Even these days, when it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a general-release motion picture and soft pornography, two of the most erotic moments one can find on film feature no nudity and bodies just touching.
Both are ‘50s movies. The first, the 1951 “A Place in the Sun,” pairs a ravishing 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift. In a scene where the two are dancing and declaring their love for each other, Taylor sets up a rendezvous. “I’ll pick you up outside the factory,” she tells Clift; and then she breathes into his ear: “You’ll be my pickup.” Moments later the emotional intensity is raised even higher when Clift exclaims, “If I could only tell you how much I love you. If I could only tell you all.” In response, she draws him closer and in a voice that could ignite fires implores him, “Tell mamma, tell mamma all.”
“Sexy” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
In the second movie, 1955’s “Picnic,” the sparks fly between Kim Novak, then 22, and William Holden. Again the context is a dance, although it would be more accurately characterized as a mating ritual. To the music of George Duning’s and Morris Stoloff’s brilliant arrangement of “It Must have Been Moonglow,” a radiant Novak, clapping her hands in rhythm, sways down a bank toward Holden, who then joins her in a dance of such sensuality that the observers can only gape, each betraying the emotion he or she involuntarily feels — envy, nostalgia, frustration, longing, wonder.
Novak was the top box office star three years running in the ‘50s. Still, she is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the other major actresses of the period — Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner. She was not earthy like Gardner or icy like Kelly or Rubensesque like Monroe or raunchy like Jane Russell or perky like Doris Day. She was something that has gone out of fashion and even become suspect in an era of feminist strictures: she was the object of a voyeuristic male gaze.
This is true of her first movie with a speaking role, 1954’s “Pushover,” a film noir in the “Double Indemnity” mode featuring, along with Novak, Fred MacMurray, E.G. Marshall, Philip Carey and Dorothy Malone. (In her best work, Novak is often surrounded by powerful co-stars, and to her credit she plays off them, not against them.) Malone could do a sultry turn of her own (“Warlock,” “Written on the Wind”), but she is no match for Novak. MacMurray plays a cop assigned to ingratiate himself with her in the hope that she will lead him to her gangster boyfriend. But, as TCM host Robert Osborne observed, one look at Novak and he’s lost. When he’s not watching her, the camera is, for the plot consists largely of a surveillance operation; a team of detectives spends endless hours looking at Novak through binoculars, as do we. It is voyeurism from a distance, and emphasizes her status as a glittering something beheld from afar.
This of course is what Jimmy Stewart does for much of the first part of “Vertigo.” Hired by a friend to monitor her activities, he follows Novak (Judy pretending to be Madeleine) from place to place, and in one extended scene stares at her as she stares at a portrait of a woman in a museum. What he doesn’t know is that the object of his desire is a confection, a fantasy created by his employer who has made her up to look like the wife he plans to kill.
When the scheme succeeds and the Stewart character believes her to be dead, he falls into a depression until he spots a young girl who bears a physical resemblance to his lost love, but is nothing like her. Rather than being refined, austere and aloof, she is coarse, over-made-up, even common. In what remains of the movie he works at turning her into the simulacrum of his beloved (he strips off her make up and then applies his own), transforming her from an all-too-flesh-and-blood woman into an ever more abstract representation of an image — itself an illusion — that lives only in his memory. When the last stage of the reconstruction is complete, his restored love emerges as if from a mist — this is a close-up that actually distances — and he is once again happy to have an object to look at rather than an actual human being who has weaknesses and needs.
The characters Novak plays know and resent the fact that those who pursue them are drawn only to their surfaces and have no idea of, or interest in, what lies beneath. Betty in “Middle of the Night,” Madge in “Picnic,” Lona in “Pushover,” Linda in “Pal Joey,” Molly in “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Polly the Pistol in “Kiss Me Stupid,” Judy in “Vertigo” — all are the prisoners of their beauty and its effect. One critic speaks of Novak’s “passive carnality.” Her characters draw men in, but not willfully. That is not who they are or what they want, although no one cares to know.
Madge in “Picnic” complains of being the “pretty one.” Betty in “Middle of the Night” yearns to be just a housewife. Polly in “Kiss Me, Stupid” lives out her real fantasy — domesticity — for a single night. Judy in “Vertigo” begs, “Can’t you just love me for who I am?” Gillian in “Bell Book and Candle” longs to be a human and not a seductive witch. Molly in “The Man with the Golden Arm” wants nothing more than to stand by her man. Even Mildred in “Of Human Bondage” projects a vulnerability that seems more genuine than the sexual voraciousness she seems driven to display.
Of the men who become entangled with the child-women Novak repeatedly portrays, only Jerry in “Middle of the Night” (played in a towering performance by Fredric March) gets it right when he says that despite the provocative and voluptuous appearance, Betty is really a little girl, insecure and in need of someone who will protect her.
It is possible that the men who directed her — Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Joshua Logan, Richard Quine, Delbert Mann — saw her in the same way and made her into a projection of their fantasies. She seems to think so. The Washington Post writer Tom Shales asked (in 1996) if the women she played were “reluctant sex symbols” and if she were one too. In response, she recalled Joshua Logan’s remarking that in “Picnic” she played Madge “like she was wearing a crown of thorns”; and, she adds, Madge’s “looks were definitely a handicap and it was that way for me…too… You could really get lost in that kind of image.”
At any rate, “that kind of image” — of the inwardly fragile beauty dependent on the men who wish only to possess her — was no longer what the movie-going public was looking for after the early ‘60s, and that model of female behavior has not come into favor again (although Scarlett Johansson comes close to reviving it in some of her movies, especially Woody Allen’s “Match Point”). But however retrograde it may be, that role was performed to perfection by Kim Novak, who, after all these years, can still break your heart.
PROC. BY MOVIES
