Ask Mick LaSalle:
Vilification of female characters.
Dear Mick LaSalle: I noted in your discussion of “Blade Runner 2049” that we had the so-typical “evil woman” assistant, and that Mark Felt’s wife (in “Mark Felt”) was portrayed by Diane Lane as troubling and troublesome. Am I the only one to notice that this constant vilification/demonization of female characters played into the Hillary Clinton disaster?
Lauren Coodley, Napa Dear Lauren Coodley: You have a superior intelligence, and this gives you the ability to recognize connections that others don’t see and to develop significant and useful insights from those connections. The only problem is that every so often connections that seem like connections are just two different things that happened — and this tendency becomes more pronounced when trying to explain a calamity. I don’t see a trend of vilifying or demonizing women in film. In the movies that you mention, for example, the biggest villains are men. To me, the problem is not that women onscreen are actively evil, or that they’re portrayed as inept or neurotic, but that they’re barely there. They’re hardly a factor. Now from this, I might say that a country that’s inundated with images of active and effective men and nonexistent women would be unlikely to elect a woman as president. But even that would be a leap. First, it would ignore the fact that 3 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for the guy who came in second. But, also, it would imply that one caused the other, when it’s more likely that both things were caused by another, bigger thing. For want of a better word, the United States has always been a butch country. Other nations have a more feminine national personality, but not this one. In our movies and in our national life, we got a whole lot of yang going on, and we could use a lot more yin. Hey Mick: Cary Grant is Hollywood royalty. But I can’t get through any of his movies. What am I not getting? Can you recommend a CG winner?
Patrick Fowler, San Francisco Hey Patrick: I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you just don’t like Cary Grant. That’s sad, but there are other people to like. But if you really want to endure the agony of sitting through another Cary Grant movie, see him in “Suspicion” (1941). If you don’t enjoy what he does there, his mix of dark and light, there’s no hope. Dear Mick: Can you explain the appeal of Rock Hudson to me? Of all the postwar cinema icons, he has always seemed the most stiff.
Berkeley Choate, Oakland Dear Berkeley: Well, he was stiff. But he had a certain impassive geniality, a quality that would be hard to imagine without his proving such a thing possible, and he was very good-looking. He made one genuine classic, “Seconds” (1966), a John Frankenheimer thriller in which he plays an old man who undergoes surgery that transforms him back into his prime. In that movie, his stiffness in his own skin was a virtue, because it wasn’t supposed to be his own skin. Ultimately, the most appealing thing about Rock Hudson was that he seemed in on the joke, even if he never explained what the joke was. (In the same era, JFK had some of that same quality, a smile that seemed to say, “You’re actually buying this, huh?”) Perhaps Hudson’s ironic nature had to do with his recognizing how amazing and random it was that he got to look like that. Or maybe it had to do with his being both a gay man and a Hollywood heartthrob, who, for a time, had everybody fooled. In any case, knowing the latter gives some of his movies an extra, interesting dimension in retrospect. For example, I remember that “Sex and the City” once had an episode about “gay straight men” (that is, straight men with a gay vibe) and “straight gay men” (gay men people assume are straight). I couldn’t help thinking of that recently while revisiting “Pillow Talk” (1959), particularly in the scenes with Hudson playing opposite Tony Randall.
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.