Rudi, I Killed Your Father

Band of Thebes, who introduced me to The Eagle, reminded me this week of Third Man on the Mountain, the 1959 Disney live-action feature about an orphaned Swiss youth (James MacArthur) who, under the patronage of Michael Rennie (sigh), gets a chance to conquer the mountain that killed his mountain-guide father. As with The Eagle, BoT read the film as a coded story of manly love, though I think he's less convincing this time around. (For example, he says that the boy "forgets all about his tomboy girlfriend", which isn't true.) Still, BoT's post brought back memories, so I checked out the DVD from the library to see how it looks fifty years later. (WARNING: There are spoilers below.)

I loved Third Man on the Mountain when I saw it in the theater (I would have been eight years old), and saw it probably more than once on television, since Disney often recycled theatrical releases on their Sunday night television show. James MacArthur was one of my early celebrity crushes, and though I don't remember for sure, I probably identified with Rennie in this bromance, not MacArthur. Or with both of them, come to think of it. They meet cute when Rudi (MacArthur) rescues Captain Winter (Rennie) from a crevasse into which the latter has carelessly fallen: I'd have identified with the rescued -- both here and in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Rennie plays a rather passive character who must be saved, and gladly would I have saved him -- and the rescuer, especially when MacArthur took his shirt off. It turns out that James MacArthur played major roles in a number of Disney films from this period, all of which I saw. Yes, my parents took me and my brothers to see them, but some interested me more than others, usually because of the young male leads. I kept track of some male stars even at that age, and MacArthur was one of them.

As for the tomboy girlfriend, she represents the Disney obsession with heterosexualizing stories that weren't heterosexual before the machine went to work on them. According to several reviews I've looked at, Lizbeth was not a character in Banner in the Sky, the James Ramsey Ullman juvenile novel the movie was based on. But as played by the baby-butch Janet Munro, she's not intrusive at all, as women stuck in male love stories usually are -- she even encourages Rudi's interaction with Captain Winter -- and she is a tomboy, as interested in climbing mountains as Rudi is. (The director of the film recalled: "She had a great sense of balance and being able to look out for herself and fall well. She was one who would do anything. It was basically a matter of me deciding what I would risk her on. She was a wonderful girl to work with.") That may be why she doesn't drop out of sight as soon as Captain Winter arrives on the scene.

The most notable thing about Third Man on the Mountain is that it was shot on location in Switzerland, and the principals got some intensive training in climbing so that they could do much of their own stuntwork. Local guides doubled for them in long shots, and there's occasional matte work because in real life, the mountains were often obscured by clouds, but the reality of the setting is palpable. I didn't know that when I saw it as a kid, but I'm sure it added to the vividness of the experience. I went through a brief fascination with the idea of learning to climb mountains, though growing up in the cornfields of Indiana offered no opportunities for that activity, and I never followed it up.

Which brings me to an amusing user review of the film at IMDB, titled "Hollywood Could Learn from the Past." (No permalink that I can find.) The writer says he first saw the film at the age of 8, just like me, but he did follow up the desire it inspired to take up mountain climbing. Fair enough, but then he goes off an a typical hate-filled-old-geezer rant:

In an age where Hollywood gratifies violence, profanity, and promiscuity, caring parents would do well to, not only let their children see this great adventure story; but to sit with them and watch it as a family. As a teenager, I never once attended a 'house-party', drank, or engaged in the trash that often creates arrogant, ungrateful, and belligerent adolescents. The memory of this film never left my mind, and kept me focused in life. Honour, self discipline, respect for our elders and caring about what others think of us; as well as a great story of personal determination and effort, young people today need to be presented with the values that used to be 'normal' in society.

The real locations used in the filming provide a welcome relief from the slick, computer-animations and green-screen fakery of modern celluloid, and the climbing depictions are far, far superior to anything that has since been passed off by Hollywood, as 'mountaineering'. Having to EARN respect, working and striving for goals, personal sacrifice, and a good story: parents owe this film to their children.

Of course, the location shooting in TMotM was unusual in its day, as the writer was vaguely aware, though the special effects to simulate mountain scenery and the like were analog and optical instead of digital as they commonly (though not universally) are now. He also is evidently unaware that MacArthur had played troubled juvenile delinquents before he went to work for Disney. I'm a decade older than the reviewer, and though I grew up on "family" movies like TMotM I went to a "house-party" or two and later drank, smoked the marijuana, and turned out to be a (gasp) homosexual and an atheist. None of which means that I don't think that respect, working and striving for goals, personal sacrifice (when it's appropriate), or good stories aren't good things.

But best of all, TMotM is short on "honour, self discipline, respect for our elders and caring about what others think of us" -- Rudi defies his elders, including his mother and uncle, who want him to give up his dream of conquering the Citadel in favor of managing a hotel. He refuses to concentrate on his respectable job as a dishwasher, and keeps running off in the middle of his shift to roam and daydream. He doesn't think that much about what "others" think of him: he wants the respect of those who've earned his respect but has little for the rest. And despite his disrespect and disobedience, he climbs the Citadel with Captain Winter (though he doesn't actually reach the summit) and returns to his village in triumph for a big Code-approved dry smooch from Lisbeth. The writer of the review is entitled to his personal values, but he shouldn't pretend that they're embodied in a film that doesn't in fact share them.

Have You Ever Seen a Grown Extraterrestrial Naked, Bobby?

Last night I saw Robert Wise's 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still on a big screen for the first time. I first saw it on TV at the age of twelve or so, and one time on video as an adult. It made a big impression on me as a kid, of course, with its message of benign interplanetary missionaries bringing the good news of peace and brotherhood to the savage Earthlings. As an adult I mainly noticed its campiness, though just about every movie from the 195os looks campy now. For years I nursed a major schoolboy crush on Michael Rennie, the Brit dreamboat who played Klaatu, and even in my dotage I can still see why: those Hepburn cheekbones, the willowy build, the accent, the reserve combined with warmth. (It also seemed to me as I watched the movie last night that Rennie resembled David Bowie, or vice versa. Was Ziggy Stardust a younger brother of Klaatu?)

I think I'm going to look at some critical writing on The Day the Earth Stood Still later on, but for now I just want to write about how it looked to me this time around.

Which was not all that different from how it looked to me as a kid. The film studies professor who introduced the film talked about its Cold War context, which is obvious enough, and its similarity to other Cold-War alien-as-Other movies that followed. But Day actually rejects the Cold War. Klaatu is dismissive of both the American and the Soviet governments' excuses for not convening the international meeting he demands for the delivery of his ultimatum. The film makes it clear that both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, are to blame for the dangerous international situation, and what the Cold War regarded as world-historical political conflict is brushed aside as petty, childish squabbling. Characters who voice conventional political sentiments are shown as foolish, like Aunt Bee, I mean Mrs. Barley who says "If you want my opinion, he came from right here on Earth. And you know where I mean." The reporter who cut short the incognito Klaatu's remarks about the dangers of reacting out of fear rather than reason got laughs from last night's college audience; he's a reminder that the broadcast media have always preferred soundbytes to discourse. The sympathetic Helen Benson immediately dumps her oafish boyfriend Tom when he makes it clear that he cares only about notoriety, not saving the earth.

The movie's politics take a dive into sentimentality when Klaatu and Bobby visit the Lincoln Memorial and admire the conclusion of the Gettysburg Address. That Lincoln presided over one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history up to his time is tactfully left out of the story.

The biggest laugh of the night went to the doctor who tells a colleague that the life expectancy on Klaatu's planet is 130, confesses that "He was very nice about it, but he made me feel like a third-class witch doctor" -- and then offers the other doctor a cigarette, which is accepted. I was especially amused by the newscaster Drew Pearson's wearing his hat as he read the news on his television program, though he was the only media figure shown doing so.

Klaatu's initial announcement, "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill," is disingenuous -- he comes bearing a threat of planetary destruction if we don't clean up our act -- and Gort the robot is the forerunner of the Terminator. (Does "Klaatu barada nikto" translate as "I'll be back"?)* Or at least of Skynet, and of the Machines from the Matrix. Klaatu explains that his people created a "race of robots" to police them, stamping out any "aggression" as soon as it appears. And really, wasn't it foolish of Klaatu in his first encounter with human beings to hold out an unexplained object as he marched silently down the spaceship's ramp toward the crowd? Leaving aside his people's study of human behavior via radio before he was sent here, which should have given him some idea, it's important to remember that Klaatu's people aren't naturally pacific either -- that's why they built their robots.

The film studies professor's attempt to draw a connection to other sf movies in which the alien monster symbolizes the Red (or Yellow) menace seemed to me off the mark. The movie mocks the hoi polloi's readiness to imagine the Man from Space (whom they have seen only in his shiny spacesuit and mask) as a creature with tentacles, a Bug-Eyed Monster. Michael Rennie isn't the Blob, the Thing, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon: the trope of a slow-moving monster carrying a frightened human woman in its arms is performed here by the robot Gort. (It's the brunette Patricia Neal whom Gort carries, though, not this bare-shouldered blonde -- who doesn't appear in the movie.) Day belongs to another strand in science fiction, which was already well-established in the genre: the story about a Kindly But Stern intergalactic dog-trainer who comes to rub our noses in our poop -- but will we allow ourselves to be housebroken, or will we have to be put down? Damon Knight had already mocked the theme in his 1950 story "To Serve Man." Other examples that come to mind include Edgar Pangborn's story "Angel's Egg," published in the same year that Day was released, a milder version of the fable in which the author laments our human immaturity and allows his cute extraterrestrial visitor to drain away his memories. (If only all lesser breeds were willing to sacrifice their lives to their superiors to further scientific knowledge!) In 1958 Robert Heinlein published Have Space Suit Will Travel, in which an American teenager finds himself as one of several human specimens examined by an intergalactic tribunal, and responds to criticism of Homo sapiens with a "You and what army?" defiance. But hey, you don't look to Hollywood for innovative science fiction.

I also guess I'll finally grit my teeth and take a look at the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves, if only to see how they updated it. And really, who better than Teh Keanu to reprise Rennie as a beautiful, human-but-not-quite visitor from outer space who dies and is raised from the dead? (Other candidates for the original role, according to IMDB's trivia page, included Spencer Tracy and Claude Rains.) The Christ-figure symbolism in the 1951 version was deliberate, and Reeves had already played a dying-and-rising character who brings Good News to Modern Man a decade earlier.

*I know it doesn't, but an Ahnuld joke had to go in there somewhere.