pleschke’s, who are willing to pay a handsome dowry for
their daughter’s marriage.
Since Helmuth, a devoted homosexual,
has no interest in women, Konrad himself secretly woes the daughter, Anneliese,
finally convincing her that by accepting marriage with Helmuth they might
remain together. The deal is struck, and the wedding celebrated; but at the
last moment, the daughter, going to his room to say goodbye, discovers Konrad
and Helmuth in the midst of sex.
Speechless, she seethes in the back
seat of the car that Konrad drives to return the parents to the train
station. When she finally begins to reveal the horror, Konrad sends the car
over the cliff, himself escaping, killing the Pleschkes while keeping his
secrets.
All this time, the rather plain looking
daughter of the Countess, Lotte (Jane Carr) has been watching and waiting, and
now makes it clear that if Konrad doesn't marry her, she will tell all. We never
know whether she will insist that Konrad, in the future, pay attention to her alone,
or whether this plotting and scheming family might all share in Konrad’s love.
Nonetheless, Konrad now is most definitely a member of the family.
*Film
legend suggests that, in truth, deWilde was somewhat of a hellion, continually
sticking out his tongue at Ladd while he made his final speech to Joey.
Los Angeles, June
8, 2016
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