melodramas!
I’ve been watching a lot of melodramas recently. I don’t know why! I guess some part of me just yearns to watch Joan Crawford slap people. Here are some thoughts about the seven I’ve watched recently. (SPOILERS ahead. If you wish to watch these movies without being spoiled, please, go watch them and return to this newsletter when your soul has been quenched.) (n.b. I believe these are all from Criterion Channel’s “Murderous Melodramas” series.)
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
OK, imagine you’re a young man who has been partially paralyzed by polio. Now imagine you’re going swimming in a lake and your new sister-in-law is there in a boat, and you start drowning because you’re tired, but instead of helping you, your SIL just sits there like this, because she resents that your brother loves you:
Girl, I wouldn’t even be mad she was watching me drown. My last word would be “…slay…” as my head slipped beneath the surface. Don’t get your fabulous coat wet on my behalf, mother!
This whole movie is about a woman who “loves too much,” which causes her to murder all the time. She even kills herself in a way that attempts to pin it on someone else, which is, I’m sorry to say, diva behavior. This one is really fun because Vincent Price shows up at the end and yells at everyone for about ten minutes, which more movies need.
Written on the Wind (1956)
Embraces the longstanding melodrama trope of “this horny woman might be The Devil,” this time expressed in a scene where Dorothy Malone shakes her ass so hard that her father falls down a staircase in another wing of the house. And she won an Oscar for it!!! This one is fun because it ends with Rock Hudson being like, fuck all you people, I’m going to Iran. You can’t just do that anymore, Rock Hudson!
A Kiss Before Dying (1956)
Why are there so many mines and mills in melodramas? Who knows. There’s a mine in here and Robert Wagner is so intent on getting his hands on it that he will seduce and murder as many mine heiresses as he needs to. There is something so beautifully homosexual about a man who’s convinced that he needs to murder his way to financial security!! This one works well because the heroes and the villains are both pretty smart, so it’s enjoyable to watch them react to each other. The one DUMB move in here is that Robert Wagner tries to kill Joanne Woodward with a poisoned lump of brown gelatin. He gives it to her and is like, eat this gelatinous lump and DON’T call anyone if it hurts!! Obviously she does not eat it. You should never eat your boyfriend’s gelatinous lumps when you are the HEIR to a MINING FORTUNE.
Bigger Than Life (1956)
This is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen about the American nuclear family. It’s based on a New Yorker article about a (real!) mild-mannered teacher who was prescribed cortisone and became, like, completely manic and insane. The movie is chilling because the whole time he’s trying to reinvent education and buy fancy clothes for himself, his wife is like, I have to stick by my man no matter what! which goes OK for a while, and then, oops! He tries to murder-suicide his entire family. So then his wife is like “God doesn’t want you to sacrifice your son to him, He didn’t even want Abraham to go through with that” and James Mason yells “GOD WAS WRONG!” If you’ve ever been manic, you will get it. Sometimes, God IS wrong and you CAN travel through time in a Planet Fitness bathroom, you know? Anyway, this movie unironically ruled, it’s really good.
Niagara (1953)
If you love big waterfalls, you’ll get a kick out of this one. Waterfalls are one-note to me so I found the many shots of Niagara Falls to be BORING. There is a really good Marilyn Monroe performance in here where she gets to be complicated and horny, but I did spend most of this movie thinking about how almost any geological formation on Earth is more interesting than a waterfall, so.
Queen Bee (1955)
Repeated references to the mill. A world-weary alcoholic man loading a rifle at breakfast. Joan Crawford taking off a chunky earring to make a phone call. Joan Crawford slapping a woman across the face because she was excited for someone else’s wedding. Joan Crawford smearing a mirror with a fistful of concealer while sobbing. Every single conversation in this movie is secretly overheard by someone else. But Seth, what is the plot?? There is no plot. The plot is, Joan Crawford is horrible to a small group of people, but they all continue to live in her house for some reason. And that… is feminism.
Violent Saturday (1955)
This movie IS called Violent Saturday, and it DOES take place in an Arizona mining town, but don’t let that fool you: there is an entire family of Amish farmers here doing their thing (offering people buttermilk, disapproving of violence). Eventually the violence gets to an Amish guy and he sticks a pitchfork in some guy’s back, which, where is THAT guy’s movie??? Violent Saturday is about the lives and loves of a small group of townspeople who intersect during a Saturday afternoon bank heist. Also, there’s a guy in here who is straight up stalking a nurse and following her home to watch her undress through her window and when he confesses this to her, she is just like, Okay! I guess that is just what people did before podcasts were invented!