The Trouble With Humor

Mary Wickes

I've been reliving my childhood watching films that I saw on the big screen when I was a kid. I watched bits and pieces of Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN a couple of months ago. Dick Van Dyke stars as a Navy pilot who goes down in the Pacific and makes a home for himself on a tropical island (along with Nancy Kwan). In the mid-sixties, the association between the military/World War II and the South Pacific was still fresh in peoples' minds so there is a strange connection between films like this one and the mid-century Tiki/Lounge aesthetic.

Tonight I watched bits of The Trouble with Angels, a Hayley Mills movie in which she plays a rebellious student at an all-girls Catholic School. The film is a loose series of vignettes of the girls getting in trouble but the narrative ties up with a surprisingly emotional ending. There is very little momentum in the film—it really is just incidents pasted together. Angels was directed by Ida Lupino (Bewitched, Gilligan's Island , The Twilight Zone) and includes appearances by a stunning Camilla Sparv and a born-to-play-nuns Mary Wickes.

There's something about comedy that makes it antithetical to art films. Both of these films are shot flat like TV shows and have a very loose, almost careless feel. It's like there's nothing standing between you and the raw presence of the leads who look as if they're not getting any direction at all. Guy Maddin's able to pull of humor but there's a partial fit there because of his loose, quirky hand-held style. I like the fact that Michel Gondry was willing to give humor a shot in Be Kind Rewind, but the problem was too tough for him to solve. He was trying to do something that James McKenney pulled off in Automatons when the enemy leader communicates using a brick-sized wrist communicator. The humor is dry, almost indiscernible, a humor of situation without a punchline. It's like the scene in Superman II when debris is falling from the sky as Superman battles Zod and out of the corner of your eye you see a convertible putting its top up. Be Kind, however, just comes off as if it's trying too hard. The car, the metal hats—it's just too self-conscious. Wes Anderson did a great job in The Life Aquatic. It's an art film with a nimble, gently comedic touch. Worth studying for combining art film and comedy.