The Heavies

You knew who they were, immediately, beyond any doubt. To the others—those in the movie and even those about you in the theater—the quartet of men riding into town might be decent, hard-working cowpokes, passing through on their way to honest employment elsewhere. But you knew better. There was a sulphurous tinge about them, a satanic aura that wafted pure evil back to the seat where you were scrooched down, hand poised over the half-empty box of popcorn, and you thrilled again at the shock of recognition. They didn't have to say anything, those four horsemen of the Apocalypse. You had only to look at their filthy clothes and beard-stubbled faces and dark, shifty eyes to be certain that they had come, like a terrible plague, to destroy this peaceful valley—that was, as soon as they got their orders from the boss.

You knew the boss, too. He was the town banker: hearty, helpful, polite and suave on the surface, inwardly a rapacious wolf, as shown by his string tie, immaculate linen, too-formally cut black suit, barber-trimmed mustache, and obvious desire to do unspeakable things to and with the heroine.

These were the heavies.

Raven they were. Totally black, unregenerate characters, revealing no trace, however minuscule, of human kindness, dedicated always to the destruction of the forces of good. Of course they never won, but they came close, occasionally, and when that happened, audiences throughout the world were seized by an almost intolerable tension. Upon the relief of this tension, as the heavies fell, vanquished, there came a satisfaction, and a confidence, almost unknown to the audiences of today.

Because the heavies are disappearing. Those few who remain, on afternoon TV shows, can hardly be recognized. Indeed, it has become difficult to tell the heavy from the hero without a program. Fed on a matinee diet that has substituted a gray collage of everyday human problems (homosexuality, miscegenation, alcoholism, fetishism, nymphomania, transvestitism, drug addiction, cannibalism) for the clash of right versus wrong, today's young audiences are denied the innocent joy of booing the villain. They will never know the overwhelming, shivery sense of impending doom which accompanied the screen appearances of the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu. They will not quail before Ming the Merciless as he levels a clawlike hand and orders Flash Gordon into the atomic furnace—except on Saturday-afternoon TV. Nor does it seem possible that moviegoers, whose most recent opportunity to hate a character wholly was Suddenly, Last Summer (if a plant—the Venus'-flytrap—may be considered a character), will ever witness a gathering of such unredeemed individuals as those who met under a dark star in Three Strangers. Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Geraldine Fitzgerald, each worse in morality and intent than the other, formed a veritable ring of malevolence. When they received their just deserts, the theaters pulsed with glee. Now those same theaters would be sibilant with sighs over the sad fate of the three unhappy, misguided, helpless neurotics.

They were heavies to us, something we could tie onto, a point of reference; a solid rock of antilaw for us to enthuse against, relish the downfall of and work off our repressions on. By their natures they made all other things seem good and worth while. Whether signifying evil incarnate, as Richard Widmark, the giggling killer in Kiss of Death, or in one of its guises—say the weak, sleazy blackmailer played by Dan Duryea in The Woman in the Window; or the wild Cody Jarred of James Cagney in White Heat—the heavy represented excitement, fear and release, of which the first and last are going, if not already gone.

The reasons are compound. But of all his implacable foes, growing awareness of the human condition perhaps did most to bring the heavy down. Of course, he never did exist in really worth-while, adult drama. Medea was probably not hissed. Neither was Macbeth, nor, for that matter, was his wife. The great dramatists have always dug deep and found a deposit of good and bad in every man. But at least they admitted the existence of the two forces. Today the very words are considered quaint. And how could it be otherwise in a world which doubts the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell, which cannot answer the question "Why not, then, since there is no such thing as sin, go forth and commit those acts you'd taken to be sins?" The mass morality of the future, if there is to be a future, will probably differ from that of the present only insofar as false, traditional restrictions, imposed by fear and ignorance, will be abandoned. We will all learn what a few have always known: that the little "evil" in the best of us makes us coresponsible for the great "evil" in the worst of us. Capital punishment will probably be a shame of the past within a few generations. Prisons may well be replaced with hospitals. And, on the whole, the world should be a better place in which to live.

But the heavies will be gone, and there are those who will miss them and the simple, bad old world they symbolized.

It would be a lie to say that we did not love them. The conscienceless Professor Moriarty, Simon Legree, the quintessence of badness (from whom the very countenance of the classic heavy was derived), Tommy Udo, Little Caesar, Count Colonna—the whole wonderful circus of bad men whose mere presence was a threatening rumble of thunder before the dagger strike of a lightning storm. Scowling, smiling or deadpan; toying with a switchblade or fingering the keys of a piano; cleaning a revolver or delivering a bouquet of roses to a victim's widow, there was no mistaking their intentions. They were out to do all those things we ourselves wanted to do, though we didn't realize it; and to hate them unqualifiedly would have been to hate ourselves unqualifiedly. It was doubtless wrong to murder children as Peter Lorre did in M, and certainly it was gratifying to see that one could not hope to retire to one's country estate after so much wholesale slaughter; but still, for all his villainy, we could not help feeling a bit sorry for the little bald man.

The truth is, we felt a bit sorry for all of them. Secretly, in our hearts, we wanted them to win, just once, to triumph over the hero, over the law, over life, but, needless to say, that wouldn't have done. Nor would it truly have pleased us, as we were to observe much later when our wish started to come true. We glorified the screen heavy, to be sure, but he did not inspire us to follow in his footsteps, because he always died hideously or, at best, was sentenced to life imprisonment. If that hadn't obtained, the real-life crime statistics of the first half of this century might have been considerably higher.

The first heavies, as we knew and loved them, appeared almost from the beginning of motion pictures. The reason we were able to recognize them immediately was that visual symbols were necessary in those early silents. No one could be expected to follow the plot otherwise, unless the producers resorted, as they sometimes did, to excessive use of subtitles. But that proved tiresome and, to many, distracting. It was easier to identify the villain by his dress and manner. It had been good enough for the stage, after all; why not for films? Thus, Western villains took on a certain, very specific appearance, as did those of other locales and periods. These had variety in that the differing stations of the villains (boss, lieutenant, henchman) had to be shown, but they soon became constants. For The Great Train Robbery and its first hundred or so sequels, it was enough to give the heavy a black mustache and/or an unshaven face. Later the subcategories began and, a decade before the advent of sound, took on their final form. The boss was always a banker, or a landlord, or a cattle baron. He was invariably unctuous in manner, soft-spoken, condescending to the hero, overly chivalrous to the heroine, tyrannical to his underlings. He was also shrewd, cynical and cowardly. His lieutenant was something of a bouncer: big, tough, merciless, obedient. The henchmen had merely to look unwashed and ill-dressed. One had a different sort of fear and respect for each.

Since long before the beginning of drama as an art form, black has symbolized evil, whereas white has symbolized virtue. It is therefore understandable and fitting that no heavy ever rode any horse or wore any costume that wasn't black. This, plus the classical attitudes they assumed, plus the fact that they were portrayed by the same actors in every picture, made picking the heavies duck soup. Why the others, particularly the heroes, were fooled, we could never understand. Yet they were, always. It was stupid of them, but we forgave, assuming that they had been blinded by their own essential goodness. Still, one could not help losing patience occasionally, even with one so thoroughly admirable as Buck Jones. The most obvious heavy in the world could have said to him, "I'll keep little Ann with me—to protect her, you understand—while you go after those ruffians," and he would have said OK.

The heavies in both historical and contemporary dramas were a bit more difficult to spot, at first. For one thing, they couldn't always wear string ties and ride black horses. However, that problem was soon licked. The villains in the historicals were given waxed mustaches, after the manner of olio, or Mr. Coffee Nerves, and the contemporaries were portrayed as Orientals, Mexicans, Germans, Britishers, Jews, Frenchmen and similar untrustworthy foreign types. Of course, the hero was invariably Anglo-Saxon American, tall, handsome, strong, innocent of guile, and at least as virginal as the heroine.

In those days before the talkies, sex was something only heavies dealt in. It could be that we identified with the hero, thought of the heroine as Mother, and equated the heavy with dear old Dad. In any case, we found the subject detestable. It was all right for the hero to kiss his horse, but unthinkable that he should attempt any such thing with the heroine. That was what he was protecting her from, wasn't it? One couldn't imagine what else the heavy might have on his mind.

The 15- or 20-chapter serials of the day were, if anything, even more clear-cut. Whether he was a detective or a cowboy, the hero was always the same dull-witted clod, in whom no one could possibly be interested except insofar as he was the antithesis of the heavy. And there was where the fun came in, for in those unforgotten Meisterwerke the heavy achieved his finest hour. He put to shame the banker, the fake preacher, the corrupt judge, the simple outlaws, even the hooded executioners. And the reason he did was that there was no depredation of which he was incapable, no foul crime he would not commit gladly, with a happy smile on his lips. The others wanted simply to kiss the heroine; the serial heavy wanted to kill her. It was his raison d'être. His face never truly showed pleasure until he had some innocent maiden lashed to the railroad tracks, with the train fast approaching; or to a log, drawing nearer and nearer to (continued on page 166)Heavies(continued from page 135) the spinning circular saw; or to a canoe headed for the Great Falls. He also enjoyed slaughtering old ladies and small children, and derived a certain amusement from making bons mots at the expense of the hopelessly doomed hero. He smoked opium, dealt in black magic, made deals with the Devil, kept innumerable slaves, and generally had a hell of a good time.

Then came sound and the beginning of the end of the heavies.

They flourished, however, for several years, reaching—as in the case of the great comics—their richest flowering just prior to the final darkness. It is their unregenerate scoundrels we remember so fondly when we think of the heavies.

They were refined but not changed in the Westerns, where they made their first and, probably, their last appearance. As in the Edison and Vitagraph days, they continued to cast murky shadows in the sleepy towns. Dogs continued to snarl at them (dogs were never fooled), and they continued to kick the animals as their first bit of establishing action. They wore identifying black from first to last. The killers in High Noon, and the evil gunman in Shane, were the same heavies we hissed, and loved, when we and films were very young. And the heroes weren't much different, either. Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd were tougher, and certainly more grown-up, but—apart from Cooper's patent fearin High Noon—their behavior was otherwise indistinguishable from that of Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson. Now even the Western mold is broken. We see, in Ride the High Country, that heroes get old, that they wear red longies, that they find nothing particularly objectionable in the idea of a marriage in a whorehouse. Most sadly, we see that the heavies aren't really bad people but, instead, young men who don't happen to be very bright. And none of them shoots a gun very well.

Such things were unthinkable, of course, in the good days when Charles King, Ed Coxen and James Mason were terrorizing the countryside. Nor did it occur to anyone that there was anything wrong in portraying Mexicans as oily, gross, hideous, overdressed bandidos, not to be trusted for a moment. Richard Cramer alone gave the Mexican government ample grounds for war. Then came awareness and with it, embarrassment. Which was either a sign of maturity or, as James Agee felt, "softening of the brain." When one considers that we lost not only foreign villains (some of whom were resuscitated during World War II) but also dialect humor, racial humor, and other main currents of American thoughtlessness, it may be considered that Agee had a point. Perhaps he had a vision of the day, upon us now, when it would be as impossible to portray a Mexican as a killer as it once was to portray him as a judge.

Cramer, at any rate, was the compleat heavy. He was one of the greatest lollers ever to appear on screen. He could lean against the wall of a building, cigarette dangling from his pendulous lower lip, and, without so much as a flicker of an eyelash, convey that the hero was as good as dead. So villainous was his countenance that he made a marvelous burlesque heavy, appearing often in the Laurel and Hardy comedies of the period without any change in the characterization.

The members of the outlaw gang were always the same, as noted, but the "legal crook" of the Westerns wore many disguises. However, his neatness always gave him away: He was the only man in the cast who was as clean as the hero. Whether banker, attorney, newspaper editor or family friend, he was always meticulously dressed. It bespoke an overweening vanity; also, his addiction to the inevitable string tie (otherwise the mark of a gambler), in a country where honest men wore bandannas or flowing four-in-hands, left little doubt that this man was not to be trusted with anything more valuable than a bag of marbles—glassies, chippies, agates and other losers, at that.

In his activities, too, the inside-the-law, or unsuspected, operator was usually too smooth. He was always ready to arrange a loan for the temporarily luckless mine operator; eager to escort the widower's daughter to Dodge City; inclined to press his assistance on the orphaned young woman who has just returned from an Eastern finishing school and needs a protector—actions which might seem fairly normal, even laudable, in real life, but which, in Western language, communicated that here was an unprincipled scoundrel.

Making him doubly dangerous was the fact that his vocation usually put him close to inside information: that a railroad was planned for the valley; that there was a cache of gold somewhere on the ranch; that a new dam would bring fertility to barren acres; or that the seeming poor orphan girl was actually the heiress to a vast Eastern fortune.

Of course, sometimes the in-group heavy, or boss, was a gambler, generally the proprietor of the town's largest saloon. In this case he could dress even more modishly without raising suspicion; but the tip-off should have been the way he treated his girls (of whom it was never thought, for a moment, that they were prostitutes, any more than Gunsmoke's Miss Kitty is thought of as a madam). In the accepted code of the West, no man would ever strike a woman except in the extremes of self-defense. So if Harry Woods, a Monogram player of the Thirties, backhanded one of his dance-hall queens, there could hardly be any doubt that it was he who set the trap for Rex Bell.

Sound, with its alarming, and curious, suggestion of reality, did not immediately corrupt the choreography. Before the fancy-shirted singers, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, et al., who dispensed such painful tedium to the Western fans, the heroes and heavies went through their traditional steps. Sex never did get a foot in, at least from the standpoint of the hero. Implacably he continued to play the eunuch, touching lips to female flesh only as a final fade-out clinch, this embarrassment usually inspired by a nudge from his horse. It is true that Ken Maynard, Buck Jones and William Boyd occasionally fell from grace, but they trod the straight and narrow often enough to keep our loyalty. The heavies, however, did not waver in their course. What we later found to be a completely normal, healthy amount of desire was, by contrast to the priestly status of the hero, an unquenchable lust which could only lead to rapine and defloration.

Returning to "foreign" heavies, we must give full marks to the Indian. The pubescents of today know him only as the wronged American whose rights were abrogated by the iniquitous white man. It was not so in the early days. Then he was a merciless savage who seldom appeared in tribes of less than 20 braves. He was cowardly and vicious. Skulking in the distance, unseen, unheard ("That's what worries me, Captain"), he was capable of infamies undreamed of. Indeed, he was filled with an unreasoning, inhuman hatred of "Americans" and dedicated to their extinction.

His leader was either a granite-faced chief who grunted monosyllabically, or a renegade, educated by a generous United States Government, who had turned against his benefactors and was now in charge of a pillaging band of red devils. Of the two, the chief was the less detestable. He was full-blooded, for one thing, whereas the renegade was more often than not a half-breed; and for another, he seemed, in an odd way, rather fond of his people. But whether he was trying to defeat progress by denying the pioneers the right to move West, or by keeping a trail herd away from a water hole, the real extent of his villainy was emphasized by the scalps dangling from his belt.

A meeting between the antagonists, face to face, to discuss terms, usually ended with the departure of the whites in attitudes of sorrowful frustration. In the event anyone should have gazed at the patriarchal chief's face, which was generally rather kindly, instead of at his belt, we were set right by the hero's right-hand man. "Did you notice those scalps, Captain? One of them was a woman's!"

Still, the half-breed renegade was worse. He was not only interested in plundering the herds and burning the ranch buildings of the settlers; he had eyes for the heroine, a frail vessel who would obviously wither and die under the harsh treatment accorded to squaws. If the renegade's intentions were honorable, that is, which was doubtful. The suggestion of unimaginable sex practices and tortures, to which she would unquestionably be subject ("Here, Molly, take this gun. If they get in, you know what to do."), made her seizure by savages even more to be feared than the immoral, perverted designs of the ordinary heavy, who, at least, wouldn't lash her to a cross and cut off her scalp. Or so we fancied. In any case, the thrill of the Indian heavy was mixed with something like real fear. When he and his savage fellows crept stealthily around the campfire, moving implacably toward the sleeping girl, we were perhaps somewhat more uncomfortable than we would have preferred.

Still, we were sorry to see him go, in a way. It wasn't much fun having our redskin revealed as a fine, upstanding American, far more entitled to the name than any of us, possessing a different but entirely worth-while culture of his own. Worse, it was confusing, since Hollywood went to extremes in the matter of correcting the earlier characterization. Overnight, it seemed, the white men became the treacherous devils. Custer, who had stood so valiantly against a horde of bloodthirsty Injuns, was suddenly a blundering idiot whose incompetence and prejudice caused the famous massacre. Audiences were asked to accept the Indian (Cochise, Sitting Bull, even Geronimo) as the hero, which was rather like asking us to leave our sister in the care of the Dalton boys. We couldn't cooperate, though we pretended. Perhaps it might have worked if any of the producers had placed the finger on the true causes of Indian-white bloodshed, but that wasn't done. So we have lost a wonderfully exciting heavy—needlessly, it could be argued, since few, if any, of those nurtured on the old concept are any the less sympathetic toward the plight of the Indian today. Moved by make-believe villainy we certainly were, but to most of us it usually remained make-believe, which is a point that seems to escape reformers.

They've had their way, nonetheless. Today's Western, in particular the emasculated, shoddy facsimile which nightly flickers on the TV screen, dispenses almost entirely with the classical formula. But in steering away from the Scylla of stereotype, it has sailed, so to speak, smack into the Charybdis of cliché. It frequently tries, but clichés, or embarrassment, are usually the result of merely competent craftsmen striving for something far beyond their reach.

Competence was enough in the halcyon days of the heavies. They did not appear in the cinema; they appeared in movies. And such was their appeal, for a time, that no self-respecting character actor would dream of turning down a juicy villainous role. Lionel Barrymore, Jean Hersholt, George Macready and hundreds more derived some of their greatest enjoyment from enacting detestable scoundrels. It was easier, for one thing, and it got rid of some bile. Furthermore, it pleased audiences.

No one questioned the characterizations, then. Robert Louis Stevenson hinted at the sad truth when he showed us that the perfidious Hyde was nothing more than a manifestation of the good Doctor Jekyll, but the hint was not taken. His great story, made into three spine-chilling movies, was assumed to be a horror yarn. The point was missed. John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy were not thought to bear any relationship to the fiendish monsters they became. They were enchanted, that was all, as the prince of legend had been turned into a frog. As Jekylls they were wholly heroic types; as Hydes they were enough to disturb the dreams of die most stouthearted. Then came the fourth production of die classic, a few years back. A Hammer film, it suggested that the whole thing was actually nothing more than a slight case of schizophrenia. Had Jekyll's beard not mysteriously disappeared upon his transmogrification, it would be somewhat difficult to tell them apart. Jekyll, in this version, is an overwhelmingly industrious sort, but then, so is Hyde. The former expresses his good, virtuous nature by mumbling and staring off in a presumably holy fashion; the latter shows his base, evil nature by pouring some whiskey into the open mouth of a sleeping tramp and by openly consorting with women. Both are terrible bores.

There was nothing boring about the great heavies of yesteryear. As Duke Mantee, Humphrey Bogart displayed his only discernible trace of human decency when he accommodated Leslie Howard, who asked to be murdered. No such weakness was shown either by Edward G. Robinson, as Little Caesar, or by Paul Muni, as Scarface. And certainly there was little virtue to be noticed in Sydney Greenstreet, whose appearances were always heralded by trumpets in a minor key. They were black villains, to the marrow of their bones. So was Boris Karloff. Whether he was Doctor Fu Manchu or Richard Ill's chief executioner, or Gray, the body snatcher, you knew he was entirely lacking in conscience. As was Bela Lugosi, in any of his roles. Unlike Karloff, he never sank to portraying ordinary human beings with ordinary faults and virtues; he was the uncorrupted blackguard upon whom you would never turn your back. If he was not sucking people's blood, he was sending forth a monster to throttle them, or otherwise arranging for their demise.

James Cagney was equally hateful in his early films. Putting bullets through the trunk lid of a car and into the unfortunate victims stowed diereunder, or taking care of an uncooperative warehouse owner, or merely pushing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face, he carried conviction.

No one could have identified with Scarface. As he tried out his new toy, a tommy gun, by cutting down innocent pedestrians, one had to shrink away. Perhaps because Al Capone was around in those days, though probably it was because of the look of genuine glee on Muni's face. It may not have been his greatest role, but he is certainly remembered for it; as Edward G. Robinson is remembered for his characterization of Little Caesar, Erich von Stroheim for his numerous foul Prussian officers, Charles Middleton for his Ming the Merciless, Ridiard Widmark for his Tommy Udo.

The last named could very well represent the high point of movie heavydom. When the giggling killer tied die helpless old woman in her wheelchair and sent her careening down that flight of stairs, a certain kind of greatness was achieved.

Shortly after that memorable scene, the gangster movie, as such, expired. It was said to glorify crime, showing vicious killers having the time of their lives through nine tenths of every picture, only to pay for their depredations in the closing moments, usually as a result of an easily avoided bit of carelessness. This was true, though one doesn't notice any sharp decrease in the crime rate with the passing of those unwholesome epics.

The nonwhite as menace also vanished, to the dismay of heavyphiles. No longer could one be certain that the red, yellow, brown or tan man with the shifty eyes (they all used to have shifty eyes) was the villain; quite the reverse: One could be certain that he wasn't.

Still it remains that the Germans' greatest contribution to the art of cinema, discounting Fritz Lang and Caligari, was their wonderful heavies. First there was the despised Hun, portrayed convincingly by actors of almost every nationality except German. Lon Chaney in his spiked helmet, and Walter Long in his, struck terror into many an American heart, though not so much, perhaps, as the inhuman, bull-necked officer enacted by Erich von Stroheim. This Austrian, who became known as one of the half-dozen truly great directors of all time, projected an image of the German male that persists to this day. The lot of them were monsters.

Oddly, the German screen heavy of the early Forties was a good deal less contemptible. While the Nazis were known to have committed atrocities presumably unimagined by their predecessors, they were, on the whole, gently treated. The common soldier was portrayed as a fiend, almost as brutal and sadistic as our American screen Indian; but the officers fared considerably better. They seemed, except for the icily sadistic SS officers, to be an intelligent group of gentlemen, more misguided than naturally barbarous. In the interpretations of Carl Esmond, J. Edward Bromberg and Paul Lukas, not to mention Marlon Brando's later interpretation, we gathered these Nazi chaps would be worthwhile members of the world community once their ideals were properly sorted out. Otto Preminger tried to correct this image, in Stalag 17, but in his broad parody of the Prussian officer, or "filthy Boche," of World War I, he was too late with too little.

No such mistake was made in our treatment of the Japanese. If one's only knowledge of them were gained from the American films produced between 1942 and 1949, one would write off the entire population as a band of hopeless barbarians. While the Nazis were almost always Nazis, or at worst "dirty Nazis," the Japanese were Japs, yellow bellies, monkeys and apes. They never came out in the open to fight, as the Germans did, but hid in the tops of palm trees. Whenever one was shot down, it was a joyful occasion. After all, it wasn't as if they were human. Whenever he raked a belly with machine-gun bullets, or drove in a bayonet, John Wayne delivered the typical epitaph. "Well, scratch another slant-eye," may be considered the archetype.

Of course now we understand that the Japanese are peace-loving friends, if anything more cultivated than Americans, so it would appear that we have used up our supply of foreign heavies, in any case. Of course, one could go back to the Chinese, the original yellow peril, and the Russians, but that would hardly be wise, considering the form an angry response might take. John Frankenheimer flirted with the idea in his delicious Mancliurian Candidate, but it's doubtful his lead will be followed.

One must not, while one is at it, neglect the ladies. They were never very convincing, or frightening, as heavies, but they tried. God knows they played hell with the heroes' lives, however difficult that may have been to understand. (Children characteristically dismiss the idea that women are to be taken seriously; when they know better, it is usually too late.) The first female villains, or villainesses, were called vamps. No one knew exactly what the word meant, but it was taken to signify any woman with a great deal of eye make-up who could, and did, distract men of honorable intent from their chosen courses. The queen of them all was Theda Bara (an anagram, her publicist insisted, of Arab Death). Miss Bara was an uncommonly attractive creature, though anyone could tell at a glance that she spelled trouble for any man foolish enough to succumb to her charms. They all did, needless to say, and they went through torment, while audiences shifted uncomfortably (the kids), breathed hard (the older men) or stared aghast (the women). Slightly below Bara in the vamp category, though a far greater star, was Gloria Swanson. The ease with which she led honest men down the primrose path was almost frightening. Pola Negri, Virginia Pearson, Valeska Suratt, Louise Glaum and Barbara La Marr were second stringers, but they kept busy. Then, for no discernible reason, the vamp lost her hold. Audiences who had taken the slinky, mascaraed femmes fatales seriously only a short time before now started to laugh at them. With that, they climbed into their leopard-skin caskets to wait for the reawakening. It never came.

Later actresses attempted to emulate the males in the matter of badness, but they were rather lightweight heavies at best. Bette Davis could hardly be characterized as a "good woman" in any of her pictures, but she seldom had the necessary dark effulgence, though of late she, and Joan Crawford, are staging something of a return match. Gale Sondergaard appeared to know her way about the dark alleys, it's true, and one was forced to admit that a few others—Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce, Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra, Judith Anderson in Rebecca, Agnes Moorehead in a wide variety of performances—had something less than the best intentions; but we always felt that in a pinch we could cope with them. At no time did they seem to be more deadly than the male. Everyone knew it took strength to be downright evil, and the worst of the ladies, or all of them together, would have withered before Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

This character may be taken as the symbol of our dissolution, or progress, depending upon one's point of view. The original Mutiny on the Bounty showed us good and evil in their purest forms. No one could have been truer of heart than Clark Gable, or baser than Laughton. The latter's scowling, sneering, sadistic Bligh was perhaps the meanest man in the world. He had not a single redeeming quality. When he ordered a crewman flogged, or hung from the highest yardarm, he had it done out of a pure sense of malice. Everyone hated him. The new Bounty is a different story altogether. Fletcher Christian, as played by Marlon Brando, is a clever, mincing, high-voiced, aristocratic fop who invites the contempt of his fellows. Bligh, on the other hand, is a plain, decent, unlettered man of the sea who is anxious to do well on his first captaincy. Of the two, it is Christian who is the less appealing. Such an interpretation, it goes without saying, would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Audiences would have bolted die theaters, disgusted, if not altogether enraged. Yet no one seems to mind today. The new version, after all, is closer to the facts. It is more intelligent, subtler, deeper. After all, the history books show, do they not, that Bligh was not really such a bad sort; no worse, certainly, than any of the other British captains. Indeed, he ended as a full admiral, while the mutineer died of syphilis.

Today's audiences appear to be pleased with the transition, though it does seem a tentative sort of pleasure. They know it's silly to hate anyone, even that neurotic Hitler; yet they get a strange, melancholy look on their faces as they sit before their TV sets, staring at Frankenstein, Dracula, Little Caesar, The Plainsman, Drums Along the Mohawk and all the other hopelessly juvenile movies of yesterday. They remind themselves that the cinema has grown up since then. Even those absurd heavies grew up. Humphrey Bogart, there, blasting helpless policemen with his pistol; didn't he go on to better things? A hunted killer in his first movie, he was a responsible businessman in his last, dispensing brotherly advice instead of bullets. Or take that snarling gangland boss there—what does he have in common with the Edward G. Robinson of today? Or that little hoodlum whose blood-spattered body is being propped against his mother's doorstep. He went on to win an Academy Award for his portrayal of George M. Cohan. Boris Karloff, Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Akim Tamiroff, Basil Rathbone—the whole lot of them: They're respectable now, fine legitimate actors or amusing comedians. And we should all be very grateful.

Oh, well, there's always Frank Nitti. But, come to think of it, he isn't looking too healthy these days...