Month: July 2015

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday introduced Jacques Tati’s droll title character to the world. The film is about nothing more than what the title indicates—a beach vacation taken by one Mr. Hulot (Tati never gives us his first name). The sense of formality in providing only his last name plays off of Hulot’s ungainly gait and ‘all-elbows-and-knees’ bearing. As Hulot interacts with his fellow seasiders over the course of several days, his air of formality brings a warmth of humanity to his character, even as his clumsiness creates difficulties for others—not to mention plenty of laughs.

That sense of humanity in Mr. Hulot only grows over the course of the film, particularly when we see him in relationship to the vacationers around him. This group of people operates on a strictly regimented schedule, moving like a herd of cattle every time the hotel’s meal bell rings. One couple always finds themselves in the restaurant a bit early, apparently unable to find anything else to occupy them beyond that most basic urge to eat. Cattle, indeed.

One recurring gag involves the lights in the beachside inn coming on in reference to one of Hulot’s nighttime escapades. While everyone else has dutifully made it to bed at a “proper” hour, Hulot finds himself out and about, exploring and adventuring. Where the group predictably files into the restaurant for lunch or sits quietly in the lobby every afternoon, Hulot leaves muddy footprints in the lobby or disturbs the quiet by leaving the door open on a windy day. Time and again Tati emphasizes the distinction between Mr. Hulot and the rest of the vacationers. True humanity looks quite different from the humdrum habits of most people.

This fundamental contrast suggests to us that of all the vacationers (save, possibly, a mysterious young woman) only Hulot has found the freedom that people so desperately seek both in vacation and in general. Hulot’s bumbling nature and the many laughs it produces becomes something of a stand in for individuality, freedom, and, most importantly, human warmth. Ironically, though filled with an attentiveness to others, Mr. Hulot generally remains beyond the touch of any other person. This sense of physical isolation provides something of a dark counterpoint to the inventive gags.

Even as Tati joyfully portrays the title character with a wry blend of formality and flailing limbs, Hulot remains beyond the reach of true human companionship. Indeed, it is the man’s difference from the crowd that makes him such a compelling figure. That Hulot never seems to find the companionship enjoyed by virtually everyone around him is not so much an indictment on his freedom and sense of wonder as it is on the rest of society’s rigidity and predictability.

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

A few years ago, Quentin Tarantino offered this blunt assessment of Irish-American (not Anglo-Saxon) John Ford:

One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity—and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the Thirties and Forties—it’s still there. And even in the Fifties.[1]

John Ford’s Revolutionary War-era drama Drums Along the Mohawk—made in 1939—is among his films that include “faceless Indians” and in this way serves as one helpful means of examining Tarantino’s view regarding Ford’s racism.[2] Tarantino isn’t alone in his assessment of Ford’s work, but I find Ford’s films, including his Westerns, to contain a rich and varied portrait of figures of all kinds, colors, and genders.

When it comes to uncomfortable scenes with racial overtones, I won’t deny there are several in Ford’s oeuvre. Drums contains one especially egregious scene recently examined by Mike D’Angelo, where two drunken natives mean to burn down a house, and end up rescuing a bed inside when an old woman protests their actions. Ford’s comic sensibilities don’t always land near my own—he tends toward the broad and the slapstick—and this scene certainly illustrates that tendency well.

However, Ford does something else in this film that complicates the picture of Tarantino’s vision of Anglo-Saxon superiority. And this more complicated picture better reflects the American experience of race through my own lenses—a mixture of good and bad, of outreach and insensitivity, of helping hands and murderous ones.

The film opens with a Northeastern U.S. wedding among colonists of some means. The house, the décor, and the dress all highlight the fact that these people expect to live according to certain standards. The people have gathered to witness the nuptials of Gil Martin (Henry Fonda), who recently built a home on the frontier of Mohawk Valley, and Lana (Claudette Colbert), daughter of high colonial society.

The film follows the Martins through their early years as settlers in the Mohawk Valley. More importantly, however, Ford proceeds to throw obstacles at the naively haughty Lana throughout the course of the film. It turns out that “wonderful” Anglo-Saxon upbringing yielded Lana few frontier survival skills, with all its emphasis on obtaining the elemental things of life—food and shelter most importantly. While Gil puts his back into his work, Lana loses her expensive and impractical possessions and discovers that there’s more to life than the latest fashions from Europe. When Lana stoops to nurse soldiers injured in a Revolutionary War battle, we get the sense that her transformation nears completion.

The final sequence of the film completes an excellent bookend with the opening wedding scene. The European settlers have to fight off a band of Native Americans (led by a pro-British European no less). Lana is among the group of settlers in the local fort, and during the fight, she even picks up a weapon and shoots a man. Not only has she lost all outward claims to gentility that she brought to the frontier, she has lived with the settlers through their darkest moments, where all become equals in the face of imminent death.

Soon after this battle, Gil and Lana visit the fort, which the settlers have set to repair. Here they discover that the Revolutionary War has ended, and someone mounts the flag atop the church steeple (the highest point within the fort). As this occurs, Ford cuts to four separate, still shots of people gazing upon the flag that stands for newfound freedom: a black woman, a blacksmith and his wife, a Native American, and finally, Gil and Lana.

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Interestingly, Ford shoots both the black woman and the Native American from below, attributing to them something like hero status. With the camera pointed upward, Ford makes these people seem larger than life, emphasizing their place in this land of freedom. Of course, these two shots aren’t without irony—as these people would have had nothing like the freedom enjoyed by the blacksmith and by Gil and Lana. In this way, this final montage has a multivalent effect—it celebrates the victory for freedom; it chides the victors for their unbalanced or incomplete views of freedom; and it reveals a yearning for something more, seeing as winning the revolution most certainly did not mean freedom for all. There’s a poignancy to these images that the Tarantino’s of the world don’t seem to count in their reckoning of Ford on race.

The last of the four shots, the one of Gil and Lana, closes the film. It also includes the only lines in this brief sequence, and in it we see the final transformation of the elite as they take on the qualities of the everyman. Gil turns from the flag to his wife and says, “I reckon we’d better be getting back to work. There’s going to be a heap to do from now on.” They no longer have the luxury of leisure. Work beckons, just as it does to many, many others who hope to have a roof over their heads or food on their plates. In the end, Ford presents Gil and Lana as equals with everyone else under the new American flag, an equality borne out of shared suffering, shared surviving, and shared needs.

[1] You can find the original interview here.

[2] Kent Jones has already offered a cogent response to Tarantino, though Jones doesn’t consider Drums. See also Richard Brody’s recent introduction to a Ford retrospective playing this summer.