Have movies lost their glamour?
The daily struggles of you and me are far more interesting and moving than gorgeous, rich, talented, successful people doing these things that no one has actually ever done. Those are fun stories, and I’ll be damned if I’m not entertained by them, but it’s shallow in a sense. Films like that never stick with me, and I never attach myself to any character in any sort of a deep fashion.
Yes.
Next question.
When?
Anything made after MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS.
Is that a good thing?
Depends on your viewpoint. Personally I derived some smug satisfaction from watching rich people behave as stupidly (or even more so) than I do.
As long as people still actually watch the Academy Awards, movies will have glamour.
—PolarisDiB
Sometimes, I want to be captivated by silly, shallow, witty people doing romantic things. This is truly frivolous and maybe not a good thing to admit, but there is art in this if it is done right (as Jacques Demy knew…and Ernst Lubitsch). And deep feelings too (as Fred Astaire knew). You can get seriously choked up watching this stuff.
I think they have. If i understand what you’re asking. I cannot recall a film made in a long time that i felt was glamours.
It is my feeling that films of the 30’ and 40’s were at the height of it.
I do not find most of today’s stars have the same class they once did. I think in part it is because of society has less today. Too much bootylious. Refinement and elegance is all but lost. I know there are exceptions.
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I think that Penelope Cruz’s ability to play the glamorous movie star is incredible now. Given her years in the wilderness of crap she put herself through on arriving in Hollywood, she’s come back fighting and oozes glamour. Granted, this is thanks to a certain old Hollywood nostalgia in her roles in Almodovar films (especially Los Abrazos Rotos) but it’s incredible in covering up her previous sins (Sahara anyone?). An incredibly beautiful woman, and the Warhol-styled poster for Los Abrazos Rotos shows her at her iconic best. Even without Almodovar, her part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a forceful diva quality that oozed glamour, especially in the scene where Scarlett Johansson is photographing her in the street.
I think Kate Winslet has a very glamorous quality to her as well, although it’s much more down-to-earth than the Bette Davis/Marlene Dietrich days granted. It doesn’t always come through her roles because she chooses very varied and challenging parts that sometimes require grit over glamour, but her talent seems mature and authentic. Tilda Swinton’s own unique attitude is a very artistic glamour I find as well. Whilst not your typical red carpet, evening dress beauty, her glamour comes through an overwhelming charisma and talent.
Or maybe it’s just an obsession I’ve developed for these three women. Either way, I think this style of glamour is a pleasant progression from the “I drink cocktails at 5 and go to bed in an ice bath at 9” style the studios imposed in the 1940s.
I’ve just realised my argument only really covers us Europeans. Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tautou, Juliette Binoche and Emmanuelle Beart too. Maybe Keira Knightley. Maybe old Hollywood glamour died out when the large influx of European talent dried up. I haven’t given this enough thought to support it fully but Garbo, Bergman, Dietrich, Loren, Bardot… Leaving Cruz to hold the fort by herself isn’t really fair now, is it?
I like artifice in film, and I enjoy realism.
I think there’s a danger in allowing the pendulum to swing too far in either direction.
It takes a highly specialized kind of narcisistic delusion to find anything more than mildly interesting in
pictures about everyday life such as SLACKER or CLERKS.
Fortunately for a certain portion of the nation’s indie filmmakers,
the demographic they set about to flatter/depict suffers from just such delusions.
Film festivals around the country are still frontloaded with small stories about small people living small.
The stories deal with the humdrum existence of twenty-somethings, who ought to be known as twenty-nothings,
if these pictures actually represent a real world.
Apparently “reality” or verisimilitude is an end in itself with intrinisic value that
remains unquestioned.
At some point we might find ourselves watching real-time footage from closed circuit cameras,
which is what I thought I was watching during the first long minutes of SMOKE and CLERKS.
“Twenty-nothings,” I like that.
The answer is a definite YES.
Hollywood has rested on its laurels for too long.
More than “endings,” there have been shifts throughout the years.
Capra’s Americana slices were existing right along side Top Hat and Dinner at Eight. Not one of the 40s ‘Best Film’ winners were artificial (save maybe Rebecca), and Film Noir, while having its own form of glamour, was hardly lighthearted. The big, overblown spectacles and musicals eventually died via their own weightiness as much as having an audience that just wasn’t there anymore. And now, in the post-Pulp Fiction era, anything even slightly “glamourous” in the old-Hollywood sense is more mimicry than anything.
Although I did like that Murder on the Orient Express reference (made the same year as Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, and The Godfather, Part II).
One cool little anecdote, though …
Sine the Oscars were mentioned, remember that in 1996, as the hundreds of women who attended that ceremony were spending thousands of dollars on their outfits, Sharon Stone, who could possibly be the last real “movie star” and one who could justifiably be labeled a real “broad,” wore an old black T-shirt from The Gap and looked better than anybody else there.
Now that’s glamour!
The real litmus test:
almost 80 years ago we had von Sternberg/Dietrich and the cycle of Garbo costume dramas.
what now even remotely compares?
In a world where we know all too well that the rich are corrupt CEOs like Kenneth Lay or con artists like Bernard Madhoff or bitches like Leona Helmsley or vacuas twits like Paris Hilton … is it possible to make a film like THE PHILADELPHIA STORY … and not have it a period piece?
Well, it is if you take the over-simplified, superficial view that ANYONE who is rich is a bad, corrupt person. Yeah, I think that would make it difficult.
Wong Kar Wai is full of glamour.
But that’s about it these days.
People have lost their glamour overall. It’s one of the ways in which the 60s changed the world — we value sincerity and authenticity more now, even if jeans and a t-shirt end up becoming a kind of uniform that doesn’t mean much anymore. I don’t think it’s a rich and poor thing — even when Joan Crawford played a working class woman she was always made-up and dressed well. It reminds me of my grandmother who always said she would “never be caught dead in a housecoat.” Today, who even knows what a housecoat is? I’m not entirely certain myself….
Wong Kar Wai is full of glamour, I agree. Maybe Resnais. Roxy Music will always be glamorous.
Wes Anderson’s films have glamour.
It may be on the wane but I think glamour is still present in period films like The Duchess, Brideshead Revisited, Atonement, Vanity Fair, Amazing Grace, The Painted Veil, etc.
Naomi Watts in The Painted Veil
Hayley Atwell in Brideshead Revisited
Keira Knightley in Atonement (above) and The Duchess (below)
George Clooney is generally considered to be the only real movie star left. I think that any kind of advance in technology that brings cinema closer to realism (Color film, digital video) destroys the glamour of cinema. When a movie is shot in black and white, it is almost otherworldly, more like a dream. It’s easier to make a film of great aesthetic beauty in black and white. Nowadays cinematographers will often used color filters to give their films a more unified aesthetic, in essence creating a palette that has less tones and is something akin to the silver of the silver screen.
I think films are best at emoting a kind of dream-like state, and many films don’t do this anymore. They are enslaved to the idea of realism, of grit on the dramatic side, or wiseass sarcasm on the comedic side. Comedies don’t have any of the magic they once did. They are basically all dialogue, radio shows with pictures. I remember seeing “Benny and June”, a movie I was looking forward to because I heard Johnny Depp was doing Buster Keaton routines and whatnot. Whoever directed that picture understood nothing of what made those routines magical. He didn’t use uninterrupted takes, and he filmed everything in close-up. Part of the magic of movies is seeing a feat accomplished, seeing a house fall around Buster Keaton, seeing King Kong climb the Empire State building, seeing Charlie Chaplin Roller skate perilously close to a precipice, and not knowing how such a thing was accomplished. Any movie you see now you know how these things are accomplished: CGI. It’s cheating. There is no longer any magic, only digital information.
It’s like Bogdonavich talks about how Orson Welles told him that there were no great performances in color, because color distracted too much from the performance. A film can only become glamorous when parts of reality are excised from it: sound, color etc.
There is something inherently magical about film itself, the magic lantern, the illusion created by the projection of light through a spinning wheel of photographs. The audience is literally seeing the light that shown on John Wayne, on Bogart, on Clark Gable, recreated in their own theatre. It is as if they are almost in the presence of these stars. Digital Video is takes a moment and synthesizes it into 1s and 0s. It is no longer human. It is information. Film has an angelic grace, a spirit that digital video will never be able to reproduce. It is wonderful that DV has democratized the art of film, but it has also cheapened it, sullied it’s glamour. Film is precious, it is costly, and indie directors have to be careful about what they shoot with it. DV is cheap, it is whorish, and directors can shoot and shoot and shoot and sacrifice very little. It is Promethean, it brings the fire down from Olympus and puts it in the hands of man.
Television is really what tarnished the glamour of movies. Peter Greenaway said “Films go to people nowadays rather than people go to films.” Taking away all the ritualization of the cinema, shrinking the image to the size of a small box, allowing people to own the movie stars and view them at their own leisure, having Cary Grant in your living room, a tiny little man on a screen, completely removes him from the glamorized context that gives him his magic. His face is no longer 40 feet tall, it is almost the size of your own. You can turn him off, you can go have a sandwich, you pet your dogs or do your taxes while he mumbles in the background. In a movie theatre you have no choice but to spectate. He is a spectre of light, a phantom, a spirit dancing on the screen. Something almost tangible, but not quite, like evaporated water. He is not a configuration of electrodes bubbling on an electronic tube. All the seats are oriented towards him. He is living a dream that the audience could never hope to possibly inhabit. Now we look to the movies and we see ourselves. We see characters with the same problems as us, the same jobs and foibles winning the same victories and losing the same defeats. We see Matthew McConaghey and his bald stepfather Terry Bradshaw. We see Seth Rogen hit a bong and marry the hot blonde we never could. I don’t want to see people who are like me. I want to see a King Kong made of flesh and bone, even if that flesh and bone is clay and metal, rather than an electronic puppet.
It will be interesting to see how Martin Scorsese portrays Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra is his projected biopic of Sinatra’s life. Will he expose the underbelly, as he is superbly capable of doing, or will he adore the beauty of their magnetism. And the casting! Who will play these roles? He flubbed it with Kate Beckinsale in THE AVIATOR. He needs someone who loves the glamour but who also can see the craziness.
Interesting points you raise there Shoyish, but I think this is another example of modern filmmakers claiming that things were easier in the past, when you didn’t have this or that to worry about (colour, realism, etc.). I think that there are plenty of films out there that support the lamentations expressed here; Short Cuts is one film that I think looks so realistic (i.e. plain) it seems false and hollow. However, whilst some directors will strip down the stylistic traits to achieve a realism that supposedly emphasises thematic content, should there not be other directors who use the new state of the medium to their advantage?
When colour came about, the possibilities of 2001 and Red Desert arrived. When sound came, Busby Berkeley’s musicals harnessed their possibility to the extreme. I personally feel The Matrix was to digital what the previous films were to their own technical innovations. There are plenty duds that came from all these innovations as well, but it requires a good director to understand the state a medium is in and use it to their advantage, not whinge for days gone by. The Blair Witch Project would be an example of a film that used the democratisation of film to its advantage, but I would look for this to be developed further in the future. I read an article in the New York Times recently about an author who was complaining he couldn’t write a story where two characters are out of contact for the majority of it now because of mobile/cell phones, Facebook, etc., when he could have either written a period piece or used these new practices to create something ‘of the moment’.
I wish I could come up with other examples, but if I knew DV well enough to be its champion, I would be out there doing it just now. As a medium of expression though, the democratisation of film is incredible. It doesn’t mean that big budget moviemaking suddenly becomes low quality but rather gives young, ambitious directors who have vision to commit something to film and use it as a foot in the door. Maybe more who have the talent will come forward this way in the coming years and we’ll see the rise of auteur-style expression in cinema again.
As someone mentioned his name above, I thought I’d add that I think Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a wonderfully glamorous film with a subject so non-Hollywood that it’s all the more delicious. The production design, the cast, the wonderful kitchen scenes and Helen Mirren’s costumes are incredible.
Le Parfum de la dame en noir (2005) has a certain glamour as well.
Sabine Azéma in black (above) and in white (below)
>>Well, it is if you take the over-simplified, superficial view that ANYONE who is rich is a bad, corrupt person. Yeah, I think that would make it difficult.<<
That is, I think, the general perception …
>>It’s one of the ways in which the 60s changed the world — we value sincerity and authenticity more now, even if jeans and a t-shirt end up becoming a kind of uniform that doesn’t mean much anymore.<<
And isn’t it odd that the 60s led directly into a nostalgia phase that included films of the Art Deco period (such as ORIENT EXPRESS and GATSBY) as mentioned above. Fashions based on that period also came along: I remember owning several pairs of “Baggies,” the wide-bottomed trousers with cuffs that seemed inspired by John Held, Jr. drawings.
And don’t worry about the housecoat, Justin; guys didn’t wear them.
Great post, Shoyish. I don’t agree with all your points, but it certainly is difficult for stars to have glamor when they’re on one’s hand-held DVD player with the 7" screen rather than 40’ tall on the silver sheet. I think the public fascination with celebrities fueling the paparazzis to stalk them, capturing on photographs every time they pop a pimple or whatever has not helped either.
>>It may be on the wane but I think glamour is still present in period films like The Duchess, Brideshead Revisited, Atonement, Vanity Fair, Amazing Grace, The Painted Veil, etc.<<
Quite right, Kim, I was forgetting about those. But during the Hollywood of the 1920s through the 1940s (at least) films were glamorous even about contemporary subjects. I don’t quite see that these days. Again, I’m not saying this is bad. Contrast that to, say, Joan Crawford playing a working class retail clerk who rides the subway to work but changes from one drop-dead outfit to another every time the camera angle shifts.
Personally I like glamor, I like fantasy, I like gritty realism – it all depends on how well the tale is told. It’s a pity things run in cycles so that we’re awash with one thing & bereft of others depending on what’s currently seen to be in vogue.
I definitely prefer realism over glamour any day of the week.
Dietrich, Louise Brooks, Garbo, Cary Grant, Astaire-Rogers-Charisse, Ava Gardner, Brigitte Helm (L’Argent, Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrowna), Lana Turner, Bogey-Bacall, Grace Kelly, Max Ophuls, Lubitsch, Steve McQueen (cool), Alain Delon (le cool), Sophia Loren, Catherine Deneuve..
v ? Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love etc), Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney, Gong Li, Penelope Cruz, Naomi WattsGoldfinger, Connery v Casino Royale, wotsisname, the franchise has lost it.
well, RUS was right , Dietrich came to my mind when i saw the thread. They don’t make em like they used to, at least not in Hollywood, though there’s maybe been a shift to the East. Or is that what we think of as the classic era covered a longer time span, unfair comparison with now? Gloria Swanson: it’s the pictures that got small?
Do we value sincerity and authenticity more now? I would argue the opposite, in the post-punk world, I tend to agree with David Mamet, who said “You can say anything as long as you don’t mean it.”
I think people confuse sincerity and authenticity with impoverishment. Just because something is trashy, or revealing (frank openness about sex, drugs, violence etc.) doesn’t make it authentic.
This is the age of irony, where people usually say the opposite of what they mean for fear of being held to their beliefs or appearing uncool.
Or maybe it’s just me.
I would be hesitant to say that the current spate of period films turned out by hollywood and other major western film industries are glamourous. These films seem like they’re playacting glamour with the help of a costume trunk. A watered-down imitation.
Glamour had a lot to do with a performer’s mystique. Of course, unfortunately for those performers, that mystique was a contractual obligation, which these days wouldn’t be tolerated.
Early Jarmusch had a kind of punk-glamour, up until about Night on Earth, after which his attitude seemed to shift. Like I said, Wes Anderson’s films have a more refined (though no less sophisticated) but slightly unconvincing, shaky kind of pop-art glamour (especially Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums, and almost all of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited).
Of course, we should make a caveat about not confusing glamour with ornate set dressing; it is an attitude, not a look.
Kenji was keen to bring up the quotation from Sunset Boulevard; the pictures have gotten small, and I think the reason is television. I challenge anyone to conjour up an example of glamour springing from television.
Which I guess brings us to the real murderer of glamour: Pop-art. Pop-art killed glamour in a nasty fever-dream; lionizing it for its own sake and then killing it off with Twiggy, David Bowie, Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones, and the canonization of advertising art (all of which I will admit that I unashamedly love). How could it survive all that? I don’t think it is irony as Shoyish suggests (irony has been around for centuries, and I don’t know why so many people want to take credit for it as a modern style), von Sternberg revels in irony (The Scarlet Empress especially).
That’s all awfully disjointed, my apologies, but I think glamour has been dead for almost fifty years, maybe more. Early to mid-fifties probably. Any thoughts?
Saying that glamour occurs in period films is proof that it no longer exists in our time. The other thing that killed off glamour was feminism — those beauty rituals were time-consuming and exhausting for women. So, yes, drag queens keep it alive, especially where they keep alive old-fashioned sex roles.
Glamour was also a conduit or a substitute for eroticism. Dietrich’s costumes highlighted her erotic quality — she was exotic, on display, a sultry advertisement. Today, in movies actors just take off their clothes. You don’t have to do that kind of complicated metonymy anymore.
Obviously, sincerity and authenticity always carry an ironic meaning. Especially in art. But it’s the form they take — casual dress, slang, less dialogue rather than more — that has become important. Glamour is not just a look — that scintillating repartee in Sturges, Hawks, Astaire and Rogers movies, was also a kind of glamour that doesn’t exist very much because screenwriters are more interested in verisimilitude than in ambiance.
@Justin
ummmmm…
I think drag queens are just a camp parody of glamour (and don’t you think it is a little sexist to assume that glamour is solely in the realm of femininity? What about Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper…, remember, opposite Garbo were Ramon Navarro and John Gilbert) and I really don’t think many women in Hollywood have exactly scaled back on the beauty rituals; neither have the men. And really, that made-up look was for the cameras, nobody was truly that glamorous, it was just that, unlike today, the industry worked hard to make sure that was the image presented.
and glamour isn’t a substitute for eroticism, it is eroticism. Do you consider those films non-erotic? Those von Sternberg films at Paramount in no way substitute anything for eroticism, it’s right there! Rather than viewing glamour as mere metonymy, I think you ought to acknowledge how direct those films were in a very refined, sophisticated and light-handed way, which is truly what glamour is.
Well, it’s not mere metonymy, it is erotic, it was simply a different style or architecture. I think you’re splitting hairs. I think we agree, actually. It’s more sensual and erotic often than just raw sex, but it was used as a substitute when sex was off limits. You had to do something to make Dietrich stand out.
Drag queens (good ones) live for what they do. They’re totally serious about it. And many of them mourn the death of traditional sex roles. Few drag queens dress up like Hilary Clinton. Of course Astaire’s tuxedo is the glamour equivalent of Ginger Rogers’ feathered gown. But he also wore his get-up to honor and highlight her. A man appearing with a bare chest in mixed company was a great cheek or insult to women in those days. Mystery always had to be preserved, mystery and the assumption that sex would always be sort of lavish and refined and costumed — today, who cares? Who would go to so much trouble? Glamour was a code of behavior as much as a look. It’s not in our movies anymore because it’s not in our lives — except, significantly, on wedding days.
“Drag queens (good ones) live for what they do. They’re totally serious about it.”
earnestness is very un-glamorous. part of glamour is a sly irony.
also, I really don’t think glamour was in anybody’s lives during the thirties. It was a nice commodity sold by the studios, which many people were willing to buy. Today, the industry has decided to sell other things.
Howard Fritzson
Much of what we see and hear now is so reality-based. We experience everything and everyone, warts and all. Our actors are required to disrobe and simulate fornication on camera (and some don’t simulate). They have to relate as closely possible to our everyday world. We strip them of all mystery.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. I like to watch movies with real characters who have a relationship to real life. Kazan, of course, demonstrated how attractive this could be. However, I do miss adoring impossibly beautiful people in quasi-poetic settings doing things that I could only dream of doing.