played by Melina Mercouri, who is considered to be an equal gang mem- ber rather than an inert âgirlfriend.â It is John Huston's Beat the Devil. (1953), however ...
A Caper of One’s Own Fantasy Female Liberation in 1960s Crime Comedy Film By Robert von Dassanowsky Abstract: Appreciated today only for the style of the early- and mid-1960s Hollywood studio product, the crime comedy film featured strong female roles that paralleled the collapse of the traditional female roles in the era’s spy films. Influenced by Hitchcock’s sexualized women and Audrey Hepburn’s independent 1950s gamines, the female “caper” character of the 1960s signals a dislocation of women’s roles brought on by a world caught between hedonism and political avowal. In this short-lived subgenre, larcenous-minded men are thwarted, mostly to their own advantage, in their attempt to force female accomplices and love interests into prescribed social behavior and appearance. The lack of an overt counterculture in these films has branded them “establishment” products, supposedly rife with the social and gender role conservatism they actually challenge and destabilize. Keywords: 1960s, comedy, crime, feminism, film.
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t is interesting to speculate how the femme-fatale image of the spy film craze of the 1960s ultimately influenced the re-vision of the female image in Western cinema at the outset of the women’s liberation movement. Sexual liberation of the era allowed for more sensual women on screen, and the suggestion that the female might well be “deadlier than the male”1 was part of this flirtation with sexual danger. The spy genre and its satires may have depicted women who were capable of anything from sexual aggression to
Nicole (Audrey Hepburn) gets tough in How to Steal a Million. Copyright © 2006 Heldrefof Publications Photo courtesy Photofest.
Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications
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world domination, but the traditional dominant cinematic codes continued to be enforced. Able females that were associated with evil either converted to passivity or were destroyed, whereas the less intelligent, sexually passive female characters allowed themselves to be used and often discarded; a romantic happy ending suggested at least a momentary matrimonial pairing between the hero and the “good girl” to reorder the gender-role chaos. However, the amplification of the “bad girl” to the level of a male super villain signaled some progress, which ironically contributed to a more realistic female character in the film of the subsequent decade. Although American cinema is even now caught between traditional images of women and an artificial “liberation” of political correctness, it is clear that the female spy of the 1960s ruptured the static postwar concept of the polarization of the woman on the screen. Film noir and Alfred Hitchcock had much to do with this situation, but more so than spy epics and parodies, the short-lived subgenre of the caper comedy provided a unique conflation of postwar cinematic influences and 1960s sexuality that destabilized traditional female imagery on screen. Like the spy film, the caper comedy sought to titillate by lacing “bad girl” sexual awareness with criminal intent and, with the dropping of censorship, could associate such intent with an active, even aggressive sexuality. The femme fatales of film noir laid the groundwork for an attractive but morally ambivalent type not easily reduced into traditional categories, and this was adopted in a more artificial manner by the 1960s spy genre. Hitchcock, who tended to humanize his female figures, also punished them, and questioned their morality, breaking from the strict good-bad dualism of traditional cinematic female characterization. But just as North by Northwest (1959) seeds the spy film of the 1960s (which, for the sake of simplification and audience interest in the space-age technology, focused on the MacGuffin rather than on the psychology of the relationships), so the character of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) would become a template
for the morally questionable female who nabs the man, usually on her terms.2 The disintegration of censorship afforded greater latitude to the criminal film of the 1960s—crime may still not pay, but criminality would no longer need to be punished in a moralistic manner. Ocean’s Eleven (1960) keeps the thieves from their ill-gotten gains but allows them to “escape” and sets the tone for the decade: hidden in a thief’s coffin, the money stolen from Las Vegas casinos goes up in smoke when he is accidentally cremated, and the gang departs empty-handed but free. Contriving an irony that ultimately kept the criminal from his or her goal or negated the value of the target suited the tastes of the 1960s audiences and suggested that the traditional good-bad value system (like the good-bad female) was now a tired cliché. The revolt against the constrictions of postwar American society, specifically the conservative 1950s, which fueled the youth movement also surfaced in modest ways in the establishment itself, in the culture of the protesters’ parents. The American Dream was no longer a reward for decent hard work, but for Machiavellian ingenuity. Just how far some would go to attain wealth in the decade that floated a national economic boom on the Vietnam War is sensed in the caper films of the decade, which focus on white-collar crime or theft by characters who are not thieves, but members of the middle and upper classes with problems. Learning their “lesson” about greed or immorality through a contrived plot twist that deflates their goal allows for audience identification and admits an accepted slippage of postwar bourgeois morality. Similarly, the transformation of women in these films signals a dislocation of women’s roles brought on by a world caught between hedonism and political avowal. Like the spy film, which provided a release valve for the pressures of the cold war with its update of the knight-hero as playboy, so the caper film glamorizes crime as stylish adventure, complete with fashion, romance, and sex, to function as vicarious escape from the hypocritical structures of consumerist capitalism and the institutionalized heterosexual relationship. The
failure of the crime in this subgenre, or its transformation into something else, usually cements the romance or allows some other life-altering realization to supply an existentialist rather than moralist semiclosure to the proceedings. Television may have had a bumper crop of female spies (the title character of Honey West; Mrs. Peel and her female colleagues from The Avengers, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Agent 99 of Get Smart, the various female leads of Mission: Impossible), but cinema had only three true attempts at creating a female James Bond, and these were seriously subverted. Joseph Losey’s psychedelic Modesty Blaise (1966), based on the popular British comic strip, offered a talented female spy (Monica Vitti), but unlike her morally superior male counterparts, she was not only a thief and associated with the underworld but also the British intelligence office that hired her ultimately must guard against her theft of a diamond shipment she was hired to save. Her independence, rejection of the intelligence establishment, and nontraditional sexual mores (like Bond in reverse, she has a backlog of sexual partners and a male sidekick that defers to her) might have developed into a strong protofeminist series, but critics and audiences alike rejected a liberated female as hero/outlaw because of her moral ambiguity.3 Frank Tashlin’s slapdash Caprice (1967), with Doris Day in a title role she despised, pretends to be a female version of the male spy spoof, but is actually about corporate espionage.4 Day’s Caprice is a thin reworking of her career-women characters of the late 1950s, and even her flirtation with casual sex is so convoluted as to slip by without any ramifications to character or plot development. Ursula Andress’s Vesper Lynd in the mega-Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) is the most memorable for her immense power and wealth (she buys Rockefeller Center, offers two nuclear warheads for the Eiffel Tower, and arranges for Lord Nelson’s statue to be moved from Trafalgar Square to her Mayfair backyard). Her completely independent lifestyle has little to do with the patriarchy beyond her manipulation of it; she kills with ease and is sexually aggressive. The film ultimately reveals
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that she has been on the side of “evil” all along. If this were not enough to negate her equality with Bond, she also admits she did it all “for love,” which allows her to ascend to heaven in a fantasy Faustian closure. Her intellect is replaced literally during her last minute on screen with ill-fitting emotionalism, as if to say that her amoral power was simply fashion; she will be weak because she is a woman (see von Dassanowsky). These characters are lavishly overcostumed to remind the audience that these are still nonthreatening female characters who impart the visual pleasure of living set decoration. The cinematic signal for the emerging new female is, however, at its most powerful where traditional and suburban matrimony frames the moral order, as in the self-parodying Doris Day film The Thrill of It All (1963). Here, writer Carl Reiner, who had fought censorship to bring a contemporary feel to the marital relationship in The Dick Van Dyke Show, satirizes the commercial machinery that supported vapid television drama of the era. The film offers the tale of a frugal and happy homemaker who discovers her own career potential as a television commercial spokesperson. Her doctor husband (James Garner), who denies his own published comprehension of the limitations and frustrations of the traditional wife in his own marriage, rejects his wife’s social and financial independence and, in an attempt to sabotage her career, forces guilt on his wife through heartless deception. Nothing is resolved; a deus ex machina, which romanticizes motherhood and reunites the couple based on the wife’s willingness to have another child, is as absurdly artificial as the television melodramas portrayed in the film. The “thrill” of a homemaker finding her talents and refusing to retreat in the face of male resentment has finally gone too far here, and the narrative shuts down. Reiner and director Norman Jewison imply that if the television spoofs in the film are impossible, the film’s ending must be dismissed as well. Such a marriage cannot be saved if gender roles are not reinvented. The central female character of the 1960s caper subgenre would briefly grow from these cracks in the images
of the passive wife and token career woman and intensifies what Laura Mulvey sees as the reason why female-oriented melodramas of the 1950s were so popular: they provided pleasure to female viewers because the genre is “structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view” (qtd. in Byars 97; emphasis in original). She argues that the female spectator can in this way “rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity” and thus vicariously break from a state of passive repression (97). Janet Walker’s Lacanian reading posits that the active female image also becomes a sexualized male fetish so that any slippage or change from tradition “becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” and that such excursions were only permitted “to the extent that it is predicated on closure” (84). The caper film of the 1960s chafes even at this restriction, because the fall of censorship has affected the interpretation of morality and the construction of Hollywood’s male criminal figure, particularly the white-collar kind, who may now be thwarted but is no longer punished. He has become aware of his limitations and frustrations in society and emotional reactions to them—to the very nature of role-playing—and thus moves toward an equal footing and even identification with the female character. In turn, his female opposite is clearly the daughter of the screwball comedy’s “assertive, high spirited [woman who] def[ies] the patriarchal system that seeks and gains her physical and verbal submission” (Carson 214). By the 1960s, the reductionist nod to a safe reframing of the male-female bourgeois dyad at the conclusion of the film had become unconvincing, even to the characters themselves. Their knowing lack of “safe closure” provides additional titillation to an audience grown tired of suffocating cinematic prescriptions in an era slowly accepting revolt as an everyday activity. Costume Power and the (Role) Model Jules Dassin’s Topkapi (1964) might be seen as the direct genesis of the caper-film style of the 1960s, given its
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grab bag of quirky characters and its strong and very adaptable female lead played by Melina Mercouri, who is considered to be an equal gang member rather than an inert “girlfriend.” It is John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953), however, with Jennifer Jones playing against her saintly cinematic image as a seemingly innocent British lady who is actually a sly conwoman that sets the stage for the costumebased image manipulations of the next decade. Hitchcock followed suit with an intelligent female bandit (Brigitte Auber) in To Catch a Thief (1955), who competes with, even impersonates, a man, and the leading lady, Grace Kelly, provided the excitement of suggested female sexual aggression and a stylish fashion show. Costuming represents a double-edged purpose in these films. It can suggest the powerful self-creativity of the character and the ability to change personas, or couch more radical affronts to the traditional gender-role image in the safety of traditional objectfemale as décor. Audrey Hepburn is the omega point for the costumed image of youthful feminine rebellion in her 1950s films (Roman Holiday, Funny Face, and Sabrina). Her on- and offscreen fashion by Paris couturier Hubert de Givenchy further rebelled against the Hollywood norms of the 1940s and 1950s in their minimalist, foreign chic. However, Elizabeth Wilson posits, “[T]he Hepburn/Givenchy style does send out contradictory messages. The Hepburn character of her contemporary films is both free and bound” through such costuming (40). Using this coding for the often “dangerously” liberated caper female allows the role revolt and the criminal act to be contained when the closure no longer satisfies. These polished Hepburn fashion clones could then never be taken completely seriously as “outlaws.” Day’s roles factor in this as well. Despite strong independent thought and behavior, her envelopepushing career girls ultimately retreat into such elegance. As Dennis Bingham posits, Day “in her ‘divine composure,’ to use Hélene Cixous’s phrase, behaves with the self-contained discretion becoming to a woman in polite society. In so doing, she allows others
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(specifically men) to define her, and to project onto her sexual definitions of the sort that put them in control.”5 The female character in the caper films of the 1960s would meld the two distinct female characters of Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (the thief and the leading lady) into a single figure and kit them out in Hepburn-like French couture to provide a safety net for audiences that might be uncomfortable with both the amorality and genderrole deconstruction. This first occurs in The Pink Panther (1963), directed by Blake Edwards, a filmmaker known
pathos; and Robert Wagner’s George, the hypersexed Lytton nephew, is a perverse version of the typical youth heartthrob. The pole on which the comedic tent of the film is mounted is Simone’s duality, which is evident in the first minutes of the film. She is both a thief and the wife of the incompetent detective who seeks to capture the criminal she not only assists but also loves. Simone’s act as dutiful and subservient wife also hides her significant acumen. Fashion is a key to her true persona, and clothing is a major factor in the film’s comedy. Chased by
. . . women use costuming as a form of communication, which is both traditionally patriarchal [. . .] and counterpatriarchal . . . for the mild revolt against traditional female roles in his films: the “sanitized” call girl in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the alcoholic wife in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), the suffragette that takes on male bravado in The Great Race (1965), the English music hall star turned World War I German spy in Darling Lili (1970), the transvestite burlesque of Victor/Victoria (1982), and a sexist man reincarnated as a woman in Switch (1991). Scholars, however, have curiously ignored the revolutionary aspects of his two strong female figures in The Pink Panther. In this film, Simone, the wife of a French police inspector (Capucine), and Princess Dala, the deposed heir to a Middle-Eastern throne (Claudia Cardinale), provide the intelligence and adaptability for the film’s complex machinations. By comparison, the male characters are as one-dimensional as more traditional female roles: David Niven’s Sir Charles Lytton, the suave jewel thief (patterned no doubt on Grant in To Catch a Thief) is a fantasy of British aristocratic eccentricity; Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau revisions Charlie Chaplin’s blunder and
the police after fencing stolen jewels in a Paris street, Simone rushes into a hotel elevator, removing her wig and making other changes, and emerges as a different woman, stylishly elegant and totally unrecognizable to the police. Sir Charles’s criminal alter ego, the Phantom, leaves a white glove embroidered with a sequined “P” at the scene of his crimes, which reveals Sir Charles’s criminality to George. A costume party at Princess Dala’s Italian villa underscores rather than hides identities. Clouseau appears dressed as a Spanish knight, a latter-day Don Quixote whose naïve idealism as pseudo-hero is crushed by a cynical world. He is clumsy in the armor, which, like his denseness, limits his ability to act. Dual gorilla costumes confuse and hide Sir Charles and George as they both vie for the Pink Panther Diamond, which is locked in the villa’s safe. Simone is costumed as a gaucho, signifying masculinity, pioneering spirit, and independence. Princess Dala also protects her sovereignty (as a deposed royal and as a woman rejecting male dominance) through clothing. She appears in couture or in national cos-
tume, depending on whether she wishes to blend into a social situation or rise above it. Significantly, she wears traditional Middle Eastern garb and no “costume” at her own costume ball, suggesting that all her appearances are roles and that women use costuming as a form of communication, which is both traditionally patriarchal (providing social-sexual signals and male visual pleasure) and counterpatriarchal (as a form of subversion or fantasy escape from strict gender role assignments). When Clouseau is accused in court of being the thief because his wife wears a $10,000 mink coat and has spent $30,000 on clothes at Yves Saint Laurent in a year, the hapless detective replies, “my wife is very frugal; she saves out of the housekeeping money.” Although the female audience would identify with the economic realities of a traditional marriage, the joke is sutured to Simone’s sexual attractiveness throughout the film, much of which is underscored by her expensive clothing. Men would therefore dislike the notion of Simone without her costuming, given the great visual pleasure she has imparted. Her character is therefore more likely to be “forgiven” for her initiative (and for her love of Sir Charles and her toleration of Clouseau), even if it is criminal. Although the film pretends to rescue the reputations of Simone and Princess Dala by their resistance to sexual seduction, the plot contrivances are obviously meant to skewer such cinematic-social definitions, as Simone is a criminal and Princess Dala becomes larcenous as well. Princess Dala hides the Pink Panther Diamond from her nation, which has taken the case to the World Court, and claims it has been stolen. Simone fends off George with the excuse that she is a “married woman” but admits she is sexually attracted to him. However, it is because of her loyalty to her affair with Sir Charles and not to her marriage with Clouseau that she resists him. Princess Dala’s sexuality and social habits are vaguely defined by reference to Islam. She admits that she is a virgin by choice, but when Sir Charles attempts to seduce her with champagne, she finds herself attracted
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to him. She passes out, which ends the seduction. The next day, Sir Charles baits her, suggesting that she is not a “real woman” because she has not slapped him for the insult. Princess Dala laughs, but when he kisses her hand, she delivers the delayed punishment. Despite her status as the daughter of a deposed Muslim monarch, it is as an independently thinking woman that she is willing to entertain certain social-sexual conventions, but only to serve her specific needs and ideals, as does Sir Charles in his guise as a British “knight” and “gentleman.” The Simone-Princess Dala conspiracy to save Sir Charles from capture by pinning the theft on Clouseau obliterates several American cinematic conventions. Crime is not punished (although Princess Dala must relinquish the diamond); the criminally tainted women manipulate the patriarchy and its law, with both Sir Charles and George passively accepting this female dominance to escape justice (they agree that Clouseau will be freed when the Phantom strikes again) and to continue the façade of aristocratic privilege. Pragmatism and role-playing for the sake of social survival is the tongue-in-cheek message of the film, but this female mode is applied to men as well. Simone and Dala are, however, “defanged” by their uniqueness, exoticness, and hypermarginalization—one is a well-dressed French jewel thief married to a cinematic joke, the other a fantasy of a Middle Eastern princess—and this allows Edwards’s film to avoid true controversy. Although crime is no longer punished in the traditional manner in mid1960s American film, American women in caper films are not given quite the latitude their European or “exotic” sisters (including the female thieves of How to Steal a Million [1966] and Gambit [1967]) manage. In Who’s Minding the Mint (1967), a broad slapstick-tinged comedy featuring a host of well-known American comedians and character actors, the thieves are separated from their loot in an ironic manner recalling Ocean’s Eleven (their money goes out to sea via a garbage scow). The female characters are reduced to the roles of the traditional girlfriend (Dorothy Provine),
who knows about, but is uninvolved in the crime, and a decoy (Jackie Joseph), who is employed to keep a guard distracted. Reactionary and Progressive Modes of the Mod Female Thief William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million flirts with the concept of amorality and theft but is the most deceptive of the subgenre, as, because the criminals are actually stealing to prevent a crime, the film is constructed to negate their criminality. Like Day’s cinematic protection from any damage to her moral reputation, even in Caprice, the notion of a thieving Hepburn would not have been deemed acceptable to the audiences of the era regardless of her (very moral) “party girl” role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The audience knows from the outset that her character Nicole’s scheme with a thief to steal the priceless Cellini Venus statuette from a Paris museum is not motivated by greed: Nicole is attempting to protect her “art collector” father, Charles Bonnet (Hugh Griffith), a second-generation forger whose father created the work modeled after his mother. Hepburn essays her usual aristocratic gamine, and her personal association with fashion is exploited in the film to add visual excitement and to tease the audience with an implied immorality/amorality. Hepburn makes her first appearance in a convertible, wearing a very “mod” white outfit—she is at once innocent (white), given limited self-control (a car associated with single men), but socially and culturally bounded (couture). Hepburn’s character is also associated with the Cellini Venus in color (white) and resemblance (her grandmother) and therefore immediately iconized on a dual level: as a star who represents superhuman perfection to the audience and is therefore a desired and safe focus of identification as her realfictional personas within the film. Her partner in crime, Simon Dermott (Peter O’Toole), wryly suggests as he hands her charwoman’s clothing for the caper that “it gives Givenchy a night off.” There are several intertexts with Hitchcock: Nicole is seen reading a paperback of his mysteries in bed before a noise frightens her in the darkened
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Bonnet villa. She discovers Simon, who disguises his break-in as an attempted robbery, whereas he intended to examine Charles’s forgery of a Van Gogh. His assumption of the “society burglar” guise to avoid revealing his true occupation of private detective clearly references Grant’s retired thief John Robie in To Catch a Thief, who is implicated but never actually steals anything. Echoing Kelly’s Frances Stevens, who urges Robie to take her jewelry (in the sexual connotation as well), is Nicole, who forces Simon into the role of a thief. Female dominance, even aggressiveness, is thus tied to a liberation that is disruptive of the social status quo and considered criminal. The theft is also implemented to protect the patriarchy (Nicole’s father and grandfather) from their original criminality. Nicole’s innocence continues despite the criminal machinations of her father, who tells her that the “basic trouble with you is that you are honest.” Yet, like the other female leads in the caper comedies, the social expectations as a “lady” chafe. Nicole works, has no female friends, and seems to prefer isolation to a socialization that would enforce traditional values. This isolation may also be a psychological reaction to her father’s illegal activities. She finds momentary freedom from her character’s socialsexual norm and as “Givenchy star” when she drives the would-be art thief to his hotel after shooting him accidently. She wears only a nightgown, an ill-fitting coat, and black rainboots. Freed from couture, she makes her own choices that run counter to the status quo. Simon, the would-be “thief” she has shot and now protects to avoid police involvement, passionately kisses her, which seals her shift in identity but also restores her to the unassailable filmic icon she is: the taste of her lips is Simon’s sampling of yet another “art” created by Charles. Nicole admits her minor and harmless slippage when her father asks if Simon “molested” her. Nicole answers longingly, “not much.” Her Givenchy attire maintains her conventional façade, but it now takes on the artificiality of a mask (which she actually wears with an over-the-top Givenchy design) for a self-appointed outlaw.
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Aside from the predictable skullduggery and the romance that blossoms as they hide in a museum broom closet before the theft of the statuette, the film can also be read as a reactionary sociocritical and gender-role statement that realigns Nicole’s liberation with the suggested criminality of the patriarchal elite. The subplot introduces an American multimillionaire, Davis Leland (Eli Wallach), who uses Nicole so he may add the statuette to his art collection even if it must be stolen. His incompetence at seduction reveals that his interest in women is based less in sexual desire than in notions of social achievement. He equates courting to business acquisition, and the woman becomes his commodity object (he gives Nicole an enormous diamond engagement ring). Second, his confession to Nicole that she calms his heterosexual anxiety—“with you, it’s like talking to a member of the board”— underscores her difference. Although there may well be homoerotic desire in this underdeveloped character, it is Nicole’s lack of traditionalism as a woman that attracts Davis. She is perceived as an equal to the men with whom he deals. Nevertheless, the statuette and Nicole remain interchangeable possessions and objects to him. For Simon, too, woman as icon and an art icon as object of desire color his dual fascination with Nicole and the Cellini Venus. At the end of the film, he informs Charles, “You have two beautiful girls.” After the successful theft of the fake Cellini, the traditional male-female relationship between Nicole and Simon becomes confused. He tells her, “O.K. you’re the boss; just do as I tell you.” The disposal of the fake Cellini and the return of the ring provide a metaphor for the value system operating in the film. Although the role of Nicole/Hepburn as an outlaw titillates the audience, it is ultimately excused. The fake Cellini, adorned with the engagement ring, is delivered to Davis, who is ecstatic to have the statuette but surprised to see the ring. Because the fake Cellini resembles Nicole, Simon underscores Leland’s desire to own her by associating his ring with the statuette. Like
Simon’s pose as a criminal, the rescue of Nicole from capitalist ownership and a loveless marriage that would repress her is a sham, as Simon has made his own demands on her and now takes her as a reward for protecting her father. Certainly, the film posits both American capitalism (Davis) and old European aristocratic decadence (Charles) as corrupt forces and so manages a whiff of antiestablishment social politics made safe for the film’s mainstream audience. Charles’s comment that “American millionaires must be all quite mad. Perhaps it’s something they put in the ink when they print the money ” allows the audience to forgive his criminality, because he only hurts a class that the film has already demonized. The greed of the wealthy is presented through an interchangeable persona—Wallach, who plays the art collectors who show up at Charles’s door. When Nicole chastises Charles for his illegal activities, he explains, “But I don’t sell them [the forged paintings] to poor people; only to millionaires.” As Simon and Nicole drive away from Charles’s Parisian villa in an expensive Jaguar, it is clear that they are not members of the counterculture, but rather represent a new generation of the selfappointed elite—a man protecting the possessions of the establishment and the daughter of an aristocratic dynasty of forgers and thieves. The restoration of the female to goodness through closure would be rejected by the film’s viewers that so precariously plays with the slippery concepts of honesty and dishonesty, innocence and criminality. But Nicole has changed, as suggested in her defiant lie about her father’s newest client (and Charles’s intent to continue forgery), to which Simon replies, “For someone who studied lying just recently, you’re showing a real flair.” Nicole thanks him ecstatically, as if she has now graduated into the male world as her fiancé’s equal and as a true Bonnet. Wilson explains that the “poignancy in her [Hepburn’s] films comes from the metamorphosis that invariably lies in wait: her passionate innocence is encased in haute couture, her beauty gets embalmed in happy endings that solve nothing” (38).
At the height of the comedy caper subgenre in the mid-1960s, three American films attempted a more nuanced approach to the synthesis of “new” woman and crime, and although they contrive solutions that allow the female lead character to escape her seemingly “outlaw” status, none of them can convincingly retract or negate the semiliberation of the character. Fitzwilly (1967), Penelope (1966), and Gambit leave the traditional female role partially deconstructed and problematic. In Fitzwilly, directed by Delbert Mann and written by Isobel Lennart6 (the only female screenwriter of this subgenre), the butler Fitzwilly (Dick Van Dyke) and his staff steal to support the old-money lifestyle of an elderly New York society matron, Miss Victoria Woodworth, known as Miss Vicki (Edith Evans), who has no idea that she is penniless. One female staff member steals with the men; another chooses to ignore the situation. Juliet Nowell (Barbara Feldon), a Columbia University graduate student in American history and daughter of an English professor (Harry Townes), applies as Miss Vicki’s part-time assistant, as Miss Vicki is writing a dictionary for poor spellers. Although Miss Vicki likes Juliet, she defers to Fitzwilly, who is dismissive of Juliet because she is an outsider and might discover the staff’s true activities. Juliet deems his abrasive, authoritarian male attitude to be inhuman, a kitschcinematic construction: “out of some horror movie, that man.” She misinterprets his controlling ways as abuse of Miss Vicki, and just to prove her wrong, Fitzwilly hires her. Nevertheless, he informs her that she will no doubt be “idiotic, interfering, and ill-kempt.” As a punch line that may be Lennart’s skewering of women’s uncritical acceptance of their social limitations, Juliet, who has earned degrees and speaks fluent French, is only insulted by the “ill-kempt” comment. Juliet is a conservative Hollywood fantasy of the mid1960s college student—far older than the average graduate student and with somewhat casual speech as the only trace of the counterculture. Her “illkempt” clothing is hardly hippy garb, but rather typical casual clothing for
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the era, and, in hindsight, is undeserving of criticism. However, for an audience used to high-fashion costuming in the studio fantasy of the workday (Day’s career women or in television’s That Girl7), Juliet might well resemble someone who actually has more going on in her life than her appearance. Taking Fitzwilly’s comments to heart, she appears for her first day at work in Hepburn-like couture that would be far beyond the means of a college student who wants to earn money “to buy a car.” Juliet also accepts her objectification as a standard. When she frets about her possible attraction to Fitzwilly, her father, who invests little effort in his own appearance, complains that she “hasn’t stopped eating all day” and that this woman with an already uncommon slimness will become “fat.” Miss Vicki’s handsome French chef (Albert Carrier) supports this fledgling anorexia complex—he, in object fascination with women, only notices her because she looks “chic” in an elegant outfit she now feels obliged to wear. Beyond its central questions regarding class and crime, the film is also partially a bildungsroman about Juliet, who learns to fit into patriarchal high society by the men who surround her and apparently hold sway in her self-realization until the revelation of criminality liberates her. Countering this image manipulation is Miss Vicki, who becomes an ersatz mother figure to Juliet and who, although always displaying the manners of a well-dressed, high-society matron (external image), conveys a countercultural, even antipatriarchal persona (internal truth) to her new “daughter.” She admits that she respects Fitzwilly’s decisions, not because this husbandless matriarch longs for male dominance, but for a matriarchal reason: she raised Fitzwilly and loves him like a son. In turn, he helped her realize her potential during a period of bad health and depression. Although she may still be a slave to her class expectations, she rejects much of society’s expectations for women in general. “The fool woman’s on a diet” is her reaction to a close friend’s meager luncheon, and Miss Vicki welcomes Fitzwilly’s suggestion of chocolate soufflé when her friend
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The independent Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine) challenges stereotypes in Ronald Neame’s Gambit. Photo courtesy of Photofest.
comes to visit: “Bless you; she’ll gain a ton.” She has created her own antiCub Scout troup, the Platypi, because she rejects the Scouts’ misogyny and regards their ideal of helping an “old lady” across the street “the height of impertinence.” She leads her uniformed scions across the city to teach them her version of history and culture, and insists they learn cooking from her chef. Although their motto “we hate reefers, girls, and gin” may seem puritanical, framed by Miss Vicki’s ideology, it actually battles the patriarchal self-indulgences of the older male generation—the fathers and grandfathers of these privileged boys, whose world she blatantly equates with barbarism. She instructs Fitzwilly to obtain safari tents for the Platypi campout to toughen them up “for the dangers that lie ahead: college, marriage, Wall Street.” Miss Vicki is open about her intense dislike for her repressive Brahmin father, whose racism (he had a reoccurring dream in which he was boiled and eaten by savages), sexism, and classism were nothing less than madness. She relates that he intended to buy Central America to turn it into a resort hotel, “one country for hunting, one for golf, and so on.” Since his demise, she has deconstructed his essence in her life (“hating father was her chief interest in her life until he died”) while keeping intact the external image of traditional,
patriarchal (high) society. Miss Vicki’s world is thus a veiled matriarchy, in which the enlightened female head uses her patriarchal class association to both dominate and liberate, and whose wealth is provided by a paterfamilias manqué who is decidedly unmasculine in the fluidity of his external identities. Obviously, Miss Vicki’s rearing taught Fitzwilly that gender and class roles are easily manipulated and assailable. Both “mother” and “son” act their external traditional identities but do not define themselves by them. Miss Vicki’s protofeminism is endearingly eccentric, making it palatable to the traditional audience. She lives in a style that is unapproachable to the masses, and Fitzwilly’s introduction, which is spoken directly to the audience, has a distancing effect that suggests the theatricality, hence safety, of the criminal adventure to come. He states, “once upon a time, the very privileged lived the way we still do.” Miss Vicki’s space is made anachronistic; large apartment buildings surround her castlelike mansion, isolating and mythologizing her. Yet she imparts her feminine wisdom and iconoclastic ideals to Juliet, who learns to question authority and think critically, even as she learns to love Fitzwilly for his sensitivity beneath the role(s) he plays. Discarding his sexist and classist arguments, she eventually uncovers the theft ring. It is important
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to note that in the sequences in which she admits her feelings and confronts Fitzwilly, she is dressed in the sweater and pants outfit reminiscent of Hepburn in Funny Face. She is never again as pragmatic and “equal” once she returns to couture. As in other caper films, the theft is made understandable if not exactly moral, and thus the characters escape demonization. Here, as a “Robin Hood” tale adapted for the mid-1960s, an impoverished, humanistic matriarch represents the poor; the rich are the soulless insurance companies. The audience is expected to accept this scapegoat for an abusive capitalist system, and modest crime for the sake of survival seems therefore acceptable, given the suggestion that the system itself is already corrupt. Juliet easily enters into this process, but will only marry Fitzwilly if he reforms. She fears for their future children rather than explicitly condemns his criminality. Fitzwilly, however, cannot admit to Miss Vicki that she is penniless because she is “very moral” and would expect Fitzwilly to repay any sums stolen. Juliet accepts the idea of a final caper to finance Miss Vicki—a Christmas Eve heist at Gimbel’s—but is not informed of the precise plans in case the plan goes awry. The violent slapstick climax to the film is a statement about the greed and self-importance of the average shopper on the eve of a holiday that represents giving, love, and peace. Shoplifters, escalating aggression, and a manic rush to grab a “free color T.V. set with any purchase” (a sign placed in the shop’s windows by Fitzwilly’s staff) present a consumerist apocalypse that allows the audience to vicariously release its frustrations while shifting the morality gauge of the film in favor of Fitzwilly. As in other caper films of the era, a contingency derails the successful conclusion of the criminal act, when a staff member confesses to the theft. Miss Vicki covers the Gimbel’s heist and other debts, as her book, although it has failed as a dictionary, has been purchased by a film studio. Fitzwilly and Juliet are reframed as the bourgeois “son and daughter” of Miss Vicki, who embraces them. They are saved
by a deus ex machina provided by female creativity that would never have occurred had the traditional patriarchal system of gender and class existed in the house. As a married couple, with Juliet knowing and abetting Fitzwilly’s crimes, the two would certainly represent the hollowness of the American Dream. As “children” to Miss Vicki and thus her heirs, might they also suggest an upwardly mobile anticapitalist revolution from above, or would the desire to keep status reflect a continuation of a cannibalistic capitalist system? In How to Steal a Million and Fitzwilly, the narrative situates the female lead between the traditional patriarchal figure and the “newer” man, who represents a deflation of male dominance and control. At its heart, Million may be reactionary, but Fitzwilly offers a more equal footing of men and women, as well as a partnership that promises a marriage of equal respect and transparency of social and sexual roles. Freud versus Givenchy, or the Genre-Reflexive Caper An attempt to psychologize the caper film fails in Arthur Hiller’s Penelope (1966), because the confused script tries to impersonate witty screwball comedy dialogue without delivering meaning or furthering the plot, and the direction chooses to be “wacky” rather than focus on the satire at hand. Even so, Penelope, Natalie Wood’s manic and idealistic waif damaged by capitalist society, is important to feminist study for the significant ruptures in traditional gender role and social norms she displays.8 The simple plot made complex by the attempted psychological underpinnings, which are then dropped in favor of a happy ending, deals with Penelope the bored wife of New York banker James Elcott (Ian Bannen) and thief. She visits an unstable psychiatrist, as signified by his name, Dr. Mannix (Dick Shawn), who believes he loves her. He discovers that she was nearly raped by her former professor (in a moronic flashback that exploits the crime as a burlesque joke) and took the professor’s watch fob as she escaped his clutches. Since then, she has stolen jewelry from women who have attempted to seduce her husband.
Her kleptomania is a clear response to sexual threat, yet she equally targets James for (sexually?) ignoring her, after failing to get his attention in trying “hobbies with James” and “hobbies for James.” Despite the convoluted impulses at work to create a “zany” character, Penelope is another “safe” foray into counterculture. She is paraded around in Parisian-style creations by Edith Head, which masks any radicalism that the character represents. The immensely wealthy milieu once again distances the assault on gender roles and social norms from the reality of the mainstream audience. James first discovers Penelope when he is the administrator of her small inheritance. She performs as a folksinger in a Greenwich Village club— a strong reference to Funny Face— appears to have no interest in money, and is unaware of his attempts to reach her because she never opens her mail. In Penelope’s view, a response creates a chain of expectations that removes human freedom of action. Because she is so different from traditional society women, James falls in love her. The establishment-counterculture collision symbolized by marriage is provocative for the era, especially given the fact that it is the female who rejects patriarchal social norms and has built her existence on a nonconformist, independent level. Penelope too easily accepts the wealthy surroundings of her establishment marriage, but, like the characters played by Hepburn, Capucine, and Feldon (as the older Miss Vicki is not a peer), she is a loner and apparently has no female friends. Unable to relate to the flirtatious, game-playing women of her social level, she is either alone or with men by choice (Dr. Mannix) or by casual attraction (the police detective Lt. Bixbee, played by Peter Falk in a nascent “Columbo” role). Although the film never clearly acknowledges that Penelope steals to undermine her husband’s (and his society’s) passiveaggressive domination, it oddly celebrates her love of spending and buying, which takes on the value of revenge. In disguise, she gives a Salvation Army official a thousand dollar bill, and when it is presented to the police as part of the
A Caper of One’s Own
bank loot, Penelope insists that James give the official a check so the bank will “break even.” Although this illogical solution is played for a joke throughout the film as an example of Penelope’s lack of rational thought, her past and desire to spread the wealth defines her altruistic and countercultural value system. James would indeed “break even” if sharing money with the needy were part of the social norm. The film parallels Penelope’s problematic social-identity shift with that of Hepburn’s move from Greenwich Village bohemia to café society in Funny Face, which was evoked in fashion. Couture also anchors Penelope’s wildness: “To be a willful, trouser-clad student type can only ever be a phase. In the end, she must ‘grow up’ and wear grown up clothes” (Wilson 40). In other words, the female revolt must be tempered or even negated, and here, this is paralleled with the social revolt of the counterculture. Instinctively, Penelope associates capitalism with theft. She uses money from a robbery at her husband’s bank to buy a mink coat and dress she proudly displays—symbols of her status as an upper-class wife. Other aspects reveal Penelope’s troubled persona, expressed through clothing or appearance. She constantly changes wigs and disguises, but accomplishes only one major robbery in which identity is hidden. Thus, her undefined identity and her search for self-definition under the cloaks of social and gender expectations of her class are clear. Indeed, when the surveillance camera only captures her as an old lady from behind during the robbery (she escapes through ditching the disguise), we are told, “Everyone else’s face was so clear.” In the director’s attempt to convey a carefree attitude, Penelope continually leaves her shoes in taxis, offices, and stores, appearing suddenly and inappropriately barefoot. This provides the film with a metaphor for the social “imprisonment” of both Penelope and James, who becomes obsessed with finding her when she disappears after another bank robbery. On the psychiatrist’s couch, he confesses that he has been neglectful and has pushed her aside “for the bank.” As they depart
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the office together, he also forgets his shoes, and she tells him, “We’re cured!” Rather than assimilate, Penelope has somehow shown her husband that he must change his understanding of his outmoded gender role. The revolution comes framed in a return to romance for the couple without comment about their wealth, but it is clear that James is malleable. Earlier in the film, at a multiracial, gender-bending artistic Greenwich Village party, he understood Penelope when she told him “If you don’t try everything, how are you going to find out what you really like?” Two subplots arising from the robbery further condemn the consumeristcapitalist worldview, in which Penelope-as-wife becomes a possession of her husband equal to his bank. Her thriftstore donation of a yellow Givenchy suit (a clear reference to Hepburn and her characterizations of measured defiance), worn to the bank robbery, brings out Princess Sadaba (Lila Kedrova) and
the robber. They inform her that they are selling her “freedom,” which the idealistic Penelope embraces, but this is the freedom of (re-)securing status, not the freedom she enjoyed as an independent woman. Princess Sadaba and Ducky are thwarted, but their criminal efforts to maintain a haute-bourgeois lifestyle and their selling of clothing that promotes such a lifestyle equates “upward mobility” and the “upper class” to predatory and antidemocratic forces (Princess Sadaba) and petty greed (Ducky). Ducky’s exploitation of a “princess” for his own importance and money, as well as James’s exploitation of a beautiful wife for his self-worth, are expanded into more specific sexualcommodity exploitation in the scene where Penelope confesses to the robbery. She has given the stolen money to Dr. Mannix, who has erred in returning it via the night-deposit box at the bank. Honeysuckle Rose (Arlene Golonka) is arrested for possessing the money,
Rather than assimilate, Penelope has somehow shown her husband that he must change his understanding of his outmoded gender role. her partner, Ducky (Lou Jacobi), who run an exclusive boutique and swindle the thrift shop out of the suit that they plan to resell for a large profit. Both characters are one-dimensional stereotypes that are so absurdly corrupted as to make Penelope’s dysfunction seem meaningful and forgivable. Kedrova’s lunatic Eastern European royal is a parody of her heartbreakingly pathetic Polish countess adrift in communism in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and conveys Old European decadence without any implication of gentility, and Jacobi’s manipulative, money-hungry Bronx Jew borders on an antiSemitic caricature, particularly given the WASPy nature of the central characters. The couple’s attempt to blackmail Penelope backfires when she wants to show the suit to James to prove she is
although she claims she found it outside the bank while she was “walking her cat” at 3 a.m. Penelope, of course, believes Rose and understands that she “works at night” without offering any moral judgment. The men automatically condemn Rose because of her difference and class, although they would use her to buy sexual pleasure. Penelope, who disregarded money at first and has come to accept it (or its purchase power) as an exchange for her loveless marriage, comprehends the Marxist concept of the wife as a form of prostitute. She identifies with Rose, and she attempts to free her by confessing. Her status, however, makes her confession unbelievable. To force the issue, Penelope throws a cocktail party inviting James’s female friends and wears the jewels that she has stolen from them, but they deny owner-
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ship and dismiss her as mad. Like Fitzwilly, insurance fraud is evoked, and Dr. Mannix explains to a confused Penelope that her targets are “bigger crooks” than she is, as they have exploited these thefts for far more insurance money than the jewels were worth. In Hiller’s film of bored high-society denizens, crime does seem to pay, and Penelope, one of the few lead female criminals in American cinema history, would in essence “get away with it” if not for her own sense of morality that transcends the façades of the film’s ruling class. The film’s overloaded symbolic coding, contrived comedic action, and banal dialogue makes Penelope an unlikely film to represent a sense of female liberation. But the tensions and arguments are here, and
kalike for Shahbandar’s wife. Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine), a Eurasian dancer in a nightclub, is convinced to play the charade for $5,000. The caper proceeds like clockwork: While Harry waxes eloquently, Lady Dean, clad in Chinese gowns by designer Jean Louis, remains silent and inscrutable. So taken is Shahbandar with her that he invites the couple to a private dinner. While Lady Dean enchants Shahbandar, who admires her silent beauty, Harry steals the sculpture. Lady Dean exits under the guise of visiting the bathroom. The couple rendezvous at the airport, where Nicole is paid and departs. It is a slick production that operates in the intricate but unrealistic patterns of a Bond film or an episode of Mission: Impossible.
. . . the female exists only for her ornamental value as an object of visual or sexual pleasure and is both iconized [. . .] and sentimentalized [. . .] by male desire and fantasy . . . the conclusion goes beyond any film of the era in suggesting that men must relocate identity beyond archaic role-playing and manages, at least through simplistic symbols, to move in that direction. Postcolonialism, Racism, and the “Recasting” of the Female Object The film that sums up the female role in the caper comedies of the 1960s is Ronald Neame’s Gambit, which functions as a near-theoretical device in delineating something akin to reality from cinematically generated clichés of racism and sexism. The first half of the film relates the scheme of Harry Dean (Michael Caine), who seeks an Asian woman in Hong Kong who resembles the beloved, dead wife of the reclusive Muslim billionaire, Ahmad Shahbandar (played by Czechoslovakian actor Herbert Lom). He owns a priceless Chinese sculpture, the head of the Chinese Empress Li Su, which also resembles his dead wife. Harry plans to steal it by impersonating a British aristocrat and employing a loo-
Traditional Golden Age Hollywood cinematic values remain unassailed: a white male dominates and proves to be more intelligent than his nonwhite cohorts; the female exists only for her ornamental value as an object of visual or sexual pleasure and is both iconized (as art) and sentimentalized (resemblance to a dead woman) by male desire and fantasy (lavish and luxurious costuming is a major aspect of her construction). The Muslim Shahbandar, who wears a fez and a monocle so as to be cinematically typed as an exotic, is easily fooled, spends indiscriminately, and is deferential to Anglo-Europeans in a colonial manner. In a ten-yearold magazine article, which Harry uses for information, a colonial fantasy of a “latter-day Arabian knight” frames Shahbandar. His surroundings are mysterious, darkly ornate, and filled with Eastern and Arabic (that is, non-Christian) art. After the caper’s successful conclusion, a return to the nightclub reveals that the heist has only taken place in
Harry’s mind. The real-life Nicole is chatty, streetwise, and suspicious. She is nothing like the Cixousian “divine composured” image he imagines or wishes her to portray. On an ideological level, the second half of the film becomes the corrective—a protofeminist and postcolonial mirror. Nicole suspects that Harry is a “crook” and that he is up to something “dishonest,” in which she initially refuses to participate, but acquiesces when a British passport is offered. Her desire for the passport and her multicultural background (she has a French Canadian mother and a Eurasian father) suggests that she is constantly at odds with her identity in both Western and Eastern worlds, and is lower on the social scale than any other female, even those of (homogeneous) color. Rejected by a racist, colonialist, patriarchal society, she identifies with women who are survivalists and have succeeded against the odds, She tells a bored Harry about Mrs. Pionski, a Polish woman who traveled from Burma to Thailand on an ox with nothing more than a paper sack. This strong but destitute motherfigure is the basis of her value system and morality: “Whenever I think of Mrs. Pionski, I appreciate luxury more.” Harry is uncomfortable with this model and Nicole’s hidden talents (she can play works by Beethoven) that do not fit into his notion of “woman,” as either his hired biracial near-prostitute or his mythical, high-born female, and he subsequently chastises her as “far too human.” The actual caper begins with the discovery that Shahbandar’s hotel no longer employs the staff member that would assure Harry’s grand entrance. Harry’s assumed title does not hold up to scrutiny, and Shahbandar is a shrewd, highly intelligent, and Western-style businessman, with suspicions of the couple. Unlike Harry’s fantasy, Shahbandar’s home is light, modern, and high tech. His art collection spans the old European masters to modern abstracts. His unexpected traits and qualities, like those of Nicole, disconcert Harry and turn the very nature of colonialism into an allegory—the exploiting power has no true comprehension of the colonial charge and its
A Caper of One’s Own
culture beyond stereotype. Shahbandar understands this dynamic and resents the incursion into his life by those with assumptions of superiority, while Harry’s plot is based in such racist (and cinematic conventional) concepts that he cannot fathom Shahbandar’s dislike of him. Nicole, however, comprehends the need to be fluid, to manipulate both herself and the situation, because as a woman of mixed race and low social standing, she is herself a “colonial” surviving by sensing expectations and fulfilling those projections (also as a reflection of male desire). As she inserts herself into Harry’s plot, she deconstructs his concept of “woman” as commodity and object of pleasure. It is her intelligence and need to communicate rather than her resemblance to an object or a memory that intrigues Shahbandar. She can discuss art, is opinionated, and parries his tests with witty responses. Harry remains both confused and silent, but he begins to see Nicole in a different light. Her human qualities, even aspects of her superiority to him, become sexually and romantically stimulating. Nicole rejects Harry’s criminal plans, but she helps him because she fears for his life. Instead of adopting an exotic look for a dinner with Shahbandar, she appears in her own white evening gown, informing Harry that she will wear her own clothes because she knows Shahbandar will like them. Thus, she breaks openly with Harry’s subjugation, reflecting respect for Shahbandar’s intelligence (he does not buy the “China doll” image) and asserting her own identity. Although the film revolves around static male images of “woman” (nightclub dance hostess, sculpture of a queen, dead wife, Lady Dean), this is the first moment in which a woman’s image of herself actually appears. When the plan goes awry, Nicole returns to the hotel to help Harry get the sculpture. She is now his equal, clad in the requisite Hepburnesque sweater, pants, and loafers. Because she is a woman, she can physically accomplish the theft, which requires climbing into the narrow alarm cage and retrieving the sculpture. Her humanity and abilities finally register with Harry, and he
blurts out, “You’re a clever girl and I love you.” Nicole rushes out of the cage, where she has “replaced” the sculpture, to embrace him and triggers the alarm. Thus, Nicole’s self-liberation as a woman off the “pedestal” of male containment and/or worship disrupts the social status quo to the point of a criminal “emergency.” Nicole, wearing a scarf over her hair and a raincoat, is captured at the airport by Shahbandar’s men, a dislocated victim of male exploitation that invokes Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At a meeting with Shahbandar, the short-haired Nicole is dressed in an elegant beige suit, carrying a handbag and white gloves resembling an “Asian” Hepburn in her “grown-up” and “bound” Givenchy style. It signals her retreat from the relative freedom of exotica, fantasy, and finally equality into the traditional role of a white, adult female. Shahbandar’s comment about the attempted theft reflects on both colonial expectations and the male-female role-playing: “So many of us posing as one thing, in reality being something quite different.” Harry ultimately reveals that the theft was a publicity hoax—the sculpture was actually hidden in Shahbandar’s home, and a forgery made of it. The result is similar to the artas-commodity conclusion in How to Steal a Million: Wealthy buyers choose to believe they can obtain the stolen original and they will pay any price to own what is actually a copy. Nicole threatens to leave Harry if he continues this caper, and he smashes the head, departing with a satisfied Nicole while his partner, the forger, must handle the buyer. The final shot, however, reveals a cupboard filled with several other copies of the sculpture. Art is reproducible, as Walter Benjamin would have it, and these copies, so common and interchangeable, reflect the reproducibility and fetish quality of the male-constructed “woman” as well. Nicole’s personal morality loses out, and she returns to the world of deceit (Harry) and white male superiority. Her potential has been contained, displayed only briefly in a fantasyladen situation. Once again, the filmic
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retreat into the gender-role status quo provides a mainstream-safe, if uncomfortable, nonclosure. The comedy caper film in which men are thwarted, mostly to their own advantage, in their attempt to force women into a static projection (How to Steal a Million and Gambit), or into a mold of prescribed social behavior and appearance (The Pink Panther, Penelope, and Fitzwilly), reached its peak by 1967. Although there were a few more unremarkable attempts in this subgenre, a deconstructionist female character and the tensions it invoked no longer played a part in these films. In that year, Arthur Penn’s tragicomedy Bonnie and Clyde became a sensation, demonstrating the public fascination with crime similar to The Pink Panther’s parody in its near-Beatlemania conclusion. The period costumes of Bonnie and Clyde influenced women’s fashions in the late 1960s, and the film spawned many imitations. It also overtook the female role in the caper film through its depiction of a woman who chooses to live as a social and sexual outlaw. Yet, as Molly Haskell notes, she is a “rural heroine” in 1960s film, suggesting that during the era, “only with a complete lack of sophistication, of awareness, could a woman be happy” and free (365–66). The frustration of Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) over the impotence of Clyde (Warren Beatty) also allowed for a cinematic glimpse into female sexual need, female desire, and male sexual dysfunction. Given such a revolutionary breakout, the caper film would naturally fade from importance, even in its own time. Nevertheless, it is ironic that the films of this risk-taking subgenre are so poorly understood today that they tend to be appreciated only for the postmodern kitsch value of their look. The lack of an overt expression of the era’s counterculture in these films, despite their veiled references, has also branded them “establishment” products, supposedly rife with the conservatism they actually challenged and destabilized. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author thanks Russell Moore for access to diverse film material.
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NOTES 1. This is the title of a 1966 film in which the “hit men” for a master criminal are all beautiful women. 2. Stanley Donen’s virtual remake of the North by Northwest character constellation in his 1966 Arabesque (with Sophia Loren in the Eve Kendall role) underscores the female spy as prostitute, used for her body rather than her mind. Loren’s take on the character in 1967, is somewhat more intelligent and deceitful. 3. Peter O’Donnell’s British strip, which began in 1963, and his later Modesty Blaise novels and short stories were extremely popular. The rejection of a similar characterization on the screen suggests the lingering and conflicting conservatism of audience reception regarding female roles in film. 4. Raquel Welch’s character in Fathom (1966) provides the oddest and most blatant attempt at avoiding female independence and equality to men in the spy genre. Although the film’s publicity markets her as a “spy,” she is actually a dental hygienist in a skydiving troupe, whose sexual attractiveness and high-flying talents are the reasons for her recruitment by the government to steal a nuclear device. Her definition and required role is only as servant and object, without even the nominal intellect and power of Loren’s character in Arabesque. 5. See Bingham 9. Bingham underscores Haskell’s belief that Day is the strongest female image in American cinema of the 1950s: “Implicit in Haskell’s observation is the idea that Day is devoid of manipulation [unlike the seductiveness of Hepburn or Kelly], that rather than inspiring or maneuvering men to get what she wants, she goes after it herself” (13). 6. Poyntz Tyler’s novel was adapted for the film. Lennart had scripted some of Hollywood’s best battle-of-the-sexes relationship films of the early 1960s (Two for the Seesaw; Period of Adjustment) and wrote the book for the musical Funny Girl, based on the life of iconoclastic star Fanny Brice, as well as for the script of the 1966 film. 7. The title character played by Marlo Thomas during the series run (1966–71) was an often unemployed New York actress who tested the pop-cultural waters as the first truly independent young woman on network television. To temper any conveyance of gender or sociopolitical revolt, her look avoided the counterculture completely. Despite her apparent poverty, she was usually clad in and “contained” by the designs of French couturiers Courreges and Oscar de la Renta. 8. The choice of Wood for this role is also a clear code to the audience of the time that their gender questions will be addressed on some level. More than any other actor, she
was associated with comedic and dramatic takes on sexual liberation throughout the 1960s: Gypsy (1962), Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), The Great Race (1965), This Property Is Condemned (1966), and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969). WORKS CITED Bingham, Dennis. “‘Before She Was a Virgin…’: Doris Day and the Decline of Female Film Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s.” Cinema Journal 45 (2006): 3–31. Byars, Jackie. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Female-Oriented Melodramas of the 1950s.” Carson, Dittmar, and Welsch 93–108. Carson, Diane. “To Be Seen but Not Heard: The Awful Truth.” Carson, Dittmar, and Welsch. 213–25. Carson, Diane, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch, ed. Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Dassin, Jules, dir. Topkapi. Perf. Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, and Maxmilian Schell. United Artists, 1964. Donen, Stanley, dir. Arabesque. Perf. Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. Universal Pictures, 1966. ———. Funny Face. Perf. Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, and Kay Thompson. Paramount, 1957. Edwards, Blake, dir. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Perf. Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Paramount, 1961. ———. The Pink Panther. Perf. David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine, and Claudia Cardinale. United Artists, 1963. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Hiller, Arthur, dir. Penelope. Perf. Natalie Wood, Ian Bannen, Dick Shawn, Peter Falk, Lila Kedrova, Lou Jacobi, and Arlene Golonka. MGM, 1966. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. North by Northwest. Perf. Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. MGM, 1959. ———. To Catch a Thief. Perf. Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and Brigitte Auber. Paramount, 1955. ———. Torn Curtain. Perf. Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, and Lila Kedrova. Universal Pictures, 1966. Huston, John, dir. Beat the Devil. Perf. Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. United Artists, 1953. Huston, John, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joe McGrath, and Val Guest, dirs. Casino Royale. Perf. Peter Sellers, Ursula
Andress, and David Niven. Columbia Pictures, 1967. Jewison, Norman, dir. The Thrill of It All. Writ. Carl Reiner. Perf. Doris Day and James Garner. Universal Pictures, 1963. Mann, Delbert, dir. Fitzwilly. Perf. Dick Van Dyke, John McGiver, Edith Evans, Barbara Feldon, and Harry Townes. United Artists, 1967. Martinson, Leslie H., dir. Fathom. Perf. Anthony Franciosa and Raquel Welch. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1966. Milestone, Lewis, dir. Ocean’s Eleven. Perf. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Warner Bros., 1960. Morris, Howard, dir. Who’s Minding the Mint? Perf. Jim Hutton, Dorothy Provine, and Jackie Joseph. Columbia Pictures, 1967. Neame, Ronald, dir. Gambit. Perf. Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, and Herbert Lom. Universal Pictures, 1967. Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. Perf. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Warner Bros., 1967. Tashlin, Frank, dir. Caprice. Perf. Doris Day and Richard Harris. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1967. That Girl. Perf. Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell. ABC, 1966–71. Thomas, Ralph, dir. Deadlier than the Male. Perf. Richard Johnson and Elke Sommer. Rank, 1966. von Dassanowsky, Robert. “Casino Royale at 33: The Postmodern Epic in Spite of Itself.” Bright Lights Film Journal 28 (Apr. 2000) 18 Sept. 2006 . Walker, Janet. “Psychoanalysis and Feminist Film Theory: The Problem of Sexual Difference and Identity.” Carson, Dittmar, and Welsch. 82–92. Wilson, Elizabeth. “Audrey Hepburn: Fashion, Film, and the 50s.” Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader. Ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. 36–40. Wyler, William, dir. How to Steal a Million. Perf. Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Eli Wallach, and Hugh Griffith. TwentiethCentury Fox, 1966.
Robert von Dassanowsky is professor of German and Film, and director of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His most recent book, Austrian Cinema: A History, is the first English language study of that nation’s film art and industry. He is currently editing a collection on New Austrian Film and researching a planned text on psychedelic cinema. He is also active as an independent producer.
