Don't grow accustomed to your face...

"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady.  In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.

In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.

It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible).  To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT."  (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)

(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings.  These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones.  And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending.  More of this in my next post.)

Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing.  The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her.  Take that, Medea!  Represent, Oedipus!  Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place.  Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting.  There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence.  This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).

Two other observations and I think I'm done.  One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring.  Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident.  But that ultimately is of no consequence.  That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again.  The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot.  Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance.  And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.

Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises.  But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story.  That really should have been re-thought.

Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation.  Because he is clearly miscast.  What Banderas does is contained fury.  That's his brand.  The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range.  There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character.  In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film.  Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.

Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter.  Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.

Who called Western Union?

I only became aware of Dance Girl Dance (1940) from the documentary about film preservation and the National Film Registry, These Amazing Shadows (2011). According to Wikipedia:

In 2007, Dance, Girl, Dance was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", describing it as Arzner's "most intriguing film" and a "meditation on the disparity between art and commerce. The dancers, played by Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball strive to preserve their own feminist integrity, while fighting for their place in the spotlight and for the love of male lead Louis Hayward.

The inaccuracy of this plot synopsis merely demonstrates that the Library of Congress is just as bad at film criticism as most full-time professionals.  I will not recount the plot -- that would waste your time and mine.  I only have three observations to make.

First, the major motion picture studios commanded such a wealth of talent, that they could throw an incredible array of top-flight talent at B-level potboiler (and the production suggests that this was a B, although perhaps a B+, a notch above RKO's usual crime melodramas).  Besides upcoming stars Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball, seen in A productions at RKO, there was Louis Heyward and Ralph Bellamy, cinematographers Russell Metty (Touch of Evil) and Joe August (They Were Expendable), screenwriters Frank Davis and Tess Slessinger, who between them worked on Pride and Prejudice, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and The Train (1964), not to mention Robert Wise as editor.  The main thing with a studio with fixed personnel costs was to keep the most people busy at the same time, so even RKO, the least stable of the studios which owned theaters, had such excess capacity as to engage this level of talent on a programmer.

Which is my second point.  The film is not groundbreaking, and fact it's message seems rather confused.  Does Lucille Ball's willingness to sell herself, not to the highest bidder but the fastest one, make her a strong independent woman or a two-dollar whore?  Is Maureen O'Hara's modesty about her talent naive humility or brutal honesty?  Is Louis Hayward a good guy with a drinking problem or he is a user?  None of this is made clear in the back-and-forth story which feels like it went through rewrites by people who hadn't read all of the previous draft.

And finally, the moments in the video I've embedded above are probably the only historically valuable moments in the film.  The situation is that Lucy Ball is a burlesque star (a Hollywood burlesque star in that she sings a G-rated dirty song and never takes any clothes off) who has hired her frenemy Maureen O'Hara as a stooge to dance some ballet steps and get booed by the audience until she is yanked off and Ball comes on.  (The plot of The Night They Raided Minksy's merges those two characters into one)  One night, things go differently, and Judy (O'Hara) stops and makes with this startling speech about The Male Gaze.  Yet, strong as it is (especially the power of a 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara), it comes virtually out of nowhere.  The film doesn't prepare much for this outburst, nor does it follow up its consequences.  Sincere, no doubt, on the part of Ms. Arzner and Miss Schlesinger (who was Mrs. Frank Davis), but pasted in, almost like a bookmark indicating another different film that they would have liked to make, if circumstances permitted.

There are two types of classic Hollywood film buffs, the "Great Old Days" fans, who revel in "good old-fashioned entertainment" like Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz and those of us who have binged on this stuff so thoroughly that, willy nilly, we have become students as interested in the missteps and almosts as the unquestioned triumphs.  Dance Girl Dance is only for the latter, and maybe only for the three minutes embedded above.

Although I had forgotten that Louis Hayward had a marvelous voice.  Have you ever seen The Return of Monte Cristo?